# How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics, Technology. COP 26 (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [572], part 1 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 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=0s) [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] dear friends uh welcome uh to Mattereum's second event at cop 26 where we will be discussing the three futures of climate action whether it is politics diplomacy or technology now of course cop 26 26 conference of the parties is an example of global diplomacy all coming together on this occasion in the city of glasgow to plan to iterate to discuss how the world can tackle the climate crisis we have seen uh political action on the streets we have seen protesters we have seen performers uh we have seen uh people trying to send their message via political action and of course we are seeing political action both in national parliaments and in city council chambers we are also seeing technology companies some of them startups with innovative ideas of how they can make things better

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=150s) some technology companies being almost as powerful as some nation states the question is can these three dimensions come together and work together to make things better or is the is there a path so diverse that this could not happen uh we have an amazing panel here today uh we will i think we will introduce folks as we as as they speak but first we're going to hear remotely from uh professor Michael Mainelli of zien uh the financial science uh think tank uh he is also an older man in the city of london and the sheriff of the city of london a hugely knowledgeable and experienced individual and we are very lucky to have this uh this message from him

[16:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=1017s) so um let me get my clicker here i guess the first thing i mention is we have just announced the partnership with zian um to produce a set of services which will give people easy access to the emissions trading standards emissions trading markets both the eu standard and the uk standard um so over the next few months we're actually going to stand up some technology so when you have something to offset you could call a set of apis to basically buy carbon directly from the uk and the eu markets at your preference and actually retire those carbon credits then and there um so there are systems like that which are in play for different kinds of tokenized carbon products which you see being produced by a lot of folks in the blockchain market this is going to provide the same sort of ease of use but it will be going directly to the main international national carbon markets and the details of that are on the zen blog and i've just tweeted them out from the Mattereum account from my account so we're doing something concrete it's a nice little step uh and i think that will get integrated into a lot of products over the next year or two um [Music] great right that was a last minute thing now we've got to get into this right so um this is going to be a long track right because what i'm going to try and describe is a fundamentally new way the world can work right the world as it currently stands there are a set of things that are just the way they are and that includes like how we think about our relationship with physical goods does anybody remember the sort of transformation that occurred when we started to get digital mapping in cars and then on phones right you get that i mean i remember 20 years ago right they'd be like somebody would invite you to a party in like some weird corridor in london and you would carry a physical a to z and you'd be guessing about bus routes to get there and consequently you tended only to go to places that you knew because getting anywhere else was difficult then came the maps then came uber and now at this point you know as long as you know roughly how far away some place is generally speaking you never wonder about where it is the robots know that for you so what i'm going to be talking about is a transformation like that and not that kind of scale for a relationship with physical goods right you know the microphone clicker the shoe the bicycle the car the house

[19:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=1167s) really really deep into the fabric what happens when you start using computers to assist our ability to own and use physical matter as a category um so Mattereum itself comes out of me basically being a disaster relief guy i kind of got religion on this in 2002 and i cooked up a 30-year plan for handling hundreds of millions of climate refugees i'm not going to talk about that planning work i'm not going to talk about the various technologies i've shipped towards that goal but Mattereum is one of a series of things that are pointed towards this goal because Mattereum's structure is useful both for cutting carbon emissions in the economy as it stands but also critically for running very very tight supply networks for managing hundreds of millions of climate refugees it starts as a developed world economy tool for reducing carbon and increasing your reuse of goods but then it can also have disaster relief applications on the same technology base or very similar one and my background is basically after 9 11 i got very heavily involved in defense security and resilience then 2014 i left to join the ethereum team project manager the launch of ethereum then shortly after that started Mattereum and here we are that's a fair summary i should also mention the book which you have in front of you uh called the future of stuff written during the pandemic and it directly addresses a lot of the topics we're going to be talking about today in terms of transparency about our physical goods all right so um let me name check here bruce sterling's shaping things that's a very important book to the Mattereum work bruce is one of our colleagues now that is another thing which is massively worth reading right let's get into this um so circular economy basically comes in multiple scopes this doesn't exactly fit the scope on the scope 2 scope 3 carbon emissions but it's pretty close the majority of thinking on circular economy is scope three circular economy you take your plastic object you throw it into the trash it is taken away to a recycling center they melt it down then they turn it into another piece of plastic which you buy in a shop and you take home and use it and you throw it in the trash so the goods are going all the way back out into the remanufacturing process they're coming all the way back in again and that long loop means you're paying to manufacture them again and

