[MUSIC]
>>Aloha kakou.
>>[Aloha]
>>I'm Michael Bruno, Provost at
UH Manoa, and it is [CLAPPING]
[LAUGHTER]
>>That wasn't even my wife.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is an extraordinary
turnout in recognition
of the importance of the
issue that we'll be
speaking about tonight.
I want to welcome you on
behalf of the University
of Hawaii at Manoa to the
UH Manoa Better Tomorrow
Speaker Series. Through this
series we seek to engage the
community, the broad community
well beyond the campus, to
address, discuss, and have
meaningful conversations about
issues that are among the most
pressing issues of our time,
and certainly this issue we
speak about tonight is.
This spring we will host
renowned speakers, among other
things, on the promise of
microbiome research to
dramatically change the way
that we view and treat
natural sciences,
life sciences, medicine
and environmental protection.
We will also have a speaker
speaking on the ravages of
domestic violence and
possible solutions.
And also on what we've learned
from one of the world's
longest-running studies of
health and well-being, with
groundbreaking findings
on the elements of
human happiness.
I had to pick one topic
that was upbeat. [LAUGHTER]
I can't wait for that one.
In events such as these, we work
to bring all elements of our
community together;
this requires extraordinary
effort  and teamwork,
and I really first want to
thank our own resident
force of nature,
Robert Perkinson. [APPLAUSE]
It is Robert's vision,
dedication, and most of all
his contagious enthusiasm
that keeps this all going.
We owe a special thanks to our
core partner in this series,
the Hawaii Community Foundation,
[APPLAUSE]
and we are very pleased to
announce tonight that
Kamehameha Schools
is signing on as an additional
core partner of the speaker
series. [APPLAUSE]
Special thanks also of course to
the Kahala Hotel and Resort,
which is generously hosting us
this evening and will host
other events through the course
of this year. [APPLAUSE]
Tonight's talk was intentionally
scheduled to coincide with the
State's annual Climate
Conference, which started
yesterday, and also with an eye
on the legislature and the
legislative session,
which will start tomorrow.
There's simply not enough time
to list every organization and
individual that made tonight's
event possible; please take a
look at the poster outside, saya
word of thanks to our sponsors,
most importantly donate
to their causes.
To state the obvious,
climate change is the challenge
of our Age. it is also a top
priority at the University of
Hawaii at Manoa.
We have extraordinary faculty,
staff, and students who are
working on various aspects of
this issue across disciplines
as varied as Engineering and
Microbiology, Architecture, and
the School of Law; in fact this
semester, through our Institute
for Sustainability and
Resilience, we are rolling out a
brand new undergraduate degree
program in Sustainability and
Resilience, with courses
being delivered from 30 differet
departments across every single
college on campus, which is an
extraordinary testament to the
power of the University.
[APPLAUSE]
Our students, our faculty are ot
in the field, in the community
making a difference in this area
I want to call out just a few
things and I'm going to embarras
a few people. Three of our
faculty, Dr. Chip Fletcher,
who's over there, [APPLAUSE]
Dr. Makena Coffman, where's
Makena? [APPLAUSE]
And Dr. Rosie Alegado,
I don't think Rosie's here
tonight, from Oceanography,
all three serve on the City's
Climate Change Commission;
in December that commission
produced a set of guidance
on revising
Oahu's shoreline setback, with
the aim of preserving our
beaches. And our beaches
are the best protection against
the onslaught of sea-level rise
and wave action from storms;
it is that soft sand that
provides the protection to our
infrastructure, and eventually
our homes. Our faculty are
modeling the impacts
of future sea-level rise;
Chip and Makena and others are
doing this daily.
A special sea-level ride rise
hazard zone has been identified
through their work and is being
used by Honolulu, Kauai and
Maui Counties to develop new
coastal setback laws, building
guidelines, and special
management districts.
We should all be proud in the
fact that action is being taken
in this state, not words.
Researchers at the Hawaii Marine
Biology, Institute for Marine
Biology, HIMB, have been working
closely with federal authorities
to develop new management
protocols for coral reef
bleaching across the
Hawaiian Islands.
Before we turn to our featured
guest this evening I would also
like to welcome Mayor
Kirk Caldwell [APPLAUSE]
and Lieutenant Governor Josh
Green [APPLAUSE].
I will ask each of them to
say a word about City and State
initiatives underway to meet the
climate crisis. The way this is
going to work - it's a little
unusual - the Lieutenant
Governor is going to introduce
our speaker tonight, and then at
the end of the speech our Mayor
is going to say a few words
after the talk, 
and then we will have
the moderated Q&A session.
So mahalo, Lieutenant Governor
Green. [APPLAUSE]
>>Aloha, everyone. David
Wallace-Wells is a slightly
scary writer, [LAUGHTER]
but an incredibly warm person.
In just a few moments speaking
with him you can tell that his
passion and intellect
is going to help the planet.
It is going to inform and
motivate people across
ethnicities, across socio-
economic boundaries, across
political spectra, across
international boundaries.
It's extraordinary when someone
falls into that, and that was
not lost on me
when we were speaking.
