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: Timber columns

This paper describes fire tests on loaded glued laminated timber columns in which the structural response was measured during the heating and cooling phases. Identi- cal columns with 280  280 mm2 cross-section and 3.7 m length were tested under various heating durations in a standard furnace to investigate integrity to full burn- out. Two of the columns were subjected to ISO 834 heating until failure and their measured fire resistance was 55 and 58 min, respectively. Two columns were sub- jected to 15 min of ISO 834 heating followed by controlled cooling; these columns failed during the cooling phase, respectively after 98 and 153 min. Flame self- extinction occurred after approximately 40 min while smoldering continued locally. Two columns tested under 10 min of ISO 834 heating both survived the defined heating–cooling exposure. Thermocouples inside the columns show sustained tem- perature increases for hours after the end of the heating phase. These full-scale fur- nace experiments show that timber columns may fail during the cooling phase after exposure to standard heating for about 25% of the standard fire resistance duration. These results, in line with previous numerical predictions, highlight the need for fur- ther investigation into fire safety until full burnout for timber structures