 When you're talking about the challenges that the future holds for society and for policy, few topics are as important as climate change. The human ingenuity that led to the industrial revolution and life as we know it today has also altered the global climate. Now, how will human ingenuity handle a warming world? We're all familiar with the doomsday predictions for more droughts, fires, floods, and economic disaster. But what are the possibilities for thriving and changed climate? Our species is innovative and adaptive, and rarely more so than when responding to stress and conflict. Today, we're here to discuss the opportunities global climate change presents for making our societies more equitable, prosperous, and resilient in the long term. Our first speaker will be Brad Allenby, who is discussing the futures of climate change. Brad is a distinguished sustainability scientist at the Julianne Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State. He's also a President's Professor of Sustainable Engineering and Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics. Thank you. Thank you, Tori. As I was preparing for this, I was reminded of a lecture I did in Washington a couple of years ago at the Smithsonian. There was an afternoon of lectures on sustainability. I was the second speaker. The first speaker was brilliant. There were about a couple hundred people in the crowd. He started by showing those postcards we're all familiar with of factories belching smoke in various places in New England, and all the postcards were talking about how wonderful this was, that we were creating the future. And, of course, his point was that these people were total jerks, and he was a very good speaker. So for about 30 minutes, we were all whooping and hollering about what total jerks these people were, but, of course, as I got up, I was left with the very unsatisfactory feeling that 20 or 30 years from now, somebody would be looking back at me and doing exactly the same thing. So I started my speech with more humility than I usually bring to my talks, and I want to do the same here. So what I want to suggest is that what we are doing is we are doing the same thing that we constantly do. We are misinterpreting the challenges that we actually face. And what I would like to suggest is that a lot of our climate change dialogue began 22 years ago, a UNFCCC process. And the time then was a time of very high concern about climate change. And what we did was lock ourselves into that mental model. The problem with that is that that leaves us less and less able to adapt to the real situations that we face, as opposed to arguing more and more vociferously about the mental models that we held 20 years ago, which may or may not remain applicable. So what I want to do is I want to bring up three technologies, not because they're critical or the most important technologies, but because they raise questions that I think lead us in a different direction of what we're looking for is productive dialogue about the issues that we face. Some of you have probably seen this. This is a picture of technologies designed to capture carbon dioxide from the ambient atmosphere. These are not yet deployed, but they can be deployed. We have the technology. It's expensive, but that means, of course, that climate change becomes a choice. If you really don't like climate change, you can deploy these technologies. So far, of course, we haven't done it because not liking climate change and paying money are two very different things. What I would like to point out about this technology is if you use this technology, it is possible to go back and reconstitute liquid carbonaceous fuels, so that you could, in fact, keep most of your current infrastructure and feed carbon-neutral gasoline back into the system. Again, these technologies are proven. They haven't been put together, and they are expensive. So I'm not saying that this is a slam dunk that we're just ignoring. What I would like to point out, though, is that this dramatically changes the kind of dialogue we have. If you listen to the way we positioned climate change 22 years ago, it was, we have to stop this monster. What this says is, no, that's not really the question you face. The question you face is actually a lot worse. The question you face is, now that I can engineer the atmosphere, what kind of world do you want? I would argue that it is that question that we are busy ignoring and that at some point focusing on 20-year-old mental models and enjoying arguing and fighting about them and insulting each other about them, which is what we do now, becomes in itself unethical. That what is required is the ability to understand the world that we have now and to adapt to it, and that getting ourselves trapped in old patterns is one way to avoid having to deal with the reality that we have indeed already created. A second technology, cultured meat. That is growing all of our meat in factories from stem cells. This technology is proven, again, it's very expensive right now, although I have seen sources that claim that you can get factory-produced meat for something like $22, $23 a pound. I think that's bogus because I haven't been able to track it down, but the price is clearly going down. Why would you do cultured meat? Well, among other things, you would do it because it changes the way you think of food. Food becomes a design space. Why is it that you're eating sandwiches that contain chicken and beef? It's because chicken and beef are the production systems. This is Marx, right? What you get is a product of the production system that is in place in your society, only it's not class warfare, it's food. The reason you eat beef is because what we have to produce food is cows. Cows are a really inefficient way to produce hamburger in terms of environmental impact in terms of a lot of