 Really happy to welcome you to the Cooper Hewitt Design Center just to tell you a little bit about why we are here at 111 Central Park North. We are what we're calling on the move at Cooper Hewitt because we're in the midst of our most ambitious renovation ever and we'll be reopening at 91st Street in spring of 2014 with 60% more gallery space so we're super excited but meanwhile we want to make sure that you all keep us in your minds so we've been popping up all over town which many of you I'm sure know. We had a wonderful graphic design show that recently closed on Governor's Island. We have four shows traveling the nation and actually the world because we have a show, a drawing show that just opened, a watercolor show that just opened in Paris last week. So look at our website and try to see every show. That's a traveling challenge. So the Cooper Hewitt Design Center we're thrilled to be here in Harlem and if you look around all of these cupboards were actually designed and by high school students along with Todd Oldham who has really become the resident designer here working with students of all ages and his idea since we're right north of Central Park was to make this a veritable treehouse so it really has that feel with the wooden paneling and the grass for the kids library. We're really, really pleased with the turnout. We've got people coming from the community every day and if the Cooper Hewitt staff looks a little weary to you that's because we're just concluding National Design Week. This is the seventh annual National Design Week and we have something every day of the week. So it started last Saturday with family programs in this space and it was completely packed again with Todd Oldham teaching kids how to make bags which they will be using for their Halloween treats I'm sure. And I just learned that we had almost a hundred kids here today tie-dying so if your chairs are a little bit doggier that's why. Monday afternoon we had a teen design fair for about 400 kids learning about how wonderful a career in design can be. It's like speed dating but they're talking to everybody in the design world whether it's an industrial designer or a fashion designer or landscape designer. It's an amazing experience that I wish I had when I was 17 years old. Monday night we had the winners panel so the five winners of the National Design Awards had a wonderful discussion about design and their careers. Tuesday morning we had a business of design breakfast with CEOs and CMOs from different major companies which will be online next week on the Cooper Hewitt website. And then last night was our Gala at Pier 60 for about 520 people honoring the best in design. And excuse me, National Design Week continues tomorrow with drop-in programs here and Saturday with two family programs. So pass the word. We're sold out but there's still room is what I understand. Interesting conundrum. And they're all free thanks to Target and this space is also thanks to Target so we're really, really thrilled to be here and to welcome you. And I am equally pleased to introduce to you our head of exhibitions and also the head of the staff sustainability committee Jocelyn Groom who has taken sustainability really to heart and it was her idea actually to have a lecture during National Design Week based on the sustainability theme. So I thank her very much for that and it's something that we hope to make a permanent part of National Design Week. So please join me in welcoming Jocelyn who will introduce Andrew. Thank you Caroline. Is Caroline said I'm Jocelyn I'm the head of exhibitions and chair of our sustainability committee and I just have a few kind of opening comments and then a short bio of Andrew and then we'll get started with Andrew so be patient. As you all know, the summer's weather was the hottest on record. More than 20,000 high temperature records have been broken so far in the United States. Cities are heating up about twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Biblical rains, unending heatwaves, savage swarms of tornadoes. What is going on? Solving issues of massive global climate change requires the participation of us all. And Andrew Revkin is here tonight to discuss how social media and communication design may help us save the planet. Speaking of communication, if you like this event, please like it, share it or tweet it using the NDW hashtag which is on the board over here. And that's also our website, to check out some of the programs that Caroline is describing to you. And I encourage you to sign up for our design news which is at the kiosk that's right at the front door before you leave. Just quickly, I wanted to share some really incredible pictures. These are from the September issue of National Geographic. And I think they really beautifully frame some of the issues that Andrew is going to be describing. Whether or not you believe that club climate change is caused by people. It's hard to deny from these pictures that something very dramatic is going on on our planet. So this first slide is in 2010. And it was a thunderstorm in Montana. And this next slide is an unprecedented dust storm in Phoenix. And that was in 2011. Looks like a mountain descending on the city. And this is from Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It's frozen spray from a very severe cold spell. This was in 2012 of this year. And this is Texas, just southeast of Lubbock, Texas. This is taken this year. This is a cotton field that's unplanted because it's too dry. And this incredible shot is from China. This was a very severe storm and this guy was caught in a parking garage and he's trying to get up the stairs. So on that, I will just give a short bio of Andrew for you. Andrew Revkin is a very busy fellow. Since 1995, he has been a science reporter for the New York Times. And he's the creator of the dot earth blog. He's the author of books such as global warming, understanding forecast. The North Pole was here puzzles and perils at the top of the world. And has an upcoming book how to fake a moon landing exposing the myths of science denial. In his spare time, he performs in his band Uncle Wade. He also writes about music and one of his stories was made into a movie called Rockstar with Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston. He's currently senior fellow at the Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Sciences at Pace University, where he teaches communication. And his current focus is using web based tools to create discussion around important issues related to balancing human affairs with the limits of our planet. So without further ado, Andrew, it's great to be here. Just one tiny clarification. I no longer am a reporter at the Times. In the end of 2009, I moved to the op ed side of paper, right now, the dot earth blog was created as a news enterprise. But now it's part of the op ed section. And I'm only in the only on the website. So you can't find me in the printed paper these days, at least not pretty rarely. So I'm going to talk about what I call Noa sphere and everything you see in this picture will be explained in a little while. And as you can imagine, the last thing the world needs is a new word, you know, iPhone, Google, we have plenty of words. But I'm going to actually reassure you by explaining that it's not a new word. It's just kind of a new spelling and a new conception of a very old word. And the pound sign has meaning as well. Well, you know, if you know anything about Twitter, you know, hashtags are a way to organize a conversation in the Twitterverse or whatever you want to call it. And what I'm going to do is take you on a very quick journey. To some extent, my learning curve is I moved from conventional journalism, which I've done for 30 years. I started in magazines in the 80s, moved to the New York Times in the 90s, wrote three or four books, three books and change in between. And then I started to move on to the web through my blog and tweeting and everything. And so I've kind of seen it all as when it comes to how you can communicate an idea. And while there's been a lot of woe is me and shame on you rhetoric the last, well, for a long time, decades really about the environment. I think we have to move beyond those shorthand ways of looking at these challenges. It's someone else's fault. That's the shame on you part. And woe is me is just the, you know, paralysis part. There's there's incredible opportunities now to shave away at big big problems and to really make some breakthroughs on that can make the world a better place. And a big chunk of the way forward is about communication. So just to give you a little taste of woe is me. The first few minutes, I'm going to kind of take you down. And then I'm going to bring you back up. The down part is really crystallized by what happened in Copenhagen at the Climate Treaty talks in 2009. I've been covering this thing called global warming since the late 1980s. My first long article about the greenhouse effect was in 1988. And I was actually already writing about the atmosphere and humans and climate change in the mid 80s. So I kind of seen this story come and go and rise and fall and importance. And it really hit a wall, though, in Copenhagen. This was a photographer in the press room where we all lived for about two weeks, seemed like two years, covering what had been hoped to be a celebration. Obama was in office. There was this Ban Ki-moon at the UN was saying seal the deal. We'll finally have a treaty. And then the realities of trying to decarbonize a world where more than 80%, actually close to 90% of the world's energy still comes from fossil fuels. And China and India and the United States and other countries are still heavily