Sustain What?

Here’s the audio/video podcast post of my live conversation with a determined duo of longtime broadcast journalists spending two months with intrepid scientists aboard the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon seeking fresh data that could show how fast Antarctica’s most vulnerable ice mass, the Thwaites Glacier, could raise sea levels.

Miles O'Brien and Kate Tobin are an independent team working together through three decades at CNN and now independently, with their output seen on CNN, PBS and now Substack through O’Brien’s Miles Ahead newsletter.

This map from the latest report of the I...

I hope you’ll great Sustain What chat on the shifting nature of climate journalism and the role of culture in climate [in]action with Sammy Roth. His 14-year track on the climate and energy beat has taken him from the Desert Sun to the Los Angeles Times (where his Boiling Point newsletter became a key read for climate-concerned folks) to Substack since October, with his fast-growing Climate Colored Goggles newsletter.

Here’s his foundational post explaining how he focuses his work and why culture and the industries around it - including Disneyland - matter as much as e...

Here’s the webcast/podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Jennifer D. Sciubba, the new president of the near-century-old Population Reference Bureau, a longtime source of unspun demographic data and analysis.

The focal point was her new book (with two veteran expert coauthors), Toxic Demography - Ideology and the Politics of Population.

Learn more in my “curtain raiser” post:

But here are some quick takeaways and links to material we explored. We discussed long cycles of politics and fear mongering, as I noted how Elon Musk’s December 11 tweet about New Zealand...

This is the Substack Live video and audio podcast post of my Sustain What chat with journalist Tina Kelley and lawyer Eric Jepeal, who are seeking partners for Commonloop, a social media platform that would funnel revenue generated from humans’ online habits (which are unlikely to change soon) into enterprises or programs that are a boon for all of us - instead of a boon for billionaires.

Here’s the curtain raiser post with lots of relevant links:

Here are some relevant papers and posts we alluded to:

2021 PNAS paper: Stewardship of global coll...

I think you’ll love this Sustain What conversation I just had with Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, the brilliant young playwrights behind Kyoto, the tragicomic play describing the titanic diplomatic and political tussle as climate change science threatened to bring an early end to the fossil fuel age.

My “curtain raiser” post has a heap of details and related links:

But much more emerged in the discussion, which also included Ben Santer, a veteran climate scientist who’s a character in the play (he writes about that here), Jean Chemnick, an E&E News/Politico...

I needed an intervention today and reached out to my old friend from the anti-consumption wars, the Rev Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping, and to Lloyd Alter, one of the great longtime guides to low-impact and low-carbon building, transportation and the rest.

I hope the resulting conversation above offers a tonic during this crazy “Black Friday” week. You can also watch and share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and YouTube:

I needed help after reading a great piece by Alter calling out CNBC for this insanely ridiculous piece warning that people and...

I hope you can watch and weigh in on this conversation I had on the final official day of COP30, the thirtieth round of climate treaty talks, which are wrapping up in Belém, the gateway city to Brazil’s vast portion of the Amazon River basin.

First we had a pop-up update from my friend Cristiane Prizibisczki, a veteran Brazilian environmental journalist covering the meeting for the great online publication ((o))eco. A big focus of their coverage was the call for a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty (a tough sell in the formal sessions even without the...

James Fahn founded the Earth Journalism Network 20 years ago. The organization has helped foster the reporting capacity of journalists around the world and helped build innovative colllaborative news networks like InfoNile and InfoAmazonia.

Here I caught him in the middle of the 30th session of negotiations under the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that is the foundation for the Paris Agreement a decade ago.

Share this post or do so on X, on Facebook, on LinkedIn.

Fahn lays out the key points being negotiated - in the absence of United States...

I hope you’ll take time to watch and share this Sustain What conversation withCory Doctorow, a tireless champion of the best that digital technology can give society and foe of those who are enshitifying this public good for profit or power.

Also please pass it around on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter. And do subscribe to Sustain What and consider chipping in if you like what I’m doing:

Doctorow has done grueling work through innumerable Pluralistic posts and his many books, including Enshittification, the main focus of this chat, and another coming soon...

If you missed my advance post on my Sustain What conversation with Laura Grego, a longtime analyst of nuclear war risks, strategies and technologies, here’s your chance to watch and weigh in over the weekend.

There’s little here that is reassuring. Grego, drawing on two decades of deep diving, says:

I would argue that I think things are about as dangerous as they’ve ever been – at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The risks of war are higher. There’s a war in Europe that threatens to pull nuclear armed adversaries into direct con...

I just had such a great Sunday Sanity conversation with the activist folk dynamos Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer. Just watch and enjoy. And share!

If you want to learn “No Kings Here,” the song Fink co-wrote with Tom Paxton, here’s their breakdown of the chords:

The back story is in yesterday’s post here:

Thank you Michael Ludgate, Peter van Soest, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

More climate and other news and analysis anon, but here we pause for a musical interlude, starting with a program note:

I hope you’ll spend some time to listen to this conversation with the Grammy-winning activist folk music duo Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer. We focused on their recent string of viral tunes confronting the Trump regime:

Listen to “No Kings Here,” written and sung by Cathy Fink and Tom Paxton. And here’s “It Ain’t Gonna Go Away - Ode to the Epstein Files”:

And now for my latest song, w...

This is the podcast post for my special September 28th Sunday Sanity conversation with my friend Dar Williams. Here’s the updated “curtain raiser’ post with all the background on our chat and Williams’ first album on Righteous Babe Records, Hummingbird Highway:

Thank you Dave Finnigan, Bart Ziegler, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Boy this was a bracing, high-velocity and fun discussion with longtime renewable-energy analyst and evangelist Joe Romm. If you missed it live, now’s your chance to listen or skim the transcript and post questions or reactions.

We explored a heap of issues related to climate, energy and online communication. We went back in time to our Dot Earth and Climate Progress tussles and moments of agreement but mostly focused on current and future events.

One thing we absolutely agreed on was that our disputes back in the Bush and Obama days over the mix of...

I hope you’ll watch and share this fresh and fascinating discussion of a project hosted at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at fostering “adversarial collaboration” when researchers - as just one example - clash in the literature over data that could reveal why humans tend to hold fast to certain beliefs and when and how they update them.

I can’t imagine a more important question these days.

My guests were project co-director Cory J. Clark and Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell who is involved with several such efforts. You can expl...

The death of John Prine early in the early weeks of the pandemic was a wrenching blow for his many fans among both audiences and fellow musicians.

As I wrote in the weekend curtain raiser, among songwriters I deeply admire, no one is on a higher plane than Prine. Around 1975, just a few years after I began learning guitar and singing, a college roommate, Aron Wolf, introduced me to Prine’s mix of touching, hilarious, folksy, bittersweet compositions. (I sorely miss Aron, who went on to a fantastic NASA career designing interplanetary spacecraft missions and was taken fa...

I hope you’ll listen to this valuable discussion with three authors of a voluminous new report critically reviewing the conclusions of President Trump’s climate science “red team” report on clima,te science. (You can explore a rough transcript here.)

You’ll meet authors Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, who co-writes the The Climate Brink on Substack; Bob Kopp, a longtime climate scientist at Rutgers who you may have gotten to know through my post on climate tipping points; and Pam McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers who’s also been a past guest on Sus...

Bill McKibben and I differ on some issues (the decarbonizing role of nuclear energy is one; big theories of change are another) but we agree on a lot and vive la différence given the inevitability of “response diversity” facing wicked stresses.

And he’s right that the accelerating surge of solar electricity generation, from Pakistan rooftops to African villages to the California and Texas grids, is a powerful and hopeful force amid so many dire signals.

Here’s what he said about Texas, renewable energy and natural gas:

Texas is completely fascinating. First thi...

This is the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation eploring how cities, counties and perhaps your community can use data mapping and visualization tools to get ahead of climate risks as people and property increasingly sprawl into flood, fire, heat and storm danger zones - and as human-amped climate change intensifies some of those hazards.

Watch above and share this post, or do the same on LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter or YouTube:

My guests were Alan Clinton, planning officer for the County of Kauai, Hawaii, and Taisha Fabricius, a technology leader at ESRI’s R...

I pulled together a quick live Sustain What event today zooming out from the latest dramatic glacial lake outburst flood generated in Suicide Basin up in the mountains above Juneau, Alaska. That’s pretty far from most of us, but the challenge posed when glaciers block rivers and suddenly disgorge vast volumes of water extends to the Himalalyas, where millions of people live downstream of such deadly dynamics.

This webcast starts with my overview of current events, I include this video snapshot I made from the many great National Weather Service, U.S. Geological Survey and university re...

I hope you’ll listen to, and share, this conversation on climate policy in the age of Trump (and lots more) with the wide-ranging Harvard economist Cass Sunstein. Sunstein worked under two presidents - Barack Obama (social cost of carbon) and Joe Biden (Homeland Security) - and has a new book out encapsulating his argument for a morals-based global accounting system for carbon: Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World—and the Future.

Sunstein actually has several books in the pipeline, including one on artificial intelligence and one on manipulation. Climate Justice is largely an update and...

Public Domain is a valuable Substack project founded by journalists focused on U.S. public lands and the agencies responsible for managing those assets for all Americans.

Here’s the podcast post of my conversation with two co-founders, Chris D'Angelo and Jimmy Tobias. You can watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and YouTube.

