Climate One

By Climate One from The Commonwealth ClubNews Science Social Sciences News Commentary Earth Sciences

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Climate One episodes

September 13, 2019 From Wheels to Wings: Our Flying Car Future
Can we beat the traffic by taking to the skies?
For more than a century, the automobile has ruled our city streets, chaining us to grid-shaped streets choked with lines of traffic. And for many of us, seemingly endless hours of daily commuting.
“But what if we can remove those chains?” asks JoeBen Bevirt of Joby Aviation. “What do our lives, what do our cities, how does the world look 20 years from now or 50 years from now? That's what gets me up everyday.
“So my mission is to save a billion people an hour a day in their daily commutes.”
The ability to sail above the freeways in a flying car, getting to work in minutes instead of hours, has long been the stuff of science fiction. But JoeBen Bevirt is already on his way towards making it a reality. He’s raised more than $100 million to develop a five-seater that he claims will be faster, cheaper and quieter than helicopters. And not just as a plaything for the rich, Bevirt promises.
“We really want to be able to launch this at an affordable price point that’s accessible to everyone,” he says. “That is similar cost to taking a taxi on a cost per passenger mile. And then our ambition is to get it to the cost of personal car.”
Other startups around the world are also developing drones or flying cars. Urban air mobility – or UAM -- is coming.
For now, there are still many challenges to getting those flying cars off the ground, from infrastructure to regulatory issues, from air traffic to zoning. Not to mention mechanics and design – what will the flying car of the future look like? Auto industry consultant Charlie Vogelheim says what comes to mind for most consumers is a cross between the Jetson’s family-sized space capsule and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
“The thing that people keep thinking about when they think about flying cars is, ‘where is that car that I can drive and then the wings come out?’”
Guests:
JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO, Joby Aviation
Uma Subramanian, CEO, Aero Technologies
Jennifer Richter, Partner, Akin Gump
CharlieVogelheim, Principal, Vogelheim Ventures
Related Links:
Air-Taxi Startup has a Working Prototype (Bloomberg)
How Airbus is working to take urban mobility airborne (Pitchbook)
Bringing Urban Mobility into the Third Dimension (Urban Future)
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on August 20th, 2019, and was made possible by the ClimateWorks Foundation.

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52 min
September 06, 2019 How Pro Sports Can Be a Player in Climate
From stadiums packed with fans, to food, beer, and waste – pro sports can have a big carbon footprint. But could the core values of athletics — integrity, teamwork, and commitment — be the same values we need to tackle the climate challenge?
”Doing sports the right way is more important now than ever,” says Jim Thompson, Founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance. “We spent a lot of time as adults trying to get kids to do certain things. What if we spend our time trying to encourage them to become the kind of people who want to do the right thing?”
Thompson, whose PCA trains youth sports coaches around the country, is a newly converted climate evangelist. “Our country, the whole world is gonna need leaders – people who do the right thing when it matters,” he says. “That's my definition of character, when you do the right thing when it matters, and what happens in the next 10 years matters a lot.”
So do pro athletes have a special role in getting their fans and teams to talk about climate?
“I think somebody needs to prompt the questions out of them, because I don't think most people aren’t going to just come out and just start talking about climate change,” says Dusty Baker, a special advisor with the San Francisco Giants who had a 19-year career as a hard-hitting outfielder and a 20-year career as a big-league manager.
Baker, who is also an avid bird hunter and solar power entrepreneur, admires the star athletes who do speak out on climate or other social issues, but he understands why others may be reluctant to do so. “You spend all your life trying to get to this goal” he explains,”and you realize it's a very limited period of time and also there's somebody always trying to take your job.”
Ultimately, the best agents for climate action in the sports arena might be the businesses and the customers – that is, teams and their fans.
“Through sport and food we have a huge opportunity to influence the world in a positive way,” says Roger McClendon, Executive Director with the Green Sports Alliance, an association of teams and venues employing sports as a vehicle to promote healthy sustainable communities throughout the world.
McClendon previously served as the first chief sustainability officer with Yum! Brands, whose holdings include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC restaurants, where he challenged the company to run cleaner.
“[Pro teams] are businesses but they have the responsibility to serve their consumers and their consumers are fans,” he says. “When the fans or the customers start saying this is important to them, then usually businesses start to listen.
Guests:

