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Peter McAteer, "Leading the Sustainable Organization: The Quest for Ethical Brands and a Culture of Sustainable Innovation" (Anthem Press, 2025)
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- [00:02]
Peter McAteer
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- [00:53]
Alfred Marcus
When did making plans get this complicated?
- [00:57]
Peter McAteer
It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together.
- [01:02]
Alfred Marcus
Use polls to settle dinner plans, send.
- [01:05]
Peter McAteer
Event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [01:17]
Alfred Marcus
Learn more@WhatsApp.com welcome to the New Books.
- [01:21]
Peter McAteer
Network.
- [01:24]
Alfred Marcus
So welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Alfred Markus, professor at the Carlson School of Management, and I host this podcast at the intersection of strategy and ethics. My guests bring forward ideas and frameworks that help us understand how businesses can thrive while serving society. Today I'm Speaking with Peter McAteer, author of Leading the Sustainable Organization, the Quest for Ethical Brands and A Culture of Sustainable Innovation, which was published by Anthem Press in 2025. This book offers both a blueprint and a call to action for leaders who want to embed sustainability in their organizations and navigate rapidly evolving environmental, regulatory and competitive conditions. This is an area that I also have been involved in for a long time, so I really look forward to this discussion with Peter. Peter, could you begin by sharing your background and what led you to write this book, how it may be different than other similar books? And how do your experiences as a consultant, educator and advisor to business leaders shape the way you approach sustainability?
- [02:46]
Peter McAteer
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. My background, I think is maybe similar to a number of people out in the marketplace the first half of my career. So through, let's say, 2000, I was in business and most of what I was doing was influenced by the great changes of the time, largely in technology and deregulation in the 80s, all sorts of other changes, and I really didn't think that much about sustainability. That really wasn't the focus. But I was always curious and I had some early examples early in my career where I happened to have Met people like Herman Daly at a conference and things like that. And I didn't realize how that would have an influence, you know, later. And then there was a recruiter called me and asked me if I wanted to come join the United nations, which I had not thought of at all. And it just happened to be when Kofi Annan was doing some interesting things and we were creating the first set of Millennium development goals in 2000. We were also creating the UN Global Compact and other sort of things. So that just happened to come along. And it forced me to ask some really interesting questions because I was in charge of both leadership development and knowledge management at United Nations. And all of a sudden you start asking questions like, well, what does someone really need to know if you're going to be an HIV AIDS expert in Sub Saharan Africa? I don't know, what do you really need to know to do that job well? And a lot of things evolved with that. And it really opened my eyes to things we created at the time, the first Human development reports in 2000, which again, very influential in my thinking as I never really thought of the world through a lens of five different regions of the world. And if I just want to narrow it down to those regions and say, well, what are they doing about these ideas? What's unique and different in the Eastern Europe or what's unique and different in the Middle East? So all of those things contributed. And then I went from there to Harvard, um, and again I just happened to be there when we started writing about some things like shared value creation and other things. So with that I decided in 2015 with the Paris Accords to do more consulting around this topic. And since then I've written three books. The first one again was really helping with those early stage companies. And the idea was, how do you approach this topic? It's new, it's different, we don't know much about this. The second book I started to address with companies as I was working with them about, well, if you're on this topic and doing things, how do you accelerate? How do you move faster if you engage this. And this latest book is a forward looking thing that says we're going to add another hundred trillion in global GDP in the next 25 years. That's a lot of production and consumption in a world which is already failing to meet its goals. So that says the people who are out there able to make decisions have to behave differently. And I wanted to create an easy way. And I think there's really two audiences there. One are people who have never been trained on this sort of thing. And I work with them a lot in the corporate environment and those are people who can do something now. But the book is also, when I work with universities too, about these young people who are going to be the folks who help define the world from 2030 to 2050. And if they graduate now, they're not quite yet in that position where they can change the strategic direction of a company. It takes a little while to get into positions of authority, but unless you give people a good foundation and some easy paths to follow, I don't see how we can expect them to transform the world unless we equip them with some easy to use tools. So that's really how I came about the book.
- [06:57]
Alfred Marcus
Yeah, the native loophrit. You talk about new boundary conditions from climate change and biodiversity loss to shifting regulatory frameworks. How should leaders think differently about strategy under these boundary conditions?
- [07:13]
Peter McAteer
Well, you know, there's always a great question that often you start with as companies start asking things. And a lot of companies you're talking about are legacy companies. So there already have. So if I'm out there talking with a large polymer company I work with recently with some of the plastics companies, they don't like to be called plastics companies, they like to be called polymer companies. Plastic is a bad word. But you wind up, you know something, a company like a BASF, they've got $70 billion in revenue. And so if I'm going to grow, I've got to replace that 70 billion with more sustainable products and services while also growing the business. And by the way, I operate in all the major markets of the world. So I've got to figure out how to do that in the United States market, the European Union and in China, which are the three big drivers in terms of how things are going. So when you look at that challenge of doing this, an easy question is, well, what's different? Right, what's different? And so the reason for laying out models and boundary conditions is to frame the book actually with two ways, because I use that as the first part of the conversation and the last part of the conversation because that also leads later on to the idea of how do you future proof your business. But you wind up saying there's a lot of things out there that people don't worry about because they're not really variable. So they've always been there, like tariffs. But no one ever thinks of tariffs. Well, what's the big deal? That's not a top of mind issue in my business. And when you Put out things like, you know, barrier reefs are disappearing. That's nice, but it's like saying, you know, the pandas are disappearing. What do I do about that tomorrow? I mean, I can't go to work and take action on this. So I think people need a model which says, here's how all these things fit together. And some of them are going to be variable and some of them, you're right, are going to be relatively stable. And certain businesses, you don't think about them. But every business right now is worried about supply chain issues. But the fundamental fact is in supply chain, we never thought about emissions. It just wasn't something that people considered at all. It was all cost and quality. So the fact that you had to put it on a ship and transport it halfway around the world, that had more to do with time to market, maybe, but for emissions or water usage or anything else, who cares? And now all of a sudden you're like, oh, oh, oh. Well, it was always there. The emissions part was always there. Now you have to think about it and that's a different animal. So you come back and you say, all right, that's different. But let's not just hyper focus on tariffs today, let's put it back in context, because this is sort of like artificial intelligence today. It's a known unknown. Where's it going to go? Who knows? Are everyone going to lose their job? Probably not, but that's not really a particularly helpful sort of framing if you're in there trying to make business decisions. So the boundary condition to me is a useful foundational conversation to help people put all the stuff in context and to say things like tipping points are really fascinating. But again, do you worry about that in the course of decision making tomorrow? Probably not. But if you hear about it, is there any aspect there which may apply to credit or valuation risk? Is there something there that someone in my organization should be worried about? Yes or no, or at least if you are in charge of worrying about these things, how often should I worry about them? Do I check in every quarter, every six months, once a year, et cetera. And I think those are helpful to when people begin to think about, you know, I need to be able to predict, well, I can't even talk to you about that topic unless you know what the entire. All the variables are.
