TedTest

From the Ted Talk by Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk

Unscramble the Blue Letters

I just did something I've never done before. I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South flrodia who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the boat we were on, by the way. The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff — the birds, the turtles, the dopnlhis, the grloauoms stuff. They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that euvneatlly gets eaetn by the big stuff. And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and destarpniss can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life ddenpes on it. So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still uinlodnfg. It's still working its way up the food caihn. Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. Rachel Carson — the godmother of meodrn environmentalism — warned us about this very thing back in 1962. She pointed out that the "control men" — as she called them — who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the icnetss, not the birds. But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on gurbs, that rniobs eat lots of womrs now stuataerd with DDT. And so, robin eggs failed to hctah, songbirds died en msase, towns fell silent. Thus the title "Silent Spring." I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm caniadan, and I can draw no ascenratl ties. And I think what it is is I don't think we have flluy come to tmres with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. After telling ourselves for so long that our tloos and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it — "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "junk shot" — the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed — the creesnlessas, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a crlutue, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy strieos about cakewalks and welcome parades. Then, it is years of deadly dmgaae control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. Our financial wizards ruinoltey fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market — the kind that never goes down. And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial eulenqivat of the junk shot — in this case, twohirng massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. We have to figure out why we keep letting this hpapen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gbamle of all — deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate cahnge. Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the ctlmiae debate, on the question of, "What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?" Now a far more relevant question — as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it — is, "What if those seiiscttns are right?" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle — the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for peerfct scientific certainty. Better to err on the side of caution. More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the pilbuc that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. But climate policy in the wltahey wolrd — to the extent that such a thing exists — is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis — finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: "What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050?" Or we ask, "How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? Can we go with two degrees, three dgeeres, or — where we're currently going — four degrees culesis?" And by the way, the assumption that we can sfaely control the Earth's awesomely coeplmx climate system as if it had a thermostat, mkanig the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right — sort of Goldilocks style — this is pure fatnasy, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thkninig on the science. The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be uetltry overwhelmed by feedback loops. So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the piorecus? A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like "greed." This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of meony. Another explanation that you often hear for resnekcselss is hubris. And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old beknar taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. And you actually don't have a lot of options. You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it — you gamed the system — or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. Now both of these options — the boy genius and the sacmemr — are going to make you vastly ondceorivfnet and therefore more prone to taking even begigr risks in the future. By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a paluqe on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. Don't feel aehasmd. Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a pcirute of Icarus hnigang from the wall, because — maybe not that one in particular — but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. So we have greed, we've got overconfidence/hubris, but since we're here at teodmewn, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. Now I'm not going to baelobr this point, but stidues do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reekscls rsiks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, wemon tend not to sffeur from overconfidence in the same way that men do. So it tnrus out that being paid less and praised less has its usdieps — for society at least. The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gfietd, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. And this problem — call it the "perils of privilege" — bgrnis us cesolr, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. Because none of us — at least in the gbloal nroth — neither men nor women, are fully epemxt from this message. Here's what I'm talking about. Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the gpris of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature — the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the cuonqirneg pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. For instance, I stumbled across this asredevneitmt outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap motehr Nature in the face." And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola — that's just a bonus. I'm showing it because — they're not a sponsor, are they? — because, in its own way, this is a casrs version of our founding srtoy. We saleppd Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so rienelist that we can never make a dent in her abundance. Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total weatr volume." In other wdros, the ocean is big; she can take it. It is this ueiylnrndg assumption of lleeimisstnss that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more — more water, more land, more untapped resources. A new bubble will replace the old one. A new tehlocgony will come along to fix the mesess we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic setsym, one that cannot survive without pueprteal growth and an undnieng supply of new frontiers. Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. The Earth always did have limits. They were just beyond our sights. And now we are hitting those limits on mlulitpe fronts. I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a fzerny and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? Now on the one hand, exhorting us to "drill, baby, drill," because God put those roseruecs into the ground in order for us to eliopxt them, and on the other, gniylrog in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. Ignore those creeping freas that we have finally hit the wall. There are still no limits. There will always be another frontier. So stop worrying and keep shnoippg. Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her rteialy TV show. In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with bnesusis as uausl. This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. The truth is that we have already eeaxhustd so much of the elisay accessible fossil fleus that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, iidcnnlug the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. It means large-scale huyiradlc fracking for gas and massive strip-mining oireopntas for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. And most controversially, it means the tar sands. I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar sadns, which this year are pjreecotd to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it skpeas to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. The oil is not liquid. You can't just dlril a hole and pump it out. Tar sand's oil is solid, mexid in with the soil. So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into msiavse toxic tlaiing podns. That's very bad news for lcoal indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. Now looking at these iagmes, it's difficult to gasrp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of enlgnad. I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever bulit. That's a person down there by the wheel. My point is that this is not oil drilling. It's not even minnig. It is terrestrial skinning. Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conivontaenl oil in cnadaa. How else to describe this, but as a form of mass iinsnaty? Just when we know we need to be laennrig to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only sntad to look at it for so long. As Jared dnoamid and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the eacxt moment when they should be putting on the brakes. The problem is that our master-narrative has an awsner for that too. At the very last minute, we are going to get seavd just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. But, of course, our secular religion is technology. Now, you may have nocietd more and more hdlneeias like these. The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the palent. The wackiest plan — and I'm not making this up — would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. So, svnoilg the problem of pollution with more pollution. Think of it as the uttalime junk shot. The serious scientists ivvnelod in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could ulseanh. Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. An escape hatch has been rhecead. A new frontier has been found. Most ialmtptrony, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. For other people, it's a guy with a geradn hose. We badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kdins of risks — risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action — like hundreds of young ppleoe willing to get atreersd, blocking drtiy power ptlnas or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories that raelpce that linear narrative of endless growth with cculriar narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it karma, call it pyhiscs, action and reaction, call it precaution — the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be reiskd for any pfirot. Thank you. (apsaulpe)

