ARTICLE: "Brazil, Alarmed, Reconsiders Policy on Climate Change," by Larry Rohter, New York Times, 31 July 2007, p. A3.

ARTICLE: "How Ghana's Economic Turnaround Is Threatened: Falling Water Level Stunts Hydro Power; More Energy Needed," by Michael M. Phillips, Wall Street Journal, 6 August 2007, p. A5.

There is a strong scientific community consensus on global warming/climate change. No one denies that trend except the weird deniers. We can argue on the role of humans in this, and we can argue about the mix of effort on trying to stem this development versus simply dealing with its effects, but clearly, we're in a long-term warming trend that will involve very serious adjustment for much of the world's population, with the biggest challenges faced by the Gap (of course, because wealth is the best protection).

As this trend unfolds, we will see states waver and then fall in line with a growing global movement to deal with global climate change on some level. In this process, we'll see a number of localized System Perturbations act as tipping points (like a hurricane appearing in the south of Brazil for the first time anyone can remember).

The unabashed good on this process can be states changing their minds on FDI and foreign involvement in helping manage and protect their natural resources.

So now we have Brazil being "willing to discuss issues that until recently it considered off the table, including market-based programs to curb the carbon emissions that result from massive deforestation in the Amazon, in which areas the size of New Jersey or larger are razed to the ground each year."

Simply put, people get nervous and demand some action from politicians.

Why this is good is that the old position of New Core that says all this is the fault of the Old Core's previous development and therefore they must pay all will logically yield to something closer to what Larry Summers argues: the biggest payoffs on learning how to stem more damage and mitigating that which cannot be prevented will come in the New Core simply because the most dynamic development processes will be centered there. What we learn in the New Core can both be retrofitted to the Old Core and migrated--as part of the development package--to the Gap as we integrate it.

The water issue can be a huge driver here. For example, Brazil plans a huge network of dams in the Amazon for future power generation. If you recognize the Amazon's role in rain creation, then other connections become apparent too, and maybe you reach the tipping point on responsible management of that immense resource before you reach the tipping point of deforestation.

So what we--together with Brazil--can learn about this process may be crucial to how a Ghana, armed with similar ambitions and far more rainfall constraints both today and in the offing, manages to survive (to include, obviously, challenging the notion of relying so much on dams in the first place), as energy diversification--not independence--is the ultimate goal here.