A handful of organizations form the beating heart of environmentalism in Southwest Colorado.
One of them is the San Juan Citizens Alliance. With more than 500 passionate members scattered across the San Juan Basin, and offices in Durango, Farmington and Cortez, the alliance has become one of the most powerful regional advocates for public lands, rivers, water and air quality and green energy.
As of a week ago, it has a new leader.
Daniel Olson is replacing Dan Randolph as the organization’s executive director.
In an interview, Olson was coy about his vision for the organization, saying he was still trying to master the parlance of the Durango office, which leans heavily on acronyms.
But with 14 years’ experience in green energy, a refreshing impatience with the corporate platitudes of “going green” and an equally refreshing patience for humanity – in all its complicated, self-defeating glory – Olson is among a new generation of environmental activists.
Olson said he left his previous job as a green consultant for Fortune 500 companies because the strides he made in persuading massive capitalist enterprises to curb their carbon emissions – while large – were small in comparison to the great scope of the environmental problem.
“For me, what that meant professionally was to quit my job and look for a new one that is based on policy and advocacy. That’s why I ended up on the San Juan Citizens Alliance,” he told about 50 people at Wednesday’s Green Business Roundtable at the Henry Strater Theatre.
Olson said global warming would never be solved without more accurate mechanisms for pricing pollution, be it in the form of a carbon tax or cap and trade.
“Once business incentives are set up, there will be no better force to go and rapaciously get that goal. But first, what we need is the right cost structure,” he said.
Olson comes to the alliance at a time when the “green” brand has never been sexier. Titans of American business like McDonald’s and Goldman Sachs relentlessly tout their forays into “green” energy, their partnerships with “green” businesses, their deep commitment to a “green” future.
Yet beneath the marketing, the facts of global warming are undeniably grim. Scientists set a goal of reducing America’s carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, using carbon emissions in 2000 as a baseline. But we are experiencing the opposite of progress. Scientists now predict that by 2025, carbon emissions will increase by more than 50 percent globally, despite accounting for governments’ efforts to curb them, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Environmentalists’ rhetoric in the 1990s tended to emphasize corporate villians from ExxonMobil to Chevron. Olson takes a humanistic approach, saying businesses and individuals want a healthy Earth. While the steps to curbing carbon emissions are intellectually obvious, they can be sabotaged by humans’ deep need for constancy and our talent for rationalization, he said.
“There are 10 things we could do in our business and in our homes right now, and 15 things that prevent us from doing it. Change is really hard,” he said.
When he was a 21-year-old philosophy major, Olson said Harvard University hired him to manage a $3 million interest-free revolving loan fund to pay for energy and conservation projects on campus. The joke was that he’d need a baseball bat behind his door to fend off all the people eager for “green” greenbacks.
“It sounded like a really, really fun job – and easy. But it was really, really hard to give that money away,” he said.
When business owners and individuals are accused of doing too little to curb carbon emissions, “I don’t have the money” is the alibi most commonly evoked, Olson said. But In his experience, humans’ discomfort with change is a greater obstacle to green businesses than a lack of money.
He learned that, “change is hard for organizations.” “People are busy, they have full schedules. We worked with a lot of facilities managers: They say, ‘I’d love to think about pioneering some new energy and retrofit bulbs for my industry.’ But the facilities managers’ mantra is, ‘It’s more important that when lights go out, I change the bulbs,” he said.
“We love to create these habits that make things automatic so we can do things the way we’ve done things,” he said. “That’s triplely, quadruplely true of businesses. Change is really hard.”
Standing in front of a giant graph showing two diverging lines – the first showing where we need to be with carbon emissions, and the second, where we are with carbon emissions – Olson told the audience he was asking them to “look at this data and not look away.”
“Some of you may be depressed by that. That’s a reasonable response,” he said. “Hopefully after some of that depression erodes, you’ll have some energy. We as business communities and individuals need to figure this out. We can depress away or get bold.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
