Sustain What?

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What episode looking at: * The recent sabotage attack on a TV station’s weather radar in Oklahoma * The spread of unfounded extreme-weather conspiracies by Republican lawmakers and attention-hijacking online figures * How opacity around government and industry tests of weather modification methods has provided an enduring hook for conspiracy mongers to build...

This evergreen Sustain What conversation on trust and mistrust in climate science and scientists is - sadly - more relevant than ever. It was organized early in the pandemic by Gil Eyal , a sociologist at Columbia University focused on attitudes toward expertise (he literally wrote the book on this - The Crisis of Expertise ). Instead of running this Sustain What show, I was one of three discussan...

This is the podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with top experts on the role - and limits - of technology as a means of cutting losses when people live in harm’s way. The issues raised in the Texas tragedy (and travesty) resonate well beyond that state’s Flash Flood Alley. My guests were Jim Moffitt , a pre-Musk Twitter engineer focused on social media as a path to flood safety; Nashin Ma...

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Michael Grunwald , the prize-winning environmental journalist and author whose latest book, We Are Eating The Earth , explores the destructive connections between people’s plates and forces wrecking ecosystems and overheating the climate. The book also charts sustainable paths forward with no sugar coating. Also on hand was Washington P...

File this post in the “sustainability of democracy” track. I just had an unplanned pop-up Sustain What conversation with the wide-ranging author Paul Greenberg about his bitingly satirical novella, A Third Term , and hope you take time for a listen. (I’ve known Paul for decades through his invaluable writing on fish and conservation.) His new work of fiction, in which George Washington is resurrec...

Today is #ShowYourStripesDay, aiming to sustain the push initiated years ago by UK climate scientist Ed Hawkins to use cool and warm colors to depict long-term climate change in ways that might grab attention and ultimately change choices and behavior. I’ve explored this innovation and related ones for a long time, most notably in a Sustain What webcast on Show Your Stripes Day in 2021 . I’ve repo...

Here’s my Sustain What conversation with Kate Marvel , a prominent climate scientist and communicator whose first book, Human Nature - Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet , is a bracing and deeply personal tour of climate science, planetary history and the array of hopeful and/or heartbreaking environmental futures ahead, depending on choices made or avoided now. Thank you, Matt Burgess an...

Given how Trumpism seems deadset on squeezing the dizzying diversity out of the United States, it seemed a great time to reach out to Peter Guttman , a world-roaming photographer who’s spent decades portraying the full prismatic wonder and weirdness of us. Please watch and/or share this conversation here or on Facebook , LinkedIn , X (at my handle @revkin ) or YouTube . Here’s a snippet focused on...

When I was building my sustainability communication project at Columbia University, I was recruited to be an author of a chapter on “ communicating risk for decision-making ” in what would become the 2022 Global Assessment Report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. I couldn’t participate fully in the end (boring reasons) but gained a valuable view of the depth and breadth o...

Whenever you need a break from the dueling pundits, have a listen to one of my Sunday Sanity shows . For those who missed us live on Sunday , here’s an audio and video antidote for Trump’s lock on our brains - a conversation, poetry reading and picking party with a couple of remarkably creative humans - the provocateur poet Andrei Codrescu , who you may have heard as a frequent NPR commentator in...

Update June 3 | In another demonstration of the Trump administration’s reckless and damaging whiplash approach to funding of vital programs, the initial freeze on this vital conduit for weather data has been reversed. But note that the Unidata blog post below includes this line about sustained threats to funding: This positive development allows us to end the current furlough of our staff and resu...

Here’s the video and podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with two Maine-based educators and a superstar student taking on tough problems in their communities that have links to the wider world. Learn all the background in my “curtain raiser” post: We were joined for a bit by Radhika Iyengar , a colleague of mine during my time at Columbia University. She’s working on an online course w...

Here’s the curtain raiser post with all the relevant links related to Jon Allsop’s new book, What is Journalism For? , and Karen Bordeleau’s New Bedford Light newsroom, which made national waves with its vivid coverage of an atrocious abuse of force by immigration officers in New Bedford several days ago. Here are two illuminating moments: Jon Allsop on how an “emergency mode” for journalism facin...

This is my first stab at a Substack Live video - done by adding Substack to my Streamyard livestream tool. Here’s the curtain-raiser post with lots of context: Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus epi...

Here’s the podcast post of my virtual Sustain What meetup with a batch of folks out in the Hands Off protests against the Trump and Musk approach to “governing.” I was also joined by a longtime reader, Josette, from New Hampshire, who used to work in telecommunications at Perkins Coie, one of the law firms that Trump has attacked. We discussed this bit of good news from Friday ( here from Reuters...

“Elon Musk can declare, properly, every Starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.” - James Fallows Here’s the webcast / podcast version of my Sustain What transportation conversation with longtime journalists James Fallows , David Kerley and Jim Motavalli. All the details and relevant links are...

I hope you heard (or now watch) my 2021 conversation with the Cambridge University climate researcher Mike Hulme and science and propaganda historian Naomi Oreskes on trust and mistrust in climate science . The same goes for our 2023 conversation about his latest book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything , which describes what he calls “climatism” - a tendency in climate-policy discussions to put CO2...

Here's today’s Sustain What discussion with two journalists from Global Press, an international newsroom supporting female reporters in the world’s most troubled regions. Global Press immediately began widespread reporting on the realtime impacts of the initial USAID freeze and persistent chaos around money flowing to public health and other vital programs from Nepal to Uganda. (I apologize for so...

Here’s the podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with three authors of a sobering, and yet slightly hopeful, paper identifying a rising number of autocracies that are followed by a sharp social and political u-turn to democratization. A rough dynamic transcript is here . The paper is here : The hopeful part of the open-access study is this: The analysis presents a systematic empirical ov...

Here’s a fresh tune for these times from my songwriting side, which has been energized since I signed on to a two-decade-old annual project called February Album Writing Month ( FAWM.org ). There’s more below about this remarkable effort - aimed at getting participants to write 14 songs in 28 days (yes, FOURTEEN !) - including a video explainer by its founder, Burr Settles , a machine learning res...

I’ll wager that most of you have already heard or read Ezra Klein’s powerful audio “ Don’t Believe Him ” manifesto examining Trump’s take on Steve Bannon’s longstanding “flood the zone” strategy designed to overwhelm media and institutional capacity to convey and challenge his unfolding demolition derby presidency. If not, here’s the captivating opening. But it’s vital to get past the initial stat...

Here’s the podcast / webcast version of my talk with Tom Kalil, who’s moved from advising two presidents on science and technology policy to building Renaissance Philanthropy , a consultancy for wealthy people who want to help fill funding and capacity gaps to help science serve society and sustainability. We talked about that work and also about the challenges and some possibilities as the second...

This is the podcast version of the Sustain What discussion I just had with the relentless clean-energy optimist, investor and evangelist Michael Liebreich . Key sections are on the need to switch metrics for success from kilowatt/hours to energy services; the ethics of focusing decarbonization on the most carbonized nations; the potential for energy-hungry AI giants to help United States regions r...

Here’s the video and audio podcast of my #SustainWhat show offering a valuable update on trends in emissions of heat-trapping methane and emerging science showing the tropics are the dominant driver of the recent rise in the flows of this potent greenhouse gas. Listen and share and weigh in. Background on my guests along with a batch of relevant links are in the “curtain raiser” post below. Here a...

This talk is the latest iteration of what I’ve learned and unlearned through 40 years of reporting and conversation wrangling around the intertwined challenges of building a safer human relationship with the climate system and with energy. My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive...