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Deadly Optimism, Useful Pessimism
Humanity is hurtling into an era of ecosystem breakdown and social collapse. Most people will understandably respond with horror, gloom, and hostility. But these reactions will just make matters worse. What’s really needed is a realistic sense of what’s...
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Meet Our Advisors: Alnoor Ladha
As a way to introduce our new Advisors to our larger community, we’ve asked them to answer a question or two that gives us a better understanding of their background or how they approach their personal or professional lives....
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The 1970s Again?
For the United States and much of the rest of the world, the 1970s were a time of high oil prices, surging inflation, stock market swoons, political upheaval, and geopolitical tension. Add pandemic and climate change to the list,...
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The Energy/Food Crisis Is Far Worse than Most Americans Realize
Everyone who owns a gasoline-burning car has noticed that fuel prices have shot up in recent weeks. And most of us have read headlines about high energy prices driving inflation. But very few Americans have any inkling just how...
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Man on Fire
Trigger warning: This article discusses suicide, depression, and climate grief. On Earth Day 2022, 50-year-old Wynn Bruce set himself on fire in front of the United States Supreme Court, apparently motivated by the climate crisis. He died the following...
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The Failure of Global Elites
In the 1970s, global political and corporate elites had all the information they needed to put the world on a path toward long-term stability. Systems science was sufficiently advanced that a team of its practitioners organized a scenario study...
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After the Ukraine Invasion: Sobering New Global Energy-Economic-Political Terrain
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s response, are ushering the world into a new energy, economic, and political era. In broad outline, this new era will have less-globally-integrated energy markets, and less-secure supplies of fossil fuels. Since energy...
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The Forest, the Moon, and the Last Time
A stoic meditation I have been practicing is called The Last Time. The idea behind this meditation is straightforward: there will be a last time for anything you do, and because you can’t really know when that is, reflecting upon this...
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Dennis Meadows on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth
Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth. Not only did this best-selling...
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Report: Taxing the World’s Richest Would Raise US $2.52 Trillion a Year
A new analysis, “Taxing Extreme Wealth,” by the Fight Inequality Alliance, Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam, and Patriotic Millionaires found a shocking rise in global wealth among the world’s richest people despite deepening inequality during the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis,...