Dusty Baker, Special Advisor, San Francisco Giants

Roger McClendon, Executive Director, Green Sports Alliance

Jim Thompson, Founder, Positive Coaching Alliance.
Related links:

Positive Coaching Alliance

Baker Energy Team

Green Sports Alliance

NBA Green

How climate change is affecting outdoor skating (NHL.com)

San Francisco Giants reclaim the Green Glove Award (MLB.com)

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52 min
August 30, 2019 Carbon Offsets: Privileged Pollution?
A carbon offset is a credit – a way to offset a unit of pollution created in one place by, say, planting a tree, or otherwise sequestering carbon, somewhere else. But in the race to bring carbon emissions to zero, are offsets a legitimate tool, or a delusion that allows heavy emitters a way out of taking real action?
“I just need to recruit everybody to make sure the forests remain forests and the farmlands have as many trees as possible,” says Pauline Kalunda, Executive Director of Ecotrust Uganda,

a non-governmental conservation organization in Uganda. She uses money from carbon offsets purchased in wealthy countries to help build environmental resilience at the community level. Buying offsets can help fund carbon-reduction projects in developing economies with limited funding – but they don’t help reduce dirty air back home.
“We ultimately need to get to a point where it is really, really expensive to pollute so that people pollute a lot less,” maintains Kahlil Baker, Executive Director of Taking Root, a Canada-based group which also works with the offset market to promote economic development among smallholder farmers in Nicaragua. Voluntary offsets are great for eco-conscious consumers who want to ease their climate guilt. Do they run the risk of letting individuals think they’re off the hook for their carbon sins?
“I’m a lot less worried about offsets from individuals than I am about Chevron offsetting,” says Zoe Cina-Sklar, a climate justice campaigner with the advocacy group Amazon Watch. She worries about corporations and other large polluters using offsets to avoid accountability under state climate policies.
Barbara Haya, a research fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy, who studies California’s offsets program, echoes this worry. “We’re allowing businesses in California like Chevron and Phillips and other large emitters to continue to emit,” she claims, “because they're buying these credits that many of which don't actually represent real emissions reductions.”
But Rajinder Sahota, who leads the Cap and Trade program for the California Air Resources Board, disagrees with the takeaways of Haya’s research. “The offsets don't play a specific line item in reducing emissions towards our target,” she counters, “they are a compliance currency under the cap and trade program.”
Ultimately, carbon offsets work best, as Derik Broekhoff from the Stockholm Environmental Institute puts it, as the icing on the cake and not the cake itself. “The advice for voluntary offset has always been reduce your own emissions first,” he suggests, “and then turn to offsets as a kind of additional even charitable contribution that you can make towards both helping the climate and making the world a better place.”
Guests (in order of appearance):

Pauline Kalunda, Executive Director, Ecotrust Uganda

Kahlil Baker, Executive Director, Taking Root

Pennie Opal Plant, Co-Founder, Idle No More Bay Area

Zoe Cina-Sklar, Climate Justice Campaigner, Amazon Watch

Barbara Haya, Research Fellow, Center for Environmental Public Policy

Rajinder Sahota, Assistant Division Chief, Industrial Strategies Division, California Air Resources Board

