Carbon Chemist

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  • An Uncertain Future Requires Uncertain Prediction Skills

    An Uncertain Future Requires Uncertain Prediction Skills

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    We live in an Age of Uncertainty. Not just because of the global threats to societies, but many face unprecedented insecurity at a personal level, particularly the younger generations. None of us know what is going to happen, and we might as well face up to it. And that’s the first lesson in making predictions: Don’t make predictions. Meaning, don’t just make a guess as to what will happen. Instead, embrace uncertainty and turn it into an opportunity. Here’s how:

    Think Fast and Slow About Uncertainty

    Uncertainty is a “conscious awareness of ignorance.” It is a personal relationship with anything we don’t know—we may be ignorant about what is going on at the moment, or what will happen in the future. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman identified two broad ways of thinking; using our fast, unconscious, gut reactions, or going slowly and deliberately through a problem. Mostly it’s fine to think fast about the future: when we are driving or choosing a film to watch. But for big decisions, it is better to just take our time.

    Conjuring Up Possible Futures

    The first step in thinking slowly about the future is to visualize the ways things could play out. Organizations may create scenarios reflecting optimistic and pessimistic outcomes, and may use a “red team” to deliberately think of what could go wrong. The UK’s Ministry of Defence even employs science-fiction writers to bring some serious imagination to possible futures.

    Individually, you could adopt a “red-team mindset,” in which you consciously critique our standard view, whether you are the sort who tends to look on the bright side, or expect the worst.

    The Problem With Just Using Words to Describe Uncertainty

    Vague verbiage about uncertainty is easily misinterpreted. It’s easy to say that something “might” or “could” happen, or even that it is “likely” to occur. But what do these words actually mean? In 1961, the CIA was planning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to topple Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered the chance of success to be just 30 percent—that is, a 70 percent chance of failure.

    This was reported as a “fair” chance, which they thought would be interpreted as “not too good.” But President Kennedy read the word optimistically and approved the invasion, which was an utter fiasco and pushed Cuba even further into Soviet influence.

    Putting Numbers on Our Ignorance

    Events such as the Bay of Pigs disaster have encouraged intelligence agencies to align words with rough numbers. For example, if someone in the UK intelligence service claims an event is “likely,” this has an official interpretation of between 55 percent and 75 percent chance. A similar scale is used in climate science, where a “very likely” event means 90 percent to 95 percent.

    As individuals, we might try to rank possible futures in terms of their likelihood, and then give them some rough magnitudes, say that getting a particular job is a “2 out of 10” event. With some imagination, we could think of all our possible future trajectories shooting out like spaghetti; and in around 20 percent of these, you will get the job.

    What Makes a Good Forecaster?

    “Superforecasters” can assess good probabilities for the future, where “good” means (a) they are “calibrated,” so that when they say “70 percent chance,” those events happen in around 70 percent of cases, and (b) they are “discriminatory,” so that high probabilities tend to be given to events that happen. They typically have an openness to new knowledge and are happy to work in teams, have an insight into their own thinking and all their biases, and have the humility to acknowledge uncertainty, admit errors, and change their minds. They are akin to Isaiah Berlin’s so-called “foxes,” willing to adapt to new evidence, rather than “hedgehogs,” stuck in a single way of thinking.

    Acknowledging the Unknown

    Donald Rumsfeld immortally described the “known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns”—those things that were beyond our imagination and had not even been thought of. When we acknowledge this possibility, this is known as “deep uncertainty,” when we can’t even list the possible futures, even with a red-team mindset. Rumsfeld didn’t, however, include the “unknown knowns”—those assumptions that we make without even thinking. These can be the most dangerous delusions, and they’re why we need critical friends to help us out of our fixed tramlines.

    Being Prepared to Be Surprised

    In 1650, Oliver Cromwell’s army was camped outside Edinburgh, and he was trying to persuade the Scottish Kirk to withdraw their support for the return of Charles II. Cromwell wrote, “Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the Word of God, all that you say? I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” This appeal was ignored, and Cromwell soundly defeated the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar.

