As a financial analyst for a solar developer, Caroline Spears saw firsthand how state policies could make, or break, clean energy projects. Local elections are often under-appreciated, but can have “real consequences on people’s ability to live with clean air and clean water and low electricity bills and affordable transit options,” she says. That’s especially true with a climate-hostile administration in the White House.
Spears now leads Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that works to identify and elect “climate champions” to state, city, utility commission, and other local government positions across the US. Spears calls the strategy “Moneyball meets climate policy,” after the data analytics strategy used by former Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane to identify undervalued talent and transform the team. Instead of calculating on-base percentage, Climate Cabinet uses data science and AI to find opportunities for the most climate impact at the local level.
Climate Cabinet uses data science and AI to find opportunities for the most climate impact at the local level. Spears calls it “Moneyball meets climate,” after the data analytics strategy used by former Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane to identify undervalued talent and transform the team. Instead of calculating on-base percentage, Climate Cabinet uses data science and AI to find opportunities for the most climate impact at the local level.
Since 2018, Climate Cabinet has supported more than 500 candidates. It is nonpartisan, as are many of the races it endorses. Voting records and windows of pro-climate opportunity, not politics, guide the organization’s decision making, it says.
While 2025 is an off-election year for federal and most state elections, dozens of mayoral and other local government contests are taking place. The San Francisco-based nonprofit, which operates as both a PAC and a Super PAC, has backed a slate of candidates in local elections being decided this week, including Susan Crawford in the hotly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Crawford won, and Climate Cabinet “high priority” candidates for Naperville, Ill. city council were ahead at press time.
The A’s may be off to a so-so start this season (maybe they need a torpedo bat?), but Climate Cabinet has seen success rates as high as 75%. ImpactAlpha spoke with Spears about the organization’s data analytics strategy and the elevated importance of state and local policy with federal climate action now under siege.
ImpactAlpha: Why Moneyball?
Caroline Spears: We know that the presidency is important, we’re seeing that every day. We know that the Senate and House are important. But there are 500,000 more people that hold elective office in the US and those elections have real consequences on people’s ability to live with clean air and clean water and low electricity bills and affordable transit options. At Climate Cabinet we look through all of those folks, using a combination of data science and on-the-ground knowledge, to sort through that number at a fast rate and find folks who are great people running to represent their communities, who are running for clean air, clean water and clean energy jobs across the country.
Politics has good predictability over a wide set of numbers and bad predictability over a small set of numbers. So we support a bunch of climate candidates, to help make sure that we deliver on all candidates as a group. In 2022, we had a really high win rate of 75%, it was very exciting. In 2024, a year where the polling kind of went the other way, we still ended up with an over 50% win rate – 87 winning candidates.
ImpactAlpha: Since January 20, we’ve seen an all-out assault on federal policy that supports climate tech. So now more than ever, we need to focus locally. Has this changed your strategy at all?
Spears: Not really. We have always believed that state and local action is the path towards achieving our climate goals, and I know this personally. During Trump I – I know this one’s crazier, but we have had one before, so we can kind of look back to that time – I was working at a solar company in solar project finance, and our company built over 60 projects in the state of Massachusetts – and none in the state of Arizona. You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know that one of those places is really hot, probably really good for solar. So I looked into why, to this day, does Arizona have fewer solar jobs? It’s because of state policy.
States can create or destroy entire clean energy markets, that is within their power. Transportation is often the largest source of pollution, and most states and local jurisdictions have enormous power over whether somebody, for example, needs to buy a $20,000 car to go to work. Is that your ticket into the modern economy? Or can you get to work in multiple ways?
ImpactAlpha: How did you come to found Climate Cabinet, without a background in politics or lobbying?
Spears: As I mentioned, I was working in solar project finance, and there were a few pieces of both legislation and political efforts that really impacted our ability to build solar. There was a negative bill in North Carolina, and it decimated the solar market there.
