Recipe for Lasting Change
John “Mac” McQuown on what makes RMI tick
By David Labrador, Writer/Editor at Rocky Mountain Institute.
John “Mac” McQuown knows a thing or two about innovation. Bloomberg Markets magazine described him as “one of the architects of the modern investing system” for, among other things, his role in pioneering the creation of the first stock index fund in the late ’60s. Mac has been a strong supporter of RMI for nearly as long. “Amory and I go back to the late 1970s,” Mac said. “His point of view rang a responsive chord in me.” Part of RMI’s new Innovation Center is named for Mac and his wife, Leslie, because of their belief that the right ingredients for creating lasting change include out-of-the-way places like Basalt, Colorado, institutions like RMI, and philanthropists like them.
UNEXPECTED INNOVATION HUBS
Mac and some others created the first stock index fund at what was then a small regional bank in San Francisco, far from the centers of financial orthodoxy. Mac says, “It’s interesting that some of the innovations in finance took root in San Francisco under the auspices of Wells Fargo bank, not at the big money-center banks in London or New York. That’s not an accident.” In much the same way, he says, “It’s pretty interesting that RMI emerged out of the head of Amory and a few other people 35 or 40 years ago in Colorado, and not at a particular bastion of higher learning; it certainly didn’t start in Washington.” He is convinced that original thinking should be supported where it is found, and that underlies his philanthropy to RMI.
“That’s where innovation occurs,” Mac says, “where you get people and capital that come together that want to do it.” He’s been the creator who was grateful for “the attitude of a couple of CEOs back in the ’60s and ’70s who were willing to innovate,” and now he’s underwriting other innovators, in turn. “Those of us who were involved in the work at Wells get a lot of credit, but, I’ll tell you, even more credit goes to the management who were willing to put up a lot of capital over a long period of time in order to see that innovation through,” he says.
CONFRONTING CLIMATE CHANGE
Mac’s passion for environmental stewardship stems from his youth as a farm boy in the Midwest. Life on his uncle’s farm was marked by thrift, conservation, and “a consciousness of what we were doing to the land upon which we lived and depended for our livelihood,” he says. “There was no throwaway culture.”
Mac always felt the importance of stewardship of land and water. But about 15 years ago, he joined the Director’s Council of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and became immersed in Scripps work in atmospheric science, including its CO2 measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This data set, nearly 60 years in the making, is the foremost indicator of rising greenhouse gases, and it set Mac on a path to do what he could to combat climate change.
“I’ve been up front and personal with this research for a number of years now,” says Mac. “And it certainly has sensitized me to the need for we humans to start paying a whole lot more attention to the consequences of our consumption and production.” Does this have a bearing on Mac’s philanthropy? “It does,” he says, “for certain.” In 2010, Mac and Leslie made a $25 million gift to the University of Chicago, where Mac works with a project on measuring the social cost of carbon. And they are strong supporters of RMI’s work.
SUPPORTING THE RIGHT APPROACH
“We spend a fair amount of time paying attention to what’s actually going on at RMI,” Mac says. He and his wife believe strongly that institutions they support should be apolitical and committed to openness and innovation. “We don’t give to any institute or any pursuit that doesn’t have these critical characteristics. We sit back and pay attention to it before we do it, and RMI passes muster, in spades.”
“The best example I can think of is Reinventing Fire: China,” Mac says. Mac bought the original, U.S.-focused Reinventing Fire book when it was first published, and gave copies to many friends, including some Sinophiles like Jack Wadsworth. “We began to ask: suppose you looked at China through the lens of Reinventing Fire, what picture would emerge?” Mac and Jack became major
“It’s pretty interesting that RMI emerged out of the head of Amory and a few other people 35 or 40 years ago in Colorado, and not at a particular bastion of higher learning.”
supporters of the Reinventing Fire: China project. “In order to do that, we had to have a lot of confidence in the ability of RMI to focus on a critical issue and bring the right kind of intelligence and data to the problem,” Mac says. “What does Amory say? ‘In God we trust; all others bring data.’”
CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE AT HOME, TOO
Mac and Leslie are immersed in the kind of transformative energy work in which RMI is a leader. They are building a microgrid at their Sonoma farm, testing several cutting-edge clean energy technologies. Arresting climate change is “going to take data and engineering and free markets,” Mac says, and he’s collecting some of that data himself. In addition to three separate battery systems and about three-quarters of a megawatt of generating capacity, Mac says, “We’re electrolyzing gray water to produce our own hydrogen. It’s under study by a team from MIT. Everything’s being measured and it’s all open source.”
The point is that “We’re going to have go through a major process of technological substitution,” he says. “First of all, we’ve got to figure out what technological substitutions we really need to do.” This spirit of experimentation underlies the test bed microgrid at the Innovation Center and at the Amory Lovins Green Home, RMI’s first headquarters. It’s key to RMI’s theory of change, and is a big part of why Mac has been supporting Amory and RMI for nearly 40 years.
WEB EXTRA
For more information on this topic, visit: rmi.org/our_goals
