We love the new book Trudeau & Doonesbury - A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art. Trudeau of course created Doonesbury, the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic that has been running since 1970 and syndicated in more than 1400 newspapers worldwide.

Doonesbury tracked the lives of a recurring cast of characters as they navigated contemporary American life. The cartoon was always daring—using art and satire to tackle various heated issues of the day, ranging from presidential politics and war to mental health, sexuality, and generational change.

We decided we’d write about the book in the Doonesbury spirit by using the comic strip format to make some of our points.1

We often encourage fellow environmentalists to try different genres and formats in order to reach bigger audiences. Reading about what Trudeau accomplished, we couldn’t help but wonder whether environmentalists might learn from his example.

Maybe environmental messages don’t always need to be so long or complex. Maybe subtler delivery and more wit will actually achieve more.

We’ve always admired Trudeau’s range. He stood up for the full gamut of injustices that he saw as they happened in real time: LGBTQ, mental health, unjust wars, shabby treatment of returning vets, and corrupt politicians all got his attention. And, in turn, public awareness and discussion of these issues changed dramatically.

We wonder now if environmentalists should also choose to be less siloed. For example, if we care as much as we say we do about climate and biodiversity, why don’t we do more about related challenges like abuse of animals in factory farming, political attacks on universities and science, cuts to budgets for global poverty and health programs, and outright lying about these same issues?

We found the book’s review of how Trudeau spoke up about AIDs especially inspiring.

Not everyone was a fan. Many newspapers canceled Doonesbury at various times because it took strong stands on controversial issues. But that never intimidated Trudeau. He just kept on speaking his truth one strip at a time, and in the process changed hearts and minds. The newspapers always came crawling back too. Their readers were ahead of them. The readers wanted to be challenged. They wanted their comic strip back too and they always got it back.

In today’s fragmented media landscape, it’s hard to see how anyone can make as big an impact as Trudeau. But we applaud those who are trying.

We admire how Kim Kardashian uses her platform of 344 million followers to advocate for criminal justice reform. And when we think about our issues, we remember Greta Thunberg’s bold messaging on climate (even if we didn’t always agree with her message 100%). The late Pope Francis brilliantly grabbed the world’s attention at the time of the Paris COP. Yvon Chouinard and his team at Patagonia have had many bold and provocative moments. And just over the past week or so a new X (Twitter) account has appeared with the handle Lake Ontario, charmingly explaining the origins of her name! Bravo to this entire gang. But who else could and should be doing more now?

And, closer to home, at this newsletter, we keep trying. Maybe—just maybe—The Instigator is having some impact too:

Extra Credit:

Please let us know what you think about all of this. In particular:

• What do you think are the best opportunities to reach big (ie, majority) audiences right now?

• Should environmentalists focus on a narrow range of core issues or should they join forces with broadly aligned movements?

• How do we use satire and humor more effectively?

• Who are today’s Trudeaus?

• What will work best for the hugely important upcoming midterm elections!

• Which messages and messengers inspire you the most right now?

Meanwhile, please keep spreading the word! If you can, try to have fun while doing so. And please make sure that you and your friends all vote.

Apropos: Potential Energy (disclosure: I am on the board) has released a report on climate communications, which suggests that talk about mandates, bans, and net zero is far less effective than talk about love, health, money, and power. I'm no longer surprised by this finding. Are you?

Onward,

So I was especially pleased to read that Mark Zuckerberg is taking Meta down the path we laid out in February and building both sustainability and local community needs into their enormous data center development plans.

I am being somewhat facetious, of course. We don’t have actual evidence that Zuck reads The Instigator (yet). And his promise certainly didn’t go as far as we recommended. It amounted to little more than one sentence in a 6,500-word essay. But the announced $1 billion fund for the communities where Meta builds data centers and the nod to environmental considerations is a start.

Meta’s Promise

Meta’s “Future Is For Everyone Fund” is a smart move on Zuck’s part, both because it’s the right thing to do and because, as we predicted, anti-data center momentum is building fast—now including 71% of Americans, according to Gallup. And just last month, New York became the first state to enact a moratorium on new data center construction.

Companies often discover too late just how much community consent is critical to their business. Given that Meta has a whopping $600 billion earmarked for data center development by 2028, it makes sense for them to start laying the groundwork to ensure it can actually be deployed.

Meta’s Reality

That was the good news. Now let’s take a closer look.

Meta’s announcement was notable for where it fell short—namely with details on how all of this will actually work. They provided no formula for how the money will be spent, no governance structure, and no third-party verification. At the end of the day, the company seems to be offering some discretionary spending that they control.

As for the dollar amount—at first glance, one billion dollars sounds serious. But consider that the company is planning to spend 600 times that amount on data centers alone in the next two years. The community fund is roughly the equivalent of two and a half days of Meta’s 2026 capital budget. Add to that the fact that the company receives tax breaks in much greater amounts for its AI projects, and the halo starts to dim.

In Good Company

Meta is not the only tech company to try and drum up goodwill. Microsoft and Google, for example, are also on the move here and, in our view, going further. Microsoft announced a “Community-First AI Infrastructure” framework in which it commits to fully covering power and grid upgrade costs so utility bills won’t increase for consumers; using 40% less water by 2030; not signing NDAs with local governments; and providing transparent data on all water and energy use by site. Google outdoes them—at least in Missouri and Nevada—by committing to cover new grid infrastructure costs via rate tariffs approved by regulators.

