You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Ten years ago, if you were a hotshot senior advisor in the Obama administration, odds are good you exited the revolving door of the White House straight into a job in Big Tech. But there’s a new career trajectory that’s looking pretty good these days: federal government to climate tech. Since the latter Obama years and increasingly with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act two years ago, former government employees are popping up at some of the most important companies and venture capital firms in the climate ecosystem.
That’s a testament to how far we’ve come since clean tech 1.0 in the 2010s, when Solyndra’s bankruptcy was blowing up headlines and the shale revolution was starting to derail renewable energy investment. As a more durable market started to rise from the ashes, a growing number of industry experts jumped into government to help fuel the revival — and then often back into industry to take advantage of a more favorable policy environment and an increased focus on corporate sustainability.
Alfred Johnson, co-founder and CEO of the tax credit marketplace Crux, told me that after growing up in D.C. but moving to Stanford for college, he was surprised to hear folks in Silicon Valley talking about government and private industry as if they had completely “mismatched objectives.” Prior to starting Crux, Johnson served as deputy chief of staff at the Department of the Treasury, his second stint at the agency during a career that’s taken him from campaigning for Obama to Blackrock, to founding his first startup, Mobilize, a platform that used to recruit volunteers for Democratic Party campaign events and progressive causes.
“The perspective that I’ve always had is that government and the private sector are fundamentally intertwined, and always have been,” Johnson told me. Crux itself demonstrates this public-private synergy: Not only did the IRA unleash an abundance of clean energy tax credits, it also made them much easier to trade — transactions Crux facilitates.
“If our goal is to mobilize trillions of dollars of investment into the clean energy transition,” Varun Sivaram, a senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, “the people holding the reins of power should absolutely not be the people who have never been in an investment committee room making a financial decision on a project.” Prior to his latest gig, Sivaram worked as an executive at Orsted, which he joined after a stint in the White House as the managing director for clean energy and innovation and a senior advisor to John Kerry, the administration’s climate envoy.
“After the IRA, I said, look, we’ve passed this extraordinary legislation. I would now love to help be at a company that can use this amazing public policy and build clean energy as fast as possible,” he told me. At Orsted he helped lead the internal R&D and artificial intelligence teams and founded Orsted Ventures, which has invested in Crux. Sivaram was also on the committee that decided to pull out of two offshore wind projects in New Jersey, resulting in a $4 billion impairment for the company. “I sometimes feel like Forrest Gump. I have had this front row seat to a lot of very important things,” Sivaram told me.
A lot of the recent revolving door activity can also be traced to the renewed vigor of the once-nearly-dormant Loan Programs Office, part of the Department of Energy, which the IRA imbued with $400 billion to guarantee loans to emerging energy technologies. LPO became a political football thanks to Solyndra, which received a loan guarantee from the office of more than $500 million. After Jigar Shah took the helm in 2021, he tripled the agency’s staff, bringing with him a cohort of private industry experts and advisors, many of whom held contract positions for about a year or two before moving back into industry to pursue other ventures in the climate tech and energy world.
Climate tech investment firms have also become a popular landing spot for former government talent. David Danielson, now a managing director at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, co-founded ARPA-E and worked in the Department of Energy in the second Obama administration. Jenny Gao, a vice president at Energy Impact Partners, went there fresh off a position in the DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions. And Clay Dumas, a partner at Lowercarbon Capital, worked in the Obama White House as the chief of staff and a senior advisor for the White House Office of Digital Strategy.
And then there’s Overture, a climate tech VC founded by former Obama staffers, which aims to help climate tech founders take advantage of government programs and navigate regulatory complexity. “In some ways, campaigns are startups — you start small with a big idea,” Michael O’Neil, one of Overture’s co-founders and partners, told me. “We used to say in the White House, How do you make the room bigger? How do you get more minds and more talent involved to make better decisions?” Now they ask the same questions to help founders build out their technologies. Overture announced the close of its first $60 million fund earlier this year.
