Jay Keasling: 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.
Dan Kammen: 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.
Thomas Goetz: I'm Thomas Goetz, executive editor at Wired
Magazine. At wired, we look
at the innovators and innovations that are changing
our world. In the next
hour, we'll see three stories from acclaimed filmmakers about
the future of energy.
We'll explore cutting edge innovations in how we drive,
how we live,
and, in our first story, how we fuel our cars.
They're all ideas that promise to
shape the path to the world of 2050.
[♪...]
The world has right now, close to a billion cars,
and we might double the
number of cars on the planet by 2050.
So if we double the number of
vehicles, we really increase the amount of fuel they consume, and
that's going to have a big, big footprint in terms of our demand
for resources to move all those vehicles around.
Kay Keasling: We're pulling up carbon that's been stored
underground and burning it in our
automobiles and putting all that carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
If we don't reduce that, we could have changes in the
climate that we could never recover from.
There's a number of forecasts for what type of transportation
economy we could move into.
One vision is that we would use more and more liquid fuels,
another one is we'll use more and more electricity.
Right now, more of the
industrial activity is focused around liquid biofuels.
The thing about a fuel is, its really unparalleled on a weight
basis how much energy is in a gallon of fuel.
And even if batteries develop as some of the
advocates hope they develop, we're not going to see batteries
running large trucks and we're certainly not
going to see an electrified air flight.
We're going to need transportation fuels for
those that will directly replace the petroleum based
fuels that we're using today.
This has kicked off people looking at a whole range of
other alternatives to petroleum in your tank.
Isaias Macedo: Commercial production of ethanol as fuel
started in Brazil in 1975. When we
started the ethanol program, nobody talked about reducing
emissions. This was not an issue at that time.
First, and most important, we didn't have money
to buy oil anymore after the first oil short.
We were importers of oil.
And today, more than 50% of all cars use ethanol
instead of gasoline.
Brazil made a very conscious choice to try to find a way to
reduce their fossil fuel dependence.
And they didn't have to look very far because Brazil's
climate is ideal for growing sugar cane.
Carlos Dinucci: when you have sugar cane plantation,
you have only two things to make:
sugar and ethanol.
My family has been in the sugarcane business since 1955
and about thirty years ago, I thought
"there's an opportunity to make more ethanol."
Now, we're producing 120,000 cubic meters of ethanol.
Brazil today has very close to 400 sugar mills.
The overall sales is 30 billion us dollars.
And this number is increasing.
If you look at how they make ethanol and how efficient the
process is, it's really a model for all of us.
They grind the plant up, extract the sugar from the
cane, the sugar goes into these large fermentation tanks which
combine sugars together with yeast that naturally produces
ethanol. They use the rest
of the plant to generate heat to distill the ethanol
and turn it into fuel.
They also use that heat to generate electricity renewably,
not putting excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Brazil has gotten to a point today where they're using about
40% less petroleum than they would be otherwise, but Brazil
cannot supply the whole world with ethanol because they
would have to cut very strongly into food
production and into critical natural areas like the Amazon to
make that happen.
This really boils down to the fact that there's only so much
arable land, and growing fuel for our gas tanks is yet another
demand on that landscape.
We cannot kid ourselves into thinking that we've found a
general solution for the world problem.
I think we have to face the world in this way today.
We have no oil in very large quantities anymore.
We have no coal transforming in a clean way, in the meantime we
have to do the best we can, and the best at
the moment is that we can do biofuels.
Sugarcane to ethanol is an incredibly efficient process.
You get out about seven times the energy you put
into growing the sugar cane. In the US when we produce
ethanol from corn, for every unit of input of energy we get
about the same amount of energy out.
So we're really not gaining anything.
We need a better process.
We don't have to take what nature's given us, we can
actually engineer plants and yeast to be more efficient.
And that's the basis
for a lot of the work that we're doing now.
What we need to look at though, is which of the pathways to come
out of this are not only good financially,
but those that are also good for sustainability.
And this equation is really wide open right now.
We are in a race to develop fuels.
The race isn't with other countries, the race
is against time.
Cristiano Borges: To meet the immediate and future demands, we
made the energy solution spring from the ground.
Luis Scoffone: Brazil is the most efficient ethanol producing
country in the world. Sugarcane
alcohol from Brazil can reduce the total carbon footprint by up
to 70%, compared with gasoline.
The biggest challenge for fuel providers, and car manufacturers
is to reduce CO2 emissions over the next twenty years.
