Most of our efforts to fight climate change, from electric cars to wind turbines, are about pumping fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But what if we could pull out the gases that are already there? Akshat Rathi, a reporter at Bloomberg with a doctorate in chemistry, knows more about this technology, called “direct air capture,” than just about anyone. He follows companies like Carbon Engineering and Climeworks that are trying to figure out how to take regular air and pull carbon dioxide out of it.

If their plans work, they could mean a world with net negative emissions: less carbon in the sky than there is right now, and a cooler planet. But his reporting has also highlighted how elusive carbon capture can be, and how tricky it can be to make the tech work at an affordable price. Rathi and Vox’s Dylan Matthews discuss how direct air capture works, how it’s different from capturing carbon at a fossil fuel plant, and the struggles of one direct air capture company in particular.

Read more of Akshat’s work here:

• Inside America's Race to Scale Direct-Air Capture Technology - Bloomberg
• Crushed Rock Could Capture Billions of Tons of Carbon Dioxide - Bloomberg
• Britain Is Getting Ready to Scale Up Negative-Emissions Technology - Bloomberg
• Planting Trees Isn’t a Simple Climate Change Solution It Seems - Bloomberg
• The story behind the world’s first large direct air capture plant — Quartz (qz.com)
• The ultimate guide to negative-emissions technologies — Quartz (qz.com)

Host:

Dylan Matthews (@DylanMatt), senior correspondent, Vox 

Producer: 

Sofi LaLonde (@sofilalonde)

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Climate scientist Kimberly Nicholas co-led a study that showed the single most effective thing an individual can do to decrease their carbon footprint is have fewer kids. Despite that finding, she still says that people who really want to have kids should go ahead with their plans. She explains how she squares that circle to Vox’s Sigal Samuel, and the two discuss how to think about the decision to have kids or not and how to make meaning in a warming world.  

Read more of Sigal’s climate reporting:

• Having fewer kids will not save the planet
• Where to donate to improve climate policy
• It’s not just Big Oil. It’s Big Meat too. 

More information about Dr. Kimberly Nicholas

• Find her new book here 
• Read more of her writing on her website
• The podcast she recommended called So Over Population

Host:

Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), staff writer, Vox 

Producer: 

Sofi LaLonde (@sofilalonde)

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In an ideal world, cutting carbon emissions would be enough to stop global warming. But after dithering for decades, the world needs a back-up plan. Kelly Wanser is the leader of a group called SilverLining that works to promote research into what it calls “solar climate intervention.” Also called “solar geoengineering,” this approach involves putting particles into clouds that reflect back the sun, directly cooling the earth. It’s a novel and potentially hazardous policy — but one that Wanser and other experts argue could hold a lot of promise as the world braces for catastrophic climate impacts. Wanser and Vox’s Dylan Matthews discuss how solar climate intervention works, how it could be implemented, and where it fits in with the goal of cutting emissions.

References: 

Kelly Wanser is the executive director of SilverLining. You can find more information at Silverlining.ngo, including its 2019 report on climate intervention research. You can also hear more from Wanser in her 2019 TED Talk.

Host:

Dylan Matthews (@DylanMatt), senior correspondent, Vox 

Producer: 

Sofi LaLonde (@sofilalonde)

Special thanks to Efim Shaprio (@efimthedream)

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Subscribe to Vox’s Future Perfect newsletter, which breaks down big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them.

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Unexplainable is a new podcast from Vox about everything we don’t know. Each week, the team looks at the most fascinating unanswered questions in science and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them. New episodes drop every Wednesday. 

This episode: Scientists still don't know how the sense of smell works. But they're looking at how powerful it is — dogs can actually sniff out cancer and many other diseases — and they're trying to figure out how to reverse-engineer it. In fact, one MIT scientist may have built a robot nose ... without completely understanding how his invention works.

Learn more: 

vox.com/unexplainable 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unexplainable/id1554578197

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0PhoePNItwrXBnmAEZgYmt?si=Y3-2TFfDT8qHkfxMjrJL2g

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How can we convince people to change their relationship with meat?

Melanie Joy has been grappling with this question for a long time. To answer it, she takes us back to other points in history when new technology helped make social change palatable. She digs into how the invention of the washing machine and other household appliances, for example, helped make feminism easier to imagine.

Then, she looks to the future, at our latest meat technologies — plant-based meat and lab grown meat — and asks: Could they make it easier for us to move away from meat altogether? 

Further listening and reading: 

• Joy’s books, Powerarchy: Understanding the Psychology of Oppression for Social Transformation and Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. 
• Vox’s Ezra Klein interviewed Joy for an episode of The Ezra Klein Show in 2018. Hear that interview and read her book recommendations here.

We always want to hear from you! Please send comments and questions to futureperfect@vox.com. 

Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

This podcast is made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Featuring:

Melanie Joy (@DrMelanieJoy)

Host:

Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), staff writer, Vox 

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Follow all of Future Perfect’s reporting on the Future of Meat.

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Beef cattle take a huge toll on the environment. In Brazil, a huge chunk of greenhouse gas emissions comes from ranching alone. And a California-sized chunk of the Amazon rainforest has been cut down to provide land for these cattle to graze on.

But one man, living on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, has a potential solution. In a series of small pilot projects run in his own small town, he’s demonstrated that he can work with ranchers to make their land healthier and more sustainable, so they don’t have to slash and burn more forest. He’s also shown that, by making the land greener and the cows healthier, he can dramatically reduce emissions from ranching.

