S2 E6:

Eco-Inventing
with Dale Vince

Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life.

Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane, and it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change-makers, from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.

This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and at select stores. 

Dana Thomas: Dale Vince is an eco-pioneer. Back in the mid-1990s, he launched Ecotricity, the world’s first green energy company, based in the United Kingdom. Today, Ecotricity services more than 200,000 domestic and business customers with renewable energy sourced from wind and sun, and it provides sustainable natural gas made in part from grass cuttings. In 2011, Dale created the Electric Highway, Europe’s first EV charging network, which runs from Scotland to Wales. More recently, he founded Devil’s Kitchen, an organization that provides vegan school dinners. Dale is also the chairman and owner of Forest Green Rovers, a professional soccer team based in England, that has been recognized by FIFA and the United Nations as the “world’s greenest football club.” 

And, as I write in the December issue of British Vogue, Dale is the founder of Skydiamond, a tech start-up that grows diamonds from carbon captured from the air. This month, Skydiamond launched a jewelry line in collaboration with eco-minded British jeweler Stephen Webster. It’s available on Stephenwebster.com — if, by chance, you’re still looking for dazzling holiday gifts. Dale will tell us all about these pro-environment initiatives, as well as share tips on how we can all live a greener life.

Also, on this holiday episode, I’m going to tell you a bit about our music contributor Eric Brace, an American Roots musician, Grammy-nominated producer, and founder of Red Beet Records, based in Nashville, Tennessee. Eric’s first band, Last Train Home, put out “Holiday Limited,” a now-classic EP of festive tunes, available on SoundCloud.

But first, Dale Vince, welcome to The Green Dream.

Dale Vince: Pleasure to be here.

Dana Thomas: So how did you become a green entrepreneur? How did you get into this idea or this movement of green entrepreneurism? Because you've been at it for about a quarter century.

Dale Vince: Yeah, so really I guess I was into sustainability before that. Pretty much since I was a kid, I've been concerned about that issue. I lived for 10 years on the road and off the grid, looking for a different way to live. 

Dana Thomas: When was that? 

Dale Vince: That was in the 80’s. The entire decade of the 80’s – the 1980’s, for those that don't even know when the 1900’s were. There must be some people that think that was so long ago. And so really it was the start of the nineties when I began to use business as a tool to bring about an environment aim. So I don't feel that I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an environmentalist that concluded that using business as a tool to get change was better than using, let's say, a charity model – asking for people to fund something – that I thought was a good idea. I thought better to turn, in this case, green energy, was my first example, into a product that I could offer people on a basis that they would accept it commercially. In 1995, we were the first green energy company in the world at that time.

Dana Thomas: Right. It's called Ecotricity. Did I pronounce that properly? 

Dale Vince: Yeah, eco’s fine. I say eco, but eco, eco. Tomato, tomato we don't mind doing…

Dana Thomas: Us Yanks with our flat vowels. So how did you come up with the idea of Ecotricity?

Dale Vince:  In my decade on the road, towards the end, I was using a windmill to power my trailer, my lights through some old batteries from a scrapyard. So I understood wind energy. I'd lived in different places. I knew when it was windy, I saw the energy coming in and going out. It was 1990, I saw the first big windmill built in Britain, in Cornwall, and I thought to myself – this was an epiphany moment – I could spend another 10 years living this low-impact lifestyle myself, or I could drop back in and try and build a big windmill on this hill I was living on that I knew was windy. And that was a simple thought that kicked off the whole thing. It took five years of battles with everybody to build this first windmill. Wind energy was brand new. It didn't really understand itself at that time. It wasn't an industry. I was brand new to that, I had...

Dana Thomas: It wasn't an industry. It's something we've been using since the dawn of time, and it wasn't an industry.

Dale Vince: Not for making electricity, no. And I had no money, no experience. And I lived in a trailer. So, I was starting from a very low place. No credibility I would say. So anyway, I fought all of these battles, managed to build a windmill in 1996. And just before, I could see it was coming, and I realized that it made sense to try and build some more. I'd learned everything about wind energy, I'd done it all myself. The process of planning, grid, finance, you name it. I went to meet the local power company, who were monopoly buyers at that time, and offered them green electricity. And they just laughed at me. They almost literally laughed me out of the office. They were like, “What's green energy? Who wants it?” kind of stuff. And here's a rubbish price because we're monopoly buyers. And so I left there deciding that I had to cut out that middleman to get a fair price for green electricity in order to build more windmills. And coincidentally, our electricity industry was just liberalizing, so it became possible to form an independent energy company, which is what I did: Ecotricity.

Dana Thomas: Are there other companies like this now?

