Saudi Arabians woke up over the weekend to a once-in-a-decade cabinet reshuffle. Octogenarian oil minister Ali al-Naimi, who has been in charge of the Kingdom’s energy policy since 1995, was replaced by Khaled al-Falih, who is to head the newly created Energy, Industry, and Natural Resources Ministry. Majed al-Qusaibi was named head of the newly created Commerce and Investment Ministry. Finally, Ahmed al-Kholifey was made governor of the Saudi Arabia’s Central Bank (SAMA). It may come as a surprise to many Saudis that the origin of this reshuffle—and indeed the Kingdom’s new economic direction—finds its impetus in a report by the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

A man with a plan

Saudi Arabia has been struggling to deal with the impact of lower oil prices. After years of recording budget surpluses, the government has seen its budgetary deficit grow to 15 percent of GDP. Lower oil prices—coupled with tensions with regional rival Iran over Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon—have put the Kingdom’s finances under pressure. Since oil prices began to plummet, Saudi Arabia’s ever-ambitious Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been spearheading an ambitious reform initiative that seeks to diversify the Kingdom’s economy away from oil. 

Dubbed “Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030,” the prince says that the new economic blueprint will increase the role of the private sector from 40 percent to 60 percent, reduce unemployment from 11 percent to 7.6 percent, and grow non-oil income exponentially. This is to be financed by the partial privatization of the Kingdom’s oil behemoth, Aramco. 

The 2030 document outlines a number of significant reforms that seek to change not only the Saudi economy, but state-society relations more broadly, in a way that has been done since the Kingdom’s founding.

The 2030 document outlines a number of significant reforms that seek to change not only the Saudi economy, but state-society relations more broadly, in a way that hasn't been done since the Kingdom’s founding. The prince’s vision seems to have been inspired by a report issued by the McKinsey Global Institute in December 2015 titled “Moving Saudi Arabia’s Economy Beyond Oil.” The vision and the report have similar policy prescriptions for diversifying the Kingdom’s economy away from oil. 

Such similarities highlight the influence of consultancies on policymaking in the Kingdom. Indeed, Bloomberg news reported that consultancies are set to earn 12 percent more in commissions in Saudi Arabia this year, the fastest growth amongst the world’s advisory markets. In a wide-ranging interview with The Economist in January, Prince Mohammed himself said that “McKinsey participates with us in many studies.” According to the Financial Times, Saudi businessmen have sarcastically dubbed the Ministry of Planning as the “McKinsey Ministry.”

McKinsey’s key report, full with glossy illustrations, contains consultant buzzwords (“transformation,” “efficiency,” and “synergies”) that would make Marty Kaan in Showtimes’s House of Lies proud. It’s by no means novel for consultants to advise governments in the region and across the world, and indeed the report does outline an ambitious blueprint for the Kingdom’s economic transformation and diversification away from oil. 

Will the public buy it?

But in a glaring omission, the report does not adequately explain how the Saudi government will be able to change the mindset of everyday Saudi Arabia citizens, who have long been accustomed to state largesse that included fuel subsidies, loans, free land, and public sector jobs. 

This is the key issue. The reform plans sound promising, and will indeed make headway in weaning the Kingdom off its oil “addiction” (as the prince himself put it). But how will everyday citizens react to the reforms? The Saudi government will be asking more of its citizens—will the citizens in turn ask for more accountability and representation? Since January, the prices of gasoline, electricity, and water have gone up. There was a public outcry against higher utility prices, which lead King Salman to fire the water minister to absorb the public’s anger. 

Such discontent is the harbinger of things to come. The coming months and years will show how Saudi leadership implements much needed economic reforms without alienating its population. While the outcome is uncertain, one thing is: consultants will continue to flock to Saudi Arabia to work on the “mother of all transformation projects.”

