Climate Now

Since humans began settling down and building civilizations 10,000 years ago, the Earth's climate has been relatively stable. But before that, the climate was more unstable - unpredictable - and humans were nomads, forced to follow the good climate for food and shelter. Today, the global average temperature is higher than it has ever been since the beginning of civilization. What does this mean for the future of human civilization? Could this mean a return to instability? Can we make civilization resilient to such dramatic changes in climate that we have never before experienced as a society?Dr. Spencer Glendon of Probable Futures joins Climate Now to speak about his work to change how we think about, talk about, and plan for the future of society.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

A 2022 study by Yale University found that two thirds of Americans (67%) rarely or never talk about climate change, and rarely or never hear people they know talking about it either. Despite the existential threat that it poses, one third of Americans (32%) only hear about global warming in the media a few times a year - or less! Are these statistics shocking? Or does it matter that people don’t talk much about climate change? How important is public awareness and public discussion in the fight to address climate change? How much does public opinion shape climate policy, or drive individuals to reduce their own climate impacts? And, if climate communication IS important, how do we get more conversations started?To mark Climate Now’s 100th episode, we partnered with the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS) to take an introspective look at the role of science communication: how does talking about climate change help address it? We are joined by three experts who look at communication in different ways: David Fenton, Founder of Fenton Communications, a social change communications firm, Leah Thomas, Founder of Intersectional Environmentalist - a climate justice collective known for its reach in environmental storytelling through social media, and Dr. Elke Weber, Professor in Energy and the Environment and in Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Together, we examine why communicating about climate change is hard, why we need to do it anyway, and what strategies, tools and events have the biggest impact in increasing awareness of the climate crisis and motivation to develop solutions.Interested in how this knowledge could inform workplace climate conversations? Our partners at NBS just published an article on that subject, based on these interviews. Check it out!Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

In 1909, headlines declared the U.S. would run out of petroleum by 1940. In 1945, the estimate was that the U.S. had 13 more years of petroleum reserves left. In 1966, we only had 10 more years before the “figurative dipstick in the United States’ oil supplies” came out dry. In the 1970’s United States, alarmist projections about exponential growth of energy demands expected that we would run out of fossil fuels by the year 2000, and yet - since 2000, our consumption of energy from fossil fuels has nearly doubled.We have a pretty consistent track record of underestimating our available fuel reserves, and how much of those reserves we will consume as technology changes and efficiency increases.  In this episode, Kingsmill Bond (Energy Strategist at RMI) and Nat Bullard (Senior Contributor with BloombergNEF) examine why it is so difficult to anticipate our future energy needs and their costs.  Kingsmill Bond posits in his recent report that this is the beginning of the end of fossil fuel demand for electricity, and investors are starting to take note.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

According to a 2022 poll from the Associated Press, although 93% of Americans acknowledge that human activity impacts climate, nearly half of Americans (47%) feel that their actions don’t have an impact on climate change. And yet, we know – it is the collective momentum of tiny particles of snow that drive an avalanche.In our upcoming episode, Climate Now sits down with James Regulinski, co-founder of Carbon Collective, to discuss the role of investing - even among individual, “retail” investors - in determining the pace at which clean energy technologies can replace our global dependence on fossil fuels. We will discuss why investing in your retirement and investing in clean energy technologies can be well-aligned endeavors, why most environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment portfolios aren’t having the impact they should, and why even small investments can make a big difference in accelerating the path to decarbonization.Carbon Collective Disclaimer regarding the use of MSCI data to develop ESG funds:The claims Carbon Collectively repeatedly makes are: MSCI explicitly states that their data should not be used to determine how good or ethical a company is, just as supplemental data to understand its exposure to risk from ESG-related issues. This means the use of the data as a measure of how ethical your portfolio is, is not supported by the data provider, even when it is sold as such. MSCI (and other data providers) use data that is self-reported by the companies. This data is not standardized or verified by MSCI or anyone. The result is data that is noisy/inconsistent. When used to build funds, the fund design is inconsistent with scientific reports of the actions we need to take to address the E of ESG. For example, the IPCC report states that if we want to stay below 2 deg warming (which is already disastrously high), we can not invest any new money in fossil fuel exploration or reserve development. However, funds using MSCI data routinely have oil and gas companies. This is not MSCI's "fault," but it is an artifact of using that data. When you use single-factor scores to judge a company, unrelated factors can "balance" each other out. So a high S score can balance a low E score. This can also lead to the inclusion of companies that are inconsistent with models of how we solve climate change. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Since the Industrial Revolution nearly 150 years ago, global average temperatures have increased by more than 1 degree C (1.9 degrees F), with the majority of that warming occurring since 1975. But during these recent decades of accelerated warming, temperatures in the arctic (latitudes above 66 degrees north) have have been rising even faster - nearly four times faster than the average global rate. The most readily observable impact of such intensive localized warming has been the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which is significant enough to be turning heads of even stalwart climate skeptics. But a less discussed (and perhaps even more dangerous) positive feedback to the warming planet is the rate at which permafrost is melting due to the quickly elevating arctic temperatures.Dr. Susan Natali, Arctic Program Director and senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, sat down with Climate Now to teach us about permafrost: what it is, why it is disappearing, and the potentially drastic - and so far barely accounted for - impact it can have on greenhouse gas emissions. Listen to find out why tackling decreasing global greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible is likely even more urgent than we thought.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

