producer of the show and today marjorie stewart is here with me in the studio good morning margery good morning and you have a guest on the phone perhaps you would like to tell us about him  guest is speaking to us from his they missed michael simpson he's the executive director of the b c council for international cooperation about which it seems we might be hearing a little bit more here in welcome mike hi how are you we're just fine raring to go full of questions for you because we need to tell our listeners audience out there that you are one of the people who attended the cup twenty one climate conference in paris and that's what we want to talk to you mainly about we want to talk to you about the international impact of climate change as well as some of the local impacts that we talk about so much but m do that i think you should give people a quick out line of what they see c i c is sure ok thanks marjorie well the british columbia council for international cooperation is exactly that it's a council or a natural work of organizations so if you think of all of the organizations that have traditionally done work globally from you know the very large groups like oxfam's or q so those are whichever groups that you and can in your mind think of as working in the amazon n rain forest or in africa or some place those groups as well as a lot of the really small groups that may just be you know a small handful of people in a small town who have got together to support an orphanage or tackle a subject like climate change or whatever they've all come together and they sit under the rubric of a network and these networks are located in all the different regions of canada and then all those networks are actually together housed under a thing called the  for us as organizations to increase our kind of collective power to be able to speak with government to be able to speak on issues and to also hold ourselves accountable to some standards so we hold ourselves accountable for example to an international p charities well a lot of them are charities but not all of them because as you know in canada charitable status prohibits you from being an advocate on key issues so for some people being outspoken about some things means that they don't get chattels charitable status so it's not a prerequisite to be part of our network it is a prerequisite to be what we call part of civil society so it means that you're non governmental and you're not from the private sector so that's the key thing to be part of one of the councils in canada so what motivated you to go to paris well what motivated us is that over the last year two thousand and fifteen was a very interesting year because in the international world the agenda the global agenda that you know the united nations and people from all over the world pushed was a thing called the sustainable development goals and these replaced what were known as the millennium development goals and the mi is yeah a lot of people hear them as the m d g's exactly and there was eight of those you remember there was a empty g s t you know from environmental sustainability to gender and so on but the thing about the m t g and of course you know we tackled as a globe we tried to tackle for example having poverty extreme poverty by two thousand and fifteen and we did a pretty good job of some of the goals actually but i'll ask you a question about yeah you know somebody mentioned to me that it was china  own population well there's a lot of truth to that because when you have a billion people you can do a lot to make the big game makes a huge impact and china is one of the major reasons why that that lifted up that's absolutely true same thing is actually happening more we'll get into that a few moments but china's role on climate change is also hugely significant so their turn around recently and their enthusiasm to start tackling climate change in more substantial way is really big but we can tackle that in a minute i was of the understanding why we got involved in in the climate change issue is climate change is one of those sustainable development goals so they're seventeen goals and climate change is one of the goals the goals we're actually interestingly agreed to back in september so the world spent four years from a kind of a bottoms up approach trying to develop this collective agenda of seventeen goals and a hundred sixty nine sub targets and that became known as like our collective agenda for the period between two thousand and fifteen and two thousand and thirty so it's kind of a shared vision that the entire world has for where we want to be in two thousand and thirty and the u document that you know more than one hundred ninety two nations signed onto in september which is a phenomenal achievement is called transforming our world and it literally trend does it's an incredibly aspirational document that that points out that we literally have to transform our world by two thousand and thirty and as it says in just to give you an idea of how radical the document is it's usually really difficult to get people at the u n to agree to things and in this document you have wording that says you know this is the potentially the last generation that has a chance at saving the planet and they're talking about the generation between now and two thousand and thirty because of things like the climate change changes that we face and population changes and some of the pressures on resources and and so on so that elective agendas what everybody got excited about paris fits into that under climate change and that's why we went to both of those meetings  papers we often get letters from people who don't live here who are somewhere else and planted and these are people who seem to have a mission to be climate change skeptics  in our country well you know and they're they're taken so very few people take them seriously anymore and it's because you know climate change kind of came onto the onto the sort of onto our radar screen shall we put it that way in the eighty's right and ninety's it became a very big deal and it was lots of deniers back then but nobody of any serious background is denying it now in terms of what the what the basic which that we're changing our climate in an incredibly short