In this episode, I talk with Matt Traldi, co-founder of Greenlight America, about the fight for clean energy at the local level. We discuss how small groups of opponents are successfully blocking renewable projects across the country, and how his organization is working to turn the tide by mobilizing local supporters and giving them the tools to advocate effectively at critical government meetings.
(PDF transcript)
(Active transcript)
Text transcript:
David Roberts
All right then. Hello everyone, welcome to Volts for January 8, 2025, "Organizing local support for clean energy projects." I'm your host, David Roberts. Two years ago, I did a podcast with journalist Michael Thomas about the network of right-wing groups fueling local opposition to clean energy projects across the US.
I lamented then, as I have many times since, that the pro–clean energy side does not have anything even remotely similar. Instead, individual developers are almost entirely on their own for community outreach and education — and they're not particularly good at it, at least most of them. A recent survey found that developers cite local opposition as a leading cause of delayed and canceled energy projects, right up there with interconnection difficulties
Since that pod, a number of groups and efforts have sprung up to try to improve the general information environment around clean energy, but one group in particular is hyper-focused on the specific problem of getting clean energy projects approved and built.
It's called Greenlight America. It launched last year and has since raised about $5 million and built up a staff of about 20. It was co-founded by longtime activist Matt Traldi, who co-founded the Trump resistance group Indivisible and before that, worked for labor unions for a decade. Greenlight helps local clean energy supporters understand where and when they can get involved on behalf of clean energy projects.
I'm excited to talk to Traldi about his theory of change, how his organization works, where local support for clean energy can be found, and how intense it tends to be, and what ordinary people can do to get involved.
All right then, with no further ado, Matt Traldi, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Matt Traldi
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
David Roberts
So, before we get into Greenlight, let's just quickly sort of establish your bona fides. You've been around this world for a while. Maybe tell just a brief history of your activism and then, in the course of that, how it is that this pulled you in.
Matt Traldi
So, thanks for the intro. Thanks again for having me. As you mentioned, I started my career in politics and activism in the labor movement. I worked for a handful of unions, most recently SEIU. And then in 2016, there was an election and I, like a lot of people, was very upset with the results. And I got involved in drafting a Google Doc guide about what people could do about it in their own communities, how they could stop the Trump agenda by focusing on their own members of Congress. That became the Indivisible guide. We put it on the Internet, it went viral, we crashed Google Docs, and then I spent the next few years helping build the Indivisible organizations and support the incredible movement of Indivisible groups across the US.
Then, a couple years ago, a few things happened at once. The first is that while I was at Indivisible, I got to work a little bit on passing the Inflation Reduction Act. And I felt, and still feel, incredible excitement and optimism that we're actually going to do what's necessary to make the clean energy transition happen and to lower emissions and fight climate change in the process. And I hadn't always felt that excitement and optimism, so I really wanted to listen to that, you know, to follow that. And right around the same time, my wife and I decided to have a kid.
Our daughter, Avery, she joined us last year. She's 13 months old now.
David Roberts
Congrats.
Matt Traldi
Thank you. Thank you. And it's a total stereotype, but for me, it really changed my time horizon. At Indivisible, we were always working on whatever the most urgent political problem of the moment happened to be. Instead, I was thinking, "What is life going to be like in 50 years for my daughter?" As you know, and as many of the folks listening know, when you look out that far, emissions reduction is very, very important. It really rises to the top of the list. So both of those things led me first, really just to start learning as much as I could about clean energy and about what would be necessary to build it.
I'm not a clean energy expert. I'm an organizer and campaigner. I started having a lot of conversations with folks who knew more about clean energy than I did. I learned some things that you and many of your listeners already know: We need to build a ton of clean energy, an absolutely crazy amount. Most of the emissions reduction in the next decade will come from the power sector. In that time, we need to build almost two large-scale, utility-scale clean energy projects per day for the next 10 years.
David Roberts
Yeah, I really... You say people get that, but I honestly don't think that even people in our world really get that. The numbers like two utility-scale projects a day is very eye-opening.
Matt Traldi
Yeah, it's like nothing we've ever seen or done before.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's a pace of building that's unprecedented in US history.
Matt Traldi
That's right. That's right. The good news, though, is that the technology is there, the costs are low, wind and solar are the cheapest energy you can build. But I learned there is this major problem, which is local permitting. Right now, hundreds of projects every year across the US get held up by local permitting and really, that's because a small number of opponents can show up and can block a project, can pass a ban, can block an ordinance that would enable clean energy development at that local level. Right now, those opponents are showing up and supporters are not.
So, we're losing by forfeit in communities across the country every week. That immediately piqued my interest because, as I mentioned, I'm not a clean energy expert, I'm not a technology person. I'm glad people are working on cold fusion — I'm the wrong person to send to help with that challenge. But an organizing and campaigning challenge that I hopefully can help with a little more. So that's what we're doing at Greenlight .
David Roberts
Right. And so, the problem, as you say, is in these local battles. They're pretty small scale. And so, there are relatively few people involved generally. Consequently, a relatively small group of people that shows up and makes a big noise can make a huge impression on these things. Like, I just want to emphasize that you don't need, like the anti-clean energy forces, huge numbers of people, right? It doesn't have to be a big popular thing. You can do a lot of damage with a few people.
Matt Traldi
That's exactly right. And a lot of this goes back to the fundamentals of local advocacy and local government. You know, things that I learned a lot about from watching Indivisible groups across the US try to influence their own members of Congress, their own representatives. Local advocacy is all about who shows up. Local government operates through hearings and planning and zoning commission meetings. These are the unsung heroes of how our government works, how our society stays together. These are folks spending hours in the middle of the day talking about installing speed bumps for the county budget.
And a tiny number of people come to these. You know, it might be a dozen people at one or 20 people at another, but the people in the room have immense influence — particularly, I would say, folks who actually live in that community. That's one of the core things about local advocacy. Because local decision makers, county councilors, folks of that type, they care about their constituents, both for high-minded reasons and also because they might want to get reelected. So they need the support of their community. And those are also people they know, their neighbors, the folks that their kids go to school with.
