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Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action. I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. You can read and share this edition online. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here.

We're coming up quickly on a new year, and this week and next is the world's largest climate conference, COP28. The UN-backed conference is a yearly effort towards cutting the world's emissions and adapting to climate change. It is controversial, messy and yet pretty much the only thing we have on a global level. I'm never quite sure what to do during COP week. This newsletter doesn't really cover international efforts, but its unavoidable that they do have an impact on the work happening locally. If you're interested in following along with this year's COP, I'd recommend Context News from Reuters, The Guardian's COP28 page and this scene-setting series from Vox about the conference in context of communities around the world. In the spirit of being consistent, I'm sharing the many stories that came across my desk in the past two weeks for this week's paid members bonus edition. Next week I'll be back with a free edition building on an earlier interview I did on free transit, talking to a rural community that took it on this summer.

If you want to support The Planet You Save and my wider climate reporting work, become a member here! In addition to bonus editions each month, you get digital resources I developed and access to a selection of excerpts from climate-related books. This month, members helped me pay for email infrastructure from Buttondown.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here. You can also read and share this edition online

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. You can also read and share this edition online and support the newsletter (and get bonus editions) by becoming a member.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here. You can also read and share this edition online.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action. This is the October bonus edition for members — thanks for making this newsletter happen.

As I parked on the street near one of Hyattsvile’s food forests, yellow and brown leaves fell all over my car, pushed by the wind. As the gusts died down, I heard the motorized rumble before I saw it, a man in a high-viz vest standing on a large industrial-scale lawn mower, turning in a tight circle before driving away from my view again.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here. You can also read this edition online.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here. You can read this edition online too.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action. I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here

A weekly newsletter — or hell, just publishing anything on a schedule — can be rough. Writing regularly is a grind, sure. But as sole writer, reporter, social media manager and editor of The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, sometimes it’s difficult for me to know which ideas I’m considering will hit the trifecta of being interesting to readers, satisfying personally and within the focus of this newsletter. In this edition, I’m sharing three stories I’m considering for future newsletters or potentially to pitch to other publications. For each of these stories I’ve at least done some initial research or reporting.

Let me know which you think I should focus on first after reading a little about them below. I’d like to give you a bit of insight to how I think about stories for this newsletter and in my reporting work at large. Afterwards, you’ll see a shiny-new survey tool Buttondown, my email software, has developed. It should only take you one click to vote. The regular what I'm reading links are here too.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here.

Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.

I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here.

Photo by Pille R. Priske on Unsplash

(An underground station of the LA Metro by Thomas Hawk on Flickr)

For a brief period earlier this year, it looked like my home city of Washington, D.C., was going to make all public transit buses free inside the city. That's been delayed because of fights about the money to pay for it, wider regional discord about the transit agency’s priorities within each state (WMATA operates in DC, Maryland and Virginia) and a looming funding gap.

I’ve written a lot about the ongoing transition to EVs, but when it comes to reducing emissions, public transit has other things going for it, including being less deadly than the giant — and increasingly battery heavy — vehicles that dominate American roads.

Thanks again for being a paid member of The Planet You Save May Be Your Own — and welcome to the new readers who signed up recently. You make it possible to fit this newsletter into my work week and offer free editions three times a month!

This bonus edition digs a bit into the Montana youth climate lawsuit win earlier this month.

I'll be back on September 7 with an edition about free public transit, and next month I might even get into why I have such a problem with the term "clean energy".

_{Wind farm in Montana by Ethan Kan on Flickr}

A quick reminder: This is the last edition for free subscribers this month as I take a brief vacation. Members get an edition in the last week of August - support the newsletter by becoming a paid member here.

This week we’re looking at two big movements: one in climate adaptation and one in the effort to move to a less polluting energy system.

Good afternoon and welcome to August. A quick programming note — The Planet You Save will be off Aug. 17 and 24 as I take a much needed break, and the month's bonus edition will go out to members on Aug. 31. A reminder that you can become a member, get the bonus monthly edition and support the newsletter (and my work at large).

A coal plant settlement in Michigan

Early this year, I wrote an edition about what a highly-technical and highly-contested planning document from an electricity utility has to do with climate change and how the state regulator accepts comment from all residents — if you can figure out how to do so:

This week, my latest story for Floodlight was published in The Guardian, the Louisiana Illuminator and the New Orleans Lens. It’s an attempt to answer a “How does this make any sense” question: How can insurers (probably correctly) identify that insuring homes in some of hardest-hit areas by climate change is no longer a viable business decision, but still agree to insure giant fossil fuel projects in the same exact area, exposed to the same risks?

If your knee-jerk answer to that question is “greed” or “money” or “capitalism,” you’re not entirely off the mark. But I’m never particularly satisfied with one-word answers, and need to understand how these factor into what feels like an irrational decision. You can read the whole story here, but in this members-only email I wanted to get into how this story came to be and what the reporting process was like.

(Rule 1 of reporting on a place you're not from: make sure you're pronouncing place names correctly)

(Aspen by Jonathan Fox on Flickr)

Last week I took a look at where the climate energy jobs were, but there are all sorts of climate jobs. This week I’ve got an interview with someone who’s got one of the them.

Hannah Berman is the senior manager for sustainability and philanthropy at Aspen Ski Company, known as SkiCo, that owns four skiing areas in Aspen, Colorado.

“Climate is an existential threat to our business,” Berman said. “We can see it through how much snow we have to make to get open on the same day every year… and we see that in how erratic storms are.”

(from the Oregon Department of Transportation on Flickr)

As the money from the single largest climate bill the US has ever passed begins to filter into the economy, there’s a very interesting split happening in where the biggest investments are making an initial impact and the climate rhetoric of those places’ elected officials. From Politico in January:

They didn’t vote for it, they don’t like it and they’re working to undermine it — but Republicans are reaping the benefits of Democrats’ climate law. In the five months since the Inflation Reduction Act became law, companies have announced tens of billions of dollars in renewable energy, battery and electric vehicle projects that will benefit from incentives in President Joe Biden’s signature law, aimed at expanding domestic manufacturing in clean energy and reducing dependence on Chinese imports.

In fact, roughly two-thirds of the major projects are in districts whose Republican lawmakers opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, according to a POLITICO analysis of major green energy manufacturing announcements made since the bill’s enactment.

Do you read this newsletter regularly? Consider becoming a paid member. You'll get an edition every week and help make The Planet You Save a reality.

I'm also planning a series of interviews with people taking climate action across the U.S, for both free and paid editions. Got a suggestion? Let me know by replying to this email.

Tiny local farms

Good afternoon from the suddenly-smoky-again East Coast. As a former colleague at The Chronicle who moved to New York said to a few weeks ago: I thought we left this behind in California.

But a major rule of climate change is that overall, there's no real escape. Sure, some places won't be as hot, but everywhere will be affected. Perhaps you can choose your particular version, but most people can't.

Right now, a heat dome is lingering over Texas and nearby parts of Mexico, making it one of the hottest places in the world (so far, their electricity grid appears to be holding, arguably because of solar and lots of new batteries).

Have you missed me? The Planet You Save took an unplanned hiatus because of other work. But I wanted to make sure members got at least one dispatch.

This week I’m sharing some stories that caught my attention this month:

You’re not alone

Most Americans support wide-reaching policies to protect the climate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But most Americans also think that support is far lower than it is, a recent study found. This is not a particularly surprising result if you’ve followed surveys on climate change.

Thanks! How can The Planet You Save work best for you?

There’s no reading selection from Threadable this month. This is in part because my own busyness, but mostly because I wasn’t seeing anyone sign up for the reading circles. As paid members of The Planet You Save, I want to make sure you’re getting the extras that are actually useful, and experimenting has always been a part of this newsletter. You still have full access to our Threadable circle with all the selections so far, and I may continue to add book excerpts in the future.

But I’m curious what you’d like to see as paid members that would be useful or you’d really enjoy - reply to this email with the letter below if any of these are of interest: - A) Bonus links editions like this one - B) A discussion group where you can share ideas and ask questions with each other - C) Deep-dives into a climate action subject quarterly - D) Keep the reading selections coming! - E) Something else It was a lovely weekend here in DC. Power-washer and clippers in hand, I was doing some yard work. But it wasn’t long before I felt the familiar, tiny pinch - my first mosquito bite. The mosquitoes love me, and my body hates mosquito bites, so much so that I was declared helpful in drawing the suckers away from others them during a summer vacation last year.

