 We should be starting on our somewhat free-format conversation with Smarri McCarthy on where it's too late to be pessimistic about climate change. Smarri McCarthy has a bit of a colored past, but his last gig was being a member of the Icelandic parliament for the Icelandic pilot party. But I'm sure Smarri can extend this introduction further. Okay, thank you all for coming. So, yeah, I was actually told that I was supposed to give you an optimistic talk about climate change. And there was this question of, okay, first off, how does one do that? But secondly, is that the talk I would necessarily give? And after thinking about it a little bit, I'm like, you know, I think I can actually be fairly optimistic about climate change. But before we can get optimistic, we need to really dive down into the pessimism and really understand how bleak this can get. But then we'll work our way up from there. With the way we're going to do this, I'm going to give you like a little bit of an intro, and then hopefully we can turn this into a bit of a conversation. So, just like how do I end up doing this? Well, while I was in the Icelandic parliament, I was in part taking care of climate policy for my party, and we were always trying to figure out how we could improve things. And I started asking these really annoying questions like, okay, hi, we're spending all this money, like all these governments all around the world are spending all this money on trying to fix climate change. Why are we not fixing climate change yet? What's the problem? Why is this hard? And the deeper I got down into this question, and you know, I talked to people in the ministries, I talked to people in business, academia, I went all the way to like the deputy secretary general of the UN, and you know, just asking everybody I could find like, how come we're not fixing this? And one of the things that became clear is we don't really know how yet. So, let's start here. I'm going to start with a quote from a book called Uninhabitable Earth. It's by David Wallace Wells. Some of you might have read it. It's actually, I'm going to take two quotes and splice them together, but he says, at two degrees, the ice sheets will begin their collapse. 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity. Major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable. And even in northern latitudes, heat waves will kill thousands each summer. Then he goes on to say, the upper end of the probability curve put forward by the United Nations to estimate the end of the century high emission scenario put us at eight degrees warming. Warming of that level would require a suicidal cocktail of sadistic policy, public indifference and catastrophic luck. At eight degrees, humans at the equator and in the tropics would not be able to move around without dying. Hardly any land on the planet would be capable of efficiently producing any of the food we now eat. Forests would be roiled by rolling storms of fire and coasts would be punished by more and more intense hurricanes. So that's the eight degree warming scenario and the two degree warming scenario. So I think we can relatively safely say that the 1.5 degree warming scenario, that ship has sailed. So on the 1.5 degree warming, this is a virtual inevitability. We might possibly be able to back out from that one, but it seems very unlikely. We're already most of the way there and this is just our reality now. The average temperature on Earth was 15 degrees Celsius when we started this mess. Now it's going to be about 16.5. That's if we manage to stop everything now. The eight degree scenario is where life is really absolutely fucked. And not just absolutely, but comprehensively fucked. But here's the good news. He said, a suicidal cocktail of sadistic policy, public indifference and catastrophic luck would be required in order for this situation to manifest. So, okay, we probably can't control luck much, but let's come back to that one. But policy and indifference are entirely controllable. And some people are currently indifferent. And there seems to be a bit of a, shall we say, political alignment on that topic. So more right-wing people are more likely to be indifferent. More left-wing people are more likely to be outraged. But in general, neither is actually helping much to fix the problem at the moment. So let's try and address this in a useful way. And actually a useful way to think about this is to not confuse indifference with the lack of agency. Because there are certainly people who are indifferent. But I think there's a lot more people who are really scared or at least somewhat concerned who would like to fix this problem, but don't know how. Much like all of these people I was talking to about this stuff in various governments and whatnot. So if we are talking about the literal millions of people in the world who would like to do something, it might be hundreds of millions or whatever. What they have in common is they don't necessarily know what exactly to do. They are uncertain what helps. They are somehow being inefficient with the money and resources and capabilities that they do have. And those are actually sufficient. So this is one of those things where we shouldn't attribute to malice where ignorance will suffice. But this isn't willful ignorance. This is just we don't really know how this stuff works yet. And broadly, this is harkening back to what I was saying at my talk yesterday, whenever it was. Yeah, I've lost count. So the issue is not as simple as just reducing the emissions of CO2 and capturing more CO2. It's also this much more complex thing of dealing with processes such as desertification and eutrophication of lakes and rivers. Those are much more complex chemical processes and we can't just reduce it to a single number. And I have this just strong complaint about using CO2 as the metric. CO2 amount in the atmosphere is a really good metric for the scale of the problem, but it is not a good metric for the scale of the solution. If we are only measuring the solutions by how well they remove CO2 from the atmosphere, then we're going to be missing things such as ecosystem failure, mass extinction events, things like that. And not to mention desertification that are actually very problematic. Quick question to interject. Isn't the scale of the solution not equally important as the complexity of the solution? Yes. Okay, so if you want to talk about scale. Yeah, sure. But okay, so desertification globally, it's about 120,000 square kilometers per year. That's about just slightly more land than Iceland. It's also about three Belgians. We're running out of Belgians. One Switzerland. Yeah, that's a good metric. And it's also going to annoy the Swiss, so I like it. But so that desertification isn't coming from one source. It isn't just the heating. The vast majority of it is due to overgrazing or an agricultural over extraction of nitrogen and nutrients. So there's a thing where you can actually catalog the causes and about half of them are social and the other half are somehow need an engineering solution. And as far as I can tell, nobody's really working on the engineering side of things on a large scale. Everybody's working in this field is working on trying to teach farmers and other experts to be better at doing their thing. So the two big anti-desertification projects that are kind of ongoing. One is in China. The other is the Great Green Wall project in Africa. That one's hardly started. The Chinese one is actually going pretty well, so that's great. But the biggest success story that I can point out is that in the 1950s, Iceland was a complete wasteland. And now it's only partially a wasteland. So we've made progress. But if I just quickly go back to the policy side of things. So I maintain that people generally want to help. People want to fix this. The fact that we're all here is evidence of that. And the fact that there's events like Extinction Rebellion and what not, organizations of all sorts is evidence of that. And if you talk to politicians, even they are kind of like, yeah, no, we need to do something. Their failing is more that they don't know exactly what to do. So bad policy, which would be one element of our cocktail, bad policy comes from lack of understanding. It comes from insufficient or incorrect information. It comes from conflicting priorities and often traditionalist