Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Hawken

Hawken is selling a climate strategy that sounds less like sacrifice and more like good design: set the rules so clean behavior becomes the default, and dirty behavior starts to look not just immoral, but irrational. The phrase "self-regulating" is doing quiet political work here. It reassures market-friendly skeptics that this is not a command-and-control fantasy, while also insisting that laissez-faire as we know it is a rigged game. If the incentives are right, you do not need constant policing; you need a system that makes cheating feel like bringing a flip phone to a smartphone economy.

"Absolutely ludicrous" is an unusually sharp word for policy talk, and that is the point. Hawken is trying to reframe environmental action from heroic virtue to basic competence. The subtext: we have tolerated a business model where companies can dump costs into the atmosphere and call it profit. That is what he means by "internalized systems of cost and production" - the vocabulary of externalities translated into an ethical accusation: pollution is a hidden subsidy.

The context is Hawken's long-running project, from The Ecology of Commerce to his later climate work, to make sustainability legible to executives, legislators, and ordinary consumers without turning it into a purity test. He is arguing for standards and price signals (carbon pricing, procurement rules, reporting requirements, performance benchmarks) that shift behavior at scale. The intent is pragmatic optimism with teeth: the future arrives faster when the economy is structured so that the clean choice is the cheap choice, and the old way is not outlawed so much as laughed out of the room.