Ammar Awad/Reuters

A Palestinian protester clashes with Israeli police during a demonstration in support of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, outside Jerusalem's Old city, April 29, 2017.

Donald Trump is not the first president to believe he can deliver a peace deal in the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After Jimmy Carter’s 1978 Camp David Accords came the Reagan Peace Plan. That was followed in 1991 by George H.W. Bush’s Madrid Conference – and on and on it has gone for decades, through Barack Obama’s failed stab at peace at the hands of former Secretary of State John Kerry.

Yet while virtually no one believes conditions are ripe for the master of “the art of the deal” to deliver quickly on what by now is the holy grail of American diplomacy, some experts with long experience in peace efforts say the potential for progress may be less dismal than meets the eye.

The key reason is the regional context – and specifically how Arab countries, in particular the Gulf states, may suddenly be seeing their renewed commitment to helping further Middle East peace as a way of accommodating a new president – and of keeping the US anchored to the region.

So when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas takes up Trump’s surprise invitation and visits the White House Wednesday, as much attention is likely to be paid to how the Arab states fit in the conversation as to the public commitments Mr. Abbas does or doesn’t make.

“The Sunni states want the US to be in the region” to put a brake on the ambitions of their archenemy, Shiite Iran, says Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East diplomat who worked in five administrations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “They perceive President Trump’s interest in the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and they may be using [it] to keep him in the region,” he says.

The corollary is that Trump can use the prospect of US engagement in the region “to keep the Arabs involved and contributing” to a re-launched peace process, Ambassador Ross says, primarily by deploying their influence with the Palestinians.

There are some signs the dynamic is already working, says Ross, now a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He notes that Sunni Arab leaders, who of late had shown dwindling interest in Mr. Abbas and the Palestinian issue generally, quickly reversed course after Trump issued his White House invitation to the Palestinian leader.

“[Abbas’s] position in the region had really been weakened,” particularly with two key players, Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Ross notes. “But both agreed to see him after Trump’s invitation,” he adds.

Pressure on Hamas

Some even see Abbas’s resurrected stature regionally and internationally as a factor in recent efforts by the militant Palestinian organization Hamas – rival to Abbas’s Fatah organization – to soften its image and present itself as a more widely palatable alternative to Fatah.

Hamas leaders chose the run-up to Abbas’s Washington visit to unveil a new set of principles that, while still claiming the right to armed struggle against Israel, downplay anti-Semitic rhetoric and accept the idea of a provisional Palestinian state as an interim step.

The document, which also calls for Hamas to develop closer ties to Egypt, was released not from the group’s power center in Gaza, which it controls, but through a series of public events in the Gulf state of Qatar – another US regional ally with renewed interest in the Palestinian issue.

Abbas remains unpopular in the West Bank, but his suddenly rising regional star poses a threat to Hamas.

Yet even with his burnished regional relevance in tow, Abbas will only count with his White House host if he demonstrates that he is ready to deliver, regional experts say – if not dramatically, at least in promising ways that tell the dealmaker-in-chief that Abbas is someone he can work with to bring about the ultimate deal.

The conventional wisdom both in Washington and in the region is that “there is no context for talks, for a grand deal,” say David Makovsky, who served as a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry’s peace initiative. “Ironically, the only person who doesn’t talk like that is the president of the United States. He believes in the deal.”

What Abbas could offer

The challenge for Abbas, Mr. Makovsky says, is that even with expectations for a “big deal” at rock bottom, pressure will mount for the Palestinian leader to come forth with some offer, to lay some cards on the table.

“If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not ripe for the home run, what’s the single?” says Makovsky, an aficionado of baseball analogies. “The administration is going to say, ‘What’s your step? We’re not only asking [something] of Israel,’” he adds, “‘so what’s the single?’”

Ross cites two things he believes Abbas could do to demonstrate his relevance to Trump and his readiness to act to get the peace process moving again.

Perhaps most important, Abbas could state a willingness to end the practice of paying the families of Palestinian “martyrs” who die in attacks on Israelis and of other Palestinians imprisoned by Israel for anti-Israeli violence.

Second, Abbas could acknowledge that “two national movements are competing for the same space, that two national identities [require] two states for two peoples,” he says. More than a restatement of support for the two-state solution, it would be an affirmation of Israeli rights that could lead the Israeli public to take a second look and perhaps break the stalemate.

Neither action would be easy for Abbas, Ross says, but he says they could demonstrate a willingness to shake things up to keep Trump interested. “These hard steps won’t produce the final deal,” he says. “But they can break the stalemate and restore the sense of possibility.”

Dramatic move by Trump?

If Trump hears enough encouraging words, speculation in Washington is that he could announce a dramatic step of his own, if not during the Abbas visit then shortly thereafter.

“Could Trump be going to Israel” late in May as part of his first trip to Europe as president? asks Makovsky, now at the Washington Institute. Might he announce he’s bringing Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu together for the first time since 2010?

Ross says such a flashy announcement would mean little absent the preliminary steps demonstrating that conditions on the ground have really changed.

“I can tell you, if you bring the two leaders together it’s a one-off. It doesn’t change anything,” he says. “What diplomacy has to do,” he adds, “you have to give the publics on each side a reason to take a second look,” a reason to believe “something is different this time.”

Brennan Linsley/AP

Dori Mann takes a snapshot of friends and family as they all participate a climate change awareness rally in Denver, one of many marches nationwide, on April 29. Many businesses are calling on President Trump to keep the US in the Paris Agreement on climate change – and experts say one reason is that young workers and customers widely support action to mitigate global warming.

[Editor's note: This story was updated to indicate that some administration officials still support a pullout from the Paris climate deal and to correct the timing of the backlash against Reagan-era moves on the environment.] 

As a candidate, Donald Trump appealed to Americans’ worries about jobs by vowing to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement and end job-killing environmental regulations. But what happens if President Trump calls for a revolt on the international agreement and corporate America doesn’t show up?

Increasingly, US businesses have been coming to the conclusion that they’re better off if the United States sticks with the Paris accord. Although it may seem counterintuitive, oil and gas companies ranging from ExxonMobil to Royal Dutch Shell, and even coal company Cloud Peak Energy, are pressing the Trump administration not to withdraw from the accord. The dearth of corporate support for a pullout makes it less likely the president will carry through on his campaign promise to “cancel” the agreement, although top administration officials are still reportedly leaning that way.

The corporate resistance also suggests that US companies are looking beyond the Trump administration and seeing more strategic advantage in helping to shape regulation, rather than trying to stop it cold.

“Companies are looking at the Trump administration policies and they’ve seen this before in the Reagan years,” says Andrew Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “And they say: ‘We've seen the blowback’ ” when President Reagan backtracked and replaced highly controversial appointments at the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Administration with more mainstream figures. 

Businesses support the Paris accord for a range of reasons – from the altruistic to the less-than-noble. For oil companies, instead of backing out of the accord, “a smarter course would be to stay in Paris and weaken it from within,” says Professor Hoffman.

That may sound cynical, but it’s actually a business axiom that may prove key in helping to garner support from other businesses for climate-friendly policies, sustainability experts say.

“My definition of sustainable is doing the right thing for the environment and making money – and it's not always in that order,” says Steve Hellem, president of Navista, a Washington-based public affairs group that helps companies and other entities meet their sustainability objectives. “It's the recognition that business will always do what is in its own best interest.”

A rising business priority

More and more businesses are concluding that action to address climate change is in their interests, according to a report released last week by World Wildlife Fund, Ceres, Calvert Research and Management, and CDP (formerly, the Carbon Disclosure Project). Among Fortune 100 companies, 63 percent have set one or more clean energy targets; among Fortune 500 companies, 48 percent have at least one climate or clean energy target, up 5 percent since a 2014 report. And the plans are increasingly ambitious, according to the report. IBM, Microsoft, and some 190 other Fortune 500 companies report saving nearly $3.7 billion in 2016 on energy efforts that reduced emissions by the equivalent of 45 coal-fired power plants.

Being climate-friendly is especially important to consumer-facing companies, which may explain why 72 percent of consumer staples firms in the Fortune 500 have set clean-energy goals. By contrast, the report finds that only 11 percent in the energy sector – where profits and carbon emissions often go hand-in-hand – have done the same.

Some business leaders conclude it's simply the right thing to do. And they hope the president is listening to their message.

“The voice of business is an important voice to hear,” says Jim Epstein, the founder of an Elkwood, Va. food company, who was in Washington this week as part of the American Sustainable Business Council’s effort to lobby Congress around the view that climate change and the environment align with free-market opportunity.

Other companies see the threat of climate change as a business opportunity, especially when it comes to selling new products and hiring the best and brightest Millennials, who tend to support climate-friendly policies.

This is even a factor in the fossil fuel sector. The natural-gas company Cheniere, for example, would benefit from a global shift from coal to natural gas-fired electricity. Coal companies see climate policy as a vehicle to receive support for carbon capture technology.

Risks in the fossil-fuel arena

The risks of not being climate-friendly have also risen, as oil and gas companies are finding out.

Some investors are beginning to flee the oil and gas sector. Last Thursday, Harvard University announced it was “pausing” investments in several fossil fuel interests, following similar moves from Columbia and Yale. These are the first steps toward potential divestment from influential institutional investors.

The risks of lawsuits are rising. Exxon, in particular, is the target of class-action suits and investigations by the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts around the premise that the company knew that global warming and the threat of regulation were real, but continued to mislead shareholders about the value of its assets. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is also looking at the company’s valuation of its oil reserves in a period of low prices and potential restrictions on carbon emissions.

Also last week, Moody’s Investors Service released a research paper arguing that as soon as 2020, oil and gas companies’ revenues could face material risks from lower demand for their products because of government policies, changing consumer preferences, and disruptive technologies, such as electric cars and alternative energy.

“The industry’s product cannot be changed and no technology exists at scale to mitigate its carbon emissions,” the report concluded. The Paris agreement “represents a substantial threat to the oil and gas industry.”

So why would oil companies support it? One reason is that, as a voluntary agreement, it doesn’t have any teeth, as opposed to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan regulations, which many energy companies balked at and which the Trump administration is starting to dismantle.

“My guess is that we'll stay in [the Paris agreement] because it allows us to participate in the negotiations and it doesn't require us to do anything” specific, says Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. That would give the companies time to try to delay or minimize regulations.

Hedging their bets?

This also may explain why oil companies often sound contradictory when addressing climate change. Exxon several years ago acknowledged that global warming was real and required action, but was still funding the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which has questioned the role of human activity, according to a 2016 report by the American Geophysical Union.

Chevron, long an outspoken critic of climate legislation, last year opposed a shareholder resolution that it detail the business risks from climate legislation. But earlier this year, it became the first major oil company to acknowledge in its 10-K annual report the heightened business risks from potential governmental investigations and private suits around climate change.

In March, Chevron chief executive John Watson said publicly that debate over climate change centers on humans' role in driving it, a common line among climate-change skeptics. But in the same month, the company released a report that said: “Chevron … recognizes that the use of fossil fuels to meet the world’s energy needs contributes to the rising concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in Earth’s atmosphere.”

Hoffman explains that corporations are political entities that incorporate competing interests and are speaking to multiple audiences, just like governments. And at a time of regulatory uncertainty, it makes business sense for oil companies to hedge their bets.

Viewed from that perspective of business interests, the entire climate debate could be made less politically divisive if it were recast as energy efficiency, argues Mr. Hellem of Navista.

“We've got these two tribes that are fighting each other,” he says. “How do we get beyond that?”

Companies “are smart enough to recognize … that they have to be responsible in the long haul,” he adds. “Eventually, they are going to be held accountable by communities and states and families.”

What’s needed, he suggests, is a discussion about how to reduce emissions through energy efficiency, with conversion costs shared by businesses and taxpayers. With the right incentives that can show businesses how they will save money on energy costs, “there’s no CEO who wouldn’t do it.”

Staff writer Mark Trumbull contributed to this report from Washington.

Aaron P. Bernstein/REUTERS

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R) of Texas heads to the Senate floor for a vote on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 26, 2017.

What happened to President Trump’s wall in this week’s bipartisan budget deal is a good way to look at the new political dynamic in Washington.

For it is a new dynamic. Up to this point – the cabinet confirmations, the Supreme Court justice, the regulatory rollbacks – all could be done with a GOP majority in Congress and a Republican in the White House.

But Congress is now in the budgeting phase, and budgeting – as well as most other major legislation – still requires clearing a 60-vote threshold in the Senate. For the first time since Mr. Trump took office, Republicans and Democrats actually have to work together to get something done.

Back to the wall. It’s not in there. There’s no $1.4 billion to start construction on a “big, beautiful” wall as the president requested. What that shows is the Democrats' clout, even as a minority party. They erected a solid wall of resistance so that not one penny could go to Trump’s expansive vision of concrete.

But here’s what did get in there: $1.5 billion for border security – technology and maintenance of existing infrastructure at the border, even if there’s nothing for new fencing, as the administration wanted. What this shows is the two parties finding common ground, something that America hasn’t seen much of in these early months.

Alas, it did not please the president.

