For the last decade and a half, the loudest voices in the climate movement have treated decarbonization like a moral crusade: ban gas stoves, declare climate emergencies, punish fossil fuel companies.
But those tactics don’t lower utility bills or build durable political coalitions. And now, amidst a radical shift in U.S. politics where the economy dominates, there’s a growing call for a pragmatic reset.
This week, we dissect two critiques of climate politics. In a Bloomberg essay, Michael Liebreich argues it’s time to ditch the guilt and doom, stop chasing impossible targets, and focus on fast, affordable progress. Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute says the “climate hawk” is an endangered species in U.S. politics.
We’ll walk through their arguments, and debate what a reset in climate politics and policy might look like.
Plus, another reset in finance. Generate Capital and Greenbacker, two of the most important clean energy investors, are both under new leadership. Both companies are re-evaluating their approaches to the market. What do these shakeups say about the state of climate capital and the “missing middle” of projects that still struggle to get financing?
Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.
With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026 . Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms.
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Transcript
Stephen Lacey: Jigar, you had a birthday party last night. How was it?
Jigar Shah: It was a manufactured success.
Stephen Lacey: When is your birthday actually?
Jigar Shah: It’s August 30th, but we had this party last year and people really liked it, so we did it again this year and it was even better.
Katherine Hamilton: You’re so lucky that you have a birthday in a nice month.
Jigar Shah: It is true.
Katherine Hamilton: My birthday is the middle of February and nobody celebrates my birthday.
Jigar Shah: Oh, well, now we’re going to have to make it our mission to celebrate your birthday.
Stephen Lacey: Well, good. I’m glad you were out last night, Jigar, because the later you stay out, the punchier you are, so…
Jigar Shah: Oh, no. Not good.
Stephen Lacey: Good entertainment value.
From Latitude Media, this is Open Circuit. This week, do we need a climate reset? For the last decade and a half, the loudest voices in the climate movement treated decarbonization kind of like a moral crusade. Ban gas stoves, declare emergencies, punish fossil fuel companies. But those tactics don’t lower utility bills or win durable majorities. And now, amidst a radical shift in US politics, there’s a growing call for a pragmatic reset. We’re going to look at some of the critiques and ideas for shifting strategy, plus we’re going to talk about another reset, this one in finance, Generate Capital and Greenbacker are two of the most important clean energy investors, have swapped out CEOs and they’re rethinking their strategies. What is behind the shakeup?
I’m Stephen Lacey, executive editor of Latitude Media. Welcome, all. As always, Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah by my side, well, virtually by my side, I guess, staring at me through a computer screen. Katherine Hamilton is the chair of 38 North Solutions. Hey there.
Katherine Hamilton: Hey.
Stephen Lacey: You’ve got some really interesting tools behind you. It looks like you’re, I don’t know, in a shaker village or something.
Katherine Hamilton: I always think it looks like a Game of Thrones, some chamber. Yeah, I put a lot of found objects in my house.
Stephen Lacey: Nice. Where do you go find those?
Katherine Hamilton: Tool sheds on my property.
Stephen Lacey: Well, you’re not at Climate Week, but it sounded like a busy week for you. You ventured down from the mountains into the city.
Katherine Hamilton: I did very briefly, but I was so jealous because I kept seeing all the cool reports coming out of Climate Week where y’all were.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, big week. Always a big week. Jigar Shah is the co-founder of Multiplier. He’s the former director of DOE’s Loan Programs Office. How is New York Climate Week this year, Jigar? It’s often called like a mini-cop because you’ve got tens of thousands of people flocking to the city, you’ve got the UN General Assembly. Did it feel any different than past years, given the political circumstances?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, I do think people are very hopeful. I think they’re probably mistaking that for defiant. When I talk to people, the level of clarity around what they want to invest in and what gives them the most sort of confidence in this moment seems lacking. And so there was a lot of great conversations around where the federal nexus is and where you can actually continue to deploy at scale and some of the things that are going on around us, like the governors who all gave big speeches at the PJM Conference on Monday. And so I think there’s a lot of those conversations. I’d say that there were less international conversations, the rooms that I were in, but it was great.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, it kind of depends on the room you’re in because you can have a choose your own adventure experience at New York Climate Week. You can go to lots of events around solutions, infrastructure, energy. A lot of the stuff that we talk about here, you could follow along with the formal UN process where countries this year were handing in their pledges late. You can get as doomery as you want too. You can go to events like the Make Billionaires Pay March that happened this week that kind of blended a coalition of anti-ICE, anti-capitalism, pro-Palestinian, and anti-fossil fuel activism. That always feels a little confusing to me. And so that actually is a good backdrop for what I want to talk about today. There’s this growing set of critiques around pieces of the climate movement and calls for a reset in how we negotiate around climate policy and actually message around this stuff.
So I want to talk about that. That’s a big part of the conversation. But I want to turn first to a story unfolding in the world of clean energy finance, a shakeup of sorts. Two of the leading firms, Generate Capital and Greenbacker have new CEOs, and they’re pledging strategic redirection. Generate is also reportedly discussing an IPO, perhaps as a new way to raise capital. Jigar co-founded Generate. And we’ve been talking about this and he says that the changes that these two companies reflect some signs of challenges in the market. Let’s start with these two firms, Jigar. Why do they matter? What is the background on how they were structured?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, it’s a good question and maybe on the outset, we should start with the fact that these companies have raised a lot of money and that money has been deployed into projects and those projects generate cash flows. So neither one of the companies is on the verge of bankruptcy or anything like that. They’re making money, people are getting paid. All of that stuff is occurring. But when you look at investment firms, they really are defined by their ability to raise more money. And right now, both of them are having a hard time raising more money. And so to get to your question, Greenbacker was created because there seemed to be a hole in the marketplace for an ability for retail investors to invest in clean energy. There were a lot of people who were banks or pension funds who could invest in renewable energy. But if you wanted to put $50,000 of your own money into something and just get a 6% dividend yield back, there was not a lot of options.
And so you had to be what they call an accredited investor to invest in clean energy. And so most people are not accredited, which is generally having a 2 to $3 million net worth, including your home value. So the way that Greenbacker did that was they filed with the SEC as if they were going public, but they never actually listed on an exchange. And so your shares are not easily traded every day. It’s not on the stock market, but you’ve gone through an SEC approval process such that you can market to retail investors. And then with Generate Capital, there was a recognition that when you have a standard GP/LP structure, general partner, limited partner structure, that you have to tell the limited partners exactly how you’re going to invest that money before they give it to you. It’s really detailed.
And in the clean energy space, being that detailed is very hard because the market changes every year. And so getting yourself the ultimate flexibility to be able to do these kinds of investments is very hard within that structure. So Generate decided to become a C corp. So in Generate’s case, all of the investors are just shareholders of Generate Capital, and that money, within reason, can be used for any purposes that Generate deems in the company’s interest. And the board, which is made up of the investors, can obviously fire the CEO or tell you you want to do something different or whatever it is. But day to day, they don’t give you detailed instructions on how to invest the money.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, Jigar. So I’m curious about Generate, because I know when you were there, you spoke a lot about the investments in fuel cells and anaerobic digesters and a bunch of other project finance that seemed really smart and seemed to really scale a lot of technologies that were working. They just needed project finance. And I just wonder how our current climate and the policy direction that our country’s been going and if that has changed how they’ve invested or if they’ve kind of stuck to what you had originally started doing.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, no, that’s a good question. And so maybe to think about when you have a company like Generate Capital, you can imagine if you invest in things that are fairly low risk that everybody is doing, then the returns are also lower. And then when you want to pay everybody’s salaries who work at the company, there’s not much left over to give back to investors. So you need higher returns. And the way that we got higher returns was to invest in leading-edge technologies. You tried to avoid bleeding-edge technologies, but you tried to be on the leading-edge. Those are people who really couldn’t get money from traditional sources of capital because like we discussed before, it wasn’t in their mandate.
So think anaerobic digesters, think battery storage, when we funded STEM back in 2014, 2015, there were a lot of different asset classes that we can go through. But part of that is also representing those asset classes into other conversations. So like with fuel cells for instance, they qualified for a 30% tax credit, but you could imagine none of the traditional tax credit investors wanted to do tax equity for fuel cells. So it took me two years to get the fuel cell companies to get tier one tax equity providers to even pay attention to them.
And as a result, Generate was able to invest at a rate that was a much higher rate of return upfront. We took the risk that we could find a tax credit buyer, and when we did, the returns that we were left with were much higher because tax equity comes in at a pretty low cost of capital. And what we were left with had a much higher cost of capital than expected, similar to anaerobic digesters where you had to figure out the renewable natural gas marketplace and the California low carbon fuel standard credits and all of this complexity. And so the question becomes, first of all, who should figure out this complexity for brand new business models? And then once you’ve figured out that complexity, can you hand it off to lower risk capital? Because when you do that, then the assets that you’re holding become even more valuable.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. So that’s really helpful background. So why are we talking about these two firms? David Crane, the former CEO of NRG, undersecretary of infrastructure at DOE when you were there, is now taking over as CEO. Greenbacker just announced a new CEO as well, Daniel de Boer, the former head of infrastructure at the firm. Both of these moves are framed as responding to a rapidly evolving market, which is often code for market pressures. Translate this for us.
Jigar Shah: So in Greenbacker’s case, they plodded along for a long time. So they were raising $10 million a month, $5 million a month. So they weren’t raising big dollars. But they made the mistake of wanting to invest in low-risk assets, so think solar and wind assets. And then by the time you paid for all the salaries at the senior level, they really could only pay a 3%, 3.5% return. But instead of telling their investors that, what they did was when solar comes back with money, they come back both in principle and in debt. So you might get 10% of your money back every year, some of which is paying back the mortgage, and some of which is the interest on the mortgage. And so if you’re paying people a 6% dividend yield out of that 10%, well, then that means you don’t have a lot left over to invest in new projects. So that means that over time, you just get smaller and smaller and smaller.
And then around 2020 with the ESG boom, they went to Morgan Stanley and Morgan Stanley just put a huge amount of money behind them. So I think it was maybe 2 or $3 billion that came in in a very short period of time and they figured out how to put it to work. Obviously, it took a little bit of time, but they also did, I think, a really large project with Hecate. And so they’re now in the process of getting that done. So Dan has come in really just to get them fixed up, like what’s working, what’s not working, which projects were maintained properly, which ones weren’t. But the fundamentals of Greenbacker are still flawed because if you actually are promising investors 6% returns, you have, let’s call it 3% of the returns that have to go to pay everybody’s salaries, well, then you need to make 9% to actually stay breakeven. And that doesn’t come from low-risk solar and wind assets.
So they recently wrote down their portfolio by 30%. So that means if it was worth 2 billion before, it’s now worth 1.4 billion. And they have to decide can they go out and raise more money? But you can imagine that one of the roles that they’re playing even in the solar and wind space is to do weird, funky stuff. So if somebody was doing a one-off wind turbine in the back of their factory, which we saw in California for years, or if people are doing new models of community solar that tried to work closely with environmental justice groups or whatever, then you can imagine very large sophisticated buyers of those assets might be like, “That’s too one off. We don’t want to deal with that $10 million project.” And so Greenbacker could play that role. But I think after 12 years or so of being in business, they still haven’t really found their way. And so they switched CEOs to try to really fix what’s broken.
