I posted last week At last, I dropped my electrical utility account. They sent me this bill off-sequence for a smaller amount than usual. Might it be my last electric bill ever? I don’t know how far I should extrapolate. I’m sure life will change in ways I can’t predict, maybe necessitating reconnecting to the grid. For now, at least, I’m enjoying the freedom, fun, and discovery of keeping my[…] Keep reading →

The United States has a Bill of Rights in its Constitution guaranteeing several freedoms around religion, speech, the press, bearing arms, search and seizure, speedy trials, and a few others. Imagine you woke up to headlines that for some technicality no one had noticed for over two centuries, the Bill of Rights had been improperly processed and turned out it was invalid. That is, imagine the Bill of Rights didn’t[…] Keep reading →

Consider a team sport like the Americas Cup, where technology plays a major role. The winning boats have long needed to be at the leading edge of ship design, requiring aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, materials science, and more. Today with the foils, people describe the boats as flying more than sailing. Many skills to pilot these ships didn’t exist a generation ago. The scientists and engineers who design the ships are part[…] Keep reading →

Why not think about what you’d do if you ran for President? How do you like this platform? My Six-Point Starting Plan The environment affects everyone, therefore my strategy starts: Top-down, bottom-up, everywhere, all at once, starting with you and me, here and now Great American Role Models I would lead in the style of many role models, but especially: Common interview question: What would I do if I were[…] Keep reading →

Bill McKibben wrote about economic growth yesterday in the New Yorker, asking “To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower? The degrowth movement makes a comeback.” He referred to a 2020 New Yorker piece “Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?.” The latter piece nearly exclusively looked at how economists looked at growth. Why should we listen to economists? Is it a science? Consider physics. In 1896, the renowned[…] Keep reading →

Failures of imagination and leadership in sustainability are the hallmarks of our time. They mean that when even sustainably-minded people try to imagine people with political or business authority acting for sustainability, they can’t think past how to make sustainability profitable or get votes. I’m going to lead CEOs to see themselves as humans first, CEOs second—politicians, journalists, celebrities, and so on too. Oskar Schindler didn’t save those Jews from[…] Keep reading →

You’ve read things like “Rich Countries Must Help Global South Transition to Post-Fossil-Fuel Future” with claims that “they see how we live, they know we got here by polluting, they have every right to want to live like us, and we have no right to deny them.” People commonly frame the problem as needing to help them create energy systems that are clean, leapfrogging us like a country that never[…] Keep reading →