Global Green's Matt Petersen On Society's Relationship With Globe

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.