In previous years, Meg and I urged climate tech marketers not to obsess over USPs and differentiation in their marketing. Most climate tech verticals were so new to buyers that differentiation didn’t matter too much. What mattered instead was boosting the category as a whole, building trust in the market, and educating buyers so they were coming to sales conversations better prepared.

This was also all in the spirit of the voluntary climate action that was taking the corporate world by storm, with a sense of “we’re all in this together.” Climate tech companies referred to their competitors as frenemies. It was all very civilised and earnest.

After interviewing thirteen climate tech marketers for our upcoming report, that feeling has changed. Climate tech marketers are still a special breed. They’re collaborative, responsible, optimistic. But there is now widespread acknowledgement that the market has changed, and marketers must change with it.

By ‘changed’, we mean that the market for climate tech products has matured. It has matured because the buyer has matured.

Although not every company is taking a sophisticated approach to climate action or ESG tech procurement, things are different from what they were even a few years ago. New sustainability grads have now had multiple years to get better and more strategic at their jobs. And more people are coming into the buying decision, from risk, procurement, finance, and beyond, adding a new layer of business-oriented sophistication to buying questions and journeys.

All this has pushed climate tech marketers to approach their messaging and content in new and more nuanced ways.

They have also realised that there are simply too many of them (offering variations on the same theme) for all to survive. I can’t help but think of Professor Trelawney’s prophecy about Harry Potter and Voldemort: Neither could live while the other survived. Sorry, bit dramatic. What we have now is a buyer’s market, and those buyers are more cautious and selective than ever.

Consolidation was the buzzword for the climate tech sector last year. We saw acquisitions, bankruptcies, and 404s where homepages used to exist.

Against this backdrop, climate tech marketers started to think more than ever about differentiation. Indeed, we have never heard climate tech marketers talk about it with the same intensity they did this year.

Although we cautioned against it in previous years, differentiation feels like the right focus for climate tech companies heading into 2026.

What makes the marketer’s job difficult is the pressure to create differentiation through messaging when it does not meaningfully exist at the product level. This is the crux of that matter. In a textbook world, the marketer’s job shouldn’t be all that difficult. If every product were truly unique, marketers would simply need to put words and pictures to this story. Instead, what many climate tech marketers are now finding themselves faced with is the challenge of articulating a uniqueness that does not actually exist. They are attempting to use words to differentiate, rather than features. It’s really hard.

Unfortunately, it’s only going to get harder, for two reasons.

The first is AI. Climate tech companies have been told that they will disappear if they do not immediately and loudly adopt AI within their products. So now we have every company seeking to become an “AI” solution, as if this itself was enough to differentiate. It is not.

There is also the secondary effect of marketers using AI for their messaging and content. When all companies have access to the same tools, it’s no wonder everything starts to sound like the same, like the mushy slop dished up in orphanages.

Even if AI didn’t exist (give me that world, just for a minute), climate tech marketers would still have a big differentiation problem on their hands, because every single marketer we spoke to, and every person we speak to in the course of our jobs, has told us that they are pursuing some variation on the same core value statement in 2026.

The consensus is that, in place of voluntary/ambitious climate action language, and in the wake of regulatory pullbacks and a toxic political climate, the new message for climate tech goes something like: it’s good for business. You’ll see immediate ROI, get better efficiency, protect against and adapt to physical risk, and fortify your supply chains.

It’s a good thing that we can now talk credibly about the business benefits of sustainability. This is a healthy shift for the industry as a whole, even if we still mourn the loss of the voluntary climate action days.

But climate tech marketers probably won’t have as easy a time with this as they imagine, because, as they’ll soon see — everyone else is doing it too. Updating your messaging to the business case will not offer the competitive advantage many marketers might assume it will. It must be done, but it’s a survival tactic. Everyone else is doing the same.

Marketers will have to get more creative about what truly differentiates them in years to come, presuming the company goal is to live long and prosper rather than be swallowed up by a bigger competitor. And of course, to be effective, this differentiation must be grounded in what buyers say or demonstrate that they are looking for. Yes, Steve Jobs gave us the personal computer before most people knew they wanted it, but this is a different market and a different era.

We are in a cautious buyer’s market. Give them what they want.

What we’re curious about this week

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how everything is television, so in the spirit of what I think is a genuine social tragedy, here are a few good videos I’ve watched recently:

→ This video about a British man’s last cabbage harvest of the season. Truly one of the best algorithmic recommendations I’ve had in years.

→ This video about the end of literacy. (For what it’s worth, I think a lot of this is hyperbolic, but it’s an interesting conversation nonetheless. What really stunned me was Ed West’s idea of a ‘hierarchy of attention’ — specifically that literacy and the ability to concentrate for long periods of time may become a trait unique to the upper classes.)

→ The Mark Carney Davos speech, if you haven’t watched it yet (start at 3:50). Clear and eloquent, and his subject (Trump) will surely not understand a word of it. Good to see Carney say what should have been said a long time ago, even if he can somehow claim that cutting capital gains tax is part of Canada’s fight against the big orange bully.

→ This video about how the physical world got so ugly (enshittified, if you will). I don’t think it really answered the question, but it was interesting and beautifully shot.

→ This AMAZING video, in a similar vein, about how modern manufacturing quality is plummeting, while prices are rising. Sorry this is all so bleak, but honestly, it’s so interesting.

→ This conversation between Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and Eugene Khoza, because it’s very random, very funny, and surprisingly deep. (Technically I listened to this as a podcast, but had to keep the video theme going.)

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need a new message for a new era of sustainability? → See our brand messaging services

⭐️ Want to come out swinging with an original data report or whitepaper this quarter? → Hit reply to ask about our Signature Offer

🔔 Want to be notified when our 2026 Climate Tech Marketing Report comes out? Follow Meg or Amelia on LinkedIn (hit the bell to be notified)

Venezuela’s most precious resource is now in the hands of a man who has six bankruptcies to his name, Greenland is on the brink of invasion, and Australia is about to go up in flames.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the key challenges climate tech marketers will face in 2026, and I’ve boiled it down to two things: slop and chaos.

On slop

AI slop was the the ‘word of the year’ for a number of dictionaries last year, to absolutely no one’s surprise. As AI content takes over the platforms where we conduct much of our online lives, it’s getting harder to tell what’s real, yes, but it’s also just getting harder to find anything interesting — anything that feels worth stopping to pay attention to.

I feel this anytime I’m online these days; the feeds are boring, the hot takes are eyeroll-worthy, even trying to pick a Netflix show is borderline impossible (and that’s even before AI infiltrates TV). This phenomenon of an endless buffet of uninspiring mush may be the defining digital trend of 2026 — that and video.

And maybe it’s just the algorithm at work, but the sheer volume of content I’m seeing around unplugging, getting offline, going analogue — something is definitely in the waters.

On chaos

In the real world, 2026 is shaping up to be even more chaotic than 2025. I was going to summarise what’s going on and what we might expect in the year ahead, but it makes me tired just thinking about it, and you already know anyway. Notably, though, most of us will experience this chaos through our online platforms — just another reason for them to tune out, put a record on and pick up a book.

With our online platforms saturated with low-quality content, and our physical world more uncertain and stress-inducing than ever before, what’s a sustainability communicator to do? How can we show up on these platforms without contributing to the entropy? How can we stand out without adding the noise?

The work we do as sustainability communicators and climate tech marketers is more challenging and also more important than ever. In 2026, how can we do it well?

1 — Hold on to your sanity.

The first step on the agenda is to hold tightly to your own sanity. This is a task that feels increasingly difficult. Here’s Margaret Atwood on sanity.

A key element of sanity is the ability to see the bigger picture, to offer an alternative perspective on the conventional narrative. Differentiate yourself (as in, yourself, not your company) by focusing on better inputs — books, podcasts, real-world conversations — and not just digesting and regurgitating the same high-fructose-corn-syrup information as everyone else.

Timothy Snyder talks about ‘unpredictability’ as being one of the key forms of freedom, but he worries that algorithmic media is taking away our unpredictability, rewiring our tastes and preferences, pulling our emotional strings, turning us into predictably compliant automatons. Here’s his advice on retaining your unpredictability — advice I happen to quite like 😉

Unfortunately, in 2026, the sanest among us are the most alarmed. The most well-informed have the most to fear. If some element of sanity has to do with maintaining robust mental health, well — maybe part of the solution is tuning out altogether for a while. Maybe just, I don’t know, pick up a paintbrush or something. I’ve heard it’s good for you.

2 — Acknowledge the humans.

My partner is a software engineer who spends much of his time reviewing other people’s code. Sometimes I hear him groaning from his office. “Ugggghhh,” he’ll say. “It’s just AI all day.” The code being sent to him for review is mostly AI-generated these days, which wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but AI code, just like AI writing, has a special shitty quality to it. “There’s just so much of it,” he says. Yes, it’s technically correct, and it’ll make the thing work, but it makes the reviewer’s life hell, because what might be a hundred lines of code in the hands of a human inevitably becomes five hundred when made by a robot. The AI saves the coders time, and creates a wonderfully shitty experience for the reviewer.

This is exactly what’s going on with a lot of B2B content right now. Marketers are thrilled that they can generate reams of professional-sounding stuff at the touch of a button. They’re publishing more than ever, yet much of it is so bland to read, so unnecessarily long, and so devoid of words that actually mean anything, that no one is reading it all. (If anything, they’re feeding it into AI for a summary).

This state of affairs makes me want to tear my hair out. It is enshittification at every level and in every way; indeed, it may be the very end state of enshittification, although perhaps that’s optimistic.

The opposite of slop is originality, which, these days, is another way of saying humanity. What is humanity in the world of B2B content? I believe it starts with creation. Don’t sit at your desk and try to write something in a vacuum. The way that usually ends is summarising boring articles on the first page of Google, or just realising how hard writing is and asking ChatGPT for help. Don’t make content that way, it’s no fun. Go an talk to someone. Interview an expert. Reach out to another organization and partner up. Talk to a customer. Talk to your founder. Honestly, talk to anyone, but start the content creation process at the human level, not the Google Doc or chatbot level.

Even something as simple as a LinkedIn post can be made more human. Share photos of the office, take a quick video of your CEO talking about the year ahead, share a lighthearted GIF or meme. It might not be much, but it’s one way to make the digital world a little less cultivated and a little more real.

Involving humans in the creation of content is a first step; acknowledging the humans on the receiving end of the content is the next one. To acknowledge the human at the other end means to be judicious about what you allow to remain in the final draft. It also doesn’t mean going to the other extreme and pasting bland, effectively meaningless AI summaries. It means thinking about what you’d like to read. Would this interest you? Would you remember it after you walked away?

✨ Bring the vibes ✨

Meg and I truly believe there is room — in both the B2B world and the climate conversation — for lightheartedness. In fact, maybe it’s our job in 2026 to bring the good vibes. Yes, in an increasingly chaotic world, we need to be careful of not coming across as tone-deaf, but there are ways to bring levity and even humour into the conversation, and people crave it now more than ever. A dollop of optimism (the grounded kind, not the overhyped marketing kind) can go a long way in these times.

Even if your message is serious (risk management, disaster preparedness, rising emissions, you name it), there are ways to inject levity, to emphasise the upside. Even simply shifting the focus from problems to solutions, or from risks to practical action steps, can help.

3 — Don’t obsess over analytics.

For starters, there’s no telling whether they’re even real. At this point, how much do you trust the tech bros? But even if the numbers are real, online marketing metrics are a slippery slope. What the algorithm rewards is not necessarily the right thing for your brand, or more importantly, your audience. The more you succumb to the analytics trap, the more you will find yourself a) hating your job (more than likely using a machine to create meaningless content to fuel an algorithm), and b) allowing the almighty algorithm to dictate your brand voice, message, and relationship with your audience. We can’t avoid the platforms, but we can still choose how we show up on them.

It seems the theme of this newsletter comes down to humans over everything else. Platforms and formats and news cycles will come and go, but humans (for now, at least) are the one constant.

If you keep anything in mind when you’re doing your job this year, keep humans in mind (and I’m not talking about customer avatars — I’m talking about, for want of a better word, souls).

Yes, there is slop, and chaos, and a whole lot of worry out there.

But there are humans out there too.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
I read so many great books over the break, so it was hard to pick just one to share here. I’d been seeing this book around on shelves all year and finally decided to give it a go, and let me tell you, I was enthralled. Wynn-Williams seems to be an unusually impressive writer and narrator, and the situations she finds herself in as Director of Public Policy at Facebook from 2011 to 2017 are storytelling gold. The up-close, behind-closed-doors interactions with Facebook heavyweights Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan are fascinating and hilarious; I laughed out loud, gasped, and visibly cringed at multiple points.

📱App: Oblique Strategies SE
Okay, wildcard, I know, I’ve never recommended an app before. I don’t plan to recommend many apps, actually, because I’m pretty anti-phone these days, but this particular app has been on my phone for years, ever since my early days working at a creative agency in Melbourne. It’s a weird one to describe, but basically, when you’re working on something and you need inspiration or a new way of thinking about something, you open it up, shake it, and it will give you a very (very) random prompt to get your brain thinking. It’s weird, but more often than not, it works.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need a new message for a new era of sustainability? → See our brand messaging services

⭐️ Want to come out swinging with an original data report or whitepaper this quarter? → Hit reply to ask about our Signature Offer

🔔 Want to be notified when our 2026 Climate Tech Marketing Report comes out? Follow Meg or Amelia on LinkedIn (hit the bell to be notified)

Meg and I have now officially been full-time at The Climate Hub for one year (we did launch earlier than that in mid-2024, but January was our official full-time start).

