Say "Happy birthday, Green Juice!"
This week marks the one-year anniversary of launching our little newsletter.
It's been so much fun and so much work. I'm enormously proud of what we cooked up this year—48 freaking posts! Every one a labor of love (and brain sweat, and body sweat, and occasional tears).
It occurs to me that most of our subscribers weren't around for the early days. You had to be there, man! Dr. Aarati and I were dropping weekly knowledge about Cool Shit and Big Dystopia into an abyss populated by supportive friends and family.
So as a birthday present, I thought it'd be nice to highlight some of our best juvenilia for anyone who missed it the first time around.
Afterwards, I'll conduct a weird little interview with myself about how I'm feeling re: the project (p good), my mental health (p bad), and tease some of what we've got in store for year two (videos! merch?!).
First, two quick announcements:
- Green Juice is henceforth moving to a biweekly (every other week) publishing cadence. More on this below.
- Abby the intern has accepted a full-time position at Green Juice! Yes, my partner and I are adopting Abby, even though she continues to be highly disruptive in the workplace, indeed is walking on my keydbnsard at this very moment. We're still negotiating her title (senior intern?) and treats bonus. Welcome to the family, Abby!!
Right-o. Let's look back at it, shall we?
1. Magnet stoves with built-in batteries
The first Green Juice post ever covered a new category of electric stove: the induction stove with a built-in LI battery, also known as a wizard's magnet stove. These powerful puppies offer several advantages: they don't require 240 volt outlets—you can plug them into any ordinary 120v outlet and the battery will make up the voltage difference—and the battery allows you to turbo-charge your cooking. Boil a pot of water in under a minute!
As luck would have it, Electra, the Brooklyn-based brand featured in our post, recently announced they're finally ready to ship stoves. Order yours before the global fossil fuel trade collapses.
Covered in this article:
- How induction uses magnets to generate heat
- Three companies producing beautiful, powerful induction+battery stoves
- A cheap but effective induction cooktop that's perfect for renters
2. Making sense of energy metrics
"Wha da fuq is a gigawatt?" If you've ever asked yourself this question, know that you're not alone. Contextualizing energy metrics—watts, kilowatt-hours, volts, et al—is a big barrier to better understand the world of clean energy.
When I started Green Juice, I barely understood this stuff myself. So I forced my friend Danny, a former math professor, to teach it to me like I was a dull child. The resulting three-part series is surprisingly readable, with fun mnemonic devices aplenty and some of my favorite Dr. Aarati illustrations.
Covered in this series:
- What is a watt, exactly?
- The difference between power and energy
- How much clean energy the U.S. needs to build to reach net-zero
3. Is geothermal the future of clean energy?
You can make a real case that advanced and/or enhanced geothermal energy—i.e. drilling into the Earth's crust to unlock infinite stores of renewable heat, which we can pump to the surface to generate electricity—will someday be a top producer of clean energy.
Pioneered by former oil and fracked gas engineers, this nascent technology is quickly getting cheaper and more efficient, with real-world deployments popping up at home and broad. If you're into the whole "America should have a functional clean energy economy that's not totally dependent on China," thing, then homemade geothermal systems could be our best bet.
Covered in this series:
- How the Earth was formed and why it's so freakin' hot down there
- What fracking actually is and how the tech is helping to unlock clean heat
- A bunch of the geothermal startups doing crazy shit: diamond-tipped drills, rock-melting lasers, and fully enclosed underground radiators
4. The surprising, infuriating world of investor-owned utilities
If Big Oil and Big Gas are the clean energy transition's biggest opps (they are), Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs) aren't so far behind.
70% of the U.S. population has zero choice as to which distribution utility we use. And yet IOUs remain shadowy, profit-driven corporations rubber-stamped by corrupt regulators. They would seriously prefer it if no one knew what they're actually getting up to.
Fuck that! As our energy bills continue to skyrocket, everyone ought to know the basics about how utilities work, how and why they actively thwart renewable energy projects, and what we can do to change the system.
Covered in this series:
- The weird way distribution utilities make huge profits
- How to read your utility bill
- Whether you should sign up for a clean Energy Service Company (ESCO)
5. Batteries will save the world
Humanity is on the precipice of the Age of Batteries, an electrified, pollution-less future in which nearly everything in our society is battery-powered—our energy grid, our transportation, and our homes. But how'd we get here? Why are batteries the best solution? Should you buy a home battery? And are they really safe?
Covered in this series:
- What a battery-powered society might look like
- The most popular battery chemistries and why they matter
- Energy density and how dense batteries can theoretically get
6. The grid is about to collapse. Microgrids may be the answer.
America's energy grid is old, poorly designed, and incapable of scaling up at the speed the energy transition demands. Thankfully, an equitable solution exists. Inspired by the evolution of the Internet from a centrally controlled, top-down system to a massively dispersed array of nearly infinite nodes, inter-nested clean energy microgrids are a utopian vision of energy resilience that just might become reality.
If you make it to part 3, there's a fun extended metaphor about forests, elves, and mushrooms in store.
Covered in this series:
- How our top-down energy grid functions today
- Good ideas to fix the grid that won't work
- What we can learn from the mycorrhizal fungal network
7. Heat pumps are the future of heating and cooling our homes
You've heard of heat pumps... but did anyone bother to explain how they work, why they're green, or that they deliver far more comfort than traditional fossil fuel-powered heating and cooling?
If not, Green Juice has you covered. Check out part 2 of this series to take our heat pump quiz: Which heat pump are you?
Covered in this series:
- How heat pumps move heat rather than generating it
- The four varieties of heat pump
- Futuristic new heat pumps that double as thermal batteries
8. Will plug-in solar panels power up New York?
Right now, 28 states and Washington, D.C. are considering bills that would legalize plug-in solar, also known as balcony solar. New York is one of them.
