Climate Positive

Paula Glover | The power of efficiency

Episode Summary

In this episode, host Gil Jenkins speaks with Paula Glover, president of the Alliance to Save Energy – a bipartisan, nonprofit coalition of business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders advocating to advance federal energy efficiency policy. Since its founding 45 years ago, the Alliance has played an integral role in nearly every major energy efficiency policy achievement on the national stage. Paula and the Alliance team believe that a nation that uses energy more productively can achieve economic growth, a cleaner environment, and greater energy security, affordability, and reliability. It was wonderful to sit down with Paula roughly one year into her tenure as president of the Alliance. We are lucky to have such a wise, passionate, joyful, and dedicated person leading the charge for energy efficiency in America!

Episode Notes

In this episode, host Gil Jenkins speaks with Paula Glover, president of the Alliance to Save Energy – a bipartisan, nonprofit coalition of business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders advocating to advance federal energy efficiency policy. Since its founding 45 years ago, the Alliance has played an integral role in nearly every major energy efficiency policy achievement on the national stage.  

Paula and the Alliance team believe that a nation that uses energy more productively can achieve economic growth, a cleaner environment, and greater energy security, affordability, and reliability. It was wonderful to sit down with Paula roughly one year into her tenure as president of the Alliance. We are lucky to have such a wise, passionate, joyful, and dedicated person leading the charge for energy efficiency in America!

Links:

Bio

Paula on Twitter

Paula on LinkedIn

Always Bet on Black: Conversations with African American energy thought leaders covering a variety of topics hosted by Paula Glover

Alliance to Save Energy

Alliance to Save Energy Twitter

Active Efficiency Collaborative

Op-Ed: Want Environmental Justice? Look to Energy Efficiency (Politico, Paula Glover, February 1, 2021)

Op-Ed: The clean energy economy has a diversity problem. Let’s change that as we build back.(Canary Media, Paula Glover, July 22, 2021)

Article: 21 Wins For Energy Efficiency In 2021 (Ellie Long, December 30, 2021)

Robert’s Rules of Order
 

Episode recorded: February 23, 2022

Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.comor tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.

Episode Transcription

Paula Glover: As an efficiency community, we have to be resilient. That's probably the hardest thing to do and to be in a politicized environment, is to be resilient yourself, to not give up, to not slow down the pace of what you're trying to accomplish because you're challenged by it, because the reality is we're likely to always be challenged. We're built for that. As an industry, we're built for that. If we are really committed, then you push through, and you find new ways to talk to new people, to convince them that what you're doing is the right thing to do.

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.

Gil: On this week’s pod, I sat down with  Paula Glover, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a bipartisan, nonprofit coalition of business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders advocating to advance federal energy efficiency policy.

The Alliance is tireless proponent of energy efficiency – and they’re organized around a visionary outlook which states that a nation that uses energy more productively can achieve economic growth, a cleaner environment, and greater energy security, affordability, and reliability.

Since its founding 45 years ago, the Alliance to Save Energy has played an integral role in nearly every major energy efficiency policy achievement on the national stage. 

As a long-time proponent of the critical but sometimes unheralded role that energy efficiency plays in combatting climate change, I was excited to chat with Paula about the work of the Alliance and learn more about personal journey and perspectives on a range of topics. As I hope you’ll take away from this interview, we are lucky to have such a wise, passionate, and dedicated person leading the charge for energy efficiency in America. With that, here is my conversation with Paula.

Gil: Welcome to Climate Positive, Paula.

Paula: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Gil: Our company has been a proud member of the Alliance to Save Energy for over 20 years, but for our listeners who aren't as familiar with the work of the Alliance, could you share a little bit about the mission, the core work? Give us some reflections on the last year since you took the helm of the Alliance in January RF 21.

Paula: Okay. Sure. The Alliance is about to celebrate its 45th birthday, established in 1977. For those of your listeners who remember the mid to late '70s, that was right after the oil embargo, 74 and '75. I mean, our industry, actually 1977 is about the time that the Department of Energy was established, and a lot of our organizations were established. We at the Alliance are bipartisan. We are focused on bipartisanship. We are a coalition of business, industry, environmental groups, and others. We have a focus on energy efficiency and the importance of efficiency, and we focus on federal advocacy as well as other activities.

