When He’s 38 (sung to the tune of When I’m 64) 

Today, my son turns 1. 

One!

A whole year of firsts. The whole thing feels impossible, like it’s been both 4 days and 4 years since he was born. Before becoming a parent, climate change felt strangely abstract to me, despite the fact that I work in sustainability. I obviously thought about emissions targets and packaging reform and PFAS, but becoming a parent made the future feel specific in a way it hadn’t before. I don’t mean this in a doom-and-gloom way, but literally. I find myself wondering if he’ll be able to take his kids skiing in Colorado regularly, if he’ll judge me for getting on a plane for my graduate school reunion and my high school reunion within the same month, if oranges will still grow in Florida. Maybe most strangely, what parts of his future will feel completely normal to him that feel unimaginable to us right now? 

In 2063, Gus will be my age, and I wanted to share my best guess at where we’ll be in 2063. 

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Miami 

By 2070, sea levels around Miami Beach are projected to be 21 to 54 inches higher than they are today. This is a big range, but sea levels around Virginia Key have already risen 8 inches since 1950, and the pace is accelerating. Climate gentrification is underway in Miami right now: higher elevation neighborhoods are appreciating faster than low-lying ones as buyers quietly price in flood risk before they even consciously acknowledge it. The most expensive zip codes in South Florida may not be the ones with the best beach access, they’ll be the ones with the best drainage. Florida homeowners already pay the highest rates in the nation, averaging $15,000 a year. Unrestricted risk-based pricing could drive premiums up another 29% by 2055, with climate risk accounting for a meaningful portion of that increase. In a five-year period alone, insurers already cancelled nearly two million homeowners’ policies in the face of rising climate risk. I’m not sure if adaptation is happening fast enough to keep those places livable before the math stops mathing. 

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Flying

Flying isn’t going anywhere, but it’s going to get more expensive, scrutinized, and… more culturally awkward. The industry’s plan is Sustainable Aviation Fuel,which sounds like a solved problem and is very much not. Waste biomass could supply somewhere between 6% and 20% of aviation fuel demand by 2050, nowhere near enough to decarbonize the sector on its own. Battery-powered short-haul flights are viable today and high speed rail investment could reduce air travel dependence for short trips a la Europe. 

By the time Gus is 38, I’d bet on a world where long-haul flying is mostly replaced by electrified rail in connected regions, and the frequency of travel normalizes downward because the economics and social norms both shift at once. Fewer trips, longer stays, a different relationship with distance. Word to young parents: Start indoctrinating your kids to end up in the same geographical region as you. 

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Food

Beef is also not going away. Anyone telling you that hasn’t looked at global demand projections, which show red meat consumption rising in the developing world even as it declines among high-income consumers. What will shift is how it’s produced and what we eat alongside it. 

Precision fermentation is the technology most likely to quietly reshape your grocery store before you even notice. It’s not just plant-based burgers but using microbes to produce real dairy proteins without a cow and real egg whites without a chicken. The outputs are chemically identical to what you’re used to. They’re already on shelves in some markets and may become so mainstream that explaining what they replaced will feel like explaining Blockbuster. 

Climate is also reshaping what grows where. In high-income countries, per-person red meat demand is projected to decline as prices rise and preferences shift. Cocoa is under pressure from heat stress. Florida oranges have been struggling for years from a combination of disease and drought. The fruits and foods that feel permanent on your table are not permanent, just slow to change. What Gus will regularly eat in 2063 might not even exist yet, from places that currently can’t grow them using technologies that are currently considered experimental. 

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Cities

This is where I get genuinely excited, because cities are already redesigning themselves in ways that are striking.

Medellín, Colombia built 30 green corridors through its urban core, tree-lined routes designed specifically for heat protection, and cooled the city by up to 3°C while reducing crime and improving public health. Singapore (shout out my absolute favorite city in the world, IYKYK) has greened 40% of its built environment and is mandating green roofs on new construction. New York has coated more than 10 million square feet of rooftops in reflective white covering. On a summer day, black asphalt rooftops reach 190°F. That’s a number worth sitting with.

A single healthy tree, through evaporation and shade, provides the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 24 hours a day, which means the cities that invest in canopy now are making an infrastructure decision as serious as building a highway.

By 2063, the wealthiest, most desirable neighborhoods in American cities will probably be the ones with the most trees, the most shade, the most walkability, and the most reliable water. The amenities that make a place livable will have reshuffled. Rooftop pools will matter less than rooftop gardens. Square footage will matter less than passive cooling.

Denver, where we live, will have its own version of this reckoning. We’re already in a drought. Water restrictions that feel exceptional right now will probably feel routine. What gets planted in yards, how homes are built, when and how kids play outside in summer will all quietly normalize around a new baseline.

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What I Keep Coming Back To 

There’s a version of the climate future that’s a disaster movie and a version that’s a documentary about adaptation. The real 2063 will be both, probably depending heavily on your zip code and your bank account, which is its own serious problem worth a separate newsletter.

The reason I’m so comfortable about this is because I believe in the technologies and the adaptation strategies happening now. It’s going to require real, continued work, and the world will still change, but isn’t that a good thing? I’m guessing a lot of us are having vastly different life experiences than our parents did at our age. So I’m not worried about “the planet.” I’m just curious whether Gus will find it strange that so many people ate bacon from real pigs, or whether he’ll grow up thinking white rooftops are just what rooftops look like, or that people spent $6 for 24 ounces of regular water in packaging that was made from fossil fuels. 

Probably all three.