How to Save a Planet

By GimletSociety & Culture News Science

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How to Save a Planet episodes

March 17, 2022Waste, Worms and Windrows: Domingo Morales' Quest to Make Compost Cool
Food waste accounts for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But it turns out composting — the mystical art of turning your food scraps into nutritious organic material that can be used to grow even more food — can help to reduce those emissions. We talk to Domingo Morales of Compost Power about how he found composting, how he’s trying to make it cool, and why he’s building compost sites at public housing developments all over New York City.
This episode contains a description of suicide, so please take care while listening. And if you or someone you love is having thoughts of suicide, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1- 800-273-TALK.
Guest: Domingo Morales
Calls to Action
If you have food scraps…compost them!
Domingo recommends finding your local food scrap drop off to start – just separate your waste, freeze it so it doesn’t smell, and bring it to a drop off bin
If you want to learn how to compost at home, check out: the Compost Power Instagram, the EPA, and SodGod for your classic aerobic compost pile, and Loop Closing to learn about worm bins
And if you’re already composting, share it with the people around you

Listen to Domingo’s compost rap!
Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Anna Ladd. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Daniel Ackerman, and Hannah Chinn. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Nicole Welch. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Peter Leonard and Emma Munger. Our fact checker for this episode was Claudia Geib.

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37 min
March 10, 2022Are The Coral Reefs Really Doomed?
You’ve probably heard of coral bleaching; if you live near a coral reef, maybe you’ve even seen the impacts of climate change on that reef up close. But what — if anything — can we do to keep coral alive? This week, we talk to Julia Baum, a marine ecologist who’s made the unlikely journey from climate despair to climate optimism… and ask her what finally changed her mind about the future of coral reefs.

Also: we're planning a special Earth Day episode, and we'd love to hear about the actions YOU'VE taken in response to climate change. Did you plant a tree? Call your representative? Investigate the refrigerants used at a grocery store near you? We want to hear about it! Fill out this form and send us a voice memo about what you did... you might hear your own voice featured on the show!

Guests: Dr. Julia Baum, Dr. Dave Vaughan
Dr. Dave Vaughan’s book, Active Coral Restoration: Techniques for a Changing Planet
Dr. Julia Baum’s study about how she saw corals survive the massive marine heat wave on Christmas

How to Save a Planet is a Spotify original podcast and Gimlet production hosted by Alex Blumberg. This episode was produced and co-hosted by Hannah Chinn. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Anna Ladd, and Daniel Ackerman. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Nicole Welch.
Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard, with original music by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Catherine Anderson, Bobby Lord, and Marcus Bagala.
Our fact checker for this episode is James Gaines. Special thanks to Kelson Poepoe and Julia’s team at the University of Victoria. And of course, thanks to all of you for listening.

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39 min
March 03, 2022Fast Fashion's Dirty Little Secret (Hint: It's Oil)
Whether you consider yourself a fashion maven or not one thing is true: you wear clothes. It's a basic rule of most societies. But in recent years, it's become clear that the clothes that keep us warm in winter and protect us from the sun in summer are also harming the planet. According to the EPA in the United States we threw out close to 13 million tons of clothing in 2018 alone. One factor? Clothes have gotten really cheap. And that's partly because these days much of it is made from fossil fuels. We take a deep look at our clothes, their climate impact, how they got so much oil in them and what we can do about it.

Calls to Action
Try the Fashion Detox, it's a 10 week break from buying clothes with deep reflection.
Learn How to Buy Clothes that are Built to Last
Check out the Guppy Friend washing bag
Learn more about Extended Producer Responsibility regulations. You can see what is happening in the UK here, and about the concept more broadly here.
You can check out FabScrap to learn more about what they're doing around textile waste.

Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. If you take an action we recommend in one of our episodes, do us a favor and tell us about it! We’d love to hear how it went and what it felt like. Record a short voice memo on your phone and send it to us via our Listener Mail Form. We might use it in an upcoming episode. Find all the actions we’ve recommended on our show here!
Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
Episode Guests
Cora Harrington (Instagram: @thelingerieaddict Twitter: @lingerie_addict), Mike Kaback, Jessica Schreiber (Instagram @fab_scrap Twitter: @fab_Scrap)

Credits
How to Save a Planet is a Spotify original podcast and Gimlet production. It's hosted by me, Alex Blumberg. This episode was produced by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Rachel Waldholz, Anna Ladd, Hannah Chinn, and Daniel Ackerman. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Nicole Welch. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Billi Libby. Our fact checker for this episode is Claudia Geib. Special thanks to Jesse Feitel.

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47 min
February 24, 2022Cold Hard Cash for Your Greenhouse Gas
When we think about what’s heating up the planet, we may picture CO2 from smokestacks and tailpipes. But there are other greenhouse gases that are even more dangerous. And some of these are hiding in garages and sheds all over the country. We’re talking about refrigerants. They’re the secret sauce behind how refrigerators and air conditioners keep things cool. But they’re heating up the planet. This week, in collaboration with NPR’s Planet Money, we take a ride with a couple of guys who tackle these climate threats with a pair of extremely high-tech tools: a van, and some cold hard cash. Then, we talk about the climate solution you could be interacting with every time you buy ice cream. This episode originally aired on October 22, 2020.
Also, sign up for our newsletter if you haven’t already!
Calls to action
Find out what refrigerant your local grocer uses at climatefriendlysupermarkets.org.
Check out how the big supermarket chains are doing on HFCs using the Supermarket Scorecard.
As for your own household fridge, if you're in the market or know someone who is, choose an HFC-free model.
Learn more about how to properly dispose of your fridge, freezer, air conditioners, and other such appliances at the end of their useful lives.
Of course, you can always call Tim and Gabe to help with disposal too! Check out their work at Tradewater and Refrigerant Finders.
Sign Green America’s Cool It! Campaign petition. While you’re there, find a climate friendly supermarket near you and thank them!
If you’re a business owner, submit a letter to the Trump Administration asking them to ratify the Kigali Amendment, the international treaty that sets the phase down schedule for HFCs globally. You would be joining many states, major industry refrigerant suppliers, and elected officials from both sides of the aisle.
The AIM Act is a bipartisan bill, supported by both the House and the Senate, that effectively would enforce the same HFC phase down schedule as the Kigali Amendment without needing to ratify it – it would cut HFC use by 85% by 2035! However, it’s likely to be vetoed by the current President. So….vote, specifically, #VoteClimate. And when it comes to local candidates those really matter too for things like public transit and composting and bike lines, so please do a little digging of your own on local candidates.

Finally, if you do end up taking one of these actions — do us a favor and tell us about it! We’d love to hear about what you did and what it felt like. So if you do something, record a short voice memo on your phone and send it to us at [email protected]. We might use it in an upcoming episode.

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48 min
February 17, 2022What's it Like to Work at Exxon – and Then Quit?
Back in 2003, Dar-Lon Chang took a job as an engineer at ExxonMobil — a job he thought would be focused on transitioning beyond fossil fuels. But over a 16-year career, he found it harder and harder to reconcile the threat of climate change with Exxon’s role as an oil and gas producer. We talk to Dar-Lon about what it was like to work inside the oil giant, what finally compelled him to leave, and what his story means for millions of oil and gas workers as the transition to a low-carbon economy picks up steam.

Guests: Dar-Lon Chang

Calls to Action
Check out the Blue Green Alliance and the Just Transition Fund for ways to support a Just Transition in the US
Read Dar-Lon’s profile in Inside Climate News

Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Anna Ladd. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Hannah Chinn, and Daniel Ackerman. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Nicole Welch. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard and Lonnie Ro with original music from Peter Leonard and Emma Munger. Our fact checker for this episode was Claudia Geib.

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28 min
February 11, 2022 Presenting: Science Vs. Joe Rogan: The Malone Interview
Today, we’re sharing an episode from another Gimlet Media podcast, Science Vs. This episode fact-checks some claims made in a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Dr. Robert Malone. As you may know, this episode has caused an uproar: Many scientists have called out the show for spreading false information about the Covid-19 vaccines and some 270 scientists and medical professionals called on Spotify (our employer!) to adopt better policies to mitigate misinformation. Our colleagues at Science Vs jumped in to, in their words, “fact check the bejesus out of it.”

