Breakthrough Dialogues

Breakthrough has long argued that fighting climate change is mainly a matter of making clean energy cheap, and — thanks in large part to federal deployment subsidies — this is precisely what we've done for solar and onshore wind technologies. But since experts agree that they aren’t enough to fully decarbonize today's electric power grids, we need to focus subsidies on emerging sources of firm generation like advanced nuclear, while also investing in the energy storage and transmission infrastructure we need to support more solar and wind. The next few years mark a potential inflection point in the evolution of America's electric system. Smart action now will enable faster, cheaper decarbonization in the future. Today’s episode is a webinar recording that discusses the merits of this strategy. It’s a conversation moderated by Grist’s Zoya Teirstein, featuring our own Alex Trembath, Leah Stokes from UC Santa Barbara, and Varun Sivaram from Columbia University. For the accompanying visuals, check out our YouTub

Kyle Bridgeforth is a fifth-generation farmer at Bridgeforth Farms, a row crop operation headquartered in Tanner, Alabama. We sat down with him in the fifth week of coronavirus quarantine — and after a tumultuous few years of international trade wars — to ask him about the challenges facing his operation and the agricultural industry. He shares the history and evolution of his family’s business, his thoughts on the importance of international trade to the stability of US agriculture, and what makes him optimistic about farming in an uncertain future.

When it comes to innovative technologies, which comes first: deployment, or the ability to financially compete? Jigar Shah – a seasoned podcast host himself and founder of clean energy financing company Generate Capital – is a firm believer in the former. He argues that technologies just don’t get cheaper when they stay outside the market. To ensure their ability to reach economies of scale, they must operate in the real world. We’ve seen that happen with solar energy, which moved from 15 cents per kWh to, in some cases, one cent. But is there such a thing as too cheap? What incentivizes peak performance? And how does COVID-induced fallen energy demand change the path toward decarbonization?

At Breakthrough, we’ve long viewed climate as a problem that would be addressed obliquely with other challenges — making clean energy cheap, building modern infrastructure, growing affordable food, and the like. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has rapidly upended our work priorities and climate politics more broadly, but we’re still committed to research on how federal stimulus bills could also, quietly, help decarbonize. So in the past couple of months, our intrepid team has begun churning out policy proposals. We recommend starting with the low-hanging fruit: focusing on infrastructure projects that we already know have bipartisan support. Today’s episode is a webinar recording that lays out specific proposals. It’s a conversation moderated by The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer, featuring our own Lauren Anderson and Ted Nordhaus, Collin O'Mara from the National Wildlife Federation, and Brad Markell from the AFL–CIO. For the accompanying visuals, check out our YouTube channel.

Rehena Jamadar, a 44-year-old woman living in a small Indian village, has only had electricity for the last 14 years of her life. If she had been able to have the lights on earlier in her life, she says, she would have gone to university. This isn’t a rare story; roughly 4 of 10 people today use less electricity per year than a modern refrigerator. Robert Bryce has been researching and writing on these issues for a long time, most recently in his documentary “Juice” and book “A Question of Power.” He argues that electricity makes the world go round, determining the fate and wealth of people to the same extent that guns, germs, and steel used to shape our stories. On today’s episode: the generator mafias in Lebanon, the soaring demand for energy by the marijuana industry, and what the pandemic has taught Robert about the grid.

Nils Gilman has a warning for us: watch out for the coming Avocado Politics. It’s a term the Berggruen Institute president uses to describe a (Brown Shirt) fascist politics wrapped in a (green) environmental layer. Despite popular opinion, Nils argues that climate action won’t necessarily be progressive – and there’s plenty of historical examples to prove the nationalist-environmentalist link. On today’s show: the consequences of alarmist rhetoric, the relationship between technocratism and trust in expert opinion, and how to re-establish strong institutions. For more on Avocado Politics, find Nils Gilman's essay in the Breakthrough Journal here.

Leah Stokes is the author of the new book Short Circuiting Policy, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, and a widely-known voice on energy issues. We sat down with her right after Super Tuesday 2020 for her thoughts on what the results mean for climate. She shares ideas on making the transition to clean energy in a way that benefits people (rather than raise electricity bills), the value of primaries in generating productive conversation, and how to avoid climate solutions that act like “band-aids over an open artery.” Tune in for the political commentary, stay for the energy expertise.

