Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Jeremy Carl, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
John Hofmeister, Former President, Shell Oil Company
Bob Inglis, Former Republican U.S. Representative, South Carolina

This program was recorded live at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on January 24, 2017.

Much has been made of the partisan divide when it comes to climate change.  But are there Republicans out there who accept and believe in climate change? Believe it or not, there are -- Bob Inglis, former South Carolina representative, is one of them. 

During his six years in Congress, Inglis says, he thought climate change was “hooey.”  It was the conviction of his 18-year-old son, followed by trips to the Arctic and Australia to see the effects of global warming for himself that convinced him of the urgency.

“[I] came home and introduced Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act of 2009,” Inglis remembers, adding that it was “probably not a good idea to introduce a carbon tax in the midst of the great recession in the reddest district in the reddest state in the nation!”  The bill died, and Inglis lost his next bid for congress to a tea party candidate. 

But the seed was planted.  Inglis went on to start RepublicEn.org, a non-profit coalition of conservative “energy optimists and climate realists.”  The solutions, he believes, are based not in government subsidies and regulations, but in free enterprise, corporate accountability and stewardship.

John Hofmeister, a former Shell Oil executive, is another unlikely supporter of the climate change movement. During his tenure at the company he was instrumental in convincing the president of Shell to get out of the Global Climate Coalition, a big-oil conglomerate which Hofmeister calls “a fishy organization that seemed to promote one thing, but actually did another.”

“They seemed to be interested superficially in effects on climate,” says Hofmeister. “But in fact they were working to defeat any legislative effort to do anything that might amend how businesses practiced and how industry operates.”

Inglis, who admits that he is now more “Republican in name only,” believes that conservatism and populism are on a collision course – which will make it difficult to make progress. He describes the populist movement as a fire. “And if you think you can direct fire, you're wrong…it’s pitchforks and torches. You can burn down some houses.  But you can't build anything because there's nothing to build with. All you’ve got is anger and pitchforks and torches.  And those aren’t good tools for building.”

The new administration has, to no one’s surprise, not been kind to the climate change movement so far. With a president focused more on the art of the deal than the state of the planet, can both sides of the aisle come together on a solution?  Conservative economists have argued for a carbon tax, even evoking free-market icon Milton Friedman in support of their cause.

“I think one has to distinguish the theory from the practice,” warns Jeremy Carl of the Hoover Institute. “And in theory, there could be a lot to be said for it, particularly if you're cutting it with offsetting taxes elsewhere.  So it's not about growing government or creating a physical drag, having carbon tax.  But the practical details I think frankly are still a huge hold up.” 

Conservatives, he says, are skeptical of “where this would go, why it might get hijacked, what other things would go along with it.  If we’re doing this, is it on top of a bunch of other rules and regulations that we've already got or are we getting rid of a bunch of subsidies?” 

That view, Inglis says, is more cynical than skeptical. “The reality is, America is waiting for somebody to bring us together. Somebody to lead and say, you know what, conservatives, do you have anything to offer?”

Both sides need to admit there’s a problem, and to reach a compromise, continues Inglis. “The left has to say ‘listen, environmental justice later.’ The right has to say, ‘really, we can trust our fellow citizens to come up with a solution that works.’

 “If we can't, the experiment in self-government has failed, and we need to call up the Queen and ask her back.”

Related Links:

RepublicEN.org

Global Climate Coalition

The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax (Huffington Post)

What would Milton Friedman do about climate change? (Forbes)

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Al Gore, Former Vice President
Bonni Cohen, Filmmaker
Jon Shenk, Filmmaker

This program was recorded live at Marines Memorial Theater in San Francisco on July 24, 2017.

In 2006, Al Gore brought his climate change slide show to the American public in the Academy Award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Back then, Gore warned of an increasing “planetary emergency” if global warming continued unchecked, including rising sea levels, coastal flooding, and nations of climate refugees.

While some of those predictions have, regrettably, come true – such as Hurricane Sandy flooding the World Trade Center site in 2012 – this year’s follow-up to the film offers less doom and gloom, more concrete solutions -- and a glimmer of hope.

