Transcript
Robinson Meyer (0:00)
This Week's episode of ShiftKey is brought to you by Salesforce, the number one AI CRM where humans with agents drive success together. Salesforce invests in bold climate technologies and leverages agentic AI to accelerate nature based solutions that benefit people and the planet. Heatmap Labs recently sat down with Sonia
Interviewer (Heatmap News Host) (0:16)
Norman, SVP of Impact at Salesforce.
Sonia Norman (0:19)
When we look at investments through the Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund, we're looking for that magical overlap of financial ROI business that can scale and actually meet the moment from a business model and execution perspective. But also, Impact ROI and Panoai is just a phenomenal startup. They are focused on climate disaster resilience and using AI to detect wildfires more quickly.
Robinson Meyer (0:51)
Listen to the end of this week's Shift Key to learn more about how Salesforce approaches impact and sustainability. This episode of ShiftKey is brought to you by Heatmap Pro. You already rely on Heatmap for daily reporting and commentary on the energy transition. That's why you listen to this show. Well, heatmap Pro brings all of our research, reporting and insights down to the local level. It's a software platform that tracks all local opposition to clean energy projects and data centers. It forecasts community sentiment and it guides data driven engagement campaigns. Go to heatmap News Pro to book a demo and see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement. That's heatmap News Pro. Hello. It's Wednesday, May 6, and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. In fact, both the United States and Iran claim to control the Strait, and energy traders around the world, not to mention policymakers and the general public, are trying to understand the situation. So today I want to welcome someone who's made billions of dollars understanding and monitoring situations a lot like this one. John Arnold has a good claim to be the best energy trader of all time. He began his career when he was 21 years old and working in natural gas trading at Enron. He later established Centaurus Advisors llc, a hedge fund specializing in energy in Houston. But since 2008, he and his wife Laura have led Arnold Ventures, which is one of the most interesting and I would say one of the most effective philanthropic organizations out there. They work on criminal justice reform, lowering drug prices, reining in sports betting, and for our purposes, how to build more housing, transportation and infrastructure in the United States, including how to build more electricity infrastructure. For that reason, they've been at the forefront of the permitting reform conversation. In fact, I'd say they'd help to drive it, in part because John is also a clean energy investor. He's a co founder and chairman of Grid United, which is building some of the most ambitious transmission projects in the United States. And he's an investor in the advanced geothermal company Fervo, which we talked about on a recent episode. So many of the topics, in fact, that we work on or talk about at ShiftKey come down to topics that John Arnold thinks about every day. One goal of Shift Key, in fact, I think is to step back from the news cycle from time to time and have bigger conversations with guests like John. And so today for the first episode in our new occasional big interview series, I'm talking to John Arnold about how he reads the current moment in energy, about what he learned during his recent trip to China where he went to EV factories. It was the first time he'd ever been to that country. And about what clean energy companies can and should learn from fossil fuels. I'm Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of heatmap News, and it's all coming up on Shift Key to heatmap's pipe podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels.
