The Climate Pod

As our environment changes, so do our brains. Climate changes impact our physical environments is many noticeable ways, but it's also changing us on the inside as well. Clayton Page Aldern is a neuroscientist turned environmental journalist who has unpacked this phenomenon in his new book, The Weight of Nature: How A Changing Climate Changes Our Brains. He joins the show this week to discuss how our brains adapt to climate change and limits we face, how shifting baseline syndrome impacts climate action, what's happening to our brains under rising temperatures, and what climate changes tell us about broader ideas surrounding free will. 

Clayton's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Vox, Newsweek, The Economist, Scientific American, and Grist, where he is a senior data reporter. 

Read The Weight of Nature: How A Changing Climate Changes Our Brains

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

For 57 years, Ed Begley Jr. has been in literally hundreds of your favorite movies and television shows. And during those years, he's also established himself as one of the most prominent voices in Hollywood on environmental sustainability and climate action. Now, he’s with a new memoir, To the Temple of Tranquility…And Step On It!, which recounts his life in both entertainment and environmental and climate advocate. Ed joins us on the show this week to discuss his life and career. We talk about his early days as a stand up comic, how he initially got into activism, his friendship with Cesar Chavez, mulling over bizarre clean energy ideas with Marlon Brando, finding common ground with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and why 1970s Los Angeles was such a great time and place for activism in entertainment. We also discuss his more recent roles in shows like Better Call Saul and why more great climate storytelling is happening, like with his friend Paul Schrader's 2017 film First Reformed.

Read To the Temple of Tranquility…And Step On It!

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

The climate movement faces mounting pressure in 2024. Record-setting temperatures and extreme weather disasters continue to devastate over a turbulent summer. Prominent plans to roll back environmental regulations and stiffle climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives have movement leaders pushing back on attacks. Is the climate movement able to handle the pressure at this critical moment? 

Few people are as equipped to answer that question as Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. Over his decades of climate and progressive leadership, Rev. Yearwood has advanced climate solutions with policymaking, culture change, direct action, and more. And he's part of a new initiative to educate people on critical issues like climate change during this transmorative year. 

The “2024 & Beyond: Creating Our Shared Future” campaign is reaching out with open town halls to educate and debate on key political issues and building a network of experts and organizations like Center for Climate Justice, Center for Popular Democracy, Hip Hop Caucus, Greenpeace, and Center for Oil and Gas Organizing.  

Rev. Yearwood Jr. joins the show this week to discuss his life and work, how change actually happens in the climate movement, why the climate movement needs to address its own weaknesses, and what strategies will be most effective in advancing progress and fighting off attacks. 

Rev. Yearwood Jr. is the President & CEO of Hip Hop Caucus. He is the host of the award-winning climate and environmental justice podcast The Coolest Show, Senior Advisor of Bloomberg Philanthropies Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign, and one of the most innovative advocates and strategists for racial justice and climate justice. He is a White House Champion of Change for Climate leadership and according to Rolling Stone he is a “New Green Hero.”

Related Links:

2024 & Beyond: Creating Our Shared Future

Hip Hop Caucus

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

In 2008, the world economic system was rocked by a financial crisis that stemmed from risky mortgages being securitized and sold as safe investments to unknowing investors.  Misaligned incentives, unpriced risk, deceptive selling practices, and a lack of regulatory scrutiny throughout the financial industry led to the Great Recession, the consequences of which we're still feeling in a variety of ways today.

While somewhat different from what preceded the 2008 financial crisis, there are clear parallels with what's happening in the home insurance and mortgage markets in areas most at risk to damage from climate-worsened storms.  As large, traditional insurance companies are leaving states like Florida, California, and Louisiana because the damages from hurricanes, floods, and wildfires have become too large, new insurance companies are replacing them. These companies are smaller, less diverse, and rely on a ratings agency known to provide good ratings to underserving companies. Unsurprisingly, when climate catastrophes hit, these insurers often go bankrupt, leaving home owners and their banks with a destroyed home and asset without the funds to rebuild or even repair.  And the implications of this aren't isolated to the local level, because most of these mortgages are securitized and sold at the national level.

This week, Prof. Pari Sastry joins the show to discuss her recent paper "When Insurers Exit: Climate Losses, Fragile Insurers, and Mortgage Markets".  This paper explains how the home home mortgage, insurance markets, and global economy are interconnected and how the climate crisis is impacting all three.  As the world is still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, it's shocking to see the early stages of what appears to be some of the same causes play out today.  And we know that the climate crisis is only going to increase the number of severe weather events, which will put an even greater strain on insurance and mortgage companies, further worsening an already fragile relationship.

Prof. Pari Sastry is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School where she focuses her research on climate finance.

