Factually, the average american keeps their car for around 8 years. I get that most people buying electric are well off but man, every three years seems like a special kind of privilege.
EVs don't matter if electricity still produced from fossil fuels. EVs are a detail, not a solution. Good public transportation is way more efficient and feasible for reducing emissions. EVs, at this point, is just a market for people to get rich.
I haven't had a vehicle in over a decade that lasted longer than 3 years because maintenance costs are outrageous, along with mandated (expensive) insurance, etc. We can't even afford a vehicle now :/
It's not that people are saying fuck it and giving up or that the problems we face are unsolvable. It's that the people in power either do not want change or are afraid to enact the policies we need to survive because most people will not accept the drastic reduction in lifestyle necessary. We can't keep living like this though
You're forgetting another possibility, which is that those who have the power to make changes are only capable of enacting mostly-incremental changes, for a variety of reasons, especially economic ones. For example, businesses cannot make dramatic pivots to new technologies without taking on massive risk and potentially screwing themselves. However, given some encouragement by government (see: Biden Bucks $$$ from infrastructure bill), as well as time to test new tech, companies can then justify taking on *quantified* risk to transition to new platforms. I am in the oil and gas sector and I see this happening. The ship turns painfully slowly but it is in fact turning.
It’s because they know rich people can just move wherever the fuck they want while the poorer people living in coastal cities are just gonna die. They don’t give a fuck
I haven't watched much yet but my current position is that we're all fucked but I wanna fight anyway. Like that quote about fascism. You don't fight fascism because you'll win, you fight it because it's fascism
I agree. The biggest reason I don't think this problem is fixable is similar to how I think poverty isn't just solved. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It doesn't mean we should stop caring.
We're going to be destroyed by an ice age... oh wait. We're going to be destroyed by acid rain... oh wait. We're going to be destroyed by global warming... oh wait... it's climate change now!!! The polar caps will be gone by 2010!!!!
I don't think fascism can fundamentally survive all that long whenever it does happen, and it can be prevented, but yeah, you fight fascism because it's fascism.
Ironic how it is too expensive to fix things but money isn't an object when it comes to bailing out banks, the stock market and funding wars that have nothing to do with the US.
It's not too expensive to fix things, Joe Biden passed the largest and most expasive infrastructure bill in US history while Republicans raged about it 6 months ago. Republicans constantly attempt to prevent us from fixing these shapes.
The grid itself is very old, unreliable, and inefficient in much of America. Some Cali wildfires have been due to fallen lines when ancient retention clips on lines decades past their expiration date fail and drop a live line. "It's too expensive to replace them all!" The wildfires seem more expensive to me... plus everyone doing EVs here would overwhelm the grid in this area of the midwest, not to mention outages from storms and floods.
@@jer280 if the us just spent a few percent of the "defense budget" ($825 billion in 2024, so just 1% would be 8.25 billion), whatever tech you're talking about, it would massively improve
@@LordDustnDirt the power of privatisation and corruption! did you see the john oliver segment on it? edit: nope i was thinking of something else but i can't find it. or maybe i couldn't find the right episode
The real way we need to stop excess waste is to shift the culture away from planned obsolescence. When it's a successful business plan to build and sell something designed to break so that you must repurchase the waste is immense and entirely unnecessary. In the energy and the resources to produce the product and especially in the energy to ship those products to their markets and the actual waste from the obsolete product being discarded.
That goal can only be achieved through government legislation that is actually enforced. Tricky when your political system has been captured by ultra capitalists.
This ties in with charging the manufacturer for the collection and recycling costs of their packaging. It would be tricky to track and enforce, but charging corporations a percentage of the retail price of their product for objects that enter the waste stream too soon would be a good path. "Too soon" would be a sliding scale, probably based on the retail price again - an object selling for $500 should last a lot longer than an object selling for $5.
I'd like to challenge the view on planned obsolescence. Cars are the biggest issue here. And while some people do pick up a new car every couple years, that car isn't totaled as "wasted". When I was a kid, a 10 year old car was a miricle on wheels. Metal bodies would rust, parts were expensive, and it wasn't worth keeping beyond that. My current car is already 13 years old... And it's fine. It had 1 major maintenance issue, and outside of that it has just been normal brakes, oil, and tire changes. And it isn't just my car, most cars made today will have a 15-20 year lifespan. And EVs with composite bodies could last literal decades with a battery swap every 10-15 years. Most home appliances use to last 5-7 years, and now 10-15 is normal. Most major items that we own will last far longer than we use them ourselves, and will live a 2nd life in someone else's home long before they see a landfill. Yes, we throw away a lot of things, and we could make a lot of headway on things like single use plastics. But the big things you buy should be lasting (or at least have the option of lasting) 15-20 years. That's pretty good in the grand scheme of things.
Man, Adam asked some great questions here and was very polite and accepted what I felt were unsatisfying answers. For instance, with electric vehicles, what about the maintenance of road systems? Parking lots? Long expansions of water, electrical, and other utility systems to feed car dependent suburbs? What about pollution from tires degrading on the roads? What about the noise and visual pollution and its effects on the health of not only surrounding people, but wildlife? There are so so so so many reasons that EVs are not a huge gain. On the topic of degrowth, the criticism was about how well we can "sell" this idea. Yet, our extractive capacity already exceeds the potential yields of the planet. We will either choose to degrow or we will be forced by material necessity to degrow in response to crisis. This isn't an individual problem either. Most of the issues deal with production, distribution, manufacturing, etc. Not consumption. This focus on the consumer end is part of the corporate gas lighting process of shifting the blame onto regular people. Now, my background is in environmental philosophy and I am on board with the general premise that the world isn't ending and that we need to deal with the hopelessness we are experiencing after our period of denial (both just strategies to avoid having the change anything, which is the underlying issue), but I can't help but feel that this interview is swinging too hard in the opposite direction. Adam brings up wonderful counterpoints and I would have loved a more serious response to them. I would have loved to come away from this interview with a greater sense of hope, because the situation does truly feel hopeless, but this sadly didn't do it for me. The underlying notion that economic growth is compatible with environmentalism makes me deeply sick to my stomach and only reinforces my feelings of despair about the whole thing.
I utterly agree with you, I really wonder if reading the book would offer anything of value. You can FEEL them changing their vocabulary to downplay what they are actually saying.
@@bonanzajellybean4802 I did a little digging into the Hannah Ritchie and all I could find was your typical neoliberal market based capitalist dogma solutions that have infiltrated and dismantled environmental movements for decades. I doubt reading her book would contradict the deeply problematic material she's put online. Hannah seemed genuinely passionate about environmental causes in this interview, but the literal meaning of what she's wrote reveals to me a subjugation of the natural environment to mere economic extraction. It's entirely possible that she's blind to this internal conflict, as that's not unusual concerning environmental action, and I don't want to express any hate towards her as a person for espousing this dangerous rhetoric. I just don't want these orthodox market solutions taken seriously; we're half a century past the point where we can repeating that same old mistake. Adam probably should have pushed her a little harder than he did, but I also understand the desire to be accommodating to guests.
