Natural Capitalism with Hunter Lovins

Hunter Lovins is an environmentalist and author, the co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, president of Natural Capitalism Solutions, and managing partner of NOW Partners. For decades, she has worked with communities and companies to encourage them to implement regenerative solutions that are not only sustainable but profitable. She is the author of many books, including Factor 4: Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource Use and Least Cost Energy, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, and A Finer Future: Creating an Economy in Service to Life.

Show host Neal and Hunter discuss her family upbringing, which brought her into close and casual contact with legendary activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. They talked about her career journey, including her time in law school and extensive studies of economics, which set the stage for her influential ideas about the pitfalls of capitalism. They also discussed how citizens and government can shape our economic system into one that is better for people and the planet, today and into the future. For more information about Hunter’s work, visit the websites for NOW Partners and Natural Capitalism Solutions.

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Transcript

Neal Collins: 0:00

How I wanna jump into this, hunter, is, um, first I wanna introduce you. You're, you're a person that actually doesn't need a lot of introduction because people might be familiar with the name Hunter Levins. um, Why don't we go back just to talk about like what the, the process of in, in the becoming and the unfolding of the work that, that you've been involved in.

L Hunter Luvins: 0:20

And well, God going to

Neal Collins: 0:22

start. Well, I know that, how about this? I, I know you, you grew up in Vermont, uh,

L Hunter Luvins: 0:27

and then born in Vermont. Born in Vermont, excuse me. I left there when I was six months old, so I didn't do very much growing up there. Taken out to the mountains behind Los Angeles. My father was a college professor who just also happened to help, mentor says Arch Chavez, Martin King. They were around the house when I was growing up. So this kind of work is what one does. My mother, uh, had about 14 careers, took a law degree with Dick Nixon, I guess before that, uh, organized in the coal fields with John L. Lewis. So I grew up, uh, trying to make the world a better place.

Neal Collins: 1:09

And that led you ultimately to law school, is that right?

L Hunter Luvins: 1:14

Yes. Uh, when I was, uh, about to graduate college, a couple of us were talking, uh, what, what do we wanna be when we grow up? I'd always, people's and little girl, what do you wanna be when you grow up? I'd say, I'm gonna be a lawyer. Got you. Lots of brownie points. Didn't have to do a darn thing about it, about to graduate, uh, college. If I don't go to law school, I'm gonna have to figure out what I'm gonna be when I grow up. So three of us took the law boards, all got about the same score, which didn't particularly matter to me. I wanted to go to Loyola, which at the time had a very good environmental program, very good clinical program. Applied. Got in. So second year before the dean said, with your law boards, you could have gone to Harvard. So they didn't wanna go to Harvard. He said, um, why didn't you get. Straight A's the first year, which I had done the second year. I said I was bored the first year. You had a whole set of classes I had to take. I didn't like'em. And I'd ran into a couple guys who said, look, this is the end of your academic career if you graduate taken past the bar. No one will ever ask you, what grade did you get in Contracts or tots. He said, if you ever get a grade above a C, which is what you had to have to stay in school, you're studying too hard, you should have been to a movie. Like, whoa, that makes sense. So