Welcome to Crash Course Climate and Energy! Over the next 12 episodes, we’re going to take a look at the ways climate change is affecting our planet, untangle the evolving energy landscape, and learn to think critically about how we, as individuals and as a society, can affect the outcomes. Navigating the politics of climate science is challenging, and such a daunting global issue can feel overwhelming. But there is hope! We’re going to help you understand some of the solutions we can employ to help decarbonize our energy sources and address global climate issues.

We know that temperatures on Earth have fluctuated dramatically in the past, but we also know that by burning fossil fuels we are causing temperatures to rise faster than ever. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll introduce some core concepts that will help us throughout the series, like the difference between climate and weather, and take a look back through the Earth’s history at other periods of significant climate change.

The carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the air every day is causing unprecedented global warming and climate change. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll give you a better understanding of the types of energy that cause carbon emissions, and discuss the disparities between the countries with the most emissions and those already facing the worst effects of climate change.

Nearly a third of all our greenhouse gas emissions come from generating electricity. Scientists agree that we have to find ways to make electricity without releasing so much carbon dioxide into the air. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’re going to tell you about some of the ways scientists and engineers are decarbonizing the electricity supply with renewable sources such as solar, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Decarbonizing our power production is vitally important if we want to curtail climate change, but there are some major logistical issues we’re going to have to overcome before we can do that. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll take a look at the challenges we face when creating, distributing, and storing electricity from renewable sources.

Humans have come up with some clever ways of keeping cool when it's warm, and staying warm when it’s cool. But unfortunately, our heating and air conditioning systems are worsening the climate crisis. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll take a look at some of the ways we might be able to decarbonize those systems to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they produce.

From the cars that take us downtown to the airplanes that fly us across the globe, transportation is one of the most visible and personal ways we are impacting the Earth’s climate. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll explore the benefits and challenges of electric vehicles, and look at some of the ways we’re trying to decarbonize much larger modes of transportation.

It’s one thing to say a business is carbon neutral. It’s another to be able to truly account for that carbon at all stages of the production process. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll take a look at efforts to count all those greenhouse gas emissions, reduce them, and capture the ones we can’t avoid.

Our warming planet isn’t just a threat to future generations; it’s a threat to us right now. If we don’t mitigate it, the continued rise in global temperature will have ripple effects throughout ecosystems and communities. In this episode of Crash Course Climate and Energy, we’ll look at how climate change has already affected our planet, and what the future might hold.