At least they mentioned veganism several times, as this actually is a very real part of the solution. But what they failed to grasp was aerosol masking effect and how reducing fossil fuels is actually going to increase the rate of warming. MEER Reflection Project is the only hopeful solution I know of that addresses this.
My fear as a person living in a coastal area is that yes its not ending, but me and my kids will get to live as climate refugees when our area is unlivable. Paying a mortgage on a house I can't live in being resented by the residents of wherever I have to relocate to.
Also consider that people live in Arizona and don’t seem to think it won’t become America’s Sahara soon enough. I don’t know why they aren’t fleeing en masse yet.
My main disagreement with her overall stance is the mischaracterization of degrowth as sacrifice and having less. She doesnt sufficiently aclnowledge how western society is the way it is because capitalist forces shaped it that way and degrowth is the act of us shaping our lives and desires ourself. Degrowth is realizing the desire to upgrade your car every three years just because is inherently bad and something we shouldnt want, but market forces convice us otherwise by placing themselves as the default. And that the forces that shape our desires will always shape it to there benefit and thats why new technology and economics alone will not be sufficient to save us. So shes right about incremental steps, but she doesnt acknowledge the adjacency individuals have in changing the world by changing theirs.
Well if your solution is to sit around and wait for The Revolution, you're going to be sorely disappointed. But Leftists love being disappointed, it makes us feel morally righteous.
There are different levels of degrowth. Not buying a new car every 3 years is one thing Completely abandoning flights is a whole other thing (and for people like me, that would mean permanently abandoning my family).
Absolutely. My family bought undeveloped property 12 years ago & opted to go solar. Not grid tied with solar as a supplement, 100% solar. It was a learning curve at first, being used to grid power that you don't really need to think about. It's now 2nd nature to look for the most energy efficient appliances, not buying unnecessary gadgets, looking for USB rechargeable small appliances, lights, etc. I don't feel that cutting my energy usage back by a substantial amount has lowered my quality of life one bit
we have brown sheep but if you buy brown woolen clothing, they take white sheep wool and dye it brown, so the colour is more even. Dye is a highly poluting energy intensive resource and we do it for almost no reason at all, the brown sheep wool is mostly thrown away. To me that's how I visualise degrowth. There are things we can do that make barely any lifestyle change but are contrary to the way capitalism and mass manufacture operates.
@luci_is_lucifer Hannah is totally not advocating degrowth! On the contrary she is advocating to make people see how they contribute to the solution without making loads of sacrifices. Do read her book!
Theres something very odd about an episode on climate change and reducing our carbon footprint having an ad for snacks shipped from half the world away. Seems like the kind of thing we should be discouraging in the grand scheme of things.
We have been sharing foods and culture across continents and oceans since the silk road. No need to hate this one niche and culturally educating form of trade.
@@thekingoffailure9967 The silk road didn't burn 4 litres of fuel per second frivolously transporting plastic packages of mostly air into the opposite hemisphere... We have the internet now, culture can be shared through the transfer of knowledge and if there's a market for foreign snacks, they can have businesses that produce them set up closer to where the customers live
SeaCargo transport has the lowest carbon footprint. It s very low on the scale of priorities. Planes, trucks and even trains are worse. So let s keep rational and focus on the worst offenders.
20:40 All the examples mentioned previously are at best a 50% reduction in emissions if fossil fuels are removed. Anyone that thinks we can get out of this crisis without cultural change, and doing things like monopoly busting, tighter emissions regulations, addressing the profit motive via individual income ceilings, ending stock buy backs, making institutions required to adopt telecommuting whenever possible, strengthening environmental agencies, etc. simply moving off of fossil fuels in the near future really only helps in places where that is even possible by regulation. Don't get me wrong I think we 100% should eliminate ICE vehicles, but acting like that is adequate is naive, and talking as if market forces alone are enough to do that is misguided. Climate change isn't a consumer problem its a regulatory one, which has been caused by the failure of regulating our modern economies, and simply acting as if this is a problem that consumers can defeat by "voting with their wallets" is just more of the same free market propaganda that got us in this mess in the first place.
100% correct. Not to mention the greenwashing lobby to make people feel good about their continued pollution ("net-zero" is complete horseshit) creating inertial drag. This is second only to the "carbon footprint" gaslighting guilt brought to you courtesy of big oil. The real hard work (and why we are screwed) is in regulation of the excesses of unbridled greed. Politics for sale in America at least, has made the necessary action all but impossible. And for the world's largest economy of self-absobed, businesses-as-usual, narcissists... restraint is untenable. We aren't doomed, but we are f*cked.
Completely agree. You can't have infinite growth while living in a snowglobe. Success is going to be impossible until we create a path for somehow producing less, consuming less and polluting less. Its just literally not possible to fix this if we have to make 4% more stuff year over year forever.
@@GStarGoku3 The thing that drives me crazy about this the most is that transitioning away from our infinite growth economy doesn't send us to the dark age. Degrowth means that we stop this madness, it doesn't mean we forget how to do manufacturing, it means that we slow advertisement, we incentivize and regulate corporations to focus on supporting workers over shareholders, as a society we need to seek technological changes that keep our currently quality of life with fewer resources instead of new and different technologies and experiences. Ideally I would love to see a world where business interests aren't the only politically important ones, and a world where if a single person has the power to affect 100s of lives or more and they knowingly make a decision that can harm or kill those people, then those people in charge are held accountable, and a world where hiding information about accidents, or incidents result in wealthy owners making poor decisions to face real jail time in general population and have all their wealth stripped and given to the victims that their greed created.
First, if we eliminate fossil fuels, we eliminate 85% of the carbon-added to the atmosphere (some amount comes from wood and agriculture). Your 50% number implies that only _some_ fossil fuels are eliminated, eg. I eliminate fossil fuels locally but I just exchange it for fossil fuels being burnt at the power plant. But if the power plat is also not using fossil fuels then the total reduction in carbon added to the atmosphere would, by necessity, drop by more than 50%. but long term... Evolution, survival of the good-enough-for-now. Eventually the species that can't adapt to a changing world will die out and ones who don't mine fossil fuels will eventually take their place. The bad news for humans who value human existence is that humans are unlikely to stop digging up fossil fuels :) Right now we're the most adapted species because the Earth is cold and loaded with bio-fuels. And once that epoch is expired, a new species will take our place. Maybe they'll have brains, maybe not. But they'll be more fit for the new Earth environment. And that's how things evolve.
