Thank you, Nicholas. Just by chance, my grandfather, the English part of my ancestors, was named Nicholas Brown.
So I feel like I'm sort of back home here with.
When you were referring to the book, I remember the late Senator Paul Simon of Illinois introducing me many years ago.
And he held the book up. He said, Lester's written the sort of book that once you put it down, you can pick it up again.
About a year ago, a woman named Liz Carpenter died.
She was, I don't know, 86. I think she had been in the Lyndon Johnson White House.
She was from Texas, a very colourful, bright woman.
And she had been, among other things, press secretary for LBJ.
And after she retired, she wrote a book entitled Ruffles and Flourishes, and she was on book tour going from city to city.
And one night in Atlanta, Georgia, just by chance, she ran into her former White House colleague, Arthur Schlesinger, in the hotel lobby.
And Arthur said, Gee, Liz, that was a great book of yours. I really enjoyed it.
Who wrote it for you? She said, Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it, Arthur.
Who read it to you? When I was asked to use John Beddington lecture of I guess a year and a half or so ago now as a point of departure,
it really didn't take a lot of effort because I had been this was several months ago,
I had been reading his his talk to, I believe it was the U.K. Commission on Sustainability and and thinking about his idea.
He said he didn't want to just project things in the indefinite future, but he wanted to give a provide sort of a time framework.
And in his opinion, these converging trends, converging trends that that Nick referred to would be coming together to create a
so-called perfect storm without actually defining in much detail exactly what that was.
He said 2030. A week later, Jonathan part in an article in The Guardian commented on Bennington's speech.
He said, I totally agree with the analysis.
The only the only point on which I would differ, he said, is the timing.
It seems to me, he said, that it's more likely to be in 2020.
Then 2030 said, I think it's much closer.
And and I thought about that and I asked myself, you know, how much time do we have?
And one of the purposes of doing World on the Edge was to try to give some sense, not, you know, that the world is going to end in 2012 or something,
but a sense of of how close we're getting to the edge and what some of the consequences might be.
We could be very close to the edge. The problem is, we don't know.
My sense is that food is probably the weak link in the system.
And we know in looking at earlier civilisations that declined in collapse that more often than not it was the food supply
giving away because of salting of soils and in sewer or deforestation and soil erosion and in the Mayan civilisation.
But for a long time I didn't think food could be the weak link for our modern civilisation.
But in recent years I've I've shifted my thinking and now not only think it could be the weak link, I think it is the weak link.
And I remember at the time of the the Russian heat wave.
Which was an extraordinary climate event. I mean,
if someone had told me last spring that the average temperature in Moscow in the month of July was going to be 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm,
I would have said, you know, I'm not a climate denier, but that's that's off the chart.
But it happened. And we saw a country dry out and the intense heat and the associated drought,
we saw a country literally burning and the inability to control the fires.
By early August, there were 300, 400 new fires starting every day.
And the one economic estimate I've seen of the total losses from the from the heat and and the fire and so forth is $300 billion.
Which is a lot. I mean, there's a lot of burning in in western Russia.
But then as I thought about it more and incidentally,
one of the consequences that that that we've paid attention to is the reduction in the grain harvest.
The Russians were hoping for something close to 100 million tonnes in the grain harvest this past year.
And it turned out that they harvested 60 million tonnes.
They lost 40% of their grain crop. I asked myself, what if that heatwave that was centred in Moscow had been centred in Chicago?
What if the United States and lost 40% of its grain harvest?
Which is exactly what would have happened if the temperature in Chicago had been 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm in July,
a period when the U.S. corn crop is as pollinating. If that heatwave had been centred in Chicago,
the U.S. would have lost 160 million tons of its 400 million ton grain harvest instead of 40 million tons, as in the case of.
Russia, 160 million ton loss in the U.S. grain harvest and the world grain harvest would have dropped stocks to a level we've never seen before.
And there would have been chaos in world grain markets.
