🏆 Top 8 Climate Podcasts from this Past Week

"Carbon Markets Demystified" | The Earthshot Podcast

Guest: Oliver Miltenberger | Consultant & Scholar
Time Saved: 58 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[11:46] OM: "The [carbon] marketplaces at their core are trying to internalize an externality, which is climate impact, and maybe rectify it through what ostensibly would be offset interventions. But if we can start doing that in this standalone arena called carbon markets, I think at some point economic decisions and policy decisions are just going to circumvent that external arena and say, we need to just fundamentally act differently and in everything that we do, we need to price carbon. And we need to price our impact on the environment. And we need to weigh the costs and benefits of damaging our ecosystems, and also the costs and benefits of not restoring ecosystems. These marketplaces are the place to innovate and the place to draw in imperative and attention. But there's a broader goal beyond it."

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⚡ Carbon & Energy

"How Well Does Soil actually Store Carbon?" | Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Guest: Eric Slessarev | Staff Scientist | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Time Saved: 34 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[17:00] ES: "There are a whole range of agricultural practices that were originally developed for perfectly good agronomic reasons that aren't actually related to sequestering atmospheric CO2. And that would include cover cropping, [no-till or agroforestry] [...]. What's happened over the last couple of decades is that there's been an increased interest in using these practices to also to fight climate change. There are difficulties though. All of these agricultural practices yield increases in the amount of organic carbon in soil. And organic carbon is not necessarily a long lived sink for atmospheric CO2. [...] One of these practices might succeed in building up some carbon, but the amount of time it sticks around is unclear, in that it will depend on future land use and future climate. [...] Conservation agriculture [...] shouldn't be treated as equivalent to a more durable or permanent carbon removal strategy."

"Can a Giant Seaweed Farm Help Curb Climate Change?" | Business Daily

Guests: John Auckland | Co-Founder | Seafields &
Victor Smetacek | Emeritus Professor
Time Saved: 18 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[2:02] JA: "Seafields is developing a hyperscale seaweed farm that it's going to be placed in the South Atlantic to grow the brown seaweed sargassum for the principal reason to sink in to the bottom of the ocean for carbon sequestration. [...] The eventual size of the farm is intended to be about 55,000 square kilometers, [...] about the same sort of size as Croatia. [...] That's the size we need to get to we believe to do a gigaton [of carbon sequestration] per annum."

"Using Finance To Drive Down Low Carbon Costs" | Climate 21

Guest: Adam Hearne | CEO | CarbonChain
Time Saved: 31 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[10:33] AH: "We've also seen the power of small incentives. So there's a case for a carbon tax bringing emissions down, if you tax x percent, you might see y percent reductions. But we've seen in this environment around debt facilities that if you just offer a small basis points discount on interest rate, you actually get a 20 fold or 50 fold reduction in carbon emissions. So it's good value for money for financial systems to do this [...] and I think it needs to be explored more in the coming years. So that the global markets, the invisible hands to markets can be directed towards these greener projects with very robust credentials behind them that show that they are on a decarbonisation pathway."

Reimagining Nature's Packaging | My Climate Journey

Guest: Insiya Jafferjee | CEO & Co-Founder | Shellworks
Time Saved: 49 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[8:24] IJ: "Plastic is actually many materials. And that's partially why you have a problem with managing it. [...] One of our principles [...] is how do you create mono material packaging, because most packaging is multiple layers of plastic. [...] A great example is we've been tackling cosmetic ingredients, which with the best of their intentions have been trying to move to natural ingredients. But then the trouble with natural ingredients is that they're very active and they have a shorter shelf life. And so they require maybe more problematic types of packaging."

💧 Food & Water

The Future of Food is Cell-Based | Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast

Guest: Lejjy Gafour | CEO | CULT Food Science
Time Saved: 30 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[12:45] LG: "CULT Food Science is the first of its kind platform in North America being publicly traded, focused on basically cell-based foods. [...] We invest on a global scale. [...] We also are focused on developing our own IP and spinning up companies where we see whitespace as well. In our current portfolio where we have investments kind of across the chain of products, everything from bioreactors to consumer products, so that there can be mutual benefit between the companies' work as well to really help things kick off."

"Water M&A, Recent Deals, Trends & Outlook" | The Future of Water

Guest: Reese Tisdale | President | Bluefield Research
Time Saved: 21 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[2:22] RT: "M&A activity is down across the board. It's not just the water sector. [...] And largely because of all the global uncertainty, whether it be energy prices in Europe, whether it be inflation globally, supply chain issues. [...] We've recorded 193 acquisitions [in the water sector] in 2022. [...] Last year, by the end of the year, we hit 511 deals."

"Localized Water Infrastructure" | The Water Values Podcast

Guests: Melissa Kelly | Staff Director & Attorney | Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources (CLEANR) &
Caroline Koch | Water Policy Director | WaterNow Alliance
Time Saved: 41 Minutes

Selected Quote:

[16:46] MK: "Our water systems are facing ever increasing stressors, [...] whether it's urban flooding, which is expected to increase by 45% by the end of the century, or the historic drought that we're experiencing [...] in the Southwest. And so communities all over the nation are looking for ways to build resiliency to climate change. And that's where localized water infrastructure (LWI) comes in."