Dale Vince: All over the world, they've popped up. There was one early days in America, called Green Mountain. I don’t know if they still operate, but I suspect that they do. Then there's one popped up in New Zealand, a couple popped up in England as well. Germany next. They're just all over the world now. The mainstream players as well, the big utility companies, have adopted green energy, with tariffs and investment and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it's become a proper global mainstream industry, which is a good thing. 

Dana Thomas: And what were some of the resistance that you ran into, in those early days?

Dale Vince: You know, there was skepticism about windmills. I call them windmills, because I think it's a nicer term, and it's closer to what they really are. People say they're wind turbines, but they're nothing like a turbine, so I dispute that. There was skepticism that they worked, that I knew what I was doing, that I could raise the money. Local objections included: they'll kill birds, affect TV signals, house prices, even pacemakers. It got a bit ridiculous, to be fair. And then there was a battle with the grid company, who behaved badly. Then there was an appeal to fight against the planning consent, that we did eventually gain, and all that kind of stuff. It was just brand new, wind energy was brand new, and the fear of the unknown, I would say, was the big driving factor.

Dana Thomas: Now, you also co-created the Electric Highway. Can you explain what the electric highway is, and when did you do this? This was, like, also really early days before there were EVs – before EVs were in fashion, right?

Dale Vince: Yeah. So, that journey began in 2008 when I wanted a better car. I declared myself a petrolhead and a treehugger in social media, and said I have to resolve this. I'm going to make an electric car. This is pre-Tesla. So we decided to build a supercar, because we knew that, from our experience, whenever you do a green alternative to something, it's got to be good. At least as good as the alternative, if not better. 

Dana Thomas:  And sexy.

Dale Vince: So we made a supercar...

Dana Thomas: Got to be sexy. 

Dale Vince: Absolutely. It still holds the land speed record in Britain, 12 years later. We got it on the road in 2010, and we called it the Nemesis, because it was meant to be the end of the fossil-powered car. That was our vision, that we should and could electrify cars, and all forms of other transport, as well, as part of the move to sustainability. But putting it on the road, in 2010, showed me immediately that one of the problems of mass adoption of electric vehicles is where to charge them, because I faced that reality every day. And so we started the Electric Highway. I started the electric highway in 2011, by completely covering our motorway network, the most important roads in our country, with places to plug in cars. There were virtually no cars on the road at the time, but we knew there was a chicken and egg problem – that people wouldn't buy cars if there wasn't somewhere to charge. And nobody was building somewhere to charge, because there were virtually no cars on the road. We just said we'll break that problem, and we'll go out and we'll build these things. And I think it was the first national network of charging points for cars in the world. 

Dana Thomas: And did you put these charging stations at rest stops and gas stations? Or did you build new places for them?

Dale Vince: So we built them at every motorway service station in the country.  Our first installations were basically three-pin plugs. That's our domestic equivalent of yours. And so, it was a very slow rate of charge. But within a year, we were putting 50 kilowatt charges in, which would put 80 percent into a Nissan Leaf, really the first mainstream electric car in our country. It would do that in 20 minutes. And the dwell time at a motorway service station for a coffee and that kind of stuff was about 20 minutes. So immediately, there was an almost perfect fit in 2012, 2013. And then we've gone on from 50 kilowatts – just before we sold it, we put in 350 kilowatt charges, which has just revolutionized everything.

Dana Thomas: That's fantastic. Did you meet resistance in asking places if you could install them, or where they like, “Yeah, bring it on, we get more customers.”

Dale Vince: Exactly. It was amazing. No resistance at all. We signed agreements with all the motorway operators, did the whole network from tip to toe of the country, and there it was.

And do you know what, to begin with, it was cheaper to give the electricity away than try to measure it and charge for it. So for the first five years of operation, it was free, which excited everybody. Like the idea that you could buy an electric car and then charge up for nothing. I'd say we had a bit of trauma, five years later, when we said, "We have to charge now guys, the volume of electricity being used is so much, and by the way the tech has caught up and now we can measure it and charge. We have to do this." And some of our customers were so angry, "But I expected this for life," that kind of stuff. Come on. There it is. Human nature.

Dana Thomas: Human nature. And you now supply green gas. What is green gas?

Dale Vince: Green gas is an alternative to fossil fuel gas. In the same way that we can make electricity from the wind and the sun and put it into the grid, instead of fossil-made electricity, we discovered a way to do this with gas, as well. It's possible to make methane from plant sources and clean that up and put it into the grid, like we do with the renewable electricity. So, we introduced the concept of green gas to Britain in 2010. It was a very exciting thing for me, because as an environmentalist, I always thought that we had the answer for electricity, but when it came to gas we just had to give it up. But when we discovered we could make gas and put that into the grid as well, we suddenly became a fully rounded green energy company. We launched a green gas tariff, and then we worked on a different way to make the gas. The standard ways back then were food waste or energy crops, which is intensive agriculture and causes a lot of its own problems. We chose instead to look at grass and we've done a couple of studies now that show there's enough grass in Britain...

