 Hey, welcome all. How many of you have ever been to Las Vegas? A couple of you. This is like the airplane going to Las Vegas and an hour and a half from now it'll be like the airplane coming back because this isn't an intense talk. And yet I think it's important. This is the issue I care most about which is Earth's natural environment, other species, the ecology of our planet. And I am not presenting these facts to scare people. I could have done another presentation with that. This is the best middle case of the science on lots of different things. I figured it out. This is the third out of five lectures. Saturday we'll be combining everything into the story of our current circumstances on the global economy and what are the possible futures and what are the possible interventions. And then next Tuesday, it will be what to do at various scales. So these are probably the two most important talks but I think it's really essential to understand the patient before we go to prescriptions or possibilities. And that's why I'm taking a long time talking about human behavior, which we talked about last week, energy, technology, money and the economy. And now I'm going to talk about pollution and the human impact on the natural world. So here's going to be the outline for today. I'm gonna do some basic ecological terms. My work on this over the last 20 years has parsed human environmental impact into three basic categories. One is the metabolism of our energy use and that has an impact on climate and oceans. The other is everything else, which is what do we do with the energy? And then there's environmental impact from that. And then the third is things that are downstream of the carbon pulse that we don't think of now that once we have less energy there will be environmental consequences of that. So those are the three categories that I'm gonna talk about. And then some closing comments. Okay, so just some basics. An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all organisms living in a particular area. It's the whole picture, including the organism's community, then their habitat. And this rhymes with some of the things we've been learning in the morning sessions. Ecosystem services are things that are free for humans. The benefits that are provided by the trees and the river and the natural systems of earth that we don't include in the prices of our economic system. I talk about energy blindness that we don't realize the economic benefits we get from fossil hydrocarbons that we're pulling out of the ground only at the cost of extraction. But we're really ecology blind as well because we pay nothing for the oxygen that the trees give off or the happiness we get when we hear a hawk, cuckoo in Oroville and those other things. Of course, there's a negative effect if the hawk, cuckoo is at 5 a.m. and wakes you up. A couple more terms. Anthropogenic means human caused of human origin. And many of these slides are just cut and pasted from some of my college lectures. And for those of you that weren't at my first lecture, I'm directing this towards the youth link, 20 something year olds. And that's kind of the tenor that I'm using it in. Anthropogenic as opposed to anthropocentric which is viewing solutions, viewing your values, viewing the world from only a human perspective and not from other creatures. Again, this gets back to the me versus we that we're headed to in our morning discussions. By the way, feel free to take pictures of these. But if you want the actual slide deck, I'm sharing that with everyone and just give your email address to Namu after and I'll send you the whole, all of them. I realized today that with the five lectures total, it's gonna be around 650 slides, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. Okay, another concept in ecology is carrying capacity, which is the number of organisms or crops or bugs or people that a region can support without environmental degradation. Overshoot is a word when the population's demand on the ecosystem exceeds the capacity of the ecosystem to regenerate and absorb the wastes. So you can have a carrying capacity that declines over time and you can overshoot that carrying capacity. Right now, we are using resources on Earth. Basically, we need 1.8, 1.7 planets of Earth to regenerate the resources we have, but it's really much worse than that because that doesn't include fossil fuels. We talk about extinctions and I'm gonna talk about that in a little bit. There's a difference between an animal or a creature going extinct and something called ecological extinction, which is those species, there's a population of them that still exists, but it's too small to play an ecological role in its ecosystem that it did before. This is a picture of passenger pigeons in the United States, which went extinct. There were many billions of them and people shot them for fun and it was in the morning, you would see a flock go over your head and it would be evening and the flock would still be flying and it would darken the skies, there were that many of them, billions of them. That was in the 19th century. Externality is a word that is, can be a positive or a negative. Usually in environmental contest, it's a negative. It's the impact of something that's not intended or included in the price, shown here is growing corn for ethanol in the Midwest, USA, and then there are nitrogen blooms in the Gulf of Mexico that cause fish to not have oxygen and such. It's an externality. Climate change is an externality of the human economic system. We're not paying for it for the most part. We grow crops and the fossil agriculture system has massively improved the productivity from pre-industrial systems and we add nitrogen fertilizer which is created from natural gas. There's phosphorus which comes from phosphate rock which we mine and it's non-renewable and potassium the same thing. So we're adding vast amounts of chemicals to the industrial agricultural system. We can and Vandana Shiva who lives in the north of India is a good friend of mine and she's advocating for growing food without fossil inputs and we can do that. The challenge is we need a lot more labor and time to do that. So fossil industry saves time and increases profits but it doesn't necessarily give us nutritious food because sometimes the micronutrients are not included and it's just grows mass amounts of corn, et cetera. So I think you wanted to say that there are too much of these that get run off into the streams and end up in the ocean and they have algal blooms. Do you want to say anything more than that? Just talk the condition, eating food that's at the beginning, baby's born, et cetera, et cetera. One of the challenges with presentations like this is every slide really could be a half hour slide and he's right, I can't cover everything. So maybe in the Q&A if we want to talk about the impact of our agricultural system on our health, we could do that because at least in the West and I think we talked about processed food the other day and one of the reasons that food is processed is a lot of the food in my country is grown in California and people don't live in California. So you have to ship it or put it on a train or something like that and if it was all fresh with no preservatives, it would spoil. So one of the reasons we do process food is for convenience and profits and it hijacks our evolutionary taste buds. Do you want to say something more? Yeah. Okay, so feedbacks. Who knows what positive and negative feedbacks are? Yes, sir. Oh, Vichesh. Vicious to cycle or virtuous cycle? Yeah. So some set of effects boosts back on itself causing it to get worse and worse and worse or better and better and better. Right, so here's where we start and if a positive feedback, it keeps going up and up and up in response to something. You do something in response to something and your response makes it worse. Negative feedback would be if you overspend on something and your bank account runs low, you then can no longer spend as one example. So we're in India and I just found this image yesterday. Can you think with respect to climate change what a positive feedback would be in India? Anyone have an idea? Growing trees would actually make the climate better because it would cool places. So that wouldn't be a positive feedback but you're in the same realm. Yes, deforestation, right. So if we have to expand economic growth and we take down forests, that would be less forest cover and that would mean warmer temps. But what about some direct response to climate change? Take out them. Less energy consuming ACs? Yes. So electricity consumption in India. You've been in the answer. Electricity consumption just in the last three years from cooling, which is refrigeration and air conditioning increased 21% in the last three years. By 2050, India's electricity demand just from home-based air conditioners will exceed the total electricity consumption of all the countries in Africa today. So as climate warms, we're gonna need more air conditioning and refrigeration requiring more coal, which creates more emissions, which makes the climate warmer. So that's a positive feedback in a negative sort of way. Okay, so those were just some intro concepts that if I refer to feedbacks or ecosystem services, you have some background. Okay, now I will show how this fits into the economic system in the next lecture, but basically the size and scale of the global economy is highly correlated to emissions. In fact, if you knew nothing at all and you took a chart of monoloa CO2 in the atmosphere, it would be 99% correlated with human historical GDP. They're incredibly tightly linked. And the only time there are pauses is when we have a 2009 financial crisis or 2020, and then it resumes higher. So I separate out climate and ocean impacts from the rest of environmental things because these are directly related to the size and scale of the global economy. And as we talked about last week, adding renewable energy so far has added to the whole system. It hasn't reduced coal and natural gas globally. It's just built more of everything. And we'll talk more about that on Saturday. So the carbon cycle, the CO2 emissions from humans enter the atmosphere and their function of the global carbon cycle. And I'm gonna briefly describe the greenhouse effect. Put simply, it's like you sleeping in bed and adding another blanket and adding another blanket. It's a thermal insulating effect on the earth. So what ends up happening is there are 342 watts per square meter of incoming sunlight to the earth. 