Articles

Colleagues said he tweeted more than any professor they knew, and Calestous Juma’s tweets covered a swarm of things. Income inequality, and a free-trade area for Africa, you might expect. Those were the subjects he taught at Harvard: getting poorer countries, especially in Africa, to grow and thrive was the obsession of his life. But he also tweeted about a wheelchair that could climb stairs, the increasing size of steaks, and the maximum number of goats seen eating up in a tree. He was extra-delighted to send out a New York Times editorial, from 1878, about Thomas Edison’s new “aerophone”: “Something ought to be done about Mr Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope.”

Calestous Juma, a prominent global advocate for sustainable development in struggling countries, particularly in his native Africa, could trace his passion for technological innovation to his arduous childhood in colonial Kenya.

A professor of the practice of international development, and a writer of great range, Calestous Juma promoted technology for the poor and vulnerable throughout the world. He also wrote a book explaining why people are wary of innovation, and delighted his more than 100,000 Twitter followers by retweeting cartoons that ribbed those who are resistant to science.

Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns.

While the threat of "resource wars" over possession of oil reserves is often exaggerated, between one-quarter and one-half of interstate wars since 1973 have been connected to one or more of eight distinct oil-related causal mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms can help policymakers design grand strategy and allocate military resources.

"The Rio+20 process is an important reminder of the urgency to guide global production and consumption patterns with sustainability principles. Sadly, there is really no genuine global institution that is championing sustainable development. The vision that inspired Rio has been supplanted by two extreme positions. The first is a group that believes economic growth will have trickle-down benefits for the environment. The environmental camp has successfully replaced the spirit of Rio with a one-sided agenda that leaves little room for recognising the central role that human wellbeing plays in natural resource management."

Extracting, delivering, and disposing water requires energy, and similarly, many processes for extracting and refining various fuel sources and producing electricity use water. This so-called 'water–energy nexus', is important to understand due to increasing energy demands and decreasing freshwater supplies in many areas. This paper performs a country-level quantitative assessment of this nexus in the MENA region.

Recent national trends in investments in global energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) are inconsistent around the world. Public RD&D investments in energy are the metric most commonly used in international comparative assessments of energy-technology innovation, and the metric employed in this article. Overall, the data indicate that International Energy Agency (IEA) member country government investments have been volatile: they peaked in the late 1970s, declined during the subsequent two decades, bottomed out in 1997, and then began to gradually grow again during the 2000s.

"Without energy, there is no economy. Without climate, there is no environment. Without economy and environment, there is no material well-being, no civil society, no personal or national security. The overriding problem associated with these realities, of course, is that the world has long been getting most of the energy its economies need from fossil fuels whose emissions are imperiling the climate that its environment needs."