In our realm, we are fortunate to have so many young people who are eager to roll up their sleeves and get to work in sustainability, climate, and environmental work. Problem is, they’re having trouble getting traction right now.

There are conversations ad nauseam about the perils on the employment horizon. And the negative consequences of these changes extend beyond individual well-being and even societal welfare. If we want real progress on climate and the environment, we need talented young people entering the field across every discipline—policy, finance, operations, science, communications, law, engineering, and entrepreneurship. The work simply can not scale without the next generation.

We should do more than just wring our hands. And we can.

Jodi put it best:

“... to anyone who has achieved a measure of success, authority or power: Together we must reeestablish the idea that older people are advocates and protectors for those beginning their careers. In an era when young people are being treated like meatware in an anonymous employment algorithm, we need to bring them all the wisdom, encouragement and connections we can.”

As I shared on LinkedIn, this is a call to action. It’s time to commit to helping young people find their place.

Sustainability professionals (like me): This is part of our job. Almost all of us have benefited from people who gave us early breaks, made introductions, or shared honest advice. I certainly did. I remember vividly and with a real sense of gratitude the people who helped me when I was trying to transition from Wall Street to the environmental community. Now it is my turn—and I would suggest many of our turns—to do the same.

That can mean brainstorming with younger people about where they might fit best, introducing them to organizations, flagging internships and entry points, reviewing resumes, practicing interviews, and advising them on how best to hustle and network even when the job search feels discouraging. It can mean opening a door, making a call, forwarding a name, or spending 20 minutes giving advice that may change someone’s trajectory.

If you’re not sure where to start, think about your organization and what it might position you to do. For example, I really admire that the newsletters My Climate Journey and Climate Tech VC list entry-level job openings and meet-ups for young professionals in our field. It’s a natural thing for a newsletter, presumably an effort but not too big a lift, and it is quite valuable—the trifecta. I’m always directing young people to those two newsletters.

I know many of you are already doing these types of things enthusiastically. If so, and you have some good advice for those of us who want to do more, please share them in the comments section below.

And if you are willing to share your guidance, don’t keep it a secret. Tell people on social media that you are happy to help. And if you have some advice that seems to work well, post those suggestions too. Here’s one example from me.

Younger people aspiring toward enviro careers: Let us know what you need. How can we help you? We want you to succeed and have a big impact. Please tell us how you think we can help most.

Also, please remember: Not everyone you seek out can engage with you. I’ll admit I can’t always keep up with requests like this on a timely basis, so please don’t be discouraged. And of course remember you’re never obliged to follow our advice. (But it’s probably a good idea to consider advice before you discard it.)

Helping our youth succeed is not charity; it’s an investment. Every strong career that gets launched in our field pays dividends in the form of expanded capacity to solve problems we must address. That’s a stake worth taking.

Onward,

I just wrapped up a week of business travel in Japan. Jet lag was having an impact, and I was also distracted by some personal challenges. Then I found myself checking news updates on my phone much more than usual because of the war in Iran. The social media completely knocked me off balance, and — although I generally think of myself as a rather focused person and reader— I was surprised by how hard a time I had concentrating on just about anything. I’ve mentioned this to some friends, who reported feeling similarly. My experience was unsettling. It was also a wake-up call.

That we’re living in the age of distraction is hardly news, but we all seem to be coming to the same conclusion: it’s getting markedly worse. Now there’s a non-profit trying to do something about it. The Friends of Attention is “a loose, informal network of creative collaborators, colleagues, and actual friends…committed to attention activism.” Among their first official initiatives is a new book that we highly recommend: Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement.

Collaboratively written, Attensity! is part manifesto, part argument, and part call to action.

The book pins much of the blame for our current situation on the social media companies that are hijacking and monetizing our attention for profit, calling for active resistance against them. Notably, they frame this not as a private struggle but a civic one. In other words, if we want healthier minds, stronger communities, and a more functional public life, we need to not only manage our individual screen times, we also need to push back hard on the social media mind grab.

What’s notable is the book’s spirit. It’s not a detached academic study or conventional self-help book. It’s an energetic attempt to move people toward action—albeit one that can feel a little repetitive and slogan-driven—to treat attention as something worth defending in public, not just managing on our own. And it’s successful. The authors make the argument feel public, urgent, and accessible. Much like the best tactics of the environmental movement itself, they speak plainly, aim wide, and try to mobilize collective action rather than just win a debate. That’s why I think environmentalists can learn from the book.

No discipline is exempt from the impact of our collective attention deficit. For environmentalists, we fear that cell phones and social media significantly disrupt the slower, deeper attention needed to take in nature fully. That matters because helping people learn to love the natural world is one of the best ways to build support for protecting it. The risk feels especially serious for young people, who may never fully learn how restorative and awe-inspiring nature can be. We should all help them to put down their phones and spend quality time outdoors.

Readers, check out Attensity!, and ask yourself, what is your attention worth? Let’s act accordingly. And please do share with us the lessons you see in it for environmentalists.

Onward,

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday that should stop every nonprofit leader in their tracks. It reported on the increasing “billionaire backlash” to the Giving Pledge.

As you likely know, the Giving Pledge was launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett to encourage the ultra‑wealthy to give away at least half their fortunes. Since then more than 250 families from 30 countries have signed on. But the once‑trendy commitment is now facing open skepticism, with some early signers quietly “modifying” their promises and at least one retracting his pledge altogether.

That’s deeply concerning. If the most public and high‑profile giving initiative of our time is stalling out, that disillusionment could easily seep down to major donors, mid‑level givers, and even everyday contributors.

Some may instinctively write off this news. Perhaps it calls to mind specific billionaires, of whom they are not fond. Or perhaps they are quick to default to ideological lines, assuming the backtracking is reflective of the pushback on “woke” causes such as DEI and ESG, or donors no longer feeling pressured into funneling money through a pipeline to “left‑wing nonprofits chosen by Bill Gates.”

But it would be a mistake to dismiss all donor frustration as culture‑war noise. I submit that we should carefully consider this feedback—it tells us something important about how some donors are reassessing philanthropy.

Many of the billionaires committed to the Giving Pledge made their fortunes as entrepreneurs and investors. They are used to asking hard questions about the rate of return on their business investments. It’s likely that they are starting to ask the same hard questions about their giving: “What, precisely, is my philanthropy accomplishing? Why does progress feel so slow compared with the urgency of the challenges?”

That instinct is healthy. Nonprofits should be as focused on outcomes as their donors are, and they should welcome, rather than resist, rigorous scrutiny of impact.

This does not come easy for non-profits. In business, there is a steady stream of signals—sales, profit margins, stock prices, market shares, analyst reports, as well as detailed comparisons to peer organizations—indicating whether a strategy is working and whether course corrections are needed.

Consider the famous “New Coke” fiasco. When Coca‑Cola made the blockbuster decision to replace its flagship drink with a new formula—“New Coke”—the customer backlash was immediate, brutal, and relentless. They hated the new product, hoarded the old one, organized protests, and flooded Coca‑Cola with thousands of complaints a day. So it’s not surprising that the company reversed course after less than 3 months. The system worked because business is wired for feedback—customers, markets, and shareholders all yell when you get it wrong.

Nonprofits typically operate in a very different environment. Beneficiaries often have little power or voice, there is no stock price, and “sales data” (like the number of people served) can be quite misleading about real impact.

A major strategic misstep at an NGO almost never triggers the equivalent of a New Coke‑style revolt. General underperformance is rarely even noticed. An organization can muddle along for years, raising money on a compelling narrative while never being forced to acknowledge or confront disappointing results.

What Non-Profits Should Do

When I led one of the world’s largest nonprofits (our annual budget was just under $1 billion at the time), I learned that we needed to create for ourselves the feedback loops that markets give businesses for free.

Here are four key things nonprofits should do to pull this off:

1. Set ambitious, concrete five‑year goals. These should be inspiring enough to motivate giving, but specific enough that everyone–the non-profit staff as well as the tough‑minded donors–can assess whether you have achieved your goals or not.

2. Be clear about capital needs. Estimate the full amount of capital required to achieve those goals over the five-year period, including overhead, talent, and the inevitable course corrections. Lowballing budgets may help close a gift today, but it almost guarantees underperformance tomorrow.

3. Build and upgrade the team intentionally. Be explicit about all of the capabilities you need: leadership, technical expertise, local knowledge, data, and evaluation. And be willing to reorganize or recruit if the current team can’t get you to the stated goals.

4. Set annual milestones and publicly report performance against them every year.

   Indicate clearly when you fall short and why, as well as what you are changing in response. This is usually the closest thing nonprofits can build to an internal “market signal.”

Handled this way, a major grant becomes a shared plan rather than a leap of faith. Donors see where you are headed, how you will get there, and real-time evidence over the life of the project will tell both sides whether the strategy is working and/or whether new steps are needed to achieve success.

What Donors Should Do

The Giving Pledge, large private foundations like Ford, and newer platforms like the Bezos Earth Fund have enormous leverage to reset expectations across the sector. They should treat the steps listed above as a requirement, not a nice-to-have. This would not only improve accountability to donors; it would also give nonprofits better feedback for their own decision‑making and help the public see where philanthropy is actually moving the needle.

The billionaire backlash against the Giving Pledge is a warning sign: donors are losing confidence that their money is driving real results. The entire sector should treat this as a wake-up call. Adopt a more transparent, performance‑oriented culture, and let’s take impact as seriously as any investor takes financial return.

Onward,

Instead, I want to look at the war through a lens we return to again and again at The Instigator: the wisdom of decarbonization.

For years now in this newsletter, we’ve argued that it’s a mistake to see climate action as a kind of expensive moral luxury whose only justification is the climate emergency—though if avoiding climate catastrophe were the only reason to decarbonize, that would already be more than enough.

The past few weeks of chaos in energy markets and shipping lanes have once again underscored a simpler, harder‑to‑ignore point: fossil‑fuel dependence is strategically dumb.

1. Decarbonization is a health policy.

Let’s start far away from the battlefield. Burning fossil fuels doesn’t just heat the planet; it poisons the air we breathe. When coal, oil, and gas are burned, they emit fine particulates and other pollutants that drive heart disease, stroke, asthma, and a long list of respiratory problems. Studies show that when air pollution is reduced, health improves surprisingly quickly: hospitalizations and premature deaths fall, and those gains can be very large even over a short time horizon.

Climate and health researchers now routinely talk about “co‑benefits”: if you cut carbon by shifting away from fossil fuels, you almost automatically cut the air pollutants that come from the same smokestacks, tailpipes, and boilers. In many analyses, the dollar value of the health benefits from cleaner air alone can offset a big chunk – or even all – of the costs of decarbonization.

So when we talk about decarbonizing power, transport, industry, and buildings, we’re not just talking about avoiding some abstract future harm in 2050. We’re talking about fewer kids in emergency rooms for asthma, fewer elderly people dying from heart and lung disease, and fewer workdays lost to illness in the near term.

2. Decarbonization is a growth strategy.

We’ve also argued here that climate action is increasingly a growth story, not just a cost story. The energy transition is driving what you might call a new clean‑tech reindustrialization: massive investment in renewable power, transmission, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and much more. The question for countries isn’t whether this shift is happening; it’s who will own the jobs, factories, innovation, and export markets it creates.

Nicholas Stern’s brand new book, The Growth Story of the 21st Century: The Economics and Opportunity of Climate Action, is an excellent and timely treatment of this argument. Stern’s case, building on his landmark 2006 review, is straightforward: the idea that we must choose between climate action and economic development is obsolete. Structured properly, climate action is the development and growth strategy for this century.

Stern emphasizes that falling clean‑tech costs, economies of scale, induced innovation, and better public health mean that clean energy is already cheaper than dirty energy in many markets and applications. He lists drivers like learning‑by‑doing, increasing returns in new technologies, improved resource efficiency, and large health and productivity gains that come along for the ride. We’ll dive into the book in more detail in a coming issue, but the headline for our purposes is simple: if you’re not trying to lead the clean‑energy race, you’re accepting a worse growth story than is available.

3. Fossil dependency is a security liability.

Now back to the war.

For decades, one of the most obvious arguments against fossil‑fuel dependency has been geopolitics. Oil and gas are commodities extracted from a relatively small number of places, many of them politically fragile, authoritarian, or both. That concentration of supply has always made importers vulnerable to price spikes, embargoes, and outright conflict.

You don’t need a PhD in international relations to see how this plays out. When we build economies and security strategies around imported fossil fuels, we:

• Make ourselves hostage to supply shocks and price volatility.

• Incentivize military spending to “protect” supply routes, fields, and sea lanes.

• End up constructing financial and insurance Rube Goldberg machines—guarantees for shippers, carve‑outs from sanctions, backstops for insurers—just to keep the oil flowing when conflict erupts.

The result is that the true cost of fossil energy is much higher than the price at the pump. On top of direct subsidies, we effectively spend enormous sums—currently more than $1billion per day on the war alone —on military forces, naval patrols, and conflict‑related disruptions that would be far smaller in a world where our energy came primarily from domestic sources.

Seen from this angle, “energy security” is not about drilling a little more at home or getting slightly better terms from unstable suppliers. It is about structurally reducing our exposure to these vulnerabilities by changing the kind of energy system we rely on.

4. Solar, wind, and storage: the better way to power economies.

There is a better way.

Sunshine and wind are free, inexhaustible, and widely distributed. Once you’ve built the solar panels and wind turbines, you are no longer exposed to fuel price shocks or supply cut‑offs. Renewables carry dramatically lower health burdens than burning fossil fuels. They also sit much closer to the people and economies that use them, which reduces dependence on distant choke points and unstable regimes.

Of course, we all know the standard objection: the sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind doesn’t always blow. That’s real—and it’s why storage, flexible demand, and smarter grids are so important. The good news is that battery costs have fallen sharply over the past decade, and learning‑curve dynamics suggest further declines as deployment scales. Storage technologies are already good enough for many grid and vehicle applications, and they keep improving.

