Buckle up, grab a hard hat, a tent (and maybe a snack). It’s going to be a bumpy ride! From camping on top of a glacier, right before billions of tons of ice melt off of it, to dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane that destroys Miami, this episode we’re diving head first into the realclimate predictions — and the imagined ways society will handle them. We’re unpacking why a glacier halfway around the world is causing sea levels around South Florida to rise faster, and then we’re heading to ...
Nov 02, 2022•33 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The Little River community in Miami is known for frequent flooding during heavy rains, high tides and storms. And when the neighborhood floods, sewage can spill into the yard; toilets back up. Even though it floods, the housing market here is hot. Long-time residents face displacement. This episode looks at flooding and flipping and how the two are related.
Oct 26, 2022•32 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Whether you live on the coast or not, sea-level rise will have profound impacts on all of us. So we packed up our bags and headed to Miami, a city that is considered one of the most vulnerable coastal cities in the world . How Miami responds will serve as a test case for how other places around the country survive the effects of climate change. Experts say seas here could rise by 5 feet or more by 2100 , eventually leaving whole parts of the city underwater. So if the city is doomed, why isn’t t...
Oct 19, 2022•34 min•Season 2Ep. 1
A powerful hurricane was churning toward the southwest coast of Florida. It looked like it was going to be bad. So we hopped on a plane and headed first to Boston where we embedded with a team of catastrophe modelers who were tracking the disaster and calculating the potential losses. The number they came up with is staggering high: $100 billion. And only $63 billion of that is insured. We then visited Gasparilla Mobile Home Estates in Placida, Florida to see what these data points looked like o...
Oct 19, 2022•21 min0
There’s the mythical version of Miami, the version that’s all about wealth and glamour and a never-ending party on the beach. And then there’s the real Miami, a deeply unequal place that could eventually be swallowed up by the Atlantic Ocean because of glaciers melting halfway around the world. Miami has been called the most vulnerable coastal city in the world because of climate change. South Florida could be one of the first places in the United States to see true devastation wrought by the cl...
Oct 12, 2022•4 min
Technology will help us avoid the worst outcomes of the climate crisis, and it’ll help us adapt to a warming planet. But technology alone can’t save us. Humans need to make profound changes. We need to change our behavior, our consumption, our policies and our mindsets. In the final episode of the season, we talk to a climate psychologist about how our minds react to change and hear from a politician relying on Fergie and Megan Thee Stallion to get Americans excited about energy policy. We also ...
Nov 24, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Imagine a future where all the lithium we need has already been extracted from the ground and is endlessly recycled. Or where the batteries we use to store renewable energy are made from abundantly available materials — like salt. This episode, we visit a lab where a couple of brilliant scientists are trying to build the batteries of the future. And we drop in on a company that’s extending the life cycle of lithium through something called “urban mining.”
Nov 17, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Our favorite place to look for climate solutions: Science fiction. In fact, sci-fi (and its sub-genre, cli-fi) is what got us thinking about adaptation in the first place. Cli-fi can get a little bleak — weather turns deadly; earth becomes uninhabitable; humans flee to space. And while it’s entertaining to imagine the worst-case scenarios, the best of the writing is hopeful. It allows us to dream up solutions that don’t involve billionaires, rockets or climate-changing satellite stations. This w...
Nov 10, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Our journey through the California desert continues. We visit the quiet front-runner in the race to extract lithium from the superhot, corrosive brine bubbling underground. And we dive into the past to look at an earlier attempt to harvest lithium from the Salton Sea. That project ended in failure, but its patents live on. And those patents could be a roadblock for the companies racing to extract the “white gold” today. With millions of dollars invested and a global supply of lithium waiting bel...
Nov 03, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 5
We’re back on the road this week, to California’s Salton Sea, a salty lake in the desert that was once marketed as “Palm Springs with water.” Today the water is receding and increasingly toxic. The community that once thrived here now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. But there is some hope. There’s a huge amount of lithium all around the Salton Sea in the bubbling hot brine deep underground. Some hopeful modern-day 49ers have big plans to get it out. If they can only suc...
Oct 27, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 4
To survive the climate crisis, we need to electrify everything: our cars, of course, but also our appliances, homes, mass transit, entire neighborhoods and cities. Everything. That’s no small task. So to better understand why electrifying everything matters, and how we’re going to do it, we look at the aftermath of a natural disaster and talk to one man who used batteries to save lives. Then we spend a little time with an entrepreneur whose vision for an electric future includes turning every bu...
Oct 20, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Mining is a complicated business. It’s destructive, it’s dangerous. But in order to get the lithium we need to power the energy transition, mining could be a necessary evil. In this episode, we go from protests in South America to a gold mine in Nevada, where we take a ride on what looks like a massive Tonka truck, all in the hopes of finding out if there’s a better way to do things while getting the metal we need to survive. After talking to mining experts, environmental justice advocates and a...
Oct 13, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 2
To get off fossil fuels, you need a lot of batteries. To get a lot of batteries, you need to mine a lot of lithium. Welcome to Thacker Pass, Nevada, where a proposed lithium mine has sparked protests from farmers, ranchers and the native Paiute–Shoshone tribe. Some tribal members reject the idea that they should sacrifice their ancestral home for the climate fight, while others say that their history is being distorted and co-opted by protestors. And farmers and ranchers in the area who have nev...
Oct 06, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 1
The climate crisis is here. The Western U.S. is burning, much of the Northeast is underwater after a hurricane and towns in Europe are swept away by massive floods. Time is slipping away to stop the worst effects of a warming planet, and the world is looking for solutions. On “How We Survive,” Molly Wood explores the technology that could provide some of those solutions, the business of acclimatizing to an increasingly inhospitable planet, and the way people have to change if we’re going to make...
Sep 21, 2021•4 min