Remember the massive methane gas leak from a storage site in Pennsylvania last year? The one Bloomberg Green called the worst US climate disaster in 2022?

When I last wrote about it the head of the division investigating the leak from Equitrans’ Rager Mountain well told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a “top-to-bottom” review of the Pennsylvania gas storage industry was on the table.

Months later, there’s been a shift about investigations and regulators, but there are still more questions about what, if any kind of effort might be done to prevent a similar leak. This week, I wanted to follow up on this story, and take a quick look at another climate story in Pennsylvania that has resonance elsewhere.

(Above: My husband tries out our freshly installed home car charger in January)

Last week I interviewed Laura Norton Amico about her new project, Climate Comes Home. It’s in the early days, but she’s organizing her work around the idea that local communities can offer the best information for people who want to make climate-friendly changes to their own home. Laura’s project dovetails with a lot of reporting I’ve done and read about cutting carbon pollution from buildings. As she said:

When you look at how many adaptation actions are organized, you see that there are hyper-local specifics, including service providers and financial assistance, that influence the answers to these questions. And so a network of trusted neighbors becomes really important.

A reminder: The Planet You Save is supported by paid members, who help this newsletter exist and get a bonus edition with access to our low-stakes reading club. Become a member here!

(Above: Laura's single-burner induction cooktop next to her gas stove)

Last year, my husband and I bought a home after years of renting. Owning a house is (probably) a good financial decision for us. But it also offered the opportunity to put some of my knowledge on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from buildings to work in practice. If I was reporting on cities and states’ attempts to cut greenhouse gases out of homes and businesses through laws and regulatory moves, I could also get the first-hand experience of doing the same to my own home.

Thanks for being a paid member and making The Planet You Save newsletter happen each week. I know it’s not Thursday, but travel this week has rearranged my schedule a bit.

This month’s members reading club selection is a section from Bren Smith’s Eat Like A Fish: My adventures as a fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer

(As a reminder, you can read along and discuss the selections through the Threadable app. It’s free, and currently only for iPhones. Go right to The Planet You Save’s reading circle via this link)

It’s been a busy week and I don’t have all the elements I need for the newsletter subject I planned for this edition. So it’s time for a quick look around local climate action stories this week.

An update

Earlier this year I spoke to Culitivando, a community group in Commerce City, CO that is doing their own air pollution monitoring after years of complaints about the nearby Suncor oil refinery. Last week, the refinery had a sulfur dioxide release that exceeded the EPA’s dangerous standard — but not for the length of time required to official violate pollution standards.

(A lockdown protest in Wells Fargo’s headquarters in April 2022. Photo by Peg Hunter on Flickr. Advocacy campaigns targeting banks have been a focus of Bill McKibben’s Third Act group of “experienced Americans”)

In the mid-teens, the sketch show Portlandia skewered, in mostly a loving way, the high-minded liberal denizens of Portland, Oregon.

My own Portlandia moments are almost always when I go to run errands in Takoma Park, Maryland, which frankly predates Portland’s rep as a crunchy, weird hippies-with-money enclave by decades.

Takoma Park did not disappoint a few weeks back when I was standing in line at the zero-waste store. A woman working at the counter was frustrated about her point of sale system, which quickly morphed into anxiety about her business checking account. “We use Bank of America … I know we shouldn’t, it’s awful,” she said out loud, unclear if to me, the other woman in the store or just the universe in general.

Hope you all had a good end of March - I’ve had a busy one, including finishing off this story for Floodlight and The Guardian (which I’ll get into more next week).

A reminder that at the end of the month, paying members of The Planet You Save get a bonus edition with first access to a very-low-impact reading club (not a whole book! no set meeting time! Just a chance to sample a good climate change read alongside comments with yours truly and fellow readers.)

So far we’ve read selections from Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in the Climate Crisis, The World as We Knew It and Field Notes from a Catastrophe. If you want to take a peek, you can download the Threadable app (iOS only, sorry) and go directly to The Planet You Save circle by clicking here .

Thanks for being a paid member and making The Planet You Save newsletter happen each week. This month’s members reading club selection is the first chapter from Elizabeth Kolbert's landmark narrative journalism book Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

(As a reminder, you can read along and discuss the selections through the Threadable app. It's free, and currently only for iPhones. Go right to The Planet You Save's circle via this link)

Originally published in 2006, this book is bit of a throwback choice, but Kolbert's ability to explain the science of climate change with concrete impacts and human narrators is still as powerful as ever.

In this first chapter, Kolbert reports from Shishmaref, Alaska, a remote village in Alaska where in the early-aughts, residents are already in serious discussions about abandoning the town over sea level rise, becoming some of the first Americans to think of themselves as climate migrants. Through Shishamaref, and Alaska's thawing permafrost, she explains how unprecedented and unknown effects of global warming could feed upon themselves.

Programming note: Next week will be a special email for The Planet You Save members about our latest selection in our low-impact reading club — get it by becoming a paid member and support the newsletter here.

After that I’ll be taking a week off from the newsletter. See you back here in April (!). With the change of seasons I’m curious to know what climate stories in your backyard are on you mind. Let me know by replying to this email.

For this busy week, I’m sharing a recent story I published that continues some earlier work I did for this newsletter, and some really good stories from around the web.

‘Reverse Commuting’ for solar

The Planet You Save newsletter is possible in the first place because of paid members. Get a special monthly edition, access to digital resources and our super low-impact reading club by becoming a paid member.

Are you avoiding thinking about global warming?

You’re not alone. A recent survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests about one in four Americans “try not to think about global warming”.

A reminder: The Planet You Save happens because of paid members, who get an exclusive email each month, a collection of digital resources and access to a extremely low-impact climate reading club on Threadable. Become a paid member here.

(Alaska Center for Energy & Power intern Cole Sudkamp-Walker, works on a solar panel at the center’s Bifacial solar test site on the UAF Experimental Farm. Photo by Jeff Fisher.)

Thanks for being a paid member and making The Planet You Save newsletter happen each week. This month’s members reading club selection is a short essay by climate activist Mary Annaise Heglar in the collection The World As We Knew It.

Edited by Tajja Isen and Amy Brady, The World as We Knew it: Dispatches from a Changing Climate is a collection of essays considering climate change’s impact on our natural world, especially the writers’ lived experience of it. This is not about global temperature mean or wildfire probabilities, but the odd temperatures and dangerous storms that these writers’ experience; noticing how trees in their neighborhood bloom differently, and how their local produce is changing.

Heglar, a writer and one-half of the recently-ended Hot Take podcast, is especially focused on how global warming’s impacts fall unevenly on to Black and brown Americans and how climate action often follows the same trend. In the essay, you’ll see how a very personal story set her down this path.

(Recent data from one of Cultivando’s home air monitors in Commerce City)

A few months ago I read a Colorado Sun article about new grants awarded to community groups for local air monitoring. The grants, from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, are meant to help local communities do third-party monitoring of air quality, especially in areas where a factory or refinery has a history of pollution concerns. Some of told the Sun the grant will allow them fill in the gaps where they say the state is not doing enough to monitor dangerous emissions.

In Colorado, the air quality grants were awarded to seven groups, all local nonprofits or local government agencies. I wanted to hear from one of these groups about why doing their own air monitoring is so important and what they planned to do with the data. Cultivando, a non-profit that works with the Latino community in Adams County, received $500,000 from the EPA.

New England dealt with a terrible cold snap last week (after a record warm January), with temperatures dipping into sub-zero, made worse by the wind chill. The weather’s impact on energy costs and switching over to non-fossil fuels has been on my mind recently, because if nothing else, I’m currently sitting in my weirdly drafty office with a space heater going.

Despite the dust up over gas stoves last month, by far the largest factor that contributes to carbon emissions from buildings is gas and propane-fueled heating. It’s why local building codes about banning or discouraging gas hookups in new construction have been so heavily fought over.

But the main alternative to fossil fuel appliances are something that still feels less mainstream than even EVs: heat pumps. Despite the name, heat pumps work for both heating and cooling in houses.

