Small Dollar, Big Impact

Climate One

News, Social Sciences, News Commentary, Science, Earth Sciences

4.7 • 583 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The climate doesn’t care where emissions cuts come from; what matters is that the world transitions to renewable energy quickly and cheaply. If it’s significantly cheaper to install solar panels in India than on a rooftop in California, then isn’t that where they should be built? Similarly, transferring money directly to local people with the greatest stake in preserving their land can have outsized impact in conservation. Where does a climate dollar go furthest? Guests: Kinari Webb, Founder, Health in Harmony Premal Shah, Founder, kiva.org, renewables.org Nathaniel Stinnett, Founder and Executive Director, Environmental Voter Project Highlights: 00:00 – Intro 04:30 – Origins of Kinari Webb’s nonprofit Health in Harmony 09:00 – Rainforests as lungs and heart of the planet 12:00 – Radical listening to communities about what they need 15:00 – Positive outcomes from responding to community needs directly 18:00 – Webb’s near-death experience from a jellyfish sting 22:00 – Rainforest conservation as a giant climate lever 29:00 – Premal Shah describes how he came to create Kiva.org 32:00 – How Kiva.org works 35:30 – Thought experiment from moral philosopher Peter Singer 38:40 – Kiva tries to reframe stories of poverty as stories of entrepreneurship 41:00 – Applying crowdfunded microfinance model to renewable energy 46:00 – Idea of “effective altruism” 49:30 – Nathaniel Stinnett: we’ve been taught to blame ourselves for the climate crisis 53:00 – How to shift public actions to make climate more political For show notes and related links, visit https://www.climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts *** Support Climate One by going ad-free! By subscribing to Climate One on Patreon, you’ll receive exclusive access to all future episodes free of ads, opportunities to connect with fellow Climate One listeners, and access to the Climate One Discord. Sign up today. Ad sales by Multitude. Contact them for ad inquiries at multitude.productions/ads Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is your latest project.
0:02.0	It's heavy with information, data and exactly 36 pages of waffle.
0:09.0	But with Acrobat Studio, you can create a PDF space,
0:13.0	an AI-powered workspace that turns documents into summaries and insights
0:17.0	and even generates reports or presentations out of it. So you can cut through the waffle,
0:22.8	work smarter, and save time. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com.
0:30.2	Ariana, before we start the episode, I think there's a really funny pop culture reference that
0:36.2	we should like think about or maybe I could just reference it very quickly, but you like Jim Carrey, I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Truman Show. Yeah, Truman Show. Liar, liar. Right. Yeah. Okay. Oh, the mask. Do you remember the mask? Oh, the mask is great. Yeah. Well, what about yes, man? No, I haven't seen that one. Okay. I have. And it's a
0:56.7	core movie for me because I saw it while I was in college. And the premise of the movie is that
1:04.4	Jim Carrey's character gets a curse where he has to say yes to everything to kind of come out of his shell.
1:12.4	And in the movie, they demonstrate the power of microfinance loans as a institutional economic practice
1:19.1	by lending organizations like banks. Right. You're going to have to explain that. Yeah, I know,
1:24.8	right? Okay. So here's the gist of it. Microfinance, I learned about it when I studied economics and college, and like the academic idea is that if you give communities with individuals that want to start small businesses, if you give them direct funding, they might be able to build
1:47.3	their businesses faster and more efficiently than relying on big institutions that might not do
1:51.8	that kind of funding normally. And that's kind of like a wonky idea. But in Yes, Man, Jim
1:56.7	Kerry plays a bank lender, right?
2:01.7	Okay.
2:02.0	Yeah.
2:02.3	Okay.
2:03.1	And normally he says no to all of these small businesses that come in.
2:05.9	But when he gets the curse, all of these people come in saying, hey, I want to start these wacky businesses.
2:10.3	Like one lady comes in and she says, hey, I want to start a cake company that makes cakes in the shapes of celebrities faces, right?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Climate One, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Climate One and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.