Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

Electricity prices in California are on the rise and they are forecast to go much, much higher in the future. Climate change is wreaking havoc across the world even as we are pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than ever before. And electric utilities want more and more control over the energy they buy or produce and sell to you. Finally, the Trump Administration is doing its best to undermine the renewable energy that could address both issues.

What if there were a cost-effective way to address all three issues and giving communities more control over their economies and their future? Well, there is: community energy! Renewable energy systems designed to be locally owned and operated, with electricity locally distributed and consumed, and cheaper and more resilient than anything that private utilities could provide. But the State of California and its investor-owned utilities have done everything they can to make it impossible to build community systems that they don’t control. Is there a way around these obstacles?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Bob Krause, energy policy strategist and principal of NeoLogic Systems in Berkeley, California. For the past five years, Bob has been working to develop and disseminate something he calls “Spark Community Utilities,” which develop and deploy local electrical utilities that can operate, legally, in parallel to and independent of the private utilities. We are going to talk about the local energy conundrum in California, how it got to be this way, and how Spark could spark a revolution in how and where you get your electricity.

Summer is over and the rainy season looms ahead. We are being promised a wild, wet and wooly winter, with a “Super” El Niño. Temperatures in the tropical Pacific are going up leaving marine mammals to starve and die. There have been few hurricanes in the Atlantic this year while, with two months left in the Pacific hurricane season, we are getting toward the end of the alphabet. Can atmospheric rivers, flooding and historic tides be far behind.

Hear a rerun of an interview about California weather and climate with Dr. Daniel Swain, a scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources division and research fellow at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Swain “engages extensively with journalists and other media partners, serving as a climate and weather science liaison to print, television, radio, and web-based outlets to facilitate accessible and accurate discourse surrounding extreme weather, climate change, and associated natural hazards.”

Watch Swain's El Niño "Weather and Climate Office Hour" (May 13). Read his "Weather West" blog.

We’ve all heard about the terrible Himalayan flash flood that traveled nearly 100 km down the Lende Kholā and Trishuli̇̄ Kholā rivers on the Nepal-Chinese border, devastating towns and villages along the way, killing at least 1,250 people and leaving more than 5,000 missing in the two countries. The causes remain under investigation, but climate change appears to have played a major role in the disaster. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Jonathan Mingle, an independent journalist and author whose reporting and writing is focused on the science and politics of climate change, energy, health, and technology. In 2015, he published Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World, in which he reported about the shrinking glaciers across the Himalayas and California, the role of black carbon in that shrinkage and the impacts on the people and nature who live there. More recently, he published an essay, Mountains are Coming Undone," in The New York Times (August 29, 2026).

For a detailed analysis of the disaster, see: "Rapid warming in the Himalaya exacerbates geohazard cascades beyond adaptation limits," (WWA scientific report No. 92) World Weather Attribution. DOI: 10.25560/136420.

Local food systems are of great importance to the Monterey Bay Region and, indeed, to California, and there is a growing number of small farms across the state supplying these systems. Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Josefina Lara Chavez, Executive Director of RegenerationLA, the Latine Alliance in Agroecology and the Food System, which has just launched Rancho Coyote Viejo in south San Benito County. The Rancho is a 25-acre pilot land access farm for beginning farmers practicing regenerative and organic agriculture, along with a demonstration farm to support RegenerationLA’s educational and technical assistance activities. The farm is an experimental collaboration with Paicines Ranch, south of Hollister, California, which owns the property. Regeneration LA seeks to strengthens networks of Latine farmers, food workers, and agricultural professionals through education and capacity building to create a robust food and farming system.

There are lots of dystopian futures floating around in the air and on the air. Imagining the future is never really about the future; it’s more like commentary about the present. “Conjunctural futures” extrapolate from the present: they are not-so-distant, generational futures that could or might be. What might those conjunctural futures look like? Can we imagine a positive one? And what must we do to get there? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson, author, visionary and “conjunctural futurist,” for a conversation about his work, his philosophy and his speculations on the conjunctural future. Robinson is best known for his 2020 book, The Ministry for the Future. Robinson has written more than20 books, many of them science fiction and others not. He has received many honors both for his writing and his struggle on behalf of nature. His most recent book is The High Sierra: A Love Story.

Nuclear weapons have been with us for 80 years. There are fewer today than was the case at the height of the Cold War, but there are more countries with nukes than ever before. Some heads of state have been, of late, threatening to use them. If you’ve seen Kathryn Bigelow’s recent film, “House of Dynamite,” you’ll know that human psychology is the linchpin on which the entire system of nuclear deterrence rests: would the President (or Premier or whatever) exchange their capitals for others? Trade Washington, DC for Moscow or Beijing?

