I would not dilute one iota the importance and the urgency of meeting the climate challenge, because it reaches into so many aspects of the even larger problem-biospheric decline. And now we are hearing from the scientists that the best case is a thousand-year recovery of the atmosphere, bringing temperatures back into the normal range, with huge disruptions in the thousand-year meantime.

It is with a great sense of urgency that I offer a solution to the biggest culprit in the massive mistreatment of the Earth and the decline of the biosphere-business and industry. That happens to be where I have spent 53 years since my graduation from Georgia Tech in 1956 as an industrial engineer, cum aspiring-then-successful entrepreneur.

After founding my company Interface in 1973, and shepherding it through start-up and survival, to prosperity and global dominance in its field, I read Paul Hawken's book The Ecology of Commerce, in the summer of 1994. Hawken's book charged business and industry as the major culprit and the only leader. He convicted me as a plunderer of Earth, and I challenged the people of Interface to lead our company and the entire industrial world to sustainability, which we defined as eventually operating our petroleum-intensive company in such a way as to take from the Earth only what can be renewed rapidly and naturally by the Earth, and to do no harm to the biosphere. Take nothing. Do no harm. I simply said: "If Hawken is right, and business and industry must lead, who will lead business and industry? Unless somebody leads, nobody will. Why not us?"

I became a recovering plunderer thanks to the people of Interface. I once told a Fortune Magazine writer that someday people like me would go to jail. That became the headline of a Fortune article that went on to describe me as America's greenest CEO. From plunderer to recovering plunderer to America's greenest CEO in five years. That, frankly, was a pretty sad commentary on American CEOs, circa 1999.

Asked later in the Canadian documentary, The Corporation, what I meant by the "go-to-jail" remark, I offered that theft is a crime, and theft of our children's future would someday be a crime.

But I realized that for this to be true-for theft of our children's future to be a crime-there must be a clear, demonstrable alternative to the takemake-waste industrial system. It is this system that so dominates our civilization and is stealing our children's future, by digging up the Earth and converting it to products that quickly become waste in a landfill or incinerator-digging up the Earth, converting it to pollution.

There is a well-known environmental impact equation popularized by Paul and Anne Ehrlich that declares:

I is environmental impact (the bigger, the worse), P is population, A is affluence,and T is technology. I know the equation is largely subjective. You can quantify people and, perhaps, affluence; but technology is abusive in too many ways to quantify, so the equation is conceptual. Still, it works to help us understand what is going on in the industrial system. Increase any of these factors, and you make things worse from an environmental point of view. Population is part of the problem. Affluence is part of the problem. And technology is part of the problem. In other words, impact comes from people, what they consume, and how it's produced. Increase them all, and you've got a pretty good description of what's been going on for the last three hundred years.

I thought about the characteristics of technology (T) as we practiced it at Interface, which makes carpets. It was extractive (taking raw materials from the Earth), linear (take-make-waste), powered by fossil fuel-derived energy, wasteful, abusive, and focused on labor productivity (more carpet per man-hour).
So we set out at Interface in 1994 to transform the way we made carpet, a petroleum-intensive product for materials as well as for energy, and to transform our technologies so that they diminished environmental impact rather than magnified it. Thinking it thorough, I realized that all of those attributes of technology must be changed, to move the T to the denominator.

Extractive must be replaced by renewable, linear by cyclical, fossil fuel energy by renewable energy (sunlight), wasteful by waste-free, abusive by benign, and labor productivity by resource- productivity. And I reasoned that if we could make the transformative changes in technology, (changing the T to T2 ),

Technology of the Future, and moving it to the denominator, i.e., I = P * A / T2), we could reduce our impact to zero, including our impact on climate. That became the Interface plan in 1996. It has been the plan ever since.

I can tell you how far we have come in the ensuing twelve years:

Net greenhouse gases, down 71 percent in absolute tonnage. Over the same span of time, sales increased by two-thirds and profits doubled. And an 82 percent, absolute, translated into a 90 percent reduction in intensity, relative to sales. This is the magnitude of the reduction that the entire global technosphere must realize by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate disruption.

Fossil fuel usage is down 60 percent per unit of production, owing to efficiencies and renewables. The cheapest, most secure barrel of oil is the one not used through efficiencies.

Water usage is down 74 percent in our worldwide carpet tile business, and down 38 percent in our broadloom carpet business.

We have diverted 175 million pounds (87,500 tons) of used carpet from landfills, closing the loop on material flows through reverse logistics and post consumer recycling technologies that did not exist when we started fifteen years ago.Those new cyclical technologies have contributed mightily to the fact that we have produced and sold 83 million square yards of climate-neutral carpet since 2004, meaning no net contribution to global climate disruption in producing that carpet throughout the entire supply chain-from mine and well-head to end-of-life reclamation-independently third- party verified. We call it Cool Carpet™, and it has been a powerful market-place differentiator.

We reckon we are a little more than half-way to our goal: zero impact, zero footprint. We have set 2020 as our target year for zero-for reaching the top of MountSustainability. We call this MissionZero™.