Technology is incredibly powerful. And in many ways, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can actually accomplish with the right science and the right technology.

That, to me, is a kind of brilliant environmental ju-jitsu - using the energy of the market and the profit-motive to get businesses to invest in preserving and improving natural systems.

If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior.

On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more.

Playing God is actually the highest expression of human nature. The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to ‘play God’, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist today.

TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable.

Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill.