Apple's Lisa Jackson talks sustainability, environmental justice in new interview

Apple senior vice president Lisa Jackson recently appeared on the Jane Goodall podcast to talk about the company's sustainability initiatives and how businesses can innovate in the area.

In the latest episode of The Jane Goodall Hopecast, Jackson — who serves as Apple's SVP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives — spoke to Goodall about the Cupertino company's past and current sustainability endeavors, as well as its plans for the future.

Jackson said that Apple was "already on the road to making significant investments in clean energy" before she joined. However, Apple picked up the speed on its sustainability initiatives "because time is super important."

In 2020, for example, Apple became a carbon-neutral company. Jackson also expanded on how Apple prioritizes clean energy and not just purchasing carbon offsets to make up for non-clean energy sources.

Additionally, Jackson says that Apple's sustainability can inspire other companies to follow suit.

"I think first and foremost, as a company, we should focus on other companies," Jackson said. "So Apple has a role and a responsibility to play in showing other companies, 'This can be done. It can be done in a way that's good for your bottom line. It can be done in a way that gets you more customers.' And so we're spending a lot of time helping. We have well over a hundred companies that have pledged to go a 100% clean energy just like Apple. And they're all our suppliers."

The Apple SVP also said that any environmental or sustainability push has to incorporate social justice as well.

"We don't want to see only people who have means, are invested in the clean economy, do well. We should all be part of the clean economy because it's the economy of the future," she said. "That's why we want to spread this idea of, 'You can be a part of the clean energy and the low carbon economy,' to our suppliers, because they're all employers in their individual regions of the world. And so they have to see another path forward."

4 Comments

steven n. 1229 comments · 13 Years

About 3 years ago

“[…] 'You can be a part of the clean energy and the low carbon economy,' to our suppliers, because they're all employers in their individual regions of the world. And so they have to see another path forward."

Then pay you suppliers more. Otherwise, this is just yammering virtue signaling.

patchythepirate 1254 comments · 12 Years

It's unbelievable that people keep pushing this nonsense, and particularly abhorrent that Apple is wasting money on carbon offsets. Shameful. We are at geologically-speaking, rock bottom levels of CO2, which is literally the building block of life. If anything, we should be pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible, not reducing it. Most plants are optimized for a CO2 level of 800-1200ppm, and we're at a paltry 400ppm, just slightly above the minimum level needed to sustain plant life (170ppm IIRC). According to NASA, the earth is greener today that it has been since we started recording it with satellites. This is not just because CO2 is gaseous plant fertilizer, but because higher CO2 confers drought resistance by minimizing H2O loss through the plant stoma, which loses H2O when it necessarily opens to obtain the CO2 it needs.

tht 5654 comments · 23 Years

patchythepirate said:

It's unbelievable that people keep pushing this nonsense, and particularly abhorrent that Apple is wasting money on carbon offsets.

As Tim Cook has said before, and paraphrasing here, sell your Apple stock, don't buy any Apple products if you feel this way. Don't think they will stop this sustainability initiative. As time moves forward, it will only accelerate as Apple and its suppliers will likely attempt to remove from the atmosphere all of the CO2 they have emitted since they started business. After that, they will attempt to remove CO2 that was emitted from other businesses, after Apple remains the powerhouse it is today.

For others, regarding the chart. It has a 600 million year time frame. Yes, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere back then, but the sun's luminosity was also about 5% less. So, it balanced out for an atmosphere for life, from life underwater in the Cambrian to the dinosaur age in the Jurassic.

Even with less solar energy hitting the planet, the estimate average global temperature was 22 °C, or 72 °F. Average. That's batshit insane hot for summers. Remember during this summer when it was 110 °F in the Pacific Northwest. Well add another 20 °F to it. Or go to Death Valley on its hottest day ever recorded at 128 °F to see what it may feel like. Not pleasant. The coldest morning temperatures in a Summer heatwave would be in the 100 °F range. Death Valley would have summer temperatures in the 140 to 150 °F in a world like this. That's cooked meat temperature. If those CO2 levels 600m years ago are here today, it will mean the extinction of human life.

Speaking of stellar or geologic time scales. The grand trend for CO2 will be to continue to go down, unless humanity survives and becomes a Kardashev Type I to low end Type II civilization, and does something. The sun"s luminosity is increasing 1% every 100m years. We will not survive a 1% increase in solar luminosity, unless we do some astroengineering scale efforts. In 1 billion years, it's a 10% increase in stellar luminosity. That will likely end even bacterial life. Lots of crazy things will happen in 100m to 1b year time frames. Oceans evaporated away. Plate tectonics and volcanism stops because the Earth's core has become cooler. If volcanism stops, CO2 will eventually drop down to near zero levels, as CO2 is sequestered in rocks from weathering and emitted back through volcanism. No photosynthesis, no oxygen. No oxygen, not ozone. No ozone, UV light will hits the surface, no life.

My favorite astroengineering concept is to move the planets to higher orbits. Move Mercury and Venus together and out to Eath-Sun L3. Move all of them about 10% higher. Crash a bunch of water comets into them. Terraform Mars. Crash a bunch of comets and Kuiper belt objects into it to increase mass. 100m time scales! The Earth revolves around the Milky Way center in 240m years. Unimaginably long time scales.

Alex_V 269 comments · 6 Years

patchythepirate said:

It's unbelievable that people keep pushing this nonsense, and particularly abhorrent that Apple is wasting money on carbon offsets. Shameful. We are at geologically-speaking, rock bottom levels of CO2, which is literally the building block of life. If anything, we should be pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible, not reducing it. Most plants are optimized for a CO2 level of 800-1200ppm, and we're at a paltry 400ppm, just slightly above the minimum level needed to sustain plant life (170ppm IIRC). According to NASA, the earth is greener today that it has been since we started recording it with satellites. This is not just because CO2 is gaseous plant fertilizer, but because higher CO2 confers drought resistance by minimizing H2O loss through the plant stoma, which loses H2O when it necessarily opens to obtain the CO2 it needs.

Infantile garbage. Simple fact-check for dummies: The time scale you are showing is from the beginning of life on earth. Why? Because you won’t show the carbon build-up in the last 100 years. Why not? Because it is alarming. What happened to all that CO2 in your graph? It was absorbed by carbon life forms (the clue is in the name) that died and were buried underground over billions of years. What has happened to all that carbon since the industrial revolution? We have been burning it and putting it back into the atmosphere as CO2.

We literally have all the answers to questions at our fingertips. You’ve got a question… type it into Wikipedia, get the answer. Where’s the problem? Before, it took a trip to your local library to look it up in an encyclopaedia. Tiresome. You want to know… is the earth round? Do scientists approve of vaccines? What is Area 51? Any sh*t… It’s not a mystery anymore. There is no controversy about the earth being round, except amongst the ignorant and liars. In my opinion, to tell a “lie,” or to be a “liar” includes people (like you) who refuse to be informed, or do the tiniest amount of fact-checking, and spread (politically inspired and corporate-originating) lies on forums like this.

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