Executive Interview: Matt Traldi, Founder & CEO, Greenlight America

Our Executive Interview series highlights a CEO or other top executive who is leading the way in the fight against climate change. Today we’re featuring Matt Traldi, founder and CEO of Greenlight America, a nonprofit that mobilizes local community members to win approval for clean energy deployment.

About Matt: Before Greenlight, he founded the Election Sabotage Response Network and related nonprofit State Democracy Defenders after leading a movement-wide election crisis boiler room involving hundreds of organizations, in 2022. In 2016, he was a co-author of the Indivisible Guide and a co-founder of the Indivisible organizations, for which he was named one of TIME Magazine’s “25 Most Influential People on the Internet” in 2017. Previously, he worked for more than a decade in the labor movement as an organizer, researcher, policy director, and co-founder and Secretary-Treasurer of a local union.

We spoke with Matt over email just after Inauguration Day last month.

 How did you get into the climate world and end up starting Greenlight America?

Matt Traldi: I started my career in the labor movement, ending up at SEIU working on the Fight for $15. Then, in 2016, I was part of founding Indivisible, a national grassroots movement that sprung up to respond to Trump’s first presidency. A couple of years ago, I got to work a little bit on passing the Inflation Reduction Act, and it left me feeling incredible excitement and optimism that we’re going to make the clean energy transition happen. Around the same time, my wife and I decided to become parents, shifting my focus to the future and the planet we were leaving my daughter.

I started talking to smart people about what the clean energy transition would require and learned a few things. In the next decade, most pollution reduction will come from the power sector. The biggest obstacle isn’t technology or cost, it’s local permitting: a small number of local opponents block clean energy in their town and county governments while supporters aren’t showing up. I and my co-founders at Greenlight realized that our grassroots organizing experience could help mobilize people and groups to show up and get clean energy projects built faster in communities across the country.

 What is the biggest challenge facing advocates for advancing clean energy?

MT: We’re losing by forfeit. We know that the majority of Americans support clean energy projects, and we know these projects have huge health and economic benefits for our communities, but supporters are not turning out or speaking up to make that case to local decision-makers. This gives opponents a clear field to be the loudest voices in the room. There are lots of studies showing this has a huge effect on getting projects delayed or canceled.

The trouble is it’s not easy to speak up in favor of clean energy. These technologies are complicated, and misinformation is rampant – many of those false claims come from groups aligned with fossil fuel billionaires. It’s also just hard to find out about local projects and figure out the best ways to show support. If we want to get projects built faster, people need help navigating all of this. That’s Greenlight’s mission. We have a resource hub for local clean energy supporters, and we’re developing solutions like our Early Warning System to find projects and permitting milestones where supporters making their voices heard can make the difference.

 What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?

MT: I’ve now been privileged to be part of starting several new nonprofit organizations. The nonprofit sector does not make it easy to build new things. Each new project has involved risk and uncertainty, something I’ve been lucky to be in the position to accept.

If you’re reading this and you think there’s a nonprofit project the world needs – something you could help accomplish – look me up. I’m happy to help. We need more work with social good as its guiding force. We need smart, creative people to bring it to life. And for that, we need to help folks starting new nonprofits to get off the ground and into the air.

 What’s something about you that might surprise people?

MT: Some people who work on climate find it to be a grim subject, but I’m incredibly hopeful about our future. The next few years will be the best years in U.S. history for clean energy deployment, despite what’s happening in Washington, D.C. I believe we’re going to transition the power sector, dramatically cut pollution, and improve life for everyone in the process.

Climate change is here. And it is already causing immense suffering. We saw that in the wildfires in Los Angeles. But to despair about it is, in my view, missing the point. We will tackle climate change. The human race will be here afterwards. But it will do a lot of harm in the meantime. So the things we do every day to move faster really matter. Speed and scale are the goals, and hope is our fuel to make them happen.

Know someone who should be featured? Email us: [email protected]. 

View our previous Executive Interviews:

• Laura Zapata, CEO & Co-Founder, Clearloop