    “Cromwell’s Rule” means that you should think like a fox, and at all times have the humility to think it possible you may be mistaken. By just entertaining a small probability of being wrong, you can rapidly adapt to surprising new information.

    The Role of Luck

    Things may turn out well for you, or they may turn out badly, largely due to factors outside your control, i.e., luck. Philosophers have identified three main types. Constitutive luck: who you were born as, your time and place in history, your parents, your genes, your inbuilt characteristics, and early upbringing. This is extremely important—you need to make the best of the hand you’ve been dealt at birth. Circumstantial luck: being at the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time. Resultant luck: how things just happened to turn out for you at that instant.

    But it’s not all outside your control—“lucky” people exploit opportunities, have positive expectations, and are resilient to things going wrong.

    Living With Uncertainty

    Being uncertain is part of being human, and few of us want to know what we are going to get for Christmas, what the result of a recorded football match will be, or even, were it possible, when we were going to die. Uncertainty is unavoidable, and we may react to that awareness of ignorance in a variety of ways—we may feel anxious or excited, hopeful or fearful, depending on the circumstances and our personal tolerance of not-knowing.

    We cannot avoid uncertainty. But with a bit of slow thinking we may be able to embrace it, be humbled by it, and even enjoy it.

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  • Tune In to the Healing Powers of a Decent Playlist

    Tune In to the Healing Powers of a Decent Playlist

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    Beliefs and practices about music’s ability to heal the mind, body, and spirit date back to the Upper Paleolithic period, about 20,000 years ago. Music was widely used by shamans and other healers to treat a variety of ailments, from mental disorders to injuries and illness. Only recently have we separated healing and music; we tend to see healing as the province of doctors and music as entertainment. Perhaps it is time to reunite two of the most intimate parts of our lives.

    Scientific advances in the past 10 years have provided a rational basis for this reunifi­cation. An emerging body of research allows us to take what had been anecdotes and place music on an equal footing with prescription drugs, surgeries, medical procedures, psychotherapy, and various forms of treatment that are mainstream and evidence-based. In the past two years alone, more than 8,000 papers have been published on the topic in peer-reviewed journals.

    Across millennia, music has been used to relieve a variety of ailments, from chronic pain to depression, anxiety, and simple boredom. It serves as a social lubricant, an intoxicating part of courtship, and in life-cycle ceremonies through birth, birthdays, marriage, anniversaries, and even death. It was 2024 that saw the culmination of years of scientific research and conferences focused on a deceptively simple question: Is music capable of delivering proven medical effects? The answer is a resounding and artfully reverberating yes.

    We have now demonstrated the efficacy of music therapy and musical interventions for improving a variety of health outcomes and for promoting wellness. From the treatment of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to the management of chronic pain and depression, music is no longer relegated to the fringes of modern medicine. Major health care companies now have procedure codes for the use of music in hospital, clinical, and outpatient settings.

    The year 2025 will see a renewed and reinvigorated use of this age-old remedy based on evidence from rigorously conducted studies. We will begin to see more sophisticated and nuanced uses of music for specific ailments, as well as for improving immune system function and overall wellness.

    The future of music in health care extends from hospital to home, from illness to neurorehabilitation, mindfulness practices, and wellness. AI will help here—not in writing music, but in selecting the songs and genres that meet both an individual’s tastes and the desired therapeutic and wellness goals. By extracting key features from music and matching them to an individual’s preferences and needs, we can usher in a new age of personalized music medicine. In the same way that an individual’s DNA can guide decisions on treatment and which drugs are likely to be most effective, AI may one day extract the DNA of music to identify precisely what music will help meet an individual’s therapeutic needs

    Consider all the information about you in the cloud—your search history, location, who you are with, calendar, contacts list, and the kinds of things you view on social media. Certain companies also know a lot about your music tastes—what you listen to, what you skipped, the time of day you listen, and where you are when you’re listening. Smart devices that read your biometrics know your heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygenation level, respiration rate, skin conductance, body temperature, blood pressure—as well as how they fluctuate as a function of time of day and what activities you’re engaged in.

