Video: Thomas Homer-Dixon: Changemakers Speakers Series, Royal Roads University (DocDrop)

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foreign good evening everybody good evening and uh welcome it's so great to see so many people out tonight I'm Philip steenkamp President and Vice Chancellor of Royal Rhodes University I really want

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to thank you for being with us tonight I would like to start by acknowledging with respect the LA quangan speaking peoples on Whose traditional territory the conference center and the song He's a squire malt and Masonic peoples whose

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historical relationships with the land continue right through to this day and it was with great gratitude that we live and learn and work on these lands Vision at Royal Roads University is

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inspiring people with the courage to transform the world and our change makers speaker series is part of this vision so Gatherings like these really exemplify one of our goals in our vision

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and that is to invite in and venture out so today tonight we are venturing out leaning into Partnerships learning from others and warmly welcoming members of

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our community our speaker this evening is an award-winning author and renowned scholar Dr Thomas Homer Dixon is the founder and the executive director of

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the Cascades the full range of humanities converging environmental economic political technological and health crises and using Advanced methods to map and

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model complex Global Systems the Cascade Institute analyzes the interactions between systemic risks it anticipates future crises and opportunities and develops High leverage interventions in

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Social systems and these interventions could rapidly shift Humanities course towards fair and sustainable prosperity some of you may know Dr Thomas Homa

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Dixon's work he's an international best-selling author published a number of books some of them include the Ingenuity Gap how can we solve the problems of the future another is the

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upside of down catastrophe creativity and the renewal of civilization he's also written carbon shift how peak oil in the climate crisis will change Canada and his most recent work commanding hope

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the power we have to renew a world in peril now prior to joining us at Royal Roads Dr Homa Dixon was a University Research chair in the faculty of environment at the University of Waterloo

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and while there he also founded the Waterloo Institute for complexity and innovation he's published widely in the media including most recently in the Globe and Mail Scientific American the New York

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Times And The Washington Post and considered among the world's top complex systems scientists Dr Homa Dixon's current research focuses on threats to Global Security and prosperity in the 21st century

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so I'm absolutely delighted to be able to introduce to you my colleague and friend Dr Thomas Holman Dixon hey Pat thank you so much Philip it's marvelous

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to be with you this evening I grew up in Victoria so this city has a very special place in my heart uh grew up at Prospect Lake

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uh went to Glenn Lyon in Oak Bay and then to Claremont and started my University education at the University of Victoria before heading east for

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40 years to do graduate work in the United States to work at the University of Toronto and in the University of Waterloo as Philip was just mentioning always coming back to visit my father

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here and return to my roots very much part of my bones this landscape this this city the sea the forests and in 2019 uh uh my whole family came

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Sarah Wolfe my partner and wife and our children Ben and Kate I'll talk a little bit about them this evening and professionally I was attracted to Victoria to set up the Cascade

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Institute I felt that it was time to take the knowledge and ideas that I had accumulated through my professional career and provide them to some very urgent practical problems that the world is facing

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and uh and and I found an opportunity in collaboration with the folks at Royal Roads University with Philip and his team to build something that would I don't think I could have built anywhere else in the country at any other institution

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in the country and uh we're very excited to see it in its uh takeoff phase right now I'll talk about some of the work of the Cascade Institute in some detail this evening

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so hope in the poly crisis uh two words one of which you're very familiar with and one of which you probably aren't familiar with we think we know about what hope is and

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and understand the emotion you aren't familiar with the concept of poly crisis it's a neologism it's a new word coined originally by the French philosopher and complexity theorist

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Edgar Moran in a book in 1999 so it hasn't been around for very long came into wide use in Europe in the late teens and then especially at the last World economic Forum meeting in January

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this of this year it's got a lot of circulation but it has been a focus of the Cascade institute's research for quite some time and I'm going to talk a little bit about that research this evening but interestingly enough hope is a more

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Tangled difficult idea to get your head around than the poly crisis the polycrisis may be a new word but it's actually in some ways easier to understand it's kind of a shorthand word for a lot of stuff going wrong all at

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the same time the sense that the world seems to be going haywire and and some people might say well that's always been the case but I'll argue tonight that that things there are

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some things that are really fundamentally different about our world today that there is there is something new and you can characterize that in part by calling it a poly crisis so you think about the things that we've been dealing with for the last

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last five or six years relatively short period of time these wildfires that are sweeping the world uh affecting BC very notably in over a number of years but California Australia

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Siberia now we see of course in Alberta and Halifax obviously driven substantially by climate change a pandemic that swept across the planet and and literally changed the course of

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human civilization we don't know exactly how and in what ways it has put us on a new pathway but there's no question that has that has happened deep dissension within our societies especially Western societies over

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systemic racism and imbalances of wealth and power that that have not been addressed effectively uh the largest migrations forced migrations in the history of the species

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taking place right now people fleeing War climate events extreme weather social breakdown corruption in their governments uh lack of Economic Opportunity

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a climate change again the drumbeat of climate change always always kind of in the background and then sometimes very prominently with the heat Dome with the atmospheric rivers in BC it sometimes seems like BC is in Fate's crosshairs

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you know that we're being taught a lesson or something I don't believe in that kind of thing but we've certainly been shocked a lot a war in in Eastern Europe

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which still could escalate into a form of catastrophic proportions perhaps even a nuclear war and then again the drumbeat of climate change this past year in Pakistan a third of the country was

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underwater a third of the country was underwater because of the storms that were substantially driven by uh warmer weather hotter atmosphere that can contain more

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water at the Cascade Institute based on partly because of work that I've been doing for uh now almost 20 years looking at the implications of converging crises uh we have really focused on the

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relationships between between all these different challenges that humanity is facing what are the Deep connections between them and we make a distinction between stresses that are building up under the

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surface of uh global global system stresses like widening economic inequalities climate heating biodiversity collapse major migrations

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demographic shifts population agent aging they're probably about 15 or 20 major long-term stresses that you can identify that are affecting

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Humanities outcomes for Better or For Worse and Trigger events which which are much less predictable the stresses you can sort of track over time you can see the trajectory they take and Trigger

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events are much less predictable they are what statisticians would call stochastic or random and we tend to pay attention when a crisis occurs you need both a trigger event and the stress the stress has been building up over a period of time and then the trigger

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happens and you get the crisis so you need both of those they're both necessary conditions but we tend to pay attention to the trigger event and not and not the stress but it's the stress change over time that we really should

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be paying attention to and one of the things we found in our research on the poly crisis at the Cascade Institute and by the way when we say the Cascade Institute we're interested in two kinds of Cascades pernicious Cascades knock-on

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effects between systems that can do a lot of harm and virtuous Cascades changes that can that cascading changes across systems that could lead to

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benefits for Humanity what we would call virtuous Cascades versus pernicious Cascades while the Pollock crisis is a set of pernicious Cascades connections between systems that are producing a lot

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of negative harm for human beings and uh one thing we have noticed with these stresses is that uh from most of them we see these three

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phenomena the stresses are amplifying accelerating and synchronizing uh simultaneously so by amplifying we mean they're getting worse so take climate

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heating for example uh in 2000 the Earth was the surface of the planet was around uh 0.72 degrees warmer than it was during in the pre-industrial

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period so there had been a warming of about 0.72 degrees now uh so just 20 years later we're at about 1.2 degrees warming right so the problem is worse than it was but it's also getting worse

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faster so there's an acceleration happening between 19 uh 1970 and 2010 the warming per decade was about 0.18 degrees Celsius

