May 26, 2007

By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID S. CLOUD
WASHINGTON, May 25 — The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.

It is the first indication that growing political pressure is forcing the White House to turn its attention to what happens after the current troop increase runs its course.

The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.

The mission would instead focus on the training of Iraqi troops and fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, while removing Americans from many of the counterinsurgency efforts inside Baghdad.

Still, there is no indication that Mr. Bush is preparing to call an early end to the current troop increase, and one reason officials are talking about their long-range strategy may be to blunt pressure from members of Congress, including some Republicans, who are pushing for a more rapid troop reduction.

The officials declined to be quoted for attribution because they were discussing internal deliberations that they expected to evolve over several months.

Officials say proponents of reducing the troops and scaling back their mission next year appear to include Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They have been joined by generals at the Pentagon and elsewhere who have long been skeptical that the Iraqi government would use the opportunity created by the troop increase to reach genuine political accommodations.

So far, the concepts are entirely a creation of Washington and have been developed without the involvement of the top commanders in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, both of whom have been enthusiastic supporters of the troop increase.

Those generals and other commanders have made it clear that they are operating on a significantly slower clock than officials in Washington, who are eager for significant withdrawals before the president leaves office in January 2009.

In an interview in Baghdad on Thursday, General Odierno, the senior United States ground commander, said any withdrawal of American troops was not advisable until December, “at a minimum.”

Even then, he said, redeployments should be carried out slowly, to avoid jeopardizing security gains.

General Odierno, who has pushed for extending the troop increase into next year, noted that units were in place or available to continue that effort through next April.

But the ideas under discussion, from the National Security Council to the Pentagon, envision reductions beginning well before then. The last time American troop levels in Iraq were anywhere near 100,000 was in January 2004, when they fell briefly to about 108,000.

One of the ideas, officials say, would be to reduce the current 20 American combat brigades to about 10, which would be completed between the spring of 2008 and the end of the year.

Several administration officials said they hoped that if such a reduction were under way in the midst of the presidential campaign, it would shift the debate from whether American forces should be pulled out by a specific deadline — the current argument consuming Washington — to what kind of long-term presence the United States should have in Iraq.

“It stems from a recognition that the current level of forces aren’t sustainable in Iraq, they aren’t sustainable in the region, and they will be increasingly unsustainable here at home,” said one administration official who has taken part in the closed-door discussions.

But other officials in Washington cautioned that any drawdown could be jeopardized by a major outbreak of new violence. Vice President Dick Cheney and others might argue that even beginning a withdrawal would embolden elements of Al Qaeda and the Shiite militias that have recently appeared to go underground.

Missing from much of the current discussion is talk about the success of democracy in Iraq, officials say, or even of the passage of reconciliation measures that Mr. Bush said in January that the troop increase would allow to take place. In interviews, many senior administration and military officials said they now doubted that those political gains, even if achieved, would significantly reduce the violence.

The officials cautioned that no firm plans have emerged from the discussions. But they said the proposals being developed envision a far smaller but long-term American presence, centering on three or four large bases around Iraq. Mr. Bush has told recent visitors to the White House that he was seeking a model similar to the American presence in South Korea.

Both Mr. Bush and Secretary Gates appeared to allude to the new ideas at separate news conferences on Thursday, though they were careful not to be specific about how or when what they are terming the post-surge phase would begin.

Mr. Gates described the administration’s goal of eventually shifting the mission in Iraq to one that is “more to train, equip, continue to go after Al Qaeda and provide support.” Such a mission, he noted, “clearly would involve fewer forces than we have now.”

Any change of course “is going to be the president’s decision,” Mr. Gates said, but one greatly influenced by assessments from General Petraeus and the new American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, who are to provide an assessment of the situation in September. Mr. Gates also referred to “the possible need for some kind of residual force in Iraq for some protracted period of time.”

A rapid transfer of responsibility to Iraqi forces and withdrawal to large bases was attempted in 2005 and 2006, with disastrous results when the Iraqi units proved incapable of halting major attacks, and sectarian violence worsened.

