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This is a man that cares. He perseveres through pain and disappointment to bring us what he's been working on to help us all on this planet. He always sounds sincere and smart. This should be good.
@-GinΠΓ Τάο so what is your solution about what humans should do about the inevitable climate heating up? What about those green jobs that are all operating right now? Would you put those people out of work telling them it's not worth it that the climate is just going to get hot anyway? Don't try ANYTHING that help?
the way i see it is that no matter how doom and gloom the situation can be, climate change is essentially a problem with no breaking point. You can't "fix it", you can only make it better so even if an apocalyptic future is inevitable, moving the needle just a little bit would save lives. an increase of 0.1% of humanity's survivability rate means saving literal millions of lives this means at no point is there a reason to give up, any action to make it better will make it better, any large action will make it much better i think it's important to focus on the lives we can save because i hope most people agree each of every lives is worth saving
I really hope you start getting more attention again Kurtis. I started following your channel back when you proved the earth was round with your bicycle (which I still think is an awesome video by the way), and you've always been one of the few people out there who seems to genuinely care about this issue, regardless of what it costs you personally. I commend your efforts, and it's great to see you back, in good health, and putting out important messages like these once more. All the best from a fellow Canadian on the east coast, keep doing what you do best!
Easily my favorite video of yours. Really appreciate the self-reflection and growth evident in this video, especially on the internal activism side. I've been on a similar journey these last few years as a young adult coming to terms with climate change. Fighting for necessary incrementalist change (like the recent climate bill passed in the US) as well as a revolution on a much larger scale is definitely a struggle, but it's absolutely worth all of the time we can give it!
This was so heartening. I feel climate anxiety every day and I can't put into words how much it means to me, hearing you say how much it affects you, too. I feel like when I talk to others about this, they either shrug it off or actually can't understand my point of view at all, while knowing (at least factually) what's at stake. Anyway, fantastic video, Kurtis, eagerly watched every second!
I love this long form detailed video on the science and history of climate change! Thanks a lot for taking the time to create this. I’ll be sharing this on my channel.
I've seen many videos on climate change, but this "compilation" feels despite the topic quite satisfying to watch. You have done a good job putting all this together in one video.
This is one of the best and most detailed summaries of the problem I've seen so far that also suggests concrete solutions on every level. I am thinking about sharing this video with the parliamentary representatives in my home country in the (perhaps naive) hope that they think about how their current political oppinion holds up to the facts you state. How would you suggest pitching this to someone whose political beliefs might be radically different from what the facts suggest? I can imagine this could do more harm than good, if the reaction is e.g. one of spite and resentment. Is it even worth it?
is it worth it? nope. if someone doesn't want to believe in reality, trying to convince them is a waste of time. time that is better spent trying to inform those who are undecided and underinformed. for example: a neighbor of mine (retired banker) is an extremely conservative climate science denier. i've tried for years to convince her, but she didn't move an inch. she also doesn't suffer a lot from climate change anyway. if it's to hot to sleep at night, she just sleeps in her second residence outside of the city, which is easy since she has a big SUV. if i then tell her that others don't have that choice, she usually says it's their own fault - everyone can be successful, if they stop complaining and just work hard enough. yikes! there are other neighbors, though. the key is to LISTEN to them - find out how they're affected, and then inform them about those things. if that's someone who can't sleep because of the heat, or the traffic at night, that's what i talk to them about. not the global south, not the rain forest, not ice bears. just don't try to convince them. listen, share your feelings, but don't overdo it. a five minute chat every other week is better than an hour long monolog. if they bite and want to know more, then you can supply them with documentaries and whatnot.
Glad you recovered. I wish you good health and I appreciate your educational videos on the matter. I will do my best to share this video in my social circle to spread awareness.
i love it when people complain about jobs getting lost due to climate action - and in the next sentence complain that wind turbines are expensive because they need to be maintained. gnaaaargh. my father originally apprenticed as a typesetter, but by the time he was finished that job didn't exist anymore due to automatization. back then people didn't complain about jobs being lost, i guess. so, what did my father do? he took a job as a technician at the austrian weather service. which is why i know about climate change since my childhood. jobs change as the world changes. we can either adapt, or complain and bury our head in the sand. do or die.
You uploaded this video right when I was reading a book of Murray Bookchin. Everything points to the same direction! I only disaggre on your idea of stronger government and that we have to participate in politics to reach the change. I think politicians won't change anything!
Thank you Kurtis. I still deal with a lot of climate anxiety, which has dramatically shaped how I live my life and plan for my future. It is heartening to know that people like you put so much effort into helping teach people about our world. One of my favourite stories is one of Fred Rogers telling a child who was distressed about scary things in the news. He said to "look for the helpers." Thanks, Kurtis, for being one of the helpers :)
Hey friend. Sorry you also struggle with it. I hope you have people to talk to about it. Especially people who understand. It is way worse when it feels like you're going through it alone (and I promise you arent - a lot of people are in our shoes). Thanks for this thoughtful and kind comment... I really appreciate it :)
Revolution baby! Excellent video Kurtis, easily one of the most comprehensive & introspective I’ve engaged with on the topic. Especially loved the section on internal activism, I’m super stoked to see how this more dialectic approach to big problems continues to shift the conversation over time :)
I quite appreciate the bit that you put in at the end about careers in environmentalism. I work in designing recycling plants and i sometimes forget that I'm actually doing something to help. It often feels a bit hopeless or that I'm harming things by nature of having to consume things, but being paralyzed by climate dread isn't exactly helpful. In any case, thank you for activism and communicating these methods for mitigating this climate crisis.
Kurtis! I just thought about you yesterday, in your biodome video! I thought to myself, "Some people are risking their lives to prove climate change.. what happened to him, hope he is alright." Now you released a video with biodome as first clip😃 what a coincidence!!
Fantastic video, I just wish more people knew about it / watched it. This is the type of video that should be played in high school to teens who will actually retain and perhaps do something with the information. The Earth thanks you Kurtis
I really started realizing this summer just how much of a big deal the climate crisis is. I'm determined to keep a resilient attitude about it, but to be honest, I can feel pretty crappy about it sometimes. I'm planning to start counseling at my local juco. I really think the analogy to the suffragism movement is going to help me. This is a topic that needs to be talked about way more, and I commend all those who are actively bringing up respectful conversations about it.
Hey George. It really sounds like you're approaching it with a healthy mindset. It is definitely hard to come to terms with, and I think its a never-ending journey... Anyway, I'm glad some parts of this video were helpful for you. Keep up the good fight my friend!
One thing not mentioned is the 'Carbon Credits', and how certain governments offshore their emissions to other countries to reduce the emission statistics of their countries. Also simply voting in politicians with a 'green agenda' isnt necessarily a good thing. Here in ireland we a have a political party called the "Green Party" and their mandate is essentially to tax the average working individual to promote green policies - Furthering a cost of living crisis. The systemic change required comes from sound social policies, enacted by those who subscribe to the idea of suppporting the many not the few. As an example: Raising levies on petrol and diesel cars to promote the average consumer to buy an EV... as opposed to subsidising EV's, reducing the cost, and making them the obvious choice. Simply increasing the awareness of climate change wont reduce the crippling nature of capitalism on the average working person - (in fact it may cause people to grow deaf to the issue altogether), nor will voting in those who say they want to curb climate change... The average voter must learn about those who are standing for elections, learn their voting history on previous bills and make an informed decisions on "Will this person enact 'Good' social reform, reform for the many and not the few". Reform as you mentioned, nationalising healthcare making it free, and making housing a basic human right. All in all, i've been following you for a few years now and i love the direction your headed. Shifting the focus from the individual to the collective, shifiting from 'What can we do as consumers' to 'What can we do as voters' Great stuff Kurtis, Keep it up :D and remember 'Power to the People!'
I really love how you were able to connect all of these topics in a comprehensive way. The onion metaphor was excellent. I feel like you took 80% of the things I learned about climate change in the last 10 years and put them all in a logical relationship to each other where I can see the full picture. I think this will help me explain why climate change is important to me to my friends and family.
Wow, I'm subscribed to this channel but youtube just flat out didn't show it to me. I hope the algorithm picks this video up, it's so well made it deserves to be seen.
Man, I will had your optimism. I really fall into that doomerism you talk about when it comes to climate talk. Like to me it feels that climate change is the product of so many systemic problems, it really feels like too many too fix. I'm glad that I am able to watch content like yours that even for a moment makes me believe that change is possible. Thanks for continuing to make this content, whenever I see your videos in my subscription feed they are the first thing I watch because knowing everything I can about climate change is important and your videos are such a good source. Thank you for the content and keep up the fantastic work!!
I know it seems hopeless sometimes, with all that money and power against us, but we have one big advantage they don't. They have to spread their messaging through the media and must tailor it to a very broad audience. We can talk to our friends and families one on one and make our message more personal. We have some new tools in our communication toolbox that can change minds without the need to explain all the nuances. Pick one that sounds interesting and Google it. Deep Canvassing harnesses the power of narrative to awaken the empathy that is often hidden by partisan tribalism. Attitudinal Inoculation exposes them to a weakened form of the bad arguments so that they become "vaccinated" against propaganda. And my favorite and the easiest to implement is Street Epistemology. It uses Socratic questions and Motivational Interviewing methods to get people to reflect on why they believe what they believe. Pick one, learn how it works, then get out there and do it!
One thing that absolutely irks me is how big companies want to make it us believe that normal consumers are the ones responsible for all climate change and should be the one who need to change. I do agree we can do certain things to help but these mega corporations , rich dudes traveling in private planes giving us speeches about using plastic fkfking straws. I'd also like to point out the carbon footprint of US military , it releases more carbon than some countries. It's insane Anyways , take care , stay healthy.
You want to blame big companies for putting the blame on consumers. That is just such nonsense. From the 70s when this issue was first raised, all scientists and lobbyists have talked about the power of the consumer to force change....which is not just correct, but well worth repeating. You can't then turn that around when a company reiterates the message. The same idiocy is used against governments by science deniers......."it's just a conspiracy of big gubmint".....completely forgetting the 3 decades of lobbying (by the citizenry and scientists) it took to even get any governments to acknowledge the existence of the issue.
I think it's really great how you're talking about not just the face value problem of climate change, but all of the societal and economic factors that surround it. We all need to be thinking more like this!
I really enjoyed this video. Exactly what I needed: realism combined with hope for the future, as well as concrete and specific advice. Thanks so much for making it!
Thank you for your time and dedication to the cause, I can tell you're very motivated to cause positive change and make an impact on the world. It's going to be critical that, as a species, we begin prioritizing health over wealth. Hands down, it is often our focus on building wealth and being more financially prosperous than our neighbor/competitor/foreign country that drives us in the wrong direction and causes so much of the friction of change. Please continue your efforts in educating the masses and letting us know our options to help fight for humanity's future.
Great video! Although I do wish there was more from the perspective of developing countries and how they can manage climate change while continuing their growth to reach the levels of western countries
Now is the time for systemic change - De-growth of economies; taxation and accountability of oil producers; decimating the livestock and dairy farming, investment in food sources which are efficient in land and water useage, subsidies for electrification and solar power, and strict global control over single-use plastics and forever-chemicals. Now is the time to accept drastic changes to the way we live today, so that we may live well tomorrow. But first and foremost, get our politicians to keep the oil in the ground.
Great to hear from you. You brought up so many things that if you didn't gloss over a bunch of stuff this could be a four hour video. In this episode I'm reminded that what is held in highest importance by those in power, be it political or corporate - but I repeat myself, is tHe eCoNOmY. Gawd, as long as money is moving we can all suffer as far as power is concerned. The economy would be healthier if we were all wealthier instead of making a few billionaires and pretending 'trickle-down' will make us all better off. So yeah, what I'm getting at is free education as far as you want to go and higher taxes on each stratum of income. I don't know that nationalising industry is the answer, but it's an answer and a lot better than allowing monopolies. Allowing monopolies is a great way for politicians to get their beaks wet. Instead of raising taxes for the good of the country they're scuppering the country in favour of greed and power. I feel a rant coming on so it's time to back away from the keyboard.
Awesome! I'm in the middle of watching and had a thought. Could you cut a little 5 minute version containing only the crucial info for people that don't have time? I think it will make more people interested. You could link this one in the description
Most of this video was really good and I appreciate it being made. Most of it. There's one thing that made me remove the like I gave it somewhere in the first half. The intersectionalist point really ticked me of. Not because I'm staunchly against hearing that perspective out, but because it's needlessly attacking and making the entire issue less palatable. I find it difficult to fathom how, in the face of gigantic issues, even very smart people resort unnecessary group thinking and detrimental identity mentality. Frankly, I don't care in which subgroup of the population traits we dislike are more prevalent. If you address these issues as an [insert ethnic or gender subgroup] problem instead of what they really are, human flaws, you unnecessarily alienate people that would otherwise support a cause. I'm all for environmental justice, that is providing aid to the people most disadvantaged, but it's not a white people vs non-whites problem. It's a geographical and a historical one. Of course racism and the like exist. Such forces alienate people and alienate us from finding a solution. We shouldn't add to it by feeding the flames of factionalism. When I hear people talk about "old white men" and so on, the same instinctive disgust settles in as when I hear antisemites talk about greedy bankers - never failing to mention they're jewish - or these law and order types who can't talk about inner city criminality without mentioning what skin colour many people involved in said criminality have (despite the correlation clearly being with poverty, not with skin tone). I don't care what percentage of fossil fuel executives are white, male, straight, cisgender or anything else of that sort. I care about what they do. And as much as you can justly be outraged at it, there's still millions of people that belong to the very same subgroups that don't engage in any of the immoral behaviours you might be outraged at. Million dollar yachts and the mental complexes you need to want to waste ressources acquiring them don't come free with every set of male genitals or low melanin level. Addressing the issue as if they were a product of such factors estranges people who would support the cause, if they did not feel slighted by those identity issues. I believe we should first focus on solving the pressing issues at hand before focussing on what part of some people's identity might have had a hand in creating many of these issues. I dislike current gender stereotypes, roles and expectations - and I dislike when people submit to them rather than creating their own personality. That being said, I don't think any one person can be specifically blamed for them. They're societal issues and merely attacking, for example, male people (most often those not at all connected with the few examples at the peak of immorality) often amounts to little more than victim blaming since most don't conform to stereotypes in bad faith but rather because they feel the need to. Gender roles, idiotic expectations, sick societal atmospheres and toxic environments are to blame, not the people that fall victim to them - and especially not their gender or skin colour. On a last note, fixing behavioral things works much better when you don't put people in a defensive (and thus less receptive) state of mind by insulting or at least indirectly offending their sense of identity. For example, if I called you a "crazy leaf-eating hippie" or some other stupid thing like that at the beginning of my comment, you might not have been so keen to read on and consider what I wrote. Instead, if you detach the issue you have from the demographic details and group identities of a person, you don't give them the sense of wanting to change them. People tend to shut themselves off if they feel their identity threatened. Insults and lectures don't get through to people, understanding and suggestions do. And the people at fault are not a demographic group (whichever) but a group of people defined by childish selfishness. Apologies if this message was all over the place. Thanks for taking the time to read it, if you did.