The built environment represents one of society’s largest environmental impacts - contributing nearly one fifth of global GHG emissions, not to mention impacts on natural resources like air and water quality, local ecosystems, and quality of life for residents. Increasingly, policies and public opinion are concentrating on reducing those impacts - creating incentives for new construction and urban development to become more sustainable - to become more “green.”But how do you define whether a building (or a city) is green? Tommy Linstroth is the founder and CEO of Green Badger, a company that provides sustainability accounting services for new construction projects, and Hilari Varnadore is the Vice President for Cities at the U.S. Green Building Council. The two joined Climate Now to explain the globally leading metric for quantifying sustainability of the built environment:  Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Tune in to hear how buildings, stadiums and cities can become LEED certified - what the process entails, what the criteria are, and why every new construction project and city planner should want to be certified as “green” through a process like LEED.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Every approach to decarbonizing the energy sector comes with its share of costs and benefits: renewables are cheap and clean, but require enormous amounts of land and are not always available when power is needed. Batteries provide useful back up power, but add cost to a renewable-supplied grid and compete with other needs for critical minerals like lithium and cobalt. Carbon capture on fossil fuel power plants can prevent stranded assets, but is expensive and could extend dependence on fossil fuels. Net-zero pathway recommendations, like those from Princeton University, BloombergNEF, and the International Energy Agency, aim to maximize the benefits of these various solutions, while minimizing the costs. But the one technology whose role within this balancing act is the most controversial is nuclear power. In our upcoming episode, we are joined by a panel of energy science and policy experts to understand the present role of nuclear power in our energy sector, why nuclear energy continues to be included in decarbonization scenarios, whether or not it should be, and how the industry would need to evolve for it to play an effective role in a clean energy future. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

On March 30, 2023, in partnership with the Livermore Lab Foundation and The Maddy Institute, Climate Now hosted a one day summit in Fresno, CA, examining the intersection of climate change and agriculture. Agriculture is both a leading driver of greenhouse gas emissions (contributing nearly one fifth of all global emissions) and a potential solution to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.Fresno, located in the heart of California's Central Valley, also illuminates the other side of the agriculture-climate change coin: one of the nation's most valuable agricultural regions, producing over a quarter of the nation's food, is threatened by extreme droughts - and this year, extreme floods - brought on by climate change.At Climate Now's one day summit, farmers, business owners, scientists, policymakers, educators and activists gathered to discuss how to prepare for the changing climate in California and other agriculture producing regions, the challenges inherent to adaptation, and the opportunities that could come with adopting climate friendly technologies and practices.For this week's episode, join us for the key takeaways from this event.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Renewable natural gas (RNG), made from the decomposition of organic waste like livestock manure, is not necessarily net-zero if it's burned to run a turbine or drive a car. But what if the RNG is not burned, but is rather pyrolyzed, breaking it down into hydrogen and another product called "carbon black," an essential component of car tires, among other things? Then the hydrogen can be used and the carbon black can be sold in solid form instead of releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. From its Nebraska-based plant, Monolith converts renewable methane into both green hydrogen and carbon black using the world's largest plasma torch (more about that in the episode). Now they are developing a commercial clean hydrogen operation, which they will use to create ammonia to sell for fertilizer. Join us for our conversation with Monolith co-founder and CEO Rob Hanson to learn about methane pyrolysis, the markets for carbon-negative industrial products, and how the Inflation Reduction Act is supporting green (or clean) hydrogen production processes (like Monolith's) in the United States.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

As we transition to a clean energy economy, demand for minerals like copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium is projected to skyrocket. According to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency, the total mineral demand from clean energy technologies will quadruple by 2040 under their “sustainable development scenario” or at least double under stated policies.  Where will all those minerals come from and how can they be accessed in a responsible way? In this episode Kurt House, CEO of KoBold Metals, explains how their company is working to aggregate, digitize, organize, and analyze global geologic data to systematically search the Earth's crust for these four key minerals.Skip ahead:00:00 This Week in Climate News09:21 How much new mining do we need?14:12 How KoBold aggregates and analyzes data17:54 Environmental and social responsibility in miningFollow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

For a building owner, building decarbonization has myriad benefits: lower utility bills, lower maintenance, healthier and more comfortable living. But the barriers to reaching those benefits are large, particularly the high upfront costs and complicated renovation process (many inspections, many permits, coordinating with many contractors). Scale up to trying to decarbonize every building in a city, and the problems scale up, too - each building has its unique challenges to decarbonization, based on location, age, state of repair, and use. But - it turns out that by decarbonizing buildings on a city level, the solutions can scale up, too.In this final installment of our three-part series examining Ithaca, New York’s road to full building decarbonization, we are joined by the team of people who are identifying solutions to these pain points in Ithaca. We will explore how bulk purchasing power, streamlined contracting, and development of communal clean energy infrastructure can clear the pathway to the city’s net-zero goals, and how these principles might serve as a blueprint to other cities in the U.S.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Reducing average global temperatures. Preserving biodiversity. Decreasing the risk of droughts, floods and hurricanes. Reducing air pollution. Reducing utility bills. Creating new jobs and opportunities. Building community engagement. Fostering environmental equity and justice.There doesn’t need to be just one reason to decarbonize a city. And when the specific needs, concerns and goals of communities are accounted for in decarbonization plans, the chances of local buy-in and of an equitable energy transition increase dramatically. Hear why, in the second part of Climate Now’s three-part deep-look into Ithaca, New York’s plans to decarbonize every building in their city. Panelists from a multi-venue live event series, held in Autumn 2022, discuss how Ithaca has approached prioritizing social justice in its plans, and why this is such an integral part of their decarbonization strategy. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

On February 15, 2023, the U.S. Senate held a hearing considering a national clean fuels program, modeled after California’s state-wide Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). The LCFS sets an annually decreasing standard of net carbon intensity (amount CO2 emissions per unit energy) for all the fuels being sold in the state. Companies that produce fuels or fuel equivalents below the carbon intensity threshold can sell low-carbon fuel credits. Companies that produce and sell fuels above the carbon intensity threshold must buy credits, thus creating a market force to encourage low-carbon fuel production and discourage carbon-intensive fuel production. Since the California LCFS standard was enacted more than a decade ago, transportation sector emissions in the state have declined by about 10% due to the program, outpacing the scheduled carbon intensity decreases. Other states and nations have taken note, with similar policies being adopted in the EU, Canada, Brazil, and Washington State and Oregon. Climate Now sat down with Colin Murphy, Deputy Director of the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment, and the Economy at University of California, Davis, to learn the details of how and why this emission reduction policy works, what impact it has had, and how energy companies are responding.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

