TEDxVancouver - Patrick Moore - 11/21/09

I was born and raised on the northern tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest next to the Pacific. I grew up playing in the mudflats next to salmon spawning streams and developed a love of nature at a young age, but then I had to come to Vancouver to go to I ended up at the University of BC studying life sciences, which I had always been my greatest interest, biology, genetics, biochemistry, some forestry and then I discovered ecology, the science of how all living things are interrelated and how we relate to them. -An environmentalist again and soon enrolled in a PhD in ecology at the University of BC and became radicalized during the height of the Cold War at the height of the Vietnam War.

I joined this small group in the basement of the Unitarian Church who were planning a protest. trip against us testing hydrogen bombs in Alaska we sailed a small fishing boat across the North Pacific we had tens of thousands of people marching in the streets blocking the US-Canada border to get attention President Nixon canceled those hydrogen bomb tests hydrogen bombs as a result of the overwhelming public opposition that we had helped create this was the last hydrogen bomb that the United States detonated and was the birth of Greenpeace. I spent the next 15 years after earning my PhD full-time and leading Greenpeace around the world.

We move on to French atmospheric nuclear testing, then saving whales in the surrounding world's oceans, and then toxic waste and uranium mining and nuclear power and all the other topics you've heard about in my nearly 40s. years as an ecologist and environmentalist Somehow I have become an environmentalist who supports nuclear energy and is somewhat skeptical about human-caused climate change. Now as to nuclear energy. I'm not out of the ordinary. Today there are many environmentalists who have decided that nuclear energy is the most effective technology. eliminate fossil fuels and replace coal plants with a nuclear plant, something that can't be easily done with wind and solar, but we'll get to that, but that's what most other environmentalists like James Lovelock, the Fr. of the Gaia hypothesis, Stewart.

Brand, the founder of Whole Earth Catalog, Steven Tyndale, former CEO of Greenpeace UK and even Bob Marley have all decided that they support nuclear energy, while Bob did so while he was alive and most of the reasons for this is the climate change, most environmentalists who have decided that they should adopt nuclear technology are because they are concerned about the consumption of fossil fuels, CO2 emissions and climate change. That's not the main reason I support nuclear energy, although it is part of it. People should wake up to the fact that the weather has stopped. warming more than 10 years ago 1998 was the warmest date the warmest year we have had in the last hundred years since then there has been a slight cooling trend yes, Arctic sea ice was the lowest in 2007 in any summer since We only started measuring it in 1979, so we don't really have a very long data set here, but for the last two years it's been rebuilding Antarctica never warmed, it stayed cold, and the sea ice around Antarctica hasn't shrunk. in the slightest and you can find it easily.

On the Internet, there's the fact that hurricane intensity is about 50 percent of what it was 10 years ago and has been steadily declining since about 1998, the warmest time of year, so it's worth looking into this . the issue that it would actually be much worse if it were 2 degrees cooler than if it were 2 degrees warmer in terms of agricultural production in particular. I ask them why there are 300 million people in the United States and only 30 million people in Canada, all huddled against the 49th parallel, a cold word sometimes I think that's why they allow us, but it's an absolute fact that The greatest biodiversity on this planet is found in the tropics the moment you move from the tropics to other places.

Where it freezes in winter, biodiversity falls by more than 90% due to adaptation to the cold. I'm glad I didn't have to do that across the North Pole. Adaptation to cold is a very specialized evolutionary adaptation, only a few species have it in our species. Homo sapiens at ten degrees Celsius naked in the open air will freeze to death in not many hours, there is no need to freeze, you only need 10 degrees Celsius and we cannot survive in that, so I am not going to insist too much on climate change because Personally, I think which is not a crisis or an apocalypse and I don't even know if we have any way to control it and why it is cooling now when all the climate models say it is supposed to continue to warm.

I'm going to wait and see what happens because I don't think we know right now and therefore I don't think we should adopt policies that are going to cost tens of billions of dollars and put hundreds of millions of people in poverty. energy and will produce food. much more expensive for people who can barely afford it, there are already 800 million people in this world who do not have enough food and policies that make energy more expensive make food more expensive, so why do I support reducing fossil fuels, because I strongly support it? In reality, there are a large number of good reasons.

The first is the issue of climate change. I agree that although we don't know exactly what is going to happen to the climate, it would be a good idea to reduce the rate of increase of CO2 in the global atmosphere at least as a precautionary measure, but secondly, nothing causes more damage to human health in terms of pollution than the burning of fossil fuels in this world. We know this for sure, it's not just a theory, we know that coal plants in particular emit sulfur and particulates and mercury and a lot more radiation than a nuclear plant are the worst forms of pollution in the world, so that's one good reason.

