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Greening the corporate ladder
'Planet hero' Hunter Lovins swoops into the Marin Green Business Forum

by Samantha Campos

Born into an activist family, Hunter Lovins spent a lot of time in the '60s raising a fuss—presumably with picket signs and peace symbols—until she realized the "traditional activist approach" just wasn't going to work. Since then, Lovins has built a bridge between big business and environmentalism, promoting sustainability while consulting with oil and utility companies—and some of the largest corporations in the world—with her nonprofit group, Natural Capitalism, Inc. Now an expert in the field, she's co-authored nine books, spoken before the U.S. Congress, the World Economic Forum and World Summit on Sustainable Development, and was named millennium "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine in 2000. Lovins is the keynote speaker at the third annual Marin Green Business Forum in Mill Valley; we spoke with her this week about the greening of Wal-Mart, the evils of Whole Foods, and a little virtual place called "Hopenhagen."

Why do big businesses often say they're interested in "going green" and then oppose legislation that supports climate change efforts?

Often, sustainability initiatives start in the marketing department. They think it's a good PR move—they don't see it as core to their business. The work that we're trying to do is to get businesses to see sustainability as essential to their corporate strategy, and as such that the traditional knee-jerk business reaction of oh, anything environmental must be bad is actually damaging to their corporate strategy, to their PR, to how people view them in the world. We've a ways to go yet.

What more can be done to reach corporate America?

What you purchase on a daily basis, it really does make a difference. Anytime you buy something ask the vendor, "Was this sustainably made?" The vendor's likely to say, "I have no earthly idea what you're talking about."

I get that all the time.

But if enough people ask that, the vendor will start to pay attention. And [especially if] you communicate to all of your friends, family, neighbors, associates what it is you're doing and why you're doing it. Because what one individual does in silence doesn't make that much of a difference—but what groups of individuals do very noisily will absolutely change the planet. It's hard to believe that it can add up and yet if you look at the socially responsible investment movement—the Carbon Disclosure Project [CDP] is an effort by, literally, a group of kids. Young people out of the UK a few years back said, "We're going to ask the biggest companies on earth—the FT 500—what their carbon footprint is." And for the first couple years, everybody ignored them. About three years ago, 66 percent of the biggest companies on earth reported through CDP their carbon footprint.

Why the change of face?

For one thing, CDP now represents institutional investors with $55 trillion in assets who want to know what a company's carbon footprint is. Initially churches started to have a negative screen—they didn't want to put money into arms manufacturers and cigarettes and such. Then it grew to what it is now—a huge movement of socially responsible funds, many of which have positive screens. They go looking for good companies, and it has dramatically changed the whole face of investing and enabled CDP to get all of these institutional investors who now care about carbon footprints.

Can you give an example of a large company that is actively changing the way it does business?

Last year Wal-Mart hired CDP to go to China to ask their suppliers about their carbon footprint. This is something no government could do. Between Wal-Mart and the Carbon Disclosure Project, Chinese companies are now having to reveal—which means they have to assess, they have to understand—what the carbon footprint is, which is a very strong signal to all these companies. And indeed, last October Wal-Mart went to China, called their thousand largest Chinese suppliers together and said, Here are the standards by which we are going to decide whether or not to buy from you. You've got to start improving your energy efficiency, you've got to clean up your labor practices. The whole set of screens, I can tell you, is scaring the hell out of suppliers to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has 60,000 to 90,000 suppliers around the world. Now, is Wal-Mart green? Hell, no! But is Wal-Mart moving the needle a heck of a lot more than I could? Absolutely.

What are the green efforts in America different from European countries?

You walk into the equivalent of a 7-Eleven just off the Champs-Elysees in Paris and half the products are proudly badged as "organic." It is considered normal in the UK to take your little-wheeled shopping cart and walk down the street to your local green grocer and local butcher and buy stuff that's been produced within 100 miles, that's badged as such, and then wheel your little cart home. Americans think nothing of jumping in their SUV and driving 20 miles to a supermarket, where they have no idea where the products came from. Now, companies like Whole Foods—although rightly it's sometimes called "Whole Paycheck"— are trying to badge themselves as selling to the "aware" shopper. But at least they are making an effort to provide a somewhat more consciously chosen product. I was just on the phone yesterday with some folks who're going to do an online green Costco or Sam's Club—a membership program whereby you can order green products which will be shipped to your house. And because it's a buyer's club, you'll get them at a discount, which will bring their price down to the equivalent to what you'd buy non-sustainable goods at. At that point, there ceases to be a reason to buy anything unsustainable. And that's where we want to get to.

What do you think is the government's role in all this?

We practice a kind of capitalism that Randy Hayes [Mill Valley resident, founder of the Rainforest Action Network] calls "cheater economics," whereby we subsidize unsustainable behavior, which makes a certain set of products look cheaper than they really are. That's just bad capitalism. We ought to have full-cost accounting. Right now the cost to your lungs, to unborn children, to green-and-growing things around the planet aren't counted in the purchase price of cheap goods. If the full cost of doing business were obvious in a product, then consumers would be able to make much more honest decisions, it would be much easier to recognize something that was grown locally, grown organically, because the price would be cheaper, because you and I and the taxpayer would no longer be subsidizing the unsustainable practices that have allowed unsustainable products to look so cheap.

Green issues seem to illicit a lot of eye-rolling from the far right. Why is that?

Environmentalists have made a serious mistake of casting this as a moral message, rather than— how is it that we achieve what it is that people want? Which is a high-quality life, prosperity and greater security. The corporatists have done a very good job of badging their product in convincing people that if you buy their product, you will be happier, you will find meaning in your life and it will convey stature and well-being, you will look younger, sexier...The advertising industry is arguably the most effective educational institution on the planet. So some of us have started working with the ad industry in helping them to help companies badge themselves as green in authentic ways.

What sort of work are you doing along those lines?

I'm working with Ogilvy & Mather [international advertising, marketing and public relations agency] that has a little group called OgilvyEarth that is running a campaign on behalf of the United Nations called "Hopenhagen." It's part of a global social media campaign to call on national delegates to go to Copenhagen and push for something real in climate protection. And Ogilvy has invited their corporate clients to be a part of this and many of them are. There are a number of [corporations that have] just called on Congress to pass meaningful climate protection legislation. I've got a paper out called "The Economic Case for Climate Protection" that [explains] why protecting the climate by encouraging energy efficiency/renewable energy is the route to prosperity. Andrew Winston has a new book out called Green Recovery. And all of this is arguing the way out of the recession is dramatic increases in the productivity with which we use all resources.

So going green will also bring a gusher of greenbacks to our economy...

It's also the way to enhance security. This country has been borrowing something like $2 billion a day to buy imported oil from folks in the Middle East who don't like us. As Jim Woolsey [ex-CIA director] put it, we're funding both sides of the war on terror. The next wave of revolution is clearly going to be the green technologies. Who will rule the world? It will be the countries that innovate, that drive this green technology revolution—per dollar invested, you will get 10 times the number of jobs from investing in energy efficiency and renewables than you get investing in building coal or nuclear plants. The sunset industries are not terribly labor intensive; they're very capital intensive. And as a result, we've been locking money up into these industries in ways that have been damaging prosperity around the planet. If what we want are jobs—and we are now in a world in which there are a billion people who want jobs and don't have them. We do not need to be investing in these old technologies—the technologies of the last century: We want to be investing in the technologies of the future—oh, and by the way, doing that solves the climate problem.

Talk carbon footprints with Samantha at scampos@pacificsun.com.