Transcript
Introduction
Jigar Shah: Hello, my name is Jigar Shah and I'm a clean energy entrepreneur.
Jamie Nolan: And I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications consultant, and this is Energy Empire. Welcome to the show. Hi, Jigar, how's it going?
Jigar Shah: We had a fantastic launch. I thought it was so great. I got tons of positive comments and I think people are hungry for the personal story behind the story.
Jamie Nolan: Yeah, I think it went great. I was very nervous, but my friends were so supportive and lifted me up. We really appreciate all the LinkedIn posts and all the love. Keep it coming, keep the reviews coming — rate, review, and subscribe, as they say. Thank you so much for the support, and stay tuned because we have a lot of very exciting guests planned.
Jigar Shah: I got a lot of feedback that the only reason they're listening is you, so I appreciate you being on this journey with me.
Jamie Nolan: Thank you. All these energy podcasts feel so bro-y, so it's nice to have some female energy in the conversation.
Jigar Shah: We're bringing on one of our good friends today, Arnab Pal. As you know, we worked with him at the Loan Programs Office, but more importantly, he's just a fantastic friend and collaborator. He has always had way better political instincts than me, and he's kept me out of a lot of messes I otherwise would have gotten myself into.
Jamie Nolan: That's definitely true. Between the two of us — him on the political front and myself on the media front — we were very focused on trying to keep you from putting your foot in your mouth.
Jigar Shah: I think the technical term is "stepping in it."
Jamie Nolan: I think we were mostly effective at that. Arnab founded a clean energy advocacy group called Deploy Action that is really doing something very different from any other group in the space.
Jigar Shah: The thing I love about it is — we're clearly in a very crowded space, lots of organizations — but Arnab has a dispassionate perspective that I find really endearing. The work matters to him, don't get me wrong. But what he really cares about is making governors look good, which is what governors actually want. There are a lot of trade associations and others who want what they want and don't care what the governors want. Arnab comes at it asking: how do I make sure the politician looks good out of this? And so they're enthusiastic about working with him. That is a completely different point of view than most folks have in the advocacy space.
Jamie Nolan: I know you've been involved in Deploy Action from the very beginning, Jigar. What's your role there and how do you support their work?
Jigar Shah: When Arnab came out with his plan, I helped fundraise for it, so I'm board chair at Deploy Action. Every once in a while he needs me to show up and press the flesh with legislators in California or other places to get people enthusiastic about the work. I'm happy to be helpful.
Jamie Nolan: I'm excited for our audience to get to know Arnab and Deploy Action and learn more about what they're trying to do and why.
Interview: Arnab Pal
### From KPMG to AmeriCorps to Capitol Hill
Jamie Nolan: Arnab, you're the executive director of the clean energy advocacy group Deploy Action. Before that, we were all colleagues at the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, where you and I were senior consultants advising Jigar on political and media strategy. Tell us a little more about how you got your start in energy.
Arnab Pal: It all started at a KPMG job. I think we've all been through this when we're young — we take a job for the money. I was 23 years old wondering: am I just going to do this the rest of my life? Show up at 8 a.m., leave at 8 p.m., eat California Pizza Kitchen on the way out the door in downtown LA.
Jigar Shah: California through and through.
Arnab Pal: Right across from the KPMG tower. That's also where I realized I didn't want to be a lawyer — I would go home at 8 p.m. and all the lawyers at Latham & Watkins would take their CPK to go and head back to the office. I was like, yeah, I'm not doing that for a living.
So I became an AmeriCorps volunteer for a year to figure out my life. I worked for Goodwill Industries, then went to grad school — twice. Anyone listening to this podcast: you do not need to do grad school twice.
Jigar Shah: Did you get anything from Goodwill that you still own today?
Arnab Pal: Tons of stuff. The Goodwills in Palo Alto and San Francisco have really nice clothing for cheap — brand new, essentially, 90% off. I think I still own a coat from Goodwill.
Jigar Shah: It's good to be a value shopper.
Arnab Pal: That's why we're friends. You like to eat at Panera Bread and I like to buy cheap clothes.
### The CIA, Ed Markey, and the IRA
Jigar Shah: When and how did you get to D.C.?
Arnab Pal: It was all done by Zoom, because it was 2020, during COVID. At the time I'd been watching Homeland every night and I really wanted to work for the CIA — which is what you do during COVID when you're bored and don't know what's going on. I applied, got through the first round, and I don't think I got any further than that. And if I did, I don't think I'm allowed to say.
Jigar Shah: Your charisma wasn't enough to get into the CIA.
Jamie Nolan: Enough for KPMG, but not enough for the CIA. Not enough rizz for that.
Arnab Pal: I was pretty disappointed. But I also got a call from an old mentor — I had interned in D.C. in college — who said the congressman he worked for at the time, Ed Markey, who's now a senator, needed a new energy advisor. His last one had gone to the administration. So I interviewed on Zoom and basically gave the pitch for why I thought I could help them pass a climate bill. They bought it. So I went from Zoom in California to D.C. in 2021, and I spent the next two years working on what became the Inflation Reduction Act.
A lot of what we do today is shaped by the fact that we were able to get something really big done — and keep some of it from repeal in 2025. The two things I learned from that experience: one, nobody really knows what they're doing or has any projections on what's going to happen. The key is to stay ready, because anyone who worked with me knew there was a very slim shot we were ever going to get anything done. And somehow in the end, it all worked out.
What happened was — and this is what we'll get into later — when President Biden got elected, a lot of promises were made and everyone was afraid to break them. So we were all pretending like we could pass a bill for six trillion dollars. Deep down, everybody knew that wasn't even close to possible. It took 18 months to come to terms with reality. In the end, we got a little lucky, with a lot of skill in the background from really smart senators and members of Congress. And we were able to salvage something that became the Inflation Reduction Act.
Jigar Shah: So we were really close to not having an IRA at all.
Arnab Pal: Absolutely.
Jigar Shah: That was the likely scenario. We snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
Arnab Pal: If there had been prediction markets, and if staffers had been allowed to bet in them, everyone would have bet against us.
### From the Loan Programs Office to Deploy Action
Jigar Shah: After you served in the U.S. Senate, you left and joined us at the Loan Programs Office. We had gotten this incentive program — the State Energy Financing Initiative — and we were not getting enough loan volume from California, weirdly, even though we were getting accused of sending all the money to blue states. I sent you to California to figure out what was going on. What did you find?
Arnab Pal: To be fair, it wasn't just California. In a lot of the places where we expected interest in our programs — New York, California, Massachusetts — there wasn't the kind of uptake we thought there would be. Whereas there was tons of activity in Georgia, Michigan, Tennessee. Part of it is that a lot of what we did was tax credit and loan based, and you need to be willing to build projects. People are less likely to want to build big projects in California and New York than in those other states.
Jigar Shah: So that led you in some ways to start Deploy Action. Tell us the origin story.
Arnab Pal: We started thinking about Deploy Action — and I use the proverbial "we" because there are so many people involved — in the fall of 2024. The idea was: if there's going to be four more years of the Inflation Reduction Act, we should work in these states and get them ready to really bring the money in. Not the grant dollars — there are always cities and counties and groups set up for that. The question was: who's going to help project developers actually want to build those projects so we can capture the tax credit dollars and the loan dollars, which are the really big pieces?
Even after the election went the way it did, we realized these states still need help. There's a different paradigm needed. If you're going to be a state that's a clean energy champion, you need to actually champion the building of those projects and make sure you don't have one set of constituents who want to protect the environment but also want to stop projects from getting developed — and another set of constituents who are trying to develop projects and getting blocked. All the while, these states have bold goals to build so much clean energy.
### What Is Deploy Action?
Jamie Nolan: What is Deploy Action?
Arnab Pal: Deploy Action is a 501(c)(4) with a 501(c)(3) sister organization — Deploy Action Fund — dedicated to building out clean energy affordably in the states. We start with the states that have always wanted this, that have built the policies for this, and are now having trouble actually getting across the finish line on the bold goals they've put out there.
Jigar Shah: There are a lot of clean energy organizations out there — trade associations, environmental nonprofits, advocacy groups. Why does Deploy actually need to exist?
