The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025

What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government, needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?

The single most important action we need in the next year is for utilities, governments, and companies—especially hyperscalers—to recognize and invest in households as energy infrastructure. We are living through the convergence of three forces: unprecedented load growth, a worsening affordability crisis, and the urgency of climate action. Household upgrades are the fastest way to add capacity to the grid, lower costs for families, and reduce emissions. Our latest analysis shows upgrading households to efficient electric devices could offset all projected data center demand growth over the next five years.

Treating households as energy infrastructure is not just a climate strategy, it is the pathway to reconciling affordability, reliability, and decarbonization while renewing the bonds of community. Once we lean into that work, the solutions—policy interventions, demand aggregation, and durable private investment—will come rushing through.

What’s one sustainability effort you personally will try to adopt in the next year?

This year I want my family to lean less on our gas car, which has basically become our “peaker plant” whenever kids’ activities pile up; tennis, flag football, soccer, two different school dropoffs—parents know this drill. We already have an EV, our daily driver, but the gas car sneaks into the mix more than I’d like. Maybe this will be the year that we fully retire that peaker plant and become a full EV household. At the same time our family has really taken to composting with the Mill Food Recycler. It really taught me how fast a new habit can stick. It’s become so normal in our house that “just mill it” is now a verb. The persuasion campaign for my own parents to follow suit is underway.

What is a climate solution that isn’t getting the attention or funding it deserves?

A climate solution that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is insurance. As climate impacts intensify, the models we use to insure risk are breaking down, leaving households, small businesses, and entire communities exposed. In many parts of the country, families are already losing access to affordable homeowners’ insurance because of wildfire, flood, or storm risk. Without viable insurance, communities can’t build resilience, families can’t protect their assets, and entire local economies are destabilized.