Readers of The Shatzkin Files might be interested in two current posts in other places. One carries my byline and is not about publishing. The other is an extensive interview with me about “what if Barnes & Noble disappeared?”
The Barnes & Noble piece is a Nathan Bransford blogpost. It is totally relevant content for regular readers of The Shatzkin Files.
The other, published on Medium, is not about publishing or my personal life at all, which are the only topics here. It is part of my new endeavor of climate change activism, which is largely a joint effort with another publishing veteran, Lena Tabori of Welcome Entertainment.
Lena and I want to build an “on-ramp” to get people involved in the climate fight, with curated facts in context to inform the newly-interested and a directory of the organizations and initiatives that can use more help. That will be done through an ambitious web presence for which we are gathering the material now and which we hope to launch by year end at climatechangeresources.com.
This piece, “Changing the political environment: taxing carbon by the ton and refunding the money by the person”, is my take on the ironic politics of “carbon fee and dividend”, a concept in which fossil fuels are “taxed” with the receipts being refunded to the taxpayers. Interesting politics arise because a climate-activist organization and a Republican market-solutions group have proposed strikingly similar proposals to do this. My contention is that a critical component is missing from the conversation on both sides and, for my money, either proposal, or any conceivable compromise between them, would be worthy of support.
Writing about climate change and the politics around it is a big part of my future. I will put those pieces on Medium until the site I’m working on with Lena is operational.