Unsung Climate Victories

Hi, I'm Dr. Ralph Levinson, Health Sciences Professor Emeritus at UCLA.
And I'm Luc Lewitanski, now a teacher in Paris, and I've worked as a journalist covering
technology, politics and power.
Welcome to Your Planet, Your Health, where we share stories about the environment without
falling prey to despair.
In these conversations, we explore the knowledge and tools that we can use to be good earthlings.
Oh, Luc, listening to what I just said, I have to admit, it's gotten a lot harder not
to fall into despair, given that my country has been taken over by climate deniers, science
deniers, who are doing everything to set back any rational attempt to control the environment.
It's tough.
You know a little spiel about trying to be good earthlings?
It reminds me of Noam Chomsky's framework of trying to imagine your experience on Earth
from the point of view of an alien.
Perhaps there's a way of looking at the situation that is not that bad.
In fact, in spite of America's government of climate denying fracas, there's been
a lot of concrete climate action that we wanted to highlight.
So Ralph, you know, the world doesn't revolve around America.
Actually America's empire is waning as a result of the actions of the Trump administration.
Actually that's not bad, Luc.
That's not bad.
We've now, probably as a species, hit the peak amount of CO2 that we're ever going
to put out in a single year.
And so with that in mind, let's talk a little bit about the big picture progress on the
fight for climate change.
And frankly, neither you nor I are interested in being Pollyannish, right?
We don't want to paint a panglossian picture of peace and prosperity, right?
And of course Trump is actually uniquely awful.
Donald Trump built a sea wall around his mansion, so he's clearly aware that rising coastal
waters are gonna happen, where it's just like, well, I guess that's about as far as
he's thought about mitigation efforts.
Be careful of just making a Trump.
If he didn't have his minions in the Congress Senate and Supreme Court,
he wouldn't have this kind of power.
The real fact is, even in the United States,
the federal government isn't the only thing going on,
let alone what China and the rest of the world is doing.
We're going to concentrate, and we often do, on the big story,
climate change.
But it's not just that.
It's pollution.
It's gutting the EPA.
It's funny.
You mentioned the EPA. Of course, we know President Richard Nixon, a Republican, not exactly a liberal by any definition.
No.
In the 70s, in the late 70s, founded the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the same one that Trump has been dismantling for a while now.
So there's something quite ironic about the trajectory of Republicans on this issue.
If people are interested, look back at our episode, I guess it was episode four, where we tracked the history of oil companies and the political discourse,
and we look into specifically Nazi Pelosi doing an ad with Newt Gingrich.
Yeah, exactly.
In which they were basically saying that there's a bipartisan consensus,
circa 2008 at least, around the issue of fighting climate change.
And right after that McCain pivoting on the issue
because he was afraid he wouldn't get the primary from the Republican party.
Yeah, there was a big change at that time.
And the change originated from a change in campaign finance spending
which allowed oil companies to massively put their thumb on the scale, right?
After having contributed to the fervour around certain military excursions of
America's during the first part of the 2000s, the oil industry was excited to
push further into destructive endeavours for our whole species by continuing to
fund this climate denialist movement. But as we said, there is some good news!
Good news, good news, good news.
Let's get to that good news because frankly, climate wins don't follow borders.
Right.
These fights are much larger than that.
This is something you found about these polls that both in this country and around the world,
people want action.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
If you look at some polling data from July 2025, at Atlas US National Poll,
The environment is the strongest issue for the Democratic Party.
So if you ask a random American, twice as many of them would prefer the democratic position
on what is labeled as environment.
Okay, so environmental issues.
Second issue, by the way, is healthcare, third education.
So all the stuff that Trump is gutting, ironically enough, it seems as though
that might not be so popular.
The new Trump budget bill, the Republican budget,
is undoing a lot of the legislative accomplishments of Joe Biden's IRA.
They're cutting 500 billion dollars in green spending.
Experts at Princeton University have projected that by 2030,
US greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 190 million metric tons,
and by 2035 470 million tons.
So of course the American Petroleum Institute, who will be familiar to our listeners,
explicitly said that the bill was directly fulfilling all their priorities, right?
The president was talking to CNBC.
Trump himself, he's explicitly supporting the coal industry.
Just insane, yeah.
Opened up coal. We were closing all our coal mines all over the country, and we're doing coal.
