Leading analysts estimate that more than 7% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are generated by small-to-medium buildings. Too often, these buildings are terribly inefficient—wasting as much as 50% of the energy they consume, which significantly drives up energy bills—and unhealthy—with deadly viruses and other toxins circulating freely. What’s more, many of these buildings primarily serve low-to-moderate income Americans, who often lack the upfront capital needed for proven upgrades. In part driven by his childhood experience with energy poverty and the related localized pollution, Donnel Baird founded BlocPower seven years ago to ensure that everyone, especially those with lower incomes and/or from other disadvantaged backgrounds, has access to greener, healthier, smarter, and more cost-effective homes and buildings. To date, BlocPower has helped to identify, finance, and upgrade more than 1,200 buildings—many in communities that had previously been left behind in our transition to a greener economy. In this episode, host Chad Reed dives deep with Donnel into how his professional experiences in community organizing and with the Obama Administration led him to his entrepreneurial efforts to decarbonize buildings in disadvantaged communities. Chad also speaks with Donnel about how best to ensure all communities—whether in neglected urban areas or deindustrialized rural areas—share in the economic benefits of a cleaner, greener economy. We hope you find this discussion as inspiring and entertaining as we did. Episode recorded: October 6, 2021
Leading analysts estimate that more than 7% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are generated by small-to-medium buildings. Too often, these buildings are terribly inefficient—wasting as much as 50% of the energy they consume, which significantly drives up energy bills—and unhealthy—with deadly viruses and other toxins circulating freely. What’s more, many of these buildings primarily serve low-to-moderate income Americans, who often lack the upfront capital needed for proven upgrades.
In part driven by his childhood experience with energy poverty and the related localized pollution, Donnel Baird founded BlocPower seven years ago to ensure that everyone, especially those with lower incomes and/or from other disadvantaged backgrounds, has access to greener, healthier, smarter, and more cost-effective homes and buildings. To date, BlocPower has helped to identify, finance, and upgrade more than 1,200 buildings—many in communities that had previously been left behind in our transition to a greener economy.
In this episode, host Chad Reed dives deep with Donnel into how his professional experiences in community organizing and with the Obama Administration led him to his entrepreneurial efforts to decarbonize buildings in disadvantaged communities. Chad also speaks with Donnel about how best to ensure all communities—whether in neglected urban areas or deindustrialized rural areas—share in the economic benefits of a cleaner, greener economy. We hope you find this discussion as inspiring and entertaining as we did.
Links:
Washington Post: This US city just voted to decarbonize every single building
Episode recorded: October 6, 2021
Donnel Baird: When it comes to clean energy and climate change, we need to be mass market immediately. The mass market is diverse, economically, racially. It is not limousine liberals on the coast in San Francisco and in New York who can afford to do Uber for walking their dog. We need solutions that are going to change people's lives and that makes sense economically. From a health perspective and have distribution. We need that yesterday.
Chad Reed: Welcome to Climate Positive, a podcast produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions. I'm Chad Reed.
Hilary Langer: I’m Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I’m Gil Jenkins.
Chad: In this series, we host candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers driving our climate positive future.
Leading analysts estimate that over 7% of US greenhouse gas emissions are generated by small to medium-sized buildings. Too often these buildings are terribly inefficient, wasting as much as 50% of the energy they consume, which significantly drives up energy bills, and unhealthy, with deadly viruses and other toxins circulating freely. What’s more, many of these buildings primarily serve low to moderate income Americans, who often lack the upfront capital needed for proven upgrades. In part driven by his childhood experiences with energy poverty and the related localized pollution, Donnel Baird founded BlocPower seven years ago to ensure that everyone, especially those with lower incomes and who are from other disadvantaged backgrounds, have access to greener, healthier, smarter and more cost-effective homes and buildings in their communities. To date, BlocPower has helped to identify, finance, and upgrade over 1200 buildings, many in communities that had been previously left behind in our transition to a greener economy. In this episode, I dive deep with Donnel into how his professional experiences in community organizing and with the Obama administration, led him to his entrepreneurial efforts to decarbonize buildings in disadvantaged communities. I also speak with Donnel about how best to ensure all communities, whether in neglected urban areas or de-industrialized rural areas, share in the economic benefits of a cleaner, greener economy. We hope you find this discussion as inspiring and entertaining as we did.
Chad: Thanks Donnel, really appreciate you joining us today here at Climate Positive.
Donnel: Super excited to be here. I know you guys do great work.
Chad: Thank you. Well, we always begin our episodes with a discussion of our guests' individual journey into the climate space. I understand you grew up initially in New York City — Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and then you moved to a small town outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Are there any childhood experiences that drove your interest into energy and climate?
Donnel: I think that initially in our home in Brooklyn, in Bed-Stuy we didn't have a working heating system. I remember it used to get down to -4°. That was unusually cold but it got down that way and so when you don't have a working heating system and it's -4°s outside that's challenging. We used the heat our apartment with a stove. We would turn on the oven, open up the oven door, and open up all the windows through these carbon monoxide.
We knew that it was pretty unhealthy but we knew that was the only way we could stay warm and our whole building was that. All of our neighbors' folks down the street same situation. It was pretty early on that this intersection of health and energy in buildings. As I got older, the understanding that, well, you're burning fossil fuels, that's what's producing the carbon monoxide or the nitrogen dioxide. That's so unhealthy.
The intersection of those three ideas was something that I learned pretty early on, and so when my best friend in college, Mariana Arcaya, introduced me to the concept of climate change. She sat me down for two, three hours, walk me through it. She made me take a class on climate change. We watched Inconvenient Truth. She explained it to me. It just all made sense.
I believe in science and so that was the journey where the personal experiences of how unhealthy and disastrous fossil fuels could be, personally, were there. This connection between the personal experiences that I had as a kid with fossil fuel, waste and efficiency in my own home with my family got connected to this broader global problem of, well, we don't have a handle on fossil fuels and if we don't figure things out pretty soon it's going to be disastrous for the whole planet.
Chad: You did study at Duke and that's where you got your undergrad degree in a number of disciplines. Then you became a community organizer, I believe in Brownsville, also Brooklyn. What did you focus on in that role, and what were your key learnings there?
Donnel: I ended up being a community organizer. I was trained by some of the same folks that are trained Barack Obama 25, 30 years before me. A lot of the core lessons that he talked about on his first campaign when he was first running for the presidency, the idea of change, and things are difficult but we're situated as Americans inside a historical context. What makes us Americans is we're optimists.
That despite history and the legacy of sexism or racism, discrimination, things being unfair, things being unequal, as Americans, we all try to strive towards a better day and a new balance of more equality, more fairness for everybody and that is what makes us uniquely American. Community organizing in some ways it's like how do you take those values that are uniquely American and make sure that when you're dealing with low-income folks or folks who live in communities that are vulnerable, that have been redlined or impacted by racism and segregation or economic inequality.
How do you make sure that those core American values and principles get experienced by those communities as well so that those folks can start to express their full citizenship potential and learn to empower themselves politically? Whether it's negotiating with a local politician to fix a streetlight that's broken and cars keep running through the light and it's dangerous for their kids to go through the crosswalk, or it's fixing the public schools and you're fighting with the mayor, or you have a matter before the governor.
How do you train and empower local people who may be a social worker or a preschool teacher that doesn't feel like they've been trained to negotiate with a governor of New York State, but that you, as a community organizer, train them and empower them to feel confident that they can walk into a negotiation with a governor, speak their mind, and force the governor to do what they want. That's what community organizing is about. What's been interesting for me is as I continue this journey through the business sector in the private sector, a lot of the principles that we learn in community organizing are literally the same.
Not only in big presidential politics which I think Obama demonstrated but in big business. As a business leader, when I go down to testify to the Senate and talk to Senator or Congresspeople, or whatever, a lot of the same principles that the best business leaders are using are her community organizing tactics, by another name. Community organizing at its core, then how do you take the processes and protocols and communication methodologies that you use in politics or in negotiations that I learned in my Columbia Business School negotiations class, and how do you teach a low-income family or a head of household, those same negotiation tactics and empower them to be successful as they negotiate.
Chad: You took those community organizing skills and your early childhood experiences, then you joined Change To Win where you focused in close collaboration with the Obama administration on creating green jobs, especially in the energy efficiency and green building spaces. What attracted you to those spaces in particular, and what were the problems you were trying to solve?
