 Well, good afternoon everybody. Let me say what a pleasure it is to be here and congratulate Ricky, Tony, everyone else at the LSE on this terrific conference which I hear has been a great success so far. Congratulations, the LSE now flourishing under its new director sitting next to me on the panel and no doubt gonna destroy everything I say. Well, this ladies and gentlemen is a prime example of how the electric city doesn't always work because I thought I was talking about political consequences of the new electric age. That was the title I had anyway and I think it must have been a preceding title so if you don't mind I do want to talk about the potential impact of climate change but I would like to range a bit more widely because I don't really agree with the idea of electric city at least as it seems to be set out in this conference and I don't agree we're in a new electric age. We are in a new age but I'll argue it's something very different from that. I think the easiest way to share this is to show that the electric city is not a novelty at all. I mean I was very influenced when I started working on energy, climate change and so forth by a book by a guy called Philip Shua, S-C-H-E-W called The Grid. The Grid is a book about the history of the electric grid and what the book shows is that modern city is inseparable from the rise of the electric grid. In other words the modern city if you date it from the late 19th century is already intrinsically absolutely and everywhere an electric city. I don't even think about it much before I read this bloody book but when you think about it everything is wired up. Everything I'm speaking into, looking at through the lights, you're looking at your computers, surreptitiously looking at your mobile phones all depends on unbelievable brain of electricity which goes through the walls, goes through the floor, goes across the airwaves without which you simply wouldn't have the modern city. You couldn't have skyscrapers, you couldn't have lifts, you couldn't have most of the paraphernalia of the modern city. So this is not really the age of the electric city. The electric city is still as it were spreading through the world but I want to argue for something different. Of course the grid still matters an awful lot and if you don't have a grid which is characteristic of large parts of the developing world you cannot really expect to develop. The grid is one of the first things you should lay down even if you've got a mobile phone network if you want to develop these days as applies to education in other areas. So it's certainly as it were on the map but it's not where the main changes we have to confront in cities come from in my opinion. Where they come from I would say two sources. The first is that the grid once you think of it is being everywhere. Once you think of it as being like a global brain a long time before the internet came along. As long as you think of the internet and other communications media is intrinsically dependent on the grid. The grid calls for the endless deployment of energy. I mean I'm a sociologist and I'm not like other people in the room. Also I don't know anything about cities apart from living in them but you know I've written about social theory for like three decades. I never even thought about energy until I spent the last five years working on climate change. But energy the deployment of energy is the very condition locus and nature of what we call an industrial civilization. So you can't have the grid without endless continuous sources of power which we take for granted certainly as social scientists we've mainly taken for granted. And this has led us to one of the big dilemmas of our civilization. It is so dependent on power. Power is still well over 90% on the result of fossil fuels and fossil fuels are creating the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which would absolutely undermine the very civilization we've built. So that is as it were the contradiction in our dependence on power and electricity which I stress is historical. It's at least 150 years old and the possibilities for the future because having spent a lot of time looking at it the evidence that climate change is real, dangerous, probably quite approximate, caused by greenhouse gases is to me more or less irrefutable. You know if you wouldn't get in a plane unless you trusted science and technology why people don't trust science and technology in this area is of a bit of a mystery. So to me the two great kind of convergent themes of living in the city today are on the one hand the development of computerized communication which of course intrinsically also depends on the grid we know all about that and the other is environmental sustainability. These are the two crunch forces of 21st century civilization I would say. In terms of their political consequences I've only got a quarter of an hour or less so there are three themes that I'd like to pick up on and offer for my distinguished panelist possibility of discussion. The first is that when you get this new crunch of living in an increasingly computerized communication system and living in a world which is manifestly living beyond its means the first consequence you get is the rise of energy politics. I think one of the reasons why sociologists not paid much attention to energy in the past is that energy was politicized but it was politicized in relation to Middle Eastern politics. That is not what still the case of course but the politicization of energy is the theme which is now entering our politics in a massive way everywhere so the rise of energy politics to me is largely something new. Today energy politics is far more open many many people are involved because of the need for example to build renewable energy systems to build wind farms and so on. It's much more open in that sense it's much more contested look at the enormous battles going on in the UK at the moment around wind power versus gas with the emergence of the new energy bill and it's far more consequential. Energy was an unacknowledged core of our civilization which has now been brought out into the open and inherently politicized. We have somehow in our politics the square of balance between energy security sustainability and job creation. Energy is obviously often city based but the main thing that's happening to the grid is that the grid now has to become a smart grid. There is no chance of moving towards a more sustainable set of energy sources if we don't have smart grids. Smart grids are necessary why well partly because of the nature of renewable energy technologies which are virtually all intermittent. If you have large-scale dependence on intermittent energy technologies then you must have used the rest of your energy system with the greatest efficiency. We can look forward I hope to a trans-European smart grid which could be one source of job creation and renewal in the European Union. Could be I say because there are many problems standing in the way of that. Any my first point is if you don't get involved in energy politics you will not understand a great deal of what modern politics increasingly will be about. Second I would want to argue I'm sure you will have discussed this to some degree that we shouldn't ignore the city as a center of production. We shouldn't simply see it as a vehicle of consumption. For what it's worth I think we're in the middle of one of the most momentous transitions in production that has ever been witnessed in human history. It is so early that most people I think don't have a real sense of its transformative character. Although everyone will know something about it I'm sure you will have discussed bits of it. What's happened is something to me truly momentous with all sorts of positive and negative implications. It is this that computers no longer exist in a virtual world on which you simply design things or write notes. Computers are entering the world of reality and directly becoming part of the world of reality. It's hard to exaggerate what a transition this could be. The early version of it is 3D printers and everyone here will know this. For anyone seeing one that 3D printers can already produce an amazing diverse to the objects from engineering parts to dental crowns and many, many other things. But 3D printing is like a upright spinning Jenny. It's just the early edge of a world in which computers will increasingly make the world. We will make the world through computers. Some people here might be following what's going on at MIT and other universities where what they're doing is now trying to design complete functional systems which can be delivered on a computer. Neil Gershengfeld from MIT for example envisages a plane and this is in his words a plane that can fly right out of a computer. I think all of us who work on the issues I do, industrialization, the movement of manufacture to the east, the future of our economy must be alert to what is going on here. Crucially when you have digital fabrication it reverses the assumption that manufacture must move from the high labor cost countries to the low labor cost countries. So Gershengfeld says in his work think globally, fabricate locally and this could very well be the wave of manufacture in the future. I mean I was saying social scientists don't learn very much but one thing I always applied in my research is that every trend produces its opposite, a kind of for gay young thing and I think this is likely to happen with the export of manufacture and need perhaps the very export of economic productivity to non western countries. So we're talking about something to me anyway. Right at the beginning fundamentally important for what our economy will be like. I know there are some people from Barcelona. I don't know the details of the scheme but I gather there is a scheme in Barcelona to set up digital fabrication workshops around the city aimed at employing unemployed youth and training them up to take part in these workshops. But this is truly where you know people use the term casually new industrial revolution but this is to me something really really dramatic and fundamentally far reaching. As I say it has numerous consequences because you can already produce the parts of a gun, a gun on a 3D printer so it won't be long before you can make a complete gun on your computer and perhaps much more dangerous forms of weaponry. So nothing comes without a price. My third theme which you know running through all this is the dilemma of our civilization, massive dependence on energy for its electricity, run through electricity but the consequences of that being intrinsically destructive. So my third theme is the city is dystopia really. So far as climate change is concerned, I first wrote my book on the politics of climate change in 2008 I think. And at that time there seemed to be some hope that we could control greenhouse gas emissions globally. We've lost hope at the moment that we can do this to mine when we've lost control of climate change. It's unbelievably important thing as well. As most people don't seem to realize that climate change as far as I know is irreversible. Once you've got the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you cannot get them out again. CO2 will be in the atmosphere for more than a century. One of the most difficult things about climate change is that even small rises in temperature will produce much more violent weather. So you'll get far more storms of much greater intensity and far bigger droughts than we ever experienced before. This is going to be almost impossible to manage. We're looking at the moment potentially. Even the World Bank, very conservative organization, has said this about a four degree increase some 25 years from now. Four degrees means about nine or 10 degrees in the polar regions. The polar regions are already melting far more dramatically than was anticipated in the IPCC reports from about five years ago. The polar regions control large elements of the world's weather. I can't tell you, you know, to me anyway how dangerous the situation is. Not just for our children, but for our own futures. So, you know, New York City is the shape of things to come. You cannot say of any individual weather event that it's the result of climate change. You cannot say that, but you can say that everything is on track for super storms which will make super storm sandy look like a bit of dust in a puddle. See, the electric city, if you want to use that term, has to build in resilience. And you have to start an hour to build in resilience. The great difficulty is, first of all, cities in poorer parts of the world have no means of doing this. So, they are extremely vulnerable. And in the advanced countries, in the industrial countries, even there, building in resilience is fantastically expensive and demands long-term thinking. Politics in democratic countries not very good at long-term thinking. See, this is like a crunch issue of our civilization. Because it's such a crunch issue, you know, people find it very difficult to think about it. Very like to say, oh, well, let's go out and have a cup of coffee, which is, in a way, a sort of rational response. But dystopian visions of the city should not be seen as simply negative pessimistic views about the future. What they are is a designation of actual risks which we face. I would say we live in a new civilization today. We've kind of moved off the edge of history because our civilization is so different from others which have proceeded and I would define it as a high opportunity, high risk civilization in which we tread a very difficult line between massive new opportunities and massive new risks with a first civilization which could destroy itself on a global scale. And it's easy to see why it's so difficult to think about this. Well, on the theme of the electric city to close with, I thought I'd mention this series by Tom Hanks, since I'm not sure it has been mentioned before. It's called the Electric City. It's an animated web series on computers. Viewers can navigate a 3D map. They can investigate the backgrounds of key figures. They can join discussions and post connections on social networks. It's all about, if I can quote from the film, how to achieve peace and security in the midst of rubble. The rubble that could be our cities. It's all about a time when fossil fuels are depleted and the remaining small communities are dependent on naturally created and local electricity. The point of dystopian visions is to avoid them. But what they signal, I would stress again, is the reality of risk. If we do not recognize the reality of risk, if we do not build in resilience into cities, we're in for awful trouble in the future. But it is so, so hard to do this. And I read a review of Tom Hanks' film, which says the TV industry yawns, not interested in what he has to say. And that tends to be the attitude of the citizenry in the face of risks which are too difficult to comprehend for many people, but are all too real. But I would stress again, high risk, high opportunity. That is the nature of our century. Thanks very much for your attention.