# How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics, Technology. COP 26 (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [572], part 2 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2022-09-02 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Connects the shelter origin story to climate diplomacy and the contracting layer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas developed here: 30-year plan (Hexayurt; target revised upward, now 300 million)
- Topics: Other speakers / contributors — searchable, not Vinay voice (32%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (19%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: circular economy (16 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); masks (5 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); democratic machinery (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); dispute resolution (8 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); Mattereum (19 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); Amory Lovins (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Jordan (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Rocky Mountain Institute (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); warranties (4 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); human rights (4 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.30 (1.00 is the top), number 253 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [231] [Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md): close in content (cosine 0.89)
  - [722] ["10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA... (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/722.md): close in content (cosine 0.88)
- On the same works, just before: [667] ['Real Estate & The Metaverse' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/667.md); [670] [‘Mattereum and Reducing Fraud to Enable True Global Peer... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/670.md); [675] ['5 -15%' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/675.md)
- On the same works, just after: [569] [How Crypto Interacts With Real World Assets (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/569.md); [749] [Vinay Gupta: AI's Impact on Jobs and Society (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/749.md); [727] [Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/727.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics, Technology. COP 26, video, 2022-09-02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [572], https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[1:19:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=4770s) we have about 30 minutes for questions and uh i think all of the all of the talks that her with all the presentations that we heard today have thrown up a lot of questions uh so who would like to start please when you when you when you're when you when you're you're speaking please also say who you are where you're from we've got a roving mic over there uh who would like to start do does he end there no hi there my name's ryan stoddart my question is directed at james so obviously over the past 18 months there's been a lot of discussion about how much of our life is digital and virtual concerns around that so i'm wondering what are your concerns for life becoming more virtual particularly for our interpersonal relationships and also for our relationship with nature i think that's a totally fair question i do share those concerns it's something that i think uh you can only have been cooped up indoors i think a lot of us during the the pandemic or you know staying in one place i've certainly appreciated i've been very lucky that i can walk to some green space from where i live and that's been hugely important and valuable i think it's really about finding the places where it makes most sense and using it there so you know this opportunity to maybe collaborate with people without having to fly across the atlantic for a meeting that seems like a great opportunity where using a virtual approach is is very important or not having to create 25 clay versions of a car uh but be able to use virtual tools to to develop that more quickly and and more cleanly that seems a really great opportunity you're right i think these these experiences of purely virtual completely supplanting um physical ones yeah i certainly have concerns around that but i also think you know you can see how quickly people came back from the pandemic where things had been more virtual and what how important physical interactions were and so i don't think that's going away i think that's pretty hardwired i think it'll really be about finding um you know just like we use concrete and steel because one's great under compression one's under tension and we've developed architecture to take advantage of those pieces and we can sort of reduce the overhead by taking uh using the things

[1:22:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=4920s) for what they're best at i think the physical world and the virtual world have their strengths and weaknesses and we'll build a society that takes advantage of the strengths and weaknesses and overall reduces the costs of because we're using things you know in the best way so that's my hope anyway i'm optimistic thank you there was a question there yeah it's directed to vinay and basically i really loved the chart when you had amazon against the Mattereum concept and doesn't that scare the out of jeff bezos and won't he kind of like fight these alternative business models the only way to fight that business model is to adopt it you know and if our role in the economy is that we are you know a kind of medium-sized enterprise 500 employees and everyone else has to basically copy our approach otherwise you know we eat them alive we'll do fine and the world will change very very quickly right i mean you know businesses can have enormous catalytic effects by spurring the incumbents into transformation and those companies are often extremely successful they wind up with a market cap of a few billion dollars uh and then the world changes around them and everybody adopts their innovation so that's one of the possible outcomes for Mattereum although frankly uh you want to see what we have coming up after this this is the beginning of the story three or four years from now the things that we'll be talking about will assume this kind of circularity is a building block and by then i will be able to tell you my secret master plan right because these things are all components right like the housing system that i designed as a component the critical infrastructure mapping tools that i designed are a component right the physical asset handling is a component the governance work that i'm doing as a component the identity work is a component and what happens when you put all these things together with the other things i don't yet talk about is we get the ability to do scalable life support for hundreds of millions of people and practically no money and practically no environmental footprint so you know if we spur a bunch of competitors a bunch of people copy our ideas you know it would be fantastic to see this kind of circularity become standards based and global but i have no fear for the company because like once we have this running there is more thank you please hello i'm kiran i'm from south of india my question is towards vinay so i want to know having physical products uh

