Climate Cast

The Trump Administration has claimed that greenhouse gases don’t endanger people. And last month, the Environmental Protection Agency said it intends to rescind a landmark 2009 legal opinion — effectively ending all its climate regulations.

This all comes on the cusp of a rapidly-warming planet fueling extreme weather events.

A hotter planet poses an existential crisis on multiple fronts, said Alan Weisman, journalist and author of “Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future.”

“We’re all feeling the heat right now, but we’re not the only creatures on earth that are suffering from climate change,” he said. “Many of [the] species that we're dependent on pollinate our food [and] become our food. Species enrich our soil, filter the air and produce oxygen. They are all also threatened by climate change.”

While mankind needs to address this problem, Weisman said his research allowed him to uncover hope in the many ways people are taking climate action in their own hands — from fusion energy technology at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology to winning climate lawsuits in the Netherlands.

“It’s a combination of different things, in a lot of different places, that are each contributing to helping to slow down climate change before it gets out of control.”

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Despite efforts from some governments to slowly pull away from climate regulations and actions, one writer discovered a climate revolution through a combination of technology, science and community.

“I was looking for our realistic hopes, when we're standing at an existential brink,” said Alan Weisman, author of “Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future.”

“Hope is an active verb, and in place after place I found things that just completely surprised me,” he said.

For example, Weisman discovered a modular, wireless energy-sharing system in one of the world’s largest refugee camps in Bangladesh, where solar-powered houses connect via Wi-Fi for peer-to-peer energy exchange.

“By the end of it, I was so amazed by the solutions that people were coming up with who simply refuse to quit trying,” Weisman said. “These are not people who wait around for miracles to happen.”

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Minnesota’s clear, cool lakes are heating up over the summer, and those warmer waters can produce a toxic agal bloom.

“Blue-green algae is bacteria,” said Kim Laing, a surface monitoring manager with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. “It often looks like pea soup [or] green paint; sometimes it might have a smell to it. It thrives in warm, shallow, nutrient-rich lakes.”

Water that’s warmer than 75 degrees along with calm, sunny weather is a perfect recipe for blue-green algae, he said.

“We have had three to four degrees higher average July and August surface water temperatures in Minnesota lakes than compared to 50 years ago,” Laing said. “Our waters are warming, we have less ice during the winter.”

This means ripe conditions for blue-green algal blooms, which can be harmful to people and their pets.

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President Donald Trump’s massive budget bill eliminates tax credits and incentives for small and large scale solar and wind projects in Minnesota. It’s also projected to increase electricity bills across the state.

The clean energy industry in Minnesota is now trying to figure out a new path forward in the wake of the massive federal budget bill where credits will dry up at the end of the year.

“There’s no phase-down period,” said All Energy Solar co-founder and CEO Michael Allen. “At the end of 2025, the residential tax credit is being eliminated, the commercial tax credit has a slightly longer extension, but it’s still also pretty painful for the industry and ultimately on the commercial side.”

Allen explained that energy still needs to be produced — somewhere — and the utility industry will likely buy or generate electricity from traditional sources: oil, coal and gas.

“If you look at it from a cost comparison, solar and wind consistently beat out those traditional forms of electricity when it comes to cost,” Allen said. “The expectation is that consumers in Minnesota will ultimately have to pay higher electricity prices because of these adjustments to the tax credits.”

Allen added, from policy standpoint, the clean energy industry will look to individual states to step up, including Minnesota which has a 100 precent carbon-free goal by 2040.  

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Will Minnesota become a climate refuge for business?

A survey conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights, in conjunction with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, asked 300 senior level executives in 14 industries how climate change is impacting their company’s bottom line.

The overwhelming answer was that many companies have been harmed, to some degree, by climate change. And nearly half said Minnesota and the Midwest are the best places to relocate their business to minimize climate impacts.

“Texas, California, New York — these are three states that actively experience the consequences of climate change,” said Kristoffer Tigue, a reporter for the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Tigue said insurance premiums have also skyrocketed nationwide, and some states impacted by extreme weather events, like California, home insurance is no longer available. The Midwest offers a refuge from those issues.

“It's milder thanks to our location in the middle of the country. We don’t get major wildfires, and we definitely don’t experience hurricanes and we tend to have an abundance of natural resources, including water.”

Tigue explained that climate change is just one factor that would determine whether a business decides to relocate, and that just 6 percent of executives who took part in the survey said they’re considering a move in the next five years.

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An increase in water vapor in the atmosphere is driving more extreme weather around the world.

How is that playing out here in Minnesota?

John Abraham, thermal sciences professor and mechanical engineering program director at University of St. Thomas, shared more about the little-known but growing climate concern.

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This week brought another significant tornado outbreak to parts of Minnesota.

Downtowns for the Twin Cities, Rochester and Duluth were spared from any storm damage, but are cities safer from tornadoes than rural parts of Minnesota? Does the urban heat island effect spare urban residents from a tornado tearing through their cities?