Here’s one excerpt. I asked Jimmy Tobias how it feels to cover agencies starkly up-ended from their traditional role (I allude to the “fire dpeartment” in the sci-fi story and film Fahrenheit 451, which burns books and homes instead of fighting...

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What episode looking at:

* The recent sabotage attack on a TV station’s weather radar in Oklahoma

* The spread of unfounded extreme-weather conspiracies by Republican lawmakers and attention-hijacking online figures

* How opacity around government and industry tests of weather modification methods has provided an enduring hook for conspiracy mongers to build on

(Read James Rodger Fleming’s paper “The pathological history of weather and climate modification: Three cycles of promise and hype.”)

* The 60-year history of scientists jumping to geoengineering climate solu...

This evergreen Sustain What conversation on trust and mistrust in climate science and scientists is - sadly - more relevant than ever. It was organized early in the pandemic by Gil Eyal, a sociologist at Columbia University focused on attitudes toward expertise (he literally wrote the book on this - The Crisis of Expertise).

Instead of running this Sustain What show, I was one of three discussants, along with the Cambridge climate-policy researcher Mike Hulme (author of Why We Disagree on Climate Change) and the Harvard historian of science and climate campaigner Naomi Oreskes, who had recently...

This is the podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with top experts on the role - and limits - of technology as a means of cutting losses when people live in harm’s way.

The issues raised in the Texas tragedy (and travesty) resonate well beyond that state’s Flash Flood Alley.

My guests were Jim Moffitt, a pre-Musk Twitter engineer focused on social media as a path to flood safety; Nashin Mahtani, director of Yayasan Peta Bencana, a realtime disaster mapping platform in Indonesia; and flood-warning analyst Andrew Kruczkiewicz of the Columbia Climate Scho...

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Michael Grunwald, the prize-winning environmental journalist and author whose latest book,We Are Eating The Earth, explores the destructive connections between people’s plates and forces wrecking ecosystems and overheating the climate. The book also charts sustainable paths forward with no sugar coating.

Also on hand was Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel, who’s most recent book is To Boldly Grow. Read her columns here. They were podcasting partners for awhile on Climavores and the episodes are still fun and illuminating.

There were big di...

File this post in the “sustainability of democracy” track.

I just had an unplanned pop-up Sustain What conversation with the wide-ranging author Paul Greenberg about his bitingly satirical novella, A Third Term, and hope you take time for a listen. (I’ve known Paul for decades through his invaluable writing on fish and conservation.)

His new work of fiction, in which George Washington is resurrected to confront a current-day president, “The Tyrant,” is a wild ride that is just the sort of prod we all need at the moment. Here’s a summary from Paul that doesn’t...

Today is #ShowYourStripesDay, aiming to sustain the push initiated years ago by UK climate scientist Ed Hawkins to use cool and warm colors to depict long-term climate change in ways that might grab attention and ultimately change choices and behavior.

I’ve explored this innovation and related ones for a long time, most notably in a Sustain What webcast on Show Your Stripes Day in 2021. I’ve reposted that episode in Substack’s player above.

As you will learn (or already know if you watched it way back when), there’s still scant behavior...

Here’s my Sustain What conversation with Kate Marvel, a prominent climate scientist and communicator whose first book, Human Nature - Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, is a bracing and deeply personal tour of climate science, planetary history and the array of hopeful and/or heartbreaking environmental futures ahead, depending on choices made or avoided now.

Thank you, Matt Burgess and cliff Krolick, for being among subscribers who watched live on Substack. Please subscribe to catch future episodes and share this post.

Marvel and I explored the book’s nine chapters, and feel...

Given how Trumpism seems deadset on squeezing the dizzying diversity out of the United States, it seemed a great time to reach out to Peter Guttman, a world-roaming photographer who’s spent decades portraying the full prismatic wonder and weirdness of us.

Please watch and/or share this conversation here or on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (at my handle @revkin) or YouTube.

Here’s a snippet focused on one of the grassroots voices pushing for Juneteenth as a national holiday - LaVerne Ross of the Calvary Baptist Church in Santa Monica, California.

As Guttman writ...

When I was building my sustainability communication project at Columbia University, I was recruited to be an author of a chapter on “communicating risk for decision-making” in what would become the 2022 Global Assessment Report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. I couldn’t participate fully in the end (boring reasons) but gained a valuable view of the depth and breadth of expertise brought together by these periodic reports. Explore some of the results here:

The pandemic, which exploded as the writing process played out, vividly illustrated how all the communication advice in the world comes...

Whenever you need a break from the dueling pundits, have a listen to one of my Sunday Sanity shows.

For those who missed us live on Sunday, here’s an audio and video antidote for Trump’s lock on our brains - a conversation, poetry reading and picking party with a couple of remarkably creative humans - the provocateur poet Andrei Codrescu, who you may have heard as a frequent NPR commentator in decades past, and masterful bluegrass and trad musician John McEuen, best known for his 50 years in the legendary Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and for help...

