Today is the 25th anniversary of David Gardiner and Associates!
On January 21, 2001, President George W. Bush had just been inaugurated. I was back in the private sector for the first time in eight years, looking for creative ways to advance national and global efforts to combat climate change.
At the beginning, DGA was just me in a home office. Since then, I’ve learned that DGA’s success has been built with support from everyone who’s been a part of it— employees, clients, coalition partners, my family, and more. I want to start out by thanking all of them. Dozens of employees and countless interns have helped me grow this organization into what it is today. It has been particularly gratifying to watch DGA’s “alumni” go on to lead impressive public and private climate action over the years.
An anniversary is a time for reflecting, and it’s certainly an interesting time for that, looking at how much the climate movement has grown since 2001—bringing us milestones like the Paris Agreement, major U.S. policy advancements, and record investment in clean energy—while contending with the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle that progress. It’s quite the dichotomy, that’s for sure.
Today, though, I’m mostly thinking about what comes next. Combatting climate change has never been a problem that anybody could solve on their own. I’m glad to be leading a team that’s laser focused on tackling these issues. There are a few key things I’ve always seen as DGA’s strengths—in particular, our longstanding focus on innovation in the climate sector and our ability to bring together very diverse groups of people committed to a sustainable future.
INNOVATION
I love to get in on the ground floor of climate solutions and build support for overlooked technologies and problems. Recently, our team has been working on data center heat reuse, a strategy that can help us conserve energy and water during the projected AI boom. We have published several papers on the topic, highlighting opportunities, projects, and policy examples in Europe where data center heat reuse is much more common. Now, we are pursuing action in the U.S., and before the end of this year, we could see multiple states pass their own legislation.
COMMUNITY
Over the years we’ve also helped build several highly ambitious climate solution coalitions from the ground up. In 2008, we helped stand up a U.N. Foundation initiative that brought together all kinds of people who care about electric transmission. We helped transform the coalition into a 501(c)(3)—Americans for a Clean Energy Grid—which is now an influential, standalone advocacy nonprofit.
Then in the mid 2010s, Mars and Procter & Gamble came to us looking for help decarbonizing their thermal energy. They wanted to know how the industrial sector could tackle this problem together. After consultation with industry leaders and others, we established the Renewable Thermal Collaborative along with an initial group of companies and partners at the World Wildlife Fund and the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Today, the RTC has more than 130 members, including major household name brands that represent $6 trillion in market capitalization. I am excited to see how the RTC continues to scale up its reach in the U.S. and abroad.
We look forward to another year of innovation, coalition building, and pursuing ambitious climate solutions. To everyone who has supported my work in some capacity over the past quarter century, I want to say once again: thank you!
Cheers to 25 and onto the future!