Donnel: I joined the Obama campaign as a senior staffer. I didn't know if we were going to win, but we totally won. My assignment once we won, they were like, "Hey, you can move to DC. We can put you in this agency or that agency." I didn't want to do that, I wanted to stay in New York. I wanted to be with my then-fiancée, my now wife. We decided that I would take this job at Change To Win, which was like an outside consultant and strategic partner to the Obama administration to really structure the six to seven billion dollars of Green Buildings Investments that were being made.
For me, the reason I took the job at Change To Win was I thought that I had been learning that greening buildings was really important. Greening buildings had become a really central pillar of the Obama Administration's 2009 Reinvestment and Recovery Act right leg. At the time we were still in Iraq, we were still in Afghanistan, so the talking points that we had is like, if we do Green Buildings and Energy Efficiency at scale, we can move America away from foreign oil and we can move America away from these wars in the Middle East, and we can create a million jobs for unemployed people, which was an important part of what needed to happen with the 2009 Economic Recovery.
By greening buildings, you get to reach all of these core Democratic Party priority goals. From a policy perspective, greening buildings made a lot of sense on top of addressing climate change. That's why I took that job. While I was there, I learned labor unions control a significant amount of pension funds. Their capital and their pension funds is a major input into Wall Street, and how Wall Street runs.
There actually was a New York Times article at the time that was called the Sleeping Colossus. This idea of this Greek myth of this giant Colossus or whatever, and if you wake him up, it's trouble. That labor union and their pension funds were that because it's just so much capital that these unions control that they invest in Wall Street firms and if they ever woke up and started to negotiate and use their leverage as capital providers to Wall Street, they could really change the game of how financial services is run.
At the time the labor unions had committed about 90 billion dollars in their pension fund assets to co-invest with 6 billion dollars from the Obama administration. My job was to help run that strategic partnership with the US Department of Energy across the country between the unions and the department of energy to figure out, could we invest and create green-collar union jobs across America, going building to building and greening all the buildings. That was what we started working on in 2009, 2010. I did that for about three or four years.
Chad: Then you went to Columbia Business School. While you're in school, you started BlocPower. You say that BlocPower is focused on turning buildings into Teslas, greener, healthier, and more valuable to fight climate change. How does BlocPower, do this and what problems are you specifically trying to solve?
Donnel: We believe in taking all the fossil fuel equipment out of buildings. Just like Tesla can take the fossil fuel equipment out of a vehicle's engine, and the automobile is all-electric, we can now do that with buildings. We can have all-electric, modern buildings that run on clean electricity that comes from solar, from wind, from hydropower. That's what BlocPower's about.
We work with existing buildings and we do the analysis using our software system to figure out what's the best way to decarbonize that building and take the fossil fuel consumption out of that building's energy system, and how do you replace that energy system with all-electric smart modern equipment? We analyze it, we finance it, we help to project manage the installation of of it in partnership with trusted local contractors. That's what we do with a primary focus on low-income buildings because we find that the market niche of low and moderate-income buildings that can't access capital, that don't have expensive sustainability engineers and officers on staff.
Those buildings are so neglected because they don't have money. They don't have technical expertise, that there's lots of problems and challenges to be addressed, and so, as we help those building owners address those challenges, we create a lot of value for them and for ourselves. Also, for our utility programs and governments that really struggle to engage those customers, and who are willing to hire us and pay us to engage those hard-to-reach customer segments.
Chad: How do you get paid? What is your revenue model?
Donnel: We get paid a couple of different ways. The building owner pays us a developer's fee for helping to engineer and analyze and finance and project manage the successful upgrade of their energy systems in their building. When we overhaul and modernize a building's energy system, the building experience in a lot of value.
Chad: You share some of that value?
Donnel: Yes, so we get a little bit of that. Then if we finance a project, there's 10 to 15 years of payments of repayments just like a mortgage. We finance the project, and so we'll make a little money on the financing. Then utility companies and local governments, they have, in many instances, I mean, there's 200 cities that have laws that they're going to be 100%, green, or 100%, renewable by 2030, 2040, 2050. In order to be in compliance with their own laws and programs, utilities, and governments have budgets, where they hire firms like ours to do program management, or outreach or marketing and sales hard to reach building owners.
Like we have a project with the city in New York, we're hiring 1000 workers to participate in the retrofit of hopefully 10,000 buildings. That creates a lot of value for the City of New York because they need these 10,000 buildings to stop burning oil. It's not enough for the city to pass a law that says, hey, all the buildings in New York City have to stop burning oil because of greenhouse gas emissions and public health. The City of New York actually has to provide some assistance or support to the building owners that are burning oil to help them move away from burning oil, and so the state of New York has hired us to provide that service to people. That's how we get paid.
