On October 30, 2017 the San Francisco Chronicle published a piece by IEE’s Ed Church about the opportunity to rebuild electricity infrastructure after the destructive fires in California’s Wine Country.

In the article, Church emphasized that local energy microgrids are more resilient in the face of service interruptions caused by natural events, including devastating fires and storms that have taken down utility infrastructure.  They are also less vulnerable to hacking, and energy loss from long-distance transmission.

On November 21, 2016 GreenBiz published this piece by IEE Executive Director Ed Church.  On New Year’s Day, 2017, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday Insight Section led off its articles called “2017 and Beyond” with a version, called Don’t Build Parking Garages – They Won’t Be Necessary.  They are excerpted below.

Three significant pressures are aligning which should give pause to investors in automobile parking garages. Garages are typically financed on a 30-year payback, either by cities or private investors. But they could find themselves holding the un-payable back-end of a 30-year note, when folks stop driving within the next 15 years.

The first pressure, already underway, is from Millennials simply not interested in driving. In part, this is based in the embracing of social media connectivity that makes connectivity via car unnecessary or burdensome. With fewer drivers’ licenses and auto purchases among young adults comes decreased need for that parking garage space.

The second pressure is the technological advancement toward autonomous vehicles. As these vehicles are converted into “robot taxis” which can be hailed with a tap on a cell phone app, the need for ownership of personal cars will decline, taking with it the need for parking space.

The third pressure, greatest of all, is the move away from fossil-fuel burning automobiles.  These will simply be phased-out.

How to know where climate change leads us? Climate scientists have discovered, and elaborately described, dramatic changes in the Earth’s climate which will effect us all. Chemists, biologists and other scientists have joined with physicists and meteorologists in the next phase of the endeavor, projecting the effects of climate change on our planet.

What follows from those predictions are proposals for physical counter-measures to lessen or adapt to the effects. But, what happens after we take those counter-measures, mostly centered on ending our use of fossil fuels? Those adaptations will change the way we live.

The longer-term realities will be living with the disruptions of adaptations necessitated by climate change: adapting to adaptation.

This is the full text of the piece written by IEE Executive Director Ed Church and published by Meeting of the Minds.  It synthesizes information from business, governments and start-ups to begin the discussion on how we will live in 2050.

In January 2013, GreenBiz.com—a leading source of news and opinion on business and the environment, published IEE’s new four-book review called “Learning from the Eco Doom Books.” See the article here.

For this review, our staff chose four important books on the topic of climate change and global warming to compare and contrast themes, causes, different remedies and solutions, and predictions that each author puts forth. We think that we can collectively create a discipline of “sustainability” by making better use of what’s already out there.  This review is an example.