 All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome, colleagues. Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. I see the numbers ramping up over here in zoom. It's such a pleasure to welcome you to our webinar today. My name is Donna Aranda, and I am the president of engineering for change and also lead the sustainability programming at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, our original founder, and I'm so pleased to be here with you today. I will be your moderator for the webinar today. And I'm incredibly also pleased to welcome Project Drawdown, our colleagues will be presenting today. We first hosted Project Drawdown back in December of 2017, when we introduced them to the E1C community and explored their recommended solutions to address climate change, especially in vulnerable regions. The world has changed tremendously since 2017, and the urgency of climate change is more prominent than ever. The world is unified in recognition that to avoid a climate catastrophe, we need to make meaningful progress in the right direction. And that means being strategic about every bit of time, energy, and funding that we put into adopting climate solution. So we're pleased to welcome back Project Drawdown and thrilled to welcome Dr. Jonathan Foley for the first time to share their new science-based plan for halting climate change, the Drawdown roadmap. So for those of you who are joining us for the first time, Engineering for Change is a non-profit organization founded jointly by the ASME and other professional organizations, with the goal to prepare, educate, and activate the international technical workforce worldwide for the benefit of people and the planet. We provide upskilling and professional development opportunities at the intersection of engineering and sustainable development for our global community and early career technical professionals through our fellowship program. And we support mission aligned organizations to achieve sustainability objectives through our impact projects and impact services. There are more than 55,000 E4C members worldwide and a global audience of over one million people and we, Engineering can change the world. And we are so glad that you are part of that community. For more information about Engineering for Change, please visit the link in the chat and follow us on our social media channels. Now, I know a lot of you are joining from all over the globe and we're eager to hear and test out the chat functionality here today on Zoom. So I would like to invite you to put your location into the Zoom chat. I'm going to start us off here. If you don't see the Zoom, please do take a look at your screen in the bottom on the middle of your slides, and you should be able to click the chat icon to type your location. So welcome. I see folks here from Toronto, where I'm originally from, as well as from Sikkim, India. We have folks here from Boston and Quito, Ghana, and Smoky Chicago, Illinois. I'm so sorry that to see that Bob from Uganda and Texas, from Gujarat to Zurich. Welcome, welcome everyone from UK to Hamburg. Oh too, we have several colleagues from Germany joining us today in La Rioja, Spain, from Kenya and Oxford, Brazilia and Seattle, so many wonderful places. Thank you so much everyone for joining from every corner of the planet. We are so thrilled to have you from the Philippines to Nigeria. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Again, just as a reminder, the chat is for comments, it is for you to connect with your colleagues, but we would like to make sure that we do keep track of any questions you have for our presenter with the dedicated Q&A. So if you have a question, do kindly use the Q&A button and we will be able to keep track of all your questions there because the chat can get a little bit lengthy and it's hard to find those wonderful questions that you may have. And of course I want to note that if you're following us on Twitter today, do kindly follow the conversation and join us for the dedicated hashtag E4C webinar series and I'll put that into the chat as well. And now, it's my great pleasure to introduce you all to our presenter for today. Jonathan Foley is the Executive Director of Project Drawdown, the world's leading resource for climate solutions. He's an internationally renowned environmental scientist, sustainability expert, author and public speaker. His work focuses on understanding our changing planet and finding new solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystem and natural resources we all depend on. And I am honored to have him here with us today and pleased to turn over the microphone, virtual microphone to Dr. Foley. Well, thank you so much for hosting this webinar today. I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of engineering for change and your mission and what you're all doing and it's so great to see such an extensive global audience of folks all over the world, timing in today so I'm going to be presenting a few slides for probably about 35 minutes or so, maybe a little bit more and we'll should have some ample time for Q&A to wrap up the hour so just to give you a head, kind of a heads up at what we're going to be doing today. Let's get out with the presentation. So, today we're going to talk a lot about climate change, of course, but mainly focusing on the solutions. But before we get started, it's really important to kind of ground everybody and where we are at the moment, of course, is that we are, of course, living in a world that is warming, and we know why it is warming. The most gases, including carbon dioxide, are accumulating in the atmosphere. There's a lot more of that stuff in the air today than there's been in millions of years, and we caused that to happen. In fact, CO2 levels alone have increased by about 50% since the middle of the 19th century. And that plus the buildup of methane and nitrous oxide and other gases are trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, as you know. And that, of course, is resulting as into a temperature increase across the world. Some places more than others does not always uniform in time and space, but overall the planet is warmed a little bit more than one degree Celsius so far. And we're already beginning to see pretty significant impacts from this warmer planet changing everything, whether it's weather patterns, ecosystems, fires around the world and so on. In a kind of new world, it's warmer and more greenhouse gas than anything human history has ever seen before. And that's where we are today. The question, of course, is where do we go next? Well, I believe we're in a race now, a race between two very, very different futures. And there is one where we just don't do anything really, where we continue on a path of using fossil fuels, unsustainable agriculture, very polluting materials, and that continues to push greenhouse gases higher and higher and higher into a world that's two, three, four, maybe five degrees warmer than normal in a world where the impacts of climate change grow to be catastrophic and severe and especially among the world's most vulnerable people. This is a world we do not want, one that could