[21:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=1317s) you're paying to distribute them again and you're paying to haul the stuff out there in the first place so that loop has a lot of friction on it and one of the reasons that circular economy has gotten off to a kind of slow start even though the idea is perfect is because there is specifically so much friction on that circular loop so what we're talking about here is a very low friction version of the circular loop where rather than the goods going all the way around into remanufacturing back out again you simply take the laptop that you have replaced to your neighbor next door who buys it off you you take the bicycle that you've decided you've had enough riding because you know it's just it's cold and wet out there and it's winter and you don't really want to bike in that and you simply sell that bicycle to somebody younger and fitter who decides they are going to bike this winter and you just pass it on to them so that kind of circularity rather than the goods going into the trash and being torn to pieces the goods are simply handed to somebody that wants them and in a world with eight billion people you know a billion of whom live in absolute poverty there is always somebody that wants the stuff right we're not short of mouths we're not short of feet why is it that we can't just take the things which are useful and pass them on and pass them on and pass them on and pass them on a lot of the answer to that is we can't figure out who wants them so has anybody seen these videos of the places in africa where the container loads of used clothes wind up after they've fallen out the back end of the charity shops and about half of it is just winding up in these enormous gigantic hills of clothing that's not happening because nobody wants to wear those clothes it's happening because the people in that specific city don't want to wear those clothes right you put those clothes in the places where people do want them they will go they will be used very little in this world is so broken that nobody wants it given how much poverty there is so to be able to get this kind of circularity in place what we have is a routing problem i have a thing i no longer want it could you figure out who wants or needs this most and could you sell it to them or could you give it to them and for this we need an ontology of things and read an ontology of needs and we need some way of matching so this is all basically a data problem and if you solve the data problem as digital mapping did for navigation um Mattereum will do for ownership it changes the relationship between people and things

[24:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=1467s) right uh here we go so the platform um i think we have adequately covered the amount of rubbish in the world it's a lot um so critical concept in this vision of the world nothing is ever made to be thrown away right and this is just absolutely the critical concept when you buy something the intention that you have is you will resell it right you might be reselling it to somebody that will then melt it down and recycle it and reuse it and it will be used as raw material but for the vast majority of the stuff in this story what's going to happen is you will buy the thing with an explicit plan for selling it again when you're done with it i buy the bicycle in spring i anticipate selling the bicycle again in autumn i accept that the bicycle is worth a little more in spring than it is in autumn but at the end of the day that's the cheapest way for me to own a bike and in the spring the next spring i will buy another bike so this model of everything you buy you intend to sell again this would apply to furniture clothes consumer electronics transport vehicles and the vast majority of the stuff that you actually personally own is in one of those four categories right that's just about all of our stuff every single one of those things has dramatically inefficient ineffective resale markets right now the resale markets are terrible does anybody ever sell anything on ebay right is it not really time consuming and annoying so that right there the time-consuming and annoying nature of selling things leaves us with a kind of difficult quandary because we wind up with huge piles of stuff that we don't want but it's too much trouble to sell it it feels morally wrong to throw it in the trash you feel like you're losing too much money if you give it to a charity shop and so you wind up just leaving it filling up a closet or an attic or the back of a car and that problem is happening because capitalism has made it incredibly liquid and easy to buy things but it's made it really really quite difficult for individual consumers to sell them again and there are a number of obstacles on that path to being able to sell again as a result when other people want to buy the thing that you have you're probably not putting on the market right now and as a result they tend to buy a new one and now there are two there's the one clogging up your attic under is the one clogging up their attic and now we have two problems right so getting rid of this right asymmetry

