Mark Mills
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he co-directs an Institute on Manufacturing Science and Innovation. He is also a strategic partner with Cottonwood Venture Partners (an energy-tech venture fund). Previously, Mills cofounded Digital Power Capi ...
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Mark's episode appearances
Episode 166: “The Future of Energy and New Technologies” with Mark Mills
Today’s episode is a treasure trove of important facts that we all should know about technology, society and the future. My guest is once again Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute – who focuses on science, technology, energy, and future manufacturing technologies – and who has just published The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s Conventional wisdom as to how technology will change the future is wrong. And what is quite wrong is the view that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. According to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive a broad economic boom over the coming decade. It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in technology’s three domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. At the center of all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. For an optimistic take on what’s […]
Episode 126: The Unsettling Truth About Green Energy with Mark Mills
In this episode, Mark Mills, Energy & Tech expert at the Manhattan Institute, and I go in-depth about the perils of so-called “green energy.” Case in point: February’s deadly blackout in Texas. Texas, with the most wind farms in the country providing 25% of its energy, learned what happens when the weather gets cold and the wind goes away. Just when you need electricity the most, it’s not there. The National Academy of Sciences has declared the electrical grid the most important invention of the 20th century. But it doesn’t work if it depends on unreliable wind and solar sources. Reliance on green energy “is a really, really bad idea. With it, we are going to switch America’s energy from domestic production to imports. We’re going to switch America’s energy from liquids and gases which are easy to move and cheap to extract, to energy minerals, which are hard to move and energy-intensive to extract,” according to Mark. “We’re going to switch from a small footprint on the planet to a huge footprint on the planet because the land area […]
about Mark
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he co-directs an Institute on Manufacturing Science and Innovation. He is also a strategic partner with Cottonwood Venture Partners (an energy-tech venture fund). Previously, Mills cofounded Digital Power Capital, a boutique venture fund, and was chairman and CTO of ICx Technologies, helping take it public in 2007. Mills is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and is author of Digital Cathedrals(2020) and Work in the Age of Robots (2018). He is also coauthor of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (2005).
His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Real Clear. Mills has appeared as a guest on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2016, Mills was named “Energy Writer of the Year” by the American Energy Society. Earlier, Mills was a technology advisor for Bank of America Securities and coauthor of the Huber-Mills Digital Power Report, a tech investment newsletter. He has testified before Congress and briefed numerous state public-service commissions and legislators.
Mills served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan and subsequently provided science and technology policy counsel to numerous private-sector firms, the Department of Energy, and U.S. research laboratories.
Early in his career, Mills was an experimental physicist and development engineer at Bell Northern Research (Canada’s Bell Labs) and at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Center on microprocessors, fiber optics, missile guidance, earning several patents for his work. He holds a degree in physics from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.