compromise our future, our security, our health, our very ways of life, and all of our opportunities in the future. We don't want this bleak future, but that is one that could still very much happen. But there is another future that's possible too. We will not be able to avoid all of climate change because some of it's already here, but we can avoid the worst of it. And we could do so starting today, because new technologies, new policies, new movements, new markets and so on to halt climate change are all appearing and growing very, very quickly, some are growing even exponentially right now. And I believe, and I think a lot of other people are beginning to believe, maybe for the first time in a lot of years, that we finally have a real chance to stop climate change. And while we're doing so, we have the benefits of also building a much more sustainable, prosperous, equitable and secure world that we've ever seen before. So these are a whole range of futures from one that's actually ends up being pretty good to one that's absolutely terrible. Which one will we get. We don't know yet, but we have to win this race we have to really try very hard to win this race and end up with the better future, but to get to that better future we're going to have to do a lot of things. Some of them are critical and a lot of them are really in the realm of science and engineering a lot of the people on this call, the work that you need to be doing is, you know, is desperately needed around the world today. So one of the things we have to do moving forward of course is to cut through all the noise and confusion. I'll talk about that in a while. But right now we hear all sorts of competing claims and all sorts of people out there saying that they have the answers. They have the solutions to climate change they just know what to do if we give them our votes, if they give them our money. But is that really true. How do we know what works and how to do it in the best possible way. In that we have to follow the science we have to follow what physics and chemistry and biology tell us is true to make sure we're not fooling ourselves or falling for false solutions. We also have to fall, kind of call out the tactics of delay and distraction. There are a lot of people who are trying to tell us, Oh, don't worry just wait a little bit will invent the next solution later, or will pollute now and remove the pollution at a future date, some kind of technique for helping us and causing more delay. We can no longer afford that either we have to follow bold leadership and show how we can move forward boldly confidently and quickly into the future. Another thing we'll have to think about too of course is how do we move past all of the doom and despair we hear, because yes there are things to be very sad about and very very concerned about. But in order to solve the problem we have to kind of move past this kind of moment of despair and anxiety and embrace a sense of hope and possibility opportunity to motivate us to get moving into the future. So let's get started and talk about this, how we can move forward through these different kind of limits and get to the problem of solving climate change. Well, so far, the world has listened to science grudgingly and it took way too long, but the world has finally listened to the science of the problem of climate change. It took about 150 years to do so. The first scientists talking about climate change actually we're publishing in the mid 1800s. Today we finally have an overwhelming majority of people around the world are aware of the problem of climate change they believe in the basic science of what's happening, and they know we need to do something about it. So finally, science has gotten through and people have heard it, when it comes to the problem of climate change. But here's the rub, when it comes to solutions, we seem to stop listening to the science, and we just listened to any random person, we run into. For example, if I go on Facebook in the morning and look at you know hey what are the solutions to climate change. I'm going to hear all sorts of people, many of whom have no expertise in this at all. Very confidently tell you and me and everybody who will listen that they have the answer to stop climate change, you know when there's nuclear or carbon capture or plastics or destroy capitalism or whatever. We just listened to kind of any random person out there who has a very strongly held but not very well informed usually opinion about climate change. But how do we know what's true, how do we know what to listen to and what to actually do just random quotes out there random ideas isn't going to work. We're going to have to rely on the science, again, not only to describe the problem, but help us sort through the solutions, because science can help us find what works, and what doesn't we can pencil out the engineering and science calculations and figure out. Hey, how much carbon would that be, how much would that cost, and is it available in enough time to really be a meaningful solution. Well, that's why Project Drawdown the organization I work for does. We spent a lot of time penciling out the solutions that are available today to stop climate change across multiple sectors. And we've built a huge library of actual solutions that are here today. For example, here in electricity, we can show you solutions that actually work, whether it's in cutting the demand for electricity and enhancing energy efficiency, or producing electricity and new low carbon ways. And so we have a whole panoply of solutions here across the electricity sector, or moving over to food and agriculture we can show you solutions about diets and food waste or growing food better that emits less greenhouse gases. Or maybe restoring lands and protecting forest, so that they continue to contain carbon the way they have historically. Or we can go over into transportation and so on and so on, and show you a whole litany of solutions across many different sectors that actually work. And using science and engineering kind of principles we can actually figure out what is effective, what's viable today, what would these actually cost and build a comprehensive library of solutions. So that's some of the work you might know our organization from in the past that we've kind of listed around 100 solutions that are viable and done the calculations done the math of how effective are they, how big could they get, what would they cost, what would this do for us. We've stated that several times so you can always go to our website at drawdown.org and get a definitive kind of consumer reports, if you will, for viable climate solutions. So this will help us sort out the what of climate solutions, what is available what tools are sitting in the toolbox, and how effective might they be. So that's really, really important and some big lessons for here are of course, we have a lot of solutions, and we're going to need a lot of different solutions working together to get the job done. But just listing solutions isn't enough, having tools in your toolbox doesn't make you a carpenter. You need to kind of learn not only what we have for solutions, but also how to use them. And that's what we're building next is what we now call the drawdown roadmap. And that's basically a guide using science of how to deploy climate solutions not just the what, but here the how of deploying climate solutions in time in space across sectors and someone to get the job done. If you will, it's kind of like the difference between having a coffee table book about food, showing beautiful pictures of food from around the world that look delicious and amazing and beautiful. That's great. But what the world really needs now is a recipe book that shows step by step how to actually assemble those amazing solutions, how to develop them, and how to put them into the world. So I'm going to walk you through this new drawdown roadmap, which is more about the how we get it done, not just what we need to do it. Well, the most important aspect of getting climate solutions done in the future is time and the need to accelerate action, because here's the fundamental problem. We have a mismatch in the atmosphere between the sources of pollution, the red curve, we're now that red dot here at the end right in the early 2020s, and the green curve, our ability to remove pollution from the atmosphere. As long as the red curves above the green curve, we have a buildup of net pollution in the atmosphere, causing more and more warming. So if I look over those last 50 years or so there's some wiggles and we are beginning to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, but overall history teaches us as our economy grows as consumerism grows as populations continue to grow and so on, that the use of fossil fuels and carbon emitting kind of economic activities continues to increase. So that's the path history has put us on is that dotted line, but we need to do the opposite we need to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions very quickly, and get them as close to zero as possible in the coming decades. But we probably won't be able to cut everything. There are probably going to be some countries in some technologies and some economic sectors that still won't be decarbonized by mid century, even in the best case scenario. So that's where we need to grow up that green curve from being essentially zero on the scale to a gigaton scale level of carbon removal, where we use either trees or soils or technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and negate that last bit of pollution. That's where we get to the moment called net zero, the blue line, where those two curves collide where we cut pollution down to almost zero and remove the little bit that we still can't get to. And that's again what we call net zero for the planet. And that's the moment we want to get to you. That's the moment we stop climate change from getting any worse. But one of the important things about these curves is the role of time. First of all, we know we have to act quickly, because we've avoided action for decades, even though we knew from the 80s and 90s and onward, we needed to do something about climate change and we didn't do it. And so we have a lot of time to catch up for. But the more fundamental reason time is so important here is the one that many people miss. This is the kind of thing that like Bill Gates doesn't seem to understand and other people seem to forget is climate is a cumulative problem. It's an integral over time it's the area under the curve is what causes climate change. The fact that the world is about 1.1 degrees warmer than normal now is because greenhouse gases have accumulated over the last 100 years to avoid future climate change our solutions also need to accumulate and build up over time. This is why time is so important. And we have to look at climate solutions as an integral, not as just the function on the curve. So when I think about this, here's a way to illustrate the point. If we cut emissions in the 2020s like this, we've just avoided that whole blue area from ever being emitted that cumulative amount of carbon was never emitted into the atmosphere. The good news about taking early action is that it also can keep going into the future. If I cut emissions in the next decade, it pays off the decade after that, and the decade after that into the future, building up a very large cumulative impact by starting now. And then we can add future emissions cuts sometime in the 2030s, and then by the 2040s we can do a little bit more. But as we go through time, the window of opportunity to reduce emissions gets smaller and smaller and smaller. We have less time to build up and to integrate our solutions over time. So this is a key point. Time is incredibly important, whether it's in terms of cutting emissions, why early action automatically has a bigger impact than later cuts, because it accumulates over longer periods of time, just basic calculus. It's also how carbon removal is going to be a relatively small player because it starts from basically zero and has to grow well about six orders of magnitude to even be measurable in the atmosphere, let alone significant to the carbon cycle. When we do the math here and do the integral of these curves, which is what the real answer is, we find out that emissions cuts are about 96% of the entire answer. And emissions cuts starting now in the first decade or so are almost three quarters of the total answer of what we need to do to stop climate change. That's really, really important. That means also carbon removals only about 4% of the answer of what we need to do to get to net zero. That's really important and it means we have to take into account time. There's a time value of carbon, if you will, just like a time value of money. Early action early investments pay off longer and better than later investments. That's why we need to have a whole different suite of climate solutions over time, including ones that take effect right now. Now what I like to call emergency breaks, things of the atmosphere can feel today without any sort of delay. Things like stopping methane leaks in natural gas pipelines and wells would have an immediate and disproportionately fast impact on climate change, or stopping deforestation across the Amazon and Indonesia and other parts of the world. What the atmosphere feels today. While we're also investing in new things like new carbon infrastructure, like renewable energy, electric vehicles, more efficient buildings and so on. We should be investing like crazy in that today, but it takes a while to permit design and build all that new infrastructure sometimes decades before planning becomes reality in terms of built environmental infrastructure issues. When we hit the emergency breaks now while we're also building out new infrastructure. We also do do an investment in the future starting today, investing in social interventions that also reduce emissions, investing in nature, and investing in new technologies. The problem though I see quite a bit maybe you see it too, is we hear about a lot about future technologies like fusion or advanced nuclear or carbon removal. Yeah, we're probably going to need all those in the future, but every year we wait for them to show up is a year they didn't work and a discounted