From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The defining feature of our era is that the next generation are bona fide digital natives. They're backed by technology, making them tech-empowered. Thanks to social media, they can sway vast audiences in mere moments. They possess a crystal-clear agenda about the environment, justice, equality, and beyond just financial markets, they're reshaping social and political narratives.
This is the most inefficient system you could possibly imagine. It takes 6-10Lbs of grain or fodder to go into an animal and, in turn, yield 1Lb of protein.
Going around the world thousands of times presents you with the depth, fragility, strength and richness of Earth; and gives you a sense of what 4.5 billion years actually means. I travelled with our Earth as it crossed the Solar System and watched as Winter and Summer swapped- it was like watching the world take one of 4.5 billion breaths.
Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.
You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.
We can cut our carbon emissions while achieving economic growth by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency. The technologies are already there, all we need is the political will.
It is about talking to people in a language they understand. You need to be able to feel and connect with stories in order to act. The more stories we have, the more people we can reach — because everybody has different contexts, and different stories will speak to different people.
People find that you don't have to go around managing the maintenance of a building with a tool belt anymore, you can go around with an iPad. You've still got to operate buildings, but our buildings have to be technically oriented as we're challenging them to be greener. So, how do you go from a tool belt to an iPad?
There's a transition from brown industries to green initiatives. This generation has been instrumental in driving this change, and they're not about to relent, regardless of governmental stances. We're also seeing the 'feminisation of finance' as women progressively take the reins of vast asset pools.
The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world.
We mustn't focus exclusively on this threat, and it tends to be the case that the global elite does. I was at Davos in January 2020 and climate change was the agenda – and the pandemic had already begun! It was quite difficult to persuade people that there might be a nearer-term threat facing us than climate change.
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.