I have a book coming out called The 
Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a
Finite Planet.
This talk is basically a short
version
of that book.
A long time ago Dickens wrote these
words in the opening of A Tale of Two
Cities
"It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times"
and this pretty much captures
the current
discussion of what's happening
on this planet.
In a lot of ways we're living in the
greatest age humanity has ever seen and you'll
hear a lot about that here at Singularity 
University, but in a lot of ways we're
facing some of the worst risks also.
So you see sort of highest levels of optimism
in some parts of society
and highest levels of pessimism in other
parts.
Now at the opening of
of the GSP
I think you all got the challenge of
finding a way to make the world better
for a billion people
and there is no topic
bigger
then the ones I am about to talk about; which is
literally the fate of the planet and of human
civilization,
and the core question of
can we keep growing richer
and better off
without over consuming and destroying
the world that we live on. So
is the future one of
sort of utopian
societies that are
incredibly prosperous but also
grain,
or is it a future like this? Who can name
this film?
Planet of the Apes, very good. This is an easy one;
they will get harder.
Alright so let's start with the best of times.
I was born in 1973 in Egypt in a working
class neighborhood
like this
and when I was born
infant mortality in Egypt
was fifteen percent, so I had a
one in six chance of dying before
age five. That's always given
me a tremendous perspective when I look
back at where I came from
and what life is like in America versus
what life is like in my parents'
generation.
It's amazing that America's obviously
such a better place.
But it's not just a difference between
cultures,
it's a difference in time
because
there was a time, well I should say of in
my parents' generation, it was even worse
three of my father's siblings
died in infancy  in five of my mother's
siblings died
alright.
Again this is not just an issue of
culture,
because in the United States
in 1900 infant mortality was
twenty five percent
and in big cities it was one and three.
In Chicago in 1900
one out of three children born died
before their fifth birthday so the
change is striking.
Today in Egypt it's two percent
and in the U.S. it's zero point seven.
Almost no metric
summarizes the progress we've made
better than that.
you can give it another way and look at
life expectancy
and you see that over the last half
century
it's soared.
At the top, the developed world where life expectancy has gone up
by about thirteen, fourteen years
and the red line is the world as a whole
where life expectancy  has gone up even more
and now it's about sixty six, sixty seven
years
around the planet where it was about
thirty years of life
was the average in 1900.
Poverty
has dropped. The fraction the world
living on less than one dollar a day
in the 1970s
was around one third of the world
and today it's down to just around five
percent.
So we've made huge strides not to the rich
world
but in the world overall.
Education, one of the most fundamental
enablers of people to make a better life
for themselves, has soared. So the top
line is the United States
but here you see India and Ethiopia, the
yellow and red lines
as two sample countries and the rest of the
world
catching up. This is on a log scale,
we see the ratio of how much scholing
the average child
growing up in the U.S. gets
versus how much schooling the average
person growing up in
Asia or Africa gets
is shrinking overtime and that's a
tremendous fundamental enabler of people.
Connectivity
is at an all-time high, something you
probably heard Peter talk about
so mobile phones
went from a technology that did not
exist practically speaking
in the 1990s
to one today that reaches more
than three-quarters of the world so more
than four billion people
have access to a mobile phone.
And if you count people who
have a friend with a mobile phone that
number is even higher.
And the internet
is close behind that. So again it's
gone from a technology that
almost didn't exist for all facts
and purposes in 1995
to one that has
two billion users
today and is rapidly growing so we're
living in an age of
sort of the greatest lifespan,
the least poverty, the least hunger,
and the most interconnectivity of all
time. That's had other consequences
as people have grown richer
and their ability to communicate to communicate has gone up, they've demanded more control
of their lives
and more participation
in the political process. So today the
fraction of the world that lives in a
democracy is also at an all-time high
and there's
a clear connection there.
There's a lot of theoretical work linking
levels of education
in a country to levels of democracy in a country and there are many theorists would tell you that
once a nation passes a certain level
of average education
democracy is fairly inevitable and we
perhaps are seeing some of that with the
Arab Spring now.
Perhaps, more surprisingly
to American audiences at
least, is that the world is becoming more
equal.
So this is a distribution of income
in 1970. So it's a scale
across the bottom
from left to right is poor to rich
and from top to bottom of how many
people live at that income level.
So you see in 1970
the world had a lump sort of off towards
the left
and then a long tail of people getting
richer off to the right.
And in 2006, the last year for which we
have great numbers,
the income distribution has both shifted to
the right field; people have gotten richer,
but it has also become more equal; it looks
more like ...
Let's do that again.
So in 1970
you have kind of a big lump of people
living on between one and two dollars a
day,
those the two vertical black lines.
And in 2006,
we've taken the people on the far left,
in poverty,
and they've moved up in income
tremendously faster
than the people on the right. The world on a
macro scale
is getting more
equal in income.
Okay, so best of times;
richest, most democratic, best off, etc.
But also potentially the worst
of times.
Let me tell you a story.
On Christmas day, 2005, I
woke up before dawn
in Guatemala.
I got up and I hiked through the jungle
to get to this structure.
This is Temple Four
in the Mayan city of Tikal
and
in 900 AD this was the
tallest structure
in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, it was the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere
until about 1900.
It was a skyscraper
and it was the middle of a giant
city inside of a civilization of about
twenty million people.
That morning when you looked out as the
dawn came up, it was an amazing
sight.
It's jungle, there's howler monkeys,
there's giant roars, you feel like you're on
the set of
Jurassic Park.
And the structure just underneath the Sun in this picture
is about one mile away from where I'm
standing.
But this was not jungle a thousand
years ago.
This was the heart of a metropolis.
But when
the West found
this for the first time
in the early twentieth century,
all of that had been reduced to this.
If you walk through a Mayan city right
now,
what you find is not so many great
tall buildings, you got a lot of mounds.
They look like hills but they're not hills.
This is the ruins
of a thousand years ago.
These cities word literally abandoned
for a thousand years.
The Mayan population dropped by a factor
of ten
from its peak
to what it was when Spaniards came.
