Continuations

“Infinite growth in a finite world is an impossibility” goes a popular quote. It is usually rolled out to illustrate that sustainability requires humanity to impose limits. Sometimes people then point to a specific element that they argue we will run out of in relatively short order, for instance phosphorus. I believe that this view is fundamentally wrong and ultimately dangerous. Instead, I propose a different motto “A finite world requires infinite growth.” To explain my disagreement let me...

In the startup world we sometimes talk about the difference between being a peacetime CEO and a wartime CEO (cf this famous essay by Ben Horowitz). While some people may be turned off by this martial metaphor, it is profoundly relevant to the government’s failure to properly deal with the COVID crisis. We must take a close look at this, if we want to stand a real chance of fighting the climate crisis, which is substantially more difficult to address. I am writing this in late in 2021, essenti...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced how think about weather using the concepts we have developed in this series. We saw that our improved data collection and ability to process more complicated weather models has given us significantly improved predictions. We also learned that because of the chaotic nature of weather, despite our massive progress on short term forecasts we still do quite poorly for forecasts that go out further than a week. Now a key question that we asked throughout thi...

Yesterday I wrote about the depressing lack of engineers and scientists in government. Part of my point was that more than ever we are facing problems caused by and solvable with science and engineering. A sampling of stories from yesterday / this morning is the perfect illustration. The New York Times provided an interesting juxtaposition. One front page story was about the De Blasio administration looking at Sweden as a model for reducing traffic accidents in New York City. The other was ab...

I have long been writing about climate change on Continuations. Mostly it has been about more evidence with the occasional call to action. Today is such a call if you live in London: Our portfolio companies AMEE and Twilio together with IBM, CapGemini and others are organizing an Environmental Data Hack Weekend this coming weekend. Climate change is showing up in data everywhere. But many of the data sets are dispersed and not easily accessible. The Environmental Data Exchange was built by Di...

I am thrilled that the Climate March in New York City yesterday had such a huge turnout. It felt like the beginning of an important movement to finally take more decisive action. The organizers estimate that more than 300,000 people attended. Marching it certainly felt full of energy and representative of a broad cross section of society On my way to the march I ran across a WSJ op-ed piece on how little we still know about how the climate works (via this tweet). That reminded me to write abo...

The topic of climate change combines many of my scientific and philosophical interests. In my draft book World After Capital I describe how knowledge is central to human affairs in that it allows us to solve problems. Many of the problems that we have had to solve over the years were of our own making. For instance, a lot of human diseases arose because we started living in proximity to animals and it was only the progress in medical knowledge that let us overcome those. The latest and bigges...

The progress with solar technology has been impressive and is well summarized in the following chart which shows the dramatic decline in the price per wattWhenever someone shows a chart like this there will quickly be people who decry subsidies for solar. The answer of course is that at this point instead of subsidizing solar we should be taxing carbon, which would make solar instantly the preferred technology for homes everywhere. In my personal portfolio (outside of USV) I am very long sola...

I have written a fair bit about climate change here on Continuations. It seems that in the US we have about a weeks worth of debate after a big storm such as Sandy and then it quickly dies down. So this year given the so far relatively uneventful hurricane season the debate seems entirely absent. That is tragic because none of the fundamentals have changed and we are seeing the devastating results now in the Philippines. Super typhoon Haiyan has apparently killed at least 10,000 people there ...

I have written a fair bit about climate change here at Continuations over the last few years. It is one of those slowly creeping threats that democracy is woefully slow and bad at addressing. So I am excited to see that we are finally getting a hopefully massive rally to spur politicians into action. If you live in or near New York and care about this issue (which should be everyone) come to the People’s Climate March this Sunday! March starts at 11.30am between 65th and 86th on Central Park ...