These are good starts. But we’ve been noting for years (see, e.g., here and here) that voluntary social and environmental commitments by corporations sound good but are mostly overrated. They are better than nothing, and they can help to get positive initiatives underway, which we appreciate. But the only way to achieve lasting change and to scale it is through public policy and regulations that require better behavior.

There’s a second-order advantage to the companies that understand that. The companies that help write the rules (such as Google and the regulator-approved tariffs they support), build cost models around them, and gain the community trust that goes with all of this will have a multi-year head start when the regulations are binding on all hyperscalers. To us, that looks like a smart way to compete.

For all constituents, it’s good news that Big Tech now recognizes that community consent for data center build-out needs to be earned. That creates an opening for hard bargaining that climate advocates, conservationists, communities, and regulators should grab.

Onward,

His organization’s latest campaign, Kangaroos Are Not Shoes, launched six years ago with a simple but ambitious mission: to get the world’s biggest athletic shoe brands to stop using wild kangaroo skins in soccer cleats. And this year’s World Cup finally delivered the decisive victory. 1,246 players across 48 national teams competed in the games. Only a single player laced up kangaroo shoes.

I asked Wayne to give us a peek behind the scenes of the campaign and its origins. I think this is one of the more remarkable and underappreciated advocacy wins in recent memory. . . and a reminder that real change is possible, even in a moment when it can feel like many of our initiatives are under siege.

Let’s start with the World Cup itself. What does it mean to see kangaroo-skin shoes all but disappear from the world’s biggest sporting stage?

It felt like a complete triumph. Kangaroo skins had, since around 1970, been a core material for soccer shoes manufactured and marketed by the athletic shoe industry. And within six years of the launch of our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign, the shoe models had vanished from the World Cup, the biggest stage in global sports. No more shoe contracts requiring elite players to wear them, no kids watching their favorite players lacing them up, no marketing hype about how the skins are thin and strong.

Let’s step back and consider the history of the Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign. How and why did you launch this six years ago? What did the landscape look like at the time? I understand there were once around 100 kangaroo-based shoe models on the market, worn by some of the sport’s biggest stars?

I’ve long had my eye on the night-time shoots of kangaroos—the biggest commercial slaughter of terrestrial, native wild animals in the world. I formulated the campaign when I started the Center for a Humane Economy—as a model example of what I wrote about in my book, The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals. The public had no clue about the killing fields. Few people had any idea what went on in this commercial slaughter. And I recognized that the athletic shoe companies couldn’t seriously defend the practice once we tagged them as the drivers of such ruthless treatment of iconic wildlife in Australia—a nation that featured the red kangaroo on its Coat of Arms.

You challenged nine of the largest athletic shoe brands in the world, seven of them foreign-owned, and you were up against not just the commercial kangaroo-shooting industry but the Australian government itself. What was most difficult about this campaign?

The commercial kangaroo-killing industry and the livestock industry demonized kangaroos, just as the livestock industry has done with wolves, grizzly bears, and wild horses. We had to correct the maligned image of kangaroos, so that people could then get to the moral matter of the cruelty of the night-time shoots and the orphaning of the joeys.

We faced an Australian government acting as the public relations and lobbying arm of the kangaroo-shooting and processing industry. When we introduced the Kangaroo Protection Act in Congress—to ban imports of kangaroo parts in the US—it was the Australian embassy and its leaders who were tromping around Capitol Hill, calling it an essential industry.

And we also had to face down the commercial shooting industry itself and its jobs arguments. And given that these shoe companies and their brands were so mammoth, we had to find creative ways to apply meaningful pressure, as well as to rebut their pablum that the commercial killing in the middle of the night in Australia was “humane” and “tightly regulated.”

What lessons do you think we can draw from this win for environmental campaigns—the kind of work many of our readers are engaged in?

Framing is crucial. We argued arithmetic: the market for soccer shoes consists of a billion soccer players in 190 countries. How can you rely on wild populations to supply this immense demand?

And then there was the killing of the joeys; it’s taboo in even America’s lethal wildlife management schemes to kill the newborns.

We also recognized that the companies, though selling kangaroo-derived shoes, also had shoes derived from human-made fabrics that were sustainable, often recycled products. In short, there were high-performance alternatives.

As you know, I’ve argued that environmental organizations should make animal welfare a higher priority. If conservation groups already care deeply about biodiversity and protecting threatened, low-population species, why shouldn’t they also care about animals like kangaroos or livestock, whose populations are large but who are still treated inhumanely?

I’ve always believed that animal protection should be in the foreground of environmental causes, as it often used to be. Environmentalists’ concerns about biodiversity and threatened populations—important as they are—tend to view animals from a distance, in a way that can seem a little abstract and impersonal. I completely agree with you that it’s not enough to care about animals collectively, as populations and species. We should care about them individually, as fellow creatures with a goodness and dignity of their own that commands our respect.

I was a history and environmental studies major at Yale University, so I cut my teeth on ecosystem defense, conservation, and responsible stewardship. But in societies with a moral outlook grounded in respect for the individual rights of human beings, we cannot discount the moral concern for individual animals—a feeling, after all, that most people have when they see or learn about human-caused suffering.

In my years of work in this space, I’ve often learned that where there’s cruelty, there are other vices. Factory farming hurts animals, but it despoils rivers and lakes and pollutes the area. Cruelty to pets in households is often comingled with spousal or child abuse. Live wildlife markets are hell on animals, while also incubating zoonotic diseases that threaten human communities.

Shifting gears, I imagine a campaign like this, which took six years and required winning over company after company, tested your patience and resolve. How do you stay inspired and keep your team motivated over a fight that tough?

