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so, the paradox is, if life were easy, if life's just the sort of thingthat shows up relatively easily and grows relatively easyinto what we've become, and that from where we are, we can relatively easilycontinue on on to grow, then we should expect the universe to be full of things like us. in fact, we should wonder whythere's any room for us at all. why has something elsefrom somewhere else

didn't come and take overearth before we grew here? the fermi paradox was a paradox promoted by enrico fermi in discussionswith his friend ed teller. it's where are they? if there are extraterrestrialsout there, ufos and so forth, really where are they? because even though peoplesee ufos in the sky, no one sees them land,there's no geological evidence that they left any trashhere in the distant past.

so we're not being visited byextraterrestrials comparable to us that are intelligenttechnological creatures. this is why i think the powerof the fermi paradox is so simple. where are they? how come we're not seeing them? and as a physicist, he would have quicklyjust negated the thought, well, they're all around us but they're invisible,

or they're in some other dimension,or they're just some other-- all the ridiculousness you hear now that we can be constantly visited and that they're out there,the truth is out there. the truth is out there,they're not out there. the universe is like13 billion years old. earth is four billion years old. so the universe had seven billion years before the earth even showed up.

there's been lots and lotsof time for other life to expand and colonize the universe,but it looks so dead. so the question is,why does the universe look dead? to me, it is the single most important of all scientific questions. how do you go from non-life to life? apparently, as far as we can see, there is no placein the visible universe, where some simple dead matter

has gone from just being dead matter, all the way to becomean expanding visible civilization. so, that path must be hard, in the sense that most thingsthat start along the path don't make it to the end, or at least they haven't made it so far. that's the idea of the great filter. we try to make a big pointon the difference between microbial habitabilityand animal habitability.

it doesn't take hardly anything; all you have to have is haveliquid water on the surface and you can have microbial habitability. but to have animals evolve and survive, it takes a much narrower rangeof conditions. all the different academic specialties that think aboutthese different areas of progress, the origin of life,multicellular animals, sex, intelligence, future expansions,all the intellectual areas

that think aboutthese things tend to think they aren't that hard,that it's not trivial, but it should be something that happens with a reasonable frequency. but when we add upall those usual stories into one total story,it tends to say, well, the whole filter isn't that hard. but then that runs upagainst the observation that the whole filter has to be hard,

because the universelooks dead and empty. so i mean, somebody's wrong. somebody somewhere along the line has just been a little too optimistic. my thought has always beenthat it's very difficult for any planetto remain habitable long enough to get to complexity. and complexity, i'm talkingabout something as simple as a flower, an animal,the simplest of animals.

it took our planet3.5 billion years before we got to very complex higher life. what are the blocks on the paththat could prevent that? so, simple dead matter, for example, could simply fail to startany form of life at all. it could just stay dead. simple forms of lifecould fail to elaborate to more advanced forms of life. they could say,fail to find sexual reproduction

and be able exchange genes. they could fail to find ways to organize into multi-cellular organisms, to join together into larger units. they could fail to develop brains, or they could fail to elaborate brains into the size and complexityof brains that we have. those are all failuresthat could happen along the path to at least, where we are.

and then from where we are,we could fail to continue to grow. we could destroy ourselves entirely, or we could become limited in such a way that we stop growingtechnically or economically and we find a stable scenariowhere we fail to grow. now, you might not thinkthat's such a bad thing, so some of the outcomesof failing to pass the great filter might be mildlyreasonably acceptable outcomes. we stay on the earth, we stayat a certain level of development,

we never go any farther. but relative to the other optionof expanding and growing and filling a universe,it still seems a bit of a shame. a lot of people instinctively think that the whole purpose of all this stuff is to go in a straight line to us. and as people point out,if you did this 1,000 times, you have all these differentdivergent ranges, you know? and even if you get the animals,why we evolved?

because sharks haven't evolved very much, peter works on nautiloids and they're largely unchangedin 400 million years because they don't have to. they're perfectly adaptedto their environment. they don't need to change. but complexity hasa narrow environmental window that allows it to survive. and so, complexity isdifficult to maintain

if you have an environment that's changing and rapidly changing. so you need stability,complexity requires stability. how often do you get stabilityis the major question about the frequencyof animal life in the universe. people say, well, we're a typical planet, we're on a typical star. and that's totally wrong. i mean, we're not a typical planet.

we're drastically differentthan all the other planets in the solar system,so we can't be typical. maybe you need tides,gigantic tides to make life. so this is hypothesis one now, that tides are important for life. so how do you have tides? moon. how often do we get a moon? therein comes the really rare part.

our moon obviously,in our solar system, is unique. there are other moons, but there's no other moon as largerelative to the size of the planet, nobody else has that. i mean the jupiter moons are really tiny compared to the size of it. getting our moon required a very, very low probability event. another planetesmal-- or actually,a planet, a mars-sized planet

hit the earth early in time,and it spun out our moon. but one effect of the moon's on us,besides making lunar tides, is that its helped stabilizethe spin axis of earth for a very long period of time. so the earth's spin axisis an 22 and 1/2 degrees and it's stabilized by this big gyroscope orbiting around the planet. when the earth hit that mars sized body over 4 and a 1/2 billion years ago

the re-scrambling of all this, because it produced-- a smaller earth, a mars size came together and produced a bigger earthand a really small moon. but the chemistryof both places got recycled. parts of the mars got strangled together with parts of the earth, and we ended up having a very thin crust. venus has a very thick crust.

it's so thick,it can't do the subduction. it can't go down through plate tectonics you don't have plate tectonics on venus. did that moon impact, moon forming eventproduce the conditions-- the earth-like conditions-- necessary to produce plate tectonics? and i think you have to have a moon and you have to have plate tectonics

to get life as we know it. from an astro-biology viewpoint, the occurrence of plate tectonicsis really important. i mean, is it typicalfor an earth-like planet to have plate tectonics? maybe it is. but on the other hand, if we look at our neighbors in space, they don't have them.

the concentric layers of the earth do something else for us. that gives us a magnetic fieldand without that magnetic field you're bathed in radiation from your sun. and surface life, land life-- life underwater is not affected. but you'll never get on land, you'll never have plants on land if youare totally bathed in radiation without a magnetic field.

all these factors, wecall rare earth factors, probably not many ofthem are really critical, but they are factors. so if you have the factor,well, do you have magnetic field or don't you have a magnetic field? maybe if you don't have one, maybe you'll never evolve giraffes because nasty things that happenwith the sun and wipe them out. but it's not, if you havethis you can have life,

if you don't, you don't. we get certainly undoubtedmulticellular life, there are some really interesting fossils about two billion yearsthat look like life has finally figured outhow to put itself together into bigger assemblages. but again these are fairly rare, it's not till a billion years ago that we see lots of evidenceof multicellular, like kelp,

you have algae that are out there. so that's a billion years ago. wow, that sounds like that's really old. compared to the 4.567? now we're taking almost four, little lessthan four billion years to get to something as complex as a kelp? come on. probably all the early life on earth

we would consider extremophiles, because they were livingin extreme conditions that we could not live in. and they're also very tough, too. animals are very easy to extinct. a typical animal species goes extinct in a couple million years. the really lucky ones,like sharks and nautiloids, maybe survive a couplehundred million years.

but typically those areonly a million years. microbes are almost inextricable. the analogy is the mass extinctionsare weeding the garden. and once you weed the garden,the good vegetables can grow. i've written about this, i've said, yeah, that's probably way it is. maybe you need to havesome critical number, too many, too few.

maybe you don't haveto have mass extinctions. this is just us tryingto rationalize what happened. and going back to frank drake, he said, well a mass extinction,a modern mass extinction would be a good thing. because after every past mass extinction, new types of life have come forth. but frank, the pointi was trying to make to him was that there is

a dead period, a recovery periodof millions of years. do we want to haveplanet earth five million years before things crawl back out and start-- no, you don't wanta modern mass extinction. yeah, we don't have that time. so the k-t event was the impact of a 10 kilometer-sized asteroidor comet that made a crater about 200 kilometers in diameterin the yucatan peninsula. and this, it's notterribly rare earth event,

it happens about every 100 million years. if you were looking atthis event from space, you would seethis big impact, big crater, big flash, very, very spectacular. and then the earth would turnthis uniform grey color. you're seeing mexicoblanketing the entire planet because it's shrouded--it blocked the sun for a visible period of time,at least a couple weeks. and so things that rely on the sunlight,

like plants and so forth, have a problem. and things are herbivores that eat these plants have a problem. and then there are maybepossible acid ocean changes and a variety of chemical effects which was a nasty cocktailto life on earth. rare earth to me was alwaysan environmental statement, that if life is rare,if the earth is rare, why in the world are we trashing it?

we see on tvthat we're just going to move on, that we'll move out,we’ll colonize the solar system. and [that] we'll get stellar drives, then we'll beam ourselvesfrom planet to planet, we're going to expand. what if we can't? it's just tough. doing things in space is really tough. and i view that a lotof ideas of interstellar travel are just absolute fantasy.

it may not ever be possibleusing any technology. i mean, warp drive is probably a fantasy. but there is, i thinka highly probable contingency that we will never getout of our solar system this in itself would answerimmediately the fermi paradox. maybe nobody gets out ever. there's never ever, never,interstellar travel. and right off the batpeople say, "oh, that's-- you cannot deny that possibility.

and yet that particularpossibility is never raised. so this is where rare earthcomes back into it. if we're stuck here,we ought to take care of it. global warmingand human caused climate change is an unhappy accident of there being billions of peopleon the planet and an abundant fuel sourcethat we're addicted to. fossil fuels arethe engines of our economy. and the engines of our growth

and the enginesof our population explosion, too. the problem in its mostimmediate form is carbon. coal, and oil, and gas release carbon into the atmosphere, and the molecular structureof co2 traps heat that would otherwise radiateback out to space. i think that a different way of looking at it is to-- i think, to understand

that probably fossil fuelis more important than ideology and the developmentof the last few hundred years. well, the stakes are very high, so this climate crisisis the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced. people often talk aboutglobal warming, climate change. today civilization was built for the climateof the early 20th century, but that climate is changing, all right?

and the population growthhas been explosive. and so probably, civilization as we know it is unsustainable. my editors don't wantanything about global warming, and they certainly don't want anything depressingabout global warming, people don't want to hear it. science tends to be fairly conservative in what it says is true,

because it has to stand upto peer review, it has to stand up to other peopledoing the same research and making sure they get the same answer. it has to be defended very rigorously. so the fact isthat these big assessments, like the ipcc report, tend to be fairly conservativein what they say is true. so you guys are from california, so you have some sense of what's going on

in one small corner of the world where we're seeing drought on a scale we haven't seen before, for instance. and that kind of thing just gets more and moreand more common and violent as the temperature goes up two degrees celsius,three degrees, four degrees. that's what we're on path for now. that's a world

where we probably can't have civilizations like the oneswe're used to having, because we won't be able to depend on raising food in the ways we do now. and our cities, most ofthem built on the coasts, will be highly vulnerable. and it'll be a difficult,maybe impossible place to live. with a four degreescelsius temperature range, we can expect the sahara desertin north africa

to jump across the mediterraneaninto central europe, resulting in summer temperaturesof 120 degrees, typical day. with a three degrees of warming, we could expect the brazilian rainforest to burn down and turn to desert, with probably super,super storm hurricanes with the capability to obliterate cities occurring from time to time. though those are the things

we sort of notice on a day to day basis, the kind of bigger, more profound mess, or what's happeningat the whole system level. both the arctic and the antarctic are now melting at prodigious rates, and the oceans are 30% more acidicthan they were 40 years ago. we're talking about the biggest physical featureson planet earth, and they're essentially breaking.

in the last 150 years or so, sea level's gone upby about 20 centimeters, which is about eight inches. now, that doesn't sound like a lot when you're standing there on the beach and the waves are crashingover your feet. but you have to remember, that's 8 inches times2/3 the area of the planet. so it's a huge volumeof water that's been added.

