I'm baaaack.

It’s been a while, friends.

As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t posted any new content to this Substack in more than four years. A lot has changed since then. I’ve gotten married, had a kid, taken a full time columnist gig at Canada’s National Observer — and even managed to win a National Newspaper Award for my work along the way.

I also spent way, way too much time on Twitter.

Like a lot of people in more progressive leaning circles, I miss the pre-Elon Musk version of that place. I miss the funny banter, the jokes, the liveliness, and the sense that it was the place where things were happening. You could interact with everyone from politicians and pundits to professional athletes and entertainers, and sometimes, if you were smart and witty enough, they might even follow you. More important, in hindsight, were the connections you made with doctors and scientists and other genuine subject-matter experts who could make you smarter and more well-informed if you were willing to listen.

That place has been gone for years now, of course, but it took me until this past week to finally and fully come to terms with that. Twitter, and the hundreds — maybe thousands? — of hours I’d spent on it was a massive sunk cost, and I just didn’t want to walk away from it without a fight. I thought, rather foolishly, that if I just posted enough facts, enough threads, or enough witty rejoinders, that I could push back against the torrent of nonsense and mendacity that now dominates its feeds.

I should have just listened to Justin Ling, another Canadian journalist who abandoned Twitter a long time ago. “The site, both through its mechanics and culture, isn’t set up to be a productive forum,” he wrote in a piece for the Toronto Star back in May. “It actively rewards and promotes squabbling, invented nonsense, anti-social behaviour and even the bots themselves.”

I understood this on an intellectual level, even if I refused to actually act on it. If social media in general, and Twitter in particular, was a form of digital lead poisoning, I suppose I prided myself on having a higher tolerance for it than most people. But I wasn’t immune to its negative effects, and it became clear to me that it had impacted both the way I work and the way I think — and not for the better.

The murder of Charlie Kirk, and the reaction to it on Twitter — including, and maybe especially, by the owner of Twitter — was my final straw. As Sam Harris — who deleted his Twitter account and its 1.5 million followers back in 2022 — argued on his own Substack recently, social media is a growing danger to the society we need to share with each other.

“I’ve compared social media to a dangerous psychological experiment, a hallucination machine, a funhouse mirror, a digital sewer—but nothing captures the ludicrous insults, moral injuries, and delusions that millions of us avidly produce and consume online. If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis—and it will send us careening from one political emergency to the next.”

We Are Losing the Information War with Ourselves

I’m going to stay on Bluesky for now, where the overarching technological principles and practices seem — for now, anyways — more conducive to promoting social harmony than sowing chaos. And I want to continue making interventions on behalf of the truth, especially when it comes to conversations about climate and energy policy in Canada. But trying to do that on Twitter in 2025 — or 2024, or 2023, or 2022 — is like trying to convince people participating in a hot dog eating contest about the virtues of healthy eating and moderation.

I’m not arrogant enough to think any of this will make a real difference, or that I even was with the threads I routinely posted on Twitter. Even so, I need to feel like I’m doing something to push back against the lies and deceit that are so pervasive in our political discourse. And I need to do it while still reclaiming at least some of my attentional capital and avoiding the sorts of disagreements and disputes that only feed the bad place’s algorithm and its insatiable appetite for conflict and squalor.

I haven’t announced my departure over on Twitter, in large part because that only would feed the beast I’m trying to escape. And I’m not going to use this Substack to raise any revenue, in large part because Canada’s National Observer takes such good care of me. If you want to support my work, go support them (and sure, tell ‘em I sent you).

But if there’s something you want to me to debunk or an argument you see being made about climate policy that doesn’t add up, let me know. I’m here to help — and I’ll be here a lot more going forward.