Supercool

If the circular economy is ever going to become just “the economy,” it will need infrastructure. In this episode, Josh talks with Rich Amsinger, co-founder of Manymoons and The Many Company, about building it. The conversation traces the company’s evolution from Borobabi, which began with Rich and Carolyn Butler trying to keep their daughter’s outgrown clothes in use, to Manymoons, what the company calls America’s first circular retailer, and now ManyCo, the AI-, logistics-, and demand-powered engine behind it all. Rich explains why returns, overstock, and excess inventory aren’t side issues in retail but a massive opportunity. He also makes the case that circularity requires more than software. It requires actually selling the stuff—while protecting the brand, recovering more value, and keeping better products in use longer.Show NotesGuest: Rich Amsinger, Co-Founder Companies: Manymoons and ManyCoFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Most architects don't tell you your home could be nearly silent, filter every breath of air, and run almost without heat. Not because it's impossible. Because they don't know how to build it.Michael Ingui does. For more than a decade, his firm has built Passive Houses across New York City — landmarked townhouses, gut renovations, apartments with swimming pools and floor-to-ceiling glass. His clients get quieter rooms, cleaner air, and heating and cooling bills 80 to 90 percent below a conventional home. For the life of the building.His opening question to clients isn't about energy or carbon. It's whether they'd like a home free of bugs. Whether they'd like to stop hearing the street.Michael is also co-founder of the Passive House Accelerator, a catalyst for zero carbon building that shares innovation and thought leadership across Passive House design and construction, and Source 2050, a marketplace for vetted high-performance building materials.For Michael, the goal is straightforward: get everyone building this way, as fast as possible. The high-performance, zero-carbon future is counting on it.Show NotesGuest: Michael Ingui, PartnerCompany: Ingui ArchitectureJohnson Controls webinar linkFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Nobody wants to be policed. Not even sustainability advocates.Charlie Sellars has spent six years as a Director of Sustainability at Microsoft. He's the author of What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable Living. His TEDx talk is titled "Make Sustainability Fun Again." His argument: the movement has spent too long trying to be right at the expense of being effective. And that mistake is costing us.But making sustainability fun is only half the equation. The other half is knowing where to aim. And that means lifecycle analysis — the ability to measure the true environmental cost of anything from cradle to grave.Here's what that reveals: 80 to 90 percent of a device's lifetime emissions — like the one you're reading now and listening with — occur before you ever turn it on. Which means the single most impactful thing you can do with the phone you're holding right now has nothing to do with how you use it.It's how long you keep it.Show Notes:Guest: Charlie Sellars, Award-Winning Author and Microsoft Sustainability DirectorBook: What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable LivingFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

* Sign-up for Johnson Controls Webinar: Evolving Building Codes *The largest geothermal residential building in New York City just opened in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 834 apartments. 320 boreholes drilled hundreds of feet underground — enough to heat and cool every unit in the building. Even the rooftop pool.Geosource Energy drilled it. This conversation is about how they did it, and what it takes to build geoexchange systems at scale in dense cities, where there's already a city's worth of infrastructure below: water, gas, electric, telecom, subways, and foundations.Geoexchange is simple to explain and hard to execute. No combustion. No fuel. Fully electric. The physics are straightforward. The delivery is not.Building owners choose geoexchange for the operating savings. And for every dollar saved at the building level, the grid saves eight or nine — because geoexchange cuts peak demand when electricity is most expensive and most scarce.That's a true decarbonization driver. And why cities from Toronto to Boston to New York are leaning in with more to follow.Geosource has completed more than 400 projects. The infrastructure they install is designed to outlast the buildings it serves. Stan calls it 500-year pipe. He's seen a building come down and the borefield stay put, ready for the next one.Show Notes:Guest: Stanley Reitsma, CEOCompany: Geosource EnergyFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

People assume farmers are conservative by nature. Cautious. Set in their ways.Ryan Jones, VP of Sustainability at Indigo Ag, has a different read: farmers aren’t risk-averse. They’re risk-saturated.Consider factors like weather, debt, input costs, labor, and fluctuating commodity prices. One bad season can set a farmer back years. So when someone shows up and says, “Change how you farm,” the first question any farmer asks is: who’s carrying the risk?That’s the problem Indigo was built to solve. Pay farmers to adopt regenerative practices. Quantify the outcomes. Connect them to buyers through carbon markets or corporate supply chains. Today, Indigo operates in 15 countries and manages a portfolio spanning 20 million acres, delivering over a megaton of greenhouse gas reductions/removals and conserving nearly 100 billion gallons of water—and it recently announced a 12-year offtake agreement with Microsoft for 2.85 million tons of carbon removal credits.But this conversation is about more than keeping carbon in the soil. It’s also about water. In the Mid-South rice belt, companies face an existential sourcing risk and farmers face an existential livelihood risk. And with a shared aquifer, one farmer conserving water doesn’t move the needle if everyone else keeps pumping.The only way through is everyone moving together. And Indigo’s bet is that you get there by making the most practical thing the most profitable thing—fast enough to matter.Show NotesGuest: Ryan Jones, Vice President of SustainabilityCompany: Indigo AgFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Forty-five million Americans live in apartments. Almost none have solar—not because the technology doesn't work, but because building owners pay for installation while tenants get the savings. It's the split incentive conundrum holding the sector back.Owen Barrett saw this problem when he started investing in apartment buildings. Nobody in multifamily was thinking about energy—just paint colors and new countertops. He tried consulting. Nobody listened. So he raised capital, bought buildings, and installed solar himself.The breakthrough: software that tracks each tenant's solar usage and bills them for it. Owners earn revenue. Tenants save money.That became Shine, a company that installs solar on apartment buildings and handles everything from design to maintenance.Shine went from 100 units in 2024 to 3,000 in 2025, projecting 20,000 in 2026. They're working with two of the five largest apartment owners in America.Owen and Josh discuss why execution beats innovation, how rising electricity prices make subsidies irrelevant, and why doing what you promise became a competitive advantage.Show NotesGuest: Owen Barrett, CEO Company: ShineFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

In 2019, Will Wiseman watched 100,000 people march through Barcelona for the global climate strikes. He felt hope. Then the obvious truth: everyone was going home, and nothing would change. So, he built Climatize, an SEC-registered investment platform that allows anyone to invest as little as $10 in clean energy projects across the United States.Climatize specializes in projects ranging from $250,000 to $5 million, which are traditionally too small for institutional lenders to fund. The company's proprietary AI tools compress due diligence from weeks to minutes. Some projects raise hundreds of thousands of dollars within 24 hours.The crowdfunding platform's progress to date: $14 million deployed across 33 clean energy projects—solar, battery storage, EV charging, and energy efficiency—in 14 states.Will and Josh discuss why finance-first messaging outperforms climate-first messaging, how AI has made small deals viable, and why speed to finance has become Climatize's competitive moat.Show NotesGuest: Will Wiseman, Co-Founder & CEO Company: ClimatizeFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Kunal Girotra was Head of Tesla Energy before leaving in 2020 to found Lunar Energy. Then he went silent. Over two years, he raised $300 million, built a 250-person team, and developed home battery systems that blend sleek design with state-of-the-art technology. Lunar emerged from stealth in 2022 with a mission to deliver endless, affordable clean energy.What differentiates Lunar: it's both a hardware and software company. The battery and AI are designed and integrated as a single system. The software learns each home's unique energy fingerprint, deciding when to charge from the grid at low rates, when to run on battery, and when to sell power back at premium prices.The results: customers earn an average of $464 annually through Virtual Power Plant programs and $338 through optimization—over $800 in total, with seamless backup power.Lunar's GridShare platform now manages 650 megawatts of distributed energy for utilities across multiple continents. This morning, the company announced $232 million in new funding to expand nationwide.Show Notes:Guest: Kunal Girotra, Founder & CEOCompany: Lunar EnergyFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Data centers have always pursued energy efficiency through better hardware—smarter chillers, advanced cooling systems. But there's a ceiling. You can only make hardware so efficient.Seven years ago, Jasper de Vries discovered the butterfly effect in data centers—something on a roof rippling through 300 billion sensor readings down to valves in server rooms. His company, Lucend, ingests that sensor data to generate operator recommendations. One facility cut power usage by 40% in a year, saving $4.3 million.Yet here's what most of us miss about AI's big energy problem: we focus on operational energy use while Scope 3 emissions—the embodied carbon from manufacturing hardware—creates massive impact, so much so that Microsoft won't hit its 2030 climate targets because of its data center growth plans. With JP Morgan projecting $5 trillion in AI infrastructure buildouts by 2030, the need to bring embodied carbon under control is urgent.Lucend's software addresses both challenges: it slashes operational energy while extending hardware life through predictive maintenance, reducing the physical wear that forces early replacement. Its technology is now deployed across over 50 facilities globally.Show NotesGuest: Jasper de Vries Company: LucendFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

What if we stopped trying to recycle and just used all our trash instead?UBQ Materials makes bio-plastics from entire trash bags—dirty diapers, greasy pizza boxes, chicken bones, mixed plastics. Everything. 100% utilization. Nothing returns to landfills.The material works in existing manufacturing equipment, costs the same as virgin plastic, and can be recycled 10+ times. It's already in Mercedes interiors and McDonald's products.CEO Albert Douer spent eight years in stealth mode perfecting the technology before selling a pound. The original plan: three years. Reality: ten. Most VCs would've killed it. He kept going.Now UBQ operates an 80,000-ton facility in the Netherlands proving the technology works at scale. The implications for waste, plastics, and the circular economy are staggering—and Albert's journey reveals what it actually takes to bring impossible-sounding innovation into the real world.Show NotesGuest: Albert Douer, CEOCompany: UBQ MaterialsFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

