A note: No more iPad drawings for now. My iPad just broke, barely two months out of warranty, and it is unfixable. It’s my third Apple product to break with no ability to be repaired. I no longer believe Apple to be a good steward, Octavia Spencer’s winning performance as Mother Earth notwithstanding. Top that off with Tim Cook cozying up to Brett Ratner, and it’s time for a change. Back to pen and paper, or fingerpainting. (If you have a non-Apple tablet that you love, do let me know!) My husband says I will give up and go back to my beloved Procreate, so I’m using this primo newsletter real estate to hold myself accountable.

Hello vibrant humans,
Can we even talk about climate now? Normally, it’s all I do. But lately, even I am finding it hard. Sometimes I go into the closet and shout about heat pumps and shipping emissions at the top of my lungs just to get it out. It’s not that I want to talk about all the other terrible stuff more than I want to talk about climate — it’s just that the terrible stuff is consuming my mediaspace, my airspace, my brainspace. Ditto those around me. Some days, I cannot find my way to climate because I’m preoccupied with the health of democracy, or worried others are breaking under the weight of so much violence and stupidity, to the extent that my nattering about the demise of Canada’s EV mandate would be not just unwelcome, but callous. I also feel like I’m waiting, fidgety and frazzly, for something to happen that likely won’t — accountability for all the crimes, deeper shared understanding of just how broken our systems are, a magical act of reset and rebirth. Unlimited kittens.

Many have written far more eloquently than me on how most humans on the planet have existed with threats like this forever, with intense precarity, showing valour and taking action all the while, often with great spirit and energy. But to be kind to myself and meet said frizzy self where it is, I will offer up a frame of generous curiosity: how can we adapt to a world that is more precarious than we might be accustomed to, so that we can continue to do the work and be of service?

We can work to broaden the aperture of acceptable discourse.

For years I felt weird talking about climate, whether in person or on humblebraggy social media sites. Disaffection was deeply bred in the late-Xennial Manic Pixie stew that paraded as my cultural upbringing. That seems so quaint now. Talk about it all. Make Kevin O’Leary angry, Billie Eilish. Rant about gender inequality on Facebook, Girl I somehow know from high school but can’t remember anything about except that you often wore fuzzy antlers. Be unabashed (yet kind) in posing the tough questions, Person who seems wise but may also be a Russian bot.

I see the hedgy caveats on LinkedIn when people talk about what is now happening in the US — I don’t normally post this kind of thing — and I’m so here for it. If you have safety in expressing yourself on public channels, then doing so is especially important. It expands the Overton window for those who have less safety and power to do likewise. At first I thought I didn’t need the caveats, but then I realized they were a perfect example of social proof: I don’t normally do this (but we are not in normal times). With that simple phrase, we break the rules of channels governed by arbitrary norms (link in comments why?) and manipulative algorithms. Nothing is normal. Normal is subjective. And as AI funnels us to sloppish monoculture, not obeying in advance is manifest in the everyday efforts to do things we don’t normally do.

And given that nothingisnormalness, I also think it’s fine to keep doing the work and talking about it. I’ve seen LinkedIn posts where writers chide climate folks for talking about EU emissions reductions while countries are being bombed. I’m a little tired of ‘two things can be true at once (eat a scoop of ice cream every time someone says it),’ but…it’s true.

We should not feel guilty for focussing on the fascism

It’s weird that it need be said, but the guilt I feel at reallocating attention or money or energy to non-climate things is real. These resources are largely fungible, but, in my brain anyways, there’s a feeling of guilt. I have only so many dollars, and if they are going to mutual aid in Minnesota, they’re not going to greenbelt defense in Ontario. How effed is that? None of these things should be left to such a fraught individual calculus, like a Kickstarter Trolley Problem. Why do my friends with jobs and healthcare in the US still need to set up GoFundMes? Because we live in an extractive system that has normalized such insanity. Having to stack rank our causes is yet another symptom of this profound brokenness.

We can remind ourselves that the answer to everything is community and neighbourism.

Writes Garrett Bucks in this absolute banger of a newsletter that you should just go read right now: The skills you and your neighbors need to resist fascism aren’t actually all that hard to learn. What’s going to slow you down is not knowing each other in the first place.

Getting to know each other is how we resist fascism, but also how we fix the park, and share the carpooling, and, ultimately, how we stop climate change. All these neighbour-connecting efforts add up. Writes Bucks: While frequently taken for granted, there’s a reason why the Nordic countries (previously some of the most unequal societies in Europe) were able to transform, in the twentieth century, into some of the most equitable and democratic in human history. It’s because, long before gaining power, they built dense networks of cooperative care infrastructure.

I love that line: dense networks of cooperative care infrastructure. And when I say it, I’m thinking about climate, even if there are no climate-y words in there.

None of these little rules alleviate that feeling that every conversation, action, or post is a negotiation in hierarchies these days. But at the same time, thinking through them has helped me. I’ve always been a person who fixates too much on the mental math of how to spend one’s precious life — should I be taking that dance class or writing that article? Making cookies or making good trouble? These things are not mutually exclusive (I think about making good trouble while I make bad cookies), but in a time where I sometimes feel my mind fraying and decaying, there is only so much time and energy.

Plus, a bonus bit of positive thinking: Civic muscle builds quick

It seems to take me a lot longer to build physical muscle in my 40s than it did in my Popeyed youth. Perhaps that’s why my assumption of late has been that building civic muscle, often from scratch, is difficult or time-consuming or impossible or all of the above. Turns out I am dead wrong on this count. Minnesota has shown that neighbourism is alive and well, and that communities of deep strength can be built almost overnight, when the motivation is protection of people and freedom. Of course, this is not a making lemonade out of lemons kind of story, but is demonstrable proof that, despite the efforts of Broligarchs, and politicians undermining the care economy for decades, people can find these skills inside themselves, and mobilize accordingly: we don’t need to get a PhD in community organizing, though it would be fun. This is good news for saving democracy, and protecting the climate. And it is climate care even if we aren’t talking about climate, because a strong and loving cross-weave of civic muscle is a prereq to climate engagement.

At a conference a few weeks ago a Minnesota climate activist talked about PTA groups raising millions for rent relief, and building massive mutual aid and community democratic defense infrastructure. She also said, in describing her community, ‘we are doing bad, but we are more connected than ever before, more loving.’

We are all doing bad right now, if we’re aware of even an ounce of what’s going on in the world, but we are only connecting, too. My son shoveled our next door neighbour’s house for a few weeks of blizzard, while she returned to Argentina to check on her aging family. She brought him back a box of those gold-wrapped Alfajores as thanks. And then I took two and gave them to my friend and neighbour, who had shared tickets to the ballet for me and my daughter. I like the image of these little gold-foiled delights, being passed from person to person, tiny pulses of sweetness amidst the depravity of these foolish times.

This Planet

How you doin?

Last Planet

Writes reader Arthur Bode, in response to my meandering search for art and balance:

Realizing that finding balance is not a box ticking exercise but a lifelong endeavour is a deep and freeing insight. The sooner in life we all twig onto that bit of wisdom the better off we will all be. There is no one and done on figuring out how to be a decent human being. Recognize and accept that we are and will remain flawed but also know that there is always the possibility, within our reach, of incremental movement toward being better at humaning.

Good grief, that last, beautiful line! Thank you so much, Arthur!

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I have probably recommended the Volts pod on reactionary centrism to you at least 3,256 times already, but…it’s one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time, so here I am, recommending it again. The whole pod is about the media/world’s default position of both-sidesist left scolding, unpacked through great examples. Nowhere is this kind of nonsense more evident than the New York Times. This article is a perfect example of it, and I grimaced through my morning coffee reading it.

Stuff + things

• Zack Galifianakis has a new gardening show and it looks darn cute!

• Cadence Weapon is an amazing musical artist, and ALSO, a great writer and textile savant. The single, Raghouse, on his new album, is a bop. From his terrif newsletter (subscribe!): “Raghouse” is named after the textile recycling facilities where vintage stores find much of their stock. They are cloaked in secrecy. I only managed to get into one after a friend connected me. I had to show up and be vetted in person. The guy’s office was safari-themed. The building was a nondescript warehouse in the middle of nowhere. The rules were as follows: I had three hours to collect a minimum of 100 pounds of clothing for a fee. The clothes rolled onto a conveyer belt and I had to sort through and grab anything of value.

• Billionaires made up 19% of US federal campaign contributions in 2024. Yikes.

• While the power grabs in the US are more overt, “public accountability is being eviscerated” here in Ontario, as our craven government seeks to weaken our Freedom of Information laws.

Electricuriosities

• Electric Living is coming! I’m super excited about this cozy and accessible campaign we’re building at the Building Decarbonization Alliance. Come to a webinar on April 2nd to learn more about how to partner with us! It’s got the most vibrant brand you’ve ever seen, designed by the excellent Geneviève Biloski.

• If you’re in Toronto and at CMPX, let a gal know! I’ll be talking a tiny bit about Electric Living at a panel on March 25th.

• Hello, induction is finally glam! I’ve been praying for this piece, at my little hot plate induction altar, for years. Thank you, NYT, for doing a darn decent job of it.

• Toronto Hydro is giving away big discounts on heat pumps…and great, free coaching! Go go go!

Thank you

As always, thank you for reading, sharing, and sending me comments. I welcome your suggestions for how to make this newsletter better. If you like it, 💚 or share it with any vibrant human you know. I hope you are safe, healthy, and dancing.

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People dancing

H/t to my friend Ian for sending this to me. He’s also started a brand new climate coalition to better utilize the grid. Check it out.

Thank you for sending me this, friend who shall remain nameless:

Need some chill beauty?

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Hello Most Vibrant Persons,
I love the name of my friend Katharine’s newish newsletter, Human on Earth. It sums up the reality of our time here in the most grounding of ways — we’re just humans on earth, humaning. It reminds me of one of David Byrne’s songs, Like Humans Do, which is about loving humanity, despite all our failings and flailings. There’s something about the phrase that provides a bit of a wry remove: this, both the gorgeous and the despicable, is just what humans do. The perspective doesn’t absolve me of wanting humans to do different, but it alleviates some of the pain of being a human on earth when humans do evil, tacky shit. It also reminds me that there are lots of beautiful, future-stewarding, and hilarious things that humans on earth do. Of course, the question it leads to is: What kind of human on earth am I? Are you? Is that guy over there in the flamingo jumpsuit?

I tried to change how I human on earth this year. My mode of working (furious) started to feel not just hamster wheely, but hamster wheel in a headwind. I was doing too much, at the expense of my creativity and health. And I would have kept at it, but for the surround-sound wisdom of so many brilliant friends and colleagues, and my own body, politely shouting STOP. I am stubborn AF so I ignored them until I didn’t. And then it still took me a while to figure it all out. I thought sabbaticals were for other people, people who don’t obsess over methane leaks.

In taking that break, I added the art back. All I have is my creativity (and great friends and fam and signature dance moves) in this world. My art time is what fuels powers not just my climate work, but my humanity. Without it, I’m slop, even if I don’t use Chat GPT.

I say all this in case the pain of our climate deadlines also keeps you up at night and messes with your functional humanity. “This is the critical decade,” said Tim Flannery in 2015 (eep). It is my forever struggle to take heed of that line while still remaining a human. That has sort of always been the leitmotif of this newsletter, but I thought balance was a thing I could tickety box, and not a lifelong effort, continually recalibrated as new wrinkles complicate our climate work. Wrinkles like democracy crumbling in around us.

Without turning all this into a hustle culture cliché about napping my way to greater productivity, I will say that slowing down for a good chunk of the year did make the subsequent work I took on more purposeful, effective, artful. It’s funny how good sleep does that.

I’ve also branched out, rebuilding old skills (PR) and broadening my climate arenas. For one of my clients, I’ve been working in the relatively new (to me) space of energy efficiency and learning so much. With good regulation of our top ten appliances, we have the power to prevent the release of the equivalent of 20% (!!!) of current global emissions by 2050. Like electrification, it’s inspiring because it is soooo darn doable. Someone tell the guy who just cut fuel standards.

I don’t really believe in resolutions unless they’re the binding climate action kind, but there are some things I want to focus on this year. In the spirit of slow and purposeful, I have just three: distribution, messaging to action, and convening.

Distribution: If a climate comms falls in the forest…

I won’t use the term enshittified because it’s jumped the snark, but in this garbage media landscape we must build with a new clarity, for decentralized power, and REAL (non-bot) communications. I am excited by what Gander and New_Public are doing. And though it’s harder than opening a jar with greasy hands to start a new social network (I see you, Mastodon), I think pragmatic optimism is the only way forward on this front. We don’t need a social network with a billion people on it. We need good information ecosystems of all kinds, and small batch, artisanal social media. I’d say “let a hundred decentralized social networks bloom,” but a) we know how that turned out, and b) it’s a bit clunky.

No matter the climate project this year, distribution and creator training is at the fore of my brain and strategy. Otherwise we’re just painting masterpieces in the dark and shouting at the bots. At the best of times, climate doesn’t market itself, and now is not the best of times. So what is the comms and marketing skew of any project, and what are the new tactics and channels we will use to make sure people get our messages? Absent the right answer to this question, the work fails.

A better narrative doesn’t mean more story. (It’s about action).

Everyone knows what the problem is: The right has message discipline and sticky/evil talking points. The left is fractured and verbose. But that doesn’t mean we can just default to punchy talking points repeated like a Sinclair news anchor. It means we need message discipline tied to real calls to action. (The right has this. It’s called Project 2025). We need better messaging AND better appeals.

What are the truisms you will repeat this year, as the noise surrounds, and the distractions mess with your head? And what will they drive people to do? It’s fun to think about one’s own message discipline.

For me:

• We don’t need moonshots or miracles. (From doom to doing!)

• Heck yes, electrotech. (Buy or advocate for electrification.)

• Get out of my streams and into my park. (Bring people together.)

• Cookies. (Self-evident.)

Mean to convene.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that art and community are one and the same, and together form the recipe for civic renewal and climate action. And there are so many incredible thinkers and writers and groups trying to foster togetherness, from my new faves, Elise Granata of Group Hug and Sam Pressler of Connective Tissue, to larger orgs like Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which give microgrants and training to individuals who want to make their communities more connected.

My friend Jode is so good at this. This year he set a goal to have conversations with 50 interesting people, and did. Together, we are relaunching my National Portrait Gallery thanks to his friend Monica, proprietor of the wonderful community hub that is Gallery 1065. (More on this below.)

How does this all connect to climate, you ask? My most cherished climate work is the stuff I do in my community because it feels real. I can see the heat pump on my neighbour’s front lawn. All of that happens because we know each other, and share ideas and resources and gingerbread recipes.

Of course, this is not easy. But I found the whole ‘being annoyed is the price we pay for community’ discourse a little weird, because duh. It’s a privilege to be annoyed by people, to have your ideas tested, and to have to figure out how to make sense of life and community with the people around you.

I feel lucky to have met so many incredible people this year, across climate retreats, client work, and beyond. When I’m out in the world engaging with people, I am reminded that humans on earth are generally good and smart and hunky.

(More: I’ve loved some of the great writing about the commodification of gathering as well. Sam Pressler on connection grift here, and Jenna Wortham on performative offlining here.)

This planet
Where will you focus your energies this year? Please let me know.

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Methane is the new ozone layer

I think Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley gets it exactly right in this Guardian op-ed, both from a solutions and a framing perspective. She argues that a legally-binding methane agreement, much like the ozone-closing work established by The Montreal Protocol, could buy us time and help solve the methane crisis. The ozone layer is held up, rightly, as a relatively short-windowed success, demonstrating that we can indeed come together, globally, to solve big climate problems.

I’ve seen other would-be solvers of wicked problem use the ozone layer as a metaphor as well lately. The incredible Tristan Harris, in this worth-your-time Prof G interview, invokes ozone as a recipe for how we might put the AI genie back in the well-regulated bottle. I’m ok with all the ozone citations, because it does feel like people know this story. Leveraging it to show people that we can tackle methane seems like a good use of metaphor.

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Stuff + things

Heat pump yourself

DIY heat pumps have been on my brain since I spent an hour chatting with a Mr. Cool rep at the AHR convention a few years ago. The refrigerant was the issue — you still had to call a contractor to do your R22. But it looks like that propane (pain?) problem is solved by a new version of DIY heat pumps that cost ~$2,500. Like balcony solar, these could be game-changing.

Hamilton, hero

Katharine Hamilton has been a favourite presence on the Energy Gang, and now Open Circuit, for something near a decade. She’s a bit of a hero of mine, and I’ll miss her voice a lot. I loved this final tribute episode where Jigar Shah and Stephen Lacey suitably fete her, and I love her words about finding dignity in any job. A true energy savant, but also a workplace and general life savant.

Leapfrogging literature

Did you read Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know? It’s a climate change novel that leapfrogs over the horrible effects of climate change. Millions of deaths, and a century later, people eat protein cakes and fetishize the early aughts. I loved the same quote the always brilliant Dwight Garner singled out in his NYTimes review:

One thing that “What We Can Know” does, improbably enough, is make one nostalgic for the present. Thomas and Rose, a century in the future, list the things they never got to see. Here is Thomas:

My list was long — the suspension bridges, the orchestras, street parties and a thousand forms of music festivals, and people’s gardening and cooking, their need for holidays, extreme sports, historical enactments, gay-pride carnivals, the risks they took with A.I., the sense of humor, the safe airplanes, the passion for pointless sports. A hundred thousand at a football match!

Yes. I’m always nostalgic for the present. Meanwhile, my daughter thought all the characters were morally questionable jerks. What did you think?

Thanks to Chris Hatch’s reader recommendation roundup, I’m reading Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake and enjoying it. Eco-espionage in the French countryside. Yes, please.

Every job is a climate job. These are Climate Jobs.

These are hard times for many people who work in climate, so I’m delighted to share these cool jobs from some friends of the Stack (can i say that? Too dorky?). Note: I’m not a recruiter for these. Double note: I don’t believe in sharing jobs that don’t have salaries listed. Note note note: good luck. (And if you have jobs you want to share, please send my way, with the caveat that most of the readership of this newsletter is Can, US, UK, and Aus).

• Ecojustice is hiring a communications strategist. Lindsay Beck is the best. Go work here.

• My Climate Plan is hiring for a National Organizing Director and a BC community organizer. Could not love this org more, and they’ve got big plans for this year.

The National Portrait Gallery of Canada of Bloorcourt

I am so excited to be bringing back the National Portrait Gallery of Canada after an almost twenty-year hiatus. The show opens January 9th at Gallery 1065 in Toronto. Please come if you’re near!

Thank you

Thank you as always for reading this at times overlong newsletter. I appreciate your insights. If you like it, please click the ♥️ and share it.

