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During the Great Society of the 1960s and thereafter, conservatives won limits on federal power. In a string of important legislative debates – over policies on housing, health, job training, and new environmental and consumer regulations – interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers pushed for what they called “state flexibility” provisions. Such rules did not shrink government; rather, they placed constraints on what federal agencies could do without the approval of state governors and legislators, making each step in government action more complex. At the urging of industry groups, early water-pollution rules were written to give governors the right to challenge federal regulatory standards. This led to delays making final regulatory decisions virtually impossible to achieve. Even when tougher water-pollution measures were passed in the 1970s, states still got to take part in standard-setting and program implementation. A decidedly uncooperative variant of federalism resulted, stalling new water-pollution controls at first and, when controls were finally put in place, giving industry interests leverage to re-fight policy battles at the state level.

Dr. Tom Chalko, MSC, PhD, head of Australia's physics, 2003 (March 3, Scientific Engineering Research, "Can a Neutron Bomb accelerate Global Volcanic Activity?", http://sci-e-research.com/neutron_bomb.html)

Consequences of using modern nuclear weapons can be far more serious than previously imagined. These consequences relate to the fact that most of the heat generated in the planetary interior is a result of nuclear decay. Over the last few decades, all superpowers have been developing so-called "". These bombs are designed to emit intensive neutron radiation while creating relatively little local mechanical damage. Military are very keen to use neutron bombs in combat, because lethal neutron radiation can peneterate even the largest and deepest bunkers. However, the military seem to ignore the fact that a neutron radiation is capable to reach significant depths in the planetary interior. In the process of passing through the planet and losing its intensity, a neutron beam stimulates nuclei of radioactive isotopes naturally present inside the planet to disintegrate. This disintegration in turn, generates more neutron and other radiation. The entire process causes increased nuclear heat generation in the planetary interior, far greater than the initial energy of the bomb. It typically takes many days or even weeks for this extra heat to conduct/convect to the surface of the planet and cause increased seismic/volcanic activity. Due to this variable delay, nuclear tests are not currently associated with seismic/volcanic activity, simply because it is believed that there is no theoretical basis for such an association. Perhaps you heard that after every major series of nuclear test there is always a period of increased seismic activity in some part of the world. This observable fact CANNOT be explained by direct energy of the explosion. The mechanism of neutron radiation accelerating decay of radioactive isotopes in the planetary interior, however, is a VERY PLAUSIBLE and realistic explanation. The process of accelerating volcanic activity is nuclear in essence. Accelerated decay of unstable radioactive isotopes already present in the planetary interior provides the necessary energy. The TRUE danger of modern nuclear weaponry is that their neutron radiation is capable to induce global overheating of the planetary interior, global volcanic activity and, in extreme circumstances, may even cause the entire planet to explode.

(Max, professor doing AI research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://time.com/6290977/nuclear-war-impact-essay/)

We know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as a video. It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke is produced, lofted and spread across the globe, altering the climate and causing mass starvation. As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact. Ballistic missiles from U.S. submarines west of Norway start striking Russia after about 10 minutes, and Russian ones from north of Canada start hitting the U.S. a few minutes later. The very first strikes fry electronics and power grids by creating an electro-magnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter. The next strikes target command-and-control centers and nuclear launch facilities. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to fly from launch to target. Major cities are targeted both because they contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy’s post-war recovery. Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones. The U.K. and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the U.S. so, Russia hits them too. Firestorms engulf many cities, where storm-level winds fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting glass and some metals and turning asphalt into flammable hot liquid. Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere. This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes. It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse – a reason to proceed with caution. A recently launched $4M open research program will hopefully help clarify public understanding and inform the global policy conversation, but much more work is needed, since most of the research on this topic is classified and focused on military rather than humanitarian impacts. We obviously don’t know how many people will survive a nuclear war. But if it’s even remotely as bad as this study predicts, it has no winners, merely losers. It’s easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is something you can do to help: please help share this video! The fact that nuclear war is likely to start via gradual escalation, perhaps combined by accident or miscalculation, means that the more people know about nuclear war, the more likely we are to avoid having one.

