Futurist Gerd Leonhard - Decarbonisation: Future Of Food, Meat, Airlines. Unthinkable New Normal.

So second topic is decarbonization, switching to a green economy. Now I talked about this for 20 years. Sometimes I felt like a broken record in the past talking about this. But this is what's now happening. This is the number one thing that's happening in the world. The switch to renewable energy that will change every single business. And I think for the good, not just for the good of the planet, but also for financial good. So this fact here, you know, about 18% of our CO2 is livestock and food. And you know that people my age have been the ones who have generated 50% of CO2 in the last 25 years. Can you imagine? I mean, people my age basically are responsible for half of the world's pollution in 25 years. So that's a fact here. And the other fact is, when you're looking at this statistic, beef is on the very top of that CO2 agenda. Is there ways to grow beef and to farm that could be different? Of course there are. There are other pressures that don't make us go down this direction. I mentioned earlier, we're now in this kind of scenario where many of us have thought, okay, that's impossible, that we're going to see more carbon taxes. But I'm here to tell you we're going to see carbon taxes on flying an airplane mandatory in the next few years. Every airplane ride you take, mandatory carbon tax. We're going to see a carbon tax on meat. We're going to see a carbon tax on regular cars going into cities. The city of London is considering only allowing electric cars. So what do we do with this? Well, unthinkable is the new normal. We have to think different. And I think that sometimes we're challenged or threatened by this because we prefer not to think the unthinkable. We want to stay comfortable, but it's good practice. When I started out being a futurist, I wrote research reports and I would sell the research report with a secure PDF for like $5,000 a piece. I saw a lot of them. One day a customer tells me my research report is useless because IBM Watson has a real time analytics engine that speaks to them and Google Trends does the same that I do. Not to look at trends, it's not quite the same. So we have to shift your business model and become more unique. So you heard about these companies. This is my favorite. This is the Futuro Burger here in Brazil, El Frango Futuro. I know you probably heard about this and this company, of course, and this is statistics showing what's going to happen with meat, conventional meat, vegan meat, cultured meat, in a race towards the future. So if you're in this business, you're smart to diversify. Ten years ago, I had a big meeting of German car company. I brought many other futurists and we said the future is car sharing, electric cars, autonomous driving and all of these things that we have today. And the people in the room laughed at us. Well, of course, they're Germans. Right? So they said, who in their right mind would share their car? Right, share my car. That's not going to happen. Right. If they had listened, you know, maybe we would have today a different scenario.

To look at what in America and soon to be across the world. So we are excited to introduce Memphis Meat Chicken to the world. We've also made clean duck meat produced without the duck. With demand for meat growing so quickly, there are not enough resources to feed the planet. We need to completely change the way meat gets to the plate. We invited a taster to have the first bite.

Tastes like chicken. Anyway, I probably shouldn't show that video to people who like real meat. So there's a challenge. What do we do with this? And the other thing is about 80% of the world's energy is derived from fossil fuel today. If that continues, your children will not be happy. I can guarantee it. At 2 degree global warming, we're going to do a lot of suffering already. 4 degrees. We're talking about 500 million climate refugees from the south where it's hot. But you're kind of in that realm yourself. And then we have what's happening in America. All of a sudden the American government finds $500 billion for the IRA, not the army, but the Inflation Reduction act to put into green energy and switches around, this is what we need in Brazil because the Americans have realized there's more money in the new way of developing energy than there was in the old. Which is hard to believe because today $3 billion of profit every single day comes from the oil industry. Oil and gas. That is going to be tough to replace this. So as we go into this future, we're looking basically at the curve again from the beginning. So the World Economic Forum says roughly about 50 million new jobs. If you're worried about jobs in Brazil, this is where they are. Climate technology, climate mitigation, climate adaptation. It's worth spending the money. So here's the lesson. The next one big one, green, is the new digital. If you think that your store and your supermarket has to innovate by being Digital, that's good. That's an ongoing thing. Now the second one is you have to innovate by being green, by being sustainable at the same time. In fact, using technology can make you green by having less waste, for example, less pollution, less plastic. I mean, there's a long list of not using certain kinds of packaging, using different ways of charging, and so on and so on. It's a very long story. So that is really together Big Blue, not IBM technology and big Green. That's a strong ticket. And it creates jobs and it creates the future. Cities are going green. I mean, every city of Rio de Janeiro is a great example. I don't know about Campinas, but Rio de Janeiro has a program to further greening everything. This is a clip from various countries around the world. And here is one from a city in Tokyo using futuristic technology to bring the city into the future. That's going to happen in every major city in Brazil. And this will be great because people have different expectations on what they eat and how they eat, as we heard earlier. Maybe it takes a little bit longer, but here we are. That is the future as we're seeing it. I mentioned earlier, vertical farming. Today you can have a high rise, 10 floors with robots producing organic food for 50,000 people. The only problem is it's a little bit expensive. It's hard to afford a high rise in every city to make your vegetables. But this will be our future. The combination of high rises, vertical farming and real farming. So if I ran a big supermarket organization, I would get into vertical farming, basically branching out into the new business Here in Matureira, that's what you call it. We have in Rio de Janeiro a garden, a community garden, where people are getting into urban farming, feeding 50,000 people. Is there a way that supermarkets can tap into this? There should be. If it can be done in Rio de Janeiro, in the favela. Can it be done other places? Absolutely. Wall Street Journal has a great article about this.