Cheaper faster better, p.6
Cheaper, Faster, Better, page 6
One of them is my friend Bill McKibben. Bill is a professor at Middlebury College, an award-winning activist, author of a dozen books on climate, and one of the founders of 350.org, an organization that partners with hundreds of grassroots campaigns around the world to fight the climate crisis. He’s even got a species of gnat named after him—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni. If I have a scientific question about climate, one of the people I call first is Bill.
Then there’s Johan Rockström, an understated Swede who runs the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Johan is a scientist, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s as good as it gets. He’s done primary research. He’s pursued truth very hard and very intentionally. He’s never tried to puff himself up or blow his own horn. He doesn’t pull punches, but he’s also not an alarmist. He lays out the evidence. And he’s really good at explaining it all in a way that non-scientists can understand.
I don’t assume that Bill and Johan will be right all the time. No one is. But I trust them to be knowledgeable and honest. And when it comes to making big decisions about the future, that’s what counts.
The clean-energy revolution has already turned a corner. Its momentum is growing stronger every year. That’s an amazing thing—but it also means we need to brace ourselves for more fossil-fuel bullshit than ever. Their goal is not really to win an argument. It’s to keep the status quo intact for as long as possible. Each year of delay means new levels of warming and extreme weather for our planet. But for the oil and gas companies, it means tens of billions of dollars in new profits. For executives at those companies, it means tens of millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses. For banks, it means avoiding having to write off bad investments. For politicians, it means avoiding a reckoning with the voters whose future they’re willing to throw away.
Climate people don’t have to parry every attack or misleading claim. Instead, we need to ask some basic questions: Is this person coming from a bubble of people who think the same way, and who stand to benefit by not thinking differently? Am I the pasta king, or have I peered below the surface of their claim? Can I trust them, or have they lied before?
Once we do that, we can stop getting bogged down by bullshit and start paying attention to the people who really deserve our trust, before it’s too late.
Climate People
Harold Mitchell
As we’ve seen in recent years, no one is immune from the effects of climate change. But lower-income communities are disproportionally harmed.
A hotter planet creates fewer work opportunities in outdoor industries like farming and construction, which employ roughly 10 million people in the United States alone. People who live in homes with older infrastructure, and are less likely to have reliable transportation, are at the greatest risk from severe weather events caused by a warming planet such as hurricanes and wildfires. A hotter planet also means more air pollution from greenhouse gas mixing with dust and aerosols, leading to more asthma attacks and respiratory infections, diseases found at higher rates in lower-income communities.
Harold Mitchell knows about environmental injustice firsthand. And he’s dedicated his life to fighting it.
Harold grew up in the Arkwright neighborhood of Spartanburg, South Carolina. When he was a kid, about 96 percent of the neighborhood’s residents were Black and a quarter lived below the poverty line. For decades, the city operated an open landfill in Arkwright, while just a few hundred feet away the International Minerals and Chemical Corporation used the neighborhood as a dumping ground for waste from a fertilizer plant.
Harold began experiencing health issues in his twenties, just as his fifty-nine-year-old father was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma. After learning that people throughout Arkwright were falling ill, Harold worked with local groups to demand answers. The EPA eventually agreed to look into the fertilizer plant and dump site and found seventy pollutants, thirty of which were in concentrations three times the level considered harmful to human health. They declared both areas Superfund sites and ordered the waste removed.
For some people, that would have been enough. But Harold recognized that the problems caused by pollution were just one symptom of a wider environmental neglect of his city, and in 1998 he founded the ReGenesis Project, a nonprofit working to revitalize Spartanburg. The oil and gas industry and its allies often suggest that environmental justice means stopping economic development from going forward. But Harold and ReGenesis disprove that every day. For them, environmental justice means moving forward in a better way, making sure that those without the loudest voices aren’t taken advantage of by wealthy and powerful corporations.
In the two decades since its founding, ReGenesis has helped clean up groundwater pollution, build a green recreation center, and construct new parks and green spaces while bringing new health centers, grocery stores, and hundreds of affordable homes powered by solar energy to Spartanburg. Today, ReGenesis is working to turn the old fertilizer plant into a sustainable hydroponics and aquaponics facility, where nutrient-rich water that comes from farming fish is used to grow plants, which in turn filter the water for the fish.
They’re also working on creating a factory that will produce 100 percent recycled and recyclable fabric. This will create jobs for the community—and since mass production of clothing that ends up in landfills sends large amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, it will help us get to net zero, too. And they’re not stopping there. Perhaps most important of all, Harold recently expanded the ReGenesis Project into the ReGenesis Institute, which aims to help underserved communities across the country replicate Spartanburg’s success.
Harold and ReGenesis are showing that when it comes to climate, justice and prosperity can go hand in hand. In fact, over the long term, the second depends on the first.
