I learned of Bruce and Milad's Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) report, The Carbon Capture Crux – Lessons Learned, with fascination since I held out for carbon capture to be one of the major potential solutions to climate change. Though climate is only one of the many environmental problems risking civilization, it's one of the big ones. I contacted them to learn what could work or not. Many projections take for granted that today's unproven technologies will work in time to help, but our wanting them to work doesn't mean they will. In our conversation, we talked about their findings and what they meant. Sadly, the results aren't pretty. As they said “as a solution to tackling catastrophic rising emissions in its…

Longtime listeners know I spent some formative years in some rough neighborhoods in Philadelphia. In researching them for my upcoming book, I discovered the many-award-winning book Loving Day by Mat Johnson took place largely a block from where I lived. His Wikipedia page showed he went to grade school with my stepbrother and stepsister. I read and loved Loving Day, which not only described my neighborhood, it explored it through race, which I was looking to understand, and it was raw and vulnerable, which I struggle to create in my writing. It opens: "In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father's house." That house was a block from my home. Loving Day led me to read his books Pym, Incognegro, and…

Mark is a physicist who went into business around the environment. There aren't many of us, so I think you'll hear a rapport we enjoyed that I think you'll enjoy too. We indulge in physicist talk. I contacted him because I found his reports on what solar and wind---what I don't see how we can call renewable, green, or clean energy sources---require in their manufacture, transportation, installation, decommissioning, and more. Many fans of such technologies gloss over their problems, which seems to me irresponsible. If we are not honest about them we will make mistakes. Partisanship is a problem when there are testable answers to how much a particular solar installation or strategy to lower emissions works. Mark looks at possible futures but also returns…

Don regularly reads my blog. We've emailed for years so after inviting to record episodes with other listeners, I invited him. We both find a systems perspective the most effective way to understand and act on our environmental problems. I enjoyed talking to him about systems. Many people see them as technical, to the extent they get the view at all, but you don't have to work with them that long to see they are how to understand the environment and how we can act on it effectively. The alternative is to keep proposing solutions that sound nice but exacerbate our problems, things like trying to reduce carbon emissions alone, carbon offsets, recycling, chasing efficiency, and plans that accelerate the system and its polluting results.…

Do you keep your screens by your bed? Do you find yourself running in circles like: Twitter to email to latest news to Facebook to Instagram to Twitter and repeating the cycle forever? John shares his results committing to turning off his screens no matter what at 8pm a couple nights a week. Do you imagine it would affects his relationship with his wife, with whom he watched shows and movies? Would he get more anxious or less? Read more or sleep earlier? What do you think you would do? He shared what worked, what challenged things he needed to do for work, feelings of addiction. Toward the end he generalized to patriarchy, hierarchy, race, and leadership. Before recording we planned to keep the conversation…