He's written a book, as you
know,
"The Uninhabitable Earth,"
which sounds like a bummer,
I would say.
It's not great when you imagine,
as he told me in a few minutes
before our our speech tonight,
his speech tonight, what it woud
look like if millions of people
were affected in a swath of the
country and the world that they
wouldn't be able to be outside
for significant periods of time
without dying, without having
having heart disease affect
them.
Can you imagine what that will
do to refugees who have no
resources, perhaps, and have to
leave their countries,
and go elsewhere.
The impact on our state,
obviously - the Mayor will
speak eloquently about that,
he's been doing excellent work -
is of great concern, but to our
globe the greatest concerns
abound. It is not lost on us
that there's an urgency.
Our current administration has
squandered 4 years,
in my opinion, and it may be
another 4 years before the
leadership comes together to
help guide, as he spoke with
me, China, a partnership in some
way, or with India. What will
that look like?
How can we as a globe get ahead
of this crisis?
And I wondered aloud to him,
"What will it look for
populations that are
already vulnerable?"
We may be able to adjust,
we may be able to acclimatize
in our own economic ways,
if we have assets or resources,
or live in a place where you
can deal with a climate change.
But what happens if you're
homeless? As we know, too many
people in our state are, or
in New York, or all across
the country or world.
What happens if we build
substandard housing just to keep
a roof over their head, and then
the impacts of global
warming do the unthinkable,
dislocate them again?
These are the kinds of topics
that he takes up, which I think
is extraordinary.
Now just as important, we should
mention some of the places he's
come from. He came from Brown,
a great education, he's
an editor at New York Magazine,
which Governor Abercrombie
swears
he read for many, many, many
decades, and I believe it.
But what I was impressed by was
just how fluidly he went back
and
forth to his life; he has a
20-month old baby, a baby
named Rocca. And I said, "David,
what does Rocca mean? He says,
'It means rock." [LAUGHTER]
So so it's not lost on me that
he's a normal guy [LAUGHTER]
that fell, as he says, from a
panic attack that lasted 1 month
long, into an extraordinary
article which Mayor Caldwell
pointed out was seminal in his
thinking, and into a novel that
is not just a best-seller, but
could have a global impact. So
let's put our hands together for
David so he can educate us on
what will happen to our world.
[APPLAUSE]
>>Thank you for that
great introduction.
I feel like there's so
many people to thank,
there's so many people
who have been a part of
putting this event on and
also bringing me out here to
Hawaii to, you know, to begin
with, and it's, you know,
it's like too long a list to go
through, but it makes me feel as
though I'm speaking really to te
whole island, and I hope that
this conversation that we're
having tonight will continue to
spread throughout the island,
and throughout the state, in the
weeks and months ahead. I want
to start, you know I often
start this way, but I want to
start by saying a few things
about myself to give you a sense
of how I came to this subject,
and my own particular
perspective on it, 
because you know
I'm up here tonight
speaking about
climate change, the climate
crisis, and all the ways that
this force will transform our
lives if we don't get a hold
of it soon, but I didn't come
to that subject as a life-long
committed environmentalist.
I never thought of myself as a
"nature person." I've never
gone on a hike, I've never owned
any pets, [LAUGHTER]
I've, you know, I've lived my
whole life, really literally my
whole life in New York City.
And I always liked taking trips,
to places like Hawaii, to visit
nature but I also felt that I
didn't live inside it.
And in fact that modern life,
with all of its conveniences and
protections, was a kind of
fortress that defended us
against the forces of nature,
however intense they might be.
In other words, I think I lived
most of my life like almost
everyone I knew, at least in
New York - I think things are a
little bit different here -
really complacent and totally
deluded about the threat from
climate change, which I took to
be happening slowly, happening
elsewhere to other people, and
at a level of severity that
didn't much threaten the way
that I lived, or any of
my loved ones lived.
On each of those ways, on
each of those three points,
I now understand I was very,
Very wrong.
But I want to talk about each of
them in turn, both to give you a
sense of my own awakening, and
also to illustrate how
much more, how much farther we
have to go in educating the
public and educating ourselves
about just what the scientific
world tells us is likely to
happen in the decades ahead and
just how urgently we need to
remodel our politics to take
a hold of this crisis and give
our and give ourselves a chance
of living in a prosperous, just,
equitable, and stable future.
So the three big delusions: 
First one I had was about the
speed of change.
Like a lot of people I know, I
was raised to think of climate
change as very slow;
starting with the Industrial
Revolution, it had fallen to us
to clean up the mess that our
grandparents left behind so
that our grandchildren wouldn't
be dealing with the results.
In fact, James Hansen has one of
the most outspoken, sometimes
called an alarmist climate
scientist, his book for
a general audience 
on the subject is called
"Storms of My Grandchildren."
That's the timeline that
even people who are quite
concerned about this issue
long talked about.
They even complained that the
impacts were so far away that
the public wouldn't engage,
and they had a hard time
expressing a sense of urgency
when the public understood
the crisis to be decades
in the distance.
But in fact half of all of
the emissions that have
ever been produced from the
burning of fossil fuels in
the entire history of humanity
have come in just
the last 30 years.
