Reverse Course: Solutions for the climate crisis

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Chris Bentley** (0:27)
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Leah Bamberger** (0:32)
Are we going to solve the problem? I don't think so. I think we're going to have a vastly different climate for a very long time, and humanity is going to look very different. But I think we're going to adapt and struggle a lot along the way.

**Chris Bentley** (0:46)
No one is coming to save us from the climate crisis, but ourselves.
This is Here and Now Anytime from NPR in WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.
I recently got a chance to talk in front of a live audience at WBUR's City Space in Boston about something I think about a lot, climate change. Specifically, Peter O'Dowd and I hosted a panel at the WBUR Festival about climate solutions.
If you've been following Here and Now Anytime, you've probably heard our environmental series Reverse Course. For the past three years now, Peter and I have been traveling across North America, learning how people and governments and companies are trying to move the dial on climate change or reverse course, as we say. We've seen shipping vessels in Costa Rica reverting to wind-powered shipping, scientists saving moose from increasingly warm winters in the north woods of Minnesota. We've canoed the Mississippi to learn about flooding, slept in an earth ship in New Mexico, rode along in hydrogen-powered and electric big rig trucks. You can find all those stories and a lot more from Reverse Course at hereandnow.org. We were joined on stage in Boston by two guests who've also been thinking a lot about solutions to the climate crisis, Leah Bamberger and Tik Root. Leah is global sustainability leader at Textron. Before that, she launched Northeastern University's Sustainability Office and was Director of Sustainability for the City of Providence, Rhode Island. Tik Root covers climate solutions and economics for Grist, the nonprofit newsroom. On this special bonus episode of the podcast, I hope you enjoy this excerpt of our discussion at the 2026 WBUR Festival. I just want to start with a big question to you Tik, since this is your full-time beat covering climate solutions. What is a climate solution? It could be cutting emissions, it could be adapting, it could be a personal change, it could be a policy. How do you approach this big question of solutions for such a giant problem?

**Tik Root** (3:11)
That is a really good question. I actually personally hate the term climate solution.

**Chris Bentley** (3:16)
All right, we better change the panel.

**Tik Root** (3:18)
Yeah.
I mean, I really, I actually, I don't have a stand in yet, but I do like Reverse Course. But I think solutions is a little bit too positive. Like for ages, the recycling and plastic industry called recycling a guilty racer. And I don't want the term solutions to become sort of a guilty racer for people because there's a lot of big important work that needs to be done. I think of it in sort of the decarbonization camp, right? Like how do we get greenhouse gases out of, for example, my life or whoever wants to get rid of greenhouse gases? How do you go about doing that? And then the second part, how do you adapt or survive in a warming world? And from there, I sort of look at who is accelerating progress and who might be impeding progress on either of those goals.
But I really do need to come up with a better word if I'm going to slag solutions.

**Peter O'Dowd** (4:16)
Leo, how do you feel about the word solutions?

**Leah Bamberger** (4:18)
Oh, it's interesting. I like your perspective on that.
My role right now, which I've been in for less than a year, Textron is a global manufacturing industrial organization company, and we make planes and helicopters and golf carts and a whole bunch of stuff that is very resource intensive, and it's challenging. And in the many cases, these are things that are driving innovation and advancing livelihood, but how do we actually think about solutions that are going to align that with our planetary boundaries? And I find that very interesting to work on. Right.

**Chris Bentley** (4:57)
I mean, the three of us are journalists. You're in the business of actually implementing these solutions. So when you sit down to think about whether it's in the private sector as you are now, or you spent a lot of time in the public sector as well, where do you start? Is it where you think it's going to make the biggest impact, or what is available right now? How do you get started?