Listen, this is gonna be long, but I really hope you can hear me out... I really just want you to understand, pointing out what kinds of people tend to be victims disproportionately, or which intersectional groups are financially dominant and exacerbating the problem, that isn't an attack. There are plenty of people, myself included, who legitimately aren't put on the defensive when others talk about this stuff. It also isn't just useless information. The fact is, when examining demographic trends, there are disproportionate impacts felt by particular groups of people. If you want to ignore that, go ahead, but it doesn't make those disparities go away, and may, in fact, ensure that certain groups of people don't get the help they need to thrive. It isn't "factionalism" or "identity mentality", its a recognition that certain population groups face specific and non-generalizable threats from a changing climate, and that an equitable approach to climate change identifies and addresses these threats without flattening a complex interplay of cultures, values, and ways of living which are NOT homogeneous even within cities. Intersectionality, if you chose to approach it without GETTING defensive, serves as a way of quantifying and understanding these differences. Class is an intersectional identity, gender is an intersectional identity, age is an intersectional identity. We can talk about these things as if they are unrelated, but the data does not bear out. They are correlated with one another, and with the material conditions under which people live. The fact of the matter is, OLD people have a disproportionate influence in politics and in regards the financial resources. WHITE people, when compared to disadvantaged groups, are less likely to find themselves impoverished and far more likely to have generational wealth. MEN are more likely to hold positions of political power in the United States, and far more likely to be ultra-wealthy than women. RICH people are disproportionately represented politically, and contribute significantly more to climate change than other groups of people. We can talk about the exceptions all we want, but if you happen to be any of those identities, it doesn't mean we are assigning blame to YOU. It is just significantly more likely for a person who is old, white, and male to have contributed directly to this problem than basically any other intersection of identities. If we want to get into the weeds, we can even talk about how black people's geographic location is, historically, motivated by racism. Redlining, segregation, and other racist american policy has made it so certain geographical regions, many of which were not commercially desirable by the almost entirely white upper class at the time, are FAR more likely to be comprised mostly of black people, and many of those locations are just factually more likely to face serious consequences from climate change than other neighborhoods. We can say that them being black isn't involved in the additional risk these people face, but that would be a LIE. They are there because white people forced them there, and applying a colorblind filter means we aren't getting a complete picture of the forces that went into their particular vulnerabilities to climate crisis. You talk about men being "attacked" and "blamed" for societal issues, but... intersectionality is ONLY about societal trends. It's a recognition that different people face different challenges, and are afforded different privileges. It examines quantitatively what sort of experiences different groups are likely to face, and what sort of impact that has on that group. The fact is, the experiences and social expectations of men in the US do shape behavior, and impart specific challenges that female people are unlikely to face. The same is true for women. Treating these populations as interchangeable in the pursuit of gender equality is ineffective at best and detrimental at worst. An intersectional approach would be to determine what factors lead to inequalities, and apply solutions which are tailored to the gender of the people involved. Many more men commit suicide than women. Should we not commit greater resources toward suicide prevention specific to male populations? Significantly more women are victims of domestic violence than men (mostly by men, too). Should we not keep that in mind when addressing domestic violence cases or accusations of abuse? I could go on. Rates of cancer, infant mortality, obesity, exposure to pollution, etc. All things that, when looking at demographic data, disproportionately effect non-white people. Should our limited resources towards fixing these problems be spent without regard for identity when the stats show not all identities are afflicted by problems equally? This is not to say that geography and poverty doesn't play a role, it absolutely does, but those are intersectional identities too. The problem is, geography and class just... genuinely doesn't account for all of the differences. Social sciences are still sciences, do you think that they don't know how to check for cross-correlations? The fact is, even when correcting for class and location, there are still inequalities linked to things like race, sexuality, and gender. To ignore that, to insist despite the evidence that everybody faces the same problems and suffers the same, means that we are less likely to help those who need help the most, and very likely to maintain or exacerbate current inequalities. You don't have to get angry about it. You don't have to be defensive about the fact that somebody's skin means they might have faced fewer obstacles, or that the average white dude is more likely to succeed financially than the average... anybody else. It just gives the people trying to fix things ways to assess what kind of help and what amount of resources should be allocated to ensure everybody has an equal chance of thriving in the wake of climate change.
(1/2) It's not that you're wrong when talking about disproportionate effects, but I think there first of all is a false way of framing. Sure, black people might suffer more from climate change than average, but is that the most relevant distinction? Those people who are (or will be) affected the most are also distinguished by being to other features: mostly poor and mostly innocent. That's what I care about. If you live in misery my first concern isn't "oh but people with the same complexion are better off statistically". People are individuals, not statistics. The fact remains, you can be an old, white, male person and still be disadvantaged, poor and powerless. Addressing the issue as a problem with old, white, male people puts exactly those at risk of discrimination who haven't had all too many advantages because of their group identities/labels and now even face discrimination on account of them. The problem isn't old, white, male people but people with too much influence, too much affluence and too little regard for anything but themselves and their close circles. Most of whom happen to be old, white and male, yes. Still the majority of old, white, male people are anywhere but in a position of power to abuse, which should provide ample proof that these demographic factors aren't a predestination to become a certain kind of disagreeable person. I fail to see how "oh but they're old, white and male! that's very important, we have to say it at every twist and turn lest we forget." is any different to nazis constantly obsessing about whether a person they dislike is jewish or not. I don't want to ignore statistics, but I'll never care as much about statistics as I care about individuals. When you mean people who abuse unjustifed power, say exactly that (or come up with a poignant term for it, if you'd like), but don't go on about old, white, male people. Someone's grandpa who dies a preventable death aged 72, still having to perform unsafe manual labour on account of not being able to retire has nothing to do with the people who are at the source of the climate mess, except that they share some demographic details. Unjust advantages and disadvantages should be addressed and dealt with, I agree, but the approach you seem to take only creates new ones - in my opinion. You said the following " if you happen to be any of those identities, it doesn't mean we are assigning blame to YOU". Then why use the terms? My aplogies if that sounds rude but isn't it very unproductive to address the wrong group? Again, I don't want to claim similar severity (for one, one group historically has always been significantly in the minority) but how is that any different than talking about "those evil jewish bankers" and then clarifying "obviously I don't mean ALL jewish people". Then maybe don't use the term as a distinguishing factor. It is neither a determinant of the behaviour you want to call out nor a characteristic that only applies to the people you want to criticise. And let's not forget that every movement also attracts dumb people who will not be able or willing to distinguish in a nuanced way. I am pretty convinced that if somebody gets shouted down as "old, white man" it won't be a person who actually should shut their mouth for once but somebody entirely not at fault for the issues at hand. You can't seriously tell me that's not unhealthy collectivism. I'm not advocating for a colourblind mentality, I see the flaws with that, but I am all for colour indifference. Whether you are black or not, I think you should have opportunities to escape the generational poverty that, yes, racism played a big part in building, but that isn't strictly in tandem with your skin tone. For example, if you're a white person that - through whatever course of events - ends up in the same region as a buch of black people, likewise unjustly denied opportunities, you should receive the same help. If everybody just woke up with blue skin one day and ethnic groups became indistinguishable, the aftermath of previous injustices would still linger on (generation wealth as you mentioned, for example). The problem isn't merely racism but a lack in social mobility. This is the problem that needs to be addressed. If a group of people is predominantly affected by an injustice (as black people are when it comes to wealth inequality) they will be predominantly aided by removing that obstacle. There is no need to draw divisions along ethnic lines - except if you want to exacerbate them. I also won't deny the aftereffects of racism, such as geographical disadvantages. However the problem isn't an irreparable scar on society that can't be mended but an issue of, again, lacking social and physical mobility (entangled with various biases here and there). Now whether a neighbourhood that gets hit by a flash flood is 90% black, 90% white, 90% asian, 90% hispanic or 90% whatever is not relevant. In any case, if it is a poor area with run-down infrastructure it's almost certainly 100% populated by people that have been screwed over and left behind. That's the tragedy, not what percentage of these people has what ancestry. If you can't bring yourself to care about people unless they belong to a statistically disadvantaged ethnicity, I think the issue lies with you and not with the people who primarily think in terms of humans, not of ethnic groups. Sorry if all of that sounds like I don't understand your points or I'm being willfully ignorant - that is not the case. I just disagree with your approach.
(2/2) By the way, I do agree with you that different experiences shape people and this can have statistical significance. If you push male people into cut-throat competitiveness it's no wonder some people end up embracing it. But people are mostly a product of their experiences, not their genitals. Your apparent gender may have an influence on what experiences you're exposed to, but again, you can draw sharper and more useful distinctions than gender and ethnicity when trying to address issues like destructive economic cultures. As for targeted ressource allocation, again I ask: why make it so specific? Why make suicide prevention a gender issue? Of course, suicide of male people is more prevalent and the causes probably coincide with harmful gender roles etc., but why not just make it suicide prevention instead of male suicide prevention? Same thing goes for domestic abuse: safe houses / shelters are a great thing but I fail to see how they have to be "women's and men's shelters". Can't we just expand capacities without caring who is statistically more likely to use them? Abuse victims should have a place to go to with as little obstacles as possible, no matter their gender. Also poverty alleviation is great, but why market it as this great crusade against the disadvantages of non-white people? I just find it sad that the modern left doesn't appear to be able to muster a care for people living in misery as long as they don't belong to "protected groups". More than any ethnicity or gender, the individually disadvantaged should be a protected group! "Should our limited resources towards fixing these problems be spent without regard for identity when the stats show not all identities are afflicted by problems equally?" Yes, because whether you get cancer treatment should be determined on whether you actually got cancer and not whether you're part of a group that is statistically more likely to have it. Now when we talk about prevention that is another thing, but there still I'd deem it more effective to intervene in high risk (aka polluted) areas rather than handing out FFP masks to random black people on the street because they're statistically more likely to suffer from respirator diseases. On average you might reach the right people with that, but you'd leave behind the people that suffer from the same issues but aren't seen because they differ from the norm. I'll come to an end with this wall of text now. Even though we disagree, I appreciate you taking the time to write such a lengthy reply. But do you see the problem here? Instead of focussing on the main issue, the climate, we get caught up in a comparably unimportant discussion, just because somebody couldn't resist talking about their favourite kind of bogeypeople. Natural disasters won't care about anyone's race or gender. Some people might be disproportionally affected, but that's not because flooding and heat waves are racist or sexist. Talking about societal issues is all well and good, but forcing that discussion at this particular point seems counterproductive to me. The relevant question is not who deserves to be hit by climate change the most, but how we can save the most people. It's like blaming colonialism on "white people" when in fact, yes, colonialist profiteurs were (almost) exclusively white, but far from all white people benefitted from colonialism. By not addressing the issue specifically, that is to say putting the blame only on those involved instead of generalizing people down to their skin tone, you will inevitably throw people under the bus that were neither involved nor in support of horrible practices such as colonial exploitation. It doesn't matter so much whether people intend calling out a statistically advantaged group in an offensive way, often offense is taken regardless. Ignoring that is not only rude, but flat out self-sabotage if you're trying to reach as many people as possible. Only because it is fine in your circle of acquaintances to have that (in my opinion ultimately unhealthy) focus on particular groups like "old, white men" that doesn't mean you can get everybody on board with it. Like it or not, the climate can't be tackled without broad support. If you slight people and metaphorically spit in their face (whether you intend to nor not), they will rather go down alongside you than help you fix a sinking ship. You might think that's dumb, I think your approach is dumb - ultimately humans are dumb. We can either acknowledge that and deal with it in a healthy way or fail at the hurdle of our own unrealistic expectations.
Awkwardly, I agree with your post from an idealistic moral perspective but not from a communications perspective. This sort of behavior *does* "feed the flames of factionalism", as you say, and it drives me up the wall. There's this disturbing mentality in society today that bigotry is okay when it targets the majority or plurality, as if that's somehow just "compensation" for past actions by other members of that group. However, *because* that is such a commonly held viewpoint, I think that this video portraying the problem like this is actually *more* likely to incite action from its target audience. After all, those like you and me who want a society which has moved past pointlessly labeling people aren't going to ignore the climate crisis just because a video about the issue portrays it as a problem of racial/gender/age disparity, whereas those who *are* focused on those sorts of issues might need the wake-up call that "hey it's great to try to give everybody equal opportunities but that might be less important than making sure everybody can literally *survive* the coming decades". And anyone who cares more about feeling personally insulted than about preventing global ecosystem collapse is probably not feasible to convince through this medium anyway. So, while that aspect of the video might irk me on a personal level, I don't think it's a bad move for the sake of getting the message out.
