An inventory of the world
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06:19
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Food energyLecture/Conference
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Point (geometry)CASE <Informatik>Lecture/Conference
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MathematicsView (database)Point (geometry)Lecture/Conference
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:21
So, who here would define themselves as an activist? Some of you I know are. Put your hands up. Who would define themselves as being in the private sector? By the way, there's no need for those two to be mutually exclusive. We would define ourselves as both.
00:42
Anyone here related to the government, any government, public sector? Okay. Anyone in any way connected in a workflow sense with the way stuff gets dug out of the ground? No one, okay.
01:02
So we're going to do a little straw poll at the beginning at the end and be brutal, not nice. I'm going to ask you the same two questions now and at the end. If I say to you we should have an open data framework of every molecule that might be monetized or consumed on the planet
01:26
under some form of CC license that any of us could access at any time. How many of you would believe that that is politically possible?
01:44
If I asked every single molecule of everything that would be dug out of the ground that anyone would use, anyone would sell or buy in the entire world available to you at a couple of touches from any device you care to name. How many people think that is imminently, let's say,
02:03
in the next one to two years, possible politically? No one? Okay. Yes, there is a gold mine, there is a gold ore reserve 300 meters under your feet
02:21
which has precisely these grams of ore at this percentage which could be mined out under the following circumstances sold into international markets for three and a half billion dollars or not. That's a different question, we're coming to that. Nobody thinks it's politically possible, anybody thinks it's technically possible within the next one to two years.
02:44
Ooh, okay, you're sprinkling a quarter. Okay, so yes, here's a quick overview as I'm hoping to get through this in 20 minutes and then we'll have time for questions.
03:02
Natural resources are public goods and we'll expand that a little bit, that's your first question, overwhelmingly. Carbon budget, we need to put that in place to understand why we might need such a global repository.
03:20
The Paris agreements, I'm going to claim it's not one agreement but potentially 10,000 different agreements and that's very key. Then an explanation of what a universal open data framework looks like and finally a consideration of where we are now in this process.
03:41
Just to get one thing out of the way, all peoples made for their own ends freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources in the UN covenants, the basis for international law. So you might think, yeah right, like the convention for human rights, it would be nice to have and so on.
04:00
In fact, it turns out that this is the law already within the nation states of the world almost, almost universally. Almost universally. The exceptions are, in fact, some of the lender here in Germany have indeterminate ownership to be decided on a case by case basis.
04:25
The online, sorry, onshore United States is the big major exception. A few places in Canada where sovereignty doesn't rest in the states because the first peoples have their own sovereignty. Some former British colonial possessions,
04:42
which are essentially the hangover of sugar plantations, but you are essentially talking about well over 90% plus of all major minerals under the ground in public ownership as a legal fact, not an ideological statement. So that's going to be important and we'll come back to it.
05:02
So this is our conception then of the way these industries work right now and arguably empirically correct perception. They go in, they build stuff, they produce, they dominate, they own. All of that's true and we've all heard of the resource curse
05:22
and the impact that these industries have, the corrosive or corruptive effect that they have in countries with very weak systems of law and civil society. That is the reality, but the nominal legal reality is a bit more like this. Is anybody here familiar with cricket?
05:41
I'm a cricket nut. So these people are servicing the pitch in a lunch break. You see the ground staff there, they're evening out the pitch, they're making sure it's ready for the next play. They work for the club. The analogy is that the people own the ground.
06:01
These would be the companies in a service capacity. Again, admittedly far from reality today, but not far from the stated legal reality. This is the current stated legal reality and the world we experience is a divergence from it.
06:20
Carbon budget. We need to run through this just a little bit because the question is, why would we need such a thing? Why would we need to understand where every molecule of monetizable wealth under the ground is and why would that need to be available to everybody in the world? The Paris agreements essentially enshrine the concept of a carbon budget
06:44
and it's worth just running through quickly. The global target, which is now being signed up to by 195 heads of state so you could disagree with the science, disagree with the policy implementation to try and solve the scientific problem,
07:01
although I imagine there aren't too many climate change deniers in the room, but this is in fact now stated policy as signed by 195 heads of state. The target is an average rise of two degrees in global temperatures. The science that that's based on says that there is a total carbon budget
07:24
estimate which we'll just call X. I don't want to get into the confusing question of actual calculations, but it's X, the total carbon budget which will limit climate change to two degrees rise. But we're currently at X minus Y.
