Seeing Through Complexity BOX SQ900
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Seeing Through Complexity BOX SQ900

Key to Canada’s growth? Recall the role of public money in developing Alberta oil

Globe and Mail

Canada faces two deep-seated, increasingly debilitating economic weaknesses: chronically low productivity growth and a lagging transition away from carbon-based energy sources. Both arise from our poor performance harnessing technological innovation.

Why so much is going wrong at the same time

Lots of things are going wrong. Does that make it a polycrisis?

Hope in the Polycrisis

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon sits down for a talk with Royal Roads University President Philip Steenkamp to explore the complex challenges facing humanity and innovative ideas about how we might solve them.

Earth’s Polycrisis Is No Mere Illusion

The backlash against the “polycrisis” neologism is well under way. But the polycrisis idea can motivate urgent scientific investigation into the architecture of global crisis interaction.

What Happens When a Cascade of Crises Collide?

Humanity faces a complex knot of seemingly distinct but entangled crises that are causing damage greater than the sum of their individual harms.

Putin isn’t bluffing about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin is forcing the West to play a dangerous game of chicken, and he’s about to throw his steering wheel out the window.

A big bet on geothermal could help prevent a climate catastrophe

Directly under our feet, there’s enough heat emanating from the planet’s core to satisfy humanity’s future zero-carbon electricity needs thousands of times over.

Two things the West must do to lower the probability that Putin will pull the nuclear trigger

This time, ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’ might not work. The Russian leader has already shown extreme irrationality in his calamitous choice to start this war.

A report on the : Limits to Growth: The World 3 computer model at 50 – what it got right and what it got wrong

Presentation for the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (CACOR)

A Warning From a Scholar of Violent Conflict That the U.S. Is Heading for a Dictatorial Takeover

Interview on the podcast “Background Briefing with Ian Masters”

States of Emergency

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship. How should Canada prepare?

Getting to Enough:
How we’ll solve the dilemma that’s destroying our world

Avoiding Mad Max and finding a path to a positive future

Climate Change and Violent Conflict: Reflections after 30 years

Presentation to a conference on Climate Change & (In)Security: Trends, Lessons, Challenges. University of Oxford; CHACR, UK Army

Canada’s thawing permafrost should be raising alarm bells in the battle against climate change

Thomas Homer-Dixon and Duane Froese | Permafrost may seem tucked away in remote northern regions. But what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.

How the United States survived an assault on its democracy – at least for now

The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol failed to make an autocrat out of Donald Trump, thanks in part to the public shields erected against his dangerous campaign of baseless election-fraud claims.

Interview with Tom Rand

Watch my video interview with Tom Rand from MaRS Impact Week (32:34)

There May Yet Be Hope

A review of Commanding Hope by the Literary Review of Canada

Pandemic Log

A running commentary on the unfolding pandemic

The world seems dire. But we must not give up on hope

To believe in the possible and to make the possible real, we must recognize that the right kind of hope can be a tool of change, and we must give our hope the muscle it requires in our present crisis.

Hope has seen better days. But Thomas Homer-Dixon has written a book for ‘those who choose to fight’

The rising risk of nuclear war. Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Vast clouds of wildfire smoke. A global pandemic. These four things seem like apples and oranges, but they share one key similarity: each signals that something is going awry in the story of human progress.

Coronavirus will change the world. It might also lead to a better future

What’s happening in response to the worldwide spread of the SARS CoV-2 virus (and COVID-19, the disease it causes) is a vivid example of a global ‘tipping event,’ in which multiple social systems flip simultaneously to a distinctly new state.

The great Canadian climate delusion

with Yonatan Strauch | Is Canada going to be the first country to break apart over the issue of climate change? That may seem like a hyperbolic question. But the fissures in our federation over climate and energy policy are now extraordinarily deep, and there’s little sign that they’ll close soon.

No . . . I did not say wind energy is ‘Idiot Power’

A poster widely circulated on the web highlights text that was purportedly written by me saying that wind power inevitably suffers an energetic deficit. The poster is fraudulent.

Alberta’s economic future in peril without shift away from fossil fuel

by Gordon Kent | Alberta needs to start shifting quickly out of the oilsands to avoid serious economic trouble as the world moves away from fossil fuels, a University of Waterloo professor says.