I think in this day and age, today specifically, the work that we do at the Alliance is incredibly important for a multitude of reasons. As we reflect on the last couple of years, I would say from March 2020, when we really started things down because of the pandemic and moving forward, we've been in an era of social justice movements, economic distress, and then economic recovery, as well as a clean energy transition, trying to address climate change, want to have rapid decarbonization.

I believe that the work that we do at the Alliance and that our members do around energy efficiency is critical to this moment and movement that we have seen ourselves in as a society. What I mean by that is that if we want to have decarbonization and address climate change, and we must, that happens with full participation of everybody and energy efficiency. That's how we're going to get there. There are other tools that we will also need, but absent energy efficiency, this crisis cannot be solved. That is my opinion. I believe that deeply, but I also think that the data from IEA and others back me up on that one.

Secondarily, if we're talking about economic recovery, clean energy, and the clean energy economy, the truth is that energy efficiency makes up the largest workforce in the energy industry at about 2.3 million jobs and our recovery has to happen and it is happening slowly. Again, we are the, I would say, leading employers in this industry. We have the most opportunity for people to participate in our new energy economy. That makes, I think, efficiency special.

Thirdly, we are also in a point of time when I mentioned economic distress, that we have many American households that suffer from high energy burden. What I mean by that is that a large portion of their income goes towards paying their energy bills in excess of sometimes 30% and 40%. Anything that we can do to make people use energy-- more efficiency, doing more by using less, clearly will then lessen their energy burden, and give them more money to spend on all the other needs that they have.

In addition to that, energy efficiency can really also help solve our problems around energy insecurity. Energy insecurity is defined by those households who make a choice at least once a year between paying their energy bills or buying food and/or medicine, and what we know is that about 30% of American households make that choice at least one month a year. Many of those households make that choice multiple months of the year, and too many of those households make that choice every single month a year.

Then if we break that down and we look at our African-American households and our Latino households, that number goes from 30% to 40% for our Latino households and 50% for African-American households. Again, if we think about how do we do more by using less, efficiency can really help lessen the energy insecurity that households are feeling. It is certainly my opinion or my contention that in this moment, energy efficiency is really uniquely poised to help us as a society address a lot of different issues. I think we are an important tool in our overall economy to address those issues.

Gil: Music to our years as a long-time champion for the first fuel and energy efficiency and an essential climate solution. I've heard you talk very movingly about your first experience in the energy field, coming out of college, working customer service for a gas company. When I heard that, I thought a little about my first job, which was actually pumping gas. It was my first job in the industry, and talking about connection with real people and real challenges in their household and seeing that, you mentioned those stats about the energy insecurity we face in this great country. Tell us about that experience.

Paula: Sure. I'd be happy to. My first job out of college was working for the local gas company taking customer payments. When I started, I actually did not know that my town had a gas company. I had no idea what a gas company did. I learned a lot just in-- obviously, understanding what the business was, but that job for me was the most informative and probably the most important job I've ever had because I got to interact with customers every single day.

I truly believe that we have no idea you the impact of our work until you sit across a table from somebody who's really struggling and has to come to you with a level of humility and humbleness that many of us, I think, would not want to do with a stranger, to ask them, to help them in a situation because they cannot afford to pay a bill.

I often tell a story about one particular customer who resonates deeply with me. I was probably about 25. She was probably about my age and she had three very young children, all under the age of maybe four. It was right after welfare reform in the late mid-'90s actually. Whatever money she was getting had been drastically reduced, she had an enormous bill, and she lived near me. I knew where she lived. She lived in subsidized housing.

