Welcome to Weekly Climate! So happy you’re here! 🤗
This newsletter provides a weekly digest of the most important reads about the climate crisis. It is for those who want to understand the climate crisis better and get an overview of what is happening in an as close to real-time as possible.
Why?
There are a ton of good climate newsletters, news-sites and podcasts and in general awesome content about the climate crisis out there (there’s also a lot of shit). There’s the big media sites like Carbon Brief, Greentech Media and Bloomberg Green. There’s the more niche focussed newsletters like Emily Atkins HEATED, Bill McKibbens via New Yorker, Jason Jacob’s My Climate Journey. And there’s podcasts: Drilled, Energy Gang, The Interchange, Decouple, Heated (again), Hot Take, My Climate Journey (again) and many more. I’m diving through most of these every week to try and stay on top about the most important news and trends within climate science, technology, startups, policy, major carbon emitters, climate justice, energy poverty and so on. And that’s when I thought it would be really cool if I could just get a newsletter that aggregated the most important climate stories from across all these topics each monday for instance, so I could make sure that I didn’t miss anything.
I searched and found nothing that satisfied this.
So since I’m reading and listening to all this stuff anyway I decided to make my own: The Weekly Climate.
What?
The newsletter has evolved since I started writing it in August 2020 but is currently centered around 7 grand challenges of the climate crisis:
Decarbonize electricity: Arguably one of the most key challenges that we must solve in order to solve the climate crisis.
Reduce impact of urban and rural: With a clean electricity grid we must reduce the impact of all human settled areas whether urban or rural. Broadly speaking this can happen via we either stop doing something (degrow) or replace the technology with which we do something with a cleaner one (decouple).
Clean non-electrifiable activities: A large part of the answers to the challenge before is to electrify everything. However, some activities we do today can’t be electrified such as international shipping and cement production.
Protect and grow nature: Nature is our friend and ally and we must protect it. Mother Nature helps us by removing carbon from the air and we must increase it’s ability to do so.
Optimize food: In terms of impact, the food industry is second only to supplying electricity. Hence we must look at how we can optimize our food production.
Climate Justice & Developing World: All climate solutions must be just and must apply to the developing world as well.
Drawdown: Finally, we must remove excess carbon from the atmosphere until we get to 350ppm, how can we do that?
In addition, I want to make the consumption of this newsletter as frictionless as possible, so I will also record each newsletter as a podcast in order for people to “read” it on the go and then perhaps dive deeper when they get to somewhere where they can read stuff. The audio recording will be available in each newsletter as well.
I recently started doing Deep Dives where based on the news from the previous week I’m going to dive deep into a particular topic. The way I do this is by doing an interview with an expert in that field via Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse (currently (June’21) evaluating which platform to use)
In my eternal quest for making the newsletter easy to digest I launched a Weekly Climate instagram account which to begin with will post the Weekly Climate Numbers. But I have some ideas for expanding it.
Finally, I will make a public database where each article I post in the newsletter is tagged and categorized, such that it will always be easy to go back in time and find stories about particular companies, countries, technologies and so on.
On the longer term I want to expand this to cover local news as well, such that people can follow news in specific countries as well. But this is too big a job for now, but if you’re interested in helping with this for your country let me know on michael@weeklyclimate.com.
The newsletter is published every monday morning (Central European Time), first issue August 17 2020. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss the first issue!
In the meantime, tell your friends! And let me know what you think about this! All feedback are welcome!
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So who is this Michael person anyway?
Hi 👋
My name is Michael and I’m an engineer and entrepreneur from Copenhagen, Denmark. I started my career in academia where I worked on my PhD with NASAs Jet Propulsion Lab and the Technical University of Denmark on self-repairing hardware. That project ultimately became my first startup. Which failed. But during the time running that I also helped organize and launch a couple of startup community groups here in Copenhagen: Startup Grind, Silicon Vikings, #cphftw and more. I quickly learned that networking and communities are powerful. During this time I also ran a small incubator at the Technical University. In 2016 I co-founded Corti.ai together with three friends. At Corti I was the CTO and helped build the first version of our product, AI software that can help 911 dispatchers figure out what’s wrong with the caller, together with our amazing team. In 2018 I became a dad and ultimately determined that the only problem I could spend the rest of my life on had to be the climate crisis, and hence this newsletter, plus more announcements to come.
When I’m not working on the climate crisis I love spending time in nature with my DSLR (Instagram @reibelography), collect Detroit 90s gararage rock on vinyl (Instagram @reibelsrecords), play guitar or piano (“jamming“ with my 1.5 year old son is just pure awesomeness), and producing (and consuming, let’s be honest) gin and whisky at my distillery, Gefjun.