2.8 Living Between Worlds — COP26 redux

The great management consultant Peter Drucker said sometime back. We can't find the actual source quote, but Drucker said, every few hundred years in Western history, there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society, its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions, rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time. I don't know when Drucker wrote that, but we are currently living through such a time. Drucker said further, a time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality. Here we are, dearly beloved, gathered together in a series of conversations that I've been hosting as an experiment, as a conversational laboratory. In part, I'll say selfishly, for me to get a chance to hear myself thinking and to know what I'm thinking, but also for us to think together, because that's where thinking actually happens. Some of you know my mentor and friend. Yes. Let me ask if everybody please mute. Please have your cameras on and your mics off, if possible. Cameras on so we can see each other. Mike's off so that we don't disturb. And. And when you do want to speak, there'll be plenty of opportunity to do that. Use the raise hand function under the reactions button at the bottom of your screen and that'll queue you up and I'll take you in order. So Fernando Flores, in a conference a couple of years ago, people were saying, I think this and I think that. And he said in his gruff Chilean voice, he said, you're not thinking. And of course, if you've ever studied with Fernando, you know that you get provocations like that out of him. And people sort of, you know, bristle and bridle and say how, you know, how arrogant of you to say that. But he continues, he says, you're not thinking. Thinking is something that's happening to you. I thought, holy mackerel, what is that? Where does that arise from? And clearly one of the places it arises from is in conversation, the conversations we're having with each other and the conversations that we have in ourselves and our internal dialogue. So here's a laboratory for us to explore thinking together about these things that concern us. Last month we talked about some four letter words. In particular, we talked about hope and fear and their power with us and the kind of confusion and mess and misattributions that we seem to build around that. The four letter word that I wanted to talk about, that we didn't get to yet, is planned. Here we are you know, on a planet in crisis. And where's the plan? Some dear friends of mine, some on this call today, have said, why isn't there a plan? And, of course, on one hand, there are lots of plans. There's a, you know, there's a myriad of plans. Everybody's got a plan. Not everybody's got a plan, but lots of people have plans of what to do. Some of them quite bold, some of them quite specific. As a planetary civilization, we clearly don't. We have COP 26. We have the conferences of the parties that have been meeting for more than a quarter of a century to discuss the climate crisis, which was called global warming and it was called climate change, and is now increasingly being called climate crisis or sometimes climate emergency, climate catastrophe. I predict that at some point we'll be talking about climate collapse. We're not there yet. The language evolves. The meetings are very similar from one to the other. In a nutshell. I don't know if you've been reading the commentaries on the COP26 that closed in Glasgow early this week. Progress and Disappointment is the short headline. Perhaps that's inevitable. Perhaps that's all that's possible at these sorts of gatherings. Some progress and some disappointment. You know, clearly an overwhelming lack of urgency, which I would assert was not inevitable, but was certainly there. I've got a few things to say about this, but let's start with just some brief sharings from those who care, sort of, what's your mood in the wake of the cop? And in briefly, a few words or a sentence, what's your assessment of what happened and where we are? Let's just get a sense of the room and then we'll continue from there. What's your mood about the cop? What's your assessment of it? Anybody? David? And then Josh. I was expecting nothing and I'm not disappointed. Okay, thank you, Josh. I was expecting very little, and I'm still not disappointed in that sense. But I think it just points to me that the COP framework may have lived, outlived its usefulness, and there may be other things we are going to need to do to get the kind of global consensus that COP was supposed to provide. Yeah, I'm going to guess that probably not instead of. But certainly in addition to. Fair enough, Carolyn. I was struck by the inadequacy of the. The institution itself, the forum, that it is not capable of doing what it needed to do, and so wondering what kinds of things we could put in place that would actually meet the challenges of the day. I happen to have been a judge in the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature, representing the interests of future generations, bringing together the rights of future generations and nature within that forum. And so it was an interesting experience to be part of it in that way. Nevertheless, I think that we've got a long way to designing institutions that can deal with that kind of planetary experience. And as a follow up, I spent most of the last month at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, with a loved one who has multiple health problems. What was impressive to me was the competence of each person, but that the system of the Mayo Clinic allowed for the competence to manifest. I keep wondering how we can create those sorts of institutions that would allow true competence, true things that would work to address the problem. What would it take to design that kind of system? Thank you. I'd like to come back to what the medical model, when it works well, offers to us in a process of diagnosis and care. Some of you have heard my colleague Chauncey Bell. I'm not sure if Chauncey's on the call today, talk about that, but let's flag that and come back to that in a bit. Thank you. Mark Roast. And David, if people have to speak, please put your hand down. Helps me manage the cuebet. Mark, hello. Mark Roust. And my impression, I was disappointed when I didn't expect that there would be 900 fossil fuel lobbyists admitted into the building and zero NGOs admitted into the building. That was really an issue of balance of power. Was the largest delegation at the comp, larger than any national delegation. Right, right. So that is raw power at work, as were the disappointing actions by the governments. So we need, as Franklin Roosevelt told the black people, you've got to make me do it. You know, organize and make me do it. We need to organize and make you do. We also need to turn capitalism to our advantage. So we need to use the technologies that are coming to replace, to displace and destroy and replace the fossil fuel technologies at a high rate of speed. So that's the complementarity that I see. Thank you, Christine. Yes. Surprisingly enough, I mean, I'm also disappointed that nothing much in terms of actual enforceable public policies came out of the conference. But I was encouraged by the fact that there was so much attention paid and there were so many issues that got raised not only in, you know, behind closed doors, but as a result of the conference in the media. That gives me hope that people's consciousness about climate change and the availability of a wide range of ways of dealing with it including adaptation is being raised and that raises the possibility of actually doing something about it. And the idea that, that we're going to quickly embrace far reaching zillion dollars worth of solutions right now and institute them in the next five years seems impossible to me. That's just not realistic. And there's a lot of unrealistic thinking that you hear, but you heard a lot, there was a lot of attention. So I was encouraged by that. And I'm wondering how we can educate people about the complexities and the scale of the challenge that we're facing all around the world. And the idea that the developed world is going to be sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the developing world every year seems unrealistic to me. And I don't know how to change that. You know, just to help them adapt, I'd like us to flag the world the word unrealistic and sort of keep that in the background of this conversation. Because unrealistic is going to be what's required of us. Right? We have to be unrealistic. But we also have to be aware that if we get disappointed and worn out and give up because it just nothing's happening will never make any difference. And that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Thank you, Ken Burgess. Ken, open your mic please. My apologies, I am new here to this call. Gil, I've been aware of your work for many years. I'm a old associate of yon Ballard and my experience with sustainability goes back many years. You're welcome. Couple of points. I am not surprised at all. That cop. The COP completely failed. I don't think. I don't believe it was actually designed to work. I feel that most of those institutions are designed to engender themselves and not really do much of anything for the real world. The solutions come down to the people. They come down to people like us to try to make the actual obstacles on the planet evident. But the reality is that we're not going to invent anything. The stuff that's going to be invented is the younger generation that is thinking so far out of the box beyond what we can even conceive they can get. All of the stuff that we're going to see is going to take decades to done. They're going to be the ones to get it done in weeks. I think that there's a lot more important issues than climate change on this planet. They deal with money, they deal with power, they deal with politics, and they deal with global control. And until we deal with those, nothing is really going to happen. And to deal with those I see, the younger generation is going to come through and they're going to circumvent it. They're going to create tools and infrastructure and mechanisms that bypass the entire doggone system, which will make it obsolete overnight. Which is exactly what needs to happen. Thank you. Let me go on to Alan Haber. Thank you, Kev. Okay, and then Stuart, you're up next. Stuart, Alan, unmute please. Okay, let me go on to Stuart and come back to you. Alan. Hello, everyone. Sorry, Unmuted. The one thing I would that I felt was that the opposition, the people most vulnerable to this, somehow voted for it, their own extinction, rather than broke with the consensus and said, this is not an agreement that serves us. There should have been a split rather than maintaining this institutional etiquette of agreeing to a consensus. And I agree that it is young people, the ones who are in the street, the sunrise, that are carrying the forefront of this spear that is not against the windmill at all, but a disaster looming. So they should, they should have not had a consensus agreement that would have brought us all a lot further ahead. Thank you, Alan. Stuart, you asked about the mood. I feel fatalistic after this meeting. And I think that what Kim Stanley Robinson described in his novel the Ministry for the Future is about the way forward. And for him, the precipitating event was a heat death of 20 million people in India in the next couple or three years. But really got things moving. Thank you, Jerry. Thanks, Gil. And I'm also a first