A conversation with Jennifer Morgan, CEO Greenpeace International hosted by Futurist Gerd Leonhard

Hi, I'm Gerd Leonhardt, futurist and host of GERD Live. We have a very special show today with Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, and a really riveting debate about the future, about climate change, about the post Corona society, and about economics and capitalism. So thanks for tuning in. Let's dive right in. Let me dive right in and ask you a question about the personal impact of the corona crisis, the COVID 19 crisis, on your life. You said once in an interview at the World Economic Forum, you mentioned that this is not a minor thing. It's not just another bump like the financial collapse was for some people considered to be another bump. So what is it in your personal life that has changed? What is the impact of COVID 19 on your personal life?

Well, I think we're in the moment of a great transformation. I think that we are in a disruption where the future needs to look very different than the past and the new normal needs to be one that's much kinder, much more sustainable, and I would say much better. But that's going to take a lot of work.

It is interesting that you're mentioning all the changes. I mean, my own work has been completely obliterated by this crisis. It's basically big events. And speaking of big events, traveling to faraway places, no longer. I give speeches around the world. And that's completely changed. That's all virtual now. This is why I call this time that we're living in the great transformation. It's like everybody's pivoting this whole area. You could say, okay, it's like a Great Depression, but. But I think it's really a great transformation. I mean, if we're looking at this kind of idea of what's happening around the world and which way we're going, it's quite clear that we've seen a lot of kindness and solidarity evolve as part of this crisis. And trust, for example, in government, and trust to each other. But, you know, here in Zurich, you can clearly see people trust their government. They pay attention to it, and it's kind of working out one way or the other. And trust is a major issue. And we have companies like Salesforce, for example, giving free products and free upgrades and software to their clients that may be in trouble because of the crisis. And then we have companies like Airbnb. They are not doing the right thing. They're not taking care of either the host or the renters, in my view, and I've written about this. So where do you see this going?

Well, I think we're in the midst of something that's really challenging and shaking our humanity. And I think we are seeing, and I'm experiencing it myself, the things that you note, that people are looking out for each other more. And I think people understand that their own actions could mean the life and death of others. And that kind of awareness and consciousness, I think is something that we have a chance for that to stay with us. But I think we need to help make some deliberate decisions as well, because I think there'll be a lot of pressure to try and just go back.

So the future of capitalism, this goes, of course, with what we have just discussed. How is the economic logic going to evolve? Are we going to finally find a more sustainable capitalism? Here in Switzerland, we have an interesting form of capitalism, a very rich country, and now we have a basic income. Basically all of us, most of us are getting money from the state. And same goes for Germany, many other countries. And that's kind of very similar to the suggestion of a basic income in context to this. We did a Twitter poll as to what people can expect from the future in terms of the recession. And most people looking at the Twitter poll agreed or said that they think that this is a L shape recession, going down, staying down, or maybe you going down and staying for a while and going back up. But people seem to think this is going to take much, much longer. And I tend to agree with this. I think we're looking at an opportunity to reinvent, but clearly a prolonged period of change. So what do you think the timeframe is and what do you think it means?

Well, I think if I've learned one thing, it's that the world is full of uncertainties right now. So I find it rather challenging to have a sense of what the economic transformation, I would say transformation rather than recovery will be. But I do think that in this moment, whether it's a U or W or an L is when we've seen in the past that disruption is possible in the system. And so that's kind of where I think we need to go, where people, power and compassion and community are actually the keys to addressing this and where we're going.

It's interesting you say this, Jennifer. The whole idea of going back to normal. I get this question all the time, are we ever going to go back to normal? And I say, no, we're not going to go back to normal. There is a time after Corona or with Corona, during Corona, that's now, are we going to go back? We're not. And Was the normal actually good enough? The normal included, of course, huge climate emergency that we're looking at. That's still here, of course. So going back to the normal, I think it was good for some people and lucky for myself, good for me mostly. But normal wasn't good enough. We do have to look a little bit further. We cannot just ignore the discussion of pollution and climate change. And when you think about all these things, inequality, you know, we have achieved many really, really good things already in regards to childbirth, death and declining poverty and all these things, as Hans Rosling is telling us in his amazing stats, or was telling us, rest in peace. But it's not quite as it looks in terms of, you know, it's not all bad, it's not all good. And right now we have a crisis because of the climate emergency. And of course this is the number one topic for your organization, for Greenpeace. And so here's what I'm wondering. Are we learning something from the crisis? Have we learned that this is. Or if there is a real emergency, we can actually do something, that we can make this everybody's burden, that we can have, share the responsibility. Can we trust the government to do the right thing? I mean, if you look at countries like Italy or Spain, where that's a major issue, but trust in the government here in Switzerland, no. But in the crisis, are we learning something? Is that going to roll over actually to a new way of thinking about a climate emergency? Are we going to wait another 20 years before we take action on this? What do you think?

