I’m more optimistic about climate than I am about journalism

This newsletter is back in business, but it's rough out there, friends

I spent seven years running a local news site. Some of you probably remember it. 

If I have any trust from my community as a fair, truth-telling sort of person, the Watershed Post is probably why. We covered the hell out of the Irene floods in 2011, which people still remember us fondly for. But the boring work we did over the years in the rural Catskills was just as important: covering local government meetings, spreading the word about new local businesses, paying attention to the myriad local scandals and characters and dustups and the good work that people were doing in the community. 

That kind of journalism is drying up so fast. In 2005, the US had almost 9,000 newspapers. Most of them are little weeklies. We are on track to have lost a third of them by the end of 2024, a year sooner than researchers studying the death of local news predicted not long ago. 

I shut down the Watershed Post in 2017. I felt like I couldn’t compete with Facebook for local ad dollars anymore, and it was exhausting trying to wear every hat in a struggling digital newsroom while living on about $30,000 a year that the business was bringing in after paying its own bills. We were lucky to be in the black. My hometown weekly paper, the Catskill Mountain News, shuttered in January of 2020 with a pile of debt. Our region has taken a heavy hit from the loss of local news, but it’s not unique. This kind of thing is happening all over.

Climate Problems Are Speeding Up — But So Are Solutions

Climate change is also accelerating faster than the academics who study it once thought it would. But so, too, are the efforts that will — yes, I said it, will — shift the energy foundations of our messy world away from burning, and toward cleaner ways of making things and making them go. Solar power is now cheaper to produce at scale than electricity from gas. Heat pumps have become wildly efficient, and much better at handling truly frigid temperatures, unlocking new possibilities for electric home heat that is both cheaper to run and far less polluting than fossil-fuel-burning. New federal policy, thanks to last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, is poised to give the growing clean energy industry a massive boost over the next decade, and includes a slew of new credits and rebates for ordinary households to get in on the zero-carbon transition. 

“Why does it even matter what we do? What about China?” people often ask me— sometimes, I suspect, because they find me annoying for talking about climate at all, and they wish to shut me up. What about China, indeed: China’s sky-high emissions are on track to start falling in 2024, because of the nation’s aggressive investments in clean energy.

I often hear people say that it doesn’t matter what “we” do, at various different sizes and shapes of “us.” But it does matter, because the future of climate change isn’t an iceberg to swerve and avoid. It’s a dial of increasing disaster and instability that is already turned up to earth-shaking levels. Every ton of greenhouse gas we don’t produce helps keep it from going up to eleven. And as soon as we stop making more greenhouse gases, leading climate scientists believe, the warming will stop also.

In most industries, and in our homes and our daily lives, we finally have the tools and the technology to stop spewing out constant climate pollution. They don’t need to be invented. To paraphrase the great sci-fi author William Gibson: They just need to be more evenly distributed. 

The task is enormous, and the obstacles standing in its path are larger than even the combined power of fossil fuel companies — which, perhaps understandably, would like to keep running the kind of businesses they know how to make money at. The up-front costs of adopting technology and practices that allow you to stop producing carbon and methane emissions are as off-putting to ordinary households as they are to farms and steelmakers and shipping companies. Building and financing new energy projects is hard; so is making them work harmoniously with local communities. And there are challenges more pernicious than money at every level: To cite a local example, the Onteora Central School District, my alma mater, recently turned down an $8.3 million EPA grant to buy a fleet of electric schoolbuses. One of the various intense logistical reasons the school board took a pass on the grant was that local volunteer fire companies are not yet ready to respond to an electric schoolbus battery fire. (As a local volunteer myself: can confirm, we need a lot of training and resources on this front.) 

Being more deeply engaged with the world of climate over the past few years has been a wild ride of ups and downs. Sometimes, as I once told an editor when a story had me gray with exhaustion, looking hard at climate problems feels like pressing your face straight into a hot frying pan. Your mind, your whole body, wants to pull back from the pain of it, to do anything except look at the truth. But while the darker possible futures and the accelerating disasters of the present are hard to accept, sometimes the optimism is profound as well. I promise you that in the multifaceted effort to stop cooking the planet and adapt to the consequences of the excess heat we have already baked in, there are many triumphs unfolding, both technological and political — and for many people, conventional wisdom has not yet gotten the memo.

If local news were more robust, we’d have a lot more nuanced and locally-focused reporting on climate. And I think people in general would have a better understanding of what’s at stake in their own communities with the risk of 1.5 or 2 or 3 degrees Celsius of warming, and what the most important solutions and challenges are. But that’s not the world we live in.

Climate solutions are gaining momentum, driving new industries, and attracting talented and passionate people. Meanwhile, the opposite is happening in local news: As the business model collapses, the industry is losing its deep bench of talent and institutional memory, and many of the papers that are still left standing are being hollowed out from the inside. It’s demoralizing. 

The death of local news in the rural Catskills is a problem I once tried to fix with everything I had in me — and I’m satisfied that I can’t fix it. I’ve spent enough time trying to wear every hat in a newsroom to know that it’s not a healthy way to operate, either for me or for the newsroom. It’s absolute hubris to think that any one person can, or should, do the work of a thriving local newspaper. With the Watershed Post, I almost drove myself into the ground trying, and I know I pushed Julia Reischel, my ex-wife and former business partner, too hard also. I don’t expect other tiny local publishers and editors who are still in the business are having a much better time of things.

