NOTE: This podcast is now available on Apple and Spotify!
I’ve always been impressed with Stacey Abrams from afar, so when I got an invitation to be directly in conversation with her, I was thrilled.
In addition to her political leadership, Abrams is also a small business owner, a New York Times best-selling author, and —something far fewer people know — a champion for clean energy and climate justice.
Video of Abrams and me singing the opening verse of Prince’s song 7. Did not have that on my Climate Week bingo card!
In 2023, Abrams joined the team at Rewiring America as senior counsel. That’s a great nonprofit dedicated to electrifying our homes, businesses, and communities. If you want to ditch fossil fuels and upgrade to electric (and save money doing it!) their website has all the top tips.
Stacey Abrams and I spoke together during Climate Week in New York City, at an event called Better Worlds Ahead, which was produced by Grist, Mother Jones, Rewiring America, and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School.
I knew the conversation would be interesting – connecting the dots between clean energy, climate justice, and democracy — but I had not anticipated that it would also be utterly delightful. Enjoy!
VERY important reminder:
In the home stretch of this incredibly important election, please join me in volunteering with Environmental Voter Project and Lead Locally to get environmentalists to the polls and supporting climate candidates in local races.
For more about those organizations and their strategies, you can check out the previous episode of this podcast, where I was in conversation with both of their founders for our Vote Climate episode.
CREDITS
This episode was produced and edited by Nora Saks, and me, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. And, as always, thanks to my chief of staff and tour producer, Jenisha Shrestha. BIG thanks to Stacey Abrams and her team, and to the event’s sponsors: Grist, Rewiring America, Mother Jones, and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School.
Okay, that’s it for now. More from us next week.
TRANSCRIPT
This content was originally created for audio and the transcript has been edited for clarity. Please note that some elements (i.e., music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.
Ayana: Hi everyone! Welcome back to the What If We Get It Right? Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
I’m still on the road for my book tour, I think this is day 28. Right now I’m in Washington DC recording this from my hotel room. Yesterday though, I had the chance to visit the White House and speak with the incredible climate team there about communication and culture and policy and gaps that need filling. That, however, was an off-the-record conversation, so there’s no audio of that I can share with you, but speaking of political leadership, I’m so excited to bring you this conversation I had with the magnificent Stacey Abrams.
She served in the Georgia House of Representatives for a decade, and back in 2018, she was the Democratic candidate for governor. Though she ended up losing that race by a painfully narrow margin, she has continued to dedicate her career to voting rights, environmental justice, and economic empowerment.
In addition to her political leadership, she’s also a small business owner, a New York Times best-selling author. And, something a lot of you might not know, she’s also a champion for clean energy.
In fact, in 2023 she joined ReWiring America as senior counsel. That’s a great nonprofit dedicated to electrifying our homes, our communities and businesses.
I’ve always been impressed with Stacey Abrams from afar, so when I got the invitation to be directly in conversation with her, I was thrilled.
We spoke together during Climate Week in New York City, at an event called Better Worlds Ahead, which was produced by Grist, Mother Jones, Rewiring America, and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School.
I knew the conversation would be interesting, but I had not anticipated that it would also be utterly delightful.
__________
Ayana: Hi. This is such a treat.
Stacey Abrams: It is.
Ayana: The vibe is so good. Thank you.
Stacey: First of all, we just, we're so excited to be here with you. And I'm going to ask you, when you were writing this, and when you were sick of the words that you were writing, when you kept writing, it was because you had a vision. What was that vision that you want this group to not only internalize, but proselytize?
A: Well, first of all, I'm a masochist for editing, so I didn't really get sick of it. I was like, how can I make it better and more clear and more distilled and shorter? It's a thick book, but I cut and I cut and I cut and I cut and I cut.
And the thing that I was trying to get across was - we basically have the climate solutions we need. There's not a big mystery about what we need to do. We know we need to go to clean energy as fast as possible, and we have the technologies to do that. We know we need to shift our transportation, invest in public transit, right? All of those things. High speed rail, for the love of God, can we please in this country?
