 All right. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. We're so honored today to have Mr. Mayank Malik from SAAC National Accelerator Laboratory here. He's going to talk to us about climate change. So Mayank, feel free to take it away. Good. Thanks, Jenny. Now that you've all put a face against the name, I'm going to turn off my video and go into my slide sharing mode. Well, thank you all for joining the talk. Are we doomed? Let me just start by saying don't worry about the pessimistic tone of the title. I'm a very optimistic person and I love solving problems. So we are going to take a problem-solving approach to the talk. I don't want anybody leaving here thinking, oh my God, the earth is dying and we are all going to die with it. Definitely not the case. There is a lot of topics that we're going to touch upon today. We're going to touch upon a framework for understanding the climate problem, making a distinction between climate change and climate adaptation, examining how that intersects with modern capitalism and how individual choices can have an effect on the solution set for these problems. These are all very big topics and think of this talk as a start of a very long conversation that we can have about various things discussed here. To sort of note about myself, I work at Grid Integration Systems and Mobility Lab in Applied Energy Division at SLAC. SLAC is one of the Office of Science National Labs that are owned by U.S. Department of Energy and operated by Stanford University. Gizmo is an interdisciplinary team. We are working on developing tools and technology that will bring grid, electricity grid into the 21st century. We want to ensure that the power that's delivered to you is reliable, efficient and affordable. You may ask what kind of tools and technologies we work on. We kind of sit at the intersection of power systems and computer science, if you will, or big data particularly. For instance, some of the technology that we are developing right now are how do you feed the extra power from your home solar into the grid without throwing it off balance or without triggering potential outages. Or technology that would allow neighbors, one who has a sort of panel and the other who doesn't, to be able to transact electricity directly from each other, between each other without having to go to the grid. So these are some of the things we are working on. The overall mission of our group is to enable 100% clean energy for all. So, almost exclusively all of our work is focused on renewable energy, which is a big, big component of climate response. My work specifically is focused on grid cybersecurity projects. And I'm currently working on developing distributed identity management system for grid assets, as well as for consumer owned behind the meter devices. Both the projects that I'm running at the moment use blockchain as a central technology to enable cybersecurity for the grid. So if you're interested in any of these areas and would like to explore more, please, you know, visit the website gizmo.slag.standford.edu. And also at the end of the presentation, you'll have my email, so please feel free to reach out to me directly. Now, the interesting thing about today's talk is it is nothing to do with my research work, because that's almost exclusively focused on cybersecurity at the moment. And we're not even going to touch on energy. We may like allude to it here and there. But the talk is not about energy, because I think that's a very narrow focus area within overall climate response than the entire problem. Before we begin quick fine print, I think this would make sense to most of you anyway, but I thought I'd call it out. Climate change is a highly politicized topic, particularly in the US. And in my opinion, it doesn't have to be. This talk is going to have a lot of data and a lot of opinions. The data is not subject to anyone's opinions. I have listed the sources and I definitely encourage you all to go check those sources and verify their truth. Opinions are all my own. So with that said, let's get started. Our goal today is to think about climate change in a way that allows us to develop a framework for the problem. And then consider the role of capitalism and consider the role of an individual within that context. As we go through this, I will introduce two key terms. You may or may not know those already. But I think those two terms are central to developing a framework around how to solve these problems, how to come up with an action plan, where to invest, what technologies need to be created, so on and so forth. So climate change has already happened. We say climate change as if it's something that's going to happen. But we are already seeing frequent extreme weather events, heat waves, fires, coastal floods, etc. We are already seeing a shift in the range and variability of climate patterns and the frequency of climate patterns. We know that global surface temperatures have warmed since the late 19th century. We know the oceans have warmed. We know the ice sheets are melting, the polar snow is melting. And all of that is known, but yet somehow our narrative around climate change is something that's going to happen, not something that's happening already. And I think where we are at right now, with regards to that, it is no longer about reversing course or avoiding climate change, the impact of climate change. I think it's more about climate adaptation now because we have passed those inflection points that would allow us to curb our consumption, perhaps reduce the usage and reliance on fossil fuels, reverse global warming, where we can, you know, avert the changes that accompany