It’s been a wild ride. On the work front, we worked with a full roster of incredible clients, each of them pioneering important climate solutions and doing their best to make the world a little better. It was a tough year for the industry, but the companies we worked (and still work) with are giving it all they’ve got — and we love to see it.

On the personal front, it’s been an even wilder ride, so we wanted to share an honest behind-the-scenes look at what was happening outside of working on client projects and writing this newsletter.

So, here’s what our lives looked like behind the scenes of our first official year in business as The Climate Hub.

1. Meg bought her dream house!

It’s a gorgeous green house in Lakewood, Ohio — perfect for an environmentalist.

2. Alas, the dream house was infested with fleas.

It unfortunately didn’t take long for Meg to find out that her dream house was infested with fleas. Having grown up with a worse-than-typical fear of bugs, well, she didn’t cope well. The first few months of first-time home ownership were filled with multiple exterminator visits, a nauseating amount of money spent, and countless hours spent vacuuming, doing laundry, and wearing unaesthetic white knee socks.

Never was there a better metaphor for the American Dream. Anyway, by Thanksgiving, they were finally flea-free and ready to host! 🎃🥧🍷

3. Amelia left Canada for good!

Amelia and her partner shipped 7 boxes and an Italian Greyhound from Canada to Australia. The boxes, which mostly contained books, were easy. The dog — it was awful.

She flew from Toronto to Dubai on a cargo plane (just her, the pilot, and a plane full of boxes), where she spent the night in a special dog hotel. Then she was put back on a plane from Dubai to Melbourne, where she spent 10 days in a government quarantine facility with an injured nose from the journey. They Uber-Eatsed some doggy treats to her in quarantine, and finally she was released and flew from Melbourne to Brisbane, where she was picked up by Amelia’s parents. What a relief!

4. Meg’s daughter began ‘nature preschool’.

Meg and her husband were nervous about dropping off their little one — she’d never been to daycare and was used to being around Mom and Dad most days. There are plenty of kids who can’t bear to leave their parents on the first day of school, but as it turns out, Charlie took off the moment she arrived. Meg and her husband had to coax her back from the school entrance in order to say goodbye. Looks like an independent streak runs in the family!

5. Amelia travelled through South America, Europe, and North Africa.

With the boxes and the dog heading to Australia, Amelia and her partner spent the first four months of the year working from some very interesting locations. There were some real bucket-list experiences on this list: a 30th birthday in a hot air balloon, camel-riding in Morocco, a sunny day atop Machu Picchu, waterfall boat rides in Argentina, and more.

6. Amelia fled Turkey, fearing arrest.

Yes, there were some incredible bucket-list experiences on Amelia’s travels. And then there was Istanbul. We happened to arrive in Istanbul just a day or two before the President (an autocrat) illegally arrested his only viable political opposition, the Mayor of Istanbul. Wild protests broke out throughout the city, our power was frequently cut, and we were blocked from YouTube and social media because the government had throttled it in an attempt to quash the protests.

We thought this was the full extent of our worries, until we found out that Erdoğan was arresting anyone who had posted negatively about him on social media. (This is standard practice for Erdoğan, but it ramped up massively during the crackdown.) A number of foreign journalists were detained, and Amelia, who had idiotically criticised Erdogan the autocrat in this very newsletter, panicked.

We escaped to the countryside temporarily, but then cut our stay in Turkëye short and fled to Lisbon. Touching down in Lisbon was a huge relief!

7. Meg attended New York Climate Week — and found a spot of good luck.

Meg loves her liminal spaces and wildflowers, but she’s an NYC girl at heart. When NYCW rolled around, she was thrilled to get back to her favourite city, meeting up with clients and other people we know in the climate world, attending sessions, and renewing a spark for her personal writing practice. She had such a great time that she barely remembered to pull out her phone and take pictures. She did, however, manage to find a good luck spot.

8. Amelia’s dog broke local records.

One afternoon, Amelia’s dog, who may be one of the most expensive domestic pets on account of her international import to Australia, decided to increase her net worth by eating almost an entire block of butter.

For those who don’t know, as Amelia did not, this is considered a medical emergency. That quantity of pure fat in the digestive tract of an Italian Greyhound could basically kill the pancreas and, thus, the dog.

So we spent the evening in the cold, grey waiting room of the emergency vet. I won’t share the photo of what they were able to remove from her stomach, but suffice to say, no creature should ever — ever — eat that much butter.

In fact, perhaps no creature ever has. “We’re not entirely sure what to give her,” the vet said, “because we’ve never had a dog eat this much butter, and there’s nothing in the literature. Usually they stop at one or two licks — we’ve never seen a dog do this.”

Congratulations, Amelia’s dog. You were the first.

9. Meg’s daughter went to her first music festival.

Meg and her husband took Charlie to her very first music festival — start ‘em young is their motto. She had a blast with the other kids and even tasted her very first s’more — quite an initiation for such a tiny little human.

10. Amelia completed her first semester of a Master’s in Environmental Management.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, but suffice to say the university experience is not what it used to be. Amelia enjoyed complementing her professional experience with classroom knowledge, but the gap between university and the real world is a big one. Also, group projects and 6-week response times appear to be a favourite tactic of Australian professors, much to Amelia’s dismay.

Alright folks, that’s it from Meg and Amelia for the year.

We’ll be back in your inboxes soon enough in 2026, but for now, enjoy the holidays — and take a deep breath.

See you next year 😊

Volunteer comes from the Latin word voluntas, meaning ‘will’ in the sense of ‘free will’ or ‘choice’. In the technical sense, then, it is accurate for corporate sustainability measures taken outside of legal requirements.

However, in the popular imagination, volunteering evokes images of well-meaning people ladling out minestrone in disposable bowls, or handing out blankets on cold winter nights, or shampooing abandoned dogs at the animal shelter. People who go out of their way to make a difference to people or creatures they don’t know and aren’t responsible for.

But when a company takes ‘voluntary’ sustainability action, this is hardly the equivalent of it spending its Saturdays at a soup kitchen. Rather, it is simply taking the bare minimum effort to compensate for destructive business models.

Perhaps an analogy will help.

When will companies start picking up after themselves?

A company that sets a ‘voluntary’ target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a bit like a dog owner that claims to be ‘voluntarily’ picking up only a fraction of the 💩 its dog leaves on the sidewalk. Actually, this is hardly equivalent: here in Queensland, Australia, a dog owner can be fined $333 for failing to pick up after their dog. We can be fined $83 for simply not carrying poo bags with us. All this for a substance that might cause a person some frustration if they step in it, but actually is quite good for the soil when you think about it.

How much do Australian companies pay for spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Something that does not in fact enrich the atmosphere (as poop might to do soil), and is far more destructive to the entire planet than a little bit of poo on shoe (although that is disgusting).

Queensland’s hyper-obsessive dog laws might be ruining that analogy a little, because technically, dog owners do have to pick up after their dogs, while companies, for the most part, do not have to clean up their carbon.

Yet at the same time, you don’t see dog owners loudly proclaiming in the streets about how committed they are to picking up 20% of their dog’s poo, taking photos of themselves plopping it in council bins, and being featured in magazines for their good work. Dog owners (not all) accept the responsibility that comes with caring for an animal that sometimes leaves unpleasantness in its wake. If only the same could be said of corporations.

When will companies take care of the people in their charge?

Let’s try another analogy — let’s look at human rights. When a company with known human rights abuses in its supply chain commits to “fully auditing its value chain,” it is hardly going above and beyond. Rather, a company that vaguely commits to sussing out the things it knew about all along is like a parent that finally relents to taking their child to the doctor for a broken arm a week after the injury.

Regardless of what the law says, we expect parents to take full and immediate responsibility for their children. Having children, in most developed countries, is a voluntary exercise — much like starting a business. And yet once again the analogy falters here, because child abuse and neglect is a criminal offence (as it should be, don’t misread me); and yet abuse or neglect of other people’s children, so long as they are simply picking cocoa beans or sifting for cobalt in the 79th tier of your supply chain, is something a company can claim credit for fixing rather than eternal shame for allowing. Neglectful parents go to prison; neglectful companies are bailed out and rebranded.

A society that mandates individual responsibility and excuses corporate irresponsibility

My analogies have failed here in part because we exist in a world that punishes individuals and praises entities. We tax personal income and let companies operate from offshore accounts, we fine drivers for not wearing seatbelts (too dangerous) and subsidise fossil fuel companies. We let companies destroy ecosystems and atmospheres, dehumanise workers, abuse children — and then celebrate them in business magazines when they commit to the absolute bare minimum of compensation for their wrongdoing.

We celebrate the arrival of LED lightbulbs in factories where carcinogenic products are unapologetically made; the electrification of fleet vehicles driven by Amazon workers who must pee in bottles to hit their quotas and have their eye movements tracked by cameras; the planting of trees by a company outsourcing the screening of vile video content to despairing African workers.

There should be no real glory in voluntary sustainability action; only a deep sorrow for the way things have been done to date, an apology, and a heads-down approach to cleaning up the mess. Going into business is the real voluntary action — doing it responsibly should be implied.

New terminology for a new era of sustainability

Do we need a new word to replace the notion of ‘voluntary’ action? Perhaps duty? Responsibility? Answerability? Something that evokes the idea of being less bad, rather than all-good.

I do not wish to discourage companies from talking about the sustainability action they are taking, but we need a tone shift. There needs to be less self-congratulation and more serious and humble reckoning of just how bad we let things get before we started to pay attention and clean up after ourselves. Patagonia’s recent sustainability report might be the perfect example to follow.

I think sustainability teams get this. They understand that even ‘net zero’ or other laudable targets are hardly net positive outcomes for the world; simply less bad ones than have been acceptable previously. It is the business leaders and marketing teams that could most do with an understanding of just how ‘too late’ and ‘too little’ their voluntary action really is.

I’d love to see less hype and more hustle in the world of corporate sustainability.

There is still so much to be done.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: On Freedom, by Timothy Snyder

I picked up this book expecting a history lesson, but it gave me so much more than that. Snyder’s central premise is that our current notion of ‘freedom’ in most of the Western world (which has largely been claimed by the political Right) is one of ‘negative freedom’, or ‘freedom from’ — specifically, freedom from a powerful, interfering government. Many other non-right-wing movements in history have defined freedom in a negative sense, but our modern definition of freedom has been largely defined by the rise of neoliberalism (”the government is the problem”), the unquestioning quest for free markets, and the mostly false idea that unregulated capitalism is the best path to prosperity for all.

Instead Snyder advocates for and eloquently defines ‘positive freedom’ — one that begins with birth and lasts a long and fulfilling lifetime. Achieving positive freedom for a nation or the world requires not no government, but an able one: a government, society, and economy that supports the raising of babies, the education of children, the enabling of adults to live a life of their own choosing — not one predetermined by circumstances or the delusions of ideological leaders.

‘Freedom from’ is an ill-considered individual concept, the idea that each of us would be perfectly fine if other people (and people in charge) would just leave us alone. Yet no human being can achieve a good life alone. Without the love and support of other people, they wouldn’t make it past their first day on earth. In Snyder’s own (paraphrased) words on a CBC Ideas podcast, “If a book about freedom doesn’t mention childbirth, you don’t have to read it.” (As he notes, this rules out most of them.)

The history of negative freedom is long and dark. In the US alone, its origins are telling. “If your only obstacle in life is the government,” says Snyder, “then what does that say about you?” Those who fear government interference are those with something — slaves, property, profits — to lose. Meanwhile, those who need government support most (at the time, people of colour, women, children) were themselves desperately unfree, doing the active work required to make the people at the top ‘free’.

Positive freedom entails not removing but building. Building infrastructure, medical systems, welfare programs and other necessary safety nets that allow people to stop worrying about the basics of survival and instead live long and fulfilling lives. In some ways this ‘build’ philosophy has echoed other great books I’ve read this year around supply-side progressivism, including Abundance and Breakneck. But this book is more than political; it is deeply personal, chronicles fascinating moments in Snyder’s own, journeyed life, and reads in a meandering and philosophical way that demands full attention and slow reading.

This is not the kind of book you leave to AI summaries (most books are not, but this one especially). It is tender and compelling in all the ways that the current conversation around government efficiency and shutdowns and premiums and policy are not. This is a book that puts humanity back into the conversation around government, economics, and society.

This may be the best book I’ve read all year.

Ways we can help 🫶

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📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

This is not a book to run through some AI book summary program to get the highlights. It is worth reading in full, and then re-reading, and then, another year or so later, reading again.

But while I encourage you to read the whole book, I will spoil some of it for you now by diving into my most powerful takeaway of the book, which is Zinsser’s four Articles of Faith for good writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Let’s take a look at how each of these apply to good climate writing.

1 — Clarity

“A clear sentence is no accident,” says Zinsser, and yet, I have to believe that, in the corporate world, an unclear sentence is also typically no accident. Maybe it is — maybe some marketers like the aspirational sound of certain claims and don’t dwell enough on what they actually mean.

But many companies obscure deliberately, particularly in their climate communications. They force their audience to project their own ideas into the gaps between the meaningless words. To a favourably predisposed audience, this may be a winning strategy. “Committed to carbon neutrality” or “eco-friendly” might sound good to a ten-year-old (actually, they’ll probably question you on it — what does that mean?). But in 2025, with most of us skeptical of anything and everything, obfuscation almost always backfires. Reading between the lines will lead to negative, not positive, conclusions. Far better to simply tell the truth.

