Climate One

By Climate One at The Commonwealth Club

Natural Sciences Social Sciences

What's Climate One about?

Greg Dalton is changing the conversation on energy, economy and the environment by offering candid discussion from climate scientists, policymakers, activists, and concerned citizens. By gathering inspiring, credible, and compelling information, he provides an essential resource to change-makers looking to make a difference.

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Colorado River Reckoning: D...

06.11.2021

The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million people across seven states. Lake Mead has fallen to its lowest level since it was filled in the 1930s, which could trigger the first stage of real water cutbacks. For ...

Climate One episodes:

06.11.2021 Colorado River Reckoning: Drought, Climate and Equal Access The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million people across seven states. Lake Mead has fallen to its lowest level since it was filled in the 1930s, which could trigger the first stage of real water cutbacks. For ...
06.04.2021 Finding the Heart to Talk About Climate Ever have a difficult conversation about climate? Pretty much everyone has. Knowing all the facts and figures only goes so far when talking to someone who just doesn’t agree. So how do we break through the barriers? Scientists trained to ...
05.28.2021 Should Nature Have Rights? If corporations can be legal persons, why can’t Mother Earth? In 2017, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River the full legal rights of a person. India also recently granted full legal rights to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, and recognized ...
05.21.2021 Hot Cities, Methane Leakers and the Catholic Church Mapping has emerged as a powerful tool for helping humans combat climate disruption. Technology for measuring the totality of global carbon emissions, for example, is highly refined: we know that half of all the carbon pollution humans have dumped into ...
05.14.2021 Journey of a Former Coal Miner What motivates the activists? Grassroots activism can take many forms, from protests to letter-writing to citizen science to community organizing. But these often more local forms of activism can get short shrift compared to the more powerful, national players in ...
05.07.2021 Climate Stories We Tell Ourselves How do our identities and values shape the way we listen to others’ climate experience? Author Nathaniel Rich and journalist Meera Subramanian cover the hopes, fears, and middle-of-the-night concerns affecting the people living closest to climate change. In Georgia, farmers ...
04.30.2021 Distorted Democracy and the “Zero-Sum Game” In the US, we’ve become accustomed to climate – like nearly everything else – being politicized. Even when potential solutions might benefit everyone, a zero-sum mentality has taken hold where there’s an “us” and a “them” and progress for them ...
04.22.2021 Living with Climate Disruption Guests: Tamara Conry, Camp Fire survivor Julia Fay Bernal, director of Pueblo Action Alliance Britt Wray, postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University focused on the intersection of mental health and the climate crisis The impacts of climate change may come fast ...
04.16.2021 REWIND: Billionaire Wilderness Guests: Dina Gilio-Whitaker, American Indian Studies Lecturer, California State University San Marcos Justin Farrell, Author, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West (Princeton University Press, 2020) Diane Regas, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Trust for ...
04.09.2021 Investing in a Clean and Equitable Recovery Speakers: Julian Brave NoiseCat, Vice President of Policy and Strategy, Data for Progress Julie Pullen, Director of Product, Jupiter Intelligence Alicia Seiger, Managing Director, Sustainable Finance Initiative, Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford University The COVID-19 shutdown has hit women and ...
04.02.2021 Entrepreneurs Creating an Inclusive Economy Guests: Sandra Kwak, CEO and Founder, 10Power Donnel Baird, CEO, BlocPower Andreas Karelas, Author, Climate Courage: How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America Summary: As the spring of 2021 arrives, ...
03.26.2021 Weird Winters Warmer, shorter winters may sound like an impact of climate change that would inspire more joy than despair. But rising temperatures and decreasing snowpack won’t just transform water supplies and species ranges. It will also disrupt a multi-billion dollar winter ...
03.19.2021 When Words Aren’t Enough: The Visual Climate Story Guests: Céline Cousteau, Explorer and Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, Director, An Inconvenient Truth; Founder, Concordia Studio Cristina Mittermeier, National Geographic Photographer; Co-Founder, SeaLegacy While IPCC risk assessments and emission projections can help us understand climate change, they don’t exactly inspire the ...
03.12.2021 The Political Reality of Climate Action True to his campaign promise, President Biden dove right into the climate crisis on Day One, signing a stack of executive orders that signaled his determination. But how effective are they? “Executive orders, I think, are often very splashy when ...
03.05.2021 Temperature Check: Science, Texas, and Climate Chaos Just two months into 2021, deadly winter temperatures left millions of Texans without water and power. Meanwhile, California is preparing for another year of intense drought, and Wall Street millionaires are moving their remote work to Florida, ground zero for ...
02.26.2021 John Kerry, Gina McCarthy and Biden’s Climate Team “The long-term energy future of America is not going to be written in fossil fuels,” declared John Kerry last April. President Biden recently appointed the former Secretary of State to a top position in his climate cabinet - United States ...
02.19.2021 Climate Narratives with Jeff Biggers, Elizabeth Kolbert and Kim Stanley Robinson In the past decade, narratives of a dystopian climate future have helped connect people with heroes in worlds decimated by climate disruption and industrial expansion. In today’s real world, scientists are looking to geo-engineering and other human innovations to preserve ...
02.11.2021 Killer Combination: Climate, Health and Poverty Experts have warned us that COVID-19 is just one example of climate change-related diseases on the rise. And while climate disruption, environmental health and the current pandemic may seem like three distinct problems, to those in the health and environmental ...
02.05.2021 This Moment in Climate with Michael Mann & Leah Stokes With a new pro-science, pro-climate action administration in the White House, there are more pathways — and far greater political will — than ever before for the clean energy transition. The question is now less about what can be done ...
01.28.2021 Varying Degrees: Climate Change in the American Mind A decade ago, a nationwide survey showed that only around twelve percent of Americans were seriously concerned about climate change. Today, public perceptions have changed. “The alarmed are between a quarter and 30% of the public,” says Edward Maibach. “That ...
01.22.2021 Fast, Fair and Clean: The New Energy Transition Hopes and expectations are high for President Biden’s first weeks in office. His recovery plans promise to take on COVID-19, a battered economy, and a rapid clean energy transition in a way that doesn’t leave communities behind. But Navajo Nation, ...
01.15.2021 Biden’s Climate Opportunity (Part 2) Incoming President Biden faces an unimaginable set of challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, a gutted economy and a nation reeling from the recent capital attack. With all of that and more on his plate, what of Biden’s plans to fight ...
01.08.2021 Talk Green, Play Dirty: Corporate America’s Mixed Record Questioning science, funding vocal climate denial groups, and encouraging the focus on personal carbon footprints are corporate America’s preferred tools for shifting the responsibility for action on climate from industry to the individual. “Companies that are very much pro-climate action, ...
01.03.2021 REWIND: Erin Brockovich / Inconspicuous Consumption Twenty years ago, Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her portrayal of maverick environmental activist Erin Brockovich in the film of the same name. These days, in addition to her work on water safety and toxins in communities, Brockovich has ...
12.26.2020 REWIND: Reimagining Capitalism / Fossil Fuels in Your Portfolio Maintaining a consumption-driven economy while keeping emissions down seems more and more like a pipe dream -- is it time to re-think capitalism altogether? “The only thing it requires is a massive cultural and political movement changing the rules that ...
12.18.2020 Biden’s Climate Opportunity (Part 1) President-elect Joe Biden says he will infuse climate change into every corner of his agenda. That’s becoming evident looking at his emerging team. "You're already seeing signs from the nominees and the people they’re choosing that climate is going to ...
12.11.2020 Mary Nichols: A Climate Champion’s Legacy Throughout a 45-year career as an environmental regulator, Mary Nichols has been a powerful champion for climate action and cutting emissions. Having been called everything from “Trump's nemesis” to “the most influential environmental regulator of all time,” Nichols has both ...
12.04.2020 Breaking Through: A Year of Climate Conversations “Unprecedented” is one of the most overused words of 2020, but it reflects the superstorm of disruption brought on by an overlapping pandemic, racial justice awakening, and presidential election. For the first time ever, climate change galvanized a record number ...
11.27.2020 Last Call for Gasoline Is this the end of the road for the internal combustion engine? California isn’t the first major economy to ban gas-powered cars and trucks, and it won’t be the last. Fifteen countries, including some of the world’s top auto markets, ...
11.20.2020 REWIND: Racism and Climate / Climate Change Through the Artist’s Eyes In this program, we revisit two Climate One programs from earlier in the year. First, events of the past year, including the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black citizens by police, have shone a glaring spotlight on ...
11.13.2020 Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate Harvest season is especially hard this year as the pandemic strains farmers and food systems, highlighting a deeply divided and often unjust America. Black farmers are no strangers to the intersection of these challenges, as structural racism in the food ...
11.06.2020 The 2020 Election: Anxiety and Incrementalism The 2020 campaign season has finally come to a close. And days after November 3rd has passed, the country is still reeling. About seventy percent of Americans - Democrats, Independents and Republicans - say the election caused a significant amount ...
