Thank you for mentioning the damages of lithium extraction. Here in Chile we even have a thing called "zonas de sacrificio" or "sacrifice zones", which are essentially whole areas that are deemed as necessary sacrifices for economic growth and are left uninhabitable by pollution. It's dystopian as fuck.
@@lawrencefrost9063 Quite often these sacrifice zones are areas where people used to live or still do. The local communities don't vote in order to designate a sacrifice zone, they are simply informed, not even asked if they approve. This practice has ruined multiple lives and even taken others. It also absolutely decimates the environment. And all for profit, in a country with extreme income inequality. Trickle down economics doesn't really work, specially here in Chile, where prices are similar to the US yet our minimum wage is like a third. How could I not be against sacrificing whole communities and ecosystems to make money for corrupt officials that sell our country to multinational corporations?
@@lawrencefrost9063 Admittedly, I am biased, for I despise these individuals and I am not a big capital owner who benefits from this. A pro you could consider is that most of Chile's GDP comes from the mining sector. But the video already showed how GDP is not necessarily a pro. Maybe if Chile had good public funding and the money being made by this practice actually solved some of our issues I wouldn't be as opposed to it. But in reality it's hard to see any pros in it unless you are directly benefiting financially from it.
@@matiasbascunan8051 But you see that is what I think is happening, even if not in the scale you wish. If this industry is extremely important economically to your country, it undeniably increases the standard of living to a lot of people. Even if most of the profits don't go the the people as they of course should, the profits are taxed and those taxes partly do go to public spending which finances your education, healthcare, infrastructure whatever, right? This seems to be a classic case of the needs of the many outweigh the negative consequences to the few (as long as the equilibrium is not completely skewed) If a thousand people have to suffer because of pollution due to mining, but it helps a million people get a better life... I don't know enough about this but i'm just playing the devil's advocate. Trying to figure out if this is ethically wrong or not. And if it is necessary despite the issues. I just happened to watch a video about this new technology, a new method to extract lithium that does not rely on the same stuff the Chile currently uses and it could potentially decrease the negative effects and decrease water usage of lithium extraction. (This one, really interesting; ruclips.net/video/xWpLFUUDTiM/видео.html&ab_channel=UndecidedwithMattFerrell ) If that can be done, would you still oppose it? Usually the more you think about something and the more research you do on a subject, the harder it is to decide if it's right or wrong.
I'm sure that, being the forthright, honest and research-thorough organization that they are, Kurzgesagt would be happy to listen to your arguments and correct some of their past errors.
At the end of the video it mentions how Bill gates funds Kurzgesagt. I'm unsure if the source of this claim is real (did not check it), however if so this pretty would discredit any claim of them being a honest organisation.
i agree with this, ive never seen kurtz to be some kind of crazy drama funded channel, this video gives some good points, i would love to see an open debate
@@LeanAndMean44 I don't think this is sarcasm due to the fact that Kurzgesagt have corrected themselves before and have devoted a video to clarify to the audience that they are trying their best but can, like all humans, make mistakes. This shows they are willing and unafraid to admit that they might've got a couple things wrong and rectify any problems arising from them
@@feckoslovakia how they responded to Bad Empanada's video does not at all show that they are willing and unafraid to admit that they might have gotten things wrong ruclips.net/video/ZRPcyWNfgxo/видео.html (this is from his second channel where he uploads clips from his weekly twitch streams).
As someone that admires most of Kurzgesagt content, the title of this video initially made me skeptical, then worried me a bit and sparked some curiosity (what is there to criticize?). I am glad I watched it. Thanks for translating the original video. I feel often a lack of hope for a better future - for all. Having a better understanding of the flaws and different political promises bring a bit of energy to be the hope, or at least die trying.
I completely agree. I am a fan of Kurzgesagt not because of any specific video or opinion they hold, but because of the general spirit behind their videos. Of course it is fine, good even, to disagree or discuss their content, and I am sure they make mistakes as well. However I think their way to look at the world and humanity is genuinely important and valuable. A generally optimistic outlook is sadly a very rare thing nowadays, and such a view being combined with science makes it all the more important.
As a mechanical engineer myself, I've tried to always keep it in my mind that efficiency is doing *more with less* rather than doing _better with more._
Ah, this is wonderful, I'm still just a student of mechanical engineering, but I always feel so confused why this philosophy is disappearing from modern engineering. I'm glad that there are still engineers with that attitude.
I'm a big fan of Kurzgesagt and seeing your title made my stomach lurch, but I'm very happy I am watching it as I work. As a person born and raised into a lower-middle class American family, I grew up looking down on busses, trains, etc. But now, as a young adult, I'm realizing how much of a problem cars are, how poor our infrastructure is, and it's left me feeling hopeless and a bit betrayed, tbh. So educating myself with videos like this at least allows me to increase my understanding.
Is it common in america for middle class families to look down on public transport? Im from a middle class family in the uk and as a kid I used buses and trains all the time, as do most others, so I never looked down on them. How else are you supposed to get about with friends?
@@WormMuncher13 You get a car. But the US is also built different, public transport here sucks. There's only busses and even in your own vehicle getting across my town (Really only about halfway across town) yesterday took a full 45 minutes. If I did the same on the bus it would be over an hour. The entire road system is trash and unless the make some radical changes that won't ever happen nothing is going to change. Outside that, because cars are so common here the only people that take busses are typically children for school or very low income people. It's hard to not look down at it when cars are faster, actually cheaper, and you don't have to sit next to a crack addict. As an addendum, I'd like to point out that the city in which I live ripped out the old historical streetcar which had failed to make money in present day and spent months and millions to build new tracks, including under a bridge, which they then had to rip out because the street car didn't actually fit. It's now annoying to drive/ride bikes downtown because of all the tracks in the middle of the road, it's constantly squealing, and has less utility than a bus which requires exactly 0 alterations to pre-existing roads. I hate the damn thing.
@@JZStudiosonline Ok cool i guess the uk is just more set up for public transport, its very good even in smaller cities and nearby towns, in larger cities it can be faster and cheaper to get public transport. Thanks for the explanation
@@WormMuncher13 It's common in North America for EVERYONE to look down on Public Transport, not just the Middle Class. Public Transport is not well done here and not respected either. Frankly, I don't see that changing without a MASSIVE change in everything -and that might be a literal statement, not hyperbole- since Public transit essentially adds 3 hours to ANY trip where you actually have a need to be somewhere at a set time. If I need to be at work for 9am, I need to be on the bus at 7:30am. When I get off work at 5:00pm, I won't be home until 6:30pm. If I need to take my kids to soccer at 6pm, I probably have to leave work at 3:30pm and cross my fingers that there's no problems getting to their school to pick them up, and then to soccer. If I want to go out and see friends, again, leave 90min leeway on both sides. Why? Because busses don't come - sometimes the driver cancels. Sometimes the busses literally can't make it due to breaking down. Because busses are late. Because traffic is terrible. Because busses come EARLY and you miss your transfer. Because some busses only come once an hour. Because sometimes busses are so crowded you literally can't get on - or worse, you can't get OFF. In some cases, it's literally faster to WALK to where you want to go than to take the bus due to the sheer amount of shenanigans it takes to get to some places. Seriously, it's faster for me to walk with my eldest daughter to her dance class, 5km away, than it is to take the bus because there is only 1 bus that goes anywhere NEAR where the studio is, it comes once an hour, and I have to take 2 busses to even get to the transit station where I can catch that single bus. When I'm in my car, I can cut an hour off of each side and still make things on time. I don't have to worry about the anti-social morons on the bus. I don't have to worry about missing my stops, or my transfers. I don't have to worry that I'm going to be stuck outside, at a stop without a shelter, at 1am when it's -30C and because it's snowing... the last bus of the night gets cancelled and I have to call a taxi to get me home. (sadly a true story for me - and it happened TWICE. The second time is when I made it my life's goal to own a car.) Cars may cost me more than public transport, but my car likely saves me and my family 30 hours a week in transportation time and allows us to have actual hobbies outside the neighbourhood. In essence, we need to completely restructure our entire cities if we're ever going to make public transit feasible on a mass scale in North America. This means businesses moving. This means grocery stores moving. This means schools moving. This means our world being shrunk into our neighbourhoods... and accepting that the "rich" neighbourhoods will get all of the good stuff to themselves because the non-rich essentially can't get there.
I look down on public transportation because even if I use it to get places I still have to take 30 mins to walk somewhere from the stop. It takes so fucking long for anything to happen in the US
A lot of people are asking for a summary: Basically, the main ideas that they critique are technosalvation and ecomodernism. They show that Kurzgesagt and other edutainments like it that claim to just be neutral, scientific and apolitical are actually biased and have underlying neoliberal assumptions that can be picked up on if examined closely. Then they finally present alternative ways of thinking about the issue and preserving hope, such as degrowth, solarpunk and post-capitalism systems. I suggest you do watch it though, it seems long, but it really flies fast, and at the end you kind of wish they even went longer into describing some of the ideas. The video is very well made, its witty and clever, but in no way are they being mean-spirited or do they attack or make fun of Kurzgesagt.
Thank you so much for including a critique of car-dependent urban planning. It's such a huge issue that often goes unnoticed since most people take it for granted as "normal". Sprawling suburbs, parking lot wastelands, and massive highways are choices we made, and they are choices we can change.
Knowing the algorithm of youtube, I feel like the reason we're both watching this video and both know about the importance of urban planning is because we're both watching channels like Not Just Bikes?
Public transport comes with its own set of ethical dilemmas. If we want to swap to a society centered around public transportation, more safety measures need to be taken.
It took me three days to go over through it all, but every single second of this video was like poetry to my ears. Amazing job guys keep it going and don’t fret for the English accent, it adds character!
I love this criticism but also think that it highlights the core reason for how Kurzgesagt has grown so much. They do research and make short, entertaining videos that work as an initial education for people new to important issues and concepts. They dive much deeper into issues than other channels of similar size but still leave out many of the details that fill longer, more in depth videos from smaller channels. While it is sad that they leave so much out and there are ideological concepts that I (and this video) disagree with, I am really thankful for how much attention their videos get as it brings more attention to the issues behind them. While many people only ever learn through the introductions that are presented by Kurzgesagt and don't continue any further to think deeper, there will be more people who do take those extra steps that might have otherwise been unaware.
They grow because people who like their content have the brains of children. It's all propaganda, just watch their nihilism video. "hurr durr dont feel bad for doing anything because nothing matters" *BLM riots happen*
dude, as a brazilian, i feel the same way about kurzgesagt. it bothers me because is a european view of things. its strage to see people from us or europe talk about the preservation of our planet and you pointed perfectly the why i feel this way, i could not describe it better. the native people and enviromentalists are literaly been killed in here for this cause, when they say ''we will survive to this'', i ask: who is we?
People have literally been killed for every sort of cause even in your "native lands." You have been taught a lie based on noble savage bigotry which makes you think that they were all sugar and spice and everything nice which is an outright lie, people were violent and brutal throughout all history and do you think the peaceful civilizations that have been made up would last for long if there was even one civilization in the area that was violent? Get a grip on reality, there doesnt seem to be many people here that have one, they tell themselves pretty little lies like the creator to feel better about things.
"We" in words of global-northern people like Kurzgesagt means "them", the global north, USA, Europe, *they* will have the resources to overcome a global climate crisis as bad as an apocalypse, but it will most likely be at the expense of the rest of us, the global south just doesn't have the infraestructure to cope with something like that, and the north will never give their resources into saving us
I was ready to be skeptical about this critique after seeing the title, but then I was pleasantly surprised with the depth and coherence of the entire critique and commentary, I think this is a really important video and more people should watch it!
Man, I was beginning to think I was a little crazy as when I share my opinions of the world people have always acted with disbelief, in accordance their premises that they don't even know they hold. I'm relieved hearing about "degrowth" as it summarizes a lot of my gut feelings that have made me feel this way. thanks for making this video man, the effort doing something like this AND THEN TRANSLATING THE WHOLE DAMN 2H FEATURE-LENGTH THING INTO ENGLISH is MONUMENTAL! you are a legend :)
I think I agree with this. I always called my beliefs Communitarianism or the idea that communities should be self sufficient and should be responsible for the care and support for each local citizen. I always approached this from a Capitalist/Socialist lens and when he said "what is the Economy for?" I stepped back and reflected. The Economy is designed for Economists, Shareholders, and Businesses to look at data points. So I think I might need to rethink my talking points with a lens in utilitarianism.
Germany is burning more than ever. You know what else we’re burning more of in the west? Wood. Btw, if you buy anything that’s made in China, that coal is being burnt on your behalf
We have reached the chauvinism stage on this debate. They can no longer deny the problem, they can no longer deny the impact, but they can just appeal to the few who actually benefit to downplay the problem. The problem is real, the consequences are real, the harm is real, but it isn't for "me"
@@MasterOfBaiter We can't stop climate-change! Do you know how much money we can make in Water Wars?! We must ensure safe future for the military industrial complex! -Avarage capitalist
"Maybe climate change is real, and maybe human activity makes it difficult to reverse, but we can't give up on industrial consumerism before someone comes up with a profitable way to solve everything! You just have to have faith!"
i have never been so conflicted. thank you so much for you guys' time and effort to go through all the research, papers, readings, to comprehend and debunk the ideas on kurzgesagt. it is really eye-opening to see the whole spectrum of the data and opinions stated by kurzgezagt and the backstory behind it. love from Indonesia!
I've grown to dislike Kurzgezagt incredibly early on when they covered the immigration problem during the Arab spring/syrian and libyan war and when they try cover banking. No channel is perfect and a lot of science channels have their leaning on which political stance they're comfy with yet Kurz just goes on a tirade of "these people bad,these people gud" which of course just made me go bleh.
And even then... where is the climate data spanning millennia? Ice core samples paint a picture that makes our current situation look very much "business as usual", but there's nobody talking about that or what those numbers actually mean. I don't have those answers myself, but it does strike me as a bit strange that graphs we see are all cut off at roughly the same point.
@@blastermaster5039 tbf I don't know the kurzgesagt channel, but that is not a political question, it can solely be answered with economics. Are those people good or bad for the economy of your country should be the only question.
@@herrpez No, actually the ice core samples are one of the most damning pieces of evidence we have when it comes to human-instigated climate change. Perhaps the most disturbing thing we have discovered is that many of our planet's greatest mass extinction events coincide with its historic peak atmospheric CO2 levels. Yes, we certainly have seen eras where there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than even humanity has churned out in these few short centuries, but those natural changes in CO2 content happened much more gradually and more importantly, they wiped out much of the life on our planet at that time. If anything ice core samples serve as a terrifying warning, not a reassurance that everything is going to be ok.
@@herrpez What you are espousing is a common and dangerous misunderstanding. Climate data spanning millennia, including old ice core samples, show changes in CO2 concentrations and temperatures that are within the order of magnitude of what we have observed in the latest decades, but, you have to consider that that data show changes occurring in the span of millennia, by effects that are nowhere as fast as the ones that are occurring right now.
I'm glad to finally see some criticism of Kurzgesagt. They're videos are polished and fairly well researched, but not without issues. I was skeptical when I first came across them a few years back but didn't find much about them outside of their own website. I agree that a lot of their videos feel dated in how they discuss environmental degradation and solutions. It makes me concerned about their videos on topics that I'm less familiar with.
Many of their things are just pop science. More or less 'look at this cool thing!'. Some better then others maybe. That said a lot of their videos that deal with humans can be yikes. Fun fact I heard they were going to make a transgender video. Still want to see if they utterly fuck it up and get caught out as fraudsters or not. Probably too spicy a topic for some neoliberals though. Oh also the grey population crisis solution they bring as part being just nice to people, like literally wishing upon a star for change. Like that is some hopes and prayers stuff. Love they try to skip saying issues like of overwork and living of universal childcare not being offered by the government. True neoliberal bull.
"The holocaust wasn't the work of barbarians, but it was the result of applying instrumental reason." Or as I like to say, "Justification is the magic word that transforms ordinary people into monsters.".
yes because making up conjecture and tricking people into believing unfounded theories on race with the help of ancient norse mythology is so fucking rational. this video is a load of fucking tree hugger horseshit
@@dosexu1 the same people who think we should work 80 weekly hours for pennies, eat bugs and soy instead of real food and live in the metaverse, spending our days as flesh automatons until we expire, all for their benefit
This video was a great surprise. I expected some people denying climate change even existed, and I'm left with the feeling that I still have so much to learn, and with another perspective which made me question my knowledge. Great video guys. Take your time making them, and keep up. PS: Your accent is great, and you don't need to get rid of it. The fact that you just wrote and narrated almost 2 hours worth of script in your second language deserves a lot of praise.
I "deny climate change" mostly because it annoys people who think "climate change" is a problem. Which correlate with people who think "over population" is a problem. They want to live and be prosperous. They don't want the Third World to live and be prosperous. They want cheap energy. They don't want the Third World to have cheap energy. And they tell themselves they aren't racists.
Germany is burning coal now that their renewables are failing to provide them energy, their nuclear plants are all dead, and Putin stopped selling them gas. France has the cheapest energy.
I love the fact that Gore said that today, 20 years ago, we'd all be dead to climate change. And yet here we are. And don't get me wrong, I think climate change is a problem. But a bigger problem is the fact that we are on the brink of nuclear war. And it wouldn't surprise me if 90% of people here supports the proxy war in Ukraine. At the very least climate change is something we can reverse, but you cannot undue nuclear winter.
If governments really wanted us to go green, they would offer sustainable means of public transportation, for free or very low prices. I live in a city that has horrible public transport and going anywhere after 7 PM must be done by car... Not that it won't take you anywhere, especially if you work outside your own city.
@Porky depends on the time period. Since 80s they started to close up some lines and train rotations (but these were in bad conditions). In the 90s an enormous number of routes were closed. But the situation is slowly getting better.
My city is trying their best to be affordable. If you can vote/petition for similar practices please do. Last year they rezoned train lines so people living at the end of the line, many stops away wouldn't need to be out of pocket by a tonne of money simply because they were VERY much further out. They are also building more train lines. City center has free busses Parking at the train station is like $2 Parking in the city central can cost over $20 a day and over $2 an hour It is not a perfect system, there isn't enough people to make public transport affordable because everyone lives in a city built around driving. I have to travel more than 50kms a day for work.
If the government wanted to go green they wouldn’t sign bills to keep people from living and sleeping in camper vans and living self sustainably. (Cough Priti Patel, cough)
That's not how economy works. The government can't turn everything cheap. Money is an important part of our cuvilization and we need it. That's why things are not cheap.
As someone that adores Kurzgesagt videos I am glad there is a long review that allows me to critique it thru an unbiased(ish) lens. Thanks for this perspective!!!
It's a rare thing to find such nuanced and developed opinions on YT. Despite my original skepticism, I'm really glad I decided to give it a click. Loved the video and would definitely love to see more from you guys. Also you accent is just fine.
Right?! I really love this video. It's about comparing and contrasting very valid opinions, instead of getting into a shitball-fight of immaturely trying to cancel and slander each other. Bless this channel. Opinions will always differ with all of us, but I'd always rather take debates and confrontations MUCH more than awful caveman wars of guns and screaming.
Just finished your whole video, honestly this is amazing. Regarding your final comments, please don't worry about your accent. I think your tone and dry sense of humour comes across wonderfully and a lot of the visual jokes were especially funny. Hope to see more!
"Solarpunk!" by "Our Changing Climate" is a Great Start, you know? Not gloomy but also not bilnded-by-Hope Coverage totally exists; in fact, entire Channels exist like this. Help with the Climate via that Channel but also UpisnotJump, Hbomberguy, Some More News, Not Just Bikes, and Second Thought.
GDP is a horrible gauge of wealth for a country. Canada has never been worse in terms of income inequality. If you don't already own a home, or work a job that brings home 200k a year while living on rice and beans, you'll NEVER own a home. The people who rent are being strangled to death to the point where several of my friends are working full time jobs to eat ONCE a day. But because home prices keep skyrocketing due to money laundering and all branches of government outright refusing to enforce the law against it, the GDP just keeps going up.
There are other measures, like GDI. Every number has a purpose and open to manipulation. Just look at inflation. They change what it contains, and then measure it in different time frames. I think the US was supposed to be in a Recession, but instead borrowed a ton of money from the future to 'boost GDP' so it was positive. But its these very same governments that have to implement the policies that are later recommended, and they won't suddenly become saints.
Same thing is happening in Spain. A regular worker with an average salary could never afford to buy a house. And due to big businesses buying whole streets and renting the houses/flats at whatever price they want, the average rent prize is skyrocketing, to the point people need 80% of their salary or more just to pay rent.
Gdp should be abolish tbh, ive heard too many politicians missunderstood what gdp is, and yea gdp itself wasnt supposed to be a gauge to find the wealth distribution of a country.
no such thing as doomed... there will always be at least 2 ants on the planet... and that's logically all that really matters in the long run. This planet is going to be the perfect habitat for life for another billion years until our sun goes bah-bye
@@ethanwasme4307 didnt think i had to specify this but what i said kinda implies that, that "world" is my future, my loves ones, community and aspirations. Wich is what you kinda fight for in your everyday Not the future of single cell beings or ants And also no, theres a lot of things that are wrong with what you said wich mostly come from ignorance, wich is okay
@2MinuteHockey My dude I'm not an ant. Good for them If they make it but seriously it's not selfish to not want to perish horribly in a world rendered uninhabitable.
@@OkamiSam "yea i'm kinda depressed about the mass human extinction event looming in my future, waiting to swallow up my adulthood and everyone i care about" "hey bud it'll be ok! i bet ants will survive!" god you know it's bleak when that's the positive optimistic response lmao
I loved every second of this, this is true environmentalism. The shiny, gimmick “Elon Musk will save us” greenwashed mindset is terrible for true environmental change, actual and practical changes like smarter argriculture, getting rid of stroads, implementing superblocks, replacing cars with bikes and public transportation in city spaces, using trains for coss-continental travel (idk what you call it actually, but going a long distance without crossing an ocean) rather than planes and cars, and changing the public mindset to older ideals of “less is more”. Hats off to the creators of this beautiful video against greenwashing propaganda, we need more things like it. Edit: I fully realize that not everywhere can be walkable I happen to live in West Virginia which is extremely unwalkable. Everyone seemed to interpret for themselves that i want to urbanize the entirety of human civilization but i don’t. My point is that cities produce the most carbon emissions so improving the way they are made is important, meanwhile the rural populations carbon output is much much less so it’s less important to improve those areas environmentally. Quit telling me I’m a communist who’s pro urbanizing the whole world, i quite like my quiet small town rural life.