It’s not just climate-specific companies and investors who are benefiting — big tech companies still attract plenty of former government employees, although the locus of that energy is now concentrated on corporate sustainability and decarbonization efforts. Lisa Jackson, VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives at Apple, served as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama. Melanie Nakagawa, the chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, previously worked as a climate advisor to Biden’s National Security Council, while Google’s director of climate and energy research, Ali Douraghy, came straight from the DOE.
Tech industry efforts to run operations with clean energy and back emerging climate solutions have also had an undeniably positive impact — most notably Frontier’s commitment to purchasing over $1 billion of carbon removal credits has catalyzed demand in the nascent industry. This initiative, led by the payments platform Stripe and co-founded by Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey, is also powered by a former government employee, Jane Flegal, who worked in the Biden White House as the senior director for industrial emissions.
While it’s true that the traditional off ramps for former government employees remain — the financial sector also still looms large, Sivaram told me — what’s new is that “there’s now actual money in starting your own company, in working at a venture fund,” he said And this, he believes, is how it should be.
“You want people who understand the nuances of the federal government and the IRA in order to effectively run companies that take advantage of the IRA. It is no secret that the government wanted companies to basically take this money. So many of us made this move.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On a looming storm, Biden’s Climate Week event, and tripling renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane John is bringing dangerous storm surge to Mexico’s Pacific coast • Flash floods and landslides are inundating villages in northern Thailand • Phoenix officials confirmed the city had 113 straight days of temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, breaking the previous record, set in 1993, of 76 days.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 41 of the state’s 67 counties ahead of a storm that is expected to slam into the state’s Gulf coast Thursday as a Category 3 or maybe even Category 4 hurricane. The executive order activates the Florida National Guard and emergency response teams. “As the system approaches, I'm urging Floridians to finalize their storm prep, monitor weather reports and follow the guidance of local authorities,” DeSantis said. “Stay Safe, Florida.”
AccuWeather
Tropical Storm Nine could strengthen into Hurricane Helene with maximum sustained wind gusts of 111-130 miles per hour, according to AccuWeather meteorologists. It could bring up to 12 inches of rain near the point of landfall, but flooding could happen as far north as the Ohio River Valley. Some parts of the Florida Panhandle could see up to 15 feet of storm surge. “This is going to be a life-threatening storm with dangerous storm surge,” said AccuWeather meteorologist Bernie Rayno. “The one factor that is alarming is how incredibly high water temperatures are, which can fuel rapid intensification right along the forecast track of this storm.”
President Biden will speak today at Climate Week NYC, taking the stage at the Bloomberg Global Business forum. His comments will highlight his administration’s climate agenda and clean energy policies and how they are “lowering costs, creating good-paying and union jobs, and reducing harmful emissions,” according to a White House statement. E&E Newsreported that many of Biden’s top energy and environmental officials are out in force, trying to remind everyone that the climate landscape would look very different under a Trump presidency.
Also happening at Climate Week today: The Global Renewables Summit, taking place at the Plaza Hotel. World leaders including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the president of this year’s COP29 summit will be expected to speak about the global goal to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. The International Energy Agency released a report today concluding that the goal, which was set at last year’s COP28, is within reach but only if countries ramp up transmission expansion and dramatically increase energy storage. “Further international cooperation is vital to deliver fit-for-purpose grids, sufficient energy storage and faster electrification, which are integral to move clean energy transitions quickly and securely,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. Another new report, from the International Renewable Energy Agency, found that 81% of the new renewable energy capacity added last year was cheaper than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, at the U.N. General Assembly, leaders of developing nations issued a plea for the world’s developed countries to stop paying “lip service” and lead the way on emissions cuts and climate finance.
The non-profit research foundation First Street released a new report yesterday examining the growing financial risks associated with climate disasters. Using its climate risk financial modeling tool, First Street found that 57 U.S. banks with a total of $627 billion in real estate loans could face material financial risk. Those loans represent nearly 11% of all loans in the country. Regional and community banks are especially vulnerable “given the concentrated nature of their lending portfolios.”
“Through climate risk financial modeling, we are able to get the first glimpse of the financial institutions which have material financial risk from their exposure to the physical impacts of climate change,” said Dr. Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street. “While this risk is material by definition, banks are finally in a position where they can proactively manage these risks to dramatically change their risk profile over time.”
The state of California is suing ExxonMobil, accusing the oil giant of lying about plastic being recyclable and overpromising on its “advanced recycling” technology. “We are asking the court to hold ExxonMobil fully accountable for its role in actively creating and exacerbating the plastics pollution crisis through its campaign of deception,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. “The case opens a new front in the legal battles against oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues,” explainedThe New York Times. But legal experts say the state will face an uphill battle in the suit.
“Even in states where coal makes up a large share of the power grid — such as West Virginia, Wyoming, or Missouri — EVs produce half as much CO2 as gasoline vehicle. That’s because EVs are much more energy efficiency than internal combustion vehicles. So even though coal is a dirtier energy source than gasoline or diesel, EVs need to far less of it (in the form of electricity) to drive an additional mile.” –Robinson Meyer explains why switching to an EV matters so much for the climate, as part of Heatmap’s new Decarbonize Your Life special report.
Interest trumps ideology just about every time.
They may only control the House of Representatives for now, but Republicans in Washington are already arguing amongst themselves about what they’ll do if they take control of both congressional chambers and the White House in November’s elections. And one of the most intense debates concerns the Inflation Reduction Act, one of Joe Biden’s signature legislative accomplishments and the most important climate bill ever passed in the U.S. Should they repeal it? Repeal it, then drown it, then set it on fire? That’s what some would prefer to do. But the reality may be more delicate than that.
Earlier this month, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson gave a speech to a conservative group in which he vowed to “cut the wasteful Green New Deal spending in the Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act” if Republicans take control (for the uninitiated, “wasteful Green New Deal spending” essentially means “whatever environmental spending you don’t like”). But he also said in an interview that “You’ve got to use a scalpel and not a sledgehammer” when going after the IRA, “because there’s a few provisions in there that have helped overall.”
To many Republicans, that was nothing less than blasphemy. “A sledgehammer to the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is what is needed,” said Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas. “Something tells me that’s going to be an issue of contention next year between some of my colleagues and their districts where they might have interests who love the largesse of Washington, D.C.,” said Representative Byron Donalds of Florida. “Repeal the IRA now. Completely,” said Representative Bob Good of Virginia. All are members of the far-right Freedom Caucus. Representatives of conservative advocacy groups have also condemned the idea of not repealing the IRA in full.
And yet, Johnson’s remarks also came after 18 Republicans in his caucus whose districts have benefited from the IRA sent him a letter warning against repealing the law. “We hear from industry and our constituents who fear the energy tax regime will once again be turned on its head due to Republican repeal efforts,” they wrote. “Prematurely repealing energy tax credits, particularly those which were used to justify investments that already broke ground, would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.”
What we have here is a conflict between interests and ideology. The hard-right conservatives will say that the law violates almost everything they believe in since it addresses climate change (which they prefer not to do) with a big, expensive, government-driven effort (which they hate). But for many Republicans, the IRA is bringing jobs and economic development to their districts. And when ideology and interests collide, interests usually prevail.
Appropriators have long understood that a key way to protect your funding is to widen the number of people and places that benefit from it. The Pentagon has always been adept at distributing subcontracts for big weapons systems across as many congressional districts as possible; if 100 different members of Congress have constituents making widgets that go in a bomber, they’ll make sure its funding won’t get cut in the next budget.
