There are now around 40 commercial capture facilities in operation globally, with a total annual capture capacity of more than 45 Mt CO2.

we're getting a taste of that in the pandemic yes you adopt a wartime or emergency mindset that helps to liberate a kind of level 00:15:22 of collective purpose it makes new things possible

i commissioned some original polling for my book from abacus research and i found some very hopeful stuff and you know the public gets the emergency and incidentally i've tried to recast 00:12:46 some of the the extreme weather events we've experienced as attacks on our soil let's think about them that way yeah um and they're ready for bold action actually the public is ahead of our politics in terms of that i was surprised to see 00:12:58 that you even mentioned in alberta the numbers are much higher than you so you mentioned quebec before so the the opinion polling nationally ranges from a high in quebec in terms of their readiness fraction right to a low in alberta but even in alberta 00:13:12 the level of support is remarkably high

Whatever one thinks of Sultan Al Jaber, one statement he’s made repeatedly makes perfect sense: “We cannot unplug the world from the current energy system before we build a new energy system.” The focus, then, has to shift.

Yet we have to not lose sight of the opportunity ahead. We have a chance to get a global agreement on some unprecedented milestones that have never been on the table before: tripling renewables worldwide by 2030, reducing fossil fuel use worldwide, and releasing trillions of climate finance.  What many don’t realise is that we are dealing with nonlinear dynamics here – not simple straight line change.

green colonialism

it's extremely dangerous to create such an autonomous agent when we do not know how to control it when we 00:58:22 can't ensure that it will not Escape our control and start making decisions and creating new things which will harm us instead of benefit us now this is not a 00:58:34 Doomsday Prophecy this is not inevitable we can find ways to regulate and control the development and deployment of AI we we don't want

you do need people who would take the discoveries and findings of Science and translate them into terms that will be accessible to the vast 00:54:05 majority of of the public and again if you don't have any scientists who tell the history of humanity then you will have people who have no regard for to 00:54:17 for science whatsoever doing I think a much much worse job telling the history of humanity

AIS at present they have intelligence but they don't have any Consciousness right there is a huge confusion in many places 01:04:06 between intelligence and Consciousness intelligence is the ability to solve problems to create new things whatever Consciousness is the ability to have feelings that okay you can beat me in 01:04:19 chess are you joyful when you win are you sad when you lose AIS and computers as far as we know they have a lot of intelligence they have zero Consciousness

the guardian says uh sapiens is extremely interesting and well expressed but it is quote overwhelmed by carelessness exaggeration 00:46:55 and sensationalism there's a kind of vandalism in Harari sweeping judgments and recklessness about causal connections uh a critical review in current affairs says uh the author is a 00:47:08 gifted Storyteller but he sacrifices science for sensationalism work riddled with errors a historian who in many ways is and here's that word quote a fraud 00:47:19 about science

if we want to see science having a deeper impact on society and politics it's crucial that we have also 00:45:52 scientific storytellers

I started my academic career as a specialist in medieval military history 00:39:49 I wrote about things like the Crusades the 100 Years War Logistics in the 100 Years War it's still like I think the the the the field that I understand best um and I wrote sapiens out of an 00:40:02 experience of teaching an introductory course in history to students in the Hebrew University it was originally written in Hebrew and I didn't think it will have much of a of a suc

if 00:36:19 you really want to make a change you cannot do it as an isolated individual the superpower of our spe is not individual genius it's the 00:36:30 ability to cooperate in large numbers so if you want to really change something join an organization or start an organization but 50 people who cooperate as part of a community of an 00:36:44 organization of a team they can make a much much bigger change than 500 isolated individuals

is there a way to say what that means about the actual world you're operating in uh when you're dealing with companies 00:35:01 or governments or Davos and these fancy one% Summits or as you alluded to conspiracies earlier as you know the Illuminati qinon typ they believe that there's that seven of you guys in a room and you they're deciding it for everyone 00:35:14 else uh uh for the internet also I think that I think that's wishful thinking they hope that there is somebody in charge truth is much worse it's chaos the truth is chaos