Grain prices would gone to levels we we could not have imagined.
Food prices would start rising throughout the world.
The grain exporting countries would begin restricting exports in order to keep their food prices under control.
Which would substantially reduce the exportable supply of grain for the world.
The oil exporting countries would begin to barter oil for grain to make sure they got the grain they needed and wanted.
And there will be scores of other countries, many of them lower income,
grain importing countries that have been scrambling for the crumbs that were left.
There would have been a total loss of faith in the market.
And the idea of a barter economy emerging is, again, sort of beyond our imagination.
But we could have seen the international economic system begin to break down.
It's based on confidence and that that confidence could have could have been lost.
So this is how far are we from a harvest like this?
No one knows. We do know right now that.
Grain prices. Soybean prices are very close to the record highs.
In 0708, corn was trading at over $6 a bushel.
Wheat over $8 a bushel. Soybeans over $14 a bushel.
The FAO Food Price Index, which is based, I think, on some 50 developing countries, is actually higher now than it was at the peak in 0708.
It was higher in December. It's probably going to be go still, still higher.
And what we do not now know is whether we will have a bumper grain harvest this year worldwide or a poor one.
What we do know is that the winter wheat crop, which is the big in the northern hemisphere,
which is most of the world's wheat production, is not in particularly good shape.
And the U.S. and China, two of the major wheat producers.
Drought is a problem in the wheat growing regions in both countries.
In Russia, part of the winter wheat did not get planted because it was too dry.
The wheat simply couldn't germinate.
And so if that winter wheat is all replaced with spring wheat, there will be a loss in yield of about a third in yield per acre.
So three of the world's leading four wheat producers.
The other, the fourth being India. Three of the four already have crops that are not going to be bumper crops for sure.
They may turn out to be good crops, but they won't be exceptional. And and it's possible that they they won't even be good.
So with wheat, there's not much prospect for advancing.
And I would point out that last year we fell short by more than 50 million tonnes.
That is, production fell short of consumption by 50, 50 plus million tons.
In addition to making up that gap. We're also faced with the need for another 40 million tons to cover the growth in demand this year.
So in excess of 90 million tons.
So just to stay where we are, we need to increase this year's grain harvest by roughly 100 million tons over last year.
If we want to rebuild stocks and get prices back down, then it's going to take something like 140 or 50 million tons.
We don't know now whether we're going to see that or not. And there's sort of two clouds hanging over the world grain market.
One is the realisation on the part of grain traders and the grain importing countries that the extreme climate events that
scientists have been talking about for decades that come with rising temperature are we're beginning to understand what that means.
We saw it in Russia. We saw it in in Pakistan with the the record flooding.
We had to record events overlapping in time this this past summer.
So I also recalled that in 1988, in the United States, we had extreme heat and drought in the Midwest.
It was a year when in places you could walk across the Mississippi River, you could wait across it was that it got that dry.
That year, the only time in our history we did not produce enough grain to satisfy our own needs.
But it wasn't a big problem because we had used stocks at the time.
So we we drew down those stocks, maintained our exports didn't really have a major effect on the world market.
We don't have that excess anymore. And during the last half of the last century,
we had idled cropland in the United States whenever there was a monsoon failure
in India or a drought and in the former Soviet Union or a heatwave in the U.S.,
in the Department of Agriculture, we'd calculate how much land we needed to bring back into production to stabilise the situation,
and then within a year things would be back to normal.
But one of the difficulties now is that, one, we no longer have the idle cropland in the United States.
We're flat out. In production terms.
And there's no norm to go back to.
The world's climate is now in a state of of flux of change.
And we just don't know what things are going to be like this year or next year or further down the road.
One of the things I've noticed and begun to think about more seriously is that the world divides.
In the basically two groups and looking at the future one, a group that's well represented here tonight, natural scientist.
We look at the future through a climate lens or a hydrological lens or in terms of soils, soil erosion and so forth, deforestation, overfishing.
