The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet
>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves. I'm here to welcome Ramez
Naam to the Microsoft research visiting speakers series. Ramez is here today to discuss his
book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. We are beset by an array of
natural resource and environmental threats, They pose a risk to human prosperity , to world
peace and to the planet itself. To improve our chances of survival we need to supercharge our
process of innovation, and make smart choices for our planet and our economy. Ramez Naam
spent 13 years at Microsoft working on Exchange, Outlook, IE and Bing. He was born in Cairo
and lives in Seattle where he writes full-time. Please join me in giving him a very warm
welcome.
>> [applause]
>> Ramez Naam: Thanks Amy and thanks to all, it's great to be here and see a lot of friendly
faces and people I know and some who I don't know as well. So I left Microsoft in late 2009, it's
been about 3 1/2 years. I've been busy since then. I've got three books that I finished in that
time. The first one that came out is Nexus, my sci-fi novel, it's available in the back, it's about
linking brains. The next one that's about to come out is the sequel to this, and I want to show
you the cover which no one has seen yet and we haven't revealed so please do not tweet this
or share this with anybody yet. Over a few more days and the video will take a little while to get
online. This is the cover to Crux, which is the sequel to Nexus. But of course, we're here to talk
about a different book which is this one that Amy just introduced. There's a history behind this
book. I started working on this book before I left Microsoft, I just didn't know it. In 2008 I was
on vacation, in this spot, this is Tulum in the Yucatán in Mexico. And I spent almost the whole
day swimming off the beach here. Just an incredibly gorgeous place. Just a little bit of litter on
the beach, and for whatever reason I started thinking about it's so beautiful here but there's a
little bit of pollution. I really want to make it a priority to figure out what the situation of the
planet is, and what my responsibilities are. I'm by heart a techno-optimist, so that's the
attitude that I came to this from. It turns out that it was fitting that this was the place where I
started working on the book without knowing yet that it was going to be a book because of one
other thing. Which is that castle there is this ancient Mayan city of Tulum. And it was one of
the last outposts of a civilization that collapsed after reaching the height of its power over 1000
years of growth, suddenly in a few decades just collapsed to nothing. It was really a story of
ecological overstretch. Of overusing resources while at the same time being beset by some
natural issues, actually climate change that happened to them that then just toppled them over
the edge. So that kind of ended up being interesting twofold motivation there. I start the book
with a line from Dickens which is, it was the best of times, it was a worst of times, one of those
famous couplets in the English language. Because that sort of captures the zeitgeist right now. I
talk a lot right now in Silicon Valley and here I am at Microsoft and so a lot of us with a
technology background really have this notion of the future is going to be a techno-utopia.
There's also a lot of people who are deep thinkers who have a very different view of what the
future might hold. Okay what's this? That's an easy one. There will be more questions and they
will get harder, okay.
So let's start with best of times before I depress you. I was born in a neighborhood a lot like this
in Cairo. A working class neighborhood and that story of what's changed there and here for me
captures how much progress has been made. When I was born, infant mortality there was
about 15%. About 15% of kids did not reach their fifth birthday. I was a preemie by about one
month. So my odds of reaching my fifth birthday were actually about three in four. When my
parents were born, it was actually much worse than that. About one in four kids didn't reach
their fifth birthday, and in fact in my dad's family, three kids died in infancy and my mom's, five
kids died in infancy. My dad wasn't even the first kid to have his name. They recycled it from
the kid before who was born and died in infancy. It was just how it was in those days. So
growing up in the US, I came here at the age of three, I had this amazing perspective of wow,
it's so much better here than it is in the developing world where we came from, but it turns out
I wasn't just getting a look at another culture. I was getting a look back in time, because in the
US in 1900 infant mortality was 25%. In Chicago that year one in three kids didn't make their
fifth birthday. So that's where we've come from across the entire planet and things are just
changed tremendously. Now Egypt's got a 2% infant mortality and in the US it's about 0.7% and
in Europe it's about 0.5%. So that progress is just astounding. You can see another metrics, I
love metrics I love numbers. Average years of life, life expectancy around the planet has just
soared over the last half-century. In fact, if we look back to 1900, the worldwide life
expectancy was about three years, and now it's more than double that and if you look closely
you'll see that the gap between the red and the black lines is closing. So were actually making
the most gains now in the developing world of catching up to the rich world in almost every
way. Extreme poverty, someone mentioned to me the Economist has an article on this, this
week. Extreme poverty around the world has plummeted. Using a one dollar a day as a metric,
we've gone from more than a third of humanity living at that level to about 5%. If you use
higher thresholds of two dollars a day and so on and so forth, you still see this sharp decline,
the final numbers might be different. But by any metric you use, poverty hunger so one, you
see that is just plummeting and now people are seriously talking about in the next 20 years
maybe we could end to extreme poverty around the world, period. That's where we're at.
Education, the most fundamental enabler of people that allows them to make a better life for
themselves. It's gone up tremendously. This is on a log scale. I was in the US, we've got more
and more educated. But let's pick two countries, Ethiopia and India to represent the developing
world and watch what happens with their average years of schooling per personal live over the
last century and less. And you see a tremendous rate of growth there and again a convergence
between cultures. That combined with technology, the work that many of us have been
involved with, the internet, computers mobile phones has tremendously leveled social playing
fields and now we see a larger fraction of nations around the world are democracies that have
ever been the case on the planet before. And a larger fraction of people living in democracies
than ever on the planet before. So plenty, plenty, plenty of positive trends for humanity. There
are also some bad things. There are also some problems that we are facing, and it's really what
I wanted to write a book about, is how do we overcome those problems.
The planet's lungs, also the Economist magazine calls them, the planet's forest, sorry. The
Economist calls them the lungs of the earth. They are vital in recycling water, in forcing rainfall
to happen, in cleaning the air and holding down soils. In antiquity, in hunter gatherer times
almost 2/3 of the planet's land area was covered in forest. Now it's about one third. We've
actually made good strides in halting or slowing at least the threat of before station, but there's
still a tremendous change [indiscernible] on the face of the planet, mostly due to agriculture,
that's what's driven this.
Freshwater, water is life. Without that, you can't really do anything. In fact we use 70% of all
freshwater around the world to grow food. It's not the showers you take, your dishwasher. It's
really growing food primarily that is the drain of this. And there are problems. How many of you
know what this is?