When any part of the economy modernizes, it electrifies. New HVAC systems? Electric heat pumps. Autonomous vehicles? Battery-powered electric cars. Next-generation factories? Not a smoke stack in sight. Which means the US needs to build as much grid infrastructure in the next decade as we built in the last 50 years.Schneider Electric is a 189-year-old infrastructure company that makes everything from the cooling systems in AI factories to the switchgear moving power across the grid. Jim Simonelli, their SVP of data centers, joins Supercool to explain why efficiency is now a core business necessity, not just an environmental virtue. Every watt that doesn't reach compute is lost revenue, which changes everything about how you design and operate at gigawatt scale.Vincent Petit, who runs Schneider's research institute, breaks down why 15 years of flat electricity demand means we've lost the muscle to build infrastructure. And why the answer isn't just more generation—it's rethinking the entire system.Show NotesGuests: Jim Simonelli, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Secure Power and Vincent Petit, Senior Vice President, Climate & Energy Transition ResearchCompany: Schneider ElectricFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Mass Timber is growing fast—expanding from a handful of commercial wood buildings in the U.S. just over a decade ago to more than 2,000 today, with 24,000 projected by 2034. Once considered niche, mass timber is moving mainstream—competing on price, speed, and domestic supply chains, not sustainability alone.Sterling Structural is leading that shift. As America's largest CLT manufacturer, the company produces one cross-laminated timber panel every 65 seconds, sourcing 100% of its wood from domestic sawmills. Sterling has recently produced its one millionth panel.This is mass timber for the masses—standardized, modular systems that contractors already understand.Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass Timber at Sterling, joins Josh Dorfman to share how mass timber went from alternative to mainstream in a decade. She discusses how Sterling supplied 1,100 prefabricated CLT panels for Amazon’s new facility in Elkhart, Indiana, and why the industry is scaling by competing directly on price, speed, and practicality—with the carbon and forestry benefits included.Show NotesGuest: Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass TimberCompany: Sterling StructuralFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn 

Clean power has never been cheaper. So why are electricity bills rising—and what's blocking faster deployment? Jigar Shah joins Supercool to explain why 2025 marked a turning point: for the first time in history, essentially 100% of new electricity demand worldwide was met by solar, wind, and nuclear. It happened because the same solutions that solve climate change are winning on affordability.But deployment could be moving much faster. The technology is proven. The finance exists. The barrier is political: governors and mayors don’t realize the leverage they have over utilities, and utility CEOs won’t act unless forced by law.In climate circles, Jigar needs no introduction. He pioneered solar financing at SunEdison, launched the Carbon War Room with Richard Branson, and ran the DOE Loan Programs Office that deployed over $100 billion in clean energy financing during the Biden Administration.We dig into what gives elected officials more power than they know, why some utility CEOs want to be mandated to deploy cheaper solutions, and why Jigar’s headline for 2026 isn’t more technology—it’s more workforce.Show NotesGuest: Jigar Shah, Co-Managing PartnerCompany: MultiplierFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

In 2025, the U.S. president called climate change a hoax. Meanwhile, global clean energy investment hit a record $2.2 trillion. Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter covering climate and energy for Bloomberg. His read on the past year: China is becoming the modern Standard Oil. The same way Rockefeller's empire exported petroleum infrastructure globally, China is now exporting electrification—solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, grid tech, project finance—to countries racing to modernize their economies. Pakistan imported solar equal to half its grid capacity in twelve months. And Ethiopia went from zero to 7% EV market share. Developing countries treat electricity like a growth engine. Rich countries struggle to meet 4% annual demand increases. Rathi joins Supercool to walk through Trump's rollback, the ripple effects at home and abroad, and why none of it is stopping the global transition to the low-carbon future.Show NotesGuest: Akshat RathiRecent Articles: BloombergBook: Climate Capitalism  Podcast: Zero: The Climate RaceFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

