About

April 2026

Originally, I started this as a newsletter in 2024 asking the question, what will it take to have a healthy world where people are thriving in the year 2525, some 500 years from now? Here are three tasks.

We must heal our divisions.
We must get off fossil fuels.
And we have to abandon our consumer cultures to embrace cultures focused on stewarding the earth, on repairing the world, as Paul Farmer used to say, a task that might take five centuries and beyond.

But how can we get there? Ours is an era of deep division, escalating emissions and rampant consumption. What would transitioning to a culture focused on healing the world even look like?

We are dedicated to growing the campaign focused on our common ground: manufacturing jobs. In the field of transforming energy, we have a nearly infinite capacity for well-paid jobs.

That led to narrowing the focus from what are all the things we need to do to get to the year 2525 safely to the question of how we can accomplish the first step, healing divisions by building on our common ground. The main policy that everyone wants is well-paid jobs. Thus we are Thejobscampaign.com.

To get involved

Subscribe to our newsletter, read more about the strategy on our page The Gist where there are several ways you can move things forward.

Staff

Greg Bates

April, 2026

My goal is simple: Together, let's transform what appears to be an impossible task of saving the world into a lifelong adventure.

A few things about me. I try to be modest, but I'll tell anyone who will listen that I deserve a gold medal in procrastination. After taking notes for a book on climate change for two years, I gave my first talk in 2015 (at a friend's house). I decided I had something original to say, then disappeared to think and read about it for a decade. With temperatures rising, extinctions expanding, and tipping points tipping, you'd think I might have said something.

In that decade, often while commuting to visit and later care for my mother, I read and listened to as much as I could, much of it having nothing to do with climate change. One stepping stone was Adam Grant's Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Later, I mistook Walter Isaacson's biography Da Vinci for a self help manual. Da Vinci worked out many things, including the outlines of the scientific method. He could have propelled humanity forward far sooner, if only he had published his notes. Instead, he kept experimenting, creating, and thinking. I have no pretensions to being smart, and no ideas as profound as the scientific method. But I took from the two books a license to slow down and think.

I kept silent because my thinking kept changing, and keeps evolving today—and because the work felt too daunting, too confusing. I watched as people running for office who were making the case for climate change being our most dire problem kept failing to win elections. I looked on as we slid closer and closer to fascism, attempting to assimilate what I was learning and rearrange the pieces. But now, the arrival of new perspectives no longer thwarts my desire to speak out. It's time.

I won't bother reciting my resume. Like everyone, I have zero qualifications for saving the world. Since nobody's ever done it before, we're all on equal footing: your ideas, your energy, your work, could be as important as anyone else's.

But I have baggage. I'm a white male boomer on the far left (one-time student and many-time publisher of Noam Chomsky among countless others, co-founder of a leftwing publishing house—you get the picture).

Two apolitical experiences continue to shape how I look at the world and my place in it. I helped take care of my dad as he was dying of ALS in 2001. In 2024, I completed nearly three years of caregiving for my mother, liberated by having the best sister in the world, who took over my duties. Prose is not the right form for me to express it clearly, but those experiences grounded me and altered my excessive optimism. (Incurable optimists take note: there's hope!)

I've lived in rural Maine for over three decades in a congressional district that voted for Trump three times, inspiring me to build bridges. (With a few guidelines, it's easy and can be fun, a topic I look forward to exploring). I have a passion for editing, reading, and writing. I cheer for underdogs, for looking at things differently.

For decades, I have gotten angry at injustices (maternal mortality, corporate power, hatred that some aim at seemingly everybody, innocent people on death row, military power used unjustly, racism, sexism, ageism, imperialism, transphobia, etc., etc., etc.), only to realize that my wellspring of anger parallels the righteous anger on the right. Some real or perceived slight crosses a line and bingo, we are off down the rabbit hole yelling, "Why can't our country even..." Or, "Why can't the human race even..."

There is power in our fury at transgressed principles. I want to write about how we can alter that power to rearrange allegiances and change the world. And I want to propel a recently popularized idea: using joy as a productive fuel for change.

I have a spouse and two adult children, more reason than anyone should ever need to abandon paralyzing despair and focus on altering the course of our collective fate. Inspiration to publish my notes.

Other notes

Frequency: Under review. (April, 2026).