Gābl Media Continuing Education

Gābl Media
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The days of the AEC community scouring the Internet for Online courses and running around town for credit worthy presentations are over! Our innovative continuing education program is THE most convenient way to get your continuing education credits! Gābl Media is now an Official AIA CES Provider! Visit gablmedia.com/members to find out more.

  1. JAN 28

    COURSE: Going Green Unpacked: Media Manipulation, Corporate Power, and Hope for the Built Environment

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. Going Green Unpacked: Media Manipulation, Corporate Power, and Hope for the Built Environment AIA CES program ID: GMGG.0011 Approved LUs: 0.50 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None What if the biggest obstacle to solving climate change is not the science, not the technology, not the money, but the story we have been trained to believe? In this course session, host Dimitrius Lynch and guest Nikita Reed pull back the curtain on why the climate crisis keeps stalling even as disasters escalate, and why Dimitrius spent hundreds of hours tracing the real engine underneath public confusion. The session reframes climate change as a communications problem built over decades through industry strategy, political incentives, and media systems that learned how to manufacture doubt, blur news with commentary, and keep audiences emotionally busy while policy stays stuck. You follow the historical thread from early environmental writing and regulation into the rise of conservative talk radio and cable news, then into the tactics that made delay feel normal, including coordinated disinformation, astroturf campaigns, and the invention of the personal carbon footprint to redirect responsibility from institutions to individuals. The session grounds the stakes in the built environment and ends with actionable leverage, showing how walkable communities, building reuse, decarbonization metrics, and shifting pressure from insurers and investors are already changing what is possible. It makes the case that architects, designers, and storytellers are not on the sidelines of this crisis: they are positioned to translate reality into understanding, design resilience into places, and use narrative to move clients, communities, and policy toward a more sustainable and just future. Program Description: Host Dimitrius Lynch and guest Nikita Reed discuss how decades of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and policy decisions led Dimitrius to spend hundreds of hours researching how industry, politics, media, and messaging have shaped public understanding of the climate crisis. They emphasize that climate change is no longer just a scientific problem but a communications challenge, echoing David Attenborough’s call to move from knowledge to collective will. Nikita highlights how the series weaves together environmental history, from early environmental writing and policy to conservative talk radio, cable news, and political strategy. The conversation explores tactics such as coordinated disinformation, astroturf campaigns, and the invention of the personal carbon footprint as a way for fossil fuel companies to shift blame from corporations to individuals. They also examine specific examples, such as the influence of the fossil fuel sector on federal administrations, the editing of scientific reports by political appointees, and the deliberate blending of news and commentary to shape public opinion. Despite the manipulation and delay tactics uncovered, Dimitrius and Nikita find reasons for hope. They point to walkable communities, building reuse, decarbonization metrics, and shifting financial pressures from insurers and investors as levers for change that directly affect the built environment. They also stress the role of architects, designers, and storytellers in communicating climate realities, designing more resilient and equitable places, and using narrative to influence both policy and public behavior toward a more sustainable and just future. Learning Objectives Describe how political messaging, media platforms, and corporate campaigns have...

    41 min

  2. JAN 28

    COURSE: Embodied Carbon, Walkable Cities, and the Climate Lawsuits That Could Change Everything