77 of that immediately gets reflected back in the atmosphere. Another 67 gets absorbed by the clouds in the atmosphere. 30 of that gets reflected back from earth and that is a result of things that have a high albedo or reflectivity like things that are painted white or snow in the north. It reflects light back to space. Blue water in the ocean absorbs light. So it has a low albedo. And so finally, there's 168 left that are absorbed by the planet. So when we talk about human impact on the climate, there's something called a radiative forcing component. And there's CO2 and there's methane and ozone. And there are some things like albedo I just mentioned, but aerosols are recently in the news. Aerosols are from sulfur emissions in burning bunker fuel and global shipping. They're also part of coal burning, et cetera. And they actually, even though you're burning coal, which is a fossil fuel, there is a blocking effect because the sulfates, the little particles go in the sky and they block out the sunlight. So those have actually a cooling effect. I'm gonna talk a little bit about that later. The net effect of all this is the net anthropogenic component of warming from our activities. And that is around, when I made this graph, it was 1.7 watts per square meter. It's now 1.9 watts per square meter. So 1.9 watts versus 168 is not a lot but this has been a stable number for a long time. And so we're adding this thermal forcing to the earth. And the reason that we know it's from fossil fuels is we can look at the isotopes of carbon in the air and a lot of them, they have carbon 12, 13 and 14 isotopes. We can tell what carbon came from the trees that are alive today. And then the old isotopes from coal and gas that are millions or even hundreds of millions of years old, there's a decay function in them so scientists can determine the age of the carbon molecules that are in the atmosphere. That's how we know that the CO2 blanket on earth is largely from ancient carbon that we're pulling out of reservoirs and burning. So earth's energy imbalance is increasing. The absorbed solar radiation by the earth is now a net of 1.9 watts per square meter. And here is another graph tomorrow, no, next Wednesday, I have a podcast coming out with Leon Simons who's a co-author of a paper called Global Warming in the Pipeline with James Hansen and he explains why this is happening. And I'll briefly talk a little bit about it. So it's true that earth has always warmed and cooled even before humans were there. This is the last 400,000 years of CO2. And before pre-industrial times, we were at 280 parts per million and now we're at 425. Global temperature is also radically changed in the past. This is the last 400,000 years. Here's a zero versus today. There were times when we had spikes of six degrees Celsius in a very short time. The Holocene, which I'm gonna show in the middle was a very, very stable period of temperatures when our ancestors evolved and left hunter gathering to become energy surplus gathers, et cetera. Sea level is also very variable over the last 400,000 years. There's been spikes and declines in sea level. In fact, just in the last 20,000 years, sea level has increased over 400 feet and it's still about 100 feet below where the really warm periods in earth were. So this is a truncated, this is that same graph I just showed and this is the last 20,000 years. So 10,000 years ago, we came out of an ice age and this is called the Holocene optimum where this is when seven places around the earth, our great grandcesters stopped hunting and gathering and started agriculture. And that was the fall from grace in my scientific opinion because we started to develop hierarchy and surplus and everything else. Then we found the carbon pulse a couple of hundred years ago, which was also a carbon trap. So we don't know how high the temperature spike is going to go, but a lot of the, if we stopped burning all carbon today, there is a lag of 20, 30, 40, 50 years of the stuff that's already been burned because of ocean circulation and it takes time. It's not instantaneous. So this is kind of a story of humans. Real briefly, emissions have not been emitted equally. Half of the emissions are in the richest 10% of nations historically. However, the big climate agreement in 2015 at the Paris Accords when President Obama was there where we agreed to do things to limit warming to one and a half or two degrees Celsius. Since that time, the global north has actually reduced coal use, but globally we've had an additional 206 gigawatts of coal because the global south is growing and needing coal for air conditioning and economic growth and other things. So now we're seeing the global north is building renewables and more efficient, et cetera. And the global south is expanding coal power quite rapidly. So this is just kind of a graph showing from 1970, month by month, the blue means cooler and the red is warmer than the average temperature in Celsius from 1850 to 1900 baseline. 2023 is here and December is about 1.9 degrees Celsius. So Paris Accords tried to get to one and a half degrees. We're already at 1.9 and I can explain why that is here. So as I said before, fossil fuels are the main drivers of global warming, but sulfur dioxide, which is in shipping acts as a cooling, it blocks out the sun. And my friend Leon did this amazing test that he measured the global oceans and looked at where the shipping was. And a lot of the emissions had to stop in 2020 because there's a global environmental regulation that said no more sulfur because it's bad for people's breathing and it's an environmental pollutant. So we removed sulfur from global shipping. And this shows all the global shipping lanes and he found a massive warming in these places. And this is just now starting to come out in the literature, this is kind of a complicated graph. This is global emissions of sulfur. This is global shipping emissions and you see two sharp drops now down to nothing. Then you see the Northern Hemisphere mid latitude warming which is where all the shipping goes. This is the Southern Hemisphere where there isn't a lot of shipping and there wasn't a lot of warming. And then this is the global oceans, all the oceans together and you have this spike. So this is why my friend Leon and others believe that we're going to have a spike in temperatures in the next six months because El Niño, we've just come out of a La Niña period and El Niño is when the ocean temperatures switch and it changes the weather patterns. And so the El Niño combined with this removal of this sulfur masking might get us to two degrees Celsius already by June of this year. And then we're going to go back down because La Niña will come back but some scientists are saying we'll hit two degrees Celsius by 2040 or 2050 and it might be 2024. So we could spend the whole hour and a half talking about different scenarios but these are historical emissions and our ultimate emissions. If there's no climate policies at all this is a range of where the ultimate warming will go 4.1 to 5.4 degrees Celsius which would be Armageddon if that happens. Current policies, pledges, two degree pathways, one and a half degree pathways and I'm gonna talk about some of the impacts of these in a minute but this is kinda, this is from the latest IPCC report. Now what will be some of the impacts of this? I originally just showed India and Asia but since this is an international audience I show the full graph and I'll give you the source and you can draw down, dig down on it however you want. So one of the impacts is flooding. These are some recent pictures in Calcutta and Oman and Thailand and France from the last couple of years. So of the numbers I just showed this is a forecast of by 2080 with our current policies if the ultimate temperature rise ends up being 1.5 degrees these shaded areas are when there will be, here the blue is a 29% increase in precipitation event. At two degrees this is what it looks like. At two and a half degrees this is what it looks like and by the way the reason this is is that warmer air can hold more moisture and so the clouds and everything else if you have your typical historical weather pattern in a two and a half degrees Celsius warmer world it's the higher standard deviation of heat and drought and flood. So you might get the same amount of water during the year but you're gonna get huge amounts in short periods of time. And then finally three degrees Celsius by the end of the century some regions like the American South and the Middle East will experience far less precipitation. Other places like Russia and China will experience much more which will lead to severe floods. Heat, a cooling shelter two summers ago in Oregon, Seville, Spain, 47 degrees Celsius, Pakistan, Japan. So at one and a half degrees Celsius there will be a 50% rise in heat waves in these areas. At two degrees you can see this impact. At two and a half degrees it's this impact. And at three degrees the world will likely experience an exponential rise in heat waves and those events will be significantly hotter pushing much of the earth into an inhabitable state. There is research showing that in a three degree Celsius world currently there is 0.8% of the global land surface area that is uninhabitable for humans and it's all right in here. But if we go to three degrees Celsius the amount of land that will be uninhabitable for humans currently three and a half billion people live in that land. Okay, so this is something important to understand. How many of you have