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The business world has a bad rap, and not without reason. Deforestation, oil spills, unlivable minimum wages, mass layoffs, the glass ceiling — the proverbial list goes on. Even as some companies purport to be environmental stewards, their treatment of employees and corporate constituents can be irresponsible, inconsiderate and downright shameless. It seems appropriate, then, that people’s trust in global institutions is at an all-time low, and corporate America is viewed as the vanguard of the distrusted establishment.

What can we expect, though, when the bottom line continues to reign supreme? When we consider externalities, human costs and the global frustration with business as usual, an alternative approach to business seems imperative to avoid the total collapse of our natural and human systems.

For the past 30 years, a small yet growing faction of leaders have pioneered frameworks that are an antidote to single-bottom-line thinking — notably the Natural Step, shared value and the triple bottom line. While those and other frameworks have focused on reinventing capitalism by shifting business strategy, accounting principles and operational standards, a new movement called conscious capitalism offers a holistic approach that puts people and moral conscience at the center of business practices.

I recently had the opportunity to learn more about conscious capitalism’s four tenets at the daylong convening HigherPurpose17 hosted by the Conscious Capitalism Bay Area Chapter. More than hearing from inspiring business leaders who provide proof that business can be a force for good, I learned that conscious capitalism doesn’t have to be an oxymoron.

Reaching a higher purpose

Of the framework’s four tenets — higher purpose, conscious leadership, conscious culture and stakeholder orientation — connecting to a higher purpose is perhaps the most pivotal to build an awakened business.

As keynote speaker John Mackey, co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, put it: “We need to go to a higher place if we’re going to face the problems of the world.”

When companies focus on purpose beyond profit, businesses are able to inspire, engage and energize stakeholders. Giving true meaning to a product or service not only adds value to customers, employees, suppliers and communities, but it also shatters the myth that business must be a zero-sum game.

In Whole Foods Market’s case, for instance, the retailer doesn’t just sell groceries, but it also promotes health and well-being — that’s its higher purpose.

Shifting into presence

It may go without saying that a conscious company is led by conscious leaders. Still, traditional organizational models — replete with hierarchies, office politics and big egos — rarely foster environments that harness consciousness. That’s why conscious leadership must be intentional.

The first step in achieving conscious leadership is self-awareness. As Christine Comaford, founder of Smart Tribes Institute, shared during the daylong seminar: “Self-awareness leads to self-regulation that helps your business.”

Comaford said 90 percent of human decisions and behaviors are driven by our emotional brain. Due to our primordial dispositions, people need to feel a sense of “safety, belonging and mattering” at all times; in other words, we need to feel safe, that we belong and that we matter.

A conscious leader will know to communicate those three values to his or her stakeholders. Once a leader understands how to speak to people’s emotional creature, they can spark greater engagement and lead more effectively.

That same level of consciousness is needed to avoid what Anna McGrath, co-founder of WonderWorks Consulting, calls “the drama triangle.” People often step into the role of “villain, victim, or hero” in any given situation out of fear, she said. At work, this dynamic prevents businesses and individuals from accomplishing their goals and achieving their higher purpose.

Conscious leaders are able to recognize when and how to let go of fear and ego, and learn to connect with others from a place of compassion and authentic presence. Being able to shift from the ‘drama triangle’ to presence means being a more conscious leader.

Building a great place to work

The self-awareness that comes with conscious leadership duly creates conscious workplace cultures that enable employees to thrive.

“When you align people and culture to the business values, profit follows," said Chinwe Onyeagoro, president of Great Place to Work. The most high-performing companies have cultures that instill pride, community and trust among employees, Onyeagoro said — and that’s no coincidence.

Great Place to Work’s Trust Index, which has surveyed 100 million employees in 56 countries, consistently shows that a better workplace yields better performance. Even more, companies recognized in the annual Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list which comprise a special investment fund have actually performed better financially compared with the rest of the market (the fund has returned 32.5 percent over the past year). Those financial returns would not be possible without a strong foundation of conscious leadership.

Conscious capitalism aspires to change our current sad business narrative from the inside out. With conscious leaders guiding the way, may it be so.

Consumer boycotts have become a frequently deployed weapon of political activism, but one question still looms large: Do they even work?

First daughter Ivanka Trump's eponymous Ivanka fashion brand is a case in point. The Ivanka brand was rocked by bad news in January following a months-long boycott spearheaded by the organization Grab Your Wallet, which targets companies affiliated with the Trump family. However, if the news circulating widely this month is accurate, Ivanka saw a spectacular turnaround in February.

February's reportedly strong numbers indicate that the Grab Your Wallet boycott was a smashing failure. However, on closer examination, the picture is much more complicated.

Ethics and boycotts

One significant issue that has muddied the Ivanka boycott picture is the appearance of unethical behavior on the part of Ivanka Trump's supporters in the Donald Trump administration.

The Ivanka line became the focus of unflattering news in January when reports surfaced that major retailers Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom were among companies dropping or pulling back on the brand.

The Nordstrom decision in particular seemed to have touched a nerve with President Trump. On Feb. 8, he aimed a salvo at Nordstrom via Twitter:

"My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!" he tweeted.

To many that unusual deployment of the White House bully pulpit breached historical norms for presidential behavior, but it was not widely viewed as a definitive violation of federal rules governing abuse of authority.

What did set legal ears twitching was a television appearance by top advisor Kellyanne Conway the following day, during which she issued a personal endorsement of the Ivanka brand (cited by The Washington Post):

“Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would tell you,” Conway said. “I’m going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody.”

That's when sales apparently took off. Numerous news organizations have cited figures compiled by the online shopping aggregator Lyst:

"According to Lyst, February drew unusually large numbers of orders across many Ivanka Trump-branded products, including dresses, shoes, pants, coats, knitwear and tops. Heels were the bestsellers, followed by dresses," the Post reported.

Unfortunately for Conway, the "free commercial" skirted a federal ethics rule that broadly prohibits federal employees from using their position to endorse products:

"An employee shall not use his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of friends, relatives, or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity."

The Trump administration took no formal action against Conway, but a group of lawyers filed an ethics complaint against her.

The ripple effects may also ensnare other White House officials. When the Office of Government Ethics pressed for stronger discipline, it received a response indicating that the president's counsel has rejected its authority over White House staff.

OGE head Walter Shaub fired back, hinting that a legal showdown is in store if the White House stands by that view:

"Presidential administrations have not considered it appropriate to challenge the applicability of ethics rules to the entire executive branch," Shaub told ABC News. "It is critical to the public's faith in the integrity of government that White House employees be held to the same standard of ethical accountability as other executive branch employees."

If Conway's promotion of the Ivanka line did indeed boost sales over the short term, the long-run consequences could be disastrous for Conway and for the reputation of the Trump administration.

The lesson for companies developing a strategy to address boycotts is simple: Don't dig yourself into a deeper hole by engaging in behavior that could be construed as unethical.

Follow the numbers...

Another important issue involves the sales figures themselves.

Tracking the effect of a boycott over the short term is a difficult exercise, considering the raft of factors affecting retail sales from season to season.

That's especially true of consumer-based boycotts. Many consumer boycotts are flash-in-the-pan exercises that fail to impact the bottom line in any discernible way. Starbucks, for example, routinely powered its way through a series of consumer boycotts in recent years.

The converse is also true. While numerous media reports implied a causal effect between the February sales spike and Conway's pitch for Ivanka, a definitive conclusion would require more detailed analysis.

In any case, the widely reported news of a February sales spike was based primarily on figures compiled by the e-commerce site Lyst.

News reports also point to market analysis by the online shopping specialist Slice Intelligence.

Neither of those sources indicate trends for in-store purchases. The Ivanka brand itself is not required to divulge sales figures, and as of this writing it has not done so.

In other words, the reports of an online sales spike for Ivanka are not necessarily an indication of a healthy brand.

One indication of ill health is a Feb. 10 report in Time magazine. If there really was a February sales spike, it's possible that deep discounts deserve more credit than Conway's pitch. The article notes that many retailers still carrying Ivanka products were featuring "enormous discounts" and "fire-sale prices." Here's one sample:

"Lord and Taylor: Dozens of Ivanka Trump shoes are now on sale on a buy-one, get-one-50%-off basis, and others are subject to plain old clearance discounts. For example, a pair of Domin Patent Leather Pumps originally listed at $145 has been marked down to $58," reported Time.

When boycotts work

For its part, Grab Your Wallet is undeterred by the positive reports swirling around the Ivanka brand.

That's probably because the organization has focused its efforts on one key element that can make all the difference between a successful boycott and a failure: brand reputation.

A study of boycotts indicates that, historically, a successful boycott involves companies that are vulnerable to jabs at their public reputation.

The Trump administration has raised the reputation issue to a whole new level. The athletic wear company Under Armour, for example, was recently forced to backpedal furiously to avoid a boycott after its CEO issued some favorable comments about the administration.

The Ivanka brand certainly falls into the category of companies that are struggling with reputation issues related to the Trump administration.

The Grab Your Wallet campaign leverages that vulnerability in a holistic way: by aiming at retailers that are eager to avoid the ripple effect of the Ivanka association.

By that measure, the month of February was also a good one for Grab Your Wallet.

On March 12 Shannon Coulter, the brand strategist who founded Grab Your Wallet, tweeted out this message to her followers:

".@IvankaTrumpHQ claims record sales in Feb, a month in which 14 companies cut ties w/Trump fam incl. Nordstrom. Let's see how March goes."

One of those companies was Burlington Coat Factory, which pulled Ivanka products from its website just a few days after the Conway pitch.

Sears and K-Mart also dropped the Ivanka home products line within a week after Conway's television appearance.

March appears to be off to a good start for Grab Your Wallet as well.

Coulter recently reported that the Bed, Bath and Beyond site no longer carries Ivanka products, and a quick search reveals that Buy Buy Baby no longer carries Ivanka diaper bags on its site.

In other recent developments, the Ivanka brand downscaled its former fine jewelry line to a lower price range.

Image credit: Ivanka Trump by Michael Vadon via flickr.com, creative commons license.

Ryan Zinke is just what U.S. President Donald Trump needs as Secretary of the Interior.

He hails from Montana, a state in America’s unspoiled heartland and a fairly entrenched Republican stronghold. He owns a bold and brassy western hat (most likely several). He’s on good terms with and well respected by Native American tribes in Montana (a real plus at the moment). And he rides a horse, named Tonto, no less.

Zinke arrived to his first day of work in Washington like few previous interior secretaries: on a horse and flanked by a police escort. His flamboyant entrance captured the media and held it spellbound while a tribal member from his home state drummed in the background and Zinke, obviously pleased with his new digs, breezed in while tipping his hat.

At a time of intense political bickering and partisan accusations, Zinke’s congenial, “get’r done” attitude is just what Trump needs in Washington. He’s a secretary who can parlance both sides of a topic, is likable but diffident toward being pinned down and, when the political need strikes, he isn’t afraid to change his vote.

A former Navy Seal and member of Montana’s state legislature, he served as the state’s sole representative to the U.S. Congress before his nomination. He received one of the quickest Senate confirmations (68-31) on the list of contentious Trump candidates.

But he also arrives with a list of unknowns. Environmentalists are wary of Zinke and cognoscente of the fact that he not only overseas some 500 million surface acres of parks, wilderness areas and other protected lands, but also the future of the country’s precious underground resources.

Pro or con for public land sales?

A couple of years ago, when Zinke was running for Congress, Montana Democrats came out with a cheat sheet of what they felt best reflected the good and (mostly) bad about Zinke.

They down-checked him because of his anti-gun stance (an oddity for Democrats to criticize these days, but not in rural Montana); because he wasn’t endorsed by the Montana Sports Alliance; and because he had an irritating habit of blocking fishing and hunting on public lands while backing commercial investment.

But what really stuck in the craw of Montana Democrats was his ambivalent and, in their opinion, often wishy-washy stance when it came to preserving public lands.

The topic of selling federal lands comes up everywhere from time to time like a bad memory, but it’s bantered about a more often now that the cost of forest fires and Mother Nature’s damaging tempests has become a burden for the cash-strapped Congress. To many who see the financial benefits that states like Montana draw from tourism in Glacier National Park and its Rocky Mountain resorts and hiking trails, selling off national parkland is a non-starter. For others, however, who recognize the potential dollar signs of private investment (or the revenue the state’s meager coffers would gain if it inherited the lands outright), it’s only a matter of time.

So Zinke’s inability to state his position when it comes to preserving federal parklands is a big concern to many Montanans.

And it should be.

What hasn’t been clear until recently is whether the new secretary would actually get behind efforts to sell the land to states or private entities. According to the Montana Democrat party, Zinke supports the sale of federal lands to states and private entities. But Zinke himself says the issue isn’t quite that simple.

In 2016, Zinke resigned as Republican Party delegate for the upcoming federal elections, because he said he didn’t agree with the party’s position on the sale of federal lands. Remaining on as a GOP delegate would have required him to support a party-wide platform to sell off federal lands. And Zinke said the GOP draft platform was “more divisive than uniting."

“At this point, I think it's better to show leadership,” he explained last year, then insisting he is against public land sales or transfers.

Public land transfers: Changing the rules

But apparently Zinke is not against rule changes that may facilitate such transfers. In January, a couple of months before he was to be confirmed as Secretary of the Interior, Zinke added his vote to a controversial rule change that would ease the process for transferring federal lands to states or other entities.

The proposed change was the first step for the new administration in shifting how U.S. federal parks and lands would be managed. It allowed the dollar value of park and wilderness lands to be zeroed out if they were transferred to another entity. That includes vast parcels of wilderness that actually earn money for the federal government through timber and mining contracts.