other impacts. Putting meat in factories has some potential significant advantages. In fact, putting meat in factories becomes a geoengineering technology although nobody addresses it that way. Because growing grains and using pasture land to support beef is a very, very resource-intensive process. So conceivably, you could begin to design, in part, the nitrogen, the phosphorus, and the carbon cycles, among many other things, by implementing factory meat. Now, food is a very culturally contentious area, domain. So the question is, to what extent are we willing to think about this kind of technology and what does it tell us about our focus only on climate change? A third technology. This comes out of the fact that there are a whole suite of research efforts that are focusing on the redesign of the human. We tend to psychologically and institutionally privilege the present. That is to say we look at ourselves and it becomes very difficult for us to believe that anything could ever be better. But that discussion of the Smithsonian, that is probably a pro-krill view at best. So the question is, what happens if we do human design? What are some of the things that are going on? Well, for example, we have robots now that are controlled by brain tissue from rats, not by chips. We have robots that are directly wired into sentient organisms, in this case a monkey at Duke, that can run, that can move arms, that can run robots in Japan, even as the monkey remains at Duke. The gaps that we assume between the human and the world around us are beginning to blur in some very interesting and challenging ways. People are talking about birthing in Neanderthal. Is this technically possible? We don't know yet, but we do know that de-extinction is becoming a hot item among the cognaceti. So for example, Stuart Brand is talking about de-extincting passenger pigeons. George Church at Harvard is talking about de-extincting woolly mammoths to the point where they have already talked to some of the tribes in Siberia where they would like to place these creatures and the tribes are really excited about it. My vote went for Sabertooth Tigers, but George said that that was further down the list. I think that's really unfortunate, but there we are. Google and Ogcog, think about it, when I walk into my class and my students flip open their notebooks, they are automatically gods. When I was growing up, if anybody had had the capability to access information the way they can, we would have worshipped at their feet, particularly when term papers were due, because our Google was going into a huge card file and looking through it and trying to find a book that it turned out that the medical students had already ripped the insides out of. But they have all of our accumulated knowledge open to them. Now, they're idiots of aunts, right? Because they don't know how to use it. They always like the first part, and then they get bothered by the second part. But the reality is, we don't know how to use it either. I'm a professor. What am I supposed to teach them that will enable them to understand what it means to have much of their cognitive function now floating out on technology networks? More importantly, five, 10, 15 years from now, when it turns out that we've got chips that have the equivalent of a cat's brain hanging off their belts, and they're socially networked even more than they are now, what does that mean cognition is going to consist of? There are some very fundamental questions buried in this. All right. So going, getting back to climate change, the argument that is focused on climate change is not unimportant, but it has become a distraction from dealing with the complexity and the depth of issues that the world today is presenting to us. We know, we don't do it all the time, but we know how to design for climactic events. That is not a significant conceptual problem. Implementing it is hard. Getting people, particularly municipal governments, to pay for a level of infrastructure that might be appropriate for more significant climate events, that's a political issue, and it can be a problem, but we know how to do it. The point is that with all of these different issues coming together to focus on climate change alone becomes a significant diminution of the challenge and leads us to do things that may be interesting in terms of climate change, but in terms of the larger systems that really we have to deal with now, because they're out there now, can be dysfunctional. For example, one of the things that people are working on is radical life extension. There are doctors at Stanford and Harvard that will tell you that the first person to live to 150 with a high quality of life has already been born in this country. That's a scenario. I don't think you ought to even consider it a prediction. It's a scenario, but it's a not implausible scenario given the progress we're making on biological systems. So what happens if that really does begin to happen? What happens if people begin to live to 150? And remember, if I can keep you alive for the next 150 years given the progress we're making in medical science, what I'm really saying is I will give you virtual biological immortality. What is that going to do to our world? What does that mean for climate change? That's kind of a stupid question. And it's a stupid question because the climate change dialogue is all wrapped up in itself over here and becomes a way of avoiding precisely these kinds of issues that need to be thought about now. The time to think about how you're going to deal with radical life extension is not when you have a lot of people that are 130 years old and you're talking about offing them. The time to think about it is now when we're developing the technologies and techniques that will in fact lead to that possibility. And we're not doing it. So a couple of obvious points. The most important one is that the way we first keyed up climate change was as a problem. We were going to solve it, right? So when we came up with the agreement in 1992, the language was stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Data since then indicate that we have been dangerously interfering with the climate system probably for at least 1,000 years since the beginning of agriculture, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. So that becomes a pretty sketchy kind of goal. If that's our goal, why is it that we're only focusing on climate and not any of the other things that are radically changing our world? The nitrogen system, for example, is reasonably broken. Why do we not care about it? Well, we don't care about it because it doesn't have the PR campaign that carbon does. So if you're carbon over here and nitrogen over here or phosphorus, for example, you may have equally difficult problems, equally difficult issues, but we're not addressing them. Moreover, one of the things that you need to think about is the fact that when we position something as a problem, we tend to think of solutions to the problem. And that would be OK if it were something that could be solved. But suppose climate change is not a problem, but is a condition of 7 billion people on this planet given the current technology state and the infrastructure that has been created to support our current economic systems. If that is the case, then in fact, climate change is not a soluble problem. It is a condition, and it is a condition that must be managed and aligned with all of the other conditions that we face. So some observations. Right now, the problem is not climate change. The condition is that we live on a terraformed planet. The planet has become a design space. The human is becoming a design space. Those are very difficult, very challenging issues. We tend to be ignoring them because we're putting so much effort only on climate change. One of the questions I would raise is at what point does the climate change dialogue become not just unhelpful, but at what point does it actually become unethical? Because what it does is it aids us in not understanding or trying to deal with the world that we already have. The second point I want to make, and this applies to the UN language, but it also applies to the mental model that lies under a lot of the climate change dialogue. We want to go back to previous states. That's what we talk about. You can't do that. These are unpredictable situations. Let's say that I give you that technology that will capture carbon, and I take you back to 280 parts per million CO2 equivalent, which is pretty much early industrial age. You're not going to get the world that existed back then, because these systems are complex and they are path dependent. You're going to get something completely new. You don't know what it is anymore than you know what the world is going to look like if we keep emitting carbon. So the point is, you cannot go back. You can't go home again, ever. You're out on the ocean. You're trying to build your boat. You're in the middle of a storm, and that's the human condition. Deal with it. Don't pretend you can go back. Don't tell yourself fairy stories. All right. Models. One of the challenges with trying to understand these complex systems is precisely that it takes us beyond the capability of traditional scientific methods. Traditionally, science has been powerful because its results are replicable. Once you get into these complex systems, it's virtually impossible to do that kind of science, because when you start looking at only small pieces of the system, you inevitably change the system as a whole in unpredictable ways. So our difficulty is that what we have to deal with these systems is models that are both partial and incomplete. That is not a bad thing. That is not a blame the modelers kind of thing. Not at all. We're doing the best we can. The point is that it is different than the way that we understood things 100 or 200 years ago. And the difference is the complexity of the anthropogenic earth, and that difference is not going to go away. There are things that can be done. One of the things that can be done is to understand that what we have are suites of conditions that are coupled together that need to be managed as conditions. Not as problems that can be solved, but as conditions. What they throw up may be actually fairly similar. A perturbation in the nitrogen cycle, for example, that affects agriculture could be similar to the kind of system that affects that climate change causes. So you can deal with what you know might be changing in the physical world without necessarily focusing on specifics of any individual perturbation. You need to develop option spaces. That is to say you need to develop the ability to make choices that give you different sets of costs and benefits across different parts of the population. Choralism is smarter than expertise. These are not scientific problems. Listen to any climate debate in the past five years and realize as you listen to it that everybody talks in terms of science, but what they're really talking about is fundamental worldviews and belief systems. You need to nourish conflict, not the kind of conflict we have. As soon as you start thinking of your adversary, as evil, then you reduce the possibility of any kind of significant understanding. And notice, of course, that that's where the climate change dialogue has gotten. I don't know how many times Nazi has been used by pro, anti, ups, downs, arounds. What that does is that generates the ability to feel quite comfortable in your position without having to worry about the world as it actually is. And of course, ensure continuous learning. I put that in because I'm a professor and I think that should go everywhere. Thank you very much.