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Steve Schmidt can pinpoint precisely when he went from being a climate denier to a climate crusader. It was in 2005 and Steve, his wife Lisa, and their two young children were on a Stanford alumni tour cruising around the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia.
Throughout the ten-day trip, Rob Dunbar, a Stanford earth science professor and the trip leader, meticulously tore apart Steve’s conviction that climate change wasn’t real. That revelation pretty much blew Steve’s life apart–his professional aspirations, his political leanings, and his lifestyle. In response, he reduced his carbon emissions by more than 98 percent, started a company whose profitability depends on people using less energy, changed from an unapologetic capitalist with Republican leanings to someone with socialist tendencies, and applied his engineering acumen and whimsical exuberance to eco-endeavors like converting an old school bus to run on used vegetable oil.
After returning from his fateful cruise, Steve, ever the engineer and intent on knowing exactly how much carbon he’d already injected into the atmosphere, taught himself how to use arcane carbon accounting protocols–personal carbon calculators weren’t yet widely available–to assess the size of his carbon footprint going back to 1961, the year he was born. What he learned was that the year his emissions peaked, he was responsible for releasing 39 metric tons of emissions into the atmosphere, magnitudes more than the 1 metric ton per person per year globally that climate scientists say we need to avoid the worst climate catastrophes. (The average carbon footprint of someone living in the United States is 16 metric tons per year.)
Steve knew he couldn’t do anything to mitigate his past emissions, so he decided to do the next best thing: drastically reduce his future emissions and then create tools so other people could do the same.
Before EVs were an option
Driving an electric vehicle is one of the most effective ways for people to reduce their carbon footprints. But in 2005, when Steve’s began his quest to cut his emissions, buying an EV wasn’t yet an option, so he and his son built one.
Steve’s fascination with electric vehicles began when he came across two 1953 electric golf carts in an abandoned barn near his house and, with his son Eric—a high school student at the time–refurbished them. (Steve still uses one of the electric golf carts, now more than 70 years old, to transport his recycling bins down his long driveway.) Soon after converting the golf carts, father and son took a year to retrofit an old MG so it too was battery powered. Eric drove the MG to high school, making it one of the first, if not the first, lithium battery powered EV in the Gunn High School parking lot.
For long distance travel, Steve and Eric converted an old school bus to run on waste vegetable oil, a carbon-free fuel that restaurants are eager to relinquish. During Covid, Steve, Lisa, and their two dogs took this bus on a 6,000-mile road trip across the U.S. to visit family. “You drive up to a campground in an old bus smelling like french fries, and everyone wants to talk to you,” Steve quips.
Then, in 2019, Steve bought a used Tesla model S, although he and his family continue to use the school bus–which now runs on biodiesel rather than used vegetable oil–for trips that include several people.
Eschewing air travel
It’s Steve’s approach to air travel—almost never flying—that sets him apart from even diehard environmentalists. One round-trip flight from San Francisco to New York adds 1.5 metric tons of greenhouse gasses to an individual’s carbon footprint. Because of that, Steve has flown only three times in the past nine years: to visit his mom back East, to visit his daughter in Alaska, and to travel to the Caribbean, a trip, Steve says without an ounce of regret, he took to make Lisa happy. (Lisa, who is also his business partner and a Los Altos Hills City Council member, doesn’t quite adhere to Steve’s strict flying regimen, although she too has drastically reduced her carbon footprint.)
Home electrification is essential for homeowners wanting to reduce their carbon emissions. In that vein, Steve replaced his tankless gas water heater with a more efficient electric heat pump water heater, his gas furnace and air conditioning system with an electric heat pump, his gas dryer with an electric washer dryer combo, and his gas cooktop with an induction cooktop. (Rather than giving his cooktop to someone else who would then inhale its noxious fumes, he turned it into a garden fountain.)
To further reduce his carbon footprint, Steve gradually cut down on his meat consumption so that today he eats almost no meat.
Steve’s efforts to minimize his carbon footprint have paid off big time: By 2020, he’d slashed his emissions to 0.7 metric tons and has averaged 1.3 metric tons in the years since.
Steve insists that his carbon reduction regimen has required little personal sacrifice. He still has a nice car, a spacious home, a big yard, and a pool (heated with solar thermal panels). And he still takes many vacations each year–mostly outdoor adventures to wilderness areas–though they’re limited to destinations he can reach by car, train, bike or a combination of those. Steve contends that this isn’t a limitation but a benefit, resulting in excursions where, instead of being stuffed into an airplane seat, he can relish the journey as well as the destination.
Steve recounts the ease of living a rich life on a tiny carbon footprint in a TedXLosAltosHills talk with that name. In his video he points out that, worldwide, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population is responsible for 45 percent of emissions. His message, clearly intended for an affluent audience, is that people can live a sustainable life without scrimping on life’s pleasures.
An unorthodox business model
In 2010 Schmidt launched his own company, Home Energy Analytics (HEA), which provides PG&E customers with a free residential energy efficiency program called HomeIntel that analyzes customers’ smart meter data, then suggests changes to their energy use. Customers who implement these changes—think putting a pool pump on a timer or turning off a radiant floor heating system during the summer—lower their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions while reducing their energy bills by an average of ten percent.
In an economy driven by consumption, HEA employs an unorthodox business model: Its revenue is determined solely by how much energy customers save. “Companies make their money by selling us new things. They typically don’t generate profits by convincing us not to buy or consume things,” Steve says. But HEA makes a profit, albeit modest, by doing exactly that.
Over sixty thousand PG&E customers have signed up for HomeIntel so far, a tiny percentage of PG&E’s five million customers. That said, the number of new HomeIntel customers has increased each of the past five years. As a result, Steve can claim credit for the annual reduction of a million metric tons of greenhouse gasses being spewed into the atmosphere per year.
Not exactly a unicorn
Despite his anything’s possible outlook, Steve has no illusions about HEA’s prospects. Initially he imagined a scenario in which HEA would be available to customers nationwide. But the realities of working with most utilities—their lack of commitment to customers reducing their energy use, the technical challenges of utilities providing reliable smart meter data, and the fact that California is the only state supporting a pay-for-performance model that rewards businesses for helping customers reduce their energy use—have caused him to lower his expectations. Rather than striving for anything close to a unicorn, his aspiration is that HEA will serve as a model for other entrepreneurs interested in launching similar programs.
The issues Steve has faced scaling up HEA coupled with his expansive knowledge of climate change have caused him to alter his view of how the U.S. economy should be structured given the climate challenges we face.
“My socialist tendencies were hidden under capitalist tendencies for a very long time,” Steve says. ““When I graduated from college, I was all about making money. I was part of that ‘greed is good’ generation. Going to school and getting degrees and having a career and getting rich was supposed to be good for the world, or at least that was what we were told. And I am now convinced that is utter hogwash. At this point in my life, I see greed and unfettered capitalism as totally wound up in climate change. Business needs to be more highly regulated for us to solve the challenges that are in front of us.”
While dubious about humans’ ability to avoid significant climate change on a global scale, Steve remains bullish about how technology can help individuals reduce their emissions. Next on his list of eco-solutions to try: the Aptera, a solar-powered, electric, three-wheeled, two-seater vehicle with a thousand-mile range that, when it hits the market, will mean he can visit his daughter in Alaska without injecting an ounce of carbon into the atmosphere.
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