Derik Broekhoff, Senior Scientist, Stockholm Environmental Institute

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52 min
August 23, 2019 Tom Steyer: Power Disruptor?
Would you vote for the candidate who says he’ll declare climate change a national emergency on Day One of his presidency? Businessman and activist Tom Steyer says his willingness to use emergency powers to deal with the climate crisis sets him apart from the crowded field of Democratic candidates.
“You have to start on day one, urgently – it's an emergency, treat it like an emergency,” Steyer urges. “I would give the Congress a 100 days … to pass something like the Green New Deal, but they've had 28 years to pass something like the Green New Deal, and actually we don't have the luxury of waiting any longer.”
Steyer also cites his record fighting the corporate takeover of the US government as another mark of distinction.
“I am the person who spent 10 years as an outsider organizing coalitions of American citizens to take on corporate interests and to register voters engage voters and turn them out at the polls,” he notes, while also affirming that his grassroots organizing will continue independently of his campaign and the election.
But as the Democratic Party moves to the left, with a more diverse candidate pool than ever, is now the right time for another wealthy white man to insist he’s the best person for the job?
“I think there's a very simple challenge for everybody who wants to be the Democratic nominee,” says Steyer,” and that’s to have something to say that people want to hear ... I think that if I'm saying something that touches people and they believe that I'm a credible messenger, then they'll respond.”
Guest:
Tom Steyer, Activist, Businessman, 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate
This program was recorded at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on August 19, 2019.

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52 min
August 16, 2019 Superpower: How Renewables are Transforming America’s Energy Future
What’s new in renewable energy? In April, 23 percent of America’s electricity came from renewables, surpassing coal for the first time. Ten states, and Puerto Rico and Washington DC, have policies in place to run on 100 percent clean power in coming decades. Achieving that presents a host of challenges, from updating an aging electricity grid to financing energy innovation to figuring out how to transport and store the renewable power.
Fortunately, says author Russell Gold, we have the talent to take those challenges on. “There's a lot of creativity in the space right now,” says Gold. “There's creativity on reducing demand, there's creativity in how we aggregate solar… and frankly, given what's going on with the climate, we sort of need to be trying them all -- simultaneously.” And if we succeed, we stand to gain a lot more than just cleaner air, a stable planet and lower electricity bills.
Guests:
Russell Gold, Reporter, the Wall Street Journal; Author, Superpower: One Man's Quest to Transform American Energy (Simon & Schuster, 2019)
Jigar Shah, Founder, SunEdison; Co-Host, The Energy Gang podcast
Lynn Doan, Team Leader, Power and Gas-Americas, Bloomberg News
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on August 5, 2019.
For full show notes, visit our website.

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52 min
August 09, 2019 The Land of Dreams and Drought
The California dream, with its promise of never-ending sunshine, fertile soil and rivers running with gold, has been beckoning people west for over two hundred years. But making that dream come true for an ever-increasing population has taken its toll on the landscape. Is the California dream coming to an end?
When its current water system was built in the 1960s and ‘70s, California’s population was about half of the forty million who live there today. And every one of its citizens needs water to drink, bathe and cook. Add to that the demands of agriculture, livestock and the natural ecosystem, and the pool of available water gets smaller and smaller.
“When the resource is finite then you have to make choices,” says author Mark Arax. “And so in the San Joaquin Valley they're gonna have to choose which land deserves that water. It's alfalfa, it's Holsteins.”
In his new book, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, Arax pulls back the curtain on the backroom deal-making between billionaire investors and regulators that has, in some cases, stolen the water right out from under our feet. Faith Kearns, a scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources, says it’s been going on for years. Even she has trouble keeping up.
“I think there is a lot of stuff that goes on really behind the scenes and that is completely inaccessible to most of us, even those of us who work on this topic professionally,” says Kearns.
California now experiences regular weather whiplash, amplified by climate change, careening between record drought and extreme rainfall. Diana Marcum won a Pulitzer Prize for her series of articles on California’s central valley farmers during the drought. Years of parched weather have taught her to appreciate the green times we do get.
“I think that’s one thing I took away from the drought,” Marcum recalls. “During it I kept thinking, I wish I would've paid more attention. I wish I could picture the snow. I wish I could picture the grass.
So right now I'm trying to look so hard that it almost hurts”
Guests:
Mark Arax, Author, “The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California” (Knopf, 2019)
Diana Marcum, Reporter, Los Angeles Times
Faith Kearns, Scientist, California Institute for Water Resources
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on July 17th, 2019.