effectiveness on climate change. This is why new technologies actually will pay play a relatively small role in the future of climate change, compared to solutions we have now. And time is more important than tech, or we like to say now is better than new. We're going to play the solutions we have today to take full advantage of that whole window of accumulating climate solutions into the future. So we need to align our climate actions with time and not wait for climate solutions to come into the future, even though a scientist and engineers we tend to love new technologies. And not and must not wait for them. Let's deploy everything we have today, especially emergency brake solutions and fold in additional solutions as they become available when and if they do, but do not wait. We also have to make sure that we align our resources or money or time our people, everything with the actual carbon in the atmosphere. That's a very poor job of us right now. But what we've learned so far is that we have to cut emissions drastically in order to stop climate change. And we can cut them directly in these six big areas electricity food industry transportation energy processing other emissions, the building operations and so on. And as I showed you before we have solutions across efficiency and decarbonization to help handle some of these. And we can cut emissions indirectly through social interventions, for example, helping indigenous communities protect their land, so that it doesn't get deforested by illegal logging or land grabs or things like this. That's investing in people first, but it later helps lower emissions. If we help indigenous communities protected their land for human rights and human wellbeing. That limits deforestation of the future which reduces future emissions. And then of course we can have carbon removal maybe rounding out the last bit of this, but most of the work is cutting emissions directly and indirectly. As I showed before to we have abundant solutions across this portfolio of what we need to do across electricity and agriculture and beyond. And we can show you pretty precisely where all this carbon is, and how much we need to do across all these different areas. Well as a kind of carbon roadmap, showing exactly what we need to do across sectors between now and mid century. And this is where the carbon is this is the earth's portfolio of action for what we need to do to stop climate change. Well how are we doing compared to the science. As one indicator of where we're putting our energy and resources let's look at the money we're putting into different kinds of climate solutions. And then of where full of philanthropic dollars are going philanthropy foundations donors, showing where these different sources of money seem to be going into different climate solutions. It's doing pretty well, but it's very much under invested in attacking problems in the industrial sector, and in what's called the other sector which is basically energy processing. Those areas are very under invested and we need to do better here. And this isn't an estimate of where venture capital private funding for new technologies and ventures is going two thirds of that money is going into one sector transportation, and almost all of that just into electric cars and scooters. Two thirds into cars and scooters where the atmosphere says that should only be about five to 10% of the answer venture capital is putting 66% of their money into that one area. So obviously a mismatch between the economic incentives for venture capital and what the science tells us we need to do. And we can look at government funding one example that would be the US. So a new inflation reduction act which will spend about 36 billion a year. The private sector spends way more on climate solutions than governments do by the way even though government gets all the media attention. You can see here, the venture capital alone is about three time on two and a half three times what the government spending on climate solutions. So most of the money is in the private sector but government matters a lot too. And we can see here how the US government investment will be mainly focused on electricity at first, and less in other sectors but putting money into electricity now might help unlock future solutions in buildings transportation industry and so on if those additional investments come here though this the basic point is we need to align our capital and other resources with carbon, and we haven't really been doing that very well because lawmakers investors and philanthropists never had a carbon roadmap to follow until now. So we need to align again with sectors in time but also with geography. Here's another you have a very international audience here on the seminar and one of the key points is to realize that climate solutions are always local. Having just one number for climate solutions for the entire world isn't enough. We have to show how climate solutions work across space. In the next version of our work at drawn and we're going to be building spatial models of climate solutions. On the individual pixel level, showing how different climate solutions work, and how effective they might be and how much they cost geographically across the world. As a kind of a proxy for this I'm showing a different kind of map here. This is a map of every power plant in the world showing how much co2 they met per unit of electricity. These by orders of magnitude here, the red power plants for example are much, much dirtier than the yellow ones, which are much dirtier than the green ones. So if you're trying to decarbonize the electricity sector near where you live, you would probably want to start with taking out the red power plants, using renewable energy, if you can, in the most effective ways to decarbonize the most polluting power sector emitters. In the US about 70% of the power emissions come from 30% of the power plants, and this kind of disproportionate impact shows up again and again and again and almost every sector and every climate solution that we can find an 80 20 rule if you will or a leverage point to get the most effective kind of impact for your investment. So we need to very carefully look at the geographic possibilities and identify hotspots of climate action that can be disproportionately effective to get more work done more quickly. And finally, we also have to make sure we focus climate solutions in ways that improve human well being. Because climate is not the only problem the world is facing, we need to solve many different problems in the environment but more importantly, for human beings across the world, especially the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth. We did an analysis of this recently where we looked at climate solutions on the left and compare them to possible solutions for human well being on the right. What we found is, if we look in countries of low and middle income countries, especially amongst people making less than $1 90 a day people living in extreme poverty. We found that there were opportunities for climate solutions here on the left to dramatically improve people's lives by increasing availability and access to