While I was working at the gas company, I wasn't making a million dollars a year. I was living in the same exact neighborhood. I understood what that distress was. When she shared with me and I knew she had a bill, that was about $1,200, but she was bringing in cash of about $300 a month. In that moment, the rules might have been shut them off until they can pay you, but the reality was when you see someone has $300 a month that they're bringing in and you know that their bill average is $500 a month because they live in substandard housing and all the other things that go along with living in poverty, there was no way she was going to be able to pay us.

We came up with an arrangement that was about five bucks a week. This young woman every friday got on a city bus with her three small children, came to my office to hand me a $5 bill, and go back home. Most of that was a show of commitment that she was really going to do what she said she was going to do. My learning was what does grace really look like? What does it look like to do the best that you can? She is what that looks like.

I can tell you, now, almost 30 years later, I still remember that customer. That one customer has defined my work for my entire career. I do feel deeply about the work that I do and that we do, and the importance because I have in my life an example, and I understand how it matters.

The other side of that, Gil, more personally is I can recall having the life shut off when I was a kid. I remember my mother not being able to pay the bill for weeks, to live in the dark for two to three weeks, to have to boil water, to take a bath. All of those things that many American households go through today. I just think our ability as an industry to share the importance of our work because that's what it really can effectuate.

Those are the changes that it can make, it's important. While we can talk about grid resiliency, we can talk about modernization, we can talk about all these other things that we're doing, which are also important, but at the end of the day, there's a person at the end of our work. At the end of that cycle, there is a person. That's what I'm always thinking about.

Gil: Wow. This notion of grace, and no doubt that experience in your own journey gives you that empathy superpower, how essential that is, and building coalitions.

Paula: Yes. Not to depress people, but as an African American woman, what I know is for many people who look like me, irregardless of the level of success that we have, we too may find ourselves two paychecks, one paycheck away from that same exact situation. It is really important to constantly exercise my empathetic muscle because it's not like it's that far away.

Gil: I've been thinking a lot about the Justice40 Initiative, which ceases to deliver 40% of the benefits to disadvantaged communities from environmental investments. Alliance talks a lot about this efficiency gap. What are your thoughts on the Justice40 Initiative promise and potential, where we are today?

Paula: I'm an internal optimist. In that way, I could probably be in the middle of a storm and find something that was really great about. That's just my personality. I do think we have been experiencing so much change and that the administration is laid out a pathway that I think is something that we should all feel really enthusiastic about. I also think though that it is really important that we remember and ensure that we bring everyone along with us, particularly even those that we may disagree with.

The unfortunate thing about the moment that we're in today and have been in for some time is really the politicization of some ideas and ideals that had never been really something that we fought about. We are finding that because efficiency is a climate solution, sometimes we get looped into that climate fight in a way that people don't see efficiency as a value because the climate discussion has become about politics and not about science.

One of the things that we do at the Alliance, we've always done, and why we stress bipartisanship is because you have to talk to everybody. In this day, when we think about Justice40, we also need to use the kind of language that ensures that people see themselves in what's going on. For some folks, when they hear equity, frontline communities, disadvantaged communities, what they think and see are black and brown people. Most of the time, that's very, very true. These communities, my community, black communities, brown communities, we are incredibly impacted by pollution and all other environmental hazards, but that does not mean that there are not communities of white people who are also suffering.

We have to do a really good job of making sure, particularly that our politicians, understand that the communities that Justice40 is designed to effectuate are not just blue communities. They're red and blue communities. They're in red and blue states. They're not just black and brown people, but they're poor people. They're impoverished people. They're people who have been left behind, and we need to paint the kind of picture, I need to paint the kind of picture that stresses the importance of the work that I do for everybody because we are all touched by it.

Will some communities benefit them more than others? Absolutely, I think that's what Justice40 is trying to do, but what Justice40 is really trying to do is play catch-up. It's not so that these communities are going to leapfrog. It's so that we can actually get them caught up to where everybody else is. My personal opinion is that this initiative is really important and it's something to be incredibly excited about.

I also think 40% investment is likely not enough because these are communities that have been forgotten for generations. These are communities who've had a lack of investment or no investment for generations. I just don't think 40% is going to be enough as other communities are continuing to move forward. I would love a world where no one's playing catch up, and I think Justice40 will help communities start to play catch up, but I also think that that's likely not enough of an investment to actually have parity.