time participant here, I should say. I attended COP23. And so I had a sense of what was coming. But unfortunately the event to me was kind of distilled by a post that someone I know put up right at the beginning of the conference. And I'm not gonna mention any names cause I know at least some on this call know this person, but he's a senior officer of major national foundation and he's the person who does their climate program. And he did a post of some photos from the VIP lounge at Dulles Airport. And he was just glowing about how wonderful this VIP lounge was. He was there because he was on his way to cop. At the end of the event, he and another officer of another major organization posted a photo of themselves standing in a natural area somewhere nearby with grimaces on their face with a comment about how disappointed they were and the disconnect, I think, with this guy between his first post, here I am in the VIP lounge at Dulles and his final pose, how disappointed we Are with what happened really brought it home to me. I'm not surprised the largest delegation was oil and gas, because what I saw three years ago, or three COPS ago, I should say, was this. It's really a trade show. And a trade show for codependent bodies, the climate activists on our side and the oil and gas people on the other side. And they need each other and they feed off of each other. And if you think of COP as a trade show, which is really what it was, you'll understand a lot of what happened there. Thank you. Co dependent bodies in a trade show. Wow, Felix. Well, I would say the last, the only one I've ever been to was in Paris, where the 1.5 aspirations toward 1.5 developed. And every time since then, I've been really disappointed at the myth that 1.5 degrees is in somehow some way a livable world, which I think is very clear. You lose 90% of your coral and so many other things. And so that setting that goal, I think, is a huge problem. And if we had a goal of reversing global warming, I think we, we would be better off. My other main takeaway really goes to the issue of all those lobbyists. And I put in the chat a piece by George Monbiot in the Guardians, and he basically says, make extreme wealth extinct, the only way to avoid climate breakdown. We could talk about whether we can survive with capitalism, but it's pretty clear we can't survive with the power of all the billionaires, the greedy billionaires who are just going to kill us. And what I think is really telling is that a week before COP, there was an agreement by 136 countries to tax wealth internationally at 15%. And to me, that is a precedent for a global movement that would say we're going to tax billionaires and use that money for loss and damages and adaptation. Thank you, Felix. Mark, I see your hand up. I'm going to come back to you in a minute. I want to say a few things first, since we've already spoken. I was disappointed too. Of course I was disappointed. There was no way to expect not to be. There was no way that this could have produced something that wouldn't have been disappointment. And we also need to see through our disappointment to acknowledge that there actually has been slow progress. Inadequate progress, certainly, but slow progress, which is generally how change moves through large institutions absent a compelling emergency, often even then, to some of the comments before about unrealistic, it was unrealistic that the planet would mobilize $9 trillion to address Covid in a matter of months with no one asking, where's the money going to come from? Now, you can criticize the COVID response in many different ways, but something remarkable happened there. Not at a cop, in some other. In some other format. You know, it's really hard to move a complex organization. Some of you have worked inside them, many of you have worked with them. You have some sense of what I'm talking about. The wheels of bureaucracy grind exceedingly slowly, you know, let. Let alone the wheels of a, you know, shifting a complex planetary culture. You know, where if. If the COP is inadequate, where's the venue for what needs to happen? Where does this take place? A friend of mine decried that, that the COP was, Was all you could expect from a consensus process. And I asked them back. Well, what's. What are you proposing as an alternative to the consensus process? The emperor of the galaxy, as far as I know, is occupied right now. She's not available to come in and just issue an edict to make this happen. You know, where's the locus of decision making, consensus, cultural transformation, power that moves this game? You know, it's. It was telling not only that the fossil fuel industry was the largest delegation at cop, but. But also look at the enormous difficulty of getting any kind of language about the ending or winding down or reduction or confronting fossil fuel subsidies. More startling for me was the realization I had not known this before. Whatever they got in was inadequate. But this was the first time the phrase fossil fuel was ever mentioned in a COP draft in 26 conferences. Stunning that the, you know, the elephant in the room and, and talked about. So, you know, for me, that's an indication of just how stuck we are, how deeply, deeply stuck we are. You know, one. And process is one of the places we're stuck. If we don't like a consensus process, we don't like democracy. Where do we go? You know, you could say authoritarianism when it's convenient, but we don't like it when the other side goes that way. And maybe in a more pragmatic way, we don't have the power to enforce decisions of any kind. So I forget, who was it, Ken, who said that before that this is a conversation about power in its many dimensions, wielded on whichever playing field that happens to be played. There's no replacing the need to cultivate, cultivate and focus and exercise power. And I want to, I want to. I want to acknowledge some. Some good mood here. We have done that to some degree. The game is joined. The conversation now whether at the cop or in the media is different than it was in Paris and it's different than it was three cops ago. As I see it, in my world, the game is joined. The issues that many of us have been talking about for decades and being dismissed or laughed at or shown the door for decades are now on the table in every boardroom on the planet. Is the action adequate? No, but the issue is there. There's no one who is not talking about it. It's in the cabinet chambers, on the agenda in every country in the planet. That's not adequate, but that's a huge shift from where if we've been having this conversation five years ago and you know, we have to recognize that we're playing in a nine ring circus or like a chess master playing 50 simultaneous games, all of which need to be played together. What I've seen post cop or anticipate post cop, is a shift in the fulcrum from international policy confabulations like the copies to markets in two realms. The conversation is no longer whether there's going to be an energy transition, it's how and how fast. Even the fossil companies understand that. How and how fast and to whose benefit and to whose damage? That's where the question is. Great series of articles in Financial Times earlier this week. I encourage you to look at them. There's on my blog, I'll put in the chat in just a moment. I've tried to gather a compendium of some of the most interesting articles. One of them points to Mark Trexler's Compendium of Compendiums at Climate Net. So I encourage you to take a look there. But you know, my speculation is that the politics of this, although it's deeply disappointing, still matters. Despair and abandonment of these processes are going to make things worse. But elections aren't the only or even the key domain of action anymore. I'm watching the streets. I'm watching the picket lines, I'm watching the shopping carts, what we buy and what we don't buy. I'm watching the world of finance, which, not bound by a consensus process, is starting to lay down the law. In some ways, big money is moving. Divestment from fossil fuels is happening. It's actually a mixed blessing because the hedge funds are circling and scooping up bargains in the fossil industry. So whenever you encourage your university to divest, you need to also be talking about what they're going to invest in with that money. But for better or for worse, while we are criticizing and challenging the Forces of global financialization. It's in a strange way, one of our situational allies. At least it has the ability to force decisions at the level of corporations and even national governments. Is that a good thing? I don't know. Do I like it? No. But I think both the young people in the streets, the consumers at the shopping carts, and the lords of Wall street laying down their dictates may move things faster than COP27. So what does this provoke for you? All. Right, go ahead. And then, thank you. The major enablers of disruption in energy, transportation, construction and part of information technology already exist. Their inventors are 81 years old, already dead and in their 60s and beyond. For infotech, I'm figuring out how to orchestrate it at all. And I'm 74. We could say that even when I was a hippie in the 60s, we actually had antecedents and they had done a lot of work. So we will support the youth in understanding what we have built when we commercialize it, which is when they will know to come to us. Also, there is a knowledge based answer to the question that you posed, Gil, of what is that? Where is the locus of decision making, consensus, power, etc. Doug Engelbart said the knowledge base is the highest form of tool. I see it as fully distributed, yet with a universal geographic information system technical foundation. This makes distributed decision making with thematic unity across the globe possible. Okay, Mark, I'm going to ask you to stop there. Yeah, that was it. Okay, great. Thank you for that, Doug Carmichael. Unmute doug. Okay. Sorry about that. You think I'd learn after a while. I worry about the kids in the street because I think they're likely to be met by guns. I think we need to think through what's going to happen there and what a better way might be. The good news for me is that we're coping with problems having to do with capitalism, with corporations, with political power that have been there for a long time, but we haven't been able to confront them. Now we have the possibility of actually confronting them. We have come to the place and there's a lot of advantage to that. And it means that we have to stay resolute and not get depressed even to enjoy from a kind of theatrical point of view, the struggle that's going on. But this is the place. We're here and it's up to us to be really smart about how difficult coping with a feudalistic society is. Thank you. I want to offer two comments on that, if I may. One is that as A child of the American left. I never anticipated a time when mainstream conversations in this country would be full of discussions about capitalism in the sense of capitalism and its limits, its flaws. Capitalism, that's the problem. That is, not everybody says that, but that's become a much more active part of conversations in mainstream culture in the last year, year and a half than I ever would have anticipated. So there's something remarkable there and there's an opening there for something we've talked before about the structural defects of capitalism, the limitations of the various reform capitalism efforts underway. So there's a lot of work to be done there. One very interesting challenge comes from Yanis Varoufakis, who's former finance minister of Greece during the popular government a few years ago. And you can look this up on YouTube. It's a conversation between Varoufakis and Slavoj Iek where Varoufakis is basically saying we talk about ending capitalism, but we're too late. Capitalism's over. What we're in now is techno feudalism. That's a very interesting riff. I can go into it more if there's time, but I would encourage you to have a look at it. There's a 20 minute version and a two hour version, so take your pick. Very provocative. It says we're in a very different world already in which value is being extracted by the feudal lords in the attention economy. Very different game that we've been living in. Dale. Byron, please. I did see that, Gil. I saw that presentation and it's, it's amazing. He's, he's incredible. In general, four things I just want to just throw up on this. There's four things are on my radar screen that have been running around for me after the cop and, and just based on a number of what people things people are saying. I do think that with all the disappointments that we all witnessed, there are new stories that are emerging around capitalism, climate and inequality. Those three things in particular. And I think those stories are increasing in quantity and volume and also in quality. So that's one thing. The second is that I've been more focused on, I think what is the more foundational problem of overshoot that we face of which climate. The climate catastrophe is one major symptom and I think about extinction, soil degradation, ocean overfishing and those things. And I think, again, I know I'm not saying I'm preaching to the saved here, but I think that the conversation ought be expanded. The third thing is that if you look this up, one barrel of oil equals 23,200 hours of human work output. And I think that our addiction to that is understandable. And I have empathy for our human addiction to every barrel of oil being 23,200 hours of human work output. So what does that mean? It means that it's going to be really hard to replace that. And then the. The last thing, the fourth thing that's on my radar screen and provoked by these, this conversation is that I think there's. There's two things. Martin Luther King once said that if you pull people out of the river, if you throw them a life preserver, people will congratulate you. I think there's. There's two things. Martin Luther King once said that if you pull people out of the river, if you throw them a life preserver, people will congratulate you. And even a lot of people give you money for life preservers. If you go up river to see who's throwing them in, that's a slightly different story. So it seems to me that our work has to be equal in life preserver work and then way upstream. And again, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but way upstream, but not to take our eye off the ball, that it has to be both of those things. Yeah, no need to apologize for preaching to the choir. There's a reason that people go to church every Sunday or to synagogue or to mosque or to rock concerts or whatever it is. The choir is important. It's one of the places where we recognize our tribe and get our fuel and learn the memes that we're going to share. So, you know, all good there. Just two quick comments, Dale. Is it going to be hard? I don't know. There's people on this call who are inventing the technologies to replace that fossil fuel fuel. The prices of renewables are dropping unbelievably fast, predicted by very few people. Though my friend Tony Seba has been predicting these things pretty much on target. Price of photovoltaics, battery storage, electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, sensor technology, all this stuff is plummeting rapidly. You have coal plants on this planet being run on solar energy. Now. It's a picture of the economics that we're looking at. So I don't want to buy the. It's hard in that sense. There's other parts of it that clearly are hard. But I want to particularly say something about your second point about the nature of the crisis. We've progressed to the point where there's general agreement that climate is the number one crisis of the 21st century. It's the existential crisis of humanity, et cetera. And I agree with you, and I agree with John Fullerton at Capital Institute, who published a beautiful piece about this last week. Climate is a symptom of the problem. It's not the problem. The problem is a human civilization that's disconnected from the living world that it depends on, that shows up, as you said, in soil depletion, decline of the oceans, collapse of biodiversity, the disappearance of what, 70% of the insect population of the United States. You notice when you drive through the Midwest now, Carol, and check me if I'm wrong on this, but windshields covered with bugs aren't the common occurrence, which used to be when I was a kid driving across country, because the populations have shifted. So we're facing potential biological catastrophe of a sort that we don't even begin to understand in a place that we don't even look, that we don't think about. I keynoted the conference of India Industries last month. There's an ESG summit. One of the things I left them with was, was I said, look, you guys, instead of focusing on the vague generalities of esg, environmental Social Governance as a filter for business activity, what if you thought about a fundamental shift from extracting from life in service of business to business in service of life. And to my really delighted surprise, it really landed in, really resonated. The chairman of the conference quoted that in his sum up of the day. Several other people referenced it. The way I'm trying to speak about it now is to challenge people to do business and policy and everything we do, frankly, as though we belonged to the living world, not to take care of it better, not to manage it better, but as if we belong to it and what opens up. And so my thinking about climate is now increasingly through that lens. I'm going to go first to some people who haven't spoken yet, Stuart Levine, and then Carolyn. Great. So thank you for kind of preceding me, Gil, because I was going to go in the direction that you did. I had kind of a small epiphany when I was swimming the other day. And that was about what an incredibly invasive species we have been as humans. I think in many ways prompted by the capitalism that's gone amok, which we've talked about. It's almost like a 12 step program that we as a species need to admit that we have been addicted to consumption. We're consuming the golden goose that we're living on. But first thing is to admit, and then we can go on from there. But that's at a very humanistic and individual level. But I think that's a thing that has to happen, and I think there might be a climate for it at this point in time. Thank you. It's a good echo of what Jerry was saying before about the co dependence in this addictive process that he's seeing at the cops. I just want to question whether the. It's popular now to talk about humans as the problem and you distinguish both humans and capitalism. Humans have been on the planet for a very long time, and if you haven't seen it yet, I strongly encourage you to find the book the dawn of Everything, just released last week, David Graeber and David Wengrow, which looks back at 100,000 years of human history in a nutshell, speculates, based on the last 30 or 40 years of archaeological research, to tell a different story about human origin. Origins. And in contrast to the traditional two stories that we have, either that we used to be noble savages and we have fallen from that pinnacle into this, you know, dark hellhole of industrial civilization, or we were stupid, brutish savages and we have risen to this pinnacle of dark satanic mills of modern civilization. Wengrow and Graeber saying, no, that's not true. What we see in human history is a wide variety of experimentation, not a linear process by any means, not people growing from hunters and gatherers to agriculture to states and civilizations, but in fact, human settlements experimenting with agriculture and leaving it, or doing agriculture for part of the year and not for part of the year, being authoritarian in certain seasons and egalitarian in other seasons. It's a tapestry of enormous variety of human experience and possibility and experimentation and, they would argue, intentional choices made over the. We call thousands of years eons. What do we call periods of tens of thousands of years? That's the times, the timescale that they're playing in. It's rich, it's provocative. One of the reviews I read of it put it on the level of Galileo and Darwin in its transformative spinning of the story. So have a look there. And that's to that point. Carolyn, please. The dawn of Everything just released last week, David Graeber and David Wengrow, which looks back at 100 and then yawn. I'm taken by the mention of the precautionary principle earlier in that it embeds an ethic which is to prevent the preventable suffering. And what I think what we lack in some ways as a culture, in the dominant culture, is a moral maturity. Moral maturity. I think is what's expressed in those civilizations, those anthropological groups that have survived in place for a very long time. And that moral maturity actually helps regulate our behavior with each other, but especially with the natural world. And it just turns out that before I went into law school, I worked as an archaeologist and did my graduate training in archaeology and worked in the desert Southwest looking at the pueblos from 600 to 950 AD and then some other. I worked on the Apache reservation and elsewhere. And my observation is that those cultures have that moral maturity in that the culture regulates the behavior to that natural world, our culture regulates behavior to technology and ignores the natural world. So our initiations are getting a driver's license. The laws that are passed are, you know, don't drive in text. We, we do not have that kind of ethic that would guide a right relationship with the natural world. And we don't have decision rules that actually carry that out. The precautionary principle coming back to that is a step in a kind of moral maturity to talk about preventing the preventable suffering. One of the. Thank you, Carolyn. One of the many eye openers in the dawn of Everything is Graeber and Wengros assertion that the European Enlightenment was actually seeded out of conversations with what they call American philosophers. They use the word American for what we now call Native American. They contrast the Americans of the indigenous culture of Turtle island with the Europeans. And there is a substantial body of literature in the 18th century of dialogues between, between Jesuit missionaries and philosophers from Algonquin, Iroquois and other kinds of tribes. And the assertion that what we think of as the European innovation of the Enlightenment comes from there, from a very moral, mature culture that has lived here for a long time. I'm also putting in the chat a link to moral imagination. Stevie Tickle in the UK is cooking that one. That's an echo of the territory Carolyn was stepping into. Thank you for that. Yann Ballard, please welcome. Hey Gil, thanks again for having us all convene in this way. Just want to mention that no transformation of capitalism will happen unless the fact that accounting doesn't give you cash information, it doesn't connect to anything of activities people are paid for, to the transaction results they're getting. So that fundamental