Historically, civilizations collapse when there are high levels of inequality and depleted resources. Hunter Lovins argues that we either solve the climate crisis now, or we lose everything we care about. But the good news is, we CAN build an economy in service to life, one that reverses climate change—at a profit.
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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 Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I am Ross Kenyon, sitting here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble. We are in Lower Manhattan right now. We are in a Holiday Inn room. This is the first time we’ve ever done a podcast set up like this, totally reconfigured the space. I feel creative. I feel like that part of me was exercised this morning. My creative juices are definitely tickled. There is a lamp dangling off the table. Oh, yeah. We didn’t realize how dusty the areas are behind desks at the Holiday Inn.
So if you work at the Holiday Inn and you’re listening to this, please be sure to dust behind there. But without any further ado, I’d like to introduce our guest. It’s truly an honor. We have Hunter Lovins. She is the president of Natural Capitalism Solutions. Hunter, you happen to be on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, so welcome.
Hunter Lovins: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: And we like to begin our podcast with the story of the guest and sort of how they got to where they are today and why they think they’re sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Unknown speaker: What a way to phrase that one.
Hunter Lovins: Well, that’s an easy answer, you ask me. So how did you get here, Hunter?
Ross Kenyon: Other than on an airplane from Colorado.
Hunter Lovins: Well, most directly, yes. Burning carbon to save the climate. Which is kind of what we all do, eh?
Ross Kenyon: Sure, yeah. You have to.
Hunter Lovins: How did I get here? Gosh, I don’t know that I had a whole lot of choice. My mother worked in the coalfields with John L. Lewis. My father helped mentor Cesar Chavez and Martin King. They were around the house when I was growing up. So trying to make the world a better place is just what you do.
Ross Kenyon: That’s some quality name dropping right there. Yeah, I did not know that.
Hunter Lovins: I planted a tree for the first Earth Day. Worked with David Brower in the 60s and in the 70s.
Ross Kenyon: He coined the term, right? Environmentalism, is that?
Hunter Lovins: No, I don’t know who coined the term, but he was our generation’s John Muir Thoreau. He was the first executive director of Sierra Club, got fired because he saved the Grand Canyon, thereby losing Sierra Club their tax-exempt status. He took a full-page ad out in the New York Times when Bureau of Reclamation was going to damn the Grand Canyon. And they said, well, but you’ll be able to boat up to the wall and see it better. He said, would you flood the Sistine Chapel to get a better view of the ceiling?
Saved the Grand Canyon and Sierra Club lost its tax status. The board freaked, fired him. He created Friends of the Earth. Then about a decade on, that board fired him because he was borrowing for operating expenses. He said, if you have a positive bank balance, you haven’t realized the urgency of the situation. And so he pivoted and created Earth Island Institute, which he ran until he died. Dave was the consummate unreasonable environmentalist. Russ Train once said, he was head of EPA, once said, Dave, be reasonable. He said, reasonable people have never accomplished anything.
Marvelous man, friend, fellow whiskey drinker and mentor. Then... In doing that, at Amory Lovins, we teamed up, created Rocky Mountain Institute. I ran that for 20 years until they fired me. So I pivoted, created natural capitalism, and here we are. Along the way, helped create a couple of MBA programs in sustainability, including the Bard MBA, where I now teach, which is what I’m doing here in New York City. This is an MBA in which sustainability, climate protection, Responsible leadership is baked into every class. It’s not an elective. It’s not a bolt-on.
We believe it is the basis of good business in today’s world.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we were at an event last night that was on impact investing and one of the speakers had a similar route and was describing how MBA programs 15 years ago, the sustainability component used to be almost like a tacked on, a little bit quasi greenwashing potentially. And now if you go to these programs, especially the ones that focus on it, It’s 100% aligned. It’s fully integrated in a very meaningful new way. And I’m not sure how recent that is, but when have MBA programs started to change and how are you trying to shape the future business leaders of tomorrow?
Hunter Lovins: An old boy named Dick Gray, Richard Gray, wrote me back in the 90s and said, did I think it would be a good idea to have an MBA around sustainability? And I wrote him back, said I thought it’d be a great idea. He wrote me again in 2001 and said, no, 2002, said, we were doing it. Would I come to San Francisco in August and help put the program together? I said, no, I’m going to Africa for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. I had just been fired from Rocky Mountain Institute and figured that was a target rich environment where I could pick up new clients and begin to build a new practice.
Dick said, when are you back? I said, well, not until the end of September. I’m not going to fly all the way to Africa and not go see animals. He said, well, we’ll wait the meeting until you get back. So the three of us who were the young staff at Natural Capitalism went to San Francisco, sat down and built the first accredited MBA in which sustainability was baked into everything. The folk there said, well, we could Have an MBA and then a class, an elective. And I said, dull, been done.
Stu Hart did that at North Carolina some years back. I said, what we ought to do is have every single class taught from this perspective. How do you honorably do business at a time in which the world is in crisis? And they said, we don’t know how to do that. I said, nobody knows how to do it. It’s never been done, but let’s go. So we did. Somehow I then wound up teaching there. In 2009, I believe, we were all at Copenhagen at the Conference of Parties on Climate. It was clear it was going to fail.
I was sitting with Eben Goodstein, who was then running the BARD program in environmental studies. And Eben said, we’re going to ally with a business school. I said, why don’t you create your own? So we did. And that’s the BARD MBA where I now teach.
Unknown speaker: Wow.
Ross Kenyon: And our people coming into the program, they already hold these values. It’s not something that you have to teach them. They’re just ready to find a way to both make money but also be good stewards of the planet and be responsible keepers, I guess you could say.
Hunter Lovins: We have a delightful diversity of students. We have people coming off Wall Street. Our classes are held a block and a half from Wall Street. We have people who say, I was never intending to take an MBA until I heard about your program, but this is what I want to do. And I argue that it doesn’t matter whether you’re running an NGO, as you guys do, as I do, whether you are a social change agent, just out being an activist, or whether you’re an entrepreneur, or whether you want to work in a big company, the kind of program that we have at BARD It teaches you what you need to know to most effectively drive change in the world.
Among other things, it teaches you who you are. We have a whole program in leadership and personal development. We have a required entrepreneurial class. All of the first-year students are part of a program called NYC Lab. We use the city as a living laboratory. Where in your first year, you get real clients, agencies, NGOs, companies who want an MBA team working with them. And it is taught by Laura Gitman of Businesses for Social Responsibility. So you learn how to be a sustainability consultant in a very professional way. My class, Principles of Sustainable Management, introduces you to the basic literacy in Environmental issues in social issues.
These are as much a question of diversity, of equity, of social justice, of a just transition as they are parts per million concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. And it’s been trying to separate these issues that’s gotten us into trouble.
Ross Kenyon: You have a number of examples in your latest book, which I just read. It’s A Finer Future.
Hunter Lovins: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: What is the subtitle there?
Hunter Lovins: Creating an Economy in Service to Life. The book grew out of several things. In 2012, the little country of Bhutan realized that if it wanted to play a leadership role in the world, It had to step up onto the world stage. So the then prime minister, a visionary man named Jigme Thinley, held a meeting at the United Nations, invited a group of us to come and talk about the possibility of taking Bhutan’s concept of gross national happiness and making it the basis of international development policy. Right now, we all march to the beat of the neoliberal drum.
The only thing that matters is growth. The only thing that matters is money. If you don’t have any, you’re not worth anything. We’re all greedy bastards, but that’s okay because the market is perfect. And in this perfect market, you against me will somehow aggregate to the greater good for all. No, it won’t. It hasn’t. What it has brought us is a world in incredible peril. The recent IPCC report has made it really clear. We’ve got about a decade to turn around climate change or we start losing the capacity of the planet to support life.
We have high levels of inequality, some of the highest ever in history. The Handy report, Human and Nature Dynamic Study, shows that collapse is actually fairly common throughout human history. When it happens, it lasts for hundreds to thousands of years. You really don’t like it. It is driven by one or both of two things, high levels of inequality or you overrun your resource base. Hello, we have both. And the report, the study said, under conditions closely resembling those now on Earth, we find that collapse is very difficult to avoid. So here little Bhutan was saying we have a different way forward.
How about happiness? Now, we reframed that as well-being because happiness is not just, I’m having a good time. It’s truly being well in your life, in your being, in your community, in the world. So we started playing with Bhutan. They invited a group of us over, an international expert working group. And as part of that, the king and the prime minister said to me, Hunter, your job is to reinvent the global economy. Like, me? So I gathered the best folk I could find and said, what would that take? How would you reinvent the global economy?
