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Elemental

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Elemental examines how hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus have changed Earth’s temperature, trajectory, past, present, and future. Stephen Porder analyzes these factors’ development.

Image courtesy of interviewee. February 21, 2024

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This video video outlines the motivations and key themes of a book that addresses the urgent need for a sustainable future in the face of pervasive environmental challenges. It emphasizes the lessons that can be learned from the geological past, specifically focusing on five essential elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. These elements are crucial not only for life but also for regulating the planet's climate.

The author discusses the historical impact of organisms like cyanobacteria and land plants, which played significant roles in altering the Earth's atmosphere and enabling the proliferation of life through innovative methods of photosynthesis and nutrient acquisition. In contrast, humans are presented as the latest world-changing organisms, utilizing fossil fuels derived from ancient plant life to drive industry and agriculture, which in turn is altering the atmosphere rapidly.

This video video stresses that humanity must manage these elements wisely to mitigate the consequences of our actions, highlighting solutions for transitioning to sustainable practices, including renewable energy and agricultural innovations. The author acknowledges past successes and expresses cautious optimism about the future, noting that while challenges remain, pathways toward sustainability are becoming more apparent. Ultimately, it calls for collective action and a commitment to understanding and nurturing these fundamental elements for a sustainable future.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video, which discusses the relationship between elements essential for life, their role in environmental change, and pathways towards sustainability:

1. **Existential Environmental Challenges**:
- "We live in a time of existential environmental worry and challenges that feel, uh, both unprecedented and unsolvable."

2. **Elements and Life**:
- "We are all built out of these five elements. They're the five most abundant elements in our bodies: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus."

3. **The Importance of Elements**:
- "These five elements... also control the climate of the planet."

4. **Innovation and Evolution**:
- "If you evolve a way of doing that more efficiently... your numbers can wildly proliferate."

5. **Historical Impact of Cyanobacteria**:
- "Cyanobacteria... combined a novel way of doing photosynthesis that was very efficient... and changed the atmosphere in a way that plunged the planet into a deep freeze."

6. **Human Connection to Past Innovators**:
- "We’ve found the dead bodies of our world-changing plant ancestors dug them up and started to burn them for energy."

7. **Future Sustainability**:
- "If modern society is built on the use of these elements, we can actually understand how to use them more wisely to mitigate the consequences."

8. **Rate of Change**:
- "Humans are doing this same scale of thing in a hundred years, a million times faster."

9. **Importance of Transition**:
- "Transitioning from the state that we are in now... that's the part that's gonna be rife with untold suffering."

10. **Cautious Optimism**:
- "I'm cautiously optimistic... I can see solutions at every turn... and that is incredibly encouraging."

11. **Path to Sustainability**:
- "I can see 70% of the path to get there... I can see most of the path, then you can start and you can run and you can figure out the path as you go."

These quotes encapsulate the essence of the video, focusing on the importance of understanding elemental relationships, historical biological innovations, current environmental challenges, and hopeful pathways toward a more sustainable future.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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A couple things motivated the book.

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Uh, one is that we live in a time

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of existential environmental worry

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and challenges that feel,

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both unprecedented and unsolvable.

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And by looking back at the geologic past

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and the thread, the elemental thread

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that connects all world changing organisms across billions

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of years of earth history, we can learn something about how

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to build a more sustainable future.

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And so in the book, which centers around these five elements

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that are the building blocks of life,

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but are also the key to regulating the climate

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of the planet, the book focuses on those five elements

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as a way of connecting humans

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and what we're doing to organisms

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that have changed the world in the past,

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of which there are actually very few.

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Um, and then use that knowledge to move forward

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and think about how we can build a more sustainable future.

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We are all built out of these five elements.

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They're the five most abundant elements in our bodies.

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Hydrogen first, oxygen second, carbon, third, nitrogen,

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fourth, phosphorus, fifth.

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They're absolutely essential for our all life.

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There are other elements that are also essential for life.

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But the thing about these five elements, as I said,

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before, is that they also control the climate.

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And so, and in addition, they control

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how much life on earth there can be.

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So if you think about it, living organisms,

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all living organisms are all built

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to these five elements roughly in the same proportions.

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So one, one way of thinking about what life itself is, is

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to think about life as a constant struggle

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to gather these elements from the environment,

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from the water that you live in, from the land

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that you live on, from the air that you're in.

