July 21st, 2026 • Chicago, IL
This event convenes philanthropists and investors with industry and academic subject matter experts to discuss important energy-related geopolitical and technological factors shaping the economy today.
Today’s landscape for energy and a low-carbon transition is being shaped by two major factors: geopolitical and technological. The geopolitical conflicts include the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. attacks on Iran affecting energy and other flows through the Strait of Hormuz. The technological changes derive from both energy use via data centers for artificial intelligence and energy production via both fossil fuel and low-carbon technologies. To date, the global economy has only added new energy generation technologies and resources while expanding existing technologies. This energy addition has translated to continuously increasing carbon emissions. On the other hand, renewable energy and battery costs have declined rapidly, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates the vast majority of peer-reviewed articles suggest that reaching a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy within the next 30-50 years poses only a minor cost to the economy.
Given these observations, and with almost all countries currently signed onto the UN Paris Agreement, why aren’t economies decarbonizing?
A critical part of the answer to this question involves a critical blind spot in the global climate response: the need for more fit-for-purpose macroeconomic models to better explain and navigate the dynamic impacts from a low-carbon energy transition. To understand these dynamics, macroeconomic models must better link materials, energy use, and efficiency constraints in the context of technological change and GDP to assess the long-term consequences of decarbonization. Data center expansion exhibits and example of the same dynamics and constraints as it commands increasing shares of economic resources and electricity generation becomes the bottleneck for AI development.