A more innovative nuclear sector will require tilting the playing field away from large, incumbent firms and toward small, entrepreneurial startups. Today we sit down with Lenka Kollar, director of strategy and external relations at one of those innovators: NuScale, an advanced nuclear company widely considered to be the furthest along among its competition. NuScale designs and commercializes small modular reactors, the first of which is planned to open in Idaho by 2026. On today’s episode: what went wrong with big nuclear, the reception of advanced nuclear within the broader clean tech community, and how to engage the general public (hint: it requires community agency, and begins far before the tech is deployed).

The Impossible Burger launched in 2016, with celebrity chef David Chang at Momofuku. Since then, the product has exploded: now available nationally at Burger King, soon to hit the grocery shelves, on its 2.0 formula (now grillable), and an R&D team that’s twice as big as it used to be. So we were excited to sit down with Jessica Appelgren, VP of Communications at Impossible Foods, who’s been there since its early days. She sees the plant-based burger as a concept more than a product: this isn’t a slow, sneaky swap, it’s an explosive cultural shift. On today’s show: how the company thinks about public fears over lab-made “Frankenfoods,” why taste is the number one factor, and Impossible’s theory of change.

We’re thrilled to welcome Carlos Curbelo for our season opener. Carlos is a former Republican Congressman from Florida's 26th congressional district. While in Congress, he co-founded and co-chaired the Climate Solutions Caucus, a coalition of legislators that still exists today, committed to bipartisan progress on climate policy. He also introduced the Market Choice Act, which aimed to attach a price to US carbon emissions, which we'll talk about in this episode — along with a discussion about Al Gore’s impact on the Hill, whether a bundling of issues (like the Green New Deal) makes them more or less attractive, and why there’s such resistance to climate propositions in Congress.

We’re closing Season Three of the Breakthrough Dialogues with a lofty vision: what would it mean to leave half of the earth for nature? Today’s guest, Carly Vynne Baker, is a chief advocate of the Nature Needs Half network who manages to break down a huge idea into the gritty logistics. What are the tradeoffs between conservation and food production? How do we balance a top-down vision with bottom-up efforts? And what kind of human management will the protected Half require? We can’t imagine a better way to wrap up our 30th episode than big-picture dreams of practical land protection. As always, let us know what you’re thinking (we’re @TheBTI on Twitter) and who you hope to hear in Season Four. We’ll be back soon. For more, here's the Breakthrough take on how to achieve a half-earth future.

Today’s episode answers all your big climate science questions. Alex chats with Zeke Hausfather, Breakthrough’s new Director of Climate and Energy, who joins us with over a decade of experience working as a scientist and researcher in the clean tech sector, Berkeley Earth, Project Drawdown, and Carbon Brief. They talk about the real-world difference between 1.5° and 2° warming (and 3°, and 4°…), the easiest sectors to decarbonize (and how), whether scientific uncertainty changes the kinds of solutions we should pursue, and, finally: how are we actually doing?

Julian Brave NoiseCat self-identifies as a “capital C, capital P” Climate Person. He’s a writer and strategist, formerly of 350.org and now at Data for Progress and the Natural History Museum, working to tackle issues of inequality through climate activism. Today’s episode is wide-ranging and topical: we cover his feelings as an “elder millennial” in a climate movement led by energetic youth, how he wishes Kanye West would intervene, and whether it’s more important to focus on bipartisanship or a better-articulated Democratic climate plan. We’re in a different climate moment than we used to be, he argues, so building new institutions suited to current needs is crucial for a strong climate fight.

One of the most important tenets of good climate communication is to listen actively to your audience. Environmental problems run deep: they’re about home, identity, lifestyle, and everything beyond and in between. That’s where any productive conversation should begin. In the spirit of better listening and more inclusive conversations, today’s episode is a little different. We’ve been collecting questions from you, our loyal audience, over the past few weeks, and today, Breakthrough’s Tali Perelman and Alex Trembath dive into them. We cover everything from electric scooters to climate denial to whether the think tank model even works. Let us know what you think and keep the dialogue going on Twitter; we’re @TheBTI.

