Energy vs Climate: How climate is changing our energy systems

On September 28th, David, Sara, and Ed were back on stage at Energy Disruptors UNITE in Calgary, recording live in front of an audience. The format for this one was four fights worth having:
Energy security in an age of chaos,
Powering the age of AI,
Canada’s role in a reordered world,
Building a system that actually works.
For each one, they played a clip from last season, with Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Vijay Gadepally and Emily Grubert, plus a not quite live appearance from the Prime Minister, and then argued about what they heard.

Then the audience took over, with questions on pausing AI, where Canada’s next climate dollar should go, and who pays for everything if the jobs disappear.

Thanks to the Energy Disruptors team for having EvC back!

0:00 Cold open: David on batteries
0:33 Intro
3:20 Fight 1: Energy security in an age of chaos
13:55 Fight 2: Powering the age of AI
24:33 Fight 3: Canada's role in a reordered world
31:40 Fight 4: Building a system that actually works
36:19 Audience questions
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Bill McKibben has been sounding the climate alarm since before most were paying attention, but lately he's finally feeling some optimism about solar power in particular.
On September 17, renowned author, journalist, and environmentalist Bill McKibben joined us remotely at Protect Our Winters (POW) Canada's 2026 Leadership Summit. He was there to talk about his latest book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.

Bill is the founder of 350.org and more recently Third Act, which organizes people over 60 for climate action. His 1989 book The End of Nature was pretty much the first written for a general audience on climate change, and his new book argues solar has already won the economic argument.

Note, this episode runs differently than our usual format. Bill opens solo for about twenty minutes, then David and I join him for another twenty minutes of conversation. Sara sat this one out.

00:00:00 - Episode Intro: Bill McKibben at the POW 2026 Leadership Summit 
00:01:27 - Climate Realities & The Clean Energy Transition 
00:23:02 - David Keith on Battery Costs & Solar Geoengineering 
00:28:56 - The Geopolitics of Chinese Solar Dominance 
00:33:44 - Decarbonization Pathways & Energy Solutions for Canada 
00:37:15 - Building Citizen Movements & Global "Sun Day" 
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On September 17, Ed sat down with former Canadian Environment and Climate Change Canada minister Steven Guilbeault for what we called a "fireside exit interview." 

Steven spent more than three decades in Canada's environmental movement, then spent seven years in federal politics, four of them running Environment and Climate Change Canada. He resigned from cabinet in November 2025 over the Ottawa-Alberta pipeline deal and left Parliament for good in early September, saying Canada is backsliding on climate action.

We recorded it live in partnership with Protect Our Winters (POW) Canada at its 2026 Leadership Summit. David and Sara sat this one out; it was just Steven and Ed and a room full of POW's supporters and ambassadors. Ed's known Steven for a long time, so they had a frank and insightful conversation about climate, advocacy and the vicissitudes of political life.
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This is a replay of our conversation with Dr. Blake Shaffer, an energy economist at the University of Calgary, on Canada's electrification bet. We recorded this in spring 2023, right after the federal budget's big bet on clean electricity. With AI data centres now competing for the same grid capacity electrification needs, it might be even more relevant than it was in 2023.

Chapters:
0:00 – Replaying Canada's electrification bet
 4:52 – David's new gig: climate systems engineering at UChicago
 7:16 – Why electrify: Blake's primer on capacity vs. generation
 17:35 – Growth rates, NIMBYism, and selling the switch to consumers
 22:11 – Capacity factor, availability, and the "clean" vs. "zero-emission" fight
 26:31 – Transmission bottlenecks and interprovincial politics
 36:07 – Social license, orphan wells, and Danielle Smith's pushback
 44:41 – Grid instability, audience Q&A, and closing thoughts

About Our Guest:
Blake Shaffer is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary where he teaches and researches on electricity markets, climate policy, and energy transitions. Shaffer uses empirical methods to evaluate policy effectiveness and better understand consumer and firm behaviour. Shaffer strives to bring rigorous evidence to help policy makers craft better policy.
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This is a replay of our conversation with Dr. Shirley Meng from the University of Chicago on battery storage. It's one of our favourite deep dives because batteries touch everything from EV range anxiety to grid scale storage, and even the whole critical minerals conversation.

When we recorded this in May 2024, Shirley was predicting real solid state battery platforms by 2027 or 2028, and here we are getting close to that window, so it's worth listening again with that timeline in mind. 

The fights over re-shoring battery manufacturing, the US-China race, the economics of lithium versus sodium, all of it is just as live today as it was then, or maybe even more so.

Episode page and show notes.

About Our Guest:
Dr. Y. Shirley Meng is a Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She serves as the Chief Scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Meng is the principal investigator of the research group - Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), that was established at University of California San Diego since 2009. She held the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 2017-2022.
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