Tribal households in the United States carry an energy burden 28% above the national average and endure 6.5 times more power outages a year, and roughly 17,000 tribal homes — housing at least 54,000 people — have no electricity at all, according to the Department of Energy. Those are the communities now first in line to absorb the next surge in demand, because Energy Information Administration concluded data center load will be the dominant driver of long-term U.S. electricity growth. Our guest this week is Cody Two Bears, founder and CEO of Indigenized Energy, and his answer to that arithmetic is tribal energy sovereignty: build it yourself, on your own terms, at your own pace. A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and once the youngest person elected to its tribal council, Cody founded the organization in 2017 after the NoDAPL protests and went on to develop North Dakota’s largest solar farm. It recently became an independent 501(c)(3) this spring and now runs energy makeover projects in four tribal communities and food sovereignty work in two more. A household that signs on returns a share of what it saves — a flat fee on one reservation, a 50-50 split on another, a sliding scale elsewhere that asks 70% from a family with a job and 10% or 20% from an elder on a fixed income. The revolving fund covers maintenance, sustains jobs, and eventually becomes collateral in places where conventional lending has never worked, because sovereign land doesn’t fit a repossession-based credit model. Cody puts it plainly: tribes are asking for a hand up, and the point of the first dollar is that nobody has to come back for a second.
The Tribal Renewable Energy Coalition that Indigenized Energy helped form won $136 million through the EPA’s $7 billion Solar for All program, and Cody’s team completed some of the earliest builds in the country before EPA terminated the program in August 2025. The reimbursements never arrived. Cody also declines to treat any of this as partisan, and he’s persuasive about why: North Dakota is a firm red state, and its farmers run the math on solar the way they’d run it on a truck loan. Ann Arbor and Portland are now standing up residential programs that resemble what tribes have operated for years, which makes Indian Country something closer to an R&D lab for community-scale energy than a charity case. The conversation gets most interesting where energy stops being about electricity. Indigenized Energy’s off-grid array at the Northern Cheyenne buffalo facility in Montana — too remote for a grid connection — runs the electric fences, water stations, and freezers, and feeds both the tribe and local food banks; Solar Builder named it 2025 Project of the Year under 100 kW. A similar system is going up at Wozu on Standing Rock to support a returning buffalo herd, doubling as shade during handling. Grass-fed buffalo raised on regenerated grassland commands a premium, so healing the land lands on the balance sheet. The energy decision, the food decision, and the land decision are one decision, because the systems were never separate to begin with.
To learn more about Indigenized Energy’s projects, programs, and workforce training, visit 4Indigenized.energy. September 16–18, 2026 brings People of the Sun to the Standing Rock Reservation, a three-day gathering of tribal leaders, energy practitioners, artists, and musicians marking ten years since NoDAPL; tickets are at PeopleoftheSun.live.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:11
Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to be talking energy independence for the nation’s Indigenous communities, which could be a model for the distributed, community-centered electrical grid of the future. The national conversation about the clean energy transition has a geography problem. It tends to center on the places where capital flows most easily: coastal cities, utility-scale solar farms in the Sun Belt, offshore wind corridors in the Northeast. But the communities bearing the highest energy burdens in the country, many of them rural and tribal, are treated as footnotes in a story that’s mostly being written somewhere else, and that gap is getting harder to ignore.
Electricity demand is accelerating, driven by AI infrastructure buildout, data centers, and an aging grid straining to modernize, and the pressure continues to land unevenly. Native American families pay disproportionately high utility rates for disproportionately unreliable service, and they’re facing the next wave of demand pressure while the federal policy environment that was supposed to support tribal energy development has become, let’s just say, significantly less reliable. The clean energy transition, as currently structured, risks leaving behind the communities that most need it.
And my guest today has been working on the other version of this story, one in which tribes don’t wait for transitions to arrive, but build their electric infrastructure themselves, on their own terms, at their own pace. Cody Two Bears is the co-founder and CEO of Indigenized Energy, an organization that works alongside tribal nations to advance energy sovereignty. He’s a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and what makes Indigenized Energy structurally different from most organizations in this market is the thing it refuses to be — an outside group bringing solutions to Native communities. Instead, Indigenized Energy is of these communities, staffed by Native leaders and practitioners, accountable to tribal governance, and built to stay present long after a grant cycle or a solar installation is complete.
Indigenized Energy is running energy makeover projects in four tribal communities, integrating solar, battery storage, and efficiency upgrades in a model designed to be replicable. Alongside that work, food sovereignty projects in two communities are connecting clean energy directly to land regeneration, water conservation, and community food systems, because Cody’s position is that energy is never just about electricity. And in April of this year, Indigenized Energy became an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a milestone that positions the organization to steward resources directly and build the long-term partnerships its three-year strategic plan depends upon.
The strategic plan itself is worth understanding. It’s built around a vision of Native-led energy futures that support thriving communities for the next seven generations — a planning horizon that puts it in a different category than most organizations in this sector. Where others build for grant cycles, Indigenized Energy is building for continuity across leadership transitions, funding volatility, and the long arc of what it actually takes to shift who holds power in an energy system.
So we’re going to talk with Cody about what the energy burdens actually look like in the communities where he works; how AI demand growth is shaping the stakes for rural and tribal communities; why distributed solar and microgrids are tools for sovereignty and not just cost savings; how energy connects to food and land and water in ways the mainstream conversation misses; as well as what it means to build an organization from the inside out rather than delivering solutions from the outside in. The clean energy transition will either be built with Indigenous communities or it will be built around them. Let’s explore Cody Two Bears’ clear view of the difference right after this quick commercial break.
Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear, Cody Two Bears. How you doing today?
Cody Two Bears 4:21
Good, good. Could be better, I guess. We know there’s a lot of energy crisis out there, a lot of things happening in the world. But you know, we’re doing the best we can with some of the circumstances.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:35
What we’re going to talk about on this show — the circumstances are truly unusual. But Indigenized Energy’s vision is for a Native-led energy future that supports generations of thriving communities for the next seven generations, and that’s a very different planning horizon than, you know, say, the typical three- or five-year corporate strategy or any federal funding cycle. How does that thinking in generations change the decisions you’re making about energy today?
Cody Two Bears 4:55
I think the biggest thing — what it looks like for, you know, energy is our people. Native American people never really thought about the energy crisis like we do today. You know, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, we were always just focused on, you know, food sovereignty, our traditional medicines, our culture, our language, things that are really important to us. But now, as we fast forward and we live in this energy era, and with really climate change kind of causing catastrophic events around the world, you’re starting to see how energy can really play a role into life-and-death situations.
So because of that, Native American people now have really looked toward energy sovereignty as another pillar, just like all those other things like food sovereignty and traditional medicines. Now, as we move forward, it’s really important to really understand how energy can really heal the land, but also making sure that energy can also make us sovereign and less reliant on outside resources.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:57
We’re going to talk a lot about the idea of sovereignty over the course of the conversation, but let me ask you about what the day-to-day experience of energy dependence feels like. What’s it actually look like in a family’s daily life?
Cody Two Bears 6:10
I think, you know, being on the reservation — I grew up on the reservation my whole life. I grew up in one of the top 10 poorest counties in the country, Sioux County, North Dakota, on the Standing Rock Reservation. Standing Rock borders two states, North Dakota and South Dakota, and is the fifth largest landmass tribe in the country. So we have a lot of land out there, rich land.
But most importantly, when I grew up, I never understood why we always had frequent power outages, why some of our utility rates were some of the highest compared to other places around us in the region especially. But I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is we always had to pay more for energy, which I would call less reliable energy. But yet we had to pay more, which was kind of ironic in itself.
But most communities, we are what I always say at the end of the line, you know, and it is something that, as infrastructure at the end of the lines are always aging, outages can be more frequent and even last longer toward the end of those utility lines. You know, that really hits our families on reservations pretty hard. The energy burden of us having to try to keep the lights on and keep our homes warm in the winter — and you can only imagine, in the northern plains where I grew up, we experience, I would say, sometimes below negative 70 wind chill factor, and we have to keep our homes warm. And could you imagine not having energy during those times, or having a power outage during those times? And now we’re even experiencing, you know, 100-plus-degree weather more frequent in the South. Could you imagine not having cool air, energy, in the South?
So, you know, those are the things that have really struck hard to a lot of people now. You know, in reservations where I come from, we’ve been experiencing those for a long time. Now we’re just seeing the rest of the world starting to experience that and start to ask questions. But I think that makes our work at Indigenized Energy even more important now, and why our energy projects have really powerful impacts, is because lowering energy costs puts real money back into our families’ pockets, especially places where I come from. But it also creates more resilient homes, which is really important. Local jobs, and of course, everlasting economic value for our community, which is really, really important. So the work that I do here at Indigenized Energy is that much more impactful because of all the reasons I just discussed, and you can walk out your front door and see the results.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:43
And that must be a really powerful experience, not just for you, but for everybody in the community.
Cody Two Bears 8:49
Absolutely. And I think the biggest thing is taking it right off the top of the meter, having those significant savings in real time, just right there at our disposal, right off the meter. Distributed energy projects, for me, in Indian Country are really important. You know, I know just having a reliable grid is really important as well, of creating solar farms and different things like that. But you can’t create a higher, more impact than actual distributed energy in Native communities.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:18
Let’s talk a little about sovereignty, and this is a concept that’s breaking out all over the place. On the net, for instance, it means raising walls around data and infrastructure that were previously open. It sounds like some previous historical eras — the enclosure movement in the U.K., for instance, and of course the seizing of lands from Native tribes in the United States. Can you unpack how tribal sovereignty supports your community’s relationship with place and resources? What does that mean to your community?
Cody Two Bears 9:51
I think, you know, just look at it in this aspect of it. For many generations, Native tribes have contributed a lot to the greater good of the United States, this country that we live in today. You know, we were the ones that had to give up a lot of our land, a lot of our resources, to be able to allow this country to flourish. Well, now a lot of Native lands have shrunken now because of the taking of our lands and what has happened historically in the last couple hundred years.
But I think the biggest thing that we’re learning from that is whatever little lands we have left now — because before then they threw us on lands that were some of the most ugliest, desolate lands in the country. But now they’re some of the most beautiful lands in the world, you know, because we’re able to preserve those lands that we’re on. But because of that, there’s not a lot of development happening on those lands.
So what we look at that is, you know, number one, our energy infrastructure is very outdated. Number two, we’re using more energy more and more every day. The Western world, where we live in the United States, we use energy probably 10 times more than the other side of the world, and it’s just continuously, rapidly growing. You know, our energy needs are always growing. So we as Native tribes, because we have a lot of land, we have a lot of resources, we want to be able to contribute to the energy grid in a way that we see fit, in a way of what energy sovereignty means to us. So not only do we want to take care of our own people and our own needs, so we don’t have to always outsource our needs anymore — we want to always insource our needs.
I think the creative thing that we’re doing here can teach a lot of municipalities, can teach a lot of communities out there, states, on actually how to be sovereign themselves and not have to rely on the greater good. Because one example: when we all know the catastrophic events that happened in Texas a few years ago, where they got cold down there and their grid shut down, and they had no power for like a week or a week and a half or something — and then we had to shut down up in the north for like four hours out of the day to send power down their way, you know. So those are just some of those examples why I say energy resiliency is really important, because we have to start to protect our communities and where we live, and our states and where we come from, even more so.
And that’s what energy sovereignty and what Indigenized Energy is doing for tribes. We’re starting to work with tribes to help them become their own tribal utility, help them generate their own energy in their own communities, and help dictate those rates, because we know that with all the things that are going on in the world right now — and we’ll get into a lot of the AI data center stuff here in a minute — but because of all the energy needs and what’s happening in the world right now, those energy costs are continuously rising. So it’s really important to be able to generate our own energy moving forward, and that’s what energy sovereignty means to Native Americans.