people don't understandis how fast levels gonna rise. whether it happens three feet, weather it happensat the end of the century, or even the middleof next century is irrelevant. three feet affects unbelievably the amount of food they can be produced. it doesn't necessarilyhave to happen all at once. just like hurricane sandyin new york, of course, that wasn't caused by global warming,

but it was exacerbated by global warming. of the 18, 19 feet of storm surge, a foot or so was global warming. now, that's not a huge impact yet, but if we're lookingat 5,6 feet of sea level rise in the next 100 years, it will begin to becomevery, very important. we have harnessedthe meager water resources of the west, all right,to sustain this great civilization

that we've built here in california. it's amazing in a semi-arid environment --this is the sixthor the seventh largest economy in the world. the economy of california is larger than the economyof russia, all right? but we all forgot that it was semi-arid, and we have a long historythat's written in great droughts. and it's come back to haunt us here,

at the beginning of the 21st century. and in this case,the economics are very clear. if you let climate changeget any further out to control, the economic damagethat it does is on a scale that we haven't encountered before. the british economistnicholas stern tried to kind of-- did the first sortof full on global scale calculations and says it looks like unabated global warming is moreof an economic hit

than world war i, world war ii,and the great depression combined. ok, so we know we're trying to avoid. why is this drought so much more severe than what we saw in the mid1940s to the early 1970s? well, the population of california has quadrupled since the 1950sand the 1960s, all right? agriculture has been explosive. in some ways you might say,well, a lot of new orleans, effectively what the governmentand the society decided

was that they were goingto continue to try to protect it, despite the factthat sea levels are rising, despite the factthat there will eventually be another storm that floods new orleans. but if it's important enough to you, then you might decide to protect it. but you have to make decisions. you can't protect the entire coast, and so what areas are we going to protect

and what areas are we going to let go of? those are questions we should beanswering right now. there is no way that 20 millionpeople in southern california, when the water from the coloradoand the sacramento in the san joaquin river dry up, there is no way you're going to move all 20 million of those people to seattle and vancouver. that's just un-doable.

so the question isone of these tipping points. and the methane clathrates are suspectedto be a possible tipping point. to where if you warmed upenough of these regions, they would release all this methane, and then you'd have greenhousewarming the ran away from you. that wasn't being drivenby humans anymore, it was really beingdriven by natural tipping points in the climate.

a tipping point, well,a good metaphor to start with is you imagine an eggon the edge of a table. and if you give it a little nudge,but it doesn't fall over, then you could give it a nudge back. you can kind of reverse the process. but if the egg is righton the edge of the table and you give it a nudgeand falls over and it breaks, then your table and egg systemis in a different state and it can't be reversed.

all right, so there was a sudden change. you've crossed a tipping pointwhen that egg fell over. well something like that existswith aspects of the climate and the climate as a whole. not yet, we haven't yet so destabilized the arctic we should give upthe fight and go on. ch4 is obviously a problem, like co2. and it's a difficult problem,because with co2 we have our hand on the thermostat.

we can turn down the amountof carbon that we use. if we let things heat to the point where we're gettingreally huge volumes of methane, we have no control of that thermostat. so that's all the more reasonto move very fast. to me, the biggest problem on the planet is the population problem. and no one talks about it, really. hardly anyone talks about it,

and no one's come up with a solution. you think it's hardto talk about carbon dioxide politically, talk aboutpopulation control politically. that's almost impossible. but you know, there actuallyare some great tools for it. education, giving women a choiceover when and how many children to have, has been shown to actually lead to population reduction. so the solutionsto that one might be good,

whether you're interestedin population control or not. it's a really huge problem and the global warming would not be such a big dealif we had kept our population around a billion people or so. more people, more energy requirements, everybody wants to become partof the middle class, growing affluence, growing technology,so it's not just population, you have to take populationand multiply it by affluence.

you can't tell the restof the world they can't be affluent, all right? you can't tell the rest of the world that they can't have an iphone. our technology is totallydependent on fossil fuels. we would have never have made to where we were without this gift from nature of this huge supply of fossil fuels. and don't thinkwe should feel guilty about it,

because it's nature provided,and we would probably still be the stone age without it, without developing iron, and so forth. but it is a-- it's almosta predictable consequence of development of lifelike ours on a planet that we get to the point where we-- we're over-productivein terms of population growth. and we also consumeall this burnable material. and ultimately, we have to transitionto a society

that does not use fossil fuels. i think it'll eventually workbecause it has to. because we have finite amountsof fossil fuels. so they will eventually run out. so ultimately we will be-- we will have a wind, water,solar economy. now, the key is to squish it forward in time so that it's faster. so will it work in the next 35 years?

it's possible, it's technicallyand economically possible. it all depends on if enough politicians and the general publicget on board with it. if the public and politiciansget on board, it will happen. what could get rid of usis our own carbon dioxide through oneof the greenhouse extinctions. if you think--call that nature, that's nature. engineering our way out isour only hope that i can see. but engineeringour way out will only work

if we recognize the limitationsof engineering your way out, that you have to take dire steps soon, or it will be too late. now of course, some people saythat technology might save us. well that's true, but in a sense, technology is also part of the problem. now, i always say that--when i talk to my students, i said, if you want a good exampleof global warming, all right, there she is or there he is.

all right, this isthe poster child for global warming. just think of all the water,natural resources, and the energy that go into cellphones. there's no way to avoid using fossil fuel in the world in which we live. that's why the job is notto spend all your time and money perfecting your own household. that's why the job is to transform the way we live,the structures in which we live.

my roof is covered with solar panels. i drive an electric car. i eat close to home,all those kinds of things. but i try not to fool myself that that's solvingthe problem, it isn't. this is a structuraland systemic problem. that means the answersare structural and systemic. that means, by far, the most important thingthat an individual can do

is not be an individual. join with other peoplein a movement large enough to move those systems and structures. and if you have time left over after that to change you're lightbulb, then by all means. we look at each energy sector,electricity, transportation, heating, cooling, and industry. then we try to electrify each sector and power that electricitywith wind, water, and solar power.

and we find from doing that that we've reduced power demand just by electrifying everythingand using some hydrogen. we would use reduce power demandoverall in california by about 44%, because electricity is so much more efficientthan combustion or burning things. technically, it's possible to do it. the strives that the engineershave made in the last 25 years are astonishing.

the price of a solar panelshas dropped 95 percent. that's an astonishing gift, and one that if we wereto take full advantage of, we'd be able to make-- not a painless, or costless,or easy transition, but it's a transition we could make. that we're not doing it in anywhere near the scale we need to is a reflection of the powerof the fossil fuel industry

to get in the way of that transition. so that means what we should be doing is building the movements necessary to break the powerof the fossil fuel industry. we can't outspend them,they have more money than any industry on earth. but that's not the onlycurrency the world works in and in extraordinary momentsthe currencies of movement, passion, spirit, creativity,sometimes, the willingness

to spend one's body and go to jail, those are currencies that count too. and we have to be-- we have to be spending themas fast as we can. so we would eliminate all fossil fuel. so we would have no more oil refineries,no more gas pipelines, no more natural gas, no more coal, no more nuclear power, no more biofuels.

we don't need it. we can solve the entire problem 100%, and with 100% reliabilityof the grid with wind, water, and solar. we're building that movement. i don't know whether it's big enough yet. but we have to put it into action, which is why we're confronting the fossil fuel industry wherever we can, on new infrastructure projects,

on their financingthrough things like divestment. i guess the grand plan, if there is one, is to try and hold downthe fossil fuel industry as best we can,to freeze their expansion. a fossil freeze, and at the same time,work and hope for a solar thaw. personally, i thinka carbon tax is a good idea, it's a good start. because we don't pay

the cost of the carbonwe add to the atmosphere. we pay the cost of digging upthe carbon from the ground and putting in our car. we don't pay the costof what it does to our planet's climate. well, i mean, every economistfor a long time has said, one of the first things we should do is put a price on carbon. clearly, and the way to do it,is this fee and dividend scheme where you put a big priceon carbon and rebate

the money back to everybody. because if anybody ownsthe sky, it's us, not exxon. that would help, we need a crash scale, world war ii scale kind of program to put solar panels on every south facing surfacewe can find, to put windmills where there's wind. we're technically capable of doing it, but it's going to take money,and will to make it happen.

now, to actually getthe thing implemented though, you need capital. so you need capitalto buy all the devices, just like you would need capital to buy devicesfor fossil fuels and plants. and that capital cost would be on the order of about $15 trillionin the united states. and again though, you have to look at howthat cost is spread over time.

so this is between now and 2050, we would havethe whole infrastructure up. and i would be working hard to make sure that we were transferringsufficient resources north to south to allow this transition to happenwhere it's needed most, in the poorest countries of the world. these guys need more energy, unlike us. and it's now entirely plausible for them to get it from clean sources,

but they need help, you know,technology, to make that happen. in the negotiations at paris this year, probably the most important question will be actuallynot over targets and timetables, it will be over financingfor the transition in poor parts of the world. those are decisions we haveto make together as a society. and the answers are notin the scientists pocket. we don't have the answers-- you know,

we can tell you aboutthe ice sheets changing, but we can't really tell you what a carbon tax isgoing to do to the economy. so remember that when i talk about this, i'm just another citizen. but the fact is that i think we have to begin to try those kinds of things, because we're probably goingto mess up along the way as we try them.

but that's nota good reason to do nothing, the alternative of do nothingis the worst thing we can do. if your experience, not your beliefs, not your theoretical understanding,but if your experience is that your food comes fromthe grocery store and your water comes from the tap, you will defend to the death the system that brought those to you because your life depends on it.

if on the other hand,your food comes from a land base and your water comes from a river, you will defend to the deaththe land base and the river and so, that's one of the thingsthat has happened is that we have hadour allegiance, our loyalty, and our life dependence transferred away from the living planetand over to this capitalist system. so, you know, we can ask ourselves, well, given the danger of climate change

and given that we have adequate solutions with existing technology to supplythe energy that we're even using, which is excessive, but we can even supply thatthrough renewable sources, why aren't we doing it? and so the answer is capitalism. capitalism is basedon profit and inequality, because obviously, some are goingto get rich, someone will be poor. so it's basedon the system of inequality,

which always means domination. so it is a rule of money. and as the ancient athenians knew, which many of us apparently don't know, the rule of moneyis not the rule of the people. democracy means the rule of the people, oligarchy is often the termused for the rule of money. oligarchy means the ruleof the few, literally. but aristotle explained,the wealthy are always the few,

and the poor are always the many, so the role of the fewis a rule of the wealthy. our lot in life isn't due to god's will, instead it's the market forces. so the market hasrewarded the billionaires. the market has punished you,because you're poor. so the market forces are portrayed as some sort of objective force the works for the common goodof everyone.

but in reality, the market was man made. it was created by human beings and it's manipulated by the richto serve their own interests. so they basically run the government through their lobbyists, and they deregulate their own industries. they create ruleswhich will enrich themselves. they create policies which requires the governmentto buy services from them

to enrich themselves further. so this market forcewhich serves as kind of a moral-- the moral basis of capitalism kind of contributesto the role of capitalism as a kind of a religious force. it's very hardfor people to get past that. in fact, many, many people,i would say, probably most people, can more easily imaginethe end of the world than they can imaginethe end of capitalism.

and you know our whole political system is one of bribery. i mean, contributions, contributions are bribery unless their small. if i give five dollarsto a senator, obviously, i don't think i'm goingto have access and control, and so that's not bribery. because i'm not goingto get anything from my $5, and i know it.

and same people give ten dollars or-- but the people who give thousandsand thousands, this is bribery. they're saying, i'm giving you moneyif you pass the laws i want. but it's legal bribery,though some of it is illegal too. the congress is a perfect reflectionof who paid for it. i mean, when there's a voteon something like the keystone pipeline, if you tell me in advance how much money each of these guys

got from the fossil fuel industry, i can predict with unerring accuracyhow they'll vote. it's a better predictor than party identification or regionor anything else. but there's also a lotof just pure misinformation put out there. there are groups and organizations often funded buy oil companies, who make it a businessto collect information,

distort it, and submit itout to the public. there's no shortage of folks like that. so there's a lot of disinformation out there, as well. as we switch off fossil fuel, we will be movingin interesting new directions. the sun and the wind areomnipresent but diffuse. we all have some. and that means that we canpower ourselves close to home.

we're no longer dependenton the richest people in the world who became the richestpeople in the world because they happen to live overdeposits of coal or gas or oil. we begin to upend the balances of power. i mean, the richest men in the world is the two koch brothers, taken together, an oil and gas fortune. they used that oil and gas money,about $100 billion, to dominate our political life.

