This Sustainable Life

Matt and I talk about his commitment and how it affected him. I talk about the Spodek Method in general and other leadership tools like creating role models. Matt talked about his hopes and expectations about technology.

When I asked him if he could imagine a world where no one polluted, he shared that he hadn't thought about it, but find the idea almost beyond conception. Think about it: if someone can't imagine an outcome, how likely do you think that person can achieve it? How likely do you think they'll subconsciously sabotage attempts? Won't it seem scary?

Can you imagine a world without pollution? Matt points out if we pollute, we violate Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. That means people who can't imagine a world without pollution can't imagine a world restoring the Golden Rule.

Listen for our conversation on this topic. Matt also talks about large changes he's incorporated in his life, already starting to avoid flying.

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Guy is a successful, well-known hedge fund founder. He's famous for paying a lot of money for one meal with Warren Buffet (hundreds of thousands of dollars), which he found worth it.

He and I know each other partly through a guest also in finance I did several episodes with, Whitney Tilson, though we emailed before we found Whitney in common.

Regular listeners know a strategy of this podcast is to bring leaders from all areas to sustainability, which lacks leadership. I also look for people in fields that people who call themselves environmentalists often call the enemy. They talk about finance people as just looking for profit, not caring whom they hurt. I think they're presuming someone's intent based on what they see. I think psychologists call that presumption the fundamental attribution error.

I don't agree with them. I think everyone has deep, intrinsic motivations on stewardship, but you have to listen more than project onto them to learn it. When it comes out, if you enable them to act on it, they may find the action inspiring and meaningful, and want to do more. I think you'll hear that happen with Guy.

I found his book, The Education of a Value Investor, an engaging read that shows the opposite of him caring only about money or profit. I can't wait for our second episode.

• Guy's home page

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I was led to Kate's article Should I Stop Flying? It’s a Difficult Decision to Make. from a newsletter from Flight Free USA. I've read, heard, written, and said a lot about not flying. I found her article the most sensitive, comprehensive, and thoughtful on the internal, personal challenge and gut check of deciding to stop flying.

I'll let you read the article to find where she lands on not flying. I expect you'll find she covers your angle and others.

It's challenging. We know it pollutes. We know it's not necessary. We want to do it, so we convince ourselves that what we believe is wrong is right, that the plane was going to fly anyway, that we're powerless to choose otherwise, and various other rationalizations and justifications (I used to. Now I find it repugnant). Though eighty percent of people alive today will never fly, we who fly feel like everyone does. So we convince ourselves that flying is inevitable, benign, and does more good than harm. Yet for people who fly, it's often their greatest contribution to pollution.

Such are my views. I suspect you probably haven't heard people thoughtfully, intelligently explore the subject. In this episode, we do.

• Kate's home page

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Since our last conversation, check out the reviews that have come in about Home on an Unruly Planet from past guests of this podcast:

• “With deep, compassionate reporting and elegant prose … Ostrander finds creativity, vital hope, and a sense of home that outlasts any address.”—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
• “As each new climate calamity obliterates, incinerates, or engulfs entire communities, we shudder to think our own could be next. Gently but purposefully, Ostrander guides us into places that have known this nightmare, not to shock but to show that the meaning of home is so powerful that people will make surprising, imaginative, even transcendent leaps to hold on to theirs. By her book’s end, you realize that maybe you could, too.” —Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us and Countdown
• “What does it mean to maintain a sense of place in an age of climate change? In At Home on an Unruly Planet, Madeline Ostrander explores this question with searching intelligence and uncommon empathy.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer-prize-winning author of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

The book comes out in paperback today (As I wrote in part 1, I don't get a commission, I just couldn't stop reading the book).

In today's conversation, we talk more about what people are doing in the communities she spent time with. I may not have conveyed enough in the notes to part 1 that she spent years with these communities. She didn't just drop in on them. She created enduring relationships. She shares more from behind the scenes and her personal relationships with people who start with creating gardens and bike programs. They don't stop there. They organize to find ways to move oil refineries out of their neighborhoods.

I brought up how Chevron doesn't buy its products. We all do. What they do, when we fill our gas tanks, buy airplane tickets, buy things shipped around the world, buy disposable diapers and other plastic, we fund their efforts. In my view, we have to change those patterns, not wait for them even if we say it's their responsibility. So Madeline and I talk about that view a bit too: individualism, capitalism, profit, and sustainability. Also, the way out: fun, community, gardens, persistence, and taking responsibility.

• Madeline's Home Page, featuring her book At Home on an Unruly Planet
• All her published articles and essays
• Her stories at The Nation

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What's actually happening with our environmental problems? Scientists predict. Journalists in periodicals tend to write what gets attention and clicks, so we don't know how accurately they represent versus sensationalize. There's plenty to sensationalize after all.

