Is Climate Anxiety Keeping People From Having Children? (w/ Dr. Jade Sasser)

In 2018, economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, which was the first neoclassical growth model to incorporate the impacts of a warming planet on the global economy.  While celebrated for its economic innovations, the DICE model and its outputs have been criticized by climate scientists for not adequately considering the devastating impacts that a rapidly warming planet will have on the environment, human wellbeing, and the economy.  Conventional attempts of forecasting GDP impacts of a one degree increase in global temperatures using the DICE model typically produce estimates of little more than a 1% decrease in global GDP. Critics argue that by downplaying the future economic costs resulting from a warming planet, these types of economic models make it easier for policymakers to justify delaying actions now to reduce emissions and slow or even stop global warming. But in a new paper titled "The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs Local Temperature", Dr. Adrien Bilal and Dr. Diego Kaenzig unveil a new model to predict the impact that global warming will have on the global economy. Their findings suggest previous studies were significantly off and, in fact, global GDP will be drastically reduced if the planet continues to warm on its current trajectory. Dr. Bilal and Dr. Kaenzig join The Climate Pod to discuss their new paper, how their approach differed from previous attempts at quantifying the economic impact of climate change, and what this means for policymakers. Dr. Adrien Bilal is an Assistant Economics Professor at Harvard University. Dr. Diego Kaenzig is an Assistant Economics Professor at Northwestern University. Read the paper here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32450 As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

Over the past five years, there have been several studies showing how the climate crisis is impacting major life decisions.  Whether it’s where to live, how to invest, or what to study, young people today are being forced to confront a climate-worsened future and decide what’s best for their personal situation given the very public failures of leaders to limit global warming.  One particular decision that has received a lot of public attention is whether or not to have a child in the middle of a climate crisis.  These studies are appearing more frequently than ever before as the climate crisis becomes more apparent than ever, but almost all of these studies fail to incorporate how this decision is impacted by the respondent's race. Dr. Jade Sasser joins the podcast this week to talk about how climate anxiety is affecting some of life's biggest decisions. Dr. Jade Sasser is an Associate Professor at the University of California Riverside and the author of the new book "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future."  Not only does this book explore the anxieties and hesitations that people have about bringing children into a world in the midst of a climate crisis, but it also looks at how the climate crisis exacerbates other social inequities and how climate anxiety affects people of different races differently. Read "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question" Listen to Dr. Sasser's podcast "Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question" As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.    

Popular films have massive influence over our culture. It's where we go to see the biggest stories on the biggest screen. It's where we go to see Nicole Kidman do that weird commerical before the film starts. Movies are really, really important. So, why isn't the climate crisis, one of the defining issues of our time, on the silver screen more often. That's a question Anna Jane Joyner and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson are investigating. Together, they put together a new report, Climate Reality On-Screen: The Climate Crisis in Popular Films, 2013–22, which outlines how often the climate crisis is showing up in famous flicks and how often we see characters aware of its existence on screen. This week, Anna Jane and Matthew explain their findings, what it means for the industry, our politics, and how filmmakers can do better going forward.  Anna Jane Joyner is a climate story consultant and the founder and director of Good Energy.  Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is an associate professor of English and environmental studies at Colby College. Read their report, Climate Reality On-Screen: The Climate Crisis in Popular Films, 2013–22 here.  As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

The American Climate Corps, an initiative that will employ 20,000 Americans in its first year to combat the climate crisis, is launching this week as the Biden Administration delivers on another campaign promise. Learning from previous national service programs such as FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps and AmeriCorps, the American Climate Corps will give young people the opportunity to learn new skills, build a pathway to a career in the clean energy economy, and earn a competitive wage. On this special Earth Day 2024 episode, White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi joins us to explain how the American Climate Corps works, how people can participate, and why more money should be invested in growing the program to expand its reach and impact. We also talk about President Biden's Solar For All announcement which will fund $7 Billion in clean energy grants. Learn more about the American Climate Corps at www.ACC.gov As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.        

For years, we've watched as Bill Weir has brought climate storytelling to one of the biggest news networks on television. On CNN, Bill has traveled the world to cover everything from extreme weather disasters to cutting-edge climate solutions. And throughout an incredibly eventful career, he's learned life lessons he hopes his children and others will consider to preserve what we love most on this warming planet. Bill joins the show this week to explain why chose this career path, what he enjoyed most about his early days as a sports reporter and actor, and what he sets out to accomplish every day on the climate beat.  Bill Weir is the Chief Climate Correspondent at CNN. He’s an Emmy Award-winning journalist, who has reported from all fifty states and more than 50 countries on every continent. His new book is Life as we Know it (Can Be) - Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World.  As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.    

