Superabundance is within reach. But ironically, the precondition to getting it is by giving it up. It sounds paradoxical, but this is actually the key to the next great leap in human evolution. I set this out with a rigorous scientific framework in my new paper on the Planetary Phase Shift.
A systems lens suggests a quarter of GDP could evaporate on a pathway to violent civil unrest, concentration camps, and genocidal violence that would be a free gift to Putin
We are all feeling it. Grief, despair, anxiety, chaos. This essay, which distils the planetary phase shift framework, gives you the tools to see through the chaos to recognise emerging possibilities of a new system that could enable superabundance beyond our wildest imaginations.
Unfolding conflict across Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran is not just a regional breakdown, but a global systemic rupture in the context of the planetary phase shift as industrial civilisation moves through the last stages of its life-cycle.
When we look at the rise of the global far-right through a systems lens, we can recognise that it as a symptom of crisis and collapse - as well as the potential for renewal. Today, humanity stands at a political inflection point in which the only viable path forward involves total transformation.
Drawing on my research on genocidal colonial systems, I explore how the original concept of genocide invented by Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin suggests that Hamas and Israel are both complicit in the co-production of genocidal violence.
2024 - the opportunity for a new beginning. What has this newsletter achieved so far, and where do we go next on the journey toward our post-carbon future?
After decades exposing fossil fuel interests, I've realised it's not about dismantling the old. We must enable the new with finance, technology & system change. The West’s biggest carbon polluters are deflecting from this necessity, in ways that have carefully obscured what really derailed COP28.
The world's energy watchdog has called it - end of the oil age is imminent. But the world is deeply unprepared for what this means - and we're still underestimating the speed, scale and consequences of what's coming. This is the greatest disruption in human history. Here's how we get ready.
A global consensus is emerging – among both clean energy pioneers and even some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers – that the age of oil is over, and that we must do all we can to accelerate the clean transformation of the global energy system in a way that is just.
Collapse is not the end - it's the beginning. The fear and uncertainty of this time signals the obsolescence of old ways of being. As we step into the unknown, truly new ways of being are emerging. Our challenge is to seize on and amplify these opportunities.
Why are our societies, politics and culture getting more and more polarised? A systems lens reveals it's no accident. It's a symptom of the twilight of the current life-cycle of civilisation as a new one dawns. From ISIS to Brexit, the entire global system is flipping into a new order....
I got into a debate about whether we have enough materials for the clean energy transition with someone who I fundamentally disagree with - and we managed to talk it through to create a shared understanding about our emerging post-carbon future
As I travel to Bangladesh, the home of my ancestors, I reflect on how a country struggling to emerge from the ravages of colonisation faces the unprecedented opportunity to become a solar super power
We've passed a global energy transition tipping point making dominance of solar, wind and batteries inevitable and irreversible within decades. A whole new system is being born. But technology alone can't save us: we need a collective shift in mindset, values and governance.
Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to climate change. But the biggest untold story is that Africa represents the future of global civilisation, and the key to a new era of unimaginable abundance within planetary boundaries.
This is the era of accelerating climate breakdown. The disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice is now inevitable. We've crossed a dangerous tipping point at risk of triggering others. Yet pathways to transformation over the next 15 years could still pull us back from collapse.
Recent claims that renewables represent an inevitable energy descent are derived from a new form of 'energy blindness' that ignores the best EROI systems science.
AI represents the Fifth Great Information Disruption since human settlements first arose. It will be unstoppable and all-encompassing - and it could help us breakthrough to a new system premised on earth-centered collective intelligence, or spiral into breakdown and collapse.
Fear that AI is an existential threat to humanity is going viral. But there's little evidence that God-like AI superintelligence is possible. The real threat comes from the abuse of AI to manipulate information - which could derail civilisation at a crucial turning point in history.