Katherine Hamilton: So Daniel de Boer came from their infrastructure arm. So how does that change the way they may be thinking about their portfolio going forward?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, it doesn’t, and that’s what scares me. I think the world of Dan and I think the world of Carl Weatherley-White, who I’ve known for years, who I think has come in as CFO, but the challenge with Greenbacker fundamentally is they have to find ways of doing funky stuff, even if they’re only comfortable with solar and wind, that generates that return, which is the promised return to investors, plus the cost of running the platform. And if they can’t do that, then they’re constantly giving people money back that actually was slated to be reinvested into new projects. And so then that means that you’re not long for the world. And so I think in this moment where we’re trying to grow the market for clean energy, there is a mainstream set of boxes. So as you know, whether it’s Brookfield or an Exterra or all these other big players who buy projects, they have very sophisticated boxes and they want 100 pieces of paper that proves that you’ve done this and proves that you’ve done that, and et cetera, et cetera.
And if you’re not that person, if you’re not a developer that can give them 100 pieces of paper or it’s not cost-effective for you to put it together because your project is $10 million and 100 pieces of paper might cost $1 million to put together, then where do you go for alternative financing? And to date, it’s been family offices maybe or other people. And those people are like, “Well, I can put my money anywhere, so I think I’m going to put it over here where I can make a lot more than over here.” And so that’s why we had the GGRF, which is now obviously not in existence. And so when you think about the total amount of financing solutions that our country needs to be able to onboard all of this extraordinary effort that developers are putting forward to get to churches, to get food banks done, to get fire stations, solar systems, to get police officers what they need. Whatever it is that people are doing with this great technology we’ve invented, there has to be an appropriate investor available for them to go to.
Stephen Lacey: And can you go into a little bit more detail about what has been plaguing Generate and how that compares to Greenbacker’s challenges?
Jigar Shah: So Greenbacker never tried to do leading-edge stuff. Generate really was very successful at doing leading-edge stuff. So when you think about all the anaerobic digesters they funded, they just reopened the Cayuga facility in New York, which is the largest food waste digester that processes food waste there. I just heard that they process a lot of White Claws that were mislabeled and had to be crushed. And so there is hundreds of thousands-
Stephen Lacey: Is that White Claw, the alcoholic seltzer?
Jigar Shah: Exactly, exactly. So when I was at Generate, we used to take all the ice cream from Unilever’s facilities. They’d always have a bad batch of ice cream and then they’d have to get rid of it. And for these food companies-
Stephen Lacey: You’ve got White Claws and ice cream. Perfect for your birthday party.
Jigar Shah: That’s what we do. So there are hundreds of thousands of tons of this food waste. So most the time, the plant is running great, but one batch goes bad, what do you do with it? And for a lot of these large corporations, they’ve committed to scope two and scope three emissions reductions. And so putting food waste in landfills, which then release methane is not good for them. So they needed a place for it to get processed. And so we put in money into a bunch of facilities and there was London, Ontario, and then there was the UK and other places, and I think they probably put a couple hundred million dollars to work into what they did. Those made very, very nice returns. I think that’s great.
But over time, what happened was they ended up with 38 people in their capital markets team and their capital markets team went out to the marketplace and said, “Hey, we have all this stuff to sell.” And the people that they went to said, “Well, that’s interesting, but what we really would love is boring community solar.” And so Generate said, “Well, maybe we should do more boring community solar.”, which they did, which is great, but then they don’t get 16 to 18% returns on boring community solar. So they did some funky financial stuff, which is fine. Lots of people do that. I think it was well within the risk tolerance, and then interest rates started going up, and when interest rates started going up, your equity returns go down because the debt actually takes more of the return.
And so now, Generate Capital has made far lower returns on low-risk assets than they made on their higher-risk, higher-reward assets. And so as a result, they’ve had a really hard time raising money the last two years because people are like, “Well, you’ve invested in low-risk stuff and haven’t given us high returns, and so why would we give you more money?” And so it’s one of those things where I think that the difficulty of the business model was the point. And when their capital markets group, which got very bloated, decided that they wanted to do easier stuff and they wanted to raise money for easier stuff, well, then they didn’t meet the returns.
Stephen Lacey: So does this mean, given the changes of focus at these two companies, that we are going to see capital limitations in the market?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, most certainly. Right? And that’s why you-
Stephen Lacey: How acute are those capital limitations?
Jigar Shah: Well, you saw that Chris Anderson of TED Fame announced a big conference. Well, he announced a big fund, a $300 million fund for doing this missing middle stuff. And then he announced a big conference, I think he’s doing this weekend in California to try to get people focused on putting more money into this missing middle. But it’s a big deal. When you think about the Loan Programs Office, we probably had $350 billion or so of unprocessed loans that were submitted to Loan Programs Office for review. But when I left, so those projects are presumably real that folks were seeking debt for. And then you have all the folks who are looking for grants out of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations or the MASC office or the Great Deployment Office or others.
And so when you think about the quantum of capital at writ large that people want for all of these sectors and clean cement and clean steel and heat batteries, and you tell me which sector, but there’s tons of them, it’s at least $100 billion if not more. And if you count up Wollemi and Spring Lane and Ultra and a few other folks, that’s maybe a billion. And so it’s not even close to the need that we have. And so all these companies have done this extraordinary work of getting through venture rounds and getting to their first of a kind project and all this other stuff, and now we need them to be part of the gigaton scale climate reductions and they’re under capitalized.
Stephen Lacey: This is an indication of why this sector is so difficult. If we continue to have trouble funding this missing middle and we have these capital constraints, what does that mean for overall carbon reduction goals and thinking about these critical sectors?
Jigar Shah: So right now, people are talking about China being the electrostate, right? But let’s be clear about what they’re really doing. They’ve scaled up solar, they’ve scaled up lithium-ion batteries and LFP batteries. They have scaled up nuclear plant deployments. These are all technologies that were shared with the Chinese during the Obama administration. And so we’re talking about electrostate technology scale up of stuff that was shared with them during the Obama administration. Now that’s awesome, and we are going to continue to grow around the world and China is selling some of those equipment to Ethiopia and Pakistan and lots of places around the world. But at some point, we’re going to need to move to heat and we’re going to have to move to clean steel and we’re going to have to move to clean cement. And you know who’s not doing that right now? China. And so the real question is when and where are all of these technologies going to scale up?
