YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Berners-Lee

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57
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2021-01-26
most recent
2021-01-26
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  1. “I think that evidence is far stronger than ever. We've got a long way to go and it's really, really urgent. But the school strikes and the extinction rebellion, showing that people really care about this stuff. Governments responding, including the UK government taking some steps that are nowhere near enough, but they are really good steps in the right direction. You know, I didn't write, I didn't get a chance to write about Biden getting elected, but there's some change. But also in my work with businesses, all different kinds of business, I'm seeing such a change in what is possible, what people want to do. So, you know, all of that needed to be written up. And of course, the pandemic, the impact of the pandemic. as well so it deserved an update”

    2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Take for humans to be solving these technically solvable challenges, and that takes you into questions of growth. What is our relationship with growth? What things is it still okay for humans to grow? We can't grow our climate emissions. We're unable to grow the size of the planet. We probably better not grow our population too much. Is it okay to grow GDP? All those sorts of questions.”

    2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, sure. So, I mean, so the book talks about all the things that are going on. So, first of all, it talks about all the environmental challenges we've got. So climate change and biodiversity. And actually, can we put up my slide two here? Because it just fleshes it all out in one go. So if you can see that now, you know, in the green around the outside are all the kind of physical challenges that we're facing. climate change, biodiversity, stuff going on in our oceans, pollution disease that we're hearing all about while we deal with all that we've got to feed the world, you know, feed a rising population. All these things have to be dealt with at once. But the kind of really good news, the one liner of good news, but I spend the first 50 to 100 pages picking through this in detail, is that from a technical and science point of view, we've got the solutions to all that stuff. If only it was just a challenge of science and technology. So the real, so that takes us into the questions of what would it be?”

    2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It really, really, really is. It's partly because I read like a snail myself. But it's partly because I always think with any kind of document, you know, you want to be able to access it, know something about it just by reading the title, and then a bit more by reading the contents page. And if you've got one minute, you should be able to flick through and find a few bits. You know, if you really love it, you should be able to read it cover to cover. And if you just want to dip in for reference. And, you know, if you want to have, you know, sit down for an hour, that's fine. If you just want to read one or two questions at night before you go to bed, it should be accessible in every way you want because the stuff that I'm writing about are really, you know, it's absolutely core. You know, I think the stuff that I put in there is the stuff that I think all humans need to get their heads around now because otherwise we can't manage the situation that we're in.”

    2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's written, you know, all books sort of start at page one and go through to page 300 and whatever. But ideally, I mean, the context we're in now is that the challenges we face are so inescapably interdependent. It doesn't work to look at climate change over here and then biodiversity over here and then the social issues that we've got to deal with and the economics and politics all separately. You have to join the whole thing up at once. So ideally, you know, you just kind of pick up the book and you'd flick through it like this and you just absorb the whole lot simultaneously. You just do that until you'd understood the whole lot. And then, you know, and then you'd have it all in your head simultaneously. So my book, which is laid out in question format, is designed to be the closest you can get to something that you can sort of pick away at and absorb simultaneously, I suppose.”

    2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Which just says, and some people use this big word for it, they call it the anthropocene, this era in which suddenly humans are the big thing that affect the planet. And we used to be the small species on the left-hand side there, you know, who could treat the Earth like a big, robust playground. Even 100 years ago, we couldn't smash the whole place up. And then we've got more and more powerful. And now we've reached this point at which suddenly the world is so fragile. And we've had a few decades of being in this anthropocene, but being able to get away with just living as if we're not. But now, right now, and it really is right now, is the moment at which if we don't transition everything about how we do life to being anthropocene fit, the consequence is going to hit us really, really hard.”

    2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, the book is about exactly that saving the planet. So I've been working on climate change for 15 years or something. And the harder you look at the whole climate change challenge, the more inescapably clear it becomes that if you want to deal with climate change, you have to see it as just one symptom of something much bigger that's going on. So what is that bigger thing? It's really that humans have been getting more and more powerful every year for centuries or millennia. But what's happened really recently is that we've suddenly become so powerful that we're the biggest thing affecting the planet. And we've reached the point where we don't have to do anything particularly stupid to smash the place up if we're not careful enough, we will smash the place up. And that's exactly what's happening at high speed now. And so I've got a slide for this, actually, my little sketch to illustrate this. My slide number one, if we can see that. Okay, so that was my little sketch.”

    2021-01-26 · Intelligence Squared · How to Save The Planet, with Mike Berners Lee and Jenny Kleeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source