    And they know about those activities, too—whether you’re running, walking, climbing steps, driving in a car, or sleeping. Of course, when you are sleeping, they know what sleep stage you’re in and how long you’ve been asleep. (They know if you’ve been sleeping, they know if you’re awake, they know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!). Soon, you’ll have the option to subscribe to music on demand where the “demand” comes from your own biometrics, serving you music to calm you down, invigorate you for an exercise workout, help you focus at work, or treat ailments such as chronic pain, depression, Parkinson’s, and even Alzheimer’s.

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  • Returning the Amazon Rainforest to Its True Caretakers

    Returning the Amazon Rainforest to Its True Caretakers

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    In 2025, a small, indigenous nation that calls itself the “people of many colors” will go home for the first time in 80 years. Their return will drive a movement of indigenous peoples across the Amazon rainforest fighting for legal titles to their ancestral territories, and winning. These victories will have global significance.

    The Siekopai lived for centuries along what is now the border between Ecuador and Peru in the western Amazon. In the 1500s, they were a powerful civilization with their own unique varieties of corn and an army capable of defeating the Portuguese conquerors and stopping their advance. Later, however, they were decimated by disease, enslaved by rubber tappers, and forcibly relocated to Jesuit missions. Approximately 80 years ago, a war between Ecuador and Peru displaced the remaining Siekopai. When the years of conflict waned, in 1979, a new, if contested, border cut through their homelands. The Siekopai now number about 1,950 survivors, with 750 in Ecuador and 1,200 in Peru.

    In Ecuador, indigenous nations are in a landlord-tenant agreement with the Ministry of the Environment. There are now nearly 5 million acres of indigenous rainforest territories locked in “protected areas” within the Ministry of Environment’s control. This gives the government, for instance, the power to grant drilling rights, as it did in the Yasuní National Park, or to change the nature of the tenant agreement, which they did when the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve was created, denying indigenous people the right to hunt, fish, or garden and effectively making them trespassers in their own land.

    In Peru, the government leases land to indigenous communities indefinitely for various uses based on the type of soil. Only 20 percent of the indigenous area is recognized as Siekopai property, while the remaining 80 percent is designated as state-owned forest lands, and are “on loan” from the state.

    Recently, however, the Siekopai have successfully challenged the legality of these titling laws—the legal process that results in the recognition of the right to property of indigenous people to their ancestral lands—and have already won two major legal victories in Ecuador and Peru. In 2021, the Siekopai received land titles to more than 500,000 acres of their lands in Peru. In September 2022, the Siekopai filed a suit against the government of Ecuador to regain ownership over Pë’këya, part of their ancestral territory located along the border. In November 2023, an Ecuadorian appeals court ruled in favor of the Siekopai, granting them legal title to another 100,000 acres of labyrinthine flooded forests and blackwater lagoons in the heart of their ancestral homelands, and marking the first time the government would issue land title to an indigenous peoples whose territory was located inside a protected area.

    In 2025, working together with Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance—allied organizations with the mission to protect both the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous autonomy—the Siekopai will further expand their land titles and create a pathway to permanently protect nearly 5 million acres of rainforest within national parks in Ecuador. In Peru, they’re going to dismantle the legal and political barriers to titling an estimated 40 million acres of ancestral indigenous territory in the Amazon. These landmark victories will set a legal precedent for millions of other indigenous people across the Amazon and hopefully allow them to return to their ancestral lands.

    Permanent land titles are not only essential to the survival of indigenous lives and cultures. They are also crucial to our collective ability to protect the rainforest. The Amazon rainforest is approaching a tipping point from which it may never recover. Between 1985 and 2022, people burned or cut down more than 11 percent of the Amazon, an area larger than France and Uruguay combined. If this rate of deforestation continues, the entire rainforest will be doomed. By 2050, the entire region could be irreversibly on the path to becoming a savanna. The destruction of the Amazon is, at the same time, the destruction of more than 300 distinct ethnicities. In other words: It is mass ecocide and ethnocide.