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52 min
August 02, 2019 Drawdown: Do We Have What It Takes to Solve Climate Change?
When it comes to solving climate change, where do we start? The organization Project Drawdown has published a list of top solutions for climate change – impactful actions already in existence that not only reduce carbon emissions, but also improve lives, create jobs and generate community resilience. “If you’re thinking about how to solve climate change here's where you start,” says Jonathan Foley, Project Drawdown’s executive director. “Electricity is about a quarter of the problem. Food, agriculture and forest are also a quarter of the problem...then you’ve got buildings, industry and transportation. Those are the five things we’ve got to change.”
One item that might surprise many is dealing with global overpopulation. And that starts with improving education and reproductive freedom for the world’s girls and women. “If women have the opportunity to be able to have a voice and be agents in their community and their country globally, we have the opportunity to have the kind of innovation that we need to be able to combat this,” says Lois Quam of Pathfinder International. “That human right to decide whether and when and how many and with whom we want to have a child, the ability to exercise that right is…one of the top strategies to combat climate change.” It’s quite a to-do list – and it’s only the beginning.
How to sort through the many daunting tasks ahead of us? Don’t be discouraged, says Foley. It almost doesn’t matter where we start, as long as we’re doing something. Corporations, policy makers, communities and individuals all have a part to play in achieving climate drawdown.
This point was driven home to the audience and panelists alike by an additional guest, 13-year old Kea Morshed. His YouTube channel, Movies with Mic1, demonstrates the many ways we can all challenge ourselves to take action on climate change.
“At the end of the day, it's gonna be behavior change by all of us that’s necessary,” Foley tells Climate One. “It’s gonna be policy change, business operations change and changes in capital, money. “So don’t pick one lever, pull them all, you know - everybody bloody one you can find!”
Guests: Kate Brandt, Sustainability Officer, Google
Jonathan Foley, Executive Director, Project Drawdown
Lois Quam, U.S. Chief Executive Officer, Pathfinder International
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on July 11, 2019.
For complete show notes, visit our website.

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52 min
July 26, 2019 The Art of the Green Deal
The climate conversation in Washington has changed enough that Democrats and Republicans are talking climate deals. A lot of that change can be attributed to the Green New Deal, a Democratic resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey.
“What we're doing with the Green New Deal is we’re putting together an army that won't just be a resolution, it's a revolution,” boasts Markey, who has served over 40 years in Congress and co-authored the last big legislative push for national climate policy a decade ago. Markey says that he and AOC “share a passion to create a movement which is going to change the relationship between the American people and the fossil fuel industry.”
That relationship is also targeted in the Green Real Deal, a market-based alternative to the Green New Deal put forward by Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. “Fossil fuels are not our future. They just aren’t,” proclaims Gaetz, very much out of step with GOP orthodoxy in general and the current administration’s policies in particular.
Less surprising than a Republican proposing to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies is that a GOP call for climate action is coming from Florida. Gaetz, whose district in the Florida panhandle was battered by Hurricane Michael in 2018 is an ardent supporter of President Trump – except when it comes to climate science.
“You can either believe the climate deniers, or you can believe your lying eyes,” he says, “and I'm from the pro-science wing of the Republican Party.” But are there really any prospects for a legislative deal passing while a pro-fossil fuel climate denier occupies the White House?
“It's more likely to see ideas like this passing as ballot initiatives in states as test kitchens that can then kind of branch out to other states than something really holistically passing through Congress before 2020,” says Miranda Green, an energy and environment reporter covering Congress for The Hill.
Still, Green is impressed with Gaetz’s fossil fuel iconoclasm and even with Trump’s apparent need to address climate – if never actually by name – in a recent White House speech. “It shows that the issue of climate change has really put itself at the center of politics right now,” she says, “at the center of the political debate.”
Guests:
Senator Ed Markey, D-MA
Representative Matt Gaetz, R-FL
Miranda Green, Energy and Environment Reporter, The Hill