Meanwhile, other countries are not waiting around. China, in particular, has been relentlessly focused on building out its clean‑energy manufacturing base. Chinese firms now produce around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and dominate much of the supply chain. They supply a majority of global wind turbines. They account for well over half of global electric vehicle sales and a large share—on the order of three‑quarters—of the world’s batteries. This dominance, built with deliberate industrial policy and sheer manufacturing scale, has made clean‑energy hardware cheaper worldwide but has also created new dependencies for everyone else.

5. No, this war is not “good” for US competition with China.

One of the more irritating tropes I’ve heard in commentary around this conflict is the notion that the war somehow improves the United States’ competitive position vis‑à‑vis China. The argument seems to be that disruptions in the Middle East and pressure on China’s relationships in the region somehow redound to Washington’s advantage.

I don’t buy it.

Sure, China sources much of its fossil fuel supply from the Middle East and Venezuela. But it’s a global commodity. And President Xi is not lying awake at night worried that US involvement in yet another Middle East conflict is going to erode China’s manufacturing lead in solar, wind, batteries, EVs, or grid equipment. While we’re tying up political bandwidth, fiscal resources, and diplomatic capital in managing the blowback from fossil‑fuel‑centric conflicts, China is largely keeping its head down and continuing to build out an ever more formidable position across every major clean‑energy value chain.

If anything, war‑driven fossil price spikes and instability make China’s clean‑energy exports more attractive to third countries. When oil shipping looks risky and gas prices are volatile, cheap solar, wind, and batteries from Chinese factories become an even easier sell. In that sense, every crisis emanating from fossil‑fuel dependency is a free advertisement for the alternative—and right now, China is the main global hardware store for that alternative.

6. What constitutes winning?

On any sane measure—human lives, regional stability, long‑term prosperity—there are no winners. War is a loss, full stop. But if we widen the frame beyond the battlefield, one pattern is becoming clearer with each fossil‑fuel shock and shipping disruption: the real strategic winners over the next few decades will be the countries that move fastest and smartest to get out of the fossil‑fuel trap.

Decarbonization is not just about parts‑per‑million of CO₂ in the atmosphere, as crucial as that is. It is about:

• Healthier people and communities

• More resilient and productive economies

• Less vulnerability to volatile petrostates and fragile shipping chokepoints

• Reduced pressure to spend staggering sums defending fuel supply lines

In that broader war—the struggle over what kind of energy system will power the 21st century—decarbonization is the winning strategy. The only real question is who will capture the economic, health, and security dividends of that victory.

My hope is that as this ugly conflict grinds on, more policymakers, business leaders, and voters will look past the daily headlines and see the deeper lesson hiding in plain sight: it is long past time to stop fighting over fossil fuels and start racing—urgently—to build the clean‑energy system that we will actually make us safer.

Onward,

Editor’s Note: Every so often, a piece of science writing lands with the clarity of a warning bell that reverberates in your mind. The publication of Robert McDonald and colleagues’ new study in Nature Sustainability is one of those moments. They warn that the global framework sustaining environmental progress—i.e., the shared trust in science and international cooperation—is cracking under political pressure.

I asked Rob, a longtime friend and former colleague from The Nature Conservancy, to unpack what’s happening, why it matters, and what we can do about it.

*******

“The foundation of our work—objective science and global cooperation—is being dismantled by a rising tide of autocratization.” So writes Rob McDonald and his coauthors, as they argue that

that the very basis of the sustainability movement is under threat.

In their article, “Uncharted Political Waters for Sustainability”, they explain that for decades, two big assumptions guided the field:

1. That the environment is a global entity that we can measure objectively, and

2. That the world’s biggest problems demand multilateral solutions—through institutions like the IPCC or the Paris Agreement.

But this bedrock foundation is now being eroded. Their paper tracks a decline in the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) and deliberative governance in many countries and argues that we are experiencing a “retreat from reason.” As governments grow skeptical of inconvenient data and dismissive of international forums, the science-to-policy pipeline breaks.

That’s why I’m especially glad Rob has agreed to talk with us about this research and what it means for those of us committed to science-based environmental progress. This timely challenge deserves our full attention. And it begs the question—what are we going to do about it?

Q: Thanks for doing this with us Rob. First, tell us a little bit about you. What is your current role, and what are some of your career highlights?

My background is as a plant ecologist, so I fell in love with conservation while spending time in the woods, counting seedlings and tracking rare plants. I then got interested in why the rare plants I loved were getting disturbed by development, and started working on urban planning and conservation. Then, at some point in my career I shifted from protecting nature from people to planning better what nature can do for people, what’s now called nature-based solutions. So, the topic we are discussing today was a departure from what I usually write about! But it became so clear to my fellow scientists and I that the current political climate was affecting sustainability science that we felt compelled to write this comment.

Q: For years, the mantra for scientists was avoid politics to maintain credibility. But you argue that the golden age of evidence-based governance may be over. Are you suggesting that being apolitical is now a luxury the scientific community can no longer afford?

No, in a way we are saying the opposite! That is, we tried in our essay to talk about the global trend toward autocracy, and what it means for certain bedrock principles of scientific integrity and having evidence-based decision-making in public policy. Those are apolitical principles; they don’t favor any political party necessarily. But they are key if sustainability scientists are going to meaningfully engage with public policy.

Q: If scientists become more politically vocal in defending democratic institutions, do we risk feeding the very “anti-science” narratives that autocrats use to dismiss us? How do we balance principled advocacy with institutional neutrality?

I think scientists and science institutions need to be vocal in defending scientific integrity and the value of science. In a sense, we need to have a positive narrative about science, that battles back against this idea that truth is whatever those in power want it to be. But I would note that having a pro-science narrative is different than being a political partisan. For instance, it is one thing to talk about the recent rejection of the greenhouse gas endangerment finding by the US government, and that it really is at odds with the scientific consensus that climate change endangers human health and well-being. That’s just a scientific fact. It is another thing to talk about politics (political parties and advocacy), which is something that science institutions, per se, should stop short of doing in my opinion.

Q: You’ve noted that autocratization makes global cooperation harder to sell. How should we frame our efforts then? Should we pivot away from grand multilateral “save-the-planet” narratives and focus more on local benefits — things like energy security or public health—even if that risks softening the global call for collaboration?

We argue in our essay that one tactic is to work locally or nationally, where progress is still possible on environmental issues, if global cooperation is blocked. But that only works for some issues. For truly global problems, like climate change, some sort of global cooperation, based upon scientific evidence, will be needed, which is why we think it is so important to have a positive narrative around the value of science and evidence-based decision-making.

Q: Much of the data we rely on comes from government-funded institutions. In an era of autocratization, how do we “autocracy-proof” our datasets? Should the private sector or philanthropy step in to build a parallel, independent infrastructure for environmental monitoring?

Yes, I think the scientific community needs to think about how it can keep working globally to assess the state of the global environment, even when particular national governments are opposed to that effort. That can mean the private sector and philanthropy stepping up to fund and maintain these global science efforts, sure. But it can also mean more support from public-sector institutions in countries still committed to scientific integrity and evidence-based decision-making.

Q: In this environment, I’m concerned that CEOs or board members may hesitate to defend scientific findings and academic freedom, worrying that it could endanger their license to operate. What would you say to them?

There are real worries for some institutions about their ability to operate, and I respect those who worry about them. I understand the impulse to “keep your head down.” However, I would encourage people to think not just about the short term (what do I do that will help keep me operating over the next few months) and more about the long term. For many companies and institutions, their reputation is their biggest asset. Standing up for science is part of that reputation. If you want your reputation to be good in the long term, then I would argue you have to be willing to take some risks now.

Q: If you had a room full of the world’s top environmental donors, what’s one thing you would ask them to fund tomorrow to counter these specific risks?

That’s a great question, I don’t know! In some ways, our essay was about pointing out a particular problem, and a call to action on it, not pretending that we have all the solutions. But I would say that philanthropy specifically to support international global environmental science collaborations (like IPCC, IPBES, etc.) will be really key, as will organizing new institutions that can nurture global science in a time of growing autocracy.

Q: Most readers of The Instigator care deeply about protecting nature and want to engage on a direct and personal basis. They want to accelerate progress, usually emphasizing practicality, not ideology. What advice do you have for them? How can individuals and institutions sustain the momentum for science-based action in this political climate?

On this specific issue, on supporting scientific integrity, one thing individuals can do is support science-based sources of information, like credible journalism or Wikipedia. And then for those of your readers who lead institutions, having those institutions take little actions to support science integrity will be important.

Q. We’ve talked mostly about how best to address mounting challenges. Let’s end on a positive note. What do you think is going well these days?

There has been tremendous growth in the renewable energy sector, so even with the UNFCCC process somewhat stalled and slowed, there is still some significant progress toward decarbonization.

Q. Any other ideas or recommendations you want to bring to the attention of our readers?

I think it is worthwhile for American readers to step back and look at the global political trends for some perspective. While we are in a troubling period of a global shift toward autocracy, that is uneven among regions, and there are some really positive trends in some countries. And then while the last few decades have seen a troubling trend toward autocracy, the global trend since the end of WWII has been one of an expansion of democracy. I try to keep that optimistic picture in mind.

Thanks, Rob.

Onward,

It’s a move that doesn’t just weaken specific rules; it tries to erase the underlying obligation to protect people from climate harm at all. In effect, it says: we refuse to see the danger, and therefore we will not act on it.

Turning away from a well-documented, almost certainly existential threat because it’s politically or economically inconvenient is a deeply cynical move, even for politicians.

But more often, the decisions made by leaders who care about the environment involve hard tradeoffs about what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of “saving” something bigger. Sometimes we are direct about those tradeoffs; sometimes we bury them in legalese, euphemisms, or wishful thinking. But almost all the time, novels can be more honest and capture what policy papers cannot.

That’s why Jonathan Miles’s new novel, Eradication: A Fable, is so compelling. It dives headfirst into one of these classic quandaries in nature conservation: what happens when saving an ecosystem means killing something that’s alive and looking right back at you?

[Spoiler alert: the remainder of this post reveals some—not all—of the primary contours of the plot.]

The novel introduces us to Adi, a recently divorced and grieving schoolteacher, who signs up for a seemingly easy five-week job on the remote Pacific island of Santa Flora. The island has been wrecked by feral goats that eat through rare plants and destroy nesting habitat for endangered birds.

Adi’s task is simple enough. Live alone, bring a rifle, and “remove” the goats so that “nature” can recover. It’s classic conservation logic—the same rationale behind real-life goat and rat eradications around the world.

But once there, Adi realizes this isn’t the clean, data-driven mission he expected. It’s actually the case of a solitary man methodically killing intelligent animals, one by one. Adi starts to feel an uneasy kinship with the goats, whom he comes to see as creatures just trying to survive in a place they never chose to be.

Then he stumbles onto darker truths about the island: the goats are only part of Santa Flora’s problem. That’s when the story mutates from tidy ecological fable into something rawer, riskier, and more human.

Eradication lives in the gray zone that real-life conservation often occupies, capturing the human side of the tradeoffs we must make. Restoring damaged ecosystems in this case means taking lives to save others—sometimes a necessary but brutal part of island and wildlife management.

Miles doesn’t condemn that reality; he humanizes it. The novel captures what conservationists already know: even morally justified actions can leave emotional scars, and the moral math of restoration is not always clean or fully satisfying.

The book also probes a deeper, more haunting question: what if our idea of “original nature” is just nostalgia? Is it always right—or even possible—to rewind ecosystems to a lost paradise? Or should we accept hybrid, changed worlds rather than waging endless war to reset them? Santa Flora becomes a perfect microcosm for that debate: beautiful, broken, and impossible to fix cleanly.

As the story unfolds, Adi starts thinking like a field biologist mid-breakdown—balancing compassion against triage, life against system survival. He starts to see how money, politics, and ego all shape the mission as much as the science. Everyone has a stake: funders seeking storybook outcomes, scientists chasing data, exploiters working quietly offshore. The “save the island” gambit was never really the whole story.

That moral fog makes Eradication a worthwhile read. Short, unsettling, funny, and strangely beautiful, it reminds us that every tidy success metric hides a tangle of tradeoffs—about whose lives count, what losses we accept, and how far we’ll go in the name of protecting nature.

Eradication lingers long after you finish it—especially if you’ve ever wondered what “saving nature” really means, and whether you would pull the trigger on Santa Flora.

Onward,

PS. Stephen Markley’s The Deluge seems quite prescient now and worth reading if you missed it. You can read our interview with the author here.

Global demand for meat and seafood is enormous, and it’s projected to keep rising for decades to come. But our current industrial meat system is a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and public health risks—not to mention cruelty to animals.

Rather than trying to change taste, Bruce argues we should change how we satisfy it.

Bruce is the founder and president of the Good Food Institute, and he’s spent the past decade working at the intersection of science, industry, and policy to help realize the next food revolution.

His new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Change the World, lays out a hopeful and rigorously researched roadmap for changing how we eat. The book argues that plant-based and cultivated meat can match or beat conventional meat on taste and price while dramatically shrinking its footprint.

I’m especially interested in the book’s implications for capital allocation, corporate strategy, and public policy. Where are the real levers to move this system at speed and scale? I was delighted therefore that Bruce agreed to join us for a conversation about the book, the state of the alternative protein sector, and what comes next.

