2026

A Call to Action for Business Next week is Climate Week here in New York, and I expect many CEOs to hit town. But it won’t just be business as usual. As the data center war wages and AI warnings become truly terrifying (we should pay attention when they use the word “existential”), I predict […]

Wit, Range, and Nerve Work We love the new book Trudeau & Doonesbury – A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art. Trudeau of course created Doonesbury, the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic that has been running since 1970 and syndicated in more than 1400 newspapers worldwide. Doonesbury tracked the lives of a recurring cast

Big tech’s reckoning with data center opposition We offer a lot of advice here at The Instigator. And it’s always refreshing when we see readers take it. After all, we think our planet depends on it. So I was especially pleased to read that Mark Zuckerberg is taking Meta down the path we laid out

A Conversation with Wayne Pacelle Allow me to introduce you to a good friend of mine. Wayne Pacelle is the former (and longtime) leader of The Humane Society of the United States, the current president of the Center for a Humane Economy, and proof positive that strategic advocacy can achieve great outcomes—including persuading some of

Smoke, Fire, and Who Actually Owns This Problem The haze that’s been sitting over half the country this week isn’t an accident, and it isn’t Canada’s fault for neglecting yard work. Nearly 900 wildfires are burning across Canada right now and have already scorched roughly 11,000 square miles—an area slightly bigger than Massachusetts. The smoke

How to Scale Investments in Nature This is one of the fundamental questions right now: How do we scale investments in nature? And after 24 years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a decade-plus running The Nature Conservancy, I keep coming back to the same answer: Start by keeping it simple. Eric Wilburn

Drayton and Mackenzie gets the clean tech grind right Every so often, we like to take a close look at literature here at The Instigator. You can see some of our recommendations here, here, here, here, and here. (And please do send us yours!) While we pride ourselves on being generally well-read, we’re particularly into climate fiction. The best of the

Why Eugene Kirpichov believes mobilizing human talent is the key to solving climate change At 250, America still gives us much to stand in awe of. Despite our problems (and we know there are many), this is still the land of opportunity. The spirit of entrepreneurship that fuels this country is alive and well, both

Clean Speed Has Come a Long Way I’ve been driving an EV for years now, but I haven’t had much luck converting even my most climate-conscious friends. I find myself repeating the same arguments: EVs are quieter, faster off the mark, cheaper to maintain, and if I’m honest, just more fun to drive. You’d also

How Washington is Undermining Markets, Clean Energy, and Public Health US climate and energy policy has entered a strange new phase. Instead of letting markets drive a cheaper, cleaner energy transition, the federal government is now spending public money to keep old fossil assets alive. . . and to slow their replacement by cleaner alternatives.