Jacob, Naomi, and Casey explore the obstacles a national carbon price has faced in the United States, and the argument for a different approach to climate action. They talk with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Nat Keohane (Senior Vice President for Climate at EDF), Saya Ameli Hajebi (Sunrise Movement activist), Carlos Curbelo (Former Congressman R-FL 26), David Roberts (Author of Volts newsletter on clean energy and politics), and Susanne Brooks (Senior Director of U.S. Climate Policy at EDF).
In Episode 3 of Pricing Nature, Jacob, Maria, and Casey chat with Sue Biniaz (Senior Fellow for Climate Change at the UN Foundation, and Visiting Lecturer at Yale), Dan Esty (Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale), and David Roberts (Author of “Volts,” a newsletter on clean energy and politics, and formerly a journalist with Vox). Today’s episode tells the story of global climate negotiations, and how these important agreements have evolved over the last 30 years. Read more at pricingnature.substack.com.
Our goal is wellness and health, which seem ever elusive amid a pandemic, the challenges of racial injustices, and the toxicity of our politics. We yearn to move on and past these strains. In this episode, we’ll instead lean into them. You’ll hear unique perspectives, explore uncomfortable topics and experience the power of truthful dialogue. We’ll move ahead together in a conversation with Dr. Jeff Gardere, psychologist and professor, and Dr. Andra Gillespie, political science professor and public scholar.
Ep. 39 – Bernie Krause on saving the music of the wild
In 1968, Dr. Bernie Krause was leading a booming music career. A prodigiously talented musician and early master of the electronic synthesizer, Krause was busy working with artists like the Doors and the Beach Boys and performing iconic effects for blockbuster films. Then Warner Brothers commissioned him to create an album incorporating the sounds of wild habitats, so he headed into Muir Woods with his recording equipment. What he heard changed his life and triggered a fifty-year odyssey.
Then and there, Krause decided that he wanted spend the rest of his life recording and archiving the music of wild animals and wild places. He quit Hollywood and began traveling the world. The soundscapes he recorded were full of epiphanies about the origin of our own culture and music, about the profound connectedness of creatures, and about the unseen tolls of human activity. Previous wildlife recordings isolated the calls of individual creatures, but Krause recorded habitats as a whole. He soon proposed a new theory of ecosystem functioning: that each species produces unique acoustic signatures, partitioning and occupying sonic niches such that the singing of all of the creatures in a healthy ecosystem can be heard, organized like players in an orchestra.
Today, Krause’s astonishing archive contains sounds made by more than 15,000 species. It is, as The New Yorker aptly put it, “an auditory Library of Alexandria for everything non-human.” Fifty percent of the recorded habitats no longer exist due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human din. We spoke with Krause about the beauty of and perils facing wild music, the extraordinary science of soundscape ecology, and how sound impacts the welfare of animals. The music in this episode is from Wild Sanctuary (www.wildsanctuary.com).
In today’s episode, Naomi and Casey speak with Nobel laureate William Nordhaus (a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale), Fran Moore (an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis), Howard Shelanski (a Law Professor at Georgetown University and former White House administrator), and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (US Senator from RI). They seek to understand the theory behind the “social cost of carbon”: the economic backbone of all carbon pricing schemes.
Welcome to Pricing Nature, a new podcast from The Yale Center for Business and the Environment, and the Yale Carbon Charge. In this first episode, we break down the basics of pricing carbon dioxide, and other harmful greenhouse gases. We’re joined by Susanne Brooks, Senior Director of U.S. Climate Policy & Analysis at EDF, to talk about how to design good carbon pricing policies.
Welcome to Pricing Nature, a limited-series podcast from the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale and the Yale Carbon Charge. We’ll tell a story about the economics, politics, and history of carbon pricing, which many argue should play a critical role in any national climate policy. Join us to hear from experts about the ins and outs of carbon pricing policy.
Ep. 38 – Margaret Renkl on discovering wonder, grief, and inspiration in backyard nature
In the long months we’ve all been confined to our homes, many people have become reacquainted with the vibrant life just outside their doors, finding unexpected joy, companionship, and hope through partaking in the cycles of love and loss that happen in the skies and yards around us. It is this wonder to be found in the natural world, from observing the habits of the nesting chipmunk family under her house, to watching a monarch butterfly break out of its chrysalis, that our guest, Margaret Renkl, captures so evocatively through her writing. In her book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, and in her weekly opinion columns for The New York Times, Renkl introduces readers to the profound joys and sorrows unfolding in the world around us. In stories about growing up in the South, the heartbreak of losing her parents, finding the perfect squirrel-proof finch feeder, and hearing the chattering of birds in her yard as they warn of a lurking snake, she grounds the extraordinary and uplifts the everyday. In this episode, we talk with Renkl about how loving nature and mourning it go hand in hand, how backyard nature can provide comfort during times of grief, the impetuousness of squirrels, and how she turned her Nashville backyard into a wildlife sanctuary.
Ep. 37 – Monica Gagliano on plant intelligence and human imagination
Are plants intelligent? Can they think? Can they hear, see, feel, smell and taste? Throughout history, most Western philosophers and scientists answered those questions with a resounding “no.” Plants have long been treated as passive, inanimate objects that form the backdrop to our active lives, rather than highly sensitive organisms with intelligence and agency of their own. But on the cutting edge of modern science, this orthodoxy is being questioned by a group of daring and imaginative scientists — including our guest, Monica Gagliano — who think that plants are radically more sophisticated and sensitive than we’ve been giving them credit for. Gagliano pioneered the field of “plant bioacoustics,” the study of sounds produced by and affecting plants. The results of her groundbreaking experiments suggest that plants may perceive, solve problems, remember, and learn via mechanisms that differ from our own. In this episode, we speak with Gagliano about the profound implications of her discoveries and how listening to plants changed her understanding of the world.