Seeing Through Complexity

Thomas Homer-Dixon warns that as “reconfigurer-in-chief,” Donald Trump will be, in philosopher Georg Hegel’s terms, a world-historical figure.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Avoiding Mad Max and finding a path to a positive future

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

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.

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.

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

A review of Commanding Hope by the Literary Review of Canada

A running commentary on the unfolding pandemic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.