Through the Noise

Join Ernesto as he sits down with Gareth Evans, the CEO and Founder of VECKTA, a groundbreaking software platform and marketplace designed to optimize onsite energy solutions. Listen as Gareth shares his vision for the future of energy, the challenges and opportunities in the industry, and how VECKTA empowers companies to achieve energy independence and sustainability. Gareth's time in Iraq following the Gulf War set his mission in motion; it opened his eyes to a world without access to reliable energy and other essentials needed to survive. He saw the impact that can have on the stability of a region and the health and success of businesses and communities. Driven by this experience, he committed himself to finding solutions that create profitable and sustainable energy outcomes so we can all thrive. VECKTA modernizes and streamlines how companies buy onsite energy systems. 

Join Ernesto as he talks with Shaun Frankson, co-founder of Plastic Bank, who shares what it's like running a business that impacts billions of people on this planet by turning plastic waste into currency. Plastic Bank empowers the Social Recycling movement that stops ocean plastic and helps alleviate poverty.  

Join Ernesto as he goes behind the scenes with Off_JaWaggon, a YouTuber quickly rising in popularity with his raw opinions surrounding politics and life on the farm in rural Minnesota. You will hear about the challenges and what actually goes into creating digital content that gets large numbers of views on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.   Off_JaWaggon is a Youtuber and Content Creator who discusses life on the farm in rural Minnesota, politics, and his own raw opinions gaining him popularity on platforms such as TikTok and Youtube  

Mark Fastoso from Mark's Game Room takes you behind the scenes sharing everything from researching his ideas, to the preparation, and even the best practices for making his videos that have gained him a large number of views in a very short period of time.  Mark Fastoso, is a multiple Emmy® and Edward R. Murrow award-winning producer with more than twenty years experience working for PBS, Curiosity Stream, History Hit and other digital platforms. Mark has extensive experience in creating highly interactive programming using the most current technologies in broadcast and on the web. Currently, Mark's current PBS project, Yellowhammer History Hunt, is proving to be very successful on PBS Learning Media with many videos achieving a 90+% completion rate.  

Have you ever considered the concept of an electric plane? Join Ernesto in this exciting episode as he sits down with Gregory Davis, President & CEO of Eviation Aircraft, as they dive into the groundbreaking achievement of creating the world's first all-electric commuter aircraft. Eviation Aircraft builds electric airplanes using advanced technology and design. It was founded in 2015 and is based in Arlington, Washington. Their mission is to build beautiful electric airplanes using advanced technology and impeccable design, imagined and built by a committed and expert workforce. 

Farzad Mesbahi is a YouTube content creator primarily focused on technology and its impact on our future. He's an entrepreneur, worked at Tesla for 4 years as a Program Manager, and was a Director of Business Intelligence and Pricing at the largest Pet Food Distributor in the United States, Phillips Pet Food and Supplies.

Josiah Hunt, CEO of Pacific Biochar Benefit Corporation, has had a career focus on biochar since 2009, helping pioneer methods of biochar production, processing, use in agriculture, and associated carbon accounting during these years. Pacific Biochar Benefit Corporation is a biochar producer and distributor with a focus on climate change mitigation and long-term soil fertility improvements.

Jeremy Lang is the Founder and Vice President of Sustainability at Pela - best known for creating the world's first biodegradable phone cases and more recently Lomi Smart Waste Appliance, a countertop composter that claims it can help solve the climate crisis. Pela is working to eliminate 10 Billion pounds of waste from the global waste stream while continuing to research and develop the most innovative products to create a waste-free future.

Climate change is accelerating, and Brennan Spellacy has built a platform that could exponentially scale our efforts to reverse its effects. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Patch, the platform for climate action. Backed by some of the world’s most visionary investors, he’s figured out how businesses can make bold, impactful climate action a reality with every transaction — with just four simple lines of code. Patch is the platform for negative emissions. Businesses can leverage their API to programmatically calculate their emissions and make any transaction climate positive.

As the President and CEO of Sentient Jet, Andrew Collins is responsible for a $450 million consumer travel and aviation business that has rapidly flourished over the last six years. Under his leadership, the company has benefited from both a digital and business model transformation, in addition to an organizational restructuring.  Founded in 1999 and now an integral part of Directional Aviation, Sentient Jet, inventor of the jet card, is one of the leading private aviation companies in the country. 

Jean-Francois Gauthier is a mechanical engineer, lifelong space geek, and the Vice-President of Measurements and Strategic Initiatives at GHGSat.  GHGSat provides actionable greenhouse gas emissions data and insights to businesses, governments, financial markets, and regulators worldwide. 

Tony Pan is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Electron. He is an inventor on 250+ patents pending, and has been named to Forbes 30 under 30, MIT Technology Review Innovators under 35, and Business Journal 40 under 40. Modern Electron is a cleantech company that develops new technologies for energy efficiency, resilience, and hydrogen. 

Scott Nguyen is CEO of Bodhi Solar and a Fellow at the University of Texas Energy Institute. Scott has 15 years of energy industry experience, 18 USPTO patents, and a PhD in Physics from Harvard University. Bodhi software platform empowers residential solar companies to deliver amazing customer experiences. Find Scott Nguyen's previous episode here.

