There is a quiet, global revolution taking place. This revolution is  not on the streets of our cities, however, but on the deserted mores of Inner Mongolia, in the vast blue expanses of the North Sea, and on the great plains of the United States. While international climate negotiations stalled in Copenhagen last December, investment in renewable energy around the world tells a different story.

In the past four years, global investment in renewable energy has quadrupled. Recent news articles report that in 2008, private firms invested $155 billion in clean energy worldwide. In 2009 global governments, through economic stimulus packages to combat recession, invested over $200 billion in creating green jobs and developing renewable energy. While we hear about China building a coal power plant every week, we don't hear about the massive renewable energy projects planned for the plains of Northern China, which  will generate ten times the energy of a single coal power plant. In fact, Thomas L. Friedman has suggested on several occasions in his New York Times column that China and other countries have entered a new race for “green” technological and economic superiority not unlike the space race of the 1960s.

But how do we know this is truly a global revolution and not just a fad of the past few years? What is the origin of all the recent concern about energy? Why is energy so important? This April 16 and 17, the Tufts Energy Conference will attempt to answer these questions. Titled The Evolution of Energy, this 5^th annual conference will include two days of panel discussions, workshops, keynotes, and an energy showcase.  The conference will feature energy experts from all over the world as well as companies, non-profits, faculty, and student researchers that are working to solve today’s energy challenges (visit www.TuftsEnergyConference.com for more information). However, in order to understand today’s challenges we must look back at the evolution of how humans have used energy over the past centuries and try to draw lessons from history.

What many people do not realize is that our sources of energy have shaped human society since the Industrial Revolution. For thousands of years, humankind’s main source of energy was wood. Then, in the late 1700s, Western societies began burning coal. Suddenly a whole new range of activities were possible. Coal-powered factories for shaping metals and producing a wide range of goods began to develop. Steam engines began to power transcontinental railroads and ocean liners. As factories needed more workers and international trade began to accelerate, people began moving to cities in order to centralize economic activity. With the growing use of petroleum and the widespread adoption of the automobile in the early 1900s, it became much easier for people to travel long distances for their daily commute and people began moving out of the cities and into the suburbs. It is clear that changing sources of energy were a driving force behind changing lifestyles.

It was not until the 1970s, however, that human civilization began to realize the consequences of its energy consumption. In 1973, the first major oil price spikes hit the world market, caused by the OPEC oil embargo. Around the same time, the first scientific reports linking the burning of fossil fuels to greenhouse gases and the warming of the planet were published, and the environmental movement had begun. Both of these events sparked new research and development in Western countries as they tried to develop energy sources that were clean, cheap, and secure. Forty years later, we are now beginning to see the mainstream adoption of these technologies.

Throughout my four years at Tufts, I have had several opportunities to witness the evolution of energy first-hand. During my freshman year, I traveled to Brussels, Belgium, the headquarters of the European Union, where the world’s first mandatory carbon emissions trading system has been set up. During my sophomore year, I attended the World Future Energy Summit, where the United Arab Emirates investment corporation, despite the UAE being the world's fourth largest oil producer, unveiled a $15 billion fund for alternative energy research. In the summer of 2008 I visited India, where hundreds of thousands of the rural poor are becoming empowered by using clean, local energy sources.

Each of these experiences signaled to me that the world has long been approaching an energy revolution. They have also shown me that the benefits of such a revolution reach beyond climate change and national security. Clean energy will vastly improve health in the world’s cities that are today filled with smog. It will mean an end to oppressive regimes around the world that are propped up by money from oil and gas exploitation. And as the world struggles to pull itself out of the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression, clean energy is a field where new jobs are being created every day.

You don’t want to miss this. Go to the Tufts Energy Conference 2010, the Evolution of Energy, to learn how the energy revolution will transform society and our daily lives. The space race of our time has begun.

What motivated Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas Day bomber, to become a terrorist? What drives an individual to kill himself along with hundreds of innocent people in a suicide attack? An effective strategy for eliminating terrorism necessitates a deep understanding of the psycho-motivations of the perpetrators. Some scholars say economic disparity leads to terrorism; others believe that religion or nationalism drives terrorists to struggle against foreign influences. To try and better understand the psychological forces behind terrorism, I interviewed history Professor Anna Geifman of Boston University .