Shannon Osaka has been one of our favorite climate journalists for years. So we were incredibly excited to have her on this week for a wide-ranging conversation on a variety of climate issues - like microplastics, extreme weather costs in the US, and covering climate change as we exceed 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. Shannon also explains how she got into climate journalism after studying the science of climate change, how she approaches her work, and the challenges of covering climate in 2024.  Shannon Osaka is a climate reporter covering policy, culture, and science for The Washington Post. Read her recent pieces we discuss on this week's episode: Why Americans pay so much more than anyone else for weather disasters With microplastics, scientists are in a race against time Earth breached a feared level of warming over the past year. Are we doomed? Read more of Shannon's work here As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.  

For decades, the biggest pushback against renewable energy was that it was more expensive to generate than electricity that came from the burning of fossil fuels. But all that changed in 2016 when both solar and wind-generated electricity became cheaper than electricity generated by coal and natural gas, at least when using the industry-standard metric, Levelized Cost of Energy. Despite the fact that renewable energy has overcome its biggest obstacle and can now be generated cheaper than fossil fuels, investments in fossil fuels continue to increase and new renewable generation development is not keeping pace with increases in demand. What happened? Brett Christophers is a Professor at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University. He joined the podcast this week to explain why price isn't the most important metric to look at when determining the prospects for the development of clean energy projects. His new book, "The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet", provides some answers to the question of why renewables aren't growing as quickly as we need them to, given that the price of renewables have fallen well below their fossil fuel counterparts. His critiques of capitalism, energy markets, and our fascination with the Levelized Cost of Energy are some of the most compelling arguments you're likely to hear on why we need transformative changes instead of incremental reforms to our existing economic system, especially when it comes to how electricity is bought and sold. Read "The Price is Wrong" As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.  

The climate crisis presents us with a number of moral challenges. We all produce emissions, but there are massive differences and inequities in how much pollution each individual is responsible for and who is harmed the most by the consequences. As the very real impacts of the crisis only become more obvious and deadly, we continue to ask ourselves: what is our responsibility?  In this week's show, we dig into some of the tough ethical considerations for living in a climate crisis. To do so, we talk to Travis Rieder, an associate research professor at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Rieder is the author of multiple books including In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids. His latest book is Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices. We discuss the conversations around individual responsibility vs. collective action, how to determine our best path for fighting climate change, and what it means to exist between purity and nihilism.  Read Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.    

In 2021, Greta Thunberg spoke to the youth climate movement at an event leading up to COP26. Her famous "Blah, Blah, Blah" speech contrasted all of the things world leaders had said about the climate crisis and what those same leaders had actually done to reduce emissions and create policies to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. Three years later, very little has changed. Of the 128 countries that set Net Zero goals, only five percent have taken the required first steps toward achieving those goals. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elizabeth Kolbert joins the podcast this week to discuss how the climate crisis gets talked about by world leaders, activists, scientists, and the media may differ from the actual facts of the world's warming situation. Her new book "H is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z" is a collection of 26 essays on various aspects of the climate crisis which tell the complete picture of what's going on, what's led us to this point, and where we could go from here. Like Elizabeth's previous books, such as "Field Notes from a Catastrophe", "The Sixth Extinction", and "Under a White Sky", "H is for Hope" is an insightful and sobering book from one of today's great climate writers. Read "H is for Hope"  As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.

Over the last century, economic growth, as measured by increases in countries' Gross Domestic Product, has been the key indicator of success. And while GDP has skyrocketed in many countries, so has fossil fuel use, deforestation, and the destruction of natural ecosystems. On top of that, inequality has actually gotten worse in many countries and incomes, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated for many parts of these "growing" economies. It seems this relentless focus on growth has not created the kind of world that most people want to live in. Professor Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist, political ecologist, and Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona. He's also the author of several books about degrowth economics - the field of economics that questions the insatiable need for growth and seeks an alternative societal structure that supports everyone, regardless of a country's ability to grow GDP. Professor Kallis joins the show to talk about degrowth economics and why it is critical to achieve the degrowth goals if we want to reduce the negative impacts of the climate crisis. We also discuss the role that 18th century philosopher and theologian Thomas Malthus had on modern economics, why he was so wrong about inequality and limits, and some of the ideas that get attributed to him that weren't actually his. Check out these two books by Professor Kallis: "The Case for Degrowth" "Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care" As always, follow us @climatepod on Twitter and email us at [email protected]. Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! Join our Facebook group.