Quoting myself, but Hannah's line of reasoning is actually dangerous and ignores all the actual warnings scientists are screaming about. "Anyone who claims CC isn't the end of the world and doesn't mention the list to follow doesn't actually understand where we are at with the science now in the last couple of years. The insect extinction (by mid century we don't know if the planets ecosystems as a whole will collapse from this, its the most dangerous thing facing humanity), aerosol demasking (we are already at 1.5C if not more, according the big study last year the more realistic idea of where we are heading is 5-10C of warming by end of century and the oceans the last 18 months are on fire since the removal of sulfur dioxides from shipping fuel), AMOC slowing (Its already slowed 25% and as the oceans warm might stop completely before the end of the century), needing to end all fossil fuel extraction now (The UN panel on climate change said we needed to stop all new fossil fuel extraction by 2019, its now 2024), ocean deoxygenation ( we are already seeing dead zones in the oceans from this), daytime temps being beyond human survivability (Per the maxwell plank institute north africa and the middle east will have lethal day time temps by the mid 2050s) and microplastics and endocrine disrupting chemicals making us infertile (this one is nearly as terrifying as the insect extinction by end of the century our ability to reproduce is in doubt) Hannah sounds like your typical journalist who believes the individual responsibility argument for climate change and doesn't understand how much worse things actually are in the just the last few years. If we want to avoid calamity nothing Hannah discussed is nearly close to enough fast enough or broad enough to avoid the potential collapse of all ecosystems on the planet and humanity as we know it with them."
I live in an apartment complex that has relatively low rent. When I was forced to buy a car last year (big red Ford squished the car I’d had for 18 years), I had to buy a gas engine because there’s no way for me to charge an electric vehicle overnight. It’s not financially feasible for me to move to an apartment where charging a vehicle is possible. It would increase my monthly expenses by over $1k per month between rent and EV car payment.
Not trying sway you in any way. But dont forget to factor that the EV Will probably save you money on fuel. If you bought a new ICE car, youd still have a new car payment. Can you find any used EVs in your area? That being said, if you can find a used Hybrid vehicle that may be a nice compromise depending on your needs. Good luck out there!
@@jschroemanThe infrastructure is not there. You need to have access to electricity over night or a EV isn’t in the cards for you. That means EVs are for rich people with houses or indoor parking. You can’t expect people to charge their car after work, spend like an hour at the charging station every night just so they can make sure they can drive to work in the morning. Or drive home on 40% and then be stuck in the morning when the thing doesn’t start. It’s either massive increase in charging stations or switch to public transport. Or they invent a better battery tech.
@@jschroeman Hi Johnny! Luckily, I only commute 2 days a week, so I only spend about $120/month on gas between work, errands, and socializing. My new (to me) car has a green mode, so I use that to drive around my city. It’s also a manual transmission 6 speed so it’s enjoyable to drive. My city is sprawling with crap public transit. When I commuted 5x per week, I took the bus. When my schedule went hybrid, I decided to save myself the uncertainty, stress, frustration, and drama of riding the bus. If my personal life had worked out the way I hoped it would, I would have had a house and a garage. In that case, I probably would have bought an EV. My husband decided that only his desires matter though 🫤
@@WaddyMuterscharging stations aren't cheaper than the equivalent in gas lol. Doesn't matter how long it takes, unless you're plugging in it at home you see absolutely no savings.
Idk if anyone’s brought this quote from Mark Fisher yet: “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Capitalism and shortsighted profit-seeking are to blame. We need to move away from our current approach, full stop!
Dr. Ritchie did a great job, great episode. The best part was the individually packaged junk food shipped across the world immediately followed by discussion of food impact on climate.
This one had me yelling in my car repeatedly (to the podcast version). There’s no meaningful “we” that can take action outside the constraints of the capitalist system that has shown it has very entrenched interests with counter-incentives to a long-term liveable planet. When Dr Ritchie mentioned the last 30 years of inaction, on her way to saying that we COULD do something going forward, I would have appreciated some pushback/questioning of the reasons for that inaction and how the next 30 years are to be any different. If the rules of the game aren’t changed away from quarterly growth targets, then there is nothing else to be done or said.
You bring up a good point, and one that really more people who care about a healthy, sustainable future and realize the capitalist barriers that are in place to prevent that, should be discussing much more. Some have. I don't know if you are aware, but see the Culture in Decline series by Peter Joseph and The New Human Rights Movement book and/or Peter's talk "A Viable Society" especially the last half which talks about solutions and means towards that solution that work to build a new system. I'm inspired by the words of the late great, Buckminster Fuller, who said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." We won't fight with mass general strikes, the powers that be have too many oppressive war machine tools to deal with that. We need strong, local mutual aid communities and worker co-op networks that can provide for the people in free and abundant ways that would be impossible for the capitalist system and rulers to achieve through their corrupt and misguided bureaucracy. One Small Town model shows to be quite capable of helping the bottom-up social change. There may be others, but that one seems to be the front runner.
@@coolioso808I think you are right, but there's a missing step there where the corrupt and misguided bureaucracy Witnesses and Accepts the superiority of the more humble model. If it worked out in any way like the socialist projects of history, they would be destroyed as a "threat." They will declare war just because your plan is better than theirs. Can your one small town stand up to the military budget of the corrupt status quo?
I'm currently working on an adventure game set in a climate apocalypse and literally wrote the line "The world didn't end, everything just got harder." the other day. Feels appropriate.
@@need-to-know- I'm not familiar with either but Reminiscence's Wikipedia page says it's set in a partially flooded Miami, and that aspect is similar. It's set in a flooded city and follows the community that's formed around the people who failed to evacuate and are trying to build a viable life while restricted to the upper floors of multistory buildings. It's a somewhat fantastical scenario (the flooding happened all at once in a giant storm, the government collapsed almost immediately, the number of survivors is small, ect) but I'm trying to take the survival methods and problems presented by the setting seriously and come up with solutions given available materials that are at the very least plausible.
Not really accurate, there are multiple issues right now that could kill all life on the planet. The top one being the insect extinction. We are going to be down 50-60% of the entire biomass of insects on the planet by the 2050s and pollinating insects are trending to be completely extinct. The entire ecosystem of the planet could collapse at that point is the most dire warning facing us from scientists. Ocean deoxygenation could kill us in hundreds of years and ocean acidification will kill all life on the planet within a few thousand years. When you read what the actual scientists are warning about in the last couple of years, its far, far worse than anything you have heard before.
As paraphrased from Mr. Carlin; the planet's gonna be fine, it's gonna keep on spinning and recover after we're gone, we are just a bad case of fleas and one day, nothing from us will remain.
@@toms5996 ... ur assuming Everyone does Not sabatoge others. Ur assuming the other ENTIRE NATIONS WONT REACT VIOLENTLY AND U R ASSUMING NO ONE WOULD EVER USE NUKES OR OTHER WEAPONS. U R FORGETTING HUMAN NATURE IN UR LITTLE PEP TALK ! .
@@toms5996 it's not defeatism. Someday, humans will maybe have left, or evolved, or some natural disaster comes around, or any number of cataclysmic event may happen. The Earth will continue spinning with or without us on it. Nothing lasts forever, in 100 years, no one will know who I was. I'll be a name on a rock, then that name will fade in time. We live, we die, but it's the stuff in between that's interesting. I'm excited for whats next for me, but the end comes for all of us, including our species someday.
@@Zaniel8 Us in Finland and us Nordics not to mention the Baltics have centuries of knowledge what comes to this issue. To answer your statement - no, nation states will not use nukes. The reason for that is that all the developed countries in the world will fare just fine with the climate change. In fact, all of us developed countries will fair even better. It's not a a topic that is widely talked about, but Northern Europe, Canada etc. will get much richer due to climate change.
