Last week the British Government released the Stern Report on Global Warming. As those of you who read about it know, the report suggested that, without immediate and aggressive spending, global warming will reduce worldwide productivity on the scale of the Great Depression. The report, commissioned by the British government is the most comprehensive study […]
Since the oil embargo of 1974, there has always been news coverage of OPEC meetings. Usually it is about raising prices or cutting production. These stories are usually accompanied by pictures of smiling or laughing men. Until recently these articles usually caused a negative reaction in me, as they represented the fact that a small […]
The dramatic increase in gasoline prices over the summer combined with the perception that oil revenues fund terrorism has created a new perception on the need for the U.S. to import oil. It is now becoming clear to a growing number of Americans that dependency on foreign oil compromises our security. In a recent poll […]
A few days ago I was flying back from a vacation in Austria. On the first leg of the journey home, from Vienna to London, I flew on British Airways and, walking on to the plane picked up a couple of British Sunday Newspapers. When reading “The Sunday Telegraphâ€, evidently a respected paper, I was […]
Sergey Brin and Larry Page are of course the founders of Google. That fact, in and of itself would be enough to respect them and praise them. Simply based on influence, Google has become practically oracular in today’s world. Not since the oracle of Delphi stood astride the rift in the ground has something had […]
In the last half of the twentieth century many of the major social, political and cultural trends in the United States started in California. The worship of the car and the surrounding car culture, the glorification of suburbia via sitcoms, surfing, music, the drug and counter-culture, free speech and student protest, progressive public higher education, […]
As a futurist I spend a lot of time looking for patterns — pattern recognition — and forces that may develop into trends. This is just the way I look at the world, trying to connect the dots into patterns and directions that suggest the future. However, in some cases it doesn’t take a futurist […]
On a recent trip to Europe I was reminded of the fact that Europeans are so much more conservation oriented and energy efficient than Americans. The lights in hotel hallways are off until you walk by the sensor or push a button; they go on for two minutes and then go off again. Motion sensors […]
In this space I have been clear about where the price of gasoline is going and, more importantly, what Americans and all global citizens need to do regarding energy. The next twenty years are a critical time, a time of potentially great peril unless we have visionary leadership and full scientific and entrepreneurial mobilization toward […]
Back in April, I took a futuristic look back as the price of gasoline from the vantage point of April 2009. The point was to suggest how the price of a gallon of gas got to $7.33. In that post, I wrote: “July 2006 There was general outrage at the pump and on the airwaves, […]