I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want nearly solar things where they go
for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell. And by the way, the panels are
are all made and the windmills, they're all made in China.
Okay?
- It's just irrational.
- Just self-destruction.
But as you say, people in America want change.
The Democrats are in front on this issue.
They have been messaging about this.
They could own this even harder
because the percentage of Americans
who want stronger climate action is 74%.
So three quarters of Americans
support stronger climate action.
There's a clear consensus for this.
The Republicans who are doing this
with the backing of this fossil fuel industry
are marching against the will of the people.
- Even conservatives, we had a conservative on our podcast.
- We spoke to Michael Jeffries on our episode five,
talking climate with conservatives.
That's clearly something that we've wanted to spotlight,
specifically the work of Senator Bob Inglis,
who's been at the forefront of fighting
to get Republicans to be on the right side of history
for the climate issue.
- For this issue, yeah, absolutely.
- Saying that Republicans are not one homogenous
oil company funded climate denying blob.
Right.
In some cases, even a majority of conservatives,
if you frame the question, would you
rather pay a little more to have cleaner air and water,
they'll go, if you put it that way
and don't make it sound like some liberal project,
oh, of course I would.
Yeah, I like clean air and water.
Some of it is framing.
Right.
So just in the United States, it's
not all just the national politics.
There's stuff going on locally.
If you look at the California state website,
there's still initiatives for solar panels,
electric vehicles that are subsidized by the state.
Now the ones that are left are not subsidized anymore
by the federal government, so they're much lower.
And there was a huge recent win in New Jersey
and in Tampa, Florida suing corporations
that were polluting, resulting in big buck findings
and requirements that these corporations clean up
and have funds that even if they go bankruptcy,
the cleanup continues.
So it's appropriate to have a negative reaction
to people destroying your ability to live and thrive.
It's just whether it demoralizes you, that's the issue.
- Zooming out to take a wider perspective,
to take in the big picture on this fight
to protect our habitats, our planet.
- Ourselves.
- That's the whole Planetary Health ethos.
(laughing)
- You were also mentioning,
while we're talking about cities,
I mentioned LA with a little illusion to New Jersey and Tampa, but you were also talking
about some things New York City had been doing.
You went to college there, so at NYU.
So you're paying attention to that.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, I guess my old haunts, the streets of New York City, are going to be increasingly
pedestrian, it looks like.
It's certainly where I now live.
In Paris, there's also been a big effort to make more streets walkable.
I think every street in front of a school had to be made pedestrian over the years.
And there's been fewer lanes for cars and more greenery being planted left and right.
And that really increases just the, on a local level, the quality of the air.
Through photosynthesis, we're getting cleaner air.
The quality of life is much improved.
And another thing that was enacted in New York last year,
and that the city of London, another city which is close to my heart,
set up over a decade ago, is a congestion charge.
Now congestion charge initially sounds a little counterintuitive.
You're making people pay in order to drive into the city.
If it's done in a smart way, you pair it with increased investments in public transit.
Right.
And so you reduce because you disincentivise cars being on the road,
you decrease car congestion and the public transit can flow more easily.
The buses are faster.
And of course for the people who live in the city,
people who work and breathe in the city, well the air quality is nicer.
And the walkability from place to place is nicer, which means the local businesses benefit
from people being able to just have foot traffic around.
And of course, the noise for the residents goes down.
So there are many ancillary benefits for these types of local initiatives that are clearly
going to be sweeping the world.
We can look at examples of Stockholm, also set up a congestion charge to great effect.
And if you look at Barcelona, in terms of urbanism and making streets more walkable,
They were pioneers over a decade ago with the Superia system, where they took blocks
of nine streets and cut off car access to them almost entirely.
There have been a lot of interesting experimentations towards making the basic unit of the city
the pedestrian and not the car.
Kind of a radical idea for American urbanism.
As we look out to these larger picture fights, so there are cities in America, there are
even states in America that are not following the Trump way. Because again, if we look at
the will of the American people, they're twice as likely to support Democrats than Republicans
on the issue of the environment. There's research in Nature from 2024 that says about 80 to
89% of the world's people want the governments of the world to organize to do something about
climate change. And as nebulous as that might sound, things have actually been working.
Right. By talking about all those European cities, we were starting to pivot to the international scene.
