Episode 12 Transcript: When the Flood is at your Door
The complete episode 12 transcript.
Molly Wood:
Hey, it's Molly Wood, and welcome back to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We’re diving deep into the climate crisis and coming up with solutions. This week … is going to feel a little bit different. If you’ve been following me for a while … you might know that the way I got into looking at climate solutions … was actually through the lens of adaptation. When I was at Marketplace … I called my series … How We Survive. I’m a practical person like that.
As I started that reporting … I was thrilled to discover that people really are working on FIXES … getting us to net zero … creating alternative products and businesses and industries … working on policies to create a healthier and lower carbon future. And also … I still think a lot about adaptation … because the truth is … we have caused a lot of global warming in a very very very short period of time … historically speaking.
Right now … the planet is most likely the hottest it’s been since before humans existed. And that’s already causing a LOT of major change and extreme weather … and that … is going to continue. The fatal heat waves that we’re seeing this summer … where people are literally dying from burns they suffer … from the PAVEMENT … in Phoenix … say … are one example … of planetary behavior that is NOT normal … and is NOT going to suddenly go away. There will be huge changes to how we live … where we live … and yes … how we survive.
ALSO … I am a big fan of Octavia Butler and her book Parable of the Sower … and the way she says change … is inevitable … change is actually God … she says … but that with forethought … and planning … you don’t have to be a victim … to change. You can shape it. You can adapt. You can create abundance. You can survive. But first … you have to accept it.
So today’s conversation is with a climate futurist … someone who is thinking about this change … recognizing what’s here now … and creating classes and workshops for the rest of us … on how to live with it.
Alex Steffen:
I'm Alex Steffen and I'm a climate futurist and writer. Among other things, I run the newsletter and podcast "The Snap Forward," and I talk about climate change, sustainability, the need for ruggedness, and how we can look at the future with more informed eyes.
Molly Wood:
Alex started his career as an environmental journalist back in 1992, and around 2000, he realized that the messaging about climate change and deforestation and toxic pollution wasn’t leading to much change. He started a project called World Changing to promote solutions through journalism and did that for seven years.
Alex Steffen:
Um, and then as that was drawn to a close, I really began to think more about, well, you know, we've been working on this stuff. Some people have been working on it at that point for 40 years, trying to shift the public debate, trying to move us away from fossil fuels towards more sustainability and so forth. Why is it that we're not making more progress? And how has that work changed because of our lack of progress?
I really began to look at what might a sustainable future look like? How might we envision where we're trying to go? The more that I did that, the more I was sort of thrown back into the present and into the awareness that actually we're already living in the future we were trying to prevent but anticipating 20 or 30 years ago. If we're gonna look at things with a smart vision, we need to understand that we've already gone through a massive set of discontinuities.
Our old thinking, the ways we've all been educated and trained, brought up to look at the world, is all out of date. We're all struggling now with the reality that our past experience is not a very good guide for our present and future choices.
Molly Wood:
Talk to me about this concept of discontinuity. This is something that comes up in your writing a lot, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to ask you.
Alex Steffen:
Yeah, so discontinuity is a widely used futurism term, which basically describes a moment in which the change is not just of magnitude but of kind. Where things become different, not just more. Usually, the way that we think about it is it's a moment in which the context for decision-making is changed. So our previous decision-making tools and patterns no longer work the way they were supposed to. Past experience and education is no guide to future choice.
It's like if, let's use a clumsy metaphor here, but if all you had ever eaten was apples and all of a sudden all the fruit in the world became oranges, you would probably eat a lot of very bad orange peel as you figured out how to eat an orange. We're surrounded by these things, small and large.
The fact that the entire composition of the atmosphere, the oceans, the soils all around the world is changing is a discontinuity. No previous generations lived through that kind of an experience on this scale, at this pace. But also, the fact that the sky is full of smoke, that heat is extreme, that record rainfalls fall day after day in a winter, these are discontinuities with our previous experience.
They're pushing us to confront events for which the tolerances in our systems were never designed.
