We need to triple global energy production by 2050. Renewables are scaling fast, but the real wild card that could change everything might just be fusion. The physics and engineering are closer than ever, but there’s a critical materials problem standing between us and unlimited clean energy.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly speaks with Dr. John Elling, a Los Alamos chemist turned serial entrepreneur who’s working on a solution that he believes will change the world. Both fusion and next-generation fission reactors rely on enriched lithium isotopes, and existing enrichment methods are slow, expensive, and require massive facilities. Dr. Elling’s company, Molten Salt Solutions, is developing a simpler, cheaper process and building the US's first commercial production facility for enriched lithium — the ingredient that could determine whether fusion energy ever actually reaches the grid.

We talk about:

• The big problem facing both fusion and advanced fission right now: the unmet demand for fuel
• A refresher on the science behind enriched lithium and nuclear energy
• The world’s growing energy demands, and why fusion will help us meet the 3x demand we’ll face by 2050
• Why the US dismantled its only enrichment facility and why Russia currently holds the only meaningful supply
• How Molten Salt Solutions' mercury-free, scalable process differs from how governments did it during the nuclear weapons era
• The race to supply fusion developers with material they need now, before commercial reactors even exist
• Why the current administration's push to reduce regulatory barriers for small modular reactors is accelerating demand for lithium-7
• John's case for why fusion is the final frontier of humanity’s energy evolution

Links:

• Molten Salt Solutions: https://www.moltensaltsolutions.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show (and support future field trips): https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

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You’re doing all the right things to make your home greener: you switched to solar and induction, you remember your reusable bags, and you always compost your scraps. But some of the biggest climate impacts of the building you live or work in? They were locked in the day it was built — in the concrete, the steel, the glass. And that matters, because the built environment accounts for roughly 42% of global emissions.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Ben Stapleton, the CEO at the U.S. Green Building Council of California, to talk about what it actually takes to make our buildings work for the climate instead of against it. Ben has spent over 20 years at the intersection of sustainability, real estate, and innovation, and he’s got a refreshingly practical outlook: the solutions exist, the business case is there, and the work is already happening, even when the federal government is pulling back.

We talk about:

• Why buildings — not cars — are the biggest source of carbon emissions, and what that means for climate strategy
• The difference between operating carbon and embodied carbon, and why that means we need two different performance standards for buildings
• How building performance standards work and why California is building a statewide framework to get there by 2030
• How to get developers to root for performance standards: sell them on lower energy costs, lower insurance premiums, and higher resale values
• What rebuilding after the LA fires could look like if we get it right, and why waiving the all-electric requirement was a missed opportunity
• USGBC California's Net Zero Accelerator and the startup trends Ben is tracking in green building tech

Links:

• U.S. Green Building Council of California: https://usgbc-ca.org/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show (and support future field trips): https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

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Home batteries are having a moment, but for years, getting one meant cobbling together a solar panel from one company, an inverter from another, a smart panel from a third, and hoping they'd all play nice. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly takes a field trip to Mountain View, California, to visit Lunar Energy, where founder and CEO Kunal Girotra has built the fully integrated solar-plus-battery ecosystem he always wished existed.

Plus: a tour of Lunar's working showroom, where we flip a breaker, watch the app react in real time, and find out what happens when you leave the oven on during a power outage.

We talk about:

• Why Kunal left Tesla Energy to build a fully integrated home energy ecosystem
• How Lunar's modular, stackable battery blocks work (think Lego bricks for your garage wall)
• The real math on savings: how a solar and battery system can cut your bill by $2,000/year, and Lunar's AI adds another $500 on top
• How "virtual power plants" are actually very real, and why Lunar wants to rename them "distributed power plants"
• Why Northeastern states are leading on VPP policy, and what utilities in other regions need to change to keep up

Links:

• Lunar Energy: https://www.lunarenergy.com/
• Sunrun (Lunar's leading VPP partner): https://www.sunrun.com/
• Green Mountain Power: https://greenmountainpower.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show (and support future field trips): https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

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Washington and the COP conferences get all the headlines, but some of the most creative and effective climate action in the world is emerging from city halls — and Denver's Office of Climate Action is one of the best examples of what's possible.

This week, Molly zooms in on the Mile High City as she talks with Chelsea Warren, Marketing and Communications Manager for Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency.

Chelsea has spent years building one of the country's most effective city-level climate communications programs, making the case that local government is where climate action gets real.

We talk about:

• Why local government is the frontline of climate action, and why local action matters more than ever
• How Denver used the rollback of federal climate policies to motivate voters to fund local climate initiatives like solar, e-bike rebates, heat pump programs, and more
• Using the science of behavioral change to effectively promote climate action
• Goodwill pop-ups, ice cream collaborations, and other non-traditional ways Denver activated around a climate campaign, and delivered 128 million impressions in the process
• Why financial incentives and positive social comparison beat education every time when it comes to motivating climate action
• The perception gap: most people wildly underestimate how many of their neighbors care about climate action
• How effective, human-centered storytelling can combat pessimism and inaction
• The co-benefits frame: reaching people through health, savings, and quality of life, not just the environment

Links:

• Denver's Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency: https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Climate-Action-Sustainability-and-Resiliency
• The Denver Climate Project: https://www.denvergov.org/Community/Denver-Climate-Project
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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Trillions of dollars worth of goods move around the planet every year, and a shocking amount is lost, spoiled, or discarded. That wasted food, medicine, and equipment isn’t just a business problem; it’s a massive, underappreciated climate problem.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly talks with Krenar Komoni, CEO and founder of Tive, a supply chain visibility company that helps businesses track and monitor shipments in real time. What started as a GPS tracker for his father-in-law's trucking company has grown into one of the fastest-growing companies in supply chain tech. Tive’s small-but-mighty trackers don’t just follow a shipment’s location — they also monitor temperature, light, and shock along the way, helping businesses intervene before a load of strawberries (or a shipment of vaccines) becomes a very expensive, very wasteful problem.

We talk about:

• Why real-time shipment visibility is a key ingredient in creating a greener supply chain
• How temperature monitoring can save hundreds of thousands of dollars of food and medicine from going to waste
• What "permanent disruption" and climate change means for global supply chains
• How route data is helping companies find faster, more fuel-efficient paths they didn't know existed
• Tive's commitment to sustainability in its own products, including lithium-free trackers and a tracker recycling program
• Why AI agents will be hungry for real-time supply chain data, and what that could unlock for global efficiency
• Krenar's 10-year vision: tracking 5-10% of all global shipments (and why that would be a very big deal)

Links:

• Tive: https://www.tive.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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Data centers don't exactly have a reputation for being climate heroes… but what if they could be? This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Jasper de Vries, co-founder and CEO of Lucend, to talk about the surprisingly wild world of data center optimization — and why the industry has been leaving billions of dollars and millions of megawatt hours on the table.

In this conversation, Jasper explains how Lucend’s platform uses machine learning and sensor data to make data centers dramatically more efficient. He also lays out a vision for the industry’s future; one where data centers generate their own renewable power, store it in batteries, and feed flexibility back to the grid on demand.

We talk about:

• Why data centers are sitting on a goldmine of untapped efficiency, and why they haven't captured it until now
• How Lucend uses 280 billion sensor readings to open up the "black box" of data center operations, saving customers an average of 25% on energy and 30% on water
• Why it’s so hard to make even the smallest changes in how a data center operates
• How "transparent AI" builds operator trust by showing every step of the recommendation process
• The water vs. energy trade-off in cooling, and why it's more complicated than headlines suggest
• Why Scope 3 emissions from hardware are the dirty secret behind Big Tech's broken climate pledges
• The vision for data centers as flexible grid assets, and what’s needed to get them there

Links:

• Lucend: https://www.getlucend.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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Less than 2% of all philanthropic giving goes to climate, and a big reason why is something Greg Rock calls "donor paralysis." People care, but the landscape is so complex that many well-meaning donors don’t take action.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Greg Rock, Executive Director of 1.5°Climate, a free national donor collaborative that's borrowing the energy of VC pitch competitions to make climate philanthropy more accessible, more exciting, and more impactful. With 600+ members and $35 million moved to over 100 organizations, 1.5°Climate is proving that you don’t have to be a billionaire, or an expert in climate tech, to make a real difference.

We talk about:

• Why less than 2% of philanthropic giving goes to climate, and what we can do to change that
• How 1.5°Climate's Shark Tank-style virtual pitch events connect donors directly with vetted climate organizations
• The three criteria that define a high-impact climate investment: catalytic potential, leverage, and gap-filling
• Why 1.5°Climate funds nonprofits that aren’t exclusively climate organizations like cattle trade associations and agricultural projects
• How the team shifted from federal to state and local climate action after the 2024 election
• The innovations Greg and 1.5°Climate are most excited about right now: next-gen geothermal, agrivoltaics, and more

Links:

• 1.5°Climate: https://onepointfiveclimate.org/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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There’s no shortage of stats to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of our food waste problem: A whopping 40% of food grown for human consumption goes to waste; $400 billion worth of food gets thrown away every year in the U.S — roughly 1.5% of GDP; Food waste is responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Must we go on?