>>: It's one of the lakes in Asia that's, you're going to show the next picture that show it getting
[indiscernible] and then refilling.
>> Ramez Naam: That's right, this is the RLC. The RLC is the fourth largest body of fresh water
in the world. Actually it was the fourth largest body of fresh water in the world, this is what it
looks like now. The RLC got pumped out by first the USSR and then Russia and the Ukraine to
grow wheat and cotton in the Ukraine and the Baltic states, and it's basically just gone. It's
dotted by the remnants of fishing villages, boats upon the sand essentially. Now the RLC is
between Kazakhstan and is Uzbekistan. Many of us couldn't find that on a map, not easily. So
doesn't really apply to us? Maybe a little bit. Who can name this body of water?
>>: Ogallala aquifer
>> Ramez Naam: Yes, the Ogallala aquifer. We don't have a giant inland lake or sea here, we
have an underground giant body of freshwater here. And this is what you call fossil water. We
use the idea of fossil fuels. Fossil water is water that was left behind at the end of the last ice
age. As the glaciers melted, they filled up this giant underground reservoir. Now that Lee charge
rate from rainfall for this reservoir is about 10,000 years. But since 1950 we've drained about a
third of it. So we've drained about 3000 years of refill out, and about 60 years and where on
pace for more than half of it to be gone in the next 20 years. In the middle of this aquifer, we
see that the water level is dropping about 3 feet per year. As we live with out of sight out of
mind, this is a surface lake in the US, we would all notice this and wouldn't allow it to happen.
But the way that it is sort of hidden away from us, it does happen. And once this water is gone
on the timescale of human civilization it is not coming back. We're not going to wait 10,000
years for it to come back. There's plenty of fish in the sea, we all know that saying. Well, there
used to be more fish in the sea. When you look at the set of fish species that humans consume,
every one of them is either at its maximum rate that can be harvested right now or more likely
in some stage of collapse, meaning that we're extracting fish in the ocean more rapidly than
reproduction can replace them, right. Fish are a renewable resource at a certain level. If you
fish them slowly enough, the fish stocks replenish, but we're not doing that. We're fishing them
overly hard because no one puts real limits on this on a global basis.
And then there is the most pervasive risk that makes all others worse, which is climate change.
The planet has a fever, essentially. This is a graph of temperature change over the last hundred
and 30 years. You see it's a jagged line, it bounces all around, it's up it's down, down, down
down, up, up, up. It's very, very noisy and yet over the long-term it's inexorably rising. And in
fact if you look at, sort of the trend lines over progressively shorter periods of time, you see the
slope just keeps getting worse. Actually the planet keeps warming. That's almost 2 degrees
Fahrenheit effectively has happened since the start of industrialization. Now some of you may
have heard this notion that climate change has stopped and the planet has stopped warming,
so we'll show you this graph. This is what we call the climate escalator. Which is at any point, if
you want to, you can draw a convenient line that shows O for the last X years, actually the
temperature has gone down or it hasn't moved, yet somehow if you draw a longer line it always
ends up that it's going down. So climate is a very, very noisy thing, yet from that noise we've
extracted a clear signal which is that red line that's going up and up and up. We know of course
that the CO2 that does this. CO2 levels just a few weeks ago for the first times reached 400
parts per million, this line right here in the atmosphere which hasn't happened in millions of
years. And for the last million, actually the highest they've been has been, most people say
about 280. We're on pace if we keep going at this rate, that by the end of the century, it will be
1000 parts per million in the atmosphere or three times higher than it's been for millions of
years and you can see this clear correlation with what happens with temperature as CO2
concentrations rise. Now as I said it's been millions of years, actually if you look, the last time
[indiscernible] were this high, about four 5 million years ago, there was no Arctic in fact there
was almost no ice in Greenland, then we had various problems. Now I love graphs. Graphs
persuade me, but they don't persuade everyone so let's use a little pictorial evidence as well.
This is the Peterson glacier in Alaska. That's what it looked like in 1920. That's what it looks like
now. This is the Bear glacier in Alaska, 1920. And here's that same area, looks like now. It's a
dramatic transformation. The planet warms fastest near the poles at night and inland. So the
areas around the Arctic are warming the fastest by far. Now this of course, people start
thinking, oh ice is melting, sea level rise. That's what you hear is the most commonly worried
about concern of climate change, right? Sea level rise. And the seas will rise, to rise between 1
and 2 meters, or about 3 to 6 feet over the course of the century. That's pretty slow actually,
and when we think about it that way we think, oh it's a future threat, we'll have to worry about
it sometime before 2100. But the reality is that there's actually threats that are happening right
now and have been happening for some time. And it's not involved with sea level. It's the
weather and the impact that has on our ability to grow food actually, which is the most basic
energy source we have. In 2003, Europe was hit with the worst heat wave on record since 1540.
Actually it was worse than 1540, but 1540 is about as far back as records go. So it's the worst
heat wave ever recorded in over 500 years, or almost 500 years of records. Seventy percent of
Ukraine's wheat crop failed. Ten percent of Portugal's forests burned down in that summer.
About 70,000 people died across Europe as a result of this heat wave. Now we can't ever say
because of one weather event, oh climate change caused that. It doesn't work that way,
weather happens. You have extreme droughts even if you don't have climate change. But we
can say with climate change, certain events are much more likely to happen. And I know that
this event was between five and 10 times more likely to happen because of the amount of
warming that has happened so far, or we can expect 5 to 10 times as many events like this in
the years to come. In 2009 China was hit with a once in a century drought. In 2010 it was hit
with another once in a century drought, which is, I don't know probability very well but
something's wrong with that right there. Wells that are giving water continuously for 500 years,
stop doing so. Now these droughts happen because warmer air has higher moisture demand.
It's able to absorb more moisture. About 7%, 8% more per degree Celsius. Now that doesn't
mean that it happens homogenously. If it did, the whole world would be just more humid.
