We have a lot of blindspots that prevent us from solving climate change, and this… this is a big one. Coal is a battery. A single piece of coal can store solar energy for 300 million years. Solar and wind can't store energy at all. That means they can't replace fossil fuels without a compatible storage capacity. While we've spent the last few decades building up wind and solar, we're lagging far behind on energy storage. Even worse, we keep saying "Solar is cheaper than coal" which is only...

This episode is exciting for me personally because it introduces two concepts that are, in my opinion, the largest solutions to climate change. The first is cellular production, bioreactors, and farm-free meat. The second reason I’m excited is because our guest today, Dr. Falconer, discovered a shortcut to solving climate change... with cat food. That's right. And we’re counting on it sounding ridiculous and flying under the radar. It turns out the simple act of producing farm-free cat food...

The journal Nature receives 10,000 scientific papers every year, but in 2023 they picked just five as the technologies most likely to make an impact on society. Jupiter Ionics was one of them. Specializing in making ammonia from electrolysis instead of fossil fuels, it is poised to revolutionize not only agriculture but our energy and transportation sectors as well. It is our pleasure to have Douglas MacFarlane, founder of Jupiter Ionics, as our guest.  Hopefully you've just listened to...

You might be surprised to hear it phrased this way, but you are a fossil fuel product. Half of the nitrogen atoms in your body are artificially synthesized. They are a product of the Haber-Bosch process, a process that requires fossil fuels. The world's population relies on fossil fuels powering the Haber-Bosch production of ammonia, used in fertilizer, to grow the food that keeps us alive. You are what you eat. In fact, without fossil fuels you probably wouldn’t exist on earth today. When...

Today we're looking at trees.  This was not the episode I wanted to do next. I had a few others planned, but everywhere I looked for replacements to fossil fuels, people thought trees were the answer. Architects specifying timber to replace concrete in low-embodied-carbon buildings,  companies buying carbon credits from forests to reach net-zero, biomass replacing coal in coal fired power plants. Every solution I heard felt... weird. Trees don't strike me as a 21st century high-tech...

Today, we're looking at one of the world's largest sources of emissions - cement. How do we make cement, and why are emissions so intense? Hint: this time it's not fossil fuels. To find out, we'll look at how the world's second largest cement manufacturer, Holcim, is reducing the embodied emissions of their product. But then we'll go further. We'll talk to Zarina Bazoeva and Matt Kennedy-Good, the founders of Neocrete, a company poised to replace cement and eliminate emissions altogether. ...

In this episode, we'll focus on wave energy. We're speaking with Heikki Paakkinen, CEO of Finland's Holvi Energy. Three billion humans get their energy from coal. To replace coal and other fossil fuels, we'll need to find an alternative. What if we could solve this by harnessing an energy source that never stops, a technology that rivals wind, enjoys 30 years of little to no maintenance, with no environmental impact?   We can. It already exists. It's floating off the coasts of Taiwan,...

In this episode, we'll focus on induction cooking. We're speaking with Glen Rockhouse, Chef of 30 years and a kitchen designer at Reward Hospitality. Imagine you're out for a nice dinner at that restaurant everyone's been ravign about. As you enjoy a meal with your friends, somewhere, deep in the bowels of the kitchen, a gas burner flares, cooking your food. When you look at how much gas that equates to, in every kitchen around the world, it's staggering.  To replace all that gas, we now...

In this episode, we'll focus on unintended consequences - Jevons Paradox, Goodhart's Law, and the Cobra Effect (perverse incentive).  For the last few decades there's been a push for energy efficiency, meant to be a stopgap, a way for the world to slow down climate change until replacements for fossil fuels reached parity.  But in the context of climate change, it doesn't matter how efficient we can ever make our fossil fuel use. We're still emitting.  So let's look at how intensive...

Climate change may be caused by carbon emissions, but it's humans who made that happen. Until we learn how to manage... us... we won't solve climate change. While science focused on the technology, the statistics, the parts per million, we should have focused on the pscyhology, the economics, the humans per billion.  So in this episode,  we'll look at how we're not as rational as we think, and how we even sabotage ourselves. We'll be looking at the economic models that explain human...

In many ways the climate crisis mimics the death of a loved one, causing us to experience the Grief Cycle. It may even feel like the doctor has handed you the diagnosis of a terminal illness. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote of the inevitable and natural way humans deal with grief, cycling through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. If these sound familiar, it's because we all experience this with climate change. Of course you're familiar with denial, but what about the others?...

Why haven't we stopped climate change? This episode explores four reasons we haven't stopped climate change in the past, and some very good reasons to start. An essential primer for first-time listeners, and a powerful motivator for anyone who wants to make a difference in climate change.  Music in this episode provided by Artlist.io  Theme Song - The Best thing - Paper Planes 00:28 Frank Bentley - It's a Fast Life! 01:37 Jimmy Svensson - Bad Connection 03:55 Setup - Oliver Michael ...