John Elkington is most comfortable when he is least comfortable, most engaged when he is making it up as he goes along. A pioneer in working with businesses toward sustainable development, John has been a proponent of the triple bottom line for 40-plus years, making both his corporate clients and other environmentalists uncomfortable and earning a reputation as the ‘grit in the corporate oyster.’
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospec. Hey, Nori Knots. Welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. We are all here in London. This is Ross speaking here with Christophe and Paul. As usual, we’ve had a lovely time in Europe. The trip is coming to an end now. We’ve had great meetings, went to a conference, been bouncing around London a lot. That’s been our primary hub. Been pretty great, huh, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, it’s been lovely, as they say here in this country. Brilliant, I’ve heard. There’s no doubt this will be a punctuation on the trip. No pressure, John. Here we are sitting in the Volans office across from John Elkington, who is the chief pollinator at Volans. And John, we like to start our podcast off really with the origin story and understanding your motivations. So... Keep in mind, you’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, so we’re going to talk about that. But how did you get going? What kind of motivated you to go in the direction you did?
And how did it all start?
John Elkington: It’s a complex story, but I mean, wonderful to see all three of you. And thanks for doing this, whatever it’s going to prove to We’re going to grill you so badly. Get ready. I like kalumi, and that’s nicely grilled as well. But as a child, we moved frequently. We lived in places like Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Israel. In Northern Ireland, we lived on a farm. One night, I went out on my own every Tuesday. I think I used to go and have supper with a farm laborer and his family. And I was coming back that night on my own in the dark through a series of flax ponds.
And I suddenly found myself in the complete dark, no moon, Surrounded by things that were wriggling every which way. Tens of thousands of them, literally. And they turned out to be baby eels, Elvis. I put my fingers down, you know, to see what the hell this was. And they were going all every which way through my fingers. And I had one of these sort of extraordinary moments where you suddenly feel shock, but an incredible sense of connection. And to the question, you know, what the hell drives me? That was part of it.
Eels is the answer. Eels is the answer. Eel driven. And then when I was 11, sent away to school, I suddenly found myself acutely shy, but standing up in front of all of the other boys and asking for their pocket money. This was 1961, for their pocket money for two weeks, so their personal allowance, whatever we call it, and getting it. And this was for the World Wildlife Fund in their first year. So I can track the roots of all of this back quite a long way, but it was really in the late 60s that I suddenly became...
An environmentalist formerly. And we were talking earlier on about parents and so on. My parents hadn’t a clue what to do with all of that. And about 20 years later, they would say, now we get it. Now we understand why you’re doing and support it. So there’s never been a very clear roadmap to follow. I’ve never had a career path to speak of. That’s sort of where it started. You just figure it out and then improvise and eventually you become a chief pollinator.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
John Elkington: Well, I was in a Wallace space, which is a sort of incubator, sort of function space somewhere in London a few weeks back. And there was a wonderful picture on the wall of painting of a man just throwing himself And I’ve always liked Kurt Vonnegut’s notion that you just got to keep throwing yourself off cliffs and hope you develop wings on the way down. And the story of my life has very often been one very much like that, of being most comfortable when least comfortable and being most engaged when I’m having to make it up as I go along.
I’m not just cranking a handle, not always knowing what I’m meant to be doing, not being an expert in that way.
Ross Kenyon: Do you find that you’re often trying to pull people out of their ruts or they get path dependent, they think about things a certain way and you like to nudge them a little bit? Would you say that describes you?
John Elkington: Well, it does. But in a way, about 40 years ago, I started to work with business at a time when most environmentalists didn’t. And in fact, about 10 years later, a Greenpeace director told me that’s not the way to go. The only way to deal with business is to pin them down. A bit like Gulliver, lots of sort of ropes and They’re the Lilliputians then. Exactly. But my sense was until you really engage these people, understand them, and then start tapping into their innate creativity and so on, you’re going to get nowhere.
You’re just going to get defensive blocking behaviors. So to your question about ruts, Absolutely. I mean, people I have largely worked with within business have been in very large companies. So the ruts are very deep and have been sort of created over immense periods of time. Somebody once described me as the grit and the corporate oyster, and I quite like that sort of term. But, you know, you’re an irritant. If they can spit you out, they will. I don’t cling on by my fingernails or whatever the oyster equivalent of that might be.
