The U.S. Department of Energy is crucial for funding, researching, and testing emerging energy tech. Now, in the Biden era, the agency is orienting itself toward deployment. How difficult is that transition? Our former co-host Jigar Shah joins Stephen, Katherine, and Ed to discuss his experience running the Energy Department’s loan programs office. In March, Jigar left his position at Generate Capital (and this podcast) to head into government service and run the loan programs office. Jigar...

EIA and IEA are out with projections for emissions and fossil fuel consumption. And they don’t look good.  On our current policy trajectory, there is no peak in sight, according to EIA By 2050, we will likely see a 50% increase in energy consumption. And even though renewables will be the fastest-growing new source of energy, hydrocarbon liquid fuels will meet the majority of demand. That means emissions could rise through 2050, absent massive changes to policy. In July, the International En...

At the beginning of the pandemic, energy prices crashed. We did an episode of this show trying to figure out how oil prices fell to negative $40 per barrel. Times have changed. Oil is up over $100/barrel. But far more acute is what’s happening with natural gas, particularly in Europe and Asia. In the US, natural gas prices have doubled in the last year. But in parts of Europe, the price has risen more than 5 times. The disruptions are clear. We're seeing stories of power shortages in China, f...

Suddenly everyone is talking about green hydrogen.  From South Africa to the United Arab Emirates. From China to Utah. Governments and developers are eyeing hydrogen as a decarbonization tool.  But the rush is also raising lots of questions: Where will hydrogen be most useful? How do you create a supply chain to support it? And how can we ensure it has climate integrity? For answers, we turned to two experts who are obsessing over the future of hydrogen: Janice Lin and Stephen Lamm. Janic...

Ride sharing has swept transportation systems over the last decade -- bringing convenience, but also congestion, inequities, and political fights. Now a new category of transportation networking is emerging: TransitTech. It makes up a class of companies that are using tech to help maximize public transit systems. So what does TransitTech look like post-pandemic? Tiffany Chu joins Katherine and Stephen this week to discuss the path forward for transit. Tiffany is the co-founder and CEO of Rem...

Shayle has been brewing up an investment thesis around how decarbonization will create stratification in traditional commodity sectors, like chemicals and materials. If you can produce the same thing in the same cost range -- but you can do so in a CO2-free or carbon-negative -- you'll reap the rewards. Lanzatech is a great test case for that thesis, as well as a great story to tell about the history of this sector. It was founded in 2005 as a biofuels company. Now, it captures industrial was...