Digital: Disrupted: The Road to Climate Regulation
August 4, 2023
Digital: Disrupted is a weekly podcast sponsored by Rocket Software, in which Paul Muller dives into the unique angles of digital transformation — the human side, the industry specifics, the pros and cons, and the unknown future. Paul asks tech/business experts today’s biggest questions, from “how do you go from disrupted to disruptor?” to “How does this matter to humanity?” Subscribe to gain foresight into what’s coming and insight on how to navigate it.
About This Week’s Guest:
Josh Griffin is the Co-founder and Chief Policy Officer of nZero, a carbon data and management platform that gives organizations the emissions data they need to reach net zero. Previously, he was a state legislator in Nevada.
Listen to the full episode here or check out some highlights below.
Paul Muller: Tell us a little bit about your background.
Josh Griffin: Yeah, it's not a typical journey if there is such thing as a typical journey towards climate tech, but my background is in public policy and honestly partisan politics.
I began getting involved in campaigns and I have a more political background having served in the Nevada state legislature, and then after that experience, I just represented companies in front of state legislatures, big hotel casinos and big data centers and big gold mining operations. And I really got to see how policy has an up-close effect on not just people. And then I started getting into energy policy. When you represent a big hotel casino or a big gold mining company, you're going to be engaged in energy policy, and over the last 20 years, if you're engaged in energy policy, you're engaged in climate policy and sustainability policy.
And so, it's that experience that I went through, and it is an aggregate of a couple of the answers in the lightning round, which is misinformation, for lack of a better word in policy fights, it is not that there was disagreement on what the outcome should be or what the end should be. The disagreement was the breadth of the problem that they were trying to solve. And so, what I thought going back to 2017, when I started at nZero with one of our other co-founders was if there were only a platform that a policymaker or a regulator or a customer could look at and see what were their impacts, not necessarily the state's aggregated impact but what were the estimates of what happened last year? What did that hotel casino or that city hall or that DMV building, and what were their impacts? Whether it was from the employees that were commuting or the load of the electricity and the time of use that it was being, and what kind of refrigerant were they using in their cooling systems and all those types of things.
What were they able to see? Because I think when you can see all that in one area, then you can start making policy decisions that make sense and not just policy decisions, but now our customers get to make operational decisions and they get to make financial decisions on how to decarbonize. We can talk about that a little bit later. But as far as just what I saw was the lack of transparent real-time, near real-time 24/7 data that was very granular, that was specific to the potential place that was having those impacts, that platform was missing. It would make for better policymaking if everybody had that same set of information that was transparent and done in real-time. And that was how nZero for me was born.
