Every job is a sustainability job. Discussion with Lincoln Bleveans
This is a transcript of the podcast interview recorded for Sustainability Explored on 09 of November 2019.
This is Season 1 Episode 12, the last episode of the 1st season.
You can listen to it here, or join on any of your favorite podcast platforms.
Let’s get it started!
[00:00:00] Anna: Hi, my name is Anna and I am your guide to the world of environmental sustainability, climate resilience, green and circular economy, corporate social responsibility, and much more. A warm welcome to my podcast, everyone. The podcast is “Sustainability Explored” and today we are recording episode #12.
Today we are having a very special guest, one of the first listeners and active supporters of this podcast — Lincoln Bleveans — a global, progressive, and pragmatic energy and sustainability executive, thought leader and communicator, writer and speaker. Lincoln, am I correct? This is what my LinkedIn search gave me.
[00:00:53] Lincoln: That’s my summary, but of course, you know, you have a great career and then you try to summarize it into a few words and that’s what I came up with.
[00:01:07] Anna: Introduce yourself a little bit more, so that the listeners understand who you are, what you are involved in now, and how you came to where you are at the moment in your career.
[00:01:18] Lincoln: Sure. My name is Lincoln Bleveans. I’m recording this from Burbank, California, the United States.
I have spent about 25 years in the global energy industry.
I started out doing power plant projects all over the world: Asia, Central America, South America, North Africa, the Middle East, and now I am an executive at a utility in Burbank.
So we’re in Southern California and, being in California, we have a mandate to be really at the cutting edge of renewable energy and sustainability, and our utility, Burbank Water & Power, has been extremely successful in doing that from the power supply standpoint, as well as the business practices, and the facilities that we have here, that we work in.
My job here is a wonderfully diverse job. I am responsible for renewable and conventional power supply, the operation of power plants, the operation of our power system, but also the long-term planning that goes into making that a success. So, not just thinking about real-time and immediate issues, but planning out 10, 20, 30 years, as California and the world changes drastically.
My view is that utility business, the electricity business will change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last hundred years. We are really on the cutting edge of that here.
[00:03:22] Anna: What kind of changes are you expecting in terms of the energy sector in California?
[00:03:29] Lincoln: It’s a very interesting circumstance where both the supply side and the demand side are changing at the same time.
On the supply side, you’re seeing a move into renewables, particularly solar energy that is much larger and much quicker than I think a lot of people expected.
So, our power plants, our power supply, have gone from predominantly, fossil fuels and predominantly dispatchable controllable energy to increasingly renewable.
We’re 33% renewable now. I expect to be at 66% or more, two thirds or more within the next, six or seven years.
And almost all of that is intermittence. So, it’s solar, it is the wind, that we just don’t have control over. We don’t have to have a lot of storage, but that too is a new frontier for the power system in large part.
So things are changing radically on the supply side, but at the same time, the customer needs and the customer wants are changing radically too.
I was just talking a lot to school kids about energy and college students about energy and the level of understanding of renewables and of climate change and how electricity fits into sustainability in general — is just extraordinary.
When I was a kid, we really didn’t know where the power came from and we really didn’t care as long as you turn the light switch or you plug something into the wall.
And now a level of awareness both at the individual level, but also at the corporate level is much, much higher. And they are very interested in moving to clean energy supply as quickly as possible, but also controlling their electricity experience as much as possible, whether through the time of use rates or, solar panels on their roof or what have you.
So, we’re seeing that in the context of the technology explosion where the tools that we now have, both on the supply side and the customer side, are allowing us to do very, very interesting things.
But it’s really a brave new world for the power system, both for those of us on the utility side and the customers.
[00:06:31] Anna: I see. I remember… Like, interesting that you have to mention public awareness campaigns, your lectures at the schools and universities. I’m following you on LinkedIn and I see you’re constantly giving keynotes, lectures, you’re always somewhere at the conferences.
And I remember, when I invited you for a podcast interview you immediately came up with what was this super interesting topic for today’s discussion that I’m really very eager to explore today — Jobs in Sustainability.
I don’t remember, as you mentioned now… I, in my childhood, I don’t remember, also knowing where the power came from. My grandma used to turn on the gas, in case she’d ever wanted to make a tea, so, she would turn the gas on and never turn it off. That’s how cheap it was, and that’s how careless the attitude was towards the gas supply.
Same with the electricity.
