 It's our great pleasure to have Hunter Lovens here to speak with us. Let me start by acknowledging and celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to their elders. I've known Hunter for a number of years now, and I think you'll find that she's probably one of the most engaging speakers that you'll ever hear. She actually started out as an environmental lawyer, so she got her degree from Loyola University in Los Angeles. And she's the founder and president of Natural Capitalism Solutions. So all things that are near and dear to my heart. She's also a professor of Sustainable Management at Bainbridge Graduate Institute and at Bard College. And she's also a master at the Daytow Masters Academy in Beijing and Shanghai. In fact, that's one of the things that we have in common, and I'll say a little bit more about that in a second. She has an academic career that spans four decades and has addressed the U.S. Congress, various parliaments around the world, including the Australian Parliament, I believe. Not the current one. Too bad. Maybe we can arrange that for later. All right. Nobody's asked her on that one. She's addressed the World Economic Forum, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and hundreds of major conferences. She was named Millennium Hero for the Planet by Time Magazine. And, pardon? Pretentious title. I know. Do you get a pin, too? Is there something on? No? Okay. And she's also been called the Green Business Icon by Newsweek. She's received the Sustainability Pioneer Award given by the European Financial Community and the Right Livelyhood Award, which is kind of the alternative Nobel Prize. The Leadership in Business Award, the Racial Carson Award, lots of other awards and things. She was also inducted into the Sustainability Hall of Fame by the International Society of Sustainability Practitioners. And she's advised governments from Afghanistan to New Zealand on economic development issues. And we actually worked together on a project that was initiated by the King of Bhutan and the Prime Minister of Bhutan on developing a new economic paradigm based on well-being and happiness and not maximizing economic growth. So we spent some time together in Bhutan working on that, and I think that's a good takeoff point for what she's going to be talking about today. How do we build an economy for the Anthropocene that's based on natural capitalism and not old-school capitalism? So help. Join me in welcoming Hunter Levins. Bob, thank you. And thanks to all of you for coming this afternoon. I think there is no more important conversation to be in, and I'm happy to hang out as long as y'all want to. So let me see if I can kick this off with some comments, and then we can have a conversation. The Anthropocene, we're all convulsed about the economy. Are we spending beyond our means? Are we borrowing too much, are governments borrowing too much, lending too much? Has the whole world gone mad? Whole? This is the first generation in which we are determining the geology, the future, the climate of the earth. We have shifted from this insignificant little species that is interested only in our own survival in a cruel world that's out to get us, from being the cruel influence that is now capable of destroying life as we know it on the planet. And we stand, if you will, at the edge of a precipice. Most of the world's people living on this precarious edge, we are beyond the planetary boundaries as people like Dr. Costanza and Rockstrom, a whole team of scientists identified. We've exceeded the boundaries in at least three aspects. And as Dr. Kate Raworth at Oxford has shown, we are not yet above the minimums required for humans to live with dignity. And what we ought to be seeking, if you will, is this donut, the safe operating space in which humanity is below those external boundaries and yet above the minimums. And a team of us headed up by Dr. Costanza and Dr. Kubiszewski wrote this book suggesting ways in which we can get there creating a sustainable and desirable future. And this is what I'm going to talk about, that we have the capacity at the same time at which we can destroy life as we know it. We have the capacity to build a world that works for 100% of humanity, which seems to me worth doing. Here's what we're up against. GBO3, a lot of scientists showed that we are losing life. Species are going extinct at a rate faster than they did when the dinosaurs disappeared. Coral reefs, sorry scuba divers, business as usual, perhaps as early as 2035 there will be no living coral reefs on planet Earth, including your Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon. This is a bit more serious, it's the Earth's lungs. And then we're acidifying the oceans. Now we can all probably live without oysters, but those little calciferous critters called phytoplankton that produce about half of the oxygen on Earth, we'd miss them. And the acid oceans are dissolving the capacity of their shells to retain integrity. Now if all of this is starting to sound a bit like that old book, Limits to Growth, I mean we all know that book was wrong, yeah? Well maybe. The April 2012 edition of the Smithsonian Magazine