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MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: Thank you so much for joining us today.
I think I'll just give you an introduction of what we're
doing, and then we'll have a discussion.
That's normally the more interesting part, the
interaction.
We started about three years ago with
Global Footprint Network.
We have worked about fifteen years on the Footprint.
But just because it was getting very popular and we
said, we need to have a central organization to take
on the message and standardize the way it's being used.
And having a very simple mission, to end overshoot.
Now, what's overshoot?
That's the first question.
Why do you want to end overshoot if you don't know
what overshoot is?
Essentially, the idea that we can use resources more rapidly
than they regenerate.
We can fish more rapidly than fish replace itself or harvest
were rapidly timber than timber regenerates.
We can emit CO2 more rapidly than it's being absorbed by
the biosphere.
All that is what is called overshoot.
So we would say climate change or fishery collapses or
deforestation, yes we could call them problems. But
actually they are more symptoms of this larger
problem of overshoot.
Another point is not so much to lament about global decline
or the ecosystems, but then translate that into something.
What can we do about it?
And that's where the Footprint comes in, a way of measuring
where we're at and to see whether we make progress
towards where we need to go.
Let me give you a quick overview of what I would like
to cover in the talk, and then we can have a discussion
afterwards.
Essentially, I'll start from the big dream of humanity,
sustainable development.
What does that mean?
How can we move forward from there?
How does the Footprint help us move in this direction?
Looking at some applications, how to systemically address
the issue of overshoot.
And then how to scale up?
Because this is a race we want to win.
Many of you may remember the concept of sustainable
development codified, you could say in some ways, for
the first time globally through this report that is
now nearly 20 years old, the Bruntland Report.
How many of you have heard of the Brundtland Report?
A few of you.
Essentially, for the first time at the global level, the
term of sustainable development emerged.
It was saying, we want to have good lives around the planet
and recognizing that just conventional development
wouldn't make it because the planet is limited.
The concept has been used in many muddy ways, and people
think, oh it's actually not that specific.
I would make the case it's the most specific policy concept
around, much more than freedom, liberty, progress.
Wonderful concepts.
But actually, sustainable development says, we want to
have wonderful lives.
Like development said, it was kind of the big idea of the
United Nations.
We want to provide great lives for everybody around the word.
That's kind of the driver.
And so the United Nations developed the Human
Development Index, which is very materialistic.
Essentially, it says people want to have long lives.
I would like to have a long life, myself.
People want to have access to education.
Most of you have had access to education.
I have had, so we like that.
And the third one is we want to have some minimal income.
Most people say, actually, maximum income.
No, but the minimal income.
And these three parameters then add up to what the United
Nations calls Human Development Index.
And 0.8 is what the United Nations calls high
development.
And I personally don't know anybody who wants to
voluntarily live under 0.8.
On average, Mexico or Libya, that's
about 0.8 for the average.
So we can say, OK, we want to be on this side.
That's what development is.
Now with sustainable development comes the
recognition that's there's another constraint.
We only have one planet.
If we didn't have one planet, if there weren't limits, then
we should have accelerated development.
There's so many people in the world that don't have enough.
We did a big project in Africa where you see they really need
more resources for having better lives.
So how can we have development?
That's really the question of sustainable development.
How can we have development, how can we have great lives
within the limits of the planet?
How do we know that?
Very simply.
And I will go into details.
We can say the budget available per person of
ecologically productive surfaces like forests,
fisheries, cropland, grazing land, all added up, divided by
the number of people on the planet, is, to use a metric
number, 1.8 global hectares.
That's about four and 1/2 acres of space that is
available on this planet.
That's all there is.
And that we can say in order for development to be
replicable worldwide, we need to be able to produce that on
a budget average of less than 1.8 acres to
provide all these resources.
To provide the food, the fiber to absorb the waste.
So that becomes this line, the threshold.
And we can say, wow, so actually we want
to be on this side.
And to make it replicable worldwide, we need to
be under this line.
So we can become very specific about sustainable development
and say, that's what where it has to happen.
We are calling for thinking inside the box, probably
another Google concept.
But that's what we're trying to make as a point.
How can we move in this direction if various countries
have different challenges?
Just to show you some country names.
Probably not surprising this distribution.
Wow, that's a big challenge.
Now you will say, but how do you actually know?
How do we know how much there is and how much we use?
Because yes, the Human Development Index, that's done
by the United Nations.
They're reliable, but who are you?
So essentially, our DNA, so to say, is
this research question.
We say without this research question, we cannot move
sustainability forwards.
And that's what we're committed to.
We're saying, we need to know how much of the biosphere's
regenerative capacity is used by human activity.
Is the human enterprise getting bigger than what the
biosphere can regenerate?
And then, who has access to which part?
And that's what we're trying to answer with
the Ecological Footprint.
Now, is it a good answer?
Possibly not the best answer.
Possible, but it's the best answer available at this
point, we would say.
And essentially, it starts from looking at the world
through a lens of metabolism.
Like I have metabolism, we eat and that keeps us alive.
An economy has a metabolism.
And the question, like for the cow, is how many resources are
necessary to maintain the cow?
How much pasture is necessary to maintain the cow?
How much ecological capacity is necessary to maintain a
city, a country, or myself?
That's what we're trying to measure.
It's an accounting of how much do we have in terms of
nature's capacity, how much do we use in terms of metabolism
to maintain ourselves?
OK, let's look at how much we have available,
our ecological supply.
Essentially, very simply, one planet.
One planet that is covered by productive ecosystems. And the
productive, exploitable ecosystems cover about 1/4 of
the surface of the planet.
And if you remember from geography, the metric system
was built on the size of the planet.
The French, 200 years ago, said let's define the
kilometer as a 40,000th piece of the equator.
They didn't get it fully right, but 200 years ago they
measured it without satellites.
They got it more or less right, and that's how the
kilometer was defined.
So you can calculate the surface yourself with the pr
square thingy, remember?
And take about 1/4, look at maps.
What is productive?
Not the Sahara, not Antarctica, but the productive
areas, 1/4.
And then you get, with a current population of about
6.5 billion people now, 6.2 in 2002.
If you divide that, you get about 1.8 hectares of
ecological productive space.
A hectare is about the size of a soccer field.
That's very culturally specific, because I think a
football field is about an acre and a soccer field is
about a hectare.
I don't know if that's very meaningful.
But anyhow, so about four acres, four and
1/2 acres of capacity.
And then, some of you will remember, you have a few non
human species here around, too.
I just saw the dinosaur out there.
