 The clairvoyance stage at MCH 2022. I'm very happy to, well, actually, I'm slightly depressed to the topic, to introduce Igor to talk about what may, what will happen with climate change. So Igor, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much for coming. This is of course the, I am the thing standing between you and beer and chunk. And I very much appreciate your presence. So I know it's a graveyard shift. For your convenience, and you can leave after this, it's fine. TLDR as every good presentation should have. This is a part of a series that has been developing as my own thinking about this topic develops. This was the first one. Oops, quite literally. And then as time went on, and this is the few years later in the next buck on, we are actually having a system being rooted by forces we do not want. That's not good. And then of course it gets worse. And I am very sorry to have probably the most depressing talk of MCH, but the idea is better to be prepared and awareer than to act as if. It's not there. So let's not reboot the system, even though the data center might want to do that. So welcome to may slash will contain climate change. My name is Igor Nikolich. I'm a social professor at University of Delft. But that's not the important part. The important part, I'm a nerd, just like all of us here. I'm a neurodiverse dad, wannabe artist, hobby blacksmith. We have two little angels. No, they're smelly teenagers, but they do drive around trash, which is good. I make stuff. I like to talk about these things, and yeah. So that's me. I've been studying sustainable development for my entire adult life. And I'm not happy for it, but it's important. And I want to share the things that I know, and especially what do we do about these things. Ask questions. There is a man, a man-page. Do ask questions. Please keep it to clarifications, because of the limited time. There is a village called Emergent Earth. Claudia, can you wave? Together with Claudia, we are organizing a village, which is a separate track to talk about these topics. Come to see us. It is on the far right of the program, not of anything else. So scroll the program. I'll show you in a second. OK, so it's OK to leave if it's too much. I will not be upset. Well, let me stir it a little bit. What are we going to do? Three things, three main things. First, I want to talk about science. I will throw facts and citations at you just to show where are we. What's going on to the best of my knowledge? I'm not a climate scientist. I'm a modeler. I build study-sustainable systems, the transitions of industrial, and things like that. But I do know my science. So this is what we know for fact. That will be part one. Part two will be informed guesswork. A hypothesis, things that I expect based on everything I know. Part three will be designed. What do we do about this stuff as a bunch of nerds? And we can do more than you think. And then there is a bit of hope, because it's so sad to leave you with a sad story. So we'll try our best. So context and a bit of theory, science starting. I want to introduce you to a couple of concepts before we dive in. So it makes conversation easy. The first concept I wanted to share with you is the notion of a wicked problem. A wicked problem is a technical term. The citation is on the bottom. You can find it in a nice paper. If you cannot download it, there is this website called SIHOB. I'm sure they have it. So what are wicked problems? Wicked problems are problems that do not have a definite problem formulation. It's kind of like, let's organize a hacker event. What does that mean? There is no clear problem. It's impossible to measure or claim success. We solved climate change. We solved hacker camps? I don't know. Solutions can only be good or bad, not true or false. There is no right or wrong in a wicked problem. It kind of works, but it's meh. There is usually no perfect solution. You can't optimize your way out of a wicked problem. There's always more than one reason why things are the way they are. And there is always multiple solutions to these things. And whenever you see a problem, you see a symptom, it usually is a symptom of something else. And it's kind of meatballs and spaghetti, right? It's all kind of connected. And objective scientific solutions are impossible. And I do not use the word lightly impossible, right? It is all about values and norms, because what is a good world to live in? Well, I might think there's a certain way that's good, but maybe you disagree. But it's still the same world, so how do we, right? Solutions are one shot. You got one try, and then that's it. You fucked up forever, right? And you cannot afford to be wrong, right? You cannot make a mistake. You must act. You know that you don't know. Good luck, right? If this was a cartoon series, it would be really funny, except it's the sustainability problem, the climate change problem, the