what i think tolkien is saying is that just as i was saying before our systems around us and our worlds are so complex that we actually will never know enough to be sure that 01:24:44 there's no grounds for hope we cannot ever know enough to be pessimists basically we cannot know enough to be pessimistic and how does gandalf put it at one point he says he this is a remarkable 01:24:57 statement i mentioned we read this a thousand times he said despair is only for those who know the future without any doubt we do not and and that for me is is the uncertainty itself 01:25:10 most people find uncertainty very scary but for me the uncertainty about the future is an enormous source of possibility it's emancipatory it means we can use our imaginations to explore alternatives

it has happened before in the past the great german existential philosopher carl jaspers has spoke of the axial age between 600 bc 01:15:42 bce and 200 bce during which five human civilizations all shifted their cosmologies simultaneously they weren't communicating much with each other but that shift in cosmology laid the groundwork for modernity we may 01:15:56 be on the cusp of a second axial age in the 21st century and and because the moment that we face as a species is completely unprecedented we've never been in a situation like this before so it's it's quite conceivable that 01:16:09 unprecedented positive changes are possible for us

the other part of this thinking about stories is to recognize that we don't know the worlds around us the systems 01:14:16 around us well enough to know that good things are impossible

i'd start at the beginning of the book by talking about how kids build their imaginary realities 01:12:32 and ben and kate when they were playing together when they were young use the phrase how about all the time how about you know we create this with lego blocks how about we imagine this world and then live in it for a while 01:12:45 and we forget to do those how abouts and in some sense this book commanding hope is my how about for the children

o i come back to this issue of stories and how we organize our thinking 01:11:03 and worlds around stories and especially stories of ours of what our own purpose in life is uh how we respond to our desperate fear of mortality and death i draw on the work of the anthropologist 01:11:16 and social psychologist ernest becker which has been elaborated by social psychologists in something called terror management theory

when we get our story wrong we get our future wrong

the story of stephanie may

it was the mothers that made all the difference he said it was mothers mobilizing around the world that stopped the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere

romantic view of the enlightenment

i think it's in chapter nine of the book i actually 00:52:31 or chapter eight i i i mentioned these folks all of the ones you just talked about curtsville tinker diamandis all of them are all mentioned and i refer to them as techno optimists

i look at pinker's books his latest one enlightenment now and i read very carefully his section on climate change he takes climate change seriously but for me this is a litmus test

i think it's more likely that 00:49:59 that we will think we will think that we this particular set of procedures ai procedures that we linked into our strategic nuclear weapons system uh will keep us safer but we haven't recognized that they're 00:50:12 unintended that there are consequences glitches in it that make it actually stupid and it mistakes the flock of geese for an incoming barrage of russian missiles and and you know unleashes everything in response 00:50:25 before we can intervene

i think the most dangerous thing about ai is not 00:47:11 super smart ai it's uh stupid ai it's artificial intelligence that is good enough to be put in charge of certain processes in our societies but not good enough to not make really 00:47:25 bad mistakes

there's this broader issue of of being able to get inside other people's heads as we're driving down the road all the time we're looking at other 00:48:05 people and because we have very advanced theories of mind

this is why i spend so much 00:45:58 time inside people's minds and talking about psychology and social psychology that that it's a kind of human stupidity or or hubris uh lack of moral compass 00:46:09 incapacity to see the world as other people see it that that we need to address and so in the book that's why i spent a lot of time providing people with some basic tools so they can for instance understand 00:46:21 other people's worldviews better

it's daunting because they're 00:37:18 all happening simultaneously in a way people don't recognize they're all kind of integrated with each other and they and they're reinforcing each other it's people call this kind of perfect storm but they don't but the problem with the 00:37:30 language the perfect storm terminology is it sort of implies that each one of these things whether it's economic stress or climate change or political polarization rising authoritarianism 00:37:41 you know collapse of mammalian populations they're all kind of separate distinct problems but actually they're all they're all affecting each other at this point

in my view the biggest the most dangerous phenomenon on the human on our planet is uh human stupidity it's not artificial intelligence

