We dive into a thought-provoking conversation with David Cash. In his insightful discussion, Cash explores how we often find ourselves constrained by the systems, frameworks, and rules we've inherited.
Guest: David Cash, Regional Administrator, EPA New England
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-w-cash
Hosts:
Alejandro Juárez Crawford
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford
Miriam Plavin-Masterman
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
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Episode Introduction
In this episode with Dr. David Cash, the regional administrator for New England at the EPA. We explore the critical intersection of clean energy, environmental justice, and economic equity. Dr. Cash shares insights on recent federal initiatives aimed at providing communities with access to affordable heating solutions, such as heat pumps, which promise not only comfort but also significant cost savings for low- and middle-income families. The discussion emphasizes the importance of integrating energy policy with social equity, highlighting how thoughtful investments can transform underserved communities while promoting job growth in the clean energy sector. Tune in for an enlightening dialogue on how clean energy can reshape our economic landscape and benefit all.
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Resources
EPA: https://www.epa.gov
EPA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/epa_newengland/
EPA New England Region Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EPARegion1/
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For more podcast stories from What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford and https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
Using Clean Energy to Level the Economic Playing Field | A conversation with David Cash | What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:00)
Ma 'am, I was thinking if you had to state your philosophy, your rule of thumb for living in five words, would it be different from what you said if you had to state it in one word or 10 ,000 words? Does the philosophy change based on how much space you have to describe it? What would it be if it were three words?
Mim Plavin-Masterman (00:27)
No, no. So one word, kindness. And, and well, four words or,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:33)
Two words is like kindness and profit or something, right?
Mim Plavin-Masterman (00:37)
Three words would be like kindness and coffee, but four words would be don't be a jerk. That's our house motto. been on the fridge since my kids were little. Don't be a jerk.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:40)
you
I think Google used to use that, quoting you. I don't think they're into it
Mim Plavin-Masterman (00:55)
I think they were Don't Be Evil.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:56)
Is that different from being a jerk? It's more, it's fewer words.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (00:58)
I'm... It's... It's definitely fewer words. I think it's more global. I feel like jerk is more interpersonal. Evil is more broad, macro.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:08)
you're being evil to me, I'm not like, stop being so evil. That'd be I'd be more likely they don't be such a jerk. Yeah. Is an evil doer does an evil doer become a jerk in their personal life? Is this is this how it works? These
Mim Plavin-Masterman (01:15)
Right. Right. Stop being a jerk. Right. Or, or to quote,
I don't know. Or, or to quote my dear friend Andy, are they acting like a jerk?
All right then. nope. Right.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:32)
judge the action, not the actor. Well, I actually want to get our guest involved in this discussion because I'm very excited by today's guest. And we have more than three words in the episode, but I'm so curious whether
the redoubtable Dave Cash has an opinion on whether life philosophy changes based on the number of words and whether it's public or personal.
David Cash (01:59)
No, it just gets more nuanced.
like the world is complicated. So, you know, there has to be new
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:05)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. So when it's some natural gas pipeline, then not being a jerk, we actually need to figure out what that
David Cash (02:12)
Not quite sure what the question is, but it's complicated.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:16)
Yeah. Well, I'm Alejandro Juarez Crawford, and this is my co -host Mim Claven Mastermind. And we're on a mission to make creating experiments of one's own as normal as watching videos on your phone. Welcome to What If Instead, the podcast.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:16)
I'm kidding.
so today we are joined by Dr. David Cash, who is the regional administrator for New England for the Environmental Protection Agency. And he's been in this role for several years now. Before coming to EPA, he was the dean of the McCormick Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston, just down the road. From here, he also worked for 10 years in the state government here in Massachusetts.
working on environment policy, energy policy, working in Governor Patrick's administration as Assistant Secretary of Policy in the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. And he was really working on clean energy and environmental justice policies in that role. He was also a commissioner in Department of Public Utilities and the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. So he's got this very interesting holistic view of this intersection of energy.
and the environment and justice all together, which I'm very excited to dig into a little bit with him. And I guess that's where I'd like to start is what led you to begin working at this intersection of energy and environment in this very holistic kind of systems thinking way.
