Climate One

By Climate One at The Commonwealth Club

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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Biden’s Climate Opportunity...

01.15.2021

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 ...

Climate One episodes:

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 ...
06.26.2020 Reimagining Capitalism: Wealth, Power, and Patriarchy Expanding oil extraction and clean energy, supporting capitalism while fighting climate change: can humans ever really have it all? In their new books, authors Hope Jahren and Rebecca Henderson explore how a healthy climate might coexist with a consumption-driven economy ...
06.19.2020 Empowering Women: The Climate Solution We Don’t Talk About As the global population approaches eight billion, humans continue to test the number of bodies that can fit onto a planet of finite resources. Empowering women through access to education and family planning may be at the core of establishing ...
06.12.2020 Will Climate Matter in the Election? With less than four months before early voting begins in the presidential election, America is enraged and inflamed across the country. People of all races are expressing their anger and solidarity in the streets and on social media. Separately, COVID ...
06.05.2020 A Decade of Oil: From Deepwater Horizon to Deflation America's latest oil boom began with a bang, literally, on Earth Day, 2010. That’s when an offshore oil rig owned by BP exploded, killing eleven workers and spilling nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. John ...
05.29.2020 REWIND: Fate of Food / Plate to Planet How do we go about feeding a planet that’s hotter, drier, and more crowded than ever? The connection between global warming and the dinner table isn’t always obvious when we go to the grocery store. But our choices about how ...
05.22.2020 COVID-19 and Climate: The Future of Energy After decades of relying on imported oil, the U.S. achieved the unthinkable and became the world’s largest producer. Production has doubled over the past decade, and in February reached its highest level ever - thirteen million barrels a day. But ...
05.15.2020 Storytelling Through the Climate Crisis How do we confront the reality of a future that will be hauntingly different from today? Some authors are using fiction to create relatable narratives while sparing us from a deluge of sobering facts that can make audiences feel detached. ...
05.08.2020 Zero-Emission Cities Can we solve the climate crisis by reimagining our cities? Climate activists have long envisioned the zero-carbon cities of the future. Now, with COVID-19 shutting down congested urban areas, city dwellers from Los Angeles to New Delhi are getting a ...
05.01.2020 Fossil Fuels in the Ground and in Your Portfolio When institutional investors divest from fossil fuel companies, does it make a difference, or is the impact merely symbolic? Some advocate keeping your stock and your influence, using investor dollars to encourage change from within. We’re not all managing billions ...
05.01.2020 COVID-19 and Climate: Economic Impacts The COVID-19 recession is unfolding at historic speed and depth. New jobless claims reached a record 10 million in just two weeks. Wall Street’s fear gauge closed at an all-time high in mid-March. Environmentally, though, the shutdown has come with ...
04.17.2020 COVID-19 and Climate: Implications for Public Health What can the spread of coronavirus teach us about the spread of climate change? Both crises have global reach, invisible perpetrators, and require aggressive, early action for containment. But while an infectious disease is acute and deeply personal, the impacts ...
04.10.2020 What’s the Future of Nuclear Power? Nuclear power - revive it or allow a slow death? Today, about a hundred nuclear plants provide 20 percent of America’s electricity. Once touted as a modern power source, nuclear fell out of favor after a series of major accidents ...
04.03.2020 COVID-19 and Climate: Human Response Why does an invisible, life-threatening virus prompt a nationwide emergency, but invisible, life-threatening gases don’t? Experts have been emphasizing the dangers of unchecked climate change for years, underscoring the need for rapid, bold action early-on to avoid the worst impacts. ...
03.27.2020 REWIND: Aligning Profits with Planet / The Circular Economy “How do you move from a place of simply trying to stop bad things and asking instead how would you make products and services in a sustainable manner?” asks Adam Davis of Ecosystem Investment Partners. Is it possible to protect ...
03.20.2020 Me vs We: What Matters Most for Climate Action? Addressing the climate challenge requires incremental and transformational change on both personal and systemic levels. That means altering our personal habits as citizens, consumers, employees and parents. At the same time, society needs to fundamentally modernize the food, transportation, building ...
03.13.2020 What the 2030 Climate Deadline Really Means For years, scientists have been saying that the climate battle will be won or lost in the next decade. The IPCC has stated that to avoid climate catastrophe, global emissions must be halved by 2030. Politicians and the media have ...
03.06.2020 Big Ideas with Dan Esty & Andy Karsner Does solving climate change mean re-thinking old top-down approaches and embracing big change at high speed? A half-century after the first Earth Day, some environmental advocates argue it’s time to challenge some of our basic assumptions about climate action. In ...
02.28.2020 Oil and Opioids on Trial Tobacco companies, opioid suppliers, gun manufacturers and the fossil fuel industry -- all have been brought under fire, and into the courts, for knowingly causing public harm, and even death, with their products. Should corporations be held liable for harmful ...
02.21.2020 Is California’s Climate Progress Going Up in Smoke? California has been at the forefront of America’s climate fight since Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the country’s first major climate law in 2006. The state’s suite of policies for decarbonizing the economy survived industry-funded attacks in court and at the ...
02.14.2020 Building a Resilient Tomorrow Climate-fueled floods, fires and droughts have devastated America’s cities and rural areas. Our natural response is to regroup, recover and rebuild. But should we instead be preparing for managed retreat? In her book Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare ...
02.07.2020 Driving Forces: How Climate Fuels Human Migration From the first humans to venture out of Africa 60,000 years ago to the displaced refugees of today, migration has always been a part of human life. And in parts of the world where immediate threats include violence and poverty, ...

Older episodes

Climate One

What's Climate One about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Climate One episodes:

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

Reimagining Capitalism: Wealth, Power, and Patriarchy

Empowering Women: The Climate Solution We Don’t Talk About

Will Climate Matter in the Election?

A Decade of Oil: From Deepwater Horizon to Deflation

REWIND: Fate of Food / Plate to Planet

COVID-19 and Climate: The Future of Energy

Storytelling Through the Climate Crisis

Zero-Emission Cities

Fossil Fuels in the Ground and in Your Portfolio

COVID-19 and Climate: Economic Impacts

COVID-19 and Climate: Implications for Public Health

What’s the Future of Nuclear Power?

COVID-19 and Climate: Human Response

REWIND: Aligning Profits with Planet / The Circular Economy

Me vs We: What Matters Most for Climate Action?

What the 2030 Climate Deadline Really Means

Big Ideas with Dan Esty & Andy Karsner

Oil and Opioids on Trial

Is California’s Climate Progress Going Up in Smoke?

Building a Resilient Tomorrow

Driving Forces: How Climate Fuels Human Migration

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