Transcript
INTRO
Jamie Nolan: Jigar, it is safe to say that today's guest is the most exciting guest ever in the history of my nine-year-old daughter's life, and she now thinks I'm cool.
Jigar Shah: Well, I feel like that alone was worth all of the effort this year.
Jamie Nolan: Truly. She has been telling friends about it, because one of her friends' moms randomly asked me the other day if Fiona was just making things up. I was like, no, we truly did have Adam Met from AJR, who has a PhD in sustainability. And with the free time that someone who sells out Madison Square Garden would have, he's a climate organizer. Who knew?
Jigar Shah: It's so crazy because I have been doing clean energy for a long time. I remember when I worked at BP in 1999, we sponsored Bonnie Raitt's tour when she was doing the biodiesel bus across the country. And there have been a lot of artists over time that have said, we want to use solar power to power the stage instead of diesel generators. But I feel like Adam is taking it to a whole new level. He was talking about how he actually has a plan for every single show on how to get people more engaged in whatever it is that they might want to do. The level of planning and sophistication that he brings to this is next level compared to any of the other artists I've ever met.
Jamie Nolan: I was in this tiny town over the weekend, in the smallest bookstore, and saw his book on the shelf there, which is just so funny. He's so legit, and he's joining us on Energy Empire, so I was pretty excited about that. Also, he has something that almost no one in energy has right now: he is working on a real bipartisan bill that is moving in both the House and the Senate. He goes up to Capitol Hill and he meets directly with legislators. And he's been able to solicit support from further to the right and to the left than one would expect, because he just has this incredible perspective on how to speak to people in language that they will hear.
Jigar Shah: He's also behind one of the top two memes that my son really likes, the World's Smallest Violin. So I just think it's hilarious, and it's so great to have him on.
INTERVIEW
FIVE BILLION STREAMS AND A PHD
Jigar Shah: All right, Adam, welcome to the show. I want to get started with: I think you're the first person on the podcast that's had five billion streams on Spotify. You've sold out Madison Square Garden multiple times. You've toured around the world. And alongside being a pop star, you're the founder of Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit that turns cultural reach into climate and civic action. And then, weirdly, I think you're pushing permitting reform. So can you just give us: who are you, and what do you actually do?
Adam Met: Who am I today? Is that a fair answer? I wear a lot of different hats, and honestly, it's because I love building things. That's my MO. As a band, the band is called AJR, we've spent the last 20 years building this band. We never did a traditional record label deal. We built this company that distributes the music. We've done partnerships with a variety of different people, but it really was about building that fan base in order to try and get to this place. And I'm so thankful that we did it when we did, because now this world of digital is a whole different world, and we can talk about that at some point.
I did my PhD at the same time as we were on the road. I would spend a few months working on my PhD, then I would come back and tour. Planet Reimagined came out of the idea around the Sustainable Development Goals. I started working with the UN because of the band's platform on the Sustainable Development Goals a few years after they were rolled out, and the woman who ran advocacy and comms at UNDP, she and I really hit it off.
So she and I started to do this big landscape analysis to understand where the climate nonprofit world was. And we found so many think tanks, research institutions, and universities that would do research, and then it would sit on a shelf forever. That's what happened with my PhD. I think three people maybe read my entire PhD, which, great, thank you to those three people if you're listening.
At the same time, there are so many advocacy organizations that do political advocacy and movement building, and they are so separate from how the research is done. So we built Planet Reimagined as an incubator, in order to build projects that take the research and turn it into something actually actionable. But it's an iterative process. As we're building these projects, we continue to do more research to understand how to make the action better and better and better.
I can give you some examples. One of them is the project I'm sure we'll talk about, that has to do with permitting reform, about putting renewables on top of oil and gas land. We built this amazing project that puts advocacy at concerts and sports events, for people to not just think about greening the events but actually doing civic and political action at the events. We built an AI platform that can take city policy in one place and help rewrite it so it works in other regulatory environments, so copy and pasting it into other cities based on their political environment and their regulatory environment. So we do a variety of different things, but all with that action research model: taking something where the research needs to be done and then implementing it.
BEYOND THE CELEBRITY CAUSE
Jamie Nolan: Okay. Adam Met from AJR, my daughter's favorite band. Every time she's in my car, she's like, Siri, play music by AJR on Spotify. Every day.
Jigar Shah: She's one billion of those five billion streams.
Jamie Nolan: Seriously. So most touring musicians who care about an issue lend their name to it, and then they just move on. You went and got a PhD in sustainability and built an organization that runs real advocacy campaigns. What made you want to take your involvement in climate and energy issues past just the celebrity cause version of events, and really get your hands into the actual machinery of how things happen? Because it really is different and extraordinary, and I think people will be really impressed with your level of commitment, like going and meeting with members of Congress about these issues that you care about.
Adam Met: I appreciate the kind words, Jamie. I can't do anything without doing it 10,000%. My brain does not have that ability. And I work with a lot of artists who are incredible at taking action around different issues. We've done some partnerships with Billie Eilish and her team around food and agriculture. We are on the Tame Impala tour right now, doing a bunch of advocacy with them. When artists get involved, it's incredible.
