How To Stop Climate Change

Samantha Richardson is the author of Ethical Profit: A Guide to Increasing Profit Using Sustainable Business Practices. She’s also the founder and CEO of Ethical Profit Accounting Agency, specializing in helping small businesses with a social or environmental mission get a handle on their finances so they can better understand their cash flow and finances. With this information, they are able to make smarter business choices to help fuel their growth.

It was a fun conversation. Here are some of the topics that we covered with Samantha:

• Myths that persist around sustainable business like the idea that it’s too expensive to operate sustainably
• Small and large steps that businesses can take to become more sustainable and all of the benefits that they can gain from doing so. 
• What are B Corps and why is it that they can be even more profitable than businesses that are strictly focused on profit
• How a focus on short term profit can cost a business more in the long run (for example the infamous Ford Pinto)
• How Samantha brought Quidditch to Australia

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Music by:

• Grace van't Hof
• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]

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“I believe the private sector and the scientific community has a bit more of a nimble opportunity here to change things more rapidly than what we keep looking at, you know, governments to do for us.” ~ Thomas M. Kostigen, author of Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future

Today we’ll be speaking with Thomas M. Kostigen, a New York Times bestselling author and journalist and has written for such publications as National Geographic, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. As a journalist, Kostigen has traveled across the world to report on everything from war zones to extreme weather.  I could go on listing Thomas’s many accomplishments but I'll let them speak for themselves. Today we’ll be focusing primarily on his new book, Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future. We’ll talk with him about things that frankly seem more fitting for a sc- fi novel than a climate change podcast, things like zapping clouds with lasers to make it rain and using nanoparticles to reflect the sun’s rays back into space.

Thomas: Hacking Planet Earth really goes into my definition of geoengineering, which is how we can take better control of not only the climate but what the climate accelerates and is connected to. And that's pretty much everything in our lives. So our food systems, mobility systems, how we conduct urban planning and how we are going to even socialize and interact in the future. And given today’s circumstances, the unfortunate circumstances With COVID-19, we're getting a little taste of what invisible threats, just like climate change, can do to our everyday life. So within the pages of Hacking Planet Earth, I get into all sorts of technologies that can affect with a big “E” the climate today, not 10 years from now, or 20 years from now or 30 years from now but today. And these technologies range from different types of devices that can deflect the sun to taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to better enhancing our soil for agriculture, to all sorts of things that we have on the innovation front and mad, mad geniuses have gotten behind, we just need to bring to scale. And so the book is really a marriage or a call for a marriage between the investment and business community and the science community. Clearly the government and political forces that traditionally would be our societal benefactors and protect us from things like climate change or other public health issues such as COVID aren't there for us. So we need to take matters into our own hands and start to do what nature can no longer do for herself. And that is to manipulate the climate for the better for all of us.

David: When I first heard about geoengineering, I thought it sounded...

Click here for the full transcript.

Music by:

• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]

Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.

Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show. 

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“The good news is the opportunities to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soils have a lot of side benefits, making the soil more resilient in the event of warming, increasing moisture in the soil, reducing pollution from farms into water systems. So let's go for it. It's crazy not to, not to do this!” 
~Aldyen Donnelly, Co-Founder and Director of Carbon Economics at Nori.

Aldyen Donnelly is a co-founder and the Director of Carbon Economics at Nori, a company whose goal is to “create a new way for anyone in the world to pay to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” She has 30 years of experience in environmental and carbon markets and developed the world's first major forward emission reduction credit purchase agreement to finance carbon sequestration in agricultural soils.

Carbon Sequestration and Soil Carbon
In this episode we discuss the massive potential for storing carbon in the soil, what farmers can do to store more carbon in their fields and how buying Nori carbon removal tons can help farmers make the investments required to do that.

Carbon Offsets and Carbon Markets
We also talk about some of the problems that carbon offsets have had up to now, what we’ve learned from those experiments and how the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace is addressing some of the past issues with streamlined software, more transparency and better verification.

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If you would like to support the show please click here.

Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.

Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show.

Click here to read the full transcript.

