My work explores how natural & human systems are changing each other, and what those changes mean for us.
Every few years I share some key trends I see emerging—ones big enough to alter our lives & fast enough to matter now.
So, what's next?
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I find the biggest change around us is just how fast our understanding of the climate emergency* itself is evolving.
Climate foresight, strategy, policy and politics are all in upheaval.
[*used here to mess the whole interconnected jackpot of climate+ ecological crises]
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I spent the last couple years writing a forthcoming book, The Snap Forward.
I came it to with years of experience in climate, sustainability & futurism.
But as I dove in, I realized how many of the assumptions we've treated as given are in fact wrong—with huge implications.
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One of our biggest assumptions is that the climate emergency is an issue. It's not, it's an era
Climate is redefining every aspect of society, already—and we're only at the beginning.
The extent this surprises us is a measurement of how little we yet grasp what's happening.
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We face the jarring realization that almost none of us—even those who work on these issues every day—have taken the climate emergency *seriously enough*.
Oh, there are plenty of dire predictions and stern warnings...
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and we should heed the warnings.
But the real bombshell is that changes in human systems are coming bigger and faster than direct climate impacts are unfolding.
Climate change will become cataclysmic to our certainties long before it becomes cataclysmic to our civilization.
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I should probably mention that this is what I do for a living.
If these questions are professionally urgent for you, I’m available to consult on strategy and foresight.
Here’s the link if you want to book a call with me.
Some of the biggest shifts are the reactions institutions, investors and governments are having to the revelation that massive climate action is now inevitable.
The question is no longer whether we’re going to act, but when?
And to who’s advantage?
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It is the magnitude of the climate-driven economic, institutional and political crisis around us that makes action inevitable.
We shouldn’t find the reality that action is now inevitable comforting.
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The predatory delay that has stalled action for the last four decades has simultaneously meant that we are surrounded not only by market (and policy) failures but by financial bubbles.
Everything that is unsolvably unsustainable is a bubble.
It will pop.
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Change will come not because we become better people, but because power is shifting.
Most of us (and most powerful interest groups/ institutions) stand to gain far more from action than we do from delay—and many stand to lose everything if the emergency is allowed to worsen.
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Damages already locked in are more costly and dangerous than most people yet understand; with delay, risks grow in non-linear, mutually reinforcing ways; and our ability to predict how the world will work is deteriorating, with profound implications for decision-making.
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Over just the next few years, we're going to see these costs, risks and uncertainties play out in three kinds of ways:
Carbon Bubbles
Brittleness Bubbles
and
Expertise Bubbles
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Carbon bubbles stem from overvaluations of fossil fuel companies, high-carbon industries, and other unsustainable practices.
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They're overvalued because of the gap between the bright futures investors currently see for these industries and the reality that any real climate action will mean many fossil fuels will be unburnable and many of these practices will be made obsolete.
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The result will be what analysts blandly term "rapid repricing," but the rest of us would call a crash.
Here it's critical to remember that almost all financial decisions—investment, credit, insurance, subsidies—are bets about the future.
While they may be bets about the future, they take place now.
Foreseeable future losses become present trouble.
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Which brings us to brittleness bubbles.
Brittleness is the quality of breaking suddenly and catastrophically. Think of a bridge collapsing.
A key fact of the climate emergency that still hasn't sunk in is that the hotter it gets, the more places and systems become brittle.
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We really don't see how climate brittle many of these places & systems already are—and how brittleness stretches out in networks, putting places at risk that are far from the direct impacts of the rising seas, monster storms & megafires causing brittle systems to collapse.
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Remember those decision-makers placing their future bets?
Long before a foreseeable risk hits, those bettors demand better odds.
If the odds can't be made good enough, they bet elsewhere.
Brittle turns into uninsurable, unbankable, uninvestable & politically friendless.
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Many of brittle places and systems are still treated as quite valuable.
But as the magnitude of the risks become apparent, we're going to see more of those rapid repricings, more bubbles popping.
The long-delayed need for bold climate action & ruggedization doesn't just mean that unsustainable & untenable assets are precariously overpriced.
