About this episode
Few people understand the green shift taking place in the corporate world better than Joel Makower. Joel is co-founder and chairman of Trellis Group, formerly known as GreenBiz, a news, content, and events company sitting at the intersection of business, technology, and sustainability. His decades of experience in this space have been marked by a number of unexpected swings, from his beginnings as a workplace health reporter, to becoming one of the first journalists to cover corporate sustainability, to his current diverse slate of projects, including one helping the music industry go green. His opinions on what it means to have a green job, among other topics, are thought-provoking, to say the least.
Notes and resources
Full transcript
Michael Gold (00:00)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Climate Swings, the show for people reaching for the next vine of climate and sustainability in their professional lives, produced in partnership with climate education and action platform, Terra.do. I’m your host, Michael Gold.
Michael Gold (00:19)
Few people understand the green shift taking place in the corporate world better than Joel Makower. Joel is co-founder and chairman of Trellis Group, formerly known as GreenBiz, a news, content, and events company sitting at the intersection of business, technology, and sustainability. His decades of experience in this space have been marked by a number of unexpected swings, from his beginnings as a workplace health reporter, to becoming one of the first journalists to cover corporate sustainability, to his current diverse slate of projects, including one helping the music industry go green. His opinions on what it means to have a green job, among other topics, are thought-provoking, to say the least. Here’s Joel.
Michael Gold (01:07)
Joel Makower, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s so great to have you here.
Joel Makower (01:11)
Great to be here, Michael. Thanks so much for having me.
Michael Gold (01:13)
So could you just start with a quick sketch of your career and what you’re up to in a professional capacity?
Joel Makower (01:23)
Wow, I never know how far back to go to do that, but I’m a journalist by training. I’ve never worked for a publication. I’ve written for lots of publications, but I became a journalist because I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to be if I grew up. And my hypothesis at the time was that under the guise of sticking my nose into other people’s business, I’d find something that I was good at and interested in and synced with my values and lifestyle or whatever.
And for the first decade and a half, turns out what I was good at and interested in and all that was sticking my nose into other people’s business and writing about it. And then I had an opportunity to, which we could get into or not, to create the US edition of a British bestseller called The Green Consumer Guide by a guy called John Elkington, who you may know. And that propelled me into this career and around the, initially around green consumerism, but very quickly pivoted to the business side. So these days, I am the co-founder and chairman of a company called Trellis Group. Some people might remember it by its not that long ago, former name, Green Biz Group. We’re a media events and networking company focusing at the intersection of business and technology and sustainability. And I’m happy to talk more about what we do. And that’s one of my hats these days.
I don’t have an operational role at Trellis, so I have some other activities going on around music sustainability and a number of other projects and relationships. So I guess that’s sort of a sketch.
Michael Gold (03:01)
Thank you for that. Looking back, the Green Consumer Guide, can you discuss that a little bit? When did that emerge and how did you get involved with that?
Joel Makower (03:14)
So if you look backwards at my career, which I guess is what you’re asking me to do, and the through line, it’s really at the intersection of business, technology, and society. So my first book in 1981 was on the health effects of office environments, because at the time they were sealing up all the buildings to save energy and tearing down all the walls to make the cubicle “Dilbert” culture and bringing all these synthetics, particle boards and materials and textiles and running HVAC less and the windows were sealed shut and all of a sudden, and then they introduced computers. That’s how old I am. They introduced PCs. There had been workstations in there, but all of a sudden this had sort of become the factory of the future. And so I wrote a book about that and that sort of, you know, I wrote about consumer and business issues and all those things together that interested me. And I ended up in the, from going from a freelance magazine journalist to becoming a book packager, book publisher, small press, then book packager for New York publishers. So by the late ’80s, I had relationships with most of the big publishers, the Harper Collins and Random Houses and Simon Schuster’s and Penguin Books and all those, and had produced books for them, not just ones I had written, but ones that other people had written and I had put together in some fashion. So in 1989 Penguin Books called and says, we just bought the US rights to a British bestseller called the Green Consumer Guide, and you would be the perfect person to Americanize it. And I’m saying, okay, well, how hard could that be? You take out the letter U and change S’s to Z’s and you know, and I said, well, send it to me. Let me take a look. And they did. And I said, this isn’t really appropriate for US audiences. You almost have to write a whole different book.
And they said, okay, write a whole different book. And I did. And it was published in early 1990 in the big run up to Earth Day 1990, which was a huge media event back when we had, you know, things like that, as media events and TV specials and every magazine had the earth on its cover—for younger listeners, magazines are like big papery blogs. And, and I was very quickly became an expert on green consumer issues, at least the media thought that. I soon thereafter had a weekly syndicated newspaper column in about 90 papers called the Green Consumer. And I was preaching the gospel of, every time you open your wallet, you cast a vote for or against the environment and the marketplace is in the democracy. It doesn’t take 51% of people voting. That was before I knew that in a democracy, didn’t take 51% of people voting, but I digress.
And then I wrote more books and things about the green consumer issues. And then I realized two things. One, there was no green consumer movement in the US. As I looked over my shoulder, I realized I was kind of standing there by myself. I later surmised that there may have been a reason that my book was called the Green Consumer. And it wasn’t necessarily me. But two, the companies I was being asked to come in and talk to about the so-called green consumer movement with themselves dealing with a lot of issues, water, waste, toxics, carbon, energy, and all those things that companies are still grappling with. And no one was really writing about that. So I jumped into that and started a monthly newsletter, what we would later do, a dead tree snail mail newsletter called the Green Business Letter, 1991, and continued to write and other books and speak on that. And then I’m old enough to say this sentence, maybe you are too, Michael, that, and then the internet came along. And I realized that while I always considered myself kind of an information packrat in this new digital world, I was actually a content aggregator. And so I created this knowledge hub called greenbiz.com and launched in ’99, 2000. And that’s the—with the company was later built around where we added events, some of the really big events and a membership network. I realized just not that many years ago, Michael, that I really kind of invented the field of sustainable business journalism. At least nobody else was doing it. I might have been the first. There were some in Europe. I knew a couple of people, particularly with the FT, Financial Times and The Economist, maybe The Guardian back then, but nobody else was writing full-time about sustainable business. So I feel good about that.
Michael Gold (08:02)
And it’s perhaps somewhat ironic given that you didn’t really start out in sustainability per se, right? You started out, you as you were talking about, in workplace health, and the Green Business Guide was presented to you as an opportunity that you decided to pursue. And then you turned it into much more of a career focus. Prior to that Green Business Guide opportunity, like how much was your mindset or your professional interest focused on questions of sustainability as they were at that time?
Joel Makower (08:34)
Yeah, they weren’t called sustainability then. Look, I was a senior in high school during the first Earth Day. That’s again, I’m dating myself. And I grew up in the Bay Area in the ’60s and late ’50s and ’60s. And, you know, it’s hard to grow up here. And my parents were Sierra Club members going back probably before I was born or certainly early on. So it was hard to grow up here in the Bay Area without necessarily, you know, without being that. Although people did. I would tell you a story about a CEO who was my age and vintage that had a different experience. But it was sort of natural for me. And when you go back to my hypothesis about why I started out as a journalist and trying to find something that I was good at and interested in, I had this moment sitting in my office then I was in DC at the time, about 1993 or four when I went, holy crap, I found it or it found me. This is what I was looking for. I’m home. And that was a really lovely moment. And I remember it very clearly. And so it really in some ways was the natural evolution of who I am and how I grew up and, and what I thought was important. I didn’t know that until I found myself there. But it was part of who I am.
Michael Gold (10:03)
Do you recall what specifically precipitated that moment?
Joel Makower (10:08)
Nah, I was just I was sitting in my office and it just I don’t know. I just realized that this is I had created a career out of out of what seemed like an interesting topic. mean, I dealt with lots of interesting topics. I wrote some, you know, magazine articles on computing before PCs, you know, and it was executive computing sections for a bunch of airline magazines, things like that. And I love technology. I love society. I grew up, you know, when I was in journalism school, there were two things going on in the world that were very impactful to me. One was Watergate, which was journalists as truth tellers. And the other was Ralph Nader, Nader’s Raider, the consumer advocate, which was every man as dragon slayers. And so those were, it was part of what I was interested in. I didn’t know how to really manifest it, I sort of did it organically as starting off as a consumer reporter largely for Washington, Washingtonian magazine and a bunch of other publications. But no, just, it just all of a sudden hit me.
Michael Gold (11:19)
So you have a long term and an interesting vantage over, I guess, what one would call the green ecosystem or the green economy. At those early days, what did that encompass? You mentioned briefly like toxic pollutants and stuff like that, but can you get a little bit into more detail about what was considered green at the time?
