The Green Blueprint

“Good fires" naturally regenerate forests. But a rise in high-severity blazes in the American West are leaving behind barren moonscapes filled with dead trees. These scorched trees act as hazardous fuel for future fires, but clearing them to replant the landscape is astronomically expensive. Add to that a massive shortage in the conifer seed supply chain, and land managers simply don't have the resources to regenerate these forests on their own.

Grant Canary, CEO and founder of Mast Reforestation, is changing that.

Today, Mast Reforestation tackles the ultimate financial bottleneck by burying fire-killed trees deep underground in oxygen-free clay vaults. This permanently stores the timber's carbon, generating high-quality credits that pay for the expensive work of clearing the land and hand-planting new, fire-resilient forests.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Grant about the realities of shutting down a beloved hardware project, the financial arbitrage of buying a legacy seed bank, and how founders should make the case for dramatic startup pivots to their investors.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

To build the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition — from wind turbines and grid stabilization to massive new AI data centers — the world needs more copper between now and 2050 than humanity has produced in its entire history. But new copper mines take anywhere from 10 to 16 years to permit and build, meaning we’re not on track to meet our rapidly growing demand.

Liz Dennett, CEO and founder of Endolith, thinks the solution lies in material that has already been pulled from the earth. Endolith uses naturally occurring microbial communities, paired with real-time data, to extract more copper from low-grade ore at existing heap leaches. By bringing a mobile bio-rig directly to mine sites, Endolith continuously adds optimized microbes into existing sulfuric acid irrigation lines, essentially turning decades-old, multi-billion-dollar assets into precision engineering tools without disrupting downstream operations.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Liz about why the climate tech bias against biological approaches needs updating, how to navigate the notoriously risk-averse nature of the mining industry, and why she deliberately kept corporate venture capital (CVC) off her cap table to preserve the company's optionality.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

For decades, the promise of new nuclear power in the West has been stifled not by the technology itself, but by the “construction problem.” Massive, multi-billion dollar mega-projects plagued by schedule creep and labor shortages have made nuclear a financial non-starter for commercial project finance.

To build nuclear at scale, we need a paradigm shift.

Jake Jurewicz, CEO of Blue Energy, believes the solution lies in treating nuclear plants less like bespoke civil engineering projects and more like manufactured products. By borrowing techniques from the offshore oil and gas and LNG industries, Blue Energy is building nuclear plants as massive, prefabricated modular blocks that can be built in shipyards and barged to their final destination—a strategy Jake likens to assembling "Duplos" rather than the complex LEGO sets.

But construction efficiency is only half the battle. To de-risk the capital stack, Blue Energy is introducing a "gas-to-nuclear" strategy, where the plant begins its life as a natural gas facility before transitioning to nuclear, allowing for early revenue generation and a more attractive risk profile for institutional lenders.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Jake about why he thinks nuclear engineers don’t need to be reinvent the wheel, how to bring fixed-price contracting to nuclear builds, and why this hybrid approach might be the "missing middle" that finally enables commercial project debt in the nuclear sector.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

Climate tech companies are often forced to rely on expensive equity to bridge the gap between government grant awards and the cash needed to get projects off the ground. But for founders building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition, dilutive capital isn't always the right tool. For many, it’s not even an option.

Dimitry Gershenson, CEO and co-founder of Enduring Planet, is proving that a specialized approach to debt can fix that.

By underwriting government grants and providing working capital to climate startups, Enduring Planet is solving a critical, often-overlooked friction point in the transition. Its model, which hinges on operational efficiency and profitability, provides a blueprint for how climate-focused debt can scale without the pitfalls of traditional venture debt. But also, according to Dimitry, it isn’t always wrong to accept venture debt, contrary to widespread belief.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Dimitry about the dynamics of climate debt, the "brutal reality" of fundraising in a volatile macro environment, and why Enduring Planet's approach to working capital is more critical than ever for the next generation of climate founders.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

Nitrogen fertilizer is essential for global food security, yet its production is a hyper-centralized, fossil-fuel-intensive process that accounts for 5 to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As geopolitical instability threatens traditional supply chains, the vulnerability of this industry has never been clearer.

Nico Pinkowski, CEO and co-founder of Nitricity, initially set out to decentralize fertilizer production with compact devices that farmers could use right on their fields. But market realities demanded a pivot. Today, Nitricity is producing liquid organic fertilizer from recycled almond shells at a centralized facility in California.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Nico about the "brutal reality" of scaling a new solution for a mature industry, the intricacies of financing a first-of-a-kind commercial plant, and why their mission to decarbonize a critical global commodity is more urgent than ever.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.