But what I will say is, energy is different for every tribe. There’s 575 federally recognized tribes, and they might do it a little bit different compared to the next tribe, and that’s okay. But the most important part is looking out for their future generations to come and making sure that those energy costs stay within those communities, but most importantly, they’re more resilient than ever. As you know, solar is becoming cheaper every single year. It’s becoming cheaper, it’s more efficient. So tribes are really looking at a way in to figure out how can we become more energy sovereign as we move forward.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:20
As you say, distributed energy and microgrids can offer real energy independence, but there’s a lot of upfront costs and technical complexity. What’s the model for making these projects work financially for communities that have been systematically under-resourced?
Cody Two Bears 13:36
And that’s a great question there, Mitch, because, you know, Indigenized Energy — I really thought hard about this. We all know that in the world today we can put up an energy project in a community like mine and turn around and leave. But if you don’t build the skill sets or capacity internally to make them understand what you’re putting there, it’s probably going to fail. It’s probably going to crumble in the next two or three years, right?
So what I do is, we create projects at Indigenized Energy, but we also are really focused on creating programs. And within those programs — what I’ve learned, and Indigenized Energy has been doing this for the last seven years now, Mitch, which is pretty exciting — so what we do is, when we create a program, a distributed residential solar program for a tribe, usually we need some upfront capital or philanthropic dollars to help kickstart a program, but knowing that these programs are going to be self-sufficient on their own.
So what I mean by that, Mitch: if you had a home on the reservation and you wanted solar, and you wanted to sign up for a program, you could sign up for that program. Every program that we create is different from each reservation that we work with. One reservation would have a flat rate fee that you would pay to be a part of the program. Another one saves 50% across the board on what you generate in your home and what you save in your home in that month — 50% of that goes back into the program, the other 50 you get to save within your own pocket. Or another one is like a sliding scale, right? Where if you work, which is, you know, very rare on reservations, not a whole lot of jobs, but if you do work, you might be able to pay up to 70% back into the program. You keep 30% because you have a job, while there’s other elders that are on fixed incomes that may only pay 10 or 20% back. So it’s like a sliding scale program.
And what we’re seeing with these programs — and that’s what we got awarded Solar for All, the $7 billion through the EPA, Mitch. When we did our proposal for that, we created that model, and we were held in high regard. Indigenized Energy, through our coalition of tribes and other Plains tribes, we were held in high regard on: this is exactly the model we need to make solar flourish in the world.
So what that means is, as we create these programs, we’re actually kickstarting that. We’re just going to kickstart that with that $136 million we got, and that was going to put like 400 of these things on every reservation. And could you imagine the income it would generate being a part of a program for every tribe and where I come from? And what that will do is, it would unlock and unleash us as Native American people to finally be investable.
You know, because a lot of times Native American tribes, we have our own laws and our own sovereignty. So a lot of times we can’t get home loans on a tribe. They can’t go and just repo a home on our reservation, or a car loan, or different types of things. So it’s very tough to do and create loans within reservations. But whenever you create a program, a sustainable program that generates money within places of some of the highest poverty places and tribal nations in the country — you generate money. Well, that’s a fund that sustains jobs. That’s a fund that takes care of the O&M, and it also creates a fund that, once you start creating that fund, you can go out and take a loan and leverage all the money that’s out there for us for low-income communities to take advantage of. So that’s what we were going to do to kickstart Indigenized Energy to take us to the next level.
And what we’ve learned in the last six months, Mitch, is there’s places like Ann Arbor, Michigan — you can look up — and Portland, they’re actually creating distributed residential programs within their own communities now, and that’s something that tribal nations have been doing for quite some time. So I just wanted to give you the kind of nuts and bolts of why our work was really important, is because we do a lot of projects too, but programs was really the big thing that Indigenized created that would really help green economies flourish within reservation boundaries.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:39
A lot of people see the process of financialization as just bad, but what you’re saying is that it can be used to move from human exploitation to human enablement.
Cody Two Bears 17:49
Right. And I think that’s the biggest thing at Indigenized Energy. We don’t always ask for handouts; we ask for a hand up. And I think that’s the biggest thing: as we’re continuously raising money, we’re continuously saying, “Hey, help a tribe start a residential program, and once they start that, then you won’t need to keep going back and asking for more money anymore. It’s going to be self-sustainable.”
And I think that was why, you know, when Biden saw our vision and actually held our proposal in high regard — there was 60 awardees that got awarded the Solar for All program, and we were one of two that was held up as an example of that. And you know, I really wish we could have continued on with that project. You know, of course, this new administration here pulled those federal fundings. We were actually through the planning stages, ready to deploy the projects and start to build things before it got pulled. But the crazy thing about that, Mitch, is even though the money got pulled, a lot of our money we never really got reimbursed fully the way we should have. So Indigenized Energy, we lost quite a few dollars and resources of not being able to get reimbursed, because it was cut off so fast.
But most importantly, I think our tribes are more ready than ever to be able to take in funds because of that, and we’re kind of ready to deploy. We’re just looking for alternative resources and support and help to make that happen.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:10
So you just completed a transition to becoming an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and that’s significant. But you’re doing it in a genuinely difficult funding environment. What does organizational resilience look like for somebody in a mission-driven organization who’s navigating that strife-driven national dialogue you just described?
Cody Two Bears 19:31
I think the biggest thing is, as nonprofits do the work, funders always ask, “Well, what is your sustainability plan to keep you guys going?” And I think the model that I just shared is exactly that sustainability plan. That, you know, any funder that would understand this financialization model, they would want to give to that. They would want to say, “Wow, I want to be a part of something like that.” So for us, it’s just getting the word out there. The model now is actually working. It makes sense. We just need to deploy in other tribal communities that we service and work with.
But you know, as far as becoming our own 501(c)(3), we can really now lock in and do this work even more at a higher level for our tribal communities. Because sometimes when you use federal funds, well, there’s always like some red tape that you go through. There’s needs within tribal communities that won’t be met, because you can only do so much with federal dollars. Or if you’re, you know, fiscally sponsored, well, the policies that they create through fiscal sponsors don’t align with tribal values. So a lot of times we always hit roadblocks because of that. So becoming a Native-led organization and our own 501(c)(3) now has really propelled us to even cut all that red tape and to really help tribal nations the way they really need it. And I think that’s the exciting part about doing this energy work, being Native-led, but most importantly, being our own 501(c)(3).
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:01
You mentioned this before, that the national conversation these days about energy demand is increasingly being driven by AI expansion and data centers, just generally. And most of that conversation focuses on grid capacity at the macro level. What gets lost or left out when frontline and rural communities aren’t part of the conversation? What do we need to know about the interdependence we need to build?
Cody Two Bears 21:24
Yeah, look. You know, there’s no avoiding it. These AI data centers are going to be coming. They’re going to be built. A lot of times it’s going to affect communities around them. A lot of times it’s going to drive up the energy costs, you know, a lot more, and it’s going to utilize a lot of their natural resources around them, right? So there’s no way of avoiding it. But I think the concern is what that means for families that are already struggling with high energy costs — is that it’s going to be so difficult.
Like, just on a reservation, there’s AI data centers going up around reservations, and we already pay high energy costs. We already have to take the burden of looking at what that would look like when power goes low. It’s going to go to these data centers, and then I just told you we’re always at the end of the line. So we’re going to get that less energy. It’s going to go somewhere else because we’re at the end of the line, which is going to cause more frequent power outages, then those energy costs to rise. So that’s why our work now even makes more sense. The work that we’re doing now is needed much more than ever, because of that fact.
And we know that as tribal communities, of the demands out there, we also know that we have to do something within our tribal reservations to utilize our sovereignty around energy as we move forward. So I think that’s the biggest thing right now. We’re kind of seeing these AI data centers starting to play out, the types of resources it’s creating, the type of energy costs rising around us. I think is really, really disturbing in my mind. So I just want to make sure that we continue to move the needle within our tribal communities, to make sure we are continuing our work, to making sure we are providing our own energy resources within our tribal nations. Because, you know, those are just more examples for us to keep pressing forward and moving the needle, to making sure we’re taking care of our own needs.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:15
As we think about a new technology like artificial intelligence, we have to drive it to do the right things for the planet and the people who live on it, but the infrastructure buildout is accelerating demand for natural resources, critical minerals, and so forth, as well as water, in addition to electricity. How do you address the contradiction between those things when you think about whether AI data centers, or data centers generally, might even be part of tribal economic development strategies in the future?
Cody Two Bears 23:44
So I think, you know, as every tribe — and I just said that earlier on this podcast — every tribe has different agendas. Every tribe utilizes things in an economic way. Some tribes don’t. Some tribes want to keep their internal natural resources and not allow things like that to happen within their tribal boundaries. So every tribe has different priorities, different needs.
But what I will say, though, is, as we do this just transition away from fossil fuels — like, you know, I think fossil fuels are the determining factor of why we are the way we are today, right? But there isn’t going to be a perfect technology today. We’re just slowly making that transition, and I think that’s one thing that a lot of my tribal elders or people in my community always ask me. Well, there’s always some type of form of extraction, right? You’re never going to get away from that. But what is less impactful? You know, what can we do to minimize our footprint within the Earth and the land and the waters and the environment around us?
And I think that just transition that we talked about is really important to me, because if I can lessen my footprint just that much more, you know, we’re gonna do that. And when the technology gets better, where we don’t need to do extraction as much anymore in the future, we’ll slowly adjust those. But right now I think it’s just that transition that we’re making away from not having to rely on one source of energy that really is destructing the lands, and understanding and knowing that, yes, there’s other forms of things that are happening out there that are being extracted, but nothing at a major level compared to what we’ve been doing in the past. So there is some movement there, and I know technology will get better. And us as Native Americans, we’re always paying attention to what is the next best thing we should be focused on to continue protecting the environment.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:31
I think we’ve got a good lay of the land, but there’s a lot more to talk about here, folks. We’re going to take a quick commercial break and be right back to continue talking with Cody Two Bears.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:45
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my conversation with Cody Two Bears, who’s co-founder and CEO of Indigenized Energy, which is a nonprofit developer of distributed electrical infrastructure that’s working to connect Native communities across the continent.
Cody, Indigenized Energy is advancing energy makeover projects in four tribal communities right now. You know, you’re integrating solar, battery storage, and various forms of efficiency. How do you think about designing resilience at the community scale? What do you describe to people when you work with them to develop an infrastructure that supports their way of life?
Cody Two Bears 26:24
Well, that’s kind of why I created Indigenized Energy, Mitch. You know, I always thought, well, what type of good technologies are out there in the world? You know, there’s all good technologies, there’s bad technologies, but there’s also technologies — you have to use them in the right way. If you don’t use them in the right way, then we’re no better than, you know, the oil companies or people that are extracting the lands in a negative way. So my aim was always collaborating Western science and technology with Indigenous ways of life and traditional customs as Native people. And how do you collaborate that to allow Native American communities to make it make sense? And I knew that was going to be the biggest challenge as I created Indigenized Energy, bringing a certain type of technology in to create energy sovereignty within our tribal communities, which is really important.
But these whole makeover projects have been significantly something that’s really true to, you know, understanding that even solar energy in itself isn’t just the answer. You know, I’ll give you an example. A lot of tribal nations live in federal HUD homes, like cookie-cutter type homes that are issued by the federal government through treaties — our treaty laws, where the federal government is supposed to build homes and provide federal funding for homes within our communities, but it’s very, very minimal. They’re cookie-cutter type homes, like I talked about. The walls ain’t very well insulated, and then, of course, Grandma’s got her old freezer that she’s had that she loves for the last 20 to 30 years, that just won’t give up, but she loves it. All these factors play in to creating, you know, what an energy bill looks like in your home, and those energy bills are sometimes eight to nine times higher than the national average, because our homes ain’t well insulated. Our homes still use old technology, and home efficiency is really becoming a big thing for tribal communities as well. So we can save a lot of money just on top of the meter with solar, but could you imagine how much we would save by making even our homes more efficient?