Demand for mobility will continue to grow.
We believe that biofuels are very
important because they help in an immediate way.
All forms of fuel are going to be needed; hydrocarbons,
natural gas, biofuels, all of them are going to
be part of the energy needs for the future of transportation.
Brazil has been very successful at taking a resource they had
and finding the process to make that into
ethanol and people call those first generation
biofuels. We have lots of lab work around
the world that are looking at the
second generation and that's generally turning cellulosic
material from for example weeds, into biofuels.
And the United States is very much at the
forefront of the innovation part of the equation.
For centuries we've been using yeast to consume glucose and
produce wine and beer.
We're trying to do something very similar, only we're
engineering the yeast to consume that glucose
and turn it into a fuel or drug or chemical.
We call this synthetic biology and when i started in this area,
many of my colleagues said "Oh Jay, this is
great work, but where's the application, what
are you going to do with these tools?" Who cares?
Malaria is an enormous problem.
In any one year, a million or so people die of
the disease and most of them are children under the age of 5.
So we thought this was a great opportunity to engineer yeast to
produce an antimalarial drug called artemisinin.
This drug is derived from plants right
now, but its too expensive for people in the developing world.
So my laboratory engineered yeast to produce small
quantities of artemisinin, now that process is being scaled up
and we'll have this drug on the market shortly,
but at a substantially reduced cost.
It turns out that that anti-malarial drug is a
hydrocarbon and it's very similar in
many ways to diesel fuel.
We thought, gosh we can turn our attention now to
fuels. We can make a few changes in that microbe to turn it into
a fuel-producing microbe.
If we imagine that glucose is going to be our new petroleum,
we need a source for that glucose.
So the crops that we're looking at are crops like
switchgrass.
This is a native grass, it grows without a lot of water and on
marginal lands. we could turn it into energy farms.
The challenge though, is that unlike sugar cane, it's
very difficult to get the sugar out of that biomass.
So we use what we call a pre-treatment process to extract
the glucose from the plant, and then we feed that
glucose to a yeast that we've engineered to
produce hydrocarbons.
And that yeast takes in the sugar, and it changes its
composition and gives us this high-energy molecule.
They float to the top, you skim them off,
you put them in your tank.
But it takes a lot of work to get from that small test tube
all the way up into
the million-gallon tank, so we have to give it time.
But I think that some of the discoveries that are happening
might be applied by the end of the decade.
In terms of a sustainable equation for the planet, the
role of biofuels is quite tricky.
There are a variety of crops that do not compete directly
with food, and finding ways to utilize those
types of crops first, that's very attractive.
So solving the science is part of the story, but then
evaluating all of the new fuels in terms of the land-use
impacts that they could have, that is an even
harder story than doing the good science.
Imagine that you could have one process that could take in
sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn it into fuel.
And imagine if that didn't involve growing
anything at all.
Nate Lewis: The synthetic biologists are trying to take
plants and make them do things that they wouldn't normally do.
On the other hand, materials chemists, like
myself, want to do artificial photosynthesis to improve on the
process that nature does in real photosynthesis.
We should follow the blue print of plants converting sunlight
into fuel, but take the approach that it could be much simpler.
All we really need is a light absorber
that absorbs sunlight.
We also need a catalyst like iron or nickel.
So when you see the hydrogen coming off of the photo-active
material, that's an example of a semi-conductor
breaking the chemical bonds of water to make
hydrogen and oxygen.
Ultimately, our pieces are going to be contained in
something that is easy to roll out like bubble wrap,
where in would come sunlight and water.
You would vent the oxygen to the air, but the bottom
would wick out your liquid or gaseous fuel, that then you
could collect and use for our cars and planes and storage.
Our goal is within two years, to have the first artificial
photosynthesis solarfuels generator that we can hold in
our hands. and then, get to scale beyond that time.
We're certainly not good at predicting the future, but to
me, electric vehicles look like a sustainable option.
We've heard proposals about things as
far-fetched as nuclear power planes, and even some proposals
to move freight around with lighter-than-air vehicles.
And so if the future in 2050 does
include a fair amount of oil, what it means would be that we
haven't deployed as many of these clean
technologies as we already know are possible.
If you think about how long it's taken for us to build up the
petroleum industry, we can't hope to reverse that overnight.
It's a huge change in our infrastructure.
Yes, we should have been working on it 30 years ago.
We didn't.
We're trying to make up for that, and that means basic
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.