But if I do stay in, then sometimes weird, slightly unpredictable forms of value can be created in the process.
Christophe Jospe: But we’re all in our ruts. So you called yourself an environmentalist. We consider ourselves environmentalists as well. But environmentalism, of course, is not a monolithic term. No. You kind of point to Greenpeace getting frustrated at how you talk to business, you know, heresy. Help us understand the nuances around environmentalism and the different ways that one can even be an environmentalist and what that even means. Yeah. We’re all in this together, right? Ostensibly, everyone wants to live in a planet that is sustainable, but there’s certain ways of going about it. And how does it all kind of piece together?
You’d think we’re all in it together.
John Elkington: And I think very often there have been, it’s almost like the early years of I was a pretty standard environmentalist to start with. I love wildlife, and that’s what brought me into it. But I never really worked with an NGO. I’ve worked on the boards or councils of many NGOs, but I don’t formally work inside one, and certainly not a campaigning one. But I’ve always loved what the campaigners and activists do. I’ve always said that in the work that we do with business, if we ever come to the point where there’s a crunch between our client And the wider world of NGOs and so on, we always side with the NGOs.
We do that not because they’re automatically and inevitably right. It’s because just the sort of lead indicators of where all of this is going to go. I’ve worked with a whole series of different generations of environmentalists. So I set up a company in 1978 called Environmental Data Services with one of the founders of World Wildlife Fund. When I started working with him, he was late 70s, early 80s in age. And he loathed Friends of the Earth. He loathed Greenpeace. And he came from a world where it was all about wildlife.
And in this country, we’d say it’s about the people who were involved in hunting, shooting, and fishing. I mean, these were fairly wealthy, well-off people. Like fox hunters cruising around on the horses and very nice dogs. That sort of thing as well. But they were the people who were making the switch from hunting elephants in Africa to wanting to conserve They would have been preservationists and then conservationists. And then we had these strange environmentalists coming along and they had a political agenda and the establishment people didn’t like that very much.
So part of my role was bridging between the older folk and the sort of, to put it broadly, the younger folk. And in some cases, people did make the transition and quite willingly, but they were all Of a different mind as to whether business was a key part of this or not. And paradoxically, some of the older people, they’d worked in business. They had their pensions invested in business. They could see the role for working with companies and so on through markets. The younger people didn’t. They were against everything. I mean, they were anti-growth and they were anti-profit and they were anti-business and so on.
And I think that was... The case for about 20 years through the 60s and 70s, early 80s. And then we saw something else happening. We saw the sort of green movement, particularly in Europe, evolving. And these people thought about this again, differently again. They came at it from the angle that We probably did need to have growth. Economics wasn’t complete betrayal of human intelligence, but that we needed to change things quite profoundly. That environmentalism’s mainstream was sort of evolving. And then along came something really quite different again. And if I was unpopular when I started to work with business, I was even more unpopular in some ways when I started to talk about, well, it’s great to have all of this green...
And I did books called The Green Capitalist and The Green Consumer Guide and so on. But actually, this is bigger than green, as most people understand it. It’s bigger than environment. It’s got to be about what I called a triple bottom line in 1994. And I had one person who just joined Sustainability, the organization I co-founded in 1987. And he said, I joined an environmental organization. And here you’re suddenly talking about economic, social, environmental impacts and value added and so on. That’s not what I want to be part of. Well, he’s still chairman of that company.
He’s a non-executive member of our board. But about 18 months afterwards, Shell came to us and said, we’re coming to you because of the triple bottom line. We want us to understand how that operates. And it was Greenpeace that had smacked Shell around the head with the Brent Spa, The oil rig dumping scandal here. And they’d had the Nigerian issue of Ken Saruwewa and his eight colleagues been executed. So it seems to be part of my role in life to conjure some sort of future which certain people, and not always our clients, find really quite uncomfortable and then live with that tension for a while that somehow resolves.