[1:24:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=5070s) registered in a blockchain however how it do does it have a legal right of ownership for the person who is owning it and is it valid in all the countries of the around the world or is it coming up such a law is coming up uh anton that's kind of your department do you want to talk about that uh sure so a very important component of the Mattereum system is enforceability of legal ownership and enforceability of the warranties the information which is provided about the object and recourse if that information is proved wrong so the system must be enforceable it must be robust to that end uh the ultimate conclusion of a dispute must be arbitration so it must have a very strong arbitration component we worked very hard to codify a system which would be effective and one of the great tools afforded to to our to our community is the new uk jurisdiction task force rules on a digital dispute resolution which essentially enable legally binding decisions by arbitrators legally binding decisions by arbitrators around disputes and their ability to make awards to the parties who's in whose favor they find another very important piece of international law is the new york convention on international arbitral awards which uh most countries are signatory to 160 jurisdictions are signatory to that uh which makes uh awards if there's a dispute between a party in say france and a party in mexico it means that both of those countries are both of those countries are signatories to that convention the award is equally recognized another important thing to note is when you have a system which records information so precisely and so fully and records the transactional

[1:27:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=5220s) facts the transactional relationships that really helps arbitrators because much of an arbitrator's job at the moment is determining the facts now the facts are recorded and they're recorded in an immutable way then the arbitrator's role becomes more about determining uh in whose favor they should find rather than spending a long time finding those facts so i hope that answers your question is there anything to add no very comprehensive i mean the the bedrock for all of this is contract law so contracts plus very good evidence it provides a tight framework which we recognize almost anywhere we put many years of work into making sure that the legals would fit cleanly inside of categories like international arbitration to get this kind of international enforceability that said um you know it's a it's a very different situation if you're dealing with you know for example clothing or furniture than if you're dealing with real estate or airline you know jet engines or these kind of things so there is definitely some questions of um scale small things medium things large things different ways of handling disputes but it all roots in contrast if i may ask the panel a question something which barbara said struck me the rlc is a terrible uh entirely human-made natural disaster and i think barbara said people should see the rlc to understand the harm that that is being done to the environment uh but of course we can't all travel to see the rlc so martin also talked about sort of being able to make the determination and james talked about education uh i guess my question is uh how can we enable people to make that determination if we can't all visit the rlc which would be a very heartbreaking site for all of us uh barbara would you like to go first i think we must rethink the media too that no all the people must travel too so to ralsi we can make some projects with game what is nice that's informs

[1:29:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=5370s) people educate the people train the people to learn things and open the eyes i think is interesting too and we can act with political parties from all the world to understand this that we know alone think in small bubbles that we we think really worldwide and if something happened in small village his his impact in all the world i think we must changing our thinking and we must rethink the role from the media too and we must stop with fake needs and we must bring really correct informed myths that's a value form and this is i think's a way to thank you uh Vinay you've spent uh two decades or more trying to get people to come to the realization that we are in trouble what else can we do is it about the best way of delivering and codifying recording information or is there more to it uh i think it's a series of funerals you know i think what's happening is that the political the politicians and the kind of power holders who were um not raised with climate change as a reality are gradually aging out you know if you think about the kind of oil politics in america we're on the last handful of oil politics people we're almost out of classical era called warriors um you know the folks whose consciousnesses were shaped by the discovery of nuclear bomb and then the rapid assembling of massive arsenals and mutually assured destruction you know those people had a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder because it was like they were the first generations of humans to be responsible for managing their own apocalypse you know that old vine from oppenheimer you know i've become death the destroyer of worlds the generation of political leaders that had that as their lived experience were not really able to do anything about climate change right the scientific data wasn't strong enough but also they'd kind of had their crisis and if it wasn't thermonuclear war they were finding it quite hard to care about you know so i think that as those generations age out what we're getting are people that are in power now have you know the climate change has been real for their entire life it agrees to their entire adult life the next generation of political leaders climate change will have been real from the age that they were very small children and

[1:32:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=5520s) they will find it much easier to act you know when greta thunder becomes you know the elected prime minister of i don't know let's say half of europe you know you could very easily imagine that you will get radical climate transformation because the population that elects her for four or five countries simultaneously um will wind up you know having the popular support to push the agenda which will bring their economies in line with reality thank you uh martin you talked about determination making the determination you you said that uh we are partially there yeah unfortunately also partially not um so that that kind of do it plus framework that i sketched out for you all is is actually something that you can apply at different scales you can apply it to an individual you can apply it to a community a household a company a state a region however you want to do it because and you can have degrees you can be you can be a bit more determined or you can try and get a sense of you know how determined is the city how determined is this room you know to act and i suppose anton your first uh the the starting point of this was uh barbara's observation to do with rlc and you know determination to act i guess we don't we can all get overwhelmed with how big a problem there is and we can lose sight of our ability to have traction on a problem and one way of addressing that is to reframe what part of the problem you're dealing with so i don't think that we need to determine each of us individually to reform governance structures right that might be a little bit difficult to start with what we might do though is to determine that there is an emergency that i need to act upon and for me to then think about what are the options for meaningful measurable action that i can do and what are the inputs that i can bring to bear and what constitutes timely effective action for me and then as you build the capacity and do more you think about what you can do collectively with others and how you can help collectively for there to be determination and collectively for options which are meaningful and inputs and so forth and so i think for me the rlc isn't a problem that i'm going

[1:34:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=5670s) to focus on and that's okay if i'm helping the possibility that people will focus on it and i'm helping drive forward the determination for people collectively to be going what the hell are the options which are meaningful for us to do and that i'm helping drive forwards that people are going to provide those inputs of money skills and using the precious resource of our time to get stuff done and i'm going to help drive forwards timely effective action and and and actually be part of a positive culture so i think that all of us in this room and both individually and with all of the organizations that we touch on and all the groups that we touch on can do this we can we can improve our determination improve our options find the inputs and take action and that that's that's my suggestion and you know my challenge to each and every one of you is you take the do it plus idea think about it talk to somebody about it and work out how do we make that how do we make that happen more thank you martin uh james the technology that you talked about could it show people the horrors of the rlc as it is now would people really respond to it in a in a visceral way i think that's a it's a great question and some great answers um i think uh roger ebert said that movies were a machine for generating empathy and i think that uh interactive experiences can be that even more so but i think there's some really important things there one is we've got to make sure that those tools are accessible to everyone and that's certainly not the case today but i i look forward to a future where that is the case and i think people are figuring out both the hardware and the software aspects of that so i do hope that that will change and then we also need to find a way it's one thing to have those resources available i'm sure there's videos on youtube uh that will document this but getting people to actually engage with it and and take notice of it is a huge challenge um i think that thinking about how we decentralize some of these platforms of discovery to discover this content and not make it just the algorithm that is is choosing what people see i think that's a really big challenge i don't have a solution to that i think that's going to be one of the defining challenges of developing these sort of online platforms is is what parts are centralized and which parts are decentralized and i think representative voices from all different parts of the world is going to be a really important aspect to that so i wish i had more

