Editor’s note: Mark Sparkman, a former senior officer with the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, is a senior international affairs analyst with the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.  The views expressed are his own.

The announcement by prosecutors that charges had been filed against suspected cyber thieves believed responsible for stealing $45 million in a matter of hours from ATM’s in two dozen countries should send a stark message to governments around the world – banks could be the most vulnerable front in cyber space.

Plenty of people have been warning us these days to worry about cyber attacks, but generally we have been worrying about the wrong things. Most “cyber Armageddon” scenarios focus on gaps in our physical infrastructure and even far-fetched scenarios such as infant incubators in hospitals being turned off. But major swathes of the United States have routinely gone without electricity and water for days following natural disasters. Soon enough, life gradually gets back to normal. Want real chaos? Destroy confidence in the banking system (or even a part of it), and just stand back and watch.

Since last fall, a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on financial institutions have temporarily denied customers access to their bank accounts, and U.S. officials have pointed an accusatory finger at Iran. Although the attacks were not devastating, U.S. officials are rightly weighing their response options. The fact is that the United States needs to gear up for the coming era of cyber threats – and start by ensuring its financial flank is not catastrophically compromised.

The banking system is built on trust. It’s slow to establish and fragile to keep. That trust must be fiercely protected. Consider some of the ways cyber attacks could quickly undermine our faith in the system. If you suspected that someone was going to steal $1,000 a month from your bank account, wouldn’t you shut it down, regardless of government guarantees on your deposits? If a regional bank discovered that 10 percent of its capital assets were being moved (or removed) every month through cyber manipulation, what would it do? If a national government knew that a hostile actor was manipulating bond prices, how might it respond – and what could that response do to the global bond market?

More from CNN: Why cyber attacks threaten our freedom

International commerce depends on billions of electronic transactions each week, ranging from simple bank transfers to complicated debt swaps. The system works only because of the faith people put into it. It is rooted in the trust built up over decades of successful transactions governed by national and international legal and accounting norms. But what if people start to see the banking system as vulnerable to manipulation by terrorist groups, crime syndicates, or countries waging semi-clandestine campaigns to undermine a rival’s economy?

For a decade or more, governments with advanced cyber capabilities and a decent knowledge of financial systems have presumably been able to alter, adjust, and amend financial data to suit their own ends. And many governments have had tempting incentives to do so, from recovering stolen funds to hindering terrorist groups or drug cartels. But so far, the incentives not to change banking data have overwhelmingly carried the day within  governments whenever this issue is broached. After all, no responsible, law-abiding government wants to set the precedent that “stealing” money – or even moving it around – is acceptable, no matter how pure their motives. The stability of international financial institutions and banks, and even of states themselves, is grounded in the belief that financial holdings and transactions are sacrosanct – not to be tampered with by any government for any reason. So governments have only frozen or confiscated funds within the confines of international sanctions, often U.N. mandates, or when a company, organization or individual has broken the law.

Government responses to assaults on banks have been restrained thus far because the cyber attacks haven’t been that severe. True, financial institutions have had to weather some DDoS attacks, in which their sites are flooded with huge volumes of data until they collapse. Such attacks can be disruptive and annoying, but most individuals, companies, and governments wake up the next morning with just as much money in their accounts as they did before the attack.

All bets are off, however, in a true offensive cyber attack. Protected data would be changed, manipulated, or destroyed, and depositors might never recover their assets. With the possibility of such an attack looming, governments should be making serious decisions about deterrence, defense, retaliation, and escalation.

That day could be closer than we think. Given the unsettling recent advances in DDoS attacks and the ever-growing scale and speed of international financial transactions, even these heretofore nuisance attacks may be crossing the threshold into outright assault on a nation’s financial infrastructure or economy. Blocking banks, businesses, and individuals from conducting transactions for even a few days could have a major economic impact.

In April, for example, Wells Fargo Bank was slammed by a sustained DDoS attack. To keep up their customers’ trust, Wells Fargo assured them publicly that their personal “information is safe.” But that may not always hold true. Companies, credit card issuers, and medical firms have regularly reported breaches of personal information – and while these have often been disconcerting and sometimes even unnerving, these information breaches or data spills have usually not significantly undermined the trust that individuals and companies place in institutions that failed to adequately protect their data. Why? Simply put, while customers may have fretted about having had their credit card data out in the open for a few days, they ultimately suffered no real losses.

