Austin Whitman wanted to get businesses to fight climate change.
Having spent the better part of his career working in carbon markets and carbon offsetting—and advising companies on how to reduce their footprint on the planet—Whitman saw an opportunity to make companies' environmental commitments apparent to consumers. As climate change becomes an ever-growing stressor for everyday people, he felt he could use consumer concern to mobilize businesses against climate change.
There was potential for a paradigm shift.
"This feels like a really interesting time to step up to the plate," Whitman said.
To that end, Whitman, who is based in Boston, teamed up with Peter Dering and Jonathan Cedar (both in San Francisco), along with Boston-based brand manager Caitlin Drown, to launch a Kickstarter for a project called "Climate Neutral"—a way to label brands that had a net zero impact on the environment.
The project, which went live on Kickstarter on Oct. 15, had an initial goal of $100,000. On Nov. 10, the project hit its goal; now, a little over a week later, Climate Neutral has raised more than $112,000 from nearly 1,700 individual backers. Kickstarter also featured it as a "Project We Love" on the site.
"We've been blown away by the support of more than 1,600 individuals and more than 40 businesses in backing our Kickstarter campaign," Drown said in an email on Monday. "It's tremendous to have this support—not just a high-five but $110,000—because it shows people really want a tool to evaluate brands on their approach to the climate crisis. This campaign gives us huge momentum to continue growing our coalition."
A registered nonprofit, Climate Neutral has effectively created a process by which it evaluates whether a company has reduced any negative impact on the environment to the point of zero. If a product is labeled Climate Neutral Certified, "it means a company has measured, reduced and offset their entire carbon footprint," Climate Neutral writes on its Kickstarter page.
"We require companies not to just say, 'Yeah, I donated a bit of money to the Arbor Day Foundation on sequestering carbon,' but to have the carbon offsets they count toward their carbon neutrality to be verified by a third party through a rigorous process," Whitman said.
Carbon offsets are an imperfect method of combating climate change. In a working paper reported on by MIT Technology Review in August, researchers at the University of California Berkeley, Stanford University and elsewhere found that California's new carbon offsets program could create perverse incentives that actually boost emissions in some sectors. That came on the heels of a May investigation by ProPublica that found that carbon credits weren't offsetting the amount of pollution they were supposed to or had brought gains that were quickly reversed or couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with.
Whitman is no stranger to these concerns. Before he became CEO of Climate Neutral, he spent 15 years in the field of carbon reduction, first at Cambridge Associates, then at Climate Change Capital, then at M.J. Bradley and Associates and a five-year stint at FirstFuel Software. In those roles, he advised companies on how to reduce their carbon footprint in various capacities.
"If you can create a commercial reason for businesses to spend more money on fighting climate change, what's wrong with that?"
And soon, Climate Neutral will not have to rely completely on third parties to verify companies' carbon neutrality.
"We have a technology tool under development that is taking traditional methods of doing detailed carbon accounting and extracting the lessons learned from that industry over a couple decades," Whitman said. "We're turning it into something that is much easier for companies to use, so even a company that only has one person who can dedicate time to this can get a realistic ballpark result."
That technology will be used to vet companies beginning early next year.
As of Oct. 31, Climate Neutral was working with more than 50 brands—another goal the organization overshot by far, having initially set a goal of recruiting 36 brands by the end of the year. At first targeting the outdoors industry, where companies tend to keep an eye toward environmental issues already, the nonprofit has since branched out to consumer goods as well as software and technology services. Allbirds, LifeStraw, Klean Kanteen and dozens of other brands have already committed.
Whitman and his team are keenly aware that the clock is ticking. Last year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that "limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society"—and we only have 11 years to do it.
With governments lagging on this timeframe, Whitman said, people are turning to businesses to take action. If Climate Neutral can create incentives for companies to fight climate change, that's a win-win scenario.
"We want to tap into the energy that consumers have right now about the importance of climate and the frustration that nothing's happening," Whitman said. "We want consumers to push businesses to do this. ... Businesses don't do things unless there's a commercial reason to do it. If you can create a commercial reason for businesses to spend more money on fighting climate change, what's wrong with that?"
