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Why Eugene Kirpichov believes mobilizing human talent is the key to solving climate change

At 250, America still gives us much to stand in awe of. Despite our problems (and we know there are many), this is still the land of opportunity. The spirit of entrepreneurship that fuels this country is alive and well, both for native born Americans and immigrants who adopt it as their own. Even better, that spirit is often directed at solving the most pressing and complex challenges of our time.

A few years ago, out of the blue, I received an email from a man named Eugene Kirpichov. Originally from Russia, Eugene introduced himself as a former software engineer at Google who had recently quit his job to start a nonprofit he was calling “Work on Climate.” The organization’s goal was simple but enormously ambitious: build the world’s largest community of professionals helping each other transition into climate work.

Eugene had never run a nonprofit before. He also had never worked in the environmental field. But that didn’t seem to deter him at all. I was struck by his directness, his sincerity, and his sheer determination to try something completely new because he believed the world needed it.

As I often say in this newsletter, everyone (and I mean literally everyone) has something meaningful to contribute to the climate challenge. You don’t need a special credential or a lifetime of experience. You just need the courage to start. Eugene embodied exactly that spirit when he reached out to me. So of course I agreed to meet with him, shared whatever advice I could, and made a small donation. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect after that.

I’m so glad I said yes. Eugene and his team have built something remarkable. Today, Work on Climate is the world’s largest professional community of its kind with nearly 40,000 members, thousands of whom have found climate jobs, started companies, and transformed their industries from within. I hope his story inspires you as much as it inspires me.

Meet Eugene Kirpichov, an American success story.

Eugene, let’s start at the beginning. Tell our readers about your background—where you grew up and how you built your career as a software engineer at Google.

I grew up in Russia and had a rather conventional path as a software engineer—most recently, having moved to the US in 2012, at Google, working on Google’s big data and AI systems. It was great fun, I got to do something I’ve always loved: work on the root causes of problems. Though back then these were software problems. Once you see the heart of the problem, previously unthinkable possibilities emerge. I’m glad to be able to do that again via Work On Climate. It’s almost a spiritual feeling for me—like connecting with truly great art, like Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Concerto. Or like being in love.

I’ve also always been involved in communities: of musicians, activists, niche areas of computer science, and so on. These were my first experiences of co-authoring the world (rather than just helping).

When I became a US citizen, I felt my chest full of a new feeling as I was walking out of the USCIS office. This place is now mine to belong, and also mine to take care of.

What was going on in your life when you decided to walk away from all of that to start Work on Climate?

I first heard about the climate crisis around 2018 from my then girlfriend (a geologist). It was a bit too much for me at the time. But later I watched “An Inconvenient Truth,” met one of Google’s climate scientists, read some books at my own pace. When the gravity of it hit me, I felt so much despair that I wrote a poem!

One day I learned that my Google colleague Cassandra was also looking for ways to “do something about climate.” We really hit it off, and a week later one-upped each other into handing in our resignations and posted our goodbye notes.

What was the problem you were trying to solve when you decided to build Work on Climate?

Our goodbye notes went viral, and hundreds of people started emailing us. Some, like us, wanted to work on climate, but didn’t know where to start. Others were builders—balancing the grid, planting mangroves, making alternative meat, plugging methane leaks in abandoned oil wells, building financing vehicles, and so on. They said: hey, we need people like you.

We realized that we’re onto something, and decided to put two and two together. Millions of people in each industry care about climate and don’t realize how they can play a role. But of course they can—solving climate change is about transforming each industry, including theirs!

However, stepping into the role is an experience nobody can navigate alone. We were able to do it because we weren’t going alone, and so we started Work On Climate to help more people have that experience and support.

Can you share some specific examples of recent wins you’re most proud of? What are the results and moments that remind you why you’re doing this work?

These days it’s rare for me to come to a climate event and not meet someone for whom our work was meaningful. People thank us for finding jobs or new colleagues, collaborators, co-founders, personal friends. Even those who haven’t walked that far yet say: Because of the inspirational and supportive power of the community, they are still walking.

If you are someone who thinks in dollars and numbers, we have numbers. 3,000+ people credit us with a role in starting their climate career; 1,500+ founders, with meaningful help on their company’s journey. That’s just the things we quantified. Hundreds of millions of dollars of human capital working to build a livable planet every year—well over 100x our total funds raised since the beginning of time.

Work on Climate has helped thousands of people begin doing climate work. And you are now helping people “become agents of change”. What does this look like for people with different professional backgrounds?

As I mentioned, solving climate change is about driving change in each industry. It is natural that people best equipped to do that are industry insiders. When you work in any company or industry, you have some authority (even if it’s not a lot), you know some of the right people, you know what is practical and what isn’t, you know the ropes of how to adopt new approaches. You know this better than any politician possibly could, and you are probably more motivated to do it, and less distracted, than your CEO.

You can initiate change without waiting to be asked. This is called agency. Paulo Freire says that to be human means to be an agent of change—to co-author the world, rather than accept it as something authored by others. I find such stories very inspiring. I think they capture the American spirit of entrepreneurship in its highest form.

