Keeping It Cool

Increasingly, youth are taking on key roles as climate advocates. So what’s it like to step into the climate policy spotlight — when you’re not even old enough to vote? Keeping It Cool talks to Purva and Alex, two Bay Area high school students, about their climate action journeys, while learning how other community members (parents, grandparents, teachers, and friends, this means you!) can join the supporting cast.

When it seems like individual action isn’t enough to fix the climate, enter policy change. We talk with Paula and Karl Danz of the Silicon Valley North chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL). CCL works to activate community members in all 50 states — by helping them tap into their own personal superpowers in support of a bigger common goal: getting Congress to act on carbon pollution pricing.

Most of us haven’t given much thought to what happens to waste after it’s tossed in the bin. To “unearth” more, we checked in with educator Julia Au of RethinkWaste. It turns out, waste can either form stinky methane in a landfill or beneficial compost for reuse on the land — and it’s up to us to choose which one. We also test Julia’s knowledge as she helps us with those tricky “what do I do with THIS?” questions.

Tired of cleaning out slimy, forgotten food out of the fridge? We are too! The amount of food that is wasted by an average household is equivalent to tossing 1 in 4 bags of groceries each trip. Robin Plutchok of StopWaste discusses the impact of all this wasted food and shares strategies for preventing waste from happening in the first place.

Compared to motor vehicles, bikes are a cleaner, greener way of getting around. So how can we get more people on bikes? KEEPING IT COOL talks with longtime bike advocate Tim Oey of the Silicon Valley Bike Coalition, a group that is already shifting the gears within our cities toward a people-powered, fossil-free mobility future. So get on board the Bike Party!

What can Bay Area residents do at an individual level to help solve climate change? It turns out that anyone using energy (both homeowners and renters) can make choices that can help keep the grid humming along on cleaner energy. Enter OhmConnect, a company that is on a mission to give people an easy way to save money and be part of the clean energy revolution. Curtis Tongue, one of OhmConnect’s co-founders, joins KEEPING IT COOL to talk about how the everyday actions of you and all your neighbors have the power (see what we did there?) to shape the green grid of the future and help us shift away from fossil fuels.

Heating and cooling buildings uses a heck of a lot of energy: So what can we be doing better? Keeping It Cool interviews Deborah Vasquez, an apartment complex manager who created big energy savings for residents through building renovations and upgrades. Yifei and Vivian uncover more ways that homeowners can cut greenhouse emissions (and lower energy bills) by chatting with Jeffrey Liang, who works for an energy efficiency agency called BayREN. His mission: to help us think about our homes with the same excitement that we have for our iPhones or Teslas.

Yifei and Vivian take the bull by the horns to find out how everyday food choices affect our greenhouse emissions, speaking with Nicole Angiel of the environmental nonprofit Acterra. They then turn to Allison Dear, a medical researcher at Stanford and a longtime vegan, to help demystify what plant-based eating is really like.

Keeping It Cool is a new Bay Area podcast focused on what local people are doing to tackle climate change. Join us.