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foreign [Music]
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I'm a professor of climate change at the University of Exeter in the UK and I want to talk to you about positive tipping points that can help us avoid bad climate tipping points
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so we're living an incredible world and we live within a kind of living complex system our life support system but also in complex societies and all complex systems have under
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particular conditions the ability to pass tipping points from one state to another and just to give you a feel for that I'm going to show a little movie of a system that I'm pushing towards a
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Tipping Point so this is a system with two alternative States it can be in uh it could have been one of them at any time but that one that it's in I'm making less stable
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and there are some telltale signs as the system in the state it's in loses stability um has the feedbacks that maintain the status quo get weaker we see the way the
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system behaves slow down and then at some point we see the system tip from one state to another which means that some really strong amplifying feedbacks a propelling change in that system in a
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way that if I took the forcing away the Tipping Point would just continue and what's important about it to pinpoint is it's an Abrupt change and it's really hard to reverse now I spent a lot of the last 20 years
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mapping out the bad tipping points in the climate system that we don't want to cross if we can avoid them I won't talk about all of these but they're involving a loss of major ice genes large amounts of sea level rise
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resulting from that reorganizations of the circulation of the ocean or the atmosphere that would change weather patterns across the world and a loss of major parts of the biosphere
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unfortunately these bad climates have been points are coupled together in a way where often tipping one of them makes tipping another more likely so we can think about a Tipping Point Cascade and in this case a bad one
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now these are one of the many reasons why we need to act decisively to limit global warming and we're not doing that decisively enough we're not
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decarbonizing the global economy as it's called nearly fast enough to get towards what's called a net zero greenhouse gas emissions we're going about five times too slowly and we need to go a lot
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quicker and that's why I want to talk about positive tipping points as our best hope of accelerating the change we need but to introduce that I'm just going to go back into history and to a distant
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relative of mine this is Lillian Lenten who if you see the photograph is wearing a number on her jacket that indicates she's in prison and the photograph is
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taken in the year 1913 giving a hint that linion was one of the original suffragettes in the UK fighting for the vote for women and she was in prison because she had burned down the Tea
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House in queue Gardens in London and like many suffragettes in prison she was on Hunger Strike but while she was on Hunger Strike she was force-fed and unfortunately they put the tube down the
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wrong way into her lungs and then they drowned her when she was rushed to hospital the government instigated a cover-up and said that she wasn't um she was only in hospital because of the
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hunger strike she'd been on that was quickly realized that that was a lie and that's one of many little events in the fight for votes for women that turned public opinion against the then government and in favor of the movement
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that ultimately caused a profound social Tipping Point because it doubled the Democratic voting and population of our country and of course that movement spread around the world
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now much more recently we've seen a different kind of social tipping Dynamics in the climate movement starting with the brave actions of Greta tunberg who by deciding to skip school
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and protest outside the Swedish Parliament made it a little bit easier for the next person to make the brave move of defying their parents and the government and the
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school and join her on strike for more decisive climate action and as they join they make it incrementally easier for the next person to join and so on and this creates a kind of exponential
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growth the self-reinforcing feedback growth of the population of protesters and that population doubled every week roughly for about six months and within
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that time it grew to millions of protesters by then not just school children but people of all ages I'm calling for more decisive climate action around the world
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which has been an amazing Tipping Point but only really counts as Greta would remind us if we actually act in a way that changes the behaviors or the technologies that are responsible for
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greenhouse gas emissions and reduces them so that's what I want to talk about next and I want to go back to history because I've got to try and convince you that we can change technology really
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quickly or behavior really quickly because we have done in the past and to illustrate that let's look at a photograph of the Easter Parade in Fifth Avenue New York City in the year 1900
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and the challenges to spot the one person in an automobile when everybody else is in a horse-drawn carriage they're actually over on the right hand side of the street as they come coming
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towards us but if we go to a photograph of the Easter Parade on the same street Fifth Avenue New York City but 13 years later in 1913 at the time when lilium was in
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hospital in London we have the opposite change in the photograph to spot the the last person left in a horse-drawn carriage when everybody else is in an automobile actually they're on almost the same
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position on the street on the right hand side coming towards us but the point is this was a fundamental change in how people moved around and in our cities and ultimately in our whole landscape
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the transition to the car and it unfolded within a decade across U.S cities and continued to spread around the world now part way through that transition there was a time even a
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century ago where about 30 percent of the vehicles were battery Electric but the Model T for the combustion engine one hour and ever since the electric vehicle has been trying to kind
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of make its way in as the alternative form of personal mobility and finally it's getting there and it's got there first um in the little country of Norway thanks to some social activists who
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really begun the extraordinary change so I'll show you a photograph of Pop members of the pop band aha together with an architecture Professor Harold
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rostvic and an environmentalist Frederick Helga who together imported uh one in the photograph is a hobby converted electric vehicle what in the UK we'd have called a Fiat Panda
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they they imported this vehicle to Norway but with a bunch of Demands on the then Norwegian government to incentivize the switch to clean
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electric transport and they knew because several of them were world famous pop stars that the media would follow them everywhere they went and shine a light on their story and they demanded that
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the import registration tax for this electric vehicle and every electric vehicle they're after being waived which saved about 20 percent on the price of the vehicle they also demanded that road
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tolls be waived for all electric vehicles that was a long fight to win took about seven or eight years and they had a bunch of other clever demands that initially the government resisted but over time began to get on board with and
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that getting on board and creating what I call enabling conditions for a Tipping Point is crucial to why in the last decade basically battery electric vehicles have completely taken over the
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market in Norway gone from a few percent of the market to now well over 18 of the market and the rest of the world is following in a kind of positive Tipping Point Cascade as the electric vehicle
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takes over the market country by country that's interesting in and of itself it's vital for reducing greenhouse gas emissions because cars are responsible for over 10 of those
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but it also opens up another opportunity space because the more electric vehicles get made and the more batteries get made the cheaper the next battery gets to make well that's great for bringing the
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price down of electric vehicles and that could be cars but it also cheap batteries enables electrifying other forms of Transport like Goods transport
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this rapid growth of electric vehicles might be the thing that convinces oil firms that they're sat on stranded effort assets and they have to redefine themselves as something else but also
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cheap batteries are a crucial enabler for the big revolution to renewable energy because when we want to boil the kettle isn't always when the Sun's shining all the wind's blowing so we're going to need cheap forms of storage including
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batteries in the future electricity grid which brings me to my second good news story of recent positive Tipping Point and that's in my country the UK where essentially in the last 10 years
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we've gone from 40 of our electricity for a burning coal in power stations to pretty much zero coal burning for electricity and all the difference has
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been made up for by a massive growth in renewable energy power supply a lot of it in the UK wind power and especially offshore wind power that's growing rapidly
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now that particular Tipping Point was triggered by a really modest price on carbon emissions in the power sector that the government introduced but it's part of a bigger picture where
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it should give us the confidence that while we can change quickly our power supply and when we look in the global context we find that the more wind turbines we make or the more solar panels we make the cheaper the next one
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gets to make a vital reinforcing feedback that's responsible for the fact that renewable energy renewable power is now the cheapest form of electricity generation in most of the world and it's
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continuing to get cheaper so we're going to an extraordinary future where electricity will be cheaper than it's ever been and that's a big incentive to use it to Electrify lots of other things light transport but also eating our
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homes and using leftover if you like renewable electricity to make other fuels where they're needed like hydrogen if we put this all together we're seeing
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the potential for positive tipping points to Cascade through the economy I mentioned how those cheap batteries from the electric vehicle Revolution help the transition to renewable energy but at the same time
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the more renewable energy there is the cheaper it gets the more that incentivizes the switch to electric vehicles so we've got lovely reinforcing feedback within the economy and that's what we need to work together
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to find and Trigger those positive tipping points so faced with an enormous and daunting problem like climate change and the scary possibility of climate tipping points we're bound to be asking what can
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I do and the point I want to leave you with is we all have some agency to be part of positive Tipping Point change just as consumers we can choose to
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purchase or adopt a different technology we can change our Behavior clearly in ways that reduce emissions but that encourage other people to do so but if we take a bigger view of us we're
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probably not just humble consumers we have some agency if we're in the media we can help tell the story of positive change which can help reinforce change if in the finance sector we can shift
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capital and that's a powerful lever of amplifying change and of course we want governments uh Governors as well as us the citizens to be on side with Progressive policies
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like we saw in their adoption in Norway in the electric vehicle case basically when all these factors come together the top down and the bottom up then I think we have a great chance to find and
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Trigger the positive tipping points we're going to need to avoid the climate and ecological crisis thanks very much [Music]
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thank you [Music]
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