Wishing you a healthy, democratic, cozy year,
Sarah

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People dancing

Arty Supreme

I saw more art this year. Run don’t walk to see the Joyce Wieland show (it’s on til January 4th). (Also, Marty Supreme is really good.)

Hello gentle readers,
There are a lot of things I think I talk about too much: chili crisp, Oxford commas, perimenopause, heat pumps. But recent experiences have made me change my mind a bit on the last one — last week I helped launch Quilt heat pumps in Canada. And many a brilliant, well-informed journalist asked me: What’s a heat pump? Why should I care? How did you get this number? So perhaps I can’t talk about heat pumps enough? Let’s find out! (I won’t be offended if you abandon ship to watch TikToks of puppies listening to jazz now, just meet me here next week).

To answer all these heat pump queries, I’ll interview myself. And do a funny voice.

What’s a heat pump and why do you talk about them so much, Sarah?

Simply: A heat pump is a device that heats and cools your home. It replaces your furnace and your AC, so it’s the Pert Plus of home heating and cooling. What’s most important is that it does this all super efficiently, and without burning any of those pesky fossil fuels. It’s 300-400% more efficient than a gas furnace, and it’s safer.

I talk about heat pumps all the time because I’m a big believer in one-and-done-ish, high-leverage climate actions. That is to say, the larger decisions we make that really impact our emissions. The reason I am so jazzed about heat pumps, and residential electrification more broadly, is that a) these big climate actions provide meaningful emissions drops while reducing decision fatigue, and b) replacing machines when they break is something we are going to have to do anyway. It’s not a climate-thing so much as a keep-my-house-functioning-thing — which really matters in these days of rollercoaster policy and the increasing politicization of…everything climate.

Heating your home is not a discretionary thing: If your furnace dies, you need to get a new one, and it’s important that we help make those new heating and cooling systems be ones that won’t burn fossil fuels for another twenty years. That’s meaningful, necessary work that exists in a completely independent realm from whether whales are being killed by wind turbines. They are not.

I also talk about heat pumps a lot because on the self-efficacy meter they are pretty darn high. For climate-caring individuals, bringing down your household emissions by 70-80 percent feels good, and makes you want to do more good for the planet. Electrifying your whole home is a thing you can do over time that reduces emissions hugely, makes your home safer and comfier, and in the long run, saves you money.

How does a heat pump work?

You should just watch this fun video if you have a few minutes and enjoy good dudes with great hair (Follow Dan too, he’s the best!). But if you don’t have three minutes: a heat pump pulls cold air from the hot air outside to cool your home in summer, and hot air out of the cold to warm your home in winter. Even when it’s so cold your nose falls off, there’s hot air inside that frigid air, and vice versa. This is why people say heat pumps are magic. And by people, I mean me.

But Sarbear, if these things are so much better, why aren’t they just everywhere? Answer: people!

Lots of things take a while to catch on because of a pesky old thing called status quo bias. And also, because there were heat pumps back in the 80s that weren’t very good. Contractors got burned. But today’s heat pumps are incredible. They work in cold climates, they come in portable styles that can be installed in apartments in fifteen minutes, they’re… pretty! But contractors like to install what they know. They don’t want to come back to fix something — a callback means money lost, a callback in Canada in winter means bone-rattling cold. Heat pump installation requires a bit of upskilling and, sometimes, some electrical. All these things cause friction. Friction slows things. For example, in high school, the friction of not studying enough hampered my physics class grade.

Home heating and cooling is something we tend to leave to the professionals. Like medicine and good haircuts. If I’m sick, I listen to my doctor (mostly). If my furnace breaks in the middle of winter, I listen to the guy (it’s often a guy) who shows up with the truck and the clipboard and the knowledge. If he says ‘don’t get a heat pump,’ I probably won’t get a heat pump. So we have to make sure he doesn’t say that (I’m working on this with an excellent team, more on this soon!). In the meantime, we have to respond with: ‘I trust you, I respect you, where did you get those cool overalls, and please give me a motherbleepin’ heat pump.’

If these things are so much better, why aren’t they just everywhere (part deux)? Answer: cost!

Well, another reason why heat pumps are not as ubiquitous as we want them to be is cost. In some places it’s an absolute no-brainer to get one: if you’re switching from delivered fuel, or there are massive rebates in your lovely town or state. In other places, the economics are less of a blowout and more like this year’s World Series: a pretty even match where the underdog absolutely should have won — the upfront costs may be a bit higher, but ultimately operating costs will come down in a carbon-constrained world. Of course, if every dollar is being counted, some people will need to go with gas, which is totally understandable, but also unfortunate, as it means locking in fossil fuels for another 15-20 years. Bummer.

But even if heat pumps do cost a tiny bit more, there’s something to consider: the resiliency and future-preparedness of your home. There will come a time, very soon, where people won’t want to buy a house with gas appliances. The public is increasingly realizing how bad gas stoves are (despite manufacturer hijinks like this), how much better heat pumps are, and how lovely it is to have a resilient, all-electric home. Instead of flipping homes to put in gas stoves, we’re already seeing realtors pulling out gas to put in induction. An electrified home will be a very sellable home.

So…how are we going to get people excited about heat pumps, when most people just want their house to be warm (and cool) and don’t give a flying furnace how that happens?

Well, ultimately, we’re not. The ideal scenario is that a contractor shows up and sells you the best and most efficient system, a heat pump, while you keep watching Is it cake? and doing the Wordle. But in the meantime, customers need to make sure we’re finding those slightly-ahead-of-the-curve contractors who will not try to sell us a gas furnace.

But also, we are getting people excited. We need, to some extent, for some people to know what heat pumps are, and to want them. It sends the demand signal that helps policy makers, contractors, and manufacturers put a little pump in their step. And to do that, we need to lead with comfort, ease, and efficiency. Because electric stuff is just cooler stuff. There are a few standouts in every electric category of appliance that help make this case. With heat pumps, it’s Quilt, purveyor of the world’s most efficient ductless heat pump. With induction stoves, it’s my friend Sam’s gorgeous version, Copper, which also happens to come with a battery. Pila makes smart home batteries. And there are new additions to the cool-electric-stuff-gallery all the time — Reservoir, a smart heat pump water heater just came on the market. And beyond EVs and E-bikes there so many neato modes of E-transport.

I’m in like Flynn, Sarah. How do we do this?

While contractors are key, we also need content creators to make HVAC desirable. I won’t say make heat pumps sexy because that’s just gross, but we have to make the unglamorous world of home ventilation salient to an audience of tastemakers. This is what I worked on a bunch in my former role at Rewiring America, and what I’m pleased to be working on now with clients like Quilt and the Building Decarb Alliance. I can talk about heat pumps til I’m red or blue in the face (depending whether I’m heating or cooling), but it’s Elena Lohse of ThisHouse5000, who is gonna make people want these things.

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But Sarah, what about all the other stuff that warms the planet? Isn’t that more important than consumer adoption of heat pumps?

It’s all important! The good delegates in Belém are doing the hard work of multilateral agreement building at COP, because we need upstream policy change. But for most of us, that stuff is abstract and far away. In Canada, home heating is responsible for 13% of our emissions. So while I may not have the power to tell the Pathways Alliance to stuff it, I do have the power to power my home electrically. Understanding just a small part of one’s role in the global energy system is super key to getting folks to care about climate writ large.

As I’ve written here umpteen times, I hate when people get all whataboutist about carbon footprints (spare me the ‘it was invented by BP’). The point that responsibility has been shunted to consumers is absolutely valid. At the same time, the endpoint of that argument is wholly disempowering: It leaves the responsibility with powerful people, who are not, last I checked, doing much. And lots of us don’t have the resources or power to fight these immovables anyway.

We’re not going to consume our way out of the climate crisis, but we do need temperate water, warm homes, and hot food. So we gotta swap, as each appliance breaks — when it dies, electrify.

A thing I didn’t really think about til a former colleague put it thus is that every gas appliance in our home is a mini fossil fuel plant, burning gas. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. I’m working to retire all the little fossil fuel plants in my home. As I do so, others are working to do the same at a global policy level, like the incredible Tzeporah Berman and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty folks, who negotiated a huge win this week.

Got it. Can you promise that you won’t natter on about heat pumps now that you’ve gotten this all out?

What do you think? I’m a lady who dances around in a heat pump costume.

What are your thoughts on chili crisp, Sare?

How much time do you have? (Our household agrees with Jeremy Allen White, and we always have two backup jars of this in the house.)

Stay pumped! (more resources)

• My friend Drew Tozer is an installer of Quilt heat pumps, and many other fine brands here in Ontario, and he literally wrote the book on heat pumps. Here’s an interview I did with him a while back.

• Shreyas’ great newsletter, Heat Pumped.

• A really thorough piece from Joseph De Natale for Climate Drift.

• Quilt makes the most gorgeous things, and their installers are helping shift things. I love love love this little piece about Doug of Wilsons Mechanical in Halifax. We need contractors like this to push things forward:

This planet: Pump up the volume

Got heat pump thoughts, experiences, dance cycles? I’d love to hear them.

Last planet: Billionaire glurge

WaPo: Most Americans dislike billionaires.

Was the language of COP strong or weak? Simon Evans of Carbon Brief analyzes the squirrel words. The International Institute for Environment and Development has a pretty, ninety-page guide to this fussy language. Too much work to parse. Better to read the commentaries and distillations to get a sense of the energy, or lack thereof. For example: Catherine Abreu provides a shocking report on what delegates were actually talking about: regressive, transphobic, racist, sexist stuff — and yet this doesn’t really show up in the plenary. Not great, active verbiage or no!

Stuff and things

Canadian heat pump adoption…help!
Hey! Since this newsletter is all about heat pumps…wanna fill out this heat pump survey for my friends at Summerhill and Clean Energy Canada? Thank you Thank you Thank you!

COP breakaway
Read Chris Hatch’s newsletter for an overview from COP (with its inactive verbs) about that global convening to break away from fossil fuels!

National Building Decarbonization Forum this week
I’ll be there talking electrifying campaigns, and listening to the likes of Chantal Hébert and Jan Rosenow. Are you in Ottawa? Come.

EV no thievee? (Sorry not sorry)
Yet another reason to get a Volt! Writes my husband in this week’s Toronto Star:

The National Portrait Gallery of Canada of Bloorcourt is coming. 20 years after I started the National Portrait Gallery of Canada in my garage…we still don’t have a National Portrait Gallery. So we’re bringing it back! This January! It’s a joke but it’s also dead serious. Portraits tell the stories of a place. Call for submissions coming soon, so git arting!

Thank you

Thank you, as always, for reading. Let me know what I get right or wrong. 💚 the good editions, and feel free to use my graphics when they’re helpful. (Thank you, subscribers!!!)

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Hope you are happy, healthy, safe,
Sarah

People dancing

I have a strong affinity for anyone who hires a Mariachi band. Ever.

PS. They say heat pump in the new Alicia Silverstone holiday romcom! Thanks Kate for sending to me!

Hello Vibrant Humans,
I lightly followed the firestorm around Bill Gates’ climate walk-back last week. Another episode in the ongoing series: Powerful Men Call Do-Over on Climate. So catchy.

Mostly, I try to find the good in these Important Memos. But lately I’ve been realizing I might just be…naively overoptimistic. A few years ago I read Eleanor Catton’s riveting novel, Birnam Wood, and spent most of the book waiting for the billionaire to have a climate awakening. Surely, I thought, he can’t be this evil. Surely there’s a third-act moral reckoning coming. Vibrant reader, there was not. It shook me then, this capacity of mine, to assume that deep down everyone is secretly trying to do good and is just playing 9-dimensional chess.

And it shook me anew last week — with Gates. I once again thought it was all just a wee bit of posturing, a nothingburger of a press-driven positional move, and not all that surprising from a guy who’s been middle of the road on climate for many years — helpful in his ways, but not around to do anything but his own things. Which is…what billionaires do. Then a colleague posted on a chat that Gates has actually donated to Bjorn Lomborg. Millions. For years. When people tell you who they are, listen, Sarah.

Who gets to reset?

Which brings me to the real topic…who gets to reset? And how can we keep these resetters from dominating the headlines, which is no different than Trump flooding the zone? Last week, for example, instead of talking about the fact that Trump and cronies used goonish threats and pressure tactics to upend a shipping treaty that would have lowered that sector’s emissions by 3%, everyone lost their minds about Gates. That was what made my skin bristle first — alllll the heds and deks saying Gates had walked back on climate. They took up precious climate attention space. Space that we can’t afford to donate to sensationalist nonsense when there’s a planet afire.

I hate doing a blame the media thing — Because the media is not a monolith, and most journalists are doing heroic work on villainous salaries. And also because it’s naive — headlines drive traffic, traffic drives money, and nuance gets flattened into clickbait pancakes. It was almost ever thus. But must we, the climate commentariat, feed the beast?

There have been a spate of ‘reset’ pieces. Last week’s Volts, recorded way back at Climate Week NYC, featured yet another one. Said Dr. V:

Lately, everyone from Tony Blair to Daniel Yergin is calling for a “climate reset,” so I brought on clean-energy analyst Michael Liebreich to discuss his own, very different version.

Liebreich’s version is not actually that different — he’s just a super smart center-right climate dude who isn’t afraid to call other center-right climate dudes’ reset takes stupid. And he’s right on lots of things, and wrong on others. But I take issue with the idea that we need a climate reset. We know what to do, we just have to do it. And where we do need, if not resets, then refreshes, I think they are less likely to come from stodgy old rich establishment men, and more likely to come from the voices we don’t listen to enough (in the Global South), and fresh voices just emerging.

Let’s find the better billionaire stories.

Billie Eilish’s brave and fun billionaire-poking quote got a bit of press last week, but was largely overshadowed by Billionaire Gates. She said:

Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.”

British MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle is a bird of a feather. He went viral a couple of years ago for stating much the same.:

To my mind, the notion that billionaires should not exist is rather commonplace, and I am confident it’s an idea shared by the majority of the population. After all, the expression “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” is as old as Christianity. And experience tells us that a billion pounds, even for those accustomed to lives of unbridled luxury, is more than anyone could need or even spend.

Like Russell-Moyle and Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, a terrific book about wealth inequality, I think this is right. A system that allows people to amass a billion dollars…isn’t a great system. That’s a billion-dollar duh. But what’s worse is that the philanthropic largesse of that extractive system is built from that system itself, so, as Giridharadas writes, it favours modest liberal tweaks, but never anything that would require structural change.

New fave onomatopoeia

What’s more, Russell-Moyle’s confidence in thinking that most people agree that having billions is bad is not misplaced. The internet’s new favorite genre seems to be celeb-vs-billionaire fanfic: for the past few months I’ve seen ‘inspiring’ stories about celebrities taking a stand against billionaires, whether it’s Riley Keough or Adam Sandler. A recent one:

Riley Keough “torches” Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires right to their faces for their greed — and then proves it with action.

At a glittering charity gala in Manhattan, Riley Keough, granddaughter of Elvis Presley, shocked a room full of the world’s richest elites by doing what few would dare — speaking truth to unimaginable power.

Fun to be sure, and these posts rack up thousands of likes and tons of (anecdotally) positive engagement, but… completely fake! Per Snopes:

This story resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as “stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental.”

Glurge. Such a perfectly gross word for how this treacly content makes me feel. But the fact that these posts make people lots of money demonstrates that many people agree with the very obvious idea that wealth-hoarding billionaires are not helping the world right now. Millions of families are wondering how they will buy food — it’s no surprise that people would be into a beautiful, made up, Eat the Rich monologue from an unlikely celeb.

Lock in.

Back in Canada, our new budget dropped this week. And while he’s not a billionaire, I find myself warily extending my Birnam-and-Bill recalibration to PM Carney, unlike media outlets The Juice and The Goose, which call billionaire BS in this almost funny but mostly just sad video. (At least there’s some Canada-Aussie collabs happening?)

I want Carney to be the climate-economics short king he’s always promised to be, a master of realpolitik playing tariff Tetris. The budget has promising nuggets that could help us hit our targets — but as always, the reductions are in the (as-yet-nonexistent) details.

I was obsessed with the phrase Let’s Go for a number of years. But its time has come and gone. We’re in ‘Lock in’ mode. Friends locked in to watch the Jays. Journalists locked in to parse all seven million pages of the budget. And emissions? They’ll be locked in, too, unless we can tune out the billionaire circus, flesh out the fine print, and fight for this beautiful world, leveraging the powerful tools that actually cut carbon. Like carbon levies, electrification, and eating more pulses. Does the word pulse sound more or less appetizing than the word bean? I dunno.

This planet: Bills, bills, bills

A billion for your thoughts?

Last planet: Weaving the cutest links

This is actually a comment from reader Tina in Hawaii about my weaving post from a few weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about it for ages, and I love it so. She writes:

I have never considered myself to be creative. But it’s interesting to me that in reading your description of weavers and the more recent modern use of the word (which I had not been introduced to yet), it reminded me of what a friend and colleague from my time teaching in Japan used to call me: Little Link. For the same reason. I do have a knack for connecting people and forging disparate relationships. Very interesting indeed.

Thank you so much, Tina. What a beautiful little nickname. How are you acting as the Little Link in your world? Let me know!

Don’t talk about climate? I’m re-reading this September report from Searchlight Institute that advised electeds and would-be electeds to not talk about climate with a different lens after last Tuesday’s Democratic sweep. It annoyed me a bit. It’s not that we can’t talk about climate, it’s that we need to talk about affordability first, and bring solutions that center upfront relief.

Americans aren’t interested in substitutes or long-term schemes. They don’t want to be sold electric vehicles or appliances with claims that they will see lower utility bills. They want relief right now. They want necessities like electricity and heat to get more affordable as soon as possible, and they’ll notice if that doesn’t happen, no matter what they are promised.

To be clear, I very much agree with this post from Ross Morales Rocketto. I don’t think we can take away anything around affordability and Dem success in owning this narrative from Tuesday’s elections, and the breathless commentary that suggests that Democrats are winning the affordable clean energy narrative seems, if not completely off base, then at least premature.

People voted against bad stuff, and with anger. They don’t like marble bathrooms, Gatsby parties, and gaslighting about the price of a turkey dinner. And it’s all making Trump very angry.

Again, and rather like the billionaire boondoggle above, it feels like a sensational headline written to drive a not-that-sensational takeaway: “We framed it in a particularly provocative way to sort of get conversation going,” the report author told Kate Yoder of Grist. That seems right, because the actual takeaway in the report makes perfect sense: It’s not about climate over affordability. It’s about affordability that happens to solve for climate. Whether you mention climate or not depends on where you are, whether clean energy is affordable, and what your constituency ate for breakfast.

