Everybody in the Pool

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re taking a step back to take a look at the data and see how we’re tracking toward making it to net zero by 2050. Ryan Pancharadsam is a partner at Kleiner Perkins and together with legendary clean tech investor John Doerr, he wrote a book called Speed & Scale, breaking down the climate crisis into a series of categories with accomplishable objectives attached to them. We’ll talk about the team’s newly updated tracker, looking at progress toward our survival, and the places where we need to move a lot farther and a lot faster to make it to net zero.

Lots of brands, from BMW to Stella McCartney to Allbirds, are using all-natural fibers, textiles, and even shoe soles that are nontoxic and totally recyclable. And all of those materials come from one place: NFW, or Natural Fiber Welding. Molly Wood interviews Luke Haverhals, the founder and CEO of NFW, about how the company develops “recipes” using abundant natural resources and runs them through existing manufacturing infrastructure, enabling a scalable transition away from fossil fuel-derived materials.

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Sometimes the water-related titles really write themselves. This week, Molly goes under the sea with Julia Marsh of Sway, which is developing a replacement for plastic using seaweed. Julia explains that seaweed is abundant, regenerative, and can be made into a replacement for single-use plastics using almost the exact same processes that are currently used to make plastic. Also, this is a woman who really, really loves seaweed.

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Molly Wood talks to Raghu Belur, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Enphase Energy, about the company's pioneering work in decentralized solar power and their vision for a distributed, software-driven energy system that puts renewable power and storage in the hands of homes and businesses. They discuss Enphase's origins back in Clean Tech 1.0, the importance of microinverters, the role of batteries, and the policy challenges (ahem, California) that are shaping the adoption of distributed energy resources.

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This week, we’re talking about sustainable food production—both an adaptation and a mitigation opportunity. Molly Wood talks with Alexander Olesen, co-founder and CEO of Babylon Micro-farms, who shares the journey from a student project aimed at feeding people in refugee camps to developing small-scale, remotely managed vertical farming systems. This startup is focused on installing beautiful micro-farms in stores, campuses, senior centers, educational spaces, and other facilities that can benefit from growing food onsite. But we also tackle the bigger picture about traditional farming, such as soil degradation and high greenhouse gas emissions, and explore how controlled environment agriculture and hydroponics present a resource-efficient solution.

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