Lindsay Baxter

Lindsay Baxter

Program Manager, Sustainability at Pennsylvania Environmental Council

“Whoever has the money to tell the story get to the story the way they want”

Maggie: Great! Can you start by telling us a little bit about your background?

 

Lindsay: I have a background in environmental science. That’s what I did my undergrad and my master’s degrees in. After I finished my master in environmental science and management at Duquesne University, I started working for the city of Pittsburgh as the city’s first sustainability coordinator. Actually, I was really lucky. I got the job before I had finished my degree because I had been doing a fellowship with Clean Air Cool Planet, an organization based out of New Hampshire that one of our funders, who was in Pittsburgh, wanted us to work on the city’s first climate action plan. I was hired on as a fellow when I was in grad school to work for them on the ground and got the opportunity to form the position of sustainability coordinator. In that role, I worked kind of in two key areas. One piece of it was really looking at the environmental impact of city operations and buildings and how to implement policies to reduce that impact. The other main area of focus was how to engage our residents and our businesses into joining us in that call to action. And I’ll be truthful that a lot more of my focus was on the first piece of that. As the first person to hold that position, there was a lot of interest from our leadership in some of the co-benefits of sustainability, so primarily looking at where we could save money. So I did a lot of work with building energy and efficiency and things like that a little bit more than the community outreach piece of the work. And I was with the city until February of 2011 and at that time, I moved over to my current employer, Pennsylvania Environmental Council. We are a state wide non-profit organization. We’ve been active in Pennsylvania for 44 years, going 45, so one of the oldest environmental nonprofits in the state. Historically, we did most of our work with state level legislation and policy. Over the last several years, we have divided into a two-pronged approach. One is still that state level legislation and sensible smart policy, but the other piece of it is working with local communities with on the ground projects to demonstrate the success of what we are advocating for at the state level. So since I’ve been with the council, projects that I have worked on include the River Town Project, which works with smaller, often economically depressed communities located along navigable rivers. We help them to recognize the river as an asset around which they can frame their economic and community development goals. We work with them on projects ranging from small business workshops to façade improvements to boat launch development, trail development, signage, a whole host of projects that are all around that central goal of welcoming visitors, fostering outdoor education opportunities all based around recognizing the river as their key asset. Through that program, we try to build stewardship for the river and use that as a springboard for other environmental and sustainability initiatives. A couple other key projects I work on here: one, serving as the co-convener of the Pittsburgh Climate Initiative, which is a consortium of about twenty or so organizations. We were formed in 2008 when the city adopted its first climate action plan, basically, because of a fear that that would just become a document on a bookshelf. How do we ensure that it’s a living document that is being implemented, that’s being updated? Who is tracking progress? So this collaborative of city government, county government, universities, businesses, and community groups came together to steer that project. I’ve been involved with that since its inception, but I’ve been serving as the convener for about three years. And then, I do a bit of work with renewable energy and energy efficiency. So, just a couple key projects: I’ve been working on, for a couple of years now, looking at the permitting and licensing requirements for hydroelectric projects in the state and working with the developer community, the federal regulatory commission, with the relevant state regulatory agencies to look at how we might be able to improve that process to ensure environmental protection, but also not be a barrier to hydro-electric projects. Quick clarifier: we aren’t interested in seeing people build new dams in the state, but there is an awful lot of dams, reservoirs, water that’s being pushed through pipes, ways that will always be there. Why not safely generate some clean energy off of it since that infrastructure is there anyways? I’m also starting to do some work with financing for residential and small commercial solar installations. The price of solar panels has come down drastically in the last couple of years and if an entity has access to low interest, longer term financing, solar can make really good economic sense for them. So we’ve been talking to a couple local lenders and trying to figure out if we can get a product developed in this area with an ideal goal of having something available to people across the whole state. So that was a really quick, long-winded elevator speech of the types of projects that I’ve been working on the past five years or so.

 

Maggie: They sound amazing!

 

Lindsay: Yeah, thanks!

 

Maggie: When we were looking for change makers to interview, one of the things that I really keyed in on was the River project. Selinsgrove is on the Susquehanna River and a lot of growing up, it was always don’t go in the river, it’s gross, and polluted. I had been thinking a lot about, especially in terms of this class, how do you deal with those issues and then reframe the understanding of what the river is and can be to residents?

