Karl Burkart, Co-Founder and Managing Director of One Earth
Interview Transcript
Transcribed by Otter AI
Kimberly White
Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Karl Burkart, Co-Founder and Managing Director of One Earth. Thank you for joining us today, Karl.
Karl Burkart
Thanks. It's great to be here talking to you.
Kimberly White
Can you tell us more about One Earth and the focus of your work there?
Karl Burkart
Yeah, I'm the managing director of One Earth, and we are a philanthropic initiative, particularly focused on the science policy interface for the three Rio conventions. And we are running correspondingly roughly three major scientific models that we support with leading scientists around the world contributing to those three models. The first big one is the climate energy transition model, which was published last year in a very dense 500-page book called achieving the Paris Climate Agreement goals. It was authored by 17 leading climate energy scientists and is now being widely cited. And that was really to look at how we can stay below the 1.5 c threshold of global temperature rise? The second one, the second model, is called the Global Safety Net, which was just published on Friday and Science Advances. That was a two and a half year plus effort, a very large spatial analysis—the first global scale analysis of biologically important land. And one of the component products coming out of it is, you could say, a set of recommended area-based targets for the upcoming UN Biodiversity Convention. So that's the second Rio convention. It shows the different types of land that can contribute to ecosystem services and biodiversity by country. The third one, which we're just starting in partnership with the University of Minnesota and other scientists will be involved in, is a global food security model. The third model will contribute to looking at how we feed 10 billion people sustainably on the planet.
Kimberly White
So, today we seem to have gone from climate deniers to an attitude of it's already too late. Do you think we have the science and technology available today to form the solutions to stabilize the climate and keep warming at 1.5 degrees?
Karl Burkart
Yes, I, I love this question. Because the answer is absolutely, yes, we have the technology. And it's not just the technology solved, and sort of we need to now go into production. It's like we have the technology. It's as Obama would have said shovel ready, you know, we have it sitting on the shelves. And in the climate model in the energy transition model we supported, according to that model, we need to go from about 20% renewable energy today to about 56%, globally, which varies by region by 2030.
So as you know, this is relatively straightforward. We know exactly how to do it. And it's using technologies that are now battle-tested for ten or more years and are scaling quickly and becoming cheaper by the minute. So really, it's not the technology that's missing for the energy transition; it's the dollars. And in the climate model, we have, well, the back of the envelope summary budget required for this. The transition I just mentioned is about 1.3 trillion a year roughly. And that's less than one third what the governments spend today subsidizing fossil fuels, which are causing global warming. So, for less than a third of what we're paying to destroy the planet, we could transition the energy with technology, create tons of jobs, be great for the economy. It would increase energy security as well. And it would reduce the health risks associated with fossil fuels and climate change. So it's win-win isn't the right word. It's like win-win-win-win-win. It's like five wins if we did that, and yeah, it's just a matter of real political will at this point in moving the dollars.
Kimberly White
So governments have been creating commitments and new targets to combat climate change, while at the same time, as you just said, propping up the fossil fuel industry with trillions of dollars in subsidies, adding to the climate crisis. Do you think the COVID-19 economic recovery efforts are an opportunity to shift away from business as usual and toward cleaner, greener energy?
Karl Burkart
Yeah, I would say it's not just yes definitely. And not just on the energy side, but also the nature based solutions side. I'm seeing a lot coming from governments, especially the EU, who have been a big leader in this, and they've announced several Commissions on sort of a green recovery. So I think that it did, COVID did two things. One thing it did, which, of course, has positive-negative, it slammed the brakes on the global economy. It was like you're driving in your car, and a kid runs in front of you, and you have to slam on your brakes in a full stop. And that happens. So it's sort of like all these conversations that were happening, and there was going to be a climate convention, there's going to be a biodiversity convention, there's going to be a big UN summit, all these things, just everything went on hold. And the results are kind of coming in now. We'll see what happens, anywhere from 9 % to 17% reduction in carbon emissions this year. We have to wait, obviously, for the post mortem, but we think it'll probably be somewhere in the middle, like maybe 12-13% of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which is actually more than what we needed to do in terms of being on the 1.5 c track. So slamming on the brakes got us on the 1.5 c course. Now, the question is, are we going to just slam on the gas pedal? And I mean, that literally, right? Because we also have to make our transportation system much cleaner. But yeah, and I think that that slamming on the brakes gave us this pause. And a lot of people to kind of get started getting their ducks in a row, starting to look at recovery packages that could then be targeted towards sustainable and green infrastructure, energy and nature based solutions. The other thing that I saw with COVID is that just the awareness of nature, you know, how important nature is. Nature has always been hard to sell as a serious issue because somehow, climate change just sounded more technical. It was very technical and serious, and many technical and serious people started 20 years ago working on the climate convention.
For some reason, the biodiversity convention was left really playing second fiddle in another room. And you had your sort of hippie organizations fighting for nature, but was like the sort of technical serious people didn't really get it. And I think COVID made a lot of people realize what happens when you start to unravel the natural infrastructure that is providing the ecosystem services that the entire planet requires to exist. You know, when you lose that, you start pulling out these threads and unraveling and unleashing things like zoonotic diseases, which are diseases transferred from animals. We also know that loss of biodiversity and loss of nature increase vector-borne diseases carried by insects. So nature is our shield that keeps humanity in a safe operating space. So I think that's been a big awareness also. That was timely because both the climate convention and the biodiversity convention got pushed a year. I mean, the biodiversity convention will be next spring, and the climate convention will be next fall. So it's kind of given us, internationally, given us a breathing space to think about this. So I think that's a positive.
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