YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Berners-Lee

lines on the record: 57
first: 2021-01-26
most recent: 2021-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You've never you can say well humans have shown that they can't respond to a problem like this because we haven't responded yet. But you know what? We've never been in this situation before and there's everything to play for. We don't know whether we're capable of pulling this off or not but we do know that the harder we push the better our chances will be.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What my most climate change depressed was, as I've said when the burning question came out in about two thousand seventeen. That was my low point. I often show that carbon curve to people to say, look, I don't want to bang on about climate change too much because you hear about the science so much, but just this one thing we need to really understand carefully is that we haven't made the faintest, not any statistically significant dent in that curve yet. And that doesn't tell us that we can't, but it does tell us that it's not about more of the same. It's about something different. Whatever our individual and piecemeal actions are, we have to frame it all up as pushing for that absolutely essential global systemic change.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yaps, absolutely. So, you know, we need the leader, we need whatever leadership we can get wherever we can get it. I'm not a Catholic, and I've been deeply critical of some popes in the past, but we even we even went out and got a bobblehead of the Pope and put it on the mantelpiece a few years back because we were so impressed with some of the things that he said about climate in his encyclical about, I think it was about five years ago. So, you know, absolutely there's a place for this. And all religious movements can show important leadership. And some of them are. I would say, yeah, I would say some of the best thinking on climate and ecology is coming out of religious movements.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“will recover from the contraction that it's had, because I think it was already starting to fly in the face of the science. It was already facing a headwind because the science was mounting up on it.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's a fly in the ointment, you know, there's a lot of technical detail on all of that, and it is complex. It will take working through and all the rest of it. But if there's one fly in the ointment, it's that we just do not know yet how to put a long haul passenger flight in the air without burning through something like a hundred tons of liquid hydrocarbon fuel. And so there's no getting round the very high carbon cost of flying. And we're going to need to fly less. I said this is not about hairtism, but if there's any element of wearing a hair shirt, we're just going to, you know, we're going to need to constrain that because we just haven't got that particular solution yet, which doesn't mean to say nobody can ever fly. It doesn't even mean to say you can't take a leisure flight. It does mean to say we just need a better reason for it than we used to have to have. And I don't think the aviation industry.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it has. And if you look out the carbon savings that have gone on from all the things that have changed as a result of the pandemic in 2020, it adds up to humanity buying itself something like at a best estimate buying itself something like three and a half weeks of extra time on the climate crisis. So it's totally, you know, it's totally irrelevant in the scheme of things in its own right as it is. However, if the changes that we, if some of the changes that we've made prove to us that change is possible, then maybe they become really significant because they're the springboard from which we begin this transition in earnest. And specifically on flying, so I said that we've got all the technologies in place.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying it's only a local issue, which is a complete load of nonsense, but one of the arguments behind this mine has been that it will create some jobs which are much needed off the west coast of Cumbria, exactly the kind of jobs that I don't want to see created. I want to see the thousands and thousands of green recovery jobs instead. But what's been missing is from the whole sort of discussion is a proper detailed visioning of how the low carbon and sustainability transition is going to really, really work for the west coast of Cumbria and make everybody's lives better full of really rewarding quality jobs. And then the third part.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can we get people to make changes? Well, okay, so it's about it's partly about creating the case and showing that these changes are actually in all of our interests. You know, the process of making the change will be great. There's habit changing. We all get scared of any sort of change where we can't imagine that it's going to work for us. And I think we need to spend a lot more time imagining and developing our vision of how this future works for everybody. So one example I'll give of this is that I live in Cumbria and there's an insane plan to open up a brand new coal mine off the west coast of Cumbria. It's going to bring two or three million tons of coal a year out of the ground with an enormous carbon footprint of eight million tons a year or something. And Robert Jenrik, our Secretary of State, has just declined to call it in.