Stories for the climate curious.
Give up your climate guilt. Sharpen your curiosity.
Join Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson as they tell stories about the powerful forces behind climate change — and the tools we have to fix it.
This show is for the climate curious people who know climate change is a problem, but are trying to figure out how to tackle it.
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Season 2, Episode 10: How Gender Equality Can Save the Planet
Take a look at many of the spaces where climate-related decisions are being made — from government to business to media — and you'll notice a numbers problem. Despite being roughly half the people on the planet, women rarely have equal representation in critical climate decision-making spaces. This isn’t just bad for women. It’s bad for everyone.
In this episode, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson take a deep dive into the data behind this idea.
Season 2, Episode 9: Paid in Blood
In the jungles of the Brazilian Amazon, groups of farmers and their families get by on what they can grow with the land beneath their feet. They're known in Brazil as “landless workers,” a social movement with the goal of increasing land access and ownership for the country’s rural poor.
These landless workers -- sometimes called land guardians or protectors -- are a symbol for the power imbalances that have destroyed the Amazon.
Season 2, Episode 8: The ‘Win Win Win’ Strategy to Close Coal Plants Fast
Coal-fired power plants are closing at record rates. But many are still scheduled to remain operational for the foreseeable future, despite losing lots of money every year.
How do we shut these uneconomic coal plants down faster? One answer: coal debt securitization.
Season 2, Episode 7: The ‘Bond Vigilante’ Exposing Fossil Fuel Risk
Since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015, banks and large investors have dumped $3.8 trillion into fossil fuels.
While the wildfires burning around the world are getting worse each year, it’s like the world's bankers are blowing on those fires, making them even bigger. For this episode, we have a story about two people who are trying to cut off that supply of oxygen to global lenders and the insurance companies backing them.
Season 2, Episode 6: The Devious Plan to Keep Us Hooked on Fossil Gas
Advocates are turning their attention to a new front in the climate war: the fossil-gas hookups in our homes that fuel burners, boilers, and other household appliances.
If we want to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to electrify the hundreds of millions of machines inside our homes and buildings as fast as possible. But the gas industry won’t go down without a fight.
Season 2, Episode 5: Farming for a Hotter, Less Stable World
When Hurricanes Maria and Irma hit Puerto Rico in 2017, they destroyed the island’s fragile food system. Farms of all sizes were battered, with around 80 percent of the island's crop value wiped out.
But a group of Puerto Rican farmers practicing an old way of farming, called agroecology, saw their operations bounce back much faster than conventional farms. What does their experience tell us about how to build and protect food systems in a rapidly warming world?
Season 2, Episode 4: Green Jobs…For All?
President Biden’s American Jobs Plan promises big investments in the clean-energy economy. How can we make sure that those dollars go to communities of color who have already been most impacted by climate change and consistently shut out of past federal programs promising transformational change? And to gender minorities who are underrepresented in certain green fields?
Season 2, Episode 3: Healing the Soil, Healing Ourselves
Black farmers are healing the entangled harms of colonization, capitalism, and White supremacy and moving agricultural climate solutions forward in the process.
In this episode, we feature an audio essay that wrestles with these themes. The essay is titled “Black Gold” by Leah Penniman, an activist, farmer, and founder of Soul Fire Farm.
Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Let’s Go Get Us a Clean Electricity Standard’
Baked into the American Jobs Plan is an ambitious proposal to set a federally-mandated Clean Electricity Standard of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035. It would put the US on track to get emissions under control and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. That is, if it gets through Congress.
Season 2, Episode 1: The ‘Prestige Problem’ Making Fossil Fuels Powerful
Fossil fuel companies are tapping into America’s “best and brightest” at top banks, public relations and advertising firms, law firms, and strategy consulting firms. In this episode (our first of the second season!) Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and Dr. Leah Stokes explore the different ways this “prestige problem” influences America’s white-collar workforce and keeps fossil fuels powerful.
