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
73
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
other problems too
it’s not as simple as that for example
if we look at
agriculture you see that a lot of the
emissions come from animal agriculture
particularly ruminants like beef and
sheep and there’s solutions there too
we’re certainly not going to invent a
cow that doesn’t
burp methane but there are alternatives
like for example this burger
it’s very tasty i’ve tried it it has a
good amount of protein
good amount of calories good amount of
fat in it and absolutely no meat
a company that created this burger was
founded in 2011
so this is all extremely recent and
in somewhat informal experiments where
people gave kids
uh these burgers to dry them out um you
found that they weren’t able to
distinguish
between um actual meat burgers and
uh these meat replacements they’re
healthy they’re tasty
and i would hope that kids are not
politely lying about the
um their estimate of what they’re eating
there
but uh really this is this is again all
of these were cherry picked so far those
are the problems we’re doing really well
on
there are harder ones uh for example
steel and concrete production are
extremely hard to solve and do without
co2 emissions
aviation is you know is really difficult
it’s hard to build airplanes that that
don’t use kerosene
but we are making progress on those
fronts too there’s work on hydrogen
airplanes and
there’s work on processes of creating
cement and
steel with far lower to even no
emissions
and my key point here is we should be
focusing on exactly that we should be
focusing on these sub-problems that
cause climate change rather than just
the effects themselves and
when we think about who is contributing
to solutions to climate change we should
be highlighting the people who invent
these things because keep in mind
progress doesn’t just happen things
don’t just get cheaper better faster
every single step every single
improvement is someone’s idea
and someone’s work and the people who do
this work
i think we should highlight those as the
heroes of climate change because they
are the ones who actually solve the
problems
now not everyone can or wants to become
you know an engineer
scientist or a sustainable business
person or
whatnot but we can all take supporting
roles
and if you look at things like the moon
landing not everyone was an astronaut
but everyone was cheering
for the astronauts there were a lot of
supporting roles that made
the astronauts job better and easier and
more effective
so if we all think about solving climate
change the way we think about the moon
landing
and we think about the people who
develop solutions as the astronauts
i think we’ll be making a lot more
progress and i think the world will be a
lot more
reasonably optimistic about our progress
because progress is happening
it is likely going to be too slow for a
1.5 degree target and there is no reason
to lie about that
but it is going to be better than what
many people fear if we all keep working
together on actual solutions
so if you want to act on climate change
i think that’s how you should be doing
it
build the tools that solve the problem
thank you