Ted Audio Collective

Hello, I'm Chris Anderson. Welcome to the Ted interview, the podcast series that starts

where a Ted talk ends. Today we're going to talk climate change. And as soon as I even

mention those words, I know that some people on the right roll their eyes and some people

on the left feel upset that I haven't used stronger language. It's not change. It's a crisis

and emergency. What I hope you'll do for the next hour is just listen with an open mind.

Because my guest, Kristiana Figueres, has probably done more than anyone in the world to

bring people together over this issue. In her role at the United Nations, she was credited

as the key architect of the Paris Climate Agreement, which probably remains humanity's

best roadmap into a hopeful future. And that's because she found ways to persuade people

to change their assumptions about what was possible. This is not about blaming each other.

This is not about trying to find some magical formula that is going to give us a fair distribution

of the atmospheric space that we still have, which every day is less and less. Change the

mental ship from a confrontation to understand that we have a new zero sum now. Either we all

win together or we all lose together. It's not about you or me. It's about you and me

winning together.

I view Kristiana as a true global hero. She has an amazing background and inspiring dreams

for the future. She's also started working directly with Ted on a major new climate

initiative that we just announced. We come into that at the end of the interview. So let's

do this.

Kristiana Figueres, welcome. Well, thank you very much for having me. This is actually

quite exciting. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. I guess we're

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