@@Grievousnw Maybe I didn't express this properly, but again, I and most people talking about this stuff, aren't preoccupied with who is to "blame" for anything, nor are they disinterested with the plight of the disadvantaged as a class of people. I don't know many, or really any, left leaning people who would genuinely approve of a scheme to only provide masks to black people, or anything like that. The point is that different groups are differently disadvantaged, and strategies that may work for one group may not for other. Campaigns against suicide that address men should reflect the ways in which men tend to commit suicide for maximum possible impact. The exact methods and reasons for suicidal ideation aren't exactly the same between genders. Dividing things into demographics rather than a generalized resource allows for specialized care that is more likely to succeed to be administered. I mean, there's a reason government entities and corporations spend the money on different advertisements for different demographics. Its because doing that makes your message more likely to get through to that demographic, and not everybody will respond well to some generalized ad campaign. Similarly, this isn't about natural disasters being racist, its about triage. If you have a limited pool of resources to spend on saving peoples lives, how do you allocate those resources? Lets think about earthquakes. If you don't consider these sorts of disproportionate impacts, it might be reasonable to focus attention on making infrastructure earthquake resistant in the parts of a city with the most infrastructure to disrupt. And this would be the right choice if there were no intersectional factors to consider! More people live in this densely populated and very well developed region of the city, so we should put more money into earthquake proofing it. But wait... there's a region over there that isn't so well developed, a region that historically has had less attention given to its infrastructure due to the racial makeup of the community. Lets not think about that part. It isn't as densely populated, so we'll give it a piece of this money for earthquake retrofitting proportional to the population of the area. Sounds fair! After doing some amount of this earthquake retrofitting work, an earthquake hits the city, and the fallout is immense. Because we allocated less funding to this region, and because of the racially motivated infrastructural deficiencies we refused to consider, more black people died in the earthquake than the population distribution of the area should expect of a natural disaster. As it turns out, highly developed regions of a city are very often quite white, and the building quality is such that a lot of the infrastructure here was less likely to be damaged by an earthquake in the first place! In fact, you probably could have left a lot of those buildings alone and been probably okay! They weren't up to code, but they were very well built. If we had considered the intersectional factors which may have informed us of the infrastructural deficiencies of formerly redlined districts, and allocated funding considering the greater vulnerability of these regions as a result, a lot less black people would have died, a somewhat larger number of white people in the developed district would have died, and the total number of dead people probably reduced by a fair bit. Maybe we could have identified the structural vulnerabilities in this district without considering race, and allocated more resources to this vulnerable population while maintaining a colorblind approach. That's an iffy one. Whose to say that the infrastructural issues were properly documented by the city during the time they were actively racist, or that building inspections for all the regions were conducted with equivalent rigor? A lot of these problems don't peak their head until after something goes wrong. If we have some data from a demographics study which suggests that the more black a district is, the more likely buildings are to suffer building code violations when inspected, should that be taken into account? I hope you see where I'm going here. Its a hypothetical, but a reasonable one. There are real and observable distortions to ecology, infrastructure, and government documentation which disadvantage specific groups of people over others, not necessarily due to active racism by current public servants, but due to the long history of oppression levied towards these groups in the past. Black majority neighborhoods, by virtue of the racism of the people who built the public utilities there, are statistically more likely to have infrastructure in disrepair. This means, in order to achieve the same level of earthquake resilience as a white neighborhood, they may need more resources than what would be expected of their population or level of land development. They also might not! That's something you can investigate to verify, and you might find that there really is no difference here, and we can apply aid without specific regard to racial identity of the population. But if you don't recognize and acknowledge the demographic disparities, and act as if everybody needs the same stuff to reach an agreed upon threshold of safety, you are maintaining the same racial dynamics put into place by previous generations. And the thing is... you probably don't need to double check when it comes to white majority districts. You can probably trust that whatever work the government said it did, and whatever inspections they said they undertook, are essentially accurate. If you want your aid to be fairly distributed according to need, putting more focus on non-white neighborhoods is a rational decision. I don't want to ramble on forever, but race is just an example here. Class is another one that statistically disadvantages certain population centers. The point is not that I think the lives of protected groups are somehow more valuable, I genuinely don't know why you expect anybody but fringe identity supremacist groups to believe that stuff. The point is that this country, and lots of countries around the world, the people in charge did think the lives of "protected groups" were worth a lot less less for hundreds of years, and they realized that belief in the construction of our cities, in the records of our bureaucracies, and in the places families were forced to settle. I really want to you try to keep in mind, intersectionality really isn't meant to apply to single individuals, and the identities aren't defined for the purposes of maintaining discriminatory practices. They are defined in reference to how different groups have been treated by society over the course of decades or centuries. The US government has cared about demographics and identity since the beginning, and it has been keeping track of that stuff for pretty bad reasons for a lot of its history. We don't GET to stop caring yet, because the consequences of that long history are still bubbling up from datasets to this day. When you're seeking medical care, screening tests are based on your intersectional identities. White people usually don't get screened for sickle cell trait. Gay people are advised to take HIV prevention drugs. I could go on. This isn't some absurd prospect. If you're white, its pretty unlikely you need to worry about sickle cell, and those tests aren't free and in unlimited supply. If you do happen to have it, it might be that you suffer more harm from the disease than if you were screened and treated for it earlier, but given a limited pool of resources, you will prevent more harm by focusing on the populations who are statistically likely to suffer these problems. It sucks for whatever random white dudes get sickle cell anemia, but if we screened everybody equally, regardless of statistics, the amount of harm done by diverting focus from the people who get hurt the most from this is almost certainly much higher than the alternative. That's just how statistics works. Outliers are few by nature. It would be great if we could just screen everybody, put as much resources into a problem as is needed to solve it, but we don't live in that world. We have to choose, and I don't want our choice to be the same one the generations before us made.
Great video, lots of great points. I was surprised you didnt mention - the urgent need to support clean energy research and prototyping - expand the capability of our electricity grid - and finally, build the global (or at least intercontinental) HVDC network so we can send electricity between continents. This way we can generate surplus electricity with solar on sunny side of the planet and then send it to the night side, no batteries necessary. This is existing tech and we already did similar global network of undersea cables - it is called the Internet.
"similar global network of undersea cables - it is called the Internet" Transmission of information versus transmission of power are two very different problems. We have technology for transatlantic power transmission, but it's very expensive. We could build some connections, but a global network for solar power at night is just fantasy.
Hey Martin, thanks for your comment! 1) That's because we already have clean energy solutions. We need to implement them, not wait for new tech. 2) I did mention that we need to re-tool our already-struggling grid 3) I haven't seen anything convincing that this is at all feasible.
i'm in sweden, one of the less bad countries afaik. but i get depressed about all this crap, i don't know what i can do. these videos and your podcast are helping at least
Amazingly well put together summary of what's up. I'm glad you mentioned Food Waste, it's a major lever in climate change and there are many exciting solutions that are systems-based and win-win-win. I also recommend Represent Us as a non-partisan, anti-corruption, pro-voter-rights organization.
It's always baffled me why we don't have a global power grid. We already have massive underwater cables to connect countries to the internet. Why not do the same for power? When one country is in light, it can provide for others in darkness. No need for batteries. Just a global solar network.
Hey Russell! Thanks so much. Sorry I dropped off the map on you a couple years back - I kinda vanished from the world when my body started kicking my ass.
Hey Curtis, I haven’t finished watching this video or even had time to properly unpack what you’ve said, but I got to a part where you mention heat pumps at about 21 mins. I live at a location with average temperatures between 17°c and 24°c. We obviously then use more cooling than heating. Do we have an equivalent to a heat pump? I have never lived in a place where we need heating. What is this heat pump you’re talking about?
Heat pumps are strange. The same installation can be used to either cool OR heat a house. It essentially just pumps the heat in whichever direction you want it (ie, heat or cool). That said, I can't speak to every region of the world for their efficiencies, but it's worth looking into!
@@ScopeofScience oh now I’m home and I’ve had a chance to look it up, here in Australia we just call them reverse cycle air conditioning. When the pump runs one way it heats, and then it runs the other way, it cools. Bonehead moment: I’m a mechanical engineer. I know what a heat pump is. I’d just not heard about a domestic product referred to commonly as a “heat pump”, even though I know that’s what is inside the machine. We just call them AC’s.
@@The.Talent The channel Technology Connections has like four videos on heat pumps. He's from the U.S., so he makes an effort to explain differences in terminology for other regions. ...Not that I'm suggesting *you* watch multiple half-hour videos just for that purpose, especially if you're a mechanical engineer. Just putting that out there, mostly for others. The vids do offer useful insight into why it's important technology from a climate perspective, but it's a channel about tech and tech adoption first and foremost, so those videos are primarily explanations of how heat pumps work and how easy/hard it would be to make them more commonplace. The most recent of those videos is at th-cam.com/video/43XKfuptnik/w-d-xo.html
For the longest I have upgraded a lot of the electric in my apartment to where it uses less and I only use lights when needed but yet I’ve noticed over the year or the first year my electric bill was cheap overtime Avenue even used less kilowatts per month but my electric bill now cost more than it did a year ago and I use less kilowatts to me that just feels like I’m being punished for using less electricity
Amazing. But it seems like the ones watching this are people who are already environmentally conscious, which is really the opposite of the crowd we need to reach. I see a lot of comments like “great video, I’ve been fighting climate change a long time so this was great to see” and not “wow, I had no idea about this. I’m definitely going to change my behaviour.” Unfortunately the people most engaged seem to be the ones with the least capacity to make a big difference. If Jeff Bezos were to learn something from this it could have the effect of millions of the rest of us taking action, but that never seems to happen. That’s why I think democratic reform has to be the main avenue to pursue climate action. We have to break the incredible bond between power, wealth, climate recklessness. Until that happens anything done on the individual level is futile. For real climate action, I’m beginning to think the the only viable course is through political reform.
You're definitely right about who this video is teaching. However, I made this video expecting that only people who were already interested/concerned would click on it (it is an hour long, afterall). I wasn't trying to convince people to care, I was trying to reach those that care but don't know what to do to, and to show them a course of action. Some have commented/messaged that they just signed up for a climate group after watching this, and that is awesome
One thing i want to note about affordable renewables is that i dont think its likely that we’re offsetting the carbon expense that was put into transport, manufacture, and installation. Countries like china can produce the materials and products very cheaply with coal as an energy source. Its very energy intensive to produce and manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, etc - and installing these at the scale needed is also very energy intensive. We basically need to perform an energy balance on everything produced and ensure that whatever carbon emitted that isnt offset in the human controlled processes is consumed by plants and is dissolved in safe amounts in large bodies of water. I think we have a very long way to go before we’re there. The pandemic is still showing how fragile our systems are and large changes can cause immediate disaster. Basically we have to inch our way to it while we make our existing systems more robust so the impacts on all lives are minimized. Just a few thoughts and ramblings. Cool video.
You are perpetuating one of the great myths of climate change, put about by the science-denying lobby. They always discuss the embodied energy of elecric vehicles, solar panels, GSHP kit, and so on, and "just asking questions" wonder out loud if the energy saving they give covers the energy that went into their manufacture and transport. This is disingenuous........because it makes the assumption that the status quo has no embodied energy at all! Yep, that's a pretty ridiculous assumption. The fact is, if you are to have a car, you are going to have a lot of embodied energy whether it is electric or ICE. And solar panels (properly sited), now have an energy-payback time of around 2 years. But science deniers never do that comparison......they just ask if the EV can ever pay back the energy that went into its manufacture.
@@MikeAG333 im not perpetuating myths or denying anything. I’m trying to approach this from an engineering view - I think it’s good to have discussions rather than pointing fingers about what I think or if I follow a bunch of fluff put out by the science denying lobby as you call it. The stuff I discuss above doesn’t deny science and it doesn’t deny embodied energy of any system. It obviously takes energy to produce any product. it’s entirely likely that the these systems that use EVs and solar can be much more efficient than say systems that use hydrocarbons. the argument about pay back for evs isn’t a bad thing to point out either. The goal is to reduce emissions and it’s also perfectly ok to inch our way there because our rate is restricted by our tech. Also, If you have that citation for the solar panel energy payback, I’ll happily take a look.
@Kurtis Baute Can you help me? How is the worst of disasters diverted onto the marginalized and POC? Like, I mean the mechanism, how does it play out in the real world exactly? Can someone help clear up my picture? Please? I like when I can understand and explain problems clearly and I can't.
Its sort of a death by a thousand cuts thing... there are a lot of contributing factors at play. The marginalized and disenfranchised are more likely to [be forced to] live in poorer neighbourhoods that have infrastructure that is less well supported, protected, and maintained. -Ambulances in the US arrive 4 minutes faster in wealthier neighbourhoods than poor ones. -Areas that have been redlined are more prone to flooding. -Disabled people and the elderly are often not able to evacuate without assistance -Fewer resources means less emergency food in your pantry, and less access to evacuation options like having a car Does that help? References: www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ambulances-wealth-idUSKBN1O324N www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-flood-risk-redlining/
This video starts super good... but around mid of Part Two you start just putting everything in the mix and saying a some "ideas" as "facts" (a-la "We must do A, B, C, D"). I think you should have passed the script by somebody else because, even I see you really genuinly care and are not intending to deceive us (nor do I believe Climate Change Isn't a problem), it just turns into a revised opinion, presented as facts. Nevertheless Kurtis, I'm SUPER HAPPY you went through your operation OK and hope to see more of you in the near future. Great weekend!
I think I did a pretty good job of expressing when I was giving an opinion by saying "I think that..." and by citing my references at the top of the screen whenever I was stating a fact. Part one and two each have the same rate of citations (about one every 20 seconds), so it actually isn't like I stop saying facts. Maybe what you mean is that I start talking less about physical sciences and more about social sciences?
I'm genuinely curious as to why you don't mention nuclear energy when talking about de-carbonizing our grid. It seems to me (not a scientist) that it would be the easiest and cleanest way to sustain a base load of power consumption on the grid without creating emissions. And waste storage, while definitely a problem in the long term, doesn't contribute to carbon emissions, which is the goal. Is it the mining? If so, what about newer reactor designs that run on Thorium and spent uranium fuel? Again, not trying to bait. I'm genuinely curious. (Also I'm like 2/3rds through the video so maybe you mention it later)
I think we absolutely need to keep all the nuclear that we have open. It fills a critical niche that is hard for renewables to fill - it allows for a stable and consistent base load. It's safe, and we have ways of storing the waste. I also think building more nuclear is part of the solution, but that is a slow process with big upfront carbon costs, and it is very unpopular (which makes it unlikely to happen).
