Watch: Q&A with Aliya Haq, President, Clean Economy Project

Aliya Haq, president of the Clean Economy Project, shares why climate advocacy needs a new playbook—one focused less on stopping harm and more on winning an economic competition. From grid modernization to building political power, Haq lays out what it will take to meet rising electricity demand while keeping energy affordable.

Catch up on the highlights below and watch the full interview here.

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On what led her to start the Clean Economy Project:

“Ten of us came together to launch Clean Econ last October. And we want to ensure that clean energy solutions become the most affordable, the most convenient, really the most compelling option. And we want to see them become the obvious choice in the marketplace. So we’re pushing for groundbreaking policy and regulatory change.

“And we want to see clean technologies as out-competing conventional, outdated energy sources.”

On the “third front” of environmental advocacy:

“The first front of environmental advocacy was the kind of early 1900s conservation movement…The second front, I think of as sort of an anti-pollution movement, more about safeguarding health… These first and second fronts were all about stopping harm.

“But it actually doesn’t work for climate because fundamentally, energy is prosperity. Energy is what fuels economic growth… It’s not about stopping fossil fuels or stopping the emissions… it is actually about clean energy becoming the most accessible so that it can outcompete any other form of energy.

“That means we need to build things as quickly as possible. We have to be deploying wind and solar as fast as we can. We need to create the infrastructure to allow for clean energy technologies to move ahead. We need to be thinking about how do we bring new emerging technologies and innovate to come down the cost curves?”

On Clean Economy’s three strategic pillars:

“We want to curate and work with partners on policy agendas that are about three key strategic pillars.

“The first is how do you accelerate the build of mature clean technologies that are already cost competitive.

“The second strategic pillar is around innovation… like advanced geothermal, long duration storage, advanced conductors. And then the third pillar is investment—how do we use public policy to encourage private investors and private capital to decide to move into clean energy industries.”

On the grid as the real bottleneck:

“If Thomas Edison were resurrected, he would be completely blindsided by same day delivery, smartphones and all the things around us. And yet the electric grid would be very comfortable for him. We cannot build a 21st century economy on a 20th century grid infrastructure.

“We have the technologies, we have the solutions to be meeting demand growth and keeping costs down. It is hard, is legitimately very difficult to fix such an old system and that is what we need to roll up our sleeves and do, but that’s going to take real alignment across a lot of different folks, whether that’s politically, whether that’s local, state, regional, federal level, there’s a lot of folks that need to come together to figure out how to fix this for everybody.”

On how communities fit into a “build more” climate strategy:

“We cannot get to scale without people feeling like these clean energy solutions are able to be built in their backyards and also feel like they’re benefiting directly from that.

“People need to see schools improving, their roads get better. They need to understand that this stuff is creating wealth. And so part of how to do that is people in their communities standing up for that, like making sure that they’re part of that process, that they’re making sure that these clean energy industries are built but are not extracting value out of the communities but are actually building the prosperity in those communities.

“It’s really important for communities to be involved in that process because otherwise we won’t see the kind of strength built, political strength, economic strength built that we need to be seeing from this economic transition.”

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