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. Embodied Carbon, Walkable Cities, and the Climate Lawsuits That Could Change Everything AIA CES program ID: GMGG.0010 Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None Who gets to decide whether climate risk becomes a legal reality with consequences, or stays a permanent argument that never has to change anything? This course session follows the power path that sits upstream of climate outcomes: the donor networks, legal strategy shops, and political operators shaping courts, agencies, and the public story about climate risk. You see how Leonard Leo’s dark-money infrastructure functions as an influence pipeline for judicial nominations and coordinated legal pressure, then how that kind of machine shows up in real stakes like the Honolulu climate liability case and the organized efforts by Republican attorneys general and allied groups to block similar lawsuits nationwide. You then zoom into Project 2025 and the Heritage agenda as a practical blueprint for deregulating energy, shrinking the EPA, and stripping climate language out of federal agencies, and you connect those institutional moves to the physical world architects and communities have to live inside. The session grounds that urgency in the 1.5°C threshold and the idea of overshoot, then turns to where leverage actually exists in emissions sectors and the built environment, including the difference between operational and embodied carbon and the real toolkit of net-zero buildings, low-carbon materials, and walkable communities. It lands on civic engagement and day-to-day professional choices as the hinge point between a future organized around liability avoidance and a future organized around public health, safety, welfare, and planetary stability. Program Description: This episode examines how powerful conservative legal and political networks are shaping United States climate policy, the courts, and public perception of climate risk, and then contrasts that influence with the urgent need for collective climate action. It traces the rise of Leonard Leo and his dark money infrastructure, describing how his organizations fund judicial nominations, legal strategies, and political campaigns aimed at protecting fossil fuel interests and weakening environmental regulation. The conversation highlights a major climate liability case in Honolulu against oil companies, the coordinated effort by Republican attorneys general and allied groups to block such lawsuits, and the broader stakes for similar climate cases across the country. It then unpacks Project twenty twenty five and the Heritage Foundation’s agenda to roll back climate policies, erase climate language from federal agencies, deregulate the energy sector, and drastically shrink the Environmental Protection Agency. Finally, the episode zooms out to explain why the one-and-a-half degree warming threshold matters, outlines key emissions sectors and built environment impacts, showcases global and architectural solutions such as net zero buildings, low-carbon materials, and walkable communities, and closes by emphasizing civic engagement and the personal and professional choices that will determine whether we prioritize profit or planetary health. Learning Objectives Describe how conservative legal networks, dark money organizations, and Project twenty twenty five seek to influence United States courts, federal agencies, and climate policy.Explain the significance of the one-and-a-half degree warming threshold, the...

    47 min

  3. JAN 28

    COURSE: Money, Power, and Pollution: Inside the Fight Over U.S. Climate Law, EPA Authority, and Environmental Justice

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. Money, Power, and Pollution: Inside the Fight Over U.S. Climate Law, EPA Authority, and Environmental Justice AIA CES program ID: GMGG.009 Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None Why are we still telling people “only you can prevent wildfires” while the legal and political system keeps rewriting what prevention even means, and what does that gap between messaging and reality cost the places we design? This course session follows the chain from early-2000s fire on the ground to policy in Washington, showing how the built environment ends up living inside decisions that most communities never voted on directly. It starts with wildfire, not as a seasonal headline but as a management story that became a climate story, where decades of total suppression and the sidelining of Indigenous-informed controlled burns helped create hotter, faster, more destructive fire regimes that threaten life, property, and ecosystems. From there it tracks how modern climate policy has moved in fits and starts across administrations, from the Obama era’s shift toward regulation and standards under political gridlock, to the Trump years’ systematic rollback of protections and the reshaping of enforcement through appointments and court decisions, and into the Biden effort to rebuild momentum through major legislation and regulatory tools. Running through the whole session is the question of constraint: how campaign finance, lobbying, and judicial decisions narrow what government can require, even as the risks keep escalating. The result is a clearer map of why architects and planners face the conditions they do right now, how wildfire and climate policy are linked through public safety and land management, and what recent policy shifts may actually change for emissions, environmental quality, and the communities most exposed. Program Description: This episode traces how U.S. climate and environmental policy from the early 2000s through the Biden administration has shaped the conditions architects, planners, and communities now face. It begins with a vivid account of the 2002 Williams Fire in California and connects historical wildfire messaging, like Smokey Bear’s “only you can prevent forest fires,” to current fire regimes made worse by climate change and land management practices. The narrative highlights how suppressing all fires, instead of using Indigenous-informed controlled burns, has contributed to more destructive wildfires and greater risks to life, property, and ecosystems. The story then moves through the Obama years, explaining how the 2008 financial crisis sidelined climate policy, the political math of the Senate filibuster, and the administration’s shift from broad climate legislation toward regulatory actions. Key achievements include stronger vehicle fuel efficiency standards, appliance efficiency rules, large-scale habitat protections, rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, and U.S. leadership in the Paris Climate Accord through the Clean Power Plan. The episode also examines the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and the growing influence of fossil fuel and corporate money in politics, which made ambitious climate legislation harder to pass. From there, the episode details how the Trump administration, guided by the Heritage Foundation, Koch network, and industry lobbyists, aggressively rolled back more than 100 environmental rules, weakened vehicle standards, replaced the Clean Power Plan with the less effective Affordable Clean Energy rule, and withdrew from the Paris Agreement. It shows how judicial appointments and decisions, including overturning Chevron deference and limiting EPA...

    1h 10m

  4. JAN 28

    COURSE: How Clinton, Bush, and Big Oil Shaped the Road to Deepwater Horizon

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. How Clinton, Bush, and Big Oil Shaped the Road to Deepwater Horizon AIA CES program ID: GMGG.008 Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None How did “personal responsibility” messaging, backroom energy policy, and industry-friendly regulation quietly set the fuse for Deepwater Horizon, and what did it teach the public to believe about climate change along the way? This course session connects the dots from the Clinton years through the George W. Bush era to show how policy choices, regulatory culture, and communication strategy combined to shape both environmental outcomes and public understanding. You see how efficiency standards and programs like Energy Star helped drive real gains in air and water quality while political and business pressure pushed climate action toward compromise and voluntary frameworks. Then the session pivots into the Bush administration’s industry-aligned leadership and the mechanisms of regulatory capture, including corruption inside the Minerals Management Service and the political handling of climate science, while public relations campaigns reframed systemic harm as individual fault through carbon footprint branding and coordinated attacks on green building standards. The final throughline ties Cheney’s energy strategy, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and its loopholes to the Macondo prospect and the Deepwater Horizon blowout, turning abstract governance into concrete consequences across ecosystems, public health, and Gulf Coast economies, with a clear picture of how preventable risk becomes “normal” when accountability gets redesigned out of the system. Program Description: This episode traces how United States energy and environmental policy from the Clinton through the George W Bush administrations paved the way for the Deepwater Horizon disaster and shaped public understanding of climate change. It begins with Bill Clinton’s mixed climate diplomacy record, the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson’s aggressive push for stronger domestic efficiency standards and market based programs like Energy Star and Green Lights, which contributed to significant improvements in air and water quality. At the same time, the episode shows how economic analysis, regulatory reform, and voluntary initiatives were used to balance environmental protection with political and business pressures. The narrative then shifts to the Bush administration, where a cabinet and senior staff deeply tied to the oil, gas, and coal industries reoriented national energy policy. The episode details corruption and regulatory capture within the Minerals Management Service, political editing of climate science by Philip Cooney, and sophisticated public relations tactics such as BP’s carbon footprint campaign and astroturfing efforts like Keep America Beautiful and LEED Exposed, all aimed at shifting blame from corporations to individuals and undermining green building standards. Finally, it connects Cheney’s secretive energy task force, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and its fracking and permitting loopholes to BP’s Macondo prospect and the Deepwater Horizon blowout, explaining the massive ecological, economic, and public health impacts on the Gulf of Mexico and its communities and calling out the absence of political courage to confront these systemic risks. Learning Objectives Identify how key policies and programs from the Clinton administration, including efficiency standards and Energy Star, influenced energy use, emissions, and environmental quality in the United...

    1h 21m

  5. JAN 28

    COURSE: Architects and Climate Politics: Understanding the Forces Blocking Environmental Progress

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. Architects and Climate Politics: Understanding the Forces Blocking Environmental Progress AIA CES program ID: GMGG.007 Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None How did a shift in political tactics, a revolution in media, and fossil-fuel money combine to make climate science feel “debatable,” even as the architecture profession was building the early foundations of green design? This course session follows the machinery that manufactured doubt in the United States, starting with the escalation of confrontational political strategy amplified by new media visibility, then moving into the long-lasting ecosystem of conservative outlets, think tanks, and corporate networks that learned how to turn uncertainty into a permanent feature of public life. Against that backdrop, it tracks the profession’s parallel arc toward sustainable practice, from early green architecture in the seventies and eighties to the creation of the AIA Committee on the Environment, the founding of the U.S. Green Building Council, and the emergence of LEED as a shared framework for healthier, more responsible buildings. The session then widens to global efforts like the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, showing how polarization and organized confusion slowed progress precisely when coordinated action was most possible. It closes by tying that history to the modern attention economy, where social media accelerates division and misinformation, and explains why understanding the communication systems around climate risk is now part of understanding the conditions architects practice within today. Program Description: This episode traces how political strategy, media evolution, and fossil-fuel interests intersected to create climate change doubt in the United States. It outlines Newt Gingrich’s transformation of political discourse through confrontational tactics amplified by C-SPAN, then explains how conservative media outlets, think tanks, and corporate networks built long-lasting systems of misinformation. The episode highlights the rise of green architecture in the 1970s and 1980s, the creation of the AIA Committee on the Environment, and the founding of the U.S. Green Building Council and the LEED rating system. It also details global climate efforts such as the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, showing how political polarization and manufactured uncertainty hindered climate progress. The episode concludes by exploring social media’s role in accelerating polarization and the ongoing manufactured confusion that continues to obstruct environmental action today. Learning Objectives Describe how political strategies in the late twentieth century shaped public perception of climate science.Explain how sustainable design movements within the AIA and USGBC emerged in response to environmental and health concerns.Analyze the influence of media, corporate interests, and misinformation networks on climate policy and public opinion.Identify how global climate agreements and political polarization affected the advancement of sustainable building practices. HSW Justification This content qualifies for HSW credit because it examines how political decisions, media systems, and industry influence directly affect public health, safety, and welfare through their impact on...

    1h 10m

  6. JAN 28

    COURSE: Environmental Justice, Inequality, and the Built Environment: How Legal Systems Shape Climate Futures

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. Environmental Justice, Inequality, and the Built Environment: How Legal Systems Shape Climate Futures AIA CES program ID: GMGG.006 Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None What happens to the built environment when an era turns wealth into architecture, treats pollution as someone else’s problem, and then rewrites the legal rules that decide whose health and land are protected? In this course session, the built environment is treated as a receipt for the nineteen eighties. You look at how status culture and suburban expansion translated into resource-heavy housing, land consumption, and the spatial logic of separation, then follow the consequences into the places that were chosen to absorb risk through discriminatory policy and siting. Environmental justice emerges here as a design-relevant reality, grounded in the work of Robert Bullard and defining protests that exposed pollution as a civil rights and human rights issue, while the story of Chico Mendes shows how conservation, labor rights, and Indigenous sovereignty collided in global environmental governance. Running through it all is the institutional battle over climate risk and regulation, from the early authority of the IPCC to the rise of legal and political strategies that reframed environmental protection and narrowed what policy could require. The result is a clearer understanding of why housing form, inequality, and law are inseparable from environmental outcomes, and why architects inherit those consequences in the decisions they make today. Program Description: This episode traces how the material excess of the 1980s, exemplified by shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and the rise of McMansions, intersected with widening inequality, environmental degradation, and the built environment. It contrasts earlier, smaller, durable homes with large, energy-intensive suburban houses that turned inward behind gates, used cheap materials, and consumed outsized amounts of land and resources, positioning them as the architectural expression of an era obsessed with wealth, separation, and status. The narrative then shifts to the emergence of environmental justice, showing how discriminatory housing policies, redlining, and enterprise zones concentrated polluting facilities in Black and low-income communities. Through the work of Robert Bullard and landmark protests like Warren County, the episode shows how environmental harms were exposed as a civil rights and human rights crisis, culminating in Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice and an ongoing, uneven struggle to protect vulnerable communities. In parallel, it tells the story of Chico Mendes and the rubber tappers in Brazil, whose fight for extractive reserves linked forest conservation, Indigenous and labor rights, and global environmental governance, even as Mendes was assassinated for his activism. Finally, the episode explains how environmental concern, which had become the top public issue by the late nineteen eighties, was systematically contested through legal and ideological strategies. It describes the founding of the Federalist Society and its mission to reshape the judiciary toward originalism, limited regulation, and strong private property rights, supported by major corporate donors. It examines President George H W Bush’s mixed environmental record, including his role in the Clean Air Act Amendments and acid rain cap-and-trade, alongside the efforts of Chief of Staff John Sununu and fossil fuel interests to sow doubt about climate science, politicize environmental policy, and reframe environmentalism as anti-business, setting the stage for today’s polarized...

    48 min

  7. JAN 27

    COURSE: Greed, Energy, and Power: How Reaganomics, Think Tanks, and Big Oil Shaped Today’s Climate Crisis

