A friend sent me this piece predicting a spike in worldwide political violence in the 2020s. Craig: I don’t put any credence in this at all, for a few reasons, primarily the so-called Black Swan effect, i.e., we tend to …
The Black Swan Effect: Why Predictions of the Future Are Hard to Make Read More »
Life is full of coincidences. On the way back from dropping my daughter off at school this morning, I heard a piece on NPR on Black Swan technology (see press release linked) which is based on a unique “optical rectification” process …
A commenter writes about the prospect of Trump’s being reelected. “Come 2020, most Americans will judge this administration by a simple yardstick, ‘am I better off in 2020 than I was in 2016’? As long the answer is ‘Yes’, the President …
Senior energy analyst Glenn Doty is highly critical of this piece, which provides an ostensible roadmap to 100% renewable energy; his comments are here. My response: First, let’s acknowledge that there are optimistic people whose analyses are more rigorous.
A client asked me to read this report from mega-consulting form McKinsey, concerning pathways by which the four top CO2-emitting commodity-producing industries (ammonia, cement, ethylene and steel) can move to a low-carbon future. Here are a few comments:
I just ran across some predictions for the stock market in the year 2030, which made me think about the so-called futurists (those who get paid to predict the future) and what they must be wrestling with.
I wrote a post recently in which I mentioned the Black Swan effect, i.e., the tendency of human beings to underestimate the importance and frequency of unforeseeable events in the future. This concept, popularized by Nassim Taleb in his 2007 …
We All Wield Tremendous Power to Restore Environmental Justice Read More »
Pessimistic articles on climate change like this one from yesterday’s New York Times always get me thinking: what can we be doing to cut back on fossil fuel emissions? Obviously this is a tough problem in a number of ways, principally …
I’m writing this post from my annual visit to the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Energy Efficiency Summit. As I mentioned, the focus this year is on materials science, and this raises some interesting questions; for instance, if renewable energy …
Does the Earth’s Crust Contain Enough Stuff to Enable Renewable Energy Dominance? Read More »
Here’s an article from Forbes.com written by my colleague Tom Konrad on Chaos Theory as it applies to the analysis of both the stock market and climate change. This subject has been at the core of Tom’s life’s work, starting …
Chaos Theory and Understanding Global Climate Change Read More »
