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Weirdly, while spending many pages detailing how the Energy Information Agency (EIA) failed to predict accurately fossil fuel trends, the report’s authors failed to highlight that the real-world performance of renewable energy (notably wind and solar) has greatly outperformed baseline forecasts. With the President’s call for more solar energy, highlighting that renewables have been doing so well (in price reductions and speed of market penetration) would seem something strongly support of Administration objectives rather than for something to be ignored in a 42-page White House report.

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An area of Alaska larger than Chicago is in flames, 1000s of people are evacuated, with 100s of homes threatened. What are we to make of this fire? After all, fires occur in nature and Alaska has had its share in the past. As Larry Lazar put it in an email to me, While the […]

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India is particularly screwed in agriculture. Either we’re going to innovate or starve to death. Innovation is the only way to maintain Indian food security. With this, Mark Kahn from the venture capital firm Omnivore Partners caught my attention as he gave a presentation at the Chicago Council on Global Affair’s annual global food security conference, […]

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Energy poverty is one of the world’s greatest challenges. There are billions of people without access to reliable and reasonably priced electricity. In India, alone, there are some 400 million people in energy poverty.  The new Indian government has set a major initiative to change this situation radically and rapidly: “to harness solar power to […]

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Each spring, millions of Americans at 1,000s of High Schools and Universities sit through commencement speeches. While many are filled with overused cliches and serve only as a speed bump en route post graduation parties, others represent mind-changing moments that “are truly worth remembering, or so well-said that they stick in the memory longer than […]

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Searching for the silver lining … perhaps Global Warming will boost drug company stock prices. Searching for the silver lining … perhaps Global Warming will boost drug company stock prices.  That is one reasonable conclusion from the National Climate Assessment released earlier today. In short, the NCA lays out that climate is creating worsened conditions […]

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At this time, US television screens are graced with several blockbuster science programs.  Showtime’s The Years of Living Dangerously provides serious and substantive looks at climate change. With Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, NewsCorp is giving thinking people a substantive reason to tune in every Sunday evening. “Cosmos aims to be a primer on the […]

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Around the planet, difficult cultural norms exist for writing.  Avoidance of direct discussion and attribution seem to be the norm for many nations.  Over recent decades, the U.S. business world has adopted an emphasis on using more direct language with the active voice.  When it comes to passive voices, a standard recommendation: Use the passive […]

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