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52 min
July 19, 2019 The Fate of Food
How will we feed a planet that’s hotter, drier, and more crowded than ever? Much of it starts with innovators who are trying to re-invent the global food system to be more productive and nutritious. Vanderbilt University Journalism professor Amanda Little chronicles some of these efforts in her new book, The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.
“We see disruption in the auto industry, we see disruption in tobacco – disruption is coming in the meat industry,” says Little, noting how conventional meat companies have been investing in technologies to produce cell-based meat without animals.
Other technological innovations, such as robots that can deploy herbicide with sniper-like precision, can help push agriculture toward more sustainable practices. But she also notes the difficulties that food startups face in getting their products to scale – which often means selling to large, industrial producers.
“We need the sort of good guys and bad guys to collaborate,” she says. “It doesn't mean that that is disrupting the, you know, the rise of local food webs and farmers markets and CSAs and locally sourced foods. It means maybe this is a way of bringing more intelligent practices to industrial ag.”
Twilight Greenaway, a contributing editor with Civil Eats, amplifies these concerns about tech disruption in the food space. “Will there be some [technology] that really can feed into a more democratic food system that allows for different types of ownership less concentrated ownership,” she asks, noting that some startups start out with the goal of selling to a large company.
She likens the current conversation to earlier discussions about the organic farming movement leading to little more than an organic Twinkie. “There’s a lot to say about changing practices on the land and what organic means in terms of pesticides and other environmental benefits,” she cautions, “but on the other hand, you’ll still end up with the Twinkie.”
Guests:
Twilight Greenaway, Contributing Editor, Civil Eats
Amanda Little, Professor of Journalism, Vanderbilt University

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53 min
July 12, 2019 Cities for the Future
When Ridley Scott envisioned the dystopian Los Angeles of 2019 in “Blade Runner,” he probably didn’t think about how much energy would be needed to run those flying cars and sky-high animated billboards. Or what all those carbon emissions would be doing to the climate.
We’re now living in the world of 2019. Flying cars are still in the future. But with over half of the global population living in urban centers, and another 2.5 billion expected to join them by 2050, maybe it’s time to take a step backward when it comes to getting around the city.
“We know that if you invite more cars, you get more cars,” says architect and urban planner Jan Gehl. “If you invite and make streets you get more traffic. And if you can make more bicycle lanes and do it properly, you get more bicycles.
“And if you invite people to walk more and use public spaces more, you get more life in the city. It's the same mechanism -- you get what you invite for.”
The cities of today have to prepare for a future that includes more heat, more flooding and more people. This means confronting the infrastructure they run on, and making some upgrades. That could have a bigger impact than most people realize.
“Approaching climate change, particularly when it comes to our cities, is this opportunity to do pretty major investments in a sort of significant retooling of cities,” says urbanist Liz Ogbu. “Not just in the U.S., but around the world.”
But large urban projects have historically ended up displacing communities of color by building freeways through their communities or by pricing them out of their own homes and businesses. Some well-known examples of this are Detroit, Miami and Los Angeles. Ogbu warns that it’s important to keep from repeating the mistakes of the past.
“I think it's time that we talk about how do we be intentional about those investments and who benefits,” Ogbu continue. “Because I think the idea that we don't consider it doesn't mean that people don't get harmed.”
Can we create a Tomorrowland that is sustainable, livable and inclusive?
Guests:
Liz Ogbu, Founder and Principal, Studio O
Laura Crescimano, Co-Founder/Principal, SITELAB Urban Studio
Jan Gehl, Architect and Founding Partner, Gehl Architects, author, “Cities for People” (Island Press, 2010)
Related Links:
SPUR: Ideas + Action for a Better City
SITELAB Urban Studio
Studio O
Liz Ogbu TED Talk: What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of displacing them? (Youtube)
Cities for People (Jan Gehl)
Jan Gehl TED Talk: In Search of the Human Scale (Youtube)
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on June 3, 2019.

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53 min

About Climate One

From the publisher's feed

We’re living through a climate emergency; addressing this crisis begins by talking about it. Co-Hosts Greg Dalton, Ariana Brocious and Kousha Navidar bring you empowering conversations that connect all aspects of the challenge — the scary and the exciting, the individual and the systemic. Join us.