NPR’s Planet Money takes on the Discount Rate, and attempts to explain how it fundamentally changes our valuation of the future. At a 7% discount rate (the OMB’s suggested discount rate), we could put away $0.20 today and have $100,000,000,000,000 (that’s $100 trillion) with which to address the costs of climate change in 500 years. Of course, that won’t matter if we’ve ended civilization in the meantime. Riiight.
How top executives lived in 1955
An archival post from Fortune Magazine, looking at how top executives lived in 1955. Much of it is juxtaposed with wistful memories of the Gilded Age 25 years earlier, before the war, at the beginning of the Depression. It’s a bizarrely fascinating portrait, and makes it clear that today’s world is far similar to 1929 than 1955.
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
Bill McKibben looks at Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math via three numbers. The problem at hand: if we want to limit warming to 2°C, we can only (globally) put about 565 more gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Unfortunately the fossil fuel industry already has about 2800 gigatons worth of reserves on their balance sheets. If we are to avoid profound alteration of the climate, all those reserves will have to be written off and taken as a loss. This will, of course, bankrupt the entire industry. That’s the goal. It’s them, or the atmosphere.
The wet side of Greenland
The wet side of Greenland. Apparently almost the entire Greenland ice sheet, including the summit, are experiencing above-freezing temperatures this year, with ice sheet albedos at an all time low, leading to a dramatic increase in meltwater flow, doubling previous flow records in some rivers. Yikes!
Brandalism artwork
A rash of billboard liberations in the UK, partly protesting the absurdly tight brand control rules surrounding the 2012 Olympics.
The Next Wave of Urban Growth
Where the Next Wave of Urban Growth Will Come From, the Harvard Business Review looks at a study from McKinsey, detailing the economic centrality of cities, vs. national economies. Large cities and modest countries are now of the same scale, and cities are growing much much faster, economically. If you’re going where the market is, most likely, it’s in a bunch of towns you’ve never heard of, each with a population of several million. Mad change.
When the River is Client
Design Explorations of the Lower Colorado River, a landscape architecture course taught by a friend of mine at Cal Poly, in which the Colorado River is taken to be the primary client, and human needs are assumed to be real, but secondary. All we have left is gardening. We might as well do a good job of it!
Discounting Fuels
It’s often been said that “time is money,” and it turns out to be more than an aphorism.
I’m going to try and tell you a story about discounting, which is one of the ways that we convert between time and money. The story has broad implications for the energy investments we choose. It’s not entirely straightforward, and if it’s going to make sense there are some background pieces you’re going to need. The background is important because the ending depends not only on understanding what is being done, but why. This story happens to be about Xcel Energy and Colorado, but the same thing happens in other places, with other companies, and in other contexts too.
To greens my argument may seem circumspect. I’m not going to challenge the doctrine of Everlasting Economic Growth. I’m not going to look at the large externalized costs of burning fossil fuels. I’m not going to argue against the monopoly electrical utility model. Those are important discussions to have — they’re just not the one I’m having here. What I’m trying to do is show that a minor change in the way we calculate the cost of future energy can drastically alter what kind of power we decide to invest in for the next century, even if we only look at the decision in selfish financial terms.
To the finance geeks among you, much of the background will be familiar, but the situation may seem strange unless you’re familiar with how regulated monopolies work. I haven’t been able to find anyone familiar with energy finance who thinks what we’re currently doing makes sense, but if you’ve got a thoughtful rebuttal, I’m genuinely interested to hear it.
The Diverging Diamond
Strong Towns takes on The Diverging Diamond and suburban traffic engineers everywhere. It’s nice to see someone on the conservative end of the spectrum also arguing passionately for livable density and good urban spaces. He comes to it from an economic point of view — we don’t have anywhere near the pile of cash required to maintain the infrastructure we’ve built (and we never will, because it’s expensive and does not come close to paying for itself in terms of economic benefits) so we need to let it crumble or actively remove it, and go back to a network of roads connecting places, which are filled with streets — networks that facilitate local activity, especially economic activity, and which are cheaper to maintain as well. And better for pedestrians, and kids, and biking, and sidewalk cafes too.
He’s got a good TEDx talk too, up here:
Heat Waves and Climate Change
A short literature review on the connection between the present fires and heat, and climate change. No individual local weather event can be reliably pinned to climate change, but the probability of a winter and spring like the ones we’ve had in 2012 without climate change are very low. We are living in a different world now, and we don’t know how it’s going to work.