00:00Well, we're here at the Under 30 Summit, and I'm lucky enough to be joined by G.E.A. Bastida,
00:08who is an environmental activist. Thank you so much for being here and for joining us.
00:12Thank you for having me.
00:13Of course. So the environment is an issue that affects everyone, but it particularly
00:18affects people in disadvantaged communities. Now, however, you have a lot of people who are
00:24very wealthy, also taking a lot of interest in it. And I understand that you're working with
00:30Richard Branson on some things. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing with him?
00:34Yeah. So it was actually very interesting for me to find out that there's billionaires who want to
00:40put their money into climate. And it's contradictory as well, because a lot of people who get to that
00:45position of wealth have done it through things that are hurting the planet. So as a climate activist,
00:50it was a conflicting thing. And then I learned about what this initiative was about, which is
00:55the planetary boundary science. There is a way in which scientists have come up of measuring the
01:00whole health of the planet in nine different boundaries, including ocean, biodiversity,
01:06actual CO2 emissions, things like phosphorus, and things like I start to not understand as
01:12the boundaries go along. And we have reached seven of the nine planetary boundaries, which means we
01:18are out of the safe operating zone. And because of this, we decided that we were going to bring a
01:23group of experts together to be ambassadors of the planetary boundaries, so people would know
01:28what the issue is, and that we have to bring the world back into the safe operating zone.
01:34This group includes people like Jane Goodall, like Sylvia Earle, David Suzuki, former president,
01:41Juan Manuel Santos, former president, Mary Robinson, former head of IMF. I mean, it's a really diverse
01:48group of economists, presidents, Nobel Prize laureates, and climate activists, which is insane
01:53for me to be in that group. And what I've learned is we might disagree on a lot of things, but we need
02:00to agree on the health of the planet. We need to agree what the baseline is, and that we have to come
02:04into a place where we can thrive, not just survive as humans, but thrive. It's given me a lot of
02:11perspective into unlikely partnerships. And Richard Branson has been a really, really big advocate of
02:19building this group so that we can tell the world about the science. And I come from, you know,
02:26in indigenous communities. Science has been a very debatable thing for us, because sometimes scientists
02:32come take knowledge, leave, and it's like extracted. Every medicine that anybody has ever seen or taken
02:39comes from plants, and a lot of people don't know that. So we are talking about how we're changing
02:45the narrative and changing things in science as well, from being very specific in tiny things to
02:51being intersectional. And actually studying things in systems is a lot harder, and we're getting there
02:57now, which makes me excited. Let's go further into technology. Artificial intelligence is changing
03:04the world, and it also demands a tremendous amount of energy, but also presents a lot of opportunities
03:11for people in all sorts of spheres. In the environmental world, how can you use it not just as the butt of the
03:20complaints, but as an opportunity to improve environmental work, to measure things more
03:25effectively? How does it present an opportunity? Yeah. I think from the climate perspective,
03:32every time you hear AI, you think of data centers, you think of energy use, and you think of, you know,
03:38there's a lot of statistics about how asking AI a question uses X amounts of energy. And we can get
03:45looped into that cycle of individual action, which is not helpful because we need systemic change. But
03:51we also get into this point where we're not seeing the potential that technology can actually have
03:56when used properly. AI can be good at identifying what to do with waste, can be good for climate
04:04modeling, giving us more accurate reports on what the weather patterns are going to look like
04:09for early warning systems for communities. If communities knew that a huge flood was going to come
04:14before it displaced 30 million people in Pakistan, what would, how would the response have been
04:21different? So I think we need to be very careful about AI's energy use. It should not be powered at
04:29all in any way by new fossil fuel infrastructure. And a lot of these companies that had net zero targets
04:34are actually going back on those targets because of AI and data centers. And we also need to see at the
04:39same time, the pattern recognition power of AI can be really helpful in our climate goals. And how we
04:45balance those things is the nuance and the types of conversations we need to actually move forward in
04:49our climate conversations because we're just fighting each other. And I was sharing this with
04:54you earlier about how in the United States, the polarization for climate is 45%. It's the most
05:00polarized country in the world on climate and on many other issues. Other countries have a polarization rate
05:06of five, 6% on climate. We cannot move forward if we're just discussing and fighting each other while
05:12the world is getting hotter and hotter. Well, and in some ways, you know, you talk about, for example,
05:17predicting where a flood could go to save hundreds of thousands, millions of people. That's not a
05:24political perspective. That's just, you know, everybody wants those people to be helped. How can you make the
05:32conversation less politically divisive? Are there techniques, tools to make it more palatable to
05:40everyone or maybe to not talk about it in political terms, but to talk about it more in terms of
05:44solutions that, you know, that everybody can agree on? I mean, my perspective on this is that climate is
05:51everything and we're not behaving in that way. Climate is everything that we eat, everything that we wear,
05:57how we move, what we see, like how we turn on our lights and turn them off. It's everything. And so
06:05if we are not seeing it as an interconnected issue where anything can be a solution, we're really losing
06:11out on the big picture. And we're operating in a world that is not, it's like the world of 50 years
06:17ago. We're not operating in our reality today. And that is why we're seeing rising sea levels in cities
06:23like Jakarta where now Indonesia is thinking about moving to the capital. We're seeing Pacific Island
06:27nations really saying we're going to have to become digital nations because we're going to be
06:32underwater. New York City is building a wall for flooding that is actually going to displace water to other
06:38communities in the city like East Harlem. And we cannot just put band-aid solutions on things. We need
06:48true, systemic, holistic solutions. And I think my generation is bringing and sounding that alarm.
06:57And it is an alarm. It has to be one. But it has to be one where we are willing to have an
07:01intergenerational cooperative movement where I'm not judging somebody on the first thing that I know
07:06about them. We need to see each other's potential to be radically collaborative and solve this crisis.
07:12Yeah. Shia, thank you so much for your time.
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