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City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

Big fan of your photos

December 9, 2025 at 1:53 AM

City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

This article led to us developing #PlayEnergetic in 2018, as a way to put the energy problem into people's hands for them to solve themselves.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

But his thinking has been deeply influenced by what might be thought of as the cheap-glasses conundrum: the inadequacy of addressing complex societal issues with technological ingenuity alone. Nowhere is this problem more apparent than with his main preoccupation these days: energy use and global warming. The world’s most urgent environmental need, he has come to believe, is not for some miraculous-seeming scientific breakthrough but for a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior. That conviction makes him doubly unusual: an extraordinarily innovative engineer who is trying to think his way around the limits of innovation.

December 9, 2025 at 12:54 AM

City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

Almost everything you need to know about climate change is in this 2010 New Yorker profile of Saul Griffith:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

The Inventor’s Dilemma

An eco-minded engineer discovers the limits of innovation.

www.newyorker.com

December 9, 2025 at 12:52 AM

Reposted by City Atlas

City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

If we had a billion hardcovers telling personal stories in great detail (everyone's lived experience is specific and real), we could fill Brin's yacht w/them, and he could start at the bow and read his way aft.
Focusing on 1 person b/c the history is easy to track:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested ten million dollars in Makani in 2006 and an additional five million in 2008, making it the company’s biggest financial backer. (Griffith and Don Montague, a professional wind- and kitesurfer, met Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, on a sailboat ride, and have taken them on excursions on a variety of wind-powered vessels of their own design.) Google is interested in energy mainly because the company’s server farms, along with the rest of the Internet, use a huge and rapidly growing amount of power.

December 8, 2025 at 5:34 PM

City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

I have been reading this too. I went back to Die Zeit just to look at the source.
www.zeit.de/2025/41/erde...

We have an educational proposal for NYC in the works & so far my main concern is that ppl's mental model about what needs to be taught is 20 yrs out of date.

"We need a plan to move Hamburg kilometers inland."
German researchers warn that the Earth could be 3 degrees warmer by 2050. That would be worse than expected. Alarmism? No, climate change is entering a new phase.
Interview: Elena Erdmann and Dr.Stefan Schmitt
From DIE ZEIT No. 41/2025
September 25, 2025

December 8, 2025 at 9:05 PM

City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

If we had a billion hardcovers telling personal stories in great detail (everyone's lived experience is specific and real), we could fill Brin's yacht w/them, and he could start at the bow and read his way aft.
Focusing on 1 person b/c the history is easy to track:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

December 8, 2025 at 5:34 PM

City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

It's easier to forget them because we can't see them, and Sergey Brin can't see them either. Our minds don't work that way. But occasionally things break the shell.
Example: what if each of the billion women wrote a book? I'm in a house that has this book on a shelf; Brin might have read it too.

Photo of the cover of a battered hardcover copy of the diary of Anne Frank.

December 8, 2025 at 5:24 PM

City Atlas

@cityatlas.bsky.social

If we take 2 billion at risk as a middle value in the actuarial projection of climate change, then 1 billion women are in that figure.
The Epstein survivor video here estimates 1000 were abused. Then by scale, each of these women stands for a million more from climate impacts.
youtu.be/FEz_Yoa1QCE