When it comes to climate change my generation are a bunch of miserable pessimistic depressing
gloomy bleak disheartening doomers.
And I get why they feel that way; we’re constantly bombarded with news about how we
only have so many years to solve the problem and every year is the hottest on record and
politicians won’t listen and corporations are still polluting, yadda yadda yadda.
Can we just reset the doom button here?
I’m not gonna tell you climate change isn’t real or that in a couple decades it won’t
be absolutely terrible, because it is and it will be.
But the outlook and the human resolve to do something about it is NOT as bad as it looks.
Remember when you were a kid and you read about the hole in the Ozone Layer, and how
it was causing Antarctica to melt faster and we were all going to die for using hairspray?
Guess what!
We fixed that.
We all got around the negotiating able and every country agreed to stop using the gases
that caused the hole in the Ozone Layer.
But you never heard about that, did you?
Because good news doesn’t generate headlines like bad news does.
Here’s some more good climate news that you might have missed;
In the USA alone, of the 530 coal power plants that existed in 2005, only 191 of them are
left.
More US electricity is now powered by renewables than by coal and the gap is only getting wider
each year.
When it comes to a growing energy demand, the new installations are overwhelmingly clean
energy, and less than 1% are oil or coal plants.
Los Angeles is pretty well known for it’s awful air pollution, but even during forest
fire season, LA air quality was nowhere near how bad it was on a daily basis in the 1980s.
In 2005 the EU adopted a continent-wide cap-and-trade system, which made companies pay for a license
to pollute.
Fifteen years later, emissions are down 21 percent, six years ahead of schedule.
In one of the most stunning decarbonisation efforts in human history, France went from
generating half their energy from fossil fuels in 1978 to 10% and falling just 10 years later
through a rapid rollout of nuclear and hydro power.
In 2012 Great Britain generated more than 50% of its energy with coal, but less than
ten years later and now we barely even switch coal plants online.
NINETY SEVEN PERCENT of Scotland powers itself by renewables – this is up from less than
30% twelve years ago in 2009.
We’ve been rapidly transitioning off fossil fuels for a while and we’re only just getting
started.
In 2020 alone, the world invested HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS in total towards the transition from
fossil fuels and combined with the past five years it brings our total to 2.5 TRILLION.
That means we’re spending more on fixing climate change than the entire world spends
on the space industry.
The European Union topped the list with 166 billion dollars of investment, followed by
China at 135 billion, and the USA in third with 85 billion, and that was with a climate
change denying lunatic in charge.
This new guy is taking it even more seriously so I imagine he’ll do even better... if
he can remember what day it is.
And compared to the fossil fuels industry we’ve already been out-investing fossil
fuels since 2013.
But there is some bad news, I’m afraid, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
In the year 2000 we thought by the year 2020 we could generate a mere 20 gigawatts per
hour of electricity via wind power.
Well, our predictions were completely wrong because today we only generate 651 gigawatts
per hour.
We were wrong by 3,155 percent.
Another catastrophic failure came in 2002 when we predicted global solar power generation
would only increase by 1 gigawatt every year until 2020.
We were wrong by 15,300 percent.
Now we install 154 gigawatts of solar per year and it only grows exponentially.
Sorry, have I not been clear on how much a gigawatt is?
A gigawatt can power 300,000 American homes, and you know how much those guys consume.
At our current capacity, our CURRENT capacity, we can power two hundred and thirty one million
homes with solar power.
If the current rate continues, by the end of the decade we should generate more solar
energy to power 450 million homes, and if three people live in each home, by my calculations
that’s 1.35 billion people living on solar energy.
So, it seems humanity is well on its way to solving the climate crisis.
We’re taking big steps to solve the crisis even though it doesn’t seem like it at times
because a lot of the progress are things you never see or hear about.
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
Wait, stop, we’re not done yet.
There’s still a lot of stuff not addressed.
Energy production is only a piece in the wider puzzle of climate change.
Another source of climate doomerism is the supposed runaway nature of polluting companies.
“My actions can’t do anything because this Guardian headline said 71% of emissions
are done by 100 companies it’s got nothing to do with me”
This is defeatist BULLS#!T. I have a question for you: Who buys from these companies?