lack of transparency, I believe is driving a lot of the problems in the world. But I really love where the conversation is going. It was appropriate that you mentioned the Iroquois to remember that the tribes of the northeastern United States were among the most institutionally violent and torturous in the history of the world. And that they came together through the Peacemaker around 1100 and created the great law of peace among the clan mothers at that time. I also want to just reference that in Scotland in the 1500s, the Catholic majority caused those of us that were Protestants to be starving and the Presbyterian assemblies were formed in order to create commons that then became the model, overcame that situation, the 1500s, and then became the model for the House of Commons. I'd like to bring it to the present time relatively by pointing out that Virginia, the whole thing that happened in Virginia, which had been going blue for some time and looks like a reversal, came from something that happened in the late 60s and early 70s where Adam Clayton Powell's chief of staff Don Anderson, went to the funeral homes and churches in southern Virginia and formed the Assemblies movement. And over half the counties in Virginia became parliamentary decision making bodies made up of representatives from every household in every neighborhood in half the counties in Virginia. And they started doing cities in North Carolina when Ford and Rockefeller pulled the funding with no advanced knowledge and destroyed the whole thing. But we can go back and look at, well, what turned Virginia blue as a southern state. The answer is organizing into these citizen assemblies by Don Anderson and the national association for the Southern Poor over about a 10 year period permanently shifted the grassroots participation of the majority population in those counties. That's a story that's completely left out of history, but I think it's an indicator of the answer to the question of what kind of institutions do we need to replace the trade shows, one of dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of examples of human, social and cultural and political innovation over not just the last 50 years, but again, going back to last 50,000 years. Yes, they would argue that this is what we do. Yep, we have done this for a long time with a great deal of sophistication. And stories that get carried forward are selective stories that support, you know, the current dominant narrative in any culture. That's what cultures do. Thank you. Let me go to Ken Burgess and then Alan Haber. Yeah, thank you again. First off, technology is never the issue. I've been working with organizations for probably about 15 years that have been dealing with absolutely revolutionary technology that could transform things overnight. Where I see the roadblock is the access to getting those ideas out into the mainstream. And that deals with management, it deals with regulation, it deals with funding, but more importantly, it deals with education and media. And so when we look at the media, what stories get populated? Stories of fear, stories of control, stories of basically keeping people, you know, dumb and stupid and I think that's the sad part, that this is what we do. Yep. We have done this for a long time with a great deal of sophistication. And where I see that changing again is with the younger folks that are completely circumventing this entire system. And once you circumvent the system, the old system becomes obsolete. And so where I'm focused, you know, and this is. It was a beautiful dovetail of what Jan was talking about within assemblies is working with the 50 states to create another level of people oriented assembly. And once you understand what that assembly can do and what it means to be a person back on the land, you are no longer subject to the rules of codes and statutes and all of the other nonsense that hampers 98% of the world, not only from an ability to exercise your freedom, but also to be able to understand just a cognition from an emotional standpoint. And the revolution is here, and there are truly many ideas to go do so. And I think this is a great conversation to start. So thank you. I appreciate your perspective, Ken. I have a different perspective, I think, on rules and norms than you do. I bridle at them like we all do. I want my freedom and creativity. But, you know, I kind of like it that you have to get your car smogged. And I like it that the manufacturers are required to have a certain adequacy of brakes and gas tank safety in those vehicles, even though it constrains their freedom. So, you know, there's a larger dialogue to have there. I just wanted to know. I'm not addressing that particular. Gil, I mean, I hear what you're saying. I'm not in. In offense to that. But what I am saying is that there's a different level of regulation and that blocks what I consider to be the ground roots intelligence. You go to every single one of your neighbors, I'll bet you 98% of them would say that we like clean air and clean water. And I don't think anybody will disagree with that. Poll after poll in this country confirms that. Yeah, so that's not my point. Okay, well, let's. Thank you. We'll circle back to that in a little bit, Alan. And then Christine and then I want to shift the conversation a little bit for the last half hour. Thank you for letting me speak again. You said something a bit ago, Gil, that brought something back to my mind. I was sent a paper from something called the Great Transition Initiative, and it looked to how we see governance rather than government, that we have to develop, that we have to see our relations in terms of the model of the life system rather than the model of the inherited structure of power. And I wish I could send this to you. Learning from Life Systems. It has about five pages of introduction that I won't summarize and then about a 25 page outline of what would be a constitution of world governance. How all our life systems interact together, both the human and the animal and the inorganic. A beautiful effort towards seeing how we look at the kind of new system that we need. And last time I spoke about we need to look at system change from the war system to the peace system. This sense of modeling on the life system is a base for, I think, a very productive kind of thinking. And I think it's a lot the way the young people in Sunrise and so on are looking at their organization. Alan, thank you. Please do send that along if you're able to. Back in our systems change conversation a couple months ago, I confess to what I find. The mystery of how systems change and how political systems change and what's the process from the seed ideas to the dominant institutions and the pathway between those. I want to talk with y' all a little bit more about that. Let me get Christine first and please do send that on, if you would. Al. Christine. Okay, so last time I spoke, I was the optimist. I love the idea of systems change and everything that everybody's talking about here about changing the culture so that we can all appreciate our interconnectedness with each other as well as nature. But when I look at what's happening in our culture and I look at the media and the importance of the media, which seems to becoming more and more important with all this online stuff, what we see are growing divisions and we've got qanon and we've got all these people sort of hiving off into craziness, you know. And so the question, it seems to me, if we want to talk about systems change, we need to figure out also how to deal with educating people. And you know, if we want to educate people about our interconnectedness and interdependencies, how do we do this in this era of, of division and you know, and my way or the highway and you, you're. You're wrong, I'm right. And you know, and the paranoia, I mean, it really came to the fore. We're still seeing it with COVID people who, who won't be vaxed, you know, and won't wear masks and feel that this is infringing on their freedom and liberty and Their it's un American. I just think that also if I see growing divisions and we've got QAnon and we've got all these people sort of hiving off into craziness, you know. And so the question, it seems to me if we want to talk about a shift in our culture, I am paranoid and worried about a shift towards My current meeting is running a little late. Yeah. So anyway, so I won't say anymore. Thanks, George. I got your hand up so I'm going to take you first and then go on to the next move. Assistance change. We need to figure out also how to deal with. I want to be practical and maybe this relates to transition towns or not. I've tried to make contact with the people here in western Massachusetts and have never been able to make it. But that's maybe me. I have problems making contact with educating people and you know, if we want to educate people about our interconnectedness, interdependencies, how do we do this in this era of folks for the last 15 or 20 years I've been saying solar is civil defense. The idea is there's going to be a weather emergency whether or not you believe climate change is real or whatever you believe about climate change. You know, there's going to be a tornado or a flood or a drought or a fire or a hurricane or a blizzard or Vancouver is going to have mudslides and you're not going to be able to get into town of division and you know, and my way or the highway practically, you know, 20 years ago I bought a couple of small solar panels and solar lights. So I have one room in my rented apartment which is solarized and I use that for my reading at night and I have a little solar flashlight and you're wrong, I'm right. And the paranoia, I mean it really came to the fore. We're still seeing it with COVID people who won't be vaxed and won't wear masks and charger that I that you can now buy for about $14 for two that I use as my bike light. And these are practical things that happen. I've tried for 20 years to talk to groups about this and say, hey, prepare for the next weather emergency in a way that builds a platform for the transition practically and feel that this is infringing on their freedom and liberty and their comes into my idea of solar swadeshi local production. But I don't see extinction rebellion doing that. I don't see anybody doing that as a possibility. I also think that it Gets us out of the theological deadlock. Climate change is real. No, it's not. Climate change is man made. No, it's not. George, Can I ask you American. I just think that also if I see a shift in our culture, I am paranoid and worried about a shift towards. My current meeting is running a little late. Yeah. So anyway. So are you talking with the folks at Extinction Rebellion about solar civil defense? I've tried and tried and I get no response. Probably that's me because that's the story of my life since. Since the time that I was actually doing stuff that got some response, you know, in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s. But, well, it might be, might be helpful to look at what was different in the times when you were doing things and got response and when you were doing things and didn't get response. I'll tell you, I won't say anymore. Thanks, George. I got your hand up, so I'm gonna take you. Whether it's political organizing or corporate sales, the line I've tried and tried and nothing has happened is not an assessment of anything other than just the way the game is. You know, you're going to make 10 calls or 100 calls before you get a sale. A car salesman is going to talk to how many people before they sell. You're going to go to how many Extinction Rebellion first and then go on to the next move. I want to be practical and meetings before something catches on. We need a kind of dogged patience in this work. I keep on doing my own stuff, but. And I'm reaching out to this group as I reached, reached out the last time, you know, but I'm not making. Maybe the, maybe this relates to transition towns. I'm not making the attempt to reach the groups anymore because I don't. I can't do that. I can't do that anymore. It's too frustrating for me. You know, that great radical Charles Schwab once said that the thing to do is to start right where you are with what you have. That, you know, it's a very simple and very profound perspective on strategy as we all, we're all on this call. Folks who kind of like to think about big pictures and big changes, but you do what you can not. I've tried to make contact with the people here in Western Massachusetts and have never been able to make it, but that's maybe me. I have problems making contact with folks. For the last 15 or 20 years, I've been saying solar is civil defense where you are. This is where I am and thank you all for listening. And George, I can see in the comments that your com what you said about solar civil defense has landed with people. It's like oh, people. I hadn't thought about it that way. You may phrase showing up in other places as a result of just a conversation. Look, this is where the work happens. It's in conversations between people. The idea is there's going to be a weather emergency. Whether it's what we say to each other, it's what we offer to each other, it's what we promise to each other, it's what we ask of each other, whether at the level of one on one or level of cop. That's where worlds are born in the language that we use and the conversations that we have. And that's been one of the premises behind this enterprise that I'm doing of these conversations with you let me or not you believe climate change is real or whatever you believe about climate change. You know there's going to be a tornado or a flood or a drought or a fire or a hurricane or a blizzard or Vancouver is going to have shift gears a little bit. We talk a lot here about what to do, about how to do it, about what to do. And as a friend of mine, I think Brad Warren is on this call now. Reminds me that if you're, if you're in the medical world, prescription without diagnosis is considered malpractice. And we jump a lot to what to do. And from time to time at least it's useful to step back and ask what's our assessment of what's going on here? What's our diagnosis? What do we think are the mudslides? And you're not going to be able to get into town. Not just the concerns that concern us, but the factors underlying those concerns that generate the conditions that we're looking at. And so in that spirit, I want to offer you not by any means a complete list, but something that I've been cooking lately in the spirit inspired practically 20 years ago, I bought a couple of small solar panels and solar, solar light. So I have one room in my rented apartment which is solarized and I use that for my by my friend Chauncey Bell, who some of you met on prior calls, who says that a diagnosis typically has three components to it. What so how did we get here and why are we stuck? And you can elaborate this in very many ways, but that's a simple way to think about it. To my ears, to my listening, a large percentage of the conversation about what to do skips over these questions reading at night and I have a little solar flashlight and certainly skips over the questions of why are we stuck? What is keeping us stuck in this situation that is not satisfactory to us. And like I said, this is not a final story. But here's let's see if this is working here. This is kind of what I started with in the first brainwriting session yesterday. Doug will come to you in just a moment. I'll give you a chance. I'm not going to read this a lot. I'll give you a chance to read it yourself. I invite you in the next 20 in charger that I that you can now buy for about $14 for two. Right. That I use as my bike light. And these are practical things that happen. I've tried for 20 years to talk to groups about this and say hey a minute or so both to add to this ways that you think we keep ourselves stuck we as individuals, cultures, communities, national planetary civilization and also any comments or critiques you might want to have of the ones that are here. Doug Carmichael I think we're mostly prepare for the next weather emergency in a way stuck because we're dealing with institutions, yet we talk about individual people. And dealing with institutions requires a lot of different thinking. Okay, say more. Well, just that for example, in this conversation the idea of institutions in particular the oil companies hardly gets mentioned. I don't think oil companies specifically. We have said things about energy that builds a platform for the transition practically. And this comes into my idea of solar swadeshi local production. What I don't see extinction rebellion doing that. I know it's companies, but not the way they're structured that helps them hold onto power. That's what I think we have to grapple with. We talked about it right at the top. We talked about the difficulty of the COP process of even saying the words fossil fuels, much less doing anything about it. And now we have a little glimmering of attention about killing the fossil fuel substance which by the way, according to some people see anybody doing that as possible in the United States exceed the military budget. So this is us taxing us to bribe people to destroy us faster. If anything doesn't make sense, that's sure it so Doug, I'm right with you. And then the question is if the diagnosis is the inordinate power of the fossil fuel industry over biological life and political life on the planet, then that stability. I also think that it gets us out of the theological deadlock. Climate change is real. No, it's not climate change is man made. No, it's not. George. Can I ask you this? Are you, are you talking with the folks in extinction rebellion about solar civil defense? That gives us the focus of what do we do to dismantle that or to shift that. I have a friend who's moved to Houston recently, started a consulting company with the explicit focus of working with the oil and gas industry on energy transition. And I'm both, I'm both in dismay and in awe of her. I think on the one hand it's a hopelessly fruitless task. On the other hand there's something she's. I've tried and tried and I get no response. Probably that's me be accomplished there in companies with the capability to move machinery, move fluids, refine complex chemistries, store energy and do other things that may have a role in a climate positive future. Who knows? Others are going to dig their heels in and slow this thing down as much as they damn can to extract as much value all the way down the slide. But she's walked into that. That's the story of my life since, since the time that I was actually doing stuff that got some response. You know, in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, there's other arenas of action, there's international discussion outside of the. But it might be, might be helpful to look at what was different in the times when about killing fossil fuel subsidies and there are arguments for keeping them. We're back into the game of not just persuasion or education, but public power. Christine, is your hand up again or is that from before? Okay, please. Yeah, I mean, you were doing things and got response and when you were doing things and didn't get response, I'll tell you what people here have already said it's about power, but it's also about systems change. And so I think part of what makes us hard is not only corporate part, the fact that oil companies like Exxon want to continue pumping oil, but that we're dependent on the distribution systems that enable us to just go to a nearby gas station to fuel up our cars or to turn on. Whether it's political organizing or corporate sales. The line I've tried and tried and nothing has happened is not an assessment of anything other than just the way the game is. You know, you're going to make 10 calls or 100 calls before you get a signal on our thermostat and have our gas heaters come on or our electricity come on. And we're to change the system, the distribution system, so that PG&E connects up and solar is, you know, the solution, but it's intermittent, so it's not a solution for people. A car salesman's going to talk to how many people before they sell. You're going to go to how many extinction rebellions who need air conditioning late in the evening when the sun is going down. I mean, we. It's a complicated system. I'm sorry to interrupt, but. Yeah, and you guys know that. So I just want to emphasize that one, the solar is intermittent story is a canard from the industry. We have storage meetings before something catches on. We need a kind of dogged patience in this work. I keep on doing my own stuff, but. And I'm reaching out to this group as I reached. Reached out the last time. We have multiple sources of energy. We have economies that are running on renewable energy. It's not impractical. It's a story that we're told. It has to be developed. It doesn't pre exist. But California has been working on this for the past. I know. You know, but I'm not making. I'm not making the attempt to reach the groups anymore because I don't. I can't do that. I can't do that anymore. It's too frustrating for me. You know, that great radical Charles Schwab once said that shut it. You know, it's shutting down the nuclear power plant, whatever it's called, that is providing some of the backup. And when there, you know, when there are blackouts, people have problems and there's backlash. And, you know, we have to deal with the complexity of the challenges of transitioning, not only developing these new technologies, but actually connecting them to our homes and our businesses. Well, I think the good news is that lots of folks in lots of jurisdictions are well at work on that. Jerry knows this. Yes, but it's not going to happen instantly. Of course it's not going to happen instantly. And for the folks who complain at Biden for saying, how can you dare to have more coal production right now if you shut down the coal industry completely tomorrow, which you can't do, obviously, would be a disaster. There has to be something to do is to start right where you are with what you have. The question is, how do you transition fast, not slow. How do you do it thorough, not piecemeal. How do you do it inclusive and not segregated and et cetera? You know, all of these big story ideas have practical concerns. It's one of the reasons that things take time in institutions, as damnably frustrating as that is. There's lots of little bricks it takes to build the wall. But you don't get there unless you say we're going to do this. It's a very simple and very profound perspective on strategy as we all, we're all on this call folks who kind of like to think about big pictures and big changes. But you do what you can where you are. This is where I am. And we're going to commit the, you know, our lives and our trust in our sacred honor and the energy and resource of our institutions to do this and figure out a way to do it faster and better and more equitably and more inclusively. So yeah, practical concerns, yes, but that's not a barrier to doing anything, which is the way it's often thrown up. And it's why, pardon me, not personally