So what happened to the Maya?
Well the Maya were at
the peak of their success,
they were at the peak of their population.
And to feed that population they had to chop
down all the trees
around them to turn that land into
farmland.
In so doing, they caused
the soil to erode,
they removed the ability of trees to
capture water
and rainfall
which exacerbated drought.
They were hit by some climate change of a
global variety as well
that also brought drought
and what that meant is that they
exhausted
their fundamental energy source which was food.
Food is the first energy technology.
Without food you can't run your 
civilization and the Maya ran out of that
and that led to more conflict in their
society
and eventually to an utter collapse.
Could that happen to us?
Well the number one energy source for
humanity is fossil fuels
and none is more important than oil.
In the the 1950s a fellow
named M. King Hubbard predicted that
we would see oil production
the U.S. eventually peak and then
drop.
This is in a very simple way.
If you look at data from any given oil
well,
you can see that
it starts off with a high flow, it goes
up and up and up and eventually the
field underneath it is depleted
and it goes down and down and down.
So his methodology was simply I'm going
to sum up
those curves of production
for an entire country and see what happens.
And he predicted that the U.S. would
peak in oil production around 1970.
No one believed him,
essentially.
But here's what happened: Oil
production initially rose and rose and
rose after his prediction
but then in 1970, it
actually did hit
a peak that he predicted and then it went down
and down and down. And it is somewhat
resurgent; in the last two years we have
seen an increase
in overall oil production in the U.S.
But that still has the U.S. producing half the amount of oil
that it did in 1970.
Well the U.S. is just
one place, it's  just one country, it's not the
world's biggest will producer.
Oil is a global commodity. Well
Hubbard also predicted that on a global
scale
we would see oil production peak
around the year 2000 using the
same methodology.
And for a long time people thought he
was crazy and oil production
went up and up and up
than it kind of plateaued, went up more
slowly
and then
for the last eight years, since 2004, it's been effectively
plateaued.
So oil production has changed by about four percent
over the last eight years, which is what
used to happen
every two to three months.
That's how fast oil production was
gaining in the 1950s.
Let's look at that
more closely.
So since two thousand four the red line
is the price of oil
and the black line is the production of
oil. So I'm capitalist; I work at
Microsoft, I can't deny it.
One thing I know about corporations is they exist to make money.
In the presence of a very high price for
one's commodity,
one has every incentive there is to
produce more of that commodity.
And so far oil producers have not
been able to keep pace with demand
and that's why prices are so high
They do fluctuate, you see in 2008
the price came down
that's because of recession.
Alright, and there's actually some data suggesting that the
peak in the price of oil was one of the
major contributors
to the global recession and not just
financial shenanigans.
Now, there is plenty of oil in the ground.
The problem is not how much oil is in the
ground,
it's our ability to pump it out.
We have gotten better and better at pumping
oil out of wells. It used to be that an
oil field
had a maximum recovery of about
thirty percent. You could get one third of the
oil
out of the field and after that it was under too
little pressure to get the rest.
So we've gotten better and better at
increasing that amount by pumping in
high-pressure water,
pumping in steam, pumping in detergents
but fundamentally you can't take a field
past
one hundred percent recovery.
And the problem is that all of our
holding onto current production levels
has been by forcing more and more oil
out of these fields. They're getting more and more exhausted.
And the rate of discovery of new fields
has not kept pace
with the rate of production. The black
is production
and the bars below it is the rate of
discovery. So the whole way that we're
keeping up with demand
is just by squeezing these existing
fields
for more and more of the oil that's in them.
And poses some severe risks for us
to come. People talk about peak oil,
we might basically be in peak oil
right now.
We might not; there are a lot of
economic incentives
that try to pump oil production up
further but again we've been more or less
at a plateau
since 2004, 2005.
So oil is not the only resource that is financially scarce.
Water
is life. We use seventy percent of the
world's water for agriculture. People
talk about conserving water
off the tap, taking shorter showers.
That is not a major source of water.
Water is predominantly resource used to
grow food.
Can anyone name this body of water?
Very good, almost no one ever gets this.
Alright Federico, very good.
Yes, that's right. The Aral Sea
is a fresh water body.
It was the fourth largest
water body
on the earth at the time of this
photo: 1989 from NASA.
Here's what it looked like in 2003.
And here's what it looks like
today.
The Aral Sea. A - R - A - L Sea.
The Aral Sea is between
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
and what happened to it
is that the U.S.S.R. in its dying days and
later Russia
basically diverted all the rivers the
fed into it and pumped all the water out
of it to grow food
and other agricultural commodities
like cotton. And so now this sea that
took tens of thousands of years to fill
up
is gone, effectively. The area around it
is dotted with the bones of fishing
villages
whole villages with boats dried up
on sandy bed
and no economy,
no fish,
and no water to keep growing those crops.
Yep, thank you.
So we'll pull it up and zoom in.
Now the Aral Sea, as I said is between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and
for the fraction of people here
who don't live near that it might seem
very academic but this is not just a
phenomenon of one place, its a phenomenon worldwide.
And right here in the United States
we have this thing, the ogallala aquifer
This aquifer is an
underground reservoir of water
that is filled with the melt of glaciers
that retreated thirteen thousand years ago.
It has a refill time
between ten thousand
and twenty thousand years is how long it
will take to refill this.
And since 1960
we have pumped nearly half of the water
out of it.
On current pace,
this will be entirely drained by 2050. And in fact in some areas like
Northern Texas
the wells that go into this aquifer are
running dry
right now.
And so people, farmers who are pumping this water out
to grow crops, grow cotton
are no longer able to do so. And if
we were out of water
agriculture fails.
This is actually a global civilization risk.
Alright, there's a saying that there's
plenty of fish in the sea.
That was once more true than it is today.
We have over fished the deep oceans
tremendously and more than half of all fish
species that humans consume
are fully crashed or tremendously over
consumed
and there are basically no fish species
left that we know of
that are under exploited
in the deep ocean, if you will.
