yes I’m gonna give a cheerful talk about
the world’s most serious problems
because I believe that we can see our
way to thinking of them of them as
solvable and then solved but first a
picture of a pelican I live on the San
Francisco Bay I don’t mean that as a
metaphor I read them floating home in
the San Francisco Bay
so pelicans will quite literally fly by
the back door and so on a recent evening
folks are over for dinner
I find myself with on one side of me one
of those guys who believes that climate
change is not real because it offends
his deeply held political persuasions or
something and on and on the other side
one of those other people who is
paralyzed with fear with the imminence
of climate change neither of those
attitudes is actually very helpful we
have to get to a point where we actually
understand that we can put our arms
around these great challenges and get
them solved and so we’re going to be
taking a quick look at how we can think
of these as business model challenges
and think of getting them to the point
where although these problems are vast
they are solvable well here’s a list of
these vast problems and yes the internet
is on the list along with water and
power reversing climate change not just
ending it reversing it food for 10 or
maybe 11 billion people without
destroying the planet unfill thiing our
oceans trees you could add to the list
there are almost certainly other things
that belong on those we do face vast
problems at global scale we do not have
the ability to put in place a cord
a global solution and yet we’re going to
get these things done yeah it’s an old
saying it’s attributed to Mark Twain but
it was actually his pal Charles Warner
everybody talks about the weather but
nobody does anything about it but take
out the word weather and put in climate
or oceans and we now have the
responsibility actually the opportunity
the exciting challenge to take on these
fantastic things and we will I do
believe that we are going to solve them
but we’re not going to solve them by
just worrying about them and I you think
of this in part because of an important
lesson from history you’ll all know that
I’m going to be talking about Robert
Malthus the British cleric who about two
hundred and twenty years ago did the
math actually he’s British on the maths
and he was able to prove quite
conclusively that we’re all going to
starve to death and the reason was that
population grows exponentially he
actually says geometrically so by a
certain percentage every decade also and
that becomes this vast up rising curve
whereas food output from farms he was
able to show using the data available at
the time was growing linearly
he said arithmetic li by a certain
amount every decade and sooner rather
than the later of that curve outstrips
that curve and this was the outcome that
he foresaw the power of population is so
superior to the power of the earth to
provide subsistence for man the
premature death must in some shape or
rather visit the human race a couple of
things about this first of all it’s
really cheerful
but also it has this very passive view
this is gonna happen kind of sorry his
idea for the solution was population
control but also you can see within this
the view that Earth exists to support
man also not a helpful way of thinking
about this so what did he get right the
exponential growth part he kind of got
right at the time that Robert Malthus
was alive there were 1 billion people on
earth today at 7.6 also and by the end
of the century maybe 10 or 11 so we can
give him a passing grade on the
exponential growth of population but
hunger in fact a lower percentage of the
population is hungry today than at any
time in human history certainly far
lower than then of course way too many
people really are hungry so what did he
miss typically the people when you ask
people that question they come up with a
shopping basket full of answers
synthetic chemicals gave us fertilizers
they gave us herbicides and pesticides
we’ve had hybridized seeds and GMO
organisms and tractors refrigeration is
really important and on the business
side
similarly things but one worth paying
attention to crop futures an invention
from the Chicago Board of Trade in the
1870s which meant that a farmer could be
paid in October for a crop to be
delivered the next August that just
didn’t mean that the farmer and his for
her family could eat and sleep during a
long cold winter it D risked farming and
once farming was dearest’ banking got
involved and once banking was involved
agriculture became huge the business
thinking then really led the emergence
of large-scale agriculture that’s a
lesson we need to carry forward but the
shopping basket approach to thinking
about what Malthus missed isn’t enough
what did he really miss he missed the
power of human innovation
he missed ingenuity and most of that
innovation in ingenuity was not there
thinking about the poor people in front
of us who are about to be hungry almost
all of it and there are a couple of key
exceptions was there looking for growth
and prosperity and bounty and that I’m
going to argue is the way we must think
about climate change and all the rest of
those things we have the power as
humanity to design for our descendants a
better earth and that’s the goal that we
should be achieving so the solutions
start to look like well we’ve got these
ingredients yes human behavior yes
policies but the business models for
