Rolf
Appearances
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We had a campaign against Mattel, the maker of Barbie. What did Barbie do? Barbie was being manufactured in China and Indonesia, and in Indonesia, the box was being wrapped with illegal rainforest destruction. We did a fiber analysis on the paper, and there was actual rainforest fiber in there that wasn't supposed to be there.
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We tested the boxes. There are people with microscopes who can look at fiber and tell if it's mixed tropical hardwood, which means they just raised the rainforest down, put it into a blender and made paper out of it and destroyed it forever. And this was something that was largely illegal as well. So yeah, we reached out to them. They didn't really have anything to say. Things escalated.
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And so, yeah, we had like a 2,500 square foot banner on their headquarters in El Segundo near the LA airport.
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Well, Ken was breaking up with Barbie because of her rainforest destruction. And Barbie was driving around in a pink bulldozer downstairs, obstinate. She wasn't going to change her ways.
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Yeah, it was a little mini bulldozer. We painted it pink. My idea was I didn't have enough money to buy a bulldozer. I just made the pitch. I'm like, look, we can buy a bulldozer and then we can sell it later. Like, it's just a cash flow issue. Just give me enough money to buy one of these little bulldozers. Later, we tried to sell it.
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And my associate was on the phone with someone who wanted to buy it. And she's like, oh, one last thing. We painted it. And the fellow said, that's fine. It's not pink or something, is it? And she had to break the news to him that it was, in fact, Barbie pink.
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They did. And then Hasbro called up right away because we'd sent them a letter and they hadn't responded. They're like, hey, we want to talk to you. I'm like, that's good because you were next. And Disney and Lego did as well.
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Isn't it better that with all those bad things, it's not also wrapped in destroyed rainforest that was illegally destroyed and polluting the climate on top of that? That part is a little bit better, and I'll take that win. Yeah, it's a broken world. I try to live with integrity. I don't walk on water. This is the paradox.
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And we were surprised to see that after China banned Bitcoin mining, it moved to the US. And when it moved to the US, fossil fuel power plants that we thought were being sunsetted or were idle or were on their way out suddenly came back to life.
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Like waste coal plants in Pennsylvania, coal in Kentucky and Montana, other states suddenly roaring back to life when we thought the fight over coal for electricity was sort of one, like it was on its way out. So it was going in the exact opposite direction of where we need to go. It became a big enough problem for us to be concerned to start to work on it. So we're focused not on crypto.
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We're not anti Bitcoin. It's we're anti burning coal to make electricity. And Bitcoin is doing that right now in the US. And we've got to make a change.
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Yeah, we look for leverage points and some of that's just testing, trying things, see if it works. We have a saying, which is like no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. It's like, if we can work together, we'll do that. Like no hard feelings. You know, this is about getting things done. I don't have time, you know, to like play these games about what side are you on?
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Like the climate doesn't care. Like the physics of carbon accumulation in the climate really doesn't care.
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I've been on glaciers before, I've never seen this much sea ice. And there's more today than there was yesterday when we were looking out. It's amazing how dynamic it is. It seems like it's all stuck in place, but it's clearly constantly moving.