4 environmental 'heresies' | Stewart Brand

82,974 views ・ 2009-07-13

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:16
Because of what I'm about to say,
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I really should establish my green credentials.
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When I was a small boy, I took my pledge
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as an American, to save and faithfully defend from waste
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the natural resources of my country,
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its air, soil and minerals, its forests, waters and wildlife.
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And I've stuck to that.
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Stanford, I majored in ecology and evolution.
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1968, I put out the Whole Earth Catalog. Was "mister natural" for a while.
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And then worked for the Jerry Brown administration.
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The Brown administration, and a bunch of my friends,
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basically leveled the energy efficiency of California,
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so it's the same now, 30 years later,
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even though our economy has gone up 80 percent, per capita.
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And we are putting out less greenhouse gasses than any other state.
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California is basically the equivalent of Europe, in this.
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This year, Whole Earth Catalog has a supplement that I'll preview today,
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called Whole Earth Discipline.
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The dominant demographic event of our time
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is this screamingly rapid urbanization
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that we have going on.
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By mid-century we'll be about 80 percent urban,
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and that's mostly in the developing world,
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where that's happening.
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It's interesting, because history is driven to a large degree
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by the size of cities.
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The developing world now has all of the biggest cities,
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and they are developing three times faster than the developed countries,
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and nine times bigger.
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It's qualitatively different.
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They are the drivers of history, as we see by looking at history.
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1,000 years ago this is what the world looked like.
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Well we now have a distribution of urban power
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similar to what we had 1,000 years ago.
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In other words, the rise of the West,
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dramatic as it was, is over.
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The aggregate numbers are absolutely overwhelming:
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1.3 million people a week coming to town,
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decade after decade.
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What's really going on?
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Well, what's going on is the villages of the world are emptying out.
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Subsistence farming is drying up basically.
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People are following opportunity into town.
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And this is why.
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I used to have a very romantic idea about villages,
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and it's because I never lived in one.
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(Laughter)
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Because in town --
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this is the bustling squatter city
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of Kibera, near Nairobi --
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they see action. They see opportunity.
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They see a cash economy that they were not able to participate in
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back in the subsistence farm.
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As you go around these places there's plenty of aesthetics.
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There is plenty going on.
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They are poor, but they are intensely urban. And they are intensely creative.
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The aggregate numbers now
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are that basically squatters,
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all one billion of them, are building the urban world,
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which means they're building the world --
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personally, one by one, family by family,
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clan by clan, neighborhood by neighborhood.
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They start flimsy and they get substantial as time goes by.
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They even build their own infrastructure.
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Well, steal their own infrastructure, at first.
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Cable TV, water, the whole gamut, all gets stolen.
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And then gradually gentrifies.
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It is not the case that slums undermine prosperity,
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not the working slums; they help create prosperity.
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So in a town like Mumbai, which is half slums,
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it's 1/6th of the GDP of India.
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Social capital in the slums is at its most urban and dense.
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These people are valuable as a group.
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And that's how they work.
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There is a lot of people who think about all these poor people,
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"Oh there's terrible things. We've got to fix their housing."
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It used to be, "Oh we've got to get them phone service."
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Now they're showing us how they do their phone service.
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Famine mostly is a rural event now.
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There are things they care about.
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And this is where we can help.
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And the nations they're in can help.
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And they are helping each other solve these issues.
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And you go to a nice dense place like this slum in Mumbai.
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You look at that lane on the right.
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And you can ask, "Okay what's going on there?"
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The answer is, "Everything."
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This is better than a mall. It's much denser.
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It's much more interactive.
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And the scale is terrific.
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The main event is, these are not people crushed by poverty.
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These are people busy getting out of poverty
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just as fast as they can.
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They're helping each other do it.
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They're doing it through an outlaw thing,
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the informal economy.
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The informal economy, it's sort of like dark energy in astrophysics:
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it's not supposed to be there, but it's huge.
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We don't understand how it works yet, but we have to.
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Furthermore, people in the informal economy,
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the gray economy --
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as time goes by,
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crime is happening around them. And they can join the criminal world,
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or they can join the legitimate world.
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We should be able to make that choice
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easier for them to get toward the legitimate world,
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because if we don't, they will go toward the criminal world.
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There's all kinds of activity.
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In Dharavi the slum performs not only
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a lot of services for itself,
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but it performs services for the city at large.
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And one of the main events are these ad-hoc schools.
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Parents pool their money to hire some local teachers
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to a private, tiny, unofficial school.
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Education is more possible in the cities, and that changes the world.