 

Lindsay: Yeah, PEC launched this as a program along the Allegheny River just north of Pittsburgh in 2010 that predates my employment here. I came on board around the time we were rolling it out along the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania. That program has really taken off. It’s been really successful. We have a total of nine or ten communities that are official River Towns right now and then we’ve also launched a full scale River Town program along the Schuylkill, in Philadelphia just north of the city and then also a Creek Town program along French Creek in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Because strangely enough there are two French Creeks in Pennsylvania and we were work along both of them. This particular program is in Northwestern PA. But I think getting to your point about how do you change people’s perceptions, when we first rolled out this program, we were using the Trail Town program as a model. And different communities, different parts of the country have trail towns or river towns programs, but the trail town program that had been developed in this region along the great Allegheny passage was interesting because it’s similar in so many ways, but the key difference is that in that case, you had these communities that were preparing for the trails to be built. The trail town program was kind of being rolled out at the same time. So people were used to having a old railroad or an old rail bed in their backyard and it was being turned into a long distance trail and they were seeing people who were biking long distances on it that needed services like coffee shops and pizza and beer and that sort of thing. It was really different in that it was preparing for an amenity that was being developed. River towns, like you said, the river has always been there. There is already a perception of what it is there for: industrial highway. We still have really heavy barge traffic, huge barges filled with coal that are being pushed by tugs down the river. How do you reframe something that has always been there? I think a big part of that has just been coming in and pointing out: here is this thing that has always been there and how do we change it? We just acknowledge that we have a perception of the river. Other tactics that we’ve used is identifying scientific data that shows the water is improving, that the wildlife and the fish are improving, that you’re seeing more diversity. I think that’s important in small sound bites and little nuggets. Obviously the general public doesn’t want to hear a whole lot of details, but I think there is the idea that hey, you’re an environmental organization and you’re telling me it’s better, I’m good to take your word for it. Other things that we’ve used in that tactic is all of these communities want to figure out what their next big thing could be for economic development. Most of them had shipbuilding, or rail transportation terminals, or glass manufacturing or mining, steel mills, some sort of industry that is no longer there and they are all kind of waiting for the next big thing. How do we get the next big manufacturing plant in here? So what we’ve tried to say is you’re probably never going to get that big manufacturing plant to come here again, that’s not really realistic. But look at these numbers from across the country about how many people are employed by outdoor recreation. Look at these statistics that show how many dollars of gross domestic product are in outdoor recreation. Yeah, you may not have that one big employer that hired people work at, but there are still opportunities there. These are really small communities with smaller populations, so having a few businesses start up and bringing in a few new people is actually pretty significant. So I think those are some of the tactics that we use. I tend to use the economic development piece as kind of a hook to get them and then once we’ve got them, trying to integrate the environmental piece of it.

 

Maggie: I think that there is sort of a general perception that a lot of sustainable development is not compatible with economic advancement. Have you ever confronted any instances where that was true or you really had to work hard to convince people that it wasn’t so incompatible?

 

Lindsay: Not so much through this program, but through other works that we do, that’s something that we hear. One thing that really strongly comes to mind is coal mining and the communities we are working in are all in coal country and some still have active mines and so we actually don’t talk about climate change at all in this program. If I’m talking about things related to climate, I’m talking about energy efficiency and how you can save energy in your business and how you can roll that in to more improvements. I’m framing everything with sort of an economic development lens because it’s such a hot topic down there that like “the ETA is trying to kill our jobs” or “Obama is trying to kill our jobs” when the statistics show that that employment has been dying off for years while production stays steady because of increases in mechanization. But nobody wants to hear that from me. We try not to talk about that a lot whenever we are in small communities like our river towns, but it’s definitely something we confronted in our other programs.

 

Maggie: You’ve now worked a lot in state, city, and rural areas. What are the differences you’ve confronted in enacting change in those different realms?