- [11:18]
Alfred Marcus
Right.
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Peter McAteer
Because we're really trying to sort through and lots of other people have written about this. The idea of seeing around corners and other sort of issues is you've got to have some sense of who do I track, who do I listen to, where's the money going, et cetera. That I can say, all right, I gotta worry about this. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it's gotta be on my radar screen. So that's always the first part of the conversation, which is why I start the book that way.
- [11:47]
Alfred Marcus
It's a very practical guy. In the end, that's what you're trying to do. You also talk about sustainability as a source of competitive differentiation. It's something I guess was brought up by Michael Porter a long time ago. In some of his writings. I think I've talked about in some of my writings. You give examples of companies that are succeeding by making sustainability part of their advantage, where it's not just a compliance issue.
- [12:12]
Peter McAteer
Well, if you look at all the transformation that's happening in the transportation industry, right, people are seeking out. I mean, you have a company like an Enphase which makes inverters. That's their whole business. It's all based on the growth in wind and solar power and things like this. Without that, they have no business. Now that is one of those beautiful companies where it's the product inside, you know, they're not driving the market, they're not driving lots of other aspects, but you can't build a solar panel without an inverter. So there are lots of businesses around the world. You know, bestest wind systems, you know, that used to be a very different kind of company. But now you have this, whatever it is, 50, 60, 70 year old business that's dominant in that industry that decided somewhere along the line to say, this is the direction we're going, that's all we're going to build. I think companies like a Tesla are easy to identify, but it's, you know, there are so many individual businesses in transportation and even artificial intelligence, right? So the big thing there, these companies are hyper conscious of their public image. So the fact that data centers are driving this. It's not unusual that a company like Nvidia is touting the fact that by eliminating all the cabling with their new systems that they are in fact greatly reducing the carbon footprint of what they're able to do and that the power consumption of their product is, you know, greatly reduces things. Levi Sprouse makes a lot of money now by using recycled denim. You know, it was almost funny a few years ago when they started putting these containers out in stores saying, bring us back your old jeans and we'll take them. Until they realized that, you know what, even if you bring me back a pair of jeans from some other company. It is a significantly less expensive than going to virgin denim, virgin cotton. So this is a great thing. People can feel good, they come in and all of a sudden this is more than just I'm not trying to comply with SEC regulations. This is. I found a great way to get new inventory and product in here. So I think that, you know, in transportation building there's all sorts of things and a lot of this is driven by public policy. So I'm a big believer that really good public policy really is helpful and Europe leads the way by far and things like that. But you often see even cities, the city of Geneva, Switzerland, which because they require recycled aggregate and concrete in any new building you're like, oh, okay, well that's just the city. But they're big enough that if you're a cement company in the area, you've got to figure out sources for getting recycled aggregate to build into everything you do in that city if you're going to get any government contract or anything else. So there's lots of examples around that where public policy leads to that. In one of my earlier books in the uk, the fact that they gave a raise the rate on solid waste disposal in a law out over a nice 10 year period of time. So you could see it coming, you could see the cost of these things going up and up and up each year. And so all of a sudden now you have companies going to companies that listen, you're going to throw away your desks and those partitions. It's going to cost you a lot of money because you're now going to pay $1,000 a ton instead. We'll take them for free, we'll recycle them and by the way, we'll also resell them back to you as refurbished. And this is becoming a nice little industry in different parts of the world that would not have been there without good regulatory activity, but nevertheless is more or less a pure play on sustainability issues.
- [16:15]
Alfred Marcus
There's a distinction, I think between companies like BASF or General Motors and like Enphase and Vestas, companies that are devoted to almost exclusively to sustainability as opposed to companies that are making a transition. How do you see that challenge being different inherently? I think it would be harder in companies that are making the transition and they have to, you know, they have their old legacy products to maintain and to. How do you see that distinction?
- [16:53]
Peter McAteer
Well, I devote the chapter on transitions specifically to for that purpose because the vast majority of economic activity in the world is a legacy business. It's not all new startups. So it's actually much more challenging if you're a Ford Motor company and you are trying to transition all these factories and union contracts and everything else than if you're a pure play startup. And it tends to make you wait until a market has been proofed, which is why everyone could see Tesla coming and no one did anything about it. And still you get beat to market. And everyone now is of course worried about the Chinese companies like BYD and things like this, which are formidable competitors. So it is a difficult thing. I mean, a lot of companies that are held up there as examples like a Unilever know Paul Paulman's work. But whenever someone asked me about that, I said, well, you know, they're worth, they've been working that for 15 years. And if you really look at how much of their revenue is, is, you know, zero emissions, it's fractional, it's tiny. So the path is quite long now for a company like that, that got started a long time ago, great. They've got this advantage because now they're building in, they're building capability, they're transitioning products over a longer period of time. If you have not been doing that and now you're just deciding to transition, as we said, something like basf, well, you got a long way to go and that path is fraught with challenges. So in that, to me you have to go product by product, you know, revenue source by revenue source. And that's not an easy thing to do in this variable regulatory environment. Now if you just stick with that example at the moment, their challenge of BASF is one thing in Europe, where you can now respond to the csrd, the new Corporate Social Sustainability Directive, but that's laid out with a calendar, you know, where everything is going. You know, you have to respond to Scope 3 emissions. On the United States side, you've been given a pass the new SEC regulations, so you don't have to worry about that. So now what do I do if I'm going to build factories, do I build factories? With this idea I can satisfy a global market, oh no, I can't. And if I build that factory in the US and it's shipping to Europe, well, it still has to have traceability despite the fact whatever the SEC regulations say. So all these things really complicate and very often what we're trying to figure out is that decision you made 10 years ago on that factory that's supposed to last 50 years, that's causing you problems because you can't undo it easily. And that's where the real challenge is for a lot of business, particularly in the manufacturing base. And the traditional way to deal with this is you sell off that part of the business, you basically take the problem and give it to somebody else. Right.