Bruce’s Background and Thesis

Q: Bruce, thanks for doing this. You’ve presented a fascinating thesis for us to chew on (pardon the pun). But first, tell us how you got here. Please share a little bit about your background with our readers.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Minnesota and went to college in Iowa. So I was surrounded by cattle in Oklahoma, pigs and turkeys in Minnesota, and pigs and more pigs in Iowa. Like most midwesterners, I ate meat for lunch and dinner pretty much every day, and it didn’t occur to me until college that meat production had any downsides. In the early 1980s, my pastor focused my confirmation classes on global hunger; he told us we have a moral obligation to do what we can to end it, which was pretty progressive for Oklahoma in the 1980s. In college, I learned from the book Diet for a Small Planet about the incredible inefficiency of cycling crops through animals, and how that contributes to global hunger. During college, I organized fasts for Oxfam and weekend volunteer trips to the nearby homeless shelter in Des Moines. After college, I spent six years running a homeless shelter for families in D.C. and two teaching through Teach For America in inner city Baltimore (teacher of the year for my school, thank you very much!).

Although I adopted a plant-based diet more than 38 years ago, it’s become very clear to me that convincing people to eat less or no meat is not a promising strategy for changing the world’s upward meat consumption trajectory. Ten years ago, inspired by the founders of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, I started GFI, to try to follow the energy transition playbook with meat: Instead of begging people to change their habits (i.e., instead of focusing on demand), let’s focus on changing how meat is made (i.e., let’s focus on supply).

Every year, I become more optimistic about our prospects for success.

Q: You open Meat with the argument that our current way of producing meat is simply not sustainable for the climate, public health, and the planet—but that the answer is not “eat less meat.” It’s “make meat differently.” For readers who haven’t picked up the book yet, can you summarize the core thesis in a few sentences?

You bet: Meat production creates enormous external costs—hunger and malnutrition, climate change and deforestation, antimicrobial resistance, pandemic risk (that’s chapters 1-4). But global meat consumption has risen every year for more than six decades and will keep rising as the global population and global economy both grow (chapter 5). The only intervention that might work is alternative proteins—meat, dairy, and eggs that are designed to provide an identical eating experience for a lower cost—and there is very strong reason to believe that they can work (chapters 6-8 and 11). The thing that makes intervention especially appealing is the economic and food security benefits, which explain why governments all over the world are now funding alternative protein research (chapters 9-10). My conclusion reflects on ways for readers to get involved.

I will note that the father of synthetic biology, Harvard Medical School genetics professor George Church, offered a very kind endorsement of the book, in which he says that he found “fascinating observations in every chapter,” and also that I’m convincing that science is up to the challenge of making plant-based and cultivated meat that compete on price and taste.

On Science and Technology

Q: You profile the scientists and entrepreneurs working to make plant-based and cultivated meat that is indistinguishable from conventional meat but ultimately cheaper, safer, and more nutritious. How far off are we from having these better options and where are we today on each of those dimensions—taste, price, and nutritional profile?
On nutrition, we’re already there. The plant-based meats that perform the best (with people who love meat) are lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, higher in fiber, and higher in protein than conventional meat. Cultivated meat, because it is actual animal meat, has the same nutritional profile as conventional meat, but it will be less likely to be contaminated by drug residues or bacterial contamination (and over time, we could manipulate it to ramp up and down nutrients that we wanted to minimize or maximize, if there is a market for such products).

On taste, we’re there for cultivated meat: It tastes the same because it is the same (and in fact many tasters point out that it’s better, because it’s more consistent). For plant-based meat, most of the products do not satisfy people who enjoy meat, but there are some products that are close, mostly from the company Impossible Foods. Most people who love meat are satisfied by Impossible’s burgers, nuggets, breakfast sausages, and hot dogs—all of which have more protein/calorie and less saturated fat than the meat they’re replacing. The Beyond Burger, Morningstar nuggets, and Gardein breakfast sausages also do well, and they also win across the range of macronutrients, including protein.

We have a ways to go on price, which is both an engineering and a scaling challenge, and I dive into these challenges in Meat. One very promising note, though: Cost of production for cultivated meat is down by a factor of 100,000 (99.999%) in just 12 years, and multiple scientists believe high-end products can already reach price parity in nice restaurants. Mass-market price parity will require more science, more engineering, more scale, and more capital—but there are no obvious scientific showstoppers. I go into all this in some detail in the book.

Q: You argue that making meat more efficiently—by feeding crops to cells or to plants, rather than to animals—can unlock huge gains for land use, water use, and emissions. Which environmental benefits here do you think are most underappreciated in the mainstream climate debate?

The one that many people find especially arresting is the basic inefficiency: I imagine all of your readers understand how bad food waste is: something like 25% of all food that is produced does not make it into the food supply. Produce 100 calories of food, and 25 will be wasted. I think that most of us, intuitively, find that unacceptable. Some environmentalists have a visceral negative reaction to food waste that, in my opinion, speaks well of them.

But think about this: The most efficient animal at turning crops into meat is the chicken, and it takes about nine calories of feed crops to produce one calorie of chicken; eight calories are used growing the animal to slaughter weight, or they go into feathers, bones, and blood—which we don’t consume. For 100 calories of chicken, you need 900 calories of feed, and 800 of those calories are “lost” to the bird’s physiology.

FLW: 100 calories of food, 25 calories not consumed by humans.

To produce chicken: 100 calories of chicken, 800 calories not consumed by humans.

That’s not all, though: There are also extra stages of production: shipping the crops to feed mills, operating feed mills, shipping the feed to farms, operating farms, shipping the animals to slaughter, operating the slaughterhouses. That’s multiple extra stages of gas-guzzling, pollution spewing semi-trucks and multiple extra energy intensive and polluting factories.

All of that is why when the UN FAO did a deep dive into the numbers for their report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” they found that animal farming is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” including land degradation, climate change, air and water pollution, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss.

Meat consumption is up more than 100 million tonnes since that report came out in 2006, to more than 370 million metric tonnes, and all predictions are that it will be up at least another 50 percent (another 185 million tonnes) by 2050.

On Markets, Business Models, and Investment

Q: One of the striking claims in “Meat” is that alternative proteins could generate very beneficial externalities, from improved economic output and millions of good jobs, to revitalizing rural economies, to reducing pandemic risk and antimicrobial resistance by shrinking intensive animal agriculture. What does this optimistic scenario look like in practice, and what needs to go right to get there?

Some of that is a given: If we succeed in reaching price and taste parity for alternative proteins (not at all certain; I talk about what we’ll need to do for that to happen), and if that triggers S-curve adoption (I spell why I believe this will happen in the book) then a few of these outcomes are baked in: Reduced food and prices will alleviate hunger and malnutrition and make it easier for smallholder farmers, pastoralists and subsistence farmers and fishers to survive; that’s how agricultural economics works. That’s not all of it, of course; there are huge issues with graft and inefficiency and geopolitics; but that is a big part of it.

We’ll also see much lower climate emissions and decreased deforestation pressure, and much less air and water pollution. We will also see much less contribution to antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk. Similarly, the economic benefits and millions of jobs are almost certain—that’s what markets do when production shifts in this way.

Revitalized rural economies is the toughest outcome to realize; it’s going to take work to make that happen. But the land use benefits of alternative proteins do open up powerful opportunities to turn back the clock on agricultural consolidation and the “get big or get out” agricultural reality that has grown year after year since the early 1970s, in the U.S. and globally. I share what that has meant for ranching and farming families, why I think alternative proteins can open up opportunities that feel hard to imagine without them, and my vision of what we should be working toward—an agricultural system that centers on the needs of farm families—in chapter 10.

Q: You’ve spent years engaging with large food companies, meat producers, and investors. How has the conversation in corporate boardrooms evolved over the past five to ten years, and what are the most promising signs you’re seeing from incumbents?

Well 10 years ago, there was no Beyond Burger, no Impossible Burger, and only one cultivated meat company that had raised any money at all; so there wasn’t much happening in corporate board rooms on the alt meats topic yet. But that changed pretty quickly starting in 2016.

It’s my impression that the incumbents played this particularly well: JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and ADM have all been steady supporters of plant-based and cultivated meat, and they’ve said, consistently, that the products will only become mainstream once they are as delicious and as affordable as animal-based meat. And that’s going to be hard and take time.

I dive more into the question of why they’re all enthusiastic about alternative meats in the book, but the short answer is: Less fragile supply chains and better profit margins, once they scale. They are not wedded to using live animals for meat, and a lot of their day-to-day headaches become a lot less intense in a world where plant-based and cultivated meat are the norm, not the exception. If you analogize to the introduction of digital photography: No one wants to be Kodak. Everyone wants to be Canon.

Q: I happen to be a long time vegan and I was very positive about the emergence over the past ten years or so of what I think are especially high quality plant-based meats. But it’s been disappointing to see what happened—first soaring expectations, then some backlash, and now a much more sober reassessment by markets. What did that recent wave get right and wrong? What should the “next wave” of alternative proteins do differently, and where would you focus capital and attention over the next five years to maximize both impact and returns in this space?

The earliest plant-based and cultivated meat innovators got the basic theory of change right: If we can nail price and taste, there will be a massive market.

Cultivated meat innovators have stayed focused on taste and price, but most of the plant-based innovators who followed Impossible and Beyond really didn’t understand the assignment. Many of them had no budget for R&D and no chief science officer; they said they were the next Impossible or Beyond, but with no R&D budget and plans to introduce products in a matter of months, they were really the next Gardenburger. Recall that it took Pat Brown—one of the most impressive scientists on the planet, as I discuss in the book, five years and tens of millions of dollars (and countless hours across dozens of scientists) to produce the Impossible Burger. So it’s not surprising that so many of them failed. I dive into this concept in the book.

I think the cultivated meat companies are still focused on the right things, and they’re making impressive progress (costs down by 99.999%, as noted). I’m also impressed by all the specialized companies in cultivated meat that are focused on specific challenges: Less expensive media, cell line development, streamlined cultivators, and so on.

Plant-based innovation needs to separate the research companies from the product companies; it’s just really hard to do both. We also need a lot more B2B companies in plant-based—solving flavor challenges, fat challenges, manufacturing challenges. The plant-based industry skipped these key research needs, because most of the companies were more similar to old school veggie meat companies than they were to Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat. That’s held back their progress.

On Policy, Public Goods, and Global Equity

Q: In the book, you draw an explicit analogy to past government investments in things like renewable energy, semiconductors, and the internet. What would a serious public R&D and industrial policy agenda for alternative proteins look like? And is anything like that politically viable right now?

It would look a lot like what governments have done for energy, pharma, and semiconductors: sustained funding for open-access science, pilot and demonstration facilities, workforce development, and early market support. This is politically viable precisely because the benefits of plant-based and cultivated meat go way beyond environmental and global health. They’re about economic competitiveness and food security—and that resonates across the political spectrum. This is the focus of chapters 9 (economics) and 10 (food security) of the book.

And here’s a key point: Japan, Korea, the UK, the EU, Israel, and Singapore are all leaning in on alternative proteins. And China. Of the 20 most active entities for cultivated meat patents over the past six years, eight are in China, three in Korea, three in Israel, and three in the U.S. America pioneered and then lost EV batteries and solar infrastructure. I’m hoping that we’ll stay in the game on alternative proteins.

My real dream is for something like the Human Genome Project, which involved scientists across the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, and China—all collaborating to map the human genome. I would love to see something like that for plant-based and cultivated meat, with a focus on making them commodity products.

Google or Microsoft could do that too—the work they’re doing on human medicine would have at least as much impact if they focused even a fraction of that level of resources on remaking meat.

Q: The global South will drive most of the increase in meat demand in the coming decades, as incomes rise and people understandably want to eat more animal protein. How do we ensure that plant-based and cultivated meat are part of the solution in those markets, rather than technologies that only benefit wealthy consumers?

I talk a lot about India, Brazil, and China in chapter 10 of the book; those three countries are significant players in alt meats, and they see alt meats as critical to their goals: For India, alt meats can help them to solve malnutrition and become a developed economy by 2047, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s number one, two, three, and four goal for the country; it’s quite literally his life’s mission.

For China, alt meats can be a massive economic driver; can be an add-on to their belt-and-road strategy; and can help them reach food self-sufficiency goals. I talk about Africa in chapter 1: some of what’s already happening in Africa with alternative proteins and also some of the promise; in short, the efficiency benefits point toward these technologies as excellent interventions for direct feeding programs and also as interventions for economic growth, food systems resilience, and climate adaptation, since they will be less vulnerable to the climatic shocks that wipe out crops and livestock.

On Strategy for Environmentalists and NGOs

Q: In your view, what are misconceptions about alternative proteins among environmental leaders—and what data or arguments from “Meat” tend to change their minds? And what should environmental NGOs be doing now to accelerate progress?

Environmental leaders are like so many other humans: They assume that if something has not happened yet, it’s not going to happen. So for plant-based meat, it is commonly believed that because the products are too expensive and not delicious enough, that will always be true. I’m honestly really surprised by the number of very smart people who are totally convinced that it is scientifically impossible for plant fats, proteins, and flavors to precisely mimic animal meat.

So my challenge to people who feel that way is this: Why do you think science can’t create plant-based meats that have an identical eating experience? What’s the impossibility? When the Impossible and Beyond Burger launched, a lot of people assumed it was going to be incredibly easy, and that was clearly wrong, but wow: The idea that because it hasn’t happened yet, it will never happen is really surprising to me.

I think we also, in 2016, were too optimistic about how quickly production could scale; this remains, I’m pretty sure, the aspect of the alternative meats endeavor that will be toughest—but I’m convinced we can do it, and I talk about what’s going to be required in the book.

Similarly, many or most environmental leaders believe what so many others believe: that $3 billion spent on cultivated meat is a lot of money; if we haven’t solved price and taste parity yet, it must be impossible.

Pointing out how innovation happens helps: I spend all of chapter eight walking through examples, from airplanes and automobiles to internet commerce and artificial intelligence. Ten years is not a lot of time for innovation, and very little energy has been spent on plant-based or cultivated meat. Sure, $3 billion sounds like a lot—until you realize how thinly it’s spread. That total has funded more than 150 companies worldwide, covering not just R&D but also expensive equipment, rent, production tests, salaries, and more. It’s also not a one-year total; it’s an all-of-time total, encompassing the first investment in October 2015 ($125,000) and extending through June 2025.

