Jeremy Rifkin - Can a Green New Deal Save Life on Earth?

[Music] [Music] okay good evening so Jeremy Rifkin is gonna come in a minute he's gonna arrive so I'm gonna take these few minutes in the meantime to to introduce him sure you know most of you know his books is a it's an eminent economist he has many identities is an economist is a social theorist is an author and is an activist so I'm very pleased to welcome him in many identities he's American but actually his work is crosses many borders is extremely influential across the globe he has advised and consulted with numerous world leaders including the last three presidents of the European Commission is very influential in Europe and also in China he was a graduate at the Wharton School at 10:00 and then went to study at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University two two competitors of shampoo but France still and then Jeremy wasted no time in fighting for his principles he joined peace movement and also strikes against oil companies so in a sense even when he was young he was thinking about oil which is going to talk about during his lecture in 1978 he co-founded the foundation on on economic trends is the super well-known author he has been published many books which have been bestsellers I'm just going to cite to some of them are here the third Industrial Revolution the zero marginal cost society so he's clearly interested by a very topical issues and you have come to hear to him to talk about his latest book the green noob deal why the fossil fuel civilization will collapse by 2028 which the French fry the translation is just Howard didn't finish actually the title is wrong because and the bold economic plan to save life on earth so it's a very bored an ambitious book in a sense that's what you would expect from him it's clearly a wake up call in a sense I would say this wake up call is sadly targeted more for an American audience because I guess in Europe this wake-up call we've heard it a lot and we are conscious about it and then under the which i think is extremely interesting is a plan which is very ambitious to ensure nothing less than the survival of the planet and everybody on on this planet so it's a it's very much an optimist I think that's what characterizes what he rised he's inspired by and the title of his book is inspired by the message of radical reform by Roosevelt's New Deal that he wants to apply to to climate and that's basically the green new deal he wants to talk about today to help the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy I think there are lots of lessons that we can take from from his messages we know that in Europe and in France it tactical we have a lot of debates on how to go from my first hill economy to to an economy which is based on renewable energy and so to his hand to his hand he presents an economic plan which again is very ambitious and that could lead to a post-carbon world so it's a great honor to have you here here is for this evening and so we're very thankful that you accepted our invitation and obviously we are super eager to hear your thoughts and ideas and so without further ado the floor is yours thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good evening everybody I'm gonna ask you to all put the cellphones away put the iPads down I know you're gonna have withdrawal symptoms we're gonna have a nice calm evening and the photographer's in the back well you have to be in the back in September millions of young boys and girls and teenagers and Gen Z's and Millennials these young people walked out of their high schools their colleges in a hundred and thirty countries millions of them and they took to the streets this is the third time twice in September once in the spring and they are frightened they're scared about their future they've called for a climate emergency and they're demanding a green new deal to transform this civilization I want to be clear about the nature of this protest we've had protests movements all through history this is different all there's other protest movements through history they could have been around tribal blood wars or religious wars or ideological Wars and all sorts of skirmishes it could be about various states of inequality and social grievances all justified in some way by the people doing it this is different this is the first planetary revolt of the human race in the 200,000 years we've been on this planet this is the first time a cohort a generation has began to identify themselves as a species endangered species this is the first time a generation has began to see their fellow creatures as part of the evolutionary family this is the first time a generation has began to understand that human beings do not have total agency on this planet far from it and this is the first time a generation has begun to realize that everything we do every single day intimately affects every other human being every other creature that we cohabit this planet with and our lithosphere our biosphere our magnetosphere our atmosphere our circadian rhythms our Lena rhythms as a canyon rhythms we are part of a very very complex and little London understood planet where there's life in the universe we're just beginning to understand how strange and wonderful it is here's what we've done for the last 200 years we have lived off the wealth of a previous geological era 300 million years ago we went down under the deep under the surface of the earth and we exhumed the burial grounds of the Carboniferous era we exhumed the dead bodies of plant and animal life from a previous purity history that had now turned into oil coal and natural gas we exhumed it we created an entire civilization out of it our fertilizers our pesticides our construction materials most of our pharmaceutical products our synthetic fiber our food additives and preservatives our power our transport our heat our life the whole civilizations based on exhuming the remains of a long buried geographical area and geological era in history the great industrial revolution that took us to the 21st century they've not taken us in to climate change we have spewed so much carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide into this planet's atmosphere that we can't get enough of the sun's heat back off the planet we are a real time climate change as you all know it's no longer a theory or looming on the horizon it's here very intimately in our day-to-day lives and I want to explain what climate change does because actually it's never described it's not very it's not complicated if it was described the entire human race would be on board with all the young people in this room so here's what I want you to know so you can carry at home climate change changes the hydrological cycle that's the most important fear for us because we're the watery planet we go to other planets no water not very interested here's the rock our ecosystems are developed over millions of years based on the hydrological cycle the precipitation that traverses the clouds that bathes the biomes and ecosystems creates life for every one degree that the temperature goes up on this earth from global warming emissions the atmosphere is actually sucking up 7% more precipitation from the ground because the heat is now forcing the precipitation into the clouds more quickly and we're getting more concentrated precipitation the clouds and more unpredictable wild out-of-control water events seventy below zero up in northern Canada and the Arctic last winter blockbuster winter snows we had snow in Guadalajara Mexico this summer huge ice sheets I'll just take my country you can take yours in the spring we have flooding across the entire mid part of the country because of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers from Minnesota to Florida I mean to Louisiana and this year the floods were so severe people did not have insurance they're evacuating small towns they're not coming back they can't rebuild and the federal government had to subsidize the farmers because the crops didn't come in this is happening year after year after year we are already seeing migrations in my country and people are leaving where they are and they're doubling up with relatives anywhere they can because they're losing their homes we have summer while drought and wildfires across the United States the West Coast is on fire all summer this weekend Los Angeles suburbs were on fire people died homes destroyed ecosystems down we had to turn off the entire power grid of Northern California during this weekend all dark because we were worried that the fires would spread and the the Transformers would burn up Northern California we have hurricane seasons from August to December we had five hurricanes in the last six weeks durian completely destroyed the Bahamas this is the new abnormal this is happening all over the world our ecosystems cannot catch up to this runaway water cycle because they can't in evolutionary terms adjust this quick and they're collapsing in real-time our scientists tell us they're chronicling it that we are likely to lose now 50% of all the species on earth in the next eight or nine decades we will never hear them we'll never see them again they've been here for millions of years and remember where the baby's almost sapiens we've been here two hundred thousand years and so the last time we had a an extinction event was a long time ago we're now in an extinction event it doesn't even make the headlines most people don't even know it's the most dramatic moment in the two hundred thousand years were here it's imperiling our possibilities to continue on the planet and most people are oblivious to this we've had five mass extinction events on Earth in the last 450 million years way before we were here they came quick the chemistry the planets shifted massive died out ten million years to get new forms of life that we are in the sixth extinction event our scientists tell us we're going to lose a half the species that the current rate were going and now the UN panel on and that the last time this happened was 65 million years ago over thousands of years ninety eight decades this is your lifetime in your children the UN Panel on Climate Change last year said we've got 12 years now 11 to completely transform the civilization we live in or else we go over one degree one and a half degrees Celsius we're at one degree now we go over one and a half degree and we have a cascading series of climatic that take us into a world we can't fathom be clear the planets rewilding it never was passive we believed that we had a passive nature that we could command and control we called it the age of progress now we understand it was a fiction and we're entering the age of resilience are we prepared what do we do we need a new economic vision for the world got to be compelling we need a game plan to execute that vision and it has to be deliverable very very quickly in every city and every rural community in the world developing countries industrial nations we got to be able to transform the society move off of a fossil fuel civilization in less than 20 years so we need to step back and ask the question how did the great economic paradigm shifts in history occur we know why they occur we're going to get a road map and a compass here at side pole very important on how we can make a quick journey into a completely new way to structure life in the civilization that now faces us all right there have been at least seven major economic paradigm shifts in history they're very an interesting anthropologically and they're