whole transition problem of human species. Where do we go into the future? How is it even going to look like? Who's right, the Elon Musk's? And we should all go to Mars and be his slaves? Or the Chinese government? Or what? I mean, I don't know. Then, so that's one bit of theory. The other bit of theory I want to talk to you about is chaos. And chaos is ridiculously misunderstood, which is always fun. Chaos means chaos occurs. Chaotic systems are systems that are iterative, things that repeat what they do. Economy is chaotic, because you trade, and then you trade again, and you go buy bread again, and you buy bread again. And these repeated actions that characterize the systems, they are path-dependent. So history matters. Where you come from determines where you can go. And they're very sensitive to initial conditions, the famous butterfly. So the red blob there is the Lawrence butterfly. This is a set of differential equations. I can give you three lectures on this, which I won't. But this is a set of differential equations that has unique properties. Namely, the small, oh, my image is overlapping. That's not good, tiny impact. Small changes in variables can have very large effects on the system's behavior. But inverse is also true. Massive changes to the inputs can produce no effect. So you can have butterflies flapping their wings, causing tornadoes, because this is a weather system. That's how it started, that's a model of weather. But you could also have a 747 try to land in the middle of field and not a single little tent moves. That's what chaotic systems are. They have these characteristic structures that stuck. It was technically called an attractor. And attractors are a pain in the ass. NASA uses attractors in these chaotic orbits. You shoot in a rocket. You have this unstable orbit, and at some point you give it a push, and it flips over the orbit around the moon. Let me demonstrate. I will show you an outcome of a simulation. This is no climate. This is a so-called predator prey system, lotcavolterra, an agent-based model over there. Wolf, sheep, grass, energy comes in, grass grows. Sheep run around, eat grass, make more sheep. Wolves run around, eat sheep, make more wolves. That's it. That dynamics is what I want to show you. What am I doing here? I am changing in the simulation the speed at which the grass grows back. So I'm adding energy into the system. I'm feeding the system by increasing the grass grows faster and faster. This is a state diagram showing you the relationships of the number of sheep, number of wolves, and the amount of grass. Make sense? Now, what do you observe? You observe a dynamic system. It's oscillating. So wolves go up, sheep go down, grass goes up, wolves go up and down. But as I'm adding energy, something weird is happening. It's oscillating more and more heavily, but it's still in the same corner until, oh fuck, sheep world. Wolves have died out. There's no more grass, there's only sheep, and as soon as grass grows up, sheep eat it and they grow more sheep, and that's it. Did you see how it happened? Oscillate, oscillate, it's still the same thing, still the same thing, oh fuck. You see the path, you see the history. It cannot just go there and it has to follow a path to get there, right? And this is what you need to understand when you think about climate change or any sustainability discussion. It's path dependent, it's chaotic. It's slow, insensitive to change until it hits you in the face and then you screw it. Make sense? Basic chaos theory. And now watch this. Paper in nature, climate change. This is the jet stream, right? You know about the jet stream? It's a wind that's spinning around the poles and it's a chaotic system. It's a wind, so it's coming from somewhere. It's going somewhere and it is being fed by more heat. Planet is warming up, CO2, you know all of that, right? It is more energy in the system and what is it doing? It is flip-flopping more and more and more and more. It's always messy, right? Chaotic systems are always messy, they're never quite stable, but they're roughly the pattern remains. Now watch those big loops appearing. It's like, holy fuck, what's going on? Why is it suddenly 30 cells used in the fucking North Pole? That's not supposed to happen. Well, it's because hot air happened to just because it has more energy, it's flip-flopping, it's flying off into places it shouldn't be flying off to. So make sense? So this is literally copy-paste chaotic systems. Probably the most depressing plot ever. Deviation of average temperature over time. Zero minus one plus one, about long-term averages, right? And I'm sure you've seen this, it was all over Twitter. And this is what, 1930s? So nothing is happening. Real as we had our first world war, we are having second world war, we are having massive industrialization, we are building factories, we are making trains, the power plants, building