In the future, 3d maps are going to help people get places more
efficiently.
As we just saw, the race to produce cleaner energy is
charging ahead. In the
meantime, demand for cars continues to climb.
By 2050, it's predicted there
will be two billion cars on the planet,
and fuel consumption will have tripled.
To keep pace, we'll have to radically
change the way we drive.
Here's our next story, 'Driven by design.'
Asaaf Biderman: The automobile came around,
in many ways it was the future.
We thought of it as one of the more positive changes that had
happened to society. Suddenly, our ability to get a
job changed, we can live farther away with
bigger plots of land, with better quality of living.
It all looked quite good.
But there are limitations to swearing by the car.
If it gets congested, your quality of
life drops immediately.
You have to spend so long in the car.
It's a very inefficient use of fuel consumption.
Things stop making sense all of a sudden.
It doesn't bring you closer to where you want to get, it
actually, sometimes brings you farther.
Narrator: The average American spends nearly 300 hours a year
in their car.
38 of them stuck in traffic.
Annually, congestion consumes over $1 billion in
gasoline in the United States alone.
The inefficiency caused by traffic, both
financial and personal, is enormous.
Dirk Sheehan and Carmen White's story
is not that unusual today.
Carmen White: Dirk works an hour and a half away in Warrenville,
Illinois. Generally he wouldn't
leave work until 6 or 6:30 and I would say usual time for him to
get home is around 8.
You all done?
Thanks, buddy.
Dirk Sheehan: Usually when I wake up I'm the only one up.
Sometimes the kids wake up with my routine.
More often than not, I don't see them in the morning.
I think about my commute when I wake up.
I check the traffic report to see if there's any delays.
The worst case scenario, it takes me
two hours to get to work.
We are already so limited in the amount of time he can spend with
the kids, and our expenses are crazy high.
We're spending $400 a month on gas.
It takes away from our food budget, and we never paid for
gas like that before. Ever.
If there's technology that would allow me to spend less time in
the car, spend less money on gas, and spend
more time at home, I'd be all for that.
Mike Finn: The cost of traffic is people's time, it's fuel
wasted, it's an emotional toll, it's a frustration.
Utilizing the roads more intelligently is a much
more efficient approach to the inability to have
supply keep up with traffic demand.
John Leonard: If you took a satellite picture of the
highway, you can see that
there's actually a lot of open space.
If we had the technology for cars to drive more closely,
but safely, then you could increase the utilization of the
road network.
What this means is that to be more efficient, to use less
fuel, we need to see the road differently.
We need cars that can navigate through the urban
landscape in a radically different way.
Cliff Fox: Maps in the future are going to be able to help
people get places either more safely or more efficiently.
Today, just helps you get from point A to point B.
But, what if I want to get someplace and use the least
amount of fuel possible?
Or, if I've got a hybrid vehicle, and I want to make sure
I've got plenty of charge to not only get
there but to get back home?
So, information that is gonna help people
achieve the more efficient or the safer route is
more detailed information about the road than a lot of people
realize is possible to collect today.
Here in Chicago, Nokia's location & commerce unit is
developing the next generation of mapping.
Lidar, sonar, 360-degree video,
all are components of what Nokia calls - digital mapping.
We use 64 lasers that rotate and they collect data in a 3D way
about the world.
It creates what we call a point cloud of information.
That point cloud allows us to measure distances
then between the points that we collect.
That system combined with the cameras, with higher precision
location detection through inertial measurement
units, that whole data system allows us to
collect 1.3 million points of data per second.
Probably within 2-3 years,
you're gonna see 3D maps that are gonna integrate the traffic
information into your routing, to help you understand.
If I've got 5 different routes to take,
which one is the most efficient today, given the way the
stoplights are running, given the way traffic is running.
All of those factors are gonna
be taken into consideration to make sure I've got the best
route.
But better mapping that can integrate topography,
infrastructure, and density is only part of the answer.
Another key to improving transport efficiency is
building cars that drive themselves.
Autonomous vehicle technology has a tremendous potential to
improve efficiency of our road infrastructure.
By removing humans from the equation, we eliminate all the
things we do wrong behind the wheel - speeding, changing
lanes too often, merging
haphazardly; and by marrying them with sophisticated 3D maps,
we can make driving safer and more energy efficient.
That next generation vehicle is being
built right now by Swedish trucking company, Scania.
Tony Sandberg: The solution, as we see it, is that the vehicles
can utilize intelligent maps.
3D maps with traffic information.