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it's estimated that between 2010 and 2040 the warming per decade is going to be about 0.27 degrees Celsius and that's an increase in the rate of warming of about 50 percent what statisticians would call the second

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derivative so you're getting acceleration and many of these problems these underlying stresses are accelerating that's somewhat understood certainly that they're getting worse as understood

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that some of them are accelerating is kind of understood by policy makers and and scientists but what's not so understood is the fact that a whole bunch of systems many of these systems seem to be tipping in a negative

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Direction simultaneously that we're getting economic crisis inflation geopolitical problems climate change major migrations

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internal instability within societies all happening at the same time now some people would think that's just kind of a perfect storm they would actually call it something like a perfect storm but that makes it sound like it's just a coincidence that all this bad stuff is happening

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simultaneously at the Cascade Institute we we believe we think there's a great deal of evidence that there are connections many of which are invisible between these separate stresses that are causing crises to synchronize

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and so a major focus our research is on these synchronization effects I'm not going to say much more about that today but we think we have some tools that can allow us to understand synchronization better

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in terms of amplification and acceleration you can this waveform diagram is sort of a nice metaphor graphical metaphor for the increasing severity of crises and the increasing

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frequency of crises within our world so here we have uh the increasing amplitude of the wave Crossing harm thresholds that are

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defined by the values within a society so as the as the shocks increase in their amplitude uh you get outcomes that are defined as crises and the crises are happening more frequently because the

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frequency of the wave is increasing as you can see a kind of compression of the waveform as you get towards the right hand side you look across the bottom and I've just put in the standard list of zoonotic viral diseases these are

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diseases viral diseases that have jumped from a natural Reservoir into a human in the human population and this is these are the major zoonotic viral disease

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outbreaks going back to hid in 1980 SARS to 2002 H1N1 2009 MERS 2012 Ebola 2014 zika 2015 and you see up through the end there and the noticeable thing that it

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seems like they're happening faster it seems like the period of time between these outbreaks is being compressed and that's what we're trying to capture with this particular graphical metaphor that you see on the

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slide wow so what does this mean in terms of our everyday lives well we can trace out the impacts of these problems of these crises in terms of our well-being on a

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day-to-day basis uh soaring housing costs well the pandemic caused we encourage governments to pump enormous liquidity into economies around the world which much which was pumped into

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real estate and Equity prices and uh gave a very sharp boost to housing prices in the Western World especially labor shortages and adequate Medical Services we're familiar with all these

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kind of Downstream local effects from these larger phenomena that are happening in the world infrastructure damage from climate change inflation all of these things

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tend to contribute to economic and social marginalization and especially a sense of insecurity a sense that that things are out of control that our leaders don't know what's going on

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and uh uh and and producing an emotional response of fear uh and and in some ways it may well be that this Century will be

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a century characterized by the emotion of fear for many people and fear doesn't stay fear it often becomes anger and anger and fear are often exploited by

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folks who uh use those emotions as a ways of as a as a way of building their political Authority to deepen divisions within their society to draw together their followers into sort of a fevered

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pitch and uh and use and use the exploitation as political opportunists use the exploitation of fear and anger to build their Authority and Power and this isn't something that we know

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now is just characteristic of say America or other societies around the world we see the same kind of distemper the same kind of emotional uh

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reactions and social divisions that are being politically exploited in many cases in Canada now and I think uh we shouldn't have been surprised by the truckers Convoy but now we understand

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that these phenomena are occurring in our country too so what do we do how do we respond to this Global poly crisis and I could do a whole talk on our analysis of the poly crisis the

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specifics of how these stresses connect together how triggers and stresses work to produce certain kinds of crises how certain kinds of crises can Cascade to produce others but I think you get the idea I think you

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you get the sense that we're in trouble so what do we do in particular how how do we Orient ourselves as individuals in the Societies in this world that it seems to be such a scary place and not

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just succumb to fear and anger well I argue we must address This Global poly crisis along two simultaneous pathways and the first is pretty obvious you actually have to deal with the

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underlying drivers the the stresses that are causing these problems you need to get a handle on carbon emissions you need to deal with economic inequality and security with systemic racism with

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ideological polarization and the whole list of things and we're not doing a very good job on many of these right now it's one of the things that's leading to what I would call the legitimate legitimization of our technocratic

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Elites in other words because they're not solving our problems very well people are not supporting those Elites in their management of our societies as much as they were and they're turning to other kinds of explanations and other

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kinds of leaders for for comfort and for answers in a world that's very scary well we need to do a better job and I will talk more about this about especially with carbon emissions how I

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think we can do a better job but we also secondly need to address the psychological impacts of the poly crisis and and you have to do this because if

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you don't address the psychological impacts the anger and the fear then you're not going to get any of the solutions because people will give up they'll fall into despair or they'll be distracted by fighting with each other and they won't actually address the

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underlying stresses and problems and this is where hope comes in because hope is really the antidote to fear and anger and uh I realized that after

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having written two books that were essentially diagnostic that unpacked the challenges humankind is facing the Ingenuity Gap and the upside of down I realized that I fundamentally had to

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address what this is doing in our minds to our sense of possibility and our sense of hope and there's the book commanding hope which is right there too and they're copies outside on the table for sale

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so this book I wrote fundamentally for Sarah and the children that I've had with Sarah Wolfe that's Kate this is a photograph

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in 2012 that's Kate uh on my shoulders and Ben holding my hand uh on the beach so Kate was four and Ben was seven at that point and uh I that's about when I

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started writing this book and I it took me eight years it was far harder than any other book I've ever written and uh it I was trying to answer the question what I'm what am I going to tell what

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are Sarah and I going to tell Ben and Kate when they grow up and they start to realize what kind of world they're growing into and my guess is that many of you with your children or your grandchildren have asked the same question

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and uh a hundred thousand words later I had sort of an answer but it's really really hard and it's really in in the end it was about how do we sustain their hope

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we noticed even though we didn't spend a lot of time talking about world problems we noticed that every time they heard about something like climate change or a war somewhere but especially climate change because that's very scary for young people

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uh they uh you know Ben or or Kate would say oh well we're we're doomed so they would use a vernacular word you can imagine which one and uh uh and and both of us both Sarah and I

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automatically would reach into the toolkit for hope that's what you do but you're not right you're not doomed you you it's not the end of the world you're not fubard or whatever you want to say you you you

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there are things you can do there are things we can do there's still possibility in front of you so this is important because I realize that hope is actually an essential emotion it's it's uh and and there's a big

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debate about whether we need hope as it turns out as hope gets harder to get some people say well we should just jettison it it's not so important but you don't do that with your kids

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right and I I thought to myself no what we need to do is have a much more muscular notion of Hope the title commanding hope basically says

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it's a double entender an intentional double entender the hope is a plastic emotion we can make it into what we want to a certain extent so we command it to be different from what we conventionally think it to

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be and that more muscular form of Hope can command us to make us feel that we have more agency in response to our problems so starting with hope is a very

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critical leverage point in addressing the challenges we face Philip mentioned that the Cascade Institute is interested in identifying High leverage intervention points places where you can go in and make a

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relatively small intervention to produce a really big change well I have to think that hope is one of those places it's an emotion that is ripe for reconfiguration rethinking reimagining it's essential if we're to solve

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problems like the polycrisis because if we don't have hope we're not going to bother trying I mean it's so it's pretty obvious isn't it right but hope isn't simple and my argument in commanding hope is

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kind of a full-throated response to the folks who would uh who who spouse a particular kind of Hope which I sort of call the it's the it's not so bad kind of hope it's not so

