It’s not.

So here's where we are, Sunday morning: Trump is trying to starve hungry kids in order to bully Democrats into abandoning our fight against health care premium increases. So Trump is starving kids in order to deny families health care. Dystopian.

No health care, no deal.

ICE vehicles waste a whopping 80% of the energy in their fuel. Electric vehicles are propelled by entirely different mechanisms. Energy enters the vehicle as electricity, which directly powers the drivetrain: EVs need not convert one form of energy to another resulting in much higher efficiency.

In case you were wondering what happened to the Last Decade, we did not win quickly. We can't give up the fight, but winning the fight no longer means winning an orderly transition to an equitably sustainable society. That future is no longer available.

"The environmental group gave up its singular focus on climate change for a broader agenda. The ensuing internal strife left it weakened..." Good try at a complex story that includes mismanagement, mission drift & divisive org politics during broad cultural changes. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

Some explanations deliver themselves. Soft denialism on the march.

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

I'll keep repeating this truth. There are few industries that understand the complex realities of how climate change is affecting the world today more than insurance. Physical risk. Non-physical risk. Liability risk. Reputational risk. Etc. We see it. www.insurancebusinessmag.com/uk/news/brea...

If sandwich shops don’t start offering a sandwich named “the acquittal” then what are we even doing

No it’s important to listen to this. Because then you understand that many of them will do ANYTHING to keep power. Remember Musk got involved in the 2024 election after saying to Tucker “if she wins” I am definitely going to prison. So we need to move knowing that nothing is off the table for them.

Some explanations deliver themselves. Soft denialism on the march.

Gavin Newsom would be America's first Gen-X president. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/u...

I think the potential of unilateral geoengineering moves — including by a private entity — to trigger events that lead to war is underappreciated.

If this election proved nothing else, it proved once again that OPTIMISM IS A POLITICAL ACT. Believing we *can* make things better — that we, together, have the power to create change — is always the first step towards actually making them better.

Oh thank fuck

Huge deal! Democrats—with strong climate credentials—edge toward control of Georgia’s giant energy system

State of the Climate: probably fine. “The accelerating climate crisis is now a major driver of global instability. Extreme weather is causing widespread impacts & direct loss of life, while also driving resource scarcity, displacement & civil unrest.” academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

A practice I began keeping about 20 years ago has been a font of evergreen learning, and it's simple: Every time I hear a person I respect use a term or technical phrase whose full meaning escapes me, I note it. Every few months, I go thru that list, and track down straight-forward explanations.

“Almost everything about our lives, communities & economies was built for the past, when conditions were different. The essential nature of the planetary crisis is discontinuity with the past.” The Brittleness Trap - @alexsteffen.bsky.social alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-brittl...

It is — based on my conversations with participants in my classes — a major dividend of having a personal climate strategy and doing the work to ruggedize your life.

This is why the greatest equity priority we had in the last 35 years was slashing CO2. On climate action, speed was justice. Now we still need huge cuts, but massive and unjust climate brittleness has been baked into many poorer countries' futures — and it's not clear it'll ever be truly addressed.

"Hurricane Melissa is now the strongest storm on the planet this year" THIS year. We know the real heavy weather is still on its way. Most Caribbean nations are extremely brittle in the face of worsening climate chaos. Available solutions are limited and expensive. www.cnn.com/weather/live...

We can no longer avoid dire crisis; nor are we likely to see an end-of-everything apocalypse. We're forced, instead, to live in discontinuity, deep uncertainty and transapocalyptic problems. https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet-ready-for-whats-already

The world is deeply unserious about dealing with climate change. We need to reduce emissions by 50% in 5 years and we're nowhere near that.

Bill Gates failing to understand the climate/ecological crisis, loudly and in public: www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-pa...

This is something I am not happy to have anticipated correctly.

We're drifting into a typhoon of eroded futures, shortened lives, family impoverishment, community despair and economic decline — because acknowledging escalating risk and planning large-scale rapid responses is opposed by those who stand to lose money as brittle assets/places/systems are devalued.

Even the best of our currently plausible pathways include the unofficial abandonment of a staggering number of people. Millions of us are being forced to plan for a world in which no one is coming, and "you're on your own." No one wants this to be true. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/no-one-wan...

‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head

30-40 inches of rain equates to the depth of the shallow end of a swimming pool. Delivered at the speed of an F1 racing car. Everywhere.

Terrifying.

"Run from the water, hide from the wind." It's hard to grasp what 175 m.p.h. sustained winds can do — even before you add in a deluge of 30-40+ inches of rain and a punishing storm surge. #melissa

"Hurricane Melissa is now the strongest storm on the planet this year" THIS year. We know the real heavy weather is still on its way. Most Caribbean nations are extremely brittle in the face of worsening climate chaos. Available solutions are limited and expensive. www.cnn.com/weather/live...

Unprecedented events are discontinuity made manifest. Discontinuity is now the context for every decision we make, whether we can admit it to ourselves or not.

For sure. I wrote a short story about that years back... thenearlynow.com/breaking-roa...

space for sustainable mobility and trees replacing space for cars is the climate hack for urban areas

A simple way to do this: Stand at the local high tide mark, preferably near coastal settlement. Look inland, with your eyes 1.5-2m above the tide mark. (This is particularly telling in Albert Park, Melbourne: you can see the surface of Kerferd Road...) www.google.com.au/maps/@-37.84...

Babies born today may well live to see more than 6 feet of additional sea level rise in their lifetimes. Walk any beach or port and imagine the normal water level being six feet higher. Then imagine how much higher the storm surges will be.

And here I was, thinking it was just known as “breaking the law.” You’re telling me there’s a *strategy* here? Golly, I’m such a rube.

“the president got mad at a television commercial so now your maple syrup is more expensive” is no way to run a country

This is nightmarish. Thirty to forty-plus inches more rain. No community is designed/built to shrug off teh flooding that come from that kind of deluge.

I think this is probably a very bad idea.

Also, we will be rebuilding climate-shattered and futureless places with our public funds long after it makes no rational sense to do so, because this "disaster industrial complex" makes more money slapping up cheap rebuilds than it would make building rugged communities in relatively safe places.

"When these things happen, we still call them 'natural disasters.' But that’s not right. ... in a very real sense all these catastrophes are *planned disasters*." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-now-liv...

And that has happened to a limited degree. But the opposite has been far more common: those with brittle assets have instead become a prime constituency for denial and predatory delay -- more concerned about the acknowledgment of risk than its reduction.

Re: the Carbon and Brittleness Bubbles. One of my unexamined assumptions in the 90s/00s was that increasing risk would serve as a counterforce to predatory delay. As more leaders saw assets at risk, and therefore at risk of devaluation, pressure to act on climate would build.

This is probably fine....

Proof that climate change is real and horrible: www.bbc.com/news/article...

Speaker Johnson officially keeps the House in recess for yet another week. The chamber hasn’t been in session since Sept. 19. @adelitaforcongress.bsky.social was elected on Sept. 23 and still hasn’t sworn in. She will be the crucial 218th signature to force a vote to release the Epstein files.