For 41 of the past 49 days, the fifth largest economy in the world has met >100% of electricity demand using solar, wind and hydro generation, frequently exceeding 140% of demand. What lessons can be learned? What does this tell us about future of energy? I asked Prof. Mark Jacobson, the most respected renewables voice on the planet …

What will the global energy mix look like in 2060? Which technologies will dominate in future, and which will dead-end? What about the toughest problems, like powering long range ships and aircraft? What happens to nuclear? I asked Michael Barnard, consultant to the biggest energy investors on the planet ...

Affordable age-reversal. Xenotransplants to eliminate organ shortages. Rewriting health economics. Virus resistant livestock and crops. What are the imminent genomics pathways to a better future? I asked George Church, the greatest genomic pioneer in the world …

GEORGE CHURCH: two things I'd like to see happen, is affordable healthcare to get us up out of poverty, and then something that will solve the 90% of disease that will get us past our normal retirement age. If we extend life by 30 years, and we extend retirement by 30 years, then …

Insurance companies must deal with the financial realities of climate change. They must make quantitative decisions and translate risks into dollars. They must do it for today’s impacts and predicted future impacts. And behind the insurance companies are the reinsurance companies who act as shock absorbers to the industry on a global scale …

TRENT THOMSON: The frequency of those perils – wildfire, floods, storms – have gone up by about 450% over 30 years, for very large losses. And the severity of those events have gone up by 1,500%. And so, what's driving that? It's economic growth, it's the value of the assets. It's the urbanization, people wanting to live more in cities, around the world, and that concentration of risk ...

Can lawyers save the planet? I asked the world’s foremost climate lawyer, Michael Gerrard, Professor at the Columbia Law School and Founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. What a privilege it was to spend time with this lifelong advocate for sustainability! We discussed the current status of climate litigation, what’s next, and the role it can play in changing the behaviours of greenhouse gas emitters and securing the future of our planet.

Bruce McCabe: We're here to talk about climate change law and where we're going … it seems that litigation and legal pathways can potentially play as much or an even more important role in changing our behaviours, and that's what I really wanted to explore with you today by starting with a premise … “Can lawyers save the planet?”

Bruce McCabe: Rodolphe Barrangou, you are a professor here at North Carolina State University and you are, to me, one of the gods of CRISPR. You were involved very early in the whole process of proving out the science. And particularly, you proved the linkage between the immunity effect and bacteria two phages. So your experimental work actually closed the loop on proving that was what CRISPR was for. So you are I guess the last so 10 or 20 people in the chain here of making the thing real, a tool that's changing humanity. I think that's fair to say.

How do we feed a planet? How do we do it through peak population, without wreaking catastrophic destruction on the biosphere and losing all semblance of the planet we once had? In October 2022, I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Distinguished Professor Rodolphe Barrangou and visiting his CRISPR lab at North Carolina State University …