Arnab Pal: The policy rationale is what I just explained. But the other piece is really looking back in time. I go back to 2017 when Trump was first elected. The environmental movement was extremely successful over the next four years — they made climate change the number one issue for a new Democratic president and Congress, which just wasn't the case in previous administrations. And going back to the IRA days, as we moved toward chopping off parts of Build Back Better, the last thing that remained standing was the clean energy tax credits and climate mitigation pieces — because of the narrative developed by green groups that said this is our existential crisis.
That was successful. But when I thought about whether to run that playbook again, I also thought about what we failed at: while climate is a very popular issue, it's not a strong issue — it's never people's top one, two, or three. So when I look at how we rebuild in 2025, I didn't want this to be just a climate or environmental group. I wanted it to address an issue people cared about every day: their pocketbook. That's always been a top-three issue. My thinking is that if we build an organization that addresses clean energy deployment through the lens of affordability, we can be not just popular, but a forceful issue people actually vote on.
Jigar Shah: There's some nuance here, though. The environmental groups had their own political rails — they elected people to office. But oftentimes they couldn't get to the finish line with just those rails. They needed labor, they needed other groups. Part of what you recognized in California, and in Virginia and other places, is that each state has its own mix of reasons why things pass or don't. You've been more scientific about studying it.
Arnab Pal: This is inside baseball versus outside baseball. When it comes to inside baseball, the environmental groups have been around a long time and are trusted as advisors. They're technically very sound. But ultimately they don't deliver votes in state capitals the way a healthcare organization would, or a labor organization would. They really need to partner with the people who can bring those votes — in the halls of Albany and Sacramento and other state capitals, but also on the ground. When someone runs for state office in California on the Democratic side, which is almost three-quarters of the legislature, they generally run their campaign out of the IBEW office, not the NRDC office.
Jigar Shah: A lot of people in the clean energy area try to claim they're going to stay above the fray — nonpartisan, bipartisan — but you are right in the middle of the fray.
Arnab Pal: We're nonpartisan. We'll work with anyone. We have bills we've championed that have gotten unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats. When you're thinking about California and New York or more Democratic states, you tend to be working with one side of the aisle because that's where the action is. And look — when you're a state legislator, especially in a consensus state with one party, you have a lot of power with the pen. Making sure the right people are elected and in the right committee chairs is how good policy happens. A lot of California's early climate policy happened because the right people were in the right places. It's not enough to write bills and post on social media. You have to champion the people who champion you.
### Measurable Impact: Grid Utilization
Jigar Shah: Can you give me an example of your impact — where you've helped move policy or driven measurable results?
Arnab Pal: One of the things we're really focused on is the utilization of the grid. To really address affordability, you need to control the costs of building infrastructure. We've worked with partners in the business and environmental community on the concept that utilities should use more of their existing infrastructure. We've already seen that legislation pop up in multiple states. There's a bill in Virginia that the governor has championed that has made tremendous progress. So we're already seeing our impact in less than a year.
Jamie Nolan: If you zoom out five years, what does winning look like for Deploy Action?
Arnab Pal: I go back to the template of what I saw between 2017 and 2021. Winning is everyone acknowledging that the next generation of the clean energy and climate fight is not so much about getting people to buy into the existential crisis — though it obviously is one — but getting folks to realize that what this industry does benefits their lives every day, not just humanity over the next 50,000 years.
Success is taking that and putting it into frameworks that states can push. But it's also building a national platform — and that's not just going to be Deploy Action, it's got to be a whole host of groups working together, so that the next time there's an opportunity to address the grid and clean energy, there is an affordability plan that every consumer in America is going to benefit from.
### The White Paper: Grid Growth, Utilization, and Affordability
### Are Governors About to Get Blindsided?
Jamie Nolan: Arnab, you and Jigar are co-authors of a new white paper dropping today called Grid Growth, Utilization, and Affordability. It's meant to be a playbook for states, governors, regulators, and other state officials on energy affordability. Are governors about to get blindsided by a grid affordability crisis?
Arnab Pal: I don't know if they'll get blindsided, but they're about to deal with a real affordability crisis. They're well aware of it — that's the motivation behind putting the time into this paper.
Jigar Shah: There's sort of a tale of two governors here. Governor Spanberger and Governor Sherrill both got elected at the same time. Governor Spanberger has really pushed the grid utilization concept and gotten a tremendous amount of people enthusiastic about it — folks in the grid utilization category, distributed energy resources, battery storage, reforming the way utilities deploy innovation. There's a big tent of enthusiasm, not just from entrepreneurs but from capital that wants to run toward solving this problem. We need a lot of investment to drive affordability through innovation.
Arnab Pal: These are common sense ideas — use more of the existing grid, incorporate distributed resources to address reliability, grid enhancing technologies, rate design. The issue is that this isn't top of mind for anyone. There's always something shinier: a new EV program, a grant program, taking poles and wires away from PG&E and starting a new utility. But if the shiniest thing out there is bringing down costs for people, this is the object we should all be looking at.
Jigar Shah: People don't know this, but since the global financial crisis in 2008, the cost of electricity generation has actually come down in inflation-adjusted terms. The fact that bills are really expensive right now is driven by increases in the cost of the transmission and distribution grid that serves us. With grid enhancing technologies, for example, we currently measure the capacity of our transmission grid using a slide rule. With modern sensors, you can actually unlock 30 to 40 percent more capacity out of that existing grid.
The same is true with batteries. We have a lot of generation that goes underutilized because the transmission grid is clogged. If you put batteries on both sides of the transmission grid, you can use it more efficiently. When it's not fully utilized, use it to charge batteries on the other side, closer to customers — batteries at Walmart stores, community centers, churches, government facilities, people's homes. That alleviates the traffic jam on the grid for the several hundred hours a year where there's congestion. And it's way cheaper — about 90 percent cheaper — than building new generation, upgrading transmission, and upgrading distribution, which is the old familiar playbook utilities have used for 50-plus years. A lot of the technologies we're talking about have been in pilot for 20 years. It's not new technology — it just hasn't been scaled up.
Arnab Pal: It's human nature — when something's comfortable, you stick with it. But we are in a very uncomfortable moment. In Northern California, it's pretty normal to have an $800 or $1,300 utility bill. Same in many parts of the East Coast. That's not comfortable anymore. What we're trying to do — sometimes nicely, sometimes not — is say: here's an effective way that might be a little uncomfortable, but it's going to allow you to run your business and save everyone a lot of money. After we explain it, people get it. But you've got to explain it about ten more times.
### Virtual Power Plants: The Fastest Megawatts We Can Build
Jamie Nolan: In the paper, you make a pretty bold claim that virtual power plants are the fastest megawatts we can build. Are VPPs really that impactful? Can you draw the line to how they lower costs?
Jigar Shah: It really is a sea change. The way utilities work today: as a residential or commercial customer, you can turn everything on in your house at the same time and the utility has an obligation to serve you. As a result, they keep overbuilding the distribution system. If five of your neighbors get an electric vehicle, they think: just in case they all plug in at the same time, we'll have to upgrade the substation for another $50 million.
But all of this stuff is digital — you can control it on an app on your phone. If you say you're willing to subscribe to a virtual power plant because you don't care when your EV charges, as long as it's full by morning — you're plugged in for 13 hours and it only takes two and a half hours to fully charge — then a computer program can make sure not all five cars are charging at the exact same time. Same with electric water heaters and heat pumps. Carrier now has a battery they install in next-generation heat pumps to avoid peak demand issues. These are features that come with new appliances. You don't have to buy something custom to subscribe into a VPP.
Part of the challenge right now is that consumers are happy to take a 20 percent discount on their bill to subscribe to a VPP, but the utility also has to have a computer program on their side to actually use that virtual power plant to make the grid they've already paid for work more efficiently. We're headed in that direction — there are over 433 utility VPP programs in effect now across the country, across 2,000-plus utilities. Almost 20 percent of all utilities in the country have one of these programs, and more are adding them every month because they don't have any other choice. They can't keep raising rates 9 percent a year.
Jigar Shah: Look at Duke Energy. They had a very robust plan to invest in their grid to meet load growth, and they just increased that plan by another 18 percent — building new central natural gas generation, upgrading transmission and distribution. They separately have 7,200 megawatts of utility-scale solar in North Carolina that they already have contracts with. None of those projects have batteries. The hyperscalers have already offered to install batteries at all of those locations, which would dramatically reduce rates for everyone in the state. Duke finds that weird — I get it, they haven't done that before. But Lord Almighty, they're asking for a 15 percent rate increase right now to implement their current plan.
