Ask The Weekly Anthropocene
A new incentive to buy a paid subscription, so I can keep all content free
Ask The Weekly Anthropocene is a personal environmental information curator service for paid subscribers
In addition to supporting more of my work (for yourself and everyone else!), a paid subscription to The Weekly Anthropocene now buys you the new “Ask the Weekly Anthropocene” feature: send me a climate, energy, environment, or biodiversity-related question of your choice, and I’ll write an article (~500 words) answering your question.
Anthropocene Earth is a complicated place, and lots of climate and environment information to help explain what’s going on is available online. However, much of it is confusing, contradictory, biased, or outright false. If there’s a topic you’d love to know more about but haven’t found the time to sift through the available information yourself, this is your chance to get a custom-researched article about it by an environmental science professional. (Sort of like how the ChatGPT AI synthesizes information to provide comprehensive answers to questions, but without the hallucinations: all The Weekly Anthropocene content relays real information with links to real sources!).
Here are some example questions to give an idea of what I’m talking about (obviously feel free to submit your own completely unique questions!):
How are gorillas doing these days? (Or black rhinos, or lions, or caribou, or scarlet macaws…) Are they still endangered? Are populations increasing or decreasing?
What progress has been made with renewable energy in Iowa recently? (Or North Carolina, or Poland, or Indonesia, or any other state, province or country…)
What’s the deal with gas stoves vs. electric stoves? There’s been a lot of news & controversy recently about health risks from gas stoves, is this a big deal?
What exactly is the difference between “total energy mix” and “electricity mix,” and why am I seeing a lot more fossil fuels in charts marked “energy mix”?
What’s going on with the ozone hole over Antarctica? I haven’t read anything about that in ages.
Is nuclear power overall better or worse than fossil fuels? Than renewables?
What is the deal with methane emissions, and where do they mostly come from? Is this just cattle flatulence we’re talking about here?
Anyone who purchases a paid subscription (including those excellent people who have already done so!) can send me their question that they would like to see an article about at samuelmatey@g.ucla.edu (or just respond to this email!). I look forward to hearing from you, and thanks again for reading The Weekly Anthropocene!
Why am I doing this?
I’d love to write more The Weekly Anthropocene content. Since moving to Substack in summer 2022, I’ve been able to build out my newsletter beyond the weekly news roundup, writing Deep Dives on human population and geothermal energy, book reviews of The Rescue Effect and Fen, Bog, & Swamp, interviews with interesting people like Dr. Cassaundra Rose, Quamrul Chowdhury and Matt Yglesias, and specials on effective altruism, book recommendations and the story of 1850s climate scientist Eunice Newton Foote.
I’d like to write more interviews, more Deep Dives, more book reviews, more historical articles, and basically more of everything. For 2023, I’m trying to sustainably send out two articles per week (the news roundup and something extra), and I’d love to go to three articles per week! More people buying paid subscriptions would directly support my being able to devote more working hours to The Weekly Anthropocene, which will allow me to write more and to send out articles more often.
On Substack, a common way to incentivize this is to write more paywalled articles, visible only to people with paid subscriptions. But I’d really prefer to avoid that: I want to write for everyone, and I only want people who can definitely afford it to buy paid subscriptions. So, I’m setting up this experimental new feature, “Ask The Weekly Anthropocene,” to incentivize people to buy paid subscriptions without limiting access to any of my writing. Give it a try, both to get a custom information service for yourself, and to support more of my writing for everyone! It’s just $5 a month, or $50 per year.