The kids are the people who show up. So, we found that even a relatively small number of people, three people here, five people there, can absolutely change the outcome, and for massive projects that have a hugely outsized impact. So, Greenlight, really, we're here to help people show up and communicate persuasively to know where and when to show up so that they can influence whether clean energy projects do get built.
David Roberts
It's worth emphasizing that things are going in the wrong direction in this particular area. Like this USA Today story was about this survey, the survey I mentioned, had this striking statistic: In the past decade, about 180 counties got their first commercial wind power projects, but in the same period, more than twice as many counties blocked wind development. So, it does seem like renewable energy development is spreading quickly, but it also kind of seems like this organized opposition is spreading even more quickly. So, you sort of alluded to it there, but tell us what the sort of broad theory of change is here.
So what's your working theory as you approach trying to solve this problem?
Matt Traldi
You know, first, I'll just say we're students of the opposition. This is another thing that I learned from my time at Indivisible. You know, we really learned from the Tea Party everything that they had done to stop progress under President Obama. And, you know, we're trying to apply many of the same strategies, tactics, and lessons to our work.
David Roberts
Well, you know, I think about, like — not to get pulled away by the subject — but this is something that always struck me, even at the time, is that it didn't seem like there were that many people involved in the Tea Party. But every little protest, you know, they send one person to a town hall with a politician. That one person yells, you know, gets on the nightly news and like, it sounds like a big thing, you know what I mean? Like, it just, like it's a small number of people, but making a very big noise and sort of creating the illusion.
It's like you're hiking through the woods, you know, and they're like creating the illusion that you're surrounded by bears, even though there's like one person out there. So, it is like projecting yourself onto a screen, making yourself look bigger and scarier than you are. That is something that that side seems very good at.
Matt Traldi
100%. And often when we look for the fingerprints, you know, it's hard to talk about the opposition without talking about fossil fuel companies and interests and their role in spreading disinformation about clean energy and also in fomenting opposition at the local level. Because you really have two parts of the opposition. There are local opponents, neighbors of projects, you know, who they might be dealing with disinformation about a clean energy technology, or they might be, you know, personally inconvenienced by a project in their community or something like that, but they're just regular people, you know. And then at the same time, you have these powerful fossil fuel interests that have a kind of existential vested interest in stopping the quick deployment of clean energy and the future in which we're going to have abundant clean energy for all Americans, you know, that is directly counter to their interests.
And, you know, often we go looking for the fingerprints of these organizations. You know, are they funding the local folks who show up? You know, are they funding the Facebook group? And it's usually not that, you know, there's no smoking gun, that they're, you know, somehow passing out millions of dollars to these local folks, but they've figured out some tactics that really work for exactly this kind of local organizing. The first thing I'd mention is they create tools and they give them away. So, national opposition groups, they come up with disinformation arguments about different clean energy technology, they come up with tactics about how to start a Facebook group, what to say at the local meeting, all of that stuff, and they give it away to anyone who will use it.
David Roberts
Yeah, this is something that came up in that pod that I referenced with Michael Thomas a couple of years ago about the dirty energy campaigners. It's like you go to a local community where maybe Bob the farmer discovers they want to build a solar panel field right next to him. In isolation, Bob the farmer probably doesn't have a lot of strong pre-existing sentiments about solar one way or the other. Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. So he might be sort of like vaguely irritated.
But then he goes and googles whatever, like, "solar farm next to you" and finds these right-wing groups that are like, "Here, Bob, here is a PDF that you can print and pass out at the meeting. Here's a bunch of arguments for why solar is bad. Here are the meetings where this is going to be decided." You know what I mean? It takes Bob's sort of vague discontent and shapes and directs it. Not like it hands Bob a check or doesn't invent Bob, you know what I mean? Or doesn't hire Bob. It finds Bob. Bob is real. But Bob gets supercharged by these groups.
Matt Traldi
That's right. And everything they put together, local activists like Bob the farmer, they're the audience, right? It's not the decision-makers, you know, because a national group, whether a fossil fuel group, you know, a nonprofit like Greenlight, we don't have any power or influence with local decision-makers. But those folks in the community, they do. And so everything you create is with those local activists as an audience. I also think we can learn a lot from the fact that opposition groups, they're happy to have Bob or whoever the neighbor is use their materials. They're not looking for the perfect messenger or the perfect message.
You know, they're trying to make sure that at every one of these hearings, there's someone to yell, right? There's someone to try to gunk up the works.
David Roberts
Someone yelling versus no one yelling is the relevant difference. What they're yelling is of secondary importance.
Matt Traldi
Yep, that's exactly right.
David Roberts
Or just like having a body there versus not having a body there. That's the big change.
Matt Traldi
Yeah, showing up is 90% of local activism, you know, and we should know that. We know how to do this. But to get back to your question about Greenlight's theory of change, it's really based on studying the opposition and exactly this, what we know about local advocacy, that local residents showing up is 90% of the battle. So, we think of our role in a couple of different ways. The first is local activists need to know where and when to show up. So, we track clean energy projects. We have something we call the "early warning system" to figure out where these hearings are going to be, where a clean energy project might win approval or might get blocked, or where a local ordinance might get passed or a ban might get passed.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, that alone is huge. I wouldn't know that stuff. Like, I wouldn't know where to look for that stuff. You know, a lot of this stuff is like, they don't advertise. It's not clear. Just knowing this stuff is going to happen is such a big deal.
Matt Traldi
Absolutely. And, you know, local governments have very limited resources to publicize these hearings. Also, most of the hearings, as we talked about before, are not that crowded. Right. You know, it's not like usually people are banging down their door to attend. So that's step one. It's just knowing where and when to show up. The second step really is about, we think about our role as supporting a network of local groups and local supporters to show up. Again, it's never going to be helpful if a national nonprofit on the opposition side or on the support side is showing up.
And, you know, the local decision-makers, they don't care what I think, you know, here in D.C.