There is reason to be concerned about this question: The United States is planning a $1.7 trillion overhaul of its entire nuclear arsenal, designing new warheads and investing in new bombers, missiles, and submarines to carry them, all in the name of “modernization.” It’s not that the current generations of platforms and warheads won’t work; it’s more that Admirals, Generals and Presidents don’t trust devices put into operation when they were very young and that there is a lot of money and prestige in having the latest generation of gadgets and lording that over the competing services. Oh, and new weapons are “manlier” than the old ones.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Dylan K. Spaulding a senior scientist in the Global Security Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists. His work focuses on technical issues related to nuclear stockpile stewardship and policies that can reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. He recently authored a UCS report entitled “Plutonium Pit Production--The Risks and Costs of US Plans to Build New Nuclear Weapons.” Its focus is on the stuff that makes warheads go “boom” but along the way, Spaulding covers a lot of other ground and the report is a good primer on nuclear weapons.

The Trump Administration has declared war on California and is hell-bent on eliminating any and all of the state’s environmental protections. As part of its “drill baby, drill” strategy, it is moving to open the California Coast to oil drilling and to increase exploration and extraction on BLM lands across the state. And not wanting to stay out of the action, the Supreme Court recently ruled that the makers of the herbicide Roundup do not have to warn users of cancer risks associated with its use. But wait, there’s more! The bad news just keeps on coming! Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for conversations on these issues with Jason Rylanderand Hollin Kretzmann from the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The Santa Cruz Mountains cover more than 1,000 square miles of the Central California Coast, running from just south of San Francisco all the way down to the Salinas Valley. The region has been actively stewarded for thousands of years by indigenous people and is a place of significant cultural, biological, and environmental diversity which supports many native plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about the mountains and the network with Dylan Skybrook, Manager of the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network, a collaboration of twenty-six organizations engaged in land stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains, whose mission is to help cultivate a resilient, vibrant region where human and natural systems can thrive for generations to come.

Over the past four centuries, the transformation of the Greater San Francisco Bay Region has been extraordinary. What was once a near paradise for a few hundred thousand indigenous First Peoples is now home to nearly 8 million whose accumulated activities since the arrival of Europeans have created an industrialized landscape interspersed with large areas of open space where nature is in recovery. How did this happen? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with David D. Schmidt, who spent two decades writing San Francisco Bay Area—An Environmental History, published by Back Country Press in 2025, and which is this year's winner of the California Book Awards Gold Medal for Contributions to Publishing. The book is a magisterial tome addressing virtually every aspect of SF Bay and its environmental transformation over the past 400 years. And learn how Alfred Hitchcock got the idea for his classic film “The Birds.”

Who knew that ponds make music? To the eye and ears, they seem silent and tranquil—except at night when, maybe, choruses of frogs serenade listeners. But ponds are much noisier than that: you have to be very quiet and have the right equipment to really hear what’s going on. And there is a lot going on: both the critters and the plants speak out. Indeed, nature is full of sounds, many of them musical and, quite possible, the forerunners of human music.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. David Rothenberg, scholar, author, musician and composer and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology whose focus is on animal sounds as music. We talk about his most recent book, Secret Sounds of Ponds, for which Rothenberg tossed a microphone into ponds and heard “an entirely new world, a realm of the unexpected and stirring rhythms and tones of some of the smallest and loudest creatures on Earth.”

The attack on Iran by the United States and Israel demonstrated, among other things, the necessity of a rapid transition to renewable fuels, like solar and wind. The technologies for capturing and converting them into usable form are heavily dependent on critical minerals, such as lithium, cobalt and others. Indeed, critical minerals are driving a new wave of resource nationalism and extraction around the globe, many of them being eyed by President Trump as potential regions of intervention and conquest. What does the gold rush for these minerals portend for world politics and economics? Are we on the brink of a new era of colonialism and imperialism or even resource wars? In two weeks, join me for a conversation about these matters with Professor Thea Riofrancos, from Providence College in Rhode Island, who recently publishedExtraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

Riofrancos is associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, the energy transition, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left.

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—commonly known as PFASs and "forever chemicals"—have become ubiquitous in the environment and are being found almost everywhere in soil, water, plants and bodies. The Trump Administration haslowered drinking water standards for PFASs presence but that does not mean the stuff has gotten safer. You might know PFASs in the form of Teflon which, for many years, are applied to non-stick cookware so those eggs slide off the pan. But if you overheat that pan, the Teflon might also slide off. PFASs slide off of many other things, as well. The environmental and health impacts of PFASs are almost totally unknown, although they are beginning to look pretty bad.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation withDr. Faith Kibuye, a Water Resources Extension Specialist in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management and the Institute of Energy and the Environment at the Pennsylvania State University. Kibuye specializes in environmental engineering, focusing on water quality, aquatic chemistry, cyanobacterial blooms, andcontaminants like pharmaceuticals and PFASs, and their fate, transport and transformation.

