Six months in, how’s it going?
Newsletter update, stats, and a couple pitches
Today’s newsletter is different from my usual ones – an update and a couple appeals.
This week marks six months since I launched this Substack newsletter. Been an interesting experience. Having this newsletter and seeking to provide you folks with weekly content and analysis has forced me to be a little more disciplined about writing. Some posts are full articles, while others provide a hodgepodge of news and action items I think are worth sharing. You can see the outcome of those efforts listed on my Substack webpage here.
I invite you to scroll through my posts as a reminder of what I’ve written (or for newish subscribers, check out the archive of what I’ve shared).
There are now just over 4,600 subscribers to this newsletter, with a few more joining every day. And each of my newsletters gets about 5,000 views. But only 2.4% of you are paid subscribers. My gratitude to those of you who have taken that step. I’m told that’s a pretty good paid subscription conversion rate for Substack, particularly for a fairly new newsletter (the median conversion rate is 3%). As you know, for better or worse, I’ve chosen to make all my posts free – no gimmicks or paywall for select articles to try to entice more paid subscribers. My orientation is to make what I write as easily and widely accessible as possible.
That said, if you find my weekly posts informative and helpful, and your finances permit, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
2026 has so far been a year of reflecting and regrouping for me. As many of you know, I spent 22 years leading a public policy think tank (a gig I left in late 2018). Then, last December, I wrapped up the five-year Climate Emergency Unit project (that initiative was always intended to be a time-limited experiment). The mission of the CEU was to take the emergency ideas in my book – A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (published in 2020) – and initiate joint campaigns and coalitions behind those transformative solutions. We had some modest successes (and I loved working with that team), but as you all know, climate progress in Canada has been mostly going backwards of late. And our commitment was to stop doing what isn’t working. Hence the need to take a step back, reassess and plan next steps. I’ve got another book idea (more on that another time), and some former CEU colleagues and I are cooking up plans for a new media project (but that will take some time to launch).
For now, I’m making my living as a freelance writer, speaker and occasional consultant. Which is why, if you appreciate my writing, I invite you to become a paid subscriber.
Book me as a speaker
Also, if you work or volunteer with an organization looking for a speaker to address the climate and other crises of our time, please consider inviting me.
In recent months, whether in person or by video, I’ve had the pleasure of giving speeches to municipal leaders at the Elbows Up for Climate conference, the Passive House Canada annual conference, the BC First Nations Leadership Council climate conference, the BC Teachers’ Federation, Pacific Northwest Climate Week, Apathy is Boring, the Vancouver Public Library, the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, and students at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
I really enjoy giving talks that draw on the material I write about in this newsletter, and I’m pretty sure the audiences like ‘em too.
If your organization is interested in booking me for a forthcoming event, or you want to read what others have said about my past talks, please visit my webpage “Book Seth as a Speaker” here, or shoot me an email at: seth@sethklein.ca
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That’s all for now. I’ll have a regular newsletter with fresh content in a couple days. Thanks!