foreign [Music] has been warning us about climate change for a really long time if you've looked at the textbooks you might have heard of a guy named arenius who talked about climate change back in the 1890s I was taught in grad school it was a guy named Joseph Tyndall in the 1860s but it turns out an American woman named Eunice Foote f-o-o-t-e beat them all by years back in 1853 she first told us how increasing the level of greenhouse gases like CO2 would warm the planet and boy did we increase those greenhouse gases in fact
CO2 levels are about 50 percent higher than they should be now higher than they've been in about 5 million years on this planet as a result of those increasing greenhouse gases you know the story what's happened is the planet warmed up just like Eunice foot told us it would in fact it's warmed about one degree Celsius so far and it's headed towards a lot more depending on our future choices so that's kind of the climate problem we've heard about it before you've heard all the details but what we need to talk about now is Solutions
how do we actually stop climate change and get the planet back on track when we think about climate Solutions you'll hear everything you'll hear all sorts of claims all sorts of people with an agenda a lot of people trying to sell you something are going to tell you what the solution is the idea is that you know if you go on Twitter or Facebook and you ask what's the solution to climate change well here's one typical set of answers you might get where people are often very confident of telling you they have the solution the
Silver Bullet the thing that'll solve it all well be a little skeptical about that and actually do a little science because science can help guide us it can tell us what might be true what might be just an assumption our best guess and test it against data and make sure that we actually can really be guided by data and not just hype so the science tells us we actually have a lot of solutions and project drawdown a few years ago we went and reviewed about a hundred major solutions to climate change and asked a lot
of deep questions about them like how big could they be how effective might they be in the future are they actually ready now and what would they cost and so we looked at lots of solutions like around energy and finding you know rooftopsilver yeah that would work and that would help a lot interesting things like food waste would help a lot too because food and agriculture are big contributors to climate change as well reducing the waste helps reduce the emissions we look across a whole bunch of things in fact and built an entire library of
solutions and when you put them together it's kind of impressive we can find a whole bunch of solutions here in let's say electricity finding lots of ways to save electricity and to make it without carbon that's cool or we can go over here into food and Agriculture and find ways to reduce food waste change diets grow food better and protect ecosystems all at the same time or maybe over here in transportation and so on and so on in fact we have a library of about a hundred very viable climate Solutions ready to go on the
shelf right here today but what this work has done so far is it really describes potential Solutions they're viable they're ready to go here they are here are the numbers but they're still kind of sitting on the shelf compared to what we need to do which is go out and deploy them and scale them make them much much bigger than they are today but that's what science hasn't done very well so far what we've basically done is written a really good food book with lots of pictures showing you what could be no doesn't that look
delicious this is great but what it isn't is a recipe book that actually tells you step by step by step what to do to make that beautiful thing a reality so that's what we got to do now go from a Solutions library to something more like a road map a set of instructions to tell you actually how to do it so I'm going to tell you today about this new thing we developed called the drawdown roadmap that shows you not only what the solutions are but how to effectively deploy them in the future because there's
some really important rules out there we got to follow the first is what are the key paths to stopping climate change well all the past that stop climate change basically begin like this this is a graph showing the history of our emissions of greenhouse gases the pollution that causes climate change we're at the Red Dot we've been increasing the level of pollution each year over time over the last 50 years or so and if we just extrapolate into the future it looked like that little dotted line well we sure as I can't do that we
have to stop this and turn it around it head way back down as fast as we can in fact pretty much all the passes stop climate change that we want basically cut emissions almost in half within the next decade to 15 years that's incredible that's a huge amount of work right ahead of us and then we got to keep cutting and keep cutting some more into the 2050s realizing that we might not get all the way there we might have cut the last of all the emissions but we'll get most of them but they still
won't be zero probably so what are we gonna have to do well we might have to balance this with a little bit of what's called carbon removal the idea that when we can suck some of that pollution out of the atmosphere well right now carbon removal is Tiny in fact even if I multiplied all the carbon removal on Earth by a million it would still be too small to see on this graph compared to the size of our emissions it's really tiny but maybe just maybe over time we could do this in our soils in
our forest or oceans and with machines and scale it up and get into that gigaton scale and suck up some of those remaining emissions but it's going to take a while and take a lot of work but when we do this we cut emissions drastically into a little bit of cleanup with carbon removal we can hit what's called Net Zero the point where we are net not polluting anymore by about 2050. this would be great this is an ambitious plan this is what stopped climate change somewhere a little bit north of 1.5 degrees Celsius okay
let's do it but one of the key things that a lot of people seem to forget is what I like to call the time value of carbon the time value of carbon basically tells us that time matters a lot as we begin to think about our climate change Solutions we see that we have this path heading down but what early action matters a lot for example cutting emissions now in the 2020s and early 2030s that kind of 50 cut in emissions that's the gift that keeps on giving because we do it now and it keeps
on holding emissions down into the future decades again and again and prevents about 900 gigatons of carbon from ever having been put in the atmosphere so the time value of carbon is kind of like the time value of money it's like when you save for retirement you better start now because it'll add up and accumulate over time you don't wait till you're 64 and try to do it at the last minute that won't work so what we have to do is keep on working on climate solutions that give back over time like this and show
how we can have climate solutions that work over time but the early actions matter the most so as we think about this we can see how climate Solutions get you here and stop climate change in the 2050s just like this but the problem is basically cutting emissions is about 94 of the job and 75 percent of the job is done in the first decade this is why high-tech Solutions often the future really don't do as much as we think it's the immediate Solutions taken now that do most of the work so most of the work
is 75 percent of it is cutting emissions now 94 is cutting emissions all together and then about six percent will be carbon removal well how does this work over time well one of the things we have to think about is that this is a huge implication for climate change into the future and as we think about the future we can work across sectors that's the most important thing here so is that what we have here is basically all the different places where we can cut emissions this is showing the sectoral breakdown of climate change emissions
from electricity food and agriculture industry transportation and buildings these are going to be kind of critical areas for us to cut emissions over time and then what we have is we can see how we can cut them through gains both in efficiency and through decarbonization kind of using different solutions to cut emissions by being more energy efficient and also by kind of doing things differently over time and then we can add indirect ways of cutting emissions this is through like social interventions things that invest in people first like helping indigenous communities protect their land helping
women and girls invest in their future their health care their education these are things you do for people but that in turn kind of have cascading benefits back to climate and then we can see how we can add carbon removal to the mix towards the end to kind of do the last little bit so we can't do otherwise so when we do all that together we can see a whole Suite of activities we can do to stop climate change in the future we can double click on this and show lots more detail here but this
is essentially kind of Earth's portfolio of what we need to do this is the Target that we should be aiming for collectively of this world this is what we need to do so that's great and we can go through each one and find individual Solutions diving back into that drawdown Library here showing individual Solutions around electricity that cut Energy Efficiency losses or kind of decarbonize the production into low carbon forms of electricity for example we can also look for maybe the cheapest Solutions because we want to be cost effective here's a graph called a McKenzie
style graph where we stack up the solutions to climate change from cheapest to most expensive from left to right the ones on the left here if you look over time what we find is that in fact these climate Solutions save money compared to a fossil fuel world and they do some incredible good for you and make you money over the next 30 Years which is fantastic so climate Solutions are available they're big and now we show you which ones are cheapest and What proportion we should do them all this is a really fantastic way to
look at it and it's what we kind of call Earth's portfolio this is what the planet has been telling us if we paid attention to this science this is what we need to do now let's compare to what we're actually doing here's again the Earth's portfolio well here's a portfolio of philanthropy money people donate to do work on climate Solutions and we show that it's actually pretty well balanced it's not completely off but you might notice the areas around industry and the kind of other energy sectors there are relatively light Investments compared to others and