arguments and then sometimes political bad faith. Now, having worked in politics for a few years, I can tell you political bad faith is nowhere near as common as we would like to believe. It's so easy to say, oh, that guy is an asshole. And everything he says is just like he's just shilling for something or other. And sure, there are people who are like that, but most of them are not. And it's super helpful for any conversation to assume some good faith. And especially, again, here ignorance and insufficient and incorrect information is sufficient to explain it. Another question here, how does identity politics figure in this equation for you? Now you're just trying to take a soft track. Identity politics is largely getting in the way of solutions. So one of the things that has been happening, I'm not saying that identity politics is always bad, but there is an element of it which causes people to kind of heighten the otherness of their adversaries. And especially when we're talking about like the political right. So for instance, there was a colleague of mine in the Icelandic Parliament from a far right-wing party. And generally I didn't really agree with him on a lot of things. But when he left politics, he went to work for the UN Convention on combating desertification because he actually felt that that was an important thing. So there's some good there even in the far right people. But you have a question on policy. I mean, there's many emerging economies which will manifest themselves in the upcoming years. Their needs are probably more focused on leveling the playing field, getting up there, being competitive in the world market. Do you consider that not a hazard to also combating climate change? Absolutely. So this is where I mentioned conflicting priorities. So when you hear of China saying, oh, we're going to have to spin up this many coal plants just to keep up with our energy production needs, yes, that's terrible and terrifying and it's really counterproductive. But at the same time, I'm no fan of Chinese policy, neither nationally or internationally or whatever, but they are actually a country that has defined very clear goals and very ambitious goals with regard to carbon reduction. So there's one of those things where, yes, what they're doing, more power plants is actually bad, but at least they are explaining why they're doing it and what their plan is to stop doing it. And so there's something where one of the things that we can do is hopefully help develop better technologies, more technologies that can make the transition faster and easier. So China at the moment, just one moment, China at the moment has the largest amount of solar panels in the world. So they're doing the best on that front, but we're giving them a hard time because they have a growing middle class who want to have electricity in their homes. I think we should try to find ways of being helpful there rather than necessarily always being in the attack mode. The other thing I'll say on that before I hand Mike to Walter is in international trade, my favorite quote of all time comes from the Indian negotiator at the original GATT agreement where they were talking about whether there should be preferential treatment for developing countries. And this guy said, let me get this right because it's so nicely worded, equity is, no, equality is equitable only among equals, right? Equality is equitable only among equals. So treating all countries the same way and holding everybody to the same standard is going to be very evil and counterproductive. And when we're looking at countries like China and India in particular that have a long way to go in terms of energy production capacity and just bringing their middle class up to a better life standard, let's also bear in mind that the closest thing we've had recently to a serious mass death event due to a wet-bulb temperature hitting 31 degrees Celsius where the air basically becomes unsurvivable. It's a sauna where people just die. That was in Tamil Nadu about a month ago in India. They hit 29.7 degrees. So Indians understand the need to fix this. So let's try to be nice and give them a break but try and help everybody along the way because it turns out we all share one atmosphere and we definitely need to make progress but let's try to be equitable, not just equal. Yeah. And to follow up, isn't there an opportunity to just leapfrog fossil fuels especially for Africa by going straight to Saudi Arabia? Yes, and this is kind of where I wanted to turn this into a conversation. So what I started with was this quote from David Wallace Wells and his definition of the, let me find that wording again, the suicidal cocktail of sadistic policy, public indifference and catastrophic luck. Now just to say regarding luck, luck is actually just what we call a failure to understand statistics. If we understand statistics, there is no luck anymore. There's just playing the game correctly. So I'd say let's turn this into a bit of a conversation about things like leapfrogging the petrochemicals, about all of these different technologies and all these different methods that would help but focus on how do we reduce public indifference, how do we avoid sadistic policy and how do we improve our understanding so that we don't have to rely on not having catastrophically bad luck. Does that sound like a good plan? And if we do this correctly, the way that the outcome of this comes, I'd like it if we could take some notes. I don't know exactly how we can do that yet. I mean we could use this I suppose. But so the ask here is let's not just be techno-optimists on here because let's also look at politics and the reality, the real politics of people having different constraints, different needs, different competing interests. And let's try to be humane about it because look we're all going to suffer if we fuck this one up. So maybe we can in a nice friendly way come up with a set of good policies, good technologies and so on but don't assume that everybody's going to be a bike-riding, vegan, hug-the-gay whales type of person. That would be great, but we're not going to get everybody in the world to do that. So yeah, all right. Question. Like CO2 reduction is important but I think the CO2 we emit today affects the climate in like 10 or 20 years from now. So what we're suffering right now is from CO2 of the past. So how can you, like the CO2 reduction right now won't necessarily prevent climate change on this moment because it's already emitted. So how would we, yeah, is it necessary to reduce CO2 to avoid climate change in the future? Yeah. Okay, so the thermal buffers of the planet like the atmosphere, and the ocean. The ocean is a much bigger buffer but it's also much slower moving. So they store heat but the CO2 in the atmosphere now, yes, it's old CO2 that's causing the problem now but it's because it's been accumulating over time. So we're making quick movements now can actually fix things relatively quickly. We don't actually understand how quickly but so I'm not super, super concerned about that. But yeah. So okay, we got indifference. We got, ah, sadistic policy and we got bad luck, catastrophic luck. Okay, so your task, let's fill these in with ways of flipping these in our favor, right? For all humanity. Anybody want to start? Catastrophic luck. Bad luck. So for indifference I'm thinking that people should bear the consequences of their own behavior in some kind of way. There should be like a feedback loop. Like, they will take a holiday. So, yeah, so in using economic incentives or regulatory incentives. Oh yeah, okay. So, yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. But there is maybe tracking externalities. Like, you know, if we look at like, you know, deforestation on a large scale. A lot of, the reason deforestation and like, you know, certain other industries work is because the industries themselves are not made to pay for the externalities. The oil industry is the massively subsidized industry in the world and that's not even counting the externalities, right? So, externality. Yeah. I was saying, so to counter indifference one of the things you can do is internalizing the costs that are now external to so that you're actually paying for the footprint of the things you're using, right? Yeah. Parts of this cost, like logistics and storing stuff and get the whole chain of the product that you're using, get it incorporated in these CO2 tags. Yeah. So there's work there being done on like tracking smart logistics chains, that kind of thing. So, yeah. I put internalized externalities under policy because it sounds less of an issue about public indifference and more about like making sure that the rules are good. Yeah. Can we just actually define indifference because I think taxes and punishments as we want to call them, yes, work on say companies, but taxes on individuals to combat indifference is regressive. So, incentives on individuals as in us are not. So, I wanted to define what we're talking about when we talk about indifference. Yeah. So, yeah. So, and I think in some ways this is kind of the PR aspect. Like, you know, it's, so let's imagine, yeah, yeah. Can we do one rule? It makes it easier if we just take the person with the microphone talks. Yeah. Okay. So, let's take like, I want to make a caricature here for a moment. Like, you know, imagine the person who has, who has least concerned about climate change of all people, right? Now, I think you all have roughly the same idea of it's going to be a white man, probably in his 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, yeah. He's going to be, you know, reasonably, not necessarily wealthy, but sufficiently well off, right? He's going to live in the West. He's going to possibly live in a rural area. And his indifference, what does it stem from? It doesn't affect him. That's, yeah. But so, if it doesn't affect him, so he doesn't care, how do we make that person care? Like, I'm not saying force him to care, but like, figure out a way to assist that person in caring. And so, I actually occasionally talk to people like this, and what I find is that they don't, it's not even that they don't care per se, it's that they just don't believe that it's actually a problem. And, you know, like, I heard this guy saying, like, yeah, you know, even if this is real, what's Greta Thunberg going to do about it? And it's like, come on, you know, this is a adult guy, you know, he's supposed to know better than, you know, but he really simplified it down to this level. And I'm like, no, no, look, there are climate scientists, they actually know what they're doing. You know, this is real. We've measured it. Why don't you care? And so what kind of incentives would work on that kind of person? You, do you want to? Also, I don't think this, I don't see where the basis that the idea that penalizing even regular people, I mean, obviously if we, you know, quintuple the price of meat, this isn't really going to affect people's, like it's going to change the cost of that, you know, if we can, quintuple the cost of gasoline, it will have slightly more impact, but it will ultimately end up beneficial. That's an argument that comes from privilege. People need to be able to eat and drive themselves around and do all kinds of things, punishing people for those, for living their lives, especially if they're poor, I think is extremely regressive. But I specifically singled out meat. Yeah, but... You said meat. Yeah, okay. Okay, so should we talk about food for a moment? Okay, so global food production, so it's about 5.4 billion tons of meat, it's about 6.3 billion tons of vegetables a year, a few hundred million tons of fish, you know, and then what? Like, which part of the food system can we actually optimize? And again, let's take it through this. Do we have sadistic policy that's making our food systems worse? Yeah, okay, so what do we do here? Okay, we could do that. But could we maybe also think about the way in which monocultures are extracting nitrogen from soil in unsustainable ways? How reliance on industrial fertilizers are causing the microbiomes in the soil to basically not produce, not bind nitrogen, right? So I think just not subsidizing, stopping subsidizing the meat industry alone is insufficient. It's probably part of the answer, but what's the big answer? Well, I think we have also to... The food for the animals is also a big problem because lots of times the rainforests are cut because they have to build that kind of food monocultures somewhere in Southern America or somewhere. So I think probably we should forbid to import that kind of stuff if it's very... if it's produced in a way that's very, very bad for the climate and for the nature. Yeah. Okay, yeah, so I think just even without addressing like the meat industry and pointing the finger there, putting stuff local and making sure that food for animals is produced locally, you have a closed loop, especially also in the Netherlands we have this nitrogen problem actually this problem, it's nitrogen that is harvested in Brazil is brought over here and is added to the system and then you have an excess and then instead of using that fertilizer you use artificial fertilizer for growing the crops that you'll eat. So if you make any kind of like farming for animals also land bound and say that the loops have to be closed, the cycle has to be closed locally that is already a big systemic improvement apart from the fact that you need to scale down a lot of these things. So. Yeah. I think the big issue here is as you mentioned, monoculture crop growing but I don't think the solution is involved in making sure that the monoculture the crops grown for animal feed are by definition going to be cheap and the same and ubiquitous so you're not going to solve the problem by just making it locally instead of in other places and shaping it. So the policy would need to be specified towards ensuring that more varied and diverse crops are grown in fields so it's a simple policy to make. Yeah, so just to note we're using these microphones as indicators of who can talk partially because we're using them to record for the stream but when it's not amplified in here so speak up if you're talking. Just to add to that point the... So there are definitely one of the reasons we seem to be doing monocultures on a large scale is because all of the so after the Green Revolution we've had much better access to industrial fertilizers and been able to scale up those processes and hyper-optimize them but now we're realizing that that was a local optimization it was like an optimization trap and maybe now people are talking about things like the regenerative agriculture which is fantastic but we don't know how to scale that up yet so if anybody's got ideas. Yeah, so the monoculture when I think of that I also think of Monsanto who grow seeds and pesticides which only work together and there's a lot of regulation to protect their intellectual property there's different ways of growing seeds I think the Netherlands is an example of that in other details where you can use each other's seeds to create new seeds again and there's like it's an open source model on seed creation and I think we could use more of that too because I think monocultures are due to companies like Monsanto Also, fertilizers take about 2% of the global energy use I think it's probably best to have the system subsidize the guys that do the good things and create a policy on that so if you do like a permit culture food garden and you grow things there you sell it from there then you get subsidized and if you do it in a less good way in a large greenhouse heated with Russian gas and using industrial fertilizers then these also vegetables should be more expensive than the well-ground ones that's discussion all separately from the meat but only the vegetables I think that's a way to incentivize people to buy the good stuff but it doesn't answer the question of scaling up this is actually a really important point that Walter brings up but specifically one of the things all of us rely on whether we are happy to admit it or not is we are getting foods on a regular basis I live in Iceland if I were only eating local food there it would become very monotonous there would be no avocados there would be very few berries it would not be a fun time so much of the food that we eat is reliant on global supply chains so I think the next thing we should go to is transportation because I do like this talk about food system but the other part the other side of the food system is the distribution channels and on that we have shipping we have cargo freight trains and such we have aviation that always becomes a hot topic but yeah anybody else on the agriculture