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It’s called The Line, a spanking new AI city to be built in the northwest of Saudi Arabia as part of the kingdom’s $500-billion NEOM project. The Line will be a “carbon-positive” community “powered by 100 per cent clean energy” strung, yes in a line, from the Red Sea coast into the...
Anthropogenic climate change and the unprecedented shift in the global center of economic gravity from West to East represent two of the most profound macrotrends set to transform the geopolitical landscape in the 21st century. Indeed, as Asia’s emerging powerhouses, notably China, with its...
The heads of state and government of the European Union propose introducing a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” from 2023, to charge imported goods according to the CO2 emitted during their production. At their recent summit, they decided to use the ensuing revenues to boost the EU’s...
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is “living through an unrivalled drop in carbon output.” According to the International Energy Agency, global use of energy will drop 6% in 2020, an amount that equals India’s total energy demand. Worldwide demand for electricity has already fallen 5%,...
Despite more than 3,000 years of Chinese history, many of the world’s countries had little to no direct experience with China or Chinese investment prior to the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). There was a presumption on the part of many governments that international best practices...
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is grappling with COVID-19, an unresolved war in Yemen and collapsed oil prices. At the same time, recurrent purges of opponents of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) are harming the country’s foreign investment climate. Within this context, the ambitious Vision...
You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up...
Climate change has become a global priority, but not for everyone. For some, it is a spoke in the wheel of economic interests — the splinter that sparks a dangerous political debate seeking to turn climate change into a myth. But if anything should summon global consensus, it is the fact that...
A succession of social upheavals over the last decade has radically realigned political power throughout the world. As a result of these tectonic shifts, what had once been on the furthest fringes of the right has now moved toward the center while the left has been pushed to the margins....
You may be a skeptic and deny that the Earth is not warming up because, depending on where you live, the effect may not be noticeable to you. But, hopefully, what you can't deny is the increasing number of weather-related disasters occurring around the world, which happens to be a really expensive...
Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, American muckraker Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle,” a searing account of the savage working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Such a mind-boggling exposé of exploited workers laboring amid rotten, contaminated and diseased meat,...