Madeline spent time with several communities to find out what problems they faced, how seriously, and what they were doing about it. The result is she sensitively portrayed them in her book At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth. The book reads at time like she's projecting doom, but she isn't. She's describing things as she sees them and the people there describe them. The second half of the book talks about what people are doing. It's sobering, but if we want to do anything, we have to know where we are and how fast we're changing.

In our conversation, beyond describing highlights of the book, she gives backstories of how she picked them, what motivated her, her goals, and more.

GOOD NEWS: the paperback comes out tomorrow. (I don't get a commission, I just couldn't stop reading it once I started).

• Madeline's Home Page, featuring her book At Home on an Unruly Planet
• All her published articles and essays
• Her stories at The Nation

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Talking with Chris has made me more concerned about population projections that only show the possibility of collapse as error bars. I hope to bring him and past guest Wolfgang Lutz on the podcast together to help resolve their disparate views.

I see some of humanity's effects on the environment that could affect our population beyond what the UN projections show not as low-probability high-impact events, but already happening. I mean things like depleting aquifers or fisheries that hundreds of millions of people rely on or plastic building up in the ocean. Several major rivers don't reach the ocean, including the Colorado, Tigris, and Euphrates. Solving these problems could be low-probability.

They’re like driving by looking only in the rear-view mirror.

Our relevant question is not, as the UN projections imply, “how do we feed ten billion?” It’s, “might human population collapse?” By implying we don’t have to worry about collapse, I see the UN discouraging acting on sustainability, in my view.

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Do you like my work because of my nearly unique background of a PhD in physics, having cofounded a couple companies, and having an MBA? You're in luck with Arnold, who has done the same. We got our MBAs together at Columbia so inevitably met. He was working on his solar startup then, Skyfuel, which was making news, though I wasn't working on sustainability yet the, still feeling like individual action wouldn't matter yet.

We ran into each other and talked about his new company, YouSolar, comparing how much power, energy, and reliability he supplies his clients with my little portable battery and panels I have to carry to my roof.

In today's conversation, after he shares his background, he shares YouSolar's grand goal, which is to change the grid, not just provide solutions to some clients. He's looking toward systemic change, filling in a power gap.

• Arnold's company, YouSolar

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You've heard me talk sustainability leadership on this podcast and probably others. Have you wondered what I sound like talking to friends unrecorded?

A friend who also teaches leadership at NYU knew my background and had talked about climate with her students. She scheduled a call to talk sustainability leadership with me to help prepare. She told me she would record it, but since we were talking on the phone and I wasn't using my recording microphone, I forgot. I felt like I was just talking to a friend. I'm posting that recording: what I sound like when I haven't prepared and don't know I'm being recorded.

In this case, I'm talking with someone I know who wanted to talk about sustainability, so it's not out of the blue with a stranger, but unrehearsed and raw.

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Recent guest Bob Litterman spoke highly of Greg and his work at the Climate Leadership Council, a rare bipartisan effort on climate. He put us in touch. In the meantime, I was curious about a climate group started by Secretaries of State James A. Baker and George P. Shultz along with Ted Halstead. But they and other prominent Republicans published The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends.

Greg is CLC's CEO, leading that project on the ground working with politicians. If you're curious how it can work, he explains it in our conversation.

You'll hear my long-standing concern that people and organizations who focus on climate and greenhouse gases end up increasing other problems. He sees in some areas that if you solve part of the problem you increase it in other areas, like squeezing a balloon, as he puts it, or whack-a-mole, as I do, but doesn't speak about that problem in focusing only on carbon.

I also didn't get to ask him about the fourth pillar of the case: "significant regulatory simplification." Could it open the door for more pollution and a net lowering of Earth's ability to sustain life?

Still, listen and hear directly from him on the bipartisan effort he's leading.

• The Climate Leadership Council
• Americans for Carbon Dividends

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Gernot and I go back a few years from meeting online over sustainability issues, finding out that we lived about a mile from each other, then meeting in person. Our first meeting, we got annoyed at each other, but our second we found we agreed on more controversial topics and had a grand old time. We also ran into each other at the conference where I met his longtime collaborator Bob Litterman, who was a recent podcast guest.

Gernot combined economics with sustainability before others did and kept at it, putting him at the forefront of environmental economics. As regular listeners know, I value experience and living by one's values, not just talking about it. How else can you gain relevant experience, credibility, integrity, and character? How else do you know what you're talking about?

Gernot has acted plenty. He talks about living more sustainably in his personal life along with his family. (As a side note, you wouldn't believe how many people tell me living sustainably with a family is impossible. It's not impossible for him, nor was it for all humans for 300,000 years. What makes it hard is marrying someone who doesn't share your values, which is another problem from sustainability, but not for Gernot).

He talks about how he renovated his loft here in New York City. He also led renovating the house he grew up in in Austria as a teenager.

He also shares an experienced environmental economist's view of the world and life. He speaks in plain English, not academic-speak, so I find him engaging and enlightening.

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