Zinke's decision unified hunters and environmentalists, who condemned his vote as “irresponsible.” Critics pulled a quote from his confirmation hearing in December: When asked his position on land transfer or sale of federal properties, he was short and to the point: “I am absolutely against transfer or sale of public land,” Zinke stated at the time.

But it would seem he is also not against loosening controls over the use and structuring of those assets.

“What [Republicans] do agree on is better management," Zinke told the Billings Gazette in an interview last July.

Instead of tighter federal controls and smaller mining quotas, he advocated for a a “watchdog panel” to offer recommendations about the fate and management of public lands.  That panel would be made up key stakeholders: mining industry, state, local and tribal representatives. At the top of the list to tackle would be private uses of the land: mining contracts (which were suspended during the Barack Obama administration), hunting rights and the potential commercialization of some functions overseen by the federal government.

Zinke insists America’s public lands are overprotected. He admitted at his Senate confirmation hearing that some of the country’s land would need to be safeguarded, but a lot of it can be opened up to hiking, fishing and hunting. And yes, he said, mining and drilling have a role to play in public lands use as well.

But so do local communities. And he’s gone on record to support the Land and Conservation Fund, which facilitates the use of mining royalties for projects that support conservation and recreation projects. That’s a welcome sign for conservation groups, but not a reassurance when it comes to how he will weigh mining and ranching interests against the protection of threatened and endangered species.

A Teddy Roosevelt conservationist?

“While he continues to paint himself as a modern Teddy Roosevelt, his very short voting record shows him repeatedly siding with industry,” Matthew Kirby recently told Scientific American.

Kirby serves as the senior campaign representative for the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America program, a campaign that directly intersects with many of the conservation issues Zinke will be responsible for addressing.

The League of Conservation Voters also shares that concern. Last year only five percent of his votes as Montana’s congressional representative were tallied as “pro-environment.” His lifetime score is even worse.

His opposition to the Obama administration’s effort to corral local support for protecting the threatened sage grouse has become a sticking point for some environmentalists who point out that the program succeeded in doing exactly what Zinke has said works best in small communities: Networking with locals instead of imposing burdensome federal regulations.

With less than a month under his belt, the country’s newest public lands manager is facing a daunting list of challenges and some $12 billion in upgrades for public parks, what he calls the “face of the Department of the Interior.” The country’s federal parks system has an image problem, but that is the least of his challenges.

With a new House bill that would allow for the sale of 3.4 million acres of public land now on the table, Zinke may have a hard time promoting his concept for a "21st-century reorganization." His greatest task will be convincing everyone that he has the well-being of America’s public investment at heart.

Image credits: 1) Flickr/Gage Skidmore; Flickr/Jeannie Stafford/US Fish and Wildlife Service

General Motors (GM) is undergoing a massive office reorganization as it transforms from a conventional automobile manufacturer to what has now become an industry buzzword: a “personal mobility” company.

To that end, many of GM’s sprawling offices and research centers, from its downtown Detroit headquarters to the iconic mid-century Technical Center designed by Eero Saarinen, are in the midst of a makeover. The modernist campus in suburban Warren, Michigan, alone will score a $1 billion facelift as the facility shifts from its current industrial “Mad Men” setting to an open workplace more reflective of a Silicon Valley campus.

The result is heaps of office furniture and other building materials that could end up in Michigan landfills, which would complicate the company’s recent push to go zero-waste. GM already generates at least $1 billion annually in recycling revenues, and its waste-diversion agenda is also linked to the company’s attempts to increase community involvement across Detroit.

So what does a company do with furniture that has some wear and tear, but is otherwise in good condition? In order to cope with all this unwanted office equipment, GM is partnering with Toronto-based environmental firm Green Standards. Joining the companies in this effort is design firm Herman Miller, which has offered the project its capacity and expertise in repurposing office furniture.

Green Standards manages Herman Miller’s rePurpose program, which works with companies that wish to shed assets such as office furniture. The program can help score a firm tax credits while reducing the amount of waste that would otherwise land in local landfills.

While local organizations receive this donated furniture and office equipment, Herman Miller also offers them interior design resources. The company claims that other firms participating in this program sees 99 percent of their unwanted goods and materials diverted from landfills.

The results from this work include at least $200,000 of in-kind donations that have been dispersed to 30 nonprofits across Michigan. The companies expect total to surge to $1 million of donations across 100 various schools and community organizations.

One of the beneficiaries is the Michigan Urban Farming Institute (MUFI), which is the midst of transforming a three-story empty apartment building in Detroit’s historic midtown New Center neighborhood into a community center. The NGO is striving to build what it describes as the first sustainable urban “agrihood” in the U.S. Meanwhile, MUFI has started its own crowdfunding campaign in order to make this project a reality, and is close to halfway meeting its fundraising goal of $50,000 before April 1.

To put all this into environmental numbers, so far the program has allowed GM to offset the equivalent of electricity consumption needed by 250 U.S. homes for one year, or growing 46,000 tree seedlings over the course of 10 years. GM expects its work with Herman Miller and Green Standards to prevent more than 2,000 tons of materials from entering Michigan landfills.

There is an employee engagement aspect as well: Volunteering with the rePurpose program is one option for GM employees who wish to participate in some form of community service. This work has participated to what GM says is part of at least 7,100 employees logging more than 50,000 volunteer hours across 75 local Detroit non-profits.

“We view waste as just a resource out of place,” David Tulauskas, sustainability director at General Motors, said in a public statement describing GM’s expectations from this program. “This reuse program enables us to reduce our environmental footprint while making a positive contribution to our community.”

Image credit: GM

Editor's Note: This post was originally published by Conscious Company Media. 

By Rachel Zurer

Worldwide, about 2 billion adults have no bank account. Nearly 800 million people live on less than $2 a day. And the population of refugees and displaced people has soared to more than 65 million globally. What do these groups have in common? They all lack formal economic identities -- defined as the digital or electronic credentials defining a person and his or her history of financial interactions in the world economy.

That means they’re shut out of the types of financial and governmental services many of us take for granted, like access to credit and loans, and often lack credentials about previous accomplishments, including birth records, educational achievements, and property ownership.

Minneapolis-based tech startup BanQu’s mission is to change all that and solve persistent poverty by providing a portable, democratic economic identity to the world’s poorest people. To do so, the company has built a patent-pending app platform and network based on cutting-edge computing technology called blockchain. In 2016, the company was piloting its app in multiple countries, and expects 2 million users by the end of 2017. We spoke with BanQu founder and CEO Ashish Gadnis about what BanQu does, how it works, and the long road ahead toward ending global poverty.

The interview

Conscious Company: What’s the background behind how you started this company?