they just announcedthey'd spend $900 million on the next presidential election, more than the republican partyor the democratic party, koch brothers: party of two. i don't think electoral politicsis a way out, because you basically have two parties which are the two halvesof the capitalist party. they both serve wall street, they both serve the same masters.

the problem with climate change is that it's not in the enda political adversary. it's not democrats versus republicans or industry versus environmentalist. those fights are important, but the basic fightis human beings against physics. physics is poor negotiator,it isn't cutting us any slack, we don't get points for spin. this culture is systematically,and fundamentally,

and i would say, psychologically,and psychopathically, based on a refusalto acknowledge or accept limits. and there could be no limits on-- i mean, the whole point of this culture is to boldly gowhere no man has gone before. and there could be no limits on so-called technological progress. there could be no limitson the number of humans there are. there could be no limitson our influence over the planet.

there could be no limits on,essentially on our behavior. and i've thought a lot, i've written a lot about cash and money. and i've just written some about it. i think money is reallyinteresting in that, let's say that i'm goingto attempt to acquire resources, and we don't have a cash economy. and i'm going to acquiresay, all the fish. the thing is, the fish are going to rot.

but there's a great thingabout money, which is it doesn't rot, and you can accumulateinfinite amounts of it. and it-- because it's entirely abstract, it means you can keepaccumulating essentially forever. even if you were going to try to accumulate gold or somethingthat doesn't rot, there still is a physical limitas to how much you could get. there's five timesas much carbon underground in known proven reserves around the world

as we can affordto burn without going over the two degrees celsius limit that i mentioned a little while ago and which has beenembraced internationally as a sort of a red line not to cross. that means we would have to leave at least 80% of itunderground, untouched. well how much is that 80% worth? well it's around 20 trilliondollars, give or take.

so does anybody seriously believe that wall street is going togive up 20 trillion dollars just to save the planet? fossil fuel industry gets huge subsidies and has for a couple of hundred years. so they have this huge built uppile of money, infrastructure. and you know, you can listsort of the easy ways in which they get subsidized,the annual depreciation allowance, all those kinds of things.

the biggest subsidiesare things like they're allowed to use the atmosphereas an open sewer for free, unlike any other industry. and they get all the rest of us to pay for defending the supply lines. i mean, nobody's under any illusion that we would have botheredto go fight wars in iraq and places like that had therenot been oil somehow involved in the whole equation.

if this was a nationthat ran on solar energy, what would we care about saudi arabia? guys, whatever. have you ever noticed that when you look at any articlein the mainstream press about the extinction or about the endangermentof some creature, you-- it always has to come backto its economic value? every time there'll bethese extraordinary articles

about-- oh like, there wasone about how basically the deep oceans, even the deep oceans are being significantlyharmed by this culture. and after talking about that for a while, it said, while it may not seemlike they have commercial value, but there are commerciallyviable fish down there. i was like, for god sake, you're talking about the vast majority of the space of this actual planet.

this water planet is being harmed by this culture and the only thing you care about how itaffects your pocketbook. part the problem is with the tremendous voraciousappetite we have for stuff, is that were decimatingmuch of the plant life on earth and particularly deforesting in southeast asia, indonesia,in the amazon, in africa. and so people forget,not get too complex,

but fully 20% of global warmingis deforestation, because that co2 is no longerbeing taken up by the forest that we're consuming fortoilet paper in china. what we need to figure out is--the biggest challenge therefore comes in places with relativelystable populations, like china, but who are startingto consume like americans, ok? the planet clearly probably can't deal with one continentconsuming like americans and definitely can't deal

with three or four consuming that way. you know, trash, toxins,all kinds of waste is necessary to maximize profit. so when things are produced,it's cheaper to produce them without protecting the environment than it is with protectingthe environment. there's 100 billion tonsof junk mail each year in the united states alone. and that junk mail which we all--

you know, we pick up in the mailbox, we toss it in the trashas soon as we walk in the house, that 100 billion tons of junk mail generates 51 million tonsof greenhouse gases each year. so it's just-- it's all over the place. overproduction, waste, it's endemic to the capitalist system. states, many states in the united states are facing the choice

between clean drinking waterand fracking. and this was presented accordingto the article as a dilemma. and they said scientistsresponse are mixed. i said, are you kidding? this is-- it's a dilemma to choose whether to have drinking water that you needto survive, or fracking. that's how much these techniques control our lives.

is that that's how the japanese energy ministercan say that, "oh, we can't imagine livingwithout electricity." the electricity is in charge,it's no longer us in charge. so, the first thing toobserve about green capitalism is that it has been a failure, and a spectacular failure so far. so even with the adventof solar panels and wind turbines and green products of all sorts,

global carbon emissions keep going up. somewhere in the last,say 20 to 30 years, environmentalism has hada dramatic shift for the worse. and it used to be that environmentalism was really about protectingplaces and beings. various, you know,somebody would love salmon, they try to protect them. somebody else loves the grand canyon, so they try to protect that.

and somewhere along the way it shifted from being about protecting wild places and beings to sustainability. and sustainabilitydoesn't mean sustaining a planet, it means sustaining this culturethat's killing the planet. you know, it's true that an electric car is less polluting when you drive it. it's much more efficient, especially if you supply the electricityfrom renewable energy sources.

but it turns out that abouthalf of the carbon footprint of a car, that is to saythe amount of carbon released into the atmosphereby the existence of a car comes at the pointof manufacturing the car. so electric cars havea carbon footprint too, through their manufacturing. they're betterthan the gasoline cars, it's true. but because of the nature of capitalism, because of its need to expandand find expanding markets,

the selling these cars in chinaand india all around the world is likely to make thingsworse, rather than better. what we really need is this first rate masstransportation systems. it's like, what dosalmon need to survive. what they need is forindustrial logging to stop, they need for industrial fishing to stop, they need for the murderof the oceans to stop, they need for global warming stop,

which means they needfor the oil economy to stop, and they need for dams to be removed. those are all straightforwardtechnical things. does that mean they're easy? no. but they're straightforwardtechnical things. when people say, i hope salmon survive, what they're saying is, i hopesalmon survive without a stop to industrial logging, withouta stop to industrial fishing,