This led to working with scholars from around the world. We created a group called Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity with people like Dr. Robert Costanza, father of ecological economics, Dr. Jacqueline McGlade, who At the time, was Chief Scientist for UN Environment Program. About two dozen equivalent minds. Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett, who wrote the book Spirit Level on the Costs of Inequality to Society, and began this conversation. What would it take to reinvent the global economy? Then Dr. Michael Pearson at Fordham University, Dr. Chris Laszlo, Andrew Winston, who wrote the great book Big Pivot about how businesses have to pivot toward a genuine commitment to sustainability, to radical transformation.
And about 40 others of us created a group called Leading for Wellbeing to try to bring this well-being concept in. Got into a bit of an argument at the Club of Rome, which at the time I was on the executive committee of. Many of the members there are of the opinion stemming from the book Limits to Growth that, well, we’re all going to die. Yeah, we’re all going to die, but not today. And there’s a tremendous amount that we can do. As the original Limits book said, if we adopt principles of sustainability and We can solve the problems facing us.
So a subset of us from the club, Stuart Wallace, who for many years ran New Economics Foundation, Anders Wiegmann, who runs climate policy for the Swedish government, John Fullerton, who was 18 years at JP Morgan, left and created a thing called Capital Institute to try to transform finance. The four of us got together and said, let’s pull the best from all of these people, from all of these groups and set it down in one place. What do we know about how to transform corporations, finance, energy, agriculture? What do we know about government policy that works, that can drive authentic change at the international level, at the national level, at the regional level?
City level and in your personal life. Is it possible to build an economy in service to life? So that’s what the book sets forth. Our answer, yes it is. If we do it, we will be much happier, going back to Bhutan’s great concept, and we’ll also make more money. We can solve the climate crisis at a profit. And the best practitioners in the field are doing this. Carbon Disclosure Project, now badged CDP, has shown that the companies that are leading in measuring and managing their carbon footprint have 18% higher return on investment than the laggards, 67% higher than the companies that say, oh, climate change isn’t a problem, we don’t care, we’re not going to do anything.
This is just better business.
Christophe Jospe: That’s great. And I’m sort of getting chills hearing you speak because it resonates with a lot of how I think we see the world, which is if we can align people’s motivation to make money with actually making the world a better place, we can We can really change things quickly and we can drive a whole lot of solutions. You brought up a lot and there’s a lot to unpack there. But I want to focus on solutions, some of which you pointed at. And there’s also a book sitting right there on the table called Dirt to Soil.
And I kind of want to get into the weeds and let’s get dirty. Things are happening, but they’re not happening quickly enough. And we can sit here around our small little table on the Holiday Inn and say, hey, you know, we can make the world a better place, but it’s not happening. We need to go.
Hunter Lovins: It is happening.
Christophe Jospe: Not quickly enough. True.
Hunter Lovins: Not quickly enough. That’s what William Gibson said. The future’s already here. It’s just not widely distributed.
Christophe Jospe: Right. Fair enough. So thank you for your correction. It is happening, but I want it to happen 100, 1000 times as quickly. So paint a picture for us. How do you see this really scaling quickly? You gave us a sort of very tight timeline that was laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You know, we take this... Sort of fear and catastrophe is, well, it’s not going to happen. It’s the motivation for us to get it right. So can you paint a picture of how you see the future of these solutions scaling?
Hunter Lovins: Sure. Two things. Let’s just for the moment talk about climate change. There are many problems in the world, but let’s take the big existential one. How the hell do we solve climate change fast and at a profit? Two steps. First of all, listen to the man Tony Siba. Stanford professor, Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Tony says, inevitably, for fundamental economic reasons, the world will be 100% renewable by 2030. There’s our timeframe. How could this be? We run on massive flows of fossil energy. We all fly around on jet planes burning fossil energy.
10 years time? Is this possible? Tony says four things will drive this, fall in the cost of solar, fall in the cost of storage, batteries, the electric car, the driverless car. After the 2016 election, I went and had a chat with Tony, I’ve known him for a decade or so, and said, okay, now it’s not possible. He said, oh, now I’m even more convinced. So I started looking at the evidence. 2017, piece out in Greentech that solar would fall below 1. 7 cents a kilowatt hour. In all of our lives, solar has been 20 cents a kilowatt hour, 15, 12, falling.
Ross Kenyon: The average American energy bill is around 10 cents a kilowatt hour.
Hunter Lovins: 10 to 12. Here in New York, it’s like 18 or 20.
Ross Kenyon: In Seattle, it’s six.