Advocates and elected officials should understand that their messages are actively weakened by a focus on “climate” over affordability and low energy prices, and that voters are looking for immediate help with rising costs rather than solutions to abstract problems. Solutions that address affordability first, and also help fight climate change, are more likely to see strong support from voters.

Stuff and things

Are you in Toronto? Two book launches!

1. I could not be more excited about this talk at my alma mater, Massey College. Julian Brave NoiseCat and Tanya Talaga in convo about his beautiful new book, We Survived the Night. Join me there!

2. I’m interviewing the witty David Berry about his new book about art and money and money and art at Type books this Thursday. Come!

Get on my roster, part one? Are you a climate, lifestyle, or biz journalist in Canada? I’d love to know you. Next week, the most efficient and most beautiful heat pumps launch across the country, and I’m helping get the word out. Interested in interviewing someone who’s installed one or anyone from the company? Just want to know more? PLEASE get in touch. In the market for a heat pump yourself? Go go go! (I’ll have a whole post on these beauties next week but I’m happy to answer questions, always!)

Get on my roster, part deux? Are you a web developer, designer, copywriter, campaigner, or digital marketer in Canada? I’d love to know you. More Vibrant, my climate comms consultancy, is building a freelance roster. Climate comms experience is a nice to have, but I welcome lateral skills, different backgrounds, and unconventional trajectories. Say 👋!

Free stuff for you is Notionally live

I finally made it. Mostly. My Stuff for You Notion is full of high-res versions of my MVP comics, doodles, and inspirational nonsense. Everything is free to use and share (just please credit/link me when you can). I’ve also put up all fifteen languages of the Buyerarchy of Needs here. Need a different language? LMK! Thank you to all the paid subscribers who gave me a bit of time to make this! And if you see any of my drawings in the wild and don’t see a high-res version on this Notion, please let me know and I’ll get them up there.

Subscribe now

People dancing

My husband and I used to make dance videos before there was a Tik or a Tok. Our kids always refused to participate. Somehow, they humoured us last week. I don’t expect it will ever happen again, so I’m savouring this.

Hope you are healthy and safe and finding joy in these volatile times.

Have a lovely week,
Sarah

Hello Vibrant Humans,
Tomorrow is Sun Day, a global activation put on by brilliant Bill McKibben, Jamie Henn, and so many others. It’s like Earth Day but brighter, because we now have the power to harness the sun’s free and profuse energy to supply our world and our lives, no dirty extractive fossil fuels needed. The clean energy revolution is not just upon us, but underway. I’m delighted by all this because it’s spot on — give people something bright and sunny to do, provide an actionable and accessible solution, wear cool shades!

Join the day of action and learn more here.

Now, some short sunny stories, snippets, snaps, and songs for the sun.

1 The Sun

Once we didn’t know how to use the sun to its fullest. Now, we do.

Solar has improved exponentially.

2 The glaring truth

I used to spend weeks animating what my daughter can now do in three minutes, with an iPad and an app she bought for ninety-nine cents.

Electrotech enables us to harness the sun's enormous energy resources. The sun supplies Earth with as much energy every five days as all fossil fuel reserves combined. This makes possible a new energy era. (Ember)

3 Leapfrog

The sun is unstoppable, she’s good trouble, she’s good power. There are no shades and no dimmer switches big enough to halt her temperate takeover. Solar panels are like rain buckets, and nations like Pakistan are putting out their panels and catching all the sun. (But not all because it’s essentially infinite!) For so long we’ve wrestled with letting the world catch up to western largesse and assumed that game of catch up would require lots of fossil fuels, but a great sunny leapfrogging is underway. Leapfrog makes me think of being a kid. Full of promise and laughter and possibility.

4 Molten metaphor

Instead of risking danger in the depths of the earth to harness toxic materials, we can use the clean, forever energy of the sun to power everything we need. The metaphor feels almost too on the nose — darkest coal, brightest sun. And yet this is the high-contrast opportunity we have. Why would we keep hanging out in hell? Especially when hell is an expensive cancer, and heaven is … free?

5 Heck yeah, Electrotech (you can take the girl outta Tumblr)

Electrons will cost less and less forever.
Fossils will cost more and more, until they’re too expensive to extract.

Fossil fuel commodities get more expensive as extraction continues and their prices are elevated by major producers controlling the supply. Electrotech is manufactured and modular, resulting in clear technology learning curves, with costs falling by around 20% every time deployment doubles. Electrotech is already capturing two-thirds of global energy investment and is responsible for all the expected growth in energy jobs. Electrotech contributed 10% of global GDP growth in 2023, including 22% in China, 5% in India, 30% in the EU and 7% in the US.

6 Efficiency (is Electrotech.) Per Ember:

Waste is universally loathed.
Except in places where it’s rude to take the last bite.
Well, even in those places.

6B Top sun

The Top Ten Suns in Art (The Guardian goes Buzzfeed)

7 Under a Sino Sun

China is rising, but also radiating, saving us from the worst of climate change, as it not only powers itself, but positions itself to take power of the world. Renewable realpolitik realignment.

Noahpinion: America has abdicated the fight against climate change.

But that doesn’t mean the strategy I advocated for defeating climate change was a bad idea. In fact, it’s still going to work! It just won’t be America that executes that strategy. It will be China. In fact, it already is.

8 A nice ironic song about the sun

9 Köttbullar och Solfångare

Everyone likes to make Ikea jokes.
Which is good, because we’ll all laugh and celebrate with meatballs and lingonberries as Ikea helps the world electrify as quickly as you can say Solfångare.

Balcony solar, heat pumps, and induction hotplates are now available in lots of countries. Ikea won’t save the world, but its customers will.

10 How low, Carbon Bro

The irony is that petromasculinity likes a fire but not the sun.
The irony is that petromasculinity hates the sun but loves a tan.

The darkness is a petrohegemony that seeks to destabilize. Listen to this Carbon Bros. podcast from the great Amy Westervelt.

11 Sun and Systems, a duet

We need the sun to power everything and the technology to deploy that power.
We don’t need moonshots or miracles because we have a sunshot.
Let’s go.

Ember at an Eletrotech webinar last week, paraphrased: we have almost everything except maybe the last 5% super mega hard-to-abate stuff

12 A sun-adjacent short story about micromobility

Change happens slowly, and then on an e-bike. Even in the s p r e a d o u t US, micromobility has a foot on the pedal. It’s hard to imagine the suburbs on e-bikes, and yet, they are.

Micromobility is replacing car trips. (And not just for silicon valley types).

13 A sun-adjacent short story about induction

People are finally feeling the magnetic pull of induction.
People who other people copy.

More here.

14 Ozone ode

It took 50 years, but the ozone layer is almost healed. We can fix things. The sun can help. Doesn’t it always make you feel better?

15 Array music

A ray arrays. Arrays for days. A daze of rays. A raise of rays.

China will have 1 trillion watts by the end of 2025.

16 Sunifesting

I don’t believe in manifesting, but I do believe in sunifesting.

17 Agrivoltaica

The animals needs shade.
The solar needs land.
The farmers need income.
The planet needs solar.

On a finite planet, sharing is thriving.

Sheep and solar, a strategic partnership.

18 On sunny days

On sunny days I allow myself the indulgence of thinking “what if it all works out,” and know that it’s partly the sun that gives that thought the ability to be true.

(Thank you, Cathy, for the koan!)

Sundown:
“All flourishing is mutual.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry

The sun shines on all of us. The earth doesn’t care who produces the emissions nor who harnesses the sun. So together we must. All flourishing is mutual.

This planet

Write me your sunny shorty? Send it to me!

Last planet: Weave the day

Thanks, Wendy, I love this:

It just so happens that I am currently doing a big weaving project on our back porch. It’s a 9 by 9 foot rug, woven on a 10 ft frame that I cannot fit into the house. My 4th one.

It’s made from long strips of wool, sewn together and woven together in a simple pattern. The thing that’s most fun for me is that it’s made from old blankets, pants, coats, random pieces of wool fabric, my own cherished Harris Tweed coat (bought 45 years ago), a wool housecoat my mother made me before that, some skirts, a derelict kilt, moth-eaten wool scarf, pant leg cutoffs from a distant relative, and so on.

It’s certainly a blending of my possibly-misunderstood, sometimes tut-tutted, perennially-evident desire to make fun practical inexpensive things for my wonderful family (without any of the ‘stuff’ that goes into commercial rugs) and my interest in repurposing products, especially if they have some personal connection.

Enough with the new normal nonsense, writes the great Chris Hatch:

But “the new normal” is a pitifully inadequate phrase, a stumbling step towards accuracy that results in misdirection. On the plus side, it does capture the irreversibility of global heating — of fossil fuel pollution creating an ever-thickening blanket of heat-trapping gases around our planet. It correctly implies that we’ve got to adapt to what we’ve already spewed. But it totally obscures the essential point: it’s not a “new normal,” it will keep getting worse.

This is an annoying story from The New York Times. It misses the point. It’s not that Climate Activism doesn’t work, it’s that society does not work right now. Is it that playbooks and people power and protests don’t work, or that nothing works because we have no media and no accountability, and our leaders have no shame, and in some cases, total disregard for the rule of law. The left needs to do so much better, it’s true, at building structures, movements, and scaffolding. But the stuff that Bill and so many others to do catalyze movements is working, just not at the scale we need. Third Way has 100,000 members and there are hundreds of activations scheduled for Sun Day.

STUFF

Wonderful Kat of Rewilding Mag mentioned me in this gorgeous piece she wrote about climate friendly gardening for The Globe.

Thanks, CAA (!), for featuring me, and also, for doing a whole issue about sustainability!

Love this chart (solar!) that Jan Rosenow shared. Incidentally, Jan will be speaking at the Building Decarb Alliance conference in November. Jan in Can is cool! Come!

So many wonderful friends are on Substack. Read Katharine Wilkinson’s Human on Earth. stat.

Climate Week(s)

New York
If you’ll be in NYC and are free on Wednesday night (Sept 24th), my friend Montana, who may be the best conversationalist in the world, and I are throwing a low key super chill party. Message me for deets.

Tronno
If you’re in Toronto, it’s the first ever Toronto Climate Week. So much great stuff. On Thursday October 2nd, my husband, Benjamin Errett, (author of the excellent Get Wit Quick newsletter as well as this terrif piece about circularity from the Globe last week) is part of some great programming on building reuse.

On Friday October 3rd, I’ll join former Mayor David Miller and a million other fab folks for a morning full of climate comms, organized by Allison Daisley. Commmeeeee!!! (We can waive costs if that is an issue).

Thank you!

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People dancing

There was a hate rally in the park right next to my house last weekend. Ironic, because it’s the very park where a united front of Jews and Italians fought back the Nazis in 1933. Counterprotestors outnumbered the racists by a huge amount, but it was still an unsettling thing. At the same time, I felt the welcoming beauty of Toronto that day — from my morning run along the beach to reggaeton dance class to a wonderful street party that my friend Julie organized to a David Byrne tribute show to a chaotic late night hang on our artiest new street. Toronto is full of diversity and joy, and it is home.

Home at the West End Phoenix Stop Making Sense show:

Home by my pals for my 40th:

Take good care! Hope your home is cozy and safe and SUNNY. These dark times call for light, warmth, community, and love,
Sarah

Hello vibrant humans,
I have two ideas, can I braid them together with thematic conviction? Let’s see.

It often surprises people, but I’m a very reluctant affirmative on art’s power to move folks to action. Sarah, you heathen! Indeed, I believe in the power of art, but not in THE POWER OF ART, if that makes any sense. I know that art permeates us, and inspires thought, which can catalyze change, but I also believe that we give art too much credit, or at least think everything will be a ‘Sharkwater’ or ‘one other piece of art that changed everything forever, which I cannot even think of.’ We hype the modest lift of the film Don’t Look Up, looking for justification and hoping for meteoric impact.

So I prefer to put less pressure on art, and focus on its importance largely in the realm of art for art’s sake — creating art gives us life, and that energy helps us change the world. AND, making art about the climate crisis helps make it normative. If that art also moves others to take action, well, what a joyful bonus. Picasso is rolling in his grave. That would be a cool piece of art.

Despite, or because of, my cynic-with-a-BFA energy, I love Wendy MacNaughton’s current series, Make Art During Fascism. She writes: Today we’re launching a three-part series on fighting tyranny with creativity. Authoritarians want compliance. Not creativity. So let’s double down on making, and do it together. I love this because each of these things are wonderful unto themselves: non-compliance, creativity, making, and making together.

I’d been thinking about what it means to make art as the fascism fahrenheit ticks up. My annual August trip to Balkan music camp in New York is a chance to modestly improve my Bulgarian folk dancing skills, but it’s also an opportunity to not read the news for a week. It’s a pulse check, too, as I ask all my friends, who come from across the US, my nosiest questions about the state of their democratic lives, and measure them against years past. This year, I tried, with greater strength and success, to ignore the news alerts, and to just be. To make art, even terrible art, with friends new and old. And I heard variations on this theme from other pals there, too: let’s just play music for a week. Not because these friends aren’t actively fighting baddies in their day-to-day, but because art is a balm, and a rejection of oppression unto itself, and sometimes you just want to hang out in a deprivation chamber with it.

We were of course not making art about climate change in any literal sense. But we were making things, and making things together. Which is a clumsy segue to a word I’ve heard a lot lately that I love, and that I think very beautifully articulates the role of the maker in today’s tyrannical times. The word of the day is Weaving. I first heard it used in this context last year, when I discovered David Brooks’ wonderful Weave: The Social Fabric Project, What’s it all about? Designed as a countermeasure to polarization and loneliness, Weave is an org that helps people forge connection in community. They write:

In communities throughout the country, in ways big and small, people are showing up for each other and building connection and trust. You probably know some of them. They are the people neighbors count on. They value everyone no matter our differences, make us feel we belong, and act to bring people together to address shared needs. We call them weavers. You may be one of them.

At the climate retreat I was at last month, at least six different individuals used the word weaving as a descriptor for the work they do, be it in their local community, or as global change agents. In a broken world, repair and connectivity feel like naturally occurring metaphors. (Or maybe we all just made too many of those woven potholders as kids.) But it’s intriguing that this word is everywhere, and that you can’t call it up in your brain without visualizing it as a soft and beautiful art. Or maybe you can? I dare ya.

In MacNaughton’s newsletter she features this passage from Beth Pickens, author of Making Art During Fascism:

Anytime you start to feel overwhelmed by humanity’s impact on people, animals, and the planet, anytime you see the awful, smug faces of fascist leaders, anytime you think you cannot leave the house because the world is too hard, I want you to think about the art, performance, music, books, and films that have made you want to be alive. Think of how those artists, like you, probably felt overwhelmed by their life and times but they made the thing anyway. Your future audiences need your work and you need to make it.

I love all of this except the last line, because you don’t need an audience to need your work in order to make art. When I picture weaving, it’s not just the dexterous handiwork of baskets and proto-hipster wall art, it’s also the dances of people flowing in and out of spaces, creating webs of connectivity and community. At Balkan camp, the weaving is literal — people are holding hands, dancing, and singing, as they snake through each other. What I like about this metaphor is that it’s not about an audience — because sometimes there is no audience, as so many people are dancing together that only a few heads are left to spectate, bemusedly, while sipping a Zywiec. The point: we can make art for power, peace, and presence.

And the definition of that art can be broad. Bringing two people together feels like art to me. It’s why I strive (and fail miserably) to be a matchmaker. But it’s such a delight to connect people and ideas, and to watch as bonds form, leading, in turn, to new ones. Somehow this feels less like creative ownership and more like collaboration, which may be why so many of the generous souls I met at the Women in Climate Leadership retreat used this particular word. Weaving requires disparate entities coming together. And it can be hard, like my daughter trying to braid my exceptionally unruly hair. But each weave makes the subsequent weaves easier, because the shape of the basket or community organization itself gains strength, allowing that many more people to find support in it.

My mantra used to be “grieve, breathe, seize,” but I’m thinking of changing it to “grieve, breathe, weave.” Or perhaps, Leave it to weaver. I will stop now.

My cousin Shi Shi says these emails can be something of a chore (not in sooo many words, she’s the loveliest) — so I’ve endeavoured to keep this one short and devoid of footnotes and esoterica. Let me know if you like a source and a quote, or prefer a shorter note!

THIS PLANET

What are you weaving? Let me know!

LAST PLANET: Hope, strategy, F1

Beautiful thoughts from wonderful writer and thinker Ella S.:

I resonate in particular with the way that you've described the complex feelings both within and between dreadful despair & bountiful hope, and how amidst it all we can find motivation towards collective climate action.

Coincidentally, I was just talking about the quote "hope is not a strategy" last week...At a Climate Justice Ottawa meeting, Mi'kma'ki warrior Sakej Ward shared that exact quotation in reference to strategic organizing against capitalist empire. Ironically enough that quote was also my Business of Advertising prof's favourite bonus question on exams and a go-to catchphrase. It's funny how these things can come up in all kinds of places and contexts.

The Bill McKibben article you shared (and HEATED's interview with him) have left me feeling excited about the action that's inevitably taking place as solar and renewable energy becomes more affordable & accessible. After the David Suzuki 'It's too late' piece, it's good to see things like that, alongside this amazing news from The Narwhal about $300million in federal funding towards Indigenous conservation of 390,000 km2 in the North West Territories.

Snippets on messaging, climate comms news, etc…

The Rallying Cry

I joke about the phrase Let’s Go a lot, and this week it sorta dawned on me that Let’s Go is just the sporty Yeppa or Opa. My sharp former colleague Britney shared the definition of Yeppa after she went to the eponymous restaurant in Atlanta.

Yeppa YEP•PA
A verbal expression that collects an existential vision: the ability to live with passion and intensity every day, seeking and accomplishing highly gratifying moments. It’s the word that springs from your lips when you realize you’re living this way — that feeling of excitement.

It’s not dissimilar to Opa, which sends a shiver through my spine when our 80-person strong Albanian ensemble shouts it out together. At a progressive hang in Montreal a few years ago, the youngs were uttering the word relatable and snapping their fingers enthusiastically when they agreed with the speaker. Whatever your favourite exhortation, find people you can shout it with, loud and often?

Being alive now.