we, we had a hell of a good time. First year. Second year, we talked a professor into teaching a class on John Rolls. It's a Harvard prof who had written a book, took him 20 years to write, called A Theory of Justice. And he said, okay. So five of us took this little seminar, turned out we didn't know enough to read roles. You have to know all of welfare economics to even understand what the book is about. So we said, huh, back up. Created a seminar in welfare economics, then read roles. So, so to me, law school was just a ton of fun. It became apparent very early on that I did not wanna work for any of the big firms. So did some work with National Lawyers Guild, did some work, pro bono on behalf of some people, and decided that the law is not a good way to drive change. Thank God for all the good environmental lawyers out there. But, uh, that was not what I wanted to do. So I quit, became a forester, helped create a little group called Tree People, which is still functioning. We planted. Trees in the forest and urban trees did environmental education. But it seemed to me the trees we were planting was a stop gap to a symptom of the real problem, which was energy misuse, misunderstanding, misallocation of energy. So around 1972, I started trying to teach myself energy policy, which back then was not a polite subject. Uh, 1973, the Arab Boyle Embargo, everybody was talking about energy, but nobody had a, an internally consistent answer. Tracked into a guy named Dery Lovens read his paper in foreign affairs cuz a guy said, this is what you're looking for. Reddit with a dictionary and a ruler going line by line. What the hell is this guy saying? When I figured out what he was saying, he's like, oh, this actually makes sense. He basically said, we don't want energy. You wouldn't know what to do with a lump coal or. Kilowatt hour if it walked up and bit you. What we want are the services that energy delivers. Cold beer, hot showers, industrial shaft power. The least cost way to get those is first of all, energy efficiency. Secondly, the, even then commercially available renewable sources at the margin. Yes, the existing sources are cheaper than what you had to pay back then to put up new solar panels, but at the margin, go build a new nuke. Go build solar panels. The solar panels are cheaper. So, uh, I started, teaching this stuff to the third graders and senior citizens. We were working with the chief economist of Atlantic Richfield said, I know that guy put us together. We integrated our careers, uh, worked at the time for David Brower, who at the time was at Friends of the Earth. I'd done some work with Dave when he was at Sierra Club. Dave, uh, was known to be unreasonable. Russ Trane at the Environmental Protection Agency once said, Dave, be reasonable. Dave said, reasonable people have never accomplished anything. Dave took a full page ad out in the, uh, New York Times when the Bureau of Reclamation was proposing to flood the Grand Canyon for a power dam. They said, well, but you'll be able to boat up to the edges and see them close up. Dave took this full page Ed out saying, would you flood the Sistine Chapel to get a closer look at the ceiling? Lost the Sierra Club, their tax status. They fired Dave, so he created friends of the Earth. Uh, friends of the Earth fired him because he was borrowing to pay operating expenses, hiring every good young person he could lay hands on in protection of the environ. And he said, uh, to the board, if you have a positive bank balance, you haven't realized the urgency of the situation. So they fired him. He created Earth Island Institute, but at the time, Dave getting fired, we were gonna get fired. So, uh, said, what do we wanna be when we grow up and created Rocky Mountain Institute? So I ran that for 20 odd years till they fired me. I said, oh, what would Dave do? Start a new organization? So I did, created Natural Capitalism, and here we are.

Neal Collins: 7:04

And, and you've got a, a title of Natural Capitalism and a and a I'm curious because I picked you up with, with a book further down the road, a a finer future, do you wanna give a synopsis between kind of That first book around, natural capitalism to a finer future that would come years later?

L Hunter Luvins: 7:23

Sure Natural Capitalism. The book actually grew out of another book called Factor four that we wrote for a German colleague. We wrote the book arguing that energy efficiency was the cheapest way to meet our energy needs. Surprise. We've been saying that for a few years. And then Ernst on Wacker, who in large part is responsible for Germany's success in solar, wrote the policy. Half of the book he and we both wrote in English. It was translated into German that was then translated back into English, Canadian English, and the book published Factor four very turgid book. So we had sent the manuscript out to a colleague of ours, man named Paul Hawkin, and to get a peer review, Paul read factor for the draft and said, rats, you just wrote half of my next book. I said, well write the other half. We'll bring it out for the North American audience. Factor four is, uh, not worth reading unless you're an engineer, and b, I'D and recreationally challenged. So, uh, three years later emerged this book, natural Capitalism, which was nothing like Factor four, much better book, still very turget, and now almost 30 years out of date. So don't go read the book, natural Capitalism, paul had written a book called The Ecology of Commerce, arguing that most of the environmental harm is coming from the way business is doing business. As Dave Rower once said, you can't do business on a dead planet, so it is therefore the business of business to help fix the problem. We wrote natural Capitalism arguing that not only is it the right thing to do, it will be more profitable. Because if you use resources more efficiently, you lower your costs. And so we argued this looking at buildings and cars and agriculture and water and whole array of areas. We were going on guts, we were taking argument by assertion this ought to be true because, and then footnoting it within an inch of its life. we sent a synopsis of it off to Harvard Business Review. They wrote back, said, we, we don't get it. What are your principles? Principles? Do we have any? Uh, well, efficiency, biomimicry, Janine, Ben's great work of how would nature do business? Nature makes a wide array of products and services very differently than we do. Amory said The Solutions Economy, which is Womack and Jones' concept of don't sell the thing, sell the service of the thing. And then we said, Dave Brower's, C P R, conservation, preservation, restoration. Good. Wrote it up, sent it to H B R. They published it. It was for many years there, most requested reprint. I said to the boys, we should rewrite the book around these four principles. They looked at me like I was Ded book was already late to the publisher, like, oh yeah. So if you ever do pick the book up, the first chapter talks about the four principles. You will find them nowhere else throughout the book. I rewrote the first chapter and then we abandoned the principles. When I started natural capitalism, it occurred to me there really are three principles, and they are verbs, not nouns. We had efficiency, biomimicry solutions, and Restoration said. What we really need, most of all, is to buy time. And we heard this again two days ago with the release of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Annual review, six, reviewing the state of the climate science. And they said, last chance, we are out of time. We know how to solve the climate crisis. We do it now or it's over. So by time, by using all resources dramatically more productively, this also saves you a hell of a lot of money. Second, redesign how we make and deliver all products and services using approaches like biomimicry and the circular economy. Walter Sta he's, uh, cradle to cradle concept of reuse remanufacture. And use as little virgin new material as you can get away with doing this is dramatically cheaper. It also generates a lot more jobs. And then third, manage all institutions to be regenerative of human and natural capital. I would argue capitalists are being bad capitalists because they are paying attention to managing, seeking to acquire accounting for two forms of capital, money and stuff. Nothing wrong with money and stuff. We all like it. Try to get it, have it, but it ignores that. There are two other forms of capital, human capital, which is more than just workers to be put into the economic equation. It is intact community. It's the. Transmission of adaptive values through intact culture and natural capital, which is a lot more than just board feet of timber or extractable or bodies. It's the services that ecosystems give to us, which again and again and again when folk like, uh, Dr. Robert Costanza, Dr. Gretchen Daley, all the way to more recently Pavan Zev, the banker who did the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity found are much more valuable in the economic equation than the money and stuff. Pavan found that if, uh, you count the loss to the economy from damage to ecosystem services, no company on earth would be profitable. And so we said good capitalist will seek to steward, manage, enhance all four forms of capital. Nothing wrong with capitalism. We're just doing it badly. So, wrote the book. Uh, I went down the road, uh, promoting the book. It's, I don't know how many Millions sold. Did reasonably well. It was funny. The publisher, uh, said, we're gonna orphan the book. Nobody wants us to read this, print 2000 copies and call it quits. I said, you're not. Three of us Spent three years writing this son of a bitch and 30 odd years before getting ready to write it. I'm not gonna let you kill the book. My chief of staff said, hire Norm. Norm is Norm Clayson. He did Marlboro. I knew Norm through horses. I said, norm doesn't wanna flog a book. Rob said, well ask him. So I took Norm to lunch. He said, you know, my daughter's been after me to do something worthwhile after all these years of selling cigarettes. I'll do it on two conditions. One, you do what I tell you. I think I know what I'm doing. I don't wanna argue about it. I said, Hey, you have a dog. Don't bark. Let's go. He said, and two, you're gonna have to quit your day job running r m i. He said, I'm gonna need a year and a half of