Fuelling the Fire: Rethinking European Policy in Times of Energy and Climate Crises

The European Union’s relative disregard for the economic, geopolitical and climatic concerns of its peripheral Eastern countries has contributed to making the war in Ukraine possible. Its consequences are now returning in the form of energy dependence and economic instability on the Union as a whole and the risk of economic crisis and deindustrialisation. This should prompt a re-assessment of the EU’s strategy towards its eastern neighbours, particularly in the energy and climate policy field. This evaluation starts from the issue of control over cheap energy as a key material foundation of state and interstate power. On this basis, we analyse the struggle between Russia and the European core states over Ukraine in terms of the ability to extract an economic surplus through the unequal exchange of energy. The current escalation should be understood as an attempt by the Russian petrostate to preserve the economic basis of its regime, which is threatened by the prospect of a low-carbon transition in Europe. We conclude that a massive acceleration of the transition away from fossil fuels is the key to economic, geopolitical and climate stabilisation, highlighting possible policy instruments the EU could use to secure its production system and protect citizens’ security

An Ileal Crohn's Disease Gene Signature Based on Whole Human Genome Expression Profiles of Disease Unaffected Ileal Mucosal Biopsies

Previous genome-wide expression studies have highlighted distinct gene expression patterns in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) compared to control samples, but the interpretation of these studies has been limited by sample heterogeneity with respect to disease phenotype, disease activity, and anatomic sites. To further improve molecular classification of inflammatory bowel disease phenotypes we focused on a single anatomic site, the disease unaffected proximal ileal margin of resected ileum, and three phenotypes that were unlikely to overlap: ileal Crohn's disease (ileal CD), ulcerative colitis (UC), and control patients without IBD. Whole human genome (Agilent) expression profiling was conducted on two independent sets of disease-unaffected ileal samples collected from the proximal margin of resected ileum. Set 1 (47 ileal CD, 27 UC, and 25 Control non-IBD patients) was used as the training set and Set 2 was subsequently collected as an independent test set (10 ileal CD, 10 UC, and 10 control non-IBD patients). We compared the 17 gene signatures selected by four different feature-selection methods to distinguish ileal CD phenotype with non-CD phenotype. The four methods yielded different but overlapping solutions that were highly discriminating. All four of these methods selected FOLH1 as a common feature. This gene is an established biomarker for prostate cancer, but has not previously been associated with Crohn's disease. Immunohistochemical staining confirmed increased expression of FOLH1 in the ileal epithelium. These results provide evidence for convergent molecular abnormalities in the macroscopically disease unaffected proximal margin of resected ileum from ileal CD subjects

Fuelling the Fire: Rethinking European Policy in Times of Energy and Climate Crises

The European Union’s relative disregard for the economic, geopolitical and climatic concerns of its peripheral Eastern countries has contributed to making the war in Ukraine possible. Its consequences are now returning in the form of energy dependence and economic instability on the Union as a whole and the risk of economic crisis and deindustrialisation. This should prompt a re-assessment of the EU’s strategy towards its eastern neighbours, particularly in the energy and climate policy field. This evaluation starts from the issue of control over cheap energy as a key material foundation of state and interstate power. On this basis, we analyse the struggle between Russia and the European core states over Ukraine in terms of the ability to extract an economic surplus through the unequal exchange of energy. The current escalation should be understood as an attempt by the Russian petrostate to preserve the economic basis of its regime, which is threatened by the prospect of a low-carbon transition in Europe. We conclude that a massive acceleration of the transition away from fossil fuels is the key to economic, geopolitical and climate stabilisation, highlighting possible policy instruments the EU could use to secure its production system and protect citizens’ security

Fuelling the Fire: Rethinking European Policy in Times of Energy and Climate Crises

The European Union’s relative disregard for the economic, geopolitical and climatic concerns of its peripheral Eastern countries has contributed to making the war in Ukraine possible. Its consequences are now returning in the form of energy dependence and economic instability on the Union as a whole and the risk of economic crisis and deindustrialisation. This should prompt a re-assessment of the EU’s strategy towards its eastern neighbours, particularly in the energy and climate policy field. This evaluation starts from the issue of control over cheap energy as a key material foundation of state and interstate power. On this basis, we analyse the struggle between Russia and the European core states over Ukraine in terms of the ability to extract an economic surplus through the unequal exchange of energy. The current escalation should be understood as an attempt by the Russian petrostate to preserve the economic basis of its regime, which is threatened by the prospect of a low-carbon transition in Europe. We conclude that a massive acceleration of the transition away from fossil fuels is the key to economic, geopolitical and climate stabilisation, highlighting possible policy instruments the EU could use to secure its production system and protect citizens’ security

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for different classification methods on the training set.

<p>Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for different classification methods on the training set.</p

Comparison of 17 ileal gene signatures selected by four different feature selection methods.

<p>Boosting <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0037139#pone.0037139-Smyth2" target="_blank">[16]</a>, PAM) <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0037139#pone.0037139-Tusher1" target="_blank">[17]</a>, random forest <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0037139#pone.0037139-Bhlmann1" target="_blank">[18]</a> and LASSO <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0037139#pone.0037139-Tibshirani1" target="_blank">[19]</a> were applied to the SAM filtered training microarray dataset to select 17 ileal gene signatures. The AUC and overall accuracy for each of the signatures were calculated based on the majority vote of 7 classifiers (Boosting, PAM, Random Forest, LASSO, Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and Naive Bayes), which is equivalently to the decision based on the median score using an usual probability threshold of 0.5 (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0037139#s2" target="_blank">Materials and Methods</a>).</p

Classification results on the training and test sets.

<p>The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity of the ileal gene signature selected by the boosting method <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0037139#pone.0037139-Smyth2" target="_blank">[16]</a> are calculated using Leaving-One-Out cross validation on the training and subsequently, direct classification of the test set based on the training set.</p