IN the early 1980s, American and Russian scientists working together outlined a stark vision of the Cold War future. In a battle between the two superpowers, smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would be so dense that it would block out the sun, turning the earth cold, dark and dry, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year. This dystopia became known as nuclear winter. We haven’t heard much about this apocalyptic future in recent years. But the research into the destructive potential of a war involving nuclear weapons has continued. Even with the reduced nuclear arsenals that the United States and Russia agreed to in 2010, we have the ability not only to set off instantaneous destruction, but also to push global temperatures below freezing, even in summer. Crops would die and starvation could kill most of humanity. But it is not just the superpowers that threaten the planet. A nuclear war between any two countries using 100 Hiroshima-size atom bombs, less than half of the combined arsenals of India and Pakistan, could produce climate change unseen in recorded human history. This is why we should celebrate the recent agreement with Iran, which may stop it from producing a nuclear weapon. And it is also why we should look with deep alarm at North Korea’s recent launching of a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, in what is believed to be an effort to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile. Nine countries have nuclear arsenals, with an estimated total of 15,695 weapons, according to the Ploughshares Fund, a global securities group. About 94 percent are held by the United States and Russia. Except for North Korea, the other nuclear nations have each kept their arsenals at roughly 100 to 300 weapons. All have the destructive power to alter the global environment. These weapons have not been a deterrent to war or aggression. But even if you think they can be, how many would you have to use? The answer is, probably one. There are simply too many nuclear weapons in the world, by as much as a factor of 1,000, for anyone, anywhere, to be safe from the potential effects of even a small war. The chance that nuclear weapons would be used by mistake, in a panic after an international incident, by a computer hacker or by a rogue leader of a nuclear nation can be eliminated only by the removal of the weapons themselves. We were among the scientists involved in the initial research that discovered the potential for nuclear winter. More modern and advanced climate modeling has confirmed the initial findings and shown that the effects would last for more than a decade. The reason is that smoke from nuclear conflagrations would rise as high as 25 miles into the atmosphere, where it would be protected from rain and take at least 10 years to dissipate. In more recent research, we looked at the potential impact of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each country detonating 50 Hiroshima-size bombs. These explosions would produce so much smoke that temperatures would plunge, shortening growing seasons and threatening the global food supply. Our calculations, based on how crops grow in different weather, showed that wheat, rice, corn and soybean production could be reduced by 10 percent to 40 percent overall for five years. The ozone layer would also be depleted, allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach the earth’s surface. We hope this continuing research on the effects of even a so-called small nuclear war will highlight the threat to the planet in the same way that visions of a nuclear winter did more than three decades ago for Russian and American leaders, when the total number of nuclear weapons peaked at about 70,000. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1985, “A great many reputable scientists are telling us that such a war could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the earth as we know it.” Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, echoed Reagan’s comment in an interview in 2000: “Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us” to reduce the size of nuclear arsenals in both countries. The Obama administration’s goal is to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons, with no specific timetable. But President Obama does not need a treaty with the Russians to take this action. He can just follow the lead of President George H. W. Bush, who unilaterally reduced America’s nuclear arsenal as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. With less than a year left in office, President Obama could add to his legacy by sending a similar signal to the Russians today. We could reduce our arsenal from roughly 7,000 weapons to 1,000, eliminating land-based missiles and outlining plans to further reduce air- and submarine-based missiles. Mr. Obama said himself in 2009 that “the existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War” and that the United States, as the only nation to have used these weapons, had “a moral responsibility” to seek a world without them. “We have to insist,” he said, “‘Yes, we can.’”

If we look at the four categories in which SIOP targets were grouped by the Cold War’s end (US GAO 1991: 2), we can easily see that moving from the first to any of the next three— and especially the fourth— amounted to countervalue targeting: (1) Nuclear Forces (ballistic missiles and their launch facilities and con- trol centers; nuclear weapons storage sites; airfields supporting nuclear- capable aircraft; ballistic missile submarine bases); (2) Leadership (command posts; key communication facilities); (3) Other Military Forces (barracks, supply depots, marshaling points; airfields not supporting nuclear forces; ammunition storage facilities; tank and vehicle storage yards); and (4) War- Supporting Industrial and Economic Factories (industrial: ammunition factories, tanks and armored per- sonnel carrier factories, petroleum refineries, railway yards and repair facilities; eco- nomic: coal, basic steel, basic aluminum, and electric power).

