Connecting Climates 1
Voting, and Consequences
This is Connecting Climates.
Introducing Connecting Climates
Welcome to Connecting Climates. Thanks for reading this edition! I’m Tim Lazaroff, a Berlin-based urbanist originally from New York. I write about urban governance, politics, and crises.
The idea behind this Substack is to connect different climates — political, ecological, and otherwise — from my vantage point straddling the North Atlantic. Each newsletter, I’ll aim to weave stories from two different climates together in unexpected ways.
It’s easy to imagine those climates being the American and German political climates on more than one occasion (like in this newsletter on voting), but there’s no restrictions on what else will make its way here, particularly when it comes to the urban. The third section, ‘A nod to brilliance’, will likely highlight interesting and innovative urban solution-making more often than not.
Mainly, I wanna have some fun writing and see where this goes. I’ve thought plenty about rolling this out and I’m excited to share this with you all. The last couple sections -- ‘Sharing is caring’, and ‘Pennies for your thoughts’ -- keep things pleasantly weird.
Connecting Climates is just as much a product of some helpful nudges towards a Substack and consistent writing that I’ve gotten lately. Thanks to each of you, Anastasia, John, and Suzy, for the supportive push, and even for many ideas that’ll make their way into Connecting Climates.
This newsletter is also an invitation to amplify each other: sharing ideas, resisting current political developments, keeping up with each other, and supporting our passions all can go hand-in-hand. We can connect our little worlds, our micro-climates, on our own terms, and truly make them better for it.
Climate 1: Post-Inaugural America
On the ground floor of our Berlin apartment building, there’s a friendly older German couple that my girlfriend and I chat with in passing, usually about their garden plot (yay) or our landlord (nay). Usually, I make an effort to say hi, a part of me still pretending to be back in the everybody-knows-everybody suburb of Floral Park, not a city renowned for its cold shoulder.
Holger (fictionalized name) is typically a jolly figure, but as we waved out from the elevator on our way up to our apartment, he bolted my way, wagging his figure and getting right in my face post-groceries.
Eine Frage… hast du für Trump gewählt??
When someone asks Americans overseas about our voting record, we tend to have few qualms. It’s especially true for me in 2016: I literally took a leave of absence to work on the campaign against Trump. But still, Holger’s got a point: America screwed up bigtime, and everyone’s gotta deal with it.
Early on in my time in Europe, it became clear to me how much Americans are voting as self-proclaimed stewards of the rest of the world. I was on exchange in Copenhagen during the 2016 primaries, when Trump’s nomination became, well, real, and the Bernie-Hillary clash made that race closer than most of us imagined possible. Back then, most of those conversations with Europeans stemmed out of their curiosity, less fear and disgust.
It was my warm-up for constantly being in what I term ‘ambassador mode’: answering, certainly not always defending, as an American abroad the our political situation back home.
Nine years later, now people ask whether I’m glad I “got out”. Sure, there’s plenty of good in my life in Berlin, but nobody wants this, and nobody can disentangle themselves completely from the United States — especially a New Yorker with considerable ties back home. There’s no ‘I told you so’, or Schadenfreude. It just flat out sucks, and there are so many emotions to hold. Trying to keep up with Trump has been nearly impossible by design.
When Trump nukes alliances (figuratively, for now) and USAID abroad, and robs essential federal services at home, no one outside his oligarchy wins. It’s eerily reminiscent of the Chicago boys running wild in Chile after a CIA-assisted coup on September 11, 1973 installed military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
For many on the outside looking in (including a stray commenter on my LinkedIn post, more on that later), there’s a notion that the chickens have come home to roost, ala Brexit. While we’ve certainly accumulated plenty of bad karma (not unlike the Brits), does American democracy deserve this? It’s both a question I never truly feel like answering, and one that, as an American, feels completely at odds with how I’m conditioned to see the world. Who among us truly believes we had all of this coming to us?
Given the chance, I optimistically doubt most people would actually sign up for the consequences coming from this chaos. As my friend John (who’s got a mean Substack of his own) and I were discussing last week, no political party — especially with the narrative that inflation pushed voters towards Republican candidates - would have ever campaigned on eggs being $10 a dozen within the first month of taking office. Or every American taxpayer’s sensitive data handed to college interns working for Elon Musk.
So I call BS on the narrative of a self-imposed reckoning. It supposes that most voters understand how the federal government works and what happens when you deprive it of experts, which is bold considering the men dismantling it barely do.
Ditto for climate change accelerating beyond scientists’ own models, those funny attempts at understanding a chaotic world. Are we all really attuned to what life will be like every half degree warmer it gets?