Arnab Pal: Jigar uses virtual power plants as the ultimate utilization tool, but there are many ways to do this. It's a broad term. One thing we've been looking at: is there a program to procure front-of-the-meter distributed batteries — which used to be called community storage — and corresponding community solar? Can we do that to ease the burden on the distribution system and bring down costs? Utilities can rate-base, procure, own, or be a part of that. This is not a violation of the utility business model. We're not telling them to stop existing. We're just telling them they need to fundamentally change what they're doing — and it will work for them in the long term.
### How Are Utilities Receiving This?
Jamie Nolan: How is this being received by utilities?
Arnab Pal: Nobody disagrees with the problem. Everybody agrees this is a potential solution. The pushback is: there's a reason we don't utilize the grid more — we have to account for reliability, and equipment could go bad if used past a certain point. But sometimes they're missing the point. They have a set of arguments they reach for whenever anyone poses something different. What we're trying to say is: if you're utilizing 50 percent of your grid, you could utilize it at 65 or even 70 percent and still hit all your reliability targets. This is more about a culture shift. The culture has been: our number one priority is to keep the lights on. Now your number one priority is to keep the lights on and bring costs down. The really smart people in the distribution and transmission planning groups at these utilities can do both. We need to shift that culture.
Jigar Shah: Digging a little deeper into the culture change piece — the CEOs and CFOs of all the utilities are essentially required to be in sync with the governor, because the governor of the state actually regulates their utility. They get it. They can't keep raising rates this fast. Their Wall Street analysts get it too — "you want to raise more equity over the next five years than you've raised in the entire history of your utility company?" They're sort of secretly, or not so secretly, saying: we like this grid utilization stuff, because it allows us to blame the state legislature and the governor for forcing us to do it. And it forces the regulators to act — regulators who don't think they currently have the mandate to regulate grid utilization from the utilities. So the regulators are saying: this gives me another tool to keep rates down. And the CEO and CFO are saying: thanks, because now I don't have to say this is my idea. Right now, utilities make more money by spending more money. It's not odd to me that they want to keep doing that.
### The White Paper's Bottom Line
Jamie Nolan: What do you want governors or regulators to take away from this report? One sentence, what should they get from going to deploy-action.org and downloading the playbook?
Arnab Pal: The pathway to both controlling and reducing rates for your customers is to get utilities to smartly use more of their existing infrastructure.
Jigar Shah: The only thing I'd add is that load growth is your friend. If we accommodate load growth in a way that uses these modern technologies, rates might go down. Everyone is weirdly obsessed with making sure rates don't go up as fast — I don't think they realize that if you follow this report, rates could actually go down. That's pretty awesome.
Arnab Pal: And let's clarify that, because these two things are tied at the hip. There are people going around saying: if we have more customers and we divide our costs by more customers, rates will go down — simple math. That's true in theory. What has historically happened is that when we bring in more customers, the cost of building infrastructure to serve those customers exceeds the benefit of having them. So rates go up. If you mandate — or suggest, or whatever you want to call it — grid utilization, then you can do what Jigar said: more customers, but using less incremental infrastructure for each one.
Jigar Shah: Using modern technology to take grid utilization from roughly 40 to 50 percent, where it is today for most utilities, up to 70 percent — which is where it was 30 or 40 years ago — is possible. That doesn't mean we don't have to build new generation or really hard-to-build long transmission projects. We should do all of that. But right now, in this moment where everyone feels like we're in a crisis, we have the tools. We've piloted them. They're ready to be deployed. And if we do it correctly, we can reduce rates for everybody.
### The Political Debate: Matt Iglesias vs. Sean Casten
Jigar Shah: There was a little fight started recently by Matt Iglesias's New York Times op-ed, which basically seemed to say we all need to be pro-oil and gas. Our friend Representative Sean Casten went to town on that on Twitter. Can you break that down for us? Because I do think it matters how folks are positioning themselves going into the 2026 midterms and 2028.