We could argue that “Nuclear Forces” are counterforce targets, but even that distinction takes no account of their vast number, or locations proximate to urban areas. Indeed, a counterforce strategy aimed “strictly” at nuclear- force targets would require many more times the weapons needed to destroy Soviet cities (Lortie 2001: 23). Thus, the United States could not destroy military targets without imposing significant “value” damage through errant blasts, fallout, and the destruction of collocated targets (McKinzie et al. 2001). Although warfighters touted the idea of counterforce exchanges that would “spare” urban targets, the indirect and collateral effects on cities— ensuing, for instance, from the spread of fallout from “surgical strikes” on nuclear missiles— would include the deaths of millions of Soviet and US citizens. The destruction of roads, governmental facilities, communi- cation links, vital industries, and so forth would destroy critical economic, societal, and governmental nodes, with (cumulative) contagion effects that would, in turn, destroy society as it previously existed.

With the new NATO plan for installation of nuclear tactical weapons in Europe, nuclear missiles may reach Moscow in only 6 minutes, and the opposite case is also possible in the same time. The question is: how can we be sure that this will not be triggered by a human error or computer malfunction. An adequate reaction dictated by the dilemma “to be or not to be” and the concept of preventive nuclear strike may lead to a nuclear consequence that is difficult to stop. At the present level of distributed controlled systems and military global navigations, this will lead to unstoppable global nuclear war. However, there is something not predicted, of which the military strategists, politicians and powerful forces are not aware. Probably, it will not be a nuclear winter that they hope to survive in their underground facilities. The most probable consequence will be a partial loss of the Earth’s atmosphere as a result of one or many powerful simultaneous tornadoes caused by the nuclear explosions.

In a tornado, a powerful antigravitational effect takes place. The official science does not have an adequate explanation for this feature due to an incorrect concept about space. The antigravitational effect is not a result of the circling air. It is a specific physical effect in the aether space that is dismissed in physics as it is currently taught. Therefore, the effective height of this effect is not limited to the height of the atmosphere. Then in the case of many simultaneous powerful tornadoes, an effect of suction of the earth atmosphere into space might take place. Such events are observed on the Sun and the present physical science does not have an explanation for them. The antigravitational effect is accompanied by specific electric and magnetic fields with a twisted shape. This is observed in tornado events on the Sun. Some effects in the upper Earth atmosphere known as sprites have a similar combination of electrical and magnetic fields but in a weaker form. They are also a mystery for contemporary physical science.

In the nuclear conversation, what are we not talking about that we should be?

We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war.

Humanity is facing its greatest test in the million-year ascent of our kind. This isn’t a single challenge. It’s a constellation of huge man-made threats, now coming together to overshadow our civilisation’s stability and even, maybe, its future survival. These ten intersecting risks are: ecological collapse, resource depletion, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, global poisoning, food insecurity, population and urban failure, pandemic disease and uncontrolled new technologies (like killer robots, artificial intelligence and universal surveillance) – reinforced by a prodigious capacity for human self-delusion. But sticking our heads in the sand and trying to ignore them will not remove the danger.

These threats are known as ‘existential risks’ because they imperil our future existence, both as individuals, as a civilisation and maybe even as a species.

Now 10 years ago, several of the world’s leading climatologists and physicists chose to reinvestigate the long-term environmental impacts of nuclear war. The peer-reviewed studies they produced are considered to be the most authoritative type of scientific research, which is subjected to criticism by the international scientific community before final publication in scholarly journals. No serious errors were found in these studies and their findings remain unchallenged.

Alan Robock et al., “Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 112 (2007).

In the event of a longer Chinese supply interruption, the U.S. rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, Calif., would likely become the first place to step up production, Gholz explains. The mine's previous owner, Molycorp, spent approximately $1.5 billion building a new separation facility for producing rare earth concentrates. It did not, however, complete the downstream processing needed to produce purified rare earth materials before the company went bankrupt in 2015 because of Chinese competition. The mine's new owner, MP Materials, plans to reactivate and complete the mothballed facility for fresh operation starting in 2020.

Another alternative is Australian company Lynas Corp., the world's only significant rare earths producer outside China. It currently operates a mine at Mount Weld in Australia, and sends ores to a separation facility in Malaysia that can purify the rare earth materials—but a complication has arisen from the fact that some ores contain radioactive thorium. Environmental concerns about low-level radioactive waste from the separation facility recently led Lynas to announce it will move some some of the "upstream" processing (which involves the radioactivity) back to Australia, while keeping "downstream" processing in Malaysia. The company has also announced it will work with Texas-based Blue Line Corp. to build a new separation facility in the U.S. for operations starting in 2022 at the earliest.

