Back in America

Hello Bruno Sarda, welcome to Back in America. Could you please introduce yourself? Sure, well thanks for having me Bruno Sarda. Long time in the US and spent the last 10 plus years now in the world of social and environmental responsibility. Okay, so you are French American, is that right? Yes. Okay, well Bruno our planet is sick, we all know it and we do nothing. Are we just going to watch our world fall apart? Hopefully not. You know I think we've known the problems we have for a long time. You know certainly science has been at this for decades, governments have known this for decades, large companies have known this for decades. We are now seeing a significant change in attitude that will be followed hopefully by some more action, whether it's enough action fast enough is going to be part of our conversation I'm sure. But I think there's a few things that have changed, including the fact that the world's basically capital markets and finance recognize that there is now is very systemic existential risk to future profitability and even viability of many systems if unaddressed.

You know sustainability, the basic definition is the ability to sustain is can we keep doing what we're doing forever? You know if you cut trees faster than they grow at some point you run out. You know if we spend money faster than we make it, at some point we run out. If we pull fish out of the sea faster than they could reproduce, at some point we run out. So this idea of can we keep doing things the same way without at some point running into either a wall or a precipice is I think the realization that certainly governments but especially the private sector, capital markets and frankly corporations are realizing that their business models are now threatened. Not by this abstract global concern but by very real existential threats to their ability to continue succeeding in their business models. Well I want to come back to that because you did spend quite a lot of time with large organization. You've been the director of sustainability for many large companies including Energy, Dell, Charles Swab. You've been named one of the most influential sustainability voices in America by the Guardian and in 2017 you were chosen by environmental leader as one of the top 50 sustainability leaders in the US. Yet after more than a decade of talk about sustainability, carbon emission is nowhere near what we need to curb climate change. Was it all greenwashing? There's certainly been a lot of greenwashing. There's also been a lot of what I would call both an ambition gap and an action gap. The ambition gap is what is the difference between the stated ambition and the needed ambition.

And I think that gap is closing rapidly. You see now the number of countries, cities, states and frankly large organizations that are now making commitments to net zero emissions by 2050. So that's what we know needs to happen. Net zero by 2050 is what the science tells us we need to do. So the ambition gap is closing. The promise is that the action needs to follow because there are plenty of examples of organization having made firm commitments and then not following through. About 10 years ago a lot of companies made some very significant commitments for example to halt deforestation especially from the use of things like palm oil. It's called the New York Declaration on Forests and 10 years later 2020 was the key milestone. Almost all of them not only failed to meet but failed to even get close. Do you have any examples here? Any names? I can't think of a single one just off the top of my head to specifically point out but it was the vast majority of the organizations that made that commitment. So there was a lot to learn in terms of what happened. Did they not mean it? Did they not mobilize the right resources to follow through on the commitment? Did they not track the right progress?

Was there leakage in the system? Which for sure there is also some in terms of illegal deforestation, those kinds of things. But I think most organizations are not in the business of trying to lie to the public about their environmental commitments but most organizations also fail to match the level of commitment to the level of resource mobilization and capital deployment necessary to actually meet the stated ambitions. So that's really now we talk about this decade as the decade of action is that words are no longer enough. The only things we are going to measure is what are you doing at what scale and what are you measuring and how can we trust what is being measured relative to what we can believe. Give me some concrete examples of things you see happening in the corporate world that make you hope. I mean, companies have been good at doing the things that are not very disruptive to their business model. For example, renewable energy. You know, a lot of the big tech companies, you know, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dell, Intel, you know, a lot of the big users of electricity have done a great job of investing in transforming, you know, making commitments to 100% renewable energy. In fact, now you have, you know, the number of companies that have committed to 100% renewable energy.

This group called the RE100 represents more energy demand than all of the state's renewable energy portfolio standards combined. So it's, you know, well in excess of 200 terawatt hours of power a year. So that's a very significant commitment. And these companies have been deploying resources to actually purchase actually most of the most exciting renewable energy projects that have been happening have been led by corporations much more than governments. Having said that, for most of these companies, all that means is they're just buying electricity from somebody else, you know, to power their data centers, to power their operations. And in many cases, they're saving money doing it. You know, the early days, for example, Google was a very early player. So was Microsoft. At the time, they were paying a premium. So that was encouraging because they knew that that was needed to send strong market signals. But now most most companies that go into renewable energy purchase contracts are actually saving money doing that. So it's encouraging that actually the scale of adoption of renewable energy is growing rapidly.