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bad with hyphens between the words right so they go out and say well it's not as bad as that because you look around you see these good things that are happening in the world and there's always lots of good things happening and and that's good but the larger picture may be really terrible

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but instead they focus on the good stuff uh and that's that's how we are supposed to sustain Our Hope but people people aren't stupid they step back and they think well the larger picture is really bad

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and so that's not a very effective form of Hope and in fact it's ripe for Attack by a whole bunch of people who think that hope should be tossed out the Widow a window defenestrated I love that word

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I don't get a chance to use it very much so so uh you know people who who claim that hope is fundamentally and inescapably false it leads us to to shift or distort the probabilities

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of the future that we want so that we're more optimistic than we should be they're basically biased we're biased thinking that the probability of a hopeful future is higher than it actually is it's naive because they

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would say these critics would say because it doesn't give us a clear sense for how we get from here to there from where we are right now to the Future that we want and then it's conducive to passivity because in many cases people

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will say I hope it's going to get better I hope things I hope that the world will not breach the two degrees Celsius barrier but it's nothing I can do about it so I'm just going to sit back and wait and watch

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well I think those critiques of the standard understanding of Hope are perfectly valid so what I propose in commanding hope is a uh is a notion of hope that

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counter poses to each of those critiques an alternative understanding of Hope hope that's honest instead of false astute instead of naive and Powerful instead of passive

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I'm not going to talk about all of those this evening but the triplet I believe creates a very powerful muscular robust notion of hope that works well in a world where things seem to be falling

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apart and that keeps you focused on taking a step forward to try to make it a better place and keeping your emotional and psychological well-being at the same time so let me say a few words about honest

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hope and I'm going to link this back these comments back to those two things I said that we need to do in response to the polycrisis we need to solve the underlying stresses and we need to deal with the

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psychological impacts of the poly crisis so that we don't slip into despair fear and anger so let's start with honest hope and here I'm really going to focus on practical Solutions so

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basically that first response which is let's deal with some of the underlying challenges there's a deep tension between hope and honesty and that's why you get the it's not so bad kind of hope

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because when you take a really close look at what's happening in the world and I spend a lot of time reading climate science it's not a pretty picture and and this is a conversation that climate scientists are having all the

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time about how they cope with what they're learning about what's happening in the climate right so honesty can actually threaten hope if

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this world is dangerous and moving what appears to be a a negative Direction honesty about that can be can be threatening to hope you have to have a kind of hope that is that is able to

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buffer itself against the reality of what's Happening we're all much more susceptible to the reassuring lie than to the Inconvenient Truth all of us this is just natural it's human

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nature right we like to be told that our leaders have this under control we like to be told that it's actually not a problem and it's all being made up by a bunch of scientists who want to pad their their research budgets

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right um because that allows us not to have to think about it but this is what's happening this is the measurements of carbon dioxide in the

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atmosphere and on the top of mountains in Hawaii Mauna Loa and then more recently a different man because they had to move the observatory and it's still an exponential curve we

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have been working on climate issues supposedly for about four decades we've certainly been talking about them for four decades and we've invested a lot of money to try to get our carbon dioxide emissions down but a primary energy consumption in the

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world 75 is still from fossil fuels and I don't see any real change in the direct trajectory of that curve you might wonder why the way by the way why it's a Sawtooth Arrangement it's because it's it's

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because you get this pulse of carbon dioxide in the northern hemisphere in the fall as you get the decay of vegetative matter and then it's sucked back out of the atmosphere uh the following spring as photosynthesis starts to uh to kick in

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but the trend line if you draw a line through the Sawtooth and you can see that it's steadily upwards supposedly we reduced our carbon dioxide output globally about seven percent during the pandemic which is you can see should be

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2020 to 2021 right there I don't see much difference do you so core of honest hope is that you you have to you have to actually come to terms with

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what I call the enough versus feasible dilemma and it's really acute with something like climate change on the one hand changes that would be enough to make a real difference let's say to keep temperature to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius

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and on the planet changes that would actually get us there with Technologies institutional changes carbon taxes whatever aren't politically socially culturally

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technologically feasible on the other hand changes that are feasible the stuff we can do isn't going to be enough to keep us to 1.5 or 2 degrees and that and this is a dilemma that

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actually crops up for just about every one of these stresses there's the stuff that we think we can do politically and socially that's feasible and we kind of do that and we just hope the problem isn't as bad as it looks

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right because we can't get to enough well it turns out that changing the light bulbs wasn't enough right that cartoon I noticed today was done in

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2007. extraordinarily prescient given what we're seeing around the world today so how do you think about this while being kind of a bit of a nerd who wants to get really

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analytical about things I think in terms of the Venn diagram and you can think of solutions for the climate problem that would be enough and those that would be feasible and too often right now it seems like these two

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sets of solutions don't overlap and the first thing if you're going to if you're going to have honest hope is to recognize that this is a real problem and not shove it under the carpet

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the second thing is you have to try to find solutions that are in that overlap Zone you try to have to try to create that overlap and so I'm going to talk for just a few minutes I'm keeping an eye on the time here just a few minutes about what I think

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we can do with respect to climate that we're working on at the Cascade Institute that's both enough and feasible potentially both enough and feasible so this is now addressing the underlying stress of

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climate change you create honest Hope by actually focusing on practical solutions to problems and the problem of the poly crisis is going to be increasingly driven by climate change and climate

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change and being really reductionist about it that's why I have it kind of pointy text here it's mainly a problem of providing huge quantities of high power density zero carbon energy and the key concept there is high power density

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it means you need sources of energy that produce a lot of watts per square meter on the surface of the planet okay so a depending on how you calculate how you add up the area that's used by oil

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rigs and oil wells and stuff like that a standard natural gas or oil well will produce thousands of watts of energy per square meter uh a nuclear power plant about a thousand watts per square meter for the

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area of the nuclear power plant a downtown in downtown Toronto the towers TD Tower and the lakes the big Scotiabank Towers they're all consuming three four five thousand watts per

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square meter right so there's kind of congruity between our sources of energy in terms of power density and our power density of consumption especially in our urban areas or in our factories and

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processing plants aluminum smelters and the like where you need thousands of watts per square meter the problem with these guys is that solar wind in a big wind array produces

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four five watts per square meter and solar and a big solar array may be 40. which means you have to cover huge areas of land in order to provide the power to

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maintain the kind of complexity high energy intensity societies that we're used to in Technologies we're used to now maybe we can live really differently but I'm not sure actually we'd want to live in that world uh that with much

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less energy intensity and I'm not sure we want to cover a lot of the landscape when we should be giving it back to Nature at a time it's under enormous stress from climate change with wind turbines and solar panels and oh by the way research just two weeks ago said

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these guys are chewing up bats all over the world killing a lot of bats okay Birds too probably so what we're focusing on at the Cascade Institute and I'd love to do another

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talk about this someday because I can get really fanatical about this one is is what we call Ultra deep geothermal power it turns out there's enough energy to power the entire species for any kind of

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projects societies we want to build thousands of times over about 10 kilometers that way it's not very far away it's just really hard to get to

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and we need to be able to drill through really hard rock the kind of I I put myself to University when I was at UVic I was going out to Alberta every summer working in the oil patch I worked as a motor man and a

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roughneck on oil rigs and gas rigs so I know something about drilling and the kind of drilling we do in in that we're really good at is through soft sedimentary rock we need to be able