 

Lindsay: I think there are probably more similarities than differences. Two things really come to mind. One thing, and I tell this story a lot, when I was working as the sustainability coordinator, I would get phone calls, emails, and personal comments from people saying things like “Portland is doing this project” or “San Francisco is doing this project, why is Pittsburgh so far behind? Why are we so backward?” And then I moved to working in these really small communities and I would talk about really basic things like energy efficient appliances and recycling. And I would get comments like “This isn’t Pittsburg. We are not as progressive here.” And this is only like forty five minutes, at most two hours outside of the city. So it really is interesting to see how there is such a spectrum to what we think is progressive and what we think is behind the times. That’s not exclusive urban vs. rural, but I think there were stronger trends in rural populations rather than urban populations. The second thing that came to mind, this was surprising to me, in a lot of the rural places we’ve worked in, access to technology and comfort level with technology is really further behind what I’ve seen closer to the city. In some cases, it’s actually access to technology. There are places two or maybe three years ago that we were working in that was trying to get a company to run a high-speed fiber optics line. They did not have access to high speed Internet yet in 2012. So, they were a little bit resistant to always doing things on the web because their Internet was really ridiculously slow because of where they were located. Just even seeing how the town leadership, your councilmen and lead volunteers, their comfort level with using email and using websites seemed to be in my perception less than when working in urban environments. And I don’t want to paint a broad stroke across all areas because some of the communities really close to Pittsburgh are small communities with lots of older folk who haven’t had a chance to use computers and email that are still using their telephone for most of their business, for their borough or their township. But in general, I found people around the city to be more technology savvy than people down in river towns. And that was something that was sort of a challenge because statistics show that people who do outdoor recreation, people who do heritage tourism, which is something we push in these areas that have rich historical resources are people who like to plan their trips online, see pictures, and read reviews of a place before they go to it. But we have people who just don’t understand why their business would need a web presence, even though they really wanted to bring travelers in from off the interstate and show them their cute little town. How are people going to find you? So that was something we worked with them. We had a fellow through the Conservation Association who went around to a lot of businesses last summer and helped them set up a profile, like for food businesses on Urban Spoon or Yelp, so that people can Google restaurants and find them. We had a lot of varying success with that, but I think we helped to increase awareness of it.

 

Maggie: Very cool! Can you compare and contrast then working on a state level vs. working at a city level in terms of government procedures for implementation?

 

Lindsay: That’s a good question. At the state level (PEC does a lot of work for), I am only exposed to that in a few of my programs, but the bureaucracy gets thicker and more complex with every level. So that’s always a challenge of who do you talk to, what types of approvals need to be put in place. I’ve been surprised in the smaller communities, in some instances, with how easy it is to get signed off on a project. In some cases, it’s like “oh, here, I’ll sign off for you” whereas in the city of Pittsburgh, it would have to go to the Solicitor’s office and sit there for a week because they have other things they are reviewing because it’s so much bigger and there are so many more levels. And then it would come back from the solicitor’s office and then a counsel might have to vote on it. It’s been really surprising on some things how much faster it is on the local level because you just have one or two key decision makers and that’s it.

 

Maggie: In terms, then, of when you think about responsibility for setting up projects or dealing with these sort of immense issues, what levels of government work best in terms of confronting things like climate change.

 

Lindsay: I’m not sure exactly what you are asking. Can you rephrase it or just repeat it?

 

Maggie: Absolutely! One of the things we’ve been looking at in class is how different levels of government can be involved in change making, especially in terms of the environment. In your experience and opinion, what are the responsibilities of different levels of government in confronting climate change issues or sustainability issues?

 

Lindsay: I think particularly if we look at climate change, across the country, we see medium to large size cities leading the charge. That’s sort of your ideal level at getting initiatives in place. Now a lot has happened because there is a lack of consensus at the federal level. And I want to be really clear- I don’t mean scientific consensus at all, I mean among elected officials. I think in some ways looking at local government, as a way to tackle actual emissions reducing projects is kind of the idea level to do it at. But the state and federal government can be really instrumental in providing funding. In recent years, with the way the economy has been, we’ve seen less of that. But, for instance, in terms of recycling, we never probably would have grown to the place it’s at now if there weren’t laws mandating it and the set up grants at the state level. If you meet certain targets, you can get more funding that will allow you to buy more trucks or have more staff. So that’s kind of an example where the state can really step in. I don’t know if Selinsgrove has recycling. I know that the town I grew up in still doesn’t because it’s not mandated to and it’s tough for a small government to put those things together and in place. I think it’s a combination of things. I think the things that are most important at the state and federal level are setting laws and developing funding mechanisms, but the local level has the most ability to do projects. One of the things about Pittsburgh Climate Initiative that I personally go back and forth on, we haven’t done a great job of telling a story or doing communications outreach about climate change. Most cities really haven’t, but a part of me still thinks why are we still hitting our heads against the wall, trying to tell people that the role of climate is changing when they watch Fox News and reporters try to make it sound like the jury is still out among scientists? Why don’t we just talk about energy efficiency? Talk about the things that are actually going to appeal to people and let them make the changes? Who cares if they think they are doing anything about climate change? But then the other part of me is like, at some point, we need the federal government to do something. Until constituents tell the federal government “we need you to do this” or at least “we won’t vote you out of office for this”, we won’t be able to get the scale that we need to stop climate change, to stop a great disaster.

