This recent paper by Miyuki Hino (University of North Carolina) and Marshall Burke (Stanford) makes the case that US homes situated within floodplains are currently overvalued by a total of $34 billion. And that’s because the associated risks are not being properly accounted for in… Read More
I have stayed at two hotels over the last month where I did not need to interact with a human as part of the check in process. And in one of those two instances I didn’t even need to interact with a computer at the… Read More
This past fall, Goldman Sachs published an important report about “making cities resilient to climate change.” In it, they remind us that the scientific consensus is that the world has already warmed from the pre-industrial era (and will likely continue to do so) and that… Read More
I spent a good chunk of this morning talking and thinking about underground building details that most people (unless you’re in the industry) would never think to consider. This is not a criticism on most people. I mean, I don’t know how iPhones are made.… Read More
On Monday, Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, announced a plan to build a new capital city on the island of Borneo. The plan is in response to Jakarta’s formidable environmental challenges. It suffers from some of the worst air quality in the world and is struggling… Read More
Bill Gates recently spoke with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Full video, here. The bit that got a lot of attention is his admission that Microsoft should have dominated in mobile (in lieu of Android). The core competencies were all there… Read More
MIT’s Self Assembly Lab and Invena (which is an organization based out of the Maldives) are trying to invent a system of underwater devices that naturally harness wave energy to restore and/or create new beaches, sandbars, and islands. The hope is that this line of… Read More
Last year, Jesse Keenan, Thomas Hill, and Anurag Gumber of Harvard University, published a research paper called, Climate gentrification: from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida. What they were trying to uncover was a possible relationship between climate change and single-family home pricing in… Read More
In 2015, Marshall Burke, Sol Hsiang, and Ted Miguel published a paper in Nature that looked at the relationship between temperature (climate) and economic output. They examined the historical impact of temperature changes (1960-2010) on 166 countries and then used this data to try and predict… Read More
What is happening in California right now is both sad and scary. I woke up to these photos in the New York Times. So I spent the morning reading up on wildfires and what causes them. I am sure many of you are thinking: Is climate… Read More