This issue is close to home for us at How to Save a Planet because, as a podcast about climate change, we’re acutely aware of the impact of false information and misinformation in muddying the waters and confusing the public – for instance, about climate science.

So we’re proud to share this episode from our colleagues, which not only digs into some of the claims made in the Malone interview, but also zooms out to talk about the bigger picture: how misinformation works, and what to watch for if you’re worried about getting sucked in by false information online.

It’s also just a great, informative, fun listen. We hope you enjoy it, and we’ll be back next week with a new episode of How to Save a Planet.

You can check out more episodes of Science Vs. for free on Spotify. You can also find the full transcript of this show, including footnotes listing all the studies cited in the episode, here.

UPDATE 2/11/22: When Science Vs first published this episode, they said that in more than 60 papers they'd gone through, they'd found only one reported case of someone dying from myocarditis after a Covid-19 vaccine. Some listeners questioned this, and they re-checked their work and found several more deaths. The episode has been updated — and thanks to the listeners who picked this up.

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49 min
February 03, 2022How Adam McKay Got Climate Change on the Big Screen
How do you get people to care about climate change? Simple: Make a blockbuster movie about it, packed full of the biggest stars in Hollywood. At least, that was Adam McKay’s approach. The writer and director of ‘Don’t Look Up’ joins the show this week to discuss the film, which parodies society’s tepid response to impending disaster. ‘Don’t Look Up’ shattered Netflix viewership records, earning more than 152 million hours streamed in its first week. In making the film, McKay channeled his climate anxiety into action. We ask McKay about his own climate change journey, how he sold Hollywood on his message, and how the rest of us non-movie stars can still make a difference. Also: What’s the deal with the General charging for free snacks??
Guest: Adam McKay
Calls to Action:
Show us your Climate Venn Diagrams!
And just for fun, a list of all the movies we mention in the episode:
Don’t Look Up
The Day After Tomorrow
Waterworld
Snowpiercer
The Tomorrow War
Solarbabies
The Ice Storm
Breaking the Waves
Hoosiers
The Mighty Ducks

Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Rachel Waldholz and Daniel Ackerman. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Anna Ladd, and Hannah Chinn. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Nicole Welch. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard Lonnie Ro with original music from Emma Munger. Our fact checker for this episode was James Gaines.

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48 min
January 27, 2022A Storm is Brewing. Is it Climate Change?
For years, we were told it wasn’t possible to link specific weather events to global warming — and that made communicating about climate change difficult: When extreme weather events were in the news, climate change was often left out of the story. This week, we tell the story of how that changed. We talk to the scientists who figured out how to model the role of climate change in events like Hurricane Harvey — the climate detectives who blew the case of extreme weather wide open.
Guests: Dr. Peter Stott, UK Met Office; Dr. Friederike (Fredi) Otto, Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment; Dr. Stephanie Herring, NOAA
Calls to Action:
Help out climate scientists from your couch! Climate scientists rely on accurate weather data to produce and test their models. But lots of historical weather data is still locked away in handwritten records from the 1800s, like old ships’ logs. Now, you can help rescue that data — by transcribing old temperature and weather logs! Check out the project Weather Rescue, which connects volunteers with documents that need transcribing. Especially good if you're a pro at deciphering cursive handwriting...
Talk about the weather! If an extreme weather event linked to climate change occurs in your region, talk to your friends and family about how climate change is affecting the weather they’re experiencing. One goal of scientists like Fredi Otto is to help get climate science into the conversation — and that only works if people HAVE that conversation. People like you!
Further Reading:
You can find more information and recent studies on extreme weather events online at World Weather Attribution
Check out Dr. Fredi Otto's book about the development of rapid event attribution, Angry Weather, or Dr. Peter Stott's memoir about his experiences as a climate scientist, Hot Air
The American Meteorological Society publishes an annual round-up of the most interesting extreme weather event attribution studies, edited by Drs. Stephanie Herring and Peter Stott.
If you liked this episode, you might like some of these past shows: Unnatural Disasters and How TV Weathercasters Went from Climate Skeptics to Champions.