Update June 3 | In another demonstration of the Trump administration’s reckless and damaging whiplash approach to funding of vital programs, the initial freeze on this vital conduit for weather data has been reversed. But note that the Unidata blog post below includes this line about sustained threats to funding:

This positive development allows us to end the current furlough of our staff and resume our operations. While we are grateful to receive our next increment of funding, we are mindful of the challenges that lie ahead with our continued funding given the administration’s proposed FY26 budget that...

Here’s the video and podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with two Maine-based educators and a superstar student taking on tough problems in their communities that have links to the wider world. Learn all the background in my “curtain raiser” post:

We were joined for a bit by Radhika Iyengar, a colleague of mine during my time at Columbia University. She’s working on an online course with Jeff Sachs on the Ages of Globalization.

There were wonderful comment contributions and questions from viewers around the Web, particularly this one from John Eppler on Faceb...

Here’s the curtain raiser post with all the relevant links related to Jon Allsop’s new book, What is Journalism For?, and Karen Bordeleau’s New Bedford Light newsroom, which made national waves with its vivid coverage of an atrocious abuse of force by immigration officers in New Bedford several days ago.

Here are two illuminating moments:

Jon Allsop on how an “emergency mode” for journalism facing the autocratic attacks from President Trump is out of date now that he’s settled into the White House:

A look at the New Bedford Light covera...

This is my first stab at a Substack Live video - done by adding Substack to my Streamyard livestream tool. Here’s the curtain-raiser post with lots of context:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s the podcast post of my virtual Sustain What meetup with a batch of folks out in the Hands Off protests against the Trump and Musk approach to “governing.” I was also joined by a longtime reader, Josette, from New Hampshire, who used to work in telecommunications at Perkins Coie, one of the law firms that Trump has attacked. We discussed this bit of good news from Friday (here from Reuters):

More than 500 law firms have signed a court brief denouncing Donald Trump's targeting of Perkins Coie and other firms, expressing alarm over the Republican president's intens...

“Elon Musk can declare, properly, every Starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.” - James Fallows

Here’s the webcast / podcast version of my Sustain What transportation conversation with longtime journalists James Fallows, David Kerley and Jim Motavalli. All the details and relevant links are in the “curtain raiser”:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fallows we...

I hope you heard (or now watch) my 2021 conversation with the Cambridge University climate researcher Mike Hulme and science and propaganda historian Naomi Oreskes on trust and mistrust in climate science.

The same goes for our 2023 conversation about his latest book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, which describes what he calls “climatism” - a tendency in climate-policy discussions to put CO2 reduction in the foreground no matter what the issue is. I’ve loaded it above and here we are on YouTube:

The “noble lie” in science-based policy campaigns

One fascinating issue he explores in...

Here's today’s Sustain What discussion with two journalists from Global Press, an international newsroom supporting female reporters in the world’s most troubled regions. Global Press immediately began widespread reporting on the realtime impacts of the initial USAID freeze and persistent chaos around money flowing to public health and other vital programs from Nepal to Uganda. (I apologize for some audio echo but you can scan the rough transcript as well.)

The editor-in-chief, Krista Karch, and Nakisanze Segawa, reporter-in-residence in Kampala, Uganda, offered disturbing descriptions of specific perils created by the Trump administration’s aggressive moves.

“...

Here’s the podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with three authors of a sobering, and yet slightly hopeful, paper identifying a rising number of autocracies that are followed by a sharp social and political u-turn to democratization. A rough dynamic transcript is here. The paper is here:

The hopeful part of the open-access study is this:

The analysis presents a systematic empirical overview of patterns and developments of U-Turns [from autocracy toward democracy between 1900 and 2023]. A key finding is that 52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the la...

Here’s a fresh tune for these times from my songwriting side, which has been energized since I signed on to a two-decade-old annual project called February Album Writing Month (FAWM.org). There’s more below about this remarkable effort - aimed at getting participants to write 14 songs in 28 days (yes, FOURTEEN!) - including a video explainer by its founder, Burr Settles, a machine learning researcher focused on language learning at DuoLingo and, of course, on music. I hope to interview him soon.

My new song, Save Dreams for Sleeping, is still in beta mode. I’ve been t...

I’ll wager that most of you have already heard or read Ezra Klein’s powerful audio “Don’t Believe Him” manifesto examining Trump’s take on Steve Bannon’s longstanding “flood the zone” strategy designed to overwhelm media and institutional capacity to convey and challenge his unfolding demolition derby presidency.

If not, here’s the captivating opening. But it’s vital to get past the initial statement about Bannon’s strategy.

In his piece, Klein notes Trump is already getting caught up in his own flood tides, with initial overreaching steps already facing legal setbacks and more resist...