dependent on these. The reality of that kind of created a wall there that really got a lot of people feeling like this photographer. And it's not, you know, again, the trajectories for the human experience on this planet the last couple of centuries have been in this sort of astonishing, vaulting shape to every curve. The curve for how much land is in agriculture, the curve for population, the curve for consumption of different resources. They all kind of look like this political cartoonist's effort from a few years back at articulating the challenge we have right now, which is we know that that curve is going to change mid-century or so. And it's not going to get as far as high as it looks here. The 12 billion is almost inconceivable in mid-century. So it'd be more like 9 billion. But the question is, how do we feed clothes and get out of poverty populations that are, we'll have 2 billion more people than we have on the planet right now? And right now there's a billion teenagers on planet Earth right now, just to give you a sense of just how many of us are out there and what a significant force we are. That alone, just a billion teenagers. In 1800, there were a billion people of all kinds, all ages. Now there's just a billion teenagers. So it feels kind of daunting. And then we need to think about, suppose in 2050, when there's 9 billion of us, suppose that we all celebrate Black Friday by going to your local target store, mall, and can you imagine 9 billion people doing this? It's not easy to imagine that and to think that there's enough resources to produce the cotton and the energy and all the other things you would need to have. Have that be the norm. So that says to me that even with technological advances, we're going to have to really look in the mirror a little bit. This gets, this relates to what I was saying about woe is me and shame on you. Too much of that stuff is not about actually self-examination and asking bigger questions like what do I really need and what do I want and how much is enough. And so those are questions that are equally important with the questions about where do we get our energy from. So just keep that in mind as I go forward here. It's about values and goals, not just about technologies. So far, we've been kind of like bacteria on a plate of agar. I don't know if when you were in science courses as a kid, you smeared something on agar in a Petri dish. It kind of looks like that. And so far that's kind of like us. Just there's resources and we're growing, growing, and scientists basically have been in the position of saying, hey, there's an edge to the Petri dish for the last 50 years or so. Basically that's a big chunk of the message that's come from climate scientists, ocean scientists, all the resource people who are studying a depletion of the overuse of phosphorus, you name it, they're saying their limits to these things. And yet we're growing as if they're not. And that creates kind of a discordant thing. To me, the scientists in position like that are kind of like the adult chiding the teenager who's come in late and was speeding and scraped the guardrail with the car. We're kind of, they're saying, hey, you know, if you don't, they're wagging a finger and saying, if you don't do x, these things are going to run out. And on dot earth a number of times, since 2008, I've been articulating that our situation on the planet right now as a species, when you look at those trajectories, you know, zoom, zoom, zoom, grow, grow, grow, heedless attention, inattention to resources, we're kind of like what we all were like when we went through puberty. You know, the teenage kind of, at least the men in the room, you know, testosterone, fuel, sort of, look what I can do, that's been us for the last 200 years. And now, scientists are kind of saying, hey, you've got to grow up. And that's never been an easy message for people to integrate as individuals or societies. And so I keep circling back to a wonderful movie from the 50s, Rebel Without a Cause, and there's a great scene when Jim Bacchus is trying to, so that's us, you know, scientists are kind of, and we're like, no, no, no. And that's why I reject that this is all about big bad exxon, trying to sell us, you know, some more fossil fuels. We've been just running through this stuff. So we have to kind of get some level of comfort with the fact that we're in a transition. We're going, we do need to modulate from kind of a sprint to more of a marathon pace. In fact, there's a piece on dot earth from about four years ago with that title. Can we move from a sprint to a marathon pace? Can we sort of grow up essentially? That's the challenge. And it's very different than the way things have been cast, I think, so far. Now, there's all kinds of other factors that are leading us to feel uncomfortable right now. For those of us who spent most of our life in the 20th century, I think most of us here, there might be one or two who have actually spent most of more than half of their lives in the 21st. But you know, we grew up with guys like this, these silver haired old avuncular guys saying, that's the way it is. Tuesday, whatever. You know, they would hand you information. You didn't have to actually think. You could just absorb. You could read the New York Times. You could listen to Walter Cronkite. It was like the whole country was dining on the same comfort meals every night, you know. In fact, it was at supper time. I remember in the 60s growing up, you know, we literally would have our mac and cheese and be listening to Walter Cronkite. So, and now it's kind of like this, where if your issue is climate change, or if your issue is abortion, or your issue is healthcare, whatever. You know, you go out there into this media environment, and you're still dining on comfort food. The problem is we're all eating different stuff. It's like the world's biggest food court. You know, if you like sushi or Spanish or Tex-Mex, whatever, you can still find some information that suits your predispositions. So, the web doesn't, you know, I'm a big fan of the web. I think it's going to overall be a tremendous revolutionary tool for fostering progress on a finite planet. But for the moment it's that it's it's full of stills of noise, and everyone's in, it can actually make you more bubble-ish than you were before. You know, you, before you had a geographic bubble. You lived in the suburbs, or you lived in a city, you lived in a slum, and now we've actually can amplify all that on the web, but just going to our favorite restaurant equivalent of where we get our food. You know, whether it's Fox or the New York Times, NPR, Climate Progress, if you're liberal. What's up with that if you're, you know, doubtful or reject that greenhouse gases are important? Dot Earth, climate.gov's the new government site that's really useful. But it's sort of, so what I try to teach at Pace University, the courses I teach there partially are about web literacy. How to, there, it's actually a great thing in a way that Walter Cronkite doesn't exist anymore. I've met the guy when he was alive, he was wonderful, and I don't mean that it's good that he's dead, but I just mean it's good that we have to kind of grow up in our, our information skills, how to be more critical about how we think, why we think, and the critical thinking stuff has been conveyed too simply as just being skeptical. We have to actually somehow integrate into how we think, a little bit of thinking about how we're thinking and how we're feeling, because most of our reactions to whether it's nuclear power or whether you're a vegan or, or a carnivore, those are not really usually rationally framed positions. They're more emotional than rational. So getting comfortable with that, understanding that a little bit is, is a part of how we move forward, I think. So, and that leads to this, you know, I spent most of my 20, first 25 years of writing about climate and biodiversity and all these issues really focused on biogeophysical questions. You know, greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere, some of them go back into the forest. How does that all work? What are the consequences? And then maybe seven years ago, around 2005, I started writing more about the social sciences, which is again, how do we perceive, how do we receive information? What do we reject? What do we accept? What makes us change behavior? What kinds of information do that? What kinds don't? And there's this very rich and very depressing body of research, which says, essentially, information doesn't matter very much. That as David Ropiek, who teaches at Harvard, wrote a book called How Risky Is It Really? He said, information is meaningless until it's framed or until it goes through your filters. And our filters are very powerful. Just to give you one example, this is a post I did on Dr. Earth two or three years ago about the work at this website. There's a group based at Yale that do studies of what they call cultural cognition, basically how your cognitive appreciation of the world is largely filtered powerfully before it gets into your brain that makes you feel or do something. So putting this in the context of climate change, I said, well, okay, let me see what this is like. And I went around in Canvas, Nobel Prize-winning physicists who've staked a position about global warming. And essentially, you can find a physicist, a Nobel Prize winning physicist to suit your view of global warming. And what this says, and a lot of the work at this website says that more information doesn't change people. That actually more information makes you reinforce your position, your preexisting position on issues like this. And that's why Robert Laughlin, Steven