China currently has most of the world's separation facilities—but if it ever were to stop exporting the purified materials, other options exist. In the short term, U.S. companies that rely on these minerals would likely have inventory stockpiles for brief supply shortages, Gholz says, who served from 2010 to 2012 as senior advisor to the Pentagon's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy. To stretch those stockpiles out, the overall market could prioritize rare earth elements for crucial applications such as military and medical technologies, while forcing makers of headphones or golf bags to pay more. "I don't think there is an obvious supply gap or hole where someone will not be able to get a Prius or Tesla or whatever they're looking at," Gholz says.

Are We Headed for a ‘Grand Solar Minimum’? (And Will It Slow Down Global Warming?)

As mentioned, the Sun is currently experiencing a lower level of sunspot activity. Some scientists speculate that this may be the beginning of a Grand Solar Minimum — a decades-to-centuries-long period of low solar activity — while others say there is insufficient evidence to support that position. During a grand minimum, solar magnetism diminishes, sunspots appear infrequently and less ultraviolet radiation reaches Earth.

Earth has gone through at least five major ice ages in its history. And you better start adapting now. Because another ice age is about to begin. Hypothetically. How would a new ice age change Earth as we know it? What could you do to survive on a frozen planet? And how are we already delaying another ice age?

During all ice ages in Earth’s history, global temperatures dropped well below freezing across the planet. And it wasn’t just a few icy trips around the Sun. Earth can take hundreds of millions of years to thaw out. The most recent ice age started the Quartenary period about 2.6 million years ago. And technically, we’re still in it today.

However, the first clinical trial to study acute cardiopulmonary responses to graphene inhalation, published in 2024, concludes that “graphene oxide nanosheet exposure was well tolerated with no adverse effects” on heart rate, blood pressure, lung function and inflammatory markers, regardless of particle size. The study is the culmination of a decade of research on mice and human tissues, but the researchers warn that the results are still preliminary. A slight increase in blood clotting was detected in a laboratory arterial model. Moreover, this is only a short-term trial, and the environmental transformation of graphene nanomaterials is still an unknown.

Recent legislative and judicial actions concerning intellectual property law reveal several stark trends. Congress has been remarkably hospitable to stronger intellectual property rights. Congress passed forty-three intellectual property laws during the time period in question. Of those that affected the substantive strength of intellectual property rights, over 80% made rights stronger.1 These laws made it easier to acquire intellectual property rights, broadened the scope of protection, and strengthened enforcement. The Supreme Court’s intellectual property jurisprudence, however, has moved largely in the opposite direction. The Court decided forty-four intellectual property cases from the October 2002–2003 Term through the October 2015–2016 Term, and of those that substantively affected the extent of rights, two-thirds weakened protection.

Footnote 1

An appropriate starting point here is Abraham Drassinower's claim that the normative heart of copyright law resides, not in the right to control unauthorized copying as such, but in what he calls the right of public presentation: an author's exclusive right to address the public, in his or her own words, in the form of a work.123 Copyright law, Drassinower argues, necessarily takes authorial activity to be an in stance of speech. All of its central categories - including in particular the exclusive rights of the author and the major defenses available to users of copyright material - should, he argues, be (re-) interpreted in relation to a conceptualization of works of authorship as communications to the public.124 This would limit the current scope of copy right protection, because when re-interpreted in this way, not every act of copying can properly be regarded as infringing. Only repro ductions of the work qua communicative act - or reproductions which are 'in the service of public presentation'125 - are normatively relevant; copies which are reproductions only 'in the physical sense'126 are not. Copies made for personal use would fall into the second category, as would copies technically incidental to the reception of the work, such as cache copies or digital copies made while browsing online. More over, to reproduce another's work as a work (i.e. to repeat the communicative act represented by the work) is - properly construed - not simply to re-communicate another's work, but to 'wrongfully place [one]self in another's position as an author'.127 What Drassinower has in mind here, evidently, is any adoption of another's communicative act as one's own, and in a way which also involves its public presentation. There is no such adoption where A independently creates and communicates a work that coincidentally bears a similarity to a pre existing work authored by B: the similarity, rightly in Drassinower's view, does not constitute a basis for finding A liable to B. There should equally be no liability, in his view, if A's use of the earlier work, though deliberate, is reasonably necessary for his or her own exercise of authorship,128 for in such a case A is addressing the public on his or her own account. (It is this interpretation of the wrong involved in copyright infringement that grounds Drassinower's arguments, noted in the Introduction above, about the legal position of transformative re-users of copyright material.) Aspects of copyright law, Drassinower argues, already recognize this fundamental reciprocity between actual and potential future authors. One example is the so-called idea /expression dichotomy: the principle that where one author has not copied another author's expression but has instead expressed the latter's idea anew, s /he has shown independent authorship and cannot be impugned for tres passing on another's authorship.129 Another example is the defense available for using a work as part of an exercise in criticism or review of that work. However other aspects of the current law - including many of those yielded by its recent expansionary tendencies - fail to acknowledge the equal authorial freedom of addressees. To remedy this, Drassinower suggests that at least some defences and exceptions to copyright protection - the vast majority of which currently give rise to nothing more than user 'privileges' and as such are vulnerable to being overridden by digital rights management systems and the contractual ordering of user privileges that these enable - should be placed on a firmer legal foundation by being characterised as user 'rights'.130 The fundamental user right, he suggests, is the right to engage with (as opposed to merely repeating), and respond publicly to, works of authorship in ways that reasonably require the use of those works. This is as integral to copyright law as the authorial right of public presentation, because it too protects authorial freedom. 'Equality, then, is the category that would make intelligible the connection between author rights and user rights as aspects of the copyright system'.131 The domain protected by copyright and the public domain (i.e. the reservoir of intellectual materials that may be freely drawn upon in authorial activity) must thus be seen as two moments of a single integrated structure oriented towards guaran teeing equal authorial freedom for all.

