Negative space

Hi there,

It’s been about a month since I last sent a newsletter, much more time than has transpired between missives from me since well before this newsletter had more than 500 subscribers. I wasn’t exactly planning on taking a month-long break; sometimes it happens that way, though, and once I leaned into it, I could tell it’d be worthwhile. Hope you didn’t miss me too much.

Today, I’ll share some reflections on the what and why of taking an unannounced break from biweekly newsletter writing. Then, I’ll let those thoughts guide us into some reflections about sustainability and such, as they invariably offer fertile ground for it.

NOTES FROM A HIATUS

With the benefit of hindsight, not working much for a month was something I very much needed to do. Having spent years now as someone whose ostensible job it is to be very online, keep up with the news, and have trenchant things to say multiple times per week, I already intuitively knew that all that wasn’t a particularly sustainable set-up, at least not sans some seriously robust controls and built in brakes one adheres to in as disciplined a fashion as one consumes, curates, and cranks out content. Further, in a newsletter from April, I wrote the following, which, based on a variety of reader responses, resonated:

Suffice it to say, I wasn’t doing a fantastic job of that, even in trying to write this newsletter twice a week. Hence the break. I say that from a place of acceptance rather than self-flagellation; as much as “crashing out” is a contemporary meme, there’s a healthy rhythm to iteratively building up and breaking down around our conceptions of who we are, what we work on, what intrinsically excites us the most, and how we want to live. I welcome that pattern, even if it’s non-linearity chafes on the systems around us that prize when lines go up in linear or exponential fashion without fail. I have watched other people stay on the proverbial hamster wheel forever—never getting off to ask themselves how it’s really going—and the results were not inspiring.

Diving in and doing stuff all the time is a great way to refine a skill or learn an industry. Sticking to route habit out of discipline and sheer force of will forever, however, is a great way to lose sight of your intrinsic desire, to get out of alignment, and, at worst, to do more harm than good.

You don’t need two of my “route habit” emails per week—trust me. Even if they’re 90% of my best work. The difference between 90% and 99% might not seem like much. That said, one thing I realized while I shirked most of my responsibilities to brood alone in the dirt, stone, and heat for weeks (pics below) is that the 90-99% scale isn’t linear.

It’s logarithmic.

Doing things by route in perpetuity is also not a great way to build a more sustainable future—whether at the personal or global level—as our current systems are, in many, many cases, unsustainable, and thus, of necessity, require more comprehensive re-evaluations, and often, very creative reapplication and reallocation of resources, whether physical, financial, or of time, attention, and spirit.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. A lot more nothing than usual. Which sounds like a vacation, but is actually quite challenging if you’re not accustomed to it and you endeavor to actually do very little, rather than say, sipping cocktails by a pool somewhere. Discomfort notwithstanding, in my experience, it’s well worth it, as it can open up more energy, excitement, and genuine engagement again vs. running (whether subconsciously, semiconsciously, or consciously) on fear and fumes.

Reflections on the medium

On another tip, not publishing for a month also served a sort of performance art objective. I thought a lot about silence in my absence. I thought, well, about the absence of silence in the modern media and technological environment. Not a novel thought—I think we all innately feel the extent to which much of our life is a revolving door of unavoidable ads. Creating space for silent contemplation and reflection is no small feat these days. Which, again, makes it all the more worthwhile.

At that level, it also felt fitting that I not contribute to the cacophony of content in email inboxes while I was pursuing the same. Whether email as a medium wholly dries up like landlines have over the next decade is an interesting question to which I don’t have an answer, though I do see it as possible. It’s possible, because anytime you flood a channel with stuff people lose interest in, whether because of the quality of content itself, the amount of it, or both, and if content, or better yet, the actual experiences people want move to other channels, well? People will rip the cord out in time. I sure have little to no interest in most of the content sitting in my inbox now, including the hundreds of messages on daily climate and energy news I’d normally slog through.

Succinctly, once I unplugged for a month—and especially given the extent to which the current federal administration uses a tried and tested “flood the zone” tactic I dissected back in January, I came home to what I’ve long preached but not always practiced. There’s a ton of noise, and most people don’t benefit that much from tapping into it. Can monitoring and discussing it be educational? Absolutely. Beyond that? Meh.

That’s not to say I don’t care about, say, the new federal budget bill, which could slash most incentives for many energy and climate technologies ranging from solar, batteries, and EVs to enhanced geothermal. Big L if it comes to bear. But also not, not in keeping with trends that have been afoot for quite some time, and that we already tracked in these pages numerous times, such as the continued ascendence of Chinese across a whole gamut of “climate” technologies, largely at the expense of U.S. leadership and ultimately, the U.S.’s geopolitical standing globally. Let me put it this way: Show me a piece of “climate” news from the past month plus, and I can dredge up an old Keep Cool article that we could effectively file it on as an addition or addendum.

It’s not that there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s just less common than tracking the day-to-day or even week-to-week stochastics of news and markets make it seem.

None of that’s to say I won’t be sending new Keep Cool emails. There’s a lot I've already put pen to paper on or outlined in the background in the past that I want to hit send on soon, plus pieces that other awesome people have submitted to me for consideration as guest posts that I’m excited to publish.

It’s simply to say this: In the comprehensive pursuit of sustainability, as long as I talk about sustainability, I’m gonna talk about what it means for:

• Me, as a writer and a living and breathing human in this world, not some automaton wordcell

• The media environment and the channels and technologies we do or don’t use, which, invariably, are quite consequential for how issues pertaining to climate, sustainability, energy, what have you, are communicated (and, dare I say, “sold” to larger audiences).