Ashish Gadnis: I grew up in poverty in India and was very lucky to get out because of education. Guys like me are the outcome of a vision that India’s first prime minister had, which was, “Hey, we may not be able to give everybody food, water, and a toilet, but we’ll find a way to give these kids education.” I was part of that. I learned how to code at an early age, got hired by Tata Group [one of India’s largest multinational companies], traveled all over the world, moved to the U.S., and the rest is history.

I built and sold three tech startups, and in 2012, I sold my last startup and started working as a volunteer in East Africa, helping build supply chains for extreme poverty populations with a focus on women. In the Congo, as I was building social enterprises as a volunteer, I uncovered a significant gap that seemed to exist in all INGOs [international non-governmental organizations] as well as social enterprises. The gap was, in my opinion, the fundamental root cause of extreme poverty in the world: While our customers — we never looked at them as beneficiaries — were making money and doing better as the social enterprises were doing well, the local financial institutions wouldn’t recognize them because they could not triangulate what was happening.

The female farmers I was working with in the Congo had a lot of things that people were “giving them.” Education, mobile phones, microfinance, and so on. Or when people come to refugee camps, they get a lot of different aid packets from different agencies. They have a loan from the Refugee Council, they’re in some sort of a program with the U.N., somebody is giving them an immunization. The problem is, all of these events are “things that happen to you.” They don’t become a part of who you are.

In the U.S., you can walk in with a utility bill, a driver’s license, or a pay stub and a financier will easily give you a loan or you can buy a car. In places like the Congo or Myanmar or Somalia, or for refugees on the move, none of that becomes part of your identity. People continue to stay poor because they’re not connected to a local, national, global supply chain.

We looked at the problem and said, “What is out there that allows the consumer, which is that mother in the Congo or refugee in Somalia, to own her transaction data?” That’s where I decided that the blockchain was a great way to solve the problem. In some ways, it’s a very simple problem, yet there wasn’t the technology to get around it until the blockchain came along.

You can actually create an identity on the blockchain, and that identity is less about, “Hey, this is my name and address” — it’s more about who you are in terms of your education records, microfinance loans, any transaction history. In the refugee and people-in-extreme-poverty zones, if you have that base identity, then you become monetizable or bankable. If you start creating these economic identities, then you can start creating stable homes, so they’re not going from loan to loan or aid to aid, and you can start fostering education.

That’s the basic construct of BanQu. I’m an evangelist because I grew up poor myself, and I hated standing in the ration line three hours every other day, without even any record of that time or transaction.

CC: Can you talk about blockchain and how that’s game changing?

AG: Blockchain is the technology that Bitcoin was built on, but people have realized that while Bitcoin continues to be unstable, the blockchain is extremely stable. Blockchain is really a distributed ledger.

In traditional systems, there are closed databases. We’re used to our banks holding all our information. If you try to pull your house records and credit profile and utility bills together, you have to ask a bunch of different institutions. Your house has a title that is held by a title company, and then all the paperwork and bureaucracy and brokers are in the middle. The blockchain decentralizes that information. It breaks that notion of a database or a system. If you have a title for your house, instead of that title sitting in five different databases, it sits on the blockchain and then the world subscribes to that title.

The best way to look at blockchain is that if I owed you something, say, 5,000 years ago — let’s just say I owed you a couple of cows — the entire village would know about it; it’s a public database. People can see it. Because of that public knowledge, I couldn’t cheat you.

Today, if I gave you a check, it takes four to six days to clear, because there are a massive number of databases. Citibank has 800 databases. Barclays has 800 databases. All of these people are touching that check over a five- to six-day period before it clears. Whereas in the blockchain, that settlement of me giving you a check happens in less than five seconds because the check is now on the blockchain, and I don’t have to rely on six layers of brokers.

A title company is one of the great examples. If you were to buy a house, look at the amount of paperwork you waste in just getting the title. Imagine a world where your house had its title on the blockchain, the entire village — going back to that example — agreed that that was the title, agreed to the validity of the house, all you’d have to do is transfer ownership from you to me and you cut through all of this paperwork and bureaucracy.

Blockchain will change the world in the next ten years. The massive transformational shift is you basically bring a level of transparency and accuracy that cuts through all the middle layers. If you think about what happened in the internet from 1994 to 2014, that level of change will happen in half the time because of the blockchain. Every industry — print, financial, health care, real estate — will be touched poverty and for refugees to gain back their status in society and grow.”

One thing that’s important: everybody talks about financial inclusion for the poor. I think that’s a misnomer. Financial inclusion [as it’s practiced today] really means, “You’re poor. I will give you some money but you will stay poor.” If you’ve ever been to Africa or East Asia, the average microloan is at 30 percent. You’re lending out $100 at 30 percent, yet in the U.S. you can raise $2 million at 4 percent.

If she has a piece of land and has been harvesting crops for thirty years, common sense demands that that mother is very bankable, that mother is very creditworthy.

In partnership with U.N. Women, we took a very simple approach and said, “What if we created an economic identity for that farmer where you could collect five or six key data points that build her identity?” We’re not talking about name, address. I’m talking about transaction stuff.

Number one, we register the farmer on our platform. That farmer has a piece of land; we digitize the land by taking a GPS picture of it. The minute you take a GPS picture of that land, it generates a forecast. If I have one acre of land [in this region], I should by blockchain. Anybody who uses a database will change. About $2 billion of new startup dollars went into financial tech or insurance tech companies last year, startups that are all basically using blockchain to make more money. The banking industry will save $15 billion annually just because of reducing the time of settlement because of the blockchain.

CC: It sounds like there are really two big leaps happening here at once. You’ve got this new way of exchanging data via the blockchain that’s very powerful. Then second, your company is the first to take that new way of exchanging data and bring that in service of all these unbanked people.

AG: Exactly. Everybody in the world is desperately trying to make more money from blockchain. We were the first ones who said, “We don’t want to touch the money side. We believe that the blockchain offers a true path for people who live in extreme the time to bring them into a trust network.

We believe that if you have an economic identity, you have every right for that identity to be portable. So, Rachel has a birth certificate. Rachel has a cell phone and a piece of land. Those should be monetizable so she can now go and get credit, she can get banking facilities.

One of the early successes we’re seeing is with very, very poor farmers in Rwanda. If you’re a poor female farmer in the middle of nowhere, on the Tanzania-Rwanda border, you basically are feeding a family of eight or ten on $300 a year, so we’re talking about even less than $2 a day. Any harvest she can raise, typically it’s maize and beans, the broker says to her, “I will buy your corn at this price, otherwise it’s going to go bad.” The mother is forced to sell the corn because she has no access to information. She has no identity. But if she has a piece of land and has been harvesting crops for thirty years, common sense demands that that be able to produce 100 kilos of corn. Then the U.N. has orchestrated buyer contracts for that 100 kilos of corn.

Now this mother/farmer has three things which she never had before. One, on her text-message phone, through the blockchain and our application, she gets to know, “I own one acre of land and it’s going to generate 100 kilos. I have a buyer for those 100 kilos, even though I’m four months away from harvesting.”