- [20:06]
Alfred Marcus
Which doesn't really solve the problem.
- [20:08]
Peter McAteer
Correct. And we see a lot of that in the market at the moment. So it makes an individual company sustainability reporting look better, but the overall progress is not going anywhere. And that's really a global problem at the moment. We're just not, we're pushing the deck around. We're not ultimately solving a lot of this problem.
- [20:28]
Alfred Marcus
What about. Inevitably, I have to ask about this, and you mentioned it briefly because regulation and public policies are so important. And we see this backlash in the United States in particular, not only just at the regulatory level, but even at the level of ESG generally, its favorability that it once had. I mean, it seemed like it was gaining so much momentum for a period of time, and now that momentum has been pushed back. How do you respond to that issue in particular and the old charge about shareholder value being slighted in comparison to sustainability?
- [21:12]
Peter McAteer
Well, it's an interesting challenge. Great. Social change has never been a linear process. And so, you know, I, as I talk to, to companies, this is again, one of the reasons I have the, the issue of ethics in the book. It's not a, it's not the entire book, but you can't address this question without the idea of at some point in time, you have to reflect on what's the right thing to do. And in deciding what the right thing to do is, the, the ignoring science doesn't change science. So the fact you can say, well, the world's not wanting, okay, the real challenge to me, and I actually, I did this in a, actually a conference I was at just yesterday. You know, someone like Joe Rogan can go on a podcast and reach almost 20 million people with his podcast and as he did recently with Mel Gibson, put up a chart there of 485 million years of US global or global climate change and say, look, it goes up and down all over the time. That's normal. So what's happening over this little spot over here where humans are. This is just part of the normal activity. And so he can be completely wrong in his interpretation of this graph, but he's going to reach 20 million people. And I can work real hard and I sell a good number of books, but I don't sell 20 million. So dealing with that misinformation is a challenge for businesses. But I again, I look at that and say, you know, you don't worry about everybody, you know, worry about the people in your business, your market. And the question is, are, you know, are you making a difference on planet Earth? Most people I meet are very interested in purpose. They want to get up in the morning and go to work and feel like they, their work has value. I mean, I, I found one of the great things I, I, I enjoyed at the United nations was that I'm supposed to be working about solving world poverty and things. To me, that's a great thing to get up in the morning. I didn't get up in the morning because the civil service regulations at the United nations said that we would all get a 2 1/2% raise in another year. That's not motivating, you know, so you wind up doing things that say, yeah, I think this is important. So I think we've taken a couple steps backwards. That's unfortunate. But things go forward and climate change in particular is a challenge. But regardless of what our politicians say, I can guarantee you there's not a banker or an insurance company out there who doesn't look at climate change very seriously because that very much affects their bottom line. And again, a variety of other companies, again, who are working in electrification, I'm sorry, whatever the US president feels or some other politician feels. China's over 50% of their electrification is already from alternative energy. Europe is over 50% and the US is 30%. So that ship has sailed. It may slow down, but that ship has sailed. And so the question is, we're doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring it, but it may take a few years for us to sort of reorient a bit. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. This episode is brought to you by ebay. Buying parts for your car, you'll know that will it work Feeling. But on ebay, buying parts is different. EBay's free return returns means if it doesn't fit or if it isn't what you expected, you just print a label, drop it off, and get your refund fast. No haggling no stress and at least 30 days to return any eligible item. Millions of parts, free returns, eBay things people love Eligible items only exclusions apply. Experience a membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Enjoy complimentary access to the American Express Global Lounge Collection and a welcome offer of 200,000 points after you spend $20,000 on purchases on the card within your first three months of membership. American Express Business Platinum there's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Platinum.
- [26:09]
Alfred Marcus
Executives and leadership has to have, they have to have a backbone based on their ethics. But there's a lot of contrary pressures. Like Mary Barra recently at General Motors retreated greatly from her commitment to electric vehicles. And maybe understandable if you were having a conversation with her, what might you say to her at this point in time?
- [26:40]
Peter McAteer
Well, I think there are ways to do things. Now in her instance, I would tell her I really wish we had this conversation back in 2010 when the idea of adopting things like plug in hybrids and things like that really would have been a great transition strategy. So I don't think those are bad products. I just think those products are a little late in terms of solving the actual issue. But they are embracing those sort of things because they're allowed to. It's really as simple as that. And they're taking a step back because they're allowed to. That's the beauty of good public policy. If public policy was consistent and people could see that looking out and the United States would do things like China does. I mean China greatly supports these transitions but with low to no cost capital. And if you offer General Motors a 0% capital to invest in EVs, Mary Bar would, would be changing her position tomorrow. So again, there are solutions. But what she's doing is she's hedging her betch. She's you can't eliminate the long term investments in factories, it takes too long. But those things are part of the boundary conditions which are very, very difficult to determine given this back and forth with the US Political public policy.
- [28:10]
Alfred Marcus
So what about you mentioned it a bit like policy consistency and the lead that actually China has taken in many respects. Could it be that as in the United States, Trump accumulates all this power in the executive, that the there's a reversal in sentiment and a new regime takes power in the United States, that it will use the power that he's accumulated to do just the opposite of what he did very rapidly. Can you imagine that happening or am I fantasizing?
