Bionic Planet: Reversing Climate Change by Restoring Nature
107 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 29 ratingsWe've entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene, and nothing is as it was. Not the trees, not the seas – not the forests, farms, or fields – and not the global economy that depends on all of these. What does this mean for your investments, your family's future, and the future of man? Each week, we dive into these issues to help you Navigate the New Reality.
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Episodes
054 | Give Us Ecotopia or Give Us Death
February 01, 2020 04:42 - 50 minutes - 70.2 MBDeveloping countries are the most vulnerable to – and least responsible for – climate change, but new research shows that some of them can dramatically boost their economies by managing their forests, farms, and fields in ways that pull greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. At a carbon price of $50 for every metric ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, for example, Costa Rica can go beyond net-zero and end up pulling four times as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as its en...
054 | Twenty Countries Can Soon Absorb More Greenhouse Gas Than They Emit
February 01, 2020 04:42 - 50 minutes - 70.2 MBDeveloping countries are the most vulnerable to – and least responsible for – climate change, but new research shows that some of them can dramatically boost their economies by managing their forests, farms, and fields in ways that pull greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. At a carbon price of $50 for every metric ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, for example, Costa Rica can go beyond net-zero and end up pulling four times as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as its en...
53: A Marshall Plan for Forests, with Charlotte Streck of Climate Focus
December 02, 2019 14:47 - 37 minutes - 51.7 MBThere's a lot of money sloshing around forests, and most of it goes into agricultural subsidies and investments that destroy forests, while only a trickle goes into programs that save them. That's why today's guest, Charlotte Streck, wants to implement a Marshall Plan for Forests.
52: Natural Climate Solutions Explained (ENCORE PRESENTATION)
December 01, 2019 16:06 - 40 minutes - 55.5 MBOn the eve of year-end climate talks in Madrid, I revisit my 2017 conversation with Bronson Griscom, Director of Forest Carbon Science for the Nature Conservancy. He headed up a team of three dozen researchers from almost two dozen institutions tasked with identifying once and for all the realistic potential of using nature as a bulwark against climate change. The result is a report called "Natural Climate Solutions", which identifies 20 low-cost, natural "pathways" that can get us 37 perc...
051 | Forests in the Paris Agreement: a Conversation with Annie Petsonk of EDF
September 16, 2019 17:13 - 48 minutes - 66.3 MBThe third episode of our three-part look at the birth of REDD+, we speak with Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund. Related Articles: “Shades of REDD+: A Marshall Plan for Tropical Forests?” Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/shades-of-redd-a-marshall-plan-for-tropical-forests/ “Forests, Farms, and the Global Carbon Sink: The Genesis” Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/forests-farms-global-carbon-sink-genesis/
051 | Forests in the Paris Agreement, Part 3: a Conversation with Annie Petsonk of EDF
September 16, 2019 17:13 - 48 minutes - 66.3 MBThe third episode of our three-part look at the birth of REDD+, we speak with Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund. Related Articles: “Shades of REDD+: A Marshall Plan for Tropical Forests?” Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/shades-of-redd-a-marshall-plan-for-tropical-forests/ “Forests, Farms, and the Global Carbon Sink: The Genesis” Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/forests-farms-global-carbon-sink-genesis/
050| Forests in the Paris Climate Agreement, Part 2: Kevin Conrad
August 22, 2019 05:15 - 56 minutes - 77.2 MBIn this second part of our three-part series on the history of forests in the Paris Climate Agreement, we hear how REDD+ got its name and made its way into the climate negotiations. Special Guest: Kevin Conrad of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations
049 | Forests in the Paris Climate Agreement, Part 1: The Birth of Forest Carbon
August 15, 2019 15:43 - 36 minutes - 50 MB2019 is shaping up to be a pivotal summer in a pivotal year in the critical race to meet the climate challenge, with major media finally discovering the role that healthy forests can play in fixing the mess. In this episode, we examine the 40-year effort to slow climate change by saving forests. It's the first of three parts developed in accompaniment with the Ecosystem Marketplace series "Forests, Farms, and the Global Carbon Sink: It’s Happening" Guest: Kevin Conrad, Coalition for Rain...
048: Understanding the IPCC’s New Compendium of Science on Climate, Forests, and Farms
August 10, 2019 01:05 - 17 minutes - 24.6 MBWe eat to live, but the food we’re eating is killing us – not just because of what it does to our bodies, but because of what it does to our climate. Beef, for example, comes from cows that burp out methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps up to 80-times more heat than carbon dioxide does, and we often chop carbon-absorbing forests to graze those methane-emitting cows, only to throw away one-third of all the food we produce. If there are two things scientists who study this...
047 | An Accountability Framework For Deforestation
June 18, 2019 15:27 - 45 minutes - 62 MBEnvironmental NGOs have long pressured companies to reduce their impact on forests, and companies have long complained that every NGO seems to come with different demands. Now a coalition of more than a dozen NGOs have called the corporate bluff by creating a framework that provides a universal way of accounting for deforestation. They call it the Accountability Framework, and today's guest, Jeff Milder, is one of the people helping to pull it together.
46| Restoration Economy, Part Two: The Billion-Dollar Foot
April 30, 2019 08:04 - 1 hour - 102 MBIt's an article of faith among some on the left that markets and capitalism are the roots of all evil, while some on the right see pure, free markets as the invisible hand of God, and regulation as the work of the Devil. Most economists will tell you they're both wrong, because there's no such thing as either a pure free market or a marketless society. We need markets to get things done, and we need governance to keep markets honest. That's especially true in environmental markets, whic...
045 | Nature, Paid on Delivery; with Guest Tim Male
April 01, 2019 03:58 - 55 minutes - 75.7 MBEnvironmental scientist Tim Male has worked the conservation puzzle from both the NGO and governmental sector -- first with NGOs like Environmental Defense Fund, then as an elected councilman, and finally as an adviser to the Obama Administration's Council on Environmental Quality. In 2017, he distilled his views in a paper called "Nature, Paid on Delivery", which examines the ways the US states of Louisiana, Maryland, California and Nevada are restoring large swathes of degraded land with o...
044 | Green New Deal Architect Rhiana Gunn-Wright
March 18, 2019 02:57 - 34 minutes - 48.1 MBWe've been fairly US-centric lately, but only because so much is finally happening there. In today's episode, we speak with Rhiana Gunn-Wright of New Consensus. That's the Think Tank that's helping freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and veteran Senator Ed Markey develop policy to support the Green New Deal they proposed last month.
043 | Bees Trees and Burning Bluffs
March 06, 2019 03:20 - 29 minutes - 40.5 MBWe're losing pollinators at an alarming rate, which scientists attribute at least in part to the loss of native plants, which evolved alongside hundreds of native pollinators -- including bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Dave Neu and Joe Krischon of the Conservation Land Stewardship have been helping to resurrect a degraded ravine north of Chicago, and today they explain how this backbreaking work helps revive colonies of bees and butterflies, and how you, too, can join the restora...
042 | The Stealth Plan to Roll Back US Water Protection (First of Two Parts)
March 01, 2019 04:38 - 56 minutes - 77.4 MBWetlands cover 274 million acres of the United States, and they ultimately provide more than half the country's drinking water, which is one reason the federal government protects them -- or has, until now. Back in December, the US EPA and Army corps of engineers unveiled new rules for regulating water, and you'd be surprised what it leaves out. More half of the country's wetlands will no longer have federal protection, and neither will so-called "ephemeral streams", that only flow in cert...
041: ENCORE PRESENTATION: Why the Sustainable Development Goals Really Are a Very Big Bid Deal
February 15, 2019 01:02 - 34 minutes - 47.6 MBWe hear a lot about the Sustainable Development Goals, or "SDGs" these days, with major pension funds like Calvert aligning their portfolios with them, and up to $12 trillion in finance, by one estimate, ready to do the same the same. But what are they? That's a question I tried answering almost three years ago -- way back in 2016. It was right after world leaders had reached the Paris Climate Agreement, and right before my fellow countrymen shot the world in the butt by electing Donald Tr...
40 | Former Climate Boss Yvo de Boer
January 23, 2019 15:43 - 1 hour - 114 MBYvo de Boer served as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from August, 2006 to July, 2010; and in November of last year, he became president of the Gold Standard, which is an NGO-led global partnership that sets standards for everything from carbon projects to the way we recognize contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) In this wide-ranging discussion, we discuss everything from the outcome of the most recent talks in ...
39 | How World's Farmers are Engaging the Global Climate Apparatus
December 24, 2018 03:44 - 51 minutes - 70.9 MBAgriculture emits roughly 20 percent of all greenhouse gasses, but sustainable management of forests, farms, and fields can turn the world's farms into massive carbon sinks that absorb greenhouse gasses by the gigaton, yet farmers -- as opposed to agriculture ministers -- have been nearly invisible at year-end climate talks. That changed this past year, thanks to a global farmer-led effort to promote climate-safe agriculture and the emergence of the Koronivia joint Working Group on Agricultu...
38 | Natural Climate Solutions at Katowice Climate Talks
December 08, 2018 10:50 - 51 minutes - 71 MBThe first week of year-end climate talks have wrapped up in Katowice, Poland, where natural climate solutions are finally getting the attention they deserve -- both in negotiations and on the sides. Everyone, it seems, agrees that we need to improve the way we manage our forests, farms, and fields -- which can get us more than a third of the way to meeting the Paris Agreement targets -- but how do you make that happen? We speak with Chris Meyer of the Environmental Defense Fund, Josefina ...
037 Oil Palm, The Prodigal Plant, Is Coming Home To Africa. What Does That Mean For Forests?
December 02, 2018 22:13 - 41 minutes - 57.6 MBSamuel Avaala shakes his head as he dips his fork into a bowl of red-red, a traditional Ghanaian stew that gets its color – and name – in part from red palm oil. “It doesn’t make sense,” he says. “Oil palm evolved here. It’s in our food; it’s in our medicine; but we built an economy on cocoa with little attention to oil palm.” Oil palm is the tree that gives us palm oil, and the people of Western and Central Africa have been cultivating it for millennia – harvesting and processing the fr...
036| Can These Indigenous People Sustainably Log And Still Save Their Forest?
November 28, 2018 22:46 - 29 minutes - 40.3 MBIlson López is the President of Belgium. Not the European country, but the indigenous village in the district of Tahuamanu, in the Peruvian state of Madre de Dios, at the western edge of the Amazon forest. He’s part of the Yine people, who are scattered from here all the way to Cusco, the capital of the old Incan empire, about 500 kilometers to the southwest. The village gets its name from the alleged homeland of a rubber trader named Justo Bezada, who began working with the people of Belg...
035 | What The Civil Rights Movement Can Teach Us About Fixing The Climate
October 31, 2018 23:33 - 1 hour - 85.6 MBIn this episode, we speak with the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, who says climate change and civil rights are inexorably intertwined, and not just because the destruction of our living ecosystems is robbing us of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Born in Kansas and raised in California, Rev Durley finished high-school in Oregon and then marched with Martin Luther King Jr while earning his first of may academic degrees -- this one in psychology at Tennessee Sta...
035 | What The Civil Rights Movement Can Teach Us About Fixing The Climate
October 31, 2018 23:32In this episode, we speak with the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, who says climate change and civil rights are inexorably intertwined, and not just because the destruction of our living ecosystems is robbing us of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Born in Kansas and raised in California, Rev Durley finished high-school in Oregon and then marched with Martin Luther King Jr while earning his first of may academic degrees -- this one in psychology at Tennessee Sta...
034 | Climate Shock Revisited: the Economics of Carbon Pricing
October 10, 2018 13:40 - 1 hour - 105 MBWhen countries around the world ratified the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, they pledged to prevent average global temperatures from rising to a level more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. They picked that number because 2 degrees Celsius is the point at which climate models start going haywire, but they also asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to review all of the available research and tell us what we'd have to do...
032 | Indigenous Leader Hindou Ibrahim on Indigenous People and Global Commodity Companies
September 11, 2018 05:19 - 1 hour - 83.8 MBHindou Ibrahim grew up in rural Chad, a member of the nomadic Mbororo people. Today, she co-chairs the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, and she advises -- some would say cajoles -- everyone from major corporations like Asia Pulp and Paper to small indigenous communities from Ecuador to Indonesia to take action on climate change.
032 | How the Trump Administration Is Undermining the Clean Water Act, Part One
July 09, 2018 17:07 - 54 minutes - 74.8 MBThis is the fifth in a five-part series. You can find the first installment here. US Environmental Protection Agency boss Scott Pruitt is gone – not because of his environmental malfeasance, but because his $43,000 phone booth, his $100,000 trip to Disneyland, and his attempts to get his wife a lucrative job were too tacky even for an administration built on bling. His replacement, Andrew Wheeler, is less embarrassing but more dangerous. A coal lobbyist until last year, Wheeler is also ...
031 How Nature Can Get Us 37 Percent Of The Way To The Paris Climate Target
March 01, 2018 03:32 - 40 minutes - 55.3 MBToday I speak with Bronson Griscom, Director of Forest Carbon Science for the Nature Conservancy. Last year, he headed up a team of three dozen researchers from almost two dozen institutions tasked with identifying once and for all the realistic potential of using nature as a bulwark against climate change. The result is a report called "Natural Climate Solutions", which identifies 20 low-cost, natural "pathways" that can get us 37 percent of the way to meeting the Paris Climate ...
030 A Green Deal for the Netherlands
January 30, 2018 23:39 - 29 minutes - 41.2 MBJos Cozijnsen shakes his tangled black mane and adjusts his leathery blue suit – fashioned, it turns out, from overalls discarded by German railroad workers and available through his sustainable clothing company, Goodfibrations. “[If you have] an office park, the Building Act says how much energy efficiency you need,” he explains. “But if you go to zero energy use, you do much more.” When it comes to fixing the climate mess, he wants everyone to do much more than the law requires, especi...
029 | A Tale of Two Companies
January 23, 2018 05:19 - 38 minutes - 52.8 MBHundreds of consumer-facing companies have pledged to purge deforestation from their supply chains -- often by only buying products that are certified as being sustainably grown. But what happens when a certified company gets caught cheating? In this case, quite a lot.
028: 2017 Year In Review
December 31, 2017 23:45 - 1 hour - 126 MBI've produced 19 episodes of Bionic Planet since the election of Donald Trump, mostly focused on the work of people trying to fix the climate mess -- and in today's episode I look back on some of the ones that seemed to resonate most with listeners. Today's guests include: Mike Korchinsky, who runs the private conservation group Wildlife Works Former UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer Anthony Hobley of the Carbon Tracker Initiative Christian Christian de Valle of Althelia Ecosphere...
027 | Understanding the World Bank's BioCarbon Fund and Forest Carbon Partnership Facility
December 01, 2017 00:54 - 1 hour - 107 MBMore and more countries across the developing world are launching large-scale, climate-smart initiatives to transform the way local communities derive their livelihoods from forests and broader land use. A key component to the success of these programs is engaging the private sector to shift behavior toward sustainable business models. The World Bank Group’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and the BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (ISFL) have spent years...
026| Breakthrough in Bonn: Fixing World's Farms
November 15, 2017 21:59 - 21 minutes - 29.7 MBUnder the Paris Agreement, countries were asked to present their own climate action plans, and 90 percent of these action plans -- technically called NDCs, for "nationally-determined contributions" -- incorporated farming fixes -- or shiftint to sustainable agriculture. That led to a major breakthrough this week at year-end climate talks here in Bonn, Germany, where our guest is Tonya Rawe, who runs the Food and Nutrition Security program at CARE International. CARE is a humanitarian aid ...
025: Trademarks, Gateways, And Global Climate Talks
November 15, 2017 10:20 - 44 minutes - 61.6 MBTowards the end of summer, climate negotiators learned of three trademark applications that were filed in May of this year. One was for the logo “REDDPLUSX”, which is described as a carbon credit brokerage. Another was for the logo “RRU”, which are proposed carbon credits generated by saving or supporting forests under the Paris Agreement. But it was the third, for the logo REDD+, that raised eyebrows across the climate community. It raised those eyebrows because scores of organizations...
024 The Grand Experiment To Save Appalachia’s Forests
October 28, 2017 15:42 - 58 minutes - 80.1 MBThe DOGWOOD ALLIANCE is an environmental NGO based in the Southeastern United States -- a region that produces 12 percent of the world's wood, pulp, and paper. STAPLES is a massive stationary and office-supply chain based up in the northern part of the country, in Massachusetts, and it buys reams and reams of paper from suppliers like Georgia Pacific and International Paper, who in turn buy paper made from trees taken from forests across the very region that Dogwood is trying to protect. ...
023 Raw Audio From New York Climate Week
October 28, 2017 14:24 - 1 hour - 151 MBToday's episode is different from most: For the most part, it's just raw audio from the Climate Week that we built episode 22 on -- namely, the event where Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 unveiled its 10 keys to slashing deforestation by 2020. I didn't edit the audio except to adjust volume levels here and there, and I don't pontificate, proselytize, or prognosticate, except towards the end, where they cut away a video that you obviously can't see with your ears. Here is a list of speaker...
022: Ten Keys To Deforestation-Free Commodities By 2020
October 09, 2017 14:49 - 50 minutes - 69.6 MBTeaser NARRATOR Donuts, deodorant, buns and burgers. They're killing us -- and not just because of what they do to our bodies. No, it's because of what the soy, beef, and palm-oil that they're made of -- and they paper they're packaged in -- do to the environment. More specifically, it's because of the way way we get these commodities -- by chopping or degrading forests -- which is one reason that tropical forests now emit more greenhouse gasses than they absorb, according to a study...
021 AlphaSource: Investing in Forest Carbon
August 17, 2017 05:03 - 48 minutes - 66.5 MBIf you know anything about IKEA Group, the giant Scandinavian furniture company, you know that most of their products are made of wood, and you may even know that they're one of the "good" companies that tries to buy only products that are sustainably harvested. They've pledged that, by 2020, 100 percent of their wood, pulp, and paper will either be recycled or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as sustainably produced. So far, they're on track to achieve that, according to the Fo...
020 Brazil and Indonesia: Connecting the Climate Dots
August 10, 2017 14:53 - 1 hour - 100 MBHave you ever heard of a company called Marfrig Global Foods? How about JBS? Hint: JBS is named after "Jose Batista Sobrinho", a Brazilian rancher who's something like the Oscar Meyer of Brazil, only much bigger.Yes, JBS and Marfrig are two of the world’s largest meatpackers, and you’ll find their products in Walmart and McDonald’s in the United States, Marks & Spencer in the United Kingdom, Albert Hein in the Netherlands… but usually with someone else's name on it. Both companies grew a...
019: Can Europe Tap The Private Sector To Protect Its Environment?
July 19, 2017 13:50 - 54 minutes - 75.1 MBOur show today starts with two French communes -- namely, Contrexéville and Vittel -- because these two have some of the cleanest, purest water in all of Europe, but they also almost didn't. Up until 1992, the farms here -- like those across Europe and around the world -- had been dribbling pesticide and cow poop into the water, while home-owners and businessmen had been doing the same for crude oil and other pollutants. But then the communes undertook a massive environmental overhaul. ...
018 | Why Zoologist Andrew Mitchell Left the Forest to Save the Forest
July 13, 2017 23:55 - 40 minutes - 55.6 MBToday we speak with Andrew Mitchell, founder and director of the Global Canopy Programme (GCP). A zoologist by training, Andrew realized that to save the forest, he had to leave the forest and enter the economic system that was impacting it. So he founded and runs GCP in Oxford and recently became a Senior Adviser to Ecosphere Plus, which is an impact investment group that funnels money into sustainable land-use. I caught up to him in May at the Innovate4Climate conference in Barcelona. I ...
How Marks & Spencer Is Helping To Build A Global ‘Sustainability Tribe’
June 19, 2017 15:56 - 38 minutes - 53.5 MBWhen UK retailer Marks & Spencer launched its ambitious sustainability strategy in early 2007, it dubbed the strategy “Plan A” to remind us that we have just one planet, so there is no Plan B. Plan A amounted to nothing less than a complete restructuring of the company’s supply chain – from the thousands of small farmers who produce its raw materials to the millions of people who buy its products – and it launched with an ambitious list of 100 commitments covering everything from the wa...
Bertrand Piccard Wants You (And Your Climate Solutions)
June 16, 2017 02:31 - 26 minutes - 36.7 MBIt's been almost a year since a Swiss engineer/businessman named André Borschberg and a Swiss psychiatrist/balloonist named Bertrand Piccard completed the first-ever around the world flight in a solar-powered airplane -- the Solar Impulse 2, a machine that could, theoretically, fly forever without every pausing to refuel. But this wasn't just an adventure. It was a mission to show that we can meet the climate challenge, and it's a mission that Bertrand Piccard is still continuing. I ran...
015: How Garlic Cloves and Orange Peels Cut Cow Burps and Slow Climate Change
June 08, 2017 00:15 - 39 minutes - 53.9 MBMore than 1.5 billion cows are spread across the planet, each with four stomachs. That's six billion stomachs emitting methane -- a powerful greenhouse gas that captures about eighty times more heat -- or contributes about eighty times as much to climate change -- as carbon dioxide does, at least in the short term. Now a new product called Mootral -- like "Neutral" but with a Mooo instead of a Nooo -- aims to slash those emissions by killing off the bad bacteria in the stomachs of cows an...
014: One Billion Tons of Voluntary Carbon
May 30, 2017 17:10 - 37 minutes - 51.1 MBWith the United Kingdom on the brink of leaving the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), the United States locked in the inertia of a Donald Trump presidency, and populism stoking fears of slackening commitment to meeting the climate challenge, support for carbon markets is coming from two once-unlikely sources: namely, risk-adverse corporate boards and China, according to the International Emission Trading Association’s (IETA) annual Greenhouse-Gas Market Sentiment survey, whic...
013 How to Track Climate Laws of the World
May 11, 2017 12:38 - 15 minutes - 22 MBOne hundred and forty-four countries have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement, and 143 of them say they'll stay-in-it – even if Donald Trump pulls the United States out. But staying in and delivering what you stayed in to do are two different things. One way to track progress is to track laws, and a newly-updated database tracks over 1200 of them. 11 May 2017 | The United States may be backsliding on climate under President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled House and Senate, but ...
012 Will Trump "Get Out of the Way" on Climate?
May 08, 2017 15:56 - 18 minutes - 25.5 MBClimate negotiators are meeting in Bonn, Germany, the next two weeks to move the Paris Climate Agreement forward – even as Republicans in the United States seem intent on moving it backward. Most countries say they want the US to stay in the agreement, but there’s reason to believe it will be better off without us. 8 May 2017 | The dark-haired man looked haggard and world-weary as he leaned towards the microphone. “We ask for your leadership,” he told US Undersecretary of State Paula Do...
011 New Age of Radical Transparency
December 02, 2016 18:36 - 35 minutes - 48.5 MBToday we examine an amazing new tool called "Trase", which launched at year-end climate talks in Marrakesh, Morocco. It shows you something we've always known was there, but could never see: namely, 320,000 supply threads, going from individual municipalities in Brazil, through local brokers, to importers in countries around the world. With it, you can see which trading companies are buying soybeans form municipalities where farmers are chopping forests to grow them, and companies can se...
010 Climate Change in the Trumpocalypse / Part 2: The Role of US States, Regions, and Business
November 27, 2016 21:34 - 38 minutes - 52.4 MBUS president-elect Donald Trump claims to have an open mind on climate science, but he put an unabashed climate-science denier in charge of his environmental transition team, and he says he'll slash NASA's climate-monitoring capabilities. Might a president who doesn't believe in climate science still find it worthwhile to stay in the Paris Agreement? And who will pick up the slack if he doesn't? These are questions we addressed in three stories on Ecosystem Marketplace: “Can Individua...
009 Climate Change in the Trumpocalypse / Part 1: Initial Reactions
November 10, 2016 11:41 - 23 minutes - 32.2 MBInitial reactions from Marrakesn to Trump Victory in US I came to year-end climate talks here in Marrakesh with a clear plan to cover the most complicated elements of these talks and break them down for a general audience. I'd intended to focus mostly on how global supply chains would change in response to this process – and I still will – but Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election has changed everything. The talks are continuing, and the Paris Agreement remains in place ...
008 Can New Aviation Agreement Save Forests?
October 07, 2016 21:15 - 42 minutes - 58.1 MBOn Thursday, 65 countries representing 83% of international aviation agreed to cap their greenhouse-gas emissions from international flights at 2020 levels from 2021 onward – in part by forcing airlines to offset emissions above that threshold, and MAYBE by funding programs that save forests and support sustainable agriculture around the world. A final decision on offset types, however, isn’t expected until 2018 Backgrond: The Paris Climate Agreement created a framework for keeping the glo...