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  • The Beginning of the End of Big Tech

    The Beginning of the End of Big Tech

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    Next year will be Big Tech’s finale. Critique of Big Tech is now common sense, voiced by a motley spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits, and even tech titans such as the VC powerhouse Y Combinator, which is singing in harmony with giants like a16z in proclaiming fealty to “little tech” against the centralized power of incumbents.

    Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it’s not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructure—from hospitals to banks to traffic systems—failing globally for an extended period.

    Another reason Big Tech is set to falter in 2025 is that the frothy AI market, on which Big Tech bet big, is beginning to lose its fizz. Major money, like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital, is worried. They went public recently with their concerns about the disconnect between the billions required to create and use large-scale AI, and the weak market fit and tepid returns where the rubber meets the AI business-model road.

    It doesn’t help that the public and regulators are waking up to AI’s reliance on, and generation of, sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been higher—as evidenced, for one, by Signal’s persistent user growth. AI, on the other hand, generally erodes privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that would, I kid you not, screenshot everything you do on your device so an AI system could give you “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn-watching?). The system required the capture of those sensitive images—which would not exist otherwise—in order to work.

    Happily, these factors aren’t just liquefying the ground below Big Tech’s dominance. They’re also powering bold visions for alternatives that stop tinkering at the edges of the monopoly tech paradigm, and work to design and build actually democratic, independent, open, and transparent tech. Imagine!

    For example, initiatives in Europe are exploring independent core tech infrastructure, with convenings of open source developers, scholars of governance, and experts on the political economy of the tech industry.

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  • 3 Simple Rules to Beat the Downsides of Aging

    3 Simple Rules to Beat the Downsides of Aging

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    We humans may be the only species that is aware of our mortality. We are obsessed with how to postpone the inevitable and, failing that, how to make the most of our lives. For much of our existence as a species, there was little we could do about either aging or death. In fact, for most of history, most of us died long before we actually aged. In the last few decades, molecular and cell biologists have made advances in understanding the underlying causes of aging, which raises the possibility of tackling aging itself.

    Researchers are exploring many mitigators: the beneficial pathways triggered by caloric restriction that improve health markers in old animals; targeting the inflammatory-compound-secreting senescent cells we accumulate as we grow older; boosting our stem-cell numbers; and revitalizing the energy-metabolizing mitochondria in our cells.

    These are all promising, but it will take some time before they are proven to be effective and safe in humans. While we wait for the biomedical establishment to come up with powerful ways to tackle aging itself, there are three simple measures that use our understanding of advances in biology and medicine to keep us in good health as we age.

    Eat Less

    A calorically restricted diet means consuming the bare minimum of calories while still getting all the nutrients we need. Such a diet is difficult to follow for most people and has been reported to slow down wound healing, possibly make you more prone to certain infections, cause you to lose muscle mass, feel cold, and suffer a loss of libido. However, a moderate diet that is balanced should provide many of the benefits observed of a calorically restricted diet. Michael Pollan said it best: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

    Keep Exercising

    Physical activity turns on many of the pathways that stimulate mitochondrial production. It also helps maintain muscle and bone mass, a serious problem as we age; counters diabetes and obesity; improves sleep; and strengthens immunity. Aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular health; load-bearing exercise helps maintain muscle mass. Both are important.

    Get Adequate Sleep

    All animals have the equivalent of sleep, because it is essential for life. Sleep is involved in repair mechanisms that prevent the buildup of damage to our cells, and sleep deprivation increases the risk of many diseases of aging, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. We need to ensure that we get an adequate amount of sleep.

    Embrace the Synergy

    The trio of diet, exercise, and sleep will together be more beneficial than any therapy currently. These three measures are all synergistic. Each of these will make it easier to carry out the other two. For example, exercise will help you sleep better. Moreover, they will all help with other things that can help with healthy aging, including preventing obesity, which is a serious cause of many diseases of old age.