2 — Simplicity

“Clutter is the disease of American writing,” says Zinsser. “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.” Imagine if Zinsser read something written by ChatGPT.

If corporations tend to fear clarity, but it is often individual writers and professionals who fear simplicity. They don’t want to sound dumb, so they make sentences longer than they need to be and add vague buzzwords that they know will allow their work to ‘pass’ in a corporate setting.

Simplicity is a tricky line to walk in climate communications. Some climate messaging is too complex, that’s for sure: some experts take the IPCC report approach, drowning people in confusing scientific jargon and assuming too much existing knowledge from their audience. But most of the time, and particularly in the corporate and marketing realms, oversimplification is what misleads consumers and leads to greenwashing allegations (and lawsuits). This style of communication takes advantage of its audience’s lack of knowledge, hoping to dazzle by making ideas seem accessible when they are really just misrepresented.

The classic “we planted X trees” and “made from recycled materials” claims are so simple that even a child could seemingly grasp the idea. But planted trees means little on its own: What kind of trees? Where? How are they maintained? What are they intended to compensate for? Same goes for claims about recycled materials, but I feel tired just thinking about the complexity.

Suffice it to say that claims like “planting trees” and “recycled” follow the principles of good writing in that they use visible, tangible nouns and verbs (the alternatives might be “offsets” and “non-virgin,” for example). They might be perfectly appropriate as headlines. But without additional explanation and context, these types of claims almost always take advantage of the simplicity principle to mislead.

3 — Brevity

Interesting that brevity is the third article of faith and not the first. If you listened to most Internet writing wisdom, you’d think that shorter is always better and the only thing wrong with your writing is its length. In a publishing environment defined by character limits, maybe this is true. But Zinsser put brevity third for a reason. Clarity is the only true objective of writing: to accurately communicate an idea. Everything else is in service of clarity, including length. The right length is whatever delivers the clearest message.

Climate communicators who believe “shorter is better” run the risk of prioritising brevity over clarity. By way of example, last year, Meg and I analyzed the sustainability reports of the 100 largest companies in the world and noticed something interesting. Many companies broke from their years-long trend of publishing 100+ page sustainability reports and instead released simple fact sheets, often only a dozen pages long, mostly filled by sparse data tables and very little surrounding narrative.

At first we wondered if this was a win. Moving to quantifiable progress reporting surely means fewer avenues for greenwashing. But we soon realised that many of the data reported were almost meaningless without appropriate context and narrative. What looked like progress was really just cowardice. Companies were so worried about being accused of greenwashing that they mistook length and format for dishonesty. This is a false assumption. Sometimes telling the truth can take a little longer, because the truth, as we know, is rarely simple and never pure.

4 — Humanity

If I were redesigning the articles of faith (and I would never!), I’d probably put humanity second. Especially in the age of AI and meaningless online content designed simply to boost page rankings. The only reason writing matters is if it is made by, and consumed by, humans. Nothing else is worth doing.

“Writing is an intimate transaction between two people,” says Zinsser, “and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.” We can blame marketing for making soulless corporations seem too human, like feel-good ads from fossil fuel companies or inspirational life vignettes from a company that makes billions selling brown sugar water. The cliched branding advice is to anthropomorphize your company — to give your brand an identity so that buyers feel loyal to it. I think this is a bastardisation of the kind of ‘humanity’ Zinsser is talking about.

A truly human ‘brand’ or communications effort would lead with honesty on climate: putting their actions in context, admitting what they don’t yet know. It would not hide behind a logo or corporate legal team; instead, it would show the real people working on these issues, explain the challenges they face, and share every detail it could in the hope that others will learn too.

“A generation ago our leaders told us where they stood and what they believed,” says Zinsser. “Today they perform strenuous verbal feats to escape that fate.” Americans, Zinsser believes, are no longer willing to go out on a limb.

Certainly this is true of today’s corporations and business leaders, who will happily release a bland statement about the importance of diversity, or climate action, or whatever the issue du jour is, while doing precisely nothing about it and pulling out of commitments when the going gets tough

Most corporate climate commitments are simply watered down versions of what a handful of pioneers are doing. Most companies hide the fact that they don’t have all the answers yet, that they haven’t figured out exactly how this climate journey is going to play out. And most will sidestep the obvious questions when progress gets derailed, or, as we’ve seen in the last 18 months, simply drop their commitments altogether. (Another reason why ‘commitment’ is a weasel word.)

In the non-corporate world, humanity has to be the #1 most important element in all communications about climate change and climate solutions. Most of us care about humans — ourselves especially — far more than we care about forests or polar bears or coral reefs. Climate change has uniquely human consequences and solutions, and the environmental movement’s frequent failure to acknowledge that has cost it significantly.

Conclusion

I keep coming back to Zinsser’s four articles of faith because I think they are all a writer needs: I would add nothing and remove nothing. The four articles are the essence of good writing, speaking, communicating. And they matter more than ever in the age of AI.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: Enshittification, by Cory Doctorow

I heard Doctorow on a podcast recently and knew I had to read his book, which explains so much of why our online and offline worlds seem to be feeling shittier and shittier. Doctorow is a highly engaging writer and also possibly the best audiobook narrator I have ever listened to.

📺 TV Show: The Diplomat (Netflix)

Wow, a new format! Instead of a podcast, here’s me telling you to go and binge-watch The Diplomat if you haven’t yet. I think it’s my favourite Netflix show, maybe ever? (Though that wouldn’t be hard.) Keri Russell is phenomenal, and if you’re a Sorkin fan, like me, a few West Wing favourites show their faces…

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

I love them so much that I used to use them everywhere. Back then, it was a kind of laziness, wanting things to sound deeper than they were, not having the tools to reach true depth of thought and instead relying on punctuation to deliver a cheaper kind of gravity. Now, thanks mostly to Sam Altman, my relationship with the em dash is far more complicated.

Let’s unpack this weighty little punctuation mark for a minute.

The em dash is a handy device. It’s designed to offset, to dramatise, to make sure people pay attention. To that end, it must be used sparingly. Use something too often, no matter how effective, and it loses all effect.

Someone tell that to ChatGPT.

I thought I loved the em dash, but no one loves the em dash like ChatGPT.

By the beginning of 2023, this sacred punctuation mark was everywhere. The em dash became a ‘surefire sign’ that something was written by ChatGPT. Of course this was nonsense. It was a way for non-writers, who had never before heard of an em dash, to claim they could tell something was written by AI. They’d discovered the secret! (I saw one person on LinkedIn claiming they’d never seen one before ChatGPT. Tell me you’ve never read a book in your life…) Meanwhile, those who had previously read a book in their life could tell something was generated by AI, dashes or no dashes, because it was completely and utterly lifeless.

Ultimately, I’m not interested in whether or not an em dash is a ‘giveaway’ for AI. I’m more interested in how ChatGPT’s overuse of em dashes is a ‘giveaway’ for the kind of content that existed before it did — the content it was trained on — and what this tells us about the world we live in.

ChatGPT doesn’t so much use them as abuse them. It feels as though every sentence is being hammed up for dramatic effect, a bit like the single-line LinkedIn ‘broetry’ or YouTube thumbnails that constantly try to outdo each other with how wide their mouths can open in shock.

That’s what all of these things do, though. They dramatise style to mask the complete lack of substance contained within. If something is legitimately shocking, you don’t need to say that it is. If it’s deeply insightful, it doesn’t need to be packaged in em dashes. It will register regardless.

Here is The Economist Style Guide (a publication used to writing about serious issues) on em dashes:

“This attention-grabbing device should be saved for when there is something truly worthy of attention.”

Tell me: is anything ChatGPT can write truly worthy of attention?

But you don’t need another writer on Substack whining about the enshittification (em-shittification?) of the written word catalysed by ChatGPT. Are there bigger things to worry about than em dashes? Of course. But can something as small as the em dash teach us about those bigger things? Also yes.

If reading an article by ChatGPT feels like a constant dramatisation of something that is really not all that dramatic or insightful, then modern climate comms feel much the same. Like being hit over the head continually by doom and gloom, by shame, by anger, by despair.

Every statistic is “breathtaking,” every figure is “whopping,” every next stage is a “collapse” or an “emergency” or the “end of life as we know it.”

Look, there are real emergencies going on — climate and non-climate. But if everything is a disaster, then nothing really is. And if we can read headlines full of urgency but still wake up the next day and buy groceries or watch Netflix… at what point does the rhetoric become background noise?

We are, after all, only human. We only have space for so much anxiety, so much compassion. Try to make us care about everything and we will tune out entirely.

My advice: keep it level-headed. Put things in context. If you do need to get dramatic, pair drama with actionable avenues so people don’t feel so paralysed. Your campaigns will be more effective, and your readers won’t be pushed one step closer to the mental and emotional brink.

Bonus feature

If you’re a marketer in the clean energy space, this one’s for you! This week, we’re profiling our friends over at Amp Your Story, a community built specifically for marketers in the clean energy space.

Amp Your Story amplifies the clean energy transition through a network of connected marketers and communicators who can lean on each other to build community, test new ideas, learn, explore, and gain confidence from a trusted community globally.

Join the waitlist

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad

I thought this book was going to be a broader, more historical stocktake of the supposedly long but bending moral arc of the universe. It’s narrower than I thought, but also far more personal and haunting. Highly, highly recommend.

🎙️ Podcast: China is Run by Engineers. America is Run by Lawyers.

A fascinating and oddly personal take on the differences between China and America, by someone with a unique vantage point on both.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

That’s why I always pay attention when I stumble across climate content aimed at a broader audience. The other day, wandering through a newsagency in the throes of a small existential crisis, I picked up something that fit the bill.

I paid $20 for this New Scientist special edition on How to think about climate change. That felt steep for a magazine, and it made me wonder: who else, besides someone who can expense this for work, is actually buying it? But that’s a topic for another day.

To save you the $20 (and information you already know, if you’re the kind of person to subscribe to this newsletter), here’s my review.

The positives

First, I was glad to see climate change get the broad coverage it deserves. At 96 pages, this edition offered enough space to give readers a real grounding. The scope was wide-ranging: starting with greenhouse gas emissions, then moving through warming impacts, renewables, technological innovation, adaptation, and future modeling. Within each area, it covered a lot of ground.

It provided a solid snapshot of where we are — progress to date, the challenges still ahead, and the debates over the best path forward even when everyone’s aiming at the same outcome.

The language and writing, despite being overly inflammatory (I’ll get to that below), was also strong. It was clear, accessible, and painted vivid pictures — good science communication principles in action. Here are a few examples:

Researchers fear that if biomass particles can’t sink as deeply into the ocean depths, the carbon they contain won’t be locked away for as long.

***

From dust and the soot emitted by power plants to floating fungi, aerosols serve as seeds on which water droplets or ice crystals can form and create a cloud.

***

Hydropower reservoirs are giant reserves that store rain and meltwater, ready to be released through energy-generating turbines when demand peaks.

***

At the moment, half the CO₂ we emit is soaked up by the land and seas, for instance as vegetation grows. As the planet gets warmer, plants on land aren’t going to take up ever more CO₂…. CO₂ is less soluble in warm water, so warming oceans may soak up less of it too.

The not-so-positives

World on fire, or language on fire?

Maybe it’s because I spend every day in this space, but the rhetoric around climate change often feels overbearing. The reliance on inflammatory language has become so predictable in climate communications that it risks becoming a cliché.

Strong words have their place. We have terms like genocide, autocracy, and crisis for a reason. And I support deliberate choices, like The Guardian’s shift from “global warming” to “global heating” or from “climate change” to “climate crisis.” Those changes sharpen meaning.

But what we see too often is not careful word choice but worn-out cliches. These phrases create stress without giving any real clarity. They make the already-convinced feel more anxious, but they give the skeptics another reason to roll their eyes.

I wrote about weasel words a while back — the vague aspirational corporate buzzwords companies use when trying to obscure a lack of action or progress. What I’m talking about here is something different. It’s language that feels more along the lines of the boy who cried wolf — constant alarmism, even when it’s falling on deaf ears.

The words that appeared over and over in this magazine are not weasel words, but maybe we can call them something else: wolf words. Words that make us feel anxious but also hopeless. This kind of language cries urgency so often, and so predictably, that eventually it stops landing.

Here are a few examples from this edition:

• filthy fossil fuels

• slash our greenhouse gas emissions

• pumping huge volumes of carbon dioxide… into the atmosphere

• the world emits a whopping 50 billion tonnes…

• extreme heatwaves ravage many parts of the world

• we need to slam on the brakes as hard as we can

• catastrophic and irreversible

• on the brink of catastrophe

• breaching disastrous “tipping points”

• the stark reality of the sweltering future

• soaring temperatures

• devastating bushfires

• fierce heatwaves, sharp declines in polar ice, deadly flooding and uncontrollable wildfires…

• deadly heat

• dire consequences

• increasingly hellish

Worth taking a moment to check your heart rate after reading this list. How do you feel?

I’m not saying these words should never be used. But they land harder when used sparingly, and it’s important to notice what it feels like to read sentence after sentence of them.

In a fun little twist, the magazine devotes a whole page to why doom-and-gloom messaging backfires. 10/10 for irony.

What is “too late?”

“Too late” is a phrase I see all the time in climate communications, and the more you understand climate science, the less sense it makes. This edition of New Scientist leaned on it heavily.

We should be cautious with this wording for two reasons. First, it’s vague. Unclear writing is bad writing. If you use a phrase like “too late,” you have to define what it means: too late for what, exactly? Too late to limit warming to 1.5°C? Too late to avoid specific impacts? Without definition, it’s just noise.

