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...
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...
January 2019 / If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. — Orson Welles In the world of New York City diesel-based heating oil, the story for No. 6 residual oil came to an end in 2015, while No. 4 oil will be eliminated by 2030. With that looming timetable it is surprising to learn that as many as one-third of all New York buildings are still using No. 4...
August 2017 / In Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan, he described the energy landscape in New York City at that time as follows (and which I have paraphrased) : Frank Algernon Cowperwood does not believe in the people; he does not trust them. To him they constitute no more than a … coal seam which is to be exploited …They present but a mass of bent backs, their knees and faces in the mire...
April 2017 / In this issue I want to turn away from global considerations and start looking closer to home at New York City’s energy infrastructure. I’ve often wondered where the electricity comes from which charges my cellphone. Deep in the recesses of my memory I remember a faint reference in an elementary school class to a power grid covering North America. This grid is relatively...
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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