Finding things to be thankful for It's Thanksgiving week here in the United States. It's also a week after the COP 29 U.N. climate conference meetings in Baku, Azerbaijan. November has been a fraught month for climate folks, and many are approaching the end of the year with an air of defeat. What could we possibly have to be thankful for? I am thankful for you. I think that my readers are curious people who believe in stepping up where we can. And that's important. I have a little anecdotal...
13 days ago • 2 min read
"What happens now?" Book launch day has come and gone, and with lots of help from all of you, Sustainable Content became an Amazon #1 bestseller. I am stunned and humbled. Thank you for your support. Also, I highly recommend writing a book if you want to reconnect with people you've lost touch with. It was great to hear from everyone. Most of the launch-adjacent conversations came around to the same basic theme: Given the future of the U.S. government and the expected rollback of a variety of...
20 days ago • 3 min read
It's finally here! It's book launch day! If real estate is all about location, then surely a sustainability-themed book launch is all about timing, right? * looks at November 2024 calendar, laughs weakly* Jokes aside, here's the thing: lately, I think many of us are looking for an avenue for hope, something that we can latch onto and say, "I can't fix that (gesturing at... well, everything), but this is in my lane. I can make progress here." Sustainable Content: How to Measure and Mitigate...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Ignoring the doom We've had a week to come to terms with what the elections mean for climate. We know it's bad. And we know that the broader forces aren't going to solve this for us. What do we know that's positive? Renewable power is increasingly cost-competitive with fossil fuels. This means that the capitalist economic incentives align with renewables. The majority of the investment from Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is going to Republican districts, in spite of the fact that no...
27 days ago • 1 min read
Grappling with what's next I start drafting this newsletter in my head several days before I start writing anything down. I spent last weekend in Pennsylvania and let's just say that what I was drafting wasn't exactly optimistic. And here we are. There's a certain irony to the fact that I'm releasing a book about climate action two weeks after the election. Timing is everything. I'm going to quote Octavia Butler's A Few Rules For Predicting the Future: "There's no single answer that will...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Maximizing efficiency Before I started working on all of this sustainable content stuff (gestures vaguely at everything, because everything in the world is interconnected), I didn't know that we basically doubled our energy consumption between 1980 and 2019, the last "normal" year before the pandemic. Globally, the vast majority of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. These fossil fuels generate the bulk of the emissions that cause climate change. A big...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
The IRA and digital content We are less than two weeks until the U.S. election. If you are American, particularly one of the swing states that could decide the aforementioned election (hello from that specific level of hell!), you are surrounded by a nonstop onslaught of nightmare scenarios on tv, radio, the internet, and your physical mailbox. This is, unsurprisingly, ramping up my anxiety levels and scrambling my brain. But today, I'm going to try to overcome the noise, pull together a wee...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
The importance of clear communication I was fortunate to spend a few days of fall break in New York City with my first-year college student. As we often do, we visited the American Museum of Natural History, which has an extensive exhibit about climate change. The display had the usual information about global warming in bold lettering: 1.5°C or 2.7°F. The kid started ranting. "This means nothing," he fumed. "Regular people see this and think oh, well, that just means that if a summer day is...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
"What does all of this climate stuff have to do with me?" As we've watched the devastation unfold from Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, it's hard not to feel a little bit antsy about the state of the world, and maybe a little powerless about what to do about it. We expect the annual storms pounding Florida to varying degrees, but we don't expect them to intensify with Milton's speed. Asheville, North Carolina was supposed to be a climate haven, a "safe" location at elevation and far...
2 months ago • 3 min read