“We’ve been here before,” General Odierno said in the interview, referring to the decisions that are coming up on how quickly to hand over authority to Iraqi units. “We’ve rushed the transition and soon lost many areas that we had before. This time it’s about having enough combat power to stay.”

But what is different now is the political environment in the United States. While Democrats in Congress relented this week and dropped demands to attach a schedule for withdrawal to a bill to finance military efforts in Iraq, White House officials concede that they have bought a few months, at best.

By the fall, they say, they are likely to lose several Republican senators and many members of the House who voted with Mr. Bush in recent weeks.

During his own news conference, Mr. Bush referred on four separate occasions to the report of the Iraq Study Group, headed by the former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and the former Congressman Lee H. Hamilton.

That report, about which Mr. Bush appeared distinctly unenthusiastic when it was issued in December, called for the withdrawal of all American combat troops by the end of March 2008. Mr. Gates was a member of the study group, though he resigned to take up his current post before the report was written.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington and David S. Cloud from Baghdad.

ARTICLE: "Globalization's Gains Come With a Price: While Poor Benefit, Inequality Feeds A Backlash Overseas," by Bob Davis, John Lyons and Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 24 May 2007, p. A1.
Obviously a serious subject that I believe applies natural speed limits on globalization (caboose braking), but smartass that I am (throw your mouse in the trash, Neil!), I couldn't resist.

Globalization promised to lift the wages of low-skilled workers, and it has.

But, CANYOUBELIEVEIT! the wages of low-skilled workers haven't kept pace with the far faster rise of higher-skilled workers, which means, if you get more education and become smarter and talented in general, you get more money.

Further data cited in the "workaholics" story yesterday says people with the highest incomes tend to work the longest hours.

So to sum up: get smarter, work harder, earn more.

Sounds like a winning system right out of Darwin, destined to generate more wealth overall and drive human progress.

Or we could mandate everyone gets the same everything and see how that goes.

Sound cruel?

Tell me this statement doesn't strike you as odd:

While globalization was expected to help the less skilled ... in developing countries, there is overwhelming evidence that these are not generally better off, at least not relative to workers with higher skill or education levels (italics mine)
So write two American Ivy League economists.

Okay ... we should aim for a globalization that rewards less skills and less education?

The kicker of the piece:

Many developing nations seem to following in the footsteps of the U.S., where the income gap has grown sharply since the early 1970s.
Interesting, because that's when you get the first serious stirrings of the info age and globalization and where modern history really begins: the early 1970s.

The two big examples cited are the ones always cited:

1) Latin America, ruined by the Spanish and left with huge income gaps due to concentrated land ownership, still has huge gaps in income. I AM SHOCKED!

2) Mao's China had achieved the amazing distinction of making all its citizens amazingly poor and equally so. Now the gaps in income are huge compared to that nirvana.

Meanwhile, the population in China living on less than a buck a day drops from over 600 million to about 100 million, or from 60 percent to about 10 percent.

Want to count up all the lives elevated and extended and improved?

Or just bitch about the gap?

Of course, the gap isn't an economic issue, but a political one. So yeah, it matters only so much as politics matter. But get big enough, and your system better get more open or a whole lot more closed.

Guess which route gets you more money?

The big driver in all of this division: the gap in skills in handling new technology.

So what should technology do? Get easier to use, I guess.

What should governments do? Improve education and expand its access.

What should biz do? Work more upstream in educational systems to improve appropriate training.

What should Latin America do? Ask Hernando De Soto.

Prisoner of Her Desires
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Posted: Thursday, May 24, 2007

Resident Fellow
Reuel Marc Gerecht

In the United States and in Europe, there is a widespread belief that the Bush administration has failed to engage Iran diplomatically. Among the advisers to the Iraq Study Group, of which I was one, most believed that the Bush administration, not the mullahs' regime, was the most culpable party in foreclosing dialogue between Washington and Tehran after 9/11.

Iran's American-educated longtime ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, has tirelessly suggested that the administration missed opportunities for improving relations and is tone-deaf to his country's peaceful intentions.

