How We Survive

We’re dropping into your feeds today to share this special bonus episode. For many people gathering around the table this holiday season, things feel a little different. Maybe it’s the cost of ingredients that’s on your mind, or cuts to USDA funding that have left your food bank running low. Or maybe it’s the simple reality of a packed schedule – there’s a lot to cook, and so little time. In this special from Marketplace, we bring listeners a collection of stories on the business and economics of food. Our reporters take us across the country to farms, home kitchens, and restaurants. We visit a refugee farmer in Houston, a chocolate-making lab in California, and stop for a bite at an award-winning restaurant in Portland.

Throughout the season, we asked you all what questions you had about food, solutions and climate change, and you did not disappoint! In this episode, we find answers to your most pressing questions, like whether grass-fed beef is more nutritious than grain-fed, if cell-cultivated meat is considered an ultra-processed food, and we find out what’s going on with insect protein (of course, a taste test is involved). Plus some tips for reducing food waste.

The 100th meridian is the longitudinal boundary separating the humid East and the arid West. Researchers say the dry line is moving east because of climate change, threatening some of our cheapest and most reliable crops, like wheat and corn. In this episode, Amy drives across Kansas to talk to farmers on both sides of the dry line to see how they’re adapting to climate change. And we hear from a scientist who’s trying to breed crops that will thrive in a hotter, drier world.

Climate change is transforming how the world grows and eats. In this episode, host Amy Scott talks with New York Times international climate correspondent Somini Sengupta about what she’s learned from farmers adapting to extreme weather. From drought-resistant crops to regenerative practices, Sengupta shows how communities on the front lines of climate change are finding new ways to survive and feed their families — and what their stories can teach us about building a more resilient global food system.

About a third of the greenhouse gases cooking our planet come from our food. Agriculture and livestock production are incredibly taxing on the planet. To curb the impact, we need to drastically reduce the amount of land we use to make food, while at the same time making more food for a growing population. How are we going to do that? In this episode we go fishing with an eccentric rancher in Northern California and hop over to Colorado to get a rare peek into the demonized factory farm industry on our hunt for answers.

If you have ever bitten into a plant-based burger and felt dissatisfied, or even grossed out, you’re not alone. In this episode, we explore the uncanny valley of meat and dive deep into what makes meat so … meaty. Plus, “The Splendid Table” host Francis Lam joins Amy Scott for a taste test of cultivated meat and shares his go-to recipes for climate-friendly proteins.

Climate change is changing what we eat. As the planet heats up, foods like salmon, chocolate and coffee might be harder to come by and more expensive to buy. In this episode, the “How We Survive” team goes on a food tour around Northern California to find out how tech entrepreneurs are finding new ways to make all sorts of foods that are under threat from the impacts of the climate crisis.

Imagine a future where chocolate and coffee are rare and expensive; where cheap, nutritional staples, like corn and wheat, are threatened. The climate crisis is a food and agriculture crisis. A third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from what’s on our plate. Cow burps, deforestation, water use and food waste all feed into making our planet unlivable. And it’s a double-edged sword, because as the planet heats up, staple crops are withering, soil is losing its nutrients, and droughts and famines will become more common. Our food systems are hurting the planet, and the hotter planet is hurting our food systems. To survive, we need to drastically cut down our use of farmland and we need to find alternative meat sources that don’t give consumers the creeps. How will we keep feeding millions of people? And how will we do that with less land? This season of “How We Survive,” we’ll take you on a food tour of the future. May we interest you in some lab-grown chocolate or some cell cultivated salmon (that is, if you’re not in Florida )? We explore the uncanny valley of meat and visit farmers in our nation’s breadbasket where hotter, drier, less predictable weather has global consequences. Finally, we’ll take you on the ground into one of the more demonized (and misunderstood) parts of the agricultural system: Factory farms.

We’re dropping into your feeds today to share this special bonus episode. It’s a conversation between host Amy Scott, Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal and Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Elizabeth Kolbert. We talk about how the accelerating climate crisis is creating economic disruption. And we get into some of the solutions that are giving us hope right now. This conversation was recorded live, over Zoom, in front of an audience. It’s presented by Odoo with additional underwriting support from The Economist.

