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As history shows, shockingly horrific - even genocidal - consequences can flow from a societal breakdown of the Rule of Law. 420 Just consider Nazi Germany and The Holocaust, 421 the Rwandan genocide, 422 "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 423 and all of the atrocities committed by the regimes in Turkey, Syrian and Iran. 424 In sharp contrast, the ideal of the Rule of Law, one articulated long ago, is that everyone will be treated fairly and equally by the law. 425 A Rule of Law system puts people front and center in their own governance, divides power to prevent its abuse, 426 insists on equal application of the laws, and requires an independent judiciary and skilled lawyers 427 to vigilantly safeguard individual rights. 428 Before the onset of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the Continental Congress, in 1774, drew particular inspiration from Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments - a book that opposed tyrannical practices - in articulating a core principle of the Enlightenment and of the American Revolution. 429 As the Continental Congress wrote that year in a letter to the inhabitants of Quebec:

"In every human Society,' says the celebrated Marquis Beccaria, following the steps of the immortal Montesquieu in impressing sentiments of Humanity, "there is an Effort continually tending to confer on one Part the height of Power and Happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of Weakness & Misery. The intent of good Laws, is to oppose this Effort, and to diffuse their Influence, universally, & equally.' 430

No changes in position surfaced in OSG’s briefs for the next several Supreme Court Terms either. Zero. And then an unusual cluster of changes during President Obama’s second term caught the Court’s eye. First, in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 32 the Government shifed positions in a controversial case under the Alien Tort Statute.33 At oral argument, Justice Scalia pounced. Addressing the Solicitor General, Justice Scalia said “that is the new position for the . . . State Department, isn’t it? . . . [A]nd for the United States Government? Why should . . . we listen to you rather than the solicitors general who took the opposite position . . . ?”34 When the Solicitor General explained that the new position sought to balance competing interests—protecting U.S. companies from liability abroad and “ensuring that our Nation’s foreign relations commitments to the rule of law and human rights are not eroded”35—Justice Scalia retorted that “it was the responsibility of your predecessors as well, and they took a different position. So . . . why should we defer to the views of . . . the current administration?”36 The Solicitor General’s response—“because we think [those views] are persuasive”—did not satisfy the Chief Justice, who also shared Justice Scalia’s concerns: “Your successors may adopt a different view,” he said, and “whatever deference you are entitled to is compromised by the fact that your predecessors took a different position.”37

That was not the only rebuke that Term. Two months later, the Chief Justice made waves in the Supreme Court bar by upbraiding an Assistant to the Solicitor General for OSG’s explanation of its change in position in an ERISA case, U.S. Airways, Inc. v. McCutchen. 38 In the middle of the Government’s argument as amicus curiae, the Chief Justice interrupted to say:

The COVID-19 pandemic also creates mitigating conditions for the terrorist threat in much of the world. Around the globe, people are implementing physical distancing measures and, therefore, removing a significant terrorist target: crowds. Physical distancing measures make tactics such as vehicle rammings, stabbings, and bombings far less effective. Without the crowds that usually allow these relatively simple attacks to generate casualties, terrorists may determine that their plans are best perpetrated once physical distancing measures are no longer in place.

While it may be convenient to think of terrorists as relatively omnipotent, my work in counter-terrorism has demonstrated that this is far from the case. Terrorists, like everybody else, can and do get sick, as do their family and friends, creating a burden on care. At the same time, the economic devastation caused by the virus has likely left many would-be terrorists without a source of income. They may be struggling with daily subsistence, meaning devoting additional resources (both in time and money) to attack planning and weapons/component procurements may take a back seat to more immediate needs.