doing important new things with
important new technologies I’m not going
to read these at all but there is one
everybody knows that solar power has now
emerged as the best way to power the
earth the marginal cost for solar power
may actually reaches zero it is already
at a point where it is typically lower
cost than fossil fuel none of which
would have been possible without the
invention of a guy called Giga Shah who
a decade or so created something really
boring called the power purchase
agreement it turns out a lot of people
once solar power not only because it’s
green because once it’s on your roof you
have you know the cost of power for the
next 20 years
but neither businesses nor homes wanted
to pay out the tens of thousands of
dollars to do it Jigga Shah realized
that this was an opportunity for a
banking innovation that banking
innovation meant people could put solar
on their roofs or their company’s roofs
with no capital cost upfront that
de-risked it the banks got involved and
now Solar has basically it is taking
over and that’s where we get to in
thinking about the business models for
building the better
that we want a really big number 100
trillion dollars the first context for
thinking about the number 100 trillion
dollars is that this is the total
economic output of the world you take
all of the gross domestic products of
every country put them in a pile and
it’s a hundred trillion dollars another
context for thinking about the number a
hundred trillion dollars is this it is
the current estimate for the total cost
to completely stop using fossil fuels
now that means we can’t afford to do it
in a year the good news is we don’t have
either technologies or the business and
we don’t need to do it in a year but if
we were to try and do it in let’s say 20
years 25 years four trillion a year now
four trillion a year is an interesting
number not just because it’s smaller
because it’s actually about the same
amount of money that is spent every year
subsidizing fossil fuels so I’m going to
repeat that the amount that it will cost
us to get rid of fossil fuels we’re
already spending propping them up with
the technologies and the business models
to do that aren’t yet mature as they
mature the non-fossil fuel solutions
become broadly affordable as they become
affordable they become profitable and as
they become profitable they become
inevitable and this is stuff that we can
do in about 20 to 25 years elements of
business models that we can put into the
recipe include accounting investing
trusting and employing accounting not
everybody’s most exciting subject about
700 years ago I think starting in Venice
or somewhere the double entry the double
column form of accounting came into
being and now dominates corporations and
governments at one con for
credit and one for debit and they have
to balance but over the last 10 years
accountants have realized it’s not
enough because we’re pushing into
unconsidered things the externalities as
economists call them a whole set of
other things including intellectual
capital and what we’re considering here
environmental and natural capital and if
you don’t do this
this is what you get now where I live in
California the free plastic bag is a
thing of the past we go to the
supermarket you got your groceries paper
bag plastic bag 25 cents the consequence
of that over the last two years is that
the number of plastic bags being picked
up on california’s beaches has dropped
by depends on which county that’s
measured by county the least drop is
ninety percent and the most significant
one of the county’s went from several
thousand in a beach cleanup exercise to
42 and this however is a resort in Bali
Indonesia and in Bali Indonesia in in
Indonesia
plastic bags are not priced to include
the price of picking them up so putting
the external cost the full cost of
things into the cost of a product has
real beneficial outcomes as a result we
must look to a future and we must all
push for a future in which that full
cost accounting happens and we must get
states and governments to do that
likewise next investing I mentioned how
Jigga Shah and before that the crop
futures enabled large-scale investing is
that number again a hundred trillion
dollars McKinsey estimates that over a
hundred trillion dollars perhaps as much
as a hundred and twenty is looking to
put places into long-term enduring
infrastructures
so if we can actually create an
infrastructure business that is about
taking care of those externalities in
cleaning up our earth then this is the
amount of money that’s actually
available what they need is long-dated
capital these are sovereign funds their
pension funds they have no interest in a
sixth month gain on the stock market
they want to put money into a project
and it’s still their 20 or 50 years from
now doing good work it has to be an
essential infrastructure yes it has to
provide good returns but essential
infrastructure is what those guys want
to invest in the money’s there the third
thing is trust when you think about the
kinds of characters that we have
available to spend these sums of money
and to do these important things and you
put them up as a sort of list of species
they start to look like oh I don’t know
the list of criminals at the police
station
right we can’t natively trust any of
them if only there were a technology
that could enable us to actually build
trust in if only and that’s the promise
of blockchain which by taking the ledger