Joel Makower (11:41)
Well, I mean, there was, first of all, companies were dealing with a lot of things. There were some laws around toxics and carbon. In the ’80s, there had been the Exxon Valdez oil spill. There had been the Bhopal toxic release in India of union carbide that killed, I don’t know, lots and lots of people. And there had been some major environmental disasters. You know, job one at that point was, first of all, stopping the bad stuff, and even things that were legal, but just the overflowing drain pipes and smokestacks and dumpsters. But then they started to get this ethos of doing well by doing good. How could you make some environmental improvements that also got you some reputational benefits and improve the bottom line? And that was where I think things were starting then, you know, and then we gave it well, how does, you know, it’s not just about improving the bottom line, how do you grow the top line? How does this become an engine for revenue and innovation and new products and services and business models? And by the way, as this progress all the way through sustainability and circular economy and everything in carbon and all that, companies are still grappling with how do you stop the bad stuff, that did not go away. There’s still lots and lots of that, as I’m sure anybody who pays attention to the news, sees from time to time that there’s some huge, huge problems. So it’s just really interesting to watch this sort of dichotomy of companies trying to figure out, how does this really drive business value and business success, and at the same time of dealing with some legacy issues that were really horrific.
I mean, you think of a Dow chemical, you know, Dow became a leader and is trying still now to become a leader in circular economy. And they also have just huge, superfund waste site, toxic waste site problems and emissions. They’re one of the, you know, a large emitter. And so, you know, we can talk more about this. But this is the I think the really interesting places. How do you judge a company to be good? You know, at the same time, back then, you know, litter and waste were a problem, you know, dealing with, you know, six pack rings, which are those things that you hold together, you know, six cans of beer or soda, you know, we’re seeing because of some sort of like, the, not too, that many years ago, the turtle with the straw on its nose became a big cause célèbre for, you know, getting rid of plastic straws. Well, that was—there was a book that came out in 1990, bestseller called 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth. And number one on that list was cutting six pack rings so they don’t get caught in nature. And one can look back at that and say, turns out there aren’t 50 simple things to do to save the earth. There’s about six really hard things. But the time that those ethos around waste and recycling was just becoming coming online at a consumer level and at the company level as well. These are some, you know, the things that, again, companies still grappling with today, but they were sort of in their infancy.
Michael Gold (15:09)
And you having been at the forefront of green business discussions for several decades, when did the idea of climate start to enter the discussion? Obviously, you mentioned Rio, right, 1992, but how much was that entering the green business discussion and how did that evolution take shape in those early years?
Joel Makower (15:33)
Well, I remember writing about it in 1990 in the consumer, the Green Consumer Guide, 1989, 1990, that talking about the things that contributed to really talk, we talked about global warming at that time. And so it was, it’s been around for a long time. And I’m not just talking about the scientific studies that go back 30 or 40 years. I’m talking about in the vernacular, in the public conversation. And it really wasn’t until the early nineties, during the George H.W. Bush administration, that it became politicized. And there’s a whole, some good stories about, you know, how and why that happened, and, and the rest is a very sad history, but, you know, the conversation has been around a long time. I don’t know, you know, like, you know, like any tipping point, it’s, it’s, you know, one thing after another, after another, and after another, and all of a sudden you find yourself in this—like, my God, it’s all around me. Because you could say, it’s really been the last five years. You could really say it’s been the last 10 or 15 or 20 years. I don’t really know. I mean, maybe because I’ve been swimming in this water that I don’t see it that clearly. You you or someone else who may have been less engaged in this or engaged more from the outside might say, well, you know, really wasn’t on my radar until, you know, 2012 or something. But, you know, this has been a very long conversation that’s still taking place and still far from settled.
Michael Gold (17:10)
Can you recall any instances of early corporate climate action at the time? Things that corporates were actually doing about this issue in those early days?
Joel Makower (17:22)
About climate or about sustainability.
Michael Gold (17:24)
About climate specifically.
Joel Makower (17:25)
Not so much not any big things that—there were there were lot of big things around waste. And which can roll up to climate, there were some, you know, big-ish things around energy. But corporate climate commitments were not a thing until really, you know, in the 21st century, you know, and probably even, you know, towards the towards the, you know, 2010s. I’m not saying that the companies weren’t doing things, but it really wasn’t—there was no real game-changing thing. I mean, there were things at the time that seemed important. And I don’t remember the year. It’s probably in the late 2000s that BP, the big British petroleum company said, we’re changing—we’re not changing our name—people said they were changing, I mean, they never said that, they were basically—it’s a marketing thing that BP now stands for Beyond Petroleum. And people said, my God, that’s amazing, one of the biggest oil companies in the world is now focusing on what happens after petroleum. That turned out to be the biggest, maybe the biggest single act of greenwash that I’ve ever seen because they, beyond petroleum, and that includes natural gas, if you include beyond that is beyond which all never amounted to more than one-tenth of 1% of their revenue, full stop. And it was a classic example of a company getting so far ahead of its skis. So that made news, that became the chatter for a long time. And there were a handful of companies that like Interface the carpet company that were talking about getting off of oil as early as the late 2000s. But there’s no big announcement. I mean, just for example, in 1990, McDonald’s announced that they were getting off of polystyrene hamburger clamshells. And that was front-page news leading newscasts. And it was a big deal. Now, it turns out there were mixed results and mixed reasons for doing that. Actually, the life-cycle analysis that they conducted actually said that polystyrene foam is probably better for the environment in terms of the impacts, not good for the environment, but less bad for the environment. But the public perception was about paper board and cardboard, so they went to and that was a big story. But those are on waste and very little around carbon.
