Real talk: I’ve felt substantially better about the planet’s future after some stuff I learned last week than I have in years.
Reducing your carbon footprint is good, but not enough. 📉 There’s already excess CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere we gotta deal with.
I’ve spent a good chunk of last week at a summit to learn about carbon markets. At first, I thought it would be a real technical meeting with lots of nitpicking over details that went over my head. 🤔 Instead, it got me pumped.
Have you ever heard that stat that 100 companies create 70% of the world’s carbon emissions? 🏭 That means even if I successfully rallied every individual to go on strict vegan diets, switch to clean energy, and forever surrender plastic (none of which I’ve totally done myself), it would only take care of a pretty small part of the problem.
At this summit, though, I started to see how more and more companies are strategizing how to be carbon neutral or negative over the next decade. 🖲 And not just the really woke ones, but corporate giants like Microsoft, Volkswagen, JetBlue, Siemens, just to name a few.
I got to meet one expert in the field I really hope to have on my podcast soon. I loved the way she put it: Forget what you hear about from Congress. Pretty much every company is thinking about this right now. You have to. MIcrosoft pledged to go carbon neutral, you better bet some folks at Google are trying to figure out how to one-up. It’s not a matter of altruism for a lot of them, but a matter of survival. There won’t be much business to do in ten years if there isn’t much of a planet.
These big shifts follow years and years of organizing, speaking up, and awareness raising at the grassroots level. 🌱🌱🌱 I’m not surprised that a lot of these commitments were made just months after the student-led climate strike. Moving the needle is always worth it. It’s easy to underrate the importance of speaking up for what matters, but don’t. It regularly produces incredible change.