Alex Steffen Profile picture
Writer, climate futurist: Sustainability, ruggedization and foresight. @alexsteffen on most platforms newsletter: THE SNAP FORWARD https://t.co/wepd2bhQZQ
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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.
Oct 29, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Why Bret Stephen's climate "conversion" is nonsense: his shifting from a dishonest denialism to a self-serving faux moderation is of no benefit to anyone, except Bret Stephens. This kind of "moderation" is, in fact, just a softer, slightly more sophisticated denialism.

Oct 28, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
Fracking hell, that Bret Stephens piece is just as bad as everyone's been saying... Image Fold a bit of wit into it and the whole thing would become indistinguishable from farce.
Oct 2, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
In a worsening planetary crisis, the claim that because no place is *completely* safe from (climate-intensified) risks, every place (no matter how great the risks it faces) is worthy of huge public investments in rebuilding and future protection is either uninformed or predatory. "No place is completely safe, so we shouldn't judge people's choices about where to build and how"

combined with

"we must make every loss whole"

is brittleness denialism.
Oct 1, 2022 9 tweets 2 min read
I worry that a political system incapable of letting investors lose when their climate-impacted investments fail will grow more rapidly brittle than it would have otherwise. "One thing I've learned in my years of whining about Florida’s unsustainable trajectory in the climate era is that most Floridians don’t care."

But, since it's your money they're spending to grow, rebuild, and eventually buy-out and bulldoze, you should.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Sep 19, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
On the need to grapple with the sheer scale of the ruggedization challenges facing us now:

"The more the government shelters people from the true and increasing cost of the choices they make in the face of global warming, the bigger the eventual bill."

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… tl;dr: steepening costs add the brittleness "find out" to the climate triangulation "fuck around."