2022 potentially marked a turning point for the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market, with new EV car sales increasing by 65% over 2021 sales, and now accounting for nearly 6% of all new vehicle sales. (If EVs maintained a 65% annual growth rate, they would reach 100% of new vehicle sales in about 6 years.)  But for medium and heavy duty vehicles, which produce an outsize share of U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gasses, the transition to zero-emissions vehicles is still trying to gain traction. In 2021, electric vehicles accounted for about 1% of bus sales, and about 0.1% of all truck sales.Battery electric vehicles could already replace about half of the freight trips completed each day in the U.S., so it is not technological readiness that is slowing EV adoption in the freight and large vehicle industry. Ray Minjares, Heavy-Duty Vehicles Program Director at the International Council on Clean Transportation, explains what is: the marketplace structure that dictates how freight vehicles are bought and sold. Ray sat down with Climate Now to examine how this marketplace works today, the policies and financing alternatives that could make zero-emission vehicles easier to adopt, and the climate and air quality impacts that would come with decarbonization of the trucking industry.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

More than one third of the world’s 2,000 largest publicly traded companies have made some kind of net-zero commitment, and the list is growing quickly. A critical part of those corporate plans will be securing cleanly sourced electricity for their energy needs, but that requires that there is enough fossil-free electricity available on the grid for every company that prefers to use it. In 2021, renewable energy and nuclear power, combined, accounted for only about 37% of global electricity production. How can a company ensure that their electricity comes from among those fossil-free sources? And how can companies encourage the growth of clean electrical capacity, so that it will meet the growing demand of consumers?These kinds of questions are exactly what Doug Miller, Deputy Director of Market & Policy Innovation at the Clean Energy Buyers Institute (CEBI), aims to answer. CEBI is a non-profit organization that collaborates with policy makers, leading philanthropies, and energy market stakeholders to identify and expedite the implementation of clean energy market solutions. They have also worked closely with the World Resources Institute (WRI), who designed the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the most commonly used standards for companies to assess their carbon emissions impact. Doug joined Climate Now to explain what those standards are, why they are evolving, and some of the innovative tools that CEBI has identified that could be incorporated into the GHG Protocol to help both national electricity grids and the companies that use them achieve their decarbonization goals faster.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Electrification is going a long way in decarbonizing small vehicles (like passenger cars) in the global transportation sector, which produces about 16% of global emissions. But for long-haul transportation: trucking, shipping and the aviation industries, electrification is far from being technologically ready. Enter a controversial solution: biodiesel. Biodiesel is a fuel derived from organic matter like plants, algae or animal fats, which started to popularize globally just this century. However, early generation biodiesel had its drawbacks: first - they are not a perfect replacement for the fuels used in diesel engines, and can only be used as an additive to fossil diesel: decreasing, but not eliminating carbon emissions. Then there was the fact that clearing forest land to grow crops to make biodiesel could produce more emissions than just using fossil diesel.Two companies: Neste and ClearFlame, are among a growing cohort of energy producers exploring more sustainable replacements to diesel fuels.We spoke with Chris Cooper and Matt Leuck (Neste) and BJ Johnson (ClearFlame) about the use of renewable liquid fuels, like renewable diesel that is made from organic waste (like spent cooking oil), that can be used as a 100% replacement for fossil diesel in engines. Stay tuned for Climate Now’s next episode, where we explore how renewable diesel is produced, how it compares in terms of environmental impact relative to fossil- and first generation bio-diesels, and how much and how fast the market for renewable diesels could grow. Key Questions:What is renewable diesel? Is it really renewable?Does renewable diesel have emissions, and how do they compare to fossil diesel?How is renewable diesel being used today, and how might it’s use expand in the future?Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