Michael Gold (20:10)
At Greenbiz slash Trellis, how much has the climate story expanded over the years? Presumably, it’s become much bigger than it was in those early years.
Joel Makower (20:23)
Sure, absolutely. There’s lots of other topics, the circular economy and energy and water, but those all roll up to climate ultimately. So, yeah, it’s become a huge part of our mission statement, helping convening professional communities to solve the climate crisis. That’s our company mission statement. So, yeah, that is job one, I think, for us and for so many others.
Below that is the whole range of, waste, toxics, water, materials, transportation and all these other things that ultimately have an impact on the climate.
Michael Gold (21:05)
So you do subscribe to the idea that every kind of environmental crisis is essentially a climate crisis? Do you think they can be kind of handled in discrete ways or talked about in discrete ways?
Joel Makower (21:16)
Well, they can because I think it’s really hard for most people and most companies to get their head around the fact that this is all connected. I mean, some of them they do. I mean, they’ll say we reduced our materials usage by 22%, which has also reduced our carbon, you know, embedded carbon impact by such and such. You know, companies do recognize that, but I don’t think it, these things are still done some compartmentally instead of systemically. Companies are by nature, compartmentalized. And they’ve got operations and supply chain and procurement and facility management, all of which are of a piece, not to mention finance and accounting and marketing and communications and everything else, HR. They’re all of a piece, but they’re not treated as a system necessarily. At least it’s very rare. I’m not even sure I could name a company that truly is doing that.
Michael Gold (22:15)
In thinking about your coverage of companies, how has the sustainability function specifically changed within the companies that you’ve looked at? Have they grown more integrated into companies? I, you talked about that companies often exist in silos, but you are seeing more and more chief sustainability officers—it’s become basically its own cottage industry?
Joel Makower (22:40)
It is and it continues to evolve, Michael, there’s—for a long time and to a large extent, still, sustainability professionals are armies of one or three or five or maybe 10 people in a multi-billion dollar global corporation with huge mandates and very little, few resources and almost no authority. So they operate out of—less out of command-and-control and more out of influence and communications and bridge-building and education. But that’s changed a lot. Now in many companies, large companies, talking about the sustainability function has been pushed out. There is someone in sustainability thinking about sustainability in operations and supply chain and facilities and all the things I mentioned before, even HR and marketing communications. And it often rolls up to the sustainability professional. But something interesting is happening right now. And it’s sort of in some ways a full cycle, full circle from 30 years ago when sustainability was largely around compliance. It wasn’t even called sustainability then. How do you comply with all the different laws that are out there, not just in the United States, but in Europe and Asia and elsewhere?
And then we went into the beyond compliance and all the stuff I talked about. And now there’s a sort of a be careful what you wish for moment. Sustainability professionals that have been asking for standardized reporting and consistent laws across jurisdictions and borders and oceans now have these mandates to do some comprehensive reporting and transparency across a whole range of issues. And so now their jobs are back to compliance. They’re back to, you know, filling out forms and meeting the needs of investors and others. It’s a very different level of what they’re complying to. But it’s it’s both healthy and problematic in that a lot of those resources are directed towards compliance with and being not directed towards actually doing the work.
And at the same time, back to your actual question, the sustainability function, at least a lot of it is moving into the CFO, chief financial officer’s department, because it is about complying with legal mandates and the kinds of things that CFOs do around in the United States, 10Ks and other things that they have to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission or the IRS, are now being asked for around sustainability performance and metrics and goals and commitments and things. And so that’s a change that’s just really getting going. So I think we’re going to continue to see those things shift.
Michael Gold (25:51)
And another aspect of corporate sustainability, the way, at least from my vantage, for a long time has been corporate social responsibility, like the CSR department, right? Are you still seeing that as being a major plank of corporate sustainability? Is it kind of being subsumed into sustainability functions or is it still kind of separate and does a lot of philanthropy and stuff like that?
Joel Makower (26:14)
Well, CSR is obviously a vague term, as is sustainability, but it really is different in lots of companies. In some cases, it’s much more around philanthropy and volunteerism and community engagement. And in other companies, it’s around human rights and fair labor practices and much more significant, I’d say, issues.
