Breakthrough Dialogues

If you're active on energy Twitter, you might have seen ongoing debates between our deputy director, Alex Trembath (@atrembath), and Vox climate journalist, David Roberts (@drvox). They finally got the chance to hash things out. In our Breakthrough Dialogues season three premiere: does political power or innovation matter more for climate? For adequate climate solutions, must we disrupt the status quo, or do smaller, sectoral regulations have a better track record? Is there any hope for a conservative climate politics in America? Tune in to hear Alex and David discuss these and more of #EnergyTwitter’s favorite questions.

When was the last time you changed your mind? If you’re anything like the rest of the population, probably not very recently. Stephanie Lepp’s podcast, Reckonings, explores why that is; through interviews with people who have gone through transformative changes, she’s found a list of commonalities begin to emerge.

Our worldviews, Stephanie explains, are intimately tied up with our identities: everything from the way we talk and dress to the communities we’re exposed to. Changing one belief seems to require a shift in the entire ecosystem. Those who have successfully broken free? They recognize that believing in A doesn’t necessitate believing in B and C: we can pick and choose based on an internal moral compass.

We’re thrilled to end season two with Stephanie. At Breakthrough, we’re eager to stray from a mindset that’s hostile toward mistakes and mind flips. We strive to create more spaces for growth, for critical self-reflection, and we hope this podcast takes one step toward that more nurturing culture. As always, let us know what you’re thinking (we’re @TheBTI on Twitter) and who you hope to hear in season three. We’ll be back soon.

Nassib Mugwanya is an outreach officer at the Uganda Biosciences Information Center, which means he brings agricultural research to farmers on the ground. He stands at the nexus, then, of the many clashing ideals over what the future of food should look like: traditional agroecology? Modern innovations? Small, big, local, organic, synthetic, biotechnical?

For Nassib, questions as theoretical as these no longer feel relevant; immersing himself in the hardships and livelihoods of those growing food every day has changed the way he considers solutions. When a farmer, struggling with banana bacterial wilt, approaches Nassib for answers, the framing is always quite practical: “What will solve the problem I have?” Today, Nassib describes himself as firmly pro-choice. “I’m a very, very strong advocate for giving farmers the full range of options,” he says. “No one should stand in their way.”

For more, read Nassib's piece in the Breakthrough Journal.

It is universally true that all rich countries use a lot of energy. This might make you think about in-home systems: refrigerators, lights, etc. But about two-thirds of the energy in an economy is used outside the home. In the US, a typical, mid-size office building uses a whole megawatt of power; that means Washington, DC’s K street – home to 105 office buildings – sucks up more energy than the entire country of Liberia. Poor countries need not just energy access but energy for growth: utility-scale grid technology.

Todd Moss, Executive Director of the Energy for Growth Hub, entered the world of energy policy through development finance issues, first at the Center for Global Development and then at the State Department. But it became increasingly obvious to him that energy is embedded into every other problem. In today’s conversation, we ask him about the seemingly oppositional goals of energy-intensive climate adaptation and reducing fossil fuel reliance, common misconceptions around the idea of leapfrogging, and why he wrote a four-part fictional book series about the dysfunctional US foreign policymaking process.

For optimal sustainability, which farming practice is best? Miriam Horn, who worked for the Environmental Defense Fund for over ten years, says: it depends. Don’t choose a sweeping solution; farming smart is place-dependent: where can we sacrifice the least biodiversity, the least sequestered carbon? Agriculture’s footprint is already vast – half of the ice-free planet – so the stakes are high. But taking Miriam’s practical stance toward conservation moves us past political divisions. Her book (now also a film), Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman, pushes against both the myth that conservation is a liberal coastal value and that you must be small and local to contribute to the solution.

In this interview, Miriam walks us through the many waves of environmentalism: from the bedrock laws of the 60s to the combative postures of the 80s, from bridge-building partnerships and market leveraging to information technology integration. Tune in for Miriam’s lessons on balancing land sparing with land sharing, how EDF taught Walmart to prioritize better farming, and why we must move past agrarian romanticism.

In theory, vegetarianism for climate mitigation is really quite simple. Just don’t choose the ham sandwich; have the hummus instead. It seems like a much simpler switch than building electric planes – and equally, perhaps even more so, as impactful – but a mass move toward vegetarianism just isn’t happening.

