Hello, world! We’ve got a lot to do.

You know who put it best? Margaret Atwood. She said, “It’s not climate change – it’s everything change." And it increasingly looks like she was right. During the past decade or so as a freelance journalist, my writing has increasingly focused on climate change and its myriad effects. This has been true for stories ranging from technology to engineering, energy, health, and wildlife – climate change looms large in all of them.

Take the threat facing roads built on permafrost, buildings endangered by increased lightning strikes, houses standing up to intensifying hurricanes, ships forced to reroute due to extreme weather, and the workers toiling in endless heatwaves who are now donning cooling vests just to make it through the day.

This newsletter is about the shift to a more resilient and a more energy efficient future. I hope that it will appeal to anyone aiming to reduce their impact on the planet, while surviving whatever climate change throws back at us.

The challenges are massive. But they are also engrossing. We are tasked with reengineering civilisation itself, bit by bit. There is hope and courage to be found in the fact that this is possible.

That word, “reengineering”, comes from the business world. But, expanded beyond that sphere, it is a powerful concept. Reengineering is what so many of us are doing right now. We’re reengineering our homes, our infrastructure, our energy resources – and our expectations, in response to climate change.

We are the first species in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history that has not just recognised an existential threat but also the fact that we might be able to do something about it.

So buckle up. Welcome to The Reengineer.

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About me

My name is Chris Baraniuk and, for better or worse, I write a lot. I’ve been publishing journalism of various forms online since I was 13 and I’m lucky enough to have made a career out of it. My stories have been published by the BBC, Wired, The Guardian, The BMJ, National Geographic, New Scientist, The Economist, and others. I love gardening, music and good food. My home is in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Sub-editor

Duncan Fyfe, writer and narrative designer, helps ensure I only publish high-quality copy on The Reengineer.

Editorial Adviser

Richard Fisher, journalist, author and lecturer is a fountain of knowledge and experience who has assisted The Reengineer from its very inception.

Statement on AI

Every article published on The Reengineer is put together by hand with zero input from generative AI tools. This will forever remain so. My articles contain original reporting, and almost always include comments from human sources I have spoken to personally. That’s what I do. This newsletter is not an excuse to churn out meandering analyses half written by a machine. It is a platform for real journalism about people, science and technology. Stories told by me to you.

If you would like to support me by becoming a paid subscriber I would be extremely grateful. Should that not be an option for you, simply sharing my writing with your friends, colleagues or social media followers would go some way towards ensuring that human-authored journalism can still make an impact in this world.