Chu, Ivar Gaiver, and Bert Richter, who's just on my blog today, have utterly powerfully different views of the global warming problem or what you do about it. He's a big fan of nuclear. He's a big fan of renewables and nuclear. He's kind of an all of the above guy like Obama. Of course, he's the energy secretary for Obama. Ivar Gaiver rejects the concept that there's the dangerous global warming. He feels it's been completely oversold. And Laughlin is kind of in the middle. So again, you can if you can get a Nobel Prize. So if you want to go into debate, you can kind of pick one of these guys and say, well, Nobel Prize winning physicist so and so says. And that says to me, remember, I spent, you know, all this time in journalism on the presumption that information matters. Why would I do this? What I do if I didn't think that I hit this wall of realizing it doesn't actually matter. Most of the time people just use it to accomplish some goal they already had. And that's one of the things that led me out of full time journalism. Not that I think it's a waste of time, but toward looking more fully at this pipeline. And my title at Pace University is Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding because I kind of invented the title. They went along with that because I wanted to understand this whole concept and to work with students and ways to make the world better despite those realities. Now here's if you want to see a powerful example of how this plays out. Fukushima happened, right? Epic earthquake off the coast of Japan. You know, tsunami, nuclear power plant, hydrogen explosion, some radiation, an uninhabitable area, a bunch of reactors turned off and now Japan's whole nuclear power system turned off for the time being. And two of the world's leading environmental writers, George Monbio, who's in Britain, you may not have heard of him, but he's kind of, he is to England what Bill McKibbin is to America. A very powerful green guy. They wrote columns when this happened that were utterly divergent. Bill McKibbin said Fukushima illustrates the brittleness of nuclear power and why we have to turn off all these reactors and move to live smaller, live more local, put up some solar panels and all will be well. George Monbio said if because he cares so passionately about greenhouse gases, he says this proves this is a robust technology. This plant still hasn't killed anybody. The low levels of radiation are unlikely actually to have a long-term impact. More people died from stress of delocation than from any direct impact from the radiation and it's the only way we're going to decarbonize a growing planet. So two green, with a capital G, people came away from this incident with utterly different conclusions. So I wrote a piece on dot earth that put side by side there. These two guys, you know, views and thesis, and each one has elements that are true and powerful. But it says to me again, this is not just about convincing some Luddite fossil fuel fans that were, and then once that's done, we'll have an easy path toward a brighter future. Different than that. And just to take it, this is the last kind of part of the downward slide and see I'm still smiling, right? I wrote a lot about, well, I've written a lot about disasters of all kinds. Everything from 9-11 to earthquakes and tsunamis. And while I was covering aspects of the tsunami in Japan, I didn't go there, but I was writing about it. I learned about these stones that all the villages on that east coast of Honshu, of that island, I think it's Honshu, have markers, like, you know, fairly far up from the shore that were what they call tsunami stones. And I wrote about this because the etching on there says, high dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point. So anyone who's wondering, you know, why we haven't gotten the global warming problem, here's an illustration of why it's hard, because here, even in communities where you have this history for centuries of great waves devastating coastal communities, people still ended up building below the stones. So that says to me, these are deeper issues than we think they are. And I've been writing a lot about that ever since. So how can you then, knowing those things, what can you do with communication to foster more resilient living, to get us out of harm's way? You know, what is it we're forgetting? In fact, the piece I did about this was called, was under the headline of disaster memory. There's an anthropologist who studied this concept of disaster memory. It's just so interesting. There are elephants, tribe, elephant groups in, that I wrote about in 2008 that had really good disaster memory, but it was only the elders, the old female elephants knew where the waterholes were where you go when it's really dry. And what happened was, through the 2000s, as hunters, ivory poachers were killing off all the elders, the elephants were just kind of wandering around. They didn't know where the water was, and they were having a higher mortality rate. So we have to listen to our elders, but we're really, you know, we're not good at that either. So this, I did this piece in 2008, are we stuck with what one reader called blah, blah, blah, bang? Is that just, are we just stuck with that? Is that going to be our way forward as a species? And I don't think that the answer is yes. But it could be if we're not attentive, if we're not thinking how we can teach, how we can learn, how we can become innovative and resilient, and just smarten up a little bit so we can avoid this sort of perpetual process of growing, growing, growing, hitting walls and then retrenching. Because now that we're at a global scale, these like with greenhouse gases and loss of biodiversity, it's not like you can then say, oh, never mind, which might have been the case if you ruined a pond where you used to fish, then you could just move to the next one. But we don't have that, that leisure anymore. Whoops, sorry. So, and I think there are ways, I'm just going to throw this slide in as a way to illustrate one thing we can do, I believe, is to design, design communication in ways that are fundamentally different. To think about, like, I'm sure if I did an exercise right now where I handed each of you a sheet of paper and you had 30 seconds to write down what you mean when you say global warming, there would be a lot of variations. The world is warming, the greenhouse effect, the disastrous destruction of the planet from X, a hoax or whatever, there would be, that probably isn't in this room, but there would be a range. And so what I try to do on the earth, I put this illustration up to on the science, at least, to start to break it down into bite-sized chunks that we can all then agree on and clarify and then move forward in a conversation. Too many times I've seen people get into these big fights about global warming when they actually are talking about something entirely different. For someone, for one person it's, when they hear that word, Al Gore's face appears in their brain and they want their head explodes. You know, that's for some people that's just what it is. For other people it's something more subtle. And so how can you, so until you clarify language, you can't move forward. So in other words, just to give you a quick sense of the science. See, of course, you know, too warming world is a very steep and powerful curve. It's, if you were a bell curve, you know, there's almost nobody out here and almost no one out there. Even Michael Crichton, the state of fear author, wrote, you know, the, he was a very skeptical guy when it came to climate change. He, I interviewed him in the mid-2000s and he didn't disagree that greenhouse gases work and that they function. He had enough science background to know that. But he disagreed that it was the most important problem that poverty and other issues didn't come first. And then, but then here's what's really tough. With global warming, the things that matter most to people remain clouded by real uncertainty. This is not someone trying to dupe you into uncertainty. The pace of sea level rise, what's going to happen with hurricanes, regional climate forecasts are not going to get better anytime soon. The most powerful model or climate models in the world, the people who run them have said that for a long time. And how much warming we're going to get from more CO2. We still don't, that answer is kind of the same range of possibilities as it was 30 years ago. Between like two and seven degrees. Meaning between manageable and catastrophe. But for too long this was all portrayed as some single body of understanding that now we knew in a powerful way there's nothing that we need to learn. And I think that that empowered some people who didn't want anything to happen by saying oh look you're overstating things because in fact there was some oversimplification of the problem. Now the same research I was talking to you about the culture of cognition work the work that gets at why people think the way they think is provided some really interesting and important insights into how to get around some of these blockades. Now I'll explain what this means for those in the back. There's a group at Yale, another unrelated group at Yale. Do this periodic survey what they call six Americas. If you just Google for that phrase you'll find a lot of their work. And they found through deep surveys with Americans that there's essentially six kinds of Americans when it comes to this thing called global warming. And they range from they range from alarmed to concerned cautious disengaged doubtful and dismissive. And they keep doing this survey periodically those bubbles have changed shape a little those are the proportions of