The Climate Pod

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This week, MS NOW anchor Jacob Soboroff is on the show for a wide-ranging conservation. We discuss his long reporting career covering the climate crisis, immigration, elections, and much, much more. I've been a longtime fan of Jacob, which you can hear about in this interview. He will anchor Connect with Jacob Soboroff on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET on MS NOW. Jacob is t...

Money is both a concrete thing and an abstract measure. If you only look at money as an abstract measure, as traditional economists have done for centuries, you'll miss out on the real role that money plays in our society.  The decisions of governments, corporations, and everyday people are influenced by money, and understanding this is helpful in understanding what's driving the decision making that's ultimately leading to a worsening climate crisis.  While discussing the new book "Against Money" by Arjun Jayadev and JW Mason, we explore a variety of topics such as John Maynard Keynes' early objections to ec...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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It's the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. In this new series from The Climate Pod, we're looking back on the global pact to determine: how have things changed since 2015 and what has the Paris Agreement accomplished? Our first three episodes were on extreme heat, adaptation, and the state of climate action. 

This week, we look at the transformative change in clean energy and electrification technology over the...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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On Thursday, the Trump Administration's announcement that the EPA was going to repeal the endangerment finding made huge news. Major news outlets across the globe covered it. An avalanche of headlines and push notifications suddenly turned even more attention to attacks on environmental regulation than we've seen during the first year of the second Trump Administration. But what's behind the headlines of this decision? What does this announcement actually d...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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"The goal I set out in the book, this planet-sized system reconstruction of the world in the direction of justice, that's a big goal."

This week, we're joined by In this conversation, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books Elite Capture and was a co...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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It's the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. In this new series from The Climate Pod, we're looking back on the global pact to determine: how have things changed since 2015 and what has the Paris Agreement accomplished? Our first two episodes were on extreme heat and adaptation. 

This week, we're looking at the massive gap that exists between the goals of the Paris Agreement and the current st...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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This episode is another discussion between two Americans talking about climate action. To say it's a weird time to focus on climate action seems like a wild understatement. But the reality is even in the face of rising fascism, the climate crisis doesn't stop. There's much happening now that will only speed it up. So what do we do about it?

On today's show, we discuss how t...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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Before the end of the year, I had my annual conversation with the always wonderful Evlondo Cooper, senior writer with the climate and energy program at Media Matters. In this conversation, we explore the new challenges of climate reporting that we saw unfold in the politically charged environment of 2025. We looke at the specific changes under the Trump administration and how a continued lack of diverse voices in climate c...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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This week, we explore a fundamental question at the heart of the climate crisis: why are so many people willing to destory the environment? This is something I think about a lot and can be infurating. It's also a more complicated story when you really dig into the motivators. 

To find out why environmental crims happens, Dr. Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist and author of Green Crime: Ins...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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This week, we're taking a deep dive into the UNEP fascinating, new Global Environment Outlook with legendary climate scientist Sir Professor Robert Watson. We discuss the state (and accelerating pace) of global warming and environmental destruction. Watson explains how emissions continue to climb, what's happened since the Paris Agreement, the state of biodiversity loss, land degradation, and air pollution, and much more. He also explains the transformative investments and ch...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. In this new series from The Climate Pod, we're looking back on the global pact to determine: how have things changed since 2015 and what has the Paris Agreement accomplished? Our first episode was on extreme heat. 

This week, we're looking at the role of adaptation. In the decade that has past since the Paris Agreement was si...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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When talking about climate change, it's easy to get caught up in the scientific terms. Carbon emissions, parts per million, global average temperature, etc. But I always want to make sure I'm framing this conversation in the human impacts that result from the crisis. That's why I wanted to have Sharon Lerner back on the show this week. Sharon Lerner is a journalist and author at ProPublica, where she c...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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Another annual UN climate change conference is in the books. So, what did it accomplish? This week, The Guardian's Oliver Milman joins the show to breakdown the results of COP30. We discuss why many thought the conference was underwhelming, the final decisions on a fossil fuel phaseout, finance for adaptation, and improving Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). We also talk about the lack of agreement on combating deforestation, the United S...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

-------------

We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. In this new series from The Climate Pod, we're looking back on the global pact to determine: how have things changed since 2015 and what has the Paris Agreement accomplished?

To kick off the series, Dr. Kristina Dahl, vice president for Science at Climate Central and the co-author of the new report Ten Years of the Paris Ag...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

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Are global leaders trying to solve the wrong climate problem? In this episode, Professor Jessica Green aruges that too often governments and institutions have misdiagnosed the core issues of the climate crisis and are going about solutions in all the wrong ways as a result. In her new book,  Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them, she focuses on the power dynamics between fo...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

This week, Justin Worland, senior correspondent at TIME, is back on the show to delve into the  COP30 and what you will want to know about this critical convening of world leaders. As one of the top journalists covering climate change and international climate policy, Justin shares his  perspective on the evolving nature of these global conferences and what's actually at stake this year in Brazil. We explore the shift from traditional neg...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

This week, we dive into the transformative potential of a world less reliant on automobiles and ask the question: "why aren't we more honest about the harms caused by our car dependency?" We're joined by the amazing Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, co-hosts of "The War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the new book, "Life After Cars," to explores the deep-seated cultural and economic ties to car dependency and the urgent n...