And we see trends that cannot be sustained.
We know that. We know it professionally. You cannot keep continue overpumping aquifers indefinitely.
And so we're concerned about the future. And we would we know we need to change, make some major changes, major course corrections.
So that's one view of the world. The other view of the world is that held by most economists.
If you look at the economic projections of the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, a major financial institution, look at their projections.
They are all more or less an extrapolation of the last few decades into the future.
They average an economic growth rate of about 3% per year, which means the 2010 economy will double in 24 years by 2034.
The economists don't ask the question, will there be enough water to support a doubling of the world economy?
What does that translate into in terms of additional demand for food and how will we satisfy those needs?
How will a doubling of the world economy affect the Earth's climate if we continue more or less with business as usual,
which is what the economists assume?
So we have these two very different views of all of it, of the future, and we've we've got to bring them together.
And it's not getting rid of economists to do it.
It's incorporating what we know in the sciences into economic policy making.
Among other things, it means restructuring the tax system to get the market to tell the truth.
And I'll come back to that a bit later. How much time do we have?
We don't know. Can we save the Greenland ice sheet?
We don't know because we don't know where the tipping point is.
And I'll come back to that, too. Historically, indeed, probably since 1970, as I can recall,
at least the rule of thumb in terms of world food security is that you need to have at least 70 days of carryover stocks at the end of the year.
That is when the new crop begins. You need 70 days of carryover stocks.
There's a cushion in case there's a poor harvest ahead.
And that's been that that number was developed by FAO, and it's been widely used.
But if it was 70 days in 1970, what should it be today?
With much greater climate volatility, for example. We haven't we haven't even begun the public dialogue to to rethink that basic point.
Agriculture as it exists today evolved over an 11,000 period of rather remarkable climate stability.
And now suddenly that climate system is changing and as a result, agricultural will be more and more out of sync with climate change,
because we can't anticipate and restructure agriculture based on the changes that that are coming.
The other thing that's new now is that I mentioned these grain price surges in the last half of the last century,
monsoon failure in India, drought and in the Soviet Union or what have you.
And we responded. Those were event driven price surges.
What we have now is a trend driven rise in prices where an event can exacerbate the trend.
But trends on both the demand and the supply side of the food equation are altering the food outlook on the demand side.
Historically, population growth was the source of additional demand, and it is still an important source of demand.
Tonight at the dinner table, there will be 219,000 people who were not there last night and again tomorrow night.
And that begins to at some point tax the skills of farmers and puts excessive pressure on the Earth's resources.
The second source of growing demand is rising affluence.
And this is a trend that a source of demand that really began developing after World War Two, as Europe recovered,
as Japan recovered, we wanted to expand the production of beef and dairy products and so forth.
We didn't have new grasslands that we could, could, could use, so we had to start feeding grain.
And that was the beginning of feedlot agriculture in the U.S. and the heavy use of grain for for dairy production.
Today, there may be 3 billion people trying to move up the food chain, consuming more grain intensive livestock products.
The third source of additional demand is the growing conversion of grain into oil.
And this is concentrated in the United States. We have we harvested the last year over 400 million tons of grain in the US.
Of that, 119 million tons went to ethanol distilleries.
And what this does, apart from diverting grain from food and feed to producing fuel, is.
It ties the price of grain to the price of oil.
Because as the price of oil goes up, it becomes more profitable to convert grain into oil, i.e. ethanol.
So if the price of oil goes to $150 a barrel, the price of grain will follow it up for close to $200 a barrel.
The price of grain will follow it up because it will become more and more profitable to convert grain into into fuel.
And it's not a solution. The grain required to fill an SUV tank 25 gallons with ethanol.
We'll feed one person for a year and average world consumption levels.
Converting grain into fuel is not a solution to oil insecurity.
From 1990 to 2005, the annual growth in world grain consumption was about 21 million tons a year.
From 2005 to 2010, that 21 million became 41 million additional tonnes of grain consumed per year,
largely because of the extraordinary growth and investment in ethanol distilleries in the US.