@@Tb0n33999 In the end everything will come to and end. What has that to do with human civilisation? Us humans will do just fine at least the next 1000 years. How we will react to change, whether internal or external, is up to us.
The amount of energy we spend on removing single use/short life items once their span is over and the amount spent on making them is nuts. Capitalism incentivizes replacement instead of long lasting and maintainable. I have some clothing I've owned for over 20 years. Disposability needs to die outside of certain limited applications.
@@tealkerberus748You don't have to be "rich" to get a new car (often leased, not bought) every 3 years. Just (upper) middle class. This will often be a car provided by the company that employs you. And it's a bit irrelevant. Those cars don't get scrapped after 3 years. They get sold as used cars for a decade or 2.
A 3-year lease is the most common way that people "buy" new cars. They practically force you to take a 3-year lease at the dealership by showing you how much money you would lose if you buy your car and use it for the full lifetime. This is especially true for electric vehicles. I just bought my first car I've ever owned at age 36 and I was convinced to lease the car for 3 years by accepting a $14,000 discount. I don't think rich people are the only people who finance new vehicles with a 3-year lease with 50% residuals. Maybe it is just an American thing?
I'm not a rich man but right now I am 3 years into a 5 year loan and the equity I have in the car could cover roughly half of another CPO. weigh that against getting back into a bumper to number warranty and understanding that likely I will be making a car payment for most of the next 27 years until I retire. It's more fiscal responsibility. A single repair job right now could cover 2 years of payments depending on what it is. Now my payments are 300 as I always buy a couple years old and take care of my cars so I get max trade in. Last time I didn't even ever buy tires for the car as I rode less than 20k miles in 39 months, so actually i spend less than anyone by updating condistently
It won't happen quick until the ocean life we extract for food collapses. Japan is hedging their bets on this with the way they catch and store tuna. And who knows what climate changes like the collapse of the Gulf Stream will mean for the parts of Europe that enjoy it's protection. And the 3'-10' rise of the oceans as the polar caps melt will only really effect people on the coast. Oh, and our major ports. So yea, it might not be a sudden catastrophic collapse, but that inevitable trickle is just as dangerous.
We talk about hope vs doomerism, when we should be talking about ANGER. I don't want these platitudes, which only alleviate people's anxieties; i want the opposite: want to see people ANGRY. I rather peoole know JUST HOW BAD things are, so that maybe they can finally get ANGRY, because "where we need to be" is on the streets, every day, until goverments take action.
Anger isn’t a positive thing in a society, anger is easily manipulated. I just want the people getting their information from this video to read a book, I want the people who don’t even watch climate change content to watch this, that’s the issue. We are several leagues deep in a sea of useless information. This is barely the surface level, and Adam’s platform is great because he provides the entertainment lacking in a lot of informational content while the guests does the actual informing. And it’s presented in such a way that the audience member doesn’t feel out of place with the information because it’s shown as though he is learning with the audience. it’s really great and tactful but don’t let this be your stopping point. Anger isn’t right. It’s not hope or complacency, it’s the fact that we are systemically becoming less and less informed and less and less interested in becoming so.
@@jordanburton9819 i get it, and I love Adam'a interviews, but this is too urgent. you know how how sufragettes and civil rights activits EVER got even an inch from the ppl in power? when, and only whem, they finally got angry and demanded it, violently when necessary 🤷🏻♀️ shit will not changed as long as we're only asking nicely
Things aren't "bad" by any measure. Global lifespan and standard of living keep rising. Hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty by industrial civilization.
@@gregorymalchuk272I think this is also something to be said - We are the frog in the boiling water with some critical exceptions; For someone who is from the developed world, it's easy to say that omg things are just getting worse and worse. If last year was your first year with access to electricity, you'd think that things are only getting better. We have to balance these narratives so that A) Yes the climate crisis IS the problem of this generation and will take monumental leaps to solve but B) The standard of living of most people is in fact getting better across the board.
I want to see us move away from an ownership economy to a "library of everything" economy. Me and all my neighbors don't need our own lawnmower and hedge trimmer and edger. We can pull our resources and share it day to day. Same with a lot of different things. That is what degrowth is ultimately about. Less stuff, but more access to that stuff, cooperation and sharing.
Lol. Go ahead and try that and see what happens the first time something breaks on that lawnmower or a week long stretch of rain and now everyone's lawn is overgrown and they all need it tomorrow. Fantasy island level notion. Because... you know... humans and all...
@@johnadams3800 we have a functioning tool library in my small town that include several lawn mowers. It is great. I don't think many people are too obsessed with their lawns and can tollerate some variability in grass condition. So this is not a fantasy at all. it is reality
@chookbuffy several. That's a key difference. The proportion of users to available equipment matter... the closer it is to 1:1, the less problems you are going to have.
Adam, I love your work, but it is difficult to overstate how much these "things will be fine if we all pitch in a little and we trust the people in charge :)" conversations drive me toward feelings of despair. I went in thinking "I should be more optimistic and protect the hope that I have even better," and left feeling more keenly than ever that I am constantly being bullshitted and we're absolutely fucked.
It's the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, yet we constantly try to downplay it with alternatives that will end up being a splash in the ocean in comparison.
Climate Change isn't the biggest threat to America, not even a crisis to be concerned about 😂 climate changes and man made climate change is bs🤦 obviously people don't do real research. Our impact on the climate is irrelevant because it's so minimal. Now if you were talking about humans impact the environment now that's a different story, but it's a difference between climate and environment 😂
Gotta keep that cha-ching status quo chugging along. After all, the sudden ramp up of once slow and passive g3noc!des is purely incidental and has nothing to do with the growing crop failures and incrementally dwindling supply chain that will also accelerate soon. As the lights go out in one country at a time, or as one town or another gets burned off the map, we simply move on like they never existed. We'll do that until the very end.
The consumer behavior problem you brought up Adam is one that was created by the auto industry. If we make it more economical to keep and maintain a vehicle and stop the constant churn of the auto industry to convince everyone that they need that new version of the vehicle it will help. Car manufacturers have been going for years to make each new years model more desirable than the last with the least amount of actual improvements to keep their profits sky high. They don't want us to move to 100% electric because it is nowhere near as profitable to them.
It's not just cars, planned obsolescence is a business model everywhere in corporate America. It's reoccurring revenue on top of a race to the bottom in quality, in order to generate exponential profits (via higher margins) to the investor class. Bonus points when you squeeze labor as well.