period of time human input is is is the worst part of it however much of it may be so called that sheryl will natural climate change is undeniable there's the climate has changed on our planet but it does that over a period of tens of thousands of years sort of like waiting for the sun to go out it well i mean i was listening to somebody on the bus actually a couple you know maybe a week or so ago and i overheard their conversation they were talking climate change in the one fella says well you know there used to be tropical forests on the poles and that's absolutely true there were tropical forests in the polar regions but that was fifteen million years ago and the planet had a chance between having an ecosystem in temperature average global temperature of that nature it had a chance to adapt to the changes over time what we're forcing on is an unprecedented change in the climate in a period of only one hundred twenty years and that's quickening the pace of that change is now happening in decades and that's the thing that's of concern so when people talk about climate change they're not talking about the fact that the climate changed naturally they're talking about anthropos it's anthropogenic genic climate change human induced climate change the fact that we're changing the atmosphere and we've done it perfectly efficiently yes we're good at what we do so having established that this is a very very serious and getting closer problem let's take a look at some of the detail that goes into the planning for this kind of agreement one of the problem so was this the language and the acronyms and the most powerful acronym around that conference was and that's exactly what it sounds like in your it's true that when you get into climate change work it's full of a lexicon a language which is a bit intimidating but there's precision behind a lot of the terms so the but the idea is very simple in this one the idea was rather than people coming to a meeting and agreeing on what they would do people would come first on what they nationally intended to do what they would bring to the what they would bring to the meeting so that way we could see what the picture was so everybody every country was tasked with say ok we'll come to the meeting with what you can do how much can you reduce your emissions of these poisonous greenhouse gases how much can you stop doing that and each country came forward with what it well people recognise that canada was in an interesting position because we went through a complete change in government and perspective on climate change some account of who was there our environment minister was in a bit of a pickle in that we how these are and i  are actually submitted back in may and some countries took until i did deadline i think was in october so for some countries you know that their submissions went as much as half a year ago or a year ago and it was an independent meeting was early december so they did they had a month it's not really and there's quite a few transition rules around these sorts of things so that was an interesting predicament for them to find themselves in you know  conferences civil society played a pretty powerful role outside the doors of the conference so to speak yeah it's interesting the way the french you know the french really deserve a lot of credit for the success of coming to a legally binding agreement because they went out diplomat they're very great diplomats they always have been right and they they took that reputation really push it so they visited every single country at least twice with diplomatic missions in the months and years actually coming up to this meeting and then when we were at the meeting they opened up quite a bit of what we could call civil society space both inside and outside of the meeting so traditionally when you go to a meeting like this now civil society is seen as and as an independent actor in our own right that's kind of the phrase and what it means is that we have some limited each country sends a mission and the countries that have got their act together include civil society on these of fish all delegations the official canadian delegations that died out completely during the harper years and there was very little civil society participation at the un meetings if even canadian participation  gone back to that it was encouraging to see that there was civil society was encouraged it was present and it was both present in terms of being candidates and one of the large delegations actually so we went from being an actor to within a and i was reminded of a mary eleven the physicist who runs the rocky mountain institute who spoke early about sustainable development and sustainability and general and he was being targeted for having a it played out i think in the debate around one point five degrees so the idea here just for some of your listeners who might not understand the this debate there's a threshold degree that scientists are telling us will throw us into a territory called dangerous climate change and that number is two degrees so if you change the overall temperature on the planet by an average of two degrees then what happens is the extreme weather events become more frequent and more intense so you see more storms more droughts doesn't really matter whether it's cold or high at the point is that events like say clones or hurricanes or tornadoes or whatever those events become they happen more frequently and they'll happen in a bigger way and levels go up water level sea level rise goes up and the and the threshold they've told us is look they said look you can probably change the climate a certain amount and you know we can that that's just an invitation to look and see if they can go faster than the maximum but actually the maximum is meant to be the safe number for the highway isn't it yes in fact it's a good analogy in the sense that you can exceed the maximum every once in a while and you're not going to move into chaos right but if we all drove at ninety miles an hour if we all drove at one hundred twenty miles an hour then the system becomes unstable and that's similar we can have a i know i'd storm every once in a while or an hurricane that you know along the averages that we've seen again on our planet