One of my central contentions is that in this moment, discontinuity is the job that no matter what field you're in, if it has any connection to climate change, sustainability, and there are very few that don't now, if it has any connection, your job is how you manage the discontinuity between what's been being done and what must now be done.
Molly Wood:
And that is everything from explaining to people what an orange is to realizing that you're now in the business of growing oranges, right?
Alex Steffen:
Right, exactly.
Molly Wood:
I want to go back a little bit to kind of this evolution of your career and what it has felt like because it's, you know, there's the problem part, which I also encountered as a journalist, and it's very frustrating. And then there's the desire to focus on solutions, and then there's this sort of realization that the solutions either aren't happening or aren't happening fast enough. And now you're effectively in kind of the adaptation, the survival game.
Alex Steffen:
Well, you know, it took its toll to work for years being part of an effort. I hoped to get people to respond to the reality of our situation and confront these massive crises that we were in the process of creating, only to find out that wow, the future we were saying we hope we never arrive at is our present. We basically completely lost that fight for 20 or 30 years. We now live in a world where the planetary crisis is a given.
Climate change is largely irreversible. There are all sorts of ecological disturbances that are only going to grow. The impact of the crisis in our lives cannot be undone. Because of delays and things that are in the pipeline, a much more chaotic world than we live today is in fact coming, even if we started doing everything perfectly now. And of course, there's not a lot of signs that we're ready to do everything perfectly.
It's tough, but also the thing that I wasn't expecting was to find that on the other side of recognizing that we've now bought a discontinuity and we have to live in it, is the realization that discontinuity is full of opportunities to do things differently. While we can't reverse the parts of this that are tragic and horrible, we can still react to the situation we have and respond in ways that engage more successfully with the reality we now live in. That understanding of the world is massively under-discussed. We don't talk nearly enough about what is now possible because we can now go faster.
Molly Wood:
So many people, I'm gonna stop and acknowledge here that very many people are kind of just at the beginning. The curse of being either a futurist or having good pattern recognition is getting there before everyone else. A lot of people are just at the beginning of this journey of realization or interest or care or effort. So that is a very hard place to live. We're sorry everyone. Welcome to the pool. But it is a time for hard truths. Now let's talk about the opportunities.
Alex Steffen:
Yeah. I mean, we have to give up all hope of a better past. That's one of the hardest things here because we have to give up all hope of a world in which we made better choices because we've already not made those choices. The fact that we are now irreversibly locked into a situation that we could have avoided, and that is gonna be full of tragedy and loss, no matter what we do, is not a real mood lifter.
But on the other hand, when we can move through that, part of what we begin to experience is what I call the experience of being native to now. Things begin to make sense again. We are able to see that while things are not good, we probably at this point have avoided the truly apocalyptic scenarios because of the hard work of millions and millions of people trying to push the ball forward. We're probably not headed towards the end of everything. Even though we've lost the opportunity to move through this crisis with minimal impact, we also are not headed towards the end of the world.
In fact, we're in a much more difficult situation in some ways, which is we're in a trans-apocalyptic future, as I call it, where some places are experiencing the end of the world, some people are experiencing the end of the world, and other people are gonna pretty much be okay for a long time, especially if they make smart choices and got lucky by birth and geography. That's not fair and it shouldn't be that way, but it is the world that we've made.
Molly Wood:
I also want to clarify one thing before I keep asking you more about solutions, which is that we have most likely avoided widespread apocalypse. I'm saying that all apocalypses are local. But that even the future you're describing relies on us still starting to do everything right. I don't want people to walk away from this saying, okay, so we're in for a hundred years of dramatic change. We are in for dramatic change no matter what we do, but it's a spectrum. We could make it much worse. There is a chance if we really had a societal transformation, we could in fact hold it to a much more manageable level. We're just not showing any signs of doing that.
All right … I know what you’re thinking … this is not the hopeful, action-oriented, everybody in the pool solutions podcast I came here for. Don’t worry. After the break … what YOU can and should do to ruggedize your life for a new reality … and how those actions model the life you want for everyone else.
Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. I’m talking with climate futurist Alex Steffen who is dropping truth bombs about the future we already live in and what we can do to both survive it and create a better one.