@@grumpyoldman6503 that's precisely why it should be countered by regulation the race and for profit is a terrible game imposed on the people by the wealthy owner class. It does nothing for us. Just look at any competitive market it's always making competition and "Winning" the goal and trying to convince everyone it's the only way to do things. It's a poisonous pointless ideology pushed by the same neoliberal crap that got us here to begin with. Hell just look at apple and the iPhone. It created the smartphone market and since it's creation it has ramped up production and the model churn of such things so that by the time one goes to market it's already obsolete. Now apple every year charges a massive premium on name alone touting it's new tech advances. Tech advances which more often than not their competition Android has had for a decade. Meanwhile as long as they can each keep their fans foaming at the mouth about how one is better than the other they all run to the store to buy the new hotness to prove it to anyone who will listen. As long as I have been alive people have constantly talked about how "they don't make them like they used too" and that's all just planned obsolescence for the purpose of satisfying greed, which anyone with common sense knows is a never ending impossible to fill bucket that is only benefiting those at the top.
@jasonbaker1887 Another fun fact: the modern over-reliance on cars is itself a result of heavy auto industry lobbying. GM bought up most of the streetcar grid we once had so that the lines could be torn out and replaced with its own busses. Relying on capitalist forces to solve environmental problems only perpetuates the issues of modern capitalism.
Some things I can say, without watching the full video. Yes we will have to mobilize every single organization, system and Community in order to confront the crisis that we are facing. Every single person person should be involved in as many ways as possible
I don't see how you minimize the consequences of living in a (potentially) 6C world. I'm pretty sure the climate science community has been unequivocal - those scenarios are disasters for humanity. Large portions of the world really do become unliveable, and if we go into a prolonged war over the remainder, especially a nuclear conflict, it could be the end for us.
@@Neddoestit’s not. Especially with the profit motive and capital being the main drivers of climate change. People are enslaved to generating capital for the state that is owned by the oligarchy, so the average person has zero power to change the system we live under or has the capability as an individual to avert the coming climate catastrophe. The world’s militaries and industries are the culprits that will not change their behavior no matter what and they are the primary contributors to climate change, because they are in competition with each other, and therefore we can not survive or avert what is coming because it would require the worlds militaries and industries to lay down their arms and for industry to sacrifice the profit motive in order to save the world. I can tell you the exact moment when that will happen, when it is too late. Every single consumer on the entire planet could go green tomorrow, and it still wouldn’t stop what is happening if the world’s militaries and industries don’t also get on board. It’s like our obsession with electrifying cars, even though road transport only accounts for 15% of emissions. Do you think that a 15% reduction in emissions is enough to stop climate change? Me either. But they act like it is the pivotal issue that will save us, if we all just electrify road transport. Without a human centric government in the seat of power in every country on earth, we are screwed. No military or industry will kneecap itself by taking a loss to transition from fossil fuels while faced with competition that is willing to use fossil fuel to get an edge over the competition.
It's meh. Our present consumption behaviors and the associated degree of industry will bring about planetary ecosystem collapse and mass extinction regardless of emissions. Clean industry, absent de-industrialization, degrowth, population reduction via responsible breeding, and rewilding, will not save us. Also, everyone with a choice absolutely should transition to vegan.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make." 🙃 (I've gone from feeling happy whenever spring arrives to being filled with dread because the summers are getting so dangerously hot. I'm in the UK...)
Same feeling here, in the Pacific NW of the USA. In 2021 we had a 45.5C day in Portland where it rarely gets to 37. I believe the follow year is the one where you got the bad heat. Spring used to be my favorite... now it just feels like the calm before the storm.
De growth also isn’t about behavior change… it’s about redistribution. Hunger is a policy choice… food gets wasted because it is profitable to do so. We don’t need to commute to work 5 days a week… more free time and easier access to necessities is a very easy sell
I really, truly, want the guest to be right, but I'm thoroughly unconvinced. It also seems like she's simply responding to a straw man argument based on a misinterpretation of Jason Hickel's work on 'degrowth.' Agreed on the non-viability of behavior change efforts (I say this as a behavioral scientist).
100% agree Hannah is in the Techno-optimist cap. Her faith on "data" that is easily measured and the reality that the world has mroe nuance and connectedness is a clear sign of this. Her misunderstading about peasant farmers feeding themselves and complete ignorance of degrowth (as per her trainwreck interview with Rachael Donald) shows how deluded she is. It is a damn shame and waste of a brain
Isn't it strange that when arguing in favor of changes under capitalism, Adam never asks why the giant fossil fuel companies would ever be willing to allow these changes to occur? I don't believe in doomerism, but I do believe in not ignoring the elephant in the room who keeps stomping on your head.
Fine. "Big Fossil" doesn't like it. We established that. Good we talked about it. And now? What, apart from doomerism, are possible actions you can take based on this information? It's the old saying, "God, give me the endurance to change what I can, give me the patience to endure what I can't, and give me the wisdom to differentiate the one from the other." "Capitalism" is something you cannot change. "Giant fossil fuel companies" are something you cannot change. So you either take the easy way out - doomerism and inactions because everything is futile - or you can do what you can and advocate for what is realistic. An alternative paradigm to capitalism is not realistic, PFTT, Keynesianism and Social Market Economy European style / New Deal is realistic. A revolution putting "giant fossil" on walls is unrealistic. Pressuring politicians for stricter standards AND EVALUTAING THEM - see "compact pickups" which were phased out by standards too strict and the loophole of pickup lorries - is realistic.
@@enysuntra1347 I don't think you or anyone can say things that are perfectly possible are unrealistic. Everything that hasn't happened can seem unrealistic until it happens. We arrange able to judge exactly where the world is going and when people will reject this system. What is definitely unrealistic is surviving much longer with capitalism as our default. It's based on competition and consumption and just doesn't align with the way nature works. The environmental crisis will just continue to worsen without ditching the profit based mindset. That may seem "unrealistic" but at least it respects the laws of nature. Something capitalism refuses to do...
@@MattAngiono Really? Nature doesn't work according to the same principles as capitalism? How so? Water seeks the easiest path to flow. Species compete for limited ressources, some are outcompeted (red squirrel, black rat,...). Plants can only grow so far as ressources allow; there are transporters "shipping" ressources to where they are needed, eg mykhorriza, insects, microbes. Capitalism is so successful because Adam Smith stumbled upon resilient systems that can self-adapt to a lot of changes; and this is exactly how nature works for longer than humanity exists. Right now, EVERY new "intelligent design"-approach ignores the evolution market economies have done and are simply outcompeted by those systems. The Social Market Economy or French/Scandinavian Socialism take "capitalism" and tweak it so the result is more desirable; however, both are under attack since the 1980s and have to prove they can overcome Reagonomics, Thatcherism and "Cocaine Labour". Leninism, Maoism, or Libertarianism, however, have failed nine ways to Sunday. Milei will fail, and we all know why. Truss failed. And don't even ask me about the "Third Way"-economies like Falangism or Peronism.
@@MattAngiono Really? Nature doesn't work according to the same principles as capitalism? How so? Water seeks the easiest path to flow. Species compete for limited ressources, some are outcompeted (red squirrel, black rat,...). Plants can only grow so far as ressources allow; there are transporters "shipping" ressources to where they are needed, eg mykhorriza, insects, microbes. Capitalism is so successful because Adam Smith stumbled upon resilient systems that can self-adapt to a lot of changes; and this is exactly how nature works for longer than humanity exists.