- [28:48]
Peter McAteer
Well, I think it might be a slight fantasy, but again, the real challenge, and again going back to the General Motors example is they're losing ground in Europe and China. So regardless, the US is not the largest market anymore. So regardless of those issues, and this goes back to the same thing I was mentioning about a company like basf. I'm greatly reducing the value of scale because you now have to think of markets differently and think of the products for markets differently. And that changes, you know, the way you think about strategy and innovation. But the simple fact is the Chinese market has gone electric. You know that. Yeah, yeah, that ship has sailed. And Europe, again, being driven a lot by the, the, the Ukraine war has moved to, towards energy independence and having electric vehicles as a large part of their strategy. They are not going back. And so, you know, with those companies like General Motors, Ford, all the legacy companies have this very traditional, right, disruptive innovation challenge of are you going to sit on the US market and try to protect that market and use it to generate some extra cash? Because you could work with legacy products more and keep one foot in both things and then what are you going to do with the losing share? You have another part of the world. That's a tough question to address, but nevertheless a very, very real issue for these legacy auto companies.
- [30:24]
Alfred Marcus
I mean, hedging, a book I wrote, I talk a lot about hedging and the hedging among the major automobile companies and the oil and gas companies. But to do hedging well is very, very difficult.
- [30:38]
Peter McAteer
Well, if you look at what Ford has done recently by setting up a little independent innovation lab in California to build out the idea for their new low cost truck. You know, part of what really surprised them was not just China, but the small startup in Detroit that was promising an under $20,000, no frills truck. And they looked at it and all of a sudden it's a truck which is only offered in gray, has this wonderful innovation called roll down windows and it has no screen on it. You just plug in your iPhone and they solve things and you look and say, well, that sounds an awful lot like Henry Ford. Wow.
- [31:19]
Alfred Marcus
See?
- [31:20]
Peter McAteer
Yeah. And in fact, if you want a color. No, you go aftermarket and you get a plastic wrap on your truck. So you know, part of their problem is this mental model that I have to build cars a certain way and I only make profit by all these add on kinds of features and they have to figure out ways and part of that is not going to be able to, you're not going to want to make a $10 billion bet. You're going to have to figure out ways to prototype this and experiment with this. And they may have to do 10 times as many prototypes and experiments. That's part of what they should be doing. And they also should be investing a lot because portfolio investment in other smart people is a great way to innovate. But they're a little late to the party, which makes the challenge bigger, not smaller.
- [32:12]
Alfred Marcus
That company that, this simple truck, is that continuing? Are they still advancing with that?
- [32:20]
Peter McAteer
They are continuing. Of course. I mentioned and I forget the name of the truck.
- [32:24]
Alfred Marcus
Yeah, it's not the name of the company too.
- [32:26]
Peter McAteer
It's a fairly good idea. They are like a lot of things, they're not manufacturing yet, they just have prototypes out. So like Rivian and a lot of these other guys who have some brilliant ideas getting to market and solving the manufacturing challenge is not an insignificant issue. But again, the, the, to me, the real issue is, hey Ford, hey gm, someone has got an idea here. And all these younger generation people who are being asked about it are fascinated with this idea of roll down windows. Wow, isn't this cool? Why didn't no one ever think of this before? Yeah, but again, it can be done. And it's the same thing with a lot of the innovations in China. A lot of what BYD and several of the other companies are doing is they're offering smaller battery packs to drive cost down. The consumers don't seem to mind. Here in Asia, one of the big innovations is with motorbike battery swaps. And when you think of that, again, because there's motorbikes everywhere, I'm in the middle of Bangkok, There must be 5 million motorbikes running around. But there's also, and I have checked this because I've spoken about, it's 11,000,711s. So you say, well, what if in front of every 711 you had a kiosk, it'd be a vending machine where you swap out a battery. Your motorbike never leaves Bangkok. So I roll up, pop one out, pop one in, swipe my card.
- [34:02]
Alfred Marcus
Are they actually there in Bangkok right now, these in front of the 7 11s or they're beginning to develop, they're.
- [34:08]
Peter McAteer
Beginning to develop it here. It's quite big in Malaysia right now. And again when you look at, again this is a good public policy sort of question and I write about this a little bit in the book, when you look at China, which did underwrite the idea of cars doing battery swaps, right. And Tesla looked At this, a lot of other people looked at this, but that requires you to have a garage and you got to have a lift and you've got to lift, pull out this several thousand pound battery pack. And now you've got to have these things everywhere. The alternative that is being explored and again you start looking at what's the motorbike market in India, China and Vietnam. Everywhere is motorbikes and these are low cost markets. You don't have to have a battery pack that is going to get you 300 kilometers. You just need one that gets me to the next 7 11. And if it's not a 711 there's some other little shop everywhere. And so it's an easier way to do the innovation. But again you have both of these things existing in the market at the same time. I would think over time the Chinese investment in this is a waste of money. You know, you have to have way too much infrastructure to make this work on, on scale with cars or trucks. But with motorbikes, I can throw this in a bat my back, you know.
- [35:26]
Alfred Marcus
The waste is, is the battery switching on scale. Yeah, that was, that has been tried. I think Tesla abandoned it in the United States. There was that Better Place company and it was started in Israel that also was doing that in the background.
- [35:42]
Peter McAteer
So again, this is a wonderful example of where public policy can do the wrong thing by encouraging certain behavior and investment that makes no sense. And in China, in large part it's because the money's free. So you're basically encouraged to open factories you don't even need because you do it at no cost. Whereas in some of these other markets which are still, you know, there's a capital allocation strategy that still is required to have a return on investment. But again, you can see it makes a lot of sense. And, and for me, if you compare the two items, I'm jumping on one, like easily the other one. I'm sitting here scratching my head saying that, I mean, I don't get where you're going with this. I got to have this garage, where do I put the batteries and all. It just doesn't make sense. So our problem in the United States is we don't have that support for these newer technologies. If anything, we're doing the opposite. We're saying, you know, drill baby, drill, we're going to pull away support and that is simply going to set us back five years in terms of competitive advantage. I don't see. Look at it. Yeah, makes no sense.
- [36:52]
Alfred Marcus
We need the infrastructure. That infrastructure rollout that didn't occur as fast as possible under Biden with the charging stations, I think was a missed opportunity. It seems like in China everything gets done so much more quickly than it does in the United States.
