Hey folks,
How much will our refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis cost us?
One way to start answering that question is to talk about brittleness.
Brittleness is the quality of being subject to sudden, difficult-to-reverse failures.
Climate brittleness describes brittleness created by the gap between the conditions for which our systems were built, and the different, more-chaotic circumstances of the planetary crisis around us.
Places and systems which are brittle to climate impacts are vulnerable to loss. That vulnerability, in turn, makes them less valuable than they were previously. We are surrounded by lost value, a situation I call the brittleness bubble.
First Street Foundation has taken a new stab at estimating how much lost value we face here in the United States, in their new report, The 12th National Risk Assessment: Property Prices in Peril. (This article summarizes some of their findings.)
Their numbers are staggering: $1.47 trillion dollars of lost real estate value over the next 30 years, impacting 84% of U.S. communities, but concentrated in 21,750 “climate abandonment neighborhoods.”
This loss stems from the combination of worsening uninsurability (leading to escalating home insurance rates) and diminishing economic vitality (leading to out-migration — they predict 55 million Americans moving away from climate risks by 2055).
In this podcast, I explore the report’s findings, give my take on the situation, and explain some of what I think is still missing from our wider debate on the brittleness bubble, crisis migration and climate foresight in general.
Thanks for listening!
Alex
PS: Tomorrow is the last day of the Early Bird discount for my Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization. If you know you want to take this Spring’s course, and want to save 25% on the tuition, use the code CCPRSPRING25 at checkout by midnight (Pacific) tomorrow, Friday the 21st. Click the green button below to sign up:
- This new podcast, When We Are, is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world, should that be your preferred way of listening. Please subscribe, rate and review.
- My work was mentioned in two news stories in the last weeks, one in The Atlantic about the breakdown of sense-making in social media and one in The Guardian about the California fires. Also, a reader asked where they might find this interview I did back in 2022: How to ruggedize your life and prepare for... whatever comes next.
- I have a recent piece in Mother Jones, Trump Won’t Confront the Climate Crisis. He’ll Feast Off It.
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- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married" and My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series. I also spoke recently with PBS News Hour about why there are no climate havens.