Dana Thomas: I mean who has the most beautiful lawns than the United Kingdom, right?

Dale Vince: Well, it's actually fields, right? What we're looking at is farmer's fields where they grow a lot of grass at the moment to feed cows. A very inefficient process. We found there's enough grass to make all of the gas that Britain needs. So suddenly, it's a really big part of how we get to net zero. We're building our first project to do this right now and come February next year it'll be pumping green gas made from grass into the grid, enough to power about 4,000 local homes. A really big step, quite excited by that.

Dana Thomas: Is it a solution for the shortages we’re facing now from the war in Ukraine?

Dale Vince: Well, yeah, because, we, for example, in Britain, can be energy independent. We've got enough wind and sun to make all the electricity we need. And I think that applies to every country in the world. Every country has access to wind and sun and we've got enough grass to make all of the gas we need. If we're energy independent, we're completely disconnected from price shocks, as well as shortages. And some of these price shocks are not about actual shortages, they're fear of shortages. The price of fossil fuels have gone through the roof just in case there's a problem. But there haven't been shortages yet.

Dana Thomas: Have you been speaking with lawmakers? Are you pushing to get Britain to be energy sufficient? 

Dale Vince: I am. 

Dana Thomas: And where does that stand?

Dale Vince: I would say that in the early days of wind and renewable energy, generally, the kind of resistance we bumped into or the obstacle we bumped into was that it was too good to be true. It was so benign as an energy source, relatively cheap, it's now the cheapest form of energy we can make – it just had no downsides and people were like, "There must be something wrong." And when I presented green gas to the opposition party in our country a few months ago, I got exactly the same reaction. There must be something wrong because our national program says.

Dana Thomas: This makes too much sense.

Dale Vince: We'll create 160,000 jobs in the rural economy, put £15 billion a year into the rural economy. We'll create vast wildlife habitats in the process, because we're organic, and make all the gas we need. And it's like, "There must be a downside." And that's what they're saying. "There must be something wrong with it." We haven't found it. That's where we're at at the moment. But I figure building the first project, we always find this works, build it and then you can bring people in and show them that it works and then you can start the ball rolling.

Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and at select stores.

Dana Thomas: If you are enjoying this conversation, tune into our episode with Hannah Elliott, the luxury car writer for Bloomberg Pursuits, and a regular contributor to The Green Dream. For our debut chat, she told me what it was like to drive the new Lucid, a luxury EV,  from San Francisco to Los Angeles, without a fixed plan for charging stops. When the car needed to get juiced up, well, here's what she did:

Hannah Elliott: I started Googling, and I was like, "You know what? I'm going to have a beautiful lunch at the Ritz. I'm just going to drive down the road, I'll go to the Ritz Santa Barbara and have a beautiful lunch." I knew the Ritz would probably have chargers there for guests. 

And so I sort of rolled down the hill another 30 minutes or so. They were very nice at the Ritz, but they did say, "Oh, the wait time for the charger, you know, you'd get it tomorrow. They were very nice — they did direct me to a shopping center in Santa Barbara that had a bank of chargers. These were fast chargers. These were the Electrify America chargers, where I parked. I charged for an hour and 23 minutes, and in the meantime bought some plants and went to a Home Goods store, where I killed time. 

I'm on a plant kick right now, because you know, I've recently moved to Los Angeles, and this is what one does when you move to LA – you get into plants. So I loaded up on flora, and at that point, I did get a full charge and then drove the rest of the way to LA. 

Dana Thomas:  Subscribe to The Green Dream podcast and hear this, and all of our other episodes. And tell your friends about us, too. Now let’s return to my talk with green entrepreneur Dale Vince.

Now, one of my favorite projects that you're doing is called Devil's Kitchen, which provides vegan lunches to schools in the UK, correct? In the US, Alice Waters has been trying to improve the school lunch programs, this has been her project for years. For every step forward, she goes two steps back. She might get into one school for a little while and then they're like, "Oh, budget cuts, we can't do this anymore." Or there's resistance. There's just resistance – or maybe kids just don't want to eat vegetables. And so it hasn't been the kind of success that you would think it could be, getting kids off of pizza, and chips, and crisps, and fries for lunch every day. So how did you come up with this idea, and how did you get it into the schools?

Dale Vince: So, at our football club, Forest Green Rovers, which we haven't talked about yet, we've learned a lot about how to introduce plant-based food to unlikely audiences, in our case a football crowd. And we've made...

Dana Thomas: Not just the players, but everybody.

Dale Vince: That's right. The crowd, they're the actual fans is what I meant. And the staff. And the players, absolutely. And through that experience we've made our own burger, which is an amazing burger. I'm a big fan of burgers. I'm vegan as well – have been for 40 years. It's the best burger I've ever tried. And we had the idea...

