What this is
Stepchange News is an automated front page for climate and energy news — the day's most important stories, each clustered with every outlet covering it, refreshed every three hours. Think of it as a TechMeme for the energy transition: one glance tells you what's happening and who's covering it.
How it works
A pipeline pulls the RSS feeds of 39 climate and energy outlets, plus links shared by a curated list of researchers and journalists on Bluesky and active discussions on Hacker News and Reddit. Articles are grouped by semantic similarity, then ranked by how many distinct outlets are covering a story, the editorial authority of those outlets, and recency. The single headline shown for each cluster is written by an AI model (Claude) in neutral wire-service style from the underlying coverage — every link goes straight to the original reporting.
There is no human editor in the loop. That means the page is fast and tireless, but also that the ranking is an algorithm's opinion, not a newsroom's. When a story matters, read the sources — that's what the links are for.
For the full version — the sourcing rules, the clustering method, the scoring formula and every threshold it uses — see how it works.
One disclosure worth making plainly: Stepchange invests in climate companies. The ranking algorithm has no knowledge of the portfolio — it sees only source count, outlet authority, recency, and topic keywords.
This is a beta
Stepchange News launched recently and is still being tuned. The clustering thresholds, the authority scores and the newsworthiness weighting all move as we watch how they behave on real news cycles — so the page you see today is not the page the algorithm will produce in six months. Expect the occasional story grouped oddly, a duplicate that should have merged, or a headline that reads flatter than it should.
Two things are always one click away when the ranking gets it wrong: the river shows every article in the window in plain reverse-chronological order, and every story page lists every outlet covering it so you can go straight to the reporting.
Feedback is genuinely useful right now — a story ranked badly, two stories that should have been one, a source worth adding, a headline that misreads the news. Email feedback@stepchange.news, or just reply to the daily digest — it goes to the same place.
Sources
Heatmap News · Canary Media · Carbon Brief · Latitude Media · Utility Dive · Grist · Inside Climate News · Climate Home News · PV Magazine · PV Tech · Guardian Environment · Electrek · Yale Climate Connections · CleanTechnica · TechCrunch Climate · EIA Today in Energy · EIA Press Releases · Catalyst (Shayle Kann) · Shift Key (Robinson Meyer & Jesse Jenkins) · Sightline Climate (CTVC) · MIT Technology Review · Climate · Volts (David Roberts) · Trellis · Wired Science · The Climate Brink · Distilled · Texas Energy & Power · Michael Liebreich · Exponential View · The Crucial Years · JKempEnergy · Super-Spiked · Casey Handmer · Distributed Grid · GEM Energy Analytics · Gerard Reid · Teach What I Know · Talking Climate · Machine Readable (Halcyon) · via Bluesky · via X
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Leave your email below and the top stories arrive in your inbox every morning. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, browse the archive, or read the full technical explanation of how the page is built. A Stepchange project, from the team behind The Stepchange Show.