Music was provided by:

• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]

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“I can't imagine anyone who would not think of this as a good thing, generating high quality and highly available energy from manure and replacing a commercially mined and processed fertilizer with recycled fertilizer. Everyone's gonna love that idea. So we need to shift some of that money from the traditional energy and nutrient sources over to the farmers.” ~ Steve Rowe, CEO, Newtrient

Steve Rowe is the CEO of Newtrient, a company that helps farmers take the nutrients that are part of the agricultural cycle and use them in new ways. Newtrient's mission is to reduce the environmental footprint of dairy farming and make it economically viable to do so. 

Nothing is wasted in nature. Anytime an organism produces waste there is some other organism waiting in line to use it. Farmers have been harnessing that natural system to recycle manure since the birth of agriculture. It’s the world’s oldest circular economy. Now there are more ways than ever to recycle, reuse or upcycle components from manure. 

Things we talked about with Steve:

• Manure as a renewable, environmentally-friendly fertilizer.
• Renewable baseload energy from feeding manure into methane digesters
• Environmentally friendly fiber products from manure
• A circular economy for manure

“We need to set up better economic signals between the urban and rural communities, which will, I believe re-knit the relationship between urban and rural the way it was, perhaps when I was a kid, when everybody knew a farmer or everyone was just one generation off the farm. Now people are very, very disconnected. We have many, many more foodies, but far fewer people who understand where food comes from.” ~ Steve Rowe 

Music was provided by:

• Avery Reidy
• Keaton Butler
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]

Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.

Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show. 

Support the show

“It is a win-win-win. It’s a win for the environment, it’s a win for women and it’s a win for mitigating against climate change.” ~ Dr. Betsy Beymer-Farris on seaweed farming in Tanzania

Dr. Betsy Beymer-Farris is the Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program at the University of Kentucky. She’s been conducting research on the coast of Tanzania for over 20 years. She’s done studies on climate policy, seaweed farming, coastal conservation, aquaculture, gender and human rights. But when she first arrived she probably had no idea how big a part of her life Tanzania would become.

“I first went to Tanzania when I was 20 years old and I had never been anywhere. So, I had been to Myrtle Beach basically. And I got on a plane and went to Tanzania and did a study abroad and it changed my life because I saw the world for the first time.” I was on the plane and I was so excited that I actually thought when we landed in Dar es Salaam, which is on the coast and nowhere near a national park, I thought I saw a giraffe because I was so excited. It was actually a pole.”

Learning the local wisdom

In addition to all of that research she has spent time learning the language and building friendships with the people that live there. They have shared with her the knowledge that they have gained over generations of working with nature every day to survive. She is not just researching their environment and way of life. She’s working to protect it.

Mafia Island Marine Park, Tanzania

Much of Betsy’s research concerns the local population in and around the Mafia Island Marine Park on the coast of Tanzania. When the marine park was established all fishing was banned to preserve the incredible biodiversity that makes it one of the premier dive spots in the world. In fact the diving is so amazing that the park is home to the most expensive hotel in the world, just $10,000 per night. Obviously the marine ecosystem is more valuable as an ecotourism spot than a mere source of food. That seems like a good story for the environment.

Good intentions

Unfortunately things are never that simple. Often we protect nature by fencing it off and kicking out the people that have lived there for thousands of years. When we do that we lose the wisdom and management practices that the local people have developed over generations of living within the natural system. In this episode Betsy shares some of the unintended consequences of creating policies to protect habitats without talking to the people that have been living there for generations. 

Learn more about Betsy Beymer-Farris

Music was provided by:

• Avery Reidy
• The Blueberries
• Kiki and the Vettes
• Paige Huguelet
• Theme music is by Juices

Audio production by Keaton Butler – [email protected]

Please share the show with a friend.
If you would like to support the show please click here.

Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show. 

Support the show

“This is an issue where politicians can reach across the aisle. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart liberal to feel good about renewable energy because it is more efficient and increasingly less expensive. ” ~ Amy Haddon, Vice President for Global Content and Cleantech Marketing for Schneider Electric Energy & Sustainability Services. 

Amy creates content to inform Schneider’s existing and potential clients on sustainability, renewable energy and other cleantech topics. But she also works with those clients to develop their own sustainability reports and communicate about their efforts. Many people have to focus on a very tight topic related to their own job. As a communicator and content creator, Amy gets to take a wide view across many areas of sustainability in multiple industries.

Focusing on consumer choices is not effective

We discussed the danger of focusing on the environmental impact of our personal consumer choices. That can lead to small changes but it can also result in guilt and frustration which doesn’t help anyone. It can lead people to focus their energy on smaller objectives where they have more control, like eliminating their use of plastic straws. But that does nothing to stop the larger problem of climate change. 