“An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” documents the former vice president as he continues his tireless fight to spread global awareness of the problem. The film’s directors, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, went behind the scenes with Gore, adopting a “fly on the wall” approach.  They shadowed him from his Nashville home, a working farm, to visits with refugees from the typhoon-devastated island of Tacloban in the Philippines, to the 2015 Paris climate summit.

Gore and the filmmakers joined Greg Dalton and a rapt Climate One audience to discuss the making of the film and the path forward that it offers for the climate movement.

While Gore was heartened by the Paris outcome, he warns that “even if all of its commitments by all 194 nations are kept, is still not enough; we need to do more.”

But the technology is there, he continues, and becoming increasingly more accessible. Costs of renewable energy, electric cars and other sustainable options are coming down “so dramatically that the world has the solutions now.”

Even the Trump administration’s whole-hearted rejection of the Paris accord hasn’t deterred the rest of the world, says Gore.

“I was deeply concerned that other countries might have used it as an excuse to pull out of the Paris agreement themselves,” admits Gore. “But I was immensely gratified when almost immediately afterward the entire rest of the world redoubled their commitment.”

Gore got applause from the audience when he cited California governor Jerry Brown for leading the way.  “Quite a number of states are moving in that direction…including a lot of California companies. Apple and Google and others come to mind who are already hundred percent renewable here.”

And, he adds, many Republican lawmakers have come out of the “climate closet” and joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus.

As with other social movements of the past, Gore notes, the tide of public opinion is turning. He compares the shift in attitude to that which fueled other social changes, such as abolition, women’s’ suffrage and LGBTQ rights.  A Tennessee native, Gore saw first-hand the changes brought about by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“You want to see ferocious resistance to social and moral change?” asks Gore. “The climate denial is no more ferocious than the resistance to civil rights in the South. “And yet, it gave way.”

With the Paris agreement, advances in technology and increased public pressure on corporations and lawmakers, there are many reasons for hope, says Gore – as long as we remain vigilant.

“This challenge is unprecedented,” Gore tells the audience. “We quadrupled population in the last hundred years…the short-term thinking with which we view the future consequences of present actions really blinds us to the full range of what we’re doing and what it causes. 

“So we do have to fall back on what's most important to us and shake off the distraction of modern culture, connect with one another on a human level.”

Related Links:

“An Inconvenient Sequel” - Trailer

Al Gore - Website

Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit

Climate Solutions Caucus

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:

Amy Goodman, Host, Executive Producer, Democracy Now!
Kenneth Kimmell, President, Union of Concerned Scientists

This program was recorded live at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 20, 2017.

In 2016, while Amy Goodman was covering the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock for Democracy Now!,  a warrant was issued for her arrest. Most people might have been deterred by that threat. Not Goodman.

“I didn't take this arrest warrant personally,” she tells the Climate One audience.  “It was a message sent to all journalists: do not come to North Dakota.  Which is exactly why we had to be there.”

In the twenty-plus years that she has been producing the independent news program Democracy Now!, Goodman has never shied away from taking on powerful industries when bringing a story to the public. Rather, she has built her career on covering the grassroots activism and general muckraking that can catalyze change – as they did at Standing Rock.

About the DAP arrest, she says, she saw it as a call to arms. “I wanted to ensure that young journalists would not be afraid to go to cover this historic gathering around the fate of the planet, around sustaining our planet …to fear that they would be arrested if they went to cover this.”

Ken Kimmell brings the same tirelessness and tenacity to his work. Under his watch, UCS has led the charge in exposing the relationship between oil companies, climate change and climate denial, and is working to make those issues a priority in congress.

Goodman and Kimmell came to Climate One to discuss the intersection between science and the media, and the ways that activist journalism can push mainstream news outlets into broadening their coverage of climate change – coverage that is sorely lacking, both maintain.

Kimmell expressed frustration that the media still isn’t doing enough in this area, despite established consensus among the scientific community that storms like Harvey and Irma are being exacerbated by climate change.

“We see all these stories…about these severe weather events and the words climate change are hardly mentioned,” says Kimmell.

 “I think [the media] really have an obligation to tell people two things,” he continues. “One, climate change has fingerprints on these events, and two, we are all paying for this right now in the billions and billions of dollars that it's going to cost to deal with all these disasters. 