And then it just becomes the new mainstream opinion at some point. I’m always conflicted because it would be very easy to answer that question, yes. But I think what I’ve done over the years is learn how to spot a wave building and get out onto it early and then surf it for a while. Because, for example, social entrepreneurship, I, from the early part of the century, worked with a bunch of people with social entrepreneurs at a time when nobody was interested in them. And then not that many years ago, you had people like Lopescan in Canada doing surveys of who in the world is most influential and leading practice in this sort of space.
And social entrepreneurs had shot right up the top and sort of almost elbowed aside the NGOs and activists. I could claim that, but I weren’t because all I’m doing is trend spotting and then trying to give a little bit of fuel to the right sort of trend.
Ross Kenyon: And when you say social entrepreneurship, are we talking about like Muhammad Yunus and Grameen and Kiva and stuff like that?
John Elkington: Exactly. I mean, from 2001, I started to work with the World Economic Forum and Vlad Schwab, the forum founder, has his own foundation. The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Pamela Hartigan, who co-founded Valens, and I wrote a book with The Power of Unreasonable People in 2008. She was working at the Forum, but trying to bring social entrepreneurs into Davos and events like that and finding it really hard. I remember when 9-11 happened, and you may remember that the first time ever Davos, or the World Economic Forum annual event, was moved to New York in support of that city.
I think I was in seventh grade. All right. Can’t help you there, John. Well, it was a strange thing because it was a city in New York that was completely off balance, security everywhere. We were in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. We had a ballroom. We had this huge space for meet the social entrepreneurs. And, you know, Muhammad Yunus was there. You mentioned him. Klaus Schwab was there. Quincy Jones, a bunch of people. The musician, the producer? Exactly. Oh, wow. But Nobody turned up. I mean, it was just a time when obviously there was quite a distraction effect, but people just couldn’t see the relevance of what people like Muhammad Yunus was doing.
It only took about two, three years, and suddenly these people were main stage at Davos. So sometimes these things can go quite fast, but that was on the basis of about 15, 20 years of people like Yunus trying to get into the mainstream. Two to three years for Nori then? Is that what’s going on here? Well, I was thinking about this earlier on today, and I love what Nori is attempting. I think it’s absolutely fundamental to the future of the economy. But the question is, is it Nori that becomes the next Microsoft, or does the Can the idea escape from you and go elsewhere?
Can somebody else pick it up? And I don’t know. I mean, capitalism and markets and so on are pretty brutal spaces. That’s one of the reasons why I sort of keep trying to reinvent myself, because I know if I stay in one area and try and slug it out, I get a bit pulverized. So you’re just always finding that next evolutionary niche to just crawl into. Yeah, crawling is exactly the right word. But no, it’s trying to get a sense of what it is that almost the sustainability industry needs to do next.
And when I started, there was no Sustainability industry, so we were trying to invent it. But now there are tens of thousands of people around the world who work in this space. It’s trying to think, it’s great what they’re doing, but a lot of it’s incremental. How do we move it onto a different, perhaps a little bit more exponential trajectory? So it’s crawling into niches, but it’s trying to open those niches out over time.
Christophe Jospe: So on previous podcasts, we’ve actually had some flack against the word sustainability. And I think it goes into this idea of, well, there’s business as usual, which we know if we continue with business as usual, we’re on a completely unsustainable path. Is sustainability sustaining business as usual so we can continue the path that we’ve been going on and in a way kind of enable the businesses to do the same but in a more sustainable way? Or is there something beyond sustainability? Or does it even matter? Are we being too pedantic with word choices?
Ross Kenyon: Oh, Christoph, you should do the joke. I think we’ve done it before on the show. No one wants to live in a sustainable marriage. This sounds very depressing and it’s not nearly good enough.
Christophe Jospe: And in a way, Nori perhaps enables business as usual while also creating an entirely unusual business. And so I’d like to kind of put a crystal ball in your hand or if you will, but tell us, John, how does sustainability actually become? I mean, sometimes I think about corporations which want to pat themselves on the back for using 23% less product in their plastic cup. Don’t want to say any names, but Starbucks, right? They say, oh, look at this great thing we’ve done. We’re so sustainable, but not really. And so maybe it doesn’t go far enough.
Where do you kind of draw the line between something that is a greenwash and advances you as a sustainable company versus something that is truly pushing the needle? And where are we going to push the needles?