those populations. This one's gotten smaller. My hypothesis is that all the bubbles in the middle are kind of the same people who just don't really they're not engaged at all in this issue. And so that says and we have it we've been locked in that kind of framing for a long time. So in 2009 when this data was from which was the year when that big the big the bill the climate bill was being debated to have a cap and trade system for CO2. That year they asked these people and the alarmed the et cetera. What do you think about cap and trade and the midline here is maybe. And they found that even the alarmed were just above maybe. So that said to me anyone who thought that bill had a chance of passing was really I don't know what they were smoking but it was never going to happen. When you have the alarmed either so either they didn't understand it or they really didn't have confidence that that was going to work. And the dismissives of course were very negative. So that says this says you're going to hit a wall if this is your strategy for solving the climate problem. Now they asked people some other questions not about climate but about energy. And here things got really interesting. Support for providing rebates for the purchase of solar panels and fuel efficient vehicles when you ask that question even the dismissives even the tea party hardy types were maybe. And everyone else is very far toward the yes. And that says to me oh that's interesting. That says that when you talk about energy especially using it more efficiently you can have a lot of consensus even in a world that's paralyzed about global warming. So when I talk to economists about that though they say oh no no no that's just what you're seeing there is the freebie effect. Basically you're giving away stuff. You know it's a subsidy. And that's why everybody's for it. So then but then they asked another question which really undercuts that idea. They asked so would you support requiring requiring mandate you think about Paul Ryan and the idea of requiring 45 mile per gallon fuel efficiency across vehicle fleets even at a thousand dollar price premium what a heavy what a laden sentence that is. So you're asking people would you support making cars more expensive as long as it would make them much more efficient. And even then almost everybody is saying either kind of maybe yes and or yes and the the dismissives are the only ones who are drifting down a little bit. So so that says to me boy there was a lot of wasted wheel spinning several years ago that fight over a climate bill when we could have had a cogent discussion about energy energy energy intelligence moving forward on using energy more efficiently and unfortunately that opportunity for the for the time being lost. So I wrote a piece at one point saying you know if I had to have a I had for my Prius which still uses significant amount of gasoline. If I had to choose between these bumper stickers. I would not do the one at the top I would do the one at the bottom. And also there's other reasons for that when when you look globally there's parts of this planet as I'll discuss in a minute where they have no energy options at all and for them fossil fuels would be the best thing going. And I think it's more important for people in situations like that to have the fuel than to worry about what kind of light bulb to screw in. But we'll talk about that in a minute. So you know I mentioned I've written about disasters and my focus on this thing called noosphere and on the power of communication to make the world safer and better than it might otherwise be. A lot of this came through my reporting on earthquakes. I wrote about the 2008 disaster in Sichuan that terrible earthquake. I didn't go there but I was co-reporting with our China correspondence on what made all these schools fall down. This school killed those kids and it was you know basically avoidable stuff. It was simple engineering failures. These these floor the flooring here was not tied in in a way that was structurally sound was bound to be a death trap. So you know I'm thinking about this and then I did a piece about how many millions of kids when you look globally are in situate in earthquake zones with bad bad engineering you realize when you add up those numbers it's many millions of children who are going to school every day in death death traps. And by the way that's true in Oregon too. This is not just some you know poor far away places. There are thousand schools in the state of Oregon I wrote about 2008 and several times since that are destined to collapse when that great Cascadia fault off the coast of Oregon finally moves. Hasn't done it in 300 years. Remember what I said about disaster memory 300 years is a long time. There weren't any Americans white you know settled western Americans here in Oregon in the year 1700. But would there do there do for that. And unlike California California has enough kind of low level seismicity that that they stay pretty concerned about earthquake design. But in the states where it's a very rare but terrible shock that they're not. So I've been focused a lot of that stuff. And I found an engineer at Purdue University named Santiago Pujol who I think is motivated to work on earthquakes because he comes from Columbia down in South America. He had come up with this really cool design to where you take the same bricks and mortar and glass windows the same materials that you could you would build a typical unsafe school with. And if you just change the configuration a little bit you can make it fundamentally safer. So and I we wrote I wrote a Science Times article about that. You know we had some nice graphics. But then I talked to my older son who's 20. Well he was a sophomore at PACE. He's a communication major. He doesn't want to go into journalism. I kind of poisoned my kids on that that idea. But he he likes special effects. He wants to do special effects for the movies. So I said Daniel can you can you do an animated graphic to show what this safer design is like and why it doesn't take more costly materials. And so so I basically using the tools we have now I could put together a earthquake engineer. A PACE sophomore and me as a communicator and come up with with this. So this is the problem. A lot of school buildings collapse the pancake. And it's because they have weak verticals columns and you know big flat floors. And this is what it looks like. And so here's his this is the typical design of a school. Whoa sorry. And Daniel kind of shows you what happens. Those weak spots cause the columns to break. So then we then he's then he runs it backwards. So we're going to play we're going to play the earthquake over again. And now all you do is do that. If you just fill the bricks vertically all the way through one side. And this is a three-story tall Purdue mock-up of a building on a shake table. This shows you that you can see there's more flexibility. That building is more up to state standing. And this shows you a nice sustainable a nice you know aesthetic design using this the principle. So it's not like you're building something that no one would want to live in or work in. So that potentiality is there right now. You know young innovative animators illustrators designers and and engineers and other scientists can get together collaborate and find ways to communicate without words. Remember we're in the biggest building boom in the history of the human species. The next 30 years is going to see more structure more floor square footage of structure built that has been built in all of history by some calculations. So if you can get out ahead of that and you know make sure people understand put the bricks all over here and you have a safer building when your earthquake comes. That's a great opportunity doing it without words is even better. There's a Roger Billam as a seismologist at University of Colorado. He also has worked in the quake zones in the Himalayas and there they've come up with these simple posters on how to mix cement where three and one cement is good. That's bad. And you don't need the the language but oh and there's another subtle detail here. So the bad there's this is a column with rebar the iron this steel bar re-iron it. You see there's just the vertical iron rods with no nothing tying them together before they pour the cement around them. So just going back to whoops sorry where am I here? Here you see these are the ties if you do that you know much more structurally we're just going this is what killed the kids in the century. So you can do this stuff but and he's a very very famed earthquake geologist. He doesn't need to be doing this stuff but he's doing it because he cares. He's attentive to this issue. He knows he's written papers about how many people are going to die when there's the next great Himalayan earthquake and he wants to do something about it so that you know you could build that in how his students are learning that their science is not just the the technical issue but you know what does it mean for people it's really great. Oops I keep going the wrong way sorry. So my earthquake reporting took me to Istanbul in 2009 where I went to a school this is they were doing a drill and this was a school that was retrofit the World Bank came up with about a billion dollars in loans for a bunch of schools and hospitals in Istanbul that are being retrofitted because that city is going to be hammered again. It's been hammered through history. In fact there's an art this there's a great art exhibition. There's a collector of earthquake art. He's in same as Kozak or something like that he lives in somewhere in Eastern Europe and he has a collection of Istanbul it's like woodcuts