A Jigar Shah Playlist
Climate tech's smartest finance guy.
Jigar Shah is probably the biggest influencer in climate tech today. He’s also an optimist, with lots of money to put behind that optimism: he runs the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, with a $400 billion checkbook to spend on the energy transition.
So if you want to understand how global decarbonization is getting financed, and how the most promising climate tech is getting developed and deployed, there’s no better person to binge-listen to.
Here’s two Jigar Shah playlists to make it easy: a Spotify playlist and a YouTube playlist.
And here’s a couple of profiles of him, for background:
Jul 3, 2023 Wall Street Journal: Joe Biden’s $400 Billion Man
May 11, 2023, New York Times: D.O.E.’s Loan Program Has a Lot More Climate Capital to Give
Spotify playlist
(Podcast appearances)
YouTube playlist
(Conference appearances)
If you want to go deeper on the tech part of climate tech, check out my guide, The 25 Most Promising Climate Technologies and Innovations, Explained.
P.S. Gratuitous pic of the week
I was in a local restaurant supply store yesterday, and came across this display case with a ten foot tall stuffed polar bear near the exit. Seriously.
The bear apparently had been shot by the store’s founder in 1966. That’s an oversized beer stein next to the bear, btw (beer/bear, get it?)… the founder also collected those.
I shouldn’t have gone down this rabbit hole, but googled around enough to confirm my suspicion that the bear was shot at the peak of polar-bear sport-hunting in the 1960s (outlawed in the early 70s). This wasn’t the peak of humans ‘harvesting’ polar bears, however. That was from 1890-1930, when arctic whalers killed as many as 800 polar bears per year… while they were up there getting whale oil for lighting etc.
But the main thought I had upon leaving this store, was: wow, this guy and I walked the planet together for a couple of years (two). I’m still walking around (grateful), but he now spends all day watching people check out with their commercial cooking gear. Hopefully induction ranges.