Hunter Lovins: Right. Because you have a lot of hydro. Right. So 10 cents a kilowatt hour starting to become a reasonable number, but below two cents. Saudis did it. They bid a 800 megawatt field at 1. 7. The recent Colorado bids, our coal loving utility, Accel Energy, said, who can supply us 1100 megawatts at any price from any source? The bids came back. They were sure natural gas would win. Natural gas came back at around four cents. Wind at a bit below two cents, solar at a bit above two cents, wind plus solar plus batteries, three cents.
Excel said, no way, did it again. And the numbers came back essentially the same with the Stupid tariffs slightly higher. Still, there was no fossil bid below $0. 04. And those were median bids. What that means is there is a great deal of wind and solar on offer at around or below $0. 02 a kilowatt hour.
Christophe Jospe: And that’s subsidy free, right?
Hunter Lovins: All energy has subsidies. You and I and the rest of the world’s taxpayers pay, what is it, $5. 3 trillion a year subsidizing fossil energy. The fossil subsidies are vastly higher than any renewable subsidies. I’m a free marketeer. Capitalism is our middle name. I would love to do away with all subsidies, and I believe in the tooth fairy too. But these are real commercial bids in today’s market. So Tony’s right on the first item, fall in the cost of solar, fall in the cost of batteries, right? Elon Musk’s batteries are, and this was again the Colorado bid, solar plus wind plus storage batteries, cheaper than any fossil bid.
Elon’s big battery in Australia when they had a power outage recently responded in a fraction of a second, handled it. The utility said, oh, this is way faster than natural gas could have scaled. And That’s the business that Tesla’s in. They’re not a car company, although their market cap is roughly General Motors. They sell, what is it, 300 times fewer cars, although Tesla is now one of the best-selling cars in the United States. But still, Tesla’s really a battery company. There are 20 gigafactories for batteries going to come online in China by 2021 and What is it?
Five million companies here in the United States would economically benefit from putting batteries in to deal with the couple hours a day of peak pricing. For example, in Tucson, peak price is 50 cents a kilowatt hour. Off peak is five. Put in the batteries and you avoid that massive peak. Now there is storage as a service. You don’t even have to put in the batteries yourself. You just buy the capacity for the couple hours a day you need it. Now, if you have renewables plus storage, you have fixed firm power, 24-hour power.
The electric car, I drive a LEAF. Many of my friends who can afford it drive Teslas and they love them. I love my LEAF. My husband’s a horseshoer. He’s a cowboy. He calls it the hippie car. He was sitting at a stoplight the other day and there was one of these big coal rolling trucks blowing diesel smoke on him. Light changed. He left them in the dirt. He loves it. He loves the torque. He loves the performance. Electric cars are just better cars. When I bought it, was sitting there, the guy was going through the paperwork.
He said, oh, you don’t need this. I said, what’s that? He said, it’s the emissions report. Oh, right. He said, man, you don’t need that. I said, what’s that? He said, it’s the maintenance schedule. How do you maintain these things? You rotate the tires.
Ross Kenyon: Isn’t it like five moving parts in a Tesla or something?
Hunter Lovins: 20.
Ross Kenyon: 20, okay.
Hunter Lovins: Compared to a thousand or more in an internal combustion engine car. China has said they’re going to phase out internal combustion engines along with India, along with many of the European countries.
Ross Kenyon: I think Denmark just said by 2030.
Hunter Lovins: Yep, by 2030. There’s that number again. These things are going to sweep. Now, the question is, oh, and then the autonomous vehicles. If you could get on your smartphone, whistle up an AEV, it takes you where you want to go, tenfold cheaper than what you today pay to buy, maintain, fuel, and insure a private vehicle. Why on earth would you own a car? Eben Goodstein, who runs the BARD program, was talking to a guy from J. D. Powers, said, how soon can I up in upstate New York? Be able to whistle one of these things up to take me to the Bard campus.
The guy said 2023. Bill Gates once said, we overestimate the speed with which things can happen in the next two years. We underestimate the speed with which things can happen in 10 years. This is a revolution that is upon us. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. If Tony’s right, and I think he’s more right than wrong, we are looking at the dissolution in value. Of oil, gas, coal, uranium, nuclear, the utility industry, the auto industry, the banks that hold paper in them, the insurance companies and pension funds that are invested in them.