And I’m hopeful that the UK gets there with the National Wealth Fund or GB Energy. I’m hopeful that the EU figures out what it wants to do with its policies or Australia. I saw Saul Griffith this week and near Climate Week, and he’s trying to get people there. They want to do green iron because Australia is known for just selling rocks and they want to do more value added work on the continent. So making lithium processing a priority or making green iron or whatever it is. But those technology companies are all in the United States. And so the question is that do they want to scale up here? Do they want to go to Australia to scale up? Are they going to just give their technology away in bankruptcy to China? Exactly how do we roll out the next generation of decarbonization technologies, which were probably admittedly 10 years away from really getting scaled up?
Stephen Lacey: All right, let’s turn now to our main story. I think it’s the perfect time to stocktake, as the UN climate parlance goes, on how we’re talking about climate, what the climate movement looks like and pathways forward in the current environment. And to kick off our next segment, I want to play a piece of tape from Donald Trump giving his speech this week to the UN General Assembly in New York. And this was happening right as tens of thousands of people were convening around the city for Climate Week.
Donald Trump: But we’re not letting this happen in America. In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe. He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be. This is what they said at the United Nations. What happened? Here we are. Another UN official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening. It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, “Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something.” Then they said, “Global warming will kill the world.” But then it started getting cooler.
So now they just call it climate change because that way, they can’t miss. It’s climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
Stephen Lacey: I wanted to hear that tape for a couple reasons. One, I don’t think you could ask for a more direct example of how dark and twisted the politics of climate are right now in America at the highest levels. But two, Trump is hinting at something that reflects an actual critique of a very vocal contingency, the doomers. And since the 2010s, the loudest message from progressive groups pushing policy action on climate change has been focused on worst case scenarios. And out of that, a deeply moral approach to policy advocacy. And that approach, at least among the most visible climate organizations, groups like the Sunrise Movement, 350.org, Greta Thunberg’s FridaysForFuture, the Extinction Rebellion, meant that for them, the only reasonable option was blocking fossil fuels, creating radical and social equity, and pushing this narrative that we add only 10 years to avert catastrophic impacts.
And if Donald Trump’s speech at the UN tells us anything, it’s that that strategy didn’t work. And I’m certainly not suggesting that you can draw a straight line between the election of Trump and the failure of the climate movement. Of course not. But they’re actually not that far from each other. Trump was elected in part because voters felt like they had felt like the left had abandoned kitchen table economic issues in favor of other causes, and they weren’t focused enough on solving problems. I think that is an important factor in the last election. And instead of building this kind of durable majority that activists thought they were, they were often alienating voters who have increasingly been worried about paying rent, affording gas, keeping the lights on. And this is where the idea of this pragmatic reset comes in.
Michael Liebreich has a really phenomenal essay in Bloomberg, this two-part essay. And in it, he argues that we need to stop making people feel guilty, stop obsessing over the climate apocalypse, and take a much more pragmatic approach to the framework for how we talk about and present climate change and the actual climate talks themselves. And Alex Trembath from the Breakthrough Institute had an essay out earlier this year where he argued that the era of the Climate Hawk is over. And he also argues that centering politics around existential threats and moral urgency has polarized the issue and hitched climate to progressive identity politics. And so I think this is just a really interesting time to grapple with this question. Do we need a complete reset on climate, both in coalition building and in policy? And I’ll turn to you first, Katherine. What do you think of, how do you buy the critique that I just outlined?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this because I listened to Liebreich, both his part one and part two of his essay, which part one tried to say, “Here’s the math we got to use to think of what’s next.” And then part two is like, “Here are the things we need to actually do for a reset.” And I also started thinking about what was happening in New York with all of the protesters, with people protesting a number of things. It wasn’t just one thing. And my sensibility has always been you need people on both sides to get to the middle. So it’s great that there’s a pragmatic approach that you can take, and we should go through and dissect what that is and what that might look like. But I don’t think you get there unless you have the left flank as well and have that pushing so that you have a middle.
Because right now, you have a president who’s out there claiming that climate is a total hoax, you have the left trying to demonstrate against a wide variety of things because there is a lot going on right now that people are protesting, and then the pragmatic approach is coming to the middle. And I think you have to have both sides to be able to come into the middle. So I think Liebreich is not wrong that this is a good time to think about that because we need to come together with what are some pragmatic solutions? That’s a good thing to think through, but you don’t get to a negotiation and a middle unless you have both sides to push back on. So for me, that’s the setup.
Stephen Lacey: I generally agree with that. I guess the question is how it filters into politics. The Democratic Party itself has a really deep problem, and many Americans felt like the Democratic Party had aligned way too closely with this progressive social agenda and rather than these kitchen table issues. And so to me, it depends on how folks who are focused on climate on the left align with the activist agenda.
Katherine Hamilton: I actually think that’s an issue of narrative and messaging because if you look at all of the bills that passed, that were essentially climate bills that passed during the Biden administration, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure bill, those were all really pragmatic solutions that dealt with kitchen table issues. But that was not what the narrative was. And I think that’s where things failed because that’s not… The narrative should have been super inclusive about this is actually going to affect your price of eggs. And now we’re seeing that happen. You take the stuff away, it is going to impact everything in your life and the affordability issues. But I think that a lot of that was not about the actual content, but about the narrative and messaging.
Stephen Lacey: Definitely. Yeah, Jigar, what do you make of the premise?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, I tend to agree with Katherine as we’ve talked about, I think on our collective podcast for 10 plus years. I think that-
Stephen Lacey: Agree meaning that you need that flank?
