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February 26, 2024
To help commemorate EESI’s 40th anniversary, we sat down with Board Chair Jared Blum to hear about his experience joining, contributing to, and leading EESI’s board of directors. Blum has served on EESI’s board since 1999, and began his tenure as chair in 2010.
In my prior life, I was the CEO of a trade association, the Polyisocyanurate Insulation Manufacturers Association (PIMA), that promotes the use of energy-efficient insulation, solar panels, and reflective roofing to reduce the heating and cooling load on commercial and residential buildings. We were searching to partner with organizations that were active in the environmental and energy space.
This was about 30 years ago, and as a business group, we were familiar with a broad array of proactive environmentally-oriented groups. My board at PIMA had concluded that only with partnerships among and between private and public interest organizations would necessary marketplace, technical, and policy change occur. I did a little research and EESI stood out as a non-partisan, effective educational organization that worked with Congress on energy efficiency and climate issues.
Then, I met with Carol Werner, who was the executive director at the time, and became a friend of the organization. In 1999, she asked me to serve on the board, and I agreed. Serving on EESI’s board allowed me to both be engaged with the private sector as a CEO and to have public sector input as an EESI board member.
At the time I joined, the EESI board was made up of former Democratic and Republican members of Congress, union representatives, academics, and members of advocacy groups in the environmental space, but there were not many private-sector perspectives. There was a real need for my voice at the table.
Quite frankly, joining the board is one of the smartest decisions I made in my role as CEO of the trade association. It allowed me to better understand what the obstacles to our work were from a policy standpoint. It also encouraged me as well as my industry to support some of the more aggressive, more effective policies to promote model energy building codes and energy-efficiency technologies. It educated me and my industry enough for PIMA to be one of the first industry groups to endorse the U.N. international climate negotiations, starting with Kyoto in 1997, and we were one of the first business communities to win the EPA Climate Protection award.
As a member of the board, I have spent time learning from the master and EESI’s founder, former U.S. Rep. Dick Ottinger. He taught me a lot about EESI’s role within the educational sphere. I learned about the value of having different groups and industries represented during our board meetings.
I think the most important takeaway from my time on EESI’s board, and then as its chair, is the ability to feel comfortable with and confident in your fellow board members. This allows us to achieve consensus in helping develop EESI priorities.
An essential project that I had the pleasure of working on was EESI’s push for adaptation and resilience measures in this country. After getting some experience developing educational resources on climate-related disasters, we became a hub to promote resilience in public policy. We were instrumental in developing support for legislation passed in 2018 that provided pre-disaster mitigation funding, now known as the Building Resilience Infrastructure and Communities program. It allows communities to adapt their infrastructure for greater resilience prior to a disaster occurring.
This effort was undertaken as part of a coalition more broadly supporting amendments to the Stafford Act, which is the basis for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We have continued to provide educational resources on climate adaptation and resilience via our Congressional briefings, and we support funding for these pre-disaster mitigation programs.
One of the real challenges here is that we are totally reliant on grantmaking or independent funding by people who look at what we do and understand and appreciate our work. I think that is a real wake-up call for anyone in the private sector, who has had reliable corporate funding for their activities over the years. If we don’t do the things that need to be done to advance the public policy process for environmental initiatives, the funding will disappear.
Year in and year out, EESI has met the fundraising challenge, and indeed over the last couple of years we have grown. We have increased our capabilities, and, at the same time, we have increased our funding. We have received large grants from funders who see our capabilities and in some cases ask us to do more, such as for our work with electrification and on-bill financing.
It was exciting and fulfilling to have the EESI board agree to an initiative to further diversity in the climate policy space. Specifically, in partnership with the UNCF (United Negro College Fund), the board rapidly approved, developed, funded, and implemented the Future Climate Leaders Scholarship in 2021 to assist students of color who wish to participate in solving the climate change challenge in their careers. We will be announcing an additional scholarship in conjunction with the George Washington University later in 2024. These are landmarks for our mission.
If you go back 40 years, EESI was the outgrowth of a specific decision by members of Congress of both political parties in the 1980s to give attention to energy technology, environmental policy, and the evolving environmental problems of the time. By 1988, the Senate had heard from several experts about the threat of climate change. We, at EESI, decided that climate was going to be one of our top priorities. Today, you can see that mission-driven identity in the plethora of briefings and white papers that we do every month of the year.
In terms of cultivating climate leaders, we have continued to upgrade, strengthen, and fund our wonderful internship program. I think that is a must for any organization. At this point, we use internships to train and motivate a diverse array of leaders to bring us into the 21st century and lead us to solutions relating to climate justice, racial equality, and sustainable energy projects for all.
Almost any road that someone chooses could be of benefit to the work on climate. There are so many crosscutting technologies and professions. Everything from medicine—with the impacts of environmental hazards on human health—to forestry, architecture, urban planning, aerospace, and hedge fund management. There is no one thing you should do, and there is no one thing you should not do.
Funding new technology development and deploying existing technology is incredibly important, and you need the dollars to do it. If you decide to go into the private sector, whether it is with a corporation, a law firm, or something else, being a climate advocate within that profession can make a difference. If you decide you want to work in the public and public-oriented sectors, there are an array of opportunities from federal, state, and local government to groups like EESI. There is literally no way that you will be precluded from having an impact on the environment if that is what you want to do.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Author/Compiled by: Maggie Christianson
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