Leah Qusba: 0:00

The most striking thing that we saw recently is AI manipulation in the siting process. So decision makers making permitting decisions around solar, wind, and batteries based on, made up people, fake comments, resulting in real decisions that have actually killed projects.

Tom Raftery: 0:21

And that is climate delay in its newest form, fake public pressure shaping real infrastructure decisions. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is Climate Confident Stories and Strategies That Cut Emissions episode 277, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. My guest today is Leah Qusba, CEO of GoodPower, and we're gonna talk about why clean energy now depends as much on trust, local messengers, and cultural power as it does on technology, cost, or policy. So I started by asking Leah how GoodPower evolved and why awareness alone is no longer enough. Leah, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Leah Qusba: 1:08

Sure. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. My name is Leah Qusba and I'm the CEO of GoodPower

Tom Raftery: 1:14

Okay. And for people who are unfamiliar, Leah with GoodPower can you give us a quick 101

Leah Qusba: 1:22

Sure. I mean, in simplest terms we believe the economy isn't working for most people, so we exist to change that and we, really think the key is by accelerating a world that seizes this enormous economic opportunity in front of us, which is really decarbonising everything from the way we drive, to the way we get our energy, to the way we grow our food.

Tom Raftery: 1:44

And if I got this right, it was that GoodPower was ACE and it's now GoodPower. So can you talk to us a little bit about why the change, what brought that about?

Leah Qusba: 1:56

Yeah. Well we were founded almost two decades ago now, and I've been at GoodPower for about 17 years, and we were founded with this, I think, really simple idea at the time. You'll remember climate was very fringe a few decades ago. But the simple idea was if you wanna change the future, you should start with the people who are gonna live in it. So we really focused on young people on education organising, really helping youth understand climate solutions, clean energy solutions, and to feel like they had a sense of agency to participate in those solutions. And over the years, the reality hit that awareness is necessary but not sufficient. So we started to incorporate advocacy and organising and leadership development and fast forward to really the 2018 midterm cycle that year in the US and we started to think about civic engagement. And that sort of brings us to present day where we've, grown enormously. Our mission has evolved, and we sort of work at the nexus of being a research institute, being a campaigning organisation that advances policy and ensures we have the right leaders to advance a decarbonisation agenda. And also we do a lot of strategic communications and education to build the public's awareness and really shift culture, I think around decarbonisation generally.

Tom Raftery: 3:15

Interesting. And we're, we're at a weird time. I wanna think in terms of decarbonisation right now, and what I mean by that is we're in the middle of this US Israel war on Iran and all the implications that has had. How, how would you think that conflict has made fossil fuel or has that conflict, do you think, made fossil fuel dependence harder to defend as "secure energy"?

Leah Qusba: 3:46

Well, I think what people are seeing around the world and what actually the market is responding to right now is people don't see this as secure energy. They see it as really volatile. They see it as a perilous future where we're importing that volatility into our energy bills and into our gas pumps where we're filling up our vehicles. And so if you just look at Europe, just over March, they had a incredible increase. I think they doubled the amount of heat pumps that were adopted in that month as per sort of the baseline. And there was a massive increase in EV adoption as well. So people are just really sick and tired of importing this volatility into their lives, I think,

Tom Raftery: 4:26

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And obviously as we both are acutely aware, for years and decades, renewables were framed as risky and fossil fuels as dependable. Do you think that story is breaking down now?

Leah Qusba: 4:40

I think it's breaking down. I think when one applies common sense to really think about these things. When you pair solar and wind with modern energy storage solutions, basically large scale batteries, you come up with a very reliable solution that isn't exposed to the, I think the global commodity risk, that oil and gas face where you have a geopolitical conflict and suddenly the house of cards falls down. When we're investing in homegrown energy, there's no fuel cost to solar or wind. There are potential supply chain issues that can happen that have to be managed around, but it's really that homegrown power. And I think the advancements in, battery energy storage in particular, are making renewables really, really attractive.

Tom Raftery: 5:25

Yeah, and, and you're right, there are potential supply chain issues with renewables and with batteries, but I gotta think you buy a solar panel once, or a fleet of solar panels once and they work for 30 years. Same with the wind turbine, same with batteries. So the supply chain, if there is a supply chain issue there, it might affect a single purchase. But if you're buying fuels, fossil fuels, you have to buy them all day, every day to keep your power plant running. And if there's a supply chain issue. There, it's far more significant because once you've got the wind turbine in place, and once you've got to your point, the solar panel in place, you're then getting the fuel for free from the sun. The sun and the wind don't have any issues with the Strait of Hormuz.

