 Good afternoon everybody. I've been running so much for the last three days that I haven't had a chance to say hello and Haven't had a chance to hear all of the wonderful things that The solution winners have brought but I have read about the individual projects And I will get further briefed in the next couple of days by having the chance to be with you We're moving it for me my calendar is now moving into the SDSN phase because it's been the General Assembly And going back and forth to the UN and We're on the west side and they're on the east side and so it's been a lot of transport In in the last three days. Let me just say a little bit about what I've seen during the General Assembly basically Global society Global academia, that's a lot of us and global business is way ahead of the politicians in general and Maybe I got the worst dose of politicians in the morning Yesterday because the General Assembly opened with two of the worst politicians on the planet both scenario first Who gave a perfectly awful talk? and then If you can imagine worse we have a Trump Who gave an even worse talk? Although I have a sneaking suspicion that both talks were written by the same person actually And I think that that may literally be true because there were certain nasty themes that permeated both speeches about national sovereignty and nations and Anti-globalism and a bunch of nonsense But the day ended well with the opening of impeachment proceedings against President Trump Which he richly deserved for that awful speech that he gave and I Felt pretty good about that and what I've also felt quite good about is How many solutions are being developed? right now you are doing wonderful work in solutions across many different fields and Many different local realities and this is also very important because local context culture ecology geography affects the kinds of solutions that make sense and this is At the essence of the whole notion of a global network of Solutions that you're finding them sharing them and making it possible for others to learn and We've had a wonderful day also of businesses Talking about solutions and that is very very exciting for me I just arrived from a Fantastic discussion with the Swedish company Scania Which makes big trucks? and they're completely committed to Decarbonizing their fleet and Even though I do almost nothing but talk about this subject morning noon and night every day seven days a week Fifty-two weeks of the year I learned a lot in the last few minutes from what this company is doing I'm going to show you a picture actually I maybe this is so obvious to you, but I've never seen it before, you know One of the big puzzles is how do you make large? trucks Zero emission we know for vehicles light-duty vehicles that electrification is almost surely the right way But for large trucks the problem is that the size of batteries right now given the Battery performance takes up too much room and it's non-economical And so there's a problem of electrification of large vehicles that is basically solved for light-duty vehicles and So I was asking and they have a perfectly sensible solution that I've never actually thought about which is You can't quite see it, but it's a giant truck being like a city trolley with the over over highway Grid we don't have that anywhere in the United States as far as I know Anywhere tried and it's only at the beginning in Europe, but what a smart straightforward idea which is you don't need the batteries if you have the green electricity powering the highway system and what the CEO of Scania was explaining to me is that 80% or so of their heavy freight is on a very small proportion of The roads which is basically the highway system So if you just devote one lane of the highways you can actually create a A Corridor that is zero emission with existing technologies and it's a wonderful solution And I said oh and if you've got that one quarter they can also be autonomous and Glint in his eye. Yes, that's part of the plan to so that we can move to autonomy of vehicles at the same time and Along that corridor can also be what you need for that which is 5g a heavy Concentration of access so suddenly you've made the transport corridor wonderfully Efficient and green and the technologies are obviously within reach and I confess I Hadn't thought about that as a solution I imagined that it would have to be a hydrogen fuel cell solution or Further advances on batteries and then I asked what do you do within the cities and he answered well within the cities? We're already all electric. This is basically the answer even for freight because it's a local Transport but then he explained that To make the cities work better You could cut down Tremendously on the number of trucks within the cities because most of the trucks are carrying a very small fraction of their potential load and with digitization of the Information about which freight is going where it's possible to make a perimeter around the city that the big trucks are coming in and they're transferring The freight into a very small number of electric vehicles because that's what the digital information will allow And I asked well could that be automatic also? He said yes, that's what we're doing so that can be autonomously done because they have a modular design of How the freight is going to be Built on top of the the transport Infrastructure so Fantastic things can be done Once we have the determination and the knowledge to do it we heard earlier today at the conference from Another fantastic company. I don't know if any of you was at the discussion with Pat Brown of impossible foods but He had the very bright idea that given the extraordinary burden of beef consumption on the planet to make What is surely a new term and that is plant-based meat Every plant yeah plant-based meat, so he just calls it meat But they're making meat products out of plants and I For impossible foods The breakthrough that they've had with the beef is to get an extremely strong Taste of beef into this plant-based food by Heem protein Which was the result of their research work that the heme protein gives a lot of the taste to beef and it can be Produced by yeast in fact, I think it is for impossible foods and then put into a plant-based protein and the Implications of that for easing the burden on the physical environment are absolutely startling I only had a small part of the imagination of all of the different Dimensions of ecological pressure that will be relieved from this Including an obvious point that we should remember that I would have forgotten on a first pass through this Which is that the amount of antibiotics being used in beef production is so high that it is one of the absolutely dire risks of creating mass resistance to large classes of antibiotics and that the pressure therefore of moving to a Plant-based meat diet would also have implications such as vastly reduced industrial uses of antibiotics and therefore vastly prolonging the usefulness and life of the antibiotics But that was just one of the many aspects of the solution that he offered We also had the vice president of sustainability of 3m Which is a major materials company in the United States about all of the different ways that Their products are being redesigned and reconfigured to be sustainable So we should feel quite optimistic actually I Technological solutions plus impeachment will get us the sustainable development goals. So I think we're getting very very close Thank you for organizing this wonderful Solutions group. I know in each country how happy The response was so congratulations to all of you for the fantastic work that you're doing your really heroes of the SDG We will make your solutions known and spread That's a core part of our network and thanks to all of you for your leadership