and in prints and lithographs and photographs showing the the history of earthquakes there and they're going to have another one. So they're starting to get out ahead. I was there to write about all the things that are going on to try to limit the losses before the earthquake strikes. And then but then when you're a reporter in in in interesting places like in a slum in Istanbul you're like a kid magnet. I don't know how many of you spend time as a professional or whatever in developing countries in poor places. Kids run up to you you know and all these kids are typically they'll just say American or they'll try out some English words they were saying Facebook and that really that really struck me. This is 2009 and I went to their community center and they I saw that these kids they were all playing they don't have a computer at home they're too poor but they had 10 or so at this community center and they were all playing Farmville and Meshura right now they're playing Minecraft which is my 14 year old son's favorite game and and I realized suddenly I was looking at you know these kids and kids here are they are now playing together Google is working really hard on translation interfaces so they'll be soon be able to play without the interference of language differences we used to think that Esperanto you know would all come to some common language now because of these technologies you don't need that anymore you can keep your language your culture your richness and still talk to people in the other side of the world that's going to happen it's happening now already but it'll be smoother smoother and smoother as time goes by very exciting so a bunch of these kids now are my Facebook friends which is really cool you know it's not like I'm communicating with them every day but it's fun to know they're out there and now when I was their age it was this how many people had a pen pal when they were a kid of the older people in the room you know you'd wait for weeks for the next crinkly envelope to come it was so special now it's still special to me but it's it can be done with a click of a mouse it's just completely seamless you can have every school in America have a sister school in a developing country it's possible now it's happening in many places and it's just such a great revolutionary way to increase our empathy our sense of that we really are a global village you know which seemed like such a hokey fantastical concept a few decades ago so this leads back to this word noosphere which I said is not a new word it's derives from newosphere which is has a Greek root in the words planet of the mind and there was a French theologian and a Russian geochemist who 30s and 1940s were closing in on this concept of that we were creating we were sheathing the planet essentially an intelligence you could say not always intelligence but but in our consciousness and that that can be a force for a sustainable force for the planet and the long run it's still an open question and remember when the early stages of it there's a lot of turbulence and we'll see how it plays out but Darwin I started fishing around and I got back as far as Darwin in terms of someone articulating the same concept and his other great book The Descent of Man he wrote that he wrote a lot about tribal in our behaviors our tribal nature and he said that as we advance our tribes will become increasingly linked to the simplest reason would tell each individual he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation and then from that point forward then it's not just nations that will all be sort of interacting and through global markets and through global relationships and he said there's only an artificial barrier to prevent man's sympathies from extending to the men of all nations and races and he took this further he said then then come our relations with other species that will have better relations with animals and which is interesting as well but here you see what's happening now is we're transcending the artificial barrier our communication technologies are taking that away so that's why in a few decades I think you'll see a much more of a real sense of global community and again the internet works in dark ways as well it allowed the 9-11 guys to get together to find out where there's schools to train and flying planes into buildings and all that stuff and of course it allowed that horrible YouTube video to circulate and create violence and hatred so it's and that gets me back to the notion of intentionality like Roger Billum the seismologist there is the potential to go into this this communication arena and work you have to work to make it work for good but it's completely it will swamp to my mind I think that side will swamp the downside so I have this notion of this this Noa Sphere is it's a network it's a network of schools libraries businesses orgs and other institutions eager to collaborate fostering a reasonable sustainable durable human journey on the planet and that requires you know some resilience it requires a lot of adaptability and ingenuity it requires a lot of collaboration but again it's never been easier to collaborate than it is right now to find someone to do the who can do the thing you can't do that's never been more possible than right now so innovation this this is a remarkable invention and it's an invention just like photovoltaics for an invention there's a guy named Messina Richard Richard what's his first name I think it's Richard Messina he was at Mozilla he was helping create Firefox way back in 2007 he proposed that this he tweeted this how do you feel about using pound sign for groups as in bar camp which was programmers would get together just discuss issues and that bar camp is a term they use so he found that look we have this thing this way for stuff to flow that we call twitter and by having a word with this little code in front of it that means that if you put that in your little search box on twitter like you put a term in google you can all talk to each other and have a cogent conversation even though you're in completely different parts of the world even though you might be not be doing it at the same exact time like you're not actually talking to each other but so it's asynchronous and global and it was an invention and this kind of inventiveness has never been more possible you can turn just a bunch of electrons can become an idea that can I'm not going to say that this is going to change the world but it's a way to organize the that particular tool twitter that's really revolutionary and this is spread into it's in google plus and other things as well so this twitter's verse whatever you want to call it is a very noisy place if you go there's a website called I think it's twitter map or something like that you go there and you can it generates a map of what people are tweeting right now all around the world and it's like you know Justin Bieber Justin Bieber Justin Bieber and all that stuff so it's a soup it seems like an incomprehensible soup like meaningless crap but again using these tools and with intentionality with goals you can make that all make sense NASA has dived into this arena of twitter they have a feed called asteroid watch and you know one of the other big perils on this planet is someday we're going to get by big asteroid or meteor meteor or meteorite it's going to happen it's happened all through Earth's history it's probably not going to happen tomorrow but I can't you know rule that out and there's always rumors about this you'll see you know some some amateur astronomer in Australia will have spot a rock and and it'll get around the internet in a heartbeat that you know we have to evacuate Boston or something and by getting into this arena they are able to sort of create a zone of authority if you go to follow us when something bad is happening related to rocks in space you know if you follow this you'll have you'll have a path through all that stuff and they have about a million of followers my courses at pace university now all have a hashtag my blogging course you guys can kind of take my blogging course sort of I mean you're sort of participating in it in an indirect way or actually in a direct way if you if you reply my students are all tweeting all the time hopefully it's part of their grade now I want them out there and and there's a like what's today Wednesday nights there's a WJ chat WJCHAT that's web journalism it's a conversation every night about web journalism every week there's one called AgChat which is about farming and on an ed chat ed tech there's communities again global communities that organize conversations where they're where they're they're able to sort of convene and discuss and come away with talking with to-do lists based on these this simple tool it's really cool there's a University of Connecticut there's a professor who teaches bird biology she makes her students when they one of their assignments standing assignment through the semester is when they see a bird doing something interesting they have to tweet about it which of course is implicitly funny and they have to they include the bird class bird class hashtag so and actually for the professors it's really cool because it gives you a time stamp you know who's doing what and when because you can kind of track their performance through their tag now of course a big chunk of the world is not on the grid and this is a terrible travesty in Guinea this is a photograph I've put on dot earth several times they're the slum outside the capital of Guinea has no electricity most of the time so the kids to do their homework kids who are in school who already want who are motivated to go to school improve their lives get jobs