But it's also, you know, important to be objective that for these companies, it doesn't necessarily mean they're making some very fundamental difference to their business model. Where you see more encouraging signs is when companies are truly willing to challenge their own kind of core operations. When you look at some of what Unilever did in farming practices and packaging practices and distribution practices, even the whole articulation of building, you know, what they call their sustainable brands was very central to their core business as a consumer packaged goods company. You see companies like Interface in the industrial carpets or companies like that that are fundamentally rethinking, reinventing, redesigning their core business processes, their core products, sometimes even their core markets. You know, the case of in the case of Interface, for example, they went from a very carbon intensive and waste heavy product. Right. So it was very energy intensive and carbon intensive to produce it. And then a product that would basically clog up landfills to basically a net zero footprint, actually carbon negative. Where now they use materials that actually are they absorb more carbon than they emit through their lifecycle.

And they completely reinvented the business model. Actually, Interface basically invented the carpet tile so that when they did commercial installs, they could basically swap out the carpet tile. So they kind of completely closed the loop so they could reuse remake. So it's almost like a zero waste model. So zero waste on the outside and zero carbon on the on the front end. So that's that's a great example of a company that really looked at, you know, how they impacted the world and made some very real changes. And then their competitors followed. You see some of the other big carpeting companies, Mosaic and others, ended up following suit.

And that's the other part that can be exciting is when there's a bit of a race to the top as opposed to kind of a race to the bottom when it comes to. You know, race to the bottom would be kind of what is the least cost compliance. And then the race to the top is how can we outcompete each other in creating customer demand, creating innovative new products to meet customer demand in some way. Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned Unilever also a few weeks ago. I was speaking with Navy Raju, who is an expert in frugal economy and circular economy. And he was also mentioning how Unilever has just released in the public domain their IP about I think it was a production of some kind of product. What do you think of people that prone circular economy or frugal economy, as they like to call it? Is that feasible in a in a capitalistic environment like the one we have in the U.S.?

I mean, it's certainly feasible. It's not compatible with certain business models. So we as consumers, you know, and, you know, we've known for years the, you know, reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycle is the third. And, you know, and these are the right order, right? Reduce is try to use less stuff. Reuse is, you know, if you lose something, don't just throw it away when you're done with it. Can you make something other with it? Can you keep it? And then the recycle is if you can't, then try to put it back in the chain. So the recycle is, of course, this idea of circularity. The frugal is more of this idea of reduce and to some extent reuse. So these are not new concepts. I think as consumers, it's become easier for us to to do that.

And there's there's new interesting models that haven't really scaled yet, partly because of the pandemic. I don't know if you've ever seen this this model called Loop, which was actually pioneered by TerraCycle. That's just down the down the road for us in New Jersey. But working with a lot of large brands where you could basically order anything from your shampoo to your Haagen-Dazs ice cream to all kinds of products, your Tide detergent in actually a reusable container. So it's basically a subscription model where you buy the container. But then basically there's a special model through e-commerce where they basically refill it. So you just use the product, but the container, the packaging stays with you. Do you use that yourself? You know, they still kind of had it as a pilot stage and it hasn't it hasn't rolled out at scale yet.

I always try to find whether it's if you take out in a restaurant, it's like, don't give me a bunch of packaging. Just let me bring my own container. Let me bring my own bowl or something. You know, sometimes regulations get in the way of that. So the question is in this kind of conspicuous consumption model, can companies do OK in this idea of the frugal or circular economy? You know, you see brands like Patagonia, even like Levi's, for example, in apparel have really tried to make that work by saying, you know, we'll make things that are better, more durable and more expensive. So we don't need to sell you something as often. And they will even fix your product for free. Sure. And you see that you see that now in some European countries, actually, this whole concept of the right to repair or even to some extent the obligation to repair.

I mean, we all know, you know, if our vacuum cleaner or microwave oven breaks, it's cheaper to replace it than to repair it. And I think this idea of build for build for recycling or build for repair was a big focus when I was at Dell, for example. We worked very closely with recyclers to understand the economics of repair and recycling, because even though many things are recyclable, many things are not recycled because nobody can make money doing so. And, you know, for example, on a computer, if it's going to take 45 minutes of skilled labor to take a computer apart, the economics don't work. If it can take five minutes of low skilled labor to take a computer apart, then, you know, the cost you've spent on labor is small enough that you can make money from the parts that you've pulled out. So we would bring recyclers into the design room to help us understand, you know, what does it take to make a product that can be disassembled rapidly by a relatively low skilled employee so as to bring the economics in place. So a lot of people have been thinking about this. I think the circular model can work, but it has to it has to also take into account equity and, you know, this idea of circular procurement.

You have to really rethink your entire supply chain model when you really approach circularity, not just the post consumption, but really the pre consumption. It has to it has to truly be designed as a loop. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, I mean, you mentioned two companies, Levi and Pentagonia. But, you know, we live in a society where citizens are consumer, where consuming is the only way to grow. How can we actually switch to a better model for the planet? I mean, does that mean the end of capitalism? I feel that in this country, in the U.S., when you say the end of capitalism, you just said a swear word. Right. It's not something people want to hear.

