What Counts
How are we doing in this climate-fight thing? We have plenty of ways to measure.
Even if you are not a baseball fan, you probably heard about the 2025 World Series between the LA Dodgers and the underdog Toronto Bluejays. In the series and in individual games (especially the final), the Jays often looked as though they were going to win ... but they didn't. Glory or flaming defeat? Fame or shame? You couldn't tell, moment by moment, which it was going to be.
The climate fight is like that, too. Stats all over the place. Failures, successes, stories of glory and stories of greed. While it's all in progress, can you really tell how it's going to turn out?
We think you can. But you have to be careful — especially in social media — to look beyond things that confirm your world view. Social media algorithms are lurking everywhere, and they aren't helpful.
Many positive measures
Even though SweetLightning covers the facts behind climate news, we believe positive and hopeful stories are extremely important. We emphasize them because they show the fight can be won. They highlight the efforts of brave and clever people who are committed and inventive and entrepreneurial and can make a difference.
We like these positive stories so much that we have an entire menu dedicated to them on our website: Hope. Do we emphasize positive stories too much? Do we create a false sense of optimism merely by our optimistic bias?
Probably. So ....
Our measurements
To make sure that you get a balanced, empirical sense of progress on energy and the environment, we are constantly digging deep into verified statistics. As often as possible, we use peer-reviewed information from highly-cited sources. We always have a little reading list at the end of each article so you can see how and where we got our information. And we try to put these statistics in clear, easy-to-read graphs and charts.
Now collected together
As of today, we have a new menu addition on SweetLightning.eco: Measurement. It will show you all the articles we have published that use objective, well-accepted, and often peer-reviewed facts.
Click here to see all our measurement articles.