We need incremental goals to build momentum and enliven grassroots supporters, donors, and politicians. Winning over nine global brands, selling into 190 countries, was a truly ambitious goal, and we needed tactics to meet the challenge.

After Diadora went kangaroo-free in 2021, we secured a pledge from the Germany-based Puma in 2023 to stop sourcing kangaroo skins. Nike paid attention to competitors and joined next, and that was extraordinary given that it’s one of the best-known brands in the world. New Balance followed. Adidas had been the most outspoken company favoring use of kangaroo-skin shoes, and I’d worked to fight off their effort in California to overturn California’s ban on the sale of kangaroo parts. After trying just about everything—including take-overs of flagship stores in New York and protests across the world—I went to the annual shareholder meeting at Adidas headquarters in Furth, Germany.

Adidas leadership gave me, as a shareholder, the opportunity to make my case to the board and executive team in attendance. After my speech, the CEO told me right then and there, grudgingly, that it would exit the kangaroo-skin business.

You’ve got to celebrate the gains along the way, just like the Union celebrated General Grant’s wins at Fort Henry, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. You keep fighting and persuading until you secure unconditional surrender.

We like to close our interviews by asking for book recommendations. What should our readers pick up next?

I read a wide range of books outside of the fields of animal protection and conservation, but apropos of our discussion, I am now reading James H. McCommons and his March release of The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds.

In confronting kangaroo killing for sale of skins and meat, I knew I was taking on the discredited practice of commercial killing for global markets. No serious-minded environmentalist should abide this slaughter of kangaroos for their skins or for meat. The latter is a form of bushmeat killing. This history of the killing of birds for meat, feathers for hats, and other purposes, as detailed by McCommons, reminds us that the work of campaigners more than a century ago still has a long tail.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, a derivative of those campaigns, is a legal framework that still provides critical protections for more than 1,000 bird species in the United States, including non-endangered birds.

We need to wake up from our moral sleepwalking when it comes to the treatment of our fellow creatures. Their lives matter just as much to them as our lives matter to us.

Thank you, Wayne.

If you’d like to learn more about Wayne’s work, check out his nonprofit, the Animal Wellness Action.

Onward,

Nearly 900 wildfires are burning across Canada right now and have already scorched roughly 11,000 square miles—an area slightly bigger than Massachusetts. The smoke has pushed air quality into “unhealthy” or “hazardous” territory across more than 20 U.S. states, from the Midwest to Washington, D.C., putting something like 100+ million Americans under air quality alerts.

With such an extreme weather event, there are a few things worth being clear-eyed about:

The people hit first and hardest are Indigenous communities living in and near these forests. Since April, dozens of First Nations have been directly impacted, with thousands of residents evacuated at some point this season and well over a thousand still displaced as of mid-July. These people have lost homes, and they’ve been exposed to very dangerous smoke.

The smoke is a serious health threat. A study published this year found that long-term wildfire smoke exposure contributes to roughly 24,100 deaths a year in the lower 48 states alone. The smoke’s particulate matter drives heart disease, asthma, premature birth, and— over time—cognitive decline.

The actual cause is a record heat wave, not “debris.” Ontario just came off a heat wave that shattered longstanding records: Armstrong hit an all-time high of 40.7°C, and Toronto came close to its own July 14 record. The heat dried out forests and allowed lightning strikes to ignite the fire. Climate scientist Daniel Swain lays all of this out clearly if you want to understand the deeper mechanics. He’s worth following.

The White House response has been to blame Canada’s “willful negligence” and threaten new tariffs, arguing that Canada “refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal.” Trump made the same claim against California in 2018 and 2020…and fire scientists debunked it then too. Forest management affects fire behavior at the margins, but it doesn’t create the heat domes and record dryness now allowing fires to ignite across nine provinces and all three territories.

The premise doesn’t hold up anyway. Canada’s boreal forest spans roughly 1.2 billion acres. It’s the largest intact forest ecosystem left on Earth. Most of the forest is remote wilderness with no roads and no history of active management. Fire is how that ecosystem has always renewed itself. Blaming “debris removal” for fires burning across an area that size is like suggesting a few sandbags would have prevented Hurricane Katrina.

And if we’re assigning blame by contribution, we’d start by acknowledging that the US has emitted more cumulative CO2 than any other country in history—roughly two-thirds more than China, the next-largest emitter, and about a fifth of the global total. If anyone owes anyone an accounting here, the math doesn’t point north.

We’ll have a more comprehensive take on White House lying coming soon. But in the meantime, dear readers, here’s our ask of you. When you come across arguments along these lines—Canada is negligent, its forests are unraked—please push back and state that this view is nonsense. Don’t duck. Say clearly that this is a climate story, not a landscaping story.

And remember this as you consider the midterm elections. Please support and vote for candidates who don’t deflect and mislead about serious events like this one, but are instead guided by science and propose sensible, realistic ways to address challenges like climate change.

Onward,

And after 24 years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a decade-plus running The Nature Conservancy, I keep coming back to the same answer: Start by keeping it simple.

Eric Wilburn recently wrote a great post that got me thinking about this question again over the past week. Eric is smart on topics like this, and I encourage you to subscribe to his newsletter.

A few fundamentals need to be in place for investments in nature to work:

1. Cash flow. The moment anyone wants to raise investor capital for a project, they need to show how the project will generate the cash flow to cover the annual cost of such capital and eventually repay the principal. Enthusiastic environmentalists sometimes skip right past this starting point in their eagerness to get an otherwise good project moving.