heard of wet bulb temperature? A very few of you. Okay, so if you wrap a thermometer in a moist cloth it's going to behave differently. It cannot evaporate and the drier and less humid the air is the faster the water will evaporate. The faster water evaporates the lower the thermometer's temperature will be relative to the air temperature. The reason this is important is human sweat evaporates more quickly in drier air because it cools the skin when it evaporates. If the relative humidity is 100% meaning it's like drenched in moisture there is no way for our sweat to evaporate and becomes very deadly and dangerous to humans. If you're in a wet bulb temperature so this graph shows the temperature 28 degrees Celsius 37 degrees Celsius and the relative humidity and if it's really humid if it's close to 100% humidity even 32 degrees Celsius is deadly for humans if they don't have water air conditioning or shade. So the incidence of wet bulb temperatures in the future in our world is going to increase almost no matter what because we're going to have more rain events and more heat. So this is going to require adaptation air conditioning shade. If it's 130 degrees and it's totally dry we can all survive we just drink enough water we get hydrated it comes out of our pores it cools us it's okay. I mean it wouldn't be pleasant but it's the combination of heat and humidity that is the danger. Agricultural impact. So one thing before I show you these slides CO2 as Sandra pointed out in the earlier lecture is good for plants up to a point but it's good for plants to grow more but sometimes that growth doesn't go into the things that humans value like the food and there's something called Liebig's law of the minimum which is if you have enough sunlight enough water enough soil but not enough phosphorus the plant can only grow as much as it's least available nutrient. And so CO2 suddenly doesn't necessarily become the least available nutrient. So we might have some crops like rice that do better in a warmer world but others will do much worse and some won't benefit from more CO2 because that's not what they're limited by. So here shows the fraction of land annually exposed to crop failure at one and a half degrees and you'll see the north of India and I don't know a lot about India but apparently a lot of food is grown in the north of India and you can see as climate warms here's two and a half degrees these are the areas that are exposed to crop failure. Okay so tangentially moving on there have been five prior mass extinctions on the world. Mass extinctions is when we lose 70% of the genera above the family level which is a massive drop in populations. We've all heard of the KT extinction which was the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs but many of the mass and minor extinctions of the past were caused by lava basalts and that's when volcanoes around the world just spewed lava and the CO2 they brought the CO2 from under the earth and spewed it out for thousands and thousands of years and that caused mass extinctions. In fact the blue lines here the blue spikes are the prior mass extinctions on earth. This was the dinosaur one that one was actually preceded by the Deccan traps which is a lava basalt volcanic province in India but you can see that most of the miniature and the miniature were these and the mass extinctions were caused by outgassing of carbon from volcanoes and now today it's our Volkswagen's, our Volvos, our vacations, et cetera that are not so metaphorically acting as volcanoes. However, we are much smaller in a couple hundred years than volcanoes that emitted carbon for 20,000 years. So we're not gonna do that, we don't have enough carbon. However, we're doing it massively faster than volcanoes did in the past. So the issue is the pace at which we're emitting carbon, the earth has never seen anything like that. So up to 25 pedograms of carbon per year. This was only 1.7 pedograms a year but we're doing it much faster. The good news from an environmental perspective in this I've done a lot of work on I think the IPCC climate scenarios are biophysically implausible. Here we're showing the gray is coal, the red is oil and this is natural gas out to the year 2100. So they basically have a tripling or even more of today's fossil fuels in the year 2100. Ain't gonna happen, no freaking way. We do not have that amount of oil or coal and natural gas we have a lot but not that much. So there are various scenarios in the IPCC, the international plenary for climate change. I think they're really, really off on this scenario because they're energy blind. However, going in the other direction they're also really conservative on biological feedbacks. They don't use methane feedbacks and the seagrasses and at some point, humanities emissions become secondary to the natural positive feedback emissions of the earth like if we warm enough the permafrost in Siberia and Canada will melt and release methane on its own irrespective of what we do. So I think they're too conservative on that. I mean, I'm not a climate scientist but I have a lot of friends that have said this. I don't think we're gonna reach the really bad climate scenarios because we're gonna have economic problems before then but I'm just laying out the different possibilities. I think once we get more culturally, obviously cannot avoid it knowledge of what's happening to the climate, humans will attempt geoengineering and apply technology to try and cool the earth using some of our energy resources and technology. There's a lot of stuff out there. Most of it in my opinion is also energy blind. It takes too much energy to do direct air capture or carbon sequestration where we try to keep the carbon under the earth. But some of the things are somewhat interesting. Some people are talking about putting up our mottas of mirrors to reflect sunlight. There's something called, oh, God darn it, what's the name, olivine which is this green rock which if you crush it and add it to large amounts in the ocean, the surf kind of pushes it and pulls it and pushes it and when it absorbs carbon in that process and sinks to the bottom, it's possible that that could take a big chunk. There's also planting trees which is geoengineering of sorts if we had massive, massive planting of trees. I mean, look at why Oroville is special relative to some other areas in Tamil Nadu. It's cooler, the weather's a little bit different because there's so many forests here. Without a forest that sun is baking down and the soil absorbs all that. Okay, here's the second part of the metabolic impact on the planet and that is oceans. Oceans comprise most of the livable habitat on earth but for most people, maybe not in Tamil Nadu because you're on the ocean but most humans don't really think about the ocean unless they order fish sticks or go on vacation or something. They care about their surroundings and they don't see the ocean. So oceans absorb 20, here's the carbon table, the CO2 flux. So here is our emissions, fossil fuel, land use change where we chopped down a forest and now that's emissions and here's how this is all absorbed. The land absorbs some, the standing forest, the atmosphere which adds the thermal blanket absorbs more and the oceans absorb 24% of the CO2 but since we've started burning fossil fuels the oceans have absorbed 90% of the heat. Oceans are deep and dark and massive and they have acted as a buffer for humans to continue to burn without disastrous consequences. If we didn't have this ocean buffer we would already be in a hot house earth so the oceans are drawing up a lot of this heat and we'll continue to do so until maybe they don't and then they out gas and like in the movie Ghostbusters that would be like crossing the streams, that would be bad. So there are multiple risks to the oceans. This is one that we hear about. I actually think this is one of the least scary risks of the ocean which is sea level rise. So sea level is now 120 meters higher than it was 20,000 years ago due to the melting from glaciation. The 30 meters lower than very warm periods. This graphic shows the world coastline if the Greenland ice sheet would melt. We lose a lot of the Southeast United States all the way into the Amazon, there's water, et cetera. One thing that's relevant possibly to Tamil Nadu and I know it's very relevant to Bangladesh is and by the way, if we look back at this think of all the ports that are in these places some of the richest cities in the world are even if we get a few one or two feet of ocean rise these cities are gonna have to move inland and that's massively disrupting to global commerce and the economies. But one thing is that even if you're right here you're not worried about ocean sea level rise because it's only gonna rise up to here. So you're not worried. But what ends up happening is if you're near the ocean the saltwater act, there's a wick that goes into the ground and it affects the salinization of the soil. And this is happening in Bangladesh right now because it's shallow near the ocean and the saltwater gets wicked up 100 miles inland and it's affecting farm productivity. I don't know, I'll find out and get back to you but it's quite a lot, it's quite a lot. It's at the whole Greenland ice sheet melts I think six feet maybe, but I don't know. Okay, ocean risk number two is warming. This shows the warming trend over the last 130 years and this is all these lines are the last since 1981. This is 2023, this is from Saturday, January 6th and this is like a sixth standard deviation higher warming of ocean surface temperatures. And this gets back to what I was saying before about the removal of sulfur as a blocker. So we've never had in human history oceans this warm starting out this year. Another risk from oceans is acidification as the pH of the ocean declines and becomes more acidic little creatures that depend on shells and calcium that the calcium dissolves, the bicarbonate ions dissolve. So at some point acidification will affect the food chain because the little plankton's