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Dr. Katharine Wilkinson

Dr. Leah Stokes

Give up your climate guilt. Sharpen your curiosity. Join Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson as they tell stories about the powerful forces behind climate change — and the tools we have to fix it. This show makes sense of big climate questions and critical topics. Our episodes are filled with stories of bold climate leadership, groundbreaking campaigns, and people doing their best to be part of the solution.

A Matter of Degrees is produced in partnership with FRQNCY Media, The 2035 Initiative at UC Santa Barbara, and The All We Can Save Project.

A Matter of Degrees

The industrial sector makes all of our physical stuff – the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the buildings we live in, and much more. It’s also one of the biggest sources of U.S. climate pollution.

In this episode of A Matter of Degrees, we bring on guest host Dr. Eric Masanet, world-leading industrial decarbonization expert, to break down how we can clean up this sector. We are also joined by Rebecca Dell, the Senior Director of the Industry Program at the ClimateWorks Foundation, Nick Santero, the Sustainability Science Team Lead at Rivian, and Yinka Bode-George, the Founder, President, and CEO of Sustain Our Future.

Cleaning Up Industry

In this episode of A Matter of Degrees, we partner with Climate One to share an inspiring conversation between Dr. Leah Stokes and Greg Dalton, the founder and co-host of Climate One, when Leah received the 2024 Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication in December.

And as a double feature, this episode also includes a conversation between writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit and Climate One co-host Ariana Brocious from 2023.

This episode was also released on the Climate One podcast.

Leah Stokes: 2024 Schneider Award Winner

This week we are sharing a special bonus episode from Boiling Point, a new podcast produced by the LA Times and hosted by climate columnist Sammy Roth. This new audio series explores how climate change is impacting California and the American West. 

The first episode focuses on the recent wildfires in Los Angeles and what they mean for the future of the city. Sammy talks with Kelly Sanders, an engineering professor at USC and former White House advisor on energy policy, about how Los Angeles can look at resilience as it builds back. 

Boiling Point is an LA Times Studios podcast and releases new episodes every Thursday.

Presenting: L.A. Wildfires: Rebuilding for a Hotter, Drier Future

Thousands of people lost their homes in the Los Angeles wildfires. Now, they’re looking to their insurance companies to help them rebuild. But as the world warms, disasters like these are becoming more frequent and more severe, exposing an insurance system that isn’t equipped to cover the rising damages. In Los Angeles, people who lost everything were left to fend for themselves. This is just the latest example of how insurance is failing to keep up with climate change. 

In this episode of A Matter of Degrees, we’re joined by Dave Jones, California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 to 2018 and the current Director for the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. We dive into how the climate crisis is breaking our home insurance system, what we can do to fix it, and how to make fossil fuel companies pay their fair share.

The Climate Crisis Is Breaking Insurance

People don’t often hear the real story about climate change: it’s happening now; fossil fuel companies with money on the line have lied about it; and it doesn’t have to be this way. 
This show is for the people who know climate change is a problem, but are still trying to figure out how we tackle it.

Introducing 'A Matter of Degrees'

The biggest climate stories blame “all of us,” or cast solutions as “impossible.” These narratives leave people feeling hopeless and confused about what we actually can do.
In our first episode: individual actions versus structural change. What’s the right way to think about the role they each have in addressing the climate crisis? We’ll explore the nuances and misperceptions. 

Leah and Katharine dig into their own personal histories and revelations. Plus, we’ll hear from Bill McKibben about why plastic straws and lightbulbs do very little about the problem. And we’ll hear from Dr. Shahzeen Attari about how individual behavior can have an impact on the climate crisis.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:

Leah Stokes

Katharine Wilkinson

Stephen Lacey

Jaime Kaiser

You can also contact us on our website.
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio.

Give Up Your Climate Guilt

Climate change is no longer a far-off scenario. It’s happening now. It’s getting more intense every year. And young people are seeing a scary future play out right in front of them.
In recent years, the youth climate movement has gained unprecedented strength. Borrowing from the civil rights movement and early environmental activists, young leaders are forcing politicians to grapple with climate change in new ways. Are we truly at a breakthrough moment? Or a breaking moment?
In this episode, we’ll hear stories from Erin Bridges, Isha Clarke, Varshini Prakash, and Mary Anne Hitt.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:

Leah Stokes

Katharine Wilkinson

Stephen Lacey

Jaime Kaiser

You can also contact us on our website.
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio.

A Breakthrough Moment?