The vehicles will be intelligent and
communicate with each other.
They will talk to each other, they will talk to the
infrastructure.
And we will see autonomously-driven vehicles.
The goal was to have multiple robots and see if they could go
60 miles fully autonomously.
Helen Taylor: My name's Helen Taylor.
My husband John and I, we're very passionate about
fuel economy.
John Taylor: Yea it's great to break world records, but that's
not the be all and end all now.
It's more important to educate people.
Together we're showing drivers around the world simple
techniques to improve their fuel efficiency.
We run these education programs, get people on the road with us,
and we finally tweak their driving techniques.
Things like just checking your tire
pressures before you even get into your car.
For every one psi your tires are
under inflated, you're wasting 3% of your fuel efficiency.
And the difference
between 65 and 75 miles per hour is a saving of 23%.
When you talk to the general public, they're very surprised
that an energy company, like Shell, is trying
to educate people on how to save money,
how to reduce CO2 emissions.
And here we have Shell sending us around the world to do that.
You always hope when you're on this planet that you can make a
real difference in people's lives.
When you get emails from people saying "I've
saved this amount of money this year, now I can put food on the
table", then you know you are really making a difference.
By displaying traffic density in the urban infrastructure
in a revolutionary way,
3D digital maps will help create a more fuel-efficient future.
But these technologies are limited by the drivers who sit
behind the wheel. Some believe, that for cars and
trucks to be truly energy-efficient, they will need
to drive themselves.
The technology's coming into play, through sensors and
capabilities for cars to drive autonomously.
In 2007, the United States' department of defense held a
competition to see if a completely autonomous,
self-driving vehicle was possible.
DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency. They had a competition to develop self-driving robots
that could drive themselves in traffic.
The goal was to have multiple robots, turn them loose
on a course, and see if they could go sixty miles in six
hours, fully autonomously.
Driving may be one of the most complex things we do every day.
Drivers make dozens of decisions at any given moment.
One study found that drivers
Were exposed to over 1,300 items of information per minute.
We make so many decisions when we're driving without even
thinking about it.
So in creating our vehicle, a great component of the
enterprise was developing software to handle
lots of sensors, feeding lots of data, and
generating a bunch of potential paths that the vehicle might
follow. And even though the robot doesn't have
the ability to predict the future, by using this
fast random path generation, the robot could anticipate a
potential accident and choose a path to avoid it
because its always thinking about what things
could the car do next.
No one expects millions of cars driving themselves anytime
soon. But there is a place where self-navigating
technologies are being optimized to create the
vehicle of the future.
We're on the Scania test track outside Stockholm,
where we have basically,
it looks like a highway but it's a separate test track where we
conduct our own experiments.
Scania, the Swedish trucking company, has recently begun
testing its next generation of long-haul truck, utilizing
radar, sonar, and intelligent mapping.
They've been able to drastically reduce fuel consumption.
Jonas Martensson: We have this example with platooning, where
will make use of the reduction in air resistance, or air drag,
that you get from driving close to each other with
heavy duty vehicles.
And in order to control this, you need to know
where the other vehicles are, their position, their velocity,
their actions in the near future.
And to be very close to the vehicle ahead of you, it
requires that you have a very accurate control.
If you look at robotics broadly, there's a wonderful set of
research of people looking at schooling fish and
trying to develop the ability for robots to work
together like that.
So there are wonderful examples from nature of how
cooperation can lead to more efficient resource utilization.
Jonas Hofstedt: You can see it when people are competing in
Tour de France. They platoon to reduce air drag.
They are not bicycling behind each other that close because
it's fun, or because they are racing, it is because they are
reducing air drag
sitting behind the man who is leading.
A truck traveling 55 miles per hour expends half its energy
just to move the air around it.
At 65 miles per hour, that number jumps to almost
two-thirds.
Even if platooning can reduce the energy used by 10 percent,
the savings would be substantial.
If a vehicle in front of another vehicle wants to brake,
it immediately sends out the brake message to the other
vehicles, so they actually brake at the same time.
Hassad Alem: The way we do this is by, we have an automated
system. so now for instance,
if i take my feet off the acceleration pedal, and turn the
system on, the velocity is automatically
governed by getting information from the vehicle
ahead through its wireless system.
We want these vehicles to maintain a
short relative distance.
So through this system, we can reduce fuel
consumption by utulizing the air drag reduction by 10%.
and 10% would mean you would be able to save
approximately 8,000 Euros per single heavyduty
vehicle per year.
