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Author and global thought leader, Hunter Lovins, discusses her new book, “A Finer Future,” in which a hopeful pathway, grounded in actual developments world-wide, is laid out for achieving a sustainable world. Integrated bottom lines, the helix of managing a sustainable organization, growing “well-being economy alliances,” and the “baking in” of sustainability objectives are among the keys Lovins articulates. Her forward-looking book, with chapters like: “Moving Money from Harm to Healing,” “Triumph of the Sun: The Mother of All Disruptions,” and “Growing a Finer Future” on carbon farming, paints a picture of the future that is possible for all of us to achieve, and the many organizations, thought leaders, and steps being taken all over the planet to get there. Referencing corporate leadership like Unilver’s commitment to 100% renewable energy, investment opportunities like the Fossil Fuel Free Exchange Traded Fund (CHGX), led by CEO Donna Morton, and the thought leadership of Michael Pirson’s “Humanistic Management,” and Kate Raworth’s “Donought Economics,” Hunter weaves together a fabric of hope, expertise, optimism and realism to inspire us all.
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth Community’s Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast Series.
Today we have visiting with us Hunter Lovins.
Hi Hunter.
Howdy.
Great to see you.
So good to be with you.
Hunter is president of Natural Capitalism Solutions.
She is the author of 16 books, including Climate Capitalism, Natural Capitalism and her most recent book, A Final Future.
She has hundreds of professional papers published in Business and Academic Journals
and is a teacher of Sustainable Business Management at Bard College in New York.
Hunter is also a CEO of Change Finance, which has released the first truly fossil fuel free exchange traded fund,
which you can find with the ticker CHGX.
Hunter, it’s so great to have you here today.
Thank you for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me.
Well, I am just so excited to share with our audience that you just recently published this new book, A Final Future.
And it does such a masterful job of presenting the real pickle that we’re in,
but the fact that we have incredible solutions right other fingertips.
And it leaves us in a very hopeful place.
And I’m just curious if you can share what was the impetus behind this?
What caused you to want to land on such a hopeful note?
A lot of people are saying there is no hope.
It’s open.
And don’t do this because it’ll put you in a very bad mood.
But you can Google near-term human extension and find what purports to these science,
saying that humans go extinct within ten years.
I think that’s the most profoundly irresponsible position that you can take.
We know how to soul hold a problem spacing.
As we have the technologies, we simply have to implement it.
And I was in an argument with some people who were essentially saying it’s over.
I said, it’s not.
And they said, prove it.
So four of us got together.
My colleague Stuart Wallace, who for many years ran a new economic foundation in the UK.
Under Ziegman, who is very active in climate policy in the Swedish government,
John Fullerton, founder of Capitol Institute for 18 years,
at J.P. Morgan left his managing director.
And we pulled together the best of the science, of the policy,
of what people are really doing on the ground around the world to solve the scary problems
like climate change.
And profit thereby.
For example, we can solve half the climate crisis.
If a colleague of mine, Tony Siva, is correct.
Tony says inevitably, by 2030, the world will be 100% renewable power.
Because of four things, fall in the cost of solar, fall in the cost of storage batteries,
the electric car, and the driverless car.
Shenzhen China today just announced that their bustle is now 100% electric.
You may have seen that General Motors recently closed six manufacturing facilities
or announced that it will, because they’re getting ready for the electric car, the autonomous car.
California has already met its 2020 goal of renewable power.
So they said, why don’t we go 100%.
So they did.
Here in Colorado, we’ve just elected a governor pledging to go 100%.
Recently, the utility, our co-loving utility, put out a bit.
Who can give us a lot of 100 megawatts of power, any source, any price?
The lowest fossil bid, four cents a kilowatt hour.
Wind a bit below two, solar a bit above two.
Wind plus storage plus.
Wind plus solar plus storage.
Three cents.
Amazing.
Cheaper than natural gas, which here or for, had been the cheapest.
And not as marginally cheaper, cheaper by the security.
And these were median bid.
So there were bids that were even cheaper than that.
Everywhere in the world today, renewables are cheaper than fossil energy.
Now, if honey is right, we will solve half the climate crisis that profit.
But we will also see the dissolution and value of oil, gas, coal, uranium,
nuclear, the utility industry, the auto industry, the banks of the whole paper
and pension funds and insurance companies that are invested in it.
