Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

Carpetmaker Interface has won accolades for its carbon-negative carpet, the manufacture of which pulls more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits. He're a look back on the company's 20-year journey from plundered of nature to climate leader.  Guest: Buddy Hay, Interface VP for Sustainability

What do Bill Gates, Mark Carney, Annette Nazareth, and Agustin Silvani have in common? They all believe that well-designed voluntary carbon markets can help the world achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert disaster. Today, they explain the new Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVDM)  Most music provided by Blue Dot Sessions

The UN's Emissions Gap Report showed that the current Paris Agreement Climate Plans (NDCs )will leave us nowhere near where we need to be to avert a climate catastrophe. Will Burns of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University joins me in a year-end retrospective.

Today I speak with environmental scientist Jason Funk, who runs the Land Use and Climate Knowledge Initiative (LUCKI) about the important findings of a paper called "Long-term thermal sensitivity of earth's tropical forests," which looks at whether forests can continue to pull carbon from the atmosphere as temperatures rise. What they found is: it's complicated.

In this episode, we speak with oceanographer and sedimentologist Steve Crooks, one of the world's leading authorities on coastal ecosystems and climate change. Related Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/em-audio-and-video-em-vietnamese-deputy-prime-minister-opens-katoomba-xvii-vows-to-integrate-economy-and-environment/

In this episode, which originally aired in October, 2018, 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 State. While there, Bobby Kennedy noticed him and persuaded Durley to join the Peace Corp, which he did. That brought him to Nigeria, then to Switzerland before coming home to the United States and becoming a central figure in Atlanta's Civil Rights scene. He says we can tap the same forces that galvanized the Civil Rights movement to fix the climate mess, but only if we recognize its inherently moral nature.

If there's one thing COVID-19 reminds us, it's that global institutions matter. For that reason, I'm replaying this 2016 episode looking at the Sustainable Development Goals.

Global greenhouse-gas emissions will drop 5.5 percent this year because of COVID-19, but they must drop 7.6 percent every year to meet the Paris Agreement's 1.5C target. Forest carbon offsets provide one way of getting there fast, but can we trust these offsets? Do they do what they say they do? This week, we hear how the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) handles carbon accounting at different scales. And my guest, Naomi Swickard, actually makes it interesting.

When US President Donald Trump disbanded his country's pandemic response team, he did so because "I don't like having thousands of people around when we don't need them." That cost-cutting measure could cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and it's a classic example of what happens when we value efficiency over resilience.  What are efficiency and resilience? Today we draw on the work of Cardiff University Lecturer Paul Nieuwenhuis to find out.

Costa Rica says it will have zero net greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, and its electrical grid already runs on 99 percent renewable energy. Today's guest is a key part of its success. As Minister of Environment, Energy and Telecommunications,  Carlos Manuel Rodriguez has overseen programs that tripled the country's forest coverage while slashing its use of fossil fuels -- all while growing its economy.

Today's guest, Daniel Palken, volunteers with a group called the Citizens Climate Lobby, or "CCL", which aims to slash US greenhouse-gas emissions by imposing a fee on fossil fuels. The fee will be based on the amount of greenhouse gas that the coal, gasoline, and jet fuels will generate when we burn them, and it will probably make fossil-fuel energy more expensive. But there's a catch -- or, the opposite of a catch... a bonus -- a dividend, if you will, because that's what CCL calls it. Under the proposed "Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act," all money raised by the carbon fee will go back to US citizens in the form of a dividend. We each pay into the system based on how much energy we use -- whether in the form of an extra few cents at the pump or slightly higher groceries -- but every single citizen gets the same dividend back. A fee-and-dividend system is different from the cap-and-trade programs that I usually focus on, for lots of reasons we get into. Daniel says that a fee-and-dividend scenario

Developing 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 entire economy emits right now. At that same carbon price, the Central African Republic can use NCS strategies to boost its GDP a staggering 90 percent. Different Countries; Different Scenarios Authored by scientists from 17 organizations, the new paper looks at 12 natural climate solutions across 79 tropical countries and identifies activities that can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6.6 billion metric tons per year – ore more than all of the emissions generated by the United States – at a price of $50 per ton or lower. “W

There'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.

On 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 percent of the way to meeting the Paris Climate Agreement targets -- sometimes at no cost, sometimes at just $10 per ton, and often while increasing food yields and reducing the cost of farming.

The 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/

In 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

2019 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 Rainforest Nations  

We 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 stuff agree on, it’s that we can slow climate change by eating less meat and wasting less food, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) new Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), which was published this morning in Geneva.

Environmental 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.

It'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, which almost always exist because of laws that require people to clean up their messes or reduce their pollution. To slow climate change, for example, we have to put a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, but how do we meet that cap? There are basically two ways. In command-and-control, a regulator writes up detailed, step-by-step prescriptions that have to be followed to the letter. In cap-and-trade, which is a market-based mechanism, emitters find their own way of meeting the cap, and they're allowed to sell emission-reductions to o