 South Africa 2035, inspired by Anton Cartwright and our late friend Peter DuPlois. Based on a live forum discussion about a successful future with carbon taxes and what South Africa might look like in 2035, which took place at COP17, held in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011. South Africa's doing great. Our economy is thriving. Energy is cheap and renewable. And carbon is taxed at 700 rands a ton. I know what you're thinking. What South Africa is this? Because it's not the one I'm living in, right? Well, this is South Africa 2035. And our friends, Piet and Anton, from the year 2035, have generously travelled back in time to help show you how this South Africa, how this world is possible, and what we had to do to get from here to here. The first thing we had to do was cut our dependence on fossil fuels, like coal, gas and oil. We had to stop taking stuff out of the ground, make the switch to clean energy. It's actually very silly to use something that runs out, because you know your technology is not going to last. In order to make the switch, carbon had to be priced or taxed in a way that forced people to make lifestyle changes. But as oil ran out and became more and more expensive, it got tough, especially for the poorest. This is where renewable energy came to the rescue. China actually helped pave the way for cheap renewable energy. China wins. On the renewable energy side, China wins. Their progress, development and innovation on that front really pushed down the cost of wind and solar energy. So, here in 2035, even if the carbon tax is 700 rands a ton, a kilowatt hour of electricity only costs 10 cents. We lead a prosperous life now. We've got cheap renewable energy. We stopped building coal power plants. We switched to electric vehicles and even have hydrogen aircraft. Even if that means that your mother-in-law, who lives half way around the world, can now come and visit more often. So how did South Africa come out so well? It's because South African government took carbon tax money and invested it in green industry companies, some of them Chinese. So, when the world shifted towards that technology, we were actually invested in the right kind of money. It was called the Green Gold Fund, an offshore sovereign wealth fund with a low-carbon investment mandate that was managed privately by the best available fund managers. And so, as the world became greener, South Africa became wealthier. Now, everyone knows South Africa used to be very dependent on the mining sector. The extractive industries. So you would think with the low cost of electricity, mining houses are thriving. Not so. We're not looking to mine every little thing that we can with our cheap electricity and smelt it up and export it to the rest of the world. We've stopped extracting things that we can't grow. The extraction tax introduced in 2025 really forced industry to change. Any extractive industry that was taking something out of the ground for the first time had to pay a tax. This forced industries to reuse, recycle, and to look at life-cycle approaches. Hemp and coconut husk became the two commodities that dominate world markets. We make most of our things out of hemp and coconut now. So aeroplanes, motor cars. South Africa now is very much a knowledge economy. We've read our souls of this legacy of effectively all the wealth that's under the ground. It's the wealth above the ground that we've come to really develop and build our richer soil. This was a big change, moving from the primary sector of mining to selling services. And for that to happen, South Africa invested in both renewable energy and education. Of course, leading up to 2035, everyone had to make some lifestyle changes. It was tough, but inevitable. Perverse helped encourage people to do that. Perverse was an app that came out around 2018, which allowed you to work out who had imposed a cost on you through their activity, whether it be a company, a household, or an individual. And you could send them a bill via your smartphone and they would have to pay you. So you could bill ESCOM for their carbon emissions. Or a farmer in Somalia could bill you for that flight to the UK. You had to start thinking about how to really live a green, less polluting life based on renewable resources. So life here in 2035 might look a little bit different. We don't own cars. We might form part of the transport system, but the days of every house with a house for the car are gone. We've got so few resources, we've got to learn to share them. Everyone has an annual budget for how much material and energy they can use. This is for the stuff that can run out, so we can't spend more than we've got. We might have moved away from the weekend brigh, or, well, it looks a bit different. We're not using huge amounts of land to raise cows anymore. Protein production has been industrialized and densified. I must say it gets pretty tasty these days. People live closer together now in cities, so that they can work together and share economic activity. Because it's an exchange of things between people. If you put people far away from each other, it makes exchange more difficult. And the crazy rat race is gone. We've stopped chasing after things that don't bring us real value, things that just make us sick. Now we value leisure time and the connections between people things money can't buy. That old country with excessive wealth and extreme poverty is gone. People used to live in bubbles, segregated from each other, and in the end it didn't bring anyone any real happiness or meaning. We concentrated on our wealth and our possessions instead of what was really important. By ignoring the negative effects of cutting ourselves off from each other, we were only damaging our future. So now the bubbles have disappeared and we live a more integrated lifestyle. By taxing the bad things, governments are able to support people's very basic needs. We don't pay for water, we don't pay for basic energy, we don't pay for basic education. Those are human rights that are paid for as a result of taxing the bad things. Our concept of capital is much broader. Capital isn't just money, bricks and mortar. It includes natural capital, things like ecosystems and ecological infrastructure. There is still competition, make no mistake. But everything is more out in the open. Information and transactions are visible to all and that's the only way we can appropriately allocate resources and funding. Everyone has the right to knowledge, knowledge shouldn't be an exclusive thing. In general there's been a devolution of power and decision making. Giant corporations and conglomerations of power have broken up. Companies that couldn't keep up with the innovations and find new ways of creating value failed. This allowed smaller entrepreneurs to start businesses in different places, thereby creating more employment. Bloated governments that were heavy at the top also got downsized. It's the same as companies. If they're too large, they become cumbersome. If they don't have competition, they start to develop some issues. So now there is more power in local government and communities. The best people work for local government. And we've gone from about 280 municipalities to 3,000. And you've got people from different backgrounds and different disciplines working together looking at the whole system. Whether you are a legal person or an economist or an agriculturalist you have to see what you do in terms of this rapidly evolving system and you have to know your place in that. And it's the people who understood systems as opposed to their line function or their discipline who have emerged at the top. That's why smart kids now don't study law or economics or finance. They study change management, innovation, system analysis. When you think of climate change and look at rising temperatures that was always just a symptom of a system that wasn't working. You couldn't just focus on the temperatures. You had to restructure the whole way the world worked. From people's day-to-day lives to the way they ran their economies. We had to change the system to make it work to the benefit of ourselves, our country and our planet. Since in the end there is only one planet for all of us. But we did it. We made it. And South Africa 2035 is great.