David Roberts
Matt, do you remember? You do. I'm sure you've been around, so I know you remember. Do you remember when, like, the hordes of Howard Dean enthusiasts, young Howard Dean enthusiasts, were sort of, like, flown into rural Idaho? What year was that when Dean...? Was that 2004?
Matt Traldi
It was 2004. Yep, I remember that race.
David Roberts
It's a very classic. I think everyone on our side of political organizing still thinks about that. Just these, like, Dean-drones banging on rural Ohio doors. It did not go well.
Matt Traldi
Yeah, you know, the messenger really matters in all of this work, and, you know, having someone local in particular, someone with credibility in the community, it makes a huge difference. And then the last thing I'd say, that's a core part. So step one, when and where to show up. Step two —
David Roberts
I want to spend some time on one.
Matt Traldi
Sure.
David Roberts
What is that early warning — what does that look like? Do you just have people out crawling the net or how's that structured?
Matt Traldi
So, there are a couple of different components of it. The first thing is absolutely people, you know, human researchers. I spent a while in the labor movement as a researcher. So, you know, we're a ways away from, you know, the AI replacing the skill and judgment of a human researcher. But a large part of it is human researchers looking on the Internet.
David Roberts
That does honestly seem like something where AI might actually help at some point, though, like just scrolling through large amounts of text.
Matt Traldi
Yeah, well, we do use — this is, you know, probably you'll get a bunch of, you know, nasty comments if I call this AI, because it's not technically AI, but we do use web crawlers to really augment their work. So, and that's something that has changed a lot. When I was a researcher, you needed to do, you know, some coding in order to set up a web crawler. You know, you needed to know Python or something. And now, you know, it's pretty easy to set up web crawlers and, you know, basically to get alerts each time a certain website makes a change.
So, for example, each time a particular local government website uploads a new PDF of their meeting agenda. And then a more sophisticated version would be each time they upload one and it includes the word "solar."
David Roberts
And, you're not looking for just sort of like any local meeting about clean energy? These are specifically about projects. Specifically about specific projects. Are you trying to sort of narrow your search that way?
Matt Traldi
Yes, and no. Specific projects are really central to what we do, but we also look for ordinances or bans that enable or block clean energy development. You know, you mentioned earlier the number of counties that have bans on wind energy. It's a growing number. It's 15% of US counties that have bans on clean energy in some way or another. You know, it's a really scary number because that includes a lot of the places that are the best for wind and solar development. They've considered the ban because there were projects being proposed there. So, it's really important if a county is considering a ban to be able to engage as well, or if there's an opportunity to pass a favorable ordinance to basically get good rules on the books that then will allow projects to move forward in an uncomplicated fashion when the individual projects are moving.
David Roberts
And these are clean energy projects specifically? So, I sort of wonder how or whether you bump up against housing, because of course that's like the hot thing now for everyone, including in climate. Are you restricting your gaze to energy projects?
Matt Traldi
That's right. So, we're only working on clean energy. And because our work is responsive to what industry is proposing, enormous amounts of solar right now, that's definitely the biggest volume of projects. Some onshore and offshore wind, battery storage projects, etc. We think of ourselves as "YIMBY for clean energy." So, we compare notes a lot with the YIMBY folks who are working on housing. You know, I think there's a lot that we can learn from the work in that space and, you know, hopefully some stuff we can share as well. But the geographic footprint tends to be a little different.
I would say that many of the housing fights are in metropolitan areas.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Matt Traldi
Whereas, you know, one thing that wind and solar have in common is that you need land to build them. And so, these tend to be rural areas, less densely populated, where there's a higher volume of wind and solar projects moving forward and higher potential for future development.
David Roberts
Okay, so first — you have these sort of three programs — the first is the early warning system, where you've just got your antenna out for meetings, local meetings related to clean energy. Then the second is this partnership network. So like you said earlier, you do not have the staff, and it would not be strategically wise, regardless, just to have a central staff of people that you send out to places to parachute in and tell them what to do. So, you are mainly about activating local partners. Locals. And I guess my question about this is, how reliable is it to find supportive partners?
Do you feel like they're always there? Have you ever gone to look and be like, "Well, no one around here seems to want this." You know what I mean? How reliable is it to find groups and people that you can work with?
Matt Traldi
It's a great question and kind of an existential one for Greenlight's work.
David Roberts
The whole theory of the case here is that there is a latent public support for this that you can activate, right?
Matt Traldi
That's right. So, one thing I'd say first is, I really strongly agree with what you said earlier that, you know, most folks don't know or care about a clean energy project moving forward. You know, there's not a silent majority of opponents. There's not a silent majority of supporters. There's a silent set of folks who don't know or care. Right. That's the majority. In the abstract, support for clean energy is quite high. You know, if you poll folks and just ask, "You know, do you think abundant solar energy is a good idea?"
People will, you know, 70% of people will say yes. And that tends to be true even in rural and conservative places. So, a big part of our work is really about activating potential support, sharing information with folks both about what a clean energy project can do for that community, the benefits it can offer, including economic benefits, as well as the massive impact that individual people can have by showing up. Most people don't realize — I recycle, you know, and I've read all the articles about how, you know, half the stuff I recycle probably isn't really recycling.
And, you know, I do it because I really want to do something positive and I'm willing, even when I know objectively that, you know...
David Roberts
It's ritualistic to some extent, right? It's like, almost like a religious practice or something.
Matt Traldi
That's right. And I think it speaks to a lot of people who really do have this desire to make a difference.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Matt Traldi
And so, to have this incredible opportunity where you could be one of five or 10 people who show up at a hearing, and if you're one of those five or 10 people and you win approval for a 400 megawatt onshore wind project and it displaces coal in the power system, those five or 10 people have the impact of something like 260,000 gas-powered cars coming off the road for a year.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, in terms of like, you know, living in the activism world, most activism most of the time is an exercise in frustration. But like this, this is an area where there is a pretty reliable and pretty short distance between action and result. Right? Like, this is one of those areas of activism where you actually can see results on a human timescale. You know, it's a rare thing in activism.