There are some other species as well that would need some
space with whom we compete.
These seals are eating our fish.
How much of our fish do we want to give to the seals?
So the question is, how much do you want to
leave for other species?
The wild species are in competition with us.
E.O. Wilson, who brought the biodiversity idea into the
public mindset and the academic debate, he thinks
about half of the biocapacity should be set aside for other
species in order to maintain one of our biggest assets,
biodiversity.
And he's very committed to quality of life.
But that would mean if we follow his advice, our budget
would shrink from 1.8 hectares on average worldwide-- it's an
average budget-- to 0.9.
And the big question really is, I think that's the
research question of this century.
How can we all live well within perhaps
one hectare per person?
And we don't know.
We say rocket science, that's really hard.
And I would say, done.
We know how to fly to the moon.
Do we know how to live on this planet?
We don't know that yet.
That's the big challenge of this century.
What's the demand side?
That's a bit more difficult, because my footprint is spread
around the globe.
So there's not just one farm supporting me, but there are
little bits of farms like from Colombia, coffee, perhaps.
Or from the Midwest, potatoes, cereals.
So they're all different pieces that are competing for
space, for food, fiber, waste absorption, open space.
You all add it up around the globe, you get one footprint.
You can go into details if you want discussion on how do we
exactly calculate it, but it's very simple.
You think about I like to eat, for example, 10 pounds of
tomatoes a year, or whatever it is.
Now how much air is necessary to produce
10 pounds of tomatoes?
Very straightforward.
Same with sheep.
I like to eat so much sheep.
How much air is necessary to produce that much sheep meat,
for example?
Just add it up, all competing areas.
We have about 5,000 data points per country and year
that we use, from United Nations statistics.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
balanced, like tomatoes.
How many are being produced?
How many are exported, how many are imported?
That's the net consumption of the United States.
How many potatoes, how many cereals, how much cotton et
cetera, all added up.
And then we can make the balance at the global level as
well, by adding up all the countries to one big
calculation.
And then we get this summary.
As we said, in total, having about 1.8 hectares available--
and some of it we may want to leave for
other species, we say--
and then we look at how much we use.
You say, wow, this guy should go into real estate.
He can make area out of nothing.
How can we use more than what we have?
How can we spend more money than we earn?
Pretty simple for some.
So like we can cut trees at twice the rate that they
regenerate, the footprint of the products would be double
as big as the area of the forest. Does that make sense?
So the overshoot would be a factor of two, so it would be
twice as big.
Globally, we see now an overshoot of about 25%, or
takes a year and three months to regenerate what we use
within one year.
You can look at the ratio.
I was born in '62, so we used about half the planet.
By now, we use 1.25 planet, so it's a rapid increase.
And you would say, yeah, but hasn't technology changed?
Yeah, technology has changed, but the ratio we're looking
at, the number of planets has stayed constant.
It's a different planet every year.
And we see, actually, a change in technology that has shifted
the bounds, but not fast enough.
So we haven't been able to make the earth more rapidly
productive than we are using resources.
So we are outstripping the ability of nature to
regenerate itself.
We're working with various agencies.
For example, the European Environment Agency sponsored
our update last year.
We are working with the WWF with the Living Planet Report.
I have a few here if you're interested.
We just had it launched in October.
We do local reports here for Europe, where Barroso-- who is
the president of the European Union, he presides over 450
million people--
wrote the foreword.
And very interestingly, he said we have to respect the
limits of the planet's natural resources and that, in a
report where we showed that in 1961, Europe
used about one Europe.
So we see per capita we see how much was the
footprint by capacity.
Now Europe uses about two and 1/2 half Europes.
Yeah, ecological capacity matters.
It's actually not just a moral issue, it's a risk issue.
Countries are starting to get exposed by having a deficit.
Where does the difference come from?
Either from liquidating your own assets, and Europe doesn't
do it that much because they have money to buy it from
somewhere else, or by importing the difference from
somewhere else.
The interesting part, how can that be used,
looking into the future?
What we did is, looking at the ratio again, from 1960 to
2000, you say how much have we used in the past?
That's where I was born, I got a son in 2001.
And the question is, how many planets will we use
when he's my age?
And then we took the most conservative United Nations
projections--
not the most extreme, the most conservative, very slow
population growth, the moderate
population growth rates.
The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change scenario, the most moderate CO2 scenario,
the most moderate.
And not even assuming that much biomass will be used.
Very aggressive agricultural increase of productivity, and
still, adding this all up, doing as if the various United
Nations agencies talked together, the overall scenario
that's coming out would tell us we would use about twice
the capacity of the planet by then.
That's kind of the crazy thing.
In the past, visionaries would go far
beyond what was necessary.
Today, we're in a situation where our collective vision
doesn't meet even what is necessary.
It's pretty striking, I would say.
So we say, actually, we probably may want to move out
of overshoot.
Probably that's a good idea, that probably pays off.
And the problem is there was an interesting study done by
BirdLife International, they looked at what's the value
created through old-fashioned conservation,
investing in birds.
$1 invested into birds, how much of
value is being generated?
They said roughly about $100 of value is generated.
And you say, why are banks not running to that opportunity?
$1 invested, $100 back, who could resist?
The reason is that the $100, they get diffused into the
whole world.
Everybody will profit from the $100 but the investor won't.
So that's what holds us back from
investing into the future.
But actually, there would be very good
returns, we believe, overall.
What happens if we actually stay on that track?
Like with money, we can talk about deficit and debt, that
accumulates through a debt, we can do that ecologically.
So a deficit has been growing, as you can see.
That's now the 1.2 planets.
And then as we continue on that track, the accumulated
debts for the area under the curve, so to say, for those
who have taken calculus and survived, it's about 35
planet-years' worth of production.
35 years of production necessary to rebuild that
stock we would deplete.
Is that possible, physically?
A forest has about 50 years worth of stock when it's
totally mature.
And then you can cut it in one year.
But then what?
Is that globally possible, is there enough stock available
to deplete for that track?
And then when you're up there, what will happen?
We believe that's pushing it.
We think moving out of overshoot is much more
productive for us.
So really, that shifts the bounds for the future.
I think one of the most destructive concepts of the
20th century that is still in our minds is
to divide the world.
We're saying there are developing countries and
developed countries.
Have you heard of this distinction, developed
countries and developing countries?
Now, if everybody, worldwide would live Western European
lifestyles, just to take one example, it would take about
three planets at the current population level.
It will be probably about 50% more people by 2050.
