I'd love to start really big picture and conceptual here, and I think, Alex, I'll send this one to you first. As we think about a lot of what we talk about here at Climate Week, markets are really good at valuing businesses and what companies produce, but not so great at valuing the natural systems that businesses depend on for that. Why do you think that doesn't happen yet? Why have markets and businesses not figured that out, and how does it change the way you think about...
Well, I think it's a question of sustainability. You know, I think when you were just asking that, my mind went to the story of the American bison, the buffalo, in the state. We had 30 million buffalo at one point, and people loved hunting them and living off of them and had lived symbiotically with it. The more and more people came, the more and more they started wiping them out slowly but surely. And as they trailed off and there weren't 30 million anymore, there was 2 million or 1 million, what happened? The value of them grew dramatically. So it was sort of predetermined that they're going to be wiped out because that's just the way the system works. And I don't think we have enough businesses and companies that think about sustainability the way Andrew does and the way Patagonia does and the way we want to.
I don't think, you know, I come at this from a family business standpoint. My great grandfather created the business for the purposes of his grandchildren, for the benefit of his children, but for the purposes of passing it on to the next generation. So I ask, you know, I'm always asking myself, what are we doing for the next generation? And that's why we're investing in clean tech and doing the things we're talking about today.
Andrew, I'd like to talk to you a little bit as a business person. How did you reach that conclusion, and how does it change the way you operate?
I'm very much along the same lines as Alex. I mean, if you happen to be successful in business, that's not success. That's a monetary success. It's, if you like, it's the partial economy. The real economy, the main economy, is nature. If you're destroying that to make a monetary economy, just a small part of the value of planet Earth, successful with the rest of it, unsuccessful, you're actually a failed business person. And as Alex says, the system is stacked. Like, you go back in the history of the United States, you had oyster farming in Chesapeake Bay. And first of all, we used to get it with rowboats. We'd get all the oysters. And then the steam engine came in and we'd get a bit more. And then wind/steam came in. And the occupants of the surrounding districts, Washington, etc., they never saw the price of oysters change because as they got rarer and rarer and rarer, the technology got better and better until there's just no oysters done. Sorry, we're out. What do you mean we're out? I mean, the price didn't change. Right. And that's the same with fish in our oceans, with biomass, biodiversity in our oceans. Our technology now is so severely accurate and so severely efficient that unless we step in and say, 'Hang on. If we don't save 30% of our oceans, we're going to destroy them.' These are things which we have to step up and do. And look, I think, and I've just prosecuted this argument to the global fishing industry with Alex this morning.
If you have an industry which is going to run out, you know, you're going to be priced as a business with a really crap multiple, like two or three if you're lucky. If you have a business which is seen as long-term sustainable, you could be priced at 10 or 20. That's like a factor of 100 to 50x. And with our business, we currently pump through 450 million gallons of diesel a year. And we've priced it at 6.2 billion to eliminate it all by 2030. We're going to bring it in at 6.2 billion. We started in 2022. That's actually a real dollar much less.
And we'll finish it by 2028 and save diesel.
I'm going to come back to...
Yeah, but like I want to hammer that point home a little bit because we talked a little bit before we came out here. It's like when you make it a math equation, it becomes easier, I think, for business people to answer. Walk through a little bit of the steps that you've gone where you say like this isn't something that you do just for fun. You do it because it's good business.
It's old news that fossil fuel is cheaper than renewable energy. It's just old news. Whenever you hear it, you just think, you poor, poorly read business person or politician, you're just not keeping up with technology. Technology's now moved so you've got energy storage, which is days instead of hours. That's happened in a year. By this time next year, you'll have weeks instead of days. That means that you can harvest energy for next to nothing from solar and wind. Let's keep hydro out of it. You're not harming anyone. And you can capture that energy, you can convert it to hydrogen, you can convert it to shipping fuel, or of course just use it, electrify everything. And numbers matter. Like we have an operating cost per ton of about, say, 20, 25 dollars. We rip 1/3 of those costs out, 1/3 in not buying a billion liters or 500 million gallons, and you've got a payback of two or three years.
Right. Alex, I feel like you've made similar math equations. Like Cox Enterprises invested billions of dollars in clean tech. I don't feel like you do that for fun, right? Maybe a little bit of fun, but there's also a smart business decision. Talk about the math in your head as you make those kinds of investments and how they might pay off.
I don't know that there's so much math. It's a little bit about like what Ryan said. What would he like to... Would he rather see life before humans? I just, I would do. I love nature. I love it. It just kills me to think of the stupid decisions that, you know, society has made, and I don't want to be contributing to that problem. I like solving it. I start, you know, like I said, my question in life is what are we doing for the next generation? And I think of clean tech as the crisis of our generation. It's something I have. I have kids 13, 11, and 6, and I think about... I just look at them and I say, are you ever going to catch a salmon when you're my age? And, you know, at the current trajectory they will not, and I would like to do something to say, I think we might have solved that problem.
Well, let's talk about what you're doing right now. Like I think what gets the two of you on the stage together is the Sustainable Markets Initiative. I mean, that's looking at a lot of oceans and fisheries. When Alex, can we start like a little bit big picture about how that might address that question that you think about for your kids? Like will they ever catch...
Well, the Sustainable Markets Initiative was founded by one of the most iconic environmentalists of all time, King Charles. He brought together people that he knows, respects, and trusts. Andrew is in charge of the oceans and fisheries group, the task force, and we connected over salmon. So I thanked him for some of his courage around salmon conservation, and he said, 'What are we doing about the salmon? You need to meet Andrew. You guys need to get together and do something powerful.'
And what the king says, what the king wants, the king gets. So Andrew and I are thinking about how we can make all this oceans and fisheries stuff add up to one of the most iconic creatures in the ocean, which is the Atlantic salmon, my personal favorite, but also the reason why nations were formed. You know, you think about what made the UK so desirable. They carved these salmon. They're on their coins, they're on their bills, they're carved into rocks in the old Druid settlements. You know, Lewis and Clark talked about it all across the United States. We're doing a damn good job of wiping them out. They're 70, 80% gone. And if we don't do anything, they will be gone. But we're doing some things.
Andrew, talk about a little bit your involvement.
Look, that is the issue. I mean, the southern bluefin tuna is down to 10% of its former, you know, parental biomass. I mean, we need to just educate the fishing industries that if they've got a sustainable product like fish, then they're going to be very valuable. But right now there's no fishery in the world which I can see is truly sustainable. The king got us together, I think, because he trusts both of us. He thinks 1 + 1 is going to equal 64,000. I'm not sure where he gets that from. He's the best optimist I've ever met. But I'm really hard-edged on controlling fishing without guns. Like I've had American senators say to me, 'We'll just send in the navy.' And this toxic machismo, and I'm just saying, 'Whatever, mate. What if you don't have a navy and you've got this huge oceanic zone and no navy? What then?' Call your friends in from the United States. They probably won't answer the phone.
But I'm distracted. What I can say is in my home country, we have a situation where we have a declining rock lobster industry. And you'd get fined if you had females or if you had pregnant females or if you had undersized crayfish, you'd get a fine and you'd argue over it, blah blah blah blah, until we brought in a rule that if you're identified by anyone that you had undersized rock lobster or females or whatever on your boat, you lost your boat, baby. Doesn't matter if it's a dinky or a 70-meter plastic fantastic, you lost it. And it got sold. And ta-da! And what I found with most of these people who would break the rules is that the loss of the boat was really galling, but what was worse is that they stopped getting invited to dinner parties. They hated the drop in social status. So now we used to have a fishing season on rock lobster of 3 months and then it went to 2 months and then it went to 2 weeks and it looked like it was going to get wiped out. We brought in this rule, if you identify, you get the boat. The proceeds, and now we don't have any season. You can fish for rock lobster 12 months of the year because they're back to abundant. So we can do that around the world.
