Anyone else a little hot?

Let's talk about who can save the world from climate disaster.

This email is going to be about saving the world from near-certain climate disaster. But before we get to that…

Gooood morning and happy Friday! I’m someone who admittedly cries a lot—I cried watching a 60-second TikTok about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the other day because I thought too long about Robert Pattinson’s growth as an actor. But I haven’t cried the way I did this week in a long, long time.

The happy tears have flowed like a river thanks to all of you. Since Episode 1 of Thinking Is Cool dropped, both my inbox and my heart have been overwhelmed by the support, constructive criticism, and thoughtful feedback. I can’t say thank you enough. But thank you. 

If you’re in the mood to share the love, send Episode 1 (Spotify // Apple) to a friend and ask them what they think about porn. We had a ~rousing~ conversation about adult entertainment, sex, and gender roles at the Thinking Is Cool launch party earlier this week. You should try it...it’s certainly an effective way to get to know your friends on a deeper level.

A couple of important programming notes:

• If you’re down to clown (aka talk about making porn suck less and ask me questions), I’m going live on Instagram tomorrow at 11:30 am ET to do just that. Follow me here to tune in.

• Episode 2 of Thinking Is Cool drops Monday. Subscribe on your platform of choice or risk missing out on me stirring the pot.

• Don’t forget to slow down and enjoy the weekend. Do something for yourself. Bet you won’t regret it.

Now, it’s time to introduce our topic for Episode 3 of Thinking Is Cool. Let’s rock.

The World Is Kinda on Fire but You CAN Do Something

Think about Earth like your college apartment. You’re sharing it with people you might not have chosen to live with, people whose habits might differ significantly from yours. Some days the apartment is clean; most days you’d be ashamed to let your mom in the front door.

Dishes pile up. Dust bunnies gather. There’s an inexplicably large presence of crumbs. And you and all your roommates swear you didn’t make the mess. If you’re like me, after enough of those days when your living room feels like a pigsty, you huff and you puff and you stomp out of your room and you mutter to yourself “fine I’ll just clean if no one else will.”

Our planet is that college apartment, and we’re about one warm summer away from the whole of humanity getting a “hey guys the kitchen was a disaster when I left this morning - can everyone pitch in later to tidy up?” text.

Climate change is no longer a question. It’s an inevitability. We know that building our global economy on fossil fuels in the post-industrial revolution world has been detrimental to our home planet (should I repeat that once more for Tucker Carlson?). The question now is what we’re going to do about it—what’s our game plan for cleaning the common area, and whose responsibility is it to send that snarky text?

This week on Thinking Is Cool, we’re exploring the ideas of climate accountability in our modern world. I promised you when this show started that I’d only spend time on issues that really, truly matter. None matter as much as this one. Unless we change our habits at a mass scale, climate change we brought onto ourselves will spell our demise.

I want to figure out what strategies we can deploy to *actually* make a difference because my decision to drink oat milk instead of almond milk feels pretty inconsequential, all things considered... 

The bad news:

• We’ll likely cross the threshold for dangerous levels of global warming between 2027 and 2042, per the World Economic Forum.

• More than 1 million species are at risk of extinction because of climate change.

• We have had five separate 500-year storms in Houston in the last five years, according to one person I interviewed for this episode. 500-year storms are the kinds of storms that are only supposed to hit...once every 500 years.

• The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2005, and seven of those 10 have occurred since 2014, according to NOAA.

And yet, the United States government continuously insists on arguing over the possibilities of climate change instead of facing the realities of it.

I feel freaked the f*ck out reading all that. Moreso, I feel guilty knowing that I’ve contributed to those startling statistics and predictions. We all have. To exist is to be a resource draw on the planet.

The good news: We do still have time to change our world for the better and leave it inhabitable for future generations, at least according to the incredibly bright people I spoke with for this episode. In fact, there’s an enormous opportunity (financially and morally) in doing so.

