Localyst is a nonprofit news media platform dedicated to creating an America powered by renewable energy. By uplifting the authentic voices of people working towards this future, Localyst harnesses the power of storytelling to inform and inspire people with timely, relevant and reliable news.
Sonia Klein and Aqsa Mengal from YPCCC’s Partnerships Program had the opportunity to sit down recently with Eli Andrews, Chief Executive Officer at Localyst, to learn more about the organization’s climate communications, community engagement work, and partnership with YPCCC.
Sonia: To start, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your role at Localyst?
Eli: My work at Localyst is centered around accelerating the transition to clean energy in the United States. Our focus area in working towards this goal is communications about clean energy in rural America, specifically in the locations where utility-scale wind and solar projects are proposed, but facing opposition of different kinds.
Usually the opposition to those projects is very vocal, loud, and organized. These campaigns sometimes look like grassroots organizing but are sometimes what we call astroturfing. This means they are driven by organized interest groups that fund opposition sentiment in locations where permits can be denied by local government officials, such as county commissioners, township clerks, and so on. Our work in the climate communication space starts with meeting people where they’re at in these rural areas by listening to their questions about wind and solar, and assessing where they are on the scale of support for these projects.
Localyst engages these people on two different tracks, depending on where their support is. One track is to educate people about the benefits of clean energy and the other is to activate and provide easy ways for supporters to publicly voice their authentic enthusiasm for renewables. So our role is as a public educator, particularly in rural communities, around clean energy and to provide a path for local people to step up and help support a future that has clean air, water, and soil.
Sonia: What led you to where you are now? How did you get involved in climate work?
Eli: When I was a kid, my dad used to make me grilled cheese sandwiches with a homemade solar oven. I’ve been enchanted by the benefits of solar energy ever since! I have been involved in impact work for all of my career, but my concern around climate change really took off when I read an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and looked at the carbon math, which was jarring. So, renewable energy has been part of my life since I was a kid, but my awakening to how urgently we need renewable energy happened after reading the IPCC report. It was actually looking at the data that got me involved in climate change work and eventually inspired me to found Localyst.
One particular statistic that continues to motivate me is just how concentrated the source of our emissions is — I mean, in the most recent Carbon Majors Report we see that just 57 corporate and state entities are responsible for more than 80% of global carbon emissions. This fact doesn’t scare me, it excites me because it shows us exactly what we need to do to turn this around! We need to target those companies, and we also need to build the clean energy that can power our lives without all that carbon pollution. So that’s why I work at Localyst, and that’s why I started this organization. I know that every single solar and wind farm we can get planted, every energy storage project we can get approved will help lead to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Sonia: What are Localyst’s broad goals for climate action from the audiences that you engage with?
Eli: One of Localyst’s key strategies is to segment our audience through simple assessments. We don’t employ a survey that’s as in-depth as YPCCC’s SASSY tool, but we ask every single subscriber how they feel about a wind or a solar farm in their community, and they all tell us if they “support,” are “on the fence,” or “oppose” a renewable energy project in their community. So this segmentation enables us to deliver messages with surgical precision — for example, our public education on the benefits of clean energy goes out to our “on the fence” and “oppose” segments. On the other hand, we give our clean energy supporters opportunities to take action. This is where our work relies on YPCCC’s Global Warming’s Six Americas research. By drawing inspiration from YPCCC’s work and segmenting our audience, we are able to provide targeted actions for supporters and deliver tailored messaging to those whose support we don’t yet have. This segmentation ensures that our communication resonates with each individual on a personal level, enabling us to shift perspectives over time and really make a meaningful difference.
We provide a lot of different ways for supporters to take actions. It significantly depends on the state however; for example, in Wisconsin, the Public Service Commission is the issuing body for permitting proposed utility-scale, 100-megawatt (and above) wind and solar projects. When a comment period opens in Wisconsin, we ask our supporters to voice their support for proposed projects online through public comments on the state website — and they do. These public comments make a difference because they help show the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin that there really is local support for these projects and people who want the commission to issue permits for renewable energy projects. In other states, permits are issued at the county or a township level. We deploy different tactics for supporters in these locations which range from petitions, to emails, and phone calls.
What’s amazing is that we have enough sun and wind in this country to completely power all of our energy needs. However, in order to operationalize this amount of clean energy, the transition needs to be built with the local licenses and good will of rural Americans — including their permission. As a nonprofit, we engage with these rural communities for the long term. We want to be in a sustained relationship with these communities and in a dialogue with developers to ensure that local communities truly benefit from these projects. Seeking strong community benefit agreements is one of the ways we hope to build a bridge between rural communities and developers.
Sonia: I’d love to hear more about how your organization has utilized YPCCC resources or insights in your strategic communication, organizing, or advocacy work.
Eli: At Localyst, we greatly benefit from, and are building on YPCCC’s seminal research. For instance, we deeply engage with the Yale Climate Opinion Map tools. Through exposure to the SASSY tool and the methodology behind it, we learned a lot about how to ask good questions that can effectively group people into different segments based on their attitudes about clean energy in their community. We’ve also benefited greatly from our relationship with Joshua Low, YPCCC’s Partnerships Director. He’s introduced and exposed us to so many organizations working in this space. For example, Potential Energy Coalition and Science Moms engage in effective communications work with our audience in particular, so having that cross-fertilization of other incredible people working in this space has been immensely helpful.
Through our YPCCC partnership, we continue to see how climate change is a great communications challenge. We’ve learned that going out and talking about climate change and carbon dioxide emissions can be too abstract, but talking about how there is a pollution blanket wrapped around the planet is an effective description that people can relate to. Further, our work with YPCCC has helped us accelerate our ability to connect with rural audiences in particular. I view YPCCC as a hub for thought leaders who are figuring out how to communicate on climate, which is especially helpful for our goal of moving the needle to build more solar and wind farms as quickly as possible.
Sonia: What do you think Localyst does well that other climate communicators could learn from?
Eli: One of our biggest takeaways from this past year is to learn from people by asking questions and meeting them where they’re at. Our audience is incredibly communicative and we operate on two-way communication channels like Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email. So when we ask people what they think, they tell us! For example, when we ask our constituents what they think about a solar or wind project, their responses can inform us about what kind of misinformation is spreading on these topics. We also learn how people tell their own stories within their own communities, which allows us to weave the language of the community into our storytelling, whether it’s about climate or weather, environment, or clean energy. We’re so humbled by how much people are willing to share with us.
And this does not only pertain to our supporters. We also learn from the on-the-fencers and the opposition as much as we learn from supporters. YPCCC’s insight into audience segmentation has been invaluable in this regard. By looking at subscribers’ comments by segment, we can understand how supporters and on-the-fencers respond differently to our prompts and build different programs for our three segments. Ultimately, as we’ve learned from YPCCC, there is growing awareness and more concern for climate change, and the same is true about renewable energy. However, driving change requires good storytelling, so we measure shifts over time with our subscribers.
Sonia: What has been Localyst’s single most exciting or surprising discovery you made in communicating or organizing around climate and is there any one success you want to highlight?
Eli: One important success that came from listening to our subscribers, is learning that our audience wants to know how to respond when their neighbors say something they know is inaccurate regarding climate change or clean energy. Essentially, when we listened, we discovered that our audience wants to know how to appropriately address misinformation and talk about clean energy effectively. One rampant example of misinformation is that wind turbines kill massive amounts of birds. Of course, it is true that these structures kill birds, but cats alone kill about 2,000 times more birds than wind turbines do every year — plus buildings and cars also kill far more birds than wind turbines. So, one bite-sized truth that really sticks for our subscribers when entering this contested space of misinformation is the fact that the number-one killer of birds in the U.S. is actually cats, and not wind turbines.
This ability to communicate effectively by arming people with helpful tools is one small success. These little gems of information that people can hold on to and talk about are really critical. For instance, I just came across this today: the amount of sunlight that strikes the Earth’s surface in an hour and a half is enough to handle the entire world’s energy consumption for a full year. This came from the U.S. Department of Energy, not some obscure study. These kinds of bite-sized truths that one can latch on to can spark people’s imagination.
Sonia: How does Localyst remain hopeful and inspired to build public will in the climate movement?
Eli: I am optimistic because we know exactly how to solve this climate problem. The solution is two-sided — one side is clean energy, and the other is targeting oil and gas companies to make this transition. There are incredible transformation examples, even from the worst polluters, which gives me hope that we can get this done–for example, over the course of about one decade, Danish Oil and Natural Gas, known as DONG became Ørsted, which today is the largest offshore wind company in the world, and between 2007 and 2020, their carbon emissions decreased by 86%. Another thing that gives me hope is that we actually have all the technology we need to solve the climate crisis in time. Not only that, but the cost of these technologies — like solar — is dramatically decreasing over time. Conversely, the cost of fossil fuels behave like a commodity and fluctuate over time. The great thing about the clean energy technology we need to transition away from fossil fuels is that these renewable technologies benefit people in a lot of different ways, including their pocketbooks. This has already happened with solar almost everywhere in the world compared to coal, and a similar trajectory is projected for wind.
The economics of the clean energy transition gives me hope. I am hopeful in terms of building good will, public will, and political will for the climate movement outside of the progressive urban centers where the will already exists. So building will, creating it where it didn’t yet exist, not only benefits the climate but also communities that then benefit from cleaner air, water, soil, and lower energy bills. Lastly, knowing how many incredibly bright, dedicated people like yourself are all working on communicating these solutions to so many different audiences makes me optimistic that we’re going to get there!
Thank you to Eli Andrews and Localyst for their time, ongoing partnership with YPCCC, and important work in the climate space.