• You, because, even though I’m very loath to advise, I intuit that the ~10,000 of you who regularly open and presumably read some of the newsletter here find some resonance in these reflections.

Hence, I also changed the tagline on Keep Cool’s new website. I’m no longer calling this a “climate tech” newsletter. It’s a newsletter about “sustainability across all sectors and scales.”

• Does sustainability as a word and meme have a lot of baggage? Totally.

• Do I think we can reclaim it? Hopefully.

• Why do I want to? Because I think “climate” and “climate tech” are just as cooked now as “sustainability” was 5-10 years ago.

Those “C” words don’t really definitionally tell us anything. What is “climate tech?” Ask a handful of your peers, and I’m sure you’ll get very different answers.

Sustainability, at least definitionally, isn’t indeterminate. At a foundational level, it invites us into a world of questions that at least rhyme with:

Those are among the most intriguing questions to me these days, wherever they crop up.

More on that in the future, though. For the rest of this email, I’ll close with thoughts on what I think “climate” communications, including mine, have gotten wrong for some time.

Reflections on the “climate” conversation in general

As it pertains to the work I do here and how it may or may not benefit you, there is a lot of work to be done in reconstituting “climate” communications. For one, while this may not be true of your echo chamber, I’ve seen a lot of people asking questions such as “where the hell did all the climate change conversation go?” of late.

Good question. There’s still plenty of it out there, if you know where to look. My inbox backlog is a prime example; there’s plenty in there, all of which I won’t read. That said, I do think it’s fair to say most “climate” communications aren’t breaking through to new audiences. Which is probably what they should be most focused on accomplishing, vs. continuing to communicate a lot of the same to groups who are already largely aligned. Or, perhaps even more importantly, they (and mine) should focus on actually shifting attitudes and behavior, rather than merely reiterating already cemented beliefs. (Side note: We’d also probably benefit from more content that helps us literally relax a bit. That’s no small part of what I’ve always been after with “Keep Cool’s” triple entendre).

Let’s take a recent eye-opening statistic that hit the wires in April: Recent global public opinion research uncovered that more than 80% of people worldwide want to see more ambitious efforts to tackle climate change, especially from policymakers and their government representatives. As the subheader of an article, aptly titled “A Silent Climate Majority,” that covered the research in The Nation noted:

Why is this majority silent? Perhaps it’s because so much of climate communication to date had, as a first, laudable step, to convince people that climate change was / is a) real, b) happening now, and c) requires collective action. Think back to “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film by Al Gore in 2006. Two decades on, the convincing effort has largely been won, and those who remain unconvinced are unlikely to shift out of that mode, as it’s ultimately more of an identity trope than an intellectual dialectic at this point. That said, if the majority that is convinced is still silent and/or unaware that it even constitutes a majority, then we're stuck in a new, dangerous middle ground: awareness without agency.

I would never suggest it’s any one person’s responsibility to combat climate change, insofar as climate change is largely a product of the systems and structures into which we’re born. However, the idea that the individual is entirely powerless is also deeply disillusioning and disenfranchising. It breeds anxiety, if not apathy. The question of why people may be surprised to learn they’re not alone in desiring more climate action is worth deeper investigation, and it isn’t as urgent as mobilizing them and shifting people out of the silent majority into an active one. That’s something I’m thinking about a lot.

Complexity > consistency

There’s also a world of nuance that has been missing from climate change conversations to date. I think this has ultimately been pretty destructive and has disenfranchised a lot of people, too. Yes, climate change is a potentially grave threat to many aspects of human society. But when I say climate change versus when another practitioner does, do we even have a shared understanding and common language of what that means? A lot of climate change mitigation conversations seem to idle for 95%+ of the time within power sector and transportation conversations. Which is a tiny subset of all the things one could talk about if, you, like I, think of climate change as the comprehensive study of how Earth’s climate systems are becoming increasingly dysregulated.

This is where I see a lot of the negative space and opportunity for communications, including my own, to improve (and for entrepreneurial and investor zeal, paired with policymaker support, to bring needed innovations and interventions to market).

Methane emissions, which I write about so often? Still desperately starved of financial capital and attention. I.e., still desperately starved of literal eyeballs and awareness. And methane emissions sources—to say nothing of the chemical itself—are meaningfully different and disparate from carbon dioxide emissions sources. Meaning a) decarbonization focused on CO2 won’t necessarily cross-pollinate to methane emissions reductions in all cases, and b) lots of methane-tailored solutions will be needed, and c) methane offers unique opportunities not found in CO2-focused work.

Similarly, agriculture, as an entire sector that produces vast amounts of emissions, dramatically reshapes physical landscapes, drives biodiversity loss, and—eh, you get the idea, is also conspicuously underdiscussed and overlooked, despite it being just as, if not more important, to human society than, say, transportation is.

I could offer more examples. But again, you get the idea.

The truly final thing I’ll say is that climate communications are also unfortunately split into a false dichotomy, into camps, as it were. By virtue of insufficient nuance, there’s a largely pessimistic camp that mostly preaches a sort of “dismal tide” and latches onto every iterative (even if speculative) study discussing how bad climate change will be and herds its flock (audience) by stick and fear of the proverbial wolf. Then there’s an abundance and techno-optimist cohort that holds up a handful of technologies (usually they have a few favorites) and presents them as a panacea to all imaginable problems.

Boring. My way has long been a tacit “third way,” though I’ve been in pursuit of the words for it and this clear a declaration of being on it. It’s a third way that says, effectively:

For once, in service of integrating what I talked about and around above, no further comment.

Not another word.

More to come again on a more regular basis soon,

Nick