On the supply side, we've talked about climate change.
The other major factor affecting the food food prospect in the short term is water shortages.
Half of us live in countries now where water tables are falling as a result of overpumping for irrigation.
Saudi Arabia, which for more than 20 years was self-sufficient in wheat production, announced.
Two, three years ago. Now that that their wheat self-sufficiency days were over, they had been pumping a fossil aquifer fairly deep,
maybe close to a half mile down, but it is now largely depleted.
And they said they're going to phase out production in eight years, but it looks like it's going to happen in five years.
Probably next year will be the last year the Saudis will produce wheat.
So in five years they will have gone from self-sufficiency to to zero production and total dependence on imported grain.
Now, that's Saudi Arabia.
That's close to 3 million tons of wheat production capacity lost, which is one half of 1% of that 600 million ton wheat crop.
So it's not in itself a market shifting on a market shifting scale, but it is 3 million tonnes of production capacity.
We no longer have the first geographic region in which grain production has peaked and started to decline because of water shortages.
The Arab. Middle East. It includes Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, which is a hydrological basket case.
And so for the first time, we're seeing peak irrigation water and peak grain production in a region of the world and a geographic region.
The World Bank estimates that 15% of India's population is fed with grain produced by overpumping.
That's 175 million people. We estimate that the Earth Policy Institute at 130 million Chinese, are being fed by overpumping.
Overpumping is by definition a short term phenomenon.
So what we have done is, in fact create water based food bubble food bubbles, food,
a food bubble economy that's artificially inflated in the short run by overpumping.
I mentioned the Saudis going from self-sufficiency to zero.
And in five years that that's particularly dramatic.
That will not happen in India or China.
But the loss of irrigation water from aquifer depletion in India, where it's mostly sustainable aquifers as opposed to fossil aquifers,
means that when the aquifers depleted, the rate of pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge.
So there will be a reduction.
Exactly how much and how fast it'll come, whether it'll be enough to over set efforts to expand the grain harvest remains to be seen.
China in a similar situation.
We don't know exactly when the when irrigation capacity will peak in these countries, but it at some point will.
So in addition to climate change, the other major factor affecting the food prospect in the short run, I think will be will be water shortages.
I could talk about the U.S. The difference between the U.S. and India and China is that 3/5 of the grain in India is produced on irrigated land,
4/5 in China. It's only one fifth in the U.S. so we will be affected, but not on nearly the same scale.
Then we have soil erosion over ploughing, overgrazing, huge dustbowl.
Two huge dust bowl is forming in the world, one in northwestern China, Western Mongolia and a bit of Central Asia, the other in Central Africa.
And we can now track these satellite images each year, and each of these huge dust storms carries millions of tons of topsoil away.
So we're we're seeing some countries now where production has peaked and begun to decline because of soil erosion, land degradation.
Countries like Lesotho, Mongolia,
North Korea and Haiti both wrestling with the soil erosion problem and not any longer able to keep production increasing.
Then we have a longer term threat. In addition to water and climate,
I should point out that crop ecologists have a rule of thumb that for each one
degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season,
we can expect a 10% decline in grain yields wheat, rice, corn.
I remember seeing a study in the Philippines on on rice and the relationship of yield to temperature at about.
And the heat affects pollination with grains. The.
At 95 degrees Fahrenheit, you have basically 100% pollination and 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
You have essentially zero pollination and total crop failure.
So a few degrees can make a big difference in that in that span.
Ice melting. The Greenland ice sheet is melting.
It is melting at an accelerating rate. If it were to melt entirely.
And that won't happen overnight. But if it were to melt entirely, sea level would rise 23 feet.
Even a one metre rise in sea level would put half the rice land in Bangladesh under water.
It would inundate a large part of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice in Vietnam.
Vietnam being the world's number two rice exporter.