Yet it ought to be clear that just the opposite is the case. The clerical regime today is no more interested in reaching a peaceful modus vivendi with the United States than it was in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright all but begged President Mohammad Khatami of Iran to just talk to them.

Since the Germans and the French first introduced the idea of "constructive engagement" with Tehran in the early 1990s, Iran has consistently checked any Western effort to have a meaningful "dialogue of civilizations."

Case in point: Haleh Esfandiari, an American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, has been jailed in Tehran's notorious Evin prison since May 8. For years, she has been an articulate and determined advocate of better relations between her homeland, Iran, and her adopted country.

Just as the former Representative Lee Hamilton, the head of the Wilson Center and the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, has advocated a "diplomatic offensive" toward Tehran, Mrs. Esfandiari has assiduously practiced micro-diplomatic soft power, using the Wilson Center as a bully pulpit for reconciliation. Suspicious, cynical, hawkish and religiously oriented analyses of the Islamic Republic--my school of thought--have not been commonly heard at the Wilson Center under Mrs. Esfandiari and Mr. Hamilton.

In Iran, too, Mr. Hamilton and his Iraq Study Group co-chairman, James Baker, are seen as America's über-engagement proponents. Mrs. Esfandiari had traveled to Iran frequently in recent years and was, on a smaller scale, viewed in a similar way. By arresting her during a visit to her 93-year-old mother, the clerical regime sent a blatant message to Mr. Hamilton about the effectiveness of engagement. He responded with a private letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asking him to allow her to leave the country. Instead, she is behind bars, described by Tehran as an agent of regime change, an "American-Zionist" spy.

It is undoubtedly the Hamilton connection and her marriage with an Iranian-born Jew--a sin under Islamic law for a Muslim woman--that made Mrs. Esfandiari such an irresistible target for a regime fond of taking hostages to intimidate its enemies.

The clerical regime doesn't play fair: A 67-year-old woman who has over the years shown Iran's representatives in the United States and other visiting Iranians, including esteemed clerics, the utmost kindness and respect is a perfect target to show the regime's distaste for Iranians who want to build bridges.

Iran's Ministry of Intelligence, which has dueled with the Central Intelligence Agency for 20 years, knows the difference between real, on-the-payroll "traitors" and those the regime just dislikes and labels as spies. It undoubtedly knows Mrs. Esfandiari isn't working on some regime-change plot masterminded by Langley or the Mossad.

Mrs. Esfandiari's arrest is what you could call "clerical engagement": Iranians and Americans are meant to (re)learn that the ruling clergy exclusively defines the terms of engagement. "Mutual interest," something Mr. Hamilton repeatedly insists the United States and clerical Iran share, isn't a phrase I've seen used by Ali Khamenei, Iran's virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic ultimate leader. Messrs. Hamilton and Baker raised the fearful (to the clerical regime) specter of an America eager to embrace the Islamic Republic. The mullahs, in a very personal, Iranian way, have replied.

Since the Germans and the French first introduced the idea of "constructive engagement" with Tehran in the early 1990s, Iran has consistently checked any Western effort to have a meaningful "dialogue of civilizations." Little harmless things are possible--Western scholars attending academic conferences; Western-Iranian sporting events that the mullahs care little about--but nothing that challenges the regime's core beliefs and mission. The humbling of the United States remains the raison d'être of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's children, who still see themselves as the vanguard of a militant Islamic world.

Since the summer of 1999, when Iran's reformist student movement was crushed by the security services, European investment in Iran has grown rapidly, by the tens of billions of dollars. As the money flows in, the clerical regime has harassed and murdered lay and clerical dissidents, exiling some of its most trenchant critics abroad or sending them to jail. Expanding commercial contacts, the Europeans had argued, was supposed to open up Iran and moderate its leadership. Messrs. Baker and Hamilton, and much of the "realist" camp in the Democratic and Republican Parties, have essentially made the same argument.

