Breakthrough Dialogues

We’re thrilled to welcome Carlos Curbelo for our season opener. Carlos is a former Republican Congressman from Florida's 26th congressional district. While in Congress, he co-founded and co-chaired the Climate Solutions Caucus, a coalition of legislators that still exists today, committed to bipartisan progress on climate policy. He also introduced the Market Choice Act, which aimed to attach a price to US carbon emissions, which we'll talk about in this episode — along with a discussion about Al Gore’s impact on the Hill, whether a bundling of issues (like the Green New Deal) makes them more or less attractive, and why there’s such resistance to climate propositions in Congress.

We’re closing Season Three of the Breakthrough Dialogues with a lofty vision: what would it mean to leave half of the earth for nature? Today’s guest, Carly Vynne Baker, is a chief advocate of the Nature Needs Half network who manages to break down a huge idea into the gritty logistics. What are the tradeoffs between conservation and food production? How do we balance a top-down vision with bottom-up efforts? And what kind of human management will the protected Half require? We can’t imagine a better way to wrap up our 30th episode than big-picture dreams of practical land protection. As always, let us know what you’re thinking (we’re @TheBTI on Twitter) and who you hope to hear in Season Four. We’ll be back soon.

For more, here's the Breakthrough take on how to achieve a half-earth future.

Today’s episode answers all your big climate science questions. Alex chats with Zeke Hausfather, Breakthrough’s new Director of Climate and Energy, who joins us with over a decade of experience working as a scientist and researcher in the clean tech sector, Berkeley Earth, Project Drawdown, and Carbon Brief. They talk about the real-world difference between 1.5° and 2° warming (and 3°, and 4°…), the easiest sectors to decarbonize (and how), whether scientific uncertainty changes the kinds of solutions we should pursue, and, finally: how are we actually doing?

Julian Brave NoiseCat self-identifies as a “capital C, capital P” Climate Person. He’s a writer and strategist, formerly of 350.org and now at Data for Progress and the Natural History Museum, working to tackle issues of inequality through climate activism. Today’s episode is wide-ranging and topical: we cover his feelings as an “elder millennial” in a climate movement led by energetic youth, how he wishes Kanye West would intervene, and whether it’s more important to focus on bipartisanship or a better-articulated Democratic climate plan. We’re in a different climate moment than we used to be, he argues, so building new institutions suited to current needs is crucial for a strong climate fight.

One of the most important tenets of good climate communication is to listen actively to your audience. Environmental problems run deep: they’re about home, identity, lifestyle, and everything beyond and in between. That’s where any productive conversation should begin. In the spirit of better listening and more inclusive conversations, today’s episode is a little different. We’ve been collecting questions from you, our loyal audience, over the past few weeks, and today, Breakthrough’s Tali Perelman and Alex Trembath dive into them. We cover everything from electric scooters to climate denial to whether the think tank model even works. Let us know what you think and keep the dialogue going on Twitter; we’re @TheBTI.

Jacquelyn Gill, paleoecologist and biogeographer, did a lot of theater growing up. She loved watching Spalding Gray’s monologues, where he would sit on stage and tell a deeply personal narrative about himself. Everything he did was constructed, of course, but you felt like you knew him. As Jacquelyn describes it, he created “bridges of empathy,” and it’s what inspired her to start Warm Regards – one of the first climate podcasts. It allows her to seek and present authenticity in ways restricted by essays or tweets. The climate conversation, she argues, has been largely restricted to the facts, which creates a sense of embattlement: wars around scientific credibility and accuracy that leave little space for breathing room or building long, slow, deep solutions. There’s an underappreciated value in talking to another human like they’re a human, as she’s able to do with radio. Jacquelyn has inspired us in our own work on the Breakthrough Dialogues, and we’re excited to share this episode with you.

Climate change, Jane Flegal argues, does not have a deadline. Yes — it’s an urgent problem that needs addressing, well, yesterday. But we aren’t about to fall from a cliff, or be hit by an asteroid. Jane, Program Officer at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust and adjunct faculty at Arizona State University, sees climate change as a long-term, ongoing condition: a risk management issue. That makes it completely unique from other, more discrete environmental problems. It’s a wicked problem with a million causal, interacting chains that have no real end, which means it requires wicked solutions: a diversified slew of innovation and policy, mitigation and adaptation. As a scholar immersed in the field of science and technology studies, Jane Flegal offers a practical, nuanced perspective on how we’re going to get through this mess.

There are few subjects more important than the future of humanity. Bryan Walsh has spent a lot of time thinking about existential risks, how to classify them, whether we care about long-term futures, and why we’re so bad at taking action on climate. As he argues, we’re simultaneously becoming more powerful as a species and creating new risks, and recognizing this double-edged power is essential in learning to be more thoughtful about the way we use new technologies. Climate change is different from things like asteroids or nuclear war, because we’re all guilty; it’s not the push of a button, it’s a million, daily, non-malicious decisions, and structural policy, and everything else. Guilt around our own consumption fuels denialism, so, Walsh tells us, we must remove some of that guilt to succeed. Through a conversation that touches on everything from Spiderman to the Doomsday Clock, nanotechnology to supervolcanoes, Bryan Walsh manages to show how an abstract future can be made less opaque.

When you think of food justice, the images that probably come to mind are those of urban gardens, fresh produce, and local fare. This conversation with food studies scholar S. Margot Finn swiftly ruptures that vision, arguing that freshness and processing don’t align as neatly with good and bad as we might have thought. As she traces the history of what counts as Good Food – from concerns about purity in the 1880s to frugality and nationalism during the wars to Michael Pollan and Food Inc. in the 1980s – we begin to see how taste may be more about identity distinction than anything else. Whether you’re interested in the problems with nutrition research, the ties between food and class mobility, or (wrong) assumptions about poverty and fast food, this is not an episode to miss.

For more, find Finn's essay in the Breakthrough Journal here.

Bishop Garrison’s son, Gus, is just over a year old. Nothing is set in stone for him; he’s full of open-minded wonder, curiosity, and exuberance. For Bishop, it’s a perfect representation of the kind of world he’s working to create in his professional life: as president and co-founder of the Rainey Center, Bishop envisions a post-partisan America that’s built bridges across all sorts of divides. In fact, the Center came to be through a friendship between Bishop – an African American, left-leaning man working in national security – and Sarah Hunt – a conservative woman working in clean energy. Today, their organization embraces the idea that diverse voices lead to creative solutions, and they never shy away from the most difficult conversations. They see the world the way Gus does, and maybe that can scale: an inclusive worldview for a stronger climate politics.