Climate Change is real. It is happening and it is accelerating. There are many obvious indicators to see for anyone not holding a contrived political filter, those that still live in the rapidly eroding state of denial. Sea level rise can now be seen in the present, not imagined decades down the line. Entire new […]
In March in this space I wrote a column called “A Major Energy Transition Has Begun”. The key point was my forecast that: “We are at the very beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. The use of fossil fuels will continue for decades but 2015-2017 will be looked back upon as the […]
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 […]
I have often been asked how I became a futurist. A part of the answer is that, starting in my 20s, I read the three people who, in my mind, were the greatest futurists of the last third of the 20th century: Alvin Toffler, R. Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. Toffler wrote about “Future Shock” […]
[Note: This column was originally published in the Shift Age Newsletter earlier this month] We are at the very beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. The use of fossil fuels will continue for decades but 2015-2017 will be looked back upon as the beginning of the transition from growth to long slow […]
During 2015, I wrote and spoke about how significant a year it was and would prove to be. Many significant events occurred and several major trends became clear. It is these events and trends that will in part shape the world as we move into 2016. I want to leave the depressing and distracting circus […]
We are now about 130 years into the automobile era. Starting with Karl Benz’s patent in the 1880s the automobile quickly became widespread with Henry Ford’s model of mass production scaling up the market 100 years ago. Since then there have been waves of significant changes. The first stage was about mechanics and engines and […]
[Note: Much of this column was first published in issue #37 of the Shift Age Newsletter] 2015 will turn out to be the peak year of fossil fuel use. By 2020 it will be clear that the decline in consumption of fossil fuels began this year. It therefore will be the first year of flat […]
In the last column here, I looked at the transformations Elon Musk is bringing to the automotive, battery and energy businesses. In this column we look at the breakthroughs he is working on in solar energy, space exploration and Internet connectivity. One of the issues with or counter arguments about electric cars was that even […]