So these home makeover programs and distributed energy projects that we do really are game changers in our communities. As we learn from what tribal communities’ needs are, we’re starting to learn that, number one, tribal communities are very distant. They’re in the middle of nowhere. A lot of our homes are just kind of put out there. There’s not really anything out there, and what that means is whenever we get disconnected from energy — especially our elders, especially our medical-needs people — they could be out without energy for a few days, which could be catastrophic.
So what we’re learning from our tribal communities, and why these home makeover projects are really important, is the tribal communities really want to focus on their elderly. They want to focus on the people in these remote areas. So then, when the power does go out, there’s battery backup there. There’s huge savings, and because we’re always at the end of the line, like I talked about, they can’t get more resilient than that. And one thing that I’ve learned from the few projects that we’ve done is there was one home that we did in the Oglala Sioux Tribe there, by Pine Ridge. When the power went out on their reservation, the home that we did there a few years ago — they were the only ones with power. This elderly group was the only ones with power, and didn’t even know that the rest of everybody was out for a whole day. They still had that resilience of having power in their home. So those are the types of things we see that are really impactful. We know that the work that we do is impactful from day one, from the time we turn that system on, the energy system on, and provide that energy resiliency.
Another one that’s really impactful there, Mitch, is we won Project of the Year through Solar Builder magazine last year, in 2025. We did a food sovereignty project that was initiated with energy sovereignty through a buffalo program out there in Northern Cheyenne. Their buffalo program is in the middle of nowhere. There’s no utility lines that reach out there to that buffalo program, because — I told you — we’re always at the end of the line. But there, there was no power lines going out there, so we had to bring the power to them. We created a small little off-grid system that powered their buffalo facility, and their buffalo facility processes buffalo meat to the community.
So not only did that have battery backup in there to make sure that we’re running in real time, but most importantly, it powered their electric fences. It powered their water stations. It powered their freezers for their buffalo meat. And now, because of that, you know, they’re able to really feed not just their own community, but they’ve been feeding local food banks in the local area because of our efforts there within that project.
So those are some powerful, powerful things that I talk about, Mitch, about why our work at Indigenized Energy is important, because, you know, we just don’t create something to save money. We actually create something that creates a way of life for our people, and I think that’s really the biggest thing that we see and why our work is so impactful. But those are just a couple examples of these home makeover projects and resiliency within communities that are really important and powerful, that we really want people to understand and know, because there’s a lot of great work that is happening out there. Even though the federal government wiped out all of our funding, that didn’t stop us from continuing to know what’s important. And our tribal communities are working hard every day to continue to strive toward that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:58
I can, to whatever degree it’s possible, really relate to being at the end of the road. I live in a very remote rural community. The federal broadband subsidy program installation stopped a half mile down the road. You know, so thankfully I have Starlink and I can talk with you. But I’m thinking, as I talk about this: is this a model for any community? And what’s your advice to a small town or a county that’s contemplating its energy independence?
Cody Two Bears 32:25
Well, I think there already is. You know, Texas is a red state, but we see a couple communities in Texas that are 100% renewable, and it’s a red state. I don’t know why renewable energy has to be under a political agenda. I don’t understand why solar has to be a political agenda. Because if you really look at it, even in where I come from in North Dakota, you know, we’re a very firm red state as well. But the farmers and ranchers are looking at solar as an economic thing. Like, it pencils out. It makes sense. Like, you’re going to save money. It’s like a car loan, right? Like, I make a loan on a solar system, and I pay that off within, you know, six, seven years, whatever it’s going to be, and then you have this power for the next 20 years free. So I mean, you know, it’s just economics. It makes sense. And so, like I said, solar energy is becoming cheaper more and more every day.
So those are the types of things that I look at. I don’t like to go on the political landscape. I show real examples of impacts of what this really does in places where we’ve worked, and I think that’s what the stories people need to hear. They don’t need to hear the propaganda of what this does, what that does, how it affects this, how it affects that. You know, I just look at real-world impacts that we’ve created.
But I think, you know, for communities outside the reservation, I would really encourage them to even look at what Ann Arbor is doing, what Portland is doing, you know, what tribal nations are doing, because we’re our own sovereign nation. Let’s learn together to figure out what an actual microgrid would look like for a community, what a tribal utility — or what a utility — would look like in your community, and how can you start programs that make sense where you come from. Because these energy costs ain’t going to wait. They’re always going to continuously rise, and we’re going to use more energy more and more every day. So I really encourage, you know, states, like I said, municipalities and cities, to really take a look at the energy crisis, because whether they know it or not, they’re going to be affected with outdated systems, and we need to figure out creative ways on how to create that within. And I think that’s the most important part of what we’re teaching here at Indigenized Energy around what energy sovereignty looks like on Native reservations, but how could that be expanded in other parts off the reservation?
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:45
This comes back to sovereignty and the idea that we will negotiate as equals. And one of your core principles is tribal direction comes first. And as you pointed out, there’s a diverse approach to tribal direction, a lot of different flavors. Many of the philanthropic and policy-driven funding opportunities that are available come with a lot of agenda. And again, thinking about any small community, not just tribal communities, how do you negotiate from a place of equality based on setting your own local standards and standing by them?
Cody Two Bears 35:20
Yeah, and I think the biggest thing that I would say is, how does funding fit in? And this is a great question, Mitch, because this is something that I know, as growing up as a Native American my whole life — you know, our people always being the original environmentalists in the Western Hemisphere — and I always look at this as energy is not just energy savings. It’s not just creating jobs. When you create good energy, it’s going to trickle down to everything else, because everything is all connected, right? So if you’re using less fossil fuels and using other alternative resources of energy, what you’re doing is you’re helping the air, you’re helping the land, you’re helping the water, you’re improving resources around us that really make sense.
So then, as you go after these federal dollars and these funds, I even use renewable energy as an economic value, of economic development. So we can attack it in all kinds of avenues and ways to how energy can make sense tied to funding, even though it’s not directly funded toward an energy project. We can relate to energy and what we do here in our work at Indigenized Energy and connect that with food sovereignty. We can connect that with jobs, with workforce — workforce development money is out there. So, you know, the things are endless on how you can connect philanthropy, federal dollars, and grants to the work that we do. You know, there’s always a path forward on what that connection looks like.
But I’ve done energy work now for the last 10 years — I’m coming on 10 years through Indigenized Energy’s existence. What I’ve learned is, you know, the work that we do helps all other areas and not just energy. And I think that’s what makes this work so attractive. That’s what makes this work so successful, and why I feel like, you know, energy projects should be funded even more than ever, because it helps the whole ecosystem around us.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:19
It’s really interesting how you describe unlocking land regeneration through this integrated approach to energy and food sovereignty. What does it look like when those two things reinforce one another? You began to describe the ripple effects, but can you point to a couple of examples where the economy of a community and the options available to it expanded because of food and energy sovereignty investments?
Cody Two Bears 37:44
Yeah. So we actually are doing a project right now on my home reservation on Standing Rock. There’s an organization called Wozu, and they do a lot of land regeneration right now. But they also are bringing back more of the buffalo herd as well, and it’s quite remarkable, the work that they’re doing. But we’re doing an off-grid system there for that buffalo program within theirs, and it’s right outside their buffalo handling facility. It’s actually bolted really high, and it’s an array there that provides shade for the buffalo, right? Which is pretty cool. So whenever they sort the buffalo there, they have a shade that’s powered by the solar array through their whole facility there, which is pretty cool. And we’re just now putting out the press release on that and what that looks like.
But we’re pretty excited about that, because now that particular program — to keep themselves sustainable, they have to be able to provide buffalo meat for their community, but they also want to, in the future, sell buffalo meat, especially, you know, with the land regeneration of the buffalo. The buffalo now are feeding off of natural grasslands, healed lands, so that grass-fed buffalo meat is at a premium right now throughout the world. So the biggest thing is that’s what’s going to keep our tribe economically stable — this program and this community — because not only are they able to help feed our own people, while using energy sovereignty and power to be able to do that, that’s going to create a ripple effect for economy-based programs that help them not only save money, not only preserve their buffalo meat, not only take the health and well-being of their buffalo as a whole as they use that for their facility, but what that does is it creates economic impacts in our communities. It also helps us be self-sustaining and self-generating.
So that’s the powerfulness of this work that we do. Because when you tie in food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, or whatever it may be, it’s always connected. You know, you can never go wrong, because those are the types of things that are really going to help flourish and take communities like ours to the next level, and we have several examples of that now. So that’s why it’s always good to not just say, let’s just throw up an energy project — and it’s good to do that and save money — but when you can tie it into other things of your ways of life, not just on reservations, but anywhere in the world, you know that really makes sense, because now that economy that you’re trying to build is speeding up a little bit more, faster, because you’re collaborating the both into something great.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:29
I’ve asked several Native guests over the years to describe what it’s like to be indigenous to a place, which I think is a skill all of us need to open our eyes to, to recognize our relationship with the systems in which we live. And I think you just described what the world would look like if we are really successful in localizing power generation. But as you think about where you’re going as an organization, where the Native communities of America are going as a collective identity, how important is the role of economic development and cultural preservation to the strategies that you’re designing for Indigenized Energy?
Cody Two Bears 41:12
All right, so let me tie this, Mitch. The word indigenized. There’s a reason why I called it Indigenized Energy, and let’s not even think about this as Indigenous people, even though that’s who I work for, that’s the work that I do for my nonprofit, and that’s my mission. But let’s just think back for a second on the word indigenized. Yeah, everybody came from somewhere. Everybody had a way of life. Everybody had a way of sustainability, you know, before the Western world kind of took over and did what they did.
Now here we are having all these issues and these problems. Now we’re starting to ask questions: Well, what do we do now to kind of reverse what we’ve done? Or what do we do now to kind of learn how to give back to the land? Because every day, Mitch, we’re taking, taking, taking, but nobody was ever taught how to give back, or give back in a way to help regenerate what we’ve been doing on this planet. And I think that’s what Indigenous people have been doing for so many generations. We’ve been taught how to do that. It’s in our way of life and our structure and what we do.
But I think the biggest thing that I want you guys to understand is that the word indigenized, and what that means is, as I go into a tribal community — like I told you, everybody’s going to do something a little bit different. So we’re going to have to indigenize what we do for the needs of what’s sustainable within your region, your climate, and what you do. There’s no one cookie-cutter way, Mitch, of doing this work everywhere. Every climate, every region has to do things differently. So we have to indigenize what we do to meet their needs, to make it make sense for them.
And I think that’s what we need to do for outside tribal communities, like in cities, municipalities. We need to indigenize their energy systems. We need to indigenize their food systems, because there’s certain things that they have to grow at certain times of the year. There’s certain medicines that are in their region that we need to keep sustainable and healthy.
So I think that’s why the word indigenized, to me, is really important, and that’s why that connects with outside communities, outside tribal reservations, because we have to learn about who we are and where we come from. And that’s something my grandma always taught me, Mitch. She told me that, and I was like, “Well, Grandma, what do you mean by that?” But you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. And I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned: once you’ve learned where you’ve been, once you’ve learned your history of your lands and where your house is and where your city is, and how it evolved, then you’ll better understand and know: okay, this part of this land here that we live on, this is what this is good for. This is what we need to focus on. So you’re actually indigenizing what you create moving forward, by just understanding who you are and where you really come from.
