Mark Rutte, former Dutch Prime Minister and current NATO secretary general, made headlines during the June 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, when he made a quip comparing international conflicts to unruly children, saying:
“Daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get them to stop.”
He was referring to United States President Donald Trump’s blunt remarks about Israel and Iran, likening them to kids in a schoolyard fight. Rutte later claimed that he was not...
Today, in the final article of this series, let’s look at resources above ground. Although of course we need air to breathe, it is everywhere – so not a resource requiring specific efforts to access. We focus the discussion instead on energy resources above ground – wind and solar power. Then we will finish by revisiting the big picture on natural resources.
The early days
Before the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of coal, humanity got...
In the previous two articles in this series on the importance of natural resources (Part 1 – subsurface energy resources, Part 2 – other subsurface resources), we focused on resources buried deep – hundreds of metres or more – underground. So when we talk about surface resources, I want to include things that are easily accessed from the surface. Some, such as sand and gravel, require a bit of digging or quarrying. Potable (fresh)...
When ChatGPT creates your next dinner party menu or Claude develops a marketing plan for your business, there is a single mathematical mechanism working behind the scenes that determines every recommendation, every strategic insight, and every apparent moment of "understanding”. It is called the attention mechanism, and despite its fundamental importance to modern AI, most people – including many business leaders making multimillion-dollar AI investments – have no idea how it actually works.
This is...
In the first article in this series, I divided natural resources into four categories:
Subsurface energy resources – oil, natural gas, coal, radioactive energy minerals and geothermal heat
Other subsurface resources – minerals (critical and non-critical)
Water and land resources – oceans, lakes, and land
Resources above ground – solar and wind energy
Having examined the first group to start the week (Part 1 – subsurface energy resources), my focus shifts to #2: other...
New advancements in artificial intelligence have a lot of us asking the question: “Can computers think?” I think the answer is currently no, though they might achieve this at some point in the distant future.
Meanwhile, humans have achieved a state that I will call the “beehive brain”, where the written thoughts of all of humanity can be quickly assimilated and analyzed, producing a result that looks very much like thinking.
The big difference between a...
Humanity distinguishes itself from other species by intellect, innovation, and technology – but we cannot survive and thrive on brainpower alone. We need natural resources to translate our ideas to products that benefit humanity.
To help understand the wide variety of natural resources and their associated issues, benefits, and challenges, I am considering them in four categories:
Subsurface energy resources – oil, natural gas, coal, radioactive energy minerals, and geothermal heat
Other subsurface resources...
We have all read articles from enthusiastic environmentalists and climate-conscious political leaders promoting vastly increased hydrogen use. They claim that more hydrogen production and consumption – especially green hydrogen – is essential in order to reduce fossil fuel consumption, advancing the energy transition to net zero and addressing climate change.
Is hydrogen, grey or green, a technically and economically feasible replacement for fossil fuels such as gasoline and natural gas? How much of what we...
The $63-million prediction machine
Today's artificial intelligence has reached an inflection point that few truly understand. When ChatGPT writes a poem, Claude solves a complex problem, or GPT-4 appears to reason through scientific questions, it feels like we have crossed into genuine machine intelligence. The responses are coherent, contextual, and often brilliant enough to fool experts in specialized fields.
But here is what the tech companies do not want you to fully grasp: these systems do...
Humanity is in the midst of profound change, transition and crisis. Not really news, you might say; this has been the case for Homo sapiens ever since they appeared on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the pace and magnitude of our transitions and crises have greatly increased with more than 8 billion people alive today, all of them striving to live comfortable, energy-intensive modern lifestyles.
Rapidly advancing technologies supported by cheap and...