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Somehow you have

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to pull those elements in the right proportions

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from the environment to build your body

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or to build your cells.

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If you evolve a way of doing that more efficiently

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or better, the your, your numbers can wildly proliferate.

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But at the same time, if that happens,

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you can then change the chemistry of the,

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of the earth itself,

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because you're pulling these elements out of the water, out

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of the air, out of the rock,

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and changing the amount of life on earth

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and changing the amount that's left.

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And where that really plays out in the history

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of life on earth is in changes to the atmosphere.

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So when organisms figure out ways

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to use carbon in a different way and pull enough nitrogen

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and phosphorus from the environment to replicate

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and have enough food

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to build out their population enormously, you can then start

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to change the chemistry

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of the atmosphere in a way that changes climate.

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And so it's the interaction between living organisms

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and the unliving world that is the key, to understanding

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how these elements change the world.

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So I'll give an example from the very, very deep past.

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Uh, the first and biggest,

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Most, not biggest in size,

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but most important world changing organism

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are called cyanobacteria.

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Cyanobacteria are ocean dwelling, organisms

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that photosynthesize.

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Um, and they combined deep in evolutionary time,

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probably somewhere around 3 billion years ago.

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They combined a novel way of doing photosynthesis

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that was very efficient.

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So it allowed them to capture a lot of carbon dioxide

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for a given amount of sunlight relative to other methods

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of photosynthesis.

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And they evolved a way to pull nitrogen, which is a key,

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piece of the photosynthetic machinery from the atmosphere.

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Our atmosphere is 80% nitrogen,

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but it's in a form that we can't access

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and cyanobacteria, incorporated away into their cells

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to access that incredibly abundant pool of nitrogen.

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So now they have a very efficient way

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of doing photosynthesis.

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They have enough nitrogen to build a lot of machinery,

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to do more photosynthesis.

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So you can think of it as like they're the best electric

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cars, and they have the best battery factory

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to produce the most batteries, right?

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And so they wildly proliferate across the oceans,

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a byproduct of their chemistry,

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change the atmosphere in a way

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that plunged the planet into a deep freeze.

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It actually froze the earth.

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It broke down the global greenhouse,

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but that byproduct was oxygen.

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And it actually set the stage for all multicellular life

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that depends on oxygen in the atmosphere.

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So for 2 billion years,

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the earth had no free oxygen in the atmosphere.

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You and I would've suffocated

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and the cyanobacteria by innovating new ways

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of gathering carbon and new ways of getting nutrients

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changed the atmosphere so much that it,

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they oxygenated the planet.

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They were the first and biggest world changing organisms.

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That was about 2.2, 2.3 billion years ago.

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Halfway through earth history,

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it took another almost 2 billion years

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before the next big world changing organisms emerged

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and literally emerged.

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The land plants came out of the ocean.

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They brought the photosynthetic machinery of

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cyanobacteria with them.

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They solved the challenge of getting water on land.

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They, they began to mine the rocks, beneath their roots

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and pull phosphorus,

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which is a nutrient I haven't talked about yet from the,

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from the nascent soils.

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And they too changed the atmosphere so much

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that they precipitated a global ice age

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or a near global ice age.

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So again, we see this story of innovation,

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of gathering energy in a new way in the case

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of cyanobacteria or from a new place in the ca case

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of land plants who move into the sunlight on land

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that was previously being unused, A new way

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of gathering hydrogen and oxygen and phosphorus

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and nitrogen to support that photosynthesis.

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And then you're a wild proliferation that changes the world.

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So moving to the last world changer,

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or the, the most recent world changer,

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which is us, what have we done?

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We've found the dead bodies

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of our world changing plant ancestors dug them up

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and started to burn them for energy.

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That's coal. We use that energy

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to store water in reservoirs, to irrigate, to drill,

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into aquifers and pull water up.

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That's what plants did with their roots.

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We used that energy to pull nitrogen from the air

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to feed a growing population.

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We could only feed about half

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of the people on the planet without

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using nitrogen fertilizer.

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That's just what the cyanobacteria, they figured out a way

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to pull nitrogen outta the air.

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And we use our fossil energy to mine

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for phosphorus in the way that plant roots mine

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for phosphorus to also fertilize our farm fields.