Except for me, I always wanted to get involved in something but then understand the why. I wanted to dissect it from the beginning, because with any advocacy campaign, the first question needs to be: what is the change you want to see in the world? Very few people actually start with that question. They start with the last final little step of it. If you go back to what is the change you want to see in the world, then you can build the steps: who are the people we need to get involved? What do we need to do to change their mind? How can we get them to take action? Do we need to build a movement around it? And that is more interesting to me than anything else.
I studied philosophy and sustainability undergrad, and so much of the philosophy that I studied was about people, and moving people, and what it means to have agency. There are a lot of influencers out there in the world that are trying to expose people to things in the world around them, because you're never going to care about something that you don't understand. If you really understand something at a deeper level, then you are going to start to care about it more.
When we're on tour with all of these artists, we talk about issues that are hyper local and hyper specific. We'll never do a national issue, very rarely do a statewide issue. It's about things like zoning and waste and education, and relating them all back to climate, of course, but things that impact them in their local community. So many fans come up to me when we're doing meet and greets on the road and they say, what can I do? I want to be part of something. And they say, I want to tackle climate change. And I always say, no, that's not the thing to start with. Because if you take on something really big like climate change, you're just going to be having loss after loss after loss. I always say start with something really small that you can achieve. If you can have a real win when you're first starting, that'll keep you engaged, because it'll give you the emotional connection to the thing to keep you involved long term.
Jamie Nolan: Yeah, totally. And I hear what you're saying about climate change, because it's a global issue. It's so much more than what one person can do. But what one person can do is get involved in some type of a fight in their local community, or advocate for their local police department to invest in EVs. Or, like here in my city of Alexandria, there's an environmental commission for the local government, and everything related to anything environmental or energy related goes through this commission, and they're begging for people to join every two years, for a two-year term. Those local actions and that local involvement is where the change is actually made. It starts there. So I love that you're making this feel more real for people, and more tangible than this very, very big, overwhelming global issue. If we just had millions of people taking action at the local level, little by little, that would be enough. It's a really powerful message.
GOOD STORIES VS. EFFECTIVE STORIES
Jamie Nolan: On this show, we talk constantly about how clean energy has a communications problem, and that we're not the best at advocating for ourselves and being influential. You've lived the opposite. You went from busking in Central Park with your two brothers to building one of the most devoted fan bases in music, as evidenced by my nine-year-old daughter. And you have poured that into your book, Amplify. So tell us a little bit more about the foundation here. What does a band understand about building an audience that the clean energy industry still needs to learn?
Adam Met: Great question. My book Amplify came out of me answering that question I just talked about, over and over and over, with fans: what can I do? How can I participate? I want to be involved. The music industry is so good at building fan bases and having people engage in fandom in whatever way feels most comfortable to them. Meaning they could just listen to the music, or they could chat with other fans online, or they could come to a show, or they could buy merchandise, or they can play the games that we have built for them online. It's all of these different kinds of ways in for people. All of those strategies can be applied to building better social movements, in particular around climate and around energy.
One of my favorite parts of this strategy building is the difference between good storytelling and effective storytelling. Good storytelling are the people that you see online, and you might want to share that story with your friends and family. But an effective story is one that's actually going to make you get up off your ass and do something about it. There's a real difference there. You see a lot of people who are one-hit wonders, or have music that doesn't translate to people coming out to shows. I'm not going to name any names, but this summer there have been a lot of concerts that have been announced that have been canceled, because people care about the music, but it doesn't really make them want to go out to see the artist in a show.
The connection between an effective story and then making people come out to participate in things like protests, or take action, that's where we're losing people. People care about climate. They care about the environment. We've seen all of these studies where, depending on the study you look at, more than 80% of the world believes that climate change is real and we need to be doing more about it. But they believe that their neighbors and their friends are the ones that don't actually care about it. We have an overwhelming majority. We need to take those people from hearing the good stories about it, and start telling them the effective stories that move them to action.
LORD ALMIGHTY, EXPLAIN THIS TO ME
Jigar Shah: So, I don't exactly know where I'm going with this, but I feel like, you know, Bono did the whole PEPFAR thing, right? With George W. Bush, and saved all those people in Africa. And your big issue is permitting reform. Literally, how boring is that? I'm trying to understand. You're going up against the Trump administration, who got us out of Paris, who has all these things about how they're anti clean energy. You're going up there for permitting reform. The people on your left and right are American Clean Power and the Solar Energy Industries Association, these trade association groups. Boring. Snooze fest, right? And so I'm trying to understand your model. You're like, I'm breaking it down, I got my PhD, I've got this thing, I'm going to create a fan base, I got the evangelizers in the center of the hurricane. Lord Almighty, explain this to me.