In fact you'll see phenomenon like
about a decade ago, fifteen years ago
we discovered this species called orange
rafi. We'd known the species,
but it became suddenly
commercially viable
and those went from being not
exploited at all
to being nearly crashed in a span of
less than twenty years.
Forests
the economists calls the world's
forests
the world's lungs;
they're response for twenty percent
of the oxygen that we breathe.
They're also incredibly important
in the moisture cycle. Forests capture
a tremendous amount of moisture passing,
turn that into cloud, and turn that into
rainfall.
So we depend on it.
In antiquity,
about two thirds
of the land area of the planet was
covered in forest.
Today it's about one third.
And primarily that difference, that one
third of the world's land area, or half of the
original forests
that are gone,
is because of agriculture. Agriculture is
the number one cause of deforestation.
Pretty much we chop down forests or we slash
and burn it and we turn it into
farmland or grazing land
for cattle and while we've made good
strides in rich countries, so North
America and Europe
have reversed the trend of deforestation
and are holding steady or even slightly
increasing. In the tropics
the trend is continuing and we're still
chopping down forest in
Brazil and Indonesia and other areas
where we really would like not to be.
And perhaps the largest global risk
is of climate change; global warming.
So I'm going to show you what the temperature
looks like since 1880, ok.
This is the temperature record
compiled from nearly a hundred thousand
separate sensors and more than a billion
data points
from 1880 to today. And what you can see is
that temperature in degrees fahrenheit
has risen by about two degrees
in that time. It's not a smooth
transition;
there's no guarantee that any year is
warmer than
the one before it.
It's a jagged line that jumps
up and down over time.
But if we look at kind of the overall trajectory,
we'll see that the shorter the
time period,
the closer you get to the present,
the faster the change
is happening, that change is
accelerating.
And it's because of the CO2
we're pumping into the atmosphere.
Records from ice cores drilled from Antartica and Greenland that go back eight hundred
thousand years,
and recently longer than that, show a close coupling of CO2 levels in the
atmosphere
and temperature for the last eight hundred thousand
years. And now if you look at that blue line
we're at CO2 levels that
we haven't seen in any of these ice cores.
If we go back further and look at sediments on  bottoms of lakes,
we find that we're at CO2 levels
that haven't been seen in the lifetime
of our species. We haven't seen these
levels in several million
years. And in fact,
the last time CO2 levels where this
high,
there were no ice caps
and seas were dramatically higher. Now that's
still a slow process;
it takes a long time
to melt the ice caps
but the process is starting right now.
Not everyone is a numbers person;
some people like more kind of
visual or
or visceral evidence.
So let me show you a couple other examples
of what's happening.
This is the Bear Glacier in Alaska.
This is a picture of it in 1920 and here's a picture of it now,
2005.
This is the Peterson Glacier,
also in Alaska.
Here's a picture of it in 1920
and here is that same area right now.
It's almost unrecognizable. Watch the mountains; watch the profile of those peaks there.
It's the same place but you wouldn't
know it
any other way.
That's one sign of what's happening and
that ice will eventually turn into
higher sea levels.
Now that will take awhile. Sea levels will
rise
between one and two meters this
century.
That's actually not the biggest threat
that we have. The biggest that we have isn't
a threat towards the end of the century; it's a threat
that's starting right now
and it's a threat to our production of
food
more than anything else.
And that's caused by more extreme
weather, more heat, more drought, and more
fire.
In 2003,  Europe suffered
its worst heat wave
since 1540; its worst heatwave in nearly five hundred years.
Seventy thousand people died,
Ukraine lost three-quarters that's grain
harvests,
about a quarter of the forests in Portugal
burned.
In 2009, China was hit
with its worst drought in more than a
century; a one in a hundred years level
drought
event.
In 2010, it was hit by another
one in a hundred years
frequency drought level event ,which
doesn't quite add up.
Wells that had provided water since
the sixteenth century
stopped.
Now this happens because warmer air can
trap more moisture.
It can take moisture up from the ground and then it can deposit it in other places.
So we see drought increasing around the
world. We also see instances of flooding
increasing because the moisture we do
get ends up more concentrated.
So in 2010 after that
air picked up all that moisture away
from China, it deposited it in Pakistan.
And an area at twice the size the state of
Texas; an area larger than Germany was
underwater in Pakistan. There are no
recorded floods
in history
as bad as this in that region.
Then later in Russia,
we got another massive drought
and another massive heat wave.
In 2010,
fifty five thousand people died of heat
in Moscow alone
in the months of July and August.
And then last summer,
in the U.S.
we had one of the hottest summers on
record.
In the American south, in Texas,
we had the driest ten-month period ever
on record and we had four million acres
of forest in Texas alone
burn.
Normally, in a normal year, one to two
million acres burns across the entire
U.S.
in a summer of fires. This is a dramatic; kind of
off the scales.
And now we're looking at this
summer.
Already the hottest May on record on the planet. It was May, we don't have a final numbers
in for June yet.
And now we have a massive heat wave
going on in most of the United
States, fortunately not the west coast.
So there are a severe challenges that
are happening right now
and I mention this is a threat to
agriculture
when these fires hit Texas, Texas' wheat
crop dropped by about half, Texas' hay
crop was basically destroyed.
So when you have extreme weather it poses a
real threat to again that most
fundamental energy source of humanity.
Now even if the temperature wasn't a
problem
there are other problems with the CO2
production
which is that CO2 hits water and
gets turned into carbonic acid.
Carbonic acid is not to say the worst thing in
the world, you've had a little bit
anytime you've had a carbonated beverage.
Your body pieces that when you exhale.
When you produce CO2 in your body,
it gets turned into carbonic acid before
you exhale it through your lungs.
A little carbonic acid is not the worst
thing
but a lot of carbonic acid is.
It affects the ability of anything that
build shelves,  so calcifiers,
coral reefs, for instance,
which do fine
at a low levels of carbonic acid
get progressively worse and
worse.
Current projections are that
about half of the coral species on Earth
will not survive
to the degree of the acidification of the oceans
that we have coming up.
