Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, everybody, welcome back. And Drew, welcome to the show.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: All right, for the uninitiated, for those who don't know, who are you and what do you do?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: My name is Drew Wilkinson.
I'm a climate activist, community organizer, and a corporate punk rocker, I guess, whose mission is to make sustainability part of everybody's job. So I do that through my own consulting business called the Climate Leadership Collective.
But I spent, I've been in, I've tried this, doing this work in lots of different places in nonprofit world and corporates and big tech. And so now I try to figure out how to do it everywhere all at once, I guess.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: Heck yeah, man. All right, tell me about this, this business that you founded. Like, what is it and what does it do?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Yeah, so I work in a small corner of corporate sustainability called employee engagement. And so that's of course not like a new concept. Employee engagement's been around forever, something that HR professionals traditionally do. Right. It's about creating a meaningful connection with your workforce, ensuring that they understand what your company is doing, what its values are, really making sure that they can sort of bring your culture to life. What is kind of new is doing employee engagement for sustainability. And so I'm sure we'll get into this, but I spent seven years at Microsoft and one of the first things I realized there was that there just were simply not enough people working on sustainability is like, this is just like a scale problem, right? Like climate change, really not even accurate to think of it as one problem. It's a poly crisis. Thousands of small problems. Compounding, even in the best case scenarios, the number of people who work on sustainability full time inside of these large corporates where they're well resourced and better. The best case scenarios, let's say the number of people who work on sustainability is always less than 1% of the whole workforce.
And so the work I do is about helping companies look at that other 99% of their workforce. Those people are all over the place. There's kind of a spectrum from sort of what we would call climate curious to like full on. I'm an environmentalist. I want to find a way to bring sustainability and climate solutions into my work. I understand that I can use my company's resources to have an outsized impact compared to anything I could do as an individual.
So. And there's people all over that spectrum. And the work I do is to help create meaningful opportunities for that 99% of most companies workforce to contribute to their environmental sustainability goals or to Push them to have some if they don't. So it's really about, as I said, making sustainability part of everybody's job. So at the end of the day, it's about transforming it away from. This is like an operational thing that one tiny under resourced team is responsible for and instead really sincerely transforming it into a cultural value that every employee in the company feels not only responsible for, but empowered to contribute to.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Let's zoom out and give just the most basic definition for anyone who's not familiar when you say sustainability, what do.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: You mean to create and maintain the conditions that allow humans and nature to coexist for present and future generations?
You can tell I have that one.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: What is it?
Why does that matter? Like what are we up against right now in all practicality?
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Yeah, well, maybe worth laying out another definition, which is anthropogenic climate change. And anthropogenic, we don't need to get hung up on the word, but it means caused by humans, right? So human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, animal agriculture, all of these things that we've been doing at least since the industrial revolution, 200, depending on where you want to draw the line, 200 years ago. All of the things that we're doing are fundamentally changing. I mean, basically the entire climate system of the Earth, from how ocean currents move to the level, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. All of those things, it turns out, are really, really bad. Not only for our survival, but for the survival of every living thing that we share this planet with and ultimately depend on for our own survival.
And so this is bad because companies, companies have an outsized role in creating the conditions that have led to climate change. You know, there's some stat out there that says something like 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions historically from all time, come from just 100 fossil fuel companies. I mean, so. So businesses have played an outsized role in exacerbating climate change, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, waste water, all of this stuff. They've also unfortunately, used their political and economic influence in governments all over the world to make sure that we don't create meaningful policy solutions to address all of that. And so the flip side of that is that the opportunity is that workers inside these companies, if they can sort of grab onto their company's resources, they can also have an outsized impact in creating climate solutions.
Sorry, I feel like I meandered away from the question.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: No, you totally hit it, man. It was really good.
So why should the average person care? And I know these seem like Real basic things. But I want to build up towards something. Why would the average person care?
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, by now, most of us, even in the first world, where we live in a bubble of privilege and most of us are not food or water insecure, by now, most of us have experienced a climate related weather disaster firsthand. You know, you and I live in the Pacific Northwest.
You and I have choked on wildfire smoke for weeks on end, you know, in what is now called smoke season, something that didn't even exist, you know, 10, 15 years ago. Most of us have experienced a flood or a drought or like, you know, open up the news headlines today and like, what Al Gore loves to say, it's like a, it's like a tour through the book of revelations every day, you know, so why should you care? Because human civilization is actually resting on a pretty fragile house of cards that relies on stable weather. Stable, you know, which leads to food production, reliable energy production for electricity. All of these things that we really take for granted day to day are actually pretty fragile systems. And on the other hand, you know, what humans are doing to the planet. I often think about it like a game of Jenga, right? You've got this tower of blocks.
