Climate Now

Today, 26% of the global population - about 2 billion people - live without reliable access to safe drinking water.  And, as climate change worsens, the availability of fresh water will only decrease.  By 2050, as many as 3.2 billion people could live in severely water-scarce regions of the world.  More than half the global population will experience water scarcity for at least one month a year. O...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission wants to standardize climate disclosures for publicly traded companies. What does that mean? On March 21, 2022 the SEC released a proposal for a new rule : publicly traded companies will have to provide disclosures about how the changing climate will affect their business, and how their business is affecting climate. This move would formalize a reporting...

In the race for decarbonization, the shipping industry faces major challenges . Fuel is cheap, almost half the price of gasoline . And, most ships last between 20-25 years , meaning that the turnover to cleaner shipping could take far longer than road transportation, where the average car is only 12 years old .  But there is some wind in the sails of maritime decarbonization initiatives. Maria Gal...

One of the most efficient ways to get to a net-zero economy is to generate electricity from renewable sources, and then make as many things run on electricity as possible .  But, as more end-use services (transportation, heating, industry) are electrified, and the source of electricity transitions from fossil fuels to renewables like solar and wind, the electricity supply chain - the pathway from...

In 2021 alone, more than $32 billion dollars were invested in green-technology startups, a four-fold increase from five years earlier.  But how far will those dollars go?  Only about 25% of venture-backed startups actually make the transition from an innovative idea to a successful business.   And when we are considering green technology, choosing which companies will have the biggest impact means...

What will it take to get 100% of new car sales to be electric by 2030? Is it consumer demand?  Is it political pressure? How about we just increase both?  The Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA) is the first industry-backed coalition advocating for 100% EV sales by 2030, and they have devised a federal roadmap for reaching that goal. Joe Britton of ZETA and Dr. Sweta Chakraborty of Pio...

Decarbonizing our global economy is critical to staying below the 1.5C threshold of warming, but so is reducing the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. By 2050, we will need to remove about ten billion tonnes of CO2 every year . Currently, we are capturing and sequestering about 40 million tonnes a year - about 0.4% of what’s needed by 2050, and less than 0.1% of the CO2-equivalent...

There is a lot of focus within climate tech on how to decarbonize cars—whether that be via electric batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, or other emerging technologies—but what about eliminating the need for cars altogether? How can we better design our cities and suburbs so that they are centered around humans, not cars? Cars do not need to be the primary method of urban transportation, and alternativ...

Climate policy at the federal level is integral to mitigating the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the United States has had a hard time so far passing ambitious climate legislation. Why is that? From the outside, the situation often seems hopeless. But what does it look like from inside Washington? To find out, Climate Now spoke with Alex McDonough. Alex started his career as a policy advisor for S...

Heavy-duty, long-haul trucks - known as Class 8 trucks - account for more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year. Electrification, while a practical option for most of the trucking industry ( see last week's episode ), is not yet as feasible for long-haul Class 8 trucks. | What options might exist to decarbonize heavy-duty trucking in the short and medium term, if...

In 2019, medium- and heavy-duty trucks accounted for about a quarter of U.S. transportation emissions while representing less than 4% of vehicles on the road, according to the U.S. EPA. It is clear the trucking industry must decarbonize in order for the transportation sector, and the economy as a whole, to reach net-zero emissions, but which emerging technologies will move freight vehicles into cl...

Ride-sharing services currently result in 69% more emissions, on average, than the trips they displace, according to a recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. But, if the ride-sharing vehicles were electric, it's a whole different story. Replacing one gasoline-powered ride-sharing car with an electric vehicle (EV) has three times the climate benefit as replacing a personal car with...

Climate Now is kicking off our Decarbonizing Transportation series by addressing a question that looms over the electric vehicle market: how can we sustainably manufacture and recycle EV batteries? To learn about electric vehicle battery trends and challenges, we are joined by Andy Stevenson, former Special Projects Associate at Tesla and former Chief Financial Officer of Redwood Materials, a batt...

The Connecticut Green Bank, the first green bank in the US, has unlocked over $2 billion in capital toward clean energy projects and other climate solutions since it was established by the state legislature in 2011. So, what is the green bank model? How does it compare to other methods of clean energy finance? And what are their impact? Climate Now speaks with Connecticut Green Bank President and...

Earth's oceans play a key role in slowing climate change, absorbing nearly a third of anthropogenic CO2 emissions . And they could, potentially, absorb more. In this episode, Climate Now explores developing methods to enhance ocean-based carbon dioxide removal. What do we know about each technique, and what are the associated risks? Learn more in our conversation with Dr. Wil Burns, visiting...

In November 2021, representatives from around the world gathered to update their climate commitments at the 26th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP 26) in Glasgow, Scotland. The conference received substantial attention from media and climate groups around the globe, the likes of which we haven't seen since COP 21 - the 2015 Paris Cli...

Wind energy is one of the cheapest sources of energy today , but it accounts for only ~6% of global electricity generation. To limit global warming to 2 degrees C or less, wind energy will need to scale up to about 5 times its current size . |  So, how can this be achieved? What are the challenges to scaling wind energy to this degree? How does off-shore wind fit into this equation? And what needs...

Much of the focus surrounding climate action is on mitigation: how do we reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and avoid catastrophic climate change in the coming decades? But the reality is the climate is already changing - and will continue to change even under the most optimistic mitigation scenarios . So what is being done to adapt and prepare for these changes? Beth...

"The [investment market] we have in place now is not working for people, it's not working for the planet, and it's actually not working for most investors." This is according to Amit Bouri, Co-founder and CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network (the GIIN), an international community dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact investing. Impact investments a...

A growing population, groundwater depletion, poor water infrastructure, overuse, and water waste threaten our global freshwater supply. Throw climate change into the mix, and the water crisis is exacerbated , as precipitation becomes less reliable and average global temperatures rise. The water crisis, like the climate crisis, is projected to get worse , but there are solutions both corporations a...

Most climate models in use today are based upon large-scale, well-understood physical relationships that drive global temperature and precipitation trends.  But the effects of complicated interactions that occur on smaller scales, which may still be significant, are harder to capture in these models. That is why Dr. Laure Zanna of New York University and her colleagues are employing machine learni...

What does it take to turn an idea that could help fight climate change into a self-sustaining business? We often hear the glamorous stories of startups that have made it, but little about the struggles, the learning, and the luck required to get there. Pol Knops, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Green Minerals, joined Climate Now to share his ongoing journey to design, develop and market a...

How do we finance the cost of mitigating climate change, while discouraging continued use of fossil fuels? The largest public statement of economists in history argues for a carbon tax - which would charge a fee for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted. But, if one country charges a different carbon tax than another, what would happen to international trade? Would fossil fuel use and emissions-inte...

A rapidly expanding list of companies have announced plans to go "carbon neutral" or "net zero". Often, these plans include at least some offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing credits from forest carbon offset programs. But buyers beware: our look into how forest carbon offsets are determined and sold suggests that there is a lot of work to be done before we will...

For businesses, a changing climate is not just about worsening weather patterns. Businesses must be prepared for what is likely to be an era of rapidly accelerating change to many dimensions of their operations, including changes in shareholder expectations, supply chains, multi-dimensional risks to physical assets, and impacts on labor, among others. A critical dimension to preparing for these ch...