it. So the talk is about climate adaptation. By the way we think about climate is, at least for general populace, it's very, very narrow. And what I mean by that is, these are the words that come to mind. If you ask anybody about what climate change is, probably global warming is the first thing they'll say and global warming due to CO2 emissions. That's not the entire picture, of course, because there's a lot more stuff happening. If you look closely, global warming is causing rising sea levels because the oceans are warmer. Ice sheets are melting. The difference of temperature variability is causing cold and bleaching. You keep going further and draw some more threads. You start seeing that ocean water that's rising, it's going into freshwater, we are resulting in freshwater loss. Our rivers are getting more water supply because of that. So there's topsoil erosion in areas that are ripe for agriculture right now, particularly the red baskets of the world. We are seeing groundwater contamination that goes along with that. You're seeing things like nutrient bleaching from the soil, more deforestation, more floods, more droughts. Those droughts are causing wildfires and these are sort of an overwhelming amount of problems. If you look at climate change, not just as global warming due to CO2 emissions, this is a lot to tackle with and it's happening all at the same time. So here in California, for instance, we are even struggling to cope with pandemic and fire at the same time. Just two things, right? Pandemic and fire and we don't have a good way to respond to that. And not to diminish the extent of the damage caused by either of those, but it's nothing compared to the extent of climate crisis. Not to mention that polar ice sheets melting will likely introduce new types of viruses to our ecosystem, viruses we haven't seen before, we don't have vaccines for, viruses that can potentially cause more pandemics, right? And if we can, we try to solve our current crisis by printing money, but we can't solve this one. We can't solve climate crisis by printing more money. Something else needs to be done. And my hope is that after the conversation, we sort of build a framework around how to think about this problem so something could be done. So how do we know? So there's a lot of problems. How do we know what problems to solve first? What is urgent and what is important? And to do that, effectively, folks from finance right now may already know that you develop a risk framework. You look at all your problems and you say, you know, what is my risk framework so I can understand severity and urgency of the problems that need to be solved first. And to build a very high level sort of risk framework for climate change, you build a taxonomy of stressors. So stressors are all of these, all of these things are stressors. They're putting stress on ecological systems and human life. And to organize the stressors in a way that we can categorize them, pull them together, understand the relationships between them and create a taxonomy. You then perform a risk assessment. You know, you list down on your risks and you come up with some urgency scores or determine the urgency for adaptation. And then you map those risks to an action plan. That action plan can then result in an investment framework for what technologies need to be bought, what companies need to exist, what science needs to be created so on and so forth. But at a very high level, these are the four things that we need to do. And at this point I'm going to introduce first of the two terms that I promised you at the beginning of the talk. Anti-disciplinary. It was popularized by MIT Media Lab. There's some great articles by Joey Ito who runs Media Lab on anti-disciplinary. So I encourage you to go to your and read his blogs. But the idea is this, when you think about the entire space of knowledge, it's sort of like a polka dot pattern that you see here on the right. And this entire space of polka dots, you know, the dots as well as the white space is all of the science. Everything, all of the knowledge and all of the science represented as a set. The disciplines are the little black dots on this polka dot pattern. So each of the black dots is a discipline. And so, you know, there's a dot for chemistry, there's a dot for biology, there's a dot for ecology, physics and so forth. And there's massive amounts of white space between the dots that represent anti-disciplinary space. So many people like to play in this white space, especially when the disciplines or one or two single disciplines don't have an answer to the type of problem we are solving. We typically tend to either grow the bubble, grow the black bubbles, or we tend to marry the bubbles, ideas from each of the bubbles we call that multidisciplinary. But I think for climate crisis as a whole, we really need to look at the problem as an anti-disciplinary problem where the solutions are in the white space. We don't really know what the solutions are. So therefore, expanding the bubbles is only going to result in short-term solutions. But looking at the white space gives us a whole new way of thinking about how to approach solving this problem. The other factor to this is that we currently treat climate change as a disciplinary problem. We try to build optimal solutions for one subset of climate change problem. And in doing so, we inevitably sub-optimize something else. So I'll take a quick example of this. The renewable energy space that I work in is awesome. And one of the great ways to generate renewable energy is through wind farms. And we can optimize building wind farms, and we can produce gigawatts and