@@MattAngiono Right now, EVERY new "intelligent design"-approach ignores the evolution market economies have done and are simply outcompeted by those systems. The Social Market Economy or French/Scandinavian Socialism take "capitalism" and tweak it so the result is more desirable; however, both are under attack since the 1980s and have to prove they can overcome Reagonomics, Thatcherism and "Cocaine Labour". Leninism, Maoism, or Libertarianism, however, have failed nine ways to Sunday. Milei will fail, and we all know why. Truss failed. And don't even ask me about the "Third Way"-economies like Falangism or Peronism.
We are over 1.5. Waiting 10 years to call it is stupid. Im onboard with stopping oil and rewild now even though I'm likely to be among the dead. But I don't see us doing anything to curb consumption.
Decoupling the economy from growth and instead tie to the environment and people. But whatever we do we’re late. We need to have the rate of consumption.
My last car lasted me 13 years, and the one before that lasted me 9 years. Aside from my very first car, I've never bought another car until the previous one died on me. I've always assumed this was the normal way to extract maximum value from our car purchases.
In the video she gave an example, if someone drives a car three years and gets a new one, it's not necessarily a negative - usually someone else out there buys the used car and it still gets it's "average car life". That used car buyer is probably also upgrading from an older car that's even worse for the environment. The oldest cars are going to die on someone, but it doesn't necessarily have to be you.
Till the wheels fall off is the only way to roll. The car culture is one of our most twisted human obsessions. Seeing the world through a windshield on the same road to hell day after day. This guest never mentioned military fossil emissions either. All wars are bankers wars.
"Died" is a relative term entirely dictated by context. Motivated people and people in developing countries can keep vehicles on the road for a million miles.
@@charlesbonnet8057Unless they ban internal combustion engine cars, in which case, western car buyers will denied all improvements to the ICE, and the western vehicle fleet will undergo "Cuba-fication" where people will desperately keep jalopies on the road as long as possible.
Sorry but Hannah Ritchie is deeply wrong in her book, not honest at all in her representation of the problem, and she doesn't actually advocate that any substantial changes sufficient to avoid the catastrophe that is already active on the planet. Incidentally, the fossil fuels industry loves climate optimism.
I think the elephant in the room is that we need to address our ecominc system and have fundemental change. Our way of consuption of the planets resources is not sustainable. I for one am in favor of socialism being the system we change to. Where we rationally plan what our economy will look like and choose to embrace sustainablitly, rather than the way things are now with impersonal, irrational market forces and powerful undemocratic organizations running the economy.
We needed to address the economic system and fundamental change 30 years ago. We are so, so far past incremental change being enough. we need sudden, dramatic global changes to have any chance of avoiding 2C and according to the more recent research might actually be heading to 5C-10C by end of century as we better understanding the masking effect of aerosols and the impact of methane released from the permafrost is having.
Adam thinks that being anticapitalist is a sort of perfectionism that ignores smaller changes in favor of the one big change, which he thinks will take a very long time to achieve and is therefore not practical. I disagree. We live in a world where companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have quickly and radically changed the lives of every single person in this country, and most people around the world. The way we live now would have seemed impossible even twenty years ago. But because it was accomplished by giant corporations, we accept it as normal and acceptable. But why should we limit ourselves only to major changes enacted by corporations for their own profit motives? To say this is the true doomerism, because these companies are destroying the world and doing immense damage to all of us every day, even apart from climate change problems. Moving away from capitalism and towards socialism is literally the most practical thing we can do.
One of their main points was contrary to your strong single solution, saying we're stuck with capitalism on this timescale (battling climate change.) While we could enact massive sudden improvement if everyone agreed, there's an incredibly heavy burden of our society, culture and lifestyle you're trying to heave out of the way. It doesn't matter how similar to our current lives it could be, or how easy or how improved, what stops us is the fear and mystery. If you came up with the way to convince everyone and get it done, you'd be president tomorrow.
11:44 in “adam ruins everything” on electric cars he totally ignores the second hand car market. Here he does it again. These cars don’t cease to exist when someone buys a new car. They get purchased by someone else. Cars stay in the roads for many years and change hands several times.
Regardless of what kind of car you drive, they all drive on fossil-fuel derived rubber tires. Car tires contribute to 300,000 tons of rubber particle pollution in the US and UK alone. Tires contribute 1000x more to particle pollution than car exhausts. Car tires are found to be responsible for 78% of microplastics. The solution is to invest in other forms of transportation that are more efficient and less carbon intensive, like trains.
@@Guavauava I agree with you on this point, but that hasn’t been a point made by Adam when he has spoken about electric cars publicly. People need to make real fact based arguments to make a case against something. All cars have so many negative externalities. Pick one of them. Don’t make up fake ones instead. I’m actually more on your side. But I’m tired of people making it harder for anti car activism by making arguments that make us look like we don’t understand how markets work.
Right, buy buying a used car is still better than buying a new car, if more people bought less new cars it would normalize fewer sales (at least that's the idea) and it's the building of the cars that releases the most GHGs because it's ENERGY that causes the most GHGs, not necessarily driving itself, although driving does release CO, Carbon MONoxide, which reacts differently than carbon being released in manufacturing and energy sectors because that C attaches to oxygen when released into the atmosphere to become CO2. There is a reason warming was happening before cars.
@@whatabouttheearth but used cars are getting bought. There isn’t a surplus of used cars. If people stopped buying new cars the price of used cars would skyrocket. It already happened during the pandemic with the semiconductor shortage in the auto industry. Yes it would be nice if people stopped buying cars and used public transportation, but in North America that really isn’t an option because our public transportation systems are so bad and local governments don’t want shift resources to improve them. They would rather just add another lane because that is the politically safe option. So no, just buying used cars wouldn’t work until there are good ways to reduce demand for cars.
The reality of this is that MOST vehicle sales in the US are new vehicles, and the typical car in the US is only driven up to about 10 years before being retired and most used cars being sold are only between 2 and 3 years old. So ignoring the fact personal vehicle electrification currently necessitates the production of millions of new EVs to replace existing ICE vehicles (many of which would be retired before the end of their useful lifespan), the used car market does really represent a great carbon sink and ignores an inconvenient fact that cars aren't typically driven for their entire life span. Adam is 100% correct that Electric vehicles are a stop gap and are a marginal gain public transit and alternative commuting (i.e. telecommuting) are required changes to decarbonize the transportation networks on developed countries. The other issue too that will start to become apparent soon is that the used EV market that will be the need to replace battery packs, right now the battery in EVs constitutes most of the emissions produced to create the vehicles and even our best LiON batteries have a shelf life of less than a decade. Generally now since most car loans are amortized over 5-8 years by the time an EV makes it to the used market its will likely need to have a new battery pack installed. In fact this is currently a problem for all of the EVs sold during the late 2000s and early 2010s, a lot old Leafs and Codas can be bought cheap because they need a new battery pack that nearly costs the same as a new modern EV. The used market is fine for ICE vehicles but until the usable battery life is improved the EV used market will remain nearly useless. The used car market really only represents a way for people to save money of the purchase of vehicles it doesn't really act as a way for people to decarbonize, the people that buy a new car every few years and sell their lightly used car are required for the people that want to buy a used car. If everyone drove every vehicle to the end of its usable lifespan, then every car would need to be bought new cause there would be no used market, and the same number of vehicles would be manufactured.
