From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

As the federal government reverses course on renewable energy projects and other policies related to climate change, states, cities, and local groups are stepping into the breach.

Today, my colleagues Kara Buckley and Katrin Einhorn

on their project to document small but significant efforts

to solve climate and environmental problems

in every state in the country.

It's Friday, January 2nd. Kara, Katrin, happy new year.

Happy New Year.

The two of you just completed this really big and ambitious series, 50 states, 50 fixes.

And I have to say it is more, let's say, optimistic than the types of stories we typically read in our

august pages. So I want to talk about the origin of this. Tell me how this series started.

Kara, I'm going to start with you. Right. So to answer your question, I have to go back in time.

I used to be a culture reporter at the paper. I was interviewing movie stars. I was reporting on things like Me Too. But throughout it all, especially in the late 2010s, I was finding it really hard to process all the negative climate news. We were hearing about the planet overheating, species crashing, etc. You were having a personal struggle. I was having a personal struggle,

and I just really didn't understand how people were coping with it. And I thought, well,

what can we do? What can I do? And so I thought, maybe I can report this out, but in a way

that focused on all these efforts that people were doing to try in reverse climate change, you know, things that

were having an impact, because a lot of things can have an impact. So in 2021, I joined the

climate desk, and my focus from the start was on people that were doing things in their

communities that were working. Which is kind of unusual in the sense that we normally think

of journalism as writing about problems, not about solutions.

Right.

So this kind of beat is kind of looking at, you know, not the plane crashes, but the planes that are not only successfully landing, but doing it really well.

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