Chapter III
Know What to Know
The fossil fuel industry loves to point out that it’s impossible to know everything about climate change. Until fairly recently, their angle of attack, developed in part by Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz, was to question the science regarding the very existence of global warming. Sure, 97 percent of scientists said climate change was real and caused by human activity, but what about the 3 percent who didn’t?
This talking point was always misleading. For decades, it’s been impossible to find a serious, respected climate scientist who didn’t agree that the climate was changing, and that humans were, by far, the most likely cause of that change. Today, even Frank Luntz has, to his credit, admitted he was wrong on climate. The oil and gas companies haven’t made a similar admission and apologized for their decades of climate change denial, but as climate change has gone from prediction to reality, they’ve stopped casting doubt on the consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and changing the weather.
Still, even though the fossil fuel industry is no longer doubting the existence of climate change, they continue to make a version of the same basic argument they did starting in the 1990s. They’ll point out that we can’t be exactly sure which clean-energy technologies will work best, or what the weather will be like on any given day in the future, or precisely how geopolitics will affect other countries’ efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. All that is true—when it comes to making predictions about the future, it’s impossible to know everything about anything. But the conclusion that they draw makes no sense: “We don’t know everything about climate change with 100 percent certainty, so we shouldn’t take any meaningful action.”
The fossil fuel industry is pointing to, and trying to benefit from, something very real: for human beings, not knowing is unsettling. Staring into the face of the fundamentally unknowable is, for most people, one of the most emotionally uncomfortable experiences we can have. Many people become paralyzed while they wait for perfectly complete information, which never comes. But imagine if you made other decisions in your life the way the fossil fuel industry wants you to make decisions about climate. If you only saw a movie if there was a 100 percent chance you’d like it or took a new job only if there was a total guarantee you’d find it fulfilling, you’d miss every opportunity.
Not knowing is particularly stressful during a crisis. During my investing career, I’ve watched so many people completely lose their cool when the market started to fall apart and it became clear that things were going to get really bad. Everyone has the urge to panic, myself included. But you have to figure out how to resist it. Because once you start panicking, you stop taking in and considering new information. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. People make decisions that they may even tell themselves are rational. But what they’re really thinking is: “I can’t handle not knowing what’s going to happen. I need to solve this problem. I need to end this pain. I need to do something, anything, immediately.” When you’re that desperate to regain a sense of stability, you stop thinking about whatever problem you were trying to solve. In investing, it’s what drives people into a fire-sale mentality. People will sell assets they know they shouldn’t sell, just so they can stop worrying about how things will turn out.
But with climate, as with other difficult, high-stakes decisions, we have to make our choices without being able to know exactly how the future will turn out. Waiting until we know everything there is to know would mean giving up, condemning ourselves to a world defined by climate catastrophe.
What we need, then, is a better way to handle the fundamentally unknowable. In my experience, such a way exists—it just requires a change in focus. Instead of asking ourselves, “How much do we know?” we need to ask a different question: “Do we know what to know?”
I first learned the importance of asking this question on a ranch in Nevada. The summer after my freshman year at Yale, most of my classmates headed for résumé-padding jobs in New York or study-abroad programs overseas or tennis-coaching jobs at their country clubs. I went to Gardnerville, a town of approximately 3,300 about an hour south of Reno. Sallie Springmeyer—a very smart, sophisticated woman who had gone to law school and been married to the state’s district attorney—owned a ranch there. She’d put up a flyer at Yale looking for ranch hands, and I’d answered it.
I wasn’t brand new to the outdoors. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a hunter and fisherman who briefly lived on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. My mom rode horses, and she fished and hunted just like her father did. In the summers when I was a kid, we would spend two weeks each year visiting my grandparents on a lake in Minnesota, and my cousins and brothers and I would fish every day—bass, perch, crappies, walleye.
But that wasn’t really why I wanted to spend a summer as a cowboy. It might sound corny, but at least it was sincere: I wanted to see America. I wanted to live and work someplace as far from Manhattan as it was possible to be, at least figuratively speaking.
I got my wish. I spent that summer in a hut with no running water, a galvanized tin roof, and wood walls so full of holes they were essentially see-through. The only bathroom was an outhouse. Every morning before breakfast, I’d get up and milk two cows. Then I’d spend my day moving cattle, fixing fences, bucking hay, or whatever else needed to be done.
A bunch of real-life cowboys worked on that ranch. Some of them I liked a lot. Others I was kind of freaked out by. My co-workers on the ranch knew where I came from, and where I was going back to in the fall, so they enjoyed putting me in my place. One day, my job was to catch a bunch of male piglets so that a ranch hand could castrate them. I was thinking there would be an operating table involved, maybe some anesthetic. Not exactly. My “operating room” was a square pen, about ten feet per side, occupied by a 500-pound sow and twelve baby pigs. About half of them were males, and I had to hunt them down, grab them, and hand them to the guy so he could do the surgery with his folding knife. No anesthetic, and only an ointment called “Bag Balm”—a salve designed to soothe udders on cows—to prevent infection.
