Archive for 'Environment & Energy'
Future of Nuclear Power II
When in my last blog I noted the very early reports of an initial explosion at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, I also suggested this would be a problem for the large-scale nuclear power plant industry. An obvious point. What we did not know on Saturday was that two or three more plants within [...]
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Future of Nuclear Power
This video of apparent explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant will not be good news for the large-scale nuclear energy industry.
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Carbon Nation a Great Film – Go See It.
Film director and producer Peter Byck watched An Inconvenient Truth some years ago and thought, “If that is the problem, what is the answer?” Thus began an odyssey now in its forth year to conceive, produce and now to show the new blockbuster documentary, Carbon Nation. The film opens today in San Francisco. Go see [...]
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Outlook 2011 Video
Here is our new video summarizing my Outlook 2011. I wrote the outlook at the beginning of the year and we posted the original on January 3. The written version with more detail, links to resources and a recap of how accurate our Outlook 2010 was can be found in our blog archives. After multiple [...]
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Future of Food: The Challenge of Food Security
Here is a brief video clip from my keynote speech to Buhler in 2010, focusing on the Challenge of Food Security. As I suggest in the video, the upcoming challenge of food security is the overwhelming amount of food we need to produce to feed the quickly growing world population. In August, when the speech [...]
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World Oil Prices Heating Up
Recent months brought a sense of security about future oil supplies and prices. Some large new oil discoveries, combined with improved production in Iraq and the Gulf states, had caused many observers to relax. Some even went so far as to claim that worries about oil were over, for the long-term future. Egypt, Tunisia and [...]
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Predictive modeling, future weather, and a forecast of Pirates
I loved this story today in the Seattle Times newspaper, about a presentation to a conference of 3500 scientists in the American Meteorological Society, by Jim Hansen. Hansen is an applied mathematician at the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California. Mr. Hansen’s weather forecast: A Chance of Pirates. Taking advantage of advances in computing power [...]
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Transportation: Vision 2050
On January 25, 2011 President Barak Obama will deliver the 2011 “State of the Union” address to the U.S. Congress and the nation. The text of the speech has not yet been released, but reports are that among other things the President will call for are national investments to keep the United States competitive in [...]
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Outlook 2011
Before we offer forecasts for 2011, let’s review how we did with Outlook 2010 Aging 2010 was indeed the final year of preparation for the age wave, but we made only modest progress in getting ready. The U.S. Health Care bill was the most positive step, as it included some needed adjustments to Medicare, and [...]
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Striking a Balance: The Yin and Yang of Futuring
This is a guest blog by Brenda Cooper. As long as I’ve been alive, humanity has obsessed over its demise – at its own hands. In second grade, stern teachers sent me crawling under desks to avoid nuclear war (talk about a culture of fear – today has nothing on the sixties). Now we are [...]
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