That's since Al Gore published
his first book on warming, and
it's since the U.N. established
its IPCC climate change body,
which signaled unmistakably to
the world that there was a
scientific consensus about this
issue, and that it was urgent.
We've done more damage since
then than we managed in all the
centuries that came before, in
all the millennia that came
before, which means also,
distressingly, we've done
more damage knowingly than
we ever managed in ignorance.
We're now starting to see those
effects in real time, and this
is a real change from how
the world looked even
just a few years ago.
The wildfires that are
burning in Sydney at present
are unprecedented.
In California we saw similar
fires in previous years, 2017
and 2018, those were
unprecedented, and yet
in Australia the fires
are burning  at least
20 times as much land.
They've killed, scientists
estimate, 1.2 billion animals.
They've forced evacuations in
the thousands in a wealthy
country, prepared as almost
no country in the world
is prepared to deal with the
effects of climate change.
The fires in Australia -
because plants store carbon,
which means when they burn
they release carbon -
fires in Australia have released
so much carbon that the
emissions for Australia have
doubled last year's level.
The flooding in the Midwest
that we saw this past spring
delayed the planting of American
crops by months; many farmers
couldn't plant their crops
at all, which means that
this year American farmers made
40% of their income, the entire
nation of farmers made 40% of
their income on flood insurance
and bailout money having to do
with the China trade war.
In Europe this summer we
saw a heat wave set a
temperature record in June.
Temperature records used
to last decades, sometimes
centuries. In Europe a record
was
set in June, then a new record
was set in July, and then the
record was approached again in
August. So three times in a
single summer.
You're seeing those effects here
as well. The heat wave that you
had here this summer, and the
marine heat wave, which is
affecting the fish life and
the quality of of reef life
around these islands is
incredibly dramatic.
The loss of beaches around the
islands is visible to anyone who
even takes a casual look.
And yet I think it's also
important to pull back and say
as soon as the end of this
century every beach that we know
today, anywhere on the planet,
will be underwater.
Now some of that sand will move,
and new sand will be created,
but no beach that you have
ever walked on anywhere in
your life will be as it was when
you walked on it.
That's happening as soon as
a few decades from now.
But my favorite example -
"favorite" is a gross word to
use
in this context - but the the
example that I always come back
to when I think about the
incredible speed with which
real time effects are now
arriving is the experience of
the
city of Houston, which this past
summer was hit by its fifth
500-year storm in five years.
Now you know that term doesn't
really mean what it used to,
thanks to climate change, but
obviously it used to refer to
a storm you'd expect to hit once
every five centuries.
Five centuries ago, Hernando
Cortez had just landed in
Mexico. There were no European
settlements in North America
at all, so we're talking about
a storm that you'd expect to
hit once during that entire
history: the settlement of the
eastern seaboard, the
establishment of colonies,
the fighting of a genocide
against the native peoples,
the fighting of an American
Revolution, the building of a
slave empire, the fighting of
a Civil War, industrialization,
World War I, World War II,
the Cold War, the American
Empire, the end of the Cold War,
the end of history,
September 11th, the financial
crisis, we're talking about a
storm we'd expect to hit
once in all of that time,
and Houston has been hit by five
of them in the last five years.
So what we're seeing almost
everywhere we look on the planet
is literally millennia of
natural disasters and extreme
weather compressed into periods
as short as just a few years.
Now, I'm 37 years old,
which means 
my life actually
contains this entire story.
When I was born, the planet's
climate seemed stable.
Scientists were worried about
the medium term and the long
term, but for the foreseeable
future things were okay.
We are now standing on the
brink of catastrophe, and
that is because of what has been
done in just those intervening
three decades.
This is not the legacy
of our ancestors.
It is the work of a single
generation. Ours.
So that's the speed.
The second big delusion that
I had was about the scope of
climate change. I heard a lot
growing up in school, listening
to Al Gore, all the rest of it,
I heard a lot about Arctic melt
and sea-level rise, and these ae
important things to think about,
I know the islands of Hawaii are
worrying about them quite a lot,
as they should, but in a
certain way they're among the
least-pressing effects of
climate change, because
the Arctic will melt over many
centuries, meanig the effects
of sea-level rise,
when they get really dramatic,
will take place so far in the
future probably we'll be able
to adapt to them, so long as we,
you know, responsibly govern
ourselves and focus on the
issues as we need to.
All of these other impacts,
which many people in the public
are not even aware of, are
arriving much more immediately,
and they represent much more
dramatic threats to the way
we live this century.
So take the economy.
Some economists believe that by
the year 2100 if we don't change
course with climate change, the
global GDP could be as much as
30% smaller than it would be
without climate change. 30%.
That's an impact that's twice as
deep as the Great Depression,
and it would be permanent.
There are impacts on agriculture
and food production. By the
end of the century, again if we
don't change course, those
studying this say that just from
temperature impacts the grain
yields we'd see around the
world would fall by perhaps
50% or more. So we'd be using
the same amount of land
to produce food, or if we
were using the same amount of
land to produce food, we'd be
getting only 50%, only half as
much of it, and we'll be using
it to feed probably twice as
many people.
