Many of you have probably heard of the concept of a "digital twin." Put simply, it is a digital representation of a physical thing. This could be a thing that already exists or, in the case of a new building, it could be a thing that you're about to make exist.
But there's no reason to stop at the scale of a building. Right now, there are groups working on modeling entire cities. Sadly, in Ukraine, it is being done to document important buildings that could get destroyed. But in other places, it is being done in order to create a new kind of urban testing environment (via FT):
“In the city, you don’t have a development environment; you only have one city. The laboratory is the place where the planners go to test. So test in a digital twin and then develop or implant in the city. That’s going to be the value.”
The thinking is that if you combine a digital twin with good real-time urban data and AI, then you might actually be able to start testing new city building initiatives. For instance, maybe you could ask it: What would happen if we added a traffic lane, here? Would it actually help congestion or would it induce new demand?
It's hard to model this kind of stuff today, which is one of the reasons why there's usually fierce debate about seemingly everything. But if we had accurate models that could tell us something close to reality, that feels like it would be a game changer for city builders.
At the beginning of this year, Globizen announced a new collection of city t-shirts. They have been very popular and we only have a few left from our original batch (which included some of the greatest places in the world: Toronto, Paris, and Park City). But we recently added a new city: Kyiv. This is obviously a really important one, and 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this shirt are going be used to support Ukraine. The plan is to allocate 50% to the Toronto Ukrainian Foundation, which has been helping displaced Ukrainians settle in Canada, and the balance to Ukraine directly (via cryptocurrencies).
If this sounds good to you, click here.
At the beginning of this year, I predicted that we would see the price of carbon continue to rise, and in particular the price of EU carbon permits. Well the year is still young but so far the opposite has been happening. Back in January, the price of EU carbon permits were hovering around €80 per tonne. Since Russia bullied its way into Ukraine at the end of February, this market has corrected and now hovers around €66 per tonne. Generally carbon prices tend to increase alongside energy prices, but the opposite dynamic is happening right now because of all of this geopolitical uncertainty. But over the long-term, I don't believe that this will remain true. So this feels like possible mispricing to me. Climate change may be a relatively less important issue in Europe right now, but it's not going away.
Chart: Trading Economics