Adam Met: Yeah, absolutely. So let me take a step back. When the Inflation Reduction Act was being negotiated, before it was, you know, the IRA, I spent a lot of time in Congress running around to Republicans and to Democrats, before we knew that no Republicans were going to be supporting this bill. I talked to Republicans and I talked to Democrats for almost a year, and I did almost none of the talking. I did almost all listening, to hear where they were on the variety of these issues. And I took all of my notes back to my team at Planet Reimagined. We created a giant whiteboard to find any possible overlap between what Republicans wanted and what Democrats wanted. And what we found was the biggest area of overlap was effective land use. It wasn't going to be around the types of energy. It wasn't going to be around electrification. It was going to be around the types of land use.
So I came up with this strategy of taking oil and gas leases, of which there are about 18 million acres around the United States that have high potential to put wind or solar on top of these leases. They are technically pre-disturbed lands. They are already set aside for oil and gas, producing oil and gas, or there are wells that need to be plugged. This is land that would not disturb any additional virgin land. So it gets the people who are on the environmental side, who don't want to disturb land for new solar and new wind, it gets them on board, because this land has already been disturbed. It gets the right on board, because this land is already about engaging with oil and gas. It would create a sublease on top of this land and be working with oil and gas, so it would create additional revenue for them, but through renewable energy. It would decrease the costs for the communities, because there's already roads, there's already buildings, and we can still have these revenues go towards protecting these communities. So I'm not yet at the point where it's about building a movement and how to sell this effectively. This is: how do we find one of these kinds of solutions that we can get Republicans on board and Democrats on board?
So now we've built this strategy, we've found these leases. When I'm talking to Republicans, I was using the idea of clean energy and an all of the above energy approach, things like that. When I was talking to Democrats, obviously it was about carbon dioxide reduction and renewable energy, wind, solar, et cetera. The bills came together. There's a bill in both the House and the Senate right now, and it has Republican and Democrat support in both. I testified in front of House Natural Resources in March, and during the testimony, additional Republicans and additional Democrats announced their sponsorship of this bill. Some people so far on the right that I never thought they would be engaged at all, and some people so far on the left that I thought they would never be engaged at all. I thought I was going for the middle, kind of like 50%.
Okay, so we have that now. We have the strategy. We built a digital platform that helps the oil and gas companies and helps the renewable developers figure out where they should be putting their land, how close it is to transmission, where there is additional transmission capacity, all of the finances, everything. So we thought about all of the different stakeholders that need to be involved. We're doing a huge amount of community sentiment, and this is where it gets to your question. So apologies for the few minutes of background.
Jigar Shah: The wind up, the wind up.
Jamie Nolan: I'm on the edge of my seat, though. This is very interesting so far. By all means, proceed.
BUYING STRANGERS BEERS
Adam Met: Excellent, excellent. So now what we're doing is massive community sentiment growth in this space, in the hyperlocal communities where we have NDAs in place with the oil and gas companies that are going to be the first ones out of the gate on this kind of project. At the federal level, we're moving forward slowly. Obviously, you mentioned Trump and Doug Burgum and all of these other people are slowing things down around energy development. It's why we did state land at the same time as we were doing federal land, so that we can continue in places even if we were pausing in other places. We did not anticipate this happening, but we thought that, just in case, we want to make sure we're going in all directions at the same time.
So we started with community sentiment work in Colorado. We literally went to bars and to restaurants and hosted events and bought people beers, in order to just share the basic information with them about what this is and what would be happening in their community. We didn't ask them to do anything. We just wanted to educate them. And that was the absolute first step.
Jigar Shah: I just want to make sure I understand this. You're saying that the people who are the key to winning this battle are beer drinkers, not wine drinkers.
Adam Met: I think you added something to my narrative there. Beer as a stand-in for alcohol of their choice, how about that? But you know, people are drinking less alcohol now, so maybe we need to think of a different approach.
Jigar Shah: NA. NA.
Adam Met: Exactly. Okay, so we started with that, and that's what we did last November, in order to create a baseline to figure out what language we should be using to talk about this. And basically it came out that the simplest language is the best. You see all of these oil fields, you see all these gas production facilities. Would you be opposed if we put solar and wind on top of this land that was already disturbed? And we got a very, very positive response from that.
The next step was seeing if people would be engaged enough to start to write to their members of Congress, to advocate for them to support this kind of legislation. To see if it was exciting enough for them to actually take some sort of action. We've also brought on a couple of companies that are doing digital awareness, phone, and door-to-door knocking about this. Because, and you know this better than most, if you're going to go to utilities, you really better make sure you have really good support in the state legislature and in the communities. So we are making sure we do all of that before we bring the utilities on board as partners. That's the strategy, basically.
AN ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE COALITION
Jigar Shah: But let me ask you. When you think about the PEPFAR stuff with Bono, one of the things that you found was that the USAID community was not actually super happy about what he was doing with George W. Bush, right? It was sort of outside of that community. And I feel like the same thing is happening here. I don't think the energy for what you're doing is coming out of the traditional environmental movement. In fact, they seem blasé about permitting reform. You're bringing the energy out of a different part of the American voter base. Help me understand that dynamic that you have been witnessing.