without the entire ecosystem or system becoming on stable what scientists are saying is you get to two degrees and you're into systemic instability it becomes dangerous for us as a take the global average which i can't remember what it is right now but let's just say it's i don't know i can't remember the number but let's just say it's ten degrees what they're saying is that if you let the global average go to twelve degrees then you're going to be into even then you have all these extreme events so for example this is this is where the science is really catching up with us quickly of the fifteen hottest years that we've had on record since we've been keeping temperatures fourteen of them have happened in the last fifteen years in fact last year was the hottest year on record period july was the hottest month that we've ever experienced on our planet in the entire time we've been keeping records and what it means is that in places like india you get temperatures hitting fifty four degrees clearly means him which are killing lots of people so lots of people ended up in the morgues dead because it was fifty four degrees out you know and we and we can look around at these anomalies and with you know al gore made a presentation in front of the entire meeting on the tuesday afternoon and it was riveting because a lot of a lot of people showed up for it but b i mean he's a fairly well informed fellow at this point and that's good material and good materials and it was  pretty riveting to see the numbers of floods the numbers of one in one thousand year events that were happening in fact while we were at the meeting you're aware that they were having a one in one thousand year flood for the second time in ten years in england and people had actually died in england right there was a million people involved in the chennai floods so these examples we're throwing out you know during the week in fact even just in the last month in canada what did we see an auto our national capital on christmas day eighteen degree temperatures people are walking around in t shirts now on christmas day and i don't know that's an anomaly these anomalies are showing up and they're showing up frequently and of enough intensity that the the statement you know that the c made way back in the ninety's is now being believe wholeheartedly and when people ask me what did you take home from paris one of the main impressions i took home is that if you can get a hundred and ninety two world leaders scared enough at this point to sit down and agree to the climate change agreement you know with its references to one point five degrees what it's telling you is that the scientific teams and the people that are behind all those governments keep in mind some of those governments like saudi arabia are so heavily invested in fossil fuels that for them to admit there's a problem is a big political issue and you know albert is wrong for us to finally step four and go actually we're now we're now scared and what i took home from the meeting is wow these there's people are frightened references to the year two thousand and five as being the year against which where measure measuring the rise of time richer yeah and this is where we get into there's some different years these are sort of yeah and it's it is a bit confusing because originally in the kyoto protocol people used one thousand nine hundred eleven canada use you know claim that by two thousand and twelve we were going to reduce our emissions by six percent below nine hundred ninety levels now of course we've got these these other threshold years and they usually have to do with which meeting was going on when because people would say as of this meeting date let's decide that's our baseline figure right and this is where the most important thing for a reader who is not familiar with this and it's hard to grasp the best concept to grasp is this thing called the carbon budget and what essentially means is that you can pump a certain amount of the five greenhouse gases and we usually use carbon because it's the biggest and the most evident and one of the easier ones to measure if we take the overall you know so use it as a kind of an indicator gas and you say how much carbon could we pump into our atmosphere before by definition we are going to hit two degrees and we know that number we know exactly what that will not exactly but we have a really good idea of how much that is and we knew that back in two thousand and eleven we could the i p c c could said look here's our carbon budget that's how much before we hit dangerous climate change and to give you an idea that time is around five hundred fifty with the goal get good jewels or gigatons so it's gigatons part me and we burn through half of that carbon budget by two thousand and sixteen close to half right so you can see that at current levels we're going to burn through our carbon budget in fact if you take if you use the one point five degree threshold which is what everybody would like to see we're going to burn through our carbon budget by two thousand and twenty oh it's my understanding that when i and he sees that all the different countries proclaiming one point five is a safe place and they seemed to get quite a bit of traction particularly with our government they did because i think the more informed people are now they're starting to realize oh my god what does this mean because you see what's going on is we're seeing the effects now of climate change like eighteen degrees in auto or or the hottest year and what all these ones that i mentioned but keep in mind those are essentially delayed impacts it takes approximately ten years by the time you emit your greenhouse gas for it to collectively show up as a change in the weather so what we're feeling today is what we essentially were had emitted in two thousand and five two thousand and six and what we've made it up now emitted now until two thousand sixteen we're not going to fully feel it and see it the impact of what we've done until the two thousand and twenty five twenty six which is ten years away and we're looking at changes when you look at them incrementally on a map which are happening ridiculously quickly that to get a sense of immediacy about it whereas anything to do with