yeah okay so recently there was a report of a long term study on agriculture and especially fertilizer use and mixing some of the kind of things we know from permaculture like nitrogen binding crops cycling over fields together with using manure so mixing with artificial fertilizers and the effect was actually that this improved harvest from the current mainstream big models so there definitely at least in some transition hybrid models possible that have a higher or similar yield to what we now would call traditional agriculture so there definitely is promising research in that respect what is very important I think is that the farmers get a fair price for the products because then they also are capable to invest in new technologies to greenhouses to use the warmth from the summer and store it in the earth and get it back in the winter for example but now it's not possible that they're really getting much too low price for the products okay so make food more expensive I mean I don't disagree but this you know and this is a balancing act maybe every supermarket make the supermarket make less problems okay we can figure that one out there's a few like there's I think two more and then transport will be the topic to move on I just think it raises an interesting point that was raised earlier that I think is central to the whole discussion which is the fact that there needs to be a massive price adjustment a massive negative externality price adjustment happen for this whole thing to work however if we were to as you say make the farmers earn the correct amount for the crops if we were to stop subsidizing the oil industry and stop subsidizing other industries then people would have to start paying a lot more for things that they're used to not paying as much for which would increase inequality quite significantly I believe so in the department of statistic policies I think there needs to be some way of making the negative externalities that are currently not being paid for to be not paid for equally by everyone that is the poorest percentage of people do not need to pay the same amount for gas or other things such as those that have higher income or everybody pays the same amount but the money used from these raised taxes is used to subsidize the existence of those that cannot afford to live otherwise because we cannot simply eradicate the poorest part of the world and then expect to go on I mean that's not the way to be I actually just wanted to mention a couple of good projects that I have heard of that are doing really cool development on helping farmers track the price throughout the entire supply chain and specifically on luxury crops like vetiver so food is one thing we all need to eat food but a luxury crop like vetiver that makes perfume like that's a really amazing one to track through and incentivize the farmers to keep the vetiver in the ground for longer because it's become a cash crop so they pull it out of the ground incentivizing them to keep it in the ground for longer increases the quality of the vetiver which also increases the price of a luxury product overall but there is also certain incentives and benefits to the soil as well so this is a Haitian project that's doing really well so there are projects out there that are doing really cool stuff about helping farmers track the price just thought I'd kind of a little bit of good news out there that's actually a good point the goal of the session was to be hopeful and positive I think we are generally going in that direction so projects like that are exactly the right kind of thing I definitely want to hear about a lot of them but I think this framing is about not just how do we hope blindly but how do we generate hopeful scenarios right so did you one of you had a sorry well actually it ties in a bit with what was said before that pay the farmers better is kind of a good idea but the reason why farmers are not feeling paid well is because of the entire financial structure around the industry right it's essentially driven by pure profit motives profit for the profit and I think as long as that is a driving factor of our food system or many other things as well probably that's never going to really get solved I think and then I'm going to jump in and kind of jump out of my role as facilitator as soon as you talk about profit for the people not profit for profit you end up having identity politics and half of society will just tune out and say fuck off hippie and that is not helpful on the indifferent side of the equation without any other basically food production the goal of food production should be food production not making a profit making a profit is a means to assure that food production so I'm loving how excited people are about things one point on this and then I'd like to move on to like transportation side of things a little bit but I put in land reform here and so have any of you read book called how Asia works okay it's very good and one of the things that they point out there is that if you look at the successful economies in Asia one of the things that unites them is that they all went through a massive land reform after World War II and what that did was it caused farmers to generally have much less land and that led to them being way more productive on the land right and so maybe land reform and I mean this in the context of agriculture but also how we treat urban environments how we organize land in general might be one of the things and of course as a recovering anarchist I feel the need to point out that land is one of the great monopolies that we need to be countering so but yeah urban stuff and transportation transportation actually easy yes okay okay so we talked about local production I'm from the FabLab community I believe also in global design and so if we are setting up the sessions that we have here and we maybe have some politicians or a country that is open to experiment I would suggest global design and local production okay so yeah this is the old part of design locally emerge globally and so I helped work on well I got the first FabLabs in Iceland started and managed to make a policy in Iceland that every secondary school should have a FabLab associated with it that was part of what my party was doing so this is right I would like to go more into global design but you have a point very hopeful things about transport but now we are derailing into this conversation no no bring it first want to respond to that remark FabLabs are fantastic for prototyping stuff for anything that is at prices we have grown used to we have to go back and look at Henry Ford well Henry Ford was not even the inventor of mass production but he was the first to do it for let's say high-end consumer goods like a car that is something FabLabs cannot do for mass production you still need two parts of your question is and that is you have your you have certain raw materials that you can only produce at scale you cannot have a steel mill in your FabLab if you want you steel to produce anything or a paper mill or you could have a FabLab in a paper mill but the paper mill itself is already an industrial scale operation at scale and you want forestry at scale as well there is too much in the weeds but yeah say again you are going on for too long ok I will you have been waiting for this literally 11 years to tell me but the other bit I want to fear back to transports accept aviation and aviation is roughly 100% of carbon emissions so as much as I hate bloody and everything related to that it is not our biggest problem shipping especially long distance shipping is nasty with bunker oil once you switch to LNG and there are other options wind could easily be recast relatively easily but it is more of an engineering problem than a fundamentals and it has to do with certain incentives to see it has not happened yet but the current supply chains that reach into East Asia and back can be made carbon neutral without changing drastically the last mile shipping can be electrified the only hard not really hard would be aviation but like I said aviation is in terms of transport more of a food note than a major issue so and that is really good news because the more you have to change in your supply chains and the way you work the more resistance you will encounter I would add to that people like to complain about the aviation industry because