To put that number in perspective, consider this: The average cost to bring a single drug to market between 2009 and 2018 was $1.3 billion, and that’s for a pharmaceutical company that already has all the necessary equipment and infrastructure, regulatory systems in place, and so on. That’s more than twice the amount raised by the best-funded cultivated meat company, Upside Foods, for all its operations going back to its first investment in 2015. Similarly, one EV battery factory costs more than $3 billion—again, the total spent over all of time on cultivated meat.

In the book, I talk about how 500 car companies went out of business in the first 10 years of the automobile industry, and most people thought cars would not be successful: They cost too much, they were hard to start, they broke down all the time. Of course they will never be generally adopted. Same thing with internet commerce and the dot com bubble: The NASDAQ lost 80 percent of its value, most internet commerce companies went bankrupt, Amazon lost more than 97 percent of its value. The common wisdom was that internet commerce had been tried and failed. There are endless examples.

Two that will be familiar to your readers: solar and EVs. Until just 10 years ago, the common wisdom was that neither could take a meaningful bit out of fossil fuels—too expensive, too inconvenient, not enough precious metals for EV batteries, not enough land for solar and wind. And on and on.

I go into all of this in chapter 8 and discuss the fact that the world has solved a range of far more vexing scientific challenges than cost and price competitive plant-based and cultivated meat.

And remember: There is no plan B on this; if alternative meats do not succeed, meat’s climate and deforestation impacts will just get worse and worse and worse. I dive into the peer review science across the range of agricultural climate mitigation options and point out that even if they all worked (which is very unlikely), meat-based climate change will just keep growing, because the mitigation options are swamped by increased meat demand.

For your readers in particular, this all begs the question: Is this a climate emergency, or isn’t it?

Q: You’ve worked closely with philanthropists and foundations that support the Good Food Institute and the broader ecosystem. What are the highest-leverage philanthropic opportunities right now that may not be obvious to traditional climate or conservation funders?

Open-access science, talent pipelines, and policy capacity: Funding research that everyone can use, supporting university programs, and building credible policy analysis has outsized leverage, and it can be deployed globally. One great thing about alt proteins is that since it’s based in science and markets, science in one country can and will scale globally. GFI is a nonprofit organization, of course, and we have just north of 240 full time team members across GFIs in India, Israel, Brazil, APAC, Europe, and the U.S. The plurality of our team members around the world are scientists, and our number one goal is helping governments to understand the value of alternative meats to economic development and food security (in all of its meanings), to ensure that government support for research and infrastructure/manufacturing continues to grow.

Anyone who is interested in partnering with us, please get in touch.

On What Can We Do

Q: What can the readers of this newsletter do to help accelerate the world’s transition to alt meats? Our readers are businesspeople, NGO leaders, academics, students and—in general—people who care very much about protecting nature in pragmatic ways that will really work. How can they help?

The concluding chapter of the book attempts to answer this question, and I picked the epigraph carefully: It’s something Joseph Romm said to New York Times reporter Peter Coy that I think sums up the problem: “It’s very hard to achieve things you’re not trying to do.”

There are dozens of climate think tanks and hundreds of environmental sciences departments and a wide range of multilateral institutions, all of which are churning out reports and papers on climate and deforestation and nature and the full range of proffered interventions, including CDR and clean hydrogen and bioengineering and many other potential interventions.

Most of these interventions have far less promise than alternative proteins for our climate, and they generally also have none of the co-benefits: AMR and pandemic risk reduction, lower food and land prices that allow more people to eat, and so on. At the same time, there are just a handful of such studies, reports, and analyses that have ever been done on alternative proteins.

All of the reports that have been done on alternative proteins have been incredibly encouraging: For example, McKinsey analysis for ClimateWorks Foundation and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office found that at 50 percent adoption, alt proteins would decrease emission by 5 billion tonnes—that’s five times the impact of totally eliminating air travel.

Include sequestration on freed up land, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis found 6.3 billion tonnes of climate benefit at fifty percent adoption; that’s more than three times the impact of every car, bus, and light truck on the planet being switched to electric.

Plus, McKinsey estimates that 640 million hectares of land would be freed up, and IIASA’s analysis reaches a nearly identical 650 million hectares. That’s an area greater than the entire Amazon rain forest.

On the other hand, WRI found that on a business-as-usual trajectory, we’ll need 3.3 billion more hectares of land in 2050 for agriculture, due to the inefficiency of cycling crops through animals for meat; that will likely be mitigated by crop efficiency improvements, but those gains are dwindling, and climate change may cause them to dwindle even more.

So: The main thing I would say is that alternative proteins are going to be critical to solving climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, and there is vanishingly little work being done on it.

Honestly, the lack of focus on agriculture made sense in a world pre-alt proteins: If there’s no solution that can abate agriculture’s emissions, let’s put it into the “hard to abate” bucket and just keep working on small-scale interventions that do a bit of good. That’s been the strategy for decades (and none of those interventions have done much good).

My argument in Meat is that alt proteins can work in a manner similar to renewable energy and EVs, but that’s not self-executing; it only works if we bring the same kind of “we can solve that problem” mentality that we’ve brought to energy transition.

We need a lot more science, a lot more environmental and economic analysis, a lot more think tank work, and a lot more advocacy from environmental groups.

We all have limited time and resources, so here’s my pitch: Rather than adding a few more units of environmental analysis or think tank work or lobbying to energy transition, which is taking 99% of climate world’s time and resources, please consider adding a few more units of environmental analysis or think tank work or lobbying to protein transition.

I talk more about precisely what’s needed in the book. If your interest is piqued, I hope you’ll read it, and please do let me know what you think.

Thank you, Bruce. And for readers who want even more, you can check out Bruce’s interview with The Guardian and his appearance on the “Saving the World from Bad Ideas” podcast.

Onward,

But there is a big, concrete side to all that cloud computing: the data centers housing the routers, wires, cooling and storage systems, servers, and huge generators that make it all happen. The buildout of these enormous infrastructures (some will be the size of airports!) is happening fast and right across the US, often in rural areas where land and energy are cheaper.

That’s both a big opportunity and a big challenge.

On one hand, these projects bring jobs and investment to communities that could benefit from them. On the other hand, they raise legitimate concerns: water use (still significant, though cooling technologies are rapidly improving), destruction of habitat for wildlife, loss of outdoor recreation areas, noise, visual blight, and infrastructure stress. It’s giving rise to NIMBYism* as neighbors worry that this new tech boom will trample the landscapes they love and bring down their home values.

And yet, if we want the U.S. to lead in AI (and for our economy to continue to thrive), we need these data centers.

The question isn’t really whether to build them, but how to build them in a way that makes sense for people and nature alike.

When I was at The Nature Conservancy, we had a framework for scenarios just like this. We called it Development by Design. It was built on the belief that questions about growth and infrastructure are rarely answered best in a binary way. So we tried to move the discussion from a simple yes or no to how.

How can we have both the benefits of new infrastructure and also good outcomes for communities and for nature?

This shifts the focus to possibilities rather than limitations and encourages creativity and collaboration rather than defaulting to status quo.

To answer this question in line with our goals, we used what is known as the “mitigation hierarchy” in conservation circles:

1. Avoid harm to communities and nature wherever possible.

2. Minimize the impacts that can’t be avoided.

3. Offset those that remain by protecting or restoring comparable ecosystems nearby.

This generally worked very well for the big and controversial infrastructure projects we considered in the energy, mining, and chemical sectors. And it should work for data centers too.

Imagine a transparent, science-based national framework that clarifies where and how data centers can be built responsibly. One that gives rural communities a seat at the table, aligns developers and conservationists, and shows policymakers that this doesn’t need to be another partisan issue. Rather, per Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s prominent book, it can be a pathway toward “abundance.”

We can power the AI revolution while protecting water, land, and wildlife.

And the additional benefit: The U.S. can lead not just in AI innovation, but in modeling how to do development the right way.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that any of this will be easy. It requires people of good will to deliberate together and find ways to compromise in a timely fashion. And there would remain additional issues to address—like how we ensure everyday consumers don’t see their electricity bills soar as the data center buildout happens.

If I were running a big conservation NGO today, I’d jump on this. It’s a rare, actionable opportunity to bridge rural and urban interests, grow the economy, and safeguard nature—together.

And if I were the CEO of a hyperscaler like Microsoft or Google in the midst of a very competitive race (land grab) to build out data centers, doing it in a community- and nature-friendly way like this would probably be a savvy way to gain significant competitive advantage.

So leaders, what do you say? Ready to make this our next great win-win frontier?

Onward,

*Not In My Backyard. An implicit recognition that something may be valuable but inconvenient to to bear locally.

Jeremy Grantham’s new memoir, The Making of a Permabear, is one of those books.

You may know Jeremy as one of the world’s most successful investors. He’s the co-founder of GMO and famous for identifying market bubbles long before it was fashionable to do so. But I’ve also known him as something else: a fearless, fact-based environmental advocate who draws on the same analytical discipline that made him so successful in finance. He is also one of the smartest and most effective ever donors to NGOs.

**Disclosure: Jeremy is my friend. We served together on the board of The Nature Conservancy, and we are co-founding board members of the NGO SPUN.**

Jeremy’s new book is part memoir, part guidebook, and part inspiration. It’s also funny, plainspoken, and full of wisdom. Jeremy always “calls them the way he sees them.” He is very blunt and always entertaining.

Here are a few lessons that stood out to me, and that might help you think about your own path to impact.

1. Play to your strengths.

Jeremy built his financial career by being an independent thinker. When everyone else was zigging, he wasn’t afraid to zag, and he stuck with his conclusions even when the crowd disagreed. That’s not easy. He tells great stories in the book about how it felt, warning about market excesses (and investing on that basis) while everyone else was celebrating (and enjoying high returns). But he was able to stick to his convictions because he did his homework and trusted his analysis. When he later turned his attention to climate and biodiversity, he deployed the same winning approach. He learned everything he could, formed evidence-based views, and acted on them.

There’s a simple lesson in there for the rest of us. You don’t have to be a contrarian investor to do something meaningful. Just figure out what you’re good at and put those skills to work for causes you care about.

2. Repurpose what you already have.

Jeremy was well known for his frequently published memos on investment opportunities. These memos were widely read in finance circles. He realized that this practice gave him a valuable platform. Important and influential people were paying close attention to him. So he started weaving environmental issues into them. He admits he didn’t see immediate traction. But he kept it up and, over time, his environmental messages started connecting with big audiences, giving him a very big voice in the sustainability conversation.

Of course you likely don’t have (and don’t need) a popular newsletter or a global firm like Jeremy. You likely already have a platform right in front of you—your workplace, community group, or professional network. Think about how you can use it, even if it’s never really been done before. Nobody ever did what Jeremy did before him. Be like Jeremy and go for it.

3. Be a lifelong learner.

Jeremy admits he didn’t know much about environmental science when he first started digging into those issues. But he took the same curiosity and rigor that served him in investing and applied it here. He read, asked questions, and learned quickly. Adopting the beginner’s mindset—the willingness to start from scratch—is something we all can emulate, especially as the world keeps changing so quickly.

When I used to meet with Jeremy and his wife Hanne during my fundraising days as TNC’s CEO, he would always ask me, “What are your highest impact projects where fundraising is difficult? How do they work? Why are they important? We’re interested in supporting initiatives like that.” That’s a classy approach. If you want to be a big-impact philanthropist, that’s a pretty good way to start.

4. Bring others along.

Jeremy’s family has been part of his journey all along—challenging him, encouraging him, and sharing his sense of mission. In the book, Jeremy relates how it was on a family trip in a rainforest where his interest in protecting the environment was first piqued. (My family and I had exactly the same very positive experience!) Big goals are easier to sustain when they’re shared. Whether it’s family, friends, or colleagues, involving others brings energy. . . and accountability.

At its heart, Jeremy’s story is about applying your best self—your skills, instincts, and determination—to the biggest challenges of our time. You don’t have to be a billionaire* or a contrarian to do that. You just have to start where you are, stay curious, and keep moving.

Onward,

*In the book, Jeremy explains he only ranks as a billionaire if you count the money he has given away—reflecting his public commitment to donate 95% of his wealth during his lifetime. Kudos Jeremy. Thank you for all you do to protect nature for future generations and all species!

We think most of our readers will agree, one way or another, that we all need to do our best right now to redirect and accelerate forward momentum. But deciding what exactly to do can be hard.

First, if you’re struggling with this question, good for you. That’s where it starts. We should be talking about this and learning from one another.

Second, let’s agree that the right thing to do is to act. Doing so certainly beats fretting on the sidelines (which won’t have much impact or even feel good).

We offer our initial ideas below. We think these suggestions have merit. But what we really hope is that they will encourage you to respond. Please critique or tell us how you would improve our ideas. More importantly, tell us exactly what you think environmentalists should be doing.

Here are our recommendations:

Take political action. Recent elections and their consequences remind us—sometimes painfully—just how high the stakes are these days when it comes to politics. But good news: the midterm elections are right around the corner in the US. We even have reason to be encouraged.

This should be our top focus. Let’s do everything we can to elect candidates who will prioritize the public policies we seek. Every vote, every donation, and every conversation counts. Write to your representatives. It may sound quaint, but we’ve seen firsthand that politicians really do take note. You can also roll up your sleeves on get-out-the-vote efforts. And don’t stop there. Please support NGOs that engage effectively in policy advocacy. And, if your circumstances allow, make financial contributions to the candidates you favor.

Don’t overthink this. Political action isn’t only for insiders or pundits. It starts with attention, persistence, and, above all, showing up. The more you do this, the more effective you will become.