all these things. And it's all fine-ish. 70s, 70s people around, yeah, there we go. And that's of course when it started going downhill. It's overall fault, I'm sorry, Vesna. But whoa, wait. There is, again, remember, chaotic systems. They are roughly somewhere, never exactly there, but roughly around that area, but suddenly, something is pushing us somewhere. And somewhere probably not very good. Now if you turn this around, you see that we are getting there. And we also watch 40 or 100 years of delay. We've been pumping CO2 and mining coal since the Industrial Revolution. Not as fast as now, but increasingly. And it takes a while. There's that delay effect of complex systems, of chaotic systems. It takes a while while they do their thing. But once they do, oh fuck. You don't stop a tanker, right? If you know big ships tankers, if they want to break, they need 25 to 30 kilometers to stop. So you could hit the brakes, but no. So okay, this is no fun. To make even more depressed, this is the recent IPCC report that just came out. Okay, so we are not in a good place, people. This is not good. We are, there is your simulated natural, if you only had solar volcanic, you know when the climate change engineers go, no, but it's the sun. No, it's not the sun. Yes, it has an effect, of course, it's oscillating, but you don't get that. And we do get that. I mean, this XKCD, who doesn't love it, right? I'm sure you've seen this one. That's the historic timeline for past 200 million years or something-ish. The line never comes into red until 2016. This is not natural. We are a step function, right? I'm sure there's lots of signals people here. You know what happens when you just drop the voltage from zero to five bomb? Nothing like that. That's like holy cow. Weather doesn't like that. We are in a very interesting situation. This is not just history. Oh, but it has been hot in the past. Of course it has. Several hundred million years ago, yes, we did have, you know, 50 million years ago, we had 700 to 900 ppm CO2. That's how the world looked like. Okay, we are now hitting, what is it? 470-ish, slowly, 450, 460? Basically Amsterdam? More. Beachside property, right? I hope you own a boat. Asia, Southeast Asia, nope. Right? There is an economist, God bless. Any economist in the rooms? Anybody be upset? No. The person who got the Nobel Prize for Economics, and I will try not to swear, has calculated that the optimal global warming for the economy is 14.7 degrees Celsius, not the 0.7. Last time this planet had 14 Celsius average higher temperature, there were palm trees of fucking Greenland. You tell me that's optimal, good luck, we're in trouble. But they got the Nobel so must be right. I was not gonna swear. Anyway, economist, thank you. Neoclassical economies, there's lots of sane economies, don't get me wrong. So we are in an interesting situation. So this is where I wanna stop the science because we can rant about this for a long time, but hope you all know this. What does this mean? Because you can look at numbers, you can look at the scary maps, but now what? Well, changes in impacts. The first thing is even if we stop now, remember the chaotic attractor, remember the tanker, even if we stop now it will take geological time scales to have that carbon removed. I want you to just think about what a geological time scale means. Humanity in its current form has existed between 200,000 to 2 million years at best. Geologists count in mega years as the smallest unit, right? So the time where you can expect the CO2 to drop naturally will be longer than humanity has ever existed. AKA, do not think as this summer as the hottest of your life, think about it as the coldest summer of your future. Now this keeps me awake at night, I have to, no, that's what we know. Impact, there's things we know are gonna happen, I mix those in, I'm gonna talk a little bit, just mention a few things that I know that we don't know and there's lots of things we have no idea about, right? The famous Romsfeld unknown unknowns. These changes will be sudden, and of course I forgot to start my timer. They will be sudden, but they will also be gradual. Both things will happen. Systems react at different times. Some systems react really quickly, some will take a while to develop. There will be hot, hot, sudden things that don't repeat and there will be systemic changes. Let's unpack this, just the various categories to give us some flavor. Ecological, much more frequent, much more extreme weather. Think about the shittiest kind of weather you have where you live is different for all of us. For me in Holland, it will be storms. More storms, shittier storms, it will be heat waves, more rain, just more. Again, remember the oscillating wolf's sheep, it's just gonna be that but quicker and more extreme, yeah? Snow, droughts, you know, anything. Ecosystems will be out of whack. Many species cannot adapt. I