So it's a dream that is not possible.
So rather, I think the future will be dividing itself.
And it's not about fair or unfair, it's just about
describing what it is between ecological debtors and
ecological creditors.
Meaning who is using more resources for their
consumption than they have available in their country and
who is not?
So Switzerland, where I'm from, we use about three times
more capacity than we have available in Switzerland.
But we are rich, we can buy the difference.
Egypt has about the same ratio, it's just more
difficult for them.
But for all of them, it's becoming
an increasing liability.
It's a risk exposure that we're not aware of.
I would say that the risk of ecological collapse-- failing
states, as they say in the defense
community, for example--
how many failing states does it take until the dollar
starts to fail?
Enormous risk.
We see that at [? Haiti ?], I'll be talking more about it.
Rwanda, we see that happen.
We just don't have much value on the Wall Street market.
But that's what is happening.
It's not about, is it possible to collapse?
Actually, historically, we have seen many examples.
I don't know if you know about Jared Diamond's book,
Collapse, but we see it now already, in
certain states, happening.
It's avoidable.
But if we don't give attention, then the number of
lives lost, the immediacy of it and the probability of it
occurring is much higher than many other risks that we are
looking at.
Now, we can do maps.
We can look at where is the footprint happening?
We can see what has happened.
We actually have a movie on our website that looks at 40
years of history, how the intensity of the
footprint has increased.
Essentially, this is a map of where you want to put your
shopping markets.
The darker it gets, that's where you want to
put the next malls.
And you can see Europe hasn't really shifted that much,
because it was already dense and a high footprint.
And then you see the emerging markets, China and India, with
large populations, not so high footprint, but it's
adding up as well.
We've just started with a project on Africa because if
you look at the human development debates or
international development debates, millennium
development goals, beautiful ideas.
But devoid of the idea of their ecological limits.
And that's kind of surprising because when you look at how
countries are moving, what you see--
and any farmer would know that--
is that our ecological capacity is starting to
constrain countries' ability to consume resources.
So in Rwanda, they would love to have larger footprints, but
their buy capacity, which is in green, their buy capacity
has been declining, to a large extent because
of population increase.
And so the footprint has moved down with it at the same rate.
And then they had a war, and then you see the buy capacity
declining more rapidly because they couldn't attend their
areas very well.
And then they were able to extend their footprint a bit
beyond biocapacity for some time.
This whole difference is food aid.
Wow, even with bad data sets from Africa, we can show what
any farmer would know.
If one's used the whole farm, that's it.
Senegal, a similar situation.
Lost biocapacity per capita.
And as they started to hit it, they were starting to get more
constrained.
And the wiggles of the biocapacity started to
translate directly into footprint.
And that's like a death and life situation for people.
That's less or more food.
So we can make this connection very directly.
Or another example of collapse.
Just tracing history.
North Korea was able to increase their footprint
pretty rapidly because of help from the
Soviet Union and China.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, China also was
floundering a little bit because of
their resource shift.
North Korea wasn't able to get energy from the former Soviet
Union, wasn't able to get their rice from China.
Their footprint collapsed dramatically.
Actually, even worse their biocapacity as well.
They didn't have the energy to run their tractors and
fertilizers.
I'll just get to you.
And as a result, that contraction led to, some
people say, up to two million people dying.
That is just a description of what is, I'm not
saying that's idea.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I guess that answers my question.
I was wondering how HDI tracks [UNINTELLIGIBLE] footprint.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: We don't have good HDIs on North Korea
because it's a pretty closed country, and people don't even
know how many--
AUDIENCE: Actually, I was wondering about the African
countries, if you have [INAUDIBLE].
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: I do have.
AUDIENCE: OK, does it track the biocapacity?
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: In some areas it does.
In some areas, we have had some more rapid--
big time, for example, in South Africa we had a reversal
of the HDI, to a large extent because of the *** crisis.
Very much, you see the the constraints of those countries
that have more capacity left, they just have more leeway to
move around than others that go into warfare.
Like Darfur is another example.
We contract Darfur because it's a sub-national region,
but that's what was happening at the regional scale, lack of
resources leading to conflicts and pretty miserable lives.
So just two insights.
Biocapacity can constrain countries, particularly low
income countries and those first. But it's basically what
any farmer would know, but just is absent from the
current debate.
So we do it as if we were limitless in our resources.
And we see already that swing, which will be getting bigger
for countries that are like arid areas in Africa.
In the biocapacity, Dry years will reduce the biocapacity,
will directly translate into lower footprints which is not
a nice thing.
Many people in the world, actually, are
reducing their footprint.
Not because they want to, because they're forced into
lower footprints.
And that's what we absolutely want to avoid.
Our commitment is to best quality of life, not just
smaller footprints.
It's just that there's only so much budget.
Now let me get to two major conclusions.
One is you say very self-serving.
What does that mean for policy makers, for
example, or for us?
One is we need good measurement tools that focus
on the things that really matter.
And sustainability is impossible without looking at
how much capacity we have compared to how much we use.
And while it's sometimes resisted, resistance doesn't
make limits go away.
Some people say, I go hiking, oh I hate gravity.
Thank you for sharing.
I hate ecological limits.
Here are told that you can live with it.
It's just what it is.
So what do comprehensive measures help you?
We call it the bed cover effect.
If you have a cold night, you have a cold head, you want to
cover your head but the cover is a bit small,
you get cold feet.
We like redwoods in California, don't we?
Let's buy more Indonesian timber and not
cut down our redwoods.
Or we don't want to omit so much CO2.
Let's put biodiesel into diesel.
Now in Europe, they have to put 5.75% of biodiesel into
diesel into the first step towards moving out of carbon.
That sounds like nothing.
BP said we don't want to get into palm oil for
supplementing these 5.75%.
Because palm oil essentially destroys tropical rainforests.
And the last orangutans-- did I say that right?
Orangutans?
You know what I mean?
Monkeys?
Essentially, they would be killed by palm oil
plantations, I think.
Now, BP is not able to get enough non-palm oil biofuel
just for the 5.75% diesel in Europe.
You say wow, are we just trashing the rest of the
biosphere by trying to get better on another side?
We have to look at the whole budget.
Are we staying within budget?
The second thing is slow things first. What
do we mean by that?
Many people talk about low-hanging fruit.
We should do things that are easy and give a good return
first. We would say not a bad idea, but even better is to
think of the slow stocks.
When we look at the curve again, how quickly we move
into overshoot, what we will see is that that's a very
short timeframe compared to stocks we put in place today.
What do I mean by stocks?
Dams, roads, power plants, people born today hopefully
are living 75 years.
These stocks put in place today will determine
consumption patterns for decades to come.
And at the same time, we need to do a radical shift.
So we need to get the stocks right today.
So any house built today that isn't up to the highest green
standards is essentially a liability, a
trap for the future.
Or building more road infrastructure for cars
possibly will detract us from being able to live
well within our means.
So it's not just about being nice to the poor Africans.
It's actually being nice to ourselves.
Are we building future-friendly
infrastructures ourselves that are able to
support us in the future?
By having clarity about what we need to get towards, I
think Paul Hawken has said we are very good at reaching
goals, but not very good at setting goals.
So we need to actually say, what is actually the goal we
are trying to achieve?
And by being able to have these measures-- and we have
seen that in Australia quite dramatically by billion-dollar
projects now, using this innovation to
reduce their footprint.
Innovation is probably the biggest resource we have to
move in that right direction.
What kinds of innovation?
And it starts with good accounting, is one innovation.
Making it accessible.
Do you know Gapminder?
Have you seen gapminder.org?
For example, how to make graphs-- and I think Google
has done it, too--
visible to people to understand.
If you look at this little graph that I showed in the
beginning, to make that accessible to people and say
wow, we can make that dynamic.
How have dots moved over time?
How has this square shrunk over time?
And start people exploring what are the possibilities, or
looking at scenarios, helping people to play God and say,
what kind of parameters can we choose to
move outside of overshoot?
So they can start to play.
What changes do fertility rates change, do consumption
rates change?
You can search to seek--
do we shoot into space, or can we land the plane again?
Very essential.
That's really where I think we need to move forward through.
In terms of adoption, you could say is that just a pie
in the sky dream?
Are we able to actually make a difference in a world?
We are playing that we believe we want to win, we want to get
out of overshoot.
Are we doing it right, such a small organization?
Fortunately, we are starting to play with
bigger and bigger players.
I think it's the biggest game in town in some ways, being
able to get out of overshoot.
And we see the typical innovation curve.
At the beginning, we were in the dark ages for a long time,
people were resisting it.
And there's still some resistance, which we are
engaging with.
And then people start to understand the challenge, they
engage with us, they talk with us, even statistical offices.
People start to accept the idea, accepting meaning they
say yeah, it's in our interest to look at the world from a
biophysical perspective.
WWF, for example, spends about $600 million a year, the
largest conservation organization worldwide, are
now using the footprint as their organizing principle for
their whole programming.
In the beginning, it was just kind of a weird idea.
Now with the living planet report, it has become so
central to their being that they say, wow, we cannot save
pandas without reducing human pressure.
But we cannot reduce human pressure without
doing it in fair ways.
Otherwise, we just have more conflict.
So sustainability becomes central to their operation.
Financial institutions starting to see we need to
understand who are the winners and losers in the future.
So whether we are interested in sustainability or not
doesn't really matter, but it's better information to
understand future performance.
And then obviously, people are already adopting it, a $1
billion project who are reducing
the ecological footprint.
So our lens is very simple.
As a symbolic goal, we say we want to have 10 nations who
adopt the footprint like GDP within 10 years.
We call it 10 in 10.
Why?
Because once you put something on the
agenda, it gets attention.
Once countries start to sweat as much about their
unemployment rate and about their ecological deficit as a
risk exposure, then we'll start to see traction.
And in order to make that happen, a lot of other things
need to be in place.
We have to be able to have successful business examples,
we have to have excellent engagement
tools with the public.
We have to have academic fora to engage with.
But that's the symbolic outcome.
Are we able to engage countries?
And these are the countries where we-- we have now about
30 countries on the hot list. The red ones, Switzerland,
Japan, have already done reviews of the calculations to
see, is that really solid information?
Actually, Japan, we're just starting with them.
The orange ones are the hotter ones.
I mean, Australia is a hot country just because of
climate, but there's more interest there.
And then the yellow ones is where we have pretty good
leads and we could move it forward with more capacity.
So North and South, as you can see, has shown interest. It's
not just a Northern tool imposed colonially onto the
South and say, you shouldn't consume
because we have consumed.
But you shouldn't follow us, but we'll change our life.
It's not about that.
It's basically just saying, hey, there's so much budget.
You choose what is in it for you.
And for all of them, they start to recognize that
biocapacity matters.
If we don't manage it well, we'll be essentially
undermining ourselves.
So with that, I would like to come to an end with the direct
presentation.
We have some few little gifts for you.
We call it the new Swiss pocket knife.
It's actually my wife's joke.
She says compared to the Swiss pocket knife, the Swiss pocket
knife cuts through Swiss cheese.
But this one cuts through bologna.
You can take a few with you.
We also say it's like a credit card because it has the same
size, and you can carry it with you.
And it's so interesting, you can show it to friends and
they say, wow you're so interesting.
I want to invite your over for dinner.
Some economists say there is no free lunch,
and they may be right.
But with this one, there are free dinners.
That's not so attractive to Google because you have good
lunches here.
It's probably not so much of an advantage.
But perhaps you can get an interesting hike or an
interesting date.
Who knows.
And then we have also a little video that summarizes what
it's all about.
And some of these Living Planet reports.
This has been the most successful
report in WWF history.
They're 50 years old soon.
Basically summarizing the overall ecological challenges
with the ecological footprint.
It picked up about 700 news stories according to Google.
That's what we use, of course, to track the news stories.
And the way to engage-- that's the last thing I want to say,
in terms of innovation.
We're trying to basically generate critical mass.
One interesting thing that perhaps Google may be
interested in engaging, is to say the Olympic games--
Beijing, Vancouver winter games, London--
they're talking about one planet Olympics.
How can we have footprint-neutral Olympics?
Because we love the Olympics, but they
take a lot of resources.
And the idea would be to engage in a calculated project
where people can calculate their footprint and find out
how they can reduce their footprint and then pledge that
difference to the Olympic games.
So to see if people can pledge enough footprint reduction to
make the Olympics footprint neutral.
And why that would be interesting is that it's a
time-limited thing, it's a competitive thing.
Which nation would get the gold medal in reducing their
footprint most per capita, for example?
You could make it interactive, and just get this message out
in a playful way, rather than being a party-pooper and just
being, these bad Olympics use too many resources.
No.
We like the Olympics, but we can do it together in a way
that actually, humanity's footprint will decrease.
So it's really a competitive spirit for the one
planet we live on.