gigawatts of energy, and that can solve quite substantial, in a substantial way, the energy demand of a particular region. Well, we optimize that problem, but if we only look at energy and we don't look at biodiversity, we sub-optimize other problems, meaning it kills a lot of birds, right? It kills a lot of birds. And particularly these wind turbines are put in coastal areas, and now there is quite a bit of funding going into how do we manage coastal bird life, right? How do we optimize both the problems where we have production of energy from renewable source, as well as, you know, preventing loss of biodiversity associated with it? And that's sort of just one example that happens all the time when you optimize one thing, you inevitably sub-optimize something else, especially when you're looking from the lens of disciplinary thinking. So now let's organize ourselves and see what the taxonomy for climate change may look like. So we go back to our stressors, and in many ways just license this information, right? But the way I, the way that appeals to me the most is this. There are fundamentally, categorically speaking, three big stressors to human life. One is climate change, one is biodiversity loss, and the other is resource inflation. If we are to save ourselves, we got to save us from the dramatic climate change effects. We have to save the species of animals and plants all around the world. And the third is slow down and stop resource depletion. And what we want to be able to do is allow national processes enough time to replenish critical resources, critical for us to survive and try. But if we build that further, we kind of result in a little bit of a graph sort of coming out of each of these things. And for climate change, it's obvious we kind of see this all the time, some of the expansion, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and some of the expansion is the one that we typically focus a lot on. So glacier and ice sheet melting, increase in temperature stratification resulting in sea level rise that has been sort of maybe the most talked about aspect of climate change in press and media. What doesn't get talked about a lot is the resource depletion and biodiversity side. And if you look at this graph, I'm not going to develop it further from here, this is just a small sampling of what this graph looks like. But if you develop this graph further, what you start noticing is there are loops and relationships between these things. So for instance, sea level rise, I don't know if you guys see my mouse. Okay, so for sea level rise, for instance, right, if sea level rise, right is enough where it can now have brackish water go into groundwater, then there is a feedback loop between sea level rise and groundwater contamination. And then everything that falls down from groundwater contamination further exacerbates the effects of that because now climate change is basically having has a loop here with resource depletion groundwater contamination stressor. And we'll talk a little bit more about these loops, but the key thing is developing a taxonomy is important. It's important to identify each of these stressors. It's also important to understand the relationships between these stressors, particularly when it comes to feedback loops between them. So the big question at that point is what systems are being stressed first, right, and how many of those systems are being impacted by each stressor. So that's what leads us to develop some sense of urgency around what do we need to solve for first. Again, many ways to organize that, but the disciplinary way to organize this is take a domain and let's call that domain natural environment. So natural environment is composed of biodiversity and natural resources. Biodiversity is then composed of animals and plants. And now we are looking a lot like we organize things in biology within animals like we have, you know, mammals and so on and so forth within mammals. We have humans, homo sapiens and homo sapiens have built environment health and wellness is of concern and homo sapiens have this incredible abstraction called the economy that nobody else has. And that's a concern too. But this is a, again, a very disciplinary way to look at things. We, you know, we kind of start with ecology, we go into biology, we go into like human sort of sciences. And then we go into economics, we go into health and built environment. You know, I guess it goes into architecture or something else. I don't know. But when you look at it this way and trace back from built environment, all the way to natural environment, you realize that built environment is not really part of natural environment. Like that hierarchy sees us to hold true when you use a disciplinary mechanism of thinking. So the framework that I like a lot is something like this, when you have your domain and the key five domains in which you have to solve for our natural environment, built environment, humans, health and wellness, economy, and governance. We have governing structures at every level from, you know, municipalities, cities, states, countries and coalitions between countries. And I think we really need to understand when all the stressors starts happening all at once, what impact does it have on each of these domains, and how each of these domains can successfully respond to this. Now you'll notice maybe other than economics. There is no one discipline that fits into either of these domains. And I think I can make a case for why economics also alone is not sufficient but let's assume that no single discipline is going to have to be able to solve for these domains. What we need is lots of disciplines