Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Okay, so I try to recycle.

  • I've got my grocery tote bag.

  • I even have solar panels on my roof.

  • But in the back of my mind, I can't help thinking:

  • Does any of this actually make a difference when it comes to climate change?

  • If you read the headlines,

  • you quickly begin to see that climate change is a massive problem.

  • So is my reusable bag really going to change the world?

  • But not everyone feels that way.

  • This is all of my trash from the past four years.

  • Oh, my god!

  • This is Lauren Singer.

  • She runs a website where she gives tips and answers questions about living a zero-waste life.

  • Okay, so you've got tiny little ends and bits and things…

  • Yeah.

  • Are you really telling me that everything else that you use for four years—

  • is—

  • you've found some other use for?

  • Totally, is compostable, infinitely reusable, or 100% easily recyclable.

  • You may look at the extremely eco-friendly way Lauren is living and find it inspiring.

  • Or maybe, like me, you're totally skeptical.

  • But a lot of what she's doing is actually pretty simple.

  • When she wants coffee, she brings her own cup.

  • Or let's say she wants to buy a pastry; she'll put it into a reusable cotton bag.

  • A safety razor instead of plastic ones.

  • There's all this disposable stuff in our lives that we're not even thinking about.

  • And what Lauren's done is find some easy substitutes.

  • Everything else ends up in the jar.

  • This is macaroni-and-cheese packaging,

  • and this was like, four years ago, right when I started.

  • That was, that was my weekend at Dad's house.

  • So these are…

  • Oh, I know what these are.

  • Plastic straws.

  • Hot chocolate.

  • This was a bad day, wasn't it, for you?

  • No, actually someone sent that to me in the mail.

  • These aren't huge trash problems.

  • The EPA isn't up in arms about plastic straws.

  • But you can see how these little bits of waste can really add up.

  • The United States is the No. 1 trash-producing country in the world.

  • If every country lived like the US,

  • we'd need over four Earths to make all the stuff we consume.

  • Do you think little things make a big difference?

  • Totally.

  • If you reduce single-use coffee cups from your routine and you're a daily coffee drinker,

  • that's 365 cups per year.

  • That's not an insignificant change.

  • If every single person did that,

  • that's a massive shift toward a more sustainable future.

  • And good policy can encourage this kind of shift.

  • Take plastic bags.

  • Americans throw away about 100 billion a year.

  • But California is trying to change this.

  • Three communities have found that if you offer a plastic bag for free,

  • 75 percent of people will take it.

  • But if you charge 10 cents for a bag, only 16 percent take it.

  • It's subtle, but this small fee makes people question whether they really need a bag.

  • And it reminds people to bring their own.

  • Communities across the country are beginning to adopt this policy,

  • and it could create a large-scale shift.

  • If New York City had a bag fee,

  • we could save roughly 7 billion plastic bags a year.

  • And without good policy,

  • it can be really hard to do the right thing.

  • Take recycling: in a place like Missoula, Montana, where I live,

  • you can't recycle glass because doing so, it turns out, costs my city too much.

  • I think this is a fundamental flaw of governments and their relationship with businesses.

  • Businesses aren't held accountable for products that they're putting into the waste stream.

  • So they're allowed to sell glass in Montana,

  • where there's no adequate recycling,

  • and completely wipe their hands free

  • and not have to subsidize any infrastructure to adequately recycle their product.

  • So that responsibility for disposing of that product falls on you,

  • as a resident and the government.

  • That is completely unfair.

  • The funny thing is, we used to have a really great system for dealing with glass.

  • After you were done with a bottle, you would just return it.

  • Companies would clean it and use it again and again.

  • Around the 1950s, companies began experimenting with single-use bottles and cans.

  • Lots of other things became single-use too.

  • Like Don Draper here, people were just tossing their garbage wherever.

  • And all this trash started to annoy people.

  • Do you remember that very famous commercial?

  • Of this Native American,

  • he's like, going down a river and there's all this waste, and tear goes down.

  • People start pollution; people can stop it.

  • And it's often credited for quote unquote "cleaning up America"

  • because we were reminded that we need to pick up our trash.

  • You see this commercial every Earth Day,

  • but it was actually funded by a group of companies,

  • many of them from the can and bottle industry.

  • They were worried that states would ban their single-use products

  • because people were getting sick of all the trash.

  • So they created this incredible ad,

  • which is very powerful, which made us pick up trash,

  • which is actually trash that they were creating

  • and selling to us.

  • Yeah

  • And profiting off of

  • It actually shifted.

  • That was the moment.

  • I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't pick up trash.

  • But as far as I can tell,

  • it was the first moment where we shifted this responsibility

  • from the person selling to the person buying.

  • That needs to change really quick.

  • And once it does, we won't even have to talk about providing adequate recycling systems

  • because businesses will create products that are easily and conveniently recyclable

  • because it will make more economic sense for them

  • if that burden is put on the business instead of the consumer and the government.

  • This gets to the heart of the matter.

  • Climate change is a giant problem.

  • We're not going to solve it without government and industry taking action.

  • We live in this complicated web of carbon emissions.

  • I mean, every single thing we do as individuals creates pollution.

  • It's overwhelming.

  • But there's one simple policy that could make going green easier for all of us,

  • and it could have an enormous impact: we could put a price on carbon.

  • Right now, companies can emit as much pollution as they like.

  • We're basically treating our sky like a giant sewer.

  • As long as it's free to pollute,

  • no one's going to stop doing it.

  • You can't just go out there and find one source or one factory, one business,

  • and shut it down and clean up your air.

  • Everybody in a sense is part of the problem.

  • If companies had to pay for the carbon they produce,

  • it would encourage better behavior.

  • This is what California did in 2006.

  • The state set a cap on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions,

  • and they lowered it over the next few years.

  • Companies could either reduce their pollution or pay for carbon allowances.

  • And so far, it's worked.

  • The state is on track to hit its 2020 goal

  • and they are looking to cut emissions by another 40% by 2030.

  • Now, California isn't perfect, but this is a huge reduction in emissions.

  • It's really larger than anything a person could achieve on their own.

  • The fears that were raised by opponents have not come to pass.

  • We've not seen an exodus of industries from California

  • or people unable to drive their cars.

  • And as the state cut emissions,

  • California's economy has actually grown by 12%,

  • outpacing the national average.

  • Going green at this scale isn't an overnight process.

  • People like Mary Nichols have spent decades fighting for better policies.

  • We certainly have enjoyed a lot of political support from all sides.

  • I think that's largely just because the public in California has demanded that

  • clean, healthy air is something that everybody ought to have access to.

  • So individual climate action does matter,

  • in the sense that it creates cultural change.

  • When Lauren makes a video tutorial or shares one of her zero-waste tips on Instagram,

  • it has a social ripple effect.

  • Do you want everyone to live the lifestyle you're living?

  • I would never tell anyone how to live their life.

  • But I'd like to show everyone that there are options.

  • That the way that we're told we have to live in this hyper-consumeristic way

  • isn't the only way we have to live in order to live in a modern world with modern luxuries.

  • Folks like Lauren really help build the bottom-up support you need for large-scale transformation.

  • Look, climate policy can be complicated, and sometimes it can be boring.

  • But we need it to solve global warming.

  • And to get better policies like a price on carbon,

  • you need to have public support.

  • Because politicians and businesses won't take action

  • unless people come together and demand it.

  • So you may not be able to fit all your trash into a Mason jar.

  • But psychologists have been developing "green nudges" that trick us into being more green.

  • Want to know whether they are working their magic on you?

  • Visit climate.universityofcalifornia.edu to learn more.

Okay, so I try to recycle.