🏆 Top 10 Climate Podcasts from this Past Week

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Every day Refind picks 7 links from around the web that make you smarter, tailored to your interests. Loved by 50k+ curious minds.

⚡ Carbon & Energy

Podcast: "Winter is Coming, Europe's Energy Crisis, [...] & more" | All-In
Hosts: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg
Time Saved: 1 Hour 12 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[36:53] CP: "I think that the European system is going to be put under stress, because there are really a bunch of different countries with very different incentives right now. Where some countries are in desperate need of energy, some countries can probably stave it off for a little bit longer, other countries are so adamantly focused on their position on Russia over and above any source of energy that they may need or don't have. [...] Ultimately, what we're learning in Europe is that irrespective of what you morally and ethically believe is right in the Ukraine, [...] the minute that you are affected at home, where you cannot take care of your children, or heat your house, all bets are off. And I think this just goes to show you that if you're going to [...] engage in proactive foreign policy, you need to make sure that domestically, you don't have any Achilles heels. And Europe had a massive Achilles heel, which is energy."

Podcast: "Is California Jump-Starting the Electric Vehicle Revolution?" | The Daily
Guest: Neal E. Boudette | Automotive Correspondent | The New York Times
Time Saved: 32 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[5:18] NB: "California wants to shift, but the industry is ahead of the state. They have been talking about similar goals. So this is a case where California is putting out some regulations and they're catching up to the industry [...]. In the long history of this has always been California pushing and the automakers resisting and fighting and dragging their feet in some ways to go along with the least amount of effort and least amount of expense to meet what California wants. And so California's announcement, while it's impressive, that's something that the auto industry has been talking about for a year and a half now."

Podcast: "Fighting Climate Change with Carbon Removal" | Climate 21
Guest: Brennan Spellacy | CEO | Patch
Time Saved: 28 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[27:17] BS: "The one thing I want to leave everyone with on this chat is really how do we focus on just getting more investment in aggregate and placing more bets. And then once we actually have clarity on what truly works and what doesn't, then we can actually double and triple down. We've done that with renewables globally so far, where global investment in renewables is something like 300 or 400 times that any sort of carbon abatement we know that works. But we haven't really figured out what are those carbon abatement strategies that scale and that's going to be 1/5 of the problem. And so eventually, it's gonna have to be 1/5 of the investment."

Podcast: "Why Heat Waves Become Deadly" | The Carbon Copy
Guest: Dr. Eric Klinenberg | Professor | NYU,
Sonal Jessel | Director of Policy | WEACT,
Danielle Renwick | Editor | Nexus Media News
Time Saved: 25 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[6:44] AH: "A study that came out a few years ago [...] found that neighborhoods that were formerly redlined today [...] are about 5 degrees hotter than neighborhoods that were not. And that number is almost 13 degrees in Portland and 10 degrees in Minneapolis. [...] On a hot day, that difference can be the difference between life and death."

Podcast: Increasing the Scalability of Utility-Scale Solar | Watt It Takes
Guest: Matt Campbell | Co-Founder & CEO | Terabase Energy
Time Saved: 53 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[2:21] MC: "Terabase has built the first digital platform that integrates the whole lifecycle of a solar power plant, starting with early stage development, all the way through construction and operations. And what's unique about what we're doing is we have part of the platform in the digital world and part of it in the physical world. Up until now, the PV (photovoltaic) industry has built one terawatt, [...] but looking into the future, we need to build at least 50 terawatts of PV and we need to do it in half the time it took to build one terawatt."

Podcast: Moving Towards Massless | Climate Tech Cocktails
Guest: Raymond Weitekamp | Founder & CEO | polySpectra
Time Saved: 54 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[30:55] RW: "The massless mission is really to leverage distributed digital manufacturing to reduce global energy usage by 25% by 2050. And this comes out of a paper [...] from 2018 in the journal Energy Policy. [...] So the [first] core tenet of massless [is] [...] if you don't need to make something, don't do it. We've built some AR tools to help people have a massless preview of their product in augmented reality. The second one is less mass. So that's where lightweighting comes in. [...] Then three is less waste. So that's doing additive versus subtractive. So we're just making what we want in the exact shape that we want it. And ideally, only in the exact amount that the customer has ordered."

Podcast: "4 Steps to Sustainable Indoor Air Quality" | The Nexus Podcast
Guest: Christian Weeks | CEO | enVerid Systems
Time Saved: 1 Hour 8 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[21:49] "This concept we've been working on for a while [is] called sustainable indoor air quality. That is, how do we deliver better indoor air quality, that is also more energy efficient, and improves buildings' resilience to outdoor air pollution. And we think this is really relevant today, because of the [...] heightened focus on indoor air quality as a result of the pandemic. At the same time, we've got this climate agenda, [where] the drums are being louder and louder around building decarb, electrification, all these things. And there's concerns about indoor air, outdoor air quality [e.g. through wildfires]."

💧 Food & Water

Podcast: "The Water Crisis in Jackson, Mississippi" | Today, Explained
Guest: Kobee Vance | Reporter | Mississippi Public Broadcasting &
Darren Olson | Vice Chair | American Society of Civil Engineers
Time Saved: 22 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[24:03] DO: "We will see more things like Jackson, Mississippi. We're going to see more headlines out West with whole towns or states running out of water. But there's also the economic side of it as well. Every year this is costing the American household over $3,000 in hidden costs for our poor infrastructure. Whether that is having to fix tires, because the roads are in such poor condition that you blew a tire, having to buy bottled water, maybe the electric grid went down and so your refrigerator shut down and you have to buy new food."

Podcast: "Soy: The Protein We Love to Hate" | Climavores
Hosts: Tamar Haspel & Mike Grunwald
Time Saved: 44 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[38:17] MG: "As terrible as the deadzone [in the Gulf of Mexico] is, if you replace soy, it would be worse because soy requires less fertilizer than the alternatives. As bad as deforestation is, if you replace soy with a less efficient crop, you would have more deforestation. [...] If we replaced meat with miso or tofu or tempeh, then absolutely that would actually be better. And in fairness, [...] if we replaced meat with plants that weren't soy based, that would also reduce our impact on the land. Don't blame soy for the problems of the food system that in some ways it makes it less awful."

Podcast: "Food for Thought" | Tech4Climate
Guest: Björn Witte | CEO | Blue Horizon
Time Saved: 1 Hour 3 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[14:25] BW: "We most likely will be 10 billion people on this planet in the next 30 years. And it's simply not sustainable [...] if you eat like the Swiss do today, or the Germans, we will probably need three times the planet. And if you eat like the Americans, you probably need five planets. [...] [Foodtech] is a solution with a really big impact [that] is 70-80% bigger than all transport combined. Every plane, every truck, every big ship combined, has way less impact on the planet than a sustainable food system."