A year of writing on climate: How I started, what I learnt and why I keep at it
My 5 lessons from 1 year of writing a climate newsletter
I launched the 'Sunny Climate, Stormy Climate' as a Substack newsletter just over a year ago in April 2023, driven by two key motivations. Motivation #1 was that as the impacts of climate change around me were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, I had been reading more and more on the topic, and felt a compelling need to do something with the growing mountain of information I had collected. And I hoped, as past experiences had taught me, that writing would bring clarity and help me make sense of the thousand different threads in my head. Motivation #2 was that no one around me seemed to be talking or reading about climate change. I soon realised, thanks to the age of personalised information, my feeds (on Google news, Twitter, Instagram) looked very different from most people around me, or from my own feed a year ago when I wasn’t so furiously interested in climate change. No one was seeing ‘climate news’ in their feeds and mainstream media didn’t seem to cover much of it either. And so, I thought publishing a summary of climate news in the form of a news digest could be a good way to take climate news to at least a few more people.
And so I started ‘Sunny climate, Stormy climate’ with the aim of making climate change a part of every day conversations. I began by publishing a weekly news digest ‘Sunny climate, stormy climate’ where I would talk about 5 stories - 3 stormy stories that spoke about the devastating impacts of climate change and were a cause for alarm and 2 sunny ones that spoke about solutions that could help us address the challenge and were a glimmer of hope. Even as I was starting out, I think my intuitive sense was that I must present a balanced point of view - talk about the problem, but also talk about the solutions. Over the year, I have continued writing the 5 story news digest, with some changes in the frequency, dialling it down from weekly to fortnightly and now monthly. I have also experimented with a few other formats - explainers, opinion pieces and quizzes! It’s been a very fun ride. I have thoroughly enjoyed going down rabbit holes as I researched for the pieces, writing them and rewriting them, and spending hours finding the right meme to go with the article. But most of all, I have cherished the conversations they have sparked.
As I reflect back on the year (and a few months) of writing, I wanted to share my reflections with my subscribers, who have been with me through this journey and kept me going and with anyone else writing on climate, cause I hope that tribe keeps growing.
So here goes!
Talking about climate is difficult, but like all difficult conversations, we need to start talking about it and the sooner we do, the better.
As I started writing, it struck me very soon that getting people to read about climate is not easy, because obviously no one likes to hear that the world as they know it is going to be devastated and no one likes to be told that they will have to make changes to their comfortable way of life which look like insane sacrifices at the moment. Imagine someone telling you, you need to reduce flying or you need to use cars less or stop eating meat! It’s like telling a chain smoker who smokes 6 packs of cigarettes a day that they are at high risk of lung cancer if they keep going this way. Wouldn’t they rather listen to the friend who says “Not everybody who smokes gets cancer right? This is just scaremongering!”
Go beyond the doom and gloom. As I started talking to people about climate change, I realised very quickly that the focus needs to be on empowering people v/s just showing them how disastrous the impacts of climate change can be. Telling people that climate change will cause glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise submerging tropical islands or that extreme heat will make cities unliveable doesn’t work as quite often, it simply scares people making them feel helpless It prompts the question ‘Can we even do anything to prevent this?’ resulting in them freezing, or worse disengaging from climate news altogether.
We do need to talk about what the impacts of climate change can be, however, we need to follow that up with information that makes them feel they can do something to change the course. We need to arm people with solutions and actions they can potentially take, as individuals, citizens, consumers and people in positions of power to address this challenge and reverse the catastrophic path we are on.
Ditch the jargon. Words like ‘adaptation’, ‘mitigation’, ‘carbon credits’, and even ‘net zero’ are like greek and latin to most people outside the climate bubble.
People outside the climate bubble when they read climate reports If we want to make the conversation on climate mainstream, we have to talk in language people understand. Most issues and solutions in this space are nuanced and I realised it’s not easy to explain it without dumbing it down. But I believe being able to do that is crucial - to explain the science in a way that will make sense to a five year old, but maintain the essence.
Find a hook. Be contextual and engaging. At the end of the day, talking to people about climate change is another piece of content in this age of content overload, where it is competing with dog reels and cat videos. I know you can’t win against them, I love them too, but you gotta try right?
The point I am trying to make is I started thinking about how can I get people to care about what I have to say about climate and that changed how I wrote. I realised I needed a hook. I found that bringing in memes or gifs, that introduce an element of relatability and make people pause for a minute has been extremely helpful. Humour also helps to break the tension that otherwise accompanies the topic. The format that has worked the best so far is quizzes. It introduces an element of gamification, most people love getting a score and end up learning something in the process. Any other ideas on what could get more people to engage on the topic?
When it comes to talking about individual action, I believe, it’s not a 0-1. Often, I read a piece or hear someone talk in a way which seems to suggest that we need to a 1000 things right if we want to support climate action - switch to a plant based diet AND buy an electric car AND stop flying AND have a Zero waste lifestyle AND so much more. This is overwhelming. And ineffective. It's not that one is either a 100% climate activist or not at all. This is the kind of battle where we’ll be better off if 100% people got it 20% right v/s if 5% of the people got it a 100% right. I believe the narrative should be to start with small steps and start wherever each one can. Acknowledge we need to change and celebrate the first step in stead of guilt tripping people for what they can’t do.
Honestly, I didn’t even expect to keep writing a year on. But here I am, 15 months later - with 50 posts, 491 subscribers and 20k+ views. So what keeps me going?
Motivation #2 (taking this conversation to more people) has been strengthened every step of the way. As I got more entrenched in the world of climate, I realised that my nagging feeling was true - there were 2 different bubbles. The climate bubble - people who ate, slept and drank climate change and environment. They saw it everywhere. The non climate bubble didn't see it even when it was staring them in the face. The mainstream media indeed did not talk about it and when it did, I have often found it inadequate in explaining the science well enough, being comprehensive about the underlying factors and bringing out regarding social equity and justice. So with every issue I write, I am even more motivated to play my part in taking this conversation about climate to more people.
A big thank you to each of my 491 subscribers. Your likes, comments and questions are the best encouragement! I would love to hear from you on what you think of my journey so far or any suggestions on how I can make this better.
I am on a mission to make climate change a part of every day conversations, one post at a time. If you want to help me, please share this with a friend, family member of colleague who may like it too!
PS: My writing has so far been limited to individuals as an audience (and not policy advocacy for the government and corporations) and hence my learnings are limited to the that sphere. I do believe that the greater role in combating this challenge will have to be played by government and corporations, but I haven’t touched upon that here and will try and write about it in another post.
Congratulations on the 50th issue/1+ year of the newsletter, Sailee! Thank you for doing this! Here's to many more issues and continuing to spread climate awareness. :)
Good read! Completely agree with most pointers here.
Getting people to understand and start acting on climate change is such a tough challenge. People around me already tend to be tired with their day jobs and work routine which ends up in them not having bandwidth for thoughts/discussions around a sad, tough to ingest, odds stacked up against you type of topic.
Feel like personalisation is actually key to changing their behaviours and thoughts. Connecting the effects of a cause, climate change, to the things they most deeply care about becomes probably the easiest way to make them care. In that sense, I feel we can potentially use the hyper-personalised niche that they have on their feeds. Talking about the effects of climate change on whatever rabbit hole they have dug themselves in their social media feeds might be our way out.