This interview has been edited for length and clarity

The basics

Tell us about yourself.

Mitchell Beer of The Energy Mix: I’m the publisher of The Energy Mix, which is a nonprofit community news site and a series of e-digests on climate change, energy, and the shift off carbon. We currently publish four different digests per week. We’re on our way to five. And we just recently celebrated our 10th anniversary in operation. 

What was your first writing job? And how did that job influence the rest of your career?

Mitchell Beer: My first job as a journalist was at a newspaper called Canadian Renewable Energy News. We produced our first edition on Halloween 1977, so we’re coming up on an anniversary, and the paper actually survived until about 1984. And I was on staff or freelance for about half of that time until early 1982. It was just an honor of a lifetime to get to spend that time digging in and learning, you know, so much about 30 or 40 different separate, distinct renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, the economics behind them, and the politics behind them. You ask what influence it had on my career–I have not been able to stay in the renewable energy space all my life. But coming out of those three and a half years, I knew what I was built to do. I knew what I was supposed to be doing. I first became involved in reporting on climate change in 1997. And then I really knew what I was supposed to do. So, I’ve been in and out of the space ever since.

So you felt the flame inside you?

Mitchell Beer: It’s a feeling of—I mean, by the time climate change came along, I can remember at the time we were working as conference publishing consultants, and I walked into that room not knowing the difference between climate change and the hole in the ozone layer. And I came out basically promising our three-year-old at the time—and she’s 30 this year—that we would keep at it until we were done. And I know so many people in this work who have a similar story. And at some point, you generalize that out and say sure, of course, you’re doing it for the people you love, you’re doing it for the people close to you. We know the solutions, we know that they are practical, they’re affordable, they’re ready for prime time, and we only get it done if we all pitch in at whatever we can do, wherever we are situated, whatever our job is, whatever kind of access we have to a particular kind of climate solution, we get it done when we all of us have that same focus on, we’re going to do what we can.

Why write?

What is the purpose of your publication? 

Mitchell Beer: What we think we can do is deploy the best practices of journalism to drive what journalism thinks of as an advocacy purpose. And for anybody who went to journalism school, I just said something that’s somewhere between weird and sacrilegious. In journalism, you learn, you’re taking one step back. You are not doing advocacy. Even in the solutions journalism community, there is a really important and legitimate conversation about how far can we go before this isn’t journalism anymore. So at The Energy Mix, our mission statement is not some variant on all the news that’s fit to print. We’re not here to build a news empire. We expect to work ourselves out of a job by 2035 because if a climate publication like ours is still needed by then, we have a bigger problem. Our mission statement is something much closer to faster, deeper carbon cuts, but we’re not advocacy. The expertise that we bring, the subject specialty that we focus on, that decides our story lineup. And once we go out to start telling the story, it’s hardcore journalism right down the line. We do the research, we conduct the interviews, we gather the evidence, we follow where it leads. We tell the story without fear or favor. And if that happens to look bad for a particular renewable energy or energy storage or efficiency project, we think we make the community stronger to whatever extent the story we write helps others, because they all have to do this together, set a standard for the quality that everybody has a right to expect from this community.

Highs and lows

Can you let us know, what is the worst decision you’ve made so far? And what can we learn from it?

Mitchell Beer: You know, that’s the toughest question in this interview, right? The worst mistake we’ve made in 10 years of publishing is that it’s taken us so long to realize that the best solutions to climate change are outside the bubble of those of us who are already working on climate change every day. And those decisions are probably going to be made for reasons that are secondarily about climate and primarily about what people are already trying to achieve. 

There are so many examples of this, but for example, we know that right across North America and way beyond, we’re in a desperate affordable housing crisis. And if you think of a household that is just routinely having to choose between food and fuel because they can’t afford both, and now the rent’s going up again, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to go to that family and say, “So how come you aren’t getting with the program on home insulation and weather stripping? Don’t you care about climate change?” The correct answer to that is, “Get out of my life. I never want to talk to you again.” And even if the pitch to that family is, “Hey, look, there’s this tax credit,” that means they have to finance it for six or eight months until the tax credit comes in. And meanwhile, they’re choosing between food and fuel. If the storyline is, “We’re going to make this home more comfortable to live in, it’ll be healthier because it’ll be less drafty. It won’t be overheated in winter, and it’s being paid for up front, and there’s a project manager that will handle all the contracting and all of the organization and the logistics around the construction project. You won’t even have to leave your home because we’re doing it from the outside in. And in the end, you won’t be choosing between food and fuel anymore because you’re not paying for fuel, your energy bill is down to 10 or 20 bucks a month instead of the 100 that it might have been before.” That turns the story on its head. And the key point is that I’ve just described a climate story. I’ve just described the climate change message and solution without using any of our standard “C” words like climate and crisis and carbon, which means it actually makes sense to somebody who didn’t already wake up this morning thinking about climate change. 

The challenges of journalism

What is your opinion on the publishing industry right now? What do you think are the current challenges that the industry is facing these days?