Wow what a comment! Love this from James Boyle on a post by Tzeporah Berman. It pulls together lots of wisdom from so many people to more articulately convey my Eric Holthaus-borrowed mantra, you are alive at just the right moment to change everything.:

It’s a privilege to be alive and to be healthy and vitally is an incalculable blessing for those who currently possess both. Confronting the always scaling and always more urgent existential emergency of human-caused climate and environmental breakdown is no bed of roses. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes (a thrice wounded Civil War vet and brilliant Supreme Court Justice) recognized: “repose is not the destiny of man.” Those of us not currently living with the fascist boot to our throat as are our brothers and sisters in China and Russia and many other places, should do what we can for our full freedom. Not as consumers but as citizens, builders, parents, partners and friends. We will all always be increasingly tested. Perhaps the best advice I’ve heard for what is coming more fully every day came from an indigenous leader: our ancestors honor us by having us here in this most decisive moment. Absolutely nothing stands between most of us and unprecedented collaborations for creative, catalytic and scaling breakthroughs building on each other. Let’s see what together we can do, again and again. Until our breath passes from us. As I heard Paul Hawken once say: “if a history of this time is written, it will be a history of heroes.”

Motherf**king Wind Farms!

I shared some thoughts with the smart folks at Launch Squad about why the Samuel L. Jackson windfarm ad was such a miss, and they pull in lots of great stuff from smarter souls, but for the TL;DR:

• Don’t repeat the myth, and don’t nod to a vague anonymous entity as the source of said myth. And certainly don’t do that in the first 10 seconds of a spot, given that most people only watch the first 3 seconds.

• Don’t whiff the ball on a clear, dazzling, and sticky summation of the value of wind.

• Don’t overcomplicate. IE don’t make up a fake product (seaweed snacks) when you have but :30 with sweary Samuel Jackson to convey to the world that wind power is effing awesome. Most people don’t know what a GHG is. People are busy, make it easy.

• DO try cool things! This is a miss, but at the same time, I’m ALWAYS HAPPY WHEN ANYONE TRIES ANYTHING OUTSIDE THE BOX, so…yeppa!

STUFF

I’m coming to Climate Week NYC for a very short minute Will you be there? Let me know!

Toronto’s first-ever climate week is coming! And the wonderful Allison Daisley has packed a whole morning full of climate comms goodness. Save the date: Friday, October 3rd, at The Weeknd’s fave library branch. More soon.

A matter of degrees. This is a terrific podcast by my pals Katherine and Leah. Though this latest ep is about taking advantage of the tax credits before it’s too late in the US, it’s a really good climate comms listen for anyone who wants to properly message why one should go electric. So well done!

Dem social strategy, served: Liz Spiers absolutely nails why the democratic media is failing. Political people, not comms people, trying to run and reign in media strategy. A must read if you make media, or, like, want to help save democracy!

Planetary plastic bummers: Once again, the global plastics treaty negotiations collapsed. It’s a bummer wrapped in PVC, because this is a solvable issue that would have immediate impact on climate, our oceans, our brains. But, we can and must keep pushing. Motivating words from Environmental Defence!

The gater abater! Or, WINNING! In a sea of retrenchment, I’ve been buoyed by some unexpected wins of late, like Alligator Alcatraz. Thank you, Heather M, for sharing this great Atmos piece by Monica Uszerowicz about the court-ordered pause on the detention center, thanks to the hard work of the Miccosukee and Betty Osceola, Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, and so many others. Beautiful writing and the photos are great, too:

There is something sacred in the Everglades: Its cathedral quiet, its long-blessed soil, its indelible mark on the state and shape of Florida itself. That sacredness has stood in direct opposition to the brutality of Alligator Alcatraz, a facility that, during its existence, has harmed innocent people, torn families apart, and scarred the land. Its court-ordered shutdown is both a reprieve and a reminder: the Everglades has long protected those who honor it, and advocates say it’s time policymakers do the same.

Winning, part deux: Somehow, the bike lanes persevered here in Toronto!

Mending magic! Thanks to everyone who came to mend and chill. We fixed onesies, summer dresses, vintage fast fashion, and made new connections as we repaired old clothes!

Saul Griffith has a new substack, and it’s called Energy and Stuff, and it’s great, even though I want him to call it Energy and Stuff and Things.

Thank you!

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Hope you are taking good care,
Sarah

People dancing

(or dueting with the birds).

“Hope is not a strategy.” — Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), F1

“Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world.” — Bill McKibben

It was 37 degrees outside on Sunday, and we needed an afternoon filmic reprieve from the heat that would appeal to multiple generations and cinematic tastes. So we went to see F1: The Movie. You know they mean business when there’s a colon involved. As someone who has been trying to improve her puny pull ups for the better part of a year, I doff my cap to you, Mr. Pitt. I counted no less than 34,527 chin ups, many done inside a cramped Westfalia van. Is Big Pull Up Bar trying to muscle some attention? But why am I writing about F1? Well, hope is not a strategy is a line older than Old Man Pitt, but something about the man’s cheeky energy made me nod deeply in response to his dimpled utterance of said line. And more than made up for having had to sit through 2.5 hours of formulaic, if fun, filmmaking. Plus, I would watch Javier Bardem read the phone book. What’s a phone book? (Another wild thing: while I’m not into burning gas while the planet burns, F1 is hitting its Net Zero targets?)

But back to hope is not a strategy. It answers the hope/nope climate question so perfectly. And defines all that I try to get across in these messy missives. I don’t like the toxic positivity of climate ‘good news,’ and I find the hope question a distraction. Here’s the wonderful Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:

To go from A(yana) to Z(inn), here’s another take:

TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory. ― Howard Zinn

This is beautiful to be sure. But everyone’s life experience is different and to demand hope of people is a presumptuous ask in a deeply broken and unequal world. One can appreciate all of the beauty in Zinn’s humanity without making it about hope. Seeing good and choosing to focus on it can just be a rational act of let’s go! Another spin on it:

I love this comment by way of Rebecca Solnit’s Facebook:

@ellearmageddon.bsky.social‬ writes: "fwiw, i don’t personally think that either doomerism OR toxic positivity is what this moment calls for; i think what we actually need to be collectively looking towards is a secret third thing (hopepunk) it’s cool and important to give a shit, and to look for ways to help each other."

Exactly. What we need is this solarpunky, will-to-act energy, which could use a name (call a German?), as well as that last line above about making community aid cool, and normative.

Like Ayana, I just don’t want the reductionist explorations of hope and cheerful ‘good climate news’ lists. They leave me cold because they feel asymmetric to The Issue. The narrative we need is: this is happening, and we need to act faster. It’s why I love the name of the climate org, We Act. It implies collectivity and declares action. We are acting.

This core narrative of action is about a fundamental transition that is underway, and needs our shared energy. As usual, Bill McKibben is leading the charge with the propulsive story about how we will do this, saving all we can save in the process. His book, Here Comes the Sun, beams out this August. McKibben’s latest piece in the New Yorker, adapted from said forthcoming book, is a ray of light, and worth reading in full (go on, I’ll wait!) It tells the shiny story of the sun’s ascendancy, and it’s not about hope so much as what is really happening, a sweeping transformation that has the potential to not just solve for climate, but autocracy:

All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.

I believe that we will change the world in the coming decades. With the sun, we have the energy and economics we need to fight. And with political ballast in the form of an ever-diminishing license for fossil fuel proponents (no matter what Lee Zeldin does), we will push forth.

It can be hard to discern which legal decisions are meaningful, but, by every estimation, last week’s ruling, by the UN’s top court (the ICJ), that countries could be in violation of International law if they fail to protect the planet from climate change, is hugely significant. Can we leverage it to fight folks who still think there’s a world where we can export LNG to Europe and not cook the planet? Maybe!

Why do I write about climate motivation all all the time? Because it is the singular narrative WE HAVE TO GET RIGHT: 1. We must make energy efficiency the default wherever we can, so people don’t have to think about this stuff. 2. And when we do need them to think about it, we must use language that inspires action. Hope, like Brad said, and Giuliani (ugh) before him, is not a strategy. It’s an emotion. The comms strategy is a positive and consistent articulation of relentless action. Demonstrating the wins, and the inevitability of this transformation, is key to driving that action.

This is extra important because we’ve got a coffee straw, and the oppo has a fire hose. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they NEVER hear about climate, and always hear misinfo. Writes the brilliant Ed Maibach: “The climate silence is defining. Only 1 in 10 Americans see anything about it on social media in a given week and even fewer (1 in 20) hear people they know talking about it in a given week.” Which is why I started a program called Talk Climate to Me a million years ago. We have to talk about climate all the time, and we have to make it simple and actionable, because the transition is inevitable, but the amount of suffering incurred depends on the speed and scale of our action.

Brad Pitt’s character in F1 is called Sonny Hayes. Which is fun. Sunny Haze. He’s a walking contradiction, an affable vaguery. But it also reminds me of Sunny Ways, a certain former Prime Minister’s nod to another PM, Wilfrid Laurier, who was known to inspire people with his warm words. Alas, Trudeau’s resurrection of Sunny Ways failed, because people don’t need cheer, hope, and tap dancing to alight their spirits. They need to see their leaders doing real, meaningful things that inspire big and little action, which may or may not give them hope, but will always give them purpose. Dimples optional.

(On this note: An absolutely great climate comms guide from my friend Anirudh and the team at Rare. Check it!)

This planet
Watt’s up? LMK!

Last planet
Efficiency, equality, electrotech (and reggaeton). I met so many lovely people on my month off, thanks for chatting, Clemence and Pippa! And new TO climate pal, Jenn! And 70+ climate ladies at an incredible summit. More below!

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Stuff

🟢 Be a Karen?
I love this woman, and this story of community support.

🟢 Shitty Mending Club: Thursday, August 7th!
Patch your leggings, build community, talk climate, drink pink things.

I was blown away by the Insta responses to my slightly tongue in chic story about about restarting Shitty Mending Club. What was it? An infrequent hang at my place where everyone was welcome to come and patch up their pile of broken garments. So/sew, let’s bring it back to life, like the overalls I just resuscitated with the world’s worst sashiko! If you’re in Toronto, we’ll be at Bickford Park, 7ish on, on Thursday, August 7th, SW quadrant. Message me for more info, or just show up with your broken things. BYOB (Bring your own bobbin, blanket, beverages) but I’ll have extra sewing basics and snacks. If you want to bring together the menders in your hood or city, by all means, go for it, and let me know how it sews! Here are some graphics you can use.

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🟢 Strong Signals!
The incredible Merran Smith and the folks over at New Economy Canada put out a very solid report this week: Strong Signals in the Noise. DYK, Canada is already the 8th largest economy for clean energy investment? Now’s the time to seize the opportunity (and stop talking about decarbonized oil, much less drilling for methane!)

🟢 Heat pump explainers, round 3,423.
Drew Tozer commissioned this animated beauty.

🟢 Joanna Macy.
The legendary and beloved teacher passed away last week at 96. Rebecca Solnit writes about her beautifully here.

🟢 Women in Climate.
I was lucky enough to spend time with 70(!) brilliant climate leaders at an incredible gathering in British Columbia last week, hearing from the likes of Xiye Bastide and Sheila Watt-Cloutier, among a million others. Each of them brought so much. My biggest worry was how I’d carry the wisdom of the week back home with me, and not return to my life of listening to podcasts at 1.5 speed. I loved this daily recipe that the amazing climate activist Zainab Salbi shared with me one day over lunch, so here ya go:

🟢 Abolishing Alligator Alcatraz.
My friends at Friends of the Everglades have been working hard to fight this terrible thing. I made a poster for them that you can purchase to help support their excellent work! (Yes, that’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas in the middle!)

🟢 BUYERARCHY on ice!
Thank you, Reykjavik, for this beautiful mural-size print of my work and wonderful collective space! Soooo cool.

People dancing

How fun are they!

Thank you!

→ Thank you new subscribers! Welcome welcome. Check out my about page for more frills and ruffles.
→ I will never not love you tapping the 💚 below when you like an edition of this ‘sletter, or sending me a note with suggestions and ideas for how to improve it.
→ You can always help me juice the algo by sharing this newsletter with people you (hopefully) like, recommending it on your own stack, or upgrading your subscription.

Hope you are taking good care,
Sarah

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Hello most valued persons,
It’s taking me longer than anticipated to finish the series I had boldly promised when last I wrote, so here’s a summery soupçon of inspo as I continue to pummel the next two installments of that series into the shape of something readable. I hope you are cool (😎🧊), and that you have an icy beverage in the vicinity. The heat has been merciless and I am grateful for my heat pumps and awnings and the large plastic pool my neighbour gave me I took from my neighbour because I could not bear to see it go to landfill.

If you’re new here thanks to my hero, Rebecca Solnit, welcome! If you’re new here thanks to the mysterious byways of the internet, also welcome! 👋 I’m Sarah. I write and draw about climate communications, and what it means to be alive right now. I also share too many viral dance videos, but you can’t win ‘em all.

Here are three things I’m thinking about: efficiency, collaboration, and electrotech. (That sounds heavy, I promise there’s some fun at the end, like me dancing with my reggaeton crew, and cake. Ok, there’s no cake.)

1 | No efficiency on an amoral planet.

I love this entire essay from Matt Duffy, Efficiency without morality is tyranny. It’s about how digital technologies have sedated us into passivity and further polarized us, destroying community. And it’s one the smartest takes on AI and technocracy that I’ve read. (It could also apply to energy efficiency. No Energy Star on an inequitable planet!) He writes:

To wit, the march of outsourcing wasn’t driven by ignorance, nor was disengagement from real community in favor of weak digital facsimiles of community. We knew factories closing would devastate communities. We knew that online life, while sometimes exciting and helpful, was no substitute for having strong communities in the physical world. We were warned, and decades later, we're still reckoning with hollowed-out towns, forgotten people, and a lack of shared spaces.

The whole essay is spot on, but I’ll pull out a few bits to keep this newsletter short, like hemlines in a canicule: For now I’m simply asking people to notice. Noticing changes our posture—how we look at ourselves, and what we expect from our neighbors.

I’ve had a bit more time to notice lately and it’s precisely in these two categories of introspection, our selves and our neighbours, that I’ve concentrated that noticing. This feels like such a thoughtful way to live in the space between blanket refusal of AI and unchecked acceptance of this relentless digital sweep. We can acknowledge that AI is here, and useful in myriad ways, and also vow to cultivate our own ethics of use (absent the very real global policy interventions we need), to preserve our brains, our relationships, our creative freedoms, and our morality. A moral seriousness, as it were.

We face a fundamental question: will we cultivate a moral framework robust enough to resist technocracy’s logic, or accept our redundancy in a world optimised for everything except being human? Part of the answer lies in small acts of inefficiency – keeping promises, forgiving freely, seeing neighbours and colleagues as more than data points.

In the space of climate and civic renewal, I’ve been thinking about this as where the vibecoding ends, thank you Shel Silverstein. How we can notice more, talk more, be more, in places with people. I’ve been a little less efficient this past month, stopping to chat with people more, pursuing larks, not ticking as many things off my to do list. And it’s been rewarding. (Slow down ✅ Irony ✅ ✅ .)

2 | There’s increasing consensus as to what we need to do to preserve climate and democracy.

It feels like we’ve been frozen for six months, watching and waiting and watching some more. Funders, save for the bold who expanded their giving immediately, have largely clutched their purses tight. People stopped hiring. Everyone held their breath. But while it’s formative yet, it does feel like a nascent crossweave is emerging, an understanding that holistic solutions and collaborative action is the cure for what ails us. Folks know, broadly, what needs to be done: we must invest in non-transactional relationships that support the building of social capital, in ways that reconcile the multiple crises we face (climate, democracy, the pistachio shortage).

It’s the how that’s harder. The cooperation and shared systems building required. On a recent ep of Open Circuit about making the grid smarter, guest and hosts talked about the grid, of course, but the conversation was actually an argument, made in musical metaphor, about connectivity and cooperation. If you are interested in both grid interconnectivity and orchestra mechanics, you can do no better than listen to Katherine Hamilton explain that the grid needs to be like an orchestra. The argument: if an errant second violin (👀) drops out of a complicated run, that’s ok, because the rest of the orchestra is in perfect harmony. Except the orchestra is the grid, and my rusty second violin is a transformer in Topeka. We need this cooperation dearly if we’re to make distributed power plants work for us, and the world. This is no easy feat, of course. Guest Arushi Sharma Frank speaks expertly about seas of Powerwalls not talking to their utilities. We need that to change. But that’s doable, manageable, not moonshotty. If someone can just get that marimba to pay attention.

Am I overly bullish on the prospect of cooperation? I think not, if successful collab means massive shared benefit and profit, and unsuccessful cooperation means a dead planet. These seem like good motivators, both.

3 | It’s all about the electrostate.

Kingsmill Bond is doing some of the best data and writing on the energy transition out there, and this piece is no exception. He very clearly breaks down the difference between generation (solar! renewables!) and electrification (final use energy! 60% of our fossil fuel usage!). As someone who has been working to amplify the importance of the latter for years, I am biased, but also, this is the story of our world and our time. What is it all about? Decoupling the power and the powered better illuminates which nations are making real progress towards achieving the goal of an electrostate, which requires progress on both fronts. Why does this matter? Because we could produce all the abundant electrons in the world, but if we don’t electrify our end use (swapping that gas car for…an e-bike!), it won’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Or it will, but those beans will be leaching methane in a landfill.

Even with the inane, tarriffy headwinds, electric generation is unstoppable, as Bond’s charts demonstrate. This is because it’s just cheaper to build solar. And also, because gas turbines are back-ordered to 2303. Regardless, it’s on the demand side of electrification that there is so much room for improvement. These products save money, and make people’s lives better. And once you go electric you do not want to switch back.

These are upgrades people notice. They go beyond saving money and enhance daily life. This is what surveys show as well: people who switch to EVs and heat pumps do not want to switch back and recommend the technology to others. That’s why any serious political push to accelerate the energy transition should focus on electrification. It’s where the benefits are clearest and most immediate.

So if you’re wondering why I talk about heat pumps all day, now you know. For me, this is the key climate change story we should be telling because it’s about things that resonate with people…that they have to do anyway (cook, heat their homes). Whether we say the words climate change is immaterial. It’s the materiality itself that matters. (But also, saying the words climate change is fine.)

For those who feel down about climate ranking ever-lower on the prioritization queue, the electrotech opportunity is also a palliative. Because lots of the things that rank higher (cost! of! living!) are solved by end-use electrification. The trick is just getting people to know this. But if we solve for human connection (item 1 in this newsletter) and collaborative, systemized action (2), we’re on the way.

Just last week, a neighbour emailed me saying she wanted to do heat pumps in her reno. The problem: said reno was already very much in progress, and her contractor didn’t think they were good. It was a matter of two phone calls to connect her to the right people to help make sure the house got pumps (thanks, Rich!). For the residents of this multi-unit home, that means increased comfort, greater temperature control, lower bills, air conditioning! And all it took was conversation and connection. (Loss aversion is also a great tool!)