Adam Met: So, I am focused on an all of the above stakeholder approach. Having people like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund on board is great, but we're also in conversations with a bunch of the groups that are further to the left, places like Earthjustice, which are also great. The work that we're doing will require that all of the above approach. When the IRA was signed, one of the things that Kamala Harris said when she was speaking in the Rose Garden was that it required people working really across the political spectrum. It required the Climate Defiances of the world, who were blocking roads and yelling at people in meetings, all the way to the people who were doing the pragmatic, centrist policy approaches. I see the need to have everybody on board in order to move this forward, and it's why we built this as bipartisan from the beginning.
Jamie Nolan: Totally get you. I think that every organization has its role to play, and someone's got to push from the left flank, and sometimes that's the enviros. I know it's easy for us to say, well, all they do is oppose things, they're only good at fighting projects, not good at building things. And to some extent that's true. But also, everyone has their own role to play, and the conversations behind the scenes are often really different. I say this to people all the time who don't live in DC: you know that, for the most part, these members of Congress from both sides of the aisle are friends. These people are colleagues. It looks like all they do is scream at each other on TV, but that's theater for you. That's not actually what's happening, for the most part, behind the scenes. People are coming to the table. Everyone has their personal position, and then the position of their organization or of their office or of their state, and they're advocating from those points of view. So it's often a lot more complex than it looks on the outside.
1,000 SIGNATURES AT 109 DEGREES
Jamie Nolan: But first of all, where do you get the energy? Because even listening to this, playing multiple shows at Red Rocks and having a whole political campaign built around your appearance in Colorado, incredible. But it also must be so much work, because you're already bringing in a huge production, and you're responsible for that, but now you're also bringing in this campaign. It's a really fascinating logistical problem. Do you have two teams? Do they travel with you to do the political stuff, or was that just because you're focused on Colorado right now?
Adam Met: Most of the shows that I do, we have some sort of campaign associated with. This summer we didn't do a full tour, but in the summer of 2024, we did a 50-city arena tour in the US. Every single city, I brought some people on the road with me, but we partnered with local organizations in every single city about a local issue.
I'll give you an example. We pulled into Phoenix. It was 109 degrees out, literally. And so the action that we had on site was for fans to sign a petition to get the local city council to unlock more dollars to combat extreme heat: tree cover, cooling zones, things like that. We got over a thousand signatures on the petition in that one night of the show. And that ended up moving the action at the city council forward, and ultimately ended up unlocking dollars to combat extreme heat.
Every single action we did on our tour was hyperlocal, because it goes back to what I was saying before: if people can see the impact in their communities and have a quick win around something, that'll keep them engaged really long term. With this summer, it's a little bit more hodgepodge because we're not on a tour bus doing that kind of thing. But when we're on a tour, it really is systematized local action based on where we are that night.
DATA CENTERS AND THE NARRATIVE PROBLEM
Jamie Nolan: That's amazing, and just so much work, all the coordination with all the local organizations. Really powerful on-the-ground grassroots community organizing that you all are doing. I'm really impressed. I do want to ask about data centers and AI, because that's obviously a huge topic of conversation right now. We recently had former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on the show, and she handed governors a very specific script, which was to be tough on data centers, make them pay their fair share, and give people something real, like a battery in their garage. Of course, this week we saw New York institute its first ban on, well, we could call it a pause on the construction of data centers while they figure these things out. And you think about narrative and this grassroots organizing for a living. So what should people be saying and doing around data centers? What's your perspective, and how has that come up in all of your work around grassroots organizing?
Adam Met: Oh yeah. Data centers.
Jigar Shah: Never heard of it.
Jamie Nolan: We cannot get through an episode without talking about load growth from data centers. It is absolutely the issue right now. But since you are so close to people and their local issues in our local communities, I'm just so curious how often this is coming up, and if that's something you all are thinking of organizing around.
Adam Met: Yeah. Almost every meeting that I have, data centers are a part of the conversation. Whether it's on the Common Grounds project, which is about co-location, and now we're talking to some of the hyperscalers about using this co-location model in order to bring additional power to their data centers. Or it's the kind of work that's being done at concerts and sports events, where people are advocating for more regulation around data centers. It is very much a part of our conversations all the time. And I've talked to, I think, all of the hyperscalers about their approaches.
I think the biggest problem that data centers have right now is the narrative problem. While there are approaches to data centers that are going to use a huge amount of energy, a huge amount of water, some combination of both, noise pollution in the area, I think that there are, in fact I know that there are, approaches to data centers that can actually be extremely beneficial to communities. Data centers making investments in these communities the same way we were talking about earlier, of what the renewable developers should be doing, embedding in the communities. There are opportunities for the companies behind the data centers to be funding things in these local communities.
This is a harder concept for people to wrap their minds around, but I want to talk about it anyway. AI is here, and it is here to stay, and it is going to continue to grow. So we are going to need more data centers. Of course, there are the ideas of people putting data centers underwater, there are people putting data centers up in space. The thing that is happening right now is people are putting data centers on land. So much of what philanthropy is focused on, and investment is focused on, is how do we make data centers use less water and use less energy. And I agree that that is an important piece of it. But one of the narratives that is really being left out of both the philanthropy sector and the investment sector is the role that AI itself can play in helping solve our climate change problems, in all of the different areas of climate.
Jigar Shah: I mean, we just had Amit Narayan from GridCARE on, and he's identifying 100,000 megawatts of stranded capacity in our grid using AI. And if we filled it, it would reduce everybody's bill by 10%. It's just nuts. This is why the whole moratorium that Governor Hochul put forward is batshit, right? Basically, what she's saying is, I'm not smart enough to negotiate with data centers right now, so let me pause for a year before I can get all the notes together so I can negotiate a good deal. Whereas Governor Whitmer just put out her principles, which of course were heralded by Governor Granholm right after that. This is a moment of leverage and negotiation to get something for the people.
Adam Met: Hundred percent. Hundred percent agree. Instead of it being a negative thing and a narrative, it needs to be completely reframed as an opportunity for people, for communities, for energy, for climate, for a variety of different things.
Jamie Nolan: Sure. I mean, honestly, I see what's happening with the hyperscalers, and a lot of the community opposition is really similar to a lot of the pushback that the solar industry has faced. And I think land use is a problem. I am definitely someone who cares about preserving undisturbed land for biodiversity. I think we should be preserving as much land as possible. I think smart land use makes sense. And to the extent that we can site these data centers on disturbed land, or brownfields, or in industrial areas, in places where they make sense, I think that's what they need to be doing. Because a lot of these conversations are because people don't want a data center across the street. Of course, that makes no sense. So I think a lot of these are common sense arguments around siting. Yes, water use, yes, energy use, all those issues matter. But I really think the rubber meets the road for a lot of communities on the siting and the way that land is being used in their communities. And frankly, I think all of those concerns are incredibly valid.
LOOK UP YOUR NEXT LOCAL ELECTION
Adam Met: I completely agree. And it's why, every time I do an interview about anything, even if it's a two-minute interview for an Instagram video or an hour-long podcast, the number one thing that I tell people they need to do is to look up when their next local election is, and to vote. Because those decisions about zoning, those decisions about waste, some decisions about energy, decisions about so many different things, about school boards, what your kids are being taught and what they're allowed to be taught and not allowed to be taught: that is all because of things that are decided at the hyperlocal level. Your vote is potentially thousands of times more powerful than your vote at the federal level. Please still vote in federal elections, I'm not saying don't vote in federal elections. But the percentage of people that are voting in local elections is so low right now. If you want to be part of the decision-making process around things like data centers, around things like batteries, around things like housing, waste, energy, where things are located, and education, please go look up when your next local election is, and get ten of your friends and go together and vote.
Jigar Shah: You're exactly right.
Jamie Nolan: And also get to know your local elected officials. Listen, the mayor of my city follows me on Instagram, and we are on a first-name basis. I will reach out to her, she will respond to me. You get to know these people. They work for you. And if there is an issue I care about, you better believe she's going to hear from me.
Adam Met: One of the interesting things about that is such a small percentage of people actually interact with their representatives, actually show up to community boards, actually connect with them on places like Instagram or through email or through phone. They take those few people that they hear from and extrapolate that to what they think their community wants broadly. Be one of those people that they're extrapolating from. Why not? It takes such little time. Five minutes, once a month, you can reach out to the person. And if they start to hear from you over and over again, you'll gain that level of respect, and then your voice will have that outsized impact.
Jamie Nolan: Yes. I recommend deciding the issues that you care about. For me, it's energy and environment, of course, but there are also some other things. For example, in DC, City Wildlife is a group I'm a huge supporter of, a longtime donor. They were getting their budget completely zeroed out by the DC City Council. I actually live in Alexandria, Virginia, but I sent a letter, a very thoughtfully written letter, to the member who was most well positioned to advocate for them. They had that funding restored. You can absolutely set aside one hour, once a month, to reach out on one issue that you care about to someone at the local level, and that has a very strong likelihood to really move something that you care about. So I would really highly recommend people spend a little bit of time looking into who represents them, and start to plug in on the topics that matter the most to them.
Jigar Shah: Yeah. Just to reinforce the point, the data center approval process goes through your local county and your local city. It doesn't go through the governor. Maybe the sales and use tax exemption goes through the governor, but the actual siting of the data center goes through your local officials. And if you don't vote for them, then you don't have the right advocate there. The same thing is true with the fact that a lot of kids get sick on school buses, because diesel school buses leak carbon monoxide into the cabin. That's why people are moving to electric school buses. If that matters to you, that decision is made at the local level. Uber and Lyft drivers, if you want them to convert to electric vehicles, that's controlled by the taxicab commission at your local county. All of these issues are local. If you want auxiliary dwelling units to go in the back of people's houses, if you want zoning reforms so that people can have more density, especially near transit, those kinds of places. I totally agree. It's crazy to me how many people go try to talk to governors or House of Representatives officials for stuff that's actually local.
Adam Met: Not a lot of people know who their representative is in Congress, but more people know their representative, more people know their senator. And while representatives are great, they're really focused on getting money allocated to projects in those communities, as opposed to ensuring that the communities are being protected. That really is done at the local level. I find it really sad that we're not focused more on local officials, and I wish I could be doing more about that, but I don't have that much time.
Jamie Nolan: You're a busy man, and you're doing a lot of good.
THE SECRET PLAN
Jigar Shah: Get on it, Adam. You can't get that Bono-like success without a little more effort. But one thing I wanted to dig in on with the time we have remaining is the permitting reform piece. Because we talked about what you were doing, and that was super informative, but we didn't actually go through why you were doing it. Why does this issue matter all that much? We clearly have lots of things we could work on, but this is the one that you think is the wedge, right? Or the most important issue.
Adam Met: Yeah. So there are a couple of reasons. My whole life has been about figuring out ways to bring people together effectively. And because energy is such a divisive issue in the United States, I was focused on energy from the beginning. My PhD looks at large-scale energy projects around the world, and how to build in human rights frameworks so that we're protecting communities from zero as these projects are being built. So when I was running around Congress, I had a little bit of the forethought that I don't want things to change so significantly depending on who is in power in the executive, or who has the Senate, or who has the House. I wanted to figure out an energy strategy that could work regardless. So I wanted to figure out one that was bipartisan from the beginning. And that's why I did as much listening as possible as I was running around, to figure out this overlap between Republicans and Democrats. It wasn't about the fact that I am so deeply passionate about permitting itself. It was that I found this is a way that we can bring people together, so that we don't have to change tack depending on what happens in any given election, that can still move our energy goals forward.
Jigar Shah: But it is a big issue, right? When you think about it, we have 2,000 gigawatts of wind and solar development that's held up because of permitting issues. We have transmission lines that could reduce the cost of electricity for everybody across the country that are held up for ten years waiting on permitting reform. So there's actually a lot here. We can help make things more affordable for people if this thing gets solved.
Adam Met: I'll reveal to you my secret plan, but please don't tell anybody else. When this bill passes, and for the nerds out there, it creates a CatEx, which is a categorical exclusion, for renewables on top of oil and gas leases. It basically cuts through a lot of the red tape and allows us to reuse the environmental data that's already been gathered, so we don't have to go out and start from scratch. It'll cut years out of the process of approving these projects. That's what the bill does. Now imagine if we could do the same thing for new transmission, running it along the same rights of way as oil and gas pipelines. That is potentially an even bigger win than the bill that I have in place right now. If we can get this bill passed, it'll open the conversation to the transmission conversation, which I think has even more potential. So that's my secret plan for why I want this CatEx approach to co-location to pass. If we already have that in a bipartisan fashion, then we can do the same thing for grid upgrades and building new grids, in order to get online all of the energy that, Jigar, you were just talking about.
Jamie Nolan: Well, your secret's safe with us. We will not tell anyone that that's what you're trying to do.
THE CLIMATE MOVEMENT SHOULDN'T EXIST
Jamie Nolan: All right, so I want to end on the election. Clean energy obviously has been politicized. The midterms are coming. I'm almost to the point where I'm going to count down the days. And your entire life's work is about turning people who quietly agree into people who actually show up and do things and actually get the work done.
Jigar Shah: You're going to be a failure if this doesn't get across the finish line, Adam.
Adam Met: Of what, the election? You mean I'm going to be a failure if the election doesn't happen? Because I don't know about that.
Jamie Nolan: Don't even put that thought out into the world. The election is definitely happening. So at this moment, what do you think clean energy supporters should be doing to energize this movement? And where do you think maybe the direction that they've used in the past is a little off base? What should we be doing differently?
Adam Met: I think talking about climate change as a concept is bad. I have a very unpopular opinion on this, but I think the climate movement as a whole shouldn't exist. I think we need to be dividing it up into different movements: around energy, around agriculture, around construction and production of things. That is so much more concrete, and that makes it so much more relatable for people. By trying to build a climate change movement, it is something that is really hard to achieve. Net zero is so far away from people. 1.5 degrees, what does that even mean to anybody? If we make them small and concrete, that's how you're going to get people out.
But even more than that, and this is what I was just talking to American Clean Power about, and what I've talked to SEIA about: even in just the energy space, it needs to be hyper targeted and hyper specific to that community. I'll give you an example. Ann Arbor, Michigan has done this amazing policy around geothermal, which is called neighborhood decarbonization. This is not going to work everywhere in the US, but this is why focusing on things locally makes so much sense. Neighborhood decarbonization, for those of you who don't know, is when you are pulling up the gas lines to replace them, and instead you replace them with hot water that is powered by geothermal. That way you are able to decarbonize a block or a neighborhood at a time, as opposed to creating incentives to put solar on individual people's houses. That's great too, but this is the kind of policy that works in Ann Arbor, works in places like Boston. It'll work in a couple of cities in California, a few other places. We're right now working on applying that policy to Columbus. This is the AI tool that we built, that can take a policy and help it work in other places. It's called Grapevine.
