Heading for Extinction

introduce myself, but you can start off. Welcome everybody. So welcome everybody, really appreciate that you've come out tonight. What is it, Saturday? On a Saturday night, precious Saturday night. And I came to this talk 2 months ago and it changed me, so it may or may not change you, but little pre-warning. This is Suzanne, and Suzanne is very active in the Malvern Extinction Rebellion group. I'm sure you've all heard of Extinction Rebellion, but you'll know more about it by the end of the evening. And I— yeah, toilet stops off the stairs. Practicalities will go until the talk will be until— well, the talk is in two halves, so the first half— okay. Great, thank you. Yeah, the talk— I'll explain as I get going, I'll explain more, but it's in two halves, so we start off with one bit, we take a break, and another bit. The whole thing including the break will probably be about an hour and a half or so, roughly. So before I actually get started on the talk, I don't know how many of you can see this really well, but this is a very interesting website that's called World Omitors. And it connects to data throughout the world, so it is actually current real-time data. So for those of you who can see this well, you can actually see the CO2 emissions going right now at this moment in the planet. You can also see the forest loss and, and land and soil erosion So I thought if somebody has— several of you have pen and paper, so I'm wondering if you could write down the forest loss right now, which stands at 3,658,419. So 3,658,419. We're going to check in with that at the end of the talk. And just while we're talking, see how much forest we've lost. I find the carbon too much to manage. So that's just a little thing. I'm just going to turn this around for one second just to get the presentation back up, and then I will carry on. So it's a bit of winging it here with the technology that we have. None of the slides are like like you have to see them. They're not that desperate, but please feel free if you want to move around some or whatever. Hopefully that angle is more or less all right. And then I've got my little mouse to advance things, which I think— there, there we go. So let me get started properly. So I want to thank Satya Robyn and Caspar and everybody at the temple for having us be here. Yes, my name is Suzanne Savage. I'm a university lecturer at Birmingham City University. I'm a teacher. And I'm rather new to this environmental activism stuff. Only a few months before Satya, I realized that basically we're in deep trouble with the planet. And sometimes this can be a little bit difficult for younger people. So it's really important to understand that some of the science that we're going to talk about is pretty harsh. We're not in a good position with the planet. The good thing is that later we talk about all the things we can do about it. Yeah? So, you know, we'll start off with that and see how we get along with this. So I will see— That is Andy calling about the computer, so I am going to take this. I'm so sorry. Hi, Andy. Andy? Yes, I'm on. It doesn't have VGA either. Come back then, darling. We're going to get on with it. Cheers, bye. So his laptop doesn't have it either. So we're just going to be stuck with this, I'm afraid. And I should have had my sound off, but I'm actually glad I took that call. So I am putting my sound off now. Very embarrassing to have the TARDIS go off in the middle of a talk. And I will say, you have to have special training to do this talk. So I've done the special training, but you're actually my first group. So, um, I will do my best. But the first thing I'd like to do is, as I said, we're going to do a little bit of interaction with each other at a couple different times in this, and I'd like to start off now. And I'd like you to turn to somebody who you maybe don't know as much as somebody you do know as much. If you have somebody like that, and just talk with them for a few minutes about what brought you here today. What's your motivation for coming to this? What are you feeling right now? So I'm just going to give you that time to share. We have a thing that we do with XR for big group things One person holds their hand up and then other people hold their hands up and then everybody knows. But we won't be doing a lot of that tonight, so you don't have to worry about it. Right, so at least you have a little bit of sense that different people come here for different reasons. But getting to know each other a little bit. So what I want to start off with, and I just need to keep checking that things are happening on my screen. I feel a bit strange, I can't see my screen. So, telling you just a little bit about Extinction Rebellion now. I'm going to go into it in the second half of the talk, but just to let you know, what's really, really important to us is that we are a nonviolent direct action organization. We are absolutely 100% committed to nonviolence. We do a lot of training to make sure that whenever we're doing any kind of action that we are peaceful. Peaceful and loving, and that's really important to us. We're ordinary people with ordinary jobs. We have teachers, we have doctors, we have nurses, we have dentists, we have cleaners, we have receptionists, we have everybody. I'm always interested in the newspapers. They always talk about, "Oh, those unwashed jobless people." Everybody has jobs. We're just like you. We've just decided that the time has come now to really step up and to do something called rebellion, which sounds really scary. So we want to try to save humanity. There we go. So there's a big problem that actually all of us are in denial about how bad the ecological crisis is. You probably don't need me to tell you about greenhouse gases. I am going to tell you about that a bit because I'm going to get into the science so you really understand what's going on. But we actually know that we're heating up the atmosphere. We know that climate change is real. And we're all— we know that everybody knows the Amazon's been burning recently and things like that. But what's not happening is an understanding of just how critical the situation has become. And there's like this wall between our knowledge that our lifestyles are destroying the planet and our actions to do something about it. So, so this talk is all about confronting that, and that can be actually quite an emotional process to go through. So what we find is that it's almost like going to the doctor and being told that you have cancer. And there's a whole process that you go through with this. There's grief, there's anger, there's denial, all those different things that you go through. And I know Satya has written about a couple of these things in her blog, and it's this whole process. And, and you get a lot of conflicting emotions when you're talking about the fate of humanity and the fate of planet. But actually, deep down inside, it's like we kind of knew we had cancer before we went to the doctor. You know, we knew that something was desperately wrong. And so the doctor giving you the diagnosis, which is basically what I'm going to give you tonight, is actually a chance to— okay, we know what the problem is, we can name it, and we can hopefully do something about it. And that's the whole idea of Extinction Rebellion. We're not going to go quietly. Into the night. We are going to do everything we can to try to turn things around before it's too late. So as I said, the talk is going to be divided into— oh, and I've got this last part here. There actually becomes a kind of relief when you know that you can do something. So you may go through a lot of emotions tonight, but hopefully the idea that actually it doesn't have to end this way will will give you a kind of galvanizing thing to move forward. So we're going to start off with the science. It's going to be very factual, very much about what's going on in the climate. I have to say I'm not a scientist. As I said, I'm a teacher, but all the facts and information I'm using are widely available in UN documents and research papers and things like that. And for all the facts that I give, I do have the sources. If you want to know about any of it, I'm happy to share that with you afterwards. But I'm not going to pretend that I'm a scientist who can explain every little bit of it. But I'll do my best, you know, to make sense of it. So that'll be the first part. And then the second part is about Extinction Rebellion and what we're trying to do to make a difference. So that's how it's going to work tonight. So the first thing in the first half is we're going to look at the climate and the ecological crisis. And this is the thing, this little planet— you've probably seen posters that people have up, you know, "There is no planet B." And there really isn't another planet. We have nowhere else to go. The only place in the universe that we can exist and life as we know it can exist is on this very fragile little biosphere around our planet. And if that goes, Not only do we go, but all life as we know it in the universe goes. We're on this thin little edge, and the problem is, is that all of our actions are destroying it. We're destroying the climate around us. We're also— it didn't go forward, did it? Yeah, we're destroying all of the climate. We're destroying the ecology, so not only the climate as in the weather, but we're also with trees, with animals, with the fabric of life, we're destroying that. And what that means is we're destroying our future. We're actually the only species in 4 billion years on this planet who can understand that it is facing imminent extinction. No other species has been able to grasp that that's coming. We can. The question is, is being able to grasp that, can we do anything about it? Are we actually going to be able to stop it? So we're going to first look at what's happening with the climate and how that works. So this is something that is probably fairly familiar to you, so I'm not going to spend loads of time on this. But you know how they talk about greenhouse gases? The greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide and methane, and then there's some water vapor, like clouds up there. And this has always existed around the Earth as long as there's been life. And what these naturally occurring greenhouse gases do is they act like a little blanket on the Earth. So the sun is bringing down all this warmth, and it hits the Earth, and these naturally occurring greenhouse gases— come on up, Andy, that's fine— these naturally occurring greenhouse gases keep some of that heat in, and so keep it nice and warm for life on Earth. And this is, for example, why they think that life can't exist on Mars, is because there's not enough of this atmosphere around it to hold the heat in. So some amount of these is naturally occurring and is, is what we need to keep things going. But what's happening is we're putting more of these into the atmosphere, so that nice cozy little blanket that we've got around us has become a very thick parka. So when the sun is beaming in all that energy, the Earth heats up and it can't escape back out into space. Some of it has always escaped escaped into space, and now it's being held in. So if you can imagine in your house, if you've ever had— if you've got really sunny windows and the sun is beaming into the house and it's all shut up, it gets quite hot, doesn't it? And that's exactly what happens to Earth. The sun can come in, but the heat can't go out. And that's why they call it the greenhouse effect, because effectively that's what it is. I remember it used to confuse me. I used to think, well, if there's more stuff in the atmosphere, maybe it will deflect the sun, you know, so maybe the sun will come and bounce off this. But apparently it doesn't. The sun— the heat still penetrates through it, but then it can't get back out, or not enough of it anyway can get back out to keep us operating at the way that we've been operating. So that is kind of, in a very quick nutshell, what climate change is through emissions. And then, this is just to show you, and this I would really encourage if you can't see very well, come and see this, because this is probably the most important image of the entire thing. What this is here is this is 2,000 years ago. This is a graph of the carbon dioxide, CO2, from 2,000 years ago, and you can see it fluctuates a little bit. Now, so there's always some change in it through all sorts of natural processes. Yeah? Right there is when we discovered fossil fuels and we started burning them. So that's what we say the beginning of the Industrial Age is there. And look what's happened. That's our problem. And when people try to say, "Oh, well, climate change is really complex," and everything else. No, this is actually really straightforward. We are up here over— today we are over 400 parts per million, where 280 is where we should be. And that graph has not tailed off. Can I— sorry, I'm really— fossil fuels, is that coal? Yes, yes, thank you for asking. Yes, fossil fuels are coal and are gas and are all the oil reserves that