Nothing is easy and the world is a mess, but stopping fossil fuel lock-in one neighbour at a time, is restorative. 11/10 would recommend.

This planet
What’s up? What’s on your mind right now. Let me know.

Last planet
It’s the democracy, stupid. Thank you, Kathleen, for sharing this! A good reminder that everywhere, people are building, connecting, growing:

Things

→ Thursday (TODAY!!!!), June 25th, 12 PM EST: Trusted messengers. I’m excited to chat about one of the most effective projects I’ve ever gotten to work on (and the data isn’t even all in yet!) I’m joining a panel of brilliant and hilarious folks (stars from Generation180, Climate Power, and the Climate Advocacy Lab!) to talk trusted messengers, building community, and Amplifiers, a creative clean energy and community-building training. Join if ya can!

→ An absolute gem of a read from the perfectly named Kara Joy.:

→ Dewiring: I’m moving on from my day job at wonderful Rewiring America. I am still working on some super fun stuff in electrification (+ climate comms), but taking a break for a month. If I’ve not gotten back to one of your notes, or just want to chat, drop me a line! July is for improving my French and catching up with friends and acquaintances.

People dancing

My friend Alison wrote this beautiful piece about embarrassing yourself for The Creativity Guild a few weeks ago. While she tried improv to embarrass her way to joy, I’ve gone deep on dancing in public to push past propriety. Regardless of the motivation, the practice, or the outcome, I cannot recommend embarrassment more. Right wing demagogues have no shame. Left-leaning types tend to fret about being gauche (see what I did there). My friend Julie told me to start posting dance videos when I was 35. It took me ten years (!!!) to feel like this was a thing I could do. Anyhoo, reggaeton is a community I never thought I’d find myself a part of (love these ladies and gent!), and yet I enjoy it so much and it has expanded my range of vision hugely. (The whole routine is 5 mins but I spared ya!) (H/t to our amazing teacher, Carolin).

Thank you!

→ Thank you new subscribers! Welcome welcome. Check out my about page for a bit more frills and ruffles.

→ I will never not love you tapping the 💚 below when you like an edition of this ‘sletter, or sending me a note with suggestions and ideas for how to improve it.

→ You can always help me juice the algo by sharing this newsletter with people you (hopefully) like, recommending it on your own stack, or upgrading your subscription.

→ ALSO, way to bury the lede, Sarah. I really appreciate your support, AND it’s been a bucket list goal of mine to make all my art freely accessible and upload all the languages of the Buyerarchy of Needs. To that end, I’ve got two databases almost ready to go. Your support makes it happen! My goal is for any org or person to use anything they need here, and it’ll always be free, but I appreciate your subs for helping making it a thang! Sneak peek (I’m really good at branding):

Bonus dancing: Steve Carell reviving this Ting Tings jam is delight itself.

Take good care!
Sarah 💚💚💚

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🍫 Climate needs democracy: functional systems + robust public media.
🍦 Climate needs community: localized webs + mutual support.
🍓 Climate needs connection: Decentralized IRL/digi comms + 2-way sharing.

I’m attempting a three-parter, a neapolitan ice cream of a series, if you will. Welcome to part 1: Climate needs democracy. These (^) are the three things I hold to be true, and, in my view, present a sequential flow for how we save this motherloving (Happy Belated Mother’s Day!) world. The only thing to know is you have to eat the chocolate first, because if you don’t, the vanilla and strawberry cease to exist. (And also, who doesn’t eat the chocolate first?)

This three-part theory borrows from professor Victor Pickard’s 2019 book, Democracy Without Journalism? Democracy requires accountability, and good journalism is one wholesale supplier of accountability. But also, can we take climate action without democracy? With one green herring (China!), I think not. Although democracy itself doesn’t necessarily deliver climate action, it’s a mostly essential precondition. That said, the secondary and tertiary preconditions for effective climate action are community and connection. I don’t know what the quaternary precondition is, I just wanted to write the word quaternary.

The death of journalism has been greatly underexaggerated

As of 2023, the US has lost a third of its local news outlets, according to a Northwestern report. In Democracy Without Journalism?, Pickard writes specifically about the demise of public service journalism. He estimates that print newsrooms have lost half their staff since 2000. And he argues that commercialism has created this problem and the only way forward is a public-funded model. “Our goal,” he concludes, “should be to create a robust and well-funded media system that is truly public, designed for our digital age, and democracy-driven, not market-driven.”

In other words, we need MORE public media. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is handing Big Bird a pink slip. With no media, we can’t protect democracy, and with no democracy, we cannot protect climate. It’s as simple as that. But here’s a galling example to paint the anti-democratic impasto:

A few months ago, Greenpeace was ordered to pay $660M in damages, after a jury stacked with oil-friendly citizens ruled in favor of Big Oil in the Dakota pipeline case. But one of the most interesting, and barely reported (cuz no media!), parts of the story is that a pay-to-play newspaper dropped actual hard copies of their yellow reportage in the zip codes most relevant to the jury. Per Neiman:

The papers bear the tagline “Real data. Real value. Real news,” but their articles are largely anonymous, echo conservative talking points on key culture war issues, and frequently opine on the destructive nature and lawlessness of the pipeline protests in the rural community between 2016 and 2017.

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in the bright light of fake news delivered to your North Dakota doorstep. And it takes climate down with it.

This says nothing of the digital misinfo that no doubt landed in these geographies as well, but those tactics are better known. What’s wild here is the co-opting of the look and feel of traditional media, creating a surround sound ecosystem of misinfo, presented as local news.

This is of course a tiny fraction of the antidemocracy-to-climate suppression pipeline (see what I did there?), but it’s the below-the-surface part of the iceberg (TIL this part is called the bummock!), and should demand our attention more than the ‘we can’t say climate anymore’ stories that inspire our noisier outrage — those are important too, but perhaps less important than the complete subversion of a working judicial system?

But I’m a climate girly

So why are so many of us fixated on our rote climate action work while democracy crumbles around us? I never thought of myself as a deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic type of gal, but a few month ago I was confronted with the reality that I was indeed making neat rows of loungers on the Promenade Deck. I had asked a climate activist and writer I revere to write something for me about electrifying LA in the wake of the fires, and she emailed back, “not now, we’re in a coup.” Again, for effect:

The sentence still bounces around in my brain, echoing loudly because I’ve cleared everything else out. In some ways, it’s the climate version of that ubiquitous Martin Niemöller quote: “First, they came for the…” Except it’s more like: When they came for democracy I said nothing, because I was…quietly trying to save the planet without using the word equity.

The thing about “climate needs democracy” is that it’s by no means a guarantee of climate success. Although 89% of people across the globe want their political leaders to take climate action, people still vote against climate and for more pressing concerns all the time. (Not because they’re bad, but because they have bills to pay and stresses to contend with that are way more important.)

So democracy is a precondition for climate action in most places. Of course the outlier here is China, where decades of tight control has paved the way for the most significant and brisk climate action on the planet. (But still, let’s be Costa Rica. Democracy and climate action and cute beach cafés with good smoothies!)

In the US, the majority of people who want to destroy democracy also want to destroy climate — to actually delete any record of it, and all accounting for it too. But climate organizations can’t shift mandates over night. So we’re often left to manage green business as usual, in a world that feels anything but usual.

Democratic action for climate satisfaction

While we don’t need to rank our existential threats, a fascist first™️ approach feels, with every passing day, like it’s rapidly getting upvoted on the apocalypse prevention To Do list. A byproduct of destroying fascism is destroying climate deniers, so this work has the added benefit of killing two evils with one stone (with apologies to the stone). But this requires a reclassification of sorts for the individual working the climate beat, and it’s why so many people I’ve been speaking to of late want to work on democracy, full stop. Climate is the fire of our lives. And democracy is the door we have to keep unlocked if we are to get to that fire.

My fave phrase, borrowed from Project Drawdown, and uttered to anyone who asks me about climate work (and anyone who doesn’t) is, Every job is a climate job. Because we need to infuse every type of work with climate and make it normative (working chief sustainability officers out of a job would mean we’ve won!). But perhaps an additional phrase needs to be, Every climate job is a democracy job.

In practice, it’s always been about thinking holistically. What can I do to shore up democracy and institutions as I work to advance climate? Climate work absent that framework feels nutty (see: we’re in a coup!). And for me, rigid brain that I am, reframing the nomenclature of our very work feels both necessary and helpful. For example, fighting the misinfo on Facebook in the federal election lead up here in Canada WAS and IS climate work. With news blocked on Canadian Facebook, bad actors swooped in to swarm feeds with anti-Carney fake news (that directed to fake CBC sites), a truly brazen attempt to undermine democracy, and also an anti-climate push. It’s no surprise that the people advocating for a well-funded CBC are the same people who believe that climate change is real. Also, their FU** the CBC campaign is funny, or rather fu**y. You should watch it.

These are scary times, and there’s no mincing that. But even as I fret that humanity is too overwhelmed by life and deadened by endless streams of digital nonsense, there are inspiring counter-examples everywhere. Serbia is out in the streets, demanding their public broadcaster be able to cover the protests overtaking their country. Led by a diverse group of the country’s students and union leaders, the non-hierarchical organizing is evidence of community power in action, which is the topic of part two of this series, Community: In truly Al Goreian fashion, I thought I’d invented the term civic muscle. But it’s being flexed everywhere, by brilliantly named groups like Warm Cookies of the Revolution, which bills itself as the ‘world’s first civic health club.’ More next week.

It’s my favourite season in Toronto. The cherry blossoms are out, and Bar Ape is open. If you come visit, I’ll take you. The only rule is that you have to walk there from wherever you are in the city. Wishing you soft serve, warm company, and good health.

This planet

How are you thinking about your climate work in the world RN? Let me know.

Last planet

Feel good homes with Drew was my first attempt at a pod. You all voted 85% in favor of more audio noodling, so noodle I shall. Thank you!

Stuff

→ Part of the challenge of this moment is the constant disorientations and realignments. Donald Trump, conscious consumer and degrowther? Of course he is nothing of the sort. But a world where kids have two good quality dolls is…lovely? I remember traveling to Argentina after default number 2,537, around 2010, and seeing a nascent Industria Argentina movement taking hold, with goods made at home, because no one would loan to them. There are parts of this reindustrialization that I love — local production, good quality products, and the jobs that come with that. It’s weird to see Democrats being the torch bearers of trade liberalization. But sometimes things are weird? And it’s ok to live with the upsidedown cake of it all right now.

→ My friend Kevin has launched balcony solar in the US. His company, Bright Saver, is a smart way to get some solar if you can’t roof it up, and you can still get in on the pilot in California. After reading the same articles as everyone else about German balcony solar, I got obsessed. Turns out Kevin and others did, too. These modular little units cannot solve everything, but they are a great and quick solution for lots of households.

→ Heat pump symposium! Sooo cool to see such energy in Canada. HRAI’s HP symposium went from from 300 to 1000 delegates in less time than it takes to say ground source heat pump. I always learn a bunch and come away with a true pearl or two at these things. This year: OMG if you get a combo HP washer dryer, you never have to worry about leaving the wet clothes in the washer for far too long (a regular thing, if you are a terrible housekeeper like moi). More efficient washing, and my son will never tell me his clothes smell like sweaty moss again?

→ My husband works in circularity and got to hear the OG, William McDonough, at last month’s conference in Denver. He made a poem out of McDonough’s keynote (reuse!), a snippet:

Net zero: More strange language for the children.
All sustainability is local.
Extended producer opportunity — go for it!

Thank you!

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People dancing

The Rockettes are really branching out.

Take good care!
Sarah

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Hello Most Vibrant People,
’What new things and foods and ideas and slang and dance classes should I be trying?’ is a run-on question I often ask myself. So today, a new thing: a podcasty video chat. Drew Tozer is the guy behind Foundry Heat Pumps, and he’s just written a book called Feel-Good Homes. The goal of his book: to help you get to know and understand your house so you can make it more comfortable — by weatherizing, getting a heat pump, and learning how to talk heat pump with your contractor.

If you’re in Ontario, Drew will mail you his book for free. If you’re anywhere else in the world, you can download a PDF for free.

I always want to understand my home more deeply (when do I need to clean the eavestroughs? what’s an eavestrough?), and yet I rarely make the time. But time is on my mind, after learning from Drew’s book that we spend an average of 70% of our lives in our homes (omg, she screams from the blue velvet couch she never leaves). Given that multi-decadal sofa suck, we might as well make our homes as cozy as can be. The fact that making our homes more comfortable provides huge planetary benefit is just the world’s perfect bonus. As climate communicators know, we must sell the benefits that are NOT climate: cozyiness, comfort, control, health, ease, delight, coolness, and the ability to whiz by people stuck in traffic when you are actively transporting yourself to and fro.

Nerdy things I wanted to ask Drew about: The best way to explain what a heat pump is (his answer is 🤌!), what makes a feel-good home, the fabric first trap, and his thoughts on why to electrify (it’s. just. better.).

This pod is a tiny MVP of an experiment to see if folks like absorbing information in this way. It is has been very minimally edited. Let me know your thoughts in the survey below!

Show notes:

00:00 Intro and random pleasantries

03:32 The Importance of Feel Good Homes

06:06 Understanding Indoor Air Quality

09:17 Future Proofing Your Home

11:58 Demand for Heat Pumps

15:01 Challenges in HVAC and Contractor Expertise

17:55 Sarah is obsessed with Fabric First

20:58 Explaining Heat Pumps

23:37 Conclusion: Electric stuff is just better. People will choose it…Cool!

Takeaways

• The average person spends 70-90% (55 years!) of their time indoors, making home comfort crucial.

• Heat pumps can significantly reduce emissions, even for those not motivated by climate change. (70-80% in Ontario, where the grid is pretty darn clean…now!)

• Future-proofing homes through electrification offers energy independence.

• Indoor air quality is primarily about source control, not just ventilation. (Metaphor about manure courtesy Joe Lstiburek)

• Homeowners often prioritize cost over quality in HVAC choices, impacting long-term comfort. Which is only human.

• The building envelope is important, but electrification can still provide substantial benefits. IE The Fabric First convo! (Sarah believes in fabric first but only to a point, because her house is made of cheesecloth).

• Heat pumps are a better consumer product compared to traditional gas appliances. And getting better every day.

• The electrification movement is gaining momentum, driven by consumer demand for better stuff. Electric stuff is just better. So even if people don’t care about climate, they’ll wanna buy the better things.

• A collaborative approach between contractors and homeowners can enhance the HVAC ecosystem.

Subscribe now

Housekeeping + thanks

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People dancing (always)

Loafers and moves.

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Hope you are happy and healthy as can be in this vibrant if vibrating world,
Sarah

When I started this newsletter six years back on ye old Mailchimp, I called it Minimum Viable Planet because it was about the little things we could do in a world where there wasn’t time or energy to do much else. At the time I had two young kiddos and a lot of puréed vegetables to gently fold into their brownies. I was working a full-time job, freelancing, and trying to make sense of a warming world. I was trying to figure out where to apply my very finite discretionary time to do what I could on climate, and that burning question was the impetus for this newsletter. I gave people prompts — letters to write, small actions to take…because even that was very hard (still is, really). Behavioral science teaches the value of breaking big things into manageable pieces (chunks!). And you know, Rome wasn’t cooled by 1.5 degrees in a day.

Talking about climate itself was a goal enough because so many people had trouble just doing that (still do, really). The course I helped create, Talk Climate to Me, sought to make talking climate unscary. Katharine Hayhoe started writing a newsletter called Talking Climate.

And Minimum Viable Planet was a product of those conditions. The nonsensical individual-versus-systemic change debate over those pesky 100 companies making 71% of our pollution hadn’t reared its unhelpful head and writing a letter to your local mucketymuck was done by way of a seemingly endless slew of New/Mode petitions that you could dispatch with relative ease, while doing whatever people did before we sourdoughed and Netflixed our way through Covid.

Minimum Viable Planet was a nod to the MVP ethos, too: move fast and save things…But while I still like that energy, I don’t like the gelatinous tech stew from which it emerged. Big tech is responsible for so much of our planetary warming, unprecedented democratic upheaval, the disappearance of news, and the cratering mental health of young people everywhere (never mind adults!). But more acutely, and even as the vision of a healthy planet feels further away than ever: I DON’T WANT A MINIMUM VIABLE PLANET! I want the Most Vibrant Planet.

What’s the good of a barely liveable world? One riven by conflict, run by despots, stripped of beauty, devoid of cookies? We don’t want to get to minimum viable JUST to prevent the Maldives from being washed away — we want to get to most vibrant to lift up the Maldives and all dives. To make the world better and more beautiful, for everyone.

The quest for a most vibrant planet is motivating. I’m not the synesthete my daughter is, but this new MVP nonetheless conjures a solarpunk cityscape full of greenery and life in my mind. And I’d rather that, even if the path to getting there feels steeper than ever. I want to picture the marching band at the end of the marathon. (See: painting the positive vision…)

What does a Most Vibrant Planet look like?

I am not joining team goodvibesonly. But how you brand is who you be. And in the face of the most bad, I want to envision the most good. And I want this digital firmament to be a most vibrant place for that convening. This isn’t a very brand-forward newsletter — it could just as well be called Sarah’s House of Momjokes — but it’s important to get it bright.

Getting it bright is lighting up paths forward, building community, and pointing to the markers of progress in a world that feels darker than ever. In light of so much climate and democratic backpedaling and capitulating, how do we go forward? More vigorously. More ardently, in our articulation of the things that matter: air to breathe, freedom to breathe it, sustainable systems, and some music and delight thrown in to boot. I will highlight more of that, and areas we can make inroads. I’m excited for some fun interviews I’ve got lined up. But first, some principles pulled from people and places I love in service of this eponymic evolution:

More! Vibrant! Phrases!

🟢 Be “incurably constructive”

I followed the stories about Voice of America’s untimely and ill-advised decimation, and its CEO, Michael Abramowitz, led me to his dad, Mort, a truly incredible character and peace broker, who passed away last year. I loved this from Samantha Power on Abramowitz’s relentless energy, from his WaPo obit:

He was “incurably constructive,” she told the New Yorker in 2014. “There was just nothing he encountered where his mind didn’t go to, ‘What can you do?’”

🟢 Possibility > positivity

I loved this BEworks report when it came out a while back. The incredible Solitaire Townsend reups it in her newsletter this week. She pulls out the idea of being a possibility thinker, and I love that, because possibility is the antidote to paralysis (h/t Saul Griffith):

Creative minds are naturally good at future-oriented thinking, perseverance, and spotting opportunities. These are all essential for climate solutions. If you’re a creative thinker who hasn’t applied your imagination to climate change: we need your magic!

🟢 Fundamentals, inevitability, and the smartest gals in the room

It’s worth listening to this whole episode of Open Circuit on the lessons of the pandemic, but it’s the back half of it that really unpacks the fundamentals of the inevitability of the transition, and the durable power of industrial policy, globally. Loved this bit from Jigar Shah:

Go figure the smartest people in the entire world were working in renewable energy. And when all of these things went haywire, the people that were able to figure it out and actually get things deployed, even though folks were betting against them, was the renewable energy industry…

And then the other thing that’s turning out to be really interesting is that this whole concept of we just need the cheapest renewable energy and the cheapest stuff has also been one of the biggest losers. Folks want resilient stuff, local stuff. And you’re starting to see a lot of folks decide that they’re going to pay a premium if they have to, but they’re going to manufacture some of it locally.

Adjacent to that is this interesting piece on the rise of the new joule order, as highlighted by CTVC yesterday. It’s a report by the Carlyle Group that says energy is being driven by security.

The report argues that amid all this global disorder, there’s a new energy world order emerging — an ongoing shift from the Oil Age to a Joule Order, driven by countries reordering their priorities to security, affordability and then climate.

🟢 Less work, more meaning

This is a fantastic post from Lloyd Alter, who advances sufficiency not degrowth. It’s not the most vibrant phrase, but it is just what we need. He wrote the post in response to the implications of tariffs on our hewers-of-wood economy here in Canada, but it’s really about so much more. Writes Lloyd: J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Day the World Stops Shopping, thought we would end up in a nicer place:

“The evidence suggests that life in a lower-consuming society really can be better, with less stress, less work or more meaningful work, and more time for the people and things that matter most. The objects that surround us can be well made or beautiful or both, and stay with us long enough to become vessels for our memories and stories. Perhaps best of all, we can savour the experience of watching our exhausted planet surge back to life: more clear water, more blue skies, more forests, more nightingales, more whales.”

🟢 Conscious consumerism, but make it dope?

I don’t write about consumerism as much as I used to…but I still try to buy as little as possible, while not boring my friends with talk of Poshmark. I love this from Blackbird Spyplane, who call themselves “earth’s No. 1 most anti-consumerist dope-clothes celebrators.”

Blackbird Spyplane

Is buying things bad?

Our Home Goods Report, full of things to enliven the place you live, and stores where you can find them, is here…

Read more

a year ago · 102 likes · 13 comments · Blackbird Spyplane

Most Valuable Planetry 📗🌱💚

a few more vibrant shoots

• The left will not be able to compete until we have a media ecosystem, something that takes time, patient capital, and smart people giving creators the space to develop their voice without meddlesome strictures. Efforts to date have failed because they missed the boat on at least two out of three of these necessities. But more and more wise minds are articulating this, forcefully, in all the thought leadershipy places, and I’m hopeful it’s finally sinking in. I like this further drilling down on what this means from Ashwath Narayan of Social Current:
  Issue/Advocacy/Impact focused organizations have to invest in infrastructure that a) supports existing progressive & political creators and gives them resources, money and tools to grow their audience b) brings new voices into our space and helps them activate around issue based messaging when they want c) creates culture first spaces for audiences that are based around key values instead of only talking points.
  

• Rule of threes! This is great and simple from the last Open circuit podcast: The three reasons that major investors are still investing in the clean energy/climate transition (in order of importance):
  1. Diversification
  2. Profit
  3. Sustainability
  

• Kelly Mark. She was such a clever, meticulous artist. I was so sad to learn of her passing last week. (Lovely/sad CBC obit)

Housekeeping and thanks

💚 If you accidentally pledged to my newsletter: I’m so sorry! Substack had some sort of pledging feature turned on, that automatically billed you when I turned on the full suite of options. PLEASE let me know if you’d like me to refund you, unsubscribe you, and then manually add you back to the list! Thank you.

💚 If you like this newsletter, tap the ❤️ below, or drop me a note telling me what to do more/less of, please!

I hope you are doing ok in these wild times,
Sarah

People dancing

Some Doechii by my fave trio:

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Dear Most Valued Persons,
Y’all. I am the gal who got the ‘Special Coaches Award’ every year in high school cross country. This was a commendation that they absolutely made up for me, Little Miss Tries Very Hard But Is Not Too Fast. I never made it to State. But I cheered through the humidity, did not miss practice, and could pretty much run forever, no matter the heat, so they kept me around. My daughter’s dad is a serious runner, known around town as one half of the Bens – two middle-aged running club dudes who do all the races, and cheer all the people (my Ben, in particular, will LOSE his voice cheering at races of all kinds, he’s got spirit, yes he do).

But though my husband is faster than me (he ran in college, and now qualifies for Boston and the like), he also has never considered himself a really fast dude. So it was with a mixture of delight and worry that I greeted my daughter’s recent-ish commitment to serious running — what if she just doesn’t have the genes to realize her dreams? What’s bred in the bone? How much can be willed and worked to success? Yes, I’m the mom who visualizes the whole continuum of an experience, which I know is both unhelpful, and noisy. The variance of possibility! (And also, my parents didn’t cut off my childhood violin lessons when they realized I wasn’t going to be Itzhak Perlman.)

Of course, I run for all the benefits that are not trophies (which btdubs no trophies pls). And I love that for my daughter. I want her to run because she loves putting her best feet forward, and derives physical and mental strength from it…But I also want her to qualify for provincials, if that’s her goal. And because she’s more like her dad than me (I would prefer to cartwheel across the finish line smiling), I am fairly sure it is her goal.

My husband’s metaphor, in running and life, has always been persistence beats resistance. It’s lovely to be sure, and it’s got an Elizabeth Warren ring to it that makes me like it just enough. But if I’m honest, I’ve never loved it. Because it presumes headwinds and resistance, a defensive and hardworky position of plowing through peanut butter forever. Which, of course, is real, and what it feels like on days where the snow and wind burn your face as you log your clicks, or as you push for climate action against bad faith baddies standing stocky and smug and arms crossed because baddies always have their arms crossed except for when they’re stroking their cats. But does persistence beats resistance motivate? I am not so sure.

Lately, during my runs, I’ve been flipping my own koans around, and the one I like most of late is Will it and skill it. In my daughter I see the craziest will, a desire so strong it got her to the city finals, and has helped her clock some pretty respectable times in 10K races we’ve been running just for kicks and clicks. Skilling feels like a more positive variation on persisting. Whilst watching the great reality show Cheer, I found it equal parts hilarious and charming when I learned that the phrase for mastering a new trick was a ‘skill.’ ‘I learned a new skill,’ the invariably perky and permatanned cheerleaders would say, each time they committed a fresh near-death maneuver to muscle memory. Like a boy scout badge, or the tickety boxes on my daughter’s twee Montessori reports (Water table ✅ Binomial cube ✅), people like skills. Skillfullness.

A few years ago I wrote a post on the negative splits required for us to meet our climate goals, and why race pace is key. I was right about that, and about the frontloaded speed required, but wrong about the race in question. It can’t be framed as a sprint. It’s a marathon, as Quadrature’s Greg De Temmerman’s explains in his very spot on recent Ted Talk. Worse (depending on your perspective!), it’s an ultra. As an ultramarathoner, De Temmerman adapts to the conditions, and trains hard for the A to B line that grows more difficult when you see that the map also contains topographies like the heights of Mt Kilimanjaro and the trough of obfuscatory Executive Orders. He says:

As with trail running, it’s important to keep our eyes on the prize. Keep moving in the short term, while you are thinking about the long term. When I start a long distance race I don’t start by saying hey 100 kms to go, 99 kms to go, no that would be killing me. I have a plan, I start by going to the next checkpoint, which is typically 4 or 5 hours away. I go there, I refuel, assess how I feel, and then I go to the next one.

The climate pep talks have been prodigious in the wake of Trump’s ascendancy and the attendant relegation of climate and DEI, and you know, general respect for humanity. But this one, from the wonderfully and ironically-named Solitaire Townsend, strikes the right tone, speaking to the durational work in front of us.

If you’ve been in sustainability only for a few years, you’ve ridden an unprecedented upward wave of growing interest, investment and public support. It’s been the easiest time in my career to land major action/change.

So, if that’s all you’ve known. Then this backlash and uncertainty right now is likely uncomfortable at best and downright scary at worst.

And yep, the stakes are higher right now with climate change really biting. But the stakes felt pretty damn high back then too.

My advice?

1. DON’T PANIC - this isn’t the first backlash, recession or major hit we’ve faced. Each time before we’ve worked out asses off and continued to make progress.

2. ADAPT - we’ve renamed, restructured, pivoted and reinvented ‘doing the right thing’ over and again. It’s a great strategy to inject energy and avoid the ‘anti’ brigade.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…so what shall we call ‘ESG’ next?

3. CONTINUE - the biggest mistake to make right now: stopping. Climate change won’t give us a time-out because a few leaders are feeling regressive. You’ve got to work harder, dig deeper, find strength in each other, listen more and be smarter in how we hit our goals. We’ve done it before, and it made us more effective. You won’t see many veterans in this movement saying ‘it’s all over’ or thinking this is a permanent downturn. Because we’ve been through this before. Positive change only stops if we do.

4. ENJOY - sustainability can be a bit dour at the best of times. Now’s the time to LOUDLY CELEBRATE every damn win. Show we’re still here, show we’re still winning/progressing/solving in more ways than ever! Joy is an act of defiance.

I’ll be right here cheering you on. And giving the occasional pep talk.

This is, of course, different from the initial running provocation of my daughter’s need for speed. But it’s about wise actions, cool heads, and the steady state of running as a helpful metaphor for these headwindy times. It’s about logging the training, even if you may not win tomorrow, and even if you may never be the person most well-equipped to win, like, ever ever. My colleague Jon Jon volunteers for an incredible climate and trail running group called Footprints. It’s easy to see why going the distance and climate are mutually inclusive endeavours.

We’ll need this endurance, because, “this is the hard part of the journey.” From Albert Cheung at BNEF (the whole piece is the most cogent and measured take on what’s to come in the energy transition FWIW.):

That the transition is starting to feel hard shouldn’t come as a surprise: many of the easier opportunities have been conquered. Early adopters in richer countries have already bought EVs and home solar systems, and renewables developers have snapped up the best sites with the cheapest grid connections, in the most economically and politically stable markets. These early movers played a critical role in driving down the costs of clean energy technologies and bringing them to scale.

I’ve been feeling pretty beat down lately, for reasons of all kinds, but I take comfort in the fact that climate malaise isn’t eating my heart the way it used to (though perhaps it should…look away from the AMOC, Little Miss Slow and Steady). I attribute this to the will it/skill it mentality. I have a merino base layer of core strength to draw from, whatever climate clawbacks may pass. And there’s the near term to focus on. Even as we simultaneously fixate on an endpoint that is occasionally hidden by hills and lumpy obstructionists. We can walk and chew gum. And get through this together.

Speaking of walking: if you don’t like running, this same perspectival clarity can be achieved by strolling, no doubt. And you get to both save money on overly fussy performance wear and not talk about gels. Which are disgusting. Don’t @ me on that one.

This planet: Running on full?

What are you thinking and feeling rn? Lemme know!

Last planet: Love is the lens.

Thank you, Fatima:

“Love is greater than positivity” are the words I needed! I always appreciated and felt connected to the active part to optimism but worried optimism risked naiveté. But love…love is an active choice and is founded (and grows) on feelings and facts and practice.”

Active choice, I love that back!

Stuff

Be the disciplined stoner. Running Ben exists at the most intriguing Venn diagram - he is the king of both cannabis reportage and running in Canada. Which kind of sums up this post. Disciplined stoners FTW. Marathon and chill?

People dancing

We dance! Golden Fest gives me life, and it came back with a cocek this year! (Plus David Byrne showed up, and I told him I was a Talking Head Pump. He looked at me like I was an affable weirdo, which…I am?). So many fave friends and musicians, and no, willful daughter, you may not crowdsurf:

🚨A kind of big thing! Please make sure you’re subscribed in email if you’d like to keep getting this email. Substack appears to be trying to push folks to their app. Thank you, Felix Salmon, for uncovering. Some readers had been asking why they weren’t getting my sends anymore…and not just because I’m an erratic emailer. Mystery vexingly solved. TY, RZ!

Thank you for reading. As always, tell me how to make this better.
Hope you are safe and healthy and happy as possible!
Sarah

Hi!
I’m in Florida for a spell. This story greeted my arrival: The race to save the Everglades, and Florida’s drinking water, is on.

I didn’t appreciate Florida nature as much as I could have when I lived here. Maybe that’s why the love I feel for beach cabbage, mangroves, the humidity, and the river of grass herself is so intense — the land is being gobbled up. An ouroboros of swampy self destruction. And yet there are heroic people doing the work. Like Friends of the Everglades. My nostalgia for the Florida I grew up in extends to the political climate, too. Once, these swamps weren’t MAGA-filled — they were conservative (you can’t spell mangrove without man!) to be sure, but there was a politics of conservation, and stewardship. What would Marjory Stoneman Douglas have made of all this? She’d have had some words, no doubt.

But enough of all things brackish and hackish, this month’s newsletter is about love. ♥️

A half-decade ago I met some curiously brilliant non-profit marketers called Potential Energy Coalition. They were working on a bunch of climate campaigns that sought to reframe how we message climate, based on actual! testing! It was widely novel at the time. One of their first campaigns was Protect What You Love, and it was a mashup of everything I’d learned from a most incredible environmental psych prof, Clara Dolderman, coupled with what we know to be true from moral foundations theory — protecting is powerful stuff. Protecting the things we love about the world is the powerfulest.

I’ve come back to love as the key operating frame time and time again in this newsletter, so instead of rehashing, I’m recombobulating all my thoughts on love here, as inspired by so many excellent people:

💚 Reframe: Climate work is love.

💚 Reposition: Love is greater than positivity.

💚 Refocus: It’s not everything you love, but something you love.

1. Climate work is love.

A while back I fell in love with these beautiful words from the excellent Cat Abreu. This is from a 2020 post I wrote on reframing climate work as not oppositional, but loving, about fighting in the most positive sense. Writes Cat:

The truth is that working on climate change is not a fight: it is an act of love. Those of us who dedicate our lives to this effort, in whatever setting we choose to work (there are climate activists in governments and businesses everywhere), do it because we love our families, our children, the lake we swam in as teenagers, the communities we have seen suffer as weather gets more extreme and sea levels rise. We do it because we see the injustice and inequity and colonial ideology that both drives and is exacerbated by climate change, and we have to believe in a world liberated from these institutions of violence.

People see just about anything oppositional as a fight. But battling the status quo doesn’t mean you are fighting against something (fossil fuel jobs, pipelines, bechamel sauce) so much as fighting FOR something. And if you’re fighting FOR something it’s because you love it, believe in it, care about it. In which case, you don’t need the language of battle at all. You are advocating, championing, building, supporting, cheering, encouraging, spelunking, twerking, vibrating with love.

(Cat Abreu: Climate action is my love language.)

2. Love > positivity.

Love is a great way to sidestep the climate positivity convo. It’s hard to be positive, and it often feels off, because although we’re making huge strides, we can see (and experience) the devastation already (some much more imminently than others), and there are headwinds aplenty. Which is why I’m tired of the positivity conversation, whether you affix a ‘toxic’ in front of it or not. Same goes for hope, despair, and hydrogen. Can we just not?

If we need motivation though, love is what compels (and survival, of course). And imagining the fate of the people and and places we love is meaningful, and effective. A new study affirms the merit of future positioning by way of exercises like Dear Tomorrow, a fave project of mine, that asks you to write to the future, or yourself. The intervention, future self continuity, is so powerful that it proved the most effective technique in support for climate policy in this neat megastudy: Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries.

The most effective strategy globally was imagining writing a letter to a child one knows today who would receive the letter 25 years later, explaining one’s climate actions today. Similarly effective was imagining oneself in the future writing a letter to one’s current self, asking questions about what actions one took or what one was thinking at the time.

“These messages shrink the timescale of climate change. They remind us that our actions today matter and will impact people we know, in our families and communities,” Pearson says.

This ‘leave what you love for future generations’ is done SO EXPERTLY in this season of the TV show Hacks, (ep 5), when young writer Ava schools veteran comedian Deborah. It hits on so many other things I think about all the time, too (how the climate crisis is a crisis of existential magnitude unlike anything that has come before it, even if you’re old enough to remember very bad things!), but it’s really about respect, which is a form of love for all humanity.

Ava: Okay, you know what? Joke all you want. But you drive cars that are inefficient. You take a private jet everywhere.

Deborah: Not everywhere.

Ava: All the stuff that you sell on QVC, it’s all plastic and fast fashion. Polyester doesn’t degrade. It’s made from oil. Okay, Forever 21 is basically Exxon. Zara–BP.

Deborah: Listen, I’m not saying you’re wrong. It’s just that young people are just so much more dramatic about everything. When you live long enough, you realize things don’t change that drastically.

Ava: Okay, think of it this way-when you play a comedy club, you don’t do the shitty material at the end of your set and leave the crowd cold out of respect for the comedian following you, right?

One tiny extra thing I love about this scene: you don’t have to have kids. Often people say they’re doing climate work for their children, which is lovely, but also leaves out a whole lotta people (and if I’m being honest, feels weird — no kin, no care?) who don’t have kids, and still want to do right by the world. Leave it nicer than you found it, progeny or no, it’s all valid. And universal.

3. Focus on what you love.

It’s not everything you love, but something you love. (From Love people in Nature, MVP 2022.)

In 2013 my favourite professor, environmental psychologist Clara Dolderman, gave a TED Talk in which she said the climate crisis was about Everything You Love. This phrase, which I fell in love with (meta much?) has hummed in my brain for nearly a decade. I wrote about it in my newsletter a few years ago, And I think everything I said, and Clara preached, still holds up, with one absolutely key change — It’s not Everything You Love, It’s Something You Love. Everything you love is a vaseline-lensed montage of the greatest hits of your life that you can’t grab onto. It’s a hyperobject itself, too big to comprehend. Something you love is a moment, a conversation, a party, a game, an embrace that you call up with a vivid clarity that sticks. It’s that singular love, situated in, but not secondary to “nature,” that motivates the action we need to inspire climate care.

How do we find the single thing that will motivate climate caring and, ultimately, climate doing? Love helps. An ability to find that clarified, singular, loveable motivator and tie it to doable things helps, too.

We ran a 10K in a torrent yesterday. At the finish line, a woman came up to me and thanked me for pacing her. I hadn’t noticed, but it felt nice to have been a useful focal point, helping someone else to achieve their goal. I hope to leverage my love to focus on the things that matter this year. Like being kinder, training my energy on the people and projects that matter most, and adding light to the world where I can. While eating cookies.

