SLE on indefinite pause
Dear folks,
As the subject line of this email strongly implies, I’m taking a step back from publishing this newsletter. It has been a very gratifying experience for me and I hope it has brought you all some inspiration, a new idea or two, or at least some guilt-free distraction from what you were actually supposed to do.
The immediate reason for taking an indefinite break: the usual. Burnout. Or whatever. Less dramatically: I overextended myself into a number of endeavours about a year and a half ago and I haven’t quite recovered from it. My brain is slow and unreliable. While I still have ideas for things to do, my entrepreneurial spirit to act on them has gone missing in action. Writing the newsletter at what I like to think of as a professional cadence of publication has become difficult, which also turns it into a source of stress and frustration. And that keeps me stuck in this state.
Even as I’m writing this, I’m already thinking about how to reboot it and reboot it properly. More visual, more narrative, more collaborative! But these ideas are going to have to simmer for a while. Maybe something else bubbles up too. I’ll decide accordingly about how to spend my time most usefully.
Because there is also a deeper reason for wanting to step back: I don’t think the newsletter was accomplishing what I wanted it to do. When I started out this newsletter in the spring of 2019, I set two lofty goals: one, to insidiously and surreptitiously indoctrinate people working in the energy sector with a social scientific way of thinking, and two, help that way of thinking become a more integral part of the – mostly technocratic – public debate about energy transitions. Hubris, of course, but at the same time, there aren’t that many people working in the (renewable) energy sector. A couple of thousand readers can go a long way.
But I never made it to a couple of thousand. On my own, I never will. It requires things that are too much work for me: having opinions on social media or bearing witness to the good news of this newsletter in spammy emails. Fortunately, the media landscape has changed for the better. I started this newsletter in the era of the 2018 IPCC report, Fridays for Future, as well as the surging Black Lives Matter movement. Bolder climate communication ambitions were forged in the crucible of this conjunction. These movements heightened many other people’s sense of urgency, opened up a new debate about inequality and justice, and sensitized them to the social nature of our climate crisis. System change was no longer just an idea. More and more people were starting grapple with what that might mean.
In turn, the debate has shifted from a scrutiny of the technologies to save or doom us to a re-examination of the social relations that trap or liberate us. Many journalists have sought to break free from conventional professional tropes and practices. Many others also took up a keyboard and started writing genre-bending newsletters. I think it’s safe to say that social science is now a more integral part of the public debate about sustainability transitions.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think there is space for even more social science. Au contraire. It still needs to be integrated in our climate governance and ways of doing business. There is even space for popular social science newsletters! Jack Marley’s summaries of climate contributions to The Conversation often contain the energy social sciences, and it boasts some 18,000 subscribers. So there’s demand. And the supply is low. In fact, I don’t really know of any other energy or climate popular social science publications. Please comment on this newsletter if you want to help others find alternatives sources of inspiration!
I am at least, at this particular moment, not the one to fill that gap. Therefore, for now, adieu and farewell. Thank you for spending some of your time with me (and my apologies if you just signed up 😬). If you want to let me know what you liked about this newsletter, or how you would do it, please do so by replying to this email. I would gladly take that feedback into that reboot!
Very best,
Marten 🙏
PS I exist on LinkedIn, if you want to maintain the connection over there.