It wasn’t just Exxon that knew about climate change decades ago. But unlike Exxon, which not only denied it but used the foulest of propaganda tactics to confuse the public and delay progress, Shell made an accurate movie about it in 1991 to inform the public, called “Climate of Concern”.
Perhaps there is a parallel universe where Shell developed a sustainable business model, put Exxon out of business, and saved the Earth. Of course that is not the universe you and I are in right now.
BBC says Tesla’s market value is now greater than Ford’s.
At the close of trading Tesla had a market value of $49bn (£38bn), compared with Ford’s value of $46bn…
The firm delivered more than 25,000 cars in the first quarter, up 70% on the same quarter last year.
While Tesla’s sales are growing fast they are still a fraction of Ford’s, which sold almost 6.7 million vehicles in 2016.
Tesla delivered 76,000 electric cars last year.
The legacy Detroit car companies could be embracing the new technologies, but instead they are allowing themselves to be creatively destroyed. Their business model, I believe, is to keep cramming pickup trucks into developing countries until they burst at the seams. Meanwhile, Tesla and Google and Uber will pass them by and become the new face of the U.S. auto industry. Then next time Ford, GM, and Chrysler tell us they need a taxpayer bailout or the U.S. auto industry will disappear, we may not have to listen.
Here’s an idea for a skyscraper hanging from an asteroid. It’s a twist on the old space elevator idea because it doesn’t actually touch the ground. First, you have to go out, catch the asteroid, and put it in the right position in orbit. Then, you build the thing. Then, once you’re in the thing it takes you on a wild ride all over the world every 24 hours.
Today is the first time I heard of the late David Fleming, but he appears to have been a sort of new age steady state economy theorist. His seminal work is Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, which is notable for being written in a sort of encyclopedia format that can be read in any order. Here’s the Amazon description:
Lean Logic is David Fleming’s masterpiece, the product of more than thirty years’ work and a testament to the creative brilliance of one of Britain’s most important intellectuals.
A dictionary unlike any other, it leads readers through Fleming’s stimulating exploration of fields as diverse as culture, history, science, art, logic, ethics, myth, economics, and anthropology, being made up of four hundred and four engaging essay-entries covering topics such as Boredom, Community, Debt, Growth, Harmless Lunatics, Land, Lean Thinking, Nanotechnology, Play, Religion, Spirit, Trust, and Utopia.
The threads running through every entry are Fleming’s deft and original analysis of how our present market-based economy is destroying the very foundations―ecological, economic, and cultural― on which it depends, and his core focus: a compelling, grounded vision for a cohesive society that might weather the consequences. A society that provides a satisfying, culturally-rich context for lives well lived, in an economy not reliant on the impossible promise of eternal economic growth. A society worth living in. Worth fighting for. Worth contributing to.
The beauty of the dictionary format is that it allows Fleming to draw connections without detracting from his in-depth exploration of each topic. Each entry carries intriguing links to other entries, inviting the enchanted reader to break free of the imposed order of a conventional book, starting where she will and following the links in the order of her choosing. In combination with Fleming’s refreshing writing style and good-natured humor, it also creates a book perfectly suited to dipping in and out.
The decades Fleming spent honing his life’s work are evident in the lightness and mastery with which Lean Logic draws on an incredible wealth of cultural and historical learning―from Whitman to Whitefield, Dickens to Daly, Kropotkin to Kafka, Keats to Kuhn, Oakeshott to Ostrom, Jung to Jensen, Machiavelli to Mumford, Mauss to Mandelbrot, Leopold to Lakatos, Polanyi to Putnam, Nietzsche to Næss, Keynes to Kumar, Scruton to Shiva, Thoreau to Toynbee, Rabelais to Rogers, Shakespeare to Schumacher, Locke to Lovelock, Homer to Homer-Dixon―in demonstrating that many of the principles it commends have a track-record of success long pre-dating our current society.
Fleming acknowledges, with honesty, the challenges ahead, but rather than inducing despair, Lean Logic is rare in its ability to inspire optimism in the creativity and intelligence of humans to nurse our ecology back to health; to rediscover the importance of place and play, of reciprocity and resilience, and of community and culture.
I’m thinking of getting my son a globe for his fourth birthday. I’ve done a little research, which I’m going to share here.
Replogle appears to be the largest manufacturer of globes. But dig into some reviews, and they appear to be not all that well made, yet not priced any lower than other brands.
There are all kinds of globes with electronic bells and whistles out there, like this one from Oregon Scientific. In the end I decided to keep it simple and not go for one of these.
Some globes have “raised relief” for mountains, like this Advantus globe, which is cool.
Ultimately I picked this Waypoint model. Even though it doesn’t have topographic relief, I like the colors and topographic detail.
This 2012 article from the Guardian goes into some detail on the Black-Scholes equation for pricing options, which bears some responsibility for the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It was cooked up by geniuses to spread risk, but misapplied by idiots to actually create risk. What are the geniuses cooking up now for the idiots to misapply next?
The new San Francisco Green Connections Plan lays out a vision of public streets as movement corridors for both people and wildlife.
Most frightening stories:
Most hopeful stories:
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
A strain of bird flu is hitting poultry farms in Tennessee and Georgia right now, but the CDC says the risk to humans of this particular strain is low.
Standard and Poor’s is coming out with a new rating system for the green-ness of bonds.
Our proposed Green Bond Evaluation methodology looks beyond the governance and management of a bond by providing an analysis and estimate of the environmental impact of the projects or initiatives financed by the bond’s proceeds over its lifetime relative to a local baseline. This would be in addition to assessing the governance and transparency surrounding the bond. When evaluating environmental impact, the methodology would consider both climate change mitigation and adaptation projects.
Mitigation projects focus on efforts to reduce or prevent the emission of greenhouse gases, ranging from upgrades to conventional generation projects to new renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives. Adaptation projects aim to take practical steps toward reducing the exposure to and managing the impact of natural catastrophes, such as building the resilience of communities and critical infrastructure against an increased risk of extreme weather events due to climate change.
The output of the Green Bond Evaluation would include at least three scores (a Transparency score, a Governance score and a Mitigation score and/or Adaptation score, as relevant…
An interesting question is whether the idea is that investors would expect to make more on a green investment, or whether some investors would be willing to settle for less in exchange for the satisfaction of having a positive impact. Borrowers would have a financial incentive to be good if doing so meant a lower interest rate, which kind of supports the latter possibility. Exactly why the rating agency itself is motivated to do this was unclear to me. But after digging into the paper a little, it looks like governments and companies will have an incentive to show that they are complying with the Paris agreement, so that may be part of what is driving this.