Michael Thomas Profile picture
Nov 3, 2021 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
I guess #COP26 is a good occasion to announce that my team and I at Campfire Labs just gave a $60,000 grant to @theclimatevote.

Here's why I'm excited about what they are building:
The single most effective #climate action anyone can take is advocating for policy change.

@theclimatevote makes that easy (and surprisingly fun).

Every week they host an hour of action. A bunch of us get together and learn from experts like the good folks at @ProjectDrawdown.
After learning about a policy or issue we get to work.

We send personalized emails to legislators. We make calls. And we set up meetings with our reps.

In my second hour of action I set up a meeting with a US Senate staffer to talk about climate!
There are a few things that make Changemakers different than traditional advocacy organizations:

1. They put volunteers to work.

Most organizations cultivate donors and use the money to hire paid lobbyists.

Changemakers turns their volunteers into the lobbyists.
2. They go beyond "Clicktivism."

None of these ALL CAPS emails asking you to "chip in $5" or send a canned email.

Changemakers shows you how to send emails that legislators actually read.

And they never ask volunteers for money.
In my experience there's only two real antidotes to climate anxiety: action and community.

@theclimatevote offers both.

If you're looking to feel a little less anxious and get to work, come join us for an hour of action - climatechangemakers.org

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More from @curious_founder

Jun 3
China built more solar capacity last year than the US built over the last 25 years.

There's been a lot of talk of "energy dominance" in the US recently.

But energy dominance requires supportive policy. And this is where the US is heading in the wrong direction.

🧵 Image
Last month, the US House passed a bill that is projected to reduce solar, wind and battery capacity growth significantly.

Before the bill, the US was expected to grow renewable capacity by about 3x over the next decade, according to @JesseJenkins et al's modeling.
If the bill passes the Senate, annual capacity growth will fall by 50%.

This bill effectively hands China the future in the 21st century's most important technologies. Image
Read 7 tweets
Feb 12
Over the last few months, I've been analyzing data on clean energy trends in America.

Today I published a report with ~50 trends that I found in my research.

One major takeaway: The U.S. added 47% more clean energy in 2024 than the year before.

🧵

cleanview.co/annual-report-…Image
While the scale of clean energy’s growth in 2024 was remarkable, the fact that clean capacity grew isn't all that surprising.

What was shocking to me, however, was just how much of the new power capacity that came online in 2024 was clean.

95% of new capacity was carbon-free. Image
In 2024, the star of the clean energy show was without a doubt solar energy.

The U.S. added 32.1 GW of new utility-scale solar capacity in 2024. Annual solar capacity additions rose by 65% in 2024 compared to 2023 when the country added 19.5 GW. Image
Read 10 tweets
Oct 1, 2024
One of the tragedies of Hurricane Helene is how few people had flood insurance.

I pulled data from FEMA for every county in North Carolina.

In most inland communities, less than 1% of homes were insured before the storm.

distilled.earth/p/hurricane-he…
Image
Take Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, for example.

The county has 137,123 housing units.

But just 941 of those units—less than 0.7%—have flood insurance through the NFIP, the federal insurance program that issues 97% of the country’s flood insurance plans.
A recent report found that 16,306 properties located in Buncombe County were at risk of flooding in a 1-in-100 year storm.

Last week’s flood was a 1-in-1,000 year event. Image
Read 6 tweets
Sep 29, 2024
The world's largest climate and weather data archive is located in Asheville, NC.

Due to an historic climate disaster, its currently offline.
I was going to NCEI's website for a story I'm working on about Hurricane Helene and America's increasingly fragile insurance system.

Public resources like this are essential to journalism and our understanding of the world.

distilled.earth
But these public resources are under threat.

Trump's top allies and former administration officials have proposed dismantling NOAA and NCEI.

They want to gut our early hurricane warning systems, our climate modeling, our scientific institutions.

theguardian.com/us-news/2024/a…
Read 4 tweets
Sep 20, 2024
I think about this cartoon a lot. Image
Now is probably a good time to plug my work.

I write a newsletter about climate change. You can subscribe to it here:

distilled.earth
Sometimes I write about internet memes like this one about wind turbines made from coal:

distilled.earth/p/this-anti-re…
Read 5 tweets
Sep 2, 2024
The Economist just published this incredible and tragic chart.

Given how many people are killed each year by big cars, it's worth understanding how we got here.

Story time 🧵 Image
In the last few decades, the SUV market in the U.S. has exploded.

According to automakers, changing consumer preferences explain this growth.

But these preferences didn't just change naturally. Automakers, and their successsful lobbying efforts, played a critical role. Image
In 1975, Congress passed a law that forced automakers to double the average fuel efficiency of their vehicles to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985.

For a few years, the bill worked as intended.
Read 15 tweets

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