Name: 300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds
Uploaded: 2017-08-09T12:44:14.000Z
Duration: 5 min 39 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...

The Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago.

and start burning coal, but they use up the coal on the ground.

Miners dig deep. Coal mines fill with water.

Samuel Newcomen invents a coal-burning steam engine

to pump out water so miners can keep digging.

James Watt makes it practical for other uses.

Now we have ingredients for the Industrial Revolution

fossil fuels and a way to put them to work.

Coal miners bog down lugging coal. Rails make it easier.

Rails and steam engine combined make a railroad.

Michael Faraday makes the first electric motor.

Nicola Tesla invents alternating current.

Soon, utility companies start burning coal to generate electricity.

Meanwhile, Edwin Drake drills the first Rock Oil well in Pennsylvania.

and Carl Daimler builds an automobile running on petroleum.

Coal tar and oil are turned into industrial chemicals

and pharmaceuticals that prolong life. More population growth.

The Wright brothers start oil fueled aviation.

Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch make fertilizer from fossil fuels.

expand food production, feeding more people.

World War I is the first fossil fueled conflict.

Then comes World War II, giving us guided missiles and atom bombs.

In between is a great depression partly caused by overproduction.

Powered assembly lines make products faster than people need them.

Advertising executives invent consumerism to soak up overproduction.

Advertisers use television to hook new generations of consumers.

Everyone's shocked to realize how dependent they are on oil.

With the energy crisis, the environmental movement is born.

But oil prices fall and everyone forgets energy shortages.

There's a showdown between market and planned economies.

Politicians decide the market will solve everything.

Globalization takes over when the market notices

Suddenly everyone has a cell phone. But world oil production stalls out.

China's now burning half the world's coal to make export products.

But where will China get more coal and oil to fuel more growth?

Rising CO2-levels lead to record heat waves,

Top soil erodes by 25 billion tons a year  from industrial agriculture.

Species go extinct at a thousand times normal rates.

Oil companies drill in miles of sea water because the easy oil is gone.

But a deep water oil platform explodes and fouls the Gulf of Mexico.

Manufacturing moves to polluting countries where labor is cheap

The financial sector is forty percent of the economy!

Banks fail. Unemployment soars. Credit evaporates!

Ok, present time. It's amazing how far we've come

in two hundred years. Just three human lifetimes

from the beginning of industrialism until now.

We can't keep dumping carbon in the atmosphere.

We can't keep growing population and consumption

or basing our economy on depleting fossil fuels.

We can't just print more money to solve the debt crisis.

It's been an exhilarating ride but there are limits.

No, it's not the end of the world but we have to do four things fast.

Adapt to the end of economic growth as we've known it.

stabilize population at a sustainable level,

and deal with our legacy of environmental destruction.

In short, we have to live within nature's budget

of renewable resources at rates of natural replenishment.

but none can fully replace fossil fuels in the time we have.

Also, we've designed and built our infrastructure

for transport, electricity and farming to suit oil, coal and gas.

Changing to different energy sources will require us to

redesign cities, manufacturing processes, health care and more.

We'll also have to rethink some of our cultural values.

None of our global problems can be tackled in isolation

We have to prepare for business as unusual.

the ability to absorb shocks and keep going.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds

resilience

crisis

ruin

tackle