David Cash (03:48)
Well, I used to teach high school science even before the list of jobs that you mentioned. And kids see the world for the reality that it is, is that all things are connected, right? And it's really hard to teach a science class to eighth graders
it's not obvious that everything is connected. And whether it's you're talking about chemistry and physics or get into more complicated things like environment, which I did in my classes, where then it becomes really obvious that biology and chemistry and physics and ecology and weather and climate and politics, you know, are all intersect. And in my time in government, and when I started in government,
which actually was my first stint in government was as a summer intern at the White House in 1995, where I was working on climate change and biodiversity. And it's just eminently clear that so many things are connected. So I don't see how you can do a good energy policy without doing good environmental policy. And if you really understand the systems, how could you not address
the injustices that have been baked into the system for decades upon decades. And that became really obvious. In fact, one of the first things we did in the Patrick administration was bring all of the energy environment agencies under one umbrella. We were the first state to do that. Because again, how can you make wise energy policy if you're not also thinking about the environment and vice versa?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (05:30)
So I feel like there's the Spider -Man version of your intro that we could do next time, which is, this is Dave Cash. He was an eighth grade science teacher and then a White House intern. And one thing you learn is that with great power, no, one thing you learn is that you can't have a sane environmental policy without thinking about energy. And that if there's injustice baked into the various parts, you got to bring
David Cash (06:00)
Absolutely. Yeah, think that's right. captured it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (06:03)
So how do you, if you wouldn't mind playing with this for a second, how do you take that beautiful crucible you described where you're with eighth grade kids and this needs to make sense to them, and how do you draw on that when you're thinking about the complexities of energy policy in the modern world?
David Cash (06:22)
when you're at the table thinking about, I mean, at any stage. So for example, in the beginning of the Patrick administration, when we're thinking about what we're gonna focus on, what kind of legislation we're gonna try to advance, what are our end goals? How are we gonna reach those goals? All of those kinds of issues have to be at the table.
If I can fast forward to the kind of end result of that and maybe go backwards, yesterday I had an awesome day. By the way, I love my job. I have an awesome job. I practically skip to work every day.
And yesterday was one of those days where I started in the morning. And you might have seen in the news yesterday, the Biden -Harris administration announced, you know, $4 .3 billion of grants going to communities driven by communities for solutions for climate change. And don't worry, I'll get to you. not just doing an advertisement because this shows all the...
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (07:25)
No, this is great. I've got this whole montage running, Dave, where you're skipping to work, right? It's lightly raining and there are some flower petals and then there's the announcement from the administration. Go on, please. We're all ears.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (07:29)
You
David Cash (07:33)
Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So we did this announcement at Union Station in New Haven and the announcement had several pieces and one of it was that Connecticut had got together five other of the New England states, five New England states and of this national $4 .3 billion, they were getting $450 million to
get heat pumps into people's homes all across New England. So like, I'm glad you pumped your fists there. Many people who are listening may be falling asleep. Heat pumps, who cares? Blah, blah, blah. know? no. no. my God. Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (08:16)
No, no, you can't. If you're in the northeast of the United States, you've got this propane tank, you've got this window air conditioner, you know, like if you're me, you couldn't get heat pumps with your solar panels and now you're blah, blah, blah. This is heat pumps.
David Cash (08:30)
And then a related announcement we were making was that the city of New Haven itself, working with community groups, working with their public housing authority, got a $9 .3 million grant to do ground source heat pump at the station, connected under the street to what's now an empty lot that's gonna be 1 ,000 units of mixed use affordable housing.
And I want to just envision a family living in that housing in a couple of years once it's built. They are going to be comfortable during the worst of the heat waves that we're now getting in New Haven because of climate change. They are going to be comfortable because the heat pumps will provide cool air. And they're going to be comfortable in the worst of the brutal New England winters because the heat pumps are going to provide
you know, comfortable heated environment for them. Okay, there's not only that. Most likely their monthly energy bills are going to be much less than they would otherwise be. You know why? Because they're not paying for a crappy, inefficient window air conditioner, right, to cool their homes. And they're not going to pay as many people in New England do for oil heating.
So they're going to have some cost savings, right? That's that is
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (09:56)
Wait, you just did, don't lose your thread, but you just did beautiful thing, right? If heat pumps sound boring, you said, they're going to be comfortable in the worst of the heat waves and they're going to be comfortable in the most intense New England winter and their bills
David Cash (10:14)
Yes, yeah, that's pretty exciting, right? Yeah, no, it's incredibly exciting. And then that's partly why this is, both of those issues are equity issues, right? Because right now for people who, for housing is a really large part of their budget and energy bills are really large part of the budget, they might be deciding in the middle of summer whether they can turn on their air conditioner.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (10:15)
There's an empty lot involved. Yeah. Yeah.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (10:17)
It's very exciting.