[1:37:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=5820s) answers but thank you james there was a question from the gentleman at the front there um i have a question for vinay i'm from aspen colorado i represent the global warming mitigation project and i i was an intern at the rocky mountain institute i was just trying to think the numbers i believe it was 37 years ago believe it or not and that's where i learned about climate change from Amory Lovins and hunter lovins and i couldn't help but notice that the rocky mountain institute was on your resume there where you've worked i was wondering if you wouldn't mind speaking briefly about your experience there sure um oh that's a crazy story so the trouble really starts on the farm you know hunter uh not 100 what i'm saying here um stephen gaskin i know gaskin tennessee big farm biggest of the hippie communes in the 1960s uh i think they got started maybe very early in the early 70s they went out and a couple of hundred school buses from san francisco trying to find a new place to live because they thought they hate ashbury was destroying itself the heroine had arrived so i was super interested in the 60s when i came to america i went to the farm as soon as i could got there and a fellow by the name of albert bates who runs the thing called world watch institute completely destroyed my life in a weekend uh question one can you figure out how to make a geodesic dome with no waste because we're building the you know Buckminster Fuller designs and they're hard to build and that set the entire direction of my life in terms of refugee and refugee management all the rest of that and then the second thing there's this thing called the environment and we're kind of running out of it and by the time you're growing up it's all going to be really screwed up you should do something if you can and i kind of sat on that for about five or six years and then 9 11 happened and it was like a signal player it was just like oh it's showtime um and through a series of unlikely coincidences involving a tibetan llama and a book without an editor and an editor without a book uh i wound up on the editorial team for smallest profitable and then winning the island game and about midway through that somebody said hey could you figure out how to like make a refugee shelter that could pack flat and i took that question home with me one day and literally said to myself this engineer's

[1:39:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=5970s) question of what's the simplest thing that could possibly work 15 minutes later i had the first hexayurt drawn out on a piece of paper made somewhat cardboard models and it was like oh wow okay there goes my future because we figured out how to do gd6 from the waste and you know we currently have maybe 10 000 of those things being built a year for burning man they're being deployed for homeless people in america there's a variant called the ShiftPod which is foldable and goes in the back of a trunk they've got those things deployed in i want to say maybe jordan i think they've got quite a large refugee settlement in jordan there are a few countries with the selling them uh the critical infrastructure mapping stuff that i did uh rmi had this model which was the pipes and wires model the you know autonomous buildings here the pipes that come in here are the wires i spent five years trying to figure out why that model didn't solve my problems and eventually decided that the answer was critical infrastructure is what keeps you alive and then that became a new model which was too hot too cold hunger thirst illness injury and a technique called simple critical infrastructure maps and i just have piles of this stuff which is built very much on the rocky mountain institute perspective and that shaped the entire rest of my career i keep actually trying to repatriate a whole bunch of that knowledge base to rocky mountain institute like hey you want the refugee sheltering you want the critical infrastructure mapping i got the circular economy tooling come on guys let's do this thing but it's become so big and so confusing and nobody really remembers the old days i haven't yet figured out how to have the conversation where i'm like look this stuff is directly genealogically descended from this buckminster fuller amory lovins you know um um bill who went off to do bright green actually i don't remember bill browning you know there's this kind of you know education that i got when i was working in the institute that's resulted in these innovations and the institute is way more set up for scaling that innovation than i am i'm trying to repatriate this stuff over like come on take this and do something with it guys so yeah that was it was hugely formative i mean rmi is like the finishing school for environmentalists in america you go there you work for three years you burn out you fall over and then you go off and do something else at least that's why it wasn't my day um but yeah i mean it's it's it's there's nowhere else like it on earth i mean it really is like the arc of the covenant for the buckminster 4 transmission thank you Vinay that's a fascinating history uh did i see a hand up there