It’s going to be the mother of all disruptions.
So we, we solve half the climate crisis and crash the global economy all at once.
We are in very interesting times.
What this says is we’re going to reinvent everything.
How we do business is going to change, which is to say,
yeah, look for entrepreneurs.
Start-up companies, young people have the opportunity to their lifetime.
Most people grow up in a time in history when things are going to be pretty much the way they always have been.
That’s not true now.
Right.
So just enormous opportunity.
Now, we solve the other half of the climate crisis through regenerative agriculture.
Folk Lake gave brown.
It was a corn soybean commodity farmer in the Dakotas that was going broke.
So I’m going broke.
I’m going to do something different.
First, he went to no till.
Stop inverting the soil.
Then he planted cover crops.
Deep-rooted plants that took nutrients deep into the ground.
Then he brought on animal impact.
Cow, sheep, goats, pigs.
They ate the cover crops, so he no longer has to grow feed for them.
They’re hooves chop up the soil.
They fertilize it.
And he has them on it only enough to disturb the soil.
And then he moves them to another pasture and another pasture.
Very light bison used to move across the great plains.
Desperque because of predators.
Now we do it with electric fences.
And it was that co-evolution of animals and grasslands
that gave us the 10 feet of thick black soil,
a pine year’s found when they came and first came across the great plains.
Gabe has gone in some of his pastures from a little over 1% soil organic matter to,
in some over 11%.
He’s taking carbon out of the air, putting it back in the soil,
where it’s a nutrient.
And he’s now wildly profitable.
So just with those two examples, renewable energy,
regenerative agriculture, we know how to solve the climate crisis.
And in the book, we profile how to transform finance,
the corporate sector, energy, agriculture,
and the policy measures that can address such issues
as the crushing inequality that we now have.
We’re now more unequal than we were before the Great Depression.
And as Thomas Piketty showed in his book, Capcom in the 21st century,
these levels of inequality drive to economic collapse.
So we have a choice.
We can crash the goal of economy,
or we can build the greatest prosperity humankind has ever known.
And that’s what we’re trying to do in the book, is set out.
How we can do this, what the role of entrepreneurs are,
let’s start up companies.
A mentor for a group called unreasonable.
With a name like that, I’d have to be a part of it.
And we bring young entrepreneurs from around the world.
I was just over in the UK working with some young people from Africa.
And from the UK, from all across Europe, in June,
I was in Hong Kong with young entrepreneurs from around Asia, from India.
And everywhere you go in the world, people are hungry for this opportunity
to personally make a difference, to make a good living.
And by doing that, to solve the narrowly problems.
Yeah, it was so exciting and so hopeful.
One of the things that strikes me with some of my friends and colleagues around the United States is that
there’s a dearth of good news in this culture in particular.
And I think, you know, a part of the reason we want to have these kinds of discussions
is to share with folks that there is so much underway already that is caused for great hope.
And I’m struck that in the chapter on corporate transformation,
there’s a sense that this is well underway.
And maybe you could speak to that a little bit.
I was on the phone yesterday with a major international company, household brand name.
And then they said, help us transform.
We know that we’re a company of the last century.
We want to be a company that is committed to efficiency in our workplace,
so good quality, good quality work for our workers,
and enhancing the quality of our communities.
That’s a pretty good vision.
So I walked through tools we have, things like the helix of managing a sustainable organization,
where we lay out, what are the activities that a company can do
as it just starts into the journey, as it spreads energy efficiency,
resource productivity throughout its operations,
as it commits to redesign how it makes and delivers products and services,
using approaches like the circular economy or biodynamic rate.
And then how it commits to being a regenerative company,
regenerating human and natural capital, both for itself and for its community.
They were so exciting to know that there are pragmatic things that a company can do
that will cut its cost, enhance its profitability, and engage its workforce.
I cited to them the numbers from Gowel Healthways that an engaged workforce
is 18% more productive, 16% more profitable than a seller workforce
in an identical industry where the workforce is unengaged.
We know from groups like the Economist Intelligence Unit,
notably Conservative Outfit, that one of the best ways to engage your workforce
is to enable them to be implementing more sustainable practices as part of their day job.