So these kind of ideas, how to apply these data sets in ways
to engage with people in constructive ways.
CRUTCHER: A suggestion.
I think people are fundamentally selfish and not
constructive.
But I think we can still get them to compete if you can
point out to them that the result of reducing their
footprint relative to their economic peers has the
aggregate effect over their entire economy of
raising their GDP.
If your footprint goes down, everything is effectively
cheaper for you.
And if you can make that case, I think it's a stronger case
than, it's the right thing to do.
As soon as you walk into the room and you start making an
oral argument that's a resource allegation on a
financial institute, I think you're going to [INAUDIBLE].
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: I couldn't agree more with you, at least
the comment.
Just so people can hear.
You were saying--
I don't know your name.
CRUTCHER: Crutcher.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: Crutcher says essentially people are
selfish and so it has to be in their self interest to reduce
their footprint, otherwise if it's just a moral argument
they will just resist it.
And I couldn't agree more.
And I think we had very poor messaging in the beginning.
I remember we had a campaign at the very beginning that was
paid by Ontario Hydro.
Ontario Hydro made us this campaign, they gave us these
buttons that said reduce your ecological footprint.
And everybody was wearing it in pride.
I then went to Chile to a lecture.
And at the end of the lecture, a brilliant little student in
the end, she said, hey, why should I reduce my footprint
so that you can eat more chocolate?
Very good, I think.
What's in it for them?
Now our commitment is not to reduce
the footprint, primarily.
Our commitment is to quality of life.
So when we are working, for example, in the African
context, helping people, how can you secure
your quality of life?
If you understand the global context, you
can act much better.
For example, we hope to do a project soon with Mozambique.
They have quite a bit of ecological reserve.
And so the question for them is not so much how to reduce
their footprint, but to say how can you take advantage of
your competitive advantage in a world where resources are
getting increasingly scarce?
In the past, for example, Enron wanted to buy all their
gas reserves and sell them to Europe because they knew about
the Kyoto market.
But luckily, Enron collapsed before so that didn't happen.
But that basically produced very little value for
Mozambique for a resource that gets
increasingly more valuable.
One implication would be focus on short term resource
contracts rather than long term resource contract, so you
can increase your price for your resource as you move
along and the world is shifting.
So absolutely.
That's what we're looking for.
How can this be in the self interest of a city, of a
business, of an individual?
And that's what we're finding with these applications,
absolutely.
So let's have two questions in the back.
And then we will go over to you.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: So I want to play devil's advocate for a second.
Someone might say the resources we have available
are not necessarily fit because you said only 7% of
oceans are available, or 11% of the earth and so on.
And also there are efficiencies in
production or whatever.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
So of course it's good to slow down the footprint and stuff,
but what about increasing available resources?
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: So the question is obviously,
technology has changed and we can also increase supply, and
that's absolutely the case.
Absolutely the case.
So we're looking at both sides, not just how much we
use but how much is available.
It's always the ratio between the two.
And then we actually look at, to what extent have we been
able to increase the productivity of the planet?
We see about, on average, a 15% increase across the board.
So agriculture, like the green revolution,
has been a huge driver.
And that has come with other costs.
For example, you need more fossil fuel
to make that happen.
It may be less biodiversity friendly, et cetera.
But we have seen a quite significant increase, just
that the increase hasn't been as rapid as
the increase of demand.
But we're saying that there are five factors that
you can look at.
On the supply side, how much area is productive, and how
productive is it per hectare?
And then on demand side, essentially how many people
times how much do they consume per person, and how
efficiently is what they consume being produced?
So all five factors play a role.
These other all the factors to look at.
AUDIENCE: In the steps that we take, I didn't see any
suggestions for getting more of the resources.
But I saw only things to reduce the consumption.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: I think all five need to
be addressed massively.
Massively.
In the efficiency side, there are some bonanzas to take
advantage of.
However, we have to be careful that efficiency gains are not
just used to consume more.
For example, airplanes.
I think the first jumbo jet--
I don't know the exact numbers-- but the first jumbo
jet was perhaps half as efficient as newest ones.
Which means we just now fly further because we don't have
to stop in between, so we can have direct flights to
Australia, for example.
So we have to be careful of the rebound effect.
I think one of the big bonanzas is demographics.
It's a very hard topic to talk about because people react,
but actually it's the most women, child, and
environment-friendly policy that opens up new
opportunities for a vast amount of populations.
If you can't turn that around fast enough, a lot of
suffering will be coming onto the poorest. Not
onto the rich people.
So all factors need to be addressed.
In the back.
AUDIENCE: Two questions One, there seems to be a single
country inside the box in Latin America.
What country is that?
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: In the box?
AUDIENCE: Actually, if you study this card, then
you can find out.
I'm not allowed to say it within this country.
And again, the square doesn't mean it's
individually desirable.
It's just a necessary condition.
AUDIENCE: --is part of the wall, but not
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: On the other side, it shows the HDI
and the footprint.
So you can go, which country has the better footprint under
the black line and an HDI that is over 0.8?
And then you go Costa Rica, 0.83.
Oh no, its footprint is too big.
Let's go down.
AUDIENCE: And my second question is that you just
mentioned demographics [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
Why is it so taboo to talk about reduction in population?
It's not so taboo to talk about population control, but
probably there is only one country that sets goals that
can potentially lead to reduction, and that is China.
Everybody else tries to, at best, maintain their
population.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: That's a very interesting question
you're raising.
Why is that demographic side so taboo?
As I said, I think that the biggest bonanza that we can
get it out of demographics.
I believe, and there's a very strong economic case to be
made, that shrinking industrial population will be
more competitive than growing industrial populations.
We can go to that detail, but demographers haven't
understood that yet.
It's a big absurdity that we haven't understood that yet.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: And I think it's such a sensitive
issue and so many things have been done wrong in the past.
For example, in India there was forced sterilization or
population control, that there were implants.
Against the knowledge of the women, they were made
infertile and things like that has been seen as
anti-feminist, against human rights.
Or religious feelings.
So I think the messaging around population has been
just extremely poor, and it's still such a liability that
nobody wants to touch the topic.
And so it's just left to those who are more
insensitive to the issue.
And then all the discussion we hear about demographics gets
people's hair to stand up, and they say oh, let's not touch
that topic because it's too difficult to touch it because
it won't affect my well-being.
And it's easy to keep it a taboo, but the suffering it
will produce is enormous.
If you compare India and China, I think it's quite
interesting, China chose to slow down
its population growth.