You know, again, things continue to shift around and I have, and I know people who have been professionals in big companies whose titles and departments have changed many, many times over the past 10 or 15 or 20 years. And it’s, in what it’s being called is—it may be different from what it was called, you know, in the past, but it’s in some ways, essentially the same thing. So I don’t think, you know, I think what CSR, corporate social responsibility is about, certainly hasn’t gone away. There are fewer, far fewer people who have CSR in their job titles. There are far fewer companies that have a CSR department. I think it’s being integrated. I mean, human rights needs to be part of supply chain. Fair labor needs to be part of HR and supply chain and procurement. So a lot of it’s just going into the business units, which is really where it needs to be. I’ve long quipped that sustainability is way too important to be left to sustainability departments. It really needs to be part of jobs very broadly.
Michael Gold (27:58)
And you alluded to this before, but much of the discussion seems like it recently has shifted also to the idea of seizing opportunities and fostering growth through corporates being more sustainable or launching sustainable products or having a sustainable image. Can you kind of get into how that narrative has taken shape and formed within the corporate community over the time that you’ve been looking at it?
Joel Makower (28:25)
Sure, well, sustainability is many things. And part of it is efficiencies, which is always important for companies. How do you do more with less? How do you maximize the use of every resource? That means not just for one-time use, but ideally on multiple uses or circular models. And that inures to the bottom line, it inures to innovation, to new products, new services, new business models.
We’ve seen products become services where instead of buying the product, you’re renting the service that product provides. So therefore the asset, the physical asset becomes, remains in the ownership of the company that’s the seller as opposed to it’s, I sell it to you and now it’s yours and you have to deal with it at the end of its useful life, which often has been going into a landfill. Now I get to have it back and I get to put those assets back into circulation and to continue to create a value from, more value from fewer molecules or the same number of molecules of whatever we’re talking about.
So that’s part of it. And there’s also the resilience piece. If you’re creating circular supply chains and they’re locally based, you may be less subject to supply-chain shocks as we’ve seen. We saw it during COVID, we’ve seen it with ships and wars and a number of other things happening out in the high seas.
You know, and then, you know, companies still think that’s it. And I believe it is true that this is a way to attract and retain employees and talent, particularly younger, you know, gen-z, millennials who are, you know, at least say they’re looking for these things and to some extent are. And so, you know, there are are a lot of sources of business value. And that’s before you even get into attracting capital and being being a more attractive investment, whether it’s in the public markets or just getting a loan at a favorable rate. So, when I talk about the business case for sustainability, have—when I give speeches, for example, I have an old answer and a new answer. And the old answer is this sort of litany of stuff I was just talking about, saving money, growing revenue, being a preferred supplier, tracking retaining talent, reputational stuff and all that. And that’s not untrue.
But the new answer boils down to a single word, risk. This is about risk, pure and simple. How do you manage risk? Risk is not something to eliminate, risk is something that exists every time we get up in the morning or walk out of the house. So how do you manage risk? And companies don’t eliminate risk. And so it’s reputational risk, financial risk, technology risk, supply chain risk, business continuity risk, a whole bunch of others. And that’s really what this is all about. And the flip side of risk is opportunity. How do companies operate in a world where energy, water, carbon, materials, and toxics are a constraint? And what are the opportunities that fall out of that? And those are really, really interesting conversations, Michael. And I think that’s what, you know, leadership companies are thinking about.
Michael Gold (31:53)
And I’d like to talk a little bit about sort of the climate workforce and people who are interested in going into the space, or maybe have decided to pivot their careers to the space in recent years. Given that all you’ve talked about, regarding what companies are doing and the actions that they’re taking both with regard to risk and opportunities, just in general, what would you say that people should consider if they want to become a corporate climate professional, which I know is kind of a maddeningly vague term, but just from your vantage, what would you say about that?
Joel Makower (32:30)
Wow, there’s a lot to say about that. I get a lot of calls or emails or LinkedIn requests and people who want career advice. I’m just graduating from college. I’m about to go to grad school. I’m a mid-career professional. I’m sort of at the end of my career, but I want to have a capstone, one more rodeo in me. And they want, you know, some specific advice or generic advice about how do I think about it? I want to get into sustainability or clean and green or climate tech or something. And I used to be able to respond to them all. Now there’s so many I can’t, it’s hard. So first of all, people talk about green jobs. And I’m like, what the hell are those? I mean, LinkedIn just put out, in the same week that you and I are talking, their annual green jobs report about the workforce. And, you know, it’s interesting. They looked at a number of, they talk about the demand for green talent, they call it. And they say the talent’s growing faster than the supply. And they list some of the jobs that are hot right now around, you know, building performance and responsible sourcing and and environmental data diligence, things like that. But I’ve talked with them many times and I used to say, I don’t know how to think about green jobs. I—if I work for GM and the assembly line, and last year I was putting windshields on Chevy Escalade, big old honking SUVs, and this year I’m putting very similar windshields on Chevy Bolts, electric vehicles. Is that a green job all of a sudden? You know, have I—am I in a different category? If I am, if I’m the head of accounting for a company that installs solar systems on houses? Is that a green job? I don’t know how to think about that. So I think the term is problematic.