Next step: If you dry the corn to 13 percent moisture content, the price of corn doubles [because it keeps longer]. With our technology, the mother has an identity: “I own a piece of land. I have a forecast. That forecast has a buyer.” And that buyer is now going to allow her to get collateral to get a dryer so she can dry her corn. All that becomes part of her history.

Third, that mother, who now has these transactions that are part of her identity — the blockchain allows her then to take that identity and, depending on her phone, she can go to [the local version of] Walmart and say, “You can see I have a piece of land. I have a microloan. I have a harvest. I have a dryer and I’m selling it at market price.” And now she can buy things. If that Rwandan woman farmer has her identity in the blockchain and she has gone through three farming cycles, you would not charge her 30 percent on $100, you would charge her 4 percent on $100 because she has history.

You’ve gotten rid of all this NGO bullshit and all this middleman and bureaucracy. You’re giving people an economic identity where they have a standing in the world, whereas in the traditional systems all this information would be on a spreadsheet, it would be sitting on a computer somewhere, at the U.N., at the Grameen Bank, and the mother is left out.

CC: How does that farmer access these records? Is it via her cell phone?

AG: One of the things I learned over the last four years spending time in Africa and refugee camps: If you’re in Somalia or if you’re in the Congo, you get cell phone service. The way we built our app, we kept it extremely lightweight because we knew not everybody is going to have a smartphone.

The way we register people, like when we did initial pilots with the Somali community, we drive it at the consumer level. We go in and we create a trust network. For example, if we sign up a young man in Minneapolis, within the day, five or ten of his family members in Mogadishu, in Jubaland, in Somaliland will sign up because they are part of a trust network. I create my identity here in the U.S. and then the app pings my mom via text message. If my mom has access to a smartphone, then it’s very simple. She can take a picture, create her identity, and now I accept her because I can see her.

If she doesn’t have a smart-phone, she can go to an M-Pesa [mobile phone-based payments] kiosk or a U.N. camp and they help her create an account. The key is that once you’re in the trust relationship, it’s more than remittance. When my mom goes and gets her $100 I sent her, that $100 becomes part of her history. If I enroll her, for example, in a World Food Programme, where they’re going to give her a food packet, that becomes part of her transaction history. If she loses her phone or something happens, there’s a war and she has to move to Ethiopia or Kenya, all she has to do is either enter a thumbprint, if they have a thumbprint scanner, or do a passphrase, and all that information is available to her on the blockchain.

This portability is so important. If you look at the refugee situation today in Dadaab, on the Somalia-Kenya border, where I was about a month ago, that is one of the largest refugee camps in the world. About 600,000 people have been there, some for 25 years. We met with a lot of people, and particularly shop-owners who are now third-generation refugee families: their parents came, these kids were born there, now they’re in their mid-20s, they have kids. Family after family said, “We want to go back to Somalia,” because they’re stateless and the Kenyan government is starting to shut down the camp. But they cannot go back to Somalia because they will not be recognized. Even by the U.N. The U.N. doesn’t recognize you and you have to start all over again.

We are in the initial stages of rollout within the camps. If you can start collecting “the data” that happens to you as a part of your blockchain identity, if I now go from one camp to another or if I’m on the move from Syria to Jordan to Greece to Turkey, every time I get to an agency, if the agency is willing to recognize that identity — and that’s where we’re in a little bit of an uphill battle, but we’re fighting it — they will be able to see, “Oh, this is Ashish.

He had a family in Syria. He owned a shop. Here is his education record. This is the kind of aid package he got in the camp,” and so on. And that makes them not just a number anymore. That’s one of the most fundamental things we are changing when it comes to refugees. There’s a lot of conversation in the U.N. and the NGO community around identity, but nobody actually has done anything, other than us, who have an actual product.

CC: Tell me about the big problems you still need to solve for this to work as you envision it.

AG: We’re in for the long haul. This is a 15-, 20-, 30-year journey. The near-term problems are getting people to recognize that it’s a person in extreme poverty’s or a refugee’s right to have an identity. I think a lot of times, NGOs look at these people as beneficiaries. In my personal opinion, you’re taking away somebody’s dignity [by thinking that way].

The other obstacle is a lot of these large NGOs tend to be very much driven by getting more donor funding. “I’m going to get more donor money if there are more refugees.” It’s a very sad way of looking at the world. We’re trying to change the conversation and say, “You want to look at the refugees and people living in extreme poverty as communities you’re investing into; peer-to-peer.”

The other barriers are the political situations. The Kenyan government right now is in turmoil. The Somalis have a failed state. The Jordanians have an issue with the Syrians. It’s constant conversations, meetings, a lot of travel.

Nothing is impossible. We’ve made a ton of progress in the last year. Over the next couple of years, our goal is to have about two million identities on the platform.

CC: What is your eventual business model? Are you guys going to be a nonprofit the whole way or are you hoping to be a social enterprise?

AG: We’re very clear with our business model that we’re a for-profit social enterprise, because that’s the way we’re going to scale the business. We’ve never been a nonprofit. I built and sold three startups. I’m not a big fan of nonprofit for the sake of nonprofit, because I’ve seen the dark side.

We have three lines of business. One is for the banks and financial institutions that are desperately trying to bank the unbanked. For example, we are having conversations in places like Colombia, where there are a couple million people who were displaced because of the FARC rebels; you can’t integrate somebody into society if you’re not willing to include them in the banking realm. There’s a bank that wants to leverage our platform. That business model is very straightforward. We charge an annual license fee.

The second model is tied to the INGOs and social enterprises that are trying to provide better services to the refugees and people in poverty. If you go to a camp it’ll shock you that there are at least 15 to 20 INGOs, and none of them talk to each other and every refugee’s information is duplicated over a bunch of spreadsheets. In that case, again, it’s a standard annual licensing fee.

The third line of business is governments that we are right now in conversations and have done some pilot testing with. Governments are looking to establish an identity that allows them to do more for their citizens. Obviously, the major reaction we get is, “Are we going to have a Big Brother scenario?” That’s where the blockchain becomes relevant. The blockchain is not a centralized database. It’s distributed on a network so that you own your data, not the government.

CC: Do you ever imagine a time where a government could decide to use this for voting or some other forms of citizen engagement?

AG: We stay out of the political arena. But think about it: If your utility bill was on the blockchain, and I can now have a thumbprint, I wouldn’t need another form of identity for voter registration. The applications are huge. I tell people I’d love to see more competition, because right now we’re the only ones who are working on this [social enterprise] side of the block-chain world.

We’re very focused on the 65 million refugees in the world, and the 2 billion people under $2 a day; we have a lot of work to do. We’ve had a couple of offers to get bought out by big banks who want to leverage our platform because we already have a product. But I don’t want to sell to a bank because then I would break my own promise [to solve this problem].

CC: What have you done about funding?

