Investing and Marketing for a Sustainable Future with Breene Murphy of Carbon Collective
Trailblazer Interview with Breene Murphy, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Carbon Collective, November 2022
Breene is the Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Carbon Collective, a former Board Member of the University of Southern California - Wrigley Institute of Environmental Science, and former Congressional Liaison and Chapter co-Leader for the Citizens Climate Lobby and working to create a sustainable future through investment and marketing.
The ocean has always been a source of inspiration for Breene.
Hi Breene. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. Great to reconnect after meeting at the NY Climate Week! How did you get into working on sustainability?
My journey began with my family. My grandmother's name was Delta Murphy. She was a very inspiring person and Incredibly involved in the community. She was the mayor of Whittier in LA county for a time, on the LA City council, part of the LA City Planning Commission, and on the board of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, which is incredible because of its foundational role in creating the blue water marine preserve on Catalina just off the coast of LA.
She had a larger-than-life personality. She'd wear salmon-colored lipstick with a baby blue sport coat with rhinestone shoulder pads and had a blonde, kind of little bouffant haircut. We'd call her the world's smallest nuclear reactor. She was a force. When she passed away, she asked me to give a speech at her funeral, and I realized I was riding her civic coattails.
She contributed so much and was an immense inspiration for me while I was starting to work and trying to figure out my direction. I was fairly young and thought to myself, "I'm going to do something… what is the biggest thing where I could positively affect lots of people?" So I got involved in climate advocacy. I started volunteering with a group called Citizens Climate Lobby focused on passing a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend that requires polluters to pay a fee based on how much they emit (the co2 equivalent they pull out of the ground). That money would be returned to people to build an economy that reduces emissions really quickly.
Breene interviewing then congressman Harley Rouda for Citizens Climate Lobby getting his cosponsorship on climate legislation.
I got very involved in volunteering on climate-related causes and wanted to pivot my professional career. I was in advertising and working in financial services running a marketing department while doing my volunteer work at the Citizens Climate Lobby.
After a few years of volunteering on climate work, I got invited back to take my grandmother's board position at USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. It's really cool. I got to sit where my grandmother did and was given some old memorabilia like her name tags. I continued to get more involved with USC and worked on a documentary with USC a few years ago called Seven Crossings. The film is about a professional big wave surfer and the best paddler of all time as he paddles the seven crossings of the eight Channel Islands to celebrate scientific progress on innovation and research to address climate change.
While working in advertising for finance, volunteering, and working with USC, I began to do a little bit of work for a friend working with Carbon Collective. He mentioned the company could use some help with marketing and was looking for someone with a background in finance and climate. After four weeks of consulting pro-bono, the co-founder asked if I wanted to join full-time. So I jumped over.
I've been really happy to transition to working more directly on climate. It's been a journey, and I gained a lot of tools and experiences along the way. I like talking to people about their journeys to working on climate. It takes a lot of hard work, but there are more tools, communities, and networks now than there ever used to be. Now there are platforms like Work on Climate, Climate Base, and My Climate Journey. There are communities to get involved in and even recruiters now, like Climate People. There are also skills-building programs like Terra.do. The climate community is amazing, and people are very open to talking. That's something that I didn't anticipate but that I feel incredibly grateful for.
There are more resources now than ever for people to get into working on climate. I think that's because of the urgency. We need to solve this problem. We need to consider- what is this world that we want to build?
It will take a lot of people, which means there's a lot of opportunity to pay people to work on this problem. And we need to scale as rapidly as possible.
That's an amazing story! What was your academic background?
I actually have an international development degree. After that, I got a creative writing Master's and was trying to write fiction and screenplays, so advertising became a natural path. But advertising at its root wasn't quite right for me, and I was trying to find more balanced work, so I got into behavioral economics. I was thinking more about how to communicate with people and how people make financial decisions. I found the subject interesting and informative about the human condition. Overall, I learned a lot from literary and economic perspectives about the prevalence of biases and the complexity of collective decision-making. With my climate volunteering, these subjects were very closely aligned.
What helped you the most toward working on climate?
Over time, I worked hard to shift my network to working on climate. There was this shift from my network being in the advertising and finance industries to that center being around climate and sustainability. I knew a lot of people that were working on sustainability and working on climate before I made the switch.
How do you approach marketing a climate product?
I always start with the basics of marketing. Whoever uses your product or service is the hero, and you're there to improve their lives. When I'm talking about climate, I want people to understand how much better the world will be when we solve climate change.
