Degrees Of Change: Climate And Fashion. Sept 20, 2019, Part 1

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🗓️ 20 September 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Climate change has been trending in the news recently—and if there’s one industry out there that knows something about trends, it’s the fashion industry. Long known for churning out cheap garments and burning through resources, some fashion labels like fast fashion giant H&M are now embracing sustainable fashion trends. But can this industry—which is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions—really shed its wasteful business model in favor of one with a lower carbon footprint? Marc Bain, a fashion reporter at Quartz, Maxine Bédat from the New Standard Institute, and Linda Greer, global policy fellow with the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs talk with Ira about the industry’s effort to reduce its climate impact. Plus, a check in on the Trump administration's rollback of the Clean Air Act waiver, and more of the week's biggest climate headlines.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato.
0:08.7	The climate is changing, and because we need to deal with it now, we open the next chapter of our series, Degrees of Change.
0:17.6	Our series explores the challenges of a changing climate and how we as a planet and a
0:22.8	people are adapting to the crisis. And it's produced this week as part of the global
0:27.7	collaboration covering climate now. Coming up, we'll talk about how the fashion industry is rebranding
0:34.8	itself in the era of climate change. But but first we check in on the gatekeepers,
0:39.9	the decision makers, the controllers of the purse strings.
0:43.5	President Trump is wrestling with the state of California over who gets to define auto-emission
0:49.0	standards for the state, California or the federal government.
0:53.7	This week, his administration dealt a provisional blow
0:56.7	by rolling back a waiver that allowed California to set stricter regulations than the federal
1:03.0	government, thus encouraging automakers to follow their lead. The president tweeted that as a
1:08.8	result of the move, quote, older, highly polluting cars
1:13.3	will be replaced by new extremely environmentally friendly cars. How's that going to work exactly?
1:20.1	Scott Waldman is the White House reporter at E&E News in Washington. Welcome back to Science Friday.
1:26.2	Thanks for having me, Ira.
1:27.3	Extremely environmentally friendly cars by loosening the regulations. Unpack that for us, Scott.
1:34.0	Well, cars are just by the nature of technological innovation getting more and more environmentally friendly already.
1:41.0	But the Trump administration is going after the Obama administration's plan to reduce, excuse me, the Obama administration plan to increase fuel efficiency of vehicles, and the Trump administration is rolling those back so that cars won't get as much per gallon of gas in the future as they would have under the Obama plan.
2:01.7	So it's certainly suspect if he's claiming that their going to, you know, his plan is better
2:06.8	than Obama's in terms of the impact on the environment.
2:09.9	But haven't the four car companies already who agreed to this, said they're going to go
	...

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