do want to point out, nature, the planet, life on earth is fine. Life on earth doesn't give a fuck about humans. Humans are not gonna be fine. There will be life, we will not kill life. I cannot imagine the scenario where humanity kills life on this planet. Lots of scenarios where humanity kills itself. Right, so life will be, I mean, geological timescales, right, in a few million years, whatever bacteria will evolve consciousness and cockroaches get to rule the world, it's gonna be fine, life-wise, not humanity-wise. Pollination, 80% decrease, there was a big study in Germany recently that counted bugs, 70% to 80% of the bugs are gone. Thank you, Bayer and Monsanto, and Neonicontinence, and temperature changes. Oops, bees go, we go, you know. Yeah, arable land loss, carbon capture going down, we cannot capture so much CO2 anymore. Methane, right, you know that stuff? Permafrost melting. Moment that permafrost melts, all that biomass starts to rot. Methane comes up, methane is 20 or 20 times the worst in CO2, in terms of global warming potential. Runaways, nonlinearities flip-flopping into the next state. Enjoy. There's a pH of the oceans, it's critical temperature, all bacteria, all plankton will start dissolving. Just literally, chemically, will dissolve. 80% of our oxygen comes from them. If you're not there, I mean, it's gonna take a while, but economic, increase in equality, I don't need to tell you about that. You know what kind of world we live in. Political instability, we've seen it, right? We've seen the Arab Spring, price of grain, triggers social unrest, triggers other things, trigger speculation. Food prices, energy prices, you know, I'm sure you've seen your electricity bill recently. Decrease in earning potential, you might not be able to make so much money. Europe, service-oriented. Who's gonna need services if you need to eat? Unavailable products and raw materials, right? They were given. There was a lot of very nasty jokes and memes I could have put up, but I didn't. But yeah, you remember that one, how much that affected everything. Now, imagine if it seriously starts getting disrupted. Logistic change, all of that. That's gonna be interesting. And of course, for each and one of us, the effects will be different at individual level, but systematically, these are the things we're looking at. Financial, oh, it's against the 1%, realize we are the 1%. You would not be here if you're not. Now, it doesn't feel like it, especially if you're a young student or you have no income, you're like, what the fuck, I'm not rich. Globally, you are well off, right? Here's the income distribution. We are talking about the, when you talk about 1%, you're thinking about the top 100 people, the top 1,000 people on that own. So there is that. Financial markets are volatile because they're moving quickly across the planet. They're trying to seek interest, looking for stability, moving around, causing instability because of that, right? Property boom bus cycles, we know all of that. So suddenly you bought all this fancy property for lots of money and now it's flooded. Oh fuck, who's gonna buy it? Nobody. If you own property, Florida, sell now, right? You cannot build dykes around Florida because of the porous limestone, so you can build a dyke, water comes under and you're done. So it's, my gaming buddies are from Florida and it's always really fun when I talk to them about this. Yeah, oh, but of course, energy transition and sustainability is way too expensive. We can't afford that because we just spent 3 millions of dollars on wars. But hey, priorities. Social, my God. If you think the hate for foreigners and immigrants is bad, imagine 150 million Bangladeshis having no home. Just one of the many countries that are extreme risk of flooding, right? 41% of the 163 million live under 10 meters. Poor country, limited ability to organize and get built. It's a delta, so it's got water both sides. And then suddenly, you know, Netherlands is in panic because few 100,000 people from Syria want to come in, imagine few 100 million standing on the borders. This is gonna happen. How are we gonna deal with it? Well, I have a hint. Aging population, when you're old, you're naturally more conservative because old people are just conservative because they have more history to protect and future to build, right? We have almost no less and less babies, so who cares? I'm obviously exaggerating, but you get it, right? Fear uncertainty, Alzheimer. Because that's, old people get that, I mean, you know. So you're gonna end up voting more conservatives. Yeah, less, more religious, when people are afraid, basic psychological mechanisms are, grab the things you know, right? Security, what do you know? Your race, your religion, your nation, me, us, not them. Right? Humans don't work at scale of six billion people. Humans work at scale of 150 to 200 people, a village. We have villages here, right? Because that's us, not them. Not because we're bad, but they're just human minds. And of course we have 20, 30 years of neoliberal bullshit because markets are amazing and markets are gonna fix everything and just let's make corporations, people, and all of that. Okay. Good. So, technological, what can you expect? Look at refugee camps for your future. Go to Crete, be in a refugee camp. You wanna eat, you give up your biometrics. You don't want that, fine, you go hungry. Right? Retinal scans, get food. Imagine that being standard operating procedure in a supermarket. But my privacy, oh, I don't care, you wanna eat? Again, it's a long, but in a world where there's limited supply, governments honestly trying to be good and try to give everybody something you will have to control, you're going to have to end up something extreme. Reduce access to limitations to criminalizations of information of technology because, again, if you're an honest government, you're trying to control. You're not being even evil, but you ended up doing very evil things because of that. In pockets, you're gonna have high tech, right? I mean, I really don't like how much fallout, and I'm sure there's people who played fallout game or cyberpunk. They're like, yeah, that's actually not too crazy. That makes sense. It's a logical conclusion of what is going on because, again, changes, because we have power-dependent systems, we have these histories, we cannot just change. You cannot just, oh, let's do everything decentralized energy, yes, and then several million kilometers of existing power lines, they're gonna just disappear? Of course not. Energy, increasing prices of energy, storage capacity fuels, all of that. Lithium is running scarce. Oil, we know about that. Stability of supply is always a problem. Stability of distribution, I mean, it was sad, but funny. That image is from a few days back. People were hosing down bridges in Amsterdam because they were buckling from the heat. They were not designed for this. No bridge anywhere in Northwestern Europe, or most of Europe, is designed to have this kind of heat. There is only so much hoses, right? And this is just one example. So imagine things cascadingly going fucked up because it's everywhere, all the time. You can't deal. I work a lot with power companies with my research and my studies and my models. This is a quote, I don't wanna put a name there, but a major company building major infrastructure. Sure, I can give you 380 kilowatt lines, give me 10 years, seven years of permits, and maybe I can buy enough copper and maybe I have enough people to build them. Rapid transition, no. Because it's expensive, slow, it's big, it's ill-organized and hard. One does not just waltz into energy transition. One slowly builds it over time, time you don't have. Transport, you might not be able to travel. I'm born in a country that has had war. I know how hard it is to leave a country, right? Try entering a country where they don't want you there. Yes, but my country's flooded and, not my problem, but fuck off. Yes, but yes, but I am important. No, you're not. Again, not a friendly thing, but a trike being black, Muslim, female, leaving Syria because they bombed your house and sitting in green camp. That's reality you might have to live with at some point, you or your kids. I do have kids before you ask, so yes, I'm worried. Whether disruptions to all of this is gonna be very interesting. Medicine, same thing. Amazing things are coming. There is expectations that first humans are born who will live to be routinely 120 or 130 years old. Imagine that population of ever-growing people. Never, it's gonna be a mess. Lots of biodiversity, we get lots of drugs for nature. We're killing that. Supply chains, right? I had a panic about a year back when suddenly my pills were not available. If I stop, I'm in trouble, so shit, how do I do this because what's too bad? Let's go crazy. Right? Antibiotic resistance, all of those things are fun. But okay, so these are the things that we need to understand because if we are going to do something about it or be prepared, one needs to know the attack surfaces. What is the stuff that's gonna affect us so we can start preparing, right? And I think many of you do infosec, you'll do the same thing. What is my APTs? What am I building against? So, some strategies. Everything I wanna say here makes sense within what I understand is context to me. This might not work for you because a different person, different history, who you are, where you are, when you are. So take it with a grain of salt but think about those big drivers I mentioned and think about how that means to you. So, there's a bunch of useless stuff that's out there that's very popular. Standard prepping. I'm gonna have gazillion bullets and I'm gonna have lots of cans, right? And then, just no, just no. Hording inner-wood strategies, especially