Leah Qusba: 6:11

Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right. And energy prices shouldn't go up and down like the stock market each and every day. They should be predictable, just like, what you're gonna spend in the next month on things like food, that there's a reasonable expectation of what things will cost. When energy prices go up, everything goes up, the cost of groceries goes up. Then we look at other sort of tertiary expenses from climate impacts. We look at the insurance affordability crisis. So I think is something that people really want. I think governments want it. I think small businesses want it. Certainly, households and families want it. And it's that predictability factor I think that makes renewables so attractive is that you actually know, oh, there is no volatile fuel cost. That's not a global commodity risk here that we're looking at. It's something that we can predict and that I think that feels really good and feels really safe for all of those stakeholders.

Tom Raftery: 7:03

Yeah, And so then, given all that, how do you think climate advocates should talk about oil shocks without sounding opportunistic?

Leah Qusba: 7:14

Well, I don't know if it's about not sounding opportunistic. This is an opportunity and whether the Trump administration realised at the time how much this geopolitical conflict was gonna solidify the energy transition and actually be a boost in this awareness moment globally, where you have governments all over the planet saying, enough is enough. We're actually gonna go full speed ahead at developing more energy security and energy independence as nations. You just look at Europe or the UK where they're importing so much of their, oil and gas. Now in the US it's a little different. I think we use, somewhere around 22 million barrels of oil a day. We produce 18 million barrels, something around that. So we produce a lot of our own energy here. Just recently, you see China, they've banned oil exports of oil produced in China, they're kind of hoarding that energy because people know this feels unpredictable. We don't know if there's an end in sight. Some people are saying, Hey, this is gonna be Trump's oil recession and we're gonna look back on this moment. It's gonna persist for potentially years, and the, downstream impacts are gonna be very serious. So I think whether it was intentional or not, this sort of really solidifies and galvanises governments around the world and small businesses and even just households, people saying, okay, we want predictability. We don't want this volatility, and this is a really great investment we can make when everything else feels out of control and unpredictable that this is something that a common sense thing we can do to have a little bit more control around the future.

Tom Raftery: 8:44

Who would've predicted that Trump would be the champion we need for the energy transition?

Leah Qusba: 8:49

Correct?

Tom Raftery: 8:53

Um, let's talk a little bit though about people trust resistance. Are, are people now the biggest bottleneck to decarbonisation? You know, Technology is obviously increasingly ready. So is local resistance often a barrier to installation of renewables?

Leah Qusba: 9:13

There's a lot of factors at play here that we really need to fix, and I think there's actually a lot of bipartisan support to fix some of them. We look at permitting reform and some of the hearings, on the hill just over the past few weeks around how do we modernise our permitting system? How do we fix long lines and inter, interconnection queues? So I think those problems aside, we put an overemphasis, I think, on those problems and we forget about actually winning the public support and social permission. If you just look at all of the phases of development from siting to permitting to construction, procurement, operations. Permitting is the most risky of the phases of development for a utility scale clean energy project. So many of these projects don't make it through the final permitting on their way to construction. And that really boils down to is the community where the project is being hosted, are they supportive? Do they have the information? So we work in lots and lots of communities around the United States and also in the UK on utility scale clean energy projects. And actually that's the critical gap we fill is educating the community and combating all of the disinformation that these municipalities and counties that people are very vulnerable to. Things like over the last couple weeks solar is a Chinese psyop, that solar panels are spying on Americans and collecting information. That was a disinformation cluster that we observed.

Tom Raftery: 10:40

Wow.

Leah Qusba: 10:41

Solar panels are leaching chemicals into the ground and they'll, give you cancer. So just these outright fear tactics, this disinformation that's being spread. How do we deliver real stories of communities that have already done this and demystify it and talk about the economic benefits? And we don't have to say much. These stories are all over the United States. People have great stories to tell.

Tom Raftery: 11:05

So talk to us a little bit about that, because I know I've seen your website with all the stories you have out there, but people listening haven't. So tell us about that. Tell us about how you get those stories, who you get them from, and how you get them out there.