These are solar panels you can buy at Costco, set up yourself, and plug directly into a wall outlet... and start producing your own clean energy, with no interconnection approval or professional installation required. Say goodbye to six months of permitting bullshit!
But how much energy can a couple 400 watt panels produce? How many bucks will they shave off your utility bill? Click to find out! And then learn how you can help advocate for plug-in solar in your state.
Covered in this series:
- Why millions of Germans are installing dirt cheap, plug-in solar panels
- How much power plug-in solar could theoretically generate for NYC
- The difference between standard vs. Time-of-Use electricity rates
9. Move over, Electric Vehicles. It's time for Electric Aviation.
As battery technology continually improves at an incredible clip, what once seemed impossible has quickly materialized. Battery-powered aircraft are flying all over the world right now. ePlanes and eVTOL (Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing) offer a slew of advantages over conventional gas-guzzling planes. Is it just a matter of time before fossil fuel-powered aviation is a thing of the past?
Covered in this series:
- The different styles of electric aircraft and how they work
- The companies vying to own the future of electric air travel
- The cozy relationship some ePlane companies maintain with the military
10. Public power is the only real solution to the utility bill crisis
Utility bills are going haywire all over the country and nobody is offering a real solution... except for us ecosocialists, that is. We know the only way to permanently drive down utility bills is to invest in publicly owned renewable energy projects and to municipalize the private utilities. The former is the cheapest way to build new electricity generation in the world. The latter ends our reliance on natural gas and allows us to make necessary, low-cost repairs to our aging grid infrastructure.
I'll say it again for the skimmers: publicly owned renewables and publicly owned utilities are *the only* way to climb out of this hole.
Covered in this series:
- What public power is, what it isn't, and how we can get more of it
- How electricity gets priced, bought, and sold at market
- Why the New York Power Authority could be the answer to NYC's prayers
Goddamn, we've covered a lot of ground in a year!
Let's wrap this up with a spot of auto-interviewing.
Q: Why are you switching to publishing every other week?
A: There are a number of reasons why we decided to switch up the cadence. One is that researching, writing, editing, publishing, and promoting Green Juice is a full-time job that pays effectively nothing after expenses. In order to keep this going for another year, I need more money and I need more time.
Speaking of which, today is a great day to *UPGRADE YOUR MEMBERSHIP* to a paid plan (just log into your account!), and/or to stuff some cash in the Solidarity Tip Jar.
Q: What will you do with more time?
I'd love to read a book again someday. And get my ass back in the gym. But I mostly plan to use the time to make embarrassing videos for the blog to deliver our message to the illiterate masses. I'll also probably do even more DSA shit. Join DSA.
Q: So you didn't just run out of stuff to say?
A: No! I have years worth of material bouncing around in my brain like a damn DVD logo. A few things I plan to write about this year:
- A whole month on China
- High-speed rail in America
- Breakthroughs in hydropower, thermal storage, and agrivoltaics
And a whole lot more! After I've rested.
Q: How burnt out are you?
A: Somewhere between healthily charred and scraping the soot off my brain with a butterknife. Dr. Aarati is a few illustrations away from a repetitive stress injury. It's been a lot. In addition to Green Juice, I put something like 20 hours a week into my work as an Ecosocialist cochair. I feel really fortunate to be in a position where I can do all this, but I gotta make the lifestyle more sustainable.
Q: Has your commitment to Green Juice soured?
No! Fermented a bit, maybe.
Q: You mentioned your mental health in the intro...
A: Yeah.
Q: You said it's "p bad"?
A: I've been neck-deep in climate change news every day for a year and half straight. It takes a toll. But I'm hanging in there! Huge shoutout to SSRIs, cannabis, and Taskmaster.
Q: How has Green Juice changed?
A: Green Juice started off as a blog about cool clean energy technology that took pains to avoid ever directly mentioning climate change. The goal was to teach myself this stuff better, not to scare anyone off, and to eventually land a job in marketing for a clean tech startup.
A year later, Green Juice is an explicitly ecosocialist publication with an increasing focus on how absolutely fucked we all are unless the world makes radical changes in a minuscule period of time. I'm doing my best to keep it lighthearted, but it would be a disservice to the readers to pretend things are okay. They are not.
Q: Bro, this is a happy birthday post...
A: Climate change is accelerating at nearly double the speed it was just 10 years ago. Humans are emitting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that it's beginning to acidify our blood. The Paris Agreement of 2015, wherein all the world powers agreed to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, has already failed. The U.S. needs to be [redacted]
Q: Woof. Let's turn down the temperature. How about some blog data points?
A: As of today (March 11, 2026) Green Juice has...
- 263 subscribers!
- 247 are free subs
- 16 are paid subs (4 are my family members)
- $102 in monthly recurring revenue
- 4,733 unique visitors
- 7,472 total views
- Average email open rate: 77%
- Average click-through rate: 7%
- Most popular post: last week's article on Every Electric! Get your free battery!!
Q: Cool. You mentioned merch?
Oh, yeah. We've got some fun merch ideas that I'd hoped to debut today, but the timing didn't quite work. Stay tuned!
Q: Final thoughts?
A: THANK YOU!!! Thank you to everyone who's read the blog this year, shared a post with a friend, or just told me you like it. It truly means a lot.
THANK YOU Dr. Aarati, who delivers amazing illustrations every damn week for basically no money, just because she cares about the project. Hire her to draw you stuff and listen to the Smart Tea podcast!
And finally, THANK YOU to my partner, J., for your support and encouragement as deep as the deepest geothermal borehole, even when I'm being a moody b. I couldn't do it without you.
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