That’s why, after building the Nest Thermostat, Harry Tannenbaum and Matt Rogers turned their attention to our kitchens. They created Mill, a sleek appliance that quietly turns your food scraps into an odorless, coffee-ground-like material, and in the process, began changing the way people think about what they buy and throw away.

And Mill isn’t stopping at our kitchen counters. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Harry returns to the show to talk about how Mill is turning their attention to the places where food waste really piles up: grocery stores, restaurants, stadiums, and beyond.

We talk about:

• Why food waste is a $400 billion problem hiding in plain sight, and why nobody’s actually measuring it
• How the data Mill collects is already changing consumer behavior, and what that means at commercial scale
• What Mill Commercial looks like: a modular, dishwasher-sized unit that processes hundreds of pounds of food per day
• The Whole Foods partnership: deploying Mill infrastructure across all locations by 2027, backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge fund
• Why dehydrated food waste going directly to chickens is a tighter, more valuable loop than composting
• The vision for residential distribution: bundled with waste services or utilities, the way Nest thermostats scaled through utilities

Links:

• Mill: https://mill.com/
• All episodes: https://everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

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The grid is getting smarter, cleaner, and infinitely more complicated all at once. Enter Gridmatic, a company using artificial intelligence to do what old-school grid modeling can’t: predict when the wind will blow, when prices will spike, and exactly when to charge or discharge a battery.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly is joined by David Miller, Chief Commercial Officer at Gridmatic, to nerd out about why managing a grid full of renewables is so much harder than managing one full of coal and gas, and what it actually takes to make renewable energy reliable at scale.

We talk about:

• Why forecasting renewable output is so much harder than forecasting demand
• How Gridmatic uses AI to predict real-time price spikes a full day ahead and position batteries accordingly
• Why Texas's grid interconnection queue has ballooned to 230 gigawatts when the state only uses 90 on its hottest day
• What "Controllable Load Resources" are, and why they might be the key to unlocking faster grid interconnection for data centers
• The crucial missing link between the vision of virtual power plants and actual grid reliability, and how software finally closes that loop

Links:

• Gridmatic: https://www.gridmatic.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

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Let's be honest: the climate conversation is having a bit of a PR crisis. The word ‘climate’ itself has become politically charged, federal funding is under threat, and media coverage has gone quiet. But the technologies are still working, the solutions are still scaling, and the people building them haven't gone anywhere. So how do you keep telling that story?

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Josh Garrett, CEO and co-founder of Redwood Climate Communications, a specialty PR and strategic communications firm that works exclusively with climate tech companies and climate-focused nonprofits. Josh has been communicating about climate for 14 years, and right now, his expertise has never been more needed.

We talk about:

• How to craft compelling stories about climate tech and policy
• Why silence is not a strategy — and how to keep talking about climate even when the political winds have shifted
• Simple word swaps that works across the aisle, like saying "pollution" instead of "greenhouse gases"
• How the fossil fuel industry built a century-long messaging machine — including the origin story of "now we're cooking with gas"
• Why climate advocates over-explain when they should be keeping it simple and repeatable
• The power of leading with co-benefits: affordability, public health, energy freedom
• How to be a “Climate YIMBY,” and why showing up to your local zoning meeting might be the highest-impact thing you can do right now
• Balancing fear and hope: why disasters are our current reality, yet progress is inevitable

Links:

• Redwood Climate Communications: https://www.redwoodclimatecomms.com/
• Yale Center for Climate Change Communication: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/
• Potential Energy Coalition: https://potentialenergycoalition.org/
• Emily Atkin’s Heated Newsletter: https://heated.world/
• Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/merchants-of-doubt-9781608193943/
• Greenlight America: https://www.greenlightamerica.org/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

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What if solar panels on your roof, a home battery in your garage, and the EV in your driveway could together make you money — while simultaneously solving the grid capacity crisis?

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Marco Krapels, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Enphase Energy, to discuss what surging data center energy demand means for the future of residential clean energy — and why Enphase thinks the answer is turning millions of American homes into a distributed, AI-optimized virtual power plant.

We talk about:

• Why the AI energy crisis might be the thing that finally scales residential solar and batteries
• How Enphase's software turns rooftop solar, home batteries, and EV chargers into smart, dispatchable grid assets
• The virtual power plant model, and why utilities are finally on board
• How Green Mountain Power in Vermont and Octopus Energy in the UK have already proven this works at scale
• Why adding solar and a 10 kWh battery to less than 10 million homes could solve the U.S. capacity crunch
• The bi-directional EV charger that's coming later this year and why it's a 7x multiplier on home battery capacity
• What a future where homeowners get paid by hyperscalers and utilities — instead of paying for their electricity — could actually look like
• Why clean, distributed energy is the fastest path to winning the AI race

Links:

• Enphase: https://enphase.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
• Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/

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