2024 has been rough, personally and planetarily. I wish you a fresh year full of new energy and the animating love you need to do what you want this year. What are your goals and dreams? Or non-goals and non-dreams (maintenance is lovely, too)?

Stuff

💚 New internet friend Shreyas has a newsletter exclusively about heat pumps, or as he, and many others, propose we call them, 2-way ACs. I’m on side from a cooling standpoint. For heat, how can you do better than the words heat pump? Maybe magic cozy heating machine?

💚 The good news lists feel impoverished this year, even though LOTS of incredible things happened. Rather point to the inevitable market markers that say this clean energy transition is happening regardless of tin pot pompadours and backsliding baddies?

💚 RIP Jimmy Carter. We’ve tried to undo his sweater efficiency for years — but he will be remembered fondly for it in the end. I’ve always associated Carter with The Sweater Song, because we do want to destroy the sweater…even as we need to wear it. It’s a song about sadness that reads as hilarious. A sweater on your person or furnace feels similar. Yet someday, we will all wear the efficiency sweaters. Rest in peace.

💚 Loved this Semafor All the Things We Got Wrong in 2024 post.

💚 What about a little climate hope? Sure. Some things are easier to undo than others — like light pollution and plastic pollution…This is beautiful, from The Narwhal:

My experience isn’t that uncommon, Michelle’s story confirms: as of 2016, 80 percent of North Americans couldn’t see the Milky Way. Since then, the night sky has become even more saturated by artificial light — about twice as bright as it was eight years ago. It’s a type of environmental degradation that’s not as obvious, but light pollution impacts creatures like bats, sea turtles, songbirds — and humans, too.

For the Huu-ay-aht, everything is connected. It’s why the First Nation is on a mission to protect its stars, and even developing a dark sky festival — which it hopes will bolster economic development, preserve astronomical traditions and draw attention to our endangered, irreplaceable view of the stars.

“Artificial lighting is not an oil spill or a felled tree,” Michelle writes. “Unlike other forms of environmental devastation, we can undo much of it with the flick of a switch. It might not be so simple as that, but it’s possible to restore some of what we’ve lost, and protect what we still have.”

People dancing

Florida gal Doechii visits her Tampa high school and you don’t wanna miss it!

The charm and the commitment.

Happy New Year! Wishing you health, happiness, and heart,
Sarah

PS. Heat pumps on bridges. Yes, please.

This week:

1. A new word recipe

2. Delight

3. Cool things

4. Cool coping things

5. People dancing

Hello delightful humans,
I read soooo many words in the clear light of last Wednesday morning, from climate writers, activists, artists, comedians, friends, bakers. And in the coming weeks, I will read thousands more. Not the Monday morning vivisections (so easy to to do now, under the million-watt glare of an LED operating room lamp) of a world choosing cartoonish strong men, but the real-time processing of smart people all over the world, working to find their way forward. Sometimes reading these planful posts and ponderings was and is helpful, and sometimes it’s too much — I’m not ready to be as pragmatic as you, good sir, I’m still processing — so wherever you are, I hope you are finding what works for you. ❤️

🖼 I am fond of frameworks for living: Le Corbusier, mnemonics, to-do lists, affirmations, heuristics — I even like the word rubric, though it’s weird and clinical and clumpy when you say it. I love a slogan that sticks, a principle that persists, a phrase that stays for days. For the last while, I’ve been a grieve, breathe, seize gal — absorb the shocks, work through them, do the things. But, rules are made to bend towards justice. So here’s my new one: Nap, ask, act.

Nap

It is wearying. And for those who are vulnerable, the nap might need to be longer, quieter, and even more nourishing. Rest is required, even if it’s a disco nap, otherwise the prescriptions being lobbed, aloud and aligned, can feel too overwhelming. Some people only need a good night’s sleep, others need to hibernate. Yes, rest is resistance, but it’s also just rest. I put myself to sleep with this paragraph, but I guess that’s the point.

Ask

What are the questions I did not ask? And did I mistake a rapacious appetite for information (and cookies) for curiosity? (Yes). I like to think of myself as an inquisitive, nosy person, but what if the pond in which I’m nosing is too homogenous? What if I need to smell farther? This is modestly rhetorical, as I have a terrible olfactory sense.

Wrote Dan Pfeiffer last week on the Democratic rebuild: We can get there if we ask the hard questions and do the work. I think that’s broadly true of everything in life, but have I/we been asking the hardest questions everywhere? Perhaps not, when the climate pace required forces a most hasty question period. I will not short circuit the asking, and I will expand its radius. This is the bodysuit I will wear.

Act

I will act. And find more courage. It all matters. I’ve hit a wall with some climate truisms (most truisms, really, which makes no sense for someone who just went on about loving rules, see above). After I hear truisms a bit too much they bore me, and feel stale, wrong even. I’ve gotten to that place with ‘every tenth of a degree matters.’ Because it’s true, but it’s sad, and, in some ways, an ongoing recalibration of defeat, dressed up as realism. At the same time, it all matters. It all adds up. “We are alive at just the moment to change everything,” says Eric Holthaus. Our human future will be determined by the people alive today (us!). We must act with the courage and love this world requires, as our circumstances allow. Which includes baking cakes for friends in need of warmth and fortitude. (Next up:🍌🍰! TY, Rachel K!)

This planet

What is your rule for living? Let me know!

Last planet

Elsa sent me this much-needed beauty and some Robin Wall Kimmerer:
Not so helpful in making a significant change.
But really comforting to me, a gardener, a grandma.
I cannot despair. hopefully some comfort to you as well…

Delight

I was thinking about delight before last week. And then I stopped. Now I’d like to relight the delight. And talk about The Delightenment.

My friend Tristan made this beautiful video about the work he’s been doing since 2017, as a response to his climate grief, and then some. I met Tristan in the most delightful way. Ambling home from brunch in 2006, my now husband and I came across a merry band of weirdos in our local park. Dressed old timey and serving free scones, they were playing an absurd game of bicycle polo, equal parts performance art and competitive sport (for artists though, so, not all that competitive). It was a beautiful act of community hilarity. And we’ve been friends ever since.

“In any design cycle, that’s the moment of the greatest opportunity…when you realize there has to be something different,” says Tristan, in this perfect video about his latest project, General Notion. Highly applicable, because we’re in a Democracy Design Cycle, right? Watch this incredibleness, and meet me below the embed.

“The archetypes of General Notion are more about moving together, delighting together,” he says. After last week, I had a brief period of overcorrecting against joy. Joy had not resounded. And worse, it had wounded. In a moment where the pain, economic and fentanylic, is so real for so many people, joy felt like the world’s most contagious case of can’t read the room. BUT. Reset. Rejoyn. We need delight more than ever.

I’d already been wrestling with what it means to delight in the commons. How do you create diverse points of entry? How do you engineer experiences that give everyone a place to feel comfortable? A bunch of twee artists in jodphurs will always be an opt-in experience, but the key is to create as many variations of delight as we can, space for people to conjure their own definitions of shared exerience, while always demonstrating that community is the mechanism by which we repair the things that are ailing — local economies, loneliness, education, climate.

This is truer than ever, and, alongside my wonderful colleague, Aimee, I’ve been diving into literature on the new structures we need for democratic renewal and flourishing.

This whole piece by Ned Resnikoff is worth a read, because it’s about redefining party as a mechanism. It pulls, as does this terrific Nation piece, from the work of political scientist Theda Skocpol, whose 2003 book, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, I am now reading. (Want to book club it with me?)

We need capital P parties and lowercase p parties, now more than ever. It’s just that they both have to be a whole heck of a lot better.

My pal, C, is a Canadian diplomat. She perfectly encapsulates why we come together. It’s like a haiku. If you’re not into the whole brevity thing:

Could not agree more.

THIS IS SO GOOD, ELIF BATUMAN.

The Elif Life

Love Letter

For a while now, I’ve been thinking over George Saunders’s short story, “Love Letter,” from the New Yorker issue of March 30, 2020. I have yet to reach any conclusions, but I do have lots of thoughts and feelings, so that’s what I’m going to share today…

Read more

a year ago · 24 likes · 3 comments · Elif Batuman

I love these gorgeous pantings of conviviality from TO artist Maxine McCrann.

My pal Rachel’s mum, Vera, was the Milton Glaser of Toronto in the 70s. LOVE THESE!

I was quoted in this John Leland piece that is so near and dear to my heart — outliers push the Overton Window. Research, overwhelmingly, is beginning to demonstrate this. Subject of the next MVP, but for now, meet Joshua Spodek.

Cool things

There’s been an explosion of great climate content on Blue Sky. Meet me there?

Public grids? YES. And what a gorge site.

The energy transition will be much cheaper than you think. The Economist.

Reader Matt has an awesome podcast with a name that I love: Future Mending. Check it out!

How cool is the idea of super circularity in renewables? Hannah Ritchie expands my frame.

Sustainability by numbers

Low-carbon tech needs much fewer materials than it used to; this matters for resource extraction in the future

The concept of a “circular economy” has always sounded nice and aspirational: running an economy on refurbished and recycled materials so that the amount of new materials you need to extract is close to zero…

Read more

a year ago · 48 likes · 17 comments · Hannah Ritchie

Cool coping things

This newsletter, How are you coping, from Chris Hatch at the National Observer, is a beautiful, and helpful, distillation about how people are dealing with the current sitch. In particular, I loved:

Some of you emailed with very practical practices. “You need to feel it to heal it,” one reader advised me. It’s such a great expression that I suspect I might be the only one not to have heard it before. It definitely echoes the advice from experts on grief and anxiety who warn against leaping exclusively towards positive thinking or collective action and bypassing our authentic experience.

A really terrific list of ideas from economist Hans Stegeman:

But with these complex issues, what can we, as a society, actually do? Some ideas:
1. 🌍 A Radical Push for Community-Led Infrastructure
Let’s rethink "infrastructure" to include more than just roads and bridges. Democracies are healthier when people are connected through shared spaces.
2. 🗳️ Empower Digital Civic Engagement (Beyond Voting)
Democracy isn't a one-time event — it's a continuous practice. We need tech-driven platforms that allow people to participate in government every day, not just during elections.
3. 🤝 Cross-Ideology Education Programs
Our societies are becoming polarized echo chambers. To combat this, we need programs that bridge ideological divides through cross-community education.
4. 🌱 Ecological Self-Reliance at the Community Level
True environmental sustainability is under constant political threat, but communities can build resilience by creating local, ecologically sustainable systems that don’t depend on federal policy shifts.
5. 🎥 Reframe Democracy in Media and Storytelling
We need stories that reshape how people view democracy and civic duty. Imagine TV series, films, and social media campaigns that portray heroes in everyday life who protect democratic values — teachers, community organizers, environmental advocates.
6. 🧠 Invest in Critical Thinking from an Early Age
A robust democracy relies on citizens who can critically assess information. It’s time to teach critical thinking, media literacy, and civic responsibility as core elements of school curricula.

Fights to win

Cycle TO versus Premier Ford. Help! Sign!

Take Toronto’s leaf blower survey, pls.

People dancing

I like to normalize aging and dancing, and often post myself trying to keep up with my 28 year-old dance classmates. But look at PENNY MARSHALL taking it up a notch!!!! Funny, and amazing, and she was 41 when she did this! Just incredible.

As always, let me know how you’re doing and how to make this newsletter better. Wishing you health and happiness, safety and sandwiches,
Sarah 💚

I’ve been thinking about memory, and doing so has precluded me from having the sharpest of climate thoughts. Fuzzy thoughts can be lovely too, but in the over-crowded clamour for people’s beautiful and fractured minds, I think of Seth Godin’s dictum to respect people’s attention. It makes me want to keep the fuzz to myself, and spare the 6K people who affirm this newsletter’s existence my haze. Plus there’s soooo much climate comms out there now — unlike the landscape in which I birthed this newsletter way back in 2019. Thank you for your notes! I’m here, you’re here. We’re breathing. I drew some pictures:

Years ago I bought the domain TheSolastalgist, thinking I would chronicle stories of solastalgia. I was taken with the phrase, coined by Dr. Glenn Albrecht, about homesickness for places changed by climate. But nostalgia is a byproduct of wistful memory, and lately I’ve been feeling a generational layer of family stories ebb away, making the solastalgia all the more intense: It’s less about melancholy visions of air and textures changed, and more about the harsh erasure of places once loved. Because what is a place but the people in it? (Superstorms aren’t helping.)

Snatching at memory is, in some ways, like conservation. The preservationist in me wants the trees to be unchanged and the memories, too. Coming home to Florida after a storm and seeing huge swaths of tree cover disappeared can feel like memories physically hacked away.

Sarah, stop being soooo drippy…the world is fraught, but also alight with possibility.

I feel like we’re in the most profound window of a moment, with five years left to right the climate ship, and impossible emissions reductions to make that so. And while we know it, fully knowing it would be debilitating. So we allow ourselves to half know it, or two-thirds know it, in order to function. Which is not dissimilar to my family’s response to the memories of the ones we love best. We know, and we can deal, but also, we cannot deal.

Lately I’ve noticed that I grab onto little snippets that speak to me, even more than usual. I’ve always been a filer of climate studies, reports, and art, but these days I’m a Joseph Cornell box of climate, a lazy wunderkammerist. 

I flip these collages over and over in my mind, as if doing so will etch them there, secure them tight in my brain forever. If I hear a brilliant climate koan while running, I will carry it ten clicks home, by mnemonic or song — I’ll sing some podcast pith to whatever tune comes to mind, in the hopes I’ll remember to record it. I could screengrab it or write it down, but it’s as if I’m testing myself to see what my mind will choose to hold. Climate…memory…climate…cookies.

I watch older folks too, and admire their ability to keep a koan. I went to hear the legendary community organizer Marshall Ganz speak on Friday and each sentence came loaded with gems: a lifetime of accrued wisdom that he can seamlessly stitch together in patterns most resplendent. 

The climate news has been too much of late, so I’ve taken extra care to preserve my energy. I lift heavy things (the actual weight of the world?) alongside my friends, I read Miranda July to feel my 40s rage and power, I take dance classes, I bake Ruffles Rice Krispie treats with my daughter, and watch football documentaries with my son. It is a luxury to be able to do this when I need to, and I acknowledge that privilege.

And I take comfort in the rising up of so much energy to do the work together, to nurture communities of love and support for what lies ahead, from a climate, democracy, or doing the laundry perspective. A few weeks ago my cousin was coming for Shabbat dinner. He’d offered to bring a challah, but when he popped by the bakery on his way home from work, they were sold out. My house is never short of bread products, and I’m not above blessing a pizza crust, so we weren’t put out. But a few minutes later, the doorbell rang. My neighbor was practicing her baking, and had made me a challah. It was still warm. She couldn’t have known her timing. 

I do not want to extrapolate this to a grand narrative that imagines something will help us pull it all out in the end. I don’t want to fetishize hope and positivity — this newsletter takes pains to be real, with a dose of chocolate chips. But I do want to focus on people. People are all we’ve got. Let’s bake for each other. And remember what it feels like to do so.

STUFF

Ripping out trees and bike lanes in Toronto is enough to make you scream. Which is what we did at DarkDancingTO. Cannot recommend this enough.

Now carbon is more important than later carbon. Lloyd Alter.

Rare Conversations. Here’s a recording and recap of a conversation I got to have with the amazing Kevin Green of Rare. If you were ever wondering, can you do ballet in a heat pump costume? Yes, yes you can.

We Don’t Have Time. Who gets to say whether we’re going slow or fast? In this case, with the EV transition. Got to be on a panel with the incredible David Fenton and Angela Hultberg at Climate Week.

Electrifying Research. In my day job at Rewiring America, we do so much cool climate comms research. This Thursday, we present our fourth Electrifying Research, including some work I helped shape (read more here!) with the fantastic Behavioural Insights Team, my colleague JahAsia’s incredible research, and the ACEEE’s Reuven Sussman. You should come!

Parties for people. Wrote this for our Rewiring Newsletter, The Current. Give people something fun and meaningful to do. Previous writing on turning protests into parties here, and here, in comic form from 2015!

People dancing

This is the most amazing party dancing in the history of time, no?

How are you doing? I hope you’re safe, healthy, and happy as possible. Always let me know how to make this newsletter better!
Thanks for reading,
Sarah

Hello lovely humans,
I wrote this list when I was 35 (when Medium was a thing!), and I think it still holds up, except #2 - the older I get, the younger I get. I’ve added ten more climate-y ones (because I think about climate more than cake pops now) to commemorate the wisdom I should have accrued this decade. Send me your lists?

45 things I know

1. I could be Tavi Gevinson’s mother.

2. Not having the energy to explore all the new emoji does not make me old. Being over fifteen makes me old.

3. I interviewed Nora Ephron a few years ago because I wanted her to expound on her “put a bikini on and don’t take it off until you’re 34” line. Respectful amendment: Put on whatever the F you want.

4. I hate prescriptive lists.

5. Especially those cloying ones written to younger selves.

7. Younger self, you really should have bought grandma the cigarettes when she asked you to.

8. You should not have spent all that time doing really unbearable community musical theatre.

9. I forgive you.

10. Segues are generally useless. Never use the phrase, “For his part.”

11. You can put almost anything in a smoothie except molasses and steel wool.

12. Acknowledge the weirdness of the phrase self care. Practice self care.

13. Do not stand in front of large speakers at loud clubs.

14. Automatic savings.

15. No bread after 4 p.m. and you will generally feel pretty good.

16.

17. Everyone already knows that moist is the grossest word.

18. French vanilla cappuccinos are never a good idea.

19. Learn how to take naps.

20. Always jump in the lake.

21. You really only need to read one book by Haruki Murakami to get the drift.

23. Don’t make fun of people for liking things.

24. Do make fun of cake pops.

25. Don’t judge people who are older than you, thinking you’ll be so much smarter/richer/fitter/more together when you’re their age.

26. Nobody is old. Just wizened. But only if it’s pronounced wizzened.

27. Wizz.

28. End.

29. No one ever wants to hear about your dream.

30. Ever ever ever.

31. Spell cheque.

32. No matter how much you floss, the dental hygienist will always give you that smug look that makes you feel like a lying bag of twerp.

33. The optimal number of people for a dinner party is six.

34. Regret is a useless emotion. Except you really should have ordered the club sandwich. And not done alllll that musical theatre.

35. Be kind.

    ---

36. What Saul says:

37. Agency is the antidote.

I’ve been thinking about this ‘action is the antidote to despair’ framing a lot since reading this post from my pal Britt. She’s a genius, and I think I disagree a bit. In general, I’m of the “do what works for you persuasion,” but also I think this is the framing I like best. You don’t have to use the antidote, it might not work for you, and it’s not meant to bypass the temporal space of processing climate grief, but it’s a thing to file in your cranium, if you even have such a luxury. There’s a neat framework here from Panu Pikhala.

