Negative stories:

• MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
• Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
• We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
• There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
• Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
• There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
• Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
• Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

• Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
• I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
• May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
• Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
• Painless vaccines may be on the way.
• The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
• Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
• The UK may have hit “peak car“.
• Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.