coming together and we'll explore a little bit of that here. Let's take an example of how these domains would fit into a risk framework. So here's a map. This map is from NOAA, sea level rise viewer. I highly encourage all of you to go to that link and check it out. It's not designed to scare you or make you angry, but if you have either of those responses I totally understand. So this is a map of US and overlaid on that map is the result of sea level rise. Of course this is based on certain scenarios of temperature rise and you can play around with that. And you'll see how much of the coastline is basically going to be underwater. That's what this map shows. But that's not enough, right? We sort of have to kind of go down that causality list and see what really is happening. So sea level rise causes saltwater to enter freshwater ways in groundwater. Okay, groundwater turns brackish. That hampers agriculture and that hampers food supply, food supplies for humans. Water level rise also causes flooding. It forces people to evacuate. There is property damage, insurance companies are overwhelmed to the point of bankrupt, litigation ensues. Food and supplies now need to be brought from somewhere else to support trapped populations. Transportation systems get overwhelmed. They mobilize air transportation. Transportation primarily uses fossil fuels today, contributing further to the issue. Government emergency funds are depleted. Social unrest ensues, government structures are broken, entire countries start to collapse. Mass refugee migration starts. Countries that are not affected close their borders to protect their own citizens and further straining political alliances. And this goes on and on. It's very depressing, but we have to understand those causalities and build a matrix. So this is what our matrix may look like. So we list down the stressor and against the stressor we list down all the risk statements and these are not comprehensive by any means. These are just here, for example. You list down all the stressors that are associated with this. So risk to agriculture to businesses to wastewater, so on and so forth. The next step we do, and by the way, there's other things like, you know, we haven't even talked about in terms of volume and variability of river systems and so on and so forth. And what impact that has on infrastructure, we didn't talk about electrical infrastructure, what impact that has on that. So take this list as a very small, small sampling as an example. So the next thing we do is we map this list to the domain that's going to the five domains that we discussed. So agriculture, maybe it's part of built environment, you can make a case for natural environment, but I don't really think modern scalable agriculture large scale firms are in any way natural environment. They are more built environment than anything else. This to big businesses perhaps is an impact on the governance domain. Then physical health due to poor water quality is an impact to human health domain. Risk to insurance of assets and areas affected by sea level rise out in economic domain. And some of these things, you know, we've been seeing these are far away from us. But that's all about insurance. You cannot right now buy a high rise condo on on the on Miami Beach and get it insured. It's still being constructed and the contractors will sell you a condo, but it's incredibly difficult to find an insurance company that's going to ensure that condo. Right. And we are starting to see some of these early early cracks emerging in the failures that are about to occur. So once we have this risk matrix map to our domains. The first thing is this we have to assign an urgent to school we understand those relationships. We develop some analytical tools to do scenario analysis based upon several factors that go into each of those stressors. They come up with a scoring method and we assign an urgency store. And I think this here this slide here. There is massive amounts of research opportunity here. Each scenario analysis, each understanding each risk understanding each stressor and how that evolves based upon factors today is a research program or a company. And if you look at that research, most of that research would fall under applied research with a three to five year commercialization pathways there's a whole lot of opportunity for a lot of you who are looking to work in this space to kind of use this empty space as what part of climate change problem framework you want to work on and what the solutions there maybe. Of course, once we have a risk framework, we then develop an action plan investment framework. Like I said, this is kind of like a start of the discussion we can really touch every topic here. But real quick, from perspective, the action plan is going to have three action categories. Exploitative activities, protective or sustainable activities and regenerative activities. And I think all our solutions are online predominantly in protective and regenerative exploitative is what got us here. And then we develop investment frameworks on what invest what activities to fund what technologies to develop so on and so forth. Now the question is, what does capitalism have to do with all this. And before I get to sort of the core of that, let's understand what an economy is economy is an abstraction that ties us all together great. And in other words, everybody wants to be rich. And you know why that's awesome. Because that's what we need we need everybody participating in solving for climate change or adapting to climate change. And we know one thing that does ties together in that regard. So why and how can we leverage