Silicon Valley I am from the town of
Cupertino which you might recognize is
the headquarters of Apple Computer but
the discussion was going to have the day
is about something that brings us
together as brothers and sisters and the
family on this blue planet that’s on the
screen behind me even though I’m from a
place that’s far away I want you to
depart today realizing that what you
what you do and what you decide in your
lives will have a direct impact on me
and my family and frankly what I do and
my family does has a direct impact on
you I grew up from the Central Valley of
California it is an agricultural area
very similar to Punjab and I grew up
with four brothers on about a mile
square piece of land and being ambitious
young men we always had our ideas about
what was fun and what was interesting
and so I’m showing you a picture here of
the fact that we had dairy cows and we
had farms and orchards and all sorts of
things that were wonderful places for us
as young men to create adventures and to
figure out how we’re going to entertain
ourselves a major priority for us of
course was how to move around in our
vast domain and so we had motorcycles we
had small dune buggies and other
vehicles that we would use to haul
things around like wood to build forts
and sticks and other things that we made
tools of so we were quite inventive and
innovative young men sometimes in very
interesting ways one time we were trying
to figure out how to get a motorcycle to
start and so we tied it up to a horse
and we figured that the horse had horse
power
that was true actually because when you
tie a motorcycle over the horse and the
horse takes off running the motorcycle
actually could be jump-started and so
now the horse of course thought he was
being chased by a motorcycle which was
unfortunate for me because I was riding
the motorcycle and tied to the horse the
horse jumped over a ditch the motorcycle
crashed into the ditch I was fine but I
was no longer on the motorcycle I was
lying on the ground so that type of
innovation which by the way the
innovation that was missing there was
how do you untie the motorcycle from the
horse was something we experienced
firsthand and had a direct impact on me
in my life the youth that you see here
though our young excited inspired young
men that didn’t realize that they would
soon be wrecking on a motorcycle because
of some of their inventions that weren’t
fully thought through and my four
brothers and I grew up together on the
farm and went on to found the largest
raw milk dairy in the world it’s on 400
acres on the land that we grew up online
and it is now a business that we’ve
shared it’s a family and now have built
it with our wives and our children and
our nephews and it’s brought us together
as a family throughout our entire life
we also built one of the largest organic
almond farms in the world and the
Central Valley is very special in that
99% of the almonds in the United States
are grown really around where I grew up
and I didn’t realize it when I was young
but it’s because in the winter time
there’s a fog that makes it very cool
but doesn’t freeze so it’s a very
special area and here in India much of
the almond products you buy actually
comes from a place near Fresno
California where I grew up my brothers
and I saw this as a business opportunity
and we built up in organic almond
farming business again managing it with
our our family together
I went on though to get into biofuels
and biofuels are an interesting industry
because they take the materials that you
grow on the farm and they turn it into
energy and I got very interested in
energy energy of course was what was
powering our motorcycles and our cars at
the at the farm but interesting enough I
didn’t realize until older that I was
older that we actually did not use
electricity
we used liquid energy in the form of
biofuels and other things and as I was
growing in my business I bought an
airplane and I started flying around the
United States and then Central America
and then Asia came here I went to Middle
East went to Dubai and Bahrain and I
discovered that the world had an energy
problem specifically I came to India and
came to find that the average India
person about 10 years ago used only one
barrel per year of crude oil for
everything energy electronics plastics
everything about one barrel per year the
average person in China was about 1.6
barrels but the average person the
United States was 25 barrels per year
per person and I had developed a career
and funding these types of companies and
specifically the Internet and I
discovered that here in Asia when you
give a mobile phone to somebody out in
Punjab or Pune and they start watching
the Internet that their consumption of
crude oil changes why because quite
frankly electricity in the form of solar
and wind and hydro and nuclear is not
transportable very easily it’s the same
problem I had on the farm right when we
had the motorcycles and the dune buggies
and had to pull them with horses is that
you couldn’t plug in your motorcycle and
then go driving around in our circles or
where your plugin was so you had to have
a type of energy that could be stored
and moved and that liquid fuels were the
solution for that so I discovered though
that there’s a problem that the
dependence we have on liquid fuels makes
us depend dependent on crude oil and so
when you give the Internet to 2.5
billion Indians Chinese and Asians
suddenly they want to do the same thing
I was doing on the farm they don’t only
want their own motorcycles they want
their own cars and trucks and vans and
some of them want their owner airplanes
like I have and they all consume liquid
fuel I would like to point out to you