Leah Qusba: 11:19

Sure. Well, 65 million times is how many times our content about positive rural, renewable energy stories has been seen over the last couple of years. We've been building what we think is the largest collection of positive renewable energy stories in the United States. We've been building this collection and just getting the good news about renewables out for a number of years. It's just hard work. We cold call people. We visit communities. We look at where there's existing operational utility scale, solar, wind, and storage. And we have a content studio that actually travels all around the United States and all over the UK to just go to communities and talk to them about their experiences. And these stories are emotional. They are stories of victory. You have these farmers or these agricultural communities that are hanging on by a thread because nothing else is working for them. And now they have a, 600 acres of solar along with their 3000 acres of soybeans and corn. And it's the one crop that doesn't fail. It's not, vulnerable to flood or drought. It pays the bills. And so you have these families or these communities, policemen and fire marshals talking about the benefits to EMS. Oftentimes the emergency management services vehicles or infrastructure are donated. You talk to school officials and you have school superintendents saying, look, our students went from barely being able to have the materials they needed to learn, to now having a new school that we got and negotiated in the community benefit agreement. So I think this infrastructure, when you really go and talk to people, and you wouldn't know this from the national news cycle of what the rhetoric we're seeing, people have these heartfelt, amazing stories about the economic lifeline that this infrastructure has meant, particularly in, in rural America.

Tom Raftery: 13:09

And how effective do you think these stories are? Because you said they've been watched 66 million times at this point now, and

Leah Qusba: 13:18

Mm-hmm.

Tom Raftery: 13:19

you're, you're talking about all the different stories that are out there. I watched several myself, the, the mayor of Boulder for example, and one of the fire marshals talking about how batteries don't go on fire, these kind of things. He's saying in, in all the years he's worked in the fire department, he's never had a battery go on fire, these kind of things. So, but that's all well and good. Are they having an impact?

Leah Qusba: 13:40

Yes. Incredibly powerful when you have a credible messenger. And I, you know, this is really sort of the foundation of, storytelling generally for groups that invest in this. It's one thing for GoodPower to say something, or for a big renewable industry trade organisation to say something right. That maybe isn't the most credible messenger. When you have a rural person talking to another rural person or a fire marshal, universally credible messenger, everybody trusts the local fire department, right? This is incredibly effective. So we have an empirical research lab led by Dr. LeeAnn Sangalang on our team. It's a PhD level, empirical research lab. So, we are extremely evidence driven as an organisation. If it's not working, we have no business doing it or investing in it. And we're okay to either fix those things or let them go. But we only wanna be doing work that is working 'cause we, don't have a lot of time, right? Time is our greatest enemy. When we think about the energy transition or climate how do we save time? How do we get there more quickly? So we have exhaustively tested this collection and we find pretty amazing outcomes. There's a meta-analysis we just did that looked at all of our content and all of the tests that we've run, all the randomised control trials over the last few years. On average, we see an 11% shift from NIMBY, not in my backyard, to YIMBY. Yes, I would consider hosting this infrastructure and how meaningful that is locally around having a community of support where I think developers, county commissioners, public service commissions, the people responsible for permitting this infrastructure, it has just been brick wall after brick wall. And that's resulted in banning these projects right now faster than we're building them. So having a community of readiness and openness and social permission that's there and that can submit comments and turn up at hearings to testify in support of the projects. This makes all the difference. We've heard that from our partners. We know that through empirical research and validation. And so I would say for groups thinking about doing this, it's one, I think one of the best investments you can make is developing a huge cadre of credible messengers that can speak personally, right? They're living it, they're living this infrastructure. We have to platform more of these people to really combat. I think some of the, the rhetoric that's happening right now federally.

Tom Raftery: 15:59

Hmm, fair. Fair. And what have your tests, your message tests taught you that climate professionals, might still resist hearing?