Matt Traldi
That's exactly right. And you know, honestly, this work, if there's one thing that I hope everyone takes away from listening to this, it's that I feel incredibly hopeful because of doing this work. At Greenlight, we've supported local groups to advance 4.4 gigawatts of clean energy in just the last year. That avoids approximately 2 million tons annually of emissions. It's incredibly tangible. And particularly when there are so many complicated and dire things going on with our politics and there's so much potential bad news, it really is a gift to be able to work on something so tangible, so beneficial in your own community, but that has this massive global set of implications if you're able to win.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's a little bit similar to when I did the pod on PUCs on Public Utility Commissions. Similarly, like an opportunity for a relatively small number of people to have a relatively outsized impact.
Matt Traldi
That's right. And really, it's about how our system of government works and where you have power. At Indivisible, Leah Greenberg, one of our co-founders, one of the co-executive directors there, she used to always say, "We didn't write the Indivisible Guide to give people hope. We wrote it to tell them they had power. But realizing that you have power is a very important ingredient of hope." And it's easy to look at national politics or global climate negotiations and think, "I have no power here." There's so little that I can do that has an influence.
But people really have power in their local communities. It's a small number of people who live there. It's a small number of people who show up.
David Roberts
Do you find that, because most of these battles are sort of being lost by default, by forfeit, if you go and activate someone and someone shows up, you generally win?
Matt Traldi
I wouldn't quite say, generally, but our win rate is pretty good when people actually show up. Yeah. So, I divide up into a couple of different sets of circumstances. Sometimes, you have local decision makers who themselves are, I'm going to say, reasonable people. You know, they're not, they don't feel super ideological about building a wind farm or a solar farm. They don't think the wind turbines are going to cause cancer or whatever crazy disinformation. But, you know, fundamentally, they're responsive to their constituents. They'd like the benefits that the development will bring to their community. But if everybody who shows up is opposed, they're going to block the project because that's their job, is to represent their constituents.
And so, in those cases, we really do think that even a couple of local supporters can give decision-makers cover to do the right thing, political cover, that they're just looking for something to hold onto. And we hear this sometimes from local decision-makers. They say, because they got input in both directions, that they had to weigh the factors themselves for what would be better for the community and decided yes. So that's one kind of situation. I would say that either when you have more hesitant decision-makers themselves, or when there's a lot of opposition organizing, you know, a lot of people showing up on the other side, it can be important to have more people show up, you know, in support, to have larger numbers.
I'll just give an example. We worked with the Western Colorado Alliance on overturning a ban on solar development in Mesa County, Colorado, and there was a ban in place. So, that's a difficult starting place. The decision makers were willing to ban solar. We'd heard that they were potentially open to passing an ordinance that would enable solar. But a lot of the details were up for debate in terms of things like setbacks. How far would solar have to be from property lines, which, if you make them big enough, then you can't have a solar project.
And in that particular case, because it really could go either way based on the decision makers and the starting line, so to speak, we tried really hard to out-mobilize the opposition. Western Colorado Alliance really gets most of the credit for this. They mobilized 30 people to a hearing, and 13 people spoke at the hearing. 11 of them were supporters and only two opponents. And so, we got a favorable ordinance in place with none of the restrictions that the opposition proposed. And I do think actually out-mobilizing, having more supporters there, in that particular case — maybe we still would have gotten rid of the ban, but if we hadn't had the numbers in that case, then maybe some of the restrictions would have made their way into the ordinance.
David Roberts
Yeah, well, getting back to my previous question, have you ever had a situation where you go and look for supportive local partners and just can't find any?
Matt Traldi
So far, we have not. There's always someone. It does really vary, though. When I was in the labor movement, there was this cliché that people would use: "What's the one thing leaders have in common? They have followers." They don't have anything in common other than the fact that leaders all have followers. I think there's a little bit of a parallel for this type of work, which is to say: "What's the one thing that partners who can mobilize people have in common? Well, they have members who want to show up for this stuff." Other than that, they're really different.
Some of them are state-based organizations, you know, that have members in a lot of communities around the state. We even work with chapters of national organizations, you know, that's Sierra Club chapters, local Indivisible groups, you know, folks like that. And then sometimes it's truly local groups. And then the last thing I'd say is that we also reach out directly to individual local folks who we think might be supportive. So sometimes it can be a little bit of an adventure, you know, finding the supporters.
David Roberts
But let me ask about the individuals because I'm curious about this. You know, we were talking about Bob earlier, Farmer Bob. So, he's got some sort of vague concerns about solar. And what these sort of anti-clean energy groups do is sort of say, "Yes, Bob, you're right. Here are some talking points, here are some materials," right? This just sort of supercharges Bob. That seems to me a lower level of difficulty than what you're trying to do. For the simple reason that they don't care whether the information is accurate or not, or whether Bob becomes well-informed, you know what I mean?
Like, they just got to give Bob stuff to yell and scream about. So, in some sense, that's a lower bar to clear. But, like, if you just find a Farmer Bob in a local community who has vaguely positive feelings about solar and you want to do the same thing, you want to give him material talking points, how easy is it to sort of train up a random local? Do you know what I mean? Do you feel like you can prepare them to speak well and accurately? Like, how big of a lift is that?
Matt Traldi
This is a really exciting question, and I think it gets to the core of what I love about our work at Greenlight . So first, I'll just do a disclaimer, which is to say, it's easier to campaign against things than to campaign for things. It's easier to organize against things than to organize for things. And that is, you know, something that I'm not even talking here about clean energy, but as the broader progressive project, so to speak, we have to tackle it.
David Roberts
It's human nature.
Matt Traldi
That's right.
David Roberts
That's why a group like yours has been so long in coming, right? Like, it's not an easy dilemma to solve, how to marry activism with positive, "Yes, building". You know, like, that's the — no one's really figured that out.
Matt Traldi
That's absolutely right. But, some things are incredibly rewarding about our work. First, as I mentioned earlier about recycling, we find that there are a lot of people out there who want to do something, want to have a positive impact in their community, want to, in particular, do something about climate change. And in general, what we find is that local supporters are sharp. They want to win, they want to be effective, and they want the right tools to be effective, to be persuasive. And that's really important because one of the tricky things about Greenlight's work is that — the reason I'm here is climate change.