Chad: You talk a lot about your software platform, and how it really creates a lot of value. What's the secret sauce there?
Donnel: Oh, man, if I told you it's not going to be a secret? I mean, not to be like to Silicon Valley about it. It's not a black box. We have data on 120 some odd million buildings across America, most of the buildings, we have data on let's say 10,000 to 15,000 buildings that we visited manually. We have additional data that we purchase from private sources that we acquire from government sources locally, federally, state governments, we have some anonymized utility data.
What we're doing is I don't know, just like Facebook is building profiles of all of us to figure out which ads they should target us with based on which photos and news articles we click on. We created a digital profile of ourselves as Facebook user, and they know to target us with ads. Like if you buy a Tesla, maybe you're good candidate for a BlocPower retrofit.
What we're doing is building a profile of 120 million buildings across America. What's their property tax payment history? When's the last time they got permitted to do a furnace upgrade, or HVAC upgrade? How many times is their mortgage turned over recently? What size is the building? What type?
We create digital profiles of all the buildings, and then we can figure out, not in a toxic, crazy democracy destroying way like Facebook, but we want to create a profile of all these buildings and figure out how to target them with clean, hyper-efficient equipment upgrades that makes sense for their building. We provide the technical expertise via our software, of what kinds of sustainability equipment makes sense on a building-by-building basis.
Our tool allows us or a building owner to type in their building's address, search for the building, and then we have a set of predictive models that will make some recommendations around what sustainability equipment makes sense for that building based on what we know of the building's energy profile. The building’s age building’s typology, its use case, its geography, which climate zone it's in. We're able to make a bunch of recommendations.
Then what I think is really important for us is like we also include constructability in that profile, and so it's not just like some random engineer saying, "Hey, I think we should decarbonize this building." Well, that's great. Well, we actually need the construction guys to walk through and say, you think the cost is going to be a hundred grand, it's actually going to be 300 grand because we got to remove lead and asbestos and there's, this pipe that's in the way and there's all this construction work that we have to do.
I think part of what we do is bring the practical, real-world application of sustainability and urban buildings into our model, and we're able to do that because we've retrofitted over 1200 apartment buildings. We have real-world construction data that we then use as an input into our software model, as the model gets more and more accurate prices go down, we're able to complete more projects, as we complete more projects, we generate more data, which goes back into our model. There's a little bit of a flywheel that we start to turn using our software and the data and the completed projects in the real world.
Chad: Once you find the customers, you scope the projects, how do you help the customers finance them because I'm sure a lot of these building owners or individual homeowners can't pay tens hundreds of thousands of dollars to do these upgrades upfront, so how do you help them finance it?
Donnel: Yes, so we do financial underwriting and then we have a $50 million line of credit with Goldman Sachs, so once we analyze the buildings pro forma financials and we have an understanding of the cost of the equipment we want to install, then we're able to use our credit line to structure a financial solution that, in many instances, saves the building owner money relative to their current operational cost.
What we try to do is to figure out, can we save the building 10%, 15% on their energy costs and their annual operating costs while upgrading them to clean healthy energy equipment. We have a financial product that we've developed with Goldman, it took us like three, four years to build it out and so we use that financial product to finance this hard-to-serve of financially underserved buildings.
Chad: That's primarily a lease like a 10 or 15-year lease?
Donnel: Yes. We most often will lease the equipment to the building, so we continue to own it. We do operations and maintenance of that equipment because we own it. Then they'll lease the equipment from us for 10 years, just like you would lease a car, and then at the end of the lease, the equipment is transferred to them or they can choose to extend the lease for another 10, 15 years if that's what makes the most sense for them.
If you think again to the millions and millions of neglected buildings where they don't have a facilities manager, they don't have a sustainability officer. This idea of giving them the green healthy energy equipment as a service, right over a lease is compelling to certain kinds of building owners because they don't have the resources or the capacity to finance and maintain these systems on their own.
Chad: I want to talk about your recent company growth, you closed a series A 63 million towards the beginning of this year, some of the top VCs, Goldman Sachs, Urban Investment Group, Kapor Capital, Salesforce Ventures, so they're supporting you. Congratulations there. I understand that fundraising has been a challenge for you as you grown this business over the last seven years or so. You were initially turned down, I think, a couple hundred times before you were able to raise your first venture financing, so could you talk to us a little about the challenges you faced as a founder in this space?
Donnel: We face a ton of challenges and still do, we're really grateful to Goldman Sachs and Kapor Capital and American Family Life Insurance and Salesforce and Exelon and all the other people who participated in our last financing, but it took us seven years to really make the case and we were just lucky that we didn't run out of money in that seven years so that we could survive long enough to have the data that we needed in order to justify our Series A financing.
It was incredibly difficult as was mentioned, we met with 200 people before we met with Kapor Capital and also Andreessen Horowitz. They were like meetings number 204 and 205. We had a list of investors who turned this down. One of these days, if we ever IPO, I'll invite all those investors to our IPO. But we were really fortunate to be able to partner with Kapor Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Andreessen doesn't normally invest in climate tech companies at all, but they made a little bit of an exception for us to get us going, so they invested twice, Kapor Capital invested several times and it was a really brutal experience fundraising and getting rejected. When you're an entrepreneur, it's your hopes and your dreams and your family and community's hopes and dreams and to be rejected that many times is really difficult.
For me, that was just building some app to post cat photos or turn cat photos into digital NFTs and sell them to suckers, or whatever's going on now. I probably wouldn't have gone through 200 rejections, but we're focused on climate change. It's not about me, it's about the planet and trying to persevere to find the right connections with the right investors who see the problem and see the solution the same way we do. It was worth it to us to get punched in the face that many times by VCs to have the opportunity to participate in the really important work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It was totally worth it.
Chad: Yes. As you know, especially with the new administration, there's increasing efforts and initiatives to include historically marginalized and underrepresented groups in the climate solutions we're all developing and financing. You've actually made the case that reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change is actually dependent on communities of color and other historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Could you tell us what you mean by that?
Donnel: I got into this big fight with a very prominent VC, so powerful. I'm not going to say who it is or even their gender, whatever. I don't want to get into it then, but we got into a big fight because their point was like, look, like we're going to do this just like we did Tesla, we're going to start out, we're going to sell stuff to rich people, costs are going to come down and then we'll sell it to like upper-middle-class people, costs come down and we'll sell it to middle-class people, costs come down and working-class people, and then eventually, it'll be like mass market.
It'd be like Tesla or like an iPhone. You could be a low-income person with an iPhone, you can figure out how to get a used iPhone for 50 bucks or a hundred bucks these days and have a supercomputer in your pocket and that didn't used to be the case, 10 years ago. The problem is we only got nine years left to make a dramatic impact on climate change. We don't have 20 years in a normative technology adoption cycle for VCs to make all their money then they sell stuff to rich people then eventually get to the mass market at some point.
When it comes to clean energy and climate change, we need to be mass market immediately. What does that look like? The mass market is diverse, economically, racially. It is not limousine liberals on the coast in San Francisco and in New York who can afford to do Uber for walking their dog or whatever's going on. We need solutions that are going to change people's lives and that makes sense economically. From a health perspective and have distribution. We need that yesterday. I don't know.
I guess I do know what a lot of people think I'm on the board of Sierra Club on the board of the Sunrise Movement. I'm on the advisory board of New York Federal Reserve Bank. I do get to listen in to a lot of conversations with people who are very alarmed about climate change and do not share my opinion, that there really isn't a way to address climate change without Black people, brown people, people of color without working people, blue-collar people.
If we have an approach where we prioritize, what is the impact of clean energy and climate solutions on working people? What if we had started five years ago by saying, we're going to have to come up with some climate solutions for the coal miners in West Virginia. I don't know what it is. We're going to have to come up with some thermal mining, geothermal, carbon capture, whatever we're going to do. We're going to capture carbon and pump it down into the mines and we're going to drill down and focus on that because we must. There is no path forward on climate unless we have the people of West Virginia on board.
Now, that's just reality. I don't think that's my opinion. I think that many more people are waking up to that. Unfortunately, it's a little bit too late because we don't have the solutions that are really have prioritized West Virginia so we can't speak to the economic impact that the clean energy revolution is going to have in West Virginia because we don't have it. I think, again, a lot of us are like, oh, we'll hire these coal miners in the solar industry.