Leah Qusba: 16:11

One of the biggest learnings. I think it didn't shock us, but it, it was a little bit surprising. We had hypothesised that the story should be from the local community, that a story from Oklahoma meant to educate people in Oklahoma would be uniquely powerful in Oklahoma. And what we learned is when you share, let's say a Midwestern identity, I'm from the Midwest and people from the upper Midwest in particular, whether it's Illinois or Minnesota or Wisconsin or Michigan, we share a Midwestern identity. So if we have a story, a powerful story from Iowa or Grant or Lafayette County in southwestern Wisconsin, that story through our tests, we've demonstrated works really well in any Midwestern state. In fact, the FOMO or the sense of competition that we have, if you just look at our sports rivalries, right, the Bears and the Packers, it's like a rivalry as old as time. We actually see incredible lifts in education and persuasion and even proxies for support and action taking in the research. So the story need not be, from Arizona to have an impact in Arizona. It could be from Nevada or it could be from New Mexico. So I think looking at regional identities, we've learned a lot about cultural identities that people share. There's a rural identity, right? There's a southern identity. And so I think that was, that was just a, a huge learning for us.

Tom Raftery: 17:32

Okay. And would you say it's more important to have the right messenger sometimes, or is it more about the message itself?

Leah Qusba: 17:41

I love this question. I would say the message is the messenger. There's no air between them. The message is the messenger, the message is absolutely no good, even if it's the most perfectly crafted, perfectly tested message. And you have every indication. It's the messenger. If the right person, if they don't have credibility with that community, it's really not worth investing in or spending money on. So I would, I would almost say the message is, is the messenger.

Tom Raftery: 18:11

And how do you make sure that these messages are then seen, particularly by people you know who would typically ignore mainstream climate campaigns?

Leah Qusba: 18:23

Oh, absolutely. So we have a, a really unique organisational structure and identity. We function a lot more like a specialised agency to accelerate decarbonisation than we do as a climate nonprofit or an environmental NGO. And so with that, we have made great investments and taken great strides over the last decade really to invest in professionalising our team. So if we're doing growth marketing, we're hiring a professional from the private sector who specialises in growth and performance marketing, or if we're doing creator marketing, we're hiring the top talent who's done creator marketing for Airbnb or some of these, companies. So really professionalising our staff and mostly our staff consists these days of top talent from the private sector, from research and academia and also from careers and political campaigns. And so that combination has allowed us, when we wanna get these stories out to communities, we basically have an internal agency led by our head of marketing and client services, Matt Lucans. And he's had several decades in running an agency himself. And so that's how we function basically. The main client for the agency is GoodPower and it helps us run really sophisticated leading edge campaigns to get this information to communities.

Tom Raftery: 20:08

That must cost a lot of money. Where does the funding come from for all this?

Leah Qusba: 20:13

You'd think it does, but here's the thing. I have two answers. First, we've grown a lot. So we've 10 XD in size over the last seven years since 2019. We operated at just under $20 million in operational spending last year, and we were about a $2 million organisation back in 2019. So we've really been hard at work fundraising and attracting new investment. The vast majority comes from institutions, so from foundations where their mission is connected also to accelerating climate solutions and decarbonisation. But this stuff is not as costly as you would imagine. Where these projects are being permitted. If we're just looking at our siting and permitting programme, these are sometimes very tiny counties where you might have very sparse population density. And so what you can do with a few thousand dollars in a month might shock you in terms of how many people you can reach, how many you can get into a, a supportive posture to submit a comment or turn up in person even. So we, we like to say we're very scrappy in that we weren't a big organisation very recently, so how we spend a dollar versus, how other organisations that spend a dollar. I just think it, it's pretty different. We, we do a lot with our resources.

Tom Raftery: 21:26

And let's talk a little bit about misinformation, disinformation, cultural power. What does climate and energy disinformation look like now?

