Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Latest Episodes:

CLIMATE ONE: What We’re Watching in Climate Now Feb 10, 2023

Show notes

2022 was a banner year for climate – both in terms of climate-fueled disaster and historic federal investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and home electrification. The questions now: How will the programs be implemented ? How will the money be spent – and who will benefit? This week, we examine the coming trends in raw material prices, the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, new investments in clean tech, tighter rules on pollution and western water negotiations.

Guests:

Felicia Marcus, Visiting Fellow, Stanford University

Nat Bullard, Senior Contributor, Bloomberg NEF, Bloomberg Green

Catherine Coleman Flowers, Vice Chair, White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council

For show notes and related links, visit ClimateOne.org.

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How to Best Age in Place: Creating a Safe and Delightful Home Feb 09, 2023

Show notes

Our homes are one of the most important contributors to a healthy aging experience. We are all so used to adapting to our environments. We make do with standards even though we all have different bodies and habits. That is easier when we are young, but in older age our homes should fit us like a glove. In this presentation, architect Susi Stadler, executive director of the Bay Area nonprofit At Home With Growing Older, and Candiece Milford, board president of At Home With Growing Older, will present a new perspective on age-friendly design and offer concrete ideas for living better at home.

At Home With Growing Older is a nonprofit organization in the San Francisco Bay Area that seeks to improve the experience of aging by providing programming in support of the continued growth, connection and well-being of older adults. A wide variety of interdisciplinary forums and workshops inspire and empower individuals to prepare for, and adapt to, the changes of growing older, as well as to re-envision what it means to age well in their own homes and communities.

About the Speakers

Susi Stadler is an architect and social entrepreneur focused on shifting the perspective on aging, and she is an advocate for imaginative and human-centered design solutions for the later phases of life. For the past 20 years, an important emphasis of her architecture work has been to provide sustainable design solutions for the complex needs of aging that allow people to age with safety and delight, at home and in the world. Her most recent architecture project was the interior design for the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace in Los Angeles. Susanne speaks and writes regularly on the subject of age-friendly environments.

Candiece Milford has been in the field of retirement living for 17 years as a marketing director both at The Sequoias San Francisco and currently at Rhoda Goldman Plaza, a residence for people who are experiencing issues of aging and memory. She has previously spoken at The Commonwealth Club several times through the Grownups Forum on retirement living options both in the Bay Area and innovative housing solutions across the country. Having been a member of the At Home With Growing Older board for the past 6 years, she currently serves as board president.

MLF ORGANIZER

Denise M. Michaud

SPEAKERS

Candiece Milford

Board President, At Home With Growing Older

Susanne Stadler

MBA, M.Arch, Principal, Stadler & Architecture; Executive Director, Co-Founder, At Home With Growing Older

Denise M. Michaud

Chair Grownups Member-led Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on February 7th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Navigating A Turbulent Economy: Annual Economic Forecast 2023 Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

High inflation, rising interest rates, sweeping tech layoffs, a crypto meltdown. The recent economic news has been less than encouraging, leading the International Monetary Fund to warn of “storm clouds” descending on the global economy. At the same time, GDP in the United States grew to more than $20 trillion in 2022. The Bay Area, largely thanks to tech, had the fastest growing economy in the United States, with GDP increasing 4.8 percent. The United States is at or near full employment. What does it all mean for workers, investors, and Americans’ pocketbooks? What impact are the Fed’s actions having?

Michael Boskin of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, will share his insights into the U.S. economy, productivity, the evolution of work and impact of tech, and whether we will tip into a recession. UC Berkeley’s Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist at the IMF, will assess the ongoing impact of the war in Ukraine, China’s COVID woes, and other trends shaping the global economy.

Join us for The Commonwealth Club’s annual Walter E. Hoadley Bank of America economic forecast.This event is underwritten by Bank of America.

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Philip Taubman On George P. Shultz: The Life And Legacy Of A Great Statesman Feb 06, 2023

Show notes

When former Secretary of State George Shultz turned 100, he published a piece in the Washington Post on what he had learned over his long career. “Trust is the coin of the realm,” he wrote. “If it is present, anything is possible. If it is absent, nothing is possible.” Three U.S. presidents put their trust in Shultz’s abilities, including Ronald Reagan, who tasked him to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union. Shultz, who died in 2021, also achieved success in the corporate world and in academia, serving as head of San Francisco’s Bechtel Corp. and as a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

A new biography, In the Nation’s Service, offers an inside look at Shultz’s legacy, from his work on Middle East peace to later efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. Author Philip Taubman, longtime New York Times editor and reporter in Washington and Moscow, draws on Shultz’s personal papers to shed new light on how he helped shape U.S. foreign policy, and how his style of conservatism has all but vanished from today’s Republican Party.

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CLIMATE ONE: Saket Soni on the People Who Make Disaster Recovery Possible Feb 03, 2023

Show notes

Who cleans up and rebuilds our communities after floods, fires, and hurricanes? COVID redefined America's definition of “essential workers,” but many who help communities recover from climate disasters remain underpaid and overlooked.