and micro organisms that have calcified shells are the basis of the food chain. Another risk for motions is the actual thermohaline circulation. There's something called the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation which brings cool water from the north down to South America. If it's salty and cold, it drops to the bottom of the ocean and goes south and it creates this conveyor belt and it moves water and temperatures with it around the earth. This has slowed 20% in the last three decades. There was a movie called, I can't remember, but there was a movie blockbuster that this happened and New York City turned into like glacier in a week or something like that. If this were to happen, Europe would go into a deep freeze because Europe depends on this warm stuff from the South coming in. So the more that glaciers and Greenland melt, the more it affects the circulation of the ocean. And in a really, really, well, that's the next one. Another ocean risk is oxygen. So global oxygen, when we burn fossil carbon, we actually, fossil fuels are inert. The moons on Jupiter are made from methane, but methane is not worth anything there because there's no oxygen. It's actually the earth's oxygen commons that allows us to have fire when we burn something. So when we burn coal, oil, or natural gas, we're taking a little bit of the oxygen out of the atmosphere. So far, we have a 0.1% decline in global oxygen levels. If that was a two or 3% decline, a lot of us would have trouble breathing. It's not that, but it has dropped 2% throughout the oceans and in the shallows of oceans where there's seagrasses and things like that, ocean oxygen content has dropped 20%. Warmer water affects the ability to dissolve and hold oxygen, and it also, again, involves water transfer. A good friend of mine, Peter Ward, has 17 books on deep time and mass extinctions. He's been on my podcast three times. He wrote a book called Under a Green Sky, which is in ancient oceans became stratified and the top were like the Black Sea where there was no oxygen at all. And what ended up happening is things would rot and there was no circulation and it emitted a hydrogen sulfide gas. And it's his theory that it was that hydrogen sulfide gas that was the kill event for the animals on land. And that would happen if the circulation of the ocean stopped. Now I'm not predicting that, but that is something that has happened in Earth's past. What is happening in Earth's present is because of the warmer ocean, there's less oxygen and in both hemispheres, fish are migrating forward because they need to get more oxygen and they can only get that in slightly cooler waters than their evolutionary environment. So fish in California are now being found in Washington or British Columbia, same thing in China. Things by Beijing are now being found by Taiwan because fish have to move towards the poles in order to get the oxygen that their sort of physiology requires. Okay, these are the impacts from the size and scale of our economy because our economy uses 82% of our energy as fossil energy and that number has not changed in the last 40 years. I mean, from 81 to 83 to 82, it's right in that range. But what do we do with the energy? We have NASCAR and Disneyland and we fly around the world and we catch sharks and chop off their fins and throw them back in the ocean. So there is a category of environmental impacts that have no direct relationship to the size and the scale of our economy but what we value and what we don't and what we do with things. So if you were depressed before you're about to be more depressed but again, I'm not making these things up. And I actually feel trepidation about giving this talk. I've known these things for a long time. If you've never heard these things it will feel like a punch in the gut and it should and I apologize for that because I don't necessarily think this story is for everyone but you all came here to listen to it. And I do think this story is absolutely essential for some people, for some humans who want to roll up their sleeves and play a role in our planet's future. We have to understand what's going on. Okay, first, net primary productivity is how much the sun and the biogeochemical process of the earth grow in the natural world, in the trees, in the algae, in the oceans. The primary productivity that the life on earth creates every year, you know, tangerines or eucalyptus trees or the phytoplankton in the ocean all that added together is called net primary productivity. Humans appropriate 40% of this and directed to the human economy leaving 60% for the other 10 million species we share the planet with. These show the higher colored areas are where we appropriate a lot of the net primary productivity. Okay, terrestrial vertebrates. When I made this slide nine years ago this was kind of a novel statistic but I think many people have heard this now. If we talk about terrestrial vertebrates 10,000, 12,000 years ago there were 300 million tons approximately of wild animals. And back then there was 0.2 million tons of humans and virtually no livestock. It was 1500 to one, we were outweighed by wild animals. So they were 99.9% of the weight and we were 0.1%. In 2015 humans weighed 423 million tons. Our livestock, our pigs, our cows, our sheep, our goats were a billion 400 million tons. Wild animals were 23 million tons. Which is we're taking more than our share. Humans and our wild animals are 96, 98% of the weight relative to 2% for wild animals. Also this is something that is eating the bigger gut punch that we never think about that in the year 10,000 years ago the total amount of weight of these creatures including us, including all the wild animals was 300 million tons. Today the total weight is six and a half times that. Why do you think that is? What was that? Yeah, that's right. So here's a graph from my friend Professor Tony Barnosky at Stanford. This is a logarithmic chart. These diamonds are all animals including livestock and this is humans and wild animals only. And around 200 years ago you started to see the total amount, the biomass size go from 0.2 to 1.4 and this ballooning is because we're all, we're taking the net primary productivity of the earth. We're growing some crops and we're feeding it to our cows and ourselves but we're also taking tens of millions of years of ancient carbon pulling it out of the ground adding that to nitrogen fertilizer, Haber-Bosch process, pesticides, fertilizers and things like that and boosting the food supply. Here's another way of representing the same thing 100,000 years ago this was wild animals. Humans were pretty much nothing and the present this is our livestock, humans and wild animals. Same thing by the way for chickens, we eat 70 billion chickens per year and something like nine billion turkeys. So if you take the weight of all birds on the planet, 70% are chickens and turkeys and 30% are all the other birds on earth. So there are two main central points from this piece. Humans and our livestock and pets by the way, as those of you in our Mandala know, I deeply, deeply love dogs. Dogs are the best invention ever by humans. I have four dogs. One is a golden retriever, the other three were rescues. I chose to not have children. That's another story. There are now a billion dogs on the planet. Dogs themselves outweigh wild animals. So we went from one in 1500 to 50 to one in our weight relationship. And then the second point, the entire weight of wild mammals, humans livestock is six or seven times higher than pre-neolithic times do mostly to the energy from the carbon pulse coupled with the machines that we use. Okay, so what does this mean with respect to wildlife? We have had a 68% decline since I was born in the last 50 years in the world in mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish. That's on average 68%. So that means that the population size, maybe there was a million of wildebeest and now it's 320,000. So it's the size of populations. That doesn't mean we've lost 68% of every animal because some animals there might have been a billion and now there's 10% of that amount. So this is an average across all these things. I think it's notable that the global North has lost less because it's richer countries and they can afford to protect the environment. Latin American, the Caribbean has just been destroyed in the biodiversity there. Why is this happening? Exploitation, habitat degradation, habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, pollution and disease. These are the areas of hotspots of human impact on threatened vertebrates. The brighter the color, the more threatened the animals are. Okay, moving on to plastics and endocrine disruptors. So we are now losing insect biomass which is the total weight of insects between one and 2% a year, every year in the earth. Of course, we don't know which it is because we only have about 100 scientists that are measuring this because it's not part of our economic system to go and catalog how many caterpillars and things like that. We do have really good information on butterflies which are a canary in the coal mine. I had a guy in my podcast who wrote about the butterfly decline and it maps to other species. The highest guess from scientists is it's due to neonicotinoid pesticides that are around the earth and that we use to boost our fossil agriculture. But insects are like trillions of tiny robots that do tasks in our environment that there's no replacement for. And if you're like the average 20 year old in America, you're afraid of spiders and bugs. Maybe that's not the way in Asia. Madhu, the other day you picked up a cockroach in this room and escorted it out. None, no one your age in the United States would have done that. No one. So congratulations on that. But we tend to neglect how important insects are in our world. Now, if we lose insects, what is one of the things that we'll also lose? Birds. And these are the decline in different types of birds and the grassland birds which eat insects have declined the most, which