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Some of the most well-known works of science fiction paint a rather bleak future of how humanity will react to existential threats. But political economist Zeynep Usman believes these stories also shed light on a more hopeful path forward. She lays it out in her 2023 talk from the TED Countdown Summit after a sponsor message.
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SPEAKER_00: We don't have to look far to see how humanity's fight against climate change might play out.
Science fiction authors from around the world, writing from different traditions, coalesce on one point.
A divided world unable to fight the common threat. In session used the three-body problem trilogy.
The threat of aliens from a dying planet invading to conquer Earth does not bring humanity together.
Instead, a potent combination of fear, jingoism and competition for scarce resources among countries
fractures the world into competing geoeconomic blocks centered around three powers. The United States, China and Europe.
And none of these blocks succeed in staving off the alien invasion with, as you can imagine,
disastrous consequences for the survival of humanity.
Sorry for all the spoilers about the books.
In George Orwell's 1984, the world's three super states,
Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia, fight each other in perpetuity in a disputed area located mostly around parts of Africa
and the Middle East where the rest reside.
The realm of fiction is years ahead in anticipating important global currents.
The International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook
describes an ongoing fragmentation of our global economy around four blocks.
The United States, China, the European Union and the rest.
This geoeconomic fragmentation may seriously hinder our ability to fight climate change by affecting the collective will to fight it.
Because no individual, no group and certainly no nation state is self-sufficient in all of the resources,
the finances and the manpower needed to reduce the rapid warming of our planet, we need collective action to invent and deploy at scale the technology solutions needed to reduce greenhouse gases
in wealthy, high-emitting countries and to build systems in poorer, low-emitting countries to help them adapt to changing weather patterns.
This is a three-part problem.
Let us start with the technoeconomic spheres of innovation.
OK, I have to confess, even that is a mouthful for me. So let's rephrase this a bit. Where in the world is innovation around low-carbon technologies happening?
To slow down the speed of global warming, we need to deploy clean technology solutions around battery storage,
renewable energy generation, et cetera, at scale in all reaches of the world.
But the innovation around these crucial low-carbon technologies is happening in only a handful of countries.
The world's largest science and technology clusters, with the highest density of inventors and scientific authors, are concentrated in just three regions, North America, Europe and Asia.
There is a danger here that the innovation and diffusion of these crucial low-carbon technologies will only happen among an exclusive group of allies,
while excluding non-allies, especially the poorer countries.
We are already seeing a trend of global public energy research and development budgets concentrated within these technoeconomic spheres of innovation.
China, Europe and the United States.
A second part of the problem is that we need to prioritize consumer gains and welfare.
The commercialization of climate mitigation and adaptation technologies is essential for their global, equitable deployment at scale.
The mass production of clean energy hardware, electric vehicles, sustainable building materials and so on will encourage their widespread use.
Access to large export markets will result in higher-quality products and the creation of green jobs at home.
Competition among producer firms will help push down prices for consumers and help raise living standards across the board, including in poorer countries. But if strict barriers to entry are placed on firms from rival geoeconomic blocs, there will be a cost to this lack of competition that is borne by ordinary people.
Inefficiencies in the mass production of green technologies by firms with monopoly power in small but captive markets will neither reduce greenhouse gases nor improve people's quality of life.
Imagine having to choose between maybe two or even one brand of highly overpriced electric vehicles or solar panels when restrictions are placed on the imports of dozens of more affordable options from companies from around the world.
This is the case currently with cell phones in some countries, where consumers are restricted to just two highly overpriced brands or maybe even one.
A third issue is that we need global standards to govern the sourcing of strategic materials.
Strategic minerals such as cobalt, copper, nickel and lithium are essential components for the manufacturing of solar panels that we all love, electric vehicles, wind turbines and other such clean energy, clean mobility hardware.
These resources are nonrenewable, they are in finite supply and they are in high demand.
By 2040, for instance, the demand for lithium is projected to grow 40-fold, for graphite 25-fold and for copper 21-fold.
These minerals are often found in poorer countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Africa, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, in Asia and in fragile ecosystems such as our ocean floors.
In a world of fiercely competing geoeconomic blocs, how will the race to access these scarce strategic minerals play out?
Think about this for a second. The race to access strategic minerals from our ocean floors, destroying precious animal and plant species or a new space race to strip the moon of strategic minerals.
I wish all of this was far-fetched, but it really is not. In fact, the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo is a cautionary tale of what a zero-sum race without guardrails to access precious human and natural resources could do.
It was the competition among European empires that drove the transatlantic slave trade between the 16th and the 19th centuries that depopulated vast swaths of the Congo.
The Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo was a source of two-thirds of the uranium used in the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 during World War II.
Today, the Congo is a source of cobalt that makes its way to refineries in China for the manufacturing of batteries.
We need global standards to prevent the destruction of our fragile ecosystems such as our ocean floors, the moon and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now, an alternative scenario is actually possible. We can reject the dystopian future painted by Liu and Orwell if we consciously prioritize collective action on the key issues that matter.
To do that, we need action on three fronts. Policymakers are the ones implementing radical protectionist policies to meet short-term political imperatives.
They need to think carefully about the long-term consequences for their people, their economies and their societies that will persist long after their political tenures.
Business leaders must consider whether atomized and insular markets are their preferred future.
And finally for us, scholars, intellectuals and activists, we must identify and defend the values that matter most to us.
We must advance continued improvements in human well-being, shared prosperity for everyone around the world, ecological balance and mutual coexistence.
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