Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy Summer Fellow Spotlight: Trisha Gupta, Heatmap News

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment's Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy Fellowship matches 11 undergraduate and graduate students with non-profit, startup, and governmental organizations committed to energy equity and the deployment of clean energy. The program provides summer research and internship opportunities to students at Yale who are committed to advancing energy equity and pursuing a career in the clean energy field. 

The Forum had the pleasure of speaking with Trisha Gupta, a second year Masters of Public Policy candidate at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. She is currently interning with Heatmap News, helping track renewable energy developments and their reception across the U.S. She also works on investigative journalism stories focused on environmental justice issues for the organization. Gupta is passionate about using data journalism to better address the inequalities that arise from economic development, especially as they relate to public health and environmental justice.

How did you learn about the Planetary Solutions Fellowship? 

I heard of the fellowship through CBEY. I actually started working with CBEY in my spring semester, but I didn't know about this fellowship explicitly. I reached out to Randy Siegel, Co-Founder of Heatmap, as he was a mentor through CBEY last year, and he said, "I really like your background. We'll see if we can set something up through Yale." 

He reached out to the CBEY team on the backend and got me to be considered for the fellowship. I had no idea it existed beforehand.

Did you know about Heatmap News before connecting with Randy? What made you interested in joining the organization? 

I have been a Heatmap reader for a while now. But it was actually the other intern with Heatmap (also a Yale student) who put me onto the fact that they were working with Randy. 

I knew I wanted to go into journalism and I really wanted to write, so I reached out. Honestly, I had no expectations regarding a summer internship. But Randy was really generous to look at my profile and say he thought I would be a good fit. Originally though, I was just reaching out to see how he got into journalism and what his recommendations were. He was an invaluable resource, for sure, and just getting his contact was great.

What draws you to investigative journalism, specifically on the climate side? Could you break down those two different avenues?

Before going back to school, I used to work in management consulting, and to me the workflow seemed similar to that of journalism. For example, you have this rush of a new project. I like to be working on something different throughout the year—I don't think I could do one project for a really extended amount of time. I enjoyed consulting that you get to learn about a lot of different topics, and there's a common skill set: you have to figure out what to do and what the right path is on your own. There's not one prescribed way of doing things to get to the answer. Sometimes it's coding, sometimes it's satellite imagery, sometimes it's looking at documents and cultivating sources. The variety of it is really appealing to me.

But above all I love to write. Reading the news is how I form my opinions, and I see journalism as an incredibly influential way to form other people's opinions. I hesitate to use the term “thought leader” but I think it can be true. Journalists influence what policymakers are reading. 

It really solidified for me when I spent a day on Capitol Hill and asked people there how they get their information. A lot of what these staffers and representatives read is the news, and through it, I figured you can have real influence.

On the climate side, I've always been really interested in accountability. 

So much of the climate story is how corporations run amok, rich billionaires ignoring the rules. It's a history of exploitation. I think part of the solution to the climate crisis, and to environmental degradation, is more accountability and transparency, with the hope that someday someone will be able to bring a lawsuit or do something about it. 

But at least shining a light and writing about these issues is one of the most important ways to combat the climate crisis. People have to be informed to act, and that’s what I’m drawn to about the issue. 

Was there anything in your past that pushed you in this direction? What made accountability and awareness central to your way of making a difference? 

I grew up in Houston, near a place called Cancer Alley—there are tons of factories and industrial pollutants causing cancer there. The environmental justice aspect of it is something I've been really aware of since I became politically active, since I started reading the news, even in middle school and high school. 

What stuck with me was seeing local, grassroots activism, and how nonprofits that did a lot of work in that space could bring attention to the issue.

I was in high school from 2015 to 2019, so social media as a tool of political activism—with the Trump campaign and everything—was really taking off. Seeing people use social media to bring different environmental justice issues in Houston to light was really formative for me, and they continue to be. Houston is just a hotbed of direct pollution, local health impacts, and environmental justice issues that all relate to this.

How do you feel working at Heatmap fits into this trajectory of yours? As for what you're doing at Heatmap, what projects are you interested in, and what are you hoping to push forward?

What I'm working on right now is different from what I thought I’d be spending the rest of my internship doing. I've been doing a lot of permitting research creating databases with county-level moratoriums, which has been really interesting. I enjoy getting to engage with local media to see what's happening. 

It's affected my perspective a lot, especially around local opposition and the different natures of it in the clean energy versus data center contexts. There seems to be similar pushback against both, but data center developers have a kind of power that clean energy developers don't, which is an interesting thread to draw on.

At Heatmap, I've really been able to engage with people who are doing this kind of work, and it's been really interesting to sit in on editorial meetings and learn about all the questions there are to tackle. The team is simply awesome. Charlie, another younger employee, has been a really invaluable resource, and his journey as an intern and doing the writing has been inspiring. I also love working with data, so getting to work in SQL and freshen up on my coding a little bit has been great. 

Overall, I hope that while I'm at Heatmap I'll be able to write a little bit, sit in on more of the editorial meetings, and get a sense—which I'm starting to from the work—of where things are headed.

I hope to work on a project that combines and quantifies the effects of permitting and local opposition on certain kinds of development. I want to be part of where the pulse is in terms of how things are developing in the clean energy space.

If you could craft the perfect next steps for you—the projects you really want to explore—I'm curious what those would be, related to Heatmap or otherwise.

At Heatmap and throughout the next fall semester, I really just want to write and get a sense of which of my pitches are newsworthy in the eyes of someone, like Randy, at Heatmap. I also hope to explore more what I enjoy writing about and what the research process is going to look like. 

My ideal next projects are really just working on some short-form pieces and getting a sense of what works, what doesn't, and what's appropriate—having the eyes of an actual editor on my pieces and just writing myself into the work.

What would you recommend to your younger self, or to a peer in your same position? 

I think from school, and especially in consulting, there's such a funnel. There are these certain universities where the path is mapped out for you. I did my undergrad at Rice, and for example, almost everyone does this path of engineering, and then they move to something less restrictive, but regardless they end up in consulting. Maybe that's inevitable for young people who don't know what they want to do. You're told consulting is the best way to get exposure, that you'll figure it out and make money if you want to go to grad school. That was my perspective. 

But a lot of people get locked into a career they're not passionate about and don't believe in. You're making money and you're at a stable point in life, so there's no reason to deviate. And then you're just convincing yourself, "You know, it's work, but I get to enjoy the weekends."

I think people should just take a leap of faith and take the risk of doing work that they actually believe in. Life is so much better now that I'm doing work and learning about things I actually care about—things that actually make an impact, where I can see the results of my work. 

I still have enough to survive, enough to have fun, enough to live my life outside of that as well. When you're in consulting, the only worlds you can see are business and these cushy strategy roles, but the work of consulting really translates to anything else. For example, I spent a fellowship on the Hill last summer, and the same skills apply there. I think the same skills apply in journalism, too. 

So anyone in consulting should really expand their mindset and take the risk, because you can always go back if it doesn't work for you. It's worth doing something meaningful.