Engineering ourselves for the climate crisis
Environmental engineer Leonard Ortolano reflects on his professional trajectory and how environmentalism has guided water resource planning, gives us a brief history of US environmental assessment...
View ArticleRenewable energy as nothing more than efficiency
Environmental engineer Gil Masters highlights the importance of buildings in shaping our energy demands and explores the potential of energy efficiency while offering fresh and practical solutions to...
View ArticleThe (slow) rise of sustainable energy
Sally Benson talks about the goals and recent accomplishments of Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), the need to partner with industry, the hopeful signs of alternative energy...
View ArticleThe law of climate change
Climate scientist-turned-legal scholar Michael Wara discusses the nuts and bolts of greenhouse gas reduction programs and questions the value of the long-standing search for a one-size-fits-all, silver...
View ArticleAre you afraid of climate change?
Co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute Michael Shellenberger discusses the cultural relevance of the Anthropocene and why it’s a term that so many people have adopted. He also addresses the complex...
View ArticleWrapping our heads around geoengineering
Drift into the stratosphere as environmental engineer Granger Morgan explains how to use aerosols to control climate change and why he calls this a bit of a Faustian bargain. He also discusses what...
View ArticleA cosmic twin study
Astrobiologist David Grinspoon takes the anthropocene off-planet to our nearest cosmic neighbor Venus and discusses what we learn about climate change here on Earth from Venus’ catastrophic green-house...
View ArticleThe Apocalypse (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Anthropocene)
One month after the Mayan apocalypse of 2012, the Generation Anthropocene team of Leslie Chang, Mike Osborne, and Miles Traer chat about the relations between the Anthropocene and apocalyptic...
View ArticleWelcome to the… Technosphere?
In this interview, Dr. Peter Haff of Duke sits down with Mike (and Mike sits down with Leslie) to explain the Technosphere. We learn that technology is emerging as a geologic force, what that means for...
View ArticlePort response to sea level rise
Ship’s captain turned researcher, Austin Becker, looks to the future for how ports will respond to sea level rise. He explains the importance of ports for world trade, the time horizons for port...
View ArticleThe (mad) science of geoengineering
Climate scientist Ken Caldeira begins with a discussion of ocean acidification, a term he helped coin. He follows with the story of how his name became attached to geoengineering, from his own...
View Article[VIDEO] Everything we’ve learned in 15 minutes or less
Audio is nice. No cameras, no spotlight. And here’s what we hope we didn’t do… (but kind of secretly wanted to)
View ArticleMedia, nature, and the zeitgeist
Today, we take a little bit of break from talking about science to instead talk about how media covers science, particularly the reporting on genetically modified organisms (more commonly called GMOs)....
View Article[ESSAY] What happened to the middle in the GMO debate?
This essay was written by Miles Traer. If you’d like to hear Miles read it, click play below. Download Episode (Right-click and select Save Link As…) The debate surrounding genetically modified...
View ArticleScience…Sort Of & GenAnthro: Where the wild things aren’t
On today’s episode, our friend and co-creator of the wildly popular Science…Sort Of podcast, Ryan Haupt, joins us to talk about Pleistocene re-wilding. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry!...
View ArticleThe Stakes
Climate change is one of the many defining characteristics of the Anthropocene. But it’s about more than greenhouse gases, energy consumption, and rising temperatures. Climate matters because of the...
View ArticleThe Planet Remade
In 2011, author and editor Oliver Morton wrote a cover article for “The Economist” titled: Welcome to the Anthropocene. Many credit this article with jumpstarting popular interest in the term. On...
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