What about conservation? We are burning through about 300 million years of fossil fuel creation in just a few centuries. a model our children can look up to maybe there should be some fossil fuels for people 500 years from now instead of us just wasting them all, but fossil fuels account for 85 percent of the world's energy today , which means that only 15 percent of our energy comes from anything other than fossil fuels, one of the reasons why it would be good to reduce fossil fuels below their current use, unfortunately they continue to grow despite all our efforts. conversations and our good intentions.

One reason it would be good for us to reduce our dependence on I think it's crazy that Al Gore is suggesting that in 10 years we won't be using any fossil fuels, which is apparently his goal and politicians around the world are jumping on each other. to make more wildly ridiculous promises about an 80% reduction in fossil fuels or a carbon neutral world. Personally, I don't think a carbon neutral world is feasible, not with so many people and not if people are going to get out of poverty in developing countries it's just not going to happen and maybe it's not necessary to have a carbon neutral world. , but it would surely be a good idea if we were not 85 percent dependent on these precious non-renewable resources, especially when there are other technologies that can do the same job cleaner and more sustainably, speaking of which, but for geopolitical reasons, simply I forgot the ones there, last but certainly not least, Middle East oil, US transportation system absolutely depends on it.

Russian gas, all of Europe now absolutely depends on it. These are the two main potential centers of instability. Politically reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas would be a good thing for world peace. I have a little ditty that goes renewable sustainable clean and green we exchange those four words like they all mean the same thing when they certainly don't know it we all know what renewable is that's good renewable is good but it's easy to use something renewable in an unsustainable way like the buffalo, for example, Atlantic cod, these were renewable resources that were used in an unsustainable way, then sustainable, we know what it means it will last a long time, we can continue doing it because it does not run out, many sustainable resources are not renewable, such as ore iron, for example, there is enough iron ore in the earth's crust to last a million years, there is no possibility that we will run out of iron, but there are non-renewable resources that are very finite, oil is a classic case, so there is clean cleaning, which means that it does not pollute. , this is a good thing, this is why we want clean and sustainable technologies, they don't have to be renewable, if they are sustainable and clean then there is green and I certainly agree with Mark on the unfortunate aspect of this word green.

Basically, the word green simply means that someone is trying to sell you something. It has now become a marketing term. It has no merit in technical or scientific explanation. It doesn't work for me, so I think the middle two words are the most important. Sustainable and clean. look at the options we have here, let's start with renewable energy. I mean, I'm all for renewable energy, but I think the green movement has chosen the wrong ones, with wind and solar being the two centerpieces of how we're supposed to go out. Fossil fuels are actually the most important renewable energy in the world is the wood from trees.

About 75 percent of all the world's renewable energy measured in energy units comes from wood, mainly for cooking and heating in developing countries, but also in wood industries in most countries. The energy used to make wood and paper is biomass from parts of the tree that are not suitable for the final product. Another 22% or so of our renewable energy in this world is hydropower. Only about 2.5 percent of all renewable energy in the world. the world is solar wind and all the others added together most of it is wood and hydroelectric then we come to nuclear energy nuclear energy is not renewable but it is extremely sustainable there is enough nuclear fuel to last thousands of years then there is thorium another radioactive natural element in the earth's crust which is much more abundant than uranium and in fact many people believe it is a better nuclear fuel than uranium for energy production, so we have no problem with sustainability.

Additionally, it is clean and does not emit any air pollutants that come out. coal plants and emit no greenhouse gases, there are about 2 percent CO2 emissions over the entire life cycle of nuclear power compared to coal, for example, the reason why wind and solar power They are not sustainable in my opinion it is twofold, firstly, if you go to Germany, where the prices of each of the technologies to produce electricity are set by law. It's called a feed-in tariff. Brown coal costs 2.4 euro cents, 2.4 euro cents per kilowatt hour. Nuclear energy costs 2.5 cents. Gas costs 3 cents. Wind power costs 10 cents and solar costs 57 cents.

They have to pay. In Germany they pay $9 billion each year for solar energy and get less than 1% of their electricity from it, and then there's wind, of which you have 12,000 megawatts one day and it goes off that night and you have nothing the next morning , it is too expensive and certainly cannot be afforded by people in Africa, Latin America or most Asian countries. The only place where wind and solar are installed in any quantity is where there are legislated requirements for utilities to purchase them or where there are legislative requirements for purchasing them. the prices they have to pay for it if it is installed nowhere else is solar and wind energy being installed on a large scale.