This is going to be the mother of all disruptions, coming at us faster than we have any clue how to manage. We are going to reinvent everything. And in so doing, we solve half the climate crisis. Now, you mentioned Gabe Brown’s book. This book is literally just out. It arrived on my desk the day I left Colorado three days ago. Dirt to Soil. Who the hell is Gabe Brown and why should you care? Gabe is a North Dakota corn soybean farmer who was going broke. And in the book, he describes the extent to which he took over his wife’s family’s farm, tried to farm it conventionally, and was losing money every year.
So he said, how do I cut my costs? First, he went to no-till agriculture. He stopped inverting the soil. When you plow and turn the soil upside down, it decarbonizes. It denitrifies. Nitric oxide is another greenhouse gas. So he stopped that. That cut a lot of his cost. Then he started planting cover crops that cooled the soil. That’s important because soil is not dirt. Soil is a living community. There are billions of microbes, mycorrhizal fungi, nematodes, all these little creatures that live in the soil that we’ve never thought had any particular value.
So we spread pesticides, herbicides, try to get rid of them, thereby turning soil into dirt and spending a lot of money. Gabe quit all of that. He realized that living community in the soil was So when he’d get a heavy rain, it no longer ran quickly off, eroding the nutrients in his soil. Furthermore, that microbiological community fixes nutrients in the soil. Now he doesn’t have to apply fertilizers. So he’s cut his costs for pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. He has healthy soil. Then he brought on animals, grazing animals. When the first pioneers came across the American Great Plains, they found 10 feet of thick black soil.
That black is carbon. How’d it get there? The action of animals, dense packed because there were wolves, lions, mountain lions, gonna eat them. If you’re a bison and there’s a wolf, the safe place to be is the middle of the herd. Everybody’s trying to get to the middle. So they eat everything, their hooves chop up the soil, they fertilize it, and then they move on. They don’t come back until the grass has regrown. This dense packing animal impact is what puts the carbon into the soil. And we can get into the science of it if you want, and Gabe does.
But basically, that’s why there was 10 feet of thick black soil when the first white folk came. They’re now down to inches. Except on Gabe’s farm, where he has gone from a little over 1% soil organic matter, carbon, to on some of his paddocks, 11%. Gabe is rolling climate change backward. Profitably, he has gone from going broke to now being wildly profitable. Selling a diversity of crops, corn, soybeans, oats, vegetables, eggs, chickens, cattle, sheep, goats. And solving the climate crisis at a profit. So you combine what Tony Sieb is doing with cutting our use of fossil.
You add what Gabe and the folk at Savory Institute who invented this approach are doing in taking carbon out of the air, putting it back in the soil where it’s a nutrient, not a pollutant. We’ve solved the climate crisis at a profit. Now, how fast can we do that Sucking of carbon out, putting it back in the soil. We don’t know is the short answer. Marin Carbon Project, which is taking dairy manure and composting it and spreading it on pastures, is getting about a ton per hectare per year. So about a half a ton per acre per year.
Gabe is obviously getting much faster uptake. Dr. David Johnson at New Mexico State University is doing something like what Marin Carbon Project is doing. And getting up to 10 tonnes per acre per year.
Unknown speaker: Wow.
Hunter Lovins: Yeah, big numbers.
Ross Kenyon: That’s the biggest one that I’ve heard to date.
Hunter Lovins: He actually gets some higher, but he’s happy to hold at 10. If you take the best science of holistic grazing, the work of Savory Institute, and you take all the world’s grasslands, the world’s grasslands are the second largest carbon sink on the planet after the oceans. So that’s a big if. Over 30 years’ time, applying holistic management, you’d get back to 280 parts per million concentration of CO2. These are numbers from, and these are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but they’re pretty good numbers from a team at Tufts University and the group at Soil for Climate, Seth Itzkin and Carl Tinneman.
So that’s a Again, that’s an illustrative number. We need to nail these numbers down. We need to see how fast farming, like what Gabe Brown is doing, can multiply. But you’re starting to have these examples all over. Joel Salatin in Swope, Virginia. Will Harris down in Bluffton, Georgia. I’ve been to these places. You go down to Will’s operation.
Ross Kenyon: Is that the White Oak or something like that?
Hunter Lovins: White Oak Pastures. Mm-hmm.
Ross Kenyon: It’s got a lot of tree range chickens. Yeah.
Hunter Lovins: Which are getting eaten by bald eagles.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve told that story on the show, yeah.
Hunter Lovins: So Will says, well, you’re supposed to tithe to the church. I guess I’m tithing to nature.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a good line.
