Episode
Climate finance without Washington: The new coalition funding community clean energy in America
- Podcast
- Energy Gang
- Published
- Sep 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2949
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Summary
As federal support for climate action in the US is cut back, a difficult question is coming into focus: what happens to clean-energy projects that still make economic sense, but no longer have Washington behind them? For low-income communities in particular, this is not just a policy story. It is about electricity bills, resilience during storms and heatwaves, access to financing, and whether practical projects such as solar, storage, and efficiency upgrades can still get built. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Amir Kirkwood, Chief Executive of the Justice Climate Fund, and Melanie Allen, Chief Executive of the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice. Together, they explain how a network of community lenders, philanthropies, green banks and local partners is trying to keep momentum alive even as federal climate funding is frozen, litigated or wound back. A central theme of the conversation is that the real constraint is not just ideology or even demand for clean energy, but the structure of finance. Amir argues that many community projects do not need breakthrough technology so much as access to affordable capital and better risk sharing. His case is that catalytic tools such as credit enhancements, loan-loss reserves and blended capital can still unlock much larger pools of private investment, even if they cannot fully replace the scale of federal support that the Inflation Reduction Act was meant to provide. Melanie brings that argument down to ground level with examples of what those projects look like in practice. In Texas, local “hub homes” equipped with solar panels and batteries are giving neighbourhoods places to charge phones, run medical devices and stay cool during outages. In North Carolina, a stalled solar project for a wastewater facility was revived through…