[APPLAUSE]
We know how to green our buildings, we know how to improve our food system, we know how to protect and restore ecosystems and take advantage of the magic that is photosynthesis, right? It's not like we have to wait for some Silicon Valley to come up with some cute new app and then we can all get to work. Like we could just start now.
And so the thing that I was trying to get across was, you know, we have all these visions of the apocalypse in pop culture, right? We have the what if we get it wrong. We have, you know, the fire and brimstone and all of the news reporting on climate disasters, but there's very little about what if we get it right? What are we working towards? What should I run towards? Show me that's not just a scary void, but like, this is worth the effort.
So this, I guess, is my answer to my own question. Like, show me it's worth it.
Stacey: So how do you know?
Ayana: How do I know it's worth it?
Stacey: Yes.
Ayana: I talked to a lot of really smart people and they were like, it's worth it.
So this book is basically like 20 interviews, a bunch of co-authored chapters, commissioned art, poetry. It's basically like my mixtape for climate futures.
Stacey: She's not joking. There's a playlist at the back.
Ayana: The best thing that happened backstage was Stacey approving of my first song choice on the mixtape.
Stacey: We won't sing it.
Ayana: We might.
Stacey: We could.
[Together singing the song 7 by Prince]: All seven and we'll watch them fall. They stand in the way of love and we will smoke them all. With their intellect and their savoir faire. No one in the whole universe could ever compare. I am yours now, and you are mine, and together we'll love through all space and time, so don't cry. One day your seven will die…
[APPLAUSE]
Ayana: Did not have that on my bingo card, but I think that was a win.
Stacey: Big ups to Prince.
Ayana: So that's the thing right? We could do this climate future stuff however, we want. We get to decide how we're creating the future. So I'd love to hear from you like what is the thing you're most excited to go from like this vision and like to reel it into reality?
Stacey: So for a lot of folks my journey in climate has been opaque if not invisible. But I grew up in Mississippi. I grew up on the Gulf of Mexico. I was in a debate team that - we were the only debate team in the southern half of the state. So it was easier to debate in New Orleans than it was to debate in North Mississippi. Which meant we would travel every week to New Orleans and Shreveport and Baton Rouge and to get over there we often had to drive through an area referred to as Cancer Alley. And as someone who grew up in a community that was often overlooked by politicians, but always found by those who did not have our best interest at heart, there was nothing to me more crystallized than the lack of concern for a community that had been so trapped by petrochemical plants that they had a national moniker that presaged their death.
Just think about how you have to popularize something that you would call it Cancer Alley without irony. And for me, it's embedded in my belief about democracy. Democracy doesn't exist in the abstract. Democracy is about how do we leverage our collective responsibility and our collective vision to make something better.
And so I actually, in college, I wrote my senior thesis on environmental justice. I worked for the EPA for the Environmental Criterion and Assessment Office in North Carolina.
Ayana: I worked for the EPA Regulatory Analysis and Policy Division, so equally exciting office name.
Stacey: EPA, number one in titling. My vision is that we move this out of voting simply because climate action is something we need, and we vote because it's something we want. And because we know it is a transformative space that gets us all of these other things. That if we are climate voters, we get high speed rail. If we are climate voters, we get clean air and clean water. If we are climate voters, our children grow up with lower rates of asthma. And that we connect the dots between democracy being fully realized, and our right to have political leaders who believe in the whole of us. And that that can be accomplished if we have these conversations because we can get it right. We've seen it happen. We have seen political leaders have these moments of clarity and courage.
And so my vision is that we are creating more and more of these moments by getting more and more of us to demand it. Not just at the federal level during a presidential election, but at the state and local level, at the zoning committee hearings, at the city council meetings, at the school board meetings, when they're making decisions about who they're contracting with, that we embed our right to a democratic space that includes the right to breathe and build and believe. And I think that that can be done. And so I think we get it right when we start to connect the dots between our democracy, not as an abstract, but democracy as a tool for getting what we deserve.