2. Someone who will actually pay for the benefits nature delivers. Nature provides enormously valuable essential services—clean water, healthy soil, carbon storage, protection from extreme weather, habitat for biodiversity, recreation opportunities, and much more. But per point # 1 above, generating the cash flow to meet capital costs requires creditworthy entities willing to pay for those services. Organizing private-sector buyers for them is genuinely hard. Eric’s post handles this well. This isn’t unique to nature-based projects, either: the same is true of traditional man-made infrastructure like bridges, seawalls, and water treatment plants, which is exactly why governments, not private capital, usually foot the bill.

3. Realistic, credible projections. Traditional infrastructure financing offers a useful model here. When sponsors ask organizations to commit capital for a project and/or purchase the services it will deliver, they back up the ask with detailed projections of what exactly the infrastructure will deliver and when, and they’re upfront about the risks. Those projections then get scrutinized by everyone with a stake in the outcome. Environmental projects tend to be thin on this kind of rigor, since the timing and quality of the services nature is supposed to deliver are often tricky to pin down.

4. Evidence. Too often, prospective capital providers for nature deals are asked to make a huge leap of faith on something that’s never really been done before. Speculative bets like that can work (see the SpaceX IPO), but they come with significant upside for investors that most green investments simply can’t provide. To find a path around this obstacle, try starting small. Fund a pilot project with philanthropic capital, work it hard to learn what does and doesn’t work, and use that evidence to strengthen the projections behind the subsequent bigger version.

There’s more required, of course. But without these four things in place, it’s hard to scale investments in nature on any basis other than philanthropy. If you’re structuring a nature-based deal, run it through these four filters before you send out your pitch.

I wrote a book about these matters a few years ago, and I think it still holds up well: Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature. If you work on projects along these lines, I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think.

Onward,

While we pride ourselves on being generally well-read, we’re particularly into climate fiction. The best of the genre lets readers imagine different futures. It builds empathy by giving us a new vantage point. And it sketches the futures—the good and bad—that climate and energy choices might actually produce.

But one catch is that sometimes Cli-Fi can slip into sermon territory. You can feel the author’s thesis statement poking through the plot. So it’s a real pleasure to recommend a new novel that never once feels preachy: Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt.

The plot, briefly: James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie meet as college students, drift apart, and then collide again as young consultants at McKinsey in the years around the 2008 financial crisis. Drayton is the disciplined, determined one on track for an early partnership; Mackenzie is the charming, restless one who can’t quite get out of his own way. Sent to Scotland to help shut down a client’s operations, the two of them start wondering if they’re capable of building something instead of just closing things down. That question leads them into a tidal energy startup which, over the course of two decades, evolves into a thriving hydrogen business. Along the way, the book folds in cameos from real figures: Ben Bernanke, Peter Thiel, and my former Goldman Sachs partners Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, and Mario Draghi all make appearances. There are nods to plenty of others in the tech and finance world whom Starritt clearly knows well.

If only more novelists sought out stories in the grubby, sometimes unglamorous machinery of the real economy—management consulting, venture fundraising, the slow grind of getting a startup from PowerPoint to product. Starritt did his homework here, and it shows. The consulting, fundraising and company-building scenes all ring true.

Just as importantly, the book stays honest about its two leads, and all of the other characters too. Drayton and Mackenzie are ambitious and likable, but they’re also flawed in ways that will feel familiar to anyone who’s spent time around founders, or frankly around any driven, imperfect human being. Nobody here is a saint purely motivated by trying to save the planet. Instead, the lead characters are two guys trying to build something that works, who happen to land on tidal power and, eventually, hydrogen.

And that isn’t so fictitious. The clean energy transition isn’t going to be won by a handful of noble crusaders. It’s going to be built by thousands of ordinary, ambitious, flawed people slogging through consulting decks, performance reviews, term sheets, product setbacks, as well romantic ups and downs. We appreciate a novel that takes that seriously, without turning it into a lecture. The book is fun, funny, absorbing, and worth your time.

More of this kind of story, please.

Onward,

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,

I find myself repeating the same arguments: EVs are quieter, faster off the mark, cheaper to maintain, and if I’m honest, just more fun to drive. You’d also be in the company of people trying to make the future better.

Unfortunately, old habits, perceived limitations, and a lingering sense that EVs are some kind of compromise still get in the way. It’s the same resistance, incidentally, that I run into when I try to get people to taste the Impossible Burger.

But I now realize that there is a much greater embodiment of this idea than anything I could say: the all-electric global racing series, or Formula E.

A Different Kind of Racing

I was a latecomer to Formula E. When it launched in 2014, it felt like a clever marketing gimmick more than a serious development in motorsport or the energy transition. Quiet cars, short races, and early technical constraints made it easy to underestimate.

A decade later, that skepticism no longer holds up. Formula E has evolved into a high-performance proving ground for electric mobility, backed by major automakers and increasingly relevant to the real-world transition away from internal combustion engines.

Here are a few dimensions that make Formula E so exciting:

The cars themselves are remarkably advanced. Today’s machines can top 200 mph, but raw speed is only part of the story. What really defines Formula E is energy management: drivers aren’t just racing each other, they’re racing their own battery constraints.

Regenerative braking plays a central role. A substantial portion of the energy used in a race is recaptured during braking and fed back into the battery. In some cases, roughly 40% of total race energy comes from regeneration. That’s extraordinary efficiency—and a preview of where consumer EV technology is heading.

