The fact is that Putin is playing a weak hand extraordinarily well because he knows exactly what he wants to do. He is not stabilizing the situation according to our definition of stability. He is defending Russia’s interests by keeping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power. This is not about the Islamic State. Any insurgent group that opposes Russian interests is a terrorist organization to Moscow.
.. President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry say that there is no military solution to the Syrian crisis. That is true, but Moscow understands that diplomacy follows the facts on the ground, not the other way around. Russia and Iran are creating favorable facts. Once this military intervention has run its course, expect a peace proposal from Moscow that reflects its interests, including securing the Russian military base at Tartus.
We should not forget that Moscow’s definition of success is not the same as ours. The Russians have shown a willingness to accept and even encourage the creation of so-called failed states and frozen conflicts from Georgia to Moldova to Ukraine. Why should Syria be any different? If Moscow’s “people” can govern only a part of the state but make it impossible for anyone else to govern the rest of it — so be it.
.. When is the last time you bought a Russian product that wasn’t petroleum?
.. The last time the Russians regretted a foreign adventure was Afghanistan. But that didn’t happen until Ronald Reagan armed the Afghan mujahideen with Stinger missiles that started blowing Russian warplanes and helicopters out of the sky. Only then did an exhausted Soviet Union led by Mikhail Gorbachev, anxious to make accommodation with the West, decide that the Afghan adventure wasn’t worth it.
.. Stop saying that we want to better understand Russian motives. The Russians know their objective very well: Secure their interests in the Middle East by any means necessary. What’s not clear about that?
Bill Gates and the Quest for Sustainable Energy
“We need an energy miracle,” says Bill Gates in this interview with Atlantic editor in chief James Bennet. “That may make it seem too daunting to people, but miracles in science are happening all the time.” So, what are the solutions to climate change? Gates has pledged to invest $2 billion in new alternative energy technologies. In this discussion with Bennet, he extolls the necessity of investment in vast and varied technologies to change such a massive infrastructure quickly. Read more about Gates’s commitment to moving the world beyond fossil fuels in theNovember 2015 issue of The Atlantic.
The Troubled Oil Business
Yet my team found in 2011 that far more powerful technologies and design methods, enlightened regulation, and maturing financing, marketing, and delivery channels then available could save nearly twice what I originally thought, at one-third the real cost. We showed how the U.S. could run a 2.6-times bigger economy in 2050 with no oil, coal, or nuclear power, $5 trillion cheaper, with no new inventions nor Acts of Congress, led by business for profit. Now, four years later, many of those assumptions look conservative.
.. Leveraging savings in the civilian oil use that’s over 50 times larger, those innovations will ultimately displace our warfighters’ missions in the Persian Gulf and South China Sea — aka Mission Unnecessary.
.. Autos are pivoting from PIGS — Personal Internal-combustion-engine Gasoline Steel-dominated vehicles — to SEALS — Shared Electrified Autonomous Lightweight Service vehicles.
.. Actually, incumbents have even less time than insurgents grant them, because capital flees before customers do.
Enemies of the Sun
We used to say that the G.O.P. was the party of Big Energy, but these days it would be more accurate to say that it’s the party of Old Energy. In the 2014 election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 87 percent of its political contributions to Republicans; for coal mining the figure was 96, that’s right, 96 percent. Meanwhile, alternative energy went 56 percent for Democrats.
.. Earlier this year Newsweek published an op-ed article purporting to show that the true cost of wind power was much higher than it seems. But it turned out that the article contained major factual errors, and its author had failed to disclose that he was the Charles W. Koch professor at Utah State, and a fellow of a Koch- and ExxonMobil-backed think tank.