Demanding action on climate change should be our focus

"Climate change in particular should be the primary focus for any of us taking action on the environment, because ultimately if we don’t mitigate climate change the ramifications of those impacts will trump any other environmental problems that we might have. For the majority of us we don’t have a lot of choices around how we get our energy. We don’t have a lot of choices over our food systems. We don’t have a lot of choices over our transportation systems, so I think that making people feel guilty about their choices is a tactic that doesn’t ultimately work because we don’t understand the scale of the systems that we’re really working within and because ultimately and unfortunately, those small consumer choices that we can make, while important and certainly affirming in terms of at least we’re doing something, they’re a small drop in the overall bucket, whereas I think our activities, our energy, our resources, could and should be better spent to pull bigger levers, like politics and government regulations and other things that we really need to change those human systems and make the system itself more sustainable so that when we come to make a choice we can feel assured that the choice that we’re making, because it’s the choice that we have, is the right choice." ~ Amy Haddon

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How would you stop climate change?
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show. 

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“What is wasteful that we can harvest and use more efficiently?” ~ Bob Powell, CEO, Brightmark Energy

Bob Powell spends a lot of his day thinking about waste. His company, Brightmark Energy, converts two very different types of waste into energy and other useful products. 

Converting manure to energy with methane digesters
Brightmark Energy builds and operates methane digesters that convert manure and other organic waste into renewable natural gas and valuable natural fertilizer. Managing manure in this way prevents methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from escaping into the atmosphere and helps to keep nitrogen and phosphorus out of our waterways.

Converting plastic waste back into diesel and other petroleum products
Brightmark Energy’s Plastics Renewal Technology can take a mixed stream of almost any type of plastic waste and convert it to low-sulfur diesel fuel, naptha and wax. They are nearing completion of their first large plastic renewal facility, located in Ashley, Indiana. When completed it will keep tons of plastic out of the landfill and provide products that would otherwise be produced from crude oil.

Bob Powell's Clean Energy Journey
Bob didn’t start his career in clean energy. He started out working with utilities and power producers to build or acquire coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants. He even did some work for oil and gas companies.
Over time Bob became disenchanted with the environmental damage that the fossil fuel industry was causing. He jumped over to the clean energy industry by starting his own solar company in 2009. In 2015 he became CEO of Brightmark Energy and switched his focus to converting waste-to-energy. 

In this episode you’ll learn about some exciting ways that we can convert waste into energy and reduce the demand for fossil fuel.

Please help us grow the show
Do you have a friend that would enjoy this show. Please share it with them.
If you would like to support the show please click here.

How would you stop climate change?
Do you have a great idea for stopping climate change? We want to hear it.
Click here to share your idea and it might be featured on the show. 

Support the show

“I had this thought in my head… what if I didn’t apply for any jobs and hiked on the Appalachian trail.“ ~ Mary Marshall

Our guest today is Mary Marshall, program manager at Solar Energy International (SEI). SEI is a non-profit training facility for people looking to get into the design and installation of solar energy systems. Mary specifically manages a program called Solar Forward, which is a technical consulting program geared toward kick-starting solar markets in rural communities.
During college Mary was intent on a career in television news. She studied hard and landed several impressive internships. She was well on her way. But something didn’t feel right.
Find out more about Solar Energy International at https://www.solarenergy.org.

If you would like to share an idea for fighting climate change go to howtostopclimatechange.com and record a short message. We'll select one idea to share in each episode.
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We don’t have time for doom, gloom, denial or hope. Let’s get to work.
How To Stop Climate Change is a show about people who work every day to fix this massive problem that we’ve created. There are so many ways to react to the climate crisis; disbelief, anger, apathy, worry. Most of us just assume that there isn’t much we can do. But some people find a way to contribute to the solution and get to work. Maybe they’ve dedicated their career to the fight. Maybe they dedicate some of their free time. We’ll hear their stories and we’ll also take a look at what actions make a difference and what things aren’t worth worrying about. 

What's your favorite idea for stopping climate change? Share it with us and we might feature it on the show. Go to HowToStopClimateChange.com and record your idea.

How To Stop Climate Change is produced by David Butler and Keaton Butler.

Contact us or support the show at HowToStopClimateChange.com

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