[1:42:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=6120s) hi thank you i'm very michael playing for mimo protocol and thank you for the talk i'm very glad that i caught your tweet earlier today and decided to come along and to hear you speak and it was very interesting to hear about Mattereum my question kind of relates to something that james said a little while ago um about the element of recourse and about the dispute resolution layer in Mattereum and i noticed that you explained you were using the traditional legal system um i wondered if you i noticed in the slides that you kind of flashed through you had a great emphasis on decentralization and endows and i wondered if you had plans to decentralize the dispute resolution layer as an eventual thing or if you were going to try and rely on the traditional legal system with all its capriciousness so um here we've got to be philosophical for a second um the question is what is property right and our answer to what is property when we're dealing with physical property is property is anything that the state will use violence to return to your ownership right and this is a very hardcore definition of property comes out you know really you know fundamental libertarian and anarchist thinking but if we define properties that which the state will use violence to return to you that defines who owns what so our mission with Mattereum is to find a way of taking the digital reality of the blockchain and representing it to the state in a way that will enable the state to take the status of the blockchain as being an accurate record of who owns what and then it will not use whatever violence is necessary to maintain those property rights now to get there you need to use a lot of contract law and you need to use very careful construction of things like the evidence base for arbitration to get rulings to get solid rules in that process if we insert any elements the state doesn't understand or doesn't trust we lose the ability to control physical property because the state will simply refuse to enforce and then the system begins to fail

[1:44:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=6270s) so what we would refer to as the hard path or the unhappy path always uses constructs that the state is fully familiar with and fully recognizes and fully understands contract law evidence arbitration digital signatures all things that have enormous weights of law and prior experience behind them um that system it's not that it isn't innovative but it's a bunch of very very standard components put together in a slightly unusual configuration none of the actual components themselves are controversial and the configuration took us several years to design an enormous amount of legal work on the other hand if we have two parties that are in a dispute right i say hey you know you told me this clicker worked and actually it's not compatible with anton's rig and we have a problem and i make a claim and then you refuse to pay the claim at that point there is a persuasion period that comes before we get to the fully unhappy path with arbitrate urgent state involvement and wars coming out of our years in that period that's where the decentralized dispute resolution comes in so there are tools like i want to say cleros where you have the potential for saying in the contract at this point before you get to the next step of arbitration you have to mount a case using this decentralized dispute resolution forum and at the end of that they will give you an opinion if you agree with the opinion and settle all good if you don't agree with the opinion you choose to contest you now have to carry 70 rather than 50 of the resulting legal bills these kind of mechanisms that isn't exactly the mechanism we have written into the contracts but that's for example right and that ability to use persuasion at the decentralized level to get people to settle the disputes without going all the way to arbitration is a critical part of the engineering that we're going to be doing over the next few years to get that to work we need a base of experience with the disputes we need enough volume of disputes that we can start sort of saying well okay for these disputes we tried this and that worked pretty well but for the really high value disputes we really need a different thing because it's causing a lot of friction maybe we should try this so the process of kind of interactively designing those dispute resolution pathways the hard path isn't likely to change very much and we designed the hard path first the soft paths that route around the hard path and persuade people to settle and persuade people to be reasonable and get people to say okay fine you are

[1:47:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=6420s) right i did make a mistake i apologize i will pay those kind of mechanisms i think a lot of that will be quite decentralized it's also very important to note that most civil justice systems have a strong preference for dispute resolution before a case comes to them and they don't look favorably on cases where that has not been attempted uh moreover uh in certain democratic societies where where uh citizens have have recourse to the justice system uh for for civil disputes uh the courts are choked up with uh high volume low-level disputes and again as i mentioned previously uh a large amount of the work that the arbitrator the the the the decision maker uh magistrate etc does depending on which system you're in what they're called is fact-finding so if you can combine a very solid recording of undisputed facts and uh the ability to resolve disputes before they enter that arena you will get justice systems looking much more favorably on on that kind of proposal uh yes here at the front of questions as well um you know you're saying about the property right so the example with the clicker let's say you had loads of different items of property that have contextual value for different people can that then be used as like collateral that then someone else gives you like a loan on or something later down the line um yes in a nutshell yes we think there's a lot of um a lot of room for pre-selling objects so if somebody was going to take a building you could take for example the windows and the beams and other reusable components of the building and you could simply have an agreement with the third party you know you will buy this object at this price when we decide we will demolish the building and at that point you know that you've got you know 35 000 worth of reusable components they've already been sold they're insured and some other stuff to make sure it doesn't get complicated if something gets damaged or blubbered with other details but that is an approach

