News Updates

Even with the troubling news that use of coal-fired electric power plants is growing in Asia, they are being steadily replaced in the United States as local solar and wind energy increasingly wins on price, with a new report finding that they can replace 74% of coal plants today and 86% by 2025, while saving customers money. Perhaps no surprise. As illustrated recently in Issues, economic forces have played a key role in driving the US decline of coal as an energy resource over the past century.

Several leading Republicans in the US Senate, perhaps feeling pressure from Democrats for not having a plan to combat global warming, now say they are working on proposals that use market-based approaches to address climate change. Their emerging options seem to align with the fundamental yardstick presented in Issues by a conservative scholar that any climate-related policies “must be compatible with individual liberty and democratic institutions, and cannot rely on coercive or unaccountable bureaucratic administration.”

With the record-setting floods in the Midwest providing stark evidence, many observers say it is time for the nation to shift from its usual mode of strengthening protective river barriers and rebuilding behind them to new strategies that take nature into greater account. Issues has a considerable track record in examining options, including a review of lessons from a massive midwestern flood in 1993, a look at how to rethink New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and a recent examination of how to improve the technical and institutional resiliency of infrastructure to withstand the effects of extreme weather events expected with climate change.

A recent News Update on deadlocked negotiations among western states on how to share Colorado River water advised, “Stay tuned.” Well, the states have now reached accord, validating the observation made in an Issues review of a book about the complexities of managing western rivers facing prolonged drought conditions: that conflict has often been a necessary precursor to solutions.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government can arrest and hold legal immigrants who are subject to deportation because they had committed crimes, even relatively minor ones and even if the individuals had served their time long ago. Some observers debate the fairness of this. But in any case, the nation has seen a merging of its criminal and immigration systems that is proving worrisome in various ways, a sociologist pointed out in Issues, and she called for a fuller examination of how this is separating people across society and how to make things better.

LED light bulbs are steadily replacing older, less-efficient types of lights, thus reducing home electricity demand and thereby saving consumers money and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And by doing so almost despite federal energy-efficiency regulations, an analyst recently explained in Issues, LEDs may illuminate a potential path around the “technological lock-in” that commonly favors mature clean energy technologies while blocking out innovative alternatives.

The college admissions bribery case rocking the nation was fueled by perceptions among parents and students that attending an elite university is the key to success—and the universities often push this notion as well. But it doesn’t have to be. The president of Arizona State University recently explained in Issues how his school focuses not on how many applicants it rejects or how hard it is to gain admittance, but on how it can reach out to and help large numbers of students, many from less-advantaged families, graduate and move into productive careers.

US nuclear power plants are in trouble, says a recent think tank report, going on to propose a set of policy steps that might help them recover. Issues has also offered proposals for reinvigorating the nuclear enterprise, including a road map for innovation to reach the next generation of affordable and safe nuclear reactors, and a call for the United States to reestablish leadership in the global commercial nuclear energy market.

Octopuses should not be raised commercially for humans to eat, for reasons both ethical and ecological, an interdisciplinary group of researchers recently argued in Issues. And the Washington Post reports that some social activists and scientists, including one of the Issues authors, are objecting on similar grounds to using octopuses in research, though some studies might be allowed under tightly controlled conditions that the US government should, but does not yet, regulate.

China may be poised to rewrite some of its laws on foreign investments, including policies that require US companies to hand over technological secrets or that illicitly enable theft of intellectual property. But critics worry the changes won’t go far enough. Moreover, a larger need is for the United States to maintain its global leadership in innovation, an analyst recently argued in Issues, proposing ways for government, industry, and universities to strengthen the nation’s innovation capability.

The US government has approved resumption of once-prohibited research on flu viruses that critics worry might end with mutant versions capable of triggering global disease outbreaks if unleashed by lab accidents or terrorism. Though much remains unknown about the projects, their approval may revive questions about how to regulate so-called dual-use biological research, a challenge examined in Issues by a scholar who studies how nations govern security concerns stemming from emerging technologies.