3 rules for a zero-carbon world | Nigel Topping

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2021

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Every human and natural system -- from oil extraction to the flight of a flock of starlings -- can be seen as a set of repeating patterns. These patterns can be disrupted for good or for bad, says Nigel Topping, the High Level Climate Action Champion for COP26, the UN’s climate change conference set to take place in November 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. He shares three rules of radical collaboration that could positively disrupt the patterns of the global economy and help humanity tackle the world’s greatest threat: climate change.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu.
0:05.8	Nigel Topping is a man who loves patterns and studying patterns, and his work right now is focused on changing the patterns contributing to the worst impacts of climate change.
0:15.3	He's the UK's high-level climate action champion for COP26.
0:19.5	That's the UN's climate conference taking place in
0:21.7	November of 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. Despite the complexity of climate change, Topping says there's a
0:28.0	lens to make the problem easier to understand and more compelling to act upon. He shares it in his
0:33.7	talk recorded for Countdown in 2021. Learn more about Countdown and get involved at countdown. ted.com.
0:42.5	My grandfather grew up in the northwest of England, surrounded by over a thousand coal mines
0:48.2	within just five miles of his hometown of Wigan.
0:52.4	And today I'm speaking to you from the site of another former mine, this time a China
0:56.5	clay mine, at the Eden Project in southwest England.
1:00.8	For generations, my grandfather's ancestors were coal miners, and it would have been only
1:05.8	natural for him to follow in their footsteps.
1:08.3	But he didn't want to go down the mine.
1:10.1	He chose a different path and
1:11.2	got a scholarship to study mathematics. And years later, I followed him into mathematics,
1:18.0	where I discovered a real love of patterns and of figuring out the underlying rules that generate
1:24.4	them. And later, when I went to work in industry, I realized that every
1:28.1	human system and every natural system can be thought of as a set of repeating patterns.
1:33.7	For example, take the energy system. We can still trace the patterns of our reliance on fossil fuels
1:39.5	all the way back to the early 1700s when we started to really use all that coal.
1:49.5	And to tackle climate change, we're going to have to move towards new patterns that are based on clean power.
	...

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