Regarding the hopelessness, i cant speak for others, but i know that my hopelessness is compounded by a multitude of factors, from the broken political system in the united states, to the fact that i dont have even a single vote in the system that is dragging the world with it because im canadian, to the fact that our political leadership up here is nothing but wannabes who constantly try to be their murrican counterparts. I want to see a better world, and i want to be wrong, but the seeing an active genocide being propped up my the government down there, and knowing that the opposition party would be doing the same or worse, really drives home the lack of actual power that most of us have over the things that determine the overwhelming majority of the actual damage being done. Also, im a queer disabled person staring down the barrel of a virulently anti-queer fascist movement that has been rising across the world, and knowing that the people in charge of my province are actively dedicated to making my life worse, or ultimately ending it, if they can get away with it.
I think a bigger issue was actually raised in an older factually we as individuals have far less impact then corporations and government. Most of those who want to make positive changes also usually can't afford it. A good example of this is the aussie electric conversion kit. It allows you to convert your current petrol car or hybrid to an electric for a fraction of the price but even that fraction at 30.000$ is still far to expensive for most people. Cancelling millionaire tax breaks would allow the government to pay for any pre 2015 or 2020 car to be converted through a government rebate of 100% would make a massive difference cleaning up so many cars but they're not likely to do it. In the end I think most of us are jaded from understanding that us as individuals can't make an impact and those that can are to greedy.
Converting cars is a rich car collector option. It's for people who are willing to pay extra to keep a beloved chassis. It was never meant as a cheap way to get an EV. For that price you get a cheap new EV or a used better one. An EV and an ICE car don't share much internally. And the doors and seats aren't the most valuable parts of a car.
30:30, calling China a "middle income country" is a bit disingenuous to what actually happened there however the key factors to Beijing's de-carbonization and a major decarbonization strategy employed in the late 2000s and early 2010s was regulating the quantity of personal vehicles, when they can be used, limiting where they can be used. China recognized in the past decade that the move to a car centric society (for them started in the mid 80s) was going to becoming a major nightmare, and started their famous license plate policies (i.e. only certain cars with certain license plates can drive on certain days) doing this they were able to regulate a significant cap on the traffic and air pollution that was being caused by commuting in city centers. Over the last decade has poured butt loads on money to improve its public transportation infrastructure and even when they started building those (now populated) "ghost cities" the first thing they did was add a rail station to nowhere before starting any other project because their government deems that to be important. Now these new pre-planned, pre-built cities are pretty easy to get around in. The implication that Dr. Ritchie is trying push is that the climate issue is a technology thing and that every small success will build up to big successes, but the issue is that isn't really how this works the reason that China has been so successful at decarbonizing (they still have a ways to go) and have made insane advances in electric car production and solar technology isn't because that is what the market wanted or leaders of the country being invested in the pursuit of knowledge, its that the Chinese government sees climate change as an existential threat and unlike countries like the US regulate corporations and hold them accountable for their actions through company ending fines, requiring CEOs and management to step down or even face legal charges. If a company in the US poisons waterways to 100s-1000000s of people that company will face fines, but nothing happens to management (look at just all the terrible things monsanto has done) where as in China if an accident like that were to occur, the upper management C-Suite execs are taken to court and put on trial, there as a pretty controversial trial in the last 5 years where a chemical company did have a spill and killed people the CEO was tried and found guilty of murder and given a death sentence. Holding the biggest polluters accountable for the destruction they cause is an incredibly necessary step to dealing with climate change. Claiming that countries can improve but then not pointing out that the improvements are not due to technology changes but instead by policy change is pretty infuriating, especially with how flippant Dr. Ritchie's response to Adam's introduction of public transportation as a necessary change is. Calling electrification of personal transportation anything but a stop gap is naive.
it's not policy, it's having communists in power and a way to distribute the surplus that isn't adolescent billionaires. the west fundamentally lacks the political infrastructure to do ANYTHING AT ALL, and even if we did, people in the western cores are too stupid to comprehend, too self-centered to care.
Thanks so much for this! I work hard every single day in the renewables industry (I make highly detailed survey maps of large areas in the rural US for mega wind and solar farms), and it really sucks when people insist it's too late and there's no hope and we shouldn't bother. I guess that makes me solarpunk?
There is a RUclips channel Knowing better. When I try to go vegetarian I literally have nightmares about hamburgers so that's not an option for me since I already have insomnia. But he says, skip meat at breakfast that's 33% vegetarian. When I heard that I started not eating meat at breakfast and lunch. 67% reduction from me!
Veganism is nice from the environmental impact standpoint, but it completely ignores the reality of human biology and a couple of hundred thousands years of evolution that has made us omnivores.
I have insomnia too from my busy mind. CBD oil before bed helps but mindfullness practice to improve my concentration has had a marked increase. I don't think people who care about the world can ever sleep soundly :(
at 11:00 the carbon debt isn't just at manufacturing there is a huge carbon at the point of disposal as well, at the end of life of any product it MUST be disposed of correctly, it needs to be broken down and the hazardous parts need to be made inert. If that means those parts can be fed back into the system to make more of that same product great, but otherwise we are causing environmental hazards if we. A: Don't correctly dispose of the product at the end of its lifecycle (which is the route all manufactures in the US takes for everything and its dispicable) which turns into enviromental non-GHG pollution that has the power to destroy eco-systems which then can lead to GHG production and reduction in sequestration B: Pretend that the correct disposal of these products doesn't create any emissions (which is what a lot of EV advocates do, even though there is a big foot print when it come to breaking down and re-refining the various precious metals contained in the product) THE COST OF DISPOSAL NEEDS TO BE FACTORED IN! EVs will always be a band aid solution, a single diesel commuter engine that can carry 100-200 passengers will always produce fewer emissions over its lifetime than 100-200 EVs driven solely by individual people. EVs are and will always be a marginal gain unless paired with social solutions like improving transit, 1 EV buss that carries an average of 20 people a day will always out perform those same 20 people requiring 20 EVs to be built. Like its crazy to think that EVs are the solution to the problem, an economic world centered around individualism is what has gotten us into this mess and it will not get us out of the this mess.
The carbon question also doens't mention at all in this podcast that we have warmed enough that the permafrost is melting and dumping huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Which is a much more potent greenhouse gas and is going to rapidly accelerate warming in the next decade.
