JP Morgan Chase is the largest investor in fossil fuels in the US financial sector. Dr. Sarah Kapnick nonchalant responses to the dangers posed by climate change may have something to with her chosen employer.
Volts is the only podcast I listen to every single episode of, but for reasons I wont express, I found this interview to be, frankly, quite embarrassing to witness on such an esteemed show as this.
I could tear on the point you raised, but also many others with this interview and the ludicrously upbeat impressions it may leave on those who dont understand much about climate science or who haven't been following it's development for the last two decades. Listening along, I didn't even catch who Dr Kapnick's employer was but I'd already figured she'd by enthralled/captured hanging out with Big Finance Consulting.
Perhaps David can invite James Hansen on the show for a counter point of summary level talking points? Hansen, often referred to as the godfather of climate science due to his early work at NASA is still publishing and many of his predictions and concerns have proved prescient. As someone who has modelled energy transition on grids, I dont share his views on nuclear power, espiecally conventional NPPs which are a mismatch for VRE supply assets making it even more uneconomical than it already is. But as a climate scientist his work continues to set the benchmark, and he needs to be listened to.
Also there's David Spratt, not a climate scientist, but a climate science communicator and risk analysts who co-authored Climate Code Red (2008). Hansen wrote in the foreword this book was a must read for all those concerned about Climate. Spratt is the Research Director of the Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration, Australia. Breakthrough have released numerous reports in the last decade on less talked about aspects of risk prognosis and climate breakdown. Things you wont hear a word about in the big business ESG marketing cycles.
AI is not going to change the basic understanding of climate change which is really based on basic physics. We know climate change is happening and we know how to stop it. The difficulty with climate change is not science it is politics.
I found this episode dissapointing. Somewhat informative, but dissapointing. Learned about advances in weather forecasting. The bloodlessness of the interview subject left me cold.
I found this interview disturbing. It beautifully illustrated why people with power and money are doing nothing to stop climate change. I think maybe this is best illustrated by the comment on how her JPMorgan clients respond to advice "Depending on the time horizons, depending on the cost of responding, depending on what their views are of their ability to change course as more information comes in, they make different decisions based on this." My translation: People with money just want to know when to run and how far, and the occassional confirmation that yes, deflecting blame (aka "attribution science") and muddying the waters is still their best course of action. Well done to Dr. Kapnick for getting through a whole interview and not letting slip that fossil fuel use causes climate change and, bonus, that in the case of marine fuel clean-up, pollution from fuel burning was good for the climate. I did not get any sense that Dr. Kapnick's rich and powerful clients were "into" mitigation. They appear to have given up and are focusing on adaptation. Fun to see JPMorgan back in the news.
given how few climate scientists have appeared on this podcast over the years — I dont recall any others off hand — this choice of guest, and the softball conversation, is quite perplexing to me.
Just read "Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation" from the New York Times before reading this. Roberts' interview glossed over the sociological aspects of climate change acceptance and action, but when people with power do not want to act on the science, for whatever reason, they bring us all down with them.
In the mid-80s, when I was working for Forest Service Research, climate change was a regular topic of discussion. We came to the conclusion that there were a lot of jokers in that deck. Fluid dynamics - and the air is a compressible fluid along with the moisture it carries - are the bugaboo of physics. That's because of the non-linear nature of those dynamics. The Earth's climate system driven by ocean-atmosphere teleconnections is such a non-linear system. Here's something I wrote in 2010, on a late but not lamented Amazon chat site, at least not by Amazon. I think they decided they didn't want to be the bit police!
A post:
I would not go so far as to say that paleoclimate studies are a 'fool's game' that can't possibly inform us. If anything, the chaos of past abrupt climate change and climate cycles has allowed for a broader understanding of what's on the table. In many ways what 'we've never seen before' has already been studied as part of the geologic past (hothouse Earth, snowball Earth, etc).
My Response:
By all means, historical studies are crucial so that the panoply of possible trajectories can be enriched. We need that and need it badly. But that's taxonomy, not predictive modeling. And it doesn't begin to encompass the probable complexity of the multidimensional state space where the climate dance is taking place.
Prediction in that space is not available to us, that's the nature of nonlinear dynamics. The best models are qualitative, not quantitative. Telling policy makers otherwise will do great long-term damage to the relationship between science and policy. We're already seeing the contours of that emerge.
What we need is a paradigm shift. There are systems whose dynamics makes them unpredictable. Climate is such a system. Past climates - the record of which is now available thanks to seminal work in coring the Greenland ice sheet - show astounding transitions in the energy budget of the planet. Those transitions happen on timescales that seem incomprehensible: as little as 5 to 10 years for a 5 degree shift in the average temperature.
What we need to be telling policy makers is not that this or that will happen with "x" degree of certainty, but that the climate is out of our control and we can't predict when it might transition to a completely different regime. That's why we need to be careful, because we don't know what's going to happen.
Part of that uncertainty revolves around variability, the excursions where episodes of heavier precipitation can and are making themselves felt. That variability is, unfortunately, the bane of agriculture everywhere as people work to adjust to the wet and dry cycles. Bad policy dynamics can make it worse, not better. That will, I believe, be the most difficult part of the chaotic transition to unpredictability, living with the variability we've injected into the system.
-----
To clarify further: there is no predicting when the system will transition. That's because any uncertainty in the initial conditions used to start the modeling can lead to a completely different trajectory for the system. That's the joker in the deck. There is no knowing precisely with no error at all, none, what the actual initial conditions are. Rounding error alone buries that hope. So we can't know what orbit the system is actually riding on.
Here's an example. Decide which of the orbital trajectories will transition to another wing and which will stay where they are. As we can see, a minute change in which orbit the system is on can lead to a completely different trajectory, or no change at all. This image doesn't contain all of the possible orbital tracks either. Those can go on forever.
When it comes to climate mitigation science it should be kept in mind that to date there is no proven technology that can be shown scalable to make a significant change in warming and the prospect for any of those succeeding is quite low. On the other hand, there are several strategies known to be very effective and very scalable: renewable energy and storage, and electrification!
Uncertainty in the science or models is irrelevant to the trend. Those who think there is comfort in the uncertainty because "maybe the reality won't be as bad as our current understanding" should be chastened by the fact that it is equally possible that "the reality could be more bad as our current understanding." In other words uncertainty is just as likely to be our enemy as our friend. The larger the uncertainty bars, the more relevant this admonition.
This exchange gets at a core systems issue we keep running into in climate work. We often assume that better forecasts, clearer targets, or stronger signals will naturally drive better outcomes. In practice, results are shaped far more by where uncertainty and constraints sit in the system. When that uncertainty is pushed downstream to cities, operators, or households, variability compounds, planning gets brittle, and resilience becomes aspirational rather than structural. Upstream design matters because it determines whether later stages are performing or simply adapting. The challenge ahead isn’t just better models or better messaging, it’s building systems that absorb volatility instead of exporting it.
As a technical writer and editor who edited scores of technical reports on the development of climate models in the 1990s and 2000s, it was interesting to hear of the more recent developments. Today, they're faster and much more complex, able to give a more complete picture of climate over more flexible timescales and with greater granularity. However, the missing elements are always going to be human behavior and political will, which are simply unpredictable. You can feed the models various scenarios to find out what would happen under certain circumstances, but realistically predicting what the climate will look like a decade or even five years from now is impossible. I was disappointed at Dr. Kapnick's answer to the last question. She could have given much more detail on the impacts the planet faces, which are considerable and tragic. Yes, the world will be a very different place. But changing human behavior and the ingrained systems that caused and continue to cause the problem is what can save us, not new technological developments based on better data and modeling.
A couple of things stood out to me from this episode. The first is that talk about future mitigation and resilience is completely unrealistic. For example, because of drought and poor water management, Tehran is about to run out of water, to the extent that the government has decided to relocate its capital to the southern coast, at a projected cost of $100 billion (if the regime can even survive this crisis). They may even need to evacuate the city. This does not fill me with hope that world governments will handle future crises as would an insurance adjuster. We haven't done that for the last 30 years, we aren't doing it now, so why should we expect that we'll start doing it at some future date?
The other thing is the references to carbon capture. Right now the cost of capturing and sequestering the carbon (or the social cost of not doing so) from a burned barrel of oil is at least 3-4x the price of the oil itself, which means that it's far better in all respects to just leave the oil in the ground, saving our future selves hundreds of dollars a ton. Meaning, the carbon is already sequestered at a price that we can only dream of!
The point about court cases to redress harms of climate change, especially the issue Dr. Kapnick mentioned of the legal difficulty of suing on the basis of harms that have not yet occurred, has at least one quasi-data point. In Held v. Montana, 16 young people sued in state court and won in 2025 against the government to uphold Montana's explicit constitutional guarantee of a healthful environment. And it was, in part, on the basis of both past and future actions by the state in regards to leasing state land for fossil fuel extraction. www.ourchildrenstrust.org/montana.
The Sabin Center at Columbia Law School, led by Michael Gerrard, tracks all of the US and global climate cases it finds. See also their crucial Climate Backtracker list. Now with 312 bad actions in 12 months. Pick one or more and fight back!
Good episode. And I am reminded of a recent episode of Cleaning Up where Bryony Worthington interviewed Zeke Hausfather which really exceeded my expectations.
For me, this is an interesting topic. But the social media discourse is just way too toxic with doom and people hijacking the issue to push their adjacent agenda. That's all just off-putting and counterproductive, IMO. So I can understand simply presenting the immediate economic benefits of renewables to actually get good outcomes. The external costs will get harder to ignore in time.
JP Morgan Chase is the largest investor in fossil fuels in the US financial sector. Dr. Sarah Kapnick nonchalant responses to the dangers posed by climate change may have something to with her chosen employer.
Volts is the only podcast I listen to every single episode of, but for reasons I wont express, I found this interview to be, frankly, quite embarrassing to witness on such an esteemed show as this.
I could tear on the point you raised, but also many others with this interview and the ludicrously upbeat impressions it may leave on those who dont understand much about climate science or who haven't been following it's development for the last two decades. Listening along, I didn't even catch who Dr Kapnick's employer was but I'd already figured she'd by enthralled/captured hanging out with Big Finance Consulting.
Perhaps David can invite James Hansen on the show for a counter point of summary level talking points? Hansen, often referred to as the godfather of climate science due to his early work at NASA is still publishing and many of his predictions and concerns have proved prescient. As someone who has modelled energy transition on grids, I dont share his views on nuclear power, espiecally conventional NPPs which are a mismatch for VRE supply assets making it even more uneconomical than it already is. But as a climate scientist his work continues to set the benchmark, and he needs to be listened to.
Also there's David Spratt, not a climate scientist, but a climate science communicator and risk analysts who co-authored Climate Code Red (2008). Hansen wrote in the foreword this book was a must read for all those concerned about Climate. Spratt is the Research Director of the Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration, Australia. Breakthrough have released numerous reports in the last decade on less talked about aspects of risk prognosis and climate breakdown. Things you wont hear a word about in the big business ESG marketing cycles.
AI is not going to change the basic understanding of climate change which is really based on basic physics. We know climate change is happening and we know how to stop it. The difficulty with climate change is not science it is politics.
I found this episode dissapointing. Somewhat informative, but dissapointing. Learned about advances in weather forecasting. The bloodlessness of the interview subject left me cold.
I found this interview disturbing. It beautifully illustrated why people with power and money are doing nothing to stop climate change. I think maybe this is best illustrated by the comment on how her JPMorgan clients respond to advice "Depending on the time horizons, depending on the cost of responding, depending on what their views are of their ability to change course as more information comes in, they make different decisions based on this." My translation: People with money just want to know when to run and how far, and the occassional confirmation that yes, deflecting blame (aka "attribution science") and muddying the waters is still their best course of action. Well done to Dr. Kapnick for getting through a whole interview and not letting slip that fossil fuel use causes climate change and, bonus, that in the case of marine fuel clean-up, pollution from fuel burning was good for the climate. I did not get any sense that Dr. Kapnick's rich and powerful clients were "into" mitigation. They appear to have given up and are focusing on adaptation. Fun to see JPMorgan back in the news.
given how few climate scientists have appeared on this podcast over the years — I dont recall any others off hand — this choice of guest, and the softball conversation, is quite perplexing to me.
Just read "Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation" from the New York Times before reading this. Roberts' interview glossed over the sociological aspects of climate change acceptance and action, but when people with power do not want to act on the science, for whatever reason, they bring us all down with them.
In the mid-80s, when I was working for Forest Service Research, climate change was a regular topic of discussion. We came to the conclusion that there were a lot of jokers in that deck. Fluid dynamics - and the air is a compressible fluid along with the moisture it carries - are the bugaboo of physics. That's because of the non-linear nature of those dynamics. The Earth's climate system driven by ocean-atmosphere teleconnections is such a non-linear system. Here's something I wrote in 2010, on a late but not lamented Amazon chat site, at least not by Amazon. I think they decided they didn't want to be the bit police!
A post:
I would not go so far as to say that paleoclimate studies are a 'fool's game' that can't possibly inform us. If anything, the chaos of past abrupt climate change and climate cycles has allowed for a broader understanding of what's on the table. In many ways what 'we've never seen before' has already been studied as part of the geologic past (hothouse Earth, snowball Earth, etc).
My Response:
By all means, historical studies are crucial so that the panoply of possible trajectories can be enriched. We need that and need it badly. But that's taxonomy, not predictive modeling. And it doesn't begin to encompass the probable complexity of the multidimensional state space where the climate dance is taking place.
Prediction in that space is not available to us, that's the nature of nonlinear dynamics. The best models are qualitative, not quantitative. Telling policy makers otherwise will do great long-term damage to the relationship between science and policy. We're already seeing the contours of that emerge.
What we need is a paradigm shift. There are systems whose dynamics makes them unpredictable. Climate is such a system. Past climates - the record of which is now available thanks to seminal work in coring the Greenland ice sheet - show astounding transitions in the energy budget of the planet. Those transitions happen on timescales that seem incomprehensible: as little as 5 to 10 years for a 5 degree shift in the average temperature.
What we need to be telling policy makers is not that this or that will happen with "x" degree of certainty, but that the climate is out of our control and we can't predict when it might transition to a completely different regime. That's why we need to be careful, because we don't know what's going to happen.
Part of that uncertainty revolves around variability, the excursions where episodes of heavier precipitation can and are making themselves felt. That variability is, unfortunately, the bane of agriculture everywhere as people work to adjust to the wet and dry cycles. Bad policy dynamics can make it worse, not better. That will, I believe, be the most difficult part of the chaotic transition to unpredictability, living with the variability we've injected into the system.
-----
To clarify further: there is no predicting when the system will transition. That's because any uncertainty in the initial conditions used to start the modeling can lead to a completely different trajectory for the system. That's the joker in the deck. There is no knowing precisely with no error at all, none, what the actual initial conditions are. Rounding error alone buries that hope. So we can't know what orbit the system is actually riding on.
Here's an example. Decide which of the orbital trajectories will transition to another wing and which will stay where they are. As we can see, a minute change in which orbit the system is on can lead to a completely different trajectory, or no change at all. This image doesn't contain all of the possible orbital tracks either. Those can go on forever.
https://fractalfoundation.org/OFCA/lorenz.jpg
When it comes to climate mitigation science it should be kept in mind that to date there is no proven technology that can be shown scalable to make a significant change in warming and the prospect for any of those succeeding is quite low. On the other hand, there are several strategies known to be very effective and very scalable: renewable energy and storage, and electrification!
Uncertainty in the science or models is irrelevant to the trend. Those who think there is comfort in the uncertainty because "maybe the reality won't be as bad as our current understanding" should be chastened by the fact that it is equally possible that "the reality could be more bad as our current understanding." In other words uncertainty is just as likely to be our enemy as our friend. The larger the uncertainty bars, the more relevant this admonition.
This exchange gets at a core systems issue we keep running into in climate work. We often assume that better forecasts, clearer targets, or stronger signals will naturally drive better outcomes. In practice, results are shaped far more by where uncertainty and constraints sit in the system. When that uncertainty is pushed downstream to cities, operators, or households, variability compounds, planning gets brittle, and resilience becomes aspirational rather than structural. Upstream design matters because it determines whether later stages are performing or simply adapting. The challenge ahead isn’t just better models or better messaging, it’s building systems that absorb volatility instead of exporting it.
As a technical writer and editor who edited scores of technical reports on the development of climate models in the 1990s and 2000s, it was interesting to hear of the more recent developments. Today, they're faster and much more complex, able to give a more complete picture of climate over more flexible timescales and with greater granularity. However, the missing elements are always going to be human behavior and political will, which are simply unpredictable. You can feed the models various scenarios to find out what would happen under certain circumstances, but realistically predicting what the climate will look like a decade or even five years from now is impossible. I was disappointed at Dr. Kapnick's answer to the last question. She could have given much more detail on the impacts the planet faces, which are considerable and tragic. Yes, the world will be a very different place. But changing human behavior and the ingrained systems that caused and continue to cause the problem is what can save us, not new technological developments based on better data and modeling.
A couple of things stood out to me from this episode. The first is that talk about future mitigation and resilience is completely unrealistic. For example, because of drought and poor water management, Tehran is about to run out of water, to the extent that the government has decided to relocate its capital to the southern coast, at a projected cost of $100 billion (if the regime can even survive this crisis). They may even need to evacuate the city. This does not fill me with hope that world governments will handle future crises as would an insurance adjuster. We haven't done that for the last 30 years, we aren't doing it now, so why should we expect that we'll start doing it at some future date?
The other thing is the references to carbon capture. Right now the cost of capturing and sequestering the carbon (or the social cost of not doing so) from a burned barrel of oil is at least 3-4x the price of the oil itself, which means that it's far better in all respects to just leave the oil in the ground, saving our future selves hundreds of dollars a ton. Meaning, the carbon is already sequestered at a price that we can only dream of!
The point about court cases to redress harms of climate change, especially the issue Dr. Kapnick mentioned of the legal difficulty of suing on the basis of harms that have not yet occurred, has at least one quasi-data point. In Held v. Montana, 16 young people sued in state court and won in 2025 against the government to uphold Montana's explicit constitutional guarantee of a healthful environment. And it was, in part, on the basis of both past and future actions by the state in regards to leasing state land for fossil fuel extraction. www.ourchildrenstrust.org/montana.
The Sabin Center at Columbia Law School, led by Michael Gerrard, tracks all of the US and global climate cases it finds. See also their crucial Climate Backtracker list. Now with 312 bad actions in 12 months. Pick one or more and fight back!
https://climate.law.columbia.edu/
Good episode. And I am reminded of a recent episode of Cleaning Up where Bryony Worthington interviewed Zeke Hausfather which really exceeded my expectations.
For me, this is an interesting topic. But the social media discourse is just way too toxic with doom and people hijacking the issue to push their adjacent agenda. That's all just off-putting and counterproductive, IMO. So I can understand simply presenting the immediate economic benefits of renewables to actually get good outcomes. The external costs will get harder to ignore in time.
This is a double listen or read transcript for sure. Thank you!!
Uplifting, over all...pulls hard against the Repub weight on our planet!
we must have been listening to different interviews!