An offensive cyber operation would be something else entirely. Such attacks aim to destroy or alter enough data to harm a target institution or national economy. The most worrisome attacks would involve adversaries deploying cyber weapons to prevent normal financial transactions from taking place. That would undermine companies’ abilities to conduct business and dilute the trust that underpins any stable economy.

A major cyber attack would require a response from the nation at the receiving end – and establish a new field of warfare. States will want to retaliate in ways that deter future would-be cyber attackers. Any nation or group that moves beyond financial espionage, messaging, or annoyance to actually electronically manipulate assets or markets must understand that it will be subject to retaliation that inflicts pain proportionate to the damage done. And if the attackers persist, target nations must be ready to escalate by returning fire at a rate and magnitude that will deter further attacks.

Adversaries cannot be allowed to destroy in a second the trust in our financial systems that has taken centuries to build.

Editor’s note: Anas El Gomati is a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, and director of Sadeq Institute, Libya’s first think tank. The views expressed are his own.

Libya may want to move on from its past, but a law passed earlier this month with the backing of more than 90 percent of lawmakers is the wrong way to go about it.

The “Political Isolation” law would be sweeping enough if it just stuck to the provisions barring anyone that held a senior position in the Gadhafi regime from holding office again for a decade. But it also states that intellectuals, academics, civil servants, security and army officials and leading media personnel should also be barred from doing so. Even exiles and defectors in opposition during Gadhafi’s reign who held senior positions in the distant past could also be barred from serving again for 10 years.

The law, which will effectively be policed by an “Isolation Commission” tasked with vetting officials, was pushed through in the wake of increased activism by Libyan militias. Indeed, militias were quick to seize on the aftermath of the bombing of the French Embassy on April 23, one of a string of attacks in the past year on foreign interests, to help further their agenda. And, even as Prime Minister Ali Zidan’s cabinet attempted to draw up a response for the international community, revolutionary and rogue militias seized four key ministries at gunpoint, demanding that the law be passed.

Yet the sweeping nature of the law – and the power of the new Isolation Commission – should be of considerable concern to those who want to see a stable transition in Libya. After all, if the Commission fully utilizes the powers granted it by the new law, potentially thousands of government officials, civil servants and security personnel could see themselves affected.

Leading figures in the previous regime with close ties to Gadhafi were always bound to feel the brunt of the revolution, but now a significant block of Libya’s leading technocrats could also be affected, including General National Congress Chairman Mohamed Magariaf, who was Libya’s ambassador to India before he defected in 1981. In addition, Prime Minister Ali Zidan and Juma’a Atiga, first deputy of the GNC who served in Saif Gadhafi’s charitable foundation, could also be targeted. This despite the fact that all three men spent time in exile.

More from GPS: Why have we forgotten Libya?

Already, within 24 hours of the law passing, Defense Minister Mohammed Barghati had resigned before being reinstated. The fate of the head of the head of the country’s ground forces, Yousef Mangoush, meanwhile, has already been decided, and he will leave office in the next 30 days.

Unfortunately, the government is unlikely to be able to push back against the arbitrary application of the law – any move by the army or militias loyal to the state to permanently end the siege of government ministries could spark a massive episode of violence, with Libya’s police force and revolutionary Supreme Security Committee being no match for the revolutionary militias.

The long-term fallout from all this could be severe. For a start, national reconciliation is under threat, as are the still fragile political bonds between ministries, the police and the SSC. In addition, members of the army’s border control could be culled across the south, east and west of the country, putting at risk decades of logistical knowledge of the terrain and local tribes.

The new law should be of real concern to the international community, in part because it could undermine domestic security, but also because it could ultimately result in the collapse of the Zidan government.

How should it respond?

The international community can and should support the general process of political reconciliation in spite of the new law, although it will need to tread carefully and avoid issuing overtly strong statements either for or against the law to avoid further politicization within Libya. Meanwhile, immediate technical assistance should be provided to the new Isolation Commission to help soften its reading of the law, which could be done by highlighting best practices from similar experiences in Latin America, Germany, Iraq and South Africa.

But however “gently” the new law is applied by the Commission, large numbers of bureaucrats could be culled, and the international community – especially through the U.N. Service Mission in Libya – should stand ready to provide technical support and skills-based training to inexperienced replacements.

Libya’s troubles did not end with the overthrowing of the Gadhafi regime, and much remains to be done if it is to capitalize on the optimism that marked the revolution in 2011. If other nations want to help Libya rebuild its fortunes, they could start by helping to ensure that Libyan civil society is allowed a free voice for moderation, civility and a democratic future.