If that tower of blocks represents the biotic community of life that we share this planet with, from bacteria and fungi to like whales and birds and everything in between, we're pulling blocks out every single day. I mean, we're in a mass extinction. The last time this many species were forced out of existence on the planet was when a meteorite smashed into it and wiped them all out with a nuclear winter that lasted a couple of years. We're not quite doing that, but no single species has ever done this before. And so systematically, we are chipping away at these things, at these systems, at these natural systems that make our way of life possible.
So why should you care? Well, if you have children, you should be very concerned about the world that they're going to inherit.
We used to talk about climate change not so long ago as, oh, it's some distant problem. It's 100 years from now. Our grandkids will. No, dude, it's here right now. It's threatening your survival, your family's survival, your children's. It's so, I mean, I don't really know how else to say it other than like, you should care about this because it literally threatens your ability to live your life in the way that you would like to, and likewise for your children. But also while you're here, it affects every single aspect of your life. We all want and need clean air, clean water, nutritious food.
All of those things are under threat from climate change.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: So without getting the whole story, because we're going to, we're going to get there. Like, give me a little bit of your background. So why should anyone listen to you? You know, like, you speak about it. Like your, your answers are like super strong.
Like I, I. Because we, we know each other a bit. I know you know your stuff, but like anyone listening here, we're like, oh, is this guy like a environmental scientist? Like, what's your background?
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Absolutely not. I would never try to claim that I'm a scientist, I'm an activist. I'll say that proudly and loudly and I always have.
Well, why should you listen to me? That's a really, that's a really interesting question. No one's really ever asked me before. I like to think because I'm a contrarian, I'm a, you know, I'll give it to you straight. I have prided myself on navigating through, you know, at least the last decade of my career, corporate structures, a place that I frankly felt very out of place when I first entered it. But I have always prided myself on bringing plain speak and real talk and like, you know, a level of frankness and, and maybe even, as I said, contrarianism into those spaces that you don't really find that much. I mean, I'm sure I know you run your own business, I don't know your career, but I'm assuming you've worked inside, inside large corporates before.
There's a, there's a whole lexicon, there's a whole language inside of corporations about how you talk and it's mostly just a lot of words that don't mean anything. It's the way that lawyers and politicians speak. Right. You say a lot without actually saying anything. And so why should people listen to me?
Because I'm, I'm bringing it to em real, you know, I'm not going to sugarcoat things. I have a class consciousness that I bring into a lot of my work. I have a contrarian spirit that comes from punk rock.
I don't know if that convinces anybody that they should listen to me. Also have good taste in music and I love to make jokes. So even if you don't necessarily like what I'm saying, hopefully you'll be entertaining.
[00:09:34] Speaker A: I love that. So how do you know what you know though? Like, I mean, because like, you really, you, you speak very eloquently about the topic and From a very informed space. Like, how did you build your body of knowledge?
[00:09:44] Speaker B: A heaping dose of curiosity and pure existential dread, I would say. It's like, like I'm a very curious person, always have been.
My. I just want to know, how does this work? Why does that work? You know, so there's that curiosity is actually the root.
The root not behavior, but the driving force behind so many of the things that I think make for well informed people. Right. Is like, you want to have a know it or you don't want to have a know it all mindset. You want to have a learn it all mindset. Right. Like always be learning.
So that's. That's a huge part of it. And then, yeah, I mean, I, I was man. I developed a political consciousness fairly early. I was 14 when 911 happened. That was obviously like a massive shock to a lot of things here in the U.S.
and so, you know, as the dust settled literally on that, it's like, well, why did people do that? Why would people slam planes into building? You know, and then, you know, just a year or two later was like wearing a not my president shirt and protesting the war in Iraq and calling Bush a war criminal. You know, as a high school kid at a time when, you know, after 9 11, the hyper patriotism, the chest beating in America was like, I mean, I got beat up by a bunch of jocks, let's put it that way.
And so, but, but I'm bringing that up because that planted the seed of like, sort of countercultural consciousness that also was like, looking at the world and going, what are we doing to it? You know? You know, what are we do? We're killing the planet. Who's killing the planet? Well, it's not everybody. It's. A lot of certain people have a lot more influence and power and benefit from it. And so all of those things just kind of like built up this. This mindset of really wanting to challenge authority openly and finding different arenas to fight those battles in. From, you know, my early career was in environmental nonprofits. I did a stint with Sea shepherd on a boat. So I've done direct action, I've done marches, I've done protests. And in the last 10 years, I've tried taking that same spirit into the belly of the beast inside corporate America. And I'm really fascinated with how far can you push a power structure like that from the inside? To which I have quite a few answers to that now after running a lot of experiments.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Good.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: So the reason I wanted to ask you like, why should anyone listen to you? And all these, you know, and like, where do you. How do you. How did you inform yourself? How did you drive? This is when I said earlier, why should anyone care?
You gave all these good reasons. Now let's flip it.
Why should anyone care? You've answered that question.
Why aren't more people acting?
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Yeah, because they don't know what to do. They don't know how to act. They don't know how to align their actions with meaningful solutions that actually address climate change.
You know, some of that is just.
I'll use the word ignorance, but I don't mean to imply that people are intentionally not knowing. Although there's plenty of. There's plenty of that. But, I mean, people don't know what to do. Right. And that's a huge part of the work I do every day, is helping people understand where is the best place for you to start.
So there's a lot of that. There's also the fact that people have been conditioned by these power structures, by our culture, by capitalism, by, you know, we've been infantilized. We've been made to believe it's not your problem. You shouldn't be trying to do anything. Don't worry about it. We'll take care of it. Whether it's an elected official or a large corporate or whatever, we have been conditioned to give away our power. And so that's a big part of it, too, is that people don't understand that they do have power and that it actually, when you study social movements throughout history, it only takes like 3% of the population kind of, to push a power structure past a tipping point, so people don't know what to do. And right now, at least in America, people are terrified. They're scared.
You know, we're a couple of months into Trump 2.0. They've obviously done everything they said they would do and more. They're taking a wrecking ball to every single social institution that we have. So it is a period of chaos and fear and persecution. Right. Like, we're all. We're just at the very beginning, and they're already putting people on planes and disappearing them. So we're also now moving very, in a very terrifying way into a sort of Orwellian future where your ability to resist these things, your ability to organize, speak out, fight back, vote, protest, the consequences are going to just continuously get higher. So people are afraid, and they don't know what to do, I would say is a big part of it. And they don't really Understand. And even when they do know that something should be done, they don't understand the difference between impact and influence when it comes to climate change. You know, we've been fed this narrative from the largest polluters in the world that it's personal sustainability, just recycle more, just eat beyond burgers. Like, don't worry, that'll solve the problem. But I be the first one to say that individual consumer choices, you know, are not going to save us from the climate crisis. Unfortunately. They're good and we should do them. You should take short showers and eat beyond burgers instead of beef and all that good stuff. But that's not going to do it. You know, it takes.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Why isn't it going to do it? Because I want to.
I want to tee up about how you work with, with companies and with corporations and what you do specifically. But like, we have been sold that line. And like, not only that, I think that that whole idea now people, it seems to be with the, with the change of, of tone politically, a lot of stuff like let's say, you know, veganism, or people call it plant based, whatever they want to call it, that was like a big deal a few years ago. And now people are like, you know, I'm going to do the whole carnivore, all carnivore diet, whatever. People can do whatever they want. But like, there's, it seems like there's been somewhat of a backlash against recycling. There's been a backlash against a lot of these things within the past, within the past few years. And I think a lot of it has to do with changing tone politically, but also people being like, I don't know who to listen to, I don't know what, I don't know what to do. And I've been doing all this stuff and trying to manage my impact and I'm tired of it, or I don't believe it. And anymore it doesn't seem to be making a difference.
So why is the individual stuff not enough?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Because none of those things address the underlying conditions that created climate change in the first place. They don't fundamentally change endless growth on a planet full of finite resources, right? Like swapping out a product that you buy for a more sustainable alternative is a good thing and you should do it right. Like in, unfortunately in a capitalist society, you do vote with your dollars. And so those votes, they count for something. But if all of us just switch over to greener products without addressing the underlying conditions that are creating climate change, which is again, unchecked burning of Fossil fuels, unlimited, unlimited economic growth on a planet full of finite resources, wealth inequality, how those resources are distributed around the world. There's no amount of recycling or Beyond Burger. I don't know. I always use the Beyond Burger example. I swear I'm not sponsored by them.
