 Rydyn ni'n ffordd. Mae'n ganddlu sy'na bod yn ôl. Ac mae'n ffordd mor sicrhau. Mae'n ganddlu sy'n gwreithi gyda. Mae'r ffordd mwy o'r gwynhau. Mae'n ganddlu sy'n gwreithi gyngor, mae'r mwy o'r gwybod theatersau. Mae rhaid i'r ganddlu sy'n wneud ymysglaen ar hynned i ddiogelio. Mae'n ganddlu sy'n gwreithi comeio. Mae rhaid i'r ganddlu sy'n gwreithi amgylcheddol am tuべonol. Fe oedd y pethau yn dwi'n gw velvetio erioed, yn oed o'r corf, ond yw'r grwp iawn. Yn ymrwyf. Roedd gennym nhw'n ystod y wahanol, nid ito'u mynedd, ac rwy'n gweithio ar ymddangos. Mae'r gweithio yma'r haneswn llawer nid o'r ffordd rwych, sy'n oed oedd yn rhaid o'r prysgolau fforddol yn y prysgol a'r byd, ac yw'n arhysig yn hynod i'r brifio i gefnogaeth, ond diwrnodd yn oed. As you do, we sort of scour social media to see who's saying nice things about you and I came across this brilliant quote from an account that described itself as women plumbers and I thought well that is a really good constituency to have behind you but even better than that was the name of their company. What are you going to call a firm of exclusively women plumbers? And they'd chosen to call themselves stop cocks. I thought my time on this planet is well served and I can leave it happily. That was rather good. Naming is another big, big, big issue as you've witnessed the tragic scenes of the environmental extremes in America at the moment and you could not make it up that a town called Paradise is burnt to the ground. I mean, Joni Mitchell sang about paving over Paradise. I don't think she ever envisaged it being burnt to the ground and I thought we need to use naming to our advantage and I wonder whether in fact we shouldn't name, we're in the middle of hurricane season as well now, I wonder whether we should actually name hurricanes instead of giving them these kind of anodyne names like Kevin and indeed my own name taken in vain Andrew and things like that, instead name them after fossil fuel companies. Hurricane Exxon, Hurricane BP. Anyway, I digress. I'm going to talk to you about the possibility of rapid transition because we're told that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than a change to the current economic system and our way of life. We were told just a couple of weeks ago, the latest state of the art science from the IPCC, that to hit the target that the world has signed up to, the 1.5 degree warming target, we are going to need, and these are their words, rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented change across the whole of the economy and society. Of course, with brilliant timing, the British government chose to have Green GB Week when they had their European launch and in Green GB Week we saw the green light for fracking, we saw subsidies to renewable and low carbon transport cut, we saw subsidies to fossil fuels, we saw expanding aviation and a further commitment to more runways and we saw the announcement of a major new road between Essex and Kent. You kind of think that the message somehow isn't getting through and that's in spite of the fact that some of the latest findings additionally from the UK's meteorological office say that where that 1.5 degree target is concerned, we could be under some scenarios as little as five years away before we cross that threshold and that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the moment is at a potentially 15 million year high. Now, that's all kind of big and it's kind of out there and it's kind of quite hard to get your head round, but when you break it down into the nitty gritty details, the practical realities of our day-to-day lives, another night, I say nice, it's kind of terrifying piece of number crunching from some scientists in Germany looking at the loss of glacier ice calculated that it takes about just 500 metres of driving in an averagely efficient modern German car to lead to the melting of a kilogram of glacier ice and that's if you believe the fuel efficiency figures and the rule of thumb on the degree to which they're overstated means it's probably, you only have to drive about 290 metres before you have directly contributed to the melting of a kilogram of glacier ice and it kind of makes it connect, it just kind of makes it a little bit more real because for everything that we know, for everything that we know, the world is still dependent upon fossil fuels for about 82% of our energy supply and if you look at the projections of the international bodies that look at this stuff like the IEA, they think that our demand for fossil fuels is going to rise still for decades to come. So something somewhere isn't working. We know we need those rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented cuts in our energy use, in our use of materials and that is two things are the priorities the IPPCC said that we need to commit to. Now on the upside, we know that we have scenarios that could see 100% renewables by 2050 in 139 countries, the modelling's been done but in the meantime the climate is changing faster than we are and not many people really believe that we've got the ability and the wit to speed up. So one of the things that we're going to be doing when we launch the rapid transition alliance in a couple of weeks is looking at examples where things have happened quicker so that we can see the agency that we potentially have because I believe that we've got built in not just a lot more resilience but a lot more agency and capacity to adapt than we give ourselves