Climate One

Russ Feingold became a household name co-authoring the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, more commonly known as McCain-Feingold. It’s the only major piece of campaign finance reform legislation passed into law in decades. Today he is using his experience navigating the levers of power to tackle alarming biodiversity loss and the worsening climate crisis. Feingold believes, “The threats posed to people from the destruction of nature are just as serious as those posed by climate change.” Guests:...

More than half of Americans are invested in the stock market, either directly or through their retirement funds, but individual investors rarely think about how their money is actually being put to use. And even if they decide to take a stand and divest from fossil fuels, that may not translate into a single molecule less carbon being released into the atmosphere. On the other hand, large institutional investors - like those that manage individuals’ retirement funds - can wield huge...

A fundamental injustice of the climate crisis is that those who have contributed to it least are already bearing the brunt of the impacts, and that will continue as global temperatures rise. Like many other environmental and societal challenges, we can’t make real progress if certain groups are left behind. How might a new model for working together to solve interconnected crises, by tracing the origins of ecofeminism, environmental justice and other movements that center the voices and...

Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) took the national spotlight as the lead manager for the second impeachment trial of the former president. As a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, he has grilled fossil fuel executives on the industry’s long history of intentionally misleading the public. And as a constitutional law professor, he has offered deep insight into the connections between an informed citizenry and a robust democracy. At a time when many Americans doubt Congress’s...

Fossil fuel companies and others have spent decades casting doubt on climate science to allow them to continue to profit. As documented by climate communication expert John Cook and others, these strategies have taken many forms: deny, dismiss, delay, deflect; and they have evolved over time. They’ve also included a concerted effort to recast political speech, banned and regulated in some contexts, as protected free speech, giving corporations more leeway in broadcasting their messages. In a...

Global sales of electric vehicles more than doubled in 2021. Projections for this year are for another huge gain as more automakers introduce more models with increasing range. This is all good news for transitioning to a clean energy economy. But sourcing the materials needed for clean energy might not be so clean. Mining is the leading industrial polluter in the U.S., but the climate crisis demands a transition to technologies that require raw materials to be extracted. How can the world...

Earlier this year, California regulators were set to propose significant changes to the incentives that drive rooftop solar installations. After widespread opposition from industry and climate advocates, the California Public Utilities Commission paused the effort. The issue centers on how much rooftop solar customers pay to use the grid and what rewards they get for selling their excess power. But California is far from the only state where net metering is a hotly contested issue. While...

Since March 2020, the global community has grappled with an unprecedented pandemic. At first, most people were willing to do what it takes to keep themselves and others safe. Two years in, pretty much everyone feels exhausted by the effort and by the general anxiety of living with COVID. The global community simultaneously faces an even greater existential threat: climate change. For those fighting to stave off this slower-moving catastrophe, fatigue is a familiar feeling. What have we...

The IPCC released its latest report the same day as the U.S. Supreme Court heard the most environmentally significant case in a decade, all while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has rattled global energy markets. It’s a lot to take in all at once. Will the disruption of methane gas supplies to Europe give it the extra push it needs to decarbonize, or will some countries always be beholden to untrustworthy partners for the resources they need? What other options exist to power our economies more...

It has been 3 million years since there’s been this much CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if we stop all burning of fossil fuels today, humans have already emitted enough CO2 that we’ll continue experiencing extreme weather events for years to come. Not only do we need to stop emitting greenhouse gasses, but according to the IPCC, we also need to accelerate the removal of CO2. With forests burning faster than we can grow them, nature-based solutions may not be enough. What role might tech-based...

Humans must dramatically rein in greenhouse gas emissions in order to slow the planetary warming caused by centuries of fossil fuel combustion. But even if we accomplish that through major reforms to our power supply, food systems, industrial industries and more, we still need to remove huge amounts of carbon already in the atmosphere to stave off the worst impacts of climate disruption. This is no easy task. We need to explore every option – both nature-based solutions and tech solutions....

In a 20-year time frame, methane is 80 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Nationally, 37% of methane emissions come from cows. 17% of all US methane emissions come from food waste rotting in landfills. More than 100 countries, including the US, signed The Global Methane Pledge, promising to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. In California, a new law went into effect directly addressing the state’s methane emissions from organic waste and dairy farms. The law...

For years, scientists, activists, and politicians have tried to warn the world of the potential catastrophic consequences of dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere: Think of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Or NASA scientist James Hansens’ testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1988, in which he said that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.” Or go all the way back to 1856, when Eunice Newton Foote first warned the world that an atmosphere heavy with...

For years, fossil fuel companies have claimed to support climate science and policy. Many have recently pledged to hit net zero emissions by midcentury. Yet behind the scenes they fight those very same policies through industry associations, shadow groups, and lobbying – all while spending vast sums on advertising and PR campaigns touting their climate commitments. This week we focus on the PR and law firms helping fossil fuel companies delay the transition to clean energy while claiming...

The climate crisis seems to be unfolding faster than ever before — with catastrophic floods, winter wildfires, and last summer’s killer heat. It’s becoming increasingly hard to mentally set climate aside as a future problem — it is here, real in our present moment. How do we grapple with the weight of these changes, and process our fear for what is coming for us, and for the next generation? And how do those emotions affect our decisions about whether or not to have children, who in many...

With expanding electrical infrastructure and some jurisdictions beginning to ban gas appliances in new construction, the transition to a clean energy economy is already happening. Understandably, labor unions that represent workers tied to the fossil fuel infrastructure are digging in their heels. While recognizing that climate change is a threat, the Laborers’ International Union of North America and the Utility Workers Union of America are skeptical of promises of a just transition, saying...

Corporate pledges of reaching net zero carbon emissions have quickly become commonplace. Critics argue that such pledges are mere greenwashing, and even if pledges are fulfilled, the balance sheets usually utilize carbon offsets, which can be of questionable quality and accountability. Proponents of corporate net zero pledges say we’ll never get to net zero emissions without corporate action, and pledges represent legitimate ramping up of ambition and commitment. How can consumers, investors...

If corporations can be legal persons, why can’t Mother Earth? In 2017, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River the full legal rights of a person. India granted full legal rights to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, and recognized that the Himalayan Glaciers have a right to exist. In 2019, the city of Toledo passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights with 61 percent of the vote, but then a year later, a federal judge struck it down. As Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, an attorney who represented Lake Erie,...

Beyond his position as chairman of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr rose to global prominence in the business world with his popularization of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), which he promoted in his best-selling book, Measure What Matters. Could the same set of management tools be applied to preventing the growing climate crisis? In Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now, John Doerr and Kleiner Perkins advisor Ryan Panchadsaram argue that it...

Each year, Climate One gives an award to a natural or social scientist for excellence in science communication. This year’s recipient of the Stephen H. Schneider Award is marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab and co-creator of the All We Can Save project. “What gets me out of bed in the morning, what makes this work of communicating about climate science and policy so important, is that we have such a huge spectrum of possible futures available to...