Jigar Shah: Well, I’ll give you an example that’s extreme. I’ve never criticized Mark Jacobson over his a hundred percent wind, solar, and hydro thing, even though I know that it’s completely freaking impossible to do anything that he’s suggesting. But there’s a lot of people who are inspired by his work, and that’s how we got a lot of the renewable portfolio standards passed at the state level. And so do I need to come out and slay his message? No. But in closed doors, I’m telling people we need a lot of clean firm power generation. And so that includes nuclear and includes geothermal, it includes other stuff. So I think the part that all these Monday morning quarterbacks misunderstand is getting to 48 votes in the Senate for the Inflation Reduction Act was virtually impossible. I think people don’t understand how diverse the Democratic Party is broadly and how important the left flank was to get Sheldon Whitehouse and Bernie Sanders to agree on something.
And so yes, they fell short of 50, they only got 48. And then you had a very pragmatic negotiation that didn’t include the environmental groups or other left flank folks from January of 2022 through August of 2022, that was only Joe Manchin, and to some degree, Kyrsten Sinema. And they passed the bill that, as Katherine suggested, was really damn pragmatic. But I just think that people don’t understand how politics works. They just want to Monday morning quarterback the narrative at the end. And look, Donald Trump has been a master of narrative. Look, I don’t love that he’s a master of the narrative, but he is. And Biden in particular was not. He certainly wasn’t doing press releases every day and press conferences every day and all the things that a president frankly has to do because while I loved Secretary Granholm, she is no stand-in for the President of the United States. And so that narrative just didn’t get done because Joe Biden wasn’t giving it.
So I just think that some of this stuff is a little too much. That being said, we’ve always agreed with these two pieces on balance within our podcast. The notion that you were going to go to the American people and say, “This is only going to cost you a little bit more, but we’re going to save the planet.” was always a terrible narrative. It was terrible for Waxman-Markey and it’s terrible now. And it doesn’t have to be the case because we have all of these extraordinary technologies that actually are the most affordable way to meet this load growth moment in this particular case and the fastest way to meet this load growth moment in this particular way.
And so we don’t have to sacrifice. For the first time in my entire career, there is no sacrifice needed. You get the most affordable solution and the fastest solution. And that should be celebrated. And I think that to Katherine’s point, the left and the doomers played some role in getting the urgency there. And all of us technocrats had a very important role in actually doing the work to get the technologies lined up and the money in there and projects built on Walmart stores and whatever it is that got the cost down.
Stephen Lacey: Katherine, how do you think the progressive climate activist wing influenced policy headed toward the IRA? In 2018, the Sunrise Movement broke out with this congressional sit-in, AOC came and visited them and praised them. There was this viral moment where they were all holding up their green jobs for everyone now signs and AOC sort of gave them the momentum they needed, and the Sunrise Movement eventually became a very influential student-led group. And the argument was that they really did create, they forced Pelosi and others to start talking about climate change in the 2018-2019 era that eventually led to the negotiations around the IRA. Is that accurate to you?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, I think it did really stress the urgency and also showed that there were young people who really cared and cared enough to go and try to meet with her and to make a point of it. Of course, in the end, they were not completely happy with what the outcome was. But that may have never been the case, but it did raise it as an issue, and it was something that had been percolating since Waxman-Markey had failed in favor of healthcare during the Obama administration. And that was probably the right choice. Everybody needs healthcare, so maybe that was the right choice, but the tactics had changed and also the energy had changed around it.
So I think it was really important that they did that and that they kept the pressure on because that forced the discussion. And maybe everybody didn’t get what they wanted out of the bill, but it definitely led, I think, to climate action. And I also think there are provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that may not have happened without those folks like low-income adders and being able to focus on communities that most need the help. I don’t know that any of that would’ve happened without that pressure.
Jigar Shah: Yeah. One other thing I would say is that as somebody who has been on boards of environmental groups and other things for a long time, we are in a weird place right now, right? Because the cleantech sector has really abrogated its entire responsibility in developing its own political infrastructure. We sort of put together CEA and then AWEA and then that became ACP, but we were really borrowing the political infrastructure from the environmental groups for many, many years. So when you think about whipping votes in state legislatures or whipping votes in the federal government and in Congress, a lot of those were environmental folks who had been around for a long time, and then they had C3 organizations and C4 organizations that could lobby and all these other things. And so it’s only now that the cleantech sector is actually recognizing that borrowing the environmental group’s political infrastructure is probably not the right call.
And in some ways, I think that’s probably what Alex Trembath is really suggesting is that the cleantech sector is sort of saying that we’re in lockstep with the environmental groups, which is not always a good thing. And frankly, probably 40% of the cleantech sector’s employees voted for Trump. And so it’s not really the right methodology by which to get our stuff done. And so now you see the cleantech sector actually building its own political rails and funding its own candidates and putting all these things together and the environmental groups are going to have to figure out what it wants to do because it’s not clear to me that being pro stuff is what the environmental groups do.
In general, they raise a lot of money when they’re against stuff. That’s what activates their base. That’s how they get lots of $50 donations, is PFAS, and figuring out how to shut down coal plants, and doing all this other stuff. Building tons of batteries and solar, it’s hard for them to raise money on that stuff. And so I think part of our challenge is they have frankly been big warriors and they’ve been doing things that I’m not sure was part of necessarily their business model because the cleantech sector wasn’t doing it. Now the cleantech sector has decided it should do it, and I think we’ll be better off for the environmental groups pushing what they care about and the cleantech sector pushing what they care about.
Stephen Lacey: I want to dissect Alex Trembath’s argument quickly. So his argument is that climate hawkism failed politically. That for more than a decade, climate hawks and activists tried to put this existential threat and moral urgency at the center of politics, and that they want attention but not durable majorities. And that climate has never cracked the top tier of voter priorities, that the efforts to raise salience actually polarized the issue instead of broadening support. And then the path forward is this pragmatism we’ve been talking about, which is climate change is of course real and serious, but it’s best addressed indirectly by focusing on things that people care about, like energy abundance, affordability, resilience, innovation, and that climate outcomes should be more of a co-benefit, not the centerpiece. What do you make of his critique of climate hawkism specifically?
