About The Energy Mix

The Energy Mix

Overview

The Energy Mix is a non-profit community news service based in Ottawa, Ontario, that covers climate change, energy and the transition away from carbon. It publishes original reporting and curated news on its website, theenergymix.com, and distributes its journalism chiefly through a family of email digests: the flagship weekday Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and the weekly feature digests Cities & Communities and Heat & Power. Its stated purpose is practical rather than partisan — in founder and publisher Mitchell Beer's oft-repeated formulation, the goal is "faster, deeper carbon cuts" that leave no one behind — and it describes the result with a house slogan: "the climate news you need."

The service is deliberately small and lean. Beer and his editorial team scan some 1,200 news headlines a week, by the organization's own account, to assemble its digests, mixing wire and partner reporting with its own stories. Its readers, as profiled by The Climate Desk in 2026, include policymakers, civil society leaders, clean energy investors and the practitioners who work on climate and energy files day to day. The Energy Mix is actively publishing in 2026: its reporting on the Climate Action Tracker's October 13, 2026 downgrade of Canada's climate policies and action to "Critically Insufficient" was being cited by other outlets within days.

History

The Energy Mix was established in May 2014, according to the organization's own published history, as a non-profit community news site and e-digest delivering climate and energy news to readers across Canada and around the world. Its founder, Mitchell Beer, brought an unusually long runway to the project: he traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency to 1977 and in climate change to 1997, and before and alongside The Energy Mix he worked as an Ottawa-based writer, editor and conference producer on energy and climate files.

Beer's public profile grew with the publication. In October 2019 he delivered a TEDx Ottawa talk on how to build wider, more constructive conversations about climate change and the energy transition. By 2023, an interview with the Green Energy Futures program marked the service's output in the tens of thousands of stories — the episode was billed around The Energy Mix's 30,000 stories on climate change. On November 3, 2022, the Delta Management Group's Clean50 organization announced that Beer had received Canada's Clean50 Lifetime Achievement Award, one of five 2023 recipients, recognizing his measurable contributions to sustainable development and a low-carbon economy. In 2025, according to his Climate Desk profile, he also received the King Charles III Coronation Medal.

Beyond its own publishing, The Energy Mix has been one of the lead partners in the Green Resilience Project, a Canada-wide series of local listening sessions on climate change, income security and local resilience. In syndication, Beer has explained that the organization partnered with the Newstex distribution service primarily to widen the reach of its stories rather than to chase revenue: the measure of success, as he put it, is a story being picked up and acted on somewhere, whether or not the reader ever visits the site itself.

Programming and Content

The Energy Mix's content falls into two streams. The first is its digest journalism: the flagship Energy Mix e-digest curates and summarizes the week's — and day's — significant climate and energy developments, drawing on the roughly 1,200 headlines its team scans weekly, with the Weekender offering a longer-form essay and analysis edition published through Substack. The second stream is its feature digests: Cities & Communities follows municipal and community-level climate action, while Heat & Power focuses on the heating, buildings and electricity files.

Editorially, Beer describes the approach as solutions journalism with a purpose. The service is explicit that it is not an advocacy organization and does not campaign; equally, it does not present the scientific record on the climate emergency as a matter of balanced opinion. Coverage therefore combines hard reporting on missed targets, fossil-fuel politics, drought and wildfire with sustained attention to responses — community solar, microgrids, energy efficiency, municipal adaptation — on the argument, as Beer has put it, that crisis-only coverage that drives readers into despair is a form of professional malpractice. A typical Weekender essay ranges from Canadian federal politics and the Carney government's climate competitiveness agenda to international developments such as United States climate rollbacks, always returning to the question of what accelerates or blocks emission cuts. Its October 2026 reporting on the Climate Action Tracker assessment — including Climate Analytics chief executive Bill Hare's criticism of the federal government's fossil-fuel tilt — is representative of the service's policy-focused news coverage.

Audience and Reach

The Energy Mix addresses a specialist, professional readership rather than a general consumer audience. The Climate Desk's 2026 profile describes its readers as policymakers, civil society leaders, clean energy investors and practitioners in the climate and energy field, in Canada and internationally. Its influence model is deliberately indirect: through Newstex syndication, republication by sector outlets such as Energy Central, newsletter forwarding and citation by other news organizations, its stories are designed to travel far beyond its own subscriber list. The organization does not publish audited audience or circulation figures, and none are asserted here; claims about its output volume (for example, the 30,000-story milestone reported by Green Energy Futures in 2023) are the organization's own, reported as such.

Digital Presence

The Energy Mix's home is theenergymix.com, where its current reporting is published and readers can subscribe to its digests free of charge. The Energy Mix Weekender is published on Substack (energymixweekender.substack.com), where Beer's essays appear under his own byline with the team's standard biography noting the 1,200-headlines-a-week newsroom process. Its stories are additionally distributed through Newstex's syndication network and republished by partner and sector sites, and its headlines circulate through community channels — a December 2025 climate learners' newsletter, for example, promoted subscriptions and donations to The Energy Mix alongside a December 3, 2025 online session at which Beer discussed the outcomes of COP30 in Belém, Canada's 2025 budget climate competitiveness strategy and the Canada–Alberta memorandum of understanding. Beer also appears in person and on panels as the publication's public face, including a 2026 live podcast event with Energi Media on how a faster energy transition can bring hope to the climate conversation, and a March 19, 2026 UBC Climate Solutions event discussing the dismantling of the United States' Inflation Reduction Act, where he was billed as The Energy Mix's founding publisher.

Ownership and Organisation

The Energy Mix is a non-profit news organization. Mitchell Beer is its founder and publisher and also serves as managing editor; a small editorial team supports the scanning, writing and production behind the flagship digest, the Weekender and the feature digests. The organization is based in Ottawa and states openly that it operates on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. As a non-profit, it is reader- and supporter-funded rather than advertising-led: subscriptions to its digests are free, and readers are encouraged to donate toward its independent climate journalism, with donations channelled through the Small Change Fund, according to community newsletters that promote the service.

Contact and Availability

The Energy Mix is available to any reader at theenergymix.com, where its latest stories are posted and its email digests — The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power — can be subscribed to at no charge. The Weekender archive is also readable on Substack. The organization is headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario; its publisher, Mitchell Beer, is its principal public contact and regularly speaks at public events, webinars and conferences on climate communication and the energy transition.