“People are still not really getting that it's affecting them right now.  Not 20 years, not 50 years, right now. And it's affecting them if they’re victims of these events, but even if they're not.

“They’re gonna pay for all of this.  We’re all gonna pay for all of this.  And the media really needs to do a much better job of explaining that.”

Related Links:

Union of Concerned Scientists

Democracy Now! 

The National Academy of Sciences: Climate Change

Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship - Democracy Now!

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Bill Nye, Television Host, Science Educator
Jason Sussberg, Filmmaker, Bill Nye: Science Guy

This program was recorded live at Marines' Memorial Theater in San Francisco on November 6, 2017.

As the Science Guy, television’s Bill Nye inspired a generation of children to love science as much as he does. But these days, he’s speaking to a new audience. "Nowadays I’m talking to adults," says Nye, "and I’m not mincing words. The climate is changing, it’s our fault, and we’ve gotta get to work on this!" 

Since ending his program in 1999, Nye and his famous bow tie have taken on a new challenge: stopping the spread of anti-scientific thinking across the world. In a new documentary, director Jason Sussberg shadows Nye as he goes toe-to-toe with outspoken climate deniers and travels the world to show the causes and effects of climate change.

A recent Climate One audience, largely made up of young admirers, was entertained by Nye as he related stories from his travels and explorations, and offered advice for aspiring young scientists.

“I became an engineer because I like bicycles and airplanes,” Nye told them. “They’re fun.”

He went on to challenge them to use their ideas to make the world a better place.

“There’s three things we want for everybody in the world,” Nye said. “We want clean water, renewably produced reliable electricity, and access to the …with those three things we could, I believe provide a high-quality life for everyone on earth. [And] for that…we’re gonna need everybody working together.”

Nye’s enthusiasm was contagious as he exhorted the rapt audience to “get ‘er done!”

“So we are in charge here,” he reminded them. “We are running the planet, and we have to take responsibility for it. 

“And so it is terrifying and cool.  It is sobering and empowering and you are gonna be a big part of that.  Go get ‘em.  Save the world!”

– Anny Celsi

Related Links:

Bill Nye: Science Guy (Film)

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Ashley Allen, Senior Manager, Climate and Land, Mars Corporation
Jason Clay, Senior Vice President, Food & Markets; Executive Director, Markets Institute, World Wildlife Fund
Annie Cull, Director of Communications, The Good Food Institute
Karen Leibowitz, co-founder, The Perennial; Executive Director, The Perennial Farming Initiative

This Climate One program was recorded live at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University on March 22, 2018.

From oatmeal to oysters, the world’s food supply is being drastically altered by rising temperatures and extreme weather. As the planet heats up, it’s affecting many of the foods we love – when and where they’re grown, how they get to the grocery store and how much we pay for them.

This changing agricultural landscape calls for adaptive measures from large food producers like Mars. The family-owned company makes not just the M&Ms, Twix and Snickers bars we love, but also pet foods like Pedigree and Iams and people foods such as Uncle Ben’s Rice.

“We source thousands of ingredients from over eighty countries around the world,” says Ashley Allen, Senior Manager of Climate and Land for Mars. “And that really is a large value chain that’s exposed to climate change in a lot of different contacts, in a lot of different countries.

“So thinking about sustainability and issues like climate change is really in our DNA,” she continues. “Everything we do now is going to be really focused on helping farmers increase their productivity, looking at places where things are grown most efficiently and effectively and focusing there.”

Jason Clay, who monitors global food markets for the World Wildlife Fund, paints a picture of climate impact on the world’s food supply.

“The impact of climate change on disease in West Africa has caused about a third of production to go down by ninety percent,” he reports.

Changes are being seen in the Midwestern U.S. as well, with many of the crops moving north towards Canada.

“We won't be producing spring wheat in the U.S. within thirty years,” Clay continues. “The Corn Belt will be in Canada within eighty years.”

The World Wildlife Fund is concerned with ways to produce more food with less environmental impact.  But, Clay adds, there’s another piece to the puzzle: eliminating food waste. In the U.S., he says, most of the waste generated is on the consumer side. 