economics, economy in general and money or capital to make an impact is why economies, perhaps the most important domain to think about. And I think part of the reason many of the efforts in climate change, although they have made huge strides have failed to meet targets global targets is because the economic incentive at the individual level are not aligned with the global priorities of goals set individual actions are not being incentivize such that collectively at an aggregate, they can result in goals set forth let's say in the Paris agreement. That's the economic abstraction we're going to focus on that capitalism as defined on a quick Google search you'll see they've come up in economic and political system in which countries trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit rather than by the state. Any of you who are from GSB probably have seen this definition heard this definition. But one of the one of the things that Mark mentioned here is the concept of growth. Capitalism capitalism has a huge appetite for growth, right, as long as things are growing we don't need to worry about it economic growth sort of like is a key bedroom concept to capitalism. In fact, it is so popular that those of you who work in technology have probably seen this court, stop being an idiot, all that matters is growth. And I believe this was this was an advice Cheryl Sandberg got from, I think Eric Schmidt, and she claims that was the best advice she ever got and that may be a great career advice right no doubt about that. But when you export this idea to all walks of economic life, you result in this need for unlimited growth, you know, or infinite growth in a finite world and that's, you can see why that is a problem. So, let's talk about what that means what that growth means growth in economic terms at a very high level means GDP, and GDP has become a measure of progress and success across. So here's the chart, I'm going to play this chart for you notice the colors, the colors go to deeper blue as GDP per capita grows and this is just from 1990 2017 so I'm going to play this and watch this evolve. And we are seeing the whole world are starting to turn a little bit more blue. Because we've defined this measure of success growth is what matters. And we are sort of following to that are holding ourselves to that goal. What is not shown here are the five decades prior to 1990. Right. So since World War two maybe growth has been of course a key principle not just in 1990 but since World War two and it has been not just part of sort of like well understood social norm, but it's also been part of the political agenda. As a country the way to grow is is to grow yours GDP GDP across the world have sold like 20% in three decades prior to this chart. And that means you produce more, because you produce more, you have to sell more, and you then design systems that are designed to encourage people to consume more. And if you do that over five decades what you result in is this consumerism sort of economy where you have to consume more for you to grow your GDP. And that's where we stand today. The interesting part about that is, as long as you keep growing. It doesn't matter how the GDP is distributed. You can ignore answering questions about equality equity, etc. Because the pie is growing. You don't need to tell people like how to slice the pie, or what slice you own, everybody slices growing. So nobody really cares. And that's what growth looks like. Well, when we start producing goods, increase our production increase our consumption and therefore resulting economic prosperity. We grow as humans our population growth so this is sort of like chart from 10,000 BC but notice sort of the last mid century to now. The curve is exponentials. Now, this results in a cyclical sort of feedback loop, where the numbers grow. And therefore the demand grows, therefore the consumption grows, therefore the production has to grow, and therefore the GDP grows, and so on and so forth. The effect it has had on our systems is this data the direct correlation between economic growth and increased stress on our systems. We talk about, so I'll take another quick example here we talk about electric cars a lot right in electric cars are going to solve the transportation problem because we're going to have less emissions. Electric cars are basically just batteries and we those batteries. One of the things that goes into those batteries is lithium. The current global reserve for lithium is very hard to determine, but it has been estimated that it's what like roughly 18 to 40 million tons I think. And with that estimate, like you can have 1.2 billion cars in the world and even if everyone wanted to go electric, it would take years for us to run out of lithium. I would argue that we would have made the same argument about fossil fuels 100 years back. Right, we'll never run out of lithium it doesn't really matter so we have to sort of look at these problems from a perspective of not just the one thing that you're trying to optimize for but everything else that it impacts and in this case it impacts resource depletion. So now, what I'm about to say here on the slide. It's going to be an obvious statement after you hear it but I think it's a very powerful statement and I, you know if you take away one thing from this discussion I want you to take it. Take this thing away. Everything we see around us came from earth. Well it's not entirely true we do get energy from the sun, but literally everything plastics biodegradables, everything that you see came from here. Right, so as we have to curb our consumption, if we are to build a sustainable thriving population, perhaps nobody says it better than Lauren McLean. She's she is a marine bio marine ecologist from Kobe University and she she said we are living in a 10% world and from her sort of disciplinary perspective. 