become part of a functioning global community they have to go to the airport parking lot to do their homework sit under the street lights like their moths and it's a travesty it's a crime to me that we live in a world where you know we're wondering about which light bulb to screw in of course there's two billion people still with no light bulb at all or a guttering kerosene lamp Ban Ki-moon the secretary general wrote a really powerful essay about energy poverty drawing on his own experience after the war growing up by where a candle was a very special thing he was usually doing his homework by by kerosene lamps which which are terrible and the candles were reserved for a particular for nights when he had to really study hard and that that says a lot how much but how much hasn't changed is terrible so so the you know the noosphere has not reached these kids of course there's another issue here they're all boys that's the the Nick Kristoff issue if you haven't read half the sky encourage you to because we're not and well just think about Malala the girl in Pakistan who got shot for seeking the right to go to school it's the norm and most many parts of for struggling developing countries for girls even if there aren't religious impediments of them going to school there are other impediments for them not going to school but that's a whole another lecture you could do a you could do a whole semester course on that photograph but that's like that's all changing in a heartbeat this is a this is the only wonky graph I think I have and it's cell phones cell phone subscriptions around the world so in 2000 there were about 700 million cell phones and they were the blue is rich countries so most of the cell phones in the world at that time were in rich countries by 2005 more than half were in poorer countries and we're up to two billion now we're this was 2010 I haven't gotten the new data but it's over five billion cell phones three quarters of them are in poor places and let me just show you what that means on the ground Libby Rosenthal a friend of mine at the paper she went to Kenya in 2010 to a very remote part of Kenya rural village and she found the story of this woman who had a cell phone already there's many parts of this world where people have cell phones even though they don't have electricity yet but what they do they have to go into town to recharge it or it's at a very high rate for the electricity and it's you know that's burdensome and the cell phone is a lifeline as you know if you've been tracking you know your cell phone in most developing countries now is your bank that's how you bank it's how you do virtually everything so it's it's a vital thing it's a way farmers get their crop price so they don't they know which market to go to all kinds it's transformative but she said she got tired of going into town once a week recharge her cell phone so she saved up money and she bought this little solar panel to put on her mud hut and she started charging her phone at home she had enough electricity left over she started selling charging time to her neighbors so she set up a business she was making money charging her neighbors cell phones and her kids instead of remember the kids in this city in Guinea don't have light her kids in this hut had a bright led lamp to do their homework by and she was saying to the reporter that they were already getting better in school all kinds of greater better outcomes you can do work at night that you couldn't have done without that so and then the only downside she found was her neighbors got so excited by this they started saving up money and buying their own little solar panels and so her business kind of ended but that says what a transformative potential when you have a portal for information and a little dribble of electricity you can have the world changing mix and it's so exciting to see that going on and here this is really interesting so that's all just telephones and maybe some tweeting but you see you think why am I showing the world cup well when the world cup was coming to South Africa something else came with it as well some private investors said hey you know we're not going to have enough bandwidth down in all these South African cities to broadcast the games and high definition to the rest of the world so they said let's lay a cable and undersea fiber optic cable and there's a company called CCOM S-E-A-C-O-M that was formed to do this and they laid a cable up the east coast of Africa from South Africa to Europe and it was privately invested all African three quarters African capital and no world banky kind of project it was money making and the cable what they found was after the world cup was over then they had all this excess bandwidth and all the countries along the east coast of the southern eastern coast of Africa tying up tying into that cable this is Tanzania tying into that offshore fiber optic cable and so the price of internet access and those child parts of Africa is plunging so go to really pretty cool and they're laying other cables it's kind of like it's literally the world being wired you think about you know most of this being satellite kind of stuff but but there's a lot of this as well it's remarkable and this can be this is transforming the potential again in so many arenas not just science and engineering but here in just simple classroom stuff this is a network of schools that was created by some young people who went around the Atlantic several couple years ago doing these little programs for kids and coastal communities it's called AtlanticRising.org and it's a program on sea level sea level rise and what you know vulnerability in coastal communities and these young educators from England went all around the Atlantic so you're talking about Ghana, Scotland, Nantucket and they did these workshops and a lot of those kids are now talking to each other on Skype so they're realizing they have common issues that even though they're separated by thousands of miles of ocean they have real issues because they live on coasts and I think that's a really cool example and of course this can all operate as an extension service you know one of the big revolutions in this country in the 1800s was that we had ways to teach farmers how to use better practices to avoid erosion and that that concept now can be global and a heartbeat think about you know the farmers are all on cell phones so the potential to the yield gap to Google for yield gap if you want to learn about the opportunities that we have right now to better the lives of poor people in agricultural zones you know there are farmers in the United States who are growing chickpeas at like seven tons per hectare where it's one ton per hectare and parts of Africa so if you can even bring that up to two or three through different practices through a little more fertilizer through other breeds of seed that kind of thing you're talking about are greatly easing that burden remember the train going up the slope you know making things more more possible a lot of this is really like match.com the potential I see is over and over again about getting the right idea to the right place at the right time or getting two people with good ideas that don't really work to get unless unless they're together getting them together like my son and the engineer and there's lots of experiments underway design the other you know this program is related to what Cooper Hewitt has been promoting in some of its exhibitions designed for the other 90 percent that's to encourage architects and designers to think about the the people who aren't driving Porsches at least some of the time and scientists without borders is a New York Academy of Sciences effort to sort of create a hub for scientists and problems to get together there's of course great opportunities this is a this is a profit making version of the same thing hey I've got something I need I'm a company and I need someone to do something and who can do it and then you get you know paid for that so it's a great oh and then there's Kickstarter has anyone actually supported something on Kickstarter I have it's amazing where so you want to create a film about water problems and slums in southern India you can put it out there show a couple examples of your work and raise a few thousand dollars and get it done I mean that wasn't in the old days you had to write some grant proposal for 10 foundations nine of which would or 10 would say thank you but no and so it's revolutionizing even the way we raise money and then think of this I was at the triple AS the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences meeting a couple years ago they had a session on what science teachers need you know overworked under budgeted science teachers one of the things they need they said they needed is little one minute videos like little explanatory animated things about momentum or about greenhouse gases or whatever they don't need you know epic five hour discovery channel documentaries they need these little bits and then they can build a lecture around that so busy science teacher seeks and then again young people can provide and there was a there's this concept called geoengineering which is if we really screw up and it turns out global warming is at the high end and our backs are to the wall we're going to want to throw something into the atmosphere to make it the planet cooler in the face of all the stuff we're throwing into the atmosphere that's making it warmer geoengineering so these guys these students in California a couple of years ago did this little explainer there we go you get the idea so here's another one from NYU this explainer.net is a journalism project there so you get the idea