Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to everyone! ‘Tis the season for resolutions, and one of mine is to resurrect this blog. My writing is pretty rusty by now, so we’ll see how it goes. I think it’s important for us to talk about the promising but difficult transition to move to a less extractive, more sustainable economy. I would like to focus more on our water service this year as well as issues of culture, consumption, and how we value biodiversity. I hope we can have some productive and insightful conversations about local developments and newer research in these and other areas. But first I have to shake off the cobwebs!

While I am figuring out how to do that, I want to thank everyone who became a member or renewed their membership with Embarcadero Media last year, and everyone who made a separate donation. I am on Embarcadero’s board of directors where I have seen first-hand how challenging it is to operate our papers at a profit. Our new publisher and CEO Adam Dawes, with assistance from senior leadership and Executive Chairman Bill Johnson, orchestrated a difficult and significant turnaround this past year to get our financials in better shape. All that effort would have been for naught without your support. I am so grateful that many of you recognize how important quality local news is to creating strong, informed, well-connected communities.

At the same time, I understand that many of you (me included) were pretty frustrated with some of the more visible changes with the papers and newsletters over the past year. The organization heard loud and clear issues related to signing in, searching for day-old content, scanning for news on laptops, finding the most active conversations, and more. The move to a new digital publishing backend was more fraught than anticipated, increasing rather than decreasing the workload of key people at the paper. Embarcadero’s staff have been diligently identifying, tracking down, prioritizing, and addressing these issues, and I expect to see some nice changes this year as they continue to roll out improvements. I personally would love to see some form of Town Square return, though that is one of the more difficult things to do.

In the meantime, I want to thank all of you for your support. It’s been a transformative year for Embarcadero Media and I look forward to seeing our papers continuing to improve in 2025. Thank you for supporting local news!

Current Climate Data

Global impacts (November 2024), US impacts (November 2024), CO2 metric, NOAA climate dashboard

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