And I think as a result, I don't have full evidence, but
as a result it has been much more able to fight poverty.
It's the most successful country in fighting poverty.
It has been able to increase its economic productivity
enormously as a country that doesn't even speak English.
Like India would be so much better positioned with its
great educational institutions, its English
language, to be much more integrated
in the global economy.
And some pockets of India are, but China, with incredible
language barriers, with the systems barrier of this
communist country, has been able to turn things around
much more effectively.
And I think demographics has a lot to do
with it, as an example.
So demographics is really important.
And then you had a question, and then you in the red.
AUDIENCE: So going back to your graph with the dots,
there seems to be a fairly strong correlation between the
human development index and the footprint.
What's the causality there?
Is it that you are more developed and you consume
more, or is it the other way around?
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: OK, so is there a correlation between
HDI and footprint?
You can look two ways at the graph.
One is to say what's the underlying pattern, and then
the other question is what are there deviants?
And I think the deviants question is more interesting
because you say, what is actually the range of
possibility?
And if you go and look at the sub-national level, you see
even bigger differences.
One of the interesting stories is, for example, Kerala in the
south of India.
About as big a population as California, and they have been
able to achieve longevity like industrialized countries, and
low child mortality and female participation and replacement
fertility industrial suicide rates.
All the industrial diseases they have inherited, as well,
on $1 a day.
Very high literacy rate.
Free education until the second year of college.
They got so successful that they're now working in the
Middle East and bringing a lot of money back and that's
screwing up the economy in some ways.
So you can actually achieve a very high quality of life and
longevity and all the population health on very
little resources.
So that's possible.
Now, generally we have seen that increase in economic
activity goes hand-in-hand with an increase in resource
use, which I understand.
That's why I say being in the square individually may not be
the fullest, most desirable situation.
It's just something we need to do globally if we don't want
to liquidate our planet.
Yes, in red, you were next.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: Sorry.
Very good, thank you.
That's very generous of you.
AUDIENCE: Is there any business bubble to the global
imprint thing, if they go public?
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: Absolutely, yeah.
We are a non-profit organization.
But a large extent, driven by fee-for-service projects.
So we have a very large percent of
fee-for-service projects.
Like, for example, producing a Living Planet report or doing
a study for the European Environment Agency or working
with the Swiss USAID or the Swiss SDC, they're called.
It's called SDC, it's the development agency of
Switzerland.
These are examples of projects that are totally
mission-driven, but people want their result.
And we love those because people then want the product.
If you just get a grant and then do something, there's no
public there.
And then you produce something that doesn't
even reach to shelf.
It just reaches your own shelf and then you have boxes of
reports nobody wants.
So the business model is really important in order to
move forward.
We also have income from our partner organizations to help
with public goods initiatives like standardization,
maintenance of our national accounts, increasing support
from foundations for these kind of initiatives, strategic
initiatives that don't have a clear product for one
particular client.
And then we are working with other businesses.
And actually, the way we work with business is we don't go
to them to say, hey, reduce your footprint.
We actually turn it the other way around--
it's probably a very American way of saying it, but we say,
we help the good guys.
We help the good guys get a bigger piece
of a shrinking pie.
So we want the good guys to outcrowded the bad guys and,
in the process, not reduce their footprint.
Actually, they should be more successful and
outcrowd the bad guys.
So we want to help the conversation of ecological
limits be successful for those who take it on.
Probably the first thing has to be breaking the taboo about
ecological limits.
And once people see that that's in their advantage--
so who is winning from that conversation?
People in the finance industry will recognize if we don't
take these risks seriously, we put our
investments in jeopardy.
Particularly long term investments, stocks that are
badly invested.
We'd actually lose out.
Underinvesting in green buildings, we'd be losing out,
for example.
Who are other winners? people in the defense industry think,
where are conflicts emerging?
People who say, we are really serious about human
development.
In Africa, if we don't look at ecologic constraints, we're
just helping a family to survive another two years, but
not systemically turn things around.
Or help one region at the cost of another.
So we need these kind of tools to succeed, and that's the
people we work with.
So we always go with the wind.
There's a lot of wind in the word, rather than trying to do
uphill battles against people who don't want to engage.
So you in the red were next, and then you.
AUDIENCE:
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: There are various budget constraints
that we have to look at.
One is financial budget constraints.
We have only so much money, and that's what
have to live in.
We only have so much ecological capacity that we
have to live in.
Some people say organic farming would use more
resources per carrots produced, for example, than
non-organic.
That's interesting to look at.
I think the debate is not conclusive on that one.
But on the other hand, organic agriculture can maintain
productivity much longer.
So these are the hard questions we have to look at.
Are we just in such a dire situation that we need to use
all the industrial agriculture we can get just to get by and
feed people, or can we actually think a little bit
more long term?
And often, we trade off the short term against the long
term when it comes down to cost. But we can think
differently.
People always tell me, politicians cannot deal with
these issues.
They only think three months ahead because of the next
election or whatever, or four years ahead if the
election is far ahead.
And I think that's not true.
Politicians help fund public projects like bridges.
And if a bridge collapses three years after it's built,
it's really bad for them and their whole party.
So in some areas, they can actually think very long term,
but not for sustainability yet.
So we haven't been able to make a case that in the same
way, we can calculate is a city future-friendly?
Are you building a trap for your constituency, or are you
building something that will operate in the long run?
So we have to look at these trade-offs.
And sometimes they may be hard choices.
But by making that clear, so sustainable
development is a trade-off.
We can say, there's only one planet and we all
want to live well.
How can we combine them?
And by understanding the potential trade-offs, can
overcome them.
By ignoring them, we just stay in business as usual and get
into more and more difficult territory.
You will be next, and then you.
Is that OK?
AUDIENCE: I was just wondering if there were any companies
that are using a smaller ecological footprint in
advertising or pushing [INAUDIBLE].
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: I just saw a bumper sticker today, offset
your footprint.
Oh, interesting, who is that?
Carbonfund.org.
So yes, it's being used quite a lot.
BP had, I think, a multimillion dollar
advertising campaign and we didn't get a dollar from it.
But we are grateful for them, where it said reduce your
carbon footprint.
AUDIENCE: But are they actually tabulating, saying,
if you buy gas from us, your ecological footprint is 10%
lower than--
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: We're working
with a number of companies.
One is the electricity company, BC Hydro, they want
to increase their production of electricity but at no net
increase in footprint, for example.
So they use that as an internal number.
We have worked with a waste company in France to look at
the footprint of waste disposal and waste management.