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:58
Cody, that’s a spectacularly clear frame for this conversation. Thanks so much for all of the ideas you’ve shared. How can our listeners follow your work? And I know that you’ve got a big event coming up. Tell us about it.
Cody Two Bears 44:09
Yeah, so you can follow us at Indigenized — it’s actually 4Indigenized.energy, the number four — and you can find us there. You look at all our work, all our previous projects, all the awards and successes that we’ve had within our projects to date. And also, we’d like to invite everybody to come out to the People of the Sun event on Standing Rock. It’s September 16th through the 18th on our reservation there on Standing Rock, and this just isn’t another conference or festival. It’s an event centered on Indigenous leadership, innovation, culture, and community. We’re bringing together tribal leaders, industry experts, artists, musicians, changemakers — you name it. We’re bringing them in, and really having those honest conversations about what the future of energy looks like, what our food systems look like, and what sovereignty looks like in real time.
And I think this year especially, it’s meaningful, because it’s the 10-year anniversary of NoDAPL. If we remember, on my homelands there on Standing Rock, in the community of — why Indigenized Energy was created — it was created because of the NoDAPL protest that happened in my community, a pipeline that was put a half mile north in my community. That’s why we do this work. It’s a 10-year anniversary, so we want to celebrate the progress that we’ve made and the work that really we’re focused on.
So I think the biggest thing is that we’re going to give out a lot of awards to a lot of champions out there in the energy sector. We’re also going to make sure that, you know, we’re entertaining people culturally, bringing a lot of great high-end musicians. So I encourage you guys to really look at PeopleoftheSun.live. Tickets now actually have become available on that website now, so go out there and get a ticket. But this is an event you’re not going to want to miss. And because of what’s happening in this country and the direction we’re going, we want to be able to allow people to be excited about this work. And just because, you know, there’s a lot of federal cuts and they moved all the tax incentives and the IRA and all of that away from this work, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to stop. We should be continuing to celebrate what is working out there, and by bringing people together, we can really accomplish that all together, as tribal people and non-tribal people. So I encourage you guys to look into PeopleoftheSun.live and see what we’re going on in September, and invite you all out to Standing Rock.
Mitch Ratcliffe 46:30
Well, Cody, the celebration of solutions is absolutely what we need to be focused on. Thanks so much for a really fascinating conversation.
Cody Two Bears 46:38
Thank you for your time, Mitch, and super excited about the work that you’re doing and putting out the word on why this work is important. So thank you so much.
Mitch Ratcliffe 46:50
Hey, welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Cody Two Bears, co-founder and CEO of Indigenized Energy, a Native-led nonprofit that helps tribal nations build their own distributed solar, storage, and efficiency technology designed around what each community actually needs. You can learn more about Cody and his team’s work at four — that’s the number four — Indigenized.energy, and there is no space or no dash between four and Indigenized. That’s 4Indigenized.energy. And you can also find tickets for the People of the Sun gathering at Standing Rock on September 16th through 18th at the site as well.
Let’s start with the word indigenized. That’s the concept Cody built his organization around, and when I asked him about being indigenous to a place, he shared a view that’s much wider than tribal energy policy. What does this mean? Everybody comes from somewhere, and everybody once had a way of living that worked where they lived. We’ve been moving an awful lot compared to previous generations the last few centuries. Every region has its own climate, its own growing season, its own medicines, its own history of how the land came to be what it is, and every place contains a community: human, animal, insect, fungal, and many more. Nature is a set of systems, and we are inside them. We’re not standing over them, as Western thinking has insisted for centuries, even as the systems that we depend upon collapse.
Native and Indigenous peoples have carried and transmitted the practical knowledge that we need about how to live as part of those systems rather than at their expense, and that is the inheritance available to all of us. But we have to learn to be of and for our place, not just prepared to take from it, whether we’re talking about mining the land, cultures, or personal data for profit. And there’s no cookie-cutter approach to designing a sustainable future that can succeed, which means the transferable asset in this case isn’t a solar project design, but the practice of knowing where you are well enough to know what to build.
Cody’s grandmother’s line lands harder than any policy paper that you’re ever going to read: you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. And you can see that principle at work in the Northern Cheyenne buffalo facility, an off-grid array that drew national attention to Indigenized Energy’s work in the tribal energy sector. The installation runs the electric fences, the water stations, the freezers, and it helps feed the community and local food banks. Energy sovereignty and food sovereignty aren’t parallel programs; they’re the same program, and a larger system than either one alone. Grass-fed buffalo raised on regenerated grassland commands a premium price, which adds the benefit of healing the land to the buffalo meat operation’s bottom line.
And that’s what balance looks like when it’s working. The energy decision, the food decision, the land decision, along with the economic decisions, are one decision, because the systems were never separate to begin with. But we’ve consistently oversimplified the economic thinking that we do. However, systems thinking is starting to unpack that misunderstanding.
Now compare all of that to the other thread in this conversation — the one I can’t shake. Cody did not romanticize the AI data center buildout. He said it’s coming, and there’s no avoiding it. He explained the mechanism driving higher energy prices plainly: rising regional demand, rising rates, and when load has to be curtailed so that you can feed those data centers, the end of the line is where the curtailment lands. Standing Rock is the fifth largest tribal landmass in the country, and also one of the poorest counties in America, and residents already pay premium prices for less reliable service. A 2023 Department of Energy report documented this pattern. Where the wire ends tells you who mattered when it was built. And the thing we have to recognize about building an infrastructure is it hardwires these power relationships over the long term — not just energy power, but political and social power.
But consider the sense of resignation in that statement, that there’s no avoiding it. A new set of systems arrives, sited by people far away, and the community absorbs the consequences without a seat at the table. And look, Cody’s people have lived that story before at a scale that most of us have never had to imagine, and here we are laying another vast layer of infrastructure on top of an industrial system that is already tearing nature apart, and we’re calling its arrival inevitable. It’s not just Native communities on the receiving end of these dictates that will shape their future — it’s all of us, and that’s the part we need to refuse. We need a voice at the table. A sense of inevitability, in the way that Cody expressed it, is the experience of a decision someone made and declined to explain to you. We can have a real conversation about what to adopt, what to discard, and what our choices mean, but only if we understand the whole system in which we are living, considering everyone and everything in the system — which is exactly the understanding indigenizing our thinking would provide.
“End of the line” speaks volumes. It suggests we’re on our own, although when you get there, you actually find that there are communities everywhere in need of new infrastructure. We’re all at the end of the line in the take, make, and waste centralized economy. We have to recognize that, which brings me to the practical answer that Cody would hand to any rural county commissioner in America.
Indigenized Energy doesn’t just install systems; it builds programs with communities that fund themselves. When a household signs on to get solar installation, it returns a share of what it saves — perhaps a flat fee here, a 50-50 split in the cost there, a sliding scale that asks for 70% from a working family and only 10% or 20% from an elder who’s living on a fixed income. The community is in it together, and that revolving fund pays for maintenance, sustains jobs, and eventually becomes collateral where conventional lending has never worked, because sovereign land doesn’t fit a repo-based credit model. It’s an acknowledgement that everyone in the community is in it together.
The Tribal Renewable Energy Coalition that Indigenized Energy helped form won 136 million dollars through the EPA’s Solar for All program on the strength of its community-centric design. Then the federal money was pulled mid-planning, and Cody’s organization ate unreimbursed costs on the way out. But the model didn’t fail, because the communities were bought into its benefits. It was the funding cycle that failed. It was the political system that failed.
Meanwhile, cities like Ann Arbor and Portland are building residential distributed programs that look a lot like what tribes have been running for years, and that’s your leading indicator. Indian Country is the R&D lab for community-scale energy, and it still needs philanthropic or public capital to kickstart — capital that’s scarcer than it was 18 months ago.
We can learn a lot from Indigenized Energy. The communities that were never at the center of the grid may be the ones who figure out how to live well without depending on it, because they never lost the habit of asking what a place can actually support. Think local, act local, and understand our roles — and there are many roles — in the larger world that we owe our children and grandchildren, down to the seventh generation.
September at Standing Rock marks 10 years since the NoDAPL protests. A decade has turned that protest into a renewable energy infrastructure. Indigenize what you build where you are. That’s the plan. We’ll be tracking what gets built next, and the growing awareness that becoming small-i indigenous is the challenge of our times. So get to know nature and the human systems that shape your reality.
Hey, look, if this conversation gave you something worth passing along, please send it to one person who needs to hear it, or leave a review where you listen. Folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste, and our archive has more than 560 episodes, and it’s waiting for you on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Thanks for your support.
I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another Innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Cody Two Bears on Indigenized Energy’s Community-Centric Grid Strategy appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/business-policy/sustainability-in-your-ear-cody-two-bears-on-indigenized-energys-community-centric-grid-strategy/
Editor’s Note: This is a sponsored posting.
Curbside food scrap collection has spread fast. BioCycle’s nationwide survey counted 14.9 million U.S. households with access to food waste collection in 2023, up 49 percent from 10 million two years earlier.
Getting those bins used is the harder part. Reported participation runs from near-universal in a handful of cities to under 30 percent in others. That gap matters. Food waste is about 24 percent of what U.S. municipal landfills take in, and the EPA estimates it accounts for 58 percent of the fugitive methane those landfills release. An unused green bin isn’t a neutral outcome.
Quick definition first, since the name varies. The green bin is the curbside cart for household organics: food scraps, plus yard trimmings and food-soiled paper depending on your program. It’s collected separately from trash and recycling and sent to a composting or anaerobic digestion facility instead of a landfill. It isn’t green everywhere. Toronto runs a Green Bin program, New York City uses brown ones, and elsewhere it’s the organics cart, the compost cart, or the food scraps cart. What matters is where the material ends up, not the color.
Why People Quit the Green Bin
Households opt out for a long list of reasons: confusion about what’s accepted, forgetting collection day, plain inconvenience. I’d add one that gets less attention because it’s unglamorous. The bin gets disgusting, cleaning it turns into a recurring chore, and eventually the chore wins.
I’ll be straight that this is a hypothesis, not a documented finding. I haven’t found a study that isolates bin cleaning as a reason people quit. What I’ve got is the pattern I hear from customers constantly. But there’s evidence that making the job less unpleasant moves the numbers.
In 2023–24, Essex County Council in the UK ran a year-long Food Recycling Project. It delivered a package to more than 375,000 households: a sticker for the general waste bin, an information leaflet, and a free roll of compostable liners. Food recycling tonnage rose an average of 21 percent against a control group in the first three months after delivery, more than double the council’s 10 percent target.
The liners were one piece of that package, running alongside a media campaign, so the case study can’t tell us how much of the gain they drove on their own. What it does show is that handing people a tool to keep the mess contained belongs in the mix alongside better signage. It also shows the limit. Free liner giveaways are a subsidy most households will never get.
So the question isn’t whether a cleaner, contained bin helps people stick with the program. Plainly it does. The question is how you get there when nobody’s handing out free bags. That’s the gap BagEZ fills.
Doing More With Less
BagEZ holds a standard bag open inside the green bin, 13 gallons (49 liters) and up. Food scraps go into the bag, not against the cart. Everything stays contained, and the bin stays clean and dry. That’s aimed straight at the reason people give up: the cleaning.
It’s a folding steel rack with clips that lock the bag to the frame. The handles grip the bin’s rim and hold the bag open and suspended. On collection day you pull off the clips, seal the bag, and lift out the frame before setting the bin at the curb.
The size is up to you, and the data says most kitchens don’t need much. The MITRE-Gallup survey, the largest U.S. household food-waste study to date, surveyed nearly 10,000 households and put the average household’s food waste at 6.2 cups a week, or about 8.8 cups once you count peels, cores, and bones. That’s a bit over half a gallon. Even a household running well above average isn’t close to filling a big curbside cart with food scraps. So size the bag to your kitchen, not your bin. A 13-gallon bag is plenty for most households, it costs less than lining a full cart, and a right-sized bag is also what makes the odor tricks below work. Size up if your program takes yard trimmings too, or if collection runs every other week.