Despite Obama's remarks in 2016 and these two incidents, experts and officials contest the viability of the nuclear terrorism threat. Dr Beyza Unal, a research fellow in nuclear policy at think tank Chatham House, argued there is currently no evidence that terrorist groups could build a nuclear weapon. Similarly, a report by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2006 emphasized how building a nuclear bomb is a difficult task for states, let alone terrorists. This is because of the issues involved in accessing uranium and creating and maintaining it at the correct grade (enriched uranium). While nuclear terrorism is a concern, the majority of terrorist attacks are conducted with conventional explosives. The 2017 Europol Terrorism Situation and Trend Report states that 40 percent of terrorist attacks used explosives. These explosives originate from a wide variety of countries across the world. According to a study by Conflict Armament Research, large quantities of explosive precursor chemicals used to make bombs as seen in the 7/7 attack in London in 2005 and the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, have been linked to supply chains in the United States, Europe, and Asia via Turkey. The threat from the spread of chemical precursors prompted the EU to begin looking at ways to tighten the regulations of these chemicals (PDF). A nuclear terrorist attack would have grave consequences, but it is currently not a realistic or viable threat given that it would require a level of sophistication from terrorists that has not yet been witnessed. The recent focus of terrorist groups has been on simplistic strikes, such as knife and vehicular attacks. If countries are concerned about nuclear terrorism, the best way to mitigate this risk could be to tighten security at civilian and government nuclear sites. But governments would be better off focusing their efforts on combatting the spread and use of conventional weapons.

In the event of a global pandemic threatening mankind with extinction, Australia and New Zealand would be the best safe havens where humans could survive and eventually repopulate the planet, scientists have said. "Discoveries in biotechnology could see a genetically-engineered pandemic threaten the survival of our species," Nick Wilson, from the University of Otago, said in a statement. "Though carriers of disease can easily circumvent land borders, a closed self-sufficient island could harbour an isolated, technologically-adept population that could repopulate the earth following a disaster."

Yet despite epidemic after epidemic, despite mass killers like smallpox and the 1918 flu, at no point has disease threatened humans with extinction. Even the Black Death, likely the most concentrated epidemic of all time, now appears as little more than a minor downturn in what has otherwise been a bull market for long-term human population growth. That’s true for animals as well. The International Union for Conservation of Nature reports that of the 833 plant and animal extinctions that have been documented since 1500, less than 4 percent can be attributed to infectious disease. Those species that were eradicated by disease tended to be small in number and geographically isolated—very much unlike human beings, who are both numerous and have spread to every corner of the world.38

With the exception of HIV—which can now be managed as a chronic condition with antiviral drugs—every major epidemic mentioned above took place before the dawn of modern medicine, before the development of antibiotics and widespread vaccines. Smallpox was even fully eradicated from the wild in 198039—the only known samples of the virus are kept at highly secure government facilities in Atlanta and Koltsovo, Russia.40 Plague is now so rare that when it breaks out in countries like Madagascar, it makes global news—yet fewer than 600 deaths from the disease were reported between 2010 and 2015. Studies have shown that most of the fatalities from the 1918 flu were actually due to secondary bacterial infections that today could be controlled by antibiotics,41 which were introduced less than a century ago. Influenza pandemics remain the great fear of infectious disease experts, but the most recent one in 2009 killed only about 284,000 people worldwide.42 That was fewer than the number of people who die from seasonal flu in an ordinary year.43

Are we safe now from events like this? Or are we more vulnerable? Could a pandemic threaten humanity’s future?10

The Black Death was not the only biological disaster to scar human history. It was not even the only great bubonic plague. In 541 CE the Plague of Justinian struck the Byzantine Empire. Over three years it took the lives of roughly 3 percent of the world’s people.11

