Enough with the "problem porn." We all know the climate crisis is a big deal. This podcast is entirely about solutions and the people who are building them. Entrepreneurs are inventing miracles; the business world is shifting; individuals are overhauling their lives; an entirely new economy is being born. Don't be the last one in.
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In part two of my two-part field trip to Livermore, California, I sit down with Inertia Enterprises’ third co-founder — Annie Kritcher, the chief scientist at Inertia and a longtime physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Annie was the lead designer behind the December 2022 National Ignition Facility (NIF) shot that achieved ignition — a self-heating fusion “burning plasma” that produced more fusion energy out than was delivered to the target. In this episode, Annie walks us through...
Fusion has been “ten years away” for decades — but one corner of the field just crossed a line that changes the conversation. In December 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s National Ignition Facility achieved ignition: a self-sustaining fusion reaction that produced net energy. And they’ve repeated it. So what happens when you take the only fusion approach that’s proven to work, and focus less on new physics… and more on building the industrial supply chain to do it again and again, cheaply...
If you’re on a mission to make your home greener, solar panels might seem like an obvious place to start. But for renters, apartment dwellers, and homeowners who can’t afford a traditional rooftop solar installation, solar has long been out of reach — until now. This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly talks with Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, about a simple climate technology that's already taken Europe by storm: plug-in solar. Also known as balcony solar, these small solar systems...
We need to triple global energy production by 2050. Renewables are scaling fast, but the real wild card that could change everything might just be fusion. The physics and engineering are closer than ever, but there’s a critical materials problem standing between us and unlimited clean energy. This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly speaks with Dr. John Elling, a Los Alamos chemist turned serial entrepreneur who’s working on a solution that he believes will change the world. Both fusion and ne...
You’re doing all the right things to make your home greener: you switched to solar and induction, you remember your reusable bags, and you always compost your scraps. But some of the biggest climate impacts of the building you live or work in? They were locked in the day it was built — in the concrete, the steel, the glass. And that matters, because the built environment accounts for roughly 42% of global emissions. This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly sits down with Ben Stapleton, the CEO...
This episode explores Lunar Energy's integrated home energy ecosystem, featuring modular batteries, AI-driven optimization, and financial benefits like up to $2500 in annual savings. Founder Kunal Girotra discusses the shift from fragmented solutions to a cohesive system that also functions as a "distributed power plant" (DPP). The discussion highlights how DPPs provide crucial grid stability, policy challenges for utilities, and the vision of a home battery becoming an essential appliance that pays you back, underscored by a showroom tour demonstrating real-time energy management and outage control.
Washington and the COP conferences get all the headlines, but some of the most creative and effective climate action in the world is emerging from city halls — and Denver's Office of Climate Action is one of the best examples of what's possible. This week, Molly zooms in on the Mile High City as she talks with Chelsea Warren, Marketing and Communications Manager for Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency. Chelsea has spent years building one of the country's most effect...
Trillions of dollars worth of goods move around the planet every year, and a shocking amount is lost, spoiled, or discarded. That wasted food, medicine, and equipment isn’t just a business problem; it’s a massive, underappreciated climate problem. This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly talks with Krenar Komoni, CEO and founder of Tive, a supply chain visibility company that helps businesses track and monitor shipments in real time. What started as a GPS tracker for his father-in-law's trucki...
Data centers don't exactly have a reputation for being climate heroes… but what if they could be? This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly sits down with Jasper de Vries, co-founder and CEO of Lucend, to talk about the surprisingly wild world of data center optimization — and why the industry has been leaving billions of dollars and millions of megawatt hours on the table. In this conversation, Jasper explains how Lucend’s platform uses machine learning and sensor data to make data centers dra...
Less than 2% of all philanthropic giving goes to climate, and a big reason why is something Greg Rock calls "donor paralysis." People care, but the landscape is so complex that many well-meaning donors don’t take action. This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly sits down with Greg Rock, Executive Director of 1.5°Climate, a free national donor collaborative that's borrowing the energy of VC pitch competitions to make climate philanthropy more accessible, more exciting, and more impactful. With ...
There’s no shortage of stats to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of our food waste problem: A whopping 40% of food grown for human consumption goes to waste; $400 billion worth of food gets thrown away every year in the U.S — roughly 1.5% of GDP; Food waste is responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Must we go on? That’s why, after building the Nest Thermostat, Harry Tannenbaum and Matt Rogers turned their attention to our kitchens. They created Mill, a sleek appliance that quie...
The grid is getting smarter, cleaner, and infinitely more complicated all at once. Enter Gridmatic, a company using artificial intelligence to do what old-school grid modeling can’t: predict when the wind will blow, when prices will spike, and exactly when to charge or discharge a battery. This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly is joined by David Miller, Chief Commercial Officer at Gridmatic, to nerd out about why managing a grid full of renewables is so much harder than managing one full of...
Let's be honest: the climate conversation is having a bit of a PR crisis. The word ‘climate’ itself has become politically charged, federal funding is under threat, and media coverage has gone quiet. But the technologies are still working, the solutions are still scaling, and the people building them haven't gone anywhere. So how do you keep telling that story? This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Josh Garrett, CEO and co-founder of Redwood Climate Communications, a specialty...
What if solar panels on your roof, a home battery in your garage, and the EV in your driveway could together make you money — while simultaneously solving the grid capacity crisis? This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly sits down with Marco Krapels, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Enphase Energy, to discuss what surging data center energy demand means for the future of residential clean energy — and why Enphase thinks the answer is turning millions of American homes into a distributed, AI...
American businesses waste 25-35% of the energy they use. So why aren’t more business owners doing something about it? For most, the problem is too complex and too expensive — there’s no single fix, there are 30 or 40, and calculating the ROI on all of them is no easy task. That’s where Budderfly comes in. Budderfly is an energy-as-a-service company with a beautifully simple premise: they take over a business’s energy bill entirely — funding all the upgrades at their own risk, and pocketing a mar...
99% of registered fleets belong to small and mid-size businesses — but the EV industry wasn't built for them. High upfront costs, years-long waits for grid access, and charging solutions designed for large operators have left the backbone of the American economy behind. This week on Everybody in the Pool, we meet a founder who’s changing that. Galina Russell, co-founder of Mitra EV, built a turnkey solution that bundles electric trucks and vans with charging infrastructure, so plumbers, electric...
Three million homes are damaged by natural disasters in the US every year — and with a billion-dollar storm hitting roughly every ten days, that number is only growing. But the system for repairing affected homes is stuck in the past, with mountains of paperwork, fragmented funding, and rampant fraud leaving vulnerable homeowners stranded. This week on Everybody in the Pool , Molly sits down with Susan Hunt Stevens, the founder and CEO of Tessi, a platform working to fix what she calls the “brok...
The impacts of climate change are hitting the world everywhere, all at once — making climate adaptation more urgent than ever before. This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re flipping the script on climate adaption; no longer viewing it as a funding gap, but as an investment opportunity that could bring lots of types of finance to the table for returns and impact. Niall Murphy, co-founder and managing partner of Morphosis, sits down with Molly to discuss how the world can scale solutions for an...
This week on Everybody in the Pool, another sexy gadget that doubles as a grid asset! We take a field trip to the Berkeley headquarters of Copper, which is reimagining the humble stove as a powerful tool for decarbonization. Their flagship product, Charlie, is a 30-inch induction range with a built-in battery that allows for plug-and-play installation, precise cooking, and the potential to support grid stability. We talk about: How a battery in a stove can reduce the need for electrical infrastr...
Heat pumps are having a moment. Last year, the U.S. passed China to become the world's number one market for heat pumps—and they're not slowing down. But while heat pumps are efficient and effective on paper, they haven't always been objects of desire. Until now. This week, Molly talks to Paul Lambert, CEO and co-founder of Quilt, about building a heat pump company that's equal parts climate solution and consumer product. Paul explains how his team is reimagining the mini-split heat pump—not jus...