Now a lot of companies will have, we’re going to celebrate Earth thing,
we’re going to plant it free.
If instead you say to the workers, look around you,
look at the ways in which we use resources, the ways that we create,
any toxic that we may have, and let’s work together to eliminate the toxic,
to eliminate the waste, waste is unsalable production.
You pay to make it, you’re not driving any value from it.
You eliminate if you cut your costs.
So you start with those easy savings.
Those savings then pay to get progressively more ambitious about,
for example, committing to go 100% renewably powered.
There are now hundreds of companies that have pledged and are delivering
on becoming 100% renewable.
I work, for example, with you, Oliver, they’ve committed to this.
And when you make that kind of a commitment,
and then you say as, as is true of many companies,
we don’t know how to do this, but let’s work together to figure it out.
Now you’re asking your people to become a part of the solution.
And they realize, when they go to work, they’re working on what they want
for their families, for their community,
they’re building a finer future.
What an exciting place to be working.
And what a great way to attract and retain talent, right?
It’s just an incredible win-win.
You’ve heard the phrase, the triple bottom line.
So it’s coined by great sustainability worker John Alkington.
For our audience, we might just mention that this is referring to businesses
that are in addition to financial performance looking at impacts
on social and natural capital.
And we talk about capital, yeah.
Planet and profit makes the triple bottom line.
Well, John has just done a product recall on that phrase.
Because he realized it doesn’t work terribly well.
What we’ve come up with is this concept called integrated bottom line.
Which is to say, if you ask a business to have three books,
three sets of accounting, if times are tough,
what are they going to shed?
Yeah, people with black.
But if I can show them that the rent to profitability is to behave responsibly
to people on planet, now it’s baked in.
It’s core to their profitability.
And we’ve counted 13 ways in which behaving more responsibly
is just better business.
So for example, you cut your costs.
You also cut your risks.
If you’re not using toxic material, your workers are not going to get as sick.
They’re not going to sell you.
Your liabilities go down.
Now you are a more appealing investment target.
The whole impact investment community is going to look at you and say,
well, responsible company, I want to be part of that.
You attract and retain the best talent.
And that’s worth an enormous amount of money.
Bob Willard has figured that could be as much as 10% add to your profitability,
not having to replace or retrain workers.
You better brand yourself.
You better manage your supply chain.
Why did Walmart announce its green initiatives?
Trust me, it was not out of goodness of their heart.
When Walmart goes green, you know there’s a business case.
In their case, they want it to better manage their supply chain.
They have at least 100,000 suppliers.
They have no idea how many they actually have.
By publishing the Walmart Sustainability Scorecard,
they were better able to say, these are suppliers from whom we want to buy.
These are the ones that will just let go, by the way.
Question number one on that scorecard.
Do you measure your carbon footprint?
Question number two.
Do you report to the Carbon Disclosure Project?
The Who?
CDT is a group of kids.
Who, about 15 years ago, just because,
it’s set out to the Financial Times 500, 500 business companies on their
little survey saying, what’s your carbon footprint?
Now, for a few years, everybody ignored them.
I mean, who died and made them gone.
But they’re backed by institutional investors who want to know
what a company’s carbon footprint is.
And so now, essentially, every major company on Earth reports to CDT.
And CDT has shown that the companies that are leading,
in measuring and managing their carbon footprint,
have 18% higher return on investment than the laggers.
67% higher than companies that say, carbon, we don’t care.
This is better business.
Notice I’m not talking about saving the solar banners.
Right.
Although it will help do that as well.
This is simply better business.
And so we are seeing around the world,
the smartest companies are becoming the most responsible companies.
What an incredible transformation.
My goodness.
I’d like to switch gears just a little bit and ask you,
you know, I know you have a lot of agree.
And I’m happy to know a handful of lawyers and friends of a few.
Boy, the path that you have gone down in your career
is not the typical path of a lawyer.
And I’m just curious, how did that happen from law school
all the way through to what you’re doing now,
inspiring and impacting folks all over the world?
What was that that got you on that path?
Well, I’m not sure I had a whole lot of choice.
My mother worked in the co-fields
with Child Out of Lewis organizing mine workers.
My father helped mentor,
says our chalvez and Martin King,
who were around the house when I was growing up.