I constructed a database of every Supreme Court opinion implicating patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret issues from July 1, 2002 through June 30, 2016. The database entries are the Supreme Court’s final decision in each matter; certiorari dispositions are not included. I removed from the database any cases that, though referring to intellectual property law, did not actually decide any intellectual property issue. For example, Illinois Tool Works, Inc. v. Independent Ink, Inc. concerned whether there should be a presumption of market power under antitrust law where the product in question is subject to patent protection.7 Though this case bears a relation to patent protection, its result did not turn on or affect patent law. The final Supreme Court database includes forty-four intellectual property decisions and is summarized in Appendix A. Using similar methods, I developed a database of every federal statute concerning patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret rights during the same time period. As with the Supreme Court data, I removed statutes that did not actually affect patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret doctrine. For example, the Lanham Act is the primary statute providing for Federal trademark protection in the United States.8 Portions of the Lanham Act regulate nontrademark activities, such as false advertising.9 Legislation that affected only the false advertising portions of the Lanham Act was excluded from the database. The final dataset includes forty-three legislative entries for the pertinent period and is summarized in Appendix B.10 The following sections analyze the contours of intellectual property activity in these Supreme Court and congressional datasets.

A. SUPREME COURT DECISIONS

China’s new diplomatic role in the Middle East is another factor that could help sustain trends of de-escalation. Beijing eschews the U.S. approach of offshore balancing against Iran via Saudi Arabia and Israel; it sees such an approach as escalatory. Rather, China is taking a more neutral approach to regional conflicts, on the premise it will calm rather than stoke tensions.

Several Iranian sources have highlighted China’s emerging critical role as a regional stabilizer. Iranian state-run media reported that after Iran attacked Saudi petroleum assets in 2019, China warned Tehran that such acts undermine its interests, given Beijing’s energy security policy is based on unhindered import of Saudi and Gulf oil.

One theme of the present moment is that countries in the Middle East are making deals based on their own national interests rather than dancing to the tune of outsiders. This independence is paradoxically because of great power rivalry in the region, not despite it. With heightened rivalry between great powers, regional powers have more options and are acting more as free agents than committed allies of global powers

For example, Israel and Saudi Arabia are showing considerable independence from the United States on issues ranging from energy policy to approaches toward Russia’s war in Ukraine. Iran, in the context of its role in supplying drones to Russia for the Russia-Ukraine war, is also feeling more confident.

In reality, Saudi Arabia is highly unlikely to seek nuclear weapons, no matter what becomes of Iran’s nuclear program, because the negative consequences of doing so would far outweigh any conceivable strategic gain. The kingdom, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has tied its future to full integration with the global economic and industrial system. It cannot afford the international ostracism that nuclear proliferation would bring. Moreover, the Saudis know that they have few friends in the U.S. Congress. Any sign that the kingdom was moving toward nuclear weapons would end U.S. arms sales and terminate the strategic relationship that has long ensured the kingdom’s security.