Ten Across Conversations

As our summers become hotter and longer, droughts become more likely, foliage dies at a faster rate, and the likelihood of personal exposure to a wildfire inevitably increases. According to The Washington Post, one in six Americans now live in a wildfire prone area. And as the transpiring events of this particularly devastating fire season for Canada have demonstrated— even if a community is not considered to be in the direct path of a fire, they may need to consider plans for alleviating indirect exposures such as a temporary, but severe decline in air quality.

After five record-setting fire seasons in a row ending in 2022, Californians are having to become adept at planning for the personal and environmental fallouts of this natural disaster. Based on data from First Street Foundation, 71% of all properties in the state are now at some risk of being impacted by a wildfire in the next 30 years. However, this preparedness has been made more difficult following the exit of two major private property insurers, State Farm and Allstate in the last year.

Not wanting to lose more property insurers or homeowners, the state legislature is considering new fire practice policies to ideally reduce the strength and reach of these annual fires. This has resulted in the creation of a new state certified prescribed fire burn boss program and continued talks with state Indigenous leaders about better ways to cultivate the land for wildfire season.

In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter explores this developing collaboration between state agencies and cultural burn practitioners to create more defensible land from wildfire, with North Fork Mono Tribe Chairman Ron Goode and LA Times environmental reporter Alex Wigglesworth.

As private sector leaders look to locate or expand their businesses—especially within the Ten Across region—they are asking questions that now far exceed the traditional real estate matters of land, space, and cost. In addition to this checklist, they are asking about water availability, energy sources, transportation, resilient public infrastructure and how climate change will impact or influence all the above. To better serve their customers and talent, they are also considering the availability of a prepared workforce, housing affordability, education, and overall quality of life of a city.

In short, corporations and other private investors are making calculations about the future in ways they never have before. Accordingly, cities and regions are having to become adept at offering these services to clients, while at the same time developing a proven sense of resilience to a number of risk factors.

In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter speaks with Chris Camacho, leader of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, and Herman Bulls, the Vice Chairman of the Americas of the global real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle, about the changing world of regional industry scouting and corporate site selection within the rapidly growing U.S. Sun Belt.

In a warming world, we are becoming increasingly reliant on air conditioning to keep our biological, economic, and health systems functioning. But this cooling technology has not come without its costs. According to the Clean Cooling Collaborative, this action of cooling our homes, businesses, medicine, goods, and more contributes to more than 7% of overall greenhouse gas emissions. Factoring in projected population and economic growth, that environmental footprint could double by 2050.

This is why Ten Across is launching a new competition (with a $100K grand prize!) for college and university faculty-led student teams across the Ten Across corridor challenging them to develop innovative solutions for more efficient, climate-friendly, affordable, and accessible cooling for underserved communities. More details regarding the new 10X Prize can be found at 10across.com/10xprize/.

Our guest for this episode has helped execute two global initiatives aimed at solving this cooling paradox. The first being, the Global Cooling Prize, which concluded in 2021 and produced two winners in their challenge to create an AC unit with 5x less climate impact. The other being the Global Cooling Efficiency Accelerator, a partnership announced last month between Rocky Mountain Institute and the Clean Cooling Collaborative to take the prize-winning and other efficient air conditioning technologies to global-market scale.

Listen in as Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Ankit Kalanki, a manager of Rocky Mountain Institute’s Carbon-Free Buildings Program, assess this imperative energy efficiency and public health challenge of the 21st Century, and the solutions that are on the way.

The 20th Century city was made possible by inventions such as the automobile and air conditioning. But as temperatures rise and cities continue to grow in both size and population, we are quickly approaching the sustainable threshold of use of these polluting technologies. The historic ways we have gone about AC unit construction; city and building design, and the traditional combustion vehicle, have all contributed to the urban heat island effect experienced in most major metropolitans, especially those along the U.S. I-10 corridor.

Reflective building materials, prolific concrete, and densely packed vehicles both absorb and give off excess heat. As AC units work to cool large high-rises throughout a warming city, the heat from within gets displaced back out into the street. The energy and refrigerants used to complete this task currently contribute more than 7% of total global greenhouse gas emissions— and that amount could double by 2050, Clean Cooling Collaborative reports.

This interview between Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Gensler strategic design and planning leaders, Anthony Brower and Dylan Jones, was recorded moments after our live discussion with author Jeff Goodell at the Gensler office in Downtown Los Angeles. Together, the three build upon themes covered in Jeff’s latest book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet;” including the ways in which the 21st Century city may develop and evolve to better serve its residents and natural environment.

This episode is also available to watch at 10across.com/category/video

When the ESG framework— standing for Environment, Social and Governance— was first introduced among investors and business leaders, it was intended to inspire or demonstrate a greater concern for the environment and society upon which major corporations depend. It has most often been a vehicle for influencing organizational decisions around resource consumption, staff diversity, and overall carbon footprint.

Over the past year, there has been mounting opposition amongst state treasurers and legislatures, particularly in the Ten Across region, to private and public ESG initiatives. For example, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama are now part of a growing number of states that have either introduced or signed legislation prohibiting state involvement with organizations that have factored ESG criteria into their operations.

While the industry term continues to occupy media and political attention, this conversation between Ten Across founder Duke Reiter; the former CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Mark Tercek; and current Senior Vice President of ESG Strategy at The Howard Hughes Corporation, Gautami Palanki, seeks to provide greater insight into the practical and proven applications of ESG performance metrics.

We are entering a new climate— One that looks very different from the one we’ve known, Jeff Goodell concludes in his latest book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”

This summer has produced record-breaking temperatures in nearly every corner of the world, including even the deepest parts of our oceans. Sea ice around Antarctica is at a record-low for the satellite era. July Fourth was the hottest day on Earth since 1979, and potentially in the last 125,000 years, according to some estimates. Lastly, an oppressive and ongoing heat wave primarily focused along the Ten Across transect, has placed 100 million Americans, or a third of the country, under excessive heat warnings and advisories for the foreseeable future. These figures suggest this will be a dangerous and influential summer for the future of our planet.

In this latest episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and author Jeff Goodell discuss the uncanny timing of “The Heat Will Kill You First,” and its place among Jeff’s last 20 years of climate reporting. This interview was recorded in front of a live audience at the Gensler office in downtown Los Angeles.

It is available to watch on our website at 10across.com/category/podcast, and to listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Warning: This episode contains some curse words and a mention of sexual assault.

For those that live in border cities — most often those with binational families, businesses, and personal cultures; images of the U.S.-Mexico border that are conjured up in nightly news segments or political debates can be drastically different from their lived reality. This is similarly true for those who study or work on the physical and metaphysical structures around this geographical divide.

What are we not seeing along our southern border? This is what Ten Across founder seeks to uncover in this episode with Brian Farling and Eddie Jones of Jones Studio, an Arizona architecture firm that was chosen to design four U.S. Land Ports of Entry, and Dr. Irasema Coronado, a distinguished academic of border studies and product of Nogales, an Arizona/Mexico border city with a rich binational history.

For more information on the guests and photos of Jones Studio's designs please visit: https://10across.com/alternative-visions-of-the-u-s-border-yesterday-tomorrow-and-today/

Cities and states along the I-10 are having to consider many existential questions as the climate warms. Looking to the future, the question is whether these communities can adequately respond and adapt to intensifying storm patterns, rising sea levels and extreme drought.

It’s a radical shift in thought, given that earlier centuries of American settlement were primarily focused on developing technologies to bend nature to our will. The century that unfolds before us now suggests these roles may ultimately become reversed.

It is hard to find a more compelling historic example of this high wire walk between man and nature than in the story of New Orleans, a city built upon particularly unforgivable lands. In this latest episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter speaks with Richard Campanella, author of Draining New Orleans: the 300 Year Quest to Dewater the Crescent City (2023) to understand the series of engineering decisions that created the city as we know it today — dangerously seated below a rising ocean and in the eye of intensifying tropical storms.

It is a moment of climate extremes in California. While the state still grapples with a shrinking Colorado River from megadrought, more snowpack accumulated on the Sierra Nevada this winter than is currently stored in one of the river’s main tributaries, Lake Mead. It was a winter season many have called unpredictable and unprecedented, resulting in a series of deadly floods and the reemergence of two infamous ghost lakes — Tulare and Owens.

In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter sits down with Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist and emeritus professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis. Together, they will try to unpack the sordid and unique history of water management in the Golden State, including how certain engineering decisions or lack thereof have created such dramatic flood control failures as were seen this spring.

As cities continue to grow in population and cultural influence within our Ten Across region, tensions between local and state governments appear to have exploded in the last few years over various socioeconomic, public safety, electoral and cultural issues.

Though preemptive action from the state or federal government has at times, been organic or useful in the past, a more concerning form of preemption has recently emerged — one which seeks to suppress or eliminate local policies that conflict with the dominant goals of certain state governments or special interest groups.

In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter speaks with Maresa Strano and Dr. Lydia Bean, co-authors of the 2019 New America report, “Punching Down: How States are Suppressing Local Democracy,” about the impacts of this movement against local governance and how it may influence the 2024 federal election