John Elkington: So you mentioned crystal balls. And last year, I came back through customs. I had a crystal ball with me, and they stopped us and pulled it out of the box and wanted to know what it was for and wondered whether it was an instrument of terrorism or whatever else. I’ve never claimed to be able to see the future, but one of the things that you can see if you study the history of change movements is there are periods where new language evolves, surfaces, and people start to play with it. And many, many years ago, maybe about 40 years ago, I remember somebody saying, and it was a linguist, that when new terms come along, they’re very sensitive, they resonate, they communicate meaning very, very clearly.
But over time, as people start to kick them around a bit like a football, The outside skin becomes more and more like a football bladder or leather casing. And in the end, they’re almost meaningless. To your question, Christophe, about sustainability, I think the concept like liberty or democracy or other things like that will be with us in a hundred years. I don’t think that the concept as an aspirational goal is ever going to go away. It doesn’t translate very well into some other languages, but let’s put that aside for the moment.
But then what happens, as you well know, is that people pick up particular terms and then they try and strap them on a bit like camouflage. They don’t always start out that way, but that’s often the way it defaults. And yesterday we had the CEO of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Andrew Morley, I think we have to be very careful that our language does not We have to be very clear about what we want to see business doing and the trajectories that we want to see particular companies or sectors following. For example, I was nine years on an advisory board within the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes from when they started.
And at that time, it was the triple bottom line being brought to investment. It was immensely exciting. And then just a few years ago, 2015, you had the Volkswagen scandal and you had Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes appointing VW as their sector leader in the transport sector two weeks before that whole emissions scandal broke. Disgraceful in one way but not surprising in another because we’re not really being as analytical as we ought to be if we were really championing systemic change. Finally, When we set up sustainability of the organization in 1987, the declared intent right from the outset was system change, not getting corporate social responsibility into a small number of companies.
It was changing economics, it was changing accounting, it was changing transparency, all of these different components of what business And I still think that is the core challenge for all of us.
Christophe Jospe: You’ve convinced us you’re one of the good guys and you haven’t sold your soul to the corporations. You work with them in order to allow them to discover the triple bottom line, which just to define quickly is... Sort of looking at people, planet, profit, all in concert and seeing that when you think about the three of those, quite often you generate a much better return. And another term used was the circular economy, which is essentially understanding all of your waste streams and minimizing those so that they’re net zero. Particularly when it comes to carbon, you can talk about the circular carbon economy where a power plant might be able to, instead of...
Actually putting that carbon into the atmosphere, find some use for it, which ultimately stores it. And actually, if you have technologies which can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce something that might go back into the atmosphere, that’s completely circular because we’re moving around and we’re not adding any net new greenhouse gases. Then I want to put the Nori philosophy on the table here, which is that the climate change problem is actually shockingly simple. There are too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We’ve blown through our budget. The United Nations is saying, Well, we want to keep the world below a 1.
5 degree Celsius limit. We don’t think that’s enough. We can’t imagine that would be okay because the climate change that we’re experiencing today is not okay and we haven’t even experienced the worst of it. So what that comes down to is stopping greenhouse gases from going into the atmosphere and removing, and we’re just going to say we’re shooting to remove 1. 5 trillion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere. Now, you said whether it’s Nori becomes the next Microsoft or someone else and someone advances this idea who really knows. Well, we don’t know, but what is abundantly clear is that there’s a need to remove.
And I would argue that the removers can motivate everyone else to do the job that they haven’t been doing yet. It kind of shocks me when I think about efficiency gains that can be made, but we’re just not doing it for one reason or another. Well, people shouldn’t be making money off of helping the environment. Don’t you agree? No. It’s immoral to do so. There are environmentalists who come after us for that. Environmentalism is a philanthropic service. And it’s not. No, it’s a need that hasn’t been properly valued. So we just want to value it.
We need systemic change. We want to be a shock to this whole system. And so I’m still going to push you on the crystal ball question because I don’t feel satisfied with your answer. We’re shocking the system. Nori works. What is the systemic response that will happen?
