Translator: Catherine Jones Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
This is my granddaughter.
(Audience) Coos
Isn't she beautiful?
It's just extraordinary,
the first look at life and how exciting it could be.
Sometimes I look at Josie-May
and I say,
what sort of life is she going to have?
Especially when you look forward to about 2050,
when she's 43.
Because by 2050,
the world is supposed to get rid of 80% of the CO2 it's generating now
to avert climate disaster.
If we don't, we're going to have more and more of the these terrible things
like the disaster in New Orleans there.
Now, I was involved in the IPCC in the last few years, helping write this.
And I've got to tell you,
there aren't many people in that group
who could see how we could actually get there.
That 80% reduction, that's a big call.
And when you look at the curves of gas, and coal, and oil,
and the total carbon that's produced,
it all looks out of control, it's going up and up and up.
How are we going to possibly get rid of 80% of that by 2050?
Well, it's even a harder story when you start to see the emerging countries,
like China,
which is now the biggest carbon polluter in the world.
What are they going to do?
They're not the good-est it seems on that.
(Laughter)
They're not so good at this.
But you can see how it starts to come in on us.
And I don't know if you feel like that some days when you look to the future.
I certainly have.
And it is quite possibly going to be difficult.
But I want to tell you a different story that's emerging.
A much more hopeful one.
I want to tell you that if you look for hope in this climate change story,
there are some amazing stories just beginning to emerge.
And I want to let some of that be known.
Certainly, over the years,
we've found little glimpses of hope in stories like this.
We've put them in books.
This is Vauban in Freiburg,
which is a 5,000 dwellings place where it's carbon free.
And it's a good place to live.
It's not as though they're sort of being poor.
And the big thing for us
is to work out if this is a movement that is changing the world.
Are we getting somewhere in the mainstream?
They call it the Green Economy.
It's the 6th Wave of future innovation.
We've had five.
We're in the Digital Wave.
What's emerging is the Green Economy.
And the big question is, are we getting there quickly enough?
And that mainstreaming is what I want to talk to you about.
Because underneath it
is this fundamental question
that wealth has always been associated with fossil fuel consumption.
They're totally coupled.
We have to continue getting wealthier.
The world needs to get out of poverty in many places.
But we can't do it
unless we disassociate ourselves from fossil fuels.
CO2 has got to go down, GDP up.
Now,
the Green Economy has been struggling because of those two things that coupled.
But you get to the point where it starts to turn over.
And then down the other side of that curve,
the market is working for you.
So it can go very quickly.
And they're the trends I want to quickly show you today.
The critical point is at that turnover.
Because the world suddenly begins to look different.
So I want to look at coal and oil.
If you took king coal as a lot of the media,
it's essentially saying,
'You can't change it,
it's just going to be around for a long time.'
But if you look at banking and their financial interests,
where are they investing?
Coal and gas are going down as investments for power,
renewables are going up.
And about 2008/9, it switched over,
so there's now more money going into renewables
than into coal and gas for power production.
So the bankers of the world have made a decision.
And they're saying the fossil fuels are going to phase out.
So where are we going to invest?
You invest in renewables.
At the same time, we're needing less power.
In the developed world,
the decoupling of wealth from power has happened.
In the UK, for example, around 2004, power consumption started going down.
We were getting more clever at running our homes and businesses.
Better appliances and technologies.
So we were beginning to change.
The same thing in Australia.
2008: Power consumption began going down.
The utilities were still planning for it to go up,
but it was a bit of a shock to them.
And one of the reasons for it is solar.
Now, solar is getting cheaper and cheaper.
Yesterday,
the International Energy Agency came out and said,
'Solar is going to be about four cents a kilowatt hour,
and it will be the most dominant part of power production by 2020.'
A very rapid change is coming.
Now in Perth, 10% of homes now have solar photovoltaics on their roofs,
mostly in the outer suburbs where they've got bigger roofs.
And more need because the homes were built pretty poorly,
and they take a lot of power.
But that's 310 megawatts.
That's a substantial power station distributed amongst the city.
And it's growing very quickly.
Much quicker than most people thought.
Now Josh's house,
Josh Byrne is one of our staff members in CUSP
and one of the hundred or so researchers we've got who are looking to the future
to create a more hopeful potential by 2050.
His house,
it's an ordinary house in Hilton he's designed and built.
Maybe you've seen it on TV.
He's totally wired up this family house in order to check how well it's doing.
It's a passive solar design;
it's got no air-con;
you can see the PVs on the roof there.
The first data has come in now to show that the amount of electricity
Just a few percent compared to a Perth average household.
And most of that is in the evening when it's more expensive.
So when you get the green area there that's produced from the PVs on the roof,
you see it not only neutralises that amount of carbon that he's consumed
but it creates more renewables back into the grid.
So it's actually carbon positive.
Now, that's a fantastic story.
Because essentially, he's got this greater wealth there.
It's a much better place to live
but no carbon.
Now, I'm not a great car salesman
but this is a Tesla.
This is an electric vehicle,
and they're starting now to take off around the world.
But the important thing for this story about coal is,
the batteries that are being developed for these electric vehicles
are now taking off and being used as storage in homes.
So you can have your PV cells, and a battery, and an electric vehicle,
and you're basically self-sufficient.
Now, you will be part of a grid,
but it'll be the primary source of your power,
and you will not need to depend on coal
or oil come to that.
So, what about China?
Isn't China building a coal-fired power station every week?
No.
They stopped.
In fact,
they should get into that good guide
because they are demonstrating how to decouple.
You see GDP there splitting off from coal.
Coal consumption has peaked in China.
That's very recent data.
You've seen it first on TEDxPerth.