Molly Wood:
I read this book recently. I do this other podcast where we interview authors of climate fiction about how they're imagining this reality. Omar El Akkad was the recent author and he talks about how he, in an essay somewhere else, mentions how everyone thinks that the future is salvageable.
Like we just sort of want to believe that the future is what we can salvage, which also removes the burden of having to do anything now. I think that there's also this idea of sort of individuality and collective action. I hear people say a lot, well, I can't do anything about climate change. Individuals can't do anything. This is a collective problem.
Alex Steffen:
I disagree with that statement. Yes, it's a collective problem, but the collective is made out of people.
Molly Wood:
It sounds like in some ways what you're saying is leaving aside the rich people who are generally gonna be okay, they are gonna have to do more. The United States will have to do more to help Barbados, for example. But also that it is incumbent on those who have the means, the care, the wealth, and the interest to adopt everything.
Alex Steffen:
Yeah. I mean, I would argue that it's even a tougher situation than that. We are currently in a situation where things are changing fast, but our cultural, political, societal, economic understandings of the magnitude and speed of that change haven't evolved alongside it. Most of us are thinking about the world in ways that aren't true. We're still thinking that we basically have the world we had, there's just this eco stuff happening too. So we gotta do something about that, whether that's charity or adding a program to our company's efforts or adopting an ESG strategy.
The reality is the world is profoundly different already now than it was 30 years ago, and most of us can't even, we're not yet ready for what's already happened. We're totally unprepared for what we know is coming, much less what might happen. As more and more people understand that, there is a cascade of efforts arising from personal self-interest, but also corporate self-interest, government response to stakeholders.
There's more and more individual efforts piling up because people, they're on a spectrum and some people cannot afford to ignore reality for very long. As that piles up, we start reaching towards a tipping point where consensus about reality, where we suddenly find ourselves confronting our own unreadiness on a societal scale.
When that happens, lots of stuff is gonna shift very fast. Not all positive. We're already in the early stages of that. One thing that we're gonna see, for example, is the loss of value in assets and practices that are no longer consonant with the reality we face. Whether that's beachfront property in a hurricane zone or high carbon, un-reformable systems, those things are going to lose value. They're gonna fail. In that situation, we have to think about what it means to be acting in a much different way.
What is important right now is that as many people, institutions, governments, begin to behave as if the world that now exists matters. Not that we get everyone to agree. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people, especially in America, who will go to their graves denying that climate change is happening. In some cases, they'll be the victims of climate change and still be denying that it's happening.
This is not a mass public education and mobilization effort. We need mobilization, but that's not what's gonna get us there. What's gonna get us there is the change of strategic priorities that each of us experiences as we understand this is how the world is.
That might be on a personal scale about how we manage our careers, our investments, where we decide to live, the choices we make in terms of how we protect our home, our family, our financial security. It will certainly involve institutional changes. We see already a lot of institutions that are working to delay change. We have a whole schema of predatory delay, as I call it, where companies work to undermine the scientific consensus to block political action.
We're also increasingly seeing what I call climate triangulation, which is people embracing the idea of big change. We really want to be net zero by 2050 and then making small little incremental steps that they then claim are in line with those longer goals.
That strategy protects the institution from change. Those things work sort of now, but they're gradually ceasing to work. At some point, we're gonna see a huge amount of torque released into our society as awareness of reality spreads, and then they're going to fail. Who is left standing then and who's ready to move?
Who's able to do what in that moment of recognition of reality is a lot of the game at this point. That's a lot of how well we do is gonna be how prepared we are to move quickly as the barriers to speed collapse.
Molly Wood:
That is the perfect segue to what I would've called you about anyway, but the thing that specifically compelled me to call you was this course that you're teaching and the writing that you've been doing recently about ruggedization.
Alex Steffen:
Yeah. So one way to see the planetary crisis is that all human systems have tolerances. A bridge can take a flood, a one in ten year flood. It may even be able to take a one in a hundred year flood, but when the one in the 1,000-year flood hits it, it's gonna wash down the stream.