The clerical regime, however, knows what Italian city-states and the Ottoman Empire knew well: you can trade with and concurrently try to vanquish your enemy. Europeans and many Americans are enraptured by the idea that commerce and capitalism make friends out of enemies, a view that conveniently allows one to spend less on defense and practice a more friendly foreign policy.

Advocates of engagement don't want to see that for Iran's ruling clergy there is no fundamental contradiction between seeking trade deals with Boeing and Exxon and also bombing American troops in Saudi Arabia, abetting the movement of Al Qaeda's holy warriors (see the 9/11 commission report) and exporting explosive devises to Iraq to kill American and British soldiers.

Many Iranians feel ashamed about the Islamic revolution's violent excesses, which were particularly bad 25 years ago when I was a student of Mrs. Esfandiari and her husband, Shaul Bakhash. However, the two never failed to point out the basic decency and beauty of their homeland and of the men and women who made the Iranian revolution. Now the revolution's ugliness has again pre-empted the country's goodness by brutalizing a woman who has done as much as any Persian poet to show Islamic Iran's complex, rich humanity.

It will be interesting to see whether Mrs. Esfandiari's large network of moderate friends--Iranian scholars, ambassadors and clerics--can activate the traditional Persian way of posht-e pardeh, "politics behind the curtain," to free her. Evin is a terrible place to wait long.

As for the Western powers, they should recall that Ronald Reagan's finest moments came when he saw that the struggles of Soviet dissidents should be at the forefront of American-Soviet relations. The liberation of one individual should sometimes define a nation's foreign policy.

If the Europeans are wise, they'd ensure that no discussion with the Iranians on any subject occurred without highlighting the plight of Mrs. Esfandiari. She indefatigably made European arguments about the need and effectiveness of soft power; they should just as indefatigably defend her.

Neither the Europeans nor the Americans will find any common ground with the clerical regime as long as Mrs. Esfandiari languishes in prison. Until she is freed, it will remain clear that the regime understands nothing other than brute force.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI.

Op-Ed Columnist

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 25, 2007
The pope and many others speak for the thoroughly religious. Christopher Hitchens has the latest best seller on behalf of the antireligious. But who speaks for the quasi-religious?

David Brooks.
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Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts.

Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture.

And now we are in the midst of an economic boom among quasi-religious Catholics. A generation ago, Catholic incomes and economic prospects were well below the national average. They had much lower college completion rates than mainline Protestants. But the past few decades have seen enormous Catholic social mobility.

According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline Protestants.

Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults in the United States today.”

How have they done it?

Well, they started from their traditional Catholic cultural base. That meant, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a strong emphasis on neighborhood cohesion and family, and a strong preference for obedience and solidarity over autonomy and rebellion.

Then over the decades, the authority of the church weakened and young Catholics assimilated. Catholic values began to converge with Protestant values. Catholic adults were more likely to use contraceptives and fertility rates plummeted. They raised their children to value autonomy more and obedience less.

The process created a crisis for the church, as it struggled to maintain authority over its American flock. But the shift was an economic boon to Catholics themselves. They found themselves in a quasi-religious sweet spot.

On the one hand, modern Catholics have retained many of the traditional patterns of their ancestors — high marriage rates, high family stability rates, low divorce rates. Catholic investors save a lot and favor low-risk investment portfolios. On the other hand, they have also become more individualistic, more future-oriented and less bound by neighborhood and extended family. They are now much better educated than their parents or grandparents, and much better educated than their family histories would lead you to predict.

More or less successfully, the children of white, ethnic, blue-collar neighborhoods have managed to adapt the Catholic communal heritage to the dynamism of a global economy. If this country was entirely Catholic, we wouldn’t be having a big debate over stagnant wages and low social mobility. The problems would scarcely exist. Populists and various politicians can talk about the prosperity-destroying menace of immigration and foreign trade. But modern Catholics have created a hybrid culture that trumps it.

In fact, if you really wanted to supercharge the nation, you’d fill it with college students who constantly attend church, but who are skeptical of everything they hear there. For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.

First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.

This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.

