TED2006: An EarthWitness site and other futures

Twelfth (and closing) session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Jamais Cascio: "the future we will create is a future we could be prout of", he says. He's the co-founder in 2003 of Worldchanging.com, a great collective blog focusing on a more sustainable and equitable future, with an intentional emphasis on solutions and practices. He starts saying that "we can build a better world, right now: we have the tools, we have the knowledge and we have the motives". So he outlines a vision for an "EarthWitness" website, somehow inspired by Peter Gabriel's Witness, that would make use of tools such as cellphones, cameras, sensors, online maps and more to create "a bottom-up, collaborative chronicle of what's happening to the environment around the world". He describes a system allowing anyone to collect information and data on environmental problems, upload and share them. That would give a voice to people affected by these problems, as well as allow anyone else to get better information and to act upon it. And in Worldchanging ethos, the site would not only look at environmental problems, but also at possible solutions.

Majora Carter is a Bronx resident and the director of Sustainable South Bronx. That's a New York neighborhood that has an incredible concentration of environmental and urban burdens (waste treatment plants, chemical facilities, power plants, distribution centers, highways, etc) and health and social issues (one out of four children have asthma, 25 % of residents are unemployed, Majora grew up with a crack house on the other side of the street). "Environmental degradation creates economic degradation which creates social degradation", she says, and that's the framework within which SSB acts: creating parks, running ecological restoration projects, installing green roofs, figuring out ways to make traffic less taxing - and in the process, creating jobs: "we are seeding the area with 'green collar' jobs, people who have both an economic interest and a personal stake in their environment".
Although Majora is clearly fighting "bad planners and developers that hyper-exploit vulnerable communities for profit", she's realistic: "we are an urban reality, not a natural preserve, and I don't expect governments or corporations to make the world a better place because it is right or moral", but because it makes economic sense: "you can make a fortune on sustainability".

Al Gore is the closing speaker of TED2006. He spoke the other evening forcefully about global warming. He walks on stage and goes personal and tells (in a very funny way) tales of life after the vice-presidency. And then he addresses the question that many have been asking him here after his speech: What can we - individuals - do about the climate crisis? He draws a blueprint in 14 points:

• reduce emissions from your home (installations, better design)
• reduce emissions from cars (hybrids etc)
• be a green consumer ("you have choices with everything you buy, from appliances to food")
• live a "carbon neutral" life ("it's easier than you think: use the carbon calculator, then reduce, and offset the rest")
• make your business carbon neutral ("it's not as hard as you think")
• integrate climate solutions into all your innovations, independently of your sector of activity
• invest sustainably, "in companies and funds that are part of the solution"
• become a catalyst for change, learn, teach others
• raise awareness by promoting "An Inconvenient Truth" (the documentary that follows Gore as he travels around the world warning about greenhouse gases; it will come out in May)
• send someone to Nashville who can learn how to give my slideshow in your community ("I'm going to conduct a course this Summer to a group of people that can then use and remix my slides and my talk in their commmunity")
• become politically active, "speak up, make democracy work"
• urge the US to join the rest of the world community in capping and trading carbon emissions (the Kyoto treaty)
• help with the mass persuasion campaign when it launches this Spring
• let's rebrand global warming (he suggests "climate crisis")

And then he outlines a vision to "finally measure reliably in what direction we are going": "We know the amount of energy that comes into Earth, but we have no clue of the amount of energy that Earth radiates; if we could put a satellite between the Earth and the Sun, at a specific point (the L-1 point between the Earth and the Sun) that would allow us for the first time to measure energy-in and energy-out in real time". Such a satellite actually does exist, it has been built in 1998 under the name Triana, it was supposed to be launched in February 2001 but the program was canceled one month before and now the spacecraft sits in a warehouse.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley legend (he was the first CEO of Sun Microsystems), gets a three-minutes talk and he uses his time to discuss ethanol-powered cars. The rising price of oil (and the impression that we're getting close to the point of declining production) and environmental concerns are making biofuels and bioenergy mainstream topics. Vinod reminds the audience that Brazil has adopted ethanol-fueled cars in the 1980s, with the fuel produced from refining sugarcane, and now 70% of all new cars sold there run on "flex fuel" (ethanol in combination with unleaded gasoline). Volkswagen is apparently considering the phaseout of gasoline-powered cars in Brazil (which is the tenth-largest auto market in the world). Ethanol, says Khosla, is cheaper, environment-friendly, sustainable, and provides an easy way for the car industry to switch from one fuel to another. Vinod is now the co-chair of an initiative in California to get the State to add an oil extraction tax that could raise up to 400 million a year to fund alternatives such as flex fuel cars. He is clearly very passionate about this: on his website there is a whitepaper he wrote last month (it's here in Word format) titled "A near-term energy solution". it starts like this: "We don't need oil, and we definitely don't need hydrogen for our cars and light trucks. We don't need new engines, new fuel distribution and storage, and we don't need a lot of money or time" to solve the energy problem.

And off we go for the hilarious conference wrap-up by comedian Tom Rielly. TED2006 closes here; TED2007 will take place from 7-10 March.

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)