Do they pump CO2 into the air just because they feel like it?
They have an incentive to because people buy their products.
That means YOU.
YOU buy their products.
You buy petrol to fill up your car.
You buy plastic made from oil that these companies dig up and refine.
You power your home from a local gas-powered energy plant.
You and me and everyone else on this planet.
You cannot absolve yourself of responsibility by shifting the blame onto “corporations”.
Most of which are owned by governments, things that (some of us at least) have control over
at the ballot box.
Governments, by the way, are also reigning in these polluting companies by implementing
carbon taxes or emissions trading programmes, where polluting firms have to pay extortionate
fines in order to pollute, which encourages them to cut down CO2 output so they pay less
in tax.
Almost all of the world’s major economies have implemented one of these programmes with
many more considering them.
And those greedy polluting capitalists are doing their bit too.
The overwhelming majority of investments into energy transition come from private investors.
Private investors are literally putting more effort into expanding our renewable capabilities
than the government.
That’s because they’re following the money; the return on investments from renewable energy
is over 420%, compared to a mere 50% in fossil fuels.
Some people who are particularly up their own arses think that the only way to fix climate
change is to abolish capitalism.
This is clearly not feasible.
If your climate change solution is to completely dismantle and rebuild the entire economic
system of nearly every country on the planet within a decade then you are not serious about
climate change.
Of course, there’s one final bit of nonsense that the climate doomers like to bring up
and that is...
Yes, China is the biggest polluter in the world but they’re not morons.
They know you can’t take over the world if everyone is dead, including your own labour
force.
Already a quarter of Chinese energy comes from renewables, which is more than the United
States, including some of the largest solar, wind, and hydro plants in the world.
While it does look like China are taking steps backwards, like planning more coal plants
as recently as last month, this is because China has a tendency to under-promise and
over-deliver, not only for propaganda purposes both at home and abroad, but to also use it
as geopolitical leverage.
The rest of the world is begging for China to reduce emissions and are likely to make
political or economic concessions to get China to cancel these upcoming plants, which they
will happily do because they never intended to build them in the first place.
“Wait you haven’t talked about India yet!”
[Oh my god]
OK, India is home to four of the world’s ten largest solar plants and they’ve all
been opened in the past four years and in 2020 they planted 250 trees in one day alone
and even if only 60% of them survive that’s 150 million trees and actually the rate of
which India increases its coal production has slowed quite a bit since 2011 down to
four gigawatts per year from seventeen and if we-
“What about Russia?” [sigh]
Alright, Russia sucks, OK?
They’re doing jack shit.
Because they stand to benefit a lot by the creation of a shipping passage over the arctic
after all the ice melts.
But the more WE do to fix the things we CAN control, the more time we’ll have to find
answers to problems we don’t have solutions to right now.
This isn’t just about Russia or India; the agricultural industry, the airline and shipping
industry, and the mountains of plastic waste we produce still don’t have definitive solutions.
The intention of this video isn’t supposed to tell you that everything will be hunky-dory
and you can sit back and not care.
We’re not doing enough yet.
But the data shows that we’re heading in the right direction, and the world needs to
keep momentum going.
The more we reduce emissions now and in the next ten years, the more time we buy ourselves
to invent newer, more efficient CO2 reduction technologies in the future, and pressure corrupt
lazy countries to do something.
The more we groan and gloom over the supposed impossibility of meeting our climate targets,
the less bothered we are to change it.
You, dear viewer, are probably not in charge of a government, but if you are please take
a look at these other very excellent policy videos.
For your average citizen, you can’t do a great deal.
All that “recycle more” and “grow plants in your back yard” advice that was popular
fifteen years ago means absolutely nothing compared to the entire industrial output of
the Russian Federation.
But if I had to offer one piece of advice, it would be eat less meat, because cutting
meat out of your diet for one day week cuts your total yearly emissions by like 14% and
basically nothing else comes close to cutting that much of your carbon footprint.
Especially red meat.
Just buy the f**king soy burger you coward.
You’re a grown adult now, you can move on from the 2013 Ragecomic Epic Bacon Memes.