Like, there's no amount of those individual consumer choices that are going to fundamentally shift the power dynamics underneath it all. Who has power? How are they wielding it? And in this case, how are they wielding it to destroy the planet? Essentially that's only going to come from, you know, strong government regulation or policy or societal revolution. Right. Like we're not going to solve climate change from coastal elites driving Teslas. Or I guess Teslas are out of favor now. But pick your, pick your electric car of choice. Like, that's not going to do it. It's a good thing. We should do it. Right? We should get away from fossil fuel internal combustion engines as much as possible. But we have to change the underlying political and economic systems that allow for this exploitation of the planet to continue unchecked. And individual choices just won't do it.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to give you something I'd love to hear take on. So I was talking to Chris, he was on the podcast a few years ago, Chris from Left 4 Dead, Swarm, Curse, all that. And we were talking about his company that I don't know if he's still doing anymore is that magic vegan bacon grease thing that he did, you know, are you familiar with that?
[00:18:03] Speaker B: No. They made like a version of vegan bacon grease.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So he, it was like one of the first like that I was aware of, like vegan, like truly vegan products. I mean, this is like goes way, way back early 2000s. And it's a real interesting story about how we did it.
And it was way before this whole like plant based vegan industry, whatever. And it totally kicked off and people were super into it and he was like selling a ton. He was like getting into whole foods and like, you know, people were interested in investing and all that. And he made an intentional decision to scale back the business rather than get bigger and bigger and bigger. And he had like. So he had magic vegan bacon grease and then he had this thing called Parmageddon, which is like fake Parmesan.
Just the coolest, like really, really interesting, real interesting guy.
So we were talking about it, I was like, hey, what? Why did you choose to scale it back? And he got this like crazy look in his eyes. I'll never forget what he said. He was like, it's all about the oligarchy and it's all about the oligarchs.
So all of these companies, these huge corporations that now have vegan products or are buying vegan, these small vegan companies, they don't care about getting meat eaters money or dairy consumers money. All they care about is getting everybody's money. And so they're not doing it because of the planet, they're not doing it because of animal welfare. They're doing it just so they get all of the money. And I don't trust the decisions that they're going to make once they take all these things.
And he went, so he went even further. He was like, when I was young, when I first got into veganism, I got really inspired by the idea of like, what if there were vegan options everywhere? Like you could go to any of the big chains that there'd be vegan options. He's like, we're here now.
But I don't trust the people who are running those things and the choices they're making. And so I made a decision to make my company smaller so I didn't have to take any corporate, corporate dollars. And it was the first time I'd ever really thought of it that way. And it was like I referenced this conversation a lot of the idea of just because companies are doing green things or having like plant based stuff, it doesn't mean if they actually care about the environment. What are your thoughts on that?
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Yeah, they mostly don't. Right. Like I was actually just thinking about this in the shower before we got on the phone today and was like, you know, first of all, there's a, there's a massive conversation we could unpack about like, what is a corporation, right? Like, is it a thing? Is it a person? You know, like legally it's a person, which is insane. But like corporations in their bones are, are hardwired to do the wrong thing for the planet. And that's not because they're inherently bad or evil. It's because they operate in a system that gives them incentives and constraints that basically the only thing you can do if you're a company is grow at any cost.
And all of those costs, something we call externalities and sustainability, meaning the pollution you create, the resources you consume, the human labor, slave labor, in some cases in your supply chain. All of these things, they're externalities, they're, they're, they're outside of your direct line of sight. They're outside the direct line of sight of your consumers. And so unfortunately, I don't think it's like corporations didn't just wake up and go, let's be evil. Some surely have, all the fossil fuel companies for one.
But like they are fundamentally incentivized to do one thing and that's create more profit every quarter. If that's the number one reason that you exist, you're going to make a certain set of decisions compared to what if your reason for existence was let's make sure that planet Earth is, you know, has a stable ecosystem in seven generations or whatever, right? Like it's just a very different thing. And so yes, corporations can and do do incredibly important work to address climate change because, you know, for better and for worse, other than government, they are the largest actors. They have the most power in our society of anything, right? There's like government and then there's corporates and like arguably they're one in the same and becoming one in the same now especially. But like for better and for worse, they are one of the most powerful actors in modern society. There aren't that many trillion dollar corporate, you know what I mean? So like they can literally move markets and so they can and do do really incredibly useful, beneficial, necessary things to address climate change. But the good they do is always overshadowed many, many times over the harm they cause to the environment. And that's just the nature of having an economic system that is based on a fantasy. Endless growth forever, it'll always get better, we'll always be able to extract more, consume more, grow more.