AG: We’re blessed. I resurrected my old teams. We invested our own money. And then we just recently closed a pretty significant seed round, because we want to expand the number of countries in which we can start deploying. Somewhere late in 2017 we’ll open a Series A to really scale it up big time.

CC: How do you make sure that you’re screening investors to be really clear that they’re mission-aligned and are not going to pressure you to sell to a big bank?

AG: The simple answer is I’m old. That helps. Pretty much everybody who we work with, we know, and everybody has the same moral compass. In fact, for our Series A, our shortlist is focused on impact investors I have known 10 years.

To be honest, everybody who has a dime wants to invest in blockchain to make more money. There is literally nobody on this [for-benefit] side of the ledger. We find ourselves in a sweet spot where people are like, “Hey, finally somebody is looking at the blockchain for good and yet they’re a for-profit enterprise.” It’s not like we’re abandoning a healthy balance sheet. We’re saying, “Hey, look, we don’t need another blockchain company trying to make more money on Wall Street.”

CC: What’s next?

AG: One of the things we’re trying to do is to start up a conversation with the refugee centers here in the U.S. When the refugees come into the U.S., they get a packet. If you’ve ever been to the Detroit airport or Atlanta airport, it’ll break your heart. They get a white plastic bag with a sticker that has a number on it. That’s it. There’s nothing recorded beyond that packet. All this history that they had, their education history back home, it’s just lost or it sits on a piece of paper. What we’re trying to say is that that family in Rwanda, if there was a civil war and if their data was part of the blockchain identity, then now they are universally acceptable as not just refugees but people who are working hard, making a living, with kids going to school.

The key is to really understand the value of the trusted network. The traditional systems are based on mistrust. That’s why banks have their own title company and your mortgage company has its own title company. Blockchain demonstrates a more democratic way of dealing with trust issues. That becomes extremely valuable for somebody who lives in poverty.

CC: What’s giving you hope?

AG: Good question. I think what gives me hope is that there is a fair amount of movement right now towards people recognizing that we’re getting to a tipping point in terms of refugees and extreme poverty and violence and crazy rhetoric on the political side. You will completely feel hopeless if you’re standing in the refugee camp, I’ll tell you that. Because time stops. If you’re a refugee in a camp for 25 years, time actually stops for you. It’s a balance.

Gadnis' best advice for mission-driven entrepreneurs

1. Be very clear about what you’re trying to solve: Don’t be enamored of the technology. For example, if the whole blockchain thing collapsed, it wouldn’t change my perspective on how we can solve poverty. I would just find another way. You can’t start with the technology and then add a passion to it. You’ve got to have the passion, period.

2. Don’t put all your bets on one client or partner: Especially working with governments and NGOs, you need to take a bit of a shotgun approach because the bureaucracy is so deep in some of these organizations. In many cases, what we’re trying to do would disintermediate a lot of these NGOs. My advice would be to play five or six sets. Just make sure you don’t fall into the trap of, “We picked up [a big client],” and two years go by and you do nothing else.

3. Be on the ground: You cannot be a mission-driven entrepreneur [trying to solve global poverty] and sit in the U.S. You have to be on the ground. I walked for four days in a refugee camp, sat with the families, went into the container camp. A lot of times I’ve seen social entrepreneurs do the helicopter run. They’ll fly in, stay at a fancy hotel, make a drive and then they’re back after a photo op. It doesn’t work that way.

Rachel is Conscious Company’s resident words wrangler, in charge of all editorial content. Before joining the CCM in April 2016, Rachel spent nearly 5 years as a print and digital editor on the award-winning team at BACKPACKER magazine. Her freelance writing and radio reporting has appeared in a variety of national publications, including Issues in Science & Technology, Yoga Journal, Paste Magazine, Pacifica Radio, and Wired, where she was a fellow in 2011. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction writing from Goucher College, studied linguistics and computer science at Duke University, and is a certified yoga teacher.

Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from "MeatLess: Transform the Way You Eat and Live—One Meal at a Time" by Kristie Middleton. Copyright © 2017. Available from Da Capo Lifelong Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

By Kristie Middleton

In December 2009, my husband, Mark, received an email from an animal sanctuary where he’d volunteered. The email requested that a group of us help transport several dozen “spent” egg-laying hens, who had been discarded by an egg factory farm, to the sanctuary.

Mark explained that we’d leave early on a Saturday morning to meet the rescue agency, move the birds from their transport crates to comfortable boxes we’d prepare for them in advance, and then drive them a couple hours north. He asked if I’d like to come along but warned that I’d be seeing animals who had been through hell. I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to help deliver these animals to a safe haven, but in spite of Mark’s warnings, I wasn’t fully prepared for what I would encounter.

When I saw these hens, I couldn’t help but think of the time I was nine years old, and my older sister taunted me about the eggs I was eating:

“You know what that is, don’t you?”

“What?” I asked.

“Dead baby birds.”

As a nine-year-old, eggs happened to be the only food I knew how to cook. My uncle Rodney, who’d once stayed with my family for a month, taught me how to make scrambled eggs; to me, it was magic watching them go from liquid to congealed to cooked within moments of hitting the hot skillet. That was when I fell in love with cooking.

It took a moment for my sister’s comment to hit me. Dead baby birds? I stopped eating eggs immediately.

Though I later learned that my sister was wrong—that the eggs we eat are actually unfertilized—as a child who loved animals, my sister’s ribbing was sufficient to turn me off eggs for good. Twenty years later, during that rescue, I came face to face with the actual ugly truth behind the egg industry.

Having been involved in animal advocacy full time for many years, I knew that the majority of egg-laying hens are confined in wire mesh cages with up to seven other birds. I knew that virtually all of their natural behaviors are denied—dustbathing, perching, and even spreading their wings. But I was still shocked to see the condition of the birds.

On the cold winter day when we transported the hens, they arrived, stuffed into tiny plastic crates with several other birds. Many were missing feathers, exposing raw, pink skin, and some had malformed beaks from botched debeaking (when factory farmers cut their beaks off with a hot blade to prevent them from pecking). They all had overgrown toenails from standing on wire for the last year or more, and some were too weak to even stand up on their own.

Retirement for egg-laying hens typically means being gassed to death then sold as low-grade meat for pet food or farm animal feed. These fortunate birds would experience something much better. Upon arrival at the sanctuary, the hens were gently removed from the crates and placed inside a barn that had been prepared for them. At first they were tentative, but a few brave souls began exploring their surroundings.

Watching the birds explore the solid ground under their claws instead of the cage wire to which they were accustomed was deeply moving. Some slowly scratched at the hay that had been placed on the ground while others pecked at it, and there were a few hens who were so weak they never stood up while we were there.

Slowly, the birds who had never properly exercised extended their wings, flapping them for the first time ever without touching the sides of their cages or one of their cage-mates. A few began taking dust baths, flinging the straw and dust up around them and relishing in the experience of cleaning their feathers. This, I thought, is why I work every day to help animals.