things like income and work, or food, water and sanitation energy resources and so on, indirectly through improving human health and gender equality and educational opportunities and so on. And we found dozens of opportunities here for climate solutions to also improve human well being, finding these kind of win-win solutions. So if we put this all together, what we see here is that we now have a good idea of the climate problem, of course. We have science telling us which solutions are possible and work well to have the potential to stop climate change. And now the third piece is we have a roadmap that shows us using science, how we can stop climate change, the when, what, where, and with whom kind of solutions we have to use to get the job done in the most optimal way. I believe we can still stop climate change if we follow science-based strategies. If we listen to the scientists and the engineers who know what they're talking about, who've done the math on this, I believe we can still stop climate change, because there is a narrow window of opportunity still to get the job done. But now we're in a different moment. It's not about convincing people we need to do something. We have to do it perfectly. We cannot afford to waste one more minute or one more dollar on the things that don't work. But unfortunately, we're doing lots of that right now, throwing money at harebrained ideas or things that will never be a very effective solution, instead of being laser focused on the actions that have the best chance to be effective and stop climate change in time. That's my ask of all of you. And I love that your organization is really kind of inspiring collaboration amongst scientists and engineers around the world to really take effective action to improve the world. How do we collaborate to get the job done? How do we work across all of our different silos and all of our different sectors and professions to really do the job of stopping climate change? No one actor, no one organization, no one country, no one anything can do this alone, but we're going to have to work together to change the world. And I believe that we can. One of the most important things I want to leave you with, and we'll have quite a bit of time for a conversation here, is that it's not game over on climate change at all. Even though we hear every day all the bad news in the media because bad news sells better than good news. What we hear all the time is the bad news, but I assure you there is good news there too. We just don't hear about it enough. It's not game over at all on climate change. It is game on. Whether you believe it or not, we are living in an incredible time with extraordinary opportunities to build a better future. We're not seizing all of those opportunities but they are still there. And an extraordinary world that we can be proud of and we'd like to see is still within reach. And I believe we can see it and if we really take the bold leadership if we really stretch if we really push ourselves, we can work together to build a better future. So I'm going to just stop there with this invitation to work together and to join together across different organizations and professions, different parts of the world, different experiences, different walks of life to see how we can collaborate and do the best job possible. And engineers are going to be central into the push to stop climate change to get this job done. Absolutely. But we're going to need everyone. And I'd love to see how we can do that together. So with that, I'm going to stop here and see how we can switch to some questions and maybe a little conversation. And thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jonathan. What a wonderful and compelling presentation, lots of comments already flying through. And I do encourage those of you who have questions to please add them to the q amp a, because we, we need to attract them that we're not going to take them in a spoken fashion so please do type them up in the Q amp a, but really compelling really clear and that's absolutely necessary when you're covering such a huge topic. I do have a question to kick us off and then I want to switch over to a few of the audience questions that are coming in. So what I would like to hear from you Jonathan is, given the mismatches that we're seeing investment, investment, and particularly, you know, seeing the outside investment, the transportation sector from BC's, and kind of also you see the electricity generation, kind of portion and that investment from governments, particularly here in the United States. How do we address those mismatches what do you see as the promising pathways, given this roadmap for reorienting that kind of investment. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, this is just one moment in time and investments are pretty fluid that they will change from year to year where they go. And so this will probably change in the future and we should help it change and that's that's very important. And that is, until now, no one had seen those graphs, you know, until we created them. That's kind of astonishing that we're actually spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year around the world on climate solutions and nobody was really tracking it very carefully. And nobody was asking the question, gee, how does that compare to what the atmosphere needs. Yeah, here's the problem and here's where we're putting our money maybe you want to look at those two things together. And it sounds very strange but nobody had done that before. So I hope that our this kind of work and maybe others who will do it and pick it up and do it even better in the future will help inspire a bit of, you know, comparison a little bit of conversation and a little bit of rethinking where we put our investments. You know, I'm not naive. Well, I'm pretty naive, but I'm not the first to appear that, you know, the role of investments in the private sector isn't to do good in the world entirely. It's also to make money and to kind of return investments back to the investor and that kind of thing. Every flavor of dollars, all that capital, each flavor of it has different goals of looking at how it proceeds risk and how it looks for reward. Whether it's philanthropy that's just hopefully trying to do good in the world or government funding that should be not looking for profit. But then we have the private sector which is the largest of all those capital stacks, that is seeking financial return. So, every flavor of capital what we call that capital stack all those different piles of money are looking to do different things. And so we have to deploy each flavor of money differently. Maybe philanthropy and government funding starts first to de-risk some solutions so that then private capital can come in later more comfortably and seek returns on their money. Or there are just some things that aren't going to be very attractive investments that philanthropy and government dollars have to take over do themselves. So every flavor of money will have to do something different and of course it's not just money. But we are talking about a multi trillion dollar a year problem of moving away from