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So you see some interesting, typical, urban things.
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So one thing slammed up against another,
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such as in Sao Paulo here.
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That's what cities do. That's how they create value,
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is by slamming things together.
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In this case, supply right next to demand.
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So the maids and the gardeners and the guards
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that live in this lively part of town on the left
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walk to work, in the boring, rich neighborhood.
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Proximity is amazing.
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We are learning about how dense proximity can be.
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Connectivity between the city and the country
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is what's going to keep the country good,
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because the city has interesting ways of doing things.
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This is what makes cities --
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(Applause)
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this is what makes cities so green in the developing world.
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Because people leave the poverty trap, an ecological disaster
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of subsistence farms, and head to town.
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And when they're gone the natural environment
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starts to come back very rapidly.
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And those who remain in the village can shift over to cash crops
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to send food to the new growing markets in town.
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So if you want to save a village, you do it with a good road,
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or with a good cell phone connection, and ideally some grid electrical power.
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So the event is: we're a city planet. That just happened.
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More than half.
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The numbers are considerable. A billion live in the squatter cities now.
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Another billion is expected.
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That's more than a sixth of humanity living a certain way.
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And that will determine a lot of how we function.
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Now, for us environmentalists,
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maybe the greenest thing about the cities is they diffuse the population bomb.
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People get into town.
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The immediately have fewer children.
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They don't even have to get rich yet. Just the opportunity of
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coming up in the world means they will have fewer, higher-quality kids,
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and the birthrate goes down radically.
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Very interesting side effect here,
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here's a slide from Phillip Longman.
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Shows what is happening.
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As we have more and more old people, like me,
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and fewer and fewer babies.
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And they are regionally separated.
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What you're getting is a world which is
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old folks, and old cities, going around doing things the old way,
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in the north.
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And young people in brand new cities they're inventing,
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doing new things, in the south.
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Where do you think the action is going to be?
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Shift of subject. Quickly drop by climate.
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The climate news, I'm sorry to say, is going to keep getting worse
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than we think, faster than we think.
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Climate is a profoundly complex, nonlinear system,
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full of runaway positive feedbacks,
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hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points.
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Here's just a few samples.
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We're going to keep being surprised. And almost all
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the surprises are going to be bad ones.
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From your standpoint this means
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a great increase in climate refugees
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over the coming decades,
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and what goes along with that, which is resource wars
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and chaos wars,
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as we're seeing in Darfur.
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That's what drought does.
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It brings carrying capacity down,
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and there's not enough carrying capacity
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to support the people. And then you're in trouble.
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Shift to the power situation.
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Baseload electricity is what it takes to run a city,
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or a city planet.
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So far there is only three sources of baseload electricity:
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coal, some gas,
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nuclear and hydro.
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Of those, only nuclear and hydro are green.
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Coal is what is causing the climate problems.
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And everyone will keep burning it
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because it's so cheap, until governments make it expensive.
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Wind and solar can't help, because so far we don't have a way to store that energy.
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So with hydro maxed out,
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coal and lose the climate,
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or nuclear, which is the current operating low-carbon source,
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and maybe save the climate.
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And if we can eventually get good solar in space,
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that also could help.
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Because remember, this is what drives the prosperity in the developing world
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in the villages and in the cities.
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So, between coal and nuclear,
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compare their waste products.
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If all of the electricity you used in your lifetime was nuclear,
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the amount of waste that would be added up
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would fit in a Coke can.
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Whereas a coal-burning plant,
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a normal one gigawatt coal plant, burns 80 rail cars of coal a day,
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each car having 100 tons.
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And it puts 18 thousand tons
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of carbon dioxide in the air.
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So and then when you compare the lifetime emissions
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of these various energy forms,
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nuclear is about even with solar and wind,
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and ahead of solar --
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oh, I'm sorry -- with hydro and wind, and ahead of solar.
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And does nuclear really compete with coal?
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Just ask the coal miners in Australia.
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That's where you see some of the source,
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not from my fellow environmentalists,
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but from people who feel threatened by nuclear power.
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Well the good news is that
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the developing world, but frankly, the whole world,
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is busy building, and starting to build, nuclear reactors.
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This is good for the atmosphere.
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It's good for their prosperity.
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I want to point out one interesting thing,
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which is that environmentalists like the thing we call micropower.
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It's supposed to be, I don't know, local solar and wind and cogeneration,
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and good things like that.
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But frankly micro-reactors which are just now coming on,
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might serve even better.
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The Russians, who started this, are building floating reactors,
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for their new passage, where the ice is melting, north of Russia.
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And they're selling these floating reactors,
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only 35 megawatts, to developing countries.
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Here's the design of an early one from Toshiba.
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It's interesting, say, to take a 25-megawatt,
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25 million watts,
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and you compare it to the standard big iron
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of an ordinary Westinghouse or Ariva,
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which is 1.2, 1.6 billion watts.
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These things are way smaller. They're much more adaptable.
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Here's an American design from Lawrence Livermore Lab.
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Here's another American design that came out
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of Los Alamos, and is now commercial.
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Almost all of these are not only small, they are proliferation-proof.
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They're typically buried in the ground.
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And the innovation is moving very rapidly.
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So I think microreactors is going to be important for the future.
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In terms of proliferation,
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nuclear energy has done more
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to dismantle nuclear weapons than any other activity.
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And that's why 10 percent of the electricity in this room,
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20 percent of electricity
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in this room is probably nuclear.
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Half of that is coming from dismantled warheads from Russia,
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soon to be joined by our dismantled warheads.
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And so I would like to see the GNEP program,
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that was developed in the Bush administration, go forward aggressively.
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And I was glad to see that president Obama
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supported the nuclear fuel bank strategy
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when he spoke in Prague the other week.
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One more subject. Genetically engineered food crops,
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in my view, as a biologist,
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have no reason to be controversial.
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My fellow environmentalists, on this subject,
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have been irrational, anti-scientific, and very harmful.
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Despite their best efforts,
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genetically engineered crops are the most
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rapidly successful agricultural innovation in history.
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They're good for the environment because they enable no-till farming,
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which leaves the soil in place,
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getting healthier from year to year --
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slso keeps less carbon dioxide going from the soil
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into the atmosphere.
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They reduce pesticide use.
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And they increase yield, which allows you to have your
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agricultural area be smaller,
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and therefore more wild area is freed up.
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By the way, this map from 2006
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is out of date because it shows Africa
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still under the thumb of Greenpeace,
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and Friends of the Earth from Europe,
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and they're finally getting out from under that.
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And biotech is moving rapidly in Africa, at last.
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This is a moral issue.
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The Nuffield Council on Bioethics
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met on this issue twice in great detail
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and said it is a moral imperative
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to make genetically engineered crops readily available.
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Speaking of imperatives, geoengineering is taboo now,
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especially in government circles,
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though I think there was a DARPA meeting on it a couple of weeks ago,
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but it will be on your plate --
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not this year but pretty soon,
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because some harsh realizations are coming along.
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This is a list of them.
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Basically the news is going to keep getting more scary.
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There will be events,
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like 35,000 people dying of a heat wave,
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which happened a while back.
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Like cyclones coming up toward Bangladesh.
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Like wars over water,
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such as in the Indus.
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And as those events keep happening
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we're going to say, "Okay, what can we do about that really?"
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But there's this little problem with geoengineering:
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what body is going to decide
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who gets to engineer? How much they do? Where they do it?
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Because everybody is downstream,
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downwind of whatever is done.
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And if we just taboo it completely
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we could lose civilization.
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But if we just say "OK,
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China, you're worried, you go ahead.
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You geoengineer your way. We'll geoengineer our way."
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That would be considered an act of war by both nations.
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So this is very interesting diplomacy coming along.
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I should say, it is more practical than people think.
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Here is an example that climatologists like a lot,
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one of the dozens of geoengineering ideas.
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This one came from the sulfur dioxide
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from Mount Pinatubo in 1991 --
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cooled the earth by half a degree.
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There was so much ice in 1992, the following year,
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that there was a bumper crop of polar bear cubs
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who were known as the Pinatubo cubs.
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To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere
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would cost on the order of a billion dollars a year.
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That's nothing, compared to all of the other
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things we may be trying to do about energy.
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Just to run by another one:
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this is a plan to brighten the reflectance of ocean clouds,
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by atomizing seawater;
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that would brighten the albedo of the whole planet.
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A nice one, because it can happen
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lots of little ways in lots of little places,
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is by copying the ancient Amazon Indians
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who made good agricultural soil
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by pyrolizing, smoldering, plant waste,
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and biochar fixes large quantities of carbon
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while it's improving the soil.
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So here is where we are.
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Nobel Prize-winning climatologist Paul Crutzen
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calls our geological era the Anthropocene,
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the human-dominated era. We are stuck
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with its obligations.
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In the Whole Earth Catalog, my first words were,
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"We are as Gods, and might as well get good at it."
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The first words of Whole Earth Discipline
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are, "We are as Gods, and have to get good at it."
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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