TILclimate

What if you could pay someone else to cancel out your carbon emissions? For this episode, we sat down with Dr. Barbara Haya from the University of California Berkeley to talk about how “carbon offsets” work and whether they are an effective tool for slowing climate change.

Roughly ten percent of the world’s CO2 emissions come from passenger vehicles: cars, pickups, motorcycles, buses, and taxis. So today, we’re going to zoom in on how people get around every day and what to consider when thinking about reducing carbon emissions from everyday travel.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are being touted as a major solution to climate change. But why is that? How do they work and what kinds of changes are needed as more EVs hit the road? To dig into this, we brought in MIT Sloan Prof. David Keith, who studies transportation technology.

Hydrogen gas acts like a fossil fuel, but with no carbon emissions. Is it the silver bullet we’ve been waiting for? Prof. Svetlana Ikonnikova of the Technical University of Munich joins us to bring light to how hydrogen works and its potential in the energy transition.

The ocean is a critical piece of the climate change puzzle. It's estimated that the ocean has absorbed about one third of the excess CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere and more than 90% of trapped heat in the atmosphere. So, today, we’re going underwater to talk about the ocean and climate change with renowned oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle.

The ocean is a critical piece of the climate change puzzle. It's estimated that the ocean has absorbed about one third of the excess CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere and more than 90% of trapped heat in the atmosphere. So, today, we’re going underwater to talk about the ocean and climate change with renowned oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle.

At MIT, we have a commitment to sharing what we know about climate change. That’s why, this summer, we’ll be back soon with a fourth season of TILclimate, bringing you new episodes that dive into even more climate topics, like the role the ocean plays in our climate, solutions for reducing transportation emissions, the future of hydrogen energy, and a whole lot more. All around 10-15 minutes, with real scientists and experts.

When people talk about how much it costs to stop climate change, what are we paying for? And who’s paying, exactly? And if we don’t pay to stop climate change – how much will that cost us?

Today we bring climate change to the dining room table. In this episode, we reinvited Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig onto the TILclimate podcast to tell us just a little more about the connections between the food we eat and climate change.

Over the last fifty years, our world has made remarkable progress in reducing hunger around the world. How can we keep our farms and food system resilient in a warming climate?

In our last episode, we talked about using technology to suck out extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But you might also be thinking—don’t trees do that? Yeah, they do! In fact, some people have proposed that by planting enough trees, we could make a big dent on climate change.

Professor Niall Mac Dowell of Imperial College London joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to demystify the process and feasibility of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Is climate change really a national security issue, in the same way we think about terrorism or nuclear weapons? And if so, what are our governments doing about it?

Sea level rise is already happening and affecting people right now. We invited Prof. James Renwick back to TILclimate to talk about the near future: what will sea-level rise look like for coastal areas in the next 20 or 30 years, and what can we do about it?

If you’ve heard only one thing about climate change, it might be that sea levels are rising, and many of the Earth’s islands and coastlines are at risk. But, why?