Leadership

Flying a private jet to a climate conference seems the height of being out of touch and acting counterproductively. If you feel that way, have you considered how much of your expenditures pays for extracting, polluting, and depleting? What fraction of your spending goes to filling your gas tank, flying, air conditioning, heating, industrial agriculture, buying things that require pollution to make like packaged food, takeout, houses, cars, nearly all meat, computer chips, and so on? Since plastic, flying, air conditioning, cars, and artificial fertilizers didn't exist more than about a century ago, human life requires none of those things. Since people in cultures without those things see those things and choose to resist imperialism, colonialism, and assimilation, humans can thrive without them. Yet most…

Yet again I heard someone saying individual action won't solve our environmental problems so we shouldn't even look at it, and this was a major public speaker. He repeated the idiocy that, as he saw it, BP creating the personal carbon footprint was a coup for distracting us from them. I'd love to see all these people who oppose individual action in 1850, saying, "you can't end slavery so don't free any slaves." No, I'm not equating pollution and slavery. I'm pointing out that living by your values is always a good choice, even if you can't fix all the world's problems yourself. Polluting kills people. If you do something that kills people and you don't want to kill people, you have to stop doing…

People respond to my disconnecting from the grid and all saying, "it's great that you're leading by example." I'm not leading by example. I don't believe leading by example works in sustainability. People have filled their hearts and minds with rationalizations and justifications why what they are doing is good, right, and normal for them. Seeing someone acting differently doesn't change their view. On the contrary, it often leads them to strengthen their beliefs about themselves. They respond, "I can see why you can avoid flying [or whatever more sustainable behavior], but I can't because I have to work for a living [or whatever rationalization and justification]." I lead through the Spodek Method: the technique to create a mindset shift followed by continual improvement. I…

I recently asked Is the greatest impediment to someone living more sustainably their resources, especially time and money? and formed the hypothesis that people with money and time are both the biggest cause of our environmental problems and resist changing the most. I'm just developing the approach and understanding, but predict and expect it will become a major point in where to focus our efforts. Going to the Amazon or coral reefs distracts us from who decides to extract, who pays for what polluting and depleting provide, who benefits from it, and whose behavior if changed would help the most. It seems obvious to me that rich people decide, pay, benefit, and could help most by changing. It's still a hypothesis, so I welcome challenges.…

This realization hit me this morning. It will seem counterintuitive, especially to people living in overdeveloped countries. The majority of people in them see people suffering from environmental destruction and want to focus on helping them. We should help them, but we should realize they aren't causing the problems. The more resources, especially time and money, someone has, the harder it is for them to stop polluting and depleting. Almost everyone who reads these words doesn't remotely live sustainably but cares and wants to do what they feel is the right thing. They see corporations and governments polluting more and think they're doing what they can. On the contrary, they are as much the problem as anyone and their resistance to see their contribution, how…

Evelyn took my Spodek Method workshop in the spring, then was the TA for the two summer sessions and will lead the fall workshop. Everything else you need to know about her background is in the video below. She's transforming herself and diving into sustainability, loving the challenges and changes. We approach it similarly but differently. Most of all, we enjoy each other's company and riffing off each other. We decided to start recording a livecast series and weren't going to wait for ourselves to figure out the software to start, so recorded our first episode. We'll stream soon. I don't think you'll hear anyone else approaching sustainability and sustainability leadership as we do. I think you'll enjoy it and future episodes. I wouldn't be…

The main places we learn about our environmental problems: scientists, educators, journalists, politicians, and activists. As a result, we look to them for solutions, along with engineers and entrepreneurs. I may be missing a field or two, but hope I got all. All play important roles, but none of those fields develop skills and experience to change behavior and culture. Culture is key because if we could magically transform all our environmental problems to pre-industrial levels---greenhouse gases, plastic, population, etc---but didn't change our culture, we'd return to this state and keep going. I used to get annoyed that people in those fields for not trying to address and act on the actual problem: to lead cultural change. It seemed the scientists felt if they just…

I posted last week At last, I dropped my electrical utility account. They sent me this bill off-sequence for a smaller amount than usual. Might it be my last electric bill ever? I don't know how far I should extrapolate. I'm sure life will change in ways I can't predict, maybe necessitating reconnecting to the grid. For now, at least, I'm enjoying the freedom, fun, and discovery of keeping my apartment disconnected from the electric grid. I could have disconnected years, maybe decades ago, though I'm not sure when portable batteries and solar panels made it this easy. Well, they're here now so others can do it too.

Bill McKibben wrote about economic growth yesterday in the New Yorker, asking "To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower? The degrowth movement makes a comeback." He referred to a 2020 New Yorker piece "Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?." The latter piece nearly exclusively looked at how economists looked at growth. Why should we listen to economists? Is it a science? Consider physics. In 1896, the renowned physicist William Thomson said about controlled heavier-than-air flight: I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. Thomson is better known today as Lord Kelvin for the title he held. If you've heard of the temperature…

You've read things like "Rich Countries Must Help Global South Transition to Post-Fossil-Fuel Future" with claims that "they see how we live, they know we got here by polluting, they have every right to want to live like us, and we have no right to deny them." People commonly frame the problem as needing to help them create energy systems that are clean, leapfrogging us like a country that never had many landlines going straight to cell phones. They'll go straight to solar and wind, which they wrongly call renewable and wrongly believe can sustain a nation's economy. Well, if you know the limitations of those power sources and how much they pollute, you know they can't replace fossil fuels and if we tried, we'd…

It's tempting to think because we feel we're acting, or that someone else is, that we're acting effectively. I'll share a post I responded to, then my response to it on a discussion board of people supporting degrowth. The other person's post I've been a nut case environmentalist before the first Earth Day and sported a ZPG sticker on my Supervan at the time. A couple months ago I would have agreed we're up shits creek. Tesla Master Plan 3 was unveiled showing a clear path to a fossil fuel free world using 1% of global GDP for 10 years. A white paper followed giving the plan in fine detail, it's a must read for anyone who wants to know what the real solutions need…

In sustainability, most people I talk to see living more sustainable as making their lives worse. That is, when I ask people if they can imagine a world where everyone lives sustainably, they can't. If I ask them to try, they think of dystopic or Stone Age wastelands. Many only see sustainability as not seeing family or exacerbating inequities (it does the opposite, polluting and depleting cause those things). If we think a path will lead to failure, we'll sabotage ourselves before failing. In sports, we call it choking. If everyone thinks they'll choke, the team will likely choke. Teammates will sabotage the team's success. That situation describes our culture today. A way out is for someone like a coach or leader to help people…