07:42
Y is all of the emissions since the start of the industrial age and those that occur naturally by all kinds of natural processes, volcano, methane releases, et cetera. So X minus Y is the remaining carbon budget. That still doesn't explain why we would need a universal open data framework,
08:06
but the fossil fuel reserves, which are registered by companies, already proven, and this is in a compliance context where their shareholders could sue them if they overstated it. And in fact, some of you may remember that the CEO of Shell
08:24
had to resign about a decade ago because Shell did massively overstate their proven reserves. These are a critical element of the market valuation of those companies. Those proven reserves are already twice the remaining carbon budget, the X minus Y.
08:42
Therefore, to meet this target, only 50% or less than 50% of the proven current reserves can be produced before we hit that total ceiling. The rest will be stranded assets. That's to say, they'll just be left in the ground.
09:00
Here's why we need the open data framework. Whose assets will they be? If we talk about a potential two to three trillion dollars of evaluated assets, fossil fuel assets in the ground, and there's now a policy signed by 195 heads of state saying only half of them can now be produced. Which half?
09:28
So here we get to the Paris Agreement. And as I said, it's not one Paris Agreement, it's many Paris Agreements because it's a floppy, internally contradictory kind of soup of an agreement
09:46
which has led the purists in the environmentalist movement to be torn up about it. You could take another view and say it was what was diplomatically necessary to get a process started in the first place. In any case, it sets this figure of two degrees.
10:03
But it does not set any top-down mechanism to achieve it. There is no world government. And there is this mess of internal inconsistencies because each country has committed to limit its own future carbon emissions to a particular quantity.
10:22
If you add all of those up, all of those contributions, the same scientists that the process is relying on would estimate that those individual country estimates add up to between 2.7 and 3.7, which really takes us into disaster territory. So it's a massive problem.
10:41
Two things will happen if the process is going to work at all and save us from frying the planet. One is that that process will get tightened up. The numbers will get tightened up and have to come down. But the second is you've still got this overall top-level framework agreement of two degrees. And what that means is it's not going to be one top-down mechanism.
11:03
It's going to be any number of regional, single-country, multi-block, combination of government and market, bottom-up implementations, bottom-up agreements. And that means every single one of them is going to need open data. And we'll just run through a couple very quickly.
11:23
Here's one possible Paris agreement. And I say there could be thousands. There's a distinguished scholar called Paul Collier who argues coal first. Most people argue coal first. But within coal first, Australia, the United States, and Germany. Why? Because those are the three rich world producers of significant coal industries
11:46
and the moral imperative, the historical imperative, and so on. But that would only happen in return for phased closure of coal in other countries, which haven't yet polluted as much, and which rely to a greater degree for their welfare
12:01
on those coal industries, such as Indonesia, Brazil, China, Mozambique, India, and so on. And within that calculation, not all coal is equal. There's going to be some coal that provides more jobs than other coal. Some coal's going to go into electricity to power fridges which are far too big.
12:21
And others are going to go into a single light bulb in a shack on the edge of Nairobi or Maputo. So there will then be trade-offs, because governments will be involved as well, between whose coal gets the most development impact within this category even. And then suddenly we need a financial model to start to predict that,
12:43
because the same coal with the same costs could have very different results in terms of jobs or even in fact electricity produced and also carbon emissions within the three big categories of oil, coal, and gas, there are significant differences of emissions related to one kind of fossil fuel to another.
13:05
That's one case. Here's the second one. Suppose in the general arguments, gas is generally considered to be the last fossil fuel which will be closed, because roughly speaking, it is half as intensive in terms of carbon emissions as coal,
13:22
with oil somewhere in between. So it will be last, but then the compromise is you already have to plan for the close, so no new mega projects. So the EU, for example, says it will refuse to accept purchases within EU countries from mega projects,
13:42
which around the world would be transported to them through something called liquefied natural gas, where you freeze it to minus 180 degrees and put it in huge tankers, which are constantly chilled, to minus 180 degrees, and you carry it around the world to a very limited number of massive industrial facilities.
14:00
So it's very easy to monitor. Suppose you had a policy like that. How would you define a mega project? Well, partly it's around how much resources are in the ground. Partly it relates to the production costs. Why? Because the market and companies will not choose to develop any of these massive resources
14:22
unless they can find global markets, which means, effectively, unless they build massive pipelines or LNG projects, which, as we said, are monitorable and visible. So there's an interplay there between how much is in the ground and what it costs to get it out, which leads you to needing what's called a reserves profile.
