Reimagining the Economy to Save the Climate

[Music]

have you ever seen

2 million wildebeest running at

full pace across the serengeti it

happens every year

and it’s one of the great natural

wonders of the world

a couple of years ago i went with my

family to kenya to

watch it and there’s one part in the

masai mara where

the wildebeest need to cross the mara

river it’s not a wide river but there

are lots of hungry crocodiles

in it we watched quite frankly with

horror as we watched thousands

of wildebeests plunging over a cliff

down to the river across the rocks

lost children some broken bones

panic chaos some very happy and

fat crocodiles my 13 year old daughter

charlotte reminded us that just earlier

on we’ve seen just a mile down river

other wildebeest crossing the same river

in an

orderly way with no cliffs and avoiding

the crocodiles altogether

and she said well why would this group

put themselves in so much

danger so i actually asked some experts

and they said well actually we don’t

know the best we can come up with

is that this is how they’ve always done

it

for tens of generations they’ve been

going

over this cliff this is the way it is

this is how we’ve always done it and it

got me to thinking that

perhaps that’s the way that we are

running our world economy and we’re

running

our society why do we

run an economy that’s so unfair

that’s so vulnerable that’s so polluting

do we need to

no but we always have

why do we design our cities for

automobiles

rather than for people why do we spend

two trillion dollars a year

subsidizing the use of fossil fuels

why do we recycle only nine percent

of the things we use why do the richest

30 people in the world have more wealth

than the

poorest three billion in the world

why does the 25 year old stock broker

on wall street earn multiples of the 50

year old

teacher who’s devoted her entire life

to teaching underprivileged children

is it experience is it somehow that it’s

socially more useful

for the stockbrokers to do what they do

no no no it’s because we’ve always done

it that way

we are like the wilder beasts

now you could say so do we need to

change

can’t we just keep doing it the way

we’ve done it for generation after

generation after generation

well unfortunately not because just like

the wildebeest we’ve come

to a cliff you’ve seen the fires

the droughts the hurricanes the ice

melts

you’ve seen how year after year they are

getting worse

did you know that 19 of the 20 hottest

years in recorded history have happened

in the first

19 years of this century

now partly we’re a victim of our own

success we have been

spectacularly successful at growing our

economy

and growing our numbers quite frankly

the size of the world economy

in terms of the amount of extraction the

amount of stuff we produce

is now 20 times what it was 100 years

ago

and if the world economy keeps growing

and say three percent a year which

economists tell us is perfectly

reasonable that will be another

20-fold increase this century as well

so no wonder with this huge increase in

the human

footprint no wonder that we are messing

up that equilibrium that we’ve enjoyed

for 10

000 years during the holocene period and

we now

are having to change the name to the

anthropocene because for the first time

ever

humans can change the planet

itself so that’s why for example we are

losing species at a rate one thousand

times

the natural rate that’s why 2.5

billion people may be short of water by

2025

and that’s why we have the existential

crisis

of climate change during my lifetime

alone

emissions of greenhouse gases have gone

up six

fold so what do we need to do well

scientists tell us

that we need to reduce carbon emissions

by half

this decade in the 2020s and then by

half again

in the 2030s and half again in the 2040s

if we’re to achieve that

it will involve the most radical

reordering of the world economy that

we’ve ever

seen before we will need radical

system-wide change

not only in our energy systems but in

our urban planning

in our agriculture and food systems in

our transportation

in our manufacturing and in even

our consumption now one thing we know

for sure

is that we can’t get there by

incremental change

gradualism simply won’t do it we need

pretty radical change now sometimes when

you talk to management gurus

they like to talk about the need for

disruptive change

i always found that puzzling i didn’t

know why change needed to be disruptive

i mean why couldn’t we just have change

that would be less trouble and the

reason we need disruptive change is

because of a concept

that’s called path dependency it’s a

concept in the social sciences and

economics and basically

it says that we’re on a path and we know

the path is actually not the best path

we know there’s another path that’s

better but we aren’t able to get from

one of these

from the current path to the future path

in a gradual way and the reason is

we’ve got so much invested in the

current path we’ve got physical

investment

we’ve got social investment we’ve got

economic investment

and we’ve got a lot of vested interest

so the only way we can get to the better

path

is through jumping through

disruptive change and that’s why we need

it consider for example

transportation in the united states we

spend

nine billion hours each year

stuck in traffic this steals people’s

time

takes it away from their families it

lowers productivity

it increases pollution it causes tens of

thousands of premature deaths a year

and it hurts future generations because

of its toxic effect

on climate change is there a better way

well yes there certainly is

in the coming decade we could move to

electric autonomous

and shared transportation linked to

very high efficiency carbon-free public

transportation systems

if we did that we would only need half

of the roads that we have now

we’d have more green space more parks we

could have bicycling we could have

walking

we’d have healthier people cleaner air

more productivity

and we’d address the problem of climate

change but would it cost more no

it would actually cost less and we can

show that will it happen

i don’t know it would require some

things we don’t have

it would require a degree of cooperation

and

action by central governments and city

governments it would require coalitions

between technology companies energy

companies

transportation companies it would

require citizens to get behind this and

really push for it

and be part of it and it would require

even international cooperation which is

difficult

and what’s true for transportation is

true for many of the other things

the revolutions that we need to go

through we need

carbon neutral buildings by 2030 we need

to move from today’s

take make waste economy to tomorrow’s

circular economy and in all of these

areas we need

the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to be

put together so that we get

disruptive change

but i know what you’re saying you’re

saying this is surely impossible

this scale of change in the decade is

impossible and you may be right

it will require degree of collective

action and international cooperation

that doesn’t exist in today’s

uncooperative world just look at the

current

pandemic for example and there are still

vested interests that need to be

overcome

but let me suggest there are actually

two areas of

real hope that could make this the

decisive

decade in the right direction the first

is economics which you may find boring

but you shouldn’t because it’s so

interesting and important

there was a time maybe 20 years ago when

the economics profession really

believed that it would be nice to act on

climate change and nature

and on addressing poverty and so on but

it cost a lot of money

and it would uh it would cost us jobs

perhaps

and it would make us less productive

less competitive

so politicians stayed away we now know

that that’s actually the economics of

the last century

today we know that for example smart

climate policy will lead to more

economic efficiency

it will drive new technologies and

it will lower risks whether the risks

for a small farmer or a huge corporation

and combined these three three things

lead to a

dynamism in the economy more

competitiveness

more jobs and much much better higher

quality

of life future so that’s the first good

news

there’s a second piece of good news

which actually relates to the current

tragic crisis relating to health and

the economy the worst in a hundred years

the one thing we

surely have learned in this pandemic is

that we are not as safe as we thought we

were

most of us believe that we put in place

government structures

that would protect us we were wrong we

were wrong

we were assuming that the past is a good

predictor of the future

we were wrong we now know we need to

look at the future

with different eyes and put new systems

in place

we are now ready for change in a way

that we were not before

we have a window of opportunity to break

through

that inertia indeed we’ve seen that we

can make changes that are pretty radical

such as

working at home and and staying in and

we’ve also learned

for example through the black lives

matter movement we’ve learned that

actually incremental change nice as it

is

will not solve the problem so we have

this window of opportunity

that we must seize in the next two years

the world economy

will have about 20 trillion dollars

pumped into it by the world’s

governments

it is very very important that that

money be spent on tomorrow’s economy

not the past we know that investing for

example in energy efficiency will create

more and better jobs than investing in

fossil fuels

we know that investing in nature-based

solutions will lead to better jobs and a

better economy

and a better society than investing in

more roads and bridges and pouring

a lot of concrete we have lots of

evidence on this it’s

really important that we skate to where

the puck will be not where the puck

is now so these are two very exciting

possibilities

to promote system-wide change but let’s

remember

finally that when we talk about system

change and we need it

we are actually part of that system we

are a key part of it

let me give you an example why are we

losing

the tropical forests in southeast asia

in borneo

and in malaysia two words palm oil

and who is it that’s consuming all this

palm oil

two words we are we are palm oil is a

wonderful commodity it’s in

half of all the products in all of the

supermarkets in the united states

you and i have probably used it three or

four times uh today already

nothing wrong with the product of palm

oil but there is a lot wrong

with how it’s produced where it comes

from and how it’s planted

after cutting down tropical forests

we can change that by demanding change

think about the consumption of food

think about the beef we eat

each unit of nutrition of beef

will use 20 times as much land 20 times

as much water and will emit 20 times as

much greenhouse gases

as the same amount of nutrition from

plant-based

food we can change it we can

be part of this remarkable change this

decade

we’ll see disruptive change i guarantee

it

but it could be bad disruptive change

really bad

or it could open up an entirely new way

and you and i have a fantastically

exciting adventure ahead of us we have

instruments at our disposal

we have our votes we have our

consumption patterns

we have our charitable giving we have

our conversations

we have the lobbying that we do we have

the choice of career we make

we have our lives that can really

influence

change so the trick is don’t be scared

by what’s going on although it is scary

rather fix our eye on the horizon to

where we want to go to

what is the world we want and then be

part of it

so there were two i started with a story

about animals i’ll finish with one but

this one

may not be true so there were two

butterfly

larvae sitting on a log having a good

time

and after a while a beautiful colorful

butterfly

fluttered by and one of the larvae

looked up

and then he looked to his friend and he

said you’re not going to get me going up

in one of those things

so the point of the story is don’t be a

larvae

know who you are know who you want to be

also don’t be a wildebeest

identify the change we want and then be

that very change

thank you very much indeed

[Music]

you