A Climate Change with Matt Matern

Today, Matt speaks with Mike Kelland, Co-founder & CEO of Planetary, about using the ocean to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Planetary adds calcium and magnesium minerals, basically an antacid, to water flowing out of coastal facilities. That lowers local acidity and lets the ocean absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. Mike breaks down the UN's new Limiting Overshoot report, which he says...

Today, Matt speaks with Drew Shula, trained architect and Founder and CEO of Verdical Group, about the part of the climate problem hiding in plain sight: the buildings we live and work in, which account for roughly 40% of global carbon emissions.  He breaks down the two halves of a building's carbon footprint, the energy it burns and the materials it's made of, and makes the case that we already k...

Today, Matt Matern speaks with Jim Murphy, Associate Vice President of Legal Advocacy at the National Wildlife Federation, about EPA's proposal to rewrite which streams and wetlands the Clean Water Act actually protects. Jim explains what the rule would do - by his estimate, removing federal protection from up to 60% of the nation's stream miles and well over 90% of historically protected wetlands...

Today, Matt Matern speaks with Rob Mullen - artist, author, and Director of the Wilderness River Expedition Art Fellowship - about the boreal forest, the largest land ecosystem on Earth and one most people have never heard of. Rob explains how a forest three times the size of the Amazon holds roughly 80% of the world's liquid fresh surface water, why bigger and more frequent fires have flipped it...

Today, Matt Matern speaks with Leah Qusba, CEO of GoodPower, a nonprofit working to win public support for the clean energy transition. They talk about moving the energy conversation away from sacrifice and toward abundance, where clean energy means more jobs, lower bills, and an economy that works for everyone. Leah shares GoodPower's polling with NORC at the University of Chicago, which found ab...

Today, Matt is joined again by Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver. One year after first joining us on the show, a lot has changed. When she was last on, plug-in solar was legal in exactly one state and nobody in the country was selling it. Since then, 35 states plus DC have introduced legislation, nine have signed it into law, and Bright Saver has started shipping kits nationwide at exactly...

Today, Matt is joined by Saar Safra, co-founder and CEO of Beewise, to talk about one of the quietest threats to our food supply - the collapse of the world's bee colonies. Saar shares how he teamed up with a commercial beekeeper to build the BeeHome: a solar-powered, AI-driven robotic hive that monitors bees around the clock and treats problems automatically, without chemicals. They dig into why...

Today, Matt Matern speaks with Zak Winnick, founder and CEO of Rangeway Energy, about building America’s first hospitality-forward EV charging network. Zak shares how a career running hotels - and years of frustration as an EV owner - led him to treat charging as an experience rather than just a piece of infrastructure. They discuss why so many public chargers feel unreliable and impersonal, and h...

Today, Matt speaks with Bren Smith, co-founder and co-executive director of GreenWave, about his journey from commercial fisherman to pioneer of regenerative ocean farming. Bren shares how a cod collapse in his native Newfoundland and two hurricanes that destroyed his farm led him to a model that grows seaweed and shellfish with no water, fertilizer, feed, or land - while rebuilding ocean ecosyste...

Today, Matt is joined by Dr. Garrett Boudinot, founder and CEO of Vycarb, to talk about a new approach to carbon capture and storage that works with water instead of pipelines and underground wells. Garrett explains how Vycarb's reactor turns CO2 into bicarbonate and stores it safely in the ocean for tens of thousands of years. He shares why traditional carbon capture has been so expensive and har...

Today, Matt is joined by David Fenton - veteran progressive communications strategist and host of The Fenton Forecast - for a conversation about the climate movement’s biggest failure: how it talks, or doesn’t talk, about the crisis. David explains “blanket of pollution” metaphor, and why framing climate action as sacrifice backfires, the soaring insurance costs hitting Americans’ wallets, and the...

Today, Matt speaks with Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures and a founding member of the Google X team behind Waymo, about using deep tech to restore ecosystems instead of just slowing the damage.  They talk about the drone companies replanting mangroves, coral reefs, and seagrass beds, and how the cost of restoration keeps falling by half. Tom explains that a park ranger in 1926 had a Je...

Today, Matt speaks with Dr. Linley Dixon, Co-Director of the Real Organic Project and cohost of the Real Organic Podcast, about why how we grow food may be the climate lever we're ignoring. Linley explains that synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer alone accounts for 1-2% of the global carbon footprint. They also dig into what's gone wrong with the label people trust. Only about 1% of US farmland is ce...

Today, Matt speaks with Jeffrey Prosserman, CEO and co-founder of Voltpost, about a simple idea with big potential: turning the lampposts and utility poles cities already have into electric vehicle chargers. Jeffrey shares his path from leading product development at Samsung to founding Voltpost, and explains why more than 40% of Americans, those without a private garage or driveway, still can't c...

In this milestone 250th episode, Matt Matern goes solo for the final installment of our “250 for 250” series - tracing what the people who founded the country actually believed about land, soil, and stewardship. From Thomas Jefferson’s near-daily weather diary and George Washington’s soil-saving crop rotations, to the myth of endless abundance baked into the American character, Matt lays out what...

Today, Matt speaks with New York Times bestselling biographer Brian Jay Jones, author of Becoming Dr. Seuss and the new book The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building. Brian traces Theodor Geisel’s unlikely path - from advertising man to the most beloved children’s author in America. They dig into the making of The Lorax: the cookie-cutter condos eating up La Jolla’s coastline...

Today, Matt speaks with Philip Nel, University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University and one of the world's leading Dr. Seuss scholars, about The Lorax and its place in the environmental movement. They trace the book's origins, from the coastal construction in La Jolla that made Seuss angry, to the trip to Kenya that finally unlocked the story he scribbled on a hotel laundr...

Today, no guest - just Matt, with the story of what one writer called “the best idea America ever had”: the national park. In 1872, in a country built on private property, the United States set aside Yellowstone as land that could never be owned by anyone - and then handed the idea to the world. Matt traces how it happened: the writer John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt, whose 1903 campfire...

Today, Matt speaks with Micah Loewinger, co-host of WNYC’s On the Media and the reporter behind the new four-part series American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA, about how the agency built to respond to America’s worst disasters became one of its least trusted institutions. Micah explains how he came to FEMA through years of covering far-right militias, why the “FEMA camps” conspiracy theory...

Today, no guest - just Matt, telling one of the strangest and most hopeful stories in American politics. It's the story of the first Earth Day, when 20 million Americans - about one in ten of the entire country - took to the streets on a single day in April 1970, and changed the course of the nation in just two years. Matt traces how that one day produced the EPA, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean...

Today, Matt speaks with Jonathan Criss, CEO and co-founder of Vital Lyfe, about reinventing how the world gets clean drinking water. After 13 years at SpaceX working on the Starlink and Dragon programs, Jonathan set out to apply the same first-principles engineering to desalination - starting with a unit he built in his garage that cleaned ocean water. They talk about why the water crisis is reall...

Today, Matt speaks with Dean Forgeron, Chief Technology Officer at CarbonCure Technologies, about the Halifax-based clean tech company decarbonizing one of the world's most polluting industries. Dean explains the chemistry behind injecting CO2 into concrete - where it permanently mineralizes into calcium carbonate, the same material as limestone, while reducing cement use by roughly 4.5% on averag...

Today, Matt is joined by Dan Miller - Managing Director of The Roda Group and host of Climate Chat on YouTube - for a wide-ranging conversation on the economics of the energy transition and the 2026 race for California Governor. Dan explains why renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels (a Harvard study attributes 8 million deaths a year to fossil fuel pollution), why EVs will replace gas c...

Today, Matt speaks with Ibhade Eigbobo, Director of Corporate Project Management at Budderfly, about why the small and midsize business sector is one of America's most underused energy assets. Ibhade explains Budderfly's energy-as-a-service model - where the company takes over a customer's entire utility bill, invests its own capital to upgrade aging equipment, and earns revenue as a share of the...

Today, Matt is joined by Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare, a global conservation nonprofit that helps coastal fishing communities, smallholder farmers, and local leaders in 60+ countries build climate resilience through behavioral science and community-led solutions. Brett shares how Rare's Fish Forever program grew from three pilot communities in the Philippines to more than 2,000 communities across Indo...