The Climate Pod – Details, episodes & analysis

The climate movement faces mounting pressure in 2024. Record-setting temperatures and extreme weather disasters continue to devastate over a turbulent summer. Prominent plans to roll back environmental regulations and stiffle climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives have movement leaders pushing back on attacks. Is the climate movement able to handle the pressure at this critical moment? 

Few people are as equipped to answer that question as Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. Over his decades of climate and progressive leadership, Rev. Yearwood has advanced climate solutions with policymaking, culture change, direct action, and more. And he's part of a new initiative to educate people on critical issues like climate change during this transmorative year. 

The “2024 & Beyond: Creating Our Shared Future” campaign is reaching out with open town halls to educate and debate on key political issues and building a network of experts and organizations like Center for Climate Justice, Center for Popular Democracy, Hip Hop Caucus, Greenpeace, and Center for Oil and Gas Organizing.  

Rev. Yearwood Jr. joins the show this week to discuss his life and work, how change actually happens in the climate movement, why the climate movement needs to address its own weaknesses, and what strategies will be most effective in advancing progress and fighting off attacks. 

Rev. Yearwood Jr. is the President & CEO of Hip Hop Caucus. He is the host of the award-winning climate and environmental justice podcast The Coolest Show, Senior Advisor of Bloomberg Philanthropies Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign, and one of the most innovative advocates and strategists for racial justice and climate justice. He is a White House Champion of Change for Climate leadership and according to Rolling Stone he is a “New Green Hero.”

Related Links:

2024 & Beyond: Creating Our Shared Future

Hip Hop Caucus

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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.

In 2008, the world economic system was rocked by a financial crisis that stemmed from risky mortgages being securitized and sold as safe investments to unknowing investors.  Misaligned incentives, unpriced risk, deceptive selling practices, and a lack of regulatory scrutiny throughout the financial industry led to the Great Recession, the consequences of which we're still feeling in a variety of ways today.

While somewhat different from what preceded the 2008 financial crisis, there are clear parallels with what's happening in the home insurance and mortgage markets in areas most at risk to damage from climate-worsened storms.  As large, traditional insurance companies are leaving states like Florida, California, and Louisiana because the damages from hurricanes, floods, and wildfires have become too large, new insurance companies are replacing them. These companies are smaller, less diverse, and rely on a ratings agency known to provide good ratings to underserving companies. Unsurprisingly, when climate catastrophes hit, these insurers often go bankrupt, leaving home owners and their banks with a destroyed home and asset without the funds to rebuild or even repair.  And the implications of this aren't isolated to the local level, because most of these mortgages are securitized and sold at the national level.

This week, Prof. Pari Sastry joins the show to discuss her recent paper "When Insurers Exit: Climate Losses, Fragile Insurers, and Mortgage Markets".  This paper explains how the home home mortgage, insurance markets, and global economy are interconnected and how the climate crisis is impacting all three.  As the world is still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, it's shocking to see the early stages of what appears to be some of the same causes play out today.  And we know that the climate crisis is only going to increase the number of severe weather events, which will put an even greater strain on insurance and mortgage companies, further worsening an already fragile relationship.

Prof. Pari Sastry is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School where she focuses her research on climate finance.

Read "When Insurers Exit": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4674279

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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.

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"

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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.

If we have any chance of staying under 2 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, the United States and China will have to act aggressively to reduce emissions in the next few decades and support the rest of the world as it decarbonizes. And to achieve that, both nations will have to work together effectively, which has become increasingly uncertain in recent years. So how do we change the current trajectory and steer away from escalating conflict?

In his new book, The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping's China, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who currently serves as President of the Asia Society, outlines a detailed plan for how the two global superpowers can establish strategic competition with each other without resorting to catastrophic war. He also weighs in on how the United States and China can work more effectively on the climate crisis and what we should learn in the breakdown in talks following Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Lastly, Mr. Rudd gives his thoughts on the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States and Australia's plan to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 from 2005 levels. 

Buy The Avoidable War here

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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 new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!

It's our 200th episode with David Roberts on the day the Inflation Reduction Act is signed into law! This is a very special one for us. One of our favorite guests, who was very cool to us early on when we were just getting started, is back to the talk about the biggest climate legislation in US history. Roberts is a longtime climate/energy writer that now runs the newsletter/podcast Volts, about clean energy and politics. He joins the show to unpack the Inflation Reduction Act, what he thinks will be the major benefits of the bill, how Democrats got the biggest investment in US climate history passed, how this compares to the Waxman-Markey failure, and what happens to the climate movement next. 

You can subscribe to Volts here.

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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 new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!

On today's show, we're having some fun with one of our first in-person interviews with Adam Gardiner, guitarist/vocalist for Guster and co-founder of REVERB, which has helped lead the music climate revolution since 2004. We discuss why Adam started using his rock fame to promote climate action, how artists can green venues and help unite the music community to address the climate crisis, and what campaigns REVERB is focused on now. We recorded this live a few months ago, just hours before Guster took the stage and it's fantastic. 

More on REVERB:

REVERB is a nonprofit dedicated to empowering millions of individuals to take action toward a better future for people and the planet. REVERB partners with musicians, festivals, and venues to green their concert events while engaging fans face-to-face at shows to take environmental and social action. Check out their current campaigns, ways to take action, and help volunteer. Follow REVERB on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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 new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!

This week, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and the author of the new book “Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions”, joins us to discuss how understanding science can help us better understand the meaning of our own existence. We also talk about whether everything is actually happening all at once, if humans can create new universes, and whether or not human behavior is truly predictable.

Check out Dr. Hossenfelder's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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 new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!

Dr. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize in Economics recipient and Distinguished Professor of Economics at City University of New York, joins the show to talk about what's driving the world's rising inflation rates, how investments in climate solutions would impact inflation and the economy, and the prospects of Congress passing a climate spending bill. Dr. Krugman also provides his thoughts on the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates, whether or not the US is in a recession, and what all of this means for climate investments.

Plus, co-hosts Ty and Brock Benefiel discuss the importance of environmental and climate advocates building political power and the urgency to elect policymakers who will support climate solutions.

Further Reading:

Paul Krugman "I Was Wrong About Inflation"

Paul Krugman "Climate Politics Are Worse Than You Think"

Nathaniel Stinnett "Climate Movement Must Stop Hoping for Political Heroes"

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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 new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!

Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin may have ended the possibility of new federal spending on climate provisions. Or at least it seems that way. What we know is that for the last year and half, people all over the world have waited and watched to see what Manchin would accept to push the United States toward meeting it's commitments in the Paris Agreement. And now, that answer may be nothing. In his recent piece, Joe Manchin’s Fickleness Is a Needless Catastrophe, The Atlantic's Robinson Meyer unpacks the saga and why this time feels different. He joins the show to discuss his piece as well as explain the very real implications for the Senate's massive failure and what could happen next. 

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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 new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!

Solving the climate crisis is about more than just swapping out fossil fuels with renewables. Though renewable energy is required for a sustainable planet, understanding the political, social, and economic structures that have allowed for fossil fuels to be burned long after global warming reached dangerous levels is essential for attacking the root causes of the crisis. Professor Aviva Chomsky addresses these issues in her new book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice. In this conversation, Professor Chomsky explains why social, racial, and economic justice is just as crucial as science in determining how humans can reverse climate catastrophe. We also discuss the Green New Deal, the Degrowth movement, tension between unions and the environmental movement, and why climate change is a democracy problem. 

Read Is Science Enough?

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter "The Climate Weekly": https://theclimateweekly.substack.com/

As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. 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 new YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group. Check out our updated website!