One caveat before you change anything: check what your program accepts. Liner rules vary a lot across North America. Some programs take certified compostable bags only, some want paper or newspaper, some want food scraps loose in the cart. A bag your hauler doesn’t accept can get your cart skipped and the whole load flagged for contamination. Earth911’s recycling search is a good place to start: earth911.com/recycling-search
After collection, a wipe with vinegar and water handles anything that’s built up. On a bin that’s stayed dry, that’s a seasonal job, not a weekly one, and you never have to drag out the hose.
The Green Bin Yuck Factor
Ever notice the puddle in the bottom of your countertop organics caddy after you pull the bag? That’s mostly moisture coming out of the food itself. Produce is largely water, and as it breaks down that water gets released.
The same thing happens in the curbside bin, at a bigger scale. Bags of scraps keep releasing moisture as they sit, and when a bag rests against the bottom and sides of the bin, that liquid builds up into the sticky residue that smells and makes the bin dirty.
BagEZ works differently because the bag never touches the bin. The frame holds it up and lets air move all the way around: underneath, the sides, everywhere. Condensation on the outside of the bag has nowhere to pool. It evaporates instead of collecting at the bottom, and the walls stay dry.
A right-sized bag makes the odor tricks work better, too. A sprinkle of baking soda in the small contained space around the bag does more than the same sprinkle spread thin across a big empty floor. Less smell, fewer flies. Fewer flies, no maggots.
Some people use food-grade diatomaceous earth against fly larvae. DE works by drying insects out, and it stops working the moment it gets wet, so a dry bin is a precondition for it doing anything at all. Same story as the baking soda: it only earns its keep in a dry, contained gap.
Two more that help, cheap. A few sheets of newspaper under the bag catch drips if a bag ever fails. And a cloth sachet of peppermint and cloves tied to the outside of the bin throws off raccoons and rodents, which hunt almost entirely by smell. A bin that doesn’t smell like food stops being worth their trouble.
Why It Works
The infrastructure is already there. The bins are at the curb, the trucks run, and the environmental case, going by the numbers up top, isn’t in question. What’s been missing is a cheap, fast way to keep the bin clean enough that people don’t quietly give up on it.
A reusable steel frame that holds a bag open sounds too simple to matter. That’s sort of the point. The bin stays clean, the habit stays easy, and food scraps end up where they’re meant to.
Set it next to the alternatives and the difference is in how each one works. Bin cleaning services deal with the problem after it happens, on a schedule, for a recurring fee. Full-size liners cost money every week and are sized to the bin, not to what you actually throw out. A frame is a one-time buy that works with the bag size your household already uses.
A green bin program only works if people keep using it, and people keep using what doesn’t gross them out. That’s the hinge the whole thing turns on. Take away the wet mess on the walls and most of the reasons to quit go with it: nothing pooling at the bottom, nothing to hose out, no smell pulling animals across the yard. The bin stays clean on its own, week after week, with a bag you were going to buy anyway.
Size it to your kitchen instead of your bin, clip it to the frame, and the green bin stops being the chore you avoid. Find it at bagez.com.
About the Author
This sponsored article was written by Sean Rana, the founder of BagEZ, a Canadian company behind the steel hanging bag frame that keeps garbage and green bins clean without special liners or ongoing costs, and works for waste and storage on the go.
The post Guest Idea: Green Bins Are Spreading Faster Than the Habit of Using Them appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/how-to-recycle/guest-idea-green-bins-are-spreading-faster-than-the-habit-of-using-them/
Yale researchers estimate that roughly 80 million Americans are alarmed about climate change. About 40 million of them say they want to be politically active on the issue. But only about 3 million actually are. When that 37 million-American group is asked why they aren’t active, researchers most often hear that nobody has asked them. That’s the focus of this week’s conversation on Sustainability In Your Ear. Only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything about climate change on social media, and two-thirds say they rarely or never hear about it from friends or in the media. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry treats persuasion as core business. David Fenton calls the situation unilateral disarmament at a moment when an information war is needed. The crowning result of climate action to date is the Inflation Reduction Act that passed by one vote and was repealed by one vote. A bill you win by a single vote, he says, is a bill you never really won David founded Fenton Communications in 1982, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes. His campaigns helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, where Yoko Ono’s “Imagine There’s No Fracking” billboard went up along Governor Andrew Cuomo’s commute, and helped launch fossil fuel divestment with the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers. His book, The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who we discuss at length in this thought-provoking interview.
He places the blame on climate advocacy spending and, more importantly, the words used to frame the issue. The climate NGO and philanthropic world spends billions a year on policy, law, and science, and spends on communication mainly to raise money from people already on its lists. David traces that to what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong idea reproduces itself because it is correct, and to its corollary, that selling ideas is dirty work beneath serious people. The second is vocabulary. “Net Zero means almost nothing to most people. “Carbon” sounds like an abstraction. And “justice,” in cognitive research, evokes images of the police and courts, not of fairness and a shared mission. We need to pivot to simpler language, like “pollution,” when describing the source of global warming. Pollution is a word nobody defends, and a blanket of pollution trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space is a picture people can easily grasp and act on.
Asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer Americans give is “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Earth911 has spent three decades on that vocabulary, and it holds up on its own terms as a materials strategy. Increased curbside recycling participation rates don’t necessarily lead to decarbonizing the grid or the truck fleets. David Fenton’s prescription for listeners is blunter than any campaign plan: talk about it, post about it, and press the funders you know to spend generating public demand for change rather than direct mail fundraising. Learn more about David’s work at davidfentonactivist.com, and find his podcast at fentonforecast.com.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thank you for joining the conversation today. Let’s talk about how to win the fight for planet and people. We already know what to do about climate change. The clean energy solutions exist. They’re the cheapest form of power on Earth, and the warning signs, from fires and floods to the rising costs of food and insurers walking away from whole regions, are impossible to miss. And yet, after decades of effort, only about a quarter of Americans are deeply engaged with the urgency of climate action, and just half are even concerned. So here’s the puzzle that my guest today, David Fenton, has wrestled for more than 50 years. If the danger is this clear and the answers are this good, why has the movement failed to bring the public along?
Part of the answer is that we’re making the case in openly hostile territory. Federal climate policy has been rolled back. The fossil fuel industry has spent decades manufacturing doubt about global warming, and its allies are ready to blame wind and solar within hours of any grid emergency, whether or not the facts support it. The social platforms where most people get their news quietly bury anything labeled climate, showing it only to the people who already agree. And if you’re a climate-concerned person, the audiences that you most need to reach will never see those messages. As David puts it, we’re in a propaganda war with the fossil fuel industry, and we’re not even on the battlefield.
David Fenton has spent his life trying to change that. He started as a teenage high school dropout, shooting photographs of the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers for the underground press in the 1960s. He co-produced the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden, and in 1982 he founded Fenton Communications, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes.
Over four decades, his work has helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, and helped launch the fossil fuel divestment movement in partnership with the Rockefellers. In fact, the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers for the movement. And now he’s distilled it all into a book called The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator. And that includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. We’re going to explore how to speak to people’s hearts before their heads, and why “make polluters pay” travels farther than “net zero by 2050,” as well as how to fight disinformation when a lie outruns the truth, and how to win over conservatives without bending the facts. So, what does a lifetime of victories and hard-won failures teach us about protecting the planet and democracy itself in this pivotal moment? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.
David Fenton, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
David Fenton 3:15
I’m feeling sustained. Thank you. How are you? Sustained.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:17
Good. I’m doing well. It’s a beautiful day here in southern Oregon, and I know in Berkeley it’s probably a nice morning as well.
David Fenton 3:25
It’s a little foggy, and that’s good. We are avoiding the heat waves of the rest of the country.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:30
Twain’s observation about San Francisco is always kind of a satisfying one when you get there, but you hear about it and you think, “Gosh, it must be cold.”
David Fenton 3:38
Yeah, well, colder is a little better right now, given what’s going on in our overheated world.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:44
Absolutely. Hey, look, you’ve spent 50 years working on trying to change the world, to put it mildly. And in the book, you turn the lens on the movement itself, calling the climate crisis the biggest communication failure in the history of progressive advocacy. Why does so much of the fault lie on our side of the conversation?
David Fenton 4:04
Well, it’s not only on our side, but everybody talks correctly about the fault of the corporate polluting interests that have confused everybody and spread all this propaganda and intentional lying, the biggest criminals of all time, in my opinion, at least measured by impact, but our movement bears some responsibility also. You know, I mean, just look at the data. You know, only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything at all about climate change on social media, their main source of news increasingly. Only, let’s say, two thirds, according to the Yale research, say they rarely or never see or hear anything about climate change from their friends or in the media.
You know, the environmental groups do a lot of great things: policy, law, science. But they don’t communicate. They don’t spend money on communicating, by and large, even though they’re very wealthy. They have huge budgets. They don’t value that, you know. As we all know, they only go out to communicate with their members to raise money, not to educate or get people involved in action. When people say that they rarely or never see or hear anything about this, that’s a failure.
And at the same time, the fossil fuel industry is very focused on propaganda and communication. They’re building up all these online influencers. They’ve always had a natural focus on this, and we’re practicing what, in the main, I would call a unilateral disarmament in the information wars. And you know, you can’t decarbonize the economy at the speed we need to according to physics without the public being on board. You know, we saw this when Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act passed by only one vote, and when you win only by one vote, you’ve won nothing permanent. And in my opinion, it’s an indicator that you have not done enough to get the public on your side, and that’s why Trump was able to repeal most of it by one vote. So if we’re winning and losing by one vote, we’re losing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:22
But do you feel, because of the one vote that still separates the two sides of the country, so to speak, that there is a lot of opportunity for real permanent change still ahead?
David Fenton 6:33
Absolutely. You know, I’m very optimistic because you know the data shows we can help people understand what this is simply, in ways that speak to their concerns about their health and their children and their property and their jobs and their prosperity and their security. But we don’t, by and large. I mean, first of all, we don’t reach people hardly at all, and then when we do, our language is an obstacle. We do not speak in terms that people can understand or that speak to their values and their everyday concerns. You know, like take the term net zero. Nobody knows what the hell that means. You know, people really do not know what carbon is, sorry. And so the whole, you know, and climate justice, that’s another one. You know, as I tell people, if you want climate justice, please don’t call it that, because nobody knows what it means. And you know, if you look at the science of cognition and linguistics, when you say the word justice, what comes into people’s head is the police and the court. So you’re confusing the hell out of people.
Now, when you talk about pollution, which is the cause of this, everybody knows what you’re talking about. And the other great thing about the word pollution is that no one will ever defend it. Pollution is never good. No one ever likes it. So, you know, we know from the research that the best language and imagery to explain what we’re doing to the Earth to people is that we have put a blanket of pollution around the Earth that’s trapping heat that used to go back out to space, and everybody can see that. That activates existing mental frames. People know what pollution is. They know what a blanket looks like. They know what a blanket does. It traps heat. So all that heat energy that used to go back out to space is now making it hotter, duh. So that’s how we need to talk about this, but we don’t.
So another thing, you know, stop me from rambling on here too much, is that people learn from influencers and characters and personalities, and we don’t build hardly any up. Al Gore has, you know, long faded from predominant view. Bless him, he did a great job. But where are influencers? You know, we have them in the wings, and we have no infrastructure to create more visibility for them, and we don’t think it’s important. So you know, I’ve written about, why is this? Why does the climate community, the vast NGO and philanthropic enterprise behind it, and it is vast, it’s very, you know, it’s many billions of dollars a year, why, excuse me, why doesn’t it value communicating and getting the public on board to demand change?
