It is hard to come away from interviewing General Motors CSO Cassandra Garber without feeling more positive about life, the planet and everything.

Perhaps that is her superpower? If so, it is the ideal gift with which to endure the current set of sustainability challenges.

Since moving to GM from Dell Technologies, Cassandra has seen:

• US pushback intensify against sustainability and DEI
• War break out in Iran
• Huge write-downs by many automakers, as they recalibrate (i.e. slow down) production of electric vehicles
• Tariffs put the supply of the critical minerals needed for EVs at risk.

To understand why she is not disheartened, it is helpful to hear how Cassandra got into sustainability as a profession.

“I couldn’t go back”

"I need someone who can be right brain and left brain. You need to be able to crunch the numbers and talk data quality and data reliability and I need you to be inspirational and tell all the great stories."

That was the pitch when Cassandra was asked to move from marketing into sustainability. She says: “Getting into sustainability was accidental,  but I liked the challenge of that. I also was a new mom and they said: ‘You don't have to travel’.

“I said: ‘That sounds lovely’. I thought I was just creating a giant marketing brochure. It was great for my moment in life, too.” Within a week, Cassandra was in the Netherlands, “talking about international integrated sustainability reporting and the significance of it for investor considerations”.

She adds: “And I am neck deep in human rights, labour rights, women's economic empowerment, water stewardship and of course climate change.

“As someone who'd always enjoyed the challenge of business and someone who bores easily, once I realised there was a challenge as meaningful as solving some of the world's most pressing environmental and social issues, I couldn't go back.”

Cassandra says she felt: “This is who I am, this is what I'm here for. These are the challenges that I want to use business to solve. And I stand by that today. I fundamentally believe that if we can make this good for business, that's how we save the world.”

Resilience through renewable energy procurement

Cassandra did not go back. And now she is CSO at the automaker General Motors, which owns brands including Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac.

Despite the challenging sustainability landscape in the US, GM’s ethos is unchanged: “To create a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion, and we have committed ourselves to leading the way toward this future.”

Cassandra says it is “really important right now” for GM to say it remains committed to this, adding: “We say out loud and say internally that we remain committed, but also recognise that we have to shift. It's not business as usual.

“I like to think of it as one long EV road trip and we have to figure out what are the right detours and what are the right things we're going to do to deliver on that vision, but the vision remains the same.”

That was writ large during this interview, when Cassandra announced that GM has reached its goal of 100% of its renewable electricity procurement in the US. She adds: “Those renewable energy contracts prevent us from having to deal with energy market price volatility. We have locked in long-term contracts that make us more resilient as a business.”

GM is also investing in communities, through a community fund that enables it to “add more energy to the grid”, which makes GM “more resilient and helps the community”.

“Are you in or are you not?”

While political angst about sustainability has caused alarm to many people, Cassandra feels it has crystallised companies’ commitment to the energy transition. She says: “I think that the first thing for companies is to decide: ‘Are you in or are you not?’ And we have decided we are in.

“And so we are keeping all of our nameplates. We've got a dozen EVs, we're continuing to invest in battery technology and we're also really working on affordability, to drive down the cost of those batteries.”

Sustainable and “so much fun”

Ultimately, though, GM’s sustainability credibility is likely to be judged on its electric vehicles. There is no better advocate for these than Cassandra, who goes from 0-60mph in one second when she talks about their performance and acceleration.

“If you remove politics from it, EVs are a better vehicle. There's a better performance that comes with them.

“An electric vehicle is exciting from an environmental standpoint and emissions reduction, and it's just a better vehicle experience. I love to watch people get into one of our EVs and get excited about it – they are so much fun!”

She says that, when she lets someone drive her EVs, they hit that accelerator and it is an “I can't go back” moment.

Moving from the edge of the seat to the heart of the matter, Cassandra tells how 12 of GM’s EVs have bidirectional charging. She explains: “Your vehicle is a moving energy asset, your own personal power plant, because in the event of a power outage, it can power your home. It's called vehicle-to-home.”

General Motors is currently working on the next evolution, moving from vehicle-to-home to vehicle-to-grid. During power outages, EV drivers can “give back to the grid and make money off of it”.

To Cassandra, the evidence in favour of EVs is overwhelming: “There is better total cost of ownership, especially as we get to this vehicle-to-grid technology. And the more people learn and get comfortable, the more we address the barriers to EVs, the faster we're going to get there.

“And world dynamics are really interesting right now because you watch oil prices spike and then what? EV interest just went up again.”

Recycling batteries for commercial energy storage

Beyond the vehicle, GM is increasingly using EV batteries to provide commercial storage systems.

A partnership with Redwood Materials sees the Nevada-based manufacturer using US-made batteries from GM and second-life battery packs from GM EVs for energy storage.

Cassandra says: “We are using the same batteries that go into your vehicles to provide power for an AI data centre and the best part is those are second life batteries.

“We have recycled 100% of the batteries that have come back to us. If we can use those batteries when they have life left in them, giving them a use for energy storage well beyond the vehicle, that is incredible for the energy transition.”

Sustainability is smart business

While the arguments and experiences are convincing, the shadow of a persistent belief looms over the energy transition – that sustainability is a loss-making exercise.

CSOs still have to expend some of their (hopefully renewable) energy to debunk the myth and overcome “bias in the space”, Cassandra says.

She adds: “The main thing that I say in pretty much every business is that sustainability is smart business. In our strategy-on-a-slide, we talk about de-risking our business through decarbonisation.

“We talk about making money and profitability by integrating sustainability in our products and we talk about our licence to operate by what we're doing from a community standpoint and how we're engaging our stakeholders. So we put a business lens over all of the things that we're doing.”

She tries to “say things that really stick”, adding: “Yes, in sustainability, we are tree huggers, but why can't they be money trees? We can all hug some money trees.

“Saying things like that often sticks with people and it helps people realise that you're here to be a partner in a profitable business and doing it in a way that actually has societal value is a win-win.”

Collaboration and innovation

GM’s ongoing commitment to the energy transition is illustrated by its founding – and ongoing, high profile – membership of Transform: Auto, a programme developed by Trio to reduce Scope 3 emissions in the global automotive industry.

Cassandra says it now has more than 800 companies signed up and has expanded from the US to the European Union and the UK. “The whole idea is that we are sharing best practices, helping everybody get more clean energy in our supply chain and that's going to elevate the entire automotive industry.”

At the same time, GM’s energy innovators, led by Kurt Kelty, VP of Battery and Sustainability – who is “wicked smart”, says Cassandra – are working on new battery technology and collaborating with other companies.

She says: “The battery is the most expensive part of the electric vehicle, so we have got to drive down those battery costs, but we also have to innovate so that we can give customers choice.

“With the different battery chemistries, we'll be able to get to a point where when you are choosing an EV, you can choose your battery based on your needs. ‘This is my short-distance commute vehicle, so I don't want to pay for a long-range battery’, or "This is my road tripper: I need to be able to go long distances, I will pay more and have this battery’.”

While tariffs turmoil endures, anti-sustainability anger burns and politics becomes ever more perplexing, GM’s action and Cassandra’s perspective are a welcome antidote.