Escuchar A Matter of Degrees

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 [https://x.com/ca_davejones?lang=en], 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.

This week we are sharing a special bonus episode from Boiling Point [https://www.latimes.com/about/pressreleases/story/2025-01-16/l-a-times-studios-launches-podcast-slate-with-boiling-point-hosted-by-times-climate-columnist-sammy-roth], a new podcast produced by the LA Times and hosted by climate columnist Sammy Roth [https://www.latimes.com/people/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 [https://viterbi.usc.edu/directory/faculty/Sanders/Kelly], 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 [https://boiling-point.simplecast.com/] is an LA Times Studios podcast and releases new episodes every Thursday.

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 [https://www.climateone.org/people/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 [http://rebeccasolnit.net/] and Climate One co-host Ariana Brocious [https://www.climateone.org/people/ariana-brocious] from 2023. This episode was also released on the Climate One [https://www.climateone.org/] podcast.

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 [https://bren.ucsb.edu/people/eric-masanet], world-leading industrial decarbonization expert, to break down how we can clean up this sector. We are also joined by Rebecca Dell [https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwdell/], the Senior Director of the Industry Program at the ClimateWorks Foundation, Nick Santero [https://www.linkedin.com/in/njsantero/], the Sustainability Science Team Lead at Rivian, and Yinka Bode-George [https://www.linkedin.com/in/yinkabg], the Founder, President, and CEO of Sustain Our Future.

In this live episode of A Matter of Degrees, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson joined Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson for a conversation on Ayana’s new book, What If We Get It Right, Visions of Climate Futures. The need to build community and the imperative to imagine the futures we want are now more important than ever. These topics are at the heart of this discussion, which took place before the election at the Carter Center in Atlanta. This episode was also released on the What If We Get It Right? [https://ayanaelizabeth.substack.com/p/the-questions-we-ask-matter] podcast.