Podcasts about columbia climate school

All the colours of the rainbow, plus oneResearchers have fired lasers directly into the eye to stimulate photoreceptors, and produce the perception of a colour that does not exist in nature. They describe it as a “supersaturated teal,” and hope the technique will allow them to better understand colour vision and perhaps lead to treatments for vision problems. Austin Roorda has been developing this technology using mirrors, lasers and optical devices. He is a professor of Optometry and Vision Science at University of California, Berkeley. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.Following in the footsteps of an ancient ankylosaurPaleontologists have found fossil footprints of an armoured dinosaur in the Canadian Rockies that fill in a critical gap in the fossil record. The footprints belonged to a club-tailed ankylosaur about five to six metres long, and are the first evidence of this type of dinosaur living in North America in a period known as the middle Cretaceous. The research was led by Victoria Arbour, curator of paleontology at the Royal B.C. Museum, and published in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology.Did the Neanderthals die from sunburn?Neanderthals disappeared 40,000 years ago, and new research suggests this corresponds to a period of weakness in the Earth's magnetic field that allowed an increase in the solar radiation reaching the surface. Researchers think they have evidence that modern humans were able to protect themselves from the sun better than Neanderthals could, and this might have contributed to the Neanderthal extinction. Raven Garvey is an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. Her team's research was published in the journal Science. Cloudy with a chance of ammonia mushballsNew observations and models of activity within Jupiter's stormy atmosphere is giving a weather report for the giant planet, and it's pretty extreme. Most interestingly, researchers predict conditions that could lead to violent lightning storms producing softball sized frozen ammonia “mushballs” that would rain through the upper atmosphere. The research was led by Chris Moeckel, a planetary scientist and aerospace engineer at the University of California-Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and was published in the journal Science Advances.Shattering heat records: climate change is turning out to be worse than expectedIn the last few years, we've seen global temperatures rising faster, with more extreme localized heatwaves, than climate models predicted. Climate scientists are trying to understand this by investigating the underlying factors behind these heating trends. Richard Allan, from the University of Reading in the U.K., was expecting a larger than normal rise in global temperatures due to natural fluctuations, but global temperatures in 2023 and 2024 were much higher than expected. Their recent study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found a growing imbalance in the earth's heat system, with increasingly more heat coming in than leaving, in large part due to changes we've seen in global cloud cover.This global heating is not happening evenly around the world. Kai Kornhuber, from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and Columbia Climate School in New York, found regional hotspots that are experiencing unexpected extreme heat, likely due to a combination of factors. That study is in the journal PNAS. 

Home insurance is one of those things you need to have and hope to never need. But as risk from climate disasters increases, many homeowners are finding it more and more difficult to obtain an affordable policy. This is especially true in the American West, where wildfires are creating more uncertainty than insurance companies are willing to cover, forcing many homeowners to enroll in state-run insurance plans. Daniel and Alison sit down with Dr. Lisa Dale, director of the Climate and Society Masters program at the Columbia Climate School, for a conversation about how policymakers can help communities navigate the insurance crisis as it relates to wildfires. Show notes: Risky Business: Insurance in the Era of Climate Change (briefing): https://www.eesi.org/briefings/view/050625insurance  Missing the mark: Effectiveness and funding in community wildfire risk reduction (Headwaters Economics report): https://headwaterseconomics.org/natural-hazards/missing-the-mark-wildfire/  All Fired up for Innovation in Wildfire Risk Analysis (podcast): https://www.eesi.org/podcasts/view/7.6-all-fired-up-for-innovation-in-wildfire-risk-analysis  Living with Climate Change: Wildfires (briefing): https://www.eesi.org/briefings/view/061322climatechange  Rethinking Tourism in the Wake of West Maui's Wildfires (article): https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/rethinking-tourism-in-the-wake-of-west-mauis-wildfires 

We continue to see disasters increase in size, frequency and impact. What are we doing wrong when it comes to disaster resilience, especially as it impacts our ability to adapt to the climate impacts that are experiencing and take a longer view to disaster resilience.  The podcast guest is Jeff Schlegelmilch an Associate Professor for Professional Practice in Climate. He is also the Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, as well as the Director of Executive Education and Non-Degree Programs for the Columbia Climate School. His areas of expertise include public health preparedness, community resilience, and the integration of private and public sector capabilities. In addition to his work at Columbia, he also served as an advisor to private sector organizations on topics related to grid resilience planning and advised leaders on preparedness systems and policy at all levels of government. He is an opinion contributor with The Hill and is frequently called upon as an expert for numerous media outlets. He is also the author of Rethinking Readiness: A Brief Guide to Twenty-First-Century Megadisasters and co-author of Catastrophic Incentives: Why Our Approaches To Disasters Keep Falling ShortPlease visit our sponsors!L3Harris Technologies' BeOn PPT App. Learn more about this amazing product here: www.l3harris.com Impulse: Bleeding Control Kits by professionals for professionals: www.dobermanemg.com/impulseDoberman Emergency Management Group provides subject matter experts in planning and training: www.dobermanemg.com

On today's program we talk about how universities are key innovators in solving the climate crisis. At the same time, as we read daily in the news, they're dealing with tremendous uncertainty. So how is Lisa Sachs, the Director of the Columbia University Center on Sustainable Investment and the recently launched Columbia Climate School MS in Climate Finance, coping with these uncertainties in U.S. climate policy and sustainable finance? And what about the volatility in career opportunities that graduates of these programs will face during the next four years? For Sachs, these are just two of the stress points she is managing in today's university environment. Sachs is also an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia Climate School, where climate science and climate change are engaged in the 21st Century's existential challenge for supremacy.

Geelong's Climate Cafe meets again this month - "Climate Café launched in Geelong"; "Winter Storm Blankets the East Coast, With Arctic Air on Its Heels"; "Locking up a 77-year-old climate protester is proof of a broken justice system"; "Wind Wars"; "Cost-of-living crisis meets new era of electric cars"; "Biden Bans New Oil and Gas Drilling Along Most U.S. Coasts"; "What Would It Take to Bring Renewable, Reliable Power to Puerto Rico?"; "Polar Vortex' Got You Baffled? Try This Extreme-Weather Guide"; "Global Water Monitor"; "High Heat Is Preferentially Killing the Young, Not the Old, New Research Finds"; "World Water Film Festival Makes a Splash at Columbia Climate School"; "'He was prescient': Jimmy Carter, the environment and the road not taken"; "A new solar project in Brooklyn could offer a model for climate justice"; "UK EV sales reached record highs in 2024, SMMT reveals"; "In 2025, let's make it game on – not game over – for our precious natural world"; "Artefacts from Pacific museums being put at risk"; "UK Electricity Reached a Record 58% From Low-Carbon Sources in 2024"; "All Chicago City Buildings Now Run on Renewable Energy"; "Deep-Sea Mining 101: Everything You Need to Know"; "Arbor Day Foundation to Plant 10 Million Trees to Replace Those Destroyed by Hurricanes Helene and Milton"; "Winter Storm Blair: Millions across North America hit by polar vortex"; "Fuel-hungry utes and SUVs dominate Australian sales, with Corolla the only small car on top 10 list"; "Fully recovering Australia's threatened species would cost 25% of GDP. We can't do it all at once – so let's start here"; "Relentless warming is driving the water cycle to new extremes, the 2024 global water report shows"; "The Renewable Energy Transition Has Residents of a Small Arizona Town on Edge".

The artificial intelligence boom is fueling a massive uptick in energy demand globally.  A Goldman Sachs report from earlier this year claimed that processing a single ChatGPT query requires almost ten times the amount of electricity as a single Google search.  But it's not just ChatGPT queries driving up demand. As we transition to more renewable energy sources, AI is becoming critical to managing and improving efficiency across our electric grid.  So how are some of the biggest American tech companies securing the power they need to meet demand? They're going nuclear.  Tech giant Microsoft recently secured a deal to restart the last functional reactor at Three Mile Island with access to 100% of the power generated. And Amazon announced a $500 million investment to develop small modular nuclear reactors. It's a sign that large tech companies see data centers – and the AI they enable –  as critical to their futures.  This week, host Bill Loveless talks with Jason Bordoff and Jared Dunnmon about their latest co-written column for Foreign Policy, titled “America's AI Leadership Depends on Energy.” Jason is founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He's also a professor of professional practice in international and public affairs, the co-founding dean emeritus at the Columbia Climate School, and a former senior director on the staff of the U.S. National Security Council. Jared is a nonresident fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy. He's also a former technical director for artificial intelligence at the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Innovation Unit.

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, spoke with Forbes' Maggie McGrath about the damage that Florida faces from Hurricane Milton--and how misinformation from some politicians about FEMA funds is deliberately misleading.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this Convo of Flanigan's Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Professor Michael Gerrard from Columbia University. He is the founder and faculty director of the groundbreaking Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and one of the foremost environmental lawyers in the nation. Michael is an advocate, litigator, teacher, and scholar who has pioneered cutting-edge legal tools and strategies for addressing climate change. He writes and teaches courses on environmental law, climate change law, and energy regulation. He was the chair of the faculty of Columbia University's renowned Earth Institute from 2015 to 2018 and now holds a joint appointment to the faculty of its successor, the Columbia Climate School.He and Ted discuss his background, growing up in Charleston, West Virginia in an immensely polluted area, which led to his interest in studying and protecting the environment. He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, and has been there ever since. He started his career in journalism, later deciding to become an environmental lawyer, and then shifted to writing books and entered the world of academia. Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2009, Michael practiced law in New York for three decades, most recently as the partner in charge of the New York office of Arnold & Porter. As an environmental lawyer, he tried numerous cases and argued many appeals in federal and state courts and administrative tribunals. He also handled the environmental aspects of diverse transactions and development projects and provided regulatory compliance advice to an array of clients in the private and public sectors. Several publications rated him the leading environmental lawyer in New York and one of the leaders in the world.He has also written or edited 14 books, including Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, the first and leading work in its field (co-edited with Jody Freeman and Michael Burger), and Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States (co-edited with John Dernbach). His 12-volume Environmental Law Practice Guide and four-volume Brownfields Law and Practice each received the Association of American Publishers' Best Law Book of the Year award.He highlights some of his most impressionable career cases, and shares that he is currently leading a legal effort to sue the Governor for New York, Kathy Hochul, for indefinitely pausing the rollout of congestion pricing in New York City. He also shares with Ted his work with the government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands on the legal issues caused by rising sea levels that threaten the island nation.

Today, the US Supreme Court offered a boost to the Biden administration by backing a federal gun ban for domestic abusers. But all eyes are on some key decisions which are yet to be released. These include whether former President Trump is protected from prosecution for actions taken while he was president, whether the prosecution of January 6th rioters via an obstruction statute is lawful, and if a restrictive Idaho abortion ban, which is preventing some patients from getting treatment, can continue. Jessica Roth, Professor of Law at the Cardozo Law School, and Steven Mazie, the Supreme Court Correspondent for The Economist, joined the show to discuss today's rulings, as well as what lies ahead.  Also on today's show: Dr. Radley M. Horton, Professor of Climate, Columbia Climate School; Dr. Rev. William J. Barber II, Founding Director, Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, Yale Divinity School / Author, “White Poverty”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Professor Alex Halliday founded the Columbia Climate School and has long championed the need for climate action. "US Elections: Could Trump Surprise Us On Climate?"; "Get on with orderly energy transition, says Origin boss"; "‘It makes our life easier': Climate campaigns seize on Dutton's refusal to set target"; "Talking the Talk: Dutton dumps climate commitment, Labor speaks with forked tongue"; "Maine college builds climate-friendly dorm out of wood"; "Why scientists fear a second Trump term, and what they are doing about it"; "Peter Dutton has reignited Australia's climate wars. We fact-check the major claims"; "Farmers who graze sheep under solar panels say it improves productivity. So why don't we do it more?"; "Will Mexico's New Climate Scientist President Change the Country's Energy Policy?"; "At risk from rising sea levels, these First Nations peoples are finding solidarity in their shared struggle"; "Serious heat wave to scorch the East next week. Maps show areas at risk."; "‘It makes our life easier': Climate campaigns seize on Dutton's refusal to set target"; "I'm a conservative. We need to make the environment non-partisan"; "Minnesota takes rare step to allow power lines alongside highways"; "Shocking: man who joked about Pacific Island nations sinking doesn't actually care about the environment"; "EnergyHub receives CEC grant to support expansion of virtual power plants in California"; "Congestion Has Never Been Worse; The Need for Congestion Pricing, Never Greater."; "Cemeteries Can Be Damaged by Climate Change—and Provide Climate Refuge"; "As the Country Heats Up, ERs May See an Influx of Young Patients Struggling With Mental Health"; "Looking at the Planetary Past to Prepare for Our Climate Changed Future—An Interview with Steven Earle"; "A year of record global heat has pushed Earth closer to dangerous threshold"; "Heavy flooding hits parts of South Florida after severe rains"; "Anatomy of a flood"; "European Union Hits E.V.s From China With Extra Tariffs Up to 38%"; "If regional communities don't want a windfarm, why would they accept a nuclear power station?"; "Peter Dutton accused of trying to ‘rip up' Australia's commitment to Paris climate agreement"; "Best-case scenario: 5% survive Milford Sound tsunami"; "End of the windmill era: NSW switches to safer, more efficient solar water pumps"; "Low-Traffic Neighborhoods Are Reclaiming London's Streets From Cars"; "Acropolis in Athens closed as Greece bakes in heatwave: What travellers need to know"; "EU to slap extra tariffs on Chinese electric cars in a bid to close competition gap"; "Where will climate change hit hardest? These interactive maps offer a telltale glimpse."; "The city that is trying to sleep: Paris seeks to cut noise pollution by four decibels"; "Up to 5m of beach are disappearing from this Spanish coast every year: Is climate change to blame?"; "My Climate View: online tool allows Australian farmers to project changes out to 2070"; "Scientists have built a ‘digital twin' of Earth to predict the future of climate change"; "How Congestion Pricing Makes Cities More Livable"; "Super election year: What are candidates in the UK, US and Australia planning on the climate?". --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-mclean/message

 In the next few months, heat waves, droughts, thunderstorms, and hurricanes will wreak havoc on regions around the world. Climate scientists say these events are becoming more extreme and dangerous thanks in part to the changing climate.  For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's outlook for the 2024 hurricane season, which just started June 1, anticipates an exceptionally high number of storms this year.  So, why are extreme weather events worsening? How is climate change contributing to this development? And what measures are being taken to adapt to this new reality?  This week host Bill Loveless talks with Radley Horton about the outlook for extreme weather events across the globe this summer, and why the intensity and severity of them is expected to increase. Radley is a professor at the Columbia Climate School, where he teaches and researches climate extremes, risks, impacts, and adaptation. He was a convening lead author for the United States' Third National Climate Assessment, and he is currently a principal investigator for NOAA, focusing on climate risk in the urban U.S. Northeast.

The amount of renewable generation that is forecasted to come online over the next few years is staggering. But renewable assets face risks - risks associated with the changing climate in the first place. As weather patterns change, affecting cloud cover, snow melt, or wind speed - renewable assets are especially vulnerable to these changes.In this episode, Paul unpacks how the changing climate may affect our increasing reliance upon renewable generation for our power supply.For further reference:"Will climate change suck the air out of Illinois' wind power industry?" - The Chicago Sun Times"Global ‘Stilling': Is Climate Change Slowing Down the Wind?" - Yale Environment 360"Hydropower: How droughts are affecting the world's biggest renewable energy source" - World Economic Forum"Wildfire smoke slashed solar power generation" - VergeRenewables 2023 Executive Summary - IEA"Global Review Assesses Hydropower's Vulnerability to Climate Change" - Columbia Climate School"Climate change extremes and photovoltaic power output" - Nature SustainabilityFollow Paul on LinkedIn.

In this episode of the Art + Climate series on the Tech in the Arts podcast, hear from Sandra Goldmark, an Associate Professor in Theatre at Barnard College and the Senior Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Engagement at the Columbia Climate School. A professor, designer, and entrepreneur, Sandra's work focuses on the circular economy and regenerative climate strategy. She is the founder of Fixup, a New York City-based pop-up repair shop, and the co-creator of the Sustainable Production Toolkit for performing arts organizations.    In this conversation with AMT Lab Lead Researcher, Hannah Brainard, Sandra shares how her background in theatrical design has supported her career in “stuff” and offers tips for arts organizations considering reducing their impact.    Additional Links: Sandra Goldmark: https://sandragoldmark.com/ Sustainable Production Toolkit: https://www.sustainableproductiontoolkit.com/  

On “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg'' Dani moderates a discussion about new research and tools that can help the world adapt to a changing climate, protect agrobiodiversity, and transform our approach to and understanding of food and nutrition. Speakers dive into the architecture of a food system that will help eaters make sustainable choices, the recent work that aims to better understand diets around the globe, and measuring progress from farm to plate.  Speakers include Jessica Fanzo, Professor of Climate and Director of the Food for Humanity Initiative at the Columbia Climate School; Anna Herforth, Senior Research Associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative's Scientific Advisory Committee; Gary Paul Nabhan, a writer, ethnobiologist, Research Social Scientist Emeritus at the University of Arizona, and the Co-Founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH; Andy Jarvis, Director of Future of Food at the Bezos Earth Fund; and Jonathan Lundgren, the Founder and Director of the Ecdysis Foundation. While you're listening, subscribe, rate, and review the show; it would mean the world to us to have your feedback. You can listen to “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” wherever you consume your podcasts.

Catherina McKenna (pictured) heaps praise on COP21 during an address to Columbia Climate School - "Catherine McKenna on Her Life, Work and Preserving the World for Future Generations"; "Ugly, treeless, hot: Push to force developers to plant trees in Melbourne's outer suburbs"; "‘Opportunistic' fraud and scams target disasters in a warming world"; "Ready or not, self-driving semi-trucks are coming to America's highways"; "Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?"; "Energy giant sees hydrogen outshining nuclear in race to replace coal"; "A River in Flux"; "How we are using AI for reliable flood forecasting at a global scale"; "Can Flashy Music Festivals Go Green?"; "Australian music festivals are increasingly affected by climate change. But is the industry doing enough to mitigate its impact?"; "17 people taken to hospital during Ed Sheeran concert at Acrisure Stadium"; "Climate change makes heat waves, storms and droughts worse, climate report confirms"; "Nearly 100 injured as hailstorm pummels Louis Tomlinson concert in Colorado"; "The BBC, Guyana, and Untangling North-South Climate Complexities"; "How we are using AI for reliable flood forecasting at a global scale"; "Flash flooding possible as thunderstorms rumble towards Melbourne from the west"; "Weather tracker: Cyclone Gamane unexpectedly veers into Madagascar"; "How a Blind Oceanographer Studies Temperature-Regulating Currents"; "Too far or not far enough? These are Europe's most and least popular climate policies"; "Major storm to sweep United States with severe weather, snow, flooding"; "U.S. clamps down on oil and gas firms releasing potent greenhouse gas"; "BYD says plug-in electrics will exceed 50 pct of new car sales in China in next 3 months"; "Po Valley: Air pollution is causing serious health risks for more than 16 million Italians"; "2024 Must Be the Year for Exponential Climate Action"; "Kim Beazley urges Tanya Plibersek to reject Woodside LNG plant extension"; "Energy giant wrongly received thousands from welfare payments of former customers under Centrelink scheme"; "Labor's car plan shifts down a gear as voters lukewarm on carbon targets"; "Five climate megaprojects that might just save the world"; "El Niño will cause record-breaking heat across the world this year"; "There are growing fears of an alarming shift in Antarctic sea ice"; "First Wisconsin tornadoes in February: ‘It's an absolute shock' (photos)"; "Water now a major risk for world's supply chains, reports CDP"; "Environmentalists Sue to Block Expansion of New York State's Largest Landfill"; "Volcanoes Can Affect Climate"; "Australia's carbon credits system a failure on global scale, study finds"; "Labor's chance to protect youth over fossil fuels"; "The surprising reasons why Big Oil may not want a second Trump term". --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-mclean/message

Columbia University's Daniel Zarrilli knows a thing or two about New York City and the effects of climate change.For almost a decade prior to Hurricane Sandy, he worked on the city's waterfront, managing maintenance and construction of the city's piers and bulkheads, overseeing cruise terminals and other maritime assets, and working with coastal communities on a variety of local projects. That experience along the city's 520-mile shoreline, plus his training as an engineer, put him in view of Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he was standing up his initiative to rebuild New York following Hurricane Sandy and make it more resilient.Bloomberg appointed Zarrilli as the city's first resilience director. He then became Chief Climate Policy Advisor under Mayor Bill de Blasio, helping usher landmark energy policy through the city council, which mandates emissions reductions produced by the city's largest buildings of 40 percent by 2030.Now Zarrilli serves as Special Advisor for Climate and Sustainability at Columbia University, helping to create a new world-leading climate school and advising on pathways to achieve the university's deep decarbonization goals. This wealth of deep experience and expertise makes him a valuable addition to the NYISO's Environmental Advisory Council, a group of outside experts that informs NYISO leadership on evolving state and federal climate policy and environmental justice considerations.Local Law 97, New York City's building decarbonization law passed in 2019, requires most buildings over 25,000 square feet to meet new energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions limits, with even stricter limits coming into effect in 2030.There are already indications that the policy is working, Zarrilli said.  “New Yorkers have so much to be proud of for the progress that has been made,” Zarrilli said. “There were $20 billion in climate adaptation investments made after Hurricane Sandy, everything from flood protection to grid upgrades to new elevated hospitals in our coastal communities.”  “I think the much more exciting thing about Local Law 97 is how it has catalyzed this marketplace in New York City around clean energy technology, innovation, and investment that is all now centered in New York City,” he said. “So much of our infrastructure was built for a world and a climate that doesn't exist anymore,” he said.He pointed to concerns about global economic conditions and supply chain challenges that can make electrification projects difficult. In the offshore wind space, he noted that some coastal communities have zoning concerns and questions that must be addressed and answered.Zarrilli credits the NYISO's forward-thinking approach to the wholesale electric market, which he says will drive incentives to speed up the clean energy transition. “The role that the NYISO plays to help provide that stimulus and incentive is really important, and not a fully appreciated role,” Zarrilli said, “but it's a critical one that I think the state and other ISOs are going to continue to learn from.Additional Resources and InformationThe New York ISO Environmental Advisory CouncilColumbia Climate SchoolLearn More Follow us on Twitter @NewYorkISO and LinkedIn @NYISO Read our blogs and watch our videos Check out our 2040 grid page

At the ESG Insider podcast, we've been hearing one key theme on repeat: Solutions to big sustainability challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss require collaboration across silos. This idea is coming across loud and clear at the global events we cover, from Climate Week NYC to COP28 in Dubai to the World Economic Forum's annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland.  In this 'Breaking down silos' miniseries of the podcast, we'll bring you examples of how collaboration across different groups of stakeholders happens in practice.    Today in Part I, we hear the perspective of an academic with a policy background in an interview with Jason Bordoff. Jason is Founding Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where he is a Professor of Professional Practice, and also Co-Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School.  Jason talks to us about the role of the private sector in the energy transition, which he says “has to be facilitated by policy.”  "We can't have a clean energy transition if we don't ensure reliability and security and affordability along the way," Jason says.   Listen to our episode about how AI became the buzzword at Davos: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/podcasts/how-ai-became-the-buzzword-at-davos   Listen to our episode about why nature was front and center on the Davos agenda: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/podcasts/nature-was-front-and-center-on-the-davos-agenda-here-s-why   Listen to our episode about 2024 trends that sustainability leaders are watching: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/podcasts/2024-trends-that-sustainability-leaders-are-watching   This piece was published by S&P Global Sustainable1, a part of S&P Global.     Copyright ©2024 by S&P Global     DISCLAIMER     By accessing this Podcast, I acknowledge that S&P GLOBAL makes no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information featured in this Podcast. The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice. Unless specifically stated otherwise, S&P GLOBAL does not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product, process, service, or organization presented or mentioned in this Podcast, and information from this Podcast should not be referenced in any way to imply such approval or endorsement. The third party materials or content of any third party site referenced in this Podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions, standards or policies of S&P GLOBAL. S&P GLOBAL assumes no responsibility or liability for the accuracy or completeness of the content contained in third party materials or on third party sites referenced in this Podcast or the compliance with applicable laws of such materials and/or links referenced herein. Moreover, S&P GLOBAL makes no warranty that this Podcast, or the server that makes it available, is free of viruses, worms, or other elements or codes that manifest contaminating or destructive properties.

Elizabeth Clines bok Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Cheap Fashion slog ner som en bomb i modeindustrin när den kom 2011. Den riktade strålkastaren mot snabbmodets konsekvenser. Det var en historia om exploatering av arbetare i fattiga länder, om kraftigt sjunkande relativpriser på kläder och en aldrig sinande prispress, om föroreningar och växande berg av textilavfall. Vad har hänt sedan dess? Vilka förändringar har haft störst påverkan? Vilka nya lagar och direktiv står vi inför? Hur kan företag arbeta med att förbättra arbetsvillkoren i fabrikerna? Vilka modeföretag gör bra ifrån sig? Är det möjligt att ställa sig utanför denna många gånger exploaterande struktur? Vad kan individer som du och jag göra?Trots att ämnet är tungt är samtalet hoppfullt.  Dessutom får vi höra historien bakom det framgångsrika #PayUp-initiativet och ta del av Remakes Accountability Report. Få industrier är så globala som just mode. I dagens avsnitt, liksom nästa, tittar vi närmare på konsekvenserna av denna globalisering. Intervjuade i avsnittet är Elizabeth Cline, författare till Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Cheap Fashion och lärare vid Columbia Climate School vid Columbia University, Tina Sendlhofer, forskare vid Stockholm Environment Institute och designern Angel Chang som är en slow fashion-förkämpe och gör kollektioner på den kinesiska landsbygden, helt utan elektricitet. Tack för att du lyssnar! Följ oss gärna på Instagram.

In April of this year, Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy reached its 10th anniversary. So this week, we're bringing back the conversation between hosts Bill Loveless and Jason Bordoff about the special milestone.  With the help of some colleagues, Jason founded CGEP in 2013 to produce unbiased, evidence-based research that examines energy issues in economics, national security, environment, and climate. Ten years later, CGEP is busier than ever addressing the world's energy and climate challenges through research, education, and dialogue. Jason is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy. He previously served as a special assistant to President Obama, and senior director for energy and climate change on the staff of the National Security Council. He has held senior policy positions on the White House's National Economic Council and Council on Environmental Quality. Earlier in his career, Jason was a scholar at the Brookings Institution, served in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, and was a consultant with McKinsey & Company.  He is also a co-founding dean emeritus of the Columbia Climate School.   

At Good Together, a huge part of what we do involves connecting the dots between conscious consumerism and climate change, and we recognize that daily actions CAN make a difference. But what if you're looking to get involved in a bigger way and even want to dedicate your career to the climate? Someone who's full of great advice is this week's guest, Dr. Lisa Allyn Dale, who teaches at Columbia Climate School in New York City. For more information, visit https://brightly.eco/blog/jobs-in-sustainability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

US healthcare emits a massive amount of carbon pollution at approximately 600 million tons annually or roughly 9% of total US greenhouse gasses.  Because of the rapid increase in climate crisis-related harms projected economic losses worldwide over the next few years are estimated in the trillions.  Consequently, the US is beginning to follow Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, Switzerland and the UK in mandating GHG emission and climate-risk disclosures.  Most noteworthy, in April 2022 the Security Exchange Commissions (SEC) issued a proposed rule, anticipated to go final this month, that will require publicly traded companies to disclose information about climate-related financial risks and financial metrics to inform investors in making corporate investment and voting decisions.  Just recently the California governor signed a “Climate Accountability Package,” the White House in late September charged the OMB to work with fed agencies to measure GHG emissions in order to calculate impacts on fed programs and the European Union has moved related reporting regulations that will impact American companies doing business overseas. During this 34 minute interview Ms. Hanawalt begins by outlining the proposed SEC climate disclosure rule. She next outlines CA's “Climate Accountability Package (S253 and S261) that address CA reporting for different sized private and public companies and discusses related European Union regulatory rules. Ms. Cynthia Hanawalt is the Director of the Sabin Center's financial regulation practice. Her work supports regulatory and policy responses to climate-related financial risk at the federal and state level and includes a focus on the complex intersections of ESG and antitrust law with sustainability goals and climate resiliency measures. Ms. Hanawalt is affiliated with Columbia Climate School and the Initiative for Climate Risk & Resilience Law. Prior to joining the Sabin Center, Ms. Hanawalt served as Chief of the Investor Protection Bureau for the New York State Office of the Attorney General and was a litigation partner at the firm Bleichmar Fonti & Auld. She was graduated from Columbia Law School where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Duke University where she received the William J. Griffith University Service Award.For more information regarding climate disclosure see these Sabin Center writings:https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2023/08/08/new-california-legislation-would-be-a-major-step-forward-for-climate-disclosure/https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2023/03/28/global-consensus-is-emerging-on-corporate-scope-3-disclosures-will-the-sec-lead-or-lag/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thehealthcarepolicypodcast.com

