Name: Can YOU Fix Climate Change?
Uploaded: 2022-04-15T01:31:02.000Z
Duration: 15 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Never before in human history have we been richer, more advanced or powerful.

And yet we feel overwhelmed in the face of rapid climate change.

Greenhouse gases trap energy from the Sun and transfer it to our atmosphere.

This leads to warmer winters, harsher summers.

Dry places become drier and wet places wetter.

Countless ecosystems will die while the rising oceans swallow coasts and the cities we build

So why don't we just like… prevent all of that?

The public debate about stopping rapid climate change often focuses on a few key features,

And so the solutions are often simplistic – rows of solar panels, biking to work,

And a huge talking point is personal responsibility.

How YOU should change your lifestyle to prevent rapid climate change, which we will find out

This is one of those videos where we want to encourage you to watch to the end, because

to discuss real doable solutions, we first need to understand

Modern industrial society as we constructed it in the last 150 years, is inherently destructive

Basically everything we do to make our lives easier, safer and more comfortable is making

The food we eat, the streets we walk on, the clothes we wear, the gadgets we use, the way

we move around and the pleasant temperatures we artificially create around us.

While most people know about the serious impact of energy, beef, cars and planes, many major

The emissions leaking out of landfills are as significant as the emissions of all the

More CO2 is released to run our homes than from all cars combined.

And the emissions produced when making a new car is equivalent to building just two metres

So it is nice to switch to electric cars but they won't solve anything if we keep building

Fixing one small part of the industrial system is not enough.

Each of the many different parts needs its own solution and many of them aren't straight

But even where we know what to do, just because a solution exists doesn't mean we are able

There are many gray areas in the fight against rapid climate change, the most prominent one

There is a clear connection between the prosperity of a nation and its carbon emissions.

In other words, richer people tend to cause more emissions.

So the key to fixing climate change is simply for the world's richest to cut back on their

While this would help, it wouldn't make the problem go away.

This is because 63% of global emissions come from low to middle income countries.

Countries where most people are not living extravagantly but are trying to escape poverty

at worst, and achieve a comfortable lifestyle at best.

The unfortunate reality is that, currently, escaping poverty and becoming middle class

So asking developing countries to cut emissions just looks like an attempt to keep them down.

It is very hard to argue that a region should protect their primeval forests and spend money

on solar panels instead of burning wood, when it can't meet basic needs for significant

So, cutting back is not a popular demand, especially if the countries making these demands

got rich by causing environmental damage in the past.

For billions of people, more emissions are a good thing personally.

When we forget about this, we tend to propose unworkable solutions.

8% of CO2 emissions are released by the concrete manufacturing industry.

But right now, concrete is also a cheap and easy way for growing populations in developing

Even rich countries aren't immune from disagreeing about rapid climate change solutions.

Banning coal, gas and oil from the energy mix is slowed down by heated discussions about

Citizens can be strictly against nuclear power but also oppose wind or solar infrastructure

In principle all of these issues can be overcome – but there are things we don't currently

We will soon need to feed 10 billion people, and we don't know how to do that without

Because of the nature of modern food production that requires fertilizers or manure, it is

Rice alone emits so much methane each year that it practically equals the emissions of

What's worse is that the foods we like the most emit the most.

57% of food emissions come from animal-based foods, although they make up only 18% of the

world's calories, and 37% of its protein.

And as people across the world grow richer, they want more meat.

Traditional diets in most cultures were primarily plant based with a little meat on top.

But with the rise of industrial style meat production and factory farming, meat has become

a staple food; a regular indulgence in developed countries and a symbol of status and wealth

Today about 40 percent of the world's habitable land is used for meat production in some form

or another, the size of North and South America combined.

This is land on which we could otherwise allow native ecosystems to regrow, like forests

in the Amazon, and suck carbon out of the atmosphere, but instead most of it is used

The available solutions are uniquely able to make everybody on the political spectrum,

Meat is highly emotional and there are a lot of whataboutism arguments floating around,

like comparing it to the worst sources of emissions.

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Can YOU Fix Climate Change?

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