[26:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=1617s) between buying and selling for individuals this is kind of a peer-to-peer decentralized vision rather than you buying the vast majority of your things from stores the idea is you will buy new things when you need a new thing but the rest of the time you're going to buy things second-handed you're going to buy things that are fully embedded in this model of circularity and that is a tech problem you sort out the technology sort out the marketplaces sort out the logistics and it's entirely possible to create a world in which things are bought and sold and moved around just as easily from consumers to other consumers as from amazon to other consumers it's a circulatory economy rooted in decentralized commerce so places where this is already done international commodities markets this is your you know futures for steel or you know uh food corn all these you know massive things where one ton of corn is much the same as another turn of tonne of corn and they're very carefully defined specifications which give you a sense of you know how these two sets of wheat differ you know this sweet is a little damper than that we it's gone from you know 1.4 humidity to 2.3 that means you have to use a little sooner there are these kind of fine variations are well documented but the commodities markets they run incredibly efficiently if you have something to sell that fits into the commodities framework you have no problem identifying buyers for it it just works um on the other hand we've got the goods which we are dealing with day-to-day the things that we own and they are not at all like that right the biggest single economic drag is the thing we call the doubt discount so you have a thing you want to sell it the person who buys it doesn't believe you when you say this thing is in great new condition they're kind of like maybe it is maybe you're lying they lowball the offer to you you think the thing is worth a thousand dollars they think it's worth a thousand dollars they think there's a 20 chance it's broken and you're not telling them they offer you 800 and then you think i'm not going to sell this for 800 i know it's worth a thousand bucks and i know that it's not broken and that asymmetry and information between the buyer and the seller causes the prices to get pushed apart from each other so the seller has very good information and says it's worth a thousand dollars i'm not going to take a penny less the buyer is like huh maybe 800 maybe a thousand maybe a hundred maybe a thousand i don't really trust this they

[29:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=1767s) depress the price and the result is that the trade doesn't happen and the cellar is stuck with the liquid stuff clogging up their closets again right this is the this is the hard path so if we get equal information between the buyers and the sellers it takes away the expectation that they're going to pay two different prices for the same object right and at that point you can have a deal right i think it's worth a thousand dollars you've got excellent third-party reviews that tell you this object is in great new condition it's definitely worth a thousand dollars you pay a thousand dollars for it it leaves my basement problem solved and all the you know co2 and other environmental damage that would have been done by making another one we got rid of all of that come on so this question about resolving value uncertainty right although it seems like a kind of weird boring technical mechanical question the actual fact of it is that the reason that we don't have a circular economy is value uncertainty the reason that ebay and the charity shops and second handiers and antique dealers and used car dealers and all the rest of that the reason that that system has not solved consumer capitalism is because nobody can figure out the condition of the goods or what anything is worth and that's literally the thing that is causing us to have these gigantic avoidable environmental footprint it's it's amazing when you bring it down to this level of simplicity but it is literally this problem of i don't want this anymore would anybody like it and if we could efficiently solve that so i wasn't losing so much value every time i sell the secondhand thing all of these problems dramatically reduce um so c2c ecommerce right literally this is the question of how do we buy and sell things from each other right the existing infrastructure for this is dramatically less efficient than the infrastructure for buying new stuff we've already discussed that a little bit um the table stakes for solving that problem are enormous and now let me skip forward a little so how do we solve this um let us suppose that i want to sell this clicker to anton right you know i wound up with this thing because i accidentally took it home after a talk and now it's sitting in my basement because i have no idea where actually came from anton wants a clicker but he's got to figure out whether this clicker works with his av setup so question one does this clicker work with his av setup well i don't know