are then made into all kinds of different petroleum products. So that could be petrol for your car, diesel for your car, but also you have to think all the plastic things we have. You know, we've been talking about— I think everybody knows recycling plastics is a problem. Those are all made from petroleum products, from oil in the ground, from fossil fuels. And so even manufacturing those Plastics lets off carbon. And one of the problems we have in Worcestershire is we are not recycle— we're not able to recycle all the plastics, so they're burning them. So they're actually taking all the plastics that you're so carefully sorting, many of them are going and being burned. And so again, all that is going up, that carbon dioxide is going up. Supposedly they filter back the nasty stuff, which they may or may not, But certainly the carbon dioxide's gone. It's gone up there. So fossil fuels are all those carbon-based fuels that basically run our entire world economy, with the exception of like wind and solar power and the renewables, and wave power in some cases. But all the things that— since this is what kicked off the Industrial Age, this is where we could have machinery, because we— before that it was like, how many horses can can you hook up to something and get the horses to pull the plows. But once you could burn the coal, that's when we had our first tractors. And all that coal that we burned, it's the carbon dioxide, more than the pollutants. We have, of course, problems with our lungs with pollutants, and there's been a lot of talk about that in cities with diesel pollutants and things like that. Those are very bad for us. But the big problem with the climate is that carbon dioxide that gets released when those fossil fuels are burned, and it just goes up there and sits up in the atmosphere. Does that feel clear to people? Yeah? Feel free if there's something like that that needs clarification. If we're using things like wind power and wave power and stuff, would that still cause a problem with greenhouse? It would not. It would not. Wind power, wave power, all of those sorts of renewable energies don't create any kind of carbon whatsoever. There might be some carbon in the manufacture of the wind tower and things like that, but then all the energy that it creates for us— solar power, all of that— is completely carbon-free. What about nuclear power? Nuclear power is a real challenge. It does not create as much carbon as, say, burning fossil fuels. The problem is, is the waste and what's happening with that. And I don't know if you've heard, but the Fukushima plant in Japan that we had all the problems with a few years ago, they now have to dump radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean because they've got a million gallons of radioactive water and they can't store it. Fukushima anymore, so they're going to release it into the Pacific. So that is the problem with nuclear. Thank you. Yeah. So this, I think, is what it really comes down to. This next graph shows us then what's happening with global temperatures over a period of time. And what you can see— this one only starts at 1850, so this was the start— of what we consider to be the Industrial Revolution with the burning of fossil fuels. And you can see temperatures do vary year to year, absolutely, but you can see that after 1980 it's on a very steep curve. And that was that same steep curve that you saw on the previous slide. As the carbon dioxide went up, so do the temperatures. The only difference here is the land temperature and the ocean temperature. The ocean temperature lags. It takes longer to heat up. Water heats less quickly. So you can see people who say, "Well, we don't really know if climate change is happening." This is simple physics. As the carbon goes up, the temperature goes up. There's no difference. So what we're seeing then as a result of all this is the planet is starting to warm. So this is a very short little video that I've got that starts from 1950-something and it goes up to 2013. So it's actually a bit old now, it's 6 years old, but you will see the yellow is starting to warm a little bit, and as the color gets darker and darker, you'll see the warming that's happening. So hopefully this will work. Yes. So over the years you'll see that it's just gradually, gradually, gradually— and look at it now. So that's just since 1954. That's the changes that have happened. And the areas that are the worst are the poor— regions. You notice that? We think that it's probably happening down in the Antarctic as well, but we don't have nearly the same kind of instruments to monitor it as closely. So it's always looking up here, but we have two poles covered in ice. And so the fact that the polar regions are warming the fastest is the biggest problem for us, actually. And what we see is that we've known that this is happening for a while. There's something called the IPCC, which is set up— a governmental body that was set up— I have it somewhere in my notes, I can't remember when now. It was set up in about 1980. All the governments of the world formed together and they said, "You know what? This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we think we're going to be having a problem." In 1980, they said that. And they have been putting out reports every few years saying, "We've got a problem. We've got a problem. We've got a problem." Since 1980. Do you remember that graph I showed you a couple of pages ago? Since 1980, how emissions have gone up. So their most recent report was out in October last year, so less than 12 months ago, and they have said that if we do not limit global warming to 1.5 degrees average, we're going to have a very huge problem and we need drastic action. So we're being told this, our governments are being told this, we need drastic action. Have we had drastic action? No, we're all sort of carrying on. All of us, myself included. We're kind of just like headlong into this. And I think this, this needs a little bit of unpicking, this 1.5 degrees Celsius. Because, you know, if it's 16 degrees or 17 or 18 degrees out, do you notice much difference with that? Yeah, it's not a lot of difference. So it's really hard for us to grasp that 1.5 degrees of temperature rise is such a big deal. And I think this is one of the problems, because when we keep talking about, "Oh, we have to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees," it doesn't sound like much to us. It really doesn't sound like much. Why is that a big deal? This graph is really difficult to understand. I did not like this graph very much. But this is sort of showing a normal temperature curve where— because the— what we're talking about are the average temperatures. So average temperatures. So temperatures go up and down between night and day, between spring and fall, between summer and winter. But when we shifted even a degree, we get way more time in the higher zones. And we actually— what's amazing is the next slide, I think, is easier to grasp. This is average temperature over time, and this is where human civilization starts, here. And you can see that actually the temperature has been relatively stable in those 10,000 years that we've actually started to build houses and proper structures and the pyramids of Egypt and all that sort of thing. 