Author Sees Early Best-Before Date for Alberta’s Oilsands

by Maurice Smith | Alberta chose the wrong path when it doubled down on the “junk energy” contained in the oilsands in recent years, and must move fast to join the energy transition away from fossil fuels if it hopes to avoid falling off the climate change cliff.

B.C.’s green shift is a window to the world

In May’s provincial election, the Green Party won its first multiple-seat breakthrough in North America, and by a fluke of electoral arithmetic, it now holds the balance of power in the legislature. Today, B.C.’s citizens are exploring uncharted political territory of potentially huge significance to people outside the province.

Trump needs a war

Donald Trump needs a war. He needs a war to fire Robert Mueller. Special counsel Mueller oversees an aggressively expanding investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election…

Who’s the chicken in Trump’s high-stakes game?

U.S. President Donald Trump loves to play chicken – the game of chicken, that is. And while his predilection toward the game is bad enough, it also turns out that he plays it badly, and that’s truly scary.

How Western Civilization Could Collapse

by Rachel Nuwer | The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society would begin to teeter.

Crisis analysis: How much damage can Trump do? (A lot)

This structured analysis of crisis risks arising from the Trump presidency was published in 2017, but it remains relevant to a potential second Trump presidency in 2025.

How Climate Change’s Effect on Agriculture can Lead to War

by Ryan Bort | On February 12, the temperature in Magnum, Oklahoma, reached 100 degrees. It was a state record for the month of February, besting a mark that was set in 1918. The average February high in Magnum is 56.

“What I got right, and what I got wrong”

Over the past decades, I’ve made various predictions about global events and trends.
Many of have been accurate but others have not.

Predictions SQ900
Cascade Institute logo

I’m the Founder and Director of The Cascade Institute, a Canadian research centre addressing the full range of humanity’s converging environmental, economic, political, technological, and health crises. Using advanced methods for mapping and modeling complex global systems, Institute researchers identify and help implement high-leverage interventions that could rapidly shift humanity’s course towards fair and sustainable prosperity.

Recent Research

Impact 2024: How Donald Trump’s Reelection Could Amplify Global Inter-systemic Risk

October 4, 2024
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Lawrence, Megan Shipman, Luke Kemp

The report precisely assesses how a second Trump administration could supercharge global economic, geopolitical, environmental, and pandemic risks and how those risks could then combine to escalate the world’s already severe polycrisis.

Earth knots

Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement

June 18, 2023
Michael Lawrence, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Scott Janzwood, Johan Rockström, Ortwin Renn, and Jonathan F. Donges

Multiple global crises have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood.

The Roubini Cascade: Are we heading for a Greater Depression?

December 4, 2020
Michael Lawrence and Thomas Homer-Dixon

This research involves a system map of Nouriel Roubini’s argument that the world is heading into a Greater Depression.

Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis

August 28, 2015
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Brian Walker, Reinette Biggs, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Carl Folke, Eric F. Lambin, Garry D. Peterson, Johan Rockström, Marten Scheffer, Will Steffen, Max Troell

Recent global crises reveal an emerging pattern of causation that could increasingly characterize the birth and progress of future global crises. A conceptual framework identifies this pattern’s deep causes, intermediate processes, and ultimate outcomes.

The Conceptual Structure of Social Disputes: Cognitive-Affective Maps as a Tool for Conflict Analysis and Resolution

August 6, 2014
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Manjana Milkoreit, Steven Mock, Tobias Schröder, and Paul Thagard

Thomas Homer-Dixon et al. | We describe and illustrate a new method of graphically diagramming disputants’ points of view called cognitive-affective mapping (CAM).

Consider the Global Impacts of Oil Pipelines

August 6, 2014
Wendy J. Palen, Thomas D. Sisk, Maureen E. Ryan, Joseph L. Árvai, Mark Jaccard, Anne K. Salomon, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Ken P. Lertzman

Wendy Palen, Thomas Homer-Dixon, et al. | As scientists spanning diverse disciplines, we urge North American leaders to take a step back: no new oil-sands projects should move forward unless developments are consistent with national and international commitments to reducing carbon pollution.

About Thomas Homer-Dixon

I am an author, social scientist, and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute. I use complexity science to understand better the diverse threats facing humankind and how they might be addressed.

One of the best-informed and most brilliant writers on global affairs today.
The Guardian

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