It just, you don't have to be a climate scientist to see that that math doesn't add up.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Well, it's that short term thinking. So you know how like if you look at a building, you don't really think that that building's not going to exist forever. You know, if you look like, I don't know, whatever building you want to look at like that built like you're not like, oh, at some point that building's not going to exist anymore. In the same way, when you think about your life, you conceptually know of course I'm going to die at some point. But you don't really like understand your own death in any kind of real way until like you're very ill or you get older or someone close to you dies. So that idea of the impermanence of everything but overshadowed by like a hard line of permanent thinking is part of what I think the issue is here where it's like, yeah, like environmental stuff matters and yeah, of course, of course it matters and whatever, but without the Real idea that no, like everything's going to end. Every single thing that we know today will end at some point. And that could be real long time or it could be real short, depending on what happens next. And the fragility that you talked about also around the idea of very few people wake up in the morning and are like, oh, I'm going to be evil today. You know, like very few people do that. Most people are lovely people and actually care about, about the world. But there is a block here. So let's talk about how your business addresses that and actually tries to get from just the individual action to leveraging influence. So can you tell us exactly what you do?
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'm a consultant, which in the last two years of trying that hat on and being like, I guess I'm this now really just means I'm a subject matter expert in my little, my little area, right? So people pay me for my expertise to say, help us make our workforce more sustainable, help us figure out the unique ways that all of these people who make up our company who don't have sustainability in their job titles, don't have sustainability in their job spec. How do they contribute? What's the intersection of all of these various jobs and roles and disciplines that are, you know, exist in most companies? Like, most companies have project managers and now software engineers and HR professionals. And like, how do you help those people understand how the work they do intersects with sustainability? How do you make sustainability part of everybody's job? So that's what I do. I work with companies to do that both top down and I work bottom up with employees. I, they can't pay me, so I offer those services for free because I believe in it, because that's how I started, right? Like I started as a bottom up employee that had no power and no influence inside of a corporate structure, but was eventually able to gain both.
And really when, when you want to help make sustainability part of an organization's culture, you just like anything, you need both, right? You need top down and bottom up efforts happening in concert at the same time. So I work top down with companies, often sustainability teams, but sometimes others, you know, HR and all of that cross functional groups of people to create the incentives and conditions that allow for employees to get involved in sustainability in some way. Many times in a corporate structure, employees just need to be explicitly told, you're allowed to work on this, right? Like if it's not in your job spec and not in your job title, why would you assume that you should be working on it? Right. Like that's just not how it works. So oftentimes it's just about creating that message of like, no, we want your contributions, we want your ideas. Right. And then creating incentives to do that. Whether that's like a gamification campaign or extending tuition reimbursement to getting a sustainability certification from a university, you know, something like that. There's lots of low hanging fruit that companies can be doing to send a very clear message to their workforce. We care about sustainability, we need your help in order to, you know, become more sustainable. And here are the ways that you could contribute. And then with employees, it's really about growing leaders and helping them understand that like, yeah, this isn't in your job title. You are going to have to fight for power and influence in a space where you have none, but you've got to do it right. Like it's really, really important for employees to speak up and do this work so that they can push their companies. Because companies will never go far enough, fast enough on their own when it comes to climate change. Because again, again, they're just incentive, they're just not incentivized for that. They're short term thinking profit, very risk averse, they don't do anything that's going to, you know, especially in the current political climate. And so employees, when you think about all the stakeholder groups that can influence the behavior of a company, employees are one of the most important ones. Right. Like you literally work inside the machine. You could send an email directly to the CEO if you want me, the customer can't do that. And even if I could, they're never going to read it. Right. So employees have a special set of tools at their disposal to influence behavior change of their employer. So I help both groups figure out how they can work together because this work is meant to be cooperative. Again, it's about making sustainably part of everybody's job. That means it is about creating massively cross functional teams where you lift that responsibility again out of that tiny chronically under resourced team and spread it around to everybody. So that's essentially what I do.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: Can you give us an example? And you can use the company name or not use the company name, but give us an example of like a piece of work you've done. Like something in action that you're like, yeah, that really captures what I do.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the most common ways for employees to sort of harness that bottom up energy, that grassroots organizing in order to again get some power and influence when it comes to sustainability decisions in their company. One of the most common ways that they do that is by self organizing into communities, employee sustainability communities like the one that I co founded at Microsoft. Colloquially they're often called green teams. Almost every company has one, right? Like most of us are familiar with the concept of employee resource groups, ergs. These are a fairly universal type of workplace community.
