A Climate Change with Matt Matern

Today, Matt speaks with Regan George, Founder and CEO of SOLRITE Energy, about turning home batteries into a power plant that helps homeowners and the grid at the same time. Regan explains why rooftop solar stopped paying off once net metering went away, and why big, smart batteries are the fix. He breaks down what a virtual power plant actually is, why most of them barely get used, and why he tells utilities to cycle his batteries two and a half times a day. He also shares a simple way to picture the grid's problem: widening the freeway never ends rush hour, but controlling when cars get on the road does. Plus, how SOLRITE is helping "solar orphans" get their savings back, why data centers should pay for batteries in the neighborhoods around them, and how his team is bringing power back to Eagle Point, Utah after the Cottonwood Fire.

Learn more about SOLRITE Energy at https://www.solriteenergy.com/

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GUEST BIO

Regan George is the Founder and CEO of SOLRITE Energy, which finances, builds and owns home solar and battery systems and links them into virtual power plants. He started his renewables career at Vivint Solar in 2012, then founded his own solar sales and installation company in Southern California before shifting it to virtual power plants and renaming it SOLRITE in 2023. SOLRITE installs large 60 kWh home batteries at no upfront cost and earns money by using them to support the grid. The company partners with battery maker sonnen and operates in Texas, California, Illinois and the Northeast.

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YOUTUBE CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold Open

00:45 Intro: A Climate Change Welcomes Regan George

2:40 Fixing Solar's Sales Problem With Fixed Pricing

3:49 How California's NEM 3.0 Changed Rooftop Solar

8:01 What Is a Virtual Power Plant?

11:13 Level Zero vs. Level Four Virtual Power Plants

14:14 California Has the Batteries. Why Not Use Them?

15:23 The Grid Is Built for the Worst Hour of the Year

16:55 The Freeway Analogy: Ending Rush Hour on the Grid

18:35 Letting Batteries Compete With Power Plants

20:29 Cycling Batteries 2.5 Times a Day

25:11 How Long Can a 60 kWh Battery Power a Home?

26:03 Helping Solar Orphans Get Their Savings Back

27:41 Fewer Brownouts and Backup Power During Fire Season

30:44 Can Home Batteries Help Data Centers Connect?

33:00 Should Data Centers Pay for Neighborhood Batteries?

34:48 Rebuilding Eagle Point After the Cottonwood Fire

39:30 Utilities Aren't the Enemy

40:47 What's Next for SOLRITE

42:09 Outro

ALSO, MAKE SURE TO CHECK OUT

If you enjoyed this episode, here is a list of some recent episodes curated especially for you:

265. Frédéric Samama – prior episode, and a good counterpoint. Fred argues money and markets alone won’t get us to act on climate, while Regan’s whole model is built on making the economics work for everyone

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/265-why-do-we-know-so-much-about-climate-change-and/id1557317787?i=1000796472561

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXN6tWFiW20

260. Leah Qusba – why Republicans still support solar; pairs with Regan calling deregulated Texas the gold standard and staying out of the politics of data centers

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/260-leah-qusba-on-why-republicans-still-support-solar/id1557317787?i=1000788943729

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiXUtGlMVw0

259. Cora Stryker – California just passed balcony solar; a direct companion to Regan’s take on California’s new legislation and what it takes to unlock home energy there

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/259-california-just-passed-balcony-solar-now-its-up/id1557317787?i=1000787722435 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHFT4A_Jxww

Today, Matt speaks with Frédéric Samama, adjunct professor at Sciences Po and author of The Enigma of Climate Inaction, about a simple question: if almost everyone knows about climate change, why aren’t we acting?

Fred, a pioneer of green finance, explains his idea of “societal bubbles.” Like a rat that learns its way to the cheese in a maze, humans got so good at getting resources through farming, capitalism and modern science that we became overconfident in the models that got us here. Now those same models are working against us, and climate change is the first crisis that puts a limit on the resources we’ve built everything around. He and Matt also get into what astronauts’ view of Earth can teach us, why climate disasters can make people believe less in climate change, and his work with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz that helped bring $800 billion in investor commitments to the Paris climate talks.