That's true for every system that we depend on. One of the things that the planetary crisis has done is both move the baseline and jack up the extremes so that more and more systems are exposed to conditions for which their tolerance is exceeded. When that happens, you often have a catastrophic collapse that becomes more difficult to recover from.
You don't want to be caught in what I think of as the brittleness trap, which is a situation in which the community you're in, the institution you're in, is reliant on systems that are no longer equipped for reality.
As those systems fail, the awareness of the risk that the whole community faces jacks up and undermines the economic and social health of that place. We're seeing this right now in some communities here in California where there's a real concern that they're going to lose the ability to insure their homes against fire.
Certainly, it's becoming tough to get new fire insurance policies, but there's some real evidence that we're gonna see these places be treated as uninsurable. When that happens, the bottom drops out of the property market there. Younger people, wealthier people, and more talented, skilled people leave first.
There's a whole set of things that happen then, from the loss of local tax revenue to loss of jobs to the kinds of hits that communities take that they now can't recover from to the same extent that just erode the prosperity of that place. Sometimes rapidly, sometimes in dribs and drabs over a decade or more.
But what happens is you end up with places where the value of the place ends up collapsing, which makes it incapable of rebuilding, responding, etc. That process can happen very fast. In fact, it's begun to happen and I expect we're gonna see it at a much bigger scale than we once thought possible.
So what do you do in the face of that as an individual or as a society? Well, one thing you need to do is understand that many of the kinds of stresses and dangers we face demand not just a bolt-on solution, not just a little bit of adaptation, but approaches that both make a system more tolerant and increase its capacity to grow, respond, invest, and act.
Climate ruggedness needs to be the core strategy of any given place but also of each of our personal lives. None of us want to be the victim, and none of us wanna wind up in a situation where our kids can't escape the town we live in because we can't sell our home, they can't get a job, whatever.
Molly Wood:
What does that mean when I look into my life? Does that mean move? There's community-level adaptation, there's country-level, but there's the individual. Maybe hard questions about the home.
Alex Steffen:
It's part of that personal discontinuity that I talk about. We now have to look at the places we live through the lens of risk and change. Some of us live in places that are perfectly fine. For the foreseeable future, no place is totally safe, but some places are relatively safe compared to many.
Some of us live in communities that have a lot going for them, that are less vulnerable, subjected to less risk, etc. Maybe we just need to move where we live within that community. We might live in a floodplain. We gotta get rid of that floodplain house and move somewhere else.
Some of us live in places that, absent a truly massive, unprecedented level of government intervention, are simply on their way to brittleness, to a brittleness collapse. Living there subjects you to this brittleness trap, and you gotta move if you're being sensible.
Some people won't, some people can't. There are people I've talked to who know where they're living isn't gonna be a good place to be, but that's where everyone they love is and they want to try and figure out how to stay and do the best they can for the people around them. I respect that.
A lot of us have a complex decision to make, based on not just matters of the heart but also practical matters.
Molly Wood:
So what are some of those practical matters?
Alex Steffen:
Basically, the first thing is you want to escape obvious risk. There are various kinds of climate modeling services available now that will give you various versions of maps that are all more or less the same. They will tell you, this is a floodplain. This has the risk of temporary but serious flooding under an extreme precipitation event. This is a fire zone.
These places are generally expected to have heat that exceeds human endurance for X number of days a year. These kinds of things. There are other risks that aren't climate risks per se but also factor in, like earthquake risk.
You want to get out of the way of the worst problems. To the extent that you are still exposed to problems, you want to be in a place that is responding to those problems with a realistic sense of urgency.
Molly Wood:
Which is why sometimes you will see lists of cities that are considered climate havens, and part of the reason for that, let's say Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Ithaca, New York, is because the towns themselves have started to respond.
Alex Steffen:
Absolutely. I think there's a strong argument to be made that a place's readiness to act is more important, in some ways, than its degree of safety. You can be in a place that has some real hazards, but if it's addressing those hazards head-on and in a realistic way, you might be better off than a place that has fewer hazards but is doing nothing to get ready for those hazards.
