Alex Steffen Biography
Alex Steffen is an American thought leader, journalist, entrepreneur, and futurist who writes and speaks about sustainability and the future of the planet. He emphasizes the importance of imagining persuasive, positive possible futures: “It’s literally true that we can’t build what we can’t imagine, the fact that we haven’t compellingly imagined a thriving, dynamic, sustainable world is a major reason we don’t already live in one.”
Alex Steffen Age
Steffen was born in 1968 in Oakland, California, the United States of America. He is currently 51 years old. Alex lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately, there is no information about his initial life neither his parent’s background.
Alex Steffen Career
Alex Steffen is a planetary futurist and creator of the thebooksWorldchangingand Carbon Zero. His new project The Heroic Future launches in September. Follow Alex on Twitter or to sign up to get his free weekly newsletter. In addition, Alex is a frequent public speaker and has spoken at TED, Poptech, Design Indaba, Amsterdam’s PicNic, The Royal Geographical Society and New Delhi’s Doors of Perception. As well as keynote addresses at industry events like the AIGA and IDSA national conferences, O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies (eTech), FOO Camp and the Business Expo Bright Green held during the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
Furthermore, he has keynoted three different South by Southwest conferences (SXSW). Alex has also spoken at universities including Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Stanford and the London School of Economics. Steffen is a frequent public speaker and has spoken at TED Poptech, Design Indaba, Amsterdam’s PicNic, The Royal Geographical Society and New Delhi’s Doors of Perception. As well as keynote addresses at industry events like the AIGA[ and IDSA national conferences, O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies (eTech), FOO Camp and the Business Expo Bright Green held during the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
Alex Stefen Net Worth
Steffen procures an attractive measure of cash through his professional careers as a planetary futurist, journalist, and entrepreneur. Alex’s net worth is around 1.5 million dollars to 2 million dollars. For almost ten years, he has work in newspapers and radio, covering planetary change on four continents. Likewise, he ran the pioneering sustainability and social innovation project Worldchanging.com and edited two best-selling Worldchanging books from 2003 to 2010. Steffen spends most of his money on helping institutes and companies anticipate the planetary future.
Alex Steffen Wife| Is Alex Steffen Married?
Steffen has kept his personal life a long way from his professional life. In that case, there is no solitary information of his past just as current connections. At the moment, Alex is caught up concentrating on his job as a planetary futurist. Other than this, there are no bits of rumors about Steffen’s relationships.
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Alex Steffen The Shareable Future of Cities
Zero, Worldwide
A worldwide transition to a climate-balanced global economy (one which adds zero CO2 each year to the total CO2 in the atmosphere) lies completely within our reach. But to achieve it, we’ll need to be honest with ourselves about geopolitics and reality. Because we have some tough decisions to make. Climate change is global, with people everywhere worsening the crisis. But we are not all equally responsible for the crisis we face now. Those of us who live in the wealthier nations got our wealth by cutting down forests, and burning coal and oil to fuel our industrialization. We are wealthy, to be blunt because we’re the ones who put most of the greenhouse gases up there in the first place
In the last century, to get wealthier, you needed smokestacks and clear-cuts and coal mines. Poorer nations — whose economies rely more on older, more polluting technologies — argue that they have a right to grow their economies to help their people escape poverty and achieve prosperity. These nations are mostly willing to negotiate with wealthier countries on lowering their climate emissions rapidly, but they will need time to transition to low-carbon economies, and they expect that we in the wealthier countries will lead the way on cutting emissions rapidly to buy them time. Essentially, the poorer nations are saying, they have a right to the lion’s share of those remaining 565 gigatons of CO2.
Even ambitious plans for global emissions reductions take time. Poorer countries now emit less overall, but their economies are inefficient and largely dependent on dirty energy. Lots of work will need to be done for those countries to level off their emissions, and more work after that for their economies to become carbon neutral, even with really aggressive innovation — innovation bolder than any we have seen anywhere in the developing world.
For example, one recent credible scenario by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows would have emissions in poorer countries leveling off in 2025, then declining 7 percent per year thereafter, until the global carbon balance was restored. Seven percent a year, it should be noted, would be extremely bold: but even that extremely bold goal would demand that the wealthier countries buy time by zeroing out their own emissions first. The poorer countries argue this is a matter of “climate equity.”
Our Cities as Climate Solutions
So, changing how our cities work proves to be a pretty vital job. Fortunately, our comparatively massive wealth has left us with a number of capacities the rest of the world simply doesn’t have: The majority of the world’s research universities, think tanks, engineering and design firms, advocacy groups, investment funds, venture capitalists, and so on, are all concentrated in the wealthiest cities — and even with China, India, and Brazil growing by leaps and bounds, this central fact of the concentration of the capacity for innovation in a relatively small number of rich cities is unlikely to change overnight.
Leading the way into a carbon zero future will be good for business. Cities that innovate in design, planning, policy, and products will equip their citizens with exportable skills and marketable experience before those in slower cities even know they exist. With thousands of large and small cities about to boom, the markets for urban innovations are almost inconceivably vast. There’s a 40-year boom on its way; cities that lead the way into a carbon zero future will be its great success stories.
Many of the most important kinds of innovations, policies, and plans needed to create such urban success stories are local — or are, at least, the kinds that don’t demand bold national action to succeed. In countries like the United States, where dirty energy companies have managed to clog the works of government, the ability to innovate meaningfully at a local level represents a huge advantage. Our major cities are small enough that committed people can actually change them and large enough that changing them can produce big impacts.
Building Carbon Zero Cities
Building carbon zero cities means not only greater prosperity but more security. Almost everything we need to do to drop our climate emissions also leaves us more rugged and resilient to disasters and global instability. Carbon zero cities mean future-proof cities, or as close as we’re likely to get. Our choice could not be clearer, to my mind: Remake our cities into central hubs in the global climate-neutral economy we’re moving towards (and ready ourselves for the tough times to come), or shirk our responsibilities and leave ourselves even more vulnerable to the onrushing chaos. As a patriot, the right choice for America is plain to me.
Alex Steffen Quotes
- Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?
- Any future which is not beautiful is unacceptable.
- No future can be beautiful which involves an economy that violates the rights of future generations, that degrades fundamental planetary systems in any way, or that fails to offer every human being a basic share of safety, dignity, and happiness.
- The future starts now.
- Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.
- We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. … Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible.
- We have to develop a model of prosperity that 4.5 billion more people can share and we don’t know how to do it.
- To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs.
- Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems.
- My other car is a bright green city.
- The answer to the problem of the American car is not under its hood. …The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car but to eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go.