You also hear—and I’ll get to the answer to your question in a second, but I have to sort of rant a little bit here—I also hear this mean that every job should be a green job or a climate job. I’ve heard both of those. Yeah, maybe. But again, is that a accountant for the solar company, a climate job? I mean, sure, you turn your head a certain way and stand on one foot and turn 12 degrees to the north, maybe you can see it that way. And I’m being a little snarky here because I just, you know, I’m all for all of this stuff. I just don’t know how to think about those terms. And so when those people contact me, say I want to get a green job, or I want to be part of the green workforce, I’m not sure what to tell them.
I’ll tell you one more sort of tangential story to make a point. I was the last year at the University of California at Berkeley that one could get a BA in journalism. They abolished the undergraduate program at that point, not because of me, but they basically said, look, if you want to be a journalist, yeah, you can take writing courses, you know, and ultimately after graduation, you get a master’s in journalism, but go learn something. Learn geography or geology or English, you know, or sports or, you know, something, you know, business, obviously, and accounting. And then, you know, dig in in your journalism career around something. Because if you’re a generalist, yeah, there’s some jobs out there, but they’re not very good jobs. And it’s hard to, they’re hard to find. And I think that’s really true of sustainability. If you want to be in sustainability, whatever that means to you, apply your skills, whatever those are.
And then you can go learn something, and then you can scratch your green gene and figure out how to apply it. But those jobs, pure play green jobs are hard to find, at least the way most people define them. Again, I’m not talking about the accountant or the windshield installer. But they’re out there. And so figuring out how do you do project management for a company that’s, you know, installing wind turbines or doing land mitigation, toxic mitigation on land use or any number of other things that are out there. You know, how do you, you know, how do you apply communications skills or whatever it is? And I think that’s, that’s the hard part. So I never know what to tell people, Michael, in terms of, you know, how do you get these jobs?
There, again, the pure play ones are hard to find. A lot of the ones that seem sexy are really just another drudgery job accounting and filling out forms and, you know, making stuff happen. You know, when it’s supposed to happen, project management kinds of things. And you may feel good about the work you’re doing, as opposed to doing something that’s destructive. That’s a that’s a beautiful thing, but I do think people need to go in with their eyes wide open. There are a lot of opportunities on LinkedIn as I said, and this is the Global Green Skills Report 2024. You can look it up, it just came out, well, election week here in the United States. And they talk about utilities industry and construction industry, manufacturing industry and technology industries and information industries. And they talk about some of the specific green skills and job titles that they’re seeing in the millions and millions of job postings that go through the LinkedIn platform. And that’s really helpful information. But ultimately, there’s, and if you go on Trellis, it might come to trellis.net or any number of websites, there’s some green job listings. And you’ll see those, those, they often are nonprofits, which is fine. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, if you want to be in the nonprofit sector, there’s a lot of opportunities. Some of those are frankly fundraising and or sales in the private sector. And that, you know, may or may not be exactly the thing you’re looking for. It’s hard and yet they’re everywhere. And I know that sounds, you know, contradictory, but you kind of have to know what you’re looking for.
Michael Gold (39:30)
So it’s basically have a trade, have some kind of profession and then figure out a way to greenify it, figure out a way to inject sustainability into that, which is in a way sort of what you and I have both done with our, you your journalism, my communications work, et cetera, right?
Joel Makower (39:47)
You said it better in 40 seconds than I said it in four minutes. but, but yeah, you, you, know,
Michael Gold (39:51)
I was inspired by your four-minute response.
Joel Makower (39:56)
But you have to have a vision of what, know, it’s that Japanese ikigai, which is, you know, these four things that, you know, what am I good at? What do I love doing? What does the world need and what can I get paid to do? You know, that’s part of it. And you kind of have to line those things up. But yeah, it’s like anything else. It’s like if you’re, if you weren’t interested in sustainability, or green, and you said, I need to find a job. Well, what is, tell me more. What are you good at? What’s your superpower? What do you wanna be good at? Is there a sector or something that gets you juiced in the morning that you’d love to be a part of? Is it technology? Is it people skills? You have to have a focus. And the same is true in the so-called green economy.
Michael Gold (40:52)
And I guess one specific example that a lot of people probably wouldn’t think of that you are also involved with now professionally is music. Musicians are not considered green jobs by any stretch of the imagination, unless you’re writing pop hits about saving the planet, which I don’t see much of. So can you talk a little bit about the Music Sustainability Alliance, how you got involved with that, and what the aims are?
Joel Makower (41:20)
Sure. Well, as I’ve stepped back from the company I co-founded, the Trellis Group, and you know, sort of, it’s funny because you mentioned this, I think before somebody was talking to me, maybe not in this conversation, but it’s an old meme in sustainability people. My goal is to work myself out of a job where you don’t need a sustainability person. It’s not really true, but people still say that I kind of worked myself out of a job and I wasn’t trying to at my own company. And I looked around one day and said, I don’t really have a job here. I mean, I’m still chairman of the board. I’m the co-founder. I’m the largest shareholder. I’m still the front person for some of the activities, but don’t really have a day-to-day job. So I stepped back and said, okay, I’m not ready to hang things up. And a good friend of mine co-founded something called the Music Sustainability Alliance about a year and a half ago. And I started helping them with their annual summit that they do in the, we do now at the—in Los Angeles the day after the Grammys every February, bringing together the music industry. it was just a real interesting opportunity to take an industry that’s really kind of new to this. It’s kind of sustainable business 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. But the idea is, the Music Alliance is an industry consortium looking at how do you reduce the negative impacts and grow the positive impacts of live music performance. And when you think about it, know, a musician shows up at an arena or a club or a festival and like, what’s the big deal? Well, you think about the logistics, the trucks, the sets, the energy, the food that’s being served there, the waste of the fans and the, if you’ve ever been to a concert and you just look at the number of red plastic cups littering the floor at the end of the night, you know, it’s just one small piece of it.
And it turns out that there’s significant issues that need to be grappled with and haven’t been. And there’s also huge opportunities. How do you create a zero-waste, renewably-powered Coachella or stagecoach or festival of some sort or an event where people carpool, there’s refillables instead of disposables, plant-based foods perhaps is—if not the only option—is available, where the talent, the artist is on stage telling people to get out and vote or something, not necessarily preaching, and not just at the event, but also in their fan engagement that they do all year long. There’s a lot of potential here, and the industry’s really nascent. They’re just starting to figure some of this out. It’s fun to be back to the future, back in an industry, and I have some history with the music industry, well, so it’s kind of sort of coming home in a certain way and helping them sort of figure this out and creating sort of what we did at GreenBiz slash Trellis, which is this community and this knowledge base and this effort to how do we do this together as collaborative spirit.
Michael Gold (44:36)
Were you in a garage band in the ’80s?
Joel Makower (44:40)
I was, I wasn’t in the garage, was in the, what we’ve called it, the rumpus room in my house. But yeah, I was in the band in the, actually in the ’70s, Michael, come on. You know, I was, I was, yeah. Yeah. Well, I was actually, I mean, I’m speaking as actually the late ’60s. So we were, you know, and it’s in Bay Area. So this is, you know, Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish and, and, and—
Michael Gold (44:51)
Everyone was trying to be a Led Zeppelin cover band at the time.
Joel Makower (45:08)
Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Yeah, that’s my exhibit. I also in a previous life in the late ’80s produced in book and audio form, an oral history of Woodstock. And I did a media tour. I was on Oprah with Country Joe McDonald and Richie Havens and on the Today Show with Arlo Guthrie. My original interviews are now sitting in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive in Cleveland. And it’s a whole other story. You can go to makower.com/woodstock and you’ll see, you know, what was it? You know, younger me on Oprah and a bunch of other stuff.
Michael Gold (45:52)
Your extracurricular activities are still more impressive than most of our first-tier careers. Thanks for that.
Joel Makower (45:59)
Well, it’s been fun. Yeah.
Michael Gold (46:02)
I’d like to talk about one more topic if we can, which is the importance of live events, because I know that that is, as you were discussing on another podcast recently, essentially Trellis’s main business line at this point. But in this era of Teams and Zooms and post-pandemic and everything kind of went virtual for a while, how do you continue to keep momentum up about the importance of live events in catalyzing change for climate.
Joel Makower (46:34)
Yeah, it’s a really good great question, Michael. I mean, it’s despite, you know, Zoom and all the others, people still want to come together and, you know, press the flash and break bread and all the things that we do. But, and that’s part of something I think bigger than it’s true in any industry. But I think it’s super true in sustainability that we learned and Eric Ferro, our CEO, who comes from the event, tech-event world really taught us this, the success of an event is, partly based on the content and, you know, with the speakers and all that. It certainly has something to do with the hospitality, the environment, the venue, the vibe, if you will. But all of that rolls up into how do you create community in an event that creates community where people want to come back as much for the community as for the content.