C-Power has groundbreaking technologies that can harness the immense power of ocean waves and accelerate decarbonization at sea and on land. Its kilowatt-scale products change the ocean from a power desert into a power- and data-enriched environment, reducing operational costs, carbon, and complexity for offshore, island, and coastal applications. Reenst Lesemann is CEO of C-Power with 30 years of operational, executive and financial experience to the role. Reenst holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina and an MBA from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. C-Power's megawatt-scale products power the next wave of zero-carbon energy for terrestrial electric grids and remote minigrids.    

Tesla got cut from the S&P 500 ESG Index. What? Jason Howell comes back to step us through the world of ESG and what’s going on with Tesla and the S&P ruckus. Jason also informed us about the SEC’s open for public comment meeting on ESG’s Sunshine Act Notice. That should be a fun one! https://www.sec.gov/os/sunshine-act-notices/sunshine-act-notice-open-052522 Jason Howell is a Certified Financial Planner™ and Chartered SRI Counselor™ professional. He is also a professor, author, former US Congressional Candidate, and a Top Wealth Adviser by Washingtonian Magazine. Jason Howell Company is a family wealth management firm that uses Sustainable Responsible Impact investing strategies to develop community stakeholders. Click here for Jason Howell's previous episode.

Stefan Koester is a senior policy analyst with the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation where he focuses on clean energy innovation and climate change policy. He has a background in energy and environmental policy and has worked on carbon pricing, corporate sustainability, energy efficiency, electricity markets, and issues related to the electric power sector and renewable energy at the state, regional, and federal levels.  ITIF is a Washington, D.C.-based think-tank with a mission to formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress. 

John Belizaire’s parents escaped Haitian dictatorship and potential death before reuniting and coming to the United States. Since the age of 14 selling floppy discs in high school, John has had an entrepreneurial spirit and interest in technology. He was a recipient of the Intel Scholarship Program and he went on to receive a computer science and engineering degree from Cornell University. When he was 28 years old, he sold his first start-up company for $150 million. He has gone on to become a versatile CEO and serial entrepreneur who has successfully founded and scaled several multi-million dollar technology and fintech companies. He is currently the CEO of Soluna, a computing company helping to shape the future of renewable energy development. His expertise as both a highly effective business leader and technology strategist has enabled his new venture and operational success steering complex initiatives from concept to funding to launch to growth. Soluna Computing builds modular, scalable data centers that convert wasted renewable energy into computing power for intensive, batchable applications such as cryptocurrency mining, AI, and machine learning.

Tony Pan is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Electron. He is an inventor on 250+ patents pending, and has been named to Forbes 30 under 30, MIT Technology Review Innovators under 35, and Business Journal 40 under 40. Modern Electron is a sustainable heat and power technology company that helps building owners and homeowners save money, reduce carbon emissions, and increase resiliency during power outages.

Daniel Brooks is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Linnean Society of London, and a Research Fellow of the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology, University of Nebraska State Museum. He has been working for the past decade as a free-lance consultant on the evolutionary biology of climate change and emerging disease. He is also an author of The Stockholm Paradigm, which we discussed in his first episode, during the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown. In his second episode, we discussed the COVID-19 vaccine. The Stockholm Paradigm The crisis of emerging disease has been a century and a half in the making. Human, veterinary and crop health practitioners convinced themselves that disease could be controlled by medicating the sick, vaccinating those at risk, and eradicating the parts of the biosphere responsible for disease transmission. Most climate scientists made no connection between climate changes and disease. Evolutionary biologists assured themselves that coevolution between pathogens and hosts provided a firewall against disease emergence by pathogens moving to new hosts. None of those traditional perspectives anticipated the onslaught of emerging infectious diseases confronting humanity. A new understanding of the evolution of pathogen-host systems, called the Stockholm Paradigm, explains what is happening. The planet is a minefield of pathogens with pre-existing capacity to infect susceptible but unexposed hosts, needing only the opportunity to come into contact with them. Climate change has always been the major catalyst for such new opportunities, through disrupting local ecosystem structure and allowing pathogens and hosts to move to new ecosystems. Once pathogens expand to new hosts, novel pathogen variants may emerge, each with new capacities to infect hosts. Mathematical models and real-world examples uniformly support the conceptual framework. Emerging disease is thus one of the climate change-related threat multipliers confronting humanity. The universe of risk is thus enormous and climate change is the trigger - time is short, danger is great, we are unprepared. Even without deadly global catastrophes of the scale of the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, emerging diseases cost humanity more than a trillion dollars per year in treatment and lost productivity. The Stockholm Paradigm also offers hope. Embodied in the DAMA (document, assess, monitor, act) protocol, we can “anticipate to mitigate” emerging disease, buying time and saving money while we search for more effective ways to cope with this challenge.

Amaury is an entrepreneur and business executive with past experiences in financial consultancy and business development. Zéphyr & Borée is a shipping company specialized in delivering low carbon fret transport solutions using wind-propelled merchant ships. Recognized to have developed in partnership with JIFMAR and AYRO the Canopée vessel : first modern wind-propelled ship of 120 meters being built currently in Europe and that will be dedicated to carry the satellite launchers of ArianeGroup from Europe to French Guiana.