We are in a race. The race is against time.
We have to build cities, we need them.
But we have to make them in a different way.
We need a wave of innovation,
not only for our way of life, but also for the planet.
The consequences would be enormous if we lose this battle.
The world has right now, close to a billion cars,
and we might double the number of cars on the planet by 2050.
We're going to need transportation fuels for those.
This has kicked off people looking at
a whole range of other alternatives to petroleum in your tank.
Sugar cane to ethanol is an incredibly efficient process.
You get out about seven times the energy
you put into growing the sugar cane.
Imagine that you could have one process
that could take in sunlight and carbon dioxide, and turn it into fuel,
and imagine that that didn't involve growing anything at all.
The cost of traffic is people's time, it's obviously money,
it's fuel wasted.
It's an emotional toll, it's a frustration.
If there's technology that would allow me to spend less time in the car,
and spend more time at home, I'd be all for that.
If you took a satellite picture of the highway,
you can see that there's actually a lot of open space.
Maps in the future are going to be able to help people
get places either more safely, or more efficiently.
The vehicles will be intelligent.
We will see completely autonomous driven vehicles.
Suddenly, mobility becomes a whole other thing.
The way we've been building cities lately is unsustainable.
We can't go on building them that way.
Welcome to Masdar City.
It's the world's first carbon-neutral city.
We are driving in the bowels of Masdar City
in an electric transportation system.
Slightly unnerving to sit in this for the first time.
Where are we going?
The whole scale here is based on the human being,
it's not based on the motor car.
One thing that's very encouraging about Masdar,
is it does represent a whole different value system.
We're trying to do as much as possible, with as little as possible.
The payoff is
"How can everything it's trying to do matter in the rest of the world?"
Research needs to be done now,
and by as many people as possible.
We have a long way to go, but I'm confident that we'll get there.