the biggest economic engine the world has ever seen fossil fuels alone, let alone agriculture and industrial materials that emit greenhouse gases. We're going to have to shift you know trillions of dollars of economic activity over to something new and do it very quickly. It definitely will require a lot of money time and effort to do that. So tracking the investments is important. I hope that by kind of pushing a little bit more on this, we'll see a little bit more investment in things that maybe are under invested in. But most of all the question of time this is the one that I really worry about as a government funding and venture capital and other things are kind of falling for these new far away technologies that never seem to show up. My first job in college was working at a fusion lab at a department of energy lab in the US in the 1980s. And people do fusion is 20 years away and always will be. They haven't made any real progress since then that's 30 years ago. And it's still exactly where it was in the 1950s and 1970s 1990s and so on. It's not going to show up anytime really soon it's a very interesting science experiment and someday will show up. In the meantime that we have to do the look at solutions that are here now to take advantage of the time window of accumulating climate solutions insulating addicts energy retrofitting energy efficiency renewables things like this. These are all solutions here now that automatically have a huge advantage over things like fusion or advanced nuclear, which we keep on hearing about and they always seem to be just over the horizon, no matter how long we wait for them. That's a little bit worrisome. And it doesn't mean they won't eventually arrive but we can't wait for them any longer. This is not a viable strategy. And this is some that's the big lesson here is to deploy what we have now in the with the billions of dollars go into deploying available solutions and then you know the millions of dollars a smaller amount goes into R&D for future solutions like carbon removal fusion. Things will be very happy to have in the future. I'm not against them at all. I'd love to have those today, but the reality is they're not around yet. So we have to think about time and across sectors as much as we can. And that's a big shift in thinking from what we usually hear. I think it's to your point a shift to scientifically informed thinking to really that that rigorous approach of evaluating where the impacts will really happen over over time and perhaps also investing more in training the scientific engineering workforce in being able to engage effectively in influencing both investment understanding the role of investment around the work that they do, but also preparing them for engaging and being at the table policy setting, and not you know, or feeling that it's not something that's their role. I know that part of project drawdowns work is actually also oriented towards that the climate solutions that work part of your portfolio. So what kind of changes can engineers make using those resources in their workplaces or in their classrooms in their labs, wherever they may be. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate your comments because that's absolutely true scientists and engineers need to do not only the science and engineering work that we do. We started as a physicist. So, you know, it's always in classes with really smart engineering students and things so I really admire everybody's in the engineering professions that we have to get out of our labs out of our offices and start circulating amongst people who are actually making the decisions. And usually in finance or in policy making circles or in business and or even nonprofits and philanthropy all of these different areas. We have to engage the decision makers, because time and time again I see these kind of decisions being made and you look around the room and like there's no scientist in here, there's no engineer in here or if it is, it may be like a software guy, you know from Oh yeah I wrote an app to order burritos once so now I'm expert on fusion. Yay. I'm like, wait a minute, and the number of mistakes being made or ridiculous kind of non scientific assertions that you hear very confidently from people who absolutely have no idea what they're talking about is kind of ridiculous. So I think the fault is on us a little bit. I used to be for most of my life I was a professor and I think we trained people to be fairly narrowly defined expertise. We grind people down into these little silos, especially in graduate school, especially in academia which where I live for a long time. I'm not teaching people know, you know sophomores know you stick to your lane you just do the science you just do the engineering. Let the policy people do the policy with the investors do the investing. Well the problem is the investors think they're doing your job. They think they're the scientists and the engineers and they're not. So we need to help kind of be in the room, and recognize their professional expertise and their, their know how of course to we probably, I would be a terrible investor, but that doesn't mean that investors are really good scientists so we need to collaborate we need to work together and show up in the room where it happens. And so yeah, be uncomfortable sometimes go into rooms you're not comfortable in that you don't know everything or you might have to ask dumb questions or apparently dumb, dumb questions that aren't dumb at all. That may be the key question nobody thought to ask before. So like you I think we need to do a better job of equipping scientists and engineers to be kind of more leaning into leadership roles to at least or to be in the room, and ask those kind of challenging questions but also to listen a lot and to learn ourselves. When I was a kid used to remind me that we were born with two ears and one mouth, we should try to use those in that ratio, if we can. So that's, but I think that's very, very important and also, as you mentioned like workforce development and education, especially higher education, we could do a better job of kind of equipping scientists and engineers to be, you know, kind of to see our social compact better that we have a role and important role in making the world better and that requires a somewhat different approach than just working in a lab. And then we have to kind of get out and see how we could be best engaged in the world by listening by learning by collaborating, but also contributing our expertise and I know how where it's needed. I think we all have a lot to offer. We all have a lot to gain to from these collaborations. I agree with you more Jonathan on that front and I give my kids that advice about the two years and one math as well. plenty. There are some very specific questions here also kind of looking at the state of the world right now and as trends have come up, one of our listeners wants to know what is your perspective on the surge of ESG projects and jobs in terms of advancing solutions to climate change. I broke up a second I couldn't quite hear you can do that. Oh certainly. What is your perspective on the surge of ESG projects