What I’ve learned: We are in grave danger of climate disaster, and millions of people (typically lower-income and marginalized groups) have already faced the fallout of our climate inaction. But...doom and gloom isn’t the whole story. We’ve actually done a pretty impressive job of getting people to care about their carbon footprints in recent years, and that counts for something.

But changing the world takes more than shopping at Reformation, carrying a metal straw, and recycling every now and then. It takes the kind of large-scale change we as individuals are widely incapable of engineering. It takes the cooperation of governments and corporations. That’s how we change our trajectory. That’s how we avoid further climate disaster. I can change my habits for the better and shrink my carbon footprint every year, but my decision to do those things won’t stop sea levels from rising.

I’ve come to recognize that the responsibility for mitigating climate change in a way that actually does something falls to those with scale—John Kerry has more of an impact than I do, and Exxon has more of an impact than my favorite vintage furniture store.

What can these scale-mongers do, then? Enact widespread policy changes that make climate inaction more expensive than climate action. Incentivize climate stewardship with $$$. Invest in next-gen technologies that can ease the transition to carbon neutrality. Propose big solutions to the biggest problem.

I’m painfully aware of my inability to enforce a carbon tax as an individual person (doesn’t mean I haven’t tried). But like many of you, I’m not content to sit idly by as governments dilly dally and businesses greenwash into another dimension.

In this week’s episode of Thinking Is Cool, we’re going to figure out what we can do to force their hands.

Because in recognizing our roles as individuals, we can fully appreciate how cooperative architecting big solutions to big problems really is. If we want to keep the lights on here (here being Earth and lights being livable temperatures), we have to start talking more.

I’ve got just the podcast to get us started.

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Let’s be real: After the year you’ve had, you’re too busy with hot girl summer to want to think about ~fiNanCiaL ReSpoNsibiLitiEs~. Trust me on this: Get your finances on autopilot now. And thank me in September.

Because I love you, I’m sharing my pre-summer to-do list:

1. Sign up for a bank account through HMBradley.

2. That’s it.

Simplifying money management and getting more financially confident is my top priority this summer. With HMBradley, that’s a walk in the park.

HMBradley, my new favorite fintech platform, is the smartest place to make the most of your money. They offer deposit and credit accounts (issued by Hatch Bank) that I’ll tell you more about soon, but here’s a little something to whet your appetite:

Sign up for a deposit account here and you can start earning up to 3.00% annual percentage yield on balances of up to $100,000. That’s up to $250 a month in your account...automatically. Go to hmb.to/ThinkingIsCool to learn more.

Deposit accounts are provided by Hatch Bank, Member FDIC. Credit cards are issued by Hatch Bank under a license with MasterCard. This is a paid endorsement.

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I wouldn’t call myself a hippie (my mom would though tbh). But I am someone who tries to be conscious of her carbon footprint. I don’t avoid planes, but I do feel a twinge of guilt for not paying to offset those carbon emissions. I don’t bring my own cup to the coffee shop, but I do feel like sh*t when I open a plastic straw.

It doesn’t mean I can’t do something. It doesn’t mean you can’t do something. We’re all human. That makes us prone to failure, but it also unites us in the fact that this is the only place we have to call home.

I hope in listening to this episode, you think about just that. We really are all in this together. And as terrifying as it can be to think that the window for climate action has shrunk in the time it took you to read this sentence...it’s not closed.

I want to hear from you.

What do you think about when you consider climate change, your responsibility, and holding businesses and governments to account? What are the biggest questions you have about climate change? Are you pessimistic? Optimistic? Neutral?

Did you post something on social media on Earth Day? Do you think putting a thirsty photo of yourself at the beach is going to “save our mother earth emoji”?

If you could go back in time and stop the industrial revolution from happening, would you? (I think about this a lot.)

Do you know anyone who still doesn’t believe in the science behind climate change? If yes, do they want to be interviewed for a podcast?

Do you think future generations will look back on ours and wonder why we didn’t do more sooner?

Tell me what you think. Hit respond and let it all out. Reply to this tweet and jump in on the conversation. Can’t wait to hear your perspectives. Stay hot, but not too hot.

’Til next time,

Kinsey

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