Research Summary
Although researchers began to assemble open-source terrorism event databases in the late 1960s, until recently most of these databases excluded domestic attacks. This exclusion is particularly misleading for the United States because, although the United States is often perceived to be the central target of transnational terrorism, the domestic attacks of foreign groups targeting the United States are often ignored. We began this article with 53 foreign terrorist groups that have been identified by U.S. State Department and other government sources as posing a special threat to the United States. Using newly available data from the Global Terrorism Database composed of both domestic and transnational terrorist attacks, we examined 16,916 attacks attributed to these groups between 1970 and 2004. We found that just 3% of attacks by these designated anti-U.S. groups were actually directed at the United States. Moreover, 99% of attacks targeting the United States did not occur on U.S. soil but were aimed at U.S. targets in other countries (e.g., embassies or multilateral corporations). We also found that more than 90% of the non-U.S. attacks were domestic (i.e., nationals from one country attacking targets of the same nationality in the same country). We used group-based trajectory analysis to examine the different developmental trajectories of U.S. target and non-U.S. target terrorist strikes and concluded that four trajectories best capture attack patterns for both. These trajectories outline three terrorist waves-which occurred in the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 21st century-as well as a trajectory that does not exhibit wave-like characteristics but instead is characterized by irregular and infrequent attacks.

Policy Implications
Our results underscore the importance of proximity for terrorist targeting. Terrorists, like ordinary criminals, are likely to choose targets close to their operational base. However, when attacks occur further from the terrorists' home bases, they are more deadly. Approximately half of the terrorist organizations studied here exhibited wave-like boom and bust attack trajectories. Given that most attacks by groups identified as threats by the U.S. government are in fact aimed at non-U.S. domestic targets, the United States should pursue efforts to strengthen the capacity of local governments to combat terrorism and to communicate to them our understanding that groups that are anti-United States are also a threat to local governments. In framing counterterrorism policies, the United States should put threats into perspective by acknowledging that we are the exception and local governments are the rule. Terrorism is not just about us.

The capture and permanent storage of CO₂ emissions from coal combustion is now widely viewed as imperative for stabilization of the global climate.  Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel.  This trend presents a forceful case for the development and wide dissemination of technologies that can decouple coal consumption from CO₂ emissions—the leading candidate technology to do this is carbon capture and storage (CCS). 

China simultaneously presents the most challenging and critical test for CCS deployment at scale.   While China has begun an handful of marquee CCS demonstration projects, the stark reality to be explored in this paper is that China’s incentives for keeping on the forefront of CCS technology learning do not translate into incentives to massively deploy CCS in power plant applications as CO₂ mitigation would have it.  In fact, fundamental and interrelated Chinese interests—in energy security, economic growth and development, and macroeconomic stability—directly argue against large-scale implementation of CCS in China unless such an implementation can be almost entirely supported by outside funding.  This paper considers how these core Chinese goals play out in the specific context of the country’s coal and power markets, and uses this analysis to draw conclusions about the path of CCS implementation in China’s energy sector. 

Finally, the paper argues that effective climate change policy will require both the vigorous promotion and careful calculation of CCS’s role in Chinese power generation.  As the world approaches the end of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 and crafts a new policy architecture for a global climate deal, international offset policy and potential US offset standards need to create methodologies that directly address CCS funding at scale.  The more closely these policies are aligned with China’s own incentives and the unique context of its coal and power markets, the better chance they have of realizing the optimal role for CCS in global climate efforts.

Project development is particularly challenging in “frontier” environments where alternative technologies, conflicting laws and agencies, and uncertain benefits or risks constrain the knowledge or decisions of participants.  Carbon capture and storage (“CCS”) projects by means of geologic sequestration are pursued in such an environment.  In these circumstances, entrepreneurs can seek to employ two distinct types of tools:  the game-changer, being an improvement to the status quo for all those similarly situated, generally achieved through collective or governmental action; and the finesse, being an individualized pursuit of an extraordinary project that is minimally affected by a given legal, business or technological obstacle.  These techniques are illustrated in the case of CCS as to ownership of property rights, carbon dioxide (“CO2”) transportation economics, liability for stored CO2 following the closure of injection wells, inter-agency and federal-state conflicts, competing technologies, and uncertain economic or legal incentives.  The finesse and the game-changer should also be useful concepts for creative solutions in other applications.

