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I forgot what the word is too, but some materials are poor radiators of heat/cold. This is more of what you want because in winter/summer, the weather will win the radiation game. The outdoors will bring more cold to your boot than your foot can in heating it up and vice versa for summer.
Plastic/rubber/polyurethane/nitrile/leather are bad at this. Translation: when you are fighting the winter war, most your boot outsoles will get cold very fast and that will radiate to your foot.
Wool is a material that does not work this way, hence why it is a great insulator. It's a material that won't feel frozen when you first put it on in the morning like a cotton button up will.
People get around this by building footwear with massive amount of insulation. Think the white bunny boot the us military uses or the mickey mouse boot. This utilizes a shell that the heat/cold radiates and still freezes with lots of insulation that doesn't give a fuck because the outdoor radiation doesn't affect it much and the shell blocks most water and wind.
EVA is one shell material I have found that doesn't give a shell what elements the outdoors puts out. It's what crocs are made of. Torvi and nordman are made with them. Made in Russia where they are very popular because it is effective and cheap. There is a us (chinese) company called tingley too with a super cheap model here. I recall a polish company too. Lemigo I think if you hate Russia for whatever reason.
Like many 'rubber' type boots though, they don't breathe and just opening up the calf vent will still leave a lot of sweat, but this is where the boot/sock liner comes in to pick up a lot of your foot juice. By this metric, you can easily bring a spare boot liner, remove the old one, wipe down the inside of the boot, insert new boot liner and have a dry boot in short order. A super thinsulated leather boot (that weighs 5 pounds in contrast would take days to dry out properly).
