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]
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