🏆 Top 8 Climate Podcasts from this Past Week

🏝️ PodSnacks is taking a summer break and will be back 09/12!

⚡ Carbon & Energy

Podcast: Plastic Waste Transformed | My Climate Journey
Guest: Jacob Nathan | Co-Founder & CEO | Epoch Biodesign
Time Saved: 47 Minutes

[13:30] JN: "Enzymes [...] are these incredible little nanomachines that exist in nature. [...] They enable us to digest food, they enable plants to turn CO2 and water into oxygen and sugars. And they really sort of make biology work. So in a similar way to our bodies converting food into energy, we are developing plastic eating enzymes that can take plastic and convert them into chemicals. And these are exactly the same chemicals that today we would make from fossil carbon. So what we can do is we can create an end of life solution for these unrecyclable plastics. [...] By doing that, we can also create chemicals out the other end that have a substantially reduced carbon footprint compared to the incumbent methods of chemical production that we have today."

Podcast: "A New Way of Procuring Energy" | The Interchange
Guest: Ryan Peusch | Founder & CEO | Zentility  
Time Saved: 32 Minutes

[7:04] RP: "For the longest time, [purchasing] has really been based on lowest price, or best contract terms, de-risking the buyer's portfolio of properties as much as possible. But now that a lot of these buyers are starting to look at their energy strategy [and] buying more renewables is actually becoming more like a corporate mandate, [...] pushed from the top of a company. And I see that trend continuing to happen."

Podcast: "Putting Beauty Products under the Microscope" | Hot Buttons
Time Saved: 46 Minutes

[10:44] RK: "We estimate there's about 121 billion units of beauty packaging annually. [...] Most things, in general in any industry are not recycled. At most 7 to 9% of plastics are recycled and most beauty packaging is plastics. But what makes beauty packaging squeezable, portable, twistable, generally attractive, and what makes them stand out on a sea of options is creating lots of different types of parts of even one individual product. So then you get into the disassembly issue. Recycling is all about aggregating uniform volumes of materials, so you can sell it. It's a commodity."

Podcast: "Did Joe Manchin just Save the Planet?" | Today, Explained
Guests: Li Zhou & Rebecca Leber | Reporter | Vox
Time Saved: 25 Minutes

[24:19] RL: "There have been a bunch of different analyzes from economic modelers looking at what the benefits this bill delivers versus the costs. And they've been unequivocal that this far outweighs what those fossil fuel projects do, that the climate benefits are considerable. Overall, the several different analyzes from groups [...] are saying that this bill delivers about 40% in emissions cuts by 2030. That is a much bigger number than where we were at without it."

💧 Food & Water

Podcast: "Changing Cooking Oil for the Better" | The Consumer VC
Guest: Jeff Nobbs | Founder & CEO | Zero Acre Farms
Time Saved: 36 Minutes

[19:20] JN: "Vegetable oil is the most consumed food in the world after rice and wheat. And we're making more of this stuff every year globally than beef, chicken, cheese, and shrimp combined. [...] And because it's doing so much harm, there's also this massive opportunity to have a really positive impact if we can replace all these vegetable oils with something else. [...] We think fermentation is the way to get there, but even if some fraction of our mission is achieved, the impact would be really really enormous."

Podcast: "Today's Food Crisis is a Postcard from our Warming Future" | Climavores  
Time Saved: 43 Minutes

[12:29] MG: "Scientists are saying that if climate change plays out the way it's currently playing out, you can see wheat yields around the world declined by a third. And that just means we're not going to have enough food. It means we're going to have to chop down the Amazon to grow it."

Podcast: "Fermenting Better Meat" | Carbotnic
Guest: Paul Shapiro | Co-Founder & CEO | The Better Meat Co.  
Time Saved: 38 Minutes

[11:28] PS: "Microbes are [our] animals, and they are way more efficient than animals. So with a cow, you might need 25 calories in to get one calorie out. However, with fermentation you're talking about way better ratios, down to like three to one. So basically, this is going to be way better than animal meat from a climate perspective."

Podcast: "AI versus Lead" | waterloop
Guest: Eric Schwartz | Co-Founder & CEO | BlueConduit  
Time Saved: 26 Minutes

[12:55] ES: "We're just at the point where we do have enough data from a variety of cities across 10 states, 50+ cities, where we are now making predictions at the aggregate level for a whole water system. Even though we have not worked with a client in that water system, we now have estimates for every water system in the country. How many lead service lines do we expect them to have right now? [...] And that is where I think there's a lot of power to some of these predictions to inform the way the states can start allocating their State Revolving Funds that are coming from the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act."