I’m excited to share my talk with Raphael Rosen. In this interview, we talk about the problem with our carbon footprint and ways we can reduce this.
Raphael Rosen is an entrepreneur helping other businesses reduce their carbon footprint through his company’s innovative software. Here he shares the issues businesses face with their carbon footprint and how you can reduce your impact through lifestyle changes.
Share with the audience a bit about yourself.
I’m the CEO and co-founder of carbon lighthouse. I have always been extremely interested in the environment and protecting the environment.
I’m very grateful to my parents for instilling that in me, as a young kid. I always went to national parks and the importance of conservation was always high. I studied physics with my co-founder, Brendan for my undergrad and master’s degrees.
About 15 years ago, I decided to leave the research world to build a clean energy company. The opportunity that I saw was to have a much faster impact by using new business models and business approaches. The idea was to take today’s existing technology and decarbonize the world, primarily through using clean sources of energy and energy efficiency within the built environment.
We started Carbon Lighhourse 12 years ago. Our humble mission is to get all of the buildings on Earth to be completely carbon neutral. The way we believe in doing that is that making it easy and profitable for building owners to decarbonize their buildings. What that means is that we find, quantify, and verify different energy-saving and clean energy opportunities. We do this for office buildings, hotels, shopping centers, warehouses, and apartment buildings.
We’ve done this in more than 1000 buildings all across the country. And yeah, excited to help other folks on their journey towards making an impact in the world.
How bad is our current carbon footprint across our planet?
The environment in which we live depends on the safe and sustainable balance of all the different parts of our atmosphere. We have been leading much more energy-intensive lifestyles over the last few 100 years.
Think about moving around with cars, trains, planes, etc. Additionally, bigger buildings that consume lots of energy, and all the things in your home that consume energy. All of this is starting to have a very significant impact on the planet and has been at an accelerating rate for the last 200 years.
What that means is the air we breathe, the oceans we rely on, and everything is starting to change. These changes can have very catastrophic consequences for not just people but all living things on the planet.
In order to get ourselves into harmony with nature, it’s important that we find solutions that allow everyone to enjoy the highest possible standard of living and comfort in ways that don’t require high energy or food consumption.
What’s one easy win readers can apply today to reduce their carbon footprint?
I highly recommend reading Drawdown by Paul Hawken, which is a comprehensive plan for getting the planet back to a safe and promising path in terms of living sustainably. There are over 100 actions in this book to take that make the biggest difference.
Obviously, driving less is a huge one. Additionally, living in cities has a big positive difference compared to living in suburbs.
How can we monitor our energy consumption at home?
It depends where you live. But in some cases, your utility bill will give you this information. However, it’s often not user-friendly.
There are many utilities that have what are called smart meters. These meters have the capability of showing your energy consumption state at 15-minute intervals. If your company doesn’t offer this solution, you can buy a meter solution online for about $15 — $20 that’ll monitor the energy consumption of an individual outlet.
What’s one tip you’d like to share for new entrepreneurs who want to build an environmentally-conscious business?
If you’re passionate about helping protect the planet, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is there are so many different problems to solve. The good news is that there are a lot of different types of business opportunities to solve these problems.
When first starting out ask yourself what environmental issue you care about the most. Then think about the solutions you could sell to customers in that space that are more environmentally friendly.
If you’re clueless about what environmental problem you care about, I recommend reading Drawdown by Paul Hawken, to get a sense of all the different opportunities. Then choose one.
For example, if you discover that you’re passionate about food waste, think about the problems people in this space have. Then brainstorm potential solutions you can offer for these problems.
What type of impact do you want to make on our planet?
I hope to build a company that will get all the buildings on earth to use green energy. This will take a long time, but thankfully we’re not alone.
I hope you enjoyed my talk with Raphael and that you took away some value. If you want to listen to the entire interview, click play below or head over to your favorite platform (Apple, Spotify, or Google.) Don’t forget to subscribe to not miss our weekly episodes.
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