The head of the world’s 12th largest oil company has been named to lead the COP28 global climate talks later this year in Dubai. The chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company will lead the summit. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is also the minister for industry and

Over 120 people have been killed after the worst floods in years occurred in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Major roads in Kinshasa were submerged and several homes collapsed. Many of those who died were in hillside areas which suffered landslides on Tuesday.  A three-day period of

A change in the way the cryptocurrency Ethereum works may have cut its power consumption by country-sized amounts. The amount of electricity saved is similar to that used by Ireland or even Austria, work published in the data-science journal Patterns suggests. Bitcoin, the largest crypto, is thought to use more electricity than

Global climate talks are on the final scheduled day of negotiations. Chances of a deal remain unclear. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Egypt was expected to go past the deadline on Friday and into the weekend. Nations have been deadlocked over creating a fund for countries impacted by

This post is a really interesting convergence of a few OODA Loop research vectors: crypto miners, drought/heat wave conditions, energy policy, risk awareness, and decision-making.

To start, the reason Texas ends up in the national headlines (and is tracked as a bellwether during this now consecutive, seemingly now annual record-breaking mid-summer heat waves) is that the state is an example of what statisticians call “extreme sampling”:  the Texas electrical grid “does not connect to other states’ grids, and can’t take power from them in emergencies.  [As a result], during a 2021 winter storm, power demand exceeded supply and over 200 people died.”  Whatever your working definition of operational resiliency may be, the Texas energy ecosystem is not it.

As summer approaches, we return to our OODA Special Report on the business impacts of drought conditions.  Initiated by OODA CTO Bob Gourley is his June 2021 post – How Drought In The US Should Impact Your Mid To Long Range Strategic Planning   – about the unprecedented heatwave in the Pacific Northwest driven by climate change, which focused on the major weather system known as a stationary Heat Dome…making existing drought conditions even worse than they were before.

In 2022, open our aperture globally, to assess how a concern for regional “megadroughts” has now morphed into what has been called “perpetual drought” conditions globally.  We now apply a global filter to our research, analysis, and scenario planning.  Specifically, Step 2 of the scenario planning process is an effort to explore the external environment for patterns and trends since our assessment last year.

Scalability is one of the main hindrances within decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and has created huge barriers to entry. Closely linked to this has been the issue of high gas fees, which continues to be a major pain point for newcomers to the Web3 space. When Web3 goes mainstream, these

Climate change and the insecurity it stimulates have the potential to amplify existing conflicts, trigger conflicts over scarce resources, and trigger forced migration (refugees and internally displaced persons or IDPs) now and in the future. Climate conflicts converge with transnational criminal activity (cartels and gangs) and exacerbate violence against persons in fragile communities. These convergences have reduced the availability of areas that are safe for displaced persons, increased resource stresses, displaced additional populations, and made it harder for migrants to seek refuge in countries like the United States or nations in Europe. In this climate security context, what is intelligence and what is humanitarian intelligence?

The United Arab Emirates has been selected to host the COP28 international climate conference in 2023 according to the ruler of Dubai. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum also serves as the prime minister of the UAE and vowed to make the conference a success and stated the UAE is committed

After two weeks of talks, a draft agreement at the COP26 climate summit has softened commitments to ended coal and other fossil fuels. The language around the use of fossil fuels has been softened, however the inclusion of the section in the agreement would be a landmark moment. A deal