“It’s portion size, it’s what you throw out of your refrigerators, it’s what restaurants throw away, it’s what buffets throw away at the end of the day,” says Clay. 

“So we’ve gotta figure out how to reduce waste of every different product all over the planet. Because that's probably the easiest strategy to get enough food that we need by 2050.”

Annie Cull is with the Good Food Institute, which advocates for plant-based alternatives to meat, for both health and environmental reasons.

“But at the end of the day, people want to make their food choices based on the same drivers that people have wanted for generations,” she says. “What tastes good, what’s affordable, what’s convenient, how much time do I have to spend in the kitchen.”

Cull says that rethinking our diets can go a long way towards improving not only our own health, but the planet’s health as well. One place to start, she says, is with hamburgers – which Americans consume to the tune of 10 billion annually.

“If we could replace just thirty percent of a beef patty with mushrooms, it’s the equivalent of 2.3 million cars off the road,” she says, citing a report from the World Resources Institute. “It's the water usage of 2.6 million Americans, and it's bringing land back into new uses about the size of Maryland.”

In the second part of the program, Greg Dalton spoke with restaurateur Karen Liebowitz. She and her husband own Perennial, a sustainably run restaurant in San Francisco, and encourage other restaurants to adopt planet-friendly practices.

One method of reducing waste, says Liebowitz, is to practice “closed-loop” cooking – using every kitchen scrap possible, from potato skins to fish bones.

“We feed those to worms and larvae at our greenhouse and they take the energy in the food and become food for fish.  And we feed the fish, and the fish fertilize the water,” she says. The water is then used to grow herbs and vegetables, bringing the process full circle.

“What we're really trying to do,” says Liebowitz, “is promote the idea that food can be part of the climate solution.”

Related Links:

The World Wildlife Fund: Food Waste

The Good Food Institute

Mars Sustainable in a Generation Plan

World Resources Institute

The Perennial Farming Initiative

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Mark Kurlansky, Author, MILK! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas (Bloomsbury, 2018)
Anna Lappé, Author, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork (Bloomsbury, 2011)

This program was recorded live at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on May 16, 2018.

Anna Lappé remembers the moment she made the connection between climate change and livestock production.

“I was sitting in my Brooklyn brownstone apartment reading a study from the United Nations,” she recalls. The report was Livestock’s Long Shadow, published in 2006, which aimed to assess the environmental impact of the livestock sector.

“At the time it was about 18 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which was more than every single train, plane and automobile,” says Lappé. “And I remember thinking, why isn’t everybody talking about this?

Lappé was spurred to explore the other ways that food production impacts our climate, “from seed to plate to landfill.” And that led her to write Diet for a Hot Planet (the title is a hat-tip to the seminal Diet for Small Planet, published by her mother, Francis Moore Lappé, in 1975).

The connection between global warming and the dinner table isn’t always obvious when we go to the grocery store.  But our choices about how we put food on our plates, and what we do with the waste, contribute to as much as one third of total greenhouse-gas emissions. How can we continue to feed a crowded planet without destroying it in the process? 

Food historian Mark Kurlansky has written best-selling books that explore the historical and cultural context of singular topics, including Cod and Salt. His most recent is MILK! A10,000 Year Food Fracas. Why a “fracas?”

“[Milk] has always been argued over, for like 10,000 years,” Kurlansky explains. “Whether you should use animals…which animals you should use, which hasn't been resolved.  The arguments about raw milk versus pasteurization which came about in the 19th century…and we have newer ones about GMO crops for feed.”

Growing, packaging, producing and disposing of the food we eat makes up a big part of our climate footprint.  And it’s easy to send blame down the supply chain. Can environmentalists, farmers and ranchers all get along?

Lappé’s research into global food production has convinced her that they can - if everyone works together toward the shared goal of fixing the climate.

“A lot of environmentalists are starting to realize that farmers really are both on the front lines of the climate impacts, but also they’re on the front lines of the climate solutions,” Lappé says. 

“And when you bring these ecological practices to the farm, you're seeing a real power for biodiversity to go up, you’re seeing a huge push toward agroforestry…so to me I think there is more of an understanding of how there's more ways we can work together.”

