JUNE-JULY 2019 / The NYC Council recently passed legislation setting new standards for greenhouse gas emission from buildings. The measure aligns with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. The bill would cut pollution from city buildings by 40% over the next 10 years as part of New York’s overall environmental goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% to...
May 2019 / The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power. — Jamal Khashoggi While America has been a superpower for almost a century, its emergence as a global energy superpower is relatively new. As an illustration, as recently as 2015 it was illegal to export oil. This all changed with the shale boom which...
April 2019 / Ever since a study by the University of Oxford predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 to 20 years, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future of work,” wrote Andres Oppenheimer in his novel, “The Robots Are Coming: The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation.” Sounds all too familiar as we...
March 2019 / The year was 1978 and I was a newly-minted bank lending officer at Irving Trust Company in Manhattan. Fresh out of high school and desperate for any type of recognition, I volunteered to join a small group of adventurers involved in introducing a futures contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange (the Exchange) to local heating oil dealers. For the uninitiated, the Exchange opened...
February 2019 / The center was not holding—it was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes as families routinely disappeared. — Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem Sounds all too familiar as we hurtle past a dysfunctional White House and confront the major new battleground between...
Best-selling financial author, Wall Street investment banker, social commentator, award-winning poet, energy consultant, off-Broadway producer, and community organizer in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Ron Spurga is the ultimate Renaissance Man.
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