That idea was built into the design of the IRA, along with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, the other Biden-era laws that contained serious climate spending. Some of the benefits are available to any American (like subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles), but others are more geographically targeted. As it turns out, those benefits have flowed disproportionately to Republican-run states and conservative areas. Which means that there are a lot of Republicans in Congress who might not be on board with repealing the IRA, even if they voted against it in the first place — which all of them did.
As you may recall, the IRA got zero Republican votes in both the Senate and House when it passed in August 2022. In the two years since, some of those same Republicans who voted no have taken credit when IRA funds came to their states and districts, to both annoyance and mockery from their Democratic counterparts.
Hypocritical or not, the economic logic can be hard to deny. According to an analysis by Bloomberg News, $206 billion in clean technology manufacturing investments have been announced under President Biden, most of which involve EVs and batteries. Of that total, $42 billion will be spent in districts represented by Democrats, while $161 billion, nearly four times as much, will go to Republican districts. Overall, that spending can be found in 185 congressional districts. Other estimates put the amount of investment even higher.
Many of the politicians representing these districts are conservative Republicans who haven’t abandoned their ideology — at least not rhetorically. Some of them may be outright climate deniers, who will be happy to rail against wasteful government spending and the Green New Deal if you ask them to. But if it comes to a vote that would cut off subsidies to a factory that’s employing thousands of their constituents, they’re almost certainly going to say no.
And if you’re an advocate of climate action, that’s fine. They can bloviate all they want. That’s why the IRA was designed the way it was: to make progress on climate, and ensure that that law was durable. White House economist Heather Boushey recently said that one of the administration’s climate goals is to “create more path dependency,” so climate progress will be harder to undo. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t vulnerable provisions of the law, but they’re likely to be the ones that don’t have advocates on both sides of the aisle; a manufacturing tax credit may be safer than the one on purchases of heat pumps.
We’ve come to expect that the passage of a major law doesn’t end the fight over it; Republicans tried for years to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and some are still talking about doing so 14 years after it passed. But they never succeeded because it would have hurt too many people. That history might repeat itself.
There is no dearth of advice on the internet about how to lower your personal carbon emissions, but if we had found any of it completely satisfying, we wouldn’t have embarked on this project in the first place.
Our goal with Decarbonize Your Life is to draw your attention to two things — the relative emissions benefits of different actions, as well as the relative structural benefits. (You’ll find everything you need to know about the project here.) For the first, we needed some help. So we shared our vision with WattTime, a nonprofit that builds data-driven tools to help people, companies, and policymakers figure out how to reduce emissions, and lucky for us, they were excited to support the project.
“So many people out there feel helpless when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, but we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the tools and information they need to make a difference,” Henry Richardson, a senior analyst at WattTime, told me as we were wrapping up this project. “So we love the idea of helping average consumers understand which actions actually available to them can meaningfully contribute to reducing climate pollution. We want to help people prioritize those higher-impact activities that can mitigate climate change faster.”
WattTime’s claim to fame is building an API that calculates the emissions impact of using the grid at a given time and place. Users can then shift their energy consumption to times when the grid is cleaner or to build renewables in places where they will reduce emissions the most.
In an ideal world, we would have taken a similar time- and place-based approach in calculating the emissions savings of each energy-related action on our list. Switching to an EV if you live somewhere with very clean power will reduce emissions more than if you live somewhere with lots of coal plants, and likewise, getting rooftop solar if you live somewhere with coal-fired electricity is more effective than in areas with a cleaner grid. But when we started to game it out, we realized that level of exactitude would be, if not exactly impossible, certainly insanity-inducing.