And that's just the heat.
Unfortunately, climate change
also is good for all the bugs
that make growing agriculture
crops really hard,
and it's really good for
the growth of weeds, 
which also makes the
growth of food really hard.
And there's recent research
which is quite eye-opening:
the causality is not exactly
clear, they think it has
something to do with the
level of carbon in the
atmosphere, but the nutritional
content of all crops has fallen
over the last few decades, so
that even as our food is
becoming less, even even as
our food production capacity
is becoming less productive,
the food that we get is
less nutritious. It's like we're
producing more and more
junk food for ourselves.
There's a relationship between
temperature and violence.
Which means if we get to the end
of the century on the course
that we're on we could have
twice as much war as we
have today, possibly more.
And that relationship between
temperature and violence,
that holds not just at the
state level, it holds, believe
it or not, at the individual
level. So you'd see rates of
murder and rape and domestic
assault go up.
There're studies showing
that even when it's hotter out
baseball pitchers retaliate more
for hit batsmen than when it's
cooler out. People get into more
arguments when they're driving
in their cars; road rage is
worse. Almost every aspect of
interpersonal dynamics gets wore
when it's hot out, and the world
is getting considerably hotter.
Temperature and, relatedly,
particulate pollution that's
produced from the burning of
fossil fuels affects
cognitive performance, it
affects
rates of premature birth and low
birth weight, it affects the
development of children
in utero and out of utero.
You can see the effect on a
person's lifetime earnings
based on how many days in the
womb they spent when it was over
90 degrees Fahrenheit.
There is a measurable,
statistical effect of that heat
on the performance of children
throughout their lives.
Now it's small, but it's
measurable, which is incredible.
Nearly every aspect of physical
health and mental health is
affected both by temperature and
particulate pollution, so rates
of schizophrenia and ADHD go up,
admissions to mental hospitals
go up, respiratory illnesses,
you know, heart disease, nearly
every aspect of human well-being
is affected by climate change,
which is to say damaged by it.
And for all of these reasons
I think no matter what you
Care about in the world,
no matter what you're focused on
as a political cause or
personal project, climate change
is tied up in it.
So if you care about wealth
creation, there's that impact
on economic growth.
If you care about economic
inequality, it's important to
keep in mind that climate
change punishes unequally,
punishing the developing world
much more intensely than the
developed world, and that is,
that pattern holds true also
within nations and at the
community level, so that
particular parts of the United
States, say, that are poor will
be hit harder, and will be able
to respond less well because
they
are less well-off, and even at
the level of communities and
cities, it is the parts of those
cities that are poorest and most
disempowered who are often most
in the path of extreme weather
and disaster. And so no matter
what level you look at if you're
worried about inequality is
climate change is there too.
If you're worried about
violence, if you're worried
about conflict,
if you're worried about state
collapse, no matter what
political cause you have
on your mind, climate change
plays a role and must be focused
on. For me this this was a kind
of a - it's almost embarrassing
to say, but it was such a
profound revelation.
I grew up thinking I lived
outside of nature, and I started
to realize not only do I live
within nature, sort of at its
discretion, but nearly
every aspect of my life and
anything that I hoped for in my
own life, or in the life of the
people that I share the planet
with, would be affected by this.
I started to see this is not a
limited problem; it's not about
sea level rise, which we can
escape if we live somewhere
other than the coast.
It is an all-encompassing story
which governs everything we do,
and no matter who you are,
where you are, what country you
live in, how wealthy you are,
your life will be affected in
some way, too, even though
there's some people who'll
be affected more and others
less, some countries the same;
no matter where you are,
this will be the story
of your lifetime.
So that's the scope of change.
The third is about severity.
Up until quite recently you know
the worst warming that we heard
about was 2 degrees of Celsius;
scientists called this level
of warming "catastrophic,"
island nations of the world
called it "genocide," and
whenever they talked about it,
whenever advocates, scientists
talked about this level of
warming, politicians, they
would say we need to do
whatever we can to avoid
that level of warming.
And I think that led a lot of
people, including me, to think
that 2 degrees was about a
worst-case scenario.
But practically speaking I think
it's a best-case scenario,
and I want to walk you through a
little bit of why I think that.
At the moment, the planet is 1.1
degrees warmer than it was
before
the Industrial Revolution. Now
1.1 degrees doesn't sound like
very much but it already puts us
entirely outside the window of
temperatures that enclosed all
of human history.
So the planet has never been
as hot, as it is today, when
there were humans around
to walk on it. And that means
that everything that we have
ever known as a species -
the development of the human
animal, the rise of agriculture,
and through agriculture of
rudimentary civilization, and
through that of modern
civilization, everything we
know about ourselves as
biological creatures, as social
creatures, political creatures,
emotional creatures, all of that
is the result of climate
conditions we have already
today left behind.
So it's like we've landed on an
entirely new planet, with a
totally different climate, and
we have to figure out what,
of the civilization we've
brought with us today,
can survive these new
conditions, what will have to
be reformed or renovated, and
what will have to be
discarded and replaced.
And that's just at 1.1 degree of
warming, which is unprecedented
in all of human history.
Scientists say that if
we immediately globally
decarbonized today, never again
emitted another ounce of carbon-
by the way, we're emitting 37
billion tons every year - if we
never emitted another ounce, we
would probably get about a half
degree more of warming from just
the carbon that's in the
pipeline today since some of
these processes take a while to
play out in the natural world.
And that means that in that
absolutely best-case scenario
we'd be landing at about 1.5 or
1.6 degrees of warming.
But given all the political
and economic and cultural
obstacles to that kind of
decarbonization, I think,
practically speaking,
something like 2 degrees is a
best-case for us.
At that level, just 2 degrees,
which we're likely to see
probably 2040, maybe 2050 if
we're lucky, damages from storms
would grow a hundredfold. One
hundredfold. They would get a
hundred times worse globally.
Cities in South Asia and the
Middle East would be so hot, as
Lieutenant Governor was quoted
me
saying earlier, that you wouldnt
be able to walk around outside
during summer heat waves without
risking heatstroke or death.
These are cities that today hold
10 or 12 or 15 million people.
They'd be so hot in just a few
decades that tens of thousands
of
them would be dying every year
just for by risking but from the
risk of walking outside.
That's one reason why the U.N.
believes that we could see 200
million climate refugees; again,
just at two degrees, which
we're likely to see by about
2040 or 2050. They think it's
possible we could get to one
billion, which is as many people
as live today in North and South
America combined.
Actually I think those numbers
are a bit high, but even if you
take the low number and divide
it in half you still get a
hundred million refugees,
which is 100 times as many as
left Syria and went into Europe
and totally scrambled that
continent's politics in ways
that
we're dealing with even today,
even in the United States, the
beginning of the of the
international populist wave
that we're living through today
began with a Syrian civil war,
which is a climate war.
There were other factors, of
course; Lebanon next door dealt
with these issues and survived
intact. But Syria would not have
fallen into disarray if it were
not for drought, and we're still
dealing with the political
impacts of that.
The U.N. believes we could
see at least 200 times as
big of a refugee impact,
just by 2040 or 2050.
At 2 degrees, still at just
2 degrees, scientists believe
that globally 153 million
additional people would die from
air pollution produced from the
burning of fossil fuels, which
is death at the scale of 25
holocausts. And at just north of
2 degrees we'd probably lock
into inevitability the permanent
loss of all the planets ice
sheets, which would bring, over
centuries, 250 feet of sea-level
rise, which is enough to drown
two-thirds of the world's
major cities, maybe 80%,
if we didn't move them,
which we probably would.
This is our best-case scenario.
So how much worse from there can
it get? Considerably worse.
How much is an open question,
and there are a lot of debates
about exactly what trajectory
path were on with emissions, but
according to some estimates by
the end of the century, if
we don't take action, we could
be dealing with $600 trillion
in global climate damages, which
is twice all the wealth that
exists in the world today.
And parts of the planet could
be hit by 6 climate-driven
natural disasters at once.
Now, I believe that the human
species is resilient and
adaptive, and we will find ways
to live under some of these new
conditions, but the question is
what level of suffering and
difficulty will we be trying
to adapt to? How much
can we possibly, how much more
difficult can we make these
questions for ourselves?
Or, theoretically,
how much easier?
I think that even in our best
case we will be dealing with an
unprecedented amount of human
suffering; that is, more
suffering due to climate change
than has ever been experienced
in the entire history of
the species. That probably
sounds like bad news.
[LAUGHS]
Well, you know, obviously it's
really awful news. But I do
think in a certain way there is
a silver lining here. And I
hope I don't sound foolish for
saying this, but ultimately, as
terrifying as some of these
scenarios are, they are
reflections of our power
over the climate.
If we get to 3 or 4 degrees,
frankly even if we get to 2
degrees, even if we get to 1 to
1.5 degrees, which we're
definitely gonna get to, we
will only be getting there
because of choices we are
making.
Which means we can make a
different set of choices.
[AUDIO CUTS OUT]
>>in theory, at least. Now, that
may sound Pollyanna-ish, and the
obstacles are enormous, but it's
just a simple fact that the main
driver of climate change is
human action: carbon emissions,
how much carbon we'll put into
the atmosphere.
And, collectively, our hands are
on those levers, which means
that we can write the story of
the planet's climate future
ourselves. 
And not just can,
we will.
Because inaction is just a
different kind of action.
We're going to be writing that
story whether we like it or not.
And not just writing it,
but living it.
And not just as observers,
but as protagonists.
This isn't just any story.
All of us are holding the fate
of the world in our hands.
It makes me uncomfortable to use
some of this language, but
it's the kind of story that
we used to only recognize in
mythology and theology.
The planet has been brought
from the brink, from stability
to the brink of catastrophe in
just 30 years, and scientists
now say we have about that much
time to take action and avoid
the worst-case impacts.
Which means almost all of us
will be here for at least some,
and possibly most, of that
next part of the story, too.
What happens next?
So what would a happy next act
look like? What kind of
relatively prosperous,
relatively livable, relatively
just future can we imagine?