Geifman is not only a terrorism expert but also an expert on Russian history. She described to me a fascinating connection: modern radical-Islam terrorism is quite similar to terrorism in 19^th century Russia, but wrapped in the shroud of Islam rather than communist ideology. Russian revolutionary terrorists “would blow up train stations, they would blow up cafes,” said Geifman, serving as an eerie forerunner to the suicide bombings perpetrated by Hamas and Hezbollah in Israeli cities and Al Qaeda on US aircraft.

Speaking with Professor Geifman led me to believe that terrorism is not driven by poverty. Osama bin Laden, the global face of Islamic terrorism, is the offspring of a billionaire family and led a hedonistic lifestyle before submerging into extremism. Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab is the son of a wealthy banker and had the privilege of attending a prestigious school in Nigeria and then a university in England. Clearly economic conditions are not the motivating force behind these terrorist acts.

Furthermore, politics and nationalistic ambitions are mere superficial wrappings for terrorists' ambitions. Their true goals are revealed in Al-Qaeda members' screams of “death to America” and in the Hamas charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel. For terrorist organizations, ideology, political affiliation, and even religious values become utterly convoluted and irrelevant, just as was the case for the Russian Bolsheviks. Geifman explained to me that at their trials, “some [terrorists] were honest to say, ‘Who the hell cares about ideology? The main thing is to kill.’” For terrorists, be they from the Middle East or Russia, the end objective is to destroy, not to acquire land or economic or political stability.  Indeed, the Russian Bolsheviks used violence to gain political power in 1917; once in control, they established a terror-based state because “as soon as terrorists come to power, they begin building on what they did to get there.” Similarly, in the case of the Israeli conflict, diplomacy and political gains for terrorists only escalated the violence. After Israel signed the Oslo peace accords in 1993, the second intifada (a mass wave of terrorism) broke out in 2000. Five years later when Israel withdrew from the Gaza strip, Hamas gained political power, and rocket attacks into Israel intensified immediately.

Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab was neither poor, nor uneducated, nor truly interested in politics. Rather, he was a lost, lonely young man who desired to be part of a that would supply meaning to his life—and his death. Al Qaeda also offered him the opportunity to project his grievances onto the US, igniting in him an irrational hatred toward the West and all infidels. The implication of this is enormous. It is imperative that we realize that these factors, not economics or a desire for policy changes, are the causes of terrorism. Abdulmuttalab is just a glimpse of the growing global jihad movement with a deadly obsession, and yet government officials such as Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano fail to speak plainly about our enemies’ ambitions. Hamas official Fathi Hamad preached in February 2008 that “we desire death, as you desire life,” and the Islamist terrorist groups continue to build a culture which glorifies—even worships—death.

However, the situation is not without hope. If terrorists are barred from projecting violence externally, their proclivity to kill may turn inward instead, causing them to eventually self-destruct. As Geifman stated,"[terrorist] leaders think that they control death, but in reality they are merely its agents. That is why every revolution ultimately swallows itself." Until this occurs, only advanced surveillance, human intelligence, offense strategy, and security will prove effective in preventing terrorism. Diplomacy with terrorists and 'soft' politics will be rewarded with holiday bombings.

The United States has a vested interest in Middle Eastern stability and peace. Attaining stability and peace would discourage Islamic terrorism, give America and the world access to natural resources, reduce the casualties of our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and protect Israel and other regional allies. Unfortunately, in the near future, Iran has the potential to disrupt these American goals. The state of Iran is hostile to the interests of the United States but currently only has limited military capability, which minimizes its status as a threat to America. However, a hostile Iran with a nuclear warhead would be a serious threat to the interests of the United States.

In order to protect its interests, the United States is correct in opposing the alleged military nuclear ambitions of Iran. But rather than physically disrupt its nuclear capability, the US can defuse the threat of Iran by deflating its hostility. While the US should continue a policy of nuclear non-proliferation in Iran, it should ultimately aim to alter the country’s hostile nature. In the long run, the most promising way to lessen that hostility is to promote a more democratic and free Iranian state. As Robert Kagan of the Washington Post stated it in January 2010, the best non-proliferation policy is “regime change in Tehran.”

