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Friedman argues that man is actually a fairly adaptable creature. The problem is that our capacity to adapt is being outpaced by a “supernova,” built from three ever faster things: technology, the market and climate change.

Man has sped up his own response times. It now takes us only 10–15 years to get used to the sort of technological changes that we used to absorb in a couple of generations; but what good is that when technology becomes obsolete every five to seven years? The supernova is making a joke of both patent law and education. Governments, companies and individuals are all struggling to keep up.


Friedman’s main cause for optimism is based on a trip back to St. Louis Park, the Minneapolis suburb where he grew up. This is perhaps the most elegiac, memorable part of the book — a piece of sustained reportage that ranks alongside “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Friedman’s masterly first book about the Middle East. He points out that the same communal virtues that made Minnesota work when he was young have survived — and are still useful. But somehow, the passages that lingered with this reader were the ones about the good old days that have disappeared — when baseball used to be a sport that everybody could afford to watch, when local boys like the young Friedman could caddy at the United States Open, when everybody in Friedman’s town went to public schools.

So you don’t finish this book thinking everything is going to be O.K. for the unhappy West — that “you can dance in a hurricane.” There is no easy pill to swallow, and most of the ones being proffered by the extremists are poison. But after your session with Dr. Friedman, you have a much better idea of the forces that are upending your world, how they work together — and what people, companies and governments can do to prosper. You do have a coherent narrative — an honest, cohesive explanation for why the world is the way it is, without miracle cures or scapegoats. And that is why everybody should hope this book does very well indeed.

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If a trip to Venice is your ideal holiday, then you’re going to love the future.

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Most of us, however, will be quite sobered by Kim Stanley Robinson’s upcoming novel, New York 2140, a near-future projection of a world reshaped by climate change. Sea level has risen by 50 feet, flooding the Big Apple and countless coastal cities around the planet. Thousands of species have gone extinct.

The same economic and political forces driving the world ever closer to that reality are still in charge, setting life on a perpetual spin cycle of boom and bust, with the rich always getting richer.

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READ THAT. It can be done.


A round of applause for Costa Rica: the small Central American country ran solely on renewable energy for 250 days of 2016, and over the whole year used renewables for 98.12 percent of its electricity needs.

The republic uses a mixture of renewable sources to generate its electricity including hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass, and solar energy, which meant it didn’t need to touch fossil fuels for two-thirds of the year.

The biggest renewable contributor is hydroelectric plants, which account for 74.35 percent of the country’s total electricity needs.

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Germany had so much renewable energy last week that customers were briefly being paid to consume electricity, it has been reported.

As spotted by Quartz, who cite data from German think tank Agora Energiewende, fair weather and high winds on Sunday 8 May saw wind, solar and hydroelectric power plants producing 54.6GW of power, roughly 80 per cent of the 68.4GW of power being consumed across the country at that time.

As a result, the price of power plummeted, and went negative from 7AM to 5PM, bottoming out at -€130 per MWh at 1PM. Energy providers were essentially being paid by producers to take the electricity off their hands.

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The video of an accident on the Autobahn in the Netherlands caught on the dashcam of a Tesla Model X shows the Autopilot’s forward collision warning predicting an accident before it could be detected by the driver.

With the release of Tesla’s version 8.0 software update in September, the automaker announced a new radar processing technology that was directly pushed over-the-air to all its vehicles equipped with the first generation Autopilot hardware.

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