I think a happy outcome would
probably mean solar arrays
barnacling the planet, almost
everywhere you looked,
although it's also the case
that if we figured out a new
form of battery technology to
transmit that power we
wouldn't need to put
those arrays everywhere;
it's been estimated that
just a sliver of the Sahara
Desert absorbs enough sunlight
to power the entire world's
energy needs, and in the U.S.
we are using more land
today in coal plants than we
would need to provide all of the
country's power through solar
energy. We probably need a
new electric grid to transmit
that energy, because in the U.S.
today two-thirds of produced
power is lost as waste heat
from the production site to the
use point; two-thirds of that
power is lost.
That's not much worse than it is
elsewhere in the world, so we
probably need to build an
entirely new electric
grid, and maybe even an entirely
new kind of electric grid.
We might need some new nuclear
power, since in the entire
history of fossil fuels the only
energy source that's ever
been reliably, um, you could
count on to reliably displace
fossil fuel energy has been
nuclear, in parts of Europe.
But probably it would have to be
an entirely different kind of
nuclear energy, because today
renewables are cheaper than
nuclear power; in fact they're
so much cheaper that in many
parts of the world it's cheaper
to build new renewable capacity
than simply to continue running
old dirty energy infrastructure.
That is a rapid change, which is
an incredibly exciting part of
our near-term future.
We probably need a new kind of
plane, because planes produce an
enormous amount of carbon, and
even though there's some
movement to reduce air travel on
an individual level, I think
it's really hard to imagine
all of the hundreds of millions
of people, especially in the 
developing world, who have just
gotten wealthy enough to afford
air  travel for the first time.
So I think what we need is a
new kind of plane that flies
on a different kind of fuel, and
doesn't cook the planet. And
given that we probably
can't ask the entire world to
entirely give up on meat either,
I think we probably need a new
kind of agriculture, as well.
But perhaps an old kind of
agriculture is a better way to
think of think of it, because we
know that there are practices,
regenerative agriculture,
etc., that can, say, turn cattle
farms, which are carbon sources,
into carbon sinks which absorb
carbon. Maybe we'll be growing
some of that meat in labs, and
maybe we can feed our cattle
seaweed, because actually if you
feed them just a little bit of
seaweed their methane emissions
-
it's another greenhouse gas -
goes down - which is a reason
they're a problem - it goes down
by 95 to 99 percent.
Probably we're gonna have to do
all three of those just in the
agricultural sector, because, as
with every other aspect of this
challenge, climate change is
just too big to solve with any
single silver bullet solution.
It requires us to take action
on all fronts, in all ways,
with all tools, and immediately.
And no matter how many tools
we deploy, we probably won't
be able to do enough. We're no
longer in a position when we can
even dream of beating climate
change, only limiting it, and
learning to live with it. That's
the terrifying math we face.
But it's also the challenge
for all of us. It means we
probably will have to be
deploying a whole raft of
solutions dealing with what are
called negative emissions, which
allow us to take carbon out of
the atmosphere in addition to
decarbonizing rapidly, that only
in billions, possibly even
trillions of new trees planted,
and it will probably also
mean whole plantations of what
are called carbon capture
machines that can take the
carbon out of the atmosphere
at an industrial level.
Now, the U.N., in their
prospectus looking at how we
could avoid catastrophic
warming,
they want us to move so quickly
on decarbonization it would be
unprecedented in the entire
history of human energies, and I
wanted just to pause there for a
second. They in order to avoid
catastrophic warming we need to
cut our emissions by 7.5 percent
per year over the next decade,
globally: no nation, no single
nation in the entire history of
humanity has ever cut its
emissions by seven-and-a-half
percent in any single year,
ever.
And the U.N. says that in order
to avoid catastrophic warming,
the entire planet needs
to do that every single year
between now and 2030.
In addition to that
decarbonization, they say that
we need to build a negative
emissions carbon capture
industry at least twice as big,
and maybe four times as big,
as today's oil and gas
business, which took
a century and a half to develop,
and globally employs tens of
millions of people. They say
we need to complete that
build out of that entirely new
industry by 2030.
We probably need an entirely
new kind of infrastructure,
because if cement were a country
it would be the world's third
biggest emitter, and China's now
pouring as much cement every
three years as the U.S. poured
in the entire 20th century.
And we're gonna have to start
thinking about sea walls and
levees and protecting vulnerable
populations all around the
world,
but maybe especially on the
coasts, many of whom are so poor
they can't afford that kind of
technology themselves, which is
why I think it must also mean
the end of a narrowly-
nationalistic geopolitics,
which allow us to define the
suffering of people
living elsewhere in the world as
insignificant, when we even
acknowledge it.
None of that's gonna be easy,
but the only obstacles are human
ones. Science is not stopping us
from taking action, and neither
is technology. We have the tools
we need today to start.
Of course, we have the tools
we need today to end global
poverty, epidemic disease, and
the abuse of women as well,
and that's why I think even more
than new tools and new tech,
what we need is a new politics:
a new way of overcoming
those human obstacles.
Our economics, our culture,
our shortsightedness, our
status quo bias which makes us
reluctant to make any
meaningful change,
our disinterest in considering
anything really scary,
our reflex to define political
goals in terms of what we think
of as practical and possible,
rather than what we
know is necessary, 
and the selfishness of the
world's rich and powerful,
who have the least incentive
to change anything.
Now, they will suffer, too -
everyone will, but not as much
as those with the least, who
have done the least to
cause this problem, and who will
be shouldering the biggest parts
of its impacts in the decades
ahead. A new politics will make
the matter of managing the
burden of climate change the
central priority of our Age,
which it has to be.
Now, I wrote my book over the
course of 2018, I turned it in
in September of 2018, and I
ended it on some mix of a couple
of the notes, the quasi-hopeful
notes, that I've just sketched
out, that ultimately, though
climate change is terrifying,
the fact that it is terrifying
is a reflection of our power,
and that politics offers a path
to real transformation.
I think for a long time we've
let ourselves be taught that we
define our, that we define our
world and make our mark on the
world through what we buy and
what we consume.
But politics is there to make a
much more dramatic reorientation
of our priorities, and it's
sitting right in front of us
as a path towards
progress on climate.
Now, I thought both of
those things were true 
when I concluded the book
on that note,
but I only sort of half-believed
them, and that's because when I
looked back on the recent
history of environmental
activism - in my
research I'd spoken to many
people who had devoted their
whole lives to this fight and
produced, practically speaking,
no progress. Every year our
emissions went up, every year we
made the problem worse; even
though we knew what we were
doing we couldn't stop ourselves
from doing more damage every
single year - I believed in a
political path forward, but I
wasn't sure what it would look
like, what it would take, or
how fast it could possibly come.
I turned my my book in in
September of 2018. I had not
heard of Greta Thunberg.
Nobody outside of Sweden had.
Practically speaking, nobody
inside of Sweden had. She had
just been striking for a few
weeks, a lonely, literally
friendless 15 year-old,
outside Swedish Parliament
with a single sign.
Now we're a little more
than a year later, 
she has led a global movement
numbering in the millions.
A truly global movement.
Climate strikes in South Asia,
in sub-Saharan Africa, in Latin
America in East Asia, not to
mention the U.S. and Western
Europe. When I turned my book
in, I'd never heard of
Extinction Rebellion;
they had not even been
founded in the U.K.
Within 6 months of being 
founded, they had forced a
conservative British Parliament
to declare a climate emergency
and commit to zero carbon
by 2050. Now,
that's not fast enough for me,
I think it's not fast enough for
the planet, but it's an
incredible step forward
given how slow-moving
politics have been on
this front for so long.
And yet the British Parliament
was followed by leadership in
Finland, in Norway, in Denmark,
each of whom made even more
ambitious pledges than the U.K.
I think their pledges are
actually so ambitious they can't
possibly be met; they want to
get to zero carbon by 2030,
which seems crazy to me.
But in any event, we're seeing
incredible movement on this
front. When I turned my book in
we had not yet elected
Alexandria Ocasio Cortes to
Congress, the Green New Deal was
the name of Jill Stein's climate
policy, not a major subject of
debate in the highest levels
of American government. We are
now walking through a Democratic
primary season, there's a debate
today, in which candidates are
engaged in an arms race
competing to be more serious
than the one to their left and
the one to their right on this
issue. That is unthinkable.
And of the major serious
remaining candidates, Joe Biden,
who's probably the least
forward-thinking of the four
of them,
his presidency on climate would
be miles more ambitious than
anything that was achieved under
the Obama Administration; that
is how fast our politics on
this issue is changing. 
We are living in an entirely
different world
than I even thought was possible
just a year or so ago.
And that's important not just
because of what is possible now,
but becaue it suggests
a path forward:
if what was impossible to
contemplate 2 years ago is now
possible, that means that with
continued momentum much more
ambitious action could become
possible in the years ahead,
and that is vital, because even
with all of this momentum at the
level of protest, at the level
of public opinion, which is
moving in unprecedented at
unprecedented rates too, at the
level of political leadership
in the U.S. and around the
world,
even with all that momentum we
need a lot more momentum
than we've got. And we also
need to leverage that
into actual policy commitments,
which in most parts of the world
have not yet been made, even as
our politics is shifting.
If we need, as the U.N. says, a
World War II-scale mobilization
on climate, that is much easier
to imagine today than it would
have been a year ago, when they
called for it, and certainly 
5 years ago, when climate
scientists would have been
reluctant to even talk in those
terms because they were scared
of how scared the public
would be of those issues.
So we're in an incredibly
privileged position not just to
be alive during the most
consequential decades in
all of human history, and to be
acting ourselves every day to
shape our future, but because
even today in 2020 the
possibilities for action are so
much bigger and more dramatic
than they seem than seemed
possible just a short time ago.
At least, that's one way of
thinking of it. [LAUGHS]
Another way is: we signed the
Paris Accords 3 years ago,
2016. No major industrial nation
on earth is on track to meet its
commitments under Paris.
Even if we met them, we'd
probably get about 3 degrees
of warming, which, as I
sketched out earlier would
be quite catastrophic, and
just since the signing of the
Paris Accords we've seen
the election of Donald Trump
in the U.S.,
Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil,
and the self-appointment
of Xi Jinping in China
as "president for life."