David Roberts
Rural communities, all things being equal, tend to be more conservative and clean energy, generally speaking, is culturally coded left. You know, I don't know if that's uniform everywhere, but generally speaking. So, I'm guessing part of what's on your mind when you go to these rural local communities is you don't want to show up talking like a leftist, right, or you don't want to assume shared progressive values. So, like, how much work do you put in to sort of de-partisanizing your materials?
Matt Traldi
This is a central question, and it's one we think a lot about. What I would say is, we have an interesting — and this is not unique to Greenlight or to this issue, you know, this is true for a lot of volunteer activism movements — we have this interesting dichotomy, right, where many of the individual activists who are going to participate in a campaign that Greenlight supports, perhaps they're a member of a local environmental organization or something like that. For them, the reason they engage might be climate, it might be emissions reduction.
David Roberts
Well, almost by definition, if they care enough to be active, they're unusual, right? Almost definitionally.
Matt Traldi
That's exactly right. They know, and we know, that perhaps to the local decision-makers, you know, perhaps to their neighbors, climate is not going to be a winning message. And so they need to know, you know, what will be an effective way to make the case for these projects. And, you know, one thing I want to say here, it's easy for those of us who care so much about climate change to be a little cynical about — is the reason climate's not a winning message in these places, you know, is it because of Fox News and right-wing lunacy and so forth?
But the sympathetic thing I want to say is this: a local community, they're not deciding, is clean energy good? They're not deciding, is climate change real? You know, they're deciding, should we build this project here?
David Roberts
Well, I mean, look at every NIMBY group in history. They're all like, "Oh, no, no, we support affordable housing, don't get us wrong. Just not here."
Matt Traldi
That's right. And so, they're deciding based on what they perceive as being good or bad for their community. Many of these, again, are rural communities. The rural way of life is very important to them. They want to preserve the community the way it is. They don't necessarily want a project that maybe is good for the globe or for the US to come in that's going to totally change everything that they value. On a human level, I think we have to be sympathetic to that.
And so, ultimately, in our view, the winning argument for these projects, the thing that local activists can share that's going to change people's minds so often, really, is about what does that local community get from the project? What are the benefits that they get? What are the things that it'll allow them to do? And there are tons of stories about this school in West Texas where every student got an iPad for the first time because of a wind project built in the community. I heard one about a school, Michigan High School, that was able to build a new football stadium from a clean energy project and then won the state championship.
So, these are the things, the tangible examples, and this is the last thing I'd say too: in general, clean energy is a very technical subject, and volunteers do need support from us in order to speak to the technical details, the setbacks, decommissioning the panels, all of that stuff. But something that I said earlier, I'm a student of the opposition. Something that the opposition does so well is they focus on stories and not facts. So if we're going to support local people, local groups, to be effective advocates for clean energy, they do need some facts.
Absolutely. Because otherwise, we're setting them up to get tricked and to not have the information they need. But they're going to win with stories of what the clean energy transition can do for their community, for communities like theirs. Not with facts and numbers and all the things that we, as progressives, as policy wonks, we love that stuff.
David Roberts
I would be horrible at this.
Matt Traldi
I'm struggling through it. I'm struggling through it.
David Roberts
Do you ever work with developers? Because, like, how much or what the community is going to get out of it, to some extent, comes down to the developer. Like, the developer can offer more or less. Do you ever work with developers to sort of sweeten the package before you wade into these fights?
Matt Traldi
So first, just to say in general about our relationship with developers: Greenlight, we collaborate with industry, with the clean energy industry as often as we can. We're always going to be more effective if we're sharing information back and forth, if we know what the developer is hearing from community stakeholders, if they know what we're hearing, what questions we're getting, all that stuff. So, we try to always do that. And we've benefited from a lot of amazing partners in the clean energy industry. And I would say there's a growing awareness of this challenge and commitment to tackling it among clean energy companies.
That, to me, is incredibly heartening. You know, they are companies trying to make a profit, sure. And also, it's not a coincidence that they ended up trying to build this thing that we all need. We need abundant clean energy for the future of the US and of the planet. And they've set themselves to this social purpose, so to speak. So, I have a lot of admiration and appreciation for them. We don't accept funding from developers. So, they don't pay us to work on their projects or anything like that. And that's a conscious choice that we think is really important for us to be an independent voice and for our partners as well.
David Roberts
Are there projects that you chose not to support because you didn't think they were good for communities? Like, are there, you know what I mean? Like, how absolute is your support for clean energy?
Matt Traldi
Yeah, it's a totally fair question. So first, I would say we never work against a clean energy project. We're a new organization; we try to only do one thing and do that one thing well. And the one thing is trying to get clean energy projects approved. But we will turn down — so during our pilot program, we ended up working on 11 campaigns, but we got approached by about 200. So there's a massive demand out there and we couldn't possibly work on every project. So we have to have some way of selecting.
David Roberts
Says a little bit about the unmet need here, just to put a flag on that.
Matt Traldi
It's true. And one of the ways that we decide on projects, we do look at what we call flags internally. So, there can be green flags, things that make us excited about a project. And then there can be red flags, things that would scare us off. I'll just give — because I come out of the labor movement — labor as an example. A green flag might be if a project has union commitments in terms of how it'll be built, that would make it more attractive to us. And a red flag might be if there's an active labor dispute, you know, we're going to steer clear. Right.
There are so many moral and strategic questions. It's just not, you know, there are enough projects out there. Let's not do that. So, there are similar kinds of flags across a bunch of different areas. Another one that I'll pop out is in the western US, in particular, there are a lot of projects that get built either on tribal land or that have implications for tribal cultural heritage. And that's something where we just think of that as a moral issue versus just a kind of campaign calculation.
If there's a tribe objecting to a project, that's probably going to be it for us in terms of whether we can support it. There are edge cases, of course, with all of these things. But it's just to say that we do think a lot about these different considerations and would decline. We wouldn't oppose a project ourselves because we're not in that business, but we would decline to work on a project if we thought the red flags were such that it didn't make sense.
David Roberts
Okay, so let's finish this list, because we're almost done with the list. The three programs are: one, the early warning system, so you're just looking around for relevant meetings where things are happening. Two is this partnership network. So, when you find something happening locally, you go activate and educate local partners, but the local partners lead. And then the third thing here is your actual campaigning, your execution of campaigns. And here, in your founding document, you said "Winning with precision." You've mentioned a few things about how you go about winning, but just say a quick word about what do you mean by precision here.
Matt Traldi
Yeah, absolutely. So this really speaks to your question about how we support local volunteers to be effective, which is that a big part of the reason, in addition to not knowing when and where to show up, a big part of the reason potential supporters are not engaging is that clean energy is a technical subject. These projects are all specific projects with various pros and cons, trade-offs, and so forth. And it can be a difficult landscape to jump into. Greenlight, one of the reasons we exist, really is to support local groups, local partners, local supporters.
We think having an organization like us, where this is really the only thing we do, is beneficial. You know, a local group might be working on 10 or 20 things, yes, but this is all we do. And so, because of that, we can really develop the tools and resources to help folks engage effectively. Precision is really about that. How do we support folks where even a small number of people can be effective, can be persuasive, messengers can show up at the right time and say the right kinds of things? Even if a lot of that will be personalized, with them of course deciding what to say, we can help them not run afoul of any details of the project and not say something that's going to backfire with the audience.
And the other thing really is about assessing the local community, the decision makers, and so forth, and thinking about what will be influential to them. I'm going to give an example of all of these elements coming together on one of our campaigns. So, we caught through our early warning system, through one of the web crawlers, actually, we caught this proposed new ordinance language in Erie County, Pennsylvania. It's a relatively pro-clean-energy place. And the new ordinance language was going to require that before projects could go up for local permitting, they would have to have interconnection approval.
David Roberts
Well, that's never going to happen.
Matt Traldi
It's never going to happen. And you know, we say at Greenlight that local permitting is the biggest obstacle. And some people who work on interconnection would complain, right?
David Roberts
They would say it's a tight race.
Matt Traldi
Interconnection is just as big. Exactly. It's a tight race. These are two big problems. And the effect of this language would be to delay projects for years while they were waiting on interconnection and potentially to kill projects because the economics of the project wouldn't pencil out if it had a three-year longer development time horizon. And in this case, because we've done a bunch of work in Pennsylvania, we have amazing partners there, Penn Environment, Clean Air Council, Solar United Neighbors.
And so, we were able to kind of get the network together pretty quickly. Our analysis was that these were relatively favorable decision-makers, you know, that they would want to make a pro clean-energy decision. So, what was needed was just for them to hear from across the spectrum of folks who care about clean energy deployment that we wanted this requirement gone. Penn Environment led a sign-on letter. They got 19 organizations to sign on, just saying, "We want this requirement removed." Solar United Neighbors hosted a power hour, got some volunteers involved, and it was only three volunteers who spoke at the hearing and made this ask for this language to be removed.
But because of that, that's the precision part. Because of that assessment of what was needed in the situation, we were able to get these six words removed from this ordinance. The favorable ordinance passed without these six words. And there's more than 900 megawatts of solar in the queue in Erie County. So that's potentially a win with a really long tail. All from this combination of an early warning system that tells us there's a problem, a strong network in Pennsylvania of local partner groups and local supporters, and then this supercharged support. How do we get folks to show up at the right time, say the right thing, have the right tactics so that we're able to win?
David Roberts
And it's worth saying, although maybe this is obvious by implication, but the more you do this, the more you strengthen those local networks and the less of a lift it is the next time. Right?
Matt Traldi
That's exactly right. The first campaign we work on in a state is so much work because we're going to partners who've never heard of us. We're introducing ourselves, we're saying, "By the way, you know, you could work on this thing with us where you'd have the same impact as, you know, planting 18 million tree seedlings and growing them for a decade." You know, it sounds like snake oil, you know, it's too good to be true. Right. In contrast, the fifth or sixth campaign we work on in the state where we've got strong partners, we're supporting them, they kind of know what they can count on us for.
They have a sense of each other's strengths and, you know, where they have members and all that stuff. It really starts, the magic really starts happening. You know, we're all able to move pretty quickly. And that's important too, because timing is one of the biggest challenges of these things. Usually, we'd love to have long notice before one of these hearings, but usually, it'll be, you know, 45 days public notice before a hearing or something like that. We're always trying to push that number up, and we benefit a lot — the other input to the early warning system that I should have mentioned is developers themselves will often tell us when they have a project moving to permitting, but even that is inexact because they know when they're planning to submit it, that might change.
And then they submit it, and then the county council decides when it's going to be on the hearing docket. So, getting the timing right and being able to respond quickly with a good network of partners makes all the difference.
David Roberts
A little bit of a nerdy question, but what is the significance of Greenlight having both a C3 and a C4?
Matt Traldi
So, Greenlight America is our 501(c)(3). And Greenlight Action is a 501(c)(4). 501(c)(3)s, at least of the type Greenlight America are educational organizations. They can raise awareness, they can, you know, share information. They can do coalition building. You know, lots of the work that Greenlight does. 501(c)(4)s are called "social welfare organizations", but really the most common type is advocacy organizations. So they engage either in direct lobbying, where they themselves are going to government officials and asking them to take some kind of action, or in grassroots lobbying, where they're working with volunteers to ask their own elected representatives to take some kind of action.
And Greenlight Action mainly engages in grassroots lobbying. You know, one of the things I'd mention here is that many of the opposition groups — this is the recurring theme of this call — is, you know, we're students of the opposition. We try to learn from what they do. Many opposition groups are structured as 501(c)(4)s so that they can do this more direct work to try to influence specific decisions made available.
David Roberts
That just means you can campaign for a specific piece of policy or specific politician?
