Economy

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    The Leapfrog Advantage: How AI Skill Development Lets Rural Communities Skip the Line

    ByElmer Hall

    Balanced Economic Development series — Part 2 of 3. How can an Economic Development Commission turn investment into lasting local prosperity while protecting quality of life and the community’s ability to shape its own future?Part 1: Beyond the Build-Out Trap · Part 2: The Leapfrog Advantage · Part 3: Megaprojects and the Vanishing Public Hearing…

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    Bridging the Discussion Divide with GenAI

    ByElmer Hall

    Ray had known Dana for 19 years, since their daughters learned to ride bikes in his cul-de-sac. On the last Saturday in June they stood in his driveway and agreed, without hesitation, on a single proposition: only American citizens should vote in American elections. 90 seconds later, Dana was walking to her car. What happened…

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    The Food-Energy-Water-Compute Nexus: Adding the Fourth Letter

    ByPiAdmin

    The water board meeting ran late on a Tuesday in October. The applicant was identified only as Project Trillium, a code name pending NDA. The slide deck showed a 250-acre footprint twelve miles north of town, a substation that would double the county’s transmission capacity, and a request that read like a typo: 14 million…

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    The Three-Year Window: Powering AI Without Locking In Gas

    ByPiAdmin

    The decision was made on a Tuesday at four in the afternoon, in a conference room on the forty-second floor of a glass tower in San Francisco. The young analyst had laid two binders on the long table. One was three inches thick, labeled SOLAR + STORAGE. The other was less than half an inch,…

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    The Price-Setter: Why Blocking Clean Energy Raises Everyone’s Bill

    ByPiAdmin

    The staff economist at the state Public Service Commission had been staring at the same spreadsheet for forty minutes. It was a Thursday in late February, the heat in the building was set too low for the season, and her office still smelled faintly of the coffee she had spilled on Monday. The spreadsheet was…

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    El Niño to La Niña: Two Climate Years That Could Reshape Weather Risk in Florida, the U.S., and the World

    ByElmer Hall

    El Niño La Niña: From record heat to hurricane season, snowpack, drought, floods, food systems, and strategic planning March 2026 was not a subtle warning. It was a flashing red light. Across the contiguous United States, March 2026 ranked as the warmest March in the 132-year U.S. record, with an average temperature 9.35°F above average….