Panos for Progress: Thoughts and Selections

  The F-150 is the top selling vehicle in the US, with 732,139 units sold in 2024. Paul Krugman: Trump has slapped high tariffs on Canadian aluminum, which is cheap because smelting uses lots of electricity, and Canada has abundant hydropower. Yet Trump somehow thinks Canada is exploiting us by offering us a key industrial input at a good price.” WSJ: Ford’s F-150 trucks, one of the company’s biggest profit generators, are among the most aluminum-intensive vehicles on the market. The company a decade ago converted the trucks to a mostly aluminum exterior, including the hood, doors and truck bed, to save weight and enhance fuel efficiency.

  Back in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council published Global Trends 2025, A Transformed World , a 100 page report translated in several languages an debated in many governmental proceedings and conferences. The report included sections on climate change and sustainability. I presented those in my CEE 444 course on infrastructure sustainability and resilience. I recently stumbled upon this report and took another look at it because it is now 2025. How much did they get right? What did they get wrong? I provide answers for four major areas of the report: geopolitics, energy, climate and destabilizing factors. On the geopolitical front they focused on BRICs… Brazil, Russia, India and China. They expected a bigger role of Brazil. But their contentious politics did not let Brazil shine. They did not expect Russia to become more demographic or technologically important. They got it right, but they did not focus on their cybersecurity advancement and threat. They expected that ca...