I grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, when a lot of things were at their worst. I was born in 1970 into a world of high inflation, skyrocketing interest rates, and — most upsetting to me — environmental degradation.
In my teens, I played a half-season of Little League Baseball. The field was directly above the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, and purple plumes of pollution billowed up past my position at first base, while batters regularly fouled balls over the fence and down into traffic. Surprisingly, nobody was ever killed. But given that this was New Jersey in the early ’80s, the response might have been: Relief at last!
Halfway through the season, though, the coaches stopped showing up, and the team quietly dissolved. Jersey didn’t kill things; it just let them die. And the thing that died most painfully and obviously was the environment. I grew up in an American wasteland, where open spaces like the Meadowlands were used as dumping grounds, and air pollution obscured the Empire State Building. Nearby Jersey City could have served as the model for Blade Runner’s sordid cityscapes.
And so I always thought I hated Jersey. I left for college and moved to Colorado after graduation. My mission in life was to fix the filth and destruction I grew up with. But over time, working in the emerging field of sustainability in the business world, I developed a new empathy for, and understanding of, my home state.
The truth was, I didn’t hate New Jersey; I hated America before environmental regulation. The Clean Air and Clean Water acts, the most significant environmental legislation in history, were passed in 1970 and 1972 respectively. 1973 saw the Endangered Species Act, the nation’s eleventh-hour acknowledgement that we had more than decimated our country’s flora and fauna, primarily for profit. But monumental laws like these take time to implement, and the government was still figuring out how to do that when I was a kid. When the laws finally took, things changed dramatically. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency, recognizing the extraordinary thing it was about to attempt, commissioned photographers to document the world before regulation, so we would remember. They knew that they were about to do a great thing. Faced with today’s even more daunting challenges — particularly in the form of climate change — do we have any such prescience or sense of urgency or confidence in our success? Given this new administration, do we even care?
The truth was, I didn’t hate New Jersey; I hated America before environmental regulation.
The EPA was created in 1970 to enforce some of these new laws. It exemplified both government’s power to improve people’s lives and their world, and the recognition that this was the only way to fix gigantic, systemic problems like air and water pollution. (The governing concept at work, that the law should be executed by an institution composed of experts and scientists, is now being directly challenged — even undone — by the Supreme Court.)
But then something changed in our approach to environmentalism. A movement toward neoliberal, free-market thinking — which downplays the need for regulation and governance — started in the ’40s and gathered steam under boosters like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan. Businesses faced with rigorous regulations devoutly swore: “Never again.” Instead of using government to solve environmental problems, business, political and academic leaders opted for the easier free-market approach, through voluntary action and with corporations in the lead. Business saw the opportunity to dodge culpability and ran with it, first through advertising that blamed consumers for plastic pollution (remember the “Crying Indian ads?”) and then when BP popularized the idea of the individual “carbon footprint,” which suggested that citizens, not a fossil fuel economy, were responsible for climate change.
This thinking wasn’t solely the province of business; to some extent, it is written in our bones. Thoreau’s writing was ultimately about taking personal action to repair the world, and Americans have always fancied themselves as rugged individualists, despite our collectivist history.
And then, along came climate change. By 1977, scientists at ExxonMobil knew exactly what our rampant combustion of fossil fuels were doing to the environment, and therefore to us. And in 1988, on a very hot summer day, NASA climatologist James Hansen warned Congress of the dire consequences we faced.
It was in this world that I began my career in the sustainable business movement at Rocky Mountain Institute. Its message was inspiring, even heart-racing: Big business was the only entity big enough, nimble enough, and motivated enough — by profit from energy savings and the bourgeoning field of clean energy — to meaningfully address the climate problem at scale. Conveniently, this approach meant that pesky government regulation or legislation would not be needed — or at least not be necessary — to solve the problem. The last gasp of big regulation was the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which halted the destruction of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants, thereby protecting the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. It was a great victory, ut it succeeded becauseb DuPont — the corporation whose chemicals created the problem in the first place — had developed a profitable solution. From there on, the problem was mostly in the hands of individuals, or business, the latter having been its cause in the first place.