Here’s the podcast / webcast version of my talk with Tom Kalil, who’s moved from advising two presidents on science and technology policy to building Renaissance Philanthropy, a consultancy for wealthy people who want to help fill funding and capacity gaps to help science serve society and sustainability.

We talked about that work and also about the challenges and some possibilities as the second Trump presidential term gets into gear.

Here’s the curtain raiser with lots of relevant links:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and suppor...

This is the podcast version of the Sustain What discussion I just had with the relentless clean-energy optimist, investor and evangelist Michael Liebreich. Key sections are on the need to switch metrics for success from kilowatt/hours to energy services; the ethics of focusing decarbonization on the most carbonized nations; the potential for energy-hungry AI giants to help United States regions revive wider grid reliability and clean-energy sourcing; and the possibility of having constructive conversations on sustainable energy abundance with the soon-to-be Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Here’s the curtain-raiser post with all the background!

...

Here’s the video and audio podcast of my #SustainWhat show offering a valuable update on trends in emissions of heat-trapping methane and emerging science showing the tropics are the dominant driver of the recent rise in the flows of this potent greenhouse gas. Listen and share and weigh in. Background on my guests along with a batch of relevant links are in the “curtain raiser” post below.

Here are some additional sources we touched on in the conversation that weren’t in my initial post:

* Human activities now fuel two-thirds of global methane emissions (Global C...

This new talk is the latest iteration of what I’ve learned and unlearned through 40 years of reporting and conversation wrangling around the intertwined challenges of building a safer human relationship with the climate system and with energy.

My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive questions, starting with “Sustain what?”

Watch or listen above and share this post, or watch and share on YouTube:

I gave the talk for the Jay Heritage Center, a nonprofit group on a h...

Take a mental break and do tell me how you stay sane and centered given the turbulence of this political and societal moment and the tough path ahead?

For me - along with our dogs, cooking, carpentry, hikes and the like - there’s always music. (Read my post explainng that side of my life if you haven’t already.)

This new song of mine, “After the Roaming,” was inspired by a melody composed by fellow student Kathy O'Rourke during our current songwriting workshop at Bagaduce Music in Blue Hill, Maine. (We were each tasked by the t...

UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As I’ve written before, no real progress on the issues I explore here on Sustain What is possible without sustaining democracy and moving past racism and hate, so I had to cover tonight’s hate-filled Trump “rally.”

As Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry, an Academy-Award winning film director.

I was hoping to interview him because in 2017 he made a stunning seven-minute documentary called “A Night at the Garden” built with rediscovered film footage of the February 1939 rally at the v...

This is the podcast version of my Sustain What show on an illuminating Washington Post story on issues and insights around the newsmaking and much-cited “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I’ve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevens’ reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. He’s outdone himself with a big new analysis of the insights and issues around the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s much-covered tally of “billion dollar weather and climate disasters” from extreme climate events. Gift link: http://wapo.st/3...

Here’s the podcast version of my “Watchwords” conversation with Mekala Krishnan, the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.” I use the term watchwords to highlight terms or phrases that too often confuse more than clarify.

We were joined halfway through by Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and exective director of Good Energy Collective, which has a its mission “building the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of the broader climate change agenda and working to align the clean energy space with environ...

First, here’s my freshly updated post offering a heap of ways anyone anywhere can help the organizations and volunteers working nonstop around Hurricane Helene devastation zones:

Second, here’s a shoutout to the professional and volunteer first responders doing highly dangerous work seeking and rescuing survivors. Several are among the more than 215 victims so far. The North Carolina National Guard has been working nonstop.

Finally, please watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation seeking lessons from the catastrophic inland flooding triggered when Hurricane Helene's remnants collided with the Appalachian Mountains. My guest is Davi...

Updated February 2025 - Given what’s unfolding under Trump 2.0, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020 with University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy and is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age. She has built a priceless suite of online learning tools to explore and share.

I’ll be holding an onstage conversation with Hobbs at the Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, Calif., on March 28. Come meet us in person!

She provides a fantastic overview of t...

Update, 6:30 pm Brazil time, Aug. 31 - X flickered to life just a few minutes after I posted this, at least from my Rio hotel - just long enough for me to tweet afresh. But now it’s spinning and frozen again. So back to Threads and Bluesky for the moment.

On the final morning of a hectic three-city visit to Brazil to brainstorm with journalists, students and scientists on next steps for climate communication, Twitter ground to a halt as an order by a Supreme Court judge here took effect.

The imposed hiatus was refreshing in...

My Sustain What webcast project started early in the pandemic and quickly evolved into having several tracks - one being regular Monday sessions I centered on pathways to Thriving Online. Here’s one of my favorites - a chat with two very different artists using drawing to communicate consequential environmental science and policy choices (also on YouTube):

Karen Romano Young (@doodlebugKRY), a seasoned science illustrator, has spent months at sea (follow her #AntarcticLog) with a focus on Antarctic science. She's also a childrens' book illustrator and author. Explore her work here.

