When he founded Green Cross International at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, former President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev probably had little idea of the magnitude of the threat presented by global warming. Yet due to his vision, the organization and its affiliates, such as Global Green USA, are now well positioned to lead the fight to save the environment. In the following VerdeXchange News interview, Global Green USA President and CEO Matt Petersen explains the organization’s mission to shift society’s relationship with the planet.
VerdeX: When Mikhail Gorbachev founded Green Cross International, of which Global Green USA is a part, he stated, “We must foster a value shift that reconnects humankind to the environment.” With this lofty goal in mind, what constitutes success for your organization?
Matt Petersen: In terms of how we measure true value shifts that reconnect our relationship with the web of life that’s been created on this planet, success would probably look different than our world looks now. It would probably look radically different in some senses, and in others it might be similar. We live in an age where shareholder value is the holy grail of our society. How do we make that turn on its head and make it work for the betterment of the public good and the benefit of all citizens, not just a few? That’s a tall order, but it’s a world where we’re able to get our food locally, live in communities, and truly be citizens. It’s a world that designs in a totally different way, whether it’s buildings, parks, or places. We have the human potential; we have most of the technologies that we need (although technologies can be as much a problem as a solution), so it’s really about the will. We need to find the will, whether it’s from climate change or the collapses we are seeing of other systems that are necessary to sustain human life on this planet.
VerdeX: Fit the goals and missions of Global Green USA into that challenge. What challenges are your organization currently addressing?
Petersen: We’re working on what we frame as three of the greatest challenges facing humanity. First, eliminating weapons of mass destruction—chemical and nuclear weapons primarily, but also biological weapons. Second, ensuring access to fresh, clean water for all humanity as a basic human right. Third, stopping climate change and reducing consumption. To achieve our mission of value shift through all of those pieces and major goals, we use different tools, but the thread of poverty runs throughout all of them. To deal with the environment, we have to deal with poverty in a very systematic, symbiotic, and synergistic way.
VerdeX: Global Green USA has supported campaigns for green construction funds for schools, colleges, and affordable housing. How would you characterize your your advocacy for green schools, homes, and buildings?
Petersen: Our work has a three-pronged approach, which is to provide technical assistance for community projects so we gain knowledge and have greater credibility and effectiveness. We then take that knowledge and use it to shape our public policy and educational efforts—each one influences the other. One of the strategies we’ve taken in advancing green affordable housing and green schools as leverage points in our communities and as public policy, is to create incentives for affordable housing through the tax credit financing process and some mandatory requirements, as well. Then, with green schools, we provide incentive funding that enables school districts to pursue green schools where students learn better. We leverage community benefit out of the tremendous amount of public spending we have for the needs of our communities.
VerdeX: Global Green is presently at work in New Orleans. Nationally, there is no greater built environment challenge than in New Orleans. What are you learning through your work there?
Petersen: We’re finding that progress is still slow in New Orleans, but, of the people who have returned to New Orleans, there is a tremendous will that I have witnessed in few other places. I find most people unable to turn their back on the community once they’ve been with the people living in New Orleans right now. That willpower is its greatest strength and resource right now. It’s not political leadership—it’s the will of the people. But how do you map that to and match it with the resources needed to rebuild that community in a smart, effective way?
What we’ve done in the in the Holy Cross neighborhood in the Ninth Ward is to create a model project that will provide 23 units of housing. It’s not an enormous development, but it will also have a community center. We have become a beacon in the city, thanks to the help of Brad Pitt, who was the chair of the design competition we did last year and continues to raise awareness about the plight of New Orleans and how green building can be a part of the future of New Orleans as a way for people adapt to and prevent climate change. We’re really using that as the leverage point and jumping off place to communicate why it’s important to do this not just in New Orleans, but in other places, as well. We’re also working on green schools there, with the support of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund and other foundations that help make our work possible there.
VerdeX: You’ve agreed to speak at the GreenXchange Global Marketplace Conference next month. One of the questions raised by the conference is how we move from public awareness, to identifying and diffusing the most promising technologies that reduce carbon emissions and increase the sustainability of the built environment and transportation. How do people best learn to “connect the green dots”?
