Climate chaos is here. What’s the plan?Over the next couple weeks, we’re giving a short tour of the key questions in personal climate ruggedization. What are the major risks and how do we understand them? What does it mean to live in a time with no new normal? What are the fundamental steps we can take to survive, thrive and prosper in the midst of a planetary crisis?Today, I explore the question, “Will my community be able to bounce back as climate impacts worsen?”(Did you miss the start of the series? You can listen here.)Are you ready to take action? My Personal Climate Strategy Workshop will show you how. In this eight-class workshop, you’ll learn a framework for making smart, practical decisions in a time of worsening crisis and deep uncertainty.The next Workshop begins next Monday, September 21, 2026! Registration closes this coming Friday, September 18, or when enrollment reaches 25 participants. (There are eight specially priced Access Rate seats left.) Learn more and save your seat:When We Are is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please subscribe, rate and review!This series is public and free, not paywalled. Please share it with others. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

How do we ready ourselves for climate chaos?Over the next couple weeks, we’re giving you a short tour in climate preparation: Climate foresight. Discontinuity. What it means to live during unprecedented changes. How to understand the new risks we now face. Why the economic brittleness brought on by climate chaos is the greatest danger most of us face. Avoiding getting trapped in places with shrinking futures. Relocation, repositioning and ruggedization. The intensifying competition for relatively safe places and stable situations. Why some opportunities will actually increase in the coming decades. How to stay healthy and resilient when working to ready yourself for unprecedented times.Today, I answer one of the questions people often ask me: “What should I be worried about?”(Missed the first show in the series? You can listen here.)When We Are is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please subscribe, rate and review!This series is public and free, not paywalled. Please share it with others.Ready to stop worrying and start strategizing? My Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is for you. In three weeks, you’ll learn the tools you need to survive, thrive and create a good life in the midst of climate chaos. The next Workshop begins Monday, September 21, 2026. Registration is open; space is limited to 25 participants. Learn more and save your seat: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

Hey friends,This is the first episode in a new series we’re doing on the fundamentals of designing a personal climate strategy.Over the next couple weeks, we’ll discuss the basics: Climate foresight. Discontinuity. What it means to live during unprecedented changes. How to understand the new risks we now face. Why the economic brittleness brought on by climate chaos is the greatest danger most of us face. Avoiding getting trapped in places with shrinking futures. Relocation, repositioning and ruggedization. The intensifying competition for relatively safe places and stable situations. Why some opportunities will actually increase in the coming decades. How to stay healthy and resilient when working to ready yourself for unprecedented times.Today, I answer one of the questions people ask me the most: “Do I need my own strategy for living in climate chaos?”When We Are is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please subscribe, rate and review!This series is free and public. Please share it with anyone you know who’s trying to get ready for the climate crisis.Ready to turn theory into action? My Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is unlike anything else out there. In three weeks, you’ll learn the tools you need to survive, thrive and create a good life in the midst of climate chaos. The next Workshop begins Monday, September 21, 2026. Registration is open; space is limited to 25 participants. Learn more and save your seat: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

Do you know how much climate chaos is costing you, now?This episode of When We Are is a quick exploration of how much loss is both a) already being incurred, and b) largely being ignored (or even being actively denied).We can’t avoid future loss completely, but turning our attention to the ways we now face riskier, more brittle and less prosperous futures can help us make better decisions as climate chaos worsens.If you’re interested in the topic, I’ve included some additional reading below.Thanks for listening,AlexI wrote about the active denial of present risk in this newsletter:I wrote about the ways climate chaos is already undermining our economic prosperity in this essay:I also wrote about the myriad ways in which the erosive effects of climate shifts — individually almost too slow or small to notice, but dire in aggregate — can wreak havoc on the systems we depend on for our prosperity:PS: As always, if you get some value from these discussions, please take a minute to rate the show. In Apple podcasts, go to the podcast’s main show page and scroll down to “Ratings & Reviews,” then click the star ratings. This really helps more people find the show. Thanks!PPS: If you find these newsletters helpful or interesting, please help spread the word: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