Open Cloze

I just did something I've never done before. I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South _______ who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the boat we were on, by the way. The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff — the birds, the turtles, the ________, the _________ stuff. They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that __________ gets _____ by the big stuff. And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and ___________ can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life _______ on it. So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still _________. It's still working its way up the food _____. Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. Rachel Carson — the godmother of ______ environmentalism — warned us about this very thing back in 1962. She pointed out that the "control men" — as she called them — who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the _______, not the birds. But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on _____, that ______ eat lots of _____ now _________ with DDT. And so, robin eggs failed to _____, songbirds died en _____, towns fell silent. Thus the title "Silent Spring." I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm ________, and I can draw no _________ ties. And I think what it is is I don't think we have _____ come to _____ with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. After telling ourselves for so long that our _____ and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it — "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "junk shot" — the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed — the ____________, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a _______, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy _______ about cakewalks and welcome parades. Then, it is years of deadly ______ control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. Our financial wizards _________ fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market — the kind that never goes down. And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial __________ of the junk shot — in this case, ________ massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. We have to figure out why we keep letting this ______, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes ______ of all — deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate ______. Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the _______ debate, on the question of, "What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?" Now a far more relevant question — as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it — is, "What if those __________ are right?" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle — the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for _______ scientific certainty. Better to err on the side of caution. More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the ______ that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. But climate policy in the _______ _____ — to the extent that such a thing exists — is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis — finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: "What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050?" Or we ask, "How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? Can we go with two degrees, three _______, or — where we're currently going — four degrees _______?" And by the way, the assumption that we can ______ control the Earth's awesomely _______ climate system as if it had a thermostat, ______ the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right — sort of Goldilocks style — this is pure _______, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic ________ on the science. The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be _______ overwhelmed by feedback loops. So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the ________? A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like "greed." This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of _____. Another explanation that you often hear for ____________ is hubris. And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old ______ taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. And you actually don't have a lot of options. You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it — you gamed the system — or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. Now both of these options — the boy genius and the _______ — are going to make you vastly _____________ and therefore more prone to taking even ______ risks in the future. By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a ______ on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. Don't feel _______. Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a _______ of Icarus _______ from the wall, because — maybe not that one in particular — but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. So we have greed, we've got overconfidence/hubris, but since we're here at ________, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. Now I'm not going to _______ this point, but _______ do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking ________ _____ than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, _____ tend not to ______ from overconfidence in the same way that men do. So it _____ out that being paid less and praised less has its _______ — for society at least. The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are ______, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. And this problem — call it the "perils of privilege" — ______ us ______, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. Because none of us — at least in the ______ _____ — neither men nor women, are fully ______ from this message. Here's what I'm talking about. Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the _____ of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature — the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the __________ pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. For instance, I stumbled across this _____________ outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap ______ Nature in the face." And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola — that's just a bonus. I'm showing it because — they're not a sponsor, are they? — because, in its own way, this is a _____ version of our founding _____. We _______ Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so _________ that we can never make a dent in her abundance. Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total _____ volume." In other _____, the ocean is big; she can take it. It is this __________ assumption of _____________ that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more — more water, more land, more untapped resources. A new bubble will replace the old one. A new __________ will come along to fix the ______ we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic ______, one that cannot survive without _________ growth and an ________ supply of new frontiers. Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. The Earth always did have limits. They were just beyond our sights. And now we are hitting those limits on ________ fronts. I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a ______ and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? Now on the one hand, exhorting us to "drill, baby, drill," because God put those _________ into the ground in order for us to _______ them, and on the other, ________ in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. Ignore those creeping _____ that we have finally hit the wall. There are still no limits. There will always be another frontier. So stop worrying and keep ________. Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her _______ TV show. In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with ________ as _____. This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. The truth is that we have already _________ so much of the ______ accessible fossil _____ that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, _________ the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. It means large-scale _________ fracking for gas and massive strip-mining __________ for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. And most controversially, it means the tar sands. I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar _____, which this year are _________ to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it ______ to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. The oil is not liquid. You can't just _____ a hole and pump it out. Tar sand's oil is solid, _____ in with the soil. So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into _______ toxic _______ _____. That's very bad news for _____ indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. Now looking at these ______, it's difficult to _____ the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of _______. I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever _____. That's a person down there by the wheel. My point is that this is not oil drilling. It's not even ______. It is terrestrial skinning. Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce ____________ oil in ______. How else to describe this, but as a form of mass ________? Just when we know we need to be ________ to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only _____ to look at it for so long. As Jared _______ and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the _____ moment when they should be putting on the brakes. The problem is that our master-narrative has an ______ for that too. At the very last minute, we are going to get _____ just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. But, of course, our secular religion is technology. Now, you may have _______ more and more _________ like these. The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the ______. The wackiest plan — and I'm not making this up — would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. So, _______ the problem of pollution with more pollution. Think of it as the ________ junk shot. The serious scientists ________ in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could _______. Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. An escape hatch has been _______. A new frontier has been found. Most ___________, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. For other people, it's a guy with a ______ hose. We badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different _____ of risks — risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action — like hundreds of young ______ willing to get ________, blocking _____ power ______ or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories that _______ that linear narrative of endless growth with ________ narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it karma, call it _______, action and reaction, call it precaution — the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be ______ for any ______. Thank you. (________)