When talking about climate change, we often get deep into the weeds quickly and throw a lot of numbers around. And these numbers can feel really disconnected from our lives: Two degrees, 415 parts per million, 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
In this episode, we've got one number we really want to focus on: 2035. It’s a date that carries a lot of hope and opportunity. If we can make progress by 2035, then we can actually make a lot of changes to our energy system and really our entire economy. 
And guess what? We have nearly all the tools to achieve that aim. In this episode, we’ll detail the reality of climate solutions -- they’re right here, right now.
Katharine and Leah will explain: why 2035? Where did this date come from? It’s a radical departure from what the clean energy community had been talking about. Up until last year, most people were planning for the electricity system to be cleaned up by 2050. And suddenly, that number has been pulled 15 years forward.
Featured in this episode: Tim Echols, Donnel Baird, Sonia Aggarwal, Jesse Jenkins, Bracken Hendricks and Sam Ricketts.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:

Leah Stokes

Katharine Wilkinson

Stephen Lacey

Jaime Kaiser

You can also contact us on our website.
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio.

An Electric Number: 2035

In July, the FBI charged Larry Householder, Ohio’s Republican Speaker of the House, with a conspiracy to pass a $1.5 billion bailout in return for $61 million in dark money. The racketeering was allegedly orchestrated by Householder and the utility FirstEnergy to kill Ohio’s renewable energy law and prop up aging coal and nuclear power plants.
What’s happening in Ohio is part of a broader story playing out under the Trump Administration. Fossil-fuel companies like FirstEnergy have used their ties to the Trump regime to push massive bailouts for dirty energy. And the pandemic was the perfect opportunity for the industry to grab more money.
In this episode, we’ll detail how these companies are raking in billions of government dollars in the wake of the $2 trillion covid stimulus package -- while millions of Americans struggle financially from the pandemic. 
Featured in this episode: Neil Waggoner, Antonia Juhasz, Alexis Goldstein, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and Tamara Toles O’Laughlin.
Don't forget to read the climate change voter's guide before casting your ballot.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:

Leah Stokes

Katharine Wilkinson

Stephen Lacey

Jaime Kaiser

A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio

The Big Fossil Fuel Bailout

It’s official. Joe Biden will be the next president. And he ran on a platform that put climate at the top of the agenda.
There’s still a lot of tension. What will happen to the balance of power in Congress? Can we make progress on climate, even with Democrats losing down-ballot races?
Even with so much uncertainty, there's actually a lot of good news. In this episode, Leah and Katharine dig into what this moment means for the future of the planet.
We were joined by two heavy-hitters this week: Heather McTeer Toney and Sam Ricketts.
Heather is the Senior Director at Moms Clean Air Force. She’s a former EPA regional administrator. And she was the first African-American, first woman, and youngest person ever elected mayor of Greenville, Mississippi. She knows the ins and outs of what a Biden Administration could do to pursue a “just” climate agenda.
Sam Ricketts is a senior fellow for Energy & Environment at the Center for American Progress. And he was climate director for Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign. He co-founded Evergreen, an organization at the forefront of developing detailed, progressive climate policies.
Resources mentioned on the show about the Georgia runoff:

Fair Fight

The New Georgia Project

Follow our co-hosts and production team:

Leah Stokes

Katharine Wilkinson

Stephen Lacey

Jaime Kaiser

A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio

After Trump: The Silver Linings Playbook

Fossil fuel companies are tapping into America’s “best and brightest” at top banks, public relations and advertising firms, law firms, and strategy consulting firms.
These organizations supply critical services to keep the fossil fuel industry humming: creative work, strategy, legal representation, financing. They’re services that oil and gas companies need to remain powerful.
In this episode (our first of the second season!) Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and Dr. Leah Stokes explore the different ways this “prestige problem” influences America’s white-collar workforce. And they’ll explore efforts to push back.
Katharine speaks with Camila Bustos, the co-founder of Law Students for Climate Accountability. She also speaks with Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media.
Resources:

Law Students for Climate Accountability scorecard

NY Times: How One Firm Drove Influence Campaigns Nationwide for Big Oil

DeSmog: The Climate-Conflicted Directors Leading the World’s Top Banks

Follow our co-hosts and production team:

Leah Stokes

Katharine Wilkinson

Stephen Lacey

Jaime Kaiser

A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio. For more episodes and transcripts, visit our website.

The ‘Prestige Problem’ Making Fossil Fuels Powerful

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