    Also Watch for These Factors

    Stress. It is known that stress has widespread metabolic effects that are harmful for health and accelerate aging. Reducing stress is always difficult, but the trio of activities mentioned can also help to reduce stress.

    Isolation. Many population studies point to loneliness resulting in poor health in old age. In an increasingly fragmented society, it’s important to maintain and nurture our social connections as we age.

    Purpose. People with a strong sense of purpose were healthier and less likely to die. One study found that one effective way to acquire a sense of purpose was to volunteer in activities that provide social interaction and bring benefits to the community or society.

    And Have Routine Checkups

    Beyond these measures, there are some simple health precautions we should all take as we age. It is important to have routine and early checkups for blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes. All of these conditions can easily and cheaply be treated to increase our chances of good health in old age. In addition, good markers for early diagnoses are becoming available for a range of treatable diseases including some types of cancer. Early detection of breast, cervical, colorectal (bowel), skin, and prostate cancer can all improve clinical outcomes.

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  • How Do You Get to Artificial General Intelligence? Think Lighter

    How Do You Get to Artificial General Intelligence? Think Lighter

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    In 2025, entrepreneurs will unleash a flood of AI-powered apps. Finally, generative AI will deliver on the hype with a new crop of affordable consumer and business apps. This is not the consensus view today. OpenAI, Google, and xAI are locked in an arms race to train the most powerful large language model (LLM) in pursuit of artificial general intelligence, known as AGI, and their gladiatorial battle dominates the mindshare and revenue share of the fledgling Gen AI ecosystem.

    For example, Elon Musk raised $6 billion to launch the newcomer xAI and bought 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, the costly chips used to process AI, costing north of $3 billion to train its model, Grok. At those prices, only techno-tycoons can afford to build these giant LLMs.

    The incredible spending by companies such as OpenAI, Google, and xAI has created a lopsided ecosystem that’s bottom heavy and top light. The LLMs trained by these huge GPU farms are usually also very expensive for inference, the process of entering a prompt and generating a response from large language models that is embedded in every app using AI. It’s as if everyone had 5G smartphones, but using data was too expensive for anyone to watch a TikTok video or surf social media. As a result, excellent LLMs with high inference costs have made it unaffordable to proliferate killer apps.

    This lopsided ecosystem of ultra-rich tech moguls battling each other has enriched Nvidia while forcing application developers into a catch-22 of either using a low-cost and low-performance model bound to disappoint users, or face paying exorbitant inference costs and risk going bankrupt.

    In 2025, a new approach will emerge that can change all that. This will return to what we’ve learned from previous technology revolutions, such as the PC era of Intel and Windows or the mobile era of Qualcomm and Android, where Moore’s law improved PCs and apps, and lower bandwidth cost improved mobile phones and apps year after year.

    But what about the high inference cost? A new law for AI inference is just around the corner. The cost of inference has fallen by a factor of 10 per year, pushed down by new AI algorithms, inference technologies, and better chips at lower prices.

    As a reference point, if a third-party developer used OpenAI’s top-of-the-line models to build AI search, in May 2023 the cost would be about $10 per query, while Google’s non-Gen-AI search costs $0.01, a 1,000x difference. But by May 2024, the price of OpenAI’s top model came down to about $1 per query. At this unprecedented 10x-per-year price drop, application developers will be able to use ever higher-quality and lower-cost models, leading to a proliferation of AI apps in the next two years.

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  • Combining AI and Crispr Will Be Transformational

    Combining AI and Crispr Will Be Transformational

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    In 2025, we will see AI and machine learning begin to amplify the impact of Crispr genome editing in medicine, agriculture, climate change, and the basic research that underpins these fields. It’s worth saying upfront that the field of AI is awash with big promises like this. With any major new technological advance there is always a hype cycle, and we are in one now. In many cases, the benefits of AI lie some years in the future, but in genomics and life science research we are seeing real impacts right now.