And, Luc, starting with the big news of the International Court of Justice, why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Well, speaking of being on the right side of history, the International Court of Justice has, as of July 23rd, 2025,
just put out a ruling at the initiative of the country of Vanuatu that nation-states must take
action on climate change. Perhaps, as we were jokingly alluding to, this is also linked to the
United States abdicating its position as the global hegemon due to the alignment of the rest of the
world on this particular issue and the reputational cost that the US will continue to incur as a result
of its malignant denialist orthodoxy. But under this new non-binding resolution, polluting
states such as the US will theoretically be compelled to pay reparations to countries
particularly affected by climate change and related disasters. So countries such as Vanuatu,
which initially put in this request at the ICJ in The Hague, would get some type of financial
reparations and maybe the US will not be part of funding those relief efforts and that'll
be part of the soft power, but whatever empire ends up taking the US's spot.
But if I'm thinking about the survival of the species, if another global power is taking
the lead on the climate issue, if only for economic reasons, perhaps that is wise.
And so let's think about why China would move on solar like this.
Is it just because they're trying to build up their reputation?
Well, it also coincides that as a result of the copious amounts of research, the cost
of producing solar panels has massively decreased in the last decade.
This is something that I feel is an under-covered story.
The cost of producing a new solar panel has decreased tenfold in the last decade.
It now costs one tenth of what it cost a decade ago to produce a new solar panel.
Now, that's mind-blowing.
It is mind-blowing.
And I just want to interject with a quote from someone who I follow closely, and like
the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman just in July,
he said, "A transition to renewables,
which might have sound like pie in the sky,
hippie dippy stuff a generation ago,
is now not just feasible,
but the only sensible energy strategy."
Except in the United States,
federal government under the Trump administration
and Republican power.
But it's still true, whether they like it or not.
This is even filtering down to some major oil companies.
There's an Italian oil giant, the company ENI,
said it expects its green business to rival revenues
from oil and gas within a decade.
So the cost of solar energy having massively fallen
means it's smart economics to invest in these renewables.
If we look at China, right, China's installed
198 gigawatts of solar energy and 46 gigawatts of wind
in the first five months of this year.
so up to June in 2025,
they've set a global benchmark
in terms of clean energy expansion.
China used to massively rely on coal energy,
and that's dropping.
The fact that solar panels now cost one-tenth
of what they used to cost 10 years ago
changes the picture financially.
The energy investor, Rob Carlton,
speaking about the United States push
for continued fossil fuel use,
said that continuing to burn fossil fuels
is a self-imposed financial penalty
which will ultimately degrade the country's
long-term global competitiveness.
The same calculation applies to any nation
or any polity of any size that chooses
to continue burning fossil fuels in any application
in which electricity could instead be provided
more competitively with renewables.
Now, I wanna draw your attention
to the idea of competitively here.
It's not a question of doing something
for your reputation as a country.
It literally is financially and economically unsound
to continue investing in fossil fuels
when renewables are a clear, cheaper alternative
at this point.
It's just choosing to not invest
in crucial infrastructure.
So solar energy is profitable.
As a result, it's growing massively.
So China's investing massively in solar, but not only.
According to the IEA, by 2035,
solar will be the world's largest energy source.
Proportionally, most of our energy
will be provided by solar panels.
And let me give you another local example here.
Just last week from when we were recording, so in early August, Los Angeles opened up
the second phase of this major solar array that's actually out in the desert in Keiran
County.
And Los Angeles is on track to, by 2035, be entirely powered by renewables.
It's already 60% renewable energy power in Los Angeles.
And by the way, it's not just solar arrays, it's also batteries, and the batteries were
produced in California.
Because energy production fluctuates when you're using renewables, actually there were
some points in May 2025 where renewables produced 158% of California's power demand.
Meanwhile the battery, thinking about the excess energy, the battery storage capacity
has also increased by 76%.
So if you're thinking big picture, California is actually counteracting a lot of the negative
ecological impact of what Trump can be doing.
Absolutely, I'm very proud to live here.
And that's in many ways California is counteracting Trump,
or at least trying.
There's a lot of wind.
Really, the states that are using it the most
are states like Texas, Iowa.
These are, you know, red states that is states
that voted Republican, but they see where the money is.
Wind is also very big in California,
but not as much as it is in those other states.
- She said these conservative states that did vote Trump in,
nonetheless investing in renewable energies.