Pat Bagley, a prize-winning po...

There are paths to cooperation and respect amid deep difference, and - in person or online - there are strategies that can move conversations either in a constructive or destructive direction. Elected and community leaders have a rhetorical choice to make every day facing that reality. That’s true even for bullet-grazed Trump.

As I tweeted yesterday, the momentous shooting in Pennsylvania can lead to “either a tipping point toward true unraveling or a pinch point that can be navigated if Trump's team chooses moderacy over feeding its already-committed base.”

Is this a tipping point or nav...

Here’s a key point I made in today’s pop-up webcast:

Think of Tornado Alley as a syndrome, not a place. And it isn’t what, and where, it used to be.

In 2018, longtime tornado researchers Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University and Harold Brooks of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., completed widely-covered research showing a substantial shift in the particular meteorological conditions that are most apt to generate tornadoes (and a shift in tornado reports).

Media coverage, then and since, has tended to zoom in on the hot ques...

I hope you’ll watch and weigh in on this Sustain What episode testing the arguments against climate alarm of Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist at BP and former Obama-era Energy Department science undersecretary who is the author of the best-selling book Unsettled – What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. An updated edition was eleased on June 11th.

You can also watch and share the conversation on YouTube, X/Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Koonin, who’s joining the Hoover Institution this fall as a senior fellow, has a new op-e...

War is hell. No headline there.

But imagine war expierenced through the eyes and ears of lions, chimpanzees, camels and other creatures in a wildlife park in northeastern Ukraine, and experienced by their keepers and a ragtag crew of volunteers who rushed to evacuate them as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion played out in 2022.

That is what you’ll experience when the documentary “Checkpoint Zoo” gets into theaters or streaming sites after its premiere at the Tribeca Festival. I hope the film gets wide distribution.

“Checkpoint Zoo” tells the story of Feldman Ecopark, a sprawling...

June 1 is the official start of hurricane season in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. To stay safe along coasts or in floodable inland areas as the season heats up, you should of course bookmark NOAA’s National Hurricane Center tracking and warning site. Don’t get too used to the storm-free image on the site at the moment:

To stay sane as the media environment around hurricanes and climate change heats up, you should bookmark NOAA’s Global Warming and Hurricanes page, curated for many years by senior scientist Tom Knutson.

Knutson is one of...

I just had a solutions-focused waste-cutting Sustain What chat with two marvelous guides - Edward Humes, the Pulitzer-winning author of Total Garbage - How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World (following up on his 2012 book Garbology - Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash); and Sarah K. Nichols, who’s driven some of the most significant innovations in state policy around waste reduction and now works for an innovative beverage container recycling company called Clynk. There’s more about Clynk below.

Watch and share on YouTube, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and Facebook.

To rece...

I’ve spent a lot of time assessing ways to defeat what I call the “complexity monster” impeding climate and energy solutions. Here’s a Sustain What webcast on a fresh approach, including building a big welcome table instead of walls. Also watch and share on Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. (Here’s a rough Trint transcript.)

I was intrigued to learn about an upcoming set of live seminars offering ways to stay cool, connected and effective amid the nonstop turbulence around and within our fossil-fuel-heated climate system. The workshop, called “Embracing our Emergency,” is being led later this spr...

📺 🎧 This is the podcast episode for the post below on a consequential scoop by a Brazilian environmental journalist revealing how the confessed murderer of an environmental hero in the western corner of the Amazon River basin 35 years ago quietly rose to regional influence under a religious nickname 1,500 miles to the east. My guests are:

* Cristiane Prizibisczki, the O Eco journalist who broke the story

* Angélica Mendes, Chico Mendes’s granddaughter, who has a biology Ph.D. and is president of Comitê Chico Mendes

Why should anyone outside of the region pay attention to the ree...

I hope you'll watch, share and weigh in on this invaluable Sustain What conversation I just had with Hannah Ritchie , the lead researcher at Our World in Data and author of the Not the End of the World, an invaluable book offering a data-based foundation for discussion and action on the full span of sustainability challenges and choices, from stemming warming to spurring human advancement where the need is deepest.

She’s getting an enormous amount of justified attention, including a TED Talk and a podcast session with Bill Gates (who also is a big financial supporter of...

Through most of my journalism career, I presumed that more information leads to better choices. As media moved online, I experimented ever more with conveying what I was reporting or learning using far more than the written word.

When I went to the North Pole in 2003, I brought back video that captured the unnerving dynamics and sounds of floating, drifting sea ice far better than words could. At climate negotiations in 2005 in Montreal, I tried out podcasting, recording the passionate voices of youth activists as a way to get beyond the gray-suited wonkiness of these sessions. I...