Dana Thomas: Four or forty?

Dale Vince: Four zero.

Dana Thomas: Before it was a trendy thing to do.

Dale Vince: When it was a mad thing to do. When – that was the reaction you got, "What? What do you eat?" Right. We had this idea that we could take this food that we were making, which is really good food – high protein, low fat, low salt – made just from plants and absent of the 14 major food allergens: soy, gluten, wheat, nuts, you name it. Which makes it really suitable for school, or any kind of mass catering, because it's completely inclusive. And we set up a little factory. We made burgers and balls to begin with and we started talking to the catering industry that supplies the schools, the wholesalers. 

And we met their price point, which is really super-important, and we ticked an awful lot of other boxes in terms of the health of the food. We road tested it with schools around where I live, and I went to meet some of the kids, and we gave them different flavor options and stuff like that. They all loved it. We've got a heritage story that comes from football, which is exciting to a lot of kids. This is what players of Forest Green eat. And we're in 10,000 primary schools now, maybe two or three years after launching. And that's half of all primary schools in our country. We're in universities and secondary schools as well. Other football clubs. It's kind of taken off, which is fabulous.

Dana Thomas: That's fantastic. Now, if you didn't go to these schools or the football clubs, is it possible to get food from Devil's Kitchen? 

Dale Vince: Yeah, at one online supermarket so far, called Ocado. We're working on the others, they're quite hard to break into. It's called Ocado, O-C-A-D-O. We sell them there. They’ve gone on really well. And you can actually buy them at the club now. We've just opened a new shop with a freezer, because our fans kept saying, "Where can I buy this stuff?" So we're going to have freezers in our new club shop.

Dana Thomas: Freezers, no doubt, powered by Ecotricity.

Dale Vince: Yes, we are powered 100 percent green electricity and solar.

Dana Thomas: So, tell us about the Forest Green Rovers. We are in the thick of the World Cup right now and the world is football/soccer mania at its height, and you have what is called the first UN-certified carbon neutral professional football club. What makes a football club carbon neutral?

Dale Vince: The UN declared us the first sports club to be carbon neutral, actually, of all. And that was three, four years ago, which is a fabulous thing. We'd been measuring our carbon footprint for 10 years and reducing it year on year. They're the first two steps, measure and reduce. And the UN came along and said, "We've got this program – nobody's completed it yet – the third step is just to buy carbon offsets to neutralize the part of your footprint that you can't reduce, directly." And we said, "Hell, why not?" I don't actually believe in carbon offsets that much. I think they come with problems they allow people to...

Dana Thomas: I do, too. It gives you free license to keep doing bad, instead of trying to fix the good, and trying to pivot to the good.

Dale Vince: Absolutely. But if you do it properly, if you have reduced and you do reduce every year and you only carbon offset the bits that you haven't yet got to, there's space for it. So we did it anyway. We said at the UN, "Fine." They are UN-certified offsets as well. So they're top grade, there's no greenwashing in there. And that was 2016, I think it was.

Dana Thomas: So where are the Green Rovers and what is their record?

Dale Vince: So I rescued the club in 2010 from bankruptcy, and it was a lower league, or known here as non-league club, in the fifth tier of English football. We're in the third tier of English football now. We've won two promotions in that time. We've turned the club completely green tackling the big issues of energy transport and food first because we discovered in the early 2000s that 80 percent of everybody's personal carbon footprint – and every organization of any size – is in the three things: how you power stuff, how you travel and what you eat. So we focused on that at the club. We've got an organic pitch that has no fertilizers or pesticides put on it. We've got a wildlife area around the edge of our ground. We have wild orchids and slow worms as a result of that. Electric car charging for fans. We did that super early before fans had electric cars, but every match now they're full. Vegan food was the big thing that took all the media attention, but there's so much other stuff we've done with banning single-use plastics.

Dana Thomas: And what about the uniforms?

Dale Vince: They're made from bamboo, or coffee grounds, or recycled fishing nets, that kind of stuff. There's no detail that we haven't looked at. We're trialing this year for the first time washable fast food containers for food and drink. We don't have single use containers in the ground now.

Dana Thomas: Excellent. And what about the shoes?

Dale Vince: The shoes the players buy themselves, but they're not leather for sure. They will be plastic, they'll be whatever the big providers of football boots have got in their supply chain at the moment. But you can see that's changing as well in terms of using recycled materials. That's happening.

Dana Thomas: The last thing left is the ball, which is I guess still made of leather, right?

Dale Vince: No, God no. They haven't been made of leather for years. It's a terrible material for footballs. It absorbs wet, for example. Leather footballs are notoriously rubbish from back in the day. Nah, that part's taken care of. They're made with plastic. 

Dana Thomas: Now, any of your players playing in Qatar right now?