Support NGOs. NGOs can do things that the private sector and individuals cannot. They bring diverse groups of people together, organize well across geographies, lead private projects (sometimes at enormous scale), sustain pressure, lobby effectively, and litigate when needed. If you have the means, contribute. If you have the time, volunteer. If you have the energy and experience, join one full-time. There’s no shortage of work—or of potential.

Lead Where You Are. Most of us are directly engaged with organizations that can do much more. Maybe it’s your employer, your university, or your congregation. These groups often underestimate the influence they hold. Leaders of these organizations listen to their constituents. Please speak up. Encourage your organization to adopt more ambitious sustainability goals, disclose their climate impacts, back nature restoration projects, and, most importantly, lobby for the public policy we need. Lean into your particular areas of experience and expertise, which you can draw on when you advocate. Leadership like this can be contagious. You can help make it happen.

Look in the Mirror. Some enviros like to debate whether personal lifestyle changes (diet, travel, consumption) make much of a dent in planetary problems and whether such efforts detract from policy reform or systemic shifts. But again, let’s not overthink it. Individual actions build habits, habits shape culture, and culture drives politics. Waste less, conserve more, and set an example for others.

Be a decent and respectful person. Sadly it seems, particularly here in the US, public policy dialog often descends into a very harsh, disrespectful, and alienating back and forth. Public officials and members of the media often speak in ways that we’d never accept from our own children. So here’s our ask: let’s not do that in the environmental community. Why? First, we’re generally good people doing our best to protect nature. Let’s act that way. Second, our hunch is that the world will grow weary of all this harsh and dispiriting dialog. We are much more likely to have greater success if we behave the way we ask our children to behave.

Share your ideas. We’ve shared our thoughts here. But what we’d really like is for you to challenge one another with your best ideas.

• What are you finding most rewarding personally?

• What efforts seem well-positioned to move the needle?

• How have you engaged politically in the most effective way?

• Which NGOs are you backing?

• How have you influenced leaders at your organizations?

• When have you been able to put your experience and expertise to work in powerful ways?

• And what can we learn from successes in other realms of public life?

None of this is easy. But the environmental story has always been one of stubborn optimism—of people acting boldly even when the odds look bleak. The race to protect nature is still on, and the only unforgivable mistake would be to stop running.

Onward,

Jonathan is a wildlife biologist who oversees the Wildlife Conservation Society’s efforts in places like Russia, China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. His book is an unexpectedly riveting account of how Amur tigers were brought back from the brink of extinction through (also non-obvious) cross-border cooperation. The book is a bright light of optimism; a case study in how science, smart politics, and some tenacity achieved spectacular results.

We’re delighted that Jonathan agreed to do an interview with us and give you a little taste of what you’ll find within his expertly crafted narrative.

Jonathan, thanks for agreeing to talk to The Instigator. You’ve spent much of your adult life in and around the Russian Far East. Sketch out the path that brought you to this region and ultimately made you an acclaimed conservation scientist and author?

I’d describe it as a gradual slide into a comfortable place. I grew up around the world, the son of a U.S. diplomat, shifting every few years from one country, culture, and language to the next. I started studying the Russian language in high school when my parents worked at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and this was really my first step toward my career. I visited the Russian Far East at the age of nineteen: I loved the wildness of the region and ended up returning first for a semester in college and then for three years in the Peace Corps.

It was during my Peace Corps period that I really came into my own. I lived in Terney, a remote village featured in both my owl and tiger books, where I leaned into the rural lifestyle. I heated my home with wood, drew water from an adjacent stream (in winter, chopping a hole through the ice), and bathed once a week in a banya (or sauna).

I began to understand that there was an acute wildlife conservation need there and amazingly devoted individuals throwing everything they had into their work. These people included staff of the Siberian Tiger Project. I soon saw that my set of skills— cultural and language familiarity coupled with an ability to endure significant physical discomfort—could create a niche for me in conservation.

I began writing first as a way to draw funding attention to my work. In graduate school, my projects focused on birds of the Russian Far East, but it was difficult to convince donors to pay for studies of obscure species in a poorly known corner of the world. So I attempted to craft evocative grant proposals that resonated with reviewers. As a conservationist, I also recognized that the public cannot care about something if they don’t know it exists, so I began writing a blog at Scientific American in 2016 called East of Siberia to share the natural wonders of the Russian Far East with Western audiences. I followed this with my book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, in 2020, which was about my PhD work with Blakiston’s fish owls.

What is the core story you tried to tell in Tigers Between Empires?

A key message of this book is that it’s not too late for conservation. The fact that the Amur tigers fought their way back from the brink of extinction is proof that wild species and wild places can still exist alongside humans.

Another important takeaway is that collaboration is key. Be they tigers or cranes or salmon or whatever, governments and NGOs need to be able to work together and across borders for wildlife conservation to be sustainable.

The book’s subtitle calls it an “improbable return.” Why is that, and what do you think was the most important factor in the ultimate success?

The Amur tiger population in Russia dwindled to just a few dozen individuals in the 1930s. Usually, when populations get that small, there is no coming back. They can instead get sucked into what’s called an “extinction vortex,” an accelerated cycle of genetic paucity, reduced breeding success, and increased vulnerability to random events that clings to a population until it’s gone completely. Given how many tigers were being removed from the wild in Russia in the early twentieth century—either by killing the adults for sport or removing the cubs for zoo and circus markets—their extinction seemed imminent. Thankfully, a strong government response creating protected areas and banning hunting and trapping tigers gave the species a chance to recover in Russia.

Meanwhile, in China, tiger numbers plummeted sharply throughout the twentieth century until there were perhaps a dozen left by the year 2000. The prevailing assumption was that that was it—the Amurs of China would follow the South China tiger to extinction in the wild there—but again this proved false. Amur tigers in China have rebounded to 70-80 today, an incredible recovery in only twenty-five years.

In both cases, I think the reason that Amur tigers were able to return was because of a combination of sound science driving conservation management, coupled with strong backing from the Russian and Chinese governments to implement and enforce policy.

You were not a direct participant to the Siberian Tiger Project, but your coverage reads as if you were on the front lines. I imagine it’s a talent other authors envy. How did you achieve this? Was your own conservation work in the region integral here?

Actually, I was a direct participant in the work, first getting involved in the year 2000, but only sporadically. But I did not want to distract from the important characters in this story by inserting myself.

I’ve been in a helicopter chasing tigers hoping for the opportunity to dart one; I’ve walked trap lines; and I’ve tracked tigers both in the snow and by following radio signals. I also took part in one tiger capture on the ground. In 2012, as an employee of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia Program (which grew out of the Siberian Tiger Project), I designed and led field studies to understand human impacts on tiger prey densities.

Because of these experiences, I was able to infuse the text with details about captures and tracking as well as the landscapes. Most importantly, I had generous access to decades of field notes and letters from Dale Miquelle, the book’s main protagonist, which offered very personal insights into key events.

How would you currently characterize the Amur Tiger project now? Cautious success? Fragile recovery? Something else?

“Fragile recovery” is a great descriptor. The return of Amur tigers to northeast Asia is an almost one-hundred-year conservation success story, but the rise in poaching following the fall of the Soviet Union showed it to be a brittle one. So long as tigers are valued as a commodity, and the natural resources they depend on are extracted for human use, we need to be vigilant or tiger populations will suffer.

Is the Amur Tiger story a model that can be applied to other species and landscapes or is it a non-replicable outlier?

The model of reintroductions of tigers to former ranges, as described in a later chapter of Tigers Between Empires, is absolutely replicable for other tiger range states. In fact, it’s currently being done in Kazakhstan. And a recent paper, which showed where tigers have gone extinct since 1900, could be used as a blueprint for strategic tiger recoveries across Asia following the same methodologies.

What do you believe is most needed for success—government policy, science, public will, capital?

Maybe this answer is a cop-out, but all of the above. Government policy is impotent if not driven by science or endorsed by the public. And capital will be squandered if there isn’t government commitment.

On a personal level, when I read your book, I couldn’t help but recall reading David Quammen’s great Song of the Dodo back in the late 1990s, back when I was a hardworking mid-level banker on Wall Street. Reading it then, I vowed to someday work directly in the conservation field. It took me a very long time to pull off (and I benefited from a lot of help and good fortune), but some 20 years later, I did join The Nature Conservancy. It was the best thing that ever happened in my working life.

Do you have any advice or guidance for people (like me back then) who might want to switch careers into your field or who may want to participate on a part-time basis?

This is a tough time to get into this field on a full-time basis, at least in the United States. The significant changes to US federal institutions since January 2025 have resulted in an abundance of extremely qualified and competent scientists now looking for work. For those interested in volunteer opportunities or possibly part-time work, however, there is a lot of urgent local need. I recommend researching local entities that have interests that overlap yours and inquiring about engagement possibilities.

And what about younger people just starting their careers?

This is tough too! If an undergraduate asks me this question, I always recommend they look into research being done by professors at their university and try to identify someone with matching interests or at least a good personality fit. Then volunteer to do anything: assist in field work, data curation, whatever. Build that relationship; ask to participate in manuscript preparation for any papers that come out of that research. Having a mentor is important, and getting your name on publications early will go a long way when applying to graduate school.

What other books might you recommend to our readers, conservation-related or not?

Three books that I’ve read recently and really enjoyed are all related to the relationship between humans and nature. First is Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth, which documents the return of wolves to Europe; Crossings by Ben Goldfarb looks at how linear infrastructure like roads, railways, and power lines fragment natural landscapes; and California Against the Sea by Rosanna Xia, which describes how different coastal communities in California are responding to a changing climate.

Thank you, Jonathan!

Onward,

If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please consider hitting the like button and/or leaving a comment. It helps other readers find us and hopefully builds more support for environmental and conservation progress.

Today, let’s consider another looming and even more unsettling affordability challenge on the horizon: home insurance.

The cost of insuring a home has soared due to recent waves of extreme weather. On average, Americans have seen their premiums rise by about 24% over the past few years—and much more than that in weather-stressed regions. Even more problematic, coverage is simply no longer available in certain areas as insurers pull back, forcing home owners into state-run programs or leaving them exposed altogether.

Here’s a fun quiz.

Q: Which states with the fastest-rising home insurance rates have political leaders who publicly downplay climate change?

A: Most of them.

The disconnect is stark, and one can’t help but wonder how long it can continue. The science here is unambiguous and robust: climate change intensifies storms, wildfires, floods, and other disasters, all of which translate directly into higher insurance claims (not to mention more devastating outcomes like the loss of life, destruction of property, and more). Escalating losses force insurers to raise prices or restrict availability in order to remain solvent.

And, of course, there is every reason to anticipate that extreme weather will only keep getting worse.

But maybe there is a small silver lining here. As famed political strategist James Carville argued back in the 90s, affordability is voters’ primary concern and shapes election outcomes. And in this case, it might just prompt a reckoning among voters that climate is one more issue with real-world consequences that cannot be demagogued away. I’m betting that voters will figure this out.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter over the past five years, you already know what we think voters should do. Pay close attention to what is happening. Push your elected leaders to address challenges in ways that make sense, and/or elect people who will do so.

Affordability challenges—insurance, energy, food, housing, you name it—are always symptoms of deeper issues. You can’t fix prices without addressing root causes: fundamental economic forces like supply and demand, public policy (tariffs, for example), and—crucially—environmental realities like climate change. Addressing these difficult challenges requires both thoughtful science (and fact-following leadership), and carefully developed policy solutions.

If you want home insurance to be both affordable and available, start by electing leaders who recognize the climate crisis and are willing to take the difficult but necessary steps to address it.

The affordability crisis is real, but it can be addressed—just not by soundbite. If more voters shift their focus beyond short-term politics to tackle the fundamentals, we can start getting on with the important work ahead. Let’s be instigators for that change.

Onward,

So, if we want to encourage consumption of a certain product, we should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable, right?

Unfortunately, here in the US we are doing just the opposite with Electric Vehicles (EVs).

This newsletter favors encouraging people to drive EVs. More people shifting to EVs will lead to numerous positive real-world impacts, including improvements in air quality and public health, decreased dependence on fossil fuels, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention a better driving experience and likely lower costs of ownership over the life of the vehicle.

And most of us in the US probably also want EVs to be made domestically to support local industry, promote job creation, develop resilient supply chains, and decrease dependence on other countries.

It’s hard to imagine US-based automakers thriving in the future if they don’t offer competitive EVs, right?

But now, as governments retool their approaches in starkly different ways, the prospects for EVs in the US don’t look promising.

China is racing ahead. In 2025, more than 50% of China’s new car sales will be electric—five times the US market share. That’s likely because, in China, EVs cost less than local gasoline-fueled cars. Contrast that to the US, where EVs command about a $14,000 premium over gas comps.

It’s not easy to do head-to-head price comparisons of EVs from China and the US because, in general, the Chinese ones are smaller and come with fewer fancy features than those made and sold in the US. But the price differences are amazing. Mini EVs can be purchased in China for as little as $5000 to $7500. The BYD Seagull (with a about a $10,000 sticker price), while smaller, seems otherwise to be pretty comparable to the Nissan Leaf ($29,000). The Tesla Model 3 is bigger and fancier but starts at about $42,000 in the US.

Chinese EVs stack up very well on the affordability front.

China will manufacture about two-thirds of the world’s EVs in 2025. China dominates the EV battery business too, with a global market share of about 80%.

China’s advantages primarily result from years of hands-on industrial policy—targeted subsidies, investments in battery supply chains, big roll-outs of charging networks—and the accompanying economies of scale. These factors have turned its auto sector into a global powerhouse. Beijing now seems to be reducing purchase subsidies, but other policies, like trade-in bonuses and quotas for “new energy vehicles,” are expected to sustain this powerful momentum.