 

Maggie: I go to school in California and coming here, there is pretty much an across the board acceptance of climate change. But back home, it is such a taboo concept and the popular opinion is that scientists don’t agree on climate change, which is wrong. So how does that perception come about? Why do you think there is such a disconnect?

 

Lindsay: I have a really strong feeling about that and my opinion is that it really comes down to who has the money to tell the story. Whoever has the money to tell the story gets to tell the story the way they want. We were even, this summer for climate initiative, were talking about “could we do a billboard campaign” with this graphic that shows 100 little stick figure scientists and 97% of them are green and 3% are red. It says 97% of scientists agree that climate change is happening and humans can do something about it. We were just trying to look at grants or sponsor ship things to do a small little outreach campaign and we just couldn’t get it together. None of us were trained in communications and hiring a PR firm was way outside of our budget, so if you look at who has a real stake in getting the general public to believe that there is not scientific consensus, those are the people with the deep pocketbooks who can put money into the billboards along the Pennsylvania turnpike. I think that’s probably the biggest reason. There’s a TV show with John Oliver and a couple months ago, he did a thing where he was saying “every time you hear on the news that scientists are going to be talking about climate change, you know one of them is going to be a climate denier and one of them believes the climate is changing.” So it looks like a draw. He says “Why don’t we get 97 scientists out here and 3 scientists who are climate deniers”. It’s a much more compelling visual, but unfortunately, the general public hasn’t seen that. They see Bill Nye the science guy and some other random scientist they have never heard of going back and forth like it’s a one to one argument.

 

Maggie: So kind of in line with thinking about those things that make it very difficult to work on climate change projects, what are some of the most difficult hurdles you’ve encountered along the way and how did you manage them?

 

Lindsay: I think that my personality type is such that I don’t like to argue with people and I find that people who don’t believe in climate change tend to be very certain and very loud and very forceful. So I tend, as someone who has a lot of information in their back pocket, tend to shut down and don’t want the stress of talking about it. I think a lot of people with scientific background have that type of personality. We aren’t out there to have a fight, or an argument, or be combative. I think those loud voices often dominate the debate. The other great challenge is how to frame a project or a policy so that it appeals to the person who you need to make a decision. I often joke I will go into sales after this job because that’s what I do, I sell ideas or beliefs. But it’s still the same concept of trying to get someone to understand or believe you. When I was at the city of Pittsburg, I worked with everyone from plumbers to electricians to attorneys to accountants, all across the board, a diverse group of people with diverse backgrounds and interests. Contrary to what people think or assumed, I didn’t really get a lot of push back. A lot of people were like “of course we want to do things to save energy in our buildings”. Not all of them believed in climate change, but most believed that what we were advocating for were really common sense solutions and for smart operations. But there was always that struggle about how do I frame this project so that someone wants to work with me. There was one gentleman in particular who was in a budget office in a higher up position and he was a nice man, but he was a loud talker and he had been with the city for twenty some years. I was with the city for two and half years and I can tell how people get burnt out. People are constantly like “somebody already tried that ten years ago. It doesn’t work”. He had a propensity to be like that. So I found that sometimes if I had an idea, instead of saying “hey, John Doe. I want to do this project and I see that this budget has that money. It will save this much and it will pay itself off”. Instead of coming to him with all the details like that, I would come to him, and keep in mind I was like twenty-six at the time, as a young woman, I would be like, “oh, can I talk to you about this project. I’m not really sure what to do about this. I feel like there is an opportunity here, but I don’t know how we would make that happen”. As long as it was his idea and I framed it such that he was helping me, I got a lot further with him. That sounds like I was so manipulative and it wasn’t. But it’s sort of figuring out what tactic works for which person. Some people love it when you have done your homework, when you can say, “here is the project, yes or no?”. Some people are like “here’s my approval. Run with it.” Others, it just seems like, if I frame it as his solution, his idea, it went a lot better.

