It's time to change the way we think about changing the world | Kelly Levin | TEDxBoston
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV84fmWP_Jo Video ID: pV84fmWP_Jo ============================================================ Transcriber: Pham Thi Kim Tuyen B2105164 Reviewer: Bashar Al-Thawabta For those of you who are following the headlines around climate change, you may see headlines like this: World shift to clean energy is unstoppable. German heat pump sales grow by 111% in the first quarter. Oil, gas and coal demand peaks by 2030. In Lula's first six months, Brazil Amazon deforestation dropped 34%, reversing trends. Exponential deployment is now unstoppable: How the clean tech revolution is happening faster than you think. Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected. Cut the climate doom - exponential green change is possible. But there's also another reality that you see in the headlines. Researchers report mass bleaching of coral reefs in warming Florida oceans: "Like a forest without trees" Canadian wildfires twice as likely because of climate change. Half of glaciers vanish with 1.5 degrees of warming. Hurricane. Climate change makes nightmare scenario more likely. Climate change is causing severe drought in a volatile Mideast zone. Antarctic ice is disappearing, threatening massive sea level rise. And just a few days ago, earth caps off its hottest 12-month period on record. So how goes the battle? How are we really doing? What solutions are working and what isn't working? We need a situation room of sorts where we can figure out which activity should we prioritize, what's going well, what's not going well, what's stuck in the mud all together. And we've built something with partners called the Systems Change Lab. To do that, we know that we need systems transformation to solve our climate and nature crises, and we need this across a number of different systems from how we power our homes and transport goods and services, to how we build our cities and how we manage our land, our freshwater and ocean, and how we tackle the underpinning systems that determine all of the other systems in terms of governance and finance and economics and so on. And for each one of these systems, we've consulted the world's leading scientists to identify what are the critical shifts to solve our climate and nature crises equitably. So, for example, for power, we need to phase out the bad, the coal, the gas. We need to rapidly scale the good, the zero carbon electricity sources. We need to modernize our grids and energy storage. And we also need to secure energy access for the many, many people around the world who don't have it today. And for example, in land, we need to protect the precious ecosystems that we have left, and we need to restore the ones that have been degraded. And we need to sustainably manage our land and reduce pollution and stop the overexploitation of species. And then when you think about systems change, you think about these underpinning cross-cutting systems that determine the rest of the systems. So, for example, in finance, we need to manage and disclose and measure our risks. We need to scale up public and private finance. We need to extend services to those that don't have it. We need to get rid of the bad subsidies. We need to price the externalities and so on. So we've built the Systems Change Lab to design science based targets for this decade. For each one of those shifts, to see where we need to be by 2030. And we look at where are we today, where have we come from? What's accelerating, what's stuck in the mud? What's headed in the wrong direction altogether? And for each one of these shifts, we not only look at high level outcomes of how they're doing, but we look at at what rate are we overcoming barriers? And are we enabling change fast enough? So, for example, if you think about phasing out the internal combustion engine, we won't only look at sales of electric vehicles, but we'll look at how many charging stations are on the road, how quickly our companies and governments adopting phaseout goals for the internal combustion engine, how much money are we pouring into our D and D for batteries, for example? And recently we looked at 42 indicators that are some of the best indicators of whether or not we're on track for 1.5°C, a goal of the Paris Agreement. And we found troubling that only one was on track the share of electric vehicles and passenger car sales. The majority of them require more than a doubling of the recent rates of change. And troubling six are headed in the wrong direction altogether. If you think about, for example, public financing of fossil fuels, which has more than doubled since 2020, the highest rates in a decade, we are headed in the wrong direction altogether. That's sobering. The good news is that change can happen exponentially. It can happen in a way that we can't actually even have predicted. If you think about things that are in your homes refrigerators, air conditioning, the cellular phones, it can take off exponentially so that change is irresistible and unstoppable. If you look at the cellular phone that we actually depend on on an hourly basis, you never could have imagined that two decades ago. So how do we learn from the lessons of exponential change to make sure that we embrace those lessons for the climate and nature crises? The thing is, we're really bad at thinking exponentially. This is the World Energy Outlook, which predicted solar energy uptake, and year after year it got it wrong. It literally redrew the lines on a map. So the system change lab is not only tracking progress towards these 50 to 70 shifts, but we're also learning about the ingredients of change where we're seeing nonlinear exponential change. What allowed that to happen? What were the ingredients of that? What was the special sauce that made that possible? And how can we take those lessons learned so that we make smarter interventions. So, for example, we look at the growth in electric vehicle sales. And we can actually see a subset of countries that has gone faster than what is needed globally, Norway and Iceland and Sweden and the Netherlands. And you can also think about solar and wind. And there are eight countries that have already grown solar and wind at a steeper rate that once needed globally. And the thing is, these countries differ significantly geographically. Different GDP per capita, different energy supply mixes, and they were all able to beat what is needed globally. And if you think about the special sauce that allowed this to happen in Uruguay, for example, it was a combination of factors first and exogenous shock that happened, a series of droughts that happened that woke the government up. The government put in place very smart policies, and they created the enabling environment for the private sector, long term contracts, private sector comes in, international investors come in and it takes off so that in 2016, Uruguay is actually exporting its excess wind to neighboring countries. That's remarkable. And it's not only the uptake of renewable energy, but it's also the phase out of the bad in coal. And if you think about the United Kingdom, where we were at at 40% of electricity generation coming from coal, declining to about 2% in less than a decade, where there's one coal power plant under operation. And what was that? That was government policy. That was carbon pricing. And incredibly supportive public falling energy demands and a combination of factors. And in fact, for all of these examples, we see a number of different factors coming together, from behavioural change to innovations and technology, from smart regulations and incentives, and most of all, courageous leadership from governments, from private sector, from activists. And we don't have enough courageous leadership today. The thing is, we need to take evidence from these kinds of examples and systemic thinking when we pursue problem solving, because the risk is that we miss the big picture. We don't actually go after the root causes. We lead to unintended consequences. We might waste our resources. We may fail to scale impact where impact. Yes, it's great in one jurisdiction, but it never actually scales to a level that's commensurate with the scale of the problem. And maybe, yes, we have some success, but then it reverses. We need to think smarter. And the thing is what we've been doing is not working. And just like the dog that fails to learn new tricks and it runs faster and faster and faster, and it can never, ever keep up with this motor cycle. This pup is smarter. It trades its transformation mode, it gets rid of its legs and jumps on the motorcycle. And we to. Yes, we must double down on what's working, but we must also adopt new thinking. We must use the very best evidence and data and science to learn where to prioritize our efforts, and to learn how to make exponential change so that it is irresistible and unstoppable in this decisive decade to address our climate and nature crises. Thank you.