Dale Vince: One of our ex-players was playing in Qatar. Kieffer Moore played for Wales last night against England, and he used to play at our club, I don't know, maybe three, four years ago. Something like that.

Dana Thomas: And your club is based in Stroud? 

Dale Vince: Yeah, just down the road from the office where I'm sitting now, maybe 15 minutes away. The town that it's in is called Nailsworth, population 5,000. Our stadium capacity is 5,000. We're the smallest club ever to be in the English football league…It carries our sustainability message incredibly. Our message has gone around the world. And I did football accidentally, just as a rescue mission, found I had to change everything, realized I'd be challenging a new audience with my message. That made it more appealing because football fans are stereotypically not going to be open to that kind of stuff. And it worked better than anybody could have ever dreamt. We have a global platform now for talking about sustainability, and we've seen the world of sport change around us.

Dana Thomas: Absolutely. Have other football clubs come to see you and pick up some of your ideas and are adopting them? Where can we see the influence of the Forest Green Rovers' carbon neutral practices? 

Dale Vince: I guess the first big thing was the UN approaching us around about 2016 and saying, "Look, we've seen your work and we're about to start a global program to do the same kind of thing, so come and talk to us." So we did that. We became a founding member of something called Sport for Climate Action, which is a program from the UN designed to reach out to all of the organizing bodies and participant clubs of sport in the world, and use their platform to reach their fans to make them live more greenly. I would describe it as being fans of the environment as well as fans of that sport. And that is the most enormous potential for change. That was 2016, and since then we've been talking to organizations of rugby, tennis, football, you name it, the whole world of sport. There are nearly 300 signatories to that program now. It's almost the entire world of sport.

So we've seen that change, and closer to home, Premier League clubs are coming to talk to us. England, the national team, coming to see how we have an organic pitch, sending food samples to Premier League teams to try with the players, and that kind of stuff. So, in football, we've seen that away fans come to our ground, they go back to their club and say, "Why can't we have food like that?" Away directors visit us and, from back in the day, the first conversations were all about – they were skeptical, stood back a little bit from this crazy thing that we were doing, bringing the environment into football. Now, when they come to our ground, they're telling us, "We've got solar panels. We're putting electric car chargers in." And we're all on the same page. 

Dana Thomas: And your sexiest project, I think, which is what I wrote about in the December issue of British Vogue, is Skydiamond. You're capturing carbon from the air, which we need to be doing, and you're turning it into diamonds, because diamonds are made of carbon. And if they're compressed carbon in the Earth, why can't we do it above ground? I just thought like, "Yeah, this is totally what we need to be doing and stop the mining and digging, digging, digging up the Earth in order to find these gems." Yes, there's a lot of magic to that. But I loved the idea that you were doing good, positive impact by absorbing all this carbon from the air to make all these dazzling gems, and not making damage at the same time, and impoverishing regions, and all the negative impact that mining has. So when did you start doing this, and how did you come up with the idea?

Dale Vince: So I had the idea about 10 years ago, probably. And it was really a mind-wandering thing – I do that. I thought about geoengineering – this concept of changing the environment on a big scale in order to pull carbon from the atmosphere and lock it up. Because getting to net zero is super important to stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere. But once we've done that anyway, we've got to pull carbon out of the atmosphere itself because there's too much in there. So that's coming, right? Whether we do that in series or in parallel, we have to do that. And I thought about the various ways to pull carbon from the atmosphere and I realized it was only half of the job because once you've got the carbon you've gotta lock it up into a permanent form and it was a hip, hop and a jump from there to the to the De Beers marketing slogan, "Diamonds are forever." And, I thought, "This is perfect. If we could take carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into diamonds, we've locked it up forever. We've created something really special that people want to have." And I thought back then that we could actually deliver sackfuls of diamonds to companies every year, and say, "This is your carbon footprint, and you can give them to your people, or what you want to do with it and everybody wins." It sounded fantastic, but what I discovered...

Dana Thomas: And divert the wealth of De Beers, yeah, we're okay with that, too. 

Dale Vince: And I think that's coming right? I think that's coming. A lot of people campaign for the end of fossil fuels have now started to campaign for the end of diamond mining, because it's so damaging. I'm going to tell you about that in a second. But what we discovered was that there's not that much carbon in a diamond. So it's not a very practical carbon capture technology for the big scale that we have to do it. But it's a wonderful hearts-and-minds approach to say that this life that we need to live, this green life – anything is possible, right? If we can make diamonds from the atmosphere, we can do anything. And a big part of our message to people is that we haven't got to give stuff up. We say whether it's burgers, cars, football, or even diamonds now. Because we've done all of those things, we just have to find another way to get what it is we want.

