Few voices in sustainability and innovation bridge journalism, real-world experience and business insight as convincingly as New York Times best-selling author Thomas Kostigen.
His most recent book, Cool Food: Erasing Your Carbon Footprint One Bite at a Time, published in early 2024, was co-authored with Academy Award-winning actor Robert Downey Jr, and follows a series of eco-focused titles, including The Green Book, You Are Here, The Big Handout, and Hacking Planet Earth.
A former Bloomberg News editor, Kostigen’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, Departures, National Geographic, and others, while he has collaborated with Nobel Prize-winning scientists, C-suite executives, Wall Street financiers, diplomats, government ministers, film directors, and a myriad of influential individuals during his storied career.
As an innovation speaker, he challenges organisations to move beyond narrow carbon metrics and rethink sustainability as an operational, cultural and strategic discipline, drawing on decades of first-hand reporting, bestselling books and advisory work that connects environmental responsibility with smarter, more resilient business decision-making.
In this interview with the London Keynote Speakers Agency, Kostigen shares how efficiency, storytelling and human experience can drive meaningful change, offering leaders actionable insight on embedding sustainability without sacrificing performance.
How can businesses make better choices to reduce their carbon footprint?
I think what businesses have to understand more than anything else is that carbon footprint is somewhat of an old legacy type of concept. We have to look at the entire sum of sustainability so that you can adhere to different protocols depending upon what type of business you have, because stakeholders expect more than just energy efficiency.
There is water efficiency to consider. There is waste efficiency to consider. There are employee relations. So it is an all-sum game, and depending upon which business you are in, there are different protocols that matter more.
I get into a lot of that in my talks – what is the best type of protocol that you should be adhering to and why. The big question is, how are you going to do it? That is what we really have to dive into when you talk to different organisations and different government entities.
It is really the all-sum game of not just carbon offsetting. It is not simply about saying, ‘Here are my carbon emissions, now I am just going to buy offsets’. It is not that game anymore. It is really about becoming operationally efficient from a management perspective, then holding that out and communicating it properly.
How can businesses implement sustainable practices while maintaining financial growth?
If you pick up on the efficiency aspect of carbon adherence and sustainability adherence, throw those out for a second. Forget about being energy efficient. Forget about being sustainably efficient. Just be efficient.
If you start to look at your business from an efficiency standpoint, you have to understand it from the very ground up, sometimes literally if you are in the agricultural business, or all the way to the cash register if you are in retail. You need to understand what your business, your consumer, and your stakeholder are going through.
When you create efficiencies across all of these aspects, you are being energy efficient, waste efficient, and water efficient. That allows you to increase cost savings across the board. You are organically, excuse the pun, becoming more financially prosperous just by being more efficient with everything that is external to your business.
It really is part of management. It is about understanding your business, accounting for it, and becoming efficient. That efficiency ultimately leads to financial growth.
How have your extensive travels shaped your understanding of climate change?
What is interesting when I travel is meeting people and putting a human face to any type of story. If you read the book Nexus, you understand how information networks are driven by stories, and human stories are the most powerful things that we have.
When we create networks and communication channels, and those things lead to businesses, they are manifestations of ideas. When you have a human story that you can relate to, point to, and use as primary research for books or talks, it becomes far more powerful than an academic answer or solution.
Being on the ground allows you to see what is actually happening. When you can understand the world better, you can relay that knowledge to other people. Hopefully, that process continues so that we can solve many of the problems facing the world today.
You are very active on the public speaking circuit. What do you hope audiences take away from your speeches?
I would like audiences to take away three things. First, I want them to feel something and have a great experience. I want them to understand that this can be a fun or at least a positive environment where they can understand what is going on.
Second, I want them to learn something. They are going to have data, information, and exercises to work through.
Third, and most importantly, I want them to have something they can take away and do. It is not just a static presentation. They will be able to implement what they learned, take it home or into the workplace, and apply it in real situations.
Whether it is an actionable takeaway, information that helps them join a different group, or a small kernel of insight they can use in their next meeting, it is about feeling, learning, and doing. If those three things land, then everybody wins.
This interview with Thomas Kostigen was conducted by Jack Hayes of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
