Agile Race To Zero
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| Number of Parts | 72 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
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Digital signalTransformation (genetics)Zoom lensLogical constantCalculationMoore's lawDisintegrationMultiplication signDigital signal processingBitWaveData storage deviceSpacetimeSoftware developerMatrix (mathematics)Web-DesignerVideo gameOpen sourceSound effectCategory of beingPotenz <Mathematik>Moore's lawGraph (mathematics)CurveNeuroinformatikScaling (geometry)Shared memory
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Hecke operatorHill differential equationExecution unitGame theoryInfinityElectronic data interchangeHost Identity ProtocolMaxima and minimaChi-squared distributionMenu (computing)Chemical equationVacuumLink (knot theory)Goodness of fitBitConcentricFacebookWaveDigital signal processingOpen sourceRobotGoogolSource codeComputer animation
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Transformation (genetics)Digital signalTransformation (genetics)Computer animation
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Zoom lensGastropod shellInfinite conjugacy class propertySound effectGastropod shellDiagram
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HypermediaConservation lawVideo gameComputer animation
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Zoom lensSource codeReduction of orderFerry CorstenReduction of orderHecke operatorDiagram
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Dynamic random-access memoryNetwork topologyComputer animation
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Zoom lensPower (physics)Reduction of orderGastropod shellStress (mechanics)CASE <Informatik>Group actionCondition numberCore dumpLine (geometry)Electric generatorRight angleKeyboard shortcutLocal ringDisk read-and-write headIrreversibler ProzessComputer animation
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Integrated development environmentGraph (mathematics)outputFunction (mathematics)Computer animation
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Green's functionAverageSoftware frameworkGroup actionCommunications protocolCopenhagen interpretationTrailLimit (category theory)Graph (mathematics)Integrated development environmentPrice indexProjective planeFunction (mathematics)Service (economics)Control flowSound effectRight angleSoftware developerFood energyCurveLine (geometry)Degree (graph theory)Observational studyEndliche ModelltheorieScaling (geometry)Computer animation
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Zoom lensZirkulation <Strömungsmechanik>Scale (map)AuthorizationObservational studyNatural numberSchmelze <Betrieb>State of matterWater vaporPoint (geometry)Computer animation
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Zoom lensTransformation (genetics)Digital signalWaveMathematicsDigital signal processingComputer animation
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Zoom lensMathematicsMultiplication signCountingComputer animation
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Zoom lensLocal ringBuildingAdaptive behaviorNatural numberSoftware frameworkElectric generatorExpected valueCohesion (computer science)Perspective (visual)Term (mathematics)MathematicsPhysical systemComputer animation
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Zoom lensAxiom of choiceVideo gameComputer clusterComputer animation
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Level (video gaming)MassAdaptive behaviorCivil engineering
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Stability theoryScalable Coherent InterfacePoint (geometry)Level (video gaming)AuthorizationCartesian coordinate systemAxiom of choiceState of matterData conversionStability theoryMathematicsGraph (mathematics)Computer animation
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Power (physics)Potenz <Mathematik>Channel capacityInternetworkingCombinational logicTerm (mathematics)Sound effectCurveFrame problemPower (physics)Graph (mathematics)Computer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Thank you. Okay. Let me first kick off by introducing myself for those who don't know me. I've been in open source web development since 1995, did Python since 1997, did Plone since 2004. I'm the founder of Quave, which runs on Plone.
00:21
And I'm also now a lecturer in digital transformation at a business school. This talk basically grew out of the thing I did, the thing that middle-aged men do, which is to marry a new wife and then take a sabbatical and wonder about the futility of life. And I was a bit fed up with being zoomed in
00:41
on software development all the time while so much stuff is ongoing. So I did a step back and I zoomed out and this all grew out of that. I'm going to take you through, well, this is not expertise, it's more like questions. Like I see three waves hitting us, three waves of disruption. I just wanna share my thoughts about those
01:01
and see what it brings for you. The first wave that's hitting us is well-known to you, it's digital transformation. It's a wave we all have been riding for the past decades it's how we make our money. This is a graph showing Moore's law. And you should note that this graph
01:20
has a logarithmical scale. It shows the increase in speed of computers over more than a century. And the increase is exponential. And this whole talk is about exponential curves and our inadequacy as human beings to fully grasp the effects of exponential developments.
01:42
And we've seen that in the digital space, like now this is from the matrix, which is more than 20 years ago. And all that stuff has come to past already. We now have elections being stolen by armies of bots. We are on the verge of seeing the deployment of literal killer bots.
02:01
And I'm a bit disappointed basically in all the digital stuff because it did a lot of good but we also now have Facebook and Google and we just have this massive concentration instead of the open source empowerment that was motivating me to step into digital. But let's park that. I think you all know about digital transformation.
