This is a crazy idea. And I wish I was not here. But sometimes the only sane alternative is to be crazy, and sometimes we have things we NEED to get done.

The steps outlined here are all necessary, fundamental, and critical to business growth. groSolar is a fantastic example of what our economic system can do and repeat. Unfortunately, creating 20, even 100 companies like groSolar does not solve our problem. What we need is the integration of all the ideas presented here and more, across the economy. We need a realization that together, as community in the broadest sense of the word, not only do we all thrive, it’s actually the only way we can survive. As I said above, the confluence of events that brings us here today is no less than the need to reorder our economy, restructure the biggest industry in the world (energy), retrain a huge percentage of our workforce, and save our planet.

I’ve said before that I’m an evolutionary technology person (there is no silver bullet), and a revolutionary business person. Of course, I’m evolutionary in a rapidly changing technology driven world, and I’m revolutionary in a market-driven economy. But listen to where we need to go. I warn you that I am not an economist, or even a learned student of business. I am a person operating in this environment, I sometimes feel thrust in from the outside. This perspective has often been useful, as well as frustrating, (some would say dangerous), but it is my perspective on where we need to go.

• Business needs to be part of the solution. Too often business believes it has a right to exist outside of any common good, or that simply “creating wealth”, is enough good. Business needs to understand that creation of wealth for a few at the expense of many, or at the expense of the Earth which is at the expense of many, is not an acceptable, sustainable, or rational model. Business needs to understand that the advance and success of business requires the advance and success of labor and environment, as well as capital.
• Labor needs to be part of the solution. And I define labor in the broadest possible terms, organized and unorganized, represented and unrepresented. Too often labor has become subjugated to the needs of its own management, or to the dictates of its own subculture instead of the needs of its individual workers, business, and the society that we all live in. Labor needs to understand that appropriate skills need to get appropriate pay and benefits, and that in crafting the pay and benefits appropriately, more long term stable work conditions can be created, meaning a better quality of living. If you all knew groSolar’s award-winning pay and benefit plans, you’d understand what I mean by appropriate.
• Capital markets need to be part of the solution. Currently everyone seeks to “beat the market”, and this pushes businesses (and labor) to extremes to make this happen. Of course only half the market can beat the market at any given time, so this is a rather futile chase, creates instability, and leads capital to pursue short term profits and market timing on a grand scale instead of long term success. Capital markets need to accept longer returns. Risk needs to be rewarded, otherwise no risk occurs. But the relentless pursuit of continually increasing margins and profits is, logically, unsustainable economically and environmentally. In the words of the Investors Forum, we need “Patient Capital”. We also need Endeavor Capital instead of Venture Capital. An endeavor attempts to create a solution to a problem. A venture seeks to create something whether there is a problem or not, sometimes creating the problem in order to sustain the venture. It seems we’ve got enough problems, let’s focus our capital on them in a sustainable way.
• Environment needs to be part of the solution. What I’ve said above is that we all need to throw out our preconceived notion of how to work together, and create new thinking. We need to do the same in the environmental movement. That movement needs to understand that if we are to continue to inhabit this Earth in numbers like we do now there must be a plan to do that. And that plan will include building some wind turbines on ridgelines, and some solar power plants in the desert, and some biomass plants in many areas. And they need to understand that the costs to the environment in one area WILL be carried by environmental savings in another. Oh I wish we had enough time to do this slowly, and be sure to not make any mistakes. But the failure of the environmental community to protect us from the worst environmental disaster of them all, saving a few unique species here and there while allowing a mass extinction to start, means that the environmental community needs to join in saying ‘Yes’ to renewable energy development, quickly, and on large scale.
• People need to be part of the solution. We are all labor, we are all business, and we are all capital. But we are all people. Our culture, the way we think about things, needs to change. We need to understand that we have the power to change the world, and that we are, right now, changing it in bad ways. We need to understand that we are told many lies, and we need to open our eyes and see things for ourselves. We need to learn to trust science and learning, not spin and marketing. We need to understand that in America we are given so much, it is our responsibility to lead the world. People need to become motivated by these facts. Only by adding culture into the motivations of business, labor, capital, and environment, can we truly find the balance in the world that we need.
• It turns out that this last one, culture, is the key to it all. With the right culture, labor, business, capital, and environment all understand that they are one, that they each have value as themselves, but only realized if they act as a whole.