The principal finding is that in the twenty-first century both the volume and the character of civil wars have changed in significant ways.5 Civil wars are and have been the dominant form of warfare in Africa, but they have declined steeply in recent years, so that today there are half as many as in the 1990s. This change tracks global patterns of decline in warfare.6 While some students of African armed conflicts, such as Paul Williams, note the recent trend,7 it is fair to say that the change in the prevalence of civil wars is not recognized by most Africanists and generalists. Equally important but even less noted is that the character of warfare in Africa has changed. Today's wars are typically fought on the peripheries of states, and insurgents tend to be militarily weak and factionalized. The large wars that pitted major fighting forces against each other, in which insurgents threatened to capture a capital or to have enough power to secede, and in which insurgents held significant territory – from the Biafra secessionists in Nigeria, to UNITA in Angola, RENAMO in Mozambique, the TPLF in Ethiopia, the EPLF in Eritrea, the SPLM in Sudan, the NRM in Uganda and the RPF in Rwanda – are few and far between in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Somalia's Al-Shabab holds territory and represents a significant threat to the Somali federal transitional government, but given the 20-year void at the centre of Somalia the case is not representative. In April 2011, rebel forces in Côte d'Ivoire captured Abidjan, but they did so with external help and after incumbent Laurent Gbagbo, facing a phalanx of domestic, regional, and international opposition, tried to steal an election.8 More characteristic of the late 2000s and the early 2010s are the low-level insurgencies in Casamance (Senegal), the Ogaden (Ethiopia), the Caprivi strip (Namibia), northern Uganda (the Lord's Resistance Army), Cabinda (Angola), Nigeria (Boko Haram), Chad and the Central African Republic (various armed groups in the east), Sudan (Darfur), and South Sudan, as well as the insurgent-bandits in eastern Congo (a variety of armed actors, including Rwandan insurgents) and northern Mali (al-Qaeda in the Maghreb). Although these armed groups are in some cases capable of sowing terror and disruption, they tend to be small in size, internally divided, poorly structured and trained, and without access to heavy weapons.9 Several of today's rebel groups have strong transnational characteristics, that is, insurgents move fluidly between states. Few are at present a significant military threat to the governments they face or in a position to seize and hold large swaths of territory.

There is little credible potential for a Sino-American conflict over resources in Africa. Contrary to popular and perennial assumptions about resource wars, industry and energy analysis sources project adequate supply of conventional hydrocarbons beyond 2035.6 Given reservoir depletion curves, any tightening of supply would be gradual. The adequacy of supply is further augmented when tertiary production and unconventional sources are considered (such as shale and tar sands). U.S. strength in unconventional sources, and potential energy independence, further reduces the likelihood of a conflict. Even in a future with vastly inflated hydrocarbon prices, these costs pale in comparison to those associated with a Sino-American war, the economic costs of which likely fall more heavily on China than the United States.7 Global hydrocarbon resources are distributed via a fungible global market, with many stakeholders and moderate diversity of supply. This enables importing states to buy a predictable supply of hydrocarbons at reasonable and competing prices over long contracts. African sources do not constitute a majority of this supply chain, and supposed victory in a theoretical great-power resource war would not guarantee security of resource supply. In sum, the potential for either China or the United States to be willing to enter war with a nuclear adversary over African oil, let alone other, less valuable resources, is extraordinarily small.8

