“It's all part of the same kind of mindset of trying to live lighter on the planet. We all know that cities are much lower energy consumers per capita. That is to say, city dwellers use much less energy than other people because of the density of housing, the transport is easier...So densification of human development is a huge climate benefit, and making cities more attractive and livable is a critical part of the equation. If you look at universities' engineering programs, civil engineering, c...
Mar 20, 2023•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Armond Cohen is Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force, which he has led since its formation in 1996. In addition to leading CATF, Armond is directly involved in CATF research and advocacy on the topic of requirements to deeply decarbonize global energy systems. Prior to his work with CATF, Armond founded and led the Conservation Law Foundation’s Energy Project starting in 1983, focusing on energy efficiency, utility resource planning, and electric industry structure. Armond has published nu...
Mar 20, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast “ ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in which Heidegger warned that nature had become just a source of resources for us, commodities, what he called standing reserves. Something that had no value other than for our ability to exploit it and mine it and use it for our use and purposes. Whether it's utilitarianism, which is sort of consequentialist ethics, always act in a way so that the outcome of your action will produce the most benefit. Or duty ethics, which simply says ...
Mar 16, 2023•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harold P. Sjursen is an educator and administrator having served on the faculty of both a liberal arts college and school of engineering. His background is in the history of philosophy, but since childhood has sustained an interest in science and technology. His current research interests focus on the philosophy of technology, global philosophy, and technological ethics. His engineering education projects address issues related to the internationalization of higher education, the integration of ...
Mar 16, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast “So when we think about cities of the future, we need to think about systems change because you can't just change one thing in isolation. You need to rethink how we can create cities that are both resilient to environmental change, they can withstand environmental shocks better. So, for example, reducing the urban heat island. We know that cities are hotter than the surrounding rural areas and within cities, there is often wide temperature variation depending on whether you're near a park or whe...
Mar 03, 2023•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andy Haines was formerly a family doctor and Professor of Primary Health Care at UCL. He developed an interest in climate change and health in the 1990’s and was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the 2nd and 3rd assessment exercises and review editor for the health chapter in the 5th assessment. He was Director (formerly Dean) of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine from 2001- October 2010. He chaired the Scientific Advisory Panel for the 2013 WHO Worl...
Mar 03, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast “In the context of cities, I think it's tough to answer. We hope that cities will become more sustainable. We hope that people living in cities will reduce their consumption of carbon-emitting fuels, but there is no global indication that the momentum in that direction is increasing appreciatively. The growth of the middle classes in large, developing economies of the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the information that I have is that the consumption practices in...
Mar 01, 2023•11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Burgman is Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conservation Biology. He is author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts. Previously, he was Adrienne Clarke Chair of Botany at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He works on expert judgement, ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment. He has written models for biosecurity, medicine regulation, marine fisheries, fo...
Mar 01, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “So, as much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. And I would also like to say the idea of attaching ads to searches, anybody could have had it. In fact, it was the most obvious thing. Just like on television, if you watch a car race, then it makes sense to have ads about cars. So I think the reason it was so successful is because innovations and new ideas, they compound. They build one upon the o...
Dec 16, 2022•11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alberto Savoia was Google’s first engineering director and is currently Innovation Agitator Emeritus, where, among other things, he led the development and launch of the original Google AdWords. He is the author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed, a book that provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, and gives insights to help successfully beat the law of market failure: that most new products will fail, even i...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast "So by looking at the effect of Earth Overshoot, which we think is the second largest risk for humanity, it actually becomes easier to address because all things come together, and you start to see the self-interest to act. Because if you're in a world of overshoot, and you're not able to be resource-secured, really it's going to hurt you. So it's not just being nice to the rest of the world. I mean, that too, but primarily, it also becomes really essential. If you're not ready for that world, i...
Dec 09, 2022•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mathis Wackernagel is Co-founder and President of Global Footprint Network. He created the Ecological Footprint with Professor William Rees at the University of British Columbia as part of his Ph.D. in community and regional planning. Mathis also earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Mathis has worked on sustainability with governments, corporations and international NGOs on six continents and has lectured at more than 100 universities. Mathis has...
Dec 09, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast "The circularity, of course, has existed in nature for a long time. Actually, nature's circularity is by evolution. There is no plan, there is no liability, and there are no preferences. It's simply the cycles such as marine tides, CO2, and water cycles, plants and animals, and basically by evolution, the best solution wins. Also, there is no waste. Dead material becomes food for other animals or plants. Now, early mankind survived by depending on these local natural resources sharing a no...
Nov 23, 2022•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Walter R. Stahel is the Founder-Director of the Product-Life Institute (Switzerland), the oldest established consultancy in Europe devoted to developing sustainable strategies and policies. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Centre, Ecole des Ponts Business School and Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome. He was awarded degrees of Doctor honoris causa by the Univers...
