This week, we have two great guests on the show to explain what's at stake at COP28 and some of the biggest issues surrounding the conference. First, New York Times correspondent David Gelles joins to discuss what he'll be covering at COP28, why the recent US-China deal heading into the conference might provided a much needed jolt, and what to watch for when it comes to climate finance and the fund for loss and damage. Then, researcher and campaigner Pascoe Sabido joins the show to discuss a new analysis of the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists at UN climate talks and what it has meant to action on climate. 

David Gelles is a correspondent on the Climate desk at The New York Times, covering the intersection of public policy and the private sector. Follow David's work at The New York Times here.

Pascoe Sabido is a researcher and campaigner at the Corporate Europe Observatory and a co-cordinator of the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition

Further Reading:

Fossil fuel lobbyists attend UN climate talks more than 7000 times

What a US-China climate deal means for COP28

Coming Soon: More oil, gas and coal

Since 2000, the United States Global Change Research Program has periodically published a report on its assessment of the climate crisis, its current impacts, its potential threats, and the solutions available to mitigate the worst impacts and adapt as quickly as possible.  Last week, the interagency program published the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Despite accounting for just 4% of the world’s population, as a result of burning fossil fuels for more than a century, the US is responsible for approximately 17% of the global warming the planet is facing today. And while US emissions are falling, they’re not falling fast enough to meet the 2050 Net Zero target established by the Biden Administration. The report explores the health, economic, environmental, and social impacts of the climate crisis that Americans are experiencing now and it clearly states that all of those will get worse if America and the world doesn’t start cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately. 

Allison Crimmins, the Director of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, joins the show to discuss the report’s main findings, the extraordinary costs of the climate crisis that Americans are already facing, and the positive benefits that could be achieved today as soon as we start deploying sufficient mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Read the full report here: https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/

Check out the companion podcast to the Fifth National Climate Assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7EIxjQNbD8&t=8s

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. 

Each year, scientists from around the world develop a comprehensive report on the state of the climate crisis. The report provides updates on dozens of the most important indicators of the progress humans are making to limit greenhouse gas emissions and the consequences of not doing so faster.  This year's report, "The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory" presents a frightening picture, as many of Earth's vital signs are flashing red and the trajectory of climate progress is pointing in the wrong direction.

Dr. Jillian Gregg, the Executive Director of Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates and a co-author of this year's report, joins the show to discuss the report's findings, what has surprised her and her colleagues most about what's happened in 2023, and the few indicators that are moving in the right direction. We also discuss the sense of urgency that can be felt in the words used by the scientists that wrote this report.

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. 

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just escape to space? Just go live on Mars and leave all our Earthly problem behind. Despite the enthusiasm for space settlement, a lot of very big questions need to be answered before we can consider leaving this planet behind. And a lot of these questions, according to authors Dr. Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith, aren't really turning up good answers. The Weinersmiths are the best-selling husband and wife writing team that have a new book out, A CITY ON MARS: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? This week, Zach joins the show to discuss the book, why climate change won't be solved by living in space, the biggest problems with living on Mars, the Moon, or a gigantic space station, and what we should do next. 

Zach Weinersmith is an author and illustrator. He makes the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. His work has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday, Foreign Policy, PBS, and elsewhere. He is one half of the wife-and-husband research team whose debut collaboration, the book titled Soonish was a New York Times bestseller. 

Read A CITY ON MARS: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

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. 

We've just passed the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which kicked off almost a full decade of energy crises in around the globe. How has energy security changed since then? With war unfolding now in the Middle East, could it happen again? How are geopolitics shifting with the transition to clean energy? Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, joins the show this week to answer all of this and more. We discuss the relationship with China and the United States, why a clean energy transition could be more turbulent than a net zero economy, and why the IRA presents a number of foreign policy considerations. 

Bordoff also serves as professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is the co-host of the Columbia Energy Exchange and his latest piece in the Wall Street Journal with Meghan O’Sullivan is titled “Lessons from the 1970s Energy Crisis Can Help Prevent the Next One.”