President Obama signaled a willingness to talk with Iran during his 2008 campaign, and he did  indeed reach out to Iran during his first year in office. Despite being lambasted as naïve, Obama has shown that his commitment to diplomacy is in fact measure of maturity and resolve—as long as it is exercised effectively. Negotiation needs to be used as a tool in the larger effort of threat-containment, rather than an end in itself. The ultimate purpose of diplomacy with Iran should not be containment of nuclear power but encouragement of a more democratic state. Although negotiating nuclear non-proliferation may be an important way to encourage democratization, it is the result of democratization and the subsequent lessening of hostility that will be most effective in long-term security.

From Cairo University in June 2009, President Obama delivered a speech on Middle-Eastern relations where he signaled his commitment to “governments that reflect the will of the people.” Although he acknowledged that there need not be hegemony between democratic governments, he said that self-governance, justice, government transparency, honesty, and individual freedoms are human rights that he will support everywhere and among all peoples.

Days later, Iran held a national election with dubious impartiality. The subsequent widespread political unrest and the ensuing crackdown of state control showed how greatly Iran needs democratic reform—and the domestic desire for it. While Obama did not speak out against Iran during the aftermath of the elections as much as other world leaders such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the opportunity to pressure Iran into political and economic reform still remains.

Through this form of diplomatic outreach, Obama can be to Iran what Ronald Reagan was to the former Soviet Union. Reagan used hard-line diplomacy and condemnation of human rights abuses as a tool to encourage a change in the very nature of the Soviet Union’s international and domestic mindset. He showed USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev that the communist empire was on the wrong side of history and that democratic reform was not only in its own interest, but ultimately inevitable. President Ahmadinejad of Iran may not be as forward-thinking as Gorbachev was, but Obama should be willing to try and promote similar changes in Iran.

Until democratic reform and regime change is achieved, there are short-term steps the US can take to avert the danger of a nuclear Iran. Iran wants power, prosperity, stability, and legitimacy; it believes that nuclear energy and a nuclear weapon will help it achieve those ends. It is the job of the United States, along with other Western democratic powers, to convince Iran that only internal economic and political reform has the capacity to truly put the country on the right path. Iran has linked its nuclear program to its overall national security and prosperity, and it is the burden of US diplomacy to persuade Iran that there are better ways to pursue its national interests.

Gaining nuclear capabilities are not a panacea for any of Iran's problems. Nuclear energy would improve prosperity, but only if it is accompanied by fundamental economic reforms which would provide for its efficient usage, as well as increase greater employment and opportunity across the board. Nuclear weapons would increase military strength, but would most likely be thwarted by Israeli, US, or international military intervention before reaching significant deterrent capacity. And none of these steps will promote internal stability unless Iran offers its citizens greater political freedoms.

Rather than acting unilaterally, Iran could cooperate with US and other nations to better achieve its goals. If Iran promised the international community that it would work towards economic reform, increased freedoms of speech, international oversight of its nuclear energy program, and the renouncement of all nuclear military ambition, the US could promise economic aid, protection from a possible Israeli air raid, and acceptance of the peaceful objective of Iran’s nuclear energy program in return. The US could even offer to help Iran's nuclear-energy progress through programs similar to the US proposal in 2009, which would have allowed Iran to buy uranium enriched to energy-usage levels in exchange for its stockpiles of lower level uranium. In this scenario, Iran would move closer to achieving its national objectives without needing to build a nuclear bomb. It would also begin the process of opening Iran's society.

If Obama can convince Ahmadinejad to change his perception of his own country’s interests and the ways to attain them, his hostility towards the US may decrease. Likewise, any reform that allows more freedom for the Iranian population and opposition movement may lessen that hostility even more. If hostility is reduced and concepts of interests altered, it is possible that Iran will, by itself, give up its costly and unnecessary military nuclear ambition. Diplomacy has the potential to bring about regime change more effectively than military or other means. Using diplomacy to encourage democratic change and to shift Iran's strategy can create an Iran that is less hostile to US interests-- and far less able to threaten them.