frameworks, in terms of advancing solutions for climate change, considering that it's not a new concept. Yeah, so that for everyone on the call if you don't know the acronym there's a lot of talk in the investment community especially amongst publicly traded equities and kind of stocks and corporate investing for what's called ESG or environmental social and governance kind of standards for investing and it's a way of kind of ranking how good or bad a company might be as traded publicly on the stock markets of the world. So environmental social and performance and their governance and transparency. This is, you know, I would say a good thing to begin to look at how companies are performing for the environment for social benefit and how well they're governed as a company and their transparency and accountability. So in spirit, this is a good thing. But the rules and the implementation of ESG investing seem to be very odd, let's say. Some of the companies for example sometimes score very highly on this which I find will strange email like how is that possible. Maybe they score well in one column but not on others or are these numbers being kind of gained a little bit. Yes, of course they are because there's tremendous financial incentive to do so. I do worry that a good idea is only as good as this execution. So we have to be careful about how those are being implemented as standards to be more, you know, how well governed is the ESG investing world itself. A lot of room for improvement I would say. Another issue is in some countries at least the United States is one example. There's a little bit of a backlash from people on the kind of the right of the political spectrum, saying they call it you know woke capitalism if you will, saying I don't care, you know what my pension fund is invested in in terms of environmental stuff I just want to see financial returns, don't introduce you know woke or lefty ideology into the investment portfolios of the world. And also politicians being politicians you want to seize a headline and get attention for people not being very smart people or whatever. They make up all this nonsense to fight over when you know it's not really a fight worth fighting. What we had to do is, of course, investments need to pay attention to the environment without a healthy environment and other investments could exist. And of course they didn't got to pay attention to social benefits because, you know, people are more important than capital without people thriving this doesn't matter anyway. And if you're fighting over transparency governance I want to know what you're hiding. So, you know he has to do something I believe we should embrace but we've got to do it better. And I do worry that the current standards and rules for it are a little bit weird. And also now it's become a kind of political game to fight over this but that's just the game of the media and the politicians getting attention for themselves. So it's a little depressing what is a good idea is not maybe doing its best possible job. That's why I tend to focus more on the private capital, where companies are maybe where there's a lot of money and it's not as much of this kind of distraction but we need to look both of the publicly traded equities and also privately traded, like private equity venture capital things like this. They're both very very important but over here there's less of that shouting at each other about these standards for investing. But anyway I think it's a good idea, but we probably aren't doing it to the best possible level. Taking an optimistic or perhaps even naive lens as you said I think another invitation for the community to engage considering how we already apply standards in in our own work in our own profession and developing technologies and considering what might be a role that we play in in terms of creating those more rigorous frameworks to ensure that the accountability is legitimate and that there's lack of or perhaps less ability to gain the system when we're talking about ESG. That's just a reflection. There's no opinion everyone in terms of the, again, coming back to the engineering workforce and where a lot of engineers end up, you know, working in and currently mapping to what is affecting climate. We're talking about these hard to decarbonize industries is large industrial sectors. And there's a question here from our audience in terms of, and also from our side that we are considering about how do we address the relative lack of investment and reducing and you know emission reducing solutions particularly in these hard to decarbonize industries. Anything that you see as particularly promising for given the lack of investment or the limit on the investment, what can we do, how can we really move the needle. Yeah, this is really really important. So just to kind of ground everybody on this a little bit. Hang on a second. Let me pull up a another picture if you don't mind. Absolutely. Here we go. Okay. Just to kind of ground everybody here's a picture of greenhouse gas emissions by their kind of large. I mean just this point of hard to a beta emissions. This is what we're talking about. So we're talking about greenhouse gases by what basically contributes them and what gases they are. So the orange color. Those are the emissions of green house gases from the production and use of fossil fuels. So that's all the coal oil gas, and so on in the world is either releasing carbon dioxide, which is about 58%, but people are kind of surprised we should think of climate change is entirely caused by fossil fuels like no it's two thirds caused by one third by other stuff. But basically fossil fuels are the orange sector, the CO2, you know, released when we burn the stuff the methane released when we, you know, mine and put the stuff around us methane leaks essentially a little bit of nitrous oxide from combustion a little bit of gas gases, but that orange stuff. That's what if we get rid of fossil fuels replace them with renewables nuclear and other energy sources that orange stuff goes away. None of that is quote hard to abate means it's hard to abate, but not impossible to abate the green area is the second largest this agriculture. That's our food system agriculture land use basically producing food in the world. So close to that is deforestation. So we definitely need to address that that's not hard to abate methane though from agriculture is harder to abate because that's all from cattle, a little bit from rice fields. There are some technologies that can reduce methane from cattle, but they don't work really well in the real world, because feeding, you know, little feed additives to cattle only works if the cattle are in the barn, where you can go get them and hand them algae or little dietary supplements to reduce their methane emissions, but 99% of the world's cattle are out in pastures in grazing lands, scurrying around vast areas where it's very impractical to feed them a dietary supplement. So methane emissions, the biggest way to reduce that is reducing the number of cattle, or, you know, dramatically through eating less meat and so on so that's a very hard to abate sector because that's not