The electrified future is arriving quickly, and putting down roots. Electric vehicle technology—including better batteries and faster charging, but also on-board information technology making both energy management and vehicle management smarter and safer—is rapidly advancing. EV infrastructure is spreading. COVID recovery funds will likely mobilize the largest ever new round of investment in electrified transport. [...]
Energy Must Be Adaptive, Agile, Accessible & Pollution-Free
The future of energy is being shaped by many converging forces, among them: Fast-moving multifaceted innovation; The geophysical and human health need for clean energy; Sustained and expanding growth-potential for low-carbon investments; Urban planning, energy-efficient building, and utility reform; Financial innovation, including integration of Earth science insights; The COVID-19 pandemic disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic emergency [...]
71% Increase in Climate-Smart Finance Commitments in 2019
The biggest growth opportunity in finance is climate-aligned investment and innovation. In 2018, all major asset classes struggled to earn. Cash was the asset class that expanded the most, signaling a pull-back from new investment and a wait-and-see attitude. In 2019, trade tensions spurred worries of a global economic slowdown that could lead to recession. [...]
Resilient Prosperity Requires Interactive Risk Tracking
Tracking of interacting compounding risks shows higher value of financing external returns. Resilience is the ability to weather and emerge from shock events. Resilience intelligence is the complex work of understanding whether we are positioned to do so. Structured, evolving guidance, rooted in Earth systems science, is critical for achieving reliable ongoing operational resilience. The [...]
2020 Vision: Choose Freedom
How much do we value human freedom? For thousands of years people of all variety of experience and influence have debated whether free will exists and which universe would be more full of virtue and good fortune—one that is fated or one that is free. Today, technology is flooding our experience with hard-to-trace information and [...]
COP25 — The Hard Work of Redefining Prosperity
The COP25 UN climate negotiations, which concluded on Sunday in Madrid, were the longest in the history of the process. This makes sense, because some of the most logistically complicated elements of a cooperative plan to upgrade economic activity everywhere were on the table. We see the COP25 as having generated important breakthroughs, though also [...]
Paris Agreement withdrawal is senseless & wasteful
The Paris Agreement establishes a foundation for responsible collaboration among nations, to achieve the speed and scale of innovation needed to avoid climate disaster. This is no small thing: Before 2015, no such detailed planet-wide collaborative process had ever been conceived, much less agreed. Then 193 nations agreed to pursue the Sustainable Development Goals and [...]
Knowledge Economy: Outmaneuvering Disinformation & Injustice
The widespread ongoing assault on open access to truth is spreading injustice and obstructing greatly needed innovation. For 240 years, one after another society acted in some way to break free from the deep injustice of the feudal system, in which some people owned others and human rights were more an ideal than a reality. [...]