I'm still sad that Jay Inslee dropped out of the 2016 us election. He wasn't going to win and at least he still got to stay in his prior position but still would've been really cool to see him or Andrew Yang elected, especially over Trump.
At part three now but there's a point I want to raise about part 1 and 2. You speak very highly of densely populated cities as opposed to suburbs, but isn't population density positively correlated with the rate of spread of pathogens like the coronavirus? From what I know (experience growing up in one of the densest cities in the world and also having lived in suburban areas during university), it's also linked to higher rates of collateral damage from crime and natural disasters alike. What do you think of this?
Great questions! I know "rural" isn't the same as "suburban", but from my experience, the trends are usually pretty similar for these sorts of things (suburban tends to fall in the middle), so I'm going to conflate the two in order to answer your question a bit more rapidly. At least in the US, covid actually had much higher death rates in rural places than in urban ones. Some of this is due to demographics like education levels (eg. different vaccination rates), but some of this is probably also due to the fact that more densely populated areas have more specialists and better hospitals. As for crime, I know in Canada there is 23% MORE crime in rural areas than urban ones. I think a lot of this ends up being a bias because there is indeed more overall crime in urban areas, and we hear about it way more often... but there are way WAY more people there, so the proportion really matters. Hope that helps! Sources: www.public-health.uiowa.edu/news-items/covid-incidence-mortality-rates-remain-much-higher-in-rural-areas/ www.gov.nl.ca/vpi/files/Fact-Sheet-8-Police-reported-crime-in-rural-and-urban-areas-in-the-Canadian-provinces-2017.pdf
@@ScopeofScience thanks for your perspective and the new info! This is new to me and I'm seeing what you're saying. I'm happy to know that it's not as bad as I thought. But to clarify, I should mention that simple death rates and crime rates are not the full picture. My experience tells me that even with a lower death rate, people in dense cities experience more pandemic-related stress, probably from (rightly) worrying about how easily they can catch the disease from all the people around and, at best, be temporarily put out of work (which could still have substantial consequences) and social interaction. Those who do end up catching it experience a lot of guilt too. Even the death of capitalism might not make this go away, were we to have pandemics after that. I also explicitly mentioned ”collateral damage” due to crime and natural disasters, not just how many police reports are made due to crime. I can't imagine this being less of a risk with respect to the crime rate, compared to rural/suburban areas. I've just finished the rest of the video and I love it btw, I'm already sharing this around as we speak, but I just wanted to mention what you hadn't talked (or maybe thought) about using my lived experience.
@@ScopeofScience I hope we'll be able to continue this conversation later. I need to sleep now because it's 3am where I am! I'm looking forward to your reply and I hope you're well
I have been studying Abolitionism for English class and I was just thinking about how incredibly similar the movements both already are, and will need to become. It also made me double down on active/transit based transportation activism as I came to realize how important public spaces that have been destroyed were to the success of ending slavery. Many protest spaces are gone, and the few left have extremely lessened and altered visibility. People mingle less and are more isolated than ever thanks to dependency on cars which isolate them during the little time one would normally have any interaction with any humans outside their tiny (and shrinking) spheres. I'd argue very strongly that car dependency gave rise to extremist talk radio shows, which then gave rise to extremist news and social media bubbles. It also gave rise to the uniquely lonely human experiences (relative to the rest of history) that social media depended on for its meteoric rise to universal addiction. We sought out community and thanks to car dependency, it was all there was - no wonder we're addicted. Abolitionists' use and creation of gathering places via churches and public places, and just having people from town see them or see free blacks mingle over time was absolutely critical - it's no wonder to me that we've struggled without being able to show people IN PERSON that environmental lifestyles can be NICER. It's harder to ignore people's lifestyles who you spend actual time with. It's no wonder to me that highways were used to bulldoze some of the most important public spaces for political change...
My feedback: use the footage from this video and shorten it into another video called "What we need to do about climate change". Cut it up like bullet points and cut out all the waffle so it's concise. In other words, you could have a video for like ten seconds you say consumer action isn't enough and then list every major change that needs to happen one after the other in that video.
I disagree/doubt with pretty much everything said but at least you are honest with actual solutions. Seems most people I see who claim to be climate activists, cannot muster up answers for what we should/should not do. At least, they can't explicitly name them like you did. I think because they know it's a bit extreme and aren't actually committed to the cause.
You don't disagree with me, you disagree with the experts that I cited. But Joe, I'm sure you know better than the people that work on this for their careers. As for solutions, it's such a huge problem in scope that it's simply just hard to summarize. I don't think people are lying, but giving an answer to what we need to do took me 54 minutes, and that's after I spent years working full time on climate and months putting the script together.
what always bothered me about ecological communication is the fact that starting from "Climate Change" you have to jump through multiple issues like CO2-Emissions, feedbackloops, biodiversity loss, climate justice and so on in order to inspire action while at the same time those issues are making the problem bigger and bigger so in the end there is somewhat a 50-50 chance that the person you are talking to either takes action or goes into apathy-mode. This is intentional. The term climate change is a term initiated by the republicans over 20 years ago in order to facilitate climate denial. By stretching out the few forces that we as climate-fighters have along such a broad front of issues it is very easy to disrupt our discourse and sow contempt. Additionally to navigate through this discourse usually requires academic thinking - unless of course you are directly impacted by this but even then your self-agency is immediately taken over by those who are in this discourse for a very long time. Therefore I think it might be useful to push a narrative which is more dense and can be understood by everyone. I go with: the systematic-escalating annihilation of our base of life for the profits of a few has to end.
That nonsense about the origin of the phrase climate change is just so damned America-centric. The Republicans have absolutely nothing whatever to do with which words are used in Europe, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on.....and "climate change" has been in use here for far longer than 20 years. It is absolutely the correct terminology, too, because the effects of global warming vary so much from place to place that some areas WILL actually cool, and many, many areas will be much wetter. In those places, it's absolutely meaningless to talk of global warming.
@@MikeAG333 I'm not talking about the invention of the term Climate Change but about its political implementation, usage and consequences around the world considering that the american public is the most powerful when it comes to influence debate around the world. I'm not saying that republicans went around and told every single scientist or pundit to go with this. It is more some sort of a very powerful dynamic which could spread on its own. Think about it: When you are starting to talk about climate change you have to explain to people what this actually means and you need to have done a ton of research so that folks cant call you out on your bs - sth most of them will do anyway. There is a hierarchy of knowledge being constructed here, over and over again and along this hierarchy it is very easy to reaffirm political antagonisms so that in the end the debate explodes so hard so that in the end it is very hard or even impossible to initiate meaningful change.
@Stein Mauer Social sciences do exist and are an important study. However, I think if we combine the physical sciences (eg. env science, conservation, env engineering) with social sciences (eg. indigenous studies, women's studies, political science), getting a consensus in government would be nearly impossible. I'm all for efficiency. Combining science with social issues (and vice versa) is not a very practical way to achieve systemic change in democratic countries (as discussed in the video).
You can't really have a reasonable discussion about these problems and their solutions without discussing the social issues involved. It's an issue that is caused by society (and not everyone equally), affects society (and not everyone equally), and needs to be solved by society (and not everyone equally). Even if you could, trying to remove social dynamics from the conversation removes a sense of responsibility from the equation. We talked about Global Warming in those strictly-scientific terms for decades, and the cause made precisely no headway, because people didn't care about polar bears and seemingly abstract scientific concepts. Once we started connecting the dots for people (the social justice side of things), we suddenly had millions taking part in global climate strikes (eg. September 2019).
I understand how talking about "the social justice side of things" can bring groups of people together. You are correct in saying that climate change affects different people to different degrees. However, by combining these issues, debates and passing bills become terribly slow. Some politicians who support certain climate policies, may vote 'nay' if the bill includes any social policies that don't conform to their voter base. The Montreal protocol was successful because of good marketing pointing at CFCs. A concerted campaign pointing at the negative effects of excess CO2 (eg. crop yield, brain function, etc) might be more successful than 'making people feel responsible'. Like you said in the video, many are in denial. This is because people do not want to feel responsible. If emotions can be removed and individual negative effects can be focused on, I think many from the political right will support climate policies.
The only thing I can criticize, like most videos of english language, most data and talk is only based or refered to United States and Canada. Which is to say the least, stupid. But in this concrete case, it makes kinda sense due to the climate change topic.
Yeah, I originally had a section near the beginning where I discussed how this is a North-American-centric perspective... but it slowed down this already long vid... and as you alluded to, we (I'm Canadian) have played a disproportionately huge roll in causing this, and respectively have the biggest opportunities to work to fix it.
🤣Republicans are the bad guys... Bro, I really appreciate your work, but you should really be apolitical because "Politics = divide to rule" Like that will help eh. Personal summaries... We are ran by junkies, “profit junkies” 🤑 “Our politicians are interchangeable figureheads on the pirate ships of the global Corporatocracy Empire” I would recommend reading at least some of Plato Quotes About Democracy and more. Also have a peek at Tocqueville. "If voting would change anything, the oligarchs would make it illegal" said Coluche, French political activist in the mid 1980's. I used to enjoy Astrophysics and Cosmology till 2012. I had a vivid interest in those. In 2012, I heard about record low ice in the Arctic. I fell from the stars, and yes, even from supermassive black holes down to Earth and began looking at our planet a lot closer... 😱 I too can't sleep and get depressed a lot. But after understanding the Physics of it all, I had to look at humans, their behavioural traits, their addictions to almost anything, including profits and ideologies. Abandon all hope, ye who enters that realm. ☮bro. Take care.
This is a brain-dead take ngl. The way to stop climate change and implement any sort of climate action requires politics. Politics is about power; people like Kurtis want to see change, and that requires power/politics. Conversely, these "profit junkies" would like to continue making profits and so utilize their political power to prevent climate action that negatively affects their profit margins. How could something so impactful as climate change not be political? Or maybe you are talking about electoral politics, which I suspect is the case. And for that, you are completely missing the point. It's very simple let me walk you through it. In the US, there are two political parties that have any substantial power. One of them has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change, worked against any climate action, and actively contributed towards, by way of loosening climate restrictions, greenhouse emissions, and in turn, climate change. The other party, while it hasn't been able to implement basically any climate regulations, is broadly in favor of climate action and acknowledges the existence of climate change, and has taken steps toward minimizing climate change (at least some representatives in the party have done that, definitely not all). By these descriptions, there is absolutely a party that is more to blame for climate change. If you deny that then you are just ignorant, one party (republicans) are substantially more at fault for climate change and actively stands in the way of any climate action while in the pockets of gas and oil. In contrast, the other party overwhelmingly doesn't (im talking generalities, of course, there are democrats that stand in the way of climate action, too, and fuck them too). And while yes, making any progress under our current system is very difficult, and yes, voting won't cut it. You need to ask yourself, do you want climate action now, or 100 years in the future when we maybe don't have the same system we do today? The way I see it, voting is yet another way we can try to implement climate action. But we have other more influential means of political power other than voting that should be pursued too (like strikes, boycotts, idk a bunch of stuff). Lastly, you quote, "If voting would change anything, the oligarchs would make it illegal" said Coluche, French political activist in the mid 1980. I guess that helps explain why the republican party has taken active steps to destroy and remove democracy in the US in recent years. The election fraud claims, the Jan 6th insurrection, the active attempts to prevent people from voting, I could go on. I mean, you can't be this ignorant of what's going on in our world. I guess you just sit back and pride yourself on being an enlightened centrist but in reality, all you do is fight against people trying to take action and ignore the fact that what you say would happen if voting had power is happening currently.
If you're trying to talk about a specific issue and one specific party is ignoring the facts to claim that issue literally doesn't exist while the world burns...saying "you should really be apolitical" is just ignoring the current realities of the world.
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This is a man that cares. He perseveres through pain and disappointment to bring us what he's been working on to help us all on this planet. He always sounds sincere and smart.
This should be good.
Thanks so much Rocky. Just gotta keep working on the stuff that matters :)
@-GinΠΓ Τάο so what is your solution about what humans should do about the inevitable climate heating up? What about those green jobs that are all operating right now? Would you put those people out of work telling them it's not worth it that the climate is just going to get hot anyway? Don't try ANYTHING that help?
the way i see it is that no matter how doom and gloom the situation can be, climate change is essentially a problem with no breaking point. You can't "fix it", you can only make it better
so even if an apocalyptic future is inevitable, moving the needle just a little bit would save lives. an increase of 0.1% of humanity's survivability rate means saving literal millions of lives
this means at no point is there a reason to give up, any action to make it better will make it better, any large action will make it much better
i think it's important to focus on the lives we can save because i hope most people agree each of every lives is worth saving
I really hope you start getting more attention again Kurtis. I started following your channel back when you proved the earth was round with your bicycle (which I still think is an awesome video by the way), and you've always been one of the few people out there who seems to genuinely care about this issue, regardless of what it costs you personally. I commend your efforts, and it's great to see you back, in good health, and putting out important messages like these once more.
All the best from a fellow Canadian on the east coast, keep doing what you do best!
Thanks so much. Big high fives from the West Coast.
Easily my favorite video of yours.
Really appreciate the self-reflection and growth evident in this video, especially on the internal activism side.
I've been on a similar journey these last few years as a young adult coming to terms with climate change. Fighting for necessary incrementalist change (like the recent climate bill passed in the US) as well as a revolution on a much larger scale is definitely a struggle, but it's absolutely worth all of the time we can give it!
Thanks so much :) I know a 1hr video like this is not everyone's jam, so I'm glad it spoke to you! Keep up the good fight.
This was so heartening. I feel climate anxiety every day and I can't put into words how much it means to me, hearing you say how much it affects you, too. I feel like when I talk to others about this, they either shrug it off or actually can't understand my point of view at all, while knowing (at least factually) what's at stake.
Anyway, fantastic video, Kurtis, eagerly watched every second!
I love this long form detailed video on the science and history of climate change! Thanks a lot for taking the time to create this. I’ll be sharing this on my channel.
Thanks so much Ankur! Really appreciate that :)
I've seen many videos on climate change, but this "compilation" feels despite the topic quite satisfying to watch.
You have done a good job putting all this together in one video.