[Read: Susan Crawford’s Moving Day]
That inconvenient climate stuff is another reminder this administration’s tentacles don’t just affect Americans (wouldn’t that make the guilt sting slightly less, though).
My day-to-day work is in international development. In case you missed it, the U.S. of A decided to take out the ID, a decision as impulsive and short-sighted, let alone budget-unfriendly, as any.
Samantha Power, former Administrator of USAID, went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to vouch for her former agency’s existence. When Colbert asked her why USAID was the first federal agency to be “taken out behind the barn”, Power chalked it up to power imbalances between American voters and the rest of the world dependent on USAID:
I think we saw last week as well an effort to cut off all federal programs but there was an uproar. People called their Congressmen and women, blue states, red states, these programs are really important in the lives of Americans. The kids at those vaccination clinics [in Sub-Saharan Africa], those girls who are in school because of USAID, they don’t vote in our elections, they don’t have the numbers of their Congresspeople, they can’t use that lever. So it’s really up to the rest of us to make that case.
Disturbingly, now that Americans have voted, there’s consequences the whole world will have to contend with. But Power points to different pathways of resistance (like the mundane ringing your elected officials, which I can vouch for after having fielded those very calls at the front desk of a Senator’s office) now that the ballots have been cast.
Resistance takes many forms beyond the ballot box. Americans — and everyone else — don’t have to accept the full spectrum of consequences. Trumpf is counting on us to go quietly.
Climate 2: The land of soon-to-be voters
I sure do wish the likes of J.D. Vance didn’t represent the country of my birth, but he quite literally just did in the most disrespectful way possible at the Munich Security Conference.
In probably the most stunning German-American relations development since I’ve been alive, the sitting American Vice President neglected an audience with the sitting German Chancellor, instead meeting the leader of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD/NSDAP) and imploring European leaders to be a little more... fascist. This, of course, comes on the heels of the unappointed oligarch-in-chief’s double Nazi salute and courting the AfD on ex-Twitter, and on the cusp of German federal elections this Sunday, February 23rd.
Rebuke was stern and swift, even in real-time at the Conference. Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave Vance a much-needed memo in meddling in allies’ elections - “you just don’t do that” - and reiterated that Germany will never include the far-right in government. While Olaf’s got a point about not wanting Nazis in power, it’s both a question for German voters (I can now consider myself one!) and of voting’s consequences: what politicians will do once they’re in power.
It’s simultaneously fascinating, illuminating, terrifying, and disheartening how key hallmarks of foreign policy in the rest of the world are relations and postures towards the United States. In the post-Cold War America in which I was raised, no single foreign country — not even Russia, or China — has such a grip on the imagination and on consequence. It’s becoming more apparent to me that this was a luxury.
While comparing different party platforms here in my quest to make an informed vote, posture towards the States is a defining foreign policy question. In other times, the question of how a given party interacts with the United States might be a touch more straightforward, but now, we’ve got a rogue, fascist-promoting oligarchy in place of a dependable ally at the helm.
How is the modern European party, or state, to adequately respond? My still-undecided vote hopefully now resists not just the Nazis in Germany, but the Musk-Vance-Trump hydra back home.
Concerningly, we’ve seen that a vote for the party most likely to win - the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - doesn’t necessarily mean it’s against the AfD and, by extension, U.S.-endorsed fascism. So, as we all head to the ballot (or postal) box, I’m trying to imagine what the full ramifications of a CDU victory (one which I certainly will not vote for, but that will be the party with like 30% of voters, an even smaller share than the supposedly-less democratic US?) will be.
On many immigrants’ minds: Are they really going to repeal the citizenship law? Will Germans from birth count more than naturalized German citizens? (Spoiler: likely not, and legally impossible).
In Berlin, some of the nasty medium-term consequences of a CDU governing ethos have taken shape with drastic budget cuts to pretty much everything not named the police and regional rail. Berlin’s arts and culture budget -- arguably the funds underpinning what makes Germany’s alternative special -- has been completely gutted. Ditto for planned public transit expansion, and a litany of other state functions that keep quality of life here incredibly high. Normally, fewer emails is a plus, but fewer event emails because no events are funded is pretty bleak.
I was chatting with a good friend of mine who’s a poet, meaning he’s in the community most immediately- and intensely-impacted by the CDU-led budget cuts. We feel pretty similar: we like it here, and don’t really want to leave, especially after the painstaking process of getting settled in a city across the world in your 20s. But he said something else that struck me: “I don’t really know where else I would go”.
Even for hypermobile, extremely well-educated, by all accounts privileged people, we’re taking in the consequences of voting (in this case, an election that neither of us could vote in) without a really compelling alternative to turn to, one where we could maintain our quality of life, opportunity, social ties, freedom, and security. What else do people really want, anyway?
Now that I’m German, but also as an immigrant (not to mention one with a Jewish last name), I volleyed Holger’s question back at him, making sure that we and his wife were set to vote in the upcoming election: Aber du musst ja auch bald wählen, oder? Sure enough, they were vocal in their distaste for the AfD, and stupefied that anyone could really vote for them.
It was low-stakes banter underpinned by the fact that both of us had a pretty fair idea we weren’t rubbing shoulders with a Nazi. Our neighborhood is traditionally progressive - its name, the ‘Rote Insel’, comes from the red being a communist stronghold pre-WWII - and being a friendly foreigner or friendly to foreigners is usually a good indicator of partisan sensibilities here.
So when I reflect again on the notion of people getting what they voted for, and the connections among different political climates, it’s hard to define the contours of our voting consequences. For me, that’s only gotten more interesting to ponder straddling continents, with a voice - and a vote - in both.
A nod to brilliance
This section goes out to collective intelligence: a recognition of how damn impressive we are as a species, and how there’s so much by way of solutions across the world. I’ll typically reserve this section for the urban. Cities around the world have got a lot to share with each other, as the ethos of exchange in my current workplace (a global local and regional governments association) can attest.
For this edition, I’d like to celebrate a collaborative group discussion I was graciously given the chance to join this past week (despite having been unable to attend both the previous call and the conference which birthed this call series, both of which I was invited to). A friend of mine described being an adult as going to the things you’re invited to. I’ll take that one step further: part of stepping into adulthood is showing up, and being fully present while you’re there.
This group of practitioners, 10x100, has already been sharing and amplifying each others’ time for 900 days as part of a “learning-centered coordination framework that drives organizational shifts from commitment to accountable impact across the entire value chain”. 10x100 was initiated by Dark Matter Labs and Politics for Tomorrow at the 2022 European Forum Alpbach, dedicated to holding 10 open dialogues total over 100-day intervals (10x100) in moving with the polycrisis.
Holding a messy presence is vital in these discussions. This quarter’s theme, ‘Disruptions & Endings’, asked us to collaboratively contemplate the following light and easy prompt: “How can we engage with uncertainty when familiar structures collapse faster than we can fully comprehend?” My master’s thesis was on neoliberalism’s posture towards uncertainty during COVID-19 in school reopenings, so this hit home on an intellectual front. On a physical and emotional level, though, we’re all struggling to hold this past four weeks’ events and meet its continued consequences, even those whose literal profession is engaging with complexity.
As my breakout room partner wisely noted, it’s impossible to sum up these discussions and their many nuances, particularly when grappling with the likes of collapse. These spaces were already essential (hence 10x100’s creation in 2022); in 2025, the urgency for our engagement and contemplation only magnifies. Another breakout room came to a similar conclusion — “It’s time to fuck shit up” — having already understood that it has continuously been time.
While there’s only one quarterly remaining, I’m curious to see where this collaboration leads, and if a renewed call for this space emerges to suit the current modified window for opportunity we now find ourselves having to encounter. I also wonder what kind of collectives like this exist and how they’re reconfiguring themselves to more appropriately meet what Donna Haraway would call a ‘thick present’. That’s a cue for you too, reader!
Sharing is caring
Leading an Instagram-free life these days is like living under a rock, and I fully acknowledge that it’s also hard seeing under a rock from the outside looking in. Here’s a section to share a little bit more about what’s happening in my world, and invitation to consider what you’d like to share from yours, too!
A new place I’ve encountered
In the spirit of Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel, this doesn’t need to be anything exotic. In fact, the extraordinary often lies in a street we’ve never walked down before, or a building we’ve only seen from one perspective. The longing for travel elsewhere ought not to be at the expense of what’s proximate.
In that vein, I turn to the Buddhistisches Tor in Kreuzberg. Having biked past it quite literally hundreds of times, but never having gone in, it’s now a fixture in my life here.
Credit: Yelp
I’m sure many of us find it wonderful, yet almost painfully sad, how ignorant we are (and often choose to remain) of the parallel universes happening all around us. Do we really know much about what’s happening in our city? In our neighborhood? In our very apartment building?
So when I entered into a space -- one I’m grateful to have been nudged towards internally and externally -- and encountered a vibrant community existing in parallel, it’s been accompanied by a range of emotions and contemplations; thankfully, shame for having “missed out” on this world for so long does not feature prominently here.