I recently ran a fascinating Sustain What webcast on one of those tangled questions that are all too common in this globalizing world of consumption and extraction: how to manage growing harvests of massive blooms of the crustaceans called krill that are also fodder for reviving populations of great whales (among other wildlife).

Listen above and share this post or do the same on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter to engage wider audiences. Also explore the rough transcript above if you can’t listen.

Krill, extraordinarily abundant in waters around Antarctica, are rich in om...

Please share this post - more than you might share others.

INSERT - Join me with a batch of wonderful guests in a special pop-up live musical gathering Monday, January 1, New Year’s Day, at noon US Eastern time! Join on YouTube here:

Also streaming on Facebook, LinkedIn and X/Twitter (no advance link in X; just join us at @revkin at showtime).

~ ~

Another year down, full of extreme heat and turmoil, success and peril - both climatic and societal. And the year ahead could make this year seem boring.

...

I hope you’ll watch or listen to this wonderful Sustain What conversation on ways to navigate, and improve, this moment on Earth increasingly called the Anthropocene - the Earth as shaped by human activities, for worse or better.

Some here will recall I played a role in the evolution of this concept thanks to a line in my 1992 book on global warming. See my essay about that at the bottom of this post.

My guests are the longtime actor and environmmental activist Ed Begley, Jr.; Sam Matey, the writer of the refreshing Substack newsletter Th...

My latest Sustain What conversation is a bit off the typical themes I’ve focused on since the early days of the pandemic. Our topic was innovations and lessons surrounding a giant-squid hunt. Watch and you’ll meet Nathan Robinson, a marine biologist and science communicator I got to know at a Global Exploration Summit we both spoke at last summer and his research collaborator and mentor Edie Widder, whose research focus has long been on bioluminescence.

Widder has built a lauded science and conservation career blending neuroscience, technology and keen observational skills. See her three TED talk...

For half a century, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, an extraordinary husband-and-wife science team at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, have been documenting both the decline of mountain glaciers in and around the tropics and the climate history locked in cylinders of ice they’ve extracted from such frozen libraries before they vanish.

Now two filmmakers, Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest, have produced an enthralling documentary, Canary, that chronicles this couple’s edge-pushing and literally death-defying efforts. O’Malley is best known for his work on the long-running Chef’s Table series on Netflix and Rivest r...

I hope you’ll give a listen to this dose of grounded climate and development optimism from three wonderful contributors to the new essay collection and online project called Not Too Late - Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possiblity.

I’m still trying to gauge who among you wants audio podcasts. Please let me know through my feedback form!

My guests were:

* the best-selling author and activist Rebecca Solnit

* the University of Maine paleoecologist and masterful communicator Jacquelyn Gill

* the Clark University climate geographer and IPCC...

As thousands of propaganda-inflamed supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro violently invaded the top offices of government in Brasilia today, I couldn’t help thinking back to the four months I spent in Brazil in 1989, the year the nation was in the midst of its first direct presidential elections since 1960.

It was heartening to track reports tonight that this insurrectionist tide had been turned back by police. But no one who cares about democracy, Indigenous rights or environmental protection should rest easy.

Most of my time in Brazil 34 years ago was spent roaming the...

For audio podcast fans

This is the audio of a webinar I just held for Columbia Climate School colleagues eager to sift for strategies making the most of online connectivity amid epic shifts, including Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. My internal work here at Columbia is focused on building science and policy communication pathways that are about more than clicks. The slides are posted here.

My earlier post has the rough transcript (also on Trint here), with links to relevant info added:

Yesterday I hosted a Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation exploring what Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter means for the platform’s capacity to save lives in emergencies like extreme storms, floods, wildfires and other environmental emergencies.

My featured guest was Jim Moffitt (@snowman), who worked in developer relations at Twitter for eight years building the capacity for the platform’s vast trove of real-time data - generated through the flow of thousands of tweets a second around the world - to be harnessed by companies, journalists, researchers or government agencies through its APIs - applic...

This is the audio version of my Columbia Climate School Sustain What discussion of the world beyond 8 billion - focused on what factors in play today will determine the quality and quantity of human lives and the environment in the decades to come.

Here’s video:

Read the text post here: As the Human Population Tops 8 Billion, a Look Beyond Bomb📈 and Crash 📉 Panic Proclamations.

Sift a rough transcript on Trint. If you become a financial supporter, you can help me hire an assistant to help with some of the production work. Duration: 01:14:08

As the latest wave of food-tossing, media-seeking climate emergency protests began, I pulled together a spirited Sustain What discussion featuring the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, which is pouring millions of dollars into edge-pushing protest networks, a longtime performance activist and two sociologists deeply researching when activism does and doesn’t matter.

