A Climate Change with Matt Matern

Today, Matt is joined by David Fenton - veteran progressive communications strategist and host of The Fenton Forecast - for a conversation about the climate movement’s biggest failure: how it talks, or doesn’t talk, about the crisis. David explains “blanket of pollution” metaphor, and why framing climate action as sacrifice backfires, the soaring insurance costs hitting Americans’ wallets, and the foss...

Today, Matt speaks with Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures and a founding member of the Google X team behind Waymo, about using deep tech to restore ecosystems instead of just slowing the damage. 

They talk about the drone companies replanting mangroves, coral reefs, and seagrass beds, and how the cost of restoration keeps falling by half. Tom explains that a park ranger in 1926 had a Jeep, a map, binoculars, and a c...

Today, Matt speaks with Dr. Linley Dixon, Co-Director of the Real Organic Project and cohost of the Real Organic Podcast, about why how we grow food may be the climate lever we're ignoring. Linley explains that synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer alone accounts for 1-2% of the global carbon footprint. They also dig into what's gone wrong with the label people trust. Only about 1% of US farmland is certified organic while roughly 80% o...

Today, Matt speaks with Jeffrey Prosserman, CEO and co-founder of Voltpost, about a simple idea with big potential: turning the lampposts and utility poles cities already have into electric vehicle chargers. Jeffrey shares his path from leading product development at Samsung to founding Voltpost, and explains why more than 40% of Americans, those without a private garage or driveway, still can't conveniently charge an EV at home.

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In this milestone 250th episode, Matt Matern goes solo for the final installment of our “250 for 250” series - tracing what the people who founded the country actually believed about land, soil, and stewardship. From Thomas Jefferson’s near-daily weather diary and George Washington’s soil-saving crop rotations, to the myth of endless abundance baked into the American character, Matt lays out what the founder...

Today, Matt speaks with New York Times bestselling biographer Brian Jay Jones, author of Becoming Dr. Seuss and the new book The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building. Brian traces Theodor Geisel’s unlikely path - from advertising man to the most beloved children’s author in America. They dig into the making of The Lorax: the cookie-cutter condos eating up La Jolla’s coastline that made Seuss f...

Today, Matt speaks with Philip Nel, University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University and one of the world's leading Dr. Seuss scholars, about The Lorax and its place in the environmental movement. They trace the book's origins, from the coastal construction in La Jolla that made Seuss angry, to the trip to Kenya that finally unlocked the story he scribbled on a hotel laundry list. They also dig into the logg...

Today, no guest - just Matt, with the story of what one writer called “the best idea America ever had”: the national park. In 1872, in a country built on private property, the United States set aside Yellowstone as land that could never be owned by anyone - and then handed the idea to the world.

Matt traces how it happened: the writer John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt, whose 1903 campfire in Yosemite helped put...

Today, Matt speaks with Micah Loewinger, co-host of WNYC’s On the Media and the reporter behind the new four-part series American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA, about how the agency built to respond to America’s worst disasters became one of its least trusted institutions. Micah explains how he came to FEMA through years of covering far-right militias, why the “FEMA camps” conspiracy theory traces bac...

Today, no guest - just Matt, telling one of the strangest and most hopeful stories in American politics. It's the story of the first Earth Day, when 20 million Americans - about one in ten of the entire country - took to the streets on a single day in April 1970, and changed the course of the nation in just two years.

Matt traces how that one day produced the EPA, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act - and uncovers the part m...

Today, Matt speaks with Jonathan Criss, CEO and co-founder of Vital Lyfe, about reinventing how the world gets clean drinking water. After 13 years at SpaceX working on the Starlink and Dragon programs, Jonathan set out to apply the same first-principles engineering to desalination - starting with a unit he built in his garage that cleaned ocean water. They talk about why the water crisis is really an infrastructure problem rather ...

Today, Matt speaks with Dean Forgeron, Chief Technology Officer at CarbonCure Technologies, about the Halifax-based clean tech company decarbonizing one of the world's most polluting industries. Dean explains the chemistry behind injecting CO2 into concrete - where it permanently mineralizes into calcium carbonate, the same material as limestone, while reducing cement use by roughly 4.5% on average. They discuss CarbonCure's recent...

Today, Matt is joined by Dan Miller - Managing Director of The Roda Group and host of Climate Chat on YouTube - for a wide-ranging conversation on the economics of the energy transition and the 2026 race for California Governor. Dan explains why renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels (a Harvard study attributes 8 million deaths a year to fossil fuel pollution), why EVs will replace gas cars the same way cars replaced hors...

Today, Matt speaks with Ibhade Eigbobo, Director of Corporate Project Management at Budderfly, about why the small and midsize business sector is one of America's most underused energy assets. Ibhade explains Budderfly's energy-as-a-service model - where the company takes over a customer's entire utility bill, invests its own capital to upgrade aging equipment, and earns revenue as a share of the savings. They cover why quick servi...

Today, Matt is joined by Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare, a global conservation nonprofit that helps coastal fishing communities, smallholder farmers, and local leaders in 60+ countries build climate resilience through behavioral science and community-led solutions. Brett shares how Rare's Fish Forever program grew from three pilot communities in the Philippines to more than 2,000 communities across Indonesia, Brazil, Mozambique, the Baha...

Today, Matt speaks with Marci Zaroff - founder of ECOfashion Corp and one of the pioneers of the sustainable fashion movement - about the real cost of what we wear. They cover how 60% of the cotton plant ends up in our food supply, why organic and regenerative fibers matter for human health, the difference between greenwashing and genuine certification, and how the industry is shifting toward traceability and outcome-based standard...

Today, Matt speaks with Annie Leonard and André Carothers, co-authors of Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It, published by Patagonia Books. Annie is the creator of The Story of Stuff and former Executive Director of Greenpeace USA. André is a four-decade activist and co-founder of the Rockwood Leadership Institute.

They discuss why peaceful protest is foundational to democracy - and how it's under unprecedented attack. They brea...

Today, Matt speaks with Doug Weir, Director at the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), about the environmental toll of armed conflict - and why it rarely gets the attention it deserves. They cover CEOBS’s real-time tracking of 300+ environmental incidents from the Iran war, including the Tehran oil fires and threats to the Persian Gulf’s fragile marine ecosystems. Doug also explains how rising military budgets...

Today, Matt speaks with Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, about one of the most ambitious bets in climate tech: putting carbon back underground permanently. Peter explains how Charm takes wood from wildfire thinning projects in the Colorado Rockies, converts it into bio-oil through a process called pyrolysis, and injects that carbon-rich liquid deep into sandstone formations in Louisiana — where it stay...