The Climate Pod

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 ...

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 Directo...

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...

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 Uncons...

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 ...

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’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...

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...

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 moderni...

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 new...

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 th...

We're undergoing a necessary renewable energy transition. And this transition will require an enormous amount of critical metals in order to power an economy without fossil fuels. Today, the processes we use to extract these materials - from copper, nickel, lithium, and more - are causing harm to both humans and our physical environment. So what do we do about it? 

In his new book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will...