10,000 years ago, it's been relatively stable. And if you see— I know it's really hard to see on here— this yellow line is 2 degrees worth of ° of warming. And if you see how far away we are, we've never been anywhere near that. And what we are on track right now is to get to 4° of warming. And to put that in perspective, you've heard about the ice ages? Like a long time ago when everything was ice? It was 4° cooler and that resulted in the ice ages. So the difference between the Ice Age and the climate that we know is the difference between what we know now and what we're going to be by the end of the century. Except we're going the other direction. We're not going back to the Ice Age. We're going to the hot stuff. So, Ice Age, no crops would grow, everything was covered in ice, yeah, saber-toothed tigers, all of that. We're headed for the other side of that. We're headed headlong for it. We have been hotter in the past, and this is sometimes what climate skeptics will talk to you about, is that, well, yes, the climate's been hotter in the past, but yes, that's when the Tyrannosaurus Rex was on the planet. Yeah, that's when all these lush green things were growing everywhere that are now the fossil fuels. It's all of the trees and the plants and the animals during the dinosaur ages, basically, that are buried underground, that turned into coal and oil and things. That's what we call them fossil fuels because they're fossilized of the living things in those times. So yes, the dinosaurs did okay with it. We will not. All the things that are around the Earth now will not do okay with this. And that's why this little tiny amount actually means everything. It's the difference between civilization and not. So this is just some of the extreme weather events that are going on. I mean, you can't get off the news with it now, all of these extreme events. This was last year in Queensland. Australia, they lost half a million cattle. They had extreme droughts, the land was really, really hard, then they had flooding like they've never had before and all these cattle drowned. This is a city in India last year called Chennai, and this city actually ran out of water. An entire major city in India had no water. People had to queue for hours and days to to get water. In this same area of India, they've been having temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius. 5-0. Remember when we were baking when it was like low 30s? Yeah? This was the terrible forest fires in California. This is Paradise, California. 85 people lost their lives in a wildfire that just obliterated a village in an hour. This is the hurricane, Hurricane Idai in Mozambique a year ago. We also had Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas a few days ago, which had the strongest winds ever recorded in the Atlantic. You know, we keep getting the strongest, the biggest, because the climate is changing and these things are only going to get worse. I happened to pull this off the internet just last night. If I can get it to play for me. This is Spain on Thursday. This was just Thursday. These are floods raging through a village in Spain because they had more rainfall in 24 hours than they've ever had since records began. So it's just flash flooding on a scale we can't even dream of. They also had— I was going to bring the picture but I didn't get it— they had hail at the end of August in Spain, this high. Hail. It's like 40 degrees and hail. This is what's happening out there. And we in Britain have been sheltered from the worst of it, but we won't be for long. These are some of the things that are happening now. We had the worst rainfall in— what was it?— 248 years in 2014 here. The heatwave this summer has already killed 70,000 people. In Europe. Now, can you imagine anything else where we said to you 70,000 Europeans died? Imagine it was a terrorist attack. But it was just the heat, so somehow that makes it okay. We've got massive problems with our insects, our Our insects have declined in the UK by more than 30%, and maybe that means that you don't have as many of the creepy crawlies coming through your window, which feels kind of alright, but without insects our world will end. And we've had a 30% decline, worldwide 40% decline. Without insects we can't pollinate any crops, we can't eat. We know that in the heatwave last year, and this is last year's, it was hottest summer on record in the UK. This year's was the hottest summer on record in England. Our accident and emergency department numbers were up, and we saw a lot of people are dying, not from like heatstroke, but all sorts of other things that happen because of the heat. We don't have air conditioning very much in this country, and the heat is going to keep going up, and we're going to keep having problems with this. So the, the problems are starting to happen in England now, and in the UK now, and they're only going to get worse. So what happens? What happens to the Earth if we continue to heat it up and we don't take any action? If we just carry on with sort of business as usual, what we're going to find is that the sea levels are starting to rise. Think of all the coastal cities in Britain. Think of Bournemouth, Plymouth, and London, which is not seaside, but because the tidal Thames, it actually functions like seaside. They reckon that the Thames barriers are going to fail within a couple of decades. 