Thanks a lot Dave! Really appreciate it
love the effort this guy puts in his videos
Thank you!
less than 5000 views?! this is such a well-made video. what a tragedy that the algorithm hasn't picked this up yet.
This is one of the best and most detailed summaries of the problem I've seen so far that also suggests concrete solutions on every level. I am thinking about sharing this video with the parliamentary representatives in my home country in the (perhaps naive) hope that they think about how their current political oppinion holds up to the facts you state. How would you suggest pitching this to someone whose political beliefs might be radically different from what the facts suggest? I can imagine this could do more harm than good, if the reaction is e.g. one of spite and resentment. Is it even worth it?
is it worth it? nope. if someone doesn't want to believe in reality, trying to convince them is a waste of time. time that is better spent trying to inform those who are undecided and underinformed.
for example: a neighbor of mine (retired banker) is an extremely conservative climate science denier. i've tried for years to convince her, but she didn't move an inch. she also doesn't suffer a lot from climate change anyway. if it's to hot to sleep at night, she just sleeps in her second residence outside of the city, which is easy since she has a big SUV. if i then tell her that others don't have that choice, she usually says it's their own fault - everyone can be successful, if they stop complaining and just work hard enough. yikes!
there are other neighbors, though. the key is to LISTEN to them - find out how they're affected, and then inform them about those things. if that's someone who can't sleep because of the heat, or the traffic at night, that's what i talk to them about. not the global south, not the rain forest, not ice bears. just don't try to convince them. listen, share your feelings, but don't overdo it. a five minute chat every other week is better than an hour long monolog. if they bite and want to know more, then you can supply them with documentaries and whatnot.
Glad you recovered. I wish you good health and I appreciate your educational videos on the matter. I will do my best to share this video in my social circle to spread awareness.
i love it when people complain about jobs getting lost due to climate action - and in the next sentence complain that wind turbines are expensive because they need to be maintained. gnaaaargh.
my father originally apprenticed as a typesetter, but by the time he was finished that job didn't exist anymore due to automatization. back then people didn't complain about jobs being lost, i guess.
so, what did my father do? he took a job as a technician at the austrian weather service. which is why i know about climate change since my childhood.
jobs change as the world changes. we can either adapt, or complain and bury our head in the sand. do or die.
You uploaded this video right when I was reading a book of Murray Bookchin. Everything points to the same direction! I only disaggre on your idea of stronger government and that we have to participate in politics to reach the change. I think politicians won't change anything!
Thank you Kurtis. I still deal with a lot of climate anxiety, which has dramatically shaped how I live my life and plan for my future. It is heartening to know that people like you put so much effort into helping teach people about our world. One of my favourite stories is one of Fred Rogers telling a child who was distressed about scary things in the news. He said to "look for the helpers."
Thanks, Kurtis, for being one of the helpers :)
Hey friend. Sorry you also struggle with it. I hope you have people to talk to about it. Especially people who understand. It is way worse when it feels like you're going through it alone (and I promise you arent - a lot of people are in our shoes). Thanks for this thoughtful and kind comment... I really appreciate it :)
Revolution baby! Excellent video Kurtis, easily one of the most comprehensive & introspective I’ve engaged with on the topic. Especially loved the section on internal activism, I’m super stoked to see how this more dialectic approach to big problems continues to shift the conversation over time :)
Thank you so so much :D
I quite appreciate the bit that you put in at the end about careers in environmentalism. I work in designing recycling plants and i sometimes forget that I'm actually doing something to help. It often feels a bit hopeless or that I'm harming things by nature of having to consume things, but being paralyzed by climate dread isn't exactly helpful.
In any case, thank you for activism and communicating these methods for mitigating this climate crisis.
Even in the poor Philippines, our state colleges and universities are free.
Thank you so much for this outstanding video about climate change.
Kurtis! I just thought about you yesterday, in your biodome video! I thought to myself, "Some people are risking their lives to prove climate change.. what happened to him, hope he is alright." Now you released a video with biodome as first clip😃 what a coincidence!!
Fantastic video, I just wish more people knew about it / watched it. This is the type of video that should be played in high school to teens who will actually retain and perhaps do something with the information. The Earth thanks you Kurtis
I really started realizing this summer just how much of a big deal the climate crisis is. I'm determined to keep a resilient attitude about it, but to be honest, I can feel pretty crappy about it sometimes. I'm planning to start counseling at my local juco. I really think the analogy to the suffragism movement is going to help me. This is a topic that needs to be talked about way more, and I commend all those who are actively bringing up respectful conversations about it.
Hey George. It really sounds like you're approaching it with a healthy mindset. It is definitely hard to come to terms with, and I think its a never-ending journey... Anyway, I'm glad some parts of this video were helpful for you. Keep up the good fight my friend!
I like the mantra "build secondary power structures"
Thank you thank you thank you Kurtis! This video is essential and I will definietly be sharing it around
Thanks Charlie :)
One thing not mentioned is the 'Carbon Credits', and how certain governments offshore their emissions to other countries to reduce the emission statistics of their countries.
Also simply voting in politicians with a 'green agenda' isnt necessarily a good thing. Here in ireland we a have a political party called the "Green Party" and their mandate is essentially to tax the average working individual to promote green policies - Furthering a cost of living crisis. The systemic change required comes from sound social policies, enacted by those who subscribe to the idea of suppporting the many not the few. As an example: Raising levies on petrol and diesel cars to promote the average consumer to buy an EV... as opposed to subsidising EV's, reducing the cost, and making them the obvious choice.
Simply increasing the awareness of climate change wont reduce the crippling nature of capitalism on the average working person - (in fact it may cause people to grow deaf to the issue altogether), nor will voting in those who say they want to curb climate change... The average voter must learn about those who are standing for elections, learn their voting history on previous bills and make an informed decisions on "Will this person enact 'Good' social reform, reform for the many and not the few". Reform as you mentioned, nationalising healthcare making it free, and making housing a basic human right.
All in all, i've been following you for a few years now and i love the direction your headed. Shifting the focus from the individual to the collective, shifiting from 'What can we do as consumers' to 'What can we do as voters'
Great stuff Kurtis, Keep it up :D
and remember 'Power to the People!'
I linked this video to Finnish parlament members :)
Kurtis, you rock. Go gett'em Tiger. Will be sharing for sure.
This was absolutely worth the wait. Thank you for making this video.
I really love how you were able to connect all of these topics in a comprehensive way. The onion metaphor was excellent. I feel like you took 80% of the things I learned about climate change in the last 10 years and put them all in a logical relationship to each other where I can see the full picture. I think this will help me explain why climate change is important to me to my friends and family.
Thank you so so much. It took me ages to write, so I really appreciate that. Hope it helps your friends and family understand things+you better 💚
Wow, I'm subscribed to this channel but youtube just flat out didn't show it to me. I hope the algorithm picks this video up, it's so well made it deserves to be seen.
This is really great Kurtis, thank you for what you do!
Man, I will had your optimism. I really fall into that doomerism you talk about when it comes to climate talk. Like to me it feels that climate change is the product of so many systemic problems, it really feels like too many too fix. I'm glad that I am able to watch content like yours that even for a moment makes me believe that change is possible.
Thanks for continuing to make this content, whenever I see your videos in my subscription feed they are the first thing I watch because knowing everything I can about climate change is important and your videos are such a good source. Thank you for the content and keep up the fantastic work!!
I know it seems hopeless sometimes, with all that money and power against us, but we have one big advantage they don't. They have to spread their messaging through the media and must tailor it to a very broad audience. We can talk to our friends and families one on one and make our message more personal.
We have some new tools in our communication toolbox that can change minds without the need to explain all the nuances. Pick one that sounds interesting and Google it.
Deep Canvassing harnesses the power of narrative to awaken the empathy that is often hidden by partisan tribalism.
Attitudinal Inoculation exposes them to a weakened form of the bad arguments so that they become "vaccinated" against propaganda.
And my favorite and the easiest to implement is Street Epistemology. It uses Socratic questions and Motivational Interviewing methods to get people to reflect on why they believe what they believe.
Pick one, learn how it works, then get out there and do it!
One thing that absolutely irks me is how big companies want to make it us believe that normal consumers are the ones responsible for all climate change and should be the one who need to change.
I do agree we can do certain things to help but these mega corporations , rich dudes traveling in private planes giving us speeches about using plastic fkfking straws.
I'd also like to point out the carbon footprint of US military , it releases more carbon than some countries. It's insane
Anyways , take care , stay healthy.
You want to blame big companies for putting the blame on consumers. That is just such nonsense. From the 70s when this issue was first raised, all scientists and lobbyists have talked about the power of the consumer to force change....which is not just correct, but well worth repeating. You can't then turn that around when a company reiterates the message. The same idiocy is used against governments by science deniers......."it's just a conspiracy of big gubmint".....completely forgetting the 3 decades of lobbying (by the citizenry and scientists) it took to even get any governments to acknowledge the existence of the issue.
I think it's really great how you're talking about not just the face value problem of climate change, but all of the societal and economic factors that surround it. We all need to be thinking more like this!
You are incredible! I loved this video even though it terrified me in a way. always looking forward to listening to you talk about any subject
I really enjoyed this video. Exactly what I needed: realism combined with hope for the future, as well as concrete and specific advice. Thanks so much for making it!
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you for your time and dedication to the cause, I can tell you're very motivated to cause positive change and make an impact on the world.
It's going to be critical that, as a species, we begin prioritizing health over wealth. Hands down, it is often our focus on building wealth and being more financially prosperous than our neighbor/competitor/foreign country that drives us in the wrong direction and causes so much of the friction of change. Please continue your efforts in educating the masses and letting us know our options to help fight for humanity's future.
Nicki Minaj should make this her next music video. She sits on a chair, just silently nodding, while Kurtis Baute talks for 45 minutes.
I could add a sick bassline to it if that helps my odds lol
Great video! Although I do wish there was more from the perspective of developing countries and how they can manage climate change while continuing their growth to reach the levels of western countries
Yah, sorry about that. It's definitely a very North American-centric video. That would make a great video topic in the future though 👍
Now is the time for systemic change - De-growth of economies; taxation and accountability of oil producers; decimating the livestock and dairy farming, investment in food sources which are efficient in land and water useage, subsidies for electrification and solar power, and strict global control over single-use plastics and forever-chemicals. Now is the time to accept drastic changes to the way we live today, so that we may live well tomorrow. But first and foremost, get our politicians to keep the oil in the ground.
Now is the time to accept our own mortality and that of other species.
Part two starts at 18:27 for anyone wondering
Thanks for the reminder! Just added the Timestamps
Been looking forward to this! Glad to see another upload, and a long video too!
this must be one of the best videos on the topic out there how does it have so little views
Amazing video, well made and a must watch. Also glad you are feeling better, one of my youtubers I watch asap
Nice to see you back :)
Thanks! It's good to be back. And next time I wont make an hour long video, so I should be back soon :)
Great to hear from you. You brought up so many things that if you didn't gloss over a bunch of stuff this could be a four hour video.
In this episode I'm reminded that what is held in highest importance by those in power, be it political or corporate - but I repeat myself, is tHe eCoNOmY. Gawd, as long as money is moving we can all suffer as far as power is concerned.
The economy would be healthier if we were all wealthier instead of making a few billionaires and pretending 'trickle-down' will make us all better off. So yeah, what I'm getting at is free education as far as you want to go and higher taxes on each stratum of income. I don't know that nationalising industry is the answer, but it's an answer and a lot better than allowing monopolies. Allowing monopolies is a great way for politicians to get their beaks wet. Instead of raising taxes for the good of the country they're scuppering the country in favour of greed and power.
I feel a rant coming on so it's time to back away from the keyboard.
Awesome! I'm in the middle of watching and had a thought. Could you cut a little 5 minute version containing only the crucial info for people that don't have time? I think it will make more people interested. You could link this one in the description
Shamefully few views! This needs to be rectified
Amazing format. Everything you said really resonate with me, it was all put together in a great way. Thanks very much! You earned a new subscriber.
Awesome! Thank you!
Good and informative video.
Great to see you alive and fighting again. Thank you for your work.
wow its been awhile! welcome back! thanks for returning & bringing great content & helping people become aware!
Thanks dude. Sending all the love :)
Most of this video was really good and I appreciate it being made. Most of it. There's one thing that made me remove the like I gave it somewhere in the first half. The intersectionalist point really ticked me of. Not because I'm staunchly against hearing that perspective out, but because it's needlessly attacking and making the entire issue less palatable. I find it difficult to fathom how, in the face of gigantic issues, even very smart people resort unnecessary group thinking and detrimental identity mentality.
Frankly, I don't care in which subgroup of the population traits we dislike are more prevalent. If you address these issues as an [insert ethnic or gender subgroup] problem instead of what they really are, human flaws, you unnecessarily alienate people that would otherwise support a cause. I'm all for environmental justice, that is providing aid to the people most disadvantaged, but it's not a white people vs non-whites problem. It's a geographical and a historical one. Of course racism and the like exist. Such forces alienate people and alienate us from finding a solution. We shouldn't add to it by feeding the flames of factionalism.
When I hear people talk about "old white men" and so on, the same instinctive disgust settles in as when I hear antisemites talk about greedy bankers - never failing to mention they're jewish - or these law and order types who can't talk about inner city criminality without mentioning what skin colour many people involved in said criminality have (despite the correlation clearly being with poverty, not with skin tone).
I don't care what percentage of fossil fuel executives are white, male, straight, cisgender or anything else of that sort. I care about what they do. And as much as you can justly be outraged at it, there's still millions of people that belong to the very same subgroups that don't engage in any of the immoral behaviours you might be outraged at. Million dollar yachts and the mental complexes you need to want to waste ressources acquiring them don't come free with every set of male genitals or low melanin level. Addressing the issue as if they were a product of such factors estranges people who would support the cause, if they did not feel slighted by those identity issues. I believe we should first focus on solving the pressing issues at hand before focussing on what part of some people's identity might have had a hand in creating many of these issues.