The price was quite cheap, so she would keep all the lights in the apartment regardless of where the family would spend most of the time, in which room. Well, definitely not in all three of them or two of them :)
So, you say, the power system planning, the whole idea of the switch from fossil fuels towards renewable energy is changing rapidly in recent years. Whether the human supply, human resource supply is ready, are people, is there enough workforce on the market to keep up with this pace?
[00:08:20] Lincoln: I believe there is, I find that when I go out to our recruit, you know, to hire someone for a new job… What I’m finding is that the workforce is very, very comfortable, not just with the technologies themselves, but with the rate of change in technology. Especially, the generation that’s currently coming into the workforce.
They’re really, they’re not just looking, they’re not just comfortable with the technology, the technology is part of the air that they breathe, so to speak. But they’re also not just comfortable with the rate of change, but they’re very eager for the rate of change, which is really exciting.
There’s a sense of innovation in this current generation that is really, really exciting people.
People want change.
They want things to improve and they want to be the ones who improve them, and to me, that mindset is what gets us, that desire to personally improve things is the mindset that will get us through this transition in what I call ‘the age of climate change’, but it’s going to require massive transitions in everything we do.
And I’m very optimistic that it’s not going to be my generation. I’m 52 years old. We’re going to be helping it along but the real engine, the real driver of the change, will be the generation that’s coming into the workforce now.
[00:10:09] Anna: Right! The job like a sustainability officer, since when you can remember it started existing in the market. In the case of Ukraine, on my memory… I started seeing it on the, what is it called? Job postings! Not more than 5–7 years ago.
How about California? When did you… when did people actually switch their mindset towards sustainability rather than, I don’t even know how to frame this question, old way of doing things including environmental, social, governance issues in the companies’ strategies, companies’ plans, management plans and so on.
When did it happen in California?
[00:11:13] Lincoln: I think in California we pride ourselves. On being on the kind the front end of these things.
So, in my experience, it really didn’t happen substantively until very recently.
I was living in New York when the big hurricane, hurricane ‘Sandy’, came through, and that was a real, this was in the fall of 2012, that was a real wake-up call. There were huge floods in Houston, Texas.
That was a huge, I think, a huge wake-up call.
But I really haven’t seen it substantively until very recently. I think it’s been talked about for, as you said, probably five to seven years.
I think the biggest challenge there is that companies who often created chief sustainability officer or similar roles, they didn’t really have any power, they didn’t have an ability to change things, in a substantive way.
In other words, they were there and they had this great title, but they didn’t have the ability or authority, to really change things in the company that they were working for.
I think that thankfully it is correcting itself now. I think companies, especially the more progressive companies, are not just hiring chief sustainability officers, but really, really doing it. Giving those individuals in those teams the power to make changes. And that to me, that’s very exciting. But I think we went from the appearance of sustainability effort. And I think now we’re really moving into the era of truly making a difference.
[00:13:28] Anna: So, would it be correct to say that it did not really exist and didn’t have real power, such positions in the sustainability market, until your region, specifically California, started to face fires and see the evidence of climate change?
[00:13:52] Lincoln: Certainly that’s been… I’m trying to think of the right analogy… It’s been almost a turbocharger. Or a supercharger on that effort. The mood is changing, I think, in a lot of parts of California.
We actually, I think, have a very European view of climate change, we see it as reality and we see ourselves being part of the problem. And therefore, we see ourselves being responsible for part of the solution.
That sense of acknowledgment and that sense of responsibility, has been slower to take hold in other parts of the US, I think, there’s certainly big political divide in the US over the issue, but certainly in California, New York, the Northeast, in particular, had been on the front end. And I think now the rest of the country is starting to acknowledge it.
I think you have to acknowledge it before you start to feel responsible for it.
And you have to feel responsible for it before you really take a big action to help mitigate it.
So that’s happening, but I just wish it was happening faster.
[00:15:32] Anna: Yeah. I heard recently an interesting saying “Nature will adapt itself to the climate change, the question is whether humanity will still be there.”
[00:15:48] Lincoln: I understand that view.
My view is, and maybe this is because I’m a utility person or, an infrastructure person, but I believe that humanity will still be here.
It’s just the conditions under which we live are going to be radically different. And I think they’re going to change at a rate that we can see, and we can feel. You look at prior changes to the climate — they didn’t happen that quickly, I don’t think.
The change that is coming now is going to happen within generations as opposed to across generations. And that’s going to be a real shock.
There was great… Great? Terrifying! Terrifying, but the very good study of coastal cities recently and where are the coastlines, where the ocean will be in 30 years. And it’s absolutely catastrophic.