That’s not very comforting to hear, but it’s where I’m at. 

It’s Dangerous Out There: Read Carefully

So what does any of that have to do with climate change, or with this newsletter? 

Well, there’s this: I want to caution you against listening too much to any one voice on a big topic like climate – mine or anybody else’s. I urge you all to read around, and to pay attention to your local news, state policy news at places like NY Focus and the Albany Times Union, and dedicated national or international climate news desks like the ones at Canary Media and Heatmap (a couple of newer faves) and Bloomberg (yes, that Bloomberg). Journalism is a volatile landscape at the top, just like it is at the bottom. CNBC just shut down its climate news desk. 

The information environment we are in right now is not a healthy one, especially in rural communities like mine that aren’t well served by local news or cultivated by news outlets as audiences. People like me, writing for little (or sometimes not-so-little) self-selecting audiences, on platforms like Substack or Medium or Patreon, are incentivized to be entertainers and pundits. We mostly don’t have editors or colleagues or any sort of robust professional support systems, beyond what we can cobble together for ourselves. Having the power to steer your own ship can be very freeing, for a writer; it has been for me, and it has enabled me to go deeper on climate topics than any local news outlet has bandwidth for. But the migration of reporters out of increasingly struggling newsrooms and onto platforms like Substack worries me, even though I’m part of it.

The infrastructure we do have as solo practitioners is falling apart. Twitter, for a very long time, was a sort of spit-and-duct-tape newsroom for me, where I could connect with fellow local reporters and state policy people and subject-matter experts, and that is no more now. Many of the people I was there to talk to have left. Moderation under current platform owner Elon Musk is a nightmare. Like a lot of disenchanted former Twitter/X users, I’ve basically decided that the value of being there is outweighed by the risk that unchecked violent footage, misinformation, and abusive user behavior on the platform will do me psychic damage. I miss what Twitter used to be, but that’s gone now, and it’s a lot tougher to stay up on a complex beat like climate without it. 

Substack itself has become a more upsetting place to be. In recent months, this platform has gone from coyly allowing to outright bragging about a little coterie of high-profile right-wing activist writers, like Richard Hanania and Chris Rufo, who are busy putting a faux-intellectual gloss on outright racist, fascist, and anti-LGBT ideology. It does seem that this particular flavor of grift is very profitable, and Substack would surely like to cash in on it. I have thought about moving to Ghost, or some other newsletter platform that isn’t playing footsie with these guys. But there are reasons to stay too: A good chunk of the respectable climate newsletter world is still here, it would be a heavy logistical lift to move, and frankly, I don’t trust any platform to continue to exist long-term. I’m thinking it over.

I’m glad to be writing again, and I’m going to keep doing my best to be fair and accountable and to say true things here. But I’d like to be clear: A bunch of solo writers without editors, building little audiences that like their writing style or their politics or what have you, begging for readers’ attention and support amid a cacophony of noise, isn’t a great recipe for making journalism. We all deserve a better world of information than the one we live in. 

On a brighter note: There’s a lot going on, and I’m gearing up to dig into it again with this newsletter. The months ahead will be action-packed in New York State climate policy world as budget season heats up. There are a lot of big fights looming over how the state should continue to put its landmark climate law into action, and how we should manage the state’s aging natural gas infrastructure as transition really gets going. There’s a lot happening upstate with power generation, the electrical grid, and energy infrastructure buildout. Just like in community news: there’s scandals and characters and dustups and good work being done in the community. We’ll get into it. 

A Note For Supporting Subscribers

This newsletter has been on hiatus for a long while, much longer than I meant to be away. I’m sorry to you all for that. Like Inigo Montoya, let me explain: no, there is too much. Let me sum up…

Turns out Twitter was pretty load-bearing for me, and losing it as a useful tool didn’t help. But the bigger issues have been a little closer to home. I had an unexplained blood clot in a major artery this summer, which earned me a thrilling and precipitous introduction to the vascular surgery department at Mt. Sinai Hospital downstate. I take it I am a lucky bastard to have kept my arm. An ongoing problem, though an improving one, is that my brain hasn’t been quite the same since my second round of Covid earlier this year. My memory isn’t great. I can churn out clever little phrases, but I wear out faster. I can’t quite hold a whole complicated story at once, I can’t picture the structure and rotate it around in my head like a 3D model to see all of its faces — and that’s how I used to do this work, so things are a little wonky around here lately. I feel like I’m re-learning how to write, and how to read long or difficult material. 

Long story short: It’s been too long and I know it. To everyone who has supported Empire of Dirt up til now, if you would like a refund on account of the publishing hiatus, or to be made a lifetime subscriber moving forward for having supported this quixotic little project already, just say the word and you’ll have it, with my gratitude. 

To local folks: I’m bartending at the Print House in Fleischmanns these days. Come on over and say hello. We’ve got a disco ball and about 4,000 vinyl records — and we’ve even got heat pumps. I’ll do my best not to be a massive nerd if you ask me about them.