credit for. Now what makes me think that? Well one of the things that makes me think that is something that happened in the early hours of Wednesday, the 14th of April 2010 when a dormant volcano covered in ice with a very hard to pronounce name. Any Icelanders in the audience? I think it sounds like eia ffietlau gych chi, but I'm not prepared to be tested. Anyway, this volcano went off. Nobody heard it across northern Europe because it was far away in Iceland. But the skies above our heads fell silent and within hours airports all over Europe were closing like somebody had switched a giant master switch for the aviation industry to off. And that's because fine dust from the cloud thrown up by the volcano is lethal to modern jet engines. And for days Europe was grounded. One of the main arteries of the modern world, the global economy, cheap ubiquitous air travel was suddenly cut. But what happened next was revelatory and a demonstration of how rapidly we can adapt to live without seemingly indispensable facets of modern life. It was a glimpse, I think, of a future in which climate change and ultimately limited oil supplies would have clipped one industry's wings. It was inconvenient. No one was prepared. But supermarkets quickly substituted local produce for perishable luxury horticultural goods that normally get flown in. Delivery companies switched transport modes. Business people took to video conferencing. Norway's prime minister at the time, Stoltenberg, was stranded in New York. So he ran the Norwegian government from the United States from his iPad. So suddenly the skies were peaceful and people found other ways to get from one place to another. They took trains, buses, taxes, and aided by social media, they shared cars, they shared rooms, they shared experiences. Spare capacity in other transport modes was taken up. Flexible communications allowed people to be present virtually where they couldn't be physically. People talked to each other and, travelling at a slower pace, found themselves enjoying the scenery and being more aware of the world that they were passing through and strikingly. As flying was something many people thought we couldn't live without, the world did not come to a standstill and everything simply carried on. Now there's other precedents to sudden changes in the way that we get around, which can speak to the present moment as well. And it speaks to a way in which perhaps we've forgotten how good we are at making things happen quickly and at scale. Now in the recent modern era, it took about 15 years just to electrify about 390 miles of existing railway track on the UK's east coast mainline. And it went massively over budget. But engineering endeavour saw rapid infrastructure development between 1845 and 1852, where nearly four and a half thousand miles of track were laid in Britain. On a single weekend in 1892, by contemporary standards, engineers began a project of breathtaking ambition, which began on the morning of Saturday, May the 21st at dawn, and was finished by 4am on the following Monday, May the 23rd. One weekend in just two days, a small perfectly coordinated army of about 4,000 workers laid a total of 177 miles of track along the great western route to the south west, converting the old gauge line. Now, if you want to look at something a little bit more recently, in post war America, and this is an example of how, if you like, we need to reverse ferret, how quickly we laid down that fossil fuel intensive infrastructure. Because in the US, in the highways program, using a lot of that spare post war capacity, in the space of three decades, they laid about 47,000 miles of road and in the process dismantled some of the more environmentally friendly urban mass transit systems. So if we can do the wrong thing quickly, we can certainly reverse just as fast. And you look at another problem which we seem to struggle with at the moment, so desperately, the housing crisis in this country. And I say that one of the great challenges of decarbonising the economy is how we retrofit our existing housing and building stock. Now we struggle to meet the demand for housing now, but at a time when the country was far economically weaker in the post war period, and under governments which were both Labour and Conservative, we were building social housing at the rate of over 200,000 homes a year at the peaks in the 50s and 60s. Now most recently, in terms of local authorities in England, if you're looking back at the year 2014-2015, we managed just about 1,400 new homes. The current government target, which they describe as ambitious, is for 12,000 in a year. I think that's extraordinary. How do we forget how to do things? How can we find out how to do things at speed and scale that we need to do again? I was really pleased to see that some of the new Democrats in the US have just been elected committing to a programme, a Green New Deal programme, an idea that we launched in the teeth of the financial crisis in 2008, seeing that being taken up as a major plank of policy in America is amazing. Now there's other things, much more recent, thinking again about that financial crisis. In the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, not only with decades of received wisdom, torn up so that we, the public, could bail out the private banking sector, we were told that you can't buck the markets and that's until they make such a mess that you have to clear up after them. But faced with