In the US, it’s the exact opposite. The Trump administration has reversed the nation’s federal support for EVs in every way possible. The Biden era $7,500 tax credit for EVs expires this year, infrastructure funding is frozen, and ambitious EV goals have been shelved. The federal government even blocked California and like-minded states from setting their own zero-emission targets.

What does this mean for the global outlook?

The good news: All indicators suggest consumers prefer electric cars.

The bad news: Policy choices, not just consumer enthusiasm or technological advances, will dictate where EVs are made and bought. For now, China looks assured of the lead position in the EV race, as US manufacturers have to figure out how to catch up with much less government help at their back. The future still looks electric, but its distribution is anything but equal.

But there is something we can do. As we note time after time, public policy matters hugely! Environmentally minded citizens, together with people who want US manufacturing to be competitive, can work to:

1. build voter support for leaders who will address this gap and

2. intensify their advocacy and engagement right now at the state and local level. If federal retrenchment persists for the time being, state-level policy could be decisive to keep America’s clean car momentum alive.

Let’s get to work.

Onward,

It was a trip organized by an environmental NGO I support. Our organization is still young, but it has been growing at a nice pace and has reached the stage where we wanted to expand our network of supporters. So we invited some folks to join us on an expedition to see the work we’re doing, spend time with us in nature, and get to know our team.

The experience reminded me once again of advice I often give in this newsletter. If you care very much about any one cause, or if you’re looking to add some meaning to your life, engage with an NGO you admire.

The trip was inspiring and fun, yes. It also focused very pragmatically on making real and substantive progress in the organization’s area of focus.

Here’s what we did:

• We hiked long distances and high elevations every day as we accompanied scientists who were doing field work.

• As we hiked, we chatted and got to know one another. We were a diverse group—different nationalities, young and old, different professions (science, business, philanthropy, NGO administration…you name it).

• As everyone became more familiar with our organization’s mission and strategy, we asked questions and offered suggestions as to how the organization could do more.

• We rolled up our sleeves, got down in the dirt, and tried our best to help the science team. We were mostly clumsy at this, but we gave it our all. It was humbling and fun.

• In the evening, we hung out, relaxed, learned about the local culture, and enjoyed the camaraderie.

• Perhaps late at night or very early in the morning, we took a few minutes to catch up on our emails and/or look at social media, but we kept it to a minimum.

I think I can safely speak for all of the guests when I say we were inspired. We started thinking about our individual capabilities, the know-how we’ve accumulated over the years, and how we could draw on that to help the org make progress toward its goals. We all committed to staying engaged and to helping the org as best we could.

Before we knew it, it was time to go home. Even though we had mostly been strangers just a couple of days before, we all hugged and promised to stay in touch. And, indeed, we are already staying in touch with one another. Everyone seems a bit envious of my formal role with the org, as it makes it easier for me to keep doing all of this. But I bet the others will find ways to engage with the org and likely think hard about how working with NGOs could be a bigger part of their lives.

Because my NGO experience is largely in the conservation field, many of my experiences with supporters are like the one I just had—in the great outdoors. That’s almost always a winning formula. People hear about one specific trip like this one, and they think: well, of course, that sounds like an especially great trip. But that misses my point—I’m suggesting that it’s the immersive engagement with the mission and people of the NGO that create the positive experience.

I remember as a young adult serving on the board of a small adult literacy program in NYC. It was my first board role, and we worked primarily in disadvantaged parts of NYC, so that where our engagements took place. Those experiences were just as fulfilling as the trip I just took. Those efforts also led to measurable and positive outcomes for society. In other words, it’s not just personal fulfillment we’re talking about, it’s also helping to make positive things happen for the world.

Why does doing stuff like this create such good feelings?

I’ve seen this time after time, as a volunteer, donor, board member, and also as the CEO of an NGO. Engaging as a volunteer/supporter takes your mind off yourself, requires that you work with and learn from others, and gets you focused on making positive things happen. Putting it this way sounds like work. And it is. But it usually turns out to be fun too.

There are many strategies to making our days more satisfying, meaningful, and joyful. But one is easy—find a non-profit org you admire and get involved. Try your best to make positive things happen.

Onward,

One theme was particularly salient given the issues we write about at The Instigator: How much power do CEOs really have to take bold corporate action for nature’s benefit?

We’ve argued here that there is a lot business can do—and we should all push hard for them to do it—but it’s difficult to get beyond initiatives that directly benefit shareholders.

Gelles’s book is 320 pages of proof that Patagonia often goes far beyond what makes “business sense”—at least by traditional metrics. And the company seemed to ultimately benefit from doing so. Doesn’t that prove businesses can do much more than they currently do and that we should hold them to greater account?

I’m not so sure.

1. Yvon owned Patagonia outright. That empowered him to do whatever he wanted with his company. Fortunately for us, Yvon usually wanted to do the right thing for nature. (The book makes clear that he also insisted that all products and initiatives ultimately be profitable.) But very few companies are owned and controlled by an individual or small group. Most of the time, companies are owned by dispersed groups of shareholders who expect business results to come first.

2. We also see that CEOs are actually quite constrained. It’s hard to tell from the book just how much impact on environmental initiatives the various CEOs at Patagonia have had, but it’s clear that it was limited. Yvon, as owner, called the shots. On some occasions, he fires executives because the environmental initiatives they oversaw produced insufficient business results.

3. What about customers? They clearly have the opportunity to wield positive influence, but our view is that their support for positive environmental action is generally quite limited. In Patagonia’s case, customer support for environmental actions seems more evident than usually is the case, but it’s less than what we’d expect or hope for. As we reported (and Gelles covers in depth), Yvon and his family—in a heroic act of generosity—transferred their entire ownership of Patagonia to a trust in 2022 with the requirement that all going-forward profits (net of reinvestments in the company) be distributed as donations to non-profit organizations focused on environmental or conservation goals. That means net profits derived from purchases at Patagonia directly fund environmental efforts. It’s hard for any other company to do better than that. Therefore, we’d expect—or at least like to see—environmentalists encourage all consumers who love nature to do as much of their shopping as possible from Patagonia. Alas, that doesn’t really seem to be happening, and Patagonia’s competitors don’t seem to be facing significant pressure to do more.

All in all, there is plenty that we can learn from the positive case study of Patagonia. More companies should try harder to follow the company’s example. And, to be clear, we think most companies have significant opportunities to do more. Let’s push them to do so.

But let’s also acknowledge that there are real limits to voluntary initiatives by the private sector. That’s why we continue to argue that the top priority for environmentalists should be politics. Above all else, we need to build a majority voter coalition that will elect legislators who fight for the public policy we need. Let’s get serious. Instead of just asking some private sector leaders to voluntarily prioritize environmental outcomes, let’s require all of them to do so.

Onward,

We need more of this. Let’s get the conversation going.

NIGEL PURVIS

Tufts University

I mostly but not fully agree with you, Mark. In the political business cycle, we are experiencing a recession -- perhaps even a depression -- on the environment, as you note. Policies are moving in the wrong direction and in many countries these are dark times, particularly for climate action. And yet I share your optimism that better times lie ahead--the business cycle moves forward; a bull market for the environment is around the corner and we can speed up the process through hard work and sensible, clear-eyed strategies of the type you write about in The Instigator. Your insight that we need to make the business case for green policies, including ambitious climate policies, by showing companies and the public that these policies make sense for non-environmental reasons is spot on. I also support your call for working collaboratively and constructively with CEOs and companies whenever possible. That said, we must also set high expectations for U.S. businesses and financial institutions, establishing what political scientists call better "norms" of behavior. We know from past periods when climate policies were moving backward that encouraging companies to abide by new, ambitious standards made a difference. When President George W. Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol, many U.S. companies joined multinationals in setting ambitious voluntary goals to reduce corporate emissions. When President Trump rejected the Paris Agreement, companies were pressed to set net-zero emission goals for mid century and many did. They also pledged to remove deforestation from their supply chains and invest in nature-based climate solutions through carbon markets. Not all of these pledges were implemented but many were and the process of raising the bar -- strengthening global norms for business -- helped redefine climate and environmental leadership in ways that demanded more of companies. We need the same kind of engagement with companies now. We should join together in pressing leading companies to lobby for sensible climate policies, oppose new coal power plants, decarbonize corporate supply chains, switch to renewable energy, and more. Advocacy campaigns from the left wing of the environmental community are necessary to hold companies accountable and moderate environmental organizations should direct their praise and engagement toward companies that are really working hard to raise the bar.

RALPH BRADBURD

Williams College

Mark has offered a great many useful observations and suggestions, and every one of them is right on the money. Two of them, in particular, strike me as offering important ways to move forward even now, a moment when environmental protection is facing the strongest national-level political headwinds seen in the last fifty years.

One promising avenue that Mark highlights is working to strengthen the pro-environment voting coalition. For this, we should “think local.” While it might be hard to move voters’ positions on global climate change, people often feel strongly about protecting their own local environment. By the definition of “local,” there are many local environmental concerns, and therefore many opportunities for engaging voters at the local level and, by focusing on the local environmental issues rather than the more contentious national or global issues, for bringing more people into the environmental coalition. The best of all outcomes for such local level efforts is a triple-win: a local environment improvement that also contributes to global environmental improvement and that demonstrably yields local economic benefits such as lower energy costs. Replacing a dirty energy source with clean low-cost renewable energy is just one example of this. Successes of this kind do not go unnoticed, and each local success can inspire other localities to try for a similar win. And this suggests some important roles for state and national level environmental organizations and for environmental philanthropy: providing technical and financial advice to the local efforts; providing financial assistance in situations where modest help can make all the difference in yielding a success; and, of course, helping to make news of local successes go viral.

Mark also offered ideas for more effectively engaging the business community in advocating for policies that yield positive environmental outcomes. I could not agree more. In the absence of regulatory requirements, we cannot expect businesses to sacrifice significant profit to achieve environmental improvements; indeed, we would be foolish to do so. Similar to local environmental issues, the name of the game is win-win situations, what we might think of as low-hanging fruit. The wonderful thing about technological change is that it keeps creating more low-hanging fruit. Renewable energy comes to mind here as well. The astonishing reductions in the cost of renewable power generation and, increasingly, battery storage, mean that businesses, especially energy-intensive ones, are potential powerful partners in advocating for policy outcomes we would see as positive. As Mark has long argued, rather than demonize business interests, we should find ways to ally their interests with ours and make use of the resources, talents and political clout they can offer. State and national level environmental organizations and environmental philanthropy can play exactly the same roles here as in the case of local environmental improvements, and, of course, financial entities with substantial resources to bring to bear can play a transformative role.

It's hard to be optimistic in these times, but there are opportunities and we need to take advantage of them. Much to do. Let’s get started.

ERIC WILBURN

Bezos Earth Fund

Building on your call to be inclusive and be kind, I think we (the environmental movement) must be wise enough to compromise in order to make progress. Progress does not come from perfection, it comes from compromise. Today, the majority of the environmental movement seems to me unwilling to compromise on anything. Far too many environmentalists seem to only see black and white solutions and are unwilling to enter into any space of grey. We live in a time when building bridges and finding common ground is critical to not only near term progress, but more importantly long-term coalitions and systems change. I fear that our own fear, exacerbated by social media, has led many in the environmental movement to be unwilling to compromise on anything, even within our own movement! Let alone find common ground with people that don’t consider themselves environmentalists at all.

I think it’s healthy to be realists about the challenges we face, but not let that fear shut down our curiosity to compromise, our capacity to build coalitions and our ability to create a shared positive vision for the future and actually believe it is possible! Now more than perhaps any other time in America and the world, people are looking for, yearning for, positive versions of the future - for pragmatic paths forward that give them something to hope for and something to get excited about. As you Mark call for inclusivity and kindness to build coalitions, I call for us to let go of our self-rightousness and our perfectionism. To step into the grey solution soup and find common ground, with others in the movement itself so that we can get out of our own way, and with others that aren’t in the movement so we can build that big, beautiful coalition. Because that coalition is the foundation of any systems transformation that I know we all so desperately want to see.

GERNOT WAGNER

Columbia Business School

You're asking the trillion dollar question, quite literally. There's no single right answer. Can't be. But here are a couple thoughts:

In the end, it's about opportunity, the green growth mindset, whatever you might call it.

Tapping into that is key.

For the time being, fossil fuel companies are among the most profitable companies in the history of the planet. That, of course, is only the case because we're allowing them -- us -- to use the atmosphere as a free toilet. But jumping up and down shouting as much won't change that fact. They will always be able to outspend whichever coalition environmentalists are able to put together. That also makes the policy wins environmentalists do get so amazing.

How to get more such wins? Opportunity.

There's plenty of money to be made cutting emissions. In a sense, that's the reason we aren't doing enough. Yes, there are costs. But costs = investments, and investments = opportunity.

I keep coming back to this graph:

It's from a BlackRock report circa 2022.

Three points become clear here:

First, it isn't the economy vs the environment. GDP goes up, as we cut emissions and stabilize the world's climates. So yeah, that old "economy-vs-climate" trope has run its course. It just isn't true. Never has been.

Second, there are losers: the fossil fuel companies, the stranded assets. So no, it isn't "economy-vs-climate" but there's definitely "profits of those who use the atmosphere as a free toilet-vs-climate". Guess who's fighting the hardest to keep things just so.

Third, there are plenty of opportunities. Green infrastructure spending is already huge -- over $2 trillion last year for the first time -- and there's plenty of need for more.

Who will benefit from that next trillion in green investments? Well, some of the usual suspects, of course, and yeah, I'd say that's mostly OK.

The real problem: many many more will benefit, who don't yet know about their luck.

What's also clear, of course, is that there are plenty more benefits to cutting carbon pollution than just the extra investment opportunities. The biggest bars in that BlackRock graph are the yellow ones: the avoided climate damages. So yes, we can't shy away from pointing out that cutting pollution is, in fact, good.

One quick final point: None of what we're talking about here is if. It's all when. Shell's most pessimistic climate scenario has the world essentially decarbonize by the end of the century. But of course, doing that would be much too late. It's about channeling trillions of dollars in the right direction, now.

That, too, is happening, despite whatever Trump wished to be true.

The larger economic, technological, and geopolitical forces propelling everyone toward cleaner energy remain as strong as ever.

PETER EBSEN

Net Zero Company

Two Strategic Pivots for Enviro Co - repositioning the problem and working on mutually beneficial solutions with Business Co

I have very much enjoyed Mark’s recent article where he has provided suggestions for course corrections to Enviro Co’s board.

He has invited me to provide some further input. Having spent the past thirty years working on climate solutions in one form or another, I offer these thoughts with considerable humility about what we're up against.

1. Move Climate Action Beyond the Culture Wars

The fundamental challenge is beyond finding centrist coalitions—it's repositioning greenhouse gas concentration as a non-partisan technical problem that demands solving, much like infrastructure or food security. After decades of climate advocacy, we must acknowledge that framing this issue within existing political divides has constrained our effectiveness.

The issue isn't that "saving the planet" should be abandoned as a goal—it's that this framing has been allowed to become divisive when it should be as universally accepted as energy security or economic stability. The path forward requires rebranding climatic stability as the essential foundation for continued economic growth and prosperity. This means demonstrating that maintaining a stable climate is not an environmental luxury but a prerequisite for sustained industrial competitiveness, agricultural productivity, and economic security.

The breakthrough comes when addressing greenhouse gas concentrations is broadly understood as maintaining the stable environmental conditions that modern economies require to function.

2. Work on mutually beneficial solutions with Business Co

The traditional approach of asking business to support environmental goals has reached its limits. Instead, we need a genuine partnership where both sides benefit directly and immediately. This requires addressing two structural challenges that have often undermined past collaborations.

Bringing the Blockers Onboard:

Industries that have historically resisted climate action—oil, gas, cement, steel—must become net beneficiaries of climate solutions, not casualties. This requires designing solutions that leverage existing infrastructure, expertise, and business relationships while creating new revenue streams for these industries.

Solving the Time Horizon Problem: Currently, Enviro Co's main argument to Business Co is that solving greenhouse gas concentrations will be economically advantageous in the very long term. This argument falls short because it ignores the business needs for short term results. A genuine partnership requires net benefits for Business Co in both the short term and the very long term.

To succeed, Enviro Co must anchor climate action in shared interests and joint gains. Reframing climatic stability as an economic essential, and structuring win-win partnerships with business, shifts us from polarization to progress. These strategic pivots can redefine the climate agenda: practical, inclusive, and built to last.

ROBERT PERKOWITZ

ecoAmerica

Thanks for the positive and productive thoughts. We need more/all of us to be thinking in this direction — given massive new obstacles, how do we meaningfully advance climate solutions? That said, I note that if you put two enviros together they’ll each have big ideas (nuclear power! get corporations to step up) that the other thinks are unrealistic. And, even if they confidently know what to do, they don’t typically don’t have a workable plan to make it happen.

It is ironic that now, when we finally have economically favorable, scaleable climate solutions ln America, opponents have captured enough of society and government to significantly reverse progress. As we watch or economy, democracy and global influence get taken apart at the same rate as climate solutions, the question remains, how should we respond?

The NYTimes Magazine piece, updated on September 18, "The Old Climate Activism Playbook No Longer Works. What Else Can?” covers the options. It distills to the basic need for broader, significant public support. David Beckman of Pisces Foundation calls it sway — addressing the underlying conditions facing climate solutions which are social.

"There are many good tactical ideas out there, but I hope we engage what is, for me, the fundamental issue: strengthening our strategic posture. To do this, the most important shift we can make is to focus more on policy’s prerequisites: influence and power. As a community, we have solutions. We need more sway."

We certainly need a majority voter coalition, and inclusive kind efforts. But how do we get sway? We’re not going to be able to spend billions of dollars and dozens ofyears on marketing and organization building. We can though, take advantage of all the, trusted infrastructure that’s been built in America over the bast couple of centuries. We can reach the vast majority of Americans with simple messages, repeated often, by trusted messengers. ecoAmerica shows the way.

ecoAmerica moves society toward climate solutions by engaging and supporting trusted national institutions to inspire and empower their many millions of members in local communities across America to visibly act and advocate for ambitious, just climate mitigation, resilience, and

restoration. ecoAmerica achieves the necessary leverage, scale, and credibility to move society by helping existing organizations add climate as a top level priority. They and their members want clean air and water on a thriving planet, we just need to help them.

Onward,

But before we dive into another week of panels and announcements, let’s step back and ask ourselves:

How are we doing?

On the one hand, there is plenty to be proud of: accelerating clean energy investment, increased climate awareness, and new promising technologies — all signs of progress and reason for optimism.

On the other hand, there are many reasons to be discouraged: greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, public policy (especially—but not only—in the US) is moving fast in exactly the wrong direction, and overall progress is falling far short of what we expected.

When you look at the Climate Week agenda, however, it feels a bit like business as usual.

I’m a former Wall Street banker, so please indulge me in a metaphor you may not like at first. Pretend for a moment that the environmental movement is a publicly traded company. Call it Enviro Co. Its stock price would likely be way down right now. Shareholders would be restless. The board of directors would be thinking about replacing the CEO and shaking up management. Activist investors would be circling, demanding radical change. That’s what happens in the private sector when results fall short of expectations. Business as usual isn’t accepted.

We can’t take this metaphor too far. For the environmental movement, there is no stock price, no single board of directors, and no easy way to force change across such a diffuse movement. But I think the metaphor is instructive. We can—and I would argue, we should—try thinking in the same way about the environmental movement we care so deeply about.

How do we decide on what kind of change to pursue? In the business world, everybody speaks up. CEOs and management teams, shareholders, research analysts, journalists, hedge funds, customers, government officials, and employees all weigh in with their ideas on what the struggling company should do. This is good—especially for leaders. They don’t have to figure out what to do by themselves. Rigorous debate leads to new strategies and thorough consideration of all ideas. Eventually, decisions are made and new initiatives get underway. Can environmentalists do the same? I say yes.

So let the discussion begin. How do you think the environmental movement in general—or, individual NGOs in particular—should change?

I’ll go first. Here are some high-level ideas I’d submit to Enviro Co’s Board of Directors for their consideration. I’ll follow up with more detailed proposals in future posts.

1. Double Down on Ambitious Efforts to Build a Majority Voter Coalition for Pragmatic Environmental Progress.

This newsletter has long argued that the only time-proven strategy to address environmental challenges is regulation that requires better behavior from polluters. Yes, getting legislation like this passed today looks exceedingly difficult. But we can start now by engaging with the centrist voters who are not yet part of the environmental coalition. This would mean listening to them, addressing their concerns, and discussing how climate progress would benefit them directly. It would also likely require new policy ideas that yield climate progress without imposing immediate costs that they would feel are too high. Over time, this kind of dialogue would allow us to build a bigger coalition of voters, which would, in turn, enable us to elect leaders who will prioritize climate matters. None of this would be easy or quick work. But it would be doable, in my view, for at least three reasons:

• We don’t have to convince everyone. We only need a majority coalition. We don’t have to engage with anti-climate zealots. We can instead focus on reasonable voters in the center.

• We have something positive to offer voters. Most environmental challenges can be addressed with policies that create net economic gains—jobs, growth, stability, and— most importantly right now—affordability. Voters want that. Research shows, for example, that voters understand that clean energy is cheaper, locally available, and unlimited in supply.

• Voters also care about securing a safe future for their children and grandchildren. They want to protect what they love. The environment is a key part of that.

I learned a lot about this first-hand when I led The Nature Conservancy. TNC operates 50 chapters in the US, each with a board of trustees that, to a large degree, lines up with the prevailing political flavor of the state—i.e., red or blue. But members have a shared desire to protect nature in common-sense ways, and the organization operates in a non-partisan manner. Every now and again, I would screw up on this front. I would say or write something that would come off as partisan to red state trustees. They would be angry, and they would be right to be. My response would be to fly to their state to meet with them in person and to apologize for my mistake. But then I would switch back to TNC’s mission and remind everyone that we agreed on much more than we disagreed on; that the stakes were high; and that we had to stay focused on making progress. And then I would do my best to do the hardest thing of all—just listen. What strategies did they think would work? Where could we find common ground so that most TNC stakeholders could get behind an idea? It always seemed to work—it’s actually not as difficult as you might think. I’m not saying it will be as easy to build a majority voter coalition for climate progress across the US, but I am saying it would be foolish not to try.

2. Ask Business to Do More—But Ask for Things That Make Sense for Business to Do

There is nothing wrong with asking business to address climate on a voluntary basis. Great things have occurred as a result. The mistake is concluding that such efforts will ever truly scale. Business leaders don’t really have the option of prioritizing environmental outcomes over business results—they are hired hands who work for owners, and owners demand the best financial results.

Also, environmentalists shouldn’t try to tell business what to do. For the most part, environmentalists don’t know what businesses should do. Running a business is harder than it looks. But we can ask questions and push toward positive policy recommendations. The main question to ask: How might more ambitious climate policy benefit a company? There are many levers here—any policy that would lead to higher revenues, lower costs, more confidence for long-term capital spending, reduced risks, more innovation, or greater engagement with customers or shareholders is fair game.

Some examples:

• At least behind closed doors, most CEOs would acknowledge that they are worried about securing all the energy and electricity they will need over the years ahead. They know that demand for energy is up and increasing sharply with activities underway like AI and data center growth. They also have concerns about volatile fossil fuel prices. They don’t just talk about energy security the way politicians do—they really need it.

• Many CEOs will share that they want full access to the emerging and attractive business opportunities associated with renewable energy. They don’t want the US to cede that market to China.

• CEOs would likely favor trade policy that ensures less clean or more carbon-intensive operators from overseas don’t have cost advantages selling their products in our domestic market.

• CEOs—especially ones who are doing as much climate positive stuff as they can—want a level playing field. They want policy that will hold their competitors to the same high standard.

• CEOs would also favor policy that is strongly supported by voters, so it would not change wildly from election to election.

• CEOs of global companies would like policy in the US to be as aligned as possible with the other major markets in which their companies compete.

And so on. That’s a lot to work with.

On the other hand, the same CEOs will be unenthusiastic about climate policy that raises costs or introduces a lot of new red tape but doesn’t really improve climate outcomes. We shouldn’t want policy like that either. And—apologies if this sounds obvious—CEOs don’t want to be criticized or blamed for all bad climate outcomes to date. They generally believe that they and their teams are working hard to deliver in the best way the products and services that their customers (including us) want.

If we have a dialogue along these lines, the most important thing that we could ask business to voluntarily take on would be to put their prodigious lobbying capabilities to work designing and pushing for the climate policies that will lead to the outcomes we seek.

3. Be Inclusive. Be Kind.

When I was trying to figure out how to transition from Wall Street to the environmental sector, most of the experienced environmentalists I reached out to encouraged me. There was so much I didn’t know, but they didn’t care. They were kind to me, and they acted like they believed that the environmental movement would benefit if it were to draw in more players with different backgrounds and capabilities, including people like me. I would never have been able to do any of the things I’ve done over the last 20 years without their help.

I hope that same spirit prevails today. It’s not always easy in these divisive, polarized, and sometimes mean-spirited times to remain open-minded about building the most diverse coalition possible. But we’ll have more success building dialogue and coalitions with diverse voters and diverse business leaders if our team is similarly diverse. Right now, we should particularly lean in on welcoming young people into the environmental community. Why? First, we’re leaving them a mess. Second, we’ll benefit from their fresh way of seeing things anew.

If Enviro Co prioritized these three big picture initiatives noted above, I think our metaphorical stock price would go up.

Our goal in this newsletter is to generate the broadest and most open-minded brainstorming possible about how we can best reset in order to accelerate progress. What do you think?

Onward,

Rich and I worked together at The Nature Conservancy for many years; he led our Australia unit and was a conservation finance lead in Asia during my tenure as CEO. At the time, our main strategy at TNC was pretty simple: given TNC’s size and financial strengths, we wanted to pursue the biggest and boldest conservation initiatives we could think of. Size is not everything, of course, but if you’re looking to have a big impact by protecting nature, doing things in as large a way as possible is usually a good way to make that happen.

Rich was a great colleague—super smart, fearless, always ready to not only challenge the private and the philanthropic sectors to step up, he also challenged TNC leaders like me too. Rich devised and led some of our boldest strategies. He left TNC shortly after I did in 2020 and today is the CEO of Carbon Growth Partners (CGP), a leading investor in the nature-based carbon business.

Please meet Rich.

Rich, thanks for agreeing to talk with me for our newsletter. Many of our readers are trying to build fulfilling and impactful careers in the environmental sector, so we like to start our interviews by asking how you got to where you are. Can you please walk us through the arc of your career to date.

Great question, Mark! I’ll start by saying it wasn’t meant to be this way. My career arc, as you call it, is really a series of sharp turns that at first look random, but in hindsight make sense if your goal is investing in climate action.

I grew up on a small farm in conservative rural Australia, where my main ambition was to become a wealthy stockbroker. So that’s the path I pursued: I left home at 17 and started trading on the Sydney Futures Exchange. After almost eight years, I moved into the physical commodities market, trading paper and cardboard in the circular economy. I was good at both, but it wasn’t fulfilling. Then in 2005—long before the term “blue carbon” was coined—I volunteered on a community project in Kenya, exploring how mangrove restoration might someday generate carbon credits.

From that moment, I was hooked on making an impact. I went back to Australia, completed an environmental management degree, and was hired as the CEO of Earthwatch Australia—the very organization I’d first volunteered with in Kenya. After that came a tourism social enterprise in Timor-Leste, followed by nearly seven great years at TNC, before founding CGP with a few TNC colleagues in 2020.

