Liu Zhenya, Columnist

Let's Get to Work on a Global Energy Grid

Future energy, information and transportation networks will improve productivity and reduce pollution worldwide.

Power grids should be transcontinental.

Photographer: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
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Globalization has fallen out of fashion. Free trade breeds inequality, the critics say. International cooperation precludes national development. Closed economies are preferable to open ones.

These statements could not be more misguided. The main reason I know this has to do not with job creation or productive employment or even global gross domestic product. It has to do with things that are much simpler and more fundamental to us all: energy, information and transportation.