We are not winning.
The crisis is still getting worse, faster than we are deploying the solutions and we need to make changes quickly.
Emissions are still going up.
All these promises of the last few years to cut emissions, emissions are still going up.
When are we going to bring these emissions down?
People are familiar with that thin blue line that the astronauts bring back in their pictures from space. That's the part of the atmosphere that has oxygen, the troposphere, and it's only five to seven kilometers thick.
That's what we're using as an open sewer. If you could drive a car straight up in the air at interstate highway speeds, you get to the top of that blue line in five minutes and all the greenhouse gas pollution would be below you.
We're still putting 162 million tons into it every single day and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.
That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this century.
Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion?
We would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world. We have to act.
So in answer to your question, I would say we have to have a sense of urgency much greater.
We've heard about divides at this conference between the North and South and the East and West. There's another divide increasingly between those who are old enough to be in positions of power and the young people of this world.
Greta Thunberg was just arrested in Germany. I agree with her efforts to stop that coal mine in Germany. Young people around the world are looking at what we're doing.
They look at the World Bank and they say, "Oh you've got a climate denier in charge of the World Bank, so why are you surprised that the World Bank is completely failing to do its job?" Secretary General says that. Everybody knows the World Bank is failing badly.
Now we have the COP process. Okay, what do I say to these young activists that I train around the world when they come to me and they say, "Are you okay with putting the the CEO of one of the largest oil companies in the world in as the president of the COP?
Is that really okay?"
Well it's not whether he's a nice guy or not or whether he's intelligent. The appearance of a conflict of interest undermines confidence at a time when climate activists around the world, and I'm partly speaking for them right here on this stage, have come to the conclusion that the people in authority are not doing their job. There's a lot of blah blah blah, as Greta says.
There are a lot of words and there are some meaningful commitments, but we are still failing badly. We need to have a supermajority process instead of unanimity in the cop. We cannot let the oil companies and gas companies and petro-states tell us what is permissible. In the last cop we were not allowed to even discuss scaling down oil and gas.
Can't discuss it. A lot of the NDCs weren't even called for. Are we going to be able to discuss scaling down oil and gas in the next cop or putting the oil industry in charge of the cop? Is that going to tell young people around the world, "We've just decided to not even disguise it anymore"?
Let me finish with this point on the on the industry.
You've had problems in your area where you tried to get legislation and the oil and gas industry came in and fought you, right? In my state, same thing.
Every piece of pro-climate legislation at the national level, the regional level, the local level, municipal level, the oil and gas industry and the coal industry, they come in and fight it tooth and nail. And they use their legacy network of political influence and wealth to stop progress.
The rest of us have to reform these international institutions so that the people of this world and including the young people of this world can say, "We are now in charge of our own destiny. We're going to stop using the sky as an open sewer. We're going to save the future and give people hope. We can do it."
And remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.