Economists have always been fascinated by the link between income and happiness. In the 1970s, we learned of the Easterlin Paradox. The economist Richard Easterlin argued that more money does not always lead to more happiness. Instead, more money often means more demands and desires.

Well, a new paper by the economist Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers turns that thesis on its head. Look at the graph in the video plotting satisfaction against income. If you were in a relatively poor country like China, India or Iran, the study found that more money meant more satisfaction. But even if you were in a rich country – and this is what is new – the results hold up.

Look at France, Germany or the U.S. on the chart. What we also found interesting was that Americans hit the highest levels of satisfaction among the 25 most populous countries in the world.

It looks like you can get satisfaction – as long as you can pay for it.

By Fareed Zakaria

“One of the bigger ironies about the IRS imbroglio is that it had nothing to do with taxes,” writes Steve Rattner in the New York Times. “These newly formed entities didn’t seek 501(c)(4) status to avoid taxes – these groups don’t earn profits and therefore don’t pay any taxes, regardless of their status. The important benefit that came from achieving 501(c)(4) status was freedom from having to disclose the names of any of their donors.”

“That’s right, what the I.R.S. was really deciding in these cases is which organizations have to disclose their funders and which don’t. And what it was trying to do – however dumbly it went about it – was to reduce the abuse of the campaign-finance rules, not the tax laws.”

–

Zanny Minton Beddoes, the economics editor for 'The Economist,' responds to readers' questions on recent economic data, the national minimum wage and gridlock in Washington.

Figures out this week suggest groundbreaking declined at home construction sites, factory activity in the mid-Atlantic region dipped. How concerned should we about these kinds of numbers?

I think we’ve had a fairly mixed crop of numbers, some of which are worrying, and some of which are quite positive. You have to be careful not to draw too much from any individual number. But broadly, my sense is that the private side of the U.S. economy is recovering at a reasonable, but not terribly dramatic, pace. The housing market, in particular, is on the mend.

Yes, some numbers disappoint, but broadly it’s a good news story. But I think the overall pace of recovery is being held back by the fiscal tightening that is going on. We had quite big tax increases at the beginning of the year. And in the sequester – and we’re getting somewhere in the order of 1.9 percent of GDP in fiscal tightening. So that’s acting as a brake on the economy and so the overall recovery is not as strong as it otherwise would be, which means there’s slower job growth than there otherwise would be.

It is a recovery, but it’s a pretty lackluster one considering how much we have to catch up, and I think that has quite a lot to do with fiscal policy.

“Jon Perrone” asks on Facebook how damaging is the current gridlock in Washington?

In the short term, I think it’s leading to a fiscal stance that’s far from optimal in that we have, to put it crudely, too much tightening in the short term, while we are not addressing what this country’s real problems are, which is entitlement reform. And I would probably add tax reform, because the U.S. tax system is incredibly inefficient and could do with reform.

But the U.S. does not have a short term fiscal problem. We saw that last week with the new deficit figures – they show that very powerfully. It’s not a situation where we have to cut fast now to deal with a fiscal crisis. But the U.S. does have a challenge with entitlements, particularly with Medicare spending in part because of the aging population and the baby boom generation, but largely because of the rise in health care costs.

Health-care cost inflation has slowed recently, and that’s probably the best thing from a longer term perspective if it lasts. But that’s where I think the policy focus needs to be. The focus in Washington is on cuts that furlough air traffic controllers or cut Head Start or cut public investment, and that’s not what this country needs. And I think that is the main economic damage from the fiscal situation in Washington – we are focusing on the wrong fiscal priority, and I think we are not focusing enough on jobs in the sense that not only is unemployment still high, but long term unemployment is still very high. There are a lot of people who are moving from unemployment to disability rolls, and there are a lot of people who have been out of work for a long time who are unable to get jobs. And I think that from a long term perspective,  this is not just a human tragedy, but it’s going to be a potentially big hit on the economy in the future. So to summarize, the focus is too much on short term fiscal – and too much on fiscal – and not on the broader challenges facing the economy.

“Jon Inklovich,” an employer, says it has been difficult to find skilled workers in manufacturing and construction. Do you feel there’s a big skills gap in these industries?

I hear that a lot, and there are plenty of numbers that suggest employers are having trouble getting skilled workers. For me that’s another reason to focus on what matters in this economy, which is not only boosting the opportunities of those out of work, but improving skills through the education system, figuring out ways to train people for tomorrow’s jobs. And I think that means a whole number of things. I think at a very young age it means a bigger focus on pre-school because that’s where you start on the education ladder. It means improving K through 12, although I know that’s primarily the purview of the states. It means thinking about community colleges more effectively as a route to the more vocational training, it means thinking about college and how college fits in.

There’s a whole slew of things where much more needs to be done to ensure that people have the skills for the jobs that are going to be created. And the U.S. is a rich economy whose future job growth is going to be in the high skill area, and we need to make sure people have the capacity to do those jobs.

The Minnesota House this month approved a $9.50 minimum wage. Tyler Benschoter asks how much of an impact you think this kind of hike would have if applied nationally?

The impact of a minimum wage depends on how high it is to average wages. If you have too high a minimum wage, it will hurt job creation and you will have negative job effects. As of right now, the U.S. minimum wage is relatively low compared to median wages – both compared to its own history, and certainly compared to other countries. So I wouldn’t be worried about a modest increase, and I think the literature tells us that clearly over the last 10 years, modest increases in the minimum wage, at a sensible level, actually don’t have huge job hurting consequences.

The problem with one single minimum wage is that you don’t allow for younger people, who are less skilled and maybe more easily pushed out of the job market, or that the minimum wage should vary for different regions.

Now that’s a complicated answer to the question, but how much damage is done depends on how high it goes, and right now the U.S. is pretty low. So I think the damage to the U.S. of a modest minimum wage rise should not be that big. But if you look at somewhere like France, where I think the minimum wage is something like 60 percent of the median wage, it’s clearly a job killer.

Editor’s note: Richard Pearshouse is a senior health and human rights researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of Toxic Tanneries: The Health Repercussions of Bangladesh’s Hazaribagh Leather. The views expressed are his own.

Last year, I spoke with a 40-year-old woman working in a Bangladesh leather tannery in the Hazaribagh neighborhood of Dhaka. The Hazaribagh tanneries, which export hundreds of millions of dollars in leather for luxury clothes, shoes and boots around the world, spew noxious pollutants into surrounding communities. They can also make their workers very ill.

Much tannery work involves measuring and mixing chemicals, adding chemicals to hides in drums, or hauling hides saturated in chemicals out of pits. Fungal infections, scabies, hives, and contact dermatitis are common. Others suffer from respiratory illnesses and chest pains.

Asked what she thought of the possibility that Hazaribagh’s tanneries might eventually move out of the city, the woman told me, “It would be very good…They could start garment factories. This would be cleaner work with a better salary.”

Last week, a deadly fire tore through a garment factory in Dhaka, killing eight workers. This followed the collapse of the Rana Plaza building on more than 1,000 workers, which made it the deadliest ever catastrophe in the history of the garment industry. Last November, a garment factory fire killed more than 100 people. So the tannery worker’s assessment sounds like a sick joke. But the truth is it was a realistic assessment of the deplorable health and safety conditions in Bangladesh.

Indeed, the current spotlight on the tragic mass casualties in Rana Plaza obscures a bigger reality: hundreds of Bangladeshi workers die every year with hardly anyone noticing.

Tannery workers die in ones and twos, often in electrocutions and boiler explosions. I spoke to tannery workers who had broken arms, or who had lost fingers or hands following serious accidents in machines. Many workers said their tannery did not supply any protective equipment. I met girls and boys, some as young as 11, in some tanneries. They work 12 or even 14 hours a day. Despite a law against children doing dangerous work, they told us that they handle skins in pits full of chemicals and water, cut hides with razor blades, or work with dangerous machinery without training or supervision. Studies of occupational cancers among tannery workers in other countries show that Hazaribagh’s employees are right to be terrified of long-term exposure to chemicals.

Tanneries and garment factories are not the only deadly industries in Bangladesh. Non-profit groups monitoring workplace safety say that in an average year, more than a hundred workers will be killed by electrocutions, falling from heights, or crushed by machinery while working in building construction. Despite introducing new regulations to govern the ship-breaking industry in 2011, 15 workers died in accidents in Chittagong yards in 2012. Similar numbers die in rice mills each year. These are only the deaths in accidents – no-one tracks deaths by occupational diseases.