14:45
This is actually an iron ore cost curve, but you can see the whole point. Why does corruption happen and billions of dollars disappearing into people's pockets? Because it can. And the reason it can is you sell at the same price.
15:01
So if the price of iron ore is $100, the production costs of one project could be $30, earning $70 profit. Another one, which is still producing, could be $95, making only $5 profit. Who's going to monitor all of that massive whack of super profit down at the bottom?
15:20
That left-hand side of the curve is exactly why the political economy of the Middle East has been what it is for the last 50 or 60 years. It's explainable overwhelmingly. Yes, ISIS a little bit. Yes, authoritarian rule of one kind or another. But it's mostly in this massive space here which creates the trillions of dollars of patronage
15:44
which fuel autocracies forever and ever. But you actually need to get a grip on those cost curves in order to answer that previous question of which gas projects would go ahead and which ones wouldn't. So that's the idea of a transparent planet.
16:03
How far are we towards that now? I'm going to suggest, because this won't be the last time you hear of this, in the years to come you can answer that question by addressing two other questions. How many oil concessions are there in the world? And are we in one now?
16:22
Is this room in an oil concession? Okay, is anyone brave enough to guess any answers to either of those questions? Well, I don't blame you. Yeah, right. I don't blame you because in answer to the first question, I can guarantee you,
16:42
it's not a question of you not knowing nothing or us not knowing nothing, I can guarantee you, like Socrates, that in fact nobody in the world knows the number of oil concessions. This is our best attempt at it. A bit of trumpet blowing there, but we have taken a bunch of really crappy JPEG maps from oil ministry websites
17:06
and we've entered them into a GIS system. So this is open data. You can zoom in and see the interaction and put other layers on and take them off and so on. And we've found that data for about 110 countries around the world,
17:20
which means there's another 100 missing, including some big ones like Russia. But that's not the same as saying everybody knows, nobody knows that number. And the second question is, well, you could potentially find out here if we were in an oil concession or not because Germany has relatively good data,
17:41
but in most of the world it would be impossible to find that out. So our answer then to this question of transparency and where we are with it is a bit like Gandhi's answer to the question, what do you think of Western civilization? And he replied, it would be a tremendous idea.
18:01
There's a big movement around transparency and EITI or Kimberly Blood Diamonds initiatives and so on, but really we are at 1% of where we need to be. So there's two paths that need to go forward in order to reach this universal open data,
18:21
which in turn is what we will need to implement the Paris Agreement. And by the way, the same approach is going to happen with minerals as well, not because of climate change but because of other so-called planetary boundaries, land use, water use, biodiversity. There are massive global level problems which require transnational management.
18:42
So you have advocacy. Here, keep going with these initiatives as they exist. They've all been invented essentially within the idea that citizens of an individual state need access to information about those resources. Big fights, super slow progress, captured by vested interests and so on.
19:01
Nevertheless, they exist and they achieve some contributions. Hug global bureaucrats. If you are used to defining yourself kind of very straightforwardly at one part of the political spectrum, you may not like that or you may like that. But here it's incredibly important because what we're talking about is the level for,
19:21
the need for transnational rule and governance of these natural resources. And that means who are the natural allies in that regardless of their more normal positions. All UN organizations, the IMF, the World Bank, absolutely natural allies. Hug the global bureaucrats and keep the mega leaks coming.
19:42
Do whatever you do that. So we go back to this question of is it just politically possible at all? Are we just dreaming here? Is it just David against Goliath? Let's go back to that nominal legal reality. In all but an absolute handful of countries and a fraction of the percentage of resources under the ground,
20:07
there is already public ownership. So you have an argument from first principles to create this system. And that in fact is what all of the national level transparency movements are about.
20:22
It's also the answer to governments who say why should we give people on the other side of the world data already? I mean the fact is countries cede parts of their sovereignty for all kinds of reasons, the EU, the UN, the World Trade Organization and so on. Then some quick data artisanal principles. Curate all data already in public domain.
20:43
Build analysis on top of that data. Get your own data. This is a tool that we've built which basically scrapes all corporate filings in the world for all extractive industries all the time. Flattens out the text from the PDFs and makes it searchable.
21:01
Which is not to overestimate what's in the corporate record. Embarrassing revelations are kept to a minimum for obvious reasons. Nevertheless companies tell investors a lot which they choose not to tell to the public. And we're able to join up the dots in that circle now because it's 2016 and we live in an open data world. But there's a lot more of that artisanal work which could be done.