That’s what makes a successful event. And we worked really hard at that. We very intentionally try at all of our events, we do four five a year, big events that range from a thousand to 5,000 people to create that kind of community. So much so that during the pandemic, there was a period of time, gosh, I forget the Greek alphabet, it might’ve been Omicron, but at some point it looked like things were going to abate and this would have been GreenBiz 22. Like we’re going to be able to come back to our, we do this event called GreenBiz in Phoenix and every February we’re going to come back to Phoenix finally after we did one in 2020 just before the stuff hit. We didn’t do it in ’21 and looked like in the fall of ’21 that we’re going to be able to go back in ’22. And then omicron hit and then we weren’t sure anymore. We ultimately, you know, and people were saying, well, you know what? You better do one in ’22 because we’re going to go anyway. Just we want to be together.
We ultimately did and it was a great event, you know, so I think a lot of it has to do with creating community. And by the way, we figured out during COVID, and that continues to this day, how to create community online. So we have a membership network called the Trellis Network. Companies join at the enterprise level and we have a bunch of different communities within that on circular economy and finance and carbon. There’s one in Europe and one in the U.S. and, and, you know, that’s been, you know, we’ve really intentionally, how do you create those kinds of communities that are hybrid? There were some of it’s, we still have some meetings where people come together in different parts of the world. So, you know, there’s a lot of, a certain amount of pixie dust and magic that you make happen to create those kinds of, the kinds of events where people want to come back for the community as much as for the content. And I think we’ve done a really good job at that.
Michael Gold (49:33)
Yeah, I spoke with another recent podcast guest whose entire career has basically been convening people around climate events. And her, one of her main messages that especially when companies want to do deals, you know, when money actually is going to exchange hands, it’s really important to have people in person there for a handshake. Is that something that you’ve also seen?
Joel Makower (49:55)
Absolutely. I mean, you know, events also succeed when transactions happen. Many, you know, traditionally, those transactions are, know, you know, I bought I sold something that you bought. But there’s also lots of other transactions of the of the connection time or, or we, you know, we’ve seen corporate coalitions being formed at informal breakfast at our events and that become the lead to financial transaction. But those are absolutely important. And the more of those transactions people come back for that or say, I have to be there because my competitors are doing business there. That is absolutely part of that. Yeah, absolutely.
Michael Gold (50:42)
And I guess just one final question that I like to ask most of my guests is, if you could think about your overarching contribution, kind of your legacy—of course, you’re nowhere near to being finished with your career—but just thinking about what you would say you’ve contributed to the climate battle, to sustainability in general.
Joel Makower (51:06)
Yeah, that’s a tough one. I I think a lot of it is connection and not just connections of people meeting one another, but connecting dots and helping people understand the big picture. That’s kind of what I’ve done as a journalist, a writer, as an analyst, is helping take this incredibly complex, nuanced, politically fraught, scientifically debatable at times, topic of sustainability and help companies make sense of it. My dad said something once to me, I was probably in junior high school or middle school and he asked me if I’d done my homework and I assured him I had, I’m sure I hadn’t, but he basically said, well, what’d you learn? And I looked at my shoes and shuffled around and I said, basically, I don’t know, just trust me or something. And he said, you you don’t really understand something until you can explain it to someone else.
And at the time, it was one of those eye-roll kinds of things. It’s like, you know, stuff-dad-says-dot-com, you know, kind of, you know, like, but and then one day I realized, A, he’s right, and B, that’s kind of what I do for a living. And, and so I think that’s part of the legacy is helping people connect the dots and to do so in a way that’s not just enlightening, but also engaging and maybe in a really good day, a little bit entertaining and how to make this stuff, you know, which is incredible complexity and scientific and technical stuff, but also at the same time about us, about our bodies, our families, our communities, our world, how to connect that head and heart and make this accessible to people and make them really, truly get it, whether they’re trying to understand something technical or trying to understand the big picture or how to communicate something or what’s really going on in this moment.
And so I think as much as anything, that’s the legacy. And then of course, the connecting of people, which is also critical and one of the joyous, most joyous parts of what I get to do for a living is watching those connections happen and watching relationships of all kinds from professionals and jobs to romantic take place. And that’s just a gift.
Michael Gold (53:31)
Well, I think that’s a wonderful place to end our conversation. Joel Makower, thank you so much.
Joel Makower (53:37)
Great pleasure, Michael. Thank you so much.
Michael Gold (53:42)
Climate Swings is produced, hosted, and edited by me, Michael Gold, with promotional support from climate education and action platform, Terra.do. Opinions expressed on the show are exclusively those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Terra.do, its founders or employees. Show notes, transcripts, and other material can be found on the podcast section of my website, wordclouds.consulting/climateswings.
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