The Bangladeshi government, retailers and consumers have an urgent responsibility to search for reforms in the rubble of Rana Plaza. They should start with a serious inspection regime. The number of workplace inspectors is woefully inadequate: in June 2012, the Inspection Department had just 18 inspectors to monitor an estimated 100,000 factories in and around Dhaka. But it’s not simply a case of more inspectors – they can hardly do their work if they continue to be cozy with industry. A deputy chief inspector with the Inspection Department told me: “We always try to maintain good relations with management. Usually we give advance notice [of an inspection]. Sometimes we send a letter, sometimes we phone if the number is available.” Although the law allows for imprisonment for those responsible for violating workplace health and safety provisions, when violations are found the common penalty is a fine of around $13. Other senior officials have told us they believe the lack of worker protections and hostility to unions stem from some parliamentarians’ financial stakes in garment factories.

Strong and independent labor groups in Bangladesh operate in a pervasively hostile environment. The torture and murder of labor rights activist Aminul Islam a year ago remains unsolved. Over a dozen labor rights leaders currently face criminal charges on a variety of spurious grounds. This matters. Organized labor would have had much more support in standing up to pressure from a factory owner to go back into a building whose walls had cracked.

Foreign companies that source from Bangladesh have a responsibility to ensure that the rights of workers throughout their supply chains are respected. Bangladesh’s tragedies have laid bare the fundamental shortcomings of the “social audits” many retailers use to monitor conditions at the factories that produce their goods. At the least, retailers who rely on these audits need to do more to ensure that they are rigorous, transparent and truly independent. Too often, none of those things are true.

Editor’s note: Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) are members of the U.S. Congress. The views expressed are their own.

For the first time since hosting Burmese dictator Ne Win nearly 50 years ago, the United States will host another head of state from Myanmar. The historic visit from President Thein Sein on Monday will, no doubt, lead to much discussion of Myanmar’s extremely long road toward democracy and whether there may be a relapse in their recent reform. It is also an opportunity to evaluate America’s new Myanmar policy.

As the U.S. reengages with Myanmar, also known as Burma, some Americans have lost sight of the ongoing, violent war against many of Myanmar's ethnic and religious minorities.  This being the case, the U.S. must closely evaluate its policy towards Myanmar and ensure that no action or word from the U.S. government be interpreted as a lack of concern for human rights abuse that continues in Myanmar, some of which Human Rights Watch has gone so far as to call “a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”

The U.S. relationship with Myanmar from 1990 to 2011 was virtually nonexistent, governed by strict sanctions brought about by the military government’s widespread, often brutal, violation of basic rights.

After the transfer of power to a quasi-civilian government in April 2011, Myanmar's government has taken modest steps toward democratization.  The Obama administration responded by rapidly lifting, easing, or suspending almost all sanctions on Myanmar.

Obama’s “Asia pivot” focuses on the administration’s management of alliances, its force posture, and trade policy to counterbalance the rising regional power of China. As an expression of America’s enduring commitment to Asia, the “Asia Pivot” is a good thing.  In Southeast Asia, however, it too often devolves into simply adapting policy to please governments in the region while ignoring human rights abuses.

More from CNN: Will EU regret dropping sanctions?

Human Rights Watch’s charge of “ethnic cleansing” is certainly justifiable. Communal violence in June 2012 between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine state was brutally used against Rohingya Muslims and, more recently, spread anti-Muslim violence in central Myanmar.  Most of the hundreds of casualties and more than the 100,000 displaced are minority Muslims.

The Burmese military’s ongoing war against the Kachin ethnic and Christian minority in northeast Myanmar over the past two years has resulted in undetermined civilian casualties, the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, forced labor, and more than 100,000 displaced.  Over the past few months, we have seen the breakdown of fragile ceasefires in Shan state, reached only last year, where recent attacks by the military have caused Shan and Palaung minority communities to flee.

During President Thein Sein’s visit to Washington, DC, President Obama should call for the unconditional and immediate release of all political prisoners.  More than 1,000 Rohingya – a heavily persecuted Muslim population within Myanmar – are still imprisoned since violence broke out in Arakan state last June 2012. After the military attacked ethnic regions in Myanmar during the past two years, nearly 500 – half of whom are Kachin Christians – became political prisoners.

Myanmar’s deeply flawed constitution, meanwhile, grants the Burmese military sweeping authority and contains no effective checks on its power to commit atrocities against ethnic minorities. Reform within Myanmar cannot occur without substantial constitutional reform measures.  Article 20 – which grants the military authority over civilians and jurisdiction to safeguard “unity” – essentially provides justification for the military’s regular attacks against civilian populations in ethnic areas. Myanmar is always in danger of reversion to war and military rule until the constitution addresses the underlying reasons for ethnic conflict.

