1 00:00:00,540 --> 00:00:10,920 Thank you, Nicholas. Just by chance, my grandfather, the English part of my ancestors, was named Nicholas Brown. 2 00:00:12,300 --> 00:00:15,330 So I feel like I'm sort of back home here with. 3 00:00:18,900 --> 00:00:26,730 When you were referring to the book, I remember the late Senator Paul Simon of Illinois introducing me many years ago. 4 00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:32,640 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. 5 00:00:40,990 --> 00:00:45,549 About a year ago, a woman named Liz Carpenter died. 6 00:00:45,550 --> 00:00:52,060 She was, I don't know, 86. I think she had been in the Lyndon Johnson White House. 7 00:00:52,060 --> 00:00:57,040 She was from Texas, a very colourful, bright woman. 8 00:00:57,040 --> 00:01:00,700 And she had been, among other things, press secretary for LBJ. 9 00:01:01,990 --> 00:01:11,290 And after she retired, she wrote a book entitled Ruffles and Flourishes, and she was on book tour going from city to city. 10 00:01:12,310 --> 00:01:21,220 And one night in Atlanta, Georgia, just by chance, she ran into her former White House colleague, Arthur Schlesinger, in the hotel lobby. 11 00:01:22,030 --> 00:01:26,380 And Arthur said, Gee, Liz, that was a great book of yours. I really enjoyed it. 12 00:01:27,160 --> 00:01:31,480 Who wrote it for you? She said, Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it, Arthur. 13 00:01:31,820 --> 00:01:51,130 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, 14 00:01:52,060 --> 00:01:56,170 it really didn't take a lot of effort because I had been this was several months ago, 15 00:01:56,170 --> 00:02:07,200 I had been reading his his talk to, I believe it was the U.K. Commission on Sustainability and and thinking about his idea. 16 00:02:07,210 --> 00:02:15,520 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. 17 00:02:15,520 --> 00:02:25,570 And in his opinion, these converging trends, converging trends that that Nick referred to would be coming together to create a 18 00:02:25,750 --> 00:02:31,150 so-called perfect storm without actually defining in much detail exactly what that was. 19 00:02:32,140 --> 00:02:42,910 He said 2030. A week later, Jonathan part in an article in The Guardian commented on Bennington's speech. 20 00:02:42,940 --> 00:02:46,510 He said, I totally agree with the analysis. 21 00:02:46,870 --> 00:02:50,740 The only the only point on which I would differ, he said, is the timing. 22 00:02:51,820 --> 00:02:57,850 It seems to me, he said, that it's more likely to be in 2020. 23 00:02:58,910 --> 00:03:02,180 Then 2030 said, I think it's much closer. 24 00:03:03,200 --> 00:03:09,650 And and I thought about that and I asked myself, you know, how much time do we have? 25 00:03:10,730 --> 00:03:20,240 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, 26 00:03:20,240 --> 00:03:27,440 but a sense of of how close we're getting to the edge and what some of the consequences might be. 27 00:03:33,120 --> 00:03:39,600 We could be very close to the edge. The problem is, we don't know. 28 00:03:41,940 --> 00:03:48,030 My sense is that food is probably the weak link in the system. 29 00:03:48,870 --> 00:03:56,099 And we know in looking at earlier civilisations that declined in collapse that more often than not it was the food supply 30 00:03:56,100 --> 00:04:06,600 giving away because of salting of soils and in sewer or deforestation and soil erosion and in the Mayan civilisation. 31 00:04:07,290 --> 00:04:14,610 But for a long time I didn't think food could be the weak link for our modern civilisation. 32 00:04:15,120 --> 00:04:25,620 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. 33 00:04:26,940 --> 00:04:32,160 And I remember at the time of the the Russian heat wave. 34 00:04:33,480 --> 00:04:37,230 Which was an extraordinary climate event. I mean, 35 00:04:37,230 --> 00:04:48,510 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, 36 00:04:49,290 --> 00:04:54,120 I would have said, you know, I'm not a climate denier, but that's that's off the chart. 37 00:04:55,590 --> 00:05:06,840 But it happened. And we saw a country dry out and the intense heat and the associated drought, 38 00:05:06,990 --> 00:05:12,480 we saw a country literally burning and the inability to control the fires. 39 00:05:12,510 --> 00:05:18,060 By early August, there were 300, 400 new fires starting every day. 40 00:05:18,540 --> 00:05:29,880 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. 41 00:05:31,350 --> 00:05:35,730 Which is a lot. I mean, there's a lot of burning in in western Russia. 42 00:05:37,200 --> 00:05:40,170 But then as I thought about it more and incidentally, 43 00:05:40,980 --> 00:05:48,240 one of the consequences that that that we've paid attention to is the reduction in the grain harvest. 44 00:05:49,380 --> 00:05:55,470 The Russians were hoping for something close to 100 million tonnes in the grain harvest this past year. 45 00:05:55,980 --> 00:05:59,700 And it turned out that they harvested 60 million tonnes. 46 00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:13,510 They lost 40% of their grain crop. I asked myself, what if that heatwave that was centred in Moscow had been centred in Chicago? 47 00:06:14,770 --> 00:06:19,000 What if the United States and lost 40% of its grain harvest? 48 00:06:21,020 --> 00:06:28,340 Which is exactly what would have happened if the temperature in Chicago had been 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm in July, 49 00:06:28,670 --> 00:06:37,959 a period when the U.S. corn crop is as pollinating. If that heatwave had been centred in Chicago, 50 00:06:37,960 --> 00:06:47,140 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. 