In 2006, labor organizer Saket Soni got an anonymous call from an Indian migrant worker in Mississippi who had scraped together $20,000 to apply for the “opportunity” to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina. The caller was only one of hundreds lured into Gulf Coast labor camps, surrounded by barbed wire, and watched by armed guards. Since then, the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters has only increased – and disaster recovery has become big business. How are the lives of people displaced by disasters intertwined with those helping to rebuild?

Guests:

Saket Soni, Founder and Director, Resilience Force

Daniel Castellanos, Director Of Workforce Engagement, Resilience Force

For show notes and related links, visit https://www.climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts

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Debbie Chinn's 'Dancing in Their Light: A Daughter's Unfinished Memoir' Feb 02, 2023

Show notes

Debbie Chinn's primary professional and volunteer career focus on philanthropic work—to heal our society and bridge our cultural differences—was seeded via a 13-generation saga across continents.

Dancing in Their Light: A Daughter's Unfinished Memoir is a biographical conversation program exploring the research that bought forth her family’s experiences assimilating in the United States. It is a specifically Chinese American immigration compilation that skillfully weaves together stories of the Chinn family restaurant, "The House of Mah Jong," and the distinct personality of a golden age of Polynesian floor shows ubiquitous in the 1960s on Long Island.

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Uncovering Brutality, Cover-Up and Corruption in Oakland Feb 01, 2023

Show notes

The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the mass protests that followed opened many Americans’ eyes to cases of police brutality and misconduct. But two decades earlier, a civil rights lawsuit against Oakland police brought some of the same issues into focus. The suit alleged that a band of rogue veteran police officers known as "The Riders" beat, kidnapped and planted drugs on Oakland residents. A 2003 settlement led to federal monitoring of the Oakland Police Department, which continues to this day.

In their new book The Riders Come Out at Night, journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham explore the history of policing in Oakland, the fallout from the trial, and why some promised reforms have failed.

Join us to hear about their reporting and what it reveals about policing in the Bay Area and the United States.

SPEAKERS

Ali Winston

Independent Reporter; Co-author, The Riders Come Out at Night

Darwin BondGraham

Reporter; Co-author, The Riders Come Out at Night

Otis R. Taylor Jr

Managing Editor, KQED News

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on January 25th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Congresswoman Jackie Speier: The Exit Interview Jan 31, 2023

Show notes

Congresswoman Jackie Speier chose to close out her congressional career at the end of 2022 and did not seek another term. Her departure from Congress brings to an end a Bay Area political career that spans more than 40 years in elected office. She represented California's 14th District in the House of Representatives—which includes San Mateo County and a portion of San Francisco County—from 2008 through 2022. Before serving in Congress, Speier was a California State Assembly member and California state senator; she started her career on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors.

Speier is returning to The Commonwealth Club to discuss her historic career, one that was launched after her near-death experience in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when she and her boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, were shot on the tarmac during the People's Temple mass murder suicide. Congressman Ryan did not survive, while Speier recovered and went on to devote her career to public service. In Congress, Speier was known as a fierce advocate for women's rights, including pressing for laws addressing reproductive rights and sexual harassment and assault, including in the military. She served on the Oversight and Reform as well as Intelligence and Armed Services committees during her time in Congress.

Please join us for a special event with a Bay Area political legend as she discusses her career as well as the changes she sees ahead for the institution she just departed and for the Democratic Party.

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Ed Larson: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of Our Nation Jan 28, 2023

Show notes

Pulitzer Prize-winner Ed Larson returns to The Commonwealth Club with a revealing look at how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding. New attention from historians and journalists has been raising pointed questions: Was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery? Was the Constitution a pact with slavery, or was it a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves, such as George Washington’s consistent refusal to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation.

Larson insightfully synthesizes these issues in his new history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved far too narrow — though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. But by the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades.

Larson delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: We witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

MLF ORGANIZER

George Hammond

SPEAKERS

Edward Larson

University Professor of History, and Darling Chair in Law, Pepperdine University; Author, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795

In Conversation with George Hammond

Author, Conversations With Socrates

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on January 24th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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CLIMATE ONE: Blue Carbon: Sinking It in the Sea Jan 27, 2023

Show notes

When most of us think about using nature to remove carbon dioxide from the air, we think of trees. Yet blue carbon, a new name for storing carbon dioxide in coastal and marine ecosystems where it can no longer trap heat in our atmosphere, may have even greater potential. Salt marshes and mangroves have carbon-capturing capacity that may surpass that of terrestrial forests. Seagrasses, for example, currently cover less than 0.2% of the ocean floor, but store about 10% of the carbon buried in the oceans each year. How can natural, ocean-based solutions benefit both the planet and the people who live in and depend on coastal ecosystems?

Guests:

Ralph Chami, Assistant Director, Western Hemisphere Division, Institute for Capacity Development, IMF

Emily Pidgeon, Vice President, Ocean Science And Innovation, Conservation International

Irina Fedorenko-Aula, Founder, Co-CEO, Vlinder

Isabella Masinde, CEO, Umita

For show notes and related links, visit ClimateOne.org

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