Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Supply chain problems keep popping up as industries fail to recognize their vulnerabilities. A little-known and critical vulnerability for the tech industry just made itself visible in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
In the next few decades, climate change is likely to have a counterintuitive effect on the North Atlantic and northern Europe when a major ocean current which brings heat from the tropics is projected to shut down.
What’s behind the levitation of U.S. coastal real estate values even as climate change suggests a grim future for those values?
Our damage to the climate will make temperatures go up in many places, but in some places temperatures will plummet.
The critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency. The values symbolized in those now-ancient comic books continue to underwrite the social order (or do I mean disorder?) that’s moving us towards ultimate self-destruction globally.
With COP28 starting and this time hosted in one of the most intensely carbon polluting countries, it is time to reflect on the where and what of the climate movement. …We need to learn to search in ourselves for the points where false hope is keeping us from really expressing what deep down we are convinced of. In other words, we need to grow up and break the chains of self-censorship…
Amid the daily headlines about the nightmare in Gaza and the earlier ones about the war in Ukraine, that other war, the potentially ultimate one that humanity is waging on the planet itself (with the slow-motion equivalent of nuclear weapons — the burning of fossil fuels), is getting all too little attention. And yet it should be considered the equivalent, even if in slow-motion, of World War III.
The diseases overrepresented in impoverished communities – obesity, diabetes, emphysema, osteoporosis, HBP, asthma, coronary blockage, mental illness, etc. – are deeply entwined with shrinking habitats and overheated climate. We might even think of poverty and climate as a single, indivisible issue.
The critical importance of water transportation is coming into focus as lack of water cripples river and canal navigation.
Increasingly, with the never-ending burning of fossil fuels, Ground Zero is no longer a single city of any sort, but this planet itself and, whether we’ve already found a third way to destroy ourselves (and so much else) or not, there is something awesomely ominous about our urge to destroy so much with our multiplying versions of fallout.
Insurance is a cornerstone of modern industrial life. Without it much of the daily activity of society would come to a halt. Climate change is threatening the viability of insurance arrangements as it brings on ever more destructive weather.
And honestly, all of this leaves me wondering today what that “prophesy” might look like for the high school graduates of 2023 or those of my grandchildren’s generation in an even more distant future. I certainly hope for the best, but also fear the worst.