all that's really going to happen for these extraordinarily wealthy folks with their in their in their estates in new zealand with their landing strips and stuff is that they're just going to have an extra couple of decades to watch things 00:43:13 fall apart around them

the idea of a game is really important and the rules of the game so what's happened is that to the extent that that we've we 00:39:33 have lost the common understanding of our reality then people start attacking the rules of the game and and that's you know going back to my work on conflict

what i would call a kind of epistemic fragmentation where where we're losing the ability as societies to have agreement on very basic facts and to the extent that we don't agree on 00:36:41 basic facts about the nature of the world and the nature of the challenges we face it's very hard to to solve those problems effectively democracy for instance can't effective effectively function 00:36:52 if if the people who are talking to each other don't actually agree on what the problems are

i have absolutely no doubt about that if we go even to three degrees warming and we're about 1.2 right at the moment above pre-industrial temperatures but if we go to even three degrees warming there isn't an ecosystem on the planet 00:35:24 that will not be shredded by that and there's no prospect for anything resembling liberal democracy to serve to survive in a world that's three degrees warmer than it was pre-industrial times

right at the top of my list is our absolutely disastrous relationship with the natural systems around us

have the wisdom to distinguish between those situations we can change in those situations we can't so it is important to sometimes say but 00:30:42 the best i can do is to hope that in this situation and part of what honest hope is about is teasing out the places where we can have agency and make a difference in the places where we can't although i argue that frequently we throw up our 00:30:54 hands too soon

distinction between hope that and hope too

onest hope is basically about making sure that our our our hope is grounded in a 00:22:07 in a realistic understanding as we face ourselves about how difficult say climate change is or or uh the economic crisis the world are facing that we actually 00:22:21 acknowledge with the best scientific information we have how serious those are so that's in a sense honest hope is a relationship to truth it's a moral stance towards truth

the third is as a psychological uh a psychological perspective on on what hope needs to be in order to give us a sense of agency 00:25:20 and powerful motivation to persevere through difficult times so those three components i mean frankly they're a reflection of my own kind of hope

the second of the 00:23:12 uh components of commanding hope is what i call astute hope and this is really uh more of an epistemological stance if the first is a moral attitude or a moral stance towards truth this is a 00:23:24 this is a a a kind of hope that reflects a particular form of knowledge uh in this case knowledge about how uh how we look at the world and what our 00:23:38 perspectives are especially our sort of ideological social and economic perspectives

what is this thing hope because a lot of people dismiss it and say that it's 00:21:01 it's a kind of weak emotion it's distracting it leads us to wishful thinking and so you know what can we what is the thinking about hope and if we apply our scientific lens 00:21:15 to it what can we do perhaps to make it a more powerful and and significant and useful emotion

we can in a sense make hope do our bidding we can command it to be a useful powerful emotion

this third book is very much a book about activism it's about personal engagement it's about agency how we can how we can make the world better as individuals and perhaps 00:20:38 collectively as as societies

i realized that that the the thing that giving me the most anguish in the world most uh a sense of crisis was the 00:16:18 possibility that my children would grow up merge into the world as adults and lose their sense of hope into a world of turbulent violence and would lose sense of hope 00:16:31 so that that's when things really started to crystalliz

how do you reframe your idea of Hope to communities that this specific 01:19:33 conception that you've explained might not apply to as is specifically bipod communities and and just a side question if you have time how do you engage with degrowth theories 01:19:45 of capitalism in your work

we have enough of these minerals in the 01:16:25 world to run a world transportation system off electricity using batteries but we don't have enough if we need batteries to stabilize our grids because we've got intermittent power from solar 01:16:39 and wind

I think there are opportunities for for 01:13:03 um reaching people in new ways emotionally powerful ways across those three emotional temperaments that we haven't exploited and I think people like James Cameron have an intuition for that they haven't either hadn't exploited yet

many people are complex systems thinkers even though they don't know it

could art in the very general sense 01:10:39 story et cetera be used as one of those tools it's a great question and the answer is absolutely

there are four possibilities out there plasma microwave water jet and percussive

the problem is that most of our 01:04:45 institutions in the Democratic World evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries at a time when uh Transportation the fastest mode of transportation was horseback and almost all the information was communicated verbally 01:04:58 and uh and now we're in a world that's just radically different

