Carbon Counter is discontinued

Last August I announced that I was stopping blogging until the new year.

Well, the new year has arrived, but I will not be returning to blogging.

The reason is simple. It is a time issue.

I am a postdoctoral scientist working on marine ecology. This blog has always been a side interest. During my PhD it occupied too much of my time. Naturally my PhD finished a bit late – doesn’t everyone’s? – and time spent on this blog and Twitter probably contributed. It now looks as if my research career will be ecological. The ups and downs of PhD and the fewer downs of my first postdocs have convinced me of this anyway.

So for the sake of my career (and sanity) I will be cutting back on my contributions to online energy debates. The first thing to go is this blog. It had probably become too intermittent to build up regular readers. And I was finding that the things I wanted to write about were not the things people were reading. Half an hour spent writing on renewables in Germany can easily pull in a couple of thousand readers; half a week spent writing on biomass can easily pull in a couple of readers.

The second thing that will probably go is regular tweeting. Logging on to Twitter each day has now become a source of annoyance. This is mostly because of the inability of Twitter to provide ways to filter what appears in your mentions tab. I have also realized that Twitter makes me excessively grumpy and negative. There are probably better things to do in life than logging on to Twitter to rant against bullshit.

So what I will be doing from now on is focusing on infographics on Twitter, and potentially a website. The website will probably not come until next year at the earliest, as much out of ignorance of how to create a website as anything.

My Twitter feed will now be focused almost exclusively on infographics. For some reason I don’t like tweeting other people’s infographics – it feels lazy. So, everything will have the @countcarbon stamp. (Naturally, the data will be taken from somewhere else…)

So far the infographics I have tweeted have almost exclusively on energy, with new ones coming in the next couple of months on dietary trends. Until now I have ignored tweeting anything directly related to climate change – I do not want to be told yet again by some random bloke that global temperatures have paused for the last 18 years – but I’m going to try to include climate change charts from now on.

From a personal, professional and sanity point of view this is probably the smart thing for me to do. After I started tweeting infographics in September my followers count on Twitter increased rapidly. The combination of improved self promotion, possibly informing whoever reads the infographics, and reduced time spent blogging and tweeting is too difficult to resist.

So this is the end of Carbon Counter. Going out with a whimper, as the cliché goes.

To keep track of what I am up to, follow me on Twitter.