Read The Enigma of Climate Inaction here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Enigma-of-Climate-Inaction-Why-Are-We-Doing-Nothing-or-Almost-Nothing-in-the-Face-of-Catastrophe/Samama/p/book/9781041030645

Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold Open

0:35 Intro: A Climate Change Welcomes Frédéric Samama

1:24 From the Financial Crisis to Green Finance

3:44 We Beat the Ozone Hole, Y2K and COVID. Why Not Climate?

4:55 The Rat in the Maze and Societal Bubbles

7:59 Civil Society and the Overview Effect

14:10 We’re Part of Nature, Not Above It

15:34 Cave Paintings and When We Started Dominating Nature

17:43 Moral Values and Climate’s Biggest Opportunity

22:39 GDP and When the Means Become the End

25:17 How Fast Social Norms Can Shift

27:57 Why Disasters Make Us Believe Less in Climate Change

31:43 The Daycare Experiment: When Money Backfires

35:23 Working With Joseph Stiglitz

37:59 Sovereign Wealth Funds and $800 Billion at COP21

40:47 Outro

GUEST BIO

Frédéric Samama is an author, investor and financial innovator whose career has spanned capital markets, institutional investment and climate finance. He began his career at J.P. Morgan and Crédit Agricole CIB, then joined Amundi, where he headed Institutional Client Coverage and Responsible Investment and pioneered some of the first mainstream low-carbon equity indices. He later joined S&P Global and is an adjunct professor at Sciences Po. He co-founded a research initiative on sovereign wealth funds with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, has testified before the US Senate, and was named 2026 Personality of the Year by Environmental Finance. His latest book is The Enigma of Climate Inaction (Routledge).

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Today, Matt speaks with Mike Kelland, Co-founder & CEO of Planetary, about using the ocean to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Planetary adds calcium and magnesium minerals, basically an antacid, to water flowing out of coastal facilities. That lowers local acidity and lets the ocean absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.

Mike breaks down the UN's new Limiting Overshoot report, which he says puts the carbon removal we need at about 23 gigatons a year, and explains why trees, machines and every other land-based approach top out around 15, leaving the ocean to close the gap. He and Matt also get into the safety question people are afraid to ask, how Planetary's Halifax plant reached 8,000 tons removed, why compliance carbon markets are the key to scaling, and the all-hands, middle-of-winter push that won Planetary an XPRIZE.

Learn more about Planetary at https://www.planetarytech.com

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Mike Kelland is the co-founder and CEO of Planetary, a Nova Scotia company that restores coastal seawater chemistry to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He founded Planetary in 2019 with Brock Battochio and ocean scientist Dr. Greg Rau. The company is a two-time XPRIZE Carbon Removal award winner and delivered the world's first independently verified ocean alkalinity enhancement carbon removal credits. Before Planetary, Mike spent about 25 years as a tech entrepreneur, founding several software companies. He holds a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Carleton University and is a Forty Under Forty recipient.

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Today, Matt speaks with Drew Shula, trained architect and Founder and CEO of Verdical Group, about the part of the climate problem hiding in plain sight: the buildings we live and work in, which account for roughly 40% of global carbon emissions. 

He breaks down the two halves of a building's carbon footprint, the energy it burns and the materials it's made of, and makes the case that we already know how to build net zero today - almost nothing requires it, which is why net zero is still less than 1% of construction. He and Matt also get into the LA fires, where Drew was displaced from his own home for six days, the city's decision to waive its all-electric requirement for rebuilds, insurance pulling out of fire zones, and why he thinks AI data centers get unfairly singled out.

The 13th annual Net Zero Conference is October 7-8, 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. You can register and learn more at netzeroconference.com

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Drew Shula is the founder and CEO of Verdical Group, a Los Angeles sustainability consulting firm he launched in 2012 that specializes in green building certifications, engineering services, ESG, and net zero strategy. Trained as an architect at the University of Notre Dame, he has built the firm into a certified B Corporation and 1% for the Planet member with projects in about 25 states and up to ten countries, for clients including NASA, Google, Johnson & Johnson, LAX, Meta and Apple. Verdical Group was named to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies in 2025. Drew is also the founder of the Net Zero Conference and Trailblazer Awards, now in its 13th year, and was the sixth person ever honored as both a LEED Fellow and a Living Future Hero. He grew up in Belfast, Maine, and lives in Los Angeles.