David Cash (10:42)
Or are they going to have to worry about bill payment, other bills, medical bills, food bills, whatever. And my goodness, if their aging mother is in the house too, then we might have some health issues, right? Because we know that there are spikes of health problems during heat waves. In fact, I saw some data from the CDC during that first heat wave that we had in June. This complicated rates, emergency room visits.
like only 50 plus during a normal summer, 50 plus out of 100 ,000 visits per day are heat related. During that heat wave, over 800. You know, so what? 15 times the number of heat related incidents are happening. Okay, so I'm going back to that apartment. That apartment in which like grandma is also in the apartment, grandma's not being rushed to Yale New Haven Hospital with a heat stroke, right?
That's a huge equity issue, right? Because we know that those kinds of ailments happen much more frequently in communities that have been underserved and overburdened by pollution. So we're getting to the equity questions there. wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But there's more.
Can you outsource the building and installation of those heat pumps to a New Haven housing unit, like, you know, to some foreign country?
No, those have to be jobs here. They have to be jobs in New Haven. They have to be jobs in New England. And that's pretty extraordinary. So we're seeing job growth. And if it's done wisely, we're going to, and many of the programs that we're investing in now, we're doing the kind of workforce development and training precisely in those communities that have higher unemployment rates and all that kind of stuff.
okay, if I could tie this into where is this housing going to be? Right across from Union Station. Access to public transit, access to jobs that they might have in other parts of the state or ability to visit their families in New York or Boston or wherever. So, it's all tied together. If we go back to your question of how are we linking energy and environment, and equity.
That's how you have to think about it. You have to craft these kinds of grant programs, which took a long time, you know, goes back to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Congress members and the Biden -Harris administration who negotiated knew that these threads are interwoven, knew that this is braided. And EPA knows that. So when Congress told us, develop this climate pollution reduction grant program, we knew that we were going to put this together.
President Biden drafted executive orders at the beginning of his term. He had us focusing on environmental justice in everything that we did. And by the way, this is not just about in a city like New Haven, it's in rural parts.
of New England as well. I have visited mobile homes communities in northern Vermont, under invested in water infrastructure. get sewage floods, all this kind of stuff. And it's not so much in our region and in other regions. They are cities and towns that are going through this transition as fossil fuels are being used less. And we have to figure out how we can invest in those communities in a way that's equitable for them.
that makes sure that they're not left behind as we transition to using more clean energy, et cetera. And that's what we're seeing. I mean, we're seeing both federal and especially private sector investments in things like battery manufacturing, EV manufacturing, all of those kinds of things are at the cutting edge of this transition to a clean energy future. And the private sector is stepping up in a major way. And I know that's something you folks are really interested in. And the federal government is acting as a catalyst
to make that happen. So you can tell I'm pretty excited.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (14:41)
So I wanted to follow up on a couple of things that you're saying. So one is this idea the benefits are targeted at affordable housing and folks of middle and lower income and working class folks. Because as we've read, a lot of the investments, a lot of the move that people make to go green or whatever are usually folks who are middle class, upper middle class. And so they're pulling.
the efficient use out of the grid and leaving this inefficient use of or inefficient heating or cooling systems for people who can least afford it. Right. And so
David Cash (15:14)
That is true, although the funding is going to all segments. The Justice 40 program, part of the Biden -Harris administration, says that 40 % have to go to low -income and disadvantaged communities. There's no question that low -income, middle -income, working -class families are going to benefit hugely from these kinds of investments.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (15:19)
Okay. Yep.
And I think that's huge because everything I've been reading is saying that if you leave behind the people who don't have the money to install the heat pump on their own or the money to go green, all they do is watch their costs rise and these trade -offs that you talk about, they just get larger, they get bigger and they feel even worse to people. So it feels like this is a way to create this huge, almost like a patient poll.
David Cash (15:49)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (16:00)
model from healthcare to be like if all these people are asking for all of this investment, the investment will come. Is that what
David Cash (16:07)
Yeah, No, that's that's that's absolutely right. Some of our some of our analysis shows in other programs where there's going to be clean energy investment. You know, it's something like.
The $27 billion of this program should spark about $150 billion of private sector investment. And of course, they're only going to private sector is going to invest when there's profit to be made. And we know what's going to happen. People are going to be demanding these kinds of technologies.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (16:32)
Right.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (16:37)
Dave, what if you could imagine, right, and it's five years out, right? So it's an administration of the future. And we're taking this problem that you've put in a nutshell and we're making it work exactly as it should. This is a what if instead question, right? So we know that up until now, so many people have not been able to afford to go off propane or worse, right? You know, I have a neighbor.
heap and she was constantly dealing with just being able to cobble together ways to keep her home warm in an upstate New York winter. So we've had that problem historically. We've had the problem of can I make the capital investment to install heat pumps which can get expensive. Now imagine for us it's five years out and the world is working exactly as it
David Cash (17:26)
Mm -hmm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (17:33)
and please feel free to go even further than may seem possible in a policy sense.