Gil: I'm with you. Staying on this theme of the polarized time, one of the reasons I'm so passionate and hopeful about energy efficiency, particularly within the climate realm, and the track record is-- at least before it was the one set of technologies that enjoyed such strong bipartisan support and it still does today. It isn't politicized. Then that's the opportunity and the responsibility that energy efficiency has for the broader decarbonization movement, to remind people there are 3 million clean energy jobs in this country, but 2.2 million of them are energy efficiency jobs. That's electricians, that's HVAC contractors. These are blue-collar jobs.

I think we love wind and solar too. We invest in that, but we've got to remember, we're going to need a lot more electricians and do this transition too. Sometimes I get frustrated with the political leads who don't remember that. The clean energy economy is maybe not the person going up the wind turbine or installing-- it's that too, but thoughts on that.

Paula: I completely agree with you. I think storytelling for me is critical. We just have to tell the stories, but we can't tell the same stories to the same people. You have to know who you're talking to. You have to tell a story that you believe is going to resonate with what their interests in a particular situation may or may not be-- may be, excuse me. I think efficiency can do that.

I think as an efficiency community, we have to be resilient. That's probably the hardest thing to do and to be in a politicized environment, is to be resilient yourself, to not give up, to not slow down the pace of what you're trying to accomplish because you're challenged by it, because the reality is we're likely to always be challenged. We're built for that. As an industry, we're built for that. If we are really committed, then you push through, and you find new ways to talk to new people, to convince them that what you're doing is the right thing to do.

I love that. Yet, is it hard and frustrating sometimes? Sure, but it also can be incredibly joyful when somebody gets it. I think as industry professionals, we talk so much about the resilience of our grid and our systems, but really we're the ones who should be resilient. We have to be resilient and not get so discouraged when things don't happen easy because they're not.

Gil: Right. Also, not get out the circular firing squad when we don't get the perfect outcome. Let's stay on that brass tax and policy and advocacy. You had a recent post, 21 Wins for Energy Efficiency in 2021. It's been a very busy legislative environment. I'm not going to ask you to remember all 21.

Paula: Please don't. [chuckles]

Gil: Could you highlight a few of the big wins for energy efficiency? I would say the planet and jobs too. but in this past year, and then what are you thinking about for 2022?

Paula: I think we're incredibly excited about all the efficiency dollars and the commitment to efficiency that happened in the infrastructure bill. That's been amazing. We had some other priorities that we had in Build Back Better, and we're still pushing through. That's what I mean by resiliency.

You may not get the biggest thing. You may only get something small, but that doesn't mean that you just say, "Oh, it's something small," and walk away from it. We try to figure out what are those things that are going to resonate with these legislators, that we can get them to support, put their votes behind, and we can push forward. We're incredibly excited about dollars for weatherization.

To my point about equity, we talked about Justice40, but programs like Weatherization and LIHEAP continue to be incredibly important to have them funded, fully funded is also important. We also know that full funding doesn't get you all the way to where you need to be. We have problems that actually, I don't think we can buy our way out of. We can't expect the government's going to make an investment, and poof, we're great. This is going to require all of us and a lot of creative and innovative thinking.

As we think about what's going to happen and how we're going to focus on the next year, part of it is, how is money spent, how we have lots of money that's been committed for investments, that money still has to get to the states, and has to be spent. We're going to be thinking deeply in working with members of the administration and trying to influence them to ensure that that money is spent in the way that we think is going to be best for a lot of people.

At the same time, we are continuing to fight for some of our other priorities around expanded 25C taxes, expanding tax credits, maintaining tax credits. In this year 2022, we are really going to be creating some new initiatives to think about what other tools do we need. I believe and we at the Alliance believe that universal access and adoption to energy efficiency, I said that when we first opened, is critical and important for a just energy transition, reduction of energy security, insecurity and burden and addressing climate change, but for that to happen, we have to have the right tools in place and the right programs, and we have to measure those programs appropriately.

That means it's a combination of weatherization-type programs, financing tools like those that your organization offers. Just basic weatherization dollars for low-income customers, working with utilities and thinking about what kind of rebates work, and should it be rebates or should it be a discount? It's tax credits and understanding who are those consumers who actually use tax credits, and who are those homeowners who actually don't use tax credits? Is that the right tool?

We're going to spend a lot of time this year, building out some reports, and really trying to understand how communities make decisions, and then what are the tools that we need to help them. That's a big focus of ours. In addition to that, we at the Alliance, in our 45th year, are going to be kicking off Energy 2040, which is really our North Star. It's our tool for us to drive us as a team and as an organization, as a coalition, to think about what does equity mean for our industry, and how do we contribute that, to think about how do we further our efficiency goals legislatively, but also to think about what's going on at the state level.

How do we support at the state level in a way that's going to be useful and true to the work that we do? How do we educate regulators if that's what we need to do? How do we do broad community outreach? How do we work with smaller non-profit organizations that are on the ground and create new partnerships and alliances? Because we can't do it all from Washington. I certainly only can't do it from my seat.

There are so many people out there who are doing this work, and look, let me be the first to say, doing it way better than I ever could imagine to do it. I want to make sure that I am partnering with those people, and we are looking at their expertise and taking their guidance and having them educate us about the things that we don't know, about how communities operate and integrate with one another, et cetera, so that we are truthful to this mission that we have and these goals that we have as an organization.

Gil: Staying on this theme of collaboration and initiatives, I want to ask you about one more, and it relates to this question I have about the semantics and the word choice of energy efficiency. For a minute, energy-efficient-- we were playing with energy productivity. We have this concept of Active Efficiency, which I like, and there's the Active Efficiency Collaborative that Alliance launched, I think, a couple of years ago now.

Paula: 2020, right?

Gil: 2020. Could you talk about that initiative in particular and explain again this notion of what traditional energy efficiency measures with these new digital technologies-- because I think most people probably think the light bulb or they think maybe HVAC, but maybe lights, or lighting. Give a sense about where the traditional meets the new digital and how that rolls up to Active Efficiency concept and collaborative.

Paula: Sure. Active Efficiency Collaborative for the Alliance is a really exciting project that really is right as you've described it; the digitization of efficiency, it's how we get to demand response, it's how we get to virtual power plants, demand flexibility, appliances that talk to the grid and allow the grid to talk to your appliances, being able to shed load, all these types of digital transactions is how I think about in my own head, is really comes under this idea of Active Efficiency.

That is the future. We know that that's where we're going. We're already seeing that with more rollouts of smart meters, folks who have now Ring doorbells and Nest thermostats or Ecobees and all the products that companies are selling themselves or that you can get at a Home Depot or at a Lowe's. The reality is that without the traditional efficiency measures already installed, these new technologies actually are meaningless for folks.

We have way too many households who do not have traditional efficiency measures installed. That's insulation, that's windows, lighting, doors, air conditioning, heating, and cooling, basic stuff. When we start to talk about what our future's going to look like, particularly around the building envelope, and I'm going to stick to residential customers for this particular conversation, when I'm talking about universal access and adoption, I'm talking about many times customers who do not have traditional efficiency measures. We're already talking about the future of efficiency, and we need to figure out how we're going to bridge this huge gap that we have in getting those particular households to even what I would consider baseline. That means they're well insulated. They have the proper lighting. They have really efficient heating and cooling. Folks feel comfortable in their home, all of that. Then once you get to that, then you can get to all the other new technologies.

Central to that though in Active Efficiency, particularly from an equity standpoint, is access to broadband because the talking back and forth doesn't really work if you don't have a strong internet connection. Among all the other things that this pandemic has gifted us as a nation, as a society, is the importance of a strong internet connection. Now we're starting to see that it's not just our stuff. We need folks to have access to broadband. We learned that access to good education actually requires access to broadband. Who knew? We had only been talking about books and everything.

