A Dutch Architect’s Vision of Cities That Float on Water
March 27th, 2024
Courtesy of The New Yorker, a look at if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land? In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the construction of Baroque […]
Read more »High Heat Insurance
March 25th, 2024
Via Fast Company, an article on one start-up company’s efforts to insure against extreme weather: Legislators in Florida recently made headlines by proposing a ban on heat-related protections for workers—including breaks to hydrate and get out of the sun. While the merits of that bill are questionable, especially as it potentially puts millions of outdoor workers in […]
Read more »Getting Off Fossil Fuels Is Hard, But This City Is Doing It – Building by Building
March 23rd, 2024
Via NPR, a feature on one city’s efforts to break its reliance on fossil fuels: ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Ithaca, N.Y., is learning that getting off fossil fuels is really hard. The U.S. aims to zero out climate warming greenhouse gases by the year 2050, but Ithaca wants to do that 20 years ahead of the […]
Read more »Want to Fight Climate Change? Fix Housing
March 22nd, 2024
Via Walrus, a look at the role housing can change in the climate fight: TWO OF THE most acute crises facing Canadians are housing and climate change. These are usually treated as separate issues, to be raised in different conversations. That’s a mistake. Climate and housing are vitally connected, and acknowledging this turns a pair […]
Read more »What Would Happen if Every American Got a Heat Pump
March 21st, 2024
Via Wired, a report on the projected impact of widespread adoption of heat pumps in the U.S.: One of the most powerful weapons you can wield to fight climate change is … an appliance. A heat pump is a fully electric device that transfers warmth from outdoor air into a building, then reverses in the summer to […]
Read more »The Climate Solution Beneath Your Feet
March 21st, 2024
Via MIT Technology Review, a look at how building materials can have outsize climate impacts, and cleaning them up will require major innovation: I’ve come across some pretty wild technologies aimed at fighting climate change. Hydrogen-powered planes, underwater mining robots, and nuclear fusion reactors—each could play a role in cutting down on greenhouse-gas emissions. But there are […]
Read more »'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.
'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.
It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.