Leah Qusba: 21:38

Well, I think to answer that, you need to just look at the state of the modern internet generally and the amount of disinformation and, and bad actors spreading that disinformation. Sometimes this is state actors. If you look at disinformation in Europe, where we also work, most of that comes from Russia specifically to undermine these technologies to say renewables are quote unquote unreliable. All of these themes meant to sow doubt and deception and to delay this inevitable decarbonisation and the decarbonisation of our economy more generally. And it makes sense because most of Russia's annual GDP comes from oil and gas. So in the US we have the best paper I've read on this is from Robert Brule, where he studies a group of actors called the Climate Change Counter Movement, just in the visible money, not the dark money, just the visible money. It's about 900 million annually that the Climate Change Counter Movement spends to sow deception and to delay the energy transition and sensible climate policy. So I like to say it's a David and Goliath battle out there because of the amount of money that is spent by these think tanks and some of it is connected to fossil fuel money. It's very difficult also to track the dollars just in terms of how this is set up in the United States. It's, it's pretty easy to hide the origination source of the dollars. So there's a lot of dark money investment into disinformation. You can imagine why that disinformation is being spread, right? We don't wanna as fossil fuel companies strand trillions of dollars of assets of our products in the ground. And so I understand why the disinformation exists, but you can really look back some of the hearings that we had in Congress over the last few years. You can look back 40 years and you can really see and understand and, and look at the receipts of this massively well-funded and organised campaign to slow down the energy transition and slow down the uptake of electrification and buildings and cars, et cetera. And it's not just the fossil fuel industry. The airline industry has been implicated. Big ag has been implicated. So it, it does exist. I think it's not well, well understood, I think by the general public who are just an end user and being fed content online and more and more of its AI generated content. I will just say the most striking thing that we saw recently that we're actually creating a solution for is AI manipulation in the siting process. So decision makers making permitting decisions around solar, wind, and batteries based on, I hate to say fake people, but made up people, fake comments, resulting in real decisions that have actually killed projects. And these decision makers feel like, okay, it's a flood of comments saying they don't want this infrastructure, but how many of those are real? And how do we detect AI manipulation in siting processes? How do we report that and support decision makers who are very under-resourced to know when this manipulation is happening? So I would just say it's an overwhelming field and a huge question. And in our own way we're trying to tackle this.

Tom Raftery: 24:58

So what would you say is the biggest mistake people make when trying to fight false information?

Leah Qusba: 25:05

I would say playing whack-a-mole and trying to fight too many fronts simultaneously instead of moving up the value chain. I think some of the best work I've seen is actually trying to change policy at the platform level. And, some of that has been widely covered in the media. We're part of a global coalition called Climate Action Against Disinformation that seeks to really hold these big social media platforms, these big tech companies accountable and actually to create common sense policies. We're now starting to see this wave of policies in Australia and Europe around even banning socials for under sixteens. And so we've been watching that. But some of the platform work in particular, which goes upstream a bit, I think trying to fight too many fronts and playing whack-a-mole on all of those fronts is one thing that's not working. And I then I think second, really thinking about our strategy to inoculate audiences. I'm not seeing enough groups get out ahead, like, the moments that are ripe for disinformation. You can anticipate every time there's a, a major climate disaster. Well, it's the LA wildfires or winter storm Fern that we just had in January in the US, we know that disinformation is going to infiltrate these narratives. We know that they're gonna blame renewables, for example, for rolling blackouts when you have a winter storm. Making sensible efforts to hedge off the disinformation through great education and sort of always on campaigns that are we call it inoculation research. But when you're, preempting and pre bunking the disinformation before it reaches the audience, so then therefore they're more resilient to understanding, oh, that's, the truth. That's the lie. I would love to see more investment, I think, from the climate community in pre bunking and inoculation strategies to make audiences more resilient.

Tom Raftery: 26:54

Okay. And what about the likes of using creators in food, fashion, gaming, cars, sports, instead of traditional climate voices?

Leah Qusba: 27:04

we have to do this. So we marketing agency internally about six years ago in 2020. We now work with about 8,500 influencers uh, around the world that are enrolled in programme. And, you know. When a climate creator say something, they're gonna be more sceptical because they know this person is a sort of a climate person or a, you a, lefty climate activist, universal credibility isn't there. But when you have audiences, most people seek out the internet for entertainment, right? They're going to scroll through funny videos. They wanna see comedy, music, culture, fashion, food. Moms are looking for recipes and money saving trends and hacks are big with young people. Workout culture. This is what people seek out the internet for, for that entertainment. So I call it the Raisin Bread theory. How do we, you know, the bread is sort of culture, right? the raisins, are how do we get our messages into culture? It's much more, persuasive and educational when we have that makeup influencer or that car bro, or that workout person or the gamer. Gaming is a big one too, with streaming and young people on platforms like Twitch. How do we sneak our messages into culture and operate within culture? That has been tremendously more impactful for us in our own research than leading with an environmental or climate message. The backdoor approach of operating within culture has been much more successful for our organisation.

Tom Raftery: 28:33

Okay. And how do you recruit these people to spread your message?