Second, it turns a complex continuum into a false binary. Climate change doesn’t flip from “safe” to “doomed” at some arbitrary threshold. Every action and every fraction of a degree matters. Framing it as a point of no return risks encouraging despair and disengagement rather than urgency.

I understand why communicators reach for it. It signals urgency. It simplifies. But climate change is one of those topics where simplification has limits. As the Einstein line goes: things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Climate change is a spectrum, and the public needs to understand that every bit of progress counts.

To its credit, the edition did acknowledge this nuance at one point—but that recognition sat uneasily alongside the “too late” framing used elsewhere.

By the way, it’s all your fault

My first red flag was the cover, which listed ‘How to reduce your carbon footprint’ as the first topic of discussion within. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with addressing your own impact. Taking individual steps can make people feel powerful, in control, and aligned with their values. But these conversations should never happen without acknowledging where the true responsibility lies: the systems, policies, and industries that are really driving climate change. This gets a brief mention in the magazine, but in a different section.

Without that context, personal-carbon-footprint messaging often backfires. Most people won’t make all the recommended changes, and instead of feeling empowered, they’re left feeling guilty or ashamed. Shame is not a productive emotion — it entrenches paralysis.

Why so anxious?

To top it off, this edition ended with a piece on eco-anxiety, which felt particularly jarring after so much doom-laden language about tipping points, feedback loops, and irreversible damage. The advice was mostly about how you can manage your feelings — with no acknowledgment that media like this might be fuelling those feelings in the first place.

Even stranger, the article skipped over one of the most practical strategies: curating your information diet, especially social media, to avoid overwhelming narratives. Instead, it circled back to advice about shrinking your own carbon footprint, as if plugging in your Tesla will solve everything.

The final verdict

I’m glad we’re still talking about climate change — I’m glad we’re giving it 100-page magazine issues. This is the kind of depth and breadth the subject demands. But I felt pretty disillusioned after reading this magazine.

If the goal of this edition was to tell readers “how to think about climate change,” the takeaway was muddled: we’re hurtling toward disaster, you should be very worried — and by the way, it’s your fault you feel this way, so buy a heat pump. (That was genuinely one of the recommendations, alongside buying an EV. Sure!)

I worry about the people, especially the young people, who are constantly subject to this kind of doom and gloom narrative that leaves them feeling ashamed, anxious, and somehow also ashamed of feeling anxious. These are big feelings. Between them, there may not be much room left for hope.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself, by Nick Bryant

I love books that use the past to explain the future. I also love books that completely rewrite how I see the world (or in this case, the US). This book does both of those things and more. I’d heard it recommended at least half a dozen times by the time I finally picked it up, and let me tell you, I could not put this thing down. A must-read for understanding what was really going on when the US was founded, and the forces that led us to our current political moment.

🎙️ Podcast: The Problem of Finding a Marriageable Man, by Good on Paper

I’m the kind of twisted person who prefers to hear discussions about love and family from economists. This podcast was a fascinating look at dating and marriage trends among young people today.

What we’re working on

👉 2026 Climate Tech Marketing Report: We’ll have more for you on this soon, but we’re happy to announce that our third annual report is now underway at The Climate Hub 😀

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

Meg is fresh off the plane from NYC Climate Week, where she had an overwhelmingly positive time and took a handful of underwhelming photos (come on Meg, think of the newsletter!).

Meanwhile, just down the road, the President of the USA began his deranged, hour-long ramble about marble floors, broken elevators, and ‘green scams’.

It would be funny — Trump can be very funny, both intentionally and unintentionally — if he was just some guy ranting on a street corner with a billboard.

If only.

Meg and I launched this newsletter because we’re interested in what goes wrong when we try to talk about climate change.

This week revealed just how broken the climate topic is.

Why, after decades of effort to move the general consensus from denialism to uncertainty to acceptance, can we still not get good people to care?

And why, after moving from denialism to ‘new denialism’ (where everyone, even fossil fuel companies, claim to believe in the science and pay lip service to net zero while doing nothing about it), have we now regressed back to old-school outright denialism?

Why is it once again either an existential threat or a total hoax?

This is what I was thinking when this little book arrived for me in the mail. It’s a book that would now be considered old — it was published in 2013.

To set the scene, that means: Russia, Canada and NZ had just exited the Kyoto Protocol, which was already largely viewed as a failure. Copenhagen (2009) was another diplomatic climate failure. The US, and much of the developed world, is slowly rebuilding after the Great Recession.

International agreement on climate change looked and felt a little like it does today, in the wake of Trump's bizarre UN speech — broken, confusing, bleak.

So what this book says about why climate seems to divide people so strongly is worth reading, even if it is now considered an ancient text.

Let’s have a look.

The same old divide: degrowth vs. green growth

What came up in Trump’s recent speech is a key thread in this book: the arguably false equivalence between degrowth and green growth.

When Trump calls climate action a ‘scam’ and suggests it will ruin economies, he is echoing the degrowth argument — the idea that climate action inevitably requires slowing economic growth.

In this respect, he shares ground with his biggest nemesis, the so-called “radical Left,” who argue that degrowth is the solution and that growth of any kind is inherently exploitative.

Knight pushes back on this false equivalence by pointing to the long history of failed doomsday prophecies, notably Thomas Malthus’s prediction that population growth would outstrip resources. Malthus was proven wrong because technology unlocked new ways to support far larger populations than seemed possible at the time. When innovation raises productivity and efficiency, we can work within the limits of a finite world without limiting people’s opportunity to improve their material well-being.

Much of today’s climate debate, Knight argues, stems from the mistaken belief that climate action requires constraining growth. The book was written twelve years ago, but the divide is still recognisable: opponents say it’s too expensive; proponents argue that inaction is what really carries the highest costs.

Knight believes the most powerful path forward is to make this “third way” argument louder — showing that climate action and prosperity can go hand in hand. That, he suggests, is how to bring the majority on board.

I think he’s probably right. Most people will only support climate action if they believe it improves, rather than reduces, their material wellbeing. That’s why I see ‘Abundance’ as a more successful recipe than degrowth for winning broad support.

But in today’s political climate, even the green-growth case struggles to cut through. No matter how much data we marshal, the issue is so polarised that it’s hard to move people right now.

At least in US politics, the fragile middle ground of the past decade has all but disappeared. The debate is no longer about which solutions work best with the least disruption. You’re either all in or all out.

That’s a big problem for climate action, but it’s looking less and less likely that we’ll be able to change the narrative anytime soon.

Is it really about the science?

Another key thread the book unravels is the idea that one side of the climate debate favours the science, while the other rejects it. On this, Knight articulates something I have felt for a long time but struggled to express: neither the Right nor the Left is actually engaging with the science in a rigorous way. Few are actually following the data. Most are following their beliefs.

Meg and I work with a lot of scientists, but we’re not practising scientists ourselves. When the IPCC releases its latest findings, we’re not critiquing the methods or rerunning the models. We’re placing our trust in the scientific process and the institutions behind it — just as MAGA voters place their trust in Trump or in the fossil fuel lobby.

Here’s Knight in his own words:

And that’s the crux of it.

On one side, the so-called “science believers” want policy to be rooted entirely in science. On the other, people want other values — sovereignty, freedom, jobs, whatever it may be — to have equal weight.

Knight’s argument is that while scientific evidence should inform policy, the actual design of policy belongs to elected leaders who represent the will of their constituents.

Basically: no matter what the science says, if the people don’t want it, it shouldn’t happen.

What an uncomfortable idea — particularly for those of us on the left who profess equal loyalty to science and democratic ideals.

I’m thinking about this a lot now.

If we claim to be on the side of democracy (remember the 2024 election, anyone?), then we also have to accept that democracy means advancing what the public wants — not just what experts say is necessary.

And if that’s the case, then the difference between an electorate that votes broadly in line with science and one that sees science as a hoax probably comes down to something very simple and very complicated: education.

Education standards are declining across much of the developed world. Beyond formal schooling, people struggle to read critically, to focus, to sift through noise.

We agonise over why so many vote against their own interests. The reality is many don’t have the educational foundation or mental frameworks to see it differently.

In today’s tech-broligarchic world, fixing education and keeping people genuinely informed may be harder than fixing climate change. Individually, the prescription is obvious: turn off social media, engage with deeper sources. Systemically, the challenge feels almost overwhelming.

Climate campaigns in an algorithmic world

What I do have to think about is how climate communications can get traction in a world where deeper conversations are less appealing, where education levels are slipping, where trust in institutions is thin, and where gut feeling and tribal loyalty often override reason.

That means climate campaigns can’t assume a rational audience weighing evidence like scientists. (More than likely, they never could.) They have to cut through the noise of chaotic, algorithm-driven feeds — short, emotional, and shareable — without losing the integrity of the message.

Somehow we have to discuss incredibly complex ideas in a language that resonates in seconds, all the while still pointing to the depth and urgency of the problem.

There is no way around the current state of information consumption. I wish we could all sit around drinking tea and discussing books, but alas. If climate action is to win mass support, communicators have to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: How to Stand Up to a Dictator, by Maria Ressa

If you don’t know Maria Ressa, she is a Filipino-American journalist currently facing life sentences from the Philippines’ corrupt and autocratic president. She is a Nobel Peace Prize Winner and a stunningly brave individual. The early parts of this memoir grated on me a little; I felt the same reading Dr Fauci’s memoir — there’s only so much “I was a gifted child, I was good at everything, I didn’t know which scholarships to choose from!” a girl can take. Still, Ressa is one of the bravest and most uncompromising voices of today, and this book is well worth a read.

🎙️ Podcast: Why Are We Getting Dumber? A Debate — Deep Questions with Cal Newport

I’m obsessed with the data on intelligence scores. I want to know why intelligence appears to have peaked in 2012 after decades of steady climbing upwards. This episode of Cal’s podcast breaks it down nicely, although not conclusively. I think it’s an important listen, both to understand what’s happening and how you might personally avoid taking part in the decline.

What we’re working on

👉 Event content: We’re working on a big piece for a client in the EU region. We’ve been working with this client for a while now, and we’ve found that their industry’s key annual conference is an ideal time to release an event-related lead magnet. Last year’s report led to $120k in deals won — let’s see if we can do it again!

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

When we talk about greenwashing, we talk about consumers being misled or a brand damaging its reputation. The conversation revolves around individual harm: one company, one group of buyers, one product.

What we rarely discuss is the macro effect. What happens when false environmental claims become so widespread that they reshape the entire landscape?

In the early days, most sustainability claims were made by earnest early adopters and taken at face value. Then everyone else arrived. The mass embrace of ESG started to raise eyebrows, especially once it became clear that many of these claims were either entirely false or simply distractions from other, deeper violations.

We’re now living in the fallout of that shift — the post-greenwashing world, if you will. What started as an attempt to talk about real climate action ended up going something like this:

→ I buy this brand because it’s more sustainable.

→ Huh, that brand was lying? I’ll avoid that brand.

→ Wait, this brand was lying too? Okay, add that to the list…

→ Another one? And another one? You know what, I think I’ll just… stop believing any of it.

This breakdown leads to terrible outcomes for companies that are genuinely committed to sustainability (all three of them, globally). Green products and companies lose the edge they once had, and consumers stop believing any claims made by marketers.

And you know, maybe that’s not the worst thing. We could all use a reality check and a better understanding of market incentives. But I don’t think anyone wants to live in a world where nothing feels true, where every claim is suspect, and where cynicism becomes the default. Unfortunately, that’s where we’ve ended up, and the problem goes well beyond greenwashing.

We’re now in a post-greenwashing society. Not because brands suddenly decided to get honest, but because no one believes the claims anymore. That’s the real tragedy of greenwashing, and it’s one we rarely talk about.

Greenwashing and the tragedy of the commons

If you’ve spent any time in environmental circles, you’re familiar with the tragedy of the commons. This is the idea that when a resource is collectively owned — say, a river full of fish or an atmosphere free of pollutants — it will inevitably collapse from overuse.

Why? Because what benefits the individual (catching as many fish as possible) conflicts with what benefits the group (maintaining fish populations so they don’t collapse). And when we can’t trust others to act in the collective interest, there is no incentive for us to do so either. Why let them catch all the fish? We might as well cast our line.

There is no hero or villain in the tragedy of the commons. That’s what makes it a tragedy. Everyone is to blame, and in the end, everyone loses.

Most conversations about greenwashing focus on the brands (the bad guys) manipulating the consumers (the good guys). But greenwashing is not a story of oppressive power or manipulation; it’s just the tragedy of the commons at work in the free market. The commons here are not rivers or fish stocks, but something far more fragile: trust.

Every misleading claim depletes common trust, no matter who makes it. And unlike natural resources, trust seems to evaporate much faster and less rationally. Once it’s broken, it is very difficult to repair.

Yes, brands hurt consumers through greenwashing, but ultimately they hurt themselves and hurt the market. If companies can’t credibly communicate their climate action, they lose the very incentive to take it, because, like it or not, marketing and brand reputation are the primary drivers of voluntary climate action. If the market stops believing or caring about sustainability claims, that lever is gone.

I think that’s where we are today.

Life in a post-trust society

Greenwashing isn’t the only example of corporations trying to get something for nothing. It’s not the only reason big companies are under suspicion, and it’s not the sole cause of our growing disillusionment with the institutions that shape our lives.

Instead, it is just another accelerant speeding us toward a complete breakdown of trust — in markets, in institutions, in each other.

People talk about living in a post-truth society. But more than anything, we’re living in a post-trust society. Even when the truth is out there, we can no longer trust it when we see it.

That’s the crux of it. Assuming a company does not have monopoly control on a market (another issue for another day), then trust is the only thing keeping them in business. Take away trust and you have no market.

I’m all for a healthy dose of skepticism. People need to start paying less attention to what people and brands say and more attention to the incentives driving them. But while skepticism is necessary, I believe cynicism is dangerous, and nihilism (the last point on the spectrum) is existential.

I think we’re well past skepticism and deep into cynicism. I hope, for the good of humanity, we don’t reach nihilism.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, by Gardiner Harris

Speaking of corporate trust, if you want something to get mad about this week, I cannot recommend this book enough. I was skeptical that there would be enough wrong with J&J to fill a 14h+ book, but wow, was this a journey. Incredibly well written and reported, and an absolute must-read for anyone who still thinks this seemingly wholesome American company can’t be “that bad.” I listened to the audiobook; Harris has a great voice and is a passionate and compelling narrator.

🎙️ Podcast: Erin Ryan: The Murder of Charlie Kirk (The Bulwark Podcast)

When big, confusing things happen, I try to avoid social media and instead wait a few weeks or month for more nuanced takes to come out from people I trust. I couldn’t do that this week because the Charlie Kirk murder made me absolutely sick to my stomach, and I couldn’t think about anything else. I still avoided social media, but I turned to the podcasts instead — the closest thing I could get to a conversation. I found a few good ones, but this one was my favourite. A measured view of Charlie Kirk’s dark contribution to the conversations of today, but also a realistic and terrifying assessment of what this moment means for the MAGA movement and the far right generally.

What we’re working on

👉 SEO push: Many of our clients have seen the same rapid dropoff in traffic that is affecting most websites this year thanks to AI search overviews. We’re working alongside an SEO agency to help one of our clients combat this drop, producing a high volume of AI-friendly content to keep traffic up.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

Your eyes are probably glazing over from these stats. At this point, most of us are immune to the word ‘death toll’ and too tired to understand what a number like 7 million actually feels like in the context of human life.

It’s not a problem unique to climate, but it’s one the climate space struggles with more than most. There is a lot of talk (some of it from me) about reducing alarmism, moving away from gloom-and-doom messaging, and injecting optimism and even humour into the discourse on climate change.

I stand by this; we can each only take so much heaviness in our lives, and doom and gloom messaging tends to have a paralysing rather than a galvanising effect.

I also think much of it is misleading.

We often hear refrains about climate change representing ‘the end of the world.’ Yet proper risk analysis reveals there is only a very slim chance that climate change wipes out the whole of humanity. At this stage, it is not a true existential threat, and it works very differently to threats that have been ranked higher on the existential risk scale (AI, biological warfare and nuclear war in particular).

And yet we cannot ignore that climate change and environmental mismanagement will be an existential threat for many people. In fact, it already is.

19,000 people died today because of avoidable environmental issues like air pollution. The same number will die again tomorrow.

People are dying every day because of climate change and environmental concerns, and yet when we frame these in policy debates or protests, we continue using abstract language like “future generations” or “the planet.”

I spent most of the 2020 lockdowns in Melbourne, where we received a grim daily virus count and death toll from our increasingly exhausted Premier. Every number greater than zero felt real. It felt like a big deal. Eradicating COVID was the only thing anyone was thinking about.

Yet we have thousands dying every day from a slower-burning cause. But just because the cause is slow-moving, does that make it any less urgent?

My question is: should we start leading with the death toll?

On the one hand, the numbers are shocking — and they might shift perception in a good way. They might also recenter the climate conversation onto human health, which might broaden the base.

On the other hand, how many more death tolls can we take? Gaza, Ukraine, floods here, earthquakes there there, measles (FFS) — is another death toll really going to get anyone’s attention right now?

Are we better off leading with optimism, or with single stories like I wrote about a few weeks ago?

I don’t know the answer. Climate change appears to be one of those issues that doesn’t respond to reason; we could write a front-page NYT article about how many people have died from climate change, and readers might just flick right past it. The more we learn about tragedies we feel we have more control over, the more the doom and gloom becomes part of our DNA.

I don’t know if the death toll is an effective message, but I’m wondering if it’s worth a try.

That’s it from me this week, folks — have a restful weekend.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, by Megan Greenwell — a fascinating, human look at the toll PE has taken on almost every sector and, therefore, every part of our lives.

🎙️ Podcast: Kids These Days: The Impact of Tech, Social Media and AI on Adolescents — A fantastic roundtable with some very unique guests and perspectives on the additional struggles technology is imposing on young people. Highly recommend.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

“How I Spent Almost $1,000,000 on Dates.”

“144 Hours Standed in the World’s Most Unknown Country with No Phone.”

Or my personal favourite: “Man Lives in Airport for 18 Years.”

But earlier this year I noticed the screen was frequently dominated by a scruffy buzzcut man with a cockney accent. Eventually I stayed to watch.

Turns out my partner had discovered Gary Stevenson — a maths prodigy who became a Citibank trader during the Global Financial Crisis. He often describes himself as the bank’s top trader (and even the best in the world), a claim that some of his former colleagues dispute. Still, Stevenson’s story reads like a classic hero’s journey:

• A kid from East London, the son of a postal worker, grows up poor, gets into trouble with the law, dreams of a better life

• He leaves home, earns an economics degree at the London School of Economics, and lands a trading role at one of the world’s most powerful banks.

• Disillusioned with what he learns on the inside, he steps away, convinced he’s seen the truth of the world. He returns home determined to share that knowledge and fight to save the wellbeing of people in his community

The Gary Stevenson of today no longer works as a trader. He spends his time writing, making YouTube videos, and appearing on TV to spread a simple message: inequality is the blind spot economists are ignoring (and it will soon cripple the economy).

➡️ His channel is worth checking out: Garys Economics

You’ve got to be skeptical of people who come out swinging with a story as wild as Gary’s, especially when paired with the sheer volume and frequency of his content (does he want to be a guru? what’s he trying to achieve here?).

But there are qualities that set him apart — traits that make his message more credible, and make people (myself included) more inclined to listen. These qualities make Stevenson the perfect messenger for his cause, and they’re also exactly the qualities we need to see more of in climate communications.

Last week I wrote about “the unimpeachable evidence of the person who was there.” Someone on LinkedIn commented that this ties neatly to the idea that the messenger can matter more than the message. Exactly. In the climate space, what we need more of isn’t new talking points — it’s the right people to deliver them. People who will actually be believed by the audiences we’re trying to reach.

So let’s look at what makes Gary such an effective messenger for inequality.

Dual citizenship

Gary holds a passport to both sides of the debate. He grew up working-class, in poverty. He speaks to the working class as one of their own. At the same time, he spent years on trading floors surrounded by the richest people in business, at the very top of global finance. He’s seen what happens on the inside.

What does this look like in the climate space? Katharine Hayhoe is the perfect example here. She’s an Evangelical Christian and a climate scientist. She can speak with authority on climate change, but she can also speak with authenticy to people who share her faith and/or live in her area (Texas). To these people, she’s not just ‘another Liberal elite peddling climate nonsense’ — she’s one of them who ventured out and came back to tell the truth.

The look

Nothing about Gary Stevenson has been shined up or toned down. Actually, his appearance would suggest he cares so much about inequality that he doesn’t even have time to change his shirt, shave his beard, or tidy up the kitchen behind him. It’s all about the message, the message, the message.

When it comes to climate messengers, we’ve got to stop obsessing over polish and poise and start letting normal people tell their stories. Greta Thunberg is a good example here: she has that recnogisable, defiant face. She was young and completely unconcerned with appearances — no makeup, no ‘cool’ clothes, no dressing up to play a part. She was just a real kid with a message for the world.

The voice

Closely tied to “the look” is Gary’s voice. I honestly think this is one of the reasons he shot to fame so quickly. He doesn’t sound like anyone else talking about economics in public. His Ilford accent is as thick as ever, and the fact that he’s never tried to soften or reform it (as so many do when they enter the public sphere) makes him both instantly recognisable and deeply believable.

Stevenson has actually spoken about this. In one of his videos, he reflects on the fact that most people in media, finance, and big business come from wealthy backgrounds, saying something like: “If you don’t have anyone that sounds like me, you’re in trouble.”

We don’t necessarily need cockney accents to get people on board with climate change, although, hey — maybe it’ll help! But we do need accents people can relate to — voices of all kinds, not just the polished tones of East Coast–educated Americans. That kind of diversity could go a long way toward getting more people on board.

Raw emotion

Beyond accents and vocabulary, the emotional pitch of a messenger’s voice is often what matters most. Gary’s delivery is usually composed, but you can feel the emotion and desperation just beneath the surface.

He’s very deliberate about his persona: it isn’t lighthearted, it isn’t funny — it’s a desperate plea. When TV hosts try to banter with him or steer the conversation somewhere trivial, he refuses. His response is always some version of: “I’m here to talk about inequality.” That clarity cuts through the more performative elements of public debate and goes a long way to earning Stevenson more credibility on his Quixotic mission.

You can tell when someone claims to represent a cause but is clearly just relishing the spotlight. With Stevenson, the impression is the opposite. Who knows — maybe he is a phony — but right now, he comes across as someone who genuinely doesn’t enjoy being in the limelight. It feels like he talks about inequality not because he wants to, but because he has to.

Greta’s raw emotion works in a similar way. Just think of the “How dare you speech!” — it landed because it was so shocking and so full of emotion, crystallising the rage of an entire generation.

No monetisation

These days, we’re all in the habit of following the money (as we should be). It’s hard to do that with Stevenson. His YouTube videos run without ads. There are no hidden courses, no coaching schemes. Yes, he has a book — but a book will never earn him anywhere near what he made at Citibank. That makes it easier to believe his motive is genuine. Maybe this is all some long-term play to build an audience, but at this stage, it doesn’t look that way.

(This might be a timely moment to add that, if you see prompts to upgrade to a paid subscription of The Climate Communicator, I’m sorry! I don’t put these in here, but we’re experimenting with what happens to the Substack algorithm if a publication has a paid offering. I’ll report back on our experiment!)

Unfortunately, truly believable climate messengers need to come across with similarly pure motives. They can’t appear to be monetising their audience or advancing a hidden agenda. Even if that didn’t eventually distort their message, it is instantly discrediting.

On top of that, climate messengers face the exhausting challenge of being branded “imperfect activists” — criticised for not living up to their cause because they fly, drive, or make any ordinary human choice. It’s infuriating, but the only response is to keep defending them when those attacks come.

So, yes — finding the right climate messengers is not an easy task. They need multiple group identities, pure motives, unassailable track records. Most of all, they need to be completely themselves. As algorithms flatten our culture and debates grow nastier and more personal, it’s getting harder and harder for people to truly be themselves in public.

But when they are, it’s almost impossible to ignore.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber — I’d heard about Graeber’s concept of bullshit jobs at least a decade ago, when his original essay made headlines. I understood what he meant immediately because it felt like most of the jobs I had had in my life had been largely, if not entirely, some form of BS job. This week I finally read the book, which is probably unnecessarily long (the essay would suffice for most) and a little too semantic at many points. Still, the idea that the private sector (the so-called bastion of efficiency) can create so many wasteful and unnecessary jobs and processes is a helpful tool to keep in mind as debates about small government vs. big government / private sector superiority vs. public sector inferiority intensify.

🎙️ Podcast: MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question — You’re all probably subscribed to Ezra at this point but this was a highly insightful episode about the state of health policy and attitudes in the US, and what’s led up to this point. I found the sections on RFK’s backstory particularly interesting, even though I think he’s a total crackpot.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

Empathy is not a uniquely human trait (many animals are capable of it, my dog excepted), but human ingenuity and our instinct for collaboration mean that we can put our empathy to work in ways and at scales that other species can’t. We can invent vaccines to save the lives of billions of children we don’t know, institute progressive tax codes, and campaign for environmental reform in the name of future generations we will never meet.

To turn the climate crisis around, we need empathy.

We need people to care.

But one of the tragedies of climate change (and many other current issues) is that we just can’t seem to get enough people — or maybe enough of the right people — to care.

Recently, I attended the Byron Writers Festival, which began on a soggy Friday and never got further than that thanks to the rain. Still, Friday morning, I managed to catch a panel on press freedom with Erik Jensen (The Saturday Paper), Peter Greste (Google him!), and John Vaillant (Fire Weather).

I arrived late and strained to hear from the back of the tent, my brand new white shoes sinking into the mud as I furiously typed notes on my phone. The conversation was wide-ranging, but I perked up when Jensen declared:

“Journalists have failed to get people to care about climate change.”

True.

Also, harsh. Getting people to care about climate change is massively difficult.

Even the most seasoned political campaigners, NGO marketing teams, and Hollywood storytellers haven’t, for the most part, cracked the code on widely appealing climate messaging — certainly not when it asks people to feel uncomfortable or to give up anything of real substance.

Sure, there have been victories — Rachel Carson in the 60s (although that took a while), Al Gore in 2006 (I will never shake the image of Gore riding up in his little lift to keep pace with his carbon graph), even Greta Thunberg’s defiant, childlike face in 2018.

But climate change as a matter of public concern almost always falls back into what has been dubbed the issue-attention cycle. Some new disaster prompts people to get all riled up about it for a hot minute, and then nothing particularly exciting comes of it, the world still turns, and people go back to their lives. We may win the occasional media battle, but we seem to be constantly losing the war. It is really, really hard to get people to care about a long-brewing and long-lasting problem for more than a blip in time.

Part of this is practical. People have so many other things to worry about in the course of a day; I’ve written about this before.

