Paul Hawken present his new book on The Rich Roll Podcast
Regeneration
How to END The Climate Crisis in One Generation
A few days ago, Paul Hawken presented his new book:
After the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Drawdown Paul is back with a new book that together with a corresponding nonprofit by the same name — regeneration.org — aims to guide and inspire the climate movement.
I talked in the past about Drawdown in this article:
Here I focus on the Podcast episode, trying to get some of the key points that were discusses. For who want to dedicate a couple of hours to understand more and take action, I highly suggest to see the full episode here:
Introduction of the new book
The World is going into crisis around climate, more rapidly than was expected, At the same time even though a majority of the people are empathetic, sympathetic, understand the basic cause and effects, they are not doing anything, they are unengaged.
Regeneration was really about looking at that, not blaming people for being disengaged, but try to understand why they are not, and what would positively engage people.
What would open up humanity to the idea of working together?
The Lack of Connectivity
The cause of global warming is a massive disconnection between each other, among people, between human beings in Nature and Nature itself. Regenerating and reversing the climate crisis is absolutely about reconnecting those broken strands.
How can we live more symbiotically on the planet?
Developing a Systemic View
Between the individual and meta institutions and global institutions is something else called agency.
There is no such thing as an individual. That’s a delusion we wake up with in the morning. Every person has agency.
It’s their family, their friends, their community, neighborhood, schools, their city, the company, colleagues, the list goes on and on and on. We are part of networks, and that is where we have influence and where we can make a difference.
The solution is everywhere, is ubiquitous, it’s local, regional, it’s where agency exists, and that is everywhere on hearth, every culture, society. That’s the good news, that is we can solve this, we really can. But we can’t solve it if we think someone is going to resolve it for us.
Every institution we have come to know and we have created so far, has been Extractive, has been taking life. And when you take life, that’s Degeneration. Regeneration is not about blaming or demonizing those institutions or those economic sectors. But that road of extraction and degeneration doesn’t go much further.
What we are doing now is stealing the future. It used to be from our children, right now is from ourselves practically.
Can we stop and go the other way? Can we not regenerate the world and have a GDP and an economy and jobs rather than degenerate it? And the fact is that We Can.
What does a Regenerative System Look Like?
Economic systems arise, and then we kind of identify them later. I don’t know what a regenerative economic system will be called. I don’t think it’ll be termed capitalistic.
If we want to turn the death of the earth into capital, we’re doing a good job. But then what are you going to do with that capital? What meaning does money have if it’s an unlivable planet?
Regeneration is about ensuring the resilience and the longevity of the planet and our relationship with it, and of our supply chains. It is the right thing to do, but is actually also very practical.
The climate movement will be the biggest in the history of humanity, but because of weather, not because there is a charismatic leader. The question is how do we work together. We need each other.
State of the Union with the State of Earth’s Climate
The sixth assessment from the intergovernmental panel on climate change came out today and it said for the first time unequivocally, global climate change that we are witnessing is caused by human beings.
The science has changed, so now we know that as soon as we stop increasing greenhouse gases, that is net zero emissions, warming will level off right away. It used to be that up until this assessment, we were baking in increasing global warming for decades if not centuries. This change is providing a substantial incentive for countries and companies and people, to accelerate that move towards net zero emissions.
The bad news anyway, is that there are irreversible changes now in effect, that can’t be reversed and one of them is melting of ice; one of them is sea level rise. Low lying cities will be flooded, will be underwater by the end of the century or before.
Politics has no excuse from this point on. Every country is going to suffer, there is no place that will be exempt.
How can Cultural & Political Viewpoints Change?
Climate has been marked by shame, guilt, fear, threat, blame. That hasn’t worked. It has made people numb, made people tune out.
The figure ground shift where people can feel we are together and we all can make the difference, is that we are social beings.What bring us together is that when you start parsing the distinct solutions, even though they’re systems, they’re connected, is that they better life for everyone.
What Regeneration is saying is that the solutions that address global warming actually address meeting current human needs, and what we’ve got to do is direct ourselves to each other. All the things that are synonymous with reversing global warming, actually reverses human suffering as well, promoting equity for all.
Moving from Industrial Agriculture to Regenerative
Industrial Agriculture started in the middle of the 19th century when chemical fertilizers were invented. It basically feeds plants NPK, the macro nutrients and when it initially started to be used, there was many bad farming in Europe, there was hunger issues, and all of a sudden you put this powder on the field and these bright green plants that are taller than the ones you didn’t get and you go, hey, we are onto something. This is cool. And pretty soon that was how you cultivate plants. Yields are greater et cetera.
It always takes time to realize that the plants are in fact weaker and regenerative ag doesn’t in fact feed the plants, but it feeds the soil, while with industrial ag soil had been degraded.
But I never met a regen ag farmer who did it because it was the right thing to do. They did it because they hit a wall. They were running out of money; they were feeling this squeeze between producing commodities, having the prices out of their control, and being part of an over-producing system that suppress prices and their costs were going up, because the soil was getting poor, turning into dirt, and then it needed more and more input, pesticides, and so on. Those farmers can see that the degenerative road ended, basically the bank calling and saying pay up or we’re going to take all your equipment.
