Emission Impossible: One Couple’s Quest To Ditch Natural Gas
March 31st, 2024
Via Grist, a look at what happened when two journalists decided to decarbonize their home: My wife and I live in a green, two-story colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac in Burlington, Vermont. Each spring, the front of our home is lined with lilacs, crocuses, and peonies. The backyard is thick with towering black […]
Read more »The Next Heat Pump Frontier? NYC Apartment Windows
March 30th, 2024
Via Wired, a look at how new heat pumps easily fit over window sills, meaning they could replace clunky apartment air-conditioning units: COURTESY OF GRADIENT Future generations will marvel at the ridiculous ways we’ve been keeping warm. With a furnace, you’re inefficiently burning toxic, planet-warming gas. In a big city like New York, your building […]
Read more »He’s Got a Plan for Cities That Flood: Stop Fighting the Water
March 29th, 2024
Courtesy of the New York Times, an article on one Chinese landscape architect in China who has a surprising strategy to help manage surges of water from storms supercharged by climate change: Cities around the world face a daunting challenge in the era of climate change: Supercharged rainstorms are turning streets into rivers, flooding subway […]
Read more »The ‘Clean Cement’ Projects Getting $1.5B In Biden Admin Funds
March 27th, 2024
Via Canary Media, a report on the ?‘clean cement’ projects – from carbon capture to alternative cement chemistries – that the U.S. is funding to slash the enormous CO2 footprint of the cement industry: Cement-making accounts for roughly 8 percent of global human-caused carbon emissions — an enormous climate footprint that will take nothing short of a full transformation to curb. […]
Read more »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 »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 »'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.