How We Survive

This season, we explored large-scale climate interventions that could be our last hope. One intervention in particular, solar geoengineering, made a lot of listeners’ heads spin. (We’re right there with you.) This episode, we answer some of your most pressing questions about solar geoengineering. We get into whether solar sunshades could harm crops, what international efforts around solar geoengin...

All season, we’ve been unpacking the controversial ways we’re messing with nature to save the planet. In this episode, we explore the wildest intervention to date: de-extinction. We take a tour of Colossal Labs, the $10 billion Dallas startup betting it can reverse-engineer extinction itself, to see how they plan to turn pigeons into dodos and Asian elephants into woolly mammoths. But whether it’s...

We can't avoid catastrophic warming without also capturing and storing carbon dioxide — both the carbon we've already emitted and the carbon we continue to emit through industries that are tough to decarbonize, like steel, petrochemicals, and cement. Europe is a leader in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), with a goal of storing at least 50 million tons of captured CO2 a year by the end of this dec...

Across the country, anti-geoengineering bills are being proposed in state legislatures. These bills would ban the intentional release of chemicals into the atmosphere for the purpose of affecting sunlight or weather, and could impact future research into stratospheric aerosol injection — or even cloud seeding. But, unlike environmentalists that are advocating against the potential use of geoengine...

Can a technology used for war help prevent an environmental catastrophe in the making? Cloud seeding is a technique where particles, usually silver iodide, gets dispersed into clouds to help generate more rain or snow and it’s been around for 80 years. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. used cloud seeding in a top secret mission called Operation Popeye, to prolong the monsoon season in Vietnam. It’s...

Talk to enough experts about geoengineering and the conversation eventually turns to termination shock. That’s the idea that if we were to start cooling the planet and then suddenly stop, the resulting “shock” of heat could be catastrophic. It’s also the title of a novel by bestselling sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson, who explores the science, politics, and unintended consequences of trying to engin...

Could dimming the sun be the key to cooling things down before the climate crisis worsens? Some scientists say yes, that we can cool the Earth by launching tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. It’s a type of solar geoengineering that was once seen as preposterous, meant to exist only in the pages of a sci-fi novel. But now, it’s a reality. To find out for ourselves, we travel to Northern...

The climate crisis is escalating. We have to decarbonize our economy, but we’re moving too slowly. So, what’s the backup plan? This season of “How We Survive” is about engineering nature: large-scale interventions that could be our last hope. We’ll explore technology being developed that could alter our weather patterns, transform our planet, and possibly save us all from the worst outcomes of the...

Earlier this month the Trump administration revoked the endangerment finding, which gave the federal government a legal basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The move is already being disputed in court. If the repeal is successful, who are the economic winners and losers? “How We Survive” host Amy Scott talks with Stanford professor Chris Field to unpack the history and legal implications...

We’re dropping into your feeds today to share this special bonus episode. For many people gathering around the table this holiday season, things feel a little different. Maybe it’s the cost of ingredients that’s on your mind, or cuts to USDA funding that have left your food bank running low. Or maybe it’s the simple reality of a packed schedule – there’s a lot to cook, and so little time.  In this...

Throughout the season, we asked you all what questions you had about food, solutions and climate change, and you did not disappoint! In this episode, we find answers to your most pressing questions, like whether grass-fed beef is more nutritious than grain-fed, if cell-cultivated meat is considered an ultra-processed food, and we find out what’s going on with insect protein (of course, a taste tes...

The 100th meridian is the longitudinal boundary separating the humid East and the arid West. Researchers say the dry line is moving east because of climate change, threatening some of our cheapest and most reliable crops, like wheat and corn. In this episode, Amy drives across Kansas to talk to farmers on both sides of the dry line to see how they’re adapting to climate change. And we hear from a...

Climate change is transforming how the world grows and eats. In this episode, host Amy Scott talks with New York Times international climate correspondent Somini Sengupta about what she’s learned from farmers adapting to extreme weather. From drought-resistant crops to regenerative practices, Sengupta shows how communities on the front lines of climate change are finding new ways to survive and fe...

About a third of the greenhouse gases cooking our planet come from our food. Agriculture and livestock production are incredibly taxing on the planet. To curb the impact, we need to drastically reduce the amount of land we use to make food, while at the same time making more food for a growing population. How are we going to do that? In this episode we go fishing with an eccentric rancher in North...

If you have ever bitten into a plant-based burger and felt dissatisfied, or even grossed out, you’re not alone. In this episode, we explore the uncanny valley of meat and dive deep into what makes meat so … meaty. Plus, “The Splendid Table” host Francis Lam joins Amy Scott for a taste test of cultivated meat and shares his go-to recipes for climate-friendly proteins.

Climate change is changing what we eat. As the planet heats up, foods like salmon, chocolate and coffee might be harder to come by and more expensive to buy. In this episode, the “How We Survive” team goes on a food tour around Northern California to find out how tech entrepreneurs are finding new ways to make all sorts of foods that are under threat from the impacts of the climate crisis. 

Imagine a future where chocolate and coffee are rare and expensive; where cheap, nutritional staples, like corn and wheat, are threatened. The climate crisis is a food and agriculture crisis. A third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from what’s on our plate. Cow burps, deforestation, water use and food waste all feed into making our planet unlivable. And it’s a double-edged sword, because a...

We’re dropping into your feeds today to share this special bonus episode. It’s a conversation between host Amy Scott, Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal and Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Elizabeth Kolbert.  We talk about how the accelerating climate crisis is creating economic disruption. And we get into some of the solutions that are giving us hope right now.   This conversation was recorded li...

A cheap and accessible form of energy lies in a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky: the sun. So why haven’t we adopted solar energy more widely? “How We Survive” host Amy Scott recently talked with longtime climate writer and activist Bill McKibben about his upcoming book “ Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization .”  In this exclu...

Last week’s massive spending and tax bill, named the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” was signed into law by President Trump . It includes major cuts to clean energy incentives, pushed forward by the Biden Administration’s signature climate law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).   The new law is a huge setback against cutting emissions and transitioning to clean energy. “How We Survive” host...

June marks the start of hurricane season but thanks to the climate crisis we’re dealing with extreme weather year-round. Just in the past month, deadly storms have devastated Kentucky and a brutal heat-wave is surging across the country. With the recent cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service, weather stations are understaffed and weather forecasting might be impacted. In this episode of Bur...

Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis? That’s the question we started this series with, and in this episode, we try to answer that question.  Host Amy Scott pops the hood of her own retirement investments to look at how to reduce their carbon impact, and she shows you how you can too. We visit a battery storage farm in the Bronx to see how New York City is leveraging its shareholder powe...

In recent years, ESG investing moved from a mainstream strategy promoted by the biggest asset managers in the world, to a polarizing topic. Financial firms scrubbed the acronym from their websites, dropped out of net-zero initiatives, and stopped advertising their climate efforts. Some have proclaimed ESG dead and buried. But if so, who killed it and why? In this episode – our ESG whodunit – we ta...

To understand the fierce and widespread backlash to environmental, social and governance investing — and more specifically, climate-conscious investing — it helps to first understand its humble origins. Part of that history began about as far from Wall Street as possible, spiritually anyway, with faith-based investors.   In this episode of “How We Survive,” we travel to the hub for religious inves...

Can capitalism save us? In 2020, it seemed like the answer was “possibly.” That year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink shook up the investment world in his annual letter to companies, in which he made climate change a major focus. On CNBC he stated, “We believe a portfolio that focuses on sustainability and climate change will be a portfolio that outperforms … and it will also help the planet.” But that w...