One of the things that we keep at the forefront of all of our government work is that policy making is about the future. Good policy is an attempt to bring about a particular vision of a particular future. For that reason, its development benefits from a strong, disciplined futures orientation, for instance: a recognition [...]

Futurists rarely talk about the impossible. Indeed, we spend much of our professional lives telling people nothing is impossible. When pushed, we’ll talk about probabilities and improbabilities, but we just can’t commit to impossible. With one exception: it is impossible to know the future. Instead, like quantum physicists, we imagine a cloud of potential futures. [...]

In the last two weeks, although almost assuredly having nothing whatsoever to do with the inauguration of an outspoken sustainability-leaning American president, there has been a raft of new and dire warnings about the state of the climate.  These pronouncements have made liberal use of terms like drastic, catastrophic, catastrophe, radical, severe consequences, imperative, must, [...]