Hunter Lovins: But he said, if everybody did this, the eagles would spread out. Then everybody would get to view bald eagles. Will is profitable. He hires 137 people. His neighbor commodity peanut farmer hires four. This is better for community economic development. And you drive into the little town of Bluffton, which you can see it was decaying, being covered with kudzu, except where Will’s operation is, where they’re rebuilding the buildings. People have jobs. People are regaining pride in their community. Oh, and it tastes better to eat this stuff.
Ross Kenyon: It’s more nutritious.
Hunter Lovins: It’s just better for everything. It’s better for the soil. It solves the climate crisis. It’s more profitable. It’s healthier for you. And it’s more fun.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we love it. Whenever you can get the profit motive embedded in something that has a result that you actually want that is good for the planet, then I think you’re able to scale. The line that we always use is you can get a lot of mileage out of altruism, but we’ve almost gotten all of it that we can, and you need to appeal to greed in some way to really scale. So if you can have all those forces working together, that seems like that’s the sweet spot, right?
Hunter Lovins: Well, the sweet spot is what Kate Raworth calls donut economics. Below the planetary boundaries, but above the human minimums where you are providing sufficiency for all, genuine equity is And that safe and just operating space is where we ought to be heading for. And again, you’re spot on. It’s more profitable. Now, the old neoliberal narrative turns out to be scientifically wrong. This notion that we’re greedy bastards and therefore we have to appeal to greed. If you look at the archaeology, if you look at the Evolutionary biology, anthropology, when humans first came down out of the trees in Africa, actually pre-humans, there were a bunch of species of us.
Most went extinct. Those who survived, our ancestors, and thus why we are sitting here today, cared more for the good of the whole than anyone cared for him or herself. We know this from the DNA. And from the archaeology, they found this little tribe of pre-humans, and they were down to fewer discrete individuals than the now endangered gorillas, cared for the elderly. They cared for cripples. They cared for the good of the whole, and they worked together.
Unknown speaker: Ross and I recently both read the book Tribe on Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger. It’s actually quoted in Hunter’s book.
Hunter Lovins: Oh, well, fantastic. Thanks.
Unknown speaker: I meant to tell you that. That’s why you read these. Yes. Yeah. I love that concept. And it’s a really great book and has some interesting insights into the ways that bring like people come together and actually feel happier during times of great strife. And because we have this like genetic need to be able to bond with people around us and feel equitable and so on.
Christophe Jospe: Right. We’re wired to cooperate. Yeah. And I think that’s something that excites us so much about building Nori and sort of from the ground up. You know, we’re not waiting for the UN to come with some edict and say, you must do this or even a compliance market. We’re saying, no, we know that the world needs carbon removal certificates. So let’s build the open source code. That will allow people who can sequester carbon in their soils and future methodologies that we plan on hosting in our platform so that this is a way that we can cooperate and sort of drive the change that we’d like to see even more quickly.
Hunter Lovins: Well, I’ve been keen to meet you folk. I’ve been following what you’ve been doing. I did a little work earlier this year with Viridium out of the UK.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve talked to Todd a little bit.
Hunter Lovins: And they were basically going to commoditize keeping standing for a standing. And I said, cool, insufficient. It’s a good thing to keep standing for a standing, no criticism there. But if we’re going to solve the climate crisis, we’ve got to be pulling carbon out of the air, putting it back into the soil. And then you guys pop up. It’s like, oh, cool, somebody is doing this. So thank you for having me on and giving me a chance to meet you guys. I’m very keen on what you’re doing. Blending the economics with the meaning.
The anthropologists tell us humans have four drives. Acquire and defend. That puts us on a plane with all animals. We need food. We need shelter. Once we have it, we want to protect it. But what makes us human is we have a drive to bond. And a drive to create meaning. And what you’re doing with Nori is giving people both of those last two, the ability to work together on behalf of something that’s greater than ourselves, on behalf of a cause, saving the planet, saving our home. We now have a thousand people missing in Florida from Hurricane Michael.
We don’t know where they are. Here’s hoping they are alive. They’re with friends. They just got out of the area. We already have two dozen or more dead because of a climate change worsened hurricane. These are going to keep hitting the Caribbean, Germany. We’ve had hurricanes hit Germany, the UK, cyclones hitting all over Southeast Asia. Had a hurricane hit Mexico, the Pacific coast. The weather is getting worse. Years ago, I called it global weirding. It’s weird everywhere, but it’s not good. Droughts are evermore. The scientists tell us by 2040, the Mideast will be too hot to be habitable.