Instead what happens is it sucks it away rapidly from one place and then deposits it rapidly in
another place. And so when the rains came back in Pakistan in 2010, an area twice the size of
California was underwater. Floods that have never been recorded of this magnitude in Pakistan
before. Fifteen million people were displaced from their homes. It was tremendous. In Russia
in 2010 they also had the worst heat wave they had ever seen. Fifty five thousand people died
in Russia in July and August 2010. Eleven thousand people died in Moscow alone in two months
due to the heat. That's worse than any terrorist attack you know of. But we don't treat it
exactly that way and of course the US has had its share of problems as well. We're now three
years into the worst drought we've seen since the dust bowl. Last year we lost about a quarter
of the US corn crop. You noticed last summer, beef was really cheap. It was really cheap
because hay, the hay crop was devastated, and so farmers were slaughtering their herds
because there was nothing else they could do. They couldn't afford to feed them. So we are
seeing some issues with this in the US as well and the climate models say were in for much,
much worse if things continue as they have been going forward. Now that's what we call linear
change, but of course we know about complex systems have these feedback loops. Sometimes
you do one thing and it makes something worse which feeds back making the original thing
worse. One of those feedback loops is the vanishing ice. You may have heard last summer the
ice reached its lowest point it's been a lot in thousands of years. And there's a negative
feedback loop there, which is that when the ice melts, ice reflects back like 90% of the energy
that hits it. The water below it is almost black and reflects back only 10% of energy that hits it.
That remaining delta is additional heat that enters that water, which leads to faster melting of
the sea ice and there you go. And in fact if we reconstruct what's happened with Arctic sea ice
over the last 1400 years, this is what we see. Like anything else in climate, it's wobbly, it moves
around, it's very noisy. But then suddenly around the time of industrialization it goes off a cliff.
If this were a business plan and we flipped the graph it would look great. Here's your hockey
stick. Well it's not exactly, it's more like a hockey cliff going on here. And in fact people criticize
climate modelers because climate models are very, very complex. They've got a lot of things
wrong. There's a lot of variability in them. So people say, oh climate models are just predicting
things that aren't going to happen, the reality is going to be not nearly as bad. But the climate
models didn't expect this to happen until about the middle of the 22nd century. So we're
actually about 130 years early on the melt of the Arctic ice cap. It doesn't mean that they won't
be wrong in the opposite direction sometimes, but there's a lot of variability and a lot of risk in
the way we look at these systems. Now it turns out that if the Arctic ice were entirely gone in
June, which is about maybe twenty, thirty years away at current pace. That, just the added
capture of sunlight hitting the dark water would have a heating impact about as large as all
human CO2 emissions. So we can get to a point where even if we stopped emitting CO2, just
the added heating from the darkening we've done on the planet, would keep warming the
planet at the rate that it's been warming, which is not a situation we want to see obviously. And
in fact another problem is that in the Arctic this was tundra, now it's what we call a fall lake,
which is when land has been frozen for thousands of years starts to melt from the top as
sunlight hits it. This area is loaded with carbon. Carbon from decaying plants and it bubbles up
in the form of methane which is actually about 25 times worse in its heating impact and there's
enough carbon buried here, about a trillion tons to dwarf everything humans have done in
warming so far. So we're sort of sitting on a time bomb. We don't want this to escape into the
atmosphere. Now if we put all of this together, people try to calculate what is the human
impact on the planet and how much of the planet's resources are we using. And what we find
is, we're not using one planet earth's worth of resources, were using about 1 1/2 planet earth's
use of resources. I don't have a spare half of planet. If you do, let's talk. I'm sure we have a good
business idea there. Further, they say that if all of humanity lived like Americans, we would be
using about five planet earth's worth of resources. I definitely don't have four spare planet
earth's, so again let's talk if you think that you do. The problem a lot of people say is rapid
economic growth. And what do we mean by that?. Who can name what this is? This is
Shanghai. Shanghai is Pudong, [indiscernible]. Shanghai twenty, thirty years ago was a small
town on the river where the biggest industry was fishing. And now it's this. This represents a
tremendous positive that has happened in the world. This went hand-in-hand with the drop in
poverty, the drop in hunger, the rise in wealth and longevity of the people in China and
throughout the rest of the world. But it also means more steel, more electricity, more coal,
more water, more food. All of it, okay. In large part, in parts of the environmental movement
you hear a cry that we have to stop this from happening. That economic growth is the problem.
The problem with that idea is twofold. One, how are you going to stop people throughout the
world from aspiring to and acquiring new resources to make their lives better. Two, even if you
could would it be just. Only about 1 billion people around the world have access to air
conditioners. Less than that have access to automobiles. So how can you say to somebody, to a
software engineer in India, or an architect in China, oh sorry, we got rich doing this but you
can't do that as well. So I think there is a deep flaw in this sort of thinking. It's just not going to
be practical. But this is the sort of thinking that you see. The Limits to Growth is the best selling
environmental book of all time. About 2 million copies sold and it says essentially that using
computer models; it says that you cannot have economic growth without over consuming and
over polluting and eventually reaching a crash. But we have heard similar things in the past.
Back in 1968 this was the number one New York Times bestseller, A Population Bomb, Paul
Ehrlich. It started with a sentence, the race to feed humanity is over. At this late date nothing
can prevent a rise in the worldwide death rate. Billions will die, which was wrong. It turns out
the hunger rate dropped after this book came out. And it kept dropping and had been dropping
already. And the rate of food production outstripped the rate of food consumption for some
time to come and still has. The same thing has been true for 200 years, since Malthus wrote his
book on population growth always outstripping resource production, was Malthus' thesis. But
in fact, since then what has happened is that we've grown food supply faster than we've grown
population. And so we've had lower and lower and lower rates of famine. So how can this
happen?
Let me tell you one story of overcoming adversity. There's a bunch of fun stories you can tally
here. This one is one of the more interesting I think. Who knows what this is?
>>: Sperm whale.
>> Ramez Naam: Sperm whale, very good, okay. People usually know it's a whale. Pacific sperm
whale. The sperm whale almost went extinct in the 1850s. Almost extinct because a fleet of
about a thousand whaling boats from North America hunted them, and over the course of
about 20 years we killed off a third of the species. About a quarter million sperm whales, we
killed off. Now North Americans don't eat whale meat really, maybe a few Inuets do but that's
not why we hunted them. We hunted them because sperm whale oil was the premier source of
lighting at that time. These are sperm whale lamps. Sperm whale oil burns with a clear flame
that doesn't flicker and doesn't produce smoke, so it was in high demand. Now what happened
was we went through a cycle that was sort of like a peak oil cycle, but for peak sperm whale oil.
