The politics of tempo, foreign policy edition.

82% of Dems consider climate change a critical threat to the U.S. over the next ten years; only 16% of GOP does.

53% of Americans, overall.

thechicagocouncil.org/sites/default/…
This is what 50 years of predatory delay can buy you: half of all Americans refuse to even recognize the greatest threat the nation faces.
Hat tip to @politico's The Long Game newsletter.
I wonder how many conservatives are exploring climate strategy on the DL. Like are there secret clubs in DC where flag-pin dudes huddle by the bar and whisper about climate sensitivity, replacement-cost solar, non-rare-earth batteries, and ruggedizing for complex threshold risks?
Meanwhile, across the pond,

"Climate change is now the most important issue, according to the British public..."

newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-d…

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More from @AlexSteffen

20 Nov
You should immediately mistrust any linear projection of positive climate impact, such as "Alaskan agriculture will benefit from warming temperatures."

(mini-rant)

[image:flickr.com/photos/baggis/…] Image
First, tho models are improving, there's always the chance that specific, long-term local impacts may work out differently than expected, for complex reasons.

"Our model indicates temperatures will rise" is different that knowing, for sure, that temperatures will rise steadily.
Second, variability is at least as important as trend. If nine years out of ten there are warmer conditions, but the other year there are unprecedented and catastrophic floods, the net result is not a gain for farmers.
Read 9 tweets
20 Nov
This is a fine piece of climate journalism, focusing on efforts to hoard the future by buying up supplies of cobalt, a mineral critical for making a number of low-carbon technologies.

Geopolitics in the planetary crisis.

nytimes.com/2021/11/20/wor…
I discuss these sorts of geopolitical changes in this podcast.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-planetar…
Amos Hochstein, State Department senior adviser for global energy security, calls access to solar panels & EV batteries "a national security imperative."
Read 4 tweets
19 Nov
There is no issue in American political life that comes close in magnitude and seriousness to this reality, that we have moved into a change of era.

Such a total collapse of leadership—that we effectively have no public discourse about the reality in which we now find ourselves.
It can make a fella tired.
Read 4 tweets
18 Nov
We're on our own, guys.

No one's coming to save us.

This isn't going to be "made right."

Personal ruggedization is no longer an idle consideration.

Indeed, there are reasons to believe it should be a primary concern for every family.

My next letter is about this clusterf***.
Right now, we see a real appetite for what I call safe utopias — fantasies where the planetary crisis is so successfully addressed that continuity is restored, and zero-sum conflicts over the pace of change become irrelevant.
But this is no utopia, and nothing about this situation is safe.

Imagination is powerful, and necessary, but imagining possibilities arising from a world where we aren't, and then treating our visions as anticipations of our options in this actual world is dangerous and deluded.
Read 6 tweets
16 Nov
We are surrounded by failure.

The climate mov't should be having a scathing self-examination about whether the strategic assumptions, organizational cultures and ideological assertions guiding climate activism work — or are part of the problem.

I see 0% chance that will happen.
We'll see how many people have the courage to even retweet this idea.
I'm hearing/seeing/reading so many urgent demands that the climate movement be exactly what it's always been, but more so!

It's like the old generals saying, after the Somme—after a million dead—that all we need is the right *kind* of frontal assault, with the proper spirit...
Read 5 tweets
15 Nov
In foresight circles, there is much discussion of general-purpose technologies.

These are techs that change everything: Printing, steam, computation.

Much effort is spent anticipating what's next.

I think, tho, that the planetary discontinuity is what will next fill that role. Image
It's orthogonal, uncomfortable to imagine.

We like to think of game-changers as being either events in the world that happen to us, or technologies we create that let to change the world.

The idea shifts in our physical relationship to the world can have similar impacts is new.
But the physical world is not just the environment in which our actions play out, it is deeply interconnected with every action we can or could take.

A physical-world discontinuity of this magnitude, then, is also a massive social, cultural and technological discontinuity...
Read 6 tweets

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