America's 31 National Emergencies Right Now | Trekking in a Wheelchair

From Malaysia to Indonesia and the UAE to the U.K., countries and institutions are looking to marry Islamic banking with green projects.

With mystic peaks, coral reefs, jungles and over 4,000 hours of annual sunlight, Malaysia’s Sabah state is an ideal candidate for clean energy initiatives. But what makes its 50-megawatt solar project, launched in April 2018, special isn’t just its potential to provide electricity to this northern Borneo region. The project is the outcome of funds raised from the world’s first Islamic green bond, with a value of $60 million, unveiled by Malaysia’s Securities Commission in July 2017.

Modern Islamic financial tools, such as bonds that adhere to Islamic law and accrue no interest, first emerged in the 1970s. The clean energy projects have grown in demand globally over the past two decades as concerns over climate change have mounted. Now, more and more countries and organizations are beginning to marry the two, opening up the possibility of investing billions in a sector that’s only expected to grow, while also offering the clean energy industry access to money it desperately needs to ramp up society’s transition away from fossil fuels.

We’re already in 31 national emergencies today. What’s a 32nd?

The question is not whether we’re in a national emergency, but which one to pick.

Washington is now in the grips of a debate about whether President Donald Trump will declare a national emergency at the southern border in order to start construction of a wall, and what happens then. Regardless of the merits of a wall — which has become a symbol for Trump’s presidency itself — most people believe declaring a national emergency to build one constitutes a substantial stretching of a 1974 law designed to give the president extraordinary powers in case of a fast-moving crisis, and courts are unlikely to grant his wish.

But in teasing the idea, Trump has once again successfully tapped into the depth of America’s id: We are in an emergency. All the time.

Policymakers are struggling to combat a gender gap that starts with literacy.

Matt Smith, acting head teacher of Huntington School in York, England, is teaching a match class. He projects a circle with three sectors onto the whiteboard. How many degrees is each sector? Twelve boys and girls, ages 15 and 16, in blue uniforms with knotted ties, stare at the board. It’s 10 a.m. on a rainy Tuesday in December, the sort of day that almost anyone who ever went to school will remember.

Huntington is a comprehensive school whose 1,532 pupils (almost all classified as “White British”) range from professors’ kids to children from a poor housing estate. The school has playing fields and tennis courts but is mostly a collection of unremarkable 1960s buildings.

In developed countries, on average, boys underperform girls at school. In Britain, White working-class boys perform especially badly. Educators have only recently started focusing on the boy problem in earnest, though Smith says: “I don’t think there’s a school in the country that hasn’t thought about it.”