There's this question of location. Part of that is also trying to anticipate how well a given community and your life in general in a place will function as discontinuity takes hold. There are certain places, certain nations around the world, certain states in the US, provinces in Canada, whatever, that are not doing as well in being realistic about what's happening as others.
There are some places that have basically just decided they are opposed to the idea of acting or even acknowledging the need to act, so nothing is being done.
Even if you're in the best place in a state that's doing nothing or even preventing action from happening, that best place may not be as good as it looks. Conversely, I think that because there is such a need for personalization, for the ability to be in a place that offers you a degree of safety, the capacities of places that are really acting, and the attractiveness of those places are gonna grow.
Places that are really beginning to move, beginning to understand this, will see more people wanting to live there, will attract more talent, more businesses, more investment, and that's gonna have a virtuous cycle of allowing those places to be bolder in their responses.
No place is doing well enough now. There's no place that you could say is an A grade. I would argue no place in the world. Part of this is just the problem of speed. What we thought might happen 30 years ago when we were trying to avoid it, became something that was likely to happen 20 years ago that we still hoped to avoid but didn't think would arrive very soon.
Now it's here and it's all happening much faster than we anticipated. Not necessarily scientifically, but culturally. The science has been pretty good.
Molly Wood:
Would we say though, that even some of...
Alex Steffen:
There have been systems where people were like, oh, we didn't expect that to happen until 2100.
Molly Wood:
Or I saw somebody mention the other day that a lot of the climate modeling for, let's say the Eastern seaboard, never took into account...
Alex Steffen:
There are all sorts of those things where we just don't know, or nobody maybe totally realized that all the extreme weather would mean...
Molly Wood:
Yeah. And it's those follow-on effects that are also really such a big deal. We tend to go, well, how much damage does a bunch of smoke in the sky really cause us? Some inconveniences, some health concerns. It's easy to pass it off until you start to realize, well, that's also a hit to the growing season. It's also the cancellation of tourism and business flights.
It's more people winding up in the hospital, stressing already stressed health systems. It's a certain amount of people having negative psychological effects. All of these things add up to a bigger and bigger impact.
Molly Wood:
We all want there to be a refuge. We all just want there to be some place. Oh man, if you just go to Iceland, everything's cool. You could stop worrying about this. We all want there to be an Iceland.
But there kind of is no place that's a refuge. So the best we can do is this complex calculation, assessment of where our lives are likely to thrive. I don't think it's the only thing that people need to pay attention to. There are a great many reasons why you might make a bad choice in terms of climate risk and future impacts that is a good choice for you as a person. Not least of which is maybe you live in a place where all your family is and all your friends are, and you're just not gonna move.
You're not gonna leave. You love that place. You wouldn't be yourself if you lived somewhere else. That's not a dumb decision. It may be an unfortunate one, but it's not dumb.
Alex Steffen:
But you better be an evangelist then. You better be pushing your city government to do the work. You better be adopting changes.
Molly Wood:
There are places that could turn things around.
Alex Steffen:
Yeah. I mean, there are some places that are very hard to imagine a positive future for. But there are a lot of places that are in the gray zone now at least, where a significant investment, changes in priorities, some triage, minimizing risks, managed retreat, these kinds of things could actually wind up making a place much better off in the future.
Molly Wood:
I love this because it's an individual action that is not fundamentally selfish. You are in fact modeling what life can and should look like, and it makes it achievable. I feel like I can do anything. If someone, you know, when I went skydiving, I thought, well, this guy does it all day every day, so clearly I can do it. If you see someone do the thing...
Alex Steffen:
Yeah. And my experience has been, there's still a lot of people who feel like we shouldn't talk about what you do as our failure to act becomes clear because it'll deter people from acting in a collective manner.
Molly Wood:
Well, we should acknowledge that ruggedization is a form of adaptation. There still is an interesting sort of purity debate about that. All of our energy should go into stopping this. It is not an uncontroversial position to say there's so much baked in that we should...
