World Changing Ideas

As a follow-up to our episode on transportation, we're revisiting a conversation with Jennifer Wong, the head of sustainability at Convoy. The company is working on improving efficiency in the trucking business by saving money for shippers and increasing earnings for truck drivers, while also helping eliminate carbon waste.  

Global transportation is responsible for 24 percent of direct CO2 emissions from fuel combustion. The transportation sector in the U.S is responsible for roughly 29 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

First, we look at how Ford is remodeling its most popular vehicle and then learn about a unique way to solve climate change in the transportation industry. Haakon Brunell is the co-founder of Carbon Crusher, a road tech company that builds carbon negative roads.

A new study shows how quickly reducing animal farming could unlock ‘negative emissions’ by lowering the amount of methane and nitrous oxide from the air and allowing forests to regenerate. Talib and Avery discuss this development through the lens of their own dietary choices.

Deforestation is partially a result of traditional agriculture practices so we’re looking into alternative agriculture to find out how it can actually benefit the environment. We're focusing on two farming innovations, one of which doesn’t involve soil to grow plants and another that uses a machine to clean up cow manure.

Stanley Janicki is the vice president of Sedron Technologies and Donald De Jong is the co-owner and CEO of Natural Prairie Dairy. They partnered to roll out the Varcor system, which upcycles cow manure into a better fertilizer while helping to sequester more carbon in the soil. Plus, it produces clean drinking water!

Gotham Greens Co-founder and CEO Viraj Puri developed an urban greenhouse farm that's completely devoid of soil. With the goal to localize supply chains, Puri is opening up more hydroponic farms located in urban settings to cut back on distribution distances.

Resources on regenerative farming and permaculture:

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/regenerative-agriculture-101#whatis

https://www.thespruce.com/permaculture-garden-principles-steps-5199140

Last year Talib talked with Maisie Hughes from American Forests about tree equity and since it seemed like a good follow-up to our episode on reforestation last week, we’re going to share some highlights from that interview.

Because it’s Earth Day in two days, we thought, what better way to celebrate than by talking about the most iconic symbol of the Earth? Trees are nature’s first line of defense when it comes to fighting climate change, because of their capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it. In this episode we’ll learn about two ways that will help forests keep doing the work they need to do.

Yee Lee is the VP of Growth at Terraformation, a forest restoration startup that aims to speed up the reforesting process.

Zack Parisa is NCX CEO and co-founder and Dr. Jennifer Jenkins is its Chief Sustainability Officer. NCX is connecting American landowners with carbon buyers using AI data mapping to open up access to the carbon offsets market.

We know that corporations have known about their own role in climate change for some time but while they might be accountable, individuals are also responsible for managing their own carbon-producing behavior.

On today's episode, we’re looking at a decades-long blame game and then we'll find out about the recent SEC ruling that could change the way companies operate when it comes to climate change. 

Last month, UN members convened at the UN Environment Assembly and passed a historic resolution to end plastic pollution. On this week's episode we're looking at what plastic is, how it can biodegrade, what biodegradable even means and what we can do to start taking plastic out of our everyday life.

Dr. Ting Xu is a professor in the Department of Science Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley.

Sarah Paiji Yoo is the CEO and co-founder of Blueland, a company that has committed to revolutionizing conventional cleaning and personal care products.

A few weeks ago, we went up to Stowe, Vermont and rode on Taiga's new electric snowmobiles. It was a fun experience testing out its new model, which is much quieter than traditional gas-powered snowmobiles.

On today's episode, we’re going to look at methane. While we know that a major source of greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide, methane also plays a huge part. It doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide but one molecule of methane has more than 80 times the warming power of a molecule of CO2. Lena Hoeglund Isaksson is a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and she explains how we can focus our efforts on removing methane. Then Newlight Technologies Co-founder and CEO Mark Herrema discusses how his company developed a unique process that creates a bioplastic material by combining air with methane.