It would be nice if Kurzgesagt ended up learning more and making a video about walkability. It’s really a concept that is under-appreciated in the world of climate change solutions
@@brandonm1708 It absolutely is, I’ve almost entirely decided to become an urban planner when I graduate from high school cause I think that better city design is key to fixing climate issues.
@@comradejosephstalinoftheus8698 that’s great! I just graduated high school and if I had heard about it sooner, I certainly would have considered doing that. Unfortunately the college I’m going to doesn’t have a degree for urban planning, so if I decide to switch majors I’d have to switch school as well. I’m still sorta considering it, but if I don’t, I will still try to be an advocate for better planning. Best of luck to you
Dude your English is so good, the use of idiom and colloquialisms feels like it's coming from a native speaker wtf And the humour. I can only aspire to he able to stumble over a sentence in another language, and here you are making witty jokes constantly. Every day I realise how limiting it is to be an English speaker in a world where we're catered to by most countries.
Lots of people from non-English speaking countries end up with a bilingual proficiency in English simply due to the constant high level of exposure to English language media from a young age
The actually speaking English really well despite having a different native language is great. What I hate is the whole "You can just replace basically any word or phrase or sentence fragment in a German text or statement with its English equivalent" thing, though. It's ridiculous how some people sound. And it really isn't an overuse of Anglicisms. People claim it is, but it's not. It's really the way I describe it. Also, if you want tips on how you can learn a foreign language fluently without leaving an English-speaking environment for even a single day, I can provide tips. There are a lot of people who've never set foot in an English-speaking country (or never for even remotely enough time to improve their English there), yet still, they're completely fluent. This can be done with other languages as well.
@@whatif5108 Can you, in this case, tell me if you grew up with two native languages (English & French) or if you've learned one of them some other way? I don't need a hyper-detailed answer, just a general one for why you already speak two languages. And, in case you speak one of them *not* on a (quasi-)native level, where you have issues speaking (and/or writing) it and why you think that is.
@@camelopardalis84 well thats the feeling of being more flurent in english than your classmate who used to live there lmao. Also just talking with people abroad makes a lot of experience as i found speaking (or trying to speak) to be very entertaining to them a lot of fun
Honestly I didn't expect a calm, collected video talking about a lot of the wider reaches of the world and it's issues. If anything, I learned quite a lot of stuff about how things work that I just- didn't know existed before, which puts a lot of things into a place of "hm lets consider this again, maybe there's something we're ignoring". Very informative, love the style, thank you for this!
Help with C-Change by learning about it! UpisNotJump, Hbomberguy, Some More News, and Second Thought are just the Best Ways to do so. The Best, not the Only Ones.
This is what real ecologist are supposed to be. Science and philosophy must work together. the fact that people are attacking you is disgusting beyond words.
@@SataChannelDayo I agree So how does that relate to science at all? I mean, science is a damn broad term, can you clarify what you meant in your initial comment?
@@Neo2266. most people consider philosophy obsolete due to the fact that philosophy most of the time is just asking questions with answers that are abstract or hard to quantify. To truly study ecology we have to consider every single part of the problem. Question the facts that we believe are already established. That is what I meant.
Incredible video! Thanks! So nice to hear someone from Slavic country talk about these things, and mention degrowth and so many other important topics. Wish someone will translate it into Russian as well!
Yeah, we also think that it's good that leftist youtube is getting some more Eastern European voices. There's quite a lot of us, very few speak out, yet I think that our recent history gives us a unique perspective. By the way, the captions are mostly done (well, not for the Kurzgesagt parts), so you could perhaps try auto-translating to Russian?
Thanks for pointing out that they talk about degrowth before I watched the whole video. Knowing that I shouldn't waste my time on eco-fascist shit, apparently supported by a core member of the US intelligence apparatus (BadEmpanada) has saved me many minutes.
@@mortarriding3913 Saw this in the notification and I feel the need to clarify: degrowth is never ecofash. It simply means re-focusing from the pure abstraction economic growth to human (and non-human) wellbeing, and has *nothing* to do with ecofascism. In fact, Hickel, whom we talk about here, bases his theory firmly on Jason W. Moore ecosocialism (even though he himself dances around the word), and climate justice is integral to degrowth. It's Kurzgesagt's misrepresentation of degrowth as "cutting back as a species overall" can be seen as ecofash.
@@t3essays why is it wrong to cut back as a species, if our species took too much from the rest of the biosphere? We are only one species, we should consume 100 or more times less resources than we currently do, otherwise decline in biodiversity is inevitable. So call it ecofasc or whatever, but I fully for gradually reducing the size of human population and consumption dramatically.
I just want to say, I love the first part of the video where they breakdown the use of the word "humanity". I think it highlights a prominent issue with the way people communicate, mainly through GENERALISATION. Even when talking with peers/family members, people will often say that "entire race" is racist, greedy, cunning, etc. or that "entire country" is corrupt, reckless, etc. It quickly conveys a message, as conversations would be unrealistically long if we excluded every group, but it will cause a consequence of unfairly labelling individuals within a group, and I personally and humbly think, leads to a lot of unhealthy stereotypes and prejudice that people experience today.
Thank you so much for vindicating my issues with electric cars! I keep hearing "your concerns are stupid and have already been addressed" whenever I bring them up, but I literally sat down with a pen and paper and worked out back in 2016 or so that electric cars couldn't work in the UK without a *huge* move towards green energy, and people just thought I was insane. I almost let myself get hoodwinked with them more recently, but your video makes so many good points I'm holding my ground on the matter.
If every registered semi truck in the USA was replaced with a tesla semi truck and only 50% of them were charging at a time it would consume more electricity than the USA currently generates. They charge at a megawatt, there are 2.79 million semis registered in the USA, and our electricity output is estimated at 1.3 million megawatts, 60% or which is made from burning carbon. These trucks are all going to want to charge at night, when you want to charge your car. There are a lot of cars and trucks on the road. If electric cars and semi trucks are to be a thing, we need to build more electrical generation capacity yesterday. Else, either trucks and cars are sitting waiting to charge or we get rolling blackouts.
@@pontiacg445And that's why It would be better to not need to drive everywhere, more than half (I think )of trips in US are only few miles (which could be made either by walking or train) that would mean.... less cars
@@koteghe7600 You are going to walk everything everywhere? Grocery stores can't have deliveries? If someone needs a new sofa, you walk to the sofa manufacturing store and then carry it home? Are you serious? No need to answer. You environmental loons never are.
Yep. Electric cars are a nothing solution. They don't address the core issue which is car-centric design and how inefficient it is at transporting people/using space properly. In many cases, a car is literally burning through massive amounts of energy to push 4100 pounds of metal and ONE person! That is very inefficient use of energy when compared to trains/buses/streetcars/etc. If we want to actually address climate change, we have to start building walkable/bikeable cities with great public transportation infrastructure so that we don't need to use cars all the time to get around.
@@seanarnold8980 Nothing stopping you buying a bike. What, the streets aren't rideable enough for you now? You have to tear literally everything apart and completely rebuild it? And you expect me to believe the average American is still going to do anything outside of what is strictly necessary? Can't even count on the average person taking their shopping carts back to the corral and you expect people to use anything inside a 15 minute city? lol LOL Step into reality, bud.
Thank you for systematically, coherently breaking down these two videos. They're being shown in classrooms in the US. This is the kind of stuff the next generation of non-climate activists will be thinking and saying. We need videos like yours.
Both the Kurzgesagt videos AND this one should be shown. The Kurzgesagt videos are good and use well-grounded sources, and this video shows how something being true doesn't necessarily mean it's the entire truth. It similarly also shows how agreeing with something doesn't necessarily mean you can't criticize that same thing. Most people in education are kids, but I think it's unnecessary to always dumb disagreements down to black and white. Most importantly of all, though, they could improve at realizing when there could be ideology hidden in something that seems objective. This video on its own also reminds those of us in the western world that things aren't the same for everyone. Not sure how we keep forgetting. I'm even guilty of it, myself.
@@v1298 yeah, if one really watched this video, youd see that he doesn't say Kurgetzat is crap, instead he points out the implications and the things he is missing. This video is more like a footnote to Kurgetzat and other green growth videos. They both compliment each other.
First of all do you think trying to prevent climate change is a fucking joke it’s not there’s already plenty of fucking topics and movies that show how fucking bleak the future can be if we don’t try to I don’t know fucking fix it and just by being bleak and you know fucking that doesn’t help fix it and he’s actually wrong in large terms colonialism is more of the same of large term large while short term gain on large very large scales by pondering and damaging peoples stuff so what he saying is actually wrong in a way colonialism was just very very aggressive capitalism on a larger scale for short term gain which damage the environment just like how companies polluting an oil and stuff like that but being doom and gloom like to video says is not gonna help anything stuff like nuclear power and other stuff like that can you know avert climate change but he’s basically saying no it can’t and coach Cozart is greenwashing and stuff like that
@@jeremyjackson7429 It would recover in 20-30 million years. This was the span it took after "The Great Dying," a period in which 96% of all life died. Of course, 30 million years is as good as forever for a species whose lifespans seem to max out at 122 years . Not to mention that by then a whole new order of creatures would replace the old (including us), as had happened after the Great Dying.
Very well put together, thank you for your work! As a translator, I'm incredibly impressed with the translation from Polish to English, you kept the same humour, cadence and syntax as if it were written in English to start off with. Thanks again and looking forward to the next video.
HOPE and Climate-Anxiety need Balance. Both were covered so good by 'Our Changing Climate' and 'Ankur Shah', please dont miss-out. Said Channel, Hbomberguy, UpisNotJump, Some More News, Second Thought, those are the Frontier-Fighters on RUclips; not high on Hopium but also not Gloomy!
I've not had the time to watch the entire video yet, but I'm glad to see that *SOMEONE* putting out some reasonable counter points to most of the climate change stuff you usually hear. "Let's just build more electric cars! That'll fix everything!" ... but yet... what about all the lithium? Finally, someone talking about some of this stuff. This is important stuff, and I love the out-of-the-box thinking of "well, maybe we don't need more electric cars, we need to make cars themselves not as important inside cities" and similar thoughts.
while Its good to have arguments about this and such, but imo its still better overall to teach people very generally about these kind of things, its better to push the idea to make more electric cars compared to the type of cars we use, did you know that plants are around 40-50% more effective then cars?
@@d4s0n282 Does that cover the sheer amount of diesel fuel used to dig the lithium up, though? Strip mining lithium is a giant fuel vacuum and you can't use electric powered excavators, they simply don't have those that would work.
@@Dhalin if everything was converted, it would prob be covered, but thats with only us right now, I would not be surprised if there is massive strides in the future that makes the switch better and more viable
@@d4s0n282 The problem is, though, we are wasting massive amounts of fuel and doing massive amounts of damage to South America's environment with this stuff, all on the "promises" that "it will get better someday". We already have technology that makes ICEs more and more efficient today. Yeah, sure they still burn fossil fuels, but they do so MUCH more efficiently than ever before, and they do not have the plethora of problems that EVs have, and who knows, maybe in time they can figure out a way to make them run off of something renewable (they're already putting Ethanol in Gasoline, though I am not sure I agree with this -- it's disrupting the farming industry and food supply in some places, that corn has to come from somewhere). The simple fact of the matter is, modern ICE cars are simply greener than EVs, by the fact of how much fuel it takes to excavate and process the rare earth materials that goes into an ICE, and also I've read that the recycling process for those huge batteries is difficult and expensive, AND they don't even really last all that long (compared to an ICE if taken care of properly). That's not saying anything about generating all of this electricity or building the infrastructure necessary to support the sheer numbers of these cars they expect, or somehow finding ways of making them affordable that more people can buy one. Last I looked, an EV is like $40k. If I could afford that, I would have renovated my house by now. I can't afford a $40k car, nor will I anyday in the foreseeable future.
@@d4s0n282 And yet that thinking right there is one of the problems with the Kurzgesagt video that this video pointed out. You can't just look at the problem of climate change like a new, shiny piece of technology that we'll make sometime in the future will fix everything. It's like the mentality that they described. The mentality that, "Oh, well, I was too lazy to start working out at the gym today. But I know for sure that I'll start tomorrow!" Instead of going top-down, with fancy equipment and tech created in a billionaire's lab, needing resources that just aren't accessible anymore,and with those resources probably being extracted from the global south, we could go ground up. Start protests, garden, donate, etc. Small things at first.
This was a truly fantastic video, and I'm glad I got to see it, even if a year late. It's great to see nuanced and in-depth discussions on all these interconnected topics around climate change. Kurzgezagt aside, I feel like the global north has always been good at getting carried away with singular narratives that end up dominating the conversation. There is so little interest in systems and connectivity, and I get worried that we're never going to make it out of the trees to see the whole forest before it's too late. Anyway, the two of you have given me a lot to think about. Thank you so much for your hard work on translating this for a new audience (and for the original video!), and I love your Polish accent. Never forget that you are also a representative of your country, and even if your government sucks, there are people like you fighting to do something about it. Anyway, cheers from the USA.
Don't be discouraged by the brainwashed liberals who attack you on leddit, it is absolutely critical that we disseminate as much information as possible, as soon as possible. No matter how painful that information is. We *must* prepare the people for the material reality of climate change, as well as for the ensuing material and class struggles. Glad I found this channel through BadEmpanada, I don't consistently agree with him and his sources, but he led me here to this well-constructed video.
Thanks! I've been following this discussion, but I guess it's to be expected - what we're saying here might be obvious for the climate crowd, but not really for leftists, especially those who consume Kurzgesagt only occasionally. Actually, we've even watched their previous video halfway through (so, before the "vote at the ballot and vote with your wallet" and the ad) and gave it a pass not too long ago😅
I don't agree with BE on everything either, but one thing's for sure and that's that he makes some extremely well documented and thoroughly researched videos, which I have a lot of respect for. I'd still argue that there needs to be a place for revolutionary optimism, but there's a difference between "everything will be fine, so I don't need to worry about it" and "things are looking bad, but if we work together as an organized class united by our material conditions and willing to make the sacrifices neccecary to combat climate change abd capitalism, a brighter future awaits." It's definitely a hard balance to strike though
"I don't consistently agree with him and his sources" [read: "I don't like the fact that Bad Empanada said very mean things about daddy Stalin in his video critiquing the 'Holodomor Genocide Question' Wikipedia article"].
@@Srijit1946 I just think on occasion he uses misleading or false sources. I think he occasionally looks for information to confirm his pre-conceived beliefs on whatever subject he's researching, instead of letting the information build the conclusion. That's why I said I don't agree with him on everything. I can look into his direct sources on individual videos and determine what information is accurate, what information has a political motivation attached to it, and what is patently false. I can disagree with his conclusions on sources and for occasionally trying to get out ahead of valid criticism of his sources in his videos. He often makes conclusions on the validity and lack of bias on information he uses just by saying things such as "the U.S. State Department would never go through such an effort to construct this low view count video in another language just for propaganda" (when the NED quite literally operates all over the world with local population groups). However, I still enjoy his research, and many of his points are valid and correct, and many of his sources are trustworthy (but not all of them). That's the nice thing about thinking for yourself, you can take a nuanced approach to sources of information. Not everything is black and white, and no one is 100% correct or 100% unbiased. You can pull from multiple sources of information, that's quite literally what doing your own research is. I guess you are incapable of understanding that, seeing the infantile way you critique. You are probably the kind of person that blindly supports any creator no matter what, that lets others think for them. The same kind of person that attacks badempanada and this new channel for criticizing kurzgesagt for their greenwashing propaganda. It is cute, but maybe you should run back along to the John Oliver channel or kurzgesagt, they might have a new cartoon on EVs for you to watch!
@@JeBubbieSpubbies I have my own disagreements with BE, there's not a single youtuber who I blindly support or agree with lmao, neither do I think that there can be such as thing as "unbiased political source of information". "I think he occasionally looks for information to confirm his pre-conceived beliefs on whatever subject he's researching, instead of letting the information build the conclusion." This is you when it comes to Stalin, Bad Empanada was very pro-Stalin a year or two ago so this doesn't really apply to him on this specific issue. It was just very easy to tell exactly what you disagree with Bad Empanada on (and probably his videos on Xinjiang and Hong Kong?), which I find very funny. My reply was not a critique at all, it was just the first thought which came to my mind when I was reading your comment and I made a low-effort reply, which you misinterpreted as me implying you should blindly believe everything which BE says instead. It's funny, now maybe you should go back to reading more Grover Furr.
You’re actually not harsh enough on him about coal. Sure the SHARE of coal usage in proportion to total energy is dropping, but the actual amount of coal being burned every year is near all time record highs still. That’s the only statistic that actually matters. The total amount being burned.
@@t3essays ale jak to? On jest Bolszewikiem. Tacy jak oni są dla nas zagrożeniem. Czemu nie macie problemu z jego obecnością tutaj. No chyba że sami jesteście czerwoni.
The part of "we're all in this together" mindset at 43:05 is one of the most naive things ever said by Kurtzgesagt. Every country is refusing to do the heavy lifting, and is waiting for others to do it for them. People that vote for political parties that want to change to a more environmentally friendly world are actively mocked, making this whole endeavour useless
This is really good stuff, like honestly some of the best critical thinking I've seen on RUclips. Citing sources while it's a good thing to do can still be misleading and not tell you the actual truth of what's really going on, sources themselves may be flawed or there is more to a problem that is out side of the scope of the source. Again really good stuff man, you really made my brain tingle and think hard.
It's that kind of thinking that we need more of these days. To say Kurzgesagt is at fault for using flawed sources is a slippery slope; every source is gonna have a flaw, because nothing is perfect. The only way to do this is to present your own sources to the contrary and have a logical, level-headed debate.
meh its a pretty bad video, it only does a good job at covertly brainwashing the less educated among us with their own ideology. Full of lies, logical fallacies, misrepresentations and scientific mistakes. The primary goal of the video seems to be pushing their own agenda of "capitalism bad" and "living like savage uncontacted tribes good", while all that is counterproductive to solving the climate crisis. In fact the savage tribes that run around half naked are the worst for the climate and should all be locked up and forced to contribute, if they are not intelligent enough they should be put in factories. Only thing that can save the climate is technology, no matter leftist like it or not. The reason they cant handle this fact is because they are hostile to science and technology and love fake "natural solutions" like homeopathy and in this case living like uncivilized swines (without electricity and so on), guess what, thats not sustainable either with billions of people.
@@WildCharger The whole idea of "fault" is at fault here, IMO. We've gotten it into our heads that if someone uses a questionable source, or fails to consider alternative interpretations of legitimate data, or accepts mainstream thoughts, that they must be somehow personally at fault for this. But that's not how people work. We cling to the first things we hear, things which confirm our preconcieved notions or absolve ourselves of responsibility. We contrive grand stories about the world from little more than nothing, then fit everything into those frameworks as if reality were obligated to make sense to us. And the thing is? The people, the systems, driving us to extinction know this and use it to their advantage. The blind hope that we can still get out of climate catastrophe through application of science doesn't come from a place of malice. It's woven into everything we are told to consume, by the people who profit from that consumption, and people falling for that subtle lie is a matter of bare humanity. It's not Kurzgesagt's fault that they believe this. They were crafted to believe it. Manipulated, as we all are, into a tool of far greater and more malign hands. To say they are at fault for that is to say one can be at fault for thinking and acting the way humans think and act.
Anyone who ever had to write a scientific piece for anything ranging from a graduate-level paper to a post-doc knows just how common it is to torture your sources until they say what you want them to, and that you should NEVER take citations at face value and instead carefully read everything being cited and even the things the sources themselves have as citations. Hell, I'd probably wager most people who e gage in academics have already done that themselves at least once, of not regularly, for motives that can be as disingenuous as an actual agenda to simply panicking when a deadline starts to get to close for comfort, I know I have, and so has every peer I've talked to.
@@Frommerman one thing that stuck with me from my college years is something my research instructor liked to say: science is infallible, but science doesn't exist, only scientists do and those fail all the time.
german here, i love seeing more non us american or british leftist on english youtube, the different perspectives that come from different experiences are really cool. also, dont worry about your accent, it has cool vibes and makes people like me feel less ashamed of our own. we can just steal english and use it despite our accents sounding weird to some, lets normalise them instead of cowering in front of the oxford dictionary!
I think what it boils down to, what pretty much everybody I've talked to doesn't seem to (want to) realize, is that CO2 emissions and the climate catastrophe is just another SYMPTOM of how we conduct ourselves on this planet. "Solving climate change" in itself won't solve anything if we don't stop (and reverse) growth. As a rule of thumb I keep saying that as long as we track our economies in percentages, we're on the wrong path.
One thing that's important to remember when discussing how old Kurzgesagt's sources is that these videos take a very long time to make. While they could get the newest data up to a certain point, after the script is completed and they start actually making the video, it would be too late to change the data. So having data from 2019 when newer and more accurate sources are available is definitely not good, it isn't always possible to update the sources used in a video late into development.
I doubt he cares given the amount of money he gets from the bill gates foundation and other billionaires he probably more than happy to promote their talking points or sees no conflicts of interest.
Except they cook few videos per month quite often... And if they released video when new data was available, but they ignored it because they already had a script and progress on the video, that's on them...
Yeah, a vast majority of their data comes from one source, which is funded by the Gates' foundation (which also funds Kurzgesagt). The actual art, sure it takes a long time. The data is mostly doctored in favor of billionaires, however.
That's why actual scentists tend to just write thesis' and papers straight away rather than waiting for their highly unique graphic design illustrator to finish his commissioned art work 2 years down the line.
I really enjoy this video. It’s civil, has well researched critiques, and doesn’t tell you to completely dismiss the channel as a whole. But there is one thing I think needs to be considered, and that’s that Kurzgesagt is not a channel designed to go in depth into the science and politics of these issues, and aims to give a more surface level analysis that the average person in western society can digest and understand. While criticism of this model is completely fair, I personally believe if we are to make significant changes to society, surface level videos like those on Kurzgesagt are very important. People like a combination of familiarity and novelty, and too much of either can alienate people and make the point harder to get across. Videos like this, while great for people with an open mind to these issues, are difficult for the average person to digest. TLDR: This is a great and valid criticism, but I believe their broad surface level analysis is more suited to making significant change than a video like this is.
except that the seeming harmless 'surface level' introduction is not basic or innocent at all. You might defend those videos by saying they're what all we need to know as 'ordinary folks'(who are assumed to have nothing to do with politics or science), but that's where you fall into the trap. Despite their apparently objective outlook, Kurzgesagt videos are not just simplified true stories with harmless flaws. They are simplifications of something else, something much more dangerous. The kind of message communicated is one that tells you economic growth is compatible with climate conservation, that capitalism is not the root cause of all the mess and suffering, that we can save our planet while maintaining the basic functioning of the status quo. Unfortunately, they are wrong and self-deceiving. Green economy is bullshit. One thing this video makes clear is that surface level stuff carry significant amount of ideological assumptions that deliver subtle right-wing libertarian ideas without you even noticing being transformed into their mindsets. This is not just an 'interesting and novel' piece of analysis or an overly detailed research video, its task is to debunk and to reveal what seems to be politically neural. It's a battle.
@@ArariaKAgelessTraveller it is a battle if there is active misinformation being communicated. politics is not something that you can just ignore because it impacts everyone's whole lives. even in something harmless like kurzgesagt there is politics. If you want things to improve you should start caring.
Didn't think I would watch this in it's entirety, and I was quite sceptical at first but - having a fair share of propaganda experience in Hungary - I have recently started watching 'opposite' propaganda a lot more, to compare my points, with varying degress of success (now I watch almost as much prageru-esque sources as I watch platforms that I am more inclined with)... so I gave it a try. I adored Kurzgesagt even years ago, and what they said rang true to my ears. But after watching this two hour video, I think the optics have changed for me, and gave me a reality check. I still support kurzgesagt, but the points brought up in this video are very valid, and thought out - the english is perfect, and the memes are on spot. Very well done man. I'll use my new perspective to seek out more information on the trends and cultural fine details mentioned by you. Also thanks for giving me a new hope for the future, I didn't even know about solarpunk up until now. You guys are amazing, very well done.
simply, after seeing all of this video in it's entirety, it is not This Polish channel versus This German Channel. Rather, it is a good thought experimental concept of applying Solarpunk into Kurzgesat proposals to hopefully see if a middle ground can exist using the strengths of both philosophies and avoiding their weaknesses. In the end, the systems and culture of the people will often be the biggest variable on the viability of both movements (Green Energy Futurism Plus SolarPunk)
None of the sources are peer reviewed studies - I am not a fan of electric vehicles and strongly believe that we need to rethink our transportation system, but the lithium thing is simply misrepresented. The majority of Lithium is sourced from Australia and there have been many studies published comparing electric vehicles to combustion engines showing that they are much better.
What a great video! It's rare a video changes my thinking, and while I already agree with most of your points, I have learned a lot with the philosophical perspective. Thank you from the Netherlands!
I appreciate that you gave us Indigenous folks some recognition. Too often this topic is dominated by white liberals who talk down to Natives and to those in the global south―like Kurzgesagt. Amazing video, looking forward to seeing more.
Wow, thanks! This topic is actually very hard for us, since we come from an ethnically homogenous and non-colonialist state, so we feel like we're walking on eggshells there.
Indigenous is kinda a broad term to use for American tribes that still live off the land. Most people around the world are indigenous. If hyper literal, we are all indigenous to Africa. There should be a better term for the people you are trying to refer to
@@willjapheth23789 It's the sociologically accurate term when describing people in settler-colonial relations. Most people don't care about this pedantry lol.
@@willjapheth23789 What are you even talking about? No matter how many ways I spin that, I can't find a single meaning of your sentence that makes sense and isn't horrendously inaccurate. Please elaborate.
As an English speaker, if this is a good representation of how poles and Slovaks present their arguments, I'm unsurprised that we haven't heard that much from y'all. At this point I'm starting to think the only likable Slavs are croatians.
@@SeanWinters Calling yourself an English speaker is a bit of a long shot. You put together such a clumsily worded comment that it's unsurprising the civilized world sees Americans as dumb baboons.
People say "well lithium destroys an ecosystem" while still relying on internal combustion engines that run on... oil. If you don't live in a city or suburban area, you pretty much have to drive a car. And honestly, what would you say would be less damaging for the environment: Using an electric car using lithium batteries and possibly better battery technologies in the future or buy a vehicle that actively not only pollutes the eco-system but extracting it's fuel damages multiple ecosystems worldwide, both marine and terrestrial. People act like there is a knockout argument against BEVs while completely ignoring the ecological burdens conventional motor vehicles cause.
Thank you for doing this; I feel like Kurzgesagt-esque informative videos with a lot of audio and visual sugar are often under-critiqued for how much they tend to be over-appreciated. I think that it's fair and fine that people in general trust creators enough to just consume information without having to think deeply and to research everything, provided that there are actors like you who make sure that content creators are being checked. Thanks again, and peace.
Did you look were and how they get there information? Look in there description in every video cuz all it's there but I agree in a the idea that the supra simplifications are a bit...extra
I like them and won't stop watching them, but they have said themselves that you should not take their information for granted but people just seem to have deleted that video out of their memory. I like the cause of kurzgezagt but i don't hesitate to look things that i find questionable up if the video is about something important.
@@jucom756 Well done; however, you aren't representative of most people, nor would people have necessarily watched "that video", whichever it is, to be able to delete it out of memory. (It seems to be a separate video, after all.) Kurzgesagt aside, a whole new genre of artificially-sweetened educational media (videos, particularly) is inevitably going to replace older, more "traditional" sources. Of course they will, because they need to compete with all the bright, flashy junk that would otherwise occupy the attention of the succeeding generations of people (children AND adults). What is likely to happen is that creators win out not exclusively by the intellectual quality of their work, but by their aesthetic and visual supremacy. While you in particular may be conscientious about what information you consume, I suspect that you cannot say the same for all our future generations.
@@artsartsart yeah that's true, just look at pragerU, they don't even attempt to be well sourced but people believe them because high production quality...
The bit on colonialism at 1:00:00 has to be one of the best short analysis on how it's expansion was justified, a basic introduction to how we got shit like 'noble savage's, racial hierarchy, etc., and why the conquest and homogenization of nature outside of Europe by Western Europeans and has and continues to be an utter catastrophy on said ecosystems. Hats off too you sir, excited to see what else you release
The irrationality of rationality concept reminds me a lot of measurability bias: in the public transit example, we can easily measure profits from ticket sales, but we can't really quantify how valuable it is to easily get from one place to another place, nor the psychological and long-term health effects of noise and air pollution. The book Seeing Like A State also talks a lot about concepts along these lines, especially Taylorism (basically optimized management techniques that try to treat people as machines for optimal productivity). This seductive idea that there is an objective, optimal, scientific solution to all of society's problems seems to make so much sense from the thousand foot view. And that a central authority should be responsible for imposing that solution on its people seems perfectly obvious. After all, you can't trust the masses to do what's best for them, because they're not playing 4D chess like you and all they can see is what's in front of them -- you know, on the ground where they have to live every day.
Thank you so much for making this video. When you introduced the concept of Solarpunk and summarised its manifesto, I realised that all thoughts i had on how our future should actually look like were expressed by this one single concept i had never hear of - Solarpunk. I work as a scientist and I cannot tell you how much the way of thinking in research (especially engineering research where I am working currently) is governed by oversimplified models and an agenda entirely focused on fullfilling the needs of our current economy. While most people are still incredibly open minded, there is a external bias that seems to push research in specific directions more than others which sometimes leads to interesting solutions being completely omitted.
Solarpunk is cyberpunk covered in plants to make it look better to a certain group of people. You still have all the same issues, population, resource constraints. It is just one big story with assertions that make it appealing to some people but it is just a story because to have that much tech, even if it is covered by plants and looks "natural", you still have the same constraints. You are being sold a lie and are eating it up because you want it to be true and aren't thinking about the environmental limiting factors because you have been tricked.
It's not just a bias, is how the field subsists, because the things that are profitable are the ones that gets funded and the things that could be profitable are the ones researched.
It's not "current" economy, it's economy. The economy is just people freely sharing resources and labour. Growth is just an increase in productivity and wealth. Economic growth is the single greatest motor for well being we have.
@@MrCmon113 that's definitely not what economy is, and it's not even a gross simplification. Economic models varied wildly across millenia and cultures, and only in recent years have we reached a unified central global model
@@Baddaby No, he'e right, as long as he isn't using bad definitions of "productivity" & "wealth". Which, yes, does seem likely, since that is the prevalent paradigm.
Came here from Bad Empanada. The information alone was fantastic, but the sudden arrival of Scott's Steiner mythical promo was where I knew I had a new place to subscribe. At long last.
this video is unbelievably based and should be shown to anyone who enjoys watching scientific video essays because not everyone goes to the lengths that you have to unpick the cherries and dive deeper into the root issues. a really good reminder to keep questioning the information being fed to us (especially by these types of channels) and to think about the wider impact of our actions. btw i actually really like kurzgesagt, but i think i enjoyed this deconstruction a hell of a lot more
Sounds like you are not questioning the information being fed to you. The problem with kurzgesagt video is it is was not pro technology enough. This deconstruction doesn't actually understand what rationalism or civilization really are. Although nether does the rest of humanity because most countries are culturally incapable of comprehending rationalism let alone implement it. Insted we get a idiotic shell of what those concepts are.
i agree this video is extremely based without a doubt it's nice to see deeper dives into subjects like this, and nuanced perspectives from different channels
@@alwynwatson6119 nooo our dehumanising, "rational" civilisation isn't wrong, it's all the poor countries that are too stupid to understand our enlightened Western way of life
I learned about a lot of concepts that I hadn't heard of before, like Degrowth and Solarpunk. Finding alternative solutions for our mainly profit driven world is pretty difficult. Thanks for translating this video.
Just wanna comment on the actual presentation style. I am very pleased to see that one can absolutely pack a video about complex philosophical and ideological ideas with a bit of cynical humor and popcultural references without it seeming any less serious. Very well done and very important insights.
Thank you for making this video to offer an alternative viewpoint of Kurzgesagt. I've always held them in high regard, so I was skeptical coming in. I'm in the process of reading both "Thinking in Systems" and "Limits to Growth" by Donella Meadows, and something didn't sit right when watching those Kurzgesagt videos -- thanks for putting it into words.
I want everyone to have seen this video. Critiquing new optimism and eco modernism. Highlighting the importance of (urban)planning and political action for the climate. Advocating solarpunk and degrowth. This video has so many good things!
Degrowth. I think it will be automatic; scientists say the population will peak at 9 billion. After all, you see inflation grows more than wage growth. Who can feed and educate a child like that?
this video has been lurking in my suggestions for weeks now and i've always postponed watching it because it is quite long. I finally commited to watching it and oh boy was it worth it! What a nice complete and well presented analysis. I used to be a huge kurzgesagt fan until I became more aware of the whole social aspect of climate change and environmental problems in general, then these videos started feeling off, like a big part of the picture was missing but I could't tell why... Until now. Thank you and keep up the good work!
@@guilhermesviech4610 I suggest you do, it seems long but once you start you will be hooked. Basically, the main ideas that they critique are technosalvation and ecomodernism. They show that Kurzgesagt and other edutainments like it that claim to just be neutral, scientific and apolitical are actually biased and have underlying neoliberal assumptions that can be picked up on if examined closely. Then they finally present alternative ways of thinking about the issue and preserving hope, such as degrowth, solarpunk and post-capitalism systems. The video is very well made, its witty and clever, but in no way are they being meanspirited or do they overly attack or make fun of Kurzgesagt.
jeez, as someone who watches Kurzgesagt regularly this was very eye opening for me. I really appreciate this content and really can't believe it's free. Thank you guys, this is exactly what the world needs. My only fear is that the world isn't ready for it, and making the world ready for it is my biggest question / concern.
Yeah, I feel like I've kinda outgrown Kurzgesagt, at least when it comes to topics like this. I no longer feel the need to use science as an escape from politics; the problems of society aren't something we can fix with a few ballots and technological advances. There is only so much room for improvement when you only think in capitalist terms.
@@dragonslair951167 Hm yeah though I feel like Kurzgesagt's videos are still important to watch despite this, just with keeping in mind of their agenda. Technological advances can only take us so far, and it has come to a point where we need deep rooted paradigm shifts within our society (this is what I've been taught in uni) to make change that will drastically decrease our impacts on the climate crisis. I do feel like ballots are vital (as well as activism and social/climate justice) in this process as democracy (as well as lobbying) is how change is made. I'm going to begin attending council meetings and such, hopefully I can both learn from and educate potential local election candidates who are unaware of how change needs to happen. It all starts bottom up as said here, begin with your local elections my guy, and spread the word :) I would suggest watching climate town too if you're interested in more.
@@dragonslair951167 "I no longer feel the need to use science as an escape from politics; the problems of society aren't something we can fix with a few ballots and technological advances." nowhere did i feel the need for this before and after watching any kurtz videos. politics is ingrained in any major advancement, tech or otherwise, this applies even commercially. chances are. most of the time, major changes in politics will eventually result in changes in tech and vice versa. theres so many examples of that in history its mind boggling. i understand what this video is saying, and agree that muddying sources and hiding some info isnt a good look for kurtz, but frankly i find it meaningless in the grand scheme of things as the subjects in this video were discussed countless times since the discovery of fossil fuels with no real result. the only things that actually started the process of reducing fossil fuel consumption was tech advancement in other areas like solar or nuclear and many other areas. tech and scientific advancement was often the starting point of getting a political advancement towards green energy to actually progress, positive or otherwise(the start of the gunpowder era). all this "well what about the south?" or "its more about environmental results than just human greed" rhetoric is meaningless as it never did create actual change or advance in any area, only after scientific advancements does the question even apply. in short, scientific advancement comes first, the rest is nothing but philosophical talking points and really wont do jackshite, as has been shown many times in reality, and current global predicament that we created for ourselves. i do believe well dig ourselves out of it though, and agree that kurtz simplifies things about this subject way too much.
@@jamesballantine23 I don't think this man understands the fact that it was a video over climate. Like their video isn't going to go into the historical process of why a country is poor due to colonialism which is cause for why poor countries don't pollute and all of that. I don't even understand how hes characterizing some of the video in a way that feels borderline dishonest. Some of Kurzgesagt's climate video is necessarily generalized to get a point across and those generalizations are correct. It seems like a very strange video to break down considering the fact that it's suppose to be a generalization.
This guy legitimately said that poor countries are poor because of colonialism. If that's not enough to make you distrust him, then perhaps you need to learn about trustworthy sourcing.
Aw what a bummer! /s The positivity about climate action is so toxic at times. Humans keep consuming more but think a little ocean clean-up & green consumerism is enough. Doomerism is such an issue too, people act more hedonistic since there’s nothing to fix. IPCC reports definitely look like we’re on track to doom though 👀💦 I certainly hope now that the Australian election has chosen more independents if will actually mean climate legislation and action 😂 but I highly doubt its viability
i usually don't think it's on purpose or they're "bought and sold by billionares" or smthg. I just assumed it was a combination of having to operate within capitalist structures (like youtube itself), trying to get your message out (if you just made a video about how truly F'ed we all are, im not sure a lot of ppl would watch it) and probably just the difficulty of getting your mindset out of the liberal capitalism thinking.
Doomerism should be "we are doomend, so we should do whatever it takes as soon as possible to try and save the world" but actually it's like "the world is going to end? So there's no point in caring, let's smoke more weed and forget about it" :/ We need to find the balance where we see the comming doom but still keep the hope to act
Doomerism is founded on disbelief of impending doom. Imagine you know you're going to die from cancer. Do you live your last lives hedonistically, or do you attempt to make peace with all that you've been through? Maybe some middle ground between the two. Human suffering is thousands of years old and has been a constant throughout history. We all have to make peace with this fact of suffering so that we can take the proper actions in response to stressful situations. On one end, yes YOLO, on the other end, if you're going to live a long life you might as well build wealth or do something creative for a living. I remember kids who died in high school, should they have spent their life on a permanent vacation? If they had they might never have been in the situation that got them killed, nullifying the very premise. And this is why we need a moderate life. A little bit of work, a little bit of friends and family, a little bit of hedonism or fun, etc. We have existential dread because we are working ourselves out of existence yet if we don't work we lose our existence. We're dead people walking and we don't know what decisions will have been worth the time that we may or may not have on this earth. I think in our culture now, being a Marxist or a union member or leader is so tabboo that some will find their hedonistic liberation within Marxism. I remember when I went full Marx when something clicked in me. I felt like those kids in the 90s war on drugs commercials, doing bad things and getting up to no good. I was so shamed from Marxism due to my upbringing (American) that I had to YOLO myself the guilty pleasures of Marx. My acting hedonistically looked like breaking away from the status quo, which opened my mind to political alternatives I'd never researched before. It's just an anecdote, but there are a lot of conservatives and liberals for whom hedonism is expressed very mildly, despite being a selfish ideal. I don't remember what I was getting at. It's almost 4 am and I probably won't remember this tomorrow.
It's so cool that you guys have included all of your sources in the description. A lot of videos don't seem to do that. Thank you for offering an untainted and easy to follow perspective on this incredibly large issue. You have just made me discard several things that I had believed before watching this. Know that your videos do an impact. Also, please keep your accent. I love it!
it took me literal months to finish watching this video because i never seemed to have enough time to sit through it all - but i'm glad i did! thanks for the refreshing, nuanced approach, for taking the time to explain everything and the necessary criticism of an otherwise very popular a beloved channel. extremely well done for a side project of a side project! ;D
@@zhanucong4614 You're smarter than that. You know that 20,000 working class people boycotting Nestle with a burning passion represents much less influence than one rich person supporting it with some pocket change as an afterthought one afternoon, and thus the rich people benefit from a "vote with dollar hahaha" style system being preffered over a "vote with your vote" style system. You don't need me to explain that to you.
@@devinnie7572 its always the free to play cope: "i can beat the money spending player with my friends if we band together and play by the rules" no bro, you stop playing their game, only way to win
I've learned not to trust kurzgesagt anymore. From the meat video to the antibiotics to this video, I realize that they aren't as purely factual as I previously thought. Thank you dude (and the others that opened my eyes).
It's really the problem inherent in anything that's "just the facts", "trust the science", etc. It's easy to conflate data about the world, which is extremely narrow and subject to all kinds of distortions, concessions, approximations (not to mention deception and cherry-picking, both intentional and accidental), with reality, but only by turning a blind eye to these shortcomings. Facts and science are good, they're better than fantasy and superstition for making decisions, but they're always subject to human interpretation, and our ability to be emotionally influenced. Ultimately humans make decisions emotionally, even when they believe they're using cold rationality. (Damage to the limbic system (a hub for emotional processing) renders a person unable to make even simple decisions like what to have for lunch (let alone complex problems), even if they can understand and explain logically all the factors a person would typically consider to make those decisions. The effect of believing one is using just the facts and basing their beliefs on "pure science" (whatever that is) is that one becomes blind to how their emotions and belief systems are affecting their thinking, how their selection of data is biased to supporting what their emotions tell them is "right", and how the motivations of countless other agencies have coloured the data they're seeing or filtered what data they have access to in the first place. Confirmation bias is a very well-known effect in science but it's such a subtle trap that its effects are still rampant even within the field, let alone on the boundary between science and politics where this kind of cherry-picking is often not a bug, it's a feature. That's why videos like these are great. It can be true both that Kurzgesagt are doing their best to follow science and dispel some myths propagated (20-30 years ago) by fossil fuel companies, and relay what they have found with the best of intentions; and that because of influences outside of the point of view that they focus on what they produce ends up being propaganda. I'm glad they made such a long video to really get into it.
6:50 : Ok then how about you keep the railways in place and you add factories nearby to build manufactured goods so that you can move them to the coastal cities (largest cities) and export them overseas instead of leaving the existing infrastructure to rot. PORTS ARE NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.
Videos such like this has made me wonder, with some anxiety, in how this’ll translate to my country of Peru. I already know the increase in temperature due to climate change will wreck us, but wreck us how exactly. The seasons have changed as well, when it’s supposed to be raining, it doesn’t for weeks; when it’s supposed to be dry, it lasts longer than before. Water’s going to be a problem in the future, with the glaciers melting down for those that live on the Andean highlands. Also, the centralization of Lima has been causing problems in, not just the balance in power, but in being the place where the opportunities are, yet the infrastructure elsewhere, for better accessibility, transportation, and access to higher speeds of internet for remote working, lacks.
This video is literally amazing haven’t even fished it, but the nuanced approach is greatly appreciated, it looks at climate change under multiple critical lenses, and I loved the economic, cultural, historical and philosophical approaches, and the humor is spot on
This is, by far, the most concise yet comprehensive take on how capitalism, global socio-politics, and the environment are related. I love it! It's everything I've ever wanted to say in one tidy video! Thank you!!
What you think is capitalism is just private property and personal autonomy. Capitalism is just a system where that largely worked for a few hundred years.
@@kayakMike1000 I want to disagree but you're right! Private property and personal autonomy are just mutually injurious. I love personal autonomy but everyone is drastically limited by the rights of those who own the most property (and who can withstand the most damage to the shared natural environment). Capitalism and democracy are enemies! Internalize the externalities! Water is a right!
@@kayakMike1000 in conclusion, I want a system that will allow us to enjoy the planet for a few hundred years more. I don't care how far capitalism has gotten us. I care how far it can take us. Humanity has replaced much older systems for far more petty reasons. I don't believe we have reached the end of history. Rather, I believe that, if we honestly can't improve anymore, then there's no point in living. One day you'll wake up and most of the fresh air will be the property of a single person who loves money more than life itself.
Recently RUclipsrs I watched have been denying climate change... What happened to winning the argument? Why are people suddenly denying something so obvious?!?
You'd have to name them, but then also categorize them. Some think it happens naturally, some think its there but we just need to cope with it. Like if we're on an airplane and the engine died. Some people labeled deniers actually believe it is happening - just that there aren't actually solutions that can be implemented. So they'll back mitigation. Some people agree and just want different solutions.