The result was environmental small ball — recycling, picking up litter, regional land conservation, voluntary carbon reduction, target-setting but not target-achieving and other uncontroversial actions that could never put a dent in a problem like climate change. Nobody seemed to notice that it was delusional, like peeing on a forest fire. Major environmental nonprofits like the Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund even partnered with large corporations like Walmart, even though it was obvious that a few willing corporations, or green moms and dads, could never solve a problem of global scale. Especially at a time when few others cared.
I spent more than a decade doing the good work: changing light bulbs to produce returns on investment of 50% to 100% and enthusiastically talking about it, all while knowing it was just a drop in the bucket. The “green” buildings built to rigorous certification standards weren’t really that good and even if they were, stood as unicorns amid a universe of crap construction.
And then one day, during my lunchtime bike ride, I found myself mulling over the climate problem and my career as I pedaled a dirt road hemmed by Colorado’s West Elk Mountains. A word popped into my head, and I could not shake it: “complicity.” I considered all the actions that were considered best practice for corporations and even in the broader environmental movement: carbon footprints, emissions-reduction targets, third-party certifications, offsets. Then I did a thought experiment: I imagined what the fossil fuel industry would want business to do in order to prevent those influential, powerful, lobbyist- and money-backed organizations from hindering its chances to monetize the remaining fossil fuel reserves. The two lists were identical: Each action appeared meaningful and serious but failed to move the systems of regulation or tax policy that might actually make a difference. Over the 28 years I worked in the field, sustainable business and mainstream environmentalism were always complicit with the status quo, and nobody seemed to care. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures continued to rise and even accelerate. At what point did it become obvious that modern environmentalism wasn’t working?
Nobody seemed to notice that it was delusional, like peeing on a forest fire.
I’ve spent the second half of my career reckoning with this problem and experimenting, leveraging the power of business to drive the big systemic changes we need, including supporting sensible regulations — putting a price on pollution, for example, instead of focusing on operational tweaks and calling it good. Business has enough influence: The fossil fuel economy in which we live is the result of its lobbying. But countering the status quo is never easy; it’s controversial, difficult, even frowned upon. When you try to change an entire utility — as we did at Aspen One, where I worked for 26 years — instead of just “taking care of your own emissions,” people get mad at you, and other businesses nervously stand down. If you argue, as we did, that trade groups that slow-walk or ignore climate action should not receive funds, you are “not a team player.” If you engage in presidential politics, as we did in the last election, boards get very twitchy, very rapidly. But these actions are challenging precisely because they can drive real change. It is so much easier to keep your head down. At sustainable business conferences, the keynote speakers are from big corporations that practice the conventional complicity model — dink around with your own problems, avoid policies and movements — and they are considered the “very serious people” in the room, the “thought leaders,” so entrenched and powerful that they need not respond to growing criticism. Instead, you get asked: “Why aren’t you doing what they are doing?”
Critiques abound, however. Why is Salesforce — a green leader in many ways — continuing to pay dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposes the very climate legislation it claims to support? Microsoft talks about going carbon negative even as it uses its own AI technology to help fossil fuel companies find and exploit more oil and gas.
In The Road, Cormac McCarthy lauds the heartbreaking beauty of the world, even in its destruction: “if he were God,” he wrote, “he would have made the world just so and no different.” More and more people in my field, particularly young people, look at rising emissions and warming, and see only approaching catastrophe and failure, and feel only despair. They are acutely aware of the complicity underlying their continuing faith in half-measures. And this knowledge means that their generation cannot take this shimmering planet, this uncanny existence, for granted. Their collective voice and individual power — as employees and consumers — have weight and influence, if they choose to use it. And they are beginning to; recently, two young tech workers blew the whistle on Microsoft’s climate hypocrisy.
To inhabit a world of sublime grace, and to have condemned that world to destruction — that makes for a terrible kind of beauty. It has different effects on different people. It can paralyze us. Or it can make us aware both of agency and a fate we cannot accept and thereby offer us the chance of a lifetime: a task of infinite worth and meaning, an opportunity in repairing the world, to be like gods. Maybe it’s an offer we can’t refuse.
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