There is no denying that capitalism has played a leading role in warming the planet.   As the Industrial Revolution ushered in previously unseen levels of prosperity for some people, human beings' negative impact on the natural world exploded at a ferocious rate.  While it's helpful for modern-day economists to look back at the faults and failures of capitalism as a way to explain the multitude of problems facing humanity in the 21st century, it's even more interesting to understand the critiques that economists of the 19th and 20th century had about capitalism and what they were experiencing in real tim...

The Climate Pod is going to be live in Chicago! Join us for our Chicago Climate Bash, the hottest comedy show on the planet! On Sunday, October 26th at 5 pm CT at The Lincoln Lodge, we're featuring an amazing lineup of great comedians and expert guests. There will be standup, panels, music, and more. This show is a live recording of The Climate Pod. Featuring Chad The Bird, Lucia Whalen, a very special guest, and more! Get your tickets now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chicago-climate-bash-tickets-1758346845749?aff=oddtdtcreator

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This week, we explore the complexities, co...

The Climate Pod is going to be live in Chicago! Join us for our Chicago Climate Bash, the hottest comedy show on the planet! On Sunday, October 26th at 5 pm CT at The Lincoln Lodge, we're featuring an amazing lineup of great comedians and expert guests. There will be standup, panels, music, and more. This show is a live recording of The Climate Pod. Featuring Chad The Bird, Lucia Whalen, a very special guest, and more! Get your tickets now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chicago-climate-bash-tickets-1758346845749?aff=oddtdtcreator

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What has caused societal collapse throughout h...

The Climate Pod is going to be live in Chicago! Join us for our Chicago Climate Bash, the hottest comedy show on the planet! On Sunday, October 26th at 5 pm CT at The Lincoln Lodge, we're featuring an amazing lineup of great comedians and expert guests. There will be standup, panels, music, and more. This show is a live recording of The Climate Pod. Featuring Chad The Bird, Lucia Whalen, a very special guest, and more! Get your tickets now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chicago-climate-bash-tickets-1758346845749?aff=oddtdtcreator

Dr. Jane Goodall died on Wednesday at the age of 91. After National Geographic published her groundbreaking work in 1963, she spent more than 60 years in the public spotlight as a prolific writer, speaker, and advocate for change. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, which has grown into one of the largest advocacy and conservation organizations in the world and started the Roots & Shoots youth program, which has helped more young people get into conservation and environmentalism. She helped build a movement. 

And she used her voice and platform to fight for climate action. In 2021, we had the ch...

WE'RE DOING A LIVE SHOW IN CHICAGO! SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26! 5 PM! GET TICKETS NOW: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chicago-climate-bash-tickets-1758346845749?aff=oddtdtcreator

Congress just rolled back major climate provisions despite a majority of Americans looking for more government action on climate at all levels of government. Why is the approach to the climate crisis in the United States so often out of step with what the public wants? Maybe the biggest issue is the underlining flaws in our democracy. As writer Osita Nwanevu argues, we've seen myriad ways in which democracy has eroded in recent decades, but many o...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

First, the conversation was centered on The Green New Deal. Then, Build Back Better, which turned into the Inflation Reduction Act. It was passed. A few years later, major climate provisions in the bill were repealed. It was fairly popular, but mostly unknown to the average American. So what have we learned? Is it possible to advance major climate policy in America?

Our guests today say yes. And they have a...

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This is an episode that fundamentally challenges the way I've thought about tackling climate change. I've always understood the history of energy as a history of transition. We went from burning a lot of wood to then burning a lot of coal, then moving from coal to mostly oil, then oil plus gas. But our guest today, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, says that thinking is totally wrong. Instead of undergoing a series of energy t...

Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it!

This week, Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, is back on the show to explore one of the most frustrating obstacles to climate action: the lack of political engagement from many climate-concerned voters. Despite the growing awareness and concern about climate change, many voters that say they care about the issue still don't perceive it as a political problem. Nathaniel delves into the reasons behind this disconnect...

You can't talk about climate action without discussing inequality. Afterall, the effects of climate change are distributed incredibly unequaly. Furthermore, it's the people who are responsible for the least amount of carbon emissions that most often face the deadliest and most damaging consequences of the crisis. 

On today's episode, we sit down with Tony Juniper, renowned environmentalist and author of Just Earth to explore the profound intersection of inequality and the climate crisis. As the climate emergency intensifies, the disparities between those who contribute the least to climate change and those who suffer the most from its i...

Five years ago, on the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we looked back with Vann Newkirk II on the complexities of the disaster. Newkirk did a thorough recounting of Katrina for his narrative podcast series, Floodlines. Since that conversation, I've often wondered about the role of the federal government in the wake of these disasters. Have we learned much in the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina? Why is FEMA so critical when a disaster strikes a certain area? Are we better prepared now or in worse shape? How is the climate crisis impacting all of this?