The Associate Professor of Climate, Columbia Climate School, Kristina G. Douglass (pictured) was one of three panellists on a webinar: "Climate Change and Societal Impacts" organised by the "Columbia Climate School". "People working on climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories"; "Individual actions you can take to address climate change"; "The Philippines' capital is running out of water. Is building a dam the solution?"; "How did Uruguay cut carbon emissions? The answer is blowing in the wind"; "Climate solutions are necessary. So we're dedicating a week to highlight them"; "Victoria's EV tax outlawed, but we're on the road to new charges"; "Greta Thunberg goes on ANOTHER climate change protest a day after Swedish eco-activist, 20, was charged with public order offence over London hotel demo"; "Amazon drought chokes river traffic, threatens northern corn exports"; "Nine ‘planetary boundaries' set the limits of global economic freedom"; "Melbourne's dams are chock-a-block. But El Nino is coming to dry things up"; "IMF should give poor countries $300bn a year to fight climate crisis, says Joseph Stiglitz"; "Rochester residents battle depression, displacement a year on from floods"; "Scientists Disagree About Drivers of September's Global Temperature Spike, but It Has Most of Them Worried"; "As gas-guzzlers dominate our roads, the queue to buy an EV in Oz just gets longer"; "People working on climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories"; "The EU must take the driver's seat in fossil fuel-free transport"; "The climate threat to California's stored nuclear waste"; "War in the Middle East jeopardizes climate talks"; "6 books to help talk to your child about climate change"; "Company invents first-of-its-kind system for powering cars: ‘Like having a gas station with your own oil well'"; "Where did all the cars go? How heavier, costlier SUVs and utes took over Australia's roads"; "High court strikes down Victoria's electric vehicle tax in ruling that could threaten other state levies"; "Australia must urgently adapt to extreme weather or face soaring premiums, insurers warn"; "Think you need another car? Consider an e-bike instead."; "We landed a camera on Venus before seeing parts of our own oceans – it's time to ramp up observations closer to home"; "The next front in the climate fight: U.S. exports of natural gas"; "Climate Misinformation Persists in New Middle School Textbooks"; "‘Climate Gentrification' Will Displace One Million People in Miami Alone"; "Farmers are bearing the brunt of big food companies' decarbonisation efforts – here's why"; "A Secretive Network Is Fighting Indigenous Rights in Australia and Canada, Expert Says"; "Europe Just Launched the World's First Carbon Tariff. Will the United States Follow Suit?"; "Australia is already an energy superpower. We should be using that to drive the world towards renewables"; "Red warning issued with Storm Babet posing ‘risk to life' in parts of Scotland"; "We don't need a nuclear renaissance. We need a solid plan on renewables"; "Atlas Network"; "Will the Earth breach its 1.5C guardrail sooner than we thought?"; "Climate Disinformation Database"; "The human factor: why Australia's net zero transition risks failing unless it is fair"; "People Deserve to Know Their Houses Are Going to Burn"; "To Teach Students about Climate Change, ‘Just the Facts' Isn't Enough"; "How Do We Dismantle Offshore Oil Structures Without Making the Public Pay?"; "How new investments and innovation in green tech are addressing climate change"; "How a ‘mosaic forest' is helping France adapt to rapid climate change"; "Does Venture Global's Louisiana LNG plant profit from pollution?"; "Fear of reprisals prevent people calling out employers on climate, says charity"; "COP28: EU to push for deal on phasing out 'unabated' fossil fuels at UN climate conference"; "Major Port in Amazon River Drops to Lowest Water Level in 121 Years"; --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-mclean/message

Carbon dioxide is part of a plant's diet THEREFORE unmitigated carbon emissions are automatically a good thing.Join Nebula (and get 40% off an annual subscription): https://go.nebula.tv/deniersplaybookBONUS EPISODES available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/deniersplaybook) SOCIALS & MORE (https://linktr.ee/deniersplaybook) CREDITS Hosts: Rollie Williams & Nicole Conlan Executive Producer: Ben Boult Audio Producer: Gregory Haddock Researcher: Canute HaroldsonArt: Jordan Doll Music: Tony Domenick SOURCES1992 Western Fuels Association “The Greening of Planet Earth.” (1992, January 1). Climate Files.Burrell, A. L., Evans, J. P., & De Kauwe, M. G. (2020). Anthropogenic climate change has driven over 5 million km 2 of drylands towards desertification. Nature Communications, 11(1), 3853. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. (n.d.). DeSmog. Retrieved September 2, 2023Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. (n.d.). CO2 Science. Www.co2science.org.Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. (2004, June 7). Center Staff. Web.archive.org.Cho, R. (2022, January 27). How Climate Change Will Affect Plants. State of the Planet; Columbia Climate School. CO2 Science. (n.d.). Www.co2science.org. Columbia Earth Institute. (2017, August 28). Climate May Quickly Drive Forest-Eating Beetles North, Says Study. State of the Planet. Congressional Record - 108th Congress. (2003). PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE 108 th. United States Congress. [PDF DOWNLOAD] Copenhagen Consensus Center. (n.d.). DeSmog. Craig Idso. (n.d.). DeSmog.Duffy, K. A., Schwalm, C. R., Arcus, V. L., Koch, G. W., Liang, L. L., & Schipper, L. A. (2021). How close are we to the temperature tipping point of the terrestrial biosphere? Science Advances, 7(3), eaay1052. Dykstra, P. (2006, February 10). CNN.com - Commentary: Global warming sizzles in pop culture - Oct 13, 2005. Www.cnn.com. EIR. (1990, February 26). CO2 increase could benefit Earth's biosphere. EIR Science & Technology; EIR Volume 17, Number 5. [PDF]Gilbert, N. (2020, December 19). Will Rising Temperatures Make Superweeds Even Stronger? Wired. Goldenberg, S. (2014, April 9). Climate change is good for you, says ultra-conservative Heartland Institute. The Guardian. Goldenberg, S. (2018, February 14). Greenpeace exposes sceptics hired to cast doubt on climate science. The Guardian; The Guardian. Goldenberg, S., & Bengtsson, H. (2016, June 13). Biggest US coal company funded dozens of groups questioning climate change. The Guardian. Green, J. K., Seneviratne, S. I., Berg, A. M., Findell, K. L., Hagemann, S., Lawrence, D. M., & Gentine, P. (2019). Large influence of soil moisture on long-term terrestrial carbon uptake. Nature, 565(7740), 476–479.Greening Earth Society. (1998). IN DEFENSE OF CARBON DIOXIDE: A Comprehensive Review of Carbon Dioxide's Effects on Human Health, Welfare, and The Environment. In Desmog. New Hope Environmental Services. [PDF] Harkinson, J. (2009, December 5). No. 8: Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (A.K.A. The Idso Family). Mother Jones. Heartland Institute. (2012, January). Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy. Heartland Institute. [PDF] Heritage Academy Mesa. (2022, August 25). Talent Show, Trips, PTO. Heritage Academy Mesa.Hille, K. (2019). Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds. NASA. Idso, S. B. (1980). The Climatological Significance of a Doubling of Earth's Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration. Science, 207(4438), 1462–1463. Idso, S. B. (1982). Carbon Dioxide Friend or Foe? IBR Press.Information Council for the Environment. (1991). ICE Memo Archive. [PDF] IPCC. (2019). Chapter 3 : Desertification — Special Report on Climate Change and Land. IPCC.Jones, M. (2005, June). Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank. Mother Jones. Keith Idso. (n.d.). DeSmog. Kirk, K. (2020, September 27). The video origin of the myth that global warming is good for agriculture. ClimateConnections.Lee, G. (1996, March 21). INDUSTRY FUNDS GLOBAL-WARMING SKEPTICS. The Washington Post.Molar-Candanosa, R. (2021, September 1). NASA at Your Table: Climate Change Impacts on Crop Growth. NASA.NASA. (2016, May 3). Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Will Help and Hurt Crops. NASA. NASA SVS. (2020, December 10). NASA Scientific Visualization Studio | Plants Are Struggling to Keep Up with Rising Carbon Dioxide Concentrations. NASA.GOV; NASA. Oregon Petition. (2023, August 9). Wikipedia. Readfearn, G. (2014, June 26). Bjorn Lomborg and the mysterious millions. Theecologist.org. Sherwood B. Idso. (n.d.). DeSmog. Sneed, A. (2018, January 23). Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants? Scientific American.Surgey, N. (2016, June 13). Peabody Coal Bankruptcy Reveals Climate Denial Network Funding. PR Watch. Terrer, C., Phillips, R. P., Hungate, B. A., Rosende, J., Pett-Ridge, J., Craig, M. E., van Groenigen, K. J., Keenan, T. F., Sulman, B. N., Stocker, B. D., Reich, P. B., Pellegrini, A. F. A., Pendall, E., Zhang, H., Evans, R. D., Carrillo, Y., Fisher, J. B., Van Sundert, K., Vicca, S., & Jackson, R. B. (2021). A trade-off between plant and soil carbon storage under elevated CO 2. Nature, 591(7851), 599–603.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the latest episode of 50 Shades of Green, Climate Group's Adam Lake joins with Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, Interim Dean of the Columbia Climate School and Joshua Amponsem, Strategy Director of the Youth Climate Justice Fund, to explore the connection between climate change and human health, and the interdisciplinary policy solutions needed to address this linkage in a just and equitable way. Check out the Climate Week NYC website to learn more about all of our wonderful community partners and stay engaged with all of the events happening September 17-24.

On April 12th, the Center on Global Energy Policy will celebrate its 10th anniversary.  Jason Bordoff founded the Center after serving in the Obama White House. During his time in the administration, he recognized a need for unbiased, evidence-based research that examined energy issues across multiple dimensions – economics, national security, climate, and the environment.  In 2013, with the help of a few friends and colleagues, Jason launched the  Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs to fill that void. Ten years later, the institution is thriving in its mission to help address the world's most challenging energy and climate problems through research, education, and dialogue.   This week, host Bill Loveless talks with Jason about his journey to start CGEP, and why he chose Columbia University as its home. They discuss publishing actionable research that is useful to policy makers, and the role of education in responding to climate change. From 2009 to 2013, Jason served as special assistant to President Obama, and as senior director for energy and climate change on the staff of the National Security Council. Prior to that, he held senior policy positions on the White House's National Economic Council and Council on Environmental Quality. He is also co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School.

Cecilia Sorensen (pictured), who is the director of the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education at Columbia University and is an Emergency Medicine physician-investigator in the area of climate change and health, told a Columbia University Climate School webinar of a hospital emergency department which had no other way of cooling heat stroke victims outside putting them in a body bag packed with ice. The doctor was one of three panellists on a webinar, hosted by the Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School and the Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, Professor Alex N. Halliday. The webinar was entitled: "Blazing Temperatures, Broken Records: Responding to the Global Heat Crisis". --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-mclean/message

2022 was one of the most tumultuous years for global energy markets in decades.War. Fossil fuel shortages. Extreme price spikes. Supply chain disruptions in clean energy. It also brought transformative changes. An historic U.S. climate bill, a first-of-its-kind loss and damage agreement at COP27, and record electric car sales. We tackled all these stories on the show this year. Now we're wondering: how will they play out next year? Will supply chains return to normal after their COVID chaos? How volatile will fossil fuel prices remain? And what kind of technological breakthroughs can we expect in clean energy?  This week, a 2022 wrap-up. Host Bill Loveless is joined by a panel of experts from the Center on Global Energy Policy – Jason Bordoff, Melissa Lott, and Mauricio Cardenas.  Jason is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy and co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School. Before joining Columbia, he served as special assistant to President Barack Obama, and as senior director for energy and climate change on the staff of the National Security Council. And, of course, he is the co-host of this show. Melissa is the director of research at the Center on Global Energy Policy. She co-leads the Power Sector and Renewable Research Initiative and serves as the acting director of the Carbontech Development Initiative. Melissa is the host of “The Big Switch,”  another podcast by the Center on Global Energy Policy. Mauricio is a professor of professional practice in global leadership at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and director of the school's Master of Public Administration in Global Leadership. He has previously served Colombia's energy minister and finance minister. Together, they discuss the year's biggest moments at the intersection of energy, policy, and geopolitics. They also talk about Europe's energy challenges, global climate and energy policies – including the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act – and the trajectory for fossil fuels and renewables in the years ahead.

This is the third and final episode of The Great Energy Transition, a series from Intelligence Squared in partnership with Cummins and we're asking what is the role of corporations in the energy transition? To discuss how the complex partnerships between corporations and governments might shape our futures, we're joined by Jennifer Rumsey, President and CEO of Cummins; Gillian Tett, Chairman of the US editorial board and U.S editor-at-large at the Financial Times; and Jason Bordoff, Co-Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School. Our host for this series is physicist and broadcaster, Helen Czerski. To find out more about Cummins, please visit cummins.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the third and final episode of The Great Energy Transition, a series from Intelligence Squared in partnership with Cummins and we're asking what is the role of corporations in the energy transition? To discuss how the complex partnerships between corporations and governments might shape our futures, we're joined by Jennifer Rumsey, President and CEO of Cummins; Gillian Tett, Chairman of the US editorial board and U.S editor-at-large at the Financial Times; and Jason Bordoff, Co-Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School. Our host for this series is physicist and broadcaster, Helen Czerski. To find out more about Cummins, please visit cummins.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The challenge of playing soccer in a warmer world is being explored, considered and studied by the Columbia Climate School and a special guest at a recent workshop/webinar was the champion American female soccer player, Samantha Mewis (pictured). She talked about what it was like to play such a physically demanding sport in a warmer world, the demands the increasing temperatures put on players and what techniques were being used to counter this dilemma. Delivering the keynote address was Lamont Associate Research Professor and climate scientist at Columbia University, Radley Horton, who currently researches climate vulnerability, extreme weather events, the limitations of climate models, and adaptation to climate change. You can see a recording of the event here. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/robert-mclean/message

An aware society is one of the best weapons against climate change. Sustainable solutions can only advance if voters and policy makers understand what's at stake. From vanishing biodiversity to the widespread intensification of destructive weather patterns, that's where environmental journalists play a decisive role acting as the bridge between scientists and the general public. Andrew Revkin is a renowned science journalist, author, and educator. He's covered a variety of environmental topics, including the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the changing climate of the North Pole. Revkin is also the founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at the Columbia Climate School. On this episode of Discover Science, hosted by graduate student Shelby Herbert of the UNR Reynolds School of Journalism's Hitchcock Project for Visualizing Science, Andrew Revkin speaks with NatGeo Monster Fish host Zeb Hogan and Professor of limnology Sudeep Chandra about the media's coverage of climate impacts around the world, Revkin's 35+ years of experience in the field, even how music has influenced his perspective as a journalist and climate defender.

