🏆 Top 8 Climate Podcasts from this Past Week

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⚡ Carbon & Energy

"Europe’s Looming Energy Crisis" | Today, Explained

Guest: Jen Kirby | Reporter | Vox
Time Saved: 22 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[16:01] JK: "The German government has agreed to cut gas consumption by about 15% between now and March of next year to avoid gas shortages and spiraling prices, which is a target that the European Union has set. [...] The government has taken a lot of other measures, [...] like monuments and statues [...] are not lit up at night anymore. [...] In Munich [...] street lights are turned off at odd hours to save energy. [...] So there are all of these little measures in addition to these larger campaigns, which are just encouraging people to cut back on energy, [for example to take] colder [and] shorter showers."

"Whatever Floats Your Wind Turbine" | Switched On

Guests: Oliver Metcalfe | Head of Wind Research | BloombergNEF &
Luisa Amorim | Wind Analyst | BloombergNEF
Time Saved: 39 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[32:33] OM: "One of the benefits of looking at floating wind is that not only can you look for the windiest sites, but you can also start to look at more sites from an environmental perspective as well. So as part of the permitting process for any wind project, whether it's onshore offshore, bottom-fixed or floating, you have to carry out environmental studies to look at what the impact will be on marine mammals on birds as well. When you're looking at floating wind, you can look at vastly more sites, because you can look at more and more water depths, and deeper water depths. So that allows you to pick and choose where you build a project. So it hopefully will have the minimal environmental impact as well."

"Grasslands: The Unsung Carbon Hero" | Short Wave

Guest: Julia Rosen | Journalist
Time Saved: 12 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[6:32] JR: "[Some people] describe grasslands as the inverse of the rainforest. What we see at the surface is just these little blades of grass, [...] but underground is this huge network of roots that can go six to eight feet deep. Some of the prairie flowers can go up to 20 feet deep, but really it functionally lives underground. And that's why it's so resilient and so interesting. [...] It's got all these elevate storage organs for the plants, the things that [they] need to survive the winter or to bounce back after a fire or grazing, that's all underground, so it's safe. And then they're photosynthesizing all the time. They're producing all these sugars, and then they're pumping carbon underground all the time."

"Financing Clean Energy in Developing Economies" | Columbia Energy Exchange

Guest: Mafalda Duarte | CEO | Climate Investment Funds
Time Saved: 51 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[21:09] MD: "[Globally] we have [...] [an] 50% increase in energy prices from last year [and] 21% increase in food prices from last year. [...] [This] hits developing countries disproportionately, because their energy bills are much higher as a percentage of GDP than developed countries. [...] Fiscally, the countries are in a really difficult situation, [which] makes the climate discussions and certainly COP27 extremely challenging. [...] The narrative over the last few years has been one of [...]  everybody is moving away from fossil fuels, including them. And now they are seeing because of the war in Ukraine, that developed countries are actually coming back to fossil fuels."

Electric Cars for Everyone | My Climate Journey

Guest: Khaled Hassounah | CEO & Co-Founder | Ample
Time Saved: 1 Hour 2 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[23:51] KH: "We think of ourselves actually as a gas station for an electric car. [...] In the same way that today once you run out of gas, you just stop somewhere and get gas and then go back on the road, [...] every time you run out of charge, you just stop at our station, our robots [...] put new ones in and you drive with a with a full charge. And our idea is that they are abundantly available everywhere."

💧 Food & Water

Rethinking Water | (don't) Waste Water!

Guest: Seth Siegel | Author
Time Saved: 28 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[3:23] SS: "Water is so fundamental and so basic that our risk [is], we take it for granted. And one of the things that you do when you take things for granted is that you don't rethink paradigms. [...] We're not charged the right amount of money for water. That's to say we're not charged enough. [...] We have agreed to allow our water systems run by our mayors, which is a big mistake, because they will never want to raise water rates as their publics will see it as a tax, even if that means inferior water, inferior health of water, [...] inadequate staff, [and] inferior software."

"Investing in Global Foodtech from Australia" | Tech4Climate

Guest: Phil Morle | Partner | Main Sequence Ventures
Time Saved: 1 Hour 7 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[35:25] PM: "If you do a consumer study on GMO, most consumers will tell you they think it's bad. If you say why it is bad, though, most consumers will say they don't know. [...]  If you're thinking about eating food, who wants to eat something that's got a genetically modified organism? [...] It's just the wrong word. [...] But we need to talk about it, because this is how we're going to actually feed ourselves. [...] I personally believe there is no version of the future where we are going back to natural farming methods to feed the 10 billion people that are going to be on the earth. We need to do it another way."

"Creating Cheese Without the Cow" | The Consumer VC

Guest: Matt Gibson | Co-Founder & CEO | New Culture
Time Saved: 30 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[3:58] "Cheese is by far [...] the most unsustainable dairy product, [...] [because] it's extremely resource intensive. Cheese is generally considered the third worst food product after beef and lamb for things such as greenhouse gas emissions [and] land usage. [For] water usage, it can be considered the most resource intensive animal product. And what makes it even worse, in my opinion, is the fact that the current plant-based cheese options don't recreate the dairy cheese experience."