Solution

involved
hanging
masse
modern
noticed
local
women
plants
fully
chain
water
depends
ancestral
physics
words
tools
picture
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upsides
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shopping
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slapped
garden
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making
banker
culture
underlying
bigger
profit
mother
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public
florida
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hydraulic
importantly
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mixed
perfect
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glorying
exploit
built
replace
people
terms
sands
utterly
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including
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fears
ashamed
story
massive
routinely
gifted
mining
precious
global
diamond
fantasy
resources
ponds
turns
worms
business
applause
gamble
multiple
saturated
risks
conventional
exhausted
answer
wealthy
technology
glamorous
celsius
advertisement
operations
scientists
stories
grasp
limitlessness
recklessness
dolphins
hatch
throwing
resilient
reality
robins
easily
england
images
grips
canadian
eaten
closer
north
system
solving
eventually
reckless
drill
risked
equivalent
arrested
dispersants
insanity
perpetual

Original Text

I just did something I've never done before. I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the boat we were on, by the way. The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff — the birds, the turtles, the dolphins, the glamorous stuff. They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff. And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it. So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still unfolding. It's still working its way up the food chain. Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. Rachel Carson — the godmother of modern environmentalism — warned us about this very thing back in 1962. She pointed out that the "control men" — as she called them — who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects, not the birds. But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on grubs, that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT. And so, robin eggs failed to hatch, songbirds died en masse, towns fell silent. Thus the title "Silent Spring." I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties. And I think what it is is I don't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it — "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "junk shot" — the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed — the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades. Then, it is years of deadly damage control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market — the kind that never goes down. And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot — in this case, throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all — deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change. Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, "What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?" Now a far more relevant question — as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it — is, "What if those scientists are right?" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle — the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty. Better to err on the side of caution. More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. But climate policy in the wealthy world — to the extent that such a thing exists — is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis — finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: "What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050?" Or we ask, "How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or — where we're currently going — four degrees Celsius?" And by the way, the assumption that we can safely control the Earth's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right — sort of Goldilocks style — this is pure fantasy, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science. The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops. So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the precious? A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like "greed." This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money. Another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris. And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. And you actually don't have a lot of options. You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it — you gamed the system — or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. Now both of these options — the boy genius and the scammer — are going to make you vastly overconfident and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future. By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. Don't feel ashamed. Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall, because — maybe not that one in particular — but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. So we have greed, we've got overconfidence/hubris, but since we're here at TEDWomen, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do. So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides — for society at least. The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. And this problem — call it the "perils of privilege" — brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. Because none of us — at least in the global North — neither men nor women, are fully exempt from this message. Here's what I'm talking about. Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature — the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap Mother Nature in the face." And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola — that's just a bonus. I'm showing it because — they're not a sponsor, are they? — because, in its own way, this is a crass version of our founding story. We slapped Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance. Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." In other words, the ocean is big; she can take it. It is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more — more water, more land, more untapped resources. A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers. Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. The Earth always did have limits. They were just beyond our sights. And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts. I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? Now on the one hand, exhorting us to "drill, baby, drill," because God put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them, and on the other, glorying in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. Ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall. There are still no limits. There will always be another frontier. So stop worrying and keep shopping. Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show. In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with business as usual. This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, including the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. And most controversially, it means the tar sands. I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. The oil is not liquid. You can't just drill a hole and pump it out. Tar sand's oil is solid, mixed in with the soil. So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds. That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. Now looking at these images, it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England. I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever built. That's a person down there by the wheel. My point is that this is not oil drilling. It's not even mining. It is terrestrial skinning. Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada. How else to describe this, but as a form of mass insanity? Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long. As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes. The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too. At the very last minute, we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. But, of course, our secular religion is technology. Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these. The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet. The wackiest plan — and I'm not making this up — would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution. Think of it as the ultimate junk shot. The serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash. Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. An escape hatch has been reached. A new frontier has been found. Most importantly, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. For other people, it's a guy with a garden hose. We badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks — risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action — like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it karma, call it physics, action and reaction, call it precaution — the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit. Thank you. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
mother nature	3
big stuff	2
exit strategy	2
junk shot	2
precautionary principle	2
reckless risks	2
reality tv	2
tv show	2
tar sands	2
endless growth	2
garden hose	2
escape hatch	2