What does that world look like?
David Cash (17:41)
I'm actually going to start from the impact that, of course, we care the most about at EPA. So what it looks like are kids standing on a street corner waiting for their school bus, and their parents aren't worried that a stinky diesel school bus is going to come by and pick them up and that their kid might have an asthma attack.
and that they might have to rush the kid to the ER. I don't know, I went to public school, I was picked up by a school bus and I remember that kind of rancid but kind of sweet, but like real stinky smell when the school bus arrived, right? So, or maybe, I don't know. But, know, so that's, you know, I start from there, that's in five years, there's no kids standing on a street corner.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (18:19)
Some kids would stand right behind it in my neighborhood, but go on.
David Cash (18:33)
breathing in diesel fuels and there's no parent worried about that. That's, you know, that's how it started. And now, now, yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (18:38)
Okay, so let's say that in five years, there is no kid standing behind a school bus spewing rancid and
David Cash (18:47)
Yeah, that might be a little fast. That's a little fast for that transition, let's fantasize. Yeah, that's the goal. That's the five, 10 years out, whatever it is. But let me kind of treat that as like a pebble with ripples, right?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (18:55)
Okay, keep going. That's number one. Keep talking. What's the next
David Cash (19:03)
And I'm just giving this one example. And I could tell this story about lead in water. I can tell this story about electric vehicles and stuff. But let's just stick with.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (19:12)
Will you give us actually three versions of the story, even if you only go deep on one, so that everyone listening to this gets clear that this is a systemic thing we could
David Cash (19:19)
Yeah, sure. Yeah.
the ripples go, go out from there. First of all, that kid is going to school more days per year because that kid's not going to the ER.
That parent is not missing work time because that parent is not taking that kid to the ER, right? So they're not working. And those numbers, by the way, are huge nationwide. school days, all that kind of stuff. That kid is not going to get long term economic disbenefits by missing school. Again, data is really clear on what the long term impacts of those kinds of things are. OK, so that's some that's that that family's health care costs are less than they otherwise would be.
But let's keep going. We've got a driver in that bus who actually is also happier and healthier. I've talked to a whole bunch of school bus drivers. They love driving electric school bus. They're quieter. They don't smell. They're not breathing in diesel fumes. That's pretty awesome.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (20:15)
So you think my bus driver might not have been so mean to me? This is a New York City cross town bus, but same thing. If the fumes hadn't been so bad, is this where we're going? We have these happy, they're singing to us. They're singing opera and beautiful tenor voices, go on.
David Cash (20:23)
You know, don't know the correlation between arguments and anger. got that.
Okay, so again, I'm just trying to go out like the fractals or the ripple. The school district is saving money and they're instead of spending money on more expensive diesel fuel and much more maintenance costs for their electric school bus versus diesel school bus, they can plow that money back into more curriculum or whatever programming they want. So school districts are happy about that.
There are students who, we're talking five to 10 years out, there are students who right now in 2024 are taking new technology courses to learn how to maintain these kind of school buses. And in fact, the school, the fantasy school district I'm talking about just hired one of these graduates. And that person now works in the bus fleet, maintaining the buses with the new electric technologies, understands about batteries, all that kind of stuff. Another student who is in that same curriculum is
now working at a battery startup that's in a town in the area, but different town, and they're developing the new, lighter, better batteries that are going to charge the new school buses of the future. And in fact, there's a battery manufacturing plant that's in Pennsylvania that's building the new batteries. There's the connections between all the kinds of things that we've got
air
There's less CO2 being emitted, so climate change is less. We're getting big equity benefits from the people who live in the areas that used to suffer under diesel and many other pollutants. We've got green jobs that are growing from this and it all started with these core investments, these catalytic investments that we're doing now. yes, and I didn't say that, you know, that battery manufacturing place where that kid is now working, there were tons of investments from the private sector to launch that that matched
initial investments from the CHIPS Act. Not an EPA Act, but certainly will have cleaner benefits in the future, right? Because we have to think about commerce and innovation and economic development all at the same time. So there's one story of the ripple of what's going to happen if we look five years to the future where this is all worked out.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (22:54)
You know, one of the great things you've just done.
is tell us what disruptive innovation originally meant. So when Clay Christensen first talked about it, it wasn't this idea of the way it's used in business startup pitches, right? Where it's just kind of simple code for shaking everything up, right? It specifically meant introducing innovations that make something that was previously accessible only to a few accessible to a broad.
market, especially those who couldn't previously afford it. Sebastian Crowe, the SoulShare founder who has been a guest on this podcast, is actually the one who turned me on to the original language Christensen used. I just want to emphasize that you've described a ripple effect, but you've also talked about a different kind of economic thriving where
David Cash (23:24)
on
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (23:47)
The ability of consumers to transition creates these health benefits, creates these opportunities to innovate, creates job benefits. And I just wanted to pause and dwell on that for a second because it's possible that we miss that story in our narratives about the transformation to green.
