The Elephant

Toronto is Canada's biggest city, and it's also one of its biggest successes when it comes to acting on climate thus far. While the average emissions for the country have been going up, Toronto has managed to not only meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gases, but exceed them by more than double. We sat down to speak with former Toronto mayor David Miller about some of the successful policies the city put in place to meet its emissions cuts, what some of the challenges were to getting there, and why in his view social integration and climate sustainability go hand in hand.

How our cities are run and designed can have a huge impact on the carbon footprint we have as individuals. Is there convenient and affordable transit available for example? Or are the buildings heated and cooled efficiently? But fortunately cities around the world are increasingly making their planning decisions with climate emissions in mind. In fact, actions by cities have been a rare bright spot in an otherwise mostly stagnant decade when it comes to climate action. We speak to Mark Watts - who leads a group called the C40 made up of some of the world's biggest cities - about some of the ways that cities are leading the way on climate.

If you care about climate, then it's been a wild couple of weeks on the U.S. supreme court. First, in a surprise decision the court issued a stay against the EPA's Clean Power Plan - dealing a devastating blow to the U.S.'s efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And then just a few days after the ruling, Antonin Scalia, one of the 5 conservative justices who voted for the stay died at age 79. unleashing a huge battle over the future of the court. We speak to journalist John Upton of Climate Central about what the recent ruling, and Antonin Scalia's death, means for both America, and the future of the climate.

In the Paris accord, 195 countries agreed that they would collectively keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees. But what does science have to say on actually keeping that goal? And how fast, and by how much, will we have to cut our emissions to get there? Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre is a climate scientist who looks at exactly this question. And the math he comes away with, isn't pretty.

Jose Maria Figueres is the President of the Carbon War Room, an organization that supports initiatives by private companies to reduce their carbon emissions. And previously he was the president of Costa Rica. We talked with Figueres about why he sees moving towards low carbon economies as an opportunity to combat other issues such as poverty, and about Costa Rica's own ambitious efforts to become carbon neutral by 2021.

Guardian columnist and journalist George Monbiot is one of the foremost political and environmental thinkers in Britain today and for decades he has been putting a spotlight on ecological issues of critical importance. He joins us to talk about how the climate change crisis isn't just an isolated problem, but one that intersects with the other major problems we're facing in our societies - from the run-away political power of corporations and the undermining of our democracies, to the rampant consumerism culture that dominates the West.

In 2014 a surprising announcement was made that ricocheted around the world - the heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune would be divesting their entire $860 million dollar philanthropic organization of fossil fuel holdings. The announcement marked a turning point for the divestment movement, which suddenly was catapulted into the mainstream.

During COP21 we caught up with Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to talk to him about the fund's daring decision to divest, and his thoughts on how the movement has been growing ever since.

On Saturday Dec 12th, as the final hours of the Paris agreement were coming together, a mass mobilization of over 10,000 climate activists gathered near the Arc de Triomphe and marched to the Eiffel Tower to push governments to take the steps required and show that a "liveable climate is a red line" that the movement is prepared to defend. We went down to hear the sounds and meet some of the people taking part.

The economy hasn't exactly done a great job of taking care of our planet's climate. And one might say that business models oriented towards profit while ignoring externalities are part of the problem, not the solution. But can companies that have sustainability at the core of their businesses, and yet are run for profit, be part of the solution?

Enter Climate-KIC, a large European public-private partnership that helps grow start-ups whose products are focused on sustainability. We first sit down with Mary Ritter, co-founder and former CEO of Climate-KIC, to discuss the role sustainable businesses can play in saving the climate. And in the second half, we talk to Climate-KIC's Director of Education Ebrahim Mohamed about what is wrong with the way economic models are taught to business students, and how changing economic education may help change the future.

We sit down with Naomi Klein to speak about Paris, why climate change is threatening to elite power, and why when it comes to dealing with the crisis, we need to temper our fears with hope for the future.