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As a result, we're wildly proliferating,

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and as a result, we're changing the atmosphere.

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We are the, the, the true successors

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of those world changing organisms.

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How can we learn to, how can

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that information help us build a more sustainable future?

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Well, if modern society is built on the, on the use

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of these elements, we can actually understand how

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to use them more wise wisely to mitigate the consequences.

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So unlike cyanobacteria

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and unlike plants, we can actually sort of end run

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around some of these, problems

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because we can figure out other ways to get energy

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to run our society that don't perturb,

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the atmosphere in the same way.

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And so, pardon me, that's, I thought I had that silenced.

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Um, and so that's the key in my opinion,

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a sustainable future is built on the foundation

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of these five elements and their wise management.

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The first lesson is that you can't radically innovate

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in your use of these elements and not change the world.

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So it is completely expected

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that we would be running into this problem at the moment.

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But we have one key advantage,

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and that is that the vast majority of energy

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that we use is used to power our society, not our bodies.

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So we don't, we can't, for example, if you

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or I eat something, we break down the chemical bonds in

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that food and we breathe out CO2, that's inevitable.

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And if there are two of us that's twice as much CO2,

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we breathe out than if there's one of us that,

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so we're gonna have an imprint

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on the atmosphere because of that.

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But that's a teeny little imprint compared to

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powering our planes, running our factories,

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driving our cars, mining,

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and you know, all of the industrial activity that we do.

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And so if we can substitute a different energy source

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for all that stuff, our footprint on the atmosphere

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will actually be pretty small.

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And so we have a, a sort of a way out relative

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to our world changing predecessors.

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It just re re it just requires us understanding that

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what we want is energy, not CO2 emissions, right?

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What we want is warm houses be able to be able to move

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around to have food that we want, that we can eat.

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And there are solutions

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that have emerged over the past couple of decades, really,

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not only for the management of carbon, of course,

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everybody's heard of what wind power and solar power,

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and there are still challenges there, but those exist.

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But there are agricultural solutions as well

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that will allow us to keep nutrients like nitrogen

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and phosphorus in place on the farm field

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where we want them, as opposed to spilling into our rivers

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as opposed to spilling into our oceans where they have,

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negative consequences for, for us

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and for all the other organisms that depend on those,

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on those ecosystems.

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So we can use what we know,

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to manage these elements more wisely.

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And that's really our path forward.

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And I think the other thing that's really important

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to understand that's really concerning

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is the rate of change.

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So when I say cyanobacteria oxygenated the planet, they did

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that over the course of hundred

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or maybe hundreds of millions of years.

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When I say the land plants radically changed the atmosphere,

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they did it over about a hundred million years.

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Humans are doing this same scale of thing

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in a hundred years, a million times faster, right?

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And the problem with that is not so much the end state.

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Like if we were to warm the planet so much

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that it was tropical from pole to pole,

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human society could probably exist in that state.

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But transitioning from the state that we are in now

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with coastal cities and agriculture where it is,

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and you know, injustice

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and poverty spread around the world, right?

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And imagining the transition between the world as it is now

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and the world as it would be in that future state,

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that's the part that's gonna be, rife with,

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untold suffering.

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And so it's really incumbent upon us both to

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minimize the amount of the transition and try

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and slow that transition down as much as possible.

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Because,

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and I use this analogy often,

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if you're gonna drive your car into a tree, it's better

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to do it at one mile an hour than it is

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to do it at a hundred miles an hour, right?

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And right now we're doing it at a hundred miles an hour.

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Um, and so we really need to say, look, these are,

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these are giant changes to the earth system.

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We wanna minimize them

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and we wanna slow them down if they have to happen.

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Um, because we need time to adapt

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that everything else on the planet needs time to adapt.

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I'm much more optimistic than I was when I

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started studying this stuff.

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You know, my, I did my PhD between 2000 and 2005,

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and it really felt like there were just no answers,

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that were gonna be deployable at scale.

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And what I say now is that,

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I see several major successes along

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with a couple of challenges.

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So the first major success, if you had asked me in 2005,

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how much warmer do you think the planet will be by the end

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of the century, I would've said four to four

11:52.855 --> 11:54.135
And a half degrees Celsius,

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which is an unimaginably warmer world with a,

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with a pretty high chance

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that it was gonna be higher than that.

