I wrote about something I've been thinking about for a long time. A kind of post-ironic collapse in our politics and culture where nihilism has become the lingua franca of the internet and beyond. It links Kirk, Clavicular, Epstein, memestock/coin stuff, mass shooters. I hope you'll read it.

NEW: "This was not a decision to reject the Moderna vaccine. It was a refusal even to think about approving it." www.thebulwark.com/p/this-is-wh...

Excited for the next Personal Climate Strategy Workshop! It's been a fantastic experience iterating this course nine times, having so many people share the difference it's made for them and learning so much along the way. Today's the last day to register. alexsteffen.thinkific.com/courses/Pers...

This season's Personal Climate Strategy Workshop starts Thursday. I'd really appreciate your help spreading the word. Please repost, forward or copy onto little notes and share via carrier pigeons. Thanks! alexsteffen.substack.com/p/it-will-ch...

The savage layoffs and editorial undermining at the Washington Post — like the "DOGE" massacres and the takeover of Twitter — are civic sabotage, pure and simple. When government and democratic institutions are undermined, those who want unaccountable power are strengthened.

"For each of us, there’s the big abstract future, tumbling off into the unknowable, and then there’s our personal future... the future of the people we care about, the work we do, the legacies we hope to leave behind." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/where-does...

"No matter what we do, we are in for massive and unprecedented climate, ecological and societal upheavals. That discontinuity is now hard-wired into every plausible future in front of us." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/what-is-a-...

"No matter what we do, we are in for massive and unprecedented climate, ecological and societal upheavals. That discontinuity is now hard-wired into every plausible future in front of us." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/what-is-a-...

"Help is not on the way. Even the best-governed societies aren’t responding at the pace demanded... there’s less sign than ever that someone else — the government, markets, activists — is coming to the rescue. We have to rescue ourselves." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-thought...

Discontinuity is here. Climate and ecological disruptions are having unprecedented impacts in the lives of every person on Earth. And, yes, that has profound security implications. "Nature is a foundation of national security" is exactly right. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

People who never paid attention to climate before are now suddenly telling us "no place is safe" from climate chaos. What they really mean is "don't compare the risks facing different places — because our brittle investments will lose value if you do." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/why-do-som...

The planetary crisis will define our future, and almost none of us have personal strategies for meeting it. This four-week Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is probably the best crash course in applied climate foresight anywhere. Check it out: alexsteffen.thinkific.com/courses/Pers...

"Help is not on the way. Even the best-governed societies aren’t responding at the pace demanded... there’s less sign than ever that someone else — the government, markets, activists — is coming to the rescue. We have to rescue ourselves." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-thought...

Everything humans have made was made with a certain sense of normal in mind. Within a given range of tolerances, that things will work more or less as expected. Climate chaos nudges the context for every object & system in our world, pushing them into conditions that exceed their design tolerances.

Discontinuity is here. Climate and ecological disruptions are having unprecedented impacts in the lives of every person on Earth. And, yes, that has profound security implications. "Nature is a foundation of national security" is exactly right. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Clearheaded, supportive review of my personal climate strategy workshop from former colleague (and recent alumnus) Justus Stewart. Tbh, "left me sometimes struggling to keep up with the volume of concepts and tools" is a fair critique. justusstewart.substack.com/p/reviewing-...

A lot of smart people have underestimated the extent to which the core barrier in action to limit the planetary crisis is simply shameless lying in service of predatory delay.

NEW: When it comes to climate foresight, the small stuff really adds up. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/things-fal...

The entire industrial civilisation is planned,built and run on statistics and averages.But statistics and averages do not hold well when the proportion of tail events explodes– 'The nature of discontinuity,though,is that what was true before becomes a poor guide for making decisions in the present'

"the climate crisis is a crisis precisely because of the magnitude of discontinuity it’s driving into the systems, natural and human, upon which our civilization was built. That process is speeding up, meaning... less time to prepare for tumultuous change." @alexsteffen.bsky.social

Once again, we're not yet ready for what's already happened.

Predatory delay on climate action is a central engine driving the fascism we see around us today. When given the choice of accepting the evidence and shifting to a low-carbon economy, or undermining democracy itself, the Carbon Lobby went all in on Trump.

“We think of climate impacts as huge, monstrous things — giant dinosaur weather-beasts rampaging across our cities. But it turns out we should be at least as worried about the plague of small strains spreading through our lives, eating away at systems functionality like a horde of gnawing rodents.”

NEW: When it comes to climate foresight, the small stuff really adds up. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/things-fal...

'Climate chaos is already making us poorer. We're just pretending it's not.'

The moment of escalating discontinuity. When we pass what thresholds—and how extreme the systems upheavals they trigger will be—we don't precisely know. But we know we should be cutting emissions on an emergency basis and ruggedizing our societies for conditions no one has ever experienced before.

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

About that "we should track clean energy deployment, not emissions cuts" argument... A thread from long ago... Clean energy is, in some ways, the least challenging piece of the puzzle.

People who never paid attention to climate before are now suddenly telling us "no place is safe" from climate chaos. What they really mean is "don't compare the risks facing different places — because our brittle investments will lose value if you do." alexsteffen.substack.com/p/why-do-som...

Climate predatory delay, attacks on scientific capacity, undermining of diplomatic efforts, refusals in policy and planning to recognize rising brittleness, and the sudden silence on climate from business and professional leaders— a broad, coordinated attempt to postpone action by smothering speech.

James Murray knows what time it is. Read this thread.

We have entered an era of climate-crisis triage, but most people still want to believe that saving everything is not only possible, but an ethical imperative. That kind of delay only makes the impacts far more costly and inequitable in the long run.

The Brittleness Bubble in the Times. The solution? Buyouts! 🎉 Every politician loves a buyout program, despite evidence that the scale of climate risk and overvaluation of brittle assets make them unsuited to address the problem in any fiscally realistic scenario. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/o...

It really shouldn't take you very long to pick sides between a gang of masked bullies and a five-year-old child.

It's not quite the most pressing issue at the moment, but the American people absolutely have a right to know the names of the federal officials who shot and killed a man peacefully protesting, who was on his knees, prone in the street when they shot him in the back.

Ian Austin, an Army veteran, was arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But he’s continued protesting. Senior reporter @julialurie.bsky.social spoke to him. “When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he says. “My nation is under attack."

OpenAI exec James Dyett calling out the cowardice

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

The Brittleness Bubble in the Times. The solution? Buyouts! 🎉 Every politician loves a buyout program, despite evidence that the scale of climate risk and overvaluation of brittle assets make them unsuited to address the problem in any fiscally realistic scenario. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/o...

James Murray knows what time it is. Read this thread.

Your uncle's house in an intensifying wildfire zone didn't lose value because researchers documented the growing risk of it burning down. It lost value because burning fossil fuels has made wildfires worse. alexsteffen.substack.com/p/will-your-...

The geopolitics of energy moving way faster than many pundits in the US seem able to see or admit. The US isn't winning and the GOP is doubling down on losing strategies. Climate action has always been inevitable. How fast it goes and who benefits the most are the questions.

Climate predatory delay, attacks on scientific capacity, undermining of diplomatic efforts, refusals in policy and planning to recognize rising brittleness, and the sudden silence on climate from business and professional leaders— a broad, coordinated attempt to postpone action by smothering speech.

Predatory delay on climate action is a central engine driving the fascism we see around us today. When given the choice of accepting the evidence and shifting to a low-carbon economy, or undermining democracy itself, the Carbon Lobby went all in on Trump.

Saying Trump was "snubbed" for the Nobel Peace Prize is like saying Goonies 3 was snubbed for the Best Picture Oscar. He was never in contention because he is a war mongering fascist.

The nuclear codes are in the hands of a man who is ranting threats to invade Greenland because he wasn't given the Nobel prize. This is probably fine.

Knowing that we will reclaim our country, end this chaos and renew our democracy is the single most important step towards winning.

From ever-brilliant @rubenbolling.bsky.social another great cartoon. See original here bsky.app/profile/rube... And reminder that a certain SCOTUS member will be immortalized for something other than "I like beer!" We should use his name in every account of these skin-color-based roundups.

AI is eating the career of every creative whose work can be easily described, modeled and predicted. Spend time learning how to think along orthogonal, unpredictable, new (or forgotten) paths... make your mind hard to model. @bruces from the mist times: bruces.medium.com/the-wonderfu...