Seeing a sustainable future Alex Steffen
[Music]
[Applause]
climate change is already a heavy topic
and it’s getting heavier because we’re
understanding that we need to do more
than we are right we’re understanding in
fact that those of us who live in the
developed world need to be really
pushing towards eliminating our
emissions that’s to put it mildly not
what’s on the table now
and it tends to feel a little
overwhelming when we look at what is
there in reality today and the magnitude
of the problem that we face and when we
have overwhelming problems in front of
us we tend to seek simple answers and I
think this is what we’ve done with
climate change we look at where the
emissions are coming from they’re coming
out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and
so forth and we say ok well the problem
is that they’re there they’re coming out
of fossil fuels that were burning so
therefore the answer must be to replace
those fossil fuels with clean sources of
energy and while of course we do need
clean energy I would put to you that
it’s possible that by looking at climate
change as a clean energy generation
problem we’re in fact setting ourselves
up not to solve it and the reason why is
that we live on a planet that is rapidly
urbanizing that shouldn’t be news to any
of us however it’s hard sometimes to
remember the extent of that urbanization
by mid-century we’re gonna have about 8
billion perhaps more people living in
cities or within a day’s travel of one
will be an overwhelmingly urban species
in order to provide the kind of energy
that it would take for 8 billion people
living in cities that are even somewhat
like the cities that those of us in the
global North live in today we would have
to generate an absolutely astonishing
amount of energy it may be possible that
we are not even able to build that much
clean energy right so if we’re seriously
talking about tackling climate change on
an urbanizing planet we need to look
somewhere else for the solution the
solution in fact maybe closer to hand
than we think because all of those
cities were building our opportunities
every city determines to a very large
extent
the amount of energy used by its
inhabitants right we tend to think of
energy use as a behavioral thing I
choose to turn this light switch on but
really enormous amounts of our energy
use are sort of predestined by the kinds
of communities and cities that we live
in I won’t show you very many graphs
today but if I can just focus on this
one for a moment it really tells us a
lot of what we need to know which is
quite simply that if you look for
example at transportation a major
category of climate emissions there is a
direct relationship between how dense a
city is and the amount of climate
emissions that its residents spew out
into the air and the correlation of
course is that denser places tend to
have lower emissions which isn’t really
all that difficult to figure out if you
think about it basically you know we
substitute in our lives access to the
things we want we go out there and we
hop in our cars and we drive from place
to place and we’re basically using
mobility to get the access we need but
when we live in a denser community
suddenly what we find of course is that
the things we need are closeby and since
the most sustainable trip is the one
that you never had to make in the first
place right suddenly our lives become
instantly more sustainable and it is
possible of course to increase the
density of the communities around us
some places are doing this with new eco
districts developing whole new
sustainable neighborhoods which is nice
work if you can get it but most of the
time what we’re talking about is in fact
reweaving the urban fabric that we
already have so we’re talking about
things like infill development really
sharp little changes to where we have
buildings where we’re developing urban
retrofitting creating different sorts of
spaces and uses out of places that are
already there increasingly we’re
realizing that we don’t even need to
densify an entire city what we need
instead is an average density that rises
to a level where we don’t drive as much
and so on and that can be done by
raising the density in very specific
spots a whole lot right so you could
think of it as tent poles that actually
raise the density of the entire city and
we find that when we do that we can in
fact have a few places that are really
hyper dense within a wider fabric of
places that are perhaps a little more
comfortable
and achieve the same results now we may
find that there are places that are
really really dense and still hold on to
their cars but the reality is that by
and large what we see when we get a lot
of people together with the right
conditions is a threshold effect where
people simply stop driving as much and
increasingly more and more people if
they’re surrounded by places that make
them feel at home give up their cars
altogether and this is a huge huge
energy savings because what comes out of
our tailpipe is really just you know the
beginning of the story with climate
emissions from cars we have the
manufacturer of the car the disposal of
the car all of the parking and freeways
and so on when you can get rid of all of
