Tzeporah Berman: The bad math of the fossil fuel industry | TED Countdown

Canada's great northern forests,

they're the place of my heart.

They hold 25 percent of the Earth's wetlands.

And they're the nesting and breeding ground

of the majority of North America's songbirds.

They're the traditional territories of hundreds of Indigenous nations.

And my climate journey started here as a forest activist a long time ago.

I was horrified that Canada's old-growth forests are being logged.

They're burning.

They're being destroyed by beetle infestations.

But also because so much of the forest is under threat

because of what lies under it.

Oil.

At the time,

I thought that Canada's failure to reduce emissions

was because we had a government

that just didn't believe in climate change.

But then in 2015, we elected a new government.

And Prime Minister Trudeau came to Paris

and with his hand on his heart,

he said, "Canada's back."

And he went home to introduce some really good climate policy,

carbon pricing.

And our emissions didn't go down.

And the government continued to green-light

and even subsidize

new oil sands, pipelines and fracking.

And that, for me, was the moment

when I realized where one of the big problems lie.

Our governments are regulating emissions

but not the production of fossil fuels.

You see, climate policy and agreements, they are complicated,

but what's simple

is that the majority of emissions

that are trapped in our atmosphere today,

well, they come from three products:

oil, gas and coal.

For decades, our countries have been negotiating targets.

But behind our backs, the fossil fuel industry has been growing production

and locking in further emissions.

I started reaching out to climate policy experts from around the world

because I wanted to understand what frameworks exist to negotiate

who gets to produce what and how much;

what policies help governments regulate,

constrain the production side of fossil fuels.

I found out that very few do.

I will never forget the day

that I sat with the Paris Agreement

and I searched for the words

fossil fuels,

oil, gas, coal.

They didn't appear.

Not even once in the world's climate agreement.

The fossil fuel industry has been successful in making itself invisible.

I started reaching out and met with, for several years,

the CEOs of major oil companies

because I wanted to understand

what these CEOs see when they read the science.

How can they justify expanding oil and gas at this moment in our history?

And also because I believe that there are good people everywhere.

There are good people stuck in some bad systems.

What I learned is that they know.

They know that we're going to have to wind down fossil fuel production.

But they are all holding out hope

that they will be the last barrel sold.

Or that unproven technologies, like carbon capture and storage,

will allow them to continue to increase production.

The problem is the math just doesn't add up.

We are currently on track today

to produce 120 percent more fossil fuels

in the next decade

than the world should burn

if we want to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In fact, even if we phased out coal overnight,

oil and gas in existing projects

would take us beyond 1.5 degrees.

For decades, climate policy has been designed on a theory

that we are going to reduce demand,

that the price of carbon is going to go up,

and the markets turbocharged by alternatives --

wind and solar, now cheaper than fossil fuels --

well, the markets are going to constrain supply.

The problem is it's not happening.

Not fast enough to keep us safe.

Why?

Because the markets today are distorted,

they're distorted by tax breaks and fossil-fuel subsidies,

but also because of the power of the fossil fuel industry.

The influence of the industry, who no longer deny climate change.

But they have moved from denial to delusion:

that technologies that are not yet proven at scale,

that are not yet cost-competitive -- are going to fix it.

In the future.

I've spent 30 years running environmental campaigns,

I've advised multiple governments on climate policy,

I’ve been arrested on the blockades,

and I've negotiated in the boardrooms

of some of the largest banks and corporations in the world.

And when I figured out that we don't have a framework

for constraining the production of fossil fuels,

I thought I was crazy.

And so did some of my colleagues.

But here's the thing.

Today we are granting permits,

we are spending trillions of dollars

to increase the production of products

that we say we're transitioning off of.

It's not a transition if we're still growing the problem.

We have more than enough fossil fuels in existing installations,

even if we stopped expansion today,

of oil, gas and coal in existing projects to use

while we carefully manage a phasedown.

And so the world is spending its intellectual,

its financial, its technical capital

to dig up stuff that we know we can't burn,

and if we do, it will burn us.

So what do we do?

A year ago, a group of academics, advocates,

scientists and former diplomats came together to create

the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative

to create the missing framework

so countries can negotiate a wind down of fossil fuels

in a way that is fair,

in a way that is equitable.

Shockingly, one of the things we found out

is that we don't have accounting or transparency right now

on who's producing what and how much.

So work is now underway to create a global registry

of fossil fuel production and reserves.

We are also at work

creating the principles of equity that have to underlie a treaty

because the challenges to stop the expansion of fossil fuels

in some countries

are going to be so different than in other countries.

There are countries today

in the developing world, like Ecuador,

that are drilling for new oil in the heart of the Amazon

just to feed their debt.

So no,

we cannot rely just on the markets

to constrain fossil fuel production.

If we do, it will be an unmanaged decline instead of a managed decline,

and more people will suffer.

We need financial leadership at this moment.

We need divestment at this moment.

But we can’t let governments off the hook.

The wealthy countries need to act first.

That means Canada and the US and Norway can't do more oil drilling

and fracking and new pipelines.

It means that the UK cannot call itself a climate leader right now

and build the Cambo oil field.

(Cheers and applause)

So here's the good news.

Support for the treaty is growing.

Every day, I'm so excited to turn on my computer.

101 Nobel laureates, including the Dalai Lama,

have endorsed the principles of a fossil fuel treaty.

Cities from around the world are passing motions at their city councils

to endorse a fossil fuel treaty:

Sydney, Barcelona, LA, Vancouver.

Over 100 elected officials from around the world, from 20 countries

starting in the global South

have endorsed the principles of a fossil fuel treaty.

Over 2,000 scientists have now endorsed the principles of the Fossil Fuel Treaty.

Indigenous leaders, youth groups,

over 800 civil society organizations

who have been fighting fossil fuel projects for decades

are now calling on their governments

to negotiate a treaty to keep it in the ground.

Some of the criticism we get is that it's too big, it's unfeasible,

it'll take too long.

But the same was erroneously said about weapons treaties.

For me, the answer is we don't have time for more of the same.

We know that oil-producing nations

are not likely to embrace the Fossil Fuel Treaty.

But what we've learned from studying landmines,

what we've learned from studying nuclear,

is that the journey matters.

Just proposing a fossil fuel treaty is creating new conversations

and new climate ambition.

A fossil fuel treaty will help us wind down

the production of fossil fuels.

It will provide a complement

and help us achieve the goals of the Paris accord.

It is a big, bold new idea.

But at this moment in history, we need some big, bold new ideas.

In 2021, millions of people lost their homes.

Thousands of people lost their lives

as the fires and the floods and the heat waves swept our planet.

I know that this can seem overwhelming.

But we are capable of enormous change in our lifetimes.

I had a conversation with my grandmother once when I was out of hope.

Feeling overwhelmed.

And she said to me,

"Do you understand how much the world has changed in my lifetime?"

She said, "When your mother was growing up,

we didn't have cell phones or computers.

We had a phone on the wall, it was a party line.

When it rang twice, it was for us."

She said, "I didn't know anyone who'd ever been on a plane."

She told me that the world had entirely changed in her lifetime.

She said, "How we travel, how we communicate,

and it will in yours as well."

So when I do this work every day for a fossil fuel treaty,

I'm holding on to the idea

that one day I'm going to be sitting with my grandchildren,

I'm going to be telling them about this time in our history

when we clawed at the last primary forest to get at the oil.

This crazy time in our history when we used to fill our cars with gas,

heat our homes with gas.

And they,

well, they will barely believe me,

because the world will be such a different place.

Thank you.

(Applause and cheers)