Breakthrough Dialogues

We Made Wind and Solar Cheap, Now What?

Jun 16, 2020

Breakthrough has long argued that fighting climate change is mainly a matter of making clean energy cheap, and — thanks in large part to federal deployment subsidies — this is precisely what we've done for solar and onshore wind technologies. But since experts agree that they aren’t enough to fully decarbonize...

Agriculture in the Time of Coronavirus

Jun 8, 2020

Kyle Bridgeforth is a fifth-generation farmer at Bridgeforth Farms, a row crop operation headquartered in Tanner, Alabama. We sat down with him in the fifth week of coronavirus quarantine — and after a tumultuous few years of international trade wars — to ask him about the challenges facing his operation and the...

Deployment-Led Innovation

May 18, 2020

When it comes to innovative technologies, which comes first: deployment, or the ability to financially compete? Jigar Shah – a seasoned podcast host himself and founder of clean energy financing company Generate Capital – is a firm believer in the former. He argues that technologies just don’t get cheaper...

For Decarbonization and Economic Recovery, Start with the Low-Hanging Fruit

May 4, 2020

At Breakthrough, we’ve long viewed climate as a problem that would be addressed obliquely with other challenges — making clean energy cheap, building modern infrastructure, growing affordable food, and the like. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has rapidly upended our work priorities and climate politics more broadly,...

Electricity Makes the World Go Round

Apr 20, 2020

Rehena Jamadar, a 44-year-old woman living in a small Indian village, has only had electricity for the last 14 years of her life. If she had been able to have the lights on earlier in her life, she says, she would have gone to university. This isn’t a rare story; roughly 4 of 10 people today use less...