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Hothouse 2.0

Climate Solutions  //   ISSUE  #85   //   HOTHOUSE 2.0

Hello dear readers, 

To pick up where we left off last issue, the final element determining where Hothouse goes from here involves adapting the editorial focus to the present. Come September, this project will be three years old. And, as Hothouse has evolved and matured, so has the landscape of challenges it set out to address.

Under Michael Coren and Jemima Kiss, Hothouse was initially intended to illuminate concrete steps individuals could take to act on climate change. The intention was to inspire and give readers back a sense of agency—an antidote to the paralysis and despair a lot of climate change coverage induced for years. This entailed heavy emphasis on the kinds of climate solutions a person could pursue at home, including simple behavioral changes, with a nod to their inherent contagiousness. 

Since September 2020, we have reported on varied topics, from how to change your career to work on climate change, to the carbon sequestering-benefits of eating oysters; from how to source clothes that will last the test of time, and how to mend them when they don’t. We reported on how to plan your own green burial, and how to re-wild your yard to foster local biodiversity and draw down carbon. 

At the time of this publication’s launch, the United States was sorely lacking meaningful climate legislation. Absent policy intervention, individual action and behavioral changes were a good place for Hothouse to start. It was fuel to the kinds of grassroots movements that ultimately did get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, and giving readers a sense of agency amidst rising climate anxiety hopefully also helped restore optimism. 

More reasons to be optimistic, new causes for concern

But there’s also reason to be more optimistic in 2023 than there was three years ago. Thanks to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, the United States has gone from lagging on political climate action to serving as an international model. 

But just as there are reasons to have renewed optimism, there are also new reasons to be concerned. 

Large-scale climate solutions—from electric vehicles to electric stoves to offshore wind developments—today face more direct opposition than ever before, which will only intensify in the years to come. The intended effect? Delaying and disrupting deployment of solutions for as long as possible. 

Politicians and industry lobbyists have long used focus groups to fine-tune their messaging around divisive topics, fomenting further division, and climate solutions will continue to be square in their crosshairs for years to come. Critics can and likely will also latch onto and amplify every climate solutions failure, decrying incompetent political or corporate leadership. 

The incentives for numerous stakeholders—from oil and gas companies, to politicians, to Big Agriculture—to delay climate action are monumental. 

For oil and gas companies, repurposing their well-funded and calculated communications from spinning tales outright denying climate change to instead manufacturing doubt designed to delay climate solutions has two obvious benefits: First, the longer they can delay the clean energy transition, the more they can continue to eke profit from every last drop of a dwindling supply of natural resources. Second, the longer oil and gas companies can delay solutions, the more time they have to better position themselves to make money off the transition. 

Adapting to the changing climate solutions landscape

Hothouse has previously highlighted that one of the most effective ways for an individual to act on climate change is to identify the thing they are uniquely well positioned to contribute to climate action, given their identity, skills, and geography, and then do that. Thus, as an individual’s skill set or geographic location might change over time, how they are best positioned to act on climate might shift along with their changing circumstances, too. In the same way, as the circumstances around climate solutions have evolved, I see where Hothouse is best positioned to contribute to the climate conversation has also shifted.

Given this new (dis)information landscape, dismantling lies about climate solutions is of course one important focal point. But several journalists already do this work well, including, and especially, Emily Atkins, creator of HEATED. Hothouse intends to leave the work of extinguishing these disinformation flames to those who do it best. 

Instead, I believe Hothouse can have an outsized impact in this new information landscape by identifying and articulating opportunities for systemic changes.

In this way, Hothouse will serve the emerging climate solutions space similar to the way mushrooms strengthen an ecosystem. Fungi transport nutrients and send electrical impulses through their tendrils of mycelium to communicate amongst themselves and trees, altering to sources of food or against approaching disease. Hothouse can serve a similar function, helping to strengthen the communication, connection, and accountability of the climate solutions space.  

A network of mycelium transporting nutrients, water, and other resources between plants and trees. (van der Heijden et al, 2014)

I’m especially convinced of this course of action when I consider the audience Hothouse has attracted. Dear readers, you include concerned parents as well as politicians, corporate executive leadership, climate tech founders, venture capitalists, academics, and transportation advocates from 98 countries and hundreds of organizations around the globe, from Google to Stripe. 

Many of you already work on climate solutions directly in your day-to-day life.

Time to make like mycelium

Similar to the way fungi decompose nutrients beneath the forest floor, transforming them into nourishment for the surrounding trees and flora, Hothouse will help digest complex new ideas and convert them into actionable information for people influential both inside and out of the climate solutions space. 

For example, after the publication of my investigation last summer challenging the design of the contemporary carbon credit market, I heard directly from readers who said the piece put words to concepts they’d been attempting to articulate for months—namely that carbon credits would be better used decarbonizing the future, rather than offsetting the past. Readers also said they felt better equipped to convey their work to others. 

There’s power in unearthing emerging ideas, refining them, and helping them spread. The more something is made clear, the easier, too, it is to hold it to account.

The kind of  illuminating  journalism I have in mind also includes the recent profile of Kraken, a UK-based software company disrupting the utilities industry, too. Other prime candidates for the kinds of stories of systemic opportunities I’d like to tell include ramping up production of nature-based solutions like hempcrete, a carbon-sequestering insulation material, or how we might turn to hemp and fungi to restore the world’s rapidly depleting topsoil. 

At the end of the day, I want every issue of Hothouse to contain answers to the following question: What are the emerging structures, designs, and opportunities incentivizing or catalyzing the lower-carbon world we need and want to live in?

Behavioral changes will of course remain a portion of Hothouse’s coverage. But, under this new framework, I hope to situate them within their larger context. The pain point of the present moment is less about giving individuals agency to act on climate change at home, and more about illuminating the ideas individuals can pursue to advance systemic changes and solutions within their communities, businesses, and other spheres of influence.

This is the right time to take this approach. As the Inflation Reduction Act goes into implementation over the next decade, the climate solutions ecosystem will  absorb hundreds of billions in federal and private investment. It is critical that these resources are deployed with speed and accuracy, even as backlash is likely to mount.

By illuminating and disseminating everything going right (and what could be better) with climate solutions in a clear and compelling manner directly to you, an audience with the power to pursue big ideas, I hope Hothouse can help ensure the most rapid, accountable, and effective deployment of resources to act on climate change.

Let’s get to it,

Cadence Bambenek

Editor-in-Chief

P.S. A special thank you to those of you who elected to support the continuation of this work!

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