Climate solutions with jokes, policy, and teeth.
How to Save a Planet treats climate change as a solvable public problem, not a private guilt trip. Its episodes move from carbon footprints and wildfire policy to soil, ocean farming, worker organizing, migration, and renewable natural gas.
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How to Save a Planet is a climate show built around action, but it is careful about what kind of action counts. Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Bloomberg keep the conversation lively, curious, and sometimes nerdy, while aiming it at the big levers behind emissions and adaptation. The show is not especially interested in scolding people into smaller individual choices. It is more interested in power. That means carbon footprints get tested against corporate messaging, BP-style calculators, transportation, refrigeration, and the much bigger math of emissions cuts. Wildfire episodes move past familiar panic and toward fire policy, Forest Service practice, light burning, and Native American communities pushing for older land-management knowledge to be taken seriously. Farming episodes look under the crops, literally. Soil becomes a climate actor, with regenerative techniques presented as both new and old, practical and reflective. The show also spends time on labor and organizing, following Emily Cunningham and Eliza Pan as Amazon workers use a shareholder resolution to shift internal culture around climate impact. It can be playful about white papers, Venn diagrams, and the absurdity of climate town hall formats. Then it can turn sharply serious. Episodes touch migration after climate disasters, undocumented recovery workers, Gulf Coast rebuilding, Indigenous knowledge, colonial systems, and the moral weight of who is asked to adapt. That range is part of the appeal. The hosts let guests and reported scenes carry real emotional force, but they keep returning to the question of what can be changed next. Some episodes are policy-heavy. Others are farm visits, listener mail, or shared conversations from other climate shows. Across formats, the show treats the audience as capable of following complexity without losing the thread. It is warm, direct, and allergic to climate helplessness. The result is climate coverage for people who want more than awareness, but who also want the route from concern to leverage explained in plain language.
Made for: For listeners who care about climate change but want sharper guidance than personal guilt or vague hope. It suits people drawn to policy, organizing, land use, labor, and practical ways to move institutions.
What sets it apart: The show connects intimate stories to structural levers, then keeps asking what can actually be done. Its mix of host banter, reported scenes, and policy detail makes climate work feel concrete without making it feel small.
Does climate change freak you out? Want to know what we, collectively, can do about it? Us, too. How to Save a Planet is a podcast that asks the big questions: What do we need to do to solve the climate crisis, and how do we get it done? Join us, journalist Alex Blumberg and scientist and policy nerd Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, as we scour the earth for solutions, talk to people who are making a difference, ask hard questions, crack dumb jokes and — episode by episode — figure out how to build the future we want.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Climate solutions become concrete through clear reporting on policy, organizing, farming, corporate pressure, and the cultural work of movements.
How to Save a Planet follows climate ideas into the places where they become practical choices, public policy, and organized pressure. Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Bloomberg move easily between reported explanation and playful conversation, asking how soil can retain…
Carbon accounting meets chicken cuddling, then Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Blumberg hand you a lever.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear-eyed climate argument about leverage, not guilt.
Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Bloomberg frame a familiar climate dispute around leverage: where can action do the most good? They take a listener's tension about individual versus systemic change and, with Katherine Wilkinson and Bill McKibben, steer it toward the biggest…
A grounded climate essay linking disaster labor, migration, and climate politics.
The piece treats climate migration as the central story and makes it feel grounded in everyday work: disaster recovery crews on the Gulf Coast, undocumented workers and some asylum seekers, and Kerala, where severe monsoons and droughts push weather into the role of mover and…
A wildfire-focused climate piece that swaps panic for practical land-management answers.
How to Save a Planet frames western wildfire season as a clear-eyed climate briefing. It covers the smoke, the deaths, and the growing sense of emergency, then narrows to the harder problem of living with fire without letting it keep tearing through communities.
Soil becomes the climate story, with farming framed as both practice and carbon responsibility.
How to Save a Planet turns soil into a climate story, using a visit to Soul Fire Farm and a conversation with Leah to show why plowing is more than a farming habit.
A climate-policy origin story that turns a niche question into a real political throughline.
This episode follows a climate idea as it moves through white papers, an op-ed, polling, and citizen questions on its way toward the Biden administration's climate agenda. Ayanna Johnson and Alex Bloomberg give that route a human shape.
Climate organizing looks different when it starts inside Amazon.
Amazon workers are the frame, but the real interest is how climate organizing takes shape when someone is still "just" an employee inside a giant company.
A tight argument for biodiversity, balance, and stopping harm.
How to Save a Planet uses Sherry Mitchell's Indigenous rights perspective to frame climate, biodiversity, and collective responsibility in plain terms.
A practical answer to a utility pitch, with enough nuance to keep it honest.
The episode treats renewable natural gas as a practical climate question: what it can do, where it falls short, and why a gas utility would be promoting it.
Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser build single reported stories around one scientific question.
Flora Lichtman interviews scientists, from gut-health researchers to Queen's Brian May.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Long interviews with neuroscientists and philosophers on consciousness, decision-making, and whether AI is anything like a brain.
Bob McDonald anchors weekly multi-segment interviews on new research, from cricket courtship to moon missions.
APA's Kim Mills interviews psychology researchers on tipping, crying, and extremism.
Anna says the argument out loud.
All We Can Save is back in paperback.
How to Save a Planet hosts Alex Bloomberg and Dr.
Baby chickens start the soil story.
How to Save a Planet co-host Dr.
Amazon employees found a pressure point.
Ayanna and Alex open with Sherry Mitchell's writing on Indigenous knowledge.
Sean got a strange utility email.
Ayanna wants a climate anthem.
Alex admits he has never seen Law & Order, and that odd little confession lets How to Save a Planet turn sideways.
Alex is the climate newbie, and Ayanna keeps him honest with running-man jokes before the show hands off to Outside/In.
How to Save a Planet producer Anna Ladd investigates why beef is uniquely damaging to the climate — it's worse than chicken, pork, dairy, and almonds combined on a per-calorie basis — tracing the problem to cow burps (not farts) that emit methane 28 times more potent than CO2 and to FDR-era corn subsidies that quadrupled the U.S.
Listener mail gets the jingle treatment.