Matt Traldi
That's right. So, it's making an ask of an elected leader to take a particular action or vote. So, to pass a local ordinance to approve a specific project. And 501(c)(3)s can do a little bit of that, but it's not their primary purpose, and they're more limited. Our side has more 501(c)(3) organizations and so more doing general education and awareness raising, but maybe not weighing in at that critical moment asking that local county council to specifically pass this ordinance or to specifically approve this project. And so, we think of grassroots lobbying work as so important.
It's central to our analysis of the problem here that folks show up in their own communities at these critical moments and ask their elected leaders directly what they want them to do.
David Roberts
Wait, Matt, you're saying that raising awareness is not the be-all, is not the end of the...?
Matt Traldi
That's right. It's, you know, it's not to — both are important, but I do think that often our side, we sometimes tend to take a knife to a gunfight.
David Roberts
We love awareness. We cannot raise it high enough.
Matt Traldi
That's right. That's right. More awareness. That's what we need.
David Roberts
You can never have too much. You've said several times that you are learning from the opposition. I wonder, do you spend any time as an organization talking about or going after or explicitly fighting the other side, exposing the networks of money and all this? There's a lot of attention to that kind of thing. Are you in that business at all?
Matt Traldi
That's a great question. The short answer is that's not our focus. A big part of the reason is, as we talked about earlier, the opposition really has these two parts. The one part is community members in a local community where a project is getting built, neighbors of the project who may be getting disinformation, they may have their own reasons that they're inconvenienced by a project. But you know, we really don't think that demonizing those folks is, it's not good for the community, it's not good for our prospects. You know, we tend to steer clear of that.
And the big fossil fuel interests that are kind of behind some of the disinformation that is getting spread, or you know, things of that type, often don't show up by name in these communities.
David Roberts
So, that's part of why it works. I mean, it's part of the beauty of the whole thing.
Matt Traldi
That's right. So, it can kind of be a bank shot. We do generally think that part of effectively countering disinformation can be mentioning that it's being intentionally spread by these outsiders.
David Roberts
That's a little bit what I was getting at. Like, do you go into these meetings and say, "Hey, look, these things you're saying are not only not true, they're from this network of groups that are funded by fossil fuels, etcetera, etcetera."
Matt Traldi
Yes, that can for sure be a component of combating it effectively. But, you know, there's this depressing thing about disinformation that I just wanted to share because, as a member of the fact-based community, I find this very confronting. So, the number one rule in working on disinformation is that you can't myth-bust it; you can't fact-check it. Right? Because, unfortunately, if you fact-check it, what people remember is there's controversy.
David Roberts
They remember it.
Matt Traldi
That's right. And so, you know, that's really tempting to all of us. But, you know, getting to this thing about stories, the focus in combating disinformation has to be reorienting to the story about why building the project is a good idea, why clean energy can bring benefits there.
David Roberts
And the story that "You've been duped" is never, even if it's true, never an inspiration to anyone.
Matt Traldi
That's right. So, we do find, and this was true, Indivisible has this amazing program called the Truth Brigade that worked on disinformation in the democracy space more so. And we did find there, and you know, we find at Greenlight as well, that sometimes it can be helpful in the midst of telling the positive story to mention there are these powerful forces who are from outside the community who are saying crazy things and distracting us basically from the way we want to make this decision, which is really like, what's best for our community? Will this project help us? And if so, how?
David Roberts
Well, this is... What is the narrative? The race class?
Matt Traldi
Yep.
David Roberts
That's what they're always talking about, right? Is it that you don't counter the specific facts or the specific pseudo facts because, like you say, in the process of countering them, you just end up repeating them and people just end up remembering them more. You try to expose why they're doing what they're doing. Like, what is the larger goal here? Why are they spewing these pseudo facts? It is to divide and distract us. Right. Like that's the focus of the message.
Matt Traldi
That's exactly right. And I'll say this thing sometimes about offshore wind because, you know, there's all this stuff about whales and offshore wind. And I, I'll say the same thing. Sometimes if we're talking about whales, we're losing. You know, it's not a real concern. People are talking about it in places where there's not even steel in the water yet. So, how could offshore wind be...? And so, you know, it's our job mainly to talk about how the clean energy transition is going to benefit a specific community where a project's getting built and also benefit all of us.
We've got this future coming of abundant clean energy and the rural revitalization that comes with that. The more we're talking about that, the better. And to the extent we go into the disinformation at all, it has to be, as you said, about why are these powerful forces trying to block it? Why are they coming up with this stuff that is a distraction at a fundamental level from whether we should build this project? And just to sound a hopeful note on this, most folks who say they oppose clean energy projects in their own communities do not actually believe these crazy things, you know, that there's cadmium leaking into the groundwater or whatever.
And so, I do think that, you know, we risk giving it too much oxygen if we dwell on the fact-checking.
David Roberts
I mean, a lot of it has the vibe of, like, "This makes me feel bad. I don't like the feeling of contemplating this and then going out and looking for something to support that feeling." Right?
Matt Traldi
That's right.
David Roberts
So what would you do with 10x your current budget?
Matt Traldi
I love this question.
David Roberts
In other words, if I could just hone it a little bit, is this very specific thing you're doing — which I think is like one of the things I like about what you're doing. I've seen many, many, many socially minded groups sort of dissipate because they're doing a million things, none of them particularly impactful. So, I love it that you're focused on this one thing. And I just wonder, like, if you had 10x the budget, is there enough of this one thing that it could absorb 10x of your effort? Or if you had 10x the budget, are there other things you would branch out into?
Matt Traldi
I love this question. I'm so excited that you asked it. And, you know, how long we have another, like, two hours, right, for my answer on this? So, the first thing, just to say, I'm going to broaden the lens a little bit from Greenlight for a moment and say clean energy deployment and siting needs more support from climate philanthropy, not just for us, but across the ecosystem. Right now, this area of work gets a tiny, tiny fraction of giving.
David Roberts
Matt, it's crazy. This is the work. This is the thing. People are aware, for F's sake. You know, like...
Matt Traldi
That's right.
David Roberts
They're aware. Let's do stuff now.
