Words matter. These are the best Alex Steffen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.
What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends, and caffeine.
The idea that we are going to be able to take our entire society as it currently works and simply change the source of energy and make it sustainable is not actually congruent with reality.
Americans trash the planet not because we’re evil, but because the industrial systems we’ve devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.
Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that’ll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.
There’s no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society – in fact, quite the opposite. The planet’s ready to work with us if we’re ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.
If we’re talking about transportation, the best thing a city can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it’s the only universal strategy that works.
The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it.
Clean air and water, a diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the human race survives – and may even extend our stay on Earth.
We don’t know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face.
The most climate friendly trip we are ever going to take is the trip we never had to take because we were close to what we wanted.
In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that’s an outdated 20th-century worldview from a time when we thought industrialization was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze of air pollution.
Climate change is not a discrete issue; it’s a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We’re chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.
The Internet has made some phenomenal breakthroughs that are still only poorly understood in terms of changing people’s ideas of us and them. If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.
The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.
There’s no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn’t happen, but I believe we don’t have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, ‘Game over.’ Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with that reality for centuries to come.
Cabbies in particular seem to like discussing the fate the Earth.
We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt.
There’s a lot of evidence that shows that if we push as hard as we need to for net-zero emissions, we’ll find ourselves with cities that are more secure, healthier, and have more economic opportunity – are frankly better cities to live in – than if we settle for the status quo.
Cities generate most of the global economy, and most of its energy use, resource demands and climate emissions. How we build cities over the next decades will largely determine whether we can deliver a bright green future.
If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.
By fundamentally changing how we design the places and systems that enable our daily lives, we can slash emissions way beyond the immediate carbon savings – because our own personal emissions are just the tip of a vast iceberg of energy and resources consumed far from our view.
I think we’re going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people get together once in a while to protest, but it’s more about an ongoing, sustained engagement in issues, networks and communities about which people care.
Copenhagen has done a remarkable job creating streets that are focused on bicycles and pedestrians.
We’re becoming a planet of a thousand new major cities. The economy of the 21st century is a city-building economy. It’s within our power to make it a carbon zero one, too; and to be blunt, civilization depends on our success.
There are a lot of different ways of building a prosperous society, and some of them use much less energy than others. And it is possible and more practical to talk about rebuilding systems to use much less energy than it is to think about trying to meet greater demands of energy through clean energy alone.
We already have many of the technologies and tools that we need to build a sustainable future. What we don’t have is a new way of thinking, and that’s really the hardest part.
Carbon zero simply means that the emissions you are releasing either are zero or balance out to zero.
Cities are responsible for the vast majority of the creation of the economy. They’re also places into which we pour the vast majority of resources, the vast majority of energy and the places where a huge percentage of the decisions about how systems are built and how products designed, etc., happen.
The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs – and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs – aren’t just a bit unsustainable, they’re ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.