David Cash (24:09)
Yeah, I think you're right. mean, there's lot about transformation that's unnerving and scary and uncertain. And there's certainly going to be bumps in the road. are going to
technology glitches and all that kind of stuff. So I totally get that. And maybe what you're talking about, and certainly something I agree with, that these kind of transformations need to happen in a way that the people who are impacted by them really understand them and are on board. And again, that's another kind of interesting part of how a lot of our grants are set up is that...
They're driven by the communities, right? The communities at the table, which by the way, is not something that EPA has done a ton of in the past, right? And we're still trying to figure that out. Like how do we get communities at the table, especially when they might not have the capacity to put together and manage a large federal grant, right? So.
Whole other topic is how we're investing in these, and I love how you use the word thriving, these things that we're calling thriving community technical assistance centers. Precisely each region, each EPA region of the country is gonna have one that is precisely set up so a community can come to them and say, hey, we don't have a lot of capacity. We want to apply to get electric school buses. What's the best way that we can do it? Can you help us? Can you help us draft, you know, all the kinds of things that they need technically.
assistance on so that they're getting what those communities are getting what they want. And by the way, this addressing equity is a big step for us. There are a lot of communities who don't and rightfully don't trust EPA, large federal bureaucracy, who in fact was the one who permitted the fossil fuel facilities in their backyards. We're the ones who
permitted the manufacturing facility. So we have a lot of wrongs to right. And having a way to have these communities at the table so that they can chart their course, they can figure out, here's what we wanna use this incredible amount of federal funding for to help lift ourselves up. That's a huge part of this whole transition that we're doing right now.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (26:34)
I mean, we're seeing, we see some of this work in budgeting, like participatory budgeting and the rise of community, like Cambridge and Massachusetts has done it. There's been a lot of work done overseas, like Brazil has implemented it in many cities. And they find that that makes people feel really bought in to what's actually happening because they had this opportunity to contribute of like, these things are valuable to me and they're negotiating and they're compromising. And so it's, you know, there's this lovely sense of sort of coalitions forming.
David Cash (27:01)
Yeah.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (27:01)
And I love the piece that you talked about about building the capacity to help the people who need this to access and manage the grants, which brings me to a little bit of a sidebar question, but not completely. in, as I was looking up your background and your role in the, as the administrator, it's sound, there are many, well, several tribal nations in this purview as well. How, how do they fit into this
David Cash (27:27)
great question. There are 10 federally recognized tribes in New England.
As you can imagine, what I've said were, you know, it's a high priority for this administration, for the Biden -Harris administration, to take our, I'm going to call it what it's called in the lingo, and I'll explain that a little bit, our trust responsibilities really seriously. So the trust responsibilities is a legal word that goes back to the treaties, you know, in the
Mim Plavin-Masterman (27:52)
Mm -hmm.
David Cash (27:54)
that just basically says the federal government has a special role to play in supporting the tribes whose land we've taken, right? we work with them as sovereign nations, and we also know that they need a huge amount of technical assistance and support And each tribe will have its own.
its own goals, its own interests, et cetera. And so we work really closely with each of the tribes and each of our divisions. So EPA, not surprisingly, is kind of split up into the air division, the water division, superfund division works. They work really well together. And each of those have touches with tribes to help address the largest concerns of tribes. And for many of the pots of funding I've been talking about, which the
the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act is about a hundred billion dollars, a hundred billion dollars. There are carve -outs for tribes specifically and of course tribes can compete with any money that can be that is competitive as well. And you know these funds are going to go from everything to
removal of lead pipes, to clean up of superfund sites, to remediation of old polluted manufacturing facilities that a tribe wants to turn into something beneficial for them, to working really closely with them, for example, on trying to reestablish salmon, Atlantic salmon runs.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (29:30)
Mm -hmm.
David Cash (29:30)
many rivers of New England where there lots of dams. And so how do we as EPA work with other federal agencies, estate agencies to try to bring this really important resource for nutrition, for their cultural ways of being, for their spiritual ways of being? How do we support tribes in doing that? And it's complicated and each issue we delve into and try to be as helpful as we can be.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (29:57)
You know, Dave, you said something in passing about folks trusting government to have an effective role in transformation. And maybe we can even broaden that beyond trust in government to mean trust in our institutions, government, corporate, community, otherwise. Mim and I write a lot about what it means to see broken systems around you and failing and ailing systems
and what that does to your sense of trust, especially when you've experienced systems designed to put your own plight, your own needs, and turn that into an afterthought that you have to really bang on a lot of doors to get in and pay attention to.
if I've had experience where government hasn't always come through for me, how do I begin to work with government as helping to make these transformations possible? And I was hoping we could actually extend that not just to government per se, but just to trust in our institutions where if I've had experiences where systems are designed not to work very well for me.
especially if I'm that person without a lot of resources that we started talking about, then often, and we know this statistically, my trust in the institutions around me has gone through the floor. So I wondered if you would pick up on that and we could talk about less a specific policy that we're enacting right now and more if we were to rebuild some of that trust.
what would we do? And if you want to even look at the difference between kind of a Robert Moses and a Jane Jacobs approach, which I was thinking about the whole time you were speaking, what, in what ways could our institutions enable more Jane Jacobs and less Robert Moses?
David Cash (31:53)
Yeah, yeah. love the, you know, when I first read the Robert Moses book, which I did this summer before I started working for the state of Massachusetts, I thought I got to read this thing. Should be required. Yeah. So the tragedy and or you could call it the violence of the Moses era.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (32:04)
should be required when you're working. No, I'm just kidding.
David Cash (32:15)
We're making huge infrastructure investments and decisions without engaging communities. He was so part and parcel of the highways going right through communities, black and brown, low income communities, and without a seat at the table, without a voice.
So one of the things as a large federal bureaucracy that we've done in small part in the past, and I'll describe a really an awesome law that requires it, one of the things that we've really ramped up in the last three years is hiring dozens and dozens of people who are going to be the ones who connect with communities, going to be the ones who
visit communities who listen, who work, see their job as working for the community, serving the community. that's, and as I mentioned that what we call the Tic Tac, the Thriving Community Technical Assistance Center, again, that's partly, that's designed to provide a space.
That's a safe space for communities to go to try to get technical assistance. And you can't do that without meeting people, understanding people, meeting them where they are, listening, listening, listening. And here's a really fantastic law that way predates this. I'm sure you've heard of Superfund. This is the EPA program and federal spending. And
yet making polluters who we can identify pay to clean up the worst of the worst, the worst sites of the worst sites. In the law, there is a community engagement specialist that's required.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (33:55)
Thank
David Cash (34:06)
and as we go into a community and start having the conversations. Because of course, what could be more scary to be told, you've got the worst of the worst toxic pollution in your backyard? Of course, they've probably known that for a while. And these community engagement specialists, I mean, their job is to do exactly what I said, to listen, listen, listen, listen, to work tirelessly.
so that the community understands what's happening, that the community has a seat at the table. And I've heard stories from staff here who have started in a community in which there was no trust, no trust of a federal agency, no trust of these federal employees. What were they coming to do? How are they going to hurt us? And just patience and listening and
explaining things in ways that people could understand, they built trust over time. And it takes years. but the results are beautiful. I just visited a Superfund site up in Vermont that had been an old mine that had
Turn the stream orange. Turn the stream orange. There was no life in that stream. It was so damaging for the community. And when I was talking to a staff member who started there, so this was, think, 25 years ago is when I was first identified. And he described like really hard town meetings, really hard sitting around a table, sitting around community room tables. And through his patience,
perseverance and I'm going to say love, he was able to kind of like create this trust that hadn't been there. And the reason he took me up there was to show me this new huge solar field that just went on the capped landfill that we had done that. Now the community is benefiting from the electricity from this solar plant that's on top of the superfund landfill. They're so excited about it.
None of that would have happened without trust.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (36:15)
You know, you just gave me this aha. You just gave me this kind of like moment of shock or frisson where maybe we're using the wrong word when we think about externalities as if the impacts of the mine 50 years down the line were just like this this thing we forgot to take into account, right? My great grandfather came from Mexico to work in the copper mines and it killed him.
He was what, an externality? Or this orange water was, yeah, something we forgot to put in the model. Maybe we need to start not just saying, okay, we bake in the externalities. Maybe you use this phrase, the community needs a seat at the table. Maybe it's gotta be the community's table. Maybe folks from government and corporate should be guests at the table, right? I'm just, you've taken us in this very interesting direction.
