I’m a climate futurist. Here’s what’s next.
I’m a climate futurist.
My work explores how natural and human systems are changing each other, and what those changes mean for us.
Every few years I share some key trends I see emerging — ones big enough to alter our lives and fast enough to matter now.
So, what’s next?
I find the biggest change around us is just how fast our understanding of the climate emergency* itself is evolving. Climate foresight, strategy, policy and politics are all in upheaval.
[*used here to mean the whole interconnected jackpot of climate and ecological crises]
I spent the last couple years writing a forthcoming book, “The Snap Forward.” I came to it with years of experience in climate, sustainability and futurism. But as I dove in, I realized how many of the assumptions we’ve treated as given are in fact wrong — with huge implications.
One of our biggest assumptions is that the climate emergency is an issue. It’s not, it’s an era.
Climate is redefining every aspect of society, already — and we’re only at the beginning. The extent this surprises us is a measurement of how little we yet grasp what’s happening.
We face the jarring realization that almost none of us — even those who work on these issues every day — have taken the climate emergency *seriously enough.*
Oh, there are plenty of dire predictions and stern warnings, and we should heed the warnings.
But the real bombshell is that changes in human systems are coming bigger and faster than direct climate impacts are unfolding.
Climate change will become cataclysmic to our certainties long before it becomes cataclysmic to our civilization.
(I should probably mention that this is what I do for a living. If these questions are professionally urgent for you, I’m available to consult on strategy and foresight. Here’s the link to learn more and book a call with me: http://bit.ly/ConsultwithAlex)
Some of the biggest shifts are the reactions institutions, investors and governments are having to the revelation that massive climate action is now inevitable. The question is no longer whether we’re going to act, but when? And to who’s advantage?
It is the magnitude of the climate-driven economic, institutional and political crisis around us that makes action inevitable. We shouldn’t find the reality that action is now inevitable comforting.
The predatory delay that has stalled action for the last four decades has simultaneously meant that we are surrounded not only by market (and policy) failures, but by financial bubbles. Everything that is unsolvably unsustainable is a bubble. It will pop.
Change will come not because we become better people, but because power is shifting.
Most of us (and most powerful interest groups/institutions) stand to gain far more from action than we do from delay — and many stand to lose everything if the emergency is allowed to worsen.
Damages already locked in are more costly and dangerous than most people yet understand; with delay, risks grow in non-linear, mutually reinforcing ways; and our ability to predict how the world will work is deteriorating, with profound implications for decision-making.
Over just the next few years, we’re going to see these costs, risks and uncertainties play out in three kinds of ways:
Carbon Bubbles
Brittleness Bubbles
and Expertise Bubbles
Carbon bubbles stem from overvaluations of fossil fuel companies, high-carbon industries, and other unsustainable practices.
They’re overvalued because of the gap between the bright futures investors currently see for these industries and the reality that any real climate action will mean many fossil fuels will be unburnable and many of these practices will be made obsolete.
The result will be what analysts blandly term “rapid repricing,” but the rest of us would call a crash. But don’t take my word for it: https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1120207762779099136?s=20
Here it’s critical to remember that almost all financial decisions — investment, credit, insurance, subsidies — are bets about the future. While they may be bets about the future, they take place now. Foreseeable future losses become present trouble.
Which brings us to brittleness bubbles. Brittleness is the quality of breaking suddenly and catastrophically. Think of a bridge collapsing. A key fact of the climate emergency that still hasn’t sunk in is that the hotter it gets, the more places and systems become brittle.
We really don’t see how climate brittle many of these places and systems already are — and how brittleness stretches out in networks, putting places at risk that are far from the direct impacts of the rising seas, monster storms and megafires causing brittle systems to collapse.
Remember those decision-makers placing their future bets? Long before a foreseeable risk hits, those bettors demand better odds. If the odds can’t be made good enough, they bet elsewhere. Brittle turns into uninsurable, unbankable, uninvestable and politically friendless.
Many of brittle places and systems are still treated as quite valuable. But as the magnitude of the risks become apparent, we’re going to see more of those rapid repricings, more bubbles popping. (more here: https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/989222610075508736)
The long-delayed need for bold climate action and ruggedization doesn’t just mean that unsustainable and untenable assets are precariously overpriced. It also means that much of the expertise acquired in building these unsustainable and untenable things is no longer relevant.
That’s because the world we’ve started to build — and that is very likely to turn into a giant building boom — is not the world we’re used to thinking of as normal, but with some sustainability solutions bolted on to it and a fresh coat of green paint.
Real climate action and ruggedization are disruptive. In a huge number of fields, the new doesn’t adapt the old to the climate emergency, it replaces it. For instance, clean energy isn’t just the oil industry but with wind turbines. It’s a different industry, entirely.
Millions of people have expertise grounded entirely in the systems being replaced. As disruption happens, that expertise loses value, fast — and no one wants to be on the receiving end of a “rapid repricing” in their career.
Paradoxically, this expertise bubble extends to many climate and sustainability professionals — especially folks who’ve built careers helping their employers reduce environmental impacts a bit in order to exhibit institutional responsibility (and get some good press).
The responsibilities institutions have for their impacts in the world are becoming less central than the risks change poses to that institution — which in turn are less critical than grasping the fast-changing strategic landscape in which it operates. Very different jobs.
The largest sea change in climate strategy, though, is that some folks are beginning to grasp that the opportunities to be found in meeting the climate emergency are not only much larger than our public debate is ready to acknowledge, but different in both nature and speed.
These opportunities will have massive impacts before they’ve even hit scale. Again, bets about the future, and the smart bet is increasingly on discontinuous acceleration towards these opportunities.
I have more to say on all this (and have written much more about all this in, “The Snap Forward”), but I’ll have to come back to it another time.
In the meantime, if exploring these questions is vital to your work, I am available for strategy and foresight consultations. Click here:
and for bespoke keynote talks and other engagements. Contact me here to put the wheels in motion:
http://alexsteffen.com/contact
Thanks for reading!
[Originally posted on Twitter on January 23, 2020.]
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