Trump calls for a government shutdown

He showed his displeasure in a couple of tweets on Tuesday morning. Referring to this week’s $1.16 trillion budget deal – which will fund the government through Sept. 30 and which gave Democrats almost everything they wanted – Trump laid out three ways "to fix mess!”:

• Elect enough Republican senators in 2018 so that they can clear the 60-vote threshold by themselves (that’s how Democrats squeaked the Affordable Care Act past the Senate)
• Blow up the 60-vote rule for Senate legislation so that everything passes with a simple majority
• Blow up the government with a “good ‘shutdown’ ” in September – i.e., force the hand of Democrats.

These last two suggestions did not go down well with Senate Republicans such John Cornyn of Texas – in the Senate's GOP leadership – and reflect what America has so far come to know about the president: That he’s on a learning curve.

“It’s a free country, he’s entitled to express his views, as are we,” Senator Cornyn told reporters Tuesday.

But in a speech just minutes before on the Senate floor he vigorously argued against the party in control shutting down the government. And he defended the 60-vote threshold as a way for members to have their say in legislation and to forge lasting consensus on America’s big issues.

Here, again, the wall teaches a lesson. Even if the president were to have his way and the Senate tore down its 60-vote rule, not every issue splits neatly along partisan lines – though more and more it’s trending that way.

Take the wall, for instance.

Why some GOP lawmakers also oppose wall

Last month, The Wall Street Journal canvassed Democrat and Republican lawmakers from Southwest border states and found that none of them supported the president’s funding request to start wall construction, though Sen. Ted Cruz (R) of Texas “backs the overall idea of a wall,” the news organization reported. For next year, the president has requested $2.6 billion.

“You don’t have a single Republican on the border who’s for the wall,” Senate minority leader Charles Schumer (D) of New York told reporters Monday. He said he had spoken with seven or eight Republican senators who oppose the president’s project. “I don’t think it can pass,” the New Yorker said, looking ahead to the wrangling over next year’s budget, even while praising the bipartisan cooperation on this year's deal.

Border lawmakers and others have concerns about the president’s focus on a physical barrier. They point to all the ways to go over, under, or through a barrier. They raise issues of terrain and eminent domain, and of fear of Mexican retaliation by blocking US agriculture exports.

They also point to cost. Estimates on building a wall range wildly, from $12 billion to nearly $70 billion. Whatever it is, it’s hard to find any lawmaker who believes Mexico will pay for it.

“It’s not helpful to his goal and to my goal to just be talking about a border wall,” Cornyn told reporters on Tuesday, referring to Trump. “We need to talk about more than infrastructure. We need to talk about technology, we need to talk about personnel, and I’d like to see a comprehensive border security plan.”

And yet the president is still promising the wall. “We will build a wall folks, don’t even worry about it,” he said at his Harrisburg, Pa., rally over the weekend.

The way through this impasse looks to be a matter of definition and scope – redefining the wall as “border security” and taking a more multifaceted approach.

“If you’re talking about drones, if you’re talking about towers, if you’re taking about anti-tunneling, if you’re talking about increasing the manpower. Then that’s fine. That’s my view of what a wall is. Not just concrete,” says Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona.

The president’s press secretary called the $1.5 billion in this week's deal “a down payment on border security.”

Carlos Jasso/Reuters

A man talks to one of the organizers of the bus known as the 'Corruptour,' during a tour showing buildings and sites involved in alleged corruption cases in Mexico City, Feb. 5, 2017.

A line of eager tourists curves along a bustling sidewalk here on a sunny Sunday afternoon, waiting to board a beige school bus for a tour like none other. One woman pores over the pamphlet that advertises each stop, elbowing her friend as she reads aloud.

“This is too good,” she laughs, rattling off sites like the “White House” (a $7 million home-buying scandal involving the presidential couple), the Senate (which named an attorney general in November, apparently to shield the majority party from investigations), and a giant television conglomerate (which took payoffs in 2012 to promote a presidential candidate).

This is the Corruptour, a 1.5-hour, 10-stop circuit that highlights stories of fraud, mismanagement, and corruption across Mexico City and, in some cases, the country. Corruption is rampant in Mexico, which has ranked in or near the bottom third of nations in Transparency International’s corruption perception index since 2000. In 2016, it placed 123rd out of 176 countries.

Thanks to Corruptour and other factors, Mexicans are talking more openly about official corruption. Mexican Millennials, a generation set to make up some 40 percent of the country’s eligible voters in the 2018 presidential election, appear eager to vote and clean up the nation’s politics. And a few young politicians are working to reform their districts.

