The Boring Climate Podcast

Can carbon utilisation scale in India? The science is advancing. The technologies are improving. But the harder questions remain. 

At Boring Deeper, GPS Renewables' first Boring Climate Conference, researchers, industry leaders, and investors -- many of whom were part of drafting the CCUS R&D roadmap: R&D Roadmap to Enable India's Net Zero Targets through Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) -- came together to discuss what it will take to move carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) from molecule to market.

Featuring:

Research: Vivek Polshettiwar, Chinmoy Ranjan and Rajnish Kumar

Industry: Sushma Rawat and Lovish Ahuja

Investment: Ashish Goel and Vishnu Rajeev

Moderated by Sebastian Peter.

The discussion explored the realities of scaling CCUS in India, from technology readiness and catalyst development to carbon pricing, investment viability, and the policy frameworks needed to support deployment at scale.

#BoringDeeper

We recently took #theboringclimatepodcast offline, to hold Boring Deeper, our first-ever dedicated conference on carbon capture, utilisation and storage (#ccus)

In this session, Dr Ashish Lele (chair of India's high-level taskforce that developed the CCUS roadmap) and Dr Anjan Ray (one of our country's foremost experts on our net-zero transition), speak to GPS Renewables CEO Mainak Chakraborty on what it would take to make India’s ambitious CCUS roadmap a reality.

India's trees are flowering earlier than they used to. Geetha Ramaswami and Suhirtha Muhil M have spent 15 years documenting exactly this through SeasonWatch, a citizen science initiative they helped build that has now logged nearly 900,000 observations of tree behavior across India.Geetha is an ecologist and one of the principal researchers behind SeasonWatch. Suhirtha led the development of SeasonWatch's Climate Change Educator Handbook — designed to be age-appropriate, culturally grounded, and taught through the tree outside the classroom window.We ask them what phenology is and why it matters, what 900,000 data points reveal about India's shifting seasons, what happens when a mango tree flowers three weeks early but its pollinators don't follow, and how citizen science turns everyday observation into a data revolution.

The Sundarbans is one of the most biodiverse — and most climate-vulnerable — places on Earth. A vast mangrove delta straddling India and Bangladesh, it is home to 4.5 million people, the Bengal tiger, and an ecosystem that has absorbed centuries of storms, floods, and now, a rapidly rising sea.

In the past decade alone, the region has been struck by five major cyclones. It has lost over 210 square kilometres of land to the Bay of Bengal since 1964. And long before islands sink, salinity is quietly poisoning the soil — forcing migration, dismantling livelihoods, and unravelling communities.

To understand what is really happening here — and what it means for the future — we speak with Dr. Annu Jalais, environmental anthropologist and Associate Professor at Krea University. 

Annu has spent decades living with and studying the communities of the Sundarbans. Her work sits at the intersection of climate change, conservation, and human–nonhuman relations, and has fundamentally challenged how we think about people, tigers, and coexistence in a landscape under siege.

Bill McKibben wrote the book on climate change — literally. In 1989, The End of Nature told the world what was coming. Thirty-six years later, his latest book Here Comes the Sun makes the case that the energy transition is already here — and moving faster than most people realise.

In this episode, we talk to one of the most influential environmentalists in history about the solar revolution that's reshaping global power.

We cover why the Global South is leading the renewables charge, what energy democracy looks like for the world's poorest communities, whether solar risks replicating fossil fuel inequalities, and why Bill believes India is positioned to leapfrog the old energy order entirely.

We also get into storage, panel efficiency, end-of-life recyclability, and why McKibben thinks hope — not outrage — is the more durable fuel for climate action.

The Himalayan glaciers are retreating, and the water, energy, and geopolitical futures of over a billion people hang in the balance.

We begin Season 3 with Dr. Anil V. Kulkarni, one of the world's leading glaciologists and a pioneer in Himalayan cryosphere research, to understand what's really happening at the roof of the world.

Dr. Kulkarni's career reads like a story of firsts. He was the first to use satellite data to track the retreat of nearly 1,900 Himalayan glaciers. He developed India's first glacier mass balance model and snow-melt runoff model, exposing how climate change is quietly eroding hydropower potential across seasons. And his research on mid-winter snowmelt has identified a chilling story of global warming hiding in plain sight.

With an M.Tech in Applied Geology from IIT-Roorkee, an M.S in Geography from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, a Ph.D in Geology, Shivaji University, Kolhapur, and 40+ years watching the mountains change - this is THE episode for you to better understand our Himalayas.

Some of the most powerful storms on Earth form where science has looked the least.

Despite being home to nearly half the global population, tropical weather remains one of the most poorly understood parts of the climate system.

In our Season 2 finale of The Boring Climate Podcast, 2025, MacArthur Fellow Ángel F. Adames Corraliza explains how tropical storms form, and gets into why better understanding of moisture, atmospheric waves, and warming is overturning long-held assumptions.

From the Madden-Julian Oscillation to humidity in the mid-latitudes, his insights could transform forecasts for four billion people.

Heat is the "invisible" disaster – it’s all around us, kills as many, perhaps more people, in India than other extreme weather events, yet doesn't capture public attention like floods or cyclones. Aditya Valiathan Pillai, doctoral researcher at King’s College London and a Visiting Fellow at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, New Delhi, joins us on The Boring Climate Podcast to help us understand heat, ways to act upon it, the policy interventions we need as our planet warms, and why this is not just a climate problem, but very much a human problem.

Our climate and ecological crises are often seen as problems of the future.

In this episode of The Boring Climate Podcast, Prof Mahesh Rangarajan, Professor of History & Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, joins us to talk about why history might offer critical lessons to address the planetary crises of the present.

When we talk about rising sea levels, we usually think of melting glaciers.

But there’s another, quieter crisis unfolding underground.

Over the past two decades, NASA satellites have tracked massive groundwater depletion- a shift now contributing more to sea-level rise than melting ice sheets.

In this episode of the Boring Climate Podcast, Dr Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, Earth System Scientist at Arizona State University, joins us to explain how human overuse of groundwater is dehydrating the planet and altering its hydrological balance.

He unpacks how terrestrial water storage, the invisible layer beneath our feet, connects our taps to the oceans, reminding us that what we draw from the ground eventually finds its way to the sea.