jumped on you because I just hear that line, that kind of way. I'm going to go to Josh Harrison and then Eckhart and then Stuart. I just thank you all for listening. And George, I can see in the comments that you're com. What you said. I just wanted to build on that concept just a little bit. I mean one of the things that we can talk about, it's the basically the psychopathology of quantum corporate solar civil defense has landed with people. It's like, oh, people. I hadn't thought about it. The corporate existence where in fact you're rewarded for sociopathic behavior. And the more sociopathically behave, the more you're rewarded that way. You may expect phrase showing up in other places as a result of just a conversation. Look, this is where the work happens. It's in conversations between people. That's kind of encapsulated in the phrase it wasn't personal, it's just business. Really. What does that really mean? And then I would also suggest that the oil companies themselves really are a target we have to look at. Because if you think about the. I think it's a list of 70 companies that have laid in 80, 75, 80% of the Planetary greenhouse gas load. It's what we say to each other, it's what we offer to each other, it's what we promise to each other. It's what we ask. That's a much more finite way to look at it than everything is beyond our control. It's so large how we're going to manage it. It is, but I want to add a little bit of salt to that soup, Josh. There's like 100 companies represent 70% of global emissions. But it's not just the companies. It's the companies and their customers, which is us, each other, whether at the level of one on one or level of cop. That's where worlds are born in the language that we use and the conversations that we have. And that's been one of the premises behind this enterprise that I'm doing of these and the Institute buy from and support in various ways. So the chain of connection an important one. But we also have within living memory different chains of connections from the customer side as well. I mean we're, you know, sad. Sad to say I'm a member of a group that I'm not alone here that used to return conversations with you bottles when I was a kid. Yeah. You know, I didn't think that was a bad thing. I didn't think I was socially deprived. I actually thought it was a cool way to earn a little bit of money when I could collect them. Thank you. Josh Eckhart, Shift gears a little bit. We talk a lot here about what to do, about how to do it, about what to do and as a friend of mine, I think Brad Warren is on this call now. Reminds me that if you're, if you're in the medical world, prescription without diagnosis. Oh, hi. I just unmuted. I guess one of the questions I have and I'm assuming this information is out there and it should be more transparent if it's not, is that what exact profile is with respect to gas and its combustion and petroleum and its combustion is out there. Obviously there's greater efficiencies of cars is considered malpractice and we jump a lot to what marginally since 1985 or whatever. But I mean as opposed to not burning it and taking petroleum and using it as plastic products and I'm assuming that's out there, there's some agreement on that and if that's there do. And from time to time at least it's useful to step back and ask what's our assessment of what's going on here? What's our diagnosis? What do we think are the are not just the concerns that concern us but the factors underlying then people should be able to be educated about their addiction or about their dependency or codependency. And then by contrast perhaps studying the potential value for having the faith that in the future there could be even those concerns that generate the conditions that we're looking at cleaner, better plastics that we could be using instead and that they could be in trust for the future generations who will have ownership of those grounded potential plastics. Yeah, well there's lots of work Underway on that Eckhart, Bucky Fuller used to talk about oil as the hundreds of millions of years accumulation of coil. And so in that spirit, I want to offer you not by any means a complete list, but something that I've been cooking lately in a spirit inspired by my friend Chauncey Bell, who some of you met on prior calls, who says that sunlight, freeze and vegetation is remarkably valuable, complex chemistry in fossil fuels. Why would you burn that just for a quick release of energy? I mean, you could heat your house by burning your cell phone. You know, you could heat your house by burning your paycheck. It has thermal value, but it has information value that's much greater than its thermal value. Some of the chemical companies, I think it's dupont is one of them, set a goal some years ago of 25% of their plastics products coming from renewable sources, botanical, biological sources. So that game is in motion. You probably get there only partly by persuading people. Diagnosis typically has three components to it. What's a good idea to buy better products? You get there partly by delivering them better products. So how did we get here and why are we stuck? And you can elaborate this in very many ways, but that's a simple way to think about it to my ears, to my listening, which is why we've seen the electric vehicle revolution take off so rapidly with, with. With Tesla's step into the market. Stuart, got your hand up. And then I want to ask. There's a lot of people who haven't spoken yet. I want to give you a chance before we wrap up the call to do that. Stuart, with me. Great. Quickly. Thank you, Gil. I just wanted to punctuate the point you made about your friend who started a consultancy in the oil and gas industry. I assume she's of similar values than you. And I just wanted to say that I spent many years railing against the legal system where I practiced law for a number of years. And it wasn't until I realized that so many of the people that I was railing against were doing the best job they could based upon their own thinking. I think it's real important a large percentage of the conversation about what to do skips over these questions to think about getting into the tent because I've been active in the American Bar association and certainly skips over the questions of why are we stuck? What is keeping us stuck in this situation that is not satisfactory to us? And like I said, this is not a final story, but for years, and you know, and I can't say I can't how many, how many, how many positive impacts I've had as a result of kind of being friends with folks as opposed to being enemies? Thank you. Another variant of that story. One of the phenomena going on now is that major corporations and major financial institutions. Let's see if this is working here. This is kind of what I started with in the first brainwriter, scrambling to hire sustainability professionals. They're going from departments of two or three people to departments of 15 or 20 people. They can't find people. They certainly can't find senior people. There's a land rush in the enemy session yesterday. Doug will come to you in just a moment. I'll give you a chance. I'm not going to read this aloud. I'll give you a chance to read it yourself. So I invite you in the next 20 minutes or so both to add to this ways that youth, right, corporate America, fossil fuel industry and so forth, to get sustainability brains aboard. Now is some of that for greenwash? Probably. Is some of that sincere recalibration of risk and opportunity and the future they're moving into? Probably. Brad Warren. Oh, I jumped to the head there. I don't know if people are aware, but every car company in the world has pretty much declared that they will be electric only cars by 2035 at the latest. Many have said 2030, which is, I think we keep ourselves stuck. We as individuals, cultures, communities, national planetary civilization and also any comments or critiques you might want to have of the ones that are here. Doug Carmichael. I think we're mostly stuck because we're dealing with institutions, yet we talk about individual people. This whole discussion about fossil fuels, they're very well aware that they're on the chopping block, in my opinion. They know it's coming. They know electric cars are the wave of the future. Paris has outlawed internal combustion engines in the city environment. I believe starting in 2025, that's three years you will not be able to drive an ice car into the city of Paris, France. Not Paris. There's one in California too. It has to be electric, so they know it's coming. The amount of investment energy, investment money, what is it? Blackrock, I think. And dealing with institutions requires a lot of different thinking and it's called BlackRock Ventures. Something like $7 trillion of their money is going into solar and renewable energy. So, okay, say. Well, just that for example, in this conversation the idea of institutions, in particular the oil companies hardly gets. I'll correct you on that one, Brad. It's a large number. 7 trillion is their Assets under management in total. Oh, okay. Sorry. But yes, money is moving rapidly. Yes, it is happening. I just want to put a little bit of hope into the conversation. I know these calls. I usually hang up from them and for about five minutes I'm like, oh crap, we're all doomed. This is the end. I might as well just, you know, be complete. He didn't. And spend all my money. Don't give any to my daughter because she's not even going to be around and. But then I let that mentioned. I don't think oil companies specifically. We have said things about energy companies, but not the way they're structured. That helps them hold on to power. That's what I think we have to grapple with. We talked about it right at the top. We talked about the difficulty of the cop process of even saying the words fossil fuels go. And my mood shifts and I realize there are some very positive things happening. It just depends where you're focusing your attention. What are you reading? What are you looking at? What are you googling? Where are you getting your information from? There are some very encouraging signs. Yeah, I'm fascinated, Brad, that you leave the call in that kind of mood because I hear from other people they leave the call in very opposite mood mood. There's a wide range of moods that people are leaving with. And so, so it's. It's partly what we're speaking about here. It's partly what you're listening in this conversation and as you say, what you choose to expose yourselves to, much less doing anything about it. And now we have a little glimmering of as a contribution to to mood management. Let me invite you all to a web pension about killing the fossil fuel substance which by the way, according to some people in the United States exceed the military budget. So this is us taxing us to bribe people to destroy us faster. The benefit are this afternoon that's humbly titled the most optimistic climate chat you'll hear this year. It's Bill McKibben in conversation with Saul Griffith, MacArthur fellow and an inventor. It's. I'm not sure the time but it's sometime this afternoon. You can find the details of that link. Different mood. This is going to be focused on the momentum and the possibility and if you know Sol at all, this is technically grounded all the way down substantially. It doesn't make sense. That's sure it so Doug, I'm right with you. And then the question is so if the analyze the engineers have a look at that. Anybody who hasn't spoken yet would like to speak. The diagnosis is the inordinate power of the fossil fuel industry over biological life and