Some sobering insights TL;DR: Last month at New York Climate Week I leaned heavily into sessions from financial and consulting organizations. In the process, I got a lot of insights into macroeconomic trends, power (in every sense of the word), and of course, AI. I've tried to hit all of these topics week by week, because hitting all at once could easily be the length of a new book. (If you need a brief recap of the strange way that Climate Week operates, you can find that in a previous...
8 days ago • 5 min read
Absolute power TL;DR: Last month at New York Climate Week I leaned heavily into sessions from financial and consulting organizations. In the process, I got a lot of insights into macroeconomic trends, power (in every sense of the word), and of course, AI. I'm going to cover each of these in the coming weeks, because hitting all at once could easily be the length of a new book. (If you need a brief recap of the strange way that Climate Week operates, you can find that in the newsletter from 26...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Everything was about AI TL;DR: Last week at New York Climate Week I leaned heavily into sessions from financial and consulting organizations. In the process, I got a lot of insights into macroeconomic trends, power (in every sense of the word), and of course, AI. I'm going to cover each of these in the coming weeks, because hitting all at once could easily be the length of a new book. (If you need a brief recap of the strange way that Climate Week operates, you can find that in last week's...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Go where the puck is going I'm pre-writing this newsletter before the whirlwind of Climate Week in New York City. It's difficult to explain the sheer chaos of Climate Week if you haven't been there. I'm going to try to explain. When you think of a conference, you think of a single event held at a convention center or hotel. The longest walk you have is from Ballroom A to Ballroom E. This isn't that. Climate Week is a completely decentralized collection of events held at various venues all...
29 days ago • 3 min read
How do we communicate? Next Tuesday, 16 September, I'll be discussing sustainable content with Tim Frick and Jenny Morgan in a free Zoom webinar: Climate Conundrums: Bridging the Gap Between Cancel Culture and Sustainable Communications. Jenny has written a book that's fundamentally about how we communicate to overcome fear, division, and the general frustration that comes with discussing climate change. And of course, you're aware that I focus on how to make our actual content more...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
I have a lot of thoughts this week... We recently took a much-needed family vacation to a place we hadn't visited in over a decade. On the surface, everything looked the same and very familiar. We went out in our rented kayaks and stand-up paddle boards for a relaxing exploration of the turquoise bay. I was excited to see the colorful fish and vibrant coral that I remembered from before. What I found was white coral and just a handful of fish. I know that coral bleaching is a phenomenon...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Climate Week and power As usual, I'm planning to go to Climate Week NYC in September. The New York Climate Week event is the most interesting for me, because it's directly plugged into Wall Street and gives a real understanding of what's being funded. This year's overarching theme is "Power On." And that, in my opinion, is the problem. We're funding energy so we can increase our power consumption. Even prior to the AI surge, we as a planet were already consuming double the energy that we were...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Bizarre questions and powerful leverage I live in a new area, and I'm frequently meeting new people. This means that I have to spend a not-insignificant amount of time explaining my professional interests to random strangers. Some people are curious. Some are dismissive. But one of the strangest comments I've gotten happened last week, and was clearly on the dismissive end of the spectrum. "What are you, some kind of futurist?" (For context, this was said in a Violet Beauregard voice that...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Easy things to do On these hot and humid days where they're trying to get us to skip the air conditioning to save energy, nobody has the energy to undertake Big Things. So here are some incredibly lazy ways to live more sustainably this summer with minimal effort or physical discomfort. Don't multitask. I think we've all had those evenings where we had a streaming movie playing on the TV in the background while sending emails on our computer and texting friends by phone. We don't need to be...
4 months ago • 3 min read