A cheap and accessible form of energy lies in a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky: the sun. So why haven’t we adopted solar energy more widely? “How We Survive” host Amy Scott recently talked with longtime climate writer and activist Bill McKibben about his upcoming book “ Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization .” In this exclusive extended interview, McKibben explains how solar power has had explosive growth in the past few years, why it’s not widely adopted in the U.S. (and ways to change that) and offers some hopeful examples of how solar power has been adopted around the world.

Last week’s massive spending and tax bill, named the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” was signed into law by President Trump . It includes major cuts to clean energy incentives, pushed forward by the Biden Administration’s signature climate law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The new law is a huge setback against cutting emissions and transitioning to clean energy. “How We Survive” host Amy Scott talks with Shannon Osaka, climate zeitgeist reporter at The Washington Post, to find out how this will impact the climate crisis and how consumers can take advantage of clean energy tax credits while they’re still around.

June marks the start of hurricane season but thanks to the climate crisis we’re dealing with extreme weather year-round. Just in the past month, deadly storms have devastated Kentucky and a brutal heat-wave is surging across the country. With the recent cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service, weather stations are understaffed and weather forecasting might be impacted. In this episode of Burning Questions, host Amy Scott talks with former National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellinni to find out how the cuts to NOAA impact all of us.

Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis? That’s the question we started this series with, and in this episode, we try to answer that question. Host Amy Scott pops the hood of her own retirement investments to look at how to reduce their carbon impact, and she shows you how you can too. We visit a battery storage farm in the Bronx to see how New York City is leveraging its shareholder power to accelerate the energy transition. Finally, we look at a phenomenon that has emerged in the wake of backlash against environmental, social and governance investing — something called “greenhushing.”

In recent years, ESG investing moved from a mainstream strategy promoted by the biggest asset managers in the world, to a polarizing topic. Financial firms scrubbed the acronym from their websites, dropped out of net-zero initiatives, and stopped advertising their climate efforts. Some have proclaimed ESG dead and buried. But if so, who killed it and why? In this episode – our ESG whodunit – we take out our magnifying glasses to take a closer look at the legislation that would spark dozens of other bills across the country. We’ll question a line-up of suspects at the center of the anti-ESG plot, and dive into their motivations for protecting the fossil fuel industry.

To understand the fierce and widespread backlash to environmental, social and governance investing — and more specifically, climate-conscious investing — it helps to first understand its humble origins. Part of that history began about as far from Wall Street as possible, spiritually anyway, with faith-based investors. In this episode of “How We Survive,” we travel to the hub for religious investors: the God Box in New York City, aka The Interchurch Center. We trace the parallel tracks of religious investors and Wall Street stakeholders back in time to find out how ESG became the polarizing strategy it is today.

Can capitalism save us? In 2020, it seemed like the answer was “possibly.” That year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink shook up the investment world in his annual letter to companies, in which he made climate change a major focus. On CNBC he stated, “We believe a portfolio that focuses on sustainability and climate change will be a portfolio that outperforms … and it will also help the planet.” But that was before a fierce backlash ensued. In this season of “How We Survive,” we follow the money — from a gathering of religious investors in New York City to a yacht in the Port of Houston — to trace how climate-conscious investing (the E in ESG) evolved from a small corner of the market, to a mainstream strategy, to a bogeyman of the right. We uncover the ways climate-conscious investing lives on today and ask: Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis?

Since early January, historic wildfires have been burning across Los Angeles. Over two dozen people have died, and more than 10,000 homes have been destroyed. Insured losses may exceed $20 billion. In the months prior to the fires, thousands of Los Angeles homeowners were dropped by insurers. Some moved over to the state-funded insurance FAIR plan while many others remained insurance-less. In this episode of “Burning Questions,” the How We Survive team surveys the devastation on the ground in the Pacific Palisades and host Amy Scott talks with Carolyn Kousky from the Environmental Defense Fund to find out if the future is insurable and what that might mean for the housing market.

