Newgeography.com

by Joel Kotkin 12/31/2025 Dear Readers: After 17 years we are closing New Geography.com. You'll now find Joel Kotkin's articles on his new Substack page, jkotkin.substack.com, which will also feature articles from past NG contributors. We owe much to those who kept the site together over the years, including Alex Lotz, Alicia Kurimska, Zina Klapper, Rhonda Howard, among others. And of course we owe most to you, our readers, who have followed us over the past 17 years.

by Paul Driessen 12/30/2025 Energy analyst Robert Bryce maintains a database showing that, as of November 2025, local communities have rejected or restricted 595 wind, 475 solar and (more recently) 72 large-scale battery projects.

The United Nations graph is an image worth 1,000 words as virtually no further explanation is needed as the world’s population explosion occurred after we discovered ways to process that black tar, i.e., crude oil, through refineries into various oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products, and transportation fuels, to support the publics’ demands for those products, which is the one of the main reason we continue to explore for that black tar.

Discovered by chance at a photo book fair, Peter Mitchell’s photographs of Leeds capture a civic world that assumed legibility, continuity, and shared meaning - before cities became abstract, branded, and hollowed out. The cover of Peter Mitchell’s Strangely Familiar tells you almost everything you need to know - if you know how to look. A tiny newsagent’s shop stands alone on muddy ground on the outskirts of Leeds. The sign reads, READ THE NEWS OF THE WORLD. BEST FOR NEWS & SPORT.

by Randal OToole 12/26/2025 Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted by people or other things on either side of them. Too many people who work on energy and greenhouse gases put on similar blinders that lead them to ignore many other social problems and goals. A case in point is a recent study that found that people all over the world travel for about 1.3 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, per day.

Last Monday I wrote a piece that lamented the state of policy movement on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in America. Here’s my followup to that. First, here’s a quick summary of that article. Over the last ten years or so, DEI saw a rise in national coverage and discourse nationally that peaked in 2020, in the aftermath of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests during the Covid pandemic.

by Joel Kotkin 12/23/2025 Conservatives have rightly denounced the extremist tendency among young progressives, but there’s a similar problem now evident on the Right. A new Manhattan Institute study of Generation-Z Republicans confirms this problem, with some embracing conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, that were once the domain of the conservative lunatic fringe. The think tank put together a group of 20 young conservatives, mostly supporters of Trump.

by Joel Kotkin 12/22/2025 ‘For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small formerly. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in one stay.’ So wrote Herodotus in his Histories, in the fifth century BC. He reminds us that world history is not a morality tale between the ‘powerful’ and their victims. Rather, societies evolve, grow stronger and overcome weaker ones.

by Samuel J Abrams 12/21/2025 Public universities are facing a crisis of confidence. Trust in higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade, driven by rising costs, ideological imbalance, and repeated assurances from campus leaders that Americans should simply ‘trust us’ about what happens in the classroom. Gallup reports that only about four in ten Americans now have high confidence in higher education—a steep decline that helps explain rising demands for transparency.

Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example. This is all the more remarkable since Prime Minister Mark Carney, was once a leading voice against fossil fuels; as head of the Bank of England, he led the charge for banks to bankroll the much-ballyhooed transition to renewables.