Academic

The Great Transformation: Climate Change as Cultural Change

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A critical conversation about climate change is going on right now through the UNFCCC process; a key stage in this process will be the Copenhagen meeting at the end of this year. This conversation, to the extent that it is prescriptive, generally emphasizes technology and economics. It stresses strategies for dealing with the climate problem that involve technical aspects of, for instance, societies’ energy mix and energy efficiency. I don’t want to disparage these approaches or suggest that they shouldn’t be pursued. But, the fact remains that despite all our efforts we seem to be falling further and further behind.

Conflict in a Nonlinear World: Complex Adaptation at the Intersection of Energy, Climate, and Security

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“More and more often, solutions to complex human conflict require complex solutions—solutions involving diverse organizations such as police forces, first responders, other government departments, non-government organizations (NGO/charities) and militaries. As a result, the politics of these operations can be Byzantine, the logistics overwhelming, and the moral and ethical considerations dizzying in their implications.”

Blink. Snap. Buzz.

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Malcolm Gladwell has a good eye for a great story. And in Blink he tells one great story after another to illustrate the power of snap judgments—those virtually instantaneous and occasionally life-changing decisions guided by intuition, instinct, or “gut” feeling that we all make in life, love, and war.

Out of the Energy Box

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with S. Julio Friedmann | The prognosis for the future of climate change is indeed alarming. Scientists say plausible scenarios include terrible droughts, crop failures, and dying forests around the Mediterranean and in the United States, South America, India, China, and Africa. Sea levels are expected to rise significantly, drowning islands and possibly displacing hundreds of millions of people from coastlines, where more than a third of the world’s population lives. Ground water supplies are set to shrink, reservoirs to dry up. Wildfires and violent storms will strike more often and much harder. And much of this change is expected within the next 50 years.

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