So trying to craft a finer future is sort of the family business.
I took a lot of agree because I believe that would be
the best way to drive change.
Now, blessings on the good environment of lawyers,
good social justice lawyers.
But I decided that’s not the most effective way to drive change.
So I quit, became a forester,
started doing environmental education,
helped build a little group in California called tree people,
which was just still there,
still planning trees and doing environmental education.
Tracked from that into energy policy,
helped create a little group call rocking out an institute,
ran that for 20 years till they fired
made created natural capitalism,
and here we are.
One of the way helped create a couple of business schools
in sustainable management,
now to each at the board MBA,
in which this stuff is baked into every class.
Most, if you’re Harvard,
you will spend your business school career reading cases.
Generally written by academics who were not there when
even if it’s a case about something with sustainability,
the academic typically changes the facts
because they want to make some point.
And I’ve asked them, I was there.
That’s not how it happened.
Why didn’t you tell the truth?
Oh, I wanted to make this point.
At board, all of our faculty are practitioners.
This is what we do as our day job.
And then we teach.
It’s what’s called a hybrid program.
So we come together four days a month
and our face to face.
It’s like an intensive retreat
then for the rest of the month classes are online.
And then a month later we come back together.
It’s a four on two year MBA.
I think it’s a better way to learn.
And our students are now taking jobs as
tens of sustainability,
working with the leading sustainability research groups,
going into big corporations,
helping to run the badass change agent NGOs,
incredible, it seems like it’s a much more hands-on
and impactful approach to that education.
When they arrive,
first day of their business school career,
they enter a class called NYC lab.
We use the city of New York as a living laboratory
and they become a consultant taught by Laura Gettman
of businesses for social responsibility
from one of the best sustainability consulting groups.
We learn how to be a consultant.
In most schools we’ll say,
oh, go play a traffic kid,
go get an internship.
We actually teach people how to do this work.
I teach principalism sustainable management,
then a course on political economy,
globalization,
certain international issues,
how you do this stuff in developing countries
and what’s going on with big trade flows
and why things like the ideology of neoliberalism
is impoverishing all of us
and why things like John Fullerton’s regenerative economics
is a much better approach.
I was just on the phone this morning
with a group called Wellbeing Economy Alliance
which Fullerton and I helped to create a long list of laws.
This is an international group that now has about 70 members
of the leading new economy groups
from around the world,
all of us working to build a new narrative
of an economy and service life.
And it is what Mr. Fullerton called for,
an economy that works for 100% of humanity.
It’s kind of stuff.
One of the things I really appreciate
about the book, The Finder Future
and the approach it takes to discussing all of this
is it takes just a bit of time and space
to talk about how we got to where we are in terms of
what was set forth toward the end of World War II.
And it’s my sense working with various business leaders,
various folks and policy and other parts of our society.
Many of us almost hate for granted
as if they were natural laws,
the rules of the so-called economic game
that we’re all planning by.
And it seems to me as more and more of us realize
my goodness, these aren’t natural laws,
these are very much human constructs.
We begin to understand probably more
some of the challenges and some of the opportunity.
So I’m wondering, could you just give us a quick overview
of what happened at the end of World War II?
Sure.
My friend Bernard Lanter,
says humans are an interesting species.
We create stories and view them
with our own reality.
And then we forget that we made the story
and think, oh, this is a natural law.
It’s not.
Economics is an art of craft.
It’s not a science.
We’re in the mess we’re in
because in 1947, 36 men gathered
at a hotel outside Montreux Switzerland,
a place called Montpellerin,
and yeah, they were all men.
Now, 1947, Europe’s in Rillens,
Ludwig von Mises is a poll
that what national socialism has done, trash Europe.
Frederick Hayack is scared to death
of the rise in the east of Soviet collectivism.
And Milton Friedman believes that the individual
is the only legitimate economic actor.
They and 33 of their buddies argued for 10 days
and built the intellectual foundations,
which they call neo-liberalism.
And their story is very simple.
Humans are greedy bastards,
but that’s okay because the market is perfect.
And in a perfect market,
you against me will somehow aggregate
to the greater good.
No, whoa, it hasn’t.
We are on the edge of system-wide collapse.
Think of Attenborough at the climate conference
in Poland released a statement saying,
we are looking at the end of civilization.
