Cut, conserve, remove: John Doeer’s strategy for leaders towards a net zero future.
By Alyson Lundstrom for Orora
Speed and Scale: A Rally Cry for Leaders and the Earth
Cut, conserve, remove: John Doeer’s strategy for leaders towards a net zero future.
By Alyson Lundstrom
John Doerr, for most of his life, was a well known venture capitalist, backing everything from Amazon to Google, until a statement from his 15 year old daughter after watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth changed everything. “I’m scared, and I’m angry,” she said, “Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it.” She was talking to the right guy. It was then that Doerr became a leader of leaders.
Using the management theories of Intel’s CEO, Andy Grove, Doerr developed a problem solving strategy based on “objectives and key results,” or OKRs, which became the key foundation for the companies he bankrolled and on which he based his first #1 New York Times best selling book, Measure What Matters.
Doeer recognized that this strategy for tackling big problems in the corporate world could hold a solution for the monumental task of tempering the doomsday scenario of atmospheric carbon gone unchecked.
Leveraging studies that showed the scale of economic disaster, the world faces if we exceed 2030 net zero targets and the fact that even if the current Paris Agreements are met in full, we may end up past the tipping point of global catastrophe, he submitted that nothing less than drastic, immediate action would do to turn this burning boat around. And so, Speed & Scale: An Action Planner for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now was born.
Cut, conserve, remove
Inspired by Franklin D Roosevelt’s World War II strategy, six tight, action oriented bullet points for winning the war scribbled on a napkin, Doeer set out to tackle the invisible threat casting a shadow over the next generation; carbon emissions.
Acknowledging that 80-year solutions are not conceivable to drive action now, Doeer sketched his own definitive six point plan with clear and measurable, aggressive, and timebound goals to reach net zero by 2050.
Electrify transportation
Decarbonize the grid
Fix food
Protect nature
Clean up industry
Remove carbon
Accelerators attached to these objectives include heavily leaning into policy and politics, movements, innovation, and investment. In order of climate impact, he set three key strategies to achieve these objectives and key metrics; cut (slash emissions), conserve (get more efficient), and remove (clean up what’s left). Imperative to this plan is that all three strategies are pursued simultaneously in a final race to keep the Earth inhabitable.
“It is now cheaper to save the Earth than ruin it.”
- Hal Harvey
COVID revealed that a world in hibernation brought a 6% reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions - a 2.3 gigaton reduction in the unrelenting assault on our ozone layer. Seeing it was possible, Doeer hatched his handbook for leaders to tackle climate change aggressively, with Speed & Scale.
While putting money on clean energy was once considered risky, the turn of 2020 showed it is now a viable express route to economic growth. “Cleantech companies demand more money, more guts, more time, and more perseverance,” Doeer writes, “...the washouts are acutely painful. But the success stories - however few and far between - are worth all the setbacks and then some. These companies are more than turning a profit. They are helping to heal the Earth.”
Zero out emissions
Doeer’s plan enlists a team of policy experts, entrepreneurs, scientists, and climate leaders to discuss the need to leverage capitalism for environmental gains. For Mary Barra, CEO of GM, that meant making a bold move to end the companies 112 year run with combustion engines. She found that given more ease of entry; consumers were open to an electric vehicle transition. And that sales could actually be accelerated through policy.
When it comes to decarbonizing the grid, Doeer spoke to Lynn Jurich of the aggressively scaled solar company Sunrun, who saw that a zero upfront cost model could vault them past early adopters of domestic renewable energy and empower homeowners to take control of their energy needs.
Food environmentalists will tell you that you make a choice about the earth you want to live on three times a day; breakfast, lunch, and dinner. To “fix food” and the enormous agricultural emissions that come with it, Doeer went to Ethan Brown, the founder of alt protein disrupter Beyond Meat, that despite an uphill battle with global acceptance, now has a spot in the cold case in over eighty countries. Brown saw taking the meat out of meat, while maintaining the nutritive value as the ultimate way to circumvent the carbon emissions from the agriculture industry, where a vicious cycle of soil degradation, carbon emissions from machinery, and ultimately an inequitable distribution of food crops goes into making us hamburgers among other luxury food items every day.
Doeer also lays out leadership examples and speaks to changemakers who are protecting nature, cleaning up the industry, and catalyzing change in carbon removal. All at electrifying speed and scale, showing that it can be done.
Accelerate the transition
While Speed & Scale has climate action tips for all, it also reveals the pain points to make an urgent transition an actionable, scalable reality. His ode to a better world gives insights into how politicians, citizens, governments, and especially investors can accelerate this last push for the future we want our children to thrive.
We are at once the problem and the solution, and Doeer invites us all to lean, with all our might, into the latter.
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