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to get through Rock that is a hundred to a thousand times harder igneous rock metamorphic rock and we need to be able to do it fast and cheaply we believe the Cascade Institute that this is actually a technically tractable problem

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you go around the world and you talk to drilling companies and drilling teams and they tend to be led by Canadians but the most advanced research on drilling deep fast cheaply through very hard rock

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is not in Canada it's in the UK it's in Slovakia and it's in the United States that doesn't make a lot of sense we should be at the frontier here and we believe that this is the power source that could literally power the planet

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the cool thing about it is that you can drop the wells in the middle of a city and you don't need a huge grid to supply the power you can take with a company that's pioneering this in the United States with microwave technology

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wants to take take existing thermal-fired power plants Coal Fired power plants strip out the boilers drop the Wells on the on the site of the power plant and hook into the existing turbines and

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use the grid that's linked up to the power plant so you don't have to build any more electrical infrastructure this is serious stuff it's going to be done this is a technical problem that's way easier than Fusion which we have

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invested hundreds of billions of dollars and it can give us the kind of zero carbon high power density thousands of watts per square meter power anywhere in the planet that we need so that's a high

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leverage intervention point and it's a reason when I when when Kate and Ben say what can we do I say well one thing we can do is develop Ultra deep geothermal power so I've got to leave that because I am

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starting to rant a bit and get there's our paper if you want it it's online and we're just ramping up a major research project in this area so let's talk about powerful hope and

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I'll see another five minutes or so and we'll be done uh this is really now so the first thing I was the first response to generate hope is to actually do

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something in the world a practical project in this case I'm proposing a major investment in Ultra deep geothermal power which could involve all kinds of Financial and Technical technical expertise produce employment

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opportunities across the country very exciting but we also need to work on what's happening in here in terms of what kind of opportunities and possibilities for the

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future that people see uh and Powerful hope so I've gone from honest hope to powerful hope powerful hope is really about having a vision of the future now that vision of the future may include things like geothermal power but I

00:37:27

actually don't think that's the important when you think about what the future is going to be like sometimes we imagine you know an urban landscape with things flying through the air you know uh people eating test tube meat some

00:37:39

different kinds of social and political Arrangements but really what we should be focusing on in terms of our Clear Vision of a desirable future are the principles on which it's anchored and that really on which it's

00:37:51

based and in the last chapter of commanding hope I try to sketch this story we can talk about the Technologies we can talk about the institutions but what kind of societies are we going to have

00:38:04

what kind of world are we going to have in terms of in terms of the the uh the moral foundations and the principles on which it's based and therefore that I identify security

00:38:17

opportunity Justice and identity and security is really about trying to reassure people that that the dangers they're seeing can be managed

00:38:29

and that uh and and that their lives aren't going to fall apart and the people that they love the most aren't going to be threatened by these changes in the world opportunity is about giving people the sense that they can flourish

00:38:43

in the future that they won't be constrained by danger and threat but they can still Express their agencies in ways that allow them to flourish and then Justice is

00:38:55

reassuring people that the distribution of wealth and power and resources will be fair within the society no matter what position they have within that Society security opportunity Justice and then

00:39:09

identity finally is about creating a sense that we're all in this challenge together a a sense of a moral Community or a moral Commonwealth to use the term that I like from the late Berkeley

00:39:22

sociologist Philip Selznick and I would say a little bit about all of these but I didn't just pull them out of thin air because they're really grounded in my understanding and research on the nature of human beings

00:39:35

especially what I would call their emotional temperaments and this is a chart that I have in my book where I I suggest that people kind of sort themselves into three categories now not

00:39:47

entirely all of us expressed at least or most of us expressed at least part of each one of these possibilities but there will be Tendencies for people to migrate and towards one apex of the

00:40:01

triangle rather than another exuberant people with an uh exuberant emotional temperament are extremely excited about life they're passionate about exercising

00:40:13

in their agency they are their principal aspiration is opportunity they have an aversion to constraint and limits they hate pessimists and they are joyful people we all know them uh

00:40:25

Prudential people are much more aware of the dangers in their world and uh and they are having aversion to danger and recklessness on profligacy but that I would say and like to argue

00:40:39

about this I would say that they are they are much more um uh responsive to the emotion of awe than others and then empathetic people

00:40:52

are those who are concerned about the state and well-being of other people and they're deeply compassionate and they their principal aspiration is Justice and fairness now you can see

00:41:04

that the the uh principles on which I think we should build our future Vision correspond to the first three of these emotional

00:41:17

temperaments so why am I saying this because what happens in our society is if you look for instance at the political programs and the rhetoric of our dominant political parties those on the right will tend to appeal or to

00:41:31

appeal to two of these three categories say the exuberant and the Prudential and those on the left will appeal the two say the empathetic and the Prudential and it produces it exacerbates deep

00:41:43

divisions that don't bring us together in a hopeful way around the challenges we face so any vision of the future I would argue that is worth a salt and is going to encourage people to pull together

00:41:56

into that moral Commonwealth that I was talking about has to appeal to all three of these categories of people and bring them together around common projects and that leads to this last principle of

00:42:09

identity this sense of having a common notion of we that brings us together the Princeton philosopher Australian Princeton philosopher Peter Singer has

00:42:22

talked about the the broadening radius of our moral uh of our moral scope but those we include within our moral Community uh potentially to include

00:42:35

biota and animals for instance outside the human community I'm really focused on the extent to which we can create a sense of community at the planetary level okay

00:42:49

now this sounds terribly naive but one thing that I've noticed in traveling around the world doing research uh social science research in a dozen or so countries all over the world is that

00:43:01

those societies that function best to solve their problems are those with the strongest sense of a commitment up to the common wheel from the top of the society to the bottom from the elites to the bottom

00:43:14

rungs socioeconomic rungs in the society those societies where everybody has a sense or more people have a sense that they're kind of in it together and that they are responsible for the well-being of each other are the ones

00:43:26

that do best and those where everybody's kind of out for themselves and especially the elites the elites start to defect and just defend their own interests as we're seeing in the United States right now run into terrible trouble

00:43:40

so I don't think we're going to evolve this sense of species-wide moral Community a sense a species-wide sense of weeness easily I think it could be an

00:43:52

enormously traumatic difficult process this Century potentially involving a huge amount of violence but I also think that it's a genuine possibility for these three reasons

00:44:04

because things are really different now than they ever have been before on this planet ever before for the species we are more connected together than we ever were before we have abundant scientific knowledge about the nature of the

00:44:16

problems we face and we are have this emerging awareness of common fate a recognition that when it comes to problems like climate change and the pandemic we're either going to solve them together or we're not going to

00:44:28

solve them and we're all going to slide down the slope together maybe the wealthy and Powerful a little bit farther up the slope But ultimately will meet the same fate now just to give you a sense of how

00:44:40

different things are over time must wrap up how different things are hyper connectivity between middle of March 2020 and the middle of April 2020.