everybody sees the planes in the sky and it is very strongly connected with ideas about like luxury but it is around 2% either side of the 2% mark and the aviation industry because they are always under this kind of criticism and scrutiny are actually trying to improve themselves so I will kind of defend them a little bit not just because I like flying but I hate flying and I will still say it is relatively speaking a food note but that said I like it when we are hard on people in that way I love to talk yesterday where she is just like trashing all sorts of things like that it is like even if I don't necessarily fully agree we need to apply that pressure right so on that note so I went to visit Ulsan in Korea a couple of years ago and there I visited the largest car factory in the world which spits out one new car every 3 seconds and next door to it is the largest ship factory in the world and there I was visiting amongst others with a guy who is the head of a very large international shipping corporation and they were laying up I think it was like 14 15 new cargo ships each of which was supposed to take 13,000 container units and I asked the guy powering them by nuclear instead of diesel and he was like no, why would we do that so how do we address this kind of indifference we have been very much on the policy side I think there might be a slight rules oriented thing here but how do we make people who are at the top of the shipping industry go like hey maybe we ought to decarbonise our shipping fleet maybe internalise the cost of carbon energy into the energy price it eventually all comes down to internalising cost yeah and it needs to be put into what reaches people which is their finances yeah so we do have there is an international agreement about so using crude oil on ships in international waters so that's been progress that's now not allowed whether people are actually enforcing it that's another question but that is one step towards internalising those so just a few random facts not really anything useful so there is actually one nuclear powered shipping vessel operating Russia has one generally it's not allowed to go into port so it has to have this design where it can carry these they call them lighters they're smaller ships that it can lower and they're basically barges and somebody tows them into port but there's a bunch of legal complexities around that so that is solving that problem of having the shipping ship that doesn't actually go into the port and having that be a reasonable thing for people to do is how you would it's the main thing to get the nuclear working the other problem is that the shipping companies actually these giant container ships they don't build them to last that long and if the reactors like at least the military like the reactors that the U.S. military uses might last longer than these ships I'm not sure so obviously that should be fixed too but that's just your question about how do we you know encourage the shipping guy to think differently I know a few of you here have heard me have these like signal rants in the morning and I don't have an answer and I'm curious to see if the room has an answer just about how we encourage more long-term thinking because I think there is a lot of short-term thinking both in terms of how we tackle climate change but just in everything right like gas prices and all these things and we're not really encouraging long-term thinking to seek seek those solutions and I don't know what the answer is I'm really curious if anybody does because it's a grand frustration of mine one small thing if you were interested in making the nuclear shipping thing work Francis has a nuclear industry that they really like and maybe you should try and convince the French that they want to have a nationalized shipping fleet so if our solution to climate change is trust the French and shoot I'm joking I'm going to pose out a few random facts about nuclear shipping is stupid first of course you need miniature reactors and the smaller your reactor the higher grade the fuel is and it will basically be close to the weapons grade that's one of the reasons they have these lovely tiny nuclear reactors in submarines but they're all military submarines the other proliferation purpose is the idea of having a Liberian flag container ships having submarine in the grade nuclear fuel on board I am not looking forward to that particular perspective that's with traditional reactors not like modern ceramic so pebble or salt pebble battery reactors are actually bloody dead end because pebble battery reactors are to be worse than the previous generations they're really shite safety wise because they make cause the graphite the pebbles are made of graphite and the temperature shrinks and expands so they create graphite dust which is the least lovable substance long story short nuclear is shite in general and especially at small scale I would say if you look into the figures for example two kites there's at least one Hamburg startup you can already replace up to 6 megawatts using massive kites that are automatically steered for the big container ships you need about 30 megawatts and that's not a terrific big jump to go for wind when you're really offshore I agree with Walter we should not run into using other non-renewables for shipping we should go to renewable energy sources like wind or even solar probably I don't know how good it is possible on ships that probably has to be researched but I think wind will certainly be possible okay yeah I'm slightly more optimistic about nuclear but I do understand the drawbacks that are being mentioned but yeah I was I was going to suggest that rather than the solution to the shipping problem is don't ship stuff build it make it closer to where it's needed as much as possible like 3d printing very good idea in Iceland then no no exactly people aren't going to be happy with it maybe 3d printed tomatoes one time I'm responding to something I heard here saying they're not made to last and that makes me think of planned obsolescence companies companies profit from constantly having renewed consumer cycles and that seems to be a very hard issue to fix because how are you going to revamp the whole economic system in one go it all entails many other systems and it's just world reform but I don't know how to solve it if anyone has the slightest of ideas I would love to hear this is a really good point and also I discovered that I really rely on autocorrect when I write the word obsolescence sorry so one of the ways we deal with that is better stronger consumer protection laws and in particular warranties longer warranties basically force longer term but one of the things that always happens and this is kind of like the trap function type thing is if the warranty is required to be 3 years then all of the equipment all of the things are going to be designed to last 3 years in one day and it will be very skewed so they don't end up accidentally breaking 2 years in 11 months so the question is not just how do we lengthen warranties and that's something that should be relatively easy to advocate for on the European level European Union loves messing around with consumer protection law but the other thing is how do you disincentivise this warranty length plus one day behaviour and that's kind of partially belongs in the indifference category and also how do you how do you foster reuse, repair recycle kind of behaviour I mean could this be done with some kind of like tax policy that essentially was meant to like drive recycling and other things so essentially after the product at some point the EU some EU thing says okay this product has been EOL we believe roughly speaking and so we're going to impose this tax this tax on the manufacturer based on sort of how much was EOL when and blah blah blah is that at all sane so actually I kind of like the direction you're going in here so the good news was around right to repair in Europe somebody here probably knows the details there's a lot better than I do but right to repair is actually making progress in a lot of places so that's good but regarding that idea so in there's a lot of places that still do like tax incentives for electric vehicles but one idea that's come up is kind of flipping the script on that and say rather let's pay people a higher amount of money to take old vehicles that pollute a lot