For example: Joe, a real estate portfolio manager, reduced usage of natural gas in his portfolio by 40%. Victor, a physics teacher, began teaching climate science in his thermodynamics class. Alyah got a huge event venue (the Chase Center) to start a food waste diversion program. Zoe, during her time at Google as a UX Content Strategist (nothing to do with climate), started its 4,000+ strong employee community that had a hand in incubating most of Google’s climate projects. Speaking of myself, one of the first things I did after quitting tech was to go to an AI conference and start a climate track there called “PAW Climate.”

I ask everyone I interview for The Instigator a version of this question: Do you feel optimistic about humanity’s ability to address the climate emergency? What’s your honest take?

When I give people my take, they say, “To be honest, I feel the same, but you can’t say that, you will scare people off!” So I’m going to say it, so that more people know they’re not alone.

I am optimistic that during my lifetime we will plant the practical seeds of a new, healthier world. Whether it is low-carbon technologies, new forms of governance, or global spiritual breakthroughs.

However, there are practical limits to the speed of social change and to the carbon cycle. I think it will take a couple of generations for these seeds to fully grow and really get the crisis under control. In the interim, an unfathomable amount of suffering and reorganization will happen. The seeds will be sprouting through ashes, but when they do, it will be beautiful.

What have you learned along the way—about starting and running a nonprofit, about building a community, about leadership—that you’d want to pass along to others who are considering doing something bold and new?

As a technologist—worse, as a technologist used to being very good at what he does—I was completely blindsided by the depth of emotional, relational, and nervous system skills required for leadership on an existential issue like climate. I fell on my face so many times. So, beyond any comparison, the biggest improvements in the quality of my leadership came from emotional and spiritual growth: therapy, intentional psychedelic journeys, 10-day Vipassana meditation courses, relationships with more enlightened friends.

Unfortunately, the value of this work is obvious only in retrospect. Imagine if you had very poor vision from birth and kept bumping into everything. You keep overcompensating by organizing your home and yelling at people not to get in your way. When other people talk to you about things they see, you are confused and think they are making it up. Then one day you somehow get LASIK surgery, and you’re like: Oh my God, I didn’t realize you could just see stuff. So I encourage your readers to take a leap of faith in this direction, even if it sounds a little woo-woo.

If you were starting another climate nonprofit today, what would it do? What is the most pressing problem we can solve next?

I think the most pressing problem for the climate movement, cutting across all climate work, is working with the human dimensions of change. All our work is about “getting” people to vote differently, invest differently, deploy differently, approve our sustainability initiatives—but people just don’t want to change, even when it seems obviously good for them. So much progress stalls or backslides.

The climate movement isn’t special in this regard: try “getting” a smoker friend to quit smoking. Effective methods exist, but they are sophisticated, and informed by the complex psychology of personal change around emotionally fraught issues like lung cancer or climate. My friend Renee Lertzman works to equip all kinds of climate changemakers with these powerful methods. This work is absolutely vital, and it is overlooked. I’m already helping Renee get it off the ground; if I wasn’t running Work On Climate, I’d help her even more.

Where do you find your inspiration? What keeps you going on the hardest days?

For me, inspiration comes from continually discovering new dimensions to the problems I’m working on. One month I’m learning about movement-building; another, psychology of self-efficacy; another, management approaches under high uncertainty. As my understanding deepens, the world appears in a new light, and it is the best feeling. I’ve also met many people who are truly extraordinary at these things, and I am inspired by my relationships with them.

What keeps me going on the hard days is quite mundane: taking care of my mental health. Working with my therapist, practicing Vipassana, doing all the basics when a bad time comes (stay hydrated, go for a walk, have a good cry), and so on. It’s part of the work, and I have to take it seriously, like an athlete has to take care of their body.

What books would you recommend to our readers?

If I recommend one book, it would be the clinical manual on motivational interviewing. If you work with people you wish acted differently—and if you work in climate, you probably do—this book will help you develop the necessary communication skills (and, sorry to disappoint, it won’t be persuasion skills). I also highly recommend David Ehrlichman’s Impact Networks for a primer on practical systems change, and our advisor David Jay’s Relationality to understand both the importance and the practice of community-building. Finally, for the bold souls interested in building or supporting early-stage social innovation themselves, read Developmental Evaluation by Michael Quinn Patton.

Finally, what are some ways interested readers can support your work?

Helping professionals become agents of change is much harder and more interesting than running a general-purpose community or getting people jobs, and it has never been done at scale before. We recently wrote about our path of learning how to do that. This work has a lot in common with building an early-stage startup, and requires capital to do well—so, we are raising additional funding.

We are not a fit for those who seek the most reputable execution of the most proven approach. Right now, for us, we’re at a developmental stage: proving that the approach can scale is the work. So we are looking to meet those who are thoughtful about supporting new, out-of-paradigm work, and understand the nature of its uncertainty.

We are also always looking for more stories of people who have initiated climate-positive change through their work, and looking to meet other groups who organize professionals for climate: for example, Clean Creatives, Life After Oil, and Practice Greenhealth. If you know someone with such a story or someone who runs such a group, reach out!

Thank you, Eugene!

For readers who want to get involved with Work on Climate, visit workonclimate.org—you can join the community, attend free Expert Office Hours, events, and workshops, explore ways to volunteer, or join me in supporting the organization financially. Feel free to get in touch with Eugene on LinkedIn or by email (eugene@workonclimate.org) to learn more about the work.

Onward,