6.8 million people in London are going to be displaced. We have also sorts of problems with sea rises, and that's in the UK. Places like the Maldives are just going to disappear. Bangladesh is going to disappear under the waves. We're going to be having all of these stronger atmospheric things like these hurricanes, like some of the storms that we've started to see in the UK. Those are going to get worse. We're going to have more deaths due to heat stress. And then what we're going to start to get is we're going to start to get crop failure, because when temperatures get too high, we can't grow grains anymore. We had a problem last year that we lost almost 50% of the vegetable crop here in the UK because of the heatwave. Now, you probably didn't notice that because of the import things that we have We've brought products in and maybe they were a little bit more expensive, but we carried on. That's counting that we've had bad weather here, but somewhere else they've had good weather. So we've been able to bring in stuff from them. That is going to increasingly be a problem. And once we don't have enough food, that's when things get really serious. Ja? So we start to have mass migration. You think we've got a problem with people coming across the Mediterranean now? It's only going to get worse. It's only going to get worse. And the idea that on our island that we're somehow immune from this is simply not true, because it's going to be hitting us as well. Did I? Ah, yeah, I was conscious of— Then we've got a problem that things are even worse because there are what some people refer to as feedback loops or amplifying effects that are kicking in that are getting worse and worse. Because here we have a picture of some ice covering in 1984. You can see how much area is covered by ice. This has been reduced down here in 2012. You can see how much little more ice there is and how much more water there is. And the problem with this is that ice is white, and you all know white reflects reflects heat. Yeah? So part of what happens is the sun rays hit the ice and they bounce right back up. But as that ice melts, it's replaced by dark water. And what does black do when it's out in the sun? It absorbs the heat. So we're looking at a linear effect of carbon versus temperature. That there's more carbon in the air because— and the temperature is going to go up because of the carbon. But the problem is, is that the reduction of ice is going to accelerate that. It's going to accelerate that a lot. And so that's where we have a problem, that even if we stopped putting stuff into the atmosphere right now, this is already going to be happening. So this will carry on So even if today we put no more carbon into the atmosphere, this feedback loop is already happening because we're warmer. We're already 1.1 degrees warmer right now, and so the ice is melting. The other thing that we're only just beginning to get a grasp of— we've all been worried about the carbon that we've been producing through the use of fossil fuels. What we've worked out is that is that methane is much more potent than carbon as one of those greenhouse gases around our planet. And there's loads of methane locked into the ice in the poles. And there's loads of methane locked into the permafrost areas, which are like the areas in Siberia and up in the northern part of Canada, those Arctic areas where it never the ground never thaws, it's frozen year-round. The methane is locked in there, so as that melts, this methane is going to be let out. So again, it's not just like a straight line going up like this, it's going to go up like this, because once this permafrost starts to melt, the methane is released and it's going to get ever so much hotter. So this, this is what we're running into. And what happens with all of this— this is a very complicated diagram that I wouldn't expect anybody to understand because I can't say I fully grasp all of it myself. But these are like the major climate things that are happening on the planet. Things like, we've all heard of the jet stream, haven't we? So the jet stream is like this current of air that goes around around the globe. And the jet stream is why in Britain we have decent weather, because the jet stream holds the Arctic air off, up, up north. And the jet stream is created by the difference between the warm water around the equator and the cold water up here in the Arctic. That's going to break down as the water in the Arctic gets warmer. So the jet stream is going to be breaking down. The Greenland ice sheets are going to melt, and that is going to affect this circulation of warm water, which is going to affect things down here and affect things back up here. So all of these things link into each other. So I think it's a bit too much to grasp all of it at once, except to to say that the world's climate is hugely interlocked and interlinked, and one thing affects the other. Like, one of the things that happens is the El Niño effect. You might have heard that happens in South America. That is directly affected by what's happening to the ice down at the poles down there. And that El Niño effect is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in, in Latin America because of the climate changes that it brings. So with a 1 to 3 degree rise in temperatures, the paler things are going to kick off, and as we get hotter, they will kick off the other stuff, which will then kick off— we're looking at having not only the Arctic Sea free of ice in the summer, that's probably going to happen in the next 2 to 5 years, we're looking at having no ice up there in the winter, and all that black sea is going to be absorbing heat. That's where we're headed for. So that's the climate half of the problem. The other half of the problem is the ecology. We talked about that biosphere, that little web of life on the skin of the Earth that is so important to us, that web of living things. And what we see is that we're destroying both the land and the oceans through the whole industrialization process. We're destroying the ecosystems that animals live on. We've heard about many of of the mass extinctions that are happening. And everything about our societies are causing this. Because this is just a picture here of an average sort of field. We have them all around us, don't we? This line used to be forest. We used to be covered in forests in most of the planet. And forests have been cut down to putting crops to feed all of us. But this kind of monocrop— this is— some people refer to this as a green desert because what wildlife is there? There's very little wildlife in there. What insects are in there? We've got the most sophisticated insecticides to keep insects out. So it's green, But it's not really fulfilling the whole web of life of everything else. It's feeding us, but it's also sucking all the nutrients out of the soil. Michael Gove, who is not exactly like a radical, has said that the UK soil has 30 to 40 years of productivity left before we can't produce food on it. 30 to 40 years. 