So, the best answer I’ve found comes from the great Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, and he says that people who study the humanities, the sciences, and the law (I’m talking to you, Bill Gates) have what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy.
That is the idea that a great piece of science or a great policy idea is going to magically reproduce itself because of its sheer intrinsic engineering brilliance, and this is a false view. The world does not work that way, and there is a corollary view to the Enlightenment fallacy, which is that selling ideas is dirty, manipulative, and beneath us, and we don’t do that even truthfully. So contrast that, Lakoff does, with the people who go to business school. That’s who we’re up against largely, who study cognitive and marketing science, and who, in most cases, except the finance guys, have to sell products and services to advance their careers, so they have a natural tendency and inclination to engage in public persuasion to succeed, and it’s very profitable for them. You know, do marketing and public confusion and propaganda, and you can avoid regulations on your industry, or get yourself a multibillion-dollar tax cut.
Mitch Ratcliffe 11:25
Thank you. That’s a great kickoff because you covered about half the questions I wanted to talk about. But let’s go back and unpack some of that stuff.
David Fenton 11:32
Sure.
Mitch Ratcliffe 11:33
Money was where you started, with money in politics, and you closed with business people earning a profit. So money is a theme here. Is the problem partly, and I find that I am consistently put off by the number of requests for money I get daily, is the problem money in politics in the first place? Should Citizens United be repealed?
David Fenton 11:59
Absolutely, of course. You know, we’re supposed to have a democracy, which means one person, one vote. But because of our very corrupt and very partisan, sadly, Supreme Court, they’ve turned it into one dollar, one vote. That is not what the founders intended, and that’s not a democracy. That’s a kleptocracy. So yes, this is a fundamental problem, but that’s a surmountable problem. You know, if you create a mass movement.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:34
What would it look like to show up and create that mass movement?
David Fenton 12:37
Well, we’ve seen it many times before. You know, I’m very privileged. At age 74, I’ve seen and participated in a number of mass movements fighting the odds and winning. You know, we stopped the Vietnam War. We overcame segregation in the South. We got gay marriage. We got compassionate care to HIV victims. You know, on and on and on. There have been a lot of victories. We legalized marijuana. You know, we’ve certainly vastly improved the status of women and gays, and civil rights in our country. We have a long way to go, but it’s nothing like it was.
So these were all the results of mass movements, and there will be a mass movement to save a livable Earth. That’s going to happen. The weather’s going to make it happen. The problem, of course, as you know from the physics, is that we wait too long to let it happen spontaneously instead of nurturing it. It could be too late. So I’m confident it’ll happen, but we’re not building the infrastructure and creating the demand for it to the degree that we could, and it would cost a fraction of the philanthropic and NGO spending on climate and the environment today if it was directed to that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:01
Well, so how do you win that business person over to the idea that there is more profit in a more sustainable, renewable energy-based economy?
David Fenton 14:09
Well, that’s happening more and more because, of course, as you know, almost all new investment in energy is going into clean energy and storage. So the market is doing that more than people know. Actually, you know, the industry, the renewable power industry, has done a very bad job of marketing. It’s kind of, you know, shell-shocked and browbeaten and keeping its head down. There is a new effort underway called Amped, amped.org, to have the industry do more sophisticated communications and to stop getting punched in the face so much.
You know, all this ridiculous stuff. Offshore wind kills whales, a meme brought to you by the people that don’t give a crap about whales. You know, or well, all the mining for solar panels and batteries, which of course is a tiny, tiny fraction of the drilling and mining for fossil fuels. I mean, these people are shameless, and they’re good at it, and we don’t counter them hardly at all.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:21
One of the issues is sort of the preponderance of bad news, and I think back to Love Canal galvanized the environmental movement in there in the 80s.
David Fenton 15:31
Sure.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:32
And now, you know, Altadena burns to the ground, Pacific Palisades burns to the ground, wildfires everywhere. I literally was evacuated because of a wildfire a couple of weeks ago.
David Fenton 15:42
Oh, wow, sorry.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:43
And well, we made it. My house is here. When you mentioned Vietnam, for instance, I mean, we lost about 58,000 Americans in Vietnam. But because of pollution from oil and natural gas, about 91,000 people die every year in the United States, and an additional 15,000 because of the wildfire smoke and the particulates that people are inhaling. What do we do to focus the potential rage that would change things?
David Fenton 16:11
Yeah, well, again, only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change and clean energy on social media. Two thirds say that they rarely or never see or hear anything about it in the media or from their friends. It’s not an issue people talk about, and that’s all overcomeable. We have no infrastructure, no marketing campaign, no persuasion campaign, none, zero, zilch at any scale to do something about this, so you can’t expect people to mobilize and organize when you have one side of an information war confusing them and reaching them all the time, and the other side quiet, basically, and underfunded.
And it’s especially tragic because in the digital communication age, we know exactly how to reach people. It’s not expensive, really, compared to the money we’re spending on other things. We know how to do it. We have all the data. There’s a great group called Potential Energy Coalition, run by a former branding guy, corporate branding guy. They have all the data. They know exactly what messages work with which audiences, but nobody is deploying it. So this is the problem. You know, there are other problems, of course, in the digital age. People sometimes feel that clicking on something is the same thing as activism, which it isn’t. But you know, I mean, here’s another issue.
So according to the Yale research, the Yale Center on Climate Change Communication, there are approximately 80 million Americans who are in the category of alarmed about climate change, and half of them, 40 million people, say they want to be politically active on the issue, but only 3 million of them are politically active on it. And by the way, that’s about the combined mailing list of the environmental groups asking you for money. So then, when they ask the 37 million who want to be politically active and aren’t, why aren’t you? You know what the number one answer they get is: nobody has asked me.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:23
They’ve only asked for money.
David Fenton 18:25
The 37 million, they even haven’t asked them for that. So, in other words, you have an infrastructure failure. We are not reaching our own base, and our own base, according to Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale, is the largest potential issue public in the country, other than abortion, much bigger than the NRA and guns. But it’s not being organized. I mean, ask yourself: if you wanted to go take effective climate action today, where would you go? What website would you go to? What social media channel would you go to? Where would you go?
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:06
Yeah, I have to say that in order to act, other than going to the website where I can send a note to my representative in Congress, not a lot of places come immediately to mind because everything is so diffuse.
David Fenton 19:19
That’s right. So no one’s building up a trusted brand, a trusted organization to do that. We could, of course, we could, and you know that speaks to a whole other issue, which is, I think we’re past peak crazy wokeness in the progressive nonprofit world, but we still have a lot of it.
You know, the language problem is big, as I mentioned, but there’s also a dogmatic problem and an ideological problem. You know, if you are stressing racial and gender divisions in your communication, you’re not going to unite people against a common enemy, so not that those subjects aren’t important. Everybody’s identity is important, but we’re not going to win by appealing to subgroups. We’re going to win by assembling majorities.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:18
We have to think of a big tent.
David Fenton 20:20
That’s right, and we need, and look, you know, we could win conservatives too. No one has a program to do that at any scale. Now, I’ve conducted experiments where I’ve bought videos on climate change into the social media feeds of conservatives, and the videos feature conservatives explaining how global warming threatens conservative values, and they’re very effective, but no one does it.
So if you’re a conservative or Republican in your filter bubble, all you ever see is that climate change is a hoax. So what do you think you’re going to believe if that’s the only information that ever reaches you? Okay, so we could disrupt that. You can buy advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you know all these platforms. The Russians do it, but we don’t.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:18
David, you’ve ignited a great conversation. I want to take a quick commercial break, and we’re going to be right back to continue the conversation. Stay tuned, folks.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with author and progressive activist David Fenton, whose new book, The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, is a guide for multi-generational campaigns for a rational climate response. David, you mentioned social media and buying advertising there, but one of the problems, and not just for advertising, but just individual posts, is that when you use the word climate, it ends up being routed to the people who already care about climate. How do you communicate when the name of the problem that you’re addressing is buried?
David Fenton 22:07
Well, first of all, you can buy access to people who aren’t in that bubble. You can just pay for it, and it’s not expensive. And of course, with digital communications, you can test your messages and content to see what really works before you pay to scale it. So it’s not an excuse, you know.
And there is something else, which is, I think that we need to put more pressure on the tech platforms and companies, and by the way, also on the television networks, which are not irrelevant as people may think. You know, I mean, the TV networks are big on TikTok as sources of news, and they don’t ever, hardly ever, link extreme weather to pollution from fossil fuels. So, you know, these people can be pressured. The problem is, the only people that pressure them are the right. We don’t, because again, our community doesn’t think you need to sell ideas. We think that’s dirty and manipulative.
But by the way, you know, thanks for mentioning my book. You know, I also have a podcast now called The Fenton Forecast on all platforms, and we’re looking at the future of climate and AI and health and democracy and all these issues.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:27
You’ve got a rule: fight falsehood immediately, and that’s because a lie will harden into a truth the more times it’s seen. But now a lie outruns the truth by a pretty wide margin, largely because the other side pays for it to do so. What’s your playbook for fighting disinformation? How’s it changed, particularly as a result of AI and the ability to amplify everything?
David Fenton 23:48
Well, it’s not only that they pay for it; they’re unified, and we’re the Tower of Babel. So you know, the Koch-funded conservative infrastructure of all their think tanks and influencers and podcasts and you know all of it. You know, they speak to the same topics and messages on a daily and weekly basis. They meet. They coordinate. They’re in lockstep, and that’s very important because the cognitive science is very clear. The way people learn is from significant amounts of repetition of simple messages. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Simple, simple, simple, simple, simple.
And by the way, most people in our community hate that. We hate simplifying things. We’re not rewarded for it, and we hate repeating ourselves. But that’s what works, and they understand it, so they organize their field to do that. And we’re, you know, everybody on their own doing their thing. So that’s one big problem. I mean, even in our scientific community, there’s no unity of discourse or language or imagery that would help a lot. Nobody organizes it, so, and we could pay for it also.
Now AI is a whole other thing, of course, and you know I don’t have all the answers to that, but I do think that eventually we are going to have to have laws in this country that demand that AI-generated content is labeled as such, and we also should have laws that to be on a social media platform, you have to prove you are a human, not a Russian bot. We’re going to go through a lot of hard times, and eventually we’re going to end up regulating these platforms. You know, you see the difference. Look at why are the Europeans so much more focused on appropriate levels of regulation of social media, and they have some rules about media in general. It’s because they went through fascism and the Holocaust, and they saw how unchecked demagoguery can kill millions. So they’re focused on this, and we’re still in a frontier, false idea of freedom model. And but it’s not going to last.
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:17
When you say that people on the left don’t like to repeat themselves, it really comes home for me because I hate repeating myself. And George Lakoff, who wrote the foreword to your book, in addition to being somebody you talk about, has argued that there are two kinds of minds politically, or two moral worldviews, that are based on different models of the family. One’s the strict father; the other is the nurturing parent. And Lakoff’s work on metaphor and how it informed our relationship with the world, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, is a brilliant, brilliant book. And his book on mathematics just blew my mind 20, 30 years ago. But I’ve never really agreed with that bicameral mind idea. How does that framework change the way you think about talking to people about climate?
David Fenton 27:03
Okay, so you left out a third category from Lakoff, which are the biconceptuals, he calls them. So Trump’s the conservative strict father. The father’s always right. White people on top. Man on top. That’s conservative morality, and the nurturing parent, that’s, you know, we kumbaya feel-good liberals. But the swing voters are the people who have both neural networks, and they either can be activated depending on the language and personalities they are exposed to.
