fancy plane rides pink lamborghinis
and giant homes in california
influencers love to flaunt a lavish
lifestyle but what would actually happen
to the planet if everybody lived like an
influencer
better yet how many earths would we need
to sustain the lifestyle of everyone
saying
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let's start with driving the thing i
hate most on earth the most famous
influencers live in america where six
million cars are purchased each year and
in the year 2015
americans combined driving length was
from earth
to pluto and back 500 times most
specifically though influencers live
here
in the epicenter of the entertainment
industry la la land
you might be a romantic and think of la
as the city of leading men
swinging their arms and dancing on the
big screen but now it's more like
beefcake men swinging something
else on the small screen in l.a on
average people drive 9.3 miles per day
which feels insane when you're from a
place like toronto
but it's actually 54 less than the rest
of southern california this is because
many angelenos which is what you're
called when you live in l.a which is
kind of amazing
take public transit but when is the last
time you saw a vlogger or a youtuber on
a bus
they'd be like oh my god is this on do i
look okay
it's taking a lot for me to tell you
this and you know how much i love you
guys
something really crazy happened to me
like story time okay
i had to take a bus
and the cream of the crop celebrities or
influencers live here in the west la
hills
aka the hollywood hills according to
public data people who live here drive
the most
out of everyone in all of la and things
add up quickly as any employee or friend
also needs to drive up into these hills
to get to your house
leading to an average of 11.1 vehicle
miles traveled per day this is why we
constantly see influencers making videos
in their car like this hi sisters hi
oh my gosh that was kind of scary also
did you know that 20 of meals in america
are actually eaten
in the car the american dream so guilty
but if we're all rich influencers we can
afford to buy an electric vehicle like a
tesla
right let's assume we can buying a tesla
is still actually worse for the
environment than taking public transit
and
charging it still relies on the current
power grid also i am aware of the irony
of me filming this in our car
i mean we're influencers after all
and since we're in cali it's not that
bad california has
amazing renewable energy sources in 2018
only 3.3 percent of the power grid came
from coal
and 0.16 came from crude oil compared to
the rest of america where 13.1
comes from coal and 36.4 from crude oil
so charging a tesla in la is pretty
green compared to the rest of america
and even the world but california still
relies pretty heavily on natural gas not
to mention the raw materials it takes to
make a tesla in the first place when you
add it all up it starts taking a toll on
the earth based on equal footprint
calculations we would need
4.3 earths to sustain a world where
everyone had the same driving lifestyle
as an influencer
that's just based off of driving in some
pretty ideal conditions but what about
their
mansions huge houses require a lot of
energy
and electricity to start americans
consume 15
of the world's energy and 20 of the
world's electricity but make up only 4
of the world's population for context
the people of india and sub-saharan
africa consume only
10 of the world's electricity but make
up 33
of the world's population influencers
tend to flaunt these large
gorgeous costly homes but the true cost
is on the earth
take just air conditioning for example
more than half of the air conditioning
units in the world are in china
and the us and keeping them running uses
2.5 times
more electricity than the whole
continent of africa uses in a year
one study i found calculated that six
percent of all electricity in the us is
used for air conditioning
and air conditioning our homes causes
more than a hundred million tons of
carbon dioxide emissions every year not
to mention the cement or concrete that's
needed to build these large homes as
surprisingly concrete accounts for five
percent of global carbon dioxide
emissions and is the second most
consumed
substance on earth after water but a lot
of these influencers do their best they
carpool
they don't always eat meat they are
minimalists
is that what this is this looks like an
evil villain's lair in a disney movie
even if we assume that these influencers
never eat meat and that they have some
energy-efficient appliances
in their home you can run a calculation
to find out that if we all drove and had
mansions like la influencers we would
need 10.9 earths to sustain the
lifestyle
so hold up how are we calculating the
amount of earths using geographical
locations and behavioral averages for
income
and neighborhood information we can
measure an influencer's global hectares
this measurement looks at how much land
sea and other resources
are needed to produce what each person's
global hectare will be per year and
there's many online calculators where
you can figure out your own eco
footprint but we're actually going to
need a lot more earths because
influencers and us right now are using a
service that emits a lot
more carbon dioxide than you might think
and that is online
video platforms the energy needed to
store deliver distribute and even watch
online video leads to 0.4 kilograms of
co2 emissions per hour in 2018 228.8
million people in the u.s
watch digital content for 82 minutes
each day
adding 1.3 billion kilograms of co2 to
the atmosphere per year so if we all
became online influencers our co2
release would be astronomical plus we'd
be uploading so much and then
downloading so much so the servers and
the energy to cool the servers would be
insane did you know they're trying to
put servers up in the arctic so we don't
spend as much money trying to cool them
and as much energy trying to cool them
either way uploading and downloading all
this video would be really bad for the
planet not to mention
the closet back in the closet i see
hello
darkness my old friend the fashion
industry is the second most polluting
industry in the world
responsible for 10 of greenhouse gas
emissions mit calculated that the global