your time. I'm gonna make you famous. I said, oh dear, I'm going to have to take off my hat. He said, not on your life. That's a brand. And I can tell you there are times walking into a corporate boardroom wearing damn cowboy hats like, I don't get forgotten. So we, uh, we flogged the book and in the end, I guess I made some of the folks at r m I jealous. Um, they, uh, concocted a, a reason to fire me and did so. So it's like, oh, hmm, I'm have to figure out what I'm gonna do with the rest of my. And that day I was supposed to fly to California to give a speech on behalf of a little nonprofit called Global Academy, run by a colleague named Walter Link. I called his chief of staff, said, uh, Tom, I can't come. I've just been fired. I gotta figure out what I'm gonna do. Tom said, call Walter. He said, Walter's in Europe, it's midnight. He said, call Walter. So I did. Walter said, hunter, how nice. I said, hold that thought. He said, oh, okay. You're now part of Global Academy. That gave me a nonprofit into which to raise the money to create natural capitalism. So fast forward 20 odd years, about two years ago, Walter called up, said, would I join a thing called now Partners? I owe Walter. So Walter says, jump, I get Airborne. Ask how high on the way up. So I said, sure. And so we're in the process of figuring that out. The expertise that is in the now partners, about a hundred people from around the world. That's, uh, pretty formidable group of sustainability experts. We went off, last November to Charmel, she in Egypt for the conference of parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Which was quite literally a shit show. The sewers exploded into the UN meeting rooms. There was literally a river of shit flowing in, in the blue zone. This is the UN's high security badge only. And of course, nothing happened. And so we've been working on, we know how to solve the climate crisis, use renewable energy, which now everywhere on earth is cheaper than fossil credit. Suis. Recently, before they almost went broke, came out with a report saying, by 2025, solar will be at 1 cent per kilowatt hour. Build a new nook that's 20 cents a kilowatt hour. I don't care whether you like nuclear packs, I love nuclear power remotely. Cited 93 million miles away. Will do just fine. The economics are clear. Solar is cheaper than running an existing natural gas plant, which will come on at four to 6 cents a kilowatt hour, vastly cheaper than running a coal plant. Six to 10 cents a kilowatt hour. Just do the math. So, as Dr. Christian Breyer in Europe, Dr. Mark Jacobson at Stanford have shown we can meet all the world's energy needs just through renewable energy. Recent study out of Cal Berkeley. If the US did this by 2035, we'd be saving a trillion dollars a year and powering the country renewably, creating vast numbers of jobs. So about, uh, what, four years ago now, a group of us got together and said, we ought to update all that, those old numbers out of natural capitalism. We know a great deal more now. And we also need to talk about the need to transform the global economy. The way we run the economy now is based on an ideology called neoliberalism, which basically says people are greedy bastards, but that's okay because the market is perfect. In a perfect market, you against me, will somehow aggregate to the greater good for all. Yeah, no, it won't. It hasn't. And the science is now showing humans actually aren't greedy bastards. And as we showed in natural capitalism, markets are anything but perfect. You just add subsidies. We subsidize fossil energy to the tune of 5.9 trillion every year. That's a market imperfection, and solar is still beating the fossils. So the neo libs were wrong. But then what else? So I've been working with a colleague named John Fullerton. John was 18 years at JP Morgan. Left as managing director, helped invent their derivatives practice, manage that private equity commodities from Tokyo to London to Wall Street 2001. He walked away. He said something is rotten in the financial system and started reading Red Natural Capitalism, red Dana Meadows, Herman Daley, Bob Costanza. And then he started writing and in 2012 he wrote a paper called Regenerative Capitalism owing back to the work of Buckminster Fuller, who said, regenerative ness is the operating principle of the universe. John laid out eight principles of what does it mean to be regenerative, and this is how said, this is how we should be practicing capitalism. He gave the paper to me. He had released it to a conference of economists. I know what happened. They all read the paper and went, oh dear, this is better than anything we've got. So they, uh, dismissed it. John was crushed, gave it to me, said It's not a very good paper. I read it on a flight to Germany, wrote him from 9,000 feet. Said John, wow. In 40 odd years of doing this work, this is the best that I have found. So John and I started writing together. Uh, we just did a gig, uh, two weeks ago at Brown University. John is now running for any of you who wanna know more about regenerative miss, go to capital institute.org. John is running a series of classes of what does Regenerative miss mean? And I said, John, there ought to be a book. He said, I don't have time to write a book. I said, well, I do. I'll write one. So, took all of John's work, took the work of unders, Figman, took the work of a colleague in the uk. Mashed it all together and updated all the numbers of how do we meet our needs for energy, for food? Took a look at regenerative agriculture, which is the other half of the solution to the climate crisis. So you stop the emission of carbon and other industrial gases through efficiency, through renewables, through all the things we know how to do. Then you take the excess gases out of the air and put it back in the soil where it belongs. Using things like regenerative grazing, holistic management, Alan Savory's, great work. So we wrote all of this up. How do we provide vehicles? What's the circular economy? How do we build buildings that require no energy to keep them comfortable year round? Yes, these buildings exist and they actually are cheaper to build. They're vastly cheaper to operate. Talked about the failings of neoliberalism, talked about what would an economy based on the principles of regenerative capitalism look like, and out came the book, A finer future arguing that we know how to build the kind of world we would all like to live in. Let's get about it. Hmm.