instead of having a secret and
controlled by one person or one entity
spreading it out in multiple copies
starts to create the basis of
unimpeachable ledgers of records that
are everywhere and no were at the same
time smart contracts in which people get
paid algorithmically upon executing upon
doing what they said they were going to
do now block chaining perfect is sort of
at the pimply teenager stage of life but
it seems to be headed in the right
direction as putting the basis for
executing trustworthy projects do
risking projects no matter where they
are and the last thing employing we’re
all used to the idea than another sad
story we have is the jobless future of
course artificial intelligence and
robots and software
eating all jobs and the second problem
of course is that jobs good jobs are
being created in places like Boston and
Northern California and Tel Aviv which
is not where most people are most people
are actually going to be in sub-saharan
Africa and South Asia believe that I’m
not sure
consider the island of Borneo and this
by the way is a really sad story I flew
over Borneo about 20 years ago it’s the
world’s third-largest islands it was
trackless jungle with elephants and
rhinos and orangutans and today it is
depending on who’s count you believe
between 60 and 80 percent clear-cut so
as a result their forestry industry is
dying and the tourist tree industry is
dying and unemployment is rising but
trees and forests are really important
for carbon sequestration we’ve got the
money to do that and software doesn’t
plant trees so one can actually think
about global renewal projects as not
only important but actually having the
potential to create hundreds of millions
of jobs collectively we have cut down
and not replaced several hundred billion
trees and it’s going to take a lot of
work to replace them and as we do that
we not only put real people to real work
but we actually create real value in
local communities in real wealth so full
accounting tens of trillions of dollars
looking for good investment blockchain
for trust and employment and of course a
pelican I know I actually took this
photograph myself two weeks ago it’s got
a date stamp yeah and I want you to use
this one as a bit of a metaphor in a
different way in the background those
white little stripy things those are the
port of Auckland a big container port in
Northern California and of course the
pelican and that’s the image of the
world that we need to design for our
future one in which there is a balance
between the business of bounty and the
strange beauty
nature because if we set that as our
goal we will achieve it and the
impossible problems will become possible
thank you
[Applause]
the world’s most serious problems
because I believe that we can see our
way to thinking of them of them as
solvable and then solved but first a
picture of a pelican I live on the San
Francisco Bay I don’t mean that as a
metaphor I read them floating home in
the San Francisco Bay
so pelicans will quite literally fly by
the back door and so on a recent evening
folks are over for dinner
I find myself with on one side of me one
of those guys who believes that climate
change is not real because it offends
his deeply held political persuasions or
something and on and on the other side
one of those other people who is
paralyzed with fear with the imminence
of climate change neither of those
attitudes is actually very helpful we
have to get to a point where we actually
understand that we can put our arms
around these great challenges and get
them solved and so we’re going to be
taking a quick look at how we can think
of these as business model challenges
and think of getting them to the point
where although these problems are vast
they are solvable well here’s a list of
these vast problems and yes the internet
is on the list along with water and
power reversing climate change not just
ending it reversing it food for 10 or
maybe 11 billion people without
destroying the planet unfill thiing our
oceans trees you could add to the list
there are almost certainly other things
that belong on those we do face vast
problems at global scale we do not have
the ability to put in place a cord
a global solution and yet we’re going to
get these things done yeah it’s an old
saying it’s attributed to Mark Twain but
it was actually his pal Charles Warner
everybody talks about the weather but
nobody does anything about it but take
out the word weather and put in climate
or oceans and we now have the
responsibility actually the opportunity
the exciting challenge to take on these
fantastic things and we will I do
believe that we are going to solve them
but we’re not going to solve them by
just worrying about them and I you think
of this in part because of an important
lesson from history you’ll all know that
I’m going to be talking about Robert
Malthus the British cleric who about two
hundred and twenty years ago did the
math actually he’s British on the maths
and he was able to prove quite
conclusively that we’re all going to
starve to death and the reason was that
population grows exponentially he
actually says geometrically so by a
certain percentage every decade also and
that becomes this vast up rising curve
whereas food output from farms he was
able to show using the data available at
the time was growing linearly
he said arithmetic li by a certain
amount every decade and sooner rather
than the later of that curve outstrips