They're almost always affinity groups for marginalized identities, right? So at Microsoft it was like blacks. At Microsoft, veterans of Microsoft, those are ergs.
Green teams often get kind of shoehorned into that because that's usually the only kind of community that a company has, although that's the wrong tool for the job. Which we could talk about the difference between communities of practice or employee resource groups if you want to get in the weeds. But essentially employees often organize themselves into these communities and in these communities they talk to each other openly about sustainability so that there's peer to peer learning, happening, knowledge sharing. They'll oftentimes organize, you know, monthly webinars, hackathons, all kinds of creative ways where employees can find ways to work on sustainability. So a lot of the work I do with companies is they either have one of these green teams or they've been thinking about it, but they don't have one yet. And in either case they're not really effective yet. You know, it's typically like a team, a teams channel or like a slack community, you know, inside the kind of corporate tech stack or whatever. But outside of maybe organizing a tree planting event once a year, they're not really doing stuff, they're not effective yet. And so the work I do is a huge chunk of the work I do, especially last year with a bunch of companies is go in and again work down with, work top down with the companies to say let's just do some basic volunteer management and some basic community management hygiene to make sure that people understand why this community exists, how to use it, where to find it, how to grow the members, and then some basic volunteer management stuff like give people one hour a week so that they're unblocked from working on this. And then with, with the employees showing them mostly through showing inspiring examples of what these green teams have successfully done in the best case scenarios in Microsoft and in some other examples too, to inspire them and show them this can be so much more than you get together once a year and plant trees. Like you can literally get power and influence, you can literally change markets, you can literally create climate solutions using your employer's resources that don't just like green your job but maybe the millions of other people who also have your job in other companies and you know people, they need inspiration, they need to see a successful example of how something has been done before. They can go, oh, oh, I could do that too. Cool.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: You know, so what is a successful example? And it could be one that you've worked on or one that you, you draw influence from. Like what's one where like employees have actually like created that condition and it, and it did impact markets and like actually shift something in like the business world.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I have to use the Microsoft example here one, because I'm the most familiar with it. I was there and a huge instigator in that. But I also got to, what's interesting as a consultant is like you parachute into a company, you do all this work with them and then you leave. And you don't always necessarily see the fruits of your labor. You teach them how to plant seeds, you teach them how to garden, you show them how to water, how to provide sunlight, all of that stuff. But then, you know, you move on to the next garden and you don't always get to see what grows. So, you know, I was at Microsoft for seven years and so I got to see the fruits of the labor a lot.
And so there are a bunch of really, really cool examples. So the first one I'll start with is the fact that Microsoft made these really big sustainability commitments in 2020 to be carbon negative, water positive, zero waste, and to protect more land than they use, all by the end of the decade. And I can unpack those terms for your listeners if they want to understand what carbon negative or zero waste means or whatever. But essentially these are industry leading corporate sustainability commitments. There are almost no other companies of that size who are trying to do things that serious. And at that pace. Many companies are making net zero commitments by 2050. Carbon negative by 2030 is, is a tall order, one that sadly they're not on track for, but they're trying really hard. So that's 2020. If you go back in time to when we first started this employee sustainability community in 2018, 2017, somewhere in there, the very first thing we started to do was figure out where are the leverage points inside the company. How do we get the company to get more serious about climate change? Because prior to 2020, I mean, they weren't really doing anything. They had like they'd been carbon neutral since 2012 or 13 through.
They're called renewable energy credits offsets. We can get into that later. It's, it's training wheels. It's the first step that you need to do to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions as a company. But ultimately it doesn't actually work that well. So anyways, they weren't really doing much. And the number of people that worked on sustainability in the company was like less than 5 in a workforce of more than 200,000.
So for the first two years, the employee sustainability community's sole focus was get the company to take climate change more seriously. And we experimented and we tried to figure out what are the ways that we can actually influence that. And one of the most effective ways actually was leveraging the hot mic at a town hall.
So pre Covid company did a live town hall every month, usually at the corporate headquarters here outside of Seattle. And almost the entire senior leadership team, including the CEO, was there. And if you got in line early enough, you could ask a question on the hot mic. And so we hit them like six months in a row with sustainability questions. And so for 30 seconds worth of effort, we elevated the conversation on why is this company not doing more for climate change in front of the entire company.
And so just a few months later, you know, Microsoft made these big sustainability commitments. And look, I'm not going to say that it's only because of employee pressure, not at all. There's lots of factors that we're kind of piling on. Basically Microsoft is getting it from all sides, consumers, customers, regulator, like everybody. And it's not special to Microsoft. You know, in the last five, six years, a lot of companies have gotten more serious about climate change, thank God.
But there's no question that us organizing into hundreds and eventually thousands and consistently applying that pressure to the company and saying, look, you gotta do more, you know, and by the way, there are thousands of us that really want to help. This isn't like a finger wagging like you're so horrible, why aren't you doing better? This is a, you're a trillion dollar technology company, you have an incredible opportunity. And I think we argued successfully responsibility to go first and do things that smaller companies can't do. And again, by the way, there are thousands of us, very smart, very talented, very passionate skill sets all over the place who want to help. So let's help each other. And so that was the first successful example is like we got the company to do more. And after the commitments, I mean my God, it was like the floodgates opened a billion dollar climate innovation fund to seed early stage climate tech startups and kind of nascent technologies. Right? Like the, there's not that many companies that could just be like, we'll just throw a billion at it and see what happens. You know, like that alone is huge. But you know, in the next three years, while I was still at Microsoft, from 2020 to the time I left, we saw like a 10x increase in the number of full time sustainability jobs. So remember what I said at the beginning, less than 1% of the workforce, which is still proportionally true, but still a 10x increase in the, in the bodies that are thinking about these problems all day, every day was awesome.
And then I can go deeper if you want other specific examples about how individual roles and functions, software engineers being maybe the best example. We have figured out how to do this not just for them as individuals, but for their entire discipline.
[00:36:36] Speaker A: Well, you said earlier you can unpack some of those, those terms. So I'd love to hear those, those terms discussed.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So Microsoft's sustainability commitments are carbon negative, water positive, zero waste by the end of the decade, by 2030. So carbon negative means you will pull more. And we use carbon as shorthand for greenhouse gases. So it's not just carbon dioxide, it's also methane and some of the other gases that are up there. But for common speak, we just say carbon. So that refers to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Again, as a refresher. You put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they warm the planet. The warming of the planet melts the ice sheets, raises sea levels, changes weather patterns. A whole bunch of nasty stuff that we don't want or need.
Carbon negative means that the company will pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere per year than it directly emits, which is actually pretty insane to think about, right? Because like when companies start this process of what's called decarbonization, essentially what they're doing is they're looking at their entire carbon footprint. How many greenhouse gases do we emit as a company?
So scope one is like all the stuff that directly you're direct. It's the emissions coming out of the tailpipes of your cars and stuff. And there's these other scopes that get slightly broader all the way out to scope three, which is like your supply chain. So like the factories that build your microchips, what are their emissions? How do you measure that? All of that? So Microsoft is saying that by the end of the decade, it will account for all of those emissions, not just the ones it directly creates, but everything, its entire supply and value chain, even up to an individual Xbox user and how much electricity they use running their Xbox for the duration of the time. They own it. Right. So this is actually really great. There's not that many companies that are willing to take that big of a responsibility for their, for their pollution.
And they're saying we're going to add all of that up, we'll know what that number is and then we're going to do a whole bunch of stuff over here to reduce that number. So operational improvements, efficiencies, massive. Like the world's largest purchases of renewable energy. There's an incredible story you could, you could tell over the last 15 years of part of the reason that renewable energy has finally gotten cost parity with fossil fuels is mostly because of tech companies and data centers and like they have purchased.
I mean they brought the cost down for, for just about everybody else. They sort of subsidized that. But then for all the stuff that you can't like, no matter what, companies will still create greenhouse gases. There's no way around that. So what do you do with the remainder of the stuff that you couldn't just kind of like reduce? So that's when you start to get into, you know, purchasing credits, carbon credits, where you as a company will say, okay, we want to pay this landowner to protect, you know, how many hectares of forest because we know that those trees will pull X amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And so that's one way to do it. Those are called nature based solutions. But increasingly we're getting into an era where human engineered solutions to physically suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere are starting to spin up. They're nascent, they're very small scale, they unfortunately require more energy to run than what they actually remove. But companies like Microsoft are investing in that because that is probably going to be a really important part of the mix is like you'll never be able to plant enough trees to pull 200 years worth of greenhouse gases that humans have put into it out. And so you're also going to need like these engineered solutions. So anyways, a rambling answer, but Microsoft is trying to, through a combination of nature based solutions and engineered solutions, be carbon negative. So it won't stop creating greenhouse gas emissions. That's impossible. But it will offset, capture and remove more than it creates, you know, year over year for zero waste.
Unfortunately, it doesn't mean making no trash because that would also be impossible for a company that size, frankly, for any of us. Right.
But it does mean getting a third party certification to show that 90% of your waste is diverted from landfill. So it could be Compost, it could be recycled, could be a lot of things. But at least 90% of the waste you create is not going into landfill.
And then water positive, that may be the simplest to understand. Right. Like all companies consume water in their operations and it's not just like the sinks and the toilets, but like for heavy manufacturing, industrial processes, water is massive. For tech companies like Microsoft, excuse me, data centers often use water for cooling, so they consume a sizable amount of water. And then there's some really contentious things about like, you know, I'm from Arizona Tech. You know, land is cheap in Arizona, so is solar power. And so tech companies are building massive data centers in the middle of the desert, sucking up water from a region that's already drought prone. So what water positive means is that the company will again look at its total water consumption and then through replenishment projects, recharging of aquifers, providing access to clean drinking water in other parts of the world, they will put more water back into the environment than they consume in their direct operations. And they're trying to do all of that by the end of the decade. Very ambitious actually.
[00:41:41] Speaker A: So amazing. Thank you for all that. But you also mentioned, you also mentioned that they're off track and it doesn't look like they're right now. It doesn't look they're going to hit it. So tell me about that.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yeah, well, with the emissions in particular, nobody has yet figured out how to decouple economic growth from rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Just haven't figured out how to do that yet. Right. So Microsoft is growing exponentially as a company, especially in the last two years, you know, post chat, GPT. Right. Like this is, we're obviously in like a new era now. They're building on average one new data center every three days.
[00:42:24] Speaker A: Whoa.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: I mean it is like some people are calling it one of the largest human construction projects in history. Not, not just Microsoft, but like the data center build out that really runs the Internet at this point. Right. It's not just AI, it's cloud computing, it's Gmail, it's your phone. Like the world runs on computing and computing runs on data centers. And so that construction alone is, takes an enormous amount of resources. Right? And then you got to think about the concrete and the steel, all of that stuff. You got to burn a lot of fossil fuels to produce that stuff, to ship it, to install it.
So part of the reason that Microsoft is wildly off track, its emissions are going up, up, up, up, up when they should be leveling off and then starting to go down in advance of, you know, it's Now April of 2025, they're growing like crazy and it's really very difficult to decouple your growth from your carbon emissions. And in the era of AI, well, I think in the last year or so we've seen what their answer is on if you're really serious about sustainability, you can't grow AI the way that you are. But we know they're never going to choose sustainability over the growth of the company or AI Again. This gets back to what I was saying earlier about how even the most well intentioned, well meaning companies, even what we could call sustainability leaders, still operate within a system that constrains them heavily from ever choosing the thing that's ultimately sustainable if it comes at the expense of their growth or profit. And so I'm actually not as up on their water and waste commitments. I think those are a little bit easier for them. Not to be too cynical, but companies can often buy their way out of problems and so that one's a little bit easier. But from the emissions perspective standpoint, you know, Microsoft uses this analogy that when they made that commitment to be carbon negative, and I was actually in the room when they did that, as an employee who had been advocating for sustainability for years, got invited to the kind of like event where they sat in the front row and it was just like, oh my God, that's amazing. Like they're actually going to do, you know, so they're doing all this stuff, but they're off track.
It's really hard. Turns out really expensive too.
And that's not to say that they are doing incredible work. Like they have figured out how to do things that other companies have not. It's not to say that it's all for nothing. Certainly not. And many of my colleagues, former colleagues, friends even, are the ones driving some of the super important innovative work. But ultimately the math is not adding up.
[00:44:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
So let's talk about your business.
[00:45:11] Speaker B: What's that beyond.