Neal Collins: 22:59

That was a beautiful synopsis, hunter, and one of the things that strikes me is that you, you introduced natural capitalism and years later we're still seeming to conflate wealth, the word and the concept of wealth with just one of those capitals. And we don't talk about any of the other things. And we don't talk about resilience. We're not talking about health, we don't talk about community. And. capitalism Isn't wrong. We just have bad capitalists. That really strikes me because in the business sector, it still seems the only index that, let's say a venture capitalist will have is how am I gonna make money to the tune of 10 to 20 x? And if you can't do that, we don't even deserve to be breathing in the same air. Like, you just need to see yourself out. And it just seems like we are going further and further and further away. Even though you've been at this for a long time, and I'm just, I'm kind of sitting here being like, Why is it that we're seeing the fossil fuel companies, for example, they have the trillions of dollars that are probably going to be. They are the ones investing in renewable energy, but they're not having to pay for any, any of the transgressions that's come before this. So what, like what does this future economy, future capitalism look like? If we haven't gotten it for the last three decades?

L Hunter Luvins: 24:41

There are roughly two ways forward. We get very serious about being better capitalists and investing in what will give us the greatest return over time. Where we went astray was what will give us the greatest return this quarter. And as Paul Pullman, who was the c e O at Unilever said, this is what drove the oh eight financial collapse. We may be on the verge of a new financial collapse as we see bank after bank after bank in trouble. Because we didn't learn the lesson of oh eight, which is you invest as Warren Buffet does for long-term value. You invest in the capital, human and natural and manufactured and financial that you are going to need to have a company that is around 10 years from now, 20 years from now, and that gives you a steady return. We've been greedy in nature. Failures are fossils. There is nothing that says this human experiment has to hang around. Now don't do this cuz it'll put you in a very bad mood. But you can Google near term human extinction and find what purports to be science saying that humans go extinct within 10 years. Hmm. That could be, I'm committed to seeing that that doesn't happen. That this human experiment. Is allowed to continue until we, uh, do gain a little wisdom. And what gives me the optimism to keep at this is that what we need to do is more profitable. So when you manage land regeneratively, you then are able to, in the case of ranching, run twice, three times, four times the number of animals on the same piece of ground. You make more money when you invest in renewables. If you're a utility, you make more money. As an industrialist, you invest in energy efficiency, you cut your costs. It was interesting, I was sitting with one of the pioneers of sustainability, a man named Ray Anderson, who was c e o of a company called Interface Carpets. Ray had read Paul's book, ecology of Commerce, the day before he was to give a speech to the employees of a company he had just bought the, the employees said, what's your environmental policy? Ray said, do we have one quick, can somebody get me a book on the environment? Somebody handed him Paul's book. He described the experience as a spear in his chest. He said, there is nothing sustainable about our company. We make carpet out of yarn from polymers, from oil, lay it on an industrial floor for a year, five years, tear it up, send it to landfill where it lasts for 20,000 years. He said, I commit. We are going to be the first company of the next industrial revolution. And he said, I have no idea how to do that. Paul. Paul said, are there others like you out there? Paul called a bunch of us. We put together what Ray called his dream team. And for years worked with Ray helping interface figure out how to do this, and they remain one of the leaders in this field. I was sitting with Ray in 2001, he was actually annoyed. He said, everything I'm doing for sustainability is enhancing shareholder value. He said, that's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do. And I said, let's break this apart. What do you count as shareholder value? Ray wrote an article after that listing seven elements. We then sat down and put a finer pencil to it came up with 13 reasons, which we call the integrated bottom line. Why caring for people and planet is just better business. So use resources more efficiently. You cut your cost. Use resources more responsibly, use fewer toxic materials. You cut your legal liabilities, you make yourself more insurable, behave responsibly. Impact investors want to put their money with you and impact investing is now a multi, multi-trillion dollar business. A year. More money is flowing faster into responsible investments than into traditional investments. This year, for the first time, more money is going into renewables than into fossil. If you behave responsibly to people, you become the kind of employer the best talent wants to come and work for you, retain that talent. Replacing an employee tends to cost two years worth of their salary. Once you have good people, if you enable them to implement more sustainable practices as part of their day job says economist intelligence unit, not exactly a liberal rag, you get a more engaged workforce, says Gallup, an engaged workforce will deliver 24% higher productivity, 21% higher profitability. That's a material number. You better manage your marketing. You're able to differentiate your product to build brand equity. You better manage your supply chain. This is why Walmart announced its sustainability scorecard. They have a hundred thousand suppliers. They actually don't know how many they have, and this enabled them to determine between suppliers. It also reduces the cost of distrust when Walmart announced its sustainability initiatives. It cut in half the number of people saying, I will never shop at a Walmart. This is the route to being first to the future. And indeed, Walmart of all companies has recently come out and pledged to become a regenerative company. Now again, I don't think they know what they're talking about, but they're smart. They'll figure it out. And you're hearing more and more and more companies committing to regenerative. So Cargo, the big, uh, ag company, target, McDonald's, Unilever, general Mills, all of these consumer products goods companies are committing to regenerative, and this is all a good thing. The corporate leaders are moving in this direction. This is so threatening to the fossil industry. To the powers of reactionary that now you have a war against what's called E S G environment, social good governance, to the point where you have the dark money, heritage, and consumers research and Alec what American legislative, uh, council sending out how-tos to def try to defeat investment into responsible companies. So 19 attorneys general from the southern states and Utah said to BlackRock, uh, their C E O, Larry Fink came out with a letter in 2019 saying, it is important to be responsible and we are going to be investing in more sustainable companies. These attorneys generals said, We are going to pull our state pension money from BlackRock Management. Bahoo BlackRock lost 4 billion that year. They actually got 230 billion more into their E S G funds. Again, this is just better business. No polar bears required. And, and

Neal Collins: 33:05

BlackRock presents a really interesting case study for me because they, they did take a lead with that paper with Larry Fink saying, we, we need to embrace sustainability. Yet I interface with aspiring and existing farmers that are saying, I wanna do regenerative farming. I do not have the ability to buy land. It is no longer affordable for me. And you can walk down almost any major urban city scape now and see people sleeping on the street in tents and. You think, oh wow. Like, what, what's going on there? And now people are starting to put the dots together that, oh my goodness, the middle income can't afford homes. It's, it's becoming out of reach. Get BlackRock gets a nice like hat on the back for doing E S G. Meanwhile, they're buying tens of thousands of homes across the world, speculating that because of macroeconomic policy, inflation's gonna go up, values will go up. And we have a corporate landlord that isn't doing anything about energy efficiency, anything about stewarding the environment, isn't doing anything about local resilience and wealth building in communities yet. We, we say amazing job because you haven't e s G fund.

L Hunter Luvins: 34:39

No. I use BlackRock as an example, that this is just better business. Hmm. This isn't woke capitalism. This is capitalism. Pure and simple. They're making more money. Quit being silly about the, you know, the, the reactionary forces attacking this as some kind of ideology. It's not, it's just basic neoliberal capitalism. You, you will make more money. Mm-hmm. Will it, will that kind of capitalism solve the world's problems? No. It's like a bad light bulb joke. How many economists does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. The free market will do it. No, it won't. Anybody who's ever had a light bulb burn out knows damn well somebody gets to climb a ladder and, um, put a new light bulb in. Markets are a good servant. They're not a good master. They're a terrible religion, and it remains important that we ask ourselves, what is meaning in life? Why are we here and what do we want? And markets are very good at allocating scarce resources efficiently. In the short term. They're no good at taking care of grandchildren. That's the job of government and of a free people coming together and saying, what kind of a world do we want to live in? To us, what is a finer future? And then how do we achieve it? Government is a contact sport. It is a participatory sport. If you stay out of it, trust me, somebody with a vested interest will get into it and will shift policy to serve their vested interest. This is something all of us need to take a much more active role in. People like, uh, Robert Reich, who is, uh, secretary of Labor now teaches at, uh, University of California, Berkeley has done a lot of writing on what do we need to do to ensure that we take care of all of us, not just some of us, not just the 1%, and pointing out inflation, where's it coming from? Massive corporate profit taking. Corporate CEOs are getting raise on, raise on raises. When was the last time you got a raise? Right. The underclass, the middle classes have stayed essentially the same since about 1980. Surprised in 1970. A man named Lewis Powell was asked, actually, 71 was asked by the US Chamber of Commerce to write a memo. How can business relegitimizing itself After the sixties, sex, drugs, rock and roll business was feeling a little beat up on Powell said, American Enterprise is under attack. The American free market is under attack and business needs to seize and use power aggressively. Assiduously. To do this, it needs to be well funded On the strength of that memo, five entities, couple foundations, Alan Coors, scfe, uh, Grace Richardson, Bradley, oh, and the Koch brothers each put something like 5 million for each of five years into creating and endowing Heritage. Hudson Hoover, Heartland American Enterprise. Judicial Crisis Network. Why do we have the Supreme Court? We have now? Because these guys invested in identifying and grooming young justices to sit on the Supreme Court. They're organized. They laid out a strategy. Powell laid out the strategy. He laid out 26 targets, and they have assiduously gone after every one of them. Local school boards, schools of business, the media. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the uk, and neoliberalism won. It became the global economic ideology. And from that date on lower classes, middle classes have stayed constant or gone down. The money has all gone to the 1%. Now the 0.01%, do you like it? If not time to organize? And, and what is

Neal Collins: 39:17

what is the the missing piece here? Because I,

L Hunter Luvins: 39:20

What's missing? Coherent citizen action and watch this space.

Neal Collins: 39:26

Okay. Coherent citizen action. As I've gotta say, like I, I, I understand all of this and I see, the argument being made for, for better capitalism and it just seems like there is a, a piece there that, cause we index so heavily towards the money and the stuff to go get more money and stuff and to stay in business, we actually need the money to make more money that. We're just cloaking ourselves in this green, regenerative, sustainable, like, oh, it's, it's great that we have these outcomes, but really at the end of the day, we just need more money and stuff.

L Hunter Luvins: 40:11

We don't, humans, well, particularly, uh, humans in, in western societies are increasingly unhappy. If you track happiness and track. G D P G D P keeps going up, happiness has leveled off and is declining. And if you ask people in their life, are you happy? Yeah, most of'em go, yeah. You know, not really. So the substance abuse amongst young people, we have record high suicide amongst teens. We have record anger amongst young people. We're not a happy society. We're in search of what it is that will make us happy. And happiness cannot be bought. what does make us happy is conversation is sitting with friends and making music or talking or organizing together to make our community a better place. There's a phrase called expedition loneliness that, uh, came from a short story about a group of people in France caught in a massive traffic jam, and they were there for days and days and days, and they set up little communities to take care of each other, and then the traffic jam cleared and they all went away and had this feeling of. But it was so good when we were together. Mm. And we have this in disasters. People come together and they serve each other and they take care of each other. And then we go back to our nine to five and trying to make money. It's like, ah, now I'm lonely. We know the answer to that. And this

Neal Collins: 41:58

is why we chose, and I don't mean to cut you off, but I, I get really lit up about this because this is why I chose our vehicle as real estate, as how do we, how do we come together and how do we design the communities that we wanna live in? And we know that right now we are living through a time of extreme isolation, a pandemic of isolation that's just as bad as, cancer and smoking and alcoholism. Because it, it has those same effects on our body. And so we're over here saying, oh, we have an energy crisis, or we have a carbon crisis. And yes we do. But at the end of the day, we know, well, can we bring communities together? Can we combat isolation and, and solve solutions through community? But the powers that be, like if you were to actually say, you know, if we're gonna try to provide safety and security and shelter for people, the way the industry is set up is we cannot lower prices. We have leveraged everything to the hills so that there's so much capital, money, capital flowing, that if you're to say, Hey, yeah, we wanna make homes more affordable, we wanna make farms more affordable for farmers. I don't see a mechanism for us to do that unless we just write off all the debt. Or a lot of the debt that our central governments have put out into circulation

L Hunter Luvins: 43:34

debt is an interesting thing. Uh, there is some great economics by, uh, Dr. Randall Ray, w r a y, uh, promulgator of an approach called Modern Money Theory, where he says, governments are not like a household. A household can only spend up to its income and then it's borrowing and it's going into debt. Governments aren't like that. If you are repaying debt with your sovereign currency, you have essentially an endless supply of it. Print it, which is what we did in oh eight. Quantitative easing was simply pour money into the economy. In the pandemic governments, the world around poured money into the economy. If you have inflation that is too high, which we do now, but it, what we have now is not structural inflation, it's corporate profit taking as Bob Reich has shown. Then you raise taxes, particularly on the uber wealthy, and now we're actually starting to see a conversation around taxation of the wealthy. And what Randy points out, uh, Randall Ray points out is what we need are programs like guaranteed jobs. So if you want a job, the government guarantees that you can have a job at a living wage with healthcare, childcare, social security, retirement, and that forces the corporate sector to raise its rates if it wants to compete for talent. Now you have no unemployment. You have nobody living on the streets unless they want to. And I would submit very few people want to, and you have people paying taxes. You take everybody off the welfare roles because they are now employed. But Randy says, don't worry about the debt so long as you are using the money and investing into the real economy. Check out the so-called Inflation reduction Act, Mr. Biden's signature piece of legislation. That's exactly what that's doing. It's investing into the real economy. Mm, into renewable energy, into building battery storage, into electric vehicles in the chip sack. Bring chip manufacturing back to the United States. For the first time in, well, since the New Deal, the United States is beginning to have a sensible industrial policy. Let's invest in ourselves. Let's invest in job creation. Let's invest in building the kind of infrastructure that we need to provide energy, water, housing, healthcare, sanitation, transportation, and do it using the most sustainable technologies. We know how to do this. We, what we have lacked until now is the political will.

Neal Collins: 46:41

Yeah. Yeah. I would say the political will is, the pink elephant in the room of, of, okay, how do we actually create policy like that and then not dump money like into a sib that goes into a thousand different directions and, and actually doesn't make the impact that it was intended to create. Um, I'm hopeful listening to you talk that there is, there's a way, a way forward. Uh, I, I so desperately want to see it as

L Hunter Luvins: 47:12

then make it be, if you wanna see it, invest yourself into it, which you do with this podcast. And anybody listening, if you're saying, I'm just one person, what can I do? Said 8 billion people. If we come together, we do, we know what it is that needs to happen. We know how to do it. It's just getting about it. And I'll tell you a short little story. I was approached by a housewife, came up to me at a meeting and said, could, could we talk? Sure. Did I know about the Sumax plant, the big cement plant down the road from where I am? Like, well, yeah. Did I know that it was the number one carbon polluter in Boulder County? No. Now if I'm supposed to be smart, if, if I had put one on one together, a coal train goes past my office a couple times a week, they're not stockpiling that stuff to look at it. They're burning it. Coal is one of the most polluting fossil fuels. They're gonna be polluting a lot, 460,000 tons of carbon per year. She said, did I know that that plant was up for a permit renewal for its mining operation, getting the raw material to make cement? I said, no, I didn't. She said, would I help? Yes, in part as a test case, if I stepped in with somebody who cared and brought a fewer resources, could a housewife beat cex Fortune 500 company? Short answer. Hmm. This was a, we turned out citizens to testify, to write letters to the editor. planning voted six zip against commissioners, voted two to two to one against three commissioners. Now a venture capitalist is putting together a capital stack to buy them out and turn the land into affordable housing and solar and regenerative agriculture. All because a housewife said, can I do this? Yes, you can.

Neal Collins: 49:26

It's a, it's a beautiful story and, and Hunter, I, I guess I'm, there's still this dissonance though that I have is like, this is empirical, right? It is me based on talking to people. Across the country and in my community that are saying, you know, I, I wanna put solar panels on, on the roof. I wanna drive an electric vehicle. I don't have the savings to do that. I don't have the money to do that. I, I can't even buy the house that I wanna live in right now. And I, I think more and more it's like, what, where are we really headed? If the will is there amongst individual actors, but they feel no agency to

L Hunter Luvins: 50:08

exercise their will. Again, this is this belief that I'm just one person. Mm-hmm. And as just one person, you don't have much agency, but when there's two of you, when there's five of you, in the case of the cex, when there's 75 of you on a commissioner's call, the politics starts to change. So what can you do? Talk to your neighbors, talk to your friends. Talk to the people you work with. Pick one problem. Now, this gal picked a very big problem, and one, pick a little problem. Something you can do something about that will make your life your community just a little bit better. And then go do it. It's the go do it part that begins to build community. Just talking isn't enough. Do one thing every day. Ask yourself, what's my dot? Do one thing and do it. You don't have to do 10. You don't have to change the whole world. Change one thing that makes the world a better place for the people around you, for your community, for the environment. Every day do something that scares you. This was, uh, Eleanor Roosevelt. Every day, do something that scares you. Learn. Learn how to be more effective. Ask people, was I any good in giving that talk? None of us are born knowing how to do this stuff. We learn how to do it, and we learn best when people are helping us. Write a letter to the editor, put out a tweet. Doesn't matter how small, if every day do one thing, you will make a.

Neal Collins: 52:02

I love that. Thank you. Thank you for grounding me there. I felt like I was just popping off into, into this, this place of, of kind of doom and gloom. Um, and I will recommend to people and I see behind hunter's faces a finer future. it's a great book. Um, you're, that, that was a, a really nice wave to really see a holistic connections with the economy and investing. John Fullerton is another just amazing, uh, leader in this space and we know a lot of people that have joined his, uh, regenerative economics course and so we'll, we'll give a plug there. But Hunter, this has been an absolute delight. Because it is so interesting to see the arc and, the ability to stick with this and, and to refine the message and to know that you're refining and not just dogmatically entrenched in one position. And, uh, so yeah, I just, it's, it's amazing to see how you've, you've really kept at it since a very young age.

L Hunter Luvins: 53:10

Well, we're in a horse race with catastrophe. Good news. We're in the race and I used to race horses, and I have, uh, I have won a buckle from, uh, having a horse that wouldn't give up.

Neal Collins: 53:27

Do you still have horses? I, I heard that you Yes. Live on a regenerative ranch or is it, you're ranching right now? Yes. Uh, and, and why, why a ranch? Like, what's, what was the call for that?

L Hunter Luvins: 53:40

the, the call for it is that I've, I've always loved horses and I was on one before I could walk. So when I had the opportunity to get a place, I got a little ranch and we run cattle horses. The reason to do that, aside from the fact that I love it, is we are taking carbon out of the air and putting it into the ground. When an animal nibbles grass, the roots slough, polysaccharide sugars that feeds the microbiological community, which mineralizes the carbon and, and do that on all the world's grass. Capture one ton per acre per year on all the world's grasslands over something like 60 to a hundred years. We get back to something like two 80 parts per million concentration of co2. Wow. We solve the climate crisis now. Job one, stop emitting. So you need renewable energy. Use regenerative agriculture to take the excess carbon out of the air, put it back in the soil, and we can go on to other problems like, uh, how to win it, backgammon. And there we go.

Neal Collins: 54:56

It's a, it's that easy. It's that easy. Hunter, it was a pleasure. Keep up the amazing work. Have a beautiful rest of your afternoon

L Hunter Luvins: 55:04

thanks so much. Audios.