The Climate Minute

Embodied Carbon, explained

Your home emits CO2 when you use gas to heat it. That’s called operational carbon emissions. Did you know that lots of CO2 was emitted just making the stuff in your walls?  Embodied carbon is the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of building and infrastructure materials. We talk to MCAN’s Better Buildings Campaign Director to find out how we can reduce the embodied carbon in our buildings. Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

The Forward Clean Energy Market, explained

How can we make it easier for the grid to transition to clean energy?  The Forward Clean Energy Market can help. Listen in to MCAN’s expert explain this new idea. Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

Renewable Energy Certificates explained

If you want to understand the transition to clean energy, you need to understand Renewable Energy Certificates. We talk to MCAN’s Clean Energy Director to find out more about what a REC is, and why they matter. Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

Do we want more electric cars or more bison?

We can make a plant go extinct in order to have EVs, or we could allow bison herds to capture CO2 from the air by rethinking our economics. The future is ours to choose. Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

“Green Growth” vs “De-growth”

In a warming world, our futures will be determined by our decisions in the present. However, two starkly different visions- one of a sacrifice free continuation of the present using renewable energy and a second of a radically downsized and more humane economy- might guide our thinking. Which way should we go?   We discuss “Green tilted glasses” from truthdig.  Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

A new idea to pull CO2 out of the air

Humans may need to go beyond reducing carbon emissions to actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere. “Carbon dioxide removal” is the buzzword.  We talk to a someone with a new idea about how to approach this gargantuan task. Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

A Poem for the IPCC

The unsettling IPCC report inspires a poetic response. Then we discuss some climate related reports.: Astroturf off Martha’s Vineyard? Why re-wild the planet? How about daylighting rivers?  What could go right? Listen in here for all the latest.  Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

A better question: “What could go right?”

In his new book, our guest invites listeners to ditch the cynical narratives we’ve become accustomed to, urges us to envision an ideal future, and offers the tools to build it.  Listen in for a fun conversation. Check our showpage at massclimateactiondotorg/blog for the hot links.

Hydrogen for home heating is a dead end solution.

Massachusetts’ natural gas distribution companies (Eversource and National Grid) want to add hydrogen to your home heating gas supply. A new report makes plain this is a bad idea. Using our state’s shiny new wind turbines to produce enough green hydrogen to allow us to put that H2 gas into the utilities’ pipelines and then burn it to heat our homes is “a dead-end climate solution that will fail to meet our state mandated emissions reduction goals at huge costs to ratepayers.”  Listen to the report’s authors discuss the issue.

The Zero Carbon Renovation Fund

Massachusetts must renovate 500,000 homes in the next seven years if we want to meet our climate goals. How to accomplish this enormous task? We speak with the Interim Executive Director of MCAN to learn about an elegant proposal- the Zero Carbon Renovation Fund- that would jump-start a commercial market to meet the challenge.