The high demand for this led to more and more boat being built going out trying to harvest
these whales. But then the whales got more and more scarce because we killed more and more
of them, and the ones that remained became more and more frightened of an wary of
humanity. In fact Moby Dick was written about a real event where a whaling boat saw a pod of
female sperm whales attack them. And nearby male who was apparently the victim of several
human attacks saw this happen, dove came up and rammed this boat called the Essex, dove
came up and rammed this boat again and sank it with all hands on board. So that was the
inspiration for Moby Dick, these events. Now the way that we addressed this. We have lighting
today, right? We did not address this by finding more sperm whales. That was not the solution
to the problem. The solution to the problem was innovation to tap into a different resource. It
was this man, Abraham Gestner, as a Canadian geologists and physician, because back in those
days you could be a geologist and a physician at the same time. He saw there was a huge
demand for quality lighting, so he went out to try to find a way to address this demand and he
created kerosene. And kerosene it turned out was far cheaper, was actually far more abundant.
The resource pool was much bigger than we had imagined. It wasn't limited to just sperm
whales, and he could produce it without killing any whales. So as far as we know Gestner was
not an environmentalist. He never mentions the whales in his diaries at all, but potentially he
saved the species or saved them from even more dramatic winnowing by pursuing this
opportunity. So physical resources in many cases are much vaster than we imagine. Often we're
tapped into a small resource pie that we think is the whole resource, possessing a much larger
resource pie around. And what we have to do is not imagine there is a larger set, not even
shrink our consumption necessarily, but tap into the larger set in a way that we can do so
sustainably. So let's start with what those are. Let's talk about energy.
This drop of oil represents all human energy consumption per year. It's a very, very, very large
drop of oil, it would be larger than Seattle. It however is dwarfed by the input of energy from an
even vaster source, which is a large fusion reactor about 8.3 light minutes from here called the
sun. The input of the sun's energy to the Earth, the amount of sunlight hitting the earth each
year is about 10,000 times the amount of energy that we use from all sources combined. It's
what keeps the planet warm. If we think of this another way, 10 seconds of sunlight hitting the
earth is equivalent in it's energy content to one day of humanity's energy use, or one hour of
sunlight hitting the planet is equivalent to energy content to one year of humanities energy use.
So the physical use of resource of energy is large. It manifests by heating the atmosphere
differentially, causing winds to blow that we can tap into. It dries evaporation of moisture that
then condenses and comes back down somewhere else creating hydropower that we can tap
into and the direct photons just reach the surface of the earth where they are so abundant
actually that about one third of 1% of humanity of land area of the planet, these little green
boxes will provide enough land with today's technology to capture enough energy to maintain
human society actually up to 2030 at the rate of growth. So there is plenty of energy available
to us.
There is also plenty of water. We're running out of fresh water but we live on a water world. It's
70% covered by water, all right. It's just that water is not potable water. That water is salt
water. Humanity accesses about 0.3% of the fresh water in the world. That freshwater, less
than 3% of all the water in the world. The vast reservoir of water is in the world's oceans. So if
we could tap into that in a way that was cost-effective, environmentally sound and energy
effective, there is more than enough water for all of our needs.
The same is true of food. Farms convert less than 1/100 of one percent of the energy hitting
them in sunlight into food that humans eat. Now there are other limits of minerals in the soils
and so on, but this study from the international food policy research Institute estimated that
while humanity grows about 2.6 billion tons of grain today, that the planet could grow overall
more than 70 billion tons of food with sufficiently mature farming technology. So when all of
these cases, the problem isn't the size of the resource, it's our ability to access the resource or
access the larger resource pool that's all around us. And the right ideas can multiply that
resource access. We'll start again with energy. This is a wafer of solar cells. If it looks a lot like a
wafer of chips that's because they are built frequently in a way that's very similar. So what kind
of wafer, it has to be extremely pure fashioned at high heat, and that makes it very, very
expensive. But that cost has been dropping rapidly. I'm sure many of you have heard about this.
Over the last 20 years, or 30 years in this case, the cost of solar power has dropped from more
than 20 dollars a watt down to less than one dollar a watt. I think today you can buy solar
panels for about 77 cents a watt actually. Another [indiscernible] recently said it was 77 dollars
per watt in the mid-1970s. So you can now buy about 100 times as much solar power per dollar
as you could in the mid-1970s. This is an exponential curve, actually it's a log scale. It looks sort
of like Moore's law. It's not nearly as fast as Moore's law. This is maybe 8% a year as opposed to
the 40% a year that we get in Moore's law, but it's still a tremendous, tremendous decline in
price. And that means that we're seeing the crossover where solar gets cheaper than fossil
energy happening in different energies starting today and extending out over the next decade
or so. If you look at a map of the US by the amount of sunlight we get, these areas that are the
darkest red in the Southwest already today, solar is as cheap as grid electricity. Now
unfortunately, we are up here which is the least light, the least insulated area, but what will
happen is the viability of solar will spread out to these ripples of color and it becomes more and
more viable over time. In fact on a current trend, in 10 years in this area solar will cost half of
what grid electricity costs overall, if we can maintain that trend and that's the key here. We also
just store energy as well. We don't just use energy during the daytime when the sun is shining
or even just when the wind is blowing. We have to be able to use it when neither of those
sources is available. Have to be able to use it in high density in vehicles as well. So we want the
price of storage to go down and the density go up. And this is what happened to just one
storage technology, lithium ion batteries, over a period of about 15 years as producers of
laptops and tablets and cell phones competed to make their products lighter, longer lasting in
their battery and cheaper. We saw the price of storage dropped by a factor of 10, and we saw
the density, the amount of storage per gram of battery nearly triple in that time. So we're
about one more cycle of this away from storage being no longer an obstacle in the deployment
of renewable energy if we can maintain the same path, the same pace of innovation which is
always the question. If we can crack energy, we can crack pretty much anything else. That
problem, that access to water issue, the real issue with desalination is how much energy does it
take to desalinate water. And in fact with more energy we can do it. We've also got more
efficient with desalination. Desalination technology in 1970 was basically the same technology
we've had since the Greeks. It was boil the water, capture the steam and let it condense. Which
is not the most efficient way you can go about doing this. But since then we started to do biomimicry, where mimicking the membranes that keep biological cells able to let certain things in
and keep other things out. So since 1970, we've cut the amount of energy it takes to desalinate
water by about a factor of 10. This is kilowatt hours per cubic meter of energy, if you care. Now
in the most high-tech desalination plants in the world in places like Israel, you can buy
desalinated water for about 5 gallons per penny, is the price that those places charge. Which is
still a lot more expensive than agricultural water is, but that price decline continues.
Agriculture, also we know that we can meet the needs of the planet. We have to grow about
70% more food to meet expected agricultural demand by 2050. But if we look at how much we
grow in different areas, the US already grows about double the world's average. And the
reason for that is mostly energy. We have tractors, we have good irrigation systems, we have
the ability to deploy fertilizer in large areas and that's what is missing in the developing world
primarily. Now, I've just been talking about how ideas can multiply our access to resources, but
they can also shrink the resources that we need to use. Let's stick with agriculture again.
Before agriculture started, we were hunter gatherers, it took about 3000 acres to feed one
person on earth. This was the footprint of one hunter gatherer on average, they vary between
tribes and spaces and so on. In the last 10,000 years, we've shrunk the amount of land needed
to feed one person by this much. By about a factor of 10,000. Now it takes about one third of 1
acre of modern farm land to feed one person. And even that is down by a factor of three since
1950. That's something that's called the green evolution, which is mostly about designing better
seeds. Now some people have the impression that, that has meant a huge increase in the
amount of energy that we used in farming. And we do use tractors and oil and natural gas and
fertilizer and so on, but if we look at American farms, the amount of energy used per calorie
grown, it's actually dropped by about a factor of two since the start of the green revolution as
well. We are using energy to do this. We are using fossil fuels, but were actually more efficient
in farming that at any point in history as well. This is data from the USDA. Everywhere you look
you see that we've gotten more efficient. People don't appreciate this, but flying is
tremendously cheaper than it was when it first came into the popular society. People used to
dress up with suits and ties to get on an airplane. You know that was such a remarkable thing.
Now the modern fleet of aircraft takes about one third as much fuel per passenger mile to fly
then did the jet airliners of the 1960s. Even our total consumption per person, Americans burn
less oil than ever before in the US. down from about 30 barrels per person per day, oh sorry per
year down to about 16 now and forecast to continue dropping, and it will probably drop faster
than that forecast there. Water use, as well and this is remarkable actually. For decades, the
average Americans use of water climbed and climbed and climbed, but in the 1970s mostly
because our farming got more efficient it stalled and now we actually use less water than we
have, actually in the newest figures we've got here that we have since around World War II.
Almost entirely because we've got more efficient in our agriculture. Now I don't want to tell you
that this is fast enough, we'd like this never to go down here. We'd like that oil number to go
down much faster than it is, but it demonstrates that you can keep growing wealth, keep
growing your economy while shrinking resource use if you innovate in the right ways.
Innovation also as a wonderful byproduct as it creates wealth, it reduces the rate of population
growth. In 1950 the average woman on earth had five children over the course of her lifetime
and hour down to 2.4. And when that crosses the two line, actually 2.1, population growth
ends. Everywhere you look, if women are empowered, if they have education, if the society is
growing in wealth, we see population growth ending. In countries you wouldn't expect. Brazil is
down to 1.6 children per women. Iran is down to 1.4 children per women. So a lot of cultures
that you would imagine having huge family still aren't, they've already made that transition and
anywhere you look where there is high population growth, you find high poverty. So rather
than thinking, oh we have to stop the growth economically to save the planet, when we
actually help people get into wealth, we actually stop the growth of population. And maybe my
geekiest two graphs, I wanted to illustrate this very quantitatively. I'm talking about a
decoupling, I'm talking about ability to grow wealth while not growing resource use and ideally
shrink it. This is what's happening in the US. The green line is GDP per capita. The redlines are
CO2 emissions per person and energy use per person, and since 1970 you see that these two
redlines, the pollution and consumption lines are flat while wealth has roughly doubled in that
time. In fact the average living space per person in a US has nearly tripled in that time. This is a
decoupling. Some of that is because the US has outsourced manufacturing to other parts of the
world, but even looking at it on a global basis, it looks very, very similar. Not quite as
pronounced, but again you see flat CO2 emissions per person, slight increased in energy use
and a marked increase in wealth. So how is it, how is it possible that you can keep getting richer
without using more resources? So let's think about this, this is a smart phone, I know I
should've used a Windows phone, I'm sorry. And on the right is ENIAC, the world's first digital
computer from my alma mater, the University of Illinois. ENIAC filled the room many times
larger than this. It had its own dedicated power station to power it, and it was less powerful
than anything that you have on you, maybe your wedding ring might have more CPUs than this
thing does. If you tried to make something like a modern smart phone using ENIAC, this is an
old iPhone. If you tried to make this iPhone using ENIAC, you would have a cube that was 2
miles on a side and consumed more power than the entire state of California. And it couldn't
play games or take pictures or talk to your friends or Angry Birds or whatever. So how is that
possible? How can you have so much more using so much less?. It's because this thing isn't
made of plastic and metal. And we think it is, it's not. It's made of condensed information. We
have bits versus atoms, right? This physical object is made mostly of bits. I'm not talking about
the software on it, I'm talking about it's physical design is mostly the accumulation of decades
or even centuries of knowledge about electro magnetics computing mathematics materials and
so on. That's how you can have less resource use, and yet more output at the end. And unlike
physical resources, ideas have some unique properties. They are not depleted by usage. They
don't break suddenly. If you share one with someone else, you're not impoverished of it.
Instead they actually accumulate and multiply and the more of them you have, the more you
can put them together in new forms. So that's the most fundamentally optimistic thing I think I
see about the world as a whole.
Okay, so I guess the problem is solved we can all go home, right? It's not solved. What we have
is really a race. It's a race between how fast we're doing damage and how fast we can innovate
and is not actually clear that we're winning this race. As much as I've talked about all the
awesome trends and innovations, it's not getting their rapid enough right now. There are many,
many challenges [indiscernible]. One is scale. I talked about how the small, the set of areas are
that we need to capture solar energy to power the planet. There are very small fraction of our
land. There are only less than 1/60 the amount of desert land. We have plenty of land, plenty
of energy, but on the scale of the industrial production needed to produce all those solar
panels, it is vast.
