A new study has revealed the massive cost in terms of lives and
money done to America into the world, thanks to things like pollution
from the generation and use of fossil fuels, big factory stuff like that.
What would we get if we were to move beyond that to decarbonized our economy?
Well, it turns out there would be a lot of benefits.
Specifically they might prevent over 50,000 premature deaths and
save $608 billion in associated benefits annually.
This is from decarbonizing just the US economy, by the way, 50,000 deaths.
Now in light of the pandemic maybe people don't prioritize that number of lives
as much as they would have in years past, but it seems significant,
it seems worth fighting for.
So let's give you a little bit more of what was found.
This is a study published earlier this week in the journal Geo Health.
The University of Wisconsin Madison's nelson Institute for Environmental studies
looked at what happens as a result of the carbon emissions from the electric power,
transportation building and industrial sectors.
And that by the way accounts for about 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions,
although they do note that there is a substantial portion of pollution that
comes from wood and bark burning.
I had not expected that obviously wildfires are a big issue and
there are people who consume those sorts of things for energy as well.
But you can get a big portion of the way to decarbonization specifically with those
industries.
Yeah, they found 53,200 premature deaths, $608 billion in benefits.
And aside from just that if that's not convincing enough to you,
what we would get if we were to decarbonization.
They expect 25,600 avoided nonfatal heart attacks,
5,000 asthma related emergency room visits and 3.68 million days of work lost.
Now this is huge in terms of the human toll,
those lives lost have ripple effects are horrific tragedies.
But maybe like companies may be big business can look into this.
It seems like you could save a bunch of money if you were to prioritize
decarbonizing, even for your own selfish reasons, Jayar what do you think?
>> I'm trying to imagine a world when this happens, I've thought before,
it's been recent, I guess it says we're getting older.
But I'm like, I'd like to see the day when actually we understand
that humans are worth legislating to help live longer or survive or
benefit or thrive even, and things like this would make that happen, right?
Like I would say that much money, so many more work hours, so many more healthy
people, people probably life expectancy would get longer just in general.
[COUGH] Those things, our good for human experience and
human existence, but they're not good for as much money making or
as much as thwarting people's ability to get further.
The way our structure is leased in this country is it's good to have these folks
who have enough people that has to be a significant majority that just don't.
So that they have to continue to fight and climb over each other in order to get to
that potential aspirational goal of being one of the have that can control things.
But if we have too many people that have opportunity that aren't stressed, that
aren't sick, they don't have to take that minimum wage job, I don't have to do it.
We might actually get people that work at McDonald's the way the Republicans
describe them as a 16 year old, which is absolutely not the case.
Then we'll have too many people that are doing well, and
then the folks that are doing well that are lording over all the wrestlers
just won't feel the same, it just doesn't work out.
So I don't think that they miss that this would be a benefit to society.
They just don't want it to be a benefit to society.
So I guess the human interactions or the humans propensity to do horrible
things would have to change, I just don't see that happening.
>> Yeah [CROSSTALK] I actually will, although I'm feeling a bit of it now too,
but we're gonna stick with this for a bit.
So like the people who would benefit the most by making this transition
are the people with the least power to actually force it to actually happen.
Those who have the ability to do it are going to necessarily find that
hypothetical future less appealing because they're already prospering already,
they're already doing better.
They have health insurance, they can go live in the mountains or
something like that vacation somewhere where they'll feel healthy or whatever,
they're going to be protected.
And that is that is really the issue.
That is why the government is supposed to get involved in these sorts of cases.
You're not gonna have industry until the economic case is indisputable.
They're not going to willingly do this if there are any costs associated with it.
Now, we are every year moving closer and closer to that point where cleaner
generation of energy and all that is cost competitive with all of it.
It's already in a lot of parts of the world better than something like coal
specifically.
But we can't necessarily wait that long,
50,000 lives a year being lost should be unacceptable.
But unfortunately,
the people with power right now don't consider to be because they apparently
don't think that they're the ones that are actually losing those lives.
And I wanna go [CROSSTALK] no, no, no, continue.
>> We just lost a million lives from COVID and that that number is still going,
how much do they care about that?
How much have we even memorialized that?
I'm not sure if they have, maybe they have and
I missed it because we've been talking about election stuff so
much and everything else that's happening with politics.
But that's a threshold, and do we care?
I mean, it's kind of we've almost set the precedent now.
So if we begin to care about American and human lives in general across the world,
it wouldn't match up with the way we've been acting lately.
So it would almost be taken, we've taken it back and go, why is he doing this?
We don't care about human life.
50,000 [LAUGH] Come on.
>> Yeah, and by the way, like it isn't just that the wealthy CEOs and
the 1% don't care.
They've convinced us not to like the vast majority of people who don't give a damn
about a million people having died of COVID are not wealthy people.
They have become active enthusiastic participants
in their own slaughter when it comes to COVID.
And also it's not like regular conservatives are losing their minds about
pollution, pushing for decarbonization for the economic and public health benefits,
they're not.
Like when we criticize wealthy people, like when I criticize Elon Musk or
whatever, like every day I go up against the cultists.
These are regular people as beaten down economically as anyone that have
been convinced that no, these are our heroes, they will save us.
They actually have our best interests at heart if I tweet nice things at them,
they will lift me up like Charlie and the chocolate factory and make me rich to,
they really do seem to believe this.
But we need to get through to people that these are not our allies,
at the very least, the vast majority are not.
Now really fast I wanna jump to one other aspect of this super quickly in terms of
worldwide deaths due to pollution.
We're talking about the effects inside the United States, but
we're just one country worldwide.
New study shows pollution is killing 9 million people a year.
It's responsible for one in six deaths of all deaths worldwide.
It dwarfs from road traffic deaths, HIV AIDS, malaria,
tuberculosis and drug and alcohol misuse.
The economic impact is $4.6 trillion or $9 million every minute.
And look I remember we talked about this years ago,
one of the estimates of pollution deaths, it was at 6 million.
Like while I've been doing this thing, we're losing millions of people
from something that is 100% needless and there's really no campaign to stop it.
So remember like doing everything we can, to fight climate change super important.
But protecting the environment is not just about overall climate change and
heating this pollution is damaging its own right.
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