Alex Steffen

Will your next home be a climate lemon? Efforts to suppress disclosure of grave climate risks in brittle areas cheat buyers and sabotage communities.

"Redfin, pointedly, has kept its climate risk ratings, with its chief economist saying, “homebuyers find climate risk scores valuable when making one of the most important financial decisions of their lives.”"

I'll be using Redfin.

@alexsteffen.bsky.social alexsteffen.substack.com/p/will-your-...

Welcome to the future we fought for five decades to avoid. Massive climate discontinuity means we no longer live in a world that can solve its most pressing problems in an orderly way.

'Welcome to the future we fought for five decades to avoid.'

'It isn’t the end of everything, not by a long shot, but it is the end of the world we all grew up in.'
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/welcome-to... by @alexsteffen.bsky.social

Conway: This is a criminal government. Unless you are willing to say that, you’re basically fighting on their terms. They get to lie, and they win that battle because people say, “We shouldn’t use that kind of language.”

But you get to use that language when it’s fucking true.

A former DEA agent called the release “devastating”: “It means any attempt to work your investigations to the highest levels is meaningless.”

The Last Big Case Against Trump Has Been Dropped The U.S. justice and political systems have shown that they can’t hold the president and his allies to account for trying to steal the 2020 election.

Good reminder that Trump was guilty of an egregious crime simply in Georgia, let alone the rest of the country, and should have served a significant stint in prison. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

To put it mildly...

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1988 James Hansen testifies before Congress, warning of danger—the culmination of decades of science and environmentalism.

We've known all this was coming for a long, long time.

R.I.P. Jimmy Cliff.

Your music was one of the soundtracks of childhood.

"Well, they're
Putting up resistance
But I know that my faith
Will lead me on..."

Screenshot of text: "The cost of inaction: $7.7 trillion. The total in climate-related damages the US has run up since 2000, according to research by Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Andrew John Stevenson."

The price fossil fuel forces on everyone else.

Or Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" illustrated by Hergé.

I wondered about the nano banana hype, so I asked it to illustrate Gary Snyder's "For the children" for me, in the manner of R. Crumb.

A few seconds later, it spat this out.

🤯 and 😵

Current and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers are growing increasingly concerned that the work they did slashing government programs and eliminating jobs will come back to haunt them with the possibility of criminal prosecutions.

Criminals increasingly concerned about being held accountable for crimes

www.rawstory.com/doge-employe...

What is today's best example of soft denialist rhetoric?

The statement "climate adaptation is indistinguishable from efforts to improve human welfare" is the sign that someone does not understand the magnitude of the planetary crisis we face — or how human systems actually work within the context of the climate and biosphere.

Just realized that in January it'll be 20 years since we premiered the Worldchanging Book — and the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Worldchanging site passed by a couple years ago.

Time just rockets on...

I don't think this meeting is the Mamdani victory some seem to think it is.

I think Trump got more out of it — "Look: even the mayor who calls me a fascist, ha ha, wants to meet with me."

Just a reminder to Antonio Guterres: "Consensus" does not mean "unanimity". A meaningful agreement will not result from #COP30 as long as a handful of bad petrostate actors can blog any real progress. Adopt a reasonable (66% or 75%) standard for reaching "consensus".

What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century Many places may become uninhabitable. Many people may be on their own.

This Atlantic piece significantly underestimates the magnitude of discontinuity around us.

It treats as futures to be avoided realities that are already unfolding now.

I suspect largely because it absolutely sucks to acknowledge we lost the Orderly Transition.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Everything so stupid but I have faith it can get stupider

An amazing show waiting to happen: the power struggles and shifting romances of a highly-paid elite security agency of poets, artists and dancers who keep AI safe from metaphorical and metaphysical attack vectors.

"LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion" @cstross.bsky.social

People evacuated after fire breaks out at Cop30 venue – video Social media footage shows people running away from smoke and flames after a fire broke out at a Cop30 venue in Belem, Brazil, on Thursday

COP 30 venue catching fire and burning for hours seems a little on the nose for our current climate moment.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Members of congress releasing a video message to members of the United States military telling them "you must refuse illegal orders" might be the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen.

*Biology excepted

I'm skeptical that AI+genetics is going to fix any major part of the planetary crisis, but designed viruses,etc loosed into the wild could be utterly catastrophic.

Scenarios worse than climate tipping points are not inconceivable, tho far from certain.

Unless you believe AI will grant the ability to edit the laws of physics*, the planetary crisis is still going to be a far bigger driver of change in human society over the next ten years.

Even most smart folks simply don't grasp the scale of discontinuity we've set in motion.

I'm uninterested in old debates I've already had many times, especially when the person bringing them is rude.

ΤΟΥ STORY The purpose of a toy is to bring happiness to a child ΤΟΥ STORY 2 Toys must accept that their child will someday outgrow them ΤΟΥ STORY 3 Toys can find new purpose with a new child ΤΟΥ STORY 4 Toys can abandon children, create their own purpose, and pursue relationships with other toys ΤΟΥ STORY 5 Toys can learn how to create new toys without the involvement of a child ΤΟΥ STORY 6 Toys construct a secret, self sustaining society parallel to human civilization ΤΟΥ STORY 7 The great human/toy wars begin THOUSANDS OF YEARS LATER Cars 1-3

Fortunately, I already figured out the plots of the next several Toy Story films

If we don't, we face far worse climate and ecological chaos.

We'll suffer huge losses.

We'll still need to zero-out emissions in disruptively rapid ways.

We'll still need a society-defining climate response.

But those undertakings won't buy nearly as many people a viable future.

Triage and managed retreat, supported mass-relocation, and unprecedented investments in ruggedization to protect what still can be protected will be needed now at scale, even if we experience a climate emissions breakthrough.

There are all sorts of development programs that can be non-adaptive, or even increase vulnerability; worsening climate brittleness is unfolding in all sort of ways that can only be checked at local and regional levels by massive investments of resources.

The statement "climate adaptation is indistinguishable from efforts to improve human welfare" is the sign that someone does not understand the magnitude of the planetary crisis we face — or how human systems actually work within the context of the climate and biosphere.