Jigar Shah: The thing that I worry about with that entire line of argumentation is it just feels like pontification by Monday morning quarterbacks. For folks who actually have to lift heavyweights all the way up the mountain and actually get stuff done, that is not how anything works. Going into the middle and saying, “We’re not going to talk about climate. We’re only going to talk about the benefits of our technology, and we’re just going to be a pro-technology argument, and we just want R&D and we just want innovation.” That’s why we’re 20 years behind. This is the Bjorn Lomborg crap that we’ve been dealing with for a long time, which is that the technologies aren’t ready to deploy at scale. Let’s keep investing in R&D. And it turned out that investing heavily into the deployment of technologies is what dropped the costs so precipitously. It wasn’t more R&D. More R&D is also always welcome. But what we want to do is actually get people to deploy stuff at scale.
Now, the question becomes can you get people to deploy stuff at scale while staying completely under the radar screen and not using climate as an argument? Which is kind of what Alex is saying. I don’t know. How did that work out for nuclear power? Not very well. And so now, the Trump administration is weaponizing nuclear power and maybe they’ll get 10 AP1000s under construction, maybe not. But when you think about how nuclear power has tried to stay under the radar screen since 2008, and very few of them have actually gotten deployed, it didn’t work that well. I think that some of the things that we do, you can say is a hype cycle within the capitalist system, too much money going into AI, but before too much money going into hydrogen or whatever it is.
And some of it is actually supported by the fact that climate hawks were the ones who convinced the capitalists that this was a hype cycle and that they should dump a bunch of money into it. And so I just think that he gets too cute by saying that I want this part of the menu, but not this part of the menu. And I think we would’ve had the exact same results technologically and crowding and capital and all that stuff if we just had done the stuff that fits my gluten-free vegan, sort of like [inaudible 00:43:49].
Katherine Hamilton: Hey, don’t knock gluten-free.
Stephen Lacey: I think we’re about to test it right now. No one is talking about climate, and we are going to see how the conversation progresses, given that people are going to be talking about affordability, reliability, resilience, and so all the things that-
Jigar Shah: No, that’s not a test.
Stephen Lacey: Why is it not a test? It’s-
Jigar Shah: Because remember, what I’m claiming is that we would not be in this situation where all of our technologies are fully affordable and we can get away with just the affordability message if we had not participated in climate hawkism the last 10 or 20 years.
Stephen Lacey: But you don’t think that the business community would’ve just innovated anyway? That there’s a contingency of entrepreneurs and investors who wouldn’t have been driving it forward without that messaging?
Katherine Hamilton: Oh, yeah. Who got all the regulation in place for tailpipe emissions and power plant emissions? If we hadn’t had the climate hawks, that wouldn’t have happened, and that opened up markets for clean energy. So that actually created the space for these new technologies to be able to pencil out. So I absolutely disagree with that premise. I also think there are voters who are single-issue voters. So I just don’t think it’s true that people are only going to vote on affordability. Maybe that’s the bulk right now. But there are climate voters. Just as there are pro-choice voters, there are people that that is their only issue that they care about, and I don’t think that that will necessarily change.
Now, some of the things, if you think of it like, “Oh, I’m just going to have a rational read of what Alex Trembath says, which by the way, if you read it, you’ll get very… And if you care about climate, you’ll get emotional reading it. So the best way to do it is to get ChatGPT to just summarize it because then it’s very dispassionate and it takes all of the tone that he loves to use out of it. But he’s saying that climate hawk era is over, that climate should be de-centered politically, but politics has room for a lot of issues as I just said. There are a lot of people who vote for a number of things, and climate mitigation can be a very happy side effect of driving down affordability and increasing jobs as Jigar has talked about forever. And then critiquing all the climate targets. Well, if you don’t have climate targets, what are you working for? What are you working toward?
And so it’s important for everybody to have a goal, even if it’s something you’re not going to be able to meet, you have a goal and you take steps to get there. And then this cultural backlash, making it a cultural issue is really tough because there are only certain people who want it to be a cultural issue. If you can de-culturize it and just have it be about the health and well-being of humans on this planet, I think you’ll be able to still make your arguments and still move ahead even if you just care about climate.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, but the climate activists marching at Climate Week are leaning into the culture wars. They’re making it about everything, every social justice issue possible, and I just do not see how that is at all a winning message in this current environment. And I think if Democrats take their cues from that or people who are generally supporting climate policy regardless of which party they’re in, if anyone is taking cues from that, it will not land.
Jigar Shah: Sure. But remember, at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, the president said that, “I actually hate my opponents.” versus other people. So you have culture wars on that side, which I don’t think other people should be participating in. Look, the fact that people do and say things that I don’t think is fully reasoned through your lens and my lens doesn’t mean that I hate them for expressing their free speech rights. And I just think that people don’t… Look, the weird thing is about Alex, is that I’ve probably been the most effective communicator of eco modernism without believing in it of anybody in the entire 25-year history of his institution. And so I only use economic messages or pollution messages or other stuff because it works for me in the companies that I work with and the technologies I’m putting forward. But to not recognize how the actual political process works and not how moments get created and how things become memes and things become viral like Greta, do I wish Greta never existed? Of course I don’t. Like, oh, my goodness.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, I’m certainly not saying that.
Jigar Shah: No, but that is kind of what he’s saying. He’s saying, “I wish that this had never been politicized. I wish that these people had never actually broken through. I wish that these things were just completely dispassionate.” I get it. We all wish that we just lived lives of quiet-like amplitude, but that’s not the world we live in. We agreed for social media companies to exist. Now, you’ve got all this screaming going on on Facebook or on Twitter or on Bluesky or whatever it is. We live in the world we’re in, and the notion that people are like, “Gosh, I wish everyone was as boring as I am.” No. No, no, no. That is not the world we live in. And so I don’t know why I want to engage in something that just is nonsensical.