10% world means that the fish used to be 90% bigger, we used to have 90% more fish in the ocean, coral reefs were much bigger, and we have basically we are living in a world that is an order of magnitude less than several generations ago. Daniel Pauly coined the term shifting baseline syndrome, which is a phenomenon of lower expectations in which each generation regards a progressively poorer natural world as normal. In the Bay Area, the Bay is pretty dirty. I still, if I go to the Bay, I'll see tons of tourists taking pictures as if it's the most prettiest site ever. You would never jump into that water. But that's a sign of lower expectations of what natural resources natural beauty and natural richness looks like and I think, I think what we need to do is reverse that shifting baseline syndrome. Here's an art piece I'd like to share with you. It was, it's popsicles made from polluted waters lakes and beaches in Taiwan. It was made from National Taiwan University and you can see plastic waste a hair comb plastic and particulate matter. This is just water. This is just water taken from the lakes and frozen into a popsicle. And I don't know. I find it pretty. And I find it sad, and I can't reconcile those two feelings. Right. And I think that's kind of where we stand. But the question really remains in what can we do as an individual, right? What is our responsibility? Because a lot of times the problem is so complex. We say we have to gather teams together. We need experts. We need to build out structures because any response an individual may make is not perhaps sufficient. And at this point, I'd like to introduce the second term of this talk. This is a Maori term from the Maori population in New Zealand. And, you know, the picture on the side, it shows, you know, the God of forest, God of storms, a lot of water, and they protect. So Kiai means guardianship and protection. It is a way of managing the environment based upon the Maori worldview, in which you each human act as a guardian and this person or groups care for an area such as a lake or a forest or a mountain. And they are given that role by their local sort of city or local EV as they refer to it. And I think as an individual, like, we can find this concept in pretty much every indigenous culture around the world. The ideas that are central to this are ones of stewardship and balance. And as individuals, it's not hard for us to practice stewardship and balance. We can reduce our consumption. You may think it doesn't matter, but it does matter if you scale that out. So what does a guardian look like in today's modern world? That's what a guardian looks like. But the point I want to make here is she's not approaching this fight and we must fight alongside her, right? The other point I want to make here is disobedience perhaps is the requirement for radical change. So how do you disobey? You don't have to really resort to crying of any kind. You can still disobey. And here's an example I'd like to use. This is the Coral Reef, the Great Barrier Reef. And it has suffered, I think it's third mass bleaching in the last five years. The internet is littered literally with articles. If you want to visit the Great Barrier Reef, the sooner the better. Go do it now. Fear of missing out. Do it now. But what that encourages is an irresponsible tourism that further depletes the reach. So perhaps the way for us to exercise disobedience is to curb our formal, right? And say, you know what, it's fine. I realize that 99% of experiences in this world I'm going to miss. So this would be just one of those. Okay, I will wrap up quickly. Another example, Dutch farmers are installing fences around Tielefield. They also stop Instagrammers from trampling. So another example of formal, right? Like we don't all need to go there and take pictures, right? And I think that's a way we can exercise our disobedience. It is said software is eating the world. I say it may be eating the world, but we can't eat software to read ourselves. We still need the world. And I want to talk about the myth of the Boiling Frog. The idea is this. Climate change has been compared to Boiling Frog. So when you take a frog and you put it in hot water, it jumps out, it saves itself because it's a dramatic change in temperature. But if you put it in a pot of water and slowly incrementally increase the temperature, you can boil the frog. Climate change has been compared to that. You know, we are really good at responding to volcano eruptions, but we are failing to address slow burning of the entire planet. Again, let me just first say this is a myth. From a biological evidence-based experiments we have found if you put a frog in boiling water, it either dies or burns beyond measure. If you put a frog in a pot of cold water and incrementally start heating it up, the frog jumps out. They don't really sit around. They don't like sitting around in pots of water. And that's kind of what we have to learn from the frogs, right? That they try to save themselves. They don't have grand illusions. They don't dilute themselves with this grand sense of self-importance. They don't start being claims about, let's save the planet. They simply try to save themselves. And I think that's what we can learn from the frogs is it's not the planet that needs saving. It's us. We cannot remove ourselves from this equation. And I will end there. I don't know if we have time for questions. Jenny can tell me that. But