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Alex Steffen Profile picture
Alex Steffen
@AlexSteffen
Climate foresight. I help people and institutions look ahead and plan strategies for thriving in a chaotic future. Free newsletter: https://t.co/wepd2bhQZQ
11 subscribers
Oct 8 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
There won't ever be a better time to get serious about your family's preparations for climate chaos.

This crisis cannot be reversed. No one is coming to make you safe. Life is only going to get harder as the damage grows.

Your future is, like it or not, your responsibility. If you're feeling, "Well, that's not right, that's not how it ought to be!"

I couldn't agree more. Yet, here we are.
Sep 30 • 29 tweets • 6 min read
Climate chaos is coming for us.

Some places face bigger risks than others, but no matter where we live, we're gonna struggle to adapt to events like nothing we've seen before.

I'm a climate futurist.

Let me level with you about what this means.
🧵
(Img:OldMarshallJailHotel) Image I teach classes on building personal climate strategies.

This is my best take on what to watch out for.

But climate science and foresight are complex, tracking fast-moving realities with many uncertainties. Smart people disagree on some key points.
(2/)
medium.com/@AlexSteffen/m…
Aug 22 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Are you a climate voter watching the Harris-Walz campaign and asking WHERE'S THE DAMN CLIMATE?

Quick thread for you on some reasons we're not seeing more, why that may be okay for 2024, and why American politics is totally unready for what comes next.

🧵

(❤️ & 🔃 pls) Image The obvious reason is that Biden just led a massive, ongoing surge in climate action at the Federal level.

The IRA and other provisions were the largest shift forward in US climate policy, ever.

Enough? No. Yet, amazing considering the opposition.
Apr 10 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The Brittleness Bubble is beginning to burst.

"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."

sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/… "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."
Feb 13 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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."

ft.com/content/ed3a1b… "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
Dec 11, 2023 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Everyone knows the world is inevitably shifting away from burning dirty fuels.

Why would oil companies work so hard to delay action — and to triangulate goals (and language) in talks today?

🧵
#cop28
Image 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.
Oct 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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.
I talked about some of this last year in this podcast: Image
Mar 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"[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.

theguardian.com/environment/20… Thread by @KHayhoe unpacking the report's key take-aways.

Mar 7, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Feb 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
How big is the Brittleness Bubble in the U.S., evaluated solely on flood risk?

Between US$121–US$237 billion.

That is a hundred-billion-dollar-plus housing bubble, and flooding is just one of many threats we face.

ht @NatBullard

#brittlenessbubble
axios.com/newsletters/ax… Image The original study:

"Our results underscore the severity of the financial risks to current homeowners and municipalities posed by potentially widespread property price deflation."

nature.com/articles/s4155…
Feb 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Nowhere does fractal inequality in America better display itself at the moment than in the availability of enjoyable and stress-relieving free time.

Having paid vacation, during which you are not expected to be available for work emergencies, is the new year-long sabbatical. The HNW "sabbatical" that actually means "I'm rich enough to not work for a whole year and find the outcome emotionally rejuvenating — while winding up wealthier still, if I've invested sensibly" is a whole new beast.
Feb 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In a growing planetary crisis, the idea that not launching into an extraction project that is short-sighted, destructive and against most people's interest is a "win for environmental groups" seems pretty outdated. We still need new minerals, so we need mines.

But we don't need every mine, much less every mining job.
Jan 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's a topic I find pretty thankless to discuss, but our assumption that disaster response will always be forthcoming, and that recovery and rebuilding are guaranteed, may not last out the decade.

If you want to see the trendline emerge, look at what's happening in PR. More and more places will suffer unofficial abandonment, which is often manifest as incredibly slow (and in the end incomplete) progress towards recovery.

Jan 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The next massive upheaval in real estate investing will stem from the institutional investors' recognition of climate risk (and the follow-on realizations of brittle-asset precarity and supply limitations on climate-strong locations).

axios.com/2022/12/05/cli… Brittleness bubble and ruggedization bottleneck.
Jan 18, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Personal ruggedization folks may recall discussion of SLR pressures on groundwater levels as invisible flood risk.

Here's @RosannaXia explaining the point much better than I did.

latimes.com/environment/st… Groundwater "gets pushed upward as denser water from the ocean moves inland from rising tides. [E]ven before the water breaks the surface, it can seep into the cracks of basements, infiltrate plumbing, or, even more insidiously, re-mobilize toxic chemicals buried underground."
Jan 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Earlier...

"We have to reforge the global economy. We have think in terms not of reforming the fossil-fuel dominated economy we have, but replacing it. That’s a gargantuan task. That said, the timing for an economic revolution has never been better..."

thenearlynow.com/the-smokestack… Now...

"The world is moving into 'a new age of clean technology manufacturing' that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of the decade, generating millions of jobs in the process, according to a new report from the IEA."

cnbc.com/2023/01/12/the…
Jan 12, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
How to change your professional trajectory to do something about the planetary crisis.

A thread. Becoming Imperial Dictator of the Earth offers some solid opportunities to pursue low-carbon economic opportunities, though some will find the hours daunting.
Jan 4, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Hugging your young child while a storm rolls in is one of the most radicalizing experiences there is, in this time of complete leadership collapse.

The red-hot core of climate action is enraged, smart and fierce parents. We should all cheer on the climate-radicalized youth, but it's we parents who will make change happen, or fail.

I need to rewrite this, for parents.

thenearlynow.com/how-to-be-youn…
Nov 30, 2022 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
If universities were run for the benefit of the youngest generation, they'd change their business models (maximizing access to low-cost great education) and instructional priorities (preparing youth to thrive in the planetary crisis they'll spend their whole lives within).

🧵 Lots of people have talked about how the rejectionist approach of elite educational institutions has hurt middle class students, and how loading universities up with amenities, options and trophy professors has contributed to the insane cost of higher education.
Nov 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Lot of recently jobless people with engineering, finance, management and communication skills could not only do good but do *well* in booming climate/sustainability/ruggedization enterprises and efforts.

Helping folks make that pivot seems like a pretty great thing to do. After all,

Nov 7, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
We see a yawning chasm between the language of the demands for the huge scale of action (mitigation, adaptation, response, reparation) needed to move all humanity forward together... and the range of plausible outcomes, even with unprecedented mobilization & cooperation.
#COP27 Image It's almost a kind of theater, except the consequences of failure are not an act.