And there are another 19 river rice growing river deltas in Asia that would be affected by a three foot rise in sea level.
We don't have to wait for the Greenland melt entirely before we begin to see this.
During the last century, sea level rose about six inches.
It's now projected to rise by up to six feet during this century.
It's the complexity of issues we're facing that makes it much more difficult now.
I mean, who would have imagined that ice melting on an island in the far north Atlantic?
Could shrink the rice harvest of Asia. A region where half the world's people live.
It's not intuitively obvious until you begin thinking about the the relation some relationship among the various parts of the natural system.
Melting mountain glaciers. Another major source of food insecurity.
We're already beginning to see this in the Andes. Some.
Glaciers like the Takaya in Bolivia are gone completely.
And and the river flows as the World Bank last week.
And they're concerned with the the the the ice melt and the flow of rivers in the Andes,
in countries like Peru, for example, and how they're being affected.
So ice melting has two effects. It raises sea level and it.
Melting glaciers in the mountains whose ice melt sustains.
In Asia, for example, the major rivers help sustain the major rivers during the dry season.
The Indus. The Ganges. The Yangtze Sea.
The yellow. And again, I don't think we've quite grasped what all this is translating into.
If I were to pick three indicators to monitor, to get a sense of our future, one would be an economic indicator grain prices.
The second would be a social indicator. The number of hungry people in the world that was declining during the closing decades of the last century.
It's now rising. And the third would be a political indicator, the number of failing states in the world.
That number is growing. And it raises a disturbing question, which is how many failing states before we have a failing global civilisation?
We don't know. We haven't been here before. But these are the sorts of questions I think we need to be asking.
What do we do? Well, it's clear that business as usual is no longer.
A viable option. And what we've worked on at the Institute for the last several years is something we call Plan B, plan A being business as usual.
Plan B has four components one, cutting carbon emissions 80%, not by 2050, but by 2020.
This is really, in a sense, a wartime kind of mobilisation to get this sort of cut.
But it's the kind of reduction it may take if you want to save the Greenland ice sheet, for example.
It doesn't guarantee it, but it at least would give us a much better shot at it.
Second is stabilising population sooner rather than later.
We think we would like to see world population follow the UN low projection and
stabilise at about 8 billion inches to go instead of going to nine or ten or 11.
And closely related to that is eradicating poverty.
We see population stabilisation and poverty eradication as being being two mutually reinforcing trends.
Eradicating poverty accelerates a shift to smaller families.
The accelerating shift to smaller families makes it easier to eradicate poverty.
So those two trends reinforce each other. And then the the fourth component of Plan B is restoring the economies natural support systems.
Forests, soils, aquifers, grasslands, fisheries.
No civilisation has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural supports, nor will ours.
But we have not incorporated that into our public thinking.
How do we do this in policy and in fiscal terms?
Restructuring the world energy economy, we think, can be done primarily by restructuring the tax system.
Getting the market to tell the truth. Reduce income taxes, raise the carbon tax, and do this over a ten year period so we don't pay any more taxes.
We tax labour less and carbon more.
That would accelerate the shift from coal and oil and natural gas to wind and solar and geothermal energy and then the eradication of poverty.
We need universal. Primary school education, for example, girls as well as boys.
We need rudimentary health care at the village level, school lunch programs and in the poorest of the poor countries.
We need to fill the family planning gap through 207 million women in the world who want to plan
their families but don't have access to family planning services and reproductive health care.
It doesn't take very much to fill that gap. It's so small, it gets lost in the rounding and larger international expenditures.
But it is, I think, central to to providing and building a sustainable future.
Then we look at soil conservation, reforestation.
Raising water productivity. And this is largely a pricing issue.
The major uses of water today. I mean, 70% is for irrigation worldwide, but a lot of that irrigation water is free or essentially free.
So farmers treat it as an abundant resource when in fact, it's a valuable resource.
And when we worry about water, we sometimes talk about drinking water,
but we drink maybe four litres of water a day, but we eat 2000 litres of water a day.