02:22
Let's look at the other waves that are coming. The major one is sustainability transformation. This is the cliched picture of an ice bear. And the problem with this is that we've seen it so often that we are now desensitized to melting ice caps
02:41
and dying polar bears. It's basically a big yawn reflex, which is a pity. This is still taken from a movie made by Shell in 1991 in which they addressed basically the effects of carbon on the climate, knowing that already done and projecting that like stabilized by 2005
03:03
which actually means zero emissions by 2005 because you don't stabilize unless you do that. And it's all a big greenwash because the movie that this came from was basically saying we should switch to natural gas and do efficiency. And that doesn't get us to zero carbon, does it?
03:22
Meanwhile, we've had three decades or more of climate talks and conferences and these are nicely superimposed here on the graph of actual measurements on Hawaii of our CO2 levels in the atmosphere. And you can see that graph not making a dent whatever talks and treaties are made.
03:42
And that's a problem. Meanwhile, the situation is so darn that we can see in a conservative medium channel like the Telegraph, that's not a very progressive newspaper, we can see JP Morgan which is a major investment bank, basically telling us that capitalism is killing life on this planet.
04:03
Now stuff has gotten pretty dire if major banks write stuff like that in conservative news media. And we're now in a situation that the next few years are probably the most important in our history. But how do we live that?
04:22
Well, there's this initiative called Race to Zero which I'm actually pretty excited about because it makes this intractable beast of like how the heck do we get to exit this self-destruct scenario? It's an effort to make that really tractable. And what it does is that it cuts the reduction
04:42
that we need to get to zero emissions per sector. And then it also cuts that per decade and it posits an exponential decline. So it says like in the first decade until 2030 we already need to have 50% decline in our greenhouse gas emissions.
05:01
And then for those 10 years, it breaks it down for each sector into specific measures that need to be taken within each sector. So the left pane, you see the graph of reduction in CO2 for the energy sector. And the main effect there should be like electrical power based on solar.
05:20
And the second one, you know the blue one is concentrated solar power. And then we have wind power. We have local and other sources and we have some other effects. And that's with half emissions in the energy sector within 10 years. The right pane, you see our digital industry which is much smaller in absolute terms but also that much smaller base figure
05:40
still needs to be halved within 10 years. And you can see that being done on device users. So being more efficient and less draining on devices using clean electricity instead of coal fired electricity cutting the use of networks, cutting the power usage of data centers and making gains in manufacturing.
06:02
And then for each decade again, another halving. So in 2040, half again emissions as to the baseline in 2030. And then do that again in 2050. In combination with drawdown, that should get us to not just net zero it should actually start sucking carbon
06:22
out of the atmosphere again. And the best way to do that is by planting trees and by planting beautiful trees and not just more the cultures of conifers. And really bad ideas to do that drawdown is by trusting in a techno fix with technologies that aren't there yet because we're in a fucking hurry.
06:41
We are in a hurry. To illustrate how much this stuff is gaining traction. We have an ongoing court case in the Netherlands against Royal Dutch Shell which is one of the largest emitters worldwide of CO2. And this builds on the Paris Agreement which has legal standing.
07:01
And the court case basically argues that based on the human rights of future generations Shell should stop doing harm. And it doesn't seek damages from Shell. It just seeks that Shell binds itself to the scenarios I just outlined which means that Shell should have a policy in place
07:21
that makes it reduce carbon emissions by 50% in 2030 and then go to net zero in 2050. And if this case succeeds and it's a very serious case it has been prepared for six years. The people doing that have great hopes that it will work. It basically challenges the core conditions of capitalism
07:42
which is I just look after myself and fuck the rest. And that's not gonna fly anymore. We really need to shift our consciousness there. And we really need to stop polluting the planet and just doing as if there's no tomorrow. And this case tries to give legal teeth to that line of thinking.
08:01
Preventing irreversible climate disruption is the race of our lives and for our lives. It is a race that we can and must win. That's Antonio Guterres who is the UN Secretary General the head of the United Nations. So there's a lot of power being put behind these initiatives. A lot of governments and lower government agencies and companies, big companies have signed up
08:22
to these badges already. So it's gaining a lot of traction. The thing is we've seen badges all along and now it's about really making the stuff work. So it's about putting action in place and not just promises. That all ends up in a positive scenario in the circular economy where we stop draining resources
08:44
and we stop polluting our environment. And we have this economy that runs nicely without degrading our environment and without degrading the future. And I really like this graph because it shows that it doesn't really work that way because this graph still has major resource inputs and major waste as outputs.
09:01
So it's not a closed circular economy at all. And that's also been turned out by a scientific review. So a bunch of scientists did a review of I think it was close to 200 studies on decoupling which is that we can have economic growth without growing our environmental impact.