without a stop to--without taking out dams, without a stop to global warming. we can say the same thingabout global warming. when people say, gosh, i hopeglobal warming doesn't exist. it's like, what will it taketo stop what warming? well, the industrial economyneeds to stop. so if we really wantto reach zero emissions across the world, that's goingto take extraordinary measures that go far beyondjust renewable electricity

generating plants,solar panels and wind turbines. so even if we generated the entire-- all the world's electricitythrough renewable sources, we would still be killing ourselves because only about 25%of global carbon emissions come from electricity and heating. the other 75% comes from other sources, so it comes froma variety of other sources. it comes from industry,it comes from transportation,

its comes from agriculture and land use. so the changes have to goacross the entire global economy if we're serious about stayingbelow two degrees celsius by the end of the century,and certainly after that, too. so that means industries are just going to have to be shut down, like it's not just the oil,gas, and coal extraction, but manufacturingof all sorts, paper products. the third biggest industry in the world

is packaging, after energy and food. so you don't think about all the things that you buy, they come in boxes are too big for the thing that it holds. that's part of marketing, you know, they make the boxes bigger on purpose so it looks likethere's more stuff inside. so all that stuff you throw away,

you buy something in the pharmacyor the grocery store, or something, and there's allkinds of paper you throw away. i mean all kinds of industrieslike this, wasteful industry, just have to be shut downor scaled way, way back. and other industries have to be open. so there's reallyno way around socializing the major industriesand coordinating production with a view towards the carbon emissions that these industries cause.

and this now not-- it's not really a moral imperative, so muchas a survival imperative. oh well, what is socialism? so socialism is,at least the marxist kind, is that you cannot have real freedom if you're a slave,or an underdog, or a servant. so you have to abolishclass distinctions. because for marx, what constitutes a class is how much money it has,

its role towards the meansof production, means of production is what people work onand with machinery, the earth and all that,that has to be communal. and you can have one classthat dominates the economy and produces only for its own profit, because what capitalism is,you produce for profits. if it's not profitable,you're not going to produce it. the idea of communism,or socialism, is the opposite. you produce for need.

what human beings need,then you manage to produce. and what are luxuries, are superfluities, things i think are needless armaments, you don't produce that, because it's not a question of profit. it's a questionof what human beings need. i don't think capitalism exists because-- inevitably because of human nature. i think that there's a rangeof behaviors in human nature.

and that range is manifestednot only in a single individual, but across the entire populationof human beings. and what capitalism doesis it rewards the worst aspects of human nature. so it rewards greed,it rewards aggressiveness in pursuit of the greed, to the extent that wars are almost unavoidable under capitalism. now i'm not saying that capitalism

causes all wars, because there were warsbefore capitalism existed. but there are certain kinds of wars, which are almost unavoidableunder capitalism, and those are resource wars. so, for example,the us invasion of iraq in 2002 was for the oil. rousseau had a wonderful passage about what would we think of a society

where the interestsof every man is opposed to the interests of every other man, where the good luck of every man requires the misfortuneof his fellow man. and yeah, if i can only win if you lose, then what kind of attitudes are we going to have towards each other? so capitalism engendersanimosities and hatred and stifles any compassion.

i'm sorry, but i haveto destroy your forest, but it's profitable. i don't care whereyou'll live afterwards, that's not my problem. so when money-- in fact,i quote rousseau again, it says "when profitis the only imperative, is it always moreprofitable to be a rascal." best case scenario is that we have the-- we have habitat forhumans on the planet in 2040.

that's the best case scenario for humans. best case scenario for non-human species and for humans in non-industrial cultures is complete collapseof industrial civilization as rapidly as possible. our planet can, and the human beingson this planet can survive more or less intactwith many of the technologies that we admire right now intactusing renewable energy resources,

primarily solar, and wind,and maybe tides, and so forth, but only if the populationof the world is reduced by 90%. that's my estimateand some other people's estimate of what population would be supported by renewable energy resources,really tapping in to them. but you know, you can lose90% of the population over a couple of centuries just by cutting way downon the birth rate. what i think's going to happen?

what do i honestlythink's going to happen? i think that this culture is going to continue to grind away until there's nothingleft but ashes and dust. and we also famously havethis global warming technique, which commonly people say,the end of the world. it's not the end of the world, you know, i mean, it's a problem. it's a huge problem for us,a huge problem for civilization.

but it's by no meansthe end of the world. the world doesn't care. the world will totallyrecover from all of this. i assume we will burn everydrop of coal in the planet. we probably won't burn allof it, but a large amount of it. and eventually on a timescaleof thousands of years, that will be removed from the atmosphere. so it-- it's our problem,not the earth's problem. when the average temperature of the earth

goes not 1.6 degrees butfour degrees, six degrees, if it goes to 10 degrees,much of the earth will be uninhabitable, all right? so at that point, you can definitely put your head between your legsand kiss your tukas goodbye. so worst case scenario is we kill everythingon the way out the door, and i mean everything. a six degree temperatureincrease, six degrees celsius,

which is about 11 degrees fahrenheit, could result in an extinctionlevel event for humanity. there may be a few lucky individuals who would survive it, maybe a billionairefinds a deep hole to dig in antarctica or somethingand stores supplies. but it would be the end for most of us. human beings are just not well suited to live in that kind of a situation.

sea levels going up to 240 feet, when that happenswe have this stagnant world, hydrogen sulfide starts rising. how fast does it take, howfast from where we are now? if we hit 1,000 parts per million,and we're at 400 now, the fossil record tellsus that the probability is we're going to go intothis hydrogen sulfide world. at the rate we're doing this,that's about 200 years at most, and at the rate we're changingand increasing in population,

it could be as little as 100 years where hit 1,000 parts per million. the notion of near term human extinction certainly adds clarityto what's important in life. and is it depressing? yes. i don't think humansare going to go extinct, we're a resourceful bunchand at least the richest among us will figure out ways to keep going. but that doesn't seemto me to be the issue.