Find out more about my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop here.We live in a planetary crisis that is at its very core intergenerationally unjust. The vast majority of the benefits of predatory delay and extractive prosperity have gone to (and been consumed by) the oldest people in out society, while their unprecedented costs will land most heavily on the youngest.But what if being young and bold can actually become an advantage at this moment? The reaction to my podcast Crisis Advice for Young People was very positive, but folks wanted to hear more about what younger people might actually do to improve their odds.This podcast is my attempt to suggest one way younger people may be able to leverage the freedoms of being young into a better position in the rough times ahead: by moving faster than other can.As the man says, “Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action.”If you find it useful, please pass it along.AlexPS: The next Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is right around the corner, on Thursday, March 19th at 12pm PST // 8pm GMT! Get an introduction to a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework, ready for times of increasing stress and disruption. Considering relocation? Planning for kids? Thinking about a new career? Mapping out the future of your business? This class can set you up to make better choices.Sign up by March 10th and save $100!PPS: As always, if you get some value from these discussions, please take a minute to rate the show. In Apple podcasts, go to the podcast’s main show page and scroll down to “Ratings & Reviews,” then click the star ratings. This really helps more people find the show. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

Reminder: The early-bird for the next live Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics ends on Tuesday, March 10! Sign up now for $97 (save $100). Class meets Thursday, March 19th at 12pm Pacific. I think of it as “The Myth of the Starting Gun and the Flat Track Fallacy.”There are two parts here:The Starting Gun: the idea that climate action and response will have a definable moment of acceleration, where delay drops away and rapid progress begins.andThe Flat Track: the notion that when that moment of acceleration comes, our task will be deploying the kinds of policies, technologies and culture changes that advocates have been demanding for decades — that future action looks more or less like what we’ve been working towards, just arriving a little later than we hoped.I think both parts are wrong. No moment of political transformation is coming, only the acceleration of capacities with unevenly distributed and partial successes. And as action does increase, we will increasingly find that our past plans simply no longer match the scale of discontinuity in front of us. No Orderly Transition is coming, and the broader climate debate is unprepared for what’s coming now.I explore this idea in this episode of When We Are.AlexPS: The ninth Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is coming up on Thursday, March 19th at 12pm PST // 8pm GMT! Get an introduction to a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework, ready for times of increasing stress and disruption. Considering relocation? Planning for your kids or grandkids? Mapping out the future of your business? This might be for you.Sign up by March 10th and save $100!PPS: As always, if you get some value from these discussions, please take a minute to rate the show. In Apple podcasts, go to the podcast’s main show page and scroll down to “Ratings & Reviews,” then click the star ratings. This really helps more people find the show.PPPS: If you find these newsletters helpful, please spread the word:Thank you! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

Millions of us are disoriented.In this podcast, I explore what foresight tells us about disorientation.We’ve all been raised, educated and trained to understand the world around us. Much of that understanding, though, is tethered to notions about the shape and behavior of systems. Many of those notions, in turn, we absorb in a variety of informal ways that are lived, social or cultural — what we often think of as common sense.In times of essential continuity, common sense plus a decent education is a powerful mix.In discontinuous moments, though, they break down. I’ve written before about how hard we have to work these days to update our education and training to maintain a sort of evergreen expertise:Recently, though, I’ve had the chance to think a bit more about the emotional impacts of losing our sense of future direction.We orient ourselves amidst change by looking for familiar landmarks, comfortable analogies between the new and the known, parallels that allow us to apply common sense to uncommon situations.When we face a moderate tempo of change, this reference to the ordinary works — and comforts us.But when we face rapid upheavals, it breaks down.We find ourselves facing personal discontinuity, since if the world is suddenly different than we thought it was, our lives are different than the ones we thought we were living. We experience horizon collapse, as our experience and common sense no longer offer us a way of anticipating what comes next. We may even confront despair, as the world around us becomes so unfamiliar it just feels wrong.That’s when it really helps to remember that we should feel this way, at least initially.The planetary discontinuity we’re in is unprecedented. We’re not supposed to instantly adapt to that. We have to undertake a process of becoming at home in the present.—AlexPS: The ninth Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is coming up on Thursday, March 19th at 12pm PST // 8pm GMT! Get an introduction to a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework, ready for times of increasing stress and disruption. Considering relocation? Planning for your kids or grandkids? Mapping out the future of your business? This might be for you.Sign up by March 10th and save $100!PPS: If you find these newsletters and podcasts helpful, please let others know: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of When We Are, I talk about those insisting that you can’t possibly choose a safer place to weather the climate crisis, because every place is endangered.I discuss why this claim is obviously wrong (some places are, in fact, relatively safe), and also who benefits from making it.Like every part of the climate crisis, our understanding of risk and ruggedization are undermined by predatory delay and denialism. Paradoxically, the repeated message that nowhere is safe makes it easier to convince us to ignore the dangers around us. Why pay attention to risk if there’s nothing we can do about it, right?I hope you’ll give this short episode a listen.You might also want to check out these recent letters:Why are those with risk-exposed assets fighting so hard to avoid a reckoning with climate risk? Because the Brittleness Bubble is deflating, fast.- Interested in creating your a climate strategy for your own life? My next live, eight-class Personal Climate Strategy Workshop begins on February 12th! Get early access to the Early-Bird discount when you enter your email at the bottom of this page (we'll send you the details ASAP).- Need expert guidance around your own climate planning, or want to discuss a business idea? Schedule a private Climate Strategy Consultation with me.- Let’s connect on Bluesky, LinkedIn or Facebook- Check out my books: Worldchanging (which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary) and Carbon Zero- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.- This podcast, When We Are, is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please subscribe, rate and review! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