00:44:53

uh four billion people about half the world's population locked down between the middle of March 2020 and middle of April 2020 the concept of social and physical distancing went viral and around the planet and changed

00:45:06

people's behavior all over the planet never has such a large fraction of the human species changed Its Behavior so fast and that was entirely because of the connectivity within the system the

00:45:19

information connectivity within the system abundant scientific knowledge within two days of the Chinese downloading the the RNA sequence for the SARS CO2 virus in January 2020 Pfizer

00:45:31

and moderna had the morphology of the vaccine molecules they were going to manufacture the basic shape of them the period of time after that before we got the vaccines into our arms was taken

00:45:43

up with testing but the previous average time for vaccinating 40 percent of the world's population for any other epidemic or pandemic or any other viral disease

00:45:56

had been 80 years 40 percent of the world's population this time we did it in two forty percent of the world's population now it was unfair the rich people were in front of the line and poor people were were left out in many cases but

00:46:10

there was it still was an incredible difference from what we've seen before so there is this opportunity for radical shifts in humankind's behavior and

00:46:23

Outlook that we can't even imagine at this moment when I sit down with Ben and Kate and and they express their despair about the state of the world and their fear I say we don't actually understand

00:46:34

these systems well enough to know what positive possibilities there are but we do know that the world is very different from the way it has been before and there may be opportunities that we can't even imagine

00:46:48

if you'd said on April excuse me August the 18th 2018 that a girl of 15 was going to sit on the steps of the Swedish Parliament buildings with a sign saying School strike for climate and she was

00:47:01

going to mobilize hundreds of millions of people around the world and fundamentally change the conversation about climate around the world you would have said oh that's a crazy idea but there she is on August the 19th 2018.

00:47:13

greater tunberg and she did it great at tunberg created a possibility and made it real there's this idea and complexity science called the adjacent possible it's just what the boundary of the beyond the

00:47:26

boundary of the real and the visible things that we know are possible and she saw that possibility maybe she didn't maybe she just felt she had to do something and she pulled it into reality we don't know what the other

00:47:38

possibilities are at this point for radical change in human in the human future so last slide second to last this when I

00:47:50

when I talked to our kids and when I think about how I respond to these situations in very practical personal terms in terms of my everyday life I think about dividing my life into these three categories or they suggest that

00:48:03

they should divide their lives into these two categories of activity in order to sustain their hope they need to work on developing the muscle of practical problem solving in

00:48:15

every aspect of their lives fixing engines growing food building things solving social problems being an effective intermediary between contending groups all of these are sort of the the Practical problems of which

00:48:29

we're going to be faced in our everyday lives more and more in the future and you need to get good you need to have that kind of nimble nimbleness and problem-solving sort of macgyver-esque ability to to figure out what's

00:48:41

available in your immediate vicinity in terms of resources and get to work to solve problems so that's the first work on being a better Problem Solver engage in whatever way you think is

00:48:55

appropriate with addressing some of these problems just get involved even if you can't see that it's going to lead you necessarily to where we want to be in the future getting involved is a very

00:49:05

important way of making making yourself more resilient psychologically in the face of these challenges and then finally experience and I've come up with this silly little term it's called tmig

00:49:19

this moment is good tmig and every time I'm doing something maybe I'm having a teammaker right now uh every time every time I'm doing something where I think oh this is really wonderful I'm holding Sarah's

00:49:31

hand or I'm having a wonderful conversation with my kids or seeing something beautiful outdoors I just think ah teammate right things are going to get rough almost certainly we need to recognize these moments

00:49:45

especially in this extraordinary place on the west coast where things are beautiful and wonderful and hold on to them and make sure that we see them and feel them this is a kind of mindfulness I'd like to put a label on it the T make label but I think it's important to

00:49:57

remind ourselves and to be able to remember that we did that in the times when things aren't so happy so thank you very much I really appreciate despite the few technical glitches there

00:50:10

I really enjoyed talking to you and I hope we have a little good conversation for the next few minutes [Applause]

00:50:22

[Music] well Ted you've left us I think one minute for questions so I hope everybody can stay just a little bit longer I really want to thank you for that really

00:50:39

engaging and interesting uh presentation um I I'll start with a few questions but I do encourage the audience of course to use the QR code here to ask questions as well and we will have the opportunity

00:50:53

for some roving mics too so please do think of your questions and I'll get started on some of mine as you were talking actually I was crossing out prospective questions because you were

00:51:06

you were answering them but you know those slides you showed about what happened in British Columbia over the last few years and many of us here in the room would have experienced

00:51:17

that directly you know the heat Dome the fire the atmospheric Rivers all of that which hit us in quick succession and I know you are a very close Observer

00:51:30

of Str you know you talked about the kind of stresses that are out there and Trigger events are there any systems you're looking at right now that are worrying you or that you are finding are

00:51:42

heading towards those those trigger events I have it well climate change is kind of a first among equals it's always there and it seems to be and I tried to stress how

00:51:56

it's getting worse but but uh I think we're not paying as as much attention right at the moment to uh potential Financial instabilities uh within banking systems

00:52:10

within China so one thing that's happened the consequence on the pandemic is that there there was this shift in the equilibrium nature of the global economy from uh basically a a low inflation low

00:52:24

interest rate regime with relatively low growth to a high inflation High interest rate regime which still appears relatively low growth but that shift has has produced

00:52:36

we haven't seen that the consequences work themselves through the global economy yet it has produced enormous stress for the balance sheets and the business models of a lot of banks

00:52:47

and uh you know that's exactly why Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt and a lot of other Regional and mid-sized Banks and some local banks in the United States are in in danger the Chinese

00:53:01

financial situation is really quite concerning uh because of the collapse and property values and uh and because municipalities have enormous amounts of

00:53:12

debt and they are uh and they have been able to sustain that debt by basically selling off the rights to develop land and they can't do that anymore because a lot of big developers are going bankrupt so there's some fundamental contradictions in the

00:53:25

Chinese economy that aren't getting the attention that they deserve then then you know the the the other place where I am really very concerned is that the progression of populist

00:53:37

authoritarianism in the world seems to be if not accelerating it's certainly advancing pretty steadily erohan and turkey uh you know he he was re-elected uh

00:53:50

Trump is enormously strong in the United States at this point I I think he's going to bury DeSantis I think he's going to get the Republican nomination and he's got a very good shot at being president again and then that changes

00:54:01

that changes the whole dynamic of the conflict in Eastern Europe with Russia and Putin it's the Europeans will be on their own trying to support the ukrainians at that point so so yeah those are the things besides climate

00:54:15

change those are the things that are really on my mind right at the moment but then you've got this other stuff like large language model AI That's just popped out of the blue that it has this potential for radically

00:54:29

changing the way we're operating our societies and we haven't really nobody's wrapped their heads around that that's why the leaders of the AI companies are so worried they just published a letter I think yesterday saying we need regulation because we don't know so

00:54:41

there you go but this just keeps you awake at night so let's talk about something else well you'll notice by the tone of my questions and probably of the Prudential temperament so Less on the Hope side

00:54:55

um but I wanted to as well as if you could elaborate a little bit on how that synchronization works because that's what I found so fascinating about your work because you know I was of the view and I think many of us were that we were

00:55:08

in the middle of a perfect storm and I think you debunked the notion of a perfect storm and say this is actually a synchronization and these crises feed off each other they shape each other and they kind of cascade into each other

00:55:19

right so that's still a hypothesis I mean I would love to be proven wrong and that this is just a coincidence and we look back in 10 years and say that was a really rough time I had all this stuff happening but but what we're seeing is

00:55:32

we look under the surface is we're seeing relationships and linkages between these problems so that that are tending to cause them to link together and I I sometimes put

00:55:45

some causal diagrams up that shows how some of the systems are linking together I think it's possible to model some of this quite effectively so here's here's uh a key thing um most big system modeling for instance

00:55:59

for climate modeling or the economic impacts of climate and with things called integrated assessment models are going all the way back to world three models of limits to growth in the 1970s they they all try to kind of represent

00:56:12

the whole system right everything that's going on in the system which is really hard because these Global Systems human systems technological and ecological and otherwise are incredibly complex so so what we're doing in the Cascade