[31:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=1917s) anything about clickers other than you know came home with me by accident he doesn't know anything about clickers we're just people that want to do like talks and have performances and you know do things with side decks so somebody that knows about clickers is somebody from an av department at say university or high school that person sits at home takes i send them a picture of the clicker and say hey will this work with his setup they say yes or they say no if they say yes they write a warranty if you pay me 50 cents a dollar then if you send him the clicker and it doesn't work with his setup i will pay you 12.50 which is the cost of replacing the clicker now that warranty it's not just a warranty on the clicker it's a warranty about the context in which the clicker has value i know that this thing is valuable to him because it solves this problem even though it is not valuable to me so and this is the critical part we are generating wealth by attaching information to objects right now i'm going to take that very slowly because it is a weird concept right in my care this thing is useless because i don't have the equipment that it plugs into i can't just send it to him because he doesn't know if it works and he's not going to buy it i need somebody to add information to this before the thing has value and that person has specialized knowledge about clickers so they take the clicker they verify it'll work with his setup immediately this has gone from being worthless junk to being worth 12.50 and at that point i sell to anton and anton takes it have a clicker right now at that point he doesn't have to buy new quicker which involves mining oil to make plastic to cast into a thing and all the electronics and so on i have rid of this thing which is cluttering my house and the kid in the high school av department that gave me the expert opinion that the clicker will work with anton's rig has just made 50 cents for a piece of knowledge that was right on the top of their head so what we have here is an alchemical process we take knowledge which is currently not being used to generate value we take goods which are currently costing people money to store and we take unmet human need and we alchemically combine these things i am benefited i got rid of the clicker and i made some money the kid with the knowledge about the av stuff is benefited they made some money for having expertise and anton has benefited

[34:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=2067s) because he didn't have to pay carbon and other taxes for generating and clicker that actually he could do how to use one and it would have been just fine right and that mechanism we call a trust community you have multiple parties a buyer a seller and a set of independent experts what binds the trust community together is knowledge about an object and financial interest in an object and the financial interest is represented as warranties and insurance so the buyer anton's position buys the clicker but they also buy the warranties associated with the clicker and that's how we bind knowledge to matter to reverse entropy so rather than having this you know extraordinarily chaotic vortex behind the consumer economy where all of the stuff in the world is piled up in this enormous kind of junk pile in basements and in thrift stores on ebay rather than having this kind of entropic destruction of value because we throw away the knowledge about things and then the stuff is left as brute physical matter with no intelligence what we're doing is we're maintaining and upgrading the intelligence that we have about objects in a way that dramatically increases your utility and value and this is literally money from thin air it's wealth from thin air because by rebinding an object to its story we take it from the status as trash in the bottom of some bucket back into the position of being a product it is an elevation of physical matter and it's done by arranging humans and knowledge and money in a way that as the site says enables the object to go where it's most valued now you know let's think about the categories here we have clothes we have furniture we have transportation vehicles and we have consumer electronics practically every single thing in this room other than the plants is in one of those categories so if we could do this for those four categories we can generate a circular economy where it becomes possible to do things like match chairs you have three of a four chair set because the last chair got lost when you moved house you'd like the fourth chair oh well i took a picture of it it got scanned somebody checked it against the database we identified other chairs which will match somebody will sell you one of those chairs it's only 75 miles from where you live and a truck is going between those two locations in three days john the chair yeah that'd be great thank you and everybody in that deal was benefited