those because somebody doesn’t use any
of them really you find that you can
actually cut transportation emissions as
much as 90 percent and people are
embracing this all around the world
we’re seeing more and more people
embrace this sort of walk shed life
people are saying that it’s moving from
the idea of the dream home to the dream
neighborhood and when you layer that
over with the kind of ubiquitous
communications that we’re starting to
see what you find is in fact even more
access sort of suffused into spaces some
of its transportation access this is a
magnificent map that shows me in this
case how far I can get from my home in
30 minutes using public transportation
some of it is about walking’s not all
perfect yet this is Google walking maps
I asked how to do the greater Ridge way
and it told me to go via Guernsey it
didn’t tell me that this route may be
missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths
though but the technologies are getting
better and we’re starting to really kind
of crowdsource this navigation and as we
just heard earlier of course we’re also
learning how to put information on dumb
objects things that don’t have any
wiring in them at all we’re learning how
to include in these sort of systems of
notation and navigation part of what
we’re finding with this is that what we
thought was the major point of
manufacturing and consumption which is
to get a bunch of stuff is not in fact
how we really live best in dense
environments what we’re finding is that
what we want is access to the capacities
of things my favorite example is a drill
who here owns a drill a home power drill
okay I do to the average home power
drill is used somewhere between 6 and 20
minutes in its entire lifetime depending
on who you
and you know so what we do is we buy
these drills that have a potential
capacity of thousands of hours of drill
time use them once or twice to put a
hole in the wall and let them sit right
our cities I would put to your
stockpiles of these surplus capacities
and while we could try and figure out
new ways to use those capacities such as
cooking or making ice sculptures or even
a mafia hit you know what we probably
will find is that in fact turning those
products into services that we have
access to when we want them is a small
is a far smarter way to go and in fact
even space itself is turning into a
service we’re finding that people can
share the same spaces do stuff with
vacant space buildings are becoming
bundles of services right so we have new
designs that are helping us take
mechanical things that we used to spend
energy on like heating cooling etc and
turn them into things that we avoid
spending energy on so we light our
buildings with daylight we cool them
with breezes we heat them with sunshine
in fact when we use all these things
what we found is that in some cases
energy use in a building can drop as
much as 90 percent which brings on
another threshold effect I like to call
furnace dumping which is quite simply if
you have a building that doesn’t need to
be heated with a furnace you save a
whole bunch of money up front these
things actually become cheaper to build
than the alternatives now when we look
at being able to you know /r our product
you slash our transportation use slash
you know our our building energy use all
of that is great but it still leaves
something behind and if we’re gonna
really truly become sustainable cities
we need to think a little differently
this is one way to do it this is
Vancouver’s propaganda about how
greenest city they are and certainly
lots of people have taken to heart this
idea that a sustainable city is covered
in greenery so we have visions like this
we have visions like this
we have visions like this now all of
these are fine projects but they really
have kind of missed an essential point
which is it’s not about the Leafs above
it’s about the system’s below do they
for instance capture rainwater so that
we can reduce water use water is energy
intensive do they perhaps include green
infrastructures so that we can take
runoff and water that’s going out of our
houses and clean it and filter it and
grow urban street trees do they connect
us back to the ecosystems around
by for example connecting us to rivers
and allowing for restoration do they
allow for pollination pollinator
pathways that bees and butterflies and
such can come back into our cities do
they even take the very waist matter
that we have from food and fiber and so
forth and turn it back into soil right
and sequester carbon take carbon out of
the air in the process of using our
cities I would submit to you that all of
these things are not only possible
they’re being done right now and that
it’s a darn good thing because right now
our economy by and large operates as
Paul Hawken said by stealing the future
selling it in the present and calling it
GDP and if we have another eight billion
or seven billion or six billion even
people living on a planet where their
cities also steal the future we’re gonna
run out of future really fast but if we
think differently I think that in fact
we can have cities that are not only
zero emissions but have unlimited
possibilities as well thank you very
much
[Applause]