Instead, WattTime helped us calculate the effect of each action if it was undertaken by an “average American household” — that is, one that consumes an average amount of electricity per year, drives an average number of miles in an average car per year, uses an average amount of energy for space heating, et cetera. WattTime also pulled data from publicly available sources like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Energy Information Administration, to estimate the baseline emissions and savings of a given action. We ultimately made two calculations for each action to account for two different ways of estimating the emissions from using the electric grid:
While the first method gives us a picture of how much good each action can do in an immediate sense, the second gives us a picture of how much good it can do over time. For example, using the first method, buying clean power came out on top, with rooftop solar offering the potential to cut CO2 by about 5.7 metric tons per year, while switching to an electric vehicle would cut about 3 metric tons per year. But using the second method, car-related actions won out, showing EVs cutting CO2 by 4.6 metric tons per year, and rooftop solar cutting 1.4 metric tons per year. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
To calculate the emissions savings from dietary changes and food waste management, we turned to two more partners: HowGood, a data platform for food system lifecycle analysis, and ReFED, which collects similar data for food waste. As with energy, we used federal data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to estimate the average American diet and ReFED’s estimates for the average American food waste mix (though note that those are for an individual, not for a household). From there, WattTime helped us determine that, for instance, just by replacing the beef in your diet with chicken, you could save nearly 2.5 metric tons of emissions each year — almost as much as you could save by going vegan.
Because we used averages and sought to simplify our list with actions like “electrify your space heating system,” rather than estimating the impact of every permutation like “switch from a propane furnace in Colorado with X efficiency to a cold climate heat pump with Y efficiency,” our estimates of emissions reductions are rough approximations and not reflective of real-world scenarios.
You’ll see that while these calculations certainly informed our ranking, they were not the sole metric we used to arrange this list. A quantitative analysis alone could not answer our question about the most “high-leverage” actions, so we used our reporting and expertise as climate journalists to fill in that last, crucial gap. Car-related actions and rooftop solar were neck-and-neck by the numbers, but we are confident that getting an EV (if you need to have a car) is more unambiguously necessary for the energy transition than getting rooftop solar. Similarly, while eating less meat can hugely reduce the carbon tied to an individual’s diet, the ripple effect it has on agricultural carbon emissions is less direct and harder to parse than the effect you can have by electrifying all your appliances and shutting down your natural gas account.
Getting an EV:
WattTime — 2.9 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 4.5 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Destroying demand for oil; increasing demand for charging stations; improving local air quality and chipping away at the social license for operating an internal combustion engine.
Getting rooftop solar:
WattTime — 5.7 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.4 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Get clean energy on the grid faster than utility-scale projects; influence neighbors; reduce electric demand in your neighborhood; reduce strain on grid if paired with a battery and part of a “virtual power plant”
Air-sealing and insulation:
WattTime — 1.2 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce strain on grid and need for grid investment; level out electricity demand to avoid the need to activate dirty “peaker” gas plants; prepare your home for cheaper, more even, and efficient heating and cooling
Switching to a heat pump for space heating:
WattTime — 1.4 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr
Switching from a gas stove to an induction stove:
WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr
Switching to a heat pump for water heating:
WattTime — 0.8 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr
Switching from a natural gas-powered dryer to a heat pump dryer:
WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr
Structural benefits: Increase demand for and reduce price of electric and efficient appliances; build a case for policies that wind down fossil fuel use; if fully electrifying, sends signal to downsize gas system.
Getting rid of your car:
WattTime — 5.17 mtCO/yr
Structural benefits: Supporting public transit and bike lanes, enabling others to use their cars less, too.
Switching from an omnivorous to a vegetarian diet:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.8 mtCO2/yr
Switching from an omnivorous to a vegan diet:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.9 mtCO2/yr
Replacing the beef in an omnivorous diet with chicken:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.5 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce demand for high-emitting food products, which has the double-pump benefit of reducing the amount of land required to cultivate high-emitting products; if replacing beef with chicken, increase demand for more carbon-efficient proteins; add to the business case for developing efficient plant-based proteins.
Cutting food waste in half:
WattTime and ReFED — more than 0.1 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce demand across the food system; send less food waste to landfill, which helps reduce methane emissions.
Composting all food waste:
WattTime and ReFED — 0.03 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Encourages the build-out of municipal composting programs; encourages responsible farming practices by lowering the cost of compost; reduces demand for nitrogen-based fertilizer.