John Elkington: Well, two things. You talked about selling the soul. I’ve never quite known what the soul was, but one of the things that we’ve really struggled with is when money is involved and you get to work very closely inside particular companies, how do you ensure that you stay broadly true? What’s your true north or whatever? One of the ways we’ve tried to I don’t know whether we sold ourselves or not, but the way we try to correct for that is to be extremely transparent about who we’re working with, what’s working, what isn’t, and not that infrequently, either resigning projects with major companies and certainly refusing to work with certain types of companies.
On the selling of the soul side, I think it’s something we’ve all got to wrestle with. Having said which, I think capitalism is absolutely crucial in terms of dealing with the problems that we’ve got to address. I do think in terms of modernization, So I’m thinking not just physical and financial, but human and intellectual and social and natural forms of capital and others as well. And there are plenty of companies now who will talk about that, but not yet probably understand quite what that entails within their businesses. And I would love to know from you all, when you talk to mainstream businesses, What is the proposition?
What is the part of the proposition you’re making to them that at this point in time resonates most energetically? Is it where they just want to take a little peek into the future that somebody else might adopt before they might try it a little bit further down the road? Or what really sells carbon capture to the mainstream capitalist?
Ross Kenyon: We also know that when they look at the offsets that are available in the traditional markets, They’re discounting those and everyone who participates knows that a credit in the traditional market does not actually represent one ton of CO2. And so when we make our case that the Nori carbon removal certificate represents one legitimate ton of CO2 removed and we have all this data to prove it and the methodology supports that, then that’s a real significant value that’s new to them. And that’s how we hope to differentiate ourselves.
John Elkington: And what do you think the response inside the sort of the mind of a chief sustainability officer might be when they hear that message? Because in a way, that sort of calls into question a lot of what they’ve been doing and claiming in the past. And it takes a brave person then to say, we were completely wrong in what we’ve done to date. Now we’re going to do it differently. Are people prepared to make that jump?
Ross Kenyon: That’s a good question. Yeah. I haven’t seen that. I would expect more people are worried about supporting a project early on. So I think people are waiting for a first mover in some cases because people could lose their jobs if Nori went belly up.
John Elkington: Well, it’s interesting because Christophe earlier on and you... We’ll have noticed that you can ask me a question and about a decade or two later, I’ll suddenly come back to some form of answer. But the question was broadly about when the system is challenged, what happens? And we know what happens. We saw it with slavery. We saw it with the National Health Service when we were trying to create that or when people were trying to create that in this country. The system, when challenged, becomes increasingly vicious. The closer you get to the transition point, The nastier the politics become the more underhand.
And I think we’ve seen elements of that with the coal industry as the fossil fuels industry as a whole becomes increasingly challenged. And then all sorts of other forms of carbon use in our global economy. We’re going to have to be prepared for some extremely sticky and extremely brutal politics. And one of the reasons I think the environmentalists and the sustainability industry and so on really has to get its act together is that the assault is going to be, at times, pretty dramatic and existential. And we need to know who we are and what we’re doing if we’re going to be able to drive change on the scale that’s needed.
Christophe Jospe: And not be our own worst enemy. But... To answer and build upon Paul’s answer of what resonates, I mean, I do think that there’s a novelty of starting a new carbon removal marketplace. I do think that the writing is on the wall that something more has to happen beyond what’s traditionally happening. And we’re not trying to demonize anyone and we’re not necessarily in the blame and shame game. Hardly. And quite frankly, I welcome the opportunity to work with the air quote, bad guys. Because if you don’t welcome the bad guys to the table, I don’t think we’re actually going to solve the problem.
And so it’s one of the question of, okay, well, you know that you emit carbon dioxide. You know that you have this externality. You don’t pay for it today, but you want to understand how to deal with this externality and how to deal with it at a lower cost than what it would otherwise cost you to do business. So let’s pick on Shell. Shell, as we know, has a shadow price on carbon that sits somewhere between $60 and $70. And they know that as long as the cost of dealing with that externality is below them, They can still have a profitable business.
They’re sitting on a number of assets in the ground and those assets have provided the world economy with enormous wealth. And so when companies are trying to do the right thing and they want to be transparent about how they’re We’re trying to do the right thing. They can look at an instrument that Nori is building or others, and they can say, here, we’ve dealt with this. And there’s an advantage, especially when the writing is on the wall, to say, we know we haven’t done enough and we want to get ahead of the curve to understand how that works.