What’s been most remarkable, though, is that the notion of ‘in parallel’ has been subsumed, somewhat, by ‘adjacent’; that is, preexisting potential connections of those who I didn’t realize were in this space (and conversely, did not recognize my prospective interest or contribution to it) revealing themselves as members of this community. It’s an invitation for further investment in this place and community, and continued curiosity in the other spaces -- physical, community, and otherwise -- that may be within arm’s reach, if only our arm were to move bravely forward in that direction.
What I’ve been reading
Reading is a staple crop of my day (and the majority of my phone time, as my girlfriend supportively points out). I’ve settled on a system of reading headier non-fiction books in the morning and novels in the evening, plus relaxing afternoons. Newsletters, other authors’ Substacks, The Ringer, ESPN, and LinkedIn binging (gross, I know) are scattered throughout the day and satisfy my phone addiction.
I’ve just finished Kindred after it summoned a childlike thirst for reading I seldom encounter. For some reason, I associate this with drives down to the beach, where I’d regularly polish off 60 pages and 2 sesame seed bagels in the 50-minute drive to Sore Thumb or Robert Moses.
Kindred -- a profound work of historical fiction made possible by science fiction -- repeatedly and willingly took the black female protagonist, Dana, and her white husband, Kevin, to a Maryland plantation in the early 1800s. It’s chilling encountering their frequent dislocations and subsequent readaptations to circumstance, particularly as time operates on different speeds between 1970s Los Angeles and antebellum Maryland (a few hours in the former stretches to years in the latter). Dana and Kevin are both writers and forced to navigate circumstances in a world unable to fully meet them as they are.
It didn’t occur to me until the 10x100 quarterly that our trying, harrowing times are testing everyone’s collective and individual moral integrity in response to American politics. One member, who’s currently in academia, spoke to compliance with executive orders and rhetoric stripping gender-affirming language and institutional racism. There are methods to resist, rather than outright comply, but a surprisingly considerable portion of peer academics and institutions are not just cooperating, in his eyes, but actively cooperating by proactively removing research content. The seemingly benign smaller acts, like taking down pictures of Harriet Tubman in American schools at NATO headquarters before Pete Hegseth’s wife visits, are indications of quickly turning over a new leaf, rather than meaningfully resisting that turn and holding moral ground.
This brings me back to Kevin, who (spoiler) was unwillingly stuck in the 1800s for five years. If we were white people in the antebellum United States, how would we act? Kevin was forced into pretending Dana was, at one point, his slave, and had multiple opportunities to imitate (and benefit enormously from) the racist zeitgeist. Yet he withdrew to a solitary life writing in the North, and refused to compromise his personal integrity running a slave-holding plantation in Maryland, cultivated in his refusal to heed family requests to separate from his black wife back in Los Angeles. Does navigating today’s America mean refusing Harriet Tubman’s story of freedom from antebellum Maryland and lifelong struggle for justice?
It’s only been four weeks since Inauguration Day, but time has seemed to stretch like in Kindred. Finding our pathways for resistance, centered in ideals of moral integrity, community, and action, can make a present we would prefer to live in a smidge more possible.
I think we’re all testing this out, somehow. For me, I’ve been reflecting on potential touchpoints where my personal situation — disentangled from federal grants, living overseas, having freedom of speech, among many other privileges — affords a greater capacity for resistance.
So I took a little step in that direction this past week, calling out my alma mater, particularly Wharton, for failing to publicly disavow its two most notorious alumni in their white supremacist state capture. Penn was intentionally silent in Trump’s first term — I was still a student back then — but public silence, in my eyes, won’t do when Project 2025 hides beyond Trump and Musk Wharton-bred business acumen to dismantle the world’s largest, most consequential employer.
Something delicious I’ve eaten
Maybe it’s a bit of homesickness, but Humble Pie in Berlin-Neukölln has been my go-to happy and catch-up place for a monthly treat. It’s the only fried chicken I’ve eaten here that’s undisputedly better than my own. You can even get their fried chicken sandwiches (mountains?) on a southern biscuit or a waffle.
But it is the humble fried pickle to whom I turn this edition’s attention. Humble Pie’s fried pickles dipped in ranch (fellow Americans abroad feel the oft-ranchless pain) were the most satisfying thing I’ve eaten this year. It’s fun having cheap, straightforward stuff like fried pickles, but introducing them to friends from Mexico and Ireland — they reacted as I would if they were crickets or sausage rolls — had me thinking about other American food we think is normal.