that curve and this was the outcome that
he foresaw the power of population is so
superior to the power of the earth to
provide subsistence for man the
premature death must in some shape or
rather visit the human race a couple of
things about this first of all it’s
really cheerful
but also it has this very passive view
this is gonna happen kind of sorry his
idea for the solution was population
control but also you can see within this
the view that Earth exists to support
man also not a helpful way of thinking
about this so what did he get right the
exponential growth part he kind of got
right at the time that Robert Malthus
was alive there were 1 billion people on
earth today at 7.6 also and by the end
of the century maybe 10 or 11 so we can
give him a passing grade on the
exponential growth of population but
hunger in fact a lower percentage of the
population is hungry today than at any
time in human history certainly far
lower than then of course way too many
people really are hungry so what did he
miss typically the people when you ask
people that question they come up with a
shopping basket full of answers
synthetic chemicals gave us fertilizers
they gave us herbicides and pesticides
we’ve had hybridized seeds and GMO
organisms and tractors refrigeration is
really important and on the business
side
similarly things but one worth paying
attention to crop futures an invention
from the Chicago Board of Trade in the
1870s which meant that a farmer could be
paid in October for a crop to be
delivered the next August that just
didn’t mean that the farmer and his for
her family could eat and sleep during a
long cold winter it D risked farming and
once farming was dearest’ banking got
involved and once banking was involved
agriculture became huge the business
thinking then really led the emergence
of large-scale agriculture that’s a
lesson we need to carry forward but the
shopping basket approach to thinking
about what Malthus missed isn’t enough
what did he really miss he missed the
power of human innovation
he missed ingenuity and most of that
innovation in ingenuity was not there
thinking about the poor people in front
of us who are about to be hungry almost
all of it and there are a couple of key
exceptions was there looking for growth
and prosperity and bounty and that I’m
going to argue is the way we must think
about climate change and all the rest of
those things we have the power as
humanity to design for our descendants a
better earth and that’s the goal that we
should be achieving so the solutions
start to look like well we’ve got these
ingredients yes human behavior yes
policies but the business models for
doing important new things with
important new technologies I’m not going
to read these at all but there is one
everybody knows that solar power has now
emerged as the best way to power the
earth the marginal cost for solar power
may actually reaches zero it is already
at a point where it is typically lower
cost than fossil fuel none of which
would have been possible without the
invention of a guy called Giga Shah who
a decade or so created something really
boring called the power purchase
agreement it turns out a lot of people
once solar power not only because it’s
green because once it’s on your roof you
have you know the cost of power for the
next 20 years
but neither businesses nor homes wanted
to pay out the tens of thousands of
dollars to do it Jigga Shah realized
that this was an opportunity for a
banking innovation that banking
innovation meant people could put solar
on their roofs or their company’s roofs
with no capital cost upfront that
de-risked it the banks got involved and
now Solar has basically it is taking
over and that’s where we get to in
thinking about the business models for
building the better
that we want a really big number 100
trillion dollars the first context for
thinking about the number 100 trillion
dollars is that this is the total
economic output of the world you take
all of the gross domestic products of
every country put them in a pile and
it’s a hundred trillion dollars another
context for thinking about the number a
hundred trillion dollars is this it is
the current estimate for the total cost
to completely stop using fossil fuels
now that means we can’t afford to do it
in a year the good news is we don’t have
either technologies or the business and
we don’t need to do it in a year but if
we were to try and do it in let’s say 20
years 25 years four trillion a year now
four trillion a year is an interesting
number not just because it’s smaller
because it’s actually about the same
amount of money that is spent every year
subsidizing fossil fuels so I’m going to
repeat that the amount that it will cost
us to get rid of fossil fuels we’re
already spending propping them up with
the technologies and the business models
to do that aren’t yet mature as they
mature the non-fossil fuel solutions
become broadly affordable as they become
affordable they become profitable and as
they become profitable they become
inevitable and this is stuff that we can
do in about 20 to 25 years elements of
business models that we can put into the
recipe include accounting investing
trusting and employing accounting not
everybody’s most exciting subject about
700 years ago I think starting in Venice
or somewhere the double entry the double
column form of accounting came into
being and now dominates corporations and
governments at one con for
