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13 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The most important thing to know...
Another terribly important thing to know:

Some other really important stuff:

You'll find more here:

alexsteffen.substack.com

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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
14 Dec
New Zealand mandates acceptance of three-story, three-unit townhouses on most lots in its major cities, with six stories around urban transit centers, and no parking requirements.

PwC estimates 105,000 new dwellings in next 8 years.

ht @ewschaetzle
stuff.co.nz/national/polit…
Rapid urbanism is needed almost everywhere, but especially in NZ, which has Bay-Area-level property craziness.

"New Zealand experienced the third-highest property price increase in the world in the past year according to statistics compiled by the IMF..."
stuff.co.nz/business/12716…
Rapid urbanism is the key to deep climate emissions reductions, the smartest means for providing housing justice, and economically critical in regions trying to ruggedize against climate impacts.

It's also eminently achievable, now, almost anywhere.

Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
14 Dec
When it comes to what time it is in this planetary crisis, I can't get this line from 'No Country for Old Men' out of my head:

"You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity." Image
What's coming will not conform to your economic expectations, or respond to your ideological demands, or slow down because you aren't ready.

What's coming is not like anything that came before. Not for a long, long time — if ever.
What's coming is your recognition of what's already happened.
Read 7 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
13 Dec
I am very glad to hear a new urgency in reporting on the planetary crisis.

But if we fail to understand *why* the silence has been so deafening, for so long — and continues still in so many parts of our public debate — we cannot understand what the actual task ahead of us is.
The same predatory delay, denial, downplaying & boundary policing that kept that silence are still at play today, sabotaging plans for action, goalwashing the urgency of crisis & triangulating strategies to deploy incremental changes to protect the unsustainable from real change.
You can't ignore the history and start fresh now. It doesn't work that way.

Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
13 Dec
Taking the planetary crisis seriously:

Retooling our economy for a finite planet is a big and deeply disruptive job.

Learning to live in the irreversible discontinuity we've already created for all humanity is a challenge of a greater magnitude, worsened by conflict and chaos. Image
More on the personal choices we face:

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/ruggedize-yo…
We've failed to prevent a planetary crisis. But failure is not the end of the world. Image
Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
4 Dec
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.
Read 6 tweets
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

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