Welcome to Planet Days! This week, we’re doing something slightly different: laying out our plan for this newsletter going forward.
I hope the changes give you more reasons to subscribe, share, and most importantly, keep reading every week. Speaking of…
First, the most significant change is our new tagline:
A green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet.
Lately, we’ve been exploring what it means to actually go green — in posts ranging from recycling to lawns to electric vehicles — and the discrepancies that often emerge: For example, there’s little “green” about driving and then parking a 1,000-pound electric vehicle for one person.
In posts every other week, we’ll call out such discrepancies, while offering visions of a greener future. Just as importantly, we’ll do our best to navigate the tradeoffs that such a vision requires.
Tradeoffs like these:
Electric or not, cars are inequitable and dangerous, but electric vehicles are also an unavoidable part of a green future.
Nuclear power brings serious concerns about waste and safety, but it’s also a large source of domestic, carbon-free energy.
U.S. climate action is frustratingly slow, but that may just be the price of politics.
“A green newsletter in a greenwashed Planet” is also a shoutout to our namesake. Planet Days started as a tongue-in-cheek spinoff of Earth Day, an event that is often criticized for being a platform for greenwashing (a way for people and companies to claim environmental wins that do little to advance climate action).
In that sense, we’ll dive into something I’ve wrestled with for years: Not only individual green actions but also how much these actions even matter, when what we really need is structural change.
When we first started Planet Days, we did so to round up the latest climate news in a brief, accessible newsletter. Our one-sentence tagline was simple enough: “A five-minute roundup of the week’s top climate news.” Since then, we’ve gone beyond just summaries and into analysis, and our new tagline reflects that.
I’ll end with this: What annoys me about the environmental field is how much of the talk and research fails to reach the general public.
I hope that through this newsletter, we can spark discussions about climate change that reach audiences beyond the traditional environmental insiders, while still avoiding (or confronting) stale discussions of recycling or all-or-nothing affairs with veganism.
And I hope that in the process we can envision and move toward a better, smarter, and, yes, greener Planet.