The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out the full quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great” appeals to billions. Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is Not Great.” Nobody wants to read a book called “God is Right Most of the Time.”

Sustainable Consumption: The Evolution of a Concept
Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a two-part report on the emergence of sustainable consumption as a major policy debate and how it will affect consumers, businesses and policymakers.
By Bart Mongoven
Energy planners in China, the United Kingdom, Finland and elsewhere recently announced they either are embarking on a major nuclear initiative or are beginning the process of major policy changes that could lead to the construction of new power reactors. Even the United States is clearly turning toward a new energy policy that addresses both oil consumption and climate change -- and also includes nuclear power generation. At the center of this new policy, which will evolve over the coming years, will be a cap-and-trade system that encourages conservation and the development of new energy technologies.
With oil consumption and climate change seriously being addressed -- and nuclear power poised to make a major comeback -- the near-term future of energy policy is becoming increasingly clear. In the longer term, the key phrase will be "sustainable consumption."
For most climate change activists, this means their life's work of making the world care about greenhouse gas emissions is giving way to a technical fight over how best to cut those emissions. Meanwhile, the activists who successfully kept nuclear reactor construction at bay will be forced to regroup and look for new strategies to achieve their goals.

As the United States, Europe and China come to recognize, to varying degrees, the growing strategic importance of finding new energy systems, the issue has moved from the domain of small fringe groups to the mainstream. The question, then, is: If climate change and oil use really are being addressed by the major energy consumers (including the United States, of all countries), will so many people and organizations remain intently focused on "saving" the climate?

The activists who first brought the current slate of energy issues to the fore are largely responsible for developing the structural remedies that industrialized countries are now turning to in response to strategic economic, national security and environmental concerns. As new players are now discussing these issues, however, the activists see themselves increasingly outside the decision-making process. The most idealistic of the lot, those who see their position eroding and their goals being co-opted, are about to launch the next major public crusade on energy policy -- one that focuses squarely on consumption and pays little attention to issues of power generation. The result will be a global energy conservation movement that could be bigger than the movement behind climate change. It could also offer tremendous financial rewards to innovators.

Successes and Failures

Realists and idealists in the environmental movement have long been on record calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would slow and then stop global warming. They portrayed a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in the Earth's temperature to mean the possible end of the humanity, or at least large portions of it. Activist groups stoked fears of the Chinese south coast, U.S. East Coast and much of Northern Europe under water. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore spoke of the beginning of a new ice age.
Faced with this dire rhetoric, industry has offered a series of compromises that would achieve the preliminary goal of modestly cutting greenhouse gas emissions and that point toward dramatic future emission reductions. Industry's decision that it can address climate change, however, is the primary cause of the divide between those who defined the terms of the debate on energy policy, the realists and the idealists. When industry began to take the issue seriously, the ideals that made easy slogans met the institutions that knew the full depth of the challenges behind the slogans. How many windmills does it take to replace a single coal-fired power plant?
The current debate, then, can represent either a massive victory or abject defeat, depending on the activists' point of view.

On one hand are the idealists who have pressed for energy policies that dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that work only toward renewable energy sources and that do not include either nuclear power or coal. They did not come all this way to see the revival of nuclear power, the perfection of "clean coal" technology or drastic subsidies for ethanol producers. Their activism was driven by a desire to spur a new economy. However, they are the ones who simultaneously say that climate change represents the possible end of the world, but that the situation is not so dire that we need to turn to proven solutions that happen to be very troublesome. For them, the current debate is a defeat. Industry's entry means the end of the game because it forces them to deal with the reality of what they are demanding.

On the other hand are the realists, those who work within the existing system to make attainable policies. For them, even those concerned by nuclear power, the current debate is a significant victory. For the first time since the 1970s, all of the major Western countries are working on policies that dramatically reduce their consumption of oil, and most are looking for alternatives to coal. Industry's entry into the issue is a dream come true for the realists because it is industry that has the knowledge and technology to make the changes the environmentalists demand.
And the realists are having a pretty good time of it. Innovative technology companies like Honeywell and Johnson Controls are in a pitched battle to develop the most efficient building environment control systems. Automakers are again advertising the fuel economy of their cars. Oil companies are lobbying parliaments for stricter caps on greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, the institutions with the wherewithal to solve complex problems are working to achieve the realists' long-standing objectives.