Caring about animals is something I’ve done from the time I was a young girl.

I grew up in suburban America with a typical childhood: spending time outdoors with my friends riding my bike, and vegging out watching cartoons on Saturday mornings and MTV after school. And my pets were always at my side—they were family members who I loved dearly.

My diet was also typical. I grew up eating Kraft macaroni and cheese, McDonald’s hamburgers, and Chick-fil-A nuggets. At one point, in my early teens, I considered becoming vegetarian. I bought a container of water-packed tofu, drained the water, and tried eating the blob for dinner—plain, unadorned, and flavorless. And there ended my first experiment with vegetarian eating. (If I could share but one gem of wisdom, it’d be this: don’t try eating plain tofu for dinner!)

Later in life, my college marketing professor discussed the concept of euphemisms—how words can make unpleasant things sound more appealing. She asked how appealing it would be to eat chicken nuggets if we instead called them “processed flesh of dead animals.”

Her words affected me. I’d sit down to eat a sandwich and think about eating the “flesh of dead animals.” I couldn’t do it, so I became a vegetarian.

Around that time, I started volunteering for an animal protection organization and became aware of the myriad ways humans use animals—for food, research, entertainment, and more. So, I decided to work full time to help animals, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Today, I’m senior food policy director for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS)—the nation’s largest animal protection organization. And in the nearly two decades I’ve been working in this field, I’ve seen tremendous progress: the number of animals euthanized in shelters has decreased dramatically, cruel farming practices once considered standard are now illegal in some places, and animal cruelty and dog-fighting are now felonies in all fifty states.

These transformations are happening because, as a society, we care deeply about animals. From the time we’re young, we’re taught to have compassion for animals. We’re exposed to animals throughout childhood in seemingly endless ways. Who didn’t have a favorite stuffed animal as a kid? We watch animals on cartoons, wear animal print clothing, and read stories prominently featuring animals such as Charlotte’s Web and The Tale of Peter the Rabbit.

And we live with lots of them. According to the American Pet Products Association, nearly 80 million U.S. households—65 percent of us—have animal companions. Forty-two percent of those homes with animals have more than one.

And as it turns out, our animal affinity extends to those raised for food. Technomic, a foodservice industry research and consulting firm, found animal welfare to be the third most-important social issue to restaurant-goers.

But while we want animals to be treated humanely, there remains a cognitive dissonance in which our daily actions don’t necessarily align with our values. According to 2015 polling by the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG), only 3.4 percent of Americans are vegetarians—the same percentage of Americans who reported to be vegetarian in 2009.

However, VRG also found that 47 percent of us eat meat-free meals at least one day a week. In fact, USDA figures indicate that we’re eating 10 percent less meat now than in 2007. So while the number of us becoming vegetarian or vegan remains consistent, the number of us actively reducing the meat we eat is growing. As a society that loves animals, we haven’t succeeded in rectifying our love of animals and how we eat. Yet that’s beginning to change with more of us desiring to eat less meat—for animals, our health, or for the planet.

Transitioning to vegetarian was easy for me: I was exposed to information that I found compelling and made simple changes to what I ate; I continued cooking my favorite meals but made them without meat; I sampled new vegetarian products at health food stores and ventured to new restaurants to sample food that was brand new to me.

While I’d stopped eating shell eggs as a child, I still consumed them in baked goods. As a new vegan, I experimented with baking with egg replacers. I sampled a variety of dairy-free milks and swapped my cow’s milk for soymilk. And I explored ice creams made from almonds and rice milk instead of dairy.

While the shift from omnivore to vegetarian to vegan was a slow process for me, I have friends who became vegan overnight, and others who are enjoying more plant-based meals while still eating meat from time to time. Everyone is at a different place in their transition: Maybe you’re thinking of committing to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, or maybe you want to be more of a flexitarian and reduce the amount of meat you eat while eating meat occasionally. Whatever path you chose, we can all eat healthier and more in alignment with our values.

Kristie Middleton is the senior director of food policy for The Humane Society of the United States and the author of MeatLess: Transform the Way You Eat and Live—One Meal at a Time.

By Peter Harris, UPS

The last few years have been transformational for climate diplomacy. In 2015, we witnessed the first legally-binding global climate deal with the Paris Agreement, and last year’s COP22 conference saw governments and businesses reaffirm their commitments to sustainable growth.

These events, coupled with a groundswell of public pressure, leave no doubt that working toward a low-carbon economy is, and will remain, a priority. Now, in the midst of dramatically changing global political climates, the private sector has an even greater responsibility and opportunity to take the lead in advancing critical social and environmental agendas.

With the world population projected to increase by more than 1 billion people by 2030, every company will be challenged to meet ever-increasing demands amidst resource constraints while also reducing environmental impacts.

This has huge implications for the transportation industry in particular, which already represents nearly a quarter of Europe's greenhouse gas emissions. However, the opportunity is there as businesses are uniquely equipped to deliver innovative solutions on a large scale, develop best practices, influence demand and supply chains, and build capacity toward sweeping progress.

In order to adequately address our industry’s impacts, businesses need to continue to invest in new technologies targeted at improving efficiencies.

Innovations and breakthroughs in the transportation sector

From electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles to 3D-printed auto manufacturing platforms, I have witnessed an increasing number of sustainable innovations in transportation.

One of the biggest breakthroughs aiding this proliferation is the big data revolution, which is driving efficiencies. Big data delivers big results, not only by providing companies with a wealth of information, but also by helping businesses make real-time decisions to improve operations.

While companies like Uber and Lyft are changing the landscape of passenger transportation by using data to advance ridesharing that cuts down on transportation costs and traffic congestion, the shipping industry is also realizing similar benefits. For example, apps like Roadie can now match shippers with drivers who are headed in the same direction as the delivery address. Similarly, Coyote Logistics, crunches pricing, lane information, service metrics, and capacity to recommend the best shipping solutions to customers, eliminating empty miles and reducing carbon emissions.

We are seeing big data being used as part of a broader effort to capitalize on information and predictive models to increase efficiencies, thereby reducing both costs and environmental impacts.

We created UPS ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation) – a route-optimization system, developed over 10 years, that analyzes real-time information from every package, along with customer information and detailed maps, to sort through trillions of possible choices and create the most efficient daily route for our drivers.

By developing more efficient routes, we are able to maximize the utilization of delivery vehicles and drivers, resulting in significant fuel savings -- which, in turn, cuts about 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from our operations every year.

Continuing to advance sustainable solutions for the transportation industry

Over the years, I have seen the challenges to investing in innovative technology firsthand. Often the upfront costs of new technologies are significant and deter small businesses from investing in them, despite the fact that initial costs will, in many cases, be paid off in future operation savings.