And there's a real market for jobs
in the clean energy sector in places like Alabama,
Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, right?
60% of Iowa's electricity is generated from wind.
- And all those jobs, not all of them,
'cause there's always gonna be maintenance and all that,
but many of those jobs now will not be created
and many will be lost due to the budget bill
by the Republican government.
- Sure, but look at a place
with a Republican government like Texas.
They're nonetheless producing renewable energy
and batteries at a high pace.
So because we can think of the vacuum on the federal level
that America has left in its issue,
China is now exporting most of the solar panels
and batteries used by the rest of the world.
- And electric vehicles too.
- Electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries,
all these things have become massive export industries
for China.
More than half of the world's renewable energy,
China has stepped up to meet this demand.
And so places like India now,
India gets over 50% of its power,
over 50% of the power used in India
comes from renewables as of 2025.
One third of the cars in Norway are electric cars now, right?
Talking about electric vehicles and China's exports here.
So the rest of the world isn't waiting for America.
The current fervor that America is under is rather terrifying but momentary.
And so if you look at places like England, all new homes built in England by 2027 will
have to have new solar panels outfitted onto them.
Poland.
We always think Poland was a leading nation in terms of coal mining.
They had a big industry of coal miners.
Well, now they're going to be producing more renewable power than coal as of May 2025.
actually hit a threshold where they're producing more renewable power as a result of them constructing
many solar panels.
Poland set itself a goal of reaching a certain photovoltaic power usage by 2030, and in fact
it's already tripled the goal that it had set back in 2021.
For instance, in the Netherlands the Dutch people hit that threshold where more than
50% of their energy comes from renewables.
As Trump is crying out, "Drill, baby, drill!"
Everyone's saying goodbye to fossil fuels.
The rest of the world is taking advantage of the low cost of solar energy and the massive
expansion of battery storage.
Economies really thrive with innovation, and what's hard for many of us in this country
now is watching how we're giving up innovation.
For a country that's loved to hate China,
you know, for an administration that wants to
bank them as the bad guys, we have ceded all sorts of power
and all sorts of markets to China.
The only explanation I have is simply because
those in power earn the thrall of oil company money.
- It's a self-inflicted wound,
like many of Trump's reckless actions.
It's doing a lot of damage to America.
- The best way to fight despair in my book
is to do something, however little, nothing is too small.
It may not be the sea change we look for,
but you gotta set up the future.
- I like that way of looking at it.
No single person can make or break the situation.
And nonetheless, the positives that we've been outlining
are very much the fruit of sustained pressure
from many people.
- Excellent, exactly.
- Even red states like Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas,
even in those red states,
there's a lot of clean energy jobs on the line.
If we zoom out back to this big picture,
China and India have decided to massively produce solar panels.
Now 46% of the world's energy capacity comes from renewable energy.
The total capacity of renewable energy in the world is, as of 2024, 4,400 gigawatts.
Well, out of that, 580 were added during 2024.
That's amazing, yeah.
about one eighth of the total capacity of renewable energy was added in 2024.
That's amazing.
Think about how massively this is growing, right?
Now that it's profitable, now that it's cheap, solar is going to change the whole picture.
And research is still going on.
There's new things coming online, battery technology, as you mentioned, other forms of storage.
People are actively looking for innovation.
This is where having a rich, thriving research environment
used to be one of the US's differentiating factors.
Absolutely.
Investing in research and development,
even for perhaps pie-in-the-sky solutions around carbon capture,
at least presents some level of optimism.
And I think these are the types of projects
where you're going to see a lot of excitement and investment
just because people want to be working on something meaningful,
and this is the crisis of our lifetimes.
Many of these get promoted early and don't pan out,
but there are things like trying to form cements
that don't give off as much CO2.
There's a lot of R&D, a lot of research and development,
and well, some of it will hit.
It's just what and when.
The next big thing could be in the works right now,
and that's continuing to go on around the world.
The countries that do that innovation
are gonna be the winners.
Let's hope that the US also realizes
that soon enough and turns it around.
In the meantime, innovation hasn't stopped completely
in the United States either.
There are plenty of entrepreneurs and engineers
and smart young people working on this, even in this country.
The world only warms as much as CO2 is in it,
in the atmosphere.
As we slow down emissions and have renewable energy,
the warming slows also.
And I wanna pump you up and pump myself up to continue
and not give up the fight.