Well, they're not dumb. They know what their salary was when they were in mining coal and they know what the salary is when they're installing solar panels and they made a lot more money, mining coal. That's why they don't want to install solar panels. The benefits of the clean energy revolution must be distributed to everyone immediately, or we're not going to have a clean energy revolution.
Chad: That's such a great point. I'm actually from Western Pennsylvania, this steel coal country myself.
Donnel: Which part? Pittsburgh?
Chad: Yes, 45 minutes outside of Pittsburgh actually. Creating jobs is obviously one way to involve folks from all backgrounds in the clean energy economy. You've also talked about the example of rural electric cooperatives and how, when they were started back in the thirties, they were a way for, in that case, rural communities, not only to get electrified, but to actually own a piece of the solution and potentially receive dividends or other cash flow from those projects and those initiatives. Could you talk a little about how you could see this model being adapted for maybe urban communities today or other communities who are not yet a part of various climate solutions?
Donnel: Let's stay with Pittsburgh where you're from. You got the beautiful river flowing through the City of Pittsburgh. You got Carnegie Mellon out there. They've got lots of robotics. Carnegie Mellon does want to play a significant role in clean energy and the clean energy revolution. They want to build new software and hardware platforms, which is their specialty. The question becomes like if Carnegie Mellon helps to invent an amazing hardware technology that can benefit the clean energy revolution at scale, how do we distribute that, and how do we, again, distribute that in a way that's going to benefit all of the people in Western Pennsylvania?
Let's say at Carnegie Mellon invents an all-electric 18 wheel truck, which this scam artist said he invented, but he didn't really do it. Let's say Carnegie Mellon actually does it. Then they're going to create a factory and they're going to do electric vehicle charging stations for their trucks to turn Western Pennsylvania into a huge new electric freight transportation hub for the Western half of the United States. Well, that's going to take a lot of infrastructure. It's going to take factories, it's going to take parking lots, new roads. It may take some solar panels and clean energy systems to generate additional electricity for the grid in Western Pennsylvania.
My view is that we're more likely to succeed if we distribute stock in those infrastructure assets to everyone in Western Pennsylvania. They could be Democrat, they could be Republican, they could be farmers, they could be hunters, they could be fishers, they can be professors at Carnegie Mellon. If we give them all stock as an incentive to participate in the hardware innovation coming out of Carnegie Mellon as it gets distributed and transforms that region, those people are going to be incentivized to make it work, to make the whole electric truck thing work in a different kind of way.
I just think that by addressing the economic equality issue, as we are creating the clean energy economy, if we include everyone in that clean energy economy on day one, we're just far more likely to be able to pass the legislation and build the factories, build the EV charging, build the road, build the parking lot, all the stuff that we need to do to make this stuff all work at scale, we are just more likely to pull it off if folks have economic ownership in that.
In New York, we're closing the digital divide right now, we got electricians out installing a community-owned internet system across the Bronx so that we can cover a million residents of the Bronx with $9 a month high-quality high-speed internet. Community leaders are going to own that system like churches, schools, the principal, low-income mothers whose kids use the system, they own that. They co-own that system with us, and so they're not passive recipients of the system. If we're like, "Hey, we need more users." Or, "We need you to go to the roof to fix this antenna because it's pointing Northwest and we need it to point Southwest." They're incentivized to participate with us.
I think even if you look at cryptocurrency, I just think there's a macro trend across the economy, distributed ownership, and participation, and we just believe that that needs to-- It's not just like Bitcoin. It needs to be for something important like clean energy infrastructure. That's our view.
Chad: Well, I think now we'll move to the hot seat. We ask a series of rapid-fire lightning questions just to get your initial thoughts on a few things. The most important advice I have ever followed is?
Donnel: Marry my wife.
Chad: Good answer. The best feedback I ever rejected is?
Donnel: Don't get married. Marry my wife. Rejected that. It's a joke, but it's not. My wife has been just a critical thought partner in my company's development and my development as a human being. That's the single most important decision I ever made was who I married. Lucky for me that we got it right. I don't want to be flip about that. For lots of young people out there who are thinking about this, trying to think about your family and what kind of role it plays in your life.
These are hard questions. I'm a millennial, a lot of my friends, they don't want to have children because of climate change. These are really important questions that-- My kid is my main inspiration. My kid is the reason that I'll let 200 investors humiliate me in investment meetings because I got to go home to my kid and I got to know that I have to deliver for him on climate change. Anyway, all of these are really important decisions. I don't want to be flip.
