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Hello everyone — and welcome back!
It’s been a while since my last podcast, but The Sweaty Penguin hasn’t gone extinct — just evolved. Adapted? There’s a pun in there somewhere.
As many of you know, in 2023, The Sweaty Penguin’s primary funder lost its funding, and the podcast ended somewhat abruptly. I’m incredibly proud of the 220+ episodes our team produced and the impact we achieved, and while I was also very excited to start the next chapter in my career, it’s always been important to me to keep The Sweaty Penguin alive and continue its mission of making climate change less overwhelming, less politicized, and more fun.
Over the past year and change, The Sweaty Penguin has been a scaled-down solo operation. I partnered with BoomPress to completely redesign the website, wrote two original articles on decarbonizing air travel and employee sustainability advocacy through Solutions Journalism Network’s Climate Cohort, and secured content-sharing partnerships with Covering Climate Now, Inside Climate News, Canary Media, and several others. These collaborations have transformed The Sweaty Penguin into a weekly hub for climate solutions and progress stories. For anyone feeling down about the state of the world, I hope it remains a place for tangible, evidence-based hope. This Patreon community has been the only source of funding keeping the site active, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who’s continued to donate through this transition.
Now that I’ve settled into a new job and a new apartment, I’m thrilled to take the next step in re-engaging The Sweaty Penguin community. Starting this month, I’ll be posting an exclusive newsletter on Patreon — sort of a written version of the Tip of the Iceberg podcast, with analysis of the month’s biggest climate story and highlights from new solutions pieces on our site. Think of it as Tip of the Iceberg, but without the skits and roasts of Sabrina Carpenter. (I’m actually a fan now. My female friends say we’re allowed to like her again.)
When Gentoo and Adélie penguins want to woo a potential mate, they gift them a pebble — a gesture that starts a new courtship. Yes, penguins are monogamous (but in the way humans are, where they also cheat occasionally). The neurodivergent community, of which I’m proudly a part, has also adopted “pebbling” to mean sharing facts and interests as an act of love. So I couldn’t think of a better name for this newsletter than The Pebble, and I can’t wait to “pebble” you all each month through new climate discourse.
I want to keep this simple, but I’d still love to see our community grow. I’m open to building on this concept a little bit, be it answering patron questions as we did in Tip of the Iceberg, expanding into Substack, or trying any other ideas. Feel free to share thoughts if you have them! With our divided political landscape and uncertain federal climate future, these conversations feel more vital than ever.
In the spirit of this week’s topic and re-engaging our community, I’ll be raffling off a signed copy of UNEP at Fifty: The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution by Dr. Maria Ivanova (who longtime Sweaty Penguin fans may remember from our podcast) to one of our patrons. Here’s the deal: if we reach 10 comments from Patreon subscribers across this post and the next one by the end of 2025, everyone who comments will be entered in the raffle. If you comment on both, you’ll be entered twice. You can share your thoughts, agree, disagree, ask a question, or just drop a penguin emoji — it all counts. I’ll draw a winner at the end of 2025. Consider it a little incentive to keep the conversation going.
Thank you all for your engagement and support of The Sweaty Penguin. And welcome to The Pebble.
— Ethan