A few years ago, my daughter Zoe saw me referred to as a “futurist” and quipped, “Well, I hope you adults don’t mess mine up.” Her very real concern started me on the long path to writing a book which tries to address just that: How can we “adults” not…

Life as we know it isn’t possible without electricity but fossil-fuel-generated electricity is threatening the planet’s climate and our future. Therefore, as I laid out in Part 1 of this series, the first prong of our six-pronged strategy for addressing climate change is to get almost all electricity from net-zero sources by 2050. That goal is certainly formidable. Zero-carbon sources, mostly in the form of solar power, wind power, nuclear power, and hydropower, currently account for about 37% of all electricity generation. Getting those net-zero sources close to 100% by 2050 would eliminate 27% of the current problem for carbon emissions. (The table…

Before diving into the details of the six-prong strategy for solving climate change that I laid out in Part 1 of this series, I’ll lay out a narrative of what success could look like by 2050. The goal of the following “future history” is not to predict what will happen…

Sadly, based on how world leaders are muddling towards COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference later this month in Glasgow, the most likely outcome is a continuation of the long history of insufficient action in the face of ever-stronger scientific evidence of human-driven damage and impending disaster. We can do…

You may never have heard of Mukesh Ambani. He’s the wealthiest person in Asia with a net worth just shy of $100B. He is also currently number eleven on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List. Ambani’s net worth jumped $3.7B recently just on the announcement that his company will “aggressively” pursue…

“There are decades where nothing happens; and, there are weeks where decades happen,” observed Vladimir Lenin. The recent weeks grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic certainly fall into the weeks-where-decades-happen category. What’s more, the trillions of dollars being spent on pandemic-fighting strategies might well make or break the decades to come…

When you’re fighting a fire, it’s easy to forget that the water can cause more damage than the fire itself. When you rebuild after a fire, the desire to rebuild quickly can trump the inclination to rebuild smartly. During a disaster, focusing on anything other than getting back to normal…

Commercialization will throw trillions of dollars of economic value up for grabs. There also could be huge positive or negative effects on health, transportation, pollution, congestion and resource usage, depending on how industrialization unfolds. — “Baloney” and “nonsense” captured the zeitgeist of many reactions to my early articles on the potential of Google’s self-driving car program. But, that was in 2013, when many viewed driverless cars as nothing more than a high-tech dalliance by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

There are viable approaches to save millions of lives and trillions of dollars — If you’re looking to make a meaningful dent in the universe, few opportunities loom as large as addressing the root causes of climate change. That’s the case even if you don’t believe we’re facing a climate crisis—and more so if you do.