As someone who has consumed a climate destroying amount of video essays, this has genuinely been one of the funniest, informative and approachable breakdowns I've watched.
Thanks brothers for translating and sharing your content with us By The way I never knew social science was this powerful a subject to perceive our reality a bit more consciously
Wow this is so well made. Not a lot of this is new, I had noticed some of these trends in their recent videos myself and have seen other pointed out, but this is such a great collection of all the point and explaining them clearly while providing pleasing visuals (which is ironically what Kurzgesagt used to do so great).
@Acceleration Quanta literally. It’s RUclips crap and everyone in this comment section is praising it as if 14 other RUclips channels haven’t made extremely similar content.
TL:DR - We need to redefine economic growth so that what we are measuring is meaningful to our changing values. One of the classic errors (which the video somewhat makes but not as bad as many who are arguing against economic growth because they do admit that we need to define economic growth properly) is the argument that one can’t get infinite economic growth with finite resources. It is true that one cannot get infinite growth of INPUTS with finite resources. However, economic growth is about OUTPUTS and its valuation if we go back to classical economics is SUPPOSED to be based on human satisfaction since the valuation is supposed to be based on the utility that individuals obtain. To do this, we need to be able to do interpersonal utility comparisons, which few economists have wanted to do because it so hard to measure but just because it is difficult to do something does not mean it is impossible to do so. More importantly, it is about economic growth PER CAPITA and perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, it is about improvements in overall utility (satisfaction) per capita (in other words, average utility). THAT can definitely happen if our population slowly decreases and we alter our definitions of economic growth to include non-market outputs including counting the benefits of extra leisure, better health, and other measures of happiness. It can even happen if we dramatically reduce income and wealth inequality WITHOUT increasing overall amounts). This is because there is declining marginal utility as income rises (in other words, if we transfer money from the rich to the poor, you end up with happier societies since the utility lost by the rich is more than offset by the gain in utility for the poor). Of course to measure this we need to standardize utility across everyone, which was the purpose of using money as a yardstick (unfortunately, that measurement is somewhat imprecise and imperfect but we can still attempt to go back and look at it from a slightly different methodology, such as the classical economics’ labor theory of value instead so we look at hours worked as a benchmark). In conclusion, we can definitely make humanity better off as time goes on but only if we are able to go back to first principles when it comes to economic theory and practice.
The solar punk part about this video was a bit strange considering the argument about how we should consider the indirect results from producing something (in this case solar panels, that is more polluting to produce than most people think and needs a lot of batteries thus incrementing the mining of lithium)
I think the point of the solar punk part of the video was to show the differences in ideology. Those differences being controlling and manipulating the world around us for economic growth as our current way of life, and instead using our intelligence to better coexist with nature right now, maybe even forgoing some of our modern comforts in order to directly improve our lives in other, more substantial ways, which is the solar punk view.
Goddammit. The new video from that other guy about kurzgesagt was so hollow and poorly made that I worry people won't take a good deep dive like this one seriously. This video actually makes well researched, proper arguments, while the new one that went somewhat viral just doesn't do that. Which is a real shame, because kurzgesagt fucking sucks on climate change stuff but now people will associate that critique with some guy who didn't know how to construct an argument rather than this.
Whereas it seems that kurzgesagt left a lot out in their two climate videos, they did do one thing right: They pulled me out of a climate doomerism spiral I was slipping into. And their videos might have prevents many more people to do the same. I think to most important thing kurzgesagt is for is to get people into the topic and create awareness. Because when they do, people are more likely to start watching other climate related videos that make the more nuanced views, thus in the end still bettering climate education even though they themselves omit certain important facts. And that I think, should be kurzgesagt's main aim, and I think it already is. (although I havent watched your whole video yet). But it is still important to have people point out flaws in videos, so keep up the good work!
@@Jane-oz7pp i dont know that channel (and cant find it right now). My main point is that because kurzgesagt is mainstream, mainstream people are more likely to get pulled into climate subjects. You need to ease people into these subjects, because if you stray too far away from what people already know and believe, you scare them away. So whereas you and me might not agree with the deeper meaning and understanding of climate politics they make, they ARE good at creating initial interest. Which is important from a science communication and education perspective. Those kinds of videos like they make, they cant and should not go too deep. The fact that they actively acknowledge and say this, is already a plus in my eyes. And then at the same time, its videos like the one from this comment section that need to analyse and deepen understanding and debunk the flaws and biases of the shallow ones. At the same time Im not going to pretend that this video, nor you and I, don't have biases too. You cannot prevent having a bias, you need to be aware of it.
@@MssIAMNOBODYSPECIAL idk if radicals are capable of empathizing with common folk. They think everyone should automatically agree with them or be dismissed.
@@willjapheth23789 @Will Japheth unfortunately, that is true. But that doesnt mean I should stop pointing out to people that if they want their way, they should be more reasonable. For example, I consider my own views on climate and political topics pretty radical (being in essense a solarpunkie, but more concretely a anti-consumerist, anti-car, socialist, green bikelover). And while I think my ideas are what is needed, I also tell people to warn me if I go too far, if I cannot be reasoned with anymore on a subject. To keep me from sliding a slippery slope. I want to extent that to others as well, because its people that are too radical, that drive the masses _that we need for support_ away. Even though I know its often futile, i still try sometimes. Even if its just to prevent other people that just read the comments to slide that slope (and not necessarily the people Im in discussion with). This comment section was still sorta doable, but I watched the other video of badempanada on the kurzgesagt videos (not all the way, because it was already too loaded and with mistakes, mind you) and those comments were toxic all the way. I stopped commenting there, because when I stood up for someone with genuine questions, I got the full blow... that was just too much for my sanity. But as far as I can handle it, I try to be the voice of reason.
@@MssIAMNOBODYSPECIAL You're probably a better advocate for what you believe then most people. It seems to me like radicals often actively alienate their own movement from regular folks when they might have ideas worth considering. Car culture is pretty strong. The more people that feel they can be for car alternatives without having to change their identity or be associated with radicals the better.
I live in a particular area in Bucharest, Romania that has experienced in the last few years a great feat of rehabilitation. While that is great and is a change that we needed more than a decade ago, perhaps, the sidewalks were very narrow and mostly occupied by illegally parked cars and the change we've seen has not widened them or in some cases removed them completely for more parking spaces. Bucharest is very much a city made for cars and not for people. It's BLANKETED in cars, filling every available space, demoralizing and putting the actual human population in serious danger.
Damn, nice video guys. You should start a discord server and make some videos in other languages too! That would be super cool! :) you'll get to 10k in no time for sure!
@@t3essays 0:43: Well, COnservatives wont ever stop being the Anti-Truth-Faction and literally be all things anti-truth so 'having won the Battle'? I dunno. Maybe or maybe not one day we get a Law that stop Pre-Marriage-Sex, but whatever.
Easiest new RUclips subscription I've made in a while. Thanks for mentioning not just the social sciences, but calling out urban designers and the psychology of human decision making as key to understanding how to avert the worst of the crisis. It's not Tesla, but building for density, de-subsidizing meat/dairy/egg production, rewilding forests, removing things like R1 zoning, and expanding freight rail to get 18-wheelers off the roads are just a few unsexy, but massively impactful.
For me it will be a great way to further practice my Polish. It's my mother language (I live in my fathers country) so I am familiar with basic vocabulary. In addition to limited historical/political/literary vocabulary due to reading books & watching Polish media, conversing with my family and visiting for the holidays. However I have a lacking vocabulary in terms of more technical terms, so I am looking forward to expanding that. I am eager to watch their Polish language videos as well. Hope they translate more of their videos too English, so that it can reach a wider audience. Love the Ed pfp btw :).
I dont know what to say exept thank you for opening my eyes about kurzgesagt. Eventhough im kindda in the apathy state of mind, your video and especially the moment when you talk about solarpunk... gave me hope. And i havent felt that for quite some time regarding the subject of the climate crisis. So thank you a lot. I really like your approach. Please do more! (your accent is great dont change, coming from a baguette croissant person cringing at baguette croissant person speaking english with poor accents, you're a pleasure to listen to)
Mixed feelings on this one. Exceptionally great Video, dont get me wrong, but I think you've been a bit too harsh on Kurzgesagt. I think they do a step in the right direction, and after those, more need and hopefully will follow. Yes, I too would have liked them to step outside of their "ideology" and also mention other solutions (e.g. Solarpunk :D which would be much more suitable). But using the word "propaganda" on that? That word is a bit extreme and might be misunderstood by the viewers. Maybe you could round the video by summing up not only repeating all of the critizism you had, but that Kurzgesagts approach goes in a positive direction, but lacks this, that and ... . Otherwise, it sounds like you are demonizing all of their doing, even tho you underlined that you dont want that to get mixed up throughout the video. There are people that dont watch all of it, and then miss out on what you are actually trying to say. Lets prevent that. My cirticism aside, thank you for this fantastic, slow, cautious, detailed and well founded work of criticism on a big player of the internet! (Yes, I did laugh from you jokes at times :D ) Please, supply us with more of that! GROW YOUR CHANNEL! GROOOW! :P JK, quality over quantity. Best wishes!
I don't think solarpunk is a desireable future at all, let me explain. Solarpunk's desired goal is much too decentralized, and de-inustrialized. The amount of people that would have to die to achieve that is grim in the extreme, not to mention that it doesn't seem to give nuclear any thought whatsoever, even if it's by far the best option for generating energy across the board. Green energy, which is one of the centrepoints of solarpunk, is not all positives. It has many negatives, some of which are not solvable through technology since it is by virtue of the method used. Nuclear energy is like a function, you get out what you put into it, making it safer, more efficient, less polluting and even cheaper in the long run.
nah, it's definitely propaganda. The word is unnecessarily demonised. You could say that this video is propaganda, too. The only thing is that Kurz's video tends towards being malicious propaganda, considering how much they ignore an how many solutions they present are also tied to Gates' businesses
it is propaganda. Our zeitgeist consists in political correctness which oftens ends up in plain lies in order to try to not be rude. Be rude. If you're making propaganda because you're getting money for it, you're a lobbyist, and lobbying used to be illegal. Let's not fall into a neoliberal society like America because we can clearly see it's not the way of the future. Channels like Kurzgesagt should be obliged to show who fund them, so we could get a clearer picture of why they say the things they say.
I can feel myself being slightly radicalized. Thank you for properly introducing me to solarpunk and degrowth. I will have to learn more, but I am cautiously supportive of it…if we can actually implement it in practice…
Just like Bernie Sanders is electable if we fucking elect him, these policies are entirely doable if we just fucking do them. Like, there's no technological or theoretical barrier here. We know these policies can be done because all of them have been done at various times and places throughout history, and we know these policies are beneficial because we know their effects. The only problems are systemic and social, stemming from inertia and decades of propaganda which convinces people at large that nothing can ever change or get better.
I think I just found my new favorite channel. I love how deep you dive into this critique, the clear goals you provide, and the clear solutions you give to achieve them. Your not optimistic, your realistic in a optimistic way. Easy subscribe
I’ve watched the whole video and it has really opened my eyes plus given me alot more information about each subject and how some things are semi correct or wrong duo to things that were not focused on.
This is fantastic! I was anxious to watch this because i've been a big fan of kurzgesagt in the past, but you've done a fantastic job of identifying how their technofuturist ideology affects what they say. Also I'd love those philosophy videos you joked about at the end - please please make them!!!
Wow. I had all the dots that made me question Kurzgesagt's videos, but I didn't couldn't exactly understand why their climate change videos were "weird" until you managed to connect them. Thank you, and especially for the Solarpunk solution because I still want to be optimistically realistic lol Also on a side note, what's bizarre is that people presume economics is centered around money, and yea it is, but putting the politics and "GDP-growth" ads and capitalistic "decreasing prices" aside, economics, fundamentally, is the study of how we just manage limited stuff with unlimited wants. Economics is VERY interested in the wellbeing of society, collectively dealing with resources i.e. research on those indigenous handling water, and etc., so it's a bit weird seeing Economics being singled out to prices, GDP, and tech in fighting climate change when it includes discussions on the Global South, environmentally-damning side effects for "eco-progress" i.e. more dams and wind-turbines and desalination plants, neuropsychology i.e. limiting consumerism, and more.
@@retrochronic44 No, they are still very good. Their pure science videos are really good (i.e. the measles one released recently), and they've shown to amend their mistakes in the past. I personally view that Kurzesagt as a whole, when approaching climate change, were too unaware of their own biases and assumptions. They're good at science (sources, professionals / peer reviewing, explaining simply), just be cautious and critical when politics are involved. My personal rule of thumb is: the quicker the explanation, the more skeptical you should be. That should sound like common sense, but it's pretty easy to blindly accept sources you trust and respect i.e. not thinking twice about errors with my comment or I accidentally said something that's not true. Everything is insanely complex, but humans need it dumbed down to understand stuff. Take for example one of Kurzesagt's claim: "Vote with your wallet" (a.k.a. don't support anti-environmental businesses). 4 words, but there's a BUNCH of nuances with that. For instance, those poor, especially the Global South as a whole, tend to not have a choice (do you choose what gas / oil company to buy from? What resources we abused third world workers for our computer semiconductors? Most poor urban American are unable to support local farmers because they only have access to junk food), and consumers are often unaware of the choices they accidentally make (did you choose whether your shirts / shoes came from sweatshops? To be made from Xinjiang cotton (before the US banned them 2020)? Your chocolate candy free from child labor?). Even if we are aware, will our dollar truly affect mega-corporations raking in millions, if not billions of dollars? Let's say we have an anti-Amazon movement because for some random reason, they turned Niagra Falls into a place to dump oil, and one million amazon users boycott them; no, TEN million. Even with that dent, they have over 100 million users (some estimates as high as 200 million), they pour billions of dollars into manipulating politicians around the globe, and are trying to monopolize all parts from picking up the item you bought to putting it on your doorstep so you don't get a choice whether to support them or not in the future. That's not even getting into the (1) illusion of choice w/ monopolies (almost all cereal is owned by 4 companies, Luttoxica owns 80% of all major glasses brand, 3 companies control 80% of mobile telecomes, 3 for 95% of credit cards, social media, almost all US major food products and crops grown in each area, the list goes on and on), (2) the complexity of each company's relation to climate change (for instance McDonalds: will they reduce their use of natural gas? cow methane emissions? carbon emissions? food waste? How about yes to all 4 while ignoring logistic emissions, preservatives, and excessive use of water in agriculture admist drought areas i.e. California and Arizona?), (3) how we blindly support capitalism and consumerism to solve everything without realizing imperfections and issues (how are companies supposed to solve the Great Pacific Ocean garbage patch the size of Texas? acidification of the ocean? over 50% of coral reefs dying? invasive species? Will there even *be* a miracle drug successfully developed to fight against drug-resistant diseases that mega farm companies created when they constantly put literal tons of antibiotics into animal feed on a massive scale? Penicillin was made only a few decades ago as the miracle drug and there's already diseases that evolved to resist Penicillin...), the list goes on and on. So that's the "everything is insanely complex" that I'm talking about, but obviously Kurzgesagt can't say all of this because even though that's important, that's hella boring to read and they're trying to entertainment while educate. Just be skeptical and you'll be fine, I still love their channel very much and they partially influenced me to pursue Medicine :)
Really amazing video - a well paced 2 hour breakdown of complex ideas in an accessible and entertaining way. What an awesome achievement! Keep up the great work!
I sat through the entire 2 hours of this for some reason and must say this was very well done. You made me doubt my beliefs a bit which is the best you could have done honestly. I still am on edge when it comes to any deep structural society changes, but I will give it some more thought. Oh and the Modernity and the Holocaust is definetly on my to read list.
You're being very introspective and honest with yourself, continue to nurture that and uncovering and speaking truth will just come naturally. Continue to be critical of yourself, but don't forget to also hold us lefties accountable whenever you have a salient point. Keep up the good work comrade c:
Structural change is coming whether we like it or not. The global economic system as we have known it is going to fall, at some point in our lifetimes, as climate change makes current food production and distribution norms impossible. The question is not whether things can or should change. The laws of physics themselves decree that they will, and damn our moralist whinging on the matter. The question is what we should do about it, and what we can build in the ashes of the old.
You might also be interested in the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which explores the connection between what Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism and pretty much everything mentioned in this video, from city planning to industrial production, to agriculture, to various historical atrocities.
Short answer is "The structure is the problem. Not because the structure is inherently evil but because it does not have the capacity to come up with solutions at the granular level."
You might want to reword your comment because there are such things as political science, that is the how to get a politician to vote for your policy type deal. Then there’s also agenda science aka policy science, that is the scientific justification used to make and or to enact a policy.
Yeah, I've noticed that EVEN BEFORE this video. The concept of universal living wage (Or however is called) seems to ignore some crucial elements of reality, most notably the issues with certain cultures not integrating to X country but living from the citizen's taxes. The sad truth is that a lot of refugees are not refugees, they're immigrants who say they're refugees to stay in europe.
@@t3essays The solution to climate change is merge 1900's and modern Europe because jesus there used to be so much public transport in the early 1800s! Urban design would provide the biggest change
I often throw around the "reject modernity, return to monke" meme, but deep down i actually believe it. We obviously don't need to take it as literally as returning to the stone age, but there's no denying that many of the world's ailments are a consequence of humanity's insane rate of progress in the past 200 years. We did too much too quickly and never gave ourselves the chance to adjust and adapt. Now we plan to do even more even faster to compensate for our previous advancements. We have essentially trapped ourselves in a positive feedback loop of solving big problems with even biggers solutions. Every positive feedback loop I've seen ends with something blowing up.
Thank you for mentioning the damages of lithium extraction. Here in Chile we even have a thing called "zonas de sacrificio" or "sacrifice zones", which are essentially whole areas that are deemed as necessary sacrifices for economic growth and are left uninhabitable by pollution. It's dystopian as fuck.
@Poket Ranger Wena choro
You clearly disagree with that. But why? Can you explain the pros and cons and why you think the cons trump the pros?
@@lawrencefrost9063 Quite often these sacrifice zones are areas where people used to live or still do. The local communities don't vote in order to designate a sacrifice zone, they are simply informed, not even asked if they approve. This practice has ruined multiple lives and even taken others. It also absolutely decimates the environment. And all for profit, in a country with extreme income inequality. Trickle down economics doesn't really work, specially here in Chile, where prices are similar to the US yet our minimum wage is like a third. How could I not be against sacrificing whole communities and ecosystems to make money for corrupt officials that sell our country to multinational corporations?
@@lawrencefrost9063 Admittedly, I am biased, for I despise these individuals and I am not a big capital owner who benefits from this. A pro you could consider is that most of Chile's GDP comes from the mining sector. But the video already showed how GDP is not necessarily a pro. Maybe if Chile had good public funding and the money being made by this practice actually solved some of our issues I wouldn't be as opposed to it. But in reality it's hard to see any pros in it unless you are directly benefiting financially from it.
@@matiasbascunan8051 But you see that is what I think is happening, even if not in the scale you wish. If this industry is extremely important economically to your country, it undeniably increases the standard of living to a lot of people. Even if most of the profits don't go the the people as they of course should, the profits are taxed and those taxes partly do go to public spending which finances your education, healthcare, infrastructure whatever, right? This seems to be a classic case of the needs of the many outweigh the negative consequences to the few (as long as the equilibrium is not completely skewed) If a thousand people have to suffer because of pollution due to mining, but it helps a million people get a better life...
I don't know enough about this but i'm just playing the devil's advocate. Trying to figure out if this is ethically wrong or not. And if it is necessary despite the issues.
I just happened to watch a video about this new technology, a new method to extract lithium that does not rely on the same stuff the Chile currently uses and it could potentially decrease the negative effects and decrease water usage of lithium extraction. (This one, really interesting; ruclips.net/video/xWpLFUUDTiM/видео.html&ab_channel=UndecidedwithMattFerrell )
If that can be done, would you still oppose it?
Usually the more you think about something and the more research you do on a subject, the harder it is to decide if it's right or wrong.
I'm sure that, being the forthright, honest and research-thorough organization that they are, Kurzgesagt would be happy to listen to your arguments and correct some of their past errors.
At the end of the video it mentions how Bill gates funds Kurzgesagt. I'm unsure if the source of this claim is real (did not check it), however if so this pretty would discredit any claim of them being a honest organisation.
i agree with this, ive never seen kurtz to be some kind of crazy drama funded channel, this video gives some good points, i would love to see an open debate
@@LeanAndMean44 I don't think this is sarcasm due to the fact that Kurzgesagt have corrected themselves before and have devoted a video to clarify to the audience that they are trying their best but can, like all humans, make mistakes. This shows they are willing and unafraid to admit that they might've got a couple things wrong and rectify any problems arising from them
@@feckoslovakia how they responded to Bad Empanada's video does not at all show that they are willing and unafraid to admit that they might have gotten things wrong ruclips.net/video/ZRPcyWNfgxo/видео.html (this is from his second channel where he uploads clips from his weekly twitch streams).
@@Srijit1946 Ok, it's on the watch later, I'll form an opinion within, idk... a week or two
As someone that admires most of Kurzgesagt content, the title of this video initially made me skeptical, then worried me a bit and sparked some curiosity (what is there to criticize?). I am glad I watched it. Thanks for translating the original video.
I feel often a lack of hope for a better future - for all. Having a better understanding of the flaws and different political promises bring a bit of energy to be the hope, or at least die trying.
I completely agree. I am a fan of Kurzgesagt not because of any specific video or opinion they hold, but because of the general spirit behind their videos. Of course it is fine, good even, to disagree or discuss their content, and I am sure they make mistakes as well. However I think their way to look at the world and humanity is genuinely important and valuable. A generally optimistic outlook is sadly a very rare thing nowadays, and such a view being combined with science makes it all the more important.
Can you sum the video up?
@@YaBoyfelipewhy not just watch it?
@@humanoidshrek5524 My dopamine receptors and my attention span are fried
5th like
As a mechanical engineer myself, I've tried to always keep it in my mind that efficiency is doing *more with less* rather than doing _better with more._
Ah, this is wonderful, I'm still just a student of mechanical engineering, but I always feel so confused why this philosophy is disappearing from modern engineering. I'm glad that there are still engineers with that attitude.