was so unkind as to go back and look at those original collapse graphs and plot the data from when the book was written in 72 until 2000, which was as far as they had the data. The dashed lines are the original projections, the solid lines are the actual data, we're eerily right on track. And about a month or so ago, down in Melbourne, a team went even further, brought the data up to date to now. And again we're right on track. Now trend is not destiny. We can yet change this, but if we keep on this heading, the future looks a bit grim. And back to the economy, the unsustainable business practices, according to Sir John Beddington, chief scientist of the UK, are what created the economic collapse, that the two are intimately linked. And until we begin to deal with these fundamental unsustainabilities, we will lurch from collapse to collapse to collapse. Well we've had one, and it evaporated about 50 trillion dollars, 80 million jobs, and caught the so-called experts quite by surprise, Alan Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of markets. He said we're in a state of shocked disbelief. Financial times went a little further, they said we don't fully understand what's happening to advanced economies. Well charming, if they don't know who does. Well some investors are starting to think about it. Jeremy Grantham runs a multi-billion dollar investment fund, said the assumptions of most investors are that we will have at least 3%, preferably about 8% GDP growth per year. Said it's not going to be like that. We'll be lucky to have 1%. And if you watch the official statistics, they always say, oh yeah, we hit 3. Until a few months later when they correct them, down closer to 1. I commend to you this video of Grantham with Charlie Rose, and he walks through for fundamental financial reasons why we are headed for zero growth. Now this is interesting, the investors are starting to come together with the limits to growth folk. What happens when that happens? Well here's what we're looking at, and Grantham points out part of the problem is the increased capital expenditure needed to obtain the resources that we assume we have to have to run the economy. So this is the percentage increase in capital expenditure of three of the oil majors, and the percentage increase of proven reserves as a result of that CAPEX. So you've got ExxonMobil in the 30s, Shell, Chevron, they're the big losers, 87% increase in CAPEX for minus 3% increase in proven reserves, they're going backwards. So when we say yeah, there's plenty of oil out there, there's plenty of gas out there, Shell Gas, Shell Gas is going to solve all our economic problems. Look at the economics. What is the capital cost of punching all those holes in the ground? Yeah, there is a lot of oil out there. If that old theory of peak oil is correct, you've hit the peak when you've extracted half the resource, not when you've run out of it, because of the increased cost of getting there. Same thing is true in metals, a colleague of Bob's and mine is writing a paper, has written a paper on peak metals saying the same thing, the ore bodies are getting poorer and poorer for the amount that you have to put in to get them out. Mandela said it, poverty is not an accident. We've made it, and because we've made it, we can change it. The economy that we have, the economic ideology that is driving the destruction of our natural capital, of our human capital, actually is not that old. It was built by a small group of men, 36 of them, who gathered at a place called Mont Pelerin, hotel outside Montreux, Switzerland, in 1947 to build the intellectual architecture to serve their narrative of the way the world ought to work, which is the primacy of the individual, that markets are the only mechanism to implement policy, and that government is bad. Heard that point of view of late? They put their members, got three of their members as heads of state, their members as advisors to essentially every head of state on the planet. They built the Chicago School of Economics in the late 1960s in the United States, a Supreme Court justice named Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum, the universities are erupting, the communists are winning, we must act. And five foundations, Olin, Coors, Skafe, Mellon and the Koch brothers, each committed something like $5 million a year for five years to build the institutions, American Enterprise, Kato, Heritage, Hoover, Hudson, Fox News. They built the institutions that messaged, researched, remessaged and rolled out this mental model of the primacy of the individual, the market is the only mechanism and government is bad. With the accession in the UK of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980, they won. They became the dominant economic ideology, the planet around to the point where now in my country, the most liberal president ever is economically to the right of Ronald Reagan. It is no longer a polite conversation to talk about any other approach than this and it served their purposes very well. Prophets are up. My compensation is double. Look at me. I'm walking on water. Yeah, you're walking on the shoulders of the poor