It also means that much of the expertise acquired in building these unsustainable and untenable things is no longer relevant.
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That's because the world we've started to build—and that is very likely to turn into a giant building boom—is not the world we're used to thinking of as normal, but with some sustainability solutions bolted on to it and a fresh coat of green paint.
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Real climate action and ruggedization are disruptive.
In a huge number of fields, the new doesn't adapt the old to the climate emergency, it replaces it.
For instance, clean energy isn't just the oil industry but with wind turbines. It's a different industry, entirely.
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Millions of people have expertise grounded entirely in the systems being replaced.
As disruption happens, that expertise loses value, fast—and no one wants to be on the receiving end of a "rapid repricing" in their career.
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Paradoxically, this expertise bubble extends to many climate & sustainability professionals—especially folks who've built careers helping their employers reduce environmental impacts a bit in order to exhibit institutional responsibility (and get some good press).
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The responsibilities institutions have for their impacts in the world are becoming less central than the risks change poses to that institution—which in turn are less critical than grasping the fast-changing strategic landscape in which it operates.
Very different jobs.
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The largest sea change in climate strategy, though, is that some folks are beginning to grasp that the opportunities to be found in meeting the climate emergency are not only much larger than our public debate is ready to acknowledge, but different in both nature and speed.
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These opportunities will have massive impacts before they've even hit scale.
Again, bets about the future, and the smart bet is increasingly on discontinuous acceleration towards these opportunities.
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I have more to say on all this (and have writtn much more about all this in The Snap Forward), but I'll have to come back to it another time.
In the meantime, if exploring these questions is vital to your work, I am available for strategy and foresight consultations:
"Starting this summer, 30,000 California policyholders will be told they are being dropped by California’s largest home insurer... as turmoil in California’s insurance industry continues."
"Since 2019, a California state law has protected homeowners affected by wildfires from being immediately non-renewed by their insurance companies. But the moratorium lasts for only a year after a declaration of emergency... So communities hit by fires from 2019 through 2022 are now vulnerable to nonrenewals due to their wildfire risk."
A huge number of homes and businesses (indeed, whole towns) are about to take serious hits to their value, as major risks begin to be more accurately priced into insurance and finance.
Long-running catastrophic failures of policy and planning.
Twenty years ago, the idea that the world was becoming uninsurable was one of our big themes on Worldchanging — and one of the major reasons I began talking about a "brittleness bubble."
Today, we find ourselves in "the uninsurable world."
"If yearly losses stick above the $100bn level, and firms are forced into further price rises and pullbacks to protect their balance sheets... there will be growing 'patches' where buying insurance is uneconomical, Swiss Re has predicted."
H/t @AssaadRazzouk
(The brittleness bubble describes all the assets that are overpriced for the world we live in, now, given their exposure to risk.)
They're fighting so hard because it isn't just their far future profits that are at stake, but their political power & financial clout in the near term.
Making fossil fuels look "too big to fail" is the central pillar of their political strategies of predatory delay.
In "Is the unsustainable too big to fail?" I made the point that civic sabotage — the overt weakening of policy and diplomacy meant to tackle climate change — produces not only useful delays but also *more confidence in the durability of unsustainable and untenable systems*.
Climate response — readying systems/ places for compound impacts; overcoming risk acceleration and disinvestment; creating platforms for building sustainable wealth; using resulting resources to increase societal returns on further ruggedization — will end up defining the next few decades more than mitigation.
"[E]very year in which emissions continue to rise eats up the available “carbon budget” and means much more drastic cuts will be needed in future years."
The longer we delay, the more likely a scenario of severe warming AND disruptive action becomes.
We should talk more about one injustice inherent in timid climate response: not only have poor people been economically forced into more dangerous places, but also many of those places are likely impossible to save in any realistic way as impacts worsen over coming decades.
I mean, we should be talking a lot more about just how many places around the world are likely to fail as they experience the steepening of losses from combined climate/ecological discontinuities, geopolitical upheaval and structurally inadequate adaptation.