Environment & Climate Change

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. The authors assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa.

Stephen Walt offers what he considers to be the top five silver linings from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stephen Walt writes that several important events occurred in 2019, but few did anything to significantly alter global trends.

In these slides, William H. Tobey and Pavel Zolotarev provide an updated summary of the threat of nuclear terrorism, based in part on the new U.S.-Russian report, Steps to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism. This was presented at the Meeting of the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit ‘Sherpas’, hosted by the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pattaya, Thailand, on January 13, 2014.

In Summer of 2013, The Project on Managing the Atom released “Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-Year Mission to Secure a Dangerous Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing.” In the report, Eben Harrell and David Hoffman tell how dedicated scientists and engineers in three countries overcame suspicions, secrecy, bureaucracy, and logistical obstacles to secure more than a dozen bombs worth of plutonium that had been left behind at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the outline of the Semipalatinsk operation had been made public before, the report filled in new details.