That is, the food that we eat requires five times as much water.
To produce, as the four leaders would drink as water of juice or coffee or whatever.
We need a worldwide effort to raise water productivity similar to the one we launched in the 1950s to raise crop land productivity,
specifically Greenland productivity. The world grain yield per acre in 2010 is nearly triple the world grain yield per acre in 1950.
We need to think about water and make the same kind of international effort to raise water productivity that we did to raise grain yields.
When we look at the cost of these things.
It turns out that eradicating poverty, reforestation, soil conservation, all these things we need to do,
restructuring the energy economy will do with tax restructuring,
but the rest will take about $200 billion of additional expenditures each year worldwide.
Now, 200 billion. This is a lot. Especially today.
It's nearly one third. Of the US military budget.
It's, it's one eighth of the global military budget.
But we're now in a situation where we have to redefine security.
We have inherited our definition of security and defined it almost exclusively in military terms.
We inherited it from the last century, which was dominated by two world wars and the Cold War.
But the big threats to our future today are not some heavily armed superpower waiting to invade us.
It's climate change. It's population growth.
It's soil erosion. It's aquifer depletion. It's rising food prices.
These are the real threats to our future now. And we need not only to redefine security, but redefine our fiscal outlook to reflect this.
Let me talk for a few minutes. Come back to the energy situation and cutting carbon emissions.
If you like, to save energy. This is a great time.
To be alive because we have extraordinary technologies.
I mean, going from incandescents to compact fluorescents cut electricity use by roughly 75%.
If we then go to LEDs. Along with light, with motion sensors to turn lights off.
When no one's in a room, we can cut electricity use for lighting by 90%.
That will enable us to close over 700 of the world's 2600 coal fired power plants.
And we'd make money in the process. It's interesting that the head of Philips in North America is projecting that by 2015,
half of all the bulbs sold in North America and in Europe will be LEDs, and by 2020 it will be 80%.
So I think we've we've got a potential here that's going to develop fast.
The other thing is to electrify the transport system. Run our cars on electricity, whether it's plug in hybrids or all electric cars.
Light rail in cities. High speed intercity rail now a major possibility.
And we need to develop renewables fast. And we're seeing some extraordinarily exciting things.
The U.S. state of Texas, the oil state for the US now has.
Over 10,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity. It has another maybe 40 on the in the planning stages, on the drawing boards,
and they're building some major transmission lines to enable them to exploit that.
Texas could be self-sufficient in electricity generation if it if it develops all the wind farms it's now planning to do.
And interesting, a lot of the money going into the wind farms is oil money.
And the exciting thing about investing in wind farms and wind infrastructure is that for the first time since the Industrial Revolution began,
we have the opportunity to invest in energy sources that will essentially last as long as the earth itself.
We've not had this for a long time, but what a legacy to leave the next generation.
Investment in wind and solar and geothermal energy.
Sources that don't run out. When you invest in a new coalfield, I mean, a new oil field, you know, it's only a matter of decades to the well.
Yields start to drop and eventually you have to find another oil field. Same with coal mines.
Eventually, the coal seams are gone. You have to find another with wind.
That's not the case. We saw.
That's not the case we see in China.
The effort to build 130,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in seven wind mega complexes in six different provinces,
130,000 megawatts of wind is it is equal to building another coal fired power plant every week for the next two and a half years.
This is big time.
Thinking China's now taken the U.S. in annual wind installations and this hundred and 30,000 megawatts is only part of what they're doing.
They have a lot of other smaller wind farms being developed all the time.
Well, the Desertec proposal in Europe in July when governments were preparing for Copenhagen this July a year ago.
Munich Re Munich Re Insured Reinsurance. Deutsche Bank.
Siemens. A group of a dozen or so companies and investors got together and and and laid out a plan for harnessing the solar resources of North Africa,
both to provide electricity in North Africa, but also to provide electricity for Europe and to integrate the wind resources of the of Northern
Europe in the North Sea with the solar resources of of North Africa into a single grid.
Big time thinking in the U.S., one of the most exciting things in the last few years,
while everyone was worried about Copenhagen and what would happen or not happen there,
there evolved in the United States, a powerful grassroots movement opposing the construction of new coal fired power plants.
As a result of that effort.
We may never license another coal plant in the United States.
And they have now moved into phase two of this.
Program, which is to close the existing coal fired power plants.
Last year, utilities announced that they were planning to close 48 coal fired power plants.
And there are more already this year. Coal use in the U.S. has declined by 8% over the last three years.
During that same period, we built almost 300 new wind farms, brought them online with a generating capacity of maybe 28,000 megawatts.
So things are changing. They're not changing fast enough yet, but they're they are changing.
Can we do it? I mentioned the need to redefine security.
I think that's at the heart of this restructuring that we need.
But when I. I'm sort of.
Overwhelmed by the scale of what we need to do in the urgency with which we have to do it.
I go back and look at the economic history, read some of the economic history of World War Two.
December 7th, 1941, the extraordinarily successful Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet, part of which was at anchor in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii.
From a military point, it was extraordinarily successful.
But what it did was to lead to a mobilisation in the United States because Americans didn't win.
They didn't want to be involved in the war.
If you've done a poll on December 6th, 95% would have said, no, we don't want to get involved or to wait until December eight.
If we got 95% saying, yes, we have to go to war.
And I think it was January six, 1942, a month after Pearl Harbour, President Roosevelt laid out UFC 100 his production goals.
He said, We're going to produce 45. 45,000 tanks.
60,000 planes. At least a few thousand ships.
And people couldn't relate to those numbers.
They were so far beyond anything anyone had talked about here, even as certainly not proposed anywhere else.
But what Roosevelt and his colleagues knew was that at that time,
the greatest concentration of industrial power in the world was in the US automobile industry,
because even during the Depression we were making two or 3 million cars a year.
So we called them the leaders of the industry and said We're going to rely heavily on you guys to help us reach these arms production goals.
And they said, Well, Mr. President, we're going to do everything we can, but it's going to be a stretch producing cars and all these arms, too.
He said, You don't understand. We're going to ban the sale of automobiles in the United States.
So the entire automobile industry had to start producing tanks and planes and all these things.
And in the end, we produced not 60,000 planes, but 229,000.
I mean, even even today, it's difficult to imagine that.
I was on book tour recently flying into Seattle in Washington, where Boeing has its large facilities.
And I was thinking 229,000 planes, but we did it.
And we can do the same thing today with wind turbines, for example, we would need about 2 million wind turbines to megawatts each.
Tibet to close all the world's coal fired power plants. That's a lot.
We produce 65 million new cars every year.
We're talking about 2 million wind turbines over the next decade. Entirely doable if we decide we want to do it.
And my closing point would be that we environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet.
But as I think about it, the planet's going to be around for some time to come.
The challenge for us is saving civilisation itself because I do not think civilisation
can withstand the stresses if we continue with business as usual much longer.
Environmental stresses translate into economic stresses that will become political instability.
And saving civilisation is not a spectator sport. We all have a stake.
We all have to get involved. I'm often asked the question as I travel around the world, you know, what can I do?
And I think people expect me to say, change your light bulbs and recycle your newspapers and so forth.
And those are important. But we're at the point now where we have to change the system.
We have to restructure the world energy economy. And we have to do it quickly.
And we've got to restore the natural support system on which the economy depends.
We can't continue destroying grasslands or overfishing and and experiencing a collapse in one fishery after another.
We can't continue overpumping aquifers. We've got to change big time change.
And we don't have much time in which to do it. And it's against that backdrop that I thank you for the invitation.
Ian Curtis, wherever you are for for working on on this.
I'm just delighted to be here tonight. And if there's if there are any questions, I'd be happy to respond to them.