In this end-of-year conversation, David Roberts, a renowned climate and clean energy journalist, lays out his headline for 2025: the rapid growth of AI data centers has forced long-delayed decisions about the power system. After two decades of mostly flat U.S. electricity demand, utilities are now facing sharp new load growth, tighter timelines, and major uncertainty—making grid capacity and interconnection central challenges. Roberts, who hosts and writes the Volts podcast and newsletter, argues that long-lead solutions like new nuclear power plants are poorly matched to this moment. The fastest, lowest-cost capacity available today comes from distributed resources: solar, batteries, flexible building loads, coordinated EV charging, and virtual power plants. Because hyperscalers face real financial pressure to get data centers online, he sees a potential opportunity to redirect some of that capital toward building distributed capacity that benefits the wider grid. The conversation also touches on political volatility and why clean energy and electrification continue to advance globally on their favorable economics, even amid U.S. policy uncertainty.Show NotesGuest: David RobertsCompany: VoltsFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Real estate companies say they want sustainability. They'll pay for it too, provided it comes with zero risk.Brad Pilgrim is co-founder & CEO of Parity, a remote HVAC optimization service for high-rises and hotels. Its customer team can walk into a building, spend 90 minutes going from the basement to roof, and tell the owner how much energy they can save—then guarantee it. After eight years, clients like AvalonBay—one of the largest multifamily REITs in the country—are seeing 20-30% cuts in HVAC costs with payback in one to two years.Brad joins Supercool to discuss how Parity overcomes real estate's risk aversion, why proof matters more than technology, and what happens when you can precondition a thousand-unit building before a heatwave hits. Plus: the one slide Brad had to add to his Series B funding round deck that changed everything.Show NotesGuest: Brad Pilgrim, co-founder & CEO Company: Parity Inc.For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

EVs for commercial fleets are increasingly attractive. Battery costs are down, range is up, and in many cases the total cost of ownership already beats gas. The problem isn’t the vehicles. It’s where they’ll charge.Voltera takes on the part of the EV transition most people never see: procuring the right real estate, securing stadium-scale power capacity, navigating zoning codes that rarely recognize EV charging as a primary use, and getting sign-off—sometimes from more than a dozen city departments—just to get started.Voltera CEO Brett Hauser joins Josh to show how the company has built a playbook for that messy middle, making EV charging viable for the country’s fleets. Now operating in markets from Los Angeles to Miami, Voltera does this work not so fleets don’t have to, but because fleets never will.Show NotesGuest: Brett Hauser, Chairman and Chief Executive OfficerCompany: VolteraFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Something big is happening inside buildings. They’re getting brains.Schneider Electric is a global giant in energy and building performance—nearly two centuries old, operating across 100+ countries, and already embedded in a million buildings. Manish Kumar, EVP of Digital Energy, joins me to unpack what it means when AI starts running the places we live and work. We dig into EcoStruxure Foresight, Schneider’s new AI assistant for buildings: a layer that links critical equipment, learns the rhythms of a space, flags waste in real time, and helps facility teams interact with their buildings as performance partners. From hospitals and data centers to hotels, airports, and offices, we explore what changes when these environments can diagnose themselves, tune performance daily, and keep improving over time—then push into the bigger horizon: what happens when that capability scales across millions of sites worldwide, how it reshapes the future of work, and the role intelligent buildings play in a modernizing grid.Show NotesGuest: Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Digital EnergyCompany: Schneider Electric Key Link: Innovation SummitFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

There are trillions of dollars of clean energy projects ready to be built—and trillions more in capital waiting to fund them. But the system connecting the two is too slow, fragmented, and expensive.That gap is what Alfred Johnson set out to close. A former Treasury official who helped steer markets through the 2008 financial crisis and later served under Janet Yellen, Johnson co-founded Crux to build the financial software layer the energy transition was missing.Crux connects developers, manufacturers, and investors across a marketplace for clean energy finance. In just two years, it’s closed over 120 transactions worth billions—turning a bureaucratic tangle of documents into a liquid market built for speed, trust, and scale.This conversation explores how liquidity, intelligence, and automation are accelerating capital into hard infrastructure—and how Crux is becoming the financial engine powering today’s clean energy industrial revolution.Show NotesGuest: Alfred Johnson, Co-Founder & CEO Company: CruxFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

A few months ago, Quilt became the first company in residential HVAC history to deliver an over-the-air upgrade—making its systems 20% more powerful overnight.Quilt is rethinking how homes heat and cool themselves. Its software-driven, ductless HVAC system combines intelligent controls, high-efficiency heat pumps, and a design language that fits seamlessly into modern architecture. By bringing the pace and polish of consumer technology to an overlooked industry, Quilt transforms comfort into a catalyst for electrification.Founder and CEO Paul Lambert joins Josh Dorfman to share how Quilt’s approach—what he calls “technical arbitrage”—adapts proven innovations from EVs and connected devices to reimagine the American home for the electric age.This episode explores how software, design, and emotion converge to make clean energy aspirational and why desire may be the most powerful tool in decarbonization.Show NotesGuest: Paul Lambert, Founder & CEOCompany: QuiltBTS Video SeriesFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn