Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the United States’ largest environmental organizations, advocated for reinstating climate action as a national priority at the MIT Energy Initiative’s 2025 Earth Day Colloquium. The Colloquium is part of the speaker series, MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition, that highlights energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. Bapna holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT and master’s degrees in business and political and economic development from Harvard University. Prior to his role with NRDC, Bapna held leadership roles at the World Bank, the Bank Information Center, and the World Resources Institute.
Q. Federal policy is currently undergoing a significant turnabout, but you shared in your talk that many environmental and clean energy efforts in recent years have been focused at the state level. What are you seeing happening in different states and regions of the country?
A. There are some good stories at the state level. It’s not only states like California and New York and Massachusetts that you would expect to do interesting things. Its states in the midwest, states in the southeast, that are often the biggest beneficiaries of clean energy investments and have a stake. And so, we’re seeing some interesting commitments and interesting movement at the state level, even with companies. Many companies still want reliable, affordable energy, and they know that clean energy, solar and storage, can be built faster than natural gas. If you’re a hyper-scaler trying to invest in a data center or an AI center, what you want is electricity as quickly as possible. You’re actually not that price sensitive because energy costs are such a small part of your investments. You just want something built that you can feel good about, that you can rely on. You can actually do things there.
Q. Even with the incentives for clean energy investment in recent years, there were many regulations, and the result is that not as much infrastructure was built as many hoped. Part of the challenge was permitting problems that have developed over the years. How is the environmental community thinking about that challenge?
A. The argument is that we have made it too complicated. We have made it too difficult to build things in America. Think about the various permitting regimens now, the complexities around getting permits to build stuff and what we need. There is truth to it. That plays out in the energy space, where a lot of the environmental movement historically has been about how to stop things from getting built. Thirty years ago, that may have made sense. Today, the way we’re going to solve these problems is not by stopping what we don’t like from getting built, but it’s actually, how do you build good stuff fast? That is a very important inflection point for the environmental building, is how do you get behind building clean energy, for example, fast? How can we expedite permits and transmission permits for clean energy? Those are very topical questions.
Q. As a leader in the environmental movement, what are you doing, and what do you think must be done, to make sustainability and climate action a national priority again?
A. A big part of what we need to do is depoliticize climate policy. The worst thing that has happened in the past 5, 10 years is how politicized energy and climate policy has become in this country and we need to find a way to move beyond that … One of the tough things that’s happened in the past 10, 15 years is that the fragmented media ecosystem has meant that the ability to engage the public on issues and animate and work together is much more complicated today than it was 10, 15 years ago. I think the environmental movement, quite honestly, is still figuring out how to operate effectively and have that presence. NRDC was founded in 1970. Earth Day, 1970, 20 million people were on the streets—that was 10 percent of the American public at that time. It led to almost unanimous votes in Congress for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act. The amount of incredible bipartisan support for the environment was a direct outpour of that ability to get people to care and to go on the streets. I think to some extent, if we really want to shift the conversation, again, we have to figure out how to recreate that moment.
MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition is an MIT Energy Initiative speaker series highlighting energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems.For more information on this and additional events, visit: energy.mit.edu/events