and what I liked about that particular piece is it it has a feel of something that's kind of urgent and negative but when it gets to the end it basically says we don't know enough about this technology we need to know more which is a fundamental which is the reality that there's gaps in understanding and that's why there's a lot divisiveness over what to do and then the power to do stuff yourself DIY has never been greater there was a guy several years ago with all the drilling going on in Pennsylvania he realized that a lot of the data on wells and permits and violations was all public but no one had actually put it on a map so he said it took like a day or two to create fracktrack.org which is a website where if you're going to move there or if you're trying to sell your house or whatever and you wanted to kind of get a clear sense of what's going on around you you click on one of these little buttons and you have a lot of detail and permits, violations, ways, production so and this was done you know by he's not a software engineer he just dove in found the tools and did it and I think that shows you again the potential to play a meaningful role especially in a world of limited budgets you know we all expect government has to be the person that's the entity that's keeping a troll over this information but we're in a post you know information is out there transparency is increasing over and over again whether it's through all the different means you've seen for information will be free in the end and I think this shows you great potential to get kind of do yourself showing and telling I mean this goes way back this gets back to the reality of what I'm talking about is not technology or really communication technology issue it's an intentionality issue it's like what do I want to communicate what do I want to get done with that and what's the best tool for it so I could tell you the volume of the atmosphere at sea level pressure you know it's a certain number of million cubic kilometers or I can show you and Adam Nieman a very talented science illustrator created this a few years back that's the volume of all the air in the atmosphere if you put it in a spherical shape at sea level pressure and it says something to me that's much more powerful than telling you a number and this is his this is the ocean actually that's all the world's liquid water that's it so it's a great starting point for a conversation about commons these these shared assets that are finite to start with something like this and then you can tell your class hey class all right so this is all the world's water but tell me I want you to go home tonight and draw this the size of a sphere for all the world's potable water or just fresh water and you really then they'd come back the next day and realize it would be too small to see and that too has power it says that's a very precious thing fresh water you can choose your wavelength like this is Colorado sunny day I'm just going to back up so you can see it again all right oil tank Colorado sunny day this is the same oil tank same day just this is infrared camera it shows you the escaping methane and I wrote about this page one story in the New York Times 2009 all the methane all that natural gas that's escaping routinely from installations across the country that can be captured by cleaner processes held in and then you have a valuable fuel so and if you let it go it's a it's a powerful greenhouse gas but you know you so choose the wavelength choose the the design choose the the means of communication with the end in mind and you have a better outcomes and Randy Olson who's a really good he wrote a book called Don't Be Such a Scientist about communicating science and he has this phrase the nerd loop too much of our conversations lately about things like climate have been just us talking to each other you know how do we communicate better as opposed to just trying stuff and these are some scientists who've tried stuff on dot earth which is really fun now I'm going to show you one last thing which is virtually everything I've told you about so far has been kind of virtual as I just repeat the word it's been data driven or involving tools and technologies but a chunk of what has to also happen in the next generation or so is a re-engagement with the the wet dirty cold muddy rich part of our planet and so a few years back my my younger son and I were in a rowing up a little channel in in Florida near where my parents live in a kind of a very overbuilt area of Florida but there was still this little fragment of mangroves and Jack Jack made a little video we had seen these herons in there the day before and he wanted to see if he gets a video of them remember that sound yeah the way dad so what's really cool about that is of course it was an electrifying experience for him to see the bird and to capture it on video but then he put it on YouTube and so this is what I call this a hybrid experience you know we think of our kids and we want to get these tools out of their hands like the professor at University of Connecticut said her kids her students have never been more engaged in watching bird behavior than they have been since she's required them to tweet about it so finding opportunities for a hybrid experience where the kid is getting wet and or seeing a remarkable bird and sharing the information again as as we've never had more capability to that I think you can have unparalleled potential to again have better outcomes on this planet and that's my story for tonight that's us this was that 1990 Voyager image and that's the furthest earth has ever been observed by humans and that's me so I'm easy I'm easy to find thank you and if we have time I could you know answer a few questions yeah we have just a few minutes so we can take a couple questions and I'll bring the mic to you who alluded to the type of efforts the Copenhagen disaster etc and the effort to change the light bulbs that people use do you feel at the end of the day at this time with the way the country is that doing something like that is a negative because it just angers, upsets, frustrates people who are who could have been more engaged by something else such as the increased mileage of cars I'm not sure completely understand but if if you the fight to get a climate bill I think was damaging because now it's I mean much much harder than it might have been to have a more modest approach to the beginning and even even Joe Rahm at this sort of aggressively activist climate site climate progress you know he said a few years ago the thing we need to do is get started we need some price on carbon not a high price of carbon at the beginning and but but three or four years ago no one was saying that it was all it had to be an ironclad thing no nuclear a terrible thing happened in like 2003 the environmental movement bailed on John McCain when he was a senator McCain Lieberman had this bill that had some elements that were favorable to the nuclear power industry and when that happened NRDC and all the other environmental groups bailed on him they said we're not going to support the bill and that struck me is just the wrong thing to do I remember I ran into the head of EDF in Washington D.C. like on a street corner I said what's going on and it's because of you know for a big chunk of the environmental community nuclear is still a no-go zone so you can't even talk about so they they lost these big opportunities at that time to have some movement when there was more by bipartisanship and now we're sort of really up against it so I think it is tougher right now I do think there's there's roads forward but it's going to take time it's going to take time and by the way in Europe you know we think of Europe as being more further along the line but they're not really when you look at the carbon accounting not just because of the the recession but because of the shift from coal to natural gas our emissions of greenhouse gases are now back to where they were in 1992 and Europe right now they're moving to coal again in Germany because they're turning off their nuclear power plants and they don't want to have fracking so it's like come on guys anyway is there another one so sorry you spoke about the web being this incredible tool for progress and innovation but you also brought up some examples of times where it has also been used for bad and I'm just wondering if you think there's if this is always a mixed bag or if there's some way that we can streamline or put some kind of control or harness this incredible potential for good I don't think you can control the web it's going to be an open source medium people will be able to do bad things with the same ease you can do good things but I think if people cultures kind of build a kind of sense a common sense of the potential for this resource to to do good stuff like getting the farmers in Africa to have a fairer price for their corn is at a fundamentally richer level than someone sending a YouTube around you know a destructive YouTube video and so I think on that scale that the potential to do good with these these media will swamp the bad stuff I just but I can't prove that to you you know it's it's an article of faith it's it's it's a faith thing I think if we all work at it if schools and teach students how to be civil on the web and to to you know use it as a tool to not just say where you're you know what shop you're going to at the mall that that it can really be powerful I didn't quite understand I think you showed a picture of an oil well and you were saying gases were escaping was that an oil well oh it's that's a yeah a methane which is the the main ingredient in natural gas as well also comes out of oil when oil