    In my field, Crispr gene editing and genomics more broadly, we often deal with enormous datasets—or, in many cases, we can’t deal with them properly because we simply don’t have the tools or the time. Supercomputers can take weeks to months to analyze subsets of data for a given question, so we have to be highly selective about which questions we choose to ask. AI and machine learning are already removing these limitations, and we are using AI tools to quickly search and make discoveries in our large genomic datasets.

    In my lab, we recently used AI tools to help us find small gene-editing proteins that had been sitting undiscovered in public genome databases because we simply didn’t have the ability to crunch all of the data that we’ve collected. A group at the Innovative Genomics Institute, the research institute that I founded 10 years ago at UC Berkeley, recently joined forces with members of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) and Center for Computational Biology, and developed a way to use a large language model, akin to what many of the popular chatbots use, to predict new functional RNA molecules that have greater heat tolerance compared to natural sequences. Imagine what else is waiting to be discovered in the massive genome and structural databases scientists have collectively built over the recent decades.

    These types of discoveries have real-world applications. For the two examples above, smaller genome editors can help with more efficient delivery of therapies into cells, and predicting heat-stable RNA molecules will help improve biomanufacturing processes that generate medicines and other valuable products. In health and drug development, we have recently seen the approval of the first Crispr-based therapy for sickle cell disease, and there are around 7,000 other genetic diseases that are waiting for a similar therapy. AI can help accelerate the process of development by predicting the best editing targets, maximizing Crispr’s precision and efficiency, and reducing off-target effects. In agriculture, AI-informed Crispr advancements promise to create more resilient, productive, and nutritious crops, ensuring greater food security and reducing the time to market by helping researchers focus on the most fruitful approaches. In climate, AI and Crispr could open up new solutions for improving natural carbon capture and environmental sustainability.

    It’s still early days, but the potential to appropriately harness the joint power of AI and Crispr, arguably the two most profound technologies of our time, is clear and exciting—and it’s already started.

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  • It’s Time to Make the Internet Safer for Kids

    It’s Time to Make the Internet Safer for Kids

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    In the real world, we have more than a century of experience figuring out how to share the world with children in order to keep them safe while still allowing adults to engage in adult-only activities, particularly those involving sex, violence, and addictive substances.

    In 18th and 19th century America, there were essentially no restrictions on children’s consumption of alcohol. However, following the temperance movement’s efforts to publicize alcohol’s harmful effects on families, women, and children, and after the failed experiment of Prohibition, states took on the responsibility of regulating alcohol. Each state eventually passed laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to those under a certain age, usually 21. This established the principle that enforcement responsibility falls to the bars, liquor stores, and casinos profiting from alcohol sales. The idea that parents alone should manage their children’s access to alcohol would have struck most people as absurd.

    Likewise, it will soon seem absurd that we once allowed children of any age to go everywhere on the internet that adults go, doing everything that adults do, without the knowledge or consent of their parents. The year 2025 will be the one where humanity remembers children are different from adults and that they need protection and age-gating in some parts of the digital world.

    The dangers are now undeniable. From the dawn of the internet through to 2024, any child who knew how to lie about their age could open an account on nearly any platform used by adults, except for those that require a credit card. This included hardcore pornography sites such as Pornhub, and the now-defunct site Omegle—where children could video chat with strangers, some of whom were naked masturbating men. It also included social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, all of which are full of content that is wildly inappropriate for children, and all of which incorporate design features that harm children in a variety of ways.

    Concern among parents and educators is now widespread.

    In 2023, a survey on children’s health conducted by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital showed that the issues that most concern parents—ranked above school violence, drugs, and bullying—were the overuse of smartphones, social media and internet safety. Another 2024 survey of school principals showed that they were similarly alarmed by the effect of smartphones on students, with 88 percent stating that they were making children tired and distracted, and 85 percent believing it was amplifying violence and bullying in schools.

    No wonder that, in 2023, a major Unesco report considered the overwhelming evidence that excessive phone use was correlated with lower school performance and poorer mental health, and called for the ban of smartphones from schools. In 2024, France, Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands followed through on those recommendations, banning digital devices in classrooms. In the US, the states of Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Florida have also imposed restrictions on smartphone usage in schools, while the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels for social media platforms. Bipartisan legislation addressing these concerns—the Kids Online Safety Act—has also passed the Senate. This new law would, for instance, force tech companies from targeting kids with personalized algorithms designed to hook them.