51 00:06:48,010 --> 00:06:58,390 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. 52 00:06:59,690 --> 00:07:03,830 And there would have been chaos in world grain markets. 53 00:07:04,760 --> 00:07:10,250 Grain prices would gone to levels we we could not have imagined. 54 00:07:10,580 --> 00:07:13,250 Food prices would start rising throughout the world. 55 00:07:14,540 --> 00:07:22,130 The grain exporting countries would begin restricting exports in order to keep their food prices under control. 56 00:07:23,310 --> 00:07:27,780 Which would substantially reduce the exportable supply of grain for the world. 57 00:07:28,800 --> 00:07:36,690 The oil exporting countries would begin to barter oil for grain to make sure they got the grain they needed and wanted. 58 00:07:38,860 --> 00:07:42,160 And there will be scores of other countries, many of them lower income, 59 00:07:42,430 --> 00:07:48,040 grain importing countries that have been scrambling for the crumbs that were left. 60 00:07:51,820 --> 00:07:54,850 There would have been a total loss of faith in the market. 61 00:07:55,720 --> 00:08:03,310 And the idea of a barter economy emerging is, again, sort of beyond our imagination. 62 00:08:03,310 --> 00:08:09,010 But we could have seen the international economic system begin to break down. 63 00:08:09,730 --> 00:08:16,900 It's based on confidence and that that confidence could have could have been lost. 64 00:08:17,800 --> 00:08:22,330 So this is how far are we from a harvest like this? 65 00:08:23,470 --> 00:08:29,110 No one knows. We do know right now that. 66 00:08:30,440 --> 00:08:35,540 Grain prices. Soybean prices are very close to the record highs. 67 00:08:35,540 --> 00:08:40,790 In 0708, corn was trading at over $6 a bushel. 68 00:08:40,790 --> 00:08:44,480 Wheat over $8 a bushel. Soybeans over $14 a bushel. 69 00:08:50,030 --> 00:09:00,800 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. 70 00:09:02,590 --> 00:09:07,000 It was higher in December. It's probably going to be go still, still higher. 71 00:09:07,960 --> 00:09:17,950 And what we do not now know is whether we will have a bumper grain harvest this year worldwide or a poor one. 72 00:09:18,310 --> 00:09:25,480 What we do know is that the winter wheat crop, which is the big in the northern hemisphere, 73 00:09:25,480 --> 00:09:31,330 which is most of the world's wheat production, is not in particularly good shape. 74 00:09:32,260 --> 00:09:35,800 And the U.S. and China, two of the major wheat producers. 75 00:09:37,600 --> 00:09:42,010 Drought is a problem in the wheat growing regions in both countries. 76 00:09:43,250 --> 00:09:50,560 In Russia, part of the winter wheat did not get planted because it was too dry. 77 00:09:50,870 --> 00:09:53,660 The wheat simply couldn't germinate. 78 00:09:54,980 --> 00:10:04,010 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. 79 00:10:04,790 --> 00:10:08,390 So three of the world's leading four wheat producers. 80 00:10:08,600 --> 00:10:15,230 The other, the fourth being India. Three of the four already have crops that are not going to be bumper crops for sure. 81 00:10:15,260 --> 00:10:23,450 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. 82 00:10:23,990 --> 00:10:27,649 So with wheat, there's not much prospect for advancing. 83 00:10:27,650 --> 00:10:32,500 And I would point out that last year we fell short by more than 50 million tonnes. 84 00:10:32,510 --> 00:10:37,760 That is, production fell short of consumption by 50, 50 plus million tons. 85 00:10:38,510 --> 00:10:48,350 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. 86 00:10:48,650 --> 00:10:51,650 So in excess of 90 million tons. 87 00:10:51,830 --> 00:11:01,160 So just to stay where we are, we need to increase this year's grain harvest by roughly 100 million tons over last year. 88 00:11:02,120 --> 00:11:09,020 If we want to rebuild stocks and get prices back down, then it's going to take something like 140 or 50 million tons. 89 00:11:10,780 --> 00:11:18,700 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. 90 00:11:18,730 --> 00:11:29,830 One is the realisation on the part of grain traders and the grain importing countries that the extreme climate events that 91 00:11:29,830 --> 00:11:38,650 scientists have been talking about for decades that come with rising temperature are we're beginning to understand what that means. 92 00:11:38,680 --> 00:11:43,690 We saw it in Russia. We saw it in in Pakistan with the the record flooding. 93 00:11:43,690 --> 00:11:49,750 We had to record events overlapping in time this this past summer. 94 00:11:53,730 --> 00:12:04,860 So I also recalled that in 1988, in the United States, we had extreme heat and drought in the Midwest. 95 00:12:05,250 --> 00:12:12,930 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. 96 00:12:14,970 --> 00:12:21,660 That year, the only time in our history we did not produce enough grain to satisfy our own needs. 97 00:12:22,590 --> 00:12:25,830 But it wasn't a big problem because we had used stocks at the time. 98 00:12:25,840 --> 00:12:32,610 So we we drew down those stocks, maintained our exports didn't really have a major effect on the world market. 99 00:12:33,210 --> 00:12:38,280 We don't have that excess anymore. And during the last half of the last century, 100 00:12:38,760 --> 00:12:45,209 we had idled cropland in the United States whenever there was a monsoon failure 101 00:12:45,210 --> 00:12:49,830 in India or a drought and in the former Soviet Union or a heatwave in the U.S., 102 00:12:50,460 --> 00:12:58,350 in the Department of Agriculture, we'd calculate how much land we needed to bring back into production to stabilise the situation, 103 00:12:58,470 --> 00:13:01,020 and then within a year things would be back to normal. 