This may not be enough. What’s really needed to break up Mexico’s longstanding culture of cozy relationships between politicians and industry, or in some cases, collusion with cartels, reform experts say, are empowered independent prosecutors, a safe environment for the press, enforcement of recent judicial and police reforms, and, perhaps most importantly, continued public activism and scrutiny.

But talking about official wrongdoing – even if only to lampoon it – is a first step.

“Having a conversation about corruption isn’t a small thing,” says Miguel Pulido, one of the many private citizens that helped organize the tour, which ran for three months through April and may be extended for a longer run here. “If we don’t talk about these things, if we don’t ... recognize the problem, people will hardly be willing to talk about solutions.”

In some ways, Mexico is doing better on the recognition front. Compared with 1996, for example, when the word “corruption” appeared in less than 30 newspaper headlines around the country, the term appeared in 3,593 headlines in 2015, according to Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, an advocacy group based in Mexico City. But there’s still plenty of work to be done when it comes to raising awareness and inspiring action.

A new kind of politician?

Growing up, Pedro Kumamoto felt the Mexican government operated under a type of Murphy’s Law of corruption: If backroom deals and the lining of pockets was a given in political circles, all politicians must therefore be corrupt.

Of course, the 27-year-old legislator in Mexico’s western Jalisco state sees things differently now that he’s taken office. He caught national attention during his 2015 campaign, when he ran as an independent without any traditional party backing. And through initiatives like donating 70 percent of his salary to projects in his district that encourage citizen participation, to backing historic legislation that stripped public officials in Jalisco of their prosecutorial immunity while in office, he’s working to spread a message to his peers that the next generation of Mexican politicians have the power to rewrite the norms of leadership here.

“What we are doing is an inspiration for a lot of people,” Mr. Kumamoto says, citing a handful of other young aspiring politicians choosing to run without party affiliation across the country, or joining the growing network of Wikipolítica, the grassroots movement he cofounded, which pushes for civic engagement and government transparency.

“We don’t want to be that ‘new generation’ that draws so much hope only to let people down. We have to build on these possibilities,” Kumamoto says.

About 77 percent of Mexican Millennials say they intend to vote in next year’s presidential elections, according to a poll published by news site Nación321 last October. That’s an incredibly high percentage of young voters, who are typically believed to skip trips to the ballot box. In the 2012 presidential race, roughly 53 percent of Mexicans between the age of 20 and 29 cast ballots. It was the age group with the lowest rate of participation, according to the Federal Electoral Institute. As a result, many hope that politicians will start perking up to the distinct preferences of Mexico’s young constituents over the next year.

But when it comes to candidates for political office, this generation wants more than the status quo. Polls show Millennials overwhelmingly prefer candidates whom they perceive as honest and who will prioritize transparency, says Alejandro Moreno, a political scientist and public opinion researcher here. 

“What caught my attention was that when Millennials are asked to characterize the country, it’s corruption,” says Mr. Moreno, who has conducted several polls on Millennial political attitudes. That’s been spurred, in part, by the uptick in high-profile corruption scandals over the past few years, from the government’s botched response and involvement in the disappearance of 43 college students to a sweetheart real-estate deal between the president’s wife and a favored government contractor, known as the White House scandal.

Technology use and a strong social-media presence among this generation means that corruption is being talked about more – both online and IRL (in real life). Will Millennials hold politicians accountable?

“What’s surprised me most [now that I’m in office] is that politicians always say they have a plan for the country, or the state, or the municipality. But I see an utter absence of future plans,” Kumamoto says. “That’s serious, because Mexicans under 30 will be living with the consequences of the actions of politicians who are overwhelmingly men and overwhelmingly older.”

“For me, that’s a call to get more diversity in office and to get [my peers] motivated and involved,” he says. “It’s our future.”

'I am 132'

Many of today’s young activists, aspiring “alternative” politicians, and members of civil society – including Kumamoto – credit their interest in fighting for transparency and a more modern democracy to a youth uprising during the 2012 presidential race.

#YoSoy132, or “I am 132,” emerged among private university students who felt television media were unfairly boosting the candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), current President Enrique Peña Nieto. The PRI, which held power in Mexico for more than 71 years straight, and a handful of media outlets, painted students protesting a speech by Mr. Peña Nieto as plants, bused in and paid to disrupt the event.

In response, 131 of the protesters posted a video online identifying themselves as registered students at the private Ibero-American University. They professed their opposition to Peña Nieto and frustration with the media. A few hours later, the first anonymous message popped up on social media: “I’m 132.”