There are unique strategic elements in Formula E that have no real analogue in traditional racing. Attack Mode, for example, gives drivers a temporary power boost if they deviate from the optimal racing line to activate it. It’s a small but telling feature: even in a fully electrified system, performance is shaped by smart choices, timing, and decision-making.

There’s also the quiet but important story of the battery itself. Early seasons required mid-race car swaps because the technology simply couldn’t go the distance. Today’s cars complete the race in one piece, and this season the series even reintroduced brief mid-race charging stops—not because the battery can’t last, but because a 30-second top-up unlocks extra power, turning faster charging into its own strategic weapon. The pace of improvement is hard to miss.

And there’s the venue. Formula E races are typically held on temporary street circuits in major cities such as New York, London, and Rome—bringing the sport directly into urban environments where electrification matters most.

Lessons Beyond the Track

What I initially overlooked (and now seems obvious) is that Formula E is not really about racing. It is about accelerating a technology curve. It shows what happens when you take a critical clean-energy technology, subject it to extreme performance demands, and give world-class engineers a reason to improve it quickly.

That dynamic should sound familiar. We’ve seen it in semiconductors, in solar panels, and in batteries. Formula E is doing something similar for electric drivetrains, power electronics, and energy management systems. And because major automakers are directly involved, the feedback loop into commercial vehicles is immediate.

There are a few broader takeaways here that strike me as directly relevant to the clean economy.

1. Constraints can be a feature, not a bug. In Formula E, strict energy limits force innovation. Efficiency becomes a competitive advantage. The same principle applies across the energy transition, where carbon constraints are increasingly driving better system design.

2. Performance matters more than virtue. People may not adopt new technologies at scale simply because they are cleaner. But they will adopt them when they are better. Faster acceleration, lower operating costs, smarter energy use—these are the attributes that should win in the marketplace.

3. Visibility accelerates acceptance. By racing in city centers, Formula E makes electrification tangible. It turns an abstract transition into something people can experience directly. That should help build public momentum.

4. The clean energy transition is not a story of compromise. It is a story of reinvention. The best electric technologies are not substitutes for what came before—they are sharp improvements.

If there is a single lesson I take from Formula E, it is this: the path to decarbonization runs through better products, not just better policies.

So often the shift away from internal combustion engines is framed as a trade-off—performance versus sustainability, cost versus responsibility. Formula E undermines that narrative. It shows that, under the right conditions, clean technologies can redefine performance itself.

That’s not just good news for racing. It may also be exactly the kind of proof point needed to convince the still-skeptical driver that the future has already arrived.

So if you’ve been on the sidelines of the EV revolution, do me a favor. First, check out a Formula E race. The Shanghai E-Prix is coming up over the fourth of July and there are plenty more races after that. Then go visit your local EV dealer and take one out for a test drive. I bet you’ll be surprised. And while you’re at it, treat yourself to an Impossible Burger too. They taste great and might just save us.

Onward,

Over the past year, Washington has leaned on federal agencies and new spending to support coal and other fossil fuels that can no longer compete on their own economics. At the same time, it has begun paying to halt or unwind major clean energy projects, even when private capital was ready to proceed.

In effect, taxpayers are paying polluters twice. First, we subsidize high‑cost, high‑pollution power plants that markets would otherwise retire. Then we pay again to block or buy out cleaner projects that could replace them at lower long‑term cost.

That is not a market failure. It is a political choice.

The New Coal Protection Program

In pure climate terms, coal remains the dirtiest of the major fuels, emitting far more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than gas, and vastly more than wind or solar. In public health terms, coal plants release particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury—pollution linked to asthma, heart disease, and premature death, especially in nearby communities.

Economics has been pushing coal out for years. The cost of utility‑scale solar and wind has fallen dramatically over the past decade, and, in much of the country, new renewables are now cheaper than new fossil power and often competitive with existing plants. Private capital has responded: renewables and storage dominate new capacity additions, while coal’s share of US electricity generation has dropped into the teens.

In a sane policy framework, the government would be helping that market trend along—managing worker and community transitions, investing in grids and storage, and accelerating the replacement of high‑cost, high‑risk assets. Instead, new federal initiatives are channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into keeping coal plants running longer than markets alone would allow, and into associated coal infrastructure that would otherwise be headed for orderly retirement.

Step back from the political noise and look at the economic logic: we are using public funds to sustain a fuel that is both more expensive and more harmful than the alternatives, even before we count its climate and health costs. That is the opposite of prudent risk management.

Paying Not to Build Clean Energy

The second half of the story is even more perverse.

In March 2026, the federal government agreed to pay approximately $1 billion to TotalEnergies to relinquish two US offshore wind leases. The company has made clear it will redirect that capital into liquefied natural gas and other fossil fuel projects.

Think about what that means in capital‑allocation terms. The state did not merely pause a project. It wrote a very large check to ensure a clean energy project would never be built—and, in the same stroke, helped finance new fossil infrastructure instead.

Nor is this just one bad headline. It reflects a broader pattern: slow‑walking or blocking offshore wind approvals, then compensating developers when projects can no longer advance under the revised rules. The message to investors is clear: when politics change, clean energy projects can be unwound, and fossil fuels will be favored in the settlement.

This is where the “paying polluters twice” dynamic comes into full view. On one side of the ledger, taxpayers are funding the extended life of uncompetitive coal. On the other side, taxpayers are compensating companies to walk away from large‑scale clean energy projects that were poised to move forward. We pay to keep the incumbent alive; we pay again to keep the challenger off the field.

If this pattern were playing out in an emerging market, investors would call it what it is: a politically driven misallocation of capital.