Alex Steffen:
Part of the problem is that we have already, I'm somebody who used to hold the position that there was no point in talking about adaptation until we acted with every ounce of effort we could muster. But we are now at a point where no matter what we do, we are facing an unprecedented planetary discontinuity.
There's literally no way to reverse that, to change it, to stop it. We can certainly act in the boldest and fastest ways possible to limit future destruction, and I am entirely in favor of that. I have spent much of my life arguing for that. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be addressing people's real needs to respond to the nature of that discontinuity.
The extent to which we are telling people not to do that is the extent to which we are telling them either this isn't that serious or we don't have your best interests in mind. Both of those are disastrous messages for those of us who want change to happen more quickly.
Molly Wood:
And in fact, let’s end this hard truths conversation on an up note. Because while Alex is quite clear that no one is going to ride in and save us … like FEMA or the Avengers … we have TOOLS.
Alex Steffen:
Something that I think a lot about and talk a lot about is just how good our solution set is now. For years, I did this project worldchanging.com. It was solutions-based journalism, and back then we used to talk about how amazing it would be if you could get a given technology or design to be X amount better.
How much more competitive it would be in the market, but also how much more widely it could be deployed, the other innovations that could be built off it, etc. In almost every case, we now live in that pipe dream we were having 15 years ago. It's not just the technological innovations, clean energy, energy efficiency, building design, but also social innovations.
The ability to understand how to finance these changes, pursue new opportunities in sustainable business or climate tech, huge evolutions in terms of the kind of policies that we understand will drive forward more rapid change. Lots and lots of evidence.
Molly Wood:
And even products, like even products would you say of economic developments.
Alex Steffen:
I think we're seeing this with EVs. It was clear EVs could work in say 2005, but they were really rare. Now the discussion is not whether EVs will become nearly all or all of the market, but when. That's a huge shift forward. The place that I see a lot of change about to occur is in building technologies. The understanding that we can save a lot of energy, improve comfort, improve safety by designing our buildings more intelligently.
With new materials, new manufacturing processes, new urban planning priorities, we can build a lot more than we're used to thinking of building. Especially as people are gonna be on the move, as we're gonna see displacement and climate migration, we need to build at an enormous scale. That's really much more possible now than it was 20 years ago to do that and do it in ways that hit high efficiency standards.
We're learning all sorts of things about how to rapidly deploy a bike network in a city, how to improve transit, how to better manage the water supply of a city that faces a drought. Just thing after thing after thing that were cool ideas somebody was talking about doing 20 years ago are now the things that are on the shelf to do if a community or local government has the intelligence and wherewithal to deploy them.
That's all awesome, and you can easily build around yourself a life with your personal choices that has a far lower carbon footprint, that's much more rugged to disruptions.
Everybody should be doing that. If it works for your situation, you should have solar panels on your roof or an EV or be harvesting rainwater.
All these things are just right off the shelf solutions and that's a real sea change. The fact that we could make the entire global economy pretty sustainable most of the way to sustainability in a couple decades if we just did it is great. It's no longer a theoretical challenge. It's no longer how might we do this, it's how do we speed adoption rates, how do we get more boots on the ground.
Molly Wood:
There's real reason for optimism.
Alex Steffen:
I think there is real reason for optimism. Things are grim, and especially if you're a feeling person, it can get to you that we live in this trans-apocalyptic situation and people are gonna suffer who don't deserve it. But if we move quickly enough, we can still create situations that are better than the ones we have now.
They're not just degraded versions that are kind of more sustainable. We can build cities that are better and more livable and more prosperous. We can build an economy that delivers sustainable prosperity to a lot more people on a much fairer but also much more prosperous basis. These are possibilities that we have in front of us. If you're somebody who's really trying to make an impact, you should be laser-focused on the optimism of what you might be able to trigger through your actions. It can be hard when daily headlines are gloomy at best, but I really think that optimism is a really smart choice right now.
Molly Wood:
Optimism is always a really smart choice. Combined with, borrowing from Octavia Butler again, forethought and planning. Alex Steffen’s newsletter is called Snap Forward on Substack, and he’ll be offering another public crash course on ruggedization in September. AlexSteffen.com is the website.