It’s an unusual career path, but I think that’s also the point: there’s a role for everyone in climate action. Yes, we need scientists, advocates, and policymakers. But we also need cloud technicians, accountants, marketers, lawyers, truck drivers, and plumbers. Whatever you’re good at, you’ll find a way to put it to use for the cause.

I have to admit, I’m worried. On the climate front, carbon emissions keep increasing, and public policy is going the wrong way in many places, including the US. When we consider biodiversity, despite our great efforts, the world keeps missing its key targets, and the vaunted 30x30 goals look like they’ll be very difficult to reach. The plastics crisis seems to only worsen, and so on. What do you think about these matters? Are you at all optimistic?

Optimism is hardwired into my DNA, so yes, I remain optimistic. The alternative is simply too bleak to contemplate. That said, it is getting harder. Pick almost any issue you care about—democracy, equality, biodiversity, human health, social cohesion—and the trend line is heading in the wrong direction. And paradoxically, that will feel true to you no matter which end of the political spectrum you view it from.

On climate specifically, the science is clear: whatever progress we make in the next decade, this period will see increasing disruption to food supplies, rising water stress, mass extinctions, more floods and fires, and growing human displacement.

The task of climate action is to limit those impacts in the longer term and to avoid the truly catastrophic outcome of heating the planet by more than 2°C. On that front, I remain hopeful. We know what needs to be done, and we have the tools, institutions, and money to do it, if we have the will. I trust that we’ll rediscover that will before it is too late.

Let’s shift to your current work. Could you please give our readers a brief overview of nature-based carbon removals and offsets? How do they work? Why do we need them? And what are the co-benefits of doing this stuff?

Nature is one of the most powerful and underutilized carbon solutions we have. Let me illustrate with an example: in Mexico, we are investing in a project called “BlueMX” to protect and restore more than 150,000 hectares of mangroves and other wetlands. Mangroves are prodigious carbon sinks—drawing down CO2 up to 5X faster than land-based forests—but more than half of all mangroves globally have been lost since the 1970s. Restoring degraded mangroves draws huge volumes of CO2 out of the atmosphere and stores it deeper and for longer underground.

This allows companies with residual emissions to offset them as part of a holistic carbon mitigation strategy. That’s the elegant simplicity of balancing emissions with durable, nature-based carbon removals: you put a tonne up, you take a tonne out. A credit for every debit. Over the life of the project, it will draw down 50 million tonnes of CO2 and store it safely in plants and soils.

But that’s not all. BlueMX is conserving the habitats of 600 known species (100 of which are threatened with extinction), has created jobs for 1,000 local community members, and has enrolled hundreds of people in social security, giving them access to health care, insurance, and fair working conditions. It is a living blueprint for how carbon projects can work: fixing the climate crisis, protecting nature, and uplifting communities.

Some bad—or even fraudulent—deals in the carbon offset market have attracted a lot of bad press. To me, this is no reason to panic. Complicated new financial markets always have bumps in the road. As long as we learn from mistakes and address what went wrong, we can keep moving ahead. Do you agree? Can we now be confident that carbon deals are working and will deliver the climate benefits they are supposed to?

Yes, carbon markets have received their share of criticism. Some of it was justified, much of it was overstated. But it is important to be clear about what was actually at issue. By and large, there were no credible claims that forests meant to be protected were destroyed, or that solar farms paid for were not built. Those outcomes are readily observable: anyone with Google Maps and 10 minutes of free time can check them out online. The concern was that some projects, having been proven, were issued more credits than they really should have been, based on arcane technical questions of carbon accounting baselines and “additionality.”

In the past two years, significant reforms have addressed these concerns. First, carbon accounting rules—especially related to nature-based solutions—are now more consistent, transparent, and less open to interpretation. And second, all major verification standards are now subject to the independent oversight of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. Together with improvements in monitoring and verification technologies, we can be confident that the climate benefits being claimed are genuinely being delivered.

One welcome outcome of these reforms will be to turn the integrity debate on its head. The real question for corporate leaders will no longer be why they are using offsets to mitigate residual emissions, but why they are not.

The buyers of these credits are typically corporations acting voluntarily. I really admire the leaders who opt in like this. What do you think is their motivation? And will it continue and scale? Or do we need regulations that require emitters to address their emissions by removing carbon from the atmosphere? If so, how do we get there?

There are many motivations for voluntary climate action: corporate responsibility, to head off unwanted regulation, the expectations of staff and customers, peer group norms, and just personal motivation to leave a better world for our kids and society at large. Those who take voluntary action should be applauded for it, loudly. But it is not enough: voluntary action currently accounts for around 1% of global emissions, and those who don’t take action face few consequences.

That’s why the convergence of voluntary and regulated markets is so important and will continue to accelerate. In countries as diverse as Australia, China, Chile, India, and Singapore, governments are including the infrastructure of the VCM and project-based carbon into their compliance regimes. The effect is powerful: companies that go beyond their regulatory obligations can generate tradable certificates, while those that fall short must buy them or pay a tax. The result is more finance flowing to high-quality projects and a fair system that rewards leadership instead of leaving it stranded. We will see more of it between now and 2030.

Putting on your forecasting hat, where do you think we’ll be in 10 years on the climate front? How important a role will carbon projects have played?

There’s no middle ground on this one: either the carbon market will have grown by orders of magnitude and played a key role in turning the tide of the climate crisis, or it will have collapsed, along with the world’s climate ambition. That’s because the two outcomes are inextricable: To address the crisis at the necessary scale and speed, we need the accelerated and cost-effective solutions that carbon markets enable, alongside direct emissions reductions. Without them, there is simply no credible path to a safe climate.

It always feels to me like we’re in a race against the clock when we pursue environmental progress. I believe we need change to happen fast and at major scale. How do you think about the challenge of speed and scale? Do you have any encouraging examples?

You’re right—it is a race against the clock. That’s why we often talk about the need to do “everything, everywhere, all at once.”’ Incremental progress won’t cut it.

The encouraging thing is that when the right mix of policy, finance, and innovation comes together, change can happen very quickly. Think about renewable energy: a decade or two ago, solar and wind were expensive niche technologies. Today, they are the cheapest form of new power in most parts of the world, and the speed of deployment has outpaced even the most optimistic forecasts. China’s emissions have probably already peaked—5 years ahead of schedule—and we expect the country will capitalize on US backsliding by taking the mantle of global climate leadership, backed by a more ambitious target, to COP30 in Belem.

Or take nature: we’re now seeing large-scale restoration projects—tens of thousands of hectares at a time—that combine satellite monitoring, drone-based aerial seeding, community leadership, and private capital in ways that simply weren’t possible 10 or 15 years ago. These are proof points that big, fast change is achievable.

The challenge is to replicate those successes across every sector, every region, and every ecosystem. That’s daunting, but it’s also encouraging—because we now know it can be done.

Back when we worked together, you and I—along with the entire TNC team and our great partners and supporters—managed to get some huge deals done for nature. It was exciting. At the time, I expected that the positive momentum would just keep increasing and that the big NGOs would become ever more powerful players in protecting nature. But it’s not clear to me if things have really worked out that way. What’s your take on where we are and how the big environmental NGOs are doing? What are the things the big organizations (together with their supporters—especially donors) should be doing to gain maximum momentum?

One of the things I loved most about working at TNC under your leadership was that sense of bold ambition—that feeling that anything was possible. The organization had the resources, courage, and clarity of purpose to ask: If not us, who? If not now, when? and then to act accordingly.

But working in the environmental movement is tougher now. With polarization so high, it often doesn’t matter how evidence-based, urgent, or important the work is, half the population will still criticize you. Add to that political leaders who seek to punish organizations for not toeing the line, and you can see why some of the big NGOs have stepped back from the front line of advocacy.

Increasingly, that space has been filled by independent media—podcasters, influencers, and viral campaigners. That’s a loss. Those voices are valuable, but they are not a substitute for fearless, evidence-based advocacy from large organizations with the history, scale, and gravitas to effect lasting change.

For NGOs and their supporters, the opportunity now is twofold. First, donors must give generously and publicly, providing the financial and political confidence for NGOs to reclaim that leadership role: to speak truth to power and to bring the community with them.

Second, they should embrace catalytic finance as a core philanthropic tool. A single dollar invested early in a project or technology can unlock a hundred more in private capital. Together—advocacy and catalytic finance—these are the levers that can restore momentum and deliver the scale of impact the world urgently needs.

All of us at The Instigator, and most of our readers, love tips on good books. So we always ask our guests for their recommendations—both on environmental books and anything else. What are some books you suggest we should read next?

I’ll use my interviewee’s prerogative to suggest a book that’s not yet on the shelves. It’s called The Carbon Paradox, co-authored by three leaders in climate finance: Renat Heuberger, Steve Zwick, and Marco Hirsbrunner. It’s a "fiction-based-on-facts" adventure story about overcoming the 25 key paradoxes facing carbon markets, and it concludes with a vision for how governments, NGOs, academia, and the private sector can unite for bold climate action. It’s a must-read. Available September 21 through

https://carbonparadox.org/

.

Thank you, Rich. That was very inspiring and actionable!

Onward,

This month marks the fifth anniversary of The Instigator! As we approach this major milestone—and hit send on our 115th newsletter!—we thought it would be a good time to check in with the most important people engaged in this endeavor: You, our loyal readers.

First, let me thank you very much for reading our newsletter. We know everyone has (too) much to read these days. So we really appreciate you taking the time to read The Instigator.

When I happen to meet up with any of you in the real world, you often give me good suggestions on topics we should cover and other feedback. Others of you send helpful comments from time to time by email. All of that input is helpful. In other contexts, I can find unsolicited advice to be annoying, but not here. For the purposes of this newsletter, it’s actually quite helpful. So bring it on. Provide any feedback you might have for us. We want our newsletter to stay relevant and interesting for you.

As you know (I hope), the main goal of this newsletter is to accelerate positive environmental progress. We focus on strategies that will allow government, business, and NGOs to get more done. We also study how individuals can make a positive impact. With that in mind we have some questions for you.

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Onward,

These days, when I speak to people—both young and old—about careers, I hear a constant refrain. “What about AI? How will AI change the environmental field and my opportunity? How should AI influence my career planning?”1

Here are my thoughts on the matter.

On Predicting the Future:

I’m definitely not an AI expert. But neither is anyone else really. At least not yet. Of course, there are many smart, accomplished individuals leading the charge on AI development. Paying attention to them is worthwhile. They have a wide range of opinions on what a fully AI-enabled world will look like. But one thing most of these folks agree on is that they don’t really know now exactly how this is all going to play out. Translation for careers: Pay close attention to the world of AI, but don’t expect to be able to predict the future.

Strategic thinkers among us sometimes like to game out the future. Perhaps there is a particular area of environmental work that will be more or less impacted by AI, they prompt me. They might be right. But it's not really possible to know right now. Don’t overthink this. There are too many variables to “outgame” AI. And planning like this contradicts my main piece of career advice (below), which I base on direct experience and that of many people I know who have built fulfilling and happy careers.

My General Career Principles

My main advice on the career front continues to be: Try to identify what will be most fulfilling for you. This can be tricky. No one can give you the answer, and it often takes much trial and error to figure out. It certainly did in my case. It’s also likely that the answer will change over time for you. No matter the stage of life you’re in, my advice is to get out there and talk to people, network, volunteer, take on part-time roles, stay humble, and try to figure this out. It’s fun to do. It usually works. Don’t look for shortcuts. Instead, do the work to figure out what kind of career will be best for you.

My other core tenet is that you should pursue work that, in one way or another, seeks to make the world a better place. The underpinning idea here is one of purpose. You don’t need to be grandiose or self-righteous about this. There are all kinds of ways to try to make the world better. Find one that suits you. In my experience, if you set and follow world-improving goals as your north star, it leads to a much more fulfilling experience.

My Specific Guidance

My more specific career advice, especially for young people, is actually quite simple. Look for jobs where two things are true: your learning curve will be very steep and your colleagues are people you respect. If one of these two things is not true—or no longer true from when you started— that’s a signal to look for another opportunity.

My AI Guidance

So, what to do about AI? That’s easy: Use it. No matter what you do for work, try to use AI as effectively as you can in everything you do.

AI probably will be the huge change agent that folks are expecting it to be. Exactly how is less clear. But whatever you do, you’ll likely do a better job and be more valuable (and have a better career experience) if you master the tool by embracing it.2 This is much more important for your career than having interesting opinions about the future impacts of AI on the world.

At the risk of dating myself, I’ll conclude with an anecdote from my early days as a young investment banker on Wall Street. At the time, Apple and IBM were just introducing what they were calling mini computers (read: those clunky white boxes that you would wheel into your cubicle to use). And a Boston start-up had just invented VisiCalc—the first computer spreadsheet. Lotus 123 software soon followed. Excel spreadsheets weren’t around yet.

When my peers and I joined Wall Street firms, the bankers who were just a few years more experienced than us were still preparing huge and detailed spreadsheets for complex M&A transactions using HP12Cs—small handheld calculators that looked kind of like a clunky iPhone.

Imagine if we had kept on doing analysis this old-fashioned way and not embraced new technology?

We could never have imagined the degree to which technology would reshape the finance industry, but that didn’t matter. We used computer spreadsheets because to us it was obvious that the future wouldn’t be about handheld calculators. How things got done by investment bankers changed right before our eyes, and we helped to make it happen.

No matter what you do for a living, you likely have a similar opportunity now. Do what we did, is my advice. Use all of the AI tools that are available—-and rapidly improving—-and see where it takes you. Be as smart as possible about how you do this. You’ll be on the front lines of change and innovation, and you’ll be wisely investing in your career too.

Onward,