The Podcast: The Swedish secret to making your company sustainable

The Podcast

The Podcast: The Swedish secret to making your company sustainable

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You want your company to be more sustainable, but don’t know where to start?  And how can a giant like BlackRock build a sustainable foundation? Henrik Henriksson, CEO of Scania, and Elaine Weidman Grunewald, co-founder of the AI Sustainability Center, explain the Sweden-inspired method they’ve outlined in their new book “Sustainability Leadership: A Swedish Approach to Transforming Your Company, Your Industry and the World.” Also: Pandemic emissions are back on the rise, and why the Greenpeace-affiliated energy company sells a lot of natural gas.

In this episode…

  • Host Jared Downing opens with his usual news brief, this time about emission levels rising again after a pandemic slump.
  • Next, Jared speaks with Grunewald and Henriksson about how to lead a company towards sustainability. Their “Swedish approach” starts with laying strong foundations of policy and company culture and ends with finally incorporating sustainability into all of a company’s actions. They discuss successful (and less successful) examples and comment on the sustainability goals of BlackRock.
  • Finally, Jared recaps our story about Greenpeace Germany’s private sector offshoot, Greenpeace Energy, and how it came to supply tens of thousands of households with fossil gas. It makes sense in context, but Jared wonders if, after ten years of selling imported natural gas, the clean ends still justify the dirty means?

Written by

Jared Downing

Jared Downing is managing editor of Climate & Capital Media. Before Climate&Capital, he spent five years in Yangon, Myanmar, producing the human rights podcast Doh Athan and producing features, columns, and cartoons for Frontier Myanmar, that country's leading English language magazine. Prior to that, he was a freelance writer in Birmingham Alabama, focusing on city culture and social justice.