I mean, I think what capitalism has become is definitely a problem. This this forever growth mentality, this actually exponential growth mentality that most stock valuations down in the market stock market. Over 80 percent of the value of most securities is actually predicated on future earnings, not current things. You know, some of the companies that are now turning out huge profits, you know, 10, 15 billion dollars a quarter. If they said, you know, like we've won capitalism, like we were doing so well, we're going to do that forever. Like we will not grow our earnings. We're just going to deliver this level of profitability forever. Like their stock would go into a tailspin. The idea that they would stop growing is today considered unacceptable.

Now, that in itself isn't necessarily what capitalism requires. Capitalism talks about, you know, how do you align with society's growth pattern in terms of providing employment for future generations? You know, we've gone from about, you know, a billion people to about seven billion people in just one century. You know, we've been around for dozens of centuries, but just in the last one, you know, we've we've grown our population exponentially. We've grown jobs exponentially. We've grown production consumption exponentially. You know, one of the one of the hardest challenges of the work and sustainability is how do you decouple this idea of financial growth with consumption and resource use? Can you, you know, can you decouple? In some cases, maybe it's possible. In many cases, at some point it's not. So we need to really rethink, you know, protein is a good example.

You know, the amount of resource it takes to produce, for example, one pound of beef or a calorie equivalent of beef is about 18 times what it takes to produce a calorie equivalent of plants. So in terms of land use, in terms of water, in terms of carbon. And so, you know, we have to look at how do we how do we make what we make? How do we consume what we make? And what do we need to change at the right scale to ensure not just continuity, but a certain, again, equity and ultimately a certain amount of resiliency? And do you think we are heading in the right direction? What do you think, Bruno? I mean, I think we're improving every day.

We're not improving nearly fast enough or big enough. I think right now there's still a certain amount of complacency from on the part of most businesses that, you know, they're doing better and they feel good about doing better. But better in most cases is nowhere near good enough. You know, there's some realization now, I think, on the greenhouse gas front, right? So on the climate impact front that you see again, all these zero carbon commitments, these science based targets where businesses have agreed to align their ambition with what science demands. So it's no longer saying, well, here's what we can do, but rather starting from here's what we need to do. So I think on greenhouse gas emissions, there's there's progress on almost everything else. There isn't, whether it's water, whether it's forest products, whether it's extraction of all sorts, whether it's on plastics.

It's still not informed by what needs to happen and much more informed by what companies feel they can do without incurring, you know, significant disruption or cost to their business model. So, you know, at some point, I think we're headed for crisis. We've seen this in pandemic, you know, all the things we didn't do to prepare, you know, you have to spend trillions of dollars after as opposed to maybe billions of dollars before. You know, the old saying, right, a pound of what is it, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. I think we're going to keep learning that lesson over and over in environmental degradation. I think we're going to see a lot of people suffer from displacement from things like sea level rise. I think we're going to see a lot of coastal communities and poor countries very significantly impacted by collapsing fisheries. I think we're going to see lots of communities impacted by changing nature of agriculture.

You know, even now we see it that the changing climate will move the optimal growing patterns of certain crops by hundreds of miles north. You know, in Bordeaux, they talk about maybe the good wines of the future will be grown in Scotland. And when you look at coffee, when you look at potatoes, you know, I talked to companies that buy enormous amounts of potatoes. They say, you know, 10, 15 years from now, the key areas of the world where they want to grow and buy their potatoes may not be the ones where they do now. So what does that mean for those communities now that, you know, have such a reliance on those key crops? So I think I think we're going to see a lot of disruption and I think we're going to see, as has often happened in history, the most vulnerable people suffer the most. And talking about climate change is political, yet its impact, as we just saw, affect people on both sides of the aisles. What will it take to get everybody on board?

I mean, we saw how divided this country is after, you know, four years of Trump. We see that Biden is, you know, raising climate change as, you know, sort of is a platform message. And yet we know that a lot of people are not on board with that and see that as really a political statement. You were, I read an article where you said, we know what to do. We just need a leader. Do we have that leader? Is Biden that leader? Can the US be trusted? Lots of questions in there.

I mean, it's a shame that this ever became a political issue that happened for two main reasons. One is because the, frankly, the fossil fuel industry, especially the oil and gas industry, you know, used their various large amounts of money to buy themselves political air cover decades ago to make sure that at least one side of the political aisle was going to have their back. And, you know, there's plenty of evidence that they, you know, back going back to the 1970s, they already knew what climate change was going to be and that their product and the consumption of their product was going to be a huge contributor. So, you know, there's a good documentary called Merchants of Doubt that I would recommend that explains actually how different industries over time from tobacco to oil and others have used very similar techniques to create political air cover for inaction, including by this idea of seeding doubt. The other thing that's very unfortunate, frankly, is how Al Gore tried to become the poster child for climate change right around the time when he had lost a very contentious election. And, you know, this period that started about 20 years ago that really started sowing the division between the political parties that it became that if you supported climate change, you supported Al Gore and then if you didn't, you didn't. So I think that was extremely unfortunate because it politicized it in a way that it didn't need to be.