Kurlansky agrees that we should be looking for solutions - not pointing fingers.

“Most farmers and most ranchers and most fishermen do not want to do harm,” says Kurlansky.  “They do want to earn a living.  And if their ways of earning a living are doing harm, you know, you have to convince them that there's a better way to do it.”

Related Links:

Diet for a Hot Planet (Anna Lappé)

MILK! A 10,000 Year Food Fracas (Mark Kurlansky)

Livestock’s Long Shadow (United Nations)

The Empathy of Food – Anna Lappé (TEDx Talk)

The California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN)

Food, Inc. - Trailer

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Christiana Figueres, Former Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Joshua Freedman, CEO, Six Seconds; Author, Inside Change
Meg Levie, Senior Teacher, Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute

After a three-year term as Executive Secretary to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres was exhausted, emotionally drained and ready to pack it in. What kept her going?

“Out of nowhere, I have no idea where, the word ‘Buddhism’ came into my mind,” Figueres remembers. She called a friend to help her on her search.  “So I’m like, Buddhism!  He says, ‘What do you know about Buddhism?’  I said, nothing.  I don’t even know how it’s spelled, but I need it!”

With the help of Buddhist teachings, Figueres found the strength and determination to sign up for a second term, which led her to the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. “I realized my commitment and my task here is to change that global mood,” she says. “And of course I can't change the global mood before I change myself, because as we know all change starts with self.”

The prospect of trying to turn the tide of global warming can seem overwhelming. But Joshua Freedman, author of several books on emotional intelligence, believes that staying mindful can help us cope.

“I think what it means is, just as the seas are rising literally, the emotional seas are rising,” he explains. “And that means we have to work harder, right?  And that's what mindfulness practice is all about.”

Rather than letting our emotions make us feel helpless, Freedman continues, we can harness them as a hidden source of power.

“This ability to grow compassion is one of the most powerful things we can do as human beings,” says Freedman. “It transforms us, it transforms our relationships, and ultimately it does transform the world.”

This program was recorded live at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 16, 2018, and is generously underwritten by the Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation.

Related Links:

Mission 2020: Urgent Climate Action

Six Seconds: The Emotional Intelligence Network

San Francisco Zen Center

Search Inside Yourself Leadership Center

Host: Greg Dalton

Guests:
Michael Gerrard, Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice, Columbia Law School
Laura Tuggle, Executive Director, Southeast Louisiana Legal Services
Tanisia Reed Coachman, Houston resident and survivor of the Tax Day Flood
Nicholas Kusnetz, Reporter, InsideClimate News

Portions of this program were recorded at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

Climate change is affecting every aspect of our lives - our environment, our health, our economy and our future. And now, it’s even creeping into our courtrooms. Climate change has brought on a wave of new reasons to go to court, for those on both sides of the issue.

In Julian vs. the United States, youths sued the government for violating their constitutional right to life and liberty by encouraging climate-altering activities. Fossil fuel companies are fighting back by advancing new laws that have a chilling effect on the activist movement – such as an Oklahom law that equates protests with domestic terrorism.

“Basically what the bill did is it took actions that are somewhat common in environmental activism movement… sort of blocking a gate or, in the case of Standing Rock, a protest [that] bleeds onto private land,” explains reporter Nicholas Kusnetz. “It took something where there were previously kind of misdemeanor minor charges, and suddenly they became really serious charges.” 

The increase in weather-driven disasters over the past few years has given rise to a whole new branch of legalese, known as “Disaster Law.” Laura Tuggle of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services helps disaster survivors navigate the muddy waters of federal relief, insurance claims and inheritance rights. She recommends that people not wait for a disaster to get their affairs and paperwork in order.

“Even if everybody knew that grandma wanted her niece or her granddaughter to inherit her home, if that's not written down in a will that's not what's going to happen by operation of law,” Tuggle warns.

RELATED LINKS:

Our Children’s Trust: Juliana v. United States

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University

Toledo, Ohio grants Lake Erie the same rights as people (Smithsonian)

A Look Back at the Tax Day Flood of 2015 (Houston Chronicle)

Harsh New Anti-Protest Laws Restrict Freedom of Speech (Nicholas Kusnetz, Washington Post)