30 to 40 years. How many of you think you'll still be around, or your children, or your neighbors' children, or your grandchildren, 30 to 40 years because of this? Forests are amazing things because not only do they support support all different kinds of life. If you think of an oak tree, they say an oak tree has 500 different species living in it of insects and critters and birds and different fungi, all these different things. And the thing that forests also do, if you go back to your science classes, trees take in carbon dioxide, don't they? And what do they give off? So trees have been— they actually breathe. They talk about the respiration. They breathe. They breathe in the carbon dioxide and they put out the oxygen that we breathe. But cutting them down everywhere, cutting them down everywhere, and we're losing not only all the— if you can imagine with these Amazon fires fires. Imagine all the creatures in there. You know, we're concerned about what it's doing to the planet, but imagine all the tree frogs and little monkeys and all sorts of little— even the funny spiders. All of them are being knocked down so that we can put crops there. But the trees also create their own climate of water. They create— that's called a rainforest because there's so many trees that they give off water water and it falls back as rain. So once you cut down the trees, there's no rain and it just gets drier and drier and drier. So you've got the problem that it's no longer keeping the climate cool, it's no longer keeping the climate wet, and it's no longer creating the oxygen that we all need. And what happens in just a few few years of when you take forests like this and turn it into growing crops. Oh, that wasn't supposed to happen. I've done something funny there. I think that's gone into the wrong place. Anyway, I was going to show you it turns into a desert, and I'll show you that in just a minute. I think the next slide is is a desert. When it dries up, you get a desert. But I pulled this up yesterday. This was just the 12th of September, so just 2 days ago. This article is "The world's losing its battle against deforestation." There was a committee that was put together just in 2014 that said, "Okay, we're going to try to save the forests." And guess what? They've given up. They can't. Yeah, yeah, we're almost finished. Okay, thank you. So that's the deforestation, and that's the one— sorry— with the desert, and that's what happens. So the oceans also absorb actually a lot of carbon and a lot of heat, and as they heat up, they're not going to be able to absorb as that carbon, and warmer oceans can hold less oxygen because, you know, there's oxygen in the water, H2O, that's the oxygen. So the fish are having problems because they can't breathe in the warmer waters, so they're all going sort of northwards and southwards, and we're having all kinds of fish species, and one-third of the planet feeds itself on things from the ocean. The other thing is that there's phytoplankton in the ocean, which again is creating oxygen for us, and the phytoplankton is burning off. Those are like little plants in there. So what we're getting is— this is how the oceans are heating up. Again, we've kind of seen that graph, so I can just sort of nip through that. These are the devastating statistics of what's happening to the plants and animals and fauna on our planet. We are currently, because of our activity, a million species are threatened with extinction right now. They will be gone forever. So all of those— oops, it's definitely telling me it's time to stop. All of— that doesn't want to flip. There we go. We've inherited this world with all these lovely animals, and all of them are at risk. So we're talking about a very reduced world from the world that we've grown up in. We're actually sawing the branch that we stand on, and the whole web of life is actually in danger of collapse. Our very existence— if we hit 4 degrees of warming, our very existence as a civilization is actually at threat. So We're going to take a little bit of time to let that sink in because that's some pretty heavy messages. But I'm going to be around, so I've got lots more time to answer questions and things like that for those who can stay. And if you do have to shoot off and you want to hear more from us, we've got a sign-up sheet over here, so do make sure. I'll pass that around while you talk. That's maybe a good idea. Thank you, Satya. I appreciate that. So, so, just following on from what Satya said, one of the things, you know, we do all know that the climate's a problem. And, and somewhere in me, I always thought they were going to fix it. I don't know who they were, but there's a they out there who's supposed to be looking after us. Who's kind of supposed to not let this kind of stuff happen.. And that's the thing that Extinction Rebellion says, is we are the people that we've been waiting for. We are the they who are going to fix it, and that's what we have planned to do. So I'm gonna go through a lot of this very, very quickly. You know, we feel very strongly that we have a moral obligation to act, not to wait for them, but to to be the we, for so many different reasons. Because we don't want to be the ones who were, "Well, why didn't you do something when you knew?" You know, we talk about, "We knew it in the '80s." Well, we really know it now. We really, really, really know it now. We're seeing the effects. So we can't just pass on with it. And we feel, you know, really strongly that we have moral obligations, you know, to other living human beings, obviously, and People in those cities in India where it's 50 flippin' degrees, you know, people are suffering there unimaginably already. In the Bahamas, it's been wiped out. And it's coming for us. We have— all of living beings are suffering. Future humans, to ourselves, and also for all the little critters on the planet. Not just us, we're destroying it for everybody. So And we think that's really fundamental to every justice system in the world is this idea that you have a right to self-defense. Almost every, every justice system you look at has that. And this is what we feel in Extinction Rebellion, that when we talk about breaking laws, it's because we have this moral obligation to act in self-defense. Because if we don't change things, then it's all going to be destroyed. So that's just looking at this beautiful planet and saying, "What are we doing?" So it's not this sort of thing like, you know, "Why should we fix this?" but "How