Bonus Episodes: The State of US and Global Climate Politics in the Biden Era
We are currently developing our second season! While we make some new stories for you, we have a couple bonus episodes. We checked in with some experts to see how climate progress is shaping up in America and internationally. Listen to both shows below, featuring Leah and Katharine’s conversations at the Bloomberg Green Summit and the Crosscut Festival in spring 2021.
Season 1, Episode 9: The ‘Darth Vader’ of Electric Utilities
In 2013, a series of attack ads blitzed television sets across Arizona. They warned of a dire threat to senior citizens. Who was the villain? Solar energy.
These ads came from front groups funded by Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility. It was part of a years-long fight against rooftop solar.
But APS isn’t alone. It’s a prime example of how monopoly utilities abuse their power to influence regulatory decisions and slow clean-energy progress.
Read more →
Season 1, Episode 8: The Stages of Black Climate Grief
Most of us are in the first stage of climate grief: denial. But what does it feel like to enter the stage of grief? And how is that grief different for black people?
In this episode, Nikayla Jefferson shares her journey breaking through denial and into grief. She also talks with
As a black person, grieving for the planet can look different, feel heavier and more immediate.
Season 1, Episode 7: One Navajo’s Fight for a Just Transition
This week, we have a special episode about the long and winding energy transition in an often overlooked place: the Navajo Nation—the largest Indian reservation in the United States.
Journalist and climate policy expert Julian Brave NoiseCat is our guide.
We’ll look at the deep history of energy extraction and colonialism that led to the current clean-energy transition for the Navajo people.
Season 1, Episode 6: Cleaning Up the Carbon Mess
Imagine the atmosphere as an overflowing bathtub. The water keeps gushing from the tap. Clearly, we need to turn it off. We have to bring emissions of heat-trapping gases down to zero, stat. But even after we do that, we still have a mess on our hands. So, we need to open the drain, let some water out.
In this episode, we’ll explore the different ways we can manage carbon emissions with natural and technological solutions.
Season 1, Episode 5: After Trump
It’s official. Joe Biden will be the next president. He ran on a platform that put climate at the top of the agenda.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty and tension. What will happen to the balance of power in Congress? Can we make progress on climate, even with Democrats losing down-ballot races?
There’s actually a lot of good news. In this episode, Leah and Katharine dig into what this moment means for the future of the planet.
Season 1, Episode 4: Trump’s Fossil Fuel Bailout
Fossil-fuel companies have used their ties to the Trump regime to push massive bailouts for dirty energy. And the pandemic was the perfect opportunity for the industry to grab more money.
In this episode, we’ll detail how these companies are raking in billions of government dollars in the wake of the $2 trillion covid stimulus package -- while millions of Americans struggle financially from the pandemic.
Season 1, Episode 3: We Have the Solutions Now
When talking about climate change, we often get deep into the weeds quickly and throw a lot of numbers around. And these numbers can feel really disconnected from our lives: Two degrees, 415 parts per million, 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
In this episode, we've got one number we really want to focus on: 2035. It’s a date that carries a lot of hope and opportunity. If we can make progress by 2035, then we can actually make a lot of changes to our energy system and really our entire economy.
Season 1, Episode 2: A Breakthrough Moment?
Climate change is no longer a far-off scenario. It’s happening now. It’s getting more intensive every year. And young people are seeing a scary future play out right in front of them.
In recent years, the youth climate movement has gained unprecedented strength. Borrowing from the civil rights movement and early environmental activists, young leaders are forcing politicians to grapple with climate change in new ways. Are we truly at a breakthrough moment? Or a breaking moment?
Season 1, Episode 1: Give Up Your Climate Guilt
The biggest climate stories blame “all of us,” or cast solutions as “impossible.” These narratives leave people feeling hopeless and confused about what we actually can do.
In our first episode: individual actions versus structural change. What’s the right way to think about the role they each have in addressing the climate crisis? We’ll explore the nuances.
Trailer: Introducing “A Matter of Degrees”
People don’t often hear the real story about climate change: it’s happening now; fossil fuel companies with money on the line have lied about it; and it doesn’t have to be this way. Here’s a preview of what we’ll be covering on this show.