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 what it took to get there (spoiler: not one magical breakthrough), what “the ignition cliff” actually means, and why Inertia is betting that manufacturing and economics — not brand-new physics — is the fastest path to commercial fusion.

• Annie’s path from nuclear engineering + plasma physics to becoming NIF’s lead designer on ignition platforms
• Why the historic ignition shot was the result of years of iteration (and a few duds along the way)
• The “pancake” shot (and the lab’s surprisingly extensive breakfast-food vocabulary for failed plasmas)
• What it felt like to get the 3:00am text — “I think we got ignition” — and why relief came before celebration
• Why many in the field had nearly given up on laser fusion ignition — and how close the NIF campaign came to being cut
• Why other fusion companies pursued different approaches: history, uncertainty, and the (very real) cost problem for lasers + targets
• The core commercialization challenge: scaling to high-repetition-rate shots (think “engine cycles”) and producing targets cheaply enough to fire millions per day

• Inertia Enterprises: https://inertia.com/
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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 and reliably? You get a field trip!

In part one of a two-part field trip to Livermore, California, Molly visits Inertia Enterprises’ “House of Fusion” to meet two of the company’s co-founders:

• Jeff Lawson (yes, that Jeff Lawson — founder of Twilio and majority owner of The Onion) on the business case for commercializing ignition, and why Inertia thinks the economics are finally ready.
• Mike Dunne, former Lawrence Livermore power-plant designer and Stanford professor, on what it takes to turn a lab breakthrough into a power plant — from a gigawatt-scale “engine” that can follow renewables on the grid, to building a million precision fuel targets a day.

• What “ignition” actually means — and why it’s different from “fusion someday”
• Why Inertia is starting with the only physics regime that’s been proven to produce net fusion energy
• The two big bottlenecks: high-power diode lasers and mass-manufactured fusion targets
• How scaling semiconductor manufacturing could drive laser costs down (and why “1,000x” matters)
• What a fusion target is: a tiny fuel capsule inside a miniature “oven” (and why lead beats gold for economics)
• Why a fusion plant looks more like a high-RPM engine than a one-off experiment — and how that changes everything
• Potential early markets beyond electricity: high-temperature process heat for steel, cement, and fertilizer
• What it looks like to build a fusion company in Silicon Valley: Apple/Waymo-style process engineers, high-end metrology, and a Nerf gun used as a stand-in for high-speed target tracking
• Thunderdome. Yes, really.

• Inertia Enterprises: https://inertia.com/
• Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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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 can be installed without contractors, plugged directly into a standard outlet, and start generating electricity immediately. More than 4 million systems are already in use in Germany, but in the United States, regulations have kept the technology largely off the market.

In this episode, Cora explains how plug-in solar could open up access to clean energy and lower electricity bills for millions of renters and homeowners. She also shares how Bright Saver is driving a wave of legislation across the country aimed at making these systems legal.

We talk about:

• What plug-in solar is and how it works
• Why millions of Europeans already use balcony solar systems
• How renters and apartment residents can benefit from generating their own electricity
• Why traditional rooftop solar remains so expensive in the United States
• The regulatory roadblocks slowing adoption, and whether safety concerns cited by utilities hold up to scrutiny
• How Utah, Maine, Maryland, Virginia, and Colorado are leading the way on legalization
• Why affordability may be the key to scaling climate solutions
• The surprising coalition of climate advocates, free-market supporters, and energy-independence champions backing plug-in solar

Links:

• Bright Saver: https://brightsaver.org
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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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 next-generation fission reactors rely on enriched lithium isotopes, and existing enrichment methods are slow, expensive, and require massive facilities. Dr. Elling’s company, Molten Salt Solutions, is developing a simpler, cheaper process and building the US's first commercial production facility for enriched lithium — the ingredient that could determine whether fusion energy ever actually reaches the grid.

• The big problem facing both fusion and advanced fission right now: the unmet demand for fuel
• A refresher on the science behind enriched lithium and nuclear energy
• The world’s growing energy demands, and why fusion will help us meet the 3x demand we’ll face by 2050
• Why the US dismantled its only enrichment facility and why Russia currently holds the only meaningful supply
• How Molten Salt Solutions' mercury-free, scalable process differs from how governments did it during the nuclear weapons era
• The race to supply fusion developers with material they need now, before commercial reactors even exist
• Why the current administration's push to reduce regulatory barriers for small modular reactors is accelerating demand for lithium-7
• John's case for why fusion is the final frontier of humanity’s energy evolution

• Molten Salt Solutions: https://www.moltensaltsolutions.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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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 at the U.S. Green Building Council of California, to talk about what it actually takes to make our buildings work for the climate instead of against it. Ben has spent over 20 years at the intersection of sustainability, real estate, and innovation, and he’s got a refreshingly practical outlook: the solutions exist, the business case is there, and the work is already happening, even when the federal government is pulling back.

• Why buildings — not cars — are the biggest source of carbon emissions, and what that means for climate strategy
• The difference between operating carbon and embodied carbon, and why that means we need two different performance standards for buildings
• How building performance standards work and why California is building a statewide framework to get there by 2030
• How to get developers to root for performance standards: sell them on lower energy costs, lower insurance premiums, and higher resale values
• What rebuilding after the LA fires could look like if we get it right, and why waiving the all-electric requirement was a missed opportunity
• USGBC California's Net Zero Accelerator and the startup trends Ben is tracking in green building tech

• U.S. Green Building Council of California: https://usgbc-ca.org/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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Home batteries are having a moment, but for years, getting one meant cobbling together a solar panel from one company, an inverter from another, a smart panel from a third, and hoping they'd all play nice. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly takes a field trip to Mountain View, California, to visit Lunar Energy, where founder and CEO Kunal Girotra has built the fully integrated solar-plus-battery ecosystem he always wished existed.

Plus: a tour of Lunar's working showroom, where we flip a breaker, watch the app react in real time, and find out what happens when you leave the oven on during a power outage.

• Why Kunal left Tesla Energy to build a fully integrated home energy ecosystem
• How Lunar's modular, stackable battery blocks work (think Lego bricks for your garage wall)
• The real math on savings: how a solar and battery system can cut your bill by $2,000/year, and Lunar's AI adds another $500 on top
• How "virtual power plants" are actually very real, and why Lunar wants to rename them "distributed power plants"
• Why Northeastern states are leading on VPP policy, and what utilities in other regions need to change to keep up

• Lunar Energy: https://www.lunarenergy.com/
• Sunrun (Lunar's leading VPP partner): https://www.sunrun.com/
• Green Mountain Power: https://greenmountainpower.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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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 effective city-level climate communications programs, making the case that local government is where climate action gets real.

• Why local government is the frontline of climate action, and why local action matters more than ever
• How Denver used the rollback of federal climate policies to motivate voters to fund local climate initiatives like solar, e-bike rebates, heat pump programs, and more
• Using the science of behavioral change to effectively promote climate action
• Goodwill pop-ups, ice cream collaborations, and other non-traditional ways Denver activated around a climate campaign, and delivered 128 million impressions in the process
• Why financial incentives and positive social comparison beat education every time when it comes to motivating climate action
• The perception gap: most people wildly underestimate how many of their neighbors care about climate action
• How effective, human-centered storytelling can combat pessimism and inaction
• The co-benefits frame: reaching people through health, savings, and quality of life, not just the environment

• Denver's Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency: https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Climate-Action-Sustainability-and-Resiliency
• The Denver Climate Project: https://www.denvergov.org/Community/Denver-Climate-Project
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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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 trucking company has grown into one of the fastest-growing companies in supply chain tech. Tive’s small-but-mighty trackers don’t just follow a shipment’s location — they also monitor temperature, light, and shock along the way, helping businesses intervene before a load of strawberries (or a shipment of vaccines) becomes a very expensive, very wasteful problem.

• Why real-time shipment visibility is a key ingredient in creating a greener supply chain
• How temperature monitoring can save hundreds of thousands of dollars of food and medicine from going to waste
• What "permanent disruption" and climate change means for global supply chains
• How route data is helping companies find faster, more fuel-efficient paths they didn't know existed
• Tive's commitment to sustainability in its own products, including lithium-free trackers and a tracker recycling program
• Why AI agents will be hungry for real-time supply chain data, and what that could unlock for global efficiency
• Krenar's 10-year vision: tracking 5-10% of all global shipments (and why that would be a very big deal)

• Tive: https://www.tive.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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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 dramatically more efficient. He also lays out a vision for the industry’s future; one where data centers generate their own renewable power, store it in batteries, and feed flexibility back to the grid on demand.

• Why data centers are sitting on a goldmine of untapped efficiency, and why they haven't captured it until now
• How Lucend uses 280 billion sensor readings to open up the "black box" of data center operations, saving customers an average of 25% on energy and 30% on water
• Why it’s so hard to make even the smallest changes in how a data center operates
• How "transparent AI" builds operator trust by showing every step of the recommendation process
• The water vs. energy trade-off in cooling, and why it's more complicated than headlines suggest
• Why Scope 3 emissions from hardware are the dirty secret behind Big Tech's broken climate pledges
• The vision for data centers as flexible grid assets, and what’s needed to get them there

• Lucend: https://www.getlucend.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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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 600+ members and $35 million moved to over 100 organizations, 1.5°Climate is proving that you don’t have to be a billionaire, or an expert in climate tech, to make a real difference.

• Why less than 2% of philanthropic giving goes to climate, and what we can do to change that
• How 1.5°Climate's Shark Tank-style virtual pitch events connect donors directly with vetted climate organizations
• The three criteria that define a high-impact climate investment: catalytic potential, leverage, and gap-filling
• Why 1.5°Climate funds nonprofits that aren’t exclusively climate organizations like cattle trade associations and agricultural projects
• How the team shifted from federal to state and local climate action after the 2024 election
• The innovations Greg and 1.5°Climate are most excited about right now: next-gen geothermal, agrivoltaics, and more

• 1.5°Climate: https://onepointfiveclimate.org/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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