investment specialist environmental and social factors have on financial components, but before that i'm in activist because of the i older i get to speak to today.

[inaudible] bills book that we will be discussing this morning has begun to play itself out and has the story of the increasing rising states of climate change, engineering. in some ways it is a companion to the first book stuck on climate change when he was in his 20s so fast forward to the ongoing contribution and he is now the go to on climate change. it's not just publishing about

problems going on but reading what he's writing and he founded the organization and has committed his life long story short, it is my goal for the understanding of how big what we are up against is but also how powerful br, as a collectivee force so i want to get into a discussion that asked the question we will hit on atme the end. i think we are ready to get going. are you ready to do this? >> that was a very kind introduction andth thank you for your good workrk and activism.

>> i'm so excited to talk not just about this book but what the book represents more broadly. it covers topics that require a certain level of bravery to take on and we dedicate it to a woman that passed away before the book was published. i have this written down here none of them had more. she spent her whole life engaged in her community and it was that sense of placing we all hear its echo. can you tell us about how her work has influenced this?

>> guest: it's very kind of you to bring her up and she's someone i've thought about almost daily. when i started it was the first iteration of the global climate and now there's other movements into the rebellion and people following so on and so forth. we were trying to find people who wanted to take on this site 15 years ago and started discovering amazing allies. we are in the most vulnerable places on the earth and small islands especially in the south pacific will disappear before this century is out and places

like that. she took it upon herself to be the organizer of those communities and they call themselves the pacific claimant warriors. i had a remarkable picture of organized people in each of these islands to build the traditional work and it wasn't that far away they used them for ast data blockade of newcastle. as it is burned it raises the

temperature. one of the greater iconic images stopping the progress with of the biggest warships in the world. she was remarkable and happily lives on in the south pacific but they are still going strong and doing great work. >> you touched on a lot i think we will eventually get to. i love this idea that you bring up often. this is hard work and it can be a really daunting site and wothat's why having community ad friends that you look up to is so important, so i'm grateful to learn more about the dedication

toca her now that you have a see of who the book was dedicated to, i'd like to ask you to rewind. a few things have happened since then. i don't know when you started writing the book that i'm curious who you imagined reading it and who you saw taking the folderer outline and putting it into action from the previous i think 16 books. >> i think most serious writers spend their lives writing one book, different chapters so this

is part and parcel this goes back 30 years. when i first started doing this in my 20s, i had no idea that i would do anything other than right. i didn't think of myself as an activist or anything. the last 15 years that's changed a lot. it's been hard to draw the line between and so it kind of brings the story up-to-date in a lot of ways but one of the things it reflects on is the kind of history of activism and how it

is a potent tool i call it technology to allow us to make electricity in the power of the sun. we needed a technology that would allow them to stand up to the mighty and the few. people like the suffragists and the million others we a don't kw really gave us those tools and now we need to figure out quickly how to bring them to bear because an awful lot is on the line at this point. we are facing existential crisis

like we haven't faced before. the battle is not over so there is a lot of work to be done. >> in any other year it would be easy to avoid. there's just nori way around it. you probably get this question all the time being asked to contextualize their work under the umbrella we experienced the global pandemic and racial reckoning and we saw the climate change shut down the state and put a lot of people at risk so

it's here with us. perhaps andha previous years. if you could go back and write another chapter about this year, obviously a lot was written on the wall so to speak, but what about this year has changed about the content of this book? >> to kind of confirm the understanding talking and working on these issues for a long time, 2020 was a remarkable year.ea 2020 was the year of the

pandemic and that should have reminded us of a few things, one of which that university reality is real. i've spent 30 years with varying degrees of success that it's realal and they don't negotiater compromise they have to lower. the pandemic was a reminder that it works in the same way. and if you decide to stand 6 feet apart and wear a mask, stand 6 feet apart and wear a mask. one of the corollaries of that is in the physical reality

sometimes speed is a very important factor. the systems are not geared for speed. i think one of the things that they will know it when they write about the pandemic is that the u.s. and south korea have their first case of the virus on the same day of january, 2020. everybody got a mask, they started testing everybody, on and on. but fewer people died in south korea in the first of the year than in the course of the day at the height of this country. they said not to worry, not a big deal and therefore we were unable to flatten the curve.

