Middle East

Obama calls for cooperation on clean energy and green jobs in Mideast

Photo: White House No one expected President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo today to focus on climate change, and it didn’t. Obama didn’t use the words “climate” or “environment,” but rather talked about the usual Middle East challenges — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the distrust of American […]

Green mideast peace

Cool video from Current about a nonprofit in Israel that brings kids together across borders to work on water problems:

Oil and the status of women in the Middle East

I'm not sure this falls under my "campus news" beat for Grist, but I heard it at a seminar at a college campus, and it's compelling enough that I'm going to say that because it falls within academia, it counts. Michael Ross is a political scientist at UCLA who was published in the February 2008 American Political Science Review with the assertion (PDF) that much of the gender inequality in the Middle East relative to the rest of the world can be explained not by traditional Islam, but by the presence of oil.

The quick version is that Ross makes a strong case that women are hurt by a previously unappreciated effect of the infamous "resource curse" that imperils democracy in countries with abundant fossil fuels.

Domestic oil and gas is not the ticket to U.S. energy security

America’s fragile domestic infrastructure threatens her energy security at least as much as dependence on oil from the Middle East. Replacing oil from that region with even more vulnerable domestic systems would therefore decrease energy security. Stranger than science fiction. Extraordinarily concentrated energy flows invite and reward devastating attack. In our 1982 Pentagon study Brittle […]