Gas: The unique alternative

Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil

We know the story: Mother Nature is sending increasingly loud and frequent signals that something new and dangerous is afoot. Regularly, climate scientists release incontrovertible data showing that climate is changing and offer robust explanations of why this is happening. We also know the other part of this story: Not enough is being done by peoples and governments to alter a trajectory that is guaranteed to force drastic changes in the human condition.

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Human nature against Mother Nature

Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil

Lately, Mother Nature seems to be trying to get our attention. Its signals are increasingly loud, strident and hard to miss. Some have been lethal. 2015 is poised to become the hottest year on record. Last October, Hurricane Patricia, the strongest ever recorded by meteorologists, produced record winds that reached 200 miles per hour. Average temperatures in the Artic have been increasing twice as fast as temperatures in the rest of the planet. This contributes to the thawing of the icecovered polar surface. Every 10 years, this ice cover shrinks by 9%. Scientists expect that polar thawing will raise sea levels to such a point that the populations of many highly urbanized coastal areas will be forced to move to higher ground.

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The World in Quotation Marks

Moisés Naím / The Atlantic

After visiting Argentina in the 1970s, the novelist V.S. Naipaul reflected on the “colonial mimicry” of Buenos Aires. “Within the imported metropolis there is the structure of a developed society. But men can often appear to be mimicking their functions,” he wrote. “So many words have acquired lesser meanings in Argentina: general, artist, journalist, historian, professor, university, director, executive, industrialist, aristocrat, library, museum, zoo: so many words seem to need inverted commas.”

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The Coming Turmoil in Latin America

Moisés Naím / The Atlantic

Latin America has gone from a period of prosperity to a period of peril. Between 2004 and 2013, the region experienced extraordinary economic growth and social progress. Demand—mostly from Asia—for the commodities that constitute the region’s main exports increased sharply, pushing up both the prices of those exports and the volumes traded. Revenues from this trade, in turn, stimulated regional economies and helped fill governments’ coffers. This unprecedented demand coincided with a period of very low interest rates, abundant credit, and surging foreign investment flows into Latin America.

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