This is not only about preventing rapidly accelerating forest fires, desertification, or drought but about how much better our world will be.
For example, I have solar on my house and an electric car - reliable transportation that was in no way affected by inflation. But it's also about the health benefits. As we clean up the air, people will have fewer respiratory diseases, and health impacts from pollution will be reduced.
Working on climate is also about creating a more stable world. We're going to have more decentralized energy and fewer national security threats, thinking about oil politics. It's thinking about a greener, cleaner economy with more jobs. This is about more innovation and creating more convenient lives. It's exciting, and I cannot wait to live in this world. I'm trying to build that future every day.
We can solve climate change. We have the technology to remove 90% of the emissions. All we need to do is scale them.
I don't think people know how much hope there is and that we can do it. People either think it's not a problem, or we're screwed. There is a middle ground. It's a huge problem, but we can do so much about it. And it will bring so many benefits. On a personal level, that amount of meaning and connection, and opportunity is deeply inspiring, and I've become a living, breathing example of the story. Marketing a climate product is about sharing that vision.
How does the future narrative of overcoming climate change factor into your marketing work at Carbon Collective?
Investment is fundamentally about a belief in the future. Describing that future, we need to help create a future that we want to retire into. We use imagery, communication, and data to share our stories. For example, we have 194 companies building solutions to climate change and earning more than 50% of their revenue from those solutions. Do people know that there are that many companies? Do people know that, only two years before, there were only 107 climate-focused publicly traded companies? We're looking at significant growth in the number of publicly traded companies building solutions. We are seeing a new industry being born, something like the start of software 25 years ago. Working on climate will reshape every aspect of the economy positively.
What are the biggest opportunities and challenges to accelerate this sustainable transformation?
The collective story we believe in is the most important. The narrative is moving from a place of, we're doomed, or this isn't a big deal to, this is a big deal, and we can do a lot about it, and we can create a better life and future. Fundamentally, our shared narrative is the biggest thing we can change, and it's already starting to happen. We see dramatically more investment into climate from the government and private sectors. We're seeing more stable jobs during difficult times. While Stripe, Twitter, and Meta, were laying people off, climate-focused companies were hiring and providing job stability.
When people start to recognize how enviable a position working on climate is, that story will compound. People will start to believe that sustainability is exciting instead of feeling like they're doing homework. That's what I want to be a part of.
What has been most inspiring to working on climate?
Joining the climate community has helped me acknowledge how complex the challenge of sustainable transformation is, recognize there's a lot of work to do, and feel empowered by the work to be done together with great people. Once joining the climate community, the threats of climate change and associated doomism transform into just another day of bad data that we are working hard to address. We can make a difference. There is still climate anxiety, but it's much smaller because I have agency.
How does your product at Carbon Collective help fight climate change?
We do two things. One is we lay out the theory of change. We divest from the bad, reinvest in the good, and pressure the rest of change. We create investment portfolios. This is a one time decision that has long tail implications, and we're creating investment portfolios that we believe will outperform standard investing. We have low fees and a great investment experience. When people see that they can do this positive thing for the world without any sacrifice, that's really exciting. After I moved all my investments over, I didn't have to think about the assets much again.
What would you advise for people just entering this climate space?
Start by doing a little bit of research. Read something like Project Drawdown to understand what is having the largest impact and to gain a scientific basis. You can read some other texts like Speed and Scale. Try to meet people in the community. Join My Climate Journey or Work on Climate or something like that. Try to evaluate what you specifically want to do. There's this great article that I still go back through all these years. It's about how to pick a career that fits you. If you're going to do this thing for a long time, the nature of your work is essential. How would you like to spend your time? What are you good at? What's your superpower, and how would you use it? Think about those things and then get as involved as possible. Volunteer, help people, and network. You will gain momentum where you can build a personal proof of concept, so someone looks at you and the work you've done and says, I want to hire that person. Or you get to a point where you're ready to start a company. If you have those two options, how can you reach a place of competence where you can make an impact? That's where I found volunteering to be incredibly helpful because people are looking for volunteers all the time, it doesn't take that much time, and you'll learn a lot and develop a skillset.
Thank you for that outline of actionable steps. One last question, how can we support your work?
Two things. If you have an old 401(k) from a company, sign up, and invest with us to roll it over. If you're working at a company, I would love to work with you to build a sustainable 401(k). Then we help you get invested in climate solutions with low fees and a highly diversified and competitively performing portfolio. Learn more about Sustainable Investing, and don't hesitate to reach out!