CleanTech Talk with Aimee Christensen, CEO & Total Bad*ss

2 years Scott Cooney 4 Comments

On the latest episode of CleanTech Talk, I got a chance to interview a longtime hero and climate warrior, Aimee Christensen. Christensen brokered the first ever bilateral agreement on climate change between the US and another nation (Costa Rica, in 1994), and has helped build the sustainability platforms for, among others, the United Nations, Microsoft, Google, and Virgin, where she helped Sir Richard Branson develop the Carbon War Room.

Christensen thinks big, and takes action both globally and locally, and this has set her apart from many who choose one or the other. She is the founder of the Sun Valley Institute for Resilience and served as its Executive Director for many years, and now is an emerita board member and proud founder. The SVIR is where Christensen took the “big ideas” around climate policy and implemented the systems thinking it requires on a local scale to help dramatically improve the local agricultural sector in Idaho, as well as providing a huge boost to its local clean energy ecosystem.

She also just came back from COP28 and shares her insights from the negotiations and her work there on catalytic climate finance, place-based resilience strategies, and decarbonizing fashion supply chains in this episode of CleanTech Talk. Take a listen!

You can find our CleanTech Talk podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket, Podbean, Radio Public, SoundCloud, or Stitcher.

Scott Cooney

Scott Cooney (LinkedIn) is a serial eco-entrepreneur focused on making the world a better place for all its residents. Scott is the founder of CleanTechnica and was just smart enough to hire someone smarter than him to run it. He then started Pono Home, a service that greens homes, which has performed efficiency retrofits on more than 20,000 homes and small businesses, reducing carbon pollution by more than 27 million pounds a year and saving customers more than $6.3 million a year on their utilities. Scott wanted to contribute to native ownership of the clean energy revolution, so he gifted Pono Home to a long tenured employee with native Hawaiian roots for just the liquidation value, turning down a mainland company interested in purchasing the company. In a previous life, Scott was an adjunct professor of Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai'i, a consultant at Saatchi & Saatchi S, where he worked with a team to educate and empower millions of employees to live healthier and more sustainably. He is the author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill) , and Green Living Ideas. Scott is an occasional investor, currently he has investments in Rivian (RIVN).

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