not in a single textbook in the world that's a single one these paradigm shifts are infrequent and they are always infrastructure transformations and the reason they're infrequent is because three defining technologies have to emerge serendipitously in a period of time and converge to create a general purpose technology platform that fundamentally changes the way society manages powers and moves its economic life its social life and governance what are those three technologies number one new communication technologies to bring the larger collectivities of our species together to commune Kait over time and space and manage an economy a society and governance obvious number two new sources of energy to more effectively bring larger collectivities together as a social unit with the power if you will to manage the economy social life and forms of governance in number three new modes of mobility and logistics to more effectively brain collectivities together so that we can move commerce social life and larger units when communication technology revolutions converge with new energy regimes and new modes of mobility in logistics it changes the way of society and civilizations manages powers and moves its day-to-day life pretty obvious actually because what I'm really saying here is our infrastructures are really a social incarnation of what every cell and organism has to do but on a big level every cell of every living creature has to have a way to communicate every cell and every organism has to have a certain amount of energy to maintain its non equilibrium State against death every cell and organism has to have motility and mobility in order to function and every cell in organism has to have a semipermeable membrane it's skin so that it can orchestrates its inners with its outers and be attuned to the circadian cirque annual lunar rhythms which guide the earth that's what infrastructures do it's not about just roads and bridges so let me give you an example of this their first Industrial Revolution in the 19th century Britain's second US revolution in the US and the 20th century the Brits take us into a convergence of communication energy and mobility communication they went to steam power printing no more manual print presses from Germany to slow steam power printing allowed us to produce lots of print very cheaply for the first time in history that gave us textbooks for something new called public we could never have had Universal education without cheap print for textbooks newspapers magazines brochures catalogs then the Brits laid out a telegraph system in the last half of the 19th century steam-powered printing and the Telegraph in Britain converged with a new source of energy coal harvested by the same steam engine they used for the printing then they put that same steam engine on tracks in rails locomotives national transport this changed our built environment our semipermeable membrane and we began to move from small cities in large rural areas to dense urban industrial environments because of hub to hub rail traffic this revolution changed our temporal spatial orientation every one of these infrastructures in history do imagine when you start to go from from traditional manual print to steam power printing or you go from a horse to a locomotive or you go from peat and wood to coal these are huge shifts in temporal spatial orientation because we're bringing logical activities together as a social creature the infrastructure is appropriate as a prothesis of our own organism our own organisms our own bodies that's what this is all about the first Industrial Revolution because we brought logical activities together allowed us to go from small free cities in Europe to large rural areas to national markets because we had this weak national markets gave rise to nation-states to secure those markets in the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States 20th century the telephone telephone was a big deal I know everyone thinks the internet is a big deal try to imagine for the first time in two hundred thousand years out of nowhere people are talking into this device and someone's talking back a thousand miles away that's why if you ever heard the term phony someone's a phony it came from phones because they thought it was magic they actually didn't believe it was a real voice the telephone later radio and television for marketing those communication technologies in the United States converged with a new source of energy cheap Texas oil then Henry Ford put everybody in the internal combustion engine for transport and mobility we move from dense urban environments with railroads to interstate riot road systems suburban build-out shopping malls travel and tourism in the whole world took that model through the 20th century that Second Industrial Revolution peaked in July 2008 that's when oil hit 147 a barrel that month and the entire global economy shut down totally quiet that was the great economic earthquake of the industrial era on the fossil fuel civilization the financial collapse the subprime mortgage collapse 60 days later that was a little aftershock because you couldn't keep the fictional economy going when the real economy turned down why the real economy everything's made out of fossil fuels when all goes over it 80 a barrel all the other prices go up when oil goes to around 110 a barrel by purchasing power slows down we are now in a convulsive endgame for the fossil fuel civilization and the industrial infrastructure is built off of it does anyone here think we're in the Sun rise of the fossil fuel era or the crest or even the plateau we can smell it's dying right in front of us I'll get back to that and where we have oil we have failed States and authoritarian States with the two outlier exceptions the United States the number one fossil fuel power in the world Canada number four they keep saying they're for climate change they hide and then every year they're putting in the pipelines and the gas and everything else so where do we go from here I'm gonna share a little anecdote when Angela Merkel became Chancellor of Germany she asked me to come to Berlin in the first couple of weeks of her government and help her address the question of how to grow the German economy create some jobs on her watch when I got to Berlin the first question I asked the Chancellor I said madam Chancellor how do you grow the German economy when your businesses are plugged into a Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure of the 20th century made up of centralized telecommunicator fossil fuels and nuclear power internal-combustion road rail water and air transport and that infrastructure to manage power and move the economy society and governance peaked in its aggregate efficiency in every industrial country in the world around between 1995 and around 2000 four or five let me explain something I'm gonna take a little more time tonight because this is SCI poll economists are wondering why our economy is slowing down and of course they use a very crude way to explain growth productivity was a crude tool just about how much output you can put out there so if you build prisons that's part of the protein of the productivity and the GDP if you have toxic waste dumps to clean up that's part of the productivity in the GDP etc so if you ask an economist what is what is the basis of productivity they'll say better machines and better workers right Siple but when Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize for economic growth here he left a little secret out that all the economists are ashamed and embarrassed about but I'm going to tell you he said when we look at every year the Industrial Revolution these two factors better machines and better workers it's only 14% of the quote productivity where's the other 86% the economists don't know is that shocking to you they call it the solo residual but every engineer knows every chemist knows every biologist knows and every architect knows because the language you use in your disciplines is the first and second laws of thermodynamics not a single business I teach at the Wharton School the oldest Business School in the world and I teach the CEO five-week program not a single business school including mine teaches this why am i mentioning this now the first and second laws of thermodynamics govern the universe the solar system our Earth's biosphere and everything we do every single day in our economic social life on this planet first law all the energy in the universe is constant since the Big Bang nothing no new energies come in left the second wall true but Energy's always changing its form but only in one direction from concentrated the Big Bang to disperse through the galaxies from order the Big Bang to disorder through the galaxies from hot in the Big Bang to cooled off in the galaxies in entropy is a measure the energy here it's not available to do work so what does this mean we take available energy out of nature a rare earths a form of material energy and a metallic or a fossil fuel and then we extract that from the earth we ship it we store it we push to reduce goods and services from it we consume it and we recycle it back to nature that's the value chain at every stage of conversion of nature's energy through our society and back to nature we have to embed a certain amount of energy even material energy like a rare earth or whatever into that good or service to get it to the next stage of its journey along the line right but in each of those conversions we lose some of the energy and that conversion process this is called aggregate efficiency Agra deficiencies the ratio of useful to potential work in every conversion this is the basis of understanding thermodynamics and how civilization wins and lose so what I said to the Chancellor she's a physicist we started this second Industrial Revolution at 3% adword efficiency pretty bad 1905 we got up to 14 and a half 14 percent in the u.s. 86 percent loss every conversion now Germany got up to eighteen and a half percent Japan got up to 20 percent those are ceilings no industrial country in the world can get beyond that on this infrastructure so on that first day with a Chancellor I discuss were there a third Industrial Revolution there was just emerging we were working out and in Europe I'd work with the last several presidents the European Commission we're just getting ready for prime time and here's the revolution it's been 29 years since the World Wide Web everyone's connected in this room and four and a half billion people are on communication internet skyping in global classrooms they're on Facebook the biggest figurative family in history won't be here for long because all the high school kids are getting off but that's another thing and they're gaming all over the world and this is this is here but now this digitalized communication Internet that we're all using is now converging with a digitized renewable energy internet we now have millions of people and small and medium sized enterprises and communities and farm associations that have created cooperatives all over the world cooperatives are the way to do this and they are taking down the Sun and taking up the wind and all that solar and wind that they're generating some of it they're using themselves and the rest they are sharing it back on an increasingly digitized renewable energy internet just like we with the same digital technology the same algorithm governments that we use for entertainment news and knowledge sharing on the communication internet it's identical now these two Internet's