So all of this assumes sort of linear
warming but there are other exponential
proceses
at work.
In particular there's a huge amount of
buried carbon
growing in the tundra and the seafloor that poses a huge risk of explosive release.
So this is tundra in Alaska. Actually, it was tundra.
Actually, it was tundra. Now it's melting. Now it's what you call a thaw lake
which is that it was once completely
frozen
now it's not. And as this lake flaws
frozen vegetable matter that was there
starts to decompose
and give off methane. And methane is a
tremendously powerful greenhouse gas.
You can see it here. This is a methane
bubble
that is formed underneath the ice. It's
about half a meter wide.
How you know it's methane? Well methane is natural gas,
if you poke a hole in this bubble
and light it, it will burn.
And when it gets into the atmosphere,
methane has in its first few years
about one hundred times
the warming power of carbon dioxide
per molecule of carbon and over
the long term about 30 years.
And there is a huge amount
of buried carbon
in the world. The world's forests and
soil and tundra
have about three times
as much carbon in them
as the atmosphere does right now.
The world's oceans have
another very large reservoir.
So if any of this did explosively
release in the atmosphere we're looking at the
ability to take
the a warming effects that we currently
think will reach us around 2100
and accelerate them so they reach us on
2020 instead. That's not
something that we want.
And there is this risk of kind of these
positive feedback loops of
high temperature thaws the permafrost which
produces more of that carbon release
which leads to more temperature
which leads to more permafrost
thaw.
This is not just a theoretical
possibility;  it's happened.
So thirteen thousand years ago,
when the last ice age ended
we ended the period called the younger dryas and temperature
soared by about ten degrees
in the span of a couple decades. So
this has happened
on planet Earth before. We know that
climate can change extremely, extremely
rapidly.
And today we see that the largest reservoirs 
of methane on the planet which
is the undersea sediment, frozen methane
slush
in the bottom of the arctic is starting to go.
A Russian expedition in December and
January, just recently, found
kilometer wide plumes of methane
bubbles
rising up from this
as the methane hydrate at the bottom, kind of a frozen slush
has started to melt.
So if we sum all of this up, all the ways
that we're sort of overusing, over polluting the
planet,
people like to talk about
what is our overall footprint on the world?
And a group called the Footprint Network
has tried to calculate this. What they've
found is that
currently we're not using just one
planet Earths worth of resources,
we're using
about one and a half
planet Earths
worth of resources.
And if everyone in the world lived the
same lifestyle
as an American, we'd be using about five
planet Earths worth of natural resources.
I don't have four spare planet Earths.
Any of you?
I don't think so but if you do, let's chat.
So the problem, many would say,
is growth.
Who can name this city?
Shanghai, Hong Kong was a good guess but it's Shanghai.
So Shanghai was little more than a
fishing village on the river twenty
years ago
and now it is a mega metropolis
and that has come with tremendous growth,
tremendous opportunity and benefit for the
people of China, the people of this region,
but its also meant the use of more steel,
more carbon, more water.
All of the things that end up producing externalities. So an increasing number of
people say that we have to stop this,
that this sort of economic growth comes
with
negative consequences and so growth
itself has to be paused.
Bill McKibben who is a wonderful
environmentalist wrote in his book Earth
that growth is a serious
problem. A fellow named Paul Gilding,
another prominent environmentalist
wrote that we have to end shopping
and the consumer
economy basically has to end if we're going to
with save the planet. A fellow named
Richard Heinberg of the Postcarbon
Institute
wrote a book called Peak Everything the subtitle is Waking Up to the Century of
Declines.
That it's not just oil that's going to peak
but as a result of that and for similar
reasons
all minerals, wood, water etc.
and we just have to get used to a world
where we just can't use as much;
we have to use less.
This unfortunately runs into some basic
issues which is that the world is
getting richer and is still growing
in population
and so demand is rising.
Over the next forty years, we expect the demand for water to go up by half,
food to go up by seventy percent,
and the demand for energy to double.
So we can't
just
say we're going to use less and
ignore the fact that people want more;
people are trying to use more.
And most of that demand increase is not
going to come from the west.
Demand is not really rising in the United
States or Europe or Japan.
It's rising in China
and India and Africa. That is where
most of the demand is coming from and it's
going to continue to for some time.
And while demand is rising there and that's where the growth is coming from,
these are the places that are rising out of
poverty.
So there is no way
that you could say
the west got rich using these
resources
but I'm sorry the rest of the world, I'm sorry
bottom four billion, bottom five billion
people
you can't do the same. That wouldn't be
just
even if it were practical. Even if there were
a way to do it.
Now the good news is that we have faced
situations like this before; we've been
warned of problems
like this before.
Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus wrote
that we were doomed, essentially.
Because population increase was
exponential so demand and consumption was
exponential
but the production of the most important
resource, food, was only linear.
So in his view the red line that was
consumption would always outpace
the green line
that was production. He thought that
England, his home country, would
face massive die-offs
in the early 1800s and
he was wrong.
In 1968,
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, widely
quoted today, highly-respected
and he opened that book with the sentence
"The war to feed humanity is over...
Billions will die.
At this late date nothing can prevent
a rise in the overall world death rate."
And he was wrong. He thought we would see
massive famines
in the 1970s
and an increase in global death and in fact
famine plummeted and the death rate has plummeted.
And the best-selling environmental
book of all time, Limits to Growth, in
1972
also predicted
massive problems and these guys
they speak to a geek's heart
because what they did was they created a
computer model.
They plugged in different variables and
they ran their model
and their model said that we were doomed.
What it said was that economic
growth, more wealth, always led to
more pollution
and more consumption of nonrenewable
resources.
And that eventually would take the world
beyond the limits of what it could provide
and into collapse.
But the collapse
is not manifesting yet either.
So what happened here? Well, a couple
things happened. One is that
population has not behaved the way that
we feared
that it would.
As the world gets richer and especially as
women get more economic power, more
education, more job opportunities
and more freedom
what we see is that fertility drops.
In the 1950s, the average
woman had 5 children over the course of her
lifetime.