Further listening and reading: 

• Christina Selby’s story about Vando Telles’s company can be found at Scientific American.
• Vox video has an in-depth explainer on deforestation in the Amazon and on the invasion of indigenous land in Brazil.
• Vox video also has an explainer on why eating beef speeds up climate change.
• Vox’s Umair Irfan traveled to Brazil last year to report on deforestation and climate change.

We always want to hear from you! Please send comments and questions to futureperfect@vox.com. 

Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

This podcast is made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Featuring:

Christina Selby (@Christina Selby), freelance science reporter

Host:

Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), staff writer, Vox 

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Follow all of Future Perfect’s reporting on the Future of Meat.

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What if the next pandemic comes, not from wet markets overseas, but from our own factory farms? Martha Nelson, who studies viruses at the NIH, says we are playing Russian roulette with potentially dangerous influenza strains on our pig farms. 

In this episode, we explain what makes these giant farms so likely to breed the next pandemic virus — and spread that virus into the world. And then, we look at solutions — from creating a virus-resistant pig, to developing a universal vaccine, to changing the systems we have for raising meat itself.

Further listening and reading: 

• Sigal Samuel wrote an in-depth explainer on the pandemic risks of factory farms earlier this year. She’s also written about “wet markets.”
• The Vox video team also made an explainer video on the same subject. 
• For more on how viruses can spread in the pig population, Martha Nelson has an excellent paper “When Pigs Fly.”
• The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations wrote a 2013 report on the health risks of factory farming.
• Sonia Shah’s book Pandemic is a great primer on how pandemic strains arise.

We always want to hear from you! Please send comments and questions to futureperfect@vox.com. 

Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

This podcast is made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Featuring:

Byrd Pinkerton (@byrdala), podcast producer, Vox

Martha Nelson (@swientist), epidemiologist, National Institutes of Health

Juergen Richt (@juergenricht), professor of veterinary medicine, Kansas State University

Host:

Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), staff writer, Vox 

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Follow all of Future Perfect’s reporting on the Future of Meat.

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Right now, we can fight off a wide range of bacterial infections using antibiotics. But those antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective, and antibiotic use on factory farms is partially to blame. 

In this episode, Lance Price and Cindy Liu, two public health researchers, explain that we give animals a steady dose of antibiotics in their feed, hoping to stave off disease in cramped, unsanitary conditions. But as a result, the bacteria in these animals develop resistance to antibiotics. But they have some suggestions for how we could make our antibiotics last.

Further listening and reading: 

• Sigal Samuel has written in depth about the antibiotic risks posed by our factory farms.
• Liu and Price’s full study is worth a read, as is this Wired writeup of its findings.
• The episode mentions some of the work that Canada andantibiotics-denmark.html"> Denmark have done to combat this resistance problem.
• It also digs into the use of the antibiotic Colistin in Chinese farms, and the subsequent spread of resistance.

We always want to hear from you! Please send comments and questions to futureperfect@vox.com. 

Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

This podcast is made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Featuring:

Byrd Pinkerton (@byrdala), podcast producer, Vox

Martha Nelson (@swientist), epidemiologist, National Institutes of Health

Juergen Richt (@juergenricht), professor of veterinary medicine, Kansas State University

Host:

Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), staff writer, Vox 

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Follow all of Future Perfect’s reporting on the Future of Meat.

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Workers in meatpacking plants already process our pigs and beef and chickens extremely fast, but recently, there’s been a push to make the meatpacking factory line move even faster. 

Isaac Arnsdorf, a ProPublica reporter, takes us deep into his reporting on why that would be extremely dangerous for workers’ health. Then Jill Mauer, a federal meat inspector, explains why she’s worried that the changes in inspections necessary to make these faster line speeds possible could endanger us all.

Further listening and reading: 

• We based the first half of this episode on reporting in Isaac Arnsdorf’s ProPublica piece on changing line speeds.
• For more on changing line speeds, there are great background pieces from factory-regulations.html">the New York Times’s Julie Creswell and the Washington Post’s Kimberly Kindi.
• Jill’s full NBC interview, which we excerpted in the episode
• The Food Integrity Campaign within the Government Accountability Project pulled together this report with affidavits from federal inspectors in pilot plants.

We always want to hear from you! Please send comments and questions to futureperfect@vox.com. 

Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

This podcast is made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Featuring:

Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf), reporter, ProPublica

Host:

Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt), senior correspondent, Vox 

More to explore:

Follow all of Future Perfect’s reporting on the Future of Meat.

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In 1992, Craig Watts got into growing chickens for Perdue Farms because he was told he could turn a good profit. Instead, he found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and unable to bargain for better working conditions because Perdue was the only game in town. Things seemed hopeless, until, in 2010, President Obama’s Department of Justice announced that they were going to look into the relationship between big poultry companies and their growers. 

In this episode, reporter Leah Douglas tells us how farmers like Craig fought to change the balance of power in chicken growing a decade ago — and what has happened since.

Further listening and reading: 

• In his book meat-racket.html">The Meat Racket, Christopher Leonard outlines the problems with contract poultry growing in much more depth, and goes into the history of the practice.
• Leah Douglas and Christopher Leonard also did a recent, in-depth investigation into problems with the US chicken industry’s treatment of farmers.
• You can watch the Department of Justice public workshops for yourself, or read transcripts, all available here.
• The National Chicken Council has compiled an FAQ that pushes back on claims that poultry growers have problems.

We always want to hear from you! Please send comments and questions to futureperfect@vox.com. 

Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

This podcast is made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

Featuring:

Byrd Pinkerton (@byrdala), podcast producer, Vox

Leah Douglas (@leahjdouglas), reporter, Food and Environment Reporting Network

Host:

Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt), senior correspondent, Vox 

More to explore:

Follow all of Future Perfect’s reporting on the Future of Meat.

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