David Cash (36:59)
Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (37:10)
And if I could play the same little game again, if you could imagine a truly participatory government where externalities weren't externalities, they were the main thing, and it wasn't a seat at the table, it was the community's tables, how would that
You got 12 years this time. In three weeks, no.
David Cash (37:31)
That's a huge, question. I mean, I don't know what that whole thing would look like, but it certainly would feel like how that staff member described the relationship with the town is now. And it certainly would feel like...
Mim Plavin-Masterman (37:34)
That's a huge
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (37:52)
Mm -hmm.
David Cash (37:56)
this meeting, this event we had yesterday in New Haven where, you know, the mayor and the
the elected alders and the head of the public housing and local NGOs and the workforce development NGO, they all were there really grateful because they had had a seat at the table in designing what they saw their future, what they wanted for their future. So that's a glimpse of that. I'm not a political scientist. I
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (38:27)
Yeah, no,
David Cash (38:29)
I don't know how to structure a whole government that way, I certainly, I can see when that happens, what happens, know, decisions are made.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (38:34)
Yeah. Maybe it's a better answer that it's not a poli sci answer, right? I was, spoke, I thought of when I graduated from high school, instead of going off to college, like responsible people like, like, like MIM, I am accusing you of being responsible here. I worked on the Clearwater Sleuth among other things. And for those who don't know this folk singer named Pete Seeger had built a replica
David Cash (38:55)
sure.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (39:03)
a replica made of an old one of the old boats that would go up and down the Hudson River. The Federalist papers were written on these etc. And every town we would stop in along the river a bunch of kids would come onto this boat and we would test the water and we would learn about water chemistry and and of course the clear clear water was instrumental in cleaning
the river where General Electric, if I've got the right firm, had dumped more. There had basically been an open pipe of PCPs going into the river. And I mention all this because Clearwater wasn't just saying, we're going to put out a program, a pressure campaign to get GE to stop. It was this engagement where we would sit around with kids in a town I'd never heard of along the river. And I'm just bringing this up again. I don't have some...
David Cash (39:37)
See
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (39:58)
you know, macro solution of prose here, but I know there's something in that bottom -up participatory piece that gets lost along the way. And that when you paint that scene, you paint it, and I first asked the five -year question, it's being found
David Cash (40:14)
Yeah, no, I think it is. on a scale that the EPA has not done, you know, we've historically been much more regulatory agency, which also you need a seat at the table. But because of bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, where
a huge granting agency now and we want to get it right. We want to make sure that we're investing funds in ways that communities find helpful. And how can you do that without having communities at the table to, you know, kind of express what they're interested in and help design and make sure it works out.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (40:50)
so as you're talking, you mentioned a couple of times, it's a long process. two things come to mind sort of observationally and then I have a question. So one is there's private sector involvement, but their time horizons for money -making are definitely shorter than the time horizon for building community trust. And two, there is something that has happened recently, like California is powering itself almost completely through renewables.
at least part of every day starting in March, but that took a long time to get to that point. And so my question is, when you talked about the private sector involvement and the private sector multiplier, one, where is it coming from? And two, how are you managing their pressure for a sort of shorter term result with the longer term community building work that's so important?
David Cash (41:39)
Yeah, that's a good question. me, gosh, I'm so glad that I had this event yesterday because it's like illuminating so much about what we're talking about. So historically, the way states and at their behest sometimes the electric utilities have dealt with things like
greater deployment of heat pumps is to have a lot of incentives for the consumer, right? And that can be very effective. Part of the interesting thing about the $450 million grant that Connecticut and four other New England states got is that they're actually looking at the manufacturer and HVAC installer part of the chain.
And the reason is that at this point, if your AC system went down and it's like 95 degrees out, oh my gosh, I got to get it replaced, and you call up your HVAC person, they're going be like, oh, you had a such and such, I'll come and replace that. Boom. And you get the same old, same old, right? So A, part of this grant is going into training of.
the installers so that when you call with that, they're like, great opportunity, we'll come by and install a heat pump. So not only will you be cool tomorrow, we're gonna save you money, right? And by the way, that fits into their profit, that an installer is gonna make money on that. So gotta be thinking that.
The other thing is looking at the manufacturers. And again, I don't know the specifics of how the grant is going to go, it's going to incentivize this, but basically saying, you know, we want to push, we want to push the manufacturers to make cheaper, better.
kinds of technologies so that again, they can make a profit because they're going to get a greater and greater market share, right? And I heard there was some chatter yesterday with of the engineers who were there that they're working on a window model of a heat pump, you know, the technology for a heat pump.
