An honest look behind the scenes of our first year in business

Hello friends and happy December.

Meg and I have now officially been full-time at The Climate Hub for one year (we did launch earlier than that in mid-2024, but January was our official full-time start).

It’s been a wild ride. On the work front, we worked with a full roster of incredible clients, each of them pioneering important climate solutions and doing their best to make the world a little better. It was a tough year for the industry, but the companies we worked (and still work) with are giving it all they’ve got — and we love to see it.

On the personal front, it’s been an even wilder ride, so we wanted to share an honest behind-the-scenes look at what was happening outside of working on client projects and writing this newsletter.

So, here’s what our lives looked like behind the scenes of our first official year in business as The Climate Hub.

It’s a gorgeous green house in Lakewood, Ohio — perfect for an environmentalist.

It unfortunately didn’t take long for Meg to find out that her dream house was infested with fleas. Having grown up with a worse-than-typical fear of bugs, well, she didn’t cope well. The first few months of first-time home ownership were filled with multiple exterminator visits, a nauseating amount of money spent, and countless hours spent vacuuming, doing laundry, and wearing unaesthetic white knee socks.

Never was there a better metaphor for the American Dream. Anyway, by Thanksgiving, they were finally flea-free and ready to host! 🎃🥧🍷

Amelia and her partner shipped 7 boxes and an Italian Greyhound from Canada to Australia. The boxes, which mostly contained books, were easy. The dog — it was awful.

She flew from Toronto to Dubai on a cargo plane (just her, the pilot, and a plane full of boxes), where she spent the night in a special dog hotel. Then she was put back on a plane from Dubai to Melbourne, where she spent 10 days in a government quarantine facility with an injured nose from the journey. They Uber-Eatsed some doggy treats to her in quarantine, and finally she was released and flew from Melbourne to Brisbane, where she was picked up by Amelia’s parents. What a relief!

Meg and her husband were nervous about dropping off their little one — she’d never been to daycare and was used to being around Mom and Dad most days. There are plenty of kids who can’t bear to leave their parents on the first day of school, but as it turns out, Charlie took off the moment she arrived. Meg and her husband had to coax her back from the school entrance in order to say goodbye. Looks like an independent streak runs in the family!

With the boxes and the dog heading to Australia, Amelia and her partner spent the first four months of the year working from some very interesting locations. There were some real bucket-list experiences on this list: a 30th birthday in a hot air balloon, camel-riding in Morocco, a sunny day atop Machu Picchu, waterfall boat rides in Argentina, and more.

Yes, there were some incredible bucket-list experiences on Amelia’s travels. And then there was Istanbul. We happened to arrive in Istanbul just a day or two before the President (an autocrat) illegally arrested his only viable political opposition, the Mayor of Istanbul. Wild protests broke out throughout the city, our power was frequently cut, and we were blocked from YouTube and social media because the government had throttled it in an attempt to quash the protests.

We thought this was the full extent of our worries, until we found out that Erdoğan was arresting anyone who had posted negatively about him on social media. (This is standard practice for Erdoğan, but it ramped up massively during the crackdown.) A number of foreign journalists were detained, and Amelia, who had idiotically criticised Erdogan the autocrat in this very newsletter, panicked.

We escaped to the countryside temporarily, but then cut our stay in Turkëye short and fled to Lisbon. Touching down in Lisbon was a huge relief!

Meg loves her liminal spaces and wildflowers, but she’s an NYC girl at heart. When NYCW rolled around, she was thrilled to get back to her favourite city, meeting up with clients and other people we know in the climate world, attending sessions, and renewing a spark for her personal writing practice. She had such a great time that she barely remembered to pull out her phone and take pictures. She did, however, manage to find a good luck spot.

One afternoon, Amelia’s dog, who may be one of the most expensive domestic pets on account of her international import to Australia, decided to increase her net worth by eating almost an entire block of butter.

For those who don’t know, as Amelia did not, this is considered a medical emergency. That quantity of pure fat in the digestive tract of an Italian Greyhound could basically kill the pancreas and, thus, the dog.

So we spent the evening in the cold, grey waiting room of the emergency vet. I won’t share the photo of what they were able to remove from her stomach, but suffice to say, no creature should ever — ever — eat that much butter.

In fact, perhaps no creature ever has. “We’re not entirely sure what to give her,” the vet said, “because we’ve never had a dog eat this much butter, and there’s nothing in the literature. Usually they stop at one or two licks — we’ve never seen a dog do this.”

Congratulations, Amelia’s dog. You were the first.

Meg and her husband took Charlie to her very first music festival — start ‘em young is their motto. She had a blast with the other kids and even tasted her very first s’more — quite an initiation for such a tiny little human.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, but suffice to say the university experience is not what it used to be. Amelia enjoyed complementing her professional experience with classroom knowledge, but the gap between university and the real world is a big one. Also, group projects and 6-week response times appear to be a favourite tactic of Australian professors, much to Amelia’s dismay.

Alright folks, that’s it from Meg and Amelia for the year.

We’ll be back in your inboxes soon enough in 2026, but for now, enjoy the holidays — and take a deep breath.

See you next year 😊