For four days the entire electrical usage of a European country came from renewable energy sources. More on that in a few paragraphs. The thoughts we think and the reality we live in shapes what we think is possible. Time after time barriers are broken that were thought to be impossible. A great example is […]
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew” – Marshall McLuhan In my prior column, I wrote about R. Buckminster’s forecast from the late 1960s that. in several decades, humanity would reach a fork in the road, utopia or oblivion. In the two years that it took to research and write “This […]
In two recent columns, here and here, I wrote about two of the three consumer economic trends that are and will dramatically change consumer and buyer behavior well into the 2020s. In this column I address the third major consumer economic trend, moving from an ownership to a rental society. This trend as with the […]
In a recent column I listed the Five Contexts of the Shift Age. As stated there, while the true cliché of the Information Age was “content is king” the true cliché of the Shift Age is “context is king”. We live in an increasingly contextual world. The context in which we receive or consume information […]
Earth Day is coming. April 22 to be exact. How I know is my email inbox. Every day for the past few weeks I get pitches to write about some company’s new eco product. The words LEED certified, Eco, Green, Recycled, Renewable have become an endless blur in the subject line of in-bound emails. This […]
The Great Recession of 2008-2010/11 is going to be a very tough time economically. As I wrote in my Forecast for 2009, this economic collapse brings four words to mind. The first word is contraction, which is the standard way to view a recession. Economic activity contracts and we are in a recession, economic expansion […]
It was two years ago that I first wrote about ocean dead zones. These are areas of the ocean that, due to a lack of oxygen, no longer sustain any life. While dead zones can happen naturally, they usually are caused by the results of human activity. A primary cause is nitrogen-rich nutrients from agricultural […]
The two trend lines are the decline in gasoline consumption and the decline in miles driven. These two are obviously connected and are obviously caused by the price of oil. For the first time in close to 30 years, we have something to be proud of when it comes to our driving behavior. Two different […]
Well, it finally has happened. The price of gasoline has increased enough to cause pain to Americans so that they are changing behavior. The approach of $4 a gallon gasoline has, in the last month produced two positive results. First, after gasoline consumption increased 1.4% in March over the same month last year, it declined […]
Two years ago in this blog, I wrote a futuristic column from April 20, 2009. The title of the column was “Remember When Gas Was Cheap?†At that time I predicted that the price of oil in early 2008 would reach $125 and that in April 2009 it would be $137. In January of 2007 […]