Ayana: What would you say to climate voters who are like not inspired about this election for whatever reason?
Stacey: We often characterize climate voters as the granola crunching, this is the only thing I talk about, think about. I have not touched plastic since 1987. If you go outside, if you cook, if you bathe, you are a climate voter. And we have to stop treating the climate voter as an esoteric third, and treat them as an everyday reality. Our job is to connect the dots. People vote on what they need. They vote for people who will give them what they need, and they vote against those who will deny them what they need. That's a really stark choice. This is not a partisan space, so I will let you figure out which choice you should make, but up and down the ballot, I have three words: Inflation Reduction Act.
[APPLAUSE]
You think the EPA titles things poorly. The Inflation Reduction Act is a transformative multi-billion dollar, multi-year opportunity to create -
Ayana: Multi-hundreds of billions -
Stacey: Multi-hundreds of billions of dollars. And what excites me about this and what I tell folks is that you don't have to vote for a candidate you like. You need to vote for the world you want. And the family that you have. And the thing you want tomorrow. Because - yeah, you can clap for it. It’s okay.
[APPLAUSE]
That one of the challenges is that we expect this purity of intention when we talk about climate voters. I don't need purity. I need participation. Purity means you have to agree with me on all things. If you don't have a compost bag in your home, you're not really a climate voter.
No, that's not the point. Do you have lungs? Do you want a heat pump so that your bill goes down? Do you want the small business that's down the street from you that could hire your nephew to be able to access some of these dollars? That's what this is. And so for me, it's a very clear connection, but we've got to make the connection. People don't wake up thinking about it. And as the more informed, our job is not to lecture, but to connect.
Ayana: And to welcome, I think. That's how I have come to describe my role in all this, is as a welcomer. Wwe need as many people as possible working on climate solutions, right? We need to build the biggest, strongest team.
Stacey: I mean, you began with urban oceanography as sort of this frame for why you do this work. When you think about the next phase, regardless of the outcome of November, whether Armageddon is nigh or not, when you think about what is your practical vision for what we do next?
Ayana: Yeah, you mentioned Urban Ocean Lab, so I co-founded this policy think tank for the future of coastal cities because basically cities aren't ready for the impacts of climate change. And there's a lot we could do to change that, right? We can adapt to the changes that are already here and coming. We can become more resilient. And so my team at Urban Ocean Lab, we crunched the numbers and it's something like one in five Americans live in a coastal city. And the demographics of that are not the coastal elite. It is 60 percent People of Color. It is a high proportion of people living in poverty. It is a high proportion of renters, many immigrants. This is something that affects regular, everyday Americans, if we don't have a plan to deal with sea level rise. If we don't have a plan to deal with how are we going to develop offshore wind energy in a way that actually benefits coastal communities, like Cancer Alley, who are dealing with all the bad stuff with the fossil fuel industry. How do we make sure they get some of the good stuff too in this clean energy transition, right?
I'm a policy nerd at heart. I very much look forward to disappearing into the woods of Maine in 2025 and just writing lots of nerdy memos that maybe 20 people will read, but they'll be the right 20 people. The big project that we're working on for 2025 with Taproot Earth, who I hope a lot of you know about, and also with a coalition group called Climigration Network, and also with NRDC, is building this coalition, this consortium of organizations that are thinking about climate-driven relocation. Because something like 13 million Americans are going to have to move just because of sea level rise within the next few decades. And let me tell you, we do not have a plan. America does not have a plan for this. And so we're building this consortium of organizations to put out our own policy platform, a consensus platform to say, this is how we think the framework for that should look.
This is us having to envision the future where we get it right on climate driven relocation. Because if we don't think that up, who's to say that ever becomes a priority for the government to deal with that in a proactive way, right? There's obviously stuff happening, but we from the outside can nudge and offer what we think that should look like, our detailed list of policy recommendations. And then advocate for those in a way that's so much stronger than if Urban Ocean Lab did it, doing that as a coalition project. So that's the next version of biting off more than I can chew.