the same with february and march to substitute the last 30 years. now we have to see it work in short time. maybe the most important thing is that the pandemic was a reminder of solidarity really matters. it's a problem, not a solution.

the nine scariest words in the english language i'm from the government and i'm here to help. but it turns out the scariest words in thehe language are we'e run out of ventilators or your house has caught on fire. you call on the fire department and the hospitals and their ability to work together as human beings on the government that allows us to deal with problems so that the sentence was heightened in minneapolis and so much of the rest of the country. the most important thing was

george floyd said he couldn't breathe. being able to breathe is the definition of being alive and you can to be alive if there is a racist cop on your neck. there's activists pointing out and it's always the same road. african-americans have three times the rate with the difference in geography. they stay inside and tape the

windows shut. it's an all-time record it reached 130 degrees fahrenheit. it's the ability to survive for a few hours. in the end all of this is a stark reminder and the dealing with that has to be toar figure

out -- >> i think you hit that head on but working towards justice and it's often how to hold of those two things. recently you had a bit of a back and forth.

but obviously for the sake of today to be for the lack of a better word, moderate. they believe in climate change but they also might find something like the green new deal and i wonder how we think about the role of neutrality on the sidelines and how does that play into addressing climate change and the shrinking of the board as you put it. >> that is a good question, catherine. >> of the institutions change

best when they change slowly and gradual. that's just the truth. it's less traumatic and less divisive, so the best way to deal with climate change would be to deal with it slowly with the kind of cultural and technological shifts that allow us to. i've got solar panels on my roof and my brother-in-law sees them and 30 years down the road we've changed them dramatically. one of the things i have to keep myself from doing is this is the

point we were trying to make to begin with for a series of reasons and whether it's a very effective campaign of denial. it's different groups of people arguing with each other and reaching some kind of a compromise. come back and decide that a few years later, that's how compromise and the system works. but the basic conflict is between human beings in physics

and soon's physics is part of compromise, that becomes our job. scientists have now told us how fast we need to work. the international group of scientists the world leans on the further analysis and published the latest report and it said if they had until 2022 to fundamentally transform the systems which they defined as cutting emissions then the prospects we set in paris just five years ago, so that's the deadline. and in the face of that, like it

or not we had to think fast. the good news is the engineers have done their jobs over the last decade that means if we want to move fast, we can but that means being willing to grasp with the best of interest its business keep model goingnt even longer.

all his technological sites about what we are going to do 40 years down the road if we do the work in the next ten years and we have solar panels and wind turbines and we can't win the climate fight in the next ten years. it's going to take a lifetime. we go past a certain tipping points.

it's one of the physical features we think the reason that so much of the arctic has melted. we are messing with huge forces here . but it's not up to us. but it's --

>> it very much relies on us and -- >> well put. between people to act and look squarely at the reality of the situation and also to stay associated and not shut down so you say in reference to the industry letting them do what they want is a flawed argument. there is no one there to stop them in any way.

it's people who don't want to be bothered trying to stop it. nothing ever happened to them anyway. it is a gift. we don't precisely know how it will end. the part i want to pull out is the patterns and how it can be a sself defense mechanism and a lt of us need to wake up and be with our families and do the things asked of us.