21:27
Having run searches through this data it turns out that the terms doubt, going and concern, if they occur within ten words of each other, are basically a pretty imminent sign that a company may be about to go bust. It's a point at which they are forced for compliance purposes to report that the auditor has said there is doubt about them as a going concern.
21:47
So once you've, it's a virtuous circle, once you've run the searches to find those terms you then run those terms explicitly. And you're able in a country like Zambia for example to identify 400 recent instances of companies they do business with which may be about to go bust.
22:03
And I was sitting with a Zambian finance ministry official last week who had no idea of these level of resources available. But the third and the most important in the long term is collecting your own data. Now are we radioactive? This is the general area, so you'll see there isn't in this hall data, this
22:30
is a map of radioactivity with levels there which is created by a citizen science project. It's all over Berlin, not quite in this point here, but we've got a better reading.
22:41
We've got a better reading that at least down at Stadtmitter they're not radioactive. And all of this is open data, you can download it all of the time. From a project called Safecast which started in reaction to the earthquake and meltdown of the nuclear reactor in Fukushima in 2011, the Japanese government was giving out no data.
23:04
So a bunch of geeks, because it's Japan, put it together, built their own geiger counters, there are a thousand of them out there and the result is a global map. And this is close to where we're standing now. And if you want to join that initiative you can just buy one of these off Amazon for 650 bucks and it will collect compliance level data.
23:28
This non-profit initiative is now consulted to, if that's the right term, by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, by federal regulators in the US and in Japan. All of a thousand pieces of kit like that which are openly viable and engineerable to compliance level.
23:47
And the ease of collection, this is actually my son, he's collected 20,000 data points by turning that kit on and walking around with it. Which is roughly the same amount of data points that has been published by the Japanese government.
24:03
It's about 23,000, the Japanese government. Safecast as a whole has coming up to 50 million data points in it. So this is the most mature example, but the same thing is coming. Open source hardware, techniques of analysis in the public space, massively saturation collection
24:22
for all forms of environmental impact including air quality, including water and so on. And that's it. But now let me ask this question again and be brutal. Who thinks that there is a reason to try and create a universal open data framework with all of the resources under the ground?
24:50
Don't be nice, but that's good, that's good, that's half from like, you know, virtually zero. Who thinks that it's politically feasible in the coming period?
25:01
Hmm, slight increase, slight increase. That's it. If there are any questions, I'm happy to take them. John, thank you for your talk. I've got a question myself about this open oil thing.
25:23
Yes. It's all fine and dandy, but don't you think it's a little bit too late to concentrate on changing this industry? Because I think it would make much more sense to concentrate resources on developing the open grid, like renewables, etc.
25:42
We've got such projects in Germany and like in states, SolarCity. So consumers, they're basically prosumers. They can sell their energy, etc. And I think it's much more feasible to do this kind of thing. And the oil industry would become just obsolete if we concentrate on this thing, I hope.
26:04
There's no question that the oil industry needs to become obsolete absolutely as fast as possible. The question of, you frame it as an either or, I guess the response to the either or is how desperate you think the situation is. In fact, who is familiar with global feedback loops, the possibility of, for example, the loss of the albedo in the Arctic?
26:26
Siberian methane, the ice shelves in Greenland, and apparently there's a new one in Antarctic that I don't know about. It is actually possible that all of this is way too late. It's possible, but I'm not sure what to do about that.
26:43
Within business as usual, and Paris Agreement is business as usual, we need to close down fossil fuels of all kinds as quickly as possible. The question is, how long? There is no sustainable fossil fuel industry, but 90% of the world's energy is still based on fossil fuels.
27:03
Show anyone a way to switch that all off tomorrow and do something else, and I'm sure about $10 trillion of investment will follow. So then the question is, what is the quickest possible way to do it, and what else do we need? I'm not claiming this is a complete solution to the climate change problem.
27:25
I have one question. How helpful are the United Nations with this cause? And the second question, if you collect all this data, isn't there already a lot of data which just needs to be made public?
27:50
The second one is no, which is the point of saying nobody in the world, quite seriously, not as a rhetorical statement, nobody in the world knows how many oil concessions there are.
28:05
Not the IMF, not the World Bank, not any individual government, not any trade organization, nobody. We are at 1% of the information that we need. And in fact, part of the problem is that activists have focused too much
28:21
on trying to get the release of information they know already exists, because that's what activists do, whereas in fact that totality of information may represent 5% to 10% of what we need in its entirety to create this kind of framework. I'm sorry, I forgot your first question. That was your second question. What was the first question?