You’re probably less doomed than you think.If you spend much time trying to figure out how to ready yourself for this accelerating climate crisis, you will likely encounter the idea that there’s nothing you can do. Game over, man.You don’t have to look very far to find people ringing in the apocalypse and inviting you to lie back and greet the collapse. Writing and teaching about climate foresight, solutions-based thinking and personal climate strategies over the years, I’ve had hundreds of people (almost all dudes) go out of their way to tell me how there’s no hope, nothing to be done, our ruin is upon us and I’m an idiot to suggest otherwise.I, alas, tend to base my foresight on facts, and here’s the fact: this is not the end of everything. We have already likely avoided the worst-case scenarios, even if we have locked in a magnitude of crisis many of us worked hard to prevent. It is not too late to limit global heating and ecological collapse, and even the harsh future we’re tumbling towards is still a future full of choices.A lot of people face grim options in battered and brittle communities, sure, but almost everyone still has options. Most listeners to podcasts like mine — educated, informed, and better-resourced than many — have an array of opportunities to make workable plans, seek relatively safety, ruggedize our lives and work with others to ready our communities for what’s coming. Most of us are far from powerless. A lot of us may in fact find that meeting the planetary crisis liberates us to live lives of greater purpose, connection and secure prosperity than the lives we live today.We may not yet personally know how to start building those lives, but that’s a different problem.Give it a listen…AlexIf you want to learn more about your own options for the future, my Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics class is a great place to start. The last class of 2025 will be held tomorrow Tuesday, December 16th, from 12pm - 2pm PST via Zoom (yes, it will be recorded!). Registration closes tomorrow, December 16th, at 11:00am PST.This is your chance to learn the foundational components and frameworks for understanding planetary discontinuity: How it impacts your choices and key decision timelines, and how to make better informed choices about your present and future. Almost 500 people have taken this short intensive (from all around the planet), and we have a great group forming for this class.Registrants also get special discounts and early access to my in-depth Personal Climate Strategy Workshop (next one coming in late-January)Step into 2026 feeling more ready and confident. Get all the class details and sign up here: https://alexsteffen.thinkific.com/products/courses/personal-climate-strategy-classWant to know what others think? For a review of my basics class, check out “How to Prepare Yourself For an Uncertain Future - The Review.” For a review of my workshop, read “Alex Steffen’s Personal Climate Strategy Workshop: A Review.“ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe

Soft denialism is climate denialism that denies not the reality of climate change, but rather its importance.In this podcast, I touch on the TrumpII-era resurgence of soft denialism, Bill Gates’ misguided climate memo, and the Atlantic’s claim that “climate adaptation is indistinguishable from efforts to improve human welfare.”Along the way, I explain why failing to understand the climate crisis as a discontinuity in human affairs means failing to understand it at all.The recently-published 2025 State of the Climate Report: a planet on the brink can be found here. A news item that came across my desk after I recorded this, but that reinforces my point: Iceland deems possible Atlantic current collapse a security risk.“Iceland has designated the potential collapse of a major Atlantic Ocean current system a national security concern and an existential threat, enabling its government to strategize for worst-case scenarios, the country’s climate minister told Reuters.The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, current brings warm water from the tropics northward toward the Arctic, and the flow of warm water helps keep Europe’s winters mild.But as warming temperatures speed the thaw of Arctic ice and cause meltwater from Greenland’s ice sheet to pour into the ocean, scientists warn the cold freshwater could disrupt the current’s flow. … Other climate ministries and meteorological offices across Northern Europe told Reuters they are funding more research while weighing possible risks in their climate adaptation plans. Ireland’s weather service said its scientists briefed the country’s prime minister last year and a parliamentary committee last month. Norway’s environment ministry said it was “seeking to deepen our understanding of the issue through new research” before determining whether to classify AMOC as a security risk.”Remember, we are only at the beginning.This podcast, When We Are, is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a minute to rate the show. In Apple podcasts, go to the podcast’s main show page and scroll down to “Ratings & Reviews,” then click the star ratings. This really helps more people find the show. Thank you! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe