Notes from Alex Steffen's talk

The following notes are from Alex Steffen's Keynote at ETech 2009. These are raw notes just dumped here. I hope to edit and create a polished post soon.

Alex Steffen from World Changing took the stage for this morning's keynote. Here are my notes from this event:

World Changing – Bright Green: A world changing guide to a future that works. (delivering prosperity to more people)
There are many young people in the developing world. ¼ people in the world are under the age of 18.

Most people who will be alive in 2050 will be living in what is currently thought of as the developing world. In places where prosperity has been kluged together

We got rich by using resources to build the stuff that (a lot of our wealth is societal wealth) most of the problems (environmental have been the result of

We have built our wealth on the problems our children will face. Massive inter generational ponzi scheme.

We are the brittle rich. Many of the things we have built our prosperity on are dependent on the developing world supporting our over-consumption.

The dirty secret is that the American prosperous are demonstrably less happy than people who were here 20,30,50 years ago. Wealth is not serving us well. We are utterly depended on the rest of the world doing the right thing for us to do anything. If we sail ahead we will destroy the planet. We need the world to agree to make changes. World divided into 2 groups “poor and frugal” and “rich and wasteful. “ We need to bring people into sustainability. We need to think of a lifestyle that returns value to the planet. Ecological handprint versus ecological footprint.
We need low carbon clean energy. We need more sustainable food (Local, sun-food, traceability) We need to get off coal... and cows.

Root cause is that we don’t understand our prosperity. It is hidden. We need political transparency. From the people and from the government. FUH2 pictures of people flipping off hummers. Transparency is also holding one another accountable.

Revealed useage: That which is measured and shown is used differently. When you know the backstory, people chose the better thing. Tell good backstories!

Smart – Connect things and people and information flows. A lot of our impact comes from stupid waste. Having to have a lot more things than you need. Wasting energy due to lack of attention.

True costs taxation – Price on CO2. In the next few years. The more carbon costs, the more things start to make sense.
Smart Infrastructure – smart grids to allow detailed control of energy. Allow us to have a more finely grained understandable read out of energy used. Bringing an energy meter into the house reduces energy use by 10%. Just seeing it makes you use less energy. When you see it, you can demand responsive energy. Level out the amount of energy people use through the day. Distributed energy, home energy systems.

Finance for transformation – PG&E sell energy services and not just supply. – Location efficient mortgages, (if you live in a place where transportation is efficient you should pay less on your home). pay as you go – car insurance. Bundle car insurance into mileage and/or gas prices.

Compact – create more dense communities and design them better. When you put people close together you dematerialize things. Shared infrastructure – costs less per person.
10 units per acre would put most Americans within transit supportive density. Affordability is out on the fringe. When you factor in cost of driving (direct cost) to the cost of living, suburban fringe is actually more expensive.

The biggest shift will be smarter buildings. Sunlight for passive heating, breezes for cooling. We are capable of building buildings without thermostats, but we don’t do it. We treat water that hits our roofs as pollution. Big storm means water mixes with waste and gets dumped to sea. That is crazy! We need to harvest rainwater.

Lunar-resonant streetlights.

Preserve natural capital. We are utterly reliant on ecosystem services to support our civilization. We are losing 2-5 trillion dollars in ecosystem services. Climate change is ony 30% of that. We need to think of flows and not stocks.

Nobody realized how depended on bees we were until they went away due to Hive Collapse Disorder. Having to pollinate by hand is pretty expensive. We need bees.

Water needs for Seattle and Portland. Water supply problems are based on lack of beavers.
Topsoil is important.

Shared goods, building lasting quality. Not owning a car takes ecological impact away. Closed loops and zero waste.

Real happiness and knowing what makes us happy is the key. Flying private home theaters.
We need to share innovation across borders. We are all in this together. What is not right
We need a sense of obligation beyond ourselves. If our triumphs are only our own they will turn to dust in our hands.