For example, in an election campaign, so take for example James Talarico in Texas, who’s running for Senate. So he’s attracting lots of swing and independent voters and some Trump voters because he’s activating the nurturing, caring, love thy neighbor, actual Christian side of their brains. So I think that the job here is to activate and mobilize the base and win over a significant number of the biconceptuals, and then you have an enduring majority. So I think that’s how I use his framework.
You know, of course, the reason we don’t like repetition and simplicity is in academia, you’re not rewarded for that. You’re rewarded for specialization. Yeah. You know, the smaller the better. So yeah, it’s bad training. It really is.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:41
Two of your signature wins turned on the messenger who delivered the message, not just the message. One was the Rockefellers divesting from fossil fuels, and the other was Yoko Ono put up a billboard on Governor Cuomo’s commute that said, “Imagine there’s no fracking.” And as I read about that in the book, I was thinking of McLuhan and his argument that the medium is the message, but it sounds like we’ve moved to the messenger is the message. Is that the case?
David Fenton 29:08
More, yeah, because as trust in institutions has declined, including traditional media institutions, what trust remains is in people, is in individual influencers online, including some celebrities like take Taylor Swift or people like that. So yes, whereas the media used to be the message, it’s increasingly what we call parasocial influencers, people that you trust and who you follow.
So the fossil fuel industry is building up a bunch of these people. You can see it. In fact, right now there is a torrent of horrible disinformation on climate on Elon Musk’s racist platform. It’s unbelievable. The worse the fires get, the hotter it gets, the more torrent of bullshit is on X. And a lot of it comes through, “Well, I used to be a climate activist, and I’ve seen the light. Fossil fuels are the greatest thing ever.” We have nobody like, so we have some incredible talent. Like, have you ever heard of Dr. Katharine Hayhoe?
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:25
Oh, sure. Yeah.
David Fenton 30:26
Okay. So she’s a Christian evangelical climate scientist at Texas Tech University. Her husband’s an evangelical preacher. She’s amazingly talented, and she has no help online, none. She has no video team, no social media team, no PR firm, no strategist. She does it all by herself. And because she’s so good, she has a million followers. She’d have 15 or 20 million, in my opinion, if she had help.
And here’s a comment on the philanthropic community and its prioritizing communication. Here we have this proven talent, and she can’t raise hardly any money to get a team because we don’t value this work.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:13
What you’re describing is this talk of authenticity. That person represents the real, and I buy into it. What makes a messenger land, and how do you find the right one?
David Fenton 31:23
Well, she lands. We’ve proven it. I’ve done focus groups with her videos and online dial testing, and there are, you know, there are TV meteorologists who are really, really good at this. You know, former Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, he’s terrific at the clean energy side of this. The founder of Amped, Steve McBee, is really a terrific spokesperson. You know, Michael Mann, the climate scientist, he’s very talented. There’s a young scientist, Marcius Extavour, who’s really effective. There’s a number of them, but they have no help. Let’s get them some help.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:04
The other issue that seems to be activating everyone, left and right, is concerns about the state of our democracy. And in fact, it ranks right up there with climate change. How do you see the fight for climate and democracy potentially merging in some way in order to make this into one struggle for a major change in the way we do things?
David Fenton 32:22
Yeah, I think that will happen. You know, we have fossil fuel industry evil billionaires, and now, unfortunately, we have Silicon Valley fascist evil billionaires, and these people are corrupting the democracy, and they’re also threatening people’s health and homes and livelihoods and prosperity and children and their lungs, so and their ability to get insurance. And you know, it’s like the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said in the 1940s. He said, you know, you could either have a democracy or you can have great concentrations of wealth, but you can’t have both.
So I think that this is all going to merge into a movement to have checks and balances on private power, which we’ve had before. Teddy Roosevelt broke up the monopolies and the trusts. You know, the top marginal tax rate in this country used to be functionally 70% under Eisenhower. It was 90, but functionally it was 70. That made owners of companies invest in their workers and businesses rather than give all the money to the government.
So actually, the whole ideology about taxes is backwards, so yeah, you know, there’s this tax on billionaires on the ballot in California this November. I think it’s very likely to pass, and it’s kind of sad to watch some of these billionaires. They’re so upset. It’s 1% a year for five years, guys. You know, this is half what you pay your hedge fund managers, and you pay them that even if they lose money. So it’s, you know, the wealth inequality is corrupting, and there are some good billionaires, you know, who fund a lot of great things, but this is distorted, and you can’t have a functioning democracy with this degree of disparity.
So yeah, I think it’s all going to change. I’m really confident it’s all going to change. History shows that periods of great income concentration lead to rebellion, and periods of less income concentration, just like periods of fascism and repression, never last. They lead to rebellions and it collapses. But the real problem, as you know, is we are running out of time to save a livable Earth and climate because the carbon dioxide stays up there for millennia, and this is the worry. Will this happen in time? And that’s up to us.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:03
That’s the nail we have to figure out how to drive home. And Franklin Roosevelt, the other one, there’s an apocryphal story about him after coming to office. The Depression was underway. He brought the richest people in the world, in the country, to the White House and said, “Look, we have to do something about this, or they’re going to kill you. What is it going to take to …”
David Fenton 35:26
I want. There’s another meeting that Franklin Roosevelt had when he first took office. He brought in all these progressive and labor leaders, and they all laid out what they wanted him to do. And Roosevelt looked at them and said, “I agree with you on everything. Now go out and make me do it.” So that’s the job.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:49
Well, okay, but what event catalyzes that moment here in the United States? Do we have to wait for the ultimate disaster?
David Fenton 35:55
You know, the disasters are happening all around us.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:58
That’s the problem. It’s just, it’s …
David Fenton 36:02
Okay, but back to, there’s nothing on social media. There’s almost nothing in the regular media about this at all. But there’s certainly nothing simply linking the pollution from oil, coal, and gas to these weather disasters. So this is not something that people really know at a deep enough level.
You know, When you ask Americans what causes climate change, you know the number one answer you get: it’s caused by the ozone hole, which it isn’t. And when you ask them how to solve it, the number one answer you get, 40%, is reduce, reuse, and recycle, which won’t solve it. So you have climate illiteracy, which we could fix, and until we do, we won’t get action.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:52
For someone listening right now, what is the one thing you would urge them to do?
David Fenton 36:56
Talk about it. Talk about it. Talk about it. Post about it. Get everybody to talk about it. We have an emergency that people aren’t talking about. That’s not good.
And I think that, pressure any philanthropies, philanthropists, and NGOs that you know to devote more of their resources to creating public demand. Public knowledge and public demand is what we lack. We don’t lack solutions; we lack demand.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:30
David, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can people follow your work and tune into the podcast?
David Fenton 37:35
So The Fenton Forecast is on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and all the major platforms. The website’s fentonforecast.com. The website for my book is davidfentonactivist.com. Davidfentonactivist.com. And if anybody wants to write to me, it’s hello at fentonforecast.com. Hello at fentonforecast.com.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:01
David, I hope you get a lot of mail. Thanks so much for your time today.
David Fenton 38:05
All right, thank you. Let’s stay in touch.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:07
I’d love to.
David Fenton 38:07
Okay, bye.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:14
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with David Fenton, the founder of Fenton Communications, author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, and host of The Fenton Forecast. You can learn more about David’s work at davidfentonactivist.com. David Fenton Activist is all one word, no space, no dash. DavidFentonActivist.com, and you can find the podcast at fentonforecast.com, which is also all one word, no spaces, no dash. Fentonforecast.com.
So, 50 years of campaigning from No Nukes to the fight over fracking in New York, and here’s the verdict that David brings back: the climate movement is losing an information war because it showed up for the fight with ideas, not effective messaging. 12% of Americans say that they ever see anything about climate change on social media. Of the roughly 40 million Americans who say they want to be politically active on climate, only about 3 million follow through with action. And when researchers ask the other 37 million why they aren’t involved, the top answer is that nobody has asked them. Well, that’s not a public opinion problem. It’s an organizing failure based on overreliance on mailing-list-based fundraising. You’ve got to give people something to do, not just ask them for money to do something for them.
So let’s start with where the money goes. Climate philanthropy and the NGOs that it funds are very good at policy, law, and science, and they spend almost nothing on persuading the public that any of that matters. David traced that to what George Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong policy argument will spread on its own just because it’s correct, in addition to the corollary that selling ideas is beneath serious people. I hear a version of this every week on the show. We are not short of solutions. We cover them constantly: heat pumps, geothermal networks, sorting technology that can pull a specific polymer out of a mixed stream. What we are short of is the 40 million voices that make any of it politically survivable. The Inflation Reduction Act passed by one vote and was gutted by one vote. And David’s read is that a bill that you win by one vote is a bill that you never really won. And so far, that’s proven to be true.
Now another point cuts closer to home for those of us who care about this. When Americans are asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer is reduce, reuse, and recycle, and bully for them. I believe that that is part of the solution. Earth911 has spent three decades on exactly that vocabulary, and I’m not going to pretend that it has succeeded. Recycling is a material strategy. It’s a big one because most of what we call consumption is really extraction, processing, and transportation, as well as the emissions embedded in the goods we buy, and they’re a bigger share of the national footprint than most people assume. But no rate of curbside recycling participation decarbonizes the grid or the fleet that delivers the products to us and takes it away, including for recycling.
David’s fix is to stop leading with the words that failed to gain cognitive traction. Net zero means almost nothing to most listeners. Carbon, which is the basis for life, is a mystery to most people. Pollution, however, is a word nobody defends, and David’s description of a blanket of pollution around the Earth that traps heat is a picture people already have in their heads. That’s worth borrowing and worth testing in conversations with your friends and family.
And finally, it’s time to look closely at the messenger economics that are involved in this new communications conflict. Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals, some of them pretty shady, and the fossil fuel side is investing in individuals. They’re hiring them, while our side leaves the best communicators to fend for themselves. David’s example of Katharine Hayhoe, the evangelical climate scientist with about a million followers who has no video team, no social team, and no strategist, is an example of that. Meanwhile, the clean energy industry, after years of taking punches over whales and mining, has launched another advocacy platform, Amped, in May of this year. Take a listen to my recent conversation with GoodPower’s Leah Qusba, who is working the same strategy from the tools end of the equation. That is, with AI-assisted tools for spotting anti-renewables messaging and responding to them.
And to David’s caution, I would add another: attention purchased is not the same as earned trust. Industry-funded persuasion carries a credibility discount, and the parasocial channel can cut both ways. The influencer who tells you that they gave up being a climate activist after seeing the light is using the exact same machinery in our minds. Money buys reach, but it doesn’t necessarily buy a message or messenger people will continue to believe. So here’s the number that I’m going to be watching for this year, and it’s not the number of gigatons of carbon or the gigawatts of energy, but whether a single large climate funder moves serious money into permanent communications infrastructures. And by the way, I am hearing rumors that there is one big one out there looking at a $300 million campaign. The 37 million wannabe climate advocates are still waiting to be asked, and they need to be equipped with messages and tools they can use to take action. So we’re going to continue to watch this story and share progress as it develops.
Hey, if this conversation gave you something to argue with, send it to somebody who will argue back and leave us a review while you’re there, folks. You’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste, and there are more than 560 episodes in the Sustainability In Your Ear archive to share with your friends, your family, and coworkers. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, and any other purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Thanks for your support. We really appreciate you spreading the word.
I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. In fact, let’s advocate for it. Have a Green Day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: David Fenton on How to Win the Climate Debate appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-david-fenton-on-how-to-win-the-climate-debate/
Unwind and sleep easy with one of these non-toxic and eco-friendly bed frames that you know was sourced consciously, both in respect to your own health and the health of our common home: Mother Earth.
What is a Non-Toxic and Eco-Friendly Bed Frame?
Just as with other eco-friendly furniture, the key elements to consider when it comes to bed frames are the materials, finishes, general production practices, and durability.