Many bipartisan voices within Congress strongly support using necessary caution in future relations with Myanmar.  As U.S. policy “pivots” towards Asia, we should establish firm benchmarks to give pro-reform forces within Myanmar, including ethnic and religious minority groups, the appropriate leverage to foster democracy and lasting civilian rule. Benchmarks should focus on progress of rule of law and constitutional reform to create a federal system with respect for minority rights and civilian control of the military, the release of all political prisoners, use of forced labor and child soldiers by the military, treatment of internally displaced people, and withdrawal of the military from ethnic areas. Sanctions against Myanmar's military – the primary perpetrator of human rights abuse in the country – should be the last sanctions to be lifted after these benchmarks are met.

The U.S. must not shy away from the historic role it has played in Myanmar’s reform and President Obama should use President Thein Sein’s visit to highlight these necessary reforms.  If Myanmar is to be a stabilizing force in the region, the government and military must undertake constitutional reform and end ethnic and religious violence.  If Myanmar is to move into the 21st century with respect to human rights and political freedoms, the U.S. can certainly help.

By Global Public Square staff

We have been thinking about an idea in the opinion pages of the New York Times to tackle one of the great challenges of our times: cutting carbon emissions to slow down climate change. It would result in the single largest reduction of CO2 emissions globally of any feasible idea out there. But there are a couple of hitches. Let's explain.

Here's the idea: it's time to help China master fracking safely.

By now it's clear that fracking (the process of extracting shale gas) has dramatically lowered America's CO2 emissions. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2006, a fifth of our electricity came from natural gas, while almost 50 percent came from coal. By 2012, natural gas had increased its share to 30 percent of our electricity. Coal's share dropped to 37 percent. The change was because of fracking: over that same period, shale gas production grew 800 percent.

The reason this shift is important is that coal is the world's dirtiest source of energy – both in its emissions of CO2 and particle pollutants. Thanks in large part to our reduced dependency on coal, U.S. CO2 emissions hit an 18-year low in 2012. U.S. emissions fell over the last five years by more than all of Europe's did. So – and this is the first hitch – environmentalists have to understand that, whatever the fantasies, natural gas is in reality producing a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions.

But now the second hitch. Why is it a good idea to help what some consider our greatest rival catch up with us? Why should we help China copy our winning formula?

The answer is simple: it's a win-win scenario.

In the past two decades, despite global investments in clean energy, the International Energy Agency says that net-net, the world's energy consumption has gotten cleaner by only 1 percent. We've essentially made no progress. Why? Well in large part, it is because of the means by which China is powering its super-fast growth. IEA data shows that if you exclude China, global consumption of coal has increased only slightly in the past decade. China, by comparison, has more than doubled its consumption. It now burns nearly as much coal as the rest of the world, combined. And it won't stop there. Every week, it opens new coal plants, leading to increasingly polluted and hazardous air. This, of course, is not just China's problem…but the whole world's problem.

As it turns out, we're not the only ones sitting on top of a shale gold mine: China actually has shale gas reserves that are nearly 50 percent larger than ours.

Beijing is going to try and mine these reserves in every way it can.  But many experts worry that China lacks the experience and technology to frack effectively. As important, it really has no understanding of how to frack safely. Here in the United States, we have environmentalists and a free press to push authorities to regulate and monitor this very new industry. China, on the other hand, may not have the same checks and balances.

This is why the United States needs to share its expertise, not keep it secret.

One of the perennial dilemmas at any climate summit is how to wean developing countries off of the dirtiest forms of energy. China can – understandably – argue that its overriding priority is growth. As the last few decades have shown, a fast-growing China translates to a fast-growing world. A cleaner China would have a similar impact.

Conservatives are, of course, mad at Barack Obama. But they are also mad at a country that isn't outraged enough at him. This frustration is now taking over mainstream and intelligent voices within the movement, and about broader issues than Benghazi.

Bret Stephens, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, laments that President Obama is not paying a price for a foreign policy that he describes as "isolationist." But our isolationism will surely come as a surprise to the diplomats, soldiers and intelligence officers working on American foreign policy. Washington spends more on defense than the next 10 great powers put together – and more on intelligence than most nations spend on their militaries.

We also have tens of thousands of troops stationed at dozens of bases abroad, from Germany to Turkey to Bahrain to Japan to South Korea. We have formal commitments to defend our most important allies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

For more on this, read the column at TIME 

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