👋 Welcome to this week’s roundup of PodSnacks.
🎙️ Discover selected quotes from 10 recently covered episodes.
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⚡ Carbon & Energy
Podcast: My Climate Journey
Episode: Decarbonizing Cement (Original Title: "Startup Series: Brimstone Energy")
Host: Jason Jacobs
Guest: Cody Finke | Co-Founder & CEO | Brimstone Energy
Category: ☁️ Carbon Reduction
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 43 min | 🗓️ 11/11/2021
Selected Quote:
[4:13] “We are working on decarbonizing the cement industry. How we're doing that is we are making ordinary Portland cement. […] We're just changing how it's made. So we are making it in a way that does not emit CO2. I want to be really clear. We're not doing carbon capture and storage play. That's an add on to a commercial cement process. We are just not making the CO2.”
Podcast: The Interchange
Episode: “Solar Power: The Silver Linings of Ditching Silver”
Host: David Banmiller
Guest: Jonathan Gifford | Founding Editor | PV Magazine
Category: ⚡ Renewable Energy
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 48 min | 🗓️ 11/12/2021
Selected Quote:
[11:33] “I think rather than incentives, what is needed more widely on an international level for solar is […] getting out of the way and letting the industry deploy. […] I consulted with my PV Magazine USA editors just earlier, and they were telling me that […] they're seeing much much more NIMBYism activity on a state by state level […] and putting roadblocks up in the way for solar. But it also applies to things like grid access […]. So I think rather than saying, we need to alter tariffs, or we need to provide you with upfront subsidies, it's […] clearing the way and letting us get on with it a little bit.”
Podcast: Political Climate
Episode: “COP26: Mobilizing Trillions in Climate Finance”
Hosts: Brandon Hurlbut, Shane Skelton & Julia Pyper
Guest: Justin Guay | Director for Global Climate Strategy | The Sunrise Project
Category: 📄 Carbon Policy
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 47 min | 🗓️ 11/12/2021
Selected Quote:
[10:22] “What the $130 trillion [commitment from the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ)] means is that the balance sheet of every financial institution that has signed up to GFANZ […] is counted towards that figure. So basically, it's all of the assets of all of these institutions theoretically pledged towards being managed to a net zero transition by 2050. On the surface, that seems like a big deal. […] The problem is, as soon as you lift up the hood, and look underneath, there's not a whole lot there. And worryingly […], they are pretty clearly trying to avoid the tough decisions. Namely, what are we going to do about the finances falling to coal, oil and gas. […] $4 trillion has been lent from global banks around the world to fossil fuels, just since the Paris Agreement alone. All those same banks have joined GFANZ. And the question becomes if you didn't get the message in Paris, are you getting the message in Glasgow? Are you really going to change? And I think that's the the healthy skepticism that GFANZ has been met with here in Glasgow.”
Podcast: Carbon Removal Newsroom
Episode: “Carbon Removal at COP26”
Host: Radhika Moolgavkar
Guest: David Morrow | Director of Research | Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University
Category: 📄 Carbon Policy
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 31 min | 🗓️ 11/12/2021
Selected Quote:
[9:49] “No one's going to be in a real position anytime soon to be net negative and really start cleaning up historical emissions. And so other than those energy producing forms of CDR, I think […] short term, maybe even medium term it is about growing and diversifying the CDR industry. And diversifying […] in the sense of developing a broader range of technologies and practices to do this, so that different societies or communities […] can adopt the technologies and practices that make the most sense for them in their context. And then looking […] out longer term, you get to the negative, you get to potentially large CDR industries cleaning up historical emissions, and cleaning up […] the bits of industrial emissions or other emissions that we can't manage to eliminate yet.”
Podcast: Volts
Episode: “An Introduction to Energy's Hottest New Trend: 24/7 Carbon-Free Electricity”
Host: David Roberts
Category: ⚡Renewable Energy
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 26 min | 🗓️ 11/12/2021
Selected Quote:
[0:28] “When a company or city claims to be 100% powered by clean energy, what it typically means is that it has tallied up its electricity consumption, purchased an equal amount of carbon free energy or CFE and called it even. That's fine as far as it goes. But now, the next horizon of voluntary climate action has come into view. A […] few companies and cities aspire not just to offset their consumption with CFE on a yearly basis, but to match their consumption with CFE production every hour of every day all year long. Running on clean energy 24/7 […] is the new hotness.”