(Laughter)
So coal and gas are coming down in their investments,
in their power consumption.
Renewables dramatically going up.
It's a big story.
So, coal is in decline.
And global divestment is now happening.
The World Bank, the EU, and the US government,
have all banned any further coal-fired power stations.
And the institutions, like universities, superannuation, foundations, churches,
are also divesting.
Because they can see
you can actually make money for your shareholders,
but you don't need carbon.
That's a new world that's coming very quickly.
Now, what about oil?
Oil's slightly different because it's running out anyway.
Essentially, peak oil has happened.
Peak oil as in conventional oil, which is cheap.
2006.
The oil we're now using,
as there's a bit of growth happening in the world,
is coming from expensive sources,
like fracking,
like deep water in the oceans,
tar sands,
they're very expensive.
So the price is going up, staying up.
It's unlikely that we'll ever have cheap oil again.
It's really pricing itself out of the future.
Now, the response has been around the world
we're beginning to see cities, in fact whole nations now, driving less.
You see here the US.
They're back to levels of car use that they had in 1994.
It's peaked.
It's going down.
After 100 years of growing consistently.
The peak occurred around about the time the price of oil reached $80 a barrel,
and it's well over that now.
The same thing's happened in Australia.
In every Australian city,
you can see there the big cities and the small cities.
Canberra's on top there - they drive cars like fury there.
(Laughter)
But it's started to peak as well.
And Perth along with Hobart and Darwin, they're all peaked.
So something's going on.
And that happened in 2004, the same year.
Certainly the price of oil is one thing, but culture is changing.
Especially amongst the young.
You see the red lines here are the most recent driving.
So in the teens, the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, 50s even,
people are driving less.
Go on into the 60s, to us baby boomers,
we're driving more.
We grew up with the car, give us a break.
(Laughter)
And we're going to drive to our own funerals, which are -
(Laughter)
which are happening quite frequently.
(Laughter)
So, the change is on.
We're essentially moving away from the car.
That's a big change.
It's happened without people really noticing it.
Why is it happening?
Certainly,
the use of social media devices is universal now.
And you can use them a lot better in a bus or a train
(Laughter)
than you can in a car.
So, there's no doubt
that you can see a growth in public transport
in the decade since the social media devices have taken off.
So in all the cities of the world, public transport is booming.
I've spent 30 years,
trying desperately to hang on to a good rail system here in Perth.
Now, you can't hardly get into it at peak times.
It is not a question of popularity anymore.
It is really just a question of how quickly we can build more.
What about China?
Well, they've also decoupled from oil.
The wealth is growing, and they're cutting back on oil.
How is this happening?
There are three things happening, but they're all about electric transport.
For a start, they've built amazing metro systems in their cities.
86 metros have been built.
And it really began a short time ago,
certainly this century.
But in the last five years, dramatic growth in the number of metros.
At the same time, electric vehicles, especially the cheaper version,
which are electric bikes and electric scooters,
there's 250 million of them
using renewable fuel,
if you've got enough renewables there,
rather than oil.
And high speed rail.
In seven years, they've built over 8,500km of high speed rail.
Now, you saw Utopia talk about the high speed rail fiasco.
And I've been a supporter of that, and it was embarrassing to watch,
but
we need it.
And at some point in our future, we're going to do it.
They did it in China, very dramatically.
You can go to any big city now
and go to the railway station for the high speed train.
It's like a massive airport.
Incredibly popular.
Just a quick look at Shanghai.
Look at the difference between 1990 and 2010.
Dramatic.
And they started by building highways,
flirting with the American model, but it kind of didn't work.
Dense cities in Asia
don't really take too many cars.
And what do you do when you get to that stage?
You build a metro.
So Shanghai built the biggest metro in the world,
in 10 years.
There are 8 million people a day using that metro.
It's an extraordinary story.
It's pretty good, I think.
(Laughter)
Now, Beijing, similarly,
and they don't like to be beaten by Shanghai,
they've now got 9 million passengers a day
on their metro.
You can see in the green line, the dramatic decline of the bicycle.
And at the same time, the private vehicles growing and replacing it.
But that stopped; the private vehicle has peaked.
The big growth now is in that public transport,
and that's the metro.
And that's continuing to grow dramatically.
So, we do see decoupling of wealth and fossil fuels.
Of GDP and CO2.
We've seen the market struggle,
and we can now see the Green Economy starting to thrive.
The peak, I think we're at that point now.
What it means is that there are very different futures
that begin to emerge on the other side of that peak.
It's like we've been climbing a mountain, and we couldn't see properly.
You get to the top and it looks very different.
Let me just show you.
Before the peak,
this is the kind of thing that you saw.
It was just a continuation of what was there,
and they're all going up.
And that's not very helpful.
But after the peak,
you can see that each of the fossil fuels reaches a point where it begins to decline
and renewables keeps going up.
GDP keeps going up.
But CO2 is going down.
And you could actually begin to imagine 80% less CO2 by 2050.
Now, that's a huge relief,
but it doesn't mean it's going to happen just like that.
But we can begin to see it.
We can still mess things up.
We're going to need every ripple and wave possible to keep things going.
Lots of heroes are needed.
This is Ephesus.
In 1000 AD it was abandoned.
It was a city that knew what was going wrong
because their port,
which is at the end of that street there,
was silting up.
It was being caused by cutting all the trees
in the forest around on the hills.
And they kept doing it.
Eventually, the city was closed down
because the port, the ocean entry to the river
is about 12km away now.
So you can mess it up.
But we can now see over the mountain.
We can begin to see a possible better future.
For Josie May, my granddaughter,
I can at least imagine
a world that is better for her.
And one where we have coped with this massive change.
Let's hope so.
Thank you.
(Applause)