The second problem is the intermittency inherent to these two renewable energies. Hydro is a continuous base load. Biomass can be a continuous base load. Geothermal source heat pumps or geothermal heat pumps are base load and continuous and I will cover them because they are a big part of this solution, but both wind and solar are intermittent, we cannot run factories, hospitals, schools, businesses and homes with technologies that disappear for three or four days in a row sorry I can't go to work today the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining this just won't work alone it may be a niche solar energy it's only useful outside of the grid when there is no alternative other than a gas or diesel generator and wind power plays a small role, although there will be one, but at ten cents a kilowatt hour it is three or four times more expensive than conventional coal and nuclear plants , one of the reasons why Si observesgreenhouse gas emissions around the world from various countries, you will see that what makes the biggest difference, given a relatively comparable GDP per capita, is the electrical technology that country uses.

Sweden, Switzerland and France have the lowest CO2 level per capita. emissions in Europe why due to a combination of hydroelectric and nuclear electricity Sweden is 45% hydroelectric, 45% nuclear and 8% biomass, which is wood from its forests, electricity practically free of fossil fuels Switzerland is 65% hydroelectric because it has many mountains with rivers and 35% nuclear France is 80% nuclear and 10% hydroelectric with some gas and renewable energies but basically free of fossil fuels in reality Canada is 65% hydroelectric and 15% nuclear for 80% of electricity generated with non-fuels fossils pretty much the exact opposite of the United States, which is 70 percent fossil fuels, 50 percent coal and 20 percent gas and about 22 percent hydroelectric, 20 percent hydroelectric, 20 percent nuclear and everything stops only a small portion of wind and solar energy etc. so my argument is that it is impossible with renewable energy alone, even hydropower. because although hydroelectric power produces 15% of the world's electricity today, about the same as nuclear, which is about 15 percent compared to all the rest combined, which is less than 1%, fossil fuels produce about 70% of the world's electricity, there is no way. that renewables alone can replace fossil fuels to a large extent, especially with a growing economy and population and the fact that we are going to need more electricity in the future and not less why, because if we clean up our electrical system It makes no sense to plug a hybrid car into a coal-fired power plant and it makes no sense to run a geothermal heat pump in If your house is in a coal-fired power plant, you're simply moving pollution from one place to another. , but if the electrical system is clean, that is, hydroelectric, nuclear, some wind and some biomass, then there are 750 million cars this year in this world.

They can be equipped with batteries in the not too distant future, it will take 15 or 20 years for this to arrive on a large scale, but it is coming, so we need more electricity, clean electricity to charge all these batteries at night, that is when We'll want to charge them during off-peak hours and when we have our cars parked in the garage at home, we can use that clean electricity to run the heat pumps in each building. Every building in the world can get the gas that replaces a heat pump. The gas boiler, the gas hot water tank and the air conditioning with more efficient systems that do not use fossil fuels, a house could be built on a glacier.

I don't recommend it but you could put pipes in the ground and extract heat from the ice. and heat your home to a comfortable temperature, that is the miracle of geothermal heat pumps. They work anywhere in the world for heating, cooling and domestic hot water. Solar hot water, as demonstrated above, is also a very important and cost-effective use of solar energy, but solar voltaics I don't think they will ever figure out how to make the Sun shine at night or on cloudy days, so we have chosen the wrong renewables to focus on in these cases. Today, China, we here, are building all these coal plants and it's true, but China is also now the world leader in hydroelectric production.

The Three Gorges Dam itself is equivalent to 40 coal-fired power plants. They are also currently building 16 nuclear power plants in China, nine in Russia and six in South Korea. six in Taiwan one in Finland two in France 53 in total now under construction worldwide Sweden has reversed its moratorium on nuclear energy and announced that it will build new plants Germany, just in the last election, has changed its position on energy nuclear and will keep its nuclear plants running and will no doubt build more in the future Italy has just announced that it will build nuclear plants for the first time Spain has just announced that it will keep its nuclear plants running this is the nuclear renaissance that is happening all over the world world and the reason why it is happening is because it is the best form of electricity that runs 24/7 safely and reliably to replace fossil fuels in the future.

I know that for many people this is something that is going to cause a lot of cognitive dissonance, but it is happening right now all over the world. people are making these decisions and I don't think it's going to change unless something completely new comes out of nowhere, but the vision is to get clean electricity to 85% fossil fuels and reduce fossils to 25 or 30% one day in the future. In the fairly distant future, this will be necessary if we are moving in the right direction. Clean electricity, charge batteries in all our private vehicles, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for transportation, run heat pumps in all our buildings, reduce our dependence on gas and other fossil fuels. fuels for heating, cooling and hot water production and could actually achieve a 50% reduction in fossil fuel use worldwide.

Thank you so much.