00:56:26

Institute is instead we're dropping out the kind of 20 top stresses because they are reasonably slow moving you can sort of track their trajectories over time they may be non-linear maybe accelerating or something like this but

00:56:38

you can still see the trends and then you look at the relationships between these stresses and you you you abstract away from a lot of the rest of the complexity you basically say under normal circumstances the world is

00:56:50

a stabilized place it's sitting in an equilibrium it has what's complexity scientists call homeostatic mechanisms basically like the kinds of things that keep our body temperature at the same level all the time so so it's self-equilibrating keeping we

00:57:04

don't understand all of those mechanisms but we know they're there and we don't have to figure them all out we can see these stresses and we know these stresses are actually we can weakening some of those mechanisms so you go you look at the stresses and you

00:57:17

look at how they are actually making the system less stable over time and I think you can get much better predictive accuracy the only other thing I'd say is that I I have a I'm even

00:57:28

thinking of anachronism acronym find the positive feedbacks bind to you positive feedback well there it is so so uh I I tell my researchers look for the

00:57:41

positive feedbacks these are not good feedbacks these are self-reinforcing feedbacks where you get a cycle of of causation that causes it to reinforce itself those

00:57:52

positive feedbacks which may cross several systems like climate economic pandemic Health Systems those positive feedbacks are where you're getting the synchronization if you can find those

00:58:04

then you're making real Headway on the synchronization effect and then the other part of it is you look for the places where you can cut in and block them because you don't want to just stand back and say oh this looks really bad you need to actually do something about

00:58:16

it and uh and and the positive feedbacks may be places where you can go in you can actually intervene uh but that's the story still to be told with our research then before I turn to the audience

00:58:28

questions then a question on interventions can you give us just an example of a of an intervention which can make a big difference well I'm just going to talk about Ultra deep geothermal I tell you I can

00:58:40

be a fanatic about this I it's it's I study climate issues for almost 40 years and climate is basically an energy problem and uh my second major Book for a

00:58:56

general audience and it's out there on the on the on the table is the upside of down and it's all about the relationship between energy and society and energy and complexity and Society so complex systems require big inputs of energy you

00:59:08

can be more efficient you can be more clever about how you use energy but the bottom line is the Technologies and the social complexity and the diversity of job occupations and everything else the levels of Education that we have

00:59:21

that we enjoy uh require enormous inputs of energy and I use these figures in a as you know in a presentation I made yesterday at Raw roads we're hooked on fossil fuels and there's a reason why we are because it's an extraordinary source

00:59:35

of energy two tablespoons of crude oil contain as much free energy as would be expended by an adult male laborer in a day you every time you fill up your gas tank if you still have a gas tank uh

00:59:48

you're putting is you're putting two years of manual labor in that in that gas tank uh we built this edifice this extraordinarily complex society off fossil fuels 40 of the carbon in

01:00:01

your bodies comes from fossil fuels from natural gas coal or or oil it's gone up into the atmosphere it's been fixed by through photosynthetic processes into your food and then you've consumed it and Incorporated it into your proteins

01:00:14

so we are a fossil fuel society we have to solve the energy problem we don't solve the energy problem Nothing Else Matters and the only Tech technology I can see to answer your question directly the only technology I can see that's

01:00:28

going to get us anywhere close to where we need to be fast enough is ultra deep geothermal we can't do it with wind and solar which is you just can't close the gap thank you okay we'll turn to questions

01:00:40

and um are we taking questions we have quite a few from coast we could probably have a whole evening with you and then we'll take some thank you

01:00:53

the questions come through on the Forum saying all from Anonymous however if you would like to claim your question you can simply raise your hand as I speak it aloud and it will be addressed in that way or you may remain anonymous I always

01:01:06

like to speak to the person who's asked the question if it's all possible uh one of the questions tonight is what is one thing each of us can do starting tomorrow to make use of this information

01:01:19

right well look I'm a big believer in the fact that uh despite the slide about changing the light bulbs that small things do add up when they're done by enough people and uh so um

01:01:32

there's a lot of stuff we can do in our lives to change our habits to change our consumption practices to encourage governments to restructure the way energy is used

01:01:44

I I I you know in terms of your personality and temperament it may not be the kind of thing you want to do to get involved in sort of local politics or otherwise but

01:01:57

getting engaged in some kind of social activity or social movement to push these changes forward but then just on a practical level just look around your household these at what you can do and change I

01:02:09

know many of us just about all of us have already done a lot right but there's still more you know I was thinking just to give you an example and I don't know how I would solve this one today I was cooking a bunch of chicken for my kids right on the grill and it

01:02:22

was uh they were boneless thighs and I was thinking as I was flipping these things over on the grill I was thinking because I was reading recently the research has come out that says that the the avian flu that's wiping birds out around the world

01:02:35

developed within poultry Farms right so we have this situation where where we get zoonotic viral jumping into poultry farms and then they mutate within the culture of the virus mutates within the poultry farms and then it jumps back out

01:02:50

into the wild wild the wild populations and starts killing birds in this case all over the planet right and that's because we like cheap chicken well I don't know exactly what the

01:03:02

solution to this is but it's time we figured this out I'm a big fan of test tube meat but uh um you know you you got to think about it you know as as flipping these things over I was thinking I'm here I'm part of

01:03:14

the problem we're all deeply embedded in these problems and we need to be very aware of that to be paying attention and do adjusting what we can do if enough people do it it starts to add up to a really big change

01:03:27

thanks we take another question into the audience questions everyone's looking at me all my questions are on the screen another question if anyone would like to again claim their question you can raise

01:03:41

your hand would you talk about the rules of national governments in exacerbating or addressing polycrisis right okay so I'm a Believer in government who asked the question can I

01:03:54

hello there so I'm a Believer in government uh I think government is uh can be and it a Force for good and many of the problems we Face are what social

01:04:07

scientists would call common good or Collective action problems and actually require coordination from government to be addressed so there is a a political philosophy of

01:04:20

course that is increasingly strong in the United States the government is not good for anything and you just have to get government out of the way and it used to be kind of uh uh anti-government light view I mean just get it out of the

01:04:33

market let the market Rip but now it's like you don't want the government doing anything uh and I think that is potentially catastrophic for addressing these problems um uh the problem is that most of our

01:04:45

institutions in the Democratic World evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries at a time when uh Transportation the fastest mode of transportation was horseback and almost all the information was communicated verbally

01:04:58

and uh and now we're in a world that's just radically different accelerating change and our institutions are not designed for this among other things we have

01:05:11

things like the official opposition that has the job of opposing everything right well that made sense once but now all the problems are so complex that that it's uh that just standing up and

01:05:24

saying what's wrong isn't going to get you very far and what people are doing wrong so I I think there's some really profound institutional challenges here government is essential but the government we have right now is facing

01:05:37

what I would call an Ingenuity Gap it's not delivering Solutions as fast as it needs to and as a result government is becoming less and less respected I talked about the delegitimization of technocratic Elites political and technocratic Elites it's a

01:05:50

real challenge but government governments that are governed by the rule of law and that are democratic in the fundamental

01:06:01

normative framework and principles are going to be essential if we're going to get ahead of problems like climate change and right now they're kind of on the ropes that wasn't very helpful but [Laughter]

01:06:14

but it was honest it's honest I think we had a hand up uh over here I believe yes dude do we have a mic we'll bring a mic I've been hearing uh reports in the news about uh geothermal