I think local narratives are going to be key. And as politicians are running, they need to do better around making the narratives personal and making them local. When you're running for Congress and you get talking points from the DNC, or anybody at the federal level, that is not going to be the thing that helps you win. You can look at really successful races that just happened. I live in New York City. Mamdani is a great example of a really successful communication strategy. It was hyper local, hyper specific, and he built this movement of people. If you can find those kinds of solutions that are going to inspire people, like neighborhood decarbonization, you won't have to be dealing with dirty gas in your neighborhood. We can easily replace it for the whole community at once, and you'll have clean energy in your homes quickly. That is the kind of thing that is going to inspire people. It's something new and innovative and exciting and outside the box.
One of the reasons why we're having such flipping back and forth between Republicans and Democrats in all of these different races is people are looking for change. They want something different. They want something creative, they want something outside the box, and they want something inspiring. The energy conversation can be that, if we make it that. If we're just using the same old talking points about solar that we've been using for the last ten years, it's never going to be that. The election is going to be successful if we frame this kind of energy as something new and clean and cheaper for people.
Jigar Shah: Wow.
Jamie Nolan: Amazing. You got spicy there for a second: don't talk about climate change. But I think your point is really well made, and we talk about this a lot on the pod. There's a lot of debate right now, should we be leaning into climate or not? And I think you've just made the strongest case that we have heard for making it hyper local, hyper relevant to people's daily lives, and that that's basically where we win hearts and minds.
Jigar Shah: I feel like that's your official point of view, Jamie.
Jamie Nolan: It is, but I like it when people double click on my point of view. A rock star has just come on our podcast.
Jigar Shah: I see, I see. And my point of view has always been similar, which is that a price on carbon doesn't make any sense. You need sectoral policy, policy that's focused on industrial emissions, transportation, et cetera. I totally agree with you. I hope we put 1.5 degrees to bed forever.
Adam Met: Agreed. Agreed. Not the concept, but the way we get there.
Jigar Shah: We'll achieve it, but I don't want to talk about how.
Jamie Nolan: We can do it, but we don't need to be talking about it in the rooms in which we have been discussing it. I think that's the takeaway.
A QUESTION FROM FIONA
Jamie Nolan: So, as I was mentioning, my nine-year-old daughter was heartbroken that she could not perch in the corner for this conversation, because she is such a massive fan of yours. So she did want to take a little video to ask you a question, which she was trying to work on for weeks. She finally came forward with something for you.
Fiona: Hi Adam. My question is, what's your favorite part about being in the band? Peace.
Adam Met: Peace to you too, Fiona. That is an awesome question. My favorite part about being in the band is the live performances. We try and build our shows like a Broadway show, so there's storytelling, there's different set pieces, there's a lot of visuals. And I love being on stage and seeing people scream our songs back to us, and seeing smiling faces. So I hope I can see you at a show soon, Fiona.
Jamie Nolan: Amazing, thank you. Well, since she wasn't able to come home for this interview, I promised her that next time you're in town, I will take her.
Adam Met: Deal. We'll make it happen.
Jigar Shah: Yay. Love it.
Adam Met: Thank you so much for inviting me. This was so great.
Jigar Shah: Thanks, Adam, for being on. And I do think we're going to get permitting reform. And when we do, we're going to have you back on and celebrate.
Adam Met: Let's do it.
DEBRIEF
Jigar Shah: Wow, Jamie. I knew that he was cool, but I just didn't know how cool. The level of sophistication behind what he was doing was just next level.
Jamie Nolan: I will admit I was not expecting his sophisticated understanding of grassroots organizing. He really understands how to elicit engagement from people.
Jigar Shah: It was next level. Next level. The thing that I loved, though, was that when he first came on, I thought that frame behind him was a piece of art, but it turned out to be a mirror. And so when he was using his hands to talk, sometimes I could see his hand in the mirror. I was distracted.
Jamie Nolan: You were distracted. Jigar, we just did a recording, this is not the Adam Met episode, where a whole person was walking around behind you for like half the recording. So keep an eye out for that Where's Waldo moment in a future episode, folks.
Jigar Shah: That's probably my mother. Yeah, no, that's so true. And I really do think his next step, right, I mean, he was raised in Brooklyn, then went to Columbia, and now lives in Chelsea. His next step is going to have to be mayor.
Jamie Nolan: Truly. I don't know where the man finds the time. I'm humbled by him. And after we finished the recording, we were shooting the shit about coming to New York for some upcoming events, and he's like, yeah, we should get together. And so, I mentioned my nine-year-old daughter is obsessed with his band, and after the recording I was like, Fiona, I might be friends with him. We might be friends now. I don't know.
Jigar Shah: You are milking this for everything you can, to get in good with your daughter.
Jamie Nolan: Listen, it's really, really hard to be cool to a nine-year-old girl. I have entered the phase of tween parenting where she is frequently embarrassed by me, so I will take whatever I can get. And this has earned me goodwill for months, at least. I mean, I'm really excited about it. And obviously I was also very impressed with him. So I guess you could say my fan worship of Adam is reaching my daughter's level. Not just because of the music, that's great, but he is a really effective climate and energy activist.
Jigar Shah: No, I think it's wonderful. Well, in any case, it's such a great episode, and really a master class in communications.
ASK JIGAR
Jamie Nolan: Welcome to Ask Jigar, our weekly segment where Jigar answers your questions about energy, and honestly, anything else you're wondering about. Huge thanks to our sponsor, Octopus Energy, for making this segment possible. And a quick reminder: anyone who sends in a question that Jigar answers on the air gets an Energy Empire hat from our merch shop. So send them in.
CHINA AND THE SUPPLY CHAIN
Jamie Nolan: All right, Jigar, let's get into it. Our first question is from AJ Cortese, who says: Jigar, what's the optimal role for Chinese technology in America's energy future? And separately, what's the realistic level, given the political climate in DC?
Jigar Shah: Well, look, we all have to admit the fact that China is 70 to 90 percent of every supply chain that is essential to modern life, from critical minerals to solar panels and battery manufacturing to, increasingly, parts for nuclear power plants and lots of other things. They clearly dominate a lot of supply chains. So I don't think this is about banning China from accessing US markets as much as it's about trying to diversify the supply chain, in the same way that we diversified where we got oil from after the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s. We want more diversification of the supply chain so no one country can use these supply chains as a weapon against the clean energy future. So I'm not anti China, or their manufacturing prowess, or how they brought the costs of everything down. But what I am pro is us diversifying our supply chain for essential things that we have to use to be able to meet AI load growth and EV charging and all the other things.
FUEL CELLS FOR DATA CENTERS
Jamie Nolan: Awesome. Totally agree. Very measured response on that one, Jigar. No hot takes there, you were right down the fairway with that one. Our next question is from Bruno Grandsard, who says: Jigar, you're pretty dismissive of behind-the-meter gas turbines for data centers because of the load cycling mismatch. That is an understatement, and if you're interested in this topic, go listen to Jigar's recent episode of Open Circuit, his other podcast, where he talks about this. But what about solid oxide fuel cells, like what Bloom Energy and Ceres Power offer? They run on natural gas but promise higher efficiency and a pathway to lower emissions. Long-term solution for data centers, or no?
Jigar Shah: This is so hard, because ultimately, I think part of the message I'm sending people is that the very best way to power data centers is on the grid. So when you decide to build all of these behind-the-meter gas resources, what they are is just backup power for the grid. And so if the data center companies want to spend, I think right now they're up to $50 billion that they're spending on behind-the-meter gas plants, great. Then next time we might have a rolling blackout, we'll run their gas plants and be able to save the grid. That's a great service they're providing for everybody. Once you go to fuel cells, though, those are not peaker plants. You can't just keep them off and maintained and then turn them on when you need them. Fuel cells run 24/7. And that's difficult to fathom, because right now these fuel cells cost like 18 cents a kilowatt-hour to provide power to the grid, and on the grid, normally, the power is at like four cents. I don't know why you would want to pay 18 cents when you can get it at four cents. Everyone says speed to power and all that stuff, but I feel like if everyone focused all of their hard-earned money and time and expertise on fixing the grid that we have, we'd have a collective good for everybody, instead of being selfish around how to get speed to power in a way that doesn't help anybody.
THE UK COUNTEREXAMPLE
Jamie Nolan: Great response. Okay, our next question is from Rhys Goodall, who says: Jigar, you often talk about how good the UK's grid management is, but power in the UK is much more expensive than it is here in the United States. Isn't that a counterexample to the idea that just using the grid better would bring prices down significantly? If not, why not?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, it's a great question, and one that has a lot of different answers to it. The UK has really done some extraordinary things around demand flexibility and figuring out how to really transact a smart grid. They've also been deploying dynamic line ratings, advanced conductors, a lot of the things that we've been advocating for that could reduce prices. But the other thing that they did was they decided that they were going to deploy batteries and that kind of stuff in a very slow and chaotic manner. And so what's happened is they've had to keep a lot of their natural gas plants operating for much longer than they expected. And natural gas actually prices the grid in the UK. They are importing liquefied natural gas, and when the natural gas plants have to run, which is pretty often, they end up having to pay these very high prices on the wholesale power market. And everyone pays that price, because the way wholesale market prices work is that the most expensive kilowatt-hour is what everybody gets paid, even the cheaper kilowatt-hours. So they're trying to create reforms there now.
And then the last thing, which is the hardest thing about the UK, is that they have not had any load growth, or growth in kilowatt-hour sales. So when you have to pay for all of that maintenance, all of that replacement of old equipment, and not have sales growth, then you end up not being able to spread that cost across a larger amount of kilowatt-hours. That's why the UK, I think, is finally chasing load growth through EV sales, through data center load growth, through new manufacturing facilities, et cetera. And so I think as the UK gets a lot more kilowatt-hour sales, you're going to find that the UK will be able to reduce their cost by 20%.
JIGAR FOR OFFICE
Jamie Nolan: All right, the final question, and this is my favorite question of the day, is from Tom Simpson, who says: Jigar, pretend you're running for office. What's your campaign message in one line, and what's issue number one on your platform?
Jigar Shah: That America is the best place in the world to realize your dreams. And we have got to clear the path of all of the unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy that keeps people from reaching those dreams. We invent everything here, and we should be able to deploy it, manufacture it, and get rich with it.
Jamie Nolan: Love it. American ingenuity for the win.