Climate Progress Isn’t a Sprint — It’s a Marathon | Greg De Temmerman | TED

What do long-distance running and our fight against climate change

have in common?

What does the fact of running very long distances,

across mountains, typically over 20 to 30 hours,

have anything to do with climate?

Well, quite a lot, it turns out.

They are both very complex and long affairs,

and both will mainly require you to deal with setbacks,

trade-offs and compromises along the way,

if you want to have a chance to see the finish line,

And I should know,

because not only do I like that sport and I know how it sounds,

I also happen to be a physicist

with a long-standing interest in complex issues like energy, nuclear fusion

or climate change.

When you prepare for a race and you look at the map,

this is typically the kind of thing you will see.

You have to go from start to finish.

And what is the shortest distance between two points?

A straight line.

You can believe me, right? I'm a scientist.

Now in reality, except if you’re a bird, you can’t just go straight.

You have to follow the path, which will usually meander around.

It's making your path much longer than what it looks like at first sight.

It starts to sound familiar, right?

Now when you look at that,

you’re actually ignoring all the mountains which might be along the way

and you have to cross.

So you will have to go up and down, and up and down,

many times.

It will make your journey much longer.

But it will also bring a lot of new challenges --

technical terrains, narrow paths, very fast changing conditions.

Because remember, you are at altitude now.

It will also require you to make choices.

"Which jacket do I take? This heavy jacket which is waterproof?

This light one, which can be much lighter? What shoes?

Dry conditions, muddy conditions. But then, it's heavier.

How much food do I need to take?"

Now it might sound like very small details.

Remember, you will be carrying your backpack with you

for the next 30 hours,

so it does matter.

Realize, also, that there is no perfect solution.

If conditions change quickly, and they can do,

your perfect choice might actually prove to be really wrong on the way.

The only thing you can do is adapt and keep going.

You can't just sit down and just cry, like, "What did I do?"

You have to keep going and adapt and do with what you have.

Winning on the long run requires you to accept overall setbacks and trade-offs,

and keep going.

Our path to solving climate change is actually going to be quite similar.

Climate change is caused

by the accumulation of greenhouse gases inside the atmosphere.

To stop climate change, we have to stop emitting.

We know what to do.

Currently, we are emitting about 57 billion tons of greenhouse gases

into the atmosphere,

mainly because of our use of fossil fuels.

Let me give you a sense of the scale.

Let's look at the worst fossil fuel, coal.

Last year alone, we burned about nine billion tons of coal.

This is a number which is really hard to grasp, so let me help you.

You have all seen pictures of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

This is about 140 meters high.

In the world,

we burn a volume of coal equivalent to that pyramid every five hours.

This is gigantic,

and this number has to go down to zero as quickly as possible.

What does that mean?

That means we have to scale and develop a whole new energy system

as fast as possible.

So we know where we need to go.

We also need to know how fast we need to get there.

As fast as possible.

Really, faster would be better,

but probably not possible.

We have decades of scientific research

telling us what the consequences of getting there late will be.

Every tenth of a degree of additional global warming

is going to significantly increase the amount of human suffering.

Turns out we also have most of the solutions we need

to divide our emissions by two in the next ten years.

Electric vehicles, solar, wind, heat pumps, insulating our homes.

Stop eating so much meat, stop cutting forests.

Start. Finish. Pretty simple, right?

Well, as with trail running,

the path to get there will be really tortuous,

will be full of challenges and setbacks, and we have to deal with that.

Let me walk you through a couple of examples to make it clear.

I have been using this running metaphor,

so let's just keep moving and let's look at the transport system.

Road transport accounts for about 12 percent of global emissions.

Electrifying cars and trucks is a great way to stop using oil

to move people and stuff around.

And actually, progress in batteries and technologies

allow us to now have electric vehicles

which are comparable to our petrol cars in terms of range,

and, very soon, in terms of cost.

So, easy solution, right?

Take all the cars, replace them by similar electric cars.

A medium-sized car for a medium-sized car, a pickup for a pickup.

A drop-in solution, really?

Job done. We are good.

Well, there's one more thing, though.

There are currently 1.4 billion cars in the world.

And this is how many cities look like.

Congested, polluted, noisy,

really not nice for pedestrians

and totally not adapted to climate change.

If the rest of the world was to use cars like Americans and Europeans do,

we would need [many] more cars in the future.

Is that desirable?

More importantly, is that even sustainable?

Electric cars are the future of cars, yes.

Are cars the future of sustainable mobility?

OK, but now we have an alternative solution, right?

Let's transform our cities,

let's make them nice for pedestrians.

Let's build them around pedestrians, let's develop public transport --

trams, metros, buses.

Let's make them adapted to climate change.

Yes, this might be the thing to do in the long run,

but this is going to take a long time,

because we are talking about big infrastructure.

So here's a bit of a trade-off.

Reducing emissions in the short term, for electric cars,

might not be the thing you want to do in the long term.

And this is one of those many trade-offs we will see over and over again.

OK, electric car it is, then, in the short term.

What type of car are we talking about?

Walk around the city,

and what you see, quite often, are big metallic monsters

with four wheels.

This is what we call "cars."

Cars are actually getting bigger and bigger.

Electric vehicles are pushing up the trend.

Let me give you an example which will speak to you.

The iconic Volkswagen Golf.

Between the time it was first released in 1974

and its latest version this year,

its weight has almost doubled.

A Ford F-150, the most popular car in the US, weighs about two tons.

Its electric version -- 2.7 tons.

Do you know how much an average human weighs?

About 62 kilos, so a bit less than I.

Building so many cars comes at a cost.

They need metals for their batteries --

copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel.

Those metals need to be mined.

Mining has a very strong environmental impact.

It affects local communities,

and in most cases, it doesn’t even benefit the producing countries.

Yet getting those metals

is actually going to help us reduce emissions globally.

And climate change is a global issue.

Another one of those trade-offs.

And I'm not saying we should just simply mine our way out of climate change.

Not at all.

First of all, we will actually need less mining in the future than we need now.

Remember those nine billion tons of coal we are burning every year?

And we can, and we must, improve mining practices.

We must decrease environmental impact

and make sure local communities are benefiting more.

But still, the more cars we need, the bigger they are,

the more metals we need.

Making it easier for customers to adopt big cars

actually pushes the constraints on the supply chain.

Here we go again, on our tortuous path across climate change.

This approach is showing some positive effects.

Last year in Norway, almost all cars sold were electric or hybrid.

In 2023, in the world, 18 percent of new cars sold were electric,

and this number is increasing quite quickly,

helped by a lot of enabling policies.

So we are progressing.

Yet it will take a long time to transform the system,

because of the numbers of cars we have.

And indeed, if you look around you,

only two to three percent of cars are electric right now.

Those trade-offs will happen across all the systems we can think of.

Think about electricity.

Are renewables perfect? No, they are not.

But this is what we can scale the fastest.

They are getting cheaper and cheaper,

so we need to accelerate and deploy them even faster.

We cannot just sit and wait

for the perfect solution, like nuclear fusion, to happen.

We don't have the time.

We need to do with what we have and get going as fast as possible.

If we make mistakes, we’ll learn along the way, and we’ll adapt.

As with trail running, it's important to keep our eyes on the prize.

Keep moving in the short term, while thinking about the long term.

When I start a long-distance race, I don't start by saying,

"Hey, 100 kilometers to go, 99 kilometers to go."

That would be killing me.

I have a plan.

I start by going to the next checkpoint,

which is, typically, four or five hours away.

I go there, I refuel, assess how I feel, and then I go to the next one.

I know that I'm getting closer and closer to the finish point.

I also know that I will have to adapt my pace depending on how I feel.

My body might hurt. Believe me, it does hurt a lot.

I might also have to adapt to the conditions which have changed.

So I have to do with all of that.

I do know that it's pretty rare

that my perfect plan actually works accordingly.

So many cases, I need to adapt.

You might think it's because you're not too good at it.

Yeah, you might have a point.

I also know the first ten kilometers are going to be much easier

than the last ten kilometers.

Same is with our climate journey.

We might have an idealized path or scenario,

but we have to make do with the reality of the situation

and the scale of the challenge.

Not accepting this

increases our risk of failing at stabilizing the climate.

I don't think this is a risk we can take.

Now, you might ask, at this point, “OK, [what] would success look like?”

Well, at the end of a long-distance race, you see the finish line,

you sprint, or you pretend to sprint.

You cross the line, you’re happy.

You made it. You're proud. Bravo.

All those months of training have paid off.

Then you realize you're exhausted. You can hardly walk.

You struggle to get to your room and take a shower.

And the next day,

you look like a 90-year-old, trying to get out of bed.

Is that how we are going to feel after completing that gigantic transition?

Well, I don't know. Let's try and find out.

In the meantime, let's not have perfect be the enemy of the good.

We need to get moving quickly

and accept all the setbacks, challenges and trade-offs along the way.

This might be annoying. This might be frustrating.

This might be upsetting.

I just don't see any other way.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)