Welcome to this week’s free edition of PodSnacks. Discover selected quotes from the 10 most recently covered climate episodes. Upgrade to a paid plan to receive the full PodSnacks summaries daily.
💧 Water
Podcast: Talking Under Water
Episode: “The Future of One Water — Climate, Equity & Recovering Stronger”
Host: Bob Crossen
Guest: Renée Willette | Vice President of Programs & Strategy | US Water Alliance
Category: 🗣️ Opinion
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 29 min | 🗓️ 10/22/2021
[11:47] “I don't think you can really understate the importance of water equity. And it's related to climate. […] The water access, the drought we saw, severe storms in the south this past year, that left millions of people without drinking water, and disproportionately impacted communities of color and low income communities. So […] at the Alliance, we really believe that water equity is aligned and connected with every other aspect of the One Water movement. You really can't have a One Water movement without water equity.”
Podcast: Smart Water Solutions
Episode: Water Purification Powered by the Photons of the Sun (Original Title: "William Janssen: Desolenator")
Host: Hakim El Fadil
Guest: William Janssen | CEO | Desolenator
Category: 🤖 Technology
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 57 min | 🗓️ 10/20/2021
[11:00] “We do not only harvest electricity from a solar array, we also harvest the heat of the sun. […] Heat has a very big advantage. […] We as humanity have stored heat for hundreds of years, for thousands of years. And storing heat is cheap, it is reliable and you can do it at large scale without very big engineering problems. So we harvest a lot of heat during the day and we use this heat 24/7 so we can basically run our installation 24/7. We are no longer dependent on whether the sun is actually shining. That gives us the opportunity to hook up to a municipal water supply, because we can supply water during the daytime but also during the night.”
Podcast: waterloop
Episode: “Estimation of Evapotranspiration”
Host: Travis Loop
Guests: Robyn Grimm | Director of Climate Resilient Water Information Systems | Environmental Defense Fund &
Forrest Melton | Research Scientist | California State University Monterey Bay
Category: 🔬 Research
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 37 min | 🗓️ 10/26/2021
[3:28] RG: “We like to say that managing water without an understanding of ET (Evapotranspiration) is kind of like trying to manage a household budget without really understanding how much money has been spent day to day. Despite its importance though only a small minority of farmers across the West have been able to use this data, in part because it's been so difficult and expensive to get in the past. And similarly, small water managers have also been unable to access this data. And water management really is truly a local undertaking. So being able to level the playing field in the way OpenET does is really critical. The fact that we're making this data widely accessible to both farmers and water managers alike, big and small, we think is a really important piece in meeting some of the water management challenges we're facing today.”
Podcast: The Future of Water
Episode: “What Did We Learn at the World’s Largest Wastewater Conference?”
Host: Reese Tisdale
Guest: Eric Bindler | Research Director, Digital Water | Bluefield Research
Category: 🔬 Research
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 41 min | 🗓️ 10/26/2021
[27:37] “What's […] always interesting to me is to see a company that's pretty well established in another industry that's trying to find a way to push into water. And I do think we've seen a lot of that, especially since COVID. […] When we had that period of time, when so many businesses were shut down, so many industries were kind of shuttered, […] a lot of the vendors that supply water, were able to kind of stay up and running because they were supplying a critical infrastructure sector. And so I think that's maybe further increased that curiosity about the water industry from outside, from adjacent industries. And also […] water is in the news a lot. And I think it's really pushing people to think about how they could adopt their existing technologies, their capabilities, their expertise to help solve problems in the water industry.”
Podcast: AquaPod
Episode: “Water Quality and Flow Monitoring in a Changing Environment”
Hosts: Adam Hobson & Helen Taylor
Guest: Chris Davis | Member | Lower 48 Instruments
Category: 🤖 Technology
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 41 min | 🗓️ 10/20/2021
[35:56] “I own a farm. And […] we've had development start to crop up over the last 20 years surrounding the farm. And I've been monitoring a creek on my farm for years. And when I built the new home on the property, […] the engineer who came out to do the assessments told me that, I needed to have a six foot culvert. […] My grandfather […] was a farmer, [said] I would triple that, if I were you. […] So I did. […] When I first put the culvert in 20 years ago, on average, I had about an inch worth of depth going through that culvert. Now, as of last year, I've got about 12 inches for the depth. […] And we're talking about averages, not spikes. […] This is directly due to run off. So I think that as different places, whether it be an university, whether it be a city, etc, start paying more attention to these runoff events from rain, and paying attention to the hard scapes that get put in versus permeable solutions. I think that's something that can really benefit everybody.”