ngrams of length 3

collocation	frequency
reality tv show	2

Important Words

abomination
abundance
accelerator
accessible
accompanying
act
action
actively
advertisement
afford
airport
alarmingly
alberta
aluminum
americas
amount
amounts
analysis
ancestral
answer
apocalypse
applause
archetypal
arctic
area
arrested
ashamed
assessment
assumption
attempt
average
avoid
awesomely
baby
bad
badly
balloons
balls
banker
barrel
based
beauty
belabor
betting
big
bigger
birds
birth
bizarre
black
blocking
boat
bonus
boreal
born
boy
bp
brain
brakes
bright
brightest
brings
bubble
built
burden
burst
business
cakewalks
call
called
calls
camp
canada
canadian
cancer
capitalism
carbon
carelessness
carson
case
catastrophe
caution
cell
celsius
center
ceo
certainty
chain
change
characterized
chosen
circles
circular
city
civilizations
clear
climate
closer
coal
cold
collective
comforting
coming
commit
complex
concerned
confess
confront
conquering
consciously
constantly
contents
continue
continuing
contrary
contributing
control
controversially
conventional
convincing
cooling
country
crass
crazy
create
creeping
crisis
crowd
crude
cultural
culture
damage
day
ddt
deadly
deal
debate
deciding
deepest
degrees
demand
dent
depends
describe
desk
destiny
detonate
diamond
died
difficult
digging
dine
dioxide
direct
dirtiest
dirty
disappeared
disaster
discovered
disparity
dispersants
distinct
dolphins
dominating
downsides
downstream
draw
drawing
drill
drilling
dump
earth
easily
eat
eaten
ecology
economic
economists
economy
effect
effects
eggs
emanating
emissions
emitted
en
endless
energy
england
entered
environment
environmental
environmentalism
equally
equivalent
era
err
escape
escaped
essentially
euphoria
europeans
evelyn
eventually
exact
exacting
exempt
exhausted
exhorting
exists
exit
experience
explain
explanation
explanations
exploit
extent
extreme
face
fact
factor
fading
fail
failed
failure
fairytale
fall
fantasy
fear
fears
feedback
feel
fell
ferocious
fields
fighting
figure
finally
financial
find
finding
firing
fix
flipside
florida
flowing
food
foot
forests
forgot
form
fossil
founding
fox
fracking
frankensteins
frankly
frantically
frenzy
frontier
frontiers
fronts
fuels
fully
fury
future
gamble
gamed
garden
gas
gave
gdp
genius
geoengineering
gifted
give
glamorous
global
glorying
god
godmother
goldilocks
golf
good
grasp
gray
great
greed
greenhouse
greeted
grips
ground
grow
growth
grubs
gulf
gunk
gush
gusher
gutted
guy
hand
hanging
happen
happy
harmed
hatch
hats
hayward
head
headlines
health
hear
heard
heats
helps
heroes
high
highly
history
hit
hitting
holds
hole
hollywood
home
hose
hot
hotter
hours
hubris
huge
human
hundreds
hydraulic
icarus
icy
idea
ignore
images
imaginable
impact
important
importantly
imported
imposing
impossible
improv
including
incredibly
indigenous
industry
inevitably
inexhaustible
insanity
inscribed
insecticides
insects
inspirational
instance
intertwined
intimately
investors
involved
ipc
irreplaceable
irreversible
jared
junk
kansas
karma
keller
kill
