Why is he still wearing a mask?
Because the danger of new viruses from zoonoses caused by climate change is not theoretical...
How do you perceive it?
When I was born, 85% of the Earth was virgin; today it is barely 25% and there will not be even 1% in 2050. For this reason, animals carrying viruses that had no contact with us today are our neighbors...
Nice wild boars here in Barcelona.
...Fueled by unusual climatic phenomena, such as the tremendous drought suffered by Catalonia or the snow in hot California, and in the Mediterranean it is worse...
Don't scare me.
I scare you because you are 22 Mediterranean states in danger, but you don't act.
Perhaps more supra-state power is needed to curb the climate threat?
In addition, the one they already have: from the UN to the OECD or the European Central Bank are following strategies more typical of the old developmentalism than to prevent the sixth extinction, that of humans...
Why have we put ourselves in danger?
For the pride of all and the greed of a few. Capitalist developmentalism is based on centralization, verticality and the principle of efficiency: maximum productivity with minimum effort.
That is called economic growth.
But it's not natural! Nature, on the other hand, are cycles, and so are we because we are part of it. Growing without limit is not natural, but a deviation from greed.
There are resources for everyone's needs, but not for the greed of a few.
Instead, all living beings are governed by circadian rhythms –in synchrony with the rotation and translation of the Earth–, which are the cycles of day, night and seasons. Denying them out of greed is suicidal.
To do?
Act. I proposed a $17 trillion plan to Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer to stop our extinction...
And President Biden approved his.
And I use my experience and influence in the EU to invest in saving us: that is, in the transition to sustainable development.
We are on time?
If we do nothing, the most optimistic projections place extinction late in the lives of children born today. Why do you think adolescents protest as soon as they perceive that threat?
Why do you think we don't hear them?
For selfishness: we ignore them and they are right.
To stop extinction, do we have to stop growing economically and decrease?
To save ourselves from extinction, we must grow more and better, not less. We must think, invest, act, progress, coordinate and take efficient initiatives.
For example.
To begin with, think: Prime Minister Prodi and I thought in 2000 what the paradigm shift that would stop extinction should be like and we analyzed eight technological revolutions to anticipate it.
Which are?
They have been revolutions in communications, energy, mobility, logistics, water and the way we organize ourselves to survive. And now we have to rethink them.
What should we rethink?
That progress isn't always schedulable, but is often serendipitous: you find it by chance while looking for something else. But you have to try, you have to put points incessantly to one day join them perhaps by chance in one direction or another.
What makes you feel optimistic?
that we are reacting The essence of capitalism is to privatize profits to a few and outsource waste to all – pollution, deforestation – after extracting their productivity...
Well, it's not an ultraliberal definition...
On the other hand, the technology that was put to serve this dynamic today is also beginning to be applied to stop it, reverse it and make it sustainable, and our species, resilient.
Where do you see healthy reactions?
In the internet of energy, for example, which privatizes production with millions of home generators and returns the surplus to the grid: a third of the cars on the planet will be electric by 2030 and will be connected to the grid: they will return energy.
We explained it not long ago here.
The same will happen with the data and the challenge that also occurs with decision-making that, therefore, would thus avoid the privatization of nature that we have suffered up to today.
Don't you see it all too easy?
I believe that technology can help us get out of the problems that its misuse has caused. And I also believe that we can rectify if we work, invest, coordinate. Energy, data, water... Democracy in the network. Networks for everyone.
