Ben Underwood grew up in Yellowstone National Park. He grounded his undergraduate studies in Bennington College’s Public Action Program, which showed him that addressing climate change is imperative, but also fun. In 2012, the Nepali social entrepreneur Anil Chitrakar introduced Underwood to biogas infrastructure, which converts organic waste into clean energy and fertilizer. Upon graduating, Underwood won a Davis Projects for Peace Grant, moved to Kathmandu, and developed five urban biogas projects. Next, he founded a development company Ripe and went to China as a Fulbright scholar in Kunming. There, he researched the financial and institutional underpinnings of a project to convert seven universities’ food waste into fuel for public buses. His vision moving forward is to use biogas projects as a platform to introduce US firms’ abundance of financing and procurement expertise to Chinese firms’ appetite for mass deployment.