Jacquelyn Gill, paleoecologist and biogeographer, did a lot of theater growing up. She loved watching Spalding Gray’s monologues, where he would sit on stage and tell a deeply personal narrative about himself. Everything he did was constructed, of course, but you felt like you knew him. As Jacquelyn describes it, he created “bridges of empathy,” and it’s what inspired her to start Warm Regards – one of the first climate podcasts. It allows her to seek and present authenticity in ways restricted by essays or tweets. The climate conversation, she argues, has been largely restricted to the facts, which creates a sense of embattlement: wars around scientific credibility and accuracy that leave little space for breathing room or building long, slow, deep solutions. There’s an underappreciated value in talking to another human like they’re a human, as she’s able to do with radio. Jacquelyn has inspired us in our own work on the Breakthrough Dialogues, and we’re excited to share this episode with you.

Climate change, Jane Flegal argues, does not have a deadline. Yes — it’s an urgent problem that needs addressing, well, yesterday. But we aren’t about to fall from a cliff, or be hit by an asteroid. Jane, Program Officer at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust and adjunct faculty at Arizona State University, sees climate change as a long-term, ongoing condition: a risk management issue. That makes it completely unique from other, more discrete environmental problems. It’s a wicked problem with a million causal, interacting chains that have no real end, which means it requires wicked solutions: a diversified slew of innovation and policy, mitigation and adaptation. As a scholar immersed in the field of science and technology studies, Jane Flegal offers a practical, nuanced perspective on how we’re going to get through this mess.

There are few subjects more important than the future of humanity. Bryan Walsh has spent a lot of time thinking about existential risks, how to classify them, whether we care about long-term futures, and why we’re so bad at taking action on climate. As he argues, we’re simultaneously becoming more powerful as a species and creating new risks, and recognizing this double-edged power is essential in learning to be more thoughtful about the way we use new technologies. Climate change is different from things like asteroids or nuclear war, because we’re all guilty; it’s not the push of a button, it’s a million, daily, non-malicious decisions, and structural policy, and everything else. Guilt around our own consumption fuels denialism, so, Walsh tells us, we must remove some of that guilt to succeed. Through a conversation that touches on everything from Spiderman to the Doomsday Clock, nanotechnology to supervolcanoes, Bryan Walsh manages to show how an abstract future can be made less opaque.

When you think of food justice, the images that probably come to mind are those of urban gardens, fresh produce, and local fare. This conversation with food studies scholar S. Margot Finn swiftly ruptures that vision, arguing that freshness and processing don’t align as neatly with good and bad as we might have thought. As she traces the history of what counts as Good Food – from concerns about purity in the 1880s to frugality and nationalism during the wars to Michael Pollan and Food Inc. in the 1980s – we begin to see how taste may be more about identity distinction than anything else. Whether you’re interested in the problems with nutrition research, the ties between food and class mobility, or (wrong) assumptions about poverty and fast food, this is not an episode to miss.   For more, find Finn's essay in the Breakthrough Journal here.

Bishop Garrison’s son, Gus, is just over a year old. Nothing is set in stone for him; he’s full of open-minded wonder, curiosity, and exuberance. For Bishop, it’s a perfect representation of the kind of world he’s working to create in his professional life: as president and co-founder of the Rainey Center, Bishop envisions a post-partisan America that’s built bridges across all sorts of divides. In fact, the Center came to be through a friendship between Bishop – an African American, left-leaning man working in national security – and Sarah Hunt – a conservative woman working in clean energy. Today, their organization embraces the idea that diverse voices lead to creative solutions, and they never shy away from the most difficult conversations. They see the world the way Gus does, and maybe that can scale: an inclusive worldview for a stronger climate politics.

If you're active on energy Twitter, you might have seen ongoing debates between our deputy director, Alex Trembath (@atrembath), and Vox climate journalist, David Roberts (@drvox). They finally got the chance to hash things out. In our Breakthrough Dialogues season three premiere: does political power or innovation matter more for climate? For adequate climate solutions, must we disrupt the status quo, or do smaller, sectoral regulations have a better track record? Is there any hope for a conservative climate politics in America? Tune in to hear Alex and David discuss these and more of #EnergyTwitter’s favorite questions.