Today it's about 2.3, 2.4 and when that crosses 2.1,
2.0
population stops growing, okay.
And this a phenomenon primarily
of wealth and education. Wealth and education
are the best contraceptives we know of, so
we want them to rise worldwide
if we want to stabilize population.
The other thing that all of these
speculators missed is the power of ideas,
the power of innovation to multiply
the value of any resource that exists
and to reduce the amount of a resource
you have to use
to get the same benefit.
Let me give you just one example. Ehrlich
thought in The Population Bomb that food
production could not possibly keep up with
population.
Thomas Malthus thought the same.
But if we look at the number of calories
available per person
on Earth, per person,
even though population
has more than doubled since the 1960s,
the number of calories available per person
has risen by about a third since then.
So we've tripled food production since the
1960s and we've done it by
breeding new strains of wheat and rice
and corn,
by producing new ways to create fertilizer,
and so on.
In fact, if we look over a very long
period of time
and we look at how many people can one acre of land feed,
we'll find that
in antiquity
it was less than a thousandth of a person.
And today, its risen dramatically the number of people you can feed per acre with the best farming practices.
So let's look at that another way. So we talked about
the footprint,
how much land, how much earth
does humanity use overall. This is the
amount of land
that it took to feed one person
in pre-history, when we were hunter-gatherers,
around three thousand acres.
And what's happened over ten thousand
years is that through innovation, through
technology, we've shrunk that
at the point that now it's about
a third of an acre to feed one person.
So we've increased
the productivity of the land by a factor of
ten thousand,
which, in return, has spared a lot of wild forests.
If we try to feed the population we have
today using the farming techniques in the
1960s, we would have had to
chop down essentially all of the
remaining forest on the planet.
That dotted line is how much land would
have had to use to farm right now
and the black line on the bottom is how much land we actually use.
And that delta is about the amount of all forest left on the planet.
So we only have the forests that we have
left in this world because we've gotten
better at producing food on the land that
we have.
So ideas
can reduce resource use.
Let me show you more examples of that.
We haven't just reduced the amount of land it takes to grow food,
we've reduced the amount of energy it
takes to grow food.
People criticized the green revolution, the increase in farming yields in
most of the world,
because they are more industrialized,
they use oil, they use natural gas
as fertilizer.
But if we have to look at how much
energy goes into producing one calorie of
land or one calorie of food,
its dropped by about half
since the 1970s because
we've gotten more efficient at
everything that we do.
Here's one example of that.
We use a tremendous amount of Nitrogen fertilizer to grow food
but the energy it takes to produce
Nitrogen fertilizer has dropped by about a
factor of ten
since 1900, because we just got more efficient at these processes.
The number of calories you can produce
per liter of water
has basically doubled. This is data
with in Australia.
This is data with wheat also in
Australia.
As again we've gotten better breeds,
we've gotten more efficient
irrigation techniques.
Air travel, we know that air travel uses
a lot of energy, right. Well the amount of
fuel used per passenger mile
in the jets sold today
is one-third
the amount of fuel used per passenger mile of
the jets sold in the 1960s.
LEDs are five hundred times as
efficient at turning energy into light as
candles.
Steel production in the U.S. uses one
fifth the energy per ton of steel produced
that it did in the 1960s
and one two hundredth the amount of energy per ton of steel created
as they did in the 1800s.
What that adds up to on a macro scale
is that in some ways consumption is
reaching a tipping point
and turning around.
So in the 1970s, the average
American
used more than thirty barrels of oil.
And today, we're down to less than twenty barrels of oil per person per year
in the United States.
And its projected to keep on dropping,
in fact I think it will drop faster than this
right here.
Water, which we depend on,
the amount of water the average person
in the U.S. uses has also dropped
by about one third since the nineteen
seventies. It's dropped really because
agriculture
has gotten more efficient.
So ideas can reduce resource use.
Ideas can also find substitutes
for scarce resources.
Let me tell you a couple stories about that.
This is a sperm whale in the Pacific.
In the mid 1800s, a fleet of
nearly a thousand fishing vessels
in North America
hunted sperm whales and killed off
about a quarter million of them
in a span of about twenty to thirty
years. We did that not because we really
valued whale meat,
because we valued the oil. Sperm
whale oil was the premier source of
lighting of that era. It is just a clear light,
without odor, without smoke,
and so it was highly in demand. There was no
source
you could get was better than that.
And that demand meant prices were high
which gave incentive to those
whalers who were out there in
and kill
sperm whale.
And we faced a problem that was sort of
like peak oil. We actually faced
a peak whale oil crisis,
if you will. Over time those whaling
boats had to go farther and farther and
farther
to find sperm whales to kill,
and there were fewer of them in the ocean and
the ones that survived were more and
more shy of dealing with humans.
In fact, Moby Dick was based on a real
event
where a sperm whale that had been attacked several times
spotted a ship called the Essex
attacking a pod of females and that sperm whale dove, came up and rammed that ship
and sank it because it had learned over time that humans were its enemies.
So from an economic standpoint, the
price was going up and supply was going
down, not dissimilar to what we have today.
That was solved not by
the discovery of more sperm whales
but by innovation. This fellow is Abraham
Gesner
he's a
Canadian physician and geologist
and he knew
that there was a huge market for a
replacement for whale oil.
If he could find a product that worked as well,
he could make millions.
And so he eventually produced something
called kerosene. He found that if he heated up
coal, captured the vapors and condensed
them,
he had something that burned
better that whale oil and he could
sell it at about a tenth of the price. He was
not so far as we know an
environmentalist; there's no evidence is
journals that he cared about sperm whales at
all.
He did care about making money
and he cared about scientific curiosity
and that led him to produce something
that was ultimately a much larger supply
and much more beneficial to the
environment, at least as we understood it there.
So that's one.
Here's another.
This is one of the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru
and for a while this was the most
valuable real estate on planet Earth.
Why?
Well, because of the birds. 
Well, actually, not exactly the birds,
its because of the bird droppings.
