Who's Saving the Planet?

On Black Friday, ditch the guilt and secure your stocking stuffers with an episode that honors the environment and Indigenous peoples. As anyone knows, makeup is a deeply personal endeavor. How we see ourselves, matters. The story of where our makeup comes from should matter too. Big makeup companies try to engineer representation and empowerment, using glitzy television ads with trendy pop songs...

Gina Stovell has been called many things: climate scientists, onetime geological consultant, sustainability evangelists (that's me who called her that, not a title she'd give herself), entrepreneur, and, most recently, pioneer of the resurgence of flow fashion.  Delivery times for her clothing company Two Days Off vary depending on how long it takes to make the garment you order, a concept di...

Here's a question I get often. How many trees can a tree planter plant, if a tree planter could plant trees all day? The answer: Many fewer than if the tree planter was a squadron of drones flying in formation precision dropping seed pellets to micro-sites. SATs were my favorite.  We have an issue here on earth: we're burning forests faster than they can naturally regenerate. Grant Canary is...

Happy Democracy Day in the United States! There's no one we'd rather have on the pod today to help us make sense of the marriage between climate and policy than our guest, Jason Bordoff. Jason founded the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University after a tenure as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change on the Staff of the National Security...

Have you ever fed a plastic bottle into the machine outside the grocery store, watched in amazement as it disappeared into that mysterious maw and returned to you a nickel, and left thinking you did your part to reduce, reuse and recycle?  Ever wondered what happened to that bottle? Today, we explore the dirty and woefully inefficient side of plastic recycling.  Martin Stephan, Deputy CE...

For our 50th episode (more than a few grey hairs in the beard to prove it) we turn the mic on ourselves to pull back the curtain on the planet saving work we're doing doing here at Who's Saving the Planet.  True to form, this episode is presented in our traditional three act structure, the problem, the solution, and the viability. For us, the problem we've come to realize after 49 enlightenin...

Here's a horrifying fact: humans ingest one credit card worth of plastic every week. Plastic is ubiquitous in everyday life, more so than we realize. The large plastic composite, for instance, the tires on our cars and busses, shed tiny micro-plastic compounds which find their way into our soil, food, and even the air we breathe. We don't yet know what the long term effects of consuming an approxi...

It's easy to say you can see the forest from the trees, easier still if you deploy a fleet of satellites using bleeding edge artificial intelligence and machine learning to count the leaves on the trees in the forests. Well, not actually, but almost.  Diego Saez-Gil, CEO and founder of Pachama , joins us this week to reveal the methodology - and purpose- behind his revolutionary start up. Her...

A rose by any other name... could be called denim overalls once DJ's had her way with them.  Do you want to take your Poison Ivy cosplay to a new level? Are you interested in offsetting the carbon you exhale through the carbon your jumper inhales? Well, finally, we can turn your closet into a plant you can wear. Really.  Post Carbon Lab is the brainchild of Dian-Jen Lin (DJ) and Hannes H...

If you were anywhere close to crunchy in high-school you had a pin on your backpack that proclaimed, "Be The Change You Want To See In The World."  The world is a big place to change, but the point (if I may, Mr. Gandhi) was that you don't need to change the world, you need to change yourself, and effect part of the world in so doing.  Brendan Lo is the intersection of one man becoming a...

Imagine you knew how much carbon went into everything that you bought on Amazon through handy browser plug in. Then imagine you could offset that carbon with one click. Now stop imagining and go check out what the team at Neutral are building! (But first, listen to this episode!) We sit down with CEO, co-founder, and proud hacker Marissa Liu and dig into how she and a team of scrappy collegiate co...

Those who make movie magic are often doing so at the expense of the environment. The logistics of producing a big-budget show or blockbuster require a tremendous amount of energy that pollutes the planet. That's not the case when Emellie O'Brien is on set. She has the strategy, staff, stuff and stats to make movies without making a mess. Her firm, Earth Angel , has worked on major produc...