Cities around the world are getting smarter. A growing number even designated themselves “smart cities.” There are, of course, as many definitions of smart cities as there are cities professing to be smart. Very generally, smart cities deploy a host of information communication technologies—including high-speed communication networks, sensors, and mobile phone apps—to boost mobility and connectivity, supercharge the digital economy, increase energy efficiency, improve the delivery of services, and generally raise the level of their residents’ welfare. Becoming “smart” typically involves harnessing troves of data to optimize city functions—from more efficient use of utilities and other services to reducing traffic congestion and pollution—all with a view to empowering public authorities and residents. However one defines them, data-enabled cities are booming. By one estimate, there are over a thousand smart city projects underway around the world. Rankings and indices are also proliferating, with such cities as Singapore, Helsinki, Seoul, and Zurich routinely topping the list. Notwithstanding global enthusiasm for hyperconnected cities, this futuristic wired urban world has a dark side. What’s more, the pitfalls may soon outweigh the supposed benefits. That’s because “smart” is increasingly a euphemism for surveillance. Cities in at least 56 countries worldwide have deployed surveillance technologies powered by automatic data mining, facial recognition, and other forms of artificial intelligence. Urban surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry, with Chinese and U.S.-based companies such as Axis, Dahua, Hikvision, Huawei, and ZTE leading the charge. Whether they are in China or elsewhere, smart cities are usually described in benign terms with the soothing promise of greener energy solutions, lower-friction mobility, and safer streets. Yet in a growing number of places from New York to Hong Kong, there are growing concerns about the ways in which supercharged surveillance is encroaching on free speech, privacy, and data protection. But the truth is that facial recognition and related technologies are far from the most worrisome feature of smart cities. Part of what supposedly makes cities smarter is the deployment and integration of surveillance technologies such as sensors and biometric data collection systems. Electronic, infrared, thermal, and lidar sensors form the basis of the smart grid, and they do everything from operating streetlights to optimizing parking and traffic flow to detecting crime. Some cities are adopting these platforms more quickly than others. China, for example, is home to 18 of the top 20 most surveilled cities in the world. Shanghai, which achieved full 5G coverage in its downtown area and 99 percent fiber-optic coverage across the city, is covered by a veritable thicket of video surveillance. Identity collection devices are commonplace, having exploded across public and private spaces. Shanghai recently installed Alibaba’s City Brain public surveillance system, which oversees over 1,100 biometric facial recognition cameras. A combination of satellites, drones, and fixed cameras grab over 20 million images a day. The bus, metro, and credit cards of local residents are also traced in real time. And these tools are spreading. Chinese firms are busily exporting surveillance tech to Latin America, other parts of Asia, and Africa, helping enable what some critics call digital authoritarianism. Surveillance technologies are hardly confined to China. They are also widespread in U.S. cities. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, law enforcement agencies and private companies deployed surveillance tools, ostensibly to improve public and private safety and security. The 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S. Patriot Act dramatically accelerated their spread. Yet support for facial recognition systems appears to be ebbing. San Francisco was the country’s first major city to ban its agencies from using them in 2019. San Francisco was among the top five most surveilled cities in the United States when eight of the nine members of its Board of Supervisors endorsed the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance. Rolling back surveillance has proved difficult—digital rights advocates recently detected over 2,700 cameras still in use for police surveillance, property security, and transportation monitoring. In 2000, campaigners sued the city for tapping into private cameras to surveil mass protests, in defiance of the new ordinance. Across North America and Western Europe, the tensions over smart cities can be distilled to concerns over how surveillance technology enables pervasive collection, retention, and misuse of personal data by everything from law enforcement agencies to private companies. Debates frequently center on the extent to which these tools undermine transparency, accountability, and trust. There are also concerns (and mounting evidence) about how facial recognition technologies are racially biased and inaccurate when it comes to people of color, discriminating particularly against Asian and African Americans. This helps explain why in the two years since San Francisco banned facial recognition technologies, 13 other U.S. cities have followed suit, including Boston; Berkeley and Oakland in California; and Portland, Oregon. By contrast, in China, racial bias seems to be a feature, not a bug—patented, marketed, and baked into national policing standards for facial recognition databases. What’s more, Chinese companies are bringing their technologies to global markets. But a narrow preoccupation with surveillance technologies, as disconcerting as they are, underestimates the threats on the near horizon. Smart cities are themselves a potential liability—for entirely different reasons. This is because many of them are approaching the precipice of a hyperconnected “internet of everything,” which comes with unprecedented levels of risk tied to billions of unsecured devices. These don’t just include real-time surveillance devices, such as satellites, drones, and closed-circuit cameras. By 2025, there could be over 75 billion connected devices around the world, many of them lacking even the most rudimentary security features. As cities become ever more connected, the risks of digital harm by malign actors grow exponentially. Cities are therefore entirely unprepared for the coming digital revolution. One of the paradoxes of a hyperconnected world is that the smarter a city gets, the more exposed it becomes to a widening array of digital threats. Already, large, medium, and small cities are being targeted for data theft, system breaches, and cyberattacks, all of which can undermine their operation and provision of essential services, and pose an existential threat. Hundreds of cities around the world have reported major digital disruptions to municipal websites, emergency call centers, health systems, and utilities delivering power or water. When city security is compromised and data privacy jeopardized, it undermines the faith of residents in digitally connected services and systems. As people feel more insecure, they may feel less inclined to participate in online health care, digitized utilities, remote learning opportunities, electronic banking services, or green initiatives—key tenets of the smart city. While not all digital threats can be countered, cities need to mount a robust capability to deter, respond to, and recover from attacks while preserving, as best they can, data protection and privacy.

But what about more nefarious bodies who are interested in specific individuals? As citizens stumble into a future where they will be walking around a city dense with sensors, cameras and drones tracking their every movement – even whether they are smiling (as has already been tested at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival) or feeling gloomy – there is a ticking time-bomb of arguments about surveillance and privacy that will dwarf any previous conversations about Facebook or even, perhaps, government intelligence agencies scanning our email. Unavoidable advertising spam everywhere you go, as in Minority Report, is just the most obvious potential annoyance. (There have already been “smart billboards” that recognised Minis driving past and said hello to them.) The smart city might be a place like Rio on steroids, where you can never disappear.