This is the Nellis Air Force Base solar array, the 10 megawatt array. This is actually what a 10th
of it, it's what a 1 megawatt array, right here. We need to make about 80 million of these if we
wanted to use just solar to meet the world's demand for energy. So what you're talking about is
plenty of energy available, plenty of land available, but an industrial mobilization that sort of on
the scale of World War II overall. It doesn't necessarily have to happen in those few years, it
could happen over a few decades, but if you do the math right now, you're looking at
somewhere in the ballpark of 50 trillion dollars, plus or minus a lot. Taking to 2050 and a lot of
climate change happening in that time. So as powerful our innovation is, it still is putting us not
in a zone we want to be in, in terms of pace of being able to solve this. So that's one problem.
But the big problem I think is market failure. This is the reason that were not moving fast
enough right now.
Who knows what this is? It's a bridge, very good Zee. This is the Cuyahoga River, outside of
Cleveland. It's a lovely place, kind of bucolic. It wasn't always this way. In 1968 you could stick
your hand in this river and have it come out covered in oil and chemicals and garbage and so
on. And so why was that? What was wrong here? This was a market failure, okay. What
happened was, the river was lined with factories and warehouses. And those factories and
warehouses reasoned very logically from their own perspective, hey I've got this garbage. The
easiest thing for me to do is to just dump it in the river. That's probably why they're situated by
the river in the first place. And in fact not only did they make this choice, the system they were
in, the market selected for that choice. If one warehouse or one factory here decided, oh I'm
actually going to ship my garbage somewhere else and where it can be safely disposed of, that
would have added to their costs. As their costs went up, they would've been driven out of
business by their lower cost competitors who would have then taken over their facilities and
taken on the same practice of dumping stuff into the river. The market algorithm, is what it is,
said to these guys, this is the way to optimize your profit. Because there is no cost, this is not
costing you anything, not costing anybody anything. But it was costing someone something. It
was doing economic damage of the 30 fish species originally in this river. There were two left at
this time, which nobody seemed to care about. But then something else happened, which is in
1969 a railroad car crossing a bridge over this river, its wheels struck a spark off the railroad,
the spark flew down into a pile of refuse and oil floating on the river and the river caught on
fire. This was the 13th time the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. But the time before had been
during World War II, the nation was distracted. This time it made the cover of Time magazine. It
was joked about on the Tonight Show. Some color television was out there, and this led to
change. 1969 this happened, in 1970 that EPA was created. By 73 we had the Clean Water Act,
and the Clean Air Act, because people woke up and said hey, that's not cool with me actually.
I'm actually not okay with the river catching on fire and there's obviously something wrong
here. Every, almost every environmental problem that exists is a market failure, is a tragedy of
the commons. If you look at the things that are depleted, they are mostly things that have no
owners, and thus no prices on them, and thus no restrictions on how much they can be
depleted and so on, whether it's deforestation, freshwater depletion, fish in the ocean who no
one owns, air pollution and even climate change. All of those happen because no one feels a
motive for themselves to protect that [indiscernible] has ownership over it overall. The tragedy
of the commons, right. The way that I think about this, being a software guy, is garbage in
garbage out. We all know this idea right. You can have the best algorithm in the world and you
can feed it garbage data, and it will produce garbage output. So the market is an amazingly
positive, amazingly powerful algorithm. It is the reason that people are rising out of poverty in
China and India and so on, but it has this flaw that if you give it a resource that has no price,
and input of zero for the value of this river, this forest, this lake or this climate, it will produce a
garbage output. And that garbage output is what kind of industrial activity happens, how does
this resource get treated, and that's what we're doing right now. Now this is a starkly different
view than the limits to growth view. The limits to growth view is, it's not about the algorithms
or anything, it's just about if you grow more, if you do more resource, more wealth creation,
you will deplete more. I'm saying something different. I'm saying you can keep raising your
wealth if you fix the algorithms so that the natural resources are protected. And in fact the
Cuyahoga River is an example of that, because this is the Cuyahoga now. You can drink out of it.
We're now back to about 27 of those 30 fish species that were in there, but the average wealth
per person for people in Cleveland has tripled since 1970. So putting those regulations to
protect this river did not stop economic growth. It didn't, we kept getting richer while
protecting that resource at the same time. So we decoupled growth and pollution. The problem
is not resources that we face, it's the rules that make up our economy and our system, okay.
In fact we done it more than once. Remember the ozone hole? In the 1970s we woke up to the
awareness that the ozone layer was being depleted. We argued about it for decades actually. It
was for several years with industry claiming there was no problem for the most part and
scientist claiming there was. Until we acted on it. We signed something called the Montréal
protocol and that Montréal protocol said we had to phase out CFCs, the chemicals in the
refrigerants that were destroying the ozone layer. And what's happened is, that the ozone layer
has kind of hit bottom. It will take decades for it to recover and is actually improving ahead of
schedule, because what happened to CFC output was this. It went off a cliff down. But contrary
to the scares that were given to us at that time, refrigeration did not fail. Medicines did not
start going bad in hospitals at this point. You were still able to get milk at home, your car air
conditioner still work. Because we innovated. At the time we signed the Montréal protocol, we
asked you to not have a replacement for CFCs. There was not one known. But two years later
we did, and it became economical, okay. When that impetus is there, when that motivation is
there, people figure it out. Same thing with acid rain. Remember acid rain, it was a big problem.
We solved acid rain, mostly. We did it by creating a new economic system called cap and trade.
We did it in the George Bush administration where we said, okay were going to take a marketdriven approach. Before this, environmental rules were usually micromanagement. They were,
you will install this equipment in this facility. Hundreds of people would come in and tell you
what to do. This is different, we'd say okay, we're going to shrink the number of allowances for
sulfur dioxide pollution each year. Sulfur dioxide is what causes acid rain. We're just going to
drop and drop and drop and drop them. You get them allocation how much you've been
producing in the past, but now you can trade them. If you can shrink your usage faster than
that shrinkage of your allowance, you can sell the excess. If you can't, you can buy the excess
but it keeps going down and in fact we've done this at about a quarter of the price that was
projected. We've cut sulfur dioxide emissions by more than half. In general, this is the issue.
We have this situation of externalities. We have the market is this big where I can manage it.
You manage things that have prices, owners etc. etc. Whether the largest of the things we
actually care about, all right. So the ultimate fix for most of these things that helps drive the
technology fixes is to change that balance, to plug in the correct values of the things we care
about, and grow the market so that it can correctly manage these things. Improving the market
algorithm if you will.
