When the eurozone was on the brink last fall, Michael Lind's summer Breakthrough Journal essay, "Against Cosmopolitanism," appeared prescient. What just a few years ago seemed to be the permanent alignment of interests between the radically different economies of Germany and Greece was replaced by an awareness of the currency union's fragility and contingency. Economic integration had outpaced political integration. The nation-state wasn't giving way to global governance. It was prevailing everywhere. Not so fast, say Ulrich Beck, one of the world's most influential living sociologists and author of the landmark 1986 tome, Risk Society, and Nils Gilman of Monitor 360 and Michael Costigan of Global Business Network. Cosmopolitanism may not be up to snuff but the nation-state isn't doing so hot either, they argue in a new Breakthrough Forum we publish today.

Conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning one of its hardest fought battles -- the battle to create parks, game preserves, and wilderness areas. The worldwide number of protected areas has risen dramatically, and yet we are continuing to lose species and wild places at an accelerating rate. In spite of these failures, most conservationist organizations have chosen to double down on the parks model. This constitutes a failure of imagination. Conservation must seek a new vision, a planet in which nature exists amidst a wide variety of modern, human landscapes. But for this to happen, conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness and forge a more optimistic and human-friendly vision. More....

President Obama's State of the Union address reflects a shift in the government's approach to climate change. The focus has shifted from divisive issues like climate science and carbon pricing to a focus on energy innovation and regulation of conventional pollutants, which has earned support from both Democrats and Republicans. We outline this new approach in our report, "Climate Pragmatism," which shows that liberals and conservatives can agree on the need for advancing clean energy R&D and pollution reductions. By minimizing extremist views in both parties, Obama has offered a new pragmatism that could be a path forward on climate change.

President Obama's State of the Union speech rightly noted the importance of manufacturing to sustaining America's economic prosperity, but any effort to "bring manufacturing back" must recognize how globalization has fundamentally changed the sector. The rise of regional supply chain clusters--where key industrial components are produced in many different countries around the world--demands new thinking and new strategies about which industries are key to American economic competitiveness, and how to create a new era of advanced manufacturing.
Read more about the importance of advanced manufacturing in this Breakthrough Institute report.

For the second year in a row, Breakthrough research has played an integral role in President Obama's State of the Union Address. This year, Obama referred to a Breakthrough Institute investigation, which found that all the major technologies related to shale gas extraction--massive hydraulic fracking, horizontal drilling, 3-D mapping--came from federal funding. Breakthrough's research was published in the Washington Post, with a longer history of shale gas and key interviews published at The Breakthrough. Breakthrough deflated the popular mythology that it was private oilman George Mitchell acting alone--without the help of the government--who caused the shale gas revolution. Beyond the critical technologies, Breakthrough's investigation also found that Mitchell benefited from a special federal tax credit for unconventional gas, and help from the Department of Energy's Sandia National Lab.

After twenty years of climate policy discussions, global emissions of climate destabilizing greenhouse gases continue to rise. There's a growing recognition that our current trajectory holds dangerous climate impacts in store. In this five-part series with our friends at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, we take stock of our current climate trajectory and outline the best routes to rapid progress.

Part 1: Taking Stock of our Climate Outlook
Part 2: Is Economic Contraction a Climate Solution?
Part 3: Clean Energy Innovation Imperative
Part 4: Building Resilience Through Climate Adaptation
Part 5: Slowing Warming by Cutting Methane and Pollutants