That's good, since the former is what the word efficiency means, and the latter is not.
this is evolution, baby! Do always follow the evolution path
I love it!
If you were to self teach yourself engineering, where would you start?
I'm a big fan of Kurzgesagt and seeing your title made my stomach lurch, but I'm very happy I am watching it as I work. As a person born and raised into a lower-middle class American family, I grew up looking down on busses, trains, etc. But now, as a young adult, I'm realizing how much of a problem cars are, how poor our infrastructure is, and it's left me feeling hopeless and a bit betrayed, tbh. So educating myself with videos like this at least allows me to increase my understanding.
Is it common in america for middle class families to look down on public transport? Im from a middle class family in the uk and as a kid I used buses and trains all the time, as do most others, so I never looked down on them. How else are you supposed to get about with friends?
@@WormMuncher13 You get a car. But the US is also built different, public transport here sucks. There's only busses and even in your own vehicle getting across my town (Really only about halfway across town) yesterday took a full 45 minutes. If I did the same on the bus it would be over an hour. The entire road system is trash and unless the make some radical changes that won't ever happen nothing is going to change.
Outside that, because cars are so common here the only people that take busses are typically children for school or very low income people. It's hard to not look down at it when cars are faster, actually cheaper, and you don't have to sit next to a crack addict.
As an addendum, I'd like to point out that the city in which I live ripped out the old historical streetcar which had failed to make money in present day and spent months and millions to build new tracks, including under a bridge, which they then had to rip out because the street car didn't actually fit. It's now annoying to drive/ride bikes downtown because of all the tracks in the middle of the road, it's constantly squealing, and has less utility than a bus which requires exactly 0 alterations to pre-existing roads. I hate the damn thing.
@@JZStudiosonline Ok cool i guess the uk is just more set up for public transport, its very good even in smaller cities and nearby towns, in larger cities it can be faster and cheaper to get public transport. Thanks for the explanation
@@WormMuncher13 It's common in North America for EVERYONE to look down on Public Transport, not just the Middle Class. Public Transport is not well done here and not respected either. Frankly, I don't see that changing without a MASSIVE change in everything -and that might be a literal statement, not hyperbole- since Public transit essentially adds 3 hours to ANY trip where you actually have a need to be somewhere at a set time.
If I need to be at work for 9am, I need to be on the bus at 7:30am. When I get off work at 5:00pm, I won't be home until 6:30pm. If I need to take my kids to soccer at 6pm, I probably have to leave work at 3:30pm and cross my fingers that there's no problems getting to their school to pick them up, and then to soccer. If I want to go out and see friends, again, leave 90min leeway on both sides. Why? Because busses don't come - sometimes the driver cancels. Sometimes the busses literally can't make it due to breaking down. Because busses are late. Because traffic is terrible. Because busses come EARLY and you miss your transfer. Because some busses only come once an hour. Because sometimes busses are so crowded you literally can't get on - or worse, you can't get OFF. In some cases, it's literally faster to WALK to where you want to go than to take the bus due to the sheer amount of shenanigans it takes to get to some places. Seriously, it's faster for me to walk with my eldest daughter to her dance class, 5km away, than it is to take the bus because there is only 1 bus that goes anywhere NEAR where the studio is, it comes once an hour, and I have to take 2 busses to even get to the transit station where I can catch that single bus.
When I'm in my car, I can cut an hour off of each side and still make things on time. I don't have to worry about the anti-social morons on the bus. I don't have to worry about missing my stops, or my transfers. I don't have to worry that I'm going to be stuck outside, at a stop without a shelter, at 1am when it's -30C and because it's snowing... the last bus of the night gets cancelled and I have to call a taxi to get me home. (sadly a true story for me - and it happened TWICE. The second time is when I made it my life's goal to own a car.) Cars may cost me more than public transport, but my car likely saves me and my family 30 hours a week in transportation time and allows us to have actual hobbies outside the neighbourhood.
In essence, we need to completely restructure our entire cities if we're ever going to make public transit feasible on a mass scale in North America. This means businesses moving. This means grocery stores moving. This means schools moving. This means our world being shrunk into our neighbourhoods... and accepting that the "rich" neighbourhoods will get all of the good stuff to themselves because the non-rich essentially can't get there.
I look down on public transportation because even if I use it to get places I still have to take 30 mins to walk somewhere from the stop. It takes so fucking long for anything to happen in the US
A lot of people are asking for a summary: Basically, the main ideas that they critique are technosalvation and ecomodernism. They show that Kurzgesagt and other edutainments like it that claim to just be neutral, scientific and apolitical are actually biased and have underlying neoliberal assumptions that can be picked up on if examined closely. Then they finally present alternative ways of thinking about the issue and preserving hope, such as degrowth, solarpunk and post-capitalism systems. I suggest you do watch it though, it seems long, but it really flies fast, and at the end you kind of wish they even went longer into describing some of the ideas. The video is very well made, its witty and clever, but in no way are they being mean-spirited or do they attack or make fun of Kurzgesagt.
Even shorter summary: ooga booga billionaire fund they bad
@@stxrb_xy Have fun licking that boot
Thank you so much for including a critique of car-dependent urban planning. It's such a huge issue that often goes unnoticed since most people take it for granted as "normal". Sprawling suburbs, parking lot wastelands, and massive highways are choices we made, and they are choices we can change.
Knowing the algorithm of youtube, I feel like the reason we're both watching this video and both know about the importance of urban planning is because we're both watching channels like Not Just Bikes?
@@janelantestaverde2018 Nailed it
Yeah when you look at Europe, its much better there
@@janelantestaverde2018 hell yea same
Public transport comes with its own set of ethical dilemmas. If we want to swap to a society centered around public transportation, more safety measures need to be taken.
It took me three days to go over through it all, but every single second of this video was like poetry to my ears. Amazing job guys keep it going and don’t fret for the English accent, it adds character!
I love this criticism but also think that it highlights the core reason for how Kurzgesagt has grown so much. They do research and make short, entertaining videos that work as an initial education for people new to important issues and concepts. They dive much deeper into issues than other channels of similar size but still leave out many of the details that fill longer, more in depth videos from smaller channels. While it is sad that they leave so much out and there are ideological concepts that I (and this video) disagree with, I am really thankful for how much attention their videos get as it brings more attention to the issues behind them. While many people only ever learn through the introductions that are presented by Kurzgesagt and don't continue any further to think deeper, there will be more people who do take those extra steps that might have otherwise been unaware.
Kurzgesagt's most repeated phrase is almost always "We don't always claim to be right" but apparently no one can get that nowadays
They grow because people who like their content have the brains of children.
It's all propaganda, just watch their nihilism video.
"hurr durr dont feel bad for doing anything because nothing matters" *BLM riots happen*
@Lind Morn idk why you cant proof read your own horribly formatted comment
@Lind Morn wtf is that comment dude what are you even trying to say
@Lind Morn English please
dude, as a brazilian, i feel the same way about kurzgesagt. it bothers me because is a european view of things. its strage to see people from us or europe talk about the preservation of our planet and you pointed perfectly the why i feel this way, i could not describe it better. the native people and enviromentalists are literaly been killed in here for this cause, when they say ''we will survive to this'', i ask: who is we?
Eurocentrism in a nutshell
@Acceleration Quanta yes but we will not be fine. In the end is it really about the planet that we are fighting for?
@accelerationquanta5816if you’d pay good money to never see snow again then try moving someplace where it doesn’t snow
People have literally been killed for every sort of cause even in your "native lands." You have been taught a lie based on noble savage bigotry which makes you think that they were all sugar and spice and everything nice which is an outright lie, people were violent and brutal throughout all history and do you think the peaceful civilizations that have been made up would last for long if there was even one civilization in the area that was violent? Get a grip on reality, there doesnt seem to be many people here that have one, they tell themselves pretty little lies like the creator to feel better about things.
"We" in words of global-northern people like Kurzgesagt means "them", the global north, USA, Europe, *they* will have the resources to overcome a global climate crisis as bad as an apocalypse, but it will most likely be at the expense of the rest of us, the global south just doesn't have the infraestructure to cope with something like that, and the north will never give their resources into saving us
I was ready to be skeptical about this critique after seeing the title, but then I was pleasantly surprised with the depth and coherence of the entire critique and commentary, I think this is a really important video and more people should watch it!
Yes.
yes
Yes
this tbh.
the fact that skepticism is your initial response shows how well the propaganda has worked on you
Man, I was beginning to think I was a little crazy as when I share my opinions of the world people have always acted with disbelief, in accordance their premises that they don't even know they hold. I'm relieved hearing about "degrowth" as it summarizes a lot of my gut feelings that have made me feel this way.
thanks for making this video man, the effort doing something like this AND THEN TRANSLATING THE WHOLE DAMN 2H FEATURE-LENGTH THING INTO ENGLISH is MONUMENTAL!
you are a legend :)
Hard say your word to those who's intentions are to solely lecture
Crazy?
I think I agree with this. I always called my beliefs Communitarianism or the idea that communities should be self sufficient and should be responsible for the care and support for each local citizen. I always approached this from a Capitalist/Socialist lens and when he said "what is the Economy for?" I stepped back and reflected. The Economy is designed for Economists, Shareholders, and Businesses to look at data points. So I think I might need to rethink my talking points with a lens in utilitarianism.
Degrowth is communism
congratulations bro, your mind has broken free from the programming, you are not crazy.
Maybe it was true then but coal usage is no longer in decline. We are now burning more coal than ever, mostly in China.
And 34 million tons of additional lignite firing in Germany because of the greens prematurely closing the nuclear fleet.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Without the Greens who would save the planet from the problems created by Greens?
Germany is burning more than ever. You know what else we’re burning more of in the west? Wood. Btw, if you buy anything that’s made in China, that coal is being burnt on your behalf
@@gregorymalchuk272 do you mean CDU/CSU? They closed the plants, it was already decided in 2011
i could be wrong, but per person, it isn't that much in china, and some parts are still going through industrialisation
We have reached the chauvinism stage on this debate. They can no longer deny the problem, they can no longer deny the impact, but they can just appeal to the few who actually benefit to downplay the problem. The problem is real, the consequences are real, the harm is real, but it isn't for "me"
If we exploit these people a bit more, then we'll be able to help them! THIS TIME FR FR
@@t3essays yeah best thing is how they are starting to talk about "de-glabolization" to secure their monopolies. Climate fascism speed run any percent
@@MasterOfBaiter We can't stop climate-change!
Do you know how much money we can make in Water Wars?!
We must ensure safe future for the military industrial complex!
-Avarage capitalist
"Maybe climate change is real, and maybe human activity makes it difficult to reverse, but we can't give up on industrial consumerism before someone comes up with a profitable way to solve everything! You just have to have faith!"
Kurzgesagt never denied it...
i have never been so conflicted. thank you so much for you guys' time and effort to go through all the research, papers, readings, to comprehend and debunk the ideas on kurzgesagt. it is really eye-opening to see the whole spectrum of the data and opinions stated by kurzgezagt and the backstory behind it. love from Indonesia!
I've grown to dislike Kurzgezagt incredibly early on when they covered the immigration problem during the Arab spring/syrian and libyan war and when they try cover banking. No channel is perfect and a lot of science channels have their leaning on which political stance they're comfy with yet Kurz just goes on a tirade of "these people bad,these people gud" which of course just made me go bleh.
And even then... where is the climate data spanning millennia? Ice core samples paint a picture that makes our current situation look very much "business as usual", but there's nobody talking about that or what those numbers actually mean. I don't have those answers myself, but it does strike me as a bit strange that graphs we see are all cut off at roughly the same point.
@@blastermaster5039 tbf I don't know the kurzgesagt channel, but that is not a political question, it can solely be answered with economics.
Are those people good or bad for the economy of your country should be the only question.
@@herrpez No, actually the ice core samples are one of the most damning pieces of evidence we have when it comes to human-instigated climate change. Perhaps the most disturbing thing we have discovered is that many of our planet's greatest mass extinction events coincide with its historic peak atmospheric CO2 levels. Yes, we certainly have seen eras where there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than even humanity has churned out in these few short centuries, but those natural changes in CO2 content happened much more gradually and more importantly, they wiped out much of the life on our planet at that time. If anything ice core samples serve as a terrifying warning, not a reassurance that everything is going to be ok.
@@herrpez What you are espousing is a common and dangerous misunderstanding.
Climate data spanning millennia, including old ice core samples, show changes in CO2 concentrations and temperatures that are within the order of magnitude of what we have observed in the latest decades, but, you have to consider that that data show changes occurring in the span of millennia, by effects that are nowhere as fast as the ones that are occurring right now.
I'm glad to finally see some criticism of Kurzgesagt. They're videos are polished and fairly well researched, but not without issues. I was skeptical when I first came across them a few years back but didn't find much about them outside of their own website. I agree that a lot of their videos feel dated in how they discuss environmental degradation and solutions. It makes me concerned about their videos on topics that I'm less familiar with.
Many of their things are just pop science. More or less 'look at this cool thing!'. Some better then others maybe. That said a lot of their videos that deal with humans can be yikes.
Fun fact I heard they were going to make a transgender video. Still want to see if they utterly fuck it up and get caught out as fraudsters or not. Probably too spicy a topic for some neoliberals though.
Oh also the grey population crisis solution they bring as part being just nice to people, like literally wishing upon a star for change. Like that is some hopes and prayers stuff. Love they try to skip saying issues like of overwork and living of universal childcare not being offered by the government. True neoliberal bull.
"The holocaust wasn't the work of barbarians, but it was the result of applying instrumental reason."
Or as I like to say, "Justification is the magic word that transforms ordinary people into monsters.".
yes because making up conjecture and tricking people into believing unfounded theories on race with the help of ancient norse mythology is so fucking rational. this video is a load of fucking tree hugger horseshit
Whose work was the weimar republic?
@Tommy playsGames2013 mine
Edit: This is the most likes ive ever gotten
@@dosexu1 the same people who think we should work 80 weekly hours for pennies, eat bugs and soy instead of real food and live in the metaverse, spending our days as flesh automatons until we expire, all for their benefit
@@mklzer0 who are “they”
This video was a great surprise. I expected some people denying climate change even existed, and I'm left with the feeling that I still have so much to learn, and with another perspective which made me question my knowledge. Great video guys. Take your time making them, and keep up.
PS: Your accent is great, and you don't need to get rid of it. The fact that you just wrote and narrated almost 2 hours worth of script in your second language deserves a lot of praise.
Climate change is real but the elites are causing it so they can get richer from us trying to fix it, which will never happen
I "deny climate change" mostly because it annoys people who think "climate change" is a problem. Which correlate with people who think "over population" is a problem.
They want to live and be prosperous. They don't want the Third World to live and be prosperous. They want cheap energy. They don't want the Third World to have cheap energy.
And they tell themselves they aren't racists.
Germany is burning coal now that their renewables are failing to provide them energy, their nuclear plants are all dead, and Putin stopped selling them gas. France has the cheapest energy.
You two, we mean 😏
Just finding something I can add to fta (^feed the algorithm ^).
I love the fact that Gore said that today, 20 years ago, we'd all be dead to climate change. And yet here we are. And don't get me wrong, I think climate change is a problem. But a bigger problem is the fact that we are on the brink of nuclear war. And it wouldn't surprise me if 90% of people here supports the proxy war in Ukraine. At the very least climate change is something we can reverse, but you cannot undue nuclear winter.
If governments really wanted us to go green, they would offer sustainable means of public transportation, for free or very low prices. I live in a city that has horrible public transport and going anywhere after 7 PM must be done by car... Not that it won't take you anywhere, especially if you work outside your own city.
@Porky depends on the time period. Since 80s they started to close up some lines and train rotations (but these were in bad conditions). In the 90s an enormous number of routes were closed. But the situation is slowly getting better.
My city is trying their best to be affordable. If you can vote/petition for similar practices please do.
Last year they rezoned train lines so people living at the end of the line, many stops away wouldn't need to be out of pocket by a tonne of money simply because they were VERY much further out.
They are also building more train lines. City center has free busses
Parking at the train station is like $2
Parking in the city central can cost over $20 a day and over $2 an hour
It is not a perfect system, there isn't enough people to make public transport affordable because everyone lives in a city built around driving. I have to travel more than 50kms a day for work.
If the government wanted to go green they wouldn’t sign bills to keep people from living and sleeping in camper vans and living self sustainably. (Cough Priti Patel, cough)
That's not how economy works. The government can't turn everything cheap. Money is an important part of our cuvilization and we need it. That's why things are not cheap.
@Porky If you need Hope, then try 'Revolutionary Optimism' by 'Second Thought'.
As someone that adores Kurzgesagt videos I am glad there is a long review that allows me to critique it thru an unbiased(ish) lens. Thanks for this perspective!!!
It's a rare thing to find such nuanced and developed opinions on YT. Despite my original skepticism, I'm really glad I decided to give it a click. Loved the video and would definitely love to see more from you guys.
Also you accent is just fine.
Right?! I really love this video. It's about comparing and contrasting very valid opinions, instead of getting into a shitball-fight of immaturely trying to cancel and slander each other. Bless this channel.
Opinions will always differ with all of us, but I'd always rather take debates and confrontations MUCH more than awful caveman wars of guns and screaming.
It's a whole lot more common than you think, you just have to know where to look
you must not remember youtube 15 years ago
@@Skantaq I most certainly dont
@@kethmarhkfy7luf.263 thank you for proving the point.👏
Just finished your whole video, honestly this is amazing. Regarding your final comments, please don't worry about your accent. I think your tone and dry sense of humour comes across wonderfully and a lot of the visual jokes were especially funny.
Hope to see more!
"Solarpunk!" by "Our Changing Climate" is a Great Start, you know? Not gloomy but also not bilnded-by-Hope Coverage totally exists; in fact, entire Channels exist like this.
Help with the Climate via that Channel but also UpisnotJump, Hbomberguy, Some More News, Not Just Bikes, and Second Thought.
GDP is a horrible gauge of wealth for a country.
Canada has never been worse in terms of income inequality. If you don't already own a home, or work a job that brings home 200k a year while living on rice and beans, you'll NEVER own a home. The people who rent are being strangled to death to the point where several of my friends are working full time jobs to eat ONCE a day. But because home prices keep skyrocketing due to money laundering and all branches of government outright refusing to enforce the law against it, the GDP just keeps going up.
There are other measures, like GDI. Every number has a purpose and open to manipulation. Just look at inflation. They change what it contains, and then measure it in different time frames. I think the US was supposed to be in a Recession, but instead borrowed a ton of money from the future to 'boost GDP' so it was positive. But its these very same governments that have to implement the policies that are later recommended, and they won't suddenly become saints.
You missed the fact that GDP per capita is actually down
Same thing is happening in Spain. A regular worker with an average salary could never afford to buy a house. And due to big businesses buying whole streets and renting the houses/flats at whatever price they want, the average rent prize is skyrocketing, to the point people need 80% of their salary or more just to pay rent.
Gdp should be abolish tbh, ive heard too many politicians missunderstood what gdp is, and yea gdp itself wasnt supposed to be a gauge to find the wealth distribution of a country.
being a young adult/teen these days feels so bad, its feels like im fighting for a world that is already doomed
no such thing as doomed... there will always be at least 2 ants on the planet... and that's logically all that really matters in the long run.
This planet is going to be the perfect habitat for life for another billion years until our sun goes bah-bye
@@ethanwasme4307 didnt think i had to specify this but what i said kinda implies that, that "world" is my future, my loves ones, community and aspirations. Wich is what you kinda fight for in your everyday
Not the future of single cell beings or ants
And also no, theres a lot of things that are wrong with what you said wich mostly come from ignorance, wich is okay
talk about ignorance.... we're all one, consciousness is 1... ants and humans alike@@OkamiSam
@2MinuteHockey My dude I'm not an ant. Good for them If they make it but seriously it's not selfish to not want to perish horribly in a world rendered uninhabitable.
@@OkamiSam "yea i'm kinda depressed about the mass human extinction event looming in my future, waiting to swallow up my adulthood and everyone i care about"
"hey bud it'll be ok! i bet ants will survive!"
god you know it's bleak when that's the positive optimistic response lmao
I loved every second of this, this is true environmentalism. The shiny, gimmick “Elon Musk will save us” greenwashed mindset is terrible for true environmental change, actual and practical changes like smarter argriculture, getting rid of stroads, implementing superblocks, replacing cars with bikes and public transportation in city spaces, using trains for coss-continental travel (idk what you call it actually, but going a long distance without crossing an ocean) rather than planes and cars, and changing the public mindset to older ideals of “less is more”. Hats off to the creators of this beautiful video against greenwashing propaganda, we need more things like it.
Edit: I fully realize that not everywhere can be walkable I happen to live in West Virginia which is extremely unwalkable. Everyone seemed to interpret for themselves that i want to urbanize the entirety of human civilization but i don’t. My point is that cities produce the most carbon emissions so improving the way they are made is important, meanwhile the rural populations carbon output is much much less so it’s less important to improve those areas environmentally. Quit telling me I’m a communist who’s pro urbanizing the whole world, i quite like my quiet small town rural life.
It would be nice if Kurzgesagt ended up learning more and making a video about walkability. It’s really a concept that is under-appreciated in the world of climate change solutions
@@brandonm1708 It absolutely is, I’ve almost entirely decided to become an urban planner when I graduate from high school cause I think that better city design is key to fixing climate issues.
@@comradejosephstalinoftheus8698 that’s great! I just graduated high school and if I had heard about it sooner, I certainly would have considered doing that. Unfortunately the college I’m going to doesn’t have a degree for urban planning, so if I decide to switch majors I’d have to switch school as well. I’m still sorta considering it, but if I don’t, I will still try to be an advocate for better planning. Best of luck to you
@@brandonm1708 You too man!!!
@@comradejosephstalinoftheus8698 wait till your out of school, you will learn how the real world works.
Dude your English is so good, the use of idiom and colloquialisms feels like it's coming from a native speaker wtf
And the humour. I can only aspire to he able to stumble over a sentence in another language, and here you are making witty jokes constantly. Every day I realise how limiting it is to be an English speaker in a world where we're catered to by most countries.
