Climate One

We’ve experienced yet another summer of record wildfires in the western U.S., endangering lives, displacing communities, and sending unhealthy smoke across the nation. 

The science is clear: human-caused climate change is making lands more conducive to burning, and we are increasingly living in flammable landscapes. Forest experts say there are tools to help reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, keep forests alive as valuable carbon sinks and make communities more resilient to megafires. But we may also have to become accustomed to more fire – and smoke – in our lives. 

How can we better live with fire, including using it as a tool, rather than always fighting it?

For transcripts and other information, visit: https://www.climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts 

Guests:

Stephen Pyne, author, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next 

Susan Husari, member of the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection

Chad T. Hanson, author, Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate

Jaime Lowe, author, Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires

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Despite her identity as an evangelical, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe doesn't accept global warming on faith; she crunches the data, analyzes the models, and helps engineers, city managers and ecologists quantify the impacts. In her new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, Hayhoe argues that when it comes to changing hearts and minds, facts are only one part of the equation. 

“The biggest problem we have is not the people who willfully decide to reject 200 years of basic science,” she says. “The bigger problem is the number of people who say, ‘it's real’ but they don’t think it matters to them.”

Hayhoe says we need to find shared values with others to drive conversations and collective action on climate disruption.

Guest:

Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist and chief scientist, The Nature Conservancy; author, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

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The COVID-19 pandemic revealed structural weaknesses and inequities that existed long before 2020. Like COVID-19, climate change is another “threat multiplier,” with the power to disrupt many of our social systems. 

In her new book, The Fight for Climate After COVID-19, Alice Hill says we need to adapt our thinking and our policies to combat the ever-increasing threat of climate change. Especially when we see more compound disasters – like a wildfire followed by a mudslide.

“We need to come together to understand the risks, understand the vulnerabilities and then start making decisions with the support and the aid of the federal government to have better outcomes,” Hill says.

What changes can we make now to better prepare for future risks and climate disasters?   

Guests:

Alice Hill, author, The Fight for Climate After COVID-19, Senior Fellow for Climate Change Policy, Council on Foreign Relations

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Thomas P. Bostick, Former Commanding General, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Francis Suarez, Mayor of Miami

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This September marks the 50th anniversary of the seminal work Diet for a Small Planet, in which Frances Moore Lappé argued that cattle constitute “a protein factory in reverse.” Lappé’s book inspired countless people to adopt vegetarian diets for environmental reasons. 

But in the last 50 years the industrial food systems in America have only grown bigger and more concentrated, and – as the Lappés would argue – more powerful. Together with her daughter Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, the two now focus on the intersections between democracy, environment, food, and justice. 

“It's really important that we understand that in order to change our food environment, we need to really work to get money out of politics, and we really need to work on how to take on that kind of consolidated power in the industry,” Anna Lappé says.  

Guests:

Frances Moore Lappé, author, Diet for a Small Planet 

Anna Lappé, author, Diet for a Hot Planet

Analena Hope Hassberg, Associate Professor, Ethnic and Women's Studies Department, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Ruth Richardson, Executive Director, Global Alliance for the Future of Food

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Water is essential for life, and throughout history we have sought to control and make use of it. As Giulio Boccaletti explores in his new book, Water: A Biography, that relationship with water has underpinned human civilization, forming an integral part of society, government and land use systems. But despite its essential nature, access to water has never been equal or entirely fair. 

Climate disruption will further destabilize the systems we’ve built to control water in our environment – even as it remains a public good without fair and equal public access. What can 10,000 years of history teach us about how we should handle water in our current and future climate?

Guests:

Giulio Boccaletti, Author, Water: A Biography

Sara Aminzadeh, Vice President of Partnerships, U.S. Water Alliance

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Hundreds of people have been arrested in Minnesota in ongoing protests against Line 3, a pipeline that will move Canadian tar sands oil, and which could be operational as soon as this month. 

Pipeline advocates, like Mike Fernandez of Enbridge (Line 3’s builder), argue that as long as people are still using oil, we need a way to transport it — and pipelines are the safest, least carbon-intensive means of doing so. Opponents, like Sierra Club’s Kelly Sheehan Martin, argue that oil companies bolster markets for oil and gas as a way to justify continued profits from building pipelines and extracting oil. Sheehan Martin argues that to seriously address the climate crisis, we need to keep the oil in the ground, and listen to the voices of those worried about harm to waterways and tribal lands. 

Why have oil pipelines become such a point of contention in the environmental movement? And what can all sides agree on to work toward the same less-carbon-reliant future?

Guests:

Mike Fernandez, Senior Vice President, Public Affairs, Communications & Sustainability, Enbridge

Daniel Raimi, Fellow, Resources for the Future

Kelly Sheehan Martin, Senior Director of Energy Campaigns, Sierra Club

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Listener Advisory: This episode contains some content related to a suicide. If you or someone you love is thinking about suicide, the National 24-hour Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.

This summer, the climate crisis seems to be unfolding faster than ever before — with catastrophic floods, huge wildfires, and killer heat. It’s becoming increasingly hard to mentally set climate aside as a future problem — it is here, real in our present moment. 

How do we grapple with the weight of these changes, and process our fear for what is coming for us, and for the next generation? And how do those emotions affect our decisions about whether or not to have children, who in many ways represent an embodied version of our hope for the future?

Guests:

Daniel Sherrell, Author, Warmth, Coming of Age at the End of Our World

Seb Gould, physics teacher

Irène Mathieu, pediatrician and poet

Virginie Le Masson, co-director of the Centre for Gender and Disaster at University College London

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In early August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report unequivocally connecting global warming and extreme weather to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions, and warning of much more dramatic climate futures if we don’t change course soon.

Since the 2020 election, Rich Thau’s Swing Voter Project has been querying those who shifted from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 about a range of issues. How will their views affect the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election? Where does climate rate on their list of issues? And does the accelerating climate crisis matter enough to affect their votes?

Guests:

Rich Thau, Moderator, The Swing Voter Project; Co-founder and President, Engagious 

Andrew Freedman, Climate and Energy Reporter, Axios

Venkatachalam “Ram” Ramaswamy, Director of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

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In October 2020, California Gov. Newsom announced a plan to protect 30% of his state by 2030. In 2021, the Biden Administration announced its own 30x30 plan, later dubbed America the Beautiful. With 12% of the U.S. already under some form of protection, where will the other 18% come from? In states like Nebraska, nearly all the land is in private hands — and the owners are worried.

With increased focus on the climate crisis, it’s easy to think we have enough to worry about without considering species other than our own. But the natural world provides critical resources that counteract the damaging impacts of climate change and sustain all life — including human life. About one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction. How much land does nature need to survive?

Guests:

Paula Ehrlich, CEO, E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation

Woody Lee, Executive Director, Utah Diné Bikéyah

Jennifer Norris, Deputy Secretary for Biodiversity and Habitat, California Natural Resources Agency

Catherine Semcer, Research Fellow, Property and Environment Research Center

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In Washington State, voters defeated initiatives to put a price on carbon ― twice. Governor Jay Inslee himself then lost his personal bid for the White House. Yet his bold ideas have proven staying power. The state legislature recently passed a carbon cap and invest bill that will reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 95 percent by 2050. 

“We’ve got to wake up every morning figuring out ‘how can I disrupt the status quo.’ Because the status quo is deadly, it’s fatal, it will destroy economies and the biology that we exist on,” Inlsee says. 

Even big oil, which spent tens of missions to defeat the 2018 carbon pricing proposal, seems to be changing its tune, with BP now supporting a price on carbon. 

How might Washington State be a bellwether for Washington DC?

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