out of distribution like you know basically make there be fewer bad vehicles on the road rather than paying further to be more supposedly good ones right so how about we do that on a slightly bigger scale and just start to provide tax incentives for using equipment for longer periods of time so we want to get rid of the old clunker cars that are polluting a lot but we probably want people to live in older houses because the most carbon efficient houses is the one that's already built right not necessarily okay yeah okay actually concrete once poured concrete once poured is a CO2 absorbent the problem is the production of the cement beforehand my problem my my skepticism I will get back to the remark just made before my skepticism about the house already built is the most carbon it's actually not true because especially in the climates in these latitudes she will burn so much fuel in hitting the house that sometimes it's actually better to demolish it and replace it with a new net zero house as a general remark about tax incentives and so forth do realize when you make policy it's always best to make tax incentives or penalize behavior at an essential place as possible so your supplier of your low quality plasticity goods will probably at the European level not be the manufacturer but an importer that's something you can talk to but by the time that plasticity crappy the product is at the ends of life the person holding it is a consumer and the manufacturer will be sitting somewhere in Southeast Asia because that's the world's workshop currently and therefore is out of reach for your so the moment you want to touch that supply that life cycle the product is at the point of importation into the European Union so you yeah I have two comments but I think the first one I have is still about the discussions five minutes ago about transport ships etc and the second one is about concrete I think if you think about the long term somebody told me that using concrete is in the beginning really really bad for the environment but if you use it more than 50 years it's even better to use concrete than water or something else no? wood is in many ways provided that it has been forested in a sustainable way so assuming sustainable forestry practices wood is way better cement is really really shite because it's actually worse than steel per ton in terms of CO2 emission but a lot of cement use could be replaced by wood so engineered wood though so more modern lumber basically anything a few meters above ground level could easily even into high rises there's currently 80 meters tall building in Norway which is made out of engineered lumber and we will probably see within the next decade wood buildings raising higher than 100 meters so for normal buildings for utility building slightly different or especially for civil works like viadex and sound that is more out there but for housing and office buildings wood is a very interesting solution to construction materials maybe go have another idea for all products that actually are supplied with the energy label right now maybe put on the energy label the expected life cycle of this product also and then if you put this expected life cycle the customer knows what to expect and then also what the energy use or in CO2 usage or whatever you can derive that from that and also maybe include some warranty statements in that so we have that on light bulbs but it would be nice to have it on everything else right so yeah cars on washing machines yeah I think we must think about which products to reuse which products to recycle and which products just to break down for example furniture if some old people die or go to a nursery home or something and there is a lot of furniture often very good we can reuse that that doesn't consume any energy and it's better to reuse this but if it's stuff probably the new thing would use much less energy so it depends on the life cycle you have to look at the special thing you you want to recycle or anything but for example mobile phones it's catastrophic how low the life cycle is but you could recycle them but you should use them for much longer on the other hand about houses you have also new materials like old materials in fact straw and clay to build houses that seems to be very energy efficient as well so we should use that much more I just wanted to say a quick note about renewable materials the type of sand we use for concrete we're rapidly running out of it and it's finite so we can't just grow it like we do with trees so that's another reason to throw that out there so instead of just labeling for life cycle you could augment the vat you could have the vat increase with the shorter life cycle it's hard to do and then there's another thing it's very phones are not that big of a problem but phones specifically because if they have a SIM card in them you could make the carriers charge higher taxes if the phone is younger so yeah I think things like that are very difficult and especially so one thing I learned during my time in politics is that tax authorities really really hate it when you mess with tax policy like it's just complicated for them and I'm not saying we shouldn't do it but we need to be very specific in how one note we've been going on for a slightly over an hour I think we have one more hour is that right so I don't necessarily want us to use the full extra hour just for shits and giggles I think we need to be a little concrete but one thing is we've been very focused on the statistic policy and actually how to make less statistic policy nobody has talked about how we improve our luck no one very little about the indifference except for the incentives I did actually write the life cycle expectations into there I think that's a really good way of powering like consumer sentiment and I wrote down conversations because conversations like this one are I think a massively good antidote to indifference but they only they sometimes end up reaching to the choir a bit so so yeah so I wanted to comment a bit on the tax incentives because I think it's often overlooked especially also by politicians that well every tax incentives and etc drives like is counterproductive in that there's some kind of like pricing issue both because it's more complex but also basically for instance with electric cars prices for electric cars in countries where their tax incentives are generally higher than in countries where there are no tax incentives because there's also a higher demand and etc and they can ask more so you actually what you're doing is subsidy you're not only giving money to consumers you're actually subsidizing producers and that could be okay but you should at least be aware that this is what happens if you do these kind of incentives and then with other things like the kind of like incentives to do away with your very old polluting car what we've seen in the Netherlands with things like that that happened like years ago is that that also didn't really work out in terms of overall pollution and landfill and etc so it is these are very complex things to steer in and usually you'll have side economic side effects that are not one-to-one related to what you're trying to steer so usually other measures are preferable before you get to that Do we have time for this Greg? Yeah Oh he wants to say we can stand up and just you know if you want but I I was first actually I would as a matter of combating indifference I would please please please please drop the bloody lingo of having to save the planet or the ecosystem or the lovely pandas the fucking pandas need porno to reproduce they're a Darwinistic failure the pandas really and the whales and so on is not it's this is not selling well outside your own little circles or maybe large circles I don't care about the size of your circles there is a massive circle that you need or massive bunch of circles that have difficulties making meat ends meats at the end of the month where fuel poverty who will not be able to buy an electric car until secondhand electric cars will become affordable in another decade or so none of these people will be convinced by a need to save the planet if they have difficulties to have both to pay the rent and their energy bill at the end of the month in February it's about us it's about humanity it's about our children yes I have a comment about luck okay very good yes