In November 2021, the City of Ithaca announced the approval of a plan to decarbonize all of its buildings by 2030. In this first-of-its-kind decarbonization plan, Ithaca outlined a pathway to electrify roughly 6,000 homes and buildings as a first step to enacting the city’s own Green New Deal - a resolution established to locally address climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice. The task is monumental - technically, financially and practically. First, an effective decarbonization plan had to be developed - how do you actually decarbonize 6,000 buildings? Second, the city had to figure out how to finance a ~ $500 million dollar infrastructure investment project with a city budget of ~ $90 million dollars. And finally, the city had to ensure that they had buy-in from building owners and that building retrofits were prioritized equitably and without disadvantaging any groups, particularly those who have been traditionally marginalized in the past.So how are they doing it, and can other cities learn from the path that Ithaca has forged? In a three-part live event series, Climate Now brought together experts, city planners, and local business and community leaders to explain what it has taken for Ithaca to enact its decarbonization plan, what has worked well, and what lessons can be learned. Our next episode will highlight the key takeaways from those conversations - stay tuned!Key Questions:Ithaca, NY made a plan to decarbonize 100% of its buildings as part of a strategy to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. What is actually involved in accomplishing such a goal? How can a small city with limited resources finance their own clean energy transition?What considerations are needed to ensure that such decarbonization plans are carried out equitably, and to the benefit of the entire community?How might other municipalities learn from Ithaca’s model?Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million people across the U.S. marched, attended speeches and sat in teach-ins, marking the first Earth Day, and spurring on the enactment of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the founding of the EPA, all of which occurred later that year. Then and now, activism has been critical to enacting environmental and climate policy, and in shifting attitudes of the general public to the urgency of mitigating climate change, but why is activism so important, and how can it be done effectively?Climate Now sat down with Bill McKibben, author, journalist and environmental activist who has led protest movements against development of the Keystone Pipeline Project (which aimed to pipe oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to Nebraska where it could link with other pipelines heading to the refineries of Texas), and for the global divestment from fossil fuels (currently amounting to $40 trillion of lost capital for fossil fuel companies, and counting). Bill joined us to discuss why activism is so important to enacting climate policy, how the biggest movements come together, and the work that needs to be done next.Key Questions:What is the role of activism in the fight against climate change?What are the key ingredients to building a successful protest movement?What lessons have can be taken from prior activist campaigns, such as against the Keystone Pipeline and for fossil fuel divestment, that inform the next steps in the climate movement?Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

In 2021, U.S. President Biden signed an executive order with the directive to achieve 100% carbon-pollution free electricity in the United States by 2030. The goal is certainly achievable: currently wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity generation, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar and wind has increased more than 2000% in the last 15 years, and there are already 1.3 terawatts (TW) of clean energy generation + storage projects seeking to connect to the grid, roughly enough for the grid to reach 80% zero-carbon electricity. But it is one thing to plan clean energy generation facilities, and another to build and connect those facilities into the national power grid, which is done with the oversight of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).FERC is required to regulate the interstate transmission of natural gas, oil, an electricity, which means they work to ensure that a hypothetical wind project in Iowa transmitting electricity to Chicago, Illinois follows all federal and state permitting requirements along its entire path. That gets complicated, and currently those 1.3 TW of clean energy projects are sitting in a backlog that is taking several years to process. Neil Chatterjee, Chairman of FERC in 2017 and again from 2018-2020, joined Climate Now to explain why getting new clean power connected to the grid is so difficult, how the process can be streamlined, and why that is so critical to reaching the U.S.’s climate goals. Stay tuned!Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

The agricultural sector produces about a tenth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and while most of that comes from livestock (about 2/3), emissions from crop production still total about 2.2 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent. Interestingly, we only actually use about half of what we grow: this is not because of food waste (its own issue), but because more than half of any crop is residue: the stems, shells, husks and anything else left behind at the end of a crop harvest.Charm Industrial is a new company with a plan to convert those crop residues (~ half a billion tons in the US alone) from a source of greenhouse gas emissions to a sink. Crop residues are usually left on harvested fields to decompose (or are burned), partially restoring the soils, and partially returning all the CO2 they absorbed during the growing season to the atmosphere. Charm plans to harvest those residues and convert them into bio-oil and biochar. The biochar returns to the soils for restoration; the bio-oil can be buried for CO2 sequestration or replace fossil-derived fuels. Climate Now sat down with Charm CEO and Co-founder Peter Reinhardt, to discuss how their technology works, and why interest is growing in this approach to carbon removal.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.