In today’s episode, we cover: • Shayle’s journey from energy transition in the market intelligence space to climate change venture capital at Energy Impact Partners (EIP) • EIP, a VC with ~$1B in AUM whose LPs are a coalition of utilities • The sectors EIP invests in • Abe’s journey from Rockport Capital Partners, a cleantech private equity firm based, to cofounding Congruent Ventures in 2016 • A history of the first cleantech wave • Lessons learned • How the current interest in climate tech com...
Feb 24, 2020•46 min
In today’s episode, we cover: ● The Rebound Effect and the ironic implications of improving energy efficiency ● Harry’s journey into Climate Change ● How Harry earned the moniker, “The Godfather of Rebound” ● Contention around rebound and its Climate implications ● Factoring in the welfare of those in developing countries and the plight of “energy poverty” ● The integral role of nuclear in any clean energy strategy ● Ecomodernism and the focus on GDP-driven solutions to Climate Change Links to t...
Feb 20, 2020•50 min
Today’s guest is Rob Hanson, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Monolith Materials, where he leads the development of next-generation technology for producing low cost, low emission hydrogen and carbon black, an important raw material used in the manufacture of rubber and plastic. Prior to Monolith, Rob served as the global director of product management for AREVA Solar , the solar division of the world’s largest nuclear company. He has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from S...
Feb 17, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Today's guest is Matt Eggers, Investor & Company Builder at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1.1 billion, patient capital fund dedicated to building companies that will have a massive impact on greenhouse gas mitigation. He also serves on the Board of the Institute for Market Transformation. Matt is a seasoned cleantech leader, investor and advisor with 20 years of experience delivering results in diverse companies. Matt’s recent past experience includes serving as a Vice President with Yard...
Feb 13, 2020•51 min
Today’s guest is Phil Duffy, President & Executive Director at Woodwell Climate Research Center. Expertise Climate modeling, extreme weather risk, societal impacts of climate change, domestic climate policy, international climate change negotiations, climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Dr. Philip Duffy is a physicist who has devoted nearly 30 years to using science to address the societal challenge of climate change. Dr. Duffy frequently engages domestic and international po...
Feb 10, 2020•48 min
Today’s guest is David Keith, Professor at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Kennedy School, and Founder of Carbon Engineering. David has worked near the interface between climate science, energy technology, and public policy for twenty-five years. He took first prize in Canada's national physics prize exam, won MIT's prize for excellence in experimental physics, and was one of TIME magazine's Heroes of the Environment . David is Professor of Applied Physics at the Harva...
Feb 06, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Today's guest is BJ Fogg, Founder & Director, Behavior Design Lab at Stanford, with an appearance by William Shan, one of his students who is project managing the launch of his new Behavior Design for Climate Action online training program. BJ teaches good people how behavior works so they can create products & services that benefit everyday people around the world. He is a behavior scientist, with deep experience in innovation and teaching. At Stanford University he runs the Behavior De...
Feb 03, 2020•57 min
This was an experiment using a new app Talkshow, which is a live discussion broadcast via twitter where listeners can text questions as we talk! Today's guest was Clay Dumas from Lowercarbon Capital, to talk about what they are up to with the fund and their newly opened roles! It is also always great to talk shop with Clay on everything climate change. Clay is a partner at Lowercarbon Capital where he invests in startups and research organizations developing technology to reduce emissions, suck ...
Jan 31, 2020•46 min
Today's guest is Jigar Shah, President & Co-Founder at Generate Capital. Jigar was the founder and CEO of SunEdison (NASDAQ: SUNE, TERP), where he pioneered “no money down solar” and unlocked a multi-billion-dollar solar market, creating the largest solar services company worldwide. He is the author of Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy. After SunEdison, Jigar served as the founding CEO of the Carbon War Room, a global non-profit founded by Sir Richard Branson and Virgin U...
Jan 30, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Today's guest is Gary Cohen, President & Co-Founder of Health Care Without Harm. Gary has been a pioneer in the environmental health movement for thirty years. Cohen is President and Co-Founder of Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth . He was also instrumental in bringing together the NGOs and hospital systems that formed the Healthier Hospitals Initiative . All three were created to transform the health care sector to be environmentally sustainable and serve as anchor instituti...
