Sustainability In Your Ear

Yale researchers estimate that roughly 80 million Americans are alarmed about climate change. About 40 million of them say they want to be politically active on the issue. But only about 3 million actually are. When that 37 million-American group is asked why they aren’t active, researchers most often hear that nobody has asked them. That’s the focus of this week’s conversation on Sustainability In Your Ear.

Only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything about climate change on social media, and two-thirds say they rarely or never hear about it from friends or in the media. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry treats persuasion as core business. David Fenton calls the situation unilateral disarmament at a moment when an information war is needed. The crowning result of climate action to date is the Inflation Reduction Act that passed by one vote and was repealed by one vote. A bill you win by a single vote, he says, is a bill you never really won.

David founded Fenton Communications in 1982, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes. His campaigns helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, where Yoko Ono's "Imagine There's No Fracking" billboard went up along Governor Andrew Cuomo's commute, and helped launch fossil fuel divestment with the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers. His book, The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who we discuss at length in this thought-provoking interview.

He places the blame on climate advocacy spending and, more importantly, the words used to frame the issue. The climate NGO and philanthropic world spends billions a year on policy, law, and science, and spends on communication mainly to raise money from people already on its lists. David traces that to what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong idea reproduces itself because it is correct, and to its corollary, that selling ideas is dirty work beneath serious people. The second is vocabulary. “Net Zero means almost nothing to most people. “Carbon” sounds like an abstraction. And “justice,” in cognitive research, evokes images of the police and courts, not of fairness and a shared mission. We need to pivot to simpler language, like “pollution,” when describing the source of global warming. Pollution is a word nobody defends, and a blanket of pollution trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space is a picture people can easily grasp and act on.

Asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer Americans give is “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Earth911 has spent three decades on that vocabulary, and it holds up on its own terms as a materials strategy. Increased curbside recycling participation rates don’t necessarily lead to decarbonizing the grid or the truck fleets. David Fenton’s prescription for listeners is blunter than any campaign plan: talk about it, post about it, and press the funders you know to spend generating public demand for change rather than direct mail fundraising.

Learn more about David's work at davidfentonactivist.com, and find his podcast at fentonforecast.com.
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Our guest is Brett Henderson, co-founder and CEO of SolarPanelRecycling.com, or SPR. The company owns and operates plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, with a fourth opening in California this year, each built to run about a million panels a year and to scale to 3 million within six months when needed. SPR is a Solar Energy Industries Association-approved national recycler and partnered with SEIA on the first residential panel drop-off program in the country. Brett came to solar after 18 years in electronics recycling at Powerhouse Recycling, SPR's parent company, and the business started in 2018 with a call from a longtime utility client that had 10,000 panels coming out of a power plant and nowhere to send them.

Brett is blunt about the economics: recycling a panel is a negative value proposition, because a panel is mostly glass and glass is cheap. What SPR sells is risk mitigation. Federal rules treat an end-of-life panel as hazardous until testing proves otherwise, most owners have no idea what is inside the modules they bought, and a utility loading thousands of them onto trucks takes on generator liability and Department of Transportation exposure. Aluminum and silver recovery subsidizes the rest. That cost has fallen 42% in 36 months at SPR, driven by rebuilt separation lines and steadier volume rather than any subsidy, and scale is what opens the end markets.

Tribal households in the United States carry an energy burden 28% above the national average and endure 6.5 times more power outages a year, and roughly 17,000 tribal homes — housing at least 54,000 people — have no electricity at all, according to the Department of Energy. Those are the communities now first in line to absorb the next surge in demand, because Energy Information Administration concluded data center load will be the dominant driver of long-term U.S. electricity growth. Our guest this week is Cody Two Bears, founder and CEO of Indigenized Energy, and his answer to that arithmetic is tribal energy sovereignty: build it yourself, on your own terms, at your own pace. A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and once the youngest person elected to its tribal council, Cody founded the organization in 2017 after the NoDAPL protests and went on to develop North Dakota’s largest solar farm at Cannon Ball. It became an independent 501(c)(3) this spring and now runs energy makeover projects in four tribal communities and food sovereignty work in two more. A household that signs on returns a share of what it saves — a flat fee on one reservation, a 50-50 split on another, a sliding scale elsewhere that asks 70% from a family with a job and 10% or 20% from an elder on a fixed income. The revolving fund covers maintenance, sustains jobs, and eventually becomes collateral in places where conventional lending has never worked, because sovereign land doesn’t fit a repossession-based credit model. Cody puts it plainly: tribes are asking for a hand up, and the point of the first dollar is that nobody has to come back for a second.