If you take an action we recommend in one of our episodes, do us a favor and tell us about it! We’d love to hear how it went and what it felt like. Record a short voice memo on your phone and send it to us via our Listener Mail Form. We might use it in an upcoming episode. Find all the actions we’ve recommended on our show here!
Credits:
How to Save a Planet is a Spotify original podcast and Gimlet production. It's hosted by Alex Blumberg.
This episode was produced by Rachel Waldholz with help from Daniel Ackerman, Hannah Chinn and Nicole Welch. The rest of our reporting and producing team are Kendra Pierre-Louis and Anna Ladd.
Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney.
Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard and Lonnie Ro with original music by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, and Billy Libby.
Our fact-checker this episode is Claudia Geib.
Special thanks to Dr. Stephanie Herring at NOAA for explaining a lot of this science to us so that we could explain it to you!

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36 min
January 20, 2022 Presenting: TED Radio Hour - An SOS From the Ocean
Today we’re sharing an episode from TED Radio Hour on NPR, which explores the biggest questions of our time with the help of the world's greatest thinkers. The host Manoush Zomorodi speaks with four ocean experts, including our former co-host Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, about how to grocery shop for seafood sustainably, how much the ocean has changed over the last century, and how beautiful whale poop is.

You can check out more episodes of TED Radio Hour on Spotify, or wherever you listen.

This episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, Fiona Geiran, Matthew Cloutier and Christina Cala. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Mohtasham, James Delahoussaye, J.C. Howard and Janet Woojeong Lee. Our audio engineer is Daniel Shuhkin. Our intern is Harrison Vijay Tsui. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint and Micah Eames.

Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

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54 min
January 13, 2022How Oil Companies Greenwash (and the Campaign To Make Them Stop)
For decades, fossil fuel companies have fought action on climate change. They've done so directly – by challenging legislation that would help reign in emissions. But they've also done it indirectly, by funding organizations who lobby congress, launching fake grassroots campaigns, and perhaps most importantly, through advertising. These ads, according to Martin Watters at the nonprofit firm ClientEarth, are greenwashing. They help sow doubt about the fossil fuel industry's role in warming the planet. This week, we take a look at those ads and examine how they stymy the conversation on climate. We also talk to some people working hard to get rid of these types of ads. They aren't going after the fossil fuel companies directly. Instead, they're targeting the people who help fossil fuel companies greenwash their image: the ad creators.
Guests: Martin Watters, Duncan Meisel, Adam Lerman
Calls to action
If you’re an ad professional, you can consider signing onto the Clean Creatives Pledge or even push your company to sign the pledge as well. You can learn more about the pledge here.
If you work for a company that is a client of the influential PR firm Edelman, Clean Creatives is running a campaign to get Edelman clients to pressure the company to drop their fossil fuel work. Learn more about the #EdelmanDropExxon campaign here.
Check out Ads Not Fit To Print, a campaign pressuring publications to stop running fossil fuel ads.
To learn more, read How One Firm Drove Influence Campaigns Nationwide for Big Oil and check out ClientEarth’s The Greenwashing Files. If you want to go even deeper check out this review paper Climate Change Disinformation and How to Combat It.

Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. If you take an action we recommend in one of our episodes, do us a favor and tell us about it! We’d love to hear how it went and what it felt like. Record a short voice memo on your phone and send it to us via our Listener Mail Form. We might use it in an upcoming episode. Find all the actions we’ve recommended on our show here!
Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Anna Ladd and Kendra Pierre-Louis. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Rachel Waldholz, Hannah Chin, and Daniel Ackerman. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Nicole Welch. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard and Lonnie Ro with original music from Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, and Catharine Anderson. Our fact checker for this episode was James Gaines.

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38 min

About How to Save a Planet

From the publisher's feed

Climate change. We know. It can feel too overwhelming. But what if there was a show about climate change that left you feeling... energized? One so filled with possibility that you actually wanted to listen? Join us, journalist Alex Blumberg and a crew of climate nerds, as we bring you smart, inspiring stories about the mess we're in and how we can get ourselves out of it.