“If you have a mobile phone, and the right sensors are deployed across the city, people have demonstrated the ability to track those individual phones,” Lyon points out. “And there’s nothing that would prevent you from visualising that movement in a SimCity-like landscape, like in Watch Dogs where you see an avatar moving through the city and you can call up their social-media profile. If you’re trying to search a very large dataset about how someone’s moving, it’s very hard to get your head around it, but as soon as you fire up a game-style visualisation, it’s very easy to see, ‘Oh, that’s where they live, that’s where they work, that’s where their mistress must be, that’s where they go to drink a lot.’”

Indeed, smart cities are dependent on machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions and decision-making. This is, in part, a product of the sheer number of inputs and the frequency and speed with which associated calculations need to be completed. In the case of the energy grid, it would be impossible for a human operator to process all the data necessary to make decisions at the speed required by the system. However, while M2M decision-making (M2MD) is an unavoidable and beneficial feature of smart cities, it is also one of the greatest risks.

NEW CITY, NEW RISK

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) - The transition to clean energy required to prevent temperatures from rising swiftly could shave 2% off global GDP by 2050 but is likely recoverable before the end of the century, a report by natural resources consultancy Wood Mackenzie said on Thursday. While investments in technologies like solar and wind farms, advanced batteries will generate jobs, the transition will also likely cause a loss of jobs and tax revenues in fossil fuel production, said the report, opens new tab called "No Pain, No Gain: The economic consequences of accelerating the energy transition". "It's by no means a way to say that we shouldn't pursue transition or slow it down," said Peter Martin, WoodMac's chief economist. "This pain in the short-term will pay off in the long-term." Benefits from limiting the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as called for by the United Nations, could boost global GDP, on aggregate by 1.6% in 2050, the report said. But actions required to spur the transition to keep temperatures from going above that level could cut 3.6% from GDP in 2050, resulting in the 2% hit, the report said. The impacts will not be felt evenly. China will feel about 27% of a cumulative $75 trillion economic hit to global GDP by 2050, while the United States will see about 12%, Europe will experience 11% and India about 7%. Economies such as Iraq that do not have financial reserves to invest in non-fossil fuel sectors could suffer the biggest losses in economic output, it said. The economic benefits of the energy transition should start to show after 2035 and lost economic output would be eventually recouped before the century's end, the report said.

CLIMATEWIRE | Global clean energy spending is expected to surge 12 percent in 2022, reaching $1.4 trillion as the world pours money into renewables, electric vehicles and energy efficiency, according to a recent International Energy Agency report. The finding, from IEA’s annual review of global energy investment, is especially notable because it represents an acceleration of the energy transition at a time when world leaders are prioritizing energy security and affordability due to the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Renewables, transmission networks and energy storage account for 80 percent of global power-sector investment, which outstrips total spending on oil and gas production and coal mining. The world now sells as many electric vehicles in a week as it did in a year a decade ago. Even technologies such as green hydrogen and carbon capture have started to gain momentum, IEA found. But trouble for the energy transition lurks beneath those green milestones. About half the increase in clean energy spending is due to rising prices — rather than investments in new clean energy capacity. Those price increases have been driven in large part by bottled-up supply chains, which have been unable to keep up with surging demand for the critical minerals used in solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. And the adoption of clean technologies varies widely across the world. Rich countries are pouring money into cleaner technologies, while the energy transition largely bypasses less wealthy nations. There’s also this: Despite the accelerated spending on green technologies, the world still is not on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, IEA said. “A massive surge in investment to accelerate clean energy transitions is the only lasting solution,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “This kind of investment is rising, but we need a much faster increase to ease the pressure on consumers from high fossil fuel prices, make our energy systems more secure, and get the world on track to reach our climate goals.” IEA’s report arrives as global energy markets are in turmoil. Oil markets already were tight entering 2022, with demand galloping ahead of supply. The rise in demand has been compounded by a refining crunch. IEA reckons global refining capacity declined for the first time in three decades last year. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only has exacerbated that dynamic, as many rich democracies around the world have shunned Russian oil. The war also has disrupted gas markets, with Europe scrambling to find a replacement for Russian shipments in the form of liquefied natural gas cargoes. As gas markets have grown tighter, many countries have turned to coal as an alternative. The problem: Coal markets already were squeezed due to falling investment in mining. Right now, less wealthy countries are being hammered by higher fossil fuel prices. IEA estimates 90 million people in Asia and Africa can no longer afford to pay for their energy needs.

