The reality of climate change | David Puttnam | TEDxDublin

gemma's given me a great lead and she's right the film industry is the most wonderful wonderful industry to deal in and one of the reasons it's wonderful is there is no such thing is it can't be done obviously there are Financial constraints other constraints but your job is to deliver something that works with the audience so the subtext in a sense of what I want to talk about this morning is that it is not impossible a layout is tough difficult but not at all impossible my subject will be uh climate change climate change and my

object next 15 minutes is to get you as justifiably angry as I possibly can so please please please do not expect a lot of jokes or laughs cuz I I wish I had them I really do also I would urge you the examples I'm going to offer go online afterwards check my sources check my references double check that I'm not uh trying to fill you with unnecessary fears or concerns or am using the wrong metaphors I'm I really sincerely hope I won now the first obvious question is what is a septarian ex film producer doing

on a stage talking about climate change well the great thing is I do have a little bit of form seven years ago to my great Good Fortune really I chaired the committee parliamentary committee that put through Parliament the world's first climate change act setting fixed targets carbon uh targets and binding targets uh that Britain is today forced to deal with or find a way around so I do a bit of History I'm very proud of what I did I'm very proud of the people I worked with most important of all I got the opportunity for

a year to interrogate and take evidence from people from around the world from China the United States everybody so we became as a community pretty pretty damn expert also worth mentioning that we got this bill through with remarkable Little Resistance cross party so one of the good things 2007 was that here was a bill the world's first climate change bill which people took real pleasure in it being the world's first with a say remarkable lack of uh of unpleasantness and uh and controversy I want to ask you to develop your anger through um four prisms

really economic health environmental sustainability and Leadership I should say leadership or the lack of it so I'm going to kick off if I with the economic listen to this it may sound like a very odd sound to put on an image of a slave ship and that's what it was this is the design of a ship of how many slaves you could cross the Atlantic with and maximize the profits of the slave owners the one of the great arguments 200 years ago a little over 200 years ago against the abolitionist slavery was an economic argument

it was claimed that 25% of the UK's economic activity was entirely related to slavery and the benefits derived in the UK from slavery 25% and therefore it would be hopelessly uneconomic to abolish slavery and William Wilberforce and those who supported him had to deal with that argument for 20 years 20 years in the end they did manage to win it and a lot of that energy got transfer into a new form of energy but it's still energy what the slaves were were providing the energy that drove the British economy and the Industrial Revolution brought a

new form of energy but what was important was the new form of energy was built around Innovation once there weren't slaves to Aion once there weren't this cheap app apparently plentiful form of energy they had to develop new forms of energy and the slave owners many of them hopefully help went out of business and a new group of M owners were not the greatest people in the world but Britain's economy far from tanking which is what had been predicted grew as never before the development of the Industrial Revolution literally was bound up in the surge

of innovation and confidence that led from the abolition of slavery so the economic argument that that kept slavery on the statute books for years was demolished within 30 years I just would like to hold as they say hold that thought what they were actually doing was engaged in a disregard for human suffering at the in the pursuit of prophit and that card's going to turn up at least twice more now through the prism of Health uh last month this extraordinary man died he was the Surgeon General United States uh from ' 69 to 72 a

very brave man he took on the tobacco companies and it was he who pushed through the very first warning that morning on packs of cigarettes um he was they managed to Lobby in order to get rid of him he was got rid of by the Nixon Administration in 1972 he continued the whole the rest of his life to argue the same case but they got shot of him in 1997 Congress 25 years later Congress called the leading figures in the tobacco industry to give evidence about the impacts of tobacco now these guys have had 25

years of medical evidence on their desks they knew exactly the situation here thanks to YouTube is what they said let me uh begin my questioning on the matter of whether or not nicotine is addictive let me ask you first I'd like to just go down the row uh whether each of you believes that that nicotine is not addictive I heard virtually all of you touch on it just yes or no do you believe nicotine is not addictive I believe nicotine is not addictive yes Mr Johnson uh Congressman cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the

classic definitions of addiction there is no intoxication we'll take that as a no and again time is short if you could just I think each of you believe nicotine is not addicted we just would like to have this for the record I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive I believe nicotine is not addictive I believe that nicotine is not addicted I believe that nicotine is not addicted and I too believe that nicotine so 9 years after a second Surgeon General had unequivocally shown that nicotine was addictive these lunatics were still claiming it

wasn't they now kind of given up trying to persuade us they've moved their wees to the third world and they're now pushing cigarettes wherever they can in Philippines and anywhere else this is a classic example of the impact of deniability thousands and thousands and thousands of people died because they clung on to this notion that was no causal link was the phrase there was no proven causal link between cigarettes and lung cancer thousands of people died this man Ralph nater check him out saved my life he also saved the life of hundreds of thousands of

other people he fought for 20 years with General Motors for the installation of seat belts in cars he had an amazing amount of evidence General Motors not only fought him they also blackmailed him they followed him they did everything possible to discredit him to the point that Senator Bobby Kennedy required General Motors chairman to come to the Congress and personally apologize to Mr NADA for what they' done to him he saved thousands of lives in the face of the denial of the automobile industry that seat belts were valuable so these are two more examples of