Stephen Lacey: I think it’s a really helpful conversation. I don’t think it’s nonsensical. I think it’s the perfect time to be having this conversation. So let’s go into some of Liebreich’s other views on what this pragmatic climate reset looks like. Katherine, what are some others that resonated with you?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, I’ll tick down… He had eight things that he wants to reset on and we can dive into any of these, but resetting climate politics, we’ve talked about that. How do you get to the center on the politics without guilt-based messaging? Sure, let’s do better messaging. Resetting climate targets, he says they should be more reasonable. You got to have climate targets, so figure out what those are. Reset energy priorities. So he’s allow for some flexible gas plants so that you can at least use those for peaking and not for baseload, and you don’t have a bunch of stranded assets. He isn’t saying you need to not do renewables. I think he’s just saying to be a little more flexible. Reset hydrogen expectations. If two people are trying to decide whether to invest in hydrogen, just send Michael Liebreich into the room who will say, he will say, “This was the stupidest idea in stupidville.” Which is exactly what he said in that article. He hates hydrogen so much. Reset diplomacy, and we may want to talk about that and dig into the COPs and how do those work.
And reset science scenarios. He has some arguments about how some of those are outdated and need to be re-upped. That would be great if we can all get on the same page on that. The US right now is not in the mood to do that, but that would be great to do. Reset finance and ESG to sort of take ESGs not as a separate piece of the puzzle, but as part of the full financial system. And also make governments be more in charge of regulation. Unfortunately, right now, our government is not doing that. And then reset policy and regulation to try to have more of a value for money test where the value is in the climate reduction. These all seem really rational, pragmatic ideas. The issue is like how do we then execute on those?
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, I thought he has really good ideas for how to change the climate negotiations process, which is really relevant, given the UN assembly this week. There were a couple of ideas that stood out to me. One was basically shrink the circus of climate talks, hold it with a much smaller number of people, focus on concrete deals in very specific industries like in steel, cement, shipping, energy. Don’t try to hash out these economy-wide, one-size-fits-all targets. Take the land use and agriculture piece and forestry out of the conversation and make it its own convention because the politics and culture of land are so much different than many of the other industrial conversations.
And then really revisit this idea of loss and damages. He argues that it doesn’t make sense to create a duplicate aid system where losses from specific climate events can’t be clearly tied with emissions, with scientific certainty, and that there’s a lot of energy that goes into that system that doesn’t make sense. And I think that clearly paring down these negotiations and making them about very specific deals in specific industries really resonates with me. Jigar, were there any that stood out to you of how to change the way we’re engaging in this negotiations process?
Jigar Shah: I don’t know that I had a lot of great insights on the negotiation process, but I totally agree with the circus. Honestly, I haven’t gone to a cop since I was forced to when I ran the [inaudible 00:53:07] and good riddance, the Biden administration tried to get me to go to COPs, and I was like, “Hell no.” I don’t know why I would go. Because this is the thing, I totally agree. I’m not a negotiator. I don’t know that I necessarily even care about the text that’s coming out of the negotiations. I’m pretty sure I’ve never really read an article in the last 10 years around what’s happening in the text and what’s happening in this and that and whatever. I think in general, it is orthogonal to what I’m doing on the cleantech side.
I totally agree with Michael, which is that these processes, which are deeply consultive and very difficult diplomatic efforts are really valuable on land use. Just so important. When you think about what we do with the rainforest or palm oil in Indonesia or some of these other things that are occurring, even in the United States, when you think about what’s happening under our current administration, I do think that our protection of land is going down in a really big way. And I do think that that conversation matters a lot. And so I hope that they take him up on that offer. I think the other challenge you have, and agree with him on the loss and damage piece, is that it is most certainly the case that we are changing the way that the globe operates, whether it’s weather patterns or sea level rise or other things. And there are going to be places around the world that are less and less habitable. Even in the United States, you can’t even get home insurance anymore in the state of Florida.
And so you’re in this weird spot where we need real solutions to these challenges. And just having a transfer of money from the United States to XYZ country doesn’t solve the underlying problem, which is around insurance and how insurance markets work. We had this conversation a little bit with our friend from JPMorgan where I was like, “Well, if these are all these issues, why are you not sending a letter to all of the homeowners saying your house is definitely going to be a problem in seven years?” And she’s like, “Well, I haven’t gotten permission to do that yet.” I get it. But I just think that there’s a way to have these conversations and a way to have a positive influence on reducing the worst possible impacts on humans around the world. And I don’t think that that comes through in any way that is actionable through the current COP process.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, and the funds that have been set up have just been absolutely unworkable. You talk to any developing country. And the definition of developing country may need to be shifted a little bit as well, but those countries are not getting what they need and in the format that they need it. So they’re saying, a lot of smaller countries are saying, “Yeah, we would love to be able to build clean resources. We can’t build any resources right now because the fund doesn’t work for us.” So trying to figure out how to restructure that in a way that’s really workable, it’s caused a lot of people a lot of gray hair. But I think that’s something that would be really important. And Liebreich says countries should be focused on their own decarbonization and their own economic growth and benefit. Well, maybe if developing countries did that and put some muscle into it, then they would have the extra cash to be able to help to both be a leader and innovate, but also to have some extra funds to be able to show the pathway for countries that don’t have the resources that they need.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. He basically argues that we should get rid of that entire rich-poor framework because as he argues, that many developing countries, they have skyscrapers, space programs, global companies, wealthy elites, and meanwhile, these supposedly rich countries are still full of people with stagnant wages, living in a cost-of-living crisis. And the best thing, as you said, Katherine, that we can do is having rich countries lead by example and that decarbonize their own economies while preserving standards of living. And he says I think, “If they fail at home, then no amount of climate finance will matter abroad.” And I generally agree with that.
