Rocky Mountain Institute Podcast

Jacob Corvidae, Manager of Rocky Mountain Institute's Buildings practice, discusses the important role of cities in achieving Paris climate agreement goals and how RMI's Carbon-Free Cities Handbook can provide guidance and help cities share best practices to accelerate impact.

RMI staff discuss the America's Pledge effort to combat carbon emissions at COP 23, and RMI's role in supporting the partnership of sub-national actors like states and cities to back the aims of the Paris Agreement.

Today at COP23, WattTime—a Rocky Mountain Institute subsidiary—and Microsoft—the leading platform and productivity company for a mobile-first, cloud-first world—launched a new way to give customers the power to understand and reduce their carbon emissions.

Deputy Mayor of Sydney, Australia Jess Miller discusses the important role of cities for global climate leadership ahead of COP23.

Maurice Meehan, Operations Lead of Shipping Efficiency at Carbon War Room, is in Bonn Germany for COP23, a two-week long yearly conference held along with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—a formal meeting to assess country progress in dealing with climate change. Currently, shipping emissions levels account for more than Germany (2.6% of global emissions)—and at this rate by 2050, this number is estimated to grow between 50 and 250%. Meehan explains the history of shipping's role in international climate negotiations, and shipping efficiency's outlook for the next 20 years.

The U.S. real estate sector is booming—with new home construction steadily rising. As of March 2017, over 621,000 new single-family homes were sold. Imagine if most of these home developments were net zero energy—generating more renewable energy than they save. RMI's Buildings experts Jacob Corvidae and Radhika Lalit explain how Residential PACE financing programs can help build and scale resilient and sustainable homes.

Following the signing of the historic Paris Agreement to combat climate change, the world's focus is now shifting from global negotiations to national implementation of climate targets. As the mobilization of public and private finance approaches to support the low-carbon transition accelerates, the global climate finance system needs to evolve to effectively match funding with the unique needs of individual countries at varying stages of economic development.

RMI's Koben Calhoun and Nick Steel discuss America's Pledge on Climate, and what needs to happen to ensure that the U.S. remains a global leader in reducing emissions and delivering ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement.

Climate Week 2017 Ep 5: Building Blocks of Climate Commitments by Rocky Mountain Institute

Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group and Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute/Carbon War Room discuss how to double the fuel efficiency of North American trucking fleets, and the progress made by Carbon War Room's Run on Less cross-country fuel efficiency roadshow during Climate Week NYC.

In response to the catastrophic impacts of Hurricanes Irma, José and Maria, Rocky Mountain Institute Managing Director Stephen Doig discuss a blueprint for scaling up renewable solutions to rebuilding energy resilience for islands and developing economies.

Rocky Mountain Institute CEO Jules Kortenhorst explains the challenges and massive opportunity that Climate Week NYC 2017 and the global energy transition holds for our future.

The world's major developing economies are stepping up to decouple their economic growth from their carbon footprint. India is in the driver's seat and creating a new transportation paradigm. Clay Stranger, Principal for the Office of the Chief Scientist focused on innovative solutions for a clean energy future.

Community-scale solar (CSS)—installations of between .5 and 5 megawatts—offer compelling economic, environmental, and grid benefits, yet the market remains largely untapped. RMI's Shine team discusses how to a spectrum of end-users can deliver lower costs, emission-free production of electricity, and stronger grid resiliency through CSS. The team also discusses RMI's work to create a standardized, scalable CSS solution to lower costs and increase deployment even further.

RMI's new podcast explores the calculus incumbent utilities, regulators, and other electricity industry stakeholders are facing as aggregated distributed energy resources like solar PV, storage, demand-response technologies, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles become cost-competitive with centralized approaches of generating and distributing electricity -- and as the industry proposes as much as $1 trillion in traditional capital investments for the grid through 2030.