Part of it is cerebral. It’s hard to get people to care about bees or polar bears or Greenland ice sheets. All of it seems impossibly remote; none of it seems all that close to home.

Part of it is — I’m convinced — linguistic. It’s also hard to get people to care about random climate terminology: what does 1.5° mean to the average person? Not a whole lot. Same goes for climate migration, global ‘warming’ (how nice!), weather ‘events’. The more we turn verbs into nouns and stories into buzzwords, our message loses its urgency. Photographs have been far more powerful than words for the climate movement, but again, you can only see a hungry polar bear or a parched giraffe once before the horror wears off.

But a huge part of the problem is simply the fact that climate change is a problem of such enormous scale that it’s hard to fathom, let alone care about every implication.

Humans have not yet evolved to handle caring about this kind of scale. We belong in families and villages — not planets. Sure, with enough education, reason, and patience, we can all grasp at some level why global problems are worth getting riled up about. But it doesn’t come naturally. (And that means it’s far easier to dismiss it as someone else’s problem or call it a hoax.)

What does come naturally is stories of one person, one family, maybe — if you’re lucky — one community. But beyond that, it’s hard to care about what your mind simply can’t imagine. We can’t hold space for empathetic feelings about an entire planet in our minds at once.

So what most climate and environmental campaigns are missing is the one thing humans need in order to actually care about something. The one thing that can’t be turned into a bipartisan debate or dismissed as fake news or alternative facts.

What’s the one thing?

In the words of John Vaillant, the one thing climate change stories are missing is:

“The unimpeachable evidence of the person who was there.”

That’s why Vaillant’s latest book, Fire Weather — a tragically ironic book about a Canadian oil town ravaged by a wildfire — spends most of its time among the residents of the town and much of its word count between quotation marks.

Vaillant’s goal in writing the book was largely to get out of the way of the people whose story it was to tell. And it works!

Anyone who has read the book can no longer see statistics or headlines about wildfires in the same way. Now they sense, on a deeply human level, what it might mean to live through something like that.

The unimpeachable evidence of the story told firsthand is a powerful tool, and I don’t see climate campaigns capitalising on it enough.

It’s not just limited to narrative nonfiction books: we should be using first-person stories, told by real people, in every medium we have. Photos, articles, videos — even a simple headline snippet taken from a true story will work.

Zipping our own mouths shut and handing the microphone over to the people hit hardest has got to be the most underrated tool in the climate storyteller’s toolbox.

Too few people are using it.

Time to change that.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump, by Philip Coggan — a teeny tiny book that punches well above its weight (or length?). Debunking Trump’s absurdity with reason and (importantly) facts is both satisfying and infuriating. The most frustrating part is looking up from the pages and realising that no matter how much sense it makes in your lovely little book, Trump and his cronies just don’t care. They don’t want reason; they want slogans and chaos. They are fuelled purely by resentment and tax cuts (for their friends), and reason has no place in any of it.

🎙️ Podcast: Trump vs. the U.S. Economy — a perfect week for me, with Ezra releasing this episode just as I was cracking open Coggan’s little book. Natasha Sarin, a Professor of Law and Economics at Yale is a wildly impressive guest and a highly compelling speaker. The exchange between these two is highly productive and well worth a listen.

What we’re working on

👉 Carbon markets report: With all the negative headlines out there about the VCM at the moment, we’re working on a report for a client about early-stage carbon project quality assessment.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

There’s a sneaky little trap that many climate and progressive campaigns fall into — and it can be summed up in a simple, three-letter word.

It’s born out of genuine commitment and a sincere desire to do good. But when it comes to creating campaigns that actually land, this little word can be the kiss of death.

Can you guess what it is?

The word is and.

And??? I can hear you asking — how could an innocent little conjunction cause so much trouble?

When I talk about the word and, I’m talking about the reflex to expand a climate campaign until it’s carrying every issue and every solution at once. Climate communicators do need to recognise that climate change exists alongside a tangle of other global problems. I’ve written about this before.

But at the same time, we can’t expect a single campaign to solve all of the world’s problems. We can’t expect it to speak to everyone or ask people to do everything they can.

The enemy of the climate campaign is overreach. Spreading ourselves across everything is a highly effective way to achieve nothing at all.

In climate comms, I’ve lost count of the campaigns that blur environmental issues together until the message is a muddle. You’ll hear a voiceover warning about greenhouse gas emissions and a warming planet, while the screen cuts to oil-soaked seabirds and overflowing landfills. The latter are real problems in their own right, but lumping them in with global warming only clutters the signal.

Clutter breeds confusion. Instead of clear, direct steps, audiences are left with a swirl of outrage, guilt, and overwhelm — emotions that more often lead to paralysis than to action.

From where I sit, there are three main ways climate campaigns collapse under their own weight. The first is trying to cover too much ground — too many problems in one go, and too many purported outcomes.

Content: 99 problems, one campaign

The blame game — getting bogged down in too many problems

A lot of climate and progressive comms start from a place of justified outrage. They see the deep inequities and failures in the system and want to name them all. The result can be a laundry list of everything wrong with the world: the climate crisis, environmental racism, the housing crisis, extractive capitalism, biodiversity collapse, food insecurity, air pollution, water scarcity — sometimes all in the same two-minute video.

I do it too. It’s tempting to think that naming the whole web of injustice will give our audience a fuller picture, more reason to act. But the effect can be the opposite. In place of urgency, you get overwhelm.

Green growth and degrowth — are they really cure-alls?

Overreach is also woven into the way we pitch green growth and sustainable development — as if installing renewables and shutting down coal plants will *also* heal racial inequities, revitalise every struggling town, fix the food system, and end global poverty before lunch. Or that a carbon tax will ripple magically through the economy until every unrelated problem is solved. Or, on the flip side, that degrowth will somehow eliminate homelessness, restore every degraded ecosystem, and [insert utopian outcome here].

I’m all for the economic and social gains the transition can deliver. But those outcomes aren’t automatic, and they’re often inflated beyond recognition. If we keep promising them as if they’re inevitable, our message stops sounding visionary and starts sounding unhinged and disconnected from the real work ahead.

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Audience: You talkin’ to me?

Another way climate campaigns overload themselves is by skipping the hard work of deciding exactly who they’re talking to. Instead, they default to a kind of broadcast mode designed for everyone, which in practice means no one in particular.

When the audience isn’t clearly defined, the message has to be smoothed out to appeal to all. Campaigns end up using vague, safe language instead of specific framing and relevant jargon that would help target audiences connect to it and feel like it’s created by people like them.

Effective campaigns commit to a target audience from the start. They speak in that audience’s language, address their priorities, and give them an action that feels relevant to their role in the problem. If other groups need to be reached, that’s what separate campaigns — or separate messages — are for. Far better to have multiple versions of a campaign going out to separate audiences than one version of a campaign designed to speak to all of them.

CTAs: What do you want me to do?

The third major way climate campaigns get in their own way is by overloading the call to action — or leaving it out entirely. A strong CTA is simple, specific, and achievable. It points to one thing the audience can do, right now, to make a tangible difference on the problem at hand.

But most campaigns I’ve seen go one of two ways:

• No CTA at all, beyond a vague “we must act now.” (I despise content like this. If I read “the time to act is now” one more time…)

• A shopping list of demands: call your MP, sign a petition, reduce your meat intake, join a march, switch banks, offset your flight, share the video.

When you give people too many options, they freeze. Decision fatigue sets in, urgency dissipates, and the likelihood of follow-through drops. The strongest campaigns resist the temptation to load up on asks. They aim for one clear step, aimed at one specific audience, to address one well-defined problem.

Everything-bagel liberalism

Here, we’re stepping into what Ezra Klein calls “everything-bagel liberalism” — the tendency for well-meaning progressive causes to get weighed down, and sometimes completely hobbled, by the impulse to fix too many things at once.

A community solar project wants to cut emissions, *and* employ veterans, *and* revitalise a local economy, *and* become a community garden to address food insecurity. All worthwhile goals in their own right — but rolled into one project, the focus blurs and progress stalls.

This is one of the key threads of Klein and Thompson’s Abundance agenda, which urges the US government to set clear priorities and stop getting in its own way.

Everything-bagel liberalism is both a symptom and a cause of the Left’s unique flavour of call-out/cancel culture. Progressives can be so wary of being criticised for overlooking something that they try to anticipate every possible objection and cover every potential blind spot. In the process, they lose the thread entirely.

This is a fatal flaw of the modern progressive movement. The intention is inclusion, but the effect is paralysis.

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Will good intentions derail the climate movement?

The best thing about progressives is that they want to make everything better for everyone (except, maybe, the billionaires — they’ve had it good enough already). The worst thing about progressives is… that they want to make everything better for everyone.

To make change — and to get people on board — we have to be disciplined in our actions and specific in our messaging. One problem at a time. The right solutions in the right places.

That’s crucial for public communicators, but climate tech marketers should take note, too. If you’re targeting sustainability leads, these people may very well have entered their careers with a progressive agenda in mind, but in the day-to-day, they have a job to do, and you’re just one tool or service to help them get it done. Don’t try to help them save the world, or even their whole company — make your message as focused and practical as you can get away with.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr — an old book by modern standards, but one that seems to get more relevant with every passing year. When Carr first started questioning what computers might be doing to our brains back in prehistoric times (2010), most people didn’t have much time for it. Now, of course, the conversation has shifted — and Carr deserves a lot of the credit for that.

🎙️ Podcast: Hasan Minhaj and Tim Miller — The Republican Road to Hell — A very productive conversation between a funny man and an earnest one, with a whole lot of insight into modern politics.

What we’re working on

👉 Our own marketing: Meg and I constantly deal with the stereotypical marketing agency conundrum: we’re so busy doing other people’s marketing, we can’t find time for our own. This week, that’s what we’ve been up to. It’s time for a little TLC for The Climate Hub!

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

Interesting — I bought it.

In climate circles, the conclusion of countless essays and podcasts and protests is that we, the people, must put pressure on our governments to solve this global crisis. That might stand a chance in Norway, or Australia, or Taiwan, but just 6% of the world lives in a ‘fully functioning’ democracy. That’s a dramatic figure (it includes countries like France and the US in its ‘flawed democracies’). But flawed and ‘hybrid’ regimes aside, more than a third of countries are full-blown authoritarian states. In these countries, no amount of people pressure is likely to sway the man (and they are all men) at the helm.

Autocrats, like the rest of us, are really just looking out for their own interests. Talking to Putin about climate change is not unlike talking to my grandpa about why he should divest from fossil fuels. The returns have been great so far. Why would either of them stop? (My grandfather is a wonderful person and not a Russian dictator.)

And really, it’s no different from every other climate conversation we need to have. Whether it’s aimed at corporations, governments, or individuals, it always boils down to: how do we get people to act in the collective interest when it appears to run counter to their personal interest?

I was curious to see what the article would say about that. Unfortunately, it didn’t say much.

Who takes more climate action: democracies or autocracies?

If you’re up to date on climate news then you were probably wondering this from the beginning: who says democracies have the high ground here? Fair question.

The research is mixed, but there is no slam-dunk trend showing that democracy leads to better climate or environmental outcomes. (National wealth does — eventually — but there are plenty of wealthy autocracies.)

Climate action is highly dependent on whoever is in power, and one strength and flaw of democracies is that power tends to change hands on a regular schedule. At the same time, while autocracies are dominated by a strongman, their party, and a toxic sprinkling of wealthy insiders, democracies don’t always rise far above this. Most of the world’s democracies are still unduly influenced by big business interests. And climate action has appeared to be at odds with big business interests for decades.

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So one of the benefits of autocracies (and I use the term benefits loosely here) is their timescales. U.S. policy runs on four-year timelines (for now). What can we get done in four years to get people to vote for us again? Same goes for most democracies. In Australia, we’re on a three-year loop. Autocrats don’t have to worry about pesky elections interfering with their plans, which means they can plan on far longer time horizons.

Take Russia interfering in US elections, part of its (very) long-term play to destabilize Western democracy. Or China’s big-picture strategy to knock the US off its podium and replace it as the global superpower.

Another ‘benefit’ of autocracies is how coordinated they can be in their national responses to emergencies or other state goals. If the state wants to move, it can move anything and everything. That’s a terrifying prospect generally, but potentially powerful when applied to something like climate action.

A long-term vision, policy consistency, public-private coordination, and a willingness to act without immediate payoff are all essential for meaningful climate action. And that’s why, in theory, autocracies could be fertile ground for climate leadership. But only under one condition: the leaders must believe that climate action uniquely benefits them, and isn’t simply a contribution to a global problem.

I think the real question is not how to get autocracies to listen to our arguments. It’s how do we get them to start making their own arguments — forming their own conclusions — that this makes strategic sense for them.

How do we lead autocracies to the conclusion that climate action is in their own interest?

Here’s one area where I think the Guardian article misses the mark — and it’s a common misunderstanding in climate discourse: conflating individual mitigation efforts with adaptation or climate protection. The piece quotes Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief, saying, “While states drag their heels on their Paris agreement commitments, state-owned companies are dominating global emissions – ignoring the desperate needs of their citizens.”

But Figueres is implying that any country facing climate impacts would serve its citizens best by cutting its emissions. That’s not really true.

In the short term, what actually helps people on the ground is adaptation: infrastructure, preparedness, resilience. In the long term, what will help future generations is coordinated global mitigation. A single country reducing its emissions may be the morally right move, but it won’t meaningfully protect its own citizens from the spiky end of climate change. Not on its own. The only thing it will do is make the country less vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy.