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“making sure that everybody in the world gets the resources they need, so for example giving somebody a decent wage so that they can live and bring up a family. And if any of those three things aren't in place, then something needs to change about that job or maybe that job shouldn't be there in the first place. There are plenty of jobs around at the moment that I would rather that the people doing those jobs were just paid the same money not to go to work, to be honest. So there's a whole re-engineering of the work thing. That's part one of the question. Part two was...”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At every skill level you can think of, and the same goes for retrofitting our infrastructure, and the same goes for all our renewable energy. So, you know, there is more, you know, there's, if anything, there is more inherent requirement for people to do work in the low, you know, in the sustainable world. Although there isn't a requirement for anybody to have to be a slave in the sustainable world. So we can pick how we go about that jobs thing. And I think we use that jobs. That jobs metric as a simple number. And I try and unpick this in the book. I talk specifically about when is a job a good thing. Actually, sometimes a job isn't a good thing. You know, a job's a good thing if the person doing that job is doing something inherently useful and the experience of doing the job is inherently rewarding and the job provides a mechanism for”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so first up, the jobs question. So there are plenty of jobs in the green recovery. So, for example, as we come out of this pandemic, it's so important that the economic recovery is a deep green recovery. And there's so much potential for it. We've talked a little bit about food and land. It takes more people to do the right thing with a piece of land. And especially where I live, where every bit of land is different, it really varies from meter to metre. It takes real skill and understanding to do the right thing. Is this bit good for this bit need a tree or should we just rewild it? Or can we put soybeans? Is it one of those pieces of land that actually you can put is the right thing to do is to put some animals on? And if so, how and what? It's very, very complex. That takes a lot of jobs.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we need there's a lot of technological transformation that we could do within our food system in order to do it more sustainably. And genetic modification is probably done in the right way really, really carefully with all the checks and balances is probably a part of that transition. I've already talked about how actually I think that we are going to be getting more and more of our nutrition without the use of photosynthesis. And I say that, you know, and I'm expecting some of the audience to be thinking that sounds pretty terrible. I think it does take some getting your head around, but I suspect it is an increasing part of the future and it will take a lot of pressure off the food and land system to enable us to do absolutely the right thing by the rest of the ecosystem.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I think the GM debate, when it hit the headlines originally, what is it, a decade or two ago, you know, came out because there was some stuff going on around GM that was really quite really stood to be very negative from a social point of view and potentially from a biodiversity point of view as well.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'd possibly say not, but I would also encourage everybody who's at that point in their lives to think really carefully about the sustainability dimension because like it or not it's definitely there now.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there's only a couple of pages specifically on population in There's No Planet B, and maybe it deserves a bit more. But I do want to make the point that it's clear that the more people there are, the more pressure we put on the world and population growth is undoubtedly a dimension of the big challenge that we face. But it's also true to say that 12 billion careful people could snuggle up together on planet Earth and live very nicely with all the other species as well. And it's also true to say that one billion careless people would and will smash the place up in no time. So population is an important dimension of this, but it's not”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody's like that, but you know, it's a chance to reflect on what did we really miss? In the old days when we could go about our lives how we wanted, what did we really miss and what stuff was just junk that we've worked out we can do without and now for goodness sake let's have back the things we really value in our lives and not have the other stuff.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I hope so. I mean, I think this pandemic has been a mixture of in terms of the system change that I've been calling for. I think this pandemic has been a mixture of on the one hand a big distraction from it and on the other hand it has really helped us along the way. So one thing we've been forced to change. It's been horrible in lots and lots of ways but for goodness sake as we rebuild our, as and when we can rebuild our lives let's let's choose how we rebuild them and make them better than they've been before and there are actually some things for lots of us about this pandemic. I kind of hesitate to say it but there are some things that have been better about it. So I've done no ironing at all for probably a year now. You know for me that's great that you know and I actually love going around in ragged old clothes that I've had for years so I enjoy that too.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think of them as the leaders. They are primarily the followers in this. They will wait until the space has been opened up by the demonstration that the people that they govern care about this stuff. So what we can all do is, you know, is liberate ourselves from it by just dematerializing a bit, buying clothes, for example, less frequently buying high quality stuff that's sustainably made, getting it mended when it needs repairing, passing it on, you know, just detuning from the kind of the needless quantities of clothing, furniture, whatever that we buy.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great example of what I've just been talking about because, you know, wouldn't it be lovely if there was some leadership from our politicians that really kind of got into this issue and helped us all tune into it and incentivized us all to get away from the idea of buying stuff that we don't need that we wear three times and chucking it out and all the rest of it? But the reality is that kind, you know, and there is a role for politics and legislation and incentives to help with that. But the reality is that the political that because our politicians”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In moving forward the business agenda and the political agenda, but I think there are those three forces there. There's the world of business, there's the people, and there's the politics. And they kind of, you know, they can help each other along. They all need to change. They'll all change together. But one thing we've really learned is that it's absolutely no good hanging around waiting for the day when the right politicians come along to show the leadership. I think the sad reality is that we have to expect probably our politicians are the followers and we the people and the business world between us are the leaders.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one person cuts their carbon, and the reality is that one way or another the rest of the world somehow kind of adjusts and absorbs the slack, unless you can get a global system change. So the question for an individual to be asking is what can I do to help bring about the conditions under which that global system change can become possible? And it's partly about the way that we live and the sustainability of our own lives, and it's partly about all the other things that we do to push for change the way we influence our politicians, the way that we choose carefully where our money is going, the way that we influence our workplace, the way we choose every time we spend or buy anything, you know, what kind of future are we pushing for. So absolutely individuals have a role. And, you know, I've already talked about the role that protest has clearly had.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so a really brilliant question. So at the end of the day, this is a global systemic problem and we need global system change. So the question becomes, what will it take to bring that about? And all of us can say, well, I'm just 17.7 billionth of the problem. You know, what can I do? I'm such a speck. And I showed that carbon curve earlier. And that's not showing any kind of a dent at all despite the fact that we all know people and companies and even countries that are trying to take action. How come when you add all that up together you don't get any kind of a dip at all? And the reason is because at the global system level and I write about this quite a bit in the book there are kind of rebound effects and self-adjusting mechanisms that keep us on the same trajectory.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, human well-being measures are really, really flawed, but as long as you treat them with a lot of caution, they're worth something. Biodiversity metrics are, you know, again, you can always gain them, but they are much more worth having. There's one very simple metric. I mean, I spend a lot of my time, especially at work, you know, counting carbon numbers. And, you know, that is one beautiful metric because there is an absolutely direct and pretty simple correlation between the way we're mucking about with our climate and the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that we're sticking up in the atmosphere. So that's one example of a pretty clear metric.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I still found myself hearing him say odd things like growth is essential, and I want to go whoa, hang a wait a minute, we need to totally unpick that, you know, growth of what exactly GDP, the size of the planet, the human population, our energy supply, growth of what, and what exactly lets you know that it's essential. Let's go back to first principles properly on all of that.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“terribly at the moment and you know but any metric you can game it so you need to stand back to it and say look you know we were only using that metric because of some qualitative thing that was really important to us like the health of people and planet so there's a whole you know and the yeah the implications for economics are enormous so it's really unsurprising that today's economics are unfit for purpose because we honed our economics over millennia in a pre-anthropocene world and that's a totally different context for humanity to be in so now we need to rework into something that is fit for the for the modern world and so i you know i heard mark carney's reflectures which in many ways i found really heartening to have a proper highly respected mainstream economist taking on some of this stuff”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, GDP, I mean, that's one of the things we need to look at is metrics and what we do with metrics and which metrics we need we use. So GDP has just got so overrated. It was invented, I don't know, when 100 years ago or something, it was never really intended to be used as the big master metric of success that it's treated as now. And it's completely out of place and inappropriate. So it's not that GDP is a bad metric, it's just that we need to unfixate ourselves and we need to tune in to other things that matter more that are more connected with the well-being of people and planet. And so that when a chancellor starts banging on about GDP, everyone just yawns at them because we're interested in other stuff more. But it's also true to say that all metrics are bit reductionist and we need to treat them all with a pinch of salt. You can game them all and we game.