slob that's underwater. And this is the mechanism by which they will rule their world. We cannot possibly meet the needs of people or take care of the environment that costs too much. Well, it's starting to get people in the streets in Europe. Governments are falling from Greece, France. The Greek economic collapse driven by this ideology of austerity. Young people, 60 to 65% of young people do not have a job. Italy, Spain would have thought that the collapse of a bank, none of us had ever heard of on an island. Most of us could not locate on a map would threaten the entire Eurozone. So, uh, Miracle, who is now the world's banker said, well, that's all right, we'll just give all the depositors a haircut, uh, take some of the value of their deposits. Directly, Vladimir Putin is on the phone to Miracle. No, you won't. Those are the deposits of my Russian mafia. Who's running our economy? Now, what's interesting is we know from the statistics that austerity does not drive economic growth, even if what you want is just pure old GDP growth. Austerity doesn't get you there. The least austere countries have the higher growth. The more austere, the country's most subjected to austerity are in a race to the bottom. And if you go back and look at history in about 1929, when we had a little economic problem, inequality was at its peak coming out of the gilded age. It was the spending into World War II that ended that depression. And from the end of the war, everybody grew together until 1979. Again, what happened in 1980? That you're in the UK, Reagan in the U.S. And this shift of economic theory to the Mont Pelerin mental model. And since then, inequality has come back to the point that says in Piketty showed it's about back to the levels it was just before the Great Depression. Piketty, this has got to be the least read bestseller in history. 700 pages of arcane economic statistics translated from the French was the number one bestseller on Amazon.com for weeks as an author. This is insulting. But what he's saying is the reason he says everybody bought my book is that this issue of inequality is now of incredible concern to all of us. And he said what's driving it is pay, particularly to the the CEL class and the nature of capital, how capital produces capital through investment. Once you have it and can invest it, you get more of it. For most of us who don't have it, we're not getting it. You cannot work hard enough to work your way out of this whole. And this level of inequality is not good for society. Our colleagues, Dr. Richard Wilkinson, Dr. Kate Pickett wrote this book, The Spirit Level, on the impacts of inequality on pretty much any metric that you care about, whether it's how long you live or whether or not you have murders in your society or whether or not people are fat or addicted or have a whole array of social challenges. They're all worse. The less equal your nation is. Now in the US, some people asked, what do you think inequality is? You think it ought to be. And the answer came back fairly egalitarian. Yeah, there's some differences, but reasonably well divided. Here's what it is. We just have no sense of how unequal we've become. So what's the way out? I think if we solve the worst of the environmental problems facing us, we create jobs. We go a long way thereby to ending poverty. We mobilize the investment money that is needed in the society. We empower the entrepreneurs who have always been the problem solvers, and then the rest will follow. And we can do it. Dr. Mark Jacobson at Stanford has shown we can power the world with 100% renewables by as early as 2035, and he is now replicating this study state by state by state throughout the United States. And it's an interesting experiment to do here in Australia. Indeed, some people have done it. Answer is essentially the same. You can power Australia with 100% renewables and doing it is the job creation engine. In my country, the regenerative economy, the green energy economy already employs more people than the fossil industry. It does better than the rest of the economy, even in a down economy. It pays better. It is hiring, manufacturing jobs. If we want to bring manufacturing back to the United States, invest in renewable energy. 25% of the jobs are in manufacturing compared to 9% for the economy as a whole. It's growing faster. California's green economy grew three times as fast as the traditional economy. Occam Steiner runs the UN environment program, reckons about half the global workforce will be involved in the green economy by 2030. And the opportunities are enormous. Shigar Shah, founder of Sun Edison, said we need 100, 110, 100,000 companies being created to sell 100 million worth of climate solutions by 2020, resulting in a $10 trillion economy. And this will solve the climate crisis and the jobs crisis. Where do you start efficiency? Listen, if you can hear an HVAC system working, it's inefficient. Essentially everything in our economy is inefficient. And Jigar said because of technological development, it's always cost effective to save about half the energy that we're using. So go through and do all the retrofits you can. A couple of