I think government is uh can be and it a Force for good and many of the problems we Face are what social 01:04:07 scientists would call common good or Collective action problems and actually require coordination from government to be addressed so there is a a political philosophy of 01:04:20 course that is increasingly strong in the United States the government is not good for anything

we're all deeply embedded in these problems

two tablespoons of crude oil contain as much free energy as would be expended by an adult male laborer in a day you every time you fill up your gas tank if you still have a gas tank uh 00:59:48 you're putting is you're putting two years of manual labor in that in that gas tank

I tell my researchers look for the 00:57:41 positive feedbacks these are not good feedbacks these are self-reinforcing feedbacks where you get a cycle of of causation that causes it to reinforce itself those 00:57:52 positive feedbacks which may cross several systems like climate economic pandemic Health Systems those positive feedbacks are where you're getting the synchronization if you can find those 00:58:04 then you're making real Headway on the synchronization effect

there's this idea and complexity science called the adjacent possible it's just what the boundary of the beyond the 00:47:26 boundary of the real and the visible

between middle of March 2020 and the middle of April 2020. 00:44:53 uh four billion people about half the world's population locked down between the middle of March 2020 and middle of April 2020 the concept of social and physical distancing went viral and around the planet and changed 00:45:06 people's behavior all over the planet never has such a large fraction of the human species changed Its Behavior so fast and that was entirely because of the connectivity within the system

the previous average time for vaccinating 40 percent of the world's population for any other epidemic or pandemic or any other viral disease 00:45:56 had been 80 years 40 percent of the world's population this time we did it in two

I think it could be an 00:43:52 enormously traumatic difficult process this Century potentially involving a huge amount of violence but I also think that it's a genuine possibility for these three reasons

one thing that I've noticed in traveling around the world doing research uh social science research in a dozen or so countries all over the world is that 00:43:01 those societies that function best to solve their problems are those with the strongest sense of a commitment up to the common wheel

Australian Princeton philosopher Peter Singer has 00:42:22 talked about the the broadening radius of our moral uh of our moral scope but those we include within our moral Community uh potentially to include 00:42:35 biota and animals for instance outside the human community

we should be focusing on in terms of our Clear Vision of a desirable future

Ultra deep geothermal power

it's mainly a problem of providing huge quantities of high power density zero carbon energy

enough versus feasible dilemma

honesty can actually threaten

what I propose in commanding hope is a uh is a notion of hope that 00:25:30 counter poses to each of those critiques an alternative understanding of Hope hope that's honest instead of false astute instead of naive and Powerful instead of passive

hope is a very 00:22:57 critical leverage point in addressing the challenges we face

hope is really the antidote to fear and anger

I argue we must address This Global poly crisis along two simultaneous pathways

in some ways it may well be that this Century will be 00:16:19 a century characterized by the emotion of fear for many people and fear doesn't stay fear it often becomes anger and anger and fear are often exploited by 00:16:31 folks who uh use those emotions as a ways of as a as a way of building their political Authority to deepen divisions within their society to draw together their followers into sort of a fevered 00:16:45 pitch and uh and use and use the exploitation as political opportunists use the exploitation of fear and anger to build their Authority and Power

in terms of amplification and acceleration you can this waveform diagram is sort of a nice metaphor graphical metaphor for the increasing severity of crises and the increasing 00:13:44 frequency of crises within our world

one thing we have noticed with these stresses is that uh from most of them we see these three 00:11:11 phenomena the stresses are amplifying accelerating and synchronizing uh simultaneously

the Cascade Institute we're interested in two kinds of Cascades

they're probably about 15 or 20 major long-term stresses that you can identify that are affecting 00:09:43 Humanities outcomes for Better or For Worse and Trigger events which which are much less predictable

at the Cascade Institute based on partly because of work that I've been doing for uh now almost 20 years looking at the implications of converging crises uh we have really focused on the 00:09:07 relationships between between all these different challenges that humanity is facing what are the Deep connections between them