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the book's written from very much a global perspective, so the challenges we face in the anthropocene are global challenges. There's no getting around it. There are 7.7 billion of us, and if we don't begin to treat 7.7 billion people as if they all matter, then we're just never going to be able to look after a planet as fragile as we're at. But a lot of the messages about what we can do are, I suppose, I have in mind probably the developed world most of the time, because actually it's primarily us that need to be the lead actors on it right now.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the most important people to reach are the people in the developed world who need to take the leading action right now. We're the people with the biggest impacts and that's absolutely right. If you're struggling to have what it takes to have a decent quality of life, then in a developing country, then you legitimately have to some degree other priorities. But it's up to us to make it good and acceptable and possible for developing countries to go down the sustainability route as well. We can help countries to transition from being poor to being sustainably wealthy.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for themselves and I think that's distinctly unproven but it is true that we won't deal with it by carrying on as we've been doing so the kind of transition that we need to see is deep you know it affects how we think what our values are which we can cultivate through through deliberate action how we do our economics how we structure up our politics you know it is deep change”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not nor percent and it's not a hundred percent, which means there's everything to play for, and we should all be and the harder we push, the better our chances become. Those things, I think I can say, you know, for sure. The truth of it is, we don't know whether we've already tipped things to a point at which combination of feedback mechanisms, you know, methane exploding out of the melting permit for us plus the melting ice caps, you know, plus the wildfires together have created a situation that we just can't undo. We think we're okay at the moment, but we don't know for sure. And the longer things go, the worse our chances get. And some people say to me, well, we've had it because you look at humans, you look at how we've responded to this. It's clear we're not fit for the situation that we've created for us. It's clear that humans can't deal with the anthropocene.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's smart guy, and he says, you know, he has to get experts onto his land the whole time because the complexity of just his little hill farm is so high that one farmer can't get their heads around in a lifetime. So yes, we need to do the right thing. You know, having said all that, there are some fairly simple things that we could do to really to make big improvements just by incentivizing the right kinds of practice. But yes, huge, huge change.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, farming needs to change all over the world, but specifically in the UK, and we've got a great opportunity to really do the right thing with our land. So it's complex. We need to do the right thing in terms of food supply, in terms of biodiversity, also in terms of the communities who work the land. And actually doing the right thing with land takes skill and effort and people. So we need more farmers, not less. They need to be incentivized to absolutely do the right thing. It's really complex. I mean, you know, if there's a, anyone who's listening, once you've finished reading, there's no Planet B, please do pick up English pastoral James Rebanks new book. He's a late district farmer. He's really rolled up his sleeves on this question, these questions of how do you do the right thing by the land, by the food, by the communities, all the rest of it.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World. I've seen so much awful greenwash over the last decade or two that I've been working full time on this agenda. And we need to create an environment in which if a business is not necessarily lying but misdirecting our attention or being disingenuous, we need to create an environment in which they will feel really exposed and embarrassed because they know their customers will walk away, their staff will care about it enough that they won't want to be associated with them. Between us all we can push for that. And America has just taken one step in the right direction and it's got a lot of work to go on that.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's so important that we do get to that post-post-truth world. You know, and I write a lot about this whole chapter on truth in the book, and if I ever wrote a fourth book, it would probably be about all about truth. You know, the complexity of what we're up against now is so high and it's also interconnected and so easy for anybody who's feeling mischievous to pull the wool over almost everyone's eyes. And we need the clearest view of the truth as far as we can discern it that we can get. And so we need to raise the standards of it. So we need to bring about, and we can all help with this, which is why I'm saying it now. You know, we need to bring about a culture in which a politician is seriously embarrassed if they are seen to have been careless with the truth. It's like, you know, did you hope that we wouldn't notice? Did you not get this or did you hope that we wouldn't get it? And it needs to be properly threatening to their careers. And the same goes for the business.