credit and one for debit and they have
to balance but over the last 10 years
accountants have realized it’s not
enough because we’re pushing into
unconsidered things the externalities as
economists call them a whole set of
other things including intellectual
capital and what we’re considering here
environmental and natural capital and if
you don’t do this
this is what you get now where I live in
California the free plastic bag is a
thing of the past we go to the
supermarket you got your groceries paper
bag plastic bag 25 cents the consequence
of that over the last two years is that
the number of plastic bags being picked
up on california’s beaches has dropped
by depends on which county that’s
measured by county the least drop is
ninety percent and the most significant
one of the county’s went from several
thousand in a beach cleanup exercise to
42 and this however is a resort in Bali
Indonesia and in Bali Indonesia in in
Indonesia
plastic bags are not priced to include
the price of picking them up so putting
the external cost the full cost of
things into the cost of a product has
real beneficial outcomes as a result we
must look to a future and we must all
push for a future in which that full
cost accounting happens and we must get
states and governments to do that
likewise next investing I mentioned how
Jigga Shah and before that the crop
futures enabled large-scale investing is
that number again a hundred trillion
dollars McKinsey estimates that over a
hundred trillion dollars perhaps as much
as a hundred and twenty is looking to
put places into long-term enduring
infrastructures
so if we can actually create an
infrastructure business that is about
taking care of those externalities in
cleaning up our earth then this is the
amount of money that’s actually
available what they need is long-dated
capital these are sovereign funds their
pension funds they have no interest in a
sixth month gain on the stock market
they want to put money into a project
and it’s still their 20 or 50 years from
now doing good work it has to be an
essential infrastructure yes it has to
provide good returns but essential
infrastructure is what those guys want
to invest in the money’s there the third
thing is trust when you think about the
kinds of characters that we have
available to spend these sums of money
and to do these important things and you
put them up as a sort of list of species
they start to look like oh I don’t know
the list of criminals at the police
station
right we can’t natively trust any of
them if only there were a technology
that could enable us to actually build
trust in if only and that’s the promise
of blockchain which by taking the ledger
instead of having a secret and
controlled by one person or one entity
spreading it out in multiple copies
starts to create the basis of
unimpeachable ledgers of records that
are everywhere and no were at the same
time smart contracts in which people get
paid algorithmically upon executing upon
doing what they said they were going to
do now block chaining perfect is sort of
at the pimply teenager stage of life but
it seems to be headed in the right
direction as putting the basis for
executing trustworthy projects do
risking projects no matter where they
are and the last thing employing we’re
all used to the idea than another sad
story we have is the jobless future of
course artificial intelligence and
robots and software
eating all jobs and the second problem
of course is that jobs good jobs are
being created in places like Boston and
Northern California and Tel Aviv which
is not where most people are most people
are actually going to be in sub-saharan
Africa and South Asia believe that I’m
not sure
consider the island of Borneo and this
by the way is a really sad story I flew
over Borneo about 20 years ago it’s the
world’s third-largest islands it was
trackless jungle with elephants and
rhinos and orangutans and today it is
depending on who’s count you believe
between 60 and 80 percent clear-cut so
as a result their forestry industry is
dying and the tourist tree industry is
dying and unemployment is rising but
trees and forests are really important
for carbon sequestration we’ve got the
money to do that and software doesn’t
plant trees so one can actually think
about global renewal projects as not
only important but actually having the
potential to create hundreds of millions
of jobs collectively we have cut down
and not replaced several hundred billion
trees and it’s going to take a lot of
work to replace them and as we do that
we not only put real people to real work
but we actually create real value in
local communities in real wealth so full
accounting tens of trillions of dollars
looking for good investment blockchain
for trust and employment and of course a
pelican I know I actually took this
photograph myself two weeks ago it’s got
a date stamp yeah and I want you to use
this one as a bit of a metaphor in a
different way in the background those
white little stripy things those are the
port of Auckland a big container port in
Northern California and of course the
pelican and that’s the image of the
world that we need to design for our
future one in which there is a balance
between the business of bounty and the
strange beauty
nature because if we set that as our
goal we will achieve it and the
impossible problems will become possible
thank you
[Applause]
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