We need to do this and we can.
And we are. This fight continues.
This has been a tipping point.
We're talking about how this year
is going to be the peak CO2 use, likely.
Of course, we can't see into the future,
but all signs point to the fact like,
because of how much cheaper
and more efficient solar panels have become,
it's extremely likely that 2025
is going to be the peak year in terms of CO2 emissions.
As we produce less CO2,
eventually the drastic effects of climate change
will slow down, perhaps even revert back to something
that will be easier to adapt to.
- Right.
- Conversely, the cheaper cost and efficiency of batteries
also helps with the storage of energy,
if it fluctuates, as renewables can sometimes do.
And if we take the outsider's perspective,
if we think about it as earthlings,
we are winning this fight.
This fight that is the result of the concerted efforts
of a small industry of fossil fuel producers.
And they're still influential, don't get me wrong,
they're still able to do a lot of damage.
But in the meantime, the resistance against them
is this sort of planetary species-wide effort
that is for now mainly taking shape
in the form of strong investments in solar and wind energy.
But as we take a bigger picture,
this is clearly where the future of our survival
as a species lies.
- To the points you're making, it's not just optimism.
I have this kind of gut reaction to the word optimism.
You know, I don't love it, but it fits here, right?
You have to have a balance, and we have to balance
this demoralizing news we get so often.
There is some hope, you know, there is,
there are efforts being made even in the United States,
certainly internationally, certainly innovation is going on.
The optimism to me, my concern is this,
like false optimism, you know, like I go for more like,
you know, Buddha's middle path, you know, optimism,
you know, I just went through this whole battle with cancer.
I've won the battle so far.
Is that optimistic?
Well, I know there's a chance it's gonna recur.
To me, a real assessment has to balance optimism
and pessimism and just see what's really in front of you
and what you can do.
If you have too much optimism,
every setback becomes magnified, I think.
Certainly looking on the positive side to me
is not optimism, and that's what we tried to do here.
Looking on the positive side of the world,
making more renewables at an ever increasing pace
that was not predicted five years ago.
The narrative was there's no way we're gonna get
to where we are now this quickly.
To me, that's not optimism,
that's just realistically positive news
and something to embrace.
- I think it's a question of how you narrativize things.
And as we are doing a storytelling endeavor
with this podcast, I feel like we obviously
are emphasizing things with a lens.
- We have ways to deal with this.
We can do better, many cities, states and countries are doing better, and we have to
embrace that vision.
Yeah, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
And I ultimately think we're gesturing at very similar ways of processing the world,
which is ultimately accepting what you cannot deal with and taking on the things that you
can as a source of motivation to make them better.
And my guess is a lot of our listeners are going through the same kind of framing and
thought processes.
Yeah, and that should not be demobilizing.
I mean, I think that as analytical and as rigorous as we can be in terms of detailing
awfulness of certain situations, I also think the only thing to do with that information
is to then take it in and to think what is the best thing we can do with a situation.
I guess that's how I sort of look at optimism, is sort of trying to find that path.
There's a lot to look at here, even on the level of cities, of the level of certain states in America,
the level of cities around the world, making these initiatives on congestion, on pedestrians,
and then on the worldwide picture in terms of the much quicker adoption of renewables and their
increase in efficiency and their decrease in cost. All these things are victories that we wanted to
celebrate and sing, right? To go back on that idea, these victories should not be dwarfed
by the people who are trying to get us to become dispirited and fall into despair.
I agree. As we've now taken you on this journey, we wanted to thank you for being along for the
ride with us, especially after so long. It's been about a year, so I will say it's been nice to be
able to catch up and work on this with Ralph. We also want to temper expectations. You talk about
not wanting to be disappointed, I suspect. We obviously are not going to pick up the rhythm
that we had before, if only because we have different things keeping us busy, but I really
love this check-in. Speaking of hope, I'm hopeful that this is something that we can continue going
forward as I have breaks from the school schedule. I think it would really be nice to be able to
continue taking the temperature of this climate situation and to do it with you is a particular
Thank you, Luc. It's been a pleasure for me too.
Alright, so if you guys have enjoyed being a part of this as well, feel free to let us know.
Personally, messages, comments, ratings and such. All very appreciated.
So, on that note, as you're fond of saying, let's stay planet, stay healthy.
That's the news!
Well, thank you and goodnight!