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agenda at all this is about making our lives. It's not just about heading off a crisis, it is about that, but it's actually about making our lives tons better while we're at it. What's the point of saving a planet? There's no fun to live in?”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's a shame, but if that happens, and I think but you know, I think it's kind of also a cheap trick from critics to try and stereotype people who care about the environment in that way. You know, it's not the kind of world that I stand for. I'm very clear and I do write, you know, I try and sum this up in one paragraph at the start of the book to try and create a flavor of the kind of world that I envisage. And it is a better one for everybody. It's more fun to live in the air's cleaner. We're more connected to the people around us. Our jobs are more fulfilling. The pressures we put on ourselves are more self-inflicted and less inflicted by other people. We compete for fun, but we collaborate when it's serious. And, you know, just everything about and we've decluttered. We're just spending more of our time in more meaningful ways. So, you know, this is not overall a hair shirt.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“as giving all people equal respect in their inherent value as humans, respecting all the other species as well, and finally respecting truth, for its own sake no matter how inconvenient that might be. And those three values were just really strongly embedded in everything they did. And there was no doubt about it. They opened up space in the UK, political space for the UK to increase its targets, and I've talked to politicians who were very clear about that. And they opened up space in the business world for asset managers, businesses of all kinds to be bolder and go further. But I think how they go about it, and I write about this in the book, is very, very important. It's not just about screaming from the streets. They've got to make it really clear. Any protest has got to make it really clear to everybody that they stand for a better world that really works for everybody.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I don't expect them to be perfect and I know that they'll make mistakes. I know they'll always get heavily criticized for those mistakes. And also the pandemic has really confused their, you know, has been a real spanner in the works.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the book, I cranked through all the numbers on this, but it turns out that if you took, if you wanted to put something like 100 people on that journey, it would require a whole year's worth of humanity's entire energy supply. So Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, well, they might be able to just about get them and their families off on this spaceship, possibly, but for us mere mortals, it's a complete pipe dream for ourselves, for our next generation, ten generations down the line, it's not happening. We're stuck on our beautiful planet A. Like it or not, and Star Trek is fiction.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So glad you asked me that question, and I did some back of the envelope calculations to head off exactly this line of thought in the book, which does try to be fun as well as serious at the same time. But if you, so if you look at the nearest planet that could be any good for humans to live on, right, in other words, has an atmosphere and so on, is pretty local in universe terms. It's only four light years away. And so if you're prepared to have a long journey, a 40-year journey, you only need to travel at a tenth of the speed of light. And if you look at the kinetic energy that's required to get a human up to that speed, it's absolutely enormous. And that's just a human flying through the air, flying through space in their underpants, which of course would be instant death. So if you give them just a small spaceship, it would...”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you look at the efficiencies of those processes that we can do today to create both carbohydrate and protein, it's something like fifty times more efficient in terms of what you can produce from a meter of land than having a field. And that's, you know, makes me go gulp a bit. Do I really look forward to that world? But I think we'll get used to it. And I think the trade-off is that we sacrifice 2% of the world's surface area to solar panels, say, and in exchange for that we get to free up the rest of the Earth's surface for biodiversity. And I think on balance it's a win.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and actually, it's something that I wrote a couple of extra pages about in the updated version of the book. And it's something that took me a little bit of time to get my head around. But if you, you know, I think that industrial-grown food is probably the way it's going to go. A lot of it is going to go that way. And the reality of that is because if you look at how much the efficiency of turning sunlight into human nutrition, you can do it by having plants capturing sunlight, growing, and then you eat parts of that plant. Maybe you have wheat, a field full of wheat. Or if you want to generate carbohydrate, you put solar panels on a field and then you have a factory that turns solar panels that uses electricity to generate carbohydrate, or you have a process that generates protein.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many things in terms of personal actions, we don't need to be really hard and fast about it, but we do need to make a lot of change and assimilate we don't need to never fly, but we do need to only fly for really good reasons. And that's, you know, if that makes it sound like it's all a bit of a wearing a hair shirt going on the sustainability thing. Overall, it's absolutely not. It's full of opportunities to go and strip out the rubbish from our lives that just stresses us out and doesn't bring any quality at all and add in things that really do add value to our lives like community and health and all kinds of other stuff.