Ditto for when my girlfriend and I encountered a Blue Raspberry-flavored Airhead at an arcade snack bar last weekend. I must have eaten thousands of these as a kid, no doubt reducing my lifespan and likely remaining adult teeth. I honestly thought these were ubiquitous, but guess the Airhead’s soft power only extends to an overpriced shell of Dave & Buster’s.
I pathetically tried recreating fried pickles at home, only to have the flour mush into a pan during a misguided attempt at sauteeing pickles for a tofu burger, which eventually disintegrated into a “salad”. I’ll add this to the list of American recipes I’ll try recreating in my kitchen after having never cooked them back home in the first place.
Pennies for your thoughts
‘Tim’s Two Cents’, the original Connecting Climates name before I realized a big Penn State football guy beat me to the punch, has a bit of a historical revival in the final section of this newsletter. I’ll try to make this section entertaining enough to justify your dedicating scrolling.
Randomness to Ponder
As if the newsletter weren’t random enough already, have some more sloppy thoughts:
Something I ponder, well, constantly: How habitable will New York be in 2045? I’ve got Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 here, which still proves too painful for me to get through. Do we need to shave a century off a high sea level-rise future?
Speaking of, Trump’s just officially gone after congestion pricing in New York City. The MTA and New York State are putting up a real fight. Things are about to get really interesting.
I’m quite lucky to have so many wonderful friends, with some extra luck needed across the world from where I was raised. A few have really been unexpected pillars of support lately. Thanks for your wisdom, affirmation, books (!), invitations, and laughs.
What’s on your mind(s)?
Google Maps Trip
Google Maps accounts for many spikes in screen time. It’ll take me to places few and far between, some I’ll likely never step foot in, others I’ve been on a daily basis.
Putting this together had me asking myself, “Where did I go lately?”, as if I physically traveled via Google Maps to somewhere else. Sometimes it does feel pretty real! Or maybe it’s a distraction from German winter… you be the judge.
Here’s this edition’s voyage: See if you can find where I’ve gone!
An Ode to the Penny
Pennies for your thoughts could not be complete without, well, pennies. This final section will feature coins in history, both in homage to the penny and in rebuke of ignorance-led authority.
In case you missed it in the tsunami, Trump ordered the Treasury to no longer mint pennies under the pretense of wastefulness. It’s a long time coming -- everyone knows a penny costs more to produce than 1 cent (3.7 cents, to be exact).
As is the case with most Trump orders, however, Trump / Project 2025 failed to consider the cost of our other coins relative to their monetary value. Nickels -- the direct casualty of our slain penny -- are the real coin loser, coming in at 13.8 cents a coin. A more comprehensive coinage pivot (Treasury leads, then Congress passes legislation) is how the government should work, not executive orders on everything from socks to swastikas.
Source: Isodore, Chris. “Getting rid of the penny introduces a new problem: nickels”. CNN.
As quarters lead the way in cost efficiency, this edition honors the U.S. State Quarters, a set of limited-edition quarters honoring each state minted from 1999 to 2008 and, shall I say, an absolute phenomenon. Each year, only a limited group of 5 State Quarters were minted in the order they ratified the Constitution or joined the Union. Delaware, as its license plates awkwardly boast, was the first State to ratify the Constitution in 1787. Its reward for being a trendsetter only came 212 years later by being in the first group of State Quarters.
For hobbyists of all ages, this meant you were continuously on alert doing otherwise banal coin-related things: buying things and getting change, checking your wallet, you name it. Whatever state quarter you were missing from a particular year’s collection must be found, then stashed away, never to be used as 25 cents again.
Perhaps from growing up in the Depression and being an absolute coupon fiend, my grandma was in pole position to assemble a complete State Quarters collection. She really was hooked, and it took very little for her to rope me in, too. If it wasn’t obvious from the Google Maps bit, I was (and remain) an absolute geography nerd, with all state capitals memorized before I could properly use a microwave. We spent pretty much my whole childhood in pursuit of the 50 State Quarters, alongside more than a few relatives and countless other Americans of all kinds.
Grandma died in November, and had us flying back on Election Night to land in JFK for funerals of simpler times. On the 6th, I was rummaging through old boxes of memories in my parents’ basement when I came across the complete State Quarters collection. Grandma left me her entire set in these quintessential 2000s thick, almost cardboard-like paper books, with holes for each already and not-yet conquered State Quarter.
This section will continue to be an ode to my grandma. We all miss her terribly every day, with an unmet wish to hop with her on the phone, hug her pint-size frame, and cackle from one of her patented deadpan one-liners. hitter26@optonline.net will always be my favorite subscriber.