Green Builder Media CEO Sara Gutterman and Sustainability Symposium 2024 speakers Xiye Bastida, Ashlee Piper, Michael Barnard and Jeremy Rifkin preview the eighth annual event, Existential Solutions. Their previews range across climate communication, consumer trust and greenwashing, emerging clean technologies, and the case for rethinking the world's building stock for a warming climate.
00:00:05:08 - 00:00:29:06
Xiye Bastida: There is such a beauty in the fact that we are an intersectional movement, that we are focused on everything. We're focused on litigation, we're focused on climate justice, we're focused on in negotiations. But something that I'm really interested about right now as I'm studying this in school, is the issue of communications, because I think that the climate crisis is a crisis of communication.
00:00:29:06 - 00:00:51:15
Xiye Bastida: And that gap that we have from actually telling the general public what the climate crisis is and where we can do about it. So I will be talking mostly about how movements develop the power of language, what prevents us from acting so that we can get to the other side. And this is something that we employ in almost every single space that we go into.
00:00:51:16 - 00:01:00:04
Xiye Bastida: And I'm excited to share it with all of you. You know, we we I think in language and we change language. We change how we think.
00:01:00:06 - 00:01:46:15
Jon Creyts: When we think about where the world is today, there is a narrative that we're all familiar with that the planet has reached scary tipping points, right? That we've hit up against one and a half degrees, and that we are seeing the consequences of climate change in ever escalating form. I think there's a counter narrative, though, that most people aren't aware of, that we're actually moving faster with solutions than we ever have that are actually growing at a scale well beyond what's what most people are aware of and that are responding to this climate crisis in ways that where we can see solutions emerge to this pressing environmental challenge.
00:01:46:17 - 00:02:12:15
Ashlee Piper: Well, I'm really excited to be at the symposium again this year. I think there's so much to continue to unpack and to learn from each other as we get into 2024. And how did we get to these historically low levels of consumer trust? Is a is a pretty broad question unto itself. But I think it really boils down, especially with younger generations, to the commodification of sustainability.
00:02:12:15 - 00:02:45:02
Ashlee Piper: If we're just talking about low levels of consumer trust around perceived greenwashing or the sustainable cred or value of products and services, we've really have seen a pretty savvy consumer group come up who have become much more well-educated about climate change, not just because the information is more widely accessible out there, but also because this is these are younger generations that are starting to see the physical manifestations of climate change.
00:02:45:04 - 00:03:18:19
Michael Barnard: We're seeing autonomous delivery of electric vehicles. We're seeing vehicles, amazing emergence of electric vehicles and demand management solutions enable us to manage those new demand centers without raising pricing electricity. We're seeing the rise of complete streets and modular developments and building programs globally that are really transforming some of those things, and I'm seeing clearly embodied carbon standards emerging in multiple countries, and, of course, heat pumps with and without thermal storage.
00:03:18:20 - 00:03:22:08
Michael Barnard: Great stuff coming.
00:03:22:10 - 00:03:53:03
Sara Gutterman: Hi, I'm Sarah Gutman, CEO of Green Builder Media, and I am so excited to present the closing session at our eighth Annual Sustainability Symposium 2024 at solutions on the Benefits of environmental, social and Governance. The urgency of climate action, the emerging climate risk disclosure policies and laws that are getting implemented across the country in states like California and at a national level through the Sep.
00:03:53:10 - 00:04:15:03
Sara Gutterman: And then also really understanding how we can get to a net zero embodied carbon built environment. So please join us for that closing session. It will be held from 2 to 3 Eastern Time on April 18th. It's a virtual and a free event, so don't miss it.
00:04:15:05 - 00:04:54:13
Jeremy Rifkin: Crisis creates opportunity all through history. This is the greatest crisis in the history of our species on this planet. We are in an extinction event. The entire infrastructure of this planet is a stranded asset. Our communications, our energy, our mobility, logistics, infrastructure and importantly, our building stock, our buildings alone. There were $320 trillion, and they're all a stranded asset because they were not designed for a climate that's radically warming with the floods, the droughts, the heat waves and the wildfires.
00:04:54:16 - 00:05:32:24
Jeremy Rifkin: So we're going to have to rethink the building stock. And the problem is we don't have a very good playbook, because the playbook we're using is what's taking us to an extinction event. It's the way we relate to nature. It's how we organize our economic life, how we govern ourselves, how we educate our kids. I'm really looking forward to your feedback on some of the new ideas for how we begin to rethink about what it means to have habitat in a world that is changing dramatically, and taking us into a new era in history, from the age of progress to the age of resilience.
00:05:32:28 - 00:05:34:11
Jeremy Rifkin: I look forward to our meeting.