    In 2025, parents will no longer be alone in tackling this problem. They will be assisted by concerned politicians and by phone-free schools. Social media companies, on the other hand, will finally acknowledge—or be forced to acknowledge by juries and legislatures—that they now own childhood, and they bear at least some responsibility for what they are doing to children.

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  • The Fossil Fuels Conversation Needs a Hard Reset

    The Fossil Fuels Conversation Needs a Hard Reset

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    In 2025, we will see a fundamental transformation in the language of climate politics. We’re going to hear a lot less about “reducing emissions” from scientists and policymakers and a lot more about “phasing out fossil fuels” or “ending coal, oil, and methane gas.” This is a good thing. Although it is scientifically accurate, the phrase “reducing emissions” is too easily used for greenwashing by the fossil-energy industry and its advocates. The expression “ending coal, oil, and methane gas,” on the other hand, keeps the focus on the action that will do most to resolve the climate crisis.

    This discourse shift has been initiated by the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The world’s climate scientists say that already existing fossil-energy infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for halting global heating at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. This statement means two things. It means that the world cannot develop any more coal, oil, or gas, if we want our planet to remain relatively livable. And it means that even some already developed fossil-fuel deposits will need to be retired before the end of their lifetime, since we need to leave space in the carbon budget for essential activities like agriculture.

    The international community has already integrated this new science into its global climate governance. The 28th Conference of the Parties—the annual conference of the world’s nations party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—called for every country to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” Never before in the history of international climate negotiations had the main cause of global heating been clearly named and specifically targeted. The United Nations itself now calls for the phaseout of coal, oil, and methane gas.

    This new climate language will become mainstream in 2025. In her policy plans for her second term aspPresident of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen pledged not to work to lower EU emissions, but to “continue to bring down energy prices by moving further away from fossil fuels.” The new UK government promised in its manifesto that it will withhold licenses for new coal and for oil exploration—and states outright that it will “ban fracking for good.” And in France, Macron has explicitly vowed to end fossil-fuel use entirely.

    Climate politics in the US will also evolve in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection for president. Republicans will continue to embrace a “drill, baby, drill” climate agenda, denying the danger or sometimes even the reality of climate change while advocating for expanding domestic crude and methane-gas production. They may try to greenwash their policies by claiming they embrace an “all of the above” energy strategy, but this messaging will have limited effects. Due to political polarization the association of Trump with coal, oil, and gas will raise Democratic support for phasing out fossil fuels. Before the 2024 election, 59 percent of Democrats said climate change should be the Federal government’s top priority, but only 48 percent said they supported a phaseout. In 2025 majorities of Democrats will begin to support fossil-fuel phaseout, especially if climate advocates revive science-based climate messaging, continue to emphasize that clean-energy deployment is job creation, and frame choosing to phase out fossil fuels as a form of freedom that upholds our right to a livable future.

    Given that Democrats won many down-ballot races, and cities and states are still pledging to pass climate policies, this shift in the Democratic majority will keep the US on the map in international climate negotiations, whether or not Trump withdraws the US from the Paris Agreement, creating new local alliances with the UK, the EU, and global south nations calling for international fossil-fuel phaseout targets. This bloc can counter the power of petrostates in international climate negotiations. At the very least, the mainstreaming of the language of fossil-fuel phaseout will help undermine the greenwashing strategy of current oil and gas company PR, which falsely advertises industry as pursuing technologies at scale to help “reduce emissions” even as they continue their upstream investments.