 

Maggie: This may not apply at all and doesn’t have a whole lot to do with sustainability, but I’m genuinely intrigued. As a woman and as a young woman, how has that impacted your ability to make changes? How has it influenced your experience as a change maker?

 

Lindsay: I think that’s a good question. I think it could be worthy of an entire research thesis on its own. I didn’t receive too much flack or push back when I worked for the city, being my gender and my age. In fact, there were times when I think it helped me. I think some people, who stayed in the city for a long time, were excited to see new energy, someone young coming in and wanting to work as a civil servant. I think for a lot of people there was a propensity to help. In the position I am in now, I feel like we run into a lot of people who prefer working with men. I don’t know if that is exclusive that they don’t want to work with a younger woman or just that they want to work with the guys they’ve always worked with. An example, we have three different men who work in this organization who have worked here for twenty plus years, two of them for twenty-five plus years. They know a lot of people in state government who I am trying to work with. Something that really irks me is that I’ll call and leave someone a phone message and instead of calling me back, they’ll call my boss. I’ll be like “oh, I never heard from John Doe. I wonder what’s going on. I called him three times” and my boss will say, “oh, yeah, he called me last night on my cell phone. We had a good talk.” It’s like “I’m glad you guys are friends, but it doesn’t help me to do my job.” There’s a of instances like that where it’s sort of like an old boys club. I wonder if I was new in my career or younger in my career, but a man, if it would be quite as difficult. I would also say that I’ve been shocked by the amount of sexual harassment that I have seen or experienced. Without getting into specifics, I have never had an instances where I felt threatened, but it is amazing to me how much I’ve heard people talk about a woman’s clothing in meetings or in front of me, where you would just think they would realize it’s not appropriate to say.

 

Maggie: That’s so frustrating. Do you, I think one of the perceptions or stereotypes I’ve been around is the idea that women in science really aren’t a thing. You are confronting these changes, though from a public policy perspective, also from the environmental science perspective. Do you think that has any bearing?

 

Lindsay: I think so. A couple girls in my field and I had a discussion about things like women in the environmental sciences fall into two camps. They are either working in really science based jobs, labs, etc. and they wear their kakis and their polo shirts and they have short hair cuts and you kind of want to ask, “are you trying to be a man? Do you just want to look the part?” It makes me wonder if it’s just the people that preferred dressing that way are the same people that are drawn to this field or have they been influenced by the culture of people they work with who all happen to be men. Then, there is the other side in the flowing skirts, like hippies, the very granola, “I’m going to teach children about gardening today and then I’m going to look at the sun because it’s beautiful” type. Where do I and some of my girlfriends fit in? We are trying to be professional. We try to dress nice, but like women, we wear jewelry, do makeup and our hair. There is something to be said about what you look like and how others in your organization respond to you and treat you. I don’t have a conclusion on how that plays out. I think people pay a lot more attention to what women are wearing more so than their male counterparts.

 

Maggie: That’s really fascinating. Shifting gears a little bit, we’ve been talking a lot about urban planning in class. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the sustainability coordinator position came to be and how that position has changed.

 