Chad: While we're on the topic of kids, the hardest part about raising kids in New York City is?
Donnel: I think the air pollution is terrible. I think we launched a new partnership with a startup that's just so amazing called Aclima. They take Google mapping cars, Google drives all these cars all over the country to map the buildings that go into Google maps. Aclima puts air pollution sensors on top of these cars. They can give you a readout of like black carbon or ozone or methane leaks in your neighborhood.
We launched a partnership with them to start mapping New York City and New York state, and the data is terrible. As a parent, I think you know that New York City, like the subways, aren't the healthiest place for your child but when you start to look at the data, it's really, really sobering and that was one of the hardest things for us. It's like New York City's really expensive to raise a kid.
Chad: What about the best part about raising kids in New York City?
Donnel: The diversity, we would sit at a playground in Brooklyn and there'd be kids from their parents are from Mexico, Pakistan. There's an Uzbek community in our neighborhood out in Brooklyn and there's all these Uzbek kids and they're just out there together from far-flung parts of the world. That's like a normal day at the playground. There's other things that are great about it but I think the fact that New York City is like an immigrant city and your baseline is like, "Yes, we're all in this together. We're all going to fight the rats on the subway together." That's what makes New York New York and that's what makes it so special.
Chad: Absolutely. I will never-
Donnel: I will never give up on trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until we finish it, then we do it. At some point, we actually could do it and achieve it and then we could move on to other stuff, presumably.
Chad: We just have to do it very quickly.
Donnel: Very quickly.
Chad: Success is?
Donnel: Success is reducing greenhouse gas emissions at scale and for me, in particular, we got 120 million buildings that waste greenhouse gases, we need to move those buildings to zero. I'll leave it to others to deal with transportation and manufacturing. I don't have the expertise to comment or participate in that but success is greening all the buildings, all of them, every single one.
Chad: My climate role model is?
Donnel: Al Gore-
Chad: You mentioned Inconvenient Truth earlier that's what got me into climate.
[crossatlk]
Donnel: It was amazing, right? I'm on the board of his nonprofit now, which is amazing. He'll be like, "Let me tell you what's going on with the climate situation in New Zealand, here's what the law and here's what the emissions are coming from." Then he's like,"Let's move to Southern Thailand versus Northwestern Thailand ,here's what they need to do to change their life."
The whole globe is in his brain and he's just constantly taking in information on what do we need to do in this part of the world, that part of the world in order to remove greenhouse gas emissions. If you talk to him for an hour, you're in a meeting with him. He's just unbelievable. Now I don't have the talent to do that but I think the inspiration and change that he is bringing about is really inspirational and I think it's really important.
Chad: The most insightful book or article I read over the last month is?
Donnel: I guess I'm supposed to say something impressive here. I will tell you, I'm getting a big kick out of the WeWork documentary and then the Theranos thing. I love reading about these fraudulent entrepreneurs. They did not have to talk to 200 investors and get rejected like I did. They raised billions of dollars and the Theranos team, they didn't even have a functioning product which, at a certain point just, obviously it's criminal but this is amazing. They didn't have a product and they raised $400 million, and people almost died. It was crazy.
I really get a kick out of the crazy like Silicon Valley stuff, even though Silicon Valley, to be fair, does not believe that Theranos or WeWork are traditional Silicon Valley companies to be fair. I'm learning a lot about that. I think in my darkest moments, to be honest, my thought is we need people just like they were willing to take a risk on this 19-year-old woman who has no college degree or to take a risk on WeWork, who apparently he is super charismatic as Bill Clinton and [unintelligible 00:34:56] but he got people to believe in it.
We need a lot of shots on goal for climate. We need thousands of entrepreneurs who are figuring out how to partner with the government and partner with universities to deliver climate solutions at scale. I'm not calling for fraudulent climate tech fraud but more courageous risk-taking capital for entrepreneurs. We need more of that.
Chad: Last one. To me, climate positive means?
Donnel: I'm positive that the climate is changing [unintelligible 00:35:30]. I'm positive about that.
[laughter]
Chad: I love it. Awesome. Thanks, Donnel.
Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong and David Benjamin Sound. If you like what you heard today, please share the show with friend and leave us a comment and a rating on our show page.
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I'm Chad Reed
And this is Climate Positive.