I've been thinking for a long time about how we got to this moment of planetary ecological emergency, and, conversely, what the world might look like had we taken a different path.

I enjoy good retro-futuristic ecotopian visions, but...

THREAD https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/retro-futurecraft-and-rethinking-tomorrow-e35f30a6727f#.23xjyfufb

I think we profoundly underestimate the impact on our imaginations of the retrospective view we have living in a world where all sane tempos of climate action are wildly disruptive.

Because here's what we so often fail to grasp: the changes needed to swerve onto a vastly less catastrophic trajectory beginning in, say, 1980 were almost gentle compared to what we now must do.

A much more sustainable society on that curve might, to us feel boringly normal.

One giant step could easily have been a national growth management act (several of which were proposed in the 1970s) to channel growth into more compact forms, preventing the outer-ring, then exurban sprawl we've seen.

A world with less sprawl would not feel crazy-wild to us.

Fuel-mileage standards could have kept improving quickly after the 1976 oil crisis, and we could have decided not to let mass-market SUVs be sold.

I doubt most of us would consider a world without SUVs unimaginably different.

Carter planned on, if I'm remembering right, solar energy to providing 20% of our power by 2000. That would have meant at least some of the learning curve we're seeing now happening earlier.

I doubt most people care where the electricity comes from when they switch on a light.

Had we kept pace with building standards and appliance efficiencies achieved by the best policies in other industrialized countries, the cuts in air pollution and CO2 would have been huge.

A US of ubiquitous triple-paned windows and thick refrigerators would not give us vertigo.

Whole arrays of solutions would already be settled parts of our lives, whole oceans of ecological harm would have never happened.

Very little of it would have led to the loss of anything meaningful about American values. Indeed, much of it would have been barely noticeable.

Instead, we're in for massive societal disruptions AND ecological discontinuity, living in a country where predatory delay by big business has been instrumental in undermining our democracy to the point we're seeing every day now.

That wasn't a missed turn, that was a derailment.

Recent work on the dynamic of steepening cruves, the reality that worsening problems in finite systems require faster, more disruptive solutions the longer we delay... https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1357391061644099585

Their steepening nature is why even unsustainable practices that remain unchanged become in effect more unsustainable over time—and why older, less rapid (but once perfectly useful) solutions grow insufficient. https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/846098797323206656

Our idea that climate action would have been hugely expensive (indeed, even that it would be hugely expensive now) has always been, to a large degree, the product of a successful, decades-long disinformation campaign. https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1295424584229912576