recession, rapidly rising energy prices, growing lines at food banks, rising unemployment and mortgage foreclosures, instead of simply bringing a knife to public spending and pushing austerity measures in the United States, a man called John Huntsman, Utah's Republican governor, surprised people with an experiment to save money. At just a month's notice, he put about three quarters of the public workforce on a four-day week. He closed about 900 public buildings on a Friday and they had the presence of mind to study the impact and then what they found was that about eight out of ten employees really liked a shorter working week and they wanted it to continue. Two-thirds said it made them more productive, many said it reduced conflict both at home and at work. Workplaces across the state reported higher staff morale and lower absenteeism and there were other surprises too. One in three among the public thought that the new arrangements that were introduced to deal with the four-day week actually improved access to services and even though it wasn't the main objective, they found that a stroke moving to a four-day week also reduced their carbon emissions by 14%. That's a huge annual climate friendly saving and by then the option of a four-day week or shorter had already become a standard contractual option in the Netherlands and then a sign of growing appeal in 2013 even at the Gambia they decided to do a similar thing for the public sector. The shorter working week is one of those ways in which you can create space to live a far more sustainable life. Living sustainable lives also means major shifts in culture. How hard are they? We get locked in. Advertising locks in a culture of consumerism. We get locked in with these messages defined as first and foremost as consumers and I notice one of the badges that proudly states citizen not consumer. I rather like that. And those messages far outweigh visible invitations to think of ourselves as citizens with broader extended responsibilities. It's a key cultural dimension that makes it hard to imagine or believe in the possibility of rapid change. Materialism and related over consumption display a kind of self-reinforcing and negative dynamic. Now in a lot of replicated studies brilliantly summarised by an American academic called Tim Cassey it's been shown that holding more materialistic values is an indicator of having relatively lower levels of well-being. Mili being exposed to images of consumer goods triggers materialistic concerns which makes us feel worse and is linked to more antisocial and less pro-environmental behaviour. It's also been shown that children exposed to advertising are seen to be less likely to interact socially and as other studies which show help by simply referring to people as consumers rather than citizens. It triggers more competitive and selfish behaviour. Well that sounds like quite a big block but there's already some practical examples of action to combat that. In hardly the world's centre for being party pooping in Brazil in 2007 in its biggest city Sao Paulo led by a conservative mayor Gilberto Casab they introduced the clean city law. The result was a near total ban affecting billboards, digital signs and advertising on buses. In the United States there are several states which strongly control public advertising too and in Paris more recent rules have reduced advertising on the city streets by 30% and kept the size of hoardings. No adverts are allowed within 50 metres of school gates. The Indian city of Chennai banned billboard advertising and in Grenoble in France. They recently banned commercial advertising in public spaces in the city streets to enhance opportunities for non-commercial expression. Several hundred advertising signs were replaced by tree planting and community and notice boards and spaces for artistic activity. In recent decades in terms of belief in the possibility of change we've seen huge and relatively quick changes in behaviour around smoking, around driving, around sexual health. I wonder if the evidence very recently is that behaviour change and the possibility of attitude change may be accelerating. Look at what's happened around single use plastics, around campaigns like everyday sexism, around the possibility of having male only panels. I know I'm a man but I'm certainly not male only on this platform today. Attitudes around sexual identity, the idea of men only clubs. History is teaching us nothing but only punishes us for not learning its lessons said the great medieval historian Vasily Klochevski, Russian guy. But I don't think that's true. I think we can learn from the past and what we're going to be doing with a rapid transition alliance which we would love all of you to have a look at and if you're part of an organisation you think it will be appropriate to sign up and affiliate please do. We're going to share evidence based hope on the possibilities and the practicalities of rapid transition to more socially just and sustainable ways of being. If we believe in the possibility of change we bring it that much closer. So just to finish I'll leave you with my favourite words which many of you may well have heard before but I love them and I think it's almost good to say them like a mantra. The great public intellectual Raymond Williams who said that to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing and in the teeth of everything we face I think that is our challenge today so thank you very much for listening.