political life on the planet. Then that gives us the focus of what do we do to dismantle that or to shift that. I have a friend who's. Or we can just take a moment or two to just be quiet and absorb what we've talked about so far. John, I'll come to you in just a minute. Let's take a moment in quiet. First, Michelle Horowitz was speaking through his T shirt. Moved to Houston recently started a consulting company with the explicit focus of John DeVaught. Thank you. Working with the oil and gas industry on energy transition. And I'm both, I'm both in dismay and in awe of her. I think on the one hand, Gil, I, you know, I take my hand down I hopelessly fruitless task. On the other hand there's something she's, you know, it's discouraging to me. I mean I feel like I'm very much in a, in a group of, you know, like minded people in terms of the concerns. Yet I still feel rather isolated in this crowd because nobody ever talks about peak oil. In my opinion, peak oil is going to impact our civilization far faster than climate change will. And the relationship between money and energy seems to be in large part missing from accomplished there in companies with the capability to move our conversation. Richard Heinberg wrote a very good book just a few years ago called Our Renewable Future. And it basically says that machinery move fluids, refine complex chemistries, store energy and do other things that may have a role in a climate positive future. Who knows, others are going to dig their heels in and slow this thing down as much as they damn can that we'll be lucky if we can replace, you know, half of the energy we get from fossil fuels with renewables. And the logical consequence of that is that we'll have half as much energy to run our civilization with a whole lot more people. And I, It just, you know, I asked, I think his name was Ken who said that there's all these as much value all the way down the slide. But she's walked into that technology is ready to go. All these renewable technologies ready to go. And I hear this from people all the time and I never hear any details. I never hear what the technology. There's other arenas of action. There's international discussion outside of the cop about killing fossil fuel subsidies and there are arguments for keeping them jazz who's going to produce them? How can they be scaled up within the next decade or two, we're back into the game of not just persuasion or education, but power. It just, you know, it just seems, you know, I still get the feeling, as well informed as everybody in this group is, I still get the feeling we're missing the big picture and that. And the big picture that's going to probably lead to a very rapid collapse. I'm going to push back on you at a couple of dimensions. First of all, my listening to these calls is very different than yours. I'm hearing plenty of talk about the things that you say you're not hearing about. Other people, you know, can say what you're hearing. But for me, it's a very different. Christine, is your hand up again, or is that from before conversation than the one that you seem to hear? The other is, okay, please. Yeah, I mean that the things you're saying are not out there, are out there. There's detailed work on transitions. People here have already said it's about power, but it's also about systems change. And so I think part of what makes this hard is not only strategies. Mark, just one comes to mind. Blank his name. Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University has done national plans for just about every country on the planet and every state in the United States in specific detail about how we get from here to there. Saul Griffith, you'll hear this afternoon, if you join, has done that as well. At the scale of, you know, how. How much steel does it take to build the new technology, to do what we need to do? There's a lot of work. It's controversial. You can debate it. People will debate it endlessly. But in fact, there's lots of work, lots of money and lots of political action. Corporate part, you know, the fact that oil companies like Exxon want to continue pumping oil. So we can disagree. But I would encourage you to make, with all respect, John, put yourself into some different conversations and different universes, but that we're dependent on the distribution systems that enable us to just go to a nearby gas station to fuel up our cars or to turn up and check out some of this work and follow the references and decide for yourself whether it's credible or not on our thermostat and have our gas heaters come on or. But I will. I will, you know. Yeah. I got to push back on you to say that it's not happening. It certainly is. Is it happening fast enough? No. Is it sufficient? No. Will we face serious damage? Very likely. As planetary civilization? Yeah. But it's not like we're going to run out of energy because of this. Sheikh Zaki Amani, who was the foreign minister of OPEC, said in the early 1970s, if any of you may remember the oil crisis of those times, he said the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones. The petroleum age isn't going to end because we run out of petroleum, but it is going to end. Peak oil is an important concept, but it's not the only story here. Fossil energy is going to be our electricity. Come on. And to change the system, the distribution outcompeted for a wide variety of reasons as far as running out of energy and efficient system so that PG&E connects up. Solar is the solution, but it's intermittent. It's not a solution for people who need air conditioning late in the evening when the sun is going down. Societal collapse. I realize I'm running out the clock here. If you look at California over the past 50 years, per capita energy use in the United States has doubled in that interval. Per cap, I should say electricity use. Per capita electricity use has doubled nationally in California, it's flat. It has not increased over 50 years. Now, I got to tell you, not all of you live in California, but I'm here and I've got lights and heat and computers and televisions and all sorts of things on running on electricity. I am not suffering in any way because we are twice as efficient as the rest of the United States. In other words, high quality of life. I mean, it's a complicated system. I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah, and you guys know that. So I just want to emphasize bust that one. The solar is intermittent story is a canard from the industry. We have storage energy. So the correlation of energy use and quality of life debunked a long time ago. We have multiple sources of energy. We have economies that are running on renewable energy and then we'll wrap up from there. So I want to. I'm going to change the topic a little bit to something personal like I did last month when I asked all of you to think of me when I was going to be hosting a virtual forum on equity and land use planning and the community where I live and that I was terrified about how it was going to go. So I want to thank all of you who thought of me. I know Gil did because he told me. How'd it go, Heather? It went very well. We had 90 people show up to a Zoom call for 90 minutes. And the first not impractical. It's a story that we're told it has to be developed. Two results. One is we're going to put together a timeline of the history of systemic racism in just this community. As a public education. It doesn't pre exist, but California has been working, working on this for the past. I know. And it's shut it. You know, it's shutting down the nuclear power plant, what. Whatever it's called, patient tool for the whole community so people can actually understand that it's providing some of the backup. And when there, you know, history of the black indigenous people of color communities here, the Pacific Islander community has a whole history here that I was ignorant of. So. So I learned some stuff. And the next week I had a meeting with the director of the planning department in the county where I live. And the public information officer wanted to let them know that we'd had this forum. They were thrilled. I was expecting them to be a little bit disgruntled that we'd like stirred the pot in this way. They were just overjoyed, thanked us for taking on the topic, acknowledge that they've done a terrible job of including their blackouts. People have problems and there's backlash. And, you know, we have to deal with the complexity of the challenges of transitioning, not only developing these new technologies, but actually historically underserved and underrepresented people offered all their help to whatever comes forward. And so connecting them to our homes and our businesses. Well, we have two things. We have two things emerging in the emergent field. Maybe a citizens assembly that will help to create more balance of power in land use decision making. It won't be overrun with developers and building industry folks, and that we might begin to have a greater community awareness of how systemic racism is active in our community. I think the good news is that lots of folks in lots of jurisdictions are well at work on that today. I live in the Pacific Northwest where when Oregon and Washington were turned into states, black people were. Were precluded from moving here. Jerry knows this. Yes, but it's not going to happen instantly. Of course it's not going to happen instantly. And for the folks, it's in Oregon law. So again, I just want to say, folks who complain at Biden for saying, how can you dare to have more coal production right now if you shut down the coal industry completely tomorrow, which you can't do, obviously would be a disaster. There has to be transition. I just took an experiment. It went well. It seems to be having ripple effects. And thank all of you for listening to me. I feel like you're my. Even though I Hardly know any of you personally. I just feel like you're my little support group when I try to step outside the box with some new idea to shake things up here. I only know to just shake it up a little bit where I live. Shake it up, Heather, that's what you've been doing as long as I've known you. I appreciate it. Thank you for raising this. You called it a change of topic, but it's not to my mind. I mean the meeting was about systemic racism. It wasn't about energy and climate futures. But the question is how do you transition Fast, not slow. How do you do it? Thorough, not so window into the process of change and how copy smile. How do you do it? Inclusive and not segregated and et cetera. Conversations evolve and this how the seeds that you planted in one meeting showed up. All of these big story ideas have practical concerns. It's one of the reasons that things take time in institutions. As damnably frustrating as that is. There's lots of little bricks up in some completely other meeting, some other place. Who could have envisioned it? I said at the start of the call that we're going to talk about this four letter word plan and we haven't really. But that's the sort of thing you don't plan. That's the sort of thing you cultivate and create the conditions for something to emerge. So thank you for doing that and for sharing that with us. We've just got a few minutes left. I'm not going to have time to call on anybody else. I apologize for that. But I want to say two things with you. Make two requests really by way of closing. One is this is our next to the last session of the year. I had planned out this series as a 2021 series takes to build the wall. But you don't get there unless you say we're going to do this. And I'm giving a lot of thought