Why do some societies successfully adapt while others do not? I concluded that a central characteristic of societies that successfully adapt is their ability to produce and deliver useful ideas (or what I call “ingenuity”) to meet the demands placed on them by worsening environmental problems.

almost all wealthy countries now is dominated 00:13:37 by the car it's not about moving people it's about moving lumps of metal around with one person in them You' have to move away from that

we have to be very careful when we respond to climate change we're not exacerbating the other ones that are there and 00:12:34 ideally we want to try and respond to all of these challenges at the same time and there are a lot of crossovers between them but there are also real risks that sometimes you you solve one thing and cause another now in contemporary Society we have been very 00:12:47 good at reductionist thinking of of silos of thinking one bit and then causing another problem elsewhere we we don't have that opportunity anymore we have to start to think of these issues at a system level

for some large corporations, the carbon footprint from their investments and cash in banks can be their largest source of emissions; for PayPal, for example, its carbon footprint from banking in 2021 was 55 times larger than all of its other emissions combined.

Consider pushing your company to change its own banking

Find a better bank

if you bank with one of the largest 11 banks in the U.S., the report suggests using the rough estimate of 0.24 metric tons of CO2 for every $1,000 you have in the bank. Between 20% and 30% of your money is likely used in fossil fuel projects or other carbon-intensive sectors like mining.

Royal Bank of Canada was the biggest fossil fuel financier in the world last year after providing over $42 billion US in funding.

Exciting new report from Project Drawdown shows how changing your bank might be one of the most effective hashtag#climate solution levers we can pull.

What is needed is a breakaway group of nations willing to get serious about the climate emergency. Who would join it? Most of the world’s countries, potentially.

“come back next year and try again”. My response is that it will be the same old thing – they’ve had 26 chances already. The planet can’t afford any more. I think the time for the Cop process is over. We just can’t keep kicking the can down the road.

Rupert Read has the best idea I have heard re international climate negotiations: countries that are serious should have their own conference where they collaborate on strong targets, plans, etc. Part of which should be recognising the dangers of remaining reliant on the petrostates, planning to transcend that reliance and sanctioning them

its design as by its original destination, the car is a luxury good. And luxury, in essence, cannot be democratized: if everyone has access to luxury, no one benefits from it; on the contrary: everyone cheats, frustrates and dispossesses others and is cheated, frustrated and dispossessed by them.

Ultimately, the conversation needs to change to how we phase out fossil fuel demand. Because it’s demand that keeps producers in business.

better described by a phylogenetic network than a bifurcating tree.[1] Reticulate patterns can be found in the phylogenetic

This dangerous framing is compounded by a generally supine media owned or controlled by the 1%

This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change.

For a flip-of-a-coin chance of staying at or below 1.5°C we have, globally, just five to eight years of current emissions before we blow our carbon budget

they have the power to hinder progress towards stopping the climate crisis, especially with their control of mainstream media.

we need to find things and issues and events that people care about that brings together the big social blocks that we have so 00:53:07 people as workers people as women people as disabled people as racialized and so on and so forth uh to into having a a united front and then when there has 00:53:21 that United f it needs to have a radical Democratic element extremely radical Democratic element as in this is not just we're changing some of the people that are at the top of the 00:53:34 state we have to go into democratize the state

they have been swallowed up into uh you know the left part of the 00:52:30 the block that fights against the the rightwing block that's a necessary role that they're playing but the next Force needs to sit outside of that

the term that I'm knocking around at the moment for you know something which isn't a green New Deal de growth is a 00:32:28 green Democratic Revolution

have you seen this amazing interview from years ago with um what's he called Andrew 00:50:57 marsky yes and um uh and he says and um Andrew Maron says in a incredibly pompous way you know journalist with a stroppy disputatious

the French Revolution happened in Denmark

well I'll start with two extremely optimistic points

how do we organize a green de Democratic Revolutio

let's go back to focusing on like these forces that exist to undermine 00:46:38 popular power um and maintain the the the ruling class

