WATCH: Executive Q&A with Michael Thomas, Founder and CEO of Cleanview

He’s gone from launching tech startups in the Bay Area to creating one of the most widely read climate newsletters in the world. Today we’re featuring Michael Thomas, founder and CEO of Cleanview, a platform helping clean energy leaders track the transition in real time, and author of Distilled, a newsletter that has reached millions and shaped the conversation on climate change globally.

About Michael Thomas: Michael is the founder of Cleanview, a platform that helps clean energy leaders track the energy transition in real-time. He also writes a newsletter about climate change, Distilled, that has been read by more than 50 million people and cited in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. Prior to starting Cleanview and Distilled, Michael ran Campfire Labs, a content marketing agency that has worked with brands like Dropbox, Asana, and Notion. Since starting the company, they have given $500,000 to climate non-profits and launched two independent climate publications.

We spoke with Michael over Zoom over email recently:

You’ve built Distilled into a must-read for people across the climate space, policy makers, founders, funders, and advocates alike, and in the last year launched Cleanview, a market intelligence platform for the clean energy transition. What first drew you to focus on clean energy and climate and how did that path take shape?

I had a bit of an unusual path into clean energy. I started my career in the tech industry and was working for a couple of different startups out in the Bay Area and then around 2015 decided to start focusing on impact projects. I spent a summer volunteering in some refugee camps in Greece during the height of their refugee crisis and was just meeting all these refugees, working with all these refugees. One day I was talking to a aid worker who said that climate change was really one of the biggest risks to refugees globally because there were going to be all of these issues in countries around the world with food security, with rising sea levels and that was going to create unprecedented migration crisis and people were going to be forced from their homes. That was the first time that I started to think about climate change, not as an issue for polar bears or nature, but really as a human issue that was going to cause a huge amount of suffering. I started to do more research, started to really dive deep and it wasn’t until about 2017 that I started to actually work on the issue and began some of my first projects.

I’m wondering if there’s anything that you can share or talk about for advocates and other leaders in the industry when it comes to building an audience and using a variety of platforms that are available to folks including LinkedIn, Substack, and others?

I’ve learned a lot in creating content online in the last really decade. A lot of people have kind of become aware of my work more recently as I’ve honed the craft and built an audience. But I’ve been making stuff online for a decade, like starting with embarrassing YouTube videos that I wouldn’t want anybody to dig up or see. I think the first thing was, is really just that producing content or messages or any ideas and getting it in front of people is a skill, and so it takes a lot of practice. You have to put out a lot of stuff and I’m a big believer in the idea that, quantity actually leads to quality and that quantity is actually more important even than quality. Rather than obsessing about is this the perfect story or the perfect video, just put a lot of stuff out there and you’ll learn.

I think the other thing that I’ve really learned is that the tactics and the way that algorithms work today are really important. I think a lot of people kind of overlook it or see it as cheap to think about how the algorithm works. And yet, we know both from the technology and also just of our politics that there are certain ways that these algorithms work that spread some ideas more than others. Even things as simple as if you put a link in your LinkedIn post or your Twitter post, that’s going to suppress its reach by a factor of 10. Just that simple little thing is the difference between getting your message in front of maybe 10,000 people or 1,000 people. And that’s a big deal.

There’s a lot of those tactics that are important. At a higher level, I often think about how to provide the right context for people to understand why something is important. When I’m writing about something, I would say half of the actual content is dedicated to kind of bringing people up to speed on the context they need to digest that information. There’s this quote from Ezra Klein that I really like, which is that you should never underestimate your audience’s intelligence and you should never overestimate their context. I’m always trying to provide people that context, not as a way of dumbing things down, but as a way of getting them the information they need to understand why a new development is important.

You often focus on finding good news to share. Despite everything that is going on in 2025, what are you optimistic about right now?

It’s taking more and more work to find some of that. It is a time full of bad news, but yeah, I think in general, there’s almost always good news happening, always good developments happening. I think one area of brightness is really the global clean energy transition. The US is an important player in the global stage, but we’re not the only country in the world and we’re really a small fraction of emissions globally right now. What happens in China, India, Europe, Africa, and all around the world has incredible amount of importance to our emissions trajectory as a world, which is obviously the thing that matters. Climate change is accumulation of global CO2 and so the speed of solar development globally is incredibly inspiring.

The continued falling cost of clean energy, the amount of clean energy that is being built in China right now is just staggering. A lot of people say, “Yeah, but coal is is being built too,” but even within that, if you look at China, the actual amount that they’re running those coal plants is falling. We’re looking at potential emissions peak in China and then we see leadership in Europe still and much of the rest of the world. I think that’s good news.

Then here in the US there’s still good things happening too. One of the things I’m following closely is the development of enhanced geothermal. A new way of building geothermal power plants to produce clean firm power that produces carbon-free electricity at all hours of the day, rain or shine. It could potentially be a huge technology for a lot of the West in decarbonizing our economies and the cost of that technology continues to fall and exceed people’s expectations. I’m watching that really closely and really excited about that.

What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?

I think the biggest risk that I’ve taken in my life was when I was 19 years old, I was through my first year of college and decided to drop out. It was at the time, unclear whether that was going to be a good decision or not. I definitely had most voices around me, including my parents, telling me not to do that and to get a degree. But I just felt like it was better to learn in the real world than to learn in a classroom.

I dropped out and moved to the Bay Area and started to work for companies and learn how to build companies and start things. And it was an incredible time to be in that area. It ended up paying off. I have never been asked where I went to college or if I’ve gotten a degree and I learned a lot and built great relationships from all that.

What is something that would surprise people about you?

Probably the biggest surprise is, I’ve got two recently born twins at home, in addition to a three-year-old. I’ve been posting online a lot with babies in hand.

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