WEBVTT

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This is my grandfather.

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And this is my son.

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My grandfather taught me to work with wood

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when I was a little boy,

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and he also taught me the idea that

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if you cut down a tree
to turn it into something,

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honor that tree's life
and make it as beautiful

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as you possibly can.

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My little boy reminded me

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that for all the technology
and all the toys in the world,

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sometimes just a small block of wood,

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if you stack it up tall,

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actually is an incredibly inspiring thing.

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These are my buildings.

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I build all around the world

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out of our office
in Vancouver and New York.

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And we build buildings
of different sizes and styles

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and different materials,
depending on where we are.

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But wood is the material
that I love the most,

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and I'm going to tell you
the story about wood.

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And part of the reason
I love it is that every time

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people go into my buildings that are wood,

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I notice they react
completely differently.

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I've never seen anybody walk
into one of my buildings

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and hug a steel or a concrete column,

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but I've actually seen
that happen in a wood building.

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I've actually seen
how people touch the wood,

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and I think there's a reason for it.

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Just like snowflakes,
no two pieces of wood

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can ever be the same anywhere on Earth.

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That's a wonderful thing.

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I like to think that wood

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gives Mother Nature
fingerprints in our buildings.

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It's Mother
Nature's fingerprints that make

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our buildings connect us to nature
in the built environment.

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Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest

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that grows to 33 stories tall.

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Down the coast here
in California, the redwood forest

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grows to 40 stories tall.

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But the buildings
that we think about in wood

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are only four stories tall
in most places on Earth.

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Even building codes actually limit
the ability for us to build

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much taller than four
stories in many places,

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and that's true here in the United States.

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Now there are exceptions,

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but there needs to be some exceptions,

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and things are going
to change, I'm hoping.

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And the reason I think that way is that

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today half of us live in cities,

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and that number is going
to grow to 75 percent.

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Cities and density mean that our buildings

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are going to continue to be big,

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and I think there's a role
for wood to play in cities.

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And I feel that way
because three billion people

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in the world today,
over the next 20 years,

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will need a new home.

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That's 40 percent of the world
that are going to need

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a new building built for them
in the next 20 years.

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Now, one in three people
living in cities today

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actually live in a slum.

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That's one billion people
in the world live in slums.

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A hundred million people
in the world are homeless.

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The scale of the challenge for architects

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and for society to deal with in building

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is to find a solution
to house these people.

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But the challenge is,
as we move to cities,

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cities are built in these two materials,

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steel and concrete,
and they're great materials.

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They're the materials of the last century.

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But they're also materials
with very high energy

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and very high greenhouse gas
emissions in their process.

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Steel represents about three percent

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of man's greenhouse gas emissions,

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and concrete is over five percent.

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So if you think about that, eight percent

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of our contribution
to greenhouse gases today

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comes from those two materials alone.

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We don't think about it
a lot, and unfortunately,

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we actually don't even think
about buildings, I think,

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as much as we should.

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This is a U.S. statistic
about the impact of greenhouse gases.

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Almost half of our greenhouse gases
are related to the building industry,

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and if we look at energy,
it's the same story.

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You'll notice that transportation's sort
of second down that list,

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but that's the conversation
we mostly hear about.

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And although a lot
of that is about energy,

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it's also so much about carbon.

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The problem I see is that, ultimately,

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the clash of how we solve that problem

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of serving those three billion people
that need a home,

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and climate change,
are a head-on collision

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about to happen, or already happening.

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That challenge means that we have
to start thinking in new ways,

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and I think wood is going
to be part of that solution,

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and I'm going to tell
you the story of why.

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As an architect, wood
is the only material,

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big material, that I can build with

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that's already grown
by the power of the sun.

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When a tree grows in the forest
and gives off oxygen

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and soaks up carbon dioxide,

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and it dies and it falls
to the forest floor,

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it gives that carbon dioxide back
to the atmosphere or into the ground.

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If it burns in a forest fire,
it's going to give that carbon

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back to the atmosphere as well.

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But if you take that wood
and you put it into a building

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or into a piece of furniture
or into that wooden toy,

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it actually has an amazing capacity

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to store the carbon and provide
us with a sequestration.

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One cubic meter of wood will store

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one tonne of carbon dioxide.

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Now our two solutions
to climate are obviously

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to reduce our emissions and find storage.

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Wood is the only major
material building material

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I can build with that actually
does both those two things.

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So I believe that we have

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an ethic that the Earth grows our food,

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and we need to move
to an ethic in this century

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that the Earth should grow our homes.

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Now, how are we going to do that

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when we're urbanizing at this rate

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and we think about wood
buildings only at four stories?

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We need to reduce the concrete
and steel and we need

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to grow bigger,
and what we've been working on

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is 30-story tall buildings made of wood.

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We've been engineering
them with an engineer

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named Eric Karsh who works with me on it,

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and we've been doing this new work because

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there are new wood products
out there for us to use,

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and we call them mass timber panels.

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These are panels made with young trees,

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small growth trees, small pieces of wood

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glued together to make
panels that are enormous:

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eight feet wide, 64 feet long,
and of various thicknesses.

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The way I describe this
best, I've found, is to say

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that we're all used
to two-by-four construction

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when we think about wood.

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That's what people jump
to as a conclusion.

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Two-by-four construction
is sort of like the little

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eight-dot bricks of Lego
that we all played with as kids,

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and you can make all kinds
of cool things out of Lego

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at that size, and out of two-by-fours.

