Good afternoon! First of all, thank you for inviting me to TED.
I download TED podcasts from iTunes and do like them.
I will tell that soon it will be hot in Norilsk and about the reasons why it will be so.
Today I will tell you about energy behaviour.
Actually, this word combination does not exist in the Russian language.
I would like to tell how we, city dwellers,
in other words you and I, influence energy consumption today.
But before it I would like to say a couple of words about the person in front of you.
I was born in Central Asia,
then I lived in Western Europe and now I work in Moscow.
When I lived in Central Asia I used to do silly things
such as turning on the cold water faucet in the kitchen
so that the stream of cold water would cool the room.
This shocked my French friends.
Telling about energy behaviour I would like to be concise and use facts.
Use facts, which are not disputed anymore, which have taken place,
and tendencies we can empirically observe.
I will proceed to the first fact. We have doubled energy consumption for 40 years.
What does it mean? It means that
my grandfather and his friends used less energy, than I do.
How did it happen? Today I have two mobile phones,
one for work calls, the other for personal ones, the same holds true for my computers and cars and so on.
Surely it also holds good for you.
You can see how you consumed energy five years ago and how you do it now.
Twenty years ago it was impossible to imagine that there would be a few TV sets or
few telephones at home or other gadgets such as iPads, tablet PCs and digital cameras.
They just did not exist.
And year after year the steady tendency to consume more and more energy
is in evidence and unavoidable.
Now this is a way of life, of a comfortable
life of people of the new generation.
If we have a look at what will happen in the next 20 years,
not 40, we will see that we will double our consumption.
Just imagine, we will halve the period during which we will double fossil fuels consumption.
Well, we are energy-thirsty but it is taking its toll.
Today, in most cases, for electrical energy production or heat processing we have to
burn fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal.
And by burning them we emit a lot of pollutants to the atmosphere.
You know from a geography course that there is the greenhouse effect
which allows us to have the comfort temperature on the planet.
When sunlight passing through greenhouse gases reflects from the planet’s surface
some of its heat escapes back into space, but the rest is trapped.
And the higher concentration of greenhouse gases is,
the higher temperature there is on the planet.
And this is called global warming.
In 2003 I lived in France and that year 15000 people died of heat-related causes there,
35000 died in Europe.
In 2005 record-breaking temperature indices were registered in 200 cities of the world.
There was a state of emergency in Kazan in 2009
as fields were burning,
and you were witnesses of the events in Moscow in 2010.
And, unfortunately, this record is expanding.
And this is not some film like 2012, but events happening in the real world.
There is a third fact. Global warming significantly affects glacier melting.
Only over a 40-year period the polar territory has reduced by 40%.
This is unquestionable for we can observe it from satellites.
So we can see that this territory is diminishing.
This territory is comparable in size with the territory of 5 countries:
Ukraine, Belorussia and Baltic states.
Can you imagine that it has happened only over the last 40 years?
And we can track this tendency according to which they will disappear in 50 years.
And the point is not that the Earth will lose some beautiful white caps, no.
When sunlight falls on an icy surface, 90% of it escapes back into space.
But if sunlight falls on a water surface, 90% remains.
And here is the problem. We are exponentially heating up our planet.
However, there is a pleasant fact.
One saved unit of energy at home or in office equals
3 units saved at a power plant.
Briefly, if we burn 100 units of coal, for example,
we get 35 units of energy and then deliver them by wire to our house.
On the way 2 units are lost and so we get 33 units out of 100.
So you gain by saving energy at home.
What I would like to say in the end is that urbanites ,
consuming more energy than any other group of people, have a serious impact on the environment
and the place we live today.
I would like to appeal to you and
ask to have a more rational attitude to energy consumption.
It does not mean that you have to sit in a dark cold room.
As for me, I am not ready to stop using my car
or other gadgets I have. As this is my way of life
and I am not me without them.
I am asking you to turn off the lights leaving home, the kitchen or the bathroom,
in other words, to turn off those devices you are not using at the moment
And you will be surprised at how much energy you can save.
Today we can save up to 45% of energy in Russia.
By turning the lights off, you are turning off the stove
which heats our planet.
By turning the lights off you are also giving back lives to those animals
whose lives we are taking away so blatantly.
Year after year polar bears have to swim longer distances for food.
My fianc?e is here right now.
She turns the lights off only because of it,
only to save polar bears.
I would like you, when turning the lights off, not to think about the money and energy you have economized,
no, that is not the point, but about your giving light to other people.
Nowadays 1.5 billion people on this planet have no access to electricity.
And this is a fact.
And two or three power plants that are built every day in the world,
what are they intended for?
They are intended for our new mobile phones, garages.
And the last, by turning the lights off, also think that you are helping to improve your health and health of those around you
since the condition of the environment, and the air quality is getting worse year after year.
This is also happening because more fuel is being burned at power plants and factories.
Nowadays one in four men in Europe is either allergic or asthmatic.
This holds true for me.
Leo Tolstoy said: Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.
Gandhi said almost the same:
Be the change you want to see in the world.
And I am asking you to be it.