Editors' Note: This post was corrected on May 12, 2016 to clarify that the report “Moving Saudi Arabia’s Economy Beyond Oil” was issued by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of McKinsey & Company. MGI’s work is independent and wholly funded by McKinsey Partners. The MGI report was not commissioned by the government of Saudi Arabia and has no formal role in government decision-making.

“If the Americans and their regional allies want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and threaten us, we will not allow any entry,” said deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, last Wednesday. Iran has a long history of making threats against this critical waterway, through which some 17 million barrels of oil exports pass daily, though it has not carried them out. But multiple regional security threats highlight threats to energy transit from and through the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—and demand new thinking about solutions.

Weak spots

Hormuz attracts attention because of its evident vulnerability. But recent years have seen severe disruptions to energy flows across the region: port blockades in Libya; pipeline sabotage in Egypt’s Sinai, Yemen, Baluchistan in Pakistan, and Turkey’s southeast; attacks on oil and gas installations across Syria and Iraq; piracy off Somalia. Energy security is threatened at all scales, from local community disturbances and strikes, up to major regional military confrontations.

Of course, it would be best to mitigate these energy security vulnerabilities by tackling the root causes of conflict across the region. But while disruption and violence persist, energy exporters and consumers alike should guard against complacency.

A glut of oil and gas supplies globally—with low prices, growing U.S. self-sufficiency, and the conclusion of the Iranian nuclear deal—may seem to have reduced the urgency: markets have hardly responded to recent flare-ups. But major economies – even the United States – still remain dependent, directly or indirectly, on energy supplies from the MENA region. Spare oil production capacity is at unusually low levels, leaving the balance vulnerable to even a moderate interruption.

Most concern has focused on oil exports, given their importance to the world economy. But the security of liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments is an under-appreciated risk, particularly for countries such as Japan and South Korea which are heavily dependent on LNG. A disruption would also have severe consequences for countries in the Middle East and North Africa, depriving them not only of revenues but potentially of critical imports.

Doing better 

There are three broad groups of approaches to mitigating the risk of energy transit disruptions: infrastructure, institutions, and market. 

1. Infrastructure includes the construction of bypass pipelines avoiding key choke-points and strategic storage.
   
   Existing bypass pipelines include SUMED (which avoids the Suez Canal); the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline in the UAE (bypassing Hormuz); and the Saudi Petroline, which runs to the Red Sea, hence offering an alternative to the Gulf and Hormuz. Proposed projects include a link from other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to Oman’s planned oil terminal at Duqm on the Indian Ocean; new or rehabilitated pipelines from Iraq across Jordan and Turkey; an expansion of Petroline; and a new terminal in southern Iran at Jask.
   
   Strategic storage can be held by oil exporters, by importers, or a combination (in which exporters hold oil close to their customers’ territory, as with arrangements between Saudi Arabia and Japan, and between Abu Dhabi and Japan and India).


2. Institutional approaches include mechanisms to deal with disruptions, such as cooperative sharing arrangements.
   
   More analysis has focused on infrastructure than on institutional and market mitigation. Yet these approaches have to work together. Physical infrastructure is not enough: it has to be embedded in a suitable framework of regulation, legislation, and diplomacy. Cross-border or multilateral pipelines require agreements on international cooperation; strategic storage is most effective when rules for its use are clear, and when holders of storage agree not to hoard scarce supplies. 
   
   The effective combination of infrastructure and institutions has a strategic benefit even if it is never used. By making oil exporters and consumers less vulnerable to threats, it makes it less likely that such threats will be carried out.
   
   Alliances can be useful for mutual security and coordination. However, they raise the difficult question of whom they are directed against. Mutually-hostile alliances would be a threat to regional energy security rather than a guarantor. Organizations such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Energy Forum (IEF), Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) could all have roles, but none is ideally placed. Rather than creating another organization, reaching an understanding between existing bodies may be more effective.


3. In general, markets cope well with the task of allocating scarce supplies. Better and timelier data, such as that gathered by the IEF, can greatly improve the functioning of markets. Governments do have a role in protecting the most vulnerable consumers and ensuring sufficient energy for critical services, but price controls, rationing, and export bans have usually been counterproductive, and many of the worst consequences of so-called energy crises have come from well-meaning government interference with the normal market process of adjustment.
   
   However, it is generally difficult or impossible for a single company or country to capture all the benefits of building strategic infrastructure—which, as with a bypass pipeline, may only be required for a few months over a period of decades. International financing, perhaps backed by a major energy importer—mostly likely China—can help support such projects, particularly at a time of fiscal austerity in the Middle East.

Energy exporters within the MENA region may often find their interests divergent. But the field of energy security is one area for more fruitful cooperation—at least between groups of states, and some external players, particularly their increasingly important Asian customers. If regional tensions and conflicts cannot be easily solved, such action at least alleviates one of the serious risks of the region’s turmoil.

For more on this topic, read Robin Mills’ new analysis paper “Risky routes: Energy transit in the Middle East.”

On Tuesday, May 24, Nigerian Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele announced that the country will adopt a more flexible foreign exchange rate system in the near future. This move signals a major policy shift by Emefiele and President Muhammadu Buhari, who had until this point opposed calls to let the naira weaken. Many international oil-related currencies have depreciated against the dollar as oil prices began their decline in 2014. Nigeria, however, has held the naira at a peg of 197-199 per U.S. dollar since March 2015, depleting foreign reserves and deterring investors, who remain concerned about the repercussions of a potential naira devaluation. Following the announcement, Nigerian stocks jumped to a five-month high and bond prices rose in anticipation that a new flexible exchange rate regime would increase the supply of dollars and help attract foreign investors.

For now it remains unclear exactly what a more flexible system will entail for Nigeria, however, some experts suggest that the Central Bank may introduce a dual-rate system, which allows select importers in strategic industries to access foreign currency at the current fixed rate, while more generally foreign currency will be available at a weaker, market-related level. This new regime raises a number of questions, including how it will be governed and who will have access to foreign currency (and at what rate). On Wednesday, Nigeria’s parliament requested a briefing soon from Emefiele and Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun to provide additional clarity on the new system, although the date for such a meeting has not yet been set.

Earlier this month, Kenya announced plans to close the Dadaab refugee camp, located in northeast Kenya, amid security concerns. The move to close the camp has been widely criticized by international actors. United States State Department Press Relations Director Elizabeth Trudeau urged Kenya to “uphold its international obligations and not forcibly repatriate refugees.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stated that the closure of the refugee camp would have “devastating consequences.” Despite these concerns, this week, at the World Humanitarian Summit, Kenya stated that it will not go back on its decision and confirmed the closure of the refugee camps within a six-month period.

The camp houses 330,000 refugees, a majority of whom fled from conflict in their home country of Somalia. Kenya insists that the camp poses a threat to its national security, as it believes the camp is used to host and train extremists from Somalia’s Islamist group al-Shabab. Kenya also argued that the developed world, notably the United Kingdom, should host its fair share of African refugees. This is not the first time Kenya has threatened to close the refugee camp. After the Garissa University attacks last April, Kenya voiced its decision to close the refugee camps, although it did not follow through with the plan.

From May 23-27, Lusaka, Zambia hosted 5,000 delegates and participants for the 2016 Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank (AfDB), with the theme, “Energy and Climate Change.” Held in the wake of December’s COP21 climate agreement and in line with Sustainable Development Goals 7 (ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all) and 13 (take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts), the theme was timely and, as many speakers emphasized, urgent. Around 645 million people in Africa have no access to electricity, and only 16 percent are connected to an energy source. To that end, AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina outlined the bank’s ambitious aim: “Our goal is clear: universal access to energy for Africa within 10 years; Expand grid power by 160 gigawatts; Connect 130 million persons to grid power; Connect 75 million persons to off grid systems; And provide access to 150 million households to clean cooking energy."

