Why climate funders don't fund housing policy, and why they oughtta

Why do climate funders prefer cutting checks for electric vehicles over fighting for dense, transit-oriented housing? I talk to Ben Holland, who recently interviewed major climate foundations about their anti-urbanism bias, and returning guest Caroline Spears, who is working to pass climate-friendly housing policy at the state level. We discuss why obsessing over easily quantifiable emissions reductions is blinding the movement to massive, tractable wins, and why ignoring zoning reform is no longer an option for serious climate advocates. (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts All right. Hello everyone. Greetings. This is Volts for April 8, 2026, “Why climate funders don’t fund housing policy and why they ought to.” I am your host, David Roberts. Volts listeners know that housing and urban land use have become something of an obsession of mine. Over the past few years I’ve done a series of episodes trying to build a case, not just that dense, walkable urbanism is good (which it obviously is, for a million reasons) — but that it is good climate policy. It belongs on a podcast about decarbonization, not as a nice-to-have or a co-benefit, but a core part of any serious strategy for getting emissions down. I talked with experts at RMI about the quantitative case — why meeting our climate goals requires not just electrifying the vehicle fleet but actually reducing how much people drive. I talked with Matthew Lewis of California YIMBY about the increasing political salience of housing and the lack of understanding in the climate movement. I talked with YIMBY activists about how the movement is racking up wins from New York to Texas and learning from itself across geographies. And I talked with Montana state senators about what bipartisan legislative success actually looks like from the inside. At least from my perspective, the empirical case has been made, the political case has been made, and there’s a growing track record of legislative success. And yet climate funders still largely seem to be sitting this one out. Today I want to understand why — and what it would take to change it. My guests are Ben Holland of WRI’s New Urban Mobility Alliance, who has been spending the last several months interviewing climate funders about exactly this question, and (serial Volts guest) Caroline Spears of Climate Cabinet, who just released a major housing-climate policy platform and works with state legislators on this stuff. He is going to talk about what they are thinking, and she is going to talk about what they ought to be doing. With no further ado: Ben Holland and Caroline Spears, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Ben Holland Thanks for having us. David Roberts Ben, let’s start with you. You have been working on urbanism-related issues in the climate world for several years now. Now you’re at WRI. Before that you were at RMI. I would like to hear about your experiences and specifically how did you find the reception of this work upstairs, up the ladder, at the boss level, let’s say. Ben Holland The story I like to tell as far as how I got converted to urbanism goes back to 2017, 2018. I was living in Austin, Texas for a project that the RMI Mobility Team was running down there. It was a direct partnership with the city of Austin and local stakeholders where, like a lot of NGOs in the space at the time, we were trying to advance electric autonomous shared mobility services and really the shiny object of those things — we were very much caught up in all of that. I was the on-the-ground government affairs person for that project and moved to Austin for that work. Over the course of a couple years there, I became well connected with the urbanism groups there and would find ourselves in conversations about, “What are you doing with regard to urban sprawl? If you think the future is autonomous vehicles, for instance, what is that going to do to vehicle miles traveled? People living farther away from core destinations?” We didn’t have a great answer for it at the time. We would have been, “These will be electric.” David Roberts “Did you see how shiny it is?” Ben Holland Yeah. It was in my time there where I came to understand the flaws of just that vision and the real need for better housing policy as well as tried and true transportation planning policy. I came back to Colorado, continued working for RMI, and started to build up what we called a climate-aligned urbanism team. Your former guests, Rushad Nanavatty and Heather House, were two of my colleagues at the time, as were Zach Subin and Jackie Lombardi. The work we were trying to do came from this acknowledgment that there needed to be better data on the actual impacts and benefits of land use reform. It was vibes-based, in my opinion. Everybody intuitively understands compact, connected communities are good. Some people have read the David Owen book “Green Metropolis,” intuitively understanding that these urban centers are, on a per capita basis, lower emissions. But that was about the extent of it. We started to try to put some real analysis together that I think you talked about on that previous podcast with Rashad and Heather. I’ll say bluntly, and I’ll take transportation as an example: even under the most wildly optimistic electric vehicle adoption scenarios, we are not going to be able to meet our climate goals without addressing the demand side — essentially reducing vehicle miles traveled. Within that goal of reducing vehicle miles traveled, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, levers is improving the way that we build and where we build and improving our land use. Over time, we started stacking up all these different analyses and putting together these beautiful decks. I think you saw one of the presentations at Climate Week back in September with our event with Gehl Architects, and we finally have the data. We’re showing you the real potential of reducing emissions through land use. Over the past few years, not just in my recent conversations with climate funders, but over the past few years, I’ve heard a number of universally held beliefs or skepticisms around the viability of land use reform or even mode shift on the transportation side of things as a fundable strategy. David Roberts What shocked me is that after that presentation, after all this extraordinary empirical work that RMI did, which I thought was quite impressive and made the case in pretty clear terms, even RMI decided not to expand its urbanism work. Ben Holland We’ve also seen a major shift in politics and where funding is going right now. A lot of funding has moved to more international interests given the current political climate. I can get into why that is understandable from their perspective, but it is also much needed to have even a state focus here in the States. David Roberts You say it’s understandable. Maybe we can address it later. But I don’t understand it at all. The fascists showed up and our response is, “All right, we’re out. Later. We’re gonna go spend overseas. We’ll be back when the fascism’s gone.” What are you guys for? Sorry, I’m yelling. Caroline, go ahead. Caroline Spears I think it’s an impulse to. Sometimes people collapse U.S. policy discussions into just Washington, D.C. and forget that we have 50 other rulemaking bodies here where we can make progress. The “no DC, go international first” impulse collapses a lot of it — oversimplifies a policy discussion. We have states and they have budgetary power. I had a lot of those conversations after, which was really folks asking questions “like that” and reminding people that we have states and their state budgets spend trillions of dollars a year and we have a lot of opportunity. David Roberts Is part of it — I don’t want to get too deep into this now — but is part of it like when you said, Ben, that most of the urbanism work before you started digging into it with RMI was mostly vibes-based? I get that. I think it’s worth saying als…