WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT?

Earthlings, hello! 👋🏽 This week’s guest is Ari Matusiak, CEO of Rewiring America , a nonprofit focused on accelerating the clean energy transition. With the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits expiring on December 31st , I wanted to sit down with Ari to talk about our energy bills, how we can still install heat pumps and more before those incentives run out, how your home could be...

This August marked 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, and the devastation that storm had across the Gulf South is still reverberating throughout the country. Today I’m talking with Dr. Samantha Montano , a professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and co-founder of Disaster Researchers for Justice . She wrote a great book called Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontline...

Welcome to Season 3 of the What If We Get It Right? podcast! 🥳 If you’re new here: This show is about what we need to do to address the climate crisis, and how to make those things happen. Here, we take climate change seriously but absolutely do not take ourselves seriously. We take a brutally honest look at the science, policy, economics, and culture of climate issues, and dive in on solutions a...

Hey there Earthlings. 🌎 Season 3 is launching next week! Thus, here’s a trailer with tidbits from previous seasons to get you stoked. We’ve got a dozen ace guests booked, and 4 episodes already recorded. We’re diving all the way in — on clean energy, FEMA, farming, messaging, and so much more. I’ll be re-interviewing a few of the experts I interviewed for my book because, turns out, some things h...

I'm aiming to live a more analog life in August (🛶🥾🏕️), so, until September, leaving you with this summer listening: an excerpt from my audiobook, the chapter titled “Away From the Brink.” To remind you, that book (which inspired this podcast) is What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures . This chapter is essentially my answer to the BIG question: What if we get it right? What would t...

Hey there Earthlings. I’m living a more analog life this summer (highly recommend). 🛶🏕️📚 So for this week’s episode, I want to introduce you to another podcast I think you just might love. It’s called Science Vs. , hosted by Wendy Zuckerman. In each episode they tackle a different topic to sort out what’s fact, what’s fiction, and what’s still TBD. As a scientist and lover of facts, I super appr...

Hey there Earthlings. 🩵 If you’ve been paying any attention to U.S. politics, these past 2 weeks have been a doozy. So, let’s get into the Big Brutal Billionaire Bailout Bill of it all. Welcome to this very special collab episode of What If We Get It Right? x Twigg & Jenkins . Carri Twigg (hey bestie) and Brad Jenkins (who was her officemate in the Obama White House) host my favorite politics pod...

If you have a Republican senator: call, email, comment on all their social posts. Tell them to vote NO on the abominable budget bill. Get your friends to do it too. ☎️ Seriously, call Congress: (202) 224-3121. (Especially if you live in Maine or Alaska.) Details in this week's newsletter and all over the news. Okay, Season 2 is a wrap — 12 delightful conversations with people showing us the ways f...

Today’s guest is Ben Wolkon. Ben is founding partner at MUUS Climate Partners , a venture capital firm that invests exclusively in climate solutions, and operates on the belief that “climate is the biggest business opportunity of the 21st century.” To be honest, when I think of venture capital, I often think of like that "greed is good" mentality and just corny finance bros. And maybe that's a bit...

Today is publication day for our favorite climate scientist. Dr. Kate Marvel wrote a book called Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet . Kate is a researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (one of the world’s leading research centers), where she specializes in climate modeling. Although, given the various infuriating, retrograde, anti-climate science shenanigan...

Alexia Leclercq is a face of the youth climate movement — something that, as we discussed, is a tricky thing to be. She is a grassroots environmental justice organizer and scholar in Austin, Texas. Alexia is also co-founder of the Colorado River Conservancy and of Start:Empowerment , an education non-profit that provides students and teachers with an immersive climate justice curriculum. She’s led...

For this live event at the WBUR Festival, Gina McCarthy and I discussed the EPA, the IRA, what’s at stake for us all... and, why we must never, ever pave paradise. Gina led the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Obama, was president of NRDC, and then, under President Biden, became the first ever National Climate Advisor, setting up a climate team in the White House. Perhaps Gina...

Today’s episode is a very sweet reunion with my former podcast co-host Alex Blumberg. Alex and I co-created How to Save a Planet, which ran for 2 years as Spotify’s flagship climate show. This episode opens with the hilariously unlikely origin story of our fab collab. (Note: When you hit play, remember to also follow this podcast :) Podcast nerds will be familiar with Alex’s work, but for the rest...

A tale of over-ups, poison, sludge, and the last bipartisan environmental issue. They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by Mariah Blake is a true crime story on the scale of what the tobacco and fossil fuel industries have done to knowingly imperil our health and our futures. But this book also highlights what’s possible when unlikely advocates, regular folks, come...

Today's guest, Sarah Stillman, is a Pulitzer and MacArthur genius award-winning journalist. She founded and leads the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, and she's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for about a decade. Sarah’s writing typically focuses on our immigration and justice systems, but increasingly (and in some part due to my nudges), she's also writing about climate change. Sarah's...

Hey there Earthlings. 💛 We’re talking sustainability and fashion, again. It’s a major industry impacting the environment and shaping the cultural context within which we make climate decisions... and I may be overcompensating for having not given fashion a chapter in the What If We Get It Right? book . A few weeks ago, I shared here a conversation on Sustainable Fashion and the Art of Care with s...

This week, I’m chatting with Jainey Bavishi, an expert in climate adaptation and resilience. We cover everything from social aid and pleasure clubs, to recovering from climate disasters, civic infrastructure, why we should absolutely not privatize weather forecasts, and – of course! – what getting it right in coastal cities looks like, in New York City, New Orleans, and beyond. I’m so glad to be s...

What the heck is going on in environmental law right now? Michael Burger , executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University’s has some answers for us. In this episode, we talk federal climate funding, the billions of dollars that are at stake (frozen, impounded, and otherwise), and what’s going on with climate law at the international and local levels. Michael’s...

This episode, we're talking sustainable fashion and the simple joys of care and repair with supermodel, author, activist, and friend Cameron Russell. Also: why stats on the climate impacts of fashion are super sketchy. If you haven’t heard of Cameron, chances are you’ve seen her. As a model, she’s appeared on many magazine covers for Vogue and Elle, and on runways and billboards for brands like Pr...

Greetings, Earthlings! 🌏 Welcome to Season 2 of the What If We Get It Right? podcast. If you’re new here (hi!) let me quickly read you in: I wrote a book called What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures (which became a NY Times Bestseller! 😮). The heart of that book is 20 interviews with people sharing what getting it right on climate could look like and how we can make those visions...

My guest this episode is The Jean Flemma. Jean spent over two decades working on Capitol Hill as staff to members of Congress, making magic behind the scenes over and over again. She is an absolute wizard of ocean and climate policy and the politics of achieving policy change. Jean and I co-founded Urban Ocean Lab , a nonprofit think tank for the future of coastal cities. So you’ll hear a bit abou...

In the last few months, the term “Green New Deal” has been popping up a lot again. And it’s the Trump administration bringing it up — as a boogeyman, as a foil for everything his crew fears about accelerating the clean energy transition. So I thought it would be a good time to discuss: What actually is the Green New Deal? How far have we gotten on implementing the concepts it includes? And why do...

Near the end of my book tour, I found myself gazing up at those large concrete guard lions outside the New York Public Library, astounded to be entering for an event about my book. The occasion was all the more sweet because it was a family affair: I was in conversation with my cousin Steve Connell , whose incredible poem “This Living Earth” appears in my book (and which you get to hear him read i...

I was originally going to title this episode “Facts Matter,” but instead chose the 90s hiphop version of that sentiment, as I’m prone to do. Today, we are peeling back the curtain on how I achieved the maximum possible accuracy and precision in my book What If We Get It Right? : I hired a fact checker named James Gaines . James is a freelance science writer, journalist, and fact checker with a spe...

I am home from my book tour (50 days!) and it feels soooo good. 😮‍💨 Towards the end of the tour, in Detroit, Michigan, I got the chance to sit down with adrienne maree brown . We’d been following each other’s work for years, and it was such a treat to gab and snack and joke in person. adrienne is a best-selling author, activist, facilitator, a songwriter, a poet, and doula. She also has a new bo...