breaking the pattern ultimately comes down to the mind and wondering if 30 plus years of doing this book still if your dmind was changed on something regarding climate change and so maybe we can apply it to folks that really need to show up. one of the things that resulted there was a time people thought natural gas was going to be a good bridge to the future. for a variety of scientific reasons it was called into the solutions and you have to

recalibrate and go forward. but sometimes the good surprises are really good ones and i think that an awful lot of this the thing that made it so difficult is there might be no way short of really just shutting down and also a lot of what human beings give to deal with it because they've seen things like solar power and wind power and sort of frivolous on the edge not capable ofn taking up slack in the system and in fact would turn out to be right. the great human capacity for engineering asserted itself and

people did this in ways that were cheap and powerful so we have vast amounts of clean energy and the irony to work itself out 75 years from now but if it takes 75 years to get there, our job now is to make it happen faster than it otherwise would and that is a political challenge. the biggest change over my years

of working on this is just the understanding to engage. i began as a writer and i've spent ten or 15 years writing more books and i had assumed incorrectly once we pile up enough evidence, the leaders would act because why wouldn't they. why wouldn't you take action. it took me to long to figure out and the science was entirely clear. there wasn't some other science pushing back. we are just losing the fight because it wasn't, it's what

theare usually about which is my and power. the industry had so much money and power that it didn't matter they were losing the argument. in texas there t is the sense of extraordinary power that even a few years ago on this date on earth, so that is why i ended up doing all this organizing because eventually it dawned on me we were going to need countervailing power. that's why it's so interesting and indicates that time to time lots of human beings and of their share in numbers and creativity and willingness to sacrifice and things adds up to political power and its own

right. one shouldn't really have to do this. why would anybody have to go to jail in order to make the government pay attention to science, but that's the world we live in so we have to figure out how to work in it and i am sorry i didn't figure out sooner. >> i think your point about the argument sounds kind of similar to we got the question write about it we haven't figured out how to turn it into a solution

and maybe it's one area where the claimant movement is around inclusivity and centering the voices of the folks with climate change and genetic engineering and have done so muchh good work it doesn't quite get the spotlight. i wonder from your perspective if you would post on that sentiment, and if so, where are the areas we can do a better job and which invoices do we need to do a better job at centering? >> i've always been told

environmentalism is something people did and you wouldn't be an environmentalist. for me the understanding shifted dramatically on 350.org. we do this international day of action to coordinate simultaneously in 180 countries with political action in the history as aut first coming-out party.

normally they joined these things as they came in with ten and 20 sometimes around the world. watching those it took me about half an hour to realize in the movement were simply incorrect because that's what most of the world is. it's maybe more so because the future bears down harder the

more vulnerable you are and then the sooner and harder you get in so it is useful if people are at the forefront of this work. frontlineom communities, availae communities and the activism now in the years and a particular child out to indigenous peoples around the world. a percentage of the world's population, but in this case and many others i think people saw

the emergence of a lot of indigenous leadership and it didn't surprise me because many to be the best activists around and the same thing is true around the world in the pacific and latin america the regional communities in australia, new zealand i think that's important for a couplee of reasons. the people in the places where they were on the reservations we thought we were giving them worthless land but it turns out now it sits on top of a lot of hydrocarbons so there's a lot of

practical with dakota access and things but also in a deeper sense the greatest on the planet kind of sinking up and from the satellite and of the computers s very much in the sink. it's the rest of us with much os the world that we keep growing the new size of the economy. there is essentially one. we need to think more deeply.

it's a pleasure to watch this. together on the same state or same jails it's powerful moments. >> i think you've done a really good job in your career. centering those that have been doing the work formp a long time and have been impacted but haven'tei always received the lipservice for doing it. it's these folks that are at the heart of the movement. the part i like is called passing the mic. i think i've managed to do it

for a couple of years because there are an extraordinary number of powerful, interesting races that help us see a lot more than in the past. it's going to make a very close call. if we do it's because we will managed to get them working in the same direction. we have been very good about that as societies and it's one of the things that better change fast. solar power is useful but again the broader people power is at least as useful.

