What we choose to believe
I read the news the same way most people do now, in fragments, on a screen, between other things. A headline is not the same as a fact, and a post that feels true is not the same as a post that is true. That gap between what feels right and what actually is right is exactly why I write these Notes, not to tell you what to think, but to give you one more tool to think it through yourself. This same gap plays out everywhere online, in health, in politics, and in the one I want to stay narrow on here, how we treat the planet we all live on.
That belief, that a short, plain piece can travel further and faster than any report sitting on a shelf, is what keeps me writing every week. Facts land in someone's pocket, and sometimes they stay there until the moment someone actually needs them. I am not writing to save the world in 800 words. I am writing to put a small thought under somebody's arm, hoping that later they carry it a little further on their own. Maybe that becomes one plastic bottle left on the shelf, one different question at work, one different way of looking at something you thought you already understood. That is enough reason for me to keep writing.
But the same speed that carries an idea also carries the wreckage, and often the wreckage is winning. A Media Matters study reported by Yale Climate Connections found that climate skeptic posts on X grew 82 percent and on YouTube 43 percent between 2021 and 2024. About 40 percent of that content on X now frames climate change as an invention used to control people, rather than something measurable happening around us.
It gets worse in a crisis. During the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate reviewed 300 viral posts spreading false claims about those disasters. One figure from that review stood out, false claims from a single prominent conspiracy theorist during the LA wildfires reached more people on X than FEMA, the LA Times, and ten major news outlets and emergency agencies combined. Lifesaving information, buried under a claim that the fire or the storm was staged.
This is what scares me. Not disagreement itself, disagreement is healthy, but the specific claim that keeps repeating, that climate change is a hoax, dreamed up by wealthy companies to frighten people into paying more. Turn that argument around for a second and look at who actually profits from doubt. The fossil fuel industry has used this playbook before, using tactics traced directly back to the tobacco industry, whose own internal memos once described doubt itself as their product. Uncertainty was never an accident. It was, and still is, a business strategy.
You do not need to be a climate scientist to notice that something is changing. But noticing is where the questions should begin, not where they end. Ask a farmer about the timing of the rain this year compared to twenty years ago. Ask an insurer why premiums near the coast keep rising. I wrote about this in more detail in the Earth Saving Account, where I compare the planet to an account we have been withdrawing from for over a century while barely making a deposit. The numbers there are not opinions. They come from the account itself.
So here is where I land. Use the speed of these platforms to look further, not to look away. Read past the headline. Ask where a claim comes from before you share it. And if a short piece from me, or from anyone else, gives you one fact worth passing on tonight at dinner, that is the whole point. Not saving the world in one post. Just putting a few more shoulders under it, one at a time.