104 00:13:03,600 --> 00:13:08,879 But one of the difficulties now is that, one, we no longer have the idle cropland in the United States. 105 00:13:08,880 --> 00:13:12,830 We're flat out. In production terms. 106 00:13:16,070 --> 00:13:19,940 And there's no norm to go back to. 107 00:13:21,250 --> 00:13:25,540 The world's climate is now in a state of of flux of change. 108 00:13:26,170 --> 00:13:34,630 And we just don't know what things are going to be like this year or next year or further down the road. 109 00:13:36,160 --> 00:13:47,830 One of the things I've noticed and begun to think about more seriously is that the world divides. 110 00:13:49,030 --> 00:13:57,940 In the basically two groups and looking at the future one, a group that's well represented here tonight, natural scientist. 111 00:13:59,570 --> 00:14:11,300 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. 112 00:14:11,600 --> 00:14:15,530 And we see trends that cannot be sustained. 113 00:14:16,010 --> 00:14:23,750 We know that. We know it professionally. You cannot keep continue overpumping aquifers indefinitely. 114 00:14:25,560 --> 00:14:34,470 And so we're concerned about the future. And we would we know we need to change, make some major changes, major course corrections. 115 00:14:35,670 --> 00:14:40,230 So that's one view of the world. The other view of the world is that held by most economists. 116 00:14:42,860 --> 00:14:54,290 If you look at the economic projections of the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, a major financial institution, look at their projections. 117 00:14:55,580 --> 00:15:02,210 They are all more or less an extrapolation of the last few decades into the future. 118 00:15:04,650 --> 00:15:15,780 They average an economic growth rate of about 3% per year, which means the 2010 economy will double in 24 years by 2034. 119 00:15:20,070 --> 00:15:27,390 The economists don't ask the question, will there be enough water to support a doubling of the world economy? 120 00:15:28,920 --> 00:15:35,130 What does that translate into in terms of additional demand for food and how will we satisfy those needs? 121 00:15:35,850 --> 00:15:43,530 How will a doubling of the world economy affect the Earth's climate if we continue more or less with business as usual, 122 00:15:43,860 --> 00:15:45,720 which is what the economists assume? 123 00:15:46,350 --> 00:15:52,890 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. 124 00:15:53,520 --> 00:15:57,419 And it's not getting rid of economists to do it. 125 00:15:57,420 --> 00:16:03,930 It's incorporating what we know in the sciences into economic policy making. 126 00:16:04,920 --> 00:16:11,430 Among other things, it means restructuring the tax system to get the market to tell the truth. 127 00:16:12,730 --> 00:16:20,530 And I'll come back to that a bit later. How much time do we have? 128 00:16:22,420 --> 00:16:29,480 We don't know. Can we save the Greenland ice sheet? 129 00:16:32,470 --> 00:16:35,680 We don't know because we don't know where the tipping point is. 130 00:16:36,400 --> 00:16:44,049 And I'll come back to that, too. Historically, indeed, probably since 1970, as I can recall, 131 00:16:44,050 --> 00:16:56,620 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. 132 00:16:57,400 --> 00:17:02,330 That is when the new crop begins. You need 70 days of carryover stocks. 133 00:17:02,330 --> 00:17:06,280 There's a cushion in case there's a poor harvest ahead. 134 00:17:07,000 --> 00:17:13,570 And that's been that that number was developed by FAO, and it's been widely used. 135 00:17:14,230 --> 00:17:20,470 But if it was 70 days in 1970, what should it be today? 136 00:17:21,840 --> 00:17:33,690 With much greater climate volatility, for example. We haven't we haven't even begun the public dialogue to to rethink that basic point. 137 00:17:35,700 --> 00:17:42,450 Agriculture as it exists today evolved over an 11,000 period of rather remarkable climate stability. 138 00:17:43,770 --> 00:17:51,329 And now suddenly that climate system is changing and as a result, agricultural will be more and more out of sync with climate change, 139 00:17:51,330 --> 00:18:01,170 because we can't anticipate and restructure agriculture based on the changes that that are coming. 140 00:18:03,690 --> 00:18:10,370 The other thing that's new now is that I mentioned these grain price surges in the last half of the last century, 141 00:18:10,380 --> 00:18:14,340 monsoon failure in India, drought and in the Soviet Union or what have you. 142 00:18:14,520 --> 00:18:23,000 And we responded. Those were event driven price surges. 143 00:18:23,780 --> 00:18:30,769 What we have now is a trend driven rise in prices where an event can exacerbate the trend. 144 00:18:30,770 --> 00:18:39,650 But trends on both the demand and the supply side of the food equation are altering the food outlook on the demand side. 145 00:18:39,980 --> 00:18:48,590 Historically, population growth was the source of additional demand, and it is still an important source of demand. 146 00:18:49,280 --> 00:18:56,150 Tonight at the dinner table, there will be 219,000 people who were not there last night and again tomorrow night. 147 00:18:57,810 --> 00:19:05,880 And that begins to at some point tax the skills of farmers and puts excessive pressure on the Earth's resources. 