Jigar Shah: Just to be clear though, Stephen, I don’t think the vast majority of the world believes in that, even though I think they need to make that shift. I’m a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. They have all these people who focus on blended finance and climate finance and all this stuff. It’s been something that people worked on for 20 years. Part of why I joined as a senior fellow is to convince people that frankly, mainstream capital flows are flowing at such large rates right now that it dwarfs blended finance.
When you think about what happened in Pakistan the last two years, not a single drop of blended finance or climate finance or development bank finance went into Pakistan. All of that money was for-profit money, all of it for the last two years. And so you’re just starting to see that as Katherine’s suggesting, that a lot of these well-intentioned programs just have not worked. They have not crowded in other capital, they have not done the skills transfer that I think people expected them to do. And so at some point, we just have to throw out things that didn’t work.
Stephen Lacey: Okay. So imagine you are a young person looking at how they can make the biggest impact right now. Could be in activism, could be in business, could be anywhere. What do you think would be the highest impact way they could spend their time on something climate related? Katherine, where would you devote your focus?
Katherine Hamilton: It’s such a funny question because at Cornell, that’s exactly what they asked me. And they had students from every type of school, every discipline, and I kind of said, “Do what you do from where you are. There are a bunch of you that are engineers, engineer. There’re a bunch of you that are scientists and researchers, do that. There’s some of you who are communications people, focus on the narrative.” Or writers writing to me is the biggest, best skill you can have. But really, you can get to it from wherever you are, find your pathway from what you love and what you’re good at. So I know that’s not a definitive answer, but I think it’s something that I can’t say to everybody, “Do policy.” That’s not right for everybody.
Jigar Shah: So I think I use the same exact answer that Katherine uses when I get asked that question. But I think maybe to give you an answer from a slightly different perspective, look, I think that there has been a 30 or 40-year effort to solve problems that are really thorny by throwing money at the problem. And I, for a long time, didn’t think that worked. But now, I definitively know that it doesn’t work. And we need to be raising a group of children today that can rethink how we accomplish our goals. That whatever discipline they want to come at it from, it can’t just be throwing money at the problem. You can’t just raise taxes more and say, “Now, this time, it’ll solve it.” Whether it’s childcare or healthcare or energy policy or climate policy or whatever it is, it can’t just be, “Here’s another feed in tariff at 47 cents a kilowatt-hour.” Or “Here’s another thing.”
It has to be, what is it at the core of our systems are holding back the ability for us to innovate within the current system? And I think that we, particularly in the West, have this ability to rise to the occasion in this moment and figure it out. I don’t want to have a top-down state like China, right? I respect China greatly, they do their thing, they have had a tremendous amount of a success in building nuclear plants, building hydro dams, whatever. I think that the way in which they accomplish that are not the trade-offs that I would want to be in that society under. I think the West has to figure out what that more balanced approach looks like. Climate happens to be the area that I’m focused on. So then there’s labor and justice and some of these other things, but I think that this is a universal problem where we’ve been thinking in a group way for 40 years and we have to break out of it.
Stephen Lacey: Those are both good answers. To get more specific, if someone who was say interested in activism or politics, creating political change, were to ask me that question, I would say find a way to do serious on-the-ground work. Find a way to make your work about influencing planning boards, zoning boards, all the local politics of building clean energy and sustainable infrastructure, because we have a deep local problem when it comes to building an energy infrastructure. And you can sort of raise awareness about climate change all you want, but if people are continually resisting this stuff, if local regulatory boards are not finding ways to build this stuff, it doesn’t matter how you talk about it, it’s just not going to get built. And more and more projects are getting caught up in this web of resistance on the local level, even among communities that theoretically should support it. And I think it’s just a growing and deep problem. And that’s where I would say is focus your attention on solving that problem.
Jigar Shah: And I think that that is still related though to the systems issue. To Katherine’s point, when you think about writing and how important writing is, we’ve lost all of our local journalism. No one’s holding a city of 3,000 people accountable for their actions. So those people can do whatever the hell they want to do. And so even if the climate solution that we’re proposing is half the price of the old solution, they’re like, “Well, but the old solution is run by my cousin and so we’re going to do it that way.” I just think that when you think about what is broken at the local level, is that the best ideas are not the ones that actually get to the top. That there’s just so much embedded resistance to change because people are like, “But that person’s been running that dealership for 40 years and he doesn’t want to add electric vehicle repair technicians.” Or whatever it is. It’s one of those things where we have somehow gotten just so sclerotic.
Stephen Lacey: Well, I think we can wrap it there. This was a good one, I think a long overdue conversation, the right week to have this conversation. Jigar, good to see you. Thanks for joining us the night after your birthday. I’m saying that with air quotes. Appreciate you doing this after a late night.
Jigar Shah: Well, I’m glad to do it, and I just want to make sure everybody recognizes that I’m still as optimistic as ever. The fact that there are no trade-offs today and that we are now the cheapest solution and the fastest solution gives me great hope that I think that this is our time.
Stephen Lacey: Absolutely. And Katherine, I know you are working on this also every day with Common Charge and thinking about how to frame this in ways that are really relevant to people’s lives, so keep at it.
Katherine Hamilton: Well, thanks. And I have a grandbaby now who can’t even say my name yet because he’s that little. But it’s the young people that I really have a lot of hope and feel pretty good about.Stephen Lacey: Absolutely. All right, y’all, thank you so much for being here. If you could give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this show, that would be really helpful. Spread the word to others. The show is produced by Latitude Media. You can find all our back episodes on the platforms and on Latitude Media where we’ve got transcripts. You can sign up for our newsletters there as well. The show is edited by me, Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director, Anne Bailey is our senior story editor. Jigar, Katherine, we’ll catch you next week, and we will catch all of you out there soon. Thanks for being here.