In Episode 281 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Meghan O'Sullivan and Jason Bordoff. Meghan O'Sullivan is a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. She is currently Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a board member of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Kennedy School. She sits on the board of directors at Raytheon and the Council on Foreign relations, and is the North American Chair of the Trilateral Commission. Jason Bordoff is the Co-Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School, the Founding Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy, and Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Relations at Columbia University. Jason also served as Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change on the Staff of the National Security Council, and, prior to that, held senior policy positions on the White House's National Economic Council and Council on Environmental Quality. Our episode today focuses on energy policy and the immense challenges inherent in trying to balance national security concerns with international climate objectives. As Meghan and Jason have both argued, moving to a net-zero global economy will require an unprecedented level of global cooperation. It will also lead to conflict along the way and inevitably produce winners and losers. While government investment and private sector innovation is crucial to managing this transition, conscious steps need to be taken in order to mitigate the geopolitical risks that this change will create, of which the war in Ukraine is only the latest example. The goal of today's conversation is to provide you with a framework for thinking about what this transition is going to look like, the challenges and opportunities that it will create along the way for governments, business, and investors, and what will be needed from all of us in order get it right. You can access the transcript and intelligence report to this week's conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you want access to our Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can learn more at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 10/31/2022

Paul Gallay is Lecturer & Co-Director at the Columbia Climate School. Columbia University is a global leader in climate and sustainability education, aiming to bring an interdisciplinary knowledge base for future climate leaders to work with businesses, communities, governments, and civil society to address the climate crisis. If you recall Season 3, Episode 13, I had David Lloyd Owen on that microphone to discuss his book, Global Water Funding. I've said it several times ever since, but if there's one book you shall read to understand the water challenges ahead, it's this one. It's hard to read, it's packed, and it's dense, but it's invaluable! So, in that book, I discovered the Catskill Mountain and Croton Watershed agreements, which the city of New York concluded in the 1990s. The Idea was to leverage nature-based solutions to prevent pollutants from entering New York's water scheme rather than heavily investing in a treatment plant that would take them out.  Since then, we've further explored nature-based solutions on that microphone, with the City of Glasgow, the City of Paris, or watershed experiments in Italy and Austria.  Yet, I had never heard of the one Paul will touch on in a minute after expanding on the New York watershed example I just mentioned.  And that new program he'll introduce to us is the perfect example of a clever application of the Climate Change adaptation we discussed with Kevin Sofen last week. Climate Change is here to stay; it will have consequences, and fencing those off using nature sounds like a very sensible approach! Water quality, involving communities, teaching, or further researching, there's a dense agenda for today's conversation. So without further due, let me remind you that if you like what you hear, please - and I can't stress that enough - share it around you. Grab your friends' phones, and subscribe them to the podcast. Recommend your favorite episode to a colleague, or tell the World with a LinkedIn post! And, of course, if there's anything you don't like about the podcast, come tell me! Can Nature Protect New York From Water Catastrophes? Yes!

with

campGEO Conversational Textbook Link - click hereLearn all the basics of Geoscience in a fun an entertaining way - with images!Link to: Barrenlands: The Epic Search for Diamonds in Canada'sToday, we get to interview author Kevin Krajick.  Below is a small sample of his credentials and accolades.Senior Editor Science News Communications, Columbia Climate SchoolAuthor at State of the PlanetWork has been featured in National Geographic, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Science, Smithsonian Mag, etcTwo time Winner of the American Geophysical Union's Walter Sullivan Award - excellence in science journalismFinalist for the National Magazine Award for Public ServiceWe were interested in interviewing Kevin because of his book on Searching for diamonds in the Northwest Territories in Canada.  This is a place near and dear to Jesse's heart because he does a lot of research up there.  The book is exceptional and reads more like a novel mainly because of two featured individuals: Chuck Fipke and Stewart (Stu) Blusson.  They are both Canadian geologists, prospectors, businessmen, helicopter pilot, etc.  Check the link below for the book.In addition to writing this book, Kevin is a writer for the Columbia Climate School (https://news.climate.columbia.edu/).  He has written on an impressive array of topic from climate, Earth science, and society.  We hope you enjoy this interesting interview.  Cheers.Remember you can Support Us Here,and share PlanetGeo with your friends and family!——————————————————Instagram: @planetgeocastTwitter: @planetgeocastFacebook: @planetgeocastSupport us: https://planetgeocast.com/support-usEmail: planetgeocast@gmail.comWebsite: https://planetgeocast.com/

"The future of water: a call to action to avert a global climate crisis" was the subject of a webinar organized by the Columbia Climate School and moderated by the school's Founding Dean, Alexander Halliday (pictured). Guests on the webinar were the Director of the Columbia Water Centre and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University, Upmanu Lall; a Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Director, of Columbia University Superfund Research Program, Ana Navas-Acien; and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, Ngai Yin Yip. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/robert-mclean/message

Today, we get to interview author Kevin Krajick.  Below is a small sample of his credentials and accolades.Senior Editor Science News Communications, Columbia Climate SchoolAuthor of State of the PlanetWork has been featured in National Geographic, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Science, Smithsonian Mag, etcTwo time Winner of the American Geophysical Union's Walter Sullivan Award - excellence in science journalismFinalist for the National Magazine Award for Public ServiceWe were interested in interviewing Kevin because of his book on Searching for diamonds in the Northwest Territories in Canada.  This is a place near and dear to Jesse's heart because he does a lot of research up there.  The book is exceptional and reads more like a novel mainly because of two featured individuals: Chuck Fipke and Stewart (Stu) Blusson.  They are both Canadian geologists, prospectors, businessmen, helicopter pilot, etc.  Check the link below for the book.In addition to writing this book, Kevin is a writer for the Columbia Climate School (https://news.climate.columbia.edu/).  He has written on an impressive array of topic from climate, Earth science, and society.  We hope you enjoy this interesting interview.  Cheers.campGEO Conversational Textbook Link - click hereLearn all the basics of Geoscience in a fun an entertaining way - with images!Link to: Barrenlands: The Epic Search for Diamonds in Canada's Remember you can Support Us Here,and share PlanetGeo with your friends and family!——————————————————Instagram: @planetgeocastTwitter: @planetgeocastFacebook: @planetgeocastSupport us: https://planetgeocast.com/support-usEmail: planetgeocast@gmail.comWebsite: https://planetgeocast.com/

Food production has a huge impact on climate change. And climate change has a huge impact on our ability to produce the food we need. As the war in Ukraine creates additional challenges to the global food and energy markets, a panel of experts looks at ways food production and consumption can adapt to address some of these huge issues, This podcast is the audio from a session at the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meetings 2022. Participants:  Adrian Monck, Managing Director, World Economic Forum Geneva (moderator) Jason Bordoff, Co-Dean, Columbia Climate School; Founding Director, Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University Geraldine Matchett, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Royal DSM NV Sam Kass, Partner, Acre Venture Partners Máximo Torero. Chief Economist, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Watch the session here: https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-meetings-2022/sessions/food-and-energy-tackling-a-global-resource-crisis Transcript: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/food-climate-energy-agenda-dialogues Check out all our podcasts on wef.ch/podcasts:  Radio Davos Meet the Leader  WEF Book Club Podcast Agenda Dialogues Join the World Economic Forum Podcast Club Catch up on all the action from the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meeting 2022 at https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-meetings-2022 and across social media, using the hashtag  #SDIM22.

Food production has a huge impact on climate change. And climate change has a huge impact on our ability to produce the food we need. As the war in Ukraine creates additional challenges to the global food and energy markets, a panel of experts looks at ways food production and consumption can adapt to address some of these huge issues, This podcast is the audio from a session at the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meetings 2022. Participants:  Adrian Monck, Managing Director, World Economic Forum Geneva (moderator) Jason Bordoff, Co-Dean, Columbia Climate School; Founding Director, Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University Geraldine Matchett, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Royal DSM NV Sam Kass, Partner, Acre Venture Partners Máximo Torero. Chief Economist, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Watch the session here: https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-meetings-2022/sessions/food-and-energy-tackling-a-global-resource-crisis Transcript: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/food-climate-energy-agenda-dialogues Check out all our podcasts on wef.ch/podcasts:  Radio Davos Meet the Leader  WEF Book Club Podcast Agenda Dialogues Join the World Economic Forum Podcast Club Catch up on all the action from the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meeting 2022 at https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-meetings-2022 and across social media, using the hashtag  #SDIM22. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Food production has a huge impact on climate change. And climate change has a huge impact on our ability to produce the food we need.As the war in Ukraine creates additional challenges to the global food and energy markets, a panel of experts looks at ways food production and consumption can adapt to address some of these huge issues,This podcast is the audio from a session at the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meetings 2022.Participants: Adrian Monck, Managing Director, World Economic Forum Geneva (moderator)Jason Bordoff, Co-Dean, Columbia Climate School; Founding Director, Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia UniversityGeraldine Matchett, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Royal DSM NVSam Kass, Partner, Acre Venture PartnersMáximo Torero. Chief Economist, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)Watch the session here: https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-meetings-2022/sessions/food-and-energy-tackling-a-global-resource-crisisTranscript: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/food-climate-energy-agenda-dialoguesCheck out all our podcasts on wef.ch/podcasts: Radio Davos Meet the Leader WEF Book Club Podcast Agenda DialoguesJoin the World Economic Forum Podcast ClubCatch up on all the action from the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meeting 2022 at https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-meetings-2022and across social media, using the hashtag #SDIM22. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The President's Inbox is pleased to present an episode from Foreign Affairs' new podcast, The Foreign Affairs Interview. In this episode, Jason Bordoff, co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School, and Meghan O'Sullivan, Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, sit down with Foreign Affairs Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan to discuss the geopolitics of energy in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the transition to clean energy.    Articles Mentioned on the Podcast   Jason Bordoff and Meghan O'Sullivan, “Green Upheaval: The New Geopolitics of Energy,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2022)   Jason Bordoff and Meghan O'Sullivan, “The New Energy Order: How Governments Will Transform Energy Markets,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2022)   Podcasts Mentioned   Jason Bordoff and Kadri Simson, “Europe's Difficult Energy Decisions,” Columbia Energy Exchange, May 10, 2022   Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, The Foreign Affairs Interview

The global energy market is in a state of upheaval. The war in Ukraine and the resulting sanctions against Russian oil and gas have forced the West, especially Europe, to quickly find new energy sources to keep the lights on and the cars running this summer. In the United States, rising gas prices are pushing President Joe Biden to make a controversial trip to Saudi Arabia to encourage the oil-rich state to increase production. This scramble for quick-fix energy solutions comes as the world is trying to kick its addiction to fossil fuels and reduce the effects of climate change. How will these short-term needs affect the urgent but longer-term transition to clean energy? And could today's energy market turbulence be a harbinger of challenges to come as the global energy system is remade?  Jason Bordoff is the co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School and the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. During the Obama administration, he served as senior director for energy and climate change on the National Security Council. Meghan O'Sullivan is a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America's Power. During the George W. Bush administration, she was deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. Together, they bring years of experience—both inside and outside of government—to the debates around energy, climate, economics, and geopolitics.   We discuss how the war in Ukraine continues to affect the global energy market, Biden's upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia, how governments can meet their energy security needs without decelerating the green transition, and why changes in the global energy system will continue to disrupt geopolitics. You can find transcripts and more episodes of "The Foreign Affairs Interview" at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/foreign-affairs-interview.

Deep dive with Professor Ruth DeFries on her recent book What would Nature Do exploring how strategies from the natural world can help humanity weather many of the environmental crises we are now facing. DeFries explains how a small number of key strategies—investments in diversity, redundancy over efficiency, self-correcting feedbacks, and decisions based on bottom-up knowledge—enable life to persist through unpredictable, sudden shocks-and various ways in which we can apply these strategies to deal with current environmental challenges we are facing. Ruth DeFries is a professor of ecology and sustainable development at Columbia University in New York co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School and is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and many other academic awards she is an author of over a 100 scientific papers related to how people are manipulating the planet and its consequences for humanity. Her most recent book is What would Nature do where she outlines a set of strategies from the natural world that she believes can help humanity deal with many of the environmental crises the world is facing.

What will happen if we can't meet the maximum of 1.5 degree target set by the IPCC? What will happen if it warms up by 2, 3, or 5 degrees? Where are these numbers even coming from?! Well first of all they're coming from people who have studied climate their entire lives so we can be fairly sure that they are at least close to the mark. Second of all, a lot of these estimations and goals come from tipping points, the topic of today's episode. Tipping points can be thought of as the point of no return, there are multiple planetary systems that are on the edge of their tipping points, and now we have to work hard to mitigate our emissions so that we don't push our planet over the brink. Lots of resources below for further reading and involvement!Climate Reality - https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/what-are-climate-change-tipping-points World Economic Forum - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/climate-tipping-points-earth/ Columbia Climate School - https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/11/11/how-close-are-we-to-climate-tipping-points/How you can get involvedDrawdown - https://www.drawdown.org/TED Countdown - https://countdown.ted.com/1% For The Planet - https://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/Count Us In - https://www.count-us-in.org/steps/Innovating a Bright Future is the podcast that brings together technology and climate action in an engaging interview format that showcases some of the most interesting initiatives taking place across the globe. If you are someone who cares about climate change but you're tired of hearing about how the world is going to explode in a few short years if we don't do something soon (What does that even mean?), then this podcast is for you. We stay away from divisive politics and meaningless numbers with no context, and instead, I interview climate action leaders implementing revolutionary ideas that are helping to reduce our impact on the world around us. Listen to this podcast to learn, be inspired, and find new ideas to look into even more. If you are interested in getting involved, please use any of the contacts or social media listed below, and look into the links below for actionable things you can do right now.Who am I?My name is Avry Krywolt, I am a student from Alberta Canada, I am passionate about taking action against climate change, and I am the host of Innovating a Bright Future. I've noticed through my own experience that the number of people concerned about climate change is growing quickly. At the same time, the information being presented to the public is, in most cases, a sad sigh of defeat, irrational denialism, or frantic screaming that does no one any good. The fact is that climate change is happening, but it is not hopeless, and you are not powerless. TED speaker and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said that “The most important thing you can do for climate change is talk about it.” so let's talk about it. Let's learn about solar energy and battery storage, let's dig into green hydrogen, and wind, and the power of water, and the importance of sustainable energy. Let's learn and let's discuss. We aren't doomed, but we have to work hard in order to keep climate change from wreaking real havoc on our world. So let's get to work.Find more information about me and the show at our website - innovatingabrightfuture.comJoin our email newsletter - https://innovatingabrightfuture.aweb.page/p/be526572-0819-4a4d-93af-05cd8b2b715c Get involved:Become a member of the Alberta Youth Leaders for Environmental EducationTake a step in the right direction with Count Us InLearn more about climate change + climate action with TED CountdownSocialsInstagram - https://instagram.com/innovatingabrightfuture?igshid=tq6tfg2l0s7Twitter - Twitter.com/ainnovatingSupport the ShowPatreon - patreon.com/innovatingabrightfutureBuy sustainable clothing from TenTreeMusic:Tech Talk by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4464-tech-talk License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license 

One of the first nuclear power plants in the US was built on a bluff overlooking the Humboldt Bay entrance and the town of King Salmon. Shut down in 1976 and recently decommissioned, the site - located 115 feet away from the bay, on a bluff 44 feet above sea level - continues to serve as storage for 37 tons of spent fuel and other radioactive waste. The underground casks are relatively safe for the next 50 years, but rising sea level and ongoing bluff erosion raise questions about long-term safety in the absence of a federal repository. Our guests this week are Michael Welch, an activist who has watchdogged the nuclear plant since it was still operating, and Professor Jennifer Marlow of Humboldt State University, who is working to facilitate inclusive community conversations about the future of the nuclear waste site. Required Reading:44 Feet: Sea-Level Rise Risk to a Spent Nuclear Fuel Site on Humboldt BayPG&E completes decommissioning process, ends nuclear facility license - Isabella Vanderheiden, Eureka Times-Standard, Oct. 30, 2021Dancing on the Hum Nuke's Grave is Strictly Prohibited - J.A. Savage, North Coast Journal, Nov. 4, 2021The Atomic Priesthood, Giant Rutabagas and What's Next for Humboldt's Decommissioned Nuke Plant - J.A. Savage, North Coast Journal, Dec. 16, 2021Crucial Antarctic Glacier Likely to Collapse Much Earlier than Expected - Lily Roberts, Columbia Climate School, Dec. 17, 2021Support the show (https://www.humboldtbaykeeper.org/get-involved/donate)

