Thats why the best way to be green is to make it so that not only is it MORALLY correct, but it's beneficial to their bottom line in the long run.

When people realize that both of their needs can be met by accomplishing something, even if they could care less about the other group, it does a great job at unifying people together.

-David Ahlport

 (Damn the 50 character comment headline limit!)

Interesting clip--lots to respond to.  I'd rather hear Elvis Costello's version of this talk by the title above, but I don't think TED is ready for that kind of plain speaking.

Because this is Grist, let's start by noting that he never mentions the way we use energy, the defining way in which we act on and in our environment and the underlying basis of all our supposed complexity.

That is why I think that the nonzero hypothesis is not proven at all, and actually isn't that useful:  Wright overlooks that what he sees as an increase in social complexity is really just a plot of energy intensity (and, necessarily, energy waste).  

"Society," from beehives to walled cities to Hong Kong are all, in a very real sense, just better ways to increase energy throughput; in the human societies, so that the share kept by those who follow his "business class morality" keeps getting larger, for energy is wealth.

Truly, that's the essential point he seems to have overlooked in trying to explain how we wind up more and more complex.  

Simply put, energy is wealth.  For going on 10,000 years now we've figured out how to tap vast stores of wealth that were put into trust millions and millions of years ago  and we've increased in social complexity in direct proportion to the rate at which we've tapped the energy (i.e., to which we have overspent our annual wealth allotment by spending the allotment of 400 years).

I don't think we can say anything about whether history has a direction, because so far all we've seen (and, by definition, by the time we get to history, we're pretty far along in the social complexity dept.)  is the apparent complexity of an oil-rush boom town, with its mesmerizing array of bright shiny lights and forest of tall towers, etc.  The question is, what happens when the energy party stops?  Did we really "advance" up some moral complexity ladder, or were we just really loud and boisterous while the music was playing.

====
( This is true even at the molecular level, because most chemicals are active precisely to the extent that they create conditions where favorable reactions can occur, favorable being those that allow molecules to reach lower overall energy states -- to release stored energy, in other words.

So at every scale from the molecular to the astronomical, the quality and availability of energy (and the nature of the losses that must occur for that energy to be used) determines our fortunes.

 This footnote discussion does not necessarily hold below the molecular level, where it appears that atoms can persist, with electrons whirling about -- or maybe not -- for billions of years without the addition of outside energy.  I've forgotten what quantum mechanics I once probably just didn't understand, so I limit the discussion to the level above that, where you can understand the world without the aid of quantum electrodynamics.)

The 5% Project