Emily Atkin Is Not an Optimist

The founder of HEATED on fossil fuel advertising, billionaires taking over media, and what removing plastic from her life is teaching her about systems change.

Hundreds of wildfires are burning simultaneously across Canada, choking much of North America in dangerous smoke. Countries in Europe are reporting thousands of excess heat-related deaths. Welcome to the summer of 2026. These stories have probably made their way to your newsfeed.

What’s taken a backseat, if not totally missing, from these stories is the role that the fossil fuel industry has played in causing these tragedies. In 2025 alone, climate coverage around the world shrank by 14%. While this is a huge loss, it is also imperceptible when climate has so little visibility to begin with — a study found that over the last four decades climate issues made up 0.55% of all news coverage in the United States.

Something that’s way easier to track: the billionaire takeover of media organizations and how that correlates with their power to turn the volume down on important climate conversations. All this does is create more cover for polluters to continue business as usual.

So what now? We have the tools and knowledge to solve this crisis, but the people in positions of power keep failing to confront it. Is eliminating plastic from your personal life going to change anything? Can you still experience joy if you're not an optimist? And what happens if we give up? We spoke to Emily Atkin from HEATED to try to make sense of all of this.

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Climate journalism can sometimes have this aloof quality, but your writing has always felt distinctly human because of the emotion. Your feelings of anger and frustration are very relatable.

I started HEATED with anger, but my emotions have really expanded since then. They were once just a star of heat, now they’re a galaxy of different emotions. I’m angry, but I’m also depressed, apathetic, frustrated. It’s a full range.

The authentic voice came partly from realizing that mainstream media would never let me have it. I spent around six years covering climate at places like The New Republic, and the problem is that every publication has its own voice. You write in the New Republic voice, the New York Times voice, the NPR voice. In none of those was I allowed to be consistently rageful. And if I was allowed to be rageful, I had to be so intellectual about it, and that doesn’t connect.

The problem with climate change reporting is that sometimes it feels like you’re intellectualizing something that doesn’t actually need to be intellectualized. This is pretty simple. It’s fossil fuel companies destroying our future for a quick buck. That’s all you need to say.

You started HEATED in 2019, which feels like you must have seen something coming that the rest of us were missing.

I would love to tell you that I saw a shift in media happening, like I invested in Google early because I knew it was going to be the biggest technology company in the world. I started HEATED because I felt like mainstream media couldn’t support me and the type of journalism I wanted to do. It was very driven by my own feelings after maybe seven or eight years working in mainstream media.

It just so happened that a lot of people were feeling the way I was feeling, and I was just the first to boil over and do something about it, at least in the climate space. Amy Westervelt had started Drilled long before I started HEATED, Amy was pioneering in that sense. But in the Substack mediaverse specifically, I was the first climate person to start a Substack, which is now... well, it’s a place [where] people are.

Sunday Times, July 2022 via @LeoHickman

I remember you wrote about the New York Times publishing Exxon ads. That was my introduction to your work. Before that I’d hear a fossil fuel ad in the middle of a podcast episode and it’d go right over my head.

Imagine if you were reading an investigation into Purdue Pharma and its role in driving the opioid epidemic, and right smack in the middle there was an ad from Purdue Pharma saying what a great, totally harmless company they are. That is what’s happening at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR. These publications know that’s not an ethical way to advertise, it’s why they’ve all banned cigarette ads. But they won’t do it for fossil fuels, because they think it makes them look biased.

And in the last year it feels like finding good climate coverage has gotten even harder. It’s not just the advertising— the newsrooms themselves are changing.

That’s no mistake. We’ve seen a massive right-wing billionaire takeover of our entire media ecosystem. If it feels like authentic climate journalism is getting harder to find, I can show you a correlation graph.

And I don’t see the billionaire class and the fossil fuel class as separate things. In order to become a billionaire, you have to be deeply invested in extractive technology and industry. We think about billionaires’ carbon footprints as being in their lifestyles — the private jets, the compounds. That’s such a small fraction. The real impact is in their investment portfolios, and in the status quo that their money sustains.

A tech billionaire today is almost the same as a fossil fuel industry billionaire. What does AI need to work? A massive amount of energy, and right now most of the electricity powering data centers still comes from fossil fuels. You see tech CEOs investing in gas. Elon Musk’s super PAC, when he was raising money for Trump, one of the biggest donors was a coal CEO. We reported on that at HEATED. It’s all the same system.

Right, and climate coverage is down globally — but when you poll people they say they care and they want their government to do something. Those things feel really at odds.

Campaign finance. That’s the answer. Until you solve money in politics, you’re always going to have that gap.

The markets are moving toward renewables, but not quickly enough. And every crisis — COVID, now this war — has this moment where people think, “Maybe this will be the turning point.” Carbon emissions dropped sharply during lockdown, and everyone said, “Now we have this opportunity to make real changes.” And then once COVID eased, everything snapped back to the status quo. I have flashbacks to that every time I hear “maybe this horrible thing will have a climate silver lining.”

Maybe this time will be different. I genuinely hope I’ll be proven wrong. But I’ve seen this movie.

You’re not an optimist.

I’m a pessimist, but I’m not an asshole. A lot of people use their pessimism as an excuse to not do anything, because they don’t think anything’s gonna happen. Even if I think it’s probably not gonna work out, I’m still gonna work towards what I believe in. I hope I’ll be proven wrong. I want to be proven wrong.

There’s a saying in the fitness community: choose your hard. It’s hard to get up and have a fitness routine. It’s also really hard to age with no muscle, to lose your bone density, to get to a point where it’s hard to move. It’s hard either way, so which one do you pick?

I took a full six-month hiatus from HEATED in 2022 because I just had to. What I learned was that the world does move on without me. There are other people doing this. I came back still burnt out, still tired, but clear that doing nothing wasn’t going to feel any better. It was just going to feel bad in a different way.

There’s that tension between individual action and systems change. Some people will say things like, “That’s not gonna fix everything.”

Nothing you do is gonna fix everything. But I’m actually embarking on a big individual action quest right now. I’ve really struggled with this question, my whole purpose at HEATED is to expose and explain the systemic drivers of the climate crisis. But I think there’s a powerful argument that individual action can drive systems change, particularly in an administration where systems change through government has become very difficult. Capitalism through consumer action, through your dollar, may actually be a more realistic path right now than [relying on] a government completely bought and paid for by the oil industry.

That said, this type of action is only accessible to people with the time and money to do it. I’d never expect anyone with zero financial leeway to do what I’m doing, which is trying to purge my life of plastic products and replace everything I can with non-plastic alternatives.

It’s also a personal health thing. Phthalates are plasticizers added to plastics to make them flexible, and they are endocrine-disrupting chemicals. They actually mess with your health in a tangible way. And people don’t realize that plastics and other petrochemicals are the fossil fuel industry’s number one growth strategy, projected to drive around 50% of oil demand growth by 2050. This was a deliberate push. In the ‘60s and ‘70s we barely had plastics. Now we’ve been convinced we can’t live without them. So much of that is marketing. If that’s where the oil industry sees its future, I can say, that’s not where I see mine.

And you’re finding that doing [the individual action] actually feels good.

What I didn’t expect is how much it would teach me. It’s become almost like a petri dish for what systemic change actually looks like. I can’t immediately replace everything. It takes time, it’s annoying, it’s expensive upfront. It’s like I’m doing my own fossil fuel phase-out. But the more you do it, the more you see it’s possible.

The other day I threw out a plastic shampoo bottle, the last one, and replaced it with a shampoo bar wrapped in recyclable paper. And I had this feeling I always get when I throw out a plastic cosmetic thing: I know from my reporting that it’s going to a landfill, no matter what I do. That happens multiple times a month. But this time I had this moment of “is this the last time I’m ever gonna have to feel this? I’m never gonna have to have this bad feeling again when I throw out a toothpaste tube, because now I have toothpaste tablets.” It was this almost optimistic thrill.

Those bad feelings are so fleeting you barely clock them. You throw out a plastic bottle and you’re like, “Ah, fuck, whatever,” and you move on. But then you realize, “I’m never gonna have to feel that again.” And that made me want to keep going.

People often expect these changes to be really burdensome. But you’re describing something that sounds like the opposite.

It’s because we’ve been brainwashed into thinking consumerism is what makes us happy. That the dopamine hit of buying something new is joy, and taking care of things is a sacrifice. But it doesn’t actually make us happy. It gives us a hit. It’s like a drug.

What I’m finding is that I’ve been sleepwalking through my own home. I wasn’t paying attention to the objects in my life — what they’re made of, whether I actually want them. Now I’m assessing everything, and it feels like being more awake. More mindful. I also feel physically better just wearing cotton and linen and silk, knowing I’m not coated in polyester. I’m not being poisoned by my clothes. That’s genuinely helpful to my mental state.

I think this is actually how you make systems change legible to people, by showing them that change can be positive and joyful. I wish more people doing individual climate action would also connect it to the need for systems change, and just say, “Look how great this actually is.” Be honest about the costs, because those are real. But also say, “Imagine how much easier this would be if we had regulations banning harmful phthalates… if we had a government that wasn’t bought and paid for. I’m doing it myself, and it’s actually awesome.”

Last question, is there anything giving you the will to live right now?

A lot of things. I am so committed to being alive. Not because I’m an optimist, but because life is beautiful and awesome. Even when a lot of horrible things are happening, there’s also so much worth living for and fighting for.

I love a lot of people. I don’t have kids, but I have a lot of kids in my life that I love — a growing number every year. I’m in my mid-30s, everyone I love is having babies, and I keep thinking, what am I gonna do, not try to make it better for them? That’s crazy. Even if I think these fuckers are never gonna get their grubby claws off our political system, I’m still gonna try.

I also get joy from simply calling out the bad guys, even if my reporting never bags their asses. I get joy from giving the middle finger, even if the middle finger doesn’t stab them through the heart.

And also, dogs exist. My goal this year is to get my first dog. I have to fight for a better planet for my dog.

Amazing answer. Thank you!

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Emily Atkin is the author and founder of HEATED, a weekly newsletter and podcast dedicated to original accountability reporting and analysis on the climate crisis. Previously, she was the climate staff writer at The New Republic, and the deputy climate editor at ThinkProgress. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Slate, Mother Jones, and other places.