Well, I think we're learning a lot. We're learning about the importance of science and listening to scientists and having scientists play a role in responding to global crises like we're in right now. We're learning that actually you can do this well or you can do it really poorly, depending on how, what your approach is. And I think it is true that you do need, you need laws, you need government, governments based on science to kind of step in and be putting forward how to, how to work if we're so interdependent on each other. We're learning as well that, you know, renewable energy is pretty great, it's doing pretty well, and that we can reduce fossil fuels and seeing how nice the world is if we have less pollution from fossil fuel. And I think. But we're also learning that activists aren't going to just go away because conditions change. So I think you're seeing creativity on the way that people are still engaging in all of this even though they can't go out on the streets. And we need to, I think, keeping those lessons moving forward. There's so much to learn from this crisis for how we solve climate change.

Well, you know, I think some of those key issues I want to touch upon with you is that we have accepted today that we live in kind of an emergency because of the Corona crisis. The state is telling us what to do, the state is telling us what not to do. The state is supporting us now. It's kind of like we're living in a time of big tech, big state, big government, and a big mess, you could say. So we kind of have a basic income now, but this whole thing kind of gets. You get this feeling of it being not capitalist, not a free market, and we would need that to tackle climate change as well. If we really want to tackle climate change, we're going to have to change fundamental things that we do and liberties that we have, just like we are doing today. So a similar kind of situation of an emergency as we have today. For example, the carbon tax. You're flying an airplane. We should pay a mandatory carbon tax, right? Maybe not. Where would the carbon tax go? Who would authority. Have authority over it? And what about the same kind of tax on meat? Many people have proposed that. This is why, of course, we're looking to develop alternatives to meat. So a carbon tax, a meat tax, would that be the right thing to do? We would need government to mandate this, clearly. I mean, I don't know, what's your take on this? Are we going to be able to do that again and see another change like this coming up?

No, certainly not. I mean, I think we're learning from this crisis that we need radical approaches to really radical crises. And we know what to do on the policy side on climate change. Scientists have been telling us that for decades. So I think what's more needed are, yes, you need governmental leaders, you do need leadership from the government to move forward on tackling climate change. The European Union has a chance right now to do that, depending on how it, you know, and that's the thing about responding to Covid and having the climate emergency in mind as you're going down that pathway is absolutely fundamental. Chancellor Merkel has even said that we'll see what she does with her car companies and, you know, the other choices that are here in Germany. But I think we're beyond actually just, yeah, sure, there's the policy mechanisms, but we need to say no more expansion or exploitation of fossil fuels. We need to say that the internal combustion engine is ending, we need to say, and governments then need to put in those policies, but based on science that need to drive us forward. We know the policies. It's really more about the politics.

Well, you know, when we talk about science, it's been pretty clear that the science on climate change has been pretty clear for a long time. But once again you have people like Michael Moore in his latest movie who was saying that basically renewable energy that we're looking at today is a scheme, it's not going to work. He's talking primarily about biomass, if you've watched this movie. So now we have a lot of opinions cruising around on this. And this is so funny when you compare to Covid. It was very similar scenario six years ago, I think Bill Gates held a talk about pandemics in the future and everything he said in there was right and the science was here and nobody paid attention. And if we are going to use the science going forward, it's hitting us now. It's a huge, unprecedented thing. But it was clear it was coming. So when we're looking at science today for climate change, it's clear the climate change panel says 30, 40 years, going up to 4 degrees warming, total other disaster, 300 million climate refugees. But we are probably going to see bad things happening in the next 10 years. Is that going to catalyze action in terms of actual time frame, what do you think is the main point and how quickly this is going to happen?

