YouSaid · the spoken record

Donnel Baird

lines on the record: 62
first: 2022-07-07
most recent: 2022-07-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's right. There's all the appliances and all the electricity that we use in our buildings. And so we burn oil and gas or coal in some places to produce electricity and send it through transmission lines to use the electricity in our homes. And then on site in our homes, we burn gas to cook with, to produce hot water that we shower with. And we also burn oil and gas for heating. And so, for example, in New York City, there's 10,000 giant apartment buildings that burn oil for hot water and for heat, like a truck filled with oil pulls up once a week and runs this like tube into the basement, into the heating system, and like pumps oil from the back of the truck into the basement, and then you burn that oil to produce hot water year round, and that is how apartment buildings in 2022, 10,000 of them at least use fossil fuels. And that's on site, right?”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“15% of the world's CO2 emissions, 30% of the United States CO2 emissions than in New York City where I am, buildings are 67%. If you look at New York City and San Francisco, you have massive amounts of CO2 and greenhouse gas that's being emitted by buildings. And so there just isn't a way to deal with climate change unless you green the buildings.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Greening buildings is a pretty compelling policy goal with a lot of social and environmental and financial outcomes. And I worked on that for a few years. It didn't work out quite as well as we'd hoped. Like other things work. Like they loaned half a billion dollars to Tesla. They invested a ton of money in rooftop solar and those things worked really great. But the idea of going building to building to green all the buildings in America, we were not able to pull that off.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the plan was we were going to create this new green buildings industry across America. We were going to retrain and rehire a million laid off construction workers to go building to building. And Secretary of Energy Chu had this vision of like an 18 wheeler MAC truck filled with organic insulation. And it was just going to drive down the block and stop at every house and pump green organic insulation into every home, into every attic to save people money. We were going to create a bunch of jobs. So like that was the vision and we were just going to have a hundred billion dollars to do this with. And guys, you might imagine, we could not quite pull it off. But it was a really compelling vision. You get to create jobs. You get to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You get to move off of foreign oil.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so remember there's a financial collapse. So I was a liaison between the U.S. Department of Energy and a bunch of labor unions and energy utility companies and Wall Street banks around a particular part of the 2009 Recovery Act. It was six and a half billion dollars with a B that was being invested in greening low-income buildings, which of course was becoming my thing. And I was like, I want to do that. I want to go green low-income buildings. And they're like, great, you can work with these labor unions and energy companies. And the labor unions had $90 billion of pension funds that they wanted to co-invest in greening buildings with $6 billion that was provided from the federal government as part of the Recovery Act.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they're eating this giant apartment building with their ovens. And so there is an inefficiency in the energy system that I”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was what was so interesting, guys. When I, you know, I ended up going to like eight or nine states with the Obama presidential campaign. And there's a pattern that I saw as we would head into low-income and working communities to persuade them that Barack Obama was their guy and he was going to support their interests and they should turn out there was this persistent pattern whether there's just this tremendous waste of energy and neglected low and moderate and income buildings that really reminded me of where I grew up. I remember walking around outside one day and it was 20 degrees outside and I was looking at this giant apartment building with all the windows open and I was like ah that's just like my three-story apartment building where I grew up. They're heating their house.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, initially I was working with the, there's a small team of community organizers who had trained President Obama when he was a community organizer back in the south side of Chicago. And so I did that for three years and was supervised by the same people that it trained Barack Obama. And then when he announced that he was running for president in 2007, I said goodbye to my girlfriend and friends in Brooklyn, packed up a car, and drove down to South Carolina to become a senior staffer with the Obama-For America campaign.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was really interested in trying to improve the lives of my family. We have this large immigrant family. I probably have 40 or 50 cousins. And I'd been given a lot of educational opportunity. I ended up going to an elite private school for high school and then going to Duke for undergrad. And my giant family was like, all right, we got Danelle through. We got to send him to Wall Street so he can make some money and come back and pay for all of his younger cousins to go to college. And so there was this kind of community uplift component to what was the expectation. But when I got to Duke, I learned about climate change. I got really interested in black civil rights and economic justice and came out of Duke extremely political and ended up becoming a community organizer”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's like a furnace in the basement that was supposed to burn oil or gas and provide hot water heating through radiators and or vents depending on what kind of building you're in. But oil and gas can be super expensive, and maintaining that furnace can be super expensive. And so the landlady was like, look, we're going to charge you guys like $25 a week for this one bedroom apartment, but there's no heat. So all of the apartments are going to have to use the gas ovens in the kitchen for heat. And like, that's what we did. That's what our neighbors did. That's what my friends at school did. That's what we did.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you got to remember to open up the window so the carbon monoxide can flow out of the apartment. So that's how we did it.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my parents emigrated from Guyana, and my dad was an engineer, and my mom was a teacher in the country's economy was collapsing. And so they moved to the United States into a pretty tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bedste, which is where notorious BIG is from. And at the time in the early 80s, most of the buildings didn't have working heating systems. So in the winter, we and all of our neighbors, when it got super cold outside, we would open up the windows and we would turn on the oven in the kitchen and open up the oven door and use the oven to provide heat to all of our apartments all winter.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT