i'm about to say i really should establish my green credentials when i was a small boy i took my pledge as an american to save and faithfully defend from waste the natural resources of my country its air soil and minerals its forests waters and wildlife and i've stuck to that
the brown administration and a bunch of my friends basically leveled the energyefficiency of california so it's the same now thirty years later even though our economy has gone up eighty percent per capita
and we are putting out less greenhouse gasses than any other state california is basically the equivalent of europe in this this year whole earth catalog has a supplement that i'll preview today called whole earth discipline
the dominant demographic event of our time is this screamingly rapid urbanization that we have going on
it's interesting because history is driven to a large degree by the size of cities the developing world now has all of the biggest cities and they are developing three times faster than the developed countries
and nine times bigger it's qualitatively different they are the drivers of history as we see by looking at history one thousand years
ago this is what the world looked like well we now have a distribution of urban power similar to what we had one thousand years ago in other words the rise of the west dramatic as it was is over
the aggregate numbers are absolutelyoverwhelming one point three million people a week coming to town decade after decade what's really going on
what's going on is the villages of the world are emptying out subsistence farming is drying up basically people are
because in town this is the bustling squatter city of kibera near nairobi
they see action they see opportunity they see a cash economy that they were not able to participate in back in the subsistence farm
as you go around these places there's plenty of aesthetics there is plenty going on they are poor but they are intensely urban and they are intenselycreative the aggregate numbers now are that basically squatters
one billion of them are building the urban world which means they're building the world personally one by one family by family clan by clan neighborhood by neighborhood
their own infrastructure at first cable tv water the whole gamut all gets stolen and then gradually gentrifies
it is not the case that slums undermineprosperity not the working slums they help create prosperity so in a town like mumbai which is half slums it's one sixth of the gdp of india
a lot of people who think about all these poor people oh there's terrible things we've got to fix their housing it used to be oh we've got to get them phone service now they're showing us how they do their phone service faminemostly is a rural
there are things they care about and this is where we can help and the nations they're in can help and they are helping each other solve these issues and you go to a nice dense place like this slum in mumbai
you look at that lane on the right and you can ask okay what's going on there the answer is everything this is better than a mall it's much denser it's much more interactive and the scale is terrific
the main event is these are not people crushed by poverty these are people busy getting out of poverty just as fast as they can they're helping each other
they're doing it through an outlaw thing the informaleconomy the informaleconomy it's sort of like dark energy in astrophysics it's not supposed to be there but it's huge we don't understand how it works yet
but we have to furthermore people in the informaleconomy the gray economy as time goes by crime is happening around them and they can join the criminal world
or they can join the legitimate world we should be able to make that choice easier for them to get toward the legitimate world because if we
they will go toward the criminal world there's all kinds of activity
money to hire some local teachers to a private tiny unofficial school education is more possible in the cities and that changes the world
see some interesting typical urban things so one thing slammed up against another such as in sao paulo here that's what cities do that's how they create value is by slamming things together in this case supply right next to demand
so the maids and the gardeners and the guards that live in this lively part of town on the left walk to work in the boring rich neighborhood
and head to town and when they're gone the natural environment starts to come back very rapidly and those who remain in the village can shift over to cash crops
to send food to the new growing markets in town so if you want to save a village you do it with a good road or with a good cellphone connection and ideally some grid electrical power
so the event is we're a city planet that just happened more than half the numbers are considerable a billion live in the squatter cities now another billion is expected
people get into town the immediately have fewer children they don't even have to get rich yet just the opportunity of coming up in the world means they will have fewer higher quality kids and the birthrate goes down radically
very interesting side effect here here 's a slide from phillip longman shows what is happening as we have more and more old people like me and fewer and fewer babies and they are regionally separated what you're getting is a world which is
old folks and old cities going around doing things the old way in the north and young people in brand new cities they're inventing
doing new things in the south where do you think the action is going to be shift of subject quickly drop by climate
the climate news i'm sorry to say is going to keep getting worse than we think faster than we think climate is a profoundlycomplex nonlinear system
full of runawaypositive feedbacks hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points here 's just a few samples
we're going to keep being surprised and almost all the surprises are going to be bad ones from your standpoint this means great increase in climate refugees
over the coming decades and what goes along with that which is resource wars and chaos wars as we're seeing
that's what drought does it brings carrying capacity down and there's not enough carrying capacity to support the people and then you're in trouble shift to the power situation
electricity coal some gas nuclear and hydro
of those only nuclear and hydro are green coal is what is causing the climate problems and everyone will keep burning it
so with hydro maxed out coal and lose the climate or nuclear which is the current operating low carbon source and maybe save the climate and if we can eventually get good solar
in space that also could help because remember this is what drives the prosperity in the developing world in the villages and in the cities so between coal and nuclear compare their waste products
if all of the electricity you used in your lifetime was nuclear the amount of waste that would be added up would fit in a coke can
a coal burning plant a normal one gigawatt coal plant burns eighty rail cars of coal a day each car having one hundred tons and it puts eighteen thousand tons of
with hydro and wind and ahead of solar and does nuclear really compete with coal just ask the coal miners in australia that's where you see some of the source not from my fellow environmentalists but from people who feel threatened by nuclear power
well the good news is that the developing world but frankly the whole world is busy building and starting to build nuclear reactors this is good for the atmosphere it's good for their prosperity
i want to point out one interesting thing which is that environmentalists like the thing we call micropower it's supposed to be i don't know local solar and wind and cogeneration and good things like that but frankly micro reactors which are just now coming
which is one point two one point six billion watts these things are way smaller they're much more adaptable here 's an american design from lawrence livermore lab
here 's another american design that came out of los alamos and is now commercial almost all of these are not only small they are proliferation proof they're typically buried in the ground
why ten percent of the electricity in this room twenty percent of electricity in this room is probably nuclear half of that is coming from dismantled
one more subject genetically engineered food crops in my view as a biologist have no reason to be controversial my fellow environmentalists on this subject have been irrational anti scientific and very
despite their best efforts genetically engineered crops are the most rapidly successful agriculturalinnovation in history
good for the environment because they enable no till farming which leaves the soil in place getting healthier from year to year also keeps less carbondioxide going from the soil into the atmosphere
they reduce pesticide use and they increase yield which allows you to have your agricultural area be smaller and therefore more wild area is freed up
by the way this map from two thousand and six is out of date because it shows africa still under the thumb of greenpeace and friends of the earth from europe
and they're finally getting out from under that and biotech is moving rapidly in africa at last this is a moral issue
the nuffield council on bioethics met on this issue twice in great detail and said it is a moral imperative to make genetically engineered crops readily available
speaking of imperatives geoengineering is taboo now especially in government circles though i think there was a darpa meeting on it a couple of weeks ago
but it will be on your plate not this year but pretty soon because some harsh realizations are coming along this is a list of
happened a while back like cyclones coming up toward bangladesh like wars over water
such as in the indus and as those events keep happening we're going to say okay what can we do about that really but there's this little problem with geoengineering
what body is going to decide
who gets to engineer how much they do where they do it because everybody is downstream downwind of whatever is done and if we just taboo it completely we could lose civilization
but if we just say ok china you're worried you go ahead you geoengineer your way we'll geoengineer our way that would be considered and act of war by both nations
so this is very interesting diplomacy coming along i should say it is more practical than people think here is an example that climatologists like a lot
that's nothing compared to all of the the other things we may be trying to do about energy
a nice one because it can happen lots of little ways in lots of little places is by copying the ancient amazon indians who made good agricultural soil by
smoldering plant waste and biochar fixes large quantities of carbon while it's improving the soil so here is where we are
nobel prize winning climatologist paul crutzen calls our geological era the anthropocene the human dominated era we are
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