What is This?

It’s unfiltered communication, from me to you, about the deepest problem that humans have ever encountered.

This is me

The climate crisis has been my beat for decades. I wrote the first book about the topic for a general audience, way back in 1989. Since then I’ve covered it for every major publication in the English speaking world, and I’ve helped build the movement to fight it. I founded 350.org, the first big grassroots climate campaign, and helped spearhead the campaigns against the Keystone Pipeline and for fossil fuel divestment. Here’s my bio. So I think I’m well-positioned to figure out, on any given day, what’s important and what’s not; where we have to push hard; where the the leverage lies. I know many of the players, and love to highlight good work. I get pissed off fairly easily. This newsletter will reflect all of that. So, subscribe.

Most of what I’ll write will be free, and for everyone—this is a crisis, and information needs sharing. But there will also be a paid subsection, which costs sixty bucks a year, or $6 a month. I hope you’ll pay, because it lets me both keep writing, and keep up my volunteer work as an organizer—now at Third Act, the new movement I founded last year for progressive organizing among people over 60.

If you subscribe, you’ll also get something somewhat different. Every Friday for the better part of a year I’ll send you a new installment of The Other Cheek—it’s a sequel to my oddly popular novel Radio Free Vermont, and as far as I know the first action saga that focuses on nonviolence. I hope it will be fun to read a book a bit at a time, sort of in the way that Dickens novels first appeared in serial. (Apologies in advance for not actually being Dickens—but I do hope that a small weekly chunk of fiction might actually work pretty well in our era of shorter attention spans.) Those Friday posts will also include a few random notes on where we are in the movement, new science, and so forth—and as a paid subscriber you’ll get the chance to respond, and to suggest new directions.