2026

Google’s Water Pledge A typical mid‑sized data center uses something like 300,000 gallons of water a day. That’s roughly equivalent to the amount used by 1,000 U.S. households. And large facilities—the kind we are told will be built in significant numbers—can use millions of gallons per day. AI is already the most rapidly adopted general-purpose […]

We can’t let the Colorado River run dry When I worked at The Nature Conservancy, the Colorado River was always on our radar. It’s a marvel of engineering and ecology—a key artery that feeds cities, farms, and canyons across seven states and two countries. At the time, we watched with real concern as the river

Commit to the Next Generations Al Gore is not the only one with an inconvenient truth. Jodi Kantor’s piece in The New York Times last weekend put one right in the title: This is a hard time to start a career. In our realm, we are fortunate to have so many young people who are eager to roll up their

Reclaiming What Matters in The Age of Distraction What is the value of your attention? I just wrapped up a week of business travel in Japan. Jet lag was having an impact, and I was also distracted by some personal challenges. Then I found myself checking news updates on my phone much more than usual

A Wake-Up Call for the Nonprofit Sector Editor’s Note: We are coming to you with a special off-schedule edition of The Instigator in order to respond in a timely manner to Sunday’s New York Times article on The Giving Pledge. Let us know what you think! The New York Times ran a piece yesterday that should stop every

A: Decarbonization Let me start with an important caveat. I have serious reservations about the wisdom of this war of choice. I wish it had never started, and I’m not going to try to adjudicate the geopolitics or the conduct of the conflict here. Others are doing that in real time, and they’re more qualified

Fighting for the Facts “We aren’t just fighting climate change anymore — we’re fighting for the right to use facts to solve it.” Editor’s Note: Every so often, a piece of science writing lands with the clarity of a warning bell that reverberates in your mind. The publication of Robert McDonald and colleagues’ new study

Which hard decisions are you willing to make? As you’ve probably seen, the Trump administration just took its most damaging climate step yet by scrapping the EPA’s endangerment finding—the scientific and legal backbone for regulating greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. It’s a move that doesn’t just weaken specific rules; it tries to erase the underlying

Get to Know Bruce Friedrich Can we fix our environmental problems by persuading people to eat lentils instead of burgers? Bruce Friedrich doesn’t think so. Global demand for meat and seafood is enormous, and it’s projected to keep rising for decades to come. But our current industrial meat system is a major driver of climate

Will Business and NGO Leaders Step Up to the Opportunity? AI’s newfound omnipresence can lend it a deceptively light feel. You power on a laptop or phone and there it is, accompanying you wherever your work or pleasure may take you. But there is a big, concrete side to all that cloud computing: the data