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PODCAST

Sustain What?

Sustain What? is a series of conversations, seeking solutions where complexity and consequence collide on the sustainability frontier. Revkin believes sustainability has no meaning on its own. The first step toward success is to ask: Sustain what? How? And for whom? revkin.substack.com

science social sciences

All Episodes

42:01

With U.S. Aid for Lifesaving Overseas Programs Still...

Sustain What? ·

2025/02/13

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

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63:12

Amid the Worst Surge Toward Autocracy in a Century,...

Sustain What? ·

2025/02/11

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

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2:05

Music for Trump Time - 🎶 Save Dreams for Sleeping,...

Sustain What? ·

2025/02/07

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

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40:19

Caught in the Trump & Musk Flood Zone? Ezra Klein and...

Sustain What? ·

2025/02/06

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

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57:09

Wealth Management with Human and Planetary Progress...

Sustain What? ·

2025/02/04

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

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92:11

Michael Liebreich on How A.I. Giants Can Help (or...

Sustain What? ·

2025/01/22

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

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62:55

Clarifying Methane Sources and Solutions

Sustain What? ·

2024/12/06

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

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47:29

What I've Learned and Unlearned in 40 Years of...

Sustain What? ·

2024/11/23

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

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2:15

How do You Stay Sane in Such Turbulent Times? For Me,...

Sustain What? ·

2024/11/03

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

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19:37

Live from Trump's Hate-Filled Madison Square Garden...

Sustain What? ·

2024/10/28

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

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78:25

What to Think - and do - About "Billion-Dollar...

Sustain What? ·

2024/10/24

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

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59:12

Dissecting the "Scale Monster" Stalking the Energy...

Sustain What? ·

2024/10/22

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

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28:43

How Appalachian Geography Amped Up Helene's Flood...

Sustain What? ·

2024/10/04

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

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58:46

As Team Trump Stokes Dangerous Hate for Haitians,...

Sustain What? ·

2024/09/15

If you like what I’m trying to do with Sustain What, hit the ♡ button. Even as Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has defended the vast majority of the state’s Haitian population, while recognizing serious issues related to the surge of newcomers, Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has double downed on his calls to “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing” - stoking sufficient fear and hatred in pursuit of the White House that bomb threats continue and

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36:16

A Brazil-Eye View of a Supreme Court Justice's...

Sustain What? ·

2024/08/31

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

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61:12

When it Comes to Climate and Sustainable Progress,...

Sustain What? ·

2024/08/06

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

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82:43

Pathways to Crosstalk, and Impact, in Perilously...

Sustain What? ·

2024/07/15

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

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18:40

Where and Why Tornado Risk is Growing as Climate -...

Sustain What? ·

2024/06/19

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

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76:19

Testing the "Unsettled" Climate-Science Assertions of...

Sustain What? ·

2024/06/11

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

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33:08

A Potent Film, Checkpoint Zoo, Provides an Animal's...

Sustain What? ·

2024/06/06

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

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89 results

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