On this episode, Ty and Brock also pay tribute to the wonderful Professor Saleemul Huq and his legacy as a climate champion. You can listen to our past interview with Professor Huq 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. 

Modern infrastructure has the ability to make our lives better.  Instant access to power and clean water. The ability to communicate with friends and family around the world. The freedom to quickly get where we want when we want. But today’s infrastructure is still very flawed. Not everyone has access to that infrastructure, which means not everyone has the agency and abilities that infrastructure can create. Our infrastructure is also directly contributing to the climate crisis. And our infrastructure was built with the assumption that the natural world upon which it relies will stay the same, but we know now that the natural world is changing rapidly as a result of a warming planet. So what can be done to create a more sustainable, resilient, and just infrastructure?

This week, we speak with Professor Deb Chachra about her new book “How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World”. Professor Chachra is a Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering and has traveled the work admiring and examining the infrastructure that so many take for granted but which enables the lives of billions of people around the world.  This conversation is a deep dive into infrastructure and the world it has created and what the world could look like if we start building better infrastructure now.

Buy "How Infrastructure Works"

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 his latest book, Our Fragile Moment - How Lessons From Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive The Climate Crisis, Professor Michael Mann makes it clear: uncertainty, when it comes to climate change, is not our friend. The famed climate professor is back on the show this week to discuss how looking back through Earth's paleoclimate record shows how fragile our current moment really is, but why we also have agency to do something about it and an urgent need to act now. We discuss what history has taught him about a potential "methane bomb," whether the Gulf Stream could actually collapse, if we are likely to see more El Nino events in the future, and what he learned studying past extinctions.  

Michael Mann is the presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Read Our Fragile Moment - How Lessons From Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive The Climate Crisis

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. 

Every year, billions of dollars are spent worldwide on carbon offsets, and the size of the market is expected to grow substantially over the next decade. But do carbon offset projects actually do what they're intended to do in the first place, which is lower carbon dioxide emissions and help communities around the world avoid worsening climate disasters from a warming planet?  Researchers at Corporate Accountability and journalists from The Guardian teamed up to answer this question and to dive deep into the claims of 50 of the largest carbon offset projects in the world. Rachel Rose Jackson, Director of Climate Research and Policy at Corporate Accountability, joins the show today to talk about what they found and what else Corporate Accountability is doing to protect our planet and people around the world from extractive and exploitative companies.

Check out the report here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/19/do-carbon-credit-reduce-emissions-greenhouse-gases

Learn more about Corporate Accountability: https://corporateaccountability.org/

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 perpetual extraction by those striving for limitless wealth has set our planet on a trajectory that could make living here impossible for billions of humans by the end of this century. Marjorie Kelly, founder of Business Ethics Magazine and currently a Senior Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative, argues that in order to overcome the capital bias that has been so destructive to our society, we must first identify the root cause, delegitimize the myths upon which extractive capitalism relies upon today, and start laying the groundwork for real transformative change.  She joins The Climate Pod this week to talk about her new book, "Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today's Crises", and to offer solutions, some of which are already having great impacts around the world today.

Buy "Wealth Supremacy"

Learn more about The Democracy Collaborative

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. 

Last weekend, we recorded some great conversations at Farm Aid 2023 in Noblesville, Indiana! Given that Farm Aid 2023 was focused on how the climate crisis is impacting family farmers and how farmers are also working on necessary solutions through regenerative agriculture, we wanted to talk to some of the folks at the center of the event.

On this episode, we speak to Indiana farmers DeAnthony and Denise Greer, as well as musicians Nathaniel Rateliff and The Particle Kid (aka Micah Nelson). We discuss a wide-range of topics on agriculture, activism, and what makes Farm Aid such a special event. This was recorded outside during a concert, so bear with us on the audio quality! 

Learn more: Watch Indiana Farmers Speak About Agriculture, Climate Resilience and Equity

Learn more about Greer Farms

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.