To talk about the experience of one of our colleagues, Alden Donnelly, she actually brought together 12 of the 19 largest emitters in Canada. Who in advance of the Kyoto Protocol realized, okay, something’s going to happen. Let’s build a new market mechanism and let’s start a new voluntary market. And so she had a consortium of emitters who were looking for carbon offset projects. And she created a system that actually transacted one of the first carbon offsets for soil carbon removal. And during that time had the largest portfolio. Hmm. Of carbon offsets in the millions of tonnes per year.
And this was completely voluntary because the companies recognized it is good for business for us to deal with our externality. Now, we’ve gone sideways in many cases. And unfortunately, now we’re in 2018. And emissions continue to rise at alarming rates. And so from our perspective, now we want to draw down carbon as fast as possible, but we don’t need to be all that large. We need to work out the mechanics to build a market mechanism. And when that market mechanism works and as it proves itself, it will then rapidly draw down even more.
And at some point, the world will say, hey, this as a whole is not OK. We realize that we’re in debt and we need to figure out how to get out of debt. And one of the things that sort of gives us a competitive advantage, not us specifically, but it’s the blockchain. Because once things are written in code, once we’ve got the various mechanics, right, of how to create carbon accounting... It may be us, it may be someone else, but, and it may be both of us. It may be all of us.
We’re all kind of in it together. And so I think the buyers in a way in our system, traditional buyers, there are companies, maybe they’re even listening to this podcast right now who say, okay, I’m not going to be the first in line, but I’m going to wait and see. I want to see how all this works. We have the advantage of being transparent about how all that goes and what that looks like. I wanted to ask questions, not give so many responses.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that was a lot there. I like the general theme, though, that you want to invite people in. And that’s what you seem to be one of your greatest strengths, John, is being able to talk to people, not as if they’re your finger wagging and shaming them, but you’re saying, come join me and we can do this great thing together. And also we’re creating value in the process. It isn’t purely punitive. And that’s what people associate with environmentalism.
John Elkington: And sometimes it drives them away almost. But it’s not either or, Ross. I mean, the naming a shaming game is a dangerous one to play. And we don’t do that either. But if you know that people are disrupting the government’s responses to these sorts of issues, I think we all have a duty to call it out. An example was quite a number of years ago, I was in Stavanger talking about climate change. And I was talking in particular about ExxonMobil and particular about their lobbying to undermine confidence in science and who should walk into the back of the room but Rex Tillerson, then the CEO of ExxonMobil with his entourage.
And over the heads of 300 fossil fuel people, he roared, that’s a goddamn lie. And we then had this exchange across the audience back and forth. I was right, he was wrong. It became much clearer over time where fault lay there. But in Norrie’s case, it’s absolutely appropriate that you do not name and shame. But I think as a movement, as an industry or whatever, we have to call out Bad behavior. And so I agree that we’ve got to be balanced and civilized and so on. But part of what we do is provocation.
And even when we’re inside a board or a C-suite environment, we’re not the easy voices always. We’re trying to call out what really is problematic with that company, its industry, its markets with capitalism and push people in a Do you think there’s a way to distinguish between bad behavior and bad people?
Ross Kenyon: Because I think that sometimes those two things get conflated when people feel personally attacked, they’re unwilling to have an open discussion or change their mind about anything.
John Elkington: I think it’s very sensible to distinguish between bad behavior and bad people. And sometimes it’s extremely hard to distinguish between the two. But what we’ve created in capitalism and the incentive structures that we’ve adopted means that very often people do things that when they stand aside or they look back in time, they’re ashamed. We’re not sort of corporate therapists, but we’re basically saying to people, you know, we’re all trapped in a system which is unsustainable, which is doing violence to the planet and to people. It’s a lot better than it once would have been.
But just wake up, pay attention, talk to people who see this differently. It’s odd how often that process transforms people, but it sometimes transforms people to the point they can no longer stay with their organization. They move on to something else that’s a risk that we take.