38. Honour your past and let it permeate you. Memories and the people who carry them disappear faster than you think.

39. What will you do with your one wild and precious life is beautiful and hard. And it’s OK if sometimes what you’re doing with your one wild and precious life is watching garbage television with your kids.

40. Grieve, breathe, seize. (repeat).

41. We don’t need moonshots and miracles. We need efficiency, heat pumps, and community. Also, buy only watt you need.

    

42. Always compliment and uplift people for putting the scary stuff out there. Don’t leave anyone on a climate or hard topics cliff. And if you like their shoes, tell them.

43. Together, with music and parties and humour.

44. Just try to undumpsterfire the world a little bit every day.

45. Gratitude. For everything.
    

    ---

Stuff

• Come to Rewiring America’s quarterly Electrifying Research session? It’s climate comms goodness, with an electric twist. July 11th, on a Zoom near you.

• New Canadian climate comedy and they are sooo good. Hot Globe. This one’s my fave:

• The artist June Leaf died last week. I somehow hadn’t really known her. I love this fabulously crusty interview she did with T Style a few years ago.

• Love this from psychologist, artist, educator, aspiring Elder Sky Sage on page 35 of this beautiful report:

We can do this.
An excerpt from Community Engagement/Climate Action/ Personal/Collective Growth (Things we see as inseparable)

To reconnect humanity, we are going to need more than a few Ministers of Loneliness. This task belongs to us all. We don’t have to resign to a fate of white-knuckling through life, clinging to our own little rafts, drifting further apart due to perfect storms. Science has shown us why it may take a bit more effort to go beyond our comfort zones or nudge ourselves into the wild unknown. Now we need to practice admitting how much we rely on each other to show up in a respectful way.

Have a beautiful week! Always let me know how to make this newsletter better! Much love, Sarah

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One crisis is bad enough. Two is terrible. And a polycrisis just makes you want to apply ointment to the cut and go back to bed. Or does it? Does a clinical name for the overload of intersecting crises harming humanity right now help or hinder our ability to process, cope, act? One of the most vigorous champions of this polyrevival (the term was coined in the 70s) is Adam Tooze:

What the polycrisis concept says is, ‘Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment’. I think that's useful, giving the sense a name. It's therapeutic. ‘Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called’.

So, knowing we’re in a particularly heightened period of varied geopolitical awfulness might be helpful (it’s not you, it’s the entire effing planet!). Does giving this collection of supremely bad things a label ameliorate our fear and stress, as Tooze suggests? 

Behavioural science would say lumping is bad — break things into pieces, don’t conflate. Chris Hatch puts it well:

For over 30 years, I’ve returned again and again to the advice Valerie Langer once offered, half joking, back in the War in the Woods defending the old growth forests of Clayoquot Sound. She’s still protecting forests, now with the organization Canopy, and her advice holds up: When the destination is out of sight, set a plausible objective and when the public and governments catch up, it’s “time to move the goalposts.”

Of course. But perhaps putting things in boxes is a privilege, if the problems are indeed very interconnected. And if the people most affected by this crossweave of horror don’t have the luxury of a perfect word to describe the stew of factors causing their pain.

I think my worry about the term is more to do with the word itself, however well intended. While most people know from poly and crisis, together they make the problems somehow less human — people are dying, from Covid, wars, climate change. People are suffering from the cost of living crisis, and rising authoritarianism. So what’s a better phrase for heightened world chaos and horror, for wicked problems woven together like an art class potholder? I love sleuthing out the right words, and I don’t know.

I could be on Team Polycrisis (sponsored by Tim Hortons) if I felt the terminology made the solutions clearer and more actionable, but I’m not sure it does. Sez Tooze:

Renewable energy is an example of the sorts of solutions we eagerly need to grasp onto in a situation which is otherwise going to be hugely challenging to our collective capacity to organize. We should be, in a structural sense, spending vastly more money on enhancing our ability to produce those kinds of fixes.

One of the things that's been happening in Germany right now is a sustained conversation between the public health authorities who had to deal with the COVID crisis in 2020, 2021, and the Bundesnetzagentur, the agency which dispatches energy within the German system, as to how they engage in public information campaigns about energy saving. And so that seems to me the kind of cross-sectoral learning the current crisis moment really demands.

They're not the same kind of problem, obviously, but in both cases, you have technical public bodies which are not party-political, but are part of the government apparatus that are making decisions that affect people in their everyday lives. The level of your heating, whether you can send your kids to school and they are communicating with each other, expert to expert, about the problems of effectively communicating in a democracy about those kinds of risks. That’s the kind of cross-sectoral learning we need more of.

I love finding holistic solutions. Who doesn’t? They’re wholly better than holey ones. But this segues perfectly to another goldstar vocab word I don’t wholly love: Multisolving. From the Multisolving Institute website:

Multisolving is a growing movement around the world. When people work together across sectors to address multiple problems with one policy or investment, they are multisolving.

Multisolving, of late popularized by the incredible Elizabeth Sawin, comes from the work of the OG systems thinker Donella Meadows. Meadows wrote that system boundaries are “lines in the mind, not in the world.” In short, we have to blur the lines to leverage solutions that solve a lot of problems at once. An enthusiastic yes to feeding two birds with one scone. And yes of course to cascading co-benefits. The fortunate thing is that co-benefits abound in the polycrisis: Climate change solutions invariably solve a half-dozen other problems, when executed with equitability at the fore. But does the term multisolving add anything to the conversation?

Aren’t we always trying to multisolve? To fix the bad with good solutions that cover as much ground as possible? I’m on side with anything that helps people feel less bad so that they can do more good, and with anything that renders a complex system more accessible, navigable. But sometimes I worry a fussy label actually creates barriers: people already multisolve in so many places, because they have to. A fancy term that you have to look up just sorta makes you feel strange…Oh, that’s what it means? Yeah, of course, we’ve been doing that for centuries.

SO WHAT SHOULD WE SAY?

Poly means many. Intersectionality is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term for the overlapping characteristics that contribute to systemic discrimination and inequality, particularly race and gender. It immediately conveys the layers of view necessary to take on the complex (poly) crises we face, and has driven important movements like intersectional environmentalism. But Crenshaw is very clear that intersectionality is not just a way to lump complicated problems together.:

These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.

Intersectionality is the human lens for the impacts of crisis. But the crises themselves are perhaps less intersectional than interwoven. Not a bunch of disparate things, but a bunch of things that interact and exacerbate each other, creating explosive chemical compounds that have very different implications for different groups of people. How do we define all that in a phrase that people can use to situate themselves in this moment in time, and find strength, and take action should they have the capacity to do so? I’m not sure it’s possible. It feels impossible to wrap my brain around. I can be aware that a multitude of factors contribute to the problem I’m staring down, but the awareness needs no formal term: we know this, and the language we use to define it should be the most human and least clinical we can find.

Instead, I wonder if it’s a bit like Steve Sloman’s Knowledge Illusion, which is a perpetual fascination of mine. From the the British Psychological Society:

The knowledge illusion occurs because we live in a community of knowledge and we fail to distinguish the knowledge that is in our heads from the knowledge outside of it. We think the knowledge we have about how things work sits inside our skulls when in fact we're drawing a lot of it from the environment and from other people. This is as much a feature of cognition as it is a bug. The world and our community house most of our knowledge base. A lot of human understanding consists simply of awareness that the knowledge is out there. Sophisticated understanding usually consists of knowing where to find it. Only the truly erudite actually have the knowledge available in their own memories.

How much do we or can we actually know? And how much is shared knowledge that we just tap into it? If you knew my brain, you’d say a lot of the latter. I can be aware of all the strands of the polycrisis, but wrapping my brain around them in a way that is both helpful and meaningful seems unlikely at best. Holding complexity and nuance doesn’t seem to be humanity’s strong suit these days. There’s too much to hold in the best of times, and, to the point of this whole newsletter, we’re not in the best of times.

As usual, Bill McKibben puts it smart: We’re in a period of INTENSITY. He’s talking about the life-destroying heat in India and Gaza, but he is also talking about everything: “Right now, everything’s turned to 11.” 

Sarah, you’ve gone on for many paragraphs. What’s the climate comms takeaway? Use polycrisis and multisolving if they’re helpful for you or your particular audience. But they probably won’t be for the vast majority of humans. So maybe just crank some Spinal Tap and zero in on the work you can do, using the simplest and easiest and funnest language possible. 

In some ways the framing of everything’s multipolypotholder connected is a helpful license to monotask. Know the complexity, whether defined by words or not, and use it to drive the single thing you can train your attention upon.

I love this:

This planet

How do you think about our interwoven problem set? What language is helpful? Let me know!

Stuff

• Rachel Donald from Planet Critical with a must read: The World is Absurd.

• Climate at the Ballot Box, A GreenPac event, June 11th. Register for online or in person here.

• GREAT Conversation piece on climate social scientists pushing back against doom. A must read!

• Yes, take away their social license. (What was left of it!) Antonio Gutierrez is amazing. So is Clean Creatives.

• Speaking of creatives, read my pal Natalie’s excellent write ups of Indigenous Creative Agencies you should totally hire, like this one on Jennifer Taback.

• Try it before you electrify it. Love to see it.

People dancing

My reggaeton crew performed last week and I’m still tired. But it was the most joyous of shows, and peak Toronto energy! My teacher Carolin is a force worth following. City Dance is very much the Toronto I love — a warm, welcoming, diverse place where you can come with any level of skill and commitment and find a style and teacher that works for you. Never clicked with a bunch of ladies so quickly! Highly recommend if you’re in TO. (They did not pay me to write this). It’s been a rough year, and this crew is getting me through.

Wishing you peace and comfort and safety and health and soft-serve ice cream,

Sarah

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I’m just going to start with these revelatory paragraphs from my lovely friend, the most incredible climate thinker, writer, and doer Kim Nicholas, from this beautiful post about grieving her mother:

It is surprising to me how little I feel bothered by my inability to do more right now. A huge and important part of my life and my identity has been poured into caring about the world. My passion for abstract ideals like Nature and Fairness, and my desire to protect people and places I love, has fueled me to fight climate change. This passion has felt like not just a job or a career but a calling. It propelled me between Madison, Stanford, Sonoma, Davis, and Sweden. It inspired me to study the changes to the Earth that climate change was causing, and to become more and more involved in speaking and writing about these in a way I hoped would motivate others to care, and to help do the work necessary to protect what they loved. But right now, it is too hard.

Part of me wonders if this inward focus is how it’s always been for “everyone” else. That the tiny details of my own life feels so much more important and real to me than anything of global and lifetime-spanning significance, but doesn’t feel like it’s happening right this very minute, to me [reader, I’m talking about climate change]. It feels selfish and fabulous.

I’ve reflected on my privilege. Until now, I’ve had the bandwidth to focus so much on taking care of the wider world because my family and I were already so well taken care of. We never had to worry about basic needs like food and water and shelter (except when my family was evacuated during the wildfires and worried their homes would burn down). I’ve largely enjoyed very good health, though that’s something I’m not taking for granted right now. I’ve had far more than my fair share of luxuries.

This resonates with me so much — what happens when you’ve never had to cede your activism, but the circumstances of your life suddenly demand it? I’ve felt this to a much more modest degree over the past six months, as I’ve grappled with some issues that have never spotted my otherwise very privileged life (I’m fiiiiine!). I know that to have my basics covered, to have good family and friends, great dance teachers, and new bakeries on my corner is a luxurious pediment on which to build a life, and it’s this pedestal that affords me the time, strength, and power to focus my energies on things like stopping fast fashion, pushing carbon border adjustments, and encouraging heat pumps, successively, if not always successfully.

But what happens when that firmament fractures a bit? How do you find the reserves to regroup, replenish, recalibrate? I’ve been thinking much about all the re-words lately. It’s an occupational hazard when your day job is at a place called Rewiring. But we’re all also, all of us, the product of billions of dollars of petro-propaganda in the form of reduce, reuse, recycle. I’ll die with these words etched in my grey matter. Which, like grey water, is recyclable? Maybe.

I love that our newest national climate comms org here in Canada is called Re.Climate. Because we’re constantly reclimating the premise: personally, politically, peripatetically. But how do we reclimate in the largest of ways when life demands it? How do we reclimate when some of our good fortune abates like our carbon budget, which is to say, suddenly, and with not enough renewable energy to be ready for it?

I’m not fully sure, but there’s a continuum from the personal reset to the global reframe. For me, these past few months have been a there’s-a-crack–in-everything-that’s-how-the-light-gets-in period of reflection. I love Kim’s acknowledgement of her own reset, and her collective call to others to pick up what she’s putting down (temporarily). She writes: This month, it isn’t my month to push for climate action. Maybe you have the bandwidth right now to pick up the baton? If you do, maybe it’s time to flex more of your top 5 Climate Superpowers, or build community and find your climate peeps. If you don’t, please take care of yourself and each other. Let’s see where the river is taking us.

It’s incredible to see how so many now shoulder the work of climate together (see this post I wrote on the diffusion of responsibility of X and the March for our Lives for adjacent thoughtery!)…and equally incredible to see this transparency of need and generosity of baton tossing. Especially if we use a baguette instead of a baton. Which…we should?

But what does it mean to lean on others in all the ways? Last week, my friend Mio and his daughter Sachi slept over at my house while my husband and I were away. He tended to my children and ordered the best takeout. I love community, but I have never liked leaning on people. I like to be the leanee. I want to be the one cookiedropping my neighbours late at night. But resetting has forced me to step back and receive. So I can climate, and breathe, and dance once in a while. And it has felt good. And weird. And good again.

Though my own microclimate has consumed me, the macroclimate of global strife and suffering has seeped (sept?) in, and I’m readjusting my priors, or at least getting acclimated to my stronger prescription. I’ve been going deep on ideas of rebirth lately, and I wish I could call up my high school social studies teacher, Mr. Ierace, to tell him as much. I doodled my way through Fanon and Foner, but have come round to the former anew, after reading too many reviews of Adam Schatz’ new book on him not to just order The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon already. Writes Schatz: He placed his faith in humanity’s capacity for rebirth and innovation and in the possibility of new departures in history: what [Hannah] Arendt called “natality.”

Fanon is talking about colonialism but his words could be about everything: “No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want is to move forward all the time, night and day, in the company of man, all men.”

It’s an unspeakable generosity when you consider the barbarism of colonialism and slavery. But it’s also what we must do with everything — hold hands with an oil rig and move, together, to a better place.

It also reminds me of the Jewish idea of tekumah, or rebirth. Wrote Liat Atzili in the New York Times a few months ago:

While preserving the memory of the horrors and losses the Shoah wrought remains important both for young Israelis and for children around the world, the concept of tekumah is also a central component of Holocaust education. Tekumah provides us with the vital life lesson of how to move on with dignity and purpose after experiencing a tragedy, and it is perhaps the most important gift that the survivors gave us.

In situations small to the opposite of small, it’s rebirth that makes us human, and lets us rise above minor indignity and major horror.

I’ve always been resistant to the concept of rebirths, of hard stops and resets. Why an arbitrary day when you will start doing that jazzercise class? Start now. Nevermind that we’re always molting, regenerating, iterating, palimpsesting, evolving in a way that is both unfixed and variable. And yet it’s silly to think these two things can’t coexist — and to not acknowledge that life sometimes injects an uninvited hard reset. It’s in the marrying of these two things that you can sometimes see the range of it all a little more clearly, too — this is who I am (a small, moving creature) in the world (a large, moving place). 

Rethinking and revising and reworking is what gets us to new places, and absolves us of regret. I don’t regret time spent on shopping diets or mason jar activism because they were formative steps. And I love reworking, coming back to a piece or painting a few weeks later to instantly see how to make it better. Why would I not take the same view of myself and my climate work? I would. I have. I am.

I hope you are giving yourself grace and space so you can lead or not lead with love and light and truffle chips.

This planet

How do you re.climate? Let me know.

Last planet

Take it seriously, hold it lightly + Capitalism!!!

Take is seriously: Thank you, C, for your lovely note about 10% happier. I love when recos land with people! Send me yours, too.

Capitalism: Writes P (thank you), citing Hickel and degrowth in his response to my capitalism isn’t great, but it’s the only system we’ve got post? 

I doubt we can get there from here any more than we can really imagine being completely decarbonized before we're further into it. I expect we need to make some more of the required climate changes and people need to see that they make things better - then with the momentum, we can propose more radical things. It's started with what we've got - some version of capitalism or post-capitalism - but the system will need to change as we decarbonize.

I'm not saying it will happen, but it could. There is so much pain and discontent; conditions are right for change.

And thanks for the photo, P!

Stuff

• Congrats to the Canadian Youth Climate Action Award Winners! (h/t Tom!!!)

• I love when people post their climate certifications from TCTM. It’s a thing to be proud of! Microcred for mega movement magic!

• Fun to chat sustainability and electrification on Maredi design’s The Green Route podcast.

• Rebecca Gao is such a great reporter. It was a delight to talk about how to not climate shame people (or feel that shame yourself) with her, for Chatelaine.

• The incredible Lisa Robertson shot a 25-minute heat pump party documentary at my house for TVO. Lots of b-roll of my kids eating snacks. (And some good heat pump facts).

• Excited to join Jolene of EllisDon and James of Indigenous Clean Energy at the Net Zero forum. Will you be there? Let me know!

• Item #2,319 in My Colleagues Are the Best: They commit to the bit, and I’m grateful for it every day.

• Bill McKibben in The New Yorker: right on the money on the Home Builders Associations terrible climate rollbackery. And point for use of the word caterwauling.

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People dancing

Tierra Whack is my fave and she has a new album that I somehow missed, and her art is incredible.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Please let me know how to make this newsletter better. And send me your thoughts and dreams. If you like MVP, please feel free to like it, share it, dance it. Have a beautiful week! 💚

Love this phrase from Dr. Lisa Genova, as well as the great podcast from whence it came.

Whatever you’re up to, hope you’re well. Let me know! Back to regularly scheduled posting soon.

Stuff

• Sign up for the next round of Talk Climate to Me.

• Are you a medical practitioner interested in bringing climate into your work? I’m hosting a webinar with the incredible Dr. Gaurab Basu this Thursday. More here.

• So much of the world we’ve not discovered!

• Come work with me!

• “Wellbeing is about capacity.” Enjoyed this interview!

• Reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity and enjoying it…slowly: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Do fewer things, work at a natural place, obsess over quality.

People succulenting

As always, let me know how to make this newsletter better!

Have a beautiful week!
Sarah