Name: The Paris Accord: What is it? And What Does it All Mean?
Uploaded: 2017-06-04T17:14:15.000Z
Duration: 5 min 54 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...

So, the United States is pulling out of the Paris Climate...

Let's be honest - There's a really good chance that you have a strong opinion on the Paris agreement,

... And an EVEN BETTER chance you don't really know what it is.

There are too many things to know, so quick timeline...

Ancient plants covered the earth, converting the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the air into Oxygen(O2)

These plants then die, and they create massive mats of organic materials that get buried.

Those organic materials then hang around under the earth getting heated up and smushed and form

energy-dense hydrocarbons, also called "fossil fuels".

Notice how cardohydrate and hydrocarbon sound similar.

Thomas Edison builds the first centralized coal-fired powerplant.

We've been using coal for a long time before that, of course

but I'm starting here because we have to start somewhere.

For the next 100 years, fossil fuels brought tremendous growth and

increases in quality life, specifically in Europe and America,

where the vast majority of fossil fuels were burned.

Decades pass. The benefits of fossil fuels eventually begin to spread

It's great, for the most part, except that all that CO2 that was locked up in fossil fuels for

billions of years is now being re-released

and CO2 is really good at letting visible light pass through it

back up by the earth does not pass right through it.

So the earth's atmosphere and oceans start having more energy in them

And while fossil fuels give us remarkable abilities to do cool and beautiful things

rely on a stable climate, for massive farming operations

I mean all of the cities that people live in.)

We want to keep the average warming of the earth below

2 degrees Celcius because, if we don't, it's

But the problem is no one country can handle this because even the biggest contributors, the U.S. and China, together make up less than

agree to make changes or no one benefits.

that have admitted basically zero greenhouse gases

are going to be the ones that are most negatively affected by this CO2

that's been released by the wealthy countries

because they have more food and water insecurity,

less access to good medicine, and less infrastructure.

No! Don't grow your economy using the same dirty fuels and techniques

Instead! Buy these solar panels from us! With the money you don't have!

Also, like, since any country that keeps burning its usual will have

a competitive advantage in industry. (So, facing climate change) everyone agrees that everyone needs to agree,

With advice from scientists, the countries altogether determined

how quickly the Earth needs to stop emitting greenhouse gases

And then, based on how developed each country is, how many people they have,

and how much they're currently emitting, they divvied up that responsibility.

There was no enforcement for meeting that goal, but there was a goal.

And, some countries that had already benefitted a lot from the last hundred years

of releasing carbon dioxide even threw in some money:

billions of dollars to aid countries that hadn't benefitted from that,

to help them grow with less reliance on fossil fuels.

Every country agreed to their own path forward, and every country was responsible

for figuring out how to meet their goals,

subsidizing renewables, regulating businesses,

changing people's behavior through education, or

And if countries don't meet their target?

This is an agreement between nations that there is a problem,

A treaty that only encourages countries to reduce

how much better off we'll be if we keep temperatures

from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, and

we don't know precisely how much we need to reduce

greenhouse gas emissions to hit that target.

incentivizing these changes now, globally,

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The Paris Accord: What is it? And What Does it All Mean?

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pretend

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infrastructure