This week on Everybody in the Pool, bummer news: your bank deposits could be funding the climate crisis? But we’d never give you bummer news without a solution! This week, Molly Wood speaks with Paul Moinester, founder of Topofinance, who reveals the shocking climate impact of conventional banking. Discover how just $10,000 in a major bank generates emissions equivalent to driving 10,000 miles yearly, and why moving your money to climate-friendly banks might be the easiest climate action you've never considered. Paul explains how corporations' banking emissions often exceed all their other emissions combined, and introduces innovative solutions that make greener banking both simple and profitable.

• Topo Finance
• Paul Moinester
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly Wood talks with Brad Hartwig, co-founder and CEO of Arbor Energy. Brad shares his remarkable journey from SpaceX rocket engineer to climate tech entrepreneur, developing technology that transforms waste biomass into carbon-negative energy using rocket propulsion principles. Yep, you read that right. A guy who used to want to be an astronaut woke up one day and realized this planet was the place to put his energy. Find out how Arbor’s tech could replace fossil fuel plants while simultaneously removing carbon from the atmosphere.

• Brad's transition from aerospace engineering at SpaceX to climate tech after witnessing California wildfires firsthand
• How Arbor Energy's technology uses "oxy combustion" (inspired by rocket engines) to generate clean electricity while capturing carbon
• The system produces no emissions - only pure CO2 (for sequestration) and clean water
• Potential to replace up to 60 gigawatts of coal and natural gas plants in the US with carbon-negative power
• Uses only waste biomass from agriculture, forestry, and potentially municipal waste
• Economic benefits for wildfire prevention through monetizing brush clearing
• First commercial deployment targeted for 2027

• Arbor Energy
• Brad Hartwig
• Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson - Climate fiction book mentioned by Brad
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In this episode of Everybody in the Pool, host Molly Wood speaks with Mat Dos Santos, co-executive director of Our Children's Trust, about how his organization is using the legal system to fight climate change on behalf of youth plaintiffs — the kids who have the most to lose if we get this wrong. Learn how landmark victories in Montana and Hawaii are creating precedents that could reshape climate policy across America.

• Constitutional Climate Rights: Our Children's Trust secured a historic victory in Montana, establishing that the state constitution's "clean and healthful environment" provision protects young people's right to a livable climate future.
• Youth-Led Legal Action: Children and teens have standing to sue over climate policies because they face disproportionate, long-term impacts from climate change and have limited political voice.
• Government Accountability: These cases highlight how fossil fuel development requires government permission and subsidies, challenging the "market-driven" narrative.
• Recent Victories: The Montana Supreme Court ruling forces the state to consider climate impacts in permitting, while a Hawaii settlement requires complete transportation decarbonization by 2045.
• Juliana v. United States: Learn about the ongoing federal case arguing that the U.S. government has violated young people's constitutional rights by knowingly promoting a fossil fuel system despite understanding climate dangers.

• Our Children’s Trust
• Mat Dos Santos
• Held v. Montana trial videos
• Youth v. Gov documentary on Netflix
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, host Molly Wood talks with Eliot Brooks, founder and CEO of Cocoon Carbon, about an unexpected climate tech challenge: how decarbonizing steel production is disrupting concrete's path to net zero. Brooks explains how his startup transforms problematic steel slag from modern electric arc furnaces into valuable materials that reduce concrete's carbon footprint while cutting costs.

• Learn how steel's shift to cleaner production methods has unintentionally limited concrete's access to low-carbon materials
• Discover how Cocoon Carbon's modular technology transforms waste into valuable cement alternatives
• Understand why addressing interconnected industrial challenges creates powerful climate tech opportunities
• Find out how this solution makes decarbonization more affordable for both industries, representing 15% of global emissions

• Cocoon Carbon
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re exploring what might be the most overlooked tool in our climate toolkit: nature itself. Yes, we like to geek out about purely technological solutions like fusion or direct-air carbon capture or electric vehicles or consumer compost devices, but there's a whole world of climate solutions that nature has already perfected over millions of years. But how does the financial world think about these solutions? Siddarth Shrikanth is an investor at Just Climate, a division of the Al Gore-founded investment firm Generation Investment Management. He’s also the author of a book called The Case for Nature. We talk about the twin crises of nature and biodiversity loss plus climate change, and how their convergence is a threat and an opportunity of equal scale.

• Just Climate
• The Case for Nature book
• Siddarth Shrikanth
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re going to keep talking about tech and climate innovation with a longtime technologist turned climate tech investor. Mike Schroepfer runs the investment fund Gigascale Capital, which has invested in some of the biggest names in climate tech: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Mill, Form Energy, and a couple other names that will be appearing soon on this very show. Schrep, as he’s known, is also the former CTO of Facebook, so he’s someone with a long view of how tech evolves and gets adopted. Join us for a fascinating conversation about the inflection point we’re at with climate tech, how AI can in fact lead to cleaner energy, and how a better world is still within reach.

• Gigascale Capital
• Commonwealth Fusion Systems on EITP
• Mill founder Matt Rogers on EITP
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s the last official episode of our miniseries, Feeding the Matrix, all about AI, energy use, and data center design. To cap off this series, Molly spoke with JoAnn Garbin, a longtime technologist, sustainability advocate, and innovator, about her work reimagining data center design at Microsoft. It turns out, the company realized years ago that communities might start rejecting new data center construction if they were too resource-intensive, polluting, or just plain ugly. Hear about how that exercise led to net-positive data center concepts, where that project sits now, and all about JoAnn’s new book, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.

• Next-generation data centers at Microsoft
• News: Reducing energy use with chip-level cooling
• Book: The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re continuing our series on AI and energy use, exploring how to expand data centers and computing without sacrificing sustainability goals or, you know, a livable planet. This week, we’re turning toward some innovations that could make that seemingly impossible goal a reality. Realta Fusion is a fusion energy company that spun out of the University of Wisconsin. It’s one of many startups working toward generating fusion energy—the clean, abundant energy that is the same reaction that powers the sun. But Realta is taking an interesting approach to deployment: it hopes to build fusion energy power plants right next to data centers or other facilities with intensive energy needs. Listen to Molly’s conversation with CEO Kieran Furlong.

• Realta Fusion
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s the second episode in our special series on AI and energy use. When it comes to making data centers more energy efficient, few have a larger burden than Amazon’s AWS — the world’s largest cloud provider by market share. Molly talks with Chris Walker, head of sustainability for AWS, about how the company’s customers are pushing it to be as energy efficient as possible, for reasons of economics and the environment. He touches on an Accenture study that says moving AI operations to the cloud can be four times more efficient than doing them on-site. And Walker says making data centers more efficient involves everything from water positivity to producing custom chips (sorry, Nvidia) to simply rearranging the furniture.

• From Amazon: AWS can help reduce the carbon footprint of AI workloads by up to 99%. Here’s how.
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This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s the first episode in our special series on AI and energy use. We’re starting at the foundational layer of AI computing: the chips. Nvidia is the undisputed leader when it comes to providing the processors (and networking equipment and cards and servers and racks) and the software platform that lets companies use those chips to train AI models. But what’s the company’s responsibility when it comes to enabling more sustainable AI? We spoke with Nvidia’s head of sustainability about how the company is making its chip architecture 96% more efficient compared to just two years ago, how it’s pioneering digital twinning to model more energy-efficient data center construction (among other things) and how its their belief that companies are not pulling back on their sustainability goals in the age of AI. Fingers crossed!

• Nvidia blog: How AI and Accelerated Computing are Driving Energy Efficiency
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