Building codes: they might sound boring, but they’re actually the front lines in a nationwide battle to decarbonize our buildings. And they do a lot more than keeping your home from falling down over your head. They regulate everything from energy efficiency, to...
There are 5.5 million commercial buildings in the U.S. Why are only 700 of them net-zero...
It’s officially summer in North America, and that means one thing – it’s getting hot. Every year, heat waves are the deadliest extreme weather event, and they’re only getting more severe. Often, the people who fall victim to heatwaves are those who are left...
In this episode, we’re touring a home with a buildings doctor. Ian Hamilton is a professor of energy,...
This week on the show, we meet someone on a mission: to decarbonize America’s buildings. Decarbonizing buildings is is actually a huge piece of decarbonizing our economy: carbon pollution from heating, cooling, and powering our buildings accounts for 30 percent of...
Ninety-five. That’s the number of times we've mentioned hydrogen on The Big Switch over the past 18 episodes. This week, we’re taking a step back to ask what ...
Hydrogen could be essential for the zero-carbon economy, especially for cleaning up concrete, steel, and chemicals. It’s also a promising fuel source for transportation and electricity that's attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in global investment....
Steel goes into pretty much everything around us – from buildings and bridges to the furniture in our homes. And decarbonizing the steel industry is essential because we need steel to decarbonize the world. Think about it. Solar panels, electric vehicles, even our...
St. James Parish, Louisiana sits in the middle of an 85-mile corridor along the Mississippi river that’s home to more than 150 petrochemical plants. This concentration of petrochemical facilities has taken a toll on the health of nearby communities – a toll that...
Petrochemicals. You might not have heard of them, but you certainly use them every day. These chemicals, made from oil, are in almost everything – plastics, medicines, clothes, toothpaste, even the insulation in your home.
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Things have shifted dramatically since we aired our last episode. There’s now a crisis in Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas. This is all on top of record demand for petroleum products and electricity as the world emerges from lockdowns.
So this week, we’re bring you an episode...
This week: A love story about concrete. Melissa and Rebecca Dell, an industrial decarbonization expert, break down our...
What does a toaster oven have to do with carbon emissions? This week, Melissa and producer Alexandria Herr dissect one to find out. Turns out carbon emissions are embedded in everything around us – from the clothes we wear to our kitchen appliances. ...
We have something different today: A crossover between The Big Switch and The Carbon Copy. If you like this episode, go over to The Carbon Copy and hit subscribe.
When Covid disrupted the economy and shifted energy...
Aviation is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize. So as Melissa plans a family trip, she wrestles with her options. Which flights emit the least carbon? How well do offsets work? Should we even be flying at all?
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When one of the biggest ships in the world got stuck in the Suez Canal, it threw a giant...
Heavy trucks emit an outsize share of greenhouse gasses and toxic pollutants. But we rely on them for nearly everything we buy. What will it take to decarbonize them?
We hear from staff at the Community Center for...
Electric autonomous vehicles shuttle us to high-tech mass transit hubs. Our fare system is contactless. We’ve already paid via a customized, equitable subscription model. All the trains and buses are on time. And we don’t have to wait in traffic. This is a world...
In the next five episodes, we'll take a deep dive into decarbonizing the entire transportation sector -- everything from bulldozers and planes to ships and trains.
In this episode we start with cars. How do we switch the world's over 1 billion fossil-fuel-powered cars to zero-carbon...
In the first five episodes of this show, we talked about cleaning up our electricity system—the power grid.
In upcoming episodes, we're going to explain how to make that Big Switch in every other sector of the economy—...