Dale Vince: So, off the back of realizing it was a small carbon absorption, we went looking for the stats for diamond mining of the ground and found there were none, right? None. So we commissioned the first independent study into diamond mining, and discovered a horrific environment story. And so, suddenly, our diamonds are an alternative to a massive environment damage. I'll give you some stats: For every single carat of diamond dug out of the ground, and there are 150 million a year, the mining industry digs 1,100 tons of rock for a fifth of a gram, which is one carat. In the process they expose 30 tons of toxic metals to the environment, consume five tons of water, and emit half a ton of greenhouse gas. That's for a single one carat stone. And it's being done at scale 150 million carats a year, vast environment damage.

Dana Thomas: Plus, there's the human side, which is people working in mines and...

Dale Vince: Absolutely, I mean you're right.

Dana Thomas: Living underground, and inhaling all those chemicals and...

Dale Vince: And the funding of wars, right? One thing that we discovered earlier this year with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that 30 percent of all of the diamonds in the world come from Russia. So, with all of the sanctions going on against Russia to prevent funding of the war, we are like, "Don't forget diamonds, everybody." And most diamond shops or jewelry shops won't tell you where the diamonds come from. And they don't even know. So you don't know if there's...

Dana Thomas: No traceability whatsoever. They can say we got them in Antwerp and before that, we don't know.

Dale Vince: Absolutely. So our diamonds are made from the sky. We like to say we mine the sky. Our ingredient list is so simple and short. It's the wind, the sun, the rain, and atmospheric carbon. That is it. And we are carbon negative by design, not carbon neutral. Our process is carbon negative. We love that.

Dana Thomas: I love that. Now this is different from lab-grown diamonds, which we keep hearing about.

Dale Vince: It is different. They are still grown in a lab, and it does use the same technology, it's known as a CVD or something-vapor-disposition machine (Chemical Vapor Deposition, ed. note). They are different, but they are still grown in a lab. All the other labs that you'll see in the world today get their gasses from an industrial process – basically from fossil fuel. So they may claim to use green electricity, using paper offsets, and that kind of stuff. Often not in a genuine way, but the gasses that they use come from the fossil fuel industry and that's the big difference between us and them. We take everything we need from the sky.

Dana Thomas: Right. And you're the only one still doing this, right?

Dale Vince: Yeah, we really made them available for sale at the start of this year and launched the idea late last year after seven years of R&D to find a way to do it, and about three years of perfecting the recipes, and last week we had certified for the first time our first perfect diamond. It's D in color, and it's flawless. Only one in 20,000 dug diamonds meets that standard of quality. So we're really super excited by that. We've hit the top grade. This is our recipe process maxing out.

Dana Thomas: That's fantastic. So, this week you're launching a new jewelry line with the designer Stephen Webster. Is that line green from beginning to end as environmentally positive as possible?

Dale Vince: Yeah, so Stephen Webster is a British designer jeweler that I first went to speak to about seven years ago. And the first stones that we made were brown, and I took some to see him. He didn't know what I was coming to talk about, and I just went, "Look, we just made that as a diamond." And he was shocked – and he loved it by the way, even though it was brown. He sent it downstairs to his testing lab, and they came back and said, "It's a diamond," which was improbable at the time. He expected them to come back and say, "Yes, made in a lab." So he fell in love with the idea, and we said, "Well, let's collaborate. Once we've perfected the recipes and everything, let's work together and launch something." He's designed this amazing jewelry. He's got his own five unique diamond cuts that are at the core of that, and he uses recycled metals. So he's been on this path, anyway, of more sustainable jewelry. . and I'm happy to finally launch with him a world-first collaboration between Skydiamond and Stephen Webster.

Dana Thomas: I love that. Now are there other gems that you're going to be able to make with this process? I mean, can you do colored diamonds like your brown diamonds, which actually are a thing in the world, and pink diamonds, and blue diamonds, and yellow diamonds? 

Dale Vince: We've done pink and blue, and they look fabulous. I really like them. Black is an idea that we had – make black diamonds. And green, kind of Ecotricity green, which is really vibrant, bright green, not a grass green. We'd like to make those as well.  We've just moved out of what you think of as an R&D phase in our little lab, and we're just moving into a commercial phase of production and sales and marketing. And we're getting ready to grow from five machines that make our stones to about 30 over the next 12 months as we grow our sales and marketing. And, in parallel, we'll be seeking out new colors. Also, size is an issue. I mean, it's fun, we've grown only a stone so far. I think that it's about six carats, and I think we'd like to try and grow something even bigger.

Dana Thomas: Now, you said from the beginning of your life since your childhood, you've been green-minded, you've been raised with environmentalism as part of your ethos.

