Inevitable

 Today's guest is Will Steger , an educator, activist, photographer, and polar explorer. Will is a prominent spokesperson for the preservation and understanding of the Arctic and is the creator of the Will Steger Foundation , which exists to educate and empower people to engage in solutions to climate change. Will was the fourth person ever to have reached both Earth's poles. He led the first conf...

This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Today's guest is Dylan Welch , Plant Manager at AMP Robotics .  Dylan grew up in the foothills of...

Today's guest is John Kinney, Founder, CEO and Managing Partner at CleanFund .  CleanFund specializes in PACE financing, an innovative way for property owners to finance public good improvements to their buildings, including clean energy, efficiency, and resiliency through their property taxes. CleanFund got its start in Berkeley, California in 2009 and initiated the first privately funded PACE tr...

Today's guest on the My Climate Journey Startup Series is Jack Morrison , Co-founder and CEO at Scythe .  Scythe recently announced a $42M Series B round of financing led by Energy Impact Partners to grow and scale their product line of autonomous electric commercial lawnmowers. When discussing the need to electrify everything, we tend to focus on electric vehicles and home efficiency. But over th...

Today's guest is Robert Piconi , CEO and co-founder at Energy Vault , which develops and deploys utility-scale energy storage solutions.  The company's offerings include proprietary gravity, battery, and green hydrogen energy storage hardware technologies supported by a technology-agnostic energy management system software layer. They can deliver short- and long-duration energy storage with the go...

Today's guest is Heidi Kujawa , founder and CEO at ByFusion . ByFusion is solving the global plastic waste crisis by turning unrecyclable plastics into building materials. Plastics are lightweight, durable, strong, low-cost, and built to last. Those qualities are fantastic in reducing the cost and weight of shipping and packaging items. And those qualities are equally terrible when it comes to was...

Today's guest is Martin Wainstein , Founder and Executive Director of OpenEarth Foundation , a California-based nonprofit that creates and supports the deployment of open-source software at the intergovernmental level to further climate understanding and action. When we think of blockchain, our brains are mostly wired to think of cryptocurrencies and for-profit schemes. OpenEarth Foundation, howev...

Today's guest is Megan O'Connor , CEO and Co-Founder of Nth Cycle .  Nth Cycle uses a metals processing technology that allows battery manufacturers to convert lower-grade critical metals into EV-battery grade on-site. The company’s approach obviates large portions of cumbersome and dirty metal supply chains for crucial EV battery metals like nickel. Megan claims that Nth Cycle's technology can be...

This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Today is Zach Gallant , Head of Maritime Operations at Fleetzero .  Zach grew up in Maine and atte...

Today's guest is Harry Tannenbaum , Co-founder and President at Mill .  Mill developed a household bin that not only collects uneaten food but also shrinks and deodorizes it. The company’s solution aims to keep food in the system and prevent it from ending up in landfills or waste systems, which would otherwise generate significant emissions.  Mill recently exited stealth and we're proud to be mul...

Today's topic is ERCOT ( The Electric Reliability Council of Texas ), and we have two guests.  Eric Goff is President at Goff Policy , an infrastructure consulting firm focusing on ERCOT market energy transition issues. Eric serves as the sole representative for residential consumers in the ERCOT stakeholder process.  Jaden Crawford is director of policy at David Energy , a modern energy retailer...

Today, we have two guests, Sonia Kastner, Founder and CEO at Pano , and Bill Clerico , Founder and Managing Partner at Convective Capital .  Both Sonia and Bill are keynotes in the emerging category of fire tech and in the subcategory of climate tech that's referred to as adaptation solutions, technologies that can help deliver resiliency in the face of an increasingly unstable planet. At Pano, So...

Today's guests are Ajay Kochhar , President, CEO, and co-founder at Li-Cycle , and Jigar Shah , Director of the Loan Programs Office at the United States Department of Energy .  Jigar is a multi-time guest on the show and a friend of the pod, and he reached out to us to see if we'd want to record an episode discussing Li-Cycle's experience in applying for and receiving a conditional commitment fro...

Today's guest is Carlos Araque , co-founder and CEO of Quaise Energy . Quaise is seeking to unlock the power of geothermal energy by drilling into deeper and hotter parts of the earth than ever, using microwave-based technology rather than traditional mechanical drill bits. Carlos has a fascinating background; he grew up in Medellin, Colombia, during the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, matriculated to...

*This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Today's guest is James Sedlak , who leads Operations and Community Engagement at Kodama Systems ,...

Our guests today are, Diego Saez-Gil of Pachama and Sam Gill of Sylvera , and we're talking about forestry carbon offsets. Forestry carbon offsets were designed as a financial tool to provide an economic incentive for landowners to make alternative decisions, to pay landowners to keep their forests intact in the case of deforestation avoidance credits or to reforest previously damaged land in the...

Today's guest is Oliver Gunasekara , co-founder and CEO at Impossible Metals .  If we're to electrify everything, we need an order of magnitude more batteries and wiring. All of this requires metals including nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese, and copper. More metals mean… you guessed it, more mining. Today's land-based mining practices are fraught with externalities that vary by material, but of...

Today's guest is Alex Blumberg , who is most recently the co-host of the climate change-focused podcast, How to Save a Planet . Alex was co-founder and CEO of Gimlet Media, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019.  Alex has a history of unpacking incredibly complex systemic issues and making them digestible for mass audiences. Prior to Gimlet, he was co-host of the podcast Planet Money, which had it...

Today's guest is Peter Reinhardt , co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial .  This conversation was recorded as a live session during Climate Career Week , a series of talks, local meetups, and office hours designed to help people make the transition into climate-oriented work. Climate Career Week was organized by Climate Draft , Terra.do , Work on Climate , and MCJ Collective.  Given the nature of...

Today's guest is Simon Moores, CEO of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence , the world’s leading Price Reporting Agency (PRA) for the lithium-ion battery to the electric vehicle supply chain and a data and intelligence provider for the space. Simon and Cody have a great conversation about the state of the EV battery supply chain and lithium in particular – where it comes from, how it's processed, what d...

Today's guest is Dr. Evan Thomas , CEO and Founder of Virridy , and Director of the Mortensen  Center in Global Engineering & Resilience and the Climate Innovation Collaboratory at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Evan is also a tenured Associate Professor in the CU Boulder Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering Department. So, he’s a busy guy.   Virridy’ s water sensors monitor...

This episode is part of our new Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Our next guest is Tonya Hicks , President and CEO of Power Solutions and Managing Principle of...

Today's guest is Sam D'Amico , Founder and CEO at Impulse . Impulse is helping to electrify homes with sleek-looking all-electric appliances, starting with an induction cooktop. Regardless of whether or not you pay close attention to the climate space, you've probably seen some commentary in the last few weeks about gas stoves. The gas stovetop has become one of the latest culture war topics in Am...

Today, we have two guests, Peter Minor , Director of Science and Innovation at Carbon180 ; and Jack Andreasen , Policy Manager for Carbon Management at Breakthrough Energy . Peter and Jack are two of the world’s foremost experts in the world on carbon dioxide removal, or CDR as it's called in climate circles. They and their respective organizations influence public policy, support critical technol...

Today's guest is Allison Dring , CEO and co-founder of Made of Air , which makes carbon-negative materials using biochar for the built environment and consumer goods. Biochar is a carbon-rich material from burning biomass such as wood or crop residue. We’ve loosely covered this topic with startups like Climate Robotics , but Made of Air is taking a different approach. The company uses biochar powd...