you mentioned before that we just don't know how to fix it how to fix the problems right because it's a macro issue that involves every possible system in our entire biosphere and we need to understand that better so that we can plan accordingly not just to make individual changes but to make changes that will cascade in our benefit so that's how we improve our luck we research we plan multi-pronged attacks when we see an area that's going to fall and it will not support civilization living there anymore can we turn it into green land that will continue to help us even as people move whatever it might be yeah I agree so I mean we could even retitle these as care more make better decisions and learn right so and the learning is absolutely right I mean if there's one aspect that I'm trying to tackle in my work it's really reducing the catastrophic luck if anything so I do think I have a comment that at least maybe slightly longer term on the catastrophic luck side so sort of and so I'm certainly not going to be defending pandas but the but the so all technology and all evolution is basically path dependent if you have something we can know how to do it every species that we exterminate we're losing knowledge and this is going to impact what is possible for us in the future as a species so at some point it is better to if it's a choice between okay we're going to lose a lot of people but if it's a choice between at some point you do want to conserve some of these a lot of these other species certainly biomes in the ground and bees and shit like this two things I think we should flip them so what was the indifference one was care more learn and make better decisions and then regarding the pandas actually is just a really neat communications and behavioral psychology problem that has largely been solved around ownership of a problem so they've done this research with just charities around children when we talk about our children rather than those children and their children people are more likely to donate money it's seriously as simple as that okay so I'm a little bit stuck on how we progress because I feel like we've covered a lot of ground already I know a lot of you still have comments and I want to try to get them but what I'm thinking is you know this is a whole session and I think you know what I set out to kind of try to get to is like okay you know the 1.5 degree you know temperature freezing situation that ship has sailed we might be able to get it back but probably not there is this catastrophic 8 degree scenario how do we avoid that and you know so our cocktail but what I'd like you know so let's continue the conversation not necessarily for much longer let's maybe give it 20 minutes so also like if you've got any good examples of projects or initiatives or new laws, regulations or anything like that that's happening in your local area or something like that that you think other people should know about this would be a great time to hear about it because you know I feel like we're losing a little bit of momentum we're getting a little bit into the weeds and I would love to have like 15 ideas to go on the internet when this is over so you had a comment yeah just also on the catastrophic luck I think it mostly also comes down to awareness because everyone has their equal part to play it's about wholeness it's about involving everything rethinking every system because it entails all these other systems all these systems are interdependent and I think we should spend a lot of time on awareness and education and with a particular interest in systems thinking and systems dynamics because they're all interwoven very good so actually I work for a paper mill in AirBake in AirBake we have three paper mills since 1661 around that time we also have our own what are our fluent plant and I find it I've worked already for 15 years there and it's only recently now that the gas prices are humongous that we are really getting in trouble and pressure is really on but I find difficult and at the same time is maybe hopeful in that sense I want to refer back to the FabLab I'm sorry is that what I lack is connectedness so we have this factory area in AirBake and we are on our own almost it feels like and yeah so Holland is on its own as well a very small country only 25 paper mills in Germany you have over 300 paper mills but it seems like everybody is working on its own and I find that depressing and at the same time I'm from the FabLab community I know it's possible to start working together and so how can we do that that is my question so on that there's I think a lot about empowering people with information I know that's like a really popular thing to say right now but I just want to talk about it quickly about a project that I know of in South Africa that is not climate related but I think kind of plays into this a little bit and it's Townships it turns out that in Cape Town they have extremely good plat maps like they know where everything is which is surprising to some people so what these people in Townships have done is gone hold on a second we have access to these plat maps we can understand what our towns are supposed to look like and they've started to do lots of really amazing community building around like installing lights and schools and things they're making their community safer so it's a lot of that kind of like information gathering information building and learning and then working with your community and whether that's really local within your town or your region or whatever it is I think there's a way to build on to that so I think that's part of the answer if you're armed with information you can build community I don't think that sort of excites me but that's on the other end of the scale because it's not very local or low scale but basically currently every three months there's another offshore floating winds cons are being pushed out by the kind of industrial firms that can make that happen so I fully expect us to that Europe may be able to be a head of the curve on electricity generation just based on offshore wind as in and what's interesting is this is stuff that is specifically designed to become mass produced specifically to be designed to be relatively low cost maintenance because offshore wind is more expensive than onshore wind because you have to helicopter in maintenance technicians or bringing expensive ships to make them etc this is all designed to be built in harbors brought into the ocean by tugboats and then connected to local grids for hydrogen echlorizes this is all there yet but this is something that is pretty viable to happen in the next decade and I'll shut up a little actually one thing just came to mind about you know the optimistic side so at events like this we have a slight tendency to be very suspicious of like capitalistic tendencies and like that kind of thing but it's interesting that like now we're in the middle of this massive economic downturn pretty much hitting every country in the world pretty much like we're seeing double digit inflation everything's pretty bad one of the things that was happening back in like October November December is that basically like every single week there was a new venture capital fund established to fund climate tech research or climate technology of some kind or other there's so much money lushing about in the system for developing technologies to help with climate change that like it's kind of almost obnoxious at the moment and one of the things that's really positive is now we're in this economic downturn and none of those funds has gone away the investment rate might have slowed down a little bit but the same amount of money is still available and so when I'm thinking about the overall big picture of like how we're going to tackle this there's definitely a tendency to go like oh yeah we're going to need a revolution and we're going to need to restructure everything but like humanity's been through a few hard places in the past one or two maybe and like yeah sometimes we have fundamentally restructured our system but often we've like just used systems that we already have in efficient ways and I think like when it comes to the technologies that are emerging you know we have more and more carbon capture plants I actually don't really believe much in the idea of like like you know if you are trying to capture carbon from the atmosphere you need to you're capturing about 300 grams per ton of processed air I don't think that's very you know scalable but hey like people are doing all sorts of cool stuff some of the projects are absolute bullshit but like there are such good projects in between that actually we're seeing progress now the other thing is I mentioned earlier the the Great Green Wall project how many of you heard of that it's so for few who didn't seem to be nodding it's this idea that they're going to like build like so grow a world wonder a green belt right across the southern end of the Sahara specifically to try and slow down the expansion of the Sahara desert now deserts are problematic in some ways some of them are natural there's a natural desert I found out a few days ago in Poland it's not very big but like there's a desert in Poland but and Sahara is at least for our purposes nowadays natural and the amount of material from the Sahara that feeds into the Amazon is like huge and super important so we don't necessarily want to eliminate the Sahara but managing to combat desertification on that scale is kind of mind-blowing so every effort that supports things like that I think will make a huge impact I just wanted to mention a few positive projects anybody else got one? I think there's a bunch of agri-voltaics look really promising there seems to be a lot of investment in that because they're going to be figuring out that they need to manage the humidity of their crops and it's useful for that I have a side quest at the moment that is around agri-voltaics specifically in the context of developing countries so one of the things that happens for those not super into power grids is so if you have countries with very underdeveloped power grids where there is a power grid are typically close to the cities and the land immediately around the city is where you're going to have the most contention or most competition for land because that's the best way to import food into the city and so what you want to do is you need more electricity but you can't take that land away from the agricultural use so by mixing those together building photovoltaics that are raised about 4 to 6 meters above the agricultural land so you can still do farming underneath it reduces the heat stress on the plants it reduces the evaporation of water while it makes it possible to grow things that you might not be able to grow in a much warmer environment but it's not perfect and we don't have good out-of-the-box models for it yet but yeah it's super cool thanks for mentioning that huh? I'm super excited about meat replacements and general vegetarian based options one of the founders of the vegetarian butcher Dutch company now started vegan cowboys and the company tries to create a yeast which can create milk directly from grass so you just cut out the whole cow in between oh that's amazing that's super awesome Compina the Dutch milk company said oh we're not afraid but I think they're afraid I hope they're afraid because I love cows I hope they can stay on this planet even after the dairy industry but they're not as efficient in creating milk mining us in the 19th century actually that's normal yeah there's a Canadian startup called Carbacrete that sounds interesting they are working with the steel industry in Canada and capturing their waste CO2 and shoving it into concrete instead of sand it is producing net negative carbon concrete yeah okay yeah actually so steel mills are a pet peeve mine because they produce about 700% of all CO2 that's released and nobody ever complains about them because nobody sees steel mills they're just there but yeah that's super cool all the big steel producers are looking into hydrogen based steel production because steel production ultimately is a redux reaction you have to want to pull out the oxygen that is inside iron oxide and currently you use syngas for that which you produce based on with coal but you can't do it with hydrogen there is a viable way forward to close to net zero steel in a reasonably close future yeah on that note the aluminum industry so the way aluminum is so you take bauxite from the ground you process it it's actually a very horrible process that needs to be fixed with that it's lots of lie lots of like bad bases but when you get the aluminum or aluminum oxide powder essentially it needs to be you need to remove the oxygen from it and the way they do that is through electrolysis and so what has been done for pretty much since the whole Hurot process was created is using giant carbon based electrodes and the oxygen is being pulled to the carbon and that releases a CO2 so it's a very CO2 rich and bad process so now some people in Iceland incidentally have developed a new type of electrode for aluminum smelting that is carbon neutral so I don't know if they have gotten into production yet but the testing is basically done so that's positive I think there are so many cool projects at the moment and two or three months ago I saw that you can be a volunteer an energy coach within your city so what you do you get a they teach you first what you should do as a coach and then you go to people and then educate them let's say turn off the lights if you go away but they also help you to find which areas in your house is coming through I think it's not really cool but it will help so you go to people, you make them aware and they start thinking about if I if I use smart small initiatives or steps it can save me money maybe it will turn out that they become I say they also provide ideas back about sustainability yeah cool so I think we're maybe done are we that's amazing it's been a rough session we've had to go through a lot of stuff but we came into this with what are the conditions needed for everything to be absolutely terrible and now we're kind of at a point where we know what to do we need to care more we need to learn more make better decisions this is fantastic we've heard about some cool projects we know that there are many more cool projects out there and I think if we go through the points here we want to improve the incentives but we need to have these conversations experience connectedness and train each other to your last point we need to understand the life cycles of our things we need to improve learning and research and awareness around that introduce more systems thinking into the entire process thinking longer term as much as possible and then on the policy side making decisions internalize the externalities to that point about 15 times and if we'd come back to it 1500 more times it wouldn't have been less true we do have some weeds here the aviation industry is not perfect shipping la la la definitely need to fix monocultures but we still like being able to get avocados in the polar regions but I love this one protect the poor being a little bit humane about the fact that there's a lot of countries where people are still struggling with the basic necessities of life and just making sure that they don't get fucked over by us being trying to save the planet because if we save the planet but fuck them over in a process then they might be incentivized to fuck us over next time it'll be nasty so let's protect everybody reform land and stop pranks 15 million other things that we might be able to do to improve our lives but you know what I'm pretty hopeful it's not perfect, it's gonna be hard but we'll win you want a final point? okay you briefly said you're a recovering anarchist can you talk about it? anarchist in public because it confuses people a lot but generally if I must label myself with some kind of political label I would say mutualist I believe in free markets and networks of exchange and that kind of thing but I also wanted to be voluntary and non-coercive on an individual communal basis and actually that Ella was talking about yesterday is a dawn of everything I think that the ideas that are presented in there about like a non-coercive society they fit very nicely with that kind of like mutualist political economy and things like that but yeah, this is off topic so maybe we can talk about it over a beer later but does that answer your question? yeah okay regardless of what our politics are or where we come from does everybody roughly agree that we've made some progress in the direction of being hopeful? okay perfect and my job here is done thank you very much