How To Stop Climate Change

Matt Russell joins us again for our second episode in a two part series about climate denial. This week we're focusing on Planet of the Humans, the new movie from Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs and Ozzy Zehner. The filmmakers aren’t climate change deniers but they are very critical of renewable energy and a lot of the arguments that they bring up in the film are incorrect talking points and myths that climate change deniers used 10 years ago. Deniers are ecstatic to have an influential liberal documentary filmmaker like Michael Moore reviving these points. It provides them with a lot of ammunition that they can use as they work to slow the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Overall the film is a poorly-researched and often incorrect indictment of nearly every aspect of the green movement, from technologies to organizations to leaders. We’re not going to dive into every topic that is covered in the film. We’ll take a look at the questions it raises around the following:

• Solar energy
• Wind energy
• Electric cars
• Hydrogen fuel cell cars
• Green business
• Population growth
• Consumerism

Links

Episode webpage:Climate Change Denial pt. 2: Planet of the Humans vs. Renewable Energy

Ketan Joshi’s analysis of Planet of the Humans

If you would like to support the show please click here.

Music by:

• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]

Please share the show with a friend.

Support the show

“This is an issue where politicians can reach across the aisle. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart liberal to feel good about renewable energy because it is more efficient and increasingly less expensive. ” ~ Amy Haddon, Vice President for Global Content and Cleantech Marketing for Schneider Electric Energy & Sustainability Services.

Amy creates content to inform Schneider’s existing and potential clients on sustainability, renewable energy and other cleantech topics. But she also works with those clients to develop their own sustainability reports and communicate about their efforts. Many people have to focus on a very tight topic related to their own job. As a communicator and content creator, Amy gets to take a wide view across many areas of sustainability in multiple industries.

Focusing on consumer choices is not effective

We discussed the danger of focusing on the environmental impact of our personal consumer choices. That can lead to small changes but it can also result in guilt and frustration which doesn’t help anyone. It can lead people to focus their energy on smaller objectives where they have more control, like eliminating their use of plastic straws. But that does nothing to stop the larger problem of climate change.

Demanding action on climate change should be our focus

"Climate change in particular should be the primary focus for any of us taking action on the environment, because ultimately if we don’t mitigate climate change the ramifications of those impacts will trump any other environmental problems that we might have. For the majority of us we don’t have a lot of choices around how we get our energy. We don’t have a lot of choices over our food systems. We don’t have a lot of choices over our transportation systems, so I think that making people feel guilty about their choices is a tactic that doesn’t ultimately work because we don’t understand the scale of the systems that we’re really working within and because ultimately and unfortunately, those small consumer choices that we can make, while important and certainly affirming in terms of at least we’re doing something, they’re a small drop in the overall bucket, whereas I think our activities, our energy, our resources, could and should be better spent to pull bigger levers, like politics and government regulations and other things that we really need to change those human systems and make the system itself more sustainable so that when we come to make a choice we can feel assured that the choice that we’re making, because it’s the choice that we have, is the right choice." ~ Amy Haddon
Please help us grow the show
Do you have a friend that would enjoy this show. Please share it with them.
If you would like to support the show please click here.
How would you stop climate change?
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.

Support the show

Dear Climate Denier
This is the premiere of a new segment for the show called Dear Climate Denier. Our guest today is Matt Russell, an environmental consultant and a good friend of mine and he’ll join us each week to discuss one or two standard climate denial topics so you’ll be ready the next time you hear those talking points come up. And, most importantly we’ll talk about the best approach for talking to your nearest and dearest climate deniers. How can you stand your ground on climate change and offer up some facts without getting into a screaming match.
The History of Climate Change Denial
Going forward Dear Climate Denier will be a quick little segment of the show but for this episode we’re going to do a deep dive on it. The best place to start is by taking a look at the history of climate science and climate change denial. We’ll also discuss some of our favorite examples of climate deniers going off the rails.
Planet of the Humans
Michael Moore released a new movie called Planet of the Humans on Earth Day this year. It attacks renewable energy, biomass, Bill McKibben and the environmental movement in general. It’s full of outdated information and unsupported conclusions. Unfortunately a lot of the points that the film makes are the exact same things that climate deniers were saying about renewable energy 10 years ago. We’ll talk about that a little bit today but we’ll go into depth on the movie in the next episode.
Links
Episode webpage: Climate Change Denial: Dear Climate DenierThe History of Climate Change DenialIf you would like to support the show please click here.
Music by:

• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected] Please share the show with a friend.

Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.

Support the show

“I believe the private sector and the scientific community has a bit more of a nimble opportunity here to change things more rapidly than what we keep looking at, you know, governments to do for us.” ~ Thomas M. Kostigen, author of Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future

Today we’ll be speaking with Thomas M. Kostigen, a New York Times bestselling author and journalist and has written for such publications as National Geographic, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. As a journalist, Kostigen has traveled across the world to report on everything from war zones to extreme weather. I could go on listing Thomas’s many accomplishments but I'll let them speak for themselves. Today we’ll be focusing primarily on his new book, Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future. We’ll talk with him about things that frankly seem more fitting for a sc- fi novel than a climate change podcast, things like zapping clouds with lasers to make it rain and using nanoparticles to reflect the sun’s rays back into space.

Thomas: Hacking Planet Earth really goes into my definition of geoengineering, which is how we can take better control of not only the climate but what the climate accelerates and is connected to. And that's pretty much everything in our lives. So our food systems, mobility systems, how we conduct urban planning and how we are going to even socialize and interact in the future. And given today’s circumstances, the unfortunate circumstances With COVID-19, we're getting a little taste of what invisible threats, just like climate change, can do to our everyday life. So within the pages of Hacking Planet Earth, I get into all sorts of technologies that can affect with a big “E” the climate today, not 10 years from now, or 20 years from now or 30 years from now but today. And these technologies range from different types of devices that can deflect the sun to taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to better enhancing our soil for agriculture, to all sorts of things that we have on the innovation front and mad, mad geniuses have gotten behind, we just need to bring to scale. And so the book is really a marriage or a call for a marriage between the investment and business community and the science community. Clearly the government and political forces that traditionally would be our societal benefactors and protect us from things like climate change or other public health issues such as COVID aren't there for us. So we need to take matters into our own hands and start to do what nature can no longer do for herself. And that is to manipulate the climate for the better for all of us.

David: When I first heard about geoengineering, I thought it sounded...

Click here for the full transcript.

Music by:

• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]
Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.

Support the show

Today we are joined by Nicole Systrom, founder of Sutro Energy Group. Nicole partners with philanthropists, investors and entrepreneurs to accelerate high-impact climate and clean technology solutions. Nicole also serves with multiple organizations that focus on energy, education, philanthropy and innovation. We’ll be talking with Nicole about how she came to be so involved in these areas, the various sectors that can help with environmental sustainability and the need for an innovative green economy, driven by creativity and investment.

Links

• Sutro Energy Group
• Nicole Systrom
• Episode webpage

If you would like to support the show please click here.

Music by:

• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Sound design by Keaton Butler – keatonbutlerrecording at gmail.com

Please share the show with a friend.

Support the show