- [37:11]
Peter McAteer
Well, we also for some reason are investing in ideas that should never get off the drawing board. I mean, so you have this massive solar energy plant on the Arizona, California border, which is one of these sort of solar furnace ideas, right? So you have this huge tower with a, you know, molten sodium flowing around at the top and 9,000 or 9 million mirrors, however many mirrors are there. But it's a design which will never get more efficient once you build it. It's set, it's done. Whereas if you look at solar fields with solar panels and you say every aspect of that is improving in terms of cost and efficiency over time. We sort of know right now, right, that the cost of a solar cell is dropping about 3% a year. The efficiency of solar cells is increasing about 3% a year. It doesn't take a genius to say, well, why don't I roll this out over time? And over a seven year period of time now I start swapping out the old panels for the new panels and so on. The same amount of real estate, I'm now getting more power, whereas that old solar furnace is going to do the same thing. If anything, it'll get less efficient as I have to maintain it over time. Yet that was a government funded investment and often we do these things because the money is available. We're willing to throw money at dumb ideas as opposed to spreading it around a little bit, waiting for proof of concept and not trying to pick winners, but trying to see to market and put in a capital allocation that gets removed over time.
- [38:58]
Alfred Marcus
The demand for electrification that's going to come about because of AI is going to be enormous, I think. And that may have positive impacts conceivably on sustainability because we want to become more electrified generally. But will that lead to the growth of. What about nuclear power? Will nuclear power play a role in this? What's your view on that?
- [39:26]
Peter McAteer
I try to be agnostic when it comes to a lot of issues. Clearly nuclear power has a lot of issues and it's not the first time that people look to take an old idea and rebrand it going forward. Personally, I still don't see, I don't like solutions and I certainly wouldn't be counseling with a company that they turn around and allocate $20 billion to a project which has an unproven track record of getting to market in Anywhere near a planned time. And again, I don't like 20 billion dollar bets. So to me, and again, I'll go back to the example I've now used several times. One of the great innovations that I think people at BASF did was coming up with the idea of mass balancing and the whole mass balancing says, I'm going to turn around and partner with my customers and I'm going to say, tell me how climate friendly you want the product, how much virgin material you want versus this other. Because when I reduce it all to base chemicals, it's all chemically identical. Doesn't matter where I got it from. But I can mix and match things at the manufacturing level. The only thing you really need is the traceability that says I can take credit for the fact that it's 20% recycled. Now if you want it fully recycled, I can do that too. It's just going to cost you more money at current markets. So it allows them to satisfy niche markets who where the value is there and scale down while still building manufacturing capability and having some predictability in the market. That seems to me like a real win. And again, it reduces the risk. Turning around and saying to an electrical grid, your only choices are like building this massive set of transmission towers or building these $20 billion power plants. I think you got to say maybe we should go back to the drawing board a little bit on this. Isn't it better to build 10 windmills or again, a solar farm that I can scale or something else so I can make profit tomorrow. And oh, by the way, if you want to site a data center there, I'm pretty comfortable that I can get a sales guy to go in and get them to commit to buy all of your power for the next 25 years because they're dying to have it. And by the way, they're going to increase their needs. You kind of know that. So the fact is you can say, and by the way, I have a scalable solution so I can increase. They'll probably buy all the increase you can get too. And when you start comparing these issues, you say, I think one just makes more sense. So I'm not against nuclear power for a lot of reasons. I could be against it. I would be saying, I just feel like there's five other answers that are better.
- [42:25]
Alfred Marcus
It's not flexible in the economics ultimately or need to be proven, let's put it that way.
- [42:33]
Peter McAteer
It's just. And we still haven't solved the nuclear waste issue. So there's a lot of troubling issues But I expect it to be part of the mix. I expect that will get approved because there's a lot of people who have interest in that.
- [42:47]
Alfred Marcus
What about solar panels on rooftops? Why hasn't that taken off to a greater extent? I mean, I think the economics, even without the subsidies are really good. And it's.
- [43:00]
Peter McAteer
Well, you know, we have a lot of competing regulatory environments and interests where certain issues that are logical can't be done just because of who owns buildings, how it's done, how risk is done, how the process of going through and getting approvals from everybody and doing things, it just gets so cumbersome.
- [43:21]
Alfred Marcus
Yes, yes, the utilities, it's not in their interest.
- [43:27]
Peter McAteer
It'S not a technical issue, it's not a funding issue. You can make a very good case on how to do it. But when these things. And again, use wind farms as an example, when it takes you 10 years to get approval. How can I tie up my capital for 10 years waiting for you to say yes or no? It just doesn't make sense to me.
- [43:44]
Alfred Marcus
You know, there's this recent research or publications that's saying that the reason why the Chinese are winning is that the Politburo is dominated by engineers, while the United States, all the political elite is a bunch of lawyers. And lawyers know how to stop things from happening. And engineers, the solution to every problem is to build something new. Actually in China, as I understand it, that the automobile industry left, EV industry now is so competitive that profits are. It's been so heavily subsidized that profits are going away. There's so many companies which from a, from our perspective is very good, from the company perspective is problematic. Is that your observation too? Yeah.
- [44:28]
Peter McAteer
China is an interesting market and I think there are again, I would say politically in the United States there are very good reasons to object to some of the subsidies and things in terms of free and fair trade. So I think that there's a legitimate conversation to be said there. At the same time, I think we are silly to not learn from different practices in terms of what makes sense. China is also building a horrible legacy of pollution like coal can power plant that can't be ignored. And it still is the largest consumer of coal on planet earth, along with India. So you have a lot of challenges together. And again, they do have a billion and a half people. This is not an insignificant set of challenges. One of our real issues with sustainability is the conflict between a range of the goals. So, you know, the biggest reduction in poverty the world has ever known has happened in the last 25 years, primarily because India and China have grown 6 plus percent per year and all those new jobs have reduced extreme poverty by phenomenal amounts. So those are real success stories. At the same time, they've also contributed to record amounts of pollution, records amounts of water consumption, et cetera. So you could have a goal that says, I want to reduce extreme poverty, so that's great, but we have to do it in a way. And that's really the leadership challenge. It is, you know, and regardless of everything I talk about, I ignore some pretty fundamental issues that I'm happy to talk about with companies that, you know, this whole issue of degrowth or can we just continue with economic growth forever? Herman Day coming back. I'm punting on that one at the moment. Let's see if we can solve some other issues. But there's clearly conflicts, but as I often say with people, when it comes to equality, we've been working on some of these issues for centuries. This is not a recent phenomenon. And the fact that we haven't solved the problem yet, well, I don't anticipate we were ever going to solve it by 2030. But the nature of climate change is simply different. And there was a wonderful study in Nature recently about Florida corals that I believe is the elkhorn and staghorn corals are now functionally extinct in the Florida reefs, which means we've lost more than 97.8% of those corals that's not coming back. And that mostly has happened with those two specific corals since 2023, when we had water in the Florida Keys, for example, water temperature above 95 degrees for extended periods of time. That's unnatural. And again, when I speak to people who are, I don't find them really much anymore who don't believe in the science or, or claim that, you know, this is all un science or new science or all these other sort of, sort of things. It's pretty easy to. It's like you completely misunderstand. First of all, this is mostly Isaac Newton sort of science. This is nothing. Very cerebral, basic principles.