Lots of people from non-English speaking countries end up with a bilingual proficiency in English simply due to the constant high level of exposure to English language media from a young age
The actually speaking English really well despite having a different native language is great. What I hate is the whole "You can just replace basically any word or phrase or sentence fragment in a German text or statement with its English equivalent" thing, though. It's ridiculous how some people sound. And it really isn't an overuse of Anglicisms. People claim it is, but it's not. It's really the way I describe it.
Also, if you want tips on how you can learn a foreign language fluently without leaving an English-speaking environment for even a single day, I can provide tips. There are a lot of people who've never set foot in an English-speaking country (or never for even remotely enough time to improve their English there), yet still, they're completely fluent. This can be done with other languages as well.
@@camelopardalis84 if you have tips I'm interested. I'm trying to learn Italian and Spanish (I already speak English and French fluently)
@@whatif5108 Can you, in this case, tell me if you grew up with two native languages (English & French) or if you've learned one of them some other way? I don't need a hyper-detailed answer, just a general one for why you already speak two languages. And, in case you speak one of them *not* on a (quasi-)native level, where you have issues speaking (and/or writing) it and why you think that is.
@@camelopardalis84 well thats the feeling of being more flurent in english than your classmate who used to live there lmao. Also just talking with people abroad makes a lot of experience as i found speaking (or trying to speak) to be very entertaining to them a lot of fun
Honestly I didn't expect a calm, collected video talking about a lot of the wider reaches of the world and it's issues. If anything, I learned quite a lot of stuff about how things work that I just- didn't know existed before, which puts a lot of things into a place of "hm lets consider this again, maybe there's something we're ignoring". Very informative, love the style, thank you for this!
Help with C-Change by learning about it! UpisNotJump, Hbomberguy, Some More News, and Second Thought are just the Best Ways to do so. The Best, not the Only Ones.
Its not hard to see why you didn't! That thumbnail is so intense, it makes kurzgesagt look like this evil propaganda machine.
@@8-bitnicolai5 Yeah, the thumbnail did not do the video justice at all
Too bad the comment section isn’t…
bruh, the "why" question is so underrated, we should ask it more
Why is the most useless question ever. "How" is a way more useful question.
@@olafsigursons ah yes, "how did you k*ll your wife" is a more important question than "why did you k*ll her" 😂😂😂
@@olafsigursons Both. Both is good
(unironically)
This is what real ecologist are supposed to be.
Science and philosophy must work together.
the fact that people are attacking you is disgusting beyond words.
What?
Science is a concept completely irrelevant to one’s philosophy. What the hell are you trying to say here?
@@Neo2266. personal philosophy and the act of studying philosophy for the purpose of understanding people and nature are two different things.
@@Neo2266.
I'd say it's the opposite
@@SataChannelDayo I agree
So how does that relate to science at all? I mean, science is a damn broad term, can you clarify what you meant in your initial comment?
@@Neo2266. most people consider philosophy obsolete due to the fact that philosophy most of the time is just asking questions with answers that are abstract or hard to quantify.
To truly study ecology we have to consider every single part of the problem. Question the facts that we believe are already established. That is what I meant.
Incredible video! Thanks! So nice to hear someone from Slavic country talk about these things, and mention degrowth and so many other important topics. Wish someone will translate it into Russian as well!
Yeah, we also think that it's good that leftist youtube is getting some more Eastern European voices. There's quite a lot of us, very few speak out, yet I think that our recent history gives us a unique perspective.
By the way, the captions are mostly done (well, not for the Kurzgesagt parts), so you could perhaps try auto-translating to Russian?
Thanks for pointing out that they talk about degrowth before I watched the whole video. Knowing that I shouldn't waste my time on eco-fascist shit, apparently supported by a core member of the US intelligence apparatus (BadEmpanada) has saved me many minutes.
@@mortarriding3913 Saw this in the notification and I feel the need to clarify: degrowth is never ecofash. It simply means re-focusing from the pure abstraction economic growth to human (and non-human) wellbeing, and has *nothing* to do with ecofascism. In fact, Hickel, whom we talk about here, bases his theory firmly on Jason W. Moore ecosocialism (even though he himself dances around the word), and climate justice is integral to degrowth. It's Kurzgesagt's misrepresentation of degrowth as "cutting back as a species overall" can be seen as ecofash.
@@mortarriding3913 I am really confused by this comment. I guess it's a joke?
@@t3essays why is it wrong to cut back as a species, if our species took too much from the rest of the biosphere? We are only one species, we should consume 100 or more times less resources than we currently do, otherwise decline in biodiversity is inevitable. So call it ecofasc or whatever, but I fully for gradually reducing the size of human population and consumption dramatically.
I just want to say, I love the first part of the video where they breakdown the use of the word "humanity". I think it highlights a prominent issue with the way people communicate, mainly through GENERALISATION.
Even when talking with peers/family members, people will often say that "entire race" is racist, greedy, cunning, etc. or that "entire country" is corrupt, reckless, etc. It quickly conveys a message, as conversations would be unrealistically long if we excluded every group, but it will cause a consequence of unfairly labelling individuals within a group, and I personally and humbly think, leads to a lot of unhealthy stereotypes and prejudice that people experience today.
Socially speaking, we're just a few steps away from exterminating all the white people in North America. 😅
Thank you so much for vindicating my issues with electric cars! I keep hearing "your concerns are stupid and have already been addressed" whenever I bring them up, but I literally sat down with a pen and paper and worked out back in 2016 or so that electric cars couldn't work in the UK without a *huge* move towards green energy, and people just thought I was insane. I almost let myself get hoodwinked with them more recently, but your video makes so many good points I'm holding my ground on the matter.
If every registered semi truck in the USA was replaced with a tesla semi truck and only 50% of them were charging at a time it would consume more electricity than the USA currently generates. They charge at a megawatt, there are 2.79 million semis registered in the USA, and our electricity output is estimated at 1.3 million megawatts, 60% or which is made from burning carbon.
These trucks are all going to want to charge at night, when you want to charge your car. There are a lot of cars and trucks on the road.
If electric cars and semi trucks are to be a thing, we need to build more electrical generation capacity yesterday. Else, either trucks and cars are sitting waiting to charge or we get rolling blackouts.
@@pontiacg445And that's why It would be better to not need to drive everywhere, more than half (I think )of trips in US are only few miles (which could be made either by walking or train)
that would mean.... less cars
@@koteghe7600 You are going to walk everything everywhere? Grocery stores can't have deliveries? If someone needs a new sofa, you walk to the sofa manufacturing store and then carry it home?
Are you serious? No need to answer. You environmental loons never are.
Yep. Electric cars are a nothing solution. They don't address the core issue which is car-centric design and how inefficient it is at transporting people/using space properly. In many cases, a car is literally burning through massive amounts of energy to push 4100 pounds of metal and ONE person! That is very inefficient use of energy when compared to trains/buses/streetcars/etc. If we want to actually address climate change, we have to start building walkable/bikeable cities with great public transportation infrastructure so that we don't need to use cars all the time to get around.
@@seanarnold8980 Nothing stopping you buying a bike.
What, the streets aren't rideable enough for you now? You have to tear literally everything apart and completely rebuild it? And you expect me to believe the average American is still going to do anything outside of what is strictly necessary? Can't even count on the average person taking their shopping carts back to the corral and you expect people to use anything inside a 15 minute city? lol
LOL
Step into reality, bud.
Thank you for systematically, coherently breaking down these two videos. They're being shown in classrooms in the US. This is the kind of stuff the next generation of non-climate activists will be thinking and saying. We need videos like yours.
Both the Kurzgesagt videos AND this one should be shown. The Kurzgesagt videos are good and use well-grounded sources, and this video shows how something being true doesn't necessarily mean it's the entire truth. It similarly also shows how agreeing with something doesn't necessarily mean you can't criticize that same thing. Most people in education are kids, but I think it's unnecessary to always dumb disagreements down to black and white. Most importantly of all, though, they could improve at realizing when there could be ideology hidden in something that seems objective.
This video on its own also reminds those of us in the western world that things aren't the same for everyone. Not sure how we keep forgetting. I'm even guilty of it, myself.
@@v1298 yeah, if one really watched this video, youd see that he doesn't say Kurgetzat is crap, instead he points out the implications and the things he is missing. This video is more like a footnote to Kurgetzat and other green growth videos. They both compliment each other.
First of all do you think trying to prevent climate change is a fucking joke it’s not there’s already plenty of fucking topics and movies that show how fucking bleak the future can be if we don’t try to I don’t know fucking fix it and just by being bleak and you know fucking that doesn’t help fix it and he’s actually wrong in large terms colonialism is more of the same of large term large while short term gain on large very large scales by pondering and damaging peoples stuff so what he saying is actually wrong in a way colonialism was just very very aggressive capitalism on a larger scale for short term gain which damage the environment just like how companies polluting an oil and stuff like that but being doom and gloom like to video says is not gonna help anything stuff like nuclear power and other stuff like that can you know avert climate change but he’s basically saying no it can’t and coach Cozart is greenwashing and stuff like that
@@michaelcox4242 You need to practice English more, your rant is barely coherent at the best of times.
@@jeremyjackson7429 It would recover in 20-30 million years. This was the span it took after "The Great Dying," a period in which 96% of all life died.
Of course, 30 million years is as good as forever for a species whose lifespans seem to max out at 122 years . Not to mention that by then a whole new order of creatures would replace the old (including us), as had happened after the Great Dying.
Very well put together, thank you for your work! As a translator, I'm incredibly impressed with the translation from Polish to English, you kept the same humour, cadence and syntax as if it were written in English to start off with. Thanks again and looking forward to the next video.
HOPE and Climate-Anxiety need Balance.
Both were covered so good by 'Our Changing Climate' and 'Ankur Shah', please dont miss-out.
Said Channel, Hbomberguy, UpisNotJump, Some More News, Second Thought, those are the Frontier-Fighters on RUclips; not high on Hopium but also not Gloomy!
I've not had the time to watch the entire video yet, but I'm glad to see that *SOMEONE* putting out some reasonable counter points to most of the climate change stuff you usually hear. "Let's just build more electric cars! That'll fix everything!" ... but yet... what about all the lithium? Finally, someone talking about some of this stuff. This is important stuff, and I love the out-of-the-box thinking of "well, maybe we don't need more electric cars, we need to make cars themselves not as important inside cities" and similar thoughts.
while Its good to have arguments about this and such, but imo its still better overall to teach people very generally about these kind of things, its better to push the idea to make more electric cars compared to the type of cars we use, did you know that plants are around 40-50% more effective then cars?
@@d4s0n282 Does that cover the sheer amount of diesel fuel used to dig the lithium up, though? Strip mining lithium is a giant fuel vacuum and you can't use electric powered excavators, they simply don't have those that would work.
@@Dhalin if everything was converted, it would prob be covered, but thats with only us right now, I would not be surprised if there is massive strides in the future that makes the switch better and more viable
@@d4s0n282 The problem is, though, we are wasting massive amounts of fuel and doing massive amounts of damage to South America's environment with this stuff, all on the "promises" that "it will get better someday".
We already have technology that makes ICEs more and more efficient today. Yeah, sure they still burn fossil fuels, but they do so MUCH more efficiently than ever before, and they do not have the plethora of problems that EVs have, and who knows, maybe in time they can figure out a way to make them run off of something renewable (they're already putting Ethanol in Gasoline, though I am not sure I agree with this -- it's disrupting the farming industry and food supply in some places, that corn has to come from somewhere).
The simple fact of the matter is, modern ICE cars are simply greener than EVs, by the fact of how much fuel it takes to excavate and process the rare earth materials that goes into an ICE, and also I've read that the recycling process for those huge batteries is difficult and expensive, AND they don't even really last all that long (compared to an ICE if taken care of properly).
That's not saying anything about generating all of this electricity or building the infrastructure necessary to support the sheer numbers of these cars they expect, or somehow finding ways of making them affordable that more people can buy one. Last I looked, an EV is like $40k. If I could afford that, I would have renovated my house by now. I can't afford a $40k car, nor will I anyday in the foreseeable future.
@@d4s0n282 And yet that thinking right there is one of the problems with the Kurzgesagt video that this video pointed out. You can't just look at the problem of climate change like a new, shiny piece of technology that we'll make sometime in the future will fix everything. It's like the mentality that they described. The mentality that, "Oh, well, I was too lazy to start working out at the gym today. But I know for sure that I'll start tomorrow!"
Instead of going top-down, with fancy equipment and tech created in a billionaire's lab, needing resources that just aren't accessible anymore,and with those resources probably being extracted from the global south, we could go ground up. Start protests, garden, donate, etc. Small things at first.
This was a truly fantastic video, and I'm glad I got to see it, even if a year late. It's great to see nuanced and in-depth discussions on all these interconnected topics around climate change. Kurzgezagt aside, I feel like the global north has always been good at getting carried away with singular narratives that end up dominating the conversation. There is so little interest in systems and connectivity, and I get worried that we're never going to make it out of the trees to see the whole forest before it's too late.
Anyway, the two of you have given me a lot to think about. Thank you so much for your hard work on translating this for a new audience (and for the original video!), and I love your Polish accent. Never forget that you are also a representative of your country, and even if your government sucks, there are people like you fighting to do something about it. Anyway, cheers from the USA.
Don't be discouraged by the brainwashed liberals who attack you on leddit, it is absolutely critical that we disseminate as much information as possible, as soon as possible. No matter how painful that information is. We *must* prepare the people for the material reality of climate change, as well as for the ensuing material and class struggles.
Glad I found this channel through BadEmpanada, I don't consistently agree with him and his sources, but he led me here to this well-constructed video.
Thanks! I've been following this discussion, but I guess it's to be expected - what we're saying here might be obvious for the climate crowd, but not really for leftists, especially those who consume Kurzgesagt only occasionally. Actually, we've even watched their previous video halfway through (so, before the "vote at the ballot and vote with your wallet" and the ad) and gave it a pass not too long ago😅
I don't agree with BE on everything either, but one thing's for sure and that's that he makes some extremely well documented and thoroughly researched videos, which I have a lot of respect for.
I'd still argue that there needs to be a place for revolutionary optimism, but there's a difference between "everything will be fine, so I don't need to worry about it" and "things are looking bad, but if we work together as an organized class united by our material conditions and willing to make the sacrifices neccecary to combat climate change abd capitalism, a brighter future awaits." It's definitely a hard balance to strike though
"I don't consistently agree with him and his sources" [read: "I don't like the fact that Bad Empanada said very mean things about daddy Stalin in his video critiquing the 'Holodomor Genocide Question' Wikipedia article"].
@@Srijit1946 I just think on occasion he uses misleading or false sources. I think he occasionally looks for information to confirm his pre-conceived beliefs on whatever subject he's researching, instead of letting the information build the conclusion. That's why I said I don't agree with him on everything. I can look into his direct sources on individual videos and determine what information is accurate, what information has a political motivation attached to it, and what is patently false. I can disagree with his conclusions on sources and for occasionally trying to get out ahead of valid criticism of his sources in his videos. He often makes conclusions on the validity and lack of bias on information he uses just by saying things such as "the U.S. State Department would never go through such an effort to construct this low view count video in another language just for propaganda" (when the NED quite literally operates all over the world with local population groups). However, I still enjoy his research, and many of his points are valid and correct, and many of his sources are trustworthy (but not all of them).
That's the nice thing about thinking for yourself, you can take a nuanced approach to sources of information. Not everything is black and white, and no one is 100% correct or 100% unbiased. You can pull from multiple sources of information, that's quite literally what doing your own research is.
I guess you are incapable of understanding that, seeing the infantile way you critique. You are probably the kind of person that blindly supports any creator no matter what, that lets others think for them. The same kind of person that attacks badempanada and this new channel for criticizing kurzgesagt for their greenwashing propaganda.
It is cute, but maybe you should run back along to the John Oliver channel or kurzgesagt, they might have a new cartoon on EVs for you to watch!
@@JeBubbieSpubbies I have my own disagreements with BE, there's not a single youtuber who I blindly support or agree with lmao, neither do I think that there can be such as thing as "unbiased political source of information". "I think he occasionally looks for information to confirm his pre-conceived beliefs on whatever subject he's researching, instead of letting the information build the conclusion." This is you when it comes to Stalin, Bad Empanada was very pro-Stalin a year or two ago so this doesn't really apply to him on this specific issue. It was just very easy to tell exactly what you disagree with Bad Empanada on (and probably his videos on Xinjiang and Hong Kong?), which I find very funny. My reply was not a critique at all, it was just the first thought which came to my mind when I was reading your comment and I made a low-effort reply, which you misinterpreted as me implying you should blindly believe everything which BE says instead. It's funny, now maybe you should go back to reading more Grover Furr.
You’re actually not harsh enough on him about coal. Sure the SHARE of coal usage in proportion to total energy is dropping, but the actual amount of coal being burned every year is near all time record highs still. That’s the only statistic that actually matters. The total amount being burned.
I've watched only part of this so far, but well done! Looking forward to more of your work in the future.
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Thanks! Our next video will be on the Anthropocene, where the bits on Badgerocene and planetary boundaries come from.
@@t3essays I’ve just started The Anthropocene Unconscious by Mark Bould and so far it’s an interesting read, so I look forward to your video!
@@t3essays ale jak to? On jest Bolszewikiem. Tacy jak oni są dla nas zagrożeniem. Czemu nie macie problemu z jego obecnością tutaj. No chyba że sami jesteście czerwoni.
Tankie
The part of "we're all in this together" mindset at 43:05 is one of the most naive things ever said by Kurtzgesagt. Every country is refusing to do the heavy lifting, and is waiting for others to do it for them. People that vote for political parties that want to change to a more environmentally friendly world are actively mocked, making this whole endeavour useless
This is really good stuff, like honestly some of the best critical thinking I've seen on RUclips. Citing sources while it's a good thing to do can still be misleading and not tell you the actual truth of what's really going on, sources themselves may be flawed or there is more to a problem that is out side of the scope of the source. Again really good stuff man, you really made my brain tingle and think hard.
It's that kind of thinking that we need more of these days. To say Kurzgesagt is at fault for using flawed sources is a slippery slope; every source is gonna have a flaw, because nothing is perfect. The only way to do this is to present your own sources to the contrary and have a logical, level-headed debate.
meh its a pretty bad video, it only does a good job at covertly brainwashing the less educated among us with their own ideology. Full of lies, logical fallacies, misrepresentations and scientific mistakes. The primary goal of the video seems to be pushing their own agenda of "capitalism bad" and "living like savage uncontacted tribes good", while all that is counterproductive to solving the climate crisis. In fact the savage tribes that run around half naked are the worst for the climate and should all be locked up and forced to contribute, if they are not intelligent enough they should be put in factories.
Only thing that can save the climate is technology, no matter leftist like it or not. The reason they cant handle this fact is because they are hostile to science and technology and love fake "natural solutions" like homeopathy and in this case living like uncivilized swines (without electricity and so on), guess what, thats not sustainable either with billions of people.
@@WildCharger The whole idea of "fault" is at fault here, IMO. We've gotten it into our heads that if someone uses a questionable source, or fails to consider alternative interpretations of legitimate data, or accepts mainstream thoughts, that they must be somehow personally at fault for this. But that's not how people work. We cling to the first things we hear, things which confirm our preconcieved notions or absolve ourselves of responsibility. We contrive grand stories about the world from little more than nothing, then fit everything into those frameworks as if reality were obligated to make sense to us. And the thing is? The people, the systems, driving us to extinction know this and use it to their advantage.
The blind hope that we can still get out of climate catastrophe through application of science doesn't come from a place of malice. It's woven into everything we are told to consume, by the people who profit from that consumption, and people falling for that subtle lie is a matter of bare humanity. It's not Kurzgesagt's fault that they believe this. They were crafted to believe it. Manipulated, as we all are, into a tool of far greater and more malign hands. To say they are at fault for that is to say one can be at fault for thinking and acting the way humans think and act.
Anyone who ever had to write a scientific piece for anything ranging from a graduate-level paper to a post-doc knows just how common it is to torture your sources until they say what you want them to, and that you should NEVER take citations at face value and instead carefully read everything being cited and even the things the sources themselves have as citations. Hell, I'd probably wager most people who e gage in academics have already done that themselves at least once, of not regularly, for motives that can be as disingenuous as an actual agenda to simply panicking when a deadline starts to get to close for comfort, I know I have, and so has every peer I've talked to.
@@Frommerman one thing that stuck with me from my college years is something my research instructor liked to say: science is infallible, but science doesn't exist, only scientists do and those fail all the time.
german here, i love seeing more non us american or british leftist on english youtube, the different perspectives that come from different experiences are really cool. also, dont worry about your accent, it has cool vibes and makes people like me feel less ashamed of our own. we can just steal english and use it despite our accents sounding weird to some, lets normalise them instead of cowering in front of the oxford dictionary!
I absolutely love it when you do those dives into theory and start connecting the dots between different bodies of work.
Thanks! That was actually the first time I wrote the script this way, previously we focused either on debunking or single issues.
I think what it boils down to, what pretty much everybody I've talked to doesn't seem to (want to) realize, is that CO2 emissions and the climate catastrophe is just another SYMPTOM of how we conduct ourselves on this planet. "Solving climate change" in itself won't solve anything if we don't stop (and reverse) growth. As a rule of thumb I keep saying that as long as we track our economies in percentages, we're on the wrong path.
One thing that's important to remember when discussing how old Kurzgesagt's sources is that these videos take a very long time to make. While they could get the newest data up to a certain point, after the script is completed and they start actually making the video, it would be too late to change the data. So having data from 2019 when newer and more accurate sources are available is definitely not good, it isn't always possible to update the sources used in a video late into development.
I doubt he cares given the amount of money he gets from the bill gates foundation and other billionaires he probably more than happy to promote their talking points or sees no conflicts of interest.
Except they cook few videos per month quite often... And if they released video when new data was available, but they ignored it because they already had a script and progress on the video, that's on them...
Yeah, a vast majority of their data comes from one source, which is funded by the Gates' foundation (which also funds Kurzgesagt). The actual art, sure it takes a long time. The data is mostly doctored in favor of billionaires, however.
That's why actual scentists tend to just write thesis' and papers straight away rather than waiting for their highly unique graphic design illustrator to finish his commissioned art work 2 years down the line.