impact of producing
polyester alone was somewhere around 706
million metric tons of carbon dioxide or
about what 185 coal-fired power plants
emit
in a year let alone selling the products
so if 80
of people in the majority world shopped
like influencers in la we would see a
77 increase in carbon dioxide emissions
associated with clothing production
a 20 increase in water usage and seven
percent increase in land use who knew
you'd have a gay man telling you to shop
less usually we just have girls being
like oh my god be my gay best friend
come
shopping with me it's like honey if it
ain't a circular economy
it ain't happening not really killing it
is the gay best friend right now
am i we'll include all that info in the
final tally of global hectares but
before we get to that let's talk about
an influencer's favorite substance
and i don't mean tummy tea i mean oil
half the world's oil is consumed by only
17 percent of the world's population
these countries are known as the oecd
nations and they are also responsible
for 33 percent of the world's co2
emissions america itself produces 15
of the world's co2 emissions compared to
bangladesh who has
half the population but only produces
one percent of the world's co2 emissions
per year
remember the sprawling mansions we
mentioned earlier people in bangladesh
do not live in these
the 163 million people of bangladesh
live within their country which is the
size of about alabama
americans on average consume 10 liters
of oil a day but we canadians fare even
worse at 10.2 liters of oil a day
compared to a bangladeshi who only uses
0.1 liters of oil per day
a lot of this oil is used up from flying
which is something that influencers love
to do
even during a global pandemic even if we
keep the influencer lifestyle vegan
we're also going to assume that they're
pretty much shopping only local they got
those expensive la grocery stores
we're going to include a flight from new
york to la every two months which i
think is actually being kind of generous
for influencer lifestyles when you study
them but we're gonna put that in as well
we discovered that if everyone lived
like an influencer we would need 12.9
earths to sustain the lifestyle so what
can we collectively take away from this
we made this video to dissect the idea
of the aspirational lifestyle that
affects all of us
including us i mean like i've got a fig
tree back there i want it to look pretty
we're all impacted by the consumption
habits we see
online and in media but if we all lived
like bangladeshis we would only need
this much of the earth to sustain all
life which is
astounding and in our current climate
crisis are these not in some ways an
aspirational lifestyle i know this can
get complex and muddy when we talk about
poverty or the quality of life but the
global happiness council found that in
2017
americans were the unhappiest they'd
ever been since starting that initiative
even though they were working eating
driving and consuming more than ever
in fact if we came together as a species
and evenly distributed our fuel and
energy consumption
across the seven billion people on this
planet we would all have the same energy
use as somebody in switzerland
in the 1960s look at those gorge trams
look at those cute little outfits
they honestly look happy and the life
expectancy of somebody in switzerland in
1965 was the same as it is in america
today
which is much higher than the world
average for more information on this you
can check out our podcast on youtube
which is all about influencers with the
link in the description ultimately we're
not advocating to
live in substandard conditions but to
just question are we
actually in better condition today now
when we're consuming more
than we might have been in the past and
can we re-evaluate
our beliefs and our ideals about this
aspirational lifestyle and what it means
to have lots of things
and now let's talk about the elephant in
the room we are from canada
if you cannot tell we drive around in
giant ass
vehicles like that one please blow out
the license plate or we could get sued
that's a gas guzzling machine if i've
ever seen one so just by living in our
culture we are treating the world
unfairly we are contributing to co2
emissions more than most people
on this earth and although mitch and i
like to call ourselves queer science
educators who try to use comedy and
drawings to make sure that science is
for everyone
sometimes my friends will go to a party
and say oh this is my friend greg he's
an influencer
at this point i will usually push them
over smash a plate and drop kick them in
the face
something we can try and work on as
influencers is to stop selling this
culture of consumption and
money and capitalism first class fun
yeah like the luxury of it all because
we know that's not good for the
environment or the planet
even though it does well on the youtube
algorithm it honestly does mansion tours
all over the place
i just think it would be cool if
culturally and i see this movement
slowly happening
we could agree that it's actually not
that interesting to just have lots of
money
to just buy things that are way too
expensive that in the first place often
exploit places that don't have as much
money yes the responsibility is always
on corporations like youtube and google
and the government but
we as people also have to have a hand in
thinking critically about these
wealthy luxurious lifestyles and what we
actually think is quote unquote cool
the climate crisis is going to be
probably the most defining thing that
happens in our lifetime
and we know that like dominating our
natural environments to create these
wealthy lifestyles is not going to hell
so yes we are influencers who made this
video
classic i know it's a lot harder than it
sounds you can't just
change culture overnight but i do think
it would be interesting to challenge the
ideas that
luxury and opulence and all these things
are
something that we should all desire and
want because they're literally
impossible we would need 12.9 earths to
sustain them
thank you for watching this comment
below your opinions we're so curious
we're thinking about this stuff
all the time subscribe for more science
and climate change related videos and we
will see you
next week