⚡ Carbon & Energy
Podcast: My Climate Journey
Episode: Investment Portfolios for Solving Climate Change (Original Title: "Startup Series: Carbon Collective")
Host: Jason Jacobs
Guest: Zach Stein | Co-Founder & CEO | Carbon Collective
Category: 💸 Investing
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 51 min | 🗓️ 10/21/2021
[45:54] “We just recently launched […] our Green 401(K) Program. So we got a lot of founder friends in the climate space. And people are like, […] I want to offer 401(K) to my employees, that's a really important perk. The problem is […] 401(K) are traditionally really conservative. […] If you're matching your employees’ money into fossil fuel companies, they're not in any additional into climate solutions […]. So while your company might be working really hard on solar on the one hand, your money is working on the status quo, and doubling down on that. And that just doesn't make sense.”
Podcast: The Interchange
Episode: “What the Frack Is Happening With Natural Gas?”
Host: Shayle Kann
Guest: Leslie Palti-Guzman | President | Gas Vista
Category: 💬 Opinion
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 30 min | 🗓️ 10/23/2021
[23:15] “[Is] the takeaway from this crisis […] going to be to double down on renewables or to double down on gas? […] I think we need both actually. […] Many countries would want to reduce their vulnerability to fluctuation of commodity prices, and be more independent and have their own renewable production and eyes on hydrogen and other fuels, or even […] rethink the phasing out of nuclear in some countries and reviving nuclear plants. But I think [it’s] also apparent to go into more gas, because after all we need it for the energy transition, and we need a backup to intermittent renewable, but we need it to be green. So I think it's going to be potentially new investments, but into leak free, reduced methane, low carbon gas that would flow into the market.”
Podcast: My Climate Journey
Episode: Google's Research on Nuclear Energy (Original Title: "Ross Koningstein, Director Emeritus at Google")
Host: Jason Jacobs
Guest: Ross Koningstein | Director Emeritus | Google
Category: ⚡ Renewable Energy
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 57 min | 🗓️ 10/25/2021
[11:26] “Everybody understands a portfolio approach to accomplishing any kind of goal, whether it's in business or politics […]. And yet, we're really not playing that game particularly effectively in climate. We're heavily loaded on activities we can accomplish now. And humanity tends to overestimate what it can do in the short term and it really underestimates what it can do in the long run. And so while not trying to say we shouldn't be doing the short term efforts, I think we need to add a bunch of efforts that are geared towards creating more options for us in the future to really address major challenges in solving climate change.”
Podcast: Climate 21
Episode: “Sequestering Carbon, Increasing Biodiversity & Alleviating Poverty”
Host: Tom Raftery
Guest: Walid Al Saqqaf | Co-Founder | Rebalance Earth
Category: ☁️ Carbon Reduction
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 52 min | 🗓️ 10/27/2021
[10:17] “Our mission […] is that we're here to build this global platform for ecosystem services to fight both climate change, biodiversity loss, and to reduce poverty. Because those three points all interlinked. […] Keystone species, such as forest elephants, great whales, […] or an ostrich are a type of species which are small in number, but have a massive impact on their ecosystem. […] They can regulate water, nutrition, food, […] they just manage the whole ecosystem, in terms of all the different species that are around. If they disappear, the whole ecosystem risks collapsing. The point is that what they do within those ecosystems is what's called the ecosystem services, they maintain it.”
Podcast: Political Climate
Episode: “Is American Offshore Wind Becoming a Reality?”
Hosts: Brandon Hurlbut, Shane Skelton & Julia Pyper
Guest: Heather Zichal | CEO | American Clean Power Association
Category: ⚡ Renewable Energy
Apple | Spotify | 🕰️ 41 min | 🗓️ 10/28/2021
[21:55] “What's exciting is that we are finally […] standing up offshore wind in the United States for the first time. […] We've got 42 megawatts here in the United States versus 24,000 megawatts between Europe [and] the UK and 10,000 megawatts in Asia. So the United States is behind. But I think we have a huge opportunity to catch up. And we also have an opportunity to learn from the other countries that have been deploying this technology. […] So we're really excited about the goal that the Biden administration put forward of deploying 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2030. We as an industry […] think it's aggressive and bold, but achievable.”