28:40
The United Nations. I mean, potentially, potentially yes, but not so far. These are early days. I mean, the UN environmental program perhaps, UN development program, absolutely. But let's not overstate even the reach of these organizations. I mean, UNDP turns over $3 billion a year.
29:00
It's a significant development agency with a lot more political legitimacy than nation state development agencies, but that's about it. It's nowhere near having the scale and level of impact and resources to deliver this right now. But we're at the beginning of it. I wanted to know, you said to reach the two degrees agreement for Paris,
29:26
it represented half of the reserve, the proven reserve of hydrocarbon. But if we added what every country individually agreed to use, it will reach up to between 2.4 and 3.6 degrees. This represents using all the proven oil reserve?
29:42
No, no, sorry. That may have been confusing. That is the scientific estimate of the end average rise in temperatures if in fact all of the countries fulfill their own individual country level contributions of reductions in emissions, which could happen by any method at all.
30:02
It's not related to the fossil fuel reserves. But if China does what it says it will and America does what it says it will and Germany and Ghana and so on, then the problem is, a huge contradiction within the process is that even that, even if they do what they say they will, adds up to between 2.7 and 3.7.
30:22
So it's a huge contradiction to the overall stated goal, which is only two degrees. Thanks. My name is Phil. I work in the clean tech sector. I also write about it, or climate change and clean tech. I have a question regarding the data. Bill McKibben and others usually, and that's a figure I've seen a lot,
30:44
say have a much higher figure for proven recoverable reserves that we can't burn, namely four-fifths. And now I was interested to see that you have a much, much lower figure, and I would be interested in your take on that. And then also secondly, as regards sort of the end game,
31:01
I would be interested in how we could use open data, both in the clean tech sector and also in the remaining fossil fuel sector, to further speed up this disruptive price trend that we already have. And I think we've seen that the Saudis, maybe we're already recognizing
31:24
that there's a limit to how much they can burn, and that's why they want to get out as much, as fast as possible, destroying the oil industry in the process. Right. You're absolutely right on the numbers. I take those numbers from Carbon Tracker, and they in turn fudge for the market because they're trying to influence the market.
31:42
So you're absolutely right. Those are on the high side, and there are much lower estimates. So I should put between 20 and 50 percent. I think for all effective purposes of demonstrating the principle, it doesn't make a difference, but you're right on the numbers. In terms of further use of open data, the same principles of open data applied to the stuff
32:01
which is destroying the planet in one way or another could also be used to renewable energies. Here's an idea. OpenStreetMaps has 180 million buildings as digital objects within its layer. There are open algorithms which will give you sun trajectory, hours of daylight a year.
32:21
Therefore, it's possible there's a roughly 20 to 30 percent variation based on roof shape. So within 20 to 30 percent margin of error, you could produce customized building-level estimates for how much solar energy somebody can get from that building in that place month by month, year by year, probably for under $20,000 for 180 million buildings
32:43
serving perhaps a billion people on the planet. That would be an example of use of open data to increase the disruptive force and explosive spread of renewables, for example. I think there's lots of examples like that. So one more, I'm told this is the last question. I got the same message here. Very quick, I think the pension funds are already in big trouble
33:01
because let's say they can't take the money out and they are too expensive, and the person who got the point, the question, don't you think that new energies will just make the old stuff obsolete, that there is no real need, that this oil has to be taken out? Yeah, I think that would be great. So the real answer is, number one, I don't know.
33:22
Number two, that would be great. But number three, let's be conservative in the original sense of the term and therefore, because we're talking about the survival of human civilization, and let's assume that it's not going to happen in that neat and convenient way with minimal disruption and therefore carry on with some radical planning.
33:40
But I think that question of valuations, this is a nonlinear change. If all of this seems very far away, all change is nonlinear. We are sitting in a place, in a city which 26 years ago nobody could have predicted a totalitarian regime was going to instantly collapse.
34:01
Real change is nonlinear. So your point about the pension funds and yours about the Saudis, I believe is true. I think it's very possible that this $1 trillion flotation is precisely about the Saudis getting some cash from what they know is going to be an overvalued asset because the investment is going to flow away very quickly.
34:22
But unfortunately, in my world view, that's still not the same as saying we can guarantee that's all going to happen on its own and just let it do its work. Okay, thanks very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Vest.