- [48:02]
Alfred Marcus
Yeah.
- [48:03]
Peter McAteer
Terribly new. And the fact is energy comes in and it's got to go somewhere. And the fact is it's stored in the oceans and if you heat up the water, we have this wonderful safety valve mechanism on planet Earth called storms that will move some of the energy somewhere else. And that's just what we're seeing. It's not complicated. Now, if you're not near one of those storms, where I am in Southeast Asia and Thailand in Particular, we haven't had bad hurricanes or cyclones and things because of geography, they're a bit more protected so they don't experience it. So it's not top of mind as much as if you are in the eastern Philippines where you get cyclones every year, it seems with increasing frequency. And I'm sure the condo market in Florida is collectively, you know, taking a deep breath that this recent Category 5 hurricane has chosen to remain out in the middle of the Atlantic because that's the kind of thing that's a, a $20 billion loss written on it if it were to make landfall. And so as a practical matter, regardless of what the politicians in Florida say, or from all the red states from Texas up to South Carolina, the insurers are going to vacate the market if they're losing money. It's as simple as that. It's not a complicated issue.
- [49:24]
Alfred Marcus
When I was younger, I thought we could solve problems and now we have to manage them. All we can do is manage them. I think that the, we've gone beyond a certain threshold with regard to carbon accumulation and we're just going to have to deal with the consequences and hope that we don't at least minimize the additional amounts that were contributing to the problem. Would you centrally agree with that?
- [49:53]
Peter McAteer
Yes. I mean, again, as I talk to people and I try to remain the optimist and I say the fact is we've baked in a certain amount of this challenge. So of the 17 goals, I said it's three to worry about. This doesn't mean the others are not important, but 13, 14, 50, so it's climate action, life on land and life underwater. If you screw up those, everything else is going to get bad anyway. So if you mess up climate change, the fact is you still have a third of the world's agriculture is farmed by people who farm less than five acres of land. Right. These people are under capitalized, which means if they lose a harvest, they don't have the money to subsidize. And we've seen with, you know, we've seen in the United States what happened during the Dust Bowl. What do people do when their farm is ruined? They hop on the car, they throw the stuff on the roof and they emigrate. So if you're worried about migration issues now, wait, wait a decade, it's going to get worse. And these things are predictable, long term, but predictable. So in there you could get depressed about that. I agree. On the other side, this is going to be the greatest entrepreneurial challenge the world has ever seen. And this is sort of a point you mentioned earlier. It's one thing to deal with what we have now where the problem is bad but not horrible. It's going to get worse as we go forward. All right, we're going to add more people, all right, by 2025, we're going to add not only 100 trillion in new GDP, we're going to add another billion and a half people. And so this issue continues to get worse over time and that we're going to have to solve it. So someone's going to have to come up with direct air capture that's actually efficient and economical in terms of carbon renewal. We're also going to have a horrible problem with our oceans with acidification and changes in the composition of the ph of the oceans and the death of corals and the difficulty of animals to build calcium shells and things like this. You know, we've already had these terrible examples like the great crab die off and the Bering Sea where you lost 50, you know, 50 million crabs, like overnight. And you say, well, how the hell did that happen? But part of it is you need research to figure out how that happened. And as it turns out, you know, when you have ice cover, the crabs have this wonderful environment, which is too cold for predators, right? So the cod doesn't want to live there because it's too darn cold, because the water there is actually minus one degree in the middle of winter. We say, isn't that frozen water? Not when it's salty and not when it's under pressure. So you have these wonderful environments where the crabs thrive. Now you have to raise the water temperature not by much, just from minus one to plus one. So it's not exactly a heat wave the way we would describe a heat wave, but it's enough to change the environment for that animal, which is a $200 million fishery. And you literally, the fishery went from one year to the next year was closed. We haven't seen that before in a lot of areas. And again, when you start eliminating coral reefs, you're going to see this fishery issue multiplied around the world. You know the words dominating today's headlines. Private equity, generative capital gains tax. But do you understand how they impact your world and your wallet? In a world that skims the what, understand the why. Because context changes everything. Subscribe@Bloomberg.com every minute your finance team spends wrestling with data is a minute Lost Insight Software's AI powered insights instantly move you from complexity to clarity. Automated analysis, real time reporting strategic recommendations all at your fingertips. Transform how your finance team works and watch your business grow. Stop wasting time. Start making smarter decisions. Learn more@insightsoftware.com AI Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless and if.
- [54:02]
Alfred Marcus
You haven't made the switch yet, here.
- [54:04]
Peter McAteer
Are 15 reasons why you should 1. It's $15 a month.
- [54:08]
Alfred Marcus
2.
- [54:09]
Peter McAteer
Seriously, it's $15 a month.
- [54:11]
Alfred Marcus
3.
- [54:12]
Peter McAteer
No big contracts. 4. I use it. 5.
- [54:14]
Alfred Marcus
My mom uses it. Are you, are you playing me off?
- [54:16]
Peter McAteer
That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan $15 per month equivalent required New customer offer first 3 months only then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra cementmobile.com There are.
- [54:30]
Alfred Marcus
Thresholds that can be reached and they can be reached suddenly and there can be major changes that might occur and those are the most dangerous in some sense because we have the least capacity to predict and to be prepared for them.