As part of a push to transform Africa’s energy needs and uses, Rwandan President Paul Kagame joined Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on a panel to support the AfDB’s “New Deal on Energy” that aims to deliver electricity to all Africans by 2025. Kenyatta specifically touted the potential of geothermal energy sources. Now, 40 percent of Kenya's power needs come from geothermal energy sources, he said, but there is still room for improvement—private businesses, which make up 30 percent of Kenya’s on-grid energy needs, have not made the switch yet.

As part of the meetings, the AfDB, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) also launched their annual African Economic Outlook, with the theme “Sustainable Cities and Structural Transformation.” In general, the report’s authors predict that the continent will maintain an average growth of 3.7 percent in 2016 before increasing to 4.5 percent in 2017, assuming commodity prices recover and the global economy improves.  However, the focus was on this year’s theme: urbanization. The authors provide an overview of urbanization trends and highlight that successful urban planning can discourage pollution and waste, slow climate change, support better social safety nets, enhance service delivery, and attract investment, among other benefits.

For more on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, see Chapter 4 of Foresight Africa 2016: Capitalizing on Urbanization: The Importance of Planning, Infrastructure, and Finance for Africa’s Growing Cities.

Editors’ Note: Science diplomacy can help countries solve on-the-ground challenges and improve standards of living for their citizens, writes David Hajjar. But it can also lay groundwork for improving relations through functional, scientific cooperation that is less politicized. This post originally appeared on Lawfare.

In the Middle East, governments and non-state actors alike have tried all forms of diplomacy to solve the challenges they face, with mixed results: shuttle diplomacy by the United States between the Israelis and Palestinians worked for a time, great-power diplomacy over the Syrian civil war largely hasn’t, and direct negotiations with unsavory groups like the Taliban have moved in fits and starts. 

But progress can come from unlikely sources, and science diplomacy—whereby experts collaborate scientifically to address common problems and build constructive international partnerships—has more potential than is often recognized. Science diplomacy can of course help countries solve on-the-ground challenges and improve standards of living for their citizens. But it can also lay groundwork for improving relations in a region often defined by tension (if not outright conflict) through functional, scientific cooperation that is less politicized. 

Efforts in science and technology, on the one hand, and diplomacy on the other, can achieve more if they are thoughtfully merged—rather than siloed. Science diplomacy, therefore, can contribute to peace- and security-building in the Middle East (and with the United States) in unique ways. 

Science and global governance

Across the world, science diplomacy has helped set the stage for advancing foreign policy and global governance goals.

The 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 illuminated how negotiating over and collaborating on science and technology issues can be an important gateway to achieving significant foreign policy goals. Direct (and often very technical) diplomacy between U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, was key to achieving the framework agreement, as was collaboration between Iranian and Western nuclear scientists more broadly. Provided that the agreement is thoroughly enforced, it’s a major victory for global nuclear nonproliferation efforts—and much credit goes to effective science diplomacy. 

Global efforts to combat climate change are another area in which science diplomacy has had a real impact on policy. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has become a model for critical science policy research and recommendations. The 2015 conference in Paris brought together hundreds of political leaders and experts to examine the scientific evidence that the globe is warming, discuss remedies, and chart a path forward that can help slow environmental damage. So, science diplomacy was again central—this time in shaping and implementing the global climate governance framework. 

Another area where we have observed substantive gains from science diplomacy is the global management of infectious diseases. The Zika outbreak in Latin America, Ebola epidemic in West Africa, dengue in the Caribbean and Asia, MERS in the Gulf region and in South Korea, and the global threat of pandemic influenza all underscore that international cooperation is key to fighting modern plagues, which spread more rapidly in an era of constant global travel. In some cases more than in others, political leaders have devoted considerable resources to promoting international scientific cooperation—whether in clinical monitoring, medical interventions, research into pathogen biology and diagnostics, and treatments (including vaccine development). In fact, the global response to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is an example where international collaboration helped identify affected populations and coordinate treatment through the WHO Global Alert and Response System (which has identified new cases in Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Canada, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). The system’s main goal is to send supplies and medical specialists (including epidemiologists), design clinical trials, provide diagnostic tests, identify modes of transmission, and provide treatment. This coordinated response effort has controlled the pandemic.

Science in a fraught region

In the Middle East, opportunities abound for science diplomacy. Not only can this type of approach help solve practical, quality-of-life challenges—from energy to health and beyond—it can bring together expert communities and bureaucracies. In the process, it can contribute to more normalized people-to-people and government-to-government relations. Even at the height of the Cold War, for example, U.S. and Russian nuclear scientists and other experts worked together to monitor each other’s nuclear facilities; even though Moscow and Washington had nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed directly at each other, bureaucratic cooperation on technical issues became a normal part of the relationship and helped enhance transparency and trust.

In the energy sector, for example, innovation in science and technology will play a crucial role in helping to transition Middle Eastern states in the region away from a dependence on fossil fuels—a broad goal of the Paris accords and a specific strategic goal of states like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Notwithstanding the sectarian disagreements between Iran and Saudi Arabia, both need to address their fast-growing demand for electricity; they need not be in competition with each other. Saudi Arabia currently fuels its own 10 percent annual rise in electricity needs with crude oil, owing to domestic natural dry gas reserves. Iran’s vast gas reserves could be used to meet the kingdom’s growing energy needs, but Iran’s decaying gas fields need $250 billion in major repairs. Many think that if Saudi Arabia used its investment power to revitalize Iran’s gas industry, it would secure the energy it needs to meet demands. The economic benefits of cooperation on energy could promote better relations. Another area of cooperation that can drive the local economies is the Arab Gulf’s first major cross-border enterprise, the Dolphin Gas Project, which was started in 2007. The project involves the transportation of natural gas from Qatar to Oman and to the UAE. Finally, international cooperation between Oman and Iran is developing, where Oman intends to import natural gas from Iran for industrial development. This would require investing in an underwater pipeline from the Iranian coast to Oman. The UAE could do the same to build its economy: import natural gas from Iran, since the pipelines exist. The technical know-how for all these initiatives already exists—to date the main stumbling block has been overcoming regional politics.

Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah (L) and Dolphin Energy Chief Executive Ahmed Ali Al Sayegh hold a news conference about the inauguration of the Dolphin Energy plant in Doha May 12, 2008. Photo credit: Reuters.

In health, there is also room for mutually-beneficial cooperation. Back in 1996, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs helped establish the Middle East Cancer Consortium—that effort continues to help train the next generation of scientists and medical professionals in cancer biology in the region. Other programs have focused on vaccine development for childhood diseases; preventing HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis infections; ending childhood malnutrition; and managing unwanted pregnancies. Programs like these have yielded important advances in public health and have enhanced cooperation between countries like the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, and Israel with the United States.

And in a unique cross-sectoral approach, Jordan is host to a promising initiative called the Synchrotron Light for Experimental Science and Application in the Middle East (SESAME). Modeled after the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), SESAME is a partnership between Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, and Turkey that aims to create research career opportunities that will limit “brain drain” from the region and serve as a model for scientific collaboration.

STEM education: The root of science diplomacy

Science diplomacy has the potential to deliver real dividends that extend beyond the science and technology spaces themselves. When states cooperate on functional, non-politicized (or at least less politicized) issues—whether at the level of non-state scientific communities or at the level of state bureaucracies focused on energy, health, or other issues—they become more accustomed to working together and trusting each other. This can gradually have spillover effects into politics and security arenas.