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Today, Matt Matern speaks with Jim Murphy, Associate Vice President of Legal Advocacy at the National Wildlife Federation, about EPA's proposal to rewrite which streams and wetlands the Clean Water Act actually protects.

Jim explains what the rule would do - by his estimate, removing federal protection from up to 60% of the nation's stream miles and well over 90% of historically protected wetlands - and why streams that don't flow year-round still carry pollution downstream. He and Matt trace how we got here, from the Cuyahoga River fire and the 1972 Clean Water Act through the Supreme Court's 2023 decision, and get into what happens when roughly half the states have no protections of their own to fall back on. They also cover the nitrate crisis overwhelming Iowa's water utilities, what fewer federal permits mean for the AI data center boom, and why Jim thinks clean water may be the issue that pulls conservation back across party lines.

Public comment on the proposal closes October 9, 2026. 

Learn more at nwf.org

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GUEST BIO

Jim Murphy is Associate Vice President of Legal Advocacy at the National Wildlife Federation, where he coordinates legal work across the organization's waters and lands programs. He has spent more than 25 years in environmental law and policy, over 20 of them at the Federation, engaging with courts, agencies, and Congress on water, wildlife, energy, and climate. He previously directed the Environmental Advocacy Clinic at Vermont Law School and has worked in private practice, at the Conservation Law Foundation, and as a Capitol Hill staffer. He writes regularly on threats to foundational environmental laws and is based in Vermont.

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Today, Matt Matern speaks with Rob Mullen - artist, author, and Director of the Wilderness River Expedition Art Fellowship - about the boreal forest, the largest land ecosystem on Earth and one most people have never heard of. Rob explains how a forest three times the size of the Amazon holds roughly 80% of the world's liquid fresh surface water, why bigger and more frequent fires have flipped it from a carbon sink into a carbon source, and how conservation funding passed it over for decades because it was too big and too empty to fit the "biodiversity hotspot" model.

He also shares the solo canoe trip that changed the course of his life, the cold call to the Smithsonian that launched two decades of wilderness art expeditions, and the number that stopped Matt in his tracks: 59% of the trees cut in Canada end up as toilet paper and paper towels for the U.S. market.

Get Rob's book, Boreal Wilderland: Art, Science, and Adventure in Earth's Greatest Wilderness, at www.robmullen.com

Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

GUEST BIO

Rob Mullen is a wildlife and wilderness artist, author, and Director of the Wilderness River Expedition Art Fellowship, which he founded in 2005 and now runs as a program of the Center for Circumpolar Studies. A native Vermonter with a biology degree from the University of Vermont, he spent years as an advertising artist in New York and California before returning home to paint full-time. He has led roughly 20 wilderness art expeditions from Labrador to Alaska, bringing more than 30 nationally and internationally known artists into the boreal forest. He also chairs the board of the Vermont Wildlife Coalition. His book Boreal Wilderland, with a foreword by Robert Bateman, was published in 2026.

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Today, Matt Matern speaks with Leah Qusba, CEO of GoodPower, a nonprofit working to win public support for the clean energy transition. They talk about moving the energy conversation away from sacrifice and toward abundance, where clean energy means more jobs, lower bills, and an economy that works for everyone. Leah shares GoodPower's polling with NORC at the University of Chicago, which found about half of Republicans still support large-scale solar, rising to roughly 70% when it's tied to lower energy bills. They also dig into the disinformation targeting renewables, why one in three projects now dies in permitting, and a little-known Arizona utility race putting energy bills on the 2026 ballot.

Check out GoodPower at goodpower.org

Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

GUEST BIO

Leah Qusba is the Chief Executive Officer of GoodPower, a strategic communications, research, and campaigning nonprofit advancing the global renewable energy transition (formerly Action for the Climate Emergency, rebranded in 2025). She has spent 17 years with the organization, building its early programs and leading national campaigns before becoming CEO. Her work focuses on winning public opinion for clean energy in rural, conservative communities - where the vast majority of new solar, wind, and storage is built and where projects most often stall at the local permitting level. A frequent media voice on energy, media, and culture, she leads GoodPower's original polling, its conservative messenger network, and its work countering AI-driven disinformation.