Petersen: The first battle is awareness. We’ve got awareness now, but how do we take that and turn into true change? Part of that is tied up into the marketplace getting the wrong signals, to a certain extent, from the policies in Washington and other parts of the globe. Presuming that will change and the market will get better signals from public policy, incentives, and subsidies, I think it takes a matching of human ingenuity with opportunity. How can we get, for example, the massive global solar initiative—which is something we’ve been working on as an organization— to deploy capital and technology that avoids building a centralized grid and an inefficient, unintelligent power system to fuel the future of rural parts of China and India? The rush to build coal and nuke plants is critical to grow the economy when there are no other sources to turn to, but how do we look for opportunities to drive the marketplace to deal with energy poverty, to leverage and buy down and reduce that risk where companies are concerned about going into more a micro-financing, distributed approach in the developing world, or the developed world, for that matter? How do we shift to a more distributed infrastructure, as we’ve already seen with cell phones and computing, and change the way we power our society? Clearly, with that has to come a lot of conservation, efficiency, and reduction in waste—just much more resource efficiency.
There has to be some shift in behavior in terms of how we live in our communities as citizens. The main opportunity is driving that capital. The signals from the marketplace and Wall Street analysts are tough to deal with, too, because not everything is going to get beautiful, rates of return—how do we bring some rationality into that?
VerdeX: You’re on a panel with Tom Soto at GreenXchange called “Maximizing Public Pension Returns through Green Technology Investing.” How might CalPERS and CalSTERS and the other large global pension funds provide better incentives for bringing new clean and green technology innovation into the marketplace? Do they have a role in addressing climate change?
Petersen: What Green Wave, Phil Angelides, and CalPERS spearheaded in California has had tremendous ripple effect and tremendous direct effect. Global Green as an organization gave CalPERS an award a few years ago for that initiative. At the same time, overall, that’s a modest amount of capital, so how do we shift from this being seen as a boutique niche opportunity where you can get great return, 30-40 percent, to being the standard for business—where every investment should consider sustainability as one of the key filters, along with IRR? They have to be good stewards of the pension funds that they have under their management—clearly, that means getting good returns. Maintaining a strong society requires keeping those pension funds healthy and strong. It requires balance, but that’s sustainability: the balance of the economy, the environment, and the community.
VerdeX: The GreenXchange Conference takes place on December 10, the same date that Al Gore receives the Nobel Peace Prize, of the Democratic presidential candidate debate in Los Angeles, and of the U.N. conference that will take place in Bali. How significant is December to the world’s effort to curb carbon emissions? Has the climate change movement finally, fully matured?
Petersen: We’ve made a lot of progress, as you’ve noted, in the last two years. We’ve got close to 800 mayors that have signed on to the Climate Protection Agreement. It doesn’t mean they’re all taking action, but we’ve seen the shifts. Washington still seems to be held to its own little world while our governors and mayors are acting on their own. It’s occurring not just domestically but internationally. I hope Washington and all those corners of power begin to listen soon. That’s the hope, that in a year from now, that you don’t just see Lee Scott talking about sustainability and pushing his agenda. You’d see CEOs of every major company doing the same thing, and then somebody leapfrogs Wal-Mart.
A great company started recently called Nau, which is taking it a notch up from what Patagonia has done. They’ve also added a greater sense of style than Patagonia, and they’re starting with a commitment of five percent gross revenues going to charities. That’s really shifting the sense of shareholder value to one of public good. How are you going to have an economy that achieves any reasonable rate of growth if we destroy the place from which we get our natural resources and make it uninhabitable for humans?
In terms of the next year, we have to use this momentum and the opportunity of the Nobel Prize going to Gore and the UNFCC as an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot. If this becomes a dwindling cause celebré, as it was after 1998, we will have failed. I venture to say that we’re going to have telling signs that will continue to crop up about our system failure, no matter what we do in the next year. But how bad it will be depends on how quickly we act in the next few years.
VerdeX: As the CEO of Global Green USA, you have global interests, but you’re based in California. Talk about the engine of California in the climate change issues that Global Green is invested in. What’s going on here that will drive change in the rest of the world?
Petersen: Depending on how the potential of our greenhouse gas emission legislation— whether it’s Pavley’s first or second bill or the lawsuit that was just announced against the EPA—plays out, California can really lead this country, and hopefully the world, to take its cue. That’s really what the meeting in Bali is about and why we’re having this conference: What’s the next step past here? How do we get past 2012 in setting targets, commitments, and deadlines to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? What cities like Santa Monica, San Francisco, or Berkeley are doing is a real laboratory. When we first started, Gorbachev used to say, “Why are you just focused here in California?” We had a D.C. office from the beginning, but as a growing group ten years ago, we said that this is really the place of so much innovation. It continues to be true today and will continue to be so in the future.
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