Climate Risk is Already on the Balance Sheet

None of this is happening in a vacuum.

The economic costs of climate change are no longer theoretical. In recent decades, the number and cost of billion‑dollar weather and climate disasters in the United States have risen sharply, with damages now routinely measured in the tens of billions per year and trillions cumulatively. Those costs are showing up in federal and state budgets, in municipal balance sheets, and in household finances.

Insurance markets are sending similar signals. Premiums in high‑risk regions are jumping; in some places, coverage is being withdrawn altogether. Reinsurers are repricing risk in real time. Markets do not argue ideology—they price what they see.

Coal and other high‑emission fuels sit at the center of that risk story. Continuing to subsidize them means shifting more costs forward onto taxpayers, consumers, and future budgets, even as cheaper, lower‑risk alternatives exist. It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of policy working against both economic and environmental self‑interest.

What a Free Market Would Do

Markets are trying to do their job. The deeper irony here is that many of us spent years trying to get markets to incorporate environmental reality. We pushed for carbon pricing, clean energy tax credits, disclosure rules, and risk analysis so that private capital would follow true costs rather than outdated assumptions. To a meaningful extent, that work has paid off. Investors now recognize that renewables and storage are scalable, cost‑competitive, and aligned with long‑term risk reduction. Fossil fuels with high emissions and high regulatory and physical risks are, in many contexts, losing ground on their own merits.

Left to itself, this is what the market would do: expand lower‑cost, lower‑risk energy; shrink higher‑cost, higher‑risk sources; and direct capital toward innovation, resilience, and efficiency.

But policy is no longer just lagging that reality—it is actively fighting it. Federal decisions to subsidize declining coal assets, to slow‑roll clean infrastructure, and to pay developers to abandon wind projects all point in the same direction: distort price signals, protect incumbents, and delay change.

That is not good climate policy. It is not good economic policy. And it is certainly not good capitalism.

What Accountability Looks Like

So what should concerned citizens—especially those who care about markets, fiscal discipline, and public health—do with this information?

First, we need to tell the story plainly. Taxpayers are being asked to fund more pollution, higher long‑term costs, and greater climate and health risks, even when cheaper clean alternatives are available. We are paying polluters twice and calling it energy policy.

Second, we should frame the issue in terms that resonate beyond the climate community. These choices raise energy costs over time, burden local communities with dirtier air, and amplify risks that are already showing up in insurance markets, municipal finances, and federal disaster spending. This is about the affordability and resilience of the real economy.

Third, we should treat this as a question of accountability. When governments override market signals to favor higher‑cost, higher‑pollution outcomes, voters have every right to ask: who benefits, who pays, and why are we subsidizing decline?

The Instigator doesn’t tell readers which candidates to support. But we do encourage you to look closely at the record, not just the rhetoric. When you see policies that pay polluters twice—first to stay, then to keep their cleaner competitors out—you are seeing a choice about what kind of economy, energy system, and climate future we are going to have.

That is a choice worth voting on.

Onward,

AI is already the most rapidly adopted general-purpose technology in history. The data centers are rapidly following suit. Since realistically, usage will not abate anytime any time soon, we can expect the amount of water usage to soar and quickly.

That’s, of course, cause for concern.

For serious people in the tech and NGO community who prioritize making meaningful progress above ideological purity, the important question now isn’t whether to build new data centers. It’s how we should be building them. In some places with extreme water stress or very weak governance or critically important ecosystems, the right answer may be not to build at all. But for most projects that cross the desks of corporate deal teams and NGOs, the more productive question is: “Under what terms do we say yes?”

Water is a good place to start.1 The volumes are big enough to be controversial—especially in places like Arizona or West Texas where even disciplined water use can endanger finite aquifers—but likely can be managed if we are careful and transparent.

On this front, Google made a positive announcement this past week. It pledged to replenish more water than its data centers consume across its portfolio by 2030. To do this, the company says it will avoid water‑intensive cooling in water‑stressed regions, prioritize reclaimed wastewater where possible, fund local water infrastructure, and—crucially—disclose its water use annually at the site level.

Google is not alone in making this kind of commitment. Microsoft and Meta have made similar pledges, and just last week four hyperscalers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta) jointly formed the Data Center Innovation Initiative, a coalition focused on sustainable data center technologies. In other words, Google’s announcement is one in a string of indicators that sustainability performance is becoming a competitive baseline.

That’s good news, but it raises the stakes for scrutiny. And the differentiator will be the credibility of such commitments.

On Disclosures

Google’s announcement made me think of two imperatives we talk about a lot at the Instigator and that apply equally to the tech hyperscalers as to the NGOs trying to keep them in line.

1. Provide / Demand Transparency

Some of Google’s pledge is really about codifying their current practices. But turning these into public, quantified commitments matters. It creates a baseline for peer companies and NGOs. It also creates opportunities for bankers, communities, and policymakers.

The part of it I like best is the commitment to annual, site‑level disclosure of water use. Without that, everything else is essentially marketing. You can’t set standards, hold anyone accountable, or build community trust if nobody knows exactly what is being withdrawn, from where, and under what conditions.

2. Ask / Address the Hard Questions

We, the interested community at large, should not be passive recipients of these commitments.

Google points to 165 stewardship projects in 97 watersheds, expected to replenish roughly 19 billion gallons of water a year by 2030—equivalent to the annual cooling needs of many mid‑sized data centers.