Now today obviously the biggest of these problems I'm talking about is climate change, and
some going to tackle that in a similar way. But this is a very, very large problem and everything
we do in our society produces some greenhouse gas. So we were worried rightly that we can
tank the economy, we could put people on unemployment, we could increase poverty if we act
in a way that's foolish in terms of regulating carbon emissions regulating climate. But there are
ideas out there that can do this at very, very low cost. One of them comes really from
something that Republican and conservative economists frequently say, which is tax the bad,
not the good. Whatever it is that you tax, you tend to get less of, it will go down. If you tax
income you will see a slight drop in income beyond a certain level. If you tax, whatever people
will shift their activity to something else that has less tax on it. So you can improve the tax
algorithm itself. This is a variant to what is called a revenue neutral carbon tax. So as of today,
the government makes this much money off of income tax, if you will or some combination of
taxes, let's just call it income tax. And we have no carbon tax. Now we want to tax carbon, but
we don't want people to admit it, but we don't want to have a huge negative impact on the
economy overall, so the idea very simply is you shift the balance. You put a price on the
pollutant while lowering the prices on things that people do right now that are not considered
harmful with the same net economic impact, but when people go to shop to buy energy or to
buy goods, that carbon price is levied on the dirty ones and not on the clean ones and the
consumer behavior shifts. So ultimately pollution is not an inevitable outcome of growth. We've
gone from rivers on fire to rivers you can drink out of from an ozone layer that was dying to one
that is recovering. The issue is not limits, it's the policies we have and the design of our
economy.
So what can we do all of us here. There is for things that I think about.
One is communicate. Because belief in these issues as problems at all spreads by word of
mouth and from person-to-person, and especially for those who are centrists or more on the
right. Al Gore is never going to convince people in those categories that there is a problem with
climate for instance. It really happens with conversation between people they trust.
Two is participate. A lot of the action these days in climate policy in particular is happening at a
state level. About half of all states have renewable energy portfolio standards that they must
reach a certain level of solar and wind penetration and state congressmen and state senators
get very, very few calls to their offices. And a little bit of action there can actually shift things
tremendously. And now a few cities, Seattle and Portland among them have pledges to become
the first carbon neutral cities in the world, and it's worth a call to the city Council, your city
councilman or the mayor's office that you support that idea.
Three is innovate. I often give this talk to people who are considering career shifts or are just
coming out of school. And there's a lot to be considered for what people themselves can do by
going into this field. And in fact, we're mostly geeks here, in the energy space, a lot of the
action right now is in software and information management to improve efficiency of delivery
of energy, to find new ways to make it work out for people.
And finally it's to keep hope. Because we have solved problems like this in the past. Every time
it took a little bit longer than it should have. Every time we delayed longer than we should have,
but in each and every one, once it's become serious, with actually tackled it and come out on
the other side better. So ultimately ideas are the most powerful source of wealth that we have
and thank you very much.
>> [applause]
>> Ramez Naam: I'll take a few questions now, and there's books in the back if you want to buy
one and I'll sign those books as well. Yes sir.
>>: I'm not sure I understand the problem actually. It almost feels like the goal is to try to fit as
many sardines into the can as possible. And that this technology will enable that, and I mean I
understand what you said about increasing education so far has a direct relationship to the
number of children so, but doesn't this sidestep a bigger problem. I mean wouldn't things just
keep, the population keep growing and so forth if we keep solving these problems. I'm not
saying that we shouldn't solve the problems, I'm just worried if it doesn't address the bigger
issue.
>> Ramez Naam: Yes, the question is, hey if we solve this problems won't we just keep over
exploiting resources, keep growing populations and thus create new ones. I don't think so and I
don't think so for two reasons. One is that, when people get rich, the population growth ends.
Right, it's not scarcity, it's really women deciding there is something else they would rather do
with their lives than have more kids. All right, decided to have kids later in life than they did
before. And two is that with all those physical resources, it looks like society's peak, that in
water use per person and metal use per person, Europe and the US and Japan and Australia
have all peaked a few decades ago and are holding steady or dropping. So it does look like
squinting at the data now, that when we will reach a certain level of wealth mostly they
consume more services and more information goods, movies, Facebook whatever, but the use
of physical resources doesn't go up anymore at all. That's what it looks like.
>>: I recently finished reading [indiscernible].
>> Ramez Naam: Okay.
>>: That you've read many times. How do you see the impact of China and India on all this,
because we're pretty enlightened about these sorts of things and in the first world, I read about
the environmental issues and a lack of awareness in China, and the lack of government policy to
try to keep this resource management issue under control. What will that take two get that in
alignment?
>> Ramez Naam: China is sort of a paradox. China is an environmental mess, and yet China is
actually acting more forcefully on climate change than the US is. So it's this summer, June 17
actually, just a couple weeks now, China's first carbon limits will go into place on Shanghai,
Quanzhou and a couple other locations, seven cities by the end of the year, including Beijing as
well. By 2016 they've announced that they will have a national carbon, a national carbon tax
plan. And China is also the number one producer of and consumer of renewable energy. So, it's
a funny situation. I think some of it amounts to this. China has a rapidly, not a rapidly growing
population, but a rapidly growing middle class. It has people that are consuming more, and that
almost always in society, what you see is that a poor society has very low pollution, a society
getting richer goes up in pollution dramatically. It's called the environmental Kuznets curve.
And then a society gets to the point that we did with the Cuyahoga River, and says whoa, we
are rich enough now to actually care about the environment and now are going to put rules in
place to start to taper that damage down. It's happened in the US, Canada, Europe etc. and in
China now you see the birth of environmental movement. You see protest happening that have
stopped the creation of power plants, both chemical factories and so on as people get to the
point where they are wealthy enough that they care more about the environment than that
they do about deregulation or more growth of this. So I think we'll see China in the long-term
making that shift about their own local pollution issues. They are kind of nearing the peak
where the US was in the bad times, but already they are acting more aggressive on climate than
we are, and that last part I attribute in large part to who their leadership is. I wouldn't wish the
Chinese government on anyone. I wouldn't want it here, but when you look at the makeup of
the Polit Bureau, the current president was trained as a chemical engineer. His predecessor was
a hydraulic engineer, his predecessor was an electrical engineer. You look at the rest of the Polit
Bureau standing committee, which is the top leadership, I think seven of the nine of them were
trained as engineers or physical scientists. So there is no debate there about whether or not
climate change is happening, unlike our government. The debate is just, how do we address
climate change while pushing as much of the cost of it as possible on to the rich world that
created the problem and making as much room as possible for our people to rise out of
poverty. That's the way that it happens in China I think.
>>: You talked a lot about, you know addressing resources like water and food and things that
you can see is renewable. How do you feel about, you know like lithium ion batteries or things
that have very finite quantities on the earth and how increased growth relates to that.
>> Ramez Naam: That's a good question, I'll repeat it, but what about kind of minerals or raw
materials that are like lithium ion, where there's only so much. I think there's two things. One is
we're better and better in extracting and finding it. People were worried for a long time that we
are about to run out of some raw materials, phosphorus is one people worry about now. But
when you look at those windows whenever they get short, they get long again because people
invest in some new technology to find it. And two is being very, very good at recycling. So now
we see that people are investing more and more at landfill mining. So even the difference
between recycling and trash is getting smaller and smaller in a lot of areas. Where Japan
estimates that their landfills alone contain a 10 to 15 year supply of gold and rare earth
minerals for the entire world. And so they are trying to invest. As prices rose in 2008, they
decided let's invest in actually getting that value back out. And then the last thing I'd say is for a
lot of those things, for the rare metals and rare minerals, people are aggressively looking at
what alternatives are there. So it used to be that solar panels use a lot of rare earth minerals,
but if you chart how many grams of rare earth per watt, that also has plunged and plunged and
plunged as manufacturers have said, hey this is going to be scarce, let's find a way to use less
and less of it. Yes sir.
>>: Your, when you talk about carbon trading, it essentially right here, carbon taxation. It
doesn't work very well in the case of sulfur dioxide's specifically because in order to have that
sort of market, you have to assign property rights, and it worked well because property rights
were by and large given to the existing holders, the power plants the coal miners, it etc. That
system hasn't worked at all in Europe in part because the rights weren't given to the existing
holders and part because the level of the rights assignment was too high, so here what it looked
like you were proposing is that all the rights are assigned to the government. And then ending
up with what looks to be a very, very aggressive tax. How do you reconcile that?
>> Ramez Naam: So, there is a question about how carbon trading works, yeah. Well I'm just
repeating it for the people that are watching us electronically, we are being watched. So I'll say
a couple things. One is, there is two variants, approaches you can take. One is sort of a cap and
trade approach, one is a pure tax approach. I favor the pure tax approach, I think most
economists do to because it's just straight out simpler. What we see in Europe is they have a
cap and trade approach and so now the prices go very low, because the recession means that
people are not trying to emit that much CO2 anyway and it's subject to those problems. You
plan wrong and you end up with a very low price. It doesn't have to be regressive though,
because you can structure it in such a way that the reduction of the taxes or even a direct check
back to people is structured such that people at the bottom get back as much or more than
they are paying in additional prices. There is various ways to do that. The simplest one is
everyone just gets a check that is their share in an even way across a population of the amount
paid by polluters. All of that said I would say that the idea that Europe's carbon market is failing
isn't quite right. What we see in Europe is, Europe created a slope for carbon emissions
allowances. The slope went like this, but Europe it has actually gone much faster. So the only
reason the price is low is because Europe's total carbon emissions are lower than what the
government thought they needed to hit. So it's not how I would have designed the system, I
don't think it's perfect, but it is actually working in the sense of they are below the target be
established. Couple more questions?
>>: How optimistic are you that we can avoid the climate problem?
>> Ramez Naam: Um, how optimistic am I that we can avoid the climate problem. I think in
general, things will get worse before they get better. So I think we will come out of this okay,
but with some serious scars that we've seen. The most recent data says that it's unlikely that
we'll see an explosive release of billions of tons of methane all at once, but these things are
hard to model . We do see that the tundra is thawing, and it's not a good thing. I think what will
happen is two lines will cross, and that's what will start to take real action. Those lines are,
number one, the rising fraction of people who are really convinced there is a problem. And that
happens not with graphs, but with pictures, or with heat waves, with sea ice melting, with
storms hitting New York, Sandy. All of that lifts beliefs, and the second is the declining cost to
the solution. When you travel to Texas now, Texas is the number one wind powered state.
People are now like, oh wind power, I thought it was just for hippies a few years ago, but now,
okay, I guess it seems okay. So that sort of drives acceptance. And I think that there is a self
correcting element which is that as things get worse and worse, the more problems that we
see, the more that will drive up tics in belief. So things start to go south very, very rapidly I think
you will see a more rapid belief spike as well. The question is, is there a chance that it goes too
fast, faster than we can react. Right now it looks like that probably won't happen, but it is a very
real risk.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Ramez Naam: I personally favor, I think we're foolish to not at least do more geo
engineering research. We've invested very, very little in it so far, and there are situations
where it could do a lot of good. I think geo engineering specifically around the Arctic. If we
could do targeted reflection of sunlight to help cool that region and help trap that very carbon, I
think that would be a very smart thing to do. Yes.
>>: I'm reading [indiscernible], and the author talks pretty interestingly about the DMZ in Korea
and how it's a fascinating accidental experiment because no humans are there by design and
what they've seen is sort of a regeneration of the planet, because there are no humans there
eco has grown, birds that were dying have come back and all these fascinating sort of things
when you get humans out of the way are coming back. And I wonder if that's a model that can
be applied across the planet to solve some of these things to say that you can depopulate
certain areas of the planet by design for periods of time to get these things sort of under
control.
>> Ramez Naam: So the question is, should we depopulate certain parts of the planet to let
nature recover. There is something I talk about in the book that I think is very interesting along
those lines which is most of the world's population does not live on most of the worlds land.
What happens is that the world's land area is overwhelmingly used, it's either not usable
because its mountains and swamps or its agricultural land, and now more than half of humanity
lives in cities, use about 1% of the world's land. So, you can imagine a scenario where we can
either grow yields on farms fast enough that we can use less and less and less farmland to feed
the population who will increase and live in cities. And we can take some of that farmland that
is very sparsely populated anyway and turn it back over to nature. And that's what I think is
very interesting, it certainly theoretically possible on paper. Whether or not can the market
force us a line to drive that much yield increase, and what we decide to do with that land. Is it
privatized, is it turned back into national parks, national forests, we'll just have to wait and see.
Okay, well I think we'll stop there. I'll be back there, and I'll be happy to sign books. Thank you
all for coming.
>>: [applause]