[1:49:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=6570s) rather than necessarily using lending because lending collateralized or not you know there are a lot of obligations that go with that it's a messy system rather than landing pre-sale end of life and kind of options like a put option or a call option might get a lot of the same goals of lending but without the complexity that comes from using objects as collateral so i think that there's quite a lot of room for getting away from the dependence on credit and credit risk estimation um by using contracts which handle things like sale of goods you know in context that solve the liquidity problems that lending solves but without having interest rate interest bearing payments on the back of that i think there's a ton of room for engineering there there was a question there hello thanks for such an engaging panel it's been really interesting um to hear everyone's insights my name is emily i'm a phd researcher looking at climate solutions i'm also working for a climate startup um that's seeking to develop a new global system of decision making and i'm a youth delegate at cop um so it's been really um interesting to hear from some of our panel members who say that they've been working in climate politics for 20 years um and also from other panel members who have grown so tired of attempting to um encourage environmental policy change that they've moved past that to developing a different system entirely and i think that was the point i really wanted to touch on was in terms of working within our existing um institutions and our existing systems um such as cops such as multilateralism um and and um the effectiveness of that to achieve change or timely effective action um versus putting all of our efforts into developing an alternative system um i was wondering if any of the panel members could touch on that point please thank you very much shall we start with martin this time thank you if you don't know what's going to heal the patient it can be a really difficult decision you know what to do and we have a we have a very complicated patient and we have a lot of people wanting to help heal the patient which is a good thing and the patient has at least two different diseases

[1:52:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=6720s) the the the patient has so many different diseases the the patient has hypercapnia which is too much carbon dioxide the patient is developing pyrexia going too hot the patient is experiencing probably multi-organ failure um the the parallels in fact malnutrition yeah absolutely the parallels between human illness and what ails the planet are are disturbing and numerous but coming back to the kind of fundamental question which almost feels like you know existing institutions or new system what worries me is that i'm not sure we have time for either as an exclusive option existing systems don't seem to me to be happening responding very quickly they get better at dealing with more acute crises and those are probably coming down the line so maybe they'll get a bit faster at being a bit more radical when things get worse that's a i don't know if that's an optimistic thought or or not the alternative trying to create something completely separate and radical i think reality is we're also into interdependent that you can't make something completely separate i think maybe the the kind of candy to use a good scott's word the canny approach might be to be trying to create the systems which will become useful when they can be used so [Music] my expectation is that governments will start governments have been getting their heads around the fact that there's a really big problem they haven't been solving the public are getting their heads around the fact there's a really big problem which governments haven't been solving we see this represented through xr and and increasing kind of shouting louder shouting to determine you know we need to determine to act where i where i worry that there isn't enough happening is on all of the work for the options because we will need the options whenever people decide that they're determining to act and we'll need the inputs whenever so i think if i was suggesting what what you might do or what people might do is do more on the options do more on the inputs because the determination is building

[1:54:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=6870s) the the timeliness and the effectiveness of the action who knows but if you're building options if you're helping work out what's a meaningful measurable action if you're increasing the number of inputs with people with knowledge with financial resources then you're giving the patient the best chance so don't make it an either or make it a kind of both but focus on options and inputs untimely as well as the determination but there's a lot of people shouting right that shouting won't be enough though that's an excellent answer thank you uh barbara diplomatic world uh of course documents existing existing institutions existing systems uh what what what what would you say to the to the to the questioner this is a time from changing and we must have as a possibilities is to doing but we need time to understand this and also institution needs a time to understand what's a changing need and also systems speak over reforms but what is the right reforms i think we must going we have no time but we need that time and we must mix the time yes uh james uh thank you barbara technology companies often don't engage with politics but they often create systems which are alternatives to what's already what already exists until sometimes they get regulated or they don't get regulated and those alternatives kind of become become the new the new normal i guess to use a phrase um what what what what do you think of that question and how would you respond i'm not sure there's a lot i can add our esteemed panelists here i mean i think the only thing i would take away is it's interesting when you see companies pushing private companies intelligent companies pushing governments for more stringent regulation that makes you feel like maybe something is changing at that point and i think that has been very interesting to see that there are you know some as you say these corporations are very large as large as some countries in some cases but they maybe have a longer time horizon than some elected governments do

