A modest request 🌞

Tell us how you like your solutions

We’ve been publishing Hothouse for more than a year now and experimenting with formats all the while. Based on your feedback, we think we’ve hit on a winning formula. Each month, we publish two deeply-reported feature stories about how people are solving the climate crisis—and what can be done in your own life, community, company, and country. 

The latter bit is crucial. It’s one of the reasons we started Hothouse. As our readers know, merely digging into despair around climate change generates apathy more often than action. That’s why people avoid the news, climate news in particular: 28% say it makes them feel powerless. “It’s clear from our research,” says Rasmus Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford in the UK, “that news is something that leaves many people feeling depressed and disempowered.” His data is below.

But our readers have told us Hothouse is not a bummer. We don’t avoid the bad news. We just focus on solutions. In fact, about two-thirds of you have said you’ve taken an action or changed your thinking after reading Hothouse.

In the fight against climate change, we often hear individuals don’t matter. Politics is presented as the best way to achieve a 2°C world. But politics is sometimes the last step. People’s actions and attitudes almost always change first. Then communities and businesses follow (remember all those contagious solar panels?). Social norms shift, and politicians and judges (finally) catch up with the zeitgeist. 

That’s why we think of Hothouse as original climate journalism with a way to act.

That brings us to a critical question: How do you want your solutions? In recent months, we’ve refined our editorial approach, which has enabled us to deliver higher-quality and deeper stories to your inbox. Now we’re redesigning the “way to act” a bit.

Our goal is to let you get the most out of Hothouse, share it with friends, and build a permanent resource of climate solutions for people to reference. We’ve laid out a few options below. We want people to be able to take the largest or the smallest possible step on the road to a cooler climate.

If you have a moment, please rank your favorites (it’s a 10 second survey) you can fill out right there. All feedback helps. You can see the options below. Thanks! 

• 🗂 The index card option: For those who like it short, we’ll fit our conclusion into a format that fits on an index card. It’s short, sweet, and to the bullet point. We don’t have enough space to go into the details, we can make sure to cover the essentials and link out to the rest. This is ideal for referencing the big picture, and sharing with friends.  

• 🏛 The blueprint option: We go deep. Each “blueprint” offers a detailed roadmap about a specific topic to take the smallest or largest possible step on a specific topic. If you’re looking to decarbonize your home, we walk you through it.   

• 📝 The resource page option: We catalog the links, resources, and tips you need to get you started on your way. Unlike the blueprint option, we’re primarily focused on sorting through the best information out there, and then giving you the required reading and best resources to help you take the next step. It’s less of a roadmap and more of a catalog to bookmark. We recommend organizations to get involved with, and useful apps and communities. 

• ☎️ Office hours option: We talk to you. Each month, we line up experts—as well as the editor and reporter who worked on the story—answering questions about that month’s theme over Zoom or Twitter Spaces. It’s an interactive discussion about how you can apply what you’ve learned that month.  

Got an idea of your own not listed here? Submit it to us! editors@hothouse.solutions.

Love,

Mike Coren and Cadence Bambenek

Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Mike Coren and Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.