[36:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=2217s) because what use is one chair of a matching set well it's way more valuable to me because i have the other three chairs than it is to the poor person whose house is cluttering and that mechanism is basically reordering all of the physical matter in the world to generate value by putting the objects in the hands of the people that want the most oh there we are right the Mattereum knowledge graph reverses entropy right it's a really really simple idea and if you carry out competently and you get the details right the world changes as much as it changed when we got digital mapping so there are an enormous number of benefits from fixing a fundamental process like selling the things that you no longer need right the benefits are universal because the process of consumption is universal this stuff is metabolic it's core to what makes human beings human beings making things and exchanging things i'm just going to pick up a couple of things durable goods so if we have goods which are going around this circular economy again and again and again you're going to tend to buy things which are more durable because if you buy everything with the intention of one day selling it you will get a much better price if the thing is in good condition when you sell it so you buy quality that will last and when you sell it you sell it for a higher value than if you bought junk um i don't know how old these jeans are i don't know how many people had them before i did denim vintage denim on ebay seems to have peaked about 25 30 years ago in the denim made in that euro never ages it's amazing right i have no idea how old this watch is i don't know where it came from i bought it from a friend who was a watch collector in london uh i've worn it could have a 10 owners could have had one probably it will work for another 50 or 100 years probably won't even need maintenance right it just turns out the good stuff lasts forever and if you don't need it to be particularly shiny you know i mean life is good right you know do we really care whether these kind of objects you know these chairs you're sitting on do you care if that's the first time somebody has sat on them right there are very few things that we're really particular about right a very few things we really care about you know like you're going to want new socks we understand that but for everything else particularly for fun things you know you want to go skiing right or you want to take up roller skating do you need new roller skates no i just need really good quality old roller

[39:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=2367s) skates and i'm going to try it for three months and if i don't like i'm going to pass them on you know 151 people have tried these roller skates and they've been running perfectly successfully since the 1980s now this raises some other questions so i'm going to i'm going to skip over some of the technical sides here and get a little more into the why questions i'll come back to that in a minute so um the critical thing about this is what about innovation right if we're going to have people continue to generate amazing new things we need to find a mechanism which allows people to continue to innovate while we're in this kind of circular economy paradigm and the way that that works is at the very top end you have pros right sometimes you call these folks prosumers that's another category but you have the people who by definition want the best available thing right you're a professional photographer you want the best available camera because if you don't have the best available camera the shots that you take will look like you didn't have the best gear and that will make you look like you're an amateur so the top end of these circular marketplaces you have the entry point of the new goods and the entry point of the new goods is for the people that are going to extremes they are the professional photographers they are the mountain climbers they're the cross-country skiers they're the bicycle racers they're the people that need to have the best stuff because they are extraordinarily driven by function and they're pushing the equipment to its very limit they need the greatest not because they are greedy they need the greatest because they're pushing right to the limit of human performance and at that point the equipment enables them to reach further and if you think about brands like north face north face sell to the pros at least that's their advertising the vast majority of what they make is outdated technology five-year-old machines that produce gore-tex which was really great five years ago and now is a little behind the curve they have a pro market where they sell stuff for four hundred dollars and a top end north face jacket has cost four hundred dollars forever because this is the price the pros will pay for the best available gear and their tolerance to put that money on the table hasn't changed much over time north face charges it because they can so that approach continues to run unchanged the difference is that rather than having a whole bunch of machinery that is producing sort of long out of date gore-tex stuff that really nobody is

[41:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=2517s) going to use if they have an alternative but it's being sold for cheap all of that stuff becomes filled with the gear which was pro gear five years ago so you sell way more of the pro gear to the pros because they know that they'll pay 400 for the jacket now they will sell it for 375 doors in a year and they will buy next year's pro jacket so what we're doing is we're cutting the price for the pros to acquire the very latest and greatest gear but in return for that far more of the pros will upgrade every single year and get every single upgrade so the projection here is an economy where pretty much the entire pro category for whatever it is musical instruments posh cars you know catwalk fashion whatever it happens to be the pros will all upgrade every year and they will start to make a living by having excellent taste they buy the new stuff they sell it on in a year if they bought something which everybody thinks is amazing they'll get a slightly higher price if they brought something which is considered to be a failed experiment they'll get a slightly lower price but they will continue to be able to subsidize their purchase of the best available stuff effectively because the second-hand markets will take up the slack so if i'm north face or apple or canon or nikon or any one of these brands if i'm you know porsche or bmw or fiat or whoever it is what happens is that every year i sell a lot more of the high-end product and i service a lot more of the parts and maintenance and spares for the things which i made 10 years ago which are now in continuous use because we figured out how our secondhand markets really work so the suggestion here is that the innovation engine not only continues to run but it runs faster and harder and what we get rid of is the manufacturing of things which are kind of substandard because technology has moved on and kind of nobody's coming in to fill in the gaps right it's a differently structured market but it is not a kind of circular economy which kills innovation and it's not a kind of circular economy that kills mass production instead rather than these amazing goods that we're making only really existing for a small rich elite that is constantly under financial pressure to upgrade instead what we're doing is we are spreading the wealth tier by tier by tier by tier because if the goods are durable in the age well 15 year old digital cameras that run on double a

[44:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=2667s) batteries are being played with his toys by kids in mexican towns right hey it's your fifth birthday have a digital camera it costs 2.50 it's really really fun and you're five years old and maybe it will get broken and maybe i can fix it and maybe i can't right hey now i'm a five-year-old with a digital camera i am happy i don't care it's 15 years old right kind of looks like a phone takes pictures i can't call anybody you know like this is made of wind right and when you're a kid do you care you know i don't know how much a lego i had when i was a kid but there was a lot of it i guarantee a lot of it did not arrive in my house knew i never noticed right and that question right do we need the new thing or do we just need the thing imagine clothing if it came in enormous fleet libraries in cities right there are 13 800 pieces of clothing in your size available today tomorrow it will be a different selection because some things will have been sold into the pool and some things will have been bought out of the pool a constantly shifting panoply of things which fit you perfectly because we've got digital sizing and you can wear them anytime you like and that as a model right more consumer choice lower environmental footprint and you know when was the last time you heard about a thing which was going to increase your quality of life and also dramatically cut your environmental footprint it's not a common model i got very excited when we figured this out let me tell you uh it made my energy policy heart jump so then we get to the house right now we're going to do the gory technical bit yeah we're here for time so um using the blockchain the right way right we took this week last week the avalanche blockchain which is probably the fifth largest blockchain in the world we took it to net zero uh we talked to them about it we told them that we needed it to do our circular economy thing we couldn't do the circular economy thing on a blockchain that wasn't net zero and we basically were like please please they said okay fine it's cop26 have your christmas present early we are now net zero and they did it they bought the carbon offsets and boom they're now net zero so that gives us a blockchain and the reason you want a blockchain for this is you want the data about the goods to last longer than the goods do right you want the data to be as permanent as possible because the data is what gives the goods value in the second hand market no data no second-hand sale thing

[46:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=2817s) becomes landfill you take the environmental impact everyone is miserable you have to keep the data alive so if i have 300 bicycles made from some little bicycle startup which then folds out in year three they made great bikes they couldn't make a living doing it the bikes are now second hand all the engineering data about the bikes is perfectly alive on the blockchain even though the original manufacturer is gone that's why we use a blockchain one of the several reasons so publication of what something is durable record keeping a change of ownership right if we have kind of digital tags on these objects and we have a partnership with a very nice digital tag company then when the objects change hands we always know who the owner is and that really helps figure out whose property is who if you're turning these over a very very accelerated rate uh guaranteed payments so again all these systems where you have a third party in the trust community who is adding value to the object by telling you about it and giving you its attributes they have to be paid and they have to be guaranteeably paid because the legal warranty that they're selling is not going to kick into place until the payment has gone to them and it's guaranteed so because we've got these very very hard records of ownership that allows us to make sure that we've constant legal coverage for the information about the objects it protects us from errors where somebody has a credit card charge back happened because they made a payment it didn't work then they lost their warranty on the deal then the goods went through the process and they bought something that they had no insurance on permanent payments were really important finally dispute resolution all of the facts about all of these transactions are stored on chain and the result of that is that the cons the system is constantly prepared for litigation you do a transaction something goes wrong you make the claim of the warranty if there is a dispute with the person offering the warranty you can immediately go in and figure that out it's a very very powerful mechanism there we are so final part how do we get involved right the platform is live today so we built the first version of the platform for handling appreciating assets um antiquities fine art um collectibles uh gold bullion we're doing gold bullion it's a weird story we're doing carbon offsets for the mining of the gold so you buy the gold as an nft it comes with the carbon offsets very clean system

