Is there still hope for climate change? Environmental journalist Fred Pearce, author of Despite It All, explains why climate change is solvable, from renewable energy and EVs to AI data centers and China's clean energy boom.

Have you given up on the planet? Before you do, hear from someone who has spent 40 years reporting from more than 80 countries, and who has watched the world solve problems that once looked impossible.

When Fred started out in the 1980s, the big environmental story was acid rain. Then came lead in petrol, the hole in the ozone layer, and warnings that a "population bomb" would starve billions. Today we barely talk about any of them, because we fixed them.

So can we do the same with climate change? Gregg plays devil's advocate and throws the hardest questions at him. AI data centers are driving up energy demand. China is still building coal plants. Corporations and governments are quietly walking back their net-zero pledges. And climate change has become deeply politicized.

Fred doesn't sugarcoat it: "You should be worried for sure." But he makes a compelling case for optimism. Solar and wind are now cheaper than coal. China has become the world's clean energy powerhouse. The conflict in Iran is pushing countries toward homegrown renewable power. And nature has an extraordinary ability to bounce back. As Fred puts it: "Hope drives ambition."

If climate news leaves you feeling anxious or hopeless, this is the episode to watch.

What you'll learn:

• How the world solved acid rain, the ozone hole, and leaded petrol, and what that teaches us about climate change

• Whether AI data centers will derail climate progress, and how renewable energy can power them

• How China went from climate villain to the global leader in solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles

• Why corporations may be easier to convince than governments, and why renewables now win on cost

• How the conflict in Iran and energy security are accelerating the shift to clean energy

• Fred's honest take on nuclear power, geothermal, and Trump's energy policy

• Geoengineering and carbon removal: should we be ready to pull CO2 out of the sky?

• What a Bolsonaro comeback could mean for Amazon deforestation

• Why letting forests regrow naturally often beats planting trees

• What Fred got wrong about caribou hunters in Alaska, and why the herd doubled

• How the "population bomb" was defused without forced policies

TIME STAMPS:

0:00 – Is There Still Hope for Climate Change?
1:10 – We Fixed Acid Rain and the Ozone Hole
3:59 – Will AI Data Centers Wreck It All?
6:16 – What About China?
10:34 – Why Companies Are Ditching Net Zero
12:13 – Iran, Oil, and Russia's EV Boom
15:11 – Is Trump Getting Anything Right?
17:56 – Can We Suck CO2 Out of the Sky?
20:40 – Bolsonaro and the Amazon
27:20 – What Fred Got Wrong
29:20 – How the Population Bomb Was Defused
33:22 – Nature's Surprise Comeback

Fred Pearce is a London-based environmental journalist who has covered climate change, water, biodiversity, and global development for more than 40 years, reporting from more than 80 countries. He is the author of 14 books, including The New Wild and Despite It All (Granta, 2026), his case for climate optimism.

Contact / Follow Fred Pearce:

Live Science: https://www.livescience.com/author/fred-pearce
Climate Home News: https://www.climatechangenews.com/author/fred-pearce/
The Breakthrough Institute: https://thebreakthrough.org/people/fred-pearce
Despite It All (Blackwell's): https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781803513638

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#ClimateChange #RenewableEnergy #ClimateHope

If you or a family member has a case involving Camp Lejeune, PFAS, NEC, or Depo-Provera, you've probably seen headlines about deadlines and settlements and wondered where your claim actually stands. In Part 2 of this conversation on Climate Change Environment Science & the Law with Gregg Goldfarb, host Gregg Goldfarb sits down again with Steven Smith, Vice President of Broughton Partners, to unpack four more mass tort campaigns that are all reaching critical moments.

Smith explains why Camp Lejeune finally has real momentum, now that a federal judge has given plaintiffs' leadership until the end of October to reach a deal with the DOJ or risk being replaced. He also clarifies why no new Camp Lejeune claims can be filed, since the window Congress opened has now closed. On PFAS, he walks through how firefighting foam (AFFF) seeps into soil and drinking water, why 131,000 cases were filed when only 60,000 to 70,000 were expected, and how an upcoming Daubert hearing on two additional injuries could shift negotiating leverage before a possible global resolution.

On NEC, Smith explains how two defendants agreed to pay just under $1 billion, why state court cases have succeeded where the federal MDL has not, and why the details of case values are still unknown. And on Depo-Provera, he breaks down the science linking the birth control shot to brain tumors called meningiomas, with more than a 5x increased risk, and shares his expectation of average case values between $150,000 and $200,000 for qualifying claims.

Throughout, Smith and Goldfarb stress that deadlines, qualifications, and venue all matter, and that claimants should talk to their own firm about where their specific case stands.

What You'll Learn

• Why a federal judge's October deadline could force a Camp Lejeune resolution

• Why new Camp Lejeune claims can no longer be filed

• How firefighting foam contaminates drinking water across the country

• Why 131,000 PFAS cases were filed, and how that number has been cleaned up

• What a Daubert hearing is, and how it could change PFAS negotiations

• How to find out if your water is contaminated with PFAS

• Why NEC cases in state court have outperformed the federal MDL

• What the science shows about Depo-Provera and brain tumors

• What Depo-Provera claimants might expect, and when

Time Stamps

0:00 - Intro

0:15 - Camp Lejune case updates

4:17 - PFAS Water Contamination Ligitagion

13:24 - NEC - Pre-Term Babies Settlement

14:23 - Depo-Provera Litigation and conclusion

Steven Smith is Vice President of Broughton Partners, a mass tort marketing and consulting firm, where he has spent nearly 20 years advising law firms and claimants across major litigations including Talc, Roundup, Hernia Mesh, Social Media, Camp Lejeune, PFAS, NEC, and Depo-Provera. Known industry-wide as "The Mass Tort Mentor," he works to help claimants get connected with qualified representation and to help law firms navigate complex, evolving litigation.

Contact / Follow Steven Smith:

Firm: https://www.broughtonpartners.com/

Phone: 954-224-1733

Email: steve@broughtonpartners.com

Want more conversations that cut through the noise on science, climate, and the issues shaping our future? Subscribe to Climate Change Environment Science & the Law with Gregg Goldfarb for new episodes every week.

If you or a family member has a case in Talc, Roundup, Hernia Mesh, or the social media litigation, you've probably heard a settlement number in the news and wondered what it actually means for you. On this episode of Climate Change Environment Science & the Law with Gregg Goldfarb, host Gregg Goldfarb sits down with Steven Smith, Vice President of Broughton Partners, to unpack four major mass tort campaigns that are all reaching critical moments at once.

Smith explains why J&J's $5.5 billion Talc settlement is really a floor, not a ceiling — with total payouts from this first wave expected closer to $8 billion, and no cap on what the company pays over time. He breaks down why a recent Supreme Court preemption ruling gutted the "failure to warn" claims in the Roundup litigation, while "design defect" claims may survive, and why the proposed class action's roughly $50,000 average case value has some claimants better off staying out of it. On Hernia Mesh, he details the split between Bard (which resolved lower-value cases early while holding back its biggest claims for a separate, stricter fund) and Covidien, where a recent verdict topped $66 million. And on social media, he walks through how Meta's $16.68 billion settlement with 29 state attorneys general is actually a step toward compensating individual families, not the end of the road.

Throughout, Smith and Goldfarb stress that "qualified" is doing a lot of work in every one of these settlements — and that claimants should be talking to their own firm about where their specific case stands before assuming a headline number applies to them.

What You'll Learn

• Why J&J's $5.5B Talc settlement is a floor, not a final number

• What "qualified" actually means — and why it changes as a case matures

• How the Supreme Court's preemption ruling reshaped the Roundup litigation

• Why some Roundup claimants may be better off outside the class action

• How Bard and Covidien ended up handling hernia mesh cases so differently

• What the $66 million Covidien verdict signals for pending cases

• Why Meta's $17B settlement is with states, not the injured kids themselves

• How to tell if your case is being handled by the right firm

• What "opting out" of a settlement means, and when it makes sense

Time Stamps:

0:00 – Cold open: $17 billion Meta settlement
0:27 – Intro: Steven Smith joins to break down mass tort settlements
1:22 – Talc / Johnson & Johnson (baby powder settlement, $5.5B+)
12:02 – Roundup (Bayer, Supreme Court ruling, class action)
17:37 – Hernia Mesh (Bard, Covidien, $66M verdict)
22:38 – Social Media (Meta, TikTok, Snapchat — $17B settlement explained)

Steven Smith is Vice President of Broughton Partners, a mass tort marketing and consulting firm, where he has spent nearly 20 years advising law firms and claimants across major litigations including Talc, Roundup, Hernia Mesh, Social Media, Camp Lejeune, PFAS, NEC, and Depo-Provera. Known industry-wide as "The Mass Tort Mentor," he works to help claimants get connected with qualified representation and to help law firms navigate complex, evolving litigation.

Contact / Follow Stephen Smith:

Firm: https://www.broughtonpartners.com/

Phone: 954-224-1733

Email: steve@broughtonpartners.com

Want more conversations that cut through the noise on science, climate, and the issues shaping our future? Subscribe to Climate Change Environment Science & the Law with Gregg Goldfarb for new episodes every week.

What does a cereal box actually tell you? A lot more than you'd think.

On this episode, Gregg Goldfarb is joined by Lisa Sutherland, who spent years running nutrition strategy inside Kellogg, and Marion Nestle, one of the country's most well-known food policy critics, to unpack their new book, Sugarcoated. The two co-authors met almost two decades ago when Nestle got rare access to Kellogg's archive: every piece of cereal packaging the company had ever created, dating back to 1919. What they found sitting in that library became the foundation for a book that traces American food policy, marketing tactics, and health claims through the lens of the cereal aisle.

The conversation digs into how sugar content in cereal has changed since Sutherland's time at Kellogg, why the toys that consumer advocates once got pulled from cereal boxes are quietly making a comeback, and how the FDA and watchdog groups have spent decades battling cereal makers over health claims that cross the line.

Nestle and Sutherland don't paint food companies as villains — they're businesses answering to shareholders every quarter — but they make clear that understanding that incentive is the key to understanding everything on the shelf. Gregg also gets both authors' take on whether today's political moment, with food additives and health claims under new scrutiny, is a real opportunity for change or just more noise.

Join Gregg Goldfarb, Marion Nestle and Lisa Sutherland on Climate Change Environment Science & the Law as they explore:

• Why cereal boxes are a surprisingly rich record of American food policy history
• How sugar content in cereal has actually changed since the 1990s — and how much
• What life was like inside Kellogg's nutrition division, from label claims to ad strategy
• Why the toys that were pulled from cereal boxes years ago are showing up again
• How the FDA and consumer advocacy groups have repeatedly challenged cereal health claims
• Why "healthier" products don't always win shelf space, even when companies want them to
• What it actually takes to write a book with a co-author — and find a literary agent
• Which cereals actually hold up as healthier choices, according to a nutrition PhD

TIME STAMPS

0:00 – The Open
0:17 – The Cereal Box as Sophisticated Advertising
1:40 – Why Sugarcoated, Why Now
2:39 – A Century of Cereal Boxes Reveal Food Policy History
5:53 – "They Want to Get Kids Hooked" — Toys Are Back
7:03 – Profit, Market Share, and the Cheerios Takeover
9:18 – Is This False Advertising?
11:57 – "That's the Issue" — The Real Incentive Behind Big Cereal
13:59 – The Michelle Obama White House Story
15:43 – What Readers Will Get From the Book
21:47 – The Healthiest Cereals, According to a Nutrition PhD
22:45 – Release Date & Sign-Off

Lisa Sutherland, PhD, is a public health–trained nutrition scientist and the former Vice President of Nutrition at Kellogg Company. She now works in academia, applying her food industry experience to public health education.

Marion Nestle is a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, the author of Food Politics, and a longtime critic of food industry marketing practices. She writes daily at foodpolitics.com.

Contact / Follow Marion

• Marion Nestle Blog: https://www.foodpolitics.com/
• Marion Nestle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marion-nestle-9515ba8/

Contact / Follow Lisa

Lisa Sutherland LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lasutherlandphd/

Get the book!

Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food: https://www.amazon.com/Sugar-Coated-Unboxing-Breakfast-California/dp/0520421272

To hear more mass tort updates and legal issues shaping our communities, subscribe to Climate Change Environment Science & the Law with Gregg Goldfarb.

Ten years. Three bankruptcies. Multiple trials. A lead plaintiffs' firm disqualified along the way. The Johnson & Johnson talc litigation has produced just about every issue a mass tort can produce, and for the tens of thousands of women waiting on it, the only question that ever mattered was whether it would actually resolve.

On this episode of Climate Change Environment Science & the Law, host Gregg Goldfarb sits down with Cameron Stevenson, shareholder at Levin Papantonio and one of the primary attorneys involved in the litigation, to walk through the settlement that finally came together. Stevenson explains what "uncapped" means in practice, why the deal is built for current claimants rather than future ones, and why he believes the dollar for dollar recovery for those claimants is substantially better than what the $8.9 billion bankruptcy proposal would have delivered, since that plan would have absorbed future claims, state AG claims, and Canadian class claims and paid out over roughly 25 years.

He also delivers the part of this episode that claimants most need to hear: having a filed case does not automatically mean qualifying. The settlement is built around epithelial ovarian cancer, and Stevenson explains why post-hysterectomy pathology is the document that determines eligibility, and why some cases filed early in the litigation may not make it through. From there, Gregg and Cameron lay out the process step by step: the registration window, the opt-in release, the proof phase, how a case gets plotted on the settlement grid, and the 95% participation threshold the deal has to clear. Stevenson also addresses future diagnoses, why ovarian cancer's long latency means new cases will keep surfacing for decades, and why anyone diagnosed down the road needs to be acutely aware of their own state's statute of limitations. The conversation closes with the reason this episode exists. Attorneys are inundated, calls are rushed, and clients are hanging up unsure of what they were just told. Gregg's call to action is simple: share this with someone who needs it, then take your questions back to your own lawyer.

Join Gregg and Cameron Stevenson on Climate Change Environment Science & the Law as they explore:

0:00 – "It Will Not Qualify"
0:13 – Did Talc Actually Settle?
0:58 – The Settlement Is Real, and It's Finalized
2:18 – Why a Smaller Number Beats the $8.9 Billion Bankruptcy Deal
4:05 – The Diagnoses Still Coming 30 Years From Now
5:22 – The One Document That Decides Your Claim
7:20 – Stop Doing the Math on What You'll Get
7:59 – Inside the Settlement Grid
10:45 – What You Need to Do This Week
11:39 – When the Money Actually Moves
14:47 – The Deadline That Can Still Cost You Everything

Cameron Stevenson is a shareholder at Levin Papantonio and one of the primary attorneys involved in the Johnson & Johnson talcum powder litigation, a mass tort spanning more than a decade, three bankruptcy attempts, and multiple trials. He returns to the show to break down the settlement for the claimants and families who have been waiting on it.

Contact / Follow Cameron Stevenson:

Phone: (850) 435-7176
Email: cstephenson@levinlaw.com
Firm: Levin Papantonio
Website: https://levinlaw.com

To hear more mass tort updates and legal issues shaping our communities, subscribe to Climate Change Environment Science & the Law with Gregg Goldfarb.

Larry Patterson went in for a routine hernia repair. He came out, eventually, with several inches of his bowel removed.

Timothy O'Brien, board-certified trial attorney and shareholder at Levin Papantonio, just won $88 million for Patterson and his wife Tammy against Covidien, a Medtronic company. It is the largest compensatory award in fifteen years of mesh litigation, and the first of roughly 2,500 cases to reach a jury. The mesh, Symbotex, sits right against your intestines behind a collagen barrier meant to last 30 days. Covidien's own internal testing showed it was gone in under seven. They knew in 2003.

O'Brien walks Gregg through the evidence that turned the trial, where sales staff swore to doctors the barrier lasted a month while R&D said otherwise in writing. He also maps the hernia mesh lawsuit landscape, from the Bard settlement covering 33,000 claimants to why Medtronic Covidien is the last major manufacturer still fighting, and what a bellwether verdict actually means for the thousands of people still waiting on their own cases

Join Gregg and Timothy O'Brien on Climate Change Environment Science & the Law as they explore:

• Why a generation of surgeons stopped doing tissue-to-tissue repair, and what that traded away

• How Symbotex's protective barrier was supposed to work, and how fast it actually disappeared

• The 2003 document that locked in the depositions and became the case's spine

• Why sales and R&D were telling two completely different stories about the same product

• What a bellwether trial is, and why the first one carries the most weight

• Where the Bard, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic Covidien litigations stand right now

• Why about 100 new Covidien cases are still being filed every month

• What Covidien's planned appeal means for people still waiting

• How to find out if you or someone you love has a case

0:00 – "They are lying": the sales pitch vs. the truth
0:48 – Meet attorney Timothy O'Brien
1:02 – The hernia mesh "safety feature" that failed
2:06 – Why hernia mesh exists in the first place
4:13 – The Patterson case: what happened to the plaintiff
5:41 – The depositions that exposed Covidien
7:46 – 2003: when they allegedly knew the truth
9:33 – The 3 major mesh manufacturers, explained
11:59 – What a "bellwether trial" means for your case
14:07 – Will Covidien settle or appeal?
17:40 – How to contact Timothy O'Brien about your case

Timothy O'Brien is a board-certified trial attorney and shareholder at Levin Papantonio, where he has served as lead or co-lead counsel in mass tort litigation against major hernia mesh manufacturers, including Bard, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic Covidien. He recently helped secure an $88 million verdict in the first bellwether trial of the Covidien hernia mesh multidistrict litigation.

Contact / Follow Timothy O'Brien:

Firm: Levin Papantonio

Website: https://levinlaw.com

Want more conversations that cut through the noise on science, climate, and the issues shaping our future? Subscribe to Climate Change Environment Science & the Law with Gregg Goldfarb for new episodes every week.