That sounds promising. But “water-positive” is a squishy term. Most replenishment comes through projects like agricultural efficiency, wetland and forest restoration, and urban water upgrades. The benefits are often modeled in a different part of the basin than the facility itself. For example, a data center drawing from a stressed aquifer in Phoenix won’t be meaningfully offset by a wetland restoration 100 miles away. Such details really matter. That’s why people on corporate sustainability teams and at NGOs should treat Google’s pledge as a starting point and then scrutinize the details.

There are equity dimensions to consider too. Data centers are disproportionately sited in communities with less political power, often rural and lower-income. When a large facility draws heavily from a local aquifer or municipal water system, it competes with farmers, households, and small businesses that have no seat at the permitting table. Water-positive accounting that looks good at the portfolio level can mask real harm at the local level. That’s why site-level disclosure isn’t just a technical nicety; it’s a matter of basic fairness.

We should think critically and ask hard questions like: How exactly is “water-positive” defined here? In which watershed? Over what time frame? And who verifies the numbers? The verification gap is big, and regulators and NGOs should figure out how to fill it.

Transparent disclosure requires:

• Site‑level data on withdrawals and discharges

• Clear identification of sources (potable, reclaimed, brackish, etc.)

• A standardized efficiency metric that allows comparisons across facilities

Following these imperatives is not an extra burden; it’s a business process. Data center developers regularly encounter permitting friction and community opposition centered on water and energy. Investors are beginning to press companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for more clarity on these impacts. Firms that can produce credible, consistent water data should be able to get projects approved faster, with fewer surprises and lower political risk. Transparency here is not just virtue signaling. It’s a smarter way to do business.

If you are an executive at a hyperscaler, this is the level of transparency you should insist on from your own teams and suppliers. If you are at a major financial institution, this is also what you should ask for in due diligence and ongoing monitoring. And if you work for a leading NGO, this is the baseline you should expect before treating any “water positive” claim as serious.

Moving from Pilot Pledge to Industry Standard

Google’s move is a useful start. But a single corporate pledge doesn’t solve a systemic problem. If you work in or around this space, you have a role to play in turning this into the new normal.

For hyperscalers:

If you’re at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, or any other company pushing big AI workloads, you should treat “water positive by 2030 with site‑level disclosure and a bias toward non‑potable sources in stressed regions” as a minimum operating standard, not a stretch aspiration.

More specifically:

• Push your organization to publicly commit to at least water‑neutral, ideally water‑positive performance in every water‑stressed basin where you operate.

• Require a clear water strategy—source mix, efficiency, replenishment projects, verification—for every major data center investment, reviewed at the same level as financial and cyber risk.

• Use your buyer power: require contractors and colocation partners to meet the same standards, not just your wholly owned facilities.

If you are a senior executive, you should assume that in a few years, regulators and investors will expect this as a baseline. Getting ahead of that curve is both environmental prudence and competitive advantage.

For NGOs:

This is a huge opportunity to shape what “good” actually means, rather than just reacting to whatever companies announce.

Three priorities stand out:

1. Help define “water positive” in real, science‑based terms, watershed by watershed. That means getting specific about baselines, additionality, and verification.

2. Build practical guidance for communities and policymakers: short, clear checklists that can be used in real permit hearings, not just long reports.

3. Play the role you’re uniquely good at: watchdog or partner.

When I was at The Nature Conservancy, I saw up close how these roles can reinforce each other. Often, activist groups like Greenpeace would campaign against companies or publish tough reports on specific projects, including our’s. In our case, the criticism stung, but it highlighted real shortcomings and pushed us to improve. We all benefit from watchdog NGOs willing to call out weak performance and fuzzy accounting. And we also need pragmatic NGOs willing to sit at the table with companies that are prepared to do better, and help hammer out stronger standards and verification.

If you work at TNC, EDF, or similar organizations, Google’s pledge is a chance to say: “Good. Now here’s how we’re going to measure and improve it, and apply the same bar to everyone else.”

Others have key roles to play too, of course. Communities have significant leverage (and are now doing a good job of using it), financial institutions can push companies hard to do better, and ultimately, we need legislation that makes commitments like this mandatory. There are opportunities for all of us to encourage these different actors to do more.

I hope that Google’s pledge has a ripple effect. But we should all do our part to encourage this by insisting that any company hoping to ride the AI wave earns its place in the watershed—in terms that make sense not only for their shareholders, but for communities and ecosystems too.

Onward,

The river is also the lifeblood of the American West’s two largest reservoirs. Lake Powell is receiving something like 13% of its normal spring runoff this year. That’s the lowest snowmelt inflow on record. Meanwhile, Lake Mead is hovering 20 feet below its shortage trigger. Hydropower from Hoover Dam could be cut by 40% this fall.

And here’s the part that should keep you up at night: water stored in the two reservoirs combined could fall to some 10% of their turn-of-the-century levels by the end of summer.

This is not a drought. It’s a slow-motion collapse of infrastructure right before our eyes.

How we got here: A brief look back

The math never did add up.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922 divided up water rights among seven basin states. But it was negotiated during one of the wettest stretches of the century, and it promised more water than the river actually delivers in an average year.

Then came the 20th century. Dams, cities, agriculture, and population growth on a scale the original negotiators never imagined. Followed by the 21st century with two decades of deepening drought, plus the added heat of climate change, which evaporates water before it even reaches the reservoirs.

More water has been promised to people than ever actually existed. Now the checking account is nearly empty. The Bureau of Reclamation has been pulling emergency levers like releasing water from upstream Flaming Gorge reservoir, slashing deliveries to Arizona and Nevada, and asking Mexico to cut back. But these are patches on a system that needs structural reform, and everyone in the basin knows it.