In this episode, Alex asks Marta Zaraska why, despite an ever-increasing abundance of vegan celebrities, memes, restaurants, and meat substitutes, we just can’t stop eating meat. As the author of Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat and a Polish-raised, kielbasa-loving eater herself, Marta is a sympathetic voice of reason. Rather than creating black-and-white categories of ethical eating, she advocates for “a strong reducetarian identity” that celebrates incremental progress. Tune in for Marta’s thoughts on why meat-eating is different for us than it was for our ancestors, how meat is linked to power and masculinity, and what created the cultural tension between carnivores and vegans.

Read her Breakthrough Journal essay here.

The Green New Deal has recently picked up social and political momentum, but federal interventions into energy and environmental problems is not a new idea. In fact, as Breakthrough energy analyst Jameson McBride argues, there is no such thing as a free market in energy. So the question is not so much whether the government should intervene, but how it should do so. What is the "green" in the Green New Deal? Should we tack on other progressive social causes? And what can past federal efforts, like the Waxman-Markey energy bill of 2009, teach us about environmental policymaking in 2019?

This episode is a little different than our usual format. Alex Trembath, former Breakthrough energy analyst and current Breakthrough deputy director, sits down with our very own Jameson to talk shop. Tune in to hear them discuss the ins and outs of energy policy and to get the latest news contextualized into broader trends.

For more, here's Jameson's piece on the Green New Deal and the Legacy of Public Power.

In June 2018, a raccoon climbed up a skyscraper in Minneapolis. It captured the attention of tens of millions of people, united around a shared concern over the creature’s wellbeing. Environmental journalist Brandon Keim is heartened by the interest, calling it a “reservoir of care” that might contain the antidote to problems of animal suffering in today’s society. The first step toward alleviating non-human pain, Brandon argues, is to grant animals political representation. He’ll be the first to admit that it sounds like a radical step, but respecting the democratic process in every sense of the word – for every creature of the world – can alter the way we think about our relationships to pets, wild animals, and everyone in between. Tune in to hear about what it would mean to give animals voice, and how compatible that vision is with everything from real estate zoning laws to agricultural production. For more, here’s his essay in the Breakthrough Journal: “If We Could Talk to the Animals.”

If dense cities are so good for communities and the climate, why is it so hard to find an affordable home in the San Francisco Bay Area? Kim-Mai Cutler, a partner at Initialized Capital, contributor to TechCrunch, and one of the leading voices in urban policy, sits down with Alex to take a deep, historical dive into how we got into this mess in the first place. She touches on everything from tech jobs to population growth, wildfires to tax codes, systemic racial inequalities to the inheritance of home ownership. Is it possible for housing to be both affordable and a generator of wealth? Why is housing one of the few instances in which we celebrate rising prices? And what do vomiting anarchists and burrowing owls have to do with all this, anyway?

Kim-Mai herself grew up in South Bay Area, in a house built the same year that Steve Jobs graduated high school. A lot has changed since then – Apple moved from a garage to a $5-billion headquarters, for example – but the neighborhood remains static. Out of curiosity and bafflement, Kim-Mai asked a simple question – “Why couldn’t we just add more housing?” – and found a Pandora’s box in response. Tune in to hear what she found in the box.

As the President of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS), George Sparks always has good science communication on his mind. For him, this begins at the very fundamentals: a better definition of science – one with a lowercase “s.” We often think of science as a cerebral, individual activity, like chess; really, George says, it’s more like rugby: it’s a team sport. It’s ugly. It’s messy. Scientists are humans, too, with the same biases as the rest of us, and the quest for truth couldn’t be further from a straight line. For better public policy, then, we need a transparent triad between journalists, policymakers, and scientists – one that’s ripe with honesty, centered around values, and grounded in better relationships.

George Sparks prides himself on the museum’s efforts to distribute inquiry-based learning methods more widely. Among his favorite projects: science-in-a-box. Just as with Blue Apron, a teacher can request a lesson on, say, “energy in Colorado,” and DMNS will ship a monopoly-like board game that has students buying power plants and making trade-offs between energy density and carbon intensity. Most recently, George created the Institute for Science and Policy, which aims to find a more effective policy space for science. Tune in to hear more about George’s projects, what’s keeping him optimistic about the future, and why he’s replaced the word “science” with “data, evidence, and reason.”