if you're European, which woods where? You and 17 gajillion other people around you, and of course not. Maybe it works if you're, but not here. So, paranoia, panic, no, useless. You just gotta be prepared, not panicked. But of course, disaster preparedness makes perfect sense, right? If you live in a place you know, you're likely to be hit by a flood or you're gonna have storms, you better be prepared, that'll be stupid not to. Which depends on where you are, what it is. So, I'll just leave, no, you will not. You will not leave, you will not be able to leave, even if you want to, you will not be welcome anywhere. World that is disrupted at this level will not be able to be gentle and friendly, right? Especially if you're not slightly different than your average middle-aged white male. Because that's unfortunately the fact that the world we live in, so, you know, think about it. What is useful? What this? And I do not say that lightly. I do believe these are the kinds of events that give me hope in humanity because we can pull this off with a bunch of dedicated, focused people. So, find them, they're open things. Learn how things, if you don't hack it, you don't own it, we know that. Right? You know how the, I don't know if you caught that. Russians were stealing Ukrainian farming equipment for whatever, and then, oh, look at us being so cool, then John Deere has disabled, now stolen Russian equipment. Look, win for John Deere. Wait, so they just turned them off for the Russians in this case, but when are they gonna turn them off for me? Then they feel like it, how does that, well, wait. Critical, what is really going on? We live in the world of this information, we know that. Verify, trust that verify, but it really, really takes time. Follow money, follow the dark money, try. That's the kind of stuff you can do as nerds, you know how to process information. Find it, track it, expose it. Follow the power lines, who is influencing what? And be creative, it's improvisation, it is repair, it is making do, learn to live it less because that's always good, right? Consume less, resources, emit less CO2, be used to being poor. We're not really poor, most of us are not. Not in the, I'm living in the dirt, I have nothing to eat poor, again, plenty people are, but we're not. Get into the mindset of not having things, what does that mean? Do you need to own something new? Can you just, you know, 90% of my furniture's recycled, just because it's fun, it's cheaper. Why waste money? But many people don't think that because we need every three years your furniture in your house, don't you? I mean, I know people who just do that. Every three years, everything goes into trash, buying new stuff. Okay, fine. Value creation, what makes value? Can you make value without having a proprietary? Big question, right? We open source has shown the world that that's possible. Can you do that with things that are capital intensive? Yeah, that's more difficult. If you need to own machines, if you need to own mines, or if you need to have, you know, how does that work? I don't know, let's find out. Can you make low tech that's useful? Right, these are all challenges for us. Can you be creative with something that's easy to make but very powerful? Communicate and educate. Here we are. Talk to people. Talk to friends and family who are maybe on the confused side. Show them. Especially communication. Lot of the environmental movement has fucked up because they talk about polar bears and pandas. Fuck pandas, talk people about the grandchildren. No, don't actually fuck pandas, that they're protected animals. But the message has been traditionally, oh my God, do it for the environment. No, that's wrong. Do it for you. Because that gets people going because that's what people care about. Abstract pandas are for the very few select people who can afford to think about pandas. Most people cannot afford not to think about the grandkids. Right? Organize. It really doesn't matter what you do as long as you're getting organized. Go into politics if you have the stomach for it. Be there, show up, step up. Because you have clue and you can at least do the less bad thing. Because there is no best thing. Remember, wicked problems, it's gonna be shit anyway. How can we make it less shit? You wanna be able to do usual emergency response skills, awareness. First, all these basic things that will make you a better human. They will help. And leadership. Can you turn me on? Cause that's not audible. This is worth watching. It's short, but I think it's a really good message here. Even though Ted meh. So ladies and gentlemen, at Ted, we talk a lot about leadership and how to make a movement. So let's watch a movement happen. Start to finish in under three minutes and dissect some lessons from it. First, of course, you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. But what he's doing is so easy to follow. So here's his first follower with a crucial role. He's going to show everyone else how to follow. Now notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. So now it's not about the leader anymore. It's about them, plural. Now there he is calling to his friends. Now if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. It takes guts to stand out like that. The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader. And here comes a second follower. Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts. Three is a crowd and the crowd is news. So a movement must be public. It's important to show not just the leader, but the followers, because you find that new followers emulate the followers, not the leader. Now here come two more people and immediately after, three more people. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. Now we've got a movement. So notice that as more people join in, it's less risky. So those that were sitting on the fence before now have no reason not to. They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, but they will be part of the in crowd if they hurry. So over the next minute, you'll see all of the, those that prefer to stick with the crowd because eventually they would be ridiculed for not joining in. And that's how you make a movement. But let's recap some lessons from this. So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals. So it's clearly about the movement, not you. Okay, but we might have missed the real lesson here. The biggest lesson, if you noticed, did you catch it? Is that leadership is over glorified. That yes, it was the shirtless guy was first and he'll get all the credit, but it was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader. So as we're told that we should all be leaders, that would be really ineffective. If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. And what a perfect place to do that, Ted. Thanks. Make sense? Chaotic systems, once it moves, it moves, but following, very important. You don't have to be the guy standing up there or the girl standing up there. It's fine. Support the thing you believe in, right? That's, we don't do enough of that because somebody else will do it. That's human, it's normal, but scary. Message of this whole talk is not that, oh God, we're gonna be screwed, because we will. That's fine. It is too late to be pessimistic. There simply is no space for that. You can go, it's gonna be terrible, yeah, whatever, it's gonna be terrible, but now what? So act. That is really my message today, is do. It almost doesn't matter what you do, but act. Go out, have fun, have chunk, enjoy party, observe, plan, think, teach, build, right? But keep in mind, what's the big picture? How does it fit in? And it doesn't always have to fit in, but vote. Not that I need to tell you people, but make sure people go vote to the right things. If you want to continue the conversation, please meet us with the Emergent Earth Village. Screenshot of the program, it's all the way to the right. So you have to scroll sideways, because it's a huge program. There's the flag, you'll see it flying. Please do come. There will be talks, you can still submit the thing, I don't know if it will be presenting something soon. There are other people who have brought in last minute thing, come and talk, and thank you. Thank you for being here in the evening and staying away from the party to listen to the pressing talk. Much appreciated. And I'm happy to hang around a bit longer if you want to discuss, because there's no program behind us. Can I give you one question to start, which is carbon capture technologies, do you think they give us any hope? Okay, so I'll repeat the question. The question was, will carbon capture and storage be the thing to help us? It's complicated. And let me clarify, it's complicated because currently most carbon capture storage technologies emit more CO2 than the safe because of the energy intensity, because you're taking extremely diluted gas. You concentrate, that's just thermodynamically terrible. If you can get this done with sufficient renewables, it's still a question. Now, if you can capture it to the source, at let's say at refinery, I think it's a stop gap, because you might give you a little bit, it slows down, it's not gonna stop it, but it'll slow down until we can develop other things. However, it's an excuse for keep on doing what we're doing and just kind of slap a plaster on it and continue, so I'm very, I'm not decided. We do a lot of work on that though, but it's been studied heavily, but it's hard, please. If you can tell us what is your recommendation for the hacker spaces to do? Keep on, keep on existing. Can you say more? I can say a lot, but not something that's, no, but keep on existing, and what I mean by that is when the shit hits the fan in whatever shape it is, I want to be a member of a hacker space, because that's