can we not?" And what's amazing is when you hear politicians say, "Well, it will cost too much." If you really sit there and think about it, what is it going to cost us if we don't? So, we know that the ways of doing things have not been working. Yeah? We've had all these things. Do you remember the Rio Summit? The Kyoto Agreement? The Paris Accords? We come up with these great names for them. But do you think that emissions are going down now? We have not managed to reduce emissions. They increased 2.6% last year. We haven't even managed to level them off, let alone decrease them. This is the outrageous thing. So, so it's not working. All these big governmental things are working. And locally, how many of you have signed petitions? How many of you might have even gone to a march? How many of you are separating out your plastics really, really carefully and not getting straws and trying to turn off the lights and turn the heat down and all these little individual actions? And that graph is still going upwards. It's not helping. It's actually just getting worse. It's almost as if Everything we've done over the last 30 to 40 years has been for naught. And that is really, really heavy to take on board. That every petition you've signed, your little monthly donations— I've been giving money to the World Wildlife Fund for like 30 years trying to save pandas and, you know, things like that. And, you know, what's happening? The graph is just going up. So— and that's actually the next slide.— is the graph is still going up. This is here, that's when the IPCC— it was telling us all this— that's when they were founded. And look how it's going up since then. So Extinction Rebellion has said there are all these structural problems to why it's not working. Now, one of the things is this kind of short-term idea of democracy. Because we see it with Boris Johnson now. He's promising us money for the NHS, he's promising us money for the schools, and this whole idea that to get elected you have to promise that everything's going to get better. No politician has the courage to actually stand up and say, you know what, we're stuffed. We're actually really stuffed, and we're gonna have to have a different kind of lifestyle that we've got now. We've got to stop putting the carbon out there. We can't keep We can't keep driving our cars around. We can't keep doing this. We've got to do things radically differently. No politician has the courage because they think they won't get elected. So they're just promising you things for the next couple of years, and they think, 'Well, future governments will sort that out.' And that's what we've been doing since 1980. Somebody else out there is going to sort it out, and we are the ones who have to sort it out now. So we've got this problem with our democracy. We've got a problem with capitalism. Capitalism is a huge problem. I know that it's like, "Ooh, capitalism will solve everything." Well, there's a— the fundamental premise— I'm going to give you economics in 30 seconds— of what capitalism is, is capitalism takes a raw material, a resource of some sort, and it changes it. So it takes a tree, it cuts it down into wood, and then you carve it into furniture or make it into a house, and it's called adding value. So through our labor, we add value to that and we can sell it for money. The wood has virtually no value. The forest— nobody has a value on the forest. It doesn't actually enter into the system as something that is valued until it is cut down and made into something. That's what capitalism does. So otherwise, there's, you know, you just— the Amazon, what's it worth? How does our system value it? You know, we talk about the fact that we've got problems because fields are not being kept properly for the water to run off, and that's where we're getting more flooding in this area because of the way the water runs off. But, but who's responsible for that? Who owns that, if you will? Who's making money off that? There's no money to be made off of a field and things like that. So we're not— capitalism doesn't value these natural things that keep us breathing. It doesn't value trees, it doesn't value rivers. The only problem capitalism runs into is we might give you a fine if you polluting the river. And the last problem that we've got is that in order to fix this, we need global action, and we're all these little countries. So you hear people say, well, the UK, we're not the biggest emitter, you know, China's the problem, India's the problem, America's the problem, you know, we only put out a tiny proportion of the need— of the world's emissions. So somehow we all have We have to work together. And we don't do that very well, I'm afraid. So, what we're saying— Oh, and this is just— I'm just going to very briefly mention this. This is actually hugely interesting because Exxon knew in 1980 what was going to happen. This is the graph that they drew in 1980 for what was going to happen to the temperatures. They knew it, and they went out and spent millions and millions and millions of pounds to convince us that climate change might not be real. That there's all this climate denial out there. Oh, you know, it's very difficult to predict the climate. It's very, very difficult. So it might not be happening. Yeah, we actually know that these guys knew it and deliberately dis-informed us for all this time. So XR is going to break the rules. And it's all okay because Greta's telling us that we need to break the rules because the rules aren't working anymore. And there are famous people in the past who have broken the rules. And don't we love Gandhi? And don't we love Martin Luther King? They weren't very popular at the time. They were seen as dangerous radicals who were upsetting the order. So these were peaceful, nonviolent activists who were questioning the way things were. And nobody liked it. But we look back and we say, "Yeah, Gandhi did a great job in India. That needed to happen." Yeah? So we look back in history and we say these people are wonderful. But at the time, their breaking the law is seen as a big problem. It's causing disruption. It's going against the status quo, if you will. But this is what we are modeling ourselves on, and it's a long tradition. The suffragettes should be up there as well. Exactly the same thing. So we are— and I think this is the part that I want to really, really focus on— our idea of civil resistance here. The first bit has got to be the commitment to non-violence. And we do a lot of training to help us in situations. And there are some