And this is what neo-liberalism has wrong.
This belief that money is the only thing that matters.
And if you’re rich,
it’s a sign that you’re blessed by God.
The old Calvinism is not true.
But they were very effective
at putting this ideology together.
They also walked into a brilliant storyteller,
a woman named Don Rand,
who wrote that letter, which remains
to the extent that our Cheeto and Chief Reads,
this is one of his books,
Paul Ryan,
it’s one of his favorite books.
Alan Greenspan credits that book
with his mental model.
Until 2008, when he said,
the market isn’t working like it’s supposed to.
And he said, I am God’s name.
These guys truly believe this narrative.
The trouble is it’s bad science.
The evolutionary biologists now tell us,
humans are not inherently greedy bastards.
When the first pre-humans came out of the trees in Africa,
we were naked,
our claws aren’t worth much,
our teeth are pretty inadequate,
we’re not as fast as a lion.
And there were many tribes of these pre-humans,
most of them went extinct.
Our ancestors were down to fewer
in number than the now endangered gorillas.
But they survived,
and you and I are here today,
because they cared more for the good of the whole
than any one of them cared for him or herself.
We know this from the DNA,
from the archaeology,
they cared for elderly,
they cared for disabled.
If you’re in a survival of the meanest bastard,
you don’t take elderly and crippled people along with you.
You said that.
Altruism, say these evolutionary biologists,
is not a flaw.
It’s who we are.
And it’s why we love Facebook.
It’s why we love people.
It’s why we people watch.
We love each other.
And we care about each other.
And this is the beginnings of a new discipline
called Humanistic Management.
My colleague Dr. Michael Pearson,
professor at Fordham,
has built the International Humanistic Management Network
of business teachers around the world
who are teaching a new way of doing business
based on how do we enhance the well-being of us all?
How do we care?
How do we work together?
This approach, we think,
is the basis of this new narrative.
Regenerative economics that John Fordham has laid out,
Humanistic Management,
the best of these evolutionary sciences,
the understanding that what people want,
and we know this because if you ask them,
it’s what they tell you,
the world around,
what people want us to be happy.
And they want a sense of belonging.
And they want a sense that they are contributing
to something more than themself,
something bigger.
So we think this is the basis of a new narrative
of a new economics.
And this is bubbling up everywhere,
whether it be Kate Rayworth’s brilliant book,
Donut Economics.
How do you live below the planetary boundaries
by the love of the human minimums,
the sweet spot that she calls the Donut?
Groups of young economic students,
a group called rethinking economics.
There are literally hundreds of these groups now
around the world all beginning to coalesce
around this new narrative.
My colleague, Dr. Katherine Trebek,
is working with governments.
She was just in Korea at a meeting
on well-being put on by the organization
of economic development cooperation.
OECD, the Economic Cooperation and Development,
on well-being.
OECD now has a metric of well-being.
And you can go on their Better Life website
and see how your country compares
to other countries in different aspects of well-being.
Beautiful.
These WE governments are looking at can we shift
from keeping national systems of account
from GDP, gross domestic product,
which is just a measure of the flow
through the economy of money and stuff,
to metrics of well-being.
And when governments start to do this,
then they make very different policy decisions.
They begin to hear more about what’s happening
at the community level.
Are people healthy?
Are they happy?
Are they well-educated?
We know that we live on a little planet.
We cannot continue to grow the throughput
of money and stuff.
But we can keep growing well-being.
How happy you are, how well-educated you are,
music culture arts.
Well, come on, we’ve got to be serious.
We need an economy.
We’ve started doing some figuring here in Colorado.
But what is our economy?
We’re building this regenerative hub
in what we call the Upper South Plab.
Quarge ship.
Just basically the Denver Motor for Collins area.
People say, oh, we’re out extracting industries in economy.
You got to have oil, gas, mining, timber,
conventional agriculture.
Actually, those are dying industries.
The natural foods industry provides four times
as many jobs as all of those combined.
Outdoor industries, growing industry,
culture, art is a vibrant part of the Colorado economy.
Education, clean technology, start-up entrepreneurship.
These are the real economy of Colorado
and they’re regenerative.
They are what’s making us better off.
They’re not polluting.