years later, go through and do them again, you will still get cost effective savings. This is particularly true in buildings. Jigar went from being an entrepreneur to running Richard Branson's carbon war room. They came out with this report on the built environment. The sort of stuff Janice Berkland here works on. HSBC reckons the energy efficiency in the built environment market today is 87 billion worth of capturable savings. In 2020, it'll be a whole lot bigger. McKinsey puts it even higher, 1.2 trillion attainable by a $520 billion investment to save about a gigaton of carbon. We need to save 17 by 2050 to get to stay at a safe level. Once you've done the efficiency, move on to the renewables. They are increasingly replacing fossil energy. In Southern California, the Edison Utility just commissioned a 1.3 gigawatt solar array. A gigawatt is roughly a nuclear sized chunk of electricity to be online by 2016. Anybody know how long it takes to build a nuke? A lot longer. They're now looking at bringing on gigawatt scale storage. You know, the rub on renewables, well, the sun doesn't shine at night. So you need storage. Well, we're getting it. We're getting utility scale storage. And at that point it's over yet. Swanson's Law. Price of solar comes down 20% for every doubling. We've had two or three of them already, eight more, and we power the entire world with solar. And now we're starting to get some really fun breakthroughs. In Arizona, they just commissioned a molten salt storage unit, 280 megawatt plant that is now up and running. This is 24 hour a day base load power from the sun. Here's the cool one. Buildings on electric cars. The battery capacity in cars running around is about 15 times the capacity of the electric grid. So you plug your car into the building and the car batteries are powering the buildings when the sun's not shining, when the sun's shining you're filling up the batteries in the cars. Have a little thing like a credit card swipe so the system knows it's you. And what has been your second largest personal expenditure is now a money making machine for you. Lots of breakthroughs coming. Next generation wind turbines. PV's hitting grid parity. This is true in most of Germany now. It's true in about 20 states in the United States. Oceans, more efficient PV's, better batteries, offshore wind turbines. A whole array of technologies just now coming on market. I was on the floor of the US Stock Exchange when my friend Tom Karnak, who was at the time running the carbon disclosure project, announced the results of their survey. The leaders, the corporate leaders in reporting and managing their carbon emissions between 2008 and 2012 achieved over 5% higher return on equity. 18% greater stability and cash flow. A percent and a half higher growth. Twice the average total return of the Global 500. And this year's report, the S&P 500 companies that have sustainability baked into what they're doing are financially outperforming the laggers. 18% higher return on investment. Notice I'm not talking about polar bears. This is business. And it's happening, whether it be Harvard Business Reports or Sustainability Certifications or my friend Yvonne getting the cover of Fortune magazine, Patagonia or Walmart, the evil empire going green. You know when Walmart goes green, they are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Harvard, sustainability is not the burden on the bottom line. It was thought to be it is the touchstone of all of innovation. And in the future, only companies that have it as a goal will achieve competitive advantage. When those wild-eyed environmentalists at Goldman Sachs tell you that the companies that are the leaders in sustainability have 25% higher stock value than their laggards, there's a business case. So at Natural Capitalism, we collected 40 of these studies. There are now more than 50 of them showing essentially the same thing. Sustainability is better business. Now if this is true, and I believe this is now proven, the old way of doing business is in trouble. And indeed the New York Times, utility executives around the world are watching nervously as the technologies they dismissed as irrelevant threaten long-established business plans. And poor countries, the developing countries are leapfrogging. They're just like they went, they blew past landline telephones and went to mobile phones. They're leapfrogging to renewables. Steve Chu, who was US Secretary of Energy, said the utilities are in danger of being FedExed, just the way the post office got FedExed, as rooftop solar modules drop in price. It's called the death spiral. And the utilities that are stupid will go away. The top 20 European utilities lost 600 billion in value over the past five years. Tesla, little Tesla, is now valued. Its market capitalization is more than half General Motors. They produce 300 times fewer cars. How can this possibly be? Because Tesla's not a car company. It's a battery company. And batteries' storage is the holy grail of the renewables revolution. As soon as you can modularize and gang together batteries to utility scale storage, it's just pure over. Here, I'm the face of the death