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Alex Steffen Profile picture
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4 Dec, 6 tweets, 2 min read
I fear that a people who can't rally together to do something as simple as vaccinate to end a pandemic has no chance of making community-led climate response — which demands far greater levels of agreement on evidence and trust in the public good — work.

nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opi…
This is not a map of a nation ready to meet a crisis in which understanding of science, acceptance of greatest-good politics and a basic trust in government are necessary for action at the speed demanded.
You'll notice some overlaps.

Places that are extremely vulnerable and without much economic value are very unlikely to get the resources needed to ruggedize. Places like that where people can't agree on how to work together have no chance, I'm afraid.
The scale of the changes needed to succeed in the face of this crisis are impossible to implement where the risks are high and the sense of civitas is weak.

Many places will not succeed.

To be clear, I'm actually pretty bullish on emissions reductions.

Indeed, I think much faster action on clean energy, electrification, methane & efficiency is inevitable.

But climate *action* in that sense is much easier than the larger, thornier problems of climate *response*.
More about that distinction and the various kinds of challenges our planetary discontinuity brings in this supporters-only podcast.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/looking-up-t…

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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
3 Dec
There are three major problems with the way the equity debate has been framed.

1. Scale: "almost $50 billion" spent over years is almost nothing compared to the scale of immediate needs.

2. Realism ⬇️

nytimes.com/2021/12/03/cli…
2. Realism: We've waited too long to save everything—and costs are rising fast. Even with a lot more public funds to work with, choice will have be made and some sort of cost-benefit analysis has to be used.

The clearest way is calculating dollar or value saved per dollar spent.
3. Triage. Even if we allocate money equally per capita, though, we're just piling it in a heap and burning it if we aren't making the hard choices we actually face. We have to have some sort of approach to managing retreat, and if we're wide it'll be decisive and fast-moving.
Read 7 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
3 Dec
Billions of us are about to go thru a fierce shock of temporal dislocation — of waking up to realize we've been swept up in a vast, heartless discontinuity, one that has been accelerating for years, one we've either ignored or imagined happening sometime in someone else's future.
The cultural, political and psychological impacts of this dislocation are beyond calculation.

I've spent a lot of time studying history, in graduate school and since. I believe there is no analog.

I find that deeply concerning.

I find our unreadiness for it totally terrifying.
I wish it were clearer to me where and how the practices of desperate societal-scale triage and of loving kindness meet.
Read 8 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
2 Dec
Folks really don't get the scale of change that is now arriving.

So many powerful interests have a stake in minimizing the urgency/downplaying the scale of discontinuity.

So many people find it easier to denounce the idea of discontinuity than face failed cultural assumptions.
Here in the U.S., almost no part of our debate is fully engaged with the realities of inexorable, discontinuous change—or the disruptiveness of the actions that have now become inevitable.

But we've got lots of predatory delay, downplaying, goalwashing & triangulation.
A major symptom:

How much concern there is for protecting people from the costs of action and how little there is for protecting them from the staggeringly larger harms of inaction.

Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
2 Dec
This @kimmelman story is a must-read.

"A process of participatory planning, rightly evolved to represent interests other than government technocrats and wealthy developers, has also created a culture of Nimby-ism that thwarts even modest proposals."

nytimes.com/2021/12/02/us/…
"Our conversations seem increasingly cramped, mean and small. Is our society just too frayed to come together around basic material needs?"
In an age of growing and combining climate, ecological and economic risks, the inability to most fast and build big is effectively the same thing as an inability to act at all.

Process designed for once-good reasons becomes a massive vulnerability in its own right.
Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
30 Nov
This new piece has gotten more reads in its first day than anything else I've written since this newsletter launched.

Here's what you need to know.

(Thread)

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/ruggedize-yo…
“When it comes to the planetary crisis, the most important question you can ask yourself is 'Where?'”

That's because climate chaos and ecological collapse are hitting differently in different places, and some places are better positioned to weather the storm than others. Image
"We must begin by understanding the nature of the crisis."

We've entered a crisis so large and complex that it is no longer an issue, but an era. It is a discontinuity with everything we're used to thinking of as normal.

Most of us are still catching up.
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…
Read 21 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
26 Nov
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.
Read 5 tweets

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