A public servant and investing pioneer challenges you to think harder.
A public servant and investing pioneer challenges you to think harder.
News focused exclusively on financing for
energy efficiency and renewable energy
CEFF handles summer ambitiously this year - the times call for it. As assumptions fall, we're handing over the issue to Dr. Michael K. Dorsey so that he can lift us above our usual deal-following discourse.
Dr. Dorsey helped co-found the Sunrise Movement with two former students. He was the youngest member of the United States delegation at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. And he's invested in many startups via a firm he founded called Around the Corner Capital. He'll have more to say about his next move, to Arizona, in a future issue later this fall. 
We have definitions to redevelop and models to rebuild, and Dr. Dorsey takes us back to our initial assumptions. Deal terms aren't necessarily bouncing off the bullet points this time, but they're running through the thinking.   

Michael K. Dorsey 
(M.F.S. '96)

Job: 

CEO of Around the Corner Capital and Partner, IberSun North America

What that means I do:

I work with governments, NGOs, universities, high-net-worth individuals, startups and others on solutions that make fossil-free energy practical, durable, scalable and equitable.  

Where we can collaborate:

I'm about to embark on a new strategic effort, at a large university's new sustainability center to scale and implement sustainable solutions--in collaboration with researchers, investors, corporations, heads of state and many others who want to deliver these sustainable solutions at scale.

What Strengthened Me On This Journey
The Revolution of Everyday Life is a 1967 book by Raoul Vaneigem, a Belgian and member of the Situationist International. It opens in a wallop: “My aim is not to make the real experience contained in this book comprehensible to readers who have no real interest in reliving it.” And continues apace, variously: “The world is going to be remade, not reconditioned."
We are prophetically encouraged and reminded: “Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life - without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints - has a corpse in his mouth.” It's at once a challenge, dare, reminder, provocation and love letter on how we can mobilize for change and deliver worlds we urgently need and want. I’ve read it more times than I can count— and given it many times as a gift. 

A Policy Innovation You Should Know Inside and Out
Readers should get a copy of the leaked internal memo (leaked by former Representative Henry Waxman) on internal efforts inside the EPA to handicap the EPA’s own Office of Environmental Equity (which was renamed Office of Environmental Justice) before its creation. The memo is remarkable for its content, as well as the handwriting in the margins presumably from one or more EPA staff. It seems aimed to not kill the Office but cripple it through subterfuge and propaganda. It's the only piece of government text (and one of the few texts overall) that brought me to real tears.  It's instructive for many, many reasons —even to this day. That's because it shows how the biggest fear of government then, like today, was that diverse forces, sometimes labeled as "environmentalists and racial justice groups," might come together to usher forth real social, political, and economic changes.

What Sticks With Me Over Successive News Cycles 
Reckoning Over Equity and Prices Requires Thinking Honestly About a Legacy of Theft
This feature ran this summer in the New Yorker but bears heavily on any model you might build about pricing for utilities or transportation or wholesale energy. The author walks us through the history of land ownership and private property, arguing that it started with a heist. 
Capturing the Trade-Offs in Carbon Removal Makes for Some Menacing Math
There was never time to believe that "markets" or "efficiency" could ever deliver the (inefficient) solution of climate justice, and there's still no time for such folly now. Yet extractive companies continue peddling the notion, even proposing that "expanding markets is essential to solving the climate crisis". This very recent article from Grist raises many concerns, from revolving doors to kickbacks and graft in forest finance.  
In Global Trade, Most Rules and Practices Favor the Haves. Where Do You See That Going?
On energy, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine, global trade seemed a second-order concern to some. Recent fights about tariffs and concerns about parts show it to be a primary concern. This essay from Walden Bello stirs the pot on assumptions about who prevails in trade terms.
This Doesn't Look Like Time for Revisiting Schoolhouse Rock and Hoping for the Best.
The recent "decisions" by the kakistocrats atop the Supreme Court cast a dilemma that haunts us all in sharp silhouettes: can the most prosperous country on Earth become an autocracy by neglect? Firebrand journalist Chris Hedges thought so as early as last year, in an argument you dismiss at your posterity's peril.
This Also Can't Be the Time to Teach Despair, in School or in the Workplace. 
The poet bell hooks died last December, and this appreciation from the Chronicle of Higher Education captures how she equated learning about the hardest things with joy of the deepest kind. You'll need to sign up for access, but I hope you'll be glad you did so. 

The Book That Keeps Coming Back to Me (and Why)
I'll leave you with Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry.
Rukeyser was a 20th Century poet and feminist, and she wrote this book about poetry's role in civic life. You can read it backward and forwards and never find an acronym or interest rate sensitivity analysis. You might be provoked to consider the deeper meanings of “well-being” and reflect on the etymologies of “economics” and environment. She writes;
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth?
However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.

Jobs 
CEFF will resume regular job listings with our next student-driven newsletter on July 20. 
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