My guests were the activism-focused sociologist Dana Fisher (@fisher_danar) of the University of Maryland along with the sociologist Robb Willer (@robbwiller) of Stanford University (an author of an important paper on the “activist’s dilemma”) and Margaret Klein Salamon (@climatepsych), executive director of the C...

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...

Original Air Date: November 11, 2020

DESCRIPTION: Too often, politicians and the rest of us choose to wait for clarity before tackling tough, consequential, challenges. News media cover disastrous events far better than underlying drivers of risk - or resilience.



To seek solutions, join Andy Revkin’s Earth Institute Sustain What brainstorm with participants in this year’s annual conference of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty – a community focused on making the most out of inconveniently murky reality.



We’ll examine how to assess and communicate effective policies...

Original Air Date: December 11, 2020

DESCRIPTION: With COVID-19 vaccines beginning to flow, many global-risk experts worry nations may lose track of the grander challenge: acting systemically, and systematically, to curb pandemic risk on a hyper-connected planet.



Join Sustain What host Andy Revkin in a solution-focused brainstorm with psychiatrist and sustainability scholar Jonathan Salk, who co-wrote “A New Reality - Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future” with his father, the famed vaccine pioneer and humanitarian Jonas Salk; Tara O’Toole, an epidemiologist, biomedical and intelligence technologist at the intelligence-focused venture firm In-Q-Tel; and Roman Krznar...

What decisions can we make today as individuals and societies to create a better tomorrow?

Join Columbia Climate School's Andrew Revkin, economist Kate Raworth, and philosopher Roman Krznaric for a conversation on how reinventing economics and incorporating long-term thinking into our current policies can help us meet the challenges of climate breakdown and global inequality, and transform our world for future generations.

Speakers:

Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long...

October 7, 2020

On Fridays, the Sustain What webcast of Columbia University's Earth Institute dives behind headlines and hashtags with leading journalists and experts to offer insights on what's really afoot.



A great panel is coming together to discuss this week's truly extraordinary developments, in which a president infected with the novel virus driving the COVID-19 pandemic checked out of a military hospital tweeting, "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life."

October 2, 2020

Thomas Homer-Dixon, the bestselling author of The Upside of Down and other books exploring pathways through complexity, joins Sustain What host Andy Revkin and two special guests in a bracing discussion of the themes of his latest work: "Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril." (https://commandinghope.com/)



The guests are:



- Susan Cox-Smith, a partner and futurist at Changeist, a consultancy and training organization that curates and creates "experiences that stretch strategic thinking, materialize the new, and connect with people about...

A pandemic and attendant economic crisis rock the world along with political and social turmoil intensified by an overheating information environment and overheating climate. What's a solution-oriented human being to do?



Slow down and stretch your time scales, according to three experienced analysts of this extraordinary moment in human history.



Join the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin, the philosopher Roman Krznaric, the journalist and resilience expert Bina Venkataraman and the filmmaker John D. Sutter in a discussion of ways to find meaning by stepping back from the urgency of now.
Duration: 01:04:22

In this webcast, former senior intelligence and national security officers explore headlines noting that intelligence reports provided to the Trump White House had laid out the likelihood of a pandemic with unnerving clarity - and one even noted worrisome signs of a rapidly spreading virus in Wuhan in November (ABC: https://bit.ly/covid19wuhanintell)



But the challenge for this or any administration is not awareness as much as prioritization, as former National Intelligence Council analyst Rod Schoonover put it in a previous Sustain What conversation:



“In my world in the in...

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 “...

Aired: June 2, 2021

A special Sustain What episode with two scientists, a journalist and a songwriter offering ways to navigate turbulence, polarization and disinformation with the fewest regrets.



Join Andy Revkin of Columbia’s Climate School with Carnegie Mellon philosopher Andy Norman; solution-focused journalist Amanda Ripley; Columbia University psychologist and conflict dissector Peter Coleman, and songwriter and storyteller Reggie Harris.



Send feedback and ideas for future shows:

http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback



Here's more on our guests:



- Peter T. Co...

Air Date: December 23, 2020

Earlier this year, the famed climate-focused novelist Kim Stanley Robinson told Columbia students: “I’ve been pushing myself to write utopian narratives; that gets weirder as we continue on the course that we’re on."



In this special intergenerational Sustain What conversation, Robinson returns to Columbia (virtually this time) to explore the themes in his sweltering, jarring new novel “Ministry for the Future” with the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin and several advocates for the future – including the 15-year-old climate change campaigner Alexandria Villaseñor and Carolyn Raffensperger...

In my 400-plus Sustain What conversations, several stand out, includng this intergenerational discussion of economic models that can fit on a finite planet. I invited Herman E. Daly, a founding force behind “steady-state economics,” to examine possible paths to less fragile global systems with Kate Raworth, whose “doughnut economics” model aims to build economic policies and metrics that put thriving ahead of growing.