And I think, you know, Al Gore really meant a lot of the things he was trying to do at the time. But in hindsight, having a very partisan political leader try to be the strongest advocate for that topic was not useful to the cause. I think what happens now, my hope and what I'm seeing, certainly I mentioned it at the beginning of our conversation, is that there's a significant mobilization on the part of money, capital markets, you know, the entire financial system. I mean, it's not that whether or not they believe in climate change, you know, it's just like you don't believe in cancer or like climate change is what it is. You know, I don't care what you believe. It is a fact. It is an ailment of our planet and it needs attention. But because it is actually significantly risky to financial flows, to financial returns, to corporate stability, that those who will support political inaction are fewer and fewer. And to some extent, even the oil and gas companies that are, you know, owned by these large financial giants like BlackRock and Vanguard and others, you know, these companies are now losing patient with the oil and gas majors who will not, you know, make transition plans. And in fact, you're seeing this just in the last few weeks with shareholder votes, you know, compelling these companies, so their owners, their shareholders telling them you will basically figure out and publish a transition pathway to net zero.

So I think, you know, climate change is going to continue to be, I think, for some in the political arena, a wedge issue. But for the most part, I think the political support for or at least the financial support for these politicians is going to quickly evaporate. And at some point, this will no longer be as wedge issue, but that doesn't mean they will do something meaningful either. So that goes to your last question. Can the U.S. be trusted? At this point, if I were any other country, I would, you know, I would be very wary that whatever Biden says or Biden does now may change next time he does something. Or if he commits to Paris, but then, you know, the Senate never ratifies any treaty or doesn't appropriate funds to, you know, to fund the work that the U.S. is committed to, the U.S. political system is in that way very, very broken. Hmm. We're getting at the end of the interview, and I have two questions for you. Are you still a teacher? I am a professor.

So you see a lot of young people, and I know that for many of them, the idea of having kids, children is almost unethical. What do you say to that? You know, I don't know that they necessarily come to me for advice on that topic. I tend to reject on the pure kind of moral basis those who say that the basically population is our biggest problem. We have plenty, plenty of resources to for everybody in this planet to live well and abundantly in ways that are in harmony with nature. That is not how we do it today. But our problem is that it's not that this planet's carrying capacity is only whatever number of billion people and is a smaller amount than what we have today. The problem we have is how we exist on this planet as a people, regardless of how many of us.

And in fact, you see all the data that the top 1% of the world's population accounts for 30, 40% of the impact. Actually, the bottom 80% of the world's population has a tiny, tiny impact on the earth, both in terms of resource use and impact on climate change. So it's not about the number of people. It's about how we exist on this planet. So, you know, certainly I don't think anybody should feel compelled to procreate, you know, for the good of society, as maybe they were once told. But to not necessarily also guilt themselves into thinking that bringing another human being into the world is somehow unethical or detrimental, because that's I think a false premise for me. Thank you. Thank you. And finally, what is America to you? America has plenty of things to me. You know, it's my home. It's where I've chosen to live for the last 30 plus years. It's actually, you know, even though I was born and raised in France, my mother, originally actually her mother was a longtime American, but hardly spent any of her life living in the US.

But I have ancestry going back to the 1600s and in the US, early settlers to to Virginia. So I have part of me, it feels like I've been here a long time and then part of it feels like I just got here. You know, I love this country for many things, and there's plenty of things in this country that I that I would like to see different. And it's such as, you know, I'm I could never get used to some of the things that growing up in a different part of the world, you just can't get to. I think the gun culture for sure for me is is one that I absolutely cannot get used to. And that for all, again, the evidence, I'm very much about facts and evidence that that gun control works everywhere. It's been tried. It works and it leads to less violence both in the streets and in the home. And that why some people just would hang on to a few sentences written by a handful of guys, you know, 250 years ago as the only premise for why they should now, you know, be allowed to carry weapons of war around in their neighborhoods.

Just like I can't understand that. And I think there's a tremendous amount of generosity and beauty of spirit in the American people. But there's also at times a I think a certain myopia and lack of awareness and understanding. It's sad that, you know, less than 10 percent of the population of this country even has a passport. I'd love, you know, more people to kind of explore the world and value other cultures. And that's part of what we do is we try to bring kind of what we know from our cultures and embrace all of what America gives us and try to give something back from what we've seen along our travels. Good. Excellent. Bruno Sala. Thank you so much. Thank you, Stan.