are converging with a third internet a digitized mobility and logistics internet made up of electric and fuel cell vehicles powered by solar and wind from the energy internet and these vehicles will be autonomous in the next decade it will operate by the same analytics and algorithms that we use on the other two Internet's for driverless transport and car sharing services these three Internet's right on top of a platform called the Internet of Things we're placing sensors across the system all over the world sensors in the agricultural fields monitoring the crops and factories and warehouses smart roads and smart homes and smart automobiles and they're tracking data in real time where's that data going not to the cloud is going to the emerging communication energy and mobility internet to manage power and move everything in this society by 2030 we're likely to have a ubiquitous interconnectivity this is a pro fesus this infrastructure of a human brain and nervous system all right remember I said every infrastructure communication that's the brain the energy you need that's the power the motility and mobility that's the transport so this time the brain is Galileo and GPS those satellites are synchronizing billions of sensors that's the nervous system by 2030 we'll have created a global brain and nervous system that can connect the human race to manage power and move society all over the world locally continental and global and we are now setting up these energy internets they will cross all the continents under the water and the Atlantic the studies are beginning and they're beginning to look to deploy and the Pacific at everywhere else so one knee as these three Internet's come in the sensors are the building's remember the first Industrial Revolution urban dance scores the second suburban build-out the third Industrial Revolution the buildings are our semipermeable membranes each building around the world's going to have to be retrofitted if they're already online to make them resilient and climate change and they become nodes they are the Internet of Things the things it's in the building's primarily every building becomes an edge data center how many of you have ever heard of the term edge data center already it's brand new and we're gonna look back at Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon and think these clunky huge vertically integrated organizations we're gonna say wasn't that cute because edge data centers are gonna are already moving to be put in buildings across the landscape residential commercial industrial institutional every buildings a node every buildings an edge data center every building is a micro power generation site for solar we're putting solar and paint in glass now every building is a charging station for your evie your electric vehicle and every building you that Evy and charging station is stored energy so if there's a climate event and the power goes out or a cyber terrorist attack or malware you can go off these continental grids because this is distributed and with no price at all no technology you need here you can quickly go off andrey a grenade in mini-grids in your community and keep the whole system running this none of what I'm telling you tonight is theoretical this is all happening on the ground but not scaling quick enough so this is changes remember I said these infrastructure revolutions change your temple spatial orientation but that changes your economic model and your governance and this is something you'll not see in a single textbook it's common sense though just before the Industrial Revolution we had another paradigm shift that's not much talked about between the 1500s and the seventeen hundred's what happened is the new communication revolution was the manual print press no more codex the new energy source across medieval Europe was windmills and water mills thousands and thousands of them they called it the people's power because now the news the cities had more power than the aristocracy with the horses alright and then the new mobility is you built canals to connect the cities all those canals you see across you to connect the cities for mobility that created a new economic system and let me be clear these infrastructures give you a real sense of the kind of economic system you create and the equalities and inequalities and the kind of governments it's not ironclad but they give you the opportunities and the restraints and then there are certain ways you can't go beyond that in the case of of capitalism when we went to the first Industrial Revolution what happened was fossil fuels are the most expensive and uranium but fossil fuels are the most expensive energies in the world to explore and extract chip and refine therefore we had to create the capitalist stock holding corporation because no monarchy could ever finance extracting fossil fuels for all of civilization so we set up stock holding corporations capitalism so you could have lots of small players invest in shares they all the railroads had to do the same thing there wasn't enough money without having these shareholding corporations and when you know an infrastructure you know again where it's going to go because of the way it's engineered in this case the first Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution were engineered to be centralized top-down in Mechelen intellectual property and they had to vertically integrate in order to create economies of scale to return the investment because the fossil fuels were so expensive then every other industry that emerged in the fossil fuel culture had to follow suit to have vertical integration and giant organizations in order to return their share their investment to the shareholders so in the first Industrial Revolution we went to national markets and every nation state 1776 the steam engine it all started to come in then the American and French Revolution nation states control national national markets when we went to the Second Industrial Revolution with container ships and jet travel we went to globalization and then we created these institutions to mediate the IMF the OECD the World Bank the UN and what happens with these centralized infrastructures of the fossil fuel civilization they are so vertically integrated that here's what we ended up with at the end of the line 500 global companies and I've taught many of the CEOs in these companies 500 global companies fortune 500 and these 500 companies represent one-third of the entire GDP of the world that's 500 CEOs and they only have 67 million workers out of a workforce of three and a half billion people does that tell you something about the inequality and the seven richest people on that pyramid this evening seven richest individuals on that pyramid this evening that vertically integrated pyramid their combined wealth equals the accumulated wealth of one half the human beings living on this planet three and a half billion people it was the nature of the infrastructure that gave you their possibilities the kind of economic system and the Soviets did it the same way with vertical integration they just had it with a state this third Industrial Revolution is different is engineered differently and so that first generation of Millennials in Silicon Valley your older folks um um I guess your parents are almost they wanted to take big vertical integration and attach it on to a third Industrial Revolution that's distributed open transparent because you want to get the network effect that's how you move it and you wanna laterally scale so this first generation Amazon Twitter Facebook they they went that way but what I'm going to tell you in Brook and green port Brooklyn here in Paris at side PO in Seoul Korea in Berlin we have a James II generation and they see it very differently and that is you're beginning to understand how you can be much more agile if you engage in very high-tech SME small and medium-sized enterprises you put them in cooperatives which are democratic so the revenue stays with the people within the co-operative and you blockchain them and scale them virtually and physically anywhere across continents across the globe it's much more agile than some clunky big giant vertically integrated organization that's trying to control the whole world and bring all the profit to them they're going to be gone they're gonna be gone this is what's in this room at site PO tonight you are the generation that's going to do that so where does it take us as we move to this distributed open transparent and laterally scale infrastructure revolution we're moving from globalization to glocalization I watch it all over the world my global team we're in regions everywhere and what's happened is it's not just Catalonia in Quebec in Scotland regions all over the world a younger generation because the technology is so cheap the fixed cost and the marginal cost are heading toward near zero you can engage in these cooperatives and blockchain them around the world and bypass the global 500 corporation bypass the nation-states and engaged directly region to region it's happening everywhere now there's an issue here this digital revolution is also changing the economic model remember I said every infrastructure comes with a new kind of economic model that's compatible with the infrastructure so in this case they do we can model economic models interesting in economics we always teach that the optimum market is where you sell at marginal cost that's what capitalism is about and so you always want to lower the marginal cost so you can put out cheap products win over market share and then bring some nice profits back to the investors here's the problem we never expected a technology revolution so extreme in its aggregate efficiency that it could actually plunge the marginal cost so low that market capitalism could no longer make a profit so what's happened here is that's what's happened and because and here's why it's happened markets are transactional think of this in terms of your engineering background markets are transactional you have a seller yeah but by oh they come together they alienate the good or service and then it's over that's a start-stop mechanism now in between the next sale you have marketing cost logistics cost warehouse cost you have to pay your employees it's too slow for a digital world so when the marginal costs go very low we shift the economic model from markets to networks from transactions to flows from sellers and buyers to providers and users from GDP to quality of life from productivity to regenerative 'ti from externalities to circularity this is a completely different model because at low marginal cost you can still make some margins if you are in platforms block change and you're managing these platforms because it's the flow of traffic 24/7 there's no stop stop you are providers others are users sometimes the other way around and the flow allows you at low marginal costs to keep a little bit of a margin and stay in the game some of the margins are going so low it's leading to the sharing economy near zero marginal cost right now tonight right now there are hundreds and millions of people sharing their music their YouTube videos we have five kitties in home we're getting a little tired of the kitty videos but they're sharing their music they're sharing the YouTube videos they're sharing their social blogs they're sharing their news they're sharing college courses they're taking college courses taught by the best professors these MOOCs they're getting college credits and then there's Wikipedia I didn't know how Jimmy Wales did it but he did it this is the fifth largest website in the world and if you eliminate the porno websites I suspect it's one and in this website we have millions of people who have literally democratized the knowledge of the world in 15 years cross-checking everybody else because evidently no one else does anything better to do I put something out there on the web and within an hour everyone in the world's crawling all over my paragraph checking it amplifying it changing it it works this website is nonprofit 50 million dollars in donations from all of us a year that's amazing that's the sharing economy none of this is in the GDP is it and so now we have a lot of people sharing solar and wind off-grid sharing with neighbors and family and friends and you know what the wind and the Sun don't send a bill we haven't had a single invoice after the fixed cost is paid coal oil gas and uranium we get a big bill with every single time we have to use them so what's happening is now as you get to a low to near zero marginal cost it's giving rise to the sharing economy now again some vertical organizations like Airbnb are trying to take it couchsurfing was too new it didn't really have it's its legs yet and then you know of course you have Oberer and lyft but now what's happening among your generation over the world in the last few years you're now socially conscious and more digital and what we're seeing as co-operators are forming around the world for car sharing services because anybody can pick up these websites to bring people together this is in rocket science anymore why would you fewer driver in it's your car and it's your labor and all your being in doing is being connected to a website to someone why would you want to send your profits up to Google and Goldman Sachs when you can share it in a cooperative this is emerging now around the world just starting it's going to get robust very very robust the sharing economy is the first new economic system to enter onto the world stage since capitalism and socialism in the 18th and 19th century it's a remarkable event part of it cat the cat traditional capitalist systems trying to absorb part of it is fighting back but we're gonna be into hybrid systems simultaneously we're gonna still be in a capitalist system a network but not markets but they're not going to be the primary arbiter of human life anymore they're gonna have to share the center stage with cooperatives blockchain engaged in near zero marginal cost sharing activity sometimes around the world it's a good choice it takes us into a more sustainable world not a runaway growth world but a sustainable way to live in a sharing economy you share everything you're done give it to someone else never has to go to landfill it's circular share the toys share everything so where does it take us from here I'm gonna say something to you tonight that's going to surprise all of you the subtitle to this book is why the fossil fuel civilization will collapse by 2028 and a bold economic plan to save life on earth why did I come up with that what you'll see in the book our studies in the last 12 months from the financial industry the banking the insurance industry all the major sectors of the economy these are internal documents they weren't private but no one's looked at them and here's what's happened this year 2019 the levelized cost of solar and wind utility scale has just dipped below the cost of every other energy we use on earth it's already been way below nuclear nuclear is gone it's now below coal and oil way below and it just dipped below natural yes we the power companies didn't see this but I should say to the credit of Citigroup the big bank five years ago four years ago they said oh my god the market is speaking this could be 100 trillion dollars they said in stranded assets across the fossil fuel civilization the intelligence unit of The Economist says it's at least in worst case scenario more than 40 trillion this is the Biggles biggest bubble in history what is the stranded asset it means if you've invested in a coal-fired power plant if you have expiration rights if you have extraction of fossil fuels that are stored if you have refineries and pipelines will never amortize them out over their 30-year life man because they won't be used or very little because solar and wind are cheaper how cheap let me tell you where this is going solar and wind have been on an exponential curve which people haven't seen just like computers when I was a kid there were no computers the first computer was at the University of Pennsylvania where I teach at the Wharton School and at the time IBM's chairman said this should get a kick out of this we'll need five computers for the world he said five yes because they're too expensive no one anticipated Intel's engineers who started doubling the capacity and having the cost on those chips in the 70s now China and Korea have a smartphone twenty-five dollars that has more computing power than put our astronauts on the moon and in the Amazon there are villagers with more power in their hand this is power to the people solar and wind is power to the people that's a little and figured the Sun shines every way the winds the wind blows everywhere so what we're facing here is this there are now power and electricity electricity companies who are buying this last 12 months long-term 20-year contracts for solar and wind very quietly I work with a lot of them for five cents four cents three cents in two cents a kilowatt hour let me explain why no one saw this coming I worked in Germany with the tree we have four major power companies there they were the Canaries in the mine this is very interesting from an engineering perspective and what happened was back around 2003 or for solar and when were only a couple of percent of the grid who cared but there's a rule of thumb that Schumpeter didn't understand when Schumpeter talked the Austrian economists about the great disruptions it was naive he thought they were new businesses no the big ones are infrastructure when you go from letter caring to telegraph that's big when you go from horse and buggy to locomotives those are the big disruptions so here's the rule of thumb in carbon tractor in the UK Oxford University called a cot they've done a good job on this but here's the rule of thumb you know when electricity came in the challenge gas lights when electricity was 3% of the market it was over why it's not so important how much of the market the incumbent has and how powerful they are it's how fast the Challenger is coming in so what we found in Germany is and I work with the mbw we saw this when solar and wind got to 14% of the electricity on the German grid 86% fossil fuels in nuclear the collapse because the investment community saw what was the growth trend and that those old energies would never amortize out their power plants 14% is the inflection point we know the United States reaches 14% of our electricity with solar and wind in 2023 globally just as we're moving now the whole world reaches twenty fourteen percent of all electricity solar and wind about twenty twenty eight twenty twenty eight that means stranded assets across not just the fossil fuel civilization but the entire complex of industries that depend on it transport what's happening there remember I said three sectors so we looked at energy let me look at communication next we looked at energy communication probably you know that Apple Facebook Google they've all gotten off the fossil fuel grid and nuclear they're all into solar and wind you know this to secure their data centers some of them are doing it in certificate but all of them will be totally off Microsoft Intel Cisco and you can look in the book and you'll see the footnotes they're all going to either off already or they're going to be off within two or three years it's cheaper and it secures their data centers and they don't have to worry about war and somebody blowing up the oil pipelines now they're off the Energy's off the utilities are often now transport now today only two-and-a-half percent of the vehicles in the world are electric vehicles but Bloomberg business and other studies we have in the book in the last 12 months here's the projection and the transport industry that I work with they're projecting this internally by 2023 electric vehicles will be competitive without a subsidy to internal impression vehicles by 2020 seven or eight they'll be cheaper I was four weeks ago in Chicago my hometown we they brought in they have an annual meeting of all the chief technology officers that control the power trains of all the transport companies in the world and we laid out this narrative they already knew if they were doing the parts they just didn't see how it fit in the big framework by 2028 20 percent of all the annual vehicle sales will be v's it's cheaper now let's go to the real world Volkswagen the largest manufacturer of vehicles in the world in June they announced that the last internal combustion platform ever will be I think it's around 2027 it's in long last one announced they have just committed 80 billion euros one company to move on electric vehicles they say they'll put out 22 million one-quarter of all production annual sales by 28 they just joined what Bechtel and they're putting in thirty five thousand charging stations in the next four years across Europe BMW Daimler they're doing the same and there's some real innovations for example BMW is got an electric vehicle that will use no rare earths everyone's worried about the rare earths they're not going to use them they already have the batteries they get 450 mile kilometres before Philip and let me go on a just a bit of a tangent here for just a second everyone's worried about all of the earth we'll still have to use we are going to eliminate with car sharing services and the transport companies I work with know this we have 1.3 billion vehicles in the world making and selling vehicles has been the the biggest single contributor to extracting the planet's resources the metal the rubber it goes on and on our studies in the transport industry show us we are moving to autonomous electric fuel cell vehicles and they will be shared instead of one person one hour a day it'll be four people all the time with algorithm governments taken to where they have to go and packaging and the auto companies are going to keep the vehicles and then on a provider user network you're going to use them and because they're the solar and wind electricity the energy will be near zero marginal cost the bodies of these automobiles they're already working on it in the auto industry all the companies will be fabricated 3d printed recycled material cheaper alright and lighter so here's where this goes we consume 90 million so let me just say we're gonna eliminate 80% of the vehicles with car sharing so we're gonna only end up with 200 million that is a huge saving of the planet's resources correct and so this is going to happen within the next 20 years 25 at the outside we consume 90 million barrels of oil a day in the world 93 million 2/3 of it goes to transport by 2028 the inflection point you follow me the market is speaking and the market didn't do this alone let me tell you what did this government the European Union put in a twenty 2020 formula in 2007 four mandates I was privileged to do the resolution for the Parliament Chancellor Merkel and the Commission did it for the Commission and we came to get others our quotas were higher of course but they came in with a 20-20-20 formula and the real big 20 was 20 percent renewable energy mandate states can give premiums if you set up a co-op and will give you premium for sending your energy back what this did is it created innovation all sorts of cooperatives forms and they got the technology cost down down down down then Premier Li President Xi Premier Li this was just serendipitous Premier Li announced in his biography when he came into office he had read the third Industrial Revolution the book and he instructed the National Development Li formed Commission and the State Council move on the narratives I'm talking to you about tonight they moved so quick I've done four official visits working with the various leadership 12 weeks after the first visit they announced 80-some billion dollars to completely digitize the state grid that's the biggest grid and they drop the cost of solar and wind even more so it's even cheaper and now we don't even need subsidies fossil fuels and nuclear are still getting billions of dollars of subsidies a year so it's the government that did it but now the market is speaking 11 trillion dollars have now come out of the fossil fuel complex in four years does that sound like a stampede to you at first it was just universities and little foundations there was ESG environment science components but then what happened is this the pension funds roared into the game now Karl Marx would probably be flipping his grave about what I'm telling you because he would never have understood this you know who the capitalists are in the world they don't even know it in fact almost no one knows it the biggest pool of capital in the world today is the 41 trillion dollars of workers pension funds that's their deferred savings invested on their behalf for retirement how many knew this 41 trillion astounding in it they just don't know that they're a class they don't but they're now finding out hold on a minute is the public pension funds are divest in quickly London New York Berlin Melbourne all over the world why what happened as we saw what happened in the coal industry in the US when natural gas became cheaper and then solar and wind cheaper than natural gas the whole coal industry went bankrupt in the last five years and guess who suffered they never paid the pensions thousands and thousands of workers there deferred savers he's gone so now the panic buttons in and the public pension funds now and the private pension funds the biggest pool of capital they've tried desperately and they are getting out because they don't want hundreds of millions of working people in this world whose hard irons pensions will be denied that is a really huge crush to the global economy you want to talk about just transitions you want to talk about the working people of the world this is where the rubber hits the road here they're getting out but here's the problem while the invisible hand of the market is a powerful force and the fossil fuel civilization is going to collapse because the cost of solar and wind are continue plunging we know this but the invisible hand doesn't create infrastructure governments do so what's happened is all these trillions of dollars that have come out there sitting there liquid they have nowhere to put their money they're desperate for scaled-up third Industrial Revolution deployment infrastructures big scale that can create millions of jobs and thousands of business opportunities but here's the problem you notice how all the nation states went to the UN last month and there was a an emergency conference by the secretary-general II said we've got to now have a completely new economic plan for the world and it petered out they came back we have 9,000 cities in the world that have signed up for the Global Covenant of Mayors for the climate Paris climate agreement and it's co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg and Merrill South kovitch who I work with who's the Vice President the European Commission in charge of the energy union in smart Europe that we did together so here's the deal if you go to any one of these 9,000 cities and the mayor will show you their ten lead buildings they're very proud they'll show you their 20 hydrogen buses they love them they'll show you their electronic pathways and bike paths they're wonderful they're all pilots they're not scaled so we have trillions and trillions of dollars escaping from the fossil fuel civilization and they're desperate for scale projects you know there's only one scale project in Europe now anybody here from the UK it's the Thames Sanitation tunnel you know to remake the Victorian sanitation of London's the only one in the EU why is this happening all of our Democratic nominees in the US for president they have come up with green New Deal's correct but there are a romantic play back to the FDR days and all of their green New Deal's say we'll have a program here a program here none of them have this narrative of putting together the infrastructure just we'll throw some money into the EBS over here and some retrofitting over here the federal government will deploy it and finance it that's okay if you were in a centralised Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure where the national governments were vertically integrated to control so any FDR's day they'd put in the big dams they hired millions of people that's not the way it happens anymore at the end of the first day with the Chancellor she said to me we'll have the third Industrial Revolution and I like this for Germany and I said well why do you like it she says German Jeremy you got to understand Germany when you talk to me about a distributed transparent laterally scaled infrastructure across Germany we are a federal republic our 16 regions run their economies and infrastructure the national government creates the codes the regulations the standards the incentives and the carrots and the sticks and the alignment that's it but now every community has to do this in my country even those that those Democratic candidates are saying the Federalists and the federal that they must know that 95% of the infrastructure in the United States is controlled by the states but there's never a single statement about it in any of their green New Deal's the reason it has to be this way and we found this out in the EU in 2017 I joined Maris F grits a vice president and Markkula the president of the regions there's 350 regions in Europe they optionally also control their infrastructures to a good extent so your country France and all the other countries give money to the EU then the EU gives it back to the regions and they have to build out the infrastructure the basis of why we do this is something called the subsidiarity principle how many have ever heard of it here in Europe it's the basic heart of the Rome treaty for EU and most people have never heard of it and what this says is that all power God already delegated by the nation-state to the EU must stay with the local regions because power starts there's a little like Gandhi's concentric circles Gandhi said every region should be self-sufficient in what they need they then can go out in larger circles and connect he didn't have the technology though to do it so in the EU we announced smart Europe and this means that every region in Europe has to scale up this infrastructure how many know of the work we've done in Hawk de France okay so president president pecheur all when it was north tackle a came to our global group and said will you do a plan for us we're the oldest industrial region in France were the coal mining region where the Rust Belt were still big but we're hurting the kids and leaving and I said I turned him down I said we won't do it because some Minister will create another pilot program and we're heading into a climate extinction event and we're sitting here playing while the earth is burning I said however if you want to go back to the region and get every day local Chamber of Commerce every trade union every University in high school every civil society organisation and are all on the same page and we'll do this together come back I never thought he would to frankly here's a pretty tenacious guy he came back and he said we've done it and I said we still won't do this for you but I'll tell you what we will do we want you to set up a peer assembly of thousands of people indirectly contributing their ideas and three hundred people on this peer assembly to work with the government you decide who's on the assembly across all of the cohorts and generations like a grand jury for a money R and we'll work with them and they create the roadmap based on this construction side but customized to their needs their children their grandchildren focus group stakeholder groups their total BS well we did it the Pierce Emily's created the roadmaps and then they're in a six year now twenty-three cities in the Rotterdam to the Hague the petrochemical complex we've done it there they've done it and same with Luxembourg now are they scaling up yet not yet but in the sixth year they have 1200 projects thousands of people employed they've retrained the grandchildren and the combining region I've been there many times they're solarizing retrofitting and making more money they're not yet at scale that they have trench ten major projects what do we need now Green Bank's France has to create a National Green Bank every region in France has to create a green bank issue green bonds the pension funds the family funds the institutional funds will come to your table you do not have to beg give them the infrastructure the reason we need peer assemblies this isn't all about technology many of you know I'm not a Silicon Valley utopian I've been critical of a lot of technologies we started the GMO debate in 1980 out of that my office technology can enable but you need something else in this case we need new government's every community is now in a disaster mode every community the world is affected now by disasters in a disaster local government and national government can't do it alone when there's a disaster I've only been in one hurricane that's not a really bad one but bad not too bad in a disaster the whole community comes out the government calls on the community and the NGOs come out and the Chamber's come out and then labor people come out and the churches and masses synagogues come out and they're engaged in real fraternity and solidarity this is where the empathic impulse in our neural circuitry which is our strong suit this is where we join each other and risk ourselves to help our fellow human beings these are ad hoc peer assemblies they just formed but what's happening is climate change is now affecting every community all the time so now after there's an event they get together now and prepare on how they adjust to the next event it's kind of like pragmatist science do we and that is an event adapt prepare an event adapt prepare so they're starting to form these peer assemblies but now they have to be formal because governments come and go but these peer assemblies need to be here across generation lines grandparents parents college students and babies in high school all right this is the key for disaster resilience there is no central government that's going to be able to handle the imagina - dove what's coming to you in this room this is the rewilding of the planet and if governments don't set up these peer assemblies and they have to be ongoing people are going to feel more abandoned every time as a clam on climate event they're gonna feel alone and they're gonna get scared and they're gonna be prey to all sorts of weird movements this is