Looking ahead to COP29 in November, we caught up with sustainability expert and futurist, Ed Gillespie, to discuss the role business can play in tackling the climate crisis.
What are the opportunities in sustainable tech that most businesses are missing?
The big opportunities in sustainable technology come not from increasing the efficiency of business as usual, but rather developing entirely new ways of doing things. I am very struck by William Jevons’ Paradox, coined in 1865 in the heat of the industrial revolution. Jevons’ observed that “An increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease”. What he’d seen was that as the efficiency with which coal was being burned increased, the rate of it’s consumption actually went up, as the increased efficiency also increased the availability of coal, and reduced its’ price. There was more of it to burn, and it was cheaper, and so people did. This explains why despite myriad energy efficiency increases in the subsequent century and a half our appetite and demand for, and the actual consumption of energy has always gone up. Increased efficiency is only ever a partial solution.
Technology is a question, not an answer in itself, and if you treat it as a provocation you will end up responding to the challenge it presents more authentically and effectively in ways beyond simple efficiencies. It’s not about doing the same things slightly less badly, but really about doing new and better things. Technology offers us choices, portals of possibility, but we need to understand the corridors of constraint on the other side of the thresholds as we cross them, often because once we step through the doorway of invitation there is no way back!
A mindset of regenerative technology represents the potential to reinvent the way we approach our work, to ‘multi-solve’ problems, reconnecting people to social and ecological health, and doing so in such a way so as to develop circular business models, empower people and restore nature. There are smart deployments of regenerative technology all around us from community powered tourism site FairBnB, through social fintech PlasticBank tackling plastic waste to end poverty, to KMXTechnologies turning lithium mining liabilities into assets.
I think what I call ‘heart-led’ technology will also be critical in future, technology that deepens our existing relationships with nature through Extended or Augmented Reality in ways like VR arts collective Marshmallowl Laser Feast have already done so powerfully.
In your work, what have you seen that makes you optimistic about businesses’ ability to help tackle the climate crisis?
Where I see real authentic hope in tackling the climate crisis is when it comes from those organisations willing to confront the challenge head-on in a truly open-minded and open-eyed way. The uncertainty this honesty creates is where our opportunity and agency for real change come from. By sitting with the awkward discomfort and asking the difficult and uncomfortable questions. This is extremely challenging but ultimately incredibly liberating as it then opens up genuine possibilities for transformative change. We are way beyond the territory of well-intentioned incrementalism now. We need big, urgent and radical solutions.
I’ve been working with FirstBus in the UK, one of the country’s biggest bus operators (4500 buses, 1M passengers/day). They have committed to a Net Zero all electric vehicle fleet by 2035. It’s a resolutely commercial strategy with £1.5B CAPEX attached to it, and it is going to not only transform their business, but also tackle climate change when their entire fleet is powered by renewable energy, lead to cleaner, quieter streets and breathable urban air and continue do what buses do best – be a swiftly deployable mass transit solution that connects people to jobs, entertainment and each other.
Perhaps most impressively however FirstBus is also making it’s all-new high-tech rapid-charging electric bus depots available to other businesses and organisations to charge their electric vehicles during the day whilst their buses are out on the road carrying passengers. This then creates a systemic benefit and shift towards an all electric vehicle fleet on our roads – with all the climate and air quality benefits that entails. That to me is really thinking like a system, but acting in an entrepreneurial fashion to make bigger change happen at scale in the larger system beyond yourself. That mindset unlocks the future.
What was the last book your read?
I’ve just finished ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’ by Edward Abbey, a pioneering ecological activism novel that follows an unlikely crew of saboteurs who come together to confront the logging, mining and extractive industries that were desecrating their landscapes. It’s funny, inspiring and beautifully poetic in places, with an undertone of poignancy given it was written in 1975 and the challenges to our environment have only become sharper in the ensuing decades since.
Have you ever had a mentor?
I have been fortunate enough to be informally mentored by a number of very wise venerable heads in the environment and sustainability movement, including Jonathon Porritt and John Elkington, widely considered and respected as ‘The Godfathers of Sustainability’. Their generosity and kindness over almost thirty years of my career have been a source of constant inspiration, invaluable guidance and both philosophical and psychological support. I can only hope that I am able to reciprocate a fraction of their approach with any of the assistance I am able to give to the next generation of activists, consultants and futurists coming up now.
What advice would you give your younger self?
It really doesn’t matter as much as you think it does what other people think about you. Do not worry or be concerned about speaking from your heart and articulating your truths. Do not be afraid of holding people’s feet to the fire. But also listen deeply for the emotional and psychological resonances in people’s responses. If you can do all this with humour, sometimes self-deprecating, carefully point out and satirise the ridiculous ways in which we often do things in the name of ‘modernity, and illuminate new paths of possibility whilst stretching the imagination of the possible, people will be inspired by that style of leadership and its honest authenticity.
For more information on Ed Gillespie’s speaking topics, availability and fees, contact leo@vbqspeakers.com.