>> i want to make sure specifically with your transition in the movement helped create and it's an interesting model for the leaders to think about cultivating next generation of talent and that may be older generations helped lead but i want to close out this idea on inclusivity and do something that i talk about in the data for mobile is understanding that nuance within the position of the just transition understanding that the folks that work in the coal mines out on the oil wells are being paid

competitively. taking a step back and looking at what seemed to me within the environmental movement and there's definitely a way to split it but to help us understand what some of those tensions are is navigating it over theea years. >> people through no fault of their own working in industries that are dangerous to the planet thisl is to say they are different from oil executives and i hope they contemplate occasionally they might end up

in a jail cell at some point but that's not true, just the opposite of people that don't honor their work over the years and now as we have to transition away from that we have to figure out how to make their lives work going forward and it's one of thes worst things about the gren new deal that young people have proposed and large parts of that have made its way into the infrastructure bill. ..

with us at home and online, who have some really interesting ideas and thoughts for you, but i have to name the fact that a big part of this book is about a.i. i haven't really asked you any questions about it because as you point out, it is a scary and

overwhelming topic that is not a straightforward as climate change. it makes climate change, which i pretty complex, look straightforward. you have-helped me where figure out where to start when i was 18 or 19, how to act on climate change. can you help me now at age 30 figure out how to act on the threats you bring up in your books about a.i. >> guest: so i think that they're kind of in the same category that climate change was 30 years ago when i was your age. that is we can see them on the horizon and as potentially overwhelming threats and be very smart to have the conversation about them right now, not 30 years from now when they're fait accompli, when they're -- and one of the first things we can

and should do is at least make sure that the forces behind them are not so powerful that they can't be checked in any way, which means taking on silicon valley, and whose power has grown unchecked in recent years, and who is doing -- forget a.i. doing insane amounts of damage already just with things like algorithms that run what you see in your facebook feed and are devoted to making you angrier and contracts 'er with every -- crazier every passing day. so breaking the power -- when we get concentrations of power that are too large, whether they're in the ends of exxon or mark zuckerberg, it is a good idea to lessen that power quickly before

it overwhelms society society's ability to cope and it's possible that facebook has already jumped past the point where it can be controlled but i'm glad to see finally people in power beginning to ask real and important questions. so i think for me moment it's really important just to be talking about questions around a.i. and human jeanettes tick engineering and saying let's until we reach some social consensus on these things let's not take steps that take us irrevocably past places where we can retreats from because they do represent an enormous challenge and they do have the possibilities of reordering what it means to be human, and those are big enough questions that we should think first. thinking is a thing that human beings are theoretically good

at. theoretically is what sets us apart so might be a good idea to do it once in a while. >> in that same section of the book you talk about flow, which is easier concept to get your arms around, and we are of course, all albeit virtual, talking thanks to a festival but reading and books, and i'm wondering if you can tell us about flow and how reaping might activate it in a way that scrolling -- >> guest: think of one of the -- the reason i write is because i'm trying to write about human beings at their best and unthing we thirds thank you the work of important thinkers and researchers is that human beings are at their best when they enter into a kind of state of

absorption, get lost in whatever it is they're doing, painting paintings, climbing difficult rock faces, whatever it is, and everybody who is a reader knows that the feeling of becoming absorbed in a book, losing track of time and losing track of your surroundings, and at some level entering mentally into the -- with a good writer into the -- that's not something that happens with twitter, and it's the opposite. >> and then whatever comes to them. all the then with that

description. and that isat satisfying at the end of the day. and that folks would persist. and at a certain point the intention stand and then when that happens it's something very very important. >> we heard yesterday on a inpanel with that experience. so twitter just can't. and then those questions that have been coming in.en i love this opening you say that there is a great quote

about help without optimism that's differentiating between the two. and that change is possible. and i do feel that come through in your writing. and that complications and in your thought leadership. and those that are advocating for it. what does hope feel like. >> and they didn't think there

is reason to do it and i wouldn't do m it. when you have a complex or something. i would just go sit on the porch and smoke cigars. maybe i'll reach an age where that's all i can do anyway. the last over ten or 15 years this has arisen we waited so long to get started.

>> the

website booktv.org. >> welcome to the manhattan institute streaming event and today i have the pleasure as an eminent scientist, a famous scientist and for some infamous to scientists. professor at nyu and the head of the department of energy research portfolio undersecretary of energy and the senate approved post under senator obama and then the chief scientist for those who may remember that used to be british petroleum and then