Keynote Speaker - Futurist: Innovation green tech, sustainability, climate change.

[00:00:00] Sustainability is another issue and I'm talking about water, yes, I'm talking about global [00:00:10] warming, yes, I'm talking about just about everything associated with this word. Whatever [00:00:15] your views are about the science, remember the future is not about the science of global [00:00:20] warming, it's about emotion. The science of global warming is a guess about what may happen [00:00:29] to our world in 2050, and by the way we will never know. Because we are already taking action, [00:00:37] by the time we get to 2050 we will probably have changed a little bit what the carbon dioxide [00:00:43] level would otherwise have been. So we will never know what would have happened in 2050 [00:00:50] if the level had risen to that point, and historians will go on debating that with scientists for [00:00:55] a thousand years more. I am convinced that global warming is related to human activity [00:01:03] important. And the carbon dioxide story is very important in it, vital. But, even if I'm [00:01:11] wrong, and there is debate about it, even if this graph of carbon dioxide and temperature [00:01:16] going back over 450,000 years, even if it is wrong, we know the future. We know that there [00:01:24] is already passion about this issue. Put your hands up if you think that the amount of emotion [00:01:32] has been changing over the next five years around the world. Put your hands up. Three [00:01:36] years ago you could hardly find a world leader talking about this issue. Now you can hardly [00:01:42] find one that doesn't talk about it every week. And this is an example of emotion changing. [00:01:49] The science has changed a little, but not very much. It's emotion attached to science which [00:01:54] is driving global warming. And you can be sure that hundreds, hundreds of millions of dollars [00:02:02] of euros will be spent on innovation in this area. Global warming represents the biggest [00:02:09] new business opportunities of this millennium so far. We are talking about potentially 40 trillion [00:02:16] dollars of innovation that will be sold in new products and services by companies over the [00:02:23] next 35 years. And with it comes other issues as well. Whether it's a threat of rising water [00:02:30] in Bangladesh or other things. And you hear a lot about companies becoming carbon neutral. [00:02:37] In five years time I think it will be difficult to hold an event like this without making the [00:02:41] entire event carbon neutral as a matter of, not a matter of choice. Which will mean that [00:02:47] all the energy that you use, including the power in this projector, will be calculated and then [00:02:55] an amount will be donated to something like the World Wildlife Fund so that it can be invested [00:03:01] in projects, probably mainly in emerging countries, to make viable ways of saving carbon elsewhere that [00:03:10] are not quite viable at the moment. So it's a project which would be fine with a 20% extra subsidy. [00:03:16] And suddenly it can work. Suddenly, a thousand more households stop burning oil or gas. They [00:03:22] stop using coal and they start running off water power or something like that. And in the energy [00:03:28] market you will continue to see massive distortion as there has been for the last 35 years. And let [00:03:35] me give you an example of how emotion and science conflict or get confused. The United States and the [00:03:42] European Union decides that biofuels is the answer to global warming or part of the answer. To burn food [00:03:48] cars is a great idea, they say. And within a few weeks, we have 20 million acres lost in [00:03:54] America of farming and 33% of the corn crop last year was put into vehicles to be burnt. [00:04:00] What a wonderful idea, you might say. By 2010, 5% of all the fuel in this part of the world will also come [00:04:09] from burning up fuel. Straight away, we have food price rises. Or is it just a coincidence? Who knows? [00:04:17] The UN thinks that up to 70% of this rise is coming from biofuels policy. But remember, the future is not [00:04:25] about truth or science. It's about emotion. And even if they are wrong, if that 70% is believed, it will cause a [00:04:34] problem. Another problem is the fact that one billion people today are hungry. Not that hungry, but hungry. And [00:04:43] another 500 million are overweight. Some of them in the same countries. And that is why we now have 33 nations [00:04:54] threatened with food insecurity. And what that means is riots. And these are some of them. And why do [00:05:01] people riot over food? Not just because they are angry. I said 300 million people in China were moving [00:05:09] from rural areas to cities, which is partly how the rural areas change, actually. It's through rural [00:05:15] migration into cities. Those populations transform. They then go back. Some of them go back with new values [00:05:22] and processes and processes and technologies and transform their rural communities. And that's [00:05:26] happening all over the world. But when you arrive and you lose your land and you arrive in a city and you [00:05:33] live in a slum, 80% of all you earn is spent buying rice or corn or something because you have no land now. [00:05:41] For the first time you are in the food market. So if food prices go up by 100%, then straight away you are [00:05:50] hungry. So what do you do? Well, the answer is you eat less so your children can eat. When the food prices [00:05:57] go up again by another 25%, you know what you do? You start selling your pots and pans. You sell your cooker. [00:06:05] You sell everything that you have to buy food. You liquidate your assets to feed your children. And when [00:06:11] your assets have gone, what do you do then? The following week you go out on the streets. The following [00:06:18] week you start picking up bricks and you throw them through the window of a food shop to feed your family. [00:06:24] The following week you turn a vehicle over, you take petrol and you light it and you burn it. The [00:06:30] following week you riot on the streets, my friends, and that is why we have seen these things happen all [00:06:35] over the world. It's not just a political protest. These are issues of survival. So does biofuel policy [00:06:43] matter? Oh yes, it does. When I was talking to the Pentagon about ways to prevent future conflict, [00:06:50] does it matter that you have a policy that produces ethanol from sugar or for the European Union the [00:06:58] same? It may do. Even if the science is wrong, even if the UN are wrong, that the food prices are not [00:07:05] related to this at all. But if the public perception is that, that's what will happen. So, and look at [00:07:11] this statement here. The UN, this is the UN's own statement. The United States and the European Union [00:07:18] have taken a criminal path by contributing to explosive rise in global fuel prices through using [00:07:25] food crops to produce biofuels. Hmm. Emotion. So what's going to happen to biofuel policy? Dead. [00:07:36] What's going to happen to turning food into fuel? It's finished. What's going to happen in five years [00:07:42] time if you've invested a whole load of money this year to build a huge factory for it? You're out of [00:07:47] business. Will we have biofuels? Of course we will. They'll be made from things like the cooking oil that [00:07:53] was used in this hotel. Yes. Put it into a diesel engine to drive a bus. Great. Use some of the crop [00:08:01] what you cannot eat. Yes. But don't convert food into fuel. So I'll just give it as an example of how [00:08:09] emotion can change in less than 24 months and how government policy can be transformed. And you find [00:08:16] one policy replaced by another when single issues rule. And that is why the world is becoming so radical. [00:08:24] OK. I'll skip these other things to do with. We're going to see amazing technologies to rebalance our [00:08:31] energy, whether it's geothermal, street lighting, which itself will reduce 3% of every country's [00:08:37] electricity bill in the West, and so on.