Climate progress isn't a sprint — it's a marathon | Greg De Temmerman

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Even if you're not a long-distance runner, you can picture it. Ups and downs over many miles, running over challenging terrain. And scientist Greg Detemmerman says this discipline serves as a strong metaphor for the battle against climate change. In his 2024 talk, he lays out a path for climate action that's inspired by the lessons from endurance runners.

0:44What do long-distance running and our fight against climate change have in common? What does the fact of running very long distances across mountains, typically over 20 to 30 hours, have anything to do with climate? What quite a lot, it turns out. They are both very complex and long affairs, and both will mainly require you to deal with setbacks, trade-offs, and compromises along the way, if you want to have a chance to see the finish line. And I should know, because not only do I like that sport, and I know how it sounds, I also happen to be a physicist with a long-standing interesting complex issue like energy, nuclear fusion, or climate change.

1:24When you prepare for a race and you look at the map, you have to go from start to finish. And what is the shortest distance between two points? A straight line. You can't believe me, right? I'm a scientist. Now, in reality, except if you're a bird, you can't just go straight. You have to follow the path, which will usually meander around. It's making your path much longer than it looks like at first sight. Starts to sound familiar, right? Now, when you look at that, you're actually ignoring all the mountains, which might be along the way, and you have to cross. So you will have to go up and down and up and down and up and down many times.

1:59It will make your journey much longer, but it will also bring a lot of new challenges. Technical terrains, narrow paths, very fast-changing conditions, because remember, you are in altitude now. It will also require you to make choices. Which jacket do I take? This heavy jacket, which is waterproof? This light one, which can be much lighter? What shoes? Dry conditions, muddy conditions, but then it's heavier. How much food do I need to take? Now, it might sound like very small details. Remember, you will be carrying your backpack with you for the next 30 hours, so it does matter. Realize also that there is no perfect solution.

2:35If conditions change quickly, and they can do, your perfect choice might actually prove to be really wrong on the way. The only thing you can do is adapt and keep going. You can't just sit down and just cry, like, what did I do? What did I do? No, no. You have to keep going and adapt and do with what you have. Winning on the long run requires you to accept all those setbacks and trade-offs and keep going. Our path to solving climate change is actually going to be quite similar. Climate change is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases inside the atmosphere. To stop climate change, we have to stop emitting.

3:10We know what to do. Currently, we are emitting about 57 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, mainly because of our use of fossil fuels. Let me give you a sense of the scale. Let's look at the worst fossil fuel, coal. Last year alone, we burned about 9 billion tons of coal. This is a number which is really hard to grasp, so let me help you. You have all seen pictures of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, I guess. This is about 140 meters high. In the world, we burn a volume of coal equivalent to that pyramid every five hours. This is gigantic, and this number has to go down to zero as quickly as possible.

3:52What does that mean? That means we have to scale and develop an all-new energy system as fast as possible. So, we know where we need to go. We also need to know how fast we need to get there, as fast as possible. Now, really, faster would be better, but probably not possible. We have decades of scientific research telling us the consequences of getting there late will be. Every tenth of a degree of additional global warming is going to significantly increase the amount of human suffering. Turns out, we also have most of the solutions we need to divide our emissions by two in the next 10 years.

4:27electric vehicles, solar, wind, heat pumps, insulating our arms, stop eating so much meat, stop cutting forests. Start, finish. Pretty simple, right? Well, as with trail running, the path to get there will be really torturous, will be full of challenges and setbacks, and we have to deal with that. Let me walk you through a couple of examples to make it clear. I have been using this running metaphor, so let's just keep moving and let's look at the transport system. Road transport accounts for about 12 % of global emissions. Electrifying cars and trucks is a great way to stop using oil to move people and stuff around.

5:06And actually, progress in batteries and technologies allow us to now have electric vehicles which are comparable to our petrol cars in terms of range and very soon in terms of cost. So, easy solution, right? Take all the cars, replace them by similar electric cars. A medium-sized car for medium-sized car, a pickup for a pickup. A drop-in solution, really. Job done. We are good. Well, there's one more thing, though. There are currently 1.4 billion cars in the world, and this is how many cities look like. Congested, polluted, noisy, really not nice for pedestrians, and totally not adapted to climate change.