You have this incredible move towards urbanization — people moving from the countryside into the cities, at the same time you have all these coastal cities going underwater over the next few decades.
I think human beings will survive, but there is the fight over resources and the mitigation measures that we’ll need to take to preserve space, living space and preserve our food supply, preserve the landscape that keeps us alive. It’s going to be a shock, I believe.
[00:17:45] Anna: I recently also came across… ‘Recently’ meaning in the last couple of years, came across the term “climate refugees”. I believe it didn’t exist, let’s say 2–3–4 years ago.
Now, it keeps popping up in the media more and more.
Do you see that happening? That stream, that trend — people leaving California or on the contrary, coming from other regions, other states to California? What changes do you observe?
[00:18:28] Lincoln: I think at least for California, the trend seems to be mostly inward. I think our population keeps growing. But on a broader basis, I do think that the term “climate refugee”, as you said, didn’t even exist a few years ago. And, I think we’re all going to be using that phrase very frequently, whether it’s escaping drought, you know, not enough water on the one hand, or escaping rising sea levels due to too much water on the other hand.
The shifts in global populations will be really astounding.
There will be economic pressures, there will be food supply pressures, but also, it’s going to be a real test of our ability to get along with each other as a species. I think there’s a real risk, that ethnic tensions, racial tensions, political tensions — we’ll make it very, very difficult to rebuild societies in the context of mass migration, where there are climate refugees.
[00:19:58] Anna: What do you see as on top of your mind. A list of solutions, who should take charge or who should take the responsibility?
How should these chief sustainability officers, because it’s still on us, on the environmentally conscious, environmentally and socially conscious people…
The burden is upon us to deliver the message properly and correctly, I see a lot of climate deniers and I see that I don’t know how to respond to that.
I still don’t have a proper speech that would reach the minds of people who are just against it, they don’t understand and they don’t want to understand.
What would be the list of very basic actions that maybe everyone could take to help the situation today?
[00:21:05] Lincoln: That’s a great question, and I think you’ve identified that there are a couple of elements there.
There’s the communication element, but then there’s also the mitigation (what can we do to slow climate change down), and then the adaptation elements.
When you talk about communication, I’ve really struggled with this, because we have a very diverse population here in Burbank.
Part of my job is to communicate with everyone, not just the people who agree with me or are already talking about it. What I’ve found, it sounds very simple, but it ends up being very powerful.
That when you’re talking about climate change, you really have to start from where your audience is. I think when we talk about things, it’s so easy to start where we are — with our understanding, with our perceptions of the world and our beliefs.
The key to communicating something this momentous and this complicated, in my experience, is real empathy.
You have to start with where your audience is and you have to think about the message in the context of your audience and not the context of your own understanding.
What you end up with there, is that it may be impossible at the beginning to talk about greenhouse gases and talk about climate change itself, so perhaps you need to start with air pollution as a first step because that is much more present, much more noticeable for people.
[00:23:08] Anna: I can not agree more!
[00:23:12] Lincoln: You have to start where people are, start with empathy and work from there.
But then, you know, the chief sustainability officer is really focused on two things.
One is mitigation. In other words, what can we do as an organization to mitigate climate change, whether it’s a power supply or supply chain, or the way we operate our factories or buildings or how we travel, when we travel, all of those things.
So, those are the mitigation steps, but I think it’s equally important to look at adaptation, and those are the steps that we need to take whether it’s infrastructure or what have you to mitigate the effects of climate change on, not just our own operations as a company, but also on our customers.
It’s not good if the company thrives and the customer doesn’t. You have to have a thriving company and a thriving customer. Working on those mitigation measures is crucial as well.
[00:24:37] Anna: I see. So mostly communication and leaving your own bubble, taking the other side, hearing the other side of the conversation, and doing the most to empathetically deliver the message.
You mentioned air pollution. Even I, myself, I have recently installed the application on my phone that tracks air quality, takes the index every hour and sends me the notification from the nearest monitoring point and I should say, wow.
That’s where the digital world brought us. Who would have thought that I would be tracking air quality next to where I spent my days!
Another question I have is… I get to work with students and trainees a lot.
And something that has been bothering me for a while is that people leaving the universities after four or five years of studies do not have enough practical experience, enough cases where they would be able to apply somehow their skills and acquired knowledge and they leave their universities with degrees, debts, and despair that they are not needed in the world, in the market, in the workforce market because they don’t know anything.
Is it worth today in the modern world to learn about sustainability, or are you more on the side of ‘learning by doing’ concept?
