So uh so since there are endowed chairs involved I will have to read the names to make sure that we give credit where credit is due. So let me introduce uh professor Noah Diffenb Wrigley professor and Kimmelman family senior fellow at uh the door school of sustainability Stanford door school of sustainability. Uh, Professor Ralpho Derso, the associate dean for integrative initiatives in environmental justice and Bing professor in environmental science, professor of earth system science, all at the Stanford Door School of Sustainability and a senior fellow
at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Uh, Professor Jamie Jones, who's my favorite professor, by the way. what >> professor of environmental social sciences sorry and by courtesy of earth system science at the Stanford door school of sustainability. Uh we have Michael Maspandrea a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor Stefan Reichlstein the William R. Timkin professor of accounting ameritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Senior Fellow at
Precourt Institute uh for energy. So thank you for for coming uh colleagues and now as you all will remember that uh we didn't have faculty panels the last couple of summits but uh Marissa and I felt that the sort of zeitgeist around sustainability made it a good idea for us to start by hearing the some just some quick updates on the research front. And so this set of uh of scholars were chosen because of the variety of of uh research perspectives they take. And so I'm
going to really just ask two questions. I gave you guys the heads up on these questions before uh the meeting. The first one is an update on new developments uh in research and impact and uh and then we'll go on to look at uh future opportunities and challenges. And so, Noah, since you're right here, I'm going to start with you. Uh, what are uh give us an update on uh what's going on with climate? >> Yeah, thanks for uh the invitation and thank you all for
being here. And um we heard in the introduction that the direction of the winds uh maybe have changed a bit. And if anyone didn't know exactly what that referred to, uh we're now back to having 100% male panels. Um so, um the winds have changed. Um well, it it wasn't for lack of it wasn't for lack of trying, but yeah. Um Bill and I are good friends. Um I knew I knew it was going to come at some point, so I guess right away >> since
I'm not his favorite professor, I thought I would say something. Um, all right. All right. So, climate. So, I I'm a climate scientist. I study um uh what it is about the climate system that most directly and acutely impacts us. That's my interests are right at that interface. Not an expert in anything as a result. Um but I would say that, you know, what's really changed in my field? Um there you know there's there's probably a list um you know our uh strongest um most uh
kind of community engaged national research center is being dismantled. So that's you know that's changing. Um but in terms of the research AI has really you know is really a revolution and um there's both a micro version of that and a macro version of that. So the micro version is like I went from thinking um I couldn't do research anymore and uh would need to go into administration um up until spring break when I started using claude to code and I realized wait a second now
I can now I can still do this. Um so you know I think you know there's the micro version that everyone is experiencing. Um and but but in climate science the macro version really is that um AI is enabling us to make um it's changing the way that we do science and there are panels upon panels just about that. Um check out the video from the HAI uh data science summit um in May for a whole panel on that. But I would say uh for my
research group for the field as a whole AI is really um changing not just not just in the in the kind of chat GPT uh interface for each of us as humans but really the fundamentally the way that we that we do climate science. I'm happy to talk more about that. That's an interest, you know, it's such an interesting point you bring up, Noah, because normally when we think about AI, we think about the tremendous amount of energy that's used obviously by AI, but there uh
given that the uh that ship has sailed. Uh it's intriguing and and I find it heartening to hear that applications of that might be then addressing the very problem that uh that it's caught up with. >> Yeah, certainly. Certainly in our research, we're able to um the AI is able to learn relationships in the climate system that you know the the human you know it's very hard for the human brain to kind of do that analysis and you know so we're able to make predictions that
are falsifiable which um as I said somewhere else now after two decades I'm a scientist so >> yeah fantastic >> falsifiable predictions. >> Thank you Noah. Thank you Noah. Mike let's turn to you next. you're at the interface of uh of research and practice and uh let's get an update from you. >> Thank you. Yeah. Hello everyone. Thank you all for being here as well. Um I'll just pick up on some of the same themes that that Noah spoke to. So so first of all just
to introduce as as Bill mentioned the kind of work I do. So I co-lead a policy program that sits within the door school of sustainability on climate and energy policy uh writ large but the key areas of focus that we have these days are around wildfire electricity and insurance policy and all of the interconnections between them. So we do a lot of work at the state level here in California and and in the western US but also look more generally at federal policy and and in
other parts of the world that are dealing with fire as well. And this is one area that has really been changing um rapidly over the last you know 10 to 20 years. Noah in is one of the people who's done research on this. Um there are a variety of factors why wildfire has become such a a new um set of risks in in the last while. One of those is climate change. It's also a legacy of of fire suppression that's led to fuel buildup. It's more
people living in vulnerable places. It's a whole range of different factors that have come together and I'm sure many of you have seen the kinds of catastrophic fires that have happened here in California over the last several years as well as in other other states and in other parts of the world too. And so the work that we do is really on how do you uh connect the kind of work that's coming out of the research community into public policym and um have interconnection in kind
of real time as policy conversations are going on. And so one of the places where AI is is just to pick up that thread is is coming into play is there's a huge amount of research that's being done and a lot of emerging understanding of what are the effective interventions to reduce risk across various aspects of the system. As you may know, electricity utilities um who have been implicated in some of the most catastrophic fires over over the last uh years uh have been investing heavily
in reducing the risk of ignition from their infrastructure during dangerous conditions, hot, dry, windy conditions. So, that's that's one thing that's happening. But there's also quite a bit of of of research going into how do we create safer communities? How do we create healthier landscapes so that in fire adapted ecosystems like here in California where fire is a natural part of of what we experience, you don't have the same kinds of catastrophic outcomes for people and for communities and for the economy and and also for
public health as well because smoke is a big part of this as well. And so there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of work that's being done to learn on the science side. There's a need to translate that into how it can inform better policym to go deeper, but I'll leave it there for now. >> Oh yeah. Well, that's very exciting. Very exciting. Thank you, Mike. Uh, so Ralffulo, uh, before I I open it up to you, I just want to comment. Many of the
people in this room, many of you were introduced to Marissa and I by Ralpho. Uh, and so it's strange for me to be introducing you, Ralffo, because you're the root cause of of the existence of this very event. the way that uh we go about identifying people to bring in. We we want this to be very much a bottomup event. And it's actually difficult to create bottom-up events, sort of top-down uh uh events that look take the handful of the most famous people in the world.
It's pretty obvious what you do. You go get the handful of most famous people in the world. But if you want change makers who are making a difference in practice, there has to be a sampling scheme. So we stratify by geography and organizational form and then we scrape the research publications of all the faculty uh at Stanford to identify country by faculty and then when we go into a country we turn to those faculty and say who's amazing and that's the way that we have gone
about doing this and then of course the problem is the oneandone problem that American academics are famous for of showing up and you never see them again so we keep circling back and Rulfo has been really central in our ability to identify people who otherwise would be uh entirely overlooked in a world where we focus so much on uh marquee names and so forth. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but uh I just I just had to say that before I uh went any further.
Ralpho, thank you for everything you've done to make it possible for the Stanford community to hear from these voices. uh give us an update please. >> Thank you. Let me start by saying that I am a little bit sad to learn that I am not his favorite but I can I can I can tell you guys that he is one of my favorite >> one of so this is not a bio completely biodirectional uh interaction but I hope it will be sometime I um my field
is actually on biodiversity that critical component of sustainability. We cannot imagine sustainability without paying attention to biodiversity. Unfortunately, what's happening to biodiversity is not good news. So, let me tell you a little bit about developments in terms of understanding what is happening to biodiverse today. As you all know, we have this fantastic technology to monitor the poles of life on the planet and that is a remote sensing technology, right? those amazing uh satellite images that we can get and we can do all kinds of really
wonderful things from assessing what was the situation 50 years ago even thousands of years ago uh project what could happen if we continue with business as usual in terms of the components of the earth which is plant life. Unfortunately that fantastic technology does not help us to understand what is happening with animal life. And so I want to share with you that uh a relatively new development is that we are beginning to understand what is happening to this other component of biodiversity which is animal life.
So we have now the development of infrared cameras. those cameras that are placed somewhere in the forest or in a savannah and they have a beam that if an animal passes in front of them the beam will be broken and the animal would be photographed with that kind of of technology with an incredible amount of field work mostly by local indigenous peoples in many parts of the planet who are sharing information with us and with big databases now we are beginning to understand what is happening
what is the pulse of the situation of animal life on the planet planet. Not good news. In 2014, we published a paper indicating that uh calculating that the decline in the abundance of vertebrates on the planet in four decades was about 50%. They had reduced their abundance in 50%. Now this study promoted other studies that have been conducted uh frequently by the WWF the World Wildlife Fund and they have come up with in uh information that shows that the situation is even worse now. They calculate
that uh the abundance of vertebrates on the planet is declining by about 70% in the last five decades or so. And now what are the consequences of that? Is that what I am really interested in now? Now that we understand and how we can measure what is happening with animal life where and what happens to the locations where these animals occur, one of the important connections that uh has become an important development in terms of us becoming aware of what's happening with life is the connections
between biodiversity and disease. There's a field now that we call disease ecology. We're understanding now how changes in biodiversity have consequences for the disease. Not only for the functioning of ecosystem but also for the well-being of humans from the point of view of disease particularly zonotic diseases. It turns out that now we understand that big animals are declining in their abundance and those big animals are the competitors and predators of the small animals. Unfortunately many of the small animals that are now thriving on the planet
they are hosts and and vectors of many many many diseases. Leptos piramania u play is now evident in some places in places increasing I just want to close my comment by saying that unfortunately right now we're living a moment which is really critical via emergence of Ebola there's another case of Ebola in the DRC now which is the actual numbers are as of as on Friday 1813 cases confirmed cases of Ebola most in the DRC and a few in Uganda and 687 deaths. So the fact
that we're changing the ecology of these animal communities, promoting the context between humans and and and and zonotic animals is creating a very big issue for us. You might remember a thing called COVID a couple of years ago, a few years ago and we are terrified that the our lack of attention, lack of perception of the importance of biodiversity might put us in a very difficult situation. But we're hopeful because now we have much better ways of assessing the situation and hopefully provide some remedies to
that. >> You know, your your comments Rulo bring me back to uh Silent Spring. >> Rachel's Yeah. A book which does not discuss climate. >> Yeah. Pesticides was the emphasis of >> U and came about only a few years into what we often refer to as the great acceleration. And it sounds like now we can measure the great acceleration as it's also applying and occurring with animal life. Uh that's incredible. Incredible. Thank you very much. By the way, we'll be circling back with the panelists and
uh for references to the various findings if people want to do a little more reading on this a little bit later. Thank you very much, Ralpho. Jamie Jones, give us an update. >> Your favorite, right? >> Yes. Right. >> I'll just point out that being Bill's favorite is not without its costs. >> He he chairs about every committee in my department now. So yeah. >> So I I anticipated that Ralfo might be kind of a downer and maybe even Noah. So I figured I'd talk about
something positive. um because I could have talked to you about human extinction and and work on existential threats but I chose not to so you can thank me later. Uh I'm interested in adaptation broadly and adaptation is a process by which individuals or or populations communities uh improve their life prospects. It's sort of a generic definition of adaptation. And uh given that we're sitting on top of a business school I I should note that adaptation and innovation are actually very similar processes. They have different intellectual
genealogies. They have some different vocabulary, but they're very they're very fundamentally uh similar. Adaptation generically requires two things. You have to have diversity and you have to have feedback, right? So, you have to have a a a you have a a challenge in the environment broadly construed. It might be the social environment. It might be the economic environment. It might be the biohysical environment. And you have to have a number of different candidate solutions, right? And so that's the diversity part. The feedback comes when one
solution does a better job than other solutions and it gets promoted, right? And so it spreads in a population. It increases in frequency. So this is a very generic type of of definition of adaptation and it's something that we need to do with respect to the changing climate. It's something that we need to do with respect to the changing economy, to the development of AI, to to all sorts of things, right? Um so what I've done recently uh work with collaborators and with students is to
look at the conditions that favor the spread of innovations that that that can serve as climate adaptations. And it turns out that uh there are a lot of intuitions about this but the intuitions are generally wrong. And one of the things one very robust result that we've that we've found is that innovation comes from peripheries. So if you want to to to to have an innovation spread through a population, you want it to happen on the periphery of the population, typically in a minoritized population. And
there's structural reasons for this. And we've we've we've uncovered this. It has nothing to do with a psychology of cool or whatever, right? There there are very clear structural reasons why it's easier for an innovation to to start on a periphery of a population and move to the to the the center of it. Uh the great Harvard sociologist James Coleman 40 years ago noted that that cohesive cores tend to frown on on deviance, right? And we we think that well that's probably a good thing, right?
Because devian is antisocial. It's criminal. Well, deviance just literally means different from the norm, right? And so the veilance on devian can be different. It can be positive, it can be negative. When it's negative, we call it devian. When it's positive, we call it innovation. cores are terrible because of the conformity that's induced by a core. Peripheries have a huge advantage for this. And we've we've documented this. We've we've we've measured it. Um and let's see, is there anything else I want to say? Yeah. And
and so there is diversity comes into this in multiple ways, right? And one of those ways is the standard sort of sociodemographic, economic, geographic diversity that we see creating subgroups of of people. But there's also a structural diversity. And it turns out that the types of of population structures that promote the spread of innovations and the adoption of of adaptive behavior in general looks an awful lot like a multicultural city where you have weakly connected or moderately connected enclaves of very close connections. Basically what happens
is that things can percolate and and amplify in the dense populations and then they spread through the the weak ties between them. They don't it and this leads to much greater adaptation in uh uh adoption of innovative uh technologies behaviors uh and so that's fun. We know we know stuff that we didn't we didn't know and we uh about how we actually make this happen and how we can promote that. We're in a tough time for both diversity and for feedback. >> Yeah. >> Right. Some
of the best mechanisms that we have for feedback include democracy and markets and we're we're doing our best at least in the United States to undermine both of those. Right. And so uh and god knows we're we're apparently fighting diversity as well. So as the manel highlights maybe um uh so these are things that we need to fight for uh because that's what's going to get us into a better place. It's going to make our lives better and maybe allow us to survive this difficult time.
>> You see what I'm talking about? I mean really, you know, so and in many ways what the the uh the clustering of otherwise uh probably not affiliated uh enclaves is well represented in this room. And I remember uh when uh in fact I was with you Ralfulo when we were on a study trip to the Philippines where we have Secretary Tony here and um u some of the innovations going on with respect to the coastal ecosystem there look very much like the innovations going on
in uh the coast of Chile in uh in and in Mexico. both areas that are also represented here. And that's the hope you bring this together in ways that wouldn't happen in a in a core, right? It's u it's super interesting. >> Um Stefan Reichlstein. So Stefan was the voice of sort of economic analysis applied to sustainability here at the GSB when practically nobody else was doing that. And um I would I would consider that the kind of positive deviance that Jaime Jones just uh just
described. >> Not criminal >> and uh yeah, not crim not yet. And uh and in fact is under as as most of you know is under such high demand uh that he spends much of his time in Europe as well as here. But we're so glad to have any of your time. Stefan, please give us an update. >> Gladly. Uh so um Bill asked uh what developments would you like a group of sustainability practitioners to know about? And uh what immediately came to mind is what
I've been working on with colleagues uh mostly in Europe but also at other um US universities and most importantly a group of uh companies. We have about a dozen companies uh multinational firms in this uh coalition. The topic um the subject really is nothing more and nothing less than corporate carbon accounting. Uh something that you have of course all heard about. Uh that's not new. What is new hopefully is that we bring um more rigor to the exercise. Um companies have for a long time been
reporting both corporate and product carbon footprints. Um but we also all know that uh there have been a lot of uh worries that these numbers are not reliable. There's a lot of greenwashing going on. Uh and the question is can this be made more rigorous ultimately also um can we bring a higher degree of verification and certification to these numbers? Uh and that's where really where my background as uh an accounting faculty here at the GSB came in. Um and so we started this initiative uh
really with an eye to developing um relying on traditional financial and managerial accounting uh to get metrics out there to basically institute a carbon ledger uh very similar to a financial ledger uh that at the end of the day would lead to such a thing as a CO2 balance sheet and the equivalent of an income statement which we call sort of a CO2 flow statement. Um that companies would uh first um prepare at the company level. Um the information would then percolate down the supply chain.
Um these numbers would be audited and in contrast to what we have sort of seen thus far, it would really be a set of numbers that would rely on primary data um obtained at every level in the supply chain. um and hopefully lead to a new form of accountability when companies state their net zero goals so that the public but also management regulators can see u to what extent they have really made progress and have made good on these uh net zero pledges. Um what's missing
still is really a set of uh specific carbon accounting standards. As you might imagine, there are a lot of things that are sort of um up in the air still. Um organizations like the greenhouse gas protocol or the science-based target initiative have issued certain guidelines, but to our uh from our perspective, these are not yet specific enough. So it's really going work in progress and we're at the currently at the stage where we're doing a couple of demonstration studies for relatively simple supply chains to really
trace these numbers uh have them audited and verified and issue then ultimately these more comprehensive carbon reports. So I um there are a lot of organizations currently that are um pursuing similar goals. So the competition is on but uh I think it's a healthy competition. Uh we hope to bring this to a conclusion within a year or so. Um we always tell each other climate change isn't waiting exactly for the accountants to get it right. So we have to sort of get a uh um a
product out there that's usable and implementable. And I'm pretty optimistic that we'll be able to do that within a year's time. >> My goodness. So Stefan um how are how are things looking with respect to governments requiring reporting right so that's a large impetus uh both uh in terms of general corporate disclosures but also policy instruments say the carbon border adjustment mechanism um that the uh the European Union uh will be imposing now to basically check that uh uh jurisdictions that don't have carbon pricing are
not at an advantage in terms of producing and selling goods to the European Union. Those kinds of things provide sort of an immediate motivation for what we're doing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Super exciting. Thanks so much for that that update. Um I'm I'm going to come back through again and now let's look forward uh what are the sort of challenges and opportunities each of you sees going forward and then I think after that there'll be time for questions before we have a break. So Noah get us
going. Yeah, I think um from my perspective a major challenge and it relates to some of what we heard um in the previous comments is that the investment and I mean I don't mean just financial investment but the societal investment in adaptation is a small fraction of what's required and we can have a discussion about whether the investment in decarbonization what fraction of what's required that is but if we look uh globally um I don't know if anyone from or related to CPI is here but
the climate policy initiative so they have tracked financial flows um for climate related projects and you know according to those data it's about 20 to one investment in decarbonization um compared to adaptation or resilience And if you know if we look at what was the inflation reduction act here in the US it was you know similarly you know order of magnitude larger for decarbonization. Um I haven't calculated the numbers for the door school but I'm certain that it's similar you know order of magnitude more investment
in in decarbonization than adaptation. Um, so you know, we're really um falling uh the the reason this matters is that we're falling further behind in terms of the gap between what we're prepared for and what's happening. And this really comes down to some pretty simple statistics and uh first principles physics about how the climate system works, right? So if you think about a bell curve, um, temperature in most locations around the world, it looks like a bell curve in terms of the daily temperature. And so
if you think about the hot end of the bell curve, as the mean the bell curve shifts, the area under that hot tail increases exponentially. So I get asked, wow, it seems like this is happening faster and faster. Is this faster than what climate scientists predicted? actually know it's it's accelerating because that's just the basic statistics of a bell curve. And there are some thermodynamics that are very um kind of fundamental to the the physics of the climate system that also create this acceleration including with
extreme precipitation and the the way that moisture increases in the atmosphere with an increment of warming. But the bottom line is that even if the world is as successful as possible in reducing emissions um stabilizing the global temperature, we're going to continue to get an acceleration of the most extreme conditions. In addition, we know largely from work done by faculty and research groups here at Stanford as as well as elsewhere uh that the sensitivity of uh many societal systems also increases exponentially as conditions get most
extreme. So this is a second contribution to this accelerating uh impact of climate change. So even if we get another half degree of warming globally, a degree, a degree and a half, and for each of those increments, we can expect accelerating climate stresses. And we're simply not investing and again, not just financially, but also more broadly society in being prepared for those conditions. And we see that unfortunately day after day, month after month, year after year around the world. uh what it takes to actually adapt.
That's a question for other people on the panel and in this room. But it's clear that from a climate perspective, we're we're going to keep getting farther behind until we're actually, you know, really investing in in leaprogging ahead. Could I push a little on a term you use that I think has a lot in it that connects to the people in the room? Make sure that everybody's seeing the link. you talked about the sensitivity of um was it institutions or basically the status quo? Could you
push on? >> So if we look so so if we look at uh you know this summer in Europe where there's been another record setting heat wave and you know New York Times had an article this morning estimating how many people have died. That's almost certainly an underestimate um in terms of the excess death. So you the the excess mortality as a function of how hot the week is is exponential, right? So as you add another increment of heat >> Yeah. in that week and you
know it's half a degree hotter than the last record that the number of people that are likely to die relative to would have died in a normal week actually goes up >> exponentially. Okay. And this is different than the fact that that increment of mean warming of the climate will increase the frequency of that heat. >> Yes. >> Exponentially. >> And that so I was wondering about that because that's a direct effect. It it uh strikes me that there may well also be and I think
you've written on this catalytic effects on human institutions uh war, conflict, migration which themselves would then have >> uh environmental behavioral scientists and global uh environmental policy you what's the noun uh what's a person a pol they're not politicians policy analysts but they're all economists I hear they're actually >> let's call them economists >> well There are many sociologists and social psychologists in the mix as well but that's fine. >> Yeah. So your department you know has many of the world leaders in in understanding that
you know those those impacts. So yeah work with that I've been involved in with Marshall Burke and others um analyzing uh yeah economic growth and um foregone economic growth uh mortality um etc. So I'm those are those have been really fruitful collaborations for me and my >> research group. Um >> I think that in terms of the question about what's on the horizon. >> Um I'm I guess I'll I'll maybe I'll be dramatic and just say I've kind of reached the end of my patience with
getting asked if it's surprising that that this is happening so fast like this is ex just exactly >> as predicted exactly as understood. Yes. Yes. No, I understand that. You know, we have I think our uh person from B is going to be arriving late. I think ironically it had to do with the weather. Um uh but you know Brack's work for with respect to trying to keep uh millions and millions of uh field workers largely women exposed to extreme heat uh across uh the subcontinent
but also now in Africa and other places. um addressing that we have Olga uh where are you OlgaV from uh superhumans dealing with uh the consequences of war uh in Ukraine and uh so many of our change makers are dealing with the very world that you are describing. >> Yes. So that example, and I'll be quiet, but that example of of people working outside in um areas that are already hot and humid is a great example of this kind of double exponential or may maybe it's
triple exponential because the the in those regions the frequency of extreme heat will for a mean warming will increase exponentially for the reasons I described. The humidity also goes up exponentially for each mean increment of warming. And then you have the effect of that on the human body. So uh again if we if we're wildly successful and we reach net zero by 2050 globally and we only have you know another half degree of global warming. We should all expect an exponential increase in the frequency of
those conditions that are create that vulnerability. >> All right. And you always preface your remarks, Noah, by saying, "And then I'll be quiet. And I hope you are never quiet." So, let me just say that. Okay. >> September 1st, I'll be on soatical and very quiet. >> All right. Mike, what do you see forward? >> Yeah, I'll I'll pick up a few of these threads, I guess. So, like I said before, I one of the big areas we work on is wildfire. And so, that actually
has both adaptation and mitigation components of it to some extent. I the work that we do that I was describing earlier on how to reduce the risk of wildfires I think sits within that adaptation umbrella and one of the challenges I see is we are increasingly understanding what are effective interventions to reduce risk but there's not consensus of actually implementing those in lots of ways just to give one example of that so um the five feet around a structure if you have burnable material in in
that uh part of of a home or or of another kind of a building that is one of the things that is seen from the research side to be most important in whether the home survives a wildfire or not because the embers burn in and then they ignite that and then the home ignites. But you can see areas for instance in LA adjacent to the the catastrophic fires that happened there last year who are the most vehemently oppo opposed to regulations that would require removal of
burnable materials in that 5t. They have you know in these kinds of of canyons in the LA area for example you know yard signs that say like keep your hands off of my yard. I I don't want my, you know, rose bush or my other, you know, >> are they burning yard signs? >> They they are probably. Yeah. Yeah. And and so adding to it as well. And and and other things like fences and connections. And so it is changing not just, you know, there's a
scientific aspect of that. And firefighters are going to come in and say, well, you need to harden your home against wildfire with the ember attack and all of this kind of language that a homeowner, if if you're hearing that, is not going to think, well, this is going to make me still have a beautiful house that is the way I want it to be. The landscaping is the way I want it to be. So there's a big aspect of behavioral sciences and other aspects of of
how you think about societal change to the point you made of kind of is if this is coming from the core or the extremes I think that's another part of that example um there's there's others um but but that is one of the things of how do you actually implement another is to the point on on financing there's a huge amount of money being spent and and one of the things that that I guess I'm seeing to to pick up a thread that Noah brought up
is that as um the the real world manif manifests the kinds of theory that we've seen from climate science since the beginning of more extreme conditions with wildfire. That's something that is leading to societal outcomes that are creating urgency for action and people are paying attention and trying to figure out what to do about it. One aspect of that is how do we use financial like insurance and other mechanisms to spread that risk around. But there's too much risk. That risk is growing. You can't just
spread it around. You need to reduce it. But how you do that and how you pay for it is something that is really unsolved at this point in terms of of the the wildfire um realm again. So utilities here in California but elsewhere are often uh financially responsible if their uh infrastructure ignited a fire. Whatever the consequences are a lot of those come back both through insurance and through directly from those who are impacted by the fire. Um they are spending mass in California. about 10
billion dollars a year to reduce the the the the likelihood of an ignition from their system. There's an order of magnitude less at least being spent on what happens after an ignition. What are the consequences? How does that fire move through landscapes and through communities? Because urban confilrations are one of the ways that we see the most catastrophic outcomes where a fire burns into a community like LA last year. Those were some examples of that. But again, the um understanding of what we could do to
reduce that risk is not necessarily in sync with both the the will to actually take those changes and then also to pay for it. So that's where there's really active policy conversations, but lots of other conversations, innovation in the private sector, too of how can tech help, how can uh social movements help to to get to better outcomes. >> All right. Well, thank you, Mike Ralpho. Looking forward. >> Thank you. because of wildfires that affect not only urban and semi-urban areas but also uh wild areas,
natural forest, natural savylvanas, those kinds of things. That's one factor that contributes to the decline in the in the coverage of nature particularly vegetation on the planet. In addition to that there is land use change particularly from the point of view of production of meat which is a massive way of uh using the land. We have now, believe it or not, rates of deforestation measured currently in the order of 10.9 million hectares per year. In case you hate metric and you don't know what 10.9 hectares
means, is roughly um 11 football 11 million areas of football fields. Can you I mean proper football, right? Soccer. 11 mill million uh those areas are being destroyed on a yearly basis. So the thing that we are excited about now is to uh find ways of doing reforestation or reing of those areas. And so in the area of conservation science associated with social sciences there is a tremendous impetus now to recover or to restore rewired many of those areas. Um at the moment unfortunately about 14
to 15% of the uh land surface of the planet is under some kind of formal protection and NPA natural protected areas. But we're finding mechanisms of discovering which are other critical imperative areas that we need to protect and rescue before it's it's too late. And we're also combining sociological information at the pixel level with the characteristics of the vegetation and wildlife in those areas to put an to organize an overlaying of those two and define the critical areas that we need to protect going forward. And
so that leads me to this important comment and challenge but at the same time fantastic opportunity. We do know that about 53% of the areas of the of the total area of the planet terrestrial area of the planet which is in good shape in terms of biodiversity is in lands of uh rural and indigenous peoples which is a critical issue to pay attention to. If we want to protect those areas, we really need to think differently to be innovative in human behavior in sociological aspects in
communication in in really multi-disciplinary and interdicciplinary approaches to protect those areas in support of those communities. We cannot leave the responsibility of protecting that precious remaining of our nature of our planet to those communities. We need to support them. I think that's a very exciting and promising area that we should be paying attention to going forward. But I wanted to share if I have one more minute >> another more microscopic aspect that I see as a challenge but at the same time an an opportunity. We
tend to think of global change as climate change and of course this is really very important as we have heard climate change is absolutely essential critical mega problem that we have in front of us but that is not the only global environmental change. We do have land use change as well, dramatic. I mentioned almost uh 10.9 million hectares destroyed per year. Uh we have overexploitation of resources. We have pollution and all of those things unfortunately do not operate and impact nature and humanity in isolation. All
of them are connected in complex ways in synergies, direct and indirect effects and so on so forth. So that is in my view being a scientist in biodiversity but I can see I can see this is relevant for every discipline the way in which can understand and model and create ways of addressing this multi multiplicity of factors affecting nature and humanity. I think that's a very important critical challenge that is so exciting actually from the scientific point of view, from the social point of view and
I hope that we can begin to think more about the complexity of global environmental change beyond climate change. >> Thank you so much for that but alo you know a number of our change makers are dealing in a bottom-up way with the very challenges that you describe and it is very inspiring to see action taken. Jamie Jones. >> So when Bill wrote us this weekend warning us what he was going to ask us, he said, uh, what are the most important sustainability opportunities or challenges coming
up in the next few years as seen from the perspective of your field? I had a moment of panic because I was like, oh my god, what is my field? I don't know what that is. So I have a lot of fields. uh and a commonality of them is that of of these different areas of my research is that I use ecological and evolutionary principles to understand change. Um and so there's a type of change. They're two they're they're two big challenges that I see uh
that honestly I think they're the biggest challenges we face. Um, and they're not given they're not taken very seriously and and I don't mean to I don't mean to throw shade on on our wonderful Door School of Sustainability, but it has a very engineering focus, right? And the thing is that engineering innovations don't do any good if they're not adopted by people, if they're not used by people. Okay? So the two the two big challenges that I see are behavior change and collective action, right? Um
how do we get people in communities, societies and our species to behave in ways that are compatible with and and sustainability is really about two things, right? It's about persistence. We have to survive. Uh you're not sustainable if you go extinct. And we have to have a sort of notion of intertemporal justice. people in the future have to be given the same opportunities that we are given, right? And and and so how do we how do we get behaviors to change to promote both our continued
persistence and this this notion of intertemporal justice and uh and how do we get together to solve the greatest collective action problem in the in the history of of our species. So those are challenges and the thing is if we don't solve those problems it you know it doesn't do any good to to come up with the cool new gimmick for for sequestering carbon or for you know everybody adopting electric cars right it's it it simply doesn't matter for an engineering solution uh to move some
problem people have to adopt it and I've I've got just a couple examples historically of situations where you had a clear innov an innovation that was obviously better. It was an improvement on the way things were done before and society didn't adopt them. So starting in 1840, Semlice and handwashing in Austria, he realized, wow, if the if the doctors just wash their hands after doing an autopsy before they deliver a baby, we can reduce the the epanatal mortality rate from approximately 20% to less than 2%.
Like that instantly, right? But the doctors being a conservative core were just like, "No, we're not going to do that. That sounds like women's stuff." Right? >> We're still fighting with this. >> No, we are still fighting it. Right. >> Washing hands. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. We're still facing that. Right. Um the the gauge war in 19th century Europe, uh in 19th century Britain, right? The great engineer Brunell had a superior broad gauge that was safer, faster, more effective, more robust. and Parliament actually voted it down,
made it illegal to use the broad gauge despite the fact of its clear engineering superiority because it was complicated, right? And and there were political interests who wanted the standard narrow gauge. Okay. The third is a D'vorjac simplified uh keyboard in the 1930s, right? There there was this this um Dvorjac developed a keyboard, some of you may use it actually, right? right? That reduces the amount your fingers have to move by 60%. It's a much more efficient solution. But the quarterty typewriter held sway. And right,
the certy was was designed for a problem that no longer existed. These hard mechanical typewriters of the of the 19th century. And so these are examples of where there's a clearly superior solution where we just ignore it. We need to figure out how to do better, particularly for these things that are literally existential for ourselves and for all the species who who comprise the systems that that protect us. Some good news. I want to end on good news. Collection collective action is typically framed as a
social dilemma. You've probably heard of the prisoners dilemma. And you know, the the thing that makes a social dilemma a social dilemma is that there's an incentive to cheat, right? To defect and to and to cheat. I actually think that most environmental problems are not social dilemmas. They're they're coordination problems. And coordination problems are actually much easier to solve. And the thing that makes a coordination problem a coordination problem is that everybody does better if everybody cooperates. It's just a matter of getting them to cooperate
on the right thing. Right? And so, um, if we can agree on a course of action, if we can figure out the ways to induce behavior change and then and then induce this cooperation, and the good news is if we look back on uh if we look sideways, if we look backwards or sideways on the the diversity of human social structures and cultures and and traditions, everything about human society is about inducing coordination. Right? Successful societies are coordinated on on their ideals, on their economic principles,
on their social principles. Right? And we know how to do this. We don't know how to induce it on such a large scale. We don't know how to induce behavior change. Uh we know some things. And I'll just conclude by saying given that I I I said that you know the door school has this engineering focus. This is science. These are scientific questions. We don't wear white lab coats. We don't put on goggles to protect our eyes when we go out and we ask people questionnaires,
right? But it is science. We are using the scientific method. We're not just sort of adding a little policy flourish to the big science that the engineers are doing. And so we need to promote scientific methodology and and a culture of science within uh the the behavioral social sciences. >> Well, thank you. Thank you so much for that, Jamie. And I, you know, it's interesting because one of the one of uh the social scientists who's who's been working very hard on exactly the question that Jamie
raises, which many of you change makers are dealing with in context, uh is uh is Nicole, who I'm putting on the spot now. Um you're probably wondering why isn't Nicole up there. Well, I just found out she was going to be here what day before yesterday, so I wasn't going to make you do that. But if you get a chance to talk with Nicole, I what I find so refreshing about Nicole's research, and many of you would know it, uh those of you who don't, you're
either living it or you ought to read it or both, right? Because the somewhat atomistic approach that we typically take when we think of this uh collective action problem as a dilemma evaporates when we think of the context. And it's that context where uh you call it what you want, call it capwa, call it community, but u it's in that context that people solve this problem all the time. And uh Nicole's research is you know is designed for that. So thank you Jamie. Uh Stefan, looking
forward >> looking forward. So I'll keep this short and uh picking up on uh your remarks. Um I want to talk about an opportunity uh that I think will be taken up. In fact, it is already being taken up. Uh but I think um some of us may be underestimating the impact of this. And this is something that comes uh out of the course that I teach here at the Stanford Business School on climate technologies. Um we have of course for years uh been talking about
the energy transition and the energy transition as really being the main lever in uh societies and the world obtaining decarbonization results. So one of the things that uh uh of course led to the first wave of decarbonization was the adoption of um clean uh energy generation technologies um primarily renewable energy uh which has really been uh responsible for most of the emission reductions that have been achieved. The development that um I want to sort of um focus on here for just a few minutes is um
the cost of energy storage. Um this is an area primarily or in in in large part in the area of battery storage. This is one of those areas where um I think we have seen a steady um innovation effort led by various countries and various companies. Um it has sort of confirmed to us the patterns that we have seen before say with renewable energy in the context of solar or wind energy. Um, basically what people uh in the engineering literature refer to as Wright's law where
basically with every doubling of installations costs are coming down by a certain percentage. And we're now at this at the stage where uh for say for lithium ion batteries to give that example um with every doubling of uh those installations worldwide um the prices are falling uh roughly by 30%. That's a huge learning rate that has been basically going on for 10 years now. at putting us in a situation where we basically can do energy storage now at onetenth of the cost that we could do
it 10 years ago. In my mind, that's huge. Uh both in terms of um reinforcing the use of renewable energy, think of um integration of renewables onto grids. Think of transportation, the whole adoption of electric vehicles. think of data centers being built uh that have to sometimes rely on off-grid solutions um that then requires naturally energy storage. So I think this is a process that has sort of not been properly um appreciated and highlighted uh that's going to be very significant in terms of reducing emissions
and here um sort of to on your earlier point I'm optimistic because it is not only useful for society and for uh the whole climate uh equation but it's also becoming increasingly economical it will be adopted. >> Okay. Well thank you very much. So we have a few minutes that we'll take for your questions for uh for the panelists. So uh go ahead and raise your hand and then I think we have a runner to come over. So um so we have three hands here. Four
with Dons. Here comes the mic. Hi, good morning. Thanks for the talks and the perspectives. I am Daniel. I run I run Silva. Silva is a supply chain player that uh supplies uh native species seeds and seedlings for large scale restoration in Brazil primarily integrated pastures in the Amazon the Brazilian Amazon. So we supply native seeds and seedlings as I said and clients they and we uh face a a a difficulty meaning we don't know whether the species selection that we should offer should be the
species that are ready and prepared for today's or five years ago or 10 years ago climate uh conditions or should we select species that are going going to thrive considering climate 10, 20, 30 years down the road since we're building new forests, right? So, how would you go about that challenge? Uh, and what def definite kind of data would you use to say here's the new normal, it's here to stay, droughtness is here to stay or five degrees above normal levels in par state are here
to stay. for example, how would you go about that species selection given the new normal of >> That's a great question, Daniel. And so, thank you for that. So, the way we'll do this, what I want to avoid is there's often a norm in panels where every single person answers every single question and and so instead jump on a question you want to answer and then the bar goes up after that. So, who wants to jump on that great question? I'll just say I'm certain the
climate will be different 10 years from now than it was 10 years ago. How to do the how to do the species selection is for another expert. >> Can I do it? I I guess with the models that we have currently in terms of how plants are going to be tracking the space given the distribution or the modifications of the distribution of clim climatic envelopes. I think one possibility is to look at the divers the specific diversity of species. Some species are adapted to multiplicity of
environmental conditions. So that's the diversity that Jamie was talking about. And also to see if you can see what the climatic envelope is going to be like, you might want to start producing seedlings and saplings that are appropriate for those new climatic conditions. So a combination of the two probably. >> And Daniel, you and Rulo should talk at some point for sure. Who's our next question? >> Can I just throw one more? >> Oh, yeah. All right. All right. Yeah, >> I think it's really important
to to avoid trying to optimize honestly because when you optimize you're adapting to the past, right? So you want to you want to actually build in the diversity um so that you have you have both intrapecific and interpecific diversity. You want you want the things that have, you know, a norm of reaction that allows them to to, you know, a to thrive in different environmental conditions, but you also want to have a wider diversity than you might otherwise than the economists might tell you to do,
right, of the of the species that you put in because some of them are going to be underperformers in the present, but they may end up being your overperformers in the future. >> Sure. Essentially, you should optimize the variance >> as well as the for sure. So, yeah. I want to share with the group one thing. We're bringing species from the sana to the Atlantic forest already. >> So that's that's >> interesting. >> Interesting. >> All right. This is more along the fire resilience and I'm
wondering if uh homeowners are getting better educated about what they could be planting and if native landscaping is uh more fire resilient if they knew about that. And also if the insurance companies are financially incentivizing homeowners by maybe lowering rates. >> That's a great question. And also could you tell us your name? >> Yes. >> For the group, please. >> Natalie Pace and I am the co-creator and executive director of the Earth Gratitude Project. >> Awesome. Thank you, Natalie. I can I can jump in on
this one >> and happy to have an offline conversation in more depth. But but just to answer that quickly, increasingly, excuse me, increasingly there is more education happening, not just for homeowners, but for insurance companies themselves as well as everybody else who who's involved in the system. Um, two things I would say. One is on the insurance side, we see insurance more as a signal rather than a cause of of solutions actually being implemented. So, for example, here in California, insurance pricing is still catching up
with how the risks are changing. And so, that's a really hard situation to then say, "We're going to majorly discount if you do these things that you should be doing." And so, that's a hard way to make a homeowner see, oh, this is in my financial interest. Instead, you need to think about other ways to to incentivize that action, both financially and otherwise. And and a part of this, too, is back to what is seen as a beautiful home and and aesthetics that, you know, and
other dimensions that go beyond the money. Um I would say that on the native um native uh uh species and plants front, you know, part of that I think definitely is an important part of the solution because those species are generally going to in a place like California be fire adapted. It still depends or it still matters where they are, right? If they're near the house or not, like I was talking about earlier. Another thing that I haven't mentioned before but is a feature of our
work is that we also do work with indigenous tribes and other peoples here in California and elsewhere who have cultural traditions that they were practicing for, you know, centuries uh before or before settlement and that was really halted in places like California. There's an increasing understanding of actually the value of bringing more of that back onto the landscape in areas not just to protect human communities but also ecological value and and and the species that live in those e ecologies as And so I think that's
another place where the native species is an important part of it as well. >> Yeah. >> All right. Thank you, Mike. Now, if you've seen your schedule, you know we're supposed to stop. I I am going to uh get us back on time later and I'll I'll I'm going to I'm going to use I'm going to use some of the break time. Yes. But I want to tell the panelists if if any of you have to leave because I want to respect the fact that you
thought you would end two minutes ago. You may, but I'm going to go ahead and continue to take a few more questions for anyone who can stay for them. So, who do we have next in the queue? Uh, Secretary Tony, please. >> Do I need a mic? >> Oh, yeah. It's coming. It's coming. It's the logistics of this room is a little a little cumbersome, but >> thank you. >> So, I'm Tony Loyaga. I'm special envoy of the president of the Philippines for disaster risk reduction.
I was previously secretary of environment. So that's why he keeps calling me sack. But Tony please. >> Okay. All right. Sorry. Sorry. >> So I actually have two questions. One for for professor Rulo and professor James on whether or not there has been any work done on adaptation, diversity and socioecological fragility. um that that intersection uh between what's happening ecologically and and what's happening socially and and your mention of zunotic diseases I think is one of those things that actually bridge um both. So, so that's
my first question. And the second question for Professor Eglestein is the role of of audit and advisory firms in in actually integrating carbon accounting properly into your your actual audit and financial statement for each corporation and whether that has been uh a barrier or or actually an enabler. Thanks. Go ahead. I for your first question, I guess the the thing that comes to mind immediately is is thinking about indigenous and and subsistence populations and the decline in harvests um of of traditional foods that they extract.
Uh it can be devastating for communities. Absolutely. Um that's uh that's a really important interaction between the biodiversity change, the climate and the um uh and the the socioeconomic v vulnerability of people who rely on you know on extracting wild foods. Um the climate comes in. Uh a former student of mine has been working and and we continue to collaborate on uh Inuit hunter gatherers in in the Arctic Circle and you know the the climate effects on their subsistence practices are devastating um because they can't
they can't pursue their sort of standard uh historical adaptations for for uh extraction of resources from the environment. So, uh it it's it there's I'm afraid there's a lot of bad news in that in that uh area. Given uh Professor Jones response, I would not dwell on that. But I would like to take this opportunity to mention another dimension of the components of local people and biodiversity, the sort of the birectional interaction there. And this is to indicate a significant problem that we have in sustainability
today, which is not only the biological the extinction of biological systems, biological extinction, but but also cultural extinction. And those two things are so uh critically intertwined that if you go to communities where because of anthropogenic impact some species are not lost, that knowledge that cosmo vision that used to have is disappearing as well. The best way in which people have been analyzing this is in the loss of languages because language is not is just not for you to be able to say like in Spanish
that's not that's not that's not a language right but it's a vision technision and really engagement with with nature and so on so forth. So we have really a dual problem of extinction biological and cultural and that's a very important challenge for society today for humanity today. >> Okay. Okay. And then I guess part two goes to you Stefan. >> Um I think a quick way to answer your question is when nowadays um company any company in the world issues a financial report typically auditors provide
what they call reasonable assurance uh that the reports have been prepared in accordance with certain accounting standards. um not so in the today in today's environment not so in the domain of carbon reports there uh the auditors typically only issue what they call limited assurance basically saying we don't quite know we didn't find any obvious it frequently takes the form of a double negative we did not find any obvious errors in in all of this uh and that's sort of one of the areas that our
initiative wants to do better with um if we have more of a structure and codified carbon accounting norms, then auditors ought to be able to provide on the books that the company um uh issues and reports at the end of the day really such a thing as reasonable assurance the way they do in the financial domain. But that hasn't happened yet. That's sort of one of the companies that are contributing to our initiative have made this very much sort of a priority to get to that
level of reliability of the reporting. >> Okay. Thank you very much, Don Mullen. >> Thank you, Bill. Uh Don Mullen, I'm from Ireland and uh a founder of 10,000 days hope initiatives. Uh Jamie, thanks for um raising the issue of devian because I want to be a bit of a deviant at the moment. And uh and it's about um one of the most powerful political voices in the world today of course and I'm sure you know this uh is telling us that climate change is a
Chinese hoax and drill baby drill uh particularly in the Arctic irrespective of the rights of the indigenous peoples. And two years ago, I had the opportunity of visiting the beautiful Mure Woods um here in uh near San Francisco. And there was a wonderful display uh on climate change and biodiversity uh and how it impacted the um uh the the ancient redwoods. Uh last year I went back and on instruction of the federal government uh the park services had removed that uh actual um display. Um, I'm
also conscious of the fact that 20 years ago I looked to Silicon Valley thinking that this was potentially the savior of the world and yet there has been a huge lurch to the right and I don't know how that's happened but as an individual I mean I'm beginning to feel more and more that uh we're losing the battle and I want to kind of try and maintain hope because my initiative are called 10,000 days hope initiatives. So how do we kind of collectively work to kind
of try and maybe even bring about uh a realignment of Silicon Valley to what matters in the world today? >> Bill, can we take another hour? >> I I I'll jump on that one. Um so some work uh raise your hand please. So Shana Atluri who uh is just uh passed her orals and will be finishing her dissertation soon is uh working with me and on on a project that addresses uh uh Don's question descriptively. Now there are other things you'd have to do and what
do you do with this knowledge but there is some hope in it and that's why I want to talk about descriptively. So uh we along with uh another of my advises u went back and looked at uh sentiment towards sustainability broadly defined from 1960 to the present in English language uh news newspapers. So I didn't do it in other languages. We just did it in the English language. Uh although it was worldwide and it's very and basically what we're looking at is the hype cycle. And
so what you see are sentiments going up and down over time. The all-time low for sustainability broadly defined. So it's not just that word uh was in 1980 during the Reagan administration, a time you and I would remember. Um we're almost at that point now with the hype cycle very interestingly uh the uh the slope of the hype cycle is pretty much the same between left leaning and right leaning periodicals just one above the other. So you you see the same hype cycle you just see
the right more skeptical uh than the left although that was not true always. If you go back to when Nixon signed uh the Clean Air Act and so forth, it was it was less polarized and we know about the changes in polarization. Separately though, and this is where Shauan's skills uh with large language models uh have shown themselves and it's this is a one of the chapter I'm now I'm self-conscious because I'm I'm relaying to you a chapter from Shovin's dissertation. So I may get this
wrong in which case you can fail me on this. uh but we're looking at a change with respect to the conrles that people use to make sense of sustainability. So think of conrles as the broader sort of meta perspective through which we make sense of things the logics of how we understand the world. Uh some people construe sustainability to be a technical issue not only in engineering but also in biology. or physics. Um, others construe techn uh uh sustainability to be a behavioral issue when we
talk about uh incentivizing firms or uh collective action problems. Um, still others construe sustainability to be a moral issue. We talk about justice for example. And what's interesting is if you look at that the commentaries on the IPCC reports which is the corpus that show and I are uh are are analyzing it's also in English although it's often hard to understand but uh uh but nonetheless if you look at those conrles they are becoming more moral over time. Am I right on that? Okay. Okay. Uh
and they are becoming more integratively complex. So for the folks in the room familiar with cognitive and social psychology, the idea that if you understand multiple perspectives simultaneously, you're more integratively complex. And integratively complex decision making is much better informed decision making. And so what I'm getting at here, Don, is it's important for us to understand the reality of the hype cycle, but to stay the course. And I know there's nobody on earth who stays the course more consistently than than Don Mullen. Um, so sometimes
I I try to give that message to folks here at Stanford when they rename initiatives every now and then. If you notice, the name of this initiative isn't changing. Um, somebody wants Two months ago, somebody asked me about the name of my department, which is environmental social sciences, my department, my other job in the uh in the door school. And I said, I was asked, you know, are you going to be thinking about somehow changing the way you refer to the department? I say, okay, so
they've taken all of our funding away. Why would I rename the department now? I mean, we're gonna own it, right? because that's the that's the um um and I'm and I'm conscious that I'm saying this in a room full of change makers who are absolutely uh being thrown about by the hype cycle right now. But you you got to keep in mind that there's that deeper current and if we react to the froth on the surface of the sea of life, we miss the fact that
that deep deeper current is going in the right direction. So that's my response to you, Don. >> I think we got a couple. >> We got Yeah. Where's our next question? >> Oh, I see. We got more people want to talk. You guys want Okay, fine. Fine. >> Go ahead. Go ahead. >> Um Oh, you got to go. Okay. >> From my perspective, the line staying the course is absolutely crucial here. And let's uh keep in mind the rest of the world is staying the course.
uh uh and even the United States large uh sort of uh individual states and companies and individuals are staying the course. I >> of course the the the empty blather about climate change being a Chinese hoax doesn't help uh and there are certain new impediments in the decarbonization pathway of the United States. But um if you look at this sort of in the grander scheme of what's happening in the world, I think it doesn't make all that much of a difference. >> Okay. And this will
be the last word, Jamie, and then we're going to have to bring it to a >> So we know empirically that that the adoption of innovations follows an S-shaped curve, right? This is this is like one of the laws of of the social sciences, and it's as good as any physical law. Um, and one of the things about when you have a heterogeneous group of of adoption curves that are shaped like that, you end up with what's called a bstable uh equilibrium and and this is
really nerdy, but this makes me feel better at night when I think about how awful the world seems to be right now. Uh, there is a the bstable equilibrium means that there's a good outcome and there's a bad outcome and these are stable and you can end up in those stable states. there's also an unstable state in the middle. I believe with with some evidence behind it that we're actually stuck in this unstable state and that by staying the course by letting some of the feedback
mechanisms like the the falling prices like the pressure to to to keep democratic institutions alive will push from the unstable one to our good equilibrium. I think that the good equilibrium is in our future if we can manage to get there. Yeah. And that's a nerdy mathematical way of of saying that I have I I have bas a basis for my hope. >> I love it. Thank you very much. Let's thank our panelists. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. So, we're going to take
a bio break. So, here's here's what we're going to do now. So the the two days are scripted in a way where we allow for a lot of unscripted interaction. And so the only thing we're going to try to be real clear on is when we begin and end things. It's the coordination problem. So we're going to have a bio break. Now when the big hand is on the nine. Okay. So that's in 10 minutes. Everybody has to be at their tables.