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If you ask me now, I would say the consensus is somewhere

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around three degrees Celsius

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warmer relative to pre-industrial.

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That's really dangerous

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and not going to be a pretty transition,

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but it's a lot better than four and a half.

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So we've made enormous progress.

12:16.305 --> 12:18.085
We haven't made as much progress as I'd like,

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but we've made enormous progress.

12:20.145 --> 12:22.565
The other thing that's really encouraging is that

12:23.105 --> 12:26.445
we now are most of the way there on figuring out how

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to run our energy system without fossil fuels.

12:29.385 --> 12:31.045
The transition will take a while.

12:31.585 --> 12:33.885
Uh, there are still gonna be power plants that get built.

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There are still gonna be power plants that take a while

12:35.725 --> 12:38.525
to shut down, but solar is now the cheapest source

12:38.525 --> 12:40.165
of energy in most electricity markets.

12:41.125 --> 12:43.405
Electric vehicles are beginning to dominate gas cars.

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They're just better. And they're, they're,

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they're like the cell phone of 2004.

12:47.995 --> 12:50.045
Like, it's better than a landline,

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but nowhere near as good as the iPhone,

12:51.865 --> 12:53.325
and not nearly as, nearly as good

12:53.325 --> 12:55.325
as the iPhone, whatever number we're up to.

12:55.825 --> 12:59.005
Um, right? So it's in the exponentially getting better

12:59.005 --> 13:01.245
phase, whereas internal combustion cars are just gonna

13:01.485 --> 13:03.005
continue to be the same thing they've been for decades.

13:03.625 --> 13:05.885
Um, so EVs are just better.

13:06.065 --> 13:07.605
So we have a good source of energy,

13:07.605 --> 13:09.445
we have a better source of transport.

13:09.585 --> 13:12.405
People are making radical innovations to agriculture

13:12.405 --> 13:13.445
that are really impressive.

13:13.625 --> 13:16.125
Not, not going back to,

13:16.125 --> 13:17.925
everybody digging up their own turnups,

13:18.025 --> 13:21.565
but, you know, modifications of large scale agriculture

13:21.565 --> 13:24.525
that really reduce the environmental impact that

13:24.545 --> 13:25.605
that's possible to do.

13:26.545 --> 13:30.485
So I can see, if I think about a, a,

13:30.645 --> 13:33.525
a sustainable world built on the sustainable management

13:33.525 --> 13:34.645
of these five elements,

13:36.565 --> 13:40.445
I can see 70% of the path to get there.

13:40.755 --> 13:43.085
Like, it's, it doesn't require a,

13:43.525 --> 13:45.285
a imagination or science fiction.

13:45.525 --> 13:46.565
I can't see the whole way.

13:47.025 --> 13:48.885
So there's a huge amount of work to be done.

13:48.885 --> 13:50.965
There's a, this is an all hands on deck.

13:51.505 --> 13:52.965
We all need to be working on this,

13:52.965 --> 13:55.685
and we all have something to contribute at every

13:55.785 --> 13:56.805
aspect of society.

13:57.305 --> 14:00.245
But I can see a path most of the path.

14:00.345 --> 14:03.205
And if you can see most of the path, then you can start

14:03.625 --> 14:06.645
and you can run and you can figure out the path

14:06.785 --> 14:08.325
as you go at the very end.

14:08.745 --> 14:12.685
But 15 years ago, I couldn't really even see the path.

14:13.105 --> 14:17.205
And so it's for that reason that I'm cautiously optimistic,

14:17.325 --> 14:19.605
I would not say I am Pollyanna about this.

14:19.685 --> 14:21.645
I don't think we're headed for an easy time,

14:22.305 --> 14:24.725
but I can see solutions at every turn.

14:25.225 --> 14:27.165
Uh, and that is incredibly encouraging

14:27.225 --> 14:31.325
and motivating to, work for those solutions.

14:32.195 --> 14:33.925
Some of them will work, some of them will not.

14:34.345 --> 14:36.125
But if we keep the principles in mind

14:36.125 --> 14:37.685
that we need these five elements

14:37.685 --> 14:39.245
and their wise management at the base

14:39.245 --> 14:42.805
of a sustainable society, that will be a guiding light to us

14:42.865 --> 14:44.805
as we figure out the details of the path.

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