Carnegie Council Podcasts

Republican politician Bob Inglis used to think that climate change was nonsense; but his son--and science--changed his mind. Today he advocates letting market forces do their work. "The thing to do is to make it apparent in the marketplace what the costs of energy are, and eliminate all the subsidies, and have a level playing field and a strong competition. If you do that, we can fix climate change. That is what needs to be done."

Next time on Global Ethics Forum, retired U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis discusses the history and geopolitics of the world’s oceans. In this excerpt, Stavridis discusses the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and its military and economic significance to the United States.

How much of a threat is fake news to the average citizen? What is Google doing to counteract its spread? Learn more with this conversation with Daniel Sieberg, co-founder of Google News Lab. Launched about three years ago, the News Lab is a small team of Google employees who collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs around the world to use technology to strengthen digital storytelling and produce more in-depth reporting.

The liberal order was never truly a global order, and we're not entering a multipolar era either, says Amitav Acharya. It's more accurate to call it a decentered, "multiplex" world, one where there are multiple consequential actors and complex global interdependence. Such a world is an unprecedented phenomenon and globalization will surely change. But it won't necessarily be a period of instability.

To mark Carnegie Council's Centennial, Michael Ignatieff and team set out to discover what moral values people hold in common across nations. What he found was that while universal human rights may be the language of states and liberal elites, what resonate with most people are "ordinary virtues" practiced on a person-to-person basis, such as tolerance and forgiveness. He concludes that liberals most focus on strengthening these ordinary virtues.

Next time on Global Ethics Forum, First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams discusses the exceptionalism of America’s free speech laws. In this excerpt, Abrams cites Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rhetoric to highlight different legal standards in speech in the United States, as compared to Europe.

Jonathan Sanders lived in Russia for a total of roughly 20 years, both as an academic researcher and as a journalist for CBS News, and has an insider's perspective on Russia and its people. He discusses the contradictions of Russian media under Putin--the "mass, crass" state-controlled media and the dissident material and rambunctious memes on RuTube--and shares personal stories of his connections with Yeltsin, Putin, and more.

"Democrats/liberals need to understand how we lost our grip on the American imagination. Why is it that we are unable to project an image of the kind of country that we want to build together, a vision that would draw people together?" Mark Lilla blames identity politics and argues that the U.S. case offers a window on the crisis of democratic citizenship worldwide.

"We need to face the fact that Turkey under Erdoğan has become a rogue regime," declares David L. Phillips. It's a corrupt, repressive, Islamist dictatorship. The U.S. should no longer regard it as an ally, but as a strategic adversary.

Next time on Global Ethics Forum, journalist James Traub discusses the ethical questions surrounding the refugee crisis in Western Europe. In this excerpt, Traub talks with journalist Stephanie Sy about his time in Sweden, the country’s generosity, and its difficulties in finding the literal space for tens of thousands of migrants.