I dislike current gender stereotypes, roles and expectations - and I dislike when people submit to them rather than creating their own personality. That being said, I don't think any one person can be specifically blamed for them. They're societal issues and merely attacking, for example, male people (most often those not at all connected with the few examples at the peak of immorality) often amounts to little more than victim blaming since most don't conform to stereotypes in bad faith but rather because they feel the need to. Gender roles, idiotic expectations, sick societal atmospheres and toxic environments are to blame, not the people that fall victim to them - and especially not their gender or skin colour.
On a last note, fixing behavioral things works much better when you don't put people in a defensive (and thus less receptive) state of mind by insulting or at least indirectly offending their sense of identity. For example, if I called you a "crazy leaf-eating hippie" or some other stupid thing like that at the beginning of my comment, you might not have been so keen to read on and consider what I wrote.
Instead, if you detach the issue you have from the demographic details and group identities of a person, you don't give them the sense of wanting to change them. People tend to shut themselves off if they feel their identity threatened. Insults and lectures don't get through to people, understanding and suggestions do.
And the people at fault are not a demographic group (whichever) but a group of people defined by childish selfishness.
Apologies if this message was all over the place. Thanks for taking the time to read it, if you did.
Listen, this is gonna be long, but I really hope you can hear me out... I really just want you to understand, pointing out what kinds of people tend to be victims disproportionately, or which intersectional groups are financially dominant and exacerbating the problem, that isn't an attack. There are plenty of people, myself included, who legitimately aren't put on the defensive when others talk about this stuff. It also isn't just useless information. The fact is, when examining demographic trends, there are disproportionate impacts felt by particular groups of people. If you want to ignore that, go ahead, but it doesn't make those disparities go away, and may, in fact, ensure that certain groups of people don't get the help they need to thrive. It isn't "factionalism" or "identity mentality", its a recognition that certain population groups face specific and non-generalizable threats from a changing climate, and that an equitable approach to climate change identifies and addresses these threats without flattening a complex interplay of cultures, values, and ways of living which are NOT homogeneous even within cities.
Intersectionality, if you chose to approach it without GETTING defensive, serves as a way of quantifying and understanding these differences. Class is an intersectional identity, gender is an intersectional identity, age is an intersectional identity. We can talk about these things as if they are unrelated, but the data does not bear out. They are correlated with one another, and with the material conditions under which people live.
The fact of the matter is, OLD people have a disproportionate influence in politics and in regards the financial resources. WHITE people, when compared to disadvantaged groups, are less likely to find themselves impoverished and far more likely to have generational wealth. MEN are more likely to hold positions of political power in the United States, and far more likely to be ultra-wealthy than women. RICH people are disproportionately represented politically, and contribute significantly more to climate change than other groups of people. We can talk about the exceptions all we want, but if you happen to be any of those identities, it doesn't mean we are assigning blame to YOU. It is just significantly more likely for a person who is old, white, and male to have contributed directly to this problem than basically any other intersection of identities.
If we want to get into the weeds, we can even talk about how black people's geographic location is, historically, motivated by racism. Redlining, segregation, and other racist american policy has made it so certain geographical regions, many of which were not commercially desirable by the almost entirely white upper class at the time, are FAR more likely to be comprised mostly of black people, and many of those locations are just factually more likely to face serious consequences from climate change than other neighborhoods. We can say that them being black isn't involved in the additional risk these people face, but that would be a LIE. They are there because white people forced them there, and applying a colorblind filter means we aren't getting a complete picture of the forces that went into their particular vulnerabilities to climate crisis.
You talk about men being "attacked" and "blamed" for societal issues, but... intersectionality is ONLY about societal trends. It's a recognition that different people face different challenges, and are afforded different privileges. It examines quantitatively what sort of experiences different groups are likely to face, and what sort of impact that has on that group. The fact is, the experiences and social expectations of men in the US do shape behavior, and impart specific challenges that female people are unlikely to face. The same is true for women. Treating these populations as interchangeable in the pursuit of gender equality is ineffective at best and detrimental at worst. An intersectional approach would be to determine what factors lead to inequalities, and apply solutions which are tailored to the gender of the people involved. Many more men commit suicide than women. Should we not commit greater resources toward suicide prevention specific to male populations? Significantly more women are victims of domestic violence than men (mostly by men, too). Should we not keep that in mind when addressing domestic violence cases or accusations of abuse?
I could go on. Rates of cancer, infant mortality, obesity, exposure to pollution, etc. All things that, when looking at demographic data, disproportionately effect non-white people. Should our limited resources towards fixing these problems be spent without regard for identity when the stats show not all identities are afflicted by problems equally? This is not to say that geography and poverty doesn't play a role, it absolutely does, but those are intersectional identities too. The problem is, geography and class just... genuinely doesn't account for all of the differences. Social sciences are still sciences, do you think that they don't know how to check for cross-correlations? The fact is, even when correcting for class and location, there are still inequalities linked to things like race, sexuality, and gender. To ignore that, to insist despite the evidence that everybody faces the same problems and suffers the same, means that we are less likely to help those who need help the most, and very likely to maintain or exacerbate current inequalities.
You don't have to get angry about it. You don't have to be defensive about the fact that somebody's skin means they might have faced fewer obstacles, or that the average white dude is more likely to succeed financially than the average... anybody else. It just gives the people trying to fix things ways to assess what kind of help and what amount of resources should be allocated to ensure everybody has an equal chance of thriving in the wake of climate change.
(1/2) It's not that you're wrong when talking about disproportionate effects, but I think there first of all is a false way of framing. Sure, black people might suffer more from climate change than average, but is that the most relevant distinction? Those people who are (or will be) affected the most are also distinguished by being to other features: mostly poor and mostly innocent. That's what I care about. If you live in misery my first concern isn't "oh but people with the same complexion are better off statistically". People are individuals, not statistics.
The fact remains, you can be an old, white, male person and still be disadvantaged, poor and powerless. Addressing the issue as a problem with old, white, male people puts exactly those at risk of discrimination who haven't had all too many advantages because of their group identities/labels and now even face discrimination on account of them. The problem isn't old, white, male people but people with too much influence, too much affluence and too little regard for anything but themselves and their close circles. Most of whom happen to be old, white and male, yes. Still the majority of old, white, male people are anywhere but in a position of power to abuse, which should provide ample proof that these demographic factors aren't a predestination to become a certain kind of disagreeable person.
I fail to see how "oh but they're old, white and male! that's very important, we have to say it at every twist and turn lest we forget." is any different to nazis constantly obsessing about whether a person they dislike is jewish or not. I don't want to ignore statistics, but I'll never care as much about statistics as I care about individuals. When you mean people who abuse unjustifed power, say exactly that (or come up with a poignant term for it, if you'd like), but don't go on about old, white, male people. Someone's grandpa who dies a preventable death aged 72, still having to perform unsafe manual labour on account of not being able to retire has nothing to do with the people who are at the source of the climate mess, except that they share some demographic details.
Unjust advantages and disadvantages should be addressed and dealt with, I agree, but the approach you seem to take only creates new ones - in my opinion.
You said the following " if you happen to be any of those identities, it doesn't mean we are assigning blame to YOU". Then why use the terms?
My aplogies if that sounds rude but isn't it very unproductive to address the wrong group? Again, I don't want to claim similar severity (for one, one group historically has always been significantly in the minority) but how is that any different than talking about "those evil jewish bankers" and then clarifying "obviously I don't mean ALL jewish people". Then maybe don't use the term as a distinguishing factor. It is neither a determinant of the behaviour you want to call out nor a characteristic that only applies to the people you want to criticise.
And let's not forget that every movement also attracts dumb people who will not be able or willing to distinguish in a nuanced way. I am pretty convinced that if somebody gets shouted down as "old, white man" it won't be a person who actually should shut their mouth for once but somebody entirely not at fault for the issues at hand.
You can't seriously tell me that's not unhealthy collectivism.
I'm not advocating for a colourblind mentality, I see the flaws with that, but I am all for colour indifference. Whether you are black or not, I think you should have opportunities to escape the generational poverty that, yes, racism played a big part in building, but that isn't strictly in tandem with your skin tone. For example, if you're a white person that - through whatever course of events - ends up in the same region as a buch of black people, likewise unjustly denied opportunities, you should receive the same help. If everybody just woke up with blue skin one day and ethnic groups became indistinguishable, the aftermath of previous injustices would still linger on (generation wealth as you mentioned, for example). The problem isn't merely racism but a lack in social mobility. This is the problem that needs to be addressed.
If a group of people is predominantly affected by an injustice (as black people are when it comes to wealth inequality) they will be predominantly aided by removing that obstacle. There is no need to draw divisions along ethnic lines - except if you want to exacerbate them.
I also won't deny the aftereffects of racism, such as geographical disadvantages. However the problem isn't an irreparable scar on society that can't be mended but an issue of, again, lacking social and physical mobility (entangled with various biases here and there). Now whether a neighbourhood that gets hit by a flash flood is 90% black, 90% white, 90% asian, 90% hispanic or 90% whatever is not relevant. In any case, if it is a poor area with run-down infrastructure it's almost certainly 100% populated by people that have been screwed over and left behind. That's the tragedy, not what percentage of these people has what ancestry.
If you can't bring yourself to care about people unless they belong to a statistically disadvantaged ethnicity, I think the issue lies with you and not with the people who primarily think in terms of humans, not of ethnic groups.
Sorry if all of that sounds like I don't understand your points or I'm being willfully ignorant - that is not the case. I just disagree with your approach.
(2/2) By the way, I do agree with you that different experiences shape people and this can have statistical significance. If you push male people into cut-throat competitiveness it's no wonder some people end up embracing it. But people are mostly a product of their experiences, not their genitals. Your apparent gender may have an influence on what experiences you're exposed to, but again, you can draw sharper and more useful distinctions than gender and ethnicity when trying to address issues like destructive economic cultures.
As for targeted ressource allocation, again I ask: why make it so specific? Why make suicide prevention a gender issue? Of course, suicide of male people is more prevalent and the causes probably coincide with harmful gender roles etc., but why not just make it suicide prevention instead of male suicide prevention? Same thing goes for domestic abuse: safe houses / shelters are a great thing but I fail to see how they have to be "women's and men's shelters". Can't we just expand capacities without caring who is statistically more likely to use them? Abuse victims should have a place to go to with as little obstacles as possible, no matter their gender. Also poverty alleviation is great, but why market it as this great crusade against the disadvantages of non-white people? I just find it sad that the modern left doesn't appear to be able to muster a care for people living in misery as long as they don't belong to "protected groups". More than any ethnicity or gender, the individually disadvantaged should be a protected group!
"Should our limited resources towards fixing these problems be spent without regard for identity when the stats show not all identities are afflicted by problems equally?"
Yes, because whether you get cancer treatment should be determined on whether you actually got cancer and not whether you're part of a group that is statistically more likely to have it.
Now when we talk about prevention that is another thing, but there still I'd deem it more effective to intervene in high risk (aka polluted) areas rather than handing out FFP masks to random black people on the street because they're statistically more likely to suffer from respirator diseases. On average you might reach the right people with that, but you'd leave behind the people that suffer from the same issues but aren't seen because they differ from the norm.
I'll come to an end with this wall of text now.
Even though we disagree, I appreciate you taking the time to write such a lengthy reply. But do you see the problem here? Instead of focussing on the main issue, the climate, we get caught up in a comparably unimportant discussion, just because somebody couldn't resist talking about their favourite kind of bogeypeople.
Natural disasters won't care about anyone's race or gender. Some people might be disproportionally affected, but that's not because flooding and heat waves are racist or sexist. Talking about societal issues is all well and good, but forcing that discussion at this particular point seems counterproductive to me. The relevant question is not who deserves to be hit by climate change the most, but how we can save the most people.
It's like blaming colonialism on "white people" when in fact, yes, colonialist profiteurs were (almost) exclusively white, but far from all white people benefitted from colonialism. By not addressing the issue specifically, that is to say putting the blame only on those involved instead of generalizing people down to their skin tone, you will inevitably throw people under the bus that were neither involved nor in support of horrible practices such as colonial exploitation.
It doesn't matter so much whether people intend calling out a statistically advantaged group in an offensive way, often offense is taken regardless. Ignoring that is not only rude, but flat out self-sabotage if you're trying to reach as many people as possible. Only because it is fine in your circle of acquaintances to have that (in my opinion ultimately unhealthy) focus on particular groups like "old, white men" that doesn't mean you can get everybody on board with it. Like it or not, the climate can't be tackled without broad support. If you slight people and metaphorically spit in their face (whether you intend to nor not), they will rather go down alongside you than help you fix a sinking ship.
You might think that's dumb, I think your approach is dumb - ultimately humans are dumb. We can either acknowledge that and deal with it in a healthy way or fail at the hurdle of our own unrealistic expectations.
Awkwardly, I agree with your post from an idealistic moral perspective but not from a communications perspective.
This sort of behavior *does* "feed the flames of factionalism", as you say, and it drives me up the wall. There's this disturbing mentality in society today that bigotry is okay when it targets the majority or plurality, as if that's somehow just "compensation" for past actions by other members of that group.
However, *because* that is such a commonly held viewpoint, I think that this video portraying the problem like this is actually *more* likely to incite action from its target audience. After all, those like you and me who want a society which has moved past pointlessly labeling people aren't going to ignore the climate crisis just because a video about the issue portrays it as a problem of racial/gender/age disparity, whereas those who *are* focused on those sorts of issues might need the wake-up call that "hey it's great to try to give everybody equal opportunities but that might be less important than making sure everybody can literally *survive* the coming decades". And anyone who cares more about feeling personally insulted than about preventing global ecosystem collapse is probably not feasible to convince through this medium anyway.
So, while that aspect of the video might irk me on a personal level, I don't think it's a bad move for the sake of getting the message out.
@@Grievousnw Maybe I didn't express this properly, but again, I and most people talking about this stuff, aren't preoccupied with who is to "blame" for anything, nor are they disinterested with the plight of the disadvantaged as a class of people. I don't know many, or really any, left leaning people who would genuinely approve of a scheme to only provide masks to black people, or anything like that.
The point is that different groups are differently disadvantaged, and strategies that may work for one group may not for other. Campaigns against suicide that address men should reflect the ways in which men tend to commit suicide for maximum possible impact. The exact methods and reasons for suicidal ideation aren't exactly the same between genders. Dividing things into demographics rather than a generalized resource allows for specialized care that is more likely to succeed to be administered.