That’s actually important for democracies, where hypocrisy can damage global relationships. (When it comes to climate action, democracies have proven themselves the ultimate hypocrites.) Autocrats, on the other hand, tend not to worry too much about being seen as hypocrites.

So I don’t think we’ll make much headway telling autocracies to reduce their emissions in order to help their citizens affected by climate change. In the first place, that’s not how climate action works, and in the second place — well — most dictators simply won’t care if some of their countrymen lose their homes to wildfires or their crops to drought.

They’re not relying on their votes, anyway.

So — could we sanction them? Cut them off?

The Guardian’s main practical suggestions for persuading dictators to take climate action involves punitive economic measures, like the EU’s CBAM. The problem, as the authors note, is the lack of precision. CBAM may punish Saudi oil exports, but it hurts African aluminium in the process — and so on and so on. There are ways to lessen the negative side effects, but ultimately, most pricing mechanisms lead to the small guys getting hit harder than the big guys, regardless of their governance structure.

And that doesn’t mean these tools aren’t worth pursuing, but even when widely applied, they might make a small dent in an autocracy’s emissions, but are unlikely to get them truly on track.

For that, I think we’ll need more than sticks. For that, I think we’ll need carrots.

Take China, an autocracy that has taken a big bite out of the climate carrot.

Global superpowerdom is China’s ultimate goal, and one of its big bets on getting there relies on the country becoming a renewable energy / transition superpower. So far, it’s working. China’s emissions are falling (albeit slowly), and clean energy sectors accounted for 26% of the country’s GDP growth last year alone. It is the #1 producer of solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries globally, by a long shot. A recent Ezra Klein podcast described China as the first global electrostate. (Yes, it is still the world’s biggest emitter — but that’s changing.)

China didn’t make this pivot because the democracies asked it nicely to reduce its emissions, or put CBAM between the country’s steel and its EU customers. It made the pivot because it looked 50, 75, 100 years into the future and said: this is our chance.

The only thing we need to say to autocrats is: there’s a way you can get rich from this.

But is the get rich argument only enticing to autocracies? Hardly. Sure, autocracies (particularly the older and more stable ones) might be more interested in regional and global domination, and they may very well be more willing to put up with the long-term horizons required for some climate investments to pay off. But superpowerdom is basically the same message we should be sending democracies too — particularly those ice-cold economists who see climate action as a cost and not as an opportunity. Every country wants a better economy. Every country wants global admiration.

Economic messaging is the key to climate comms in virtually all its forms — at the individual, corporate, and state level. Time to start talking business.

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What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson — a lot of people are very angry about this book, and I can see why. The timing of its release, combined with its hyperbolic title and cover would seem to make Tapper and Thompson into the ultimate opportunists. I agree with this criticism. The authors are no doubt sensationalists, and the tone throughout most of the book is overcooked. But I still think this is an important read, because it gets at one of the Left’s biggest problems: that in trying to save the world from one threat (Trump, in this case), we can fail to notice the risk right in front of us (a President no longer fit for the job). I recommend the audio version of this book — Tapper is an engaging and at times darkly funny narrator.

🇦🇺📚 Bonus book for the ~2 Aussies subscribed to this newsletter: The Great Divide, by Alan Kohler. A must-read for truly understanding our uniquely Australian-flavoured housing crisis.

🎙️ Podcast: Is Decarbonization Dead? — I was excited to see a climate-themed episode from my favourite NYT podcaster, and this one didn’t disappoint. Some great insights here into the insane lack of energy market logic behind parts of the Big Beautiful Bill (much of which makes no economic sense, climate aside). Quote I’m thinking about: “The next wave of energy politics will be about affordability.”

What we’re working on

👉 Wrapping up an ESG report: We’re putting the finishing touches on the first ESG report for a software company we’ve worked with previously. After this, we’ll transition into Phase 2 of our arrangement: helping them develop their ESG targets and strategy.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

I was floored, and I immediately sent it to Meg. Meg and I are always talking about helping climate tech companies become unicorns. But the unicorn concept is one of those delusional, destructive Silicon Valley ideas — all Peter Thiel-style monopoly culture, startup Darwinism, survival of the biggest. Why did I ever think unicorns were cool?

What’s exciting about the idea that out of a cohort of startups, only one will make it big and squash the rest? Who wants to live in that world?

Maybe there’s nothing we can do about the Silicon Valley tech scene (it seems to have been taken down a notch or two recently anyway), but we don’t have keep talking about unicorns in climate tech. The unicorn model is fundamentally at odds with climate tech for two reasons. First, solving the climate crisis will require many solutions to succeed — across sectors, geographies, and a mix of public and private players. Second, the idea of one company growing aggressively to dominate the field is, in itself, unsustainable.

Sustainable refers to that which can be sustained. Something that generates a reasonable profit to keep itself in service, gives real value to real people using it, adapts strategically to the world around it, doesn’t attach its whole self to products or processes that may not survive, doesn’t need constant emergency infusions from investors hoping for a future payday, doesn’t need to rush an IPO so its founders can cash out — you get the idea. A truly sustainable business requires asking yourself: What would it look like if we wanted this company to last 50, or 75, or 100 years?

In 50 years’ time, we want climate tech as an industry to be a wide-ranging herd of camels, not a small handful of self-obsessed unicorns. We don’t want a single provider in each niche monopolizing the market. We want a massive ecosystem of products, services, and public goods that complement and compete with each other to bring us an abundant future.

To get there, climate tech founders need to stop chasing unicorn status and start thinking like camels.

What are the secrets to thinking like a camel?

• Make two plans: one for the long term and one for the short term. Startups need a plan beyond the next quarter or next funding round, but focusing only on the long term is equally narrow-minded. Climate tech changes quickly, and founders and marketers need to be sensitive to the changing tides without going all-in on short-term developments.

• Focus on getting to self-sufficiency as soon as possible. Unless you’re in deep tech and have to stay leashed to the deep pockets for many years to come, it’s worth thinking about the quickest way to wean your company off the exhausting but addictive VC cycle. If you really want to build a camel, becoming self-sufficient is the ultimate goal.

• Build a brand! Markets change and products follow, but brands are (effectively) eternal. Yes, you need short-term (typically paid) marketing to drive lead gen, but the best thing you can do for your company in the long term is to become a name people like and trust. In our world, this comes from getting really, really good at a particular content channel (or two, or three!), and sticking at it.

• Making strategic alliances. The Silicon Valley model might want you to see your peers as competitors, but a surprising number of them won’t be direct competitors. Even when they are, the opportunities for collaboration are endless, and rarely something to worry about. We’ve always encouraged our clients to collaborate with clients, research partners/foundations, investors, adjacent companies, and even ‘competitors’. From a marketing collaboration standpoint, the best potential collaborators are those ‘competing’ with you on content topics/keywords but not on product. Team up and double your audience!

• Resist the temptation to copy. The more you copy your peers, the less distinguishable you become, the more squashable you are by the big players. Your product doesn’t have to do everything, and your audience doesn’t have to be everyone. Much better if it doesn’t — but the temptation to expand horizontally rather than vertically is real, and requires disciplined resistance.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: Empire of AI, by Karen Hao — A book tracing the wild personal and professional journeys of the ghouls running OpenAI. This is more than I ever wanted to know about the world of the big AI startups, so I’m slowly getting through it, but Hao does a great job at weaving some incredibly compelling narrative between deeper dives into the history of artificial intelligence and the bigger questions it poses. (P.S. The link will take you to the audio version, which I’m listening to. I broke up with Audible and joined Libro.fm, which supports independent bookstores.)

📖 Article: Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market — I’ve just discovered Kyla Scanlon and can’t get enough. A penscive, whip-smart Gen Z economist with a knack for placing the current moment within its broader historical context. This article in particular explores what it’s like to enter the labour market as a young person today.

Kyla’s Newsletter

Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market

Good morning from Aspen, Colorado! This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber…

Read more

9 months ago · 524 likes · 82 comments · kyla scanlon

🎙️ Podcast: Jeff Daniels on the Enemy Within — I’m currently obsessed with Nicolle Wallace, and this conversation with Jeff Daniels is exactly the kind the world needs right now. I should’ve known the man who played Will McAvoy on-screen had to be something like him off-screen, but this podcast really was a joy to listen to. On a related note, if you’ve never watched The Newsroom, this is your sign to go and do it.

What we’re working on

👉 A book proposal! Not for us, unfortunately (someday!) but for a thought leader in a particular climate tech niche. We don’t normally get to write books for our clients, but when this one came along, I (Amelia) jumped at the chance.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

It seems like climate policy news these days is either terrible (looking at you, ‘Merica) or conflicting (looking at you, Europe). Evidently, the US’s aggressive anti-climate activity is more ideological than anything, but in the rest of the world, we’re seeing more complicated tensions at play. I think it comes down to this: climate change is one problem among many. But for those of us working in the space, it often feels like the problem — the biggest one, the one everything else should orbit around.

Most people rarely think about climate change. And when they do, it tends to rank low on their list of concerns, thanks to a bias known as future discounting, where we downplay the importance of things that feel far off.

You can see this now playing out in the EU and the UK as proposed greenwashing legislation is rolled back under the guise of keeping the business world competitive. Whether this is the right move or the wrong one, it highlights the tension playing out in people’s minds: climate (long-term) vs. competitiveness (short-term).

When the economy is struggling (the real economy — not the one the journalists are talking about), people don’t care about a 1.5°C temperature rise. (Actually, no one ever cared about 1.5°C. What a terrible campaign.) When you can’t afford a house, you don’t care if it has solar panels. When your mental health is at its lowest, it’s hard to give a damn about trees.

Climate people tend to put climate change at the top of the agenda. But for policymakers — and business leaders — it’s just one of many competing priorities. And when something more immediate comes along, climate almost always drops to the bottom of the list.

I don’t know what we, as climate communicators, can reasonably do about this,but being aware of it is the first step. We need to acknowledge that climate change exists on a smorgasbord of global issues, so as not to sound totally naive when we talk about mitigation. When we ignore the other problems, we alienate the people suffering from them and turn them against our cause.

That’s it from me this week — enjoy your weekends, and hit me up if you’ve got good book recommendations. I’m in the mood for dystopian fiction. I wonder why.

This week’s briefing

❌ What’s bad

UK government follows in EU footsteps and walks back greenwashing rules

The UK Treasury has scrapped its plan for a Green Taxonomy, a framework meant to standardize corporate sustainability claims. The major argument here is that the framework wasn’t practical. That may be true, but what’s the alternative? Businesses are now left relying on voluntary measures and patchwork regulatory guidance to self-police their environmental claims. And we know how well that goes!

✅ What’s good

Guardian’s sales team is now Carbon-Literate

The Guardian has never been shy about calling things as they are. It helped popularise the phrase global heating, banned fossil fuel ads back in 2020, and now, true to form, it claims to be the first media company in the world with a fully Carbon Literate advertising sales team, meaning that every member of the team has completed training through the Carbon Literacy Project. (They announced this in April, but I’m slow on the update.)

It’s a natural move for The Guardian, but one that any company serious about its climate commitments should be looking at. Marketing and PR teams bear most of the responsbility for the today’s greenwashed advertising landscape. Carbon literacy training is a low-cost, high-impact way for companies to stop saying things they’ll have to walk back later.

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What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: Personal History, by Katharine Graham — I read this a few years ago and think about it all the time. I followed it up with a biography of Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer — an extraordinary figure in his own right. If you haven’t read Graham’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning memoir, I can’t recommend it enough. Graham is a humble but unwavering figure whose leadership at the Washington Post is sorely missed. To that end, it’s an important read today as the media landscape cowers and squirms under Trump. One thought I’m having: Is Laurene Powell Jobs (owner of The Atlantic) today’s Katharine Graham?

📖 Article: Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us — As a big fan of books, I’m terrified about what a post-book, post-literate future looks like. Some days, it feels like it’s already here. This incredible deep dive by Carl Hendrick laments the end of long, slow, deliberate reading. Some highlights: “Not all reading is created equal. Just as not all food nourishes, not all content feeds the mind… The immersive arc of narrative is giving way to the skimmable feed.”

🎙️ Podcast: The Economic Theory That Explains Why Americans Are So Mad — Ezra Klein interviews his wife, economics reporter Annie Lowrey, on the very confusing economy we live in — one that clearly had a huge sway on the last US federal election. It’s a year old now, but little has changed. TL;DR: while the big stuff becomes increasingly out of reach (houses, childcare, healthcare, etc.), we spend more on the little stuff (restaurants, air fryers, espresso machines) — because what the hell. The way we measure the health of the economy seems to have more to do with the little stuff and less to do with the big stuff, which is partly why things look good on paper, and we’re all still mad about it.

What we’re working on

👉 Corporate messaging refresh — As our brand messaging expert, Meg is heading up a new creative project: a corporate messaging refresh for a market leader in climate risk analytics. It’s a timely exercise, and there’s no one better for the job. In the meantime, I’m knee-deep in our clients’ web analytics, looking (as always), for buried treasure.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

Amelia here, writing on a sunny Australian winter’s day. It’s the end of a productive week, the world is still turning, and I’ve got a stack of books to accompany me into the weekend.

Before I sign off for the week, let’s take a quick look at what’s happening in the world of climate comms.

This week’s briefing

❌ What’s bad

Greenwashing… or reef-washing?

Here in Australia, coral reefs are a kind of biological and cultural icon. We’re so proud of the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve also been happy to dredge it up to let coal and oil ships through it, and content to watch it bleach in rapidly warming ocean waters. But seriously, we love it.

So we get riled up when sunscreen companies (Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic) whack a misleading “reef-friendly” label on more than 90 of their sunscreen products.

Here’s the logic behind this made-up label: These products didn’t contain some of the worst-known reef-harming chemicals (like oxybenzone). But they still included other ingredients, like octocrylene and homosalate, which scientific studies have also flagged as harmful to coral reefs.

So they made up a label, awarded it to themselves, and figured no one would notice. But even if they’d been totally right about being reef-friendly, this label should’ve raised red flags internally. It’s vague. It’s a brand-new concept for most consumers. And it’s technically complex — far too complex to be summed up in two words like “reef-friendly.”

Anyway, they’re paying the price now — the ACCC has launched legal action against the parent company.

But you don’t have to be a sunscreen company to use this farcical case study as a great example of what not to do in your climate comms.

Want to stand out? Great. Differentiation is good marketing (purple cows and all that). But making up your own label — one with no clear definition, no verification, and no third-party backing — isn’t standing out. It’s just greenwashing. Especially when you’re capitalizing on something as emotionally loaded as coral reefs.

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✅ What’s good

Pope Leo interrupts vacation to talk about climate change

Climate change often feels like a battleground of political ideologies, but Pope Leo’s latest move is pretty cool. The new Pope interrupted his vacation to lead a special Mass — The Mass for the Care of Creation.

“We live in a world that is burning,” he says, encouraging Catholics to care for God’s creation. This is the second time in a week the Vatican has spoken out on climate change, and it’s more than just lip service.

The leader of the Catholic church is an ideal messenger for the climate cause. Religion has played both hero and villain when it comes to social progress — often driving community action at the local level, while also holding back broader movements for change. Today, the Catholic Church is often associated with conservative ideology, and because climate change has been politicized, that means many Catholics are now skeptical of climate action.

We could parade as many young, liberal science types as we like in front of Catholic audiences, telling them climate change is urgent and real — but more often than not, that just deepens the divide. What we need are messengers on the inside of those “out-groups”: people who speak from within their own communities, who use familiar language, and who remind people of shared values.

Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian and climate scientist, is another great example of an in-group messenger. That’s two so far. We need so many more.

What we’re curious about this week

📚 Book: The Anxious Generation — I tend to be late to the party on bestsellers and early to the party on extremely niche books that no one else will ever read (or hear about). This one is a bestseller you’ve all probably heard about, and — well — sometimes books do well for a reason. Anyone with a child or a future with children must read this book. Predictably, the backlash on Haidt’s work has begun, but something Ezra Klein said in his interview with Haidt now sticks with me (I’m paraphrasing): You could show me all the evidence in the world that says screens aren’t bad for kids, and I still wouldn’t let my kids sit on iPads all day. I just don’t think it’s a good way to be a human.

🎙️ Podcast: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism — surprise surprise, another Ezra recommendation. This interview with Margaret Atwood was re-released a couple months ago, but recorded a couple years ago. If anything, it’s even more relevant today, which brings us to Ezra’s central point: Atwood sees everything. She is like the soccer player who sees where the ball is headed and gets there first. Only she’s playing a wholly different game.

🎙️ Another podcast: Mamdani, Trump, and the End of the Old Politics — New York has a new mayor and it’s basically because of TikTok. As far as politics goes, the new media game has officially replaced the old. As far as mainstream climate messaging goes — well — it’s time governments and NGOs took note. Both Ezra and Chris Hayes (The Sirens’ Call) shine in this episode. It’s a fun one.

What we’re working on

👉 SEO & AI for climate tech — I’m writing a guide on how to shift your content strategy to deal with the challenges of AI. It’s something every single one of our clients is dealing with. As I pull it together, I’d love to hear from you: what’s your traffic looking like lately? How much do you know about how AI is affecting it, and what are you doing to address it? (Hit reply and let me know.)

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

📣 Share this with your climate tech marketing team

Meg here, it’s been a while!! Shout out to my better business half for keeping this newsletter running while I decidedly, er, did not. Thanks Amelia!

Somehow, summer seems to be the busy season at The Climate Hub. Despite that, I am determined to make this summer feel like a summer. Loooots going on. My little fam put an offer on our dream house two days ago (it’s a green house on Brockley street, I mean, come on 😭) — accepting good vibes; the market here is bonkers! I’m writing this on a Wednesday because we’re gearing up from Thursday and taking our three-year-old to her first ever music festival. A good move? Time will tell…

Anywho, let’s get into it.

This week, we’re following along with the seemingly never-ending saga of Big Tech Bad News. But Brazil and France are taking a stand against false narratives — we like that!

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This week’s briefing

❌ What’s bad

Big tech stays at it

This past Sunday, organizations including the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Votes, Public Citizen, and Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, published an open letter in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times, penned to Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft CEOs: CLEAN UP THE CLOUD.

Google’s latest sustainability report stated its carbon emissions increased 51% between 2019 and 2024. That’s an already enormous figure. Yet, a report authored by non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship found that Google’s carbon emissions actually went up by 65% in the same time period.

The report is damning, saying that Google:

• Relies heavily on speculative technologies to achieve its net-zero goals

• Presents misleading data (Google says it has improved the energy efficiency of its data centers by 50% over 13 years. Kairos argues that citing energy efficiency numbers rather than sharing absolute ones obscures Google’s total emissions)

• Opts for corporate-friendly metrics (market-based emissions rather than location-based emissions)

• Has ultimately increased its total energy consumption 1,282% since 2010

Meanwhile, Amazon investors strike down all its shareholder proposals (again). One would have required additional reporting on Amazon’s carbon emissions. Another targeted the climate impact of its data centers, and a third called for greater disclosure around packaging materials.

It’s getting harder and harder to believe that big tech will save us in any way when it’s clear they’re unwilling to clean up even their own acts.

What this means for climate comms:
If the companies selling AI, cloud computing, and ad platforms can’t tell the truth about their climate impact, why should anyone believe your climate claims? As communicators, we have to remember that selective transparency — like highlighting efficiency gains without absolute emissions — can easily erode trust. Clear, honest numbers matter more than aspirational net-zero pledges.

✅ What’s good

A joint effort to combat climate disinformation

This is a CLEAR stand against the anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-moral clusterfuck much of the world finds itself in today.

France and Brazil co-authored the “Joint France-Brazil press release: accelerating climate action.” 👇

“Launched in partnership with the UN and UNESCO, and supported by several other nations […] and organizations, this initiative is the first official multilateral recognition of the danger of disinformation on climate action. It will develop effective strategies against the spread of false narratives, support independent journalism, protect environmental defenders, and advocate for the democratic regulation of social media platforms, thereby setting a global benchmark for tackling disinformation in the digital age.”

Bravo. Let’s hope others follow suit.

What this means for climate comms:
Disinformation is a systemic risk for anyone communicating climate action. This joint initiative shows that tackling false narratives is becoming a recognized priority at the highest levels. Communicators should see this as a green light to call out misinformation more confidently — and to proactively build trust by rooting messaging in verifiable facts and context.

What we’re reading this week

📚 Book: The Known World — Feels like I’ve been reading this one for weeks. (My daughter, whose sleep patterns as an infant were so enviable I feared speaking of them to other new moms for fear of ostracism, has decided she *hates* bedtime.) This book though: a feat of moral intricacy.

📖 Article: What I Learned from My Mother and the Postal Service — sent this one to my family group chat with a one-line explanation: “This was a startlingly touching piece touching on everything going wrong in the U.S. right now.”

What we’re working on

👉 We’ve been ramping up with a new carbon credit ratings company. Part of our work together includes diagnosing current opportunities and weaknesses in their marketing funnel. We’ll follow it up with a 6-month content plan. Most of you already know Amelia and I are all up in the carbon markets, so this one is right in our sweet spot.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Want to make your sales team’s dreams come true? → Funnel high-quality MQLs and SQLs into your pipeline with a system of clear, credible, and commercially sharp content.

🌟 Need help getting your customers to understand your value? → Define your positioning, uncover your most marketable messages, and finally resonate with your buyers.

📣 Need serious marketing help but don’t know where to start? → Our 90-day ‘Rent-A-CMO’ package helps you get a proper grip on your marketing funnel, identify your friction points, and find new opportunities to pursue.

Hi folks,

The climate movement has a habit of taking one step forward and then jumping in the car and reversing all the way back down the hill. This week’s issue has a few small wins, but also some pretty big setbacks.

So, basically — just another week in the climate world!

This week’s briefing

❌ What’s bad

EU decides greenwashing isn’t so bad after all

JD Vance will be thrilled: the EU is caving under right-wing pressure. One of the cornerstones of the EU’s Green Deal — the Green Claims Directive — was designed to crack down on greenwashing by requiring companies to back up their environmental claims with third-party verification.

This week, under pressure from right-wing parties and business lobbyists, the European Commission paused work on the directive, citing concerns about the “burden” it would place on micro-businesses to have their environmental claims verified by third parties.

The irony in all of this is that the kind of environmental claims the directive targets are voluntary claims. We’re not talking about mandatory disclosures or complex emissions reporting requirements that often do place unnecessary burdens on smaller companies. We’re talking about a simple rule: if you want to slap a carbon-neutral or any other vaguely eco-sounding label on a product to boost your sales, it’s on you to prove it’s actually true.

Not that hard, really — but in a political environment trolled by right-wing extremists, anything that requires people to fact-check their claims before profiting from them is apparently too hard.

What effect will this have on the world of corporate climate claims? Honestly, maybe not too much. We’ve already seen a massive silencing on the climate front, from both well-meaning and not-so-well meaning companies. Legal directives aside, the reputational risks of being called out for greenwashing are enough to keep many companies quiet — for the moment. Still, any kind of policy action on the green claims would have been a welcome step forward, and seeing this much pushback in the EU, which has historically been pro-climate-legislation, is disheartening.

It also reminds us that climate change is not the only problem the world is facing. Right now, the EU is focused on a number of threats, and increasing business competitiveness is a key focus. Deregulation is in, so the Green Claims Directive is out. When we talk about climate action, even at the policy level, we need to make sure we frame the end — and the means — in terms that align with the broader political, social and economic zeitgeist, rather than those that appear naive and impractical.

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✅ What’s good

EnergyAustralia says sorry

It might be old news for some, but last month, EnergyAustralia (one of Australia’s largest energy retailers) admitted that it had been greenwashing with its “Go Neutral” campaign and apologised to the 400,000+ customers who signed up because of the campaign.

In a nutshell, the campaign claimed that EnergyAustralia would reduce emissions on behalf of its customers, when really, this just involved buying (usually international) offsets and calling it a day.

It doesn’t surprise me that a carbon neutrality campaign by a major Australian energy provider was a fraud: they basically all are, as I discovered in my quest to find a renewable energy provider for my home in Queensland (spoiler: there were none). What does surprise me is the legal victory and the plain English apology that followed

🤷‍♀️ What’s messy

Another study finds problems with corporate carbon credit use

Every time I see these headlines, I sigh. I actually love the VCM. A good majority of Meg’s and my clients are VCM heavyweights. I think it’s a place filled, largely, with good people, good projects, and good intentions. And yet there’s still so much work to be done to make sure the VCM is used as a tool for good and not for greenwashing.

The LSE recently analysed almost 3,000 climate-related lawsuits and found that legal backlash from corporate carbon credit use is growing. To be fair, we didn’t need a cohort of economists to tell us that.

What I see in all of this is not that carbon credits are problematic (sometimes they are, sometimes they’re essential) — it’s about how companies talk about their use of carbon credits. If Shell bought 100,000 credits and never said a word about it, who would care? I certainly wouldn’t — all the power to them. But it’s when companies buy credits in order to make claims that things get, well… messy. That’s why I’ve always been a fan of reframing voluntary carbon credit purchases as contributions rather than offsets or whatever other dodgy terms companies love to use. It’s also why I’ll be glad to see compliance markets become more widespread.

What we’re reading this week

📚 Book: Kicking Away the Ladder — I’m doing background reading for a big writing project we’re taking on at The Climate Hub. The client recommended this book as an example of the style he’s aiming for, and now I’m hooked. Here’s the idea: developed countries like the UK and the US have long preached that free trade and liberal institutions are the keys to economic success, including for developing countries. (Let’s just ignore Trump’s tariffs for now.) But liberal economic policies are not what led these superpowers to economic dominance in the first place. In pushing this agenda on developing countries, are the superpowers kicking away the very ladder that they once climbed — and might they be doing it on purpose?

📖 Article: Has science fiction forgotten how to help us dream of a better world? I’ve said this before on this newsletter and I’ll say it again: We need more positive representations of the future. This is why I loved Abundance, the documentary 2040, and the movie Her. I think we’ve all forgotten just how persuasive optimism can be.

🎙️ Podcast: The very American roots of Trumpism — don’t hold out hope for a podcast recommendation from me that isn’t either Ezra Klein or Kara Swisher. For NYT subscribers, this episode of The Ezra Klein Show explores the fascinating history of illiberalism in America, revealing that the land of freedom’s shadow self.

What we’re working on

👉 Charitable ESG comms: A large non-profit recently approached us for help turning their ESG communications into something both creative and concrete. We’re helping them zoom in on what really matters — where to focus, what to spotlight, and how to make the biggest possible impact. Let’s just say it: this is the kind of work we love.

Ways we can help 🫶

🎯 Need help building an organic lead-generating machine? → See our lead gen services

📥 Want to know what’s trending in the world of sustainability reporting? → Download our free PDF: 2025 State of Sustainability Reporting

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