It may be sometime before autonomous vehicles make up the
majority of cars on America's highways.
Nevertheless, some of these technologies are already
making their way into our lives.
Now this polar baby wants to sleep.
Do you get to pick out books every day or is it just...
I get to pick out books sometimes.
Okay.
When we look toward the future, the systems will absolutely make
it safer and more efficient and less
costly for you and also make your life easier
because you're spending less time on the roads.
The city begins to talk, begins to tell you where is there
congestion, what's going on in different areas of town?
Suddenly the car becomes a part of a
much bigger ecosystem.
We can look at how cars interact with other cars,
how cars interact with infrastructure and us, the
drivers, can start to make
smart decisions about how to move around.
Suddenly, mobility becomes a whole other thing.
Paul Goldberger: No matter how much money they have, no matter
how much oil they have,
everybody has to go in a different direction.
We've seen that changing the way we drive can improve
transportation efficiencies.
But what if we change the way we build and live in our cities?
That's the subject of our next story, "Searching for Utopia".
We'll travel to the United Arab Emirates, and
discover a city rising out of the desert.
Let's take a look.
From the beginning, we've dreamed of Utopia.
A place where we could live in
harmony with each other, and in balance with nature.
Many have imagined it,
tried to design it, but the dream always slipped away.
Then, I heard they were building a new city called
"Masdar", near Abu Dhabi, in the Arabian desert.
It sounded like an unlikely place for Utopia,
and I wanted to see it.
The last half-century has been a pretty bad time for the making
of cities, mostly.
The natural tendency has been to accommodate to the automobile
more than anything else.
Try walking around Abu Dhabi, it’s impossible,
you have to take a car everywhere.
Dubai, the same thing.
They are among the least pedestrian-friendly
places in the world, they are not green by any
other measure either, and these are not easy things to fix.
Masdar is still under construction, and it doesn't
look like much from the highway.
But they claim it's going to redefine the way cities are
designed, built, and powered.
Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, will be the city of the future, and
the role model for the world.
Once you see what they've envisioned for this
utopian city, its very impressive.
It's carbon-neutral, pedestrian friendly and powered by
renewable energies.
But I do notice, we're going to have to change our
relationship with cars.
Car audio: Welcome to Masdar City.
Austin Relton: We are driving in the bowels of Masdar City in an
electric transportation system.
It's slightly unnerving to see this for the first time and
"where are we going?"
the first big move the architects at foster and
partners made was to put all transportation underneath the
city, leaving the streets of Masdar totally free
of cars.
The place reminded me of a medieval city.
And actually, many design elements are adapted from
ancient Arabic towns and villages.
It's all about looking back into history to move forward.
There are some very
very simple ideas that have a huge impact.
This is a pedestrian zone, there's no cars here.
This has enabled us to push our streets together to take
advantage of the shade, channel the cooling breezes through.
The whole scale here is based on the human being, its not based
on the motor car.
As soon as you lift up the pedestrian plane by seven
meters, you've suddenly captured this breeze.
What you can see here on the balcony is we've got a
modern interpretation of an ancient Arabic screen.
What we must avoid is
direct sunlight hitting any piece of glass.
As soon as the sun hits the glass,
the heat's transferred into the building and we have to use more
energy to cool it down.
Can this really make all that much of a difference?
Yeah, absolutely.
For example, downtown Abu Dhabi... sixty-meter wide
streets, black asphalt, mirrored reflective buildings, no relief
from the sun.
On a day in September, the air temperature in both places
was 39 degrees.
in Abu Dhabi, the
temperature measured at the asphalt was 57 degrees.
in Masdar, the temperature measured on the
ground, 33 degrees, so we've actually lowered
the air temperature.
We're trying to do as much as possible, with as little as
possible.
These simple design moves, cut air conditioning needs by 60%.
But this place is also, technically, very sophisticated.
The roof panels not only provide
shade, they also generate electricity.
And the walls themselves are made of
glass reinforced concrete, literally sand taken from the
desert.
Everything here is geared towards maximizing energy
efficiency.
Masdar does represent a whole different value system.
It represents an acknowledgment that, eventually,
everybody has to go in a different kind of direction.
No matter how much money they have,
no matter how much oil they have, no matter anything else.
All of the cities here in this part of the world
have come out of nowhere.
There was nothing here not so long ago, except
small settlements in the desert.
And then all of this oil and all of this money,
and suddenly, you know, wham, these cities started popping up.
