From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you view the world from a moral perspective, you have no option but to address climate change in a timely fashion. The good news is that the moral imperative is backed-up by economics, technological advance and capital shifts.
The people who will be disproportionately harmed by climate change are those who are (in general) less advantaged economically and socially. Justice means equality of opportunity for all human beings, and that equality of opportunity is quickly reduced if you're in Bangladesh and your home is flooded or if you're in Nigeria and your crops fail because the rains have changed.
Even if there was no climate change… even if there was no problem with the environment… we would still need to replace the polluting infrastructure we have because it is too expensive and too outdated compared to modern, efficient, infrastructure.
A regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.
I'll hope I have helped be more generative and less extractive, through my own actions, and through my support of others. We live in a world where we're constantly battling these forces and we need to ensure we're more generative than extractive — of each other, of our planet — I believe we can do it.
Climate change is a real, and present, threat to the economy – and to all classes of national and private assets. If you manage other people's money, you have a fiduciary duty to de-risk it by managing for climate change.
If you speak to heads of states and corporations about the costs, that will be incurred to protect the environment, they will never invite you again. If you come and speak their language about job-creation and profit, they will welcome you with open arms and tell you to start implementing.
Globally, we have neglected this topic [agriculture] for decades. We have, worldwide, over a billion undernourished people. Food prices have risen over the past few years, with our own research showing these should accelerate up from 2010. The world's demographics are also alarming: The world's population has quadrupled in the twentieth century, doubling between 1960 and 2007. For the first time in history, we have seen the global urban population exceed the rural one, and, over the past forty years, agricultural-land has increased by only 10%. Two words, food security, are central to our model.
We're heading to a world where all our energy is derived from the sun and from renewables, a world where we will have a squanderable abundance of energy. There's 6,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the Earth than we consume as a species.
During the twentieth century we saw consumption boom beyond the planets natural limits, beyond what the planet is capable of sustaining. Everything is connected, forest destruction is a major cause of global warming, climate change.
Every plant has to endlessly sense and monitor a number of environmental parameters; and is constantly called upon to make decisions. This is not the place to list numerous cases of intelligence behaviour in plants, a huge volume of such examples can be found in scientific literature.
Our relationship with the ocean is beautiful – you frequently see people at the shoreline, just in prayer or meditating… connecting with the ocean, letting the waves wash over them… Being around the ocean is our connection to something bigger- you can just lay in the ocean and let your worries wash away.