Everything is politics

Here’s where it gets hard. The current rules governing shortages and reservoir operations expire in 2026, and the seven basin states have been negotiating new operating guidelines for the last two years. They’ve missed deadline after deadline. After the most recent deadline (February 2026) came and went without a deal, the Interior Department essentially said, “Agree on something, or we’ll decide for you.”

Why can’t they agree? Because every state has deeply entrenched water rights, powerful agricultural constituencies, and elected officials who answer to those constituencies.

• Arizona’s governor won’t sign anything that doesn’t put mandatory cuts on Upper Basin states.

• Colorado says the Upper Basin is already constrained by nature—their rivers just don’t fill up the way they used to.

• California’s Imperial Valley has half a million acres of thirsty crops and senior water rights it will defend in court.

No state wants to be the one that gives up water. Nobody wants to be the governor who tells farmers to grow less or cities to use less.

Now add in the current federal posture. The new administration has not exactly prioritized collaborative water governance in the West. Agencies are understaffed, interagency coordination is strained, and the political bandwidth for complex multi-state negotiation is limited. The states are largely left to themselves. . . and they’re not making much progress.

The business case for getting this right

Conserving the Colorado River is much more than an environmental issue.

When you hear about reservoir levels, don’t just think of farms, fish, and wildlife. Think of your data center’s cooling systems. Think of your employees’ homes. Think of the regional economy that makes your business viable.

The tech campuses in Phoenix, the semiconductor fabs coming online in Arizona, the logistics hubs, the tourism economy around the Grand Canyon, and the ski industry all depend on reliable water.

The river is green infrastructure—infrastructure every bit as essential as man-made (or “gray”) infrastructure —and the business community should be paying more attention.

We need to apply the kind of pressure that changes the political calculus. There is a version of this where business leaders—not just environmental advocates—show up and push hard for a real agreement. Where the Chamber of Commerce in Phoenix says we need a deal. Where Arizona’s tech sector tells its politicians that water security is not optional.

I’ve been in rooms where people work through problems like this. It’s hard. People get angry. Old grievances surface. But deals get made, especially once the alternative (chaos) becomes scarier than compromise. We are dangerously close to that point on the Colorado. Here’s what we think pragmatic progress could look like.

1. Face the actual numbers. Every negotiating party should be required to engage with the same set of hydrological projections. Not their own consultants’ models but shared, federally validated data. It’s harder to protect phantom water once you agree it’s not actually there.

2. Pay people to use less. Voluntary water markets work. Arizona and California have used them. When cities and water agencies pay farmers to leave fields fallow for a season, everybody wins: the farmer gets compensated, the reservoir gets a breather. Scaled up with federal support, this is one of the fastest ways to create meaningful reduction without litigation.

3. Go after agriculture seriously and fairly. About 70-80% of Colorado River water goes to agriculture, much of it to water-intensive crops like alfalfa. That’s not a villainous choice—it’s rational under the old economics. But the new economics demand a rethink. Farmers can’t bear this alone. Federal crop transition programs, conservation easements, and financial support for switching to lower-water crops are essential if you want farmers at the table rather than in court.

4. Invest in supply-side solutions. Wastewater recycling alone could save nearly 900,000 acre-feet annually in the basin—enough for close to two million households. Water recycling, stormwater capture, and desalination (especially in coastal California) aren’t silver bullets, but they meaningfully change the math. The private sector can help finance this at scale.

5. Tribal nations need a real seat at the negotiating table. Thirty tribal nations hold water rights in the Colorado River Basin, but their interests have too often been treated as an afterthought. Including them meaningfully—not just as stakeholders to consult, but as parties with legal standing and legitimate claims isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s what a durable agreement will require.

6. Set up a sunset review. Any new post-2026 agreement should include mandatory five-year reviews tied to actual hydrological conditions. If the drought deepens, the agreement adjusts. Static deals written today won’t survive the climate of 2040. Build in flexibility now, before the next crisis forces it.

Reality check

None of this will be easy, and I’m not optimistic that a solution will get resolved cleanly before the new fall deadline that Interior has set for when it will take matters into its own hands. Federal imposition will be messy, litigated, and unpopular. But it may be the only way to force a floor under which the system doesn’t collapse entirely.

The worst outcome here isn’t just empty reservoirs; it’s the cascade: hydropower goes offline, electricity prices spike, water delivery systems fail, agriculture collapses in certain valleys, cities face mandatory restrictions, ecosystems and wildlife suffer, and the legal battles that follow make the last two years of negotiations look like a friendly chat. None of this is inevitable. But all of it is possible if we don’t move faster than we have been.

The good news is that this is a solvable problem. Not without some people getting less than they currently feel entitled to. But the technology, know-how, and financing exist to solve this. Smart people on all sides know what needs to happen. What’s missing is political courage. It’s engagement and pressure from citizens, businesses, and civil society that makes political courage possible.

That’s where instigators come in. Push your elected officials. Pressure your companies. Talk to your neighbors about water use. Support organizations doing the hard work of negotiation and conservation in the basin.

The Colorado River doesn’t care about our deadlines, our politics, or our negotiations. It will keep flowing—or not flowing—based on snowpack and heat and twenty-six years of drought. It’s up to us to do more to save it.

*****

Thanks for reading The Instigator. If you found this useful, please share it with someone who should be paying attention. And if you’re working on Colorado River solutions—water markets, recycling infrastructure, agricultural transition—I’d love to hear from you.

Onward,

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!