Nordhaus-style models of optimal patent policy design have traditionally modeled innovations as isolated discoveries. However, in practice, many or most innovations are cumulative, in the sense that a given discovery may be an input into later follow-on discoveries. When innovation is cumulative, optimal patent policy design also depends on how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation. One prominent example in recent policy debates is a patented human gene sequence. Sequenced genetic data are a research input into subsequent follow-on discoveries: by analyzing sequenced genetic data, scientists may discover links between genetic variations and diseases, and such knowledge can be applied to commercialize medical technologies such as pharmaceutical treatments and diagnostic tests. If patents on discoveries such as human genes affect follow-on innovation, that effect is a key additional input into optimal patent policy design. In this paper, we investigate whether patents on human genes have affected follow-on scientific research and product development. Our broad goal is to inform whether the Nordhaus-style tradeoff between ex ante incentives and deadweight loss is sufficient for optimal patent policy design, or whether, at least in this context, the effects of patents on follow-on innovation need to be considered. Investigating how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation requires addressing two key challenges. First, in most markets it is difficult or impossible to take a given set of technologies which are claimed as intellectual property in patents and measure follow-on innovation on those technologies. Follow-on innovations which infringe the original patent legally require a license from the original innovator. But because licenses are very rarely publicly disclosed, constructing appropriate measures of follow-on innovation for any given patented invention is quite difficult. Second, a priori we expect a selection bias problem to arise if inventors are more likely to file for or to obtain patents on technologies that are inherently more valuable. This type of selection raises the concern that any measured differences in follow-on innovation across patented and non-patented technologies may reflect the selection of which technologies are patented, rather than a causal effect of patents on follow-on innovation.

Third, bad patent information quality, since it makes freedom to operate analyses prohibitively costly, favors patent trolling and the risk of patent litigation. Trolling behaviors consist of companies trying to provoke infringement and place infringing firms in hold-up situations (Pénin, 2012). Hold-up means that a firm has made sunk investments, such as research and development investments, marketing investments or specific assets investments, and is therefore committed to its technological trajectory. It can hardly stop using the technology if it is accused of infringement. Therefore, firms trapped in hold-ups are in a very uncomfortable and unbalanced position to negotiate licenses on infringed patents. Consequently, the strategy followed by patent trolls is to try to provoke hold-up situations by hiding their patents or by refusing to grant licenses before potential infringers have made sunk investments. This enables patent trolls to capture a share of the value that is much higher than the intrinsic value of the technology they own (Lemley, Shapiro, 2006; Farrell et al., 2007; Shapiro, 2010). The use of patents to provoke hold-up situations may also occur during the implementation of standards, where firms that own essential patents might be tempted to hide them during negotiations to increase their value ex-post (Tassey, 2000). This is particularly the case for ICT (Maskus, Merill, 2013; Lemley, Shapiro, 2013). Patent trolling entails important costs for society. According to a White House patent report (2013), trolls sued approximately 100,000 companies in the United States in 2012. Similarly, Bessen et al. (2011) found that “NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives and a net loss of social welfare”. Furthermore, patent trolls have a deterring effect on R&D investment since, given the risk of encountering a patent troll, innovative companies might be more reluctant to invest (Pénin, 2012). In the same vein, due to the risks of trolling, firms might be more reluctant to collaborate and perform open innovation. Finally, patent trolls might also reduce the diffusion of a given technology (Tucker 2013). The existence of patent trolls is clearly linked to the bad quality of patent information. In a world where patent information is perfect, i.e. where patent users can identify at a minimum cost patents that they might infringe, firms that are trapped in hold-up situations are those that have not done clean freedom to operate analyses. Firms that perform these analyses properly can identify relevant patents and either invent around them or negotiate a license. But in a world with bad patent information, freedom to operate analyses are too costly and it is impossible for a manufacturing firm to evaluate ex-ante its freedom to operate. In such a world patent trolling is pervasive.