money and the money we're ruled the world is is very immediate and people people are worrying about their money budgets a lot more than they're worrying about their carbon budget and this is now i think one of the sadder parts for me having been the cut meetings and having seen all of the good souls that have been fighting for this for fifteen twenty twenty five years is that they're turning out to be absolutely correct and the warnings they put on the table were we needed to turn it around you know the one nine hundred ninety s were called the turnaround decade for a reason we needed to turn it around back then so what we're feeling now everybody starting to panic now and go my god it looks like we're getting hurricanes but you know we had a hurricane in the philippines that exceeded the i was the harshest when we've ever felt on the planet it's ever been measured and now we get one this year exceeds that one you see so we're getting the scares left right and center and that's what was interesting was to go and look at the country prevailing winds and see mexico highlighting the hurricane that was hurricane patricia right that just came through in november zoe highlighting that one other countries highlighting all of the challenges that they face some of the small island nations highlighting the sea level rise one of the small island nations president's was there he's already bought land in fiji he's already said it's too late it will he's already said he's got a six year window based on the i don't know the numbers on that yeah i don't know the numbers on how many people but you know but it's a lot and then of course it's incredibly sad also to see some of the other countries bringing profiling what's happened in el salvador to the coastline there are entire communities have been buried we can look at what was riveting was to see the flooding that's happening on the planet in china and other places where we're not talking small amounts of hydrological change we're talking this is one of the big things you see if you change the planet and you warm it up a very graphic image that al gore gave you said look tech to envision how much energy is being trapped by man made human gases that are emitted into the gas he showed a picture of an atomic bomb we all remember that four hundred thousand of those going off every day and that is the equivalent amount of energy that we're trapping because of greenhouse gases on our planet every day i was so stunned i was due to stick i went back i looked it up on the internet i checked it out and sure enough it turns out that it's true that is being tracked and he points out most of that energy is being absorbed into our oceans and when you absorb it into the oceans going take a look n past it displays at the paris meeting what our ocean temperatures gradients are looking like right now and the meaning of that we're experiencing this year of course is extension hating it but there's a thing known as the blob it's the spew jim out of warm water in the northern pacific right now all that energy that we're capturing from the sun is being absorbed into the oceans which then changes our hydrological cycle so you get a lot more precipitation in the air and all the sudden bang you're you're seeing these ridiculous flooding events going on all over the planet floods and shouts and so on i suspect that so some may want to go to where station and i have spent at this point is is this about time system that would be fine sure we'll just mention to our listeners that you're listening to c h l y one a one point seven f your campus and community station based in the ny movement of course were heard as well at c h l y dot ca where we stream live and podcast and we the one event today i think today is fair trade tuesday and global village no not imo has some special zoo now if you're familiar with global village in iowa you know that the store has closed until next fall but you can order by e mail there are it's the the food type products really that are available right now you can order dried fruit shea butter creams which is a food i guess but that's over very nice skin creams reiss chocolate bars all of oil by e mailing  makes the most marvelous rub or spring plague on roasted veggies or salads you could imagine ok and are you willing to give your contact information should probably be able to get it to the global listening to on c h l is changes today margery is talking with michael simpson executive director of the b c council for international co operation about climate change it's getting scarier and scarier and also you will probably be talking about what the government of canada needs to do in the wake of the climate talks last month in paris well part of what we want to do is investigate what c our government to task for left hand right hand to behave here in other words and coverage increased and use encouraging increase carbon carbon gases with aid to other countries while at the same time claiming to pursue some sustainability goals and i mentioned this to was saddam's length agency of government but subsea intent to foreign affairs anyway this person laughed and said oh yes she said everybody understands that especially the fossil fuel groups they don't see why we should be giving money for events and experts from all over the world come to discuss you know the challenges of the nuances of climate change and one of the things that comes up is a thing called policy coherence so it's the idea that you have  know very you know to her credit to making some very bold statements about canada wanting to you know aspiring to a one point five degree target for example i mean that's incredible counter goes from being what was known as a dinosaur fossil fuel i mean our fossil award winning organization or country to suddenly were advocating one of the more aggressive sides of the target which is one point five degrees which is fantastic the problem is that of the word development which has to mean a sort of lowering of a culture and then became debased to the level of how do you make money well yeah and  the mining companies junior mining companies are actually registered on the canadian t s x so we have a very strong sector in canada out there around the world mining and looking for