Jan 27, 2020•46 min
Today's guest is Tim Freundlich, CEO of ImpactAssets. Tim is a long-time innovator in new financial instruments in the social enterprise sector, which he now applies as the head of ImpactAssets, the $1 billion boutique donor advised fund and investment note offerer for impact investments. While previously at Calvert Foundation for 12 years, he conceived of and launched the donor advised fund. He was also instrumental in building the $250mm Community Investment Note with more than $1 billion inve...
Jan 23, 2020•52 min
Today’s guest is Akshat Rathi, a London-based reporter, covering science, energy, and environment for Bloomberg News. He has a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Oxford, and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai. He tells stories of the people and their ideas tackling the biggest problem facing humanity: climate change. And he is currently working on a book about scaling up climate solutions. Previously, Akshat was a senior reporter at Q...
Jan 20, 2020•57 min
Today's guest is Joey Bergstein, CEO of Seventh Generation, recently acquired by Unilever. Seventh Generation’s mission is to inspire a consumer revolution that nurtures the health of the next seven generations. The company is a leader in positive business practices through the use of renewable plant-based products, industry-leading transparency with respect to ingredient disclosures, and recyclable packaging. Joey joined Seventh Generation in 2011 and, together with the Seventh Generation team,...
Jan 16, 2020•46 min
Today's guest is Senator Stephen Fenberg, a Democrat who serves as state Senator in the 18th District in Colorado where he's served since 2017. He also serves as the Senate Majority Leader. A few years after graduating from CU, Senator Fenberg founded New Era Colorado, a nonprofit organization dedicated engaging, educating, and training young people in the political process. The organization has registered hundreds of thousands of young people to vote in Colorado and successfully passed several ...
Jan 13, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Today's guest is Shreya Dave, co-founder and CEO of Via Separations. Via Separations has pioneered a new membrane based on graphene oxide for fine liquid filtration in harsh environments, with applications in food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and bulk and specialty chemicals. They are scaling up and commercializing the material platform for use in industrial separation processes such as food ingredient production and chemical manufacturing. Shreya graduated from MIT with a PhD in Mechanical Eng...
Jan 09, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Today's guest is David Perry, President, CEO, and Director of Indigo Ag, Indigo Ag is harnessing nature to help farmers sustainably feed the planet. They improve grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health through the use of natural microbiology and digital technologies. Founded in 2016 Indigo Ag has raised more than $650 million in funding. The recently announced Terraton Initiative is a global effort to remove a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere an...
Jan 06, 2020•38 min
Today's guest is Dr. Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown. Project Drawdown is a world-class research organization that reviews, analyzes, and identifies the most viable global climate solutions, and shares these findings with the world. Their book, Drawdown, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and describes the hundred most substantive solutions to global warming. For each one, describes its history, its carbon impact, the relative cost and savings, path to adoption, and ...
Jan 02, 2020•56 min
Today’s guest is Barney Schauble, Chairman, Nephila Climate, the world's largest asset manager dedicated to weather and catastrophe insurance risks. Barney joined Nephila Capital in 2004 as a Managing Partner and moved to San Francisco in 2010 to set up Nephila Advisors. Barney is the Chair of the Board of Nephila Climate (NCx), and also a Director of Nephila Capital Ltd. and Nephila Holdings Ltd. Barney is the Head of Nephila Labs, where his primary responsibilities include oversight of researc...
Dec 30, 2019•1 hr 5 min
Today’s guest is Marilyn Waite, Program Officer, Climate & Clean Energy Finance at William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. Marilyn manages the foundation’s grantmaking on climate and clean energy finance with the ambitious goal of addressing climate change by accelerating the transition to a climate-friendly economy. Her grantmaking mobilizes private capital investments in low-carbon and climate-friendly energy infrastructure and systems, seeking to redirect finance from high- to low-carbon ...
Dec 26, 2019•50 min
Today’s guest is Gene Berdichevsky, Co-Founder & CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies. Prior to co-founding Sila, Gene was the seventh employee at Tesla Motors where he served as Principal Engineer on the Roadster battery, leading the development of the world’s first, safe, mass-produced, automotive lithium-ion battery system. Gene holds two degrees from Stanford University; an MS in Engineering with a focus on energy and materials, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering. He has co-authored 42 patents a...
Dec 23, 2019•53 min
Today’s guest is Shayle Kann, Managing Director for Energy Impact Partners. EIP is an investment firm that invests in companies shaping the energy landscape of the future. It's backed by a broad coalition of some of the world's largest and most innovative utilities that collectively span the globe, access millions of households, and spend more than 20 billion annually on new technologies and procurement. Shayle leads research & strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Previously, Shayle spent ove...
Dec 19, 2019•56 min
Today’s guest is Jason Jacobs, host of this podcast! That's right. Enough people were asking me to do an episode where someone interviews me to summarize where I am on the journey, that I finally but the bullet and did it. And it wasn’t even planned! I was having coffee with an avid MCJ listener, Remy Evard, and he said “you should really do an episode where someone interviews you”, so, with about 5 minutes of prep, we grabbed the microphones and did an episode right on the spot! It is a brief d...
Dec 16, 2019•22 min
Today’s guest is Professor Sam Fankhauser, Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, both at The London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also an Associate Director at economics consultancy Vivid Economics and a Non-Executive Director of CDC Group, the UK’s development finance institution. Previously, Sam worked at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank...
Dec 12, 2019•46 min
Today’s guest Dr. Julio Friedmann, a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Dr. Friedmann recently served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy at the Department of Energy where he was responsible for DOE’s R&D program in advanced fossil energy systems, carbon capture, and storage (CCS), CO2 utilization, and clean coal deployment. His expertise includes Large-Scale Carbon Management, CO2 removal, CO2 recycling, ...
Dec 09, 2019•1 hr 9 min
Today's guest is Ilan Gur, the CEO of Activate and the Founder of Cyclotron Road. Cyclotron Road is an entrepreneurial fellowship program that pairs PhD fellows working on promising scientific breakthroughs with grants that pay their salaries. Access to a bunch of expensive equipment and showers them with mentorship to try to bridge the gap between early academic research that shows great promise and actually turning the corner to become a company. Prior to founding Cyclotron Road, Ilan launched...
Dec 05, 2019•1 hr 12 min
Today’s guest is Lara Pierpoint, Director of Technical Strategy at Exelon. Exelon is America's leading competitive energy provider with one of the cleanest and lowest cost power generation fleets. Its utility serves millions of electric and gas customers. Lara's team is tasked with enhancing Exelon's ability to capitalize on new technology and respond to disruptive innovations. Her expertise is in systems analysis, modeling and policy. And her knowledge is deep in nuclear, gas and electric inter...
Dec 02, 2019•50 min
Today’s guest is Shawn Murphy, Founder & CEO of Titan Advanced Energy Solutions. Titan is an advanced battery management system technology company, which is revolutionizing the renewable space by lowering the cost of lithium ion batteries by at least 30 to 40%, and doubling their expected life. Titan's technology uses ultrasound to measure and determine the state of health, and state of charge real time and is about 100 times better than the current state of the art. This technology will eve...
Nov 27, 2019•1 hr 2 min
Today’s guest is David Burt, the CEO and Founder of DeltaTerra Capital and the lead Portfolio Manager for DeltaTerra funds. DeltaTerra provides proprietary financial models, customized portfolio analysis, and unique hedging strategies that enable highly informed climate risk management for asset owners and investors. Before founding DeltaTerra, David was a Partner and Portfolio Manager at Wellington Management Company. Prior to Wellington, he built investment processes at BlueMountain Capital, A...
Nov 25, 2019•56 min
Today’s guest is Melinda Hanson, Head of Sustainability at Bird, a micromobility company based in Santa Monica, CA. Founded in September 2017, Bird operates shared electric scooters in over 100 cities in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, with 10 million rides in its first year of operation. Melinda joined Bird from the National Association of City Transportation Officials, where she served as deputy director of NACTO's international programs. Before that, Melinda was a consultant for t...
Nov 21, 2019•41 min
Today’s guest is Ken Kimmell, President of Union of Concerned Scientists, a leading science-based nonprofit that combines the knowledge and influence of the scientific community with the passion of concerned citizens to build a healthy planet and a safer world. Ken has more than 30 years of experience in government, environmental policy, and advocacy. He is a national advocate for clean energy and transportation policies and a driving force behind UCS’s “Power Ahead” campaign to build a large an...
Nov 18, 2019•1 hr 6 min