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. Greed, Energy, and Power: How Reaganomics, Think Tanks, and Big Oil Shaped Today’s Climate Crisis AIA CES program ID: GMGG.005 Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None How did a Middle East alliance, an oil embargo, and a domestic energy panic turn into decades of environmental consequences, and what happens when the people who understand the risk best choose delay over responsibility? This episode follows the tight braid of geopolitics, energy markets, and environmental policy from the mid twentieth century through the late nineteen eighties, showing how power, profit, and public messaging shaped the climate path as much as science did. You move from the conflict dynamics of the Levant and the emergence of the U.S.–Israel alliance into the OPEC oil embargo and the shock that forced Americans to face fossil dependence, then into the lived reality of the nineteen seventies crisis, where regulation, tax policy, corporate behavior, and consumption collided with global disruption. From there, the episode contrasts the era of conservation-minded policy and institution-building under Carter with the free-market turn of the Reagan years that weakened enforcement, politicized oversight, and invited deeper corporate influence, even as major environmental disasters and new scientific alarms made the stakes impossible to ignore. Along the way, it exposes the fossil fuel industry’s early internal climate research and the deliberate strategies used to stall regulation, then widens out to the global response, from ozone discovery and NASA’s research to the Brundtland Commission and the Montreal Protocol, revealing how scientific warning becomes policy only when the political will is stronger than the incentives to postpone. Program Description: This episode traces the intertwined history of geopolitics, energy, and environmental policy from the mid twentieth century through the late nineteen eighties, framed by the idea that unchecked greed shapes both climate risk and political choices. It opens with the long arc of conflict in the Levant, the creation of the modern state of Israel, and the strategic alliance that developed between the United States and Israel, which helped trigger the OPEC oil embargo and a global energy crisis that forced Americans to confront their dependence on fossil fuels. The narrative then follows the domestic energy crisis of the nineteen seventies, explaining how U S regulation, tax policy, oil company behavior, and surging consumption combined with international shocks to produce fuel shortages, long gas lines, and political backlash. The episode explores President Jimmy Carter’s response, including comprehensive energy conservation efforts, the creation of the Department of Energy, tax incentives for efficiency and renewables, the strategic petroleum reserve, and major environmental legislation such as Superfund and large-scale land conservation in Alaska. Against this, it reveals the fossil fuel industry’s early and remarkably accurate internal climate science, dating back to the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and shows how oil companies privately understood the catastrophic potential of continued emissions while publicly questioning the science and investing in strategies to delay regulation. The story then shifts to the Reagan era, describing how deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and reliance on free market ideology reduced environmental protections and undercut federal agencies like the EPA through budget cuts and politicized oversight. The Heritage Foundation and its Mandate for Leadership document provided a detailed conservative blueprint that heavily influenced...

    1h 1m

  8. JAN 27

    COURSE: Divergence in Design: From Modernism to Postmodern Architecture and Sustainability

    Welcome to the Gābl Media Continuing Education podcast feed! Each podcast is approved for continuing education credits. Divergence in Design: From Modernism to Postmodern Architecture and Sustainability AIA CES program ID: GMGG.004 Approved LUs: 0.5 LU|HSW Prerequisites: None Program level: Entry Advance learner preparation: None When “form follows function” stopped being enough, what replaced it, and how did that argument quietly set the stage for the way we talk about cities, meaning, and environmental performance now? This course follows the split in architectural thinking from early modernism and the international style into postmodernism and the first waves of green architecture, using the major voices and factions as a map of what the profession was trying to solve in each era. You move from Bauhaus influence and the authority of Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier into the critiques that reframed urban life and architectural meaning through Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi, then through the competing schools and groups that pushed the discipline in different directions as culture shifted and the profession diversified. Alongside that design debate, the course introduces early sustainability precedents and “living lightly” experiments, including arcology, Paolo Soleri’s vision, and Arcosanti, set against the growing visibility of climate science and the environmental crisis. By the end, participants can connect these historical movements to current decisions about urban form, density, resilience, and environmental responsiveness, with a clearer sense of what survives, what fails, and what cities require in a warming world. Program Description: This course traces the divergence of architectural thought from early modernism and the international style to the rise of postmodernism and early green architecture, set against growing awareness of the environmental crisis. Learners will explore how Bauhaus ideas, the work of leaders such as Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier, and later critics like Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi reshaped the built environment and challenged the mantra of pure functionalism. The course examines influential groups including the New York Five, the Grays, the Chicago Seven, the third bay tradition, and the emerging L A school, and connects their experiments to broader cultural shifts, civil rights, and diversification of the profession. It then introduces early sustainability concepts, from the first global conversations on the human environment to Paolo Soleri’s arcology and the experimental community of Arcosanti, along with evolving climate science and its implications for design. Throughout, participants will connect historical movements to contemporary concerns about urban form, environmental performance, and the survival of cities in a warming world. Learning Objectives Describe the evolution from modernism and the international style to postmodern architecture, and relate these shifts to changing social, cultural, and environmental priorities.Analyze how key figures and groups such as Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi, the New York Five, the Grays, and the Chicago Seven challenged modernist planning and influenced contemporary approaches to context, symbolism, and urban life.Explain early sustainability concepts and precedents, including arcology, Arcosanti, and living lightly on the land, and evaluate how these ideas inform current strategies for environmentally responsive design.Interpret key developments in climate science discussed in...

    35 min
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The days of the AEC community scouring the Internet for Online courses and running around town for credit worthy presentations are over! Our innovative continuing education program is THE most convenient way to get your continuing education credits! Gābl Media is now an Official AIA CES Provider! Visit gablmedia.com/members to find out more.

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