gold and looking for oil and all that sort of thing and the government came in and said well we want to support that because that's development and so we have for example an extract of institute which is set out by the canadian government to promote extractive a conservative about some of the conservative international development banks do this in fact they're a very good example because the african development bank for example seventy percent of the energy projects that it contributed to over the past decades been oriented towards carbon intensive industries like natural gas or or fossil fuels right they've completely reversed that in the last three years which is hopeful right they've looked at and going wow this is we're investing in the wrong side of the equation when it comes to climate change now seventy percent of the african development bank initiatives around energy are oriented towards renewables that's a policy coherence change right where you're trying to drive what the left hand is doing so that it works with the right hand is doing and in this case the right hand is the one that's saying look we've got to we've got to tackle climate change and get it down to one point five degrees or begin to do that then you have to get your fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel and you know all the ways in which we support carbon intensive future we have to stop doing that and in fact if you take this is one of the interesting things about the renewables argument because people often look at solar panels and wind generators and they say that's not possible without subsidy and for years people a and i'm one of those people that's lived for noodles personally for more than a decade of lived in or in a in a in a solar powered home and it's completely possible not you don't need to subsidize it we need to do is get rid of the perverse subsidy these are called there's actually a name perverse subsidy to fossil fuels get rid of the fossil fuels and nuclear subsidies which amount to five hundred billion dollars get rid of those and stop paying for those and also knew that was known as a level playing field it's super interesting is that even that argument now has been superseded by the idea that renewables in most parts of the world are now on cost parity with fossil fuels so if you go a place like denmark forty percent of the entire country is being run off wind energy and we haven't even started to pick up the drawing tools and look at how we could do that in british columbia compared to the you know compared to the resources that are sitting right here on our doorstep we have the highest wind energy on the wind energy map in canada and we're not exploiting that in b c because we've we've chosen to invest in things like l and g and gas and and go with a carbon intensive future and so what policy coheren all about is sitting down with governments and saying look we've got to get this right we've got to get the left hand working with the right hand so that everybody's working towards a vision and a future which we all aspire to and that beautifully that vision is beautifully articulated in the sustainable development goals it articulated exactly how we can do this you know as a globe not as individual nations and then each nation steps up towards that vision what became really apparent in paris is that our we cannot achieve anything in terms of tackling climate change in tow we envision and see ourselves living you know in a carbon free world by two thousand and fifteen well that is it is very very difficult for governments to take highways and rail for instance people take a prejudiced position and they they they take up their position and then they look for everything that they can use to support the position and you know or any other argument entail people who don't want to be bothered to making changes it's really change they're afraid of and yet change is breathing down our necks they say that it's not fair to give subsidies to rail well what do they call the amounts that government poor into roads you know yeah and this is where there's been some great analyses done by various groups to look at been a kind of subsidies that go into cooler fossil fuels and when you look at those subsidies what's interesting now  even china is getting scared rate went while we were at the paris meetings china had to beijing had its first red alert where smog alerts you could even see two hundred feet i think a lot of us have seen the photograph of the police going out to evening from school at four o'clock the buses were stalled the traffic they the street lights didn't light up the road you had to feel for the edge of the sidewalk with your foo people interesting i'll bet you can remember what people were saying prior to the clean air act how are we going to live without coal so how are we going to be able to do a little or you know all of the all of the stuff you know china is an interesting case because people are going to say that china is not a good argument for a nation that is going to reach a sustainable development goal in terms of carbon emissions but again it's about time lag isn't it and there are a very big piece of real estate and i don't know how the decision making in china where i'm sure it's not monolithic but it did seem able to impose the one child policy for as long as it was climate change on its own it needs to be a shared agenda and there's about twenty subjects like that exactly exactly and so i mean i often use the example i did a lot of work in the one niger delta and in the niger delta there anything called gas flaring so russia and nigeria are the world's biggest culprits on illegal gas flowing and this is where you take measuring natural gas and there rather than pumping it back into the earth when you're taking gas so to an oil well what you do is you just burn it off right the amount of the do that modi there you go a used to be and in fact canada still does it briskly still does but we are under a much heavier regulation we're not quite the culprits that russia nigeria just to give you an idea like we go out of our way to try to you know ride our bicycles and have bike lanes and get our cars off the road  the amount of gas flaring that nigeria does is equivalent actually