Arnab Pal: There are two different thoughts here. Matt Iglesias is basically saying: when we were "all of the above" like Barack Obama was, we used to win elections. Now we don't, and it's because we've become climate zealots — I'm overstating his position a bit. And Sean Casten's response is: the world is on fire, and leadership isn't reading polls, it's moving them. I think it's a bit of a false choice. The reason we won elections 15 years ago had nothing to do with supporting oil and gas. We need a new North Star. "All of the above" in 2026 doesn't necessarily mean cheaper — and cheaper is what we need to help people every day. We now know that bringing down people's costs isn't necessarily accomplished by opening a new natural gas plant. My answer to the debate: we should not hide away from climate, because people still care and it's a popular issue — not a forceful one, but popular. But we need to address people's actual problems, not get into a binary of gas and oil versus solar and wind. People look at it as: how much did I spend on my utility bill this month?
Jigar Shah: When we were serving in office, I don't remember ever vilifying the oil and gas industry. There are hundreds of thousands of extraordinary people who work in that industry. Some of them do really dangerous jobs. That said, their stock price reflects analysts saying they'll dividend out all their profits for the rest of time and discounting it back. They're trading at 12 times earnings, not 50 times, because people don't believe they're part of the future. Their best days are seen as behind them. I don't know why they'd want that. They should use their extraordinary skills to unlock geothermal, carbon sequestration, nuclear. They have the smartest applied engineers in our country. Our country has the best technology in the world, the Department of Energy has funded all of it, and it's sitting on shelves gathering dust. It should be deployed at scale as fast as possible.
Jamie Nolan: When we look at oil and gas historically trying to get involved in emerging energy technologies, the track record's not great. Right now they're leaning hard into petrochemicals and plastics. They have a tremendous workforce — highly trained specialists who could be putting their expertise to use with critical minerals, geothermal, nuclear. Why plastics?
Jigar Shah: Plastics are profitable — that's why. People are addicted to a throwaway culture and we'll have to work hard to figure that out. But there is also innovation happening. Devon Energy is an investor in Fervo Energy. Darren Woods, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, has stood up to President Trump and said they're going to continue their carbon sequestration projects. There's a lot of interest from the oil and gas sector in doing this. But all of these arguments are on the wrong playing field. We should not be saying these technologies are blue and these are red. Energy abundance and prosperity are kitchen table issues. Everybody wants their electricity bill to be a number 22 issue again — not something they think about. We have the technologies to do that. The playing field we should be on is: why is it so damn hard to do big things in our country? We only have 5 or 6 percent of our rooftops with solar. Australia has 40 percent. That's a regulatory and political problem we need to solve.
Arnab Pal: A lot of our problem is the discourse. Matt Iglesias is right that we shouldn't demonize sectors that provide value to society. Natural gas kept energy prices down in the Obama years, kept inflation low, and we built a very strong economy. What's changed is that "all of the above" in support of gas may not make the same economic sense it did 15 years ago.
Jigar Shah: It most certainly doesn't. If we build all the natural gas power plants everyone wants to build, we'll use 10 billion cubic feet of gas a day just to power those plants — which will raise the price of making things in our country. We should be using our cheap natural gas to out-compete Saudi Arabia and Europe in manufacturing. The fact that we can get natural gas at the equivalent of roughly a penny per kilowatt-hour is awesome. I'd like to keep it that way. I don't know why anyone would want to double the price of natural gas in our country.
### Do We Talk About Climate?
Jamie Nolan: The Climate and Community Institute recently argued that when voters are asked to rank abstract issues, climate loses to cost of living — no surprise. But the real question is whether voters want policies that tackle climate while delivering material benefits. They say the evidence is yes, and they push back on messaging that hides the word climate. Do we talk about climate? Do we bury that messaging? Do we lean on other benefits right now?
Arnab Pal: I'm going to start by going back to some research I did as a grad student with Tony Leiserowitz, a climate communications expert at the Yale School of the Environment. We looked at one question in the General Social Survey: are you willing to pay more to protect the environment? They've asked it for about 70 years. What we found — with statistical significance, controlling for variables — is that any time there's a Democratic president, that willingness to pay goes down over the course of the presidency. People think: the right people are in charge, environmental work is getting done, we may not need to do as much personally. And as soon as there's a Republican president, willingness to pay goes back up. Over the next two or three years, people are going to be mad about the rollback of environmental protection. To completely eliminate climate from our discourse would be foolish.
