With President-elect Trump less inclined to prioritize climate action at the federal level, the results of the 2024 election in many ways passed the buck on handling the climate crisis to states and corporations.
Nonprofits stand to play a part, too. Climate Solutions, which works with state legislatures to pass climate policy and partners with corporations to help them decarbonize, has long worked with states and companies to help them move climate policy forward.
Tech Brew talked with Climate Solutions Executive Director Gregg Small about his work and the organization’s efforts to advance climate policy.
Tell me about you, how you got to Climate Solutions, and what you do there.
I’ve been at Climate Solutions for 17 years. I’ve been the executive director here that whole time, and before that, I had been the executive director of a couple other organizations that had worked more on public health, toxic chemicals, pesticides, those types of issues. I got this job in 2008, and around that time, I just was feeling the intense pull to work on climate change for fairly obvious reasons. And, well, here I am, 17 years later—still at it.
What are some examples of what you’re advising companies to do? What are some processes that they’re starting to engage in because they worked with Climate Solutions to decarbonize?
Every sector is different, right? Like fleets is different than buildings, is different than trying to get solar panels on your building, etc.…[But] at a certain level, a lot of the basics are the basics: Understand the vehicles that are in your fleet, understand the alternative models that are available to you, understand how to work with utilities—because utilities have to help you set up your charging infrastructure if you are putting out enough that you have to upgrade on that front—understand the state and federal and, at times, local incentives that are in place that can help you deal with the up-front cost…The basics of “Here’s what you have to do to understand what you have right now and what your options are for actually making it happen” are relatively straightforward.
We put together this 13-week program. You’ll have a week that’s focused on the utilities coming in and talking about “Here’s how you work with utilities.” And we’ll have state or federal government agency folks come in and talk about “These are the state and federal incentives that you could use and access, and here’s how you do that.”...It’s been really incredibly effective.
You’ve worked with Washington Governor Jay Inslee on the Climate Commitment Act. What other stuff have you collaborated with him and the Washington State government on?
Everything. Washington State has passed a lot of really great climate and clean energy bills over the course of the last five or six years. The Climate Commitment Act is certainly the centerpiece of it, and we’re really, really proud of that. But the state’s also passed a whole bunch of other things: We passed a bill to get the state to 100% clean energy, we passed a low carbon fuel standard, which some other states have passed…A whole suite of policies that we’ve worked on in partnership with Governor Inslee and other legislators in Washington to get things across the finish line.
How can states encourage climate action, decarbonization, green tech innovation under the Trump administration? It seems like the Pacific Northwest has been taking matters into its own hands and moving forward.
Washington and Oregon have really passed a bunch of great policies…but we’re far from alone. California, of course, has done a lot of stuff; New York has passed a lot of great policies; Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan…A lot of states have really invested in this.
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Trump becoming the president is a disaster for climate because of the things that he did in his first administration. There’s just no way to get around [that] this is a very, very big problem at a global level. That said, we can still do a lot of stuff that is not impacted by what the Trump administration does at the statewide level. We can pass all of these policies…States don’t need the federal government to pass bills to commit to 100% clean energy or to put in place a cap-and-invest program that caps carbon pollution and invests hundreds of millions or billions of dollars—depending on the size of the state.
The key in moving forward on climate progress in the United States in the era of Trump is really twofold. Number one, what we’ve just been talking about: leadership states continuing to move forward. And number two is corporations playing a key leadership role…Corporations have made a lot of really big commitments to get to net zero by a certain date.
Hundreds and hundreds of businesses all around the country, including some of the biggest corporations on the planet, have made commitments that are very significant around cutting their carbon. And they don’t need the Trump administration to keep moving forward on that. If many of these corporations actually make good on what they’ve said they’re going to do, they completely can transform the marketplace.
You have states like California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Illinois, Michigan—that’s a lot of economic power. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon obviously have enormous economic power. We can change markets, and there’s nothing the Trump administration can do about that.
Climate tech is exploding in part because of the Inflation Reduction Act. So if you couple transforming markets of the scale of California and all these other states, as well as Microsoft and Amazon buying up renewable energy, you can transform markets, and that’s not something that the Trump administration can stop. He can slow it. He can stall it. He will, that will happen. But if we do right on these other key tracks, we can keep at it.
What is the role of nonprofits like Climate Solutions during a time like this?
We can do everything we can to keep leadership states moving forward. We can build incredible coalitions. As an example, on Initiative 2117 [which voters rejected, upholding the Climate Commitment Act in Washington], that coalition was 600 organizations…this was the biggest coalition on any issue in the history of Washington State, ever. What NGOs can do is we can form partnerships with tribal nations, with businesses, with labor unions, with public health organizations and just create an unstoppable political force for continued action. That we can do. And then really work closely with the business community and corporations on supporting and/or pushing them to do more and make good on what they’ve said [they’ll do].
Can you share the next big policy proposal or ballot initiative that Climate Solutions is going to be focused on?
The next big frontier, from a policy perspective, is really around…the era of these sweeping policies like the Climate Commitment Act, cap and invest, or 100% clean energy, we’ve done a lot of those things. The important thing now is passing policies that allow us to implement them.