Dale Vince: My parents weren't interested in it, the school wasn't interested in it, nobody was interested in it. But it concerned me. And I remember my first concerned thought was where all the oil came from. I was looking at cars. I knew they had roughly 10-gallon tanks to hold fuel. I was a kid that liked to make things, power them with batteries, and that kind of stuff, and I was very aware of the finite nature of batteries back in the day. They weren't rechargeable. They had valuable metals in them, but you had to throw them away. And I thought, how much fuel is in all of these cars on the roads today, which isn't as many as it was, like, 40, 50 years later. And where does it all come from and when will it run out? Because I knew that it had to run out, but nobody was talking about it. And this would've been mid to late 70s.

Dana Thomas: Right. And you, you were living where?

Dale Vince: Living on the east coast of England, a place called Great Yarmouth. And I also had concerns about animals as well – eating animals. It really didn't sit well with me. And I bumped into culture at that time when I talked about it and challenged it. My parents were angry about that. "Why would you talk about which part of an animal this is?" And I'm like, "Well, if I'm going to eat it, why can't I talk about what it is?" kind of thing. It was all about accepted norms. I was outside of quite a lot of those.

Dana Thomas: So that's when you became a vegan?

Dale Vince: When I left home, which was round about age of 18, that was it. I never had meat after that. And it was a short journey from vegetarianism to veganism.

Dana Thomas: So, let's talk about the bigger picture of the green economy. I was at a conference last year in Edinburgh, TED conference, and Al Gore said that the Green Revolution has the potential to generate more jobs and more wealth than the Industrial and Tech Revolutions combined. Clearly, you've been proving this by creating cool companies, and cool jobs. Do you agree with this idea that through innovation and trying to fix all the damage of the industrial revolution, we can actually have a better economy, a green economy that's really healthy?

Dale Vince: Yeah, I do. Absolutely. And if you look at the concept of energy independence, which is going against the grain of the last few decades of globalization where we've opened ourselves up to global supply chains and markets where somebody else sets the price. If you look at energy independence as the very opposite of that, saying, "Look, we'll make the energy we need here and use in our country," the economic benefits of that are absolutely enormous. Right now, we're spending £150 billion a year on our electricity bills as a nation. With a third of that sum of money, we could make all the electricity we need here in our country with £50 billion. And then after that our electricity bills would be about £15 billion a year, not 150. And that money won't leave our economy to go to fossil fuel regimes somewhere else in the world. It will stay in our economy, which is the most incredible strengthening that I think any industry has ever been able to offer to a country.

Dana Thomas: Absolutely. And it also frees you up from political issues. Like we're dealing with Ukraine right now, that's why we aren't going to be able to have gas in our homes, to heat our homes this winter. Because there's a war in Ukraine on the other side of Europe – that you're less dependent on a very unstable geopolitical atmosphere and relationships, and it's incredibly freeing in the sense.

Dale Vince: Definitely. And it's not just instability from the occasional war, and there have been many wars either fought directly about fossil fuels, or in a kind of pseudo sense in the Middle East, for example. But the fossil fuel industry, OPEC is a supplier's cartel, and they manipulate the market to put the price of oil where they want. So we don't even have a free market in global oil. And being energy independent frees us from the cartels, the price speculators, and the manipulators, as well as from global events, like the odd war here and there, which just keep happening.

Dana Thomas: Now, what do you say to people who brush off climate change or say, "Whatever I do it doesn't really matter because the US and China are making so much pollution that my little effort is going to be a raindrop in the ocean." How do you convince people to get onto the green train?

Dale Vince: Look, it's simply the right thing to do. And people said back in the day when recycling first became a thing, "Oh, what difference does it make if I recycle my plastic on my glass?" But now we've got recycling levels in that 70–80 percent in some places. Collectively, these little things that we do add up to something big.

Dana Thomas: So what for you are the biggest issues today? 

Dale Vince: I have a really simple answer. There are only two things and, all of the big issues we face get resolved when we change these two things: stop using fossil fuels, and stop eating animals. Because intensive animal agriculture is not just one of the biggest drivers of the climate crisis, but it's also the driver of the global Sixth Mass Great Extinction of wildlife on our planet that's happening now, because we take so much land, 90 percent of our planet for farming to grow animals to feed ourselves, a most inefficient process. We need 75 percent less farmland, if we simply eat plants, we can give the rest back to nature. Obviously, fossil fuels is driving the climate crisis – polluting the air, polluting the land and the water. And put these in combination, there really aren't many other problems that we need to worry about – fossil fuels and animal farming.

Dana Thomas: What are your next projects? What's on the bulletin board that you're going to tackle next? Because, clearly you've done electricity, gas, school meals, sports, cars, and diamonds. What's next?

Dale Vince: We have a water machine that we've been working on for five years. It's come out of R&D now, it's being tested. It basically will take a house, or you can scale it up to a village, whatever you want – take a house off of the sewage and mains water grid. And this could have an application in California, for example, where you've got chronic water shortages. We can see that. And we waste a lot of water of course in our normal way of living. This device will capture everything that you put down the drain, clean it up, and make it available to use in the house again. It creates a cycle of water in the house that can make you independent from the water and sewage system.

