Toasting You, Substack and Legacy Media

Reflections on environMENTAL's freshman campaign on Substack

As professionals working in the environmental space for decades, we’ve struggled watching the impact fear mongering and panic over the environment and climate change have had across the world. Spending trillions on wind, solar and other forms of “alternative” energy have only slightly offset increases in consumption of oil, natural gas and coal, not replaced them. The costs, and the opportunity costs, have largely been shoved under the rug.

We’ve gnashed our teeth and muttered under our breath about what good those funds could do to provide food, clean water, basic sanitation and electrification for billions of people around the world living in poverty. Endless domestic examples like the mine tailings debacle in the Animas river in Colorado, drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and more than 1,000 unresolved Federal Superfund sites in the U.S. prove we have no shortage of urgent domestic risks to human health and the environment that could be improved or resolved for a fraction of what has been spent on “climate change”.

Our founder/head writer had for years been thinking about a way to push back against modern environmentalism’s worst abuses, wastes of resources and the consequences they impose on the world’s poor. And, to expose the element within it that dares use noble and important human pursuits like the desire for health, safety and a vibrant natural world for the lowest of political aims - in particular, ideologies that have left nations in ruins and 100 million in graves in the 20th century alone.

In spring 2022, a friend sent us a link to an article on an internet publishing medium with which we had only a passing familiarity. The author’s ability to convey complex concepts at the intersection of energy, economics and environmental policy with amazing simplicity, depth and conciseness blew us away. A few days later we subscribed immediately after reading a second erudite piece by Doomberg on Substack.

Over the summer and fall of 2022, we increasingly admired the quality of Doomberg’s content, and that of several other content creators on the Substack platform. An energy writer whose work we’d read for years, Robert Bryce, set out on his Substack journey in November 2022. We developed an appreciation and affinity for the platform, its look and feel, the diversity and heterodox courage of its many authors.

Around Thanksgiving last year, the thought occurred to our founder: what if the way to push back against neo-environmentalism’s worse excesses was through the written word, using this amazing new media platform Substack?

That is the simple story of how environMENTAL was born. Blame Substack first and Doomberg second.

Armed with nothing more than a laptop and the desire to try use our experience to help avoid a slow-motion trainwreck we’ve seen coming for years, we set out to see what would happen just over a year ago, on December 10, 2022. We had no professional writing experience, no email list to upload, and no idea what to expect. Subscriber count: 0. Followers on Twitter: 0. We were literally building our own cabin in the wilderness with a hand saw.

Over the course of the ensuing 54 weeks we published 30 articles. We covered topics ranging from the consequences of Europe’s misbegotten energy, economic and environmental policies coming home to roost and harming the developing world, to PFAS, and the unsurprising travails of the wind and solar industries worldwide. We experimented with stories about things that have bothered us for years (the “precautionary principle”, “sustainabilchemy”, corn ethanol). And we wrote stories related to current events (COP28, Argentina’s new libertarian President).

The process of choosing topics, research, writing, editing, selection and placement of images, etc. were all brand new to us (and frankly, still are!). We quickly found that as mediocre as we are at writing, we’re even worse at marketing and social media. It’s not obvious we would have ever figured out how to use Twitter/X effectively even if Elon hadn’t scrambled links to Substack content.

But a funny thing happened. We started gaining subscribers, slowly but consistently.

We were encouraged reading the bios of every new subscriber who listed theirs. We noticed a steadily growing number of engineers, executives from industrial concerns, finance professionals, and even some think tanks, energy writers, and academics we respect among our subscribers. And, we read each and every comment to see what we could glean from our readers.

We are pleased to report the results of our freshman campaign on Substack. What started as an idea now has the support of 1,562 subscribers and growing.

We set out to contribute to the discussion at the intersection of environmental, energy and economic policy even beyond our U.S. base. Wikipedia lists 88 countries and territories in which English is either an official, administrative, or cultural language. We are pleased to report that environMENTAL is read in virtually all of them.

To our readers and subscribers, thank you for your support. To the dozens of readers who have pledged annual/monthly paid subscriptions, we are truly honored and humbled by your offers. (When we started, we honestly had no idea that Substack even placed a “pledge” button on free Substack content until your generous pledges and kind words of support started showing up! When we figured it out by seeing it on a friend’s unsubscribed phone, we scrambled around our dashboard trying to figure out how to remove it!).

To our partners at Substack, thank you for the amazing platform and the vision and courage to create it. Both will be necessary to defend it.

And finally, to the advanced world’s legacy media, thank you. Some might argue we owe more you than all of the above, for what Doomberg wisely notes as a “market inefficiency” that opened a door for all of us (at your expense). For that, we are most grateful and wish you continued success in 2024.

Thanks also to other Substack content creators at the crossroads of the energy, environmental, and economic dialogue, who restacked our posts, offered a kind comment, and even recommended us to your readers. We’re grateful and honored.

Here’s what you can expect from environMENTAL in 2024 and beyond.

For 2024, we will continue to publish two, occasionally 3 articles per month. 2024 will be our founder and head writer’s last year before retirement, and the timing of our launch was not accidental. We are still learning, and will experiment with different publication lengths, formats, and topics. We will authentically strive for continual improvement. We are not publishing for quantity to feed rankings or algorithms.

We will not shy away from controversy, nor will we descend into click-bait fear mongering to drive subscriber numbers. We have been fortunate to live our lives without being infected with the “disease of more”, and this project will be no exception.

Every word in every post will be the authentic words of our head writer. We have never used AI in any post, and if we ever use it in the future, it will be purely for background research.

We will never take advertisements or sponsorships. Absolute editorial freedom is a first principle. We will live or die by our own efforts and words.

While we work to refine and improve environMENTAL, we will continue to provide our content free for most of 2024. We will give subscribers ample heads up if/when we decide to move to a subscription model late next year. If we do so, it will be at a modest price, and will always be free to university students. Any monetary value we ever receive from this project will be a value-for-value exchange directly with our subscribers. We will be reader supported.

If money were our primary motivation, we’d simply continue to work a few more years in our present roles. This project has always been, and will always be, about something else.

The consequences of bad energy, environmental and economic policy take the worst toll on the world’s poorest, everywhere, always. We see green shoots of reason and logic beginning to acknowledge the effects of such policies over the last two decades. A return to the laws of physics and economics is slowly starting to break out across the western world. Our goal is to help hasten that process by providing a different perspective, with the facts to counter a narrative that has run amok without being properly held to account for far too long.

Thank you joining us and for your support in that mission. Happy New Year. We’ll see you in January!

- Team environMENTAL

We’re eager to hear what you thought about our first year on Substack and what we could do better. Leave us a comment. Your input matters!