Jason Bordoff, cofounding dean, Columbia Climate School, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy, and professor of professional practice in international and public affairs at Columbia University, leads a conversation on energy policy and efforts to combat climate change.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to today's session of the CFR Fall 2021 Academic Webinar Series. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record. And the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have with us today Jason Bordoff to talk about energy policy and efforts to combat climate change. Jason Bordoff is cofounding dean of the Columbia Climate School, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy, and professor of professional practice in international and public affairs at Columbia University. He previously served as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for energy and climate change on the National Security Council, and he has held senior policy positions on the White House's National Economic Council and Council on Environmental Quality. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and is often on TV and radio. So, we're really happy to have him with us today. So, Jason, thank you very much. We are just coming off the COP26 conference that took place in Glasgow that started on October 31, I believe, and concluded last Friday, November 12. Could you talk about what came out of the conference at a high level, if you think that the agreements that were reached went far enough or didn't go far enough, and what your policy recommendations are to really advance and fight the countdown that we have to the Earth warming? BORDOFF: Yeah. Thanks. Well, first, thanks to you, Irina, and thanks to CFR for the invitation to be with you all today. Really delighted to have the chance to talk about these important issues. I was there for much of the two-week period in Glasgow representing the Energy Center and the Climate School here at Columbia. I think it's kind of a glass half-full/glass half-empty outlook coming out of Glasgow. So I think the Glasgow conference was notable in several respects. We'll look back on it, I think, and some of the things we will remember are—some of the things we'll remember—(dog barking)—sorry—are the role of the private sector and private finance, I think, was much more prominent in Glasgow this year. I think there were commitments around some important things like methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, was much higher on the priority list in this U.N. climate meeting than in prior ones. You had pledges on deforestation and other things that are important. And then the final agreement did have some important elements to it, particularly around Article 6, how you design carbon markets around the world. But the glass half-empty outlook is still we are nowhere close to being on track for the kind of targets that countries and companies are committing to: net zero by 2050 or 1.5 degrees of warming. I think there were—there should be hope and optimism coming out of COP. The role of the youth—at Columbia, we were honored to organize a private roundtable for President Obama with youth climate activists. It's hard to spend time with young people in COP or on campus here at Columbia or anywhere else and not be inspired by how passionately they take these issues. So the activism you saw in the streets, the sense of urgency among everyone—activists, civil society, governments, the private sector—felt different, I think, at this COP than other COPs that I have attended or probably the ones I haven't attended. But there was also for some I saw kind of we're coming out of this and we're on track for below two degrees. Or, you know, Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, tweeted that when you add up all the pledges we're on track for 1.8 degrees Celsius warming. He's talking about all of the pledges meaning every country who's promised to be net zero by 2050, 2060, 2070, and at least from my standpoint there's a good reason to take those with a grain of salt. They're not often backed up by concrete plans or ideas about how you would get anywhere close to achieving those goals. So it's good that we have elevated ambition, which is kind of one of the core outcomes of the COP in Glasgow. But it is also the case that when you elevate ambition and the reality doesn't change as fast or maybe faster than the ambition is changing, what you have is a growing gap between ambition and reality. And I think that's where we are today. Oil use is rising each and every year. Gas use is rising. Coal use is going up this year. I don't know if it's going to keep going up, but at a minimum it's going to plateau. It's not falling off a cliff. So the reality of the energy world today—which is 75 percent of emissions are energy—is not anything close to net zero by 2050. It is the case that progress is possible. So if you go back to before the Paris agreement, we were on track for something like maybe 3.7 degrees Celsius of warming. If you look at a current outlook, it's maybe 2.7, 2.8 (degrees), so just below three degrees. So progress is possible. That's good. If you look at the nationally determined contribution pledges—so the commitments countries made that are more near term, more accountability for them; the commitments they made to reduce emissions by 2030, their NDCs—we would be on track for about 2.4 degrees Celsius warming, assuming all those pledges are fulfilled. But history would suggest a reason to be a little skeptical about that. The U.S. has a pledge to get to a 50 to 52 percent reduction in emissions by 2030, and look at how things are working or not working in Washington and make your own judgment about how likely it is that we'll put in place the set of policies that would be required to get to that ambitious level of decarbonization by 2030. And I think the same healthy dose of skepticism is warranted when you look elsewhere in the world. But even if we achieve all of those, we're still falling short of below two degrees, nevertheless 1.5 (degrees). And so, again, I think the outcome from COP for me was optimism that progress is possible—we have made a lot of progress in the last ten years—but acute concern that we're nowhere close to being on track to take targets like 1.5 degrees Celsius or net zero by 2050 seriously. And we just need to be honest as a climate and energy community—and I live in both of those worlds; there's a lot of overlap between them, obviously—about how hard it is to achieve the goals we are talking about. Renewables have grown incredibly quickly. Optimistic headlines every day about what is happening in solar and wind. Costs have come down more than 90 percent. Battery costs have come down more than 90 percent in the last decade. But solar and wind create electricity, and electricity is 20 percent of global final energy consumption. The outlook for electric vehicles is much more promising today. Lots of companies like Ford and others are committing to be all-electric by a certain date ten or twenty years from now. Cars are 20 percent of global oil demand. About half of the emission reductions—cumulative emission reductions between now and 2050 will need to come from technologies that are not yet available at commercial scale and sectors of the economy that are really hard to decarbonize like steel and cement and ships and airplanes. We're not—we don't have all the tools we need to do those yet. And then, in Glasgow, the focus of a lot of what we did at Columbia was on—we did a lot of different things, but one of the key areas of focus was the challenge of thinking about decarbonization in emerging and developing economies. I don't think we talk about that enough. The issue of historical responsibility of loss and damage was more on the agenda this year, and I think you'll hear even more about it in the year ahead. The next COP is in Africa. There was growing tension between rich and poor countries at this COP. I think a starting point was what we see in the pandemic alone and how inequitable around the world the impacts of the pandemic are. Many people couldn't even travel to Glasgow from the Global South because they couldn't get vaccinated. We need, between now and 2050, estimates are—a ballpark—$100 trillion of additional investment in clean energy if we're going to get on track for 1.5 (degrees)/net zero by 2050. So the question that should obsess all of us who work in this space: Where will that money come from? Most of it's going to be private sector, not public. Most of it is going to be in developing and emerging economies. That is where the growth in energy is going to come from. Eight hundred million people have no access to energy at all. Nevertheless, if you model what energy access means, it's often defined as, you have enough to turn on lights or charge your cellphone. But when you talk about even a fraction of the standard of living we take for granted—driving a car, having a refrigerator, having an air conditioner—the numbers are massive. They're just huge, and the population of Africa's going to double to 2.2 billion by the year 2050. So these are really big numbers and we need to recognize how hard this is. But we should also recognize that it is possible. We have a lot of the tools we need. We need innovation in technology and we need stronger policy, whether that's a carbon price or standards for different sectors. And then, of course, we need private-sector actors to step up as well, and all of us. And we have these great commitments to achieve these goals with a lot of capital being put to work, and now we need to hold people accountable to make sure that they do that. So, again, I look back on the last two weeks or before, two weeks of COP, the gap between ambition and reality got bigger. Not necessarily a bad thing—ambition is a good thing—but now it's time to turn the ambition into action. We need governments to follow through on their pledges. Good news is we have a wide menu of options for reducing emissions. The bad news is there's not a lot of time at our current rate of emissions. And emissions are still going up each and every year. They're not even falling yet. Remember, what matters is the cumulative total, not the annual flow. At our current rate of emissions, the budget—carbon budget for staying below 1.5 (degrees) is used up in, around a decade or so, so there's not much time to get to work. But I'm really excited about what we're building with the first climate school in the country here at Columbia. When it comes to pushing—turning ambition into action, that requires research, it requires education, and it requires engaging with partners in civil society and the public sector and the private sector to help turn that research into action. And the people we're working with here every day on campus are the ones who are going to be the leaders that are going to hopefully do a better job—(laughs)—than we've done over the last few decades. So whatever you're doing at your educational institution—be it teaching or research or learning—we all have a role to play in the implementation of responsible, forward-thinking energy policy. I'm really excited to have the chance to talk with you all today. Look forward to your questions and to the conversation. Thank you again. FASKIANOS: Jason, that's fantastic. Thank you very much for that informative and sobering view. So let's turn to all of you now for your questions. So I'm going to go first to—I have one raised hand from Stephen Kass. Q: OK. Thank you. Jason, thank you for the very useful and concise summary. What specific kinds of energy programs do you think developing countries should now be pursuing? Should they be giving up coal entirely? Should they be importing natural gas? Should they be investing in renewables or nuclear? What recipe would you advise developing countries to pursue for their own energy needs? BORDOFF: It's going to need to be a lot of different things, so there's no single answer to that, of course. And by the way, I'll just say it would be super helpful if people don't mind just introducing yourself when you ask a question. That would be helpful to me, at least. I appreciate it. I think they need to do a lot of different things. I think I would start with low-hanging fruit, and renewable electricity is not the entire answer. The sun and wind are intermittent. Electricity can't do certain things yet, like power ships and airplanes. But the low cost of solar and wind, I think, does mean it's a good place to start, and then we need to think about those other sectors as well. I think a key thing there comes back to finance, and that's why we're spending so much time on it with our research agenda here. Access to financing and cost of capital are really important. Clean energy tends to be more capital-intensive and then, like solar and wind, more CAPEX, less OPEX over time. But attaining financing in poor countries is really difficult and expensive. Lack of experience with renewable energy, local banks are often reluctant to lend to those kinds of projects. And then foreign investors, where most of that capital is going to come from, view projects often in emerging markets and developing economies particularly as more risky. Local utilities may not be creditworthy. There's currency inflation risk in many developing countries, people worry about recouping their upfront investment if bills are paid in local currency. There's political risk, maybe corruption, inconsistently enforced regulations. And it can be harder to build clean energy infrastructure if you don't have other kinds of infrastructure, like ports, and roads, and bridges and a good electrical grid. So I would start there. And I think there's a role for those countries to scale up their clean energy sectors, but also for policymakers and multilateral development banks and governments elsewhere—there was a lot of focus in Glasgow on whether the developed countries would make good on their promise made in Copenhagen to send $100 billion a year in climate finance to developing countries. And they fell short of that. But even that is kind of a rounding error, compared to the one to two trillion (dollars) a year that the International Energy Agency estimates is needed. So there are many other things besides just writing a check that government, like in the U.S. or elsewhere, can do. The Development Finance Corporation, for example, can lend to banks in local and affordable rates, finance projects in local currency, expand the availability of loan guarantees. I've written before about how I think even what often gets called industrial policy, let's think about some sectors—in the same way China did with solar or batteries fifteen years ago. Are there sectors where governments might help to grow domestic industries and, by doing that, scale—bring down the cost of technologies that are expensive now, the premium for low-carbon or zero-carbon cement or steel. It's just—it's not reasonable to ask a developing country to build new cities, and new highways, and all the new construction they're going to do with zero-carbon steel and cement because it's just way too expensive. So how do you bring those costs down? If we think about investments, we can make through U.S. infrastructure or other spending to do that, that not only may help to grow some domestic industries and jobs here, that can be its own form of global leadership if we're driving those costs of those technologies down to make it cheaper for others to pick up. So I think that's one of the places I'd start. But there are a lot of other things we need to do too. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question—and let me just go back. Stephen Kass is an adjunct professor at NYU. So the next question is a written question from Wei Liang, who is an assistant professor of international policy studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. And the question is: I wonder if you could briefly address the Green Climate Fund and individual countries' pledge on that. BORDOFF: Yeah, I mean, it touches a little bit on what I said a moment ago about the need for developed countries to provide climate finance to developing countries. And so I think that's—it's important that we take those obligations seriously, and that we, in advanced economies, step up and make those funds available. And but, again, we're talking—the amount we're still talking about is so small compared to the amounts that are needed to deal both with the impacts of climate change, and then also to curb climate change, to mitigate climate change. Because we know that developing countries are in the parts of the world that will often be most adversely impacted by climate impacts—droughts, and heat waves, and storms, and food security issues—from a standpoint of equity are the parts of the world that have done the least to cause this problem, responsible for very few emissions. If you look cumulatively at emissions since the start of the industrial age, about half—nearly half have come from the U.S. and EU combined. Two percent from the entire continent of Africa. So they are using very little energy today, haven't therefore contributed to the problems, and have the fewest resources, of course, to cope with the impacts, and also to develop in a cleaner way. Sometimes it's cheaper to develop in a cleaner way. Renewables are often today competitive with coal, even without subsidy. But there are many areas where that's not the case, and there is a cost. And we need to help make sure that, you know, we're thinking about what a just transition looks like. And that means many different things for different communities, whether you're a coal worker or an agricultural worker in California that may, you know, be working outside in worse and worse heat. But it also means thinking about the parts of the world that need assistance to make this transition. So I think we need to be taking that much more seriously. FASKIANOS: Next question is a raised hand from Tara Weil, who is an undergraduate student at Pomona College. Q: Hi. So, given that developed nations are the largest contributors to carbon emissions, as you've said, how can larger powers be convinced as to the importance of addressing global inequality with regards to climate change? And thank you so much, also, for giving this talk. BORDOFF: Yeah. Thank you for being here. I don't have a great answer to your question. I mean, the politics of foreign aid in general are not great, as we often hear in events at CFR. So I do think one—we need to continue to encourage, through political advocacy, civil society, and other ways, governments in advanced economies to think about all the tools they have at their disposal. I think the ones that are going to be—I'm reluctant to try to speak as a political commenter rather than a climate and energy commenter on what's going to work politically. But part of that is demonstrating what—it's not just generosity. It is also in one's self-interest to do these things. And just look at the pandemic, right? What would it look like for the U.S. to show greater leadership, or any country to show even greater leadership and help cope with the pandemic all around the world in parts of the world that are struggling to vaccinate their people? That is not only an act of generosity, but it is clearly one of self-interest too, because it's a pretty globalized economy and you're not going to be able to get a pandemic under control at home if it's not under control abroad. Of course, the same is true of the impacts of climate change. It doesn't matter where a ton of CO2 comes from. And we can decarbonize our own economy, but the U.S. is only 15 percent of annual emissions globally. So it's not going to make a huge difference unless everyone else does that as well. There is also the potential, I think, to—and we see this increasingly when you look at the discussion of the Biden infrastructure bill, how they talk about the U.S.-China relationship, which of course are the two most important countries from the standpoint of climate change. It is one of cooperation. That was one of the success stories in Glasgow, was a commitment to cooperate more. We'll see if we can actually do it, because it's a pretty difficult and tense U.S.-China relationship right now. So the question is, can you separate climate from all those other problems on human rights, and intellectual property, and everything else and then cooperate on climate? It's been hard, but there's a renewed commitment to try to do that. But also, a recognition that action in the clean energy space is not only about cooperation but it's also about economic competition. And you have seen more and more focus on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the aisle on thinking about the security of supply chains, and critical minerals, and the inputs in lithium and rare earth elements that go into many aspects of clean energy. To my point before about aspects of industrial policy that might help grow your own domestic economy, I think there are ways in which countries can take measures that help—that help their own economies and help workers and help create jobs, and that in the process are helping to drive forward more quickly the clean energy technologies we need, and bring down the cost of those technologies to make them more accessible and available in some of the less-developed countries. So I think trying to frame it less as do we keep funds at home, do we write a check abroad? But there are actually many steps you could do to create economic opportunities and are win-win. Without being pollyannish about it, I think there is some truth to some of those. And I think we can focus on those politically as well. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take an international question from Luciana Alexandra Ghica, who is an associate professor for international cooperation at the University of Bucharest. What type of topics do you think we should address immediately in university programs that provide training in climate, development, global policies, or international public affairs, so that a new generation of leaders really pushes forward the agenda on climate change? BORDOFF: Yeah. Well, I'll say a quick word about what we're doing at Columbia, and maybe it's relevant to that question, because Columbia has made this historic commitment to build a climate school. There are many initiatives, and centers, and institutes. There was not only a handful of schools—law school, business school, medical school, engineering school. And it is the largest commitment a university can make to any particular topic, is something on the scale of a school with degree-granting authority and tenure-granting authority, and all the things that come with a school. And it's just the scale at a place like Columbia, and many other places, is just enormous. That's what we're doing on climate. We have created a climate school. And I'm honored President Bollinger asked me to help lead it. And we're going to build a faculty. We have our first inaugural class of masters' students, about ninety students that are going through the program right now, and we have a building in Manhattan for the climate school, and on and on. The idea—but the question is, what is climate, right? Because academia has been historically organized into traditional academic disciplines. So you have people who you hire through a tenured search, and they go to the engineering faculty and build their lab there. And there's law professors, and their business school professors, and on and on and on, social work. But for climate, you need all of those, right? They all kind of need to come together. And, like, interdisciplinary doesn't even sort of do justice to what it means to think about approaching this systemic—it's a systemic challenge. The system has to change. And so whatever solution you're talking about—if you want to get hydrogen to scale in the world, let's—you know, for certain sectors of the economy that may be hard to do with renewable energy, or in terms of renewable energy and, say, green hydrogen. You need engineering breakthroughs to bring down the cost of electrolyzers, or you need new business models, or you need financial institution frameworks that figure out how you're going to put the capital into these things. You need the policy incentives. How are you going to—you need permitting and regulation. How do we permit hydrogen infrastructure? It's barely been done before. There are concerns in the environmental justice community about some aspects of technologies like that or carbon capture that need to be taken seriously and addressed. There are geopolitical implications, potentially, to starting to build a global trade in ammonia or hydrogen, and what security concerns—energy security concerns might accompany those, the way we thought about oil or gas from Russia into Europe. I have an article coming out in the next issue of Foreign Affairs about the geopolitics of the energy transition. So we need disciplines that come together and look at a problem like that in all of those multifaceted dimensions, so we can figure out how to get from a lab to scale out in the world. And so when we think about the areas of concentration here, climate finance, climate justice, climate in society, climate in international security—I mean, a range of things that I think are really important to help people understand. And that's going to be a major focus of what we do at the climate school here. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let's go next to Sean Grossnickle, who has raised his hand. A graduate student at Fordham University. Q: Speak now? Hi, this is not Sean but Henry Schwalbenberg, also at Fordham, where I teach in our international political economy and development program. I went to a conference about a month ago in Rome. And there was a physicist from CERN. And he was a big advocate of something I'd never heard of, and this is this thorium for nuclear reactors. And he was going through all the pros, but I wanted a more balanced perspective on it. And I'm hoping that you might give me a little pros and cons of this thorium nuclear reactor technique. BORDOFF: Yeah. I will be honest and say that nuclear is not my area of focus. We have a pretty strong team here that works in nuclear, and I think is optimistic about the breakthroughs we're going to see in several potential areas of nuclear—advanced nuclear technology, that being one of them, or small modular reactors, and others. At a high level, I will say I do think if you're serious about the math of decarbonization and getting to net zero by 2050, it's hard to do without zero-carbon nuclear power. It's firm, baseload power. It runs all the time. Obviously, there are challenges with intermittency of solar and wind, although they can be addressed to some extent with energy story. Most of the analyses that are done show not necessarily in the U.S. but in other parts of the world significant growth in nuclear power. The International Energy Agency just modeled what it looks like to get to net zero by 2050, and this pathway that got a lot of attention for saying things like we would not be investing in new oil and gas supply. The world has to change a lot pretty quickly. And they have about a hundred new nuclear plants being built by 2030, so that's a pretty big number. So we're going to need all tools—(laughs)—that we have at our disposal. And unfortunately, I worry we may still fall short. So I think at a high level we need to think really hard about how to improve nuclear technology. The people who know that really well I think are optimistic about our ability to do that. And I will follow up on thorium in particular with my colleagues at Columbia, and happy to follow up with you offline about it. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take a written question from Stephen Bird, who's an associate professor of political science at Clarkson University. He thanks you, and he wanted you to talk a little bit more about political will. The overall dollar amounts are clear. Much cheaper to address climate change than to ignore it. That said, countries are, clearly, lagging. Is it a case of countries just don't want to take action now because of issues of fairness or because of lack of domestic political support, i.e., citizens aren't convinced that they should pay costs now with payoffs that come later, and what might we do to improve that issue in terms of persuading or arguing for more political will? BORDOFF: Yeah. It's a question for, you know, a political scientist as much as an energy or climate expert, and I wish I had a better answer to it. I think it is—climate is one of the trickiest problems for so many reasons but one of those is there is no acute event now that you sort of respond to, hopefully, and pull everyone together. It's a set of things that, you know, of course, there would have been storms and droughts before but we know they're intensified and made worse. It's hard to rally public support. We often respond to a crisis kind of proverbial, you know, frog in the boiling water kind of thing. So that makes it hard. There are huge issues—we talked about a just transition a few minutes ago—there are huge issues with intergenerational equity when we talk about climate. There are, clearly, climate impacts and damages today but some of the worst will be in the future, including for people who may not be born yet, and we don't do a great job in our political environment about thinking about those and valuing them today and how you do that, and from an economic standpoint, of course, there are questions about discount rates you apply and everything else. I think, politically, one of the things that has mobilized stronger climate—support for climate action, so it is encouraging that if you look at polling on climate change, the level of urgency that the public in many countries, including the U.S., broadly, ascribe to acting on climate has gone up a lot. It's higher today than it was, you know, a decade or so ago. That's a result of people seeing the impacts and also advocacy campaigns and political campaigns. It is often tied to—it's like a win-win. Like, President Biden says when he thinks of climate he thinks of jobs, and so we're going to deal with climate and we're going to grow the economy faster and we're going to create jobs, and there is truth to that. It is also the case that there are costs. The cost of inaction are higher, but there are costs associated with the transition itself. So if you survey the American public, I think, climate, according to the latest YouGov/Economist poll I saw, you know, it was number two on the list of things they cared the most about. That's much higher than in the past. And then if you ask the American public are they willing to pay $0.25 a gallon more at the pump to act on climate, 75 percent say no. And you look at the challenges the Biden administration is having right now sort of thinking about a really strong set of measures to put in place to move the ball forward on climate, but acute concern today about where oil prices are and inflation and natural gas prices as we head into the winter. If the weather is cold then it's going to be really expensive for people to heat their homes in parts—some parts of the country like New England, maybe. So that's a reality, and I think we need to—it was interesting, in the roundtable we did with President Obama with climate activists, that was a message he had for them. You know, be impatient, be angry, keep the pressure on, but also be pragmatic. And by that he means, like, you know, try to see the world through the eyes of others and people who are worried about the cost of filling up at the pump, the cost of paying their heating bills. They're not—some of them may not be where you are yet. They may not have the same sense of urgency with acting on climate that many of us on this Zoom do and need to take those concerns seriously. So I think that's a real challenge, and it can be addressed with good policy, to some extent, right, if you think about the revenue raised from a carbon tax and how it could be redistributed in a way that reduce the regressive impacts. I've written about how, at a high level—I'll say one last point—if we get on track for an energy transition, which we're not on yet, right. (Laughs.) Oil and gas use are going up each and every year. But imagine we started to get on track where those were falling year after year. It's still going to take decades, and that process of transition is going to be really messy. It's going to be really volatile. We're going to have fits and starts in policy from Obama to Trump to Biden. We're going to make estimate—we're going to make bets on technologies and maybe get those technologies wrong or misunderstand the cost curves, the potential to shut down investment in certain forms of energy before the rest are ready to pick up the slack. If it's messy and volatile and bumpy, that's not only harmful economically and geopolitically, it will undermine public support for stronger climate action. So you see, like, in Washington they're selling off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve because we're moving to a world beyond oil and also we have all this domestic oil now with shale. We need more, not fewer, tools to mitigate volatility for the next several decades if we're serious about making this transition, and I think the same is true for thinking about sort of buffers you could build into geopolitics, foreign policy, and national security, because there will be—in a post-oil and gas world, you know, you may say, well, we're not going to worry as much about the Middle East or about, you know, Russia's leverage in Europe. But there will be new risks created and we can talk about what some of those might be, and we need new tools of foreign policy to mitigate those potential foreign policy risks. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question. Raised hand from Chloe Demrovsky, adjunct instructor at NYU. Q: Hey, can you hear me? BORDOFF: Yes. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Hi. Chloe Demrovsky, adjunct at NYU and president and CEO of Disaster Recovery Institute International. Thanks for being with us, Jason. So my question is about the feasibility and your thoughts on artificially altered clouds or solar geoengineering. What are the ethical and geopolitical implications of, perhaps, using this to buy a little time for our energy transition? Thanks. BORDOFF: Yeah. A super interesting question, and I will say, again, I'm sort of—think of myself as an energy expert. So that is where I spend more time than thinking about tools like solar geoengineering. I guess, it seems there's, obviously, huge risks associated with something like that and we need to understand them. We need to do research. We need to figure out what those risks may be. There are global governance concerns. It's actually pretty cheap to do solar geoengineering. So what happens when some country or some billionaire decides they want to start spraying stuff into the atmosphere to cool the planet? And for those who don't know that, you know, solar—I mean, you think of after a volcano the planet cools a little bit because of all the particulates up in the atmosphere. When you model in an energy system model how much phasing out coal will reduce warming, you, obviously, have much less carbon dioxide emissions but that's offset slightly—not completely, of course—it's offset a little bit by the fact that you have less local air pollution, which is a good thing from air pollution. But air pollution has a slightly cooling effect, because you have these little particles floating around that reflect sunlight. So the idea is can we create that artificially and cool the planet, and you can imagine lots of reasons why that could go wrong when you're trying to figure out what—how much to put in there, what unintended consequences could be. You still have other impacts of carbon dioxide like ocean acidification. Maybe you go too far in one direction, that's like you're setting the thermostat. That's why one of the companies doing carbon removal is called Global Thermostat. You're kind of figuring out what temperature it should be. But I will say so it's an area that needs research and I think, given how far we are away from achieving goals like 1.5 and net-zero 2050, I guess what I would say is in the same way that when I worked in the Obama administration it was—I wouldn't say controversial, but there were some people who didn't want to talk about adaptation because it was kind of a more—there was a moral hazard problem there. It was, you know, less pressure to mitigate and reduce emissions if we thought adaptation was a solution. People worry about that from the standpoint of solar geoengineering. But the likelihood—I hope I'm wrong, but the likelihood that we roll the clock forward, you know, later this decade and we realize we've made progress but we're still pretty far short, and the impacts of climate change in the same way the IPCC 1.5 report said, you know what, 1.5 is going to be pretty bad, too, and that's even worse than we thought, the more we learn about climate the more reason there is to be concerned, not less concerned. It seems very plausible to me that we will kind of come to a growing consensus that we have to think about whether this technology can, as you said, buy us time. This is not something you do permanently. You need to get to net zero to stop global warming. But if you want to reduce the impacts of warming on the rate of Arctic sea ice melt and all the rest, can you buy time, extend the runway, by doing this for some number of decades. And I think—I don't have a strong view on the right answer to that. But I think it's something we, certainly, need to be thinking about researching and understanding what the consequences would be because we're going to have to figure out how to take more abrupt actions to close that gap between ambition and reality unless the reality starts to change much more quickly than is the case right now. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I saw a raised hand from Maya but she lowered it. So if you want to raise your hand again, please do so. And in the meantime, I'm going to take a written question from Jennifer Sklarew, who's an assistant professor of energy and sustainability at George Mason University. Was CCS/CCUS, which carbon capture and storage/carbon capture utilization and storage, to write out those acronyms, promoted as a climate change solution in Glasgow and was there a pushback against this technology option as both a climate change solution and a support mechanism for continued fossil fuel use? BORDOFF: There was some pushback but, I think, actually, more in the other direction. So I think there has been a growing recognition from many in the climate world that carbon capture technology, carbon removal technology, need to be part of the solution. I think there's almost no climate model at this point that shows how you would get to 1.5 degrees or net zero—1.5 degrees without huge amounts of negative emissions—carbon removal. Some of that can be nature based, but a lot of it will be—some of it will be technology based as well and focusing on what we care about, which is the emissions, is the most important thing. So and this is not, I don't think, the primary thing you're going to do. You want to do the things that are easiest and cheapest and present the fewest risks. So putting a lot of renewables into the grid, getting electrification into the vehicle fleet—there's a lot of things that you would do before that. But if you think about some of the sectors in the economy we talked about before that are hard to decarbonize like steel and cement, it may well be the case that carbon capture is part of the technology there. There was a big announcement yesterday from the NET Power Allam Cycle gas plant in Texas that they had finally come online with delivering net-zero power to the grid. It was sort of a milestone in that technology. So we need to advance this technology and figure out how we're going to—how we're going to get where we need to be. We need to hold that kind of technology accountable to make sure that it's actually meeting the standards we're talking about so that it actually is very low, if not zero, carbon. But if you look at, you know, most of the scenarios I'm aware of, whether it's—Princeton did the study “Net-Zero America,” how we get to net zero by 2050 in the U.S. The International Energy Agency, as I said, did it for net zero globally. There is a meaningful role for carbon capture, to some extent, in the power sector in these heavy industry sectors like steel and cement, and then making, say, hydrogen some of that will be blue hydrogen. Most of it, eventually, will be green, but there may be some role for blue hydrogen, which is—which is gas with carbon capture. So I think, if anything, there's been a growing understanding that we need all tools on deck right away and, again, I fear even with all the tools we may still fall short. FASKIANOS: Great. There's a written question from Laila Bichara, who's at SUNY Farmingdale, international business. There was a New York Times article, “Business Schools Respond to a Flood of Interest in ESG,” talking about the issue of the scarcity of skills in recent graduates to help with social impact, sustainable investments, climate finance, and social entrepreneurship. And she wanted to know if there are resources that you could point the group to in terms of foundation courses or certification that would provide all students with a basic foundation. BORDOFF: Yeah. That's a really good question and it's a growing area of focus and I think universities should be doing more in. The Tamer Center of Columbia Business School does a lot of work in ESG. We hosted a really interesting roundtable at the Center on Global Energy Policy yesterday on ESG and actually been doing a lot of work thinking about that in the context of state-owned enterprises and national oil companies, which we don't talk about enough. But they're a really, really big part of the problem we're talking about. We tend to focus more on these very well-known private sector companies or financial institutions in places like New York. So there—Bloomberg Philanthropies has done a huge amount in this space. I think there's some really good educational programs with some universities and business schools that have done a lot in the ESG space. But I think it's a need, to be frank. I mean, the fact that you're asking the question and I'm pointing to a few examples, but not a huge number, and it is something that universities need to educate themselves about but then is an opportunity for us to educate others. Maybe a revenue one, too, with executive education or something. But there's a lot of companies and financial institutions that want to understand this better. I worry that while there's a huge growing focus on climate, which is a good thing, in the financial community, the phrase ESG kind of means so many different things right now. It's this alphabet soup of regulations and standards and disclosure requirements, and some may make a difference and some may not and it's hard to figure out which ones matter, and for people who want to do the responsible thing what does that really mean. That's an area where research is needed. I mean, that's a role for what we do every day to think about if the SEC is going to regulate what makes a difference and what doesn't, if you're going to create green bonds. If you're going to call everything green in the finance community, what's real and what's not? What moves the needle? What doesn't? What are the returns for greener portfolios? How is that affecting the cost of capital for clean energy versus dirty energy? You know, on and on. I think those are important research questions for us to take on and then it's our job to help educate others as well. FASKIANOS: Great. So the next question I'm going to take from—oh, OK. Good. Maya Copeland (sp) has written her question. She's a political science major at Delaware State University. Do you believe developed nations like the U.S. have done a lot in reference to climate change or mostly talk? If you believe nations like the U.S. have dropped the ball in this aspect, what do you think it would take to get those powerhouses serious about environmental change? BORDOFF: I think advanced economies have done—many have done a lot. I mean, the European Union has taken climate seriously and has reduced emissions and has pretty strong measures in place with a carbon market, for example, with a pretty high carbon price right now. The politics of this issue are not quite as favorable in the U.S., but the U.S. has seen emissions decline more than most over the last decade and a half, in part because of policy measures that have, you know, advanced renewable energy and brought the cost of that down as well as cheaper natural gas displacing coal for a while. But at a broader level, you know, have we done enough? The answer is no one's done enough—(laughs)—which is why emissions are still going up every single year. So that—so the answer is no, we haven't done enough. Almost no country has done enough at home to be on a trajectory for net zero 2050. You saw the announcements from countries like India saying, we'll get to net zero by 2070, and, you know, people said, oh, well, that's terrible. They're not saying 2050. And implicit in that is sort of saying, well, if you want to get global to net zero by 2050 we're not all going to move at the same speed, right. Some countries have advanced with the benefit of hydrocarbons since the Industrial Age and some haven't. So, presumably, the pathways are going to look different, right. And, you know, that's not always how countries in the advanced—in the developing—in the developed world talk about it. The commitment from the Biden administration is net zero by 2050. So I would say there's been—there are some models to point to of countries that have taken this issue seriously but we're not doing enough and partly because the political will is not there and partly—I come back to what I said before—this problem is harder than people realize. So you say which countries are doing enough, like, point to some models, right, and somebody might point to Norway, which, you know, the share of new vehicles sold that are electric in Norway went from zero to, I think, it's 70 percent now. I mean, that's amazing. Seventy percent of new car sales are electric. And if you go back to the start of that trajectory, about a decade or decade and a half, oil demand is unchanged in Norway. So we can talk about why that is and it's because a lot—as I said earlier, a lot of oil is used for things other than cars, and it's increased for trucks and planes and petrochemicals. It takes time for the vehicle fleet to turn over. So when you start selling a bunch of electric cars, you know, average car is on the road for fifteen years so it takes a while before that—the vehicle stock turns over. So I saw that kind of mapped out on a chart recently, just two lines—one is electric vehicle sales going straight up and then the other is oil demand in a flat line. It's a reminder of how unforgiving the math of decarbonization is. The math of climate is really unforgiving, like, you know, the kind of harmful impacts we're going to see with even 1.5 degrees warming. But the math of energy and decarbonization is really unforgiving, too. It's—and we just need to be honest with ourselves about what it takes to get where we need to go. Because I think it's good to have optimism and ambition, but I worry there should be optimism but not happy talk. We should recognize that there's a lot of work to do and let's get to work doing it. FASKIANOS: Great. So there are several questions in the chat about China. I'm going to start off with Andrew Campbell, who's a student at George Mason University. Is LNG—liquefied natural gas—a bridge toward renewable energy still being considered? If not, how are India and China's expected growth and increase in coal use going to be addressed? And then there are a couple of other comments or questions about China. You know, what's your take on China as the biggest emitter and return somewhat to coal? Can we actually even make stated and adequate new goals? And, you know, given the relationship between U.S. and China, which is contentious, you know, what is the cooperation going to be between U.S. and China on climate? So there's a lot packed in there, but I know you can address it all. (Laughs.) BORDOFF: Yeah. I think the China question is really hard, as I said earlier, this kind of, like, competition and cooperation and we're going to try to do both, and I think there was a hope early on—Secretary Kerry said it—that climate could be segmented from the broader challenges in the U.S.-China relationship, and I think that has proven harder to do than people had hoped, in part, because, you know, you need both parties to want to do that. I think China has signaled it's not necessarily willing to segment cooperation on climate from lots of other issues. And then these things bleed together where, you know, there's measures being taken in Washington to restrict imports of solar panels from China, that there were concerns that were made with—in ways that have human rights abuses associated with them with forced labor or maybe have unfair trade practices in terms of subsidies. China is—you know, the leadership in China takes climate seriously. This is a country that recognizes, I think, climate change is real and that needs to be addressed. They have a set of national interests that matter a lot, obviously, to them in terms of economic growth, and the pathway to get there is challenging. So it's a country that's growing clean energy incredibly quickly, as we're seeing right now, in part because there's a(n) energy crunch throughout Europe and Asia. They are ramping up the use of coal quite a bit again, but also taking some pretty strong measures to advance clean energy and, over time, hopefully, move in a lower carbon direction for reasons both about concerns over climate but also local air pollution, which is much, much worse in many parts of China than it is here and that's a huge source of concern for the public there. So when it comes to things like coal they need to figure out how to address those air pollution problems. And then for reasons of economic competition, like I mentioned a minute ago. I mean, China dominates the global market for refining and processing of critical minerals for solar panels, and there are economic and national competitiveness and strategic reasons to do that. So all of those things motivate them to move in the direction of clean energy, but they need to be moving faster to phase down hydrocarbon energy for sure. And then you ask a really hard question about—not hard, but one of the most contentious questions is about the role of natural gas in the transition, and we can have a whole separate session about that. I think there is a view of many in the climate community and many in developing countries—in developed countries that there's not space left in the carbon budget for natural gas, and you saw the Biden administration recently declare through the Treasury Department that, except in very rare cases of the poorest of the poor like Sierra Leone or something, they would not finance natural gas projects through the multilateral development banks. The vice president of Nigeria, I think, responded—speaking of CFR—in Foreign Affairs by writing that this was not fair and you need to think about a viable pathway for a country like Nigeria to develop and it just—it doesn't work to get there that fast. There has to be a bridge. The role of gas looks very different in different parts of the world. It looks different in the U.S. than it does in an emerging or a developing economy. It looks different in the power sector, where there are a lot more alternatives like renewables than it does in heavy industry or how we heat our homes. It looks different for, say, in the Global South, where you're talking about people who are still using coal and charcoal and dung for cooking to think about solutions like liquefied petroleum gas. So all of those things are true, but we need to think about gas also with the carbon budget in mind. I mean, the math is just the math. (Laughs.) If you're going to build any gas infrastructure and not have it blow through the carbon budget, it's going to have to be retired before the end of its normal economic life and you need to think about how that might look in different parts of the world. So you need to be fair to people, to allow them to grow, but also recognize that the math of carbon, you know, is what it is. FASKIANOS: Great. I just want to credit those last—the China questions came from Lada Kochtcheeva at North Carolina State University and Joan Kaufman, who's director of Schwarzman Scholars based in China. We are really at the end of our time—we started a couple minutes late—and I just wanted to go back to—there are students on the call who are following with a professor on the webinar who wanted you just to comment on blue hydrogen, whether or not it is contributing or helping to reduce greenhouse gases. BORDOFF: I think the answer is it can. You just need to make sure that it actually does. So the question of—and by blue hydrogen we mean, you know, using gas with carbon capture to create hydrogen. It needs to have very low methane leakage rates. It needs to have very high capture rates, and we know that is technically possible. It doesn't mean it will be done that way. So if people are going to pursue blue hydrogen as part of the solution in the—particularly in the near term, you need to make sure that it's meeting those standards. I think in the long run my guess and, I think, most guesses would be that green hydrogen is going to make more sense. It's going to be cheaper. The cost is going to come down. And so if we have a significant part of the energy sector that is hydrogen and ammonia in, say, 2050, more of that's going to be green than blue. But there can be a role for blue if you make sure it's done the right way. You just have to actually make sure it's done the right way. FASKIANOS: Great. And, Jason, we are out of time, but I wanted to give you one last, you know, one-minute or thirty seconds, whatever you want, just to say some parting words on your work at the center or, you know, to leave the group with what they can do, again. So— BORDOFF: Well, I would just say thanks for the chance to be with you all and for the work that you're doing every day. You know, I think Glasgow was a moment when the world came together to elevate ambition and roll up our sleeves and say this is—this is the decisive decade. Like, we'll know ten years from now—(laughs)—if we got anywhere close to making it or not. And so it's time for everyone to kind of roll up their sleeves and say, what can we do? We're doing that, I think, at Columbia with the creation of this new climate school. We do that every day at the Center on Global Energy Policy. And so just in all of your institutions, you know, what does that mean for you? What does it mean for the institution? What does that mean for your own research and time and how you allocate it? How do we step up and say, what can we do in the biggest and boldest way we can? Because we need—we're creating a climate school because I think the view is—you know, a hundred years ago there were no schools of public health and now it's how would you deal with a pandemic without a school of public health? So I think our view is decades from now we'll look back and wonder how we ever thought it was possible to handle a problem as complex and urgent as climate change without universities devoting their greatest kind of resource to them. And the measure of success for universities has to be research and new knowledge creation. It has to be education. It has to be serving our own communities. For us, it's, you know, the community here in New York, Harlem. But also are we focusing the extraordinary resources and capacity and expertise of these great institutions to solve humanity's greatest problems? That has to be a motivating force, too, for much of—maybe not all of but a lot of what universities do. So I'd just ask all of us to go back and think about how we can do that in our own work every day. and we have to do it through partnerships. I think universities don't work together as well as they need to. But this is only going to work if we work together. FASKIANOS: Great way to end. Thank you very much, Jason Bordoff. We really appreciate it. We'll have to look for your article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which is published by CFR. So, we are excited that you continue to contribute to the magazine. You can follow Jason Bordoff on Twitter at @JasonBordoff. Very easy to remember. Our final academic webinar of the semester will be on Wednesday, December 1, at 1:00 p.m. (ET). Michelle Gavin, who is CFR's Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies, will talk about African politics and security issues. So in the meantime, follow us at @CFR_Academic. Come to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you. Take care. BORDOFF: Thank you. (END)