Read "When Insurers Exit": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4674279

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

Bad actors continue to push fake talking points to obscure the truth on climate change and slow down action. So how we combat these common myths and inspire people to do more? That's the focus of today's show and a new book by our guest, Dr. Genevieve Guenther. In her new book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, Guenther argues that climate leaders should use sharper language that argues for transformative action and a windfall of benefits in the face of the massive, destructive threat of climate change. She joins the show to discuss how we talk about the costs of clean energy, why the "India and China" excuse needs to stop in American climate discource, and why dramatic drops in clean energy costs have lead some to be complacent on climate. 

Genevieve Guenther s the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School, where she sits on the board of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Her research has appeared in both scholarly journals and media outlets such as Scientific American, The New Republic, and MSNBC. You can purchase The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It here.

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

For 70 years, building out and expanding American highways have been core parts to the entire US transportation project. But the initial effort to connect cities and states has created gigantic problems in the subsequent decades. Instead of fixing many of these critical issues, too often we see cities and states double down on the problem and make our transportation system worse. And carbon emissions from the transportation sector are a huge part of the climate fight. So what do we do about highways as these roads continue to expand and draw investment?

Our guest, Megan Kimble, has been looking for the answers. In her new book, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and The Future of America's Highways, she both looks back at the origins of the American highway system and examines today's fight to determine what is happening and how decisions are being made that design our transportation system. We discuss the "freeway fighters" that are working to remove highways and prevent highways from being expanded, how federal investments favor highways over transit, how highways have been used to exacerbate racial inequities, and why climate activists are helping to make change. 

Megan Kimble is an investigative journalist and former executive editor at The Texas Observer. She has written about housing, transportation, and urban development for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, and Bloomberg CityLab. 

Check out City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and The Future of America's Highways

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

President Biden campaigned on the promises of producing 100% of America's electricity with clean energy resources by 2035 and getting America's economy to Net Zero emissions by 2050.  Since President Biden took office, the US Congress has passed the Bi-partisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPs and Science Act - all aimed at helping America transition to a clean energy economy.  In addition to creating incentives for private companies to invest in clean energy manufacturing in America, those three bills also provided billions of dollars to the United States Department of Energy to oversee the research, development, and deployment of clean energy technologies.

Secretary Jennifer Granholm has led the Department of Energy throughout the entire Biden Administration and has completely restructured the Department to achieve President Biden's clean energy goals for America.  This week, Secretary Granholm joins The Climate Pod to discuss how the DOE helps enable the deployment of new clean energy technologies, what should be done about technology companies ramping up their energy consumption due to massive data centers, what the DOE could look like under a second Biden or Trump presidential term, and so much more.

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

Mary Annaïse Heglar is back on the show to discuss her new book "Troubled Waters", a fictional account of a young Black woman in Mississippi that uses direct action against the fossil fuel industry as a healing mechanism for her own grief, while also learning about the grief and trauma that her own grandmother carries with her from her days at the center of the Civil Rights movement.  Mary Annaïse Heglar is one of the great essayists and writers about the climate crisis, climate grief, and climate justice.

Buy "Troubled Waters"

Buy "The World is Ours to Cherish"

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

The climate movement is used to fight denial. Few who do this work escape the need to push back against critics claiming that human-created carbon dioxide emissions don't cause dangerous warming. But as the crisis becomes more clear and everpresent, it's time to expand our definition of climate denial, argues author Tad DeLay. In his new book, Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change, DeLay confronts the idea that we are rarely facing up to the real facts of the crisis and allowing for a great deal of harm to take place as a result. He joins the show to discuss what the Left often misses when it comes to the facts of climate change, why a more honest conversation is unnecessary, and what he fears most as more people are harmed by both the crisis and the reaction to it. 

Tad DeLay, PhD is a philosopher, religion scholar, and interdisciplinary critical theorist. He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Baltimore. He is the author of multiple books, including his latest, Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change.

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have already been invested in clean energy projects in America since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022. With that level of spending, clean energy jobs are on the rise, meaning there's never been a better time to start a career focused on combating the climate crisis. The variety of roles in clean energy jobs means there are plenty of ways you can become a "Climate Person" in your professional life, even if you've been one in your personal life for a while. Being a "Climate Person" also isn't restricted to just careers in clean energy, but also means incorporating climate solutions into whatever it is you do for a living.

Tom Steyer, co-founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions, founder of NextGen Climate America, and 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary Candidate joins the show this week to discuss his new book "Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We'll Win the Climate War" and strategies for becoming a "Climate Person" at a time when the world needs more of them than ever. We also talk about how turning politicians, business leaders, and investors into climate people will be critical to the sustainability of human life on our planet.

Read "Cheaper, Faster, Better"

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!