My talks

Co2 graph

Atmospheric Co2 over the last 800,000 years. Ice Ages have come and gone but the use of fossil fuels has pushed us into a new and dangerous place. My response is to write these blogs and to give talks about what humanity could and should do to bring us back toward a safer climatic future.

A couple of weeks ago, on the night before the election, I was giving a talk in Bridgnorth. The title was ‘Trump, the Carbon Bubble & the possibilities of a better future.’ I was putting forward a strongly political message and one man got up and left, saying he’d come to hear about climate change and not about politics. As I tried to point out to him, and to the hall full of people, effective action to reduce the dangers of climate change is essentially a set of political decisions. Humanity has the technologies to massively reduce all forms of pollution, and also the technologies to make the situation very much worse. What infrastructure we build, what taxes we implement, how we allocate resources and how we cooperate internationally are all fundamentally political decisions.

The first part of my talk was focused on the global political struggle as Trump, Putin, Saudi Arabia and the global oil, gas and coal corporations who fund them seek to keep the fossil fuel economy going as long as possible. On the other hand the vast majority of countries see the dangers of climate change and the positive opportunities in developing cleantech based economies. Some governments, such as that of the UK, are in a state of confusion, thinking they can do both. Most of the EU, China and many smaller countries are increasingly seeing the necessity and the benefits of ditching fossil fuels.

The second part of my talk focused on the emerging range of technologies that are making it possible to provide a good standard of living and a good quality of life to all 7.5 billion of us, and to do this in ways that reduce the dangers of climate change, reduce pollution and regenerate biodiversity. These positive possibilities get better by the day, yet our time window in which we need to take action gets narrower by the day.

I’ve a few more talks coming up, and I’d absolutely love to do more. One that I’m developing is titled ‘How to create a better world: fundamental principles.’ Another I’m working on is ‘Can we feed 9 billion people sustainably?’ I often do talks about what a 100% renewably powered global economy might look like and how we might get there. If you’d like me to come and speak, show slides, take questions and lead discussions with whatever group of people you’re involved with, please do get in touch.

After the Bridgnorth talk I got some really positive feedback, including that the man who left early complaining that the talk was too political had e-mailed the organiser later that evening to say it was probably his loss to have left early. Very encouraging!

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