10.30.2020 Power Shift: Jamie Margolin and Dorceta Taylor What is the role of power in deciding the fate of a planet? 2020 has seen a reckoning with various forms of power embedded in racial, gender, and generational identities. As we think about a transfer of U.S. presidential power, ...
10.23.2020 Steve Schmidt and Varshini Prakash on Disrupting Climate Politics Can we break up the political logjam on climate? “The brokenness of our politics,” says Republican political strategist Stephen Schmidt, “is that we have 90% agreement on a dozen different solutions that we cannot get through the state or federal ...
10.16.2020 Climate Ambition with Gina McCarthy, Annie Leonard and Tamara Toles O’Laughlin Environmental groups like NRDC, 350.org, and Greenpeace helped move climate onto the presidential agenda last year, pushing Joe Biden and other Democrats’ stance on bold action. Now organizers and advocates are backing recovery plans that bolster clean energy jobs, help ...
10.09.2020 A Feminist Climate Renaissance Pathways for reducing carbon emissions include electrifying transportation, replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar power. But in this time of national reckoning on racial and economic disparities there is growing support for a more holistic approach. This view holds ...
10.02.2020 Tech to the Rescue? Technology has helped the world survive, thrive and stay connected through the COVID-19 lockdown. As countries look toward re-opening in a post-pandemic world, does tech hold the same promise in the fight to solve climate change? From mapping weather patterns ...
09.25.2020 Erin Brockovich: Superman’s Not Coming Twenty years ago, Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her portrayal of maverick environmental activist Erin Brockovich in the film of the same name. These days, in addition to her work on water safety and toxins in communities, Brockovich has ...
09.18.2020 Daniel Yergin: Energy, Markets and the Clash of Nations From pipelines to clean power, the world’s biggest economies are brokering developments in oil, gas, and renewables that will shape climate and politics for years to come. But COVID, plummeting oil prices, and expectations for diversity and sustainability are changing ...
09.11.2020 Living With Fire Wildfires are nothing new – they’ve been part of the west’s ecology for millennia. But burning fossil fuels and suppressing the burning of forests over the past century have led to larger, more frequent and ever-more catastrophic wildfires. And burning ...
09.04.2020 Polluting and Providing: The Dirty Energy Dilemma The cost and health burdens of electricity production have long been higher for low-income communities of color than for wealthy white ones. But for many of those communities the fossil fuel industry is also a source of jobs, tax dollars, ...
08.28.2020 Climate Change Through the Artist's Eyes with Alonzo King Can art help us process our changing climate? The story of climate change is typically told in the language of facts and figures, graphs and charts. But through dance, music, sculpture and other media, artists can reach people on a ...
08.21.2020 COVID-19 and Climate: Implications for our Food System Coronavirus outbreaks in food markets, food plants, and farmworker communities have impacted food access and put a spotlight on food insecurity. Farmers are hurting as supply chains for fresh, perishable foods shrivel, while food banks have seen a surge in ...
08.14.2020 Flooding in America Miami may be the poster child of rising waters in the U.S., but further inland, states are grappling with torrential flooding that is becoming the new norm. The Great Flood of 2019 caused destroyed acres of farmland and caused billions ...
08.07.2020 Billion Dollar Burger Long before the coronavirus began disrupting America’s trillion-dollar meat industry, lab-grown proteins were upending the way we consume chicken, pork, and beef. With an environmental footprint far smaller than traditional animal agriculture, are cell-cultured and plant-based meat products — now ...
07.31.2020 The Future Earth: Eric Holthaus and Katharine Wilkinson Science has given us a realistic picture of what Earth will look like with unmitigated climate change: increased extreme weather events, crippled economies, and a world where those with the least are the hardest hit. By creating community and sharing ...
07.24.2020 Billionaire Wilderness For many of us, the story of the American wilderness begins when Europeans arrived on these shores and began conquering it. The wide open spaces of the American West loom large in our country’s mythology. But what often gets written ...
07.17.2020 John Kerry: The Global Dynamics Of Decarbonization The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 7.5% in 2020 — exactly the rate needed globally to meet the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. Can other major economies like China and Europe make plans ...
07.10.2020 The 2020 Election with Tiffany Cross, Rick Wilson and Rich Thau Racism, police and the pandemic are dominating hearts and headlines, but will they translate to votes in national and regional elections? One study found wavering Trump voters rank immigration and climate change as top reasons for a possible vote change, ...
07.02.2020 Real Talk: Racism and Climate The national uprising ignited by the murder of George Floyd has cast a spotlight on the country’s embedded, institutional racism, including the fraught relationship between environmentalism and communities of color. Air pollution, severe weather and the economic upheaval brought on ...

Older episodes

Climate One

What's Climate One about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Climate One episodes:

Colorado River Reckoning: Drought, Climate and Equal Access

Finding the Heart to Talk About Climate

Should Nature Have Rights?

Hot Cities, Methane Leakers and the Catholic Church

Journey of a Former Coal Miner

Climate Stories We Tell Ourselves

Distorted Democracy and the “Zero-Sum Game”

Living with Climate Disruption

REWIND: Billionaire Wilderness

Investing in a Clean and Equitable Recovery

Entrepreneurs Creating an Inclusive Economy

Weird Winters

When Words Aren’t Enough: The Visual Climate Story

The Political Reality of Climate Action

Temperature Check: Science, Texas, and Climate Chaos

John Kerry, Gina McCarthy and Biden’s Climate Team

Climate Narratives with Jeff Biggers, Elizabeth Kolbert and Kim Stanley Robinson

Killer Combination: Climate, Health and Poverty

This Moment in Climate with Michael Mann & Leah Stokes

Varying Degrees: Climate Change in the American Mind

Fast, Fair and Clean: The New Energy Transition

Biden’s Climate Opportunity (Part 2)

Talk Green, Play Dirty: Corporate America’s Mixed Record

REWIND: Erin Brockovich / Inconspicuous Consumption

REWIND: Reimagining Capitalism / Fossil Fuels in Your Portfolio

Biden’s Climate Opportunity (Part 1)

Mary Nichols: A Climate Champion’s Legacy

Breaking Through: A Year of Climate Conversations

Last Call for Gasoline

REWIND: Racism and Climate / Climate Change Through the Artist’s Eyes

Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate

The 2020 Election: Anxiety and Incrementalism

Power Shift: Jamie Margolin and Dorceta Taylor

Steve Schmidt and Varshini Prakash on Disrupting Climate Politics

Climate Ambition with Gina McCarthy, Annie Leonard and Tamara Toles O’Laughlin

A Feminist Climate Renaissance

Tech to the Rescue?

Erin Brockovich: Superman’s Not Coming

Daniel Yergin: Energy, Markets and the Clash of Nations

Living With Fire

Polluting and Providing: The Dirty Energy Dilemma

Climate Change Through the Artist's Eyes with Alonzo King

COVID-19 and Climate: Implications for our Food System

Flooding in America

Billion Dollar Burger

The Future Earth: Eric Holthaus and Katharine Wilkinson

Billionaire Wilderness

John Kerry: The Global Dynamics Of Decarbonization

The 2020 Election with Tiffany Cross, Rick Wilson and Rich Thau

Real Talk: Racism and Climate

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