Saving the Planet: By Any Means Necessary
By Peter Lupoff, Skytop Contributor / August 31st, 2022
Peter is CEO of Net Impact, a 160,000+ member organization with a mission to inspire, equip and activate emerging leaders to build a more just and sustainable world.
He is the Founder and Principal of Lupoff/Stevens Family Office, the holding company of the various activities, including investments, social and environmental programmatic activations, academic work, advisory and projects, of Peter M. Lupoff, his partner, Kelly and son, Max.
Lupoff/Stevens Family Office is committed to fomenting a just and sustainable planet, seeking acceptable financial returns alongside demonstrable social/environmental. Our strategy is to specifically impact benefits to people and the planet from our 100% Impact/Responsible Investment Portfolio. In addition, our investment mandate and policy objectives support social and climate equity and justice.
Peter previously founded Tiburon Capital Management, running Tiburon as CIO until acquired by a consulting firm (remaining on as CIO of the acquirer). Peter is President of Clean Power for Humanity, bringing green electrification projects to rural Asian villages and schools, and is a judge/mentor with Defy Ventures, training the previously incarcerated.
Since 2016, Peter has taught Responsible Investing classes as Special Lecturer at Yale School of Management and Fordham University, where he was Entrepreneur-in-Residence 2018-19, and remains a Gabelli Fellow.
While there are myriad problems to solve in order to achieve the goal of a more just and sustainable world, climate change is an existential threat – one that, pretty much, renders all others moot if we cannot support life on Earth. Governments and business are the most powerful potential drivers of change and should do all they can do to save all we can save. If institutions do not, the people will take up the slack and act, and there will be aggression and conflict prior to wins, losses or draws for people and the planet.
The status quo for business and policymakers is at risk at a pace that is hastening. The growing realization (by all people) that those in power are squandering an opportunity to save the planet is quickening a generation to action, ultimately all people, towards stepping in and correcting the course.
Incremental vs Exponential Outcomes
The timelines promised by industry incumbents, such as ‘carbon negative by 2040’ are not enough. Talk and propaganda are not enough. Anand Ghirdhadaras 2018 book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, gave us the talking points we’d all felt or muttered to ourselves, watching older white men fly into Davos to pontificate about global solutions to the world’s wicked problems.
This zeitgeist manifested in more than 100,000 people marching in protest at COP 26 in Glasgow last fall of 2021. In October 2021, Shells’ CEO’s TedTalk was shut down by activists in the room who grilled him to the cheers of an audience who’d gathered to hear his anticipated uninterrupted presentation.
Later that same month, McKinsey employees penned a letter to management accosting them for the firm’s work with the world’s top polluters.
In November 2021 the communications firm, Edelman, got a similar letter signed by myriad talent personalities urging them to drop fossil fuel clients. In January 2022, over 450 scientists signed a letter in support, calling on all public relations and advertising agencies to drop fossil fuel clients.
There is a palpable change afoot. People, particularly younger people, are dissatisfied with the efforts of big business and lawmakers. They are increasingly irritated by those with power and capital who control the narrative in order to maintain the status quo, committing to incremental transition when we are in desperate need for exponential outcomes.
This isn’t ‘wokeness’. It’s about planetary survival. Disagree with this assessment or not, it does not change the growing antipathy of all people toward those in positions of power who profess to have our best interests at heart.
“The Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” says Audre Lorde
The climate movement has always advocated for peaceful protest and non-violent pressure to effect change. Note that for the 100,000 that took to the streets in Glasgow during COP 26 there were just five arrests. But we as people are increasingly anxious about the existential threat of climate change. ‘Climate Anxiety’ has entered the popular lexicon as a generational malady. Parties with vested interests push or pay others to shape and promote a narrative that ‘it’s already too late.’ This ‘doomism’ is the next iteration of the now archaic climate change denial.
