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commercials. So here's what we're doing. This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. But it's
not just the developed nations. The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace. And
actually, their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965. And they're catching
up very dramatically. The total concentrations: by 2025, they will be essentially where we were in 1985. If the
wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. But we have given
to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in
Bolivia -- over thirty years.
This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The '60s. '70s. '80s. '90s. We have to stop this. And the good news
is that we can. We have the technologies. We have to have a unified view of how to go about this: the struggle
against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple
solution.
People say, "What's the solution?" Here it is. Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue neutral,
to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck -- and some things have changed since
the 19th century. In the poor world, we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the
climate crisis. Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted, if we do not solve the climate crisis.
But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been
talked about a lot in Europe. This was from Nature magazine. These are concentrating solar, renewable energy
plants, linked in a so-called "supergrid" to supply all of the electrical power to Europe, largely from developing
countries -- high-voltage DC currents. This is not pie in the sky; this can be done.
We need to do it for our own economy. The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There
are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a
portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in
their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the
equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these, so
I'll have a disclaimer there. But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and
conservation.
You've seen this slide before, but there's a change. The only two countries that didn't ratify -- and now
there's only one. Australia had an election. And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and
Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. And we trained 250 people to
give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. Lot of other things contributed to it, but the
new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia's position on Kyoto, and
he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. This is Lake
Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names, we'd call
the one in the southeast now Katrina, and we would say it's headed toward Atlanta. We can't wait for the kind of
drought Australia had to change our political culture. Here's more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the
U.S. are up to 780 -- and I thought I saw one go by there, just to localize this -- which is good news.
Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so
commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are
alive in the United States of America today especially, but also the rest of the world, have to somehow
understand that history has presented us with a choice -- just as Jill [Bolte] Taylor was figuring out how to save
her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. We now have a culture
of distraction. But we have a planetary emergency. And we have to find a way to create, in the generation of
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