[APPLAUSE]
Ayana: So I'd love to talk a little bit about the electrification of it all. So I was so excited when you became a part of Rewiring America, when you were like, I'm all in on this electrification thing.
[APPLAUSE]
And as you mentioned before, to some people, this was like, what? Why? Climate? I had no idea. And so we know climate and democracy are inextricably linked, our ability to get anything done there. But I'd love to hear from you just, what are you focused on with Rewiring and to the extent that you can reveal a little, what's next as far as that collaboration?
Stacey: So I am honored to serve as a senior advisor to Rewiring. I had a little bit of time on my hands after 2022. And so when I was looking for the next phase, it was of a piece. One of the reasons I stand for public office is that it is a platform that allows you to have dramatic impact on multiple issues at once. If I don't get those jobs though, my responsibility doesn't suddenly disappear. And so, I'm always looking for - how can I leverage what I do to accomplish the things I think need to be done? And Rewiring was the perfect opportunity.
It begins as a conversation about electrification, but we all know that more than 40% of our carbon emissions come from decisions we make at our home or around our home. So if you're going to tackle the climate crisis, looking inside the home is critical.
To your point about communities that are on the margins and they're too often left out, if you have a gas stove in a poorly ventilated rental apartment, you face a climate catastrophe in your home. If you live in a rural community where natural gas is plentiful, but your pension is not, then the gap is just as wide as the Gulf. And so what Rewiring does is really think about how do they close that gap? How do they make certain that electrification, the resources that are embedded in the IRA get to the communities that need it?
And so I came on board. I've been part of developing what we call demonstration projects across the country, including in a tiny town in Southwest Georgia, cause you know, that’s me, called De Soto, where we've been working with a rural community to help electrify every single one of their homes.
Ayana: Can we get a little…?
[APPLAUSE]
Ayana: It's a big deal.
Stacey: It's been quite amazing because these aren't the people you think about when you think about electrification, when you think about climate action, you don't think De Soto, Georgia. But what we found is that it's part of how you create the conversation. There was an elderly woman who we were going to be working with in a few weeks, but around Christmas time, 2023, I get a phone call that she's been living without hot water in her home for almost a month. That she's going across the street or down to the gas station to get hot water. And because she was older, it was just getting harder and we're like, we can go ahead and get you your water.
We can get you a heat pump hot water heater. And we installed it and it changed her life.
Each time we do this, someone's life gets better and what I'm so excited about with Rewiring is that we are connecting the dots between climate action, not meaning sacrifice, but meaning success.
Ayana: I love how Rewiring uses the term upgrade.
Stacey: Exactly.
Ayana: I'm like, this is an upgrade.
Stacey: This is an upgrade.
Ayana: I got a heat pump, hot water heater. It's awesome. Electric cars, also really great. I mean, everyone owning their own individual car is not the answer, etc. But they're great.
Stacey: I'm from the South. It's in our contract.
Ayana: And I will say for the Inflation Reduction Act, if anyone's a homeowner or knows a homeowner, there are major, major tax credits in there, and people do not know about it. So tell them.
Stacey: Yeah, if you go to Rewiring.org, we actually have tools that help you plan, help you understand what you're entitled to. Because of the GGRF, which is another greenhouse gas reduction fund…
Ayana: I usually know the acronyms, but I didn't know that one.
Stacey: When you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars, acronyms multiply.
So GGRF is, it's billions that were given out, twenty seven billion. And the consortium that Rewiring is a part of, which includes Habitat for Humanity, United Way, Enterprise, LISC, and Rewiring America, will be deploying two billion dollars across the country over the next seven years to do home electrification with a very specific focus on low income and developing, so LIDAC communities.
I'm excited because what this means is that this is not going to be money that just goes to the people who already know where the money is. But it also will go to contractors. This is a business opportunity. This is an economic development opportunity. And that matters because if you want people to believe they should do something, show them how they too will benefit. And we tend to have this sort of reflexive, well, if it's about making money, it's not a good idea.
If you want people to be engaged, let them know they're helping solve a problem. Like, oh, I don't know, rent? Or food or education? And so thinking about how contractors become part of the aggressive way we deploy this money is also how do you create more vocational opportunities for young people who aren't going to college and don't have to go to college, but are going to have to take care of themselves and their families. This is a way that they can build skills that we will need for generations.
And so I see this role with Rewiring, the work that we're doing with power based energy, these are two very real opportunities to build this community that believes not only in climate action, but climate success. And I think that's what you talk about so beautifully, which is - what if we get it right is about - what if we succeed?
Ayana: Listening to you say that reminds me - so there's 20 interviews in this book and one of them is with Jigar Shah, who is the head of the Loan Program Office at the Department of Energy, and he's got 400 billion dollars that he can loan out, loan, not grants, to for-profit companies that are developing clean energy technologies to help them get to market.
And he's like, this is all great. There's great stuff coming. We do not need to wait to get started, though. But like, there's more good innovation coming in the future, I promise you, I'm seeing it. But also, we need a million electricians. We need plumbers, we need pipefitters, right? We need carpenters, we need people to literally build the future, right? And the solar installers, and the wind turbine people, right?
And so I think the vocational piece of this is critical. And these are good jobs, often very well-paying union jobs, right? And making sure, again, that like, the people who got screwed by the oil and gas sector in terms of pollution or, you know, the wages they were able to earn in that are really benefiting from this transition is like that's the just transition piece.
Stacey: And you've got small contractors who are not going to - they're not general contractors. They can install a heat pump. And you've got electricians who need to know that someone's got to upgrade the electric panel so the heat pump doesn't blow up the house. And you've got an HVAC operator who…
Ayana: This is a very serious gap. People are waiting like six months, a year, to get a heat pump.
Stacey: And that's assuming they will come to your neighborhood. So one of the problems we learned to solve in De Soto was that we couldn't find anyone locally to take on this responsibility. And I'm so proud of Rewiring being willing to lean in and do this work. But now we've got to solve it across the country. Because this is a real economic opportunity, especially for women, for People of Color, for rural communities to build real businesses that serve the public and serve their need to make money. Not everyone's gonna be a millionaire, but we can have a lot more thousandaires in America.
And so how do we use the IRA to create more thousandaires? Because those thousandaires who come into their own, because they are promoting clean energy, will keep wanting clean energy. So you are creating your own universe of acolytes because they make more when we do better.
And that's the Rewiring model that I think is what you imagine. It's how do we make it easier for people to do good? And you can do good and do well at the same time. And so let's think about what all of those pieces look like because when we accomplish that, we survive. And that's kind of cool. I want to live. I really do.
Ayana: When we were backstage chatting, I realized we were kindred spirits when I asked you about hope. I have a sort of tenuous relationship with hope. I'm not a fan of hope. We always both get asked about hope in literally every speaking thing we do. It's like, how did you get into this work? What gives you hope? What's your self care thing? And we both promised each other, we wouldn't ask each other these questions. But, I do think it might be interesting to say why you're not like, yay, hope. Why don't you love hope?
Stacey: I'm gonna get you. Hope hurts. Hope is a fantastic device that is incredibly painful when it is dashed. And as someone who works in voting rights and its polar opposite, voter suppression, someone who believes in democracy as a tool for making people's lives better because I think poverty is immoral and economically inefficient and solvable, hope is a great motto. It is a poor organizing tool. Because when someone's hope is dashed, you have lied to them.
So I don't do optimism or pessimism. I do determination. It's a very stoic philosophy, which is that I can only be measured by my effort. And I can only judge my outcome by what I'm willing to commit to. My corollary is that I'm an ameliorist. Which is not a word.