Leah Qusba: 28:39

Well, we got, really exhausted working with creator marketing consultancies back in 2020. And we tried a lot of them and were like, why are we paying these consultants this premium? We can just go and find creators ourselves. We can slide into their dms on Instagram or TikTok and we can recruit them and we can build our own creator agency internal to GoodPower And so we did that and by doing that, we've reduced costs, increased speed. The content and the briefs are much better as a result.'cause we're the specialists in these, the particular messaging here. So we made that investment about six years ago now. And it's just a lot of hard work. It's finding people across the ideological spectrum. If we're doing a campaign where, there was a poll recently that came out from Kellyann Conway who's a sort of a famous conservative pollster where she said a majority of Republicans want large scale solar too. Well, we can't have a bunch of sort of progressive voices talking about that poll. We need to find centre right voices that are credible messengers with centre right audiences to elevate that poll and to help build more support with conservatives around solar. So we would hire creators from our community that have that centre right credibility. If we're working on, this federal legislation around toxics that's a vote is coming up in September, we're gonna find the MAHA moms who have this massive credibility with other parents and people who are health conscious. So it's really about matching the messenger to the message and making sure we're really thinking about the whole ideological spectrum and we're really matching people who have a similar interest or are in a similar affinity group with each other very similarly to how we do storytelling around clean energy projects, right? Rural speaks to rural. And there's a particular vernacular in language and set of values and principles there. And so same thing with creator marketing. It's finding these creators that have developed these niche markets in food and fashion and cars and all these other things and working with them when appropriate around particular high attention moments or campaigns that we're running.

Tom Raftery: 30:49

Okay, and obviously you're not running on instinct as you mentioned already, there's a lot of research underneath all this. What has your research changed about how you do the campaigns?

Leah Qusba: 31:02

Yeah, I mean I think research is a continual teacher to us as we think about how we evaluate our work, how we do better how we improve it. I would say in the creator marketing space, too much emphasis over the last few decades for anybody doing any climate communications has really been on how do we get that perfect message? What's the perfect combination of words or this silver bullet mentality when really the perfect message could crash and burn on TikTok? Because it's not culturally salient. It's not tied to trends. It's not fast enough in the moments that matter. It's not distributed to the right people. So what we think works in a lab setting and we were like, oh, this is the perfect message 'cause it was so persuasive and we got that extra percentage point of lift. When you go and put that message online or try to, it's the translation, I think, of that message that often falls flat. And so you see some of these traditional climate groups that are online and you go to their social handles and they're just losing people because there's no cultural relevance there. So I think our biggest learning too, from our own research is how do we have that balance of the content has to be effective, it has to win hearts and minds, but it also has to be delivered with speed from the right people and with cultural salience and to be on trend. Otherwise, algorithmic gods on these platforms will not be pleased and they will not serve your content to the people. You're not gonna, you know, sort of reach organic virality. Just because it's a perfect message doesn't mean it's gonna work online.

Tom Raftery: 32:33

And are there stories you can talk to of campaigns that worked less well than expected? Or on the flip side, ones that worked even better than expected?

Leah Qusba: 32:46

Yeah, what are some bright spots? I think around campaigns that worked less well. We did a campaign a few years ago around, holding utilities accountable and messaging their rate payers and saying, look, your utility is blocking decarbonisation policies locally. And I think our learning from that, while it was effective at turning rate payers against their utilities, when you try to include too many technical details, and again, you're like using jargon or climate speak or energy speak that the general public just isn't thinking about every day and you lose that connection to culture and make it too complex or there's too many ideas you're trying to communicate in a brief. That has been a big learning of how do we simplify, what's the tweet that we could extrapolate from this brief that we wanna make sure comes through. Otherwise, the content, I think, can feel inauthentic. It can feel too contrived. And I think that's a major cautionary tale for people doing creator marketing is like, let the creator do their thing. You're working with them because they've developed this audience organically of a million followers, let's say they're doing something right. They know how to connect with that audience. So, trust that and don't overly script things or be too contrived. I would say one that really surprised us that we actually won an award for was these over the top hilarious fake EV commercials that we've made for the Super Bowl. And then we put them out around the Super Bowl and we actually tested them against real Super Bowl commercials, like from Kia. They had an EV commercial. We tested them head to head, and our content was actually more effective than the car companies at increasing support and intent to even pursue buying an EV. So, that one was really exciting. And I think, comedy was the key, is that the world can feel pretty dark and unpredictable and the more and more we can deliver something that makes people laugh or that's silly and feels irreverent and surprising and how do we package some of this highly technical stuff within a format that is just snackable for people? I think that was a huge learning for us and really an unexpected win.

