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June 26, 2024
That’s AllotA Energy!
Later this week on Colorado’s beautiful Western Slope, I’ll be giving a keynote talk at an energy transition conference. The timing is perfect because I get to share some of my first analyses of the 2024 edition of the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy — an absolutely indispensable resource that was just released a few…
June 24, 2024
The Lurking Dangers in State-Level AI Regulation
An ordinary bill signing became extraordinary last month when Colorado Gov. Jared Polis used the occasion to deliver a detailed critique of the bill he was signing, Senate Bill 24-205. The bill is one of the first pieces of legislation that regulates cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Still, Polis isn’t totally convinced that it’s ready for prime time:…
June 20, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use I: Framing the Problem
Yesterday the silicon chip platform company Nvidia became the most valuable public company in the US, surpassing Microsoft: Nvidia became the U.S.’s most valuable listed company Tuesday thanks to the demand for its artificial-intelligence chips, leading a tech boom that brings back memories from around the start of this century. Nvidia’s chips have been the workhorses of…
June 20, 2024
The Death of Environmentalism at 20
Twenty years ago, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus “dropped” (in Ted’s words) an essay at the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association titled, The Death of Environmentalism (DoE). The DoE prompted a vigorous debate about environmentalism in the United States that continues today. Here is how the New York Times characterized the reaction to the essay in 2005: The…
June 18, 2024
Transformative Growth with AI Is Likely. Explosive Growth Is Science Fiction.
A couple weeks back, Tim Lee, the author of the Understanding AI Substack, put out the following plea on X: “I really wish there were more economists involved in discussions of the implications of superintelligence.” He added, “The most obvious example is people predicting mass unemployment without thinking through the impact of high productivity on fiscal and monetary…
June 17, 2024
Billion Dollar Disasters on Steroids
Shortly after my paper Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” was accepted for publication, I was tipped off to a public but unnamed and well-hidden directory on the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that contained 17 (now 18) of the most recent versions of the “billion dollar disaster” (BDD) tabulation, dating to March 2020….
June 17, 2024
The AI Arms Race: Apple and OpenAI’s Partnership Raises the Bar for Privacy and a More Secure User Experience
Apple unveiled at its World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC24) Private Cloud Compute, or PPC, last Monday as a new way to manage the technical possibilities around security and privacy in cloud computing and artificial intelligence. This new cloud intelligence system is designed to prioritize privacy features that were previously limited to devices and will now be available…
June 11, 2024
The Economics of AI and the Impending Robot Takeover, Part I
Tim Lee, the author of the excellent Understanding AI Substack, recently took to X with a plea: “I really wish there were more economists involved in discussions of the implications of superintelligence.” He continued: The most obvious example is people predicting mass unemployment without thinking through the impact of high productivity on fiscal and monetary policy. There are…
June 10, 2024
Climate Science is About to Make a Huge Mistake
Scenarios are fundamental to climate research and policy. As THB readers know better than most everyone, for years climate science and policy have been off trackin relying heavily on an outdated extreme emissions scenario called RCP8.5, one of four RCP scenarios developed starting almost two decades ago.(1) Some in the climate science community, though slow out of the…
June 6, 2024
The Government is Gunning for Live Nation. It’s Making a Historic Mistake
In today’s complex business environment, being a CEO is akin to playing three-dimensional chess. Markets and supply chains are constantly disrupted by global conflicts, financial markets remain volatile, and AI is transforming industries at a breakneck pace, not to mention the shifting political winds and declining public trust in institutions. Despite these complexities, the Biden administration is…