Europe Moving to Immediacy

What industry is not doing for the realists -- supporting their sense of urgency -- the Russians are doing through their energy blackmail of Europe. As idealistic as Europeans consider themselves, having their economies held hostage by Moscow is forcing the European public to look for swift, realistic answers to its energy problems.

In the months since Russia's move against Belarus, many European governments have embarked on energy paths that environmentalists do not consider perfect solutions -- but that would solve pressing problems. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government called May 23 for a revival of the United Kingdom's nuclear industry, including the construction of five nuclear reactors by 2020. Finland has begun construction on a new nuclear plant, and Central European EU members are clamoring to get out from under their commitments to abandon nuclear energy as a condition of joining the union. Norway, for its part, continues to battle the Russians over the gas-rich Outer Continental Shelf in the Arctic (even while it imposes dramatic motor vehicle regulations on its drivers).

As with the U.S. move toward embracing climate change, Europeans have stopped looking for ideal or nearly ideal solutions. Like the United States, they are increasingly looking for secure energy sources as much as they are looking for carbon-reducing technologies. They are behaving as if the crisis is immediate.

China is largely in the same position as Europe vis-a-vis Russia, but its situation is exponentially more complex. While China is similar to the United States in that it can meet its energy needs with coal for more than a century, it cannot afford the pollution and other structural costs that have come with its constellation of coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, for those concerned about climate change, China is a looming problem, set to pass the United States in greenhouse gas emissions in 2008.

China is desperate for new forms of energy, and the industrialized countries are desperate for China to find them. Unlike Europe, which until recently had been satisfied to tinker with inefficient but well-meaning attempts to change the fundamentals of energy production, China has not embraced less-efficient options like wind or solar power. It is far behind being able to satisfy demand, and it cannot afford to waste resources on concepts that feel good but do little.
As a result, China is emerging as a testing ground for the large-scale modern energy systems. Beijing is working out an agreement with Westinghouse to build advanced-technology nuclear reactors as a part of its drive to build as many as three new reactors a year for the next decade. Meanwhile, Western companies are investing heavily in developing coal-to-liquids technologies for China that would reduce the air pollution from using coal as a power source. Although environmentalists oppose both reactors and this latest coal technology, they are effective ways to solve energy problems.

What Comes Next

As is almost always the case, things have not worked out perfectly for the idealists (and, as they are idealists, this is to say things have not worked out at all). So where do they go from here? Having led the public to care about climate change only to be co-opted by industry, those dedicated to the attainment of the ideal energy system are regrouping around the issue of "sustainable consumption." The term, grown out of international environmental conferences, is defined by the Sierra Club as "the use of goods and services that satisfy basic needs and improve quality of life while minimizing the use of irreplaceable natural resources and the byproducts of toxic materials, waste and pollution."

The key elements of sustainable consumption are taxing consumption, taking a life-cycle view of a product's costs and increasing individual consumers' attention to these issues. The issue is a natural follow-on to the 10-year focus on energy generation, and can build on many of the same concepts.

The entry of industry into energy issues due to climate change policy and the pressure in Europe created by Russia's aggressiveness has driven the global energy policy past the inflection point -- and things are beginning to change. People everywhere are looking at energy and energy policy very differently than they did five years ago, and most nations are acting urgently to make fundamental changes. Because these changes have come quickly due to public pressure (rather than due to market forces, which tend to be slower), they have focused on what is available now to help move economies away from reliance on Russian natural gas and the creation of greenhouse gases. The result has been to make changes where it is easiest for governments to force action and for corporations to find market advantages.

Outside of automobile fuel-efficiency standards and moves by individual corporations and institutions to save energy, conservation has been looked at as a second-tier issue compared to generation. That is now going to change.