This week, we’re sharing another podcast we like from our friends at Outside Magazine. A quarter of the money at the world’s largest banks goes directly to funding fossil fuel projects. But what if it didn’t? In this episode of “Outside Podcast,” reporter Cat Jaffee calls customer service at her bank — one of the world’s largest financial institutions — to ask them if they might consider investing her money differently. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

Last week’s elections delivered climate wins and setbacks. What will a second Donald Trump presidency mean for climate policy going forward? What can President Joe Biden accomplish in the remainder of his term? And how did state climate measures perform? Host Amy Scott talks with Washington Post climate reporter Shannon Osaka to unpack it all.

In the wake of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, the internet was flooded with conspiracy theories and misinformation, ranging from false claims that the government geo-engineerd the storm on purpose, to false rumors around FEMA blocking aid from people who needed it. In this installment of “Burning Questions,” “How We Survive” host Amy Scott interviews climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to find out what drives conspiracy theories after a climate disaster and what we can do to combat misinformation with our friends and loved ones. Resources to combat misinformation: Katharine Hayhoe’s tools You can also check out Katharine’s “ Talking Climate ” newsletter FEMA’s hurricane rumor response Skeptical Science resources National Climate Assessment

After spending nearly a year exploring U.S. national security and climate change, some big questions remain: Should the American military be smaller? Is that even possible? And what about the upcoming election; Could it upend the military’s climate focus? In our last episode of the season, host Kai Ryssdal reflects on his past and explores the possibilities for the military’s future. To support Marketplace’s impactful journalism, donate here: https://support.marketplace.org/hws-sn

Imagine it’s 2044. We’ve failed to control global warming and temperatures have risen 2 degrees Celsius. Northern South America is suffering from extreme heat, mudslides, agricultural collapse and rolling blackouts. Governments are falling apart and 2 million people are on the move. If you were president of the United States, what would you do? The U.S. military has used simulated scenarios, called wargames, for decades to help prepare for future threats. These days, climate change is the focus of some Pentagon wargames. In this episode, we look at how wargaming became a tool for the military to anticipate threats, and host Kai Ryssdal steps into the Oval Office to play out a climate crisis set in 2044, with help from two retired high-level military officials and a professional game designer. To support Marketplace’s impactful journalism, donate here: https://support.marketplace.org/hws-sn

On Jan. 20, a 20-foot wave crashed into a community center on a U.S. military base in the Marshall Islands. The wave broke down the door, smashed windows and even dragged people under. Waves and storm-driven flooding aren’t uncommon in the Marshall Islands. But this one hit a base that’s vital to U.S. national security. It’s where the United States conducts missile testing. Very few people ever see this remote and fortified location on a tiny island halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Host Kai Ryssdal treks across the Pacific to find out how our military will respond to the existential climate threat, and asks: What do rich countries and major carbon emitters like the U.S. owe to the people and nations bearing the brunt of the climate crisis? To support Marketplace’s journalism, donate here .

The Department of Defense is an enormous consumer of energy, using 73 million barrels of fuel annually. An F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet, burns 15 gallons of gas every minute when cruising. And more than a third of the DoD’s emissions come from powering its estimated 750 bases around the world. On the flip side, the Pentagon has an enormous budget, about $850 billion a year. So how is it leveraging some of that money and power to work on some of our biggest climate problems? In this episode, host Kai Ryssdal takes a look at some of the promising tech solutions that the military is investing in to make it more resilient and reduce emissions. We tour a warehouse in New York making sustainable aviation fuel, visit a microgrid at the original Top Gun school in California and swing by the E-ring, where the higher-ups in the Pentagon work. To support Marketplace’s journalism, donate here .

The Arctic is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the world, and as it warms, a whole new set of national security issues is emerging. This episode, host Kai Ryssdal traverses the frozen terrain that could be the center stage for global conflict. We hitch a ride with the Coast Guard, drop in on training exercises in the frigid Alaskan mountain range and uncover vital military infrastructure that’s falling into the ocean. How are climate change and national security converging in the Arctic? And is our military ready for it? To support Marketplace’s impactful journalism, donate here: https://support.marketplace.org/hws-sn