Progress on Solving Climate Change

when i first realized how big of a

problem climate change really is

i immediately wanted to act i wanted to

do something about it

so i went and googled how to solve

climate change

as a machine learning researcher i spent

a lot of my time looking at data

and reading scientific papers so i was

okay with having to do that

but i wanted to start out by just

getting an overview a big picture idea

first

by you know reading a few articles

watching some videos and so on

i just wanted to know which solution

seemed most promising and most worth

working on and

you know where we are generally but it

turned out that that’s really difficult

there is a lot of misinformation

and particularly conflicting and

contradicting information online

and as i later found out it turns out

the oil industry

the fossil fuel industry uh invested

billions uh

in in into confusion to to confuse the

public by

you know providing wrong information in

this into injecting it so that

makes it really hard for someone who

isn’t already an expert to really get to

the bottom of it and understand it

and say the least that didn’t make me

happy so

long story short over the last year i

was lucky enough to be able to work with

over 100 scientists

illustrators animators community

managers and more

to build a platform that does provide

science-backed but also easy to

understand

explanations of climate change and

solutions to climate change

and today i want to share how this

journey turned me from being

quite pessimistic at the beginning about

our future and where this is all going

to reasonably cautiously optimistic

and because it’s easier to memorize i

summarize these in three key takeaways

but let’s start at the pessimistic end

where i started out too

this is an article from 1956.

it was published in the new york times

and it talks about climate change

so have we made progress since then well

if you look at this graph

it shows the yearly emissions of

greenhouse gases

of the world and nope doesn’t really

look like we made progress does it

it’s been going up since we started

measuring and there is no real end in

sight if you

just go from this graph but really

i’m showing this for a specific reason i

mean that we often look at the wrong

data we like to think of who emits how

much and

blaming each other blaming various

countries but a much more useful variant

of this graph

is this this one shows where emissions

come from not geographically but

per sector and you can clearly see that

73 percent here that’s almost three

quarters of emissions come from

energy energy is electricity heating

transportation fuels and a few more

minor things

grouped together which leads me to my

first takeaway

there’s a lot of discussion going on

about minor things like plastic straws

and really you name it we shouldn’t be

looking at that

we should be looking at 73 percent of

the problem and we should at least spend

of our attention on that the other 27

matter too

but they matter 27 and it’s important to

allocate attention

based on that i think if we genuinely

want to solve climate change

but it’s not just important to look at

the right

type of data it’s also important to look

on the right time skills

if we want to measure progress on

climate change it is highly important

that we’re able to track it in the short

term there’s no way to hold any

politician

or business accountable over many

decades

people just cycle through that too

quickly presidents are

in for you know four or five years

depending on country

business leaders yeah they retire after

20 years so you want to hold anyone

accountable you have to be able to

measure things

on a you know one year time skill or

less

but that’s not how we measure climate

change at the moment

we look at these graphs that go hundreds

of years into the past and

when we do try to measure progress into

the future we look at well how much did

emissions increase this year

compared to last year but really a 10

emissions reduction from last year

to this year wouldn’t matter much it’s

just 10 percent it’s

really not what we need we need to get

to zero

so unless we have a clear long-term plan

to get to zero emissions we’re not

solving climate change

but again this is the dilemma we need to

track it in the short term right so how

would we do that if not by looking at

how much did we reduce emissions this

year and next year

well the answer is stop looking at the

effects climate change and greenhouse

gas emissions are

derivatives they’re effects of what

we’re doing

and if instead of looking at these

effects we look at how much

progress we’re making towards being able

to build a world

that has zero co2 emissions then we can

track it in the short term

let me show you what i mean here let’s

start with energy this shows what the

ratio of fossil fuels to other sources

of energy

that we use are and if you look at this

graph alone

and you look at this sort of slight you

know curve down you might think well

nothing is going to change right

for a good reason you know you’re just

drawing that line okay it’s been a while

now and

you know why wouldn’t it continue it

makes sense

but it’s not the complete picture

luckily

and here’s why if you look at what

potential

sources of energy we could be using the

first one

is fossil fuels and we don’t want that

because you know causes climate change

we’ve been there

second one is nuclear third one is hydro

and the fourth one is i bucket that

together solar and wind

they’re very similar in that we can’t

control the weather

now let’s look at what each of them has

been up to

over the last you know few decades and

maybe we spot

an indicator for the future so here’s

nuclear let’s start with nuclear firstly

nuclear is safer than

most people think it causes hundreds of

times fewer deaths than

coal does and you know even oil and gas

cause a lot more deaths

uh we still have to deal with the waste

issue and in some cases some types of

waste

live thousands to millions of years and

yeah we’re probably going to invent some

way to deal with that but we don’t have

it yet

and then you find the other issue that

you

kind of have to pay for it and nuclear

is expensive

so building new nuclear plants is not a

very lucrative option for many countries

some are doing it

but but most aren’t and if we could sort

of reframe

nuclear economics that’d be fantastic

and a nuclear would be a great solution

but at the moment it’s just multiple

times as expensive as alternatives which

makes it really difficult to justify

building a lot of it

okay so what about hydro well hydro

actually is

pretty good hydra is cheap and you know

some countries like norway for example

run almost exclusively on hydropower but

the problem is that a lot of places in

the world a lot of countries just

don’t have enough mountains and rivers

to do that what about solar and window

solar and wind have been really popular

in the last few years

but they haven’t been popular before and

there’s a good reason for that

check out this graph this is the price

of solar photovoltaic panels over a few

decades

it’s decreased by a factor of 300.

that’s insane think about it

it got 300 times cheaper so what does

that mean

practically you might think that solar

panels are almost free now but that’s

not what happened

what happened is that they started out

being insanely expensive

nobody would have ever thought about

installing a solar panel under roof it’s

just

you know 300 times as expensive as it

should be but today

they’re still not free but they are the

cheapest source of new build electricity

for two-thirds of the global population

and that’s massive because if you don’t

have to trade off

between the economy and the environment

the decision becomes obvious

but if you do then you get a debate you

get those people that say well this is

too expensive we can’t do that and you

get the people that say but it’s for the

environment we have to

i’m not saying one side is right or

wrong but history clearly shows that

this causes delays

and in action nothing happens but if we

can align

the environment with the economic side

of things

should work out pretty easily that’s

what happened with solar

and in fact you know you remember that

ratio graph i showed you

this one change the fact that solar

panels

and wind power similarly dropped in

price dramatically

made mckinsey one of the leading

consulting firms in the world

predict that the deployment volume of

solar and wind

will absolutely skyrocket over the next

two decades

and it’s not just solar if you look at

batteries for example you see that their

price has decreased by a factor of

7 over the last 10 years and this will

enable us to use the clean electricity

we generate from solar wind hydro and

nuclear

in our cars and trucks and thereby get

rid of the need for oil-based fuels

now this leads me to my second takeaway

and it’s that if we want to track

short-term progress

and we have to and we should be looking

at the improvements of the tools we have

rather than the direct effects like the

co2 emissions

because that’s delayed by many decades

the work that has been done on solar

panels

in the 1970s 80s 90s is only starting to

be visible now as we start deploying

them on a larger scale

and will only be really heavily visible

in 20

20 30 20 50. my last point

is that there is no plan b innovation is

our only way out of climate change

and that’s because billions of people

still live in poverty

if we want to give everyone a fair and

equitable life

you look at how much we consume in the

rich countries and rich regions of the

world

you give everyone sort of a baseline

that’s a little lower than that but

you know higher than what you find today

in sub-saharan africa

you see that global consumption levels

will increase

and that’s not a good sign for you know

the theory that we should just reduce

how much we consume and yes in rich

countries we should

but globally that’s not going to change

anything this is not going to solve the

problem

think about it if you reduced the

world’s consumption by half even which

we cannot do and shouldn’t do because of

the idea of giving everyone a fair and

equitable life but even if you did

you would only reduce emissions by half

and

that would delay climate change by a

factor of two it wouldn’t prevent it

it certainly wouldn’t solve what we

already did

but it would just delay it so there is

really no plan b

and today our society is very much based

on fossil fuels

but with the technological innovation

that we’ve been seeing over the last

decades and particularly the last decade

we’re getting closer to being able to

transition away from that

and as i said energy is 73 of the

problem and i wanted to focus 73

of my attention on it but there are