Pushing on a String
This effort can be divided into two main fronts: Decentralized Utility and Decentralized Ownership.
Dror Poleg • Crypto and the Conservation of Centralization
Claims that everything connects skate over trade-offs and tensions, like those between the speed of progress towards net zero and effects on social justice. Such views can also encourage a hermetically sealed network of ideas, incapable of engaging with enemies or learning from them, since if these ideas really are so pure and harmonious, they will
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable
... See moreVaclav Smil • How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
Every plan for shrinking production of greenhouse gases (other than directly reducing consumption) involves the construction of vast amounts of new infrastructure for generating and distributing energy, as well as manufacturing huge quantities of “sustainable” products to consume the energy thus produced—and all that new construction and manufactur
... See moreDavid Owen • The Conundrum
tend to fragment agencies by problem, rather like mailbox pigeonholes, but the long emergency will require managing complex systems over long time periods.