Lucie Pinson works to turn off the tap of financing for fossil fuel expansion and negotiate with banks and insurers on coal, oil and gas exit policies.

People have been grappling with the question of artificial creativity -- alongside the question of artificial intelligence -- for over 170 years. For instance, could we program machines to create high quality original music? And if we do, is it the machine or the programmer that exhibits creativity? Gil Weinberg investigates this creative conund...

Confirmation bias, loss aversion, the halo effect – inherently, humans face obstacles when making rational decisions. In the future, could purely logical cognitive computers help erase these blind spots? Dario Gil explores what the future of cognitive computers looks like and considers the uneasy question: could technology ever replace humans?

As the sun rises over a quiet coral reef, one animal breaks the morning silence. Named for its vibrant scales and beak-like teeth, the parrotfish devours a particularly crunchy breakfast: rocks. Why would any creature take bites out of the seafloor? Mike Gil explores how these quirky and flashy foragers play a key role in defending the essential...

Traditional job interviews are stressful interrogations that can often exclude marginalized populations. Here's how psychologist and entrepreneur Gil Winch says we can rethink hiring, training and onboarding to allow people to show their true potential.

About this event: Ideas worth spreading in the Central Valley of California, central of the world markets in Oil and Agriculture; central to new experiments in high speed rail, education, incarceration, technology and the arts; and central to solutions to issues like redeveloping downtown areas, homelessness, the opioid crisis, and water issues.

About this event: Surinam is a beautifull country, with beautifull people of all nations. Diversity is our lifestyle, since people from all nations where gathered to surinam during slavery and after. Still we are the worlds example to respect each other in our many cultural diffrances. Surinam is unique, it is rich in oil, gold, timber, agri culture and beautifu...

About this event: Between losing many longtime residents from the flood and the growth from the oil patch, Minot has unique opportunities to determine what kind of city it will be. The conference will feature the region’s leading thinkers, innovators, artists, philosophers and entertainers representing such diverse fields as technology, entertainment, entrepr...

Discarded plastic, too often, ends up buried or burned, not recycled (it's just too complicated). But Mike Biddle has found a way to close the loop.

About this event: If you’re looking for a common denominator for this year’s TEDxBinghamtonUniversity speakers – they’re all doers. Each has made his or her mark in very different arenas. But whether it’s the world of finance, corruption, sustainable food sourcing, oil, pornography, discovering your true self or hula-hooping – our speakers have something to say o...

About this event: As always, TEDxTallinn 2014 was high-class and inspiring — we welcomed over a dozen outstanding speakers. You were introduced to wind-powered land rovers, disappearing languages, mathematics, photographers changing the world, ocean-sailing robots which clean oil spills, and even to the Estonian national epic “Kalevipoeg”. Add to that interactive...

A powerful thinker and globe-trotting advisor on sustainability, Louise Fresco says it's time to think of food as a topic of social and economic importance on par with oil -- that responsible agriculture and food consumption are crucial to world stability.

TED Fellow Mike Gil conducts field experiments and builds mathematical models to understand how marine ecosystems function.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a soil and global-change scientist and educator passionate about all things related to the science and beauty of soils.

The Keystone XL pipeline, which has been proposed to transport oil the 1700 miles from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, is something of a Rorschach test in the United States. Advocates of the pipeline believe that it’s the holy-grail project that will create jobs for Americans and ensure the country’s oil independence. Opponents of the pipeline w...

Ian Ritchie

UPS's Julio Gil thinks that technology is flipping the equation on future cities, and that rural may soon become the new urban.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would stretch 1,700 miles from Western Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas. And it has become a touchstone for the bitter fight over America's energy future. Opponents say the pipeline -- designed to bring oil from Canadian tar sands down through the United States -- would further bind future generations to outdat...

It may not appear very lively six feet underground, but a single teaspoon of soil contains more organisms than there are human beings on the planet. From bacteria and algae to fungi and protozoa, soils are home to one quarter of Earth's biodiversity. And perhaps soil's most important inhabitants are its microbes. Carolyn Marshall digs into how s...

Scientist Sylvia Earle (TED Talk: My wish: Protect our oceans) has spent the past five decades exploring the seas. During that time, she's witnessed a steep decline in ocean wildlife numbers -- and a sharp incline in the number of ocean deadzones and oil drilling sites. An original documentary about Earle's life and work premieres today on Netfl...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson "We've run into a giant fracking problem," says TED curator Chris Anderson by way of introducing the next speaker, energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who comes to the stage to talk about methods to solve the energy crisis facing the United States. Or as he puts it, his "alternative to alternative energy" and what...

Chances are, you probably haven’t heard of Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. But this rule, adopted on Monday by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), brings with it the potential for big global change. Section 1504 requires that all oil, gas and mining companies listed in the US dis...

Why learn about methane? Because it could be our chance to make a real dent in global warming, says environmentalist Fred Krupp. Methane, which is created when four hydrogen atoms bond to one atom of carbon, is a molecule that’s lighter than air. It's amazingly useful -- it’s the primary component of natural gas, which generates roughly 22 perc...

Tzeporah Berman is the Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and the international program director of Stand.Earth.

About this event: Africa, believed to be the first home for life on earth. As the continent drift occurred millions of years ago, Africa stood there as a strong and a solid piece of land continuing to inhabit some of the most amazing wildlife, beautiful nature and diversified tribes of people. The continent boasts of land with abundant natural resources like oil,...

At the Afghan Institute of Learning, Sakena Yacoobi provides teacher training to Afghan women, supporting education for girls and boys throughout the country.

A Juan Pablo Sáez Gil le encantan los palídromos. Tanto, que ha escrito un libro que se lee igual de principio al final que del final a principio. En esta charla lúdica nos cuenta sobre la magia de ver las cosas del revés.

About this event: For too long we have lived in a world where short-term fixes are ‘good enough’. Imagine a world where people intentionally designed solutions with the future in mind. Imagine if every company followed a ‘future proofing’ process to minimise possible negative consequences. Can we seize opportunities when they arise and protect our future at the s...

About this event: TEDxCarbonTracker is part of Countdown hosted by TED. The debate will explore the timing of peak fossil fuel demand and what it means for financial markets and geopolitics, touching on topics from two of the Countdown themes: resilient economies and the future of energy. Fossil fuels have enjoyed growth for the last 200 years and until recentl...

In January of 2013, TED Fellow Cesar Harada, inventor of an open-source sailing robot, set sail on a four-month, 14-country round-the-world journey with Unreasonable at Sea, a global innovation accelerator on board a boat. Here, he tells us about how this extraordinary voyage helped crystallize his vision for how his open source sailing robo...