Materials
If you’re looking for a natural bed frame and want it to be non-toxic, it’s typically best to go the solid wood route if you can.
Most plywood, particleboard, or engineered wood is made with glue that contains added formaldehyde. As a Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) and probable carcinogen, formaldehyde is an environmental and health risk for yourself and the workers producing that product. While all wood naturally contains formaldehyde, pressed wood contains higher concentrations of it.
Another material to consider if you’re looking for non-toxic furniture is solid metal, due to its durability, easy maintenance, and recyclability. However, this option isn’t as eco-friendly if that metal was newly mined, rather than recycled.
Sourcing
Of course, although wood is renewable, it’s not always sustainably sourced. Look at a company’s About or Sustainability pages to see what information they can provide about how the wood they use is harvested and where it is sourced from. Look for things like:
- Local sourcing. This minimizes the product’s carbon footprint and typically means that a company has more transparency into their supply chain.
- FSC-certified. While not perfect, the Forest Stewardship Council seal is the most widely used third-party verification for sustainably-sourced wood.
- Reclaimed wood. Finding a bed frame made from repurposed materials is a fantastic option if you can find it. Not only does using reclaimed wood reduce waste, but it minimizes the need to cut down additional trees.
Finishes
Most conventional finishes used on furniture contain VOCs, which can cause a myriad of short-term and long-term health impacts. Look for non-toxic bed frames with low-VOC or even better, zero-VOC finishes.
Other Production Practices:
- Renewable energy use. Does the company use wind or solar power for its operations? Do they purchase Renewable Energy Credits?
- Waste reduction. How does the company handle material waste such as leftover wood? Do they work to minimize water use and energy use?
- Donations. Does the company give back to an environmental organization through a group like 1% for the Planet? Do they plant more trees than the number of trees cut down to produce their products?
Durability
One of the all-too-often left out elements of sustainability is durability and longevity! The longer the bed frame lasts, the longer it stays out of the landfill, and the fewer new bed frames you’ll have to consume.
How can you determine durability? Look for sturdy materials, good construction, check out the reviews for the brand’s products, and see what sort of warranty the brand offers. Some brands offer 1-year or 5-year warranties, and some even include a lifetime guarantee! The longer a brand commits to standing behind its products, the better.
If you’re planning to move around often, you may also want to consider how well the bed frame can be deconstructed and reconstructed. Fast furniture brands with poor construction — and that may use plastic in places that should be supported with metal — may not hold up after a few moves.
A Quick Note on Certifications
Certifications aren’t the full story in sustainability, but they can provide an important added layer of verification to a company’s claims.
- FSC Certified = the wood sourcing was responsibly managed (not perfect but generally recommended as a stronger standard that Sustainable Forestry Initiative)
- GOTS Certified = the fabric meets strict organic and safety standards; this applies to the textiles only (like any upholstery on a bed frame), not the wood or any foam
- GREENGUARD / GREENGUARD Gold Certified = the finished product was tested for low chemical emissions, with Gold representing the stricter tier;
- LEED Certified = verifies the environmental performance of the building or manufacturing facility itself (energy use, water efficiency, indoor air quality); this is a facility-level certification, not a claim about the product’s materials or emissions
- Carbon Neutral Certified = verifies that a company has measured its greenhouse gas emissions and offset or reduced them to net zero; this is typically a company-level claim, not a guarantee about any single product’s individual footprint
How to Find Sustainable and Natural Bed Frames
As always, shopping secondhand is a great way to source furniture sustainably and more affordably! Sites like Facebook Marketplace, local Buy Nothing groups, and Craigslist can be resources for finding cheap eco-friendly furniture — sometimes, you can even get a piece for free if you’re willing to take care of the pick-up.
I also recommend checking out EstateSales.net to find local estate sales happening near you! I have found some of my absolute favorite pieces of high-quality, preloved furniture at estate sales.
For a more curated selection of secondhand bed frames, check out AptDeco.
And if vintage furniture (usually defined by being more than 40 years old) is more your style, take a look at Chairish, EBTH, or 1st Dibs.
If you can’t find anything preloved, or you’d prefer to purchase a verified non-toxic bed frame, check out these brands below for sustainable bedroom furniture!
Note that this sustainable bed frame guide contains affiliate links, meaning we’ll earn a small commission if you choose to purchase through one of these links, which helps us continue to run this site. As always, all brands meet rigorous criteria for sustainability and are brands we love — and that we think you’ll love too!
Brands with Sustainable and Non-Toxic Bed Frames:
Our Top Overall Pick: Savvy Rest
Savvy Rest has everything you need to sleep more restfully, from organic mattresses to non-toxic bedroom furniture. The brand’s timeless all-natural platform beds — The Afton is their flagship platform bed and The Esmont is a platform bed with a customizable headboard — are made in their own Virginia workshop. Each bed is crafted out of sustainably-sourced maple and poplar wood and is available unfinished or with a zero-VOC finish.
The non-toxic furniture company also has a sustainable adjustable bed frame crafted from responsibly-sourced solid red oak, featuring a mid-century modern headboard.
Conscious Qualities: Sustainably-Sourced Wood, Zero-VOC Finishes, Local Production
Price Range: $1,049 (Twin platform bed) – $4,799 (King adjustable bed frame) | Use code CONSCIOUSSTYLE20 for 20% off
Shipping: Free White Glove delivery within continental U.S.; contact for quotes outside 48 contiguous states
Best Reclaimed Wood Bed Frame Options: Avocado
Made in their own GOTS-certified Los Angeles factory, Avocado Mattress makes eco-friendly bed frames with high environmental, health, and social standards. Each bed frame is made out of reclaimed wood or solid FSC-certified timber and zero-VOC finishes.
For the bed frames made from new wood, Avocado Mattress uses non-toxic Titebond wood glues. The Certified B-Corporation also pays living wages and offers benefits, including family healthcare, to their production factory team members.
Conscious Qualities: Reclaimed or FSC-Certified Wood, Zero-VOC Finishes, Local Production in a GOTS-Certified Factory, Greenguard-Certified (Gold), Carbon Neutral Certified
Price Range: $750 (Twin platform bed) – $7,999 (California King frame with headboard)
Shipping: Ships furniture within the contiguous U.S.
Best Variety of Eco-Friendly Beds: Medley
Using only the highest quality non-toxic materials for their sustainable furniture, Medley has natural bed frames are made from domestically-sourced FSC-certified solid wood. Each wooden bed frame is made-to-order in Los Angeles using zero-VOC glue and zero-VOC all-natural furniture polish. (Note: Medley’s bamboo furniture uses low-VOC finishes.)
If you prefer an upholstered sustainable bed, check out Medley’s Nein bed which has the option to use organic natural latex.
Conscious Qualities: Local In-House Production, FSC-Certified Wood, Natural Finishes, Made-to-Order
Price Range: $2,495 (Twin bed with headboard) – $6,595 (King bed with headboard and storage)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S. (contact Medley for quotes outside of the U.S.)
Best for Sustainable Upholstered Beds: Saatva
Saatva is a sustainable mattress company that has expanded into eco-friendly bed frames too. The company uses responsibly sourced hardwood that has been kiln-dried for maximum durability for the bed frame as well as plywood slats for additional support. (Note: I asked Saatva’s customer support team about potential toxins in the plywood, and they have told me that their beds are free of formaldehyde.)
For upholstery, Saatva offers natural linen as an option, which would be the non-toxic fabric choice!
Probably the most impressive feature of Saatva’s beds is their attention to quality and proper support. They even offer a 180-day trial to make sure you love the bed, plus a lifetime warranty — a feature you definitely won’t find at most big box furniture stores.
Conscious Qualities: Sustainably-Sourced Hardwood, Natural Upholstery Option, Lifetime Warranty
Price Range: $795 (Twin platform bed) – $3,295 (King bed with leather headboard)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S; free in-room delivery
Best Design Forward Sustainable Beds: Cisco Home @ Urban Natural
Made to order with exceptional care in Los Angeles, Cisco Home is the real deal when it comes to quality sustainable furniture, including their eco-friendly upholstered or slipcovered beds. (Choose upholstered for a more classic style or select slipcovered for easy cleaning and maintenance.) Cisco’s cozy yet elegant beds will transform your bedroom into an aesthetically pleasing sanctuary.
Cisco Home’s default furniture options don’t automatically include their best eco materials. So for the most eco-minded and non-toxic option, select “Make it Organic” on the product pages which will ensure your bed gets made with only the highest quality earth-conscious materials: FSC-certified woods, organic latex, jute, hemp, organic cotton, and wool.
Conscious Qualities: Made In California, Made-to-Order, Low-VOC Stains, FSC-Certified Wood and Natural Materials (with “Inside Green” option)
Price: $3,588 (Twin upholstered bed) – $10,979 (King organic upholstered bed)
Shipping: Ships within contiguous U.S.; white glove delivery available with fee
Best Simple Sustainable Wood Bed Frame: Birch
Organic and eco-friendly mattress company Birch also has a natural wood bed frame made from responsibly-sourced hardwood. In fact, all of the wood in the Birch Wood Frame are from FSC-certified and LEED compliant sources, to verify their commitment to responsible wood harvesting and energy use.
Specifically, this sustainable bed frame is made up of Appalachian hardwood bed rails, solid Southern Yellow Pin wood slats, and Appalachian Maple legs. This minimal solid wood bed frame is finished with all-natural water-based VOC-free finishes.
And in case you needed more reasons to love this non-toxic bed frame: it’s handmade in the USA, ships free, and comes with a 5-year warranty.
Conscious Qualities: Solid Wood, Responsibly Sourced, Zero VOC Finishes
Price: $599 (Twin) – $978 (King)
Shipping: U.S. and Canada (feel applies to HI, AK, and Canada)
Best Affordable Eco-Friendly Bed Frame: Thuma
Minimal yet functional, Thuma’s eco-friendly beds are designed with intention — they are supportive and sturdy yet simple and easy to assemble.
Each minimalist bed is made from upcycled and repurposed rubberwood trees and is shipped out efficiently in recycled cardboard. (No styrofoam here!) With an average 4.9 star rating from nearly 21,000 reviews, there’s clearly a lot to love about Thuma’s sustainable bed frames.
Conscious Qualities: GREENGUARD Certified, Repurposed Wood
Price Range: $895 (Twin bed, frame only) – $2,595 (King bed with upholstered headboard)
Shipping: Ships within U.S. and Canada (international customers can use freight forwarder)
Best Untreated Non-Toxic Bed Frame: My Green Mattress
MyGreenMattress.com has a simple sustainable bed frame made in the US from untreated domestically-sourced Poplar wood. The non-toxic bed frame does not have any wood stains, adhesives, or toxic chemicals. This slatted platform bed also eliminates the need for a box spring.
Conscious Qualities: Domestically-Sourced Wood, Non-Toxic & Untreated, Made in the US
Price: $799 (Twin without headboard) – $1,899 (King with headboard)
Shipping: Free shipping within U.S.
And that’s a wrap on our guide to sustainable and non-toxic bed frames. Thanks for reading, and for taking the time to be thoughtful about your next bedroom furniture purchase. And I hope that this guide saved you some time and research and you’re on your way to finding the right sustainably-crafted bed that suits your needs and interior aesthetic.
Complete Your Bedroom: Non-Toxic Mattresses | Eco-Friendly Pillows | Organic Bedding | Non-Toxic Nightstands
Shopping For Other Furniture? Browse These Guides:
The Best Sustainable Furniture Brands
Non-Toxic Furniture Brands For A Healthy Home
Actually Sustainable and Non-Toxic Sofas for Restful Relaxation
The post 8 Sustainable and Non-Toxic Bed Frames for a Peaceful Slumber appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.
8 Sustainable and Non-Toxic Bed Frames for a Peaceful Slumber
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