That day, I learned that when a pig gets castrated, it screams exactly like a two-year-old child. And what does the mother do? She tries to kill whoever is threatening her children. So there I was, in a pen with an enraged 500-pound sow, trying to dodge her while scooping up her remaining piglets. Meanwhile, the cowboy stood outside, thinking it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen in his whole life—this kid from Yale trying to evade an infuriated sow. In fairness—and with several decades of hindsight—I can see why.
Somehow, I made it out of that pen alive. What’s more, I enjoyed the experience on the ranch so much that the next summer I went to Oregon to pick cherries—a different version of looking for America. My co-workers were mostly migrant laborers from Mexico rather than cowboys. But in many respects, not least the sheer physicality of the work, the experience was similar.
I learned three big things over those summers. The first is that there’s no such thing as unskilled labor. Our free-market society values some skills more than others, but any time I hear someone describing backbreaking work as “unskilled,” I think back to the pickers on the orchard who could collect three bushels in the time it took me to collect one, or to the ranchers who could expertly corral a dangerous young bull. You think that’s unskilled? I want to say. Why don’t you try it?
The second lesson I learned on the ranch and in the orchard is that there are some things in life you just can’t know.
I’m not talking about metaphysical questions like What is the meaning of life? or What happens after we die? I’m talking about the here and now. What I saw during those two summers was that the web of relationships within nature—among animals, people, weather, sun, soil, streams, fruit, livestock—is far too vast and complicated to fully comprehend. And furthermore, it’s impossible to bend it to our will.
Some people I worked with couldn’t stand the idea that nature would always be beyond their control. The ranch foreman, whom I’ll call Doug, “trained” horses by hitting them in the face with a shovel. He refused to believe he couldn’t bend a wild creature to his will. Not surprisingly, his tactic backfired. Almost every horse he trained was terrified of people. If you shifted your weight ever so slightly in the saddle, or shuffled your feet in the stirrups, or did anything else even the tiniest bit surprising, the horse would freak out and buck.
It was clear to me even back then that Doug’s reaction to his fear of the unknown wasn’t productive. Rather than balk at the idea that some things were unknowable, you had to learn to accept it. If you wait for perfect information, you’ll be left waiting forever. If you act as though you understand something completely, you’ll make bad decisions.
At the same time, sometimes if you zoom out far enough and try to understand the big picture, you can find something knowable and predictable—some essential truth you can act on. In my case, after my summer on Sallie Springmeyer’s ranch in Gardnerville, I went home and bought ten shares of stock each in John Deere and International Harvester.
When I think about it now, this was in some ways a foolish investment. I knew what a Deere tractor was. I knew what an International Harvester combine was. But I knew nothing about the companies from a business perspective. What were their market caps? How effective were their CEOs? Did they have a lot of bad debt?
But in another important respect, my early stock purchases were sensible. After my summer on the ranch, it became clear to me that agriculture was a business that depended on a million inscrutable variables. But I’d also noticed that no matter how those variables turned out, in good times and in bad, ranchers and farmers were buying new equipment and repairing old equipment.
In other words, while agriculture was inherently prone to wild and seemingly random fluctuations, selling agricultural machinery was much more consistently profitable. The way the companies that made these machines sucked up all the available cash in the system wasn’t remotely fair to farmers, but the fact remained. If you knew what to know, you could make money investing in agriculture.
The same basic idea applies to climate. We may not know everything, but we can know a few big things. What’s the climate equivalent of investing in agricultural machinery rather than buying livestock or growing crops? The answer is pretty simple. I’d say we should look at the basic relationship between greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane and the gradual warming of the planet. If you know the basic, predictable fact that more emissions equal more disruption to our weather patterns and, by extension, to humanity, then it’s not that difficult to figure out, broadly speaking, where to invest your time. It’s also why getting to net zero is such an important goal. Regardless of how we reach that point, we know that if we get there, we’ll have stopped making things worse and can start to make them better.
Another version of knowing what to know is what I think of as “drafting a quarterback.” If I tell you that a football team has a once-in-a-generation talent at wide receiver, there’s still a lot you need to know before being able to guess how the team as a whole will perform. But if I tell you that a team has a once-in-a-generation talent at quarterback, it’s a different story. You may not know everything, but that one piece of knowledge is enough to tell you that the team is a contender.
In the investing world, a lot of people struggle not because they’re bad analysts but because they’re analyzing the wrong things. They’re focused on the wide receivers when they should be trying to draft a quarterback. Here’s a real-world example. If you wanted to make a lot of money in the stock market over the last thirty years, you didn’t need to form tons of small ideas about which companies would do well and which wouldn’t. You needed just one big idea: everyone is buying more software and information technology, so it’s smart to invest in companies that have really strong IT. That idea—and that idea alone—would have led you to everything from Amazon to Walmart to Uber to Airbnb. Knowing that one piece of information would have been like having Tom Brady on your team.