[00:26:41] Lincoln: I am really more of… I think it’s both.
I think that the education system has a very important role to play in creating that awareness. Although now that awareness is really in every aspect of our lives, in a lot of cases, as you said, even with air pollution, which is part of it, the apps and the tracking mechanisms. But I really think, mind you, it might be unusual, but that is that.
Really, every job is a sustainability job.
I see sustainability choices in literally everything we do.
I got my cup of coffee this morning and I put it in a mug, a ceramic permanent mug as opposed to a paper cup for a plastic cup. And it’s become a very conscious choice. But I also realize that by using something that I have to wash, that I’m putting more detergents into the environment too. So, it’s not perfect.
But I really see everything that we do, and every job that we do as a sustainability job. I think whether you are working in a factory or working in a shop or making choices as part of a corporation/ organization, that literally every choice you make has sustainability always.
I’m looking around my office here and looking at things that were shipped from China, across the world.
They’re inexpensive to buy, but you can look at your smartphone, for example (I call it ‘my brain’) and realize that that piece of equipment contains parts from all over the world, that those parts were all shipped usually in containers on big, ocean-going ships that use very, very nasty oil and fuel, and then they were put together.
How are they put together? Were the factories running on a coal fire, or more on renewable power? How did they get to the store where I bought them? How do they run the store?
You can look at everything!
You know, when I buy some fruit that isn’t in season here in California, maybe it came from South America, you will think about the carbon footprint of that piece of fruit. It’s pretty astounding. Pretty amazing.
So, every job has that, every job that we do, you can think about and impact from a sustainability perspective.
I really believe that using less paper in a printer… Literally every choice that we make, everything that we do or we don’t do, has a sustainability aspect.
So, I’m very much in favor of whether your jobs say “sustainability” in it or not, every job is a sustainability job.
[00:30:50] Anna: One advice you would give to those who want to enter the sustainability job market, who want to have sustainability impact in a corporation, where to go, what to look for, how to present yourself? Now I am mostly asking this question for the students and trainees that I’ve have.
[00:26:41] Lincoln: I can suggest two ways to go about that. One is to become very, very good at sustainability itself, and that is politics, that is economics, that is a whole lot of science: sociology, psychology.
Sustainability has so many different elements to it, I think you can, if you wanted to, you could create that sort of focus where you become a sustainability expert on a standalone basis.
I think the bigger impact though, at least for now, is not to become a sustainability expert so much as to be become expert in something where you could have a sustainability impact.
I’ll use ocean shipping as an example again. That’s an industry that is really the heartbeat of the global economy. We couldn’t live without it. And yet it is so incredibly polluting. Airplane travel is the same way, and the industries are really struggling for solutions to mitigate and to change that.
People who create the solutions, people who really change the world for those industries will be sustainability experts per se.
They will be experts in engines and compulsion, they will be experts in the logistics that go into that business, they will be experts in perhaps localizing supply chains so you don’t have to touch the boat or the airplane in the first place.
And I think that’s actually where the bigger impact is right now.
I think, becoming an expert in a field where sustainability is needed, that’s the only way you’re going to make that feel more sustainable because you’ve got to become an expert in it before you can change it.
You know, the musicians will say, “You have to know the rules before you can break the rules”.
I think that’s where the big impact is now. I don’t know if that will hold, but I’m guessing it will.
Again, you look around — every single thing in our world has a sustainability element to it, and you have to be expert in that thing before you can discover that, and implement sustainability in that.
[00:34:21] Anna: Yeah. So first going deeply, let’s say, in the technological process to find the elements or pieces of that process that can be changed into a more sustainable way of work.
[00:34:35] Lincoln: Oh, that’s exactly!
[00:34:21] Anna: Amazing! Well, it was very interesting talking to you! We’re reaching now the end of the podcast episode, as we have agreed to half an hour, 30+ some minutes, but it’s been a very interesting conversation. I would talk to you hours on end. Thank you very much, Lincoln, for your time, input, and for all the effort that you put in your work.
[00:35:12] Lincoln: You’re very, very welcome. It’s been a pleasure to be in the program!
[00:35:16] Anna: Thank you so much, and happy upcoming weekend to you and to our listeners too!
You have been listening to episode #12 on jobs in sustainability on “Sustainability Explored”. Goodbye.
If you liked the episode, found it useful and/or going to implement any advice given by Lincoln, please do let me or him know, we would appreciate your feedback, and it will most certainly make us very happy!
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Stay tuned, stay sustainable!