to what to do next. And so I'm going to invite your and we're going to commit the, you know, our lives and our trust and our sacred honor and the energy and resources of our institutions to do this and figure out a way to do it faster and better and more equitably and more so yeah, practical concern ideas, your feedback, your suggestions about what we what you would like to see in these conversations or something different, if it's different topics, different formats, You know, one of the ideas come up is a reading group that dives deep into the dawn of everything kind of process. Please, please mute if your mic is open. No, I'll just Please mute if your mic is open. Thank you. And so I'll, as I always do, I'll be sending out a survey, hopefully later today with some new questions in it. I'd invite you if you can take a few turns. Yes, but that's not a barrier to doing anything, which is the way it's often thrown up. That's why, pardon me, not moments to respond to that and give me your thoughts. If that's not a convenient format, email me, call me up. I'd love to hear your, your, your. Your thoughts. Your personal jumped on you because I just hear that line using that kind of way, I'm going to go to needs, your desires, what you'd like to do in shaping to Josh Harrison and then Eckhart and then Stuart. I just, just wanted to build on that concept just a little bit. I mean one of this and other formats of conversations with this group and hopefully rippling well beyond the other. As I've mentioned in previous calls, I'm finding myself increasingly doing not just the corporate strategy work that I've been doing for the past 30 years, but working one on one with people who are leaders or emerging leaders in the realms of concerns that we share here. I'm calling this trim tab for trim tabs using Bucky's image of the trim tab. The little rudder that moves the big rudder that moves the ship. So I'm finding that I'm valuable in service to people who are leaders inside of organizations, outside of organizations, what have you, the things that we can talk about. It's basically the psychopathology of corporate we're trying to move the world. So if either if this is something that you might the corporate existence where in fact you're rewarded for sociopathic behavior be interested in or if you know people who might be interested in. I would welcome hearing from you having your referrals or invitations to them because I see that as being an increasing and the more sociopathically behave, the more you're rewarded. Part of my work over the coming years and a place where I can add value that's kind of, you know, encapsulated in the phrase it wasn't personal, it's just, it has the kind of ripple effects that Heather was just illustrated for us. So thank you for that reminder. You can save the chat using the three dots at the lower right hand corner of your chat screen. We will not send out the chat. That's for you to save. We will post the recording of this call as soon as we can. We're a little slow on the production side of things. We're hopefully getting better at that. Thank you again for your presence and your attention and for a rich conversation and for all that you're doing in the world. Business. Really? What does that really mean then? I would also suggest that the oil companies themselves really are a target we have to look at. Because if you think about the. I think it's a list of 70 companies that have laid in 80, 75, 80% of the Planetary greenhouse gas load. That's a much more finite way to look at it than everything is beyond our control. It's so large how we're going to manage it. It is, but I want to add a little bit of salt to that soup, Josh. There's like 100 companies represent 7, 70% of global emissions. But it's not just the companies. It's the companies and their customers, which is us and the Institute buy from and support in various ways. So the chain of connection, it's an important one. But we also have, within living memory, different chains of connections from the customer side as well. I mean, we're, you know, sad. Sad to say. I'm a member of a group that. I'm not alone here, that used to return bottles when I was a kid. I didn't think that was a bad thing. I didn't think I was socially deprived. I actually thought it was a cool way to earn a little bit of money when I could collect them. Thank you. Josh Eckhart. Oh, hi. I just unmuted. I guess one of the questions I have, and I'm assuming this information is out there, and it should be more transparent if it's not, is that what exact profile is with respect to gas and its combustion and petroleum and its combustion is out there? I mean, obviously there's greater efficiencies of cars marginally since 1985 or whatever, but as opposed to not burning it and taking petroleum and using it as plastic products. And I'm assuming that's out there, there's some agreement on that. And if that's there, then people should be able to be educated about their addiction or about their dependency or codependency. And then by contrast, perhaps studying the potential value for having the faith that in the future there could be even cleaner, better plastics that we could be using instead and that they could be in trust for the future, you know, generations who will have ownership of those grounded potential plastics. Yeah, well, there's. There's work. There's lots of work underway on that Eckhart, Bucky Fuller used to talk about oil as the hundreds of millions of years accumulation of coiled sunlight freeze and vegetation is remarkably valuable. Complex chemistry in fossil fuels. Why would you burn that just for a quick release of energy? I mean, you could heat your house by burning your sofa. You could heat your house by burning your paycheck. It has thermal value, but it has information value that's much greater than its thermal value. Some of the chemical companies, I think it's dupontis one of them set a goal some years ago of 25% of their plastics products coming from renewable sources, biological sources. So that game is in motion. You probably get there only partly by persuading people it's a good idea to buy better products. You get there partly by delivering them better products, which is why we've seen the electric vehicle revolution take off so rapidly with, with Tesla's step into the market. Stuart, got your hand up. And then I want to ask. There's a lot of people who haven't spoken yet. I want to give you a chance before we wrap up the call to do that. Stuart, with you. Great. Quickly. Thank you. Gil, I just wanted to punctuate the point you made about your friend who started a consultancy in the oil and gas industry. I assume she's of similar values than you. And I just wanted to say that I spent many years railing against the. The legal system where I practiced law for a number of years. And it wasn't until I realized that so many of the people that I was railing against were doing the best job they could based upon their own thinking. I think it's real important to think about getting into the tent because I've been active in the American Bar association for years and you know, and I can't say I can't how many, how many. How many positive impacts I've had as a result of kind of being friends with folks as opposed to being enemies. Thank you. Another variant of that story. One of the phenomena going on now is that major corporations and major financial institutions are scrambling to hire sustainability professionals. They're going from departments of two or three people to departments of 50 or 20 people. They can't find people. They certainly can't find senior people. There's a land rush in the enemy, right? Corporate America, fossil fuel industry and so forth to get sustainability brains aboard. Now, is some of that for Greenwash? Probably. Is some of that sincere recalibration of risk and opportunity and the future they're moving into? Probably. Fred Warren. Oh, I jumped to the head there. So I don't know if people are aware, but every car company in the world has pretty much declared that they will be electric only cars by 2035 at the latest. Many have said 2030, which is this whole discussion about fossil fuels. They're very well aware that they're on the chopping block, in my opinion. They know it's coming. They know electric cars are the wave of the future. Paris has outlawed internal combustion engines in the city environment. I believe starting in 2025, that's three years. You will not be able to drive an ICE car into the city of Paris, France. That Paris, there's one in California. It has to be electric, so they know it's coming. The amount of investment money, what is it? BlackRock, I think it's called BlackRock Ventures. Something like $7 trillion of their money is going into solar and renewable energy. I'll correct you on that one, Brad. It's a large number. 7 trillion is their assets under management in total. Oh, okay. Sorry. But yes, money is moving rapidly. Yes, it is happening. I just want to put a little bit of hope into the conversation. I know these calls. I usually hang up from them and for about five minutes, I'm like, oh, crap, we're all doomed. This is the end. I might as well just, you know, be complete heathen and spend all my money. Don't give any to my daughter because she's not even gonna be around. And. But then I let that go and. And my mood shifts, and I realized there are some very positive things happening. It just depends where you're focusing your attention. What are you reading? What are you looking at? What are you Googling? Where are you getting your information from? There are some very encouraging signs. Yeah, I'm fascinated, Brad, that you leave the call in that kind of mood, because I hear from other people, they leave the call in a very opposite mood. There's a wide range of moods that people are leaving with. And so. So it's partly what we're speaking about here. It's partly what you're listening in this conversation, and as you say, what you choose to expose yourselves to as a contribution to mood management, let me invite you all to a webinar this afternoon that's humbly titled the most optimistic climate chat you'll hear this year. It's Bill McKibben in conversation with Saul Griffith, MacArthur fellow and an inventor. It's. I'm not sure the time, but it's sometime this afternoon. You can find the details of that link. Different mood. This is going to be focused on the momentum and the possibility. And if you know Sol at all, this is technically grounded all the way down, substantially analyzed and engineered. Have a look at that. Anybody who hasn't spoken yet would like to speak. Or we can just take a moment or two to just be quiet and absorb what we've talked about so far. John, I'll come to you in just a minute. Let's take a moment in quiet first. Michelle Horowitz is speaking through his T shirt. John duvall, thank you, Gilbert. I take my hand down. It's discouraging to me. I feel like I'm very much in a group of like minded people in terms of the concerns, yet I still feel rather isolated in this crowd because nobody ever talks about peak oil. In my opinion, peak oil is going to impact our civilization far faster than climate change will. And the relationship between money and energy seems to be in large part missing from our conversation. Richard Heinberg wrote a very good book just a few years ago called Our Renewable Future, and it basically says that we'll be lucky if we can replace half of the energy we get from from fossil fuels with renewables. And the logical consequence of that is that we'll have half as much energy to run our civilization with a whole lot more people.