i'll give you a better example journeying the paris agreement there was a methane leak from in california that sequent to seven million cars climate a greenhouse gas and we won't get enough jail active culture industry here that's another program yeah well these this is the part that was alarming to me was to see the science coming to paris and just to see how concerned some of the scientists were because once one group that these are experts in gas flaring and these are the best in the world in terms of understanding gas flaring they said look i think we screwed up here by as much as ninety percent on our estimations of methane gas leaks and currently methane gas leak are equivalent to three percent of all greenhouse gas emissions so you're looking at a huge load bearing fruit if you could solve that problem it's faster and cheaper and easier to go out and regulate that solve that than it is to try to convince everybody to ride their bikes to work you see him getting on the load bearing fruit are sitting there and they're easy to grab and do those are the ones we should be prior rising whereas the the longer shifts in cultural change those ones are harder to convince people to do so a lot of governments like china are in an excellent position to do that because they can make their decisions quick fast i mean they they changed their forestry laws overnight you know a while ago they can they can make these shifts very quickly so there's actually a lot of hope with china that they're a big player and they and they do it's not all bad news with china either keep in mind in china they are there the biggest you know increase in renewables on the planet is in china and the current price of solar technology is because of china so long as they're not putting them on those politicians in india you know i don't know the answer to that i do know that everybody though collectively is getting scared of these the frequency of these events like you know when india had fifty four degrees it's pretty noticeable right and when you and i have floods it's pretty noticeable so every government is looking at this and asking themselves what do we individually do now what they used to do is go to these meetings and i was kind of a negotiation and they still did not like they and try to negotiate from their perspective but what was so clear about paris was that the triumph of the french was for people to see the unified vision that if we don't solve this one it's kind of like a lifeboat isn't it i mean you fall into a life does it really matter if you get a first class or third class to get to that point i mean the problem is you need to survive and this is where we're at on the planet this is the first time you know that i've been to one of these meetings where you look around the room and you realize wow you people are really frightened and that the civil society activists they were frightened in the ninety's you know and the scientists were frightened back and than now everybody's catching up and going hey we're frightened and the irony is that we're actually on the tail end of to fall into the trap of saying yes to both sides saying yes to the extract if industry and yes to the sustainable goals but we can't do them both together it's nonsense says it unfortunately boils down to nonsense exactly you can't have your cake and eat it too in this case since so if we're going to go down one side what if we're going to make a decision and i think that liberal government's been very forthright in its desire to tackle climate change they went to that meeting made some very  visionary statements mckenna played a fantastic rules of facilitator canada sent a strong team if we need now to walk or talk yes the walking of our talk is not something we're going to do after doing some studies are looking at this in five to ten years our window for action is literally right now and we in civil society organization sarrasin if it you also need to keep the pressure on our own government let's turn for a minute to the money question and the  of of almost everything and the fact that corporations are there front and players in the use of money and the fall of good says right now no corporations have to make a profit that's what they're for capitalism you either go the chinese way and everything is done by fiat where you go they so called democratic way and you allow the marketplace some flexibility and if there's to be flexibility corporate investors need to be able to make some money on the capital that they're loaning out how do we encourage them to do that well one thing that i'm encouraged by is the fact that corporations  course you know at the end of the day the decision makers behind them our people and the collective intelligence that we have on the planet through the internet through the availability of information means that it's pretty hard to be a leading corporate figure in a major corporation and not be aware of climate change and not have a personal take on it and as people are becoming i mean this is the sad thing i wish that the climate change impacts happened immediately and there wasn't these ten year lag because you people because if people could are starting to see what we did the impacts of what we did in two thousand and five as these years as we move down our little time scale here of being a species trying to survive on the planet people are more and more and more is going to be hard to say geez you know this is not my problem and corporations are actually interestingly are in a very unique position because they can make decisions very quickly they can move very quickly and they're positioned really well to try and come up with innovative changes so it's not all bad news if they get on board and the way what we've tended to do in the past is set it up in a very diametrically opposed kind of civil society as good as all answers and corporations are bad i actually don't buy that argument i think there's too much evidence now of people in corporations that would like to do the right thing would like to orient the production of something or in a more sustainable way and adopt green policies and do what they can what we need now is more cooperative behavior between all of us admitting we're all in this problematic i