You say, wow, waste disposal is not just a cost, it's an
investment in being able to recuperate ecological values
out of the waste streams. They're starting to think
about the whole metabolism, so they're becoming managers of
the metabolism.
We have worked with green building initiatives in order
to say how much it can be reduced.
There's an interesting example, BedZED in the UK,
where the architect said, we want to live on one planet.
What would it take?
They did a social housing project on a small footprint
and afterwards measured, how close did we get?
And I think more important is not just to say, we are better
than you, but saying we are honest. We tried, we failed,
that's why we failed, and that's how we make it better
in the future.
So honesty beats performance, from my perspective.
And the honesty is about the honesty of recognizing that
it's one planet, and what does that mean?
How close are we getting to this goal?
Does that answer your question?
We have some more business case studies if you want to
look at them.
But every business uses it slightly differently.
We could use labels, for example.
People have had this idea.
It hasn't happened yet, maybe it's a possibility.
AUDIENCE: To questions on the demand side, and you tell me
if they're related.
First of all, what's behind this explosive demand growth
shown in the red?
And how come the UAE has the highest demand?
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: We always laugh at Dubai because they
have ski slopes in the middle of the hottest desert.
We don't laugh much at Las Vegas, which is
about the same thing.
There are Las Vegases around where people are wealthy and
they can just build whatever they want.
I think Dubai is as legitimate in building ski slopes as Las
Vegas is to build water oases.
Energy is cheap, so they cool down their cows.
AUDIENCE: So it's an energy thing.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: Energy is a big part of it, and wealth
and being able to purchase things from other places.
AUDIENCE: So you said growth is--
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: And the growth here--
to a large extent, all the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
population is a big driver.
Everything we want to consume.
Or actually, here we look at not so
much increase in energy.
Basically, flat per capita consumption nearly, and
population is still increasing.
So you can't say it's population.
It's just that it happens to correlate in a similar amount
per capita, it's not increasing that much a
footprint because of efficiency gains, so you may
be able to get it a little bit more.
So that's why we say the
measurement is really important.
What would it cost to put GDP into 10 countries.
I think with 10 countries, we'll have critical mass.
And once this is on people's radar screens, our activities
will become fundamentally different once we recognize
wow, this is not just something nice, moral, to
have, but it's actually a risk that we, as a country, are
exposed to.
We believe it takes about $100 million.
Now, is that a lot?
Actually, not really.
In France, there are 7,000 people working in GDP, just
for France.
That's a budget of about $700 million a year.
It's an important measure.
It's an important measure, I'm not arguing that.
We are 15 people right now.
We are growing about at 50% a year.
50 people now, and one and 1/2 people are dedicated to look
at the national accounts for 150 countries.
Ridiculous, ridiculous.
Of course, we use data from the United Nations and all
that, so that's some pre-work that has been done by others.
But it would take so little.
And how much investment would we have to turn around?
And that's something we want to do more.
How much world GDP would we start to have to invest to
bend the curve?
Like the millennium development goals, I don't
know if you are familiar with those.
People say about 0.7% of world GDP would need to be invested
to make them happen.
This probably takes a little bit more because it's more
comprehensive than millennium development goals.
We think between 2% and 10% or something.
So it's in that $5 trillion range a year of investments.
And I call them investments because they're not lost
money, they actually will generate more benefits than
they cost. It's just we have to find structures that some
of the benefits go back to the investors.
So it could be private and public investment.
So with $100 million of investment to establish this
in the world-- which doesn't seem that, it's less than a
military airplane--
we hope to catalyze $5 trillion worth of investments
a year into the right direction.
That's a pretty high return on investment per dollar.
OK, perhaps our probability of succeeding may be 10%.
I hope actually higher.
But at that discount of just 10% of that ratio, it's still
a huge impact that it can have, by just bringing the
information to people's attention.
And I think that's why Google is interesting for us because
you are working on information, making formation
accessible, interesting.
And not just as a moral argument, but so people can
start to play with it and start to see why it is
relevant to themselves.
I sometimes use an experiment in lecture.
I bring a balloon and I blow up a balloon and say, is
bigger always better, and blow it up.
Oh, you're right.
Nothing has happened so far.
Shouldn't we have some more chocolate?
And the interesting part is actually people who sit close,
they sit there with grim faces.
They say, oh my god, what's happening.
And people in the back, they just laugh their heads off.
And the interesting part of this is everybody has exactly
the same information.
Everybody has exactly the same information, but the relevance
of this same information is different to people.
So it's not about information, per se.
It's to make the information relevant to people.
And I think our friend--
Chucker?
CRUTCHER: Crutcher.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: --Crutcher said it has to link to
people's self interest directly.
They have to see themselves in there and say, wow, this makes
sense for me.
This makes my life safer.
In Melbourne, for example, they had huge water crises,
still have because it's a very dry area, growing steady.
And 20 years ago, people felt when they used more water,
they had a happier life.
Big swimming pools, long showers,
washing their car, gardening.
Beautiful, you know.
And then just hearing the water splatter.
What could be nicer?
And now they realize, wow, this is actually undermining
our collective security.
Now they have an indicator that says how many percentage
points are left behind [? the dam? ?]
Oh, 37%?
Two weeks ago it was 36%.
Wow, we're better off.
So collectively when they see we have more saved, we are
better off.
And then the neighbor is washing their car, they say,
you're undermining my future.
Using less, I'm better off.
Same with saving.
Rather than spending the money stupidly, I
have it in the bank.
I'm better off, I'm safer.
The same way we can reprogram our understanding, it's not
reprogramming our genetic makeup.
We work with the people as they are.
That's what we have genetically,
biologically available.
But you say, I'm better off as a nation when we don't have
this risk exposure.
We are safer as a nation, or are we safer as a city if we
can be efficient.
And I'm safer with my investment because my house
will not depend so much on resources that are vanishing.
Like the Petroleum Institute.
I don't know if you saw this big
advertising, balanced energy.
Did you see that big advertisement?
It said, with all that oil undiscovered under public
lands, by 2050, we'll be using 28 million barrels a day in
the United States.
Under the public land, they have 30 billion barrels of oil
to be pumped out.
So 1,000 times more.
So you say, this would be enough to power 50 million
cars and 30 million houses for 30 years.
Now if you just do the calculations, it's actually
just 1,000 times more per day, so it's three
years with oil supply.
Hooray, boundless energy.
It's just going to go on for three years exactly as it did
before, and then what?
That's all they oil we have under public land, which spans
I don't know how many percentage points of the whole
United States?
