Russian approaches to energy security and climate change: Russian gas exports to the EU

The proposition that EU climate policy represents a threat to Russia’s gas exports to the EU, and therefore to Russia’s energy security, is critically examined. It is concluded that whilst the greater significance of climate-change action for Russian energy security currently lies not in Russia’s own emissions reduction commitments but in those of the EU, an even greater threat to Russia’s energy security is posed by the development of the EU internal gas market and challenges to Russia’s participation in that market. However, the coming decades could see Russia’s energy security increasingly influenced by climate-change action policies undertaken by current importers of Russian gas such as the EU, and potential importers such as China and India. The challenge for Russia will be to adapt to developments in energy security and climate-change action at the European and global levels

The political import of deconstruction—Derrida’s limits?: a forum on Jacques Derrida’s specters of Marx after 25 Years, part I

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s

Experimental investigation of structural failure during the cooling phase of a fire: concrete columns

Structures may collapse during the cooling phase of a fire, yet standard furnace tests only measure the response under heating. There lacks experimental test protocols and design methods to assess resistance until burnout. This paper describes a new experimental approach for burnout resistance evaluation, reports experimental data on loaded reinforced concrete columns in furnace tests with cooling down phases, and presents numerical models of the tests. The test results show that columns designed for a standard fire resistance of 60 min exhibited a fire resistance of 83 min in the furnace but failed during the cooling phase when the burners were shut off after 72 min while the load was maintained. Two other specimens survived exposure to heating of 45 and 55 min, respectively, and their residual capacity was measured. Finite element analyses show agreement with the tests, showing applicability of numerical methods for evaluating burnout resistance of concrete columns. These findings demonstrate experimentally that delayed thermal-mechanical effects can jeopardize structural stability in real fires, and provide a framework to measure these effects. Moving beyond fire resistance to quantify the response until burnout will support designs for safety of occupants and firefighters throughout the fire and promote repairability and resilience