More than one third of the world’s 2,000 largest publicly traded companies have made some kind of net-zero commitment, and the list is growing quickly. A critical part of those corporate plans will be securing cleanly sourced electricity for their energy needs, but that requires that there is enough fossil-free electricity available on the grid for every company that prefers to use it. In 2021, renewable energy and nuclear power, combined, accounted for only about 37% of global electricity produ...
Feb 20, 2023•30 min•Season 1Ep. 87
Electrification is going a long way in decarbonizing small vehicles (like passenger cars) in the global transportation sector, which produces about 16% of global emissions . But for long-haul transportation: trucking, shipping and the aviation industries, electrification is far from being technologically ready. Enter a controversial solution: biodiesel. Biodiesel is a fuel derived from organic matter like plants, algae or animal fats, which started to popularize globally just this century . Howe...
Feb 13, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 86
In November 2021, the City of Ithaca announced the approval of a plan to decarbonize all of its buildings by 2030 . In this first-of-its-kind decarbonization plan, Ithaca outlined a pathway to electrify roughly 6,000 homes and buildings as a first step to enacting the city’s own Green New Deal - a resolution established to locally address climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice. The task is monumental - technically, financially and practically. First, an effective decarbonizati...
Feb 06, 2023•32 min•Season 1Ep. 85
On April 22, 1970, 20 million people across the U.S. marched, attended speeches and sat in teach-ins, marking the first Earth Day , and spurring on the enactment of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the founding of the EPA, all of which occurred later that year. Then and now, activism has been critical to enacting environmental and climate policy, and in shifting attitudes of the general public to the urgency of mitigating climate change, but why is activism so important, and how can it...
Jan 30, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 84
In 2021, U.S. President Biden signed an executive order with the directive to achieve 100% carbon-pollution free electricity in the United States by 2030. The goal is certainly achievable: currently wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity generation, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar and wind has increased more than 2000% in the last 15 years , and there are already 1.3 terawatts (TW) of clean energy generation + storage projects seeking to connect to the grid, roughly e...
Jan 23, 2023•32 min•Season 1Ep. 83
The agricultural sector produces about a tenth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and while most of that comes from livestock (about 2/3), emissions from crop production still total about 2.2 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent . Interestingly, we only actually use about half of what we grow: this is not because of food waste ( its own issue ), but because more than half of any crop is residue : the stems, shells, husks and anything else left behind at the end of a crop harvest. Charm In...
Jan 16, 2023•29 min•Season 1Ep. 82
“We've built an entire industrial economy around a set of energy sources, and we're now thinking about diversifying way beyond that. And that's a big set of changes.” What will it take to diversify our energy economy, and how do we actually do it? That is the remit of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), according to Kate Gordon, senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy. In this week's podcast, Ms. Gordon joins us to discuss how the DOE is structured today; how they’re working with states,...
Jan 09, 2023•30 min•Season 1Ep. 81
The carbon footprint of stuff For the last two centuries, continuous economic growth (the increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces, per capita) has been recognized as the critical driver in the drastic global decrease in extreme poverty. The problem is, an ever-increasing "quantity and quality of economic goods and services" - in the current economy at least - requires ever increasing consumption of raw materials: minerals, water, energy, tr...
Dec 22, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 80
Last week, LLNL's National Ignition Facility successfully 'ignited' a nuclear fusion reaction equivalent to what takes place in the sun: the conversion of hydrogen to helium + energy. In a first, the experiment produced more energy than was needed to initiate the reaction. While the experiment lasted only fractions of a second, it proved what had been hypothesized since the 1960’s: that lasers can be used to induce energy-generating fusion in a laboratory setting. The enormity of this achievemen...
Dec 19, 2022•34 min•Season 1Ep. 79
Can Earth’s geothermal heat warm - and cool - your home? The hottest day ever recorded on Earth was on July 10, 1913. Thermometers in California’s Death Valley measured 134oF . The coldest day ever recorded on land (not on an Antarctic ice sheet) was in the tiny Siberian settlement of Oymyakon, which got as cold as -90oF on February 6, 1933. But anyone standing in either of these locations, on these days of extreme hot and cold, were a mere 30 feet away from much more reasonable temperatures - a...