stands to reason. They have studied ants in the middle of the Amazon jungle that have no exposure to human settlements, even indigenous communities. And they've measured high levels of phthalates and plastics, which implies that they're becoming airborne and going down in the rain. Everywhere on earth, this has been measured including in the Arctic Circle. So phthalates are in fragrance, personal care, toys, plastic packaging. They're linked to endocrine disrupting, sperm count drop, which I'm gonna talk about, toxicity, et cetera. So this is a global problem. I just had a podcast with a billionaire named Jeremy Grantham and on the podcast he said he believes plastic pollution and endocrine disrupting chemicals is a bigger threat to our future than climate change. I'm gonna talk a little bit about that in a minute. They're finding pollution at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in creatures that are five miles under the earth that is higher pollution than polluted rivers in China because the stuff precipitates on the ocean floor and goes to the bottom. We now, plastics on our planet weigh more than all wild animals combined and in the ocean in the next 20 years they will outweigh fish at current projections. This is a major story that you probably have not heard about. My friend, Shauna Swan, who I also did a podcast with did a ground baking study in 2017 that showed that human sperm count was dropping by 1.16% a year. So in 1973, it was 100 million sperm per milliliter and it dropped to 49 million. She just this year did an update and that was the 2017 paper. She didn't do these three continents. Now she's done the whole world. It's in every country and the drop has accelerated to 2.6% a year. So Jeremy Grantham says that right now one couple in seven cannot have a child. They're trying to have a child and they cannot. And what people don't say is that 20 years ago that was zero. Anyone that wanted a baby unless they had some genetic something could and in 20 years it's gone to one in seven. And he believes by 2050 that many human couples will not be able to reproduce because of the endocrine disrupting impact on the male reproductive system. And by the way, it's not just humans. This has also been mapped onto farm animals and wild animals, et cetera. So plastics come from fossil fuels. Plastics are created from the chemistry of the precursors that come from a barrel of oil or natural gas. There are lots of other environmental things that I could talk about. There's something called the planetary boundaries which is very credible, robust, popular in the news. The two people that created it are gonna be in my podcast next month the Stockholm Resilience Center. It includes things like ocean acidification. Chandra was talking about biogeochemical flows, potassium, nitrogen, novel entities. This would be the plastics, land system change, biosphere integrity, climate change, freshwater change, ozone. And there is a safe operating space and these orange are well outside what's safe and the red is way outside the safe. And so we're trying to catalog those things. What's B-R, the left-hand side? Biosphere integrity is something. Yeah. Oh, there's a second component to biosphere integrity, number two, and it's not yet quantified. I don't know. I'll try to find out in a moment. So then the last category is something that is also not talked about much, which is what happened. All these are impacts that we've seen between this yellow star and this red star, everything I've just described. But what happens as we decline this century as our fossil inputs go down? For some species, that's gonna be good news, right? For animals that live very remote from human habitation or fish that live a five-hour diesel fuel ride out to catch them. But those animals and ecosystems that are close to human sediments might have a worse time. In the 2009 financial crisis, the country of Greece, which had to pay back a lot of loans and everything, was really in an economic spiral. They had to hire military armed guards to protect the forests in the north of Greece to protect, to keep humans from going and chopping down the wood for firewood. So that is a huge thing that we have this great standing forest in the world. And if we have less energy to input into the human system, humans in the past have gone to current carbon instead of ancient carbon, the current carbon in trees for timber, for fuel, for building materials. So it's an open question and it is the absolute core of my work is to think two or three steps ahead to build firewalls and plans to protect nature on the downslope of post-growth human economies. So it's not a pretty picture. And I don't know how much of this is new to all of you. It's not new to me and I've kind of grieved for this long ago in our morning sessions, we're talking about voluntarily conjuring up emotions. This is the most common emotion for me is I feel sadness about this almost every day and I've known it for 20 years. So getting back to our first lecture where I talked about an alien anthropologist coming to earth and observing and what would these species be like? Well, what would an alien anthropologist say observing the carbon pulse of the human situation? There would be a difference between humans voting for what would be best for their self-interest and that would be, you know, hoping that we have a lot more carbon to support our convenience and our energy use. But then that would be in opposition to the things that are best for the natural world and that is the conversation. That is where we've arrived at. You sitting in this room are part of the first generation of our species to be able to understand that and to be able to connect how the picture is and this is not our faults. Now that we know it, we are complicit in it and I think in our own small way or in a large way should play a role. This is not our faults. We were born into this metabolic superorganism. I'm gonna talk more about that on Saturday but you know, an open question is as a species are we gonna keep looking at the stock market as our measure of success or will we ever care and engage on behalf of what I refer to as the real stock market? That's all I had for today. We'll get slightly better mood on the Saturday one and next Tuesday I'll offer some pathways forward. Thank you. Thank you. Questions, comments, complaints, disagreements, tears, hopes. Yes, sir. We'll show that's the difference between the domestic, like the animals, the wild animals and the domestic animals. Yes. But what about the plants, like how different they are? Different, yeah. Yeah, so our forests are much smaller than they were a million years ago but they're actually much larger than they were 500, 700 years ago because the advent of fossil fuels allowed us to keep a lot of standing forests up. As far as the flowers and things like that, I don't know but right now the earth's forests are generally in good shape, generally. There are some places, I should have showed, I will in my next, in my next slow, if you show an aerial view of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, it's one island and it's split down in the middle in the two countries and Dominican Republic is green and they have sustainable development and Haiti is like denuded. There are no trees to speak of. It's like brown from the sky. So there are different pathways. As far as plants, I don't know. But I know that in the mid-19th century, the United States East Coast was completely clear cut for lumber and food and for firewood. So it's all, most of it is second. Henry Thoreau said that a squirrel could jump across trees from New York to California without ever touching the ground. We had a billion chestnut trees in the United States or even more than that. Massive, massive trees. And that was from a disease, a blight, the chestnut blight. I'm not a real expert on that, but thank you for the question. Yes? Okay, oh, I hate to burst your bubble, but if you read Jared Diamond's collapse, the reason the Dominican Republic doesn't burn its trees is because they import gas. Yeah, I mean, there are other reasons, but you can, sure. But Haiti tried to import gas too, and they were too poor to do it. That's right. Yeah. So what happens when there's no more gas for the Dominican Republic? And that's why we need to be aware of all this. You're right. That's exactly right. You didn't burst my bubble. Good. Yeah. Just on that one. Yeah. But please, I mean, I'm happy to have bubbles burst. I mean, I don't enjoy this. And yet, this is the world that we're alive in. And so I'm still open on this in my own life, whether it's better to tell people this or not. You know, I mean, it's not a clear cut answer. But I think if no one knows this, then the default scenario is just gonna continue. So, how many of you knew most of this coming in here? Okay. Oh, wow. Okay, so a good quarter of you knew most of this already. Yeah. You didn't know about the sperm. Yeah. Yeah. Is that negative feedback cycle? You would think, right? Two comments there. First of all, you don't need 50 million sperm to get pregnant. And we've not seen a reduction in babies, not much. And the second one is it could be going back to my behavior slide. It could be, and now this is science fiction, Nate's speculation, I don't know, that some future Genghis Khan's like children of men, the movie, there may be some men that are able to have babies and they have a lot of them. I'm just totally speculating there, I don't know. That's what I appreciate about it. This might be an argument that's valid for some people who deny all these things are too much, because some people that I don't bother about this, but they are affected by it. So, there is an American billionaire who I know, very, very right-wing, doesn't believe in climate change, which I just can't understand. And I think that's not because people are stupid, but because there's a, and I don't think that the climate change is the fault of fossil fuel companies. They're the dealers, we're the users, but