It's only a cubic meter in size. We've shrunk it from the size of a room to a cubic meter. It's a retrofit device – you just dig a little hole, a cubic meter hole, and drop this thing in beside your house and everything gravity-feeds into it. It cleans up the water, puts it into another one cubic meter tank, and that's all you need. And maybe American houses are a bit bigger, but this is a rough model for Britain. It's undergoing certification for global use, which is really exciting, because water is a big climate issue. 

And we're going to start a zero carbon airline. It's going to be hydrogen powered planes. It should be in the skies in 18 months time. Zero-carbon flying, the length and breadth of Britain, and within a few years we'll be across Europe. Really exciting time because it's held to be one of the kind of things that we can't solve, right? How are we going to fly in a world of net zero? We think the answer's coming, if not almost here.

Dana Thomas: And what can listeners do individually? 

Dale Vince: There's always about three things: energy, transport, and food. So look at how you power your home. You can buy a green tariff, that's easy almost anywhere in the world. But you could also look to make your own electricity with solar panels, that's become super-economic. Also, change your appliances, light bulbs for LEDs, right? You get your money back in 12 months or something. And energy-efficient appliances – when you change your appliances, go for something that uses less energy, do insulation, that kind of stuff. It's always about wasting less, using less. And what you do need, get it from a green source. So that applies in energy. In transport, it's just the same. Think about how often you travel and why? Do you really need to? When you do travel, do it in a lower carbon form. Get an electric car, if you can afford it. Use a bike, if it works for you. That kind of stuff. And in food, stop eating animals. It's one of the biggest, easier things that people can do and it will make you feel fantastic.

Dana Thomas: Thank you so much for being on The Green Dream. We've had a wonderful time with you today, Dale Vince, and hearing about all of your adventures, and especially your dazzling Skydiamonds. Thank you for leading us to a greener future and keep at it, and we look forward to hearing more about new projects to come.

Dale Vince: That's awesome. Thank you. I've really enjoyed being with you today. So thank you for that.

Dana Thomas: Back in the early 1990s, when I was news aide for the Style section of The Washington Post, I wrote a performing arts column for the Sunday paper called Limelight. Each week’s subjects were assigned to me by a young editor named Eric Brace, a gifted writer and amateur rock musician who, on Friday nights, could be found performing with his brother Alan at the Dupont Circle bookshop, Kramer Books and Afterwards. Eric was on guitar, and Alan was on upright bass. I’d pop in to see them on my way home from a late shift in the newsroom. Then I moved to Paris, and Eric moved to the Weekend section of the paper, covering music. He did a fine job at it, too.

Twenty years ago or so, Eric decided to flip his life around, and started making music for a living, rather than simply writing about it. He co-founded a band called Last Train Home. At first, they performed in the Washington metropolitan area, and won local music awards. Eventually, Eric moved to Nashville with his wife, and our former Washington Post colleague, Mary Ann Werner, and together founded Red Beet Records, a label that puts out folk music, roots-rock, Americana, bluegrass, country, singer-songwriter, and even French chansons. In 2011, Eric and his music partner Peter Cooper produced “I Love: Tom T. Hall's Songs of Fox Hollow,” a modern re-creation of Hall’s 1974 children’s album, with performances by Buddy Miller, Bobby Bare, Patty Griffin, Duane Eddy, and, of course, Last Train Home. They performed “The Mysterious Fox of Fox Hollow.” Here’s a snippet. The LP was nominated for a Grammy for Best Children's Album and Eric went to the awards in Los Angeles. It was pretty thrilling for him, but also for all of his longtime friends and supporters, like me.

When I needed music for The Green Dream podcast, I immediately thought of my old friend Eric, and he kindly offered up instrumental versions of songs from Cartes Postales, his solo album of French chansons. Here’s what it sounds like when he sings along. This is “Si tu vois ma mère,” by Sidney Bechet, as the French say.  

This time of year, I always put on Holiday Limited, an EP that Eric recorded with Last Train Home in 2000. You can find some of Holiday Limited’s songs on Spotify, and the entire EP on Soundcloud. I thought it’d be a nice way to end this final episode of The Green Dream’s second season. We’ll be back in the New Year with a slew of fabulous and fascinating guests, beginning with supermodel-turned-activist Amber Valletta. I hope you’ll join us. And I wish you a wonderful holiday season.

Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and at select stores. 

The Green Dream was written by Dana Thomas. From Talkbox Productions with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. I’m Dana Thomas, the European Sustainability Editor for British Vogue. You can follow me on Instagram and on Twitter where my handle for both is @DanaThomasParis. Thank you for listening.