the overwhelming majority of people support are not on the political agenda which is why this whole the idea that there is a center in politics is a complete fiction

you can see it all the time it's 00:41:37 unbelievably it's unbelievably painful we look at all the our institutions

the changes that we need to make to our political system go well well 00:41:10 well beyond like having a better P party in changing who some of the MPS are and so on and so forth because it is structurally set up to insulate the ruling class from popular pressure

it is so difficult to get people excited about politics because they've sort of seen through the two- party system now where it's just like the same thing over and 00:38:25 over

our posture as well 00:36:59 has to be like totally anti- systemic we're not coming in to try to get some reforms to try to amarate just some of the some of the crisis 00:37:11 because we it's actually not possible

I you know think this is important in the kind of what the left postur is to regime break to system breakdown which 00:35:27 experiencing has to be anti-regime let

normal crisis in the system for most people is degrowth like 00:22:22 most people's living standards don't rise that's so it's it's divorced from the experience that that most people have in in in the UK you know where we're where we're speaking from wages at 00:22:36 the same level they were in 2005 rents aren't bills aren't your groceries aren't but your pay is so um you know most people have been experiencing 00:22:49 degrowth that's the comms reason why it's bad

we're on the highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator and he completely right 00:33:33 apart from one thing right

we need to implement emergency 00:30:58 plans to transform th some things very fast and those are the highest order things within the within the world system so that 00:31:11 is um most importantly energy food production and debt write Downs those are those are the things and there are other things as well but

couldn't that be one way to like quite dramatically Force regime change then if if you could Implement degrowth and kind of trigger a because this is a 00:30:21 a lot of what they talk about as well degrowth Scholars like it's either degrowth a controlled degrowth or an uncontrolled Financial collapse so couldn't that then force a change in the 00:30:32 financial system

why do we need 00:24:19 to have economic expansion because there's 300 trillion dollar of debt based on future expansion so if we don't have future expansion that's $300 trillion 00:24:33 worth of debt which isn't going to be repaid entirely which means total financial crisis and so on and so right I say it is baked into the system

there are sort of 00:17:41 two broad um programs or ideas that deal with this or that try to engage with this issue they have pockets of support 00:17:52 one is the idea of a green New Deal or a global Green New Deal and the other one is degrowth and and I don't think that either of those work for different reasons

Conclusion: Supporting our hypotheses, we identify a general trend that social marginalization is associated with less system-justification. Those benefitting from the status quo (e.g., healthier, wealthier, less lonely) were more likely to hold system-justifying beliefs. However, some groups who are disadvantaged within the existing system reported higher system-justification—suggesting that system oppression may be a key moderator of the effect of social position on system justification.

the oppression of gender minority and non-white individuals very likely increases the costs of desisting from system-justifying beliefs as is the case when minority political candidates are judged as more extreme compared to white and male candidates (69)—increasing the social sanctions (costs) for holding “extreme” views. These pressures can give rise to politics of respectability—which are used to deflect social pressures targeting one's identity (70, 71).

we as a society do…. Stuff to get money

softness is not the kind of thing that's generated in my brain okay 00:06:36 softness is a word that describes how I am currently interacting with a sponge it's a mistake to go looking in the brain to understand why I feel it is soft rather than hard because it lies in 00:06:48 what I'm doing and the same for these other accompanying fields thinking this way about softness is a way of escaping from the explanatory Gap 00:07:01 because it it's a way of escaping from the idea that we need to find a brain mechanism that's generating the softness

there may be a little bit of a mystery is in the quality of the redness of red or in this case the quality of the felt softness and this is where 00:04:56 sensory motor theory has an original contribution

In the past seven years alone I’ve given more than 500 talks and interviews about regeneration, and I sense the same fear again and again in most leaders. A fear of fully embracing a regenerative transition because it means they need to let go of most of what they have been taught is good business and leadership. They need to surrender to a landscape that doesn’t have a fixed toolbox, process-plans, checklists and business models and it scares the shit out of most executives.