How Future In Bloom Is Using The Power Of Stories To Spark Climate Hope
Steph Speirs, Founder of the Future in Bloom | Barbara Kinney/Emerson Collective
Two-thirds of young people say they carry crippling anxiety about climate change. Steph Speirs, a clean energy entrepreneur turned documentary filmmaker, doesn't know a single person actually building the technology to fix it who feels that way. That gap, between the dread most people carry and the conviction of the people doing the work, is the entire reason her documentary project, Future in Bloom, exists.
Speirs spent the last decade running Solstice, a community solar company built to get rooftop solar to people who'd always been shut out of it. After selling the company to a Japanese conglomerate, she started teaching climate tech innovation and commercialization at Yale's business school. That's where she saw the gap she'd go on to build a media company around: only 70 students a year got access to material she thought the world needed. So she picked up a camera instead of holding onto the lecture slot.
From the Classroom to the Camera
"I wanted to democratize access to the class," she says. That instinct became a YouTube channel called Future in Bloom. The bigger realization came from watching climate policy lose ground. "Policy follows culture, and we're losing the cultural conversation about climate technologies and clean energy," Speirs says. Most people don't believe these technologies save them money or make their lives better. Worse, she says, "our current media environment incentivizes outrage bait," even as local builders are quietly getting real projects done. So Future in Bloom stopped lecturing and started filming them.
Milford, Utah is where that idea became a film. "Revival," Future in Bloom's first documentary, follows the small town's next-generation geothermal boom — the largest of its kind in the country — and doesn't flatter it: a disinvested community getting revitalized and straining under its own growth at the same time. Speirs initially funded pre-production herself, out of her retirement savings, because she wanted proof before asking anyone else to believe in it.
Speirs plays a lot of roles but partnered with experienced filmmakers to make the films. "I am the creator, the writer, I interview all the interviewees, I produce the documentaries, set up all the interviews and the logistics, and then I executive produce as well," she says. Her partner, Julio Cesar Obscura, directs and edits — "like camera obscura," she notes, "which is pretty perfect."
A Second Film, and a Harder Sell
Fusion power works by forcing atoms together instead of splitting them apart, the same reaction that powers the sun, releasing enormous energy without the long-lived radioactive waste of traditional nuclear plants. It's been decades away for so long that most people have stopped paying attention. Speirs is betting that's about to change. Future in Bloom's second film, "Ignition," released this summer, follows four fusion plants across Washington, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Tennessee, all racing to commercialize the technology by the 2030s. "It's a story about American innovation, and how we exist in this geopolitical race to be the first to commercialize fusion," Speirs says.
Both films have found rooms that matter: "Ignition" at the Atlantic Council, "Revival" at the Aspen Institute and before California lawmakers weighing geothermal legislation. A third film on rural prosperity is in pre-production, and one on off-grid solar in the Navajo Nation is coming next.
The Strategy Behind the Films
In just a few months, Future in Bloom has drawn 50,000 subscribers across Substack and short-form video, including a TikTok series called "Solving the AI Power Problem." "We give reading lists, we give curriculum, we give case studies, we give expert interviews," Speirs says. "There should be an antidote to the doom and gloom we see in traditional media right now." Hence the name, "it harkens to nature and nature's role alongside technology," she says, a pointed rejection of the idea that the two are opposites.
That optimism isn't naive; it's strategic. Speirs's theory is that anxiety fades with action, not information. "No one person can solve everything. But if you do one thing in concert with motivated, competent, kind, caring humans, you can see the ripple effect that impact has." So the films target two audiences at once: the policymakers and investors who can move real resources, and everyday viewers who've been shut out by jargon. "This is a world of acronyms," she says. "We avoid using buzzwords so people can feel like this industry has a place for them too."
Filming the Contradiction
Speirs's method is simple: stop arguing the abstraction, go film the town. She doesn't sand down the contradictions to make the technology look good, she leaves the housing prices in next to the job numbers, and lets the tension do the persuading. It's a small discipline with a large implication: trust isn't won by hiding the hard parts of a story. It's won by including them.
More Towns, More Rooms
More films are coming, more communities, more rooms where policy actually gets made. Speirs is also pushing further into in-person events, convinced the real problem underneath climate anxiety is disconnection, from each other, from the land, from where power and food actually come from. "The more we can foster that connection, both online and in person, the more we can repair the world in little ways." That's the bet Future in Bloom is making, one town at a time.
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