I mean, you talk about five years, what if in five years at one of these big box stores, you go in to buy an AC and you could buy the old plunker over here. Actually, they probably won't even be for sale. They can't compete to the new window unit heat pump kind of thing that's going to save you a ton on electricity and still be great.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (43:56)
Right, right.
David Cash (44:04)
And of course it takes scale. So again, when I think of one of the Biden Harris advantages of the Inflation Reduction Act is this greenhouse gas reduction fund essentially setting up these financial institutions, some people call them green banks or climate banks, that are gonna leverage private capital. I don't know what, nobody knows what they're gonna be used for, but again, you can imagine.
a hospital that wants to completely retrofit. And this is part of health care costs. So they want to retrofit because they were built in the seventies, you know, terrible. They need to be weatherized. And this this federal funding is going to be a catalyst. And there'll be some financial thing where you know, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will pony
Mim Plavin-Masterman (44:38)
Right, right.
David Cash (44:55)
you know, a million dollars to this hospital, but because a private investor can invest and they'll have some contract that the savings that the hospital will have over the next 20 years will go to be, you know, we'll pay the interest on the private sector loan. I mean, boom, there you go. Right. And the higher scale, there's been tons of those kinds of things around the country, the scale of a hospital. But what if, you know, it's all the hospitals in the MGH system, you know,
that are going to do it. And you're talking some real money investment and real return on investment set that you can make. we're always thinking private sector in that regard. Government isn't the one that makes the car. Government doesn't make a battery. Government doesn't make a heat pump. It's the private sector. We just have to level the playing field from a regulatory perspective.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (45:33)
I knew.
Yeah, maybe we could.
David Cash (45:49)
and when it makes sense, prime the market with these catalytic investments that we're making.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (45:54)
Often though we run into with climate the diminishing window. Right at the moment we say things are going to take some time. When Carl Sagan presented on global warming to the US Congress in 1985, we could have gradually tapered off. We can't now. And business as usual takes us well north of two degrees.
Even existing commitments don't get us below two degrees and for listeners, that's a threshold. It's really just a marking where that's above pre -industrial levels and to not have cataclysmic events even worse than we're experiencing today, we've got to stay below that.
Now, if we only have a few years to radically shift beyond even the most aggressive government commitments, which I value, is there, do you have thoughts now as a person, right? As that person who is teaching eighth grade science, what could we do to treat this as a society like something the enemy is at the gates and we have a little
David Cash (47:20)
Yeah, I mean, we have to keep on, keep on shouting, A, about the huge impacts that this is having. And this is, you know, unfortunately we're able to see it more, see it, feel it, experience it more and more and more. Right. And I think over time people are just going to, you know,
They're going to know we're in an urgent crisis because their lives are impacted by climate change in that kind of way. And we have to continue to shout about the opportunity that this is. And again, we're going to see that more and more and more. When we have more. Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (48:02)
That's really good. What you just did that we don't just shout about the crisis, we shout about the opportunity. Maybe our shouting has been way too much crisis and too little opportunity. Maybe we need to have a different kind of shouting. I mean, you shouted at me about the crisis. Eventually, my ears get numb. You shout about me about opportunities, I go into
David Cash (48:27)
Yeah, no, it's a huge opportunity. And in fact, as I was preparing for this podcast,
I, one of the what ifs I asked was what if we simultaneously treated climate change as the urgent crisis it is and as the enormous opportunity it is in the context of bringing environmental justice to communities that have been overburdened and underserved. If we, and we, I mean we are, what if we more collectively did? I think one of the, one of the reasons I skip to work every day is that I work in an administration that is treating it in
kind of way with the urgency but with the notion of opportunity and with the core that this has to be about justice this has to be about bringing equity where it has not been brought before so yeah I yeah that's we have to be yelling about that
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (49:24)
You've heard from Dave Cash, he skips to work partly because he has a song in his heart, partly because the corn is as high as an elephant's eye, but partly because he's working on not just the crisis, but also the opportunity that stands in front of all of us now. In all seriousness, Dave, as you close by singing that song that's in your heart,
Mim Plavin-Masterman (49:27)
And we should all yell.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (49:48)
Seriously, thank you very much for spending this time with us on What If Instead. I'm really grateful to you and particularly that you end on that note where listeners can be thinking about not just that crisis, but the opportunity in this for us.
David Cash (50:05)
Well, thank you for this opportunity for me to talk with both of you. This has been totally exciting. This is awesome.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (50:10)
Yeah, It was, you're outstanding. Thank you so much, Dave.
David Cash (50:11)
Ha ha.
You bet. Thank you. Thank you, ma 'am.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (50:16)
As always, Dave, it's pleasure.