mean find somebody find anybody in canada right now who doesn't have their foot deep in the carbon pool and i'll be surprised because it's well let's  and not so much big picture or distant line up thinking about the future and thinking about how to get by today and i want to this they want a list of things they personally can do to try and be helpful in this and to adjust towards that tricky cultural change so where would you begin like i think the first thing i'd put on the top of my list if i was listening is radio program i want to like what do i do personally is i would say think radically because what his sort of like loud says art of war you know he says in that book very interesting if you ever in a losing position tell your troops the truth because nothing is better than the truth and the truth right now is time has run out actually for the scenario of a sustainable wonderful world we're already past that point and we will miss the mark by two thousand and twenty so what everybody needs to do is look at their life and go actually the world i thought i was going to be living in a two thousand and twenty five two thousand three is just simply not going to exist and by two thousand and fifty is if you drop this idea you know a kind of a hopeful idea that it's all going to get better and accept the idea we missed that in the ninety's and now we're looking at is a very strong adaptive agenda where everything's going to shift when people look at that then you go well maybe i will ride my bike you know maybe i will carpool maybe i will shift what i was going to do right and then and your mind shift in the the list becomes very easy to fill in after that isn't changed by the the  article i think i assent to about a study suggesting that industrial civilization is in fact headed for another of our civil law unless i liked the unless it but what interested me were the interrelated wicked problems where population well it's pretty hard to figure out how to reduce population dramatically overnight population climate we've we've spent nearly an hour discussing th water we talk a bit about water agriculture we try and talk about talk of puncture quite a bit on this program and energy so energy means electricity would you like to tell people where most of bit of an ali because our grids are tied right so at night we actually get our energy from natural gas from alberta which lot of hers what means don't realize but the point i guess that you're bringing up though is like how do we take these wicked problems and avoid an apocalyptic scenario and one of the sad things about climate change really is that it does have an apocalyptic kind of narrative to it and you know you you did your time with the peace movement you know that we had the two minutes to midnight same kind of urgency and frenetic sense that my god we're all go die right i had a fifteen year old daughter who came down to breakfast one morning and said she lost a lot of sleep because she was trying to figure out the easiest way to commit suicide if i do ok obama there you go and that's a sad verdict i mean suggesting it's not an option we can't we don't have that as an option but neither should we opt for the naive a take a of a hopeful answer what we need to do is just get to work just just get working get movie you've been an activist your whole life you know that that is the fundamental motivating thing is you just do something and that builds into something else built into something else next thing you look around and you see that wow countries like denmark are forty percent running off of renewables some countries are looking at one hundred percent shift that's phenomenal and then when you look even at this this agreement that just got past read the text of transforming our world or read the text of the press room it's phenomenal that the world's leaders are actually agreeing to this so it's move and it's because people incrementally tackled and tackle it's people like yourselves have been activists for decades consistently bringing the message back to people which is stay motivated stay on task stay focused and don't worry about like yes it does look bad it does really what would be the term kind of realistically optimistic i don't know what the term would be but it's this idea that we just keep trying and that's why working in all these different causes  your life look at your life and goal was my personal impact and then scale it up because i am a believer in reducing your personal footprint i strongly believe that and have a smaller footprint as i can manage but i also believe that there's a lot of wisdom in also tackling the collective load bearing fruit because you can make one policy change for example let's get rid of those methane leaks we can do that really quickly and we can solve the problem that would take a lot of energy to get collectively for us to collectively figure out for those people who've got the time and the energy and the chutzpah to get out there and tackle those problems it's a lonely world and climate change it's a lonely world and doing this kind of sustainability work we need more people tackling it in creative ways and that's the beauty this is the whole beauty of this is you've kind of now did i said there is these unknowns out there i know in creativity and problem solving and we have a younger generation now coming out that thinks differently uses different tools and has an exciting way of organizing all these things are new even the internet and our ability to move an idea around i'm at that meeting i would watch somebody speak and within seconds the i phones and the phones are tapping that information it's all over the planet within minutes after you can be at an international meeting you know and the impact of something can be all around the planet the idea shifted and moved and it's in that sense that i think we have to keep in mind new tools new ways of us we're going to use in our social consciousness as a species could out evolve o you're just looking in general you have to write a whole name oh ok so b c so for our international cooperation ok thank you marjorie stewart and that's our show tune in next week for librarians on the radio and on behalf of our production team thanks so much for joining us