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Tim Flannery Professor of Science, Maquarie University; Chair, Copenhagen Climate Council; Author, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet Greg Dalton, Vice President of Special Projects, The Commonwealth Club; Founder, Climate One - Moderator Tim Flannery doesn\u2019t do pessimism. Flannery explains the source of his optimism, a major theme of his new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, in this Climate One conversation at the Hoover Theatre, in San Jose. It stems from what he says is a popular misunderstanding of what natural selection actually is. \u201cThis is not a \u2018survival of the fittest world,\u2019\u201d he says, referring to the phrase used as shorthand for Darwin\u2019s perceived worldview. \u201cThis is a world where evolution has spawned extraordinary interrelationships, interactions, and co-evolutionary outcomes.\u201d Over the last 10,000 years humanity has built what Flannery describes as a \u201csuper-organism\u201d \u2013 a level of organization similar to that of ants, termites, or bees. And the glue that holds the super-organism together is the division of labor, interdependence. \u201cThat means,\u201d says Flannery, \u201cthat the survival of the super-organism becomes all-important to us. We can\u2019t afford to back up the planet.\u201d And as \u201cwe form this one great super-organism, where we are all interconnected, we gain the capacity to deal with environmental challenges.\u201d And for the biggest environmental challenge of all, climate change, Flannery sees reason for hope where others despair. Take COP15, the momentous United Nations climate change conference convened in Copenhagen in December 2009. Conventional wisdom holds that COP15 was a failure. Flannery disagrees. \u201cI think it is self-evident it wasn\u2019t a failure,\u201d he says. The meeting was the setting for the largest-ever gathering of heads of state. Countries accounting for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions made reduction pledges. Flannery sees progress across the map. China is a global leader in wind and solar energy, and is preparing to launch regional carbon cap-and-trade systems. India has enacted a small tax on coal and recently launched an aggressive energy efficiency trading scheme. South Korea is spending 2% of GDP on green growth. The European Union raised its 2020 emissions reduction target from 20% to a minimum of 25%. The United States is halfway to reaching its goal of reducing emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. \u201cThe job now for us,\u201d Flannery says, \u201cis to knuckle down and make sure that our countries carry their fair share of the burden. We need to have hope. We need look at things over the right time scale. And we need to re-gather the energy that\u2019s required to carry this further.\u201d This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Historic Hoover Theatre in San Jose, CA on May 4th, 2011\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices