Supercool

What do China, a sustainable furniture startup, and a blog called The Lazy Environmentalist have to do with Supercool? This week, we're taking a short summer break from new interviews, but not before sharing the story behind the show. In a special extended introduction, Josh Dorfman traces the unexpected path that shaped his philosophy on climate innovation—from working in bicycle-lock factories i...

In 2019, Amazon made one of the biggest EV bets in business: 100,000 electric vehicles by 2030. Today, it is halfway there. Amazon now has more than 50,000 EVs on the road globally, including 40,000 Rivian delivery vans. But getting to that number has required much more than replacing gas vans with electric ones. It has forced Amazon to rebuild delivery around the realities of electricity: where v...

If net zero is better, why isn’t it normal? We have the technology and the know-how. Schools, hospitals, and skyscrapers are already being built that are beautiful, cheap to operate, and carbon-free. And yet less than 1% are net zero. Drew Shula is founder and CEO of Verdical Group, whose team has worked on green building projects for clients including Apple, Meta, and NASA. He also founded the Ne...

Some of the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world have almost no real visibility into one of their largest costs: power. Contracts are complex. Prices swing. Grid capacity is scarce. Costs are rising. For some companies today, electricity can account for 30% to 40% of OpEx. For data centers, access to power determines whether a project begins operating or waits for years in a queue. V...

While companies across the construction industry were raising prices because of tariffs last year, Wythe Windows did the opposite: it lowered prices on high-performance, energy-efficient windows. Even more striking, Wythe manufactures them 20 miles from Midtown NYC. Darren Macri came to construction after film school at NYU and built the first passive house in New Jersey. That project exposed the...

Utility costs are among the largest expense categories in multifamily real estate; they have been rising in the double digits year over year. The industry's attempt to answer has largely been technology. Smarter systems. AI-powered optimization. Devices that promise to cut costs by plugging into aging infrastructure. Kyle Hendricks, VP and Head of Sustainability at Equity Residential, one of Ameri...

Geothermal should be an easy sell. It is quiet, efficient, comfortable, and cheap to run once installed. The problem has been the upfront cost of putting it in the ground. Dandelion spent years proving residential geothermal could work house by house. Now CEO Dan Yates is taking it into new home construction, where whole developments can be built with geothermal from the start. Dandelion’s partner...

Americans think they recycle. Mostly, we don’t. More than half of all recyclable materials never reach a recycling bin. They go straight into the garbage, where the waste industry has historically had little economic incentive — and limited technology — to recover them. Matanya Horowitz founded AMP to build AI-powered robots that sort cans, bottles, and other valuable materials in recycling facili...

Cow burps are one of climate’s strangest and most stubborn problems. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and cattle are responsible for about 30 percent of global methane emissions. For years, the basic answer has been: eat less beef and drink less milk. Kathryn Polkoff, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Hoofprint Biome, thinks there is a better way. Hoofprint uses natural enzymes to reshape t...

Construction has a hidden waste problem, and it starts long before anything reaches the job site. For centuries, the master builder was the person who translated architectural vision into buildable reality. Today, modern construction is too complex for any one person to play that role. A commercial building can contain hundreds of thousands of components across electrical, mechanical, plumbing, st...

Ron Gonen built the largest privately held recycling and composting company in America largely in secret. For five years, his team acquired family-owned recycling operations across the country. When Circular Services finally surfaced two years ago — 35 facilities, municipal contracts in New York, Charlotte, Austin, San Antonio, and Phoenix — the industry's reaction was: wait, they did what? That's...

Sign up for Johnson Controls' Free Webinar: Optimizing Lifecycle Value Webinar -- The ocean is an unforgiving place to put a machine. That’s why wave energy has remained one of the most promising — and most elusive — sources of renewable power. In this episode, Josh talks with Catharina Belfrage Sahlstrand, Chief Commercial Officer of CorPower Ocean, about how the company is turning wave energy in...

Sign up for Johnson Controls' Free Webinar: Optimizing Lifecycle Value Webinar -- It’s one thing to invent a better, more sustainable building material. It’s another to get builders, dealers, and contractors to adopt it. Modern Mill has done both. In this episode, Josh talks with Chandler Delinks, the company’s Sales Director and employee number one, about how Modern Mill set up shop in Mississipp...

Sign up for Risk and Resilience — Designing for a Changing World , a Johnson Controls fireside chat at 1pm EST today featuring Ralph DiNola, founder of Building Insights Group and former CEO of New Buildings Institute, in conversation with Rob Tanner, Marketing Director at Johnson Controls.    -- For decades, the answer to shoreline erosion has been the same: build something big, hard, and heavy....

Every climate company that scales knows the secret: they don’t sell climate. In this solo episode of Supercool, host Josh Dorfman shares one of the clearest lessons from nearly two years of conversations with founders, CEOs, operators, and investors across the low-carbon economy: the companies that break through do not lead with technical specs or climate mission. Their messaging is built around c...

If the circular economy is ever going to become just “the economy,” it will need infrastructure. In this episode, Josh talks with Rich Amsinger, co-founder of Manymoons and The Many Company, about building it. The conversation traces the company’s evolution from Borobabi, which began with Rich and Carolyn Butler trying to keep their daughter’s outgrown clothes in use, to Manymoons, what the compan...

Most architects don't tell you your home could be nearly silent, filter every breath of air, and run almost without heat. Not because it's impossible. Because they don't know how to build it. Michael Ingui does. For more than a decade, his firm has built Passive Houses across New York City — landmarked townhouses, gut renovations, apartments with swimming pools and floor-to-ceiling glass. His clie...

Nobody wants to be policed. Not even sustainability advocates. Charlie Sellars has spent six years as a Director of Sustainability at Microsoft. He's the author of What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable Living. His TEDx talk is titled "Make Sustainability Fun Again." His argument: the movement has spent too long trying to be right at the expense of being effective. And that mist...

* Sign-up for Johnson Controls Webinar: Evolving Building Codes * The largest geothermal residential building in New York City just opened in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 834 apartments. 320 boreholes drilled hundreds of feet underground — enough to heat and cool every unit in the building. Even the rooftop pool. Geosource Energy drilled it. This conversation is about how they did it, and what it takes t...

People assume farmers are conservative by nature. Cautious. Set in their ways. Ryan Jones, VP of Sustainability at Indigo Ag, has a different read: farmers aren’t risk-averse. They’re risk-saturated. Consider factors like weather, debt, input costs, labor, and fluctuating commodity prices. One bad season can set a farmer back years. So when someone shows up and says, “Change how you farm,” the fir...

Forty-five million Americans live in apartments. Almost none have solar—not because the technology doesn't work, but because building owners pay for installation while tenants get the savings. It's the split incentive conundrum holding the sector back. Owen Barrett saw this problem when he started investing in apartment buildings. Nobody in multifamily was thinking about energy—just paint colors a...

In 2019, Will Wiseman watched 100,000 people march through Barcelona for the global climate strikes. He felt hope. Then the obvious truth: everyone was going home, and nothing would change. So, he built Climatize, an SEC-registered investment platform that allows anyone to invest as little as $10 in clean energy projects across the United States. Climatize specializes in projects ranging from $250...

Kunal Girotra was Head of Tesla Energy before leaving in 2020 to found Lunar Energy. Then he went silent. Over two years, he raised $300 million, built a 250-person team, and developed home battery systems that blend sleek design with state-of-the-art technology. Lunar emerged from stealth in 2022 with a mission to deliver endless, affordable clean energy. What differentiates Lunar: it's both a ha...

Data centers have always pursued energy efficiency through better hardware—smarter chillers, advanced cooling systems. But there's a ceiling. You can only make hardware so efficient. Seven years ago, Jasper de Vries discovered the butterfly effect in data centers—something on a roof rippling through 300 billion sensor readings down to valves in server rooms. His company, Lucend, ingests that senso...

What if we stopped trying to recycle and just used all our trash instead? UBQ Materials makes bio-plastics from entire trash bags—dirty diapers, greasy pizza boxes, chicken bones, mixed plastics. Everything. 100% utilization. Nothing returns to landfills. The material works in existing manufacturing equipment, costs the same as virgin plastic, and can be recycled 10+ times. It's already in Mercede...