Fourth, bad patent information also massively increases the problem of “the tragedy of the anticommons” (Heller, Eisenberg, 1998) and the proliferation of costly patent litigations. A tragedy of the anticommons occurs when a technology is protected by a large number of patents. Therefore, ownership over this technology is fragmented. It is shared between a large number of patent holders, each having the right to refuse that others exploit the technology. In this case, firms that want to use the technology must obtain the agreement of all the patent owners. This fragmentation of ownership over a single technology therefore entails important transaction costs and induces a risk that the technology does not diffuse as it should. Due to the proliferation of patents, a promising technology might remain underused because it is too costly to negotiate and buy licenses from all the patent owners. This problem of anticommons is also known in the literature as a problem of royalty stacking (David, 2011). Empirically, the anticommons problem has been put forward by Murray and Stern (2007) and Von Graevenitz et al. (2011; 2012) [6]

Why Patents Might Not Provide Good Fences? In this section we discuss the three conditions introduced above and which are necessary in order to ensure good patent information quality. A first necessary condition is that patent databases must make it possible to easily identify relevant patents. Each user of the patent system must be able to easily find the information that it needs, and that allows him [the user] to take relevant strategic decisions. For example, a firm that is looking for a partner with technological complementarities must be able to browse patent databases in order to identify that partner. In other words, patent databases must make it possible to identify technological neighbors at a minimum cost. Similarly, if one firm aims at launching a new product on the market, it must be able to easily identify potential patents that it could infringe, in order to negotiate licenses ex-ante. However, this is not exactly what patent databases offer. Existing patent classifications, such as the International Patent Classification (IPC) for example, are useful to take strategic decisions about the identification of potential partners or potential future technological avenues (technological forecasting). Based on patent databases, firms increasingly perform patent mapping and patent landscaping, i.e. they organize patent information in such a way as to understand what is happening in a given sector, in a given company, or with a given technology (Lee et al., 2015). But these classifications do not allow the identification of patent neighbors from a legal point of view. They do enable patents to be found in similar technological classes, but they are of little help in performing exhaustive freedom to operate analyses, i.e. identifying patents that a firm might infringe. So far, there is no reliable patent index that allows users to find adjacent inventions. For example, in the case of land ownership, in most developed countries there is a public land registry that allows with certainty, and at a minimum cost, the identification of adjacent neighbors. Investors can easily identify stakeholders with whom they need to negotiate in order to develop real estate projects. There is nothing comparable for patents. This is highly problematic since, as we will see below, the absence of precise patent indexation favors hold-up behavior and patent trolling.

The issue of patent classification and indexation naturally escalates with the existing number of patents (Mulligan, Lee, 2012). The more patents in a sector, the more important it is to have an indexation system that enables users to easily find relevant patents. In the absence of reliable indexation, each user must analyze all the patents in force in the economy. Thus, the more patents there are, the more patents firms have to analyze, and the more costly this is. This explains why patents are so problematic today in sectors where millions of them are sometimes in force, such as ICT. In these sectors, due to the absence of reliable patent indexes, it is highly costly to identify patents that a firm can infringe, thus inducing a proliferation of costly litigations. In the case of software, for example, Mulligan and Lee (2012) performed an original simulation exercise which shows that given the number of software patents in the USA, the number of firms developing software, and the time required to analyze each patent, if each firm wants to perform an exhaustive freedom to operate analysis before it launches new software, it would require more patent lawyers than there are in the US. This simple simulation exercise demonstrates the absurdity of the situation nowadays. In some sectors where huge numbers of patents are in force, it becomes rational for firms not to perform freedom to operate analyses. Since these are costly and hardly reduce the probability of future litigations, it is rational for firms to keep their money aside in preparation for future litigation. Although rational from the firm point of view, these behaviors and the proliferation of patent litigation they induce entail a huge cost for society. The second necessary condition to ensure good patent information quality is that the boundaries provided by patents (the claims) and the description of the information that they contain must be understandable. When reading a patent, users must be able to understand what is protected by this patent (the borders or boundaries), and to understand the description of the invention that is patented. However, this condition does not often hold. Many patents are difficult to read and understood, even by experts. The technical information included in the patent is often of little help to readers. Worse, the perimeter of protection of the patent is often hard to decipher.