148 00:19:06,870 --> 00:19:10,980 The second source of growing demand is rising affluence. 149 00:19:11,960 --> 00:19:19,070 And this is a trend that a source of demand that really began developing after World War Two, as Europe recovered, 150 00:19:19,070 --> 00:19:25,440 as Japan recovered, we wanted to expand the production of beef and dairy products and so forth. 151 00:19:25,490 --> 00:19:32,479 We didn't have new grasslands that we could, could, could use, so we had to start feeding grain. 152 00:19:32,480 --> 00:19:39,620 And that was the beginning of feedlot agriculture in the U.S. and the heavy use of grain for for dairy production. 153 00:19:42,700 --> 00:19:50,260 Today, there may be 3 billion people trying to move up the food chain, consuming more grain intensive livestock products. 154 00:19:51,670 --> 00:19:56,470 The third source of additional demand is the growing conversion of grain into oil. 155 00:19:59,260 --> 00:20:08,140 And this is concentrated in the United States. We have we harvested the last year over 400 million tons of grain in the US. 156 00:20:08,950 --> 00:20:13,510 Of that, 119 million tons went to ethanol distilleries. 157 00:20:14,590 --> 00:20:23,380 And what this does, apart from diverting grain from food and feed to producing fuel, is. 158 00:20:25,740 --> 00:20:28,590 It ties the price of grain to the price of oil. 159 00:20:30,060 --> 00:20:37,770 Because as the price of oil goes up, it becomes more profitable to convert grain into oil, i.e. ethanol. 160 00:20:38,520 --> 00:20:44,849 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. 161 00:20:44,850 --> 00:20:51,180 The price of grain will follow it up because it will become more and more profitable to convert grain into into fuel. 162 00:20:53,550 --> 00:21:03,600 And it's not a solution. The grain required to fill an SUV tank 25 gallons with ethanol. 163 00:21:06,380 --> 00:21:10,340 We'll feed one person for a year and average world consumption levels. 164 00:21:11,760 --> 00:21:15,330 Converting grain into fuel is not a solution to oil insecurity. 165 00:21:17,810 --> 00:21:26,510 From 1990 to 2005, the annual growth in world grain consumption was about 21 million tons a year. 166 00:21:27,950 --> 00:21:36,740 From 2005 to 2010, that 21 million became 41 million additional tonnes of grain consumed per year, 167 00:21:36,770 --> 00:21:43,250 largely because of the extraordinary growth and investment in ethanol distilleries in the US. 168 00:21:44,960 --> 00:21:48,500 On the supply side, we've talked about climate change. 169 00:21:49,100 --> 00:21:58,880 The other major factor affecting the food food prospect in the short term is water shortages. 170 00:22:01,800 --> 00:22:09,270 Half of us live in countries now where water tables are falling as a result of overpumping for irrigation. 171 00:22:10,230 --> 00:22:19,740 Saudi Arabia, which for more than 20 years was self-sufficient in wheat production, announced. 172 00:22:21,380 --> 00:22:33,680 Two, three years ago. Now that that their wheat self-sufficiency days were over, they had been pumping a fossil aquifer fairly deep, 173 00:22:33,680 --> 00:22:39,440 maybe close to a half mile down, but it is now largely depleted. 174 00:22:40,010 --> 00:22:45,710 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. 175 00:22:46,010 --> 00:22:51,110 Probably next year will be the last year the Saudis will produce wheat. 176 00:22:51,110 --> 00:22:58,550 So in five years they will have gone from self-sufficiency to to zero production and total dependence on imported grain. 177 00:22:59,420 --> 00:23:01,010 Now, that's Saudi Arabia. 178 00:23:01,010 --> 00:23:08,959 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. 179 00:23:08,960 --> 00:23:19,870 So it's not in itself a market shifting on a market shifting scale, but it is 3 million tonnes of production capacity. 180 00:23:19,880 --> 00:23:29,840 We no longer have the first geographic region in which grain production has peaked and started to decline because of water shortages. 181 00:23:30,440 --> 00:23:40,210 The Arab. Middle East. It includes Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, which is a hydrological basket case. 182 00:23:41,980 --> 00:23:53,290 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. 183 00:23:58,680 --> 00:24:05,190 The World Bank estimates that 15% of India's population is fed with grain produced by overpumping. 184 00:24:06,330 --> 00:24:22,500 That's 175 million people. We estimate that the Earth Policy Institute at 130 million Chinese, are being fed by overpumping. 185 00:24:24,380 --> 00:24:27,680 Overpumping is by definition a short term phenomenon. 186 00:24:28,160 --> 00:24:35,030 So what we have done is, in fact create water based food bubble food bubbles, food, 187 00:24:35,030 --> 00:24:39,890 a food bubble economy that's artificially inflated in the short run by overpumping. 188 00:24:41,540 --> 00:24:45,829 I mentioned the Saudis going from self-sufficiency to zero. 189 00:24:45,830 --> 00:24:50,750 And in five years that that's particularly dramatic. 190 00:24:50,750 --> 00:24:53,120 That will not happen in India or China. 191 00:24:53,480 --> 00:25:02,900 But the loss of irrigation water from aquifer depletion in India, where it's mostly sustainable aquifers as opposed to fossil aquifers, 192 00:25:03,620 --> 00:25:09,920 means that when the aquifers depleted, the rate of pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge. 193 00:25:10,340 --> 00:25:11,840 So there will be a reduction. 194 00:25:12,290 --> 00:25:20,150 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. 195 00:25:20,900 --> 00:25:25,250 China in a similar situation. 196 00:25:26,330 --> 00:25:38,990 We don't know exactly when the when irrigation capacity will peak in these countries, but it at some point will. 197 00:25:39,680 --> 00:25:50,000 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. 198 00:25:51,200 --> 00:25:58,009 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, 199 00:25:58,010 --> 00:26:06,680 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. 200 00:26:07,910 --> 00:26:13,600 Then we have soil erosion over ploughing, overgrazing, huge dustbowl. 201 00:26:13,640 --> 00:26:22,220 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. 202 00:26:23,150 --> 00:26:32,540 And we can now track these satellite images each year, and each of these huge dust storms carries millions of tons of topsoil away. 203 00:26:33,860 --> 00:26:41,660 So we're we're seeing some countries now where production has peaked and begun to decline because of soil erosion, land degradation. 204 00:26:42,110 --> 00:26:44,420 Countries like Lesotho, Mongolia, 205 00:26:45,560 --> 00:26:54,380 North Korea and Haiti both wrestling with the soil erosion problem and not any longer able to keep production increasing. 206 00:27:00,330 --> 00:27:07,690 Then we have a longer term threat. In addition to water and climate, 207 00:27:07,690 --> 00:27:12,129 I should point out that crop ecologists have a rule of thumb that for each one 208 00:27:12,130 --> 00:27:16,900 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season, 209 00:27:16,900 --> 00:27:22,480 we can expect a 10% decline in grain yields wheat, rice, corn. 210 00:27:24,160 --> 00:27:31,240 I remember seeing a study in the Philippines on on rice and the relationship of yield to temperature at about. 211 00:27:31,930 --> 00:27:36,040 And the heat affects pollination with grains. The. 212 00:27:38,580 --> 00:27:45,870 At 95 degrees Fahrenheit, you have basically 100% pollination and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. 213 00:27:45,900 --> 00:27:49,620 You have essentially zero pollination and total crop failure. 214 00:27:50,220 --> 00:27:54,570 So a few degrees can make a big difference in that in that span. 215 00:28:01,130 --> 00:28:05,720 Ice melting. The Greenland ice sheet is melting. 216 00:28:06,290 --> 00:28:12,350 It is melting at an accelerating rate. If it were to melt entirely. 217 00:28:12,530 --> 00:28:18,590 And that won't happen overnight. But if it were to melt entirely, sea level would rise 23 feet. 218 00:28:21,490 --> 00:28:28,270 Even a one metre rise in sea level would put half the rice land in Bangladesh under water. 219 00:28:28,900 --> 00:28:35,290 It would inundate a large part of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice in Vietnam. 220 00:28:36,160 --> 00:28:38,590 Vietnam being the world's number two rice exporter. 221 00:28:38,800 --> 00:28:46,090 And there are another 19 river rice growing river deltas in Asia that would be affected by a three foot rise in sea level. 222 00:28:46,630 --> 00:28:51,700 We don't have to wait for the Greenland melt entirely before we begin to see this. 223 00:28:53,620 --> 00:28:56,710 During the last century, sea level rose about six inches. 224 00:28:57,460 --> 00:29:01,720 It's now projected to rise by up to six feet during this century. 225 00:29:08,250 --> 00:29:13,470 It's the complexity of issues we're facing that makes it much more difficult now. 226 00:29:13,500 --> 00:29:21,300 I mean, who would have imagined that ice melting on an island in the far north Atlantic? 227 00:29:22,250 --> 00:29:27,720 Could shrink the rice harvest of Asia. A region where half the world's people live. 228 00:29:28,820 --> 00:29:39,830 It's not intuitively obvious until you begin thinking about the the relation some relationship among the various parts of the natural system. 229 00:29:41,420 --> 00:29:50,140 Melting mountain glaciers. Another major source of food insecurity. 230 00:29:50,720 --> 00:29:54,860 We're already beginning to see this in the Andes. Some. 231 00:29:56,390 --> 00:30:01,820 Glaciers like the Takaya in Bolivia are gone completely. 232 00:30:04,420 --> 00:30:08,950 And and the river flows as the World Bank last week. 233 00:30:09,730 --> 00:30:17,139 And they're concerned with the the the the ice melt and the flow of rivers in the Andes, 234 00:30:17,140 --> 00:30:21,370 in countries like Peru, for example, and how they're being affected. 235 00:30:22,990 --> 00:30:26,710 So ice melting has two effects. It raises sea level and it. 236 00:30:27,800 --> 00:30:31,670 Melting glaciers in the mountains whose ice melt sustains. 237 00:30:32,510 --> 00:30:38,000 In Asia, for example, the major rivers help sustain the major rivers during the dry season. 238 00:30:38,810 --> 00:30:42,940 The Indus. The Ganges. The Yangtze Sea. 239 00:30:43,980 --> 00:30:52,090 The yellow. And again, I don't think we've quite grasped what all this is translating into. 240 00:30:59,410 --> 00:31:10,270 If I were to pick three indicators to monitor, to get a sense of our future, one would be an economic indicator grain prices. 241 00:31:11,140 --> 00:31:19,630 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. 242 00:31:19,900 --> 00:31:27,920 It's now rising. And the third would be a political indicator, the number of failing states in the world. 243 00:31:28,760 --> 00:31:37,310 That number is growing. And it raises a disturbing question, which is how many failing states before we have a failing global civilisation? 244 00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:45,170 We don't know. We haven't been here before. But these are the sorts of questions I think we need to be asking. 