The most significant change into the regenerative ag community is caused by farmers, farmers talking to farmers.
What are the impediments to Renewable Energy?
I think that the major obstacle is offshore wind, sighting offshore wind. I think a Danish engineer, has solved the problem. The three blade configurations that you see today on the big turbines, he invented it that. And a farming supply company called Vestas heard about him, and they purchased the rights to his design, and now they are the biggest wind turbine company.
And he has also invented a floating platform, that can go out far into the sea, to areas where they want interfere with “people’s view scape”, and that is going to come in at a price that is also less expensive than coal gas and oil. Wind already is, solar is also lower cost than fossil fuel electrical generation. It’s a matter of 2 -3 years.
There is also a disruption spiral.
The cost of solar and renewable energy is going down, and as the cost goes down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, demand for fossil fuel goes down and their costs goes up. As demand goes up for renewable energy, it attracts more investment, more capital wants to go were something is growing. The cost of capital goes down, while for investment into fossil fuels which are peaking and declining, the cost of capital is going up.
This is a disruptive spiral that is going to accelerate the rate of adoption that we are seeing in renewables.
Most of the projections we have been seeing so far have been linear. I think we are on a threshold where we’re going to be surprised at the rate of growth in solar and wind.
Is Battery Tech creating a Rare Metal Monopoly?
The rare earths monopoly is practically China, not quite but they are at 56 or 58% of Lithium and so on.
But there’s a whole bunch of innovators circling around: solid-state batteries, carbon based batteries with no lithium. Startups that are brilliant and are pointing to material use and storage capacity and cost reductions that we’ve seen in every single area of energy on the renewable side. Nobody thought that solar and wind could be this cheap, ever, not in your wildest imagination. The same thing holds true for storage, I don’t think we are locked in to the technologies that we are using right now. We are going to see still usage of minerals, but ubiquitous materials and easy to get.
The Delusion of Continuing to Grow the Economy
The business as usual scenarios project an economy that’s two and a half times bigger by 2050 and seven by 2100. And that is just ridiculous.
Part of the innovation has to be, how can we do more with less? How can we fulfill our needs as human beings? In a way that actually lowers our footprint, not just our carbon footprint, but our whole footprint.
Steady State Economy can take care of the whole World. What it won’t do (as opposed to capitalism), is create multibillionaires. Insane amount of capital that is destroying the world for the rest of people.
The Problems over Consumption and Waste
If you are poor yes, more clothing, food, education, housing of course. Once you achieve a certain level, it doesn’t make you happy.
Excess accumulation has no relationship to happiness. And meanwhile amidst that consumption, there’s a tremendous amount of waste.
8% of global emissions is due to the clothing industry. Is the number 2 Industry in terms of waste and water usage.
Food: the report came out last week, that the number for food waste is 40%. The most significan proportion is in the farm, but that depends on the continent.
Reconnecting to Nature
You have to be in Nature; you have to turn off everything that’s on and turn on everything that’s off.
This idea of regeneration, the core of it, is experience the inseparability of everything and each other and to honor that. The most important thing to do is to listen to Nature.The way we have been taught to lead our lives just fractured everything, just shattered all the connections that are actually intrinsically there. Regeneration is that rediscovery.
The idea that beliefs change our actions: if that was true, we’d be in a very different situation today with respect to climate.
It’s Actions that change Beliefs.
Just go do, start doing, don’t think about it, and don’t worry about the numbers. And watching a documentary on Netflix on climate doesn’t do anything either. We have to make sure we are actually doing something.
What is Paul most Enthusiastic about?
The rate at which people are rediscovering land in all its myriad forms.
Another 10% of loss of our terrestrial systems would increase PPM from 419, which is today, to 519 like that. It’ll add a hundred PPM. Now let’s flip that. If we add 9% more C into all those systems…9% is not a lot, then we sequester all the carbon we’ve emitted since 1800. And if we go to 13–14%, we will also account for all the carbon that is planned to be emitted by 2050.
If you look at any place you live, any place you love and say: can we have a 10, 12, 14% improvement here? Like more trees, more grasslands, or can we change the grazing strategies and technologies? Can we change the farming strategy? Heck yeah! We can! And that’s just in protection. That’s not technology, that’s not energy. There are many other things we can do.
Strategies of Communication
Don’t use the word Climate, don’t use the word Global Warming. Those represent macro issues and are conceptual, and mean almost nothing to everybody. Speak in ways that are meaningful to the people that surround you.
For example the purpose of Regen Ag is not to sequester carbon, that’s an outcome. Is really important to understand the difference.
The purpose for a farmer is to actually improve their life, to get out of debt, to stop using poisons, to increase their profitability, to be proud of what they are doing, to become more resilient to drought and too much water so that the soil can be a reservoir instead of dirt. To increase the pollinators to your crops. It goes on and on and on. And by the way the outcome is more life in the soil, and that life is measured by C carbon. But that’s an outcome, that is not the purpose.
And so the same thing with climate. Our purpose is to really take care of each other, to improve the wellbeing of humanity on this planet, and all living creatures, all of life. And if we do that, we reverse global warming. But if you start with reversing global warming, you’ve lost most people right there, because you are putting the outcome before the value, the purpose, the thing that connect.
We have to connect where our values are common.