Ross Kenyon: I guess I would reframe my question as being, it shouldn’t be the only arrow in the quiver, you could say. We get the impression that’s the only one that environmentalists have, and its power is almost diminished by being the only one that seems to be used. Totally. Yeah.
John Elkington: I think we’ve got to be better at economics than I think we’ve got to be better at science or at least as good in science as most scientists. I think we’ve got to master a bunch of different disciplines that feed into capitalism as she’s currently practiced. If we’re really going to move the needle on this, we can’t simply sort of bang on doors or wave placards. Not that’s what most of us do. It can help on occasion.
Christophe Jospe: Or even throw cheap shots at each other. Oh, I love cheap shots. No, you’re right, Christoph. To give an example, last night, Vallons was very gracious to let us use the space next door. And we gave a presentation around Nori and what we’re doing. And inevitably, we start talking about the different methodologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And we had what one might call a direct air capture purist talking about the dangers of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. And while he might be right when we’re talking about bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which is where You take biomass, you find fast growing trees and you pulverize them and then burn them at a power plant and then store that carbon underground.
It’s not all bad and it doesn’t do anyone any benefit to say we’re all taking carbon out of the atmosphere. How can you? Anyway, I think that’s just a pet peeve I have where I want to believe and I want to enable that we’re all in this together. And I believe that a pure market signal that says if you’ve emitted a ton of CO2, you can put another ton of CO2 away. And if you don’t want to pay to put it away, well, then do everything you can to reduce So I’d kind of like to get your perspective a little bit on, well, it ain’t going to happen if money doesn’t flow.
So how can we have the money flow to different solutions without sort of taking cheap shots at which solution should get the most amount of money?
John Elkington: It’s funny, I was in China last week, I was in Paris on Monday, I’m in Milan tomorrow, at Copenhagen the following week, and so it goes. And the Copenhagen event is about investment. So it’s many of the big investors in this space, particularly in Europe. And because I knew I got to do that presentation, I was looking back at an event we did last year called Breakthrough Money with UBS, the Swiss bank, as our sort of co-host. And one of the people who was speaking at that event, somebody who’s founded groups like Carbon Tracker, Mark Campanale, another guy, Nick Robbins, who’s been involved in the United Nations Environment Programme Sustainable Finance Inquiry, both of them saying something very similar to each other, which is economics and finance are singularly poor at valuing the bigger sort of resources in our world in the right way.
And getting them from A to B in a coherent, timely way is often very difficult. You need these sort of shocks that go through the system. And I think that’s part of the story. But I also think that part of the game with the financial community now is getting... into a conversation with them about things that they are thinking about seriously. So for example, artificial intelligence is something that many financial analysts think that their jobs are going to be taken away by AI in a relatively sort of short So if you can start to engage them on some of those sorts of areas, and for example, talk in London, there’s a firm called Arabesque, and they’re basically saying that the future is about data and environment, social and governance frameworks in the financial community.
I think these people are not stupid in the finance sector. They’re under system conditions which stop them doing some of the stuff that they know that they really need to do. But we’ve got to sort of get them into conversations that they wouldn’t otherwise be involved in. And also just show them some of the things that are beginning to happen in this wider world that they won’t necessarily be aware of. I always love the science fiction writer William Gibson. You know his quote about the future order here and all the rest of it.
Most people don’t see that because they’re sort of locked away in their reality bubbles. And part of what we do is to try and break them out of those bubbles and introduce them to people who see an emergent set of realities. And it’s no different with the financial community, although a tougher challenge than it is with the mainstream corporate world.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to say that you red pill people, but that term is no longer safe to use. It’s been stolen by the alt-right. Oops. Oops. No matrix references then.
Christophe Jospe: I’d love to hear your perspective on China. Because here we have a country which has now surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter, but probably better positioned to make a greater impact.
John Elkington: I think it will make a greater impact, but I think it will not in terms of the historic impact that the United States has delivered, because in creating the Bretton Woods institutions and creating a rules-based global trading and geopolitical order, I think the United States did something that no country in history has done previously. And President Trump is seemingly trying to undermine that. And the Chinese have a vested interest to some degree in it being undermined as well. So they can set up their own version of the World Bank and have people come to that, and then they control that system.
I’ve worked in Japan for 25 years. I really like Japan. I like the Japanese. If I had to choose between the Japanese and Chinese, and this is not politically correct to say, I prefer The Chinese sense of humor, and there’s a directness to them, which I really like. But I’ve not been that often to China. There have been moments where I really worry, because I think if you look at their declared intent to deliver an ecological civilization, that sounds fantastic. And it’s a sort of a level ambition, which the United States certainly doesn’t embrace, and Europe doesn’t really embrace either.
And they have this capacity to think Seriously long-term in a way that our Western countries, even if we had it, were perhaps in danger of losing. But I’ve encountered levels of nationalism in China, which remind me of... It’s very rare now that you find it in Japan, but I was once in China at the time when they shot down one of their space satellites and the debris just spewed around the world. And this was just almost like a finger up to the rest of the world. We can do this and count on us being willing to do it.
So I think the Chinese are both immensely exciting where you can see them on the right trajectories and immensely worrying when you look at what their impact on geopolitics and so on. They’re moving into Africa in ways that no one really has oversight of and their control of mineral resources, they’re buying up water resources in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere. So you’ve asked a simple question, What about China? We really have to work with these people very, very energetically and over sustained periods of time. But fundamentally, too, I think we have to model the behaviors that we want them to adopt.
At the moment, we’re not properly doing that.
Christophe Jospe: Gulp. Yeah. Everyone just looks at each other. Well, yeah.
John Elkington: Oddly, despite how I sometimes sound, I’m an optimist. I was born an optimist, and it hasn’t been knocked out of me to date. And I’m 68, and I feel the next 15 to 20 years are going to be by far the most exciting, challenging, and I have to say dangerous in my entire working career. And there are many reasons for that, but climate change and climate chaos is one of those. And I personally believe we’re on a trajectory to levels of warming which are Just inconceivable. And when I was in Shanghai last week, I was sitting on the 27th floor of a hotel looking down on the Huangpo River and reflecting on the amount of construction activity you see in that city.
It’s astonishing. I’ve never seen so much construction going on at one time. And then I was also looking at the studies that say, if you go to two degrees, or we go to two degrees, Shanghai will lose land which currently houses 11. 6 million people. If we go to four degrees, and this is a city of 24 million people currently, the most populous city in the world. If we go to four degrees, it’s 22. 4 million people. I mean, forget the decimal points and all the rest of it, but these are very big numbers of people being displaced.
These are capital cities, or at least cities with very big financial sectors and so on, where the disruption will be off the Somebody once said, to be born in an era with no great challenge is to be robbed. Well, we certainly haven’t been robbed. We have humongous challenges. And I think what Nori is doing, I think the blockchain trajectory in our economies and to some degree our societies is immensely exciting. But the final point that I will make is that while I think it’s very easy to overestimate the impact that technology will have in saving us or driving us off the rails, There is such a big raft of technologies coming through now, all of which in one way or another have a direct or indirect influence on our climate footprint.
But as an industry, again, the danger is that we look backwards. We look at oil, we look at chemicals, we look at automotive, all the people who created yesterday’s problems and challenges. We’ve got to dive deep into not just blockchain, but synthetic biology and autonomous vehicles and internet of everything, artificial intelligence. No accident that my next book will be Not because I’m an expert, because I feel this aching need to understand what the hell is going on in that space. How do we improve the balance between the sort of fallout and the good stuff that we want to see in the world?
I congratulate you for what you’ve done with Nori today. I was very pleased when we did the Imperial College event. Just a few days back, I was watching the companies in the room They’re very intrigued by what you’re doing and what the implications might be going forward. But we’ve got quite an effort still to get them over the threshold and to the point where they’re all doing this stuff and they take it for granted.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I like to say if climbing Everest is our goal, we barely got into Kathmandu.
John Elkington: One thing I take encouragement from, you now see these photographs of people queuing to get to the peak of Everest. So if we set our hearts and minds on some of these things, we can make it happen.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. That was very fun, John. Thanks so much for being here. And I’m really glad to see people who are so philosophically aligned. We feel a lot of kinship with Bolenz and you personally. The same. Thank you all. Thank you for having us.