my email is here. Reach out to me. I would be more than happy to talk with you. If you're interested in our work at Gizmo, more than happy to talk with you, host tours for our lab once we can open the labs after COVID. But thank you for joining the talk. And Jenny, tell us if we have any room for questions. Yeah. Thanks, Mayank, for your talk. We have about eight minutes. Happy to take questions now. Hi, Mayank. I'd love to ask a question. That was really great. By the way, thank you. And the question, are we doomed to me sounds like, yes, if we can't get rid of capitalism. I'd like your perspective on that because, of course, we all say we can do individual action, but really to make the changes that we truly need. We need to change the system. Yeah, I mean, I think I think there's, there's some fairness in that argument, but I would say, for better or for worse, money is how things work right now. And if you think you have a way to affect the world in which you solve for climate crisis or allow for better adaptation against climate crisis, then, then to have that impact, you would need capital in the current system. And if you would need capital to have that impact, then it's your, it's almost your moral imperative to get that capital, right. If the system over makes total sense, if we have the time and the luxury to be able to do so. These systems don't turn get turned over as a revolution, they get turned over as an evolutionary sort of change. And honestly, I don't know of any other system, other than capitalism right now, that allows us to have the kind of lifestyle that we have, enjoy the comforts that we have, and be able to scale also. That's one. The other thing I would say is there are mechanisms to fit things under the context of capitalism that allows us to solve for climate adaptation. One example I'll use is, there's one that are from the Rania River in New Zealand. And recently, I think two years ago, that river was assigned personhood. So just like you have in capitalistic societies, LLC status or escort or secort status for companies like Apple doesn't really exist. Just like this phantom thing we have created through legal regulatory frameworks of capitalism, Microsoft Apple. So this river exercises that same ability. And let's say you put you decide that you want to build a water bottling company on that river. That river is now going to hold shareholder rights in your company. And that would be exercised by nonprofit organizations locally, who care for the well being of that river, and the river gets to vote on how quickly you grow that company. So there are absolutely mechanisms that we haven't deployed within capitalism to support climate action. I personally don't think that a complete revolution or moving away from capitalism to a better tool. Another system is the answer because that other system doesn't exist. And from what I can tell, coordinating a system at that scale would take much longer than actually using capitalism as a tool to solve the problem. I have a quick question. So in your personal opinion, what do you think is the best way we can make an impact on an individual level like what do you think is the number one thing that each of us can go forth and do to make a difference. I think the number one thing is more of an umbrella sort of statement. I think reducing consumption, right. Reducing consumption is the number one thing and reducing consumption, not as a as a compromise, but you know, particularly in America, you know, we see massive sort of health crisis due to obesity and cardiac issues. So reducing consumption, just eating would help us, right. It's not just we're not doing it for the environment. It's great to exercise restraint. And I think we have built a society worldwide where consumption is the sort of right answer. And truly, if you look at GDP is the economic measure, but if you start incorporating happiness measures that include friendships and societal sort of fabric, you realize that perhaps restraint is much better than consumption. I think I have a quick question. So I know that you had one slide where you were listening at all these different opportunities for research or for business or for career, whatever. I feel often when I'm when I'm thinking about it, I just get kind of overwhelmed with how many different things need to happen in concert in order to really make an impact on this. So do you have kind of a framework or advice on how to kind of parse through all the different options all the different kind of pathways towards change that we need to make happen in terms of how to focus your efforts. So that that's that's a work in progress what I showed you here is an incomplete set me along with a, you know, a friend of mine and co worker David Chastain, we are working on developing a framework that allows us to segment those opportunities, and then categorize them in a way that it makes sense in also a way that maybe reduces the complexity of each of those individual things from interdisciplinary to maybe multidisciplinary where we can say, we need these x five skill sets to be able to solve this problem. You know, if you are, if this is your passion and if you want to solve for something like this, take anyone in there. I think if we all pick one we solve it right there's definitely not seven billion items in this taxonomy. We are seven billion people. So it's not we just have to we just have to pick one and just go with it and reach out please if you want to have conversations about this, again, you know, reach out to me, I, I would love to talk about this. The more people we can get talking about this, the sooner we'll get to solutions.