However, there is a glaring omission in BP’s projections:  there is little attention paid to the impact of growing (even if decelerating)  fossil fuel use on global warming.   However, it is my belief that growing supply could very well outstrip growing demand over this time frame, which would cause prices to fall.  That would leave room for carbon taxes, the revenues from which should be diverted to mitigation efforts.   The latter will be a hard sell – there are entrenched interests on both sides that will fight it (from the right, carbon taxes are anathema while forces on the green left are hostile to a  geo-engineering approach), but as water seeks its own level, so, too, do obvious policy choices.

Pakistan has always desired to expand its influence in Afghanistan and beyond. Central Asia is seen as an area of natural expansion for the country. Islamabad’s objectives in the region are determined by its geopolitical imperative: to turn itself into the leader of an Islamic bloc stretching from the Black Sea to China able to counter India’s influence and become an autonomous actor on the international scene. In this context, the destabilizing efforts carried out by the ISI through support to terrorist groups in Central Asia since the early 90s have been aimed at creating the right conditions so that the Pakistani leadership could gradually take over from of other major powers such as Russia, China and the United States.

Read the whole thing.

The ISI has built what is in essence a model for a low-tech, asymmetric analog to the integrated defense network centered on complex weapons systems that the US is building.

Dr. Robbin Laird writing at US Naval Institute’s journal Proceedings details how, by combining the F-35 with existing (and developing) Aegis technology, the US is building a global, mobile defense network that will far outmatch anything any competitor can field:

Originally designed as a Cold War tool to bolster fleet defense against a challenging Soviet Navy, the Aegis program has since the 1970s evolved and morphed. Among the factors that have exponentially increased the core program’s capabilities, the software and microelectronics revolution has played a major role. Targeting precision, C4ISR, and missile technologies have all developed, and today Aegis is a key element in global missile defense. Of central relevance not only to the program but to global security, Aegis coupled with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will provide unprecedented modular flexibility at sea for U.S. command authority and our allies as they shape responses to inevitable future crises.

. . .

South Korea illustrates how multiple basing in the F-35 age can work. That nation, in its ongoing defense against North Korea, has defensive systems against missiles and a good army. In the F-35 era, defense and offense are transformed into strategic mobility. Now, instead of investing in static systems able to do nothing other than await invasion, South Korea has flexible forces that can operate in national defense, participate regionally, and contribute to a global reserve capability. Aegis at-sea systems are a key element of sea-based defensive capability that has been provided with strategic mobility.

Add the F-35Bs to the South Korean military, and now you can disperse force, complicate any North Korean attack, and add this capability to the country’s mobile naval force that currently is being rolled out. Deterrence of China is also enhanced, because mobility of operations from South Korea makes China’s thinking more difficult. For one thing, there is no single line of attack on U.S. forces. If the Chinese should target Guam, we would now have multiple bases from the sea and land from which the 360-degree-enabled F-35s coupled with Aegis and other systems would provide a troubling situation for our enemy, who would not be guaranteed success with a large-area single strike.

The U.S. Navy’s Aegis program is an important contributor to shaping the foundation for such a global system. Because all current Aegis navies are potential candidates for the F-35, with the deployment of the Joint Strike Fighter will come important sensor capabilities around the world. We have the opportunity to create an integrated air-sea sensor net for deployed fleets that provides, in turn, a growing ability to shape missile-defense forces and protective cover for global-presence forces.

These F-35-Aegis offense and defense bubbles can be networked throughout the Pacific to enhance the capacity of individual nations. They represent a prime example of how one country’s assets can contribute to the reach others, together establishing a scalable capability for a honeycombed force.

Overall, the enterprise lays a foundation for a global capability in sea-based missile defenses and for protecting deployed forces as well as projecting force. Power such as this is increasingly central to the freedom of action necessary for the worldwide operation of the U.S. military and our coalition partners.

The F-35 is not without its problems – the naval variant will be delayed for an indefinite period because of a design error that renders it functionally useless - but the lead that the US maintains over the entire world in terms of military technology will remain wide for the foreseeable future.