    Of course the petrostates, along with India and China, will push back against the rhetoric of fossil fuel phaseout. But India can be helped to turn away from its domestic coal stores by clean-energy financing at close to cost along with the international aid and technology transfers already pledged at previous climate conferences. And although its rhetoric may not align with that of the West, China should not be imagined as opposed to climate action. China has enacted the most comprehensive climate policy on the planet, in service of its goal to peak emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2060. If their climate messaging remains focused on “emissions,” in light of their plan to keep using fossil fuels past 2030, they are preparing for next decade’s pivot away from fossil fuels by building out clean energy at a truly extraordinary rate.

    In 2025 climate discourse will recenter on the message that halting global heating requires the phaseout of coal, oil, and gas. This new consensus will shift the politics of climate change and help motivate an urgent sprint to a clean-energy, ecologically integrated economy—the only economy that ensures a livable future.

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  • The Climate-Driven Diaspora Is Here

    The Climate-Driven Diaspora Is Here

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    Many places are becoming increasingly unlivable. And around one-quarter of humanity is already dealing with drought and associated food insecurity. By 2070, one-fifth of the planet could become too hot for normal human life, causing up to 3.5 billion people to move. Sea level rise alone could displace 410 million people globally by 2100.

    We are poised to see the largest and fastest movement of people in human history. New policy frameworks will be needed. In 2025, we will begin to shift from reactive to proactive, and start to embrace the imperative of climate-driven relocation.

    Unsurprisingly, climate-driven relocation will hit poor communities and communities of color hardest. Those with the fewest resources to adapt, who did the least to cause the climate crisis, will bear the brunt. Think of the 33 million displaced by the floods in Pakistan in 2022, with 9.4 million acres of farmland damaged or destroyed. Think of how the history of racism in America increases climate risks—formerly redlined neighborhoods have 25 percent more homes facing high flood risk. But no person, no place is immune—think of the heat waves in Europe in 2022 that killed more than 61,000, where few people have air conditioning because it was never needed. At the rate humanity continues to spew greenhouse gases, all that could be just a dress rehearsal.

    To date, most climate migration has occurred within nations, but as the regions affected by extreme weather expand, that will need to change. We will have to be vigilant about keeping xenophobia at bay, acknowledging the cruel injustice at play as the lowest greenhouse gas emitting nations, like the Pacific islands, are the first to be inundated.

    Where will people go? How will this be managed? One thing is certain: Ignoring the problem will not make it go away; to the contrary, it will result in chaos. At the international, national, and local levels, we will begin to develop policies to fill the current legislative and regulatory void, like restricting construction of housing in high-risk areas. One example is the State of New Jersey buying out around 200 property owners in Woodbridge Township—one of the areas most affected by flooding from Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012—to ban new construction developments and return the land to nature.

    Other initiatives and policies will involve preparing lower-risk areas to become receiving communities for those who must relocate. In the Pacific, one of the world’s lowest greenhouse emitting regions, whole nations are in danger of being inundated. The nation of Kiribati has already bought land in Fiji as part of their plan to ultimately relocate people as needed due to sea level rise. In 2023, 18 Pacific Island nations endorsed the Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility, which outlines several priorities such as regional collaboration on cross-border relocation to ensure that human rights are being respected, developing guidelines in consultation with relocating communities and coordinating support between countries for cross-border migrants.

    In 2025, at the level of individuals and families, we will see those with means start to relocate proactively. Already, 11 percent of Americans have considered moving to avoid the impacts of global warming, and roughly 75 percent are hesitant to buy homes in areas with high climate risks like wildfires (more than 30 million homes in the lower 48 US states are at risk of being hit with wildfires).

    We will also continue to see the insurance market play a significant role in these shifts, as more and more high-risk places become uninsurable. For instance, in 2023, the National Flood Insurance Program changed its pricing structure for the first time since it was established in 1968. As a result, the average cost of flood insurance has risen in many places—in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, it soared by more than 1,000 percent.

    In 2025, continually rebuilding in the same places after extreme weather events, standard practice to date, will become widely understood as absurd. It’s not that people want to move, to leave the communities and ecosystems they love and call home; it’s that they must. Cultures and diasporas will start shifting to embrace this new reality. Many of them will face a stark question: What does home actually mean in the age of climate breakdown?

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