@@stupxd more recently yes, but most of their videos are at least a few weeks apart
I really enjoy this video. It’s civil, has well researched critiques, and doesn’t tell you to completely dismiss the channel as a whole. But there is one thing I think needs to be considered, and that’s that Kurzgesagt is not a channel designed to go in depth into the science and politics of these issues, and aims to give a more surface level analysis that the average person in western society can digest and understand. While criticism of this model is completely fair, I personally believe if we are to make significant changes to society, surface level videos like those on Kurzgesagt are very important. People like a combination of familiarity and novelty, and too much of either can alienate people and make the point harder to get across. Videos like this, while great for people with an open mind to these issues, are difficult for the average person to digest.
TLDR: This is a great and valid criticism, but I believe their broad surface level analysis is more suited to making significant change than a video like this is.
agree
except that the seeming harmless 'surface level' introduction is not basic or innocent at all. You might defend those videos by saying they're what all we need to know as 'ordinary folks'(who are assumed to have nothing to do with politics or science), but that's where you fall into the trap. Despite their apparently objective outlook, Kurzgesagt videos are not just simplified true stories with harmless flaws. They are simplifications of something else, something much more dangerous. The kind of message communicated is one that tells you economic growth is compatible with climate conservation, that capitalism is not the root cause of all the mess and suffering, that we can save our planet while maintaining the basic functioning of the status quo. Unfortunately, they are wrong and self-deceiving. Green economy is bullshit. One thing this video makes clear is that surface level stuff carry significant amount of ideological assumptions that deliver subtle right-wing libertarian ideas without you even noticing being transformed into their mindsets. This is not just an 'interesting and novel' piece of analysis or an overly detailed research video, its task is to debunk and to reveal what seems to be politically neural. It's a battle.
@@helenliang656seeing everything as a battle must be pretty exhausting
@@Ninjaguiden89Internet ppl and their politically driven minds
@@ArariaKAgelessTraveller it is a battle if there is active misinformation being communicated. politics is not something that you can just ignore because it impacts everyone's whole lives. even in something harmless like kurzgesagt there is politics. If you want things to improve you should start caring.
Didn't think I would watch this in it's entirety, and I was quite sceptical at first but - having a fair share of propaganda experience in Hungary - I have recently started watching 'opposite' propaganda a lot more, to compare my points, with varying degress of success (now I watch almost as much prageru-esque sources as I watch platforms that I am more inclined with)... so I gave it a try.
I adored Kurzgesagt even years ago, and what they said rang true to my ears.
But after watching this two hour video, I think the optics have changed for me, and gave me a reality check. I still support kurzgesagt, but the points brought up in this video are very valid, and thought out - the english is perfect, and the memes are on spot. Very well done man.
I'll use my new perspective to seek out more information on the trends and cultural fine details mentioned by you. Also thanks for giving me a new hope for the future, I didn't even know about solarpunk up until now.
You guys are amazing, very well done.
same hapenned for me
simply, after seeing all of this video in it's entirety, it is not This Polish channel versus This German Channel.
Rather, it is a good thought experimental concept of applying Solarpunk into Kurzgesat proposals to hopefully see if a middle ground can exist using the strengths of both philosophies and avoiding their weaknesses.
In the end, the systems and culture of the people will often be the biggest variable on the viability of both movements (Green Energy Futurism Plus SolarPunk)
None of the sources are peer reviewed studies - I am not a fan of electric vehicles and strongly believe that we need to rethink our transportation system, but the lithium thing is simply misrepresented. The majority of Lithium is sourced from Australia and there have been many studies published comparing electric vehicles to combustion engines showing that they are much better.
What a great video! It's rare a video changes my thinking, and while I already agree with most of your points, I have learned a lot with the philosophical perspective. Thank you from the Netherlands!
Thanks, it's always great to read such comments!
@@t3essays In that case, I wish you receive many more.
I appreciate that you gave us Indigenous folks some recognition. Too often this topic is dominated by white liberals who talk down to Natives and to those in the global south―like Kurzgesagt. Amazing video, looking forward to seeing more.
Wow, thanks! This topic is actually very hard for us, since we come from an ethnically homogenous and non-colonialist state, so we feel like we're walking on eggshells there.
Indigenous is kinda a broad term to use for American tribes that still live off the land. Most people around the world are indigenous. If hyper literal, we are all indigenous to Africa. There should be a better term for the people you are trying to refer to
@@willjapheth23789 It's the sociologically accurate term when describing people in settler-colonial relations. Most people don't care about this pedantry lol.
@@surgeland9084 even in a settler vs native context it doesn't tell us that they are more inclined to be a low environmental impact type culture.
@@willjapheth23789 What are you even talking about? No matter how many ways I spin that, I can't find a single meaning of your sentence that makes sense and isn't horrendously inaccurate. Please elaborate.
As a Slovak, I really appreciate chanel of this kind run by Polish creators. All the power to you!
As an English speaker, if this is a good representation of how poles and Slovaks present their arguments, I'm unsurprised that we haven't heard that much from y'all.
At this point I'm starting to think the only likable Slavs are croatians.
@@SeanWinters Calling yourself an English speaker is a bit of a long shot. You put together such a clumsily worded comment that it's unsurprising the civilized world sees Americans as dumb baboons.
I’m Slovak too
People say "well lithium destroys an ecosystem" while still relying on internal combustion engines that run on... oil. If you don't live in a city or suburban area, you pretty much have to drive a car. And honestly, what would you say would be less damaging for the environment: Using an electric car using lithium batteries and possibly better battery technologies in the future or buy a vehicle that actively not only pollutes the eco-system but extracting it's fuel damages multiple ecosystems worldwide, both marine and terrestrial. People act like there is a knockout argument against BEVs while completely ignoring the ecological burdens conventional motor vehicles cause.
You are entirely missing the point
Thank you for doing this; I feel like Kurzgesagt-esque informative videos with a lot of audio and visual sugar are often under-critiqued for how much they tend to be over-appreciated.
I think that it's fair and fine that people in general trust creators enough to just consume information without having to think deeply and to research everything, provided that there are actors like you who make sure that content creators are being checked.
Thanks again, and peace.
They need to be kept in check
Did you look were and how they get there information? Look in there description in every video cuz all it's there but I agree in a the idea that the supra simplifications are a bit...extra
I like them and won't stop watching them, but they have said themselves that you should not take their information for granted but people just seem to have deleted that video out of their memory. I like the cause of kurzgezagt but i don't hesitate to look things that i find questionable up if the video is about something important.
@@jucom756 Well done; however, you aren't representative of most people, nor would people have necessarily watched "that video", whichever it is, to be able to delete it out of memory. (It seems to be a separate video, after all.)
Kurzgesagt aside, a whole new genre of artificially-sweetened educational media (videos, particularly) is inevitably going to replace older, more "traditional" sources. Of course they will, because they need to compete with all the bright, flashy junk that would otherwise occupy the attention of the succeeding generations of people (children AND adults). What is likely to happen is that creators win out not exclusively by the intellectual quality of their work, but by their aesthetic and visual supremacy.
While you in particular may be conscientious about what information you consume, I suspect that you cannot say the same for all our future generations.
@@artsartsart yeah that's true, just look at pragerU, they don't even attempt to be well sourced but people believe them because high production quality...
Really enjoyed this… as much as I could given the subject matter. Subscribed and looking forward to the English translations of your other videos.
There is no Agenda though.
But eitherway-and-anyway: Just go watch Hbomberguy and UpisnotJump INSTEAD.
The bit on colonialism at 1:00:00 has to be one of the best short analysis on how it's expansion was justified, a basic introduction to how we got shit like 'noble savage's, racial hierarchy, etc., and why the conquest and homogenization of nature outside of Europe by Western Europeans and has and continues to be an utter catastrophy on said ecosystems. Hats off too you sir, excited to see what else you release
Well, our second planned release is the full video from which we took some of these clips (the capitalocene)
@@t3essays Ooh excited to check it out when it arrives!
of course we speak down to you.
we have to. We're literally on the top hemisphere of the planet ;p
That’s nonsense
That explanation was wonderful
The irrationality of rationality concept reminds me a lot of measurability bias: in the public transit example, we can easily measure profits from ticket sales, but we can't really quantify how valuable it is to easily get from one place to another place, nor the psychological and long-term health effects of noise and air pollution.
The book Seeing Like A State also talks a lot about concepts along these lines, especially Taylorism (basically optimized management techniques that try to treat people as machines for optimal productivity). This seductive idea that there is an objective, optimal, scientific solution to all of society's problems seems to make so much sense from the thousand foot view. And that a central authority should be responsible for imposing that solution on its people seems perfectly obvious.
After all, you can't trust the masses to do what's best for them, because they're not playing 4D chess like you and all they can see is what's in front of them -- you know, on the ground where they have to live every day.
Thank you so much for making this video. When you introduced the concept of Solarpunk and summarised its manifesto, I realised that all thoughts i had on how our future should actually look like were expressed by this one single concept i had never hear of - Solarpunk. I work as a scientist and I cannot tell you how much the way of thinking in research (especially engineering research where I am working currently) is governed by oversimplified models and an agenda entirely focused on fullfilling the needs of our current economy. While most people are still incredibly open minded, there is a external bias that seems to push research in specific directions more than others which sometimes leads to interesting solutions being completely omitted.
Solarpunk is cyberpunk covered in plants to make it look better to a certain group of people. You still have all the same issues, population, resource constraints. It is just one big story with assertions that make it appealing to some people but it is just a story because to have that much tech, even if it is covered by plants and looks "natural", you still have the same constraints. You are being sold a lie and are eating it up because you want it to be true and aren't thinking about the environmental limiting factors because you have been tricked.
It's not just a bias, is how the field subsists, because the things that are profitable are the ones that gets funded and the things that could be profitable are the ones researched.
It's not "current" economy, it's economy.
The economy is just people freely sharing resources and labour.
Growth is just an increase in productivity and wealth.
Economic growth is the single greatest motor for well being we have.
@@MrCmon113 that's definitely not what economy is, and it's not even a gross simplification.
Economic models varied wildly across millenia and cultures, and only in recent years have we reached a unified central global model
@@Baddaby No, he'e right, as long as he isn't using bad definitions of "productivity" & "wealth". Which, yes, does seem likely, since that is the prevalent paradigm.
Came here from Bad Empanada. The information alone was fantastic, but the sudden arrival of Scott's Steiner mythical promo was where I knew I had a new place to subscribe. At long last.
this video is unbelievably based and should be shown to anyone who enjoys watching scientific video essays because not everyone goes to the lengths that you have to unpick the cherries and dive deeper into the root issues. a really good reminder to keep questioning the information being fed to us (especially by these types of channels) and to think about the wider impact of our actions. btw i actually really like kurzgesagt, but i think i enjoyed this deconstruction a hell of a lot more
Sounds like you are not questioning the information being fed to you. The problem with kurzgesagt video is it is was not pro technology enough. This deconstruction doesn't actually understand what rationalism or civilization really are. Although nether does the rest of humanity because most countries are culturally incapable of comprehending rationalism let alone implement it. Insted we get a idiotic shell of what those concepts are.
i agree this video is extremely based without a doubt
it's nice to see deeper dives into subjects like this, and nuanced perspectives from different channels
@@alwynwatson6119also i had an aneurysm trying to read this
@@lostconstruct1008 yeah i don't know what the fuck this guy was trying to say
@@alwynwatson6119 nooo our dehumanising, "rational" civilisation isn't wrong, it's all the poor countries that are too stupid to understand our enlightened Western way of life
I learned about a lot of concepts that I hadn't heard of before, like Degrowth and Solarpunk. Finding alternative solutions for our mainly profit driven world is pretty difficult. Thanks for translating this video.
Just wanna comment on the actual presentation style. I am very pleased to see that one can absolutely pack a video about complex philosophical and ideological ideas with a bit of cynical humor and popcultural references without it seeming any less serious. Very well done and very important insights.
Thank you for making this video to offer an alternative viewpoint of Kurzgesagt. I've always held them in high regard, so I was skeptical coming in.
I'm in the process of reading both "Thinking in Systems" and "Limits to Growth" by Donella Meadows, and something didn't sit right when watching those Kurzgesagt videos -- thanks for putting it into words.
I want everyone to have seen this video.
Critiquing new optimism and eco modernism.
Highlighting the importance of (urban)planning and political action for the climate.
Advocating solarpunk and degrowth.
This video has so many good things!
Degrowth. I think it will be automatic; scientists say the population will peak at 9 billion. After all, you see inflation grows more than wage growth. Who can feed and educate a child like that?
this video has been lurking in my suggestions for weeks now and i've always postponed watching it because it is quite long. I finally commited to watching it and oh boy was it worth it! What a nice complete and well presented analysis. I used to be a huge kurzgesagt fan until I became more aware of the whole social aspect of climate change and environmental problems in general, then these videos started feeling off, like a big part of the picture was missing but I could't tell why... Until now. Thank you and keep up the good work!
can you explain to me? I dont have the time to watch the whole video
@@guilhermesviech4610 I suggest you do, it seems long but once you start you will be hooked. Basically, the main ideas that they critique are technosalvation and ecomodernism. They show that Kurzgesagt and other edutainments like it that claim to just be neutral, scientific and apolitical are actually biased and have underlying neoliberal assumptions that can be picked up on if examined closely. Then they finally present alternative ways of thinking about the issue and preserving hope, such as degrowth, solarpunk and post-capitalism systems. The video is very well made, its witty and clever, but in no way are they being meanspirited or do they overly attack or make fun of Kurzgesagt.
jeez, as someone who watches Kurzgesagt regularly this was very eye opening for me. I really appreciate this content and really can't believe it's free. Thank you guys, this is exactly what the world needs. My only fear is that the world isn't ready for it, and making the world ready for it is my biggest question / concern.
Yeah, I feel like I've kinda outgrown Kurzgesagt, at least when it comes to topics like this. I no longer feel the need to use science as an escape from politics; the problems of society aren't something we can fix with a few ballots and technological advances. There is only so much room for improvement when you only think in capitalist terms.
@@dragonslair951167 Hm yeah though I feel like Kurzgesagt's videos are still important to watch despite this, just with keeping in mind of their agenda. Technological advances can only take us so far, and it has come to a point where we need deep rooted paradigm shifts within our society (this is what I've been taught in uni) to make change that will drastically decrease our impacts on the climate crisis. I do feel like ballots are vital (as well as activism and social/climate justice) in this process as democracy (as well as lobbying) is how change is made. I'm going to begin attending council meetings and such, hopefully I can both learn from and educate potential local election candidates who are unaware of how change needs to happen. It all starts bottom up as said here, begin with your local elections my guy, and spread the word :) I would suggest watching climate town too if you're interested in more.
@@dragonslair951167 "I no longer feel the need to use science as an escape from politics; the problems of society aren't something we can fix with a few ballots and technological advances." nowhere did i feel the need for this before and after watching any kurtz videos. politics is ingrained in any major advancement, tech or otherwise, this applies even commercially. chances are. most of the time, major changes in politics will eventually result in changes in tech and vice versa. theres so many examples of that in history its mind boggling. i understand what this video is saying, and agree that muddying sources and hiding some info isnt a good look for kurtz, but frankly i find it meaningless in the grand scheme of things as the subjects in this video were discussed countless times since the discovery of fossil fuels with no real result. the only things that actually started the process of reducing fossil fuel consumption was tech advancement in other areas like solar or nuclear and many other areas. tech and scientific advancement was often the starting point of getting a political advancement towards green energy to actually progress, positive or otherwise(the start of the gunpowder era).
all this "well what about the south?" or "its more about environmental results than just human greed" rhetoric is meaningless as it never did create actual change or advance in any area, only after scientific advancements does the question even apply. in short, scientific advancement comes first, the rest is nothing but philosophical talking points and really wont do jackshite, as has been shown many times in reality, and current global predicament that we created for ourselves. i do believe well dig ourselves out of it though, and agree that kurtz simplifies things about this subject way too much.
@@jamesballantine23 I don't think this man understands the fact that it was a video over climate. Like their video isn't going to go into the historical process of why a country is poor due to colonialism which is cause for why poor countries don't pollute and all of that. I don't even understand how hes characterizing some of the video in a way that feels borderline dishonest.
Some of Kurzgesagt's climate video is necessarily generalized to get a point across and those generalizations are correct. It seems like a very strange video to break down considering the fact that it's suppose to be a generalization.
This guy legitimately said that poor countries are poor because of colonialism.
If that's not enough to make you distrust him, then perhaps you need to learn about trustworthy sourcing.
It’s always a highlight of my day when I find something good from Poland. 🇵🇱
Aw what a bummer! /s
The positivity about climate action is so toxic at times. Humans keep consuming more but think a little ocean clean-up & green consumerism is enough.
Doomerism is such an issue too, people act more hedonistic since there’s nothing to fix.
IPCC reports definitely look like we’re on track to doom though 👀💦 I certainly hope now that the Australian election has chosen more independents if will actually mean climate legislation and action 😂 but I highly doubt its viability
i usually don't think it's on purpose or they're "bought and sold by billionares" or smthg. I just assumed it was a combination of having to operate within capitalist structures (like youtube itself), trying to get your message out (if you just made a video about how truly F'ed we all are, im not sure a lot of ppl would watch it) and probably just the difficulty of getting your mindset out of the liberal capitalism thinking.
Doomers don't have children.
The most effective action is not having children. Nothing you do for the climate will matter if you procreate.
Doomerism should be "we are doomend, so we should do whatever it takes as soon as possible to try and save the world" but actually it's like "the world is going to end? So there's no point in caring, let's smoke more weed and forget about it" :/ We need to find the balance where we see the comming doom but still keep the hope to act
@@tiagghho Doomers take the action that is most effective. They don't have kids.
Doomerism is founded on disbelief of impending doom. Imagine you know you're going to die from cancer. Do you live your last lives hedonistically, or do you attempt to make peace with all that you've been through? Maybe some middle ground between the two. Human suffering is thousands of years old and has been a constant throughout history. We all have to make peace with this fact of suffering so that we can take the proper actions in response to stressful situations.
On one end, yes YOLO, on the other end, if you're going to live a long life you might as well build wealth or do something creative for a living. I remember kids who died in high school, should they have spent their life on a permanent vacation? If they had they might never have been in the situation that got them killed, nullifying the very premise.
And this is why we need a moderate life. A little bit of work, a little bit of friends and family, a little bit of hedonism or fun, etc. We have existential dread because we are working ourselves out of existence yet if we don't work we lose our existence. We're dead people walking and we don't know what decisions will have been worth the time that we may or may not have on this earth.
I think in our culture now, being a Marxist or a union member or leader is so tabboo that some will find their hedonistic liberation within Marxism. I remember when I went full Marx when something clicked in me. I felt like those kids in the 90s war on drugs commercials, doing bad things and getting up to no good. I was so shamed from Marxism due to my upbringing (American) that I had to YOLO myself the guilty pleasures of Marx. My acting hedonistically looked like breaking away from the status quo, which opened my mind to political alternatives I'd never researched before. It's just an anecdote, but there are a lot of conservatives and liberals for whom hedonism is expressed very mildly, despite being a selfish ideal.
I don't remember what I was getting at. It's almost 4 am and I probably won't remember this tomorrow.
It's so cool that you guys have included all of your sources in the description. A lot of videos don't seem to do that. Thank you for offering an untainted and easy to follow perspective on this incredibly large issue. You have just made me discard several things that I had believed before watching this. Know that your videos do an impact.
Also, please keep your accent. I love it!
it took me literal months to finish watching this video because i never seemed to have enough time to sit through it all - but i'm glad i did! thanks for the refreshing, nuanced approach, for taking the time to explain everything and the necessary criticism of an otherwise very popular a beloved channel. extremely well done for a side project of a side project! ;D
Nice!
Now you can start double checking every information given, that way you can be sure that everything is true.
Voting with your wallet: It's like voting with your vote, but for rich people!
Its not,for exsample you can vote agaist nestle by warning others of their crimes agaist humanity
@@zhanucong4614 You're smarter than that. You know that 20,000 working class people boycotting Nestle with a burning passion represents much less influence than one rich person supporting it with some pocket change as an afterthought one afternoon, and thus the rich people benefit from a "vote with dollar hahaha" style system being preffered over a "vote with your vote" style system. You don't need me to explain that to you.
@@devinnie7572 its always the free to play cope: "i can beat the money spending player with my friends if we band together and play by the rules"
no bro, you stop playing their game, only way to win
I've learned not to trust kurzgesagt anymore. From the meat video to the antibiotics to this video, I realize that they aren't as purely factual as I previously thought. Thank you dude (and the others that opened my eyes).
It's really the problem inherent in anything that's "just the facts", "trust the science", etc. It's easy to conflate data about the world, which is extremely narrow and subject to all kinds of distortions, concessions, approximations (not to mention deception and cherry-picking, both intentional and accidental), with reality, but only by turning a blind eye to these shortcomings. Facts and science are good, they're better than fantasy and superstition for making decisions, but they're always subject to human interpretation, and our ability to be emotionally influenced.
Ultimately humans make decisions emotionally, even when they believe they're using cold rationality. (Damage to the limbic system (a hub for emotional processing) renders a person unable to make even simple decisions like what to have for lunch (let alone complex problems), even if they can understand and explain logically all the factors a person would typically consider to make those decisions. The effect of believing one is using just the facts and basing their beliefs on "pure science" (whatever that is) is that one becomes blind to how their emotions and belief systems are affecting their thinking, how their selection of data is biased to supporting what their emotions tell them is "right", and how the motivations of countless other agencies have coloured the data they're seeing or filtered what data they have access to in the first place. Confirmation bias is a very well-known effect in science but it's such a subtle trap that its effects are still rampant even within the field, let alone on the boundary between science and politics where this kind of cherry-picking is often not a bug, it's a feature.
That's why videos like these are great. It can be true both that Kurzgesagt are doing their best to follow science and dispel some myths propagated (20-30 years ago) by fossil fuel companies, and relay what they have found with the best of intentions; and that because of influences outside of the point of view that they focus on what they produce ends up being propaganda. I'm glad they made such a long video to really get into it.
6:50 : Ok then how about you keep the railways in place and you add factories nearby to build manufactured goods so that you can move them to the coastal cities (largest cities) and export them overseas instead of leaving the existing infrastructure to rot. PORTS ARE NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.
Videos such like this has made me wonder, with some anxiety, in how this’ll translate to my country of Peru.