245 00:31:46,520 --> 00:31:51,830 What do we do? Well, it's clear that business as usual is no longer. 246 00:31:52,720 --> 00:32:03,370 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. 247 00:32:04,060 --> 00:32:13,000 Plan B has four components one, cutting carbon emissions 80%, not by 2050, but by 2020. 248 00:32:14,270 --> 00:32:20,210 This is really, in a sense, a wartime kind of mobilisation to get this sort of cut. 249 00:32:21,340 --> 00:32:27,730 But it's the kind of reduction it may take if you want to save the Greenland ice sheet, for example. 250 00:32:28,720 --> 00:32:33,520 It doesn't guarantee it, but it at least would give us a much better shot at it. 251 00:32:34,090 --> 00:32:37,270 Second is stabilising population sooner rather than later. 252 00:32:38,600 --> 00:32:44,649 We think we would like to see world population follow the UN low projection and 253 00:32:44,650 --> 00:32:49,570 stabilise at about 8 billion inches to go instead of going to nine or ten or 11. 254 00:32:51,850 --> 00:32:54,940 And closely related to that is eradicating poverty. 255 00:32:55,600 --> 00:33:03,340 We see population stabilisation and poverty eradication as being being two mutually reinforcing trends. 256 00:33:04,300 --> 00:33:07,900 Eradicating poverty accelerates a shift to smaller families. 257 00:33:08,650 --> 00:33:12,850 The accelerating shift to smaller families makes it easier to eradicate poverty. 258 00:33:12,860 --> 00:33:21,460 So those two trends reinforce each other. And then the the fourth component of Plan B is restoring the economies natural support systems. 259 00:33:22,300 --> 00:33:26,200 Forests, soils, aquifers, grasslands, fisheries. 260 00:33:27,690 --> 00:33:35,340 No civilisation has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural supports, nor will ours. 261 00:33:36,850 --> 00:33:41,350 But we have not incorporated that into our public thinking. 262 00:33:44,660 --> 00:33:50,300 How do we do this in policy and in fiscal terms? 263 00:33:50,660 --> 00:33:57,860 Restructuring the world energy economy, we think, can be done primarily by restructuring the tax system. 264 00:33:58,190 --> 00:34:09,220 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. 265 00:34:09,940 --> 00:34:12,880 We tax labour less and carbon more. 266 00:34:14,320 --> 00:34:28,570 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. 267 00:34:29,440 --> 00:34:36,070 We need universal. Primary school education, for example, girls as well as boys. 268 00:34:36,310 --> 00:34:42,610 We need rudimentary health care at the village level, school lunch programs and in the poorest of the poor countries. 269 00:34:46,260 --> 00:34:51,959 We need to fill the family planning gap through 207 million women in the world who want to plan 270 00:34:51,960 --> 00:34:58,020 their families but don't have access to family planning services and reproductive health care. 271 00:34:59,130 --> 00:35:08,570 It doesn't take very much to fill that gap. It's so small, it gets lost in the rounding and larger international expenditures. 272 00:35:09,230 --> 00:35:17,510 But it is, I think, central to to providing and building a sustainable future. 273 00:35:20,740 --> 00:35:24,370 Then we look at soil conservation, reforestation. 274 00:35:26,140 --> 00:35:31,330 Raising water productivity. And this is largely a pricing issue. 275 00:35:33,380 --> 00:35:42,560 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. 276 00:35:43,190 --> 00:35:47,600 So farmers treat it as an abundant resource when in fact, it's a valuable resource. 277 00:35:48,260 --> 00:35:51,200 And when we worry about water, we sometimes talk about drinking water, 278 00:35:51,200 --> 00:35:59,630 but we drink maybe four litres of water a day, but we eat 2000 litres of water a day. 279 00:36:00,380 --> 00:36:04,400 That is, the food that we eat requires five times as much water. 280 00:36:05,350 --> 00:36:12,010 To produce, as the four leaders would drink as water of juice or coffee or whatever. 281 00:36:15,690 --> 00:36:26,639 We need a worldwide effort to raise water productivity similar to the one we launched in the 1950s to raise crop land productivity, 282 00:36:26,640 --> 00:36:38,160 specifically Greenland productivity. The world grain yield per acre in 2010 is nearly triple the world grain yield per acre in 1950. 283 00:36:39,420 --> 00:36:48,210 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. 284 00:36:49,830 --> 00:36:56,250 When we look at the cost of these things. 285 00:36:57,210 --> 00:37:05,340 It turns out that eradicating poverty, reforestation, soil conservation, all these things we need to do, 286 00:37:06,720 --> 00:37:09,959 restructuring the energy economy will do with tax restructuring, 287 00:37:09,960 --> 00:37:16,260 but the rest will take about $200 billion of additional expenditures each year worldwide. 288 00:37:17,520 --> 00:37:21,830 Now, 200 billion. This is a lot. Especially today. 289 00:37:22,940 --> 00:37:27,290 It's nearly one third. Of the US military budget. 290 00:37:27,920 --> 00:37:31,790 It's, it's one eighth of the global military budget. 291 00:37:34,000 --> 00:37:37,600 But we're now in a situation where we have to redefine security. 292 00:37:39,210 --> 00:37:45,990 We have inherited our definition of security and defined it almost exclusively in military terms. 293 00:37:47,460 --> 00:37:52,170 We inherited it from the last century, which was dominated by two world wars and the Cold War. 294 00:37:53,820 --> 00:38:04,470 But the big threats to our future today are not some heavily armed superpower waiting to invade us. 295 00:38:05,820 --> 00:38:08,970 It's climate change. It's population growth. 