Science diplomacy doesn’t just happen, though—it requires real efforts on behalf of policymakers and experts. One crucial step is advancing STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to build more robust and diverse expert communities. This is something that President Obama emphasized in his speech at Cairo's Al-Azhar University in 2009. He identified possible areas of cooperation, both within the region and with the United States, including researching and piloting new sources of energy, creating “green” jobs, enhancing communication and informatics, sharing medical information, generating clean water, and growing new crops. 

In some countries in the region, particularly in the Gulf, there are signs of new investment in STEM education and related efforts. For example, Qatar has pledged to spend 3 percent of its GDP on scientific research, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has decided to create the world’s first sustainable city. Saudi Arabia created the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) with a $20 billion endowment, $200 million of which has been used to attract scientists and educators from the West. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE continue to build and sustain partnerships with European and American universities. 

Interest in science among students and the general citizenry in many Middle Eastern countries remains low, which is problematic at a time when the region’s young people need to compete in a world increasingly centered around STEM. More governments in the region—perhaps with U.S. help—need to increase efforts to attract their young people to STEM education and careers.

International cooperation on STEM issues—led by science diplomats—can strengthen relationships between Middle Eastern states and with the United States. Science and technology disciplines transcend politics, borders, and cultures, and are thus an important bridge between nations. During a time of strained geopolitical relationships, we can focus on making progress in health and disease, food and water security, and other areas—and thereby enhance domestic stability and international security in the process. 

When the Volkswagen emissions control scandal broke into the headlines in September, I wrote here how I felt like my lifelong love affair with VW had been violated. As an environmentalist, owning a Jetta that zipped along for 42 miles on a gallon of diesel was the best of both worlds. And it was a lie. My wife, Holly Flood, said she felt like she’d been “duped,” and since then she’s vowed never to buy another VW.

I’m not so sure. But I was pleased this week to see the agreed terms for the nearly half million of us who own the smaller diesel engine cars in the U.S. This was the largest car settlement in U.S. history.

What I like is the combination of individual and collective compensation for this crime.

On the individual side, if this deal is approved by the judge in early October, my family will get our 2009 Jetta TDI sedan fixed for free (if the Environmental Protection Agency approves the fix), and we’ll get a check for $5,100. Holly says that’s perfect timing for a down payment on a new car (which will not be a VW).

I’m pushing for a plug-in electric hybrid, which we can charge with renewable energy we get off the grid from our local provider, People’s Power & Light. In our case, for every electron we use, they pay to have one electron put in from wind power somewhere right here in New England. Hopefully we’ll have variable pricing of electricity by then, allowing us to charge the car when the juice is cheapest, like when the wind blows at night but few people are using much electricity.

The unknown for us is whether the VW fix will noticeably harm the performance of the car. I’m guessing it will, perhaps in its remarkable torque, in its gas mileage, or both. But at this point the car has tons of my wife’s commuting miles on it, so we’re hanging on to it as the in-town backup car. Under the settlement we could get an extra $7k and give up the car entirely. That may be tempting, as it’s at that point where it’s getting substantially more expensive to maintain, and the Kelley Blue Book value is around $6k. They apparently aren’t lowballing us.

The collective part of this agreement is actually more interesting.

VW agreed to pay $4.7 billion  into environmental programs, which in my estimation will eliminate more harm than they created. One estimate guessed that scores of premature deaths occurred in the U.S. from VW’s “defeat devices” that shut off emissions controls when they were not being tested. Most of the deaths were probably in California, where there were many more sales of diesels than elsewhere in the country. (Of course in Europe the concentration of diesels is much greater and the Guardian put the number of deaths at thousands in the U.K. alone.) 

One part of this fund will go to replace diesel buses with electric ones. This will measurably improve air quality in inner cities, the precise places where extra sooty VWs were causing ill health and premature deaths with their NOx emissions. Another part will go to install electric vehicle charging stations in California. This helps overcome the “chicken and egg” problem of people not being willing to switch to electric vehicles for fear of running out of juice. The settlement says that “Volkswagen must spend $2 billion to promote non-polluting cars (“zero emissions vehicles” or “ZEV”), over and above any amount Volkswagen previously planned to spend on such technology.” That counterfactual will probably be impossible to prove, but the idea here is fairness.

