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This year a number of factors have converged to substantially increase the impetus for a credible, effective programme to radically decarbonize the economies of high-income countries, particularly in the EU but also more broadly, in ways that would reduce economic inequality and are just and sustainable. These include the European Commission's European Green Deal, Coronavirus Recovery Plan and revamped Hydrogen Strategy; international calls for a green, sustainable and just coronavirus recovery; a global revival of Keynesian supply-side economics; and increasing interest in direct central bank funding of government stimulus programmes. In this essay I offer a first attempt to draw these elements together to suggest what might be a coherent strategy for action, at least for countries with stable, resilient currencies. One of the key elements would be for central banks to finance their governments' decarbonization programmes directly by buying government bonds and holding them in perpetuity as insurance against misallocation of funds. The losers in such a strategy would be elements in the finance sector which have come to rely on virtually free bailouts and handouts from central banks via quantitative easing programmes. Resistance to the proposed strategy would probably be fierce from these quarters.The discussions around the unsustainability of the dominant socio-economic structures have yet to produce solutions to address the escalating problems we face as a species. Such discussions, this paper argues, are hindered by the limited scope of the proposed solutions within a business-as-usual context as well as by the underlying technological rationale upon which these solutions are developed. In this paper, we conceptualize a radical sustainable alternative to the energy conundrum based on an emerging mode of production and a commons-based political economy. We propose a commons-oriented Energy Internet as a potential system for energy production and consumption, which may be better suited to tackle the current issues society faces. We conclude by referring to some of the challenges that the implementation of such a proposal would entail.This article advances theoretical and empirical knowledge at the nexus of energy politics and conflict intervention by analyzing the complex dynamics connecting energy resources, civil war, and outside state support of rebel groups. read more It focuses on the role of global energy supply competition in states' decision to support armed groups that are involved in conflicts in other states. Further, this study enhances the extant research that focuses primarily on the resource wealth of conflict-ridden states by analyzing the effect of the interveners' resource wealth on their sponsorship of foreign non-state armed groups. This study identifies two causal paths linking energy resources, specifically natural gas, to state support of rebels by building on outside state supporters' motives for (1) competition over supply to global markets; and (2) secure access to resources and supply routes. The empirical section includes a large-N analysis on original data covering 454 rebel groups and their state supporters and a detailed case study of the Russian intervention in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.While most hydrogen research focuses on the technical and cost hurdles to a full-scale hydrogen economy, little consideration has been given to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of hydrogen developments. The technologies and infrastructures underpinning a hydrogen economy can take markedly different forms, and the choice over which pathway to take is the object of competition between different stakeholders and countries. Over time, cross-border maritime trade in hydrogen has the potential to fundamentally redraw the geography of global energy trade, create a new class of energy exporters, and reshape geopolitical relations and alliances between countries. International governance and investments to scale up hydrogen value chains could reduce the risk of market fragmentation, carbon lock-in, and intensified geo-economic rivalry.Sociotechnical sustainability transitions are understood to involve changes in cultural meaning, alongside a wide variety of other changes. One of the most popular conceptual models of such change, the multi-level perspective, exogenously locates slow-changing cultural factors in the 'sociotechnical landscape', viewing this landscape as periodically subject to 'shocks' that may support the break-through of niche innovations. Here we emphasise that shock to a sociotechnical system has social psychological dimensions, including meaning-related correlates. Accordingly, we apply social representations theory, as a theory of meaning, to provide a social psychological account of energy landscape shock and associated policy change. For illustration we take newspaper representations of the 2011 German social and policy response to the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan. The study illustrates the inter-related role of affect, identity and symbolic meaning-making in the public response to a sociotechnical landscape shock.Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in December 2019 and caused a pandemic. To monitor the global transmission pattern of SARS-CoV-2, it is required to constantly update the phylogenetic tree of genomic sequences with 29.9 kb, which may be time consuming. Phylogenetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 may be accelerated by making a multiple alignment of nucleotide sequences using the CPA (combining pairwise alignments) method, in which a pairwise alignment is made for a reference and each of other sequences, and the pairwise alignments are combined into a multiple alignment. Here it is shown from the analysis of 3729 genomic sequences for SARS-CoV-2 and outgroup strains that the CPA method can produce a multiple alignment with an elevated or a reduced number of variable sites depending on the reference compared to the OMA (ordinary multiple alignment) method, which was considered to be the most reliable. In particular, the topology of the phylogenetic tree constructed from the multiple alignment made using the CPA method adopting the outgroup sequence as the reference was considerably different from that using the OMA method, suggesting that the outgroup sequence may not be suitable as the reference in the CPA method.