Ayana: I’m so relieved it's not a word… I was like…
Stacey: It’s not. So I took the word ameliorate years and years ago and decided I'm an ameliorist. You know, ameliorate to mitigate challenge. My shorthand is, I think the glass is half full. It's probably poisoned though. And so my job is to find the antidote. Not to worry about how full the glass is or to worry about what the poison is. It's to make sure that when the problem happens, I'm determined to solve it. And so I don't do optimism, pessimism, or hope. I do determination. You go.
[APPLAUSE]
Ayana: Very similar answer, slightly different words, right? I'm a scientist. I'm a realist. I'm not an optimist. I've seen the scientific projections. I've seen enough about how humanity does not actually get it together and collaborate delightfully to solve problems together, right? I know that we have, though, innumerable possible futures. You use the word determination, I'm just tenacious. Like, what else can I do? Who else can I bring into this? Is there another way? Bang down the door, crawl through the window, climb down the chimney. What are we doing? And how can we have a reserve so deep that when we hit these setbacks we're not like, Oh well, I tried, and then give up. And a lot of that to me is like, who I work with. I do not work with jerks. I have the luxury of choosing my collaborators and I'm like, this work is hard enough without assholes around me. So if you have this luxury…
Stacey: So kindred spirits - my business partner and I, when we first started our company, one of our rules was we don't work with jerks. We, it was the other word, but yeah.
Ayana: But I think for me it's like, this incredible writer, philosopher, Terry Tempest Williams, I ran into two years ago in the lobby of some big climate event, and I don't know how, there's something about people who don't like hope who instantly find that out about each other.
Stacey: I think it’s the dark cloud?
Ayana: And she looks at me and she grabs my shoulder, she was like, thank God! And I was like, you too? Okay, great. Why? And you know what she said to me? She was like, I wish people would make their vows to something deeper than hope. And I just want to offer that to you. Is it love? Is it truth? Is it courage? Is it solutions? Is it community? What is the thing that you can really commit to, even though the odds are impossibly long that we're going to get it all the way right?
We don't get to give up on life on earth. I don't need hope. I need an action item. I need a strategy. I need collaborators. I need a good playlist. I don't need someone to be like, It's all going to be okay in the end. Cause that's bullshit.
Stacey: What she said.
It's election time, but do not lecture anyone. Now is the time to connect the dots. Find five people that you know aren't planning to vote and don't tell them, oh, you have to vote to save the world. Ask them what they need. Ask them what they're afraid of and then help them figure out how casting a ballot might mitigate that harm. Because people want to know you care about their lives. They don't care about your politics. But they can't hear that if all they hear is you telling them that it's their fault they're in this space. Make sure you listen to them, and make sure you get them to go up and down the ballot. Because much like, you know, downloading an app, all the devil’s in the details. So we need people to go all the way to the bottom because that's the only way we're going to get to the top. Go.
[CREDITS]
Ayana: This episode was produced and edited by Nora Saks, and me, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
Big thanks to Stacey Abrams and her team. And to the event’s sponsors; Grist, Rewiring America, Mother Jones, and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School. You can find out more about the incredible work that Rewiring America is doing at rewiringamerica.org.
And as always, huge thanks to my chief of staff and tour producer, Jenisha Shrestha.
Before we go, one last very important reminder. We are in the home stretch of an incredibly important election. It’s critical to support climate candidates up and down the ballot. So please join me in volunteering with Environmental Voter Project and with Lead Locally so that we’re getting environmentalists to the polls and supporting climate candidates in local races.
For more about those organizations and their strategies, you can check out the previous episode of this podcast, where I was in conversation with both of their founders for our Vote Climate episode.
Please check out environmentalvoter.org and leadlocally.org for phone banking and canvassing opportunities every single day between now and election day.
Okay, that’s it for this episode. More from us next week.
Episode 3: Connecting the dots with Stacey Abrams