organizations disregarding human suffering in the pursuit of profit I had a bad car crash in Italy three years ago I would not be here there's no question about that I would not be here but for Ralph nater on to the next one Environmental sustainability this is a a tough one I think that as human beings we are not unlike durables we're kind of great at the fight or flight thing we're great when we sense danger at jumping up and looking around and spotting it and and reacting we're good at it it's what's kept us on

this planet all these years what we're terrible at terrible at is dealing with Slow Burn issues issues that just get worse and worse and worse in the background and which on a day-to-day basis we can kind of put in the back of our minds and not get too engag with we are very very susceptible to what I would term slow slowburn issues now I'm a child of the 60s I was brought up with this Mantra I believed it then I believe if anything more powerfully now basically unless you're prepared to become part of the answer

you are by definition part of the problem and this is nowhere could this be more true than in the area of environmental SU sustainability I also think that Nelson Mela as usual was right when he says that in order to solve these problems we can't just address them with our expectations we actually have to exceed our expectations all of you will know the uh notion that uh the planet is finite but that if we all want to live in the way that the West lives we will require five planets five planets there AR five planets

let me make one very important point don't worry about the planet the planet is fine we're the problem the planet can live perfectly happy and will continue for billions of years to come very very happily without us it is we who the planet is probably fed up with and with good reason I might add now it's not that we didn't know about this this is the first edition of a book written 50 years ago over 50 years ago by Rachel Carson silence spr we were warned 50 years ago that what we were doing was unsustainable

we were warned that what we were doing was Lethal to our own future as I say because it's been a slow burn issue we chose to nod make nice noises and ignore it Tom fredman a couple of months ago this wonderful writer in the New York Times I think he's absolutely right when he says this how we make the transition to a stabilized and still prosperous relationship with the Earth and each other is surely the story of our time bit more evidence the insurance industry I don't know if you can read these These are the

biggest most expensive disasters of 2012 the insurance industry is woken up and is really now beginning to take these issues very very seriously in fact last week I say yeah may have been earlier this week the CEO of one of the world's biggest insurance companies AV Eva said this and he is it's great that the industry is beginning to step up and say this try to imagine if you will an uninsurable world try and imagine an uninsurable environment for yourselves uninsurable houses uninsurable anything the insurance company is saying very clearly and insurance industry is saying

very clearly unless we alter things they cannot remain in business in an affordable manner that's say the premiums will charge they will be forced to charge we won't possibly be able to pay now here's the challenge to you this also is exactly right we're the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the very last generation certainly in the people in this Hall to be able to do anything about it because if we continue to stick our heads on the ground if we continue to act like Geral and not like sensible long-term people

if we continue to do that we will undoubtedly face and certain it won't be us the consequences this morning at breakfast there were a couple of very young people people with us it is our children and our children's children that will suffer we may just Escape okay I will I'm 73 years old I'll certainly with unless I'm very unlucky get out of I will I will get off this I'll get off this planet you know I mean let's be fair none of us are going to leave this place alive right we're at some point we're

all going to face this but this is not a sustainable future and yet this is the the actual reality of any number of cities in the world today and why because we have an economic environment which is prepared last time I'll show it I promise you is prepared to proceed disregarding human suffering in the pursuit of profit we've been sucked into the belief that an economic system that we use and work with is the only possible way forward and in truth unless we alter the system it is the absolute certainty that it will see the

end of us as a species maybe by the end of the century maybe Beyond last point I want to make is about leadership this is self-evident the first step in solving a problem is to recognize that there is one now we don't have a bad record in this particular instance in 1961 I was newly married and my wife and I went to bed November 1961 really really really not sure sure that there was going to be a tomorrow morning many of your parents many of your parents would have had the same experience we really didn't

know this is the Cuban Missile Crisis we really didn't know if there was going to be a tomorrow and yet fortunately two Statesmen decided to step back and do the right thing so we're back to gma's point human beings given the right circumstances given the right leadership the right opportunities can do the right thing we don't have to be stupid people we can do the right thing and remember the anti-vietnam war protest which I was involved the Iraq war protest these people weren't wrong these people were not wrong they were actually right and subsequent events

have proved them to be right so the notion that somehow action is ignored yes it may be but you also are in a position as I am to say actually I was there I was right I may have been ignored we may not stopped the war what we wanted to but I was right that's not a bad thing to begin to drift towards uh your last days thinking I promise you last time I was on Ted I did a talk on what we term the duty of care I believe profoundly in the duty of care

I think it's a phrase We Kick about a lot duty of care to Children duty of care to Armed Forces duty of care to the elderly we have a duty of care to each other and we have a overriding duty of care to Future Generations we have to start exercising it there is no other possible way we have to exercise a Duty Care we have to work out for ourselves what that really means to us what can we do this wonderful wonderful phrase of Franklin brosevelt there's a mysterious cycle in human events to some generations

much is given of other Generations much is expected this generation has a Revo with Destiny I'm here to tell you this generation has an absolute rendevu with Destiny and just like the movie industry if you are prepared to accept that anything is possible then go out there and make it possible thank you very much