I mean, there's a reason government entities and corporations spend the money on different advertisements for different demographics. Its because doing that makes your message more likely to get through to that demographic, and not everybody will respond well to some generalized ad campaign.
Similarly, this isn't about natural disasters being racist, its about triage. If you have a limited pool of resources to spend on saving peoples lives, how do you allocate those resources?
Lets think about earthquakes. If you don't consider these sorts of disproportionate impacts, it might be reasonable to focus attention on making infrastructure earthquake resistant in the parts of a city with the most infrastructure to disrupt. And this would be the right choice if there were no intersectional factors to consider! More people live in this densely populated and very well developed region of the city, so we should put more money into earthquake proofing it.
But wait... there's a region over there that isn't so well developed, a region that historically has had less attention given to its infrastructure due to the racial makeup of the community. Lets not think about that part. It isn't as densely populated, so we'll give it a piece of this money for earthquake retrofitting proportional to the population of the area. Sounds fair!
After doing some amount of this earthquake retrofitting work, an earthquake hits the city, and the fallout is immense. Because we allocated less funding to this region, and because of the racially motivated infrastructural deficiencies we refused to consider, more black people died in the earthquake than the population distribution of the area should expect of a natural disaster. As it turns out, highly developed regions of a city are very often quite white, and the building quality is such that a lot of the infrastructure here was less likely to be damaged by an earthquake in the first place! In fact, you probably could have left a lot of those buildings alone and been probably okay! They weren't up to code, but they were very well built.
If we had considered the intersectional factors which may have informed us of the infrastructural deficiencies of formerly redlined districts, and allocated funding considering the greater vulnerability of these regions as a result, a lot less black people would have died, a somewhat larger number of white people in the developed district would have died, and the total number of dead people probably reduced by a fair bit.
Maybe we could have identified the structural vulnerabilities in this district without considering race, and allocated more resources to this vulnerable population while maintaining a colorblind approach. That's an iffy one. Whose to say that the infrastructural issues were properly documented by the city during the time they were actively racist, or that building inspections for all the regions were conducted with equivalent rigor? A lot of these problems don't peak their head until after something goes wrong. If we have some data from a demographics study which suggests that the more black a district is, the more likely buildings are to suffer building code violations when inspected, should that be taken into account?
I hope you see where I'm going here. Its a hypothetical, but a reasonable one. There are real and observable distortions to ecology, infrastructure, and government documentation which disadvantage specific groups of people over others, not necessarily due to active racism by current public servants, but due to the long history of oppression levied towards these groups in the past. Black majority neighborhoods, by virtue of the racism of the people who built the public utilities there, are statistically more likely to have infrastructure in disrepair. This means, in order to achieve the same level of earthquake resilience as a white neighborhood, they may need more resources than what would be expected of their population or level of land development.
They also might not! That's something you can investigate to verify, and you might find that there really is no difference here, and we can apply aid without specific regard to racial identity of the population. But if you don't recognize and acknowledge the demographic disparities, and act as if everybody needs the same stuff to reach an agreed upon threshold of safety, you are maintaining the same racial dynamics put into place by previous generations.
And the thing is... you probably don't need to double check when it comes to white majority districts. You can probably trust that whatever work the government said it did, and whatever inspections they said they undertook, are essentially accurate. If you want your aid to be fairly distributed according to need, putting more focus on non-white neighborhoods is a rational decision.
I don't want to ramble on forever, but race is just an example here. Class is another one that statistically disadvantages certain population centers. The point is not that I think the lives of protected groups are somehow more valuable, I genuinely don't know why you expect anybody but fringe identity supremacist groups to believe that stuff. The point is that this country, and lots of countries around the world, the people in charge did think the lives of "protected groups" were worth a lot less less for hundreds of years, and they realized that belief in the construction of our cities, in the records of our bureaucracies, and in the places families were forced to settle.
I really want to you try to keep in mind, intersectionality really isn't meant to apply to single individuals, and the identities aren't defined for the purposes of maintaining discriminatory practices. They are defined in reference to how different groups have been treated by society over the course of decades or centuries. The US government has cared about demographics and identity since the beginning, and it has been keeping track of that stuff for pretty bad reasons for a lot of its history. We don't GET to stop caring yet, because the consequences of that long history are still bubbling up from datasets to this day.
When you're seeking medical care, screening tests are based on your intersectional identities. White people usually don't get screened for sickle cell trait. Gay people are advised to take HIV prevention drugs. I could go on. This isn't some absurd prospect. If you're white, its pretty unlikely you need to worry about sickle cell, and those tests aren't free and in unlimited supply. If you do happen to have it, it might be that you suffer more harm from the disease than if you were screened and treated for it earlier, but given a limited pool of resources, you will prevent more harm by focusing on the populations who are statistically likely to suffer these problems. It sucks for whatever random white dudes get sickle cell anemia, but if we screened everybody equally, regardless of statistics, the amount of harm done by diverting focus from the people who get hurt the most from this is almost certainly much higher than the alternative. That's just how statistics works. Outliers are few by nature. It would be great if we could just screen everybody, put as much resources into a problem as is needed to solve it, but we don't live in that world. We have to choose, and I don't want our choice to be the same one the generations before us made.
Great video, lots of great points. I was surprised you didnt mention
- the urgent need to support clean energy research and prototyping
- expand the capability of our electricity grid
- and finally, build the global (or at least intercontinental) HVDC network so we can send electricity between continents. This way we can generate surplus electricity with solar on sunny side of the planet and then send it to the night side, no batteries necessary. This is existing tech and we already did similar global network of undersea cables - it is called the Internet.
"similar global network of undersea cables - it is called the Internet" Transmission of information versus transmission of power are two very different problems. We have technology for transatlantic power transmission, but it's very expensive. We could build some connections, but a global network for solar power at night is just fantasy.
Hey Martin, thanks for your comment!
1) That's because we already have clean energy solutions. We need to implement them, not wait for new tech.
2) I did mention that we need to re-tool our already-struggling grid
3) I haven't seen anything convincing that this is at all feasible.
Don't mind me just commenting to boots the vid's chance to spread. Love the points here, always amazed with the work you do!
Haha thanks friend!
And just like peeling through the layers of an onion, this makes me cry....
Really top synopsis. Thank you.
😔😢
i'm in sweden, one of the less bad countries afaik. but i get depressed about all this crap, i don't know what i can do. these videos and your podcast are helping at least
Amazingly well put together summary of what's up. I'm glad you mentioned Food Waste, it's a major lever in climate change and there are many exciting solutions that are systems-based and win-win-win.
I also recommend Represent Us as a non-partisan, anti-corruption, pro-voter-rights organization.
It's always baffled me why we don't have a global power grid. We already have massive underwater cables to connect countries to the internet. Why not do the same for power? When one country is in light, it can provide for others in darkness. No need for batteries. Just a global solar network.
Glad to see you back and fighting Kurtis, fantastic vid! 💪
Hey Russell! Thanks so much. Sorry I dropped off the map on you a couple years back - I kinda vanished from the world when my body started kicking my ass.
@@ScopeofScience no sweat, got to take care of yourself! Always open to future collabs, hit me up if you ever have any ideas
Amazing video - thank you for your work!
Finally made me sign up to XR (it's weird how now it seems obvious, but I never thought of it before)
Making my day Tau :)
One of the most important videos to share.
Thank you for putting this out!
So glad to learn more thank you 🙏
Hey Curtis, I haven’t finished watching this video or even had time to properly unpack what you’ve said, but I got to a part where you mention heat pumps at about 21 mins.
I live at a location with average temperatures between 17°c and 24°c. We obviously then use more cooling than heating. Do we have an equivalent to a heat pump? I have never lived in a place where we need heating. What is this heat pump you’re talking about?
Had to put this comment while I was travelling. Didn’t want to forget it before I got home. 🚵♂️
Heat pumps are strange. The same installation can be used to either cool OR heat a house. It essentially just pumps the heat in whichever direction you want it (ie, heat or cool). That said, I can't speak to every region of the world for their efficiencies, but it's worth looking into!
@@ScopeofScience oh now I’m home and I’ve had a chance to look it up, here in Australia we just call them reverse cycle air conditioning. When the pump runs one way it heats, and then it runs the other way, it cools.
Bonehead moment: I’m a mechanical engineer. I know what a heat pump is. I’d just not heard about a domestic product referred to commonly as a “heat pump”, even though I know that’s what is inside the machine. We just call them AC’s.
@@The.Talent The channel Technology Connections has like four videos on heat pumps. He's from the U.S., so he makes an effort to explain differences in terminology for other regions.
...Not that I'm suggesting *you* watch multiple half-hour videos just for that purpose, especially if you're a mechanical engineer. Just putting that out there, mostly for others. The vids do offer useful insight into why it's important technology from a climate perspective, but it's a channel about tech and tech adoption first and foremost, so those videos are primarily explanations of how heat pumps work and how easy/hard it would be to make them more commonplace. The most recent of those videos is at th-cam.com/video/43XKfuptnik/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for this video and your work! This is so important! People like you give me hope on a better future!!! Take good care of yourself !💜💜
For the longest I have upgraded a lot of the electric in my apartment to where it uses less and I only use lights when needed but yet I’ve noticed over the year or the first year my electric bill was cheap overtime Avenue even used less kilowatts per month but my electric bill now cost more than it did a year ago and I use less kilowatts to me that just feels like I’m being punished for using less electricity
Amazing. But it seems like the ones watching this are people who are already environmentally conscious, which is really the opposite of the crowd we need to reach. I see a lot of comments like “great video, I’ve been fighting climate change a long time so this was great to see” and not “wow, I had no idea about this. I’m definitely going to change my behaviour.” Unfortunately the people most engaged seem to be the ones with the least capacity to make a big difference. If Jeff Bezos were to learn something from this it could have the effect of millions of the rest of us taking action, but that never seems to happen.
That’s why I think democratic reform has to be the main avenue to pursue climate action. We have to break the incredible bond between power, wealth, climate recklessness. Until that happens anything done on the individual level is futile. For real climate action, I’m beginning to think the the only viable course is through political reform.
You're definitely right about who this video is teaching. However, I made this video expecting that only people who were already interested/concerned would click on it (it is an hour long, afterall). I wasn't trying to convince people to care, I was trying to reach those that care but don't know what to do to, and to show them a course of action. Some have commented/messaged that they just signed up for a climate group after watching this, and that is awesome
You got my support Kurtis.
I really hope more people get to see this video
One thing i want to note about affordable renewables is that i dont think its likely that we’re offsetting the carbon expense that was put into transport, manufacture, and installation. Countries like china can produce the materials and products very cheaply with coal as an energy source. Its very energy intensive to produce and manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, etc - and installing these at the scale needed is also very energy intensive. We basically need to perform an energy balance on everything produced and ensure that whatever carbon emitted that isnt offset in the human controlled processes is consumed by plants and is dissolved in safe amounts in large bodies of water. I think we have a very long way to go before we’re there. The pandemic is still showing how fragile our systems are and large changes can cause immediate disaster. Basically we have to inch our way to it while we make our existing systems more robust so the impacts on all lives are minimized. Just a few thoughts and ramblings. Cool video.
You are perpetuating one of the great myths of climate change, put about by the science-denying lobby. They always discuss the embodied energy of elecric vehicles, solar panels, GSHP kit, and so on, and "just asking questions" wonder out loud if the energy saving they give covers the energy that went into their manufacture and transport. This is disingenuous........because it makes the assumption that the status quo has no embodied energy at all! Yep, that's a pretty ridiculous assumption. The fact is, if you are to have a car, you are going to have a lot of embodied energy whether it is electric or ICE. And solar panels (properly sited), now have an energy-payback time of around 2 years. But science deniers never do that comparison......they just ask if the EV can ever pay back the energy that went into its manufacture.
@@MikeAG333 im not perpetuating myths or denying anything. I’m trying to approach this from an engineering view - I think it’s good to have discussions rather than pointing fingers about what I think or if I follow a bunch of fluff put out by the science denying lobby as you call it. The stuff I discuss above doesn’t deny science and it doesn’t deny embodied energy of any system. It obviously takes energy to produce any product. it’s entirely likely that the these systems that use EVs and solar can be much more efficient than say systems that use hydrocarbons. the argument about pay back for evs isn’t a bad thing to point out either. The goal is to reduce emissions and it’s also perfectly ok to inch our way there because our rate is restricted by our tech. Also, If you have that citation for the solar panel energy payback, I’ll happily take a look.
THANK YOU!!
YOU ARE WELCOME!!
@Kurtis Baute Can you help me? How is the worst of disasters diverted onto the marginalized and POC? Like, I mean the mechanism, how does it play out in the real world exactly? Can someone help clear up my picture? Please? I like when I can understand and explain problems clearly and I can't.
Its sort of a death by a thousand cuts thing... there are a lot of contributing factors at play. The marginalized and disenfranchised are more likely to [be forced to] live in poorer neighbourhoods that have infrastructure that is less well supported, protected, and maintained.
-Ambulances in the US arrive 4 minutes faster in wealthier neighbourhoods than poor ones.
-Areas that have been redlined are more prone to flooding.
-Disabled people and the elderly are often not able to evacuate without assistance
-Fewer resources means less emergency food in your pantry, and less access to evacuation options like having a car
Does that help?
References:
www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ambulances-wealth-idUSKBN1O324N
www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-flood-risk-redlining/
This video starts super good... but around mid of Part Two you start just putting everything in the mix and saying a some "ideas" as "facts" (a-la "We must do A, B, C, D"). I think you should have passed the script by somebody else because, even I see you really genuinly care and are not intending to deceive us (nor do I believe Climate Change Isn't a problem), it just turns into a revised opinion, presented as facts.
Nevertheless Kurtis, I'm SUPER HAPPY you went through your operation OK and hope to see more of you in the near future.
Great weekend!
I think I did a pretty good job of expressing when I was giving an opinion by saying "I think that..." and by citing my references at the top of the screen whenever I was stating a fact. Part one and two each have the same rate of citations (about one every 20 seconds), so it actually isn't like I stop saying facts. Maybe what you mean is that I start talking less about physical sciences and more about social sciences?