kind
kinds
knew
lack
land
landscapes
largest
latest
leaders
learning
left
letting
lie
life
lifestyles
likes
limitlessness
limits
linear
liquid
live
living
local
long
loop
loops
lot
lots
lowering
mad
magically
magnificent
making
manifest
market
mass
masse
massive
meaning
means
meant
mechanistic
media
memorably
men
mention
mere
mess
message
messes
mexico
midst
miles
mind
mining
minute
mit
mixed
modern
moment
money
monochromatic
months
mother
motorola
move
movie
multiple
narrative
narratives
nature
newly
news
north
noticed
number
nurturing
occupied
ocean
oil
oily
operation
operations
optimistic
options
order
overachievers
overconfidence
overconfident
overt
overwhelmed
paid
pain
palin
parades
particle
particles
path
pays
people
percent
perfect
perpetual
person
personally
phone
physicist
physics
phytoplankton
pick
picture
pinpoint
pioneer
place
places
plan
planet
planetary
planning
plants
plaque
plugged
point
pointed
policy
pollution
ponds
pop
popping
popular
possibility
potential
power
practice
praised
precaution
precautionary
precious
precisely
preparing
price
principle
problem
process
produce
produces
profit
projected
prone
proving
public
pump
pumped
pure
put
puts
putting
question
questions
quickly
rachel
range
rapture
rates
ravage
rays
reach
reached
reaction
real
reality
reckless
recklessness
reflect
reject
relation
relevant
relief
religion
remains
remarkable
remind
reminds
renewables
replace
reporting
requires
research
resilient
resources
retell
rid
rip
ripped
risk
risked
riskier
risks
robe
robin
robins
root
routinely
rugged
rule
safe
safely
salvation
sand
sands
sarah
saturated
saved
savior
scale
scammer
science
scientific
scientist
scientists
sea
seas
secular
settling
shifting
shoot
shopping
shot
show
showing
shown
side
sieges
sights
significantly
silent
similar
simply
size
skinning
sky
slamming
slapped
slightly
small
societal
society
soil
solid
solving
songbirds
sort
source
south
space
speaks
spent
spew
sponsor
spring
stakes
stand
stands
states
stop
stories
story
strangest
strategy
stratosphere
stress
striking
studies
studying
stuff
stumbled
style
suddenly
suffer
suicide
sulfates
sulfur
sun
supply
supposedly
supremacy
surface
surgeon
surges
surprise
surprised
survive
suspended
system
tailing
talking
tar
team
techniques
technology
tedtalk
tedwomen
telling
temporarily
tend
terms
terrestrial
terrifying
theory
thermostat
thinking
throwing
ties
time
times
tinged
tiny
tired
tires
title
told
tony
tools
topsoil
total
towns
toxic
trace
tracking
training
trapped
travels
trees
tremendous
triathlon
trucks
truth
turning
turns
turtles
tv
twin
ultimate
underlying
understand
unending
unfolding
united
university
unleash
unleashed
untapped
untested
untouched
upsides
usual
utterly
vast
vastly
verges
version
vessel
victim
vivid
volume
wackiest
wait
wall
warming
warned
wars
washroom
watch
water
watery
waves
weakness
wealth
wealthy
week
wheel
wilderness
win
wind
witness
wizards
women
won
words
work
working
world
worms
worry
worrying
worth
wrong
year
years
young