we need to do a better job to balance this out another big area of funding though is Venture Capital much bigger pot of money about 90 billion a year has been going into Venture Capital around climate Tech Lately by the way that's about two to three times more than the federal government will be investing through the inflation reduction act so the private sector is doing a lot a lot of this in Venture Capital but look how whack that is venture capital is spending about 60 percent of the money on Transportation like electric cars and scooters
and trying to be Elon Musk again or whatever I don't know what they're doing but the climate is telling us it's really 13 of the problem why are we putting so much money into one solution when it's actually a relatively small part we need to balance this out a little bit better and put our money where the carbon is that would help enormously the other thing we have to do is not just work better across the sectors we need to do for climate change we ought to work better across time scales again the importance of
time what we see here is kind of again that graph of what we need to do between now and 2050 to stop climate change and if we have a portfolio of solutions across different economic sectors we also need to have a portfolio of solutions across time because right now we need to hit an emergency brake what are the things we can do that will begin to bend the curve like right now in the next two to three years not decades years what can we do now well some of those things will be like stopping deforestation
deforestation today emits about 12 percent of the world's emissions about equal to the United States and yet that number is going up and U.S emissions are going down let's focus on deforestation let's focus on methane leaks where methane has a disproportionate impact on climate in the first decade or two that would be important or Energy Efficiency gains and so on things we could do now without waiting and at the same time we begin to build out our new low carbon infrastructure this is going to be you know every electricity system transportation system agricultural system industry
in the world has to be rebuilt now and so we do that at the same time knowing that it's going to pay off a little bit later we also need to invest in people especially indigenous communities women and girls and others for their benefit but also for long-term climate benefit as well those seeds will grow and pay off in the future as will nature-based carbon removal kind of farming differently planting trees differently farming the oceans and so on these things will be important but they take decades to accumulate carbon so we should do that now
and let that decade take over and then finally the investments in new technologies which could also pay off handsomely in the future as well and top of all that we have to work across sectors and time as well as geography because there are a lot of 80 20 rules out there for example about 70 percent of the CO2 from the US power sector comes from 30 percent of the power plants and 30 percent of the methane leaks come from one percent of the wells so we had to go into these precise locations where we could
have a bigger impact and leverage that impact to kind of make sure we're getting the biggest bang for our buck right here right now so how can we use this kind of road map how can we use science to guide us about how we allocate our work across different economic sectors across time and across geography well we can use that to guide Investments especially guide Investments by the private sector like maybe Venture capitalists it can guide donations by foundations and philanthropists it could also guide policy in terms of things about how the government spends its
money on climate Solutions and make sure we're putting it in the right place because I can assure you right now we're not and we can do a much much better job so with all of this guidance from the you know how we mix it up across sectors across time and across geography we can take all of this work and be far far more impactful and really Drive change on climate change in a way that's not driven by hype or agenda but driven by data and by science and now finally this is available and we're going
to make this available to the world so when I think about climate change just to wrap up of course we all think of the incredible challenges the incredible problems that are facing us today but I also see an incredible opportunity because we're going to be the first Generations in history that could live in a world where we don't have to destroy the planet to advance human well-being we could live in a world that is truly sustainable we can live in a world with 100 literacy with no poverty and chronic disease is a thing of the
past this is something that generates thousands of generations before us only you could dream of and today it's just kind of Out Of Reach of us but if we were to stretch we could touch it and make it real so I want to live for that world I want to fight for that world because I can assure you right now it is not game over it's game on this is the time to focus this is the time to dig in this is a time to make a difference because we are just Within Reach of an
incredible world that we could have if we only wanted it so to do that though we need bold leaders and bold Visions to guide us to a better future and I think some of those bull leaders are probably in this audience today and I hope some of you will become those and guide us to a better future and build the world that we want so with that thank you very much and hope we can enjoy the rest of the day today thank you so much foreign
