Climate Papa

What if the most important step you can take for biodiversity is simply… noticing? Species are disappearing far faster than we can track, and for many of them, our entire scientific record amounts to a handful of specimens scattered across museum shelves. My guest today, Scott Loarie , has spent the last decade building one of the most hopeful counterforces to that trend: iNaturalist . What starte...

How do you make decisions for the next hundred years based on evidence you only know today? That’s the question Gary Yohe has spent more than four decades wrestling with. One of the first five economists in the world working on climate change back in the early 1980s, Gary served as the Coordinating Lead Author for multiple IPCC report chapters, including the Fourth Assessment that shared the 2007...

Agriculture, forestry, and land use together account for nearly 24 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet somehow land sits in a weird blind spot: ignored by climate conversations focused on energy and transport, underanalyzed by markets, and mispriced by farmers and timber investors alike. That’s the problem, and opportunity, we’re going to discuss today. I sit down with Danan Margason , found...

✨ Special teaser from the Stepchange Show. Details here . ✨ 🎧 Listen to the full episode: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Substack Any other podcast player search: ‘Stepchange’ Today’s Climate Papa episode is a quick teaser from my other project, The Stepchange Show . Anay and I spent months digging into the hidden backbone of our modern world: data centers . These warehouses of machines quietly...

What happens when you take the two biggest sources of emissions in the US—transportation and electricity—and smash them together at breakneck speed? In this episode of Climate Papa, I sit down with  Apoorv Bhargava , the co-founder and CEO of  WeaveGrid . We explore the massive, unfolding challenge and opportunity of integrating millions of electric vehicles onto a grid that wasn't built for them....

Ben sits down with Michael Leggett —former Google and Facebook design leader turned climate entrepreneur—to explore the invisible but essential machinery behind the clean energy economy. Michael is the co-founder and Head of Product at Ever.green , a startup working to democratize access to high-impact renewable energy deals. Ben and Michael go deep into the world of renewable energy credits (RECs...

In this live crossover episode of Climate Papa and Volts , I sit down with renowned climate journalist David Roberts for a conversation bridging the personal and the planetary. David traces his unlikely path from doctoral philosophy drop out into journalism—and how his early love of systems thinking shapes his work today. We dive into the puzzle that is the energy transition. With clean energy sol...

What if the biggest climate impact from companies like Google wasn’t in their operations, but in how they shape the decisions of billions of people? In this episode of Climate Papa, I sit down with Travis McCoy , Director of Product for Sustainability at Google. We talk about his journey into climate, the pivotal moment that pushed him to make the leap, and how Google is leveraging its massive dis...

Today I'm excited to introduce a new project, the Stepchange podcast, where we share the stories of human progress. Like Climate Papa, it's driven by a curiosity about the systems that shape our world, but focuses on the historical innovations and moments that got us here and the transformations happening now. The show is a long-form conversation hosted by me and Anay where we unpack the t...

There was a fire that burned for 29 hours. It destroyed over 17,000 buildings, killed over 300 people, and left more than 100,000 homeless. This was the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Out of the ashes, Chicago rebuilt itself into a global model of resilience. The disaster spurred major changes, including the use of fire-resistant building materials, stricter safety codes, the expansion of the fire de...

On this show, we’ve explored how people can make infrastructure changes in their lives that have long-term positive climate impacts—whether it’s upgrading your furnace to a heat pump or switching from a gas car to an EV. Food is on the other end of the spectrum. It’s the ultimate behavioral challenge: the average person has three meals a day, 21 meals a week. That's over 1,000 meals a year or 5,00...

I sit down with Kathy Hannun--the founder of Dandelion Energy , a geothermal heat pump comany that she spun out of Google X. What is a geothermal heat pump? Well, if you go outside and drill a hole a few hundred feet below ground you would get to a stable temperature--somewhere in the 50-60 degrees range. This earth is a fantastic place to transfer heat to and from. You can then cycle a fluid (lik...

A bit over a year ago Ben met Anay Shah . In the months that followed Anay and Ben spent hours, then days, then months bringing forth Stepchange . Anay has not only become a fund co-founder and close friend—he’s also shared in the joy of parallel newborn parenting—both he and Ben had new babies less than a month apart over the summer. Together, they explore Anay’s journey from his early days at th...

How do we get the money from climate legislation into the hands of someone buying a heat pump or solar? Between passing legislation, like the Inflation Reducaiton Act (IRA), and a homeowner getting new devices to run their homes there is a major coordination, paperwork, and financing problem to orchestrate. In this episode Ben interviews Jeff Coleman , founder and CEO of Eli Technologies , and fel...

This episode is a bit more papa and a bit less climate. Ben shares some family news and processes it with his 6-year-old and 3-year-old. They hit on some climate topics, the purpose of ants, and what was in the universe before earth. Kids are the best. Happy Father’s Day to all the fellow climate papas out there. Referenced in the episode: Last year’s Father’s Day special Astrophysics for People i...

The presentation: Decarbonization: Stocks and flows, abundance and scarcity, net zero In 1995, a Morgan Stanley analyst named Mary Meeker released a report called The Internet Trends Report. In 2001 it became a slide deck. Each year the release of the annual Mary Meeker deck was eagerly devoured by those trying to understand what's going on in technology 1 . It informed public market and ventu...

As the first episode of the year, I’m focusing on a bit of a personal update. Today, I'm announcing the launch of a new climate venture fund, Stepchange . I use this week's episode to share the story behind the fund. I struggled with putting this episode out—I felt self-conscious spending the time promoting my work so publicly. But I believe that investing our money, our time, and our soci...

See Nicole's work referenced here . The world of climate tech is small and something happened about two years ago. From climate newsletters to Twitter accounts and LinkedIn posts... everything became more... colorful . There were stunning watercolors explaining the carbon cycle in oceans, the carbon impact of a hamburger, or the way that heat pump works to magically transfer heat into a home....

It was the summer of 2022 and David Rusenko had completed 15 years of a classic Silicon Valley success story. It started back in 2007 when he applied to the 4th batch of YC two hours before the deadline with his startup--Weebly. He grew Weebly, a website and ecommerce platform, to hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions in revenue and was acquired by Square in 2018. At Square he took on int...

Ben sits down with fellow climate papa, Dimitry Gershenson . They head off the deep end into how to balance being a present father with being present for your start up ambitions. They explore if founding a startup makes you more of a jerk to your kids and the importance of vulnerability and apology when you mess up. They reflect on how those same skills make you a much better parent, partner, and...

I wasn't sure if I should put an episode out this week. I feel like at any given moment nearly 100% of my mind and attention and definitely my emotional energy has been on processing the events over this last weekend in Israel. Climate Papa is not a news podcast and certainly not a geopolitical podcast. But this is a personal podcast--it's been a space over the last few months where I'...

Announcement: It’s PNW Climate Week next week and I’m going to host the first ever Climate Papa meetup! Next Wednesday, September 27th, at 3:30pm at Volunteer Park. Register here! Fall is here—the leaves are changing and it’s back to school season. This time of year always feels like the “real” start to the year. Coincidentally, it’s when the Jewish High Holidays begin, the New Year, Rosh Hashanah...

Well, we made it ten episodes in before hitting on the most emotionally charged of home appliances—the cooktop. Despite gas stoves not being a significant cause of emissions, they are a clever lock-in device used to drive homeowners to want to keep (or even add) gas hookups to their homes. The plan may ultimately backfire as we all become aware of how terrible it is for our (and especially our kid...

It's the middle of August. For most of us, this is a hot and humid time of year--especially with heat waves raging across much of the world. To deal with more extreme temperatures we're going to need effective cooling, and a lot of it, quickly. Fortunately, we have the right device that can suck heat out (or push it into) our homes — heat pumps. Ben chats with Bill to get to the bottom of...

Ben and Erika Reinhardt hop on post-bedtime to trade stories about their 5 and 2.5 year olds and make bathtub greenhouse gas analogies. Erika has made it her, and Spark Climate’s , mission to find and invest in the solutions we are likely or possibly going to need in the future that are, today, woefully behind. This has led to a focus on methane–currently responsible for 0.5°C of warming. Despite...