we're going to take a lotof dna out along the way, biologists think halfthe species on the planet could go out this century. and we're going to doin incredible numbers of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth, most of whom havedone nothing to contribute to the problem we now face. if you're a family memberof the 5 million people a year who die early deathsbecause of climate change,

you're already feeling it. no, i don't think it's goingto be too late for humans. humans are an incrediblytenacious species with all kinds of ways of getting by. and they are all over the planet living in some far, far places and in some veryunpromising environments, and doing sometimes fairly well. so no, that's not what we're going to--

we're not going to losehuman beings, unfortunately. what we're going to loseis a lot of species, of other speciesand a lot of stuff in the ocean. and then things will, you know-- you've read about the six extinctions, or the five previous extinctions,they all came back. even the ones where lifeon earth was reduced to some fairly simple organisms,they do come back. so no, it's not an end of humanity,

but it is a reductionof, and a loss maybe, of a lot of technology,and information, and science that might come aboutif things got really weird. i think as a sociallyprogressive ideology, we want to try to help everybody. i mean, we want to embracehumanity as a whole and try to create a systemwhere we can all live. i mean, population isa problem, it should go down. i agree, it should decrease.

but not through this kindof mad max dystopian futures where you havea few deep green resistance types who are trying to live off meadowsand then you've got raiding, you know, right wing gun fanaticswho go and steal their food and there's no civilization there, so they got that. but it's not a veryattractive kind of future. one also has to look underfoot,and in their backyard, to say, well, what arethe environmental problems?

they're not the same here as they are in east asia or manyother parts of the world where environmentalproblems and social problems are right in your face all the time. they're not in our face here, which is why so many americansgo about their lives heedlessly at the moment. but the changes that are comingseem to be pretty inevitable. when you have sustenance level living,

you are not thinking too muchabout major global problems, you're worried about your kids. it's too many kids,to many mouths to feed. parents will do anything they need to do to keep their kids fed. now from day to day, most people are just trying to survive. trying to put a roof over their head. their education levelis not necessarily high,

doesn't mean their intelligenceis not high. but how much timedo they have for global warming, you know, when they're tryingto feed their family, look for a job in a sinking economy? fighting off al qaedapoor people are in the middle east. and so, you know, you have to-- to us, it seemsthe most compelling issue. but for most people,there are many, many issues. but remember, this issue will tend

to override everything else and guide all the rest of these issues. i mean, we don't know how much longerbefore we have such disasters in floods, or droughts, or whatever, which we already starting to feel. and whether that can becounteracted in time, that's a very iffy question. and so it's hard to be optimistic,

but we have to actas if something can be done because we can't just lay backand let disaster overwhelm us. it looks to me like there's still time. you know, there's 20 years or so where we can really tryto turn things around and save ourselves. and i can't think of anythingbetter to do than try. i mean, if you just take the point of view that we're doomed,

then why get out of bed in the morning? you know, i mean, why send these emailssaying that we're doomed, if there's really literallynothing that can be done? it's both a-- it'san unprecedented threat, but it's alsoan unprecedented opportunity, because it has the potentialto bring us together. it intensifies all struggles for justice. economic, ecologic,civil rights, human rights,

you name it, every issue out there is intensified by the climate struggle. i think if we changeour culture to the point where people are reallyconcerned about climate change and understand it it's completely possibleto address and deal with it, then i think the politicians will probably haveno choice but to follow. you know, i thinkthe hopeful analogies in our time

are the ways in which thingslike gay marriage became-- quickly went frombeing impossible to contemplate to being so obvious that only the most troglodytestand up against it. this is harder, because there'smore money involved, you know? but, the stakes are high enough that it's worth the fightto find out if we can do it. so things can change--if you look back in history, things don't change gradually,they change suddenly.

take the american revolution, that was a sudden changewithin the british empire, or the russian revolution of 1917. things can change muchfaster than you imagine, and because of that, it's very important to have ideas out on the table for the aftermath. how do we get from hereto a global green new deal that solves the climate crisisand the economic crisis

in one fell swoop? we do that by standing upand using the residual, you know, the vestigesof democracy that we still have. we still do have a democracy, they do everythingto tilt the playing field. i mean, one of the problemsof environmentalism is i think a lot of usdon't know what we want. do we want this culture we continue? do we want for there to bephotovoltaics on every rooftop?

what do we want? and i'm very clear what i want. what i want is for there to be more wild salmon every yearthan the year before. what i want is for thereto be less dioxide in every mother's breast milkevery year than the year before. i want for there to be more wild fish in the oceansevery year than the year before. i want for there to be moremigratory song birds every year

than the year before. i want there to be more newts every year in the worldthan there was a year before. i want for there to bemore frogs every year than there was the year before. we have such a steephill to climb to be seen, to be on the ballot, to be heard, to participate in debates, et cetera. it's so difficult to be a third party

in the us, that's forced manyof us parties to come together. so the greens have sort of encompassed a broad agenda of the leftand of independent politics to some extent, of libertarianand civil liberties, kinds of thinking as well. there's no reason that we couldn't haveall kinds of social services, and especially in the united states. we have a productivecapacity to give everyone

free medical care, free education through the phd level, mass transportation as i said, we can make sure peoplehave places to live, all this is easily within graspof our productive capacity. and we could do thiswith a low carbon footprint. fewer emergency room visits,fewer hospitalizations, less respiratory illness,less cardiovascular disease, less asthma,

and temperatures will just bemore stable on a global scale, when people realize these benefits, in addition tothe direct financial benefits of stabilizing energy pricesand the job creation, they'll be on board. so i think right nowit's more an education issue, because most people justaren't aware what is possible. we need to put peopleand planet over profit. you know, i think sort of fundamentally,

that's what eco-socialism is about. and i think that is also fundamentally what the green party is about, that if we want the planet to survive, we need a political and economic system that puts people, planet,and peace over profit. and right now we don't have that. i just an emailfrom lawrence[inaudible] the other day. he said, i think the answer gary, is

a civil ecological socialism. so you have to putsome other label with socialism to say that socialism might work. the resistance to socialism is not necessarily a bad resistance, its resistance to too much organization of the state by peoplewho are not tuned in to what everybody elseis thinking and doing. so it is a most universal moral rule

and it often has a religious basis, but there's no reasonwhy it can't have a secular appeal. so in that sense it's universal. and what it tells us is not to treat others in the waywe don't want to be treated. so if we want good schoolsfor ourselves and our children, we should want good schoolsfor our neighbor. if you want medical care for ourselves, we should want medical care for others.

if we don't wantto be treated like animals in sub living wages, we should not want to treat anybodylike animals and sub living wages. so that's why socialization is a demand for equality, for humanity. operatively, the real problem is the control of big moneyover our political discourse, and over our communications system.

because they're foreverputting us into pigeon holes and trying to fanthe flames of combat between us. but, you know, i've workedwith libertarians quite a bit. in fact, we now have a joint legal case against the commissionon presidential debates to try to open them up. i don't-- i mean, i don't know what sort of systemwe'll have all at the end of it. i anticipate we'd still havemarkets and things.

i don't think we're going to have a centrally planned economy. the idea of market, you can only have a transformation-- a revolutionary transformation of a society through revolutionis essentially correct. i mean we say, that's terrible, people should find a way without-- we didn't find a wayto start without revolution

and we didn't abolish slaverywithout a civil war. and england has its own civil war to establish a parliamentary system. france, we all knowhad the french revolution. the russians had theirs,the chinese had theirs, the cubans had theirs. confrontation, education's good, but best education's accomplished often in confrontationwith the powers that be.

the point is that it's not thisculture that's hitting bottom, it's everybody else hitting bottom. as this culture is addictedto its power over-- and addicted to theseauthoritarian techniques, addicted to its technologies, addicted to-- oneof the pro-slavery philosophers in the 1830s wrote that the reason that they couldn't get rid of slaveryis because how else would they get the comforts or elegancies

on which their entire wayof life is based. and that's really what the arguments against bringing downcivilization come to, is that we'll loseour comforts or elegancies. and that's not a good reasonto kill the planet. i think that going to jail, for me, it's no fun to spenda few nights in jail, but it's not the end of the world. the end of the worldis the end of the world.

is this anarchism or anarchy? anarchy means real disorder. anarchism means-- actually all it means is societies without the formation of the institution of the state. so what it means, really,is self government. i think complaining about capitalism as a destructive competitivesystem comes from our intuition that the forager way of lifeis the right way of life.

we evolved as foragers, and deepinside us as a forager still, who wants to live in a world like that? foragers lived in small communitiesof 20 to 50 who shared food, who shared resources, who make communal decisionsand decided where to go when. you were free to leave,and so it was nice. but in order for humanityto become larger and more powerful, we had to adopt behaviorsthat were not forager behaviors.

religion and other formsof culture pressure came in to help us do these things. but at some level we're awarethat they aren't natural and they aren't what feels right. and then there's marshallsahlins groundbreaking study, called stone age economics, in which he said a number of the hunting and gatheringcultures of the upper paleolithic were the original affluent society.

they only had to workabout 20 hours a week to get the food and materialsthat they need to live. we didn't have a city on the planet until a few thousand years ago. a city by definition is an area in which humans areovershooting their land base. they require water and foodand sometimes clean air and in today's case, fossil fuels to be shipped into within the city limits.

so we all rely upon several acres, or several hundred acresfor our own survival. you live in a city,you just don't know it. there's a lot more in the world then people who are-- don't even remember what itwas like to have an outhouse. and they think,i couldn't live like that. well, you can live like that. there's all kinds of waysthat people have lived

and done very sophisticated little things as they did it all the way through. does our founding documentfor this country say, life, liberty, and the pursuit of electricity? no, we lived for two million years, we lived through the early 1960sin this country, in many places without grid-tied electricity. the rural south didn't have electricity-- grid-tied electricity until the 1960s,

and there were no solar panels. what i've been workingtoward is to try to develop an anthropological humanistperspective on history. and i talked about that when i was up at my collegethe other day, reed, about a post-human humanismand a new perspective on the whole global project, which is to understandthe varieties of human strategies for survival, and not just survival,

but for living the good life as they find itin each in their own place. and that is one of the answersthat we will come back to as the global type economy crumbles and the high energy usetype economy crumbles. and then the questions arewhat do you lose after that? which reminds me of pericles,the famous orator, during the peloponnesian war where he meant what democracymeant to the athenians.

and among other things he said, when people don't mingle with politics, who don't saythey mind your own business. they're failing their business. their business is to beinvolved in politics, it is to be involving the arts. so he has asserted the multi-dimensional capacityof the athenians, which he contrastedto the one dimensional spartans

that they were fighting at the time. so i wrote this poemcalled "for the children". think of it as the models then of graphs. the raising hills, the slopes of statistics lie before us. the steep climbof everything going up, up, as we all go down. in the next centuryor the one beyond that,

they say, are valleys, pastures. we can meet therein peace, if we make it. to climb these coming crests, one word to you too,you and your children. stay together. learn the flowers. go light. my name is robin hanson, i'm an associate professor of economics at george mason university.

i've spent many years thinking about a excessively widevariety of subjects, including the distant future,aliens, big issues like that. so i'm don brownleeat the university of washington. i'm an astronomer. i work on cometsand extraterrestrial materials. and i was the principal investigator of the nasa stardust mission, which flew out to a cometand grabbed samples of it

and brought it back to earth. peter douglas ward, professor of biologyand earth and space sciences at the university of washington, and soon to be professor of geobiology at the university of adelaide, australia. my name is josh willis, i'm a climate scientistat nasa's jet propulsion laboratory. and i study global warming

and how the oceans change as a resultof human caused climate change. i'm bill mckibben, a professorhere at middlebury college and the founder of 350.org, which is the first big globalgrassroots climate campaign. yeah, hi, i'm bill patzert, i'm a climatologistat nasa's jet propulsion laboratory. i've been working on climatevariability and climate change for more than four decades.

sure, i'm guy mcpherson, i'm professor emeritusat the university of arizona. i left the institutionabout five years ago in despair and disgust. my name is david klein,i'm a mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at california stateuniversity at northridge. i'm also the director of the climate science program on campus.

well, my name is roger carasso. i'm a professor emeritus at california state universityin northridge where i taught some 40 years and my special interest wasalways classical political theory. i'm derek jensen,i'm the author of "endgame", and "a language older than words-culture make believe". and i'm a longtime grassrootsenvironmental activist. i'm mark jacobson,

a professor of civiland environmental engineering and director of the atmosphereenergy program at stanford university. i'm jill stein,and i'm a candidate for president. i'm gary snyder, a melon grower, and a seller of okra and aubergine in one of the remoteback country forests. also, i write poetry sometimes.