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Douglass Sims steers money and political will toward green projects.
getting to yes A seasoned deal maker helps governments and institutions find the profitability in sustainability
Heather Greer
A
by kristen french
s a teenager in the 1970s, Douglass
Sims watched closely as his father, an executive at Johnson & Johnson, worked to make medicine and health-care products more widely available in Africa. Later, after getting a philosophy degree and a law degree, Sims went to work for a British law firm, where he oversaw the financing of infrastructure and energy projects in Africa and Latin America. His life experience and education had equipped him to understand, better than many, the complex ways in which planetary, social, and individual health are interrelated—and the work he was doing certainly seemed tailor-made for a young, socially engaged attorney. But as he scoured one environmental disclosure statement after
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another, Sims began to grow hydro and wind—could yield commore and more uneasy. Many of parable amounts of energy while the projects he was facilitating, having far less impact on Chile’s the data clearly showed, were natural treasures than megacontaminating the water, air, and projects like HidroAysén or a proearth in ways that would only end posed series of new coal mines. The conventional wisdom in up further impoverishing the lives of the very people he was trying Chile had long held that such alternatives were too expensive. to help. “I had been focused on asking, “We showed that they weren’t,” ‘How do you increase people’s in- Sims says, “and it blew everycomes?’” Sims says. “But I began body’s mind.” The same impulse to marshal to see that there are different kinds of poverty, including the quality-of- innovation for the betterment of life poverty that comes from not people’s lives and environments led Sims to take on a project living in a healthy environment.” Determined to approach the back home in New York. He has issue holistically, Sims joined played an important role in the NRDC in 2010 as a senior finance creation of the New York Green specialist for energy projects. To- Bank, a state-managed financial day he works in the organization’s institution dedicated to increasinternational program and its ing investment in clean-energy Center for Market Innovation technologies. Scheduled to open (CMI), which aims to redirect for business in 2014, the bank will capital toward sustainable busi- be staffed by clean-energy investnesses. Now he draws from that ment experts. With his former same well of experience and ex- CMI colleague Greg Hale, Sims pertise to find new ways of making presented the idea to Governor clean energy affordable—and, yes, Andrew Cuomo’s staff in 2012, profitable—in both the develop- and over the course of the year provided input and ing and the develVisit switchboard.nrdc.org/ advice that influoped worlds. blogs/dsims for more on global enced the goverMuch of what green-energy infrastructure nor’s decision to Sims does at CMI takes the form of demonstrating to endorse the project—and, ultigovernments and investors that mately, to commit $1 billion of sustainable investments are both seed capital to make it a reality. Sims hopes that the New York environmentally sound and economically wise. In Chile, he has Green Bank will become a model promoted cost-effective renewable for other banks in other states. If alternatives to HidroAysén, the it does, it will serve to reinforce hydroelectric dam megaproject his abiding belief that social, that, if completed, could cause ir- economic, and environmental reversible environmental damage progress are structurally conand disrupt local communities. nected—and that success needn’t With NRDC colleague Amanda be viewed as a zero-sum game in Maxwell, Sims has shown how which one can win only if somea low-impact portfolio of energy body else is losing. “It’s about making everybody efficiency and renewable-energy technologies—such as solar, prosper,” he says, “by making the biomass, geothermal, and small pie bigger.”
winter 2013/2014
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