We’ve heard a lot about the problem of microplastics pollution. Just how bad is it? What are its causes? What are microplastics doing to us and the world? Is anything being done to stem the accelerating production and consumption of plastics that end up in our water, our air, in animals, and in human bodies? Liste to a conversation about microplastics with host Ronnie Lipschutz, Dr. Myra Finkelstein, Adjunct Professor in the Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology Department at UC Santa Cruz and Dr. Steven Mentor a Santa Cruz climate activist and long-time environmentalist. Finklestein has been examining the health effects of plastic ingestion on seabirds to better understand the consequences for marine wildlife and human health. Mentor will discuss campaigns in California to regulate microplastics and what can be done to turn the tide of plastic packaging and consumption.

You can learn more about the topic from Food and Water Watch, the Netflix film "The Plastic Detox" and the Interstate Technology & Regulatory Council.

Indigenous peoples around the world are under threat, especially from massive development projects engineered by governments and corporations, which promise to destroy the lands, forests and waters on which those peoples depend. In an article that appeared in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, “We Think They'll Kill Someone” journalist Anjan Sundaram reported on one such project in the Southern Mexico Oaxacan town of San Blas Atempa, where a new factory will wipe out a communally owned forest.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Sundaram. He is an Indian author, war reporter, academic, television presenter and founder of The Stringer Foundation. He is the author of three memoirs of journalism, Stringer, Bad News and Breakup. His forthcoming book, Double Exposure: Two Reporters in the Climate War, is scheduled for publication this coming fall.

The State of California has created a program called “Transformative Climate Communities,” focused on making low-income, urban areas more resilient, efficient and responsive to housing, energy and climate challenges. What does this mean on the ground? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Nancy Faulstitch, Executive Director and Eloy Ortiz, Special Projects Manager at Regeneración Pajaro Valley which, along with Monterey County, received a TCC planning grant in 2021. They have been leaders in this effort and will talk about the planning process and what happens next. Regeneración is a Pajaro Valley non-profit that builds bridges between residents and climate practitioners in local cities, counties, and at the state level.

The world’s cities are big and getting bigger. By 2050, 80% of the world’s people will live in cities. Can cities be made sustainable? Who is thinking about this? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Peter Calthorpe, architect and urban designer with HDR, a global company specializing in architecture, engineering, environmental and construction services. Over the past 45 years, Calthorpe has been a primary advocate for sustainable communities, the New Urbanism and transit-oriented development. His most recent publications are "Ending Global Sprawl: Urban Standards for Sustainable and Resilient Development" for the World Bank and “Grand Boulevards and the AB2011 Revolution: Reinventing the Strip to Solve California’s Housing Crisis.”

Over the past several decades, there has been a concerted effort by biologists, economists and others to put avalue on nature’s services: what would it cost, for example, to provide clean water the way nature does? Oxygen, photosynthesis, soil? Early estimates were around $30 trillion per year; arguably, today they are much higher, over $100 trillion. But getting from hypothetical calculations to actual incorporation into real work policy and development projects is no easy task. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Daniel Chiu Suarez, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has just published Biologists Unite! The Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services, an account of why three decades of academic, activist and policy efforts have failed to incorporate ecosystems services into global economic accounting and action.

The removal of four dams from the Klamath River in Northern California is rapidly becoming one of the great recent success stories in conservation and restoration. The riverbank habitat is returning to its former condition and salmon have been spotted swimming upriver past the sites where the dams once blocked their passage. Along with this comes the restoration of the indigenous peoples’ way of life, heavily dependent on those fish. Join Host Ronnie for an update on the Klamath in a conversation with Amy Bowers Cordalis, who has just published The Water Remembers—My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life. She is a mother, fisherwoman, attorney, executive director of Ridges to Riffles, and member of the Yurok Nation and its former general counsel.

(Photo by Brontë Wittpenn, San Francisco Chronicle)

Many listeners are probably familiar with the tags found in hotel bathrooms that read: “Save Our Planet,” followed by instructions about reusing and replacing towels, and concluding “Thank you for helping us converse the Earth’s vital resources.” Reusing towels might help conserve the hotel’s financial resources but does that make any difference for the Planet? Such “lifestyle environmentalism” is widespread, providing a sense of doing something in a world in which collective action is so difficult. In two weeks, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Michael Maniates, for a conversation about his new book, The Living-Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Maniates dismisses the notion that individual actions can make a significant impact on the state of the planet. But if not that, what are we to do?

Lake Tahoe is one of California’s natural jewels but it is under siege and increasingly awash in plastic wastes, as visitors carelessly dispose of bottles and packages and discarded items degrade into small pieces washed into the lake. What happens to that stuff? As we have been learning, microplastics are everywhere, in the environment and in our bodies. What are their impacts on people, animals and nature? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Madison “Madio” Wallner, a UCSC PhD student in Environmental Science, who is studying microplastics and tire particles in Tahoe’s bottom sediments.