Sustainability Guru: Climate Changes Must Be Fought Through Changes in Behavior

As a favored consultant for international companies, author of four bestsellers in business literature and one of London's most sought-after presences on the lecture circuit, John Grant has made himself spokesman for changing the world from the bottom up, with products and concepts capable of engendering new green trends and behavior patterns among consumers.

Monday Morning* catches up with him during a visit to Denmark shortly after he has piqued an auditorium filled with business people from the Nordic countries (Nordic Climate Solutions conference, see "Swedish PM: Act Today to Save Tomorrow" and "A Bottle of Whiskey for a Climate Agreement: A Conversation With Hunter Lovins," both published here at the Climate Community) by saying that these countries, despite the highly buzzed cleantech industry, are lagging completely behind when it comes to true green behavior. And besides, cleantech is not at all the panacea for climate problems, as we are prone to believe.

Monday Morning: What exactly do you mean by that?

John Grant: Don't get me wrong. Cleantech is great. You can get very much efficiency out of this. But technology is only the easy part. It does not make us change our lifestyles fundamentally. And that is what is needed if we honestly want to avoid irreversible climate damage over the next decades. The problem is that we do not believe anyone is willing to make sacrifices. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you speak to people in a different way and ask: "What is worrying you? And how do you deal with your anxieties?," most people will respond: "If only someone would tell me what I myself can do to make a difference."

In certain ways, John Grant is reminiscent of a friendlier Gordon Ramsey. The sheer joy of speaking, the pace and the sometimes bewildering jumps in scenery are the same. He rambles expansively, sprinkling names and historic references. But – unlike Ramsey – he is almost excessively calm. And you can be in no doubt why he has achieved guru status in marketing circles and among CEOs, for there are many eye-openers among his unconventional thoughts.

JG: The problem is that today, ordinary people feel alienated from both politics and business. We are thought of as "Nixon babies." They are afraid we will scream if we are disturbed. Therefore, politicians and businesses spend a lot of energy adapting the surrounding world to our present lifestyle and behavior. This is particularly evident in U.S. politics, which has for years argued in favor of the American way of life and maintained that the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation. So they reach for the simple solution and try to solve the climate problems through technology, like hybrid cars.

But this is merely technology crafted to make us able to continue the American dream that freedom equals your own private car. Maybe we should instead opt for new solutions that can change this behavior. For instance, radically new public transportation solutions offering far more choices than are available to us today.

A snake in paradise

John Grant's pet theory is that everything should revolve around making green products the norm, not around making run-of-the-mill products appear green. The latter merely amounts to greenwashing – an effective way of exploiting the green agenda in order to push sales of products that do not basically contribute to a climate-friendly society.

MM: Would you place hybrid cars in that category?

JG: Yes and no. Hybrid cars do not fundamentally challenge the unsustainable behavior that each of us must perforce own a car which is resource-costly to produce, maintain, and dispose of. Also, hybrid cars today are only fuel-efficient gasoline automobiles. It remains doubtful whether switching to a hybrid car will actually reduce an individual's total carbon dioxide footprint.

Grant has built up steam, though not in Ramsey's sometimes livid and aggressive manner. He is still extremely pleasant to be with. But his speed has increased an extra notch, and he leans forward over the table. The subject has changed to the so-called "rebound effect": the idea that environmental savings in one area only pop up as environmental burdens in another. Grant is convinced that we will get nowhere without changes in behavior.

"The problem is that when you drive your Prius you feel that you can drive a little longer and more often with a clean conscience. Another effect is that money saved in one area is often just transferred to spending in another. This lies in our behavior. Therefore products making it cheaper for us to go on, like the hybrid car, have a questionable effect on total carbon dioxide emissions," he says.

The rebound effect is a snake in the financial paradise of the cleantech industry. This business area has recently achieved boisterous growth by equating energy savings with financial savings. The subject thus remains a controversial one, dividing the current global scientific community in two – just as human-created climate changes did a few years back.

Scientific members of IPCC, the UN international panel on climate change, could not reach an agreement on the significance of the rebound effect, therefore avoiding mention of it in the reports that today underpin the UN climate strategy. Today, this body is met with criticism, say, by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), which concludes that the rebound effect is indeed a significant factor liable to overturn strategies hitherto applied to reaching the necessary global goals for carbon dioxide reduction.

And with his background in marketing and profound knowledge of consumer behavior, Grant has no doubt that this is a quagmire that should be taken seriously: "It is a serious problem that we must face when creating new solutions," he states.

Back to the laundromat

MM: It appears that dramatic changes in Western consumption and lifestyle are needed. How do you envision that the necessary changes in behavior can be sped up?

JG: More collective consumer goods are a fine place to start. The laundromat is an excellent example of how collective life forms are more sustainable. By going for shared laundromats instead of a washer/dryer in each and every home it is possible to invest in far more costly, but also far better machines. They will wash clothes more efficiently, filter, handle, and reuse water more efficiently and save energy at the same time.

The problem lies in the fact that there is still a lot more status connected with owning things yourself. The laundromat is seen as working class and a vestige from our parents' time, or our grandparents' time even. So the challenge lies in inventing collective systems that appeal to our times. If we stick to the example of the laundromat, it might, for instance, be possible to combine laundry with a fitness center, which today has become a trendy collective good. Why not unload your laundry when checking into the center and pick it up after your workout? At the same time, some of the energy consumed by the washing machines might be covered by using the energy put into the fitness machines.

The big problem is that we have inherited an economy destined to ravage the climate. And that we are under time pressure from many sides to rethink the economy. The present economy is based on the Industrial Revolution, which built on the energy stored in fossil fuels throughout millions of years. It has been a free ride, but this is also the only free ride we're getting. Within the coming decades we will run out of the cheap fossil fuels. Coal may have a time horizon of 200 years, but the era of cheap oil will probably be over within a decade. That will be the end of the economy as we now know it. The trick lies in replacing it with a better alternative in time.

MM: Considering that we have used an entire century to build up the present economy, do we even have that time?

JG: Conventional wisdom says it takes a generation to fashion a structural revolution, but the Internet is your example that things can be sped up. In just a few years, the Net has created entirely new rules of the game in the economy. Not necessarily more sustainable, but we can see how just a few years can change the world completely; changing planes in mid-air, so to speak. Besides, there are many examples of how the Internet constitutes a very effective platform for systems like the laundromat example, making it easy for people to shift to a more sustainable behavior. For instance, the City Car Club [Britain's leading online booking system for shared vehicles] has made it easy to drive a car without in fact owning one.

Look out for crocodiles

Another driver for redesigning the global economy is the present financial crisis. In times of recession, there has typically also been a will to create big changes. In the 1930s, this made Roosevelt create a New Deal, modifying and humanizing the economy. Consumers were to be given more weight than producers; and society came into focus instead of individualists. Today, we are in a similar situation, according to Grant. The difference only being that the demand for structural changes is even bigger than in the '30s.

"You could say that this is a very unusual situation for innovation to be in. Normally, we don't really know where we are going. But we do today. The goal is a low-carbon society. We have the vision. It is just far away. The real question is, How to we get from here to there? I recently discussed this with David Blood [Al Gore's partner in the investment firm Generation Investment Management and member of the Copenhagen Climate Council]. He said: 'We have run out of quick profits. Now we have to do the unthinkable. And the unthinkable is a challenge. If we could choose not to do it, nobody would take the chance. But if we are pressured by a crisis, we have to.' That is the situation we are now facing," Grant concludes.

And after having juggled words, he ends on a pedagogical note: "If you imagine this situation as a nature documentary, it is quite straightforward. Right now, we are standing by a riverbank. We must cross the river in order to get to new grazing pastures; in our case, a climate-friendly economy. From behind, we are pressured by an economy that is collapsing. So there is no turning back. We can either waste our strength wallowing in the mud of the riverbank or leap into the river to reach the new pastures. That is the choice of our generation. The scary part is that we have never been in the river before, and we don't know if there are crocodiles lurking. But we have to take that chance."

Contact the author, Bjarke Wiegand, at: bw@mm.dk

*Editor's Note: This article originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Monday Morning.