India has been famous for arguing that it (and the rest of the developing world) should incur no expense in controlling emissions that cause climate change. The west caused the problem and it should clean it up. That argument is increasingly untenable — both in the fundamental arithmetic of climate change, which is a problem that is impossible to solve without developing country participation, and in the political reality that important western partners will increasingly demand more of India and other developing countries. India’s own public is also demanding more.

The Indian government has outlined a broad plan for what could be done, but the plan still lacks a strategy to inform which efforts offer the most leverage on warming emissions and which are most credible because they align with India’s own interests.

This paper offers a framework for that strategy. It suggests that a large number of options to control warming gases are in India’s own self-interest, and with three case studies it suggests that leverage on emissions could amount to several hundred million tonnes of CO2 annually over the next decade and an even larger quantity by 2030. (For comparison, the Kyoto Protocol has caused worldwide emission reductions of, at most, a couple hundred million tonnes of CO2 per year.) We suggest in addition to identifying self-interest — which is the key concept in the burgeoning literature on “co-benefits” of climate change policy — that it is also important to examine where India and outsiders (e.g., technology providers and donors) have leverage.

One reason that strategies offered to date have remained abstract and difficult to implement is that they are not rooted in a clear understanding of where the Government of India is able to deliver on its promises (and where Indian firms have access to the needed technology and practices). Many ideas are interesting in theory but do not align with the administrative and technological capabilities of the Indian context. As the rest of the world contemplates how to engage with India on the task of controlling emissions it must craft deals that reflect India’s interests, capabilities and leverage on emissions. These deals will not be simple to craft, but there are many precedents for such arrangements in other areas of international cooperation, such as in accession agreements to the WTO.

Coal is the major primary energy which fuels economic growth in China. The original Soviet-style institutions of the coal sector were adopted after the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. But since the end of 1970s there have been major changes: a market system was introduced to the coal sector and the Major State Coalmines were transferred from central to local governments. This paper explains these market-oriented and decentralizing trends and explores their implications for the electric power sector, now the largest single consumer of coal.

The argument of this paper is that the market-oriented and decentralizing reforms in the coal sector were influenced by the changes in state energy investment priority as well as the relationship between the central and local governments in the context of broader reforms within China’s economy. However, these market-oriented and decentralizing reforms have not equally influenced the electric power sector. Since coal is the primary input into Chinese power generation, and power sector reform falls behind coal sector reform, the tension between the power and coal sectors is unavoidable and has raised concerns about electricity shortages.

In June 2009, a group of experts in climate science, crop modeling, and crop development gathered at Stanford University to discuss the major needs for successful crop adaptation to climate change. To focus discussion over the three day period, the meeting centered on just three major crops – rice, wheat, and maize – given that these provide the bulk of calories to most populations. The meeting also focused on two aspects of climate– extreme high temperatures and extreme low moisture conditions (i.e. drought) – that present substantial challenges to crops in current climate and are likely to become more prevalent through time. Other aspects of climate change such as more frequent flooding or saltwater intrusion associated with rising sea levels were not addressed, although they may also be important.

The current document is split into two sections:

• a brief summary of material presented at the meeting on the current state of climate projections, crop modeling, crop genetic resources and breeding; and
  
• the collective views of participants on major needs for future research and investment, which emerged from discussions over the three day meeting.
  

The main target audiences for the document are donor institutions seeking to invest in climate adaptation, and climate and crop scientists seeking to set research agendas. We intend the term donor institutions to include private foundations, governments, and inter‐governmental organizations such as the World Bank and United Nations. An underlying assumption of the Stanford meeting was that there is a real and growing need to identify specific investment opportunities that will improve food security in the face of climate change. This is reflected, for instance, by the recent G8 announcement of a $20B investment in food security, the expectation of additional resources for adaptation from the Copenhagen Conference in 2009, and the emphasis of the Obama administration on food and climate issues.