I'm genuinely curious as to why you don't mention nuclear energy when talking about de-carbonizing our grid. It seems to me (not a scientist) that it would be the easiest and cleanest way to sustain a base load of power consumption on the grid without creating emissions. And waste storage, while definitely a problem in the long term, doesn't contribute to carbon emissions, which is the goal. Is it the mining? If so, what about newer reactor designs that run on Thorium and spent uranium fuel?
Again, not trying to bait. I'm genuinely curious. (Also I'm like 2/3rds through the video so maybe you mention it later)
He mentioned this in the first quarter. He includes it with renewables as how the Energy Mix should be.
20:37 and wait for it
@@lordsp ah ok, thanks.
@@Alex_Howe no biggie. His message gets kinda heavy at some point where it’s hard to keep up with him.
Kurtis. What do you think about Nuclear Power. For or against?
I think we absolutely need to keep all the nuclear that we have open. It fills a critical niche that is hard for renewables to fill - it allows for a stable and consistent base load. It's safe, and we have ways of storing the waste. I also think building more nuclear is part of the solution, but that is a slow process with big upfront carbon costs, and it is very unpopular (which makes it unlikely to happen).
We are going to need every tool in the toolbox.
Very important video! I really appreciate the simple way you explain things! 18:43 Climate Change is like Ogres
I'm still sad that Jay Inslee dropped out of the 2016 us election. He wasn't going to win and at least he still got to stay in his prior position but still would've been really cool to see him or Andrew Yang elected, especially over Trump.
You are dedicated!
Also we need to end inlecual property to ensure inventions are utilised buy everyone. And that art is enjoyed buy all.
Leaving a comment to help the algorithm
Amazing video, great work
At part three now but there's a point I want to raise about part 1 and 2. You speak very highly of densely populated cities as opposed to suburbs, but isn't population density positively correlated with the rate of spread of pathogens like the coronavirus? From what I know (experience growing up in one of the densest cities in the world and also having lived in suburban areas during university), it's also linked to higher rates of collateral damage from crime and natural disasters alike. What do you think of this?
Great questions! I know "rural" isn't the same as "suburban", but from my experience, the trends are usually pretty similar for these sorts of things (suburban tends to fall in the middle), so I'm going to conflate the two in order to answer your question a bit more rapidly.
At least in the US, covid actually had much higher death rates in rural places than in urban ones. Some of this is due to demographics like education levels (eg. different vaccination rates), but some of this is probably also due to the fact that more densely populated areas have more specialists and better hospitals.
As for crime, I know in Canada there is 23% MORE crime in rural areas than urban ones. I think a lot of this ends up being a bias because there is indeed more overall crime in urban areas, and we hear about it way more often... but there are way WAY more people there, so the proportion really matters.
Hope that helps!
Sources:
www.public-health.uiowa.edu/news-items/covid-incidence-mortality-rates-remain-much-higher-in-rural-areas/
www.gov.nl.ca/vpi/files/Fact-Sheet-8-Police-reported-crime-in-rural-and-urban-areas-in-the-Canadian-provinces-2017.pdf
@@ScopeofScience thanks for your perspective and the new info! This is new to me and I'm seeing what you're saying. I'm happy to know that it's not as bad as I thought. But to clarify, I should mention that simple death rates and crime rates are not the full picture.
My experience tells me that even with a lower death rate, people in dense cities experience more pandemic-related stress, probably from (rightly) worrying about how easily they can catch the disease from all the people around and, at best, be temporarily put out of work (which could still have substantial consequences) and social interaction. Those who do end up catching it experience a lot of guilt too. Even the death of capitalism might not make this go away, were we to have pandemics after that.
I also explicitly mentioned ”collateral damage” due to crime and natural disasters, not just how many police reports are made due to crime. I can't imagine this being less of a risk with respect to the crime rate, compared to rural/suburban areas.
I've just finished the rest of the video and I love it btw, I'm already sharing this around as we speak, but I just wanted to mention what you hadn't talked (or maybe thought) about using my lived experience.
@@ScopeofScience I hope we'll be able to continue this conversation later. I need to sleep now because it's 3am where I am! I'm looking forward to your reply and I hope you're well
love the effort! great video.
I have been studying Abolitionism for English class and I was just thinking about how incredibly similar the movements both already are, and will need to become.
It also made me double down on active/transit based transportation activism as I came to realize how important public spaces that have been destroyed were to the success of ending slavery. Many protest spaces are gone, and the few left have extremely lessened and altered visibility. People mingle less and are more isolated than ever thanks to dependency on cars which isolate them during the little time one would normally have any interaction with any humans outside their tiny (and shrinking) spheres.
I'd argue very strongly that car dependency gave rise to extremist talk radio shows, which then gave rise to extremist news and social media bubbles. It also gave rise to the uniquely lonely human experiences (relative to the rest of history) that social media depended on for its meteoric rise to universal addiction. We sought out community and thanks to car dependency, it was all there was - no wonder we're addicted.
Abolitionists' use and creation of gathering places via churches and public places, and just having people from town see them or see free blacks mingle over time was absolutely critical - it's no wonder to me that we've struggled without being able to show people IN PERSON that environmental lifestyles can be NICER. It's harder to ignore people's lifestyles who you spend actual time with.
It's no wonder to me that highways were used to bulldoze some of the most important public spaces for political change...
Feedback effects act more like multipliers than perpetually increasing even if we stopped right? I hope so
Good vid😚
My feedback: use the footage from this video and shorten it into another video called "What we need to do about climate change". Cut it up like bullet points and cut out all the waffle so it's concise. In other words, you could have a video for like ten seconds you say consumer action isn't enough and then list every major change that needs to happen one after the other in that video.
You have the social media savvy that I lack. Thanks for this idea!
I disagree/doubt with pretty much everything said but at least you are honest with actual solutions. Seems most people I see who claim to be climate activists, cannot muster up answers for what we should/should not do. At least, they can't explicitly name them like you did. I think because they know it's a bit extreme and aren't actually committed to the cause.
You don't disagree with me, you disagree with the experts that I cited. But Joe, I'm sure you know better than the people that work on this for their careers. As for solutions, it's such a huge problem in scope that it's simply just hard to summarize. I don't think people are lying, but giving an answer to what we need to do took me 54 minutes, and that's after I spent years working full time on climate and months putting the script together.
2:50 Tom Scott cameo?
what always bothered me about ecological communication is the fact that starting from "Climate Change" you have to jump through multiple issues like CO2-Emissions, feedbackloops, biodiversity loss, climate justice and so on in order to inspire action while at the same time those issues are making the problem bigger and bigger so in the end there is somewhat a 50-50 chance that the person you are talking to either takes action or goes into apathy-mode. This is intentional.
The term climate change is a term initiated by the republicans over 20 years ago in order to facilitate climate denial. By stretching out the few forces that we as climate-fighters have along such a broad front of issues it is very easy to disrupt our discourse and sow contempt. Additionally to navigate through this discourse usually requires academic thinking - unless of course you are directly impacted by this but even then your self-agency is immediately taken over by those who are in this discourse for a very long time. Therefore I think it might be useful to push a narrative which is more dense and can be understood by everyone. I go with: the systematic-escalating annihilation of our base of life for the profits of a few has to end.
That nonsense about the origin of the phrase climate change is just so damned America-centric. The Republicans have absolutely nothing whatever to do with which words are used in Europe, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on.....and "climate change" has been in use here for far longer than 20 years. It is absolutely the correct terminology, too, because the effects of global warming vary so much from place to place that some areas WILL actually cool, and many, many areas will be much wetter. In those places, it's absolutely meaningless to talk of global warming.
@@MikeAG333 I'm not talking about the invention of the term Climate Change but about its political implementation, usage and consequences around the world considering that the american public is the most powerful when it comes to influence debate around the world. I'm not saying that republicans went around and told every single scientist or pundit to go with this. It is more some sort of a very powerful dynamic which could spread on its own. Think about it:
When you are starting to talk about climate change you have to explain to people what this actually means and you need to have done a ton of research so that folks cant call you out on your bs - sth most of them will do anyway. There is a hierarchy of knowledge being constructed here, over and over again and along this hierarchy it is very easy to reaffirm political antagonisms so that in the end the debate explodes so hard so that in the end it is very hard or even impossible to initiate meaningful change.
So we are the legendary ones to be second and first?
We need to stopp using focile fules now
Carbon capture technology that works: trees. Cheap, useful, and no research dollars and years and years of study and delay.
Yo you real smart
best video of all time, i cried
Aw Hector. Thanks. It means a lot to me to know that this connected with you. Hope you're doing well!
Everything said before the social justice section (28:55) was reasonable. I think science and social issues should be separately discussed.
@Stein Mauer Social sciences do exist and are an important study. However, I think if we combine the physical sciences (eg. env science, conservation, env engineering) with social sciences (eg. indigenous studies, women's studies, political science), getting a consensus in government would be nearly impossible.
I'm all for efficiency. Combining science with social issues (and vice versa) is not a very practical way to achieve systemic change in democratic countries (as discussed in the video).
You can't really have a reasonable discussion about these problems and their solutions without discussing the social issues involved. It's an issue that is caused by society (and not everyone equally), affects society (and not everyone equally), and needs to be solved by society (and not everyone equally). Even if you could, trying to remove social dynamics from the conversation removes a sense of responsibility from the equation. We talked about Global Warming in those strictly-scientific terms for decades, and the cause made precisely no headway, because people didn't care about polar bears and seemingly abstract scientific concepts. Once we started connecting the dots for people (the social justice side of things), we suddenly had millions taking part in global climate strikes (eg. September 2019).
I understand how talking about "the social justice side of things" can bring groups of people together. You are correct in saying that climate change affects different people to different degrees.
However, by combining these issues, debates and passing bills become terribly slow. Some politicians who support certain climate policies, may vote 'nay' if the bill includes any social policies that don't conform to their voter base.
The Montreal protocol was successful because of good marketing pointing at CFCs. A concerted campaign pointing at the negative effects of excess CO2 (eg. crop yield, brain function, etc) might be more successful than 'making people feel responsible'.
Like you said in the video, many are in denial. This is because people do not want to feel responsible. If emotions can be removed and individual negative effects can be focused on, I think many from the political right will support climate policies.
The only thing I can criticize, like most videos of english language, most data and talk is only based or refered to United States and Canada. Which is to say the least, stupid. But in this concrete case, it makes kinda sense due to the climate change topic.
Yeah, I originally had a section near the beginning where I discussed how this is a North-American-centric perspective... but it slowed down this already long vid... and as you alluded to, we (I'm Canadian) have played a disproportionately huge roll in causing this, and respectively have the biggest opportunities to work to fix it.
@@ScopeofScience Don't worry 👍
important video!!
very good video
If the biggest battery can power a million homes for half an hour, why can’t we have 48 of them for every million homes? 22:09
🤣Republicans are the bad guys... Bro, I really appreciate your work, but you should really be apolitical because "Politics = divide to rule" Like that will help eh.
Personal summaries...
We are ran by junkies, “profit junkies” 🤑
“Our politicians are interchangeable figureheads on the pirate ships of the global Corporatocracy Empire”
I would recommend reading at least some of Plato Quotes About Democracy and more. Also have a peek at Tocqueville.
"If voting would change anything, the oligarchs would make it illegal" said Coluche, French political activist in the mid 1980's.
I used to enjoy Astrophysics and Cosmology till 2012. I had a vivid interest in those.
In 2012, I heard about record low ice in the Arctic. I fell from the stars, and yes, even from supermassive black holes down to Earth and began looking at our planet a lot closer... 😱
I too can't sleep and get depressed a lot. But after understanding the Physics of it all, I had to look at humans, their behavioural traits, their addictions to almost anything, including profits and ideologies.
Abandon all hope, ye who enters that realm.
☮bro. Take care.
This is a brain-dead take ngl. The way to stop climate change and implement any sort of climate action requires politics. Politics is about power; people like Kurtis want to see change, and that requires power/politics. Conversely, these "profit junkies" would like to continue making profits and so utilize their political power to prevent climate action that negatively affects their profit margins. How could something so impactful as climate change not be political?
Or maybe you are talking about electoral politics, which I suspect is the case. And for that, you are completely missing the point. It's very simple let me walk you through it. In the US, there are two political parties that have any substantial power. One of them has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change, worked against any climate action, and actively contributed towards, by way of loosening climate restrictions, greenhouse emissions, and in turn, climate change. The other party, while it hasn't been able to implement basically any climate regulations, is broadly in favor of climate action and acknowledges the existence of climate change, and has taken steps toward minimizing climate change (at least some representatives in the party have done that, definitely not all). By these descriptions, there is absolutely a party that is more to blame for climate change. If you deny that then you are just ignorant, one party (republicans) are substantially more at fault for climate change and actively stands in the way of any climate action while in the pockets of gas and oil. In contrast, the other party overwhelmingly doesn't (im talking generalities, of course, there are democrats that stand in the way of climate action, too, and fuck them too).
And while yes, making any progress under our current system is very difficult, and yes, voting won't cut it. You need to ask yourself, do you want climate action now, or 100 years in the future when we maybe don't have the same system we do today? The way I see it, voting is yet another way we can try to implement climate action. But we have other more influential means of political power other than voting that should be pursued too (like strikes, boycotts, idk a bunch of stuff).
Lastly, you quote, "If voting would change anything, the oligarchs would make it illegal" said Coluche, French political activist in the mid 1980. I guess that helps explain why the republican party has taken active steps to destroy and remove democracy in the US in recent years. The election fraud claims, the Jan 6th insurrection, the active attempts to prevent people from voting, I could go on. I mean, you can't be this ignorant of what's going on in our world. I guess you just sit back and pride yourself on being an enlightened centrist but in reality, all you do is fight against people trying to take action and ignore the fact that what you say would happen if voting had power is happening currently.
If you're trying to talk about a specific issue and one specific party is ignoring the facts to claim that issue literally doesn't exist while the world burns...saying "you should really be apolitical" is just ignoring the current realities of the world.
14th
15th
@@ScopeofScience 16th?