The various impacts have a common cause: the sheer volume of economic activity. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it. But our failure to see the whole ensures that we fail to address this crisis systemically and effectively.

When we box up this predicament, our efforts to solve one aspect of the crisis exacerbate another. For example, if we were to build sufficient direct air capture machines to make a major difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations, this would demand a massive new wave of mining and processing for the steel and concrete. The impact of such construction pulses travels around the world. To take just one component, the mining of sand to make concrete is trashing hundreds of precious habitats. It’s especially devastating to rivers, whose sand is highly sought in construction. Rivers are already being hit by drought, the disappearance of mountain ice and snow, our extraction of water, and pollution from farming, sewage and industry. Sand dredging, on top of these assaults, could be a final, fatal blow.

Figure 1. Countries with fast-track programs for green technology patent applications: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The food price spikes in the late 2000s caught the world’s attention, particularly when sharp increases in food and fuel prices in 2008 coincided with street demonstrations and riots in many countries. For 2008 and the two preceding years, researchers identified a significant number of countries (totaling 54) with protests during what was called the global food crisis (Benson et al. 2008). Violent protests occurred in 21 countries, and nonviolent protests occurred in 44 countries. Both types of protest took place in 11 countries. In a separate analysis, developing countries with low government effectiveness experienced more food price protests between 2007 and 2008 than countries with high government effectiveness (World Bank 201la). Although the incidence of violent protests was much higher in countries with less capable governance, many factors could be causing or contributing to these protests, such as government response tactics, rather than the initial food price spike. Data on food riots and food prices have tracked together in recent years. Agricultural commodity prices started strengthening in international markets in 2006. In the latter half of 2007, as prices continued to rise, two or fewer food price riots per month were recorded (based on World Food Programme data, as reported in Brinkman and Hendrix 2011). As prices peaked and remained high during mid-2008, the number of riots increased dramatically, with a cumulative total of 84 by August 2008. Subsequently, both prices and the monthly number of protests declined. Several researchers have studied the connection between food price shocks and conflict, finding at least some relationship between food prices and conflict. According to Dell et al. (2008), higher food prices lead to income declines and an increase in political instability, but only for poor countries. Researchers also found a positive and significant relationship between weather shocks (affecting food availability, prices, and real income) and the probability of suffering government repression or a civil war (Besley and Persson 2009). Arezki and Bruckner (2011) evaluated a constructed food price index and political variables, including data on riots and anti-government demonstrations and measures of civil unrest. Using data from 61 countries over the period 1970 to 2007, they found a direct connection between food price shocks and an increased likelihood of civil conflict, including riots and demonstrations. Other researchers have broadened the analysis by considering government responses or underlying policies that affect local prices, and consequently influence outcomes and the linkage between food price shocks and conflict. Carter and Bates (2012) evaluated data from 30 developing countries for the time period 1961 to 2001, concluding that when governments mitigate the impact of food price shocks on urban consumers, the apparent relationship between food price shocks and civil war disappears. Moreover, when the urban consumers can expect a favorable response, the protests only serve as a motivation for a policy response rather than as a prelude to something more serious, such as violent demonstrations or even civil war. Many in the international development community see war and conflict as a development issue, with a war or conflict severely damaging the local economy, which in turn leads to forced migration and dislocation, and ultimately acute food insecurity. Brinkman and Hendrix (2011) ask if it could be the other way around, with food insecurity causing conflict. Their answer, based on a review of the literature, is "a highly qualified yes," especially for intrastate conflict. The primary reason is that insecurity itself heightens the risk of democratic breakdown and civil conflict. The linkage connecting food insecurity to conflict is contingent on levels of economic development (a stronger linkage for poorer countries), existing political institutions, and other factors. The researchers say establishing causation directly is elusive, considering a lack of evidence for explaining individual behavior. The debate over cause and effect is ongoing. Policies can nevertheless be implemented to reduce price variability. Less costly forms of stabilization, at least in terms of government outlays, include reducing import tariffs (and quotas) to lower prices and restricting exports to increase food availability. However, these types of policy responses, while perhaps helping an individual country's consumers in the short run, can lead to increased international price volatility, with potential for disproportionate adverse impacts on other countries that also may be experiencing food insecurity.