But they sprung up in a false love of a
Western model that was already out of date.
The model of the late 20th century automobile-based
energy-hogging city.
For most of the world, energy is very expensive. But the United
Arab Emirates is sitting on 10% of the world's
oil, and energy is cheap, so cheap you can
run a ski slope in a shopping mall,
and build the world's tallest skyscraper.
But even here, cheap energy won't last forever, and the
people behind Masdar are determined to find alternatives.
Martin Haigh: One of the most crucial aspects of our energy
odeling and scenario quantification is how much
energy in total is the world going to use in 2050.
Wim Thomas: The scenarios team is a bunch of people with rich
imagination, I would say.
Adam Newton: We have political
scientists, economists, geopolitical experts.
Really we try to simplify the complexity all
around us.
Jeremy Bentham: We in the Scenarios team are currently
putting a lot of attention into cities and city development.
A lot of megacities are going to be built in the coming decades.
We're talking about the equivalent of a new city of a
million people every week.
That is an incredible demand.
Most of the world's resources are consumed by the cities.
What if we could offer a blueprint for a better
city? Public transportation, information, energy.
We understand demand will rise, we understand the
current supplies will struggle to keep pace.
So we have to of course, find
ways of bridging the gap between the demand and the supply.
Decisions that we take now are going to have a major impact on
decades to come.
There's enough oil under these sands to last 150 years.
But fundamental to the Masdar ideal, is getting
energy from renewable sources, from
geothermal and wind, and most of all, from a source they have in
abundance in the desert: the sun.
This field of solar panels makes more than enough
electricity to run Masdar, and the excess power is sent to the
Abu Dhabi grid.
But silicon panels are expensive, and the price of
solar power needs to drop if
its going to be competitive from Africa to Asia to Arizona.
in the future, Masdar hopes to get energy from this prototype
called the solar beam down.
Uusing highly reflective mirrors, the solar beam down may
generate power more cheaply and ecologically than silicon
panels.
The mirrors bounce the suns rays up to the tower, and then down
to a point. reaching a temperature of 600
degrees, steam can be generated to run
turbines to make electricity.
There's just one problem: neither of these solar
technologies work at night.
So Masdar needs to draw power from the grid
when the sun goes down, and that power comes from natural gas.
The reality is, it’s just not yet possible to power Masdar
entirely without fossil fuels.
The great challenge with Masdar,
will be "how do you make it a place that will
not be just this ideal city that no other place could actually
aspire to, 'cause it doesn't seem real."
What Masdar has to be is a laboratory that develops things
that then can be applied in existing cities all around the
world, because that's where it will pay off.
There's no pay off if it's just about itself.
The payoff is "how can everything it's trying to
do matter in the rest of the world?"
Right now, there's only a store, two restaurants, a bank, and a
few hundred students living here.
It's too early to tell if Masdar will work as a city when it's
finished, but much has been achieved: they are
carbon-neutral, and largely,
powered by renewable energies.
Solutions here won't work everywhere
though, many cities are in cold climates, and cooling is not
their energy problem.
They need to let sunlight in, not keep it out.
Cities like Los Angeles or Houston are built around cars.
Can Masdar's lessons be applied to them?
Still, its a step in the right direction.
And, its impressive that this step is being
taken by a country that doesn't need to take it.
I met a guy who said "actually, they did need to take it."
He took me to the desert to explain.
Muhamad Alkhalil: God says...
[arabic]
God talks about man's place in, in the universe.
That this world is a trust.
And god offered this trust to the mountains, to the
heavens, to the land, to earth, and all refused it, refused to
take this trust.
But man being adventurous, vain, maybe too ambitious, being man
accepted it.
Now, accepting it, there is a responsibility.
Taking responsibility isn't always easy.
Utopia may be unattainable, but we
must reach for it, and Masdar does give us a clue to what
cities will be like in the future.
They may not look quite like Masdar,
but they will be shaped by the same concerns.
By energy.
Where it comes from, and how its used.
The way we've been building cities lately is unsustainable.
We can't go on building them that way.
But to say that we can't build cities the way we have
been building them doesn't mean
we can't build cities in the future.
In fact, we have to build cities.
Cities are the essential statement of human civilization.
So, we will continue to make them, but we have to make them
in a different way.
what we've seen is that the world of 2050 won't look
drastically different from the world today, but the
challenges of a growing population and
increased energy use demand real solutions.
Its innovations like those we've just seen that will be critical
in charting our path to the world of 2050.