But how long do people, particularly nexgen, live with this anxiety, protesting peacefully, before anxiety gives way to anger and outspokenness, to more forceful action, driven by a biological (and/or moral) imperative to protect loved ones, children, and future generations?
If business and government choose not to move quick enough and make tangible climate gains to the satisfaction of all people, it is likely that targeted property destruction and violence are a logical coming tool in the tool kit, as Climate Anxiety turns to anger, and anger leads to those actions necessary to slow greenhouse gasses and save all we can save.
This sounds alarmist, yes, I get that. Yet, it doesn’t make this false.
We have not seen a moment like this before: risks to all people and existence, driven by our own hand. We are the first generation living that may knowingly damn all future people. What should all people do when faced with forces unwilling to effect change for the well-being of all, in the service of gradual change for the benefit of an entitled few today, borrowing forward to the detriment of future generations?
All Plausible Outcomes Add Up to 100%
How do we, the people of this world, choose to influence outcomes when those in power, who’s institutions wield the largest impact, lack humanity, the moral commitment, and have powerful incentives to rationalize delay? What are the instruments any of us have in order to effect change? If it’s a voice, the pen, a brick, a torch, at some point we will reach for what we have. If we can foresee this plausible outcome, how might we shape it to be as peaceful as possible while moving with alacrity toward meaningful change?
I think about this with a dispassion that I worked hard to cultivate as an investment fund manager for many years.
I would challenge my team to consider all the plausible outcomes related to prospective investment ideas. Routinely younger analysts would harbor very natural human biases around their ‘hoped for’ outcome, outsizing this possibility to justify all the work done to get to the ‘buy’ recommendation. In probability, all outcomes can only add up to 100%, it’s just math.
When we focus on the thrown away 5% downside probable outcome, giving it more light and air and discussion, my teams frequently and considerably upped the percentage probability. ‘Will they miss an interest payment?’ ‘What if their new product is delayed?’ ‘What if they lose that lawsuit?’
Considering businesses and lawmakers’ modest efforts related to the climate crisis, how plausible is it that we see nexgen (and others, all people) come to insist on the agency they’ve increasingly realized is their right and relate it to the climate crisis?
When met with ongoing incrementalism, how likely is it that people choose to damage the plant, property and equipment of those harming the planet and increasing existential threat for all inhabitants? 10%? 25% More?
Hollow Arguments Portent an End to a Stultified Status Quo
The Supreme Court has recently ruled to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s oversight powers over factory greenhouse gas emissions. This foolish legal gamesmanship strips powers from a sovereign to assure protection of people for whatever BS reasons jurists might contrive and cite precedence in support. Afterall, it contravenes a for-profit business’ ability to exploit unbridled profiteering, regardless of consequences for people and planet.
The Supreme Court and some lawmakers are so determined to assure ‘free markets’ that ideology trumps morality. Some people actively fall in line with a Right versus Left coding on this, ignoring Right versus Wrong.
This eventually will ring hollow and then watch out.
The laborious way those systems and their supporters contrive coherence to the logic/morality of decisions, whether lawmakers, judges, business leadership, all, in the name of reified ideology, has afforded them the short-term cover that perpetuates incremental control and profit as we careen toward climate disaster.
However cleverly worded by shills in social media, people know the visceral right versus wrong and will wade in to build alliances (regardless of the archaic selling by stooges of right versus left) to effect change, as survival will require it.
Where will you, your employer, institutions be and what stories about this moment would you be proud to tell your grandchildren?
“Almost everything that is great has been done by youth”, says Benjamin Disraeli
We are in a very fraught and fragile time, but businesses are run by people with families and share these anxieties and anger. If there is hope, it is in the wisdom of all people, in particular a next generation that inherits a world with problems not of their creation, who can and will mobilize to save all that we can save.
Hopefully we are spawning a next generation of better stewards in business and government, caretakers for all future generations. Youth will help out.
As my then 13-year-old son told me a few years back, when discussing ‘fixing the world’, ‘Dad, your job is to just get out of the way.’
Perhaps so.