I already know the increase in temperature due to climate change will wreck us, but wreck us how exactly.
The seasons have changed as well, when it’s supposed to be raining, it doesn’t for weeks; when it’s supposed to be dry, it lasts longer than before. Water’s going to be a problem in the future, with the glaciers melting down for those that live on the Andean highlands.
Also, the centralization of Lima has been causing problems in, not just the balance in power, but in being the place where the opportunities are, yet the infrastructure elsewhere, for better accessibility, transportation, and access to higher speeds of internet for remote working, lacks.
This video is literally amazing haven’t even fished it, but the nuanced approach is greatly appreciated, it looks at climate change under multiple critical lenses, and I loved the economic, cultural, historical and philosophical approaches, and the humor is spot on
This is, by far, the most concise yet comprehensive take on how capitalism, global socio-politics, and the environment are related. I love it! It's everything I've ever wanted to say in one tidy video! Thank you!!
What you think is capitalism is just private property and personal autonomy. Capitalism is just a system where that largely worked for a few hundred years.
@@kayakMike1000 I want to disagree but you're right! Private property and personal autonomy are just mutually injurious. I love personal autonomy but everyone is drastically limited by the rights of those who own the most property (and who can withstand the most damage to the shared natural environment).
Capitalism and democracy are enemies! Internalize the externalities! Water is a right!
@@kayakMike1000 in conclusion, I want a system that will allow us to enjoy the planet for a few hundred years more. I don't care how far capitalism has gotten us. I care how far it can take us. Humanity has replaced much older systems for far more petty reasons. I don't believe we have reached the end of history. Rather, I believe that, if we honestly can't improve anymore, then there's no point in living. One day you'll wake up and most of the fresh air will be the property of a single person who loves money more than life itself.
@@kayakMike1000 your definitions can be applied to every previous economic system like feudalism and slave empires...
Lol
The Soviet union and china are and we're times worse
Recently RUclipsrs I watched have been denying climate change...
What happened to winning the argument?
Why are people suddenly denying something so obvious?!?
You'd have to name them, but then also categorize them. Some think it happens naturally, some think its there but we just need to cope with it. Like if we're on an airplane and the engine died. Some people labeled deniers actually believe it is happening - just that there aren't actually solutions that can be implemented. So they'll back mitigation. Some people agree and just want different solutions.
As someone who has consumed a climate destroying amount of video essays, this has genuinely been one of the funniest, informative and approachable breakdowns I've watched.
Very true
Thanks brothers for translating and sharing your content with us
By The way I never knew social science was this powerful a subject to perceive our reality a bit more consciously
Wow this is so well made.
Not a lot of this is new, I had noticed some of these trends in their recent videos myself and have seen other pointed out, but this is such a great collection of all the point and explaining them clearly while providing pleasing visuals (which is ironically what Kurzgesagt used to do so great).
@accelerationquanta5816 k
@Acceleration Quanta literally. It’s RUclips crap and everyone in this comment section is praising it as if 14 other RUclips channels haven’t made extremely similar content.
@@gdaw8326 htis is like the time i went shopping and a child looked at me and decided to fall down on their knees and started crying
@@karl6046 why you looking at kids crying bro
@@gdaw8326 jhioweifj902
TL:DR - We need to redefine economic growth so that what we are measuring is meaningful to our changing values.
One of the classic errors (which the video somewhat makes but not as bad as many who are arguing against economic growth because they do admit that we need to define economic growth properly) is the argument that one can’t get infinite economic growth with finite resources. It is true that one cannot get infinite growth of INPUTS with finite resources.
However, economic growth is about OUTPUTS and its valuation if we go back to classical economics is SUPPOSED to be based on human satisfaction since the valuation is supposed to be based on the utility that individuals obtain. To do this, we need to be able to do interpersonal utility comparisons, which few economists have wanted to do because it so hard to measure but just because it is difficult to do something does not mean it is impossible to do so.
More importantly, it is about economic growth PER CAPITA and perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, it is about improvements in overall utility (satisfaction) per capita (in other words, average utility). THAT can definitely happen if our population slowly decreases and we alter our definitions of economic growth to include non-market outputs including counting the benefits of extra leisure, better health, and other measures of happiness. It can even happen if we dramatically reduce income and wealth inequality WITHOUT increasing overall amounts). This is because there is declining marginal utility as income rises (in other words, if we transfer money from the rich to the poor, you end up with happier societies since the utility lost by the rich is more than offset by the gain in utility for the poor). Of course to measure this we need to standardize utility across everyone, which was the purpose of using money as a yardstick (unfortunately, that measurement is somewhat imprecise and imperfect but we can still attempt to go back and look at it from a slightly different methodology, such as the classical economics’ labor theory of value instead so we look at hours worked as a benchmark).
In conclusion, we can definitely make humanity better off as time goes on but only if we are able to go back to first principles when it comes to economic theory and practice.
The solar punk part about this video was a bit strange considering the argument about how we should consider the indirect results from producing something (in this case solar panels, that is more polluting to produce than most people think and needs a lot of batteries thus incrementing the mining of lithium)
But you forgot the single important factor for these people: it's aesthetic
@@Daniel-ih4zh Solarpunk is just arcadian pastoralism and reactionary ideologies in a nice dress. Infuriating no one points this out
@@oza9287 solarpunk is stupid because it created vulnerability to be exploited by threat actors.
I think the point of the solar punk part of the video was to show the differences in ideology. Those differences being controlling and manipulating the world around us for economic growth as our current way of life, and instead using our intelligence to better coexist with nature right now, maybe even forgoing some of our modern comforts in order to directly improve our lives in other, more substantial ways, which is the solar punk view.
Goddammit. The new video from that other guy about kurzgesagt was so hollow and poorly made that I worry people won't take a good deep dive like this one seriously. This video actually makes well researched, proper arguments, while the new one that went somewhat viral just doesn't do that. Which is a real shame, because kurzgesagt fucking sucks on climate change stuff but now people will associate that critique with some guy who didn't know how to construct an argument rather than this.
Whereas it seems that kurzgesagt left a lot out in their two climate videos, they did do one thing right:
They pulled me out of a climate doomerism spiral I was slipping into.
And their videos might have prevents many more people to do the same.
I think to most important thing kurzgesagt is for is to get people into the topic and create awareness. Because when they do, people are more likely to start watching other climate related videos that make the more nuanced views, thus in the end still bettering climate education even though they themselves omit certain important facts.
And that I think, should be kurzgesagt's main aim, and I think it already is. (although I havent watched your whole video yet).
But it is still important to have people point out flaws in videos, so keep up the good work!
eh, Red Planet does that without the neoliberal greenwashing nonsense
@@Jane-oz7pp i dont know that channel (and cant find it right now).
My main point is that because kurzgesagt is mainstream, mainstream people are more likely to get pulled into climate subjects. You need to ease people into these subjects, because if you stray too far away from what people already know and believe, you scare them away.
So whereas you and me might not agree with the deeper meaning and understanding of climate politics they make, they ARE good at creating initial interest. Which is important from a science communication and education perspective. Those kinds of videos like they make, they cant and should not go too deep. The fact that they actively acknowledge and say this, is already a plus in my eyes.
And then at the same time, its videos like the one from this comment section that need to analyse and deepen understanding and debunk the flaws and biases of the shallow ones. At the same time Im not going to pretend that this video, nor you and I, don't have biases too.
You cannot prevent having a bias, you need to be aware of it.
@@MssIAMNOBODYSPECIAL idk if radicals are capable of empathizing with common folk. They think everyone should automatically agree with them or be dismissed.
@@willjapheth23789 @Will Japheth unfortunately, that is true. But that doesnt mean I should stop pointing out to people that if they want their way, they should be more reasonable.
For example, I consider my own views on climate and political topics pretty radical (being in essense a solarpunkie, but more concretely a anti-consumerist, anti-car, socialist, green bikelover). And while I think my ideas are what is needed, I also tell people to warn me if I go too far, if I cannot be reasoned with anymore on a subject. To keep me from sliding a slippery slope.
I want to extent that to others as well, because its people that are too radical, that drive the masses _that we need for support_ away. Even though I know its often futile, i still try sometimes.
Even if its just to prevent other people that just read the comments to slide that slope (and not necessarily the people Im in discussion with).
This comment section was still sorta doable, but I watched the other video of badempanada on the kurzgesagt videos (not all the way, because it was already too loaded and with mistakes, mind you) and those comments were toxic all the way.
I stopped commenting there, because when I stood up for someone with genuine questions, I got the full blow... that was just too much for my sanity.
But as far as I can handle it, I try to be the voice of reason.
@@MssIAMNOBODYSPECIAL You're probably a better advocate for what you believe then most people. It seems to me like radicals often actively alienate their own movement from regular folks when they might have ideas worth considering. Car culture is pretty strong. The more people that feel they can be for car alternatives without having to change their identity or be associated with radicals the better.
I live in a particular area in Bucharest, Romania that has experienced in the last few years a great feat of rehabilitation. While that is great and is a change that we needed more than a decade ago, perhaps, the sidewalks were very narrow and mostly occupied by illegally parked cars and the change we've seen has not widened them or in some cases removed them completely for more parking spaces. Bucharest is very much a city made for cars and not for people. It's BLANKETED in cars, filling every available space, demoralizing and putting the actual human population in serious danger.
Plus smack bang in an earthquake zone, isn't it? I went to Bucharest a year ago and I don't think I've ever seen that many cars in a European city😅😅😅
Damn, nice video guys. You should start a discord server and make some videos in other languages too! That would be super cool! :) you'll get to 10k in no time for sure!
Well, if Kurzgesagt are doing it...🤔
@@t3essays 0:43: Well, COnservatives wont ever stop
being the Anti-Truth-Faction and literally be all things anti-truth
so 'having won the Battle'?
I dunno.
Maybe or maybe not one day we get a Law that stop Pre-Marriage-Sex,
but whatever.
Easiest new RUclips subscription I've made in a while. Thanks for mentioning not just the social sciences, but calling out urban designers and the psychology of human decision making as key to understanding how to avert the worst of the crisis.
It's not Tesla, but building for density, de-subsidizing meat/dairy/egg production, rewilding forests, removing things like R1 zoning, and expanding freight rail to get 18-wheelers off the roads are just a few unsexy, but massively impactful.
It’s crazy to think about how much high quality content like this is out of my reach because of language, thank you for translating this! Great video!
Time to learn Polish I guess
For me it will be a great way to further practice my Polish. It's my mother language (I live in my fathers country) so I am familiar with basic vocabulary. In addition to limited historical/political/literary vocabulary due to reading books & watching Polish media, conversing with my family and visiting for the holidays.
However I have a lacking vocabulary in terms of more technical terms, so I am looking forward to expanding that. I am eager to watch their Polish language videos as well.
Hope they translate more of their videos too English, so that it can reach a wider audience.
Love the Ed pfp btw :).
I dont know what to say exept thank you for opening my eyes about kurzgesagt. Eventhough im kindda in the apathy state of mind, your video and especially the moment when you talk about solarpunk... gave me hope. And i havent felt that for quite some time regarding the subject of the climate crisis. So thank you a lot. I really like your approach. Please do more! (your accent is great dont change, coming from a baguette croissant person cringing at baguette croissant person speaking english with poor accents, you're a pleasure to listen to)
Mixed feelings on this one. Exceptionally great Video, dont get me wrong, but I think you've been a bit too harsh on Kurzgesagt. I think they do a step in the right direction, and after those, more need and hopefully will follow. Yes, I too would have liked them to step outside of their "ideology" and also mention other solutions (e.g. Solarpunk :D which would be much more suitable). But using the word "propaganda" on that? That word is a bit extreme and might be misunderstood by the viewers.
Maybe you could round the video by summing up not only repeating all of the critizism you had, but that Kurzgesagts approach goes in a positive direction, but lacks this, that and ... . Otherwise, it sounds like you are demonizing all of their doing, even tho you underlined that you dont want that to get mixed up throughout the video. There are people that dont watch all of it, and then miss out on what you are actually trying to say. Lets prevent that.
My cirticism aside, thank you for this fantastic, slow, cautious, detailed and well founded work of criticism on a big player of the internet! (Yes, I did laugh from you jokes at times :D )
Please, supply us with more of that! GROW YOUR CHANNEL! GROOOW! :P
JK, quality over quantity. Best wishes!
Yes they will definitely change ideology when they are sponsored by gates foundations, abso-fucking-lutely
Get this up there fr
I don't think solarpunk is a desireable future at all, let me explain.
Solarpunk's desired goal is much too decentralized, and de-inustrialized. The amount of people that would have to die to achieve that is grim in the extreme, not to mention that it doesn't seem to give nuclear any thought whatsoever, even if it's by far the best option for generating energy across the board. Green energy, which is one of the centrepoints of solarpunk, is not all positives. It has many negatives, some of which are not solvable through technology since it is by virtue of the method used. Nuclear energy is like a function, you get out what you put into it, making it safer, more efficient, less polluting and even cheaper in the long run.
nah, it's definitely propaganda. The word is unnecessarily demonised. You could say that this video is propaganda, too. The only thing is that Kurz's video tends towards being malicious propaganda, considering how much they ignore an how many solutions they present are also tied to Gates' businesses
it is propaganda. Our zeitgeist consists in political correctness which oftens ends up in plain lies in order to try to not be rude. Be rude. If you're making propaganda because you're getting money for it, you're a lobbyist, and lobbying used to be illegal. Let's not fall into a neoliberal society like America because we can clearly see it's not the way of the future. Channels like Kurzgesagt should be obliged to show who fund them, so we could get a clearer picture of why they say the things they say.
I can feel myself being slightly radicalized. Thank you for properly introducing me to solarpunk and degrowth. I will have to learn more, but I am cautiously supportive of it…if we can actually implement it in practice…
I'm glad someone else feels the same. This comment section is an echo chamber if I've ever seen one.
Agreed
Redditors getting "radicalized" when they hear a different opinion
@@theburnedman9628 ...
Just like Bernie Sanders is electable if we fucking elect him, these policies are entirely doable if we just fucking do them. Like, there's no technological or theoretical barrier here. We know these policies can be done because all of them have been done at various times and places throughout history, and we know these policies are beneficial because we know their effects. The only problems are systemic and social, stemming from inertia and decades of propaganda which convinces people at large that nothing can ever change or get better.
I think I just found my new favorite channel. I love how deep you dive into this critique, the clear goals you provide, and the clear solutions you give to achieve them. Your not optimistic, your realistic in a optimistic way. Easy subscribe
This is one of the best video I have seen on climate change. Thank you for making this.
I’ve watched the whole video and it has really opened my eyes plus given me alot more information about each subject and how some things are semi correct or wrong duo to things that were not focused on.
This is fantastic! I was anxious to watch this because i've been a big fan of kurzgesagt in the past, but you've done a fantastic job of identifying how their technofuturist ideology affects what they say. Also I'd love those philosophy videos you joked about at the end - please please make them!!!
So Kurzgesagt is evil?
Probably not
@@thegnarledpirate9198 Not likely, but they are as biased as any of us to their views and are also disproportionately influential on SciTube.
@@oliverlarosa8046sounds evil to me.
@@thegnarledpirate9198 why does everything need to be either good or evil
Wow. I had all the dots that made me question Kurzgesagt's videos, but I didn't couldn't exactly understand why their climate change videos were "weird" until you managed to connect them. Thank you, and especially for the Solarpunk solution because I still want to be optimistically realistic lol
Also on a side note, what's bizarre is that people presume economics is centered around money, and yea it is, but putting the politics and "GDP-growth" ads and capitalistic "decreasing prices" aside, economics, fundamentally, is the study of how we just manage limited stuff with unlimited wants. Economics is VERY interested in the wellbeing of society, collectively dealing with resources i.e. research on those indigenous handling water, and etc., so it's a bit weird seeing Economics being singled out to prices, GDP, and tech in fighting climate change when it includes discussions on the Global South, environmentally-damning side effects for "eco-progress" i.e. more dams and wind-turbines and desalination plants, neuropsychology i.e. limiting consumerism, and more.
So Kurzesagt's not a good youtuber [I am really busy so I can't watch the video]
@@retrochronic44 No, they are still very good. Their pure science videos are really good (i.e. the measles one released recently), and they've shown to amend their mistakes in the past. I personally view that Kurzesagt as a whole, when approaching climate change, were too unaware of their own biases and assumptions. They're good at science (sources, professionals / peer reviewing, explaining simply), just be cautious and critical when politics are involved.
My personal rule of thumb is: the quicker the explanation, the more skeptical you should be. That should sound like common sense, but it's pretty easy to blindly accept sources you trust and respect i.e. not thinking twice about errors with my comment or I accidentally said something that's not true. Everything is insanely complex, but humans need it dumbed down to understand stuff.
Take for example one of Kurzesagt's claim: "Vote with your wallet" (a.k.a. don't support anti-environmental businesses). 4 words, but there's a BUNCH of nuances with that. For instance, those poor, especially the Global South as a whole, tend to not have a choice (do you choose what gas / oil company to buy from? What resources we abused third world workers for our computer semiconductors? Most poor urban American are unable to support local farmers because they only have access to junk food), and consumers are often unaware of the choices they accidentally make (did you choose whether your shirts / shoes came from sweatshops? To be made from Xinjiang cotton (before the US banned them 2020)? Your chocolate candy free from child labor?). Even if we are aware, will our dollar truly affect mega-corporations raking in millions, if not billions of dollars? Let's say we have an anti-Amazon movement because for some random reason, they turned Niagra Falls into a place to dump oil, and one million amazon users boycott them; no, TEN million. Even with that dent, they have over 100 million users (some estimates as high as 200 million), they pour billions of dollars into manipulating politicians around the globe, and are trying to monopolize all parts from picking up the item you bought to putting it on your doorstep so you don't get a choice whether to support them or not in the future. That's not even getting into the (1) illusion of choice w/ monopolies (almost all cereal is owned by 4 companies, Luttoxica owns 80% of all major glasses brand, 3 companies control 80% of mobile telecomes, 3 for 95% of credit cards, social media, almost all US major food products and crops grown in each area, the list goes on and on), (2) the complexity of each company's relation to climate change (for instance McDonalds: will they reduce their use of natural gas? cow methane emissions? carbon emissions? food waste? How about yes to all 4 while ignoring logistic emissions, preservatives, and excessive use of water in agriculture admist drought areas i.e. California and Arizona?), (3) how we blindly support capitalism and consumerism to solve everything without realizing imperfections and issues (how are companies supposed to solve the Great Pacific Ocean garbage patch the size of Texas? acidification of the ocean? over 50% of coral reefs dying? invasive species? Will there even *be* a miracle drug successfully developed to fight against drug-resistant diseases that mega farm companies created when they constantly put literal tons of antibiotics into animal feed on a massive scale? Penicillin was made only a few decades ago as the miracle drug and there's already diseases that evolved to resist Penicillin...), the list goes on and on.
So that's the "everything is insanely complex" that I'm talking about, but obviously Kurzgesagt can't say all of this because even though that's important, that's hella boring to read and they're trying to entertainment while educate. Just be skeptical and you'll be fine, I still love their channel very much and they partially influenced me to pursue Medicine :)
@@heyo8674 Oh ok, and you are right this is very boring to read,
@@retrochronic44 lol ik, thanks for reading all that tho
@@heyo8674 I didn't read it all, I just read the first and final paragraph.
Really amazing video - a well paced 2 hour breakdown of complex ideas in an accessible and entertaining way. What an awesome achievement! Keep up the great work!
I sat through the entire 2 hours of this for some reason and must say this was very well done. You made me doubt my beliefs a bit which is the best you could have done honestly. I still am on edge when it comes to any deep structural society changes, but I will give it some more thought. Oh and the Modernity and the Holocaust is definetly on my to read list.
You're being very introspective and honest with yourself, continue to nurture that and uncovering and speaking truth will just come naturally. Continue to be critical of yourself, but don't forget to also hold us lefties accountable whenever you have a salient point. Keep up the good work comrade c:
Structural change is coming whether we like it or not. The global economic system as we have known it is going to fall, at some point in our lifetimes, as climate change makes current food production and distribution norms impossible. The question is not whether things can or should change. The laws of physics themselves decree that they will, and damn our moralist whinging on the matter. The question is what we should do about it, and what we can build in the ashes of the old.
"you will own nothing, and you will be happy"
You might also be interested in the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which explores the connection between what Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism and pretty much everything mentioned in this video, from city planning to industrial production, to agriculture, to various historical atrocities.
Short answer is "The structure is the problem. Not because the structure is inherently evil but because it does not have the capacity to come up with solutions at the granular level."
Kurzgesagt is good at science, not politics, when I say science I mean stuff like explaining dark matter, black holes, the immune system, ecs.
You might want to reword your comment because there are such things as political science, that is the how to get a politician to vote for your policy type deal.
Then there’s also agenda science aka policy science, that is the scientific justification used to make and or to enact a policy.
@@darth3911 political science, like most psychological sciences, are a “soft” science.
Yeah, I've noticed that EVEN BEFORE this video. The concept of universal living wage (Or however is called) seems to ignore some crucial elements of reality, most notably the issues with certain cultures not integrating to X country but living from the citizen's taxes. The sad truth is that a lot of refugees are not refugees, they're immigrants who say they're refugees to stay in europe.
@@darth3911 they meant STEM.
Wow, so professional for the first video on the channel! Which billionaire is sponsoring you?
Ummm... can you still make Soros jokes in 2022?
@@t3essays I think they all automatically switch to Gates jokes now. Great video, mate, congratulations.
@@Personal_Chizo tbf there's not a lot of difference between the two
@@t3essays
The solution to climate change is merge 1900's and modern Europe because jesus there used to be so much public transport in the early 1800s!
Urban design would provide the biggest change
This is not his first video
I often throw around the "reject modernity, return to monke" meme, but deep down i actually believe it. We obviously don't need to take it as literally as returning to the stone age, but there's no denying that many of the world's ailments are a consequence of humanity's insane rate of progress in the past 200 years. We did too much too quickly and never gave ourselves the chance to adjust and adapt. Now we plan to do even more even faster to compensate for our previous advancements. We have essentially trapped ourselves in a positive feedback loop of solving big problems with even biggers solutions. Every positive feedback loop I've seen ends with something blowing up.