Jigar Shah: They just rolled back the mercury rule for coal. Pregnant women now face the prospect of not being able to eat fish because of mercury in the water. It's done.
Jamie Nolan: It's wild. Not to mention overturning the endangerment finding — a very bad couple of weeks for climate policy. I'd push back a little though, Arnab. My viewpoint is that you always customize the message to the audience. There are rooms where climate works and a lot of rooms where it doesn't. Most of my family are Republicans. I grew up in a very red rural area of Maryland. Talking about environmental protection, reducing pollution, conservation, open lands — all of that plays so much better than talking about climate, because in certain rooms it's so politicized that you lose people immediately. Do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?
Our friends at Third Way pushed back on the Climate and Community Institute and tweeted: "If Climate and Community wants to talk more about climate change, that's their prerogative, but we'll be over at the winner's table."
Jigar Shah: Damn.
Arnab Pal: That is narrow minded, and here's why. I agree that affordability is the number one issue and that's where the focus should be. But there are people who care about different things in this country, and you're going to need all the people who care about affordability and all the people who care about climate change, and you need them voting for the same things. To exclude one of those groups is subtraction. That's not how politics works. Third Way should know better. You win by bringing everyone into a big tent. Sometimes you talk about climate. Sometimes you talk about affordability. You probably talk about affordability with more people. But to shy away from one of the biggest issues facing humanity — where there is a small but powerful constituency behind it — you lose the passion of those voters. And that's not smart either.
Jamie Nolan: Don't you think those voters get it though? That they know what's actually behind all of this even if we don't say it explicitly?
Jigar Shah: I lean on the economic message because that's my natural state, but I don't step back from the emotion behind my views on climate. We are two storms away from Florida being fully uninsurable. Two storms away from every single company — including the state's backstop insurance provider — being fully bankrupt. People who live in Florida want to live in Florida, but they will be unable to soon. That is a climate change issue. I don't lead with that argument almost ever, but I'm fluent in it and believe very strongly in its emotional power.
Arnab Pal: Let me give an example from a different topic with a similar arc. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, the most popular provision was that people under 26 could stay on their parents' insurance — about 70 percent approval. You could have said: we'll only talk about that. But the folks who did that work knew it was something people would remember for generations, and for that to happen you have to talk about the moral benefit. The ACA wasn't very popular when it passed. We talked about how people who wouldn't have insurance would get insurance. Over time it became very popular — in part because we won the moral argument. Lead with the most popular thing — affordability, in this case. But if you want this to be a generationally changing issue, you also have to include the moral argument.
Jigar Shah: And call it Obamacare.
Jamie Nolan: I mean, I think it depends on whether we're talking about national messaging or targeted conversations. This is a tale as old as time. When I was at the Solar Energy Technologies Office and Donald Trump won in 2016, we were shocked — we'd been preparing for a Clinton administration. I spent the next three months completely rewriting every piece of communication: the identity deck, the talking points, the website — all of it reframed as Republican-friendly. The messaging hasn't changed: jobs, economic competitiveness, national security. You do not lead with climate. I worked under the Trump administration for a couple of months before I left, but I don't really care what we call it. I just want to win. Our technologies are superior, we are winning, and it's inevitable. It's going to take time, but it's inevitable. And I don't need to talk about climate for this technology to win on an even playing field.
Jigar Shah: Arnab, you're going to be able to keep coming back to continue this conversation — you're the second friend of the pod. This is obviously not settled. The Matt Iglesias versus Sean Casten, the Third Way talking points — people are going to keep talking about this. But either way, I feel like Deploy Action has cemented its role in moving the ball forward. Thanks very much for joining us.
Arnab Pal: Thank you guys for having me.
Closing
Jigar Shah: We ended pretty spicy there, Jamie. I like it.
Jamie Nolan: We did. I think I had some of my first hot takes, so I'm proud of myself. I'm a baby podcaster — I'm growing.
Jigar Shah: I'm looking forward to a lot more hot takes. Thank you so much. It was so great to see Arnab, and this is another edition of Energy Empire. You can find us wherever you find your favorite podcasts — on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, absolutely on YouTube. Smash that subscribe button, as my son likes to say, and we'll be back with you next week.