they are guilty of some obfuscation and PR to make this not obvious. But this guy hired my friend Shauna Swan to tell him about sperm drop and endocrine. He's very worried about that all of a sudden. So, he wasn't worried about climate change, but he is worried about that issue. So, maybe it is something that people are waking up to. Michael Bloomberg, another billionaire, hugely worried about the sperm drop issue and plastics. So, it's starting. Actually, tomorrow morning, my podcast is on the plastics that come in packaging. And her name is Jane Munkah, and she runs the Global Packaging Forum. She believes that there are things we can do, like if we heat things in a microwave that have plastic, the phthalates go right into the food. You should never heat things, and you should never pour alcohol in anything that has plastic in it, because it will go in. And there's a lot, I don't know about in India, but in Europe, in the United States, they have these displays of fresh fruit and vegetables that look all shiny and perfect, is because they're sprayed with some protectants, and there are endocrine disruptors in that. And she believes that a big part of the endocrine disrupting is in pregnant women that consume those vegetables and fruits. Again, I don't know these things, but there are experts that are working on them. Yeah, Puja. So along the lines of endocrine disruption, the first lecture, I think you said, marketing is one of the worst things we've mentioned. And it's interesting because, at least in the Western world, I think in other parts of the world as well, but of course it's experienced in the US, there's all kinds of marketing that's gone into packaging, no phthalates, no sulfates in stores, like not even high-end stores, just Target, Walmart, your everyday stores. In your opinion, do you think that's a lot of greenwashing or do you think that this is marketing actually trying to steer us in a safe way? I get confused about that. I think there is a lot of greenwashing going on. I think a lot of those companies are doing that because they see a demand for young people who are like, I'm not gonna use straws because I see seabirds eating these plastic things and I don't want that. So some of it is a response to what humans are choosing. But ultimately, it doesn't matter if you're the CEO, a man or a woman of a company, your job is to maximize profits. And if you don't do that, you'll get replaced by someone who does. And this gets into the super organism dynamic I'll talk about Saturday. So doing the right thing for the environment can cost just a little bit more and that should be the way we go, but it could cost a lot more, which is why a lot of companies don't do it until their consumers demand that they do it. But there are, we could do a lot of things with bamboo, for instance, it grows really fast and we can make things that we use today out of non-fossil fuel inputs. The real issue is, I think I said this the other day, the human economy right now is 19 terawatts, which is 19 trillion watts of metabolism 24 seven, which is 190 billion 100 watt light bulbs turned on 24 seven all the time with all the material consumption that goes with it, with all the impact on nature, that is patently unsustainable. So we're going to have to collectively, not out of choice, because I don't think that's in our nature, in aggregate as individuals we can, but we're going to have to respond to a lower material throughput. And some of that will be the mother, necessity will be the mother of invention and we'll have to invent ways to get our packaging or our consumption using more local ingredients. I had a podcast last year with a woman from Lebanon. Lebanon had a 90% drop in their currency and they have 50% unemployment and their economy is down in half. And yet this woman is a climate activist and an environmentalist and she is inventing ways to make packaging for foodstuffs within Lebanon with potatoes and algae and other local things because that's her passion and that's what she's trying to do. So there's going to be tons of examples like that. The reason that I give lectures like this is to get people thinking two or three steps ahead before we're forced to do this to start thinking about ways to intervene. And just to follow up, I think I'm also asking because I think there's often a false sense of being eco-friendly. Oh, right. I know that's happened to me. Yeah. Like because of all this marketing and things like you think you're buying into changing the world or making a difference. And I think we get confused and it's not, like we're not engaging in the right ways I guess of trying to help the environment. So yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to talk about that on my next Tuesdays lecture. I mean, I took a jet to India as did you. So if I used a straw yesterday without a straw, you know, what's the net impact? But I believe at this stage, the goal should be to maximize your positive impact on the planet is more important than minimizing your negative impact on the planet. Because I could have chosen to just stay in my back 40 with my dogs and carved things out of wood and not talk to anyone or not use my phone and not come here. Would that have been a positive impact on the planet relative to all my other work? I don't know. I like to think not. Yeah, yes. I've read that the 10% of the wealthiest people use at least half of the energy and resources. Yep, I had a chart with that. I believe that they are exempt and that everybody else should be tightening their belt and they can go in their private jet to their environmental comment. Like how do you change that when they're the ones who are in control? I think we are a part of these 10% most of us. Or at least part of the 20%. Yeah, most of us are. I am, or 15% anyways. I know a lot of people in that demographic. So let me answer that a few different ways. First of all, everyone is in their situation and they look at loss aversion from their situation. So I don't think those people, the Uber Elite billionaires are going to massively change until their status is at risk. And then they will change. Having said that, I know several people in that demographic that are giving away half to two thirds of their wealth towards initiatives that build community and sustainable development. And they realize it's not the people that made the money. It's their children. The people that made the money, you can't reach with this story because those type of people measure their self-worth by more net worth. But their children and their children's children didn't do that and they inherited it and they have greater degrees of freedom in my experience. But I think at each level there's a power law that's going on of 80% of the resources are being funneled to 20% of the people in the professional basketball in the United States. 80% of the points are scored by 20% of the people. It's called a power law and you see it everywhere. So I actually, this is going to be like a PhD level comment. I think how we diverged from our ancestral past was due largely to energy surplus and equality and sanity is not going to completely return until a lot of this energy surplus goes away or at least stabilizes. I mean, we as a global culture, not India, but as a global culture on average, we are so rich versus our ancestors. Like kings and queens of old Cleopatra, like the average American uses more energy than a rich person from a thousand years ago. And we totally take it for granted because we compare ourselves to the people on our street and we don't have enough so we feel like we're losers and we're addicted to more stimulation and Netflix and chill and I want to order more pizzas and Amazon boxes and it's just crazy. Which is why coming to this Mandala and seeing how people are in Oroville, with not a lot of resources, but a higher level of happiness and spirituality and community is really powerful. And I think it's at the core of Paths Forward. Yeah. Danya and then you, sir. Permafrost, do you know actually what is a global temperature? Permafrost, if inversely, gets triggered. Not tipping quotes in the plan. I think they're very essential in terms of the disability scenarios. And then I would like to know what type of fossil fuel scenario triggers that? In recent IPCC, it's overestimated the future of fossil fuel consumption, I think. You have a different idea about that. I wonder whether it's whether it sits relative to the triggering of Permafrost. Well, I did mention that though I thought IPCC was too naive about energy, I also think they're too conservative on the biological feedbacks. So I do broadly think that CO2 is the powder and methane is the bullet that has caused prior extinctions. Methane is way more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is. And there's tons of, I mean, billions of tons of methane both in the ocean floor and something called methane hydrates and in the Permafrost. I don't know what scenarios, but I do know this. I have many friends who are climate scientists and a few years ago there was all kinds of climate scientists who were in the ocean. And a few years ago there was all kinds of really scary books published on climate change. There was one called The Uninhabitable Earth. And a lot of climate, and I did not do this in my charts, but a lot of people that want to get other people's attention and climate change, climate change is a big worry. Look at these graphs. They were referenced the RCP 8.5 scenario, which is the most scary of all the scenarios without telling you that that's not the base case. They're presenting it as if it were a base case. And most of the biological feedbacks like Permafrost only get triggered in that scenario from the last that I've heard. According to the IPCC, I'm not a climate scientist, but I'm a system scientist. So I can kind of take a step back and look at how things fit together. I know that when I talk to my climate scientist friends, I cheer them up because they're unaware of these energy limits. They look at these like we're going to continue to do this with fossil fuels. Now, not to get too deep in the weeds, I could definitely see a plausible scenario where human population increases, where the economy tanks, where there's a lot poorer people globally, and we don't use as much oil and gas because we can't afford it, but we use more coal. And I think there will be less emissions than today, but not 90% less, maybe 40% less. And so that doesn't bring us to the Armageddon climate scenarios unless there are tipping points and thresholds, like you said, but it's still no walk in the park either. Yeah. One follow up question. I actually identified so many tracks cause and consequences amidst of that, for instance, Amok, Fermanfrost, declining crop yields, hulk and cauldron, parts of the world, more precipitation. But they're all sort of like parallel systems, but it's so hard to see that interaction. Yes. And to see the positive or negative feedback books. Yes. Between them, where's your position on that? My position is this synthesis of these three lectures and the one I'm going to give Saturday are complex enough. The climate modeling is so unbelievably complex with the clouds and everything. And now you're asking another, how do these systems interact with each other? We can take guesses and we can create models and the models are only as good as their weakest link. So for all of you today, that this is not your vocation, just kind of take this in as just a squint and see this as this is a general trend. Don't worry about all these details because you could spend your life obsessing about different aspects of this. Just kind of understand this is kind of what's going on and then go back to your job or your purpose or what you want to work on. But I do think over time, we need to look at those things more, the interactions between climate change and ocean warming and toxics and how it all fits together. But here's the thing, this just drives me nuts, but it makes sense. The best and the brightest go to work on Wall Street or in AI or whatever, they're not looking into ecology because they don't get a lot of status or compensation working on the real stock market. And that's one thing I'd like to change. Whether it's money or not, we should have a lot more young, bright, pro-future humans working on these issues and being able to afford a lifestyle when they're doing that instead of, oh, I care about the environment, but I got to go get this job. Because we're not, our culture doesn't value this yet. Rit large. Yeah. You had a question, then you, and then you. Yeah, you sir. So my question is around what you were sharing about the grief. Like Daniel also says that I want you to be depressed and Charles says that you should get into despair so that you can, you know, see the unknown and connect with it. You also shared that, the same thing. And when we used to do this workshops, rethinking, development, in the end we used to see that people are hopeless and they would feel that, you know, there is nothing and all that. I appreciate that. Yes, we should go into that so that we can see the other things when you are in discomfort, you can actually, but at the same time I'm interested that there are two ways they can go. One is like, if it is available to, like it is on YouTube, so many people can see and they can operate from fear of despair and they can do stupid things. And as you said that there are other people who might use this information and they are grounded enough, they have community that can support them and they can, you know, process their emotions and do something productive. I'm interested in one that, how you have processed your grief. You had the community or the people around you, they were grounded enough so that they could support you. And at the same time, what is your advice for the people who are receiving this information? Like what you have received in 20 years, you are giving in one, one, two hours and they have to process it. Yeah, that's such a great question. I'll give you my personal answer to it. Some of the people in my mandala might be more qualified on the how does one sit with this. I've coped with it in three ways. The most importantly is I've developed a network of 40 close friends around the world that are experts on this and they understand it. And so we have deep conversations online about this without feeling weird or sad. It's just kind of understood. So when you have a conversation with another human being, even if you don't come up with an answer to the thing, I think I said this the other day, it suppresses your cortisol, which is a stress hormone, it boosts your helper T cells. So my wish would, I mean, if there was like one, this is why I never have taught this online. I taught it to college students in a circle of 25 people that had, and I assigned buddy groups that when they left the class, there were three others and they could process this. This would be too much to take like a one-on-one here. I'm gonna watch a YouTube video and I don't hang out in your house by yourself. My wish would be that 30% of the people in a community would be fluent in these ideas and they could process and talk about them themselves because community makes you feel less alone and it makes you come up with strategies on what do you want, what do we want to do and Tamil Nadu to respond to this or in our own family, et cetera. That's one thing. Second thing is I have four dogs and they immediately ground me in the present moment and I go for hikes. I also have nine ducks which really calm me down and make me laugh because they are damn funny and I live by some land that I take walks every day. And the third thing is conversations like this and questions from people like you that are earnest and they see that I might not have everything right but it's kind of in the right direction and it's obviously happening and I would like, you didn't say this but I would like to play a role in this and that is just increasingly buoying for my psychology when I go around the world and see so many humans that are like, how do I get involved? What do I do? And I get 100 emails a day like that which means I have over 1,000 unread emails since I've been here. So that type of thing tells me that this is a language that is resonating with people around the world. Those three things help me but it's still a lot and the hardest thing for me now is not the grief. The hardest thing is when some person, climate change is a hoax, you don't understand and you're an idiot and they're disagreeing with various aspects of this and I find it, I've found it difficult to not engage with those people when I'm learning to just walk away but I wanna help anyone understand these things. So this is fighting against the media machine that doesn't want these details broadcast on the nightly news. So it's kind of a back channel conversation that's happening. I don't know if that answers your question but ultimately that's why I'm in Orville is I'm trying to learn personal coping skills not the state of the world but with my work in the world so that I don't burn out on this because humans didn't evolve to learn this. We had saber two tigers here, everyone take care, look out and then it's back to having sex in the woods and eating good food and going and picking some berries or whatever but this is 20 years that I've been eating, sleeping and breathing this stuff so you're right and I apologize that I laid it all on you in an hour. All right, there were more questions. You had your hand up and then you, sir. Well, since net zero emissions and shipping to the different energies. Yeah, you weren't here on Saturday, were you? Yeah, so I talked about energy there. I think net zero is a delusion. It's a way that we can have a happy story and continue our social arrangements. Our entire economy is based on carbon. So net zero carbon just makes absolutely no sense especially since they think we're gonna grow the economy and go to net zero, which makes even less sense. I think, and the other thing that I hammered on Saturday is climate change as I indicated today is a serious problem. But we also have carbon tunnel vision that we're trying to keep everything else the same and optimized for less carbon and that just is not systemically plausible. So I think over time it will become clear that net zero is a fantasy. And there are countries that are goods and services dominated that are growing by growing their fossil fuels less. So that's called decoupling. But the world as a whole is not doing that. Oh, there's a slide that I forgot to put in here. There was an article in science a few years ago that had two major statements in it. And I'll add the slide when I send the deck to Namu. One is that you know what the single largest predictor of emissions was in the world? Growth and income, which I thought was interesting. And the second is that if the United States, this was what the article in science said, if the United States did everything possible to reach net zero and did all of the Paris agreements totally got rid of coal and natural gas, went to renewables and did everything perfectly. But it was the only country that did it. By the year 2100, the temperature differential would have been 3.3 degrees Celsius instead of 3.4. This is a global problem, climate in the oceans. So I don't know how that is going to manifest. And the whole global North, global South thing is going to be a massive, massive part of our conversation the next 10 years. And I don't have a good answer to that. But I'm trying to lay out what it looks like. Okay, you, sir. And then did you have a question? I did, but you already answered. Okay, you and then you. Yeah, I had two questions. One was about carbon tunnel emissions because you had mentioned the last elements, my vocation side actually, the other one. Carbon television? Carbon television. Oh, carbon tunnel vision, yeah, yeah. Well, you can see when I talked about insects and sperm count drop and the mammal decline. When those things, people in climate change don't talk about that stuff. And I think that's also important. When I started this as a climate activist, that's why I left Wall Street because I learned about climate. But I've now seen that it's a much bigger story. And at the end of the day, we need to change how we consume. By say we, I mean the average person on the world. And that's another reason that our mandala is here is how can we feel satisfied without having a lot of consumption and reducing those impulses. And maybe if 3%, 5% of humans start that way, it starts some new cultural path, maybe. What was your second question? So you said that all the brightest minds are going to Wall Street, but... Except for you, but... There's been a trend in like sustainability in itself is some sort of a trend right now. And a lot of people are moving in that direction. You see that there is, like especially with climate financing coming in, there's more opportunities by being jobs. You see that that will influence the shift in the outcome. We're going to talk a little bit about that on Saturday. I think it's really encouraging that a lot of young people are becoming aware of this and moving into sustainability sort of vocations. As it pertains to climate specifically, I think we're a little bit in an economic bubble because of central banks and low interest rates and economic growth and things like that. And once this great simplification starts to unravel and the economy starts to decline, a lot of the people working in climate may not have jobs the way they do today because governments are giving money towards this because there's surplus money. I mean, sometimes I think that the environmental movement in the United States and the global North is itself a product of the period of material wealth that we've lived through. I mean, myself, I was able to go get a PhD and study this stuff and blog about it because I didn't have to dig trenches and get my own food and other things. So in many ways, the environmental ethic is a product of our energy surplus and let's not waste it. Yeah, you, yeah. It's been a week of a lot of shocking facts and everything. My question is more oriented towards the action because I want to be in action and I've been thinking so far that localized action is what I want to be part of and then also definitely it's not going to be away from the global thing, but I wanted to be very strongly involved in localized action. But recently, in the last weekend, I met some fishermen from the villages along the ECR and the kind of things that they are facing, the reality that they are facing and how it is degrading and how this whole community, their life is fully sustained by the sea and how much in danger they are, their lives are. It's a whole community and people on land are never going to be able to fish like they do. So it just brought to me because I see those problems they are experiencing are not because of just the landscape. It's because of what is happening globally and on different scales and that it's kind of a wicked problem. This week have led me into a thinking of, like it shattered my idea of localized action and I'm kind of like, what is it that I have to really do? So, and your answer to Jordania, just touched upon that, but I am really in that conclusion right now. Did you come to my first two lectures or not? I was. Okay. I'm gonna come up with some paths on next Tuesday's lecture. Of course it depends, do you primarily care about Orville or Tamil Nadu or the world or your family to survive and thrive or do you also care about the other species? I mean, it depends what you care about and what really speaks to you. Can you briefly tell me what the experience is of the Indian fishers that you mentioned, like what's happening? So the fishing and community which is just 70 kilometers away from here, they are experiencing, so they have only local methods of fishing and they are not equipped with motor boats or big nets or anything. So they are still doing the traditional way of fishing and the economy is playing a major role where the commercial fishing and all the other fishermen who are equipped with a lot of motor boats and everything, they come 400 kilometers from down south to fish here and that is creating an imbalance and a lot more and the natural breeding grounds in the sea which is a little bit of shallow waters where they could reach the traditional fishing methods. Those are being destroyed by the motor boats. So there, it's kind of that. And then also a lot of disasters which keep continuously happening and no disaster warnings for those people and their lives are at risk and post disaster relief. I mean, from end to end, they are really critically endangered and... I don't have an answer to that but I think what you just described is a microcosm of two things of the Walmartization of the world where the big thing is more efficient and corporations and big entities become their own super organisms and they crowd out the more local sustainable methods. And that's part of something the whole world faces but certainly poorer countries like India face it worse. I think AI is gonna make this worse. I think AI is gonna take a lot of jobs where people are creating PowerPoints and moving graphics and you're gonna be able to do it in 30 minutes using AI. So I think what you're describing is a real worry for the coming decades where what will be the vocations of people relative to the past. And I don't have answers for that then we probably are gonna have to learn how to get by with less resources on average. There's good news and bad news living here. You're not very rich but you also don't need a lot. And would I rather be here or in the United States? The United States is incredibly rich yet people are so conditioned and entitled and if they get 2% less from a huge amount they freak out and get their guns or whatever. I mean it's crazy. So I'm sorry and I perpetually feel bad about this that I'm telling this story and when people tell stories like one of my students complained to the chancellor the vice chancellor and he said, teachers are supposed to tell you a problem and then tell you the solution. And I didn't have a solution. So I'm trying to describe what's going on and it's heartbreaking the story you told me and I expect there's gonna be more things like that and we need people working on pathways through that. I just don't know enough about the situation here too. But you personally should learn as much as you can tolerate about these things and figure out your own inner spirit and your inner calling and what you're like. Yeah, these are the things I wanna do. And you don't have to know that all now. You can just take a step in the direction of something that you're curious about or sings to your heart. And then two years from now something will open up and yeah, this is the path I wanna do. Don't feel like you have to own all this and solve it all because we can't. So I'll have more to say next week but thank you for sharing. Yes, sir. One quick remark and one quick question. Do you remember the world watch HCT? Yeah, I know them well. So I'm with this animal state of the world. I wrote some chapters for them. Ah, I recognize those chapters now. We do. But remember that in addition of about 10 or 12 years ago the way of these three pictures that if we were already consuming one and a half planets at that time, we would all start living like Western Europe, it would be two planets. And if we would all start living in the United States, you would need five planets. Yeah, that's true. You mentioned that. That's just a quick remark. My question is this, if we take 1860, the start of the steam engine, the commercial steam engine designed by Mr. Watt as a benchmark or as a starting point, is it correct that we were about 2.5 billion people at that time? Less than that. Less than that even, right? So now suppose if it had remained 2.5 population till today, right? It has now become we are eight, right? Yeah. What would have been the impact on the planet without that incredible population? Had we never found fossil fuels, there would be no reason that our species couldn't have lived to see a million years in history. We have found them, but we would not have exploded in population so much. So how much is the contribution from the explosion in population? Well, first of all, you can't separate them. Right. But hypothetically, if we were all consuming like we are today, but only 2.5 billion of us. Well, then that would be 2.5 eighths of the emissions. Right. But again, like I said the other day, is it the population or is it the amount and type of consumption? And it's both. And what has caused the population explosion according to you? What does it cost? Caused by the explosion of the population. Well, it's ultimately by, I mean, ultimately it's by more food being available from more caloric input into the system. But that's helped by machines. It's self-reinforcing. Self-reinforcing until, and we've reinforced it more with money. That's digital money. And now we're reinforcing it more with AI and such. Oh, we should probably wrap up. There was, was there more question? Yes, sir. Okay, last month I was at the corporate aid and United Nations were rallying like all the countries. Yeah. Like 100,000 people coming in. There were a few people on. You were at COP28 in Dubai. Okay. And I was wondering like United Nations seems to be absolutely failing in its role to unite and rally the countries and then just talking of one or two or three dimensions. Whereas the world needs so many different thought matters and rally different experts. So have you come across any other alternate uniting forces which are at the level which is required right now? No. Hey, thank you all. This was intense. So thank you for paying attention and sitting with it. Saturday we will talk about fitting it all together. What did the future look like? And then next Tuesday, lots of possible paths, pathways forward as a nation and as a community and as individual humans. Thank you all. Thank you. Happy ending.