Nov 23, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Much greater investment in public transport infrastructure is enormous with about 40% of our carbon pollution in cities coming from cars and transportation. That really needs to be focused on and prioritized, and of course electrifying everything that we can, both in that sector and beyond, including in our buildings. I believe roughly 60% of our carbon pollution in cities is coming from buildings and those that are not built in smart kind of climate-secure ways. How can we shift off of natural...
Oct 18, 2022•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Britt Wray is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She's a writer and broadcaster researching the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, she is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she investigates the mental health consequences of ecological disruption. She holds a PhD in Science Communication from the University of Copenhagen. He...
Oct 18, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast "I think water is taking a backseat and personally, I feel like water is the messenger that delivers the bad news of climate change to your front door. So in the work that I do, it's heavily intertwined, but it's taking a backseat. There are parts about water that are maybe separate from climate change, and that could be the quality discussions, the infrastructure discussions, although they are somewhat loosely related to climate change and they are impacted by climate change. That's sometimes p...
Oct 14, 2022•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. From 2013 through 20...
Oct 14, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Cities are certainly a great place to start because the way that we do them - you can see it if you go up in an airplane and look down - you can see that they're built against nature. You can see it in the color of the city. It's interesting. We reflect it in our maps. Cities are gray, and the rest of the world is green. We build them against the natural world, and the way that we do it - concrete - is one of the worst environmental materials we could use, and we have no intention, at the momen...
Aug 15, 2022•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas, and his most recent books are M...
Aug 15, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast "How can you get to the point where people are actually not moving around as much and reducing their carbon footprint in various ways? The main way we're planning on doing that is decarbonizing the economy. This means electrifying a lot of things. People still are moving around. They're now using electric cars, but they're still using cars. How can you build new cities that don't require that in quite the same way? And maybe we've got some visions as to the sort of things that might happen or sh...
Jul 25, 2022•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kevin Trenberth is a Distinguished Scholar at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder and an Honorary Academic in the Department of Physics, Auckland University in Auckland, New Zealand. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Change reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and shared the 2007 Nobel Pe...
Jul 25, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast “We have prepared a selection of solutions for the specific needs of cities – construction, ways to make buildings carbon neutral and much more efficient, new heating systems, mobility, of course, supply chains, waste management. We really focus on cities and would like to make an alliance of all cities interested in these solutions to start to use them and test them everywhere. So that's one of the actions we're doing now.” Psychiatrist, aviator and explorer, Bertrand Piccard made history in 19...
Jul 21, 2022•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Psychiatrist, aviator and explorer, Bertrand Piccard made history in 1999 by accomplishing the first ever non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, and a number of years later the first round-the-world solar-powered flight. Piccard has dedicated his life to demonstrating sustainable development opportunities. He is Founder and Chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, which has assembled a verified portfolio of over 1400 actionable and profitable climate solutions. As a pioneer of new ways of thi...
Jul 21, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Cities are acting, local governments are acting, nations are acting, at all levels. The technologies for renewable energy, for energy storage, are increasing really rapidly. At the same time, we're starting to see what the pathway might actually look like to strongly mitigate climate change... Some of the recent work that I've been doing has been to really start thinking about what happens after 2100? After 2100, the world could be one in which we're still emitting huge amounts of carbon. It's ...
Jul 20, 2022•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Charles D. Koven is an Earth System Scientist, working in the Climate Sciences Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He investigates feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle. Dr. Koven’s primary research focus is on high-latitude feedbacks to climate change, and in particular the role of soil carbon in permafrost soils, and its response to changing climate. Dr. Koven is a lead author on the IPCC report as part of Working Group I, The Physical Science Basis of Climate...
Jul 20, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Certainly on the perimeter of urban centers, water farms are able to provide water and then brought into that city center or other ways. Roofs of buildings is an area where we can deploy hydropanels, where you can plumb directly into a building, so you can imagine in a more urban context, that's a way to bring water directly into that building itself... Water insecurity and water scarcity is affecting all people in almost every part of the world. By 2025, we expect 1.8 billion people to suffer ...
Jul 13, 2022•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Neil Grimmer is Brand President of SOURCE Global, innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel, a renewable technology that uses the sun to transform water vapor in the air to clean, safe and perfectly mineralized drinking water. The Public Benefit Company’s mission is to bring perfect drinking water to every person, every place, and Neil leads its marketing, consumer packaged goods and last-mile water solutions for community, consumer and commercial customers in more than 50 countries. "Certainly on the ...
Jul 13, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Changing cities is going to mean changing how we do politics in them. What kind of decisions do cities get to make? This changes pretty widely across countries and even states within the United States where cities can either get the benefit of the doubt that they get to decide what happens within their jurisdiction, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the United States, that's called Home Rule, which can be really useful, but it also sets up a race to the bottom in a lot of cases where ...
Jun 24, 2022•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast David A. Banks is the Director of Globalization Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY and the author of the forthcoming book The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America published by University of California Press. He is also a delegate to the Troy Area Labor Council and the co-host of the podcast Ironweeds. "Changing cities is going to mean changing how we do politics in them. What kind of decisions do cities get to make? This changes pretty widely across countries and...
Jun 24, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