Buildings account for a third of America's greenhouse gas emissions, yet until recently, we've been flatlined on progress. That's changing—fast. This week, Molly talks to Panama Bartholomy, founder of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, about how an unlikely alliance of utilities, manufacturers, installers, and nonprofits is transforming the way we heat, cool, and power our homes. Panama explains how finding 80% common ground among competitors created unstoppable momentum—and how the U.S. ju...
This episode features Quinn Nakayama from PG&E's GRID division, discussing innovative strategies to meet California's aggressive clean energy goals amidst rapidly growing demand from electric vehicles and data centers. They explore how smart load management, advanced grid technologies, and even temporary use of data center backup generators can avoid massive infrastructure builds, reduce electricity rates, and maintain the state's path to net-zero by 2045. The discussion highlights a shift from capital-intensive expansion to strategic optimization and collaboration with startups.
This week on Everybody in the Pool, we're diving into the world of protein production — in reverse. Recently, the USDA released a new food pyramid that controversially places red meat and dairy at the top. That, combined with the global and particularly American obsession with protein, make it a great time to talk to Ross Milne, CEO of Leaft Foods. Leaft is developing a groundbreaking technology that extracts protein directly from alfalfa leaves, potentially reducing emissions by 97% compared to...
Molly Wood features an episode from the S2G Podcast, where experts Matt Walker and Larson Mettler delve into the evolving protein industry. They discuss increasing global demand, significant supply chain challenges for seafood, beef, and poultry, and how producers are responding with technological advancements in animal feed and alternative proteins. The conversation also explores the potential of hybrid and cultivated meat products, highlighting cross-sector learnings and envisioning a future protein system that is localized, data-driven, and regenerative.
This episode features Nathan Silvernail, co-founder and CEO of Plantd, discussing his journey from SpaceX to tackling climate change. Plantd is creating a tree-free, carbon-negative alternative to engineered wood (OSB), aiming to decarbonize the built environment. They are building a vertically integrated system, from growing the biomass on repurposed land to manufacturing the material and generating co-benefits like biochar and energy, all while replacing traditional building methods without demanding builders change.
This week on Everybody in the Pool , we’re diving into one of the biggest bottlenecks in the clean energy transition: critical minerals —the lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and precious metals we need for EVs, batteries, and the grid. The problem isn’t that we’re running out. It’s that extraction and refining are expensive, polluting, and increasingly constrained by geopolitics. My guest is Adam Uliana , co-founder and CEO of Chemfinity Technologies , a startup spun out of UC Berkeley that’s bu...
This week on Everybody in the Pool , we’re talking about one of the biggest blockers to real climate action: amazing solutions that never scale because no one pays for them . My guest is Grant Canary , founder and CEO of Mast Reforestation , a company rebuilding forests after catastrophic wildfires — and reinventing carbon credits so that reforestation can actually fund itself. Mast takes the most expensive part of post-fire recovery — dealing with hundreds of dead, unstable, methane-emitting tr...
This week on Everybody in the Pool , we’re starting in full aspirational mode (with one of my least climate-friendly obsessions) — with iconic classic cars rebuilt as state-of-the-art EVs . Think: vintage Porsches, Land Rovers, Pagodas, even a GT40… all stripped to bare metal, fully restored, and reborn as clean-air electric machines. Yeah, I’m dying over here. My guest is Justin Lunny , founder and CEO of Everrati , a company that electrifies beloved classic cars while also building a cutting-e...
This week on Everybody in the Pool , we’re talking about one of the least-visible but largest waste problems in the world: food processing waste . Every time fruits or vegetables are peeled, chopped, juiced, or processed, mountains of perfectly good plant material get thrown out or sold for pennies. It’s expensive, it’s inefficient, and it’s a huge climate problem. My guest is Michelle Ruiz , founder and CEO of Hyfe, a company unlocking the massive value hidden in this “waste.” Hyfe has develope...
This week on Everybody in the Pool , more power, right beneath our feet. Even as the United States has been attempting to stop or divest from renewable energy sources, there’s one kind of baseload power that doesn’t make anyone mad: geothermal. So this week we’re talking not just geothermal, but next-generation geothermal . My guest is Cindy Taff , CEO of Sage Geosystems , a company developing flexible, modular geothermal systems that can provide both baseload renewable power and incredible long...