So for millions of years
birds nesting on these islands have
been depositing guano
on these islands. And guano was loaded
with nitrogen and that's what makes it an incredible
fertilizer. In fact
some people, some organic farmers
use it even today.
It was
sold
as a fertilizer and bags you could
buy to put on your fields.
And agriculture in the U.S. and Europe
depended on it.
Basically this product doubled the yield
of crop you could get per acre
in the U.S. and Europe.
It was so vital
that President Fillmore in his 1850 State of the Union Address
mentioned the Chincha Islands as a
strategic U.S. interest.
The same way that a president now
might talk about the oil fields of Saudi
Arabia.
So valuable
that Spain, Peru had been a a Spanish
colony,
sent its most powerful warship, the
Numencia, brand new,
and headed a fleet to re-conquer these
islands because they wanted the revenue.
A war was fought,
Peru and Costa Rica
and Chile against Spain.
Eventually the Spaniards lost.
But then
something else happened, which was this
was a finite resource so even after a war
was fought for this
the islands dried up, eventually the guano
was mostly gone.
And so people had to scramble to find a new
source.
So they found it
north of there
in
the deserts, the Tarapaca Desert
in northern Peru.
And now this became the most valuable
source of saltpeter, which was the
nitrogen fertilizer extracted from there.
So valuable that Chile, that had come to Peru's aid,
invaded Peru to take this away from them. And then Chile became the world's Saudi Arabia
that had a near monopoly on fertilizer
and all the world depended upon it
to be able to grow their food.
But then after about twenty years of that,
people began to notice
that the yields, or that the amount of saltpeter they could mine,
was dropping.
The incoming President of the British
Royal Society
in 1900, in his address said
the world is doomed
because
this stuff was so valuable in the U.S.
and Europe in particular.
And he created a challenge
for scientists to find a way to produce
Nitrogen fertilizer from some more
abundant source.
A couple men rose to that. These two men, Bosch  and Haber
who came up with a way to extract Nitrogen
from the atmosphere
where it makes up seventy eight percent of the air that we breathe and turn it into
fertilizer to be applied to the
fields.
Because it's so much the of the
atmosphere, it is a nearly
inexhaustible resource
and both of these men won the Nobel
Prize for their work. Their process,
the Haber-Bosch process
now doubles the amount of food we can grow
in our planet and is responsible for feeding three to
four billion more people
and uses only one percent
of the energy that humanity uses overall.
So ideas can find substitutes for scarce
resources when properly motivated.
Finally,
ideas can transform waste
into value. This is a landfill mining
operation
in Germany
and what's happening here is that
what we've thrown out as garbage has
tremendous value in it.
The governor of Japan estimates that
Japan's landfills alone
contain a ten year's supply of gold for the world
and about a ten year's supply of rare earth
minerals
for the Japanese economy.
Alcoa estimates that the world's
landfills overall could replace aluminum
mines for a period of fifteen to twenty
years
just by taking the aluminum out of
landfills, even when aluminum is a highly
recycled
metal. So there's tremendous
resources that we've taken for
granted.
The world is a finite place, right. Well what
that means for
minerals, for materials
is that they're not lost, they're not
destroyed. We use something, we throw it
out. We haven't destroyed it, we've just
changed its location, we've changed its
concentration. In many cases,
we're increasing its entropy; we're spreading
it more widely,
but in many other cases, we're actually concentrating it.
The yields of rare earth metals in
landfills
are actually higher than they are
in most mines around the world.
So as technology is improving, we're
learning to make that cycle more closed
and to turn all waste into recycling,
effectively.
So ideas can reduce resource use, they can
find substitutes for scarce
resources,
and they can transform waste into value.
So what does that mean for the limits of growth?
What are they really?
Is there a population limit?
Yes, there's only a finite number of
people that this planet could support.
But it doesn't look like we're going to
hit that.
If we look at the population of the world
going forward, well from the past heading
into the future, what we find is that
if fertility trends continue,
the world will top out at between nine
and ten billion people
around 2050, 2060
and then actually start to decline.
Now this depends upon those trends of
fertility continuing.
But the most important driver of that
is to continue to increase wealth,
education, and freedom for people around
the world, especially for women around
the world.
If that continues to happen on pace
then we will halt population growth of
the planet and in fact we'll start to face a
different problem
which is not enough young people
on the planet, but that's another topic for
today.
What about the physical resources given
that we might have nine or ten billion
people
what is the limit of physical resource
growth on the planet?
Well it's real.
But let me put it in perspective. This drop of 
oil on the screen
represents all of the energy that human
civilization uses in any
given year
today. That's a very, very, very, large drop of oil.
But if we compare it to a different source
of energy
which is the amount of energy that the
Sun strikes a plant with each year we
find that the latter is
massively higher than the former
and, in fact,  the Sun every year
hits the Earth at the top of the
atmosphere
with ten thousand times as much energy
as humanity uses from all sources
combined.
Ten seconds of sunlight, about as long as
it takes me to say this second
is the same amount of energy that humanity
uses from all sources in one day.
One hour of sunlight striking the top of
the atmosphere
provides the Earth with as much energy
as humanity uses from all sources combined
in an entire year.
Now that insulation, that solar energy, gets
manifested in many ways. It heats up part
of the atmosphere and that creates a
wind
and wind power now is growing, its
about one percent of
U.S. electricity but its nearly doubling
every two years.
It heats up moisture
which goes up into the atmosphere and
comes down as rainfall which produces
hydropower, which is about ten percent of the
electricity that we use in the United States.
But most powerfully in the long term,
the Sun's rays striking the ground
are tremendous in their energy.
They are so tremendous
that if you wanted to power the world
entirely off of direct solar,
if you look at our energy needs for 2030,
what you would need in land area are
those little green boxes so
less than a third of a percent of the
world's land area at current solar cell
efficiencies
is all you need
to capture enough energy
to meet all of the world's energy needs through 2030.
That's stupendous, right.
The problem is not the available energy,
it's not the available land, it's cost of
manufacturing those solar cells.
Solar cells are manufactured on silicon
wafers
a lot like we make computer chips.
