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Most nonprofit boards can do whatever they want.
Surely you’ve heard by now. On Friday, the board of directors of OpenAI, the world-bestriding startup at the center of the new artificial intelligence boom, fired its chief executive, Sam Altman. He had not been “consistently candid” with the board, the company said, setting in motion a coup — and potential counter-coup — that has transfixed the tech, business, and media industries for the past 72 hours.
OpenAI is — was? — a strange organization. Until last week, it was both the country’s hottest new tech company and an independent nonprofit devoted to ensuring that a hypothetical, hyper-intelligent AI “benefits all of humanity.” The nonprofit board owned and controlled the for-profit startup, but it did not fund it entirely; the startup could and did accept outside investment, such as a $13 billion infusion from Microsoft.
This kind of dual nonprofit/for-profit structure isn’t uncommon in the tech industry. The encrypted messaging app Signal, for instance, is owned by a foundation, as is the company that makes the cheap, programmable microchip Raspberry Pi. The open-source browser Firefox is overseen by the Mozilla Foundation.
But OpenAI’s structure is unusually convoluted, with two nested holding companies and a growing split between who was providing the money (Microsoft) and who ostensibly controlled operations (the nonprofit board). That tension between the nonprofit board and the for-profit company is what ultimately ripped apart OpenAI, because when the people with control (the board) tried to fire Altman, the people with the money (Microsoft) said no. As I write this, Microsoft seems likely to win.
This may all seem remote from what we cover here at Heatmap. Other than the fact that ChatGPT devours electricity, OpenAI doesn’t obviously have anything to do with climate change, electric vehicles, or the energy transition. Sometimes I even have the sense that many climate advocates take a certain delight in high-profile AI setbacks, because they resent competing with it for existential-risk airtime.
Yet OpenAI’s schism is a warning for climate world. Strip back the money, the apocalypticism, the big ideas and Terminator references, and OpenAI is fundamentally a story about nonprofit governance. When a majority of the board decided to knock Altman from his perch, nobody could stop them. They alone decided to torch $80 billion in market value overnight and set their institution on fire. Whether that was the right or wrong choice, it illustrates how nonprofit organizations — especially those that, like OpenAI, are controlled solely by a board of directors — act with an unusual amount of arbitrary authority.
Why does that matter for the climate or environmental movement? Because the climate and energy world is absolutely teeming with nonprofit organizations — and many of them are just as unconstrained, just as willfully wacky, as OpenAI.
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Let’s step back. Nonprofits can generally be governed in two ways. (Apologies to nonprofit lawyers in the audience: I’m about to vastly simplify your specialty.) The first is a chapter- or membership-driven structure, in which a mass membership elects leaders to serve on a board of directors. Many unions, social clubs, and business groups take this form: Every few years, the members elect a new president or board of directors, who lead the organization for the next few years.
The other way is a so-called “board-only” organization. In this structure, the nonprofit’s board of directors leads the organization and does not answer to a membership or chapter. (There is often no membership to answer to.) When a vacancy opens up on the board, its remaining members appoint a replacement, perpetuating itself over time.
OpenAI was just such a board-only organization. Even though Altman was CEO, OpenAI was led officially by its board of directors.
This is a stranger way of running an organization than it may seem. For a small, private foundation, it may work just fine: Such an organization has no staff and probably meets rarely. (Most U.S. nonprofits are just this sort of organization.) But when a board-only nonprofit gets big — when it fulfills a crucial public purpose or employs hundreds or thousands of people — it faces an unusual lack of institutional constraints.
Consider, for instance, what life is like for a decently sized business, a small government agency, and a medium-sized nonprofit. The decently sized business is constantly buffeted by external forcing factors. Its creditors need to be repaid; it is battling for market share and product position. It faces market discipline or at least some kind of profit motive. It has to remain focused, competitive, and at least theoretically efficient.
The government agency, meanwhile, is constrained by public scrutiny and political oversight. Its bureaucrats and public servants are managed by elected officials, who are themselves accountable to the public. When a particularly important agency is not doing its job, voters can demand a change or elect new leadership.
Nonprofits can have some of the same built-in checks and balances — but only when they are controlled by members, and not by a board. If a members association embarrasses itself, for instance, or if it doesn’t carry out its mission, then its membership can vote out the board and elect new directors to replace them. But stakeholders have no such recourse for a board-only nonprofit. Insulated from market pressure and public oversight, board-only nonprofits are free to wander off into wackadoodle land.
The problem is that board-only nonprofits are only becoming more powerful — in fact, many of the nonprofits you know best are probably controlled solely by their board. In 2002, the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol observed that American civic life had undergone a rapid transformation: where it had once been full of membership-driven federations, such as the Lions Club or the League of Women Voters, it was now dominated by issues-focused advocacy groups.
From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, she wrote, America “had a uniquely balanced civic life, in which markets expanded but could not subsume civil society, in which governments at multiple levels deliberately and indirectly encouraged federated voluntary associations.” But from the 1960s to the 1990s, that old network fell apart. It was “bypassed and shoved to the side by a gaggle of professionally dominated advocacy groups and nonprofit institutions rarely attached to memberships worthy of the name,” Skocpol wrote.
The sheer number of groups exploded. In 1958, the Encyclopedia of Associations listed approximately 6,500 associations, Skocpol writes. By 1990, that number had more than tripled to 23,000. Today, the American Society of Association Executives — which is, just so we’re clear here, literally an association for associations — counts almost 1.9 million associations, including 1.2 million nonprofits.
This new network includes some nonprofits that claim to have members but are not in fact governed by them, such as the AARP. It includes “public citizen” or legal-advocacy groups, which watchdog legislation or fight for important precedents in the courts, such as Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, or Public Citizen itself. And it includes independent, mission-driven, and board-controlled nonprofits — such as OpenAI.
There is nothing wrong with these new groups per se. Many of them are inspired by the advocacy and legal organizations that won some of the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest victories. But unlike the member federations and civic associations that they largely replaced, these new groups don’t force Americans to engage with what their neighbors are thinking and feeling. So they “compartmentalize” America, in Skocpol’s words. Instead of articulating the views of a deep, national membership network, these groups essentially speak for a centralized and professionalized leadership corps — invariably located in a major city — who are armed with modern marketing techniques. And instead of fundraising through dues, fees, or tithes, these new groups depend on direct-mail operations, massive ad campaigns, and foundation grants.
This is the organizational superstructure on which much of the modern climate movement rests. When you read a climate news story, someone quoted in it will probably work for such a nonprofit. Many climate and energy policy experts spend at least part of their careers at some kind of nonprofit. Most climate or environmental news outlets — although not this one — are funded in whole or part through donations and foundation grants. And most climate initiatives that earn mainstream attention receive grants from a handful of foundations.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this setup — and, of course, an equivalent network devoted to stopping and delaying climate policy exists to rival it on the right. But the entire design places an enormous amount of faith in the leaders of these nonprofits and foundations, and in the social strata that they occupy. If a nonprofit messes up, then only public attention or press coverage can right the ship. And there is simply not enough of either resource to keep these things on track.
That leads to odd resource allocation decisions, business units that seem to have no purpose (alongside teams that seem perpetually overworked), and decisions that frame otherwise decent policies in politically unpalatable ways. It regularly burns out people involved in climate organizations. And it means that much of the climate movement’s strategy is controlled by foundation officials and nonprofit directors. Like any other group of executives, these people are capable of deluding themselves about what is happening in the world; unlike other types of leaders, however, they face neither an angry electorate nor a ruthless market that will force them to update their worldview. The risk exists, then, that they could blunder into disaster — and take the climate movement with them.
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The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.