More and more posts appeared, proclaiming solidarity with the student protesters.

The movement, which prided itself on having no clear leader, spread to include public university students as well. They had a laundry list of demands ranging from a more democratized media landscape to better internet access. It was the first time since the iconic 1968 student movement, which was marked by the government massacre of young protesters in Tlatelolco Plaza, that a unified movement emerged defined specifically by its membership of youth, observers say.

But the movement largely fizzled out after Peña Nieto’s victory. That makes it easy to overlook the impacts of #YoSoy132, says María Elena Meneses Rocha, who wrote a book about the movement. It’s left a lasting mark here when it comes to youth mobilization, she says, pointing to examples like the international networks built by #YoSoy132 that jumped into action following the presumed murders of 43 teachers’ college students in 2014. A youth collective called “More than 131” still meets regularly to discuss the news and publish documentary projects online about transparency and human rights. Grupo Televisa, the country’s dominant broadcaster, accused of serving as a PRI mouthpiece in 2012, now has an hour-long segment each weekend where young academics and students can voice their concerns and comment on political events.

“That kind of space didn’t exist for students in this country before,” says Alejandro Díaz, director of research at the school of government at Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Younger voters have shown a preference for anti-establishment candidates in recent elections, such as independent governor of Nuevo Leon, Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, or “El Bronco,” who made social media engagement a staple of his campaign.

“If you are 21 in 2018, you have roughly another 10 elections in your lifetime,” says Mr. Díaz. “We assume Millennials will preserve these values and attitudes and behaviors [around corruption and transparency] for more than 25 or 35 years. This segment of the electorate is important now, but they will become even more important in the future.”

Tuned in. Then tuned out.

What unites Millennials is the shared experience growing up with access to technology. From hackathons focused on using tech to improve transparency to the corruption street tour, Millennials are taking steps to educate themselves and make it harder for politicians and leaders to ignore corruption.

Yet, this easy understanding of computers, cellphones, and digital applications leads to a common criticism around the globe: that conversations or political awareness taking place on social media don’t necessarily translate into action by Millennials.

“They are more creative and innovative, and for a hackathon they are excellent,” says José Luis Chicoma, executive director of Ethos, a think tank that works on a number of anticorruption initiatives here. “In terms of tools to combat corruption, we might see some important changes with this generation.”

Ethos hosted a hackathon in January, bringing together nearly 90 young competitors on 25 teams to try to come up with technological solutions to issues of corruption in Mexico. The proposals ranged from cellphone applications that can be used by citizens at traffic stops to better inform themselves about their rights when dealing with police, to a digital platform that allows people to rank their experiences and give feedback when reporting crimes. But corruption doesn’t end because new tools are created.

“We have to change the norms and values in Mexico, and I don’t know that a new perspective from one generation is enough to do that,” Mr. Chicoma says.

Ms. Meneses, author of the book on the 132 movement, agrees. “Politicians can easily tune them out,” she says of young protesters. “I’m not seeing, frankly, any [political] party talking about this generation in a sincere way.”

But public pressure – on the streets and online – is increasingly important to changing the culture of corruption in Mexico. And it’s already showing results, through initiatives like the 3de3 law, a citizen and civil-society backed law that requires politicians to disclose conflicts of interest, assets, and tax returns. It also clearly defines 10 categories of corruption and lays out punishments for violations. Thanks to social media – and the pressure it can put on modern-day politicians – the proposed law garnered more than 600,000 signatures in less than three months, moving the citizen proposal into Mexico’s Congress.

“There’s really no incentive for political leaders to push forward in fighting corruption on their own,” says Kevin Casas-Zamora, a former vice president of Costa Rica who recently published a report on fighting corruption in Latin America for the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. “That’s why social pressure, an independent media, they are so important. Unless [politicians] are faced with a scandal of monumental proportions that threatens the very viability of the political system, they aren’t likely to take it upon themselves to clamp down on corruption preemptively.”

Public involvement and pressure can join forces with other watchdogs, like the media. However, despite a media that is more independent than it was in the 20^th century when Mexico was dominated by one political party, there are still serious shortcomings. Many newspapers rely on government funding for advertisements, salaries are low, which reporters say makes them easy targets for drug cartels to coopt, and the environment is increasingly unsafe for reporters. In March this year, five journalists were attacked, resulting in the deaths of three. Reporters Without Borders calls Mexico the most dangerous place for journalists in the world. Clamping down on investigative journalism or independent reporting has a direct effect on holding public officials accountable and uncovering corruption.

Despite the tough conditions, which analysts suspect will only worsen in the lead-up to the 2018 presidential election, hard-hitting journalism has already helped bring corruption here to light. Journalist Carmen Aristegui, for example, was essentially pushed off the air after her team revealed the White House scandal in 2015, but instead of disappearing into the shadows, they’ve kept their show alive, and more independent, by moving to an internet radio station.

Finding ways to maintain public interest is also key.

“Corruption is something my friends and I talk a lot about because it’s a big problem in Mexico,” says Francisco Martinez, 19, who signed up for the waiting list to ride on the Corruptour earlier this year. He didn’t make it on the bus, but the majority of the passengers were under the age of 30, something that caught the attention of Claudia, one of the older corruption tourists.

“What is going to really stay with me after today is all the new people here, the young people,” she says, following the tour. “I’m getting off this bus with a lot of hope for the future.”

Rick Guidice/NASA

O’Neill Cylinder interior provides a 20-mile vista. Children born here would think it totally normal to have ‘upside down’ land areas overhead.

Science fiction has long painted space settlements as inevitable, and talk of Martian brick-building and life-supporting gardens makes it feel closer than ever. But some suggest a simpler path to long-term living in space: orbital habitats near Earth.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk placed colonization under serious consideration last fall at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, when he announced his intention to bring 1 million people to Mars. But while the presentation was heavy on rocket technicalities, it left out details of how colonists will survive, much less raise children in a high-radiation, low-gravity environment millions of miles away.

NASA contractor and colonization advocate Al Globus says there’s a “radically easier” way: large, round habitats known as O’Neill cylinders that orbit nearby, spinning at just the right speed to create the sensation of normal gravity inside.

“It’s tough to do things 50 million kilometers away,” he says.

Nestled into the protective bubble of Earth’s magnetic field, such a colony could sidestep some of the biological challenges posed by Martian living to focus on the immediate technical problems of space construction and resource recycling. Plus, it would be close. Whether you need a new carbon dioxide scrubber or a quick escape, help would be hours, not months, away.

Indeed, we don't really know how livable we can make Mars. “Musk, NASA headquarters, the movies, all assume that [living in] one-third gravity will be essentially the same as [living in Earth] gravity,” says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. “But we have zero data to support that assumption. If it turns out that one-third gravity has the same physiological effects on humans as zero gravity, then Mars is not an option for long-term colonization in the way that Musk is thinking.”

Advocates expect humans to adapt as they have in the past. President of the Mars Society Robert Zubrin compares settling Mars to settling the Earth's Northern Hemisphere: “We evolved in Kenya. Winters would have killed an unshielded human in a single night.”

Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill first crunched the numbers decades ago for the design that now bears his name, and found no theoretical obstacles to building miles-long habitats free from the punishing forces that batter Earthly structures.

Globus has updated that work with plans for a more modest starting point, a third-of-a-mile-wide cylinder in Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (ELEO), where he envisions it supporting hundreds to thousands of people in a relatively low-radiation environment with Earthlike pseudo-gravity.

Bryan Versteeg/spacehabs.com

The curved interior of Kalpana One, a roughly 800 by 1000 foot cylindrical space habitat that engineers calculate could support 3,000 people.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially in space. If concerns about gravity and radiation hinder a Mars colony, material scarcity threatens the creation of orbital settlements. A proper O’Neill cylinder would need millions of tons of rock and metal.

Earth-launched materials could support early, smaller habitats, but more robust colonies would eventually require resources from the moon and nearby asteroids.

“If you want to get less dependent on Earth then you have to develop a transportation system that can get lunar materials.... This is not an impossible task. This is merely difficult,” Globus says with the characteristic optimism of a space engineer.

But schemes to mine and shuttle raw materials seem impracticable to many experts. Dr. Zubrin, for one, is skeptical. “It’s a lot easier to settle a planet than to build one,” he says.

Globus counters that Mars is a big place, and no single site will offer all the necessary materials. “Developing a transportation system on Mars is difficult too.... It’s probably easier on Mars, but on the other hand it’s also 50 million kilometers away,” he explains.

He cautions against what Dr. O’Neill originally called the ”mental hangup” of assuming that worlds are inherently easier to colonize than open space: “You have to build all the same stuff on Mars that you have to build in orbit. You need pressure vessels, you need radiation shielding (which we actually don’t need in ELEO), you need a power system, you need life support.”

Either type of settlement would be highly dependent on Earth for decades to centuries, and, for Globus, the shipping costs alone justify starting closer to home.

