Talking Climate

Episode Intro: A few weeks ago, I recorded an interview with Margaret Lumley who is co-founder and CEO of a small startup called Roca Water. Roca was one of the top runners up for our Wilkes Climate Prize in 2025. They are driving an innovative technology to tackle two different but related problems – that of water pollution and how we currently make fertilizer for growing plants, for agriculture. Wastewater is a serious climate and pollution problem, but it doesn’t get talked ab...

Episode Intro: The topic we’re exploring in this episode is climate change and humor. Can climate change be funny? To explore this question, I had the chance to speak with Sara Yeo, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, who researches science communication, along with Julia St. Andre, currently a senior studying science communication. For her honors thesis Julia researched the effects of humorous climate change communication – specifically how humor and emo...

Episode Intro: A couple years ago, a Utah statewide ballot initiative called Clean the Darn Air was proposed to tackle the persistent air pollution which Wasatch Front residents deal with every year. The proposal was to tax the things that cause the pollution -- the carbon emissions – by levying a 10 cents per gallon tax on gasoline purchases and a penny per kilowatt for electricity. From this tax, Utah residents could eliminate an unpopular state sales tax on grocery store food, ...

Episode Intro: One of the two runners up for the Wilkes Center Climate Launch Prize this past year is De Novo Foodlabs, a startup with operations in North Carolina and Cape Town, South Africa, which is focused on using precision fermentation to synthesize a new kind of lactoferrin. I had to read up on this myself, but Lactoferrin, is a nutrient found exclusively in milk from mammals. It’s in human breast milk, but commonly it’s harvest from cow’s milk and sold as an ingredient for infan...

Episode Intro: Ross Chambless: Many believe that chemistry is foundational to understanding and solving environmental challenges. And when it comes to solving a pernicious global environmental problem – such as methane emissions – it may be basic chemistry research that ultimately leads society to innovative breakthroughs. Methane (C𝐻4) is a potent greenhouse gas. It is the main component of natural gas and is released through human activities like fossil fuel production, agriculture, and fro...