EPISODE RESOURCES

Today, Matt is joined again by Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver. One year after first joining us on the show, a lot has changed. When she was last on, plug-in solar was legal in exactly one state and nobody in the country was selling it. Since then, 35 states plus DC have introduced legislation, nine have signed it into law, and Bright Saver has started shipping kits nationwide at exactly what they cost: $285.30, no markup. Here in California, SB 868 - the Plug and Play Solar Act - just cleared both houses of the legislature and is now sitting on Governor Newsom's desk awaiting his signature.

Cora argues that the climate movement's biggest opportunity is affordability, as only about 3% of Americans rank climate as their top voting priority, while 54% name the economy and household expenses.

Check out Bright Saver at https://www.brightsaver.org

Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

GUEST BIO

Cora Stryker is co-founder of Bright Saver, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit working to make plug-in "balcony" solar affordable and legal across the United States. The organization sells solar kits to its members at cost and advocates for state legislation that treats small plug-in systems like household appliances rather than power plants. She is a serial founder of mission-driven organizations, including the Climate Justice Incubator and GirlBlazer. She studied biology at Brown University and began her career as a rare and endangered plant biologist in Hawaii, later teaching basic writing at a community college.

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Today, Matt is joined by Saar Safra, co-founder and CEO of Beewise, to talk about one of the quietest threats to our food supply - the collapse of the world's bee colonies. Saar shares how he teamed up with a commercial beekeeper to build the BeeHome: a solar-powered, AI-driven robotic hive that monitors bees around the clock and treats problems automatically, without chemicals. They dig into why bees pollinate roughly 75% of the crops we eat, how monoculture and pesticides have turned farmland into a desert for pollinators, and how Beewise has cut colony collapse from 40–60% down to under 10%. And Saar gives Matt a peak at the company's new Bees for Buildings program bringing pollinators into cities and their goal of scaling this technology to help communities around the world.

Learn more about Beewise at beewise.ag

Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

GUEST BIO

Saar Safra is the co-founder and CEO of Beewise, an agtech company on a mission to save bees and secure the global food supply. A serial entrepreneur - Beewise is his sixth company - he partnered with commercial beekeeper Eliyah Radzyner to build the BeeHome, a solar-powered, AI-driven robotic hive that autonomously monitors and cares for colonies. Beewise is now one of the largest pollination-services providers in the country, operating across more than 300,000 acres for growers including Blue Diamond, Driscoll's, and Taylor Farms. The company has raised roughly $170 million and reports colony collapse rates under 10%, compared with an industry average that can exceed 50%.

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CURATED LIST OF EPISODES

If you enjoyed this episode of A Climate Change, here is a list of some recent episodes curated especially for you:

Today, Matt Matern speaks with Zak Winnick, founder and CEO of Rangeway Energy, about building America’s first hospitality-forward EV charging network. Zak shares how a career running hotels - and years of frustration as an EV owner - led him to treat charging as an experience rather than just a piece of infrastructure. They discuss why so many public chargers feel unreliable and impersonal, and how Rangeway is targeting the scenic, underserved highways the big networks skip. Zak also explains why the real money is in the amenities rather than the electricity - and how he plans to make Rangeway the "Apple of EV charging."

Check out Rangeway Energy at rangeway.co. Interested investors can reach the team at [email protected].

Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

GUEST BIO

Zak Winnick is the founder and CEO of Rangeway Energy, a startup building America’s first hospitality-forward EV charging network. Drawing on more than 15 years in hospitality operations and IT - and his own experience as a longtime EV owner and EV-community leader - he designs charging destinations that pair reliable fast charging with climate-controlled lounges, thoughtful amenities, and sustainable, often off-grid infrastructure. Rangeway focuses on scenic, underserved corridors, with its first sites planned for Missouri and Southern California. Winnick’s guiding idea is simple: make the stop, not just the charger, the point.

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