When We Are with Alex Steffen

You’re probably less doomed than you think.

If you spend much time trying to figure out how to ready yourself for this accelerating climate crisis, you will likely encounter the idea that there’s nothing you can do. Game over, man.

You don’t have to look very far to find people ringing in the apocalypse and inviting you to lie back and greet the collapse. Writing and teaching about climate foresight, solutions-based thinking and personal climate strategies over the years, I’ve had hundreds of people (almost all dudes) go out of their way to t...

Soft denialism is climate denialism that denies not the reality of climate change, but rather its importance.

In this podcast, I touch on the TrumpII-era resurgence of soft denialism, Bill Gates’ misguided climate memo, and the Atlantic’s claim that “climate adaptation is indistinguishable from efforts to improve human welfare.”

Along the way, I explain why failing to understand the climate crisis as a discontinuity in human affairs means failing to understand it at all.

The recently-published 2025 State of the Climate Report: a planet on the brink can be found here.

A news i...

In my last podcast, I laid out why our horizons of concern are so important.

In particular, I talked about how having kids (or grandkids or nieces and nephews, or chosen family, or whatever) makes us care about events that many still consider far off in the future… but that will be within their lifetimes.

Having a longer decision horizon means planning for a wildly different world, and doing our best to set these young people up for success.

But what if you are the young person? What if you’re just getting a st...

In this podcast, I talk about our horizons of concern. I discuss what it means to love kids who will experience the full blast of the climate crisis, decades from now.

When facing threats that are fast-moving and increasingly chaotic, it’s natural to want a simple answer. The more threat and confusion we feel, the simpler the answer we’re likely to seek. Someone is always prepared to provide those simple answers, for profit or political advantage.

We see this in the field of climate foresight, where a wide range of ratings and...

Hey folks,

This is a bit of a longer podcast, where I unpack some of the uncomfortable realities of this present moment in the planetary crisis — and why we need a new approach to solutions thinking and chosen optimism.

Some of the ideas discussed:

* How I’ve been reluctant to engage the more conflict-generating parts of climate foresight in public, but am done being circumspect.

* The violent reaction to knowledge, expertise and authority being recontextualized by discontinuity.

* Moving from a time of climate action as solution to climate action as h...

The Trump gang has continued their chaos attack on America, most recently by gutting the next National Climate Assessment, including dismissing the group of scientists and experts preparing it.

In this podcast, I quickly explain:

* What the NCA is, and why it’s so useful.

* Why clear climate assessments, delivered through transparent processes, are so critical to climate foresight — both in America and around the world.

* What it means for each of us, as individuals, to try to make good future decisions when the best climate foresight is increasingly private, proprietary and...

Notes for this podcast:

“Being too far ahead is the same thing as being wrong.” —James Allworth

If you talk about the future, you risk having a market that's still unprepared to see the value in what you're offering to them. But sometimes what was too far ahead becomes exactly what people now need to know.

We're seeing a sea change in climate foresight. An abrupt collision with reality, that is snapping forward a whole set of conversations about strategy, the future and the perils and opportunities of our moment.

One fundam...

Reminder: My intensive Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins Tuesday. Registration ends tonight at 11:59 pm Pacific time.

Ready to sign up? Click the button below.

Or click this link https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule/21f79c52/?appointmentTypeIds[]=73970428

Recognizing when we are can be a life-changing experience.

In this podcast I explore how, for a growing number of us, it no longer feels enough to simply acknowledge that climate change and the planetary crisis are real, or even to sound the alarm about the magnitude of the problems we face.

...

My intensive Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins next week.

Five, two-hour classes held via Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays (March 11th, 13th, 18th, 20th and 25th). A 90 minute wrap-up Q&A discussion on Thursday, March 27th. Class Times: 11:00am Pacific Standard Time (PST)

Ready to sign up? Click the button below.

Or click this link https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule/21f79c52/?appointmentTypeIds[]=73970428

Friends,

If you feel your compass spinning these days, you are definitely not alone.

The sheer speed of planetary change and the chaos...

In this podcast, I react to the recent New York Times piece How Can I Lower My Climate Risk When Buying a House?

The piece begins by noting the rising concern people have with the growing risks they take on when buying a home:

“A question we get from readers more and more is some version of this: How should the growing risks from climate change affect my decision to buy a house? Or, if I buy a house, where should I buy, and what should I keep in mind?

“It seems especially urge...

Hey folks,

How much will our refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis cost us?

One way to start answering that question is to talk about brittleness.

Brittleness is the quality of being subject to sudden, difficult-to-reverse failures.

Climate brittleness describes brittleness created by the gap between the conditions for which our systems were built, and the different, more-chaotic circumstances of the planetary crisis around us.

Places and systems which are brittle to climate impacts are vulnerable to loss. That vulnerability, in turn, makes them less valuable than they were...

Hey folks—

If you feel, right now, like you are waking up to a magnitude of upheaval you didn’t expect — if you feel really unsure about what it means and what you should do to manage the resulting chaos in your own life — you are not alone.

Working through this sudden collision with planetary reality is work we will all be forced to take up in the next few years.

In this podcast, I unpack discontinuity, and the ways in which it demands new thinking. That need for new thinking can leave us with...

Hey folks—

How do I remain an optimist about the human future, even as the planetary crisis worsens?

A few thoughts.

Alex

PS: A little more to chew on:

* More here on the mythological universal conversion event, and how we might think more clearly about the future.

* Why real optimism springs from grasping what fights are now winnable and why outspoken optimism is actually critical to winning those fights.

* The long-running debate about whether “optimistic” or “resolute” is the right description of this stance, and whether “s...

Hey folks—

We’ve moved from the era when avoiding the planetary crisis was the most pressing mission on Earth, to one where avoiding further catastrophe is now a subset of the challenge of responding to a climate and biosphere now in crisis.

Could there be a better time to have unchecked corruption, reinvigorated predatory delay and a general collapse of competance in Washington, D.C.?

In this impromptu podcast, I talk Trump, the lost Orderly Transition, and why reactive, forced climate response is so costly, unfair, and zero sum. Luckily, reactive, forced clim...

“We know we need to move, but how soon do we need to do it?” is a question I get a lot.

There are no simple answers: every personal climate strategy is a unique set of solutions for a particular set of problems. But some of the key questions we need to ask ourselves are:

* What are we gaining by staying put? Are there future events (e.g., a child’s graduation, retirement, a job promotion) we’re looking to see through before we go?

* What are the costs of climate relocation, and will we...

In this brand new When We Are podcast, I discuss why our concept of “natural disaster” — a sudden and unexpected calamitous natural event bringing great loss from which we then recover and return to normal life — is less and less useful for understanding the world we now live in.

I also briefly discuss the movie Jaws.

Please note that When We Are is now available on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and other platforms, if that’s how you prefer to do your listening.

Please also help me spread the word by sharing, or rating and...

Hey Folks—

This is episode zero of my new casual podcast for subscribers.

Give it a listen to find out more (it’s about 10 minutes long).

Here’s the show description: “The climate crisis is no longer something happening to other people, somewhere else. It's changing all our lives, right now. Few of us are ready. Join renowned climate futurist Alex Steffen and guests as we show the patterns behind the chaos, learn how to build smart climate strategies, and laugh at the absurdity of daily life in discontinuous times.”

If you l...