To your question about collaboration and partnership, the Alliance to Save Energy is not a broadband telecommunications organization, but we need to have partners who do focus on that because we need them to make our stuff work. Access is not just lines in the ground. Access is affordability, right? Broadband internet service is expensive. I used to live in New Jersey, I now live in Maryland. Internet is cheaper in Maryland than it is in New Jersey, but I still spend over $200 a month. It's not cheap.

If we're thinking about households who are already struggling and why I believe that 40% is not enough is because 40% has to cover not just the basic stuff, but now I actually have to make sure you have the right infrastructure that is affordable so that you can have the new stuff, so that five generations, three generations from now, we're not having a similar type of Justice40 initiative because we didn't think far enough ahead about what our needs are going to be.

Active Efficiency for us at the Alliance is such exciting work to be doing. It is that integration of just efficiency and technology and even our utility companies and others, but that doesn't work without the traditional efficiencies measures installed in folks' homes. Not that it doesn't work, but that is not as valuable. We can't replace one with the other. One of the things at the Alliance that we really do focus and talk about is you need all of it. It's hard, but we need all of it, and then there are some stair steps, so basics first, new stuff next, but the basic stuff is more expensive and sometimes a lot harder to do, but without it, if you don't know how to walk, you're not going to know how to run. If you don't know how to read, you're not going to be able to do [unintelligible 00:27:23] so. If we don't have good windows, doors, lighting, insulation, heating, and cooling, we're not having appliances that talk to each other.

Gil: I know and we get so distracted by the shiny widgets.

Paula: Of course. I love a shiny penny.

Gil: Yes, and the price on these sensors and technology has come down. There's no question, the access point, but you're so right to point that out. I want to ask, like us, you started a podcast during the pandemic.

Paula: I did. Always Bet on Black.

Gil: Great name.

Paula: You want to hear a secret? Well, your whole audience will hear a secret. I came up with that name because I was obsessing one weekend about the movie with Wesley Snipes, Passenger 57. He has that line, "Always Bet on Black," and I love that.

Gil: Oh, gosh. He tells the terrorist that, yes. That's the [unintelligible 00:28:13], I love that movie. What's the show about?

Paula: It is a show of storytelling. During the pandemic, in my previous role, when I was the CEO of the American Association of Blacks in Energy, I've always been very, very lucky to know phenomenal leaders. I just have. I've been incredibly lucky to get to know phenomenal leaders across the spectrum. During the summer of '22, as so many of us were really, I think, reeling from all of the things that were going on at that time, we were all reeling for different reasons, but it was a lot. That was just the summer of a lot. I would get an opportunity to talk to leaders and I thought how awesome would it be for other people to just hear from them, for them to tell their stories?

My board chair, Chris Womack, who is now the CEO of Georgia Power, I have an idea, I have a phenomenal team who picked up my idea and ran with it so that I couldn't back out. I had absolutely planned to back out. They got to me way before I got a shot, but I called Chris Womack, and I said, "I have this idea. I want to do this podcast. It's really about storytelling. Would you be on it?" He was like, "Sure," and then scheduled it the next week before I was ready. I was forced to get ready.

He really started this journey of being really open about telling his story. Telling his story as a leader, telling personal experiences, sharing how he thinks about leadership as an African American man of a large company. It's when Barack Obama was elected president. Everyone-- we had to say, he's an African American president, but he's not the president just for black people. He's America's president.

I will tell you, as African Americans in leadership, that is something we all confront, that we are representative of a group, and because there aren't many of us, those who look like us do look to us, but we are also leaders for everybody. There's a bit of a balancing act sometimes that goes along with that. That's how Always Bet on Black started, and in fact, I am now retaping Season 2, and we're going to start again, of just getting folks to talk about leadership.

One of the things that I truly believe is that leadership is not about position or title. I look to interview and talk with people who inspire me and I invite people who listen. They will find that not every person who inspires me is the CEO, muckety-muck of an organization. They're just people who inspire me, who have great stories, who were committed to an idea, and they just ran with it. They're all African American because I'm African American, and I don't think we tell enough of our stories. So, that's what we're going to continue to do.

Gil: Awesome. Season 2 coming out soon, you can subscribe anywhere.

Paula: You can subscribe, find-- anywhere you get your podcast, you can find me.

Gil: Let's move to our hot seat.

Paula: Okay.

Gil: First one, best piece of advice your mom ever gave you.

Paula: The best piece of advice that I ever got from my mom, and she lived this way, was there is always space to be kind, even to those who you think are mean to you. Kindness always rules the day. She did a great job. My mother's been gone for about seven years, but she did a great job because when I'm not kind, I feel such guilt. Even if I feel like I'm right, I feel bad that I wasn't kind.

Gil: That's what moms do, and you come from a big family.

Paula: 10 siblings. I'm one of 10.

Gil: Then you have a lot of kids too, right?

Paula: Seven children. We have a blended family. Seven children and seven grandchildren.

Gil: Okay. I have two kids. So, give me the best piece of parenting advice from someone from a big family. You must have some wisdom.

Paula: [chuckles] You know what? My best piece of advice would be, let them figure it out because they will.

Gil: Love it. Before we taped, you shared with me that you were the high school champion in New York for parliamentary procedure.

Paula: In Connecticut, yes.

Gil: No doubt learning the rules of how to conduct an orderly meeting at such a young age helped you in your career and probably all positions. For those of us who aren't as familiar with parliamentary procedure, what is the most important thing about Robert's Rules of Order?

Paula: The most important thing about Robert's Rules of Order really is that there's a structure to how-- not just how you run a meeting, but how you take a vote and then memorialize that vote. Ensuring that you have a structure even if you don't do everything in the exact order that the book says is really important because that is how you're going to be able to catalog, recall what actually happened, and you always want to have really good recordkeeping. Whether you're for-profit or nonprofit, really good recordkeeping is important.

Gil: March Madness is around the corner because I know you're a St John's Red Storm fan.

Paula: I am.

Gil: What's going on with your squad? What? Eighth or ninth in the Big East? Can we return to the glory days?

Paula: I'm always going to hold out hope, but I will tell you when they rejiggered that Big East back in 1989 and let Miami and all these other funky schools in, it broke my heart and continues to break my heart, but I'll be a Red Storm fan till I die. I will. I long for the Big East that was just Providence, UConn, Syracuse, and all those, and check out ESPN's 30 by 30 on what happened to the Big East with Jim [unintelligible 00:34:08] and why they actually broke up.

Gil: What's your favorite basketball life lesson?

Paula: I will tell you the life lesson that I actually got from that 30 by 30 and sport in particular as a former athlete is that loyalty to your team is a thing, and it's not loyalty to a person, it's loyalty to your team. It's not just about people but about a body. That's important. That's where your commitment tends to lie.

Gil: The word or phrase I most overuse is-

Paula: I can't say it here.

Gil: Okay. Success is-

Paula: Joy and laughter.

Gil: I will never-

Paula: I will never jump out of a plane.

Gil: Okay, the biggest misconception about energy efficiency is-

Paula: That you don't need it.

Gil: Who's your role model in the energy field?

Paula: The gentleman by the name of Barrett Hatches, African American man who had served as president of three utility companies in the '90s. One of which was NIPSCO, SEMCO, and then he also did SEMCO, I think, out in Alaska. An incredible person, a dear friend, and absolutely a role model. Kindest person I know.

Gil: Awesome. Last question we ask all our guests, what does "climate positive" mean to you?

Paula: Climate positive means to me that we are going to address this problem, but we're not going to do it on the backs of poor people, which is, quite frankly, how we dress all our problems, and if we address this one on the backs of poor people, and not just in the United States, across the world, if we can do that without doing it on their backs, that's climate positive for me.

Gil: Awesome. Thank you.

 

Gil: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong. If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify, which really helps us reach more listeners. 

You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com.

I'm Gil Jenkins. 

And this is Climate Positive.