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay, so it's one of the, you know, there's no getting around it if you look at our food and land system. It's about a quarter of the whole climate challenge, but it's also, you know, we also desperately need to stop hemorrhaging our biodiversity and we need to feed a rising global population. And if you look at the role of meat and dairy in this, it's clear cut that the amount of meat and dairy we have in our food system is putting enormous pressure on our food and land. Our biodiversity, the climate and everything. And it's not that we need to go absolutely 100% vegan or even vegetarian, but it is pretty clear cut that at the global level and even more than that at the UK level we need to eat a lot less meat and dairy. The good news is that that'll be good for us as well. It could be really tasty. We'll get used to it. We'll get to enjoy it. We'll get to the point where it's what we want to do. But it's like so.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take this data from planet Earth and say, oh, we can tell from this that humans haven't noticed climate change yet. And I'm picking my words carefully that that curve's going up exactly as if, exactly as if we had not noticed climate change. So the real challenge is the heart of the climate change phenomenon has been what's that head doing in the sand? But I think that head has moved the first millimeter upwards now. And if you think you're trying to pull that head out the sand, you're as the first millimeter is the hardest one, isn't it? Immeasurably better when we're making that transition.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All about the big picture on climate change. And when that came out, I remember we sat down together and we were just kind of looking at each other, scratching our heads going, come on, look, the stuff we've put down here is so not rocket science. And yet the world is just carrying on regardless. It was just felt ridiculous. It's like the global brain is just broken here. It doesn't feel like that anymore. It feels like there's a long way to go, but it feels that the slow process of humanity waking up has actually begun in a meaningful way. And I think when you're trying to get system change and it does need to be a really big, holistic system change, I think the first parts of that change are the hardest ones. So I've got, actually, I've got a little slide on this. So my slide three, you know, it shows that the curve there is global carbon emissions going up year on year. And if you were looking at this from Mars, you'd say Martian would look down on”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I'm an optimist because I'm an optimist in the sense that I think there's everything to play for, or it looks likely that there's everything to play for. Humanity is really playing with fire now. And actually, we talk, we tend to talk about the challenges we face as if we understand them a lot more than we really do. The truth of it is we're throwing the dice. We don't know whether we've already crossed tipping points on climate that we now can't go back from. Same with some of the other environmental challenges that are going on. But it looks likely that if we take really strong action right now, we have the opportunity to probably live better than ever most of us. And so, you know, am I optimistic? What I would say is this. A few years ago, Duncan Clark and I wrote The Burning Question. It's about 2013.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that would be to overstate it. I mean, America is hugely important, but what I think gives me enormous hope is that the first thing Trump did was pull out of the Paris Agreement, which was nuts. I mean, every significant country in the world signed up to the Paris Agreement and then America pulled out. And yet, despite that, the momentum on climate change has still gathered pace. And in the UK, it's gathered a lot of pace. And amongst the population, it's gathered a lot of pace amongst the business world, it's gathered a lot of pace, and it's gathered a little bit of pace in politically as well. But momentum's growing throughout the world. And now without Trump acting like an anchor on the whole thing, I really think we might see a real change in the pace. And China is also making some of the right noises. Very significant”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those three values were absolutely laced throughout both those two acceptance species, and yet they've been absent from the last four years of US rhetorics. And I just felt really, really elated. I hope Biden's as well, I hope he's as good as I hope he's going to be.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really hope that this is going to be a very good chapter. I mean, I think there's no doubt about it. So the Trump years have been like a lead weight on the world's response to climate and the wider environmental crisis. And, you know, whatever Biden turns out to be like just lifting that weight will make a huge difference. And Biden is saying a lot of the things I'd want him to say. I was really quite, I haven't heard his speech today yet, but I did hear his acceptance speeches and Camilla Harris's acceptance speech as well. And I was really struck that the value, there are three core values that I call for in, no, there's no planet B, which are I just lay out three values that I think humans now need from a practical perspective. Humanity can't thrive without fostering these values as cultural norms.”
2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source