This Week in MCJ (5/23/20)
This Week in MCJ (5/23/20)
Update on MCJ membership, first virtual town hall announced, several climate-related news items and job openings, and more!
This Week in MCJ is a free weekly email curating news, jobs, new MCJ episodes, and other noteworthy happenings in the MCJ community.
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Hey all,
Wow, what a week!
Although we are just at the very beginning of the transition to a paid membership-driven community, we ripped the band-aid and implemented it, which was the hardest part. And to our great relief and excitement, it was generally received very well! We have a solid core base of initial paying members, which we can now build upon steadily over time, in close collaboration with this growing group.
And now….. the real work begins. There are a few vectors we are planning to expand upon as it relates to membership:
Content
We are going to continue publishing one free podcast episode every week. In addition, we will initially plan on at least one bonus episode every month. We have our first guest locked in for a June release, and we know you will like it a lot! We have a few others we are gunning for (Patrick Collison and Lucas Joppa are two examples, in case anyone from the community can help!), and would be thrilled if we can nail down any or all of them. We put it to you though! Let us know if you have a wish list of people we should have on the show! The bar is “holy sh*t, I can’t believe MCJ was able to get them to come on.”
Community
As many of you know, the MCJ slack room has emerged as a vibrant place, where people are engaged, collaborative, and eager to make a difference. Seeing the study groups, book clubs, panel discussions, meetups (pre-pandemic), etc. that have been self-organized by community members in there has been absolutely incredible!
Directionally, we want to provide more structure/consistency to the slack room, so the volunteer community organizers (and everyone in the community!) know where the guard rails are and feel empowered to proceed confidently to make stuff happen. We have a call scheduled next week with the community organizers to start to hash out these guidelines. We will keep you posted, and if you are interested in learning more about becoming a community organizer, get in touch.
Going forward, we plan on a mix of community-organized and MCJ-organized events and programs, so we can all further our knowledge and connective tissue together! We have a couple initiatives we are in the early stages of piloting that, if they go well, we will be excited to roll out in a broader way.
One point of note is that there are over 700 people in the slack room, of which only a small (but rapidly increasing!) percentage are currently paying for membership. We want to make the paying members feel special and make sure they get their money’s worth, but we are also grateful for the people who helped make the community such a vibrant place, and get us to this point. While we aren’t going to police and ask the non-members to leave or be excluded from events/programs (at least initially), we are really centering our efforts and resources around paying members going forward. We do ask that if you aren’t paying and find that you are taking advantage of and getting value from the community offerings, that you please consider becoming a paying member. It is the only way MCJ will be able to scale and reach its full potential. Also, if there are people you think would find value in and bring value to the MCJ community, let them know about us, as well!
Virtual Town Halls
As promised, one of the benefits of membership will be virtual town halls, where we walk through our plans, give members a chance to weigh in and make requests on our direction, and also just get to know each other better!
For our first town hall, we want to open it up to EVERYONE, not just paying members. This is a big transition point for MCJ, and we want anyone that wants to to have the chance to hear about it from us, ask questions, voice concerns, etc.
This event will be held on Friday May 29th at 3pm EST. You can request to be added to the calendar invite here, which has all of the access information.
This is a grand experiment, and we feel very fortunate to be figuring it out along with you. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a long journey :).
Jason
…
📼Episodes
Here’s this week’s episode, in case you missed it!
Episode 104: Mark Lewis, Global Head of Sustainability Research at BNP Paribas Asset Management
BNPP AM is a global investment firm with approximately 400 billion euros under management. Mark oversees a team of analysts that, among other responsibilities, evaluates companies and prospective investments as it relates to their sustainability. Their analysis, which measures a company’s performance according to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics, amounts to a rating which the firm assigns to every investment. Inherent with this score is the belief that companies that have a higher ESG rating will perform better over the long term than those with a lower score, ultimately delivering greater returns for the firm’s clients. We cover a lot in this episode, including a great overview of the history and current status of SRI and ESG investing. We also talk about the path forward with the clean energy transition, ESG's role in that process, and how people like you and I can help.
🏗 What You’re Building
Projects and initiatives from the community.
Congrats to MCJer Bryan Guido Hassin on the launch of his new organization, Third Derivative! Bryan has a great thread here describing his plans, and explaining how MCJ was helpful in his process. Well done, Bryan!
MCJer, Jeremy Freeman, announced the launch of CarbonPlan, a non-profit that is working to bring more transparency and scientific integrity to carbon removal and climate solutions. CarbonPlan “helps organizations make specific decisions towards their carbon removal goals. And … works collaboratively to build open tools and resources for the evaluation and deployment of carbon removal and other climate solutions.”
Congrats, Jeremy!
🚨MCJ’s First Town Hall — Save The Date!
As mentioned above, we’re organizing our first town hall for MCJ members*, facilitated virtually over Zoom! If you’re a member, we invite you to join us on Friday, May 29th at 3pm EST; please reach out to us using the button below to request a calendar invite. We’ll be covering several topics, most important of which is hearing feedback from the community. Hope to see you there!
*please note, this first town hall will be open to all MCJ’ers, but these town halls will be for dues-paying MCJ members going forward
💼Jobs
Here are some jobs shared by members of the MCJ community that we think might be of interest to you.
Operations Manager at Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Milpitas, CA (job listing)
Sr. Accountant at Clean Capital in New York, NY (job listing)
Software Developer at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. IIASA Energy Researcher and Ep. 88 guest, Daniel Huppmann posted the opportunity on the MCJ Slack and invites those interested to DM him.
Interested in sharing a job with the community? Use the button below to let us know, or just post it in #climatejobs in the MCJ slack room.
📰Recommended Reading
Below are recently published articles and content that we find interesting and/or that were shared by fellow MCJers.
Stripe: “Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases”
Leading Climate at Stripe, Ryan Orbuch shares an update on the commitment the company announced last year to spend at least $1M annually to pay for the direct removal of atmospheric carbon. This piece was tweeted by CEO and Co-Founder Patrick Collison.
The New York Times: “Americans See Climate as a Concern, Even Amid Coronavirus Crisis”
Amid fears that the COVID-19 pandemic may be displacing the public’s concern for climate change, a report published by Yale and George Mason University showed a majority of those polled accept climate change is happening and caused by human activity.
The New York Time: “Climate Change Is Making Hurricanes Stronger, Researchers Find”
Data from the past four decades is revealing that climate change has contributed to more severe hurricanes. According to the article, “The analysis, of satellite images dating to 1979, shows that warming has increased the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a major one of Category 3 or higher, with sustained winds greater than 110 miles an hour, by about 8 percent a decade.”
“School focused on climate and sustainability will amplify Stanford’s impact”
Stanford is designing a school focused on climate and sustainability that will draw on the considerable expertise that exists across academic units, aligning those efforts around research, education and impact.
🎟Events
Past and upcoming events organized or surfaced by your fellow MCJers.
Upcoming
Study Group (Saturday, May 23rd, 11am PST / 2pm EST)
Saturday’s Study Group will focus on the topic of land conservation and restoration and will have as guest Joseph Pallant, Dir. of Climate Innovation at EcoTrust Canada. Please DM the organizer, Amy Wang, to be added to the invite.
MCJ Community Chat (Sunday, May 31st)
Organizers of the MCJ Community Chat are soliciting feedback on topics for an upcoming event. You can share your opinions using this Google Form and DM one of the organizers, Eli Kariv, if you have any questions.
”Let’s talk food!” event, hosted by MCJers Eli Kariv and Erica Du.
Sign up here.