Climate Town Year In Review

Dear everyone,

I hope you are enjoying your end-of-year festivities, and for those of you that have covid (statistically, 85% of us), I hope you are sequestered safely and absolutely taking the virus to the cleaners. Since this is the inaugural year of the Climate Town Patreon page, I wanted to say a deep and heartfelt thank you for your early adoption and your support. Here are some quick numbers about the year 2021 for Climate Town (and in some cases personal stats that kinda impact the ol’ channel brand):

1. In 2021 we added 165,807 channel subscribers
2. 464,099.4 hours of Climate Town videos were watched in 2021. Even the boring ones. I just asked google what that was in years, and it’s like 53 years. SO I GUESS IT WASN’T THAT BAD OF AN INVESTMENT TO BUY 53 COMPUTERS AND HAVE THEM LOOP MY VIDEOS FOR ALL OF 2021, WAS IT?!?
3. An astonishing 1,983-ish of you beautiful poets became Patreon subscribers. If I die tonight (suspect foul play!) I think I would die happy knowing that 1,983-ish of you are down-with-da-town.
   1. But seriously, please have some bumbling-yet-effective detective investigate my death Columbo-style.
   2. Also, if you’ve never watched Columbo, HOLY HELL please watch an episode or two. It’s amazing. It stars Peter Falk (the old man from The Princess Bride) and it’s just top notch.
4. I made a total of 8 videos which have actual clicky names but I refer to them in my own head as “exxon history, super bowl, texas blackouts, cars, FedEx, it wasn’t me feat. exxon, fast fashion, and gas stoves.” I think we can more or less do DOUBLE that in 2022 now that all you patrons have hooked me ALL the way up (see number 3). Also, I graduated from school - speaking of which …
5. Columbia University mailed me my Climate Science and Policy degree for the paltry sum of $60,000-ish dollars in student loans. In my defense, I thought Joe Biden might have canceled some of that, but time makes fools of us all. Onwards and upwards.
6. Climate Town got to the front page of reddit a few times, and even when moderators deleted the post for being “too political,” it felt good to be up there. If you are part of the Reddit-YouTube-Patreon pipeline, please take this as a personal thank you.
7. Because of the Patreon support (see number 3), we’ve been able to hire an extra 3 people at Climate Town, and we’re about to hire a social media manager. The videos are still gonna feel pretty low-rent, but there will just be more of them.

So once again, thank you for your help and for watching. I have some goals for 2022 that I’d like to write here as a way of keeping myself on track. Have you ever found that if you tell enough people your goals, you feel obligated to do them so you don’t look like a complete tool? Well, this is that. 2022 GOALS:

1. 16 videos in 2022. It’s a lot but I think we can hit it.
2. Get into some political shit. I took a class in Climate Change Law and it emphasized where the levers of political power were and I think we can make some videos that aim at collective political action.
3. I dunno, maybe 500,000 subscribers by 2023? It’s a stretch goal.
4. That’s it. I’m already nervous about the first 3.
5. Okay, number 4 doesn’t count. It really inflates the number of goals.
6. Seriously? Now 4 and 5 are bullshit.

Here’s to 2022. Hopefully it’s the year we stop digging down and start to dig up.

Love,
Rollie Williams