And like computer chips they're very,
very expensive.
Now that is changing over time. It's
changing in part because
we're raising the efficiency of cells so what
fraction of light that hits them
gets turned into electricity is going up and to
the right with various different technologies.
But more importantly, we are lowering the
cost of manufacturing.
There is something like a Moore's Law; there is an exponential decline
in the cost of solar
per watt.
In 1980, it cost about twenty dollars per watt of
solar and today it costs about one dollar per
watt of solar.
As we go back further,
to the invention of solar cells in 1954,
it cost about forty dollars per watt of
solar then and again today it's about one
dollar per watt.
What that means that we're hitting the crossover
point right around now. It's different
in different parts of the world,
but in southern California, for large
installations, we've just about hit the
point where solar electricity
is as cheap as electricity coming from a coal or natural gas plant and then over the
next ten to fifteen years
that'll become increasingly true
in different parts of the world
that have less sunlight
than southern California.
Now capturing energy is one thing,
you also have to
be able to use that energy
for things like nighttime use when the sun
isn't shining or things like automobiles
that need to have the energy on board
and so for that we need storage.
And in a lot of ways right now, storage is 
actually a harder problem then capturing
energy from the Sun.
But there is some hope for this because what
we can see is that there are a trends
in increasing the density
of storage; how much energy you can store in a
given size or weight,
and reducing the price.
Lithium ion batteries are what you have in
your iPads, your laptops,
your phones.
And the tremendous competition for devices
that last longer are lighter
has driven huge innovation in those. So
over the course of about fifteen years,
1990
to 2005, the price of lithium
ion batteries per kilowatt hour they
store dropped by a factor of ten
and the density; how much energy you can
store in a given weight went up by about a
factor of two and a half.
And in fact that's not a new trend
since
the early 1900s, the amount of energy you can store in a weight of
battery
has been going up and up and up by about a
factor of five.
And on the horizon now are new types of
batteries. These last two bars show
metal-air batteries, Zinc-Air
and Lithium-Air and those look to have
densities, theoretical densities
that are ten times higher then the best
lithium-ion batteries we have today.
They're not commercialized, they're
being researched,
but if they fulfill their promise
we will get to a point where you could have an
electric car
that can go hundreds of miles on a
charge
and you can get to the point we can
deploy batteries at grid scale.
To be able to capture
solar and wind for use overnight.
Now
there's another approach as well.
Batteries are one way to store energy,
but another is fuel. Fuel is not just an energy
source. Oil is a source,
for circumstance,
but it is also a way to carry energy
with you.
And gasoline
has an energy density that is
three times as high, per unit weight, as a lithium-ion battery today.
So it's extremely convenient for things like cars and airplanes and so on.
So,
anybody know who this man is?
Craig Venter, very good, somebody whispered it back there.
So why is Craig Venter talking about fuels?
Because Exxon paid his company,
Synthetic Genomics, six hundred
million dollars to work on
next-generation biofuels
that turn sunlight, CO2, and water
into fuel.
George Church is another pioneer
in genome sequencing, he's an adviser to Singularity University,
and he's involved in the company working on
this as well.
And what both of these are leveraging
is something that I'm sure you heard
already
in your your time here which is
that
genomics is moving incredibly fast.
If Moore's Law is that black line,
the trend in the prize of
gene sequencing and gene printing
is the red line. It is quantitatively the
fastest rate of innovation of any
technology
on the planet right now.
So what both of these pioneers in genomics
are trying to do
is engineer
microorganisms like algae
to directly produce fuel.
So you take an entity that can absorb
sunlight, water, CO2,
today if we use algae biofuels people
harvest them. They drag big nets through this,
they have to process the algae, heat them up, burst them,
turn their products, their
internal sugars and fats,
into fuel.
Instead, what both Venter and Church are
trying to do, compete with each other,
is genetically engineer them so that
they actually excrete as waste products
biofuel, either of the biodiesel sort of
variety meaning a lipid, a fat,
or an ethanol sort of variety, meaning a
sugar.
This has tremendous advantages.
So one thing is
it can operate on saltwater, it can
operate on brackish water humans can't
drink.
So you can put these in deserts that are very sunny and abut large bodies of saltwater very easily.
And if the promise of them is fulfilled,
if the yields
that look possible in experiments
are achieved, then we're talking about
the ability to produce
nearly an infinite amount of fuel at a cost
that is lower than gasoline is sold today.
In fact, DARPA
has been talking about five dollar
gallon
bio kerosene in 2014.
Now this might sound crazy because the
current price for biofuel the Navy pays
is about twenty three dollars a gallon
but in 2008, the U.S. Navy
was paying about a hundred dollars a
gallon for biofuels.
So they know that investing in this can
drop the price of technology.
Why does DARPA care?
Because the cost of fuel in foreign war
zones is actually something like two
hundred dollars a gallon
when you factor in the convoys to get
fuel in there,
the security you have to provide, and so on. And
DARPA is also concerned that in any future war
the U.S.
might be cut off from foreign energy
supplies.
So DARPA  wants to see a situation where
the U.S. can be energy self-sufficient
and even where individual battle groups
or individual forward bases
can be generating some significant portion
of their own fuel.
There are also ways to do this without
biology, to use
dried
to pull CO2 out of the air and turn it into
fuel.
I won't go into them too far. And the nice
thing about biofuels is
while bring them gives off CO2, all the
carbon you're sticking into the air when
you burn them
is carbon that was sucked out of the atmosphere
to create them in the first place. So it's
sort of a closed loop or nearly a closed loop.
So there is potential here on the energy
front
and if we can crack energy, we can crack
everything.
We live on a water planet, we worry about our
fresh water sources
but the fresh water that we access
is less than a tenth of a percent
of all of the water on the planet.
Ninety seven percent of the water on the
planet
is in the oceans and salty.
It used to be that to desalinate that, to turn that into fresh water, you had to
boil the water,
capture the steam, and condense it.
And that's a very, very energy-intensive
process.
