Publications

Water Politics


Glen Canyon Dam: Facing Dead Pool

Via The Land Desk, a look at the crisis facing Glen Canyon Dam: In 1998, when I was in fourth grade, I joined a class field trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. But when we got to Cortez, the road was barricaded. Hours earlier, three men had stolen a water-tanker truck and killed […]

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Wildcats & Black Sheep


Oracle to Invest $6.5 Billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure in Malaysia

Via Morningstar, a report on Oracle’s Malaysian investment plans: Oracle Corp. plans to invest more than $6.5 billion to establish a public cloud region in Malaysia, aiming to meet the country’s growing demand for artificial intelligence and cloud services. The investment will allow Malaysian businesses to leverage AI infrastructure and services, and migrate mission-critical workloads […]

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An Unpredictable America Looks More And More Like An Emerging Market

Courtesy of The Financial Times, commentary examining how an unpredictable America looks more and more like an emerging market: Last week, as the UN General Assembly met in New York, I moderated an event with a group of well-known economists and foreign affairs experts on the effects of the US election on the future of […]

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North Korea In BRICS: A Reach Too Far?

Via the Asia Times, an article on how Pyongyang’s accession would undermine the grouping’s emerging credibility as a counterweight to the West-led world order: North Korea’s potential membership in BRICS, the bloc named for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that is now expanding beyond that core deeper into the so-called Global South, presents […]

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Watergy Nexus


Grumble in the Jungle: Sinohydro’s Difficult Decade in Bolivia

Via Dialogue Earth, a look at how Sinohydro has struggled with its six projects in Bolivia, facing complaints over environmental harms, labour issues and quality of works In the early hours of 6 May, a jaguar was run over by a vehicle near the site of works to widen a section of the Cochabamba-Santa Cruz highway, […]

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Brazil Mega Dams Promised A Green Future. Then Came Climate Change

Via the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a look at how Brazilian President Lula bet big on mega dams in the 2000s to expand clean energy. Now climate change is hurting Brazil’s green ambitions: Amazon mega dams running well below capacity as river levels low Underperformance not new but worsened by record-setting drought Brazil turns to polluting […]

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How Much Energy Does Desalination Use?

Via Sustainability by Numbers, a look at how much energy does desalinisation use? Is it “absurdly cheap”? Elon Musk has said several times recently that desalinisation is “absurdly cheap”.1  This was surprising to me. When I was younger I was taught the mantra that desalinisation “uses lots of energy and is really expensive”. And to be honest, […]

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Grid Unlocked


Why One Developer Won’t Quit Fighting To Connect America’s Grids

Via MIT Technology Review, an article on efforts to connect the U.S.’s grids: Michael Skelly hasn’t learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the Houston-based energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest, delivering clean electricity […]

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What Happens When A Concrete Jungle Becomes A ‘Sponge City’

Via High Country News, a look at how engineering for flood resilience can address storms heightened by climate change. The living roof of the H2 Hotel in Healdsburg, California, both cools the building and mitigates rainwater runoff.John D. Ivanko/Alamy Stock Photo In early February, meteorologists warned Southern Californians that a supercharged storm was headed their way, […]

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Grid-Scale Batteries: Clean Energy’s Next Trillion-Dollar Business

Via The Economist, a report on grid-scale batteries: Decarbonising the world’s electricity supply will take more than solar panels and wind turbines, which rely on sunshine and a steady breeze to generate power. Grid-scale storage offers a solution to this intermittency problem, but there is too little of it about. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an […]

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Seeds of A Revolution


Carbon Colonialism and Land Grabs: Africa Must Eat or Be Eaten

Via Pan African Review, commentary on how – if Africa can’t contribute to putting food on the world’s table – someone will buy or seize its lands by force and do so: Over the last year, the Liberian government has agreed to sell or has sold about 10% of the country’s land — equivalent to 10,931 square […]

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World’s Biggest Deforestation Project Gets Underway in Papua for Sugarcane

Via Mongabay, an article on what some are calling the world’s biggest deforestation project in PNG: Land clearing has begun is what’s being called the biggest deforestation effort in the world, as Indonesia looks to establish 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of sugarcane plantations in the Papua region. One of the companies involved in […]

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Laundering Carbon—The Gulf’s ‘New Scramble for Africa’

Via Middle East Research and Information Project, a report on The Gulf’s ‘new scramble for Africa’: In early November 2023, shortly before the COP28 summit opened in Dubai, a hitherto obscure UAE firm attracted significant media attention around news of their prospective land deals in Africa. Reports suggested that Blue Carbon—a company privately owned by […]

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SynWorlds


How AI Brought 11,000 College Football Players to Digital Life in Three Months

Via the Wall Street Journal, a report on Electronic Arts’ use of new tech to scan photos for its videogame after securing players’ likeness rights for the first time A character artist works on the new ‘EA Sports College Football 25.’ PHOTO: EA SPORTS It has been over a decade since Electronic Arts released a college football videogame. To […]

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How Generative AI Could Reinvent What It Means To Play

Via MIT’s Technology Review, a report on how how AI-powered NPCs that don’t need a script could make games—and other worlds—deeply immersiv First, a confession. I only got into playing video games a little over a year ago (I know, I know). A Christmas gift of an Xbox Series S “for the kids” dragged me—pretty easily, […]

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Gym Class VR Builds On Popularity With NBA Logos and Venues

Via Sports Business Journal, a look at how Gym Class VR is building on its popularity with the addition of NBA logos and venues: The mid-range jumper may be a lost art in the NBA game, but I sank one from just inside the free-throw line at the TD Garden, as the PA announcer called out the basket. […]

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Roof Options


What Should We Do With The World’s Rooftops: Produce Food or Energy?

Via Anthropocene Magazine, a report on a new study finds that rooftop agriculture yields greater economic benefits, whereas rooftop solar wins on greenhouse gas emissions: A carefully calibrated combination of rooftop gardens and solar panels could meet 15% of a city’s vegetable needs and provide 5% of its electricity on average, according to a new China-wide […]

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Second Green Roof Installed at Boston Medical Center

Via Green Roofs.com, a report on another green roof in Boston: This month, Recover Green Roofs celebrated the opening of Newmarket Farm at Boston Medical Center (BMC) at 960 Mass. Ave. The green roof design process highlights a critical collaboration between BMC, Recover Green Roofs, and Higher Ground Farm. Recover completed the installation in the Spring of 2024. Each organization […]

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The Global Buffetts


Inside A Baby Berkshire Hathaway

Via Forbes, a look at how Markel’s Chief executive Thomas Gayner has quietly turned insurer Markel into a mini-conglomerate. Meet Richmond’s answer to the Oracle of Omaha:  Thomas Gayner gets a kick out of telling the story. It was 1983. He had just graduated from the University of Virginia with a plan to return home to Salem, […]

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Constellation Software, Tech’s Berkshire Hathaway

Via The Economist, a look at a firm which many consider as technology’s Berkshire Hathaway: For older startups these are tough times. The weak recent stockmarket debuts of Arm, a British chipmaker, Instacart, a grocery-delivery group, and Klaviyo, a software firm, have dampened enthusiasm for initial public offerings. Venture capital (vc) has dried up. Data […]

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The ‘Next Warren Buffett’ Curse Isn’t Always Fatal

Via Bloomberg, interesting commentary on how many – such as crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried couldn’t survive the comparison – but others who actually invest somewhat like the Berkshire Hathaway chairman fare better: A couple of months ago, crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was peering out from the cover of Fortune magazine above the words “The Next Warren Buffett?” Now he’s at […]

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Networked Nature


Will Open Source Data and AI Help The Oceans Survive?

Via USA Today, a look at how open-source data and AI can help the world’s oceans survive a record-breaking year of heat: Approximately one in four marine life creatures live in coral reefs. Commonly mistaken for plants, corals are critical animals that provide aquatic species with the food, shelter, and breeding grounds necessary for sustaining biodiversity. As […]

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To Reduce Wildlife Deaths Caused by Fences, Scientists Are Turning to AI

Via Science.org, a look at how software trained to identify fences from aerial images could help wildlife managers prevent pronghorn from getting stuck and starving: As many as 1 million kilometers of fence may crisscross the western United States, enough to stretch to the Moon and back. Erected over the past century, largely to contain […]

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Sea Lions Equipped with Cameras Help Uncover Uncharted Ocean Habitats

Via Terra Daily, a look at how tech-enabled sea lions are helping uncover ocean habitats: The world’s seabeds remain largely unexplored, with current knowledge being inconsistent. Utilizing remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) to study seabeds can be costly, dependent on weather conditions, and challenging in deep, remote areas.To address these obstacles, Australian researchers have turned […]

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