About Jon

Green Juice is written and produced by Jon Schaff, an out-of-work copywriter who hadn't heard of a heat pump until last year. 

Jon invites you to form a parasocial relationship with him. 

In his own words:

My life changed when I got laid off. I’d been working as an ad copywriter for a tech startup, the latest in an unbroken series of copywriting jobs I’ve held since graduating college. 

After the layoff, I took some time to think deeply. And what I thought was: I’ve never worked for a company I gave a single shit about in my entire life. 

And then I thought: I should look at my phone.

That’s when I discovered Volts. Volts is a podcast and newsletter by David Roberts, a climate journalist and green energy evangelist. The first episode I listened to was called How railroads could boost the US energy transition. Reader, let me tell you: it freaked my bean. 

I listened to more Volts episodes. I learned about crazy new ideas, like closed-loop hydropower, solid-state batteries, and thermal energy networks. It wasn’t always easy to understand the material: I paused the pod often to Google unfamiliar words and phrases. I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the many energy acronyms. I watched and rewatched YouTube videos about how electrons.  

Eventually, I got the hang of it. Soon enough, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

Except I discovered that clean energy is actually pretty tricky to talk about. There’s just so much information, so much necessary context. A typical conversation went like this:   

ME (talking too fast): “Did you know we could use the existing railroad network to do energy transmission and distribution? It would solve a ton of Grid infrastructure problems! Except the railroads—the trains and the tracks—are all privately owned, which I just learned about. Which is crazy, because they’re infrastructure! Just like our utility companies: they’re public services, but they’re beholden foremost to Wall Street! Why should we expect railroads to make a quarterly profit? But if we took public ownership of them—the railroads, I mean, but also the utilities—we could shift huge amounts of freight trucking back to rail. And almost as a byproduct, we could revitalize our small towns in the process. We’d have to electrify all the tracks, of course, but that’s actually not as hard as you might think. They’re electric everywhere in Europe. The easiest way would be a combination of catenary and battery-powered trains.”

MY NORMAL FRIEND: “Cool… do you know who Addison Rae is?”

I didn’t want to stop talking about it, though. Because the more I learned about clean energy, the more I began to confront an important, unpleasant truth about myself:

I realized that I've been so afraid of climate change, I refused to really think about it.

I mean, I knew our planet was in trouble. I just didn’t think there was anything we could do about it. I was firmly in the “We’re screwed, game over, might as well live my life” camp that includes, I think, the majority of Americans. So I avoided the scary headlines and PBS documentaries and climate protests like the plague.

But while I was learning about all the Cool Shit going on in clean energy, a funny thing happened: I started to become more optimistic about climate change.

Once I understood that there are real, proven solutions available to us right now, I couldn’t stop imagining a different version of the world—a world that's more just, more egalitarian, more enlightened.

Suddenly, I felt downright hopeful. And that hopeful epoch lasted for… a little while.

Because then I got really, really fucking angry. I started to wonder: if these solutions exist, if they’re not actually that hard to implement, and if they’re orders of magnitude cheaper than business-as-usual… why isn’t the world changing faster? What’s preventing humanity from coming together to beat the thing that’s going to kill all of us in probably less than 150 years?

It started to feel like we're all in Game of Thrones: the rich and powerful are busy arguing over who gets to be the king; meanwhile, the White Walkers are scaling the city walls to suck down our souls.

So I decided to do what I can to help. I enrolled in a bootcamp program with the excellent Climate Drift career accelerator to get a non-podcast-based climate education. I joined a local volunteer group, Climate Changemakers, which gets together once a week to beg our elected officials to do their jobs. I got on a bus to Albany to lobby for the NY HEAT Act, an important bill that would put an end to recklessly expanding poisonous 'natural' gas infrastructure. I started canvassing for Zohran Mamdani, an incredible candidate who I hope and believe will be the next mayor of New York City.

But I kept returning to the same problem: barely anybody knows about this stuff. If they did— if everybody really knew—then maybe we'd do something about it.   

I started Green Juice to get my friends excited about the mind-bogglingly cool world of clean energy technology.

I hope it gets you excited, too.

And then I hope it makes you really, really fucking angry.