where the knowledge is, that's where the connections are, that's where community is, that's where skills are, that's where information flows real quick, and that's when how we quicker know what's going on because we are a bunch of smart nerds. What to do exactly? I don't, there's so many ways to do that, but don't let them die. We've seen, I'm sure you've all seen that, post-COVID numbers are down at hacker spaces, struggling to get the camps going, keep that going, because we need that momentum, we need smart people together, not isolated. Hi, I have a question, please. Are there any specific technologies that you would recommend us to research? Oh my God, excellent question, by the way. I do not believe that a sustainability transition at this point is a technical problem. I'm convinced that it's not easy, but I think we have the tech. We know how to build solar, we know how to build waves, we know how to build wind farms, highly controversial, you could even do safe nuclear, Victorian, whatever you could. It is the organizational capacity, it's the political will, it's the getting your head out of your ass and actually acting, so I believe it's first and foremost a social problem. If anything, go vote, go become a president. No, I mean, lead the political movement, stand up, have people vote for you and do the not bad things. But tech specifically, I don't think that's the problem, it's there, a lot is there. And we tend to over obsess about technology because we are technologists, but that's not the problem. And you have to be very careful, Silicon Valley keeps on making the mistake. Or we'll just fix it with more technology, no. It's a social problem, not a technical problem. And yes, it has a technical component. Yes, about social problems. What are we going to do with the baby boom generation? They are with so many, they started out voting for welfare systems when they were young and now they're starting to vote conservative, extremely conservative, et cetera. Talk to them about grandkids. Because there are parents, they're not bad people per se. I mean, there's lots of assholes, but there are lots of very good people who just don't know better. Talk to them about the grandkids. What kind of world do you want for your grandkids? Because that's one thing they'll care about. Because that's what the thing that lives past beyond them. But yeah, that's, we just have to, there is a saying in science progress is one funeral at a time. Because that's how all the ideas die is when prominent old farts just clear the stage. Including myself at some point and all of us, but that's what it is. At these hacker camps, I'm always a bit conflicted about the blinking lights. Because they look awesome. They also consume energy, I suppose. No, decimal points somewhere, they're irrelevant. But I really see it also as a teaching possibility for people like, how can you make, like what do you consume, but not how batteries, whatever. Where do you think like, what's your view on this? And where is like the line where it becomes wasteful or? That's a very loaded and very good question. Okay, so when you do the math, the lights are irrelevant. Where people always like, save the planet, turn off the lights. Nobody fucking cares. Eat two kilos of meat and you're done. Right, so two kilos of meat less, I'm sorry. So the total energy value compared to what you normally would consume in, you know, anybody flown in from the US to be in a conference, they've consumed a CO2 budget for all the lights on this terrain instantly, but at one trip. So that's peanuts. I drive a 10-year-old diesel car. I am standing here talking about sustainability. Like, what the fuck? Why? Because I'm a poor fucking academic and I can't afford a better one. What I can afford is to talk to you about these things and talk to large petrochemical companies about making their stuff more sustainable. And when a single, okay, Dow Chemicals in Ternos in Holland, the biggest plastic manufacturer in Europe, they have a single machine that takes 900 megawatts of thermal power continuously. That's several cities worth of power in a single machine. When that thing goes sustainable through hopefully my work, I can fly my whole rest of, okay, you know what I mean? So it's very hard to, because, you know, eat less meat, not have kids that have kids, but teach them to be smart and responsible. Don't fly. Those things matter. Blink and lights, LED's. So yes, have fun because otherwise you'll be fucking depressed and not actually do anything. No, but that's important because if you're not here to enjoy life and care about life and want to make sure it keeps on going, then, you know, celebrate life while staring death in dice. It's like, fuck you, yeah? Actually, that pretty much brings us to time unless anyone has any very, very last questions. No, so I guess, thank you very much. Thank you all very much. Thanks for coming.