The Good, the Bad, and the Solvable Problems of Climate Change

If you’ll allow us to toot our own horn for a moment, Heatmap House — our first-ever daylong series of panels with the most influential voices in climate, clean energy, and sustainability, part of New York Climate Week — had everything. Senator Chuck Schumer kicked things off with an emphatic call to action for climate advocates at the top of the day. Then a series of industry leaders in clean energy manufacturing gave us a forecast for the future of American decarbonization, followed by investors and technologists including Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert telling us how exactly we might find the funding for that future.

Here’s a quick recap, in case you weren’t able to make it out to New York City for the event. Our first session of the day, “The Big (Green) Apple,” centered on New York’s efforts to future-proof the state. Schumer began the day with what my colleague Katie Brigham described as a “rousing condemnation of the Trump administration’s climate policies and a call to action for climate advocates everywhere.”

“New York remains the climate leader, but Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth,” Schumer said.

Among the various sessions that followed, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo spoke with Uchenna Bright, a commissioner on the New York State Public Service Commission, about New York’s evolving energy system and how to keep it affordable for New Yorkers. Later, Emily spoke with Elijah Hutchinson of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice about the city’s specific climate goals, and how those are inextricably tied with advancing equality for all the city’s residents.

Justin E. Driscoll, the president and CEO of the New York Power Authority, which sponsored the session, highlighted how the public power utility is modernizing through grid enhancing technologies, a.k.a. GETs. He also touched on the utility's newest mission, courtesy of Governor Kathy Hochul, to launch at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear capacity upstate.

Other speakers from the morning session included Andrew Bowman, CEO of Jupiter Power, and Jon Powers, co-founder of CleanCapital, who spoke with Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin about the nuts and bolts of power generation. Meanwhile Ben Furnas, executive director at Transportation Alternatives, emphasized the importance of clean, efficient ways of getting around the city in conversation with executive editor Robinson Meyer.

Our midday session, “Built to Scale,” was a lesson in pragmatism. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, along with other clean energy voices including Ricardo Falu, chief operating officer at AES, argued that the global fight to decarbonize is going on with or without the United States. “It is best for people to operate under the assumption that the United States, at least for the next three years, will be a destructive force on collective climate action,” Schatz said to Rob.

Falu, whose company has succeeded in getting clean energy projects off the ground abroad, concurred. “In Chile, we pay 12 cents for a solar panel. Here in the U.S., it’s 36 to 37 [cents]. Why is that?” he said in conversation with Emily. “In many other countries, you don’t need incentives for renewables. They are competitive.”

But many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S. These included Jake Oster of Amazon, who told Katie that energy efficiency is at the forefront of Amazon’s data center growth efforts. Carla Peterman, chief sustainability officer of PG&E, told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin that she was confident data center demand will eventually bring down electricity rates for consumers. Other speakers highlighted the need for clarity from lawmakers in order for clean energy projects to advance, including Julien Dumoulin-Smith of Jefferies, who talked to Matthew about the clean energy financing equation.

Jeff Tolnar, president of Shoals Technology Group, which sponsored the midday session, shared a similar sentiment. “Tariffs — I’m not the best speller in the world, but it has become a four-letter word,” he said. “In April, our supply chain team did a fantastic job, and then a month later there’s a change and then a month later, another change, and then there’s a tweet. It causes chaos in the supply chain.”

Our final session of the night, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” focused on the future of climate tech investment. Climate investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer sat down with Rob to discuss what needs to happen for climate innovation to finally achieve deployment. Steyer is confident that a “huge, powerful wave” is still driving renewable energy.

“For the people who never look at the numbers, for the people who don’t pay attention to actual investment decisions, costs, profit margins, you can say whatever you want. But I’ll tell you this: The rig count is down 10% to 20% in 2025 in America,” Steyer said.

Dawn Lippert, CEO of Elemental Impact and founding partner of Earthshot Ventures, then talked with Rob about the biggest potential challenge facing renewables deployment, even in the face of such unstoppability — that is, “bankability,” otherwise known as the “missing middle” in climate tech investment.

“It takes quite a lot of capital, and there’s no one to hand it out on the financial infrastructure side. They’re not ready for infrastructure investors. They’re definitely not ready for banks,” Lippert said.

Moreover, in the midst of rapid load growth, “there’s massive gaps in capacity,” added Jon Norman, president of Hydrostor, the sponsor of our last session of the day. “That’s really tricky. That requires investment.”

Rounding out our last session were Christian Anderson, co-founder of the carbon accounting platform Watershed, and Rick Needham, chief commercial officer of Commonwealth Fusion, who discussed what makes a climate tech unicorn with Katie. Sublime Systems CEO Leah Ellis, whose company makes low-carbon cement, and Microsoft’s Katie Ross, talked with Emily about how their companies are partnering up to produce low-carbon cement.

The bottom line? Circumstances for clean energy deployment may be particularly tough at the moment, but there are thousands of creative people finding innovative ways to reach our decarbonized future.

The current policy environment “doesn’t mean that collective climate action can’t continue,” said Schatz. “It doesn’t mean that American companies, American governors, American nonprofits, American journalists, can’t be part of this whole movement to solve this generational challenge.”