Fighting Climate Change, One Building At A Time

Published by NPR: When Donnel Baird was in his 20s, he had twin passions, and he didn’t want to choose between them. “I vowed that I was going to try to combine my passion for Black civil rights with trying to do something about climate change,” he says. He’s doing it now, with a company that he founded called BlocPower. He’s attacking one of the seemingly intractable sources of America’s greenhouse emissions: old residential buildings. And he’s focusing on neighborhoods that don’t have a lot of money to invest. Cathy Higgins, research director for the New Buildings Institute, in Portland, Oregon, has been pushing for energy-saving upgrades in America’s buildings for 30 years. She says that “there’s a lot of change that’s happening, that I’ve never seen in my career before, that makes me incredibly optimistic.” Companies like BlocPower, she says, are part of that change.

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