To answer a...

This has been a rough year for the US climate movement. And few people have spent as many years or invested as much time in thinking about the climate movement than Bill McKibben, author of the first book on climate change, The End of Nature. In this perilous moment we find ourselves in, McKibben is finding some inspiration in the transformative potential of renewable energy and how it can help both power the planet and revitalize the climate movement. In his new book, Here Comes The Sun, he offers both the grim reality we face as warming worsens and the...

On July 23, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that many are regarding as a groundbreaking legal moment for the fight against climate change. But what was included in the actual opinion? What does this mean for the future of climate litigation? And most importantly, what will this mean for the future of climate action?

To answer all these questions and more, we talk to Dr. Maria Antonia Tigre, the Director of Global Climate Change Litigation at the Sabin Center. She explains how this decision sets a new precedent in international law by recognizing the...

This week, Dr. Kate Marvel, author of Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, is on the show to discuss the complex ways she processes varying emotions while studying climate change and thinking about this planetary crisis. Marvel talks about her journey from a high school student disinterested in science to studying cosmology to eventually becoming a leading climate scientist. She explains why she's inspired by this work and the people that do it. We talk about the creative and fun aspects of working with climate models, some of the certainities and uncertainites that come with...

The climate crisis seems to be missing from the overwhelming majority of the popular culture that we consume. But is that really the case?

In this compelling conversation Mark Bould, a distinguished professor of film and literature at the University of the West of England, explains how we might be able to uncover the crisis in TV, books, and film where it isn't obvious at first glance. Bould is the author of The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture, which challenges our conventional understanding of climate change narratives and encourages us to uncover the implicit climate themes woven i...

This week, David Wallace-Wells is back on the show for a wide-ranging conversation on the climate crisis unfolding in 2025. I was struck by David's recent essay, "We Can Adapt and Prepare for Floods. But Will We?" in the wake of the horrific flooding in Texas. As David explains, the climate disasters we face today are increasingly unpredictable and widespread, challenging our traditional understanding of what our climate risks are where they can happen.

Despite the rising frequency and cost of these disasters, David notes that increasingly it appears that our most commons response is largely to normalize...

Why were there so many serial killers in the US in the 1970s and 80s? Why were so many in the Pacific Northwest?

This week, we explore the Lead Crime Hypothesis with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser. In her new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, she explores the potential link between mid-20th century pollution from leaded gasoline and industrial smelters and the spike in violent crime. We also examine how the reduction of lead in the environment could explain the subsequent drop in crime rates since the 1990s, but how...

We're living through a time of extraordinary change to the US energy landscape. As Robbie Orvis, Senior Director of Modeling and Analysis at Energy Innovation argues, the combination of surging demand for electricity with new policies designed to slow the build out of cheaper, cleaner, faster energy sources like wind, solar, and batteries will result in higher utility bills, fewer jobs, and slower economic growth. And that will impact everyone, likely in more ways than you'd expect.

Orvis joins The Climate Pod this week for an in-depth examination of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. How much l...

This week, David Roberts is back on the show to discuss what has happened to the Inflation Reduction Act and what it means to clean energy and the climate movement to have such a major setback. We step back to think through the landscape of climate policy now and also reflect on pivotal moments in the recent history of legislative efforts that have shaped the current state of clean energy in the U.S. From his early days at Grist to his influential work at Vox, David offers a unique perspective on the challenges and triumphs of advocating for...

Hey, it's been quite a while since we last posted an episode. What is going on? We explain what's been happening and what to expect now. 

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Prior to the New Deal, millions of rural Americans were quite literally living in the dark. Though electricity had been available for decades, it was out of reach for most living in America's  countryside post-World War I. That all changed within a decade. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's approach to the power sector during the Great Depression transformed electrification and public utilities on rural life and dramatically modernized the American home throught the nation. In his new book, Democracy In Power, A History of Electrification in the United States, Sandeep Vaheesan explores the rapid economic and social changes brought about b...

We're back for one last episode of 2024 with our most frequent guest on The Climate Pod! Evlondo Cooper is back on the show to review how climate change was covered in mainstream media over the course of the year. In this conversation, Evlondo Cooper discusses the evolving landscape of climate media, why it remains critical to connect extreme weather events to climate change, and how that still continues to be absent from major news coverage. He highlights the power of mainstream media in shaping public perception and the role of independent media is increasingly playing in providing in-depth coverage...

What would the world look like at 3-degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels? In his latest work, Collision Course: 3-degrees of warming & humanity's future, David Spratt explores the catastrophic implications of the planet we're heading towards as warming continues to accelerate. He argues we need to face up to realities of the crisis and have an honest discourse on risks and impacts already occuring. On the show this week, he joins us to discuss the significance of tipping points, and the systemic risks posed by climate change, and the non-linear, catastrophic impacts expected at 3-degrees. We also explore...