spiral. This is the five kilowatt solar unit on my ranch. And my leaf. So I plug my car into the sun. I tell you what, it's mighty nice passing a petrol station. And I went and bought a leaf because I was having breakfast with a guy who said, I did the math with the tax rebate. What I pay monthly for the car is the same as I was paying for petrol, for gasoline. He said, I have a free car. I went and debated the frackers. And the guy I was debating was really good. And he had the last word. And he said, you need our product. We're going to drill it. You're going to buy it. I was in a bad mood. The next morning, the man I lived with called up. He said, it was a rainy day. Been out horse shooing. He called up. He said, hey, you want to go drive a leaf? I said, yeah, I do. It outperforms my Porsche. I sold the Porsche and I now drive a leaf and love it. Nissan got it right. When you, and any of you who've ever driven an electric car, the torque is incredible. So your acceleration, you heard of smokers. This is this, the U.S. is crazy. This is this phenomenon in the States where these guys who have these big old lumbering trucks, big old pipes, burn diesel, they've tuned it so that when they hit the accelerator, it blows smoke to blow all over people like Bob who drive a Prius. So Rob, my guy was sitting in a light in the leaf with a smoker next to him. And this guy was going, boom, boom, boom, boom. And looking over at him, Rob just waited until the light changed and just blew away from him. It'll out-accelerate any gasoline-powered car just because of the torque. Now, it ain't going to top out like the Porsche did. Porsche could outrun it at the high end. But there's the limit to how fast you can go before you start paying a lot in traffic tickets. So the front of the car is the acceleration and the handling. Now, if the utility is nice to me, I will do what I do today, which is I'm grid interconnected. When the power goes out, I have an isolation relay and I can stand alone. And in the floods last fall when power was gone for four days, we partied on. If the utility is not nice to me, I buy one of these Bosch or LG 5 kilowatt storage systems, which are now commercial. I cut the tie and I stand alone. Now, me, Kwame, who cares? Me as a big company like Unilever, which is now announced it's going 100% renewable powered, or Apple or Google or Ikea or Walmart. If the utility is nice, we stay grid interconnected. And this is good for everybody. A grid is a nice thing to have. We built it, we paid for it, we might as well use it. But if the utilities are stupid, we all start dropping off the grid and then all hell breaks loose. You have this exact same problem here with your economy. You have made a bet that China will want all the iron ore you can dig and all the coal you can dig. And so you are a banana republic. You think your economy will get you rich extracting resources and selling them as commodities. China is smarter than that. China is starting to decouple from your economy. China has as its basis for development policy, the circular economy, energy efficiency. China is investing hugely in renewables. They cannot go 100% renewable today. So you can sell coal to them for a few years yet. Is this a good bet for your national economy for the next 10, 20, 50 years? Here's what your vice chancellor has done. Go A&U and this is smart business. He's not the first, Stanford did it, Oxford's done it. But it's a very smart move. Some of the coal equities have lost 90% of their value since 2011. Bloomberg had a nice piece. Don't be the last one holding these equities. People are going to play this market for a little while. You say, well, if I sell somebody else will just buy. Yeah, for a little while. Bloomberg also said long-term fundamentals of oil and gas are not favorable. Is this really what you want to be betting your economy on? Here's what got me. City, city group, a report out last June called Energy Darwinism. Said this is the era of renewables. They talked about the alarming fall in the cost of solar. Alarming to who? Fossil fuels further up the cost curves are most at risk. What it costs now to build a new coal plant. And trust me, China can do math. Face competition with new technologies within the first quarter of their lifetime. These projects entail significantly more risk than is widely recognized. What city did was they said there is utility scale solar now on offer at 5 cents a kilowatt hour a U.S. Indeed 4 cents, but they said we discount that that's subsidized. Hint to city. All energy is subsidized. And around the world the fossil energy is subsidized 12 times as much as all the efficiency in renewables. But fine. What city said that was interesting. 10 year unsubsidized forward price of gas, which is the cheap option. 11 cents a kilowatt hour. 10 year forward price unsubsidized of solar. 10 cents a kilowatt hour. They said it's over. Solar wins. So you have a 10 year horizon at best if what you want to be is an extractive industries economy. And city said the history of the energy industry tells us that change is never gradual. New technologies are embraced at the expense of incumbents. And this goes from wood to coal to oil to gas. And city said this is now the age of renewables. Now smart utility commissions are getting this. So New York state just issued the reforming the energy vision act. Business as usual should no longer be considered the only cost effective way to meet our responsibility to provide power to everybody. We're going to enable customers to choose cleaner more resilient power options. Integrating distributed energy resources as the primary means of meeting system needs. Hawaii has done the same thing. Germany of course plans to be 100% renewable by 2050. Scotland by 2020. And now it gets interesting. The people are getting into the streets. Nothing scares a politician more than people in the streets. 400,000 of us in New York City was pretty amazing. Another 600,000 around the world including cities here. Institutions that lose their legitimacy die very quickly. I like the little guy at the bottom. He's walking away. And it doesn't take very long. Before institutions that have seemed to us to be inevitable die. I spent a lot of time with the folk at Occupy. I wanted to hear what they were on about. Occupy lacked a strategy of change. And this scares me of all the big challenges in the world. This one scares me. How many of you have seen this video? Yeah, a couple of you. If you haven't, go check it out. Russell Brand Jeremy Paxman. Just Google Russell Brand Jeremy Paxman Revolution. And in it, Brand says I haven't a flicker of a doubt. It'll be revolution. Most watched YouTube video all of last year. Really? I don't think they have a clue. Revolutions eat their own. And Sarah Palin shoots straighter than we do. So this is going to be interesting. Landing this beast is going to be a little turbulent. I don't think we're prepared for the challenges facing us. But I think we'd better get prepared. So what Bob and Ida and a whole team of us are doing is trying to fundamentally rethink the economy. What would an economy be that worked for 100% of humanity? Here's what we have now. We, the environment, natural capital people are in service to the economy, which is in service to finance. What's wrong with this picture? It's wrong way around. Finance ought to be a tool in service to a healthy economy that is in service to life. The poet Wendell Berry put it well, our economy has become an anti-economy, a financial system without sound economic basis and without economic virtues. This is our life. We get dressed in clothes that we buy for work, drive through traffic in a car we're still paying for in order to get to the job that we need to pay for the clothes in the car and the house we leave vacant all day so that we can afford to live in it. And after 9-11, my president said go shopping. He was actually right. If you have an economy 70% based on consumption and in a crisis you act as if nothing's wrong, nothing's wrong. So after the 08 recession, the Financial Times blamed all of us who weren't buying enough. It's the zombie U.S. consumer. Well, the zombie U.S. consumer consumes a lot. You look at what we spend on things we don't need like makeup. It had more than pay for reproductive health care. Pet food would eliminate hunger. Bottled water. Three times over provide clean drinking water for the world. As Dana Meadows said, we are seeking to meet non-material needs with stuff. What would you suggest to fill the dark empty space in my soul? Bobby Kennedy said, even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task to confront the poverty, satisfaction, purpose and dignity that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product counts pollution and advertising and ambulances, locks and jails and destruction, napalm nuclear warheads, armored cars. Yet it does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. Is there any? It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it doesn't even measure whether or not we're happier. This is work that Bob Costanza has been leading for years, asking, why are we measuring things in this stupid way? And are there different metrics? And so as he mentioned, we were asked to Bhutan by the visionary prime minister to see if we could create a new model of development. Bob and Ida and Dr. Jacqueline Maglade, who's now chief scientist of the UN Environment Program, Richard and Kate, Ashok Khosla, runs development alternatives in India. And we gave it a go. And then for a variety of reasons, Bhutan chose to go in a different direction. So Bob and Ida and I got on the phone one day and said, why don't we create our own little organization out of this team of people that has been pulled together. And so we did. The Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity, ASAP4ALL.org. Join us. We are starting a whole conversation around what would an economy be in service to life. Here's the old mindset. The old mindset. Technology is important, but it's only a solution. It benefits all. Yeah, there are limits to the Earth. But if we are caring, if we're restoring for regenerative, we can build a different kind of economy, preserve the natural capital that underpins all of life, shift to the concept of sufficiency. Bob introduced me to a word out of Scandinavia. Lagom. Enough. Enoughness. Pretty cool thought. We thought about calling it the Lagom economy, but nobody'd know what it means. We need to move from all of us being a bucket of crabs, where as soon as any of us begins to get elevation, the other ones claw us all down. We're all in this together. And we need to move from the concept of creating jobs to creating real ownership to place-based economies. We can have a global economy. I'm particularly fond of Scotland's finest export. And yes, I have sampled whiskies around the world. They still don't beat Scotland. But our economies ought to be place-based and resilient locally. Then we can afford to import the luxuries. But we need to be moving from exports to meeting our needs locally. If we are standing on the edge of a cliff, the only smart thing to do is to turn around and take a step forward. And when we do, we see everything we've left behind from indigenous wisdom to the intactness of the natural world. It's a beautiful world. Innovation is found at the edges. And we need to begin to roll the edges back up into a conversation in the center to change the story. Humans have always learned by story. What is our new story? Pete Seager said the key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known. Edges in nature are where the abundance is, where a forest meets a meadow, where a river meets the ocean in an estuary. Because of diversity. Entrepreneurs celebrate diversity. Entrepreneurs aren't afraid of edges. They've always sailed out from the edge. And when they do, they find it's not a flat earth. You don't fall off the edge. It's around earth. This whole concept of circularity. Entrepreneurs are also the job creators. The Kaufman Foundation showed that in the U.S. in all but seven years from 1977 to now, the big companies have been job destroyers. The job creators are the startups. And so I want to brag on my kids that I'm the CEO of the company. These are some of my students. Two teams. One California's highest environmental award. Building a company called EOS Climate. They realized that refrigerants are 11,000 times worse for the climate than CO2. And with regulations coming on the grocery stores, the companies that have all these refrigerants are just going to let them go. Not good. So they came up with a proprietary technology to destroy them. But what was the business model? So one of them spent a lot of time with the California Air Resources Board when the Republican governor put in place a carbon cap and they then created a market to trade emissions reductions. They got destruction of refrigerants classified as an emission reduction. Okay, now there's a business model. Then they brought in some technology. On an iPhone, you can track chain of custody of these refrigerants. They built an app. The things are worth recycling. Turns out they cost $5 a pound. So you recycle them, recycle them, recycle them, recycle them. Every time getting your carbon credit. And then when you're done with them, you destroy them. Getting another carbon credit. Now they have a great business model. They're making money. The companies are making money and they're solving the problem. The Isle of Ag off Scotland. This was owned by some British landlords who kind of treated the people like serfs. They put it up for sale, put the whole island up for sale to be developed. The people said, wait a minute, let's buy our island. So they did a Kickstarter Indiegogo campaign and they raised the money to buy the island. And now they're taking it 100% renewably powered. They're doing regenerative agriculture. It's the only place in Scotland with net in migration. They're an interesting species. We created the economic model that is destroying life as we know it. And we can change it. Cheater capitalism is not a natural law. We can do something different. And you can do something different here. Here's the question for you. What do you want your future to be? Dr. Mike Smith sitting here is one of the lead authors on this book Natural Advantage of Nations that lays out for Australia for this whole part of the world how to implement a sustainable future. And Mike taught me Australia was the third country in the world to develop a programmable computer and another computer in the 40s in the 60s but you didn't fund it. You didn't invest in it. You let Silicon Valley take the computer industry. Australia has some of the best scientists in renewable energy in energy efficiency now in regenerative agriculture in all of the technologies that are needed to build a sustainable world. You're going to miss this opportunity because you want to remain there. Yeah, you can pave over it paint over it said what we do in the next 10 years matters more than what humanity does in the next 10,000. We're up against it. This is if you will humanity's final exam was Bucky's phrase and Bucky also said we are called to be the architects of the future not its victims. Thank you to join us join Ida, join Bob join all of us at ASAP join an international team in trying to rethink this economic paradigm in this time of incredible peril and incredible opportunity you want to play? Thank you.