“The urban heat island probably would not save you if the storm were in a position to enter that urban area,” said climatologist Kenneth Blumenfeld. “We should definitely disabuse ourselves of this myth.”

Blumenfeld, who has researched urban tornados, said the probability of tornadoes striking skyscraper-filled cities like the Twin Cities, or smaller downtowns, are just as high as elsewhere.

“All the big cities, [in] tornado prone regions like the Midwest, the South and the Great Plains, have relatively high amounts of tornado activity — it’s a lesson for all of us that tornadoes can and do hit cities.”

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Electric vehicle use in Minnesota boomed over the past decade due to the popular fleet of Tesla vehicles driving into the market.

However, the Q1 auto sales report from earlier this year, showed a drop in sales for Tesla’s EVs. The indication that there might be a slowing popularity for the brand had some experts blame the company’s CEO Elon Musk and his relationship with American politics. Even Gov. Tim Walz took at jab at Musk and the company’s business woes.

“The governor has certainly continued, to some degree, his feud with Elon Musk,” said Walker Orenstein, energy, natural resources and sustainability reporter for the Minnesota Star Tribune. “[Walz] jokes about it not being the best idea, because Elon Musk is a very rich man.”

Politics could be a driving force in the drop in Tesla sales, but Orenstein explained the EV growing market is another culprit.

“Tesla’s share of the EV market was declining well before [Q1 auto sales] — I think that it reflects more options that are available to people,” Orenstein said. “At this point in time, the governor doesn’t need Tesla and Musk quite to the same degree, and that’s because the marketplace for EVs has just grown so much.”

New EV companies, and well-established automakers have been electrifying the EV market across the country, but cold weather and a lack of model options are also the reason why Minnesotans haven’t fully embraced the technology.

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For the past eleven years, the planet has been consecutively warmer each year. It’s a trend that has climate scientists and policy makers worried.

In 2024, global temperatures reached 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial record, according to the World Meteorological Organization and the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

It’s the level of warming that those who work for climate solutions have been trying to avoid.

“Now the question is: What are we going to do next? What is the next goal going to be?” said Shannon Osaka, a climate reporter for The Washington Post.

Osaka wrote about extreme weather events linked to climate change, the consequences for slow-moving climate policy and Earth’s temperatures rapidly rising past a critical threshold for sustainable life.

“We don’t know where those tipping points are: They could be at 1.6 degrees [Celsius]; they could be at 2.5 degrees Celsius. It’s like a sort of terrifying dice roll.”

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Craft beer grew in popularity over the past decade across Minnesota, but the brewing process has also created a ton of wastewater.

Now, there’s an experiment to make the process carbon neutral. University of Minnesota professor Paige Novak and Fulton Brewing are working on a new, sustainable way to treat wastewater from the brewing process.

She spoke to MPR chief meteorologist Paul Huttner for Climate Cast.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

When beer is brewed, a whole lot of extra wastewater is produced.

For every pint of beer that’s made, there's usually four to 10 pints of wastewater that’s generated at the same time. This wastewater tends to go to a centralized treatment facility where it’s treated, then cleaned up and discharged to a river.

What happens during that wastewater cleanup process is that a lot of energy is used to pump air into the water, bacteria eat up all the waste, and all that pumping of the air creates a huge energy requirement, and also produces CO2.

It’s a huge amount of energy that we use to clean our wastewater.

If you look nationally, the amount of electricity that we use nationally just for wastewater is about 2 percent. So you think about everything that we do in terms of driving, heating our homes, lighting things, and 2 percent of that is used for our wastewater. It’s a huge amount.

I work in biological wastewater treatment systems. I look at bacteria that can help clean up pollutants, including wastewater pollutants.

What we’ve done is develop a system where we can put bacteria into little pellets. We can add these pellets to a tank. The bacteria are active, so we can put a lot of bacteria in there and keep them in the tank and they degrade all the wastewater.

And if you do it at the site before the wastewater is diluted, you can treat the wastewater differently and actually generate methane gas, which can be used as an energy source onsite.

In addition to using a lot of water, breweries use energy to heat the material to make the beer — also to heat the brewery in the winter. So you get added energy creation at the brewery, and then you save energy for treatment when you go to the wastewater treatment plant.

They have been wonderful partners. They’ve been working with us on this process for years now. We did an initial pilot study at their brewery a few years ago, and that was really helpful to see what didn’t work. And then we were able to get additional funding from the Department of Energy to continue to work on this process.

We just finished up a second pilot study at Fulton where we were able to show that the system worked amazingly well.

I think we, just as consumers, need to keep in mind that there’s all this additional work that needs to be done to keep these processes that supply us with the food and beverages going. So think about supporting clean water use, supporting treatment, and supporting research as you go along your day using these products.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.