Billions to Trillions: Bringing Climate Leaders to the Table

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Tackling this crisis requires more than just technological innovation; it demands a radical transformation of social norms, market structures, and financial systems. Because individual countries alone must spend trillions of dollars to reach their environmental goals, lasting global climate change solutions will depend on the investment of public and private capital.

For decades, Duke has been a leader in climate finance, advancing research that links policy innovations with financial capital to accelerate climate solutions. The university’s interdisciplinary approach, which integrates research across fields such as economics, law, engineering, and environmental sciences, brings together scholars, policymakers, industry leaders, and nonprofits to influence how capital flows to climate solutions.

“We’re not just an impartial mediator,” says Jackson Ewing, director of energy and climate policy at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. “We also have real knowledge of the sector, so we can facilitate sophisticated dialogues.”

Duke’s premier summit to convene climate finance leaders, “From Billions to Trillions,” brings together leaders across numerous sectors to discuss the changing landscape of climate finance. In April 2025, more than 500 participants attended the second annual summit to unpack challenges and explore potential solutions in conversations with Duke faculty.

The summit was a collaboration of the Nicholas Institute, Fuqua School of Business, Sanford School of Public Policy, and Nicholas School of the Environment. The event was designed to make the most of Duke’s academic assets and convening power to accelerate climate solutions, in alignment with the Duke Climate Commitment.

One resonant message was that the global energy transition must balance a core set of values: sustainability, affordability, reliability, and security. “Fundamentally, the best strategy for climate resilience is inclusive growth and development,” said Alix Peterson Zwane, director of research and engagement strategy at the Nicholas Institute. “The challenge we face is not one in which we lower our ambitions around growth, but one in which we accommodate new ways of achieving those growth rates relative to what we’ve done in the past.”

Speakers broadly agreed that money exists for these efforts, with challenges centering on how to incentivize investors to spend it on low-carbon development solutions. While sharing their own innovative investment strategies and technologies, speakers called for new forms of capital and partnerships with the public sector and philanthropy to scale up energy and climate solutions.

Rising energy demand in the United States creates challenges and opportunities. Data centers that power artificial intelligence—as well as the electrification of transportation and other economic sectors—are driving the spike in demand. Benjamin Schwartz, managing head of infrastructure partnerships and policy at OpenAI, framed energy supply as a matter of global competitiveness in the race to lead on AI. As other speakers pointed out, that presents a dual challenge of meeting current and future demand while transitioning to cleaner energy.

Several tech companies have floated the idea of building their own power generation for data centers, although that plan is not as efficient as connecting to the power grid, said Jeff Bladen, head of energy at Verrus. Bladen made the case that “we need to best use the grid we have while building the grid we need,” citing a recent analysis on grid flexibility from the Nicholas Institute.

Opportunities for bipartisan consensus on energy still exist. Many current White House policies presented to meet rising energy demand would also support clean energy solutions.

“Energy is a very pragmatic thing,” said David Crane, who served as undersecretary for infrastructure at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Biden administration. “Permitting reform, transmission, nuclear—there’s a lot that [Democrats and Republicans] could agree on if they want to, so there is hope for collaboration.”

Reform of federal permitting and the National Environmental Policy Act is essential to speeding the energy transition and bringing power online more quickly. Few ideas came up more frequently across the spectrum of speakers. Whether a company wants to build a natural gas pipeline or transmission lines to connect a solar farm to the grid, the federal approval process currently stretches on for multiple years.

Permitting reform came close to reality in the last Congress and has drawn broad support from clean energy advocates, as well as the oil and gas industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While reform could lead to some additional fossil fuel production, an estimated 80–90 percent of projects waiting to connect to the grid are renewable energy.

“The direction of travel and economics of clean energy is much better than the direction of travel and economics of fossil fuels right now,” said Nat Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “So if you make it much easier to build all energy infrastructure, I’m willing to make the bet that that’s mostly going to yield more clean energy.”