Sociologically, this is a fascinating case, because it reveals how our society resolves scandals that killed people through knowing contamination of the environment. As Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates harshly put it, "By duping regulators, Volkswagen turned nearly half a million American drivers into unwitting accomplices in an unprecedented assault on our environment." There are individuals inside this company who deserve criminal prosecution, but apparently most of the thousands of other employees did not know what was going on.

The corporate response has been interesting, and seems to vary sharply from how most U.S. auto firms have dealt with similar lawsuits and scandals in the past. VW did not drag out the battle, but set aside $16 billion immediately as a loss, and then settled rather generously with us. (This spring they had already given us a $500 gift card and $500 in repairs in what was essentially hush money.)

VW’s response to this crisis was creative, forward-looking, and ultimately pro-social. Just a week or so ago they announced that their new business model was to be in electrics: They announced they’d be rolling out 31 electric vehicles in the coming years. This is a remarkable turn for a company that pushed diesels for decades as the solution to climate change. This is what it looks like when a massive corporation whose reputation was built on trust and belief in the integrity of a brand seeks to battle its way back into a changing market.

Spending billions on charging stations and replacing diesel buses may make immediate sense—can we say if this is helping avoid premature deaths or it is merely crass self-interest? Does it matter? 

Of course it does. But my first impression of what VW did this week was of a fair deal that was not just lining my pocket. It was helping us get off fossil fuels as a society and benefiting human health and the environment in a substantial way. And by rebuilding a major employer in Germany, the U.S., and around the world into one that might be a part of the solution to climate change, this is a significant and fairly brilliant business move to position the company for the next half century.

Or am I merely a sucker for my old flame?

With new technologies for extracting oil and natural gas producing an energy boom throughout North America, Senior Fellow Charles Ebinger sees the potential in hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” to free the continent from dependence on Middle East oil, and even make some progress on curbing sources of air pollution.
 

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Video

• Fracking and Prospects for Energy Security in North America

Baltimore provides a prime example of how metropolitan areas around the nation are turning to clean, green industries as a source of vibrant, sustainable growth. Expert Jennifer Vey outlines how such communities can identify their assets and capitalize on them to revitalize their economies.

Video

• Baltimore as a Case Study in Metro Economic Recovery

Audio

• @ Brookings Podcast: Baltimore as a Case Study in Metro Economic Recovery

Partisan gridlock and political extremism threaten to tear down the pillars of public policy and render the U.S. government utterly dysfunctional, argues Senior Fellow Thomas Mann, co-author with Norman Ornstein—resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute—of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (Basic Books, 2012). He argues that a flood of super-PAC money, negative ads and cowed mainstream news media are contributing to the problem.

Video

• Mann: Blame for Gridlock Is Squarely on Republican Party

Drought, low agriculture productivity and a cascade of bad policy choices have put millions in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel at risk for starvation. Senior Fellow Mwangi Kimenyi, director of the Africa Growth Initiative, says the consequences will haunt the continent for decades to come.

Video

• Mwangi S. Kimenyi: Food Insecurity in Africa Can Be Solved

Year after year, federal spending on poverty programs has been going up, but we still see more and more people who have no margin to guard against unexpected expenses or job loss. At the same time, for different reasons, Americans who are not impoverished have seen their wealth decline sharply. Expert Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families, says the problems are growing deeper, despite increased federal spending on programs to assist the poor. Haskins says everyone must sacrifice, but also says, that people in general, who finish high school, get a job, and get married and delay having children until age 21 are better off.

