I was recently joined by Sage Lenier, Executive Director at Sustainable and Just Future to discuss why renewables cannot replace fossil fuels with current energy demands, and the concept of food system resilience and flexibility in an era of climate change.

Jeff Gitterman: Hi, and welcome to the impact on FinTech TV down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I’m your host, Jeff Gitterman, and I’m joined this morning by Sage Lenier, climate activist, Time magazine next-generation leader, and Executive Director at Sustainable and Just Future. Sage, thanks for joining me today.

Sage Lenier: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Gitterman: So what I love about the concept of today’s topic is that you’re a climate activist, and when people think about climate activists, they usually think about people these days throwing paint on the wall of a Renoir or a Van Gogh or people stopping traffic in the streets. And to be on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and be a climate activist who really thinks about the economic impacts of climate activism, to me is so special. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you approach climate activism through economic channels.

Lenier: I’m really excited to talk about this. I mean, I have a lot of respect for that work, and I understand that theory of change, the frustration that we’re quite literally sprinting towards our extinction and no one’s doing anything about it. I think there also is something to be said about the fact that if not for the protests and the direct action, there wouldn’t be the public outcry, the impetus for this transformation in the private sector. Ten, 15 years ago, it wasn’t the case that every Fortune 500 company had a chief sustainability officer or a corporate social responsibility team. These things are brand new and it’s because it’s a PR crisis caused by a bunch of high schoolers marching and people throwing paint.

So I think you have to look at what the ripple effects of that are. So I really value that work and what it transforms too. But that being said, we need someone working on every single side of it because we’re not getting where we need to be. So I think for me, looking at like, okay, some folks are blocking a pipeline, why is the pipeline being built in that region? What’s causing that increase in demand? What’s the root cause? Blocking a pipeline from being constructed doesn’t stop the underlying economic factors that are causing it to be built.

And so for me, I think coming to the economy as the basis of my work and climate, having climate economics or circular economics being the basis of my work, I think is really essential, the next step for the movement overall. Because we need to look at the underlying factors driving increased energy consumption. I say this all the time, we are not replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. Every single year, we add so much additional energy demand that all of the renewables we’re building are just offsetting that additional demand. And then on top of that, we’re extracting more fossil fuels.

So we need to start looking at what’s driving that additional demand so that we can get around to eventually replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.

To catch the full conversation, you can watch my interview with Sage Lenier. 

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