So as much progress as has been
made, we need dramatically more,
because as those three leaders
show - Xi is a little bit
of a different case, but
certainly as Trump and Bolsonaro
or Scott Morrison in Australia
show - climate change won't
necessarily produce political
movement in only one direction.
There are risks of moving in the
other direction, as well.
Towards a more zero-sum view of
the world, a sense of resource
competition, and a growing
commitment among leaders
of particular nations to the
security and well-being of their
citizens, rather than the
security and well-being of the
world as a whole. We are living
through that wave today, and it
is up to us to
turn the tide.
In a world as divided as ours,
and in which it's so hard to
imagine collective global
action,
it is absolutely incumbent on
all of us to do whatever we can
to build those kinds of
coalitions and forms of
consensus and cooperative
networks, because
climate change is a
global problem;
it can only be solved globally,
and it can only be solved
by humans.
The challenge before us
is to secure a livable,
prosperous, and relatively-just
future for future generations,
and no matter who you are,
no matter what you do,
that job is yours.
The task is ours.
So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
And here's the mayor!
[APPLAUSE]
>>Good evening and aloha.
[ALOHA]
So I have a few comments from
the perspective of the City and
County of Honolulu and
and Oahu and
probably the State of Hawaii.
Read the article, and we're
starting our Climate Change
Office, the first one in the
United States with the name
"climate change" in any city.
Sat down with Josh and said,
"We need to do a lot more. And
we need to get through this
together." And since then
we've done all kinds of stuff.
You know I did a mayor's
directive almost immediately,
resulted in our rail project
to raise the podiums of their
stations in town so that it can
address climate change of six
feet of sea level rise.
You know we're adjusting our
codes: plumbing, electrical, and
others. We're planting hundreds
of thousands of trees.
We're filing a lawsuit against
the large big oil companies.
We're banning plastics.
We're not allowing walls to be
built and it's having an impact
on people, friends of ours who
are upset. We're gonna be
raising podiums of buildings in
town. The city doesn't retreat,
the city hardens in the city
areas, but we retreat in other
areas. We're rebuilding our
infrastructure, we're looking at
electric buses. We are taking
action. But we're also getting
huge pushback from our friends,
people we know in this room.
The efforts on plastic - we
turned some of our leaders, who
I've never seen become
protesters, out protesting in
front of Honolulu Hale. And it,
you know, it's part of the
challenge, and it's not coming
from headquarters far away, it's
coming from headquarters right
in downtown Honolulu. And we
really should know better. And
David made that point. You know,
I got this book in Munich coming
back from a vacation. It's
paperback, and guys out front,
they have the hardback said how
did I get this? You got to go to
Europe to get it. Everyone in
Europe is reading this book, and
I'd read the article, I read the
book. I got back, I was jet-
lagged and so I'd wake up in the
middle of night at 3 usually,
and I thought I'd read this
book, but I could never
fall asleep again,
because then I laid in bed
worrying, and think, "I got to
tell Josh we got to do a lot
more a lot quicker." 
And I and I kind of embarrassed
to say this but I got the book
in Munich because we were
coming back from Egypt
because I wanted to take
my wife and daughter
to see the Pyramids.
Bucket list.
But, yes, I flew on a jet plane
all the way from Honolulu, all
the way there and all the way
back. But I went there, you know
and it is one of the Wonders
of the World, and it's an
incredible story of what the
Egyptians did. But it made me
think of things like the Great
Wall of China, and what humans
did there, and even coming home
here to my island where I
grew up, the Island of Hawaii,
you know Puukohola, the heiau
that Kamehameha the Great built
before he went off to conquer
the other islands. You know, a
lot of hands touched a lot of
pohaku, a lot of stone, to build
this. And that gives me hope.
You know, us humans need a
purpose. We need to belong, and
we need great things to do
together. And it goes to David's
point: it made me think, in
2016, I think, when Hurricane
Lane collapsed in front of
Waikiki, a category 5 hurricane
that whipped up, overnight,
and fell apart within a day,
luckily, and then I took off to
go to the ending of Jerry
Brown's
Climate Action Summit in
San Francisco. And I got there
feeling pretty hopeless: one, I
got there and then the Nuuanu
reservoir was gonna flood and
maybe breach and flood Waikiki
Honolulu, and I'm in now San
Francisco. Not a good thing
for a mayor.
But I sat there listening
and thinking, "It's hopeless."
And then I saw tribal women
from Africa, I heard some of the
largest Fortune 500 company
executives, heard United Nation
leaders and Prime Ministers, and
environmentalists: all kinds of
people talking about what they
were doing on our planet Earth
to address our climate crisis.
So I think there is hope that
we can bend the arc of our
climate crisis and create
a green, habitable, and
just global economy.
I believe we can.
It's incumbent on us to
take action and to lead.
I want to thank David for
his courage, and I hope you do
not stop talking about this.
You're only 37, got a lot of
years to continue to make sure
that we bend that arc to a
more green and more just
environmental world.
Thank You. Mahalo everyone.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]