lovely videos that I can share with you that are like people in the occupation in London in April, you know, meditating together and sending out peace and love to everyone, and to the police who were standing over them waiting to arrest them. And we work really, really hard to maintain our non-violence. And it will work also if we have lots and lots and lots of people. We've got a rebellion coming up in October, and we're going to send at least 20,000 people onto the streets of London. Of London. Yeah, and we're going to take over London. It's going to be ours. So we need huge numbers. Social science tells us that this works. Social science tells us that when you go to the capital city, that's where power is concentrated. So you have to go to the capital city of your country and you have to take it over. You have to say, we are going to be disruptive. We are going to break break the law, not because any of us actually really want to sit in the road, but because it's the way we can get attention. It's the way we can say to people, 'This is how important it is. We are willing to sit in the road and be arrested because we want to try to change things and save things.' And what we found is after our rebellion in April, we had Climate emergency is declared in a lot of places. A lot of the newspapers are printing more. So I'm not going to suggest at all that what we did in April has fixed the problem, but it's started it. It's made a big difference. We occupied 4 sites in April. We're going to occupy at least 11 in October. So it's absolutely going to be massive. And I'm gonna skip through some of this. This is the history of Extinction Rebellion. We've only been around for less than a year. We started in October 2018, believe it or not, and now you will see that we are in 63 countries and counting. Yeah, we've got it all over the world in less than a year because what we're doing is Works. It's where we need to go right now to get the change. So I want to skip through to make sure we get here. So I'm going to talk about the 3 demands that we have. I think these are really important. Our first one is tell the truth about the ecological crisis and declare a climate emergency. That's the one we've been working really hard on to do exactly what I was doing with you tonight saying this is how bad it is, and I wanted to acknowledge that it is a very conservative version. It's the one that we can justify at any level scientifically with no arguments. But yes, there's a lot more we could say. So we want the media— we had an amazing interview with our founder Roger Hallam a couple of weeks ago, and the guy's like, 'You have to give them hope, you have to give them hope, emissions are going down,' and he's like, 'No, No, emissions are not going down. We don't need hope, we need courage. Courage will hopefully create a hopeful future for us, but right now we need courage and we need people to know what's happening. So our first demand is tell the truth. Yeah, our second demand: we have got to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions like yesterday. So we're saying 2025, basically as soon as possible. So Theresa May said, oh yeah, we could stop reducing them in 2050, you know, because economically it would cost too much. I'm just speechless. The third one then, this is a really interesting one, and I'm not going to go into it. We have a whole lot of slides on it, but I really want people to grasp this because what we're talking about— if to get to net zero here, to try to save what's happening, we have to make massive changes. What are we going to give up? How are we going to organize ourselves? And we don't have a huge amount of confidence in the short-term politicians to do this. Now a lot of people ask us, "Well, it's fine for Extinction Rebellion to say that it's all a big problem, but how are you gonna fix it?" And we're here to say, "I don't know." We don't know. We're not scientists. We're not technicians. We're not geophysicist people. Now we're saying that we have to get together. We know that we've got to get the carbon down. So that's what we're here to do.. But other people have to decide how we can organize society. We're not going to sit here and pretend that we have all the answers of how society has to organize itself. So the idea of the citizens' assembly is it's a bit like, you know, a jury. We bring a jury of ordinary citizens together and we consider them capable of— when experts tell them what the law is, we consider them capable to judge guilt or innocence. That's like a foundation of our justice system, isn't it? So the idea of the citizens' assembly is that we bring citizens, ordinary citizens, together. It's quite a— a whole citizens' assembly takes months and months, but you bring a very representative sample of the whole population. So if you have 10% people over 70 in your country, then you have 10% over 70, and you, you look at single— how many single moms and different racial and ethnic and economic and So it's a microcosm of society. And then you present them with the problems and they come up with, "Okay, what are we going to do as people?" So we're saying we need citizens' assemblies to start thinking about, "What the heck? How are we going to do this? How are we going to get there? What do we have to sacrifice? Also, what do we have to gain?" Because we see it as losing something, and we are. We are going to lose the lifestyle we have. Whether we surrender it ourselves, whether we say we're going to try to cut off at 2025 and save things, we can surrender it that way, or we can have it ripped from us in a few more years. Either way, change is coming. And we would rather be part of the positive change. And so that's what we're inviting you to do. We're inviting you to join us. It's a hard struggle. We don't always know what we're doing. I'm not going to pretend that we're somehow experts in this. We're just average people. Andy, my colleague, is with us. You know, we're just normal people trying to figure this out. Satya Robyn has jumped on board, and we need all the help we can get. We need every person on hand to bring you gifts to us, to bring your ideas to us and bring your grief and your fear to us because there's a place for all of that. And there's a whole bunch more I can tell you about Extinction Rebellion some other time. But we really, we have what we call a regenerative culture where we have places to feel all this because we know we have to change and it's hard. And I don't know what the end road is, but I I invite you to come and travel it with us.