Video

• Solutions to Poverty's Rise in America

The terrible attack in Nice on July 14—Bastille Day—saddened us all. For a country that has done so much historically to promote democracy and human rights at home and abroad, France is paying a terrible and unfair price, even more than most countries. My colleagues Will McCants and Chris Meserole have carefully documented the toll that France, and certain other Francophone countries like Belgium, have suffered in recent years from global terrorism. It is heart wrenching.

From what we know so far, the attack was carried out by a deeply distraught, potentially deranged, and in any case extremely brutal local man from Nice of Tunisian descent and French nationality. Marital problems, the recent loss of his job, and a general sense of personal unhappiness seem to have contributed to the state of mind that led him to commit this heinous atrocity. Perhaps we will soon learn that ISIS, directly or indirectly, inspired the attack in one way or another as well. My colleague Dan Byman has already tapped into his deep expertise about terrorism to remind us that ISIS had in fact encouraged ramming attacks with vehicles before, even if the actual manifestation of such tactics in this case was mostly new. 

This attack will again raise the question: Why France? On this point, I do have a somewhat different take than some of my colleagues. The argument that France has partly brought these tragedies upon itself—perhaps because of its policies of secularism and in particular its limitations on when and where women can wear the veil in France—strikes me as unpersuasive. Its logical policy implications are also potentially disturbing, because if interpreted wrongly, it could lead to a debate on whether France should modify such policies so as to make itself less vulnerable to terrorism. That outcome, even if unintended, could dance very close to the line of encouraging appeasement of heinous acts of violence with policy changes that run counter to much of what French culture and society would otherwise favor. So I feel the need to push back.

Here are some of the arguments, as I see them, against blaming French culture or policy for this recent string of horrible attacks including the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the November 2015 mass shootings in Paris, and the Nice tragedy (as well as recent attacks in Belgium):

• Starting with the simplest point, we still do not know much about the perpetrator of the Nice killings. From what we do surmise so far, personal problems appear to be largely at the root of the violence—different from, but not entirely unlike, the case with the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen.
• We need to be careful about drawing implications from a small number of major attacks. Since 2000, there have also been major attacks in the Western world by extremist jihadis or takfiris in New York, Washington, Spain, London, San Bernardino, Orlando, and Russia. None of these are Francophone. Even Belgium is itself a mixed country, linguistically and culturally.
• Partly for reasons of geography, as well as history, France does face a larger problem than some other European countries of individuals leaving its country to go to Syria or Iraq to fight for ISIS, and then returning. But it is hardly unique in the scale of this problem.
• Continental Europe has a specific additional problem that is not as widely shared in the United Kingdom or the United States: Its criminal networks largely overlap with its extremist and/or terrorist networks. This point may be irrelevant to the Nice attack, but more widely, extremists in France or Belgium can make use of illicit channels for moving people, money, and weapons that are less available to would-be jihadis in places like the U.K. (where the criminal networks have more of a Caribbean and sub-Saharan African character, meaning they overlap less with extremist networks).
• Of course, the greatest numbers of terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists occur in the broader Muslim world, with Muslims as the primary victims—from Iraq and Syria to Libya and Yemen and Somalia to South Asia. French domestic policies have no bearing on these, of course.

There is no doubt that good work by counterterrorism and intelligence forces is crucial to preventing future attacks. France has done well in this regard—though it surely can do better, and it is surely trying to get better. There is also no doubt that promoting social cohesion in a broad sense is a worthy goal. But I would hesitate, personally, to attribute any apparent trend line in major attacks in the West to a particular policy of a country like France—especially when the latter is in fact doing much to seek to build bridges, as a matter of national policy, with Muslims at home and abroad. 

There is much more to do in promoting social cohesion, to be sure, even here in America (though our own problems probably center more on race than on religion at the moment). But the Nice attacker almost assuredly didn’t attack because his estranged wife couldn’t wear a veil in the manner and/or places she wanted. At a moment like this in particular, I disagree with insinuations to the contrary.