They’re not damaging to the ecosystem.
They’re harmful to the people who are working in those professions.
They make us enjoy higher quality of life.
So this is what we ought to be growing.
And we ought to then be pruning away the legacy industries
that are part of the problem.
One of the things I love about this in message
and the way that you’re presenting it is that
as we make this transition over the coming years,
we are talking about an opportunity for so many of us
from all walks and backgrounds and places all over
to how it improved the quality of life.
And I’m curious.
I wonder if more and more of us understood that.
We might even more quickly get on board
and participate in this transition that’s already underway.
As I said, we’re hoping at a time
of incredible economic dislocation
in which the old industries are crumbling in front of us.
And it’s important that we ask ourselves,
how do we ensure quality livelihoods for everyone?
How do we transition in a way that brings justice, equity,
to the people who gave us the world that we have today?
So that we enable people to retrain
to get good jobs in these new industries
or if, as some people say,
artificial intelligence will end most jobs.
We’re all going to be out of work.
Well, then we need new systems
to ensure that we still have a high quality of life.
So my colleague, Dr. Randall Ray,
teaches Bard has a proposal called Guarantee Jobs,
which I guess now the Democrats are starting to pick up.
And he says, the government ought to pay any nonprofit
and I believe local government who can hire people
to do the jobs that are needed.
And $15 an hour, at least, full benefits.
Health care, retirement, child care.
Now the corporates will have to pay the same amount
if they want to attract good talent.
You’ve just done away with poverty.
You’re well on your way to reversing inequality.
And you’re putting money in the pockets of people.
And it is that spending of the money
that then generates economic health within the society.
This thing will pay for itself.
And it will provide a very high quality of life for us all.
So check it out. Guarantee Jobs.
Absolutely.
Randall Ray.
Let me mention that to our audience,
this is the Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast Series.
Brought to you by the Y on Earth community.
And today we are visiting with Hunter Levin’s author
of a finer future.
And for folks who are interested in connecting with you
Hunter via Twitter, your handle is at HLevin’s.
And folks can also get themselves copies of the book
at ourfindersfuture.com.
Or your favorite local bookstore.
Support independent bookstores.
Beautiful. Support your local bookstore.
And for folks who are interested in learning more about the work
you’re doing generally around the world,
they can go to natcapsolutions.org.
We’ll have all the spellings in our show notes.
And just want to mention as well that for our audience
as a thank you for tuning in.
If you’d like to check out any of the Y on Earth audiobooks
or e-books you can go to Yoners.org and use the code podcast
for a little discount on those.
So we encourage you to check all this out.
And I really encourage you to check out a finer future.
It’s a wonderful book.
Packed with information presented in such a way that it will quickly
give you an education on where we’re at and where we’re heading.
And how you can plug in and get involved with that.
One of the things that really jumped out at me Hunter
in reading a finer future is this parable of the caterpillar.
And I think it’s so important for folks to hear this.
I’m wondering if you might summarize,
what is this parable of the caterpillar?
How does this relate to us?
If you’re ever seeing a caterpillar,
throwing along the ground,
munching away on a leaf,
look at a happy little critter.
Until one day, something drives it to attach to a branch
and begin an incredible transformation.
Now, our happy little caterpillar,
crawling around the ground,
has no earthly idea what sticks in the happened to it.
You ever broke in one of these priceless parts?
There’s no worm in there.
There’s no butterfly in there.
It’s just good.
And if our world feels gooey right now,
maybe it’s because we’re in the midst
of this profound transformation.
With the caterpillar, if you’re patient,
it starts to change.
And something whole week different starts to emerge.
It’s weak at first.
I talk to people who, seeing the butterflies,
crawling to break out of the chrysalis,
and tell them that they break the chrysalis away.
And what results is this weak, crippled,
little creature.
It has to fight.
Part of what gives the butterfly the ability to fly
is the fight.
Is the struggle.
Is breaking the chrysalis apart
and then spreading its wings
and letting the sun and the wind dry it.
So I ask people,
given that we know how to solve all of the problems facing us,
do you want to be a part of it?
Absolutely.
Then let’s fly.
Love it.
Hunter, thank you so much for joining us today.
It’s such a pleasure talking to you.
Erin, let’s let you.
Thank you.
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