Anna Kelly sat down with solar installers, wind turbine technicians, program evaluators, policy advocates, founders, researchers, grid builders, and efficiency engineers, and asked them to talk about their work. She recorded their stories in the documentary oral history tradition of Studs Terkel: real voices describing real work, with dignity and specificity and the mess of real life.
This second edition, extensively revised from the 2023 publication Climate Champions, features 37 chapters organized across seven parts, from hands-on fieldwork to data science, policy, entrepreneurship, grid infrastructure, energy efficiency, and teaching. Each chapter is built from a single long-form interview, edited to preserve the speaker's voice while making it readable. People told her about jobs they'd stumbled into, mentors who changed their paths, days they wanted to quit, and moments they realized the work mattered.
The people in this book are not famous. They are regular workers. But because they work on climate, they go to bed feeling good every single night.
Introduction.- Climate Communication.- The Grid.- Batteries, Policy, and Resiliency.- Wind.- Solar.- Transportation.- Entrepreneurs.- Energy Efficiency.- Carbon Sequestration.- Conclusion.
Anna Kelly is a pathologically curious, climate and climate-adjacent author who works in energy and climate policy. She writes standards, designs measurement systems, and figures out if things are working the way they're supposed to. She has a master's in energy policy from Oregon State University. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and their two daughters.