In 2024, 91% of new large-scale renewable projects around the world made electricity for less money than any fossil-fuel option, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. Solar power was 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, and onshore wind was 53% cheaper. The technology that can lower energy bills, keep the grid stable, and create jobs is now the most affordable way to build power almost anywhere. So, here’s the big question our guest faces every day: if clean energy is this good and this affordable, why is it still so tough to get people to support it? Leah Qusba leads GoodPower, a nonprofit focused on strategic communications and research.

For almost twenty years, it was known as Action for the Climate Emergency, but it changed its name during Climate Week 2025. Since Leah took over, the group has grown about ten times bigger, built a network of over 8,500 content creators who share facts about renewables, and started running live messaging tests through its Good Data Lab. The new name highlights that renewable power is good power, and the best way to win support is by showing how it affects people’s monthly bills. The decision to rebrand was based on data. Leah’s team learned that words like “climate” and “emergency” can shut down conversations in rural, conservative areas where most new wind and solar projects are built. GoodPower shifted its message to focus on jobs, community investment, and steady power bills.

GoodPower also works to fight anti-renewables disinformation, which Leah says spreads fastest in the first day or two after a grid emergency. When Winter Storm Fern knocked out power in more than 20 states in January, the organization had a few days’ notice and quickly got its creator network ready to “prebunk” the usual claim that renewables caused the blackouts. This strategy, based on the Debunking Handbook, starts with the truth, points out the false claim, and then repeats the truth to make it stick.

GoodPower uses the same idea in its AI tools: CleanCast predicts where local fights over new projects might start so communities can get accurate information early, and TrueVoice spots AI-generated comments in public records. Still, Leah says the best messengers are neighbors, since people trust those who share their experiences. For instance, when Boulder City, Nevada’s Republican mayor, Joe Hardy, talks about how solar and storage helped his town’s budget, it connects with other conservative communities in a way ads can’t.GoodPower’s network of creators shares clean-energy messages through car-repair, food, and gaming videos. Leah calls this the raisin bread theory: the regular content is the bread, and the renewables message is the raisin. For communities already dealing with climate impacts, she highlights groups like Extreme Weather Survivors, which gives wildfire and flood survivors a way to push for policy changes from the ground up.

To learn more, visit goodpower.org and follow Leah Qusba on LinkedIn, where she is active and easy to reach.
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If you hold a 401(k), an IRA, or a single index fund, you own a sliver of hundreds of American companies, yet you almost certainly let someone else decide how those shares vote. Individual investors hold about 25% of all U.S. public equities, more than BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street combined, yet only about one in eight of them votes the shares they own; the rest of those ballots get cast by a handful of asset managers and the proxy advisory firms they rely on, deciding who sits on corporate boards, how executives are paid, and what a company owes its workers, its customers, and the climate. This week’s two guests want to put that voice back in owners’ hands. Gabriel Grant, co-founder of the nonprofit Shareholder Democracy, is building the machinery to let everyday investors delegate their proxy votes to a civil-society organization they already trust, such as a labor union, a faith community, an environmental group, choosing a representative once and changing it whenever they want. Doug Heske, CEO of Newday Impact Investing and its Causeway platform, comes at the same problem from the engagement side, channeling revenue from values-aligned portfolios into work with more than 50 mission-aligned nonprofit partners and connecting investors and donors to the causes — and companies — they care about. Grant is building the rights layer that gets a vote counted; Doug is building the engagement layer that turns it into a continuing conversation with management. Their conversation brings the challenge into focus.

On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, learn how the proxy vote problem undercuts foundations whose endowments quietly vote against the shareholder proposals their own grantees are writing — one side of the house funds the change while the other votes it down, because the signal most managers are rewarded for is next year’s return. Coordinating millions of small owners across thousands of ballots was mechanically impossible for most of the last century, but the internet collapsed the cost of communication and AI is collapsing the cost of reading thousands of ballot items at once, which is what makes the idea newly buildable. Grant is quick to add that the vote is leverage, not the destination, because most of the value in corporate governance is created in dialogue with management. He is candid about the limits: one share, one vote will never be pure democracy. The thread the conversation dives into governance ideas pioneered by Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, who built a global network by getting rival banks to share sensitive data around one shared purpose. Hock's “chaordic” thinking blends chaos, and offers a model that Grant and Doug believe is finally buildable for shareholders.

To learn more about Shareholder Democracy and delegate your proxy votes — or, if you have a brokerage account, to try the pilot that auto-forwards your ballots to the new voting platform — visit shareholderdemocracy.org. To explore Newday Impact Investing and the Causeway platform for values-aligned investing and giving, visit causewayimpact.com.
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