The Climate Pod

Latest Episodes:

How To Win Climate Arguments And Influence People (w/ Dr. Genevieve Guenther) Jul 10, 2024

Show notes

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 theclimatepod@gmail.com. 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.

Highways Are Horrible For Climate Change. How Does The Problem Keep Expanding? Jun 26, 2024

Show notes

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

US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm on America's Clean Energy Mission Jun 19, 2024

Show notes

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.

Grief, Racism, and the Climate Crisis (w/ Mary Annaïse Heglar) Jun 12, 2024

Show notes

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"

What Will The Future Of Climate Denial Look Like? (w/ Tad DeLay) Jun 05, 2024

Show notes

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.

We Need More Climate People (w/ Tom Steyer) May 29, 2024

Show notes

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/

The Complex Threat Of Sea Level Rise (w/ Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney) May 22, 2024

Show notes

This week, two Pultizer Prize-winning reporters join the show to discuss their new investigative series, "The Drowning South," and how the threat of sea level rise is causing a number of complex problems in America's southern coastal cities. The Washington Post's Chris Mooney, a reporter covering climate change, energy and the environment, and Brady Dennis, a reporter focusing on environmental policy, public health issues and climate impacts, explain why the American south is facing an unusual amount of problems with sea level rise, what's happening in the region compared to other parts of the country, and how flooding is causing a variety of issues testing local areas' ability to adapt.

The first three stories of "The Drowning South" series are available here:

The New Face of Flooding

A Hidden Threat

Where Seas are Rising with 'Unprecedented' Speed

Groundbreaking Economic Study Suggests Greater Climate Damages (w/ Dr. Adrien Bilal and Dr. Diego Kaenzig) May 15, 2024

Show notes

In 2018, economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, which was the first neoclassical growth model to incorporate the impacts of a warming planet on the global economy. While celebrated for its economic innovations, the DICE model and its outputs have been criticized by climate scientists for not adequately considering the devastating impacts that a rapidly warming planet will have on the environment, human wellbeing, and the economy. Conventional attempts of forecasting GDP impacts of a one degree increase in global temperatures using the DICE model typically produce estimates of little more than a 1% decrease in global GDP. Critics argue that by downplaying the future economic costs resulting from a warming planet, these types of economic models make it easier for policymakers to justify delaying actions now to reduce emissions and slow or even stop global warming.

But in a new paper titled "The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs Local Temperature", Dr. Adrien Bilal and Dr. Diego Kaenzig unveil a new model to predict the impact that global warming will have on the global economy. Their findings suggest previous studies were significantly off and, in fact, global GDP will be drastically reduced if the planet continues to warm on its current trajectory. Dr. Bilal and Dr. Kaenzig join The Climate Pod to discuss their new paper, how their approach differed from previous attempts at quantifying the economic impact of climate change, and what this means for policymakers.

Dr. Adrien Bilal is an Assistant Economics Professor at Harvard University.

Dr. Diego Kaenzig is an Assistant Economics Professor at Northwestern University.

Read the paper here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32450

Is Climate Anxiety Keeping People From Having Children? (w/ Dr. Jade Sasser) May 08, 2024

Show notes

Over the past five years, there have been several studies showing how the climate crisis is impacting major life decisions. Whether it's where to live, how to invest, or what to study, young people today are being forced to confront a climate-worsened future and decide what's best for their personal situation given the very public failures of leaders to limit global warming. One particular decision that has received a lot of public attention is whether or not to have a child in the middle of a climate crisis. These studies are appearing more frequently than ever before as the climate crisis becomes more apparent than ever, but almost all of these studies fail to incorporate how this decision is impacted by the respondent's race.

Dr. Jade Sasser joins the podcast this week to talk about how climate anxiety is affecting some of life's biggest decisions. Dr. Jade Sasser is an Associate Professor at the University of California Riverside and the author of the new book "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future." Not only does this book explore the anxieties and hesitations that people have about bringing children into a world in the midst of a climate crisis, but it also looks at how the climate crisis exacerbates other social inequities and how climate anxiety affects people of different races differently.

Read "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question"

Listen to Dr. Sasser's podcast "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question"

Why Is Climate Change Missing In Our Movies? (w/ Anna Jane Joyner and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson) May 01, 2024

Show notes

Popular films have massive influence over our culture. It's where we go to see the biggest stories on the biggest screen. It's where we go to see Nicole Kidman do that weird commerical before the film starts. Movies are really, really important.

So, why isn't the climate crisis, one of the defining issues of our time, on the silver screen more often. That's a question Anna Jane Joyner and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson are investigating. Together, they put together a new report, Climate Reality On-Screen: The Climate Crisis in Popular Films, 2013–22, which outlines how often the climate crisis is showing up in famous flicks and how often we see characters aware of its existence on screen. This week, Anna Jane and Matthew explain their findings, what it means for the industry, our politics, and how filmmakers can do better going forward.

Anna Jane Joyner is a climate story consultant and the founder and director of Good Energy. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is an associate professor of English and environmental studies at Colby College. Read their report, Climate Reality On-Screen: The Climate Crisis in Popular Films, 2013–22 here.

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