Intuit has partnered with Project Drawdown to negate fifty times its emissions through carbon removal by 2030. Project Drawdown's Executive Director, Dr. Jonathan Foley, is on the show to explain Intuit's commitment, their collaboration, and whether this is the beginning of the tech industry's surge into carbon removal.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon, Lead Strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Dr. Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown. Saw a very interesting press release come out of Intuit. I won’t tell you exactly what it is. I’ll let Dr. Foley explain. So what exactly is happening with Intuit, Dr. Foley, and what is Project Drawdown’s role in this process?
Jonathan Foley: Yeah. Well, thanks for asking, Ross. Intuit is really stepping up the game of all companies, I think, working on building a climate-safe future. A lot of companies have recently pledged to do something along the lines of a Paris Accord or, you know, to be basically carbon neutral sometime in the middle of the century. You know, that is, you know, zero out the net emissions of a corporation maybe by 2050. Intuit says, well, that’s not enough. Simply reducing the pollution we add to the atmosphere, contributing to climate change, just reducing that isn’t really a leadership position.
It’s kind of a follower position. Leaders would step up and go beyond that to say, yeah, Yes, we should clean up our pollution, of course, absolutely. But can we go beyond it, working with our customers, our clients, the communities within which we work, our employees, other organizations and governments? How can we be a leader? So Intuit put out a really bold, bold commitment saying that they’re going to not only zero out their emissions, they’re going to go 50 times beyond that and do it only within a decade. So they call it their 50 by 30 commitment that is 50 times drawdown by the year 2030.
And we’re really proud to partner with them and are starting to work with other companies. I can’t name them yet, but other companies quietly to also make such bold commitments to go far beyond carbon neutral to truly carbon negative and be a huge net benefit to fighting climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, this is very exciting. And for those of you who may not be aware, Intuit runs Mint and TurboTax and other financial applications like that are consumer facing. You probably use some of them.
Jonathan Foley: Yeah. They also, I mean, one of the things I’m excited about is so many of their customers are small to medium-sized businesses, you know, kind of small entrepreneurs and, you know, kind of, you know, small businesses around the country, around the world, really. And so if Intuit can help And so this is a nice way to enable a big business to help small businesses and communities and families and others around the world really also get on board with addressing climate change. And that’s why we’re really excited with a company like Intuit to work with them.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a very good point. And this is also following on what we’ve seen from Stripe and Shopify. And it sounds like there’s more in the works. Why do you think all of these large visible companies are now focusing on carbon negativity and actually being net drawers down of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Why is this happening right now?
Jonathan Foley: Well, I think it’s, you know, just the urgency of the problem and the opportunity that might be here to address it. Sadly, we’ve spent way too long, decades and decades, you know, since the late 80s, I’ve been focusing on this stuff. We’ve been trying to convince, you know, the UN and our We need our national capitals to solve this problem for us. And, well, they haven’t. Very little leadership is coming from Washington, D. C. right now, unfortunately, and the U. N. framework is just so slow and cumbersome. So we need other kinds of leaders to step up as well.
I think corporations have a special role to play that, you know, they They helped create some of the mess we’re in, some companies especially. But also they have the power of the purse. They have resources, they have technology, they have talented staff, they have a bully pulpit. And they can exercise a lot of leadership as well. That could be really crucial in addressing climate change. And we just need more of all of the above right now. And it’s exciting to see some corporations take it to the next level.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. That’s been an exciting thing for us to watch over here. Do you think that we’ll see a lot more of these truly carbon negative corporate commitments then moving forward? And it seems like not an arms race. What’s the correct metaphor I’m looking for? It seems like companies are now jockeying to lead being the most carbon negative and making these big statements and trying to get press and trying to show that they are ahead of the curve on this. So do you think we’re going to see a lot more of this in the next year, a couple of years?
Jonathan Foley: Oh, I sure hope so. I mean, wouldn’t that be nice to have kind of a virtuous race to solutions instead of a race to just profits and destruction of climate? That would be very, very nice. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind at all seeing companies trying to one-up each other all the time on this kind of space. That’d be great. And I’d love to see cities do the same thing and states and countries kind of one-upping each other. Oh, yeah, you’re going to get carbon negative by 2040. We’re going to do it in 2035 or whatever.
That would be great. I’d love to see Donald Trump get on Twitter and commit us to something like that because of his ego or whatever. Now, I think it’s also a leadership position because, you know, solving climate change really is good for us. There’s every solution you look at within like the original drawdown book or others, you see that almost all of the solutions to climate change have enormous co-benefits initially in like reducing costs through energy efficiency or locking in good rates for energy for, you know, renewable energy purchasing. Or it’s also to help attract and retain talent.
A lot of young professionals today really want to work with companies that have purpose and kind of a social impact that’s positive. And I think this helps them too. It also helps reputation and also future regular relationships. And so, I think this is just a win-win-win for almost all businesses. Some will struggle with this, of course. But I think a leading company, especially in tech and other fields where they’re They want to keep ahead of this leadership position and also have relatively small emissions compared to big manufacturing companies, let’s say, but have outsized influence.
So companies like Intuit or Stripe, you were mentioning before, can really do a lot, I think, in this space to lead, and it’s going to be good for them and their shareholders as well. So I think it’s a win-win.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. I’m very excited, looking forward to seeing a lot more of these, doing a lot more episodes where I’m able to speak with people about gigantic corporate commitments. So I hope you’re right. I think you probably are. So let’s keep our fingers crossed. We’ll see. Well, what’s next for Project Drawdown? What else are you working about that you can speak about here?
Jonathan Foley: Yeah, well, Project Drawdown’s actually be releasing a lot of new things in the next few months. It’s a really busy and exciting time for us. A lot of people, if they know about Project Drawdown, know about us through the book that was published just about two years ago now called Drawdown. That represented a huge body of research done by about 100 people over a couple of years. And it was just a beautiful summary of kind of what do we know today about potential climate solutions? That is, how big could they be?
How do they work? And what might they cost? And the original book reviewed about 100 of these, which is pretty extraordinary, and did it in a nice, accessible, kind of friendly coffee table book format, which is really pretty cool. That all happened before I joined Drawdown, and I’m just so pleased of the work they But now we’re reaching Drawdown 2. 0, where we’re going to be updating all of the solutions again, all of the framework again. We’re going to change fundamentally how we present the solutions in, I think, a much more powerful way and release them much more frequently.
And do it over electronic means. So in February of 2020, we’ll be releasing the Drawdown 2020 solution set. And I suspect we’ll be releasing updates maybe every six months or so, almost like software, because the world changes really quickly. We need to know what the latest, latest cost on batteries and solar panels and other things need to be for these calculations. But also the science gets better. We learn more. There’s more practice in the world. We can kind of reflect more on this, but also we can add more solutions. For example, we’re adding later in 2020, some new ocean solutions, which were not so prevalent in the first book.
So keep an eye out for that. In February 2020, we’ll be doing a major, major release of new solutions, new frameworks and new areas and a kind of a new way of presenting them. In the meantime, we’re building kind of three partnership areas that might be of interest to your listeners. One we announced yesterday is called Drawdown Learn. If you go to drawdown.org slash learn, you’ll go to this space, which is meant to be a network of educators. Whether it’s informal classrooms like K-12, colleges and universities and so on, as well as informal learning, kind of in workshops, just over the web, just interested in folks who want to learn more about climate solutions.
There are a number of new resources being put together there, including some online classes we’ll be offering, some new teaching materials and a teacher’s network. So that’s pretty exciting. We’re really thrilled about that. A little later this year, we’ll be launching Drawdown Communities, which will be kind of a new space on our website focusing on community resources, communities that have reached out to us saying, we want to be a drawdown city, a drawdown county or state or whatever, and that we want to provide some resources to help them get started, but also to network them to each other so they can learn from the best practices of other drawdown communities, of which there seem to be just hundreds of interested parties.
And then a little bit after that, we’re really excited. We’re launching Drawdown Labs, which is basically our business partnership incubator. This is where the work with Intuit will take place, but other companies we’re talking to as well. So Drawdown Labs is going to be a kind of a skunk works within Drawdown focusing on how do we help companies and others implement climate solutions at scale to go far beyond just being carbon neutral, but to be really eating into the emissions we need to lower for the world. So a lot of things coming up, Drawdown 2020 in February, Drawdown Learn today, basically, Drawdown Communities and Drawdown Labs all in the next couple of months.
A lot on our plates.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it sounds very busy over there in a good way, though. Those are all worthwhile things. I’m sure we’ll do future shows with many of these exciting updates.
Jonathan Foley: We’re excited. We’ve had our heads down working on this stuff for a few months. So it’s nice to kind of, you know, get up for air and show these things soon. So we’re really excited about that.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Yeah, I’ll be happy to feature that. And if you look in the show notes, I’ll put links, listeners, in case you want to follow up on any of this. And then also, I know that you’re quite active on Twitter. You’re at Global Eco Guy. Is that right?
Jonathan Foley: Yeah. Yeah, I’m Global Eco Guy. Unfortunate handle, but it was available. So both on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all that stuff. But I’m also on the web at globalecoguy.org is sort of my blog and personal website. And of course, You can follow us at Project Drawdown on social media as well. And of course, at drawdown.org, our main website. And there you can also sign up for a newsletter that we publish every so often, which is a good way to keep in touch too. So hope your listeners follow us and see what we’re up to.
We’d love to get feedback too and hear from your listeners and partners about what we can do better.
Ross Kenyon: Sure, absolutely. So check those show notes, listeners, and go there. Get involved. This is a great nexus for you to become involved in the carbon removal drawdown space. Well, Dr. Foley, thank you so much for being here with us. I’m grateful for your time and doing the show.
Jonathan Foley: Hey, thanks for the time, Ross. I really appreciate it. And good luck with all the great work you’re doing, too.
Unknown speaker: Great. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: And if you enjoy the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening.