[1:57:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=7020s) and so i think they're seeing where things are going and saying well if we want to maintain you know continue to be operational and that requires a habitable planet so we really need these changes to to come about so um yeah i don't think uh i have much more to add thank you james Vinay yeah so i've changed my mind on this several times over the last 10 15 years maybe longer largely by trying things and not having them work um 10 years ago i thought the hot plan was piling in behind progressive incumbents you know my motto was that there were basically progressive and regressive forces inside of the institutions and if the kind of opinionated public piled in behind the progressive incumbents we could tip the balance of power inside of the existing institutions and get faster action as a result and i think there's some room for that i think it's somewhat successful um now i've come to a kind of different conclusion which is we just have to stop anybody over the age of 30 voting [Laughter] the existing democratic machinery is fine but we're in a position where because the younger generation is much smaller than the older generation the younger generation have lost control of their futures society is reflecting the interests of the people that will be dead before climate change really hits they're very numerous they're very wealthy and they've corrupted democracy for their own benefit and the problem of democracy is always democracy is two wolves and a sheep discussing what's for dinner right so the old are destroying the futures of the young as a way of maintaining their enormous pension pots in their five bedroom three carriage three car garage houses and you know inside of a constitutional democracy if you don't have some kind of uh civil right or or human rights argument that says a piece of legislation is illegal you can't do anything about democratic representation right so in america you have constitutional rights and the constitutional rights limit what the democracy can do but unless you have a constitutional amendment that says you as a young person have the right to grow up uh in a world where the climate works and the nat and nature works in the manner that it did for your ancestors if we don't have that as a constitutional right you can't make a constitutional argument the old don't have the right to destroy the future of

[1:59:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=7170s) the young so on one hand new civil rights new constitutional rights extensions to the constitution to manage the rights of the young and protect them as a minority class right you know if the young outnumbered the old by the ratio that they did say 100 years ago you wouldn't have these problems with climate change because the youth vote would be so large and so numerous and so powerful that you would simply not be able to say we're going to ruin the world in 50 years don't worry we'll all be dead right but that we're going to ruin the world don't worry we'll all be dead is the default negotiating position of all of the political parties because the main you know what's the median age of a voter these days do you know a fan martin i don't there are some other things i'd respond to oh sure sure but the um that median age of a voter being just way too old creates a situation where we have his gerundocracy is being run for the benefit of the people that will be dead before the bills are paid for climate change but also for national debt and the bankrupt pension systems and every other damn thing in this situation so i think if we were to say the young are a minority and they need minority protections as they would get if they were a member of any other protected class we can start talking about using constitutional machinery to perfect protect protect the future of the young and i think it's that kind of radicalism like there is no reason the democratic machinery cannot work but you have to intervene at a high enough level to address the real problem and the problem is we're treating young people as if they have no right to a future and that can be changed but you have to figure out some way of making a constitutional level argument a human rights level argument to say these are the rights of the young you cannot pass a law to take away those rights that's unconstitutional or it breaks human rights obligations and you have to rebuild the structure from the constitutional level down now what would it take to do that that's an open question right maybe that requires revolution maybe that requires you know massive massive grassroots movements maybe it requires general strikes i don't know what kind of pressure you have applied to the governments to get the kind of bipartisan cooperation you need to pass a constitutional amendment in america but i think that it's a constitutional amendment level work in america and equivalents in the uk europe china i think you have to go in at that level of human rights to be able to say

---
Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/572-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [572] How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics, Technology. COP 26, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.