- [54:44]
Peter McAteer
Well, this goes back again, depending on who I would be speaking with now. If I was speaking with a seafood company or an agriculture company, I would say let's go back to our question of boundary conditions and those issues we first started talking about, like tipping points and planetary boundaries that are too complex and scientific for me to worry about. Say, well, now you see how they connect very directly to your business. And so now the question is, what's the intermediary kind of issues that we have to be watching that says, well, how, what happens if we get a disruption in our basic supply of fish or in the type of fish, the species of fish, all these other sort of things that may affect us? How do we start hedging in relationship to these sort of questions? And that's a legitimate business question that I think you can put on the table again, depending on the industry. And that's where you have to get specific to people and say, yes, soybean farmer, you weren't watching that issue of tariffs, were you? Because now it just bites you in the butt. But it always was there and always was a challenge. But it also was a challenge that we plant entire states with one product and that we also have diseases which are increasingly affecting. So if you're a banana producer, right, the key banana we import from the United States into the United States from Latin America is under a disease threat. If you lose it, you lose it, you lose the banana crop.
- [56:10]
Alfred Marcus
This is a great conversation. We can go on for much greater length. But I'm going to say a few things and you can comment on any of them. What about meat eating versus vegetarianism is a potential issue or something that we can deal with. Another one is aging. The population is aging very rapidly and actually by the year 2050 I think population start to decline. What kind of impact will that have? And then a very practical business one has BYD eaten Tesla's lunch. And Tesla now only exists because of tariff protection in the United States. And if we would let BYD in, they would wipe Tesla from off the face of the planet. You can take any of those?
- [57:05]
Peter McAteer
Well, I tend not to believe people who say that our population numbers are going to hit some magical point where they're going to decline when we've never seen this behavior before. I also tend not to believe 50 year projections because it doesn't mean anything in a practical basis. And I think counting on something happening that's never happened before is not a really great strategy. So in essence I assume that population will increase and that all sorts of wonderful things may happen which I don't know about yet, that will have a tendency to increase GDP or increase population or do all sorts of things that in some combination is going to lead me back where I was before, where I have to deal with ever increasing amounts of consumption. So with that you have to you address the fundamental issues. And so something like vegetarianism and beef and things. Well, it's a problem. Now, is it a problem if I were to solve transportation? Is it a problem if I were to solve a variety of the other agricultural practices? If I were to solve shipping, transportation and emissions, If I were to solve airline emissions? There are various ways where I think the ultimate answer is you're not going to be able to get to emission zero. Right? Right. Not a issue. The bigger issue with beef as an example is the fact that 200 years ago the world was populated by millions of wilderbeast and billions of buffalo and all sorts of other things. And what we've done is we've totally transformed the biosystem so that we now have. And if my numbers are correct, something like 2 billion cows and 800 million pigs and 400 million chickens and everything else is disappearing. And we have 10 major crops around the world. And so we've narrowed down biodiversity by an unbelievable amount, which again from a scientific basis, a practical basis, we know is a bad idea. Having all these monocultures is simply not a sustainable practice. And we also know we've lost enormous amounts of topsoil, we've lost enormous amounts of fresh water. So the bigger issue to me is say okay, perfect. Eat as much beef as you want. You want to have a steak, I don't care. But we have to eliminate all the emissions that we practically can as fast as we can. And there are great opportunities. So let's pursue the opportunities and apply the capital where we can have real gain. In other instances, I think the market changes a little bit by itself. I think the younger generations are drinking less alcohol, eating less beef. So market activities work wonderful in many ways, which I think is partly the answer to the Tesla question. Whether Tesla comes or goes. To be honest, I'm not sure I really care. And I think it may very well that BYD doesn't exist either. It wouldn't be the first time that early adopters in an industry such as a Digital Equipment Corporation or an IBM or many others exit the market because other companies prove that they can do the same thing better. So I think, as opposed to try to define winners and prop up Tesla, regardless, if it turns out that the shareholders of Tesla don't want to pay Elon a billion or trillion dollars and he decides to leave and take his ideas and go somewhere, I'm sure, like as in many businesses, you ultimately have to have a succession plan and some new person could come along and build nice cars. I don't, I don't really have a problem with that. And, or they will go bankrupt and someone will love to buy their nice factories and use them to build something else. Again, I don't see a major problem with that. So I, to me, I believe that the markets and business are the solution. You can't solve these problems with charity. We know that for a fact. It doesn't work. And again, the existential threat comes from the twin pillars, SDG 14 and 15 biodiversity and 13 climate. You solve those two, you make everything else better, make everything else easier. If you don't solve them, then those issues that are in there, in my boundary conditions, such as increases in nationalism, increases in political isolation, other sort of things, I think have a tendency to get worse. And they make all those other problems of equality, et cetera, worse, not better, because people tend to retreat to more conservative positions and everybody's looking for a boogeyman to blame for the problems of the world. So I think it's in everybody's interest and it's in good public policy interest. And I think multilateralism is in everybody's interest. So if I look for a positive change in the future, I would look for a leader who is able to talk to people about immigration, not because everybody is A rapist and a murderer, but because we're going to add another billion and a half people to planet Earth and we're going to add 100 trillion in GDP and we have all these climate issues which are logically going to move poor people from where they are now to somewhere else. And AI is going to eliminate jobs, which is going to mean we're going to start creating generations of people who don't have employees, employment, all of that may make immigration worse. And that's the issue we should be dealing with, not some figment that everybody's worried about, something else. So I think we need politicians who reframe these issues from a sustainability perspective that get behind those in meaningful ways and allow you to grow your economy in a clean way. And I always try to simplify that, which is what I really try to do in the book. You go from these big, complex pictures, which will give someone a headache trying to figure out all these issues, to shrink it back and say, I just want you to focus on, find me some sustainable advantage or competitive advantage in sustainability. Right. And then don't do anything negative. Right. Don't harm the environment as part of finding competitive advantage. And while you're doing it, try to have an ethical framework as you make these decisions that you're doing the right thing for the communities where we live and work. Right. And if possible, maybe you can help clean up some of the mess we've already created. Right. And that's, I'll add that as a secondary issue, not as a primary issue, but if you just focus on that, don't focus on 17 goals and 169 sub measures and 232 indicators and all this other sort of stuff which will make your, you know, brain explode in terms of complexity. But focus on the simple things and say, be part of the solution. And that's the people I wrote the book for.
- [64:16]
Alfred Marcus
It's an entrepreneurial opportunity, especially if we're in an environment, public policy environment that is supportive and encouraging and it's really, in the end, based on people's ethics and principles and their basic character, that they're willing to understand this and be part of the transition.