I know, I got a bit sidetracked.
One thing we want, according to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change signed by 170
heads of state, including George Bush Sr. in '92, is to
say we want to maintain the atmospheric concentration
constant in the long run.
Essentially they signed, a bathtub eventually would
overflow if you continue to fill it up.
So we shouldn't fill it up continuously.
So essentially, as a service, what we want, we think the
next generation is as good off if they don't have a higher
concentration as we had.
So otherwise, we leave them with more of a debt.
So that's a service that we want collectively, we said
that codified, so to say.
Now, what does that mean?
Either we can sequester the CO2 with technology, or we say
no, let nature handle it.
How much nature do we need to provide this service?
So for all the parts that we don't take responsibility
ourselves to sequester it, then that's released to nature
and say OK, let nature handle that.
So how much of the biosphere's capacity is available to
sequester CO2?
How much actually is needed compared to how much we put in
the atmosphere?
So we see it as a balance and say, if we just let nature
take care of it, that's how much capacity
would be set aside.
And then rather than harvesting timber, we need to
leave it aside for sequestering CO2 because they
are in competition.
Either we can harvest the timber or we can leave the
area for CO2 accumulation.
Just to show, nature doesn't have enough service capacity
to provide the service that we say we want.
And then you can compare that to say, OK, when we do
biomass, how much area is necessary?
Some biomass applications actually lead to larger
footprints, even, than fossil fuel because they're so
inefficient.
Others are very efficient.
So you start to see what energy options, how are they
interplaying?
Are we just shifting the footprint, or
are we moving it?
So it some ways, we don't advocate [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
sequestration solution, we just say essentially,
according to the research question, we say the limiting
factor of the planet is its regenerist capacity.
How much is available?
How much do we actually use?
It's not hypothetical.
It's actually comparing actual demand with actual supply in
every year.
But it's a good question.
And there's actually a whole research paper if you want
more details on how it's calculated, how it links to
IPCC calculations, all that.
I'm happy to send that to you.
And I also passed around this yellow sheet if you're
interested in our newsletters, which come
out every two seconds.
No, every two months or so.
Then just put on your email and then get updated.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: There's no more question because I already
asked one question.
So like you talked about, data between the long term and the
short term.
I was wondering if there's any way in which you make
something profitable in the short term as well as the long
term so you don't even have to convince people oh, this is in
your self interest. Two years, or maybe in the short term
meaning six months or something.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: I think some of these possibilities,
absolutely, and some of them you need to put in more
investments first. For example, the green buildings
may be a little bit more expensive in the beginning,
but then operational costs are way lower.
So by doing good accounting and, for example, putting
operational expenses and construction expense in one
pot, you can see the benefit earlier on through finance
mechanisms, where you can finance the hump.
It will be possible to, through finance mechanisms,
achieve this outcome.
Absolutely.
Here are the innovations that are needed.
AUDIENCE: You had mentioned using waste productivity,
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
for generating energy out of the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
both in the short and long term.
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL: And then there may be some things that
don't produce enough benefits to the user.
We are driven by externalities, and some people
say externality is actually the best
cost-saving mechanism existing.
And if you take a Stern Report--
I don't know if you've seen the Stern Report from the UK--
essentially they say each ton of carbon emitted now has a
cost of $80.
And then you have voluntary markets, so most of the CO2
emitted now has zero cost. And then there's
some voluntary market--
I don't know how many percentage points of the
overall CO2 emissions are from fossil fuel-- that is traded
at between $8 and $12.
So even in these markets, it's tenfold less than the actual
cost. So even in the best case of the voluntary market, it's
still at a distortion of a factor of 10.
10 times more externalities.
And the externalities would be far smaller than the price, 10
times bigger than the price itself.
So there are missed incentives now, massive missed incentives
that subsidize bad behaviors in terms of climate or
sustainability.
So I don't think the structure right now is fully there, that
all the sustainability projects will win
out on their own.
But some are, and we need to do then symbolically and to
show the technological advances that are possible,
absolutely.
So that's why also need a social contract, then.
We need to show that it's technically feasible and that
already now economically interesting to get people's
attention, absolutely.
Very good question.
I don't know how much more time you have, but we are
interested in looking at building relationships also
with you, particularly, how to display this
data in exciting ways.
Google Earth is an excellent example.
It could be populated with this kind of information.
Scenario calculators where people can play with this data
and make the graphs dynamic and interesting.
If that's of interest to you or you'd like to help us in
making our website much more interesting, we'd love that
support, and other ways that you see fit.
Because as I said, I think it's a very some small-- $100
million is a very small investment, in some ways.
And that we could leverage so much investment
into the right direction.
Overshoot is the biggest game in town, I think.
We are here to win it.
People say, are you a pessimist or an optimist?
And I would say, once you play--
if you ask a football player, are you an
optimist or a pessimist?
They'll just say, I'm just playing.
We're trying to play as hard as we can.
And I think it's great probability.
We see the uptake so fast in the world that, actually, we
can get this on people's agenda.
It's such an easy concept.
I remember I talked with my grandfather 20 years ago, not
because I was particularly smart, but my grandfather said
about oil, don't worry about oil.
We always will have 30 or 40 years worth
of oil in the ground.
And as a kid I said, how is that possible?
There's a limited amount, isn't there less and less and
less and less?
So we have these concepts, we can invent our-- we're out of
resources, they don't really exist, whatever.
And now we say, oh my god.
If you're familiar with Limits to Growth, are you familiar to
Limits to Growth, us computer geeks?
You are, obviously.
Go back to that book, 1972.
Just rough, standard runs, whatever.
And they actually didn't say the word will come to an end,
as people claimed they did.
They showed curves and they say in the mid of the 21st
century, there will be a downturn if we just stay on
the same track.
Now if you look at all the climate research, if you look
at these curves that we showed here, if you looked at the oil
peak curve, even from Shell, they all show the same
downturns in the same time range.
So it's kind of interesting how these simple truths we
haven't been able to communicate well or to accept.
I think it's a psychological question.
How can we make it accessible?
That's I think why Google is so beautiful in some ways.
Make information attractive and interesting so people can
explore it themselves, rather than hitting people with the
moral stick.
I'm a moralist by birth.
I like to hit people and say, you're wrong.
But somehow, it's not that inviting.
And so providing information in accessible ways, that's
really key to a transformation.
That's why I'm excited to be here.
So thank you very, very, very much, and I look forward to
your email conversations.
And come and visit us in Oakland, we are close by.
Thank you.