The Exchanges

Q All right, so you start to realize this, and it's around 20 12, you decide to go to business school. Did you have a fully formed idea in mind about what you thought you might want to do?

A I did, Guy. I, um, apparently in my Columbia Business School application, I wrote up the argument for block power, and basically it was that there seemed to be all of these challenges and opportunities in the green buildings industry that I was learning about while I was working with the Department of Energy and the labor unions, and I just couldn't figure out why we couldn't do a better job of, like, fixing the industry, and so I would ask this question around, Well, why can't Wall Street provide the capital to pay for us to green all the buildings? And the answer would be, well, Wall Street can provide all the capital. And I'd be like, okay, why can't we train more mechanical engineers to do a better job of analyzing the buildings and figuring out what kinds of green equipment should go into buildings? And the answer would be like, well, nothing's stopping us from doing that. There was just no one who was focused on it, who was willing to kind of invest, I guess, their whole life And make it their mission to solve this problem at scale, and for me, because I care about climate change, and because I care about creating jobs in low-income communities like the one where I grew up, um, green buildings just seemed like a really important mission, and it seemed like it could just check a lot of boxes for me and be a life well lived if I pursued figuring out how to solve the problem…

AI assessment note: “I did, Guy. I, um, apparently in my Columbia Business School application”

Q And also, I think you are also sourcing workers from communities where you're focused on too, right?

A 100%. We have got a really cool project in New York with Mayor Eric Adams. We're hiring 1500 people from the low income communities where I grew up and where I was a community organizer in New York City, and we're training them on how to electrify buildings. And we're paying them 20 to 40 bucks an hour and putting them to work to decarbonize buildings in New York City to install heat pumps and solar panels. And so we've got 1500 of these workers. Guy, we had a whole street gang that was like out dealing drugs a few months ago, and there's like 50 of them, and they came to us and they said, look, we're willing to shut down the gang if you guys are willing to train us and get us certified and get us jobs. Electrifying buildings where we can make 70 grand a year, 80 grand a year, and we don't have to run from the cops or run from the rival gangs. Like, we will shut down the street gang. And so we set up a training specifically for them, and, you know, we shut down a whole street gang. So we're really excited to be able to start addressing this, like, double waste, right? The waste of human potential in these communities alongside the waste of fossil fuel energy. It's really inspiring for me after 10 years of work to be able to come full circle on that. We're thrilled about it.

AI assessment note: “100%. We have got a really cool project in New York with Mayor Eric Adams.”

Q I know you went on to study history and political science at Duke, but what, what were you sort of interested in doing? Were you, um, were you interested in politics? Is that the direction you thought you'd head into?

A Um, I was really interested in trying to improve the lives of my family. You know, we have this large immigrant family. I probably have 40 or 50 cousins. And I had been given a lot of educational opportunity. Um, I ended up going to an elite private school for high school and then going to Duke for undergrad. And my giant family was like, alright, we got Danell through. We gotta send him to Wall Street so he can make some money. And, uh, come back and pay for all of his, uh, younger cousins to go to college. Um, and so there was this kind of community uplift component to what was the expectation. But when I got to Duke, I learned about climate change. Um, I got really interested in black civil rights and economic justice and came out of Duke extremely political and then ended up becoming a community organizer.

AI assessment note: “came out of Duke extremely political and then ended up becoming a community organizer.”

Q And that comes from presumably the energy used by everybody in the building. So then when they plug stuff in or the lights or whatever, you know, but also other things like in a home, I guess your washing machine, your dryer, your gas oven and stove top. Are all those the factors that add up to 30% of carbon emissions?

A That's right. There's all the appliances and all the electricity that we use in our buildings. And so we burn oil and gas or coal in some places to produce electricity and send it through transmission lines to use the electricity in our homes. And then on site in our homes, we burn gas to cook with, to produce hot water that we shower with. And we also burn oil and gas for heating, and so, for example, in New York City, there's 10,000 giant apartment buildings that burn oil for hot water and for heat. Like, a truck filled with oil pulls up once a week and runs this, like, tube into the basement, into the heating system, and, like, pumps oil from the back of the truck into the basement, and then you burn that oil to produce hot water year round, and that is how apartment buildings in twenty-twenty-two 10,000 of them, at least, use fossil fuels, and that's on site, right? Um, so it's a pretty significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

AI assessment note: “That's right. There's all the appliances and all the electricity that we use”

Q for a moment. And let's just take a, let's say a 10 story apartment complex in Bed-Stuy. And it's an old building built in the late sixties, early seventies, not super well insulated, not super efficient, but you want to convert that building. You can essentially Put enough solar panels on the roof of that building to power that building, or would it require other sources of energy as well?

A If it was a building in, like, downtown Cleveland, you could put enough solar on the roof, but because New York is so dense, the roofs in New York aren't big enough to, like, provide enough power to the tall buildings. What we do have in New York City is we get most of our electricity, or will next year, from a hydroelectric project in Quebec. Oh. And so there's this giant dam in Quebec that spins a bunch of turbines, and Produces clean electricity and sends that electricity down to New York City, and so the source of our electricity in New York is going to be far, far cleaner than it is right now, and than it is in most places in the country, and so.

AI assessment note: “the roofs in New York aren't big enough to, like, provide enough power”

Q I mean, you, you grew up with not a whole lot of access to heating in your apartment. When you were doing that work in South Carolina, were you exposed to anything like that during that time?

A Yeah, that was, what was so interesting, guys, when I, you know, I ended up going to like eight or nine states with the Obama presidential campaign. And there's a pattern that I saw as we would head into low income and working communities to persuade them that Barack Obama was their guy and he was going to support their interests and they should turn out. There's this persistent pattern where there's, there's just this tremendous waste of energy and neglected low and moderate income buildings that really reminded me of where I grew up. Um, I remember walking around outside one day and it was 20 degrees outside. And I was looking at this giant apartment building with all the windows open, and I was like, ah, that's just like my three-story apartment building where I grew up.

AI assessment note: “there's just this tremendous waste of energy and neglected low and moderate income buildings”