The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate

In 1959 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century beneath the surface of the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet. There they studied the feasibility of deploying ballistic missiles within the ice sheet. The base and its wastes were abandoned with minimal decommissioning in 1967, under the assumption they would be preserved for eternity by perpetually accumulating snowfall. Here we show that a transition in ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is plausible within the next 75 years, under a business-as-usual anthropogenic emissions scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5). Net ablation would guarantee the eventual remobilization of physical, chemical, biological, and radiological wastes abandoned at the site. While Camp Century and four other contemporaneous ice sheet bases were legally established under a Danish-U.S. treaty, the potential remobilization of their abandoned wastes, previously regarded as sequestered, represents an entirely new pathway of political dispute resulting from climate change

Oil and Revolutionary Governments: Fuel for International Conflict

AbstractOil-exporting states, or petrostates, engage in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) at a much higher rate on average than nonpetrostates. Why is this so? Further, what explains the variation among the petrostates in adopting aggressive foreign policies and engaging in MIDs on that basis? This article develops a theory that proposes that revolutionary petrostates have a higher propensity to launch MIDs than comparable nonpetrostates. This theory is tested with statistical analysis using a new quantitative data set that identifies revolutionary governments in the period 1945–2001. The results show that petro-revolutionary governments constitute a special threat to international peace and security. This evidence of resource-backed aggression challenges the conventional view of petrostates as the targets of international competition for resources.</jats:p

Partial Hegemony

When and why does international order change? Easy to take for granted, international governing arrangements shape our world. They allow us to eat food imported from other countries, live safely from nuclear war, travel to foreign cities, profit from our savings, and much else. New threats, including climate change and simmering US-China hostility, lead many to worry that the “liberal order,” or the US position within it, is at risk. Theorists often try to understand that situation by looking at other cases of great power decline, like the British Empire or even ancient Athens. Yet so much is different about those cases that we can draw only imperfect lessons from them. A better approach is to look at how the United States itself already lost much of its international dominance, in the 1970s, in the realm of oil. Only now, with several decades of hindsight, can we fully appreciate it. The experiences of that partial decline in American hegemony, and the associated shifts in oil politics, can teach us a lot about general patterns of international order. Leaders and analysts can apply those lessons when seeking to understand or design new international governing arrangements on topics ranging from climate change to peacekeeping, and nuclear proliferation to the global energy transition.</p

Oil and Security: The Necessity of Political Economy

AbstractMany international conflicts are in some way related to energy, ever since oil became the world's preeminent strategic commodity in the early 20th century. I argue that the most important energy-related variable for international conflict is a state's net oil import position. Oil politics tends to appear in one of three ways in security studies. Some have emphasized resource wars; others have focused on the needs of oil importers; and still others on the pathologies of oil exporters. These disparate approaches, largely isolated from each other, can better be understood as relating to a single explanatory variable. Lots of other variables matter but none are as central as net oil imports. This means that to understand energy and security, a political economy framework is a necessity. For oil exporters, external petro-aggression and internal pathologies of the resource curse are the key mechanisms. For oil importers, energy consumption needs generate a plethora of mechanisms that complicate conflict dynamics. A sophisticated understanding of these mechanisms can improve our understanding of both national and global security.</jats:p