Where are these people going to go? We solve the climate crisis or we lose everything we care about in our communities, in our families. And again, we know how to do it profitably. So thank you for all that you do in enabling people to become a part of this solution.
Ross Kenyon: That’s so nice. Thank you, Hunter. For some reason, I de-emphasize sometimes the focus on meaning because I can be a little bit of the hard-nosed one around here where environmentalism is full of cliches. No one cares anymore. They’ve heard the save the planet mumbo jumbo a million times. And what if you could make a lot of money removing carbon? And that could help. But yeah, maybe we should be focusing more in that direction, too, because obviously, I mean, I’m going to confess, many of the economists that you harp on, I’m a fan of.
Although I also love Jane Jacobs and Eleanor Ostrom, too. So I hope we can be friends if I also like Hayek. I hope we’re okay there.
Hunter Lovins: Well, you take the original neolibs. They were trying to do a good thing. Ludwig von Mises was appalled at what national socialism had done to trash Europe. Hayek was scared to death of the rise in the East of Soviet collectivism, and the Soviet system murdered millions of its citizens. Friedman believed the individual was the only legitimate economic actor. They put neoliberalism together to fight what had just trashed the planet in World War II and what they feared would trash the planet going forward. I think they just missed a little of it.
The individual is important. An individual human dignity is core to our sense of happiness. So I think we need a new ism. And I’ve been putting this out to students. Name it. Somebody came up with the name Humidee yesterday.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like a tech company.
Hunter Lovins: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: They make dehumidifiers. Yeah.
Hunter Lovins: And the trouble is you take all the isms, communism, socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and they’ve all failed. We stand on the edge of a precipice in which we could lose humanity. Now, George Carlin said, save the earth. The earth will be fine. It’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. I’m a little sentimental about this human experiment. I would like to see all of the great things that humans have created. Endure indefinitely, the definition of sustainability, the ability to sustain. But the way in which we’re going to do that is going to be very different than any of the isms we’ve had so far.
I work a lot with John Fullerton, who, as I said, came off J. P. Morgan. He’s got an approach that he calls regenerative capitalism, and he’s laid out eight principles of what a system has to be to operate in accordance with the principles of nature. Things like right relationship. Peter Brown’s phrase owes to the ecological economists of the economy is this little system within society which exists within the biosphere. Your relationship with your family. If you’re in wrong relationship, you’re not happy. Your body’s relationship with its parts. This concept of wholism.
And having all of the pieces working as a functional whole. Empowered participation, where you have a say in the forces that are affecting you. Circularity, the circular economy and the circulatory system in our bodies. Edge effect abundance. This comes from Janine Benyus, the great biologist, who says in nature, the most abundant ecosystems are where one or more come together because you have diversity. The Ability to entrepreneur, to be adaptive. Humans are entrepreneurial. When rabbits are threatened, they freeze. When humans are threatened, we entrepreneur. Again, we can create better ways of living together.
We have... These guiding principles, which as best John has been able to put, are what enables nature, natural systems to function. Perhaps the most important is honor’s place. We can have a vibrant global economy. I’m very fond of Scotch whiskey. We make very good whiskey in Colorado, but I just happen to like whiskey from the Isle of Skye. And we can trade whiskey. Vibrantly, so long as every place, every ecosystem, every community has its own integrity. So John has just launched a program called Regenerative Hubs. We just started one in the Denver Boulder area.
We were down in Costa Rica this summer. The country of Costa Rica wanted one. Got down there and the people in the territories each wanted one too. So I don’t know, maybe there are going to be five in Costa Rica. Their territories are related to biosphere preserves, which are related to watersheds. So I started thinking, what’s our watershed? Turns out it’s the Upper South Platte watershed that just happens to include Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins. So we had a meeting last week where about 80 people came together from all over this bioregion and talked about what would a regenerative economy in Colorado be?
In our little piece of Colorado. People look at Colorado and say, you’re an extractive industry state. You have oil and gas, mining, timber. Actually, that’s a tiny piece of the economy. Nobody had ever really counted. Oil and gas is at most 6% of the Colorado economy. Colorado is much more about things like entrepreneurialism. We have a vibrant startup ecosystem where you have the entrepreneurs, the financiers, the incubators, accelerators. The outdoor industry, just the association, just moved to Colorado. Skiing, all of the recreation, tourism, education. We have a whole number of great educational institutions.