Lindsay: Sure! The city of Pittsburgh did its first greenhouse gas inventory in 2006 and that was done by students in a public policy course at Carnegie Mellon. Their professor was an adjunct whose other job was as the director of the Green Building Alliance. Building out of that exercise, she and a couple other local leaders pitched the idea of a climate action plan to the city and were able to get some funding from the Surdna foundation to support that work. The plan was written by the Green Government Task Force, which was a city appointed task force of close to forty five individuals representing higher education, businesses, faith based organizations, community groups. It was great in terms of its representation, but it was way to big to get anything done. That was the same time I was working for Clean Air Cool Planet and so those of us that were actually working on a project, we did most of the heavy lifting of writing the climate action plan. In writing it, I did a lot of work in calling people in city government and asking them questions about different pieces of the plan, what the city was already doing in terms of sustainability, what types of projects they were thinking about. Through that process, we identified a lot of gaps and opportunities where no one was working. We also identified some replication. For example, the recycling supervisor based out of public works and the urban forester based out of city planning were both kind of kicking around the idea and in their spare time, trying to do some research, into a city owned composting facility. On the one hand, because the recycling supervisor had an issue with leaves and sending them to a contractor and on the other hand, he urban forester because we already buy compost for the trees that we are planting. We use it in our parks, could we do it ourselves? Neither of those individuals had ever met each other or spoken with each other. That’s like a huge missed opportunity. So that was a big piece of it. I would say there were three main reasons. Number one, the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. There were a lot of opportunities to coordinate activities. I would say the second piece was that the city was getting a lot more questions from outsiders, especially the media, about large projects like the carbon disclosure project, etc. that wanted to get data from the city to be able to report on what they were doing or benchmark them. There wasn’t really that go-to person. The city was getting asked to have a person on different panels and presentations. The third piece of it was that I really wanted to be a sustainability coordinator and I was working with the people in power. Every chance I got; I would be like “ you guys should consider creating a position to handle all this”. That’s kind of how they got around to create the position. Unlike what some people think, I wasn’t handed the position. They actually did interviews and it was somewhat competitive. But luckily, I was able to come on board. When I left the position, it actually sat vacant for about six months. I don’t think it was necessarily that the city didn’t see the value in that position. I think it was issues with the mayoral offices. There was a lot of controversy and a lot of other things going on. The person that they hired had a really different background than me. She is still there. I am not completely positive what all she works on, but her passion and interest is more on the community engagement piece. Then, this past January, our new mayor was inaugurated and he established a new position of sustainability manager. That’s sort of a higher level, higher profile position, almost envisioned to be a cabinet position. It’s not, but it’s designed to be hired than I was. He oversees the sustainability coordinator. So there has been some of evolving of the position and the scope since it was first formed.

 

Maggie: How did you know you wanted to be a sustainability coordinator?

 

Lindsay: Because it’s awesome. I think that when I first heard the job, it really appealed to me for a couple reasons. One, I really like working with people, especially diverse groups of people. So the idea of working with public works and the finance office and the law department was really appealing to me. I feel like that was a strength of mine that I really found through course work and I worked for a year and a half before I went back to grad school. Another real strength of mine was translating environmental principles into language that people were more comfortable with. The other part of it was I was really motivated to save the city some money. My interest is mostly environmental, but I saw so many opportunities to save energy and to save money. Pittsburgh is recovering, but we were, I think we still are, an Act 47 city. It’s a state declaration where instead of declaring bankruptcy, the state takes over and has oversight in your financials, where you can invest your money, etc. So the opportunity to save money on our utilities was a huge, huge help. I was really passionate about the mission. I did serve as a spokesperson for the mayor in a lot of issues and that was something I enjoyed and took immense pride in. I really loved working in city government. The only reason that I left that job was a lot of the crazy controversial, legal sort of things that were occurring in our administration. I am not someone who is interested in working in politics, so I decided to escape when the opportunity came up.

 

Maggie: You currently work in an NGO. Is the governmental role something you would go back to? Do you think NGOs have as much a capacity to make change as the government?

 

Lindsay: I would say there is as much, if not more, opportunity, depending on the project and the policy. When I was at the city, there were so many things that my hands were tied on, limited either because of financial considerations or what the officials in my office wanted to do. But I could call a partner in one of the NGOs and they had a lot of latitude to help me in so many ways. And that was what was so appealing to me about moving to PEC. For instance, the project that I working on about hydroelectricity, I don’t really want to go into details, but there was one issue with one of the state policies about when you have to get your license. The way Pennsylvania has it set up, they want you to apply for all your permits at once. One of them requires final engineering plans. It’s really difficult for engineering projects to be able to raise the money to do their final drawings without the federal license. They are stuck in a kind of catch-22. The people and different agencies that I’ve spoken to have acknowledged that this is kind of an issue, but they say, “I’m only one entity. I only work in one job and that’s the only power I have.” PEC can come in as this neutral third party and it’s not certain that we are actually going to approve anything, but we are working on brokering these conversations. There is sort of a freedom that we have that I wouldn’t have if I worked for the state or federal agencies. I do think there are other opportunities where the city owns street lights, owns a car fleet, so in terms of being actually able to do a project and say, “we saved this much CO2.” Now, where I work with local governments and I advocate for changes they can make and help them find resources, the ultimate opportunity belongs them alone and if they don’t want to do it, there’s nothing I can do. I think it depends on the project, which side maybe has more power and more opportunity.

 

Maggie: Is going back to working in the government something you ever consider?

 

Lindsay: Yes. I think my next step is going to be the corporate sector because I’ve never worked for a business. But who knows?