European Institute

By Walter Nicklin in Paris

A few days into the much anticipated 21^st meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,  the mood here in Paris seems more optimistic than not.  That’s at least partly due to having defined “success” downward, as the parties long ago recognized: (1) that a formally binding treaty (especially given domestic U.S. politics) would be all but impossible; (2) that strictly limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celius above preindustrial levels, a goal originally proposed by the European Union two decades ago, should not be the conference’s top-down organizing principle.

By Paul Horne

Editor’s Note: These comments are from an American international political economist and long-time resident in Paris where he is now.

Paris – Nov. 16, 2015. Three days after jihadists massacred at least 130 people and wounded 350 in Paris, France is facing another shock: How to deal with the consequences of Daesh’s attack on French and European society.

By Walter Nicklin

With less than the two weeks to go before the COP21, the Paris attacks have perhaps done more harm to the UN conference than U.S. climate-change deniers could ever have hoped to achieve -- a perverse and happy outcome for the fossil-fuel-dependent Islamic State, which, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, derives $40 million a month producing and exporting oil.

By Michael D. Mosettig, former Foreign Editor of PBS’s The News Hour

Despite the events in Paris, CIA Director John Brennan kept his commitment to open a think tank conference 60 hours after the deadly attacks. But show up he did for a discussion that included the suggestion that some European governments re-think their post-Snowden curbs on intelligence gathering but rejecting suggestions that the European Union would have to end its policies of free movement.