Mitchell Beer: There is no business model, really. You know, I think it’s better than it was five and ten years ago, but we’re trying to figure out where the revenue comes from, trying to figure out what are the ethics around different revenue streams. You know, at the extreme, and certainly in the climate space, there are publications that are just getting shamelessly funded by the fossil fuel industry and maybe kind of sort of disclosing that in fine print or not disclosing it at all versus being more upfront about how you fund yourself, however you go about it, and then knowing that that’s going to trigger some tough conversations, with critics saying, “So how can we believe you with the way you’re funded?” 

The first piece of that is we just disclose it so that you can ask us that question, so we can have that conversation, and here’s how we protect the operation. I think it’s useful to make the point that traditional journalism—and some of us remember it—was in no way pure. 

When I was in journalism school, we learned about Lord Thomson of Fleet, who owned an inordinate number of Canadian newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s. And his attitude about news was that its only purpose was that it was the stuff you put between the advertising. People in the Thomson chain were well-trained, and they knew what they needed to do, and they tried to keep it independent. No one will convince me that management never had influence in Thomson or anywhere else. So this has always been an issue in journalism. It’s tougher now because traditional revenue models have blown up. We’re being pressed by disinformation, pressed by misinformation, all of that augmented by AI. 

And it’s everywhere. I can’t even begin to imagine what the United States is going through when misinformation can take the form of these claims that the January 6th insurrection was wonderful people having a picnic on Capitol Hill. Tell that to the families of the police officers who were murdered by those terrorists. And yet you’re in this working environment where everything is subject to question, nothing is trusted. And very often, journalists are threatened or worse for doing their job. All of us face all of that, and nobody said it was going to be easy. But it’s tough right now.

One thing that I saw recently that really gave me hope, and maybe a pathway for sort of stabilizing and valuing one of the aspects of news that has really been lost lately—we covered a UCLA study about three or four months ago where they found that public support for and interest in infrastructure projects really increased when it was reported by local news. And sort of through our lens, this wasn’t specifically about green infrastructure. Obviously, I’m curious to know how it applies to anything that’s about climate solutions. But the storyline is that, if you’re sitting in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and you hear that the administration is putting $7.3 billion into some new piece of the Inflation Reduction Act or the infrastructure bill, your reaction often is going to be, “Okay, their hands are in my pocket again.” 

However, if you’re sitting in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and the story is, “We’re getting $1.2 million or $500,000 for this pedestrian bridge that will mean that we can cut our daily commute by half an hour each way, each day, we can walk instead of driving. It’s easier, it’s safer, it’s really pleasant because I always loved that body of water that the bridge goes over, I could just never get there because I never had time because I was so busy driving to and from work. And by the way, it’ll have a bike lane, so my daughter will be safe getting to and from school and won’t have to inhale diesel fumes on a school bus that hasn’t been electrified yet.” So that $500,000 is going to be a hell of a lot more compelling to somebody than the big-picture dollar amount that the White House publishes. 

But where are the local media to tell that story? The bad news is that they’ve all been trashed and hollowed out. The good news is there’s a really obvious solution there. And it’s not just to get locally focused infrastructure reporting. It’s the importance we bring as a profession, as an industry, to building and sustaining community. And I don’t mean any of that as PR fluff. The story might just as well be, “That damn bridge was such a great idea, but the tender was corrupt.” Local media tells that story as well. Localizing it is something that’s been lost. Identifying the fact that it’s been lost is the first step in getting it back, and it’s one of the first steps in getting our communities back. 

There was this era when everything was just like “go global,” and now communities and society are coming back to the forefront.

Mitchell Beer: When I was in journalism school– too long ago now–what we learned was local always outweighs national, national always outweighs international. And I can so clearly remember thinking, “Oh, yeah, yeah, our generation is going to be different because international dynamics, international issues do matter.” It makes it a lot more challenging, but I think it’s better than not, that we have access to all this international news. We can see in a heartbeat what’s going on around the world. It’s really important. And we’ve lost so much by losing local news. And I don’t think it has to be either/or.

Choosing syndication

Can you tell me why you decided to partner with Newstex? 

Mitchell Beer: To be honest, the one thing that we’re looking for is that wider reach. It’s nice to receive a revenue report once a month, but really, our goal is to get the news as far and wide as we can. It’s of secondary importance to us whether somebody ever finds their way to our news site. If they find a story that they can pick up and run with and do something with that results in faster, deeper carbon cuts and leave no one behind—I don’t care if they even know we exist. Seriously. Being with Newstex, it opens our content to a wider community.

Mitchell Beer is founder and publisher of The Energy Mix, a non-profit community news site and e-digest series on climate change, energy, and the shift off carbon. He traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency to 1977, in climate change to 1997, and he delivered a TEDx Ottawa talk in October 2019 on how to build wider, more constructive conversations on climate change and the energy transition. A proud moment was building a model wind turbine from wooden stir sticks with his then-11-year-old daughter, and improv comedy practices have often been the best part of his week. He received the Canada’s Clean50 Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.