Astronomical costs

Neither vision would come cheap. Space agencies will help, but some economic drive is necessary for sustained colonization, and experts have settled on two candidates: entrepreneurial settlers and rich tourists.

The Mars camp favors a pioneering model, much like how Americans spread west. “I think that Mars is gonna be a great place to go,” said Musk at Guadalajara. “It will be the planet of opportunity.”

Zubrin sees Mars in a similar light, a rich but harsh environment ill-suited for vacationing. “Pioneering is for people with a stoic ethic who believe that happiness is a life where you can accomplish great deeds. It will be a real long time before space, even Earth orbit, is a place of safety and comfort.”

He predicts a Mars colony would become "a pressure cooker for invention.”

Globus, however, suggests that ticket sales could drive development. No one knows the size of the space-tourism market, but private individuals have paid tens of millions of dollars to visit the ISS, and more than 600 people have put down large deposits for spots on Virgin Galactic’s waiting list for five minutes in space.

The key to expanding that market, in Globus’s opinion, would be habitats big enough to keep even pampered tourists happy.

"Most people don’t want to live in what basically boils down to some huts connected by tunnels under [30 feet] of stuff [on Mars],” he explains, adding that it would be easier to build large structures in orbit than on Mars.

Globus sees small-scale tourism as the path to large-scale colonies, starting with orbiting hotels much like the ones Bigelow Aerospace is developing. “A hotel is not a whole lot different from a settlement. It has to be pressurized. It might want to recycle its air. It might want to rotate,” he says.

NASA's Dr. McKay points to Antarctica as precedent for tourists paying thousands to visit an inhospitable place: “Their demand and resources enable an infrastructure that enables me to do research there. I love that model. I see that model as applicable to the moon, to space, and maybe even to Mars.”

The big question

Floating cylinders and world-based colonies have at least one thing in common: Both seem highly implausible.

But big thinking demands strong justification. Musk frames the enterprise as a response to existential threats, but McKay questions the assertion that space colonies are the obvious first line of defense, mentioning arctic seed banks and massive underground bunkers as survival strategies that might take priority.  

Globus finds the existential argument convincing, but offers a second motivation: a moral responsibility to spread life beyond Earth. “No other species is even remotely in a position to settle space....  It’s our duty.”

Space settlements may be science fiction today, but  lunar landers and flying cars once were, too. Classifying a concept as such neither assures its failure nor guarantees its promise. But for now, questions and dreams abound while firm answers are few.

“Long term, we need to determine if [colonization is] possible,” says McKay. “We’re assuming that it’s possible ... but I want to emphasize that we don’t know that it’s possible.”

AP Photo

A woman works with fabric at 99Degrees Custom, in Lawrence, Mass.

If a quiet theme can be found in Washington’s debates over taxes, trade, budgets, and regulations, it is the difficulty of settling on actions that will bring back the high productivity that the United States enjoyed just 20 years ago. Productivity growth, or a rising output per worker, has slowed, as it has in much of the world, reducing living standards. What can bring it back?

The first step is for elected leaders to focus on ways to foster innovation, such as investments in education, infrastructure, and research. One model for such a singular political focus is New Zealand. In 2010, it set up a Productivity Commission that reviews government actions on their ability to boost the productivity of people, ideas, and capital.

For the world at large, the International Monetary Fund plays a similar role. In a new report, titled “Gone with the Headwinds: Global Productivity,” the IMF offers up a long list of solutions that should ignite a bipartisan consensus in Congress. With the US economy slowing down in 2017, the report is a must read for lawmakers on ideas. Two examples: better tax incentives for young tech firms and better support to help older workers retrain for jobs in new industries.

In a recent speech, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde drove home the point: “If productivity growth had followed its pre-2008 crisis trend, overall GDP [gross domestic product] in advanced economies would be about 5 percent higher today. That would be the equivalent of adding a country with an output larger than Germany to the global economy.”

Today’s economies need more than new technologies, such as robots. Innovation in the workplace also requires more certainty and direction from government – such as on taxes, trade, and regulation. “Leaning back and waiting for artificial intelligence or other technologies to trigger a productivity revival is simply not an option,” says Ms. Lagarde.

The US has long led the world in productivity growth, largely because of its flexibility and openness to new ideas, migrants, and global competition. Today’s American worker needs to work only about 17 weeks to enjoy the real income of the average worker a century ago. That progress need not slow if US leaders practice their innovation by working together on ways to raise productivity.