[49:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=2967s) so it's up and running right now it uses the openc system which is the absolutely standard way of buying and selling nfts we also just took it onto a platform called polygon previously called matic so we're now able to issue these things on an l2 solution which has low transaction costs to low carbon emissions um the version which is running on avalanche i think is probably three months out might be less um yeah that's a yeah that's all i'm sorry so um the asset passport itself is a series of legal warranties committed by different people so that's the trust community structure it's called an asset passport each page of the asset passport has a different set of information guaranteed by a different party um i just mentioned the gold with the carbon offsets we covered that um and basically right you know what happens if you run this kind of circular economy is that the take make waste economy begins to look like the oil or the coal economy it's just another outmoded artifact of fossil fuel capitalism where we run the economy basically straight from the oil well or the coal mine right into the garbage and in that context you don't really want something like amazon which is a one-way economy that basically is just accelerated take make waste what you want is a system in which there is a genuine ability to get the goods around this circular economy and that is i think it boom i'm just going to skip these oh yeah we talked about the book um so that's it there you are right that's how the world could work and the reason that we're doing it this way is that i spent 20 years banging my head against policy when i was working in energy policy think tanks and defense security and resilience contexts and i just could not find any way of getting government to change its i don't know ten years ago you know i was a mask activist we had h5n1 it was the flu pandemic it was extremely scary and i spent a lot of time banging my head on government's doors saying could we not get things like a national reserve for mask stuff i had a site called flu code which is all about like masks masks are super important ten years later the pandemic arrives the masks that you're wearing are the masks which are really really really well

[51:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ0Hpq5cQU&t=3117s) scientifically tested to prevent airborne infections spreading they have really good data to back them up right the cloth masks that we're used to wearing during the pandemic not such great data really not so effective right so this notion that you know like market activism works if you want to solve the problem you can do it commercially but you have to turn up and you have to get involved and you have to raise capital under boycott you have to build systems you know i'm trying that because i kind of lost faith in the other approach um so i'm quite looking forward to our discussions because you know like you know i have opinions i will stop thank you Vinay okay our next panelist is uh one of my oldest friends i'm very happy that he's joined us here today um i've known him for i think about 25 years which is a terrifying thought and katie was saying to me earlier our team member katie that this is the ultimate version of a circular economy how uh sort of our relationship and our friendship has come full circle uh james golding is a technical director at epic games which is a very large technology company and whilst Mattereum as a startup the company james works for is is very big and james even though he represents one particular segment of the technology industry i think is going to share some thoughts with us about how tech can uh drive climate action thank you very much anton um so just a few thoughts today around technology and obviously technology is a huge broad topic i'm not someone who knows about inventing new kinds of concrete and steel or capturing carbon but what we do at epic is build virtual worlds build real-time 3d worlds based on data based on all kinds of things based on creativity and we feel certainly i feel that there's lots of opportunity there to to couple that with climate change which is obviously a very real world problem but like vinay was talking about there's amazing things you can do when you couple the real world and the digital world and you can just look at recent headlines uh around you know some u.s companies and what they're thinking around the metaverse that's the last time i'll use that word uh today but it certainly shows that there's a lot of interest in in this real-time 3d world

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