has been pumped out of the ground it's it's de-gassing methane comes out of that oil and after you you blogged on that what sort of what sort of industrial response did you find it find to that information well it's it's been interesting so you know the industry this was 2009 this is before the Gulf spill and BP actually was a leader in tightening its facilities to end those kinds of leaks BP I wrote a big piece focused a little bit on BP and what they were doing to foster a culture a corporate culture that leaks are bad that this is a valuable this is our product natural gas we need to keep it in the pipelines and sell it to people to burn as a clean fuel not let it escape into the air so it was at BP and some other companies they really did a good job of essentially eliminating those emissions but other companies are the culture is it's it's it's an easier sell within the average oil gas company to drill a new well than to fix the old one and so there's there again there's a culture change that has to happen but that's the same culture change that I'm talking about on every front whether it's turning out the lights you know in rooms when you leave them we just are still not a culture that's attuned to the having energy the energy quest is also about a quest for efficiency as well you know making sure you're not wasting it so many Americans in the recession have had to make do with less and make more of what we have that surely there must be some sort of tide change happening in public opinion about that kind of thing well you know the best the best metric of that is sales of Priuses and a miles driven vehicle miles driven per person and you see a very consistent energy prices go up gas prices go up Priuses sales go up miles driven goes down and I wrote about peace about there was a period yeah it was during the the recession when for the first time in decades the vehicle miles driven went down and everyone's saying ah see finally we're there but that also happened in the 70s during the oil crisis and then it was like up up up and when you see oil prices go down then everyone just starts driving again or then the Prius sales go down it's just so this gets some of this well that's why it's great you know Obama and the debate the one I credited him on the block the other day for you know he was talking he did he joined the drill fest there with with Romney you know we all have to drill but it but he did say that alone is not that doesn't solve our problem we have to cut our demand we have so we're doubling vehicle efficiency blah blah thank god he slipped that in there because otherwise you know really was pretty tired and but again vehicle efficiency there's there's ways to you can you can mandate some of that stuff and people are okay with that as you saw from those service hi so if we want to try and move the needle and for for good what do you what do you think what are your like top three top five what are the most important things that we could do whether it be as individuals or collectively as organizations well as individuals and families particularly as families just fostering a culture of examining what's enough you know do we really need another shirt or do we you know how frequently do you go to the next iPod or iPad you know those those issues matter that sense of just examining sufficiency what's enough making sure the kids grow up with a a richer sense of that than what's imposed on them through advertising and through that competitive thing and you know and these are deeper issues than like passing our climate bill but they're really important I wrote a piece in 2005 about gross national happiness this concept in Bhutan of having new ways to measure success and a lesson until we as individuals and societies shift how we measure success you know GDP is doesn't tell you about everybody's quality of life it just tells you about overall growth in the economy finding other metrics the things you measure are the things that shape how you behave to some extent so I think we have to work to shift some of those norms and there are people even at the census bureau in 2000 no the commerce census is one of those places in that piece in 2005 there are people within the bureaucracy who are trying to kind of come with a new basket of indicators so it isn't just GDP Congress didn't want to give them the money for it though so there's work to be done and I don't really see you know I could tell you a three-point plan obviously using less stuff eating less meat thinking about energy when you drive trip chaining dude if you have to use a car use it efficiently if all those kinds of things matter but they don't matter as much as making sure your school where your kids are learning is focused on ingenuity innovation teaching that failure is okay because if you're not going to have breakthroughs if you're not failing and that you know all those things are hard too but that's I think where there's real promise and then connectivity you know making sure your kid as I was saying that potentially have your kid be in touch with kids in Botswana or Bali is unparalleled finding there's ways to figure that out you know have them sort of explore do a door of the explorer thing that's ends with them finding a kid in Thailand on Facebook or something that stuff I think matters I think we have time for one more question okay two more Hi I'm a graphic designer and I'm working on a corporate social responsibility report right now for a company that provides energy by combusting waste and I was wondering like I'm learning a lot about the process just through this report and that's the first that I really learned about it and I was wondering what your thoughts on that were on burning waste for energy there's a I think we lost some big opportunities in this country to do that when I was in Seoul South Korea a few years ago in Scandinavia one of the most environmentally conscious countries they routinely turn trash to energy waste energy and they do it cleanly they don't worry about the emissions because there aren't any of that are any they're substantive here though we've really that the it's like this issue that Tom Friedman and others have talked about we moved from NIMBY to banana banana being built absolutely nothing anywhere near anything and NIMBY was not in my backyard but now it's impossible to get certain things done now and you know New York rejected incineration all of our waste goes in trucks hundreds and hundreds of trucks polluting poor neighborhoods in the city and because we won't incinerate or trash here and there are real issues with social justice and where you put it and but we haven't really you know there's so many opportunities to look in a new way at our resources and our waste and figure out how to be more systemic about it and some of that's very un-American unfortunately like in Copenhagen they all their waste heat they're incredibly good at using waste heat like from one building and you know turning it into something else and we're just you know we just don't think systemically it's it actually is kind of un-American in a way regional planning association in this region I've written about I don't know how many studies of theirs I wrote about when I was a metro reporter and it's like but we just don't think regionally we don't you know we're always I don't know it's tough but I you know there's a lot of promise there but there also would be impediments depending on where it's done one more so I thought it was interesting that you spent most of the lecture talking about all these issues that are it seemed like most of the issues have to do with like politics and like policy and things of that sort but you didn't talk much about like cities and buildings and because that's part of the part of the equation too and I just oh yeah I wanted to know if if that is a function of just your interest or that maybe the way cities are playing the way we build buildings don't matter quite as much and that it's more that it's more about policy and like relationships between different countries and making sure developing country cities remain functional is like one of the biggest priorities that exists no cities are vitally important right now and they are there they can be a great way to soften our impact on the the overall biosphere to do things more efficiently people who move to cities end up with lower fertility rates quicker access to education more healthcare the people in rural areas so the urbanization of the human species is probably one of the biggest boons to to our prospects for having a decent ride in the century in the century that exists but that's a whole another I mean I could do a whole another talk on it I didn't you're right I glossed over it because I really I'm focusing here on communication and New York City is doing remarkable things that they could go much further in terms of efficiency and using like you know the million trees plan a million trees thing there's a iTree software or something one of my graduate students was working on this and I could you could actually have every community right now could adopt the schools could adopt the trees and their neighborhood they're all the trees are all like GIS tag geotagged and they know everything about it each tree you could have there's great ways to use information within cities that make efficiency and you know sort of an awareness of the value of living stuff higher or that kind of thing so I don't know yes the answer is cities matter hugely including this one okay I think that concludes the program thank you let's give a big round of applause again to Andrew thank you great talk and do visit the blog and I'm easy to find so if you have any questions follow up