Episodes

This week on Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich sits down with mechanical engineer and YouTube creator Dr Rosemary "Rosie" Barnes to discuss the critical role of engineering in addressing climate change. Rosie shares insights fro...

Electric vehicles are finally becoming more mainstream, but this hasn’t stopped a flood of negative stories and political attempts to scare people away from making the switch to better, more cost efficient vehicles. So is the...

With the UK general election tomorrow, the Cleaning Up team sits down with Dr Simon Evans of Carbon Brief to run through each party's manifesto, and what they say about UK climate and energy policy. With Labour widely predict...

As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, one of the biggest challenges is decarbonizing industrial processes that require consistent, reliable sources of energy to produce high-temperatures. Typically these processes ...

Depending on who you ask, methane is either a useful transition fuel to a low-carbon future, or a super polluter. The science of methane says that for natural gas to have a lower climate footprint than other fossil fuels, par...

Has science cracked the code on mass producing realistic meat substitutes? Or are lab-gown alternative proteins an impossible dream? In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, Baroness Bryony Worthington sits down with president of the Good Food Institute, Bruce Friedrich, to explore the future of food…

As everyone knows, battery prices are plummeting and manufacturing volumes are soaring, whether for EVs or for grid-connected storage. And everyone knows there's a problem: only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. The rest go to landfill, right? Wrong. This week's guest on Cleaning Up is the …

Last week the leading lights of Europe's electricity industry gathered for the annual Eurelectric Power Summit at the Lagonissi Beach Resort just outside Athens. The conference - under the hashtag this year of #lights on - lasted two days and covered the key issues facing Europe's and the world's p…

China's policies that direct capital towards cleaner industries have been game changing, and this week we're continuing the China theme, sharing two conversations Bryony had earlier this month at a conference at Xiamen University in Fujian Province. China's role in the clean energy transition could…

In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, we find how much and how much more governments would have to spend for hydrogen to live up to its hype. This audio blog is adapted from a piece Michael wrote at the end of last year for BloombergNEF, entitled "Clean Hydrogen's Missing Trillions", which estimat…

Up this week is Simon Holmes à Court, the Australian investor and philanthropist with a passion for using data to change the world. In 2022, the federal elections in Australia delivered an upset, as around a third of the electorate turned their back on the established parties and voted in seven…

How can we build a more united climate movement? What should be the role of geoengineering? And how can indigenous voices be brought into the climate conversation? Bryony puts these questions to model, actor, director, ambassador and businesswoman, Lily Cole.

Welcome to Season 12 of Cleaning Up! If you want a sense of the trajectory of climate action, you have to understand China, and you have to understand finance. There is no one better to share insights on both than Dr Ma Jun, Founder and President of the Institute of Finance and Sustainability in Be…

Bryony and Michael round up the eleventh season of Cleaning Up this week. They explore the themes running through the episodes, from theories of change to innovation, and discuss the things that surprised them, the moments they liked (or didn't) and reasons for optimism for the transition.

Michael chats with Saul Griffith, Australian-born engineer, inventor, advisor, author and 2007 MacArthur "Genius". He specialises in clean and renewable energy technologies, and has founded a dozen technology companies across 20 years in Silicon Valley, as well as authoring 3 books, including `Elec…

Bryony speaks to two fascinating guests, both specialising in methane emissions, their causes and impacts: Dr. Sebastien Biraud and Sharon Wilson. Dr. Biraud is a biogeochemist, leading the Climate Sciences Department. Sebastien's work has taken him to the tropical rainforests of the Amazon, the…

This week, Michael presents the second part of his two-parter for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, exploring the bear and bull cases for the net zero transition. This week is the bull case: the "5 superheroes" of the transition, 5 forces/trends even more powerful than last week's "5 horsemen", which c…

Michael is solo this week on Cleaning Up, outlining the "5 horsemen" of the net-zero transition - the five greatest obstacles to the net zero transition. These 5 horsemen are: the economics of energy solutions, the electrical grid, the demand for critical mineral, political and social inertia, pred…

Bryony returns with Bonny Simi, President of Operations at Joby Aviation, where she's working on bringing to market a new civilian electric VTOL (eVTOL) aircraft. Prior to joining the team at Joby, Bonny held several operational and strategic roles at JetBlue Most notably, she founded and led JetBl…

Michael returns to talk with legendary educator and inventor, Donald Sadoway, Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry at MIT. After earning his PhD in chemical metallurgy in 1977 at the University of Toronto, he joined the faculty at MIT in 1978 where he spent 44 years. For 16 of those, he taught…

Tamsin Lishman joins Bryony this week to talk heat pumps. Tamsin is CEO of Kensa Group, a Cornwall-based manufacturer and installer of ground source heat pumps. Kensa is the UK's only manufacturer of ground source heat pumps. Both air source and ground source heat pumps are rapidly growing technolo…

Michael sits down this week with Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder and lead analyst at CREA - the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. After working as a campaigner and then as an analyst at Greenpeace, Lauri helped set up CREA, an NGO that produces research reports on the trends, causes, health…

This week, Bryony is back, this time to talk to David Wallace-Wells. David is an American journalist and author who often writes about climate change. His 2017 article "The Uninhabitable Earth" for New York Magazine was the publication's most-read article in history. David then turned the article i…

This week, Michael's guest is Mark Cutifani, chairman of Vale Base Metals and formerly CEO of South African gold mining company, Ashanti, and British mining company, Anglo American. He was born and grew up in Wollongong, Australia. After leaving high school in 1976, he joined Coal Cliff collier…