Healthcare, services, clean energy, cannabis. These are all much bigger. Each one of these is a much bigger piece of the Colorado economy than oil and gas. Clean food. The natural foods industry is in many ways headquartered in Boulder. And so we’re seeing all of these little regenerative farms and ranches springing up. No one piece of this has the sense of itself as anything other than insignificant. But you put them all together and that’s the Colorado economy. So one of the things we’re starting to do is make ourselves self-aware. Of the extent to which this regenerative economy is bubbling up everywhere.
And then realize if we invest in this, if we work together as, if you will, a regenerative cluster, we can transform the economy of Colorado. Then on a global level... We’ve created a thing called We All, Wellbeing Economy Alliance, which is pulling together new economy groups from around the world, headed up by Stuart Wallace, whom I mentioned used to run New Economics Foundation. So that’s at the global level. The hubs are at the local level. And you listening can join either of these, both of these, and do it in your community.
Work with you guys at Nori to begin offsetting your carbon. Work with your local producers to enable them to start getting credits for the carbon that they’re putting into the ground at the same time that these producers are delivering to you healthier food and building your own regenerative economy locally. We can do it. We know how to do it. It’s just a question of getting on about it. And yes, we can do it in the time set forth by the IPCC.
Christophe Jospe: I agree. I’m kind of getting drunk on all the optimism you’re feeding us.
Unknown speaker: I definitely look forward to- I don’t think you could disagree with that if you had wanted to. Yeah, no, I cannot.
Hunter Lovins: Check out the book, A Finer Future, Creating an Economy in Service to Life. It has 100 pages of footnotes.
Unknown speaker: Because every assertion- Sounds like Ross’s kind of book.
Hunter Lovins: Every assertion we make is documented. It’s happening somewhere.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. Is there anything else that we should cover that we missed? I think we got so much good content in there. Yeah. I almost feel bad for our producer and editor and all the footnoting they’re going to have to do for the show notes. Yeah. We’ll keep them to that same standard for you.
Hunter Lovins: It’s really easy. Just pick up a copy of A Finer Future. The footnotes are all there. Do pick up a copy of Gabe Brown’s book, Dirt to Soil. Oh, yeah. And those of you who are listening do participate in NORI. This is a way that you personally can do your part to offset the carbon that your lifestyle currently causes. Oh, and we mentioned a lot about we all fly around. Turns out there is a carbon neutral way of doing jet fuel. There’s a cool little company called Lanza Tech out of Chicago.
That has taken microbes, tuned them to take carbon flue gases and turn it into yoga pants and jet fuel.
Ross Kenyon: I love every example like that I hear from plastics and polymers and materials, consumer goods that come out of that. And then fuel. It’s with microbes, though. It’s not with algae.
Hunter Lovins: It’s not with algae. It’s microbes. And so you can tune the microbes to eat microbes. Carbon flue gas from, say, a Chinese steel refinery or Indian oil refinery or municipal solid waste. So now we know what to do with the plastics crisis.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that one gets me really excited. And also, yeah, Gabe Brown, if you are listening, we’re coming for you. Just know it’s a matter of time before you’re on the show. We really want you. We like what you’re doing.
Hunter Lovins: Gabe, thanks for all that you’re doing. You’re showing the way, you know, along with Joel, along with Will Harris, along with all of the regenerative producers. And real kudos to Alan Savory, who showed us the way of how to do regenerative agriculture, to Robert Rodale at Rodale Institute. Who showed us how to do regenerative vegetable production. To people like Vandana Shiva, who’s doing it in India. To Wangari Matai, who was tree planting across Kenya. There are so many examples, the world around, of people who are building a finer future, who are creating this economy in service to life.
In your community, find who they are, go meet them, shake their hand, and join them.
Christophe Jospe: This is wonderful. Thank you, Hunter. It absolutely sort of hits the nail on the head. The sort of more interconnected we are, the more complex we are all going to become more resilient. So I certainly I think this was our best podcast yet. I’m looking forward to the time when we can come out almost every three podcasts.
Unknown speaker: Well, this set the bar even higher. That can still be true. Yeah, it’s easy because it’s the latest one we’ve done. But we’ll be out there in Colorado with a bottle of scotch and hopefully you’ll open your door and we’ll Is Lagavulin okay? Or you like the sky one?
Hunter Lovins: I’ll drink Lagavulin. That’s a very fine, the Isla Scotches will do just fine. And come on by the ranch. We’ll sit on the front porch, drink some whiskey and talk about how to save the world.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds great. We’ll see you there. Take care.
Hunter Lovins: Adios.