According to a new study by the Columbia Climate School, exposure to deadly urban heat has tripled since the 1980s.  The increase is the combined result of both rising global temperatures and booming urban population growth. The study looked at more than 13,000 cities worldwide and found that incidents of extreme heat and humidity have […]

David and Helen talk to Jason Bordoff, Dean of the Columbia Climate School and former Special Assistant to Barack Obama, about climate, COP26 and the enormous challenges of the energy transition. How can we balance the need for energy security with the need to wean the world off its dependency on fossil fuels? Why is China still so reliant on coal? Who will pay for the energy needs of the developing world? Plus, just how scared are the oil companies of public opinion? You can read more of Jason's work here.Talking Points:Energy transition will require a lot of capital investment.Clean energy tends to be more capital intensive in the short term; although the long-term operating costs are lower.Private capital needs to be mobilized to make this happen. Can large financial institutions forgo significant returns if oil prices go back up?  There is a clash between climate ambition and energy reality.The reality is that, despite tremendous advances in clean energy, oil and gas usage are still going up. The more the ambition is elevated, the bigger this gap becomes. During a lockdown that shut down half of the global economy, carbon emissions only fell 6%. To reach the 1.5 degree target, emissions need to decrease much more quickly.We might start seeing more disruptive and ambitious policies on the table in coming years. Or, maybe not. When questions of energy affordability, reliability, and security come into tension with climate ambition, there is a risk that climate ambition will lose. Is increasing efficiency enough, or will energy consumption also need to go down?In many parts of the world, energy use will actually need to increase in the coming decades. What is needed to make significant investments in clean energy in the developing world financially viable?Some people, like John Kerry, hoped that the U.S. and China might find a point of consensus on climate.In practice, that has not really happened.Could economic competition be a more effective driver than cooperation?If we always see high oil prices as a political problem that we can't afford, then how will we get to the point at which we allow high prices to reduce demand?The United States is the world's largest oil producer, but the U.S. government has much less control over American oil and gas producers than OPEC states do.Should we be talking more about energy and less about climate? Mentioned in this Episode: The Columbia Climate SchoolJason's recent article in Foreign Policy on energy in the developing worldJason, on why everything you think about the geopolitics of climate change is wrongJason's podcast, Columbia Energy ExchangeFurther Learning: How much will it cost the UK to reach net zero?

Original Air Date: October 27, 2021 Drawing on insights from his book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, our featured guest, Professor Noam Chomsky, will explore paths to climate progress on an overheating and starkly unequal planet with fresh assessments from Columbia Climate School's Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and Dr. Belinda Archibong, a Barnard College economist focused on African development and perspectives on climate and energy policy. The session will be hosted by longtime climate journalist Andy Revkin, the founding director of the Initiative on Communication & Sustainability of the Columbia Climate School. Student nominated representatives from Teachers College will have an opportunity to engage the panel with their questions on climate action and learning. Links to bios and more information are here: https://j.mp/chomskyclimate This special Sustain What segment is organized by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School and the Teachers College Program in Adult Learning and Leadership. It is hosted by Andy Revkin, founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia Climate School.

Podcast jest dostępny także w formie newslettera: https://ainewsletter.integratedaisolutions.com/ Google, Amazon i Microsoft zatrudniają i wydają miliony dolarów na projektowanie własnych chipów komputerowych od podstaw, aby wycisnąć oszczędności finansowe i lepszą wydajność z serwerów, które obsługują i szkolą modele uczenia maszynowego firm. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-develops-new-machine-learning-chip Centrum będzie prowadzone przez Columbia Engineering, Wydział Nauk Humanistycznych i Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, we współpracy z Teachers College, Columbia Business School, School of Social Work oraz nową przekrojową Columbia Climate School. https://news.columbia.edu/news/columbia-ai-based-climate-modeling-center Systemy sztucznej inteligencji są wykorzystywane do określania, kto otrzymuje usługi publiczne i decydowania, kto ma szansę na zatrudnienie, powiedział szef praw ONZ, ostrzegając, że gromadzone dane mogą być zagrożone, nieaktualne, a nawet dyskryminujące. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/9/15/warning-of-risk-un-rights-chief-urges-ai-oversight-regulation Policja z Queensland przygotowuje się do rozpoczęcia prób systemu sztucznej inteligencji w celu identyfikacji przestępców wysokiego ryzyka przemocy domowej, a funkcjonariusze zamierzają wykorzystać dane do „pukania do drzwi” https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/14/queensland-police-to-trial-ai-tool-designed-to-predict-and-prevent-domestic-violence-incidents „Chodzi o inwestowanie w nasze największe źródło siły, nasze sojusze i aktualizowanie ich, aby lepiej sprostać zagrożeniom dnia dzisiejszego i jutra” https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/15/biden-deal-uk-australia-defense-tech-sharing-511877 Odwiedź www.integratedaisolutions.com

Google, Amazon und Microsoft haben alle Millionen von Dollar eingestellt und ausgegeben, um ihre eigenen Computerchips von Grund auf neu zu entwickeln, mit dem Ziel, finanzielle Einsparungen und eine bessere Leistung von Servern zu erzielen, die die maschinellen Lernmodelle der Unternehmen handhaben und trainieren. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-develops-new-machine-learning-chip Das Zentrum wird von Columbia Engineering, Columbias Faculty of Arts of Sciences, und dem Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Teachers College, der Columbia Business School, der School of Social Work und der neuen übergreifenden Columbia Climate School geleitet. https://news.columbia.edu/news/columbia-ai-based-climate-modeling-center Künstliche Intelligenzsysteme werden verwendet, um zu bestimmen, wer öffentliche Dienstleistungen erhält und wer eine Chance hat, für einen Job eingestellt zu werden, sagte der UN-Rechtschef und warnte davor, dass gesammelte Daten kompromittiert, veraltet und sogar diskriminierend sein können. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/9/15/warning-of-risk-un-rights-chief-urges-ai-oversight-regulation Die Polizei von Queensland bereitet sich auf den Beginn von Prozessen mit einem System der künstlichen Intelligenz vor, um Täter mit hohem Risiko für häusliche Gewalt zu identifizieren, und die Beamten beabsichtigen, die Daten zu verwenden, um vor einer ernsthaften Eskalation „an Türen zu klopfen“. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/14/queensland-police-to-trial-ai-tool-designed-to-predict-and-prevent-domestic-violence-incidents „Hier geht es darum, in unsere größte Kraftquelle, unsere Allianzen, zu investieren und sie zu aktualisieren, um den Bedrohungen von heute und morgen besser begegnen zu können“, sagte Biden aus dem Weißen Haus zwischen zwei Monitoren, die die anderen Weltführer zeigten. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/15/biden-deal-uk-australia-defense-tech-sharing-511877 Visit www.integratedaisolutions.com

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all hired and spent millions of dollars to develop their own computer chips from scratch with the aim of generating financial savings and better performance from servers that handle and train companies' machine learning models. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-develops-new-machine-learning-chip The center is led by Columbia Engineering, Columbia's Faculty of Arts of Sciences, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in collaboration with Teachers College, Columbia Business School, School of Social Work, and the new overarching Columbia Climate School. https://news.columbia.edu/news/columbia-ai-based-climate-modeling-center Artificial intelligence systems are used to determine who receives public services and who has a chance of being hired for a job, the UN lawyer said, warning that data collected can be compromised, out of date and even discriminatory. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/9/15/warning-of-risk-un-rights-chief-urges-ai-oversight-regulation Queensland Police are preparing to begin trials using an artificial intelligence system to identify high-risk domestic violence perpetrators, and officers intend to use the data to “knock on doors” before a serious escalation occurs ". https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/14/queensland-police-to-trial-ai-tool-designed-to-predict-and-prevent-domestic-violence-incidents "This is about investing in our greatest source of strength, our alliances, and updating them to better meet the threats of today and tomorrow," said Biden from the White House between two monitors showing the other world leaders. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/15/biden-deal-uk-australia-defense-tech-sharing-511877 Visit www.integratedaisolutions.com

The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and there is much excitement today about the road ahead for electric vehicles.  Many automakers have pledged to increase the share of their production by going all battery or fuel cell electric within a decade, but few of the new models meet current buyer preference for larger vehicles with increased utility. But the Ford Motor Company's introduction of the F-150 Lightning, a battery electric version of the best-selling truck in the U.S. for the last 44 years, may signal a tipping point in building the future of zero emissions transportation. This live episode of the podcast, moderated by Host Jason Bordoff, features two key figures in the clean transportation transition: The first is Jim Farley, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ford, a role he took on just about a year ago. He also serves as a member of the company's Board of Directors and was previously Chief Operating Officer. Also in the conversation is Mary Nichols, a long-time environmental champion and  Chair of the California Air Resources Board. She's now a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy.   Jim and Mary discuss the significant changes taking place in the industry's plans and strategies to achieve carbon neutrality and the role of regulation, policy and investments in building demand for battery electric vehicles.  The Climate Group has selected the Columbia Climate School as its University partner for this year's Climate Week NYC. Running Sept. 20-26, Climate Week NYC convened key climate leaders to accelerate climate action and discuss ambitious commitments ahead of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference this fall in Glasgow.

Air Date: August 6, 2021 DESCRIPTION: In this special live Sustain What webcast, join host Andy Revkin of the Columbia Climate School and http://revkin.bulletin.com in a brisk solution-focused discussion with top experts of pathways to risk reduction in the world's hundreds of crowding deluge danger zones. Humans are profoundly heating the climate and changing storm patterns through a surge in emissions of heat-trapping gases and other pollution. But there's also been a simultaneous surge of settlement in zones prone to flooding -- producing what some geographers call an “expanding bull's eye” of exposure to climate-related threats like floods. And of course the poorest and most marginalized populations are always hurt most. A pioneering study, published in Nature on Wednesday, has greatly raised estimates of population growth in flood-affected regions and offers sobering projections of much more flood exposure through 2030 without big changes in policy at every scale. Luckily the work, sifting millions of high-resolution satellite images, has also produced a new open-access tool, the Global Flood Database (http://global-flood-database.cloudtostreet.ai), that offers officials at all levels, the financial world and communities a clearer view of the exposure they've created and a chance to shape safer development paths in the critical years ahead. Read Andy Revkin's story about the paper: http://j.mp/bulletinflood GUESTS: Beth Tellman, Cloud to Street Chief Science Officer and lead author of the Nature paper Jean-Martin Bauer, Senior Digital Advisor for the UN World Food Programme and former WFP Country Director of Republic of the Congo Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development Simon Young, senior director for climate and resilience at the global advisory company Willis Towers Watson (he has been building new types of insurance to respond to floods and other extreme events around the world including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands)

Wildfires in the western US and parts of Canada, driven by extreme drought conditions and heat waves, are casting hazy skies across the country. We talked to Brian Kahn, the managing editor of Earther and a lecturer at the Columbia Climate School about how climate change is altering our lives. Some counties nationwide are recommending that even vaccinated individuals keep their masks on when in indoor public spaces to fight the spread of the Delta variant of coronavirus. And in headlines: India's COVID death toll estimated to be over 4 million, the former chair of Trump's inaugural committee Tom Barrack was arrested for foreign lobbying charges, and Japan loses big on the Olympics. Show Notes: The Guardian: “Deadly flooding hits central China, affecting tens of millions” – https://bit.ly/3xWnAlY Washington Post Op-Ed: “The pandemic has changed course again. The Biden administration urgently needs to do the same” – https://wapo.st/3hV2IpU For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this 30th episode of the podcast, I'm honoured to be joined by renowned climate scientist Professor Maureen Raymo. Maureen is Co-Founding Dean of Columbia Climate School, and Director at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University.Here is a sample paragraph from her bio on the Columbia Climate School Leadership page:Prof. Raymo is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, The Geological Society of America, The Geological Society of London, and The Explorer's Club.  In 2014 she became the first woman to be awarded the Wollaston Medal, The Geological Society of London's most senior medal previously award to Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, and Charles Darwin.  She was awarded the Maurice Ewing Medal by the AGU and U. S. Navy “for significant original contributions to the ocean sciences” and the European Geosciences Union, upon recognizing her accomplishments with the Milankovic Medal, wrote, “Maureen E. Raymo's work has given names to critical, foundational ideas: the ‘uplift-weathering hypothesis', the ‘41-thousand-year problem', ‘Pliocene sea level paradox', and ‘the Lisiecki-Raymo δ18O Stack' are all central themes in palaeoceanography that appear in textbooks and have their roots in Raymo's research and intellectual contributions.”  Maureen's work, firmly based on observations and data, has shaped our understanding of Earth's natural climate variability and her many landmark papers have influenced a generation of climate scientists. So you can see why it is such a great honour to have Prof Raymo (or Maureen as she asked me to call her) come on the podcast.We had a fascinating conversation, which although it started out bleak discussing sea-level rise, ended on a very optimistic note, I'm delighted to report.As always, I learned loads (including how to correctly pronounce Pliocene

The fact that the climate is changing is an incontrovertible fact. If we do nothing – or fall short of what is needed – human beings as a species are headed toward unprecedented disaster.  Our guest in this episode, Dr. Ruth DeFries, Professor of Ecology and Sustainable Development at Columbia University and Co-founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School, is one of the people committed to addressing the factors driving climate change and helping us see a path other than the one we are on. In this episode, Dr. DeFries discusses how we've passed humanity's climate “period of grace” and why we should immediately reduce planet-warming emissions while preparing for an unstable climate future.  

It’s been quite a tumultuous year for the oil and gas industry, from a historic pandemic that sent oil prices crashing to growing pressure and urgency for companies to align their strategies with the world’s escalating climate ambitions. Occidental Petroleum is one of those companies, which has faced those challenges and more, including how to manage the high profile acquisition of Anadarko shortly before the pandemic struck.  In this edition of Columbia Energy Exchange, host Jason Bordoff is joined by the person navigating Occidental Petroleum through this period, its CEO, Vicki Hollub, who has been CEO since 2016. Vicki recently said Oxy would become not just an oil company but a carbon management company, and Jason asked her about that and more when they spoke a few days ago in front of a live virtual audience at the annual Climate Science and Investment Conference hosted by the Columbia Climate School and the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School.  During her 35-year career with Occidental, Vicki has held a variety of management and technical positions on three continents. Vicki started her career working on oil rigs in 1981, after graduating from the University of Alabama. She’s the most senior woman in the oil and gas sector and was the first woman to head a major American oil company.