- [64:38]
Peter McAteer
Yes. Well, even when I talk to people in government organizations, what a great time to be in government. What a great time to embrace service to your community, to help solve these problems, to help create the landscape that allows businesses to thrive and creates this new sustainable environment. How great is it to come to work every day thinking that you're going to be able to solve some of the most Difficult problems that humankind has ever faced. This is, this is good stuff. Get your hands around it. You got to feel good.
- [65:10]
Alfred Marcus
You solve this, you get better human beings working for your companies if you provide them with this mission as part of what your companies are doing.
- [65:21]
Peter McAteer
Well, I think that is partly the secret to sort of the early efforts of companies like Tesla, that people were not going to work because they wanted to work 80 hours a week and get abuse. Now that's not the secret. The secret is you gave them a vision of solving this unsolvable problem, of transforming planet Earth. And we knew that, you know, without Elon Musk, we knew that when people joined the NASA back in the 60s, putting someone on the moon, I can go to work to do that. That sounds like fun. And I'll work a lot of hours to solve that problem. So we've got these good purpose based things which again, when I focus with companies on this sort of side of it and how to help create a purpose to your organization which is part of finding competitive advantage. You say this is the secret sauce. This is not just this. Let's put a value proposition on the wall that sounds nice and everyone will look at it in the elevator. This is the key to getting people excited to come to work and to solve these big problems and to really put their brains behind this. That's what you're trying to engage and if you can do that, this is magic. This is good stuff.
- [66:37]
Alfred Marcus
Sounds to me like you're still optimistic.
- [66:40]
Peter McAteer
I try to make fun of. Well, I look at people and when I ask me why am I doing this, because I'm now 70 years old and I say it's a legacy thing for me. I think if you're honest with yourself, you say I'm part of the problem. I consumed my share of plastics and produced my share of emissions and I'd like to leave the world a little bit better for my kids and grandkids. So I'm unabashed about that. And I have no problem going to work and saying my job is to solve climate change. I'm not going to worry about someone saying I can't do that and what's the metrics and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Don't worry about it. If I solve it, I'll know it, but I'm not worried about that. So don't worry about me. We'll deal with it.
- [67:25]
Alfred Marcus
I love it. You're passionate and you're inspiring and it's easy to get down these days and become depressed. So I really appreciate Your approach, what are you working on right now? What are your main projects?
- [67:42]
Peter McAteer
I laid out these, the three books. This is the third book in a series. And I always had the idea for these three books, so I laid that out. And the next step is I tend every two years or so after speaking with all the customers. So I'm focused a little bit now on working in developing markets and working with small island developing and least developed countries, again on the idea that you can't solve the problem unless you bring everybody along. And so the markets I describe tend to be the markets with the least resources, with the highest population rates, and are going to be the perfect markets that if I solve or get rid of fossil fuels in large developing markets, it's not going to change the fact that most of the fossil fuels are owned by national oil companies. And Saudi Arabia is still going to have a cost of production, about five bucks a barrel. So even if the United States doesn't want to buy their oil, they're going to turn to Africa or Latin America or some poor country which doesn't have infrastructure, and they're going to sell them the established stuff, which works well and they'll still have a market. So unless you solve the problem for everybody, we don't solve the problem. So again, I want to work in those environments. And that is the kind of situation where you can say sometimes an innovation has happened somewhere else, but we really have to be able to figure out is what are the boundary conditions you are operating under in this developing market and what are the public policy issues here. And are there any parallels from the last 50 years which really match well, which give us guidance on what kind of practices might succeed? And I think that matching of things is really just a practical question of I don't want to take 20 years to solve the problem here. I want to leapfrog. I want to solve the problem now. So how do I do that in those markets that it's less expensive. And again, that's the reason to look for legacy technologies and legacy solutions because they tend to be lower cost in terms of how they're adopted and they tend to come along with lessons learned and a variety of other things that are easier to adopt. So I think there's a whole innovation opportunity there and there's going to be more. There's more than a billion people in Africa. There's a huge market there for things. You have countries which still have extreme poverty rates in excess of 50%. You have a lot of Southeast Asia, which again could use a lot More innovation. And we're the successes we've had so far. So I'm working with companies, I'm trying to line up something for Pakistan in the near future to go work there, because I've never worked there. And it's a wonderful market with wonderful problems with its own set of political frameworks and things like that. But nevertheless, they are still subject to the three major markets of the world that I describe in the book. They're still subject to the innovation tensions that I describe in the book. And if they want to grow, they want to grow like most developing countries. They want to export, they want to do a variety of things. Well, if you're going to export, then you have to know what Europe is doing. You have to know what China's doing. You have to be able to figure out where your niche is. And you can't work on the niche. That was the niche people would pursue 30 years ago, a labor based kind of, because that's being eliminated by artificial intelligence, robotics and automation. So you're going to have to think differently about this going forward. But again, to me, if I don't solve the issue in a country like that, we are inviting political unrest, we are inviting problems to happen in parts of the world because there's going to be a water crisis. We know it because of the upstream dams done in the Himalayas, just like we know Egypt is going to have a crisis. Another place I want to work in the near future because of the upstream dams on the Nile and the reduction in water flow and the fact that you have this 50 million population sitting there that already has extreme poverty. And if you don't solve it, what's going to happen? More extremism? More political violence?
- [72:04]
Alfred Marcus
I think it's predictable and you're so knowledgeable. It's just been a wonderful conversation. Peter, thank you for joining me today and for sharing your insights from leading the sustainable organization. For listeners, I'm Alfred Marcus and this has been a conversation on the New Books Network. My series explores the space where strategy meets ethics, how leaders and organizations can navigate complexity while saying staying true to their values. I hope you'll join me for upcoming episodes as we continue to explore books that matter for business and society. If you have comments, you can reach me at amarcusmn. Edu. Or if you have books that you would like me to feature on this podcast, please tell me about them. Thank you very much.
- [73:09]
Peter McAteer
And Doug, here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu. Is that guy with the the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty, Liberty.
- [73:32]
Alfred Marcus
Liberty.
- [73:33]
Peter McAteer
Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates excludes Massachusetts.