Last week, paid members of this newsletter got an email with access to the first selection in our extremely-low impact reading club on Threadable.

I’m using the app to share a selection from a climate-related book as well as my comments and questions each month. Read along with us by becoming a paid member here.

Thanks for being a paid member of The Planet You Save May Be Your Own. In 2022, you helped me research, report and write 54 emails and tens of thousands of words to hundreds of subscribers, as well as develop the Zero Cities guide. As 2023 starts, I’m hoping to expand this even further - and paid members are are a huge part of that.

As I mentioned last month, I’m changing up how I thank you for making The Planet You Save newsletter possible.

Fellow newsletter writer Colleen Hagerty introduced me last month to using the free app Threadable as a virtual book club for her readers. It’s designed to be low commitment: I choose a short excerpt from a book, share my own highlights, thoughts and questions in the margin.

Unlike most book clubs, there’s no set time to discuss or awkward conversation because you didn’t read this month’s selection yet. While Threadable can be used for just about any book, most of them can only be done in excerpts – so the selections will be based on a chapter or two. Just read at your leisure and share as much or as little as you want. The only downside at the moment is that the app is only available for iOS (aka, iPhones and the like).

I’m beginning to gain a reputation, even outside of this newsletter, for noticing gas infrastructure.

During our home search in DC, I identified by smell, an extensive gas leak in a house that had been empty for a while, something our agent said had never happened to him before. Now, in the house we actually decided on, I often walk the same circuit out in the neighborhood to break up my day. On the walks, I kept noticing that a gas smell was wafting somewhere in front of a set of houses on our street. Intermittent, but definitely there. After about the fourth time, I called DC’s gas utility, Washington Gas, to report it.

It was a confusing call, where I had to clarify several times that I was not the homeowner where the leak was happening, and no, I didn’t have an exact address. If anything, the smell seemed to be stronger on the sidewalk, like it was coming from the street.

I immediately thought of HEET.

(Monroe Coal Plant, Michigan)

“As someone with lifelong asthma and a mother of people with asthma, I celebrate at the close of every dirty coal-burning plant.”

It’s a strong statement, but I didn’t find it on a TV ad, a Facebook comment or even a news article. Instead, it was among dozens of comments filed to an official regulatory docket.

Electric cars in the U.S. had a banner year in 2021, doubling the number sold from the year before.

But in early November 2022, an unrelated, largely invisible, leak threatened to erase a chunk of that progress on climate.

For almost two weeks, methane from a natural gas storage site in rural Pennsylvania leaked into the air. By time the leak was capped, more than a billion cubic feet of methane gas had escaped the storage site.

Methane, as we’ve mentioned before, is a powerful greenhouse gas, even more so than carbon dioxide over a shorter time scale. It’s also the majority component of natural gas. When gas is used for heating, cooking and electricity production it produces greenhouse gas emissions. But full-on leaks directly into the atmosphere is far worse: Bloomberg News estimates the November leak at Rager Mountain “effectively erased emissions gains from about half of the 656,000 electric vehicles sold in the US last year.”

Thanks for being a paid subscriber and welcome to this month’s bonus newsletter.

Climate TRACE

Climate TRACE makes climate action faster and easier by mobilizing the global tech community to track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

A brief scheduling note: I’m taking next week off and the final week of the year will be a resource edition for paid members. I’ll see you in 2023 with lots more climate action stories – let me know what you want to read more about next year by replying to this email.

Data brought them to the neighborhood, but relationships needed to grow

We’re starting today in Gardenland, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Sacramento. The neighborhood formed about 100 years ago and some residents have lived there for decades, often not having the money to update their homes to be more energy efficient. Sacramento’s municipal utility has its own “carbon zero” goal by 2030, and part of that is electrifying some of the oldest, least efficient homes in the city. Sacramento’s Cap Radio reports on the work it takes to get there.

Back to quick roundup stories for December. Next week will be the last regular email of the year: I’ll be taking the week before Christmas off and paid members will get their monthly resource email in the last week of December.

(Did you know you can support The Planet You Save at by becoming a paid member at any monthly price point? You’ll get the monthly resource email and help make this newsletter happen)

Beyond Shuggie’s

A post shared by .

The end of the year beckons. How did we get here so fast? Should we rush to finish? Or slow down and reflect?

I don’t have particular answers for you, but I do know there’s a lot of smaller stories that I haven’t gotten to this year I want to feature. So for the rest of December, I’ll be doing a round-ups of local climate action stories around the US. What’s caught your eye this year? Tell me by replying to this email

New York City schools get a little less polluted

Back in October, New York City announced it was converting 100 of its schools from fossil-fuel boilers to all-electric heating by 2030, targeting schools in areas with high asthma rates. The effort also includes switching 200 schools off No.4 oil to biofuels by 2026, and upgrade to energy efficient lighting in 800 schools.

Thanks for being a paid subscriber and welcome to this month's bonus newsletter. This month, I wanted to share some books, links and other good reading about how parents can discuss and take action on climate change alongside their children.

The first assumption is: you should! As with all big scary things, avoiding talking with children about climate change won't make the problem better.

I'm not a parent myself, but I have been the child concerned about the environment and questioning what pollution is doing to the Earth (I guess it never really wore off). Climate change is an overwhelming subject and touches on feelings of guilt, anxiety and not being in control. If parents are unsure themselves, how then to explain to their kids?

I think there's also a lot of value of listening to kids and teenagers on this — so I've included resources of teenagers and young people speaking on their own concerns and their own strategies. As a not-quite young person who still has much of their adulthood ahead of them, I and a lot of other adults need to listen to those of us who have the most to lose.

(Programming note: Next week’s newsletter is for paid subscribers. I’ll be back in everyone’s inbox two Thursdays from now, likely doing a quick round ups of stories around the U.S. for the rest of the year. This month’s bonus edition will go out on next Wednesday, not Thanksgiving Day. It’s all about resources for parents (and people with young people in their lives) about talking to their kids about climate change, from the youngest questions to the frustrated teens, but also about how they can listen back. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible, from the technology costs to the coffee I consume writing it. Become a paid subscriber here.

(Maryland Governor-elect Wes Moore, right, is expected to push the state towards more proactive climate policy. Photo Credit: Howard County Library)

The U.S. midterm elections are now — for the most part — settled. With more of the dust cleared, I wanted to take a look at the results of some key local and state elections especially relevant to climate action.

(Paw Paw by JoLynne Martinez on Flickr)

Coming across a truly joyful climate story is unfortunately rare, but coming across one that has local relevance is even rarer. Which is how I felt when I saw journalist Whitney Bauck’s short feature on the paw paw, a tropical-tasting fruit that grows in eastern North America that’s starting a bit of a comeback. As she writes in the story, pawpaws grow from northern Florida and western New York to eastern Kansas, and “boasts a soft, custardy flesh with a mild flavor somewhere between a mango and a banana.”

But these native fruits aren’t a regular staple in North American homes, in part because they are pretty resistant to the way we get most of our fruits and vegetables: at the grocery store. I wanted to talk to Bauck more about why I’ve had mangos but not paw paws, and the potential climate benefit of the fruit. This interview has been condensed (it was an exciting subject!)

(Gov. Jay Inslee cuts a ribbon for Washington state's first electric school bus at Franklin Pierce High School in Tacoma in 2019)

Coming to a school near you over the next four years: Electric buses.

Late in October, the EPA announced awards for $1 billion in rebate funding for school districts to buy "alternative fuel" buses. The funding came out of the 2021 Infrastructure act, and is the first round of a total of $5 billion for electric and other non-diesel buses.

No, it's not Thursday. This is a special newsletter edition.

Every week I keep a running list of local climates stories I want to share alongside the weekly story or Q&A, but this week's list had already grown.... extensive by Monday. There's a reason: next Tuesday is Election Day and this upcoming weekend is the start of the annual Conference of Parties (COP), the worldwide climate conference. It's a one-two punch of local and international climate coverage.

I've written before that I particularly dread COP news cycles because you get so much more of "I just read the headlines and we are all gonna die" talk without a lot of context around it. One of the reasons I started The Planet You Save is to bring some more context to the climate story -- both realistic in how far behind we are collectively but also where the solutions and changes are happening where you can see them.