And the solution needs to happen fast, and it’s big. Currently, the US solar industry has total revenues of about $3 billion per year. That is only 1/6 of the revenue attributed to US Mother’s Day, and 1/50 of the revenues attributed to a typical US Christmas season. You’ve all heard of Moore’s Law.. We need to grow the solar industry and other renewable industries at a rate equal to Moore’s Law. We need to not rest on our laurels, we need to cast off our laurels so they do not slow us down. We need to think in new ways, we need to break old rules where they are not helpful. Most of all, we need to understand that we’ve just started, and that we need to keep moving, not reflect, contemplate, and consider small demonstrations. The successes of the past years have merely dug the lowest groundwork for us to build on. And while we still think we have enough time to build these industries, we have no time to spare.

Put another way, we need to think as big as big oil. The solar industry’s US revenues are currently equal to about 2 days of ExxonMobil’s annual revenues. That’s based on installing 0.4 GigaWatts last year, a quantity that produces the equivalent of about 1/10 the electrical output of one large fossil fired power plant. And there are some who think we want to grow the industry aggressively to install upwards of 10 GW per year in 2020. That’s 25 times our current annual US installations. That would be about equal to the output of 2 or 3 fossil fired plants. That’s not what I call change, and the math simply does not work to solve our problems. And I for one am working FAR too hard to have this industry not succeed in beating climate change. So what do we need to achieve? My math says we need to get to 125 GW of installations per year, or 300 times what we did in 2008, to make a real difference. That’s HUGE, right? Well, no. It’s about as big as ExxonMobil, one oil company, somewhere around $450 billion of revenue spread over many companies. This CAN be done. But we need to think in those terms. We need to grow at 67% per year, the same as Moore’s Law, about the same as the speed of Prius adoption and cell phone use.

So let’s take those shuttered and soon to be shuttered GM and Chrysler plants and start building wind turbines and solar panels. Let’s retrain their workers for production. Let’s take the skilled people who built production housing and retrain them for PV and solar thermal installation, and let’s train masses of people for weatherization. This all needs an economic kick start from the government, but once started, it will drive itself strongly.

How do we effect this change? (I mean beyond drinking more caffeine?)

A few suggestions:

• To EVERY corporate and personal Mission Statement on the planet, we add the following words to the end “…in harmony with the Earth.” Sustainability must become elemental in business. This is culture change.
• Capital is asked to be creative AND patient, while funding Endeavors, not Ventures. Capital is asked to make new rules, and look for returns in different ways. Shouldn’t SJF get a return from the government for creating or retaining 4900 jobs?
• Government is asked to invest, without a clear immediate dollar return, similar to the investment in land, and public projects during the great depression, and now in GM and Chrysler.
• Labor is asked to bring opportunities and solutions to the table, not demands. Labor can accelerate implementation of these goals as fast as any other sector.
• Business is asked to stop striving for the expected, and break the mold of following the past. What we’ve learned from business’ past is that it’s not sustainable, is typically inequitable, and not very efficient in the long term. How about a complete end to quarterly reporting, a crackdown on frivolous shareholder suits, and the repeal of the requirement to always return the maximum short term dollar to shareholders, no matter what it means for the long term.
• Business, labor, capital and environment are asked to partner to achieve the goals of the endeavor. In other words, we all work together like crazy to save the planet.

I’m just the guy at the front of the room who says thank you for all you all have done, for helping to bring us to this place we are at. But I’m also going to tell you that you are not done, there is no time for rest, and NOW is the time to redouble our efforts and achieve the vision I have laid out above. Together, under this vision, we can:

• Create not just good jobs, but good careers for all.
• Create a business model where there is a component of working for the common good embodied deep in the business mission and actions.
• Use our world’s capital, in all its forms, to create a sustainable home for humankind and all those who we share this Earth with, thus creating a stable economic and environmental climate, so intertwined as to be one.
• Create a world better for everyone than the one we have today.

This is a crazy idea. We will win, not by losing our senses, but by gaining control of them.

We are the people we’ve been looking for. This is the moment. Let’s go do it.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under General Interest, Social Responsibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.