01:06:35

plants causing earthquakes oh good question and uh I was wondering if you could address that oh that I I planted him so he could ask this question um yeah so I told you I can I can go on about this

01:06:49

but very quickly uh uh there there is conventional geothermal and then Ultra deep conventional geothermal uses sedimentary drilling technology you know the cones the drilling bits we are familiar with

01:07:02

the three cone bits of drilling through Limestone or sedimentary rock and uh those Wells tend to be fairly shallow they're drilled through sedimentary rock in places where the heat is fairly close to the surface and

01:07:15

those Wells tend the places where you can get that that heat and usually it's wet Rock too you were drilling into wet Rock so you can get the hot water and bring it up to the surface to drive turbines the big

01:07:28

geysers geothermal plant in California is like that it's a huge plant um but hot wet Rock close to the surface and sedimentary systems tends to be that tends to exist along the boundaries of

01:07:41

plates where the plates are coming together because the heat has come close to the surface of the Earth in those areas and of course when you pump fluid down into those areas you can induce earthquakes because it causes the plates

01:07:53

to slip so the the reason you want to be able to go deep in hard rock to places the reason you want to do that is because you can get away from those tectonically active zones and reduce the

01:08:07

earthquake risk and probably to zero among other things you're going so deep that even if there is a little bit of slippage down there it's a long way away and it will probably won't be felt on the surface so there there's a huge

01:08:18

Advantage from going from say four to five kilometers in sedimentary rock to 10 to 15 kilometers in igneous rock but right now just to give you a sense if we want to drill a well in igneous rock to 10 kilometers it will cost us

01:08:31

100 million dollars we need to get that price to make geothermal functional and economically viable down to between five and ten million dollars we think it's technologically feasible as long as you

01:08:44

are using conventional mechanical grinding technology there are four possibilities out there plasma microwave water jet and percussive and at least three of them are moving very fast and Canadians aren't involved in

01:08:57

any of them right at the moment I think you can tell Tad's passion for deep geothermal so I didn't stop in that one we we have we'll take a couple more questions and we have uh one down here

01:09:10

thank you we could get a mic I think somebody's bringing you a mic and yes here we go thank you and then there is a question up there later so if you're just here

01:09:23

with the mic that's great thank you hello um hi Dad um I have a I'd like to maybe start by being staying to truths I guess

01:09:35

um the first being that um though this is you know this is a remarkable event um and you you called yourself a nerd at one point when you had the Venn diagrams

01:09:46

and I to him nerd in that way um but there are a surprisingly small amount of nerds who would show up to an event like this read a book like this

01:09:59

one that you've written which is uh incredibly important um the other kind of Truth is is that that art that stories that um you know TV shows streaming services

01:10:12

[Music] um concerts all these sort of things um is remarkably powerful and popular um it reaches just about everyone so if

01:10:25

we are to tap into these high leverage intervention points and to solve these huge issues is or could art in the very general sense

01:10:39

story et cetera be used as one of those tools it's a great question and the answer is absolutely and I have been thinking about this for a long time I mean I

01:10:51

through my books I do what I know best which is to take ideas and try to make them more understandable for broad audiences important ideas and and I think there's more than a few nerds out there I think

01:11:04

there are a lot of aspiring nerds and uh and I also start from the premise just on your first point I start from the premise that everybody's smart and it's just you need to get a little bit of their time and you need to walk through

01:11:17

very carefully say the basics of thermodynamics you know and I do that in the upside of down or some of the basic things about the psychology of Hope and just about anybody can understand that and understand why it's important that

01:11:30

in in actual effect many people are complex systems thinkers even though they don't know it they use Concepts like you know the straw that broke the camel's back or the hole is

01:11:42

more than the sum of Parts well the first one is the concept of non-linearity and the second one is the concept of emergence so it's all there you just have to draw it out and and and help people see the pieces so that's the

01:11:56

first thing but the second thing is this is you're right ultimately it's a very small slice and if you want to reach people on a broad way you need to you need to evoke the emotions that come with stories

01:12:09

um some of the movies about climate change recently which is the one uh with the meteorite that's going to hit the earth I was talking to somebody about it yeah don't look up right so so

01:12:22

I've actually a a person who's a big supporter of the Cascade Institute Joe McKinnis is a very close friend of James Cameron's and I've been having this kind of distant conversation with James Cameron because James Cameron

01:12:36

is probably one of the greatest um I guess could say uh he's a contemporary Storyteller right with an enormous Sway and you can tell where he falls on these

01:12:49

issues because it's Avatar is all about about uh changing our relationship to the natural world I think there are opportunities for for

01:13:03

um reaching people in new ways emotionally powerful ways across those three emotional temperaments that we haven't exploited and I think people like James Cameron have an intuition for that they haven't either hadn't exploited yet

01:13:15

effectively thank you thank you yes there's a question at the top there and I think I think

01:13:26

right here yes hi um my question is about electric cars I have one so careful yeah I have a hybrid but

01:13:40

um you said that 75 of the carbon is caused by fossil fuels and we definitely need to do something about that so electric cars seems on the surface like a good idea

01:13:52

but of course as we all I'm sure are aware is that the uh the lithium that's needed to create uh to create the batteries are mined in

01:14:03

places like Congo where human rights are zero it seems children are are killing themselves for us and the idea of recycling those batteries they're huge

01:14:16

what's it going to take before we can get to that point and the infrastructure that is needed for uh transforming within just a few short years if if Trudeau is correct

01:14:29

um it does seem to be quite impossible I came here tonight because I really do want to Hope but I find that there's so many times when we think oh there's the great technology that we soon discover that is not so great

01:14:42

yeah so uh there's no silver bullets and I would say that that's going to be almost certainly the case with the ultra deep geothermal too there will be there will be challenges and and consequences

01:14:55

that have to be managed so uh and you're right about everything you're saying about electric vehicles uh although um first of all it's 75 of the primary

01:15:08

consumption of energy is still fossil fuels in the world and uh and that's budged from what 78 like we've just made very little difference in the last few years but changing the transportation system

01:15:21

is a really critical part of that and one way or the other it has to be electrified it's it's just there's there's we can reduce the amount we use vehicles and cars and I think there's some space for adaptation there we can

01:15:34

increase the uh the the public transport live more densely in cities some of those changes will take a long time because they involve infrastructural changes but overall the transportation is going to have to Electrify

01:15:46

so um there is rapid progress on Battery Technology I was at a meeting at McGill University just a few weeks ago talking about ways of reducing the amount of lithium

01:15:59

recycling it can is going to get much more much more effective batteries will eventually be standardized there'll be robotic factories and they'll be pulled apart in the same ways and we'll get we'll get pretty close to 100 material

01:16:13

recycling uh it's the general conclusion of this conference of the of this Workshop I was at of the experts who were there is that we have we have enough of these minerals in the

01:16:25

world to run a world transportation system off electricity using batteries but we don't have enough if we need batteries to stabilize our grids because we've got intermittent power from solar

01:16:39

and wind okay and of course there's a huge demand for Batteries to stabilize the grid now if those bad those batteries though don't have to be lithium-based they can be other kinds of batteries they can be big bulky uh they

01:16:53

aren't don't have to be mobile they can be hydraulic batteries they're all kinds of things you can do there or we don't rely so heavily on wind and solar the bottom line is for EVS

01:17:06

there's no way out of this this car this climate change problem if we don't Electrify the transportation system we have to figure out to do it with the least load and and pressure on the

01:17:19

global ecosystems possible with all of the political and social consequences you're talking about eventually most of the need for these uh these Metals will be met through