09:23
And that just doesn't turn out that way. It turns out that way sometimes locally if you disregard side effects but it hasn't been shown for any large scale economic entity like a country or whatever. It's just not happening. And that's what this curve shows. We've been talking about decoupling for decades
09:42
and trying to decouple for decades meaning that we could have societal development without growing impacts on the environment. And this graph just shows that that's not happening. We just keep polluting. This is another graph showing a projection of 50 years ago, Club of Rome in 1970.
10:03
And they predicted that various economic indicators would peak around 2020, 2025 like services, like industrial output, like food and they would decline afterwards. And this graph also shows that in 2030
10:21
population would start to decline because of the adverse impacts we have of basically our economy collapsing. And the scary thing about this graph is that it was recently updated with more recent data. And those most recent data actually tracked the projections of this very simple 50 years old model. And that's pretty bad news.
10:44
This is how we get from where we are to zero carbon. And this is based on a two degrees heating scenario. And this is a graph from 2015. And each year that we delay going down the graph gets steeper.
11:01
So if we would have started properly reducing carbon emissions in 1995, we would be on the bottom most yellow slope and that would have been somehow feasible, but we are now already five ticks to the right of the magenta big line. So that's a steep decline. And actually it's steeper because we don't need
11:21
to target two degrees heating. We need to target one and a half degrees as the upper bound before we start triggering uncontrollable climate change basically to be a bit safe. And we already like, this is a 2019 graph. We're now at the end of 2020. So we're already more than one tick to the right again here.
11:42
The scary thing about this graph is that it basically reflects what we do as humans. It reflects our human activity because that's all bound with energy consumption. So a decline this steep, it's like falling off a cliff. That's you hitting your house and you driving your car
12:00
and then stop hitting your house and stop driving your car and stop eating food. I don't know what it all implies, but this is basically a collapse scenario that we're seeing here. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire because it is, our predicament is dire.
12:23
This comes from a study published in nature and the authors made an inventory of potential tipping points in our climate. And they identified something like 23, 10 years ago. And they recalculated recently the state
12:40
for all these tipping points. And they found that the majority actually has evidence that the tips have been triggered. So that there's a cascade starting to go where our climate is getting worse. So we're talking about the Amazon in A turning into Savannah. We're talking about G, the Greenland ice sheet
13:00
starting to melt and water levels rising. We're talking about H, the permafrost falling and releasing methane. We're talking about B, the Arctic melting and absorbing more heat because water absorbs more heat than white ice.
13:20
And that stuff is panning out like this. What you're looking at here is a graph of last month of the Arctic temperature anomaly. And you can see with the red zone there that the Arctic over the whole month has been 12 degrees hotter than the historical record average, a full 12 degrees.
13:44
So planet wide, we're currently at 1.1 degree above the baseline. And this is 12 degrees hotter. But the problem with this is that it's not really useful to incite fear when talking about this.
14:02
But the flip side of that, it's also not really useful to keep closing our eyes for the reality that we're facing. So how do we balance that? How do we balance the difficult emotions that all of this raises? This should be a movie poster
14:20
for a dystopian science fiction movie. But actually it's a movie poster for a documentary about the campfire that ravaged California in 2018. So that brings me to the third wave of disruption that we're facing. We've seen digital transformation.
14:40
We've seen sustainability where we need to cut emissions really fast. But there's a third wave of change that's coming which is that we need to prepare for impact of the stuff that's already been done for the climate change that we are unable to prevent. There was a paper about that in 2018 and it's called The Climate Change Paper
15:00
So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy. At the time of this screenshot, it was read 100,000 times which is really atypical for an academic paper. By now it has been downloaded over 3 million times and they've stopped counting. And that paper basically outlines several ways to think about adaptation to disruption
15:22
and to societal collapse. One of those is resilience. And that's a term I think from an engineering perspective we can easily phrase as loose coupling, high cohesion. And it's mainly about reducing the close coupling that we have between all the systems that constitute our society.
15:42
And by reducing coupling, making them less vulnerable to adverse impacts. So that's thinking in terms of community building of local food growing and stuff like that. The second R in the deep adaptation framework is to relinquish, is to let go of expectations
16:03
about comfort and consumption that are just not sensible given the reality that we're facing. It's about facing that the only sustainable growth is de-growth. It's about to stop eating meat, to stop flying.
16:21
Now, whatever you can do as an individual to cut your carbon emissions. And also to recognize that it's not enough to just do that as an individual but we need systemic change to make that happen. The third R is that of restoration. It's trying to build back some of the things that we lost.
16:40
It's taking a seven generation approach to what we're doing here and trying to create a pathway towards a world where our children's children's children can survive and can even thrive in a way that is far more imbalanced with nature than we are currently living. The fourth R in the framework is that of reconciliation.
17:02
It's about atoning for the fact that most of the damage has been caused historically by rich white people in the North and most of the damage is being and is going to be suffered by poor brown people in the global South. It's to atone, it's to decolonize
17:23
our whole approach to life. And it also involves doing the same with the future and with our descendants who will have to bear the price for the lifestyle choices that we're making right now. All of that shows up in, for example, Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future.
17:43
Extinction Rebellion was majorly influenced by the deep adaptation paper. And we are now seeing mass civil disobedience and mass social movements at a level that we haven't seen in decades, which is pretty hopeful given how dire the situation is.
18:01
This is a graph from a paper which investigated how can we actually make change? And what you're seeing here is on the Y axis, on the vertical axis, you see stability being measured and on the horizontal axis, we measure decarbonization. What it shows is that we're stuck now in a local suboptimum where we can't move
18:23
to decarbonization because it would destabilize our society. And then the authors say that by having social movements like Extinction Rebellion or whatever choices you are making and the conversations you are having, we can shift that stability slope downwards in a way that makes reaching the decarbonized state
18:42
actually feasible. And in the end, that's of course a much more stable state than our current business as usual, which is heading off a cliff. Another thing to derive hope from is what Bruce Mao identifies as the power double-double. Instead of thinking about population growth
19:02
in Mao Tuzian terms, like it's spending disaster because all those people need to eat and consume, he flips the frame on that and he says, the more humans we have, the more talent there is available. So that's one of the exponential curves in this graph. And the other curve is the exponential growth
19:21
in access to knowledge that for example, the internet brings access to education. So what we're seeing here is a double exponential of human capacity and human empowerment together. And we need to realize that a combination, such an exponential combination,
19:40
we can't really grasp the effects of that. We can't really predict the effects of that. It's fundamentally unpredictable. Anything can happen. We're seeing some of that play out already in the COVID-19 response. The virus was sequenced extremely fast. So the virus sequence was published
20:01
within weeks of China finding the virus. We've now seen vaccines having been developed with an efficaciousness of more than 90%, which is extraordinary in historical terms. And we've also seen governments step in and facilitate the scale up of the production to such an extent that we're now ready
20:22
to start immunizing the whole world population within less of a year of this pandemic starting to occur. So all of that is much, much faster than have ever happened before. And it's partly a result of science being prepared for the scenario and having basically prepared agents
20:41
to build a virus, to build an immunity response from, to build a vaccine from. Those delivery mechanisms had already been developed before COVID came along, and they just plugged their COVID remedy into the existing delivery platforms. So that's all really helpful. And also the whole COVID-19 response showed that governments can actually do the unthinkable
21:00
and shut down the economy. And if they can do that for a pandemic, why couldn't they do that for a climate emergency? So it starts people questioning why our response is so weak. And it also starts people to think differently about state intervention versus liberalism and just let stuff happen.
21:23
Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that we need to somehow have a massive consciousness shift because we are one life, we are one planet, and we need to enlarge our circle of consideration to include other people, to include also non-human beings,
21:42
to include the natural world, and to include future generations. And that's the big challenge that we're facing as our generation to make that happen and to make it work. So to summarize, I tried to sketch how we're facing a triple disruption, a perfect storm where three waves superimpose
22:02
that of digital transformation, that of sustainability transformation, and that of deep adaptation. And I don't have any answers here. I'm just trying to pose questions like, so what can we do there? And I think open technology is important because it provides bottom-up agility. It's empowering for local actors
22:25
as opposed to Silicon Valley, at least it could be. We need to work on fast decarbonization. It's critical to achieve climate justice. And like I said, we need to do that individually, but we also need to find ways to affect systemic change.
22:41
And we need a consciousness shift. And part of that is orienting towards resilient communities. And again, as an open source community, we have plenty of experience in non-traditional ways of organizing and networked grassroots wave organizing. So I'm hoping that this crowd, you and me,
23:01
have something valuable to bring in terms of technology, in terms of agility, in terms of network organization expertise to make a change for good in this horrible situation. Some books as inspiration. Bruce Malm, Massive Change, 24.
23:21
24 patterns to affect massive change in our lives. That's really good. And I'm currently reading the Ministry for the Future, which is both a gripping science fiction novel, but it's also full of really deep thought about specifically all these challenges that I mentioned in this talk. It always seems impossible until it's done.
23:44
That's what Malm and Dela said. And we can maybe have some hope based on that quote. You can follow me on Twitter at hirostevens. And I'm infrequently blogging a dark Agile world. And I hope to do a write-up of this talk there soon
24:01
with all the references linked to all the resources that I mentioned. That's what I had to say, right on time. Yeah, we have five minutes remaining for the talk time. So that's a good time for Q&A. So thank you, Guido, for coming and giving your talk.
24:22
Everyone can now go click on the face-to-face link down underneath the video in loud swarm and join Guido so that we can all continue the discussion. So thank you. So.