Resources

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

October 4, 2024
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Emily Smejkal, and Peter Massie

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.

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.

Why so much is going wrong at the same time

October 18, 2023

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

Hope in the Polycrisis

June 12, 2023
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Philip Steenkamp

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

February 18, 2023
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Lawrence, and Scott Janzwood

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.

When Crises Collide image from New York Times

What Happens When a Cascade of Crises Collide?

November 13, 2022
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström

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 during a meeting in Sochi, Russia, on Sept. 26. GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Putin isn’t bluffing about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine

September 26, 2022

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

May 27, 2022

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.

Putin at end of table

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

March 10, 2022

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

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