Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
President Obama clearly wants to break with his predecessor on energy and climate policy. But the American political divide has not disappeared, and it still threatens to derail the Copenhagen climate negotiations next December. Three developments during the past week highlight both the promise and the peril: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's appointment of Todd Stern to be U.S.
Eldis, the online aggregator of development policy, practice and research at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, is conducting a survey to identify "the most significant new piece of development research of 2008." This strikes me as having roughly the same statistical validity as American Idol does for when it comes to finding new singing talent. Still, as with Idol and other talent shows, the entertainment value of a popularity contest is hard to dispute!
What is it going to take to get the World Bank to change course on renewable energy? Here at the Center we’ve been trying to help get the bank to be more aggressive on renewables for nearly a year. But inertia is a powerful force, and despite shifts in thinking by individual bank staff, the institution itself is still moving very slowly. But what if a major client and a competitor joined forces on renewables?
Today Bloomberg News reports that Russia's national monopoly, Gazprom, has shut down all natural gas shipments to the Ukraine as part of an escalating price war that has created an energy crisis in Europe.
We are at the start of what promises to be an unusually difficult year in the global economy. Policy decisions in the United States and other rich world countries will matter immensely for poor and vulnerable people living in developing countries.
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