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💧 Water
Podcast: (don't) Waste Water!
Episode: Simplifying Onsite Water Reuse (Original Title: "Central Water Management Networks won’t Handle 2050. Time for an Epic Move?")
Host: Antoine Walter
Guest: Aaron Tartakovsky | CEO & Co-Founder | Epic Cleantec
Category: 🤖 Technology
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 51 min | 🗓️ 11/10/2021
Selected Quote:
[12:28] “Epic Cleantech does on site wastewater treatment and reuse, which means we're going into large buildings or groups of buildings, taking wastewater that you would normally send to the sewer, we are capturing that wastewater, treating it and then reusing it in the building for non potable applications, things like toilet flushing, urinal, flushing, irrigation, cooling towers, laundry. And when you add up all of these different non potable applications, you can sometimes get up to 95% of the building’s water use can be provided by recycled water sources.”
Podcast: waterloop
Episode: “Tracking the Tides with Tech”
Host: Travis Loop
Guests: Brian Glazer & Nicole Elko | Co-Founders | Hohonu
Category: 🤖 Technology
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 37 min | 🗓️ 11/16/2021
Selected Quote:
[32:41] BG: “By 2030, the national median high tide flooding events are probably going to increase by 2 to 3 times and 5 to 15 times by 2050. Along the US coastlines alone, there's $120 billion real estate that's at risk of flooding twice a month by 2050. And the communities need access to be able to start to plan for how to approach this, because […] that can't happen at the federal government level, it has to happen from the community level. And the first way to start thinking about planning for mitigation is to actually have local information on the physical environment.”
Podcast: The Water Values Podcast
Episode: “Outcome Based Contracting”
Host: Dave McGimpsey
Guest: Alyson Watson | CEO | Woodard & Curran
Category: 🚰 Utilities
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 33 min | 🗓️ 11/16/2021
Selected Quote:
[13:13] “We really can't expect people to just suddenly start thinking in terms of outcomes, when that has just not been […] our education and that's not been how we've approached things historically. So what we can do […] is to start talking this way internally. So start thinking about, what [have] we traditionally measured and tracked? And how might we evolve from those traditional KPIs […] to talking about outcomes? And that can be something like, instead of talking about profits, for example, what are we actually trying to achieve with those profits? […] Our goals instead of X dollars could be we want to reinvest in our people to this level, we want to provide this level of opportunities to our staff, we want to be able to make this level of contribution to charitable organizations.”
Podcast: (don't) Waste Water!
Episode: “18 Months Left to Close the Gap”
Host: Antoine Walter
Guest: Mina Guli | CEO & Co-Founder | Thirst Foundation
Category: 🗣️ Opinion
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 1 hr 1 min | 🗓️ 11/16/2021
Selected Quote:
[12:16] “We are all living in the water crisis. […] By 2030, there's going to be a 40% gap between the demand for water and the supply of water available. Right now 3 billion people don't have access to adequate hand washing facilities in the middle of a pandemic, which is disgraceful. Deforestation gets front page news, but our wetlands are disappearing, […] four times faster than a rainforest. These are horrifying statistics. But […] we're numb to these problems, we're numb to the images, we're numb to a lot of these statistics and they just feel like numbers on a page. We need to bring these numbers to life. And we need to help people to understand that these aren't just numbers on a page. They're real people's lives in places all over the world. And they're not someone else's problem. They’re our problem too. And that is because water goes into everything we use, we buy and we consume every single day.”
Podcast: Water Nerds
Episode: “Minerals In Drinking Water”
Host: Analies Ross-Dyjak
Category: 🔬 Research
Apple | 🕰️ 15 min | 🗓️ 11/16/2021
Selected Quote:
[6:26] “Is it true that some bottled water companies add minerals back into water? Yes, this is true. And it kind of seems ridiculous. So basically, when bottled water companies are treating the water, they'll usually strip the water completely of pretty much everything [...] and then actually add minerals back in, mostly due to it not tasting good without minerals. So minerals, add that crisp, refreshing taste that water typically has. […] This is actually also a marketing tool used by a lot of bottled water companies as well.”