01:17:30

recycling probably 80 or 90 percent there'll be enough in the system that can be recycled through the system but it's it's a big problem there's no question about it I would say though I would trade

01:17:44

an EV system with all the battery issues over uh the fossil fuel system that's wrecking the planet any day right

01:17:56

you'd add up the negatives on the fossil fuel side versus the negatives on on the emerging electric vehicle side and there's no comparison so I've seen many many hands and I know

01:18:09

we are way over time I'm going to give the loss There's an opportunity to talk to Tad afterwards up in the lobby so I'm going to give the last question is that Jasmine yes Jasmine hi Jasmine and if you could bring a mic down here please

01:18:21

thank you hi um what struck me about your presentation is the lack of intersectional analysis application of critical race Theory and the historical to contemporary engagement of settler

01:18:43

colonialism I think it's very easy to say to your children that you're not doomed if you're white because we know from the research on environmental racism that these violences and disasters are spread

01:18:56

disproportionately toward bipod communities many bipoc scholars evidence that we are not all part of the same Community when you refer to Identity we simply can't be when the

01:19:10

intersections of class race power and more those Dynamics differentiate our access to everything it's too simplistic to think that we can categorize people into their temperaments because those

01:19:22

temperaments are determined by their intersections in the communities and identities aforementioned so how do you reframe your idea of Hope to communities that this specific

01:19:33

conception that you've explained might not apply to as is specifically bipod communities and and just a side question if you have time how do you engage with degrowth theories

01:19:45

of capitalism in your work thank you yeah so so I take this really really seriously okay and you're right I I didn't address them in my presentation

01:19:59

they are certainly addressed in aspects of our research at the Cascade Institute so for instance one of our researchers has been doing a a very detailed

01:20:12

thoughtful study of the nature of power and how power is expressed and used within societies and I also will be first to admit that I am not well positioned to understand a lot of

01:20:25

the challenges that the bipart communities and others face and I would leave it to others to try to explain to me so I can understand better um nonetheless I would challenge you in a few points and we can have a separate

01:20:38

conversation about this um uh the differences between us are minuscule uh when we look at

01:20:52

the human species as a whole biological differences we are we are a common a common species right and we are facing some species-wide challenges on this

01:21:05

planet now the the responsibility for addressing those challenges is going to weigh most heavily on those with the greatest wealth and power and opportunity

01:21:16

uh and so the the responses that are unfold at a global level will almost inevitably involve if they're going to be just and fair if we're going to be really committed to

01:21:30

those principles of justice and fairness very substantial redistribution of wealth and power it's inescapable people don't want to hear that people at the top of the peep just don't want to hear that but I'm happy to say it I say

01:21:44

it in the book quite explicitly in the book how that's going to happen without Monumental violence is a really open question and and I I think that

01:21:57

if I put my hope somewhere is that we are in such an unusual situation in the history of the species now that maybe maybe there will be new moral and normative and cultural and identity

01:22:10

developments that will help us pull together around these problems but it's not going to happen without a lot of trauma the first process is as scarcity becomes worse the first things that will happen

01:22:22

are that people start fighting with each other because that's kind of what we've done in the past then at some point we might there might be a Dawning realization that this is actually not going to get us to where we need to be

01:22:35

and what evolves in terms of a moral framework and identity framework out of that I don't think we can say at this point so so we're under enormous stress and uh and and that creates potential

01:22:48

opportunities I would like to think that in 2100 post 2100 that we've gone through this critical period of trauma and transition and ended up with much more Humane Society where the kinds of diverse

01:23:01

groups that have been uh on the outside of the power hierarchies are are now uh able to flourish like everyone else can um I think that possibility is still

01:23:15

before us uh so that's my answer to the first question except I'd say that the temperamental differences I think I could show you some research suggests they exist in all

01:23:25

categories in all in all groups that yes the power relationships and the intersectionality within societies causes them to be expressed in somewhat different ways but the underlying temperamental differences are

01:23:39

common across all all cultures and all and all social groups so let's put that aside and we can continue the conversation on the degrowth stuff um and this I have an extended

01:23:51

section in the book about it too uh about uh growth and the challenge of growth we it's very easy to talk about degrowth but forty percent of the world's

01:24:04

population still lives on five dollars a day or less and they aspire to what we have and we can't just say oh sorry we got it now you can't dump your carbon into the atmosphere because you know it again

01:24:17

it's this redistributive issue we have to we have to go out of our way at this point and we're not doing a good job we're supposed to have 100 billion dollars in a fund to make this happen globally but we have to we have to actually make it

01:24:28

possible for the less economically advantaged people in the world to LeapFrog over this dirty development phase technologically dirty development phase and at the moment we're not doing we're not investing the resources

01:24:42

so um uh I'll just finish with something that that in May strike focuses a little bit unusual

01:24:54

um but I think it's true uh you don't you can hope for things that are low probability there's a there's a false assumption out there that hope you can that hope

01:25:09

requires a high probability of the outcome you're hoping for that's not the case you know any of you who are Physicians and you've had to tell somebody that they're desperately ill and say

01:25:21

terminally ill well or or could be terminally ill critically ill you say you know you've got a five percent chance of living and the person will say okay what can I do to make sure I fall in that five percent they will hope for

01:25:33

that five percent any of us would right I I think the chances just looking at the situation right now with all the stuff that's coming towards us and our deep commitment to fossil fuel consumption

01:25:46

the problems of systemic Injustice within our societies that you're talking about doesn't look good what are we at I present ten percent of having a human Humane Society and 2100 or Beyond

01:26:00

20 percent so sometimes I tell I you know I speak to young people a lot and the parents get really upset with me that the young people don't and and uh and they come up

01:26:11

one they come up to me and say so so what do you think the chances are we're going to pull out of this in a way that's a world that we want I don't know what are the chances it's too complex assistant to be sure about

01:26:24

what you know twenty percent let's say 20 and they say Okay 20 then and they walk off and they're going to aim for that 20 percent they're going to hope for that 20 and they're going to work for that 20 all right so I think it's kind of a it's

01:26:37

kind of a mugs game to try to estimate how how big a chance there is we just need to all work and try to open up as many possibilities as possible for creating the more just and prosperous Society broadly based

01:26:51

I'm serious about that Justice and fairness thing right well you heard hints of John Rawls and what I'm saying and we can have a separate conversation about John Ross but yes I think that that we

01:27:04

need to think about where we would situate ourselves if we didn't know where we were coming in what kind of principles of Justice we would adopt if we didn't know what kind of social status we were going to have in our society

01:27:16

and then it turns out that we come up with something resembling the golden rule or category categorical imperative that we need to create a system that is

01:27:28

fair as Fair as possible regardless of where you're situated socioeconomically in it so anyway I think that's it we we have to and we are way over time it was a really fascinating conversation

01:27:52

so I really want to thank you Ted for joining us tonight and giving us a lot to think about and thank you for those wonderful questions too um Ted's going to be up at the registration desk off to which to sign

01:28:05

books if you're interested and I encourage you to stop by and continue the conversation uh the other thing is I would love to thank our sponsor the Victoria Times Colonist and thank you to the roar Road

01:28:18

staff who helped coordinate this wonderful event but thank you most of all to all of you who came out to join us tonight I really really love seeing you all here we'll we will have more change makers speaker series uh coming

01:28:31

up later this year so watch the website rru changemakers.ca or follow our social media channels and see you next time and good night

01:28:42

everybody have a great evening thank you foreign