5:47If the rest of the world was to use cars like Americans and Europeans do, we would need much more cars in the future. Is that desirable? More importantly, is that even sustainable? Electric cars are the future of cars. Yes. Are cars the future of sustainable mobility? Okay, but now we have an alternative solution, right? Let's transform our cities. Let's make them nice for pedestrians. Let's build them around pedestrians. Let's develop public transport, trams, metros, buses. Let's make them adapted to climate change. Yes, this might be the thing to do in the long run, but this is going to take a long time because we are talking about big infrastructure.

6:28So here's a bit of a trade-off. Reducing emissions on the short term through electric cars might not be the thing you want to do in the long term. And this is one of those many trade-offs we will see over and over again. Okay, electric car it is then, in the short term. What type of car are we talking about? Walk around the city, and what you see quite often are big metallic monsters with four wheels. This is what we call cars. Cars are actually getting bigger and bigger. Electric vehicles are pushing up the trend. Let me give you an example which will talk to you. The iconic Volkswagen Golf. Between the time it was first released in 1974 and its latest version this year, its weight has almost doubled.

7:08A Ford F-150, the most popular car in the U.S., weighs about two tons. Its electric version, 2.7 tons. Do you know how much an average human weighs? about 62 kilos, so a bit less than that. Building so many cars comes at a cost. They need metals for their batteries, copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel. Those metals need to be mined. Mining has very strong environmental impact. It affects local communities. And in most cases, it doesn't even benefit the producing countries. Yet, getting those metals is actually going to help us reduce emissions globally. And climate change is a global issue. Another one of those trailers.

7:49And I'm not saying we should just simply mine our way out of climate change. Not at all. First of all, we will actually need less mining in the future than we need now. Remember those 9 billion tons of coal we are burning every year? And we can and we must improve mining practices. We must decrease environmental impacts and make sure local communities are benefiting more. But still, the more cars we need, the bigger they are, the more metals we need. Making it easier for customers to adopt big cars actually pushes the constraints on the supply chain. Here we go again on our tertiary path across climate change.

8:23This approach is showing some positive effect, though. Last year, in Norway, almost all cars sold were electric or hybrid. In 2023, in the world, 18 % of new cars sold were electric, and this number is increasing quite quickly, helped by a lot of enabling policies, so we are progressing. Yet, it will take a long time to transform the system because of the number of cars we are. And indeed, if you look around you, only 2 % to 3 % of cars are electric right now. Those trade-offs will happen all across all the systems we can think of. Think about electricity. Are renewables perfect? No, they are not.

8:59But this is what we can scale the fastest. They are getting cheaper and cheaper. So we need to accelerate and deploy them even faster. We cannot just sit and wait for the perfect solution like nuclear fusion to happen. We don't have the time for that. We need to do with what we have and get going as fast as possible. If we make mistakes, we'll learn along the way and we'll adapt. As we've tried running, it's important to keep our eyes on the prize, keep moving in the short term while thinking about the long term. When I start a long-distance race, I don't start by saying, hey, 100 kilometers to go, 99 kilometers to go, that would be killing me.

9:34I have a plan. I start by going to the next checkpoint, which is typically four or five hours away. I go there, I refuel, assess how I feel, and then I go to the next one. I know that I'm getting closer and closer to the finish point. I also know that I will have to adapt my pace depending on how I feel. My body might hurt. Believe me, it does hurt a lot. I might also have to adapt to the conditions which I've changed. So I have to do with all of that. I do know that it's pretty rare that my perfect plan actually works accordingly. So many cases I need to adapt. You might think it's because you're not too good at it.

10:10Yeah, you might have a point. I also know the first 10 kilometers are going to be much easier than the last 10 kilometers. Same is with our climate journey. We might have an idealized path or scenario, but we have to make do with the reality of the situation and the scale of the challenge. Not accepting this increases our risk of failing at stabilizing the climate. I don't think this is a risk we can take. Now, you might ask at this point, okay, how would success look like? Well, at the end of a long-distance race, you see the finish line, you sprint, or you pretend to sprint. You cross the line, you're happy, you made it, you're proud.

10:49Bravo! All those months of training have paid off. Then you realize you're exhausted, you can hardly walk, you struggle to get to your room and take a shower, and the next day you look like a 90-year-old trying to get out of bed. Is that how we are going to feel after completing that gigantic transition? Well, I don't know. Let's try and find out. In the meantime, let's not have perfect be the enemy of the good. We need to get moving quickly and accept all the setbacks, challenges, and trade-offs along the way. This might be annoying. This might be frustrating. This might be upsetting. I just don't see any other way.

11:24Thank you very much. Thank you.

11:32That was Greg DeTemmerman at TED Countdown's Dilemma event in Brussels. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faze Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. Thank you.