But we've learned, we've learned to mimic the behavior of membranes around cells
that are selectively permeable; they can let some things through and not others. Mimicking
that we have taken the energy it takes
to desalinate
and dropped it by a factor of ten
over the last forty years. So where it once took
sixteen kilowatt hours per cubic meter
of water to desalinate it,
now it takes around two.
And if we look at that efficiency
with about one tenth of the world's energy
budget
we could desalinate enough water to meet
everyone's water needs
from just desalination. Even before we
increase energy availability
and continue to innovate in desalination.
Food,
we have to increase food availability
by seventy percent by 2050.
That's a huge challenge and we want to do
it
without chopping down
more tropical jungle, okay.
Now
we could do it if we could just lift the
world's yields
to match the same yield
as the U.S. and Europe. If you look at
the red line, the bottom is world yield
and the blue light at the top is US
yield. So in the United States and Europe
the food produced per acre is about
double that of the world as a whole.
And it's really because of greater
investment.
You have all more ability to afford fertilizer, more ability to afford tractors and so on.
and there are other ways as well. One
thing that we know is that corn, for
instance, produces about twice the yield
per acre
as wheat and we know the genetics for
that was something that we can port
as well. I'm going to hurry up here because we're running a little bit late.
So visible limits exist but they are extremely, extremely distant.
The wealth limit
is even more distant and I want to be
very clear on this point.
The limits to growth model says that to
get more wealth you have to consume more
resources.
But if we look at what's happened around
the world,
GDP per person
has roughly doubled since 1970 while consumption has stayed
almost flat.
So the top line here is GDP per capita
around the world in green
and the red lines are CO2 emissions per
capita
and energy use per capita.
They have risen but they've risen
nothing like
the amount of wealth. How is that possible?
Consider an iPhone versus ENIAC, the
first digital computer. The iPhone has
billions of times more computational
capability
but it's also tremendously smaller and uses about a billion times
less energy per calculation and costs
hundreds of dollars instead of tens of
millions
of dollars. Ultimately ideas are the
ultimate resource, they are the thing that
makes an iPhone much more powerful
than an ENIAC. It's that concentrated knowledge
while still using less.
And ideas tend to spread, accumulate, and
multiply, so there is no practical limit.
The problem is not solved though.
We are in a race between consumption and
innovation.
This is a very darwinian marketplace and
the companies that are working on this
many of them will fail.
Ultimately, that's to the benefit of the
consumer because the few that survive will be
those with the best technology.
The big problems are twofold.
Scale
so to take
the world and deploy solar on all of
those dots, which are very small compared to the
land that we have,
it will take ten million of these.
This is the Nellis Air Force Base solar
installation and that will take roughly
on current path about fifty trillion
dollars
till the year 2050 and that will
allow for about three degrees celsius of warming,
which is not something we want.
The even bigger failure, even bigger
problem is market failure.
This is the Cuyahoga River
in Ohio and it looks very nice.
But in the late 1960s, it looked
like this. You could secure hand in it
and pull it out covered with oil and the
reason is there was a market
failure and all businesses that surrounded that
river
had every incentive to save costs
bite dumping their used oil,
their crap
into the river. It was a cost for
society as a whole, but it wasn't
felt by that economic entity, the
business, the factory.
It's a market externality.
What that meant was eventually catastrophe.
All the fish died in the river and then
in 1969
a rail car going over the river threw a spark
which hit a slick of oil on the river
and it caught on fire. The river itself
burst into flames.
That was a wake-up call for the
world and it led to a lot of positive
things
in the U.S.
If we look more broadly, every environmental
problem on the planet today
is the case of an externality; it's a
market failure where the
environmental damage that's being caused
in a cost to someone other than the
person doing the damage. So one entity
can absorb the benefits while pushing
the costs on someone else.
That's true of deforestation, freshwater
depletion,
air pollution, fish in the sea,
and of climate change. These are all
problems of
the commons. So how do we solve that? Well,
this is the Cuyahoga River today as a
problem that was solved.
The ozone layer depletion was a
major problem
in the 1980s. Here's what it
looked like then, right it's bad let's say.
And now it's turned around
and we have reduced
the release of CFCs that destroy ozone to
nearly zero.
And the ozone layer is actually
healing.
Acid rain was a major problem in
the 1980s, 1990s
also one that we've essentially solved, we've cut
acid rate and producing sulfur
dioxide
by about half due to something called Cap and
Trade.
This,
interestingly enough, is not an effort led
solely by the left.
It's been an effort that has had input
from both the left
and the right and sometimes. The EPA in the
U.S.
was created by Richard Nixon.
the
montreal protocol that limited the release of
CFCs that destroyed the ozone layer was signed by Ronald
Reagan
and Cap and Trade for sulfur dioxide that
causes acid rain
was signed by George Bush. So it is possible to
work across the aisle for this.
In every case, by the way, the actual cost
of fixing these problems has been between
half and a quarter of the projected
costs because innovation is cheaper every time.
The biggest problem we have today
is carbon dioxide release and other
greenhouse gases
that cause climate change.
And so the way to solve that is to put a
price on these.
Economic actors
that are producing that damage will
feel the pain themselves. I'm right at the
end, so I'm going
to give you one
last concept
which is that
the way to handle this is to tax the bad,
not that good. People think about any new
tax
as causing a major economic disruption
but there are ways to handle this and
the idea here is a revenue-neutral
carbon tax.
So if the government raises revenue
right now by a one mechanism, say
income tax,
the idea is to shift that
to a carbon tax
where you shrink one tax and raise the
other. So the total amount of money being
taken out of the economy is the same but
it changes the prices of things. So coal
becomes relatively more expensive in comparison to
solar, say,
and people shift in that way.
So
I will end here, just saying that there is no conflict between green and growth
and what you can all do is communicate
about these issues, participate in the
political process, and most relevant to
this audience is innovate. You are here
getting educated on these topics
and you're here at a very entrepreneurial
environment where you can help launch
the companies and technologies that will
solve
some of these problems.
And keep hope because we've fixed it before.
All right, thank you.