296 00:38:10,390 --> 00:38:16,080 It's soil erosion. It's aquifer depletion. It's rising food prices. 297 00:38:18,180 --> 00:38:28,020 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. 298 00:38:29,700 --> 00:38:35,190 Let me talk for a few minutes. Come back to the energy situation and cutting carbon emissions. 299 00:38:38,580 --> 00:38:44,440 If you like, to save energy. This is a great time. 300 00:38:45,300 --> 00:38:48,570 To be alive because we have extraordinary technologies. 301 00:38:49,230 --> 00:38:57,780 I mean, going from incandescents to compact fluorescents cut electricity use by roughly 75%. 302 00:38:59,040 --> 00:39:06,629 If we then go to LEDs. Along with light, with motion sensors to turn lights off. 303 00:39:06,630 --> 00:39:12,750 When no one's in a room, we can cut electricity use for lighting by 90%. 304 00:39:13,440 --> 00:39:20,280 That will enable us to close over 700 of the world's 2600 coal fired power plants. 305 00:39:23,190 --> 00:39:33,000 And we'd make money in the process. It's interesting that the head of Philips in North America is projecting that by 2015, 306 00:39:33,330 --> 00:39:40,620 half of all the bulbs sold in North America and in Europe will be LEDs, and by 2020 it will be 80%. 307 00:39:41,280 --> 00:39:47,310 So I think we've we've got a potential here that's going to develop fast. 308 00:39:48,360 --> 00:39:59,570 The other thing is to electrify the transport system. Run our cars on electricity, whether it's plug in hybrids or all electric cars. 309 00:40:00,140 --> 00:40:07,460 Light rail in cities. High speed intercity rail now a major possibility. 310 00:40:10,270 --> 00:40:14,710 And we need to develop renewables fast. And we're seeing some extraordinarily exciting things. 311 00:40:15,310 --> 00:40:21,880 The U.S. state of Texas, the oil state for the US now has. 312 00:40:22,920 --> 00:40:32,620 Over 10,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity. It has another maybe 40 on the in the planning stages, on the drawing boards, 313 00:40:32,620 --> 00:40:37,720 and they're building some major transmission lines to enable them to exploit that. 314 00:40:38,710 --> 00:40:47,860 Texas could be self-sufficient in electricity generation if it if it develops all the wind farms it's now planning to do. 315 00:40:49,580 --> 00:40:52,790 And interesting, a lot of the money going into the wind farms is oil money. 316 00:40:53,510 --> 00:41:01,850 And the exciting thing about investing in wind farms and wind infrastructure is that for the first time since the Industrial Revolution began, 317 00:41:02,150 --> 00:41:08,990 we have the opportunity to invest in energy sources that will essentially last as long as the earth itself. 318 00:41:10,370 --> 00:41:14,900 We've not had this for a long time, but what a legacy to leave the next generation. 319 00:41:15,830 --> 00:41:19,280 Investment in wind and solar and geothermal energy. 320 00:41:19,280 --> 00:41:28,790 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. 321 00:41:28,790 --> 00:41:33,280 Yields start to drop and eventually you have to find another oil field. Same with coal mines. 322 00:41:33,290 --> 00:41:37,250 Eventually, the coal seams are gone. You have to find another with wind. 323 00:41:37,550 --> 00:41:40,920 That's not the case. We saw. 324 00:41:41,010 --> 00:41:42,810 That's not the case we see in China. 325 00:41:43,260 --> 00:41:52,080 The effort to build 130,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in seven wind mega complexes in six different provinces, 326 00:41:52,800 --> 00:42:01,890 130,000 megawatts of wind is it is equal to building another coal fired power plant every week for the next two and a half years. 327 00:42:03,630 --> 00:42:04,770 This is big time. 328 00:42:05,870 --> 00:42:15,620 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. 329 00:42:15,630 --> 00:42:19,490 They have a lot of other smaller wind farms being developed all the time. 330 00:42:20,790 --> 00:42:29,300 Well, the Desertec proposal in Europe in July when governments were preparing for Copenhagen this July a year ago. 331 00:42:31,980 --> 00:42:35,280 Munich Re Munich Re Insured Reinsurance. Deutsche Bank. 332 00:42:35,280 --> 00:42:49,350 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, 333 00:42:49,740 --> 00:42:59,819 both to provide electricity in North Africa, but also to provide electricity for Europe and to integrate the wind resources of the of Northern 334 00:42:59,820 --> 00:43:05,070 Europe in the North Sea with the solar resources of of North Africa into a single grid. 335 00:43:06,780 --> 00:43:13,919 Big time thinking in the U.S., one of the most exciting things in the last few years, 336 00:43:13,920 --> 00:43:19,740 while everyone was worried about Copenhagen and what would happen or not happen there, 337 00:43:20,160 --> 00:43:28,440 there evolved in the United States, a powerful grassroots movement opposing the construction of new coal fired power plants. 338 00:43:29,220 --> 00:43:32,220 As a result of that effort. 339 00:43:32,910 --> 00:43:37,290 We may never license another coal plant in the United States. 340 00:43:39,020 --> 00:43:42,500 And they have now moved into phase two of this. 341 00:43:44,160 --> 00:43:47,400 Program, which is to close the existing coal fired power plants. 342 00:43:49,190 --> 00:43:55,520 Last year, utilities announced that they were planning to close 48 coal fired power plants. 343 00:43:56,180 --> 00:44:03,530 And there are more already this year. Coal use in the U.S. has declined by 8% over the last three years. 