Dec 12, 2022•33 min•Season 1Ep. 78
A micro-grid is a local grid. That means that energy generation occurs locally (no giant transmission lines) to support local energy demand, and it has the option to operate independently from a traditional regional power grid. These kinds of grids are attractive because they can take advantage of growing renewable energy infrastructure like rooftop solar, and they can create resiliency against regional grid failures, which are becoming increasingly frequent with the climate change-related uptic...
Dec 05, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 77
Is the battery revolution here? Or have we already been living in it for three decades? Renewable energy sources - wind and solar - have become the cheapest and fastest growing form of electricity generation. But the industry has not yet escaped the perennial criticism that keeps many from believing that the world could run entirely on renewable energy: what happens when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing? To date, batteries have not been a particularly convincing answer, due both t...
Nov 28, 2022•34 min•Season 1Ep. 76
Since its founding in 1952, the mission of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been to meet urgent national security needs through scientific and technological innovation. Expanding from its focus on nuclear weapons science at the height of the Cold War, LLNL has become a national research leader in counterterrorism, intelligence, defense, and energy , with its emphasis in the latter being to advance national energy security while also reducing its impact. And critical to reducing ...
Nov 21, 2022•37 min•Season 1Ep. 75
How many crises can we address at once? In October of this year, headlines broke that the global animal population in 2018 is 69% smaller than it was a half century ago, in 1970. It is the latest bad news in a string of studies on biodiversity loss, which is happening at a rate not seen on this planet since the last mass extinction . It also follows on the heels of an analysis from the U.N. World Food Program, estimating that due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, a record 345 million people are at ris...
Nov 14, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 74
The side benefit of reducing building emissions? Increasing quality of life. Building operations (heating, cooling and electrification) account for 27% of global CO2 emissions , but represent some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the challenge of global decarbonization. With efficient design and transitioning to cleanly-sourced electricity, like solar panels, building-related emissions could be decreased by as much as 80% . Katy McGinty, vice president and chief sustainability officer of Johnson C...
Nov 07, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 73
The global shipping industry emits ~ 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, about as much as the sixth highest emitting nation in the world . In hopes of changing course, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has mandated that starting in 2023, most commercial vessels will have to document their CO2 emissions , and demonstrate progress towards reaching the IMO objective of an industry-wide 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 . But that is easier said than done. As we learned in earl...
Oct 24, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 72
For some sectors of our economy, electrification as a decarbonization strategy is a whole lot easier said than done. Take the steel industry - which is responsible for 11% of global CO2 emissions . A large part of those emissions come from the ‘coking’ process - where coal-fired furnaces burning at up to 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) are used to break the bonds between iron and oxygen in the ore materials used to make steel. Driving this reaction with electricity, instead of a...
Oct 17, 2022•18 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Mitigating climate change is a race against time, requiring “ rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society ,” according to the IPCC, who says we need to halve global emissions by 2030 . But Tom Dinwoodie of Epic Institute argues that this kind of rapid change actually isn’t unprecedented , when compared to technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, which repeatedly went from expensive and obscure to globally adopted in the course of a few decades: electricity, automo...
Oct 03, 2022•20 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Calls for transparent information on the carbon footprint of a product, service, company or government are getting louder from consumers and investors , and will likely be soon codified in regulations like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule on climate risk reporting for publicly traded companies. But how do you actually account for all the emissions released in the production process or in a company activity? Is it even possible to accurately quantify? Charles Cannon, a ...
Sep 19, 2022•22 min•Season 1Ep. 69
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into U.S. law by President Joe Biden on August 16th , might be the biggest climate investment in history , but it does not look much like the kinds of policies that have been most championed by climate activists and economists. There is no carbon tax, no cap and trade program , no specific emissions targets . Instead, the law combines a slew of incentives like rebates and tax credits aimed to encourage significant growth of the clean energy and electric ...
Sep 06, 2022•32 min•Season 1Ep. 68
International waters don’t belong to anybody, but everybody is connected to them. Like the global burden created by greenhouse gas emissions from any one country, company or individual, what a single country or corporation chooses to put into the ocean as a climate change solution could be felt by the global community, if it turns out to have negative consequences on ocean chemistry or ecosystems. In this final installment of our deep dive into the potential and risks of ocean carbon dioxide rem...
Aug 23, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 67
Did you know plastic bags were originally intended to be an environmental solution? The idea was to replace paper bags in an effort to reduce deforestation. In 1935, cane toads were another fix - they were introduced to Australian sugarcane plantations to control insect pests. But, the ecological disaster this invasive species created far outweighed their agricultural benefit . It is often hard to anticipate the downstream environmental impacts of our actions, even when we are working in good fa...
Aug 22, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 66
More than 4 billion years ago, when Earth was still in its infancy, the atmosphere held more than 100,000 times the amount of CO2 it does today. Ever so slowly, that CO2 was absorbed into the oceans, where it reacted with rocks of the seafloor or was scavenged by organisms, eventually becoming trapped in sediment and slowly sequestered into Earth’s deep interior. This is the Earth’s deep-carbon cycle - nature’s way of regulating greenhouse gasses. This week, Climate Now takes you on a special th...
Aug 22, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 65
On June 30, 2022, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision on the case “EPA v. West Virginia,” ruling in a 6-3 vote that the EPA exceeded its statutory authority by setting greenhouse gas emissions standards that would effectively require utilities to shift away from fossil fuel-sourced power generation to renewables. At the time of the decision, it was met with a raft of alarmist headlines, forecasting that it would be a disaster for climate change mitigation , and that it threate...
Aug 09, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 64
In 2017, the V.C. Summer Nuclear Plant expansion - meant to hail the renaissance of nuclear power in the US - came screeching to a halt. The project, to build two new reactors at an existing South Carolina facility, was canceled after being delayed more than a year, costing $9 billion USD, and still being only 40% complete. Now, the only new nuclear project in the works in the U.S. is the Vogtle Plant expansion in Georgia; a project also more than a year behind schedule, and billions of dollars ...
Jul 25, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 63
Heating, cooling and electrifying buildings produces nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, but by employing existing energy efficient technologies and switching to renewables, we could cut 87% of building-related emissions by 2050 . So, how do we get there? Climate Now speaks with two companies working to eliminate the barriers to decarbonizing buildings. Andy Frank, founder of Sealed, explains how Sealed makes it easier for homeowners to implement energy efficiency improvements b...
Jul 11, 2022•35 min•Season 1Ep. 62
In the international carbon offset market, the average price of removing one tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere is still below $15 USD , nowhere near enough to cover the costs of carbon capture and storage (CCS). As Dr. Sheila Olmstead (University of Texas, Austin) explained in a recent Climate Now podcast episode , this is why CCS is one of the few climate technologies not experiencing exponential growth. “Unless there's a market for captured CO2, then it doesn't make economic sense… to adopt the...
Jun 20, 2022•32 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Each year, we produce about 30 billion tonnes of concrete globally. That’s nearly 10,000 pounds , or more than 2 entire cars-worth of concrete, per person, per year. We produce enough steel to build more than 2700 Empire State Buildings annually. We produce more than 100 pounds of plastic per person , each year. And with all of this material production, we also produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly one-third of global GHG emissions come from industry, with steel, concrete, and chemic...
Jun 13, 2022•37 min•Season 1Ep. 60
Are we underestimating the potential of increased efficiency? It wouldn’t be the first time. In 2021, the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasted a 50% increase in global energy demand by 2050. Such forecasts have echoes of the 1970’s, when – in the middle of a global energy crisis – forecasters were anticipating as much as a 300% increase in energy demand over the next 3 decades . Those forecasters missed the mark by about 250%, because they didn’t ...
Jun 06, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 59
“Inertia is a hell of a thing. Inertia is there, and there is very little motivation for an incumbent to change course. So you have to have that disruption from the outside. The same thing with financial services.” - Marilyn Waite, Climate Finance Fund In the 2019/2020 fiscal year, the global climate finance sector reached a record 632 billion US dollars . Unfortunately - that is a little short of the more than $3 trillion US dollars needed each year to keep warming under 2 degrees C, according ...
May 31, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 58