plugging in my airplane and flying
around is not a very realistic way to
fly so you’re dependent on very dense
mobile storable fuels but here’s what
happens when you burn those fuels this
is the global emissions of carbon
dioxide that comes out of burning
petroleum and when you put that in the
atmosphere and the atmosphere warms up
we get climate change and climate change
of course is very potentially damaging
to people in India and China and
everywhere else but you really have no
choice why because in making electricity
you’re burning coal and burn it in
running your vehicles you’re burning
crude oil so I went on to found four
companies that do about 1.8 billion
dollars per year revenue that
specifically do not use petroleum to
make the fuel that Senor cars and it
flies your airplanes and in California
which is a state that measures how much
carbon goes into the atmosphere and then
incentivizes people like me to make more
of that fuel you might notice about
eighty-five percent of the carbon
reduction that’s happened in California
came from companies like ours who built
plants that are able to not emit
Cartman into the atmosphere I want to
get back to the beginning the story
though I mentioned my brothers and I
grew up an area with almond orchards and
the it’s this type of orchard is from
the Central Valley and looks exactly
like what I remember as a child running
around with my brothers and discovering
how to hurt ourselves doing a variety of
different things one morning when I was
12 years old my mother came in very
early in the morning and told me that my
brother who’s 7 years old was in the far
right of the picture had been killed the
night before on a foggy night driving in
the Central Valley California he was
seven years old and at that time I was
very sad for my family but I was more
sad about the life that my brother David
could have had and what he could have
done to impact not only our family in
our community but the whole world and as
I toured the world and built plants in
the United States and frankly built a 50
million gallon biodiesel plant and
talked him out of India east of
Hyderabad I came to appreciate that what
we do does have an opportunity to impact
you here in India and the rest of the
world and so I went back to the place
where I grew up and every 20 years what
you see here are trees and those trees
are knocked down and the trees are
replaced and from that you end up with a
waste product it’s the wood from those
trees that wood it can be either be
burned and make pollution much like what
happens here in northern India when you
burn the crops and you look out you see
the atmosphere as pollution we do the
same thing in California from these
orchards so my team and I are expanding
an existing hundred and fifty million
dollar biofuels plant that’s the largest
plant in California that we own to
invest another hundred and fifty million
dollars in a plant that will look just
like this and next year if you come to
California come
at our company you will see that we’re
taking the orchard wood that would have
been burned and create air pollution and
climate change and we’re converting it
into advanced biofuels replacing the
petroleum that is creating the carbon
dioxide that’s creating climate change
now what’s amazing and is a unique
insight is that the plants that we’re
using for this fuel actually grow based
upon the carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere whereas petroleum is carbon
that’s in the ground so for every gallon
you drive a car using the fuel from this
plant you will actually be taking carbon
dioxide out of the atmosphere that will
grow almonds it will make fuel that then
when your car burns it goes back in the
atmosphere but there’s less carbon going
back in our atmosphere it’s below zero
carbon emissions Bill Gates did a TED
talk it’s a very popular one has almost
two million views the title of his talk
is innovating to zero what he meant was
innovating to zero carbon this plant and
the innovation and funding behind it
will take us to innovating to below zero
allowing us to reverse the effects of
climate change at the same time get
benefits of reducing air pollution by
using this waste material not to burn
and create air pollution but actually to
make your lives better I want to comment
to you that India’s at a decision point
and that the leaders of India and the
population of India in its rapid growth
of six or seven percent per year have to
make a decision about whether it invests
in the innovation to use the waste
products that are currently being burned
and creating air pollution as the fuel
for your future or whether you become
more dependent on imported petroleum and
burning coal and burning petroleum
natural gas as your source of energy and
each one of you
we’ll make that decision it will not be
your political leaders because they are
elected by you and they unfortunately
are going to go with what you think is
what your future needs to look like we
are together on this small blue planet
parked in the middle of a very large
universe and we are all brothers and
sisters on this same planet and what
climate change has taught us is that the
decisions that I make in the companies
that I start the projects we fund the
decisions that you make and how you
select the energy that goes into your
cars and your homes the politicians that
you support are directly connected
because we are in the same family on the
same blue planet I would like you to
remember that as you make your career
choices
but also as you make your choices at the
pump on using renewable fuels or not
using renewable fuels thank you for your
time today
you
[Music] [Applause]