About Alex Steffen: Alex Steffen is an American futurist who writes and speaks about sustainability and the future of the planet.
Carbon zero simply means that the emissions you are releasing either are zero or balance out to zero.
Cabbies in particular seem to like discussing the fate the Earth.
Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.
For most people, using the Internet broadens their sense of who 'we' is and actually ends up leaving us in a place of greater compassion and understanding. It leaves us more connected to a larger group of people and more at one with a lot more people...
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 ...
It is very possible to have lives that are just as prosperous, and nicer, that use 5 percent of the fossil fuels and virgin materials we do now. But if we're living anything like the average McMansion-ite, SUV-driving suburbanites, there's simply no ...
The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it.
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.
If nothing else, the Internet allows people to put their ideas out there and let the world decide whether they're worth paying attention to.
More is not better. Better is better. You don't need a bigger house; you need a different floor plan. You don't need more stuff; you need stuff you'll actually use.
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?
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 pla...
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 ...
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.