344 00:44:03,860 --> 00:44:13,340 During that same period, we built almost 300 new wind farms, brought them online with a generating capacity of maybe 28,000 megawatts. 345 00:44:14,660 --> 00:44:19,430 So things are changing. They're not changing fast enough yet, but they're they are changing. 346 00:44:23,060 --> 00:44:27,230 Can we do it? I mentioned the need to redefine security. 347 00:44:27,240 --> 00:44:30,830 I think that's at the heart of this restructuring that we need. 348 00:44:33,230 --> 00:44:36,430 But when I. I'm sort of. 349 00:44:38,390 --> 00:44:43,340 Overwhelmed by the scale of what we need to do in the urgency with which we have to do it. 350 00:44:43,880 --> 00:44:48,890 I go back and look at the economic history, read some of the economic history of World War Two. 351 00:44:50,610 --> 00:45:01,080 December 7th, 1941, the extraordinarily successful Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet, part of which was at anchor in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. 352 00:45:02,010 --> 00:45:05,010 From a military point, it was extraordinarily successful. 353 00:45:06,480 --> 00:45:15,330 But what it did was to lead to a mobilisation in the United States because Americans didn't win. 354 00:45:15,470 --> 00:45:17,370 They didn't want to be involved in the war. 355 00:45:17,410 --> 00:45:23,920 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. 356 00:45:24,470 --> 00:45:28,080 If we got 95% saying, yes, we have to go to war. 357 00:45:29,040 --> 00:45:37,770 And I think it was January six, 1942, a month after Pearl Harbour, President Roosevelt laid out UFC 100 his production goals. 358 00:45:38,190 --> 00:45:43,120 He said, We're going to produce 45. 45,000 tanks. 359 00:45:43,650 --> 00:45:48,990 60,000 planes. At least a few thousand ships. 360 00:45:50,430 --> 00:45:53,570 And people couldn't relate to those numbers. 361 00:45:53,580 --> 00:46:03,450 They were so far beyond anything anyone had talked about here, even as certainly not proposed anywhere else. 362 00:46:04,080 --> 00:46:08,220 But what Roosevelt and his colleagues knew was that at that time, 363 00:46:08,640 --> 00:46:13,680 the greatest concentration of industrial power in the world was in the US automobile industry, 364 00:46:14,130 --> 00:46:17,940 because even during the Depression we were making two or 3 million cars a year. 365 00:46:18,690 --> 00:46:26,220 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. 366 00:46:26,850 --> 00:46:33,750 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. 367 00:46:34,830 --> 00:46:41,250 He said, You don't understand. We're going to ban the sale of automobiles in the United States. 368 00:46:41,430 --> 00:46:46,919 So the entire automobile industry had to start producing tanks and planes and all these things. 369 00:46:46,920 --> 00:46:53,770 And in the end, we produced not 60,000 planes, but 229,000. 370 00:46:54,480 --> 00:47:00,360 I mean, even even today, it's difficult to imagine that. 371 00:47:01,260 --> 00:47:09,540 I was on book tour recently flying into Seattle in Washington, where Boeing has its large facilities. 372 00:47:09,540 --> 00:47:15,990 And I was thinking 229,000 planes, but we did it. 373 00:47:16,980 --> 00:47:25,650 And we can do the same thing today with wind turbines, for example, we would need about 2 million wind turbines to megawatts each. 374 00:47:26,310 --> 00:47:33,630 Tibet to close all the world's coal fired power plants. That's a lot. 375 00:47:33,760 --> 00:47:37,120 We produce 65 million new cars every year. 376 00:47:37,690 --> 00:47:45,580 We're talking about 2 million wind turbines over the next decade. Entirely doable if we decide we want to do it. 377 00:47:46,630 --> 00:47:57,130 And my closing point would be that we environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet. 378 00:47:58,180 --> 00:48:02,680 But as I think about it, the planet's going to be around for some time to come. 379 00:48:03,870 --> 00:48:10,889 The challenge for us is saving civilisation itself because I do not think civilisation 380 00:48:10,890 --> 00:48:17,340 can withstand the stresses if we continue with business as usual much longer. 381 00:48:18,570 --> 00:48:23,850 Environmental stresses translate into economic stresses that will become political instability. 382 00:48:26,260 --> 00:48:31,950 And saving civilisation is not a spectator sport. We all have a stake. 383 00:48:32,130 --> 00:48:38,230 We all have to get involved. I'm often asked the question as I travel around the world, you know, what can I do? 384 00:48:38,670 --> 00:48:43,740 And I think people expect me to say, change your light bulbs and recycle your newspapers and so forth. 385 00:48:44,400 --> 00:48:48,870 And those are important. But we're at the point now where we have to change the system. 386 00:48:49,890 --> 00:48:55,080 We have to restructure the world energy economy. And we have to do it quickly. 387 00:48:55,550 --> 00:49:00,290 And we've got to restore the natural support system on which the economy depends. 388 00:49:00,300 --> 00:49:10,200 We can't continue destroying grasslands or overfishing and and experiencing a collapse in one fishery after another. 389 00:49:10,560 --> 00:49:17,010 We can't continue overpumping aquifers. We've got to change big time change. 390 00:49:18,300 --> 00:49:25,890 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. 391 00:49:25,890 --> 00:49:30,450 Ian Curtis, wherever you are for for working on on this. 392 00:49:31,440 --> 00:49:37,650 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.