Another barrier is that of regulations hindering the use of alternative fuels. The adoption of renewable natural gas in the European transportation sector is slow due to a number of government incentives encouraging its use in other industries in preference to transport. To combat these hurdles, the private sector must continue to work closely with government to bring down costs, reduce inhibiting policies and regulations and help scale new technologies.

Despite these challenges, I strongly believe the key to continuous, industry-changing innovation is companies working together to share best practices and key learnings. My advice for other businesses working to implement and scale green technologies is three-fold: be focused, be committed and be patient.

First, be clear about your intention and rationale behind pursuing sustainable technology: Why are you doing this, and what will be the short- and long-term impacts on your business?

Once ambitions are clearly defined, you must lay out an achievable, long-term roadmap to make progress toward your company’s commitments. You will need buy-in, not just from the top of the organization, but also from employees at all levels and key stakeholders outside your organization to ensure stamina and commitment when you come up against challenges.

And lastly, you will need to remain dedicated to building new technologies up to scale. With economic forces and the political environment constantly changing, investment and infrastructure development can be unpredictable. An important step in ensuring buy-in remains strong over the years is measuring and reporting progress to gather insights that can help improve and support these commitments.

Ultimately, investing in technologies that increase the sustainability of operations is a smart business move. It serves as a combination of risk mitigation and opportunity creation. And, if you are able to demonstrate strong leadership, tangible brand benefits including increased cost savings, enhanced customer engagement and higher employee retention rates will follow. Our world needs more companies that are committed to being at the forefront of technology investments that spur sustainable outcomes, and who work with other leaders to use innovation as a tool for addressing critical environmental challenges.

Peter Harris serves as UPS Director of Sustainability in Europe.

Late last week Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, appeared on the CNBC show “Squawk Box.” During his interview, he insisted that carbon emissions are not a primary cause of climate change.

“There's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see," Pruitt told host Joe Kernen.

To many, Pruitt’s comments are in line with the Donald Trump administration’s playbook. The idea is simple: Say something outrageous that will ignite a firestorm on social media and foment the launch of press releases and public statements from organizations that oppose the president’s agenda. Meanwhile, the White House is dishing out executive orders as it dismantles or delays rules implemented by the previous administration. Such changes in policy are not as fun to read and cannot be crammed in a 140-character tweet, but nonetheless they have far more impact.

In addition to his comments on man-made climate change, Pruitt also cast doubt on whether the EPA was the right government body to regulate carbon emissions. “Nowhere in the equation has Congress spoken,” said Pruitt, as he wondered aloud if the agency was even equipped to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

In the case of the EPA, those shifts include the end of the agency’s methane disclosure rule and tactics used to cease the Clean Power Plan. Considering Pruitt’s background and testimony during his confirmation hearings, his comments on CNBC should hardly come as a surprise. Critics have noted, however, that last week’s interview was a departure from the administrator's prior rhetoric: During his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing, he said he had no opinion whatsoever on human beings’ impact on climate change.

Nevertheless, the interview sparked plenty of blowback – and some analysts warn the new administration could create fatigue as the public gets a sense that the White House is in constant chaos. Furthermore, if results do not come close to matching Trump’s promises and the economy starts to slow down, the GOP risks seeing a Capitol Hill turnover rivaling what occurred in 1994, 2006 and 2010.

For now, voters don't seem happy: The EPA’s D.C. offices received so many calls over the weekend that the agency’s voicemail system jammed, The Hill reported on Saturday.

Republican lawmakers also fielded an overwhelming amount of telephone calls, but as reporter Max Greenwood noted, it is common for elected officials to receive an onslaught of calls – but heads of government agencies are usually spared the wrath of concerned or angry citizens.

Meanwhile, scientific organizations are doing more than rolling their eyes at Pruitt’s comments. The American Meteorological Society, for example, slammed the administrator for his comments on Monday. In a public letter, the group said Pruitt's “mischaracterizing the science is not the best starting point for a constructive dialogue.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Brenda Ekwurzel described Pruitt’s statement as “dead wrong,” and reminded readers that federal agencies, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have documented climate change data for decades. Both of those agencies could see deep cuts under the new administration, according to White House budget proposals.

Image credit: Wigwam Jones/Flickr

Buried beneath the constant distractions, including President Donald Trump’s accusations that the former Barack Obama administration “wiretapped” his New York offices, was last week’s updated version of the controversial travel ban.

Trump issued the new ban after federal courts struck down his January executive order barring visitors from seven African and Middle Eastern nations. The new ban will take effect when the clock strikes midnight EDT on Thursday in order to give airport and federal agency staff time to prepare, as well as avoid the human nightmare of citizens being held up at airports (and, for the White House, to dodge another public relations fiasco).

The latest version includes four major changes. First, Iraq was removed from the list of restricted countries, a move critics said was needed to engage that country to fight the Islamic State. The indefinite ban on Syrian refugees was lifted; now they are subjected to the same 120-day waiting period for all refugees. The new ban does not allow for any religious preferences, so Christians claiming persecution would no longer have priority in attempting to enter the U.S. – which critics said risked all sorts of constitutional challenges. Green card holders and those with visas already approved, or “vetted,” are also exempt from the updated ban.

Nevertheless, many in the business community, including technology companies, are still stridently opposed to the ban.

One company that continues to speak out is Airbnb, which took a stand during the chaos that festered after the first travel ban was imposed in late January. The company’s CEO, Brian Chesky, immediately spoke out against the ban on Twitter:

[embed]https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/838796816757895169[/embed]

Airbnb was joined by ridesharing companies Lyft and Uber, which also made the rounds last week in condemning the ban. And in a blog post, chief legal and business officer of Mozilla, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, wrote: “It seems clear that little (if any) progress was made on the thinking behind this action.”

As with other technology firms, Mozilla says any travel ban undermines trust in the U.S. immigration system, hurts the American technology industry, risks international cooperation, and is a tactic that ostensibly plays to national security fears but, in the end, only creates more division.

The technology sector is also opposed to the dismantling of the H1-B visa program, which companies say is necessary to attract top talent in order to remain competitive in a global marketplace.

Critics of any ban also point out that these policies do not exclude nations where Trump has, or is rumored to have, various business ties, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – the latter two being home to the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks. Large Muslim-majority nations, such as Indonesia and Pakistan, were also left off the list. Also not included in the ban is Lebanon, which has a light Muslim majority and is also the host of many refugee camps.

Meanwhile, more states are wading into the fray and by challenging the ban in court. Yesterday, California became the seventh U.S. state to file suit against the Trump administration, joining states including Washington, New York and Hawaii.

Watch for the travel industry to start speaking out against the ban as summer edges closer, especially after indiscriminate vetting and even  prevention of the entry of nationals from nations such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. The silence of the past week will not last for long, especially as these companies start taking a hit on their financial statements. Newark Liberty International Airport, for example, has reportedly seen bookings decline by 7 percent since the first ban was implemented.

Image credit: Ron Cogswell/Flickr