Matt Traldi
That's right. This is where, you know, if you care about emissions reduction, which I do. Right. This is where all of the emissions reduction is going to come in the next few years. And so, you know, again, just to say, you know, if you're a billionaire and you're listening to this, you know, of course, I welcome your support at Greenlight, but more generally, you know, come on in, the water is fine. There's a lot to do in the clean energy deployment space. And you know, we work a lot with local partners, as I mentioned. And, you know, local groups truly have very limited resources.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Matt Traldi
And they're pulled in a million directions. Tiny budgets, limited staff. And that stands in the way of doing this work.
David Roberts
Yeah. People underestimate how much just knowing a thing is happening — like, I think people have it in their mind that, like, oh, there's this. There are these professional groups out there who are on top of these things, you know, like somebody is watching. But like, very often you find that nobody's watching and just doing what you're doing. Just going and saying, "Hey, there's a meeting two weeks from now." It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's amazing how much that can accomplish.
Matt Traldi
Absolutely. So then, on Greenlight in particular, the first thing I'd say is there's immense need. I mentioned that, you know, during our pilot period, we worked on 11 campaigns and we were approached about 200 different projects and that rate has continued.
David Roberts
Well, there's 20x. That's 20x your budget right there.
Matt Traldi
That's right. That's right. And you know, I'm an optimist about the clean energy transition. That is, I hope everyone listening to this feels a little jolt of optimism going into the holidays. I think we're 100% going to make this happen. The economics are on our side, the momentum is on our side. I think the next few years are going to be the best years in U.S. history for clean energy deployment, for energy deployment overall. I know that things can look a little grim if you look at national politics, but in this area, there's an enormous opportunity, an enormous amount to accomplish.
And the more deployment is growing, the more the industry is growing, the more need there is for this work. The more projects are getting blocked, the more local fights there are, all of that stuff. And so, we expect, you know, right now there are a couple hundred projects that move forward and also that get blocked every year. And we think within the next few years that'll be more like 600 or 700 that could get blocked.
David Roberts
So you did 11 in a year?
Matt Traldi
We've now done a couple dozen. 11 was during — we had a pilot program of six months, yeah.
David Roberts
So, a couple dozen a year. But if there's 700 of them, we need a lot more of you.
Matt Traldi
We need a lot more. Next year, we're hoping to do 70 to 100 projects. That's our goal for next year. But, you know, really, we could be doing a lot more. A big part of that — our model for engaging is very regionally focused. So, you know, with 10x the budget, we'd have 10 times as many campaign staff and more states and regions across the country. And that just allows for all the reasons that, you know, having someone based in a region, they know the partners, they know the social context, they're just able to support folks in communities who are actually showing up much more effectively.
Having someone in D.C. doesn't do it, right? So that's a big part of it. Also, the early warning system, this big research project of where are these critical milestones? When can people show up so that we stop losing by forfeit? That's something that's just a huge focus for us as we grow. And one other area that I would just kind of lift up as really important is about building more and more partnerships. So, you know, the places where we've been able to invest, like Pennsylvania, I mentioned earlier, in relationship building with partners, in kind of all collaborating together, that's where we're really able to have as much impact as possible.
And that takes time, it takes investment, takes work, all of that stuff, both from us and from the partner organizations. Obviously, the folks that we're working with. So those are just a few things. But I would say that we're not right now planning on becoming an organization that does 100 different things. We think this one thing is super important and local work to support people on the ground, groups on the ground in communities where clean energy is moving forward to win, to get these projects across the finish line.
David Roberts
This is facts on the ground, right?
Matt Traldi
That's right.
David Roberts
I mean, this is something I feel like just like the left, generally so enamored of words and ideas, and so neglectful of just facts on the ground and how much immense influence is exerted by facts on the ground. So, like every solar field you enable installed, makes literally everything else easier after that. Right? Like, you're changing the firmament here with every one of these, making all the other more specific jobs easier.
Matt Traldi
100%. And you know, this gets back to something you said early in the conversation, which is that we also have facts on the ground in terms of our movements, our movement infrastructure, and we haven't invested in local organizing, not just on clean energy, but more broadly as a movement. And one of the things that I'm most excited about Greenlight's work is that element of we're going into local communities that may not have had a ton of progressive advocacy work of any kind for quite some time and working with local partners.
David Roberts
Yeah, and those partnerships last after this fight is over, right? I mean, they persist.
Matt Traldi
That's right. And in the long term, I really think that another thing you said earlier in the conversation that I think people don't yet imagine the scale that we're going to be building at and that we need to build at, and it's going to be a massive transformation, not just for our energy system, but for our economy and in particular for these rural communities. Often utility scale, solar farm or wind farm, we're often talking about the biggest development of any kind that's happened in this rural county ever. And these are places that not all of them certainly, but many rural communities have declining population, declining tax base, they need development.
David Roberts
I mean, it's an ongoing threat to our politics.
Matt Traldi
That's right. And so, if there's a prospect of something that is great for the country, great for the world, and you can preserve these communities, you know, preserve the rural character of a community while also, you know, building this project, infusing new resources, etc., I think that's going to be really where the magic happens, because ultimately we won't — we talked about this earlier. Communities are not deciding "Is clean energy good?" They're deciding "Should we build this project here?" We won't build the clean energy transition unless the answer that many of them come up with is yes.
And that answer is going to be because they actually benefit, you know, that they actually are, you know, they're not just bearing a cost for the rest of us. So that's, I think, what's so exciting about this. And I do see 10x, 20x. You know, I don't worry about us running out of clean energy deployment work to do anytime soon.
David Roberts
All right, well, on that note, we'll wrap it up. I just want to reiterate how important this work is at our particular historical juncture. This is the inflection point here. The technology work has been done to a large extent, a lot of the policy work has been done, and now it's really just block and tackle, putting the stuff in the ground. So, thank you so much for doing this work. And like you say, if you're a billionaire listening, please wake up to the need for this kind of work and open your checkbook. All right, thanks so much, Matt.
Matt Traldi
Thank you.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
Share this post