Well, there's so many things there and that you just asked. I mean, first of all, Michael Moore is clearly somewhere in the 1970s. I don't know where he is. The head of the International Energy Agency is talking about renewables being the source and the way to be going. And it's clear that job creation there is huge in these branches. And I think the crisis is actually showing actually the smartness of renewable energy versus investing or bailing out for, God forbid, volatile oil. Right. So then if you come to this question of no one paid attention. Well, I think it's really important that people understand that there was a deliberate campaign by the fossil fuel industry to draw attention away and put in doubt, lots of documentation, investigation on this. And look, in the 70s you see that happening from the Koch brothers, you see what happened moving into a neoliberal economy. You see the short termism and you see the doubt that's brought forward on climate science. We're in the showdown now. We're in the showdown now. And I think the thing that I noted at the beginning of 2020 was that you saw investors starting to ask the questions of investing in oil. You saw moving away from coal, you saw that all moving. You saw people in the streets. So the showdown is now, people are dying now from climate change impacts. And so it's, you know, if you're sitting in the north and you're, you may, you will still feel it. If you're a farmer sitting in Germany, the droughts are real. But if you're sitting in Mozambique or you're sitting in places that are experiencing these events now, it's now.

So you're saying it's very, very real. I mean, we're seeing all kinds of things happening with oil right now. The oil price has gone down and now it's back up somewhere in the lower 30s or so, but it even went sub zero before. I think we are seeing the end of oil coming up. I think I talked about the end of oil for quite some time, roughly five years at least. And the oil price is now back to $30 or so, but it's never coming back to the hundred dollar range. And I think we can feel the end of oil coming. I think the end of oil is as certain as music has moved to the cloud and phone calls are now done through an app. You know, I said that 15 years ago, music is moving to the cloud. Everybody said, what is the cloud? What is that? We don't want it, we don't like it, it's the end of business. But it's not, it's the start of a new business. As we can see today, the same thing is going to happen to oil.

No, I totally agree with you, of course. I mean, I think that it's quite clear that this crisis is showing the volatility of that market. It was quite clear before the COVID crisis that we, we have too much oil already out there and we need to move away. And that if you're looking for less risky smart investments, oil is not the way to go. So clearly there should be no bailout money going into these industries that are extracting fossil fuels or industrial agriculture is another one. Right.

So when we talk about climate change and fuel and carbon tax and so on, I did a poll yesterday, Jennifer, a poll about asking people what they think is going to happen to climate change. Now because of the COVID 19 and many people said okay, right now if you look at the options, most people say that's going to be harder, not because money is tight, right. It's going to be saying that it's delayed because there's higher priorities and this feels a little bit weird. I think the right kind of agenda would be that we can tackle this now because now we're in a position of resetting. So the solidarity effect and all of those things that we've been discussing, what do you think is going to happen here? Greenpeace talks a lot about this. So is this the opportunity for us to get it right?

No, absolutely. I mean it's. Climate change is happening now, biodiversity loss is happening now and Covid is happening now. And it's not just because we have a Covid crisis that climate stops. And the good news, because there is good news, is that there is an opening here to do these things together. When are we going to have this much money potentially going in? And when do we have the chance to really take a look at the system we're all living in, the economic system, the social system, to say who? This doesn't really work very well.

Jennifer, you said many times in the interviews and I just read a tweet with you about this, we said that this is the moment to fundamentally change the underlying system. We have the opportunity to create a world that we want to create now, a much more just and healthy population and planet. So given all of this, are you saying we're going to reinvent capitalism and what exactly do you think we should do here?

I mean more the. Well, yes, the economics. I think the neoliberal system is clearly broken. We've seen that a system that focuses more on private wealth more than public goods, whether they be common goods or public welfare has created these crises of inequality, the climate crisis. And you know, if you, if you shift and start looking, which I think we're doing more in Covid is about the well being of people. What are our health systems, how are we doing on, well on education, how are we doing on inequality between rich and poor? And this crisis is exposing how bad those things are, along with of course the climate crisis that's there and so that's the opportunity, I think, is to say this short term growth model that a lot of the neoliberal theory and practice has been over the years hasn't worked. It worked to bring people out of poverty, as you said, and that's there. But we're now in world, we're in an exponential world. We're in a world where technology is different as well. And so re evaluating that and making sure that you're giving more value to that well being of people and the planet. That's the chance.

I agree wholeheartedly. And this is a great way to wrap up our conversation. Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, thanks so much for being here. People can find out more about what you do and when you do it and how you do it at Twitter, climatemorgan and of course YouTube and all the usual Greenpeace channels as well. Thanks very much for being part of it and I hope to see you in the future.