As a financial analyst, people would call me and tell me about their projects and then say, hey, the Montana Public Service Commission is considering this new rulemaking and here’s how it changes some of these model inputs. Can you throw those in and see the outcome? I did that, and I was like, wow, it sinks every single one of our projects in the state of Montana. The commission did pass those rules, and a commissioner literally said on hot mic, “Well, this will kill all the solar in the state.” Sometimes people are pretty blatant.
So I started, kind of on my own time, researching the people behind that decision. Who are these people? Why are they making bad business decisions? How did they get there? I thought, how do we get someone else who’s going to be more interested in growing the clean energy economy?
ImpactAlpha: So how do you determine climate champions?
Spears: We care about votes, not vibes. Politicians say a lot of stuff on TV or maybe on Twitter, but we look at voting record. That’s what we come back to every time. How have you voted to build the clean energy economy? How have you voted to reduce air pollution, reduce greenhouse gas pollution, solve climate change?
We’re also looking at the climate impact of their offices and the political viability. So we ask, “can you win?” And if you win this race, what can you do? What is the power of this office? What can that office do to solve the climate crisis?
So we rank candidates on two axes, which are climate impact and winnability. If they’ve held elected office before, we can use our data science team to pull their track record of how they’ve done and their opponent’s track record of how they’ve done.
ImpactAlpha: Who’s a good example?
Spears: Okay, there’s state rep Michael Feggans in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He’s an Air Force veteran who loves cars, actually built an electric vehicle. His was the district that flipped the Virginia House of Delegates in 2019. He has a great track record. He’s been in office in Virginia in those years where we haven’t had a governor who’s been at all interested in climate bills. Michael has helped the state legislature hold the line on a bunch of terrible bills that got filed, trying to force Virginia to stop counting greenhouse gas emissions. We need to get him a governor who will sign his ideas into law. He did help get one bill through, a bill that said before the government procures a vehicle, they should look at the lifetime cost of that vehicle and see how much the taxpayers are going to pay. And guess what vehicle (gas-powered or electric) is cheaper?
Impact Alpha: What about recruiting people who don’t have a voting track record – haven’t held elective office – Moneyball digging even deeper?
Spears: If someone hasn’t run for office before, we simply say, What have you already done? Maybe you volunteered on your city’s convection (electric stoves) task force. Maybe you were instrumental in making sure you had more tree canopy in your area of the city that didn’t have a lot of trees. What have you done before you got to this point with the power that you had at that point?
In Columbia, Missouri, we helped support an incredible Climate Champion, Mayor Barbara Buffaloe in her first election campaign in 2022, which she won by 800 votes. The city controls its own electric grid, and she signed clean energy contracts that are overwhelmingly supported by the people in Columbia. She made building electrification easier, which is so hard to do, so we really need everyone on deck to make that piece of it easier. Now she chairs the National Conference of Mayors’ sustainability working group. So you elect one mayor in this one town, and you’ve got clean energy, you’ve got building electrification, and now she’s in a spot where she’s actually advising other mayors. That’s the type of person, the type of leadership we support. And it’s our job is to help them stay there and help them continue to make great decisions.
Impact Alpha: OK, let’s zoom back out to the big picture. How are you viewing the next four years? What’s your message to investors in the climate tech sector?
Spears: We are going to decarbonize the global economy. That is going to happen. Not because we wish it, but because when you look at solar, batteries, EVs – the cost curve declines are undeniable. So in that context – let’s think again about Moneyball – under-the-radar opportunities can have a huge impact. States can be globally important. They can look to each other, they can look to Virginia for how to decarbonize their electricity grid. We have a lot of leadership.
We are going to get there. It’s just a matter of how fast we can do it to solve climate change. And that’s the thing that keeps me up at night – how can we take every opportunity that we have? And how do we get climate action at every opportunity that we have, and l do it in a way that makes people lives better? Finding those opportunities – that’s what I do every day.
