Often we need to use policy to level the playing field, or to be sure that a technology is managed in a responsible way.

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.

Today, our incentives aren't set up well - you can make a lot of money burning fossil fuels, digging up wetlands, pumping fossil water out of aquifers that will take 10,000 years to recharge, overfishing species in international waters that are close to collapse, and so on.

I was much more of a naïve techno-optimist than I am now. I still believe that technology can help us come out of this situation with a richer humanity with less impact on the planet, but now I think it has to be paired with effective policy in order to achieve that.

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.

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.

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded.