Climate Break: A podcast focused on solutions to the climate crisis

Climate change is a huge topic and a huge force in our lives. The people who founded Berkeley Law’s in 2020 Climatic holiday podcast, recently partnered with NPR affiliate KALW, you know this and want to help by offering solutions in small weekly episodes.

In these questions and answers News from Berkeley talks to the creators of Climatic holidayboth from the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) — Ethan Elkind, director of the center’s climate program and podcast host, and Ken Alex, director of Project Climate and producer of the podcast — about the show and why they started it .

Berkeley News: Why did you decide to do it? Climatic holiday?

Ken Alex: One of the biggest challenges with climate is always getting people to act, to care, to find different ways to talk about it to different audiences. And one thing we talked about at CLEE is that a lot of the coverage of climate change, unfortunately for obvious reasons, is pretty negative. You know, the series of horrors that come down and are already here, to some extent.

So my thought was, “Can we try something with a different tone that really just focuses on solutions?” And then when we talked about it with Ethan and others, we also thought that making short clips, instead of really going in depth or beating people over the head with it, just to have these kind of little teasers to give people an idea, give them a little bit of hope and have a lot of solutions, which in our experience, there are a lot.

Ethan Elkind: Yes, I would describe the show as something of an antidote to despair. Hopefully, it empowers people and shows them that there are very important climate solutions, some of which they can adopt in their own lives and, perhaps more importantly, that they can support on a societal scale. And just to show people all the great work that’s being done out there and all the innovation that the climate challenge is unleashing. And a lot of that is happening right here at UC Berkeley. It was actually quite surprising to us how much amazing work was happening across campus in corners that we at the law school didn’t even know existed. So it was fun to feature some of that work in the show.

How do you find all these experts on campus working on climate solutions?

Ken Alex: One thing kind of leads to another. You find one guy working on something and he says, “Oh, you know this guy’s work?” There’s also the Berkeley Climate Change Network, run by Bruce Riordan, which collects all the current work on climate, which is surprising hard to understand. And then, a lot Climatic holiday is run by students and they give us ideas all the time – some of them from the students’ teachers themselves. The number and variety of projects and solutions at UC Berkeley alone is amazing. And then if you expand beyond that to the Bay Area, California and beyond, it’s practically endless.

Ethan Elkind: The Berkeley Climate Change Network is an attempt to bring together all the different climate work happening on campus, so that definitely helps. But Ken also has a lot of contacts and experience in this area, first for the Attorney General’s office where he led the environmental law division and then as counsel [former Gov.] Jerry Brown as Senior Climate Advisor and Director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. And I’ve been at this job for over a decade and a half. So we started with a pretty good idea of ​​who does what.

But I would also really respect the students. We are almost entirely taught by students. CLEE Senior Fellow Chandra Middleton takes the lead in overseeing them, and Ken and I help out, but we have students from the journalism school, the law school, the business school, and a great group of students who have been really innovative and probing in finding the great research , which are done both on and off campus. So they really take the lead.

When listening to some of the Climatic breaks episodes that last less than two minutes each, I found myself wanting to learn more about many of the topics. How do audiences respond to the format?

Ethan Elkind: The feedback we received was very positive. I was surprised – you can actually fit quite a bit of information into less than two minutes. It’s a nice way to get people’s attention and then encourage them to dig deeper if they want to get more involved.

In addition, we are now partnered with KALW radio, the NPR affiliate in San Francisco, which airs the show twice every Thursday and once on Sunday mornings. It’s also available on the NPR One podcast app, which allows listeners to live stream local NPR stations. Our goal is to spread the show on more radio stations in the country, not only through digital distribution. Less than two minutes is a good length to fit between longer hour-long radio programs on public radio, in particular.

What are some of your favorite episodes?

Ken Alex: We did some based on community service, some based on really hard science. Some of them are on more sociological things. One that comes to mind is using oyster shells to create a sea wall. We interviewed someone who is big on corporate activism about how tech companies, for example, can encourage their management to lobby for climate policy and take a bigger position on climate policy. It’s just a range of things, from technology to community activism to some of the interesting research that’s going on in science, in general, and agriculture, everything.

Ethan Elkind: We did a few focused on the Bay Area. One was with an environmental justice activist from West Oakland, Ms. Margaret Gordon, who spoke about the work she is doing to monitor toxic air pollution, which is actually co-pollution with greenhouse gas emissions, in her community. It was a real highlight.

We interviewed a researcher at UC Davis who is developing a method of feeding cows with seaweed supplements to reduce their methane gas, which is really interesting and promising. We interviewed a professor at Berkeley, Whendee Silver, who is experimenting with ranch soil management and ways to use grasslands to capture carbon, so that’s fascinating.

Another Berkeley researcher is looking at fiber optic cables to better monitor offshore wind development and make sure offshore wind is producing optimally. There’s another researcher on campus doing electric vehicle charging that he can optimize to support the grid, to encourage people to charge when we have enough electricity available, not when it’s limited. I could go on and on, it’s all quite fascinating.

One thing we talked about News from Berkeley is how many decisions there are, but how few of them are implemented. Do your guests ever discuss how to apply these solutions to the climate crisis?

Ken Alex: We do longer-form podcast episodes that we call Climate 101 to look at some issues. In fact, we intend to do one on the barriers to implementation. Much of the work that CLEE does outside of the podcast world is actually related to exactly this set of problems.

Ethan has spent the last dozen years working on reports that are very focused on, “Here’s the problem, here’s the barriers to action, and here’s some of the solutions.” And my project—Project Climate—is laser-focused on implementation, because, as you just pointed out, there are all these solutions, but each of them has its own set of challenges to come to fruition. And so given the speed of climate change and our need to act quickly, that’s really been a big part of our focus.

Ethan Elkind: And we always ask our guests, “What are the challenges of implementing this solution or scaling it up?” We want to leave it up to the listeners with the next steps that need to happen. Maybe it’s companies or politicians at the local, state or federal level doing something, or sometimes individual action as well. Implementation is always a big challenge. We actually have an episode on how to communicate better about climate change, how to communicate climate science, especially to people who aren’t usually receptive to those messages.

What were some of the ideas that came from this episode? What are some effective ways to communicate climate change solutions to people who are not typically receptive to these messages?

Ethan Elkind: It’s mostly about framing—how to frame the problem, not using language that would immediately irritate people, but talking about shared values ​​and co-benefits.

Ken Alex: Two of the most important elements are around meeting people where they are and acknowledging different perspectives. The more “place-based” the discussion of climate impacts and solutions, the more they relate to people’s lives. People also experience climate impacts differently and have different views on what is caused by climate change and what may just be annual variability. It’s good to recognize different views and perspectives.

Where you want to see Climatic holiday in five years? What impact do you hope it will have?

Ethan Elkind: One of the goals we have is to reach audiences that are not usually as engaged with climate change. In places like the Bay Area, most people generally understand what’s going on with climate change, and there’s generally more support for climate action. But there is always more to do. So we definitely want to communicate with that audience.

There are many fascinating solutions that have many co-benefits, can improve people’s lives, and are something that people can adopt on a larger scale that do not involve sacrifice – certainly not as much sacrifice as doing nothing and let climate change happen unabated.

So that’s really one of our goals — to reach audiences that might not otherwise have heard of these solutions. And even for someone like me who works in this field, I learn a lot in these interviews. There is so much we can all learn from.

Ken Alex: The other thing is to give some airtime to some of the people who are working in some obscurity on some amazing things. That was one of the most fascinating—you find someone in some lab somewhere doing something about extracting CO2 from ocean water. Who would even think of that, let alone someone who thinks there is actually a way to do it?