This fascinating paper raises many questions.  Perhaps feminism was never really a Western discourse to begin with – at its core, feminism is thoroughly rooted in anti-colonialism, and the Western brand is a deformed and maladjusted version of true feminism (as one of the case study subjects argues).

Read the whole thing.

In the past, I wrote that Obama would be able to campaign in 2012 on his foreign policy successes, but this one decision undercuts that entire theme.  His GOP opponent, whomever that turns out to be, can easily cast the Keystone XL decision as one that hurts the US and aids our greatest challenger (China) in one fell swoop.

Next, early reports indicate that the State Department is going to reject the Keystone pipeline.  This is a foolish policy decision for many reasons which we have detailed before, but it is utterly incoherent when juxtaposed with the pronouncement from the jobs council the day before.  To paraphrase a favorite line of US liberals, it appears that the left hand doesn’t know what the far left hand is doing.

“Article 5 is not in such a good shape,” said Espen Barth Eide, speaking before an audience assembled at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I’m not talking about political will, but the actual ability to deliver if something happens in the trans-Atlantic theater of a more classical type of aggression.”

Exercises have shown that NATO’s ability to conduct conventional military operations has markedly declined, Barth Eide said.

Barth Eide is particularly worried about the state of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter due to uncertainties caused by the pending $480 billion cut in US defense budgets.   Many European nations have relied on the aging F-16, which will end its service life at the end of the current decade.   Delays in F-35 production could leave such countries without advanced defense aircraft.  Barth Eide is attempting to create a consortium of such nations to coordinate their F-35 purchases in order to ensure that the production run continues. I have written in the past how the US has managed to use F-35 partnerships and purchases as a geopolitical lever; we must be certain to consider this when making decisions about the future of the weapon system.  We cannot be penny wise and pound foolish – if we are not going to keep our forces on the ground locally, then we must insure that local governments remain tethered to our defense network in other ways, and sophisticated weapons systems are excellent ways of doing so.  Norway, in particular, is an important ally. They intend to purchase not only the F-35, but also AEGIS systems that will form part of the ballistic missile defense network.

The theme of American decline and the coming Age of China is widely accepted.  Even long time Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski is contemplating the end of American supremacy and concludes only that China cannot afford for it to occur too quickly.

I have to disagree.  The last 5 cycles of the World System have seen various challengers for global leadership (hegemony is the term within the discourse).

copyright EnerGeoPolitics, 2010

While the players have changed, the basic structure has not:  It has always been a contest between economic/political systems that are relatively more open on the winning side and relatively more closed on the losing side.   The closed society always looks to have tremendous advantages – Imperial Spain, Napoleonic France, Industrial Germany.  Indeed, both the French and German economies had grown to surpass in size that of Great Britain, the other contestant, just prior to the ultimate struggles between the nations.  Still, it has always been the more open system that has consistently carried the day and dominated the following era.

The Chinese Model certainly presents a formidable challenge to the open system of the maritime democracies, and geopolitics does not have iron clad laws that deem what has happened in the past will always happen in the future.  However, if the US and its allies focus on the strengths of their system and make the decision to be more open, more entrepreneurial and more innovative, then the Chinese wave will crest and recede.

However, the Air Force is not finished with its efforts to build a missile defense system around high powered lasers.  The plan now is to wed the advances in unmanned aerial vehicle technology (UAV) with the next generation lasers and build a more powerful yet cheaper alternative platform.

Leading UK geologists say hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is “very unlikely” to cause methane contamination of groundwater, adding that two earth tremors triggered by exploration last year were too small to cause damage.  Mike Stephenson of the British Geological Survey (BGS) said on Tuesday that most geologists thought fracking was a “pretty safe activity” and the risks associated with it were low. He said the distance between the shale-gas reserves, which lie between 1,500 and 3,000 metres underground, and groundwater supplies, usually found at depths of between 40 and 50 metres, made it unlikely that fracking could allow methane to seep into the water table.

“Most geologists are pretty convinced that it is extremely unlikely that contamination would occur,” he added.

Stephenson said the UK had one of the strictest regulatory regimes in the world and that two cases of methane pollution of water in the US, which had been highlighted by anti-fracking protestors there, were the result of mismanagement and were unrelated to the drilling process.