probably going to happen overnight. Nitrous oxide emissions probably are hard to abate but not impossible. Most of that comes from over using fertilizers. So we can kind of see the food sector is going to be kind of challenging and you know solar panels won't help you with cows or fertilizer emissions, those are really difficult. The red areas of where it gets really thorny and that's probably what you're alluding to these are emissions from kind of industrial products and processes that aren't about burning fossil fuels they're things like cement outgassing CO2 to the atmosphere, or methane emitted from different processes, fluorinated gases what we use in refrigerants leaking air conditioners leaking refrigerators things like that. There are oxide emissions there are these are the emissions that are probably the most challenging to obey aren't the fossil fuel ones, or some of the agriculture ones are probably mostly the industrial emissions. And then we can kind of scoot down here I'll just show one last little sector we can map very carefully. All these emissions, kind of by sub sector and really nail down like what are the most challenging to admit in my opinion they're going to be things like steel and cement using fertilizers, and some of the remaining methane emissions from agriculture. So let's make sure we're focusing on the hard to abate green gas gases to the truly hard to abate. One might be aviation fuel. We don't yet have a drop in electrified solution to that. Are there sustainable aviation fuel technologies coming around yep but they're very small. So we're going to have to get really good at some of these hard to abate ones the biggest though would be cement steel aviation waste disposal outgassing nitrous oxide from fertilizers and animal methane I think those are some of the most challenging areas where solar panels and, you know, batteries and electric vehicles aren't going to just drop in and save the day. So some of it's not, and we have to know which is which. There is a question actually that's directly tied to your point regarding what do you see as the most promising alternatives to concrete and steel in particular in terms of, you know, reducing those emissions. Do you think that is on on your radar that you want to flag. Um, well again, that's a lot there I'm just looking at the clock when I cut the two minutes left for we need to wrap up. I'll defer people to maybe go read our website about some of that we do have a few suggestions around concrete and steel somewhere very practical today, like cement mixtures of you know whether you use Portland cement or other kinds of materials. There are things we can do that can dramatically cut COT emissions. But there aren't you know they're very few perfect solutions that kind of do everything right now. There's also a lot of interest in steel like you know using hydrogen and other things and steel manufacturing. So that's a very long conversation but I encourage people to read more about it but yes there's some interesting work we have a little bit on our website. So most of those are a little bit further out. I think cement has some more interesting solutions right now steals probably more challenging, but and they're probably people on this call we're better experts on that than any of us would be great to talk to you but just keeping And I do encourage you also we on the SME climate change page there are a number of podcasts and articles speaking exactly to these particular industries these technologies and what's on the horizon. And then we do have a really great question here from one of the listeners that noted that you mentioned that the rise of consumerism as a compounding factor increasing CO2 emissions. This is an ism that has been in the making for well over a century so it's pretty well entrenched. I'm interested in your thoughts on circular economy as a solution. Do you reckon for example that it's possible to couple consumption from emissions. Well, we are. That's the good news, beginning to do that not fast enough but you're absolutely right. I mean this is now a personal belief not a scientific one but I think people who call for the end of capitalism or de growing the global economy I think that's like wow that's a, you managed to pick a problem that's even harder than we imagine the whole global economy while decarbonizing the planet like I'm not smart enough to figure that one out. So I'm trying to figure out like in a world that people want without revolution and heads on spikes around the world. You know, or in pikes around the world. How do we decarbonize the existing world order a little bit better make it better and more humane and more environmentally reasonable. That's some that is beginning to happen. There are about 40 countries in the world that have grown their economy a lot in the last 20 to 30 years while lowering their CO2 emissions, the United States happens to be one of them. Since 2007 is the best when we hit peak emissions in the US, and it's dropped by 21% since then, even accounting for trade with China and other countries by the way that's that's a fallacy. And the national trade and embedded emissions that also dropped by about 20%. So the US economy, the biggest economy on the planet still is decarbonizing in absolute terms and especially per dollar GDP. That's good news and 35 or 40 other countries are doing the same thing, mostly Western rich countries. Today is cut its emissions, most of all by about 40% since the 1990s, you don't hear about that very much but there's kind of bending the curve. While economies and populations and consumerism have grown emissions have fallen in the most advanced economies on earth. A lot with the exceptions of Australia and Canada so far they they've been more or less flatter inching up a little bit. So, you know, why what's working what isn't. Those are interesting questions, and how can we do better and I think it's really critical that we, we find solutions to this because I think asking the world to stop the juggernaut of consumerism and a global economy is, you know, orders of magnitude more challenging than stopping climate change we know how to decarbonize most of what we showed already. Why don't we just do that. And we'll get some challenges along the way but I think that's, it's doable we see evidence for this challenging yes absolutely and I wish we could also dial down consumerism personally and for the environment. So do we really need that throw away kind of thing or can we invest in more durable more circular goods and services that really make the world a little bit better. Well that I need to hang up here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Jonathan for joining us today you've been enlightening and inspiring and we're so incredibly grateful for the time you've given us and wish you the very best with a draw down map, the roadmap and of course look forward to working with you and your community in advancing the solution so thank you to our all of our listeners thank you to our presenter and I wish you all a good day good evening good morning wherever you may be and see you on the next engineering for change webinar. Goodbye everyone. Bye.