the way we create the solidarity as a social creature and every community has to be responsible for its biosphere 19 kilometres now let me go to the president of your country for a minute president met crawlin and I'm not talking about anything else except this one incident president Makran a few weeks ago was the only world leader so I give him credit for this who stood stood up and said to Brazil my god stop the fires in the Amazon never stop this is the lungs of the planet these forests are absorbing the co2 emissions this is all of us now that are affected what the president did and I think he must have intuitively understood it as all of you do because the younger generation that in a that we never were a geopolitical world with all these borders in passive territory and in nature the biosphere doesn't or honor borders the Sun the wind the rhythms of nature so what he was saying is he was thinking as in terms of biosphere consciousness wasn't he then the president of Brazil this is our sovereign territory geopolitics this is the in and yang of an old worldview in a new in a geopolitical world every nation is sovereign every citizen is sovereign and we all compete for scarce resources in a zero-sum game in our nations on our behalf do this same thing I don't have to remind you you fought two world wars with Germany for coal in the world Valley oil in the Bosphorus millions of people have died and they're dying in Syria too this evening that's why we militarized the world do we need to militarize the world when everybody is producing Sun and wind and sharing some loves and surpluses with each other never this is a change from geopolitics to Basra consciousness but here's what President Makran could have said taking it one more step why are they burning those trees in the Amazon why they're burning them for six inches of topsoil to graze a cow for the beef on your plate in France and everywhere else around the world nobody wanted to take that step my wife and I are animal rights activists we love cows but there's 1.3 billion cows in the world they take up 27% of the ice-free land mass the methane they produces 23 Grymes more powerful more per molecule than co2 and the nitrous oxide from their poop is 288 times more powerful but that's only the beginning of the story here's where we start to learn a new way of living do you know that 60% of the topsoil in the world now is left that's it it takes a thousand years to create a topsoil so here's the thing half the agricultural world were agricultural land in the world today half of it it's feed grain for cattle and then a little bit for others and they are not efficient legumes with the same protein you use 1/10 of the acreage we're not going to have any choice here it isn't Oh take don't take my beef away we're going to have to buy time to free up that half of the agricultural land that's still left to grow legumes and other plants that are more efficient and change our diet if we can't even change our diet to be more healthy we're not going to make it that's only one change of thousands of change but the good thing is we start to learn to live within the rhythms of the earth when we have solar and wind we're conscious every day are the rhythms of the earth and how it comes and goes and we share it with others so I'm gonna leave you with this with this thought I don't think it's just about the technology I'm here at Sai PO I don't think it's just about the market the invisible hand even though it's a really good thing this is happening that the fossil fuel civilization is collapsing but I'm going to tell you two things one if we don't put in this new infrastructure in the next 10 years we're gonna have an abyss because the old infrastructure is collapsing so I am only guardedly hopeful because I remember I said that infrastructure transitions also change your worldviews your temples spatial orientation if you look at forge or hunter societies 180 thousand years we lived in them their empathy very small infrastructures they were bands of 150 tribes and they only had blood tie empathy ancestral worship mythological consciousness when we go to the big huge agricultural civilizations with big irrigation systems like Sumer the Indus Valley of India and China were bringing thousands of people together then beyond blood ties that was really scary so how did they integrate them into this infrastructure the great religions formed then I'm Jewish all Jews started to think of Jews as a figure to family all right in first century Rome all Christians kissed each other on the face that was weird they thought of themselves as a figurative family so empathy extended to the infrastructures and the collectivities so we could empathize what broader people in the social dynamic let me just skip all the way up to the 19th century the first Industrial Revolution we had another skip up in empathy everyone in France started to have common education common seller patience common historical marks much of its that fictional because you had 1200 languages here in the 12th century there was no France on that 11th century that we know of and what happens is when you get to nation-states everyone starts to think as a citizen and that everyone in their state is part of their family so French people will go to war for the rest of their family right but they certainly won't reach out to the Germans the Italian to someone else when we go now to the streets out here and started my talk this younger generation in this room you are moving empathy which started with mythological consciousness theological conscious ideological consciousness in the global air psychological consciousness you're the first generation of bands for consciousness we're now connecting the world as a collectivity and all of its distributed diversity and we have a generation in this room who's starting to see themselves as an endangered species fellow creatures as part of our evolutionary heritage and the earth we live in as a common habitat there had been dark periods in history where all of these evolutionary changes in empathy have collapsed but the good part of this for me is it nonetheless there's an evolution here with all the bad kinds that shows that we're capable because we're the most social creature we have the biggest neocortex we're soft wired for neural in our neural circuitry from empathy we could get there that's our strong suit we now have biosphere consciousness we now know everything we do affects everyone else that's the cruel lesson of climate change but it's the silver lining so I'm guardedly hopeful that we can move forward and my last message is disciple I know sigh Paul you young people have to step to the floor and get this done yes I want you to be out in the streets with side pole posters when there are student strikes I'm sure you are but also and I want you to keep the pressure on I want you to be militant nonviolent and keep the pressure on now we have millions I'm going to tell you in a few years we're going to have tens of millions and in ten years I'll bet you we have hundreds of millions of young why because they're gonna see the impacts of climate change it's frightening I know it's terrifying we have 10 year-olds coming home and asking their mom and dad will I grow up will I have children we have to now put that aside and keep it on our lens and now we have to be fearless we have to be resilient and I want everybody here inside Paul who's being trained in the technological lives and hopefully the social arts you need to not only be on the streets but you have to go back to your communities you have to be there in these peer assemblies you have to run for political office you have to create those smart cooperative SMEs you have to be involved in the civil society you have to be there all with your fellow if you will comrades in these communities and you have to create the cooperatives in the infrastructure to make this happen we're never going to do it any other way and I will say this people say especially parents can we do this in time in the book we looked at this seriously because we we I don't want anyone to be misled all right so we put in the first Industrial Revolution in the United States between 1860 and 1890 the juvenile infrastructure the Transcontinental railroads the transcontinental telegraph the homesteading acts were ceded land to millions of people for their semipermeable membranes their habitats and their growing their food we put in the land-grant universities so we could train the generation we did it all the juvenile infrastructure between 1860 and 1890 20 more years to maturity we did the Second Industrial Revolution the United States in the 20th century in 25 years from 1908 when Henry Ford put out the Model T to 1932 then the depression in war and then we built the mature infrastructure with the interstate highway systems in the 1950s and 60s if we could do the first one in 30 years and the second one in 25 because it built off the first one we can do the third one in 20 be with me 10 years for a juvenile infrastructure and we've laid out the engineering possibilities the technology the cost another 8 or 9 years to get us zero-carbon not-not-not net zero zero it's going to require the human race and this is the this is probably the last opportunity between you and your children and your grandchildren I know it's hard for you to accept the fact that after two hundred thousand years you've been caught in this pivotal moment in it's places like sight pole where you've got to dedicate the rest of the life with the expertise you have to going back and working in appeared assemblies in the regions of France to make this happen if not you who and if not now when so you want to be able to look your grandchildren in the eyes and 80 years from now it's going to be quite different it's going to be tough but you can at least say what you did and hopefully we have an opportunity now to begin again on this planet to find our proper stewarding role with the rest of the creatures who deserve their moment here to and to learn to live lightly on this earth the only thing I can tell you at 74 everything gets more challenging to me except one thing this life this thing called life is so mysterious we don't see it anywhere in the universe we've taken it for granted now that we're endangered we're starting to appreciate ourselves we need to take that empathic response in our neural circuitry and build this out and began to learn in a different way to live in a different way and begin to see our fellow creatures as part of our family and - we heal the planet and hopefully to live in a world that although it's rewilding will allow us to be here and continue our sojourn with many of our fellow creatures psycho is a place to start this and I'm counting on all of you in this room to lead this in France good night [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] who wants to be first okay thank you so there's some excellent confidence so excuse me as my saundra so agitated tonight it so alarmist maybe possibly even pessimistic but let me say this you have mentioned in great detail and with very convincing arguments what we can do to change the course of this destructive talk we've set ourselves upon but one last lesson remains in terms of the collapse of the fossil fuel industry how do you convince that elusive minority that sits at the top of earthly oil derrick every oil date every shale gas crowd the hostile fuel industry itself could change I got it thank you first of all I don't think I've been an activist for 45 years I've never been an optimist or a pessimist they don't do you any good if you're an optimist you're waiting around for the good news and if you're a pessimist you're waiting around for the bad news it's a self-fulfilling prophecy on the pessimist side by the way it really is and the optimists are always disappointed what we need to be is hopeful and but then at the same time not naive what I'm saying to you is I I know that the fossil fuel civilization is collapsing it could be a little earlier a little later but it's around the next 10 years the real issue here is not that the real issue is do we have the stamina I hope this doesn't hurt anyone's feelings we have a digital generation here your globally connected you know the technology will you have the attention span because the agent resilience requires a huge amount of fearless behavior year-in year-out a generation after generation you cannot be disappointed if it doesn't work for you in the first year you keep the pressure on and you have to understand what Tom Payne said it was a great American revolutionary then he came over to France and got I think you kicked him out of here and he went to New England Tom Paine said something very good he said every generation must be free to remake the world anew and not be tethered by the ancestors in the grave you're gonna have to in some way start over and what I'm saying to you is that this is tough it isn't just about coming up with some new engineering here at SCI Paul it's about how you in day in and day out become an activist in your career and work when it really looks dark when it looks like nothing's happening where there's so many defeats you have to keep moving because climate change is going to test the human race like no other moment in history that's my concern be tough be fearless be resilient don't worry about setbacks and don't worry about the fossil fuel industry it's going worry about the kind of world you can create in your communities with the technology and with the Sociology and with the new kinds of governance that's what you got to do is you got to stay tough yes thank you very much I have a question on centralization versus decentralization issue sorry centralization versus decentralization distributed not decentralize okay so if sure we don't want a few vertically integrated companies to capture all the network externalities but don't we need some form of central authority to foster big projects like space exploration or nuclear engineering well all these space exploration on the side we now have to deal with our planet I don't know how many people here but I really don't think we should be spending a lot of our money and resources to go to space where there's nothing up there that's going to help us save life here or there that's an escape route I'll spend a moment on nuclear power I usually don't like to because it's so gone as a technology nuclear power makes up 20% of the energy of the planet alright the expense of nuclear power plants it's a hundred and twelve dollars per megawatt hour solar and wind are in the 29 to 39 they're all stranded assets the moment you put them up you'll never amortize these plants I think a little over 40% of the freshwater in France is going to cool nuclear reactors this is a big problem did you know that you know I think it's about 40% it's a lot here's the problem when the water goes in it comes out heated and it's dehydrating your lakes and streams that are already facing drought and agricultural losses it's even worse now with climate change the water is too hot before it goes in and you can't use it so every summer what happened last summer in southern France you had to shut down the nuclear reactors because the water and the relates and rivers were too warm because of climate change and you couldn't use them this is going to happen every year more and more these plants will be stranded also because the water is too hot and that water then is undermining the ecosystems this is a this is a absurd to be building nuclear power plants 20th century centralized power plants with all those that cost when we have solar and wind cheaper and everybody can do it and we can share it across France and across Europe someone else yes right here is this lady here just shout [Music] well we're very clear in the European Commission level and that's what the books about national governments cannot do this alone they won't they're not the Regents already are in my country although president Trump is trying to push back on all of it you may not know this that as I said the states control their infrastructure 29 of our 50 states have renewable energy portfolio standards and a given premium to go back to the grid the US Conference of Mayors which represents 91 percent of the GDP in the country in June at their annual conference called for a climate emergency and a green new deal and cities from Los Angeles to New York have moved for a green new deal so it's the regional level for you I know you're French all right I know there's a lot of French students here and you have a centralized government it's been trying to give more power of the region's you got to move quicker but the regions have power under the EU your government and France gives the money to the EU that gives it to the regions the regions and where that's going to happen because when a world is rewilding there's no central authority that can actually have the ability to actually handle every single locality that's our having to address climate events the localities have to do that now the national government there is one thing they can do they can help set up the national power grid Germany just announced they're going to put an entire power grid underground in four years from north to south so you can get solar and wind in the north which has a lot of open land and send it to the urban areas in the south so when it comes to the national power grids there despite their the backbone just like the interstate highway systems were the backbone for the Second Industrial Revolution all right so there's some things they can do but please do not think that any central government is going to do this it's all of you in your communities they're going to have to do this for generations or it'll never happen everyone has to be responsible for their 19 kilometers of the biosphere that's the only way this is going to happen the national governments can create some alignments and codes some standards which are essential some carrots and sticks so they play a role the primary role is going to be back in your communities someone else yes up there thank you very much for the talk my question is about the issue of inequality so we have seen now in the first stages of this transition some of the companies that have emerged from the new technological developments are characterized by like high degree of inequality like we can see for example companies like Facebook or Amazon or so on there are sort of polarizing incomes let's say so do you think this is an issue so how should we deal with it and there should be like a automatic regulation as the system evolves there will be government regulation for that a mix of both Thanks well while we have opportunity here to lateral eyes the world with cooperatives in and all of this the darknets pretty impressive it's half the battle how do we ensure network neutrality when everyone in the world is connected how do we ensure governments don't prolong this Internet of Things so that they can intervene in other countries political doings they're already doing that how do we ensure the big Internet companies and telecom companies don't commodify our data sell it to third parties and destroy our personal agency how do we protect privacy how do we prevent malware and syrus of cyber terrorism that we spend half of every day on the darknet the way to deal with the darknet is to be able to do two things one the more redundant and distributed the system the less vulnerable it is to the darknet and that is if there's a cyber terrorist attack or a climate event you're able to go off these continental grids this is already emerging this is not theoretical and go back and decentralized you can move from a distributed grid to a decentralized grid in micro grids and keep operating when there's a real bad thing that's happening so the more distributed the system the less vulnerable you are then to there's other things in the book and this is what I've devoted a lot of my life to we don't want to see the privatization in the infrastructure we don't want Google and Facebook to be able to control the infrastructure of a smart world deal it's creepy totally creepy right so what happened in 1980 when Thatcher and Reagan came in and they fell in love with the neoliberal synthesis of capitalism out of the University of Chicago in Austria they said well you know government's only infrastructure they're bureaucratic there's no competition they're lethargic if we privatize it we'd have the old entrepreneurial spirit well what really happened is the Second Industrial Revolution at that time was starting to peak and there was not much market left and they saw a plumbing infrastructure everybody needs you can't escape the roads the water systems but what we found when you privatize infrastructure in private corporate hands they strip the assets if the water system needs changing because there's lead in it or because the drainage is overflowing with a climate event you think they're gonna put all that money into it if they if they can get away with it do you think they're going to improve a prison that becomes privatized under their control to make it a better environment they don't do it I'm in favor of every community controlling its infrastructure the water systems the power the energy the mobility and logistics in Commons I'm in favor of cooperatives emerging which is still one of the outside of the capitalist system I don't know if you know this cooperatives are massive there's several billion people the largest bank in France is a cooperative housing cooperatives farming cooperatives and you know what not a single business school ever mentions cooperatives they're massive I like co-operators they're democratic the revenue stays in the community so I like Commons that are controlled by the community so you in sandwich you decide in your community how much data when can I opt in and out what is acceptable what threatens our ability to have agency what things when we say no to it's got to be decided in local communities by people who know each other all over the world that's the way we deal with us okay way in the back up there ya go yeah she'll you gotta be very well well let's try one first and the second one this is okay and the second one actually um I was just wondering words maybe the first one first okay there are unbelievable mmm high-tech cooperatives that are distributed around the world have you ever heard of Monta Grande in Spain ample these are massive cooperatives they're huge they are much more powerful than most a lot of the industries in Spain they've been around 30 years and they are democratically controlled there's so many types of cooperatives if you go to France your credit agricole that's a co-operative bank it's the biggest bank in France correct I could go in endlessly the reason you don't know this is because this is the best kept secret in the world that cooperatives are responsible for the lives of maybe a billion and a half two billion people but the business schools don't want to touch it they're democratic they stay in the community no profits to a third party so look up on Google the history of cooperatives and where they stand now you'll be shocked at what you were never taught at the University okay you had one it's got it let me go to someone else wait down here okay we forgive you so what we've done this hits home my dad was the third convertor plastic bags in the world in 1951 or two he had a small company of ten people they didn't know about climate change but what's interesting about his company this little teeny company it went down in the great recession because the price of oil went up the price of plastic went up the recession hit and no one needed packaging and we went out of business in 50 years he didn't know back then none of us knew this what's happened what we've what's happening now is we're working with the chemist and the geneticist and in honty France for example with his beautiful new tech part its state-of-the-art and we have a cooperatives they're made up of I didn't do this they did these companies they put together chemists and biologists and then working together to get biological substitutes for petrochemical products for lubricants for sufferings for aviation fuel for cement for construction for packaging and they're bringing out products already really already so what's happened this isn't death difficult it's just no one's paid attention to it the hard to abate sectors are the most difficult here's what just happened today just announced in the news you can google it one of the biggest steel producing plants in America in Colorado it built out the entire West was steel it's been around since 1870 they just announced that they have just invested in massive solar around the entire area of the building and 95% of the steel production will be solar and wind it's zero marginal cost they're doing it night now in the field this is all the things that are happening that's pretty good so I what I'm saying is I agree with you that we're going to have to find substitutes and everyone's on it why the market the market is speaking here yeah gonna take someone younger here where are we this young man over here well you know I mentioned several examples in my talk the planet can't sustain the kind of runaway growth that we have now I think we're the scientists tell us we're living we're living as if we are in one and a half to two planets we only have one so remember I mentioned the beef situation you know and that we have to take half our agricultural land and move it from feed grain to legumes that's just one thing there's so many ways to lower the sustainability and actually have a better quality of life all right we need to share everything we have so for example this is just a small thing but it's a big thing parents today in your generation little older with children babies they're in these toys sharing networks now all over the world and they go up and they have a one-time entrance fee and then they can get any toy by age group to their child all right now why is this interesting before this a parent would say to their seven-year-old daughter who always believed Santa Claus being the guest she said they would say we bought this toy from you this isn't Christmas we're giving this to you this is your property this is not your brothers toy this is not your sister's toy this is your toy you're responsible for taking care of it the child is learning property but you know what she's really learning aha I heard what mom and dad said this isn't my brothers and sisters toy mine power negotiation they'll never use it unless I get something bad there's nothing wrong with property in some ways but now these these new parents are going up and subscribing to sharing websites they bring the toy home and this isn't scripted they're just saying you there's a little seven-year-old up another little child had this toy by the way they clean them don't worry about it another little try played with his toy and the other little girl really loved it she had a good time with it she took really good care of it because she knew one day you'd want to play with a toy so you'll want to get good care of it because one day another child will want to play with a toy the child is learning the toy is not property it's not possession it's not territory it's not power it's an experience that then let others to share so not being scripted we've got parents all over the world who are coming to a more sustainable lifestyle share everything nothing has to be put away forever or set down into the landfill these are the normal day-to-day things that we don't think about they change our consciousness and I see some of the mothers and fathers here and shaking their hand has yeah they have to deal with all those toys that are used for two days and then they end up in the basement for the next 20 years okay one more okay two more cuz you seem to be anxious there are you're wearing me out to orphans go ahead yeah two-thirds of the solar and wind energy generated last year came from the developing world not the developed world is that shock you here's why we learned a lesson we were blinded it turns out in the developing world their liability is their asset what do I mean the liabilities they don't have any infrastructure therefore they can build it from scratch there's no special interest and they can create brand new codes and standards what we've learned in Europe believe me in China is specially in Europe when you have the old Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure with code standards and regulations for that special interests that guarded they block us from getting to the new codes and standards and building out the new infrastructure because of the special interest so what we found in sub-saharan Africa and India was very interesting co-operators are forming and mostly by women let me explain something about this when you look a lot of the world a billion people have no no light at all no electricity where you find no electricity you find very deep patriarchal family units where the women are the slaves the children of the slaves because they control they have to deal with the energy that maintains that way of life we've we've never had a history of this but what I think freed women in the West was electricity it's a piece from an anthropological point of view because they had to tend the hearth they were they were yoked to the hearth so they only went through third grade when electricity came in they could then go to school and go beyond third grade and go beyond high school and with electricity we went to not just upper-body strength skills but emotional and mental skills to be a clerk or an accountant or whatever and when women did that they became more independent and they had less babies in this planet they went in just to the rebirth of one-to-one so in the developing world where there are eight or nine kids because the father always wants someone on hand if somebody doesn't make it I'll show you very very enslaved women and children so it's no accident that the women are calling out creating these electricity operas and it's so simple they're they're going into villages with 200 or so Hut's in sub-saharan Africa and they're giving each Hut a one solar panel for the roof at least one smartphone least the solar panel gives you light I cannot tell you what that means to people light first of all you can then study for school the cellphone is important because the solar panel powers the phone so you don't have to walk for two weeks to get power you're right there then once a month you put a dollar or whatever it is to the credit union and you pay it on and that's less than the cost of the kerosene that's killing you in the hut they can now wire up 200 huts in a small village with a little battery in a cement container for $2,500 so this is what's really interesting you remember when that power went out in India a few years ago 750 million people in the dark and panic it shouldn't smile but in these villages where there were electricity out in the rural areas they were fine they're churning machines are working their fans were working all of their technology was working because they were distributing they weren't in a central grid interesting huh that's Christian this one where is he human it better be good it's the last one and it better not be too tough and and thank you answer solar energy but those are intermittent energy we cannot control them except through batteries which are not yet invented and batteries actually need those very rare minerals who's like exploitation is extremely polluting and creates dependence is like among countries so how can you actually solve this issue graduates that question and we've got a section in the book on it you know that the cost of batteries you want to hear this one seventy five percent in the last three years seventy five percent they are really cheap now we're putting it in everywhere and when it comes to the materials we do use materials of the earth but now as we move into the third Industrial Revolution as I said to this gentleman we are in a fast track all over the world bringing together chemists and biologists and engineers to have biological alternatives to petrochemical products we're even doing with our food we're creating meatless burgers made out of cell tissue alright and that's okay because you're not using as much land so what you have to know is we're pretty ingenious the human race and we're on the move to do this and so this is happening now the other thing is the national gas industry says well you need us as backup because the Sun isn't always shining and the wind isn't always blowing no we don't because there's so much solar and wind coming into the grid number one that we don't even we may use those plants gas plants once in a while but they're still not advertising out more importantly the Sun tends to go up into the grid at high noon and that's when you need most of the electricity the wind tends to come at night so it's a good balance more important the reason we don't need these other fuels is backup power plants the reason is that we are digitizing the grid so that we're using algorithm governance all most of your homes have smart meters that's a capable of giving you information back and forth to the grid so what utilities are doing they're starting to work with their consumers and they're aggregating them so that consumers can determine what time to use certain energies and not use others given the price on and the algorithm governance can actually weigh all of that so they keep a very good peak in base law it's the algorithms and data that does that but once everyone I'm sure most of your homes have advanced meters that's sending that information so the data again and the analytics allow them to smooth out the grid whenever they need to have it next the charging stations and the Eevee's we're moving to massive EVs by 2028 boys clothing now that's fine okay all right so what's happening now is electric vehicles are the storage because they're going to be millions and millions of them in a few years and when they're parked they're already doing this when they're parked your computer is programmed so if the electricity grid renewable energy and its need some power you send your part of your electricity back and you get paid good night everybody [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Sciences Po

Views: 46,196

Rating: 4.8345642 out of 5

Keywords: Sciences Po, University, étudiants, Jeremy Rifkin, American, economic

Id: 11LJBsTugWo

Length: 107min 13sec (6433 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020