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But do remember when you were a kid,

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and you kind of sifted
through the pile in your basement,

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and you found that big
24-dot brick of Lego,

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and you were kind of like,

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"Cool, this is awesome. I can
build something really big,

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and this is going to be great."

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That's the change.

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Mass timber panels
are those 24-dot bricks.

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They're changing the scale
of what we can do,

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and what we've developed
is something we call FFTT,

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which is a Creative Commons solution

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to building a very flexible system

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of building with these large
panels where we tilt up

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six stories at a time if we want to.

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This animation shows you
how the building goes together

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in a very simple way, but these
buildings are available

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for architects and engineers
now to build on

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for different cultures in the world,

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different architectural
styles and characters.

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In order for us to build safely,

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we've engineered these
buildings, actually,

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to work in a Vancouver context,

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where we're a high seismic zone,

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even at 30 stories tall.

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Now obviously, every time I bring this up,

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people even, you know, here
at the conference, say,

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"Are you serious? Thirty stories?
How's that going to happen?"

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And there's a lot of really
good questions that are asked

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and important questions
that we spent quite a long time

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working on the answers
to as we put together

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our report and the peer reviewed report.

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I'm just going to focus on a few of them,

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and let's start with fire,
because I think fire

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is probably the first one that you're
all thinking about right now.

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Fair enough.

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And the way I describe it is this.

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If I asked you to take
a match and light it

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and hold up a log and try
to get that log to go on fire,

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it doesn't happen, right?
We all know that.

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But to build a fire, you kind
of start with small pieces

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of wood and you work your way up,

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and eventually you can
add the log to the fire,

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and when you do add the log
to the fire, of course,

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it burns, but it burns slowly.

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Well, mass timber panels,
these new products

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that we're using, are much like the log.

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It's hard to start them
on fire, and when they do,

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they actually burn
extraordinarily predictably,

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and we can use fire science
in order to predict

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and make these buildings
as safe as concrete

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and as safe as steel.

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The next big issue, deforestation.

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Eighteen percent of our contribution

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to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide

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is the result of deforestation.

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The last thing we want
to do is cut down trees.

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Or, the last thing we want to do
is cut down the wrong trees.

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There are models for sustainable forestry

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that allow us to cut trees properly,

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and those are the only trees appropriate

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to use for these kinds of systems.

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Now I actually think that these ideas

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will change the economics
of deforestation.

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In countries with deforestation issues,

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we need to find a way to provide

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better value for the forest

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and actually encourage
people to make money

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through very fast growth cycles --

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10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees
that make these products

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and allow us to build at this scale.

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We've calculated a 20-story building:

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We'll grow enough wood in North
America every 13 minutes.

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That's how much it takes.

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The carbon story here
is a really good one.

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If we built a 20-story building
out of cement and concrete,

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the process would result
in the manufacturing

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of that cement and 1,200
tonnes of carbon dioxide.

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If we did it in wood, in this solution,

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we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes,

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for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes.

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That's the equivalent of about 900 cars

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removed from the road in one year.

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Think back to that three billion people

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that need a new home,

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and maybe this
is a contributor to reducing.

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We're at the beginning
of a revolution, I hope,

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in the way we build, because this
is the first new way

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to build a skyscraper
in probably 100 years or more.

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But the challenge is changing
society's perception

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of possibility, and it's a huge challenge.

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The engineering is, truthfully,
the easy part of this.

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And the way I describe it is this.

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The first skyscraper, technically --

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and the definition of a skyscraper is 10
stories tall, believe it or not —

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but the first skyscraper
was this one in Chicago,

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and people were terrified to walk
underneath this building.

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But only four years after it was built,

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Gustave Eiffel was building
the Eiffel Tower,

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and as he built the Eiffel Tower,

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he changed the skylines
of the cities of the world,

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changed and created a competition

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between places like New
York City and Chicago,

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where developers started building
bigger and bigger buildings

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and pushing the envelope
up higher and higher

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with better and better engineering.

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We built this model in New York, actually,

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as a theoretical model on the campus

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of a technical university soon to come,

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and the reason we picked this site

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to just show you what these
buildings may look like,

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because the exterior can change.

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It's really just the structure
that we're talking about.

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The reason we picked it is because this
is a technical university,

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and I believe that wood is the most

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technologically advanced
material I can build with.

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It just happens to be that Mother
Nature holds the patent,

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and we don't really feel
comfortable with it.

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But that's the way it should be,

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nature's fingerprints
in the built environment.

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I'm looking for this opportunity

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to create an Eiffel Tower
moment, we call it.

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Buildings are starting
to go up around the world.

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There's a building in London
that's nine stories,

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a new building that just
finished in Australia

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that I believe is 10 or 11.

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We're starting to push the height
up of these wood buildings,

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and we're hoping, and I'm hoping,

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that my hometown of Vancouver
actually potentially

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announces the world's tallest
at around 20 stories

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in the not-so-distant future.

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That Eiffel Tower moment
will break the ceiling,

00:11:48.268 --> 00:11:49.935
these arbitrary ceilings of height,

00:11:49.959 --> 00:11:52.627
and allow wood buildings
to join the competition.

00:11:52.651 --> 00:11:54.592
And I believe the race is ultimately on.

00:11:54.616 --> 00:11:56.042
Thank you.

00:11:56.066 --> 00:12:01.328
(Applause)