Climate finance, interrupted

Beth Bafford spent years designing Climate United, a revolving fund meant to push out $7 billion of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money to underserved communities. She had barely begun issuing loans when Trump shut the program down and rescinded all the money. In this episode, I talk with her about that experience, the ongoing legal fight to reclaim some of the money, and the central importance of finance in clean energy policy. 📌 Instructions to add paid episodes to your preferred podcast app via mobile / desktop (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Hello, everyone. Greetings. This is Volts for April 17, 2026: “Climate finance, interrupted.” I am your host, David Roberts. Clean energy has a finance problem. The technologies exist and they are increasingly cheap, but capital still doesn’t flow to the places that need it most — low-income communities, rural areas, projects too small to get on the radar of private lenders. Tax credits don’t help if you don’t have tax liability. And grants can rarely scale enough to cover the gap. The Biden administration had an ambitious plan to fix that problem: the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, $27 billion seeded into a new ecosystem of revolving funds and community lenders designed to continuously cycle clean energy capital into underserved markets for decades to come. It was one of the most innovative things in the IRA and almost nobody paid attention to it. (If you want the full deep dive, I did an episode back in 2024 with Jahi Wise, the EPA official who designed it.) Beth Bafford paid attention. As CEO of Climate United — the coalition that won the largest single chunk of GGRF funding, nearly $7 billion — she spent years designing financial structures, assembling lending partnerships, and generally standing up the organization from scratch. She got about $400 million out the door before the Trump administration froze the accounts and tried to kill the whole program. She’s been fighting in court ever since. By the time you hear this, she’ll have left the job — her last day is March 31. So we’re taking the opportunity to talk while she’s still in the thick of it: what Climate United was trying to build, what the freeze felt like from the inside, and what the whole experience taught her about the role of finance in the energy transition. With no further ado, Beth Bafford, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Beth Bafford Thank you for having me. David Roberts Let’s rewind the tape a little bit and go back. This is not directly germane to our topic at hand, but I was charmed by it. I went back and read this piece of yours, several years old, about you leaving a high-profile Wall Street job to volunteer as an unpaid volunteer for the Obama campaign. You wrote a story about being on the subway going to quit your job, and you hear “Defying Gravity,” the song “Defying Gravity,” on your headphones, and it gives you strength. I have to say that everything about that is literally the most millennial thing I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. I love it. And it really, I had forgotten because of — waves hands at current events — I had forgotten about that whole thing. There are many people with stories like yours. There’s a whole generation of people who were pulled into public service by Obama. Not just public service, but public service with a smile and some optimism and can-do spirit. That just seems gone now. But there’s a whole generation and I just wonder, who’s pulling the Beths into public service today? Where is that generation now? Do you ever think about that? Beth Bafford It’s funny you say that because, yeah, I think about it a lot and I talk about this with friends and colleagues a lot. That’s now my number one criterion for political candidates: their ability to attract and inspire blindly optimistic talent. Because no matter the side of the aisle or your policy preferences or your governance style, it’s really about how you govern, who you surround yourself with, who is interested, excited to come to work every day to solve these problems. And I think of it as what I call the Obama ripple effect. I have so many friends and colleagues from that time. David Roberts I interview people every week and they’re everywhere. They’re in state government, they’re running companies now, they’re running NGOs. That Obama diaspora has spread out now and is running things. And it just doesn’t — I don’t see a — maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t know that I see a wave coming in today in the same way. Beth Bafford Yeah, hopefully we will be surprised. I do think that training early on in your career — I talk to people about careers all the time — and that experience and training, not in any way that’s overtly political, just the experience of being a part of something, working with really inspired and talented people for a common goal, working your butt off 20 hours a day and existing on — I think I used to get quadruple shot lattes to make it through the day. The bond that we created with my friends and colleagues at that time is one that still exists 15 years later. David Roberts Then you worked for Obama for quite a while, ended up in the Obama White House and OMB. Then you went to OMB, then you went to McKinsey, and then you went to this Calvert Fund. This journey has given you this respect for finance — the underappreciated role of finance. Talk a little bit just about your experiences before the GGRF. How you learned and what you came to believe about finance as a tool. Beth Bafford Yeah, my eyes were really opened to the importance of finance and credit when I was an organizer on the campaign. Something that really struck me was that no matter where I was in the country, when I went to someone’s doorstep — and we went to thousands of doorsteps, knocking on doors and talking to voters — no matter where they were in the country, urban, rural, suburban, man, woman, race, background, economic status, people all wanted the same thing. They wanted a safe place to live for themselves and their family. They wanted a community around themselves that they felt a part of. They wanted a job with dignity and respect. Many of the things that underpin those basic desires are things that are enabled or not enabled by access to the credit markets: the ability to buy a home by accessing a mortgage, the ability to buy or own a business by accessing a loan, the ability for businesses to generate and create jobs, the ability for a community to come together and build a community facility or a church or a place to gather or a health clinic. Many of those things — that basic community infrastructure — really rely on access to credit. David Roberts You worked in healthcare for most of that time, right? You were focused on healthcare. Beth Bafford I was focused on healthcare, yep. David Roberts Where finance obviously plays a huge role. Beth Bafford Absolutely. With that in mind, I went to business school after working in the White House and used those two years to explore this intersection. I knew that I had this mission in mind and wanted to help people access those basic needs. I knew that I wanted a finance and business toolkit. My mom’s a financial advisor. I’ve always been interested in the markets, and I knew that there was some area that those intersected, but didn’t know where I wanted to be. When I was in business school, I discovered this world of community finance and impact investing and got obsessed with that intersection. When I landed at Calvert Impact, it was a dream to be in a place that specializes and focuses on understanding and addressing these chronic gaps in the credit markets and works with on-the-ground partners globally to address those gaps in ways that both generate a return, but also importantly, demonstrate that these markets are investable, that these are not things that are only required to be filled by philanthropy. There is a role for the financial markets in building these sectors. W…