Tom Raftery: 34:56

Okay. As a, as an owner of a Kia EV, I must go look up that ad sometime.

Leah Qusba: 35:02

Yes, we won a, we won an award for this. We submitted some of the creative for an award and surprisingly we won that award,

Tom Raftery: 35:09

Brilliant,

Leah Qusba: 35:10

which was really exciting.

Tom Raftery: 35:12

So what's hardest to measure? Would it be changing minds, changing behaviour, changing power, something else?

Leah Qusba: 35:21

I think that's a really great question. And we have these different levels that we measure in all of our research. And I think the easiest one to get points on and get persuasion lift on is really the education and awareness. Did people walk away learning something? Next hardest is did we change their mind that, you know, a, a persuasion outcome around did they think this way and now they think this way? The next is a proxy for action taking. So will they say, my mind was so changed, because of this, I plan to do X. Then there's the actual action taking. Can we follow these people that we've reached with these campaigns? Can we track their VIN numbers and see did they actually purchase the EV? And then I would say it's the systems culture change and really isolating our impact in that and being able to go to our stakeholders, our board, our staff, our funders, and say, okay, was our unique contribution, we can, isolate that oftentimes through a randomised control trial. Was it our contribution that made the difference here? So I would say it's in that order of difficulty. And then certainly, the societal systems change of did the policy pass and what, role did we play along with other, other partners we're working with sort of in that big systemic change.

Tom Raftery: 36:37

Time. Now for the lightning round, I have a couple of quick questions, one sentence answers if you could. So first one up. What is less safe oil or local power?

Leah Qusba: 36:53

Oil is less safe,

Tom Raftery: 36:55

Obviously facts or feelings, which moves people faster?

Leah Qusba: 37:02

Definitely feelings,

Tom Raftery: 37:05

Agreed. Who's harder to reach, sceptics or the ignored?

Leah Qusba: 37:10

Sceptics are harder to reach.

Tom Raftery: 37:13

Okay. What climate message should disappear?

Leah Qusba: 37:18

Vote for climate. You should vote for your self-interest.

Tom Raftery: 37:21

Oh, interesting. Interesting. Cheap energy or clean energy. Is that a false choice?

Leah Qusba: 37:30

False choice. And people don't like cheap things. They like affordable things, but cheap things don't sound high quality.

Tom Raftery: 37:38

What should leaders stop pretending?

Leah Qusba: 37:42

That we're the smartest people in the room. We should learn from the communities that are already living the energy transition.

Tom Raftery: 37:50

Okay. The last one, and you can go two or three sentences on this one. What would change if people saw clean energy first as protection, not sacrifice?

Leah Qusba: 38:01

The market forces are too strong to stop the energy transition. It is unstoppable. The question now is, can we remove the roadblocks and go more quickly? So it's really how do we look at the energy transition? How do we save time and how do we fix the broken pieces in the system, the cogs in the wheel to allow us to get there more quickly? I think the energy transition and decarbonisation, we will look back on this moment historically and say, this was the greatest economic renaissance for the middle class maybe ever. But certainly in generations.

Tom Raftery: 38:36

And a left field question for you, if you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional as a champion for the energy transition, who would it be and why?

Leah Qusba: 38:54

I would say Bob Marley, hands down, every little thing is gonna be all right.

Tom Raftery: 39:00

Brilliant. Okay. We're coming towards the end of the now Leah. Is there any question that I did not ask that you wish I did, or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Leah Qusba: 39:14

I think you were very complete. I don't think I have anything at this point.

Tom Raftery: 39:18

Brilliant. Okay. Superb. So in that case, Leah, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Leah Qusba: 39:29

I would have them go to GoodPower.org and specifically they can look at our 2030 strategic plan. We'd love to be in touch with you if you also work on this type of work. Please be in touch with us.

Tom Raftery: 39:42

Okay, fantastic. Leah, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Leah Qusba: 39:48

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.