Two main issues plague consumers looking to shop sustainably: finding the startups (who generally don't have massive marketing budgets to find you) that are making sustainable products, and secondly, trusting that those products are actually doing good for the planet, not just pretending to.  That's where Climate Neutral comes in. They have created software tool (affectionately dubbed the "Tr...

This week we cap off our activism abroad series with three inspiring activists who aren't waiting for anyone to change the world for them, they don't have that kind of time. Michael, Luna and Lily are all still in high school but that doesn't stop them from organizing, pressuring the government, and teaching their parents a thing or three.

This one takes a bit of explaining. Rachel Major, co-founder and CEO of NuLeaf Technologies , began her journey into entrepreneurship as most do, with a grant from NASA. Her particular area of expertise was in biology, and she has a particular affinity for the  development of technology through biomimicry: "the design and production of materials, structures, and systems that are modeled on bi...

Elizabeth Gulugulu lives in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, but her ambitions reach far beyond the city limits. She has traveled to the United Nations as a representative for her community, lobbied her elected officials to enforce better governance, and given voice to the anxiety and hope of her generation.  Join us this week in our second edition of our Activism Abroad series. 

What do you get when you mix energetic electrolysis, micro-biotic fermentation, and a couple of mad scientists? I'll take "Creates Dinner Out of Sunlight and Air" for 800, Alex.  Welcome to Solar Foods, the Finnish brainchild of Pasi Vainikka and his co-founder Dr Juha-Pekka Pitkänen. They've been developing a process of synthesizing a protein the've developed and feeding it using hydrogen ha...

The Jammu Kashmir region of India is a remote patch of land that has- for decades- been home to ongoing geo-political turmoil, border scuffles and two all out shooting wars. And recently, things got worse.  But that doesn't keep Anmol Ohri from fighting to save the planet. He is using his activism, ingenuity and grit to unite people from different countries, religions, ages, socio-economic st...

Dr. Enric Sala was a lauded professor until he quit his job because, in his words, "I was doing was writing the obituary of ocean life."  Thus began his journey in ocean conservation which would lead him to found the Pristine Seas project and become National Geographic's Explorer-in-Residence. In this episode of Who's Saving the Planet we discuss Dr. Sala's transition from the halls of academ...

Sustainable marketing guru Suzanne Shelton pulls back the curtain on what preppers, extremists and anarchists reveal about what’s in store for a post-Covid world.  With 29 years of experience, Mrs. Shelton's consulting firm is the industry leader in providing actionable advice to industries concerning sustainable marketing, consumer insights and strategic guidance. The Shelton Group recently...

Every so often we find innovators creating fantastically elegant solutions to equally fantastically huge problems. In this episode we take a journey into the ocean to discover a remedy for what is a distinctly terrestrial problem: the greenhouse gasses produced by dairy and beef cows. Scientist and entrepreneur Alexia has isolated a strain of seaweed which reduces the methane output from cows (bur...

How do you align the interests of business, government, and communities with the rigor and rigidity of environmental science? Well, with carrots and sticks, and a good measure of grit. Dr. Brosnan shares with us her journey from the world of science and academia, where there can be a right answer because math, into the world of consulting where the answers are never entirely right or wrong, but ca...

Ciara May is walking the path of an entrepreneur: she recognized a problem, looked for a solution on the market, and when she found none existed, she rolled up her sleeves and built one. Rebundle is a synthetic hair brand focused on the black female market, who right now have only cheap, mass produced,  and harmful options made primarily from low-grade plastic. Ciara's created a biodegradable...

Can we save our future by putting a price on carbon? A carbon tax has been in the conversation since the 70's, but we've had very little in the way of progress despite decades of scientist and economists arguing that it could be the most efficient and effective method of combating climate change. So, what gives? This week we bring Peter Vail Marsters, researcher and carbon tax expert from Columbia...

Mimi Ausland began her career as a climate activist at the age of 14 with a click-to-give website that landed her on Oprah, Ellen, and the Today Show- and that was just the beginning.  Mimi built and runs the website Freetheocean.com which she's developed into a platform that turns eyeballs into dollars through leveraging sponsorships and advertising. She uses the revenue through advertising to fu...