26:15 Dr. Ritchie has such a narrow focus each of these arguments that keep getting made are overly simplifying what is going on, ignoring the light pollution issue (which actually is a very big issue) using LED bulbs as an example of how the improvement of efficiency doesn't mean that the gains won't be diminished with additional use ignores two the emissions required to make them, and the emissions required to dispose of them. Yes overall even with people using them in abundance with respect to older technologies like tungsten or fluorescent in the US the year-to-year power savings through their use has been astronomical, however this ignores that there is a big cost to the manufacturing of the various electronic components, and there is a big cost to disposing of them correctly after they have been used up. There has also been a big issue industry wide where LED bulbs only last 3 or fewer years, MANY LED bulbs are made with inferior components and are wired in series making a product that contains dozens of components that can completely fail if even a single one dies meaning that most of these products die before their lifespan should dictate it should. Technically you can return bulbs if they die prematurely under their manufactures warranty but no one does. Its easy enough for the end user to repair LED bulbs, but the fact of the matter is most people don't and when you start to account for the increased manufacturing and disposal costs of LED bulbs over tungsten filament, LED still comes out a head but not by as much as being lead on here...
Spot on! It is amazing how the so-called smartest people in our society are acctually ignorant of suh things....I think it is no coincidence. I am no Einstein but I was not the best student at school but i've noticed that those who were the best and brightests were actually performing on tests that always had a clear answer in the back of the text book or took a view/position that was favourable to those in authority. Hannah seems to be one of those types. I'm sure there are thousands or so brilliant female minds that could do her job but not be brainwashed into neo-classical economic ideology. Hae you heard about Jevons Parodox or the Rebound Effect. LEDs are a good example of that. People buy a lot more precisely because they use less power and as a result they use more energy (or at least embodied energy).
I've got Philips ultra-efficient light bulbs that run room temperature and seem to last forever. They get 180 lumens per watt, about as good as you can get in the 120 volt market. I don't think the state or the power companies are subsidizing costs on light bulbs anymore, so I bore the full cost and reap the benefits.
@@gregorymalchuk272 I am happy you managed to find some light bulbs that have lasted a long time, but as someone who has been using LED bulbs has purchased expensive and cheap ones and repairs them, I can assure the vast majority of these bulbs do not last, to the point where every box of LED bulbs I have purchased going back to 2012 has a 5-10 year manufacturer warranty included as part of the purchase. i.e. these companies are so certain that their products will have failures that they are willing to replace their 5 dollar light bulbs when they die instead of just using quality parts (decent caps for the most part). Those Phillips bulbs aren't even available where I live, and are also the glass and filament style which cannot be opened, repaired and resealed like the plastic dome bulbs, which means that their life span cannot be easily expanded through minor repairs like replacing the cap on the board. Also just because one company has decided to make a good durable product at a premium for what is already a premium product doesn't change the fact that the market is flooded with unreliable products produced by US mega corps.
I put solar panels on the roof of my house. This lowered my consumption from the grid down to nearly zero. I don't have a battery storage system (yet) - so I do use electricity at night for AC (required to exist in South Texas where I live) and ancillary uses; we have changed our behavior to use high power systems - like the washer and dryer, and dishwasher - only during the day. This behavior change, coupled with Solar energy has driven our usage of the grid power (which itself is being moved towards solar and wind) to less than 1%: 99% less than we used 2 years ago. There is also a tax rebate that helped (slightly - the year I installed it for $63,000 - I got a $5000 rebate [based on my income unfortunately I'm not rich].) At the end of the day I traded a $300 power bill (during high usage periods) for a $300 loan payment - so largely a net zero cost change for me. But the tradeoff for me was lowering my carbon footprint from grid use down to 1% - which has to have a positive impact.
Are you allowed to harvest your own rainwater? That's the next thing you can do to limit your environmental impact - collect the water off your roof and use it for your needs instead of mains water taken from an aquifer or river somewhere. Of course a lot of housing in the US is unsuitable for this because the roof is covered with toxic bitumen products, but if you have a clean roof material then water self-sufficiency becomes very easy. The next step after shelter, water, and electricity, is growing your own food, but that's a lot more work than the first three.
@@tealkerberus748 I think it depends on where you live, and the municipality rules and state laws. That being said, if you use swales and small ponds on your own property, I think you would have a better chance of not getting into any trouble with laws. IANAL - caveat emptor. Do your own research on the subject.
I am a nihilist. I am convinced that global climate change is going to be humans extinction event, simply because we as a species are too amoral to manage our own intellectual development. But I still do my part because I also know I might be wrong. Why are both of you assuming that nihilist and Dick are synonyms?
Adam, maybe your buds are buying a new car every couple of years, but the average age of a car on the road in the US is over 12 years. And where I live, the electricity is hydro-not great for other reasons, but carbon free. And I have 6kw of solar on my roof. So when we shuttle our kids to the three different teams we coach (with 3 teams worth of gear), in our huge EV, we’re at least not spewing carbon. Would be better if we rode the bike, but it’s WAY better than our Ford Flex was. And, we like the car. If it keeps running, we’ll never buy another car.
I'm not a doomer, I just don't see how we overcome the opposition's money without resulting to violence. The billionaires can literally buy the laws they want and basically pay to not obey the ones we have. And we're not willing to have a second French Revolution about it.
I think along with a lot of people in this comment section, I feel a little weird about this episode. I'm a big fan of the show, but this definitely feels just like an electric car commercial. In reality, the vast majority of pollution and carbon emissions come from factories I haven't heard anything about that the changes in actual industry other than what we can personally do, because there are some kind of far possibilities for us to actually combat the industry itself, but I did not see that addressed in this episode, perhaps you could do an episode on that.
Setting up our lives and homes so that we can handle a transition to a mediaeval/iron age technology isn't easy, but that's the long term resilient choice. If green tech or cold fusion does suddenly come along and rescue us all we won't have lost anything, but being prepared for Decline or Collapse is the best way to not die in that scenario.
...on the Impossible meat and the like, I find the replacement most useful in situations where the meat is normally present but not a real focus. Meat taste and texture is a real integral part of a burger, but in something like a taco dip where you could use beef, turkey, or pork and the difference wouldn't be super noticeable, it seems to do fine. I'm also really hopeful on dairy substitutes -- plant-based cheese is still not something I feel good about but I've pretty well been able to switch to plant-based milk and cream substitutes without issue.
What is required is a radical change in social values, away from consumerism and instant gratification toward minimalism, understanding what is essential and a willingness to make deep sacrifice. Sadly, I'm the pessimist who sees only a very slim chance of such a thing happening. Then again, I have seen many amazing things in my life, so who knows?
If there's any good to come out of millennials/zoomers/Gen A coming up in an economy that allows for very few luxuries, it's that we're being forced to adjust our values to match.
I think this is the wrong approach. People adapt their morals to their material and cultural context. Consumerism and instant gratification exist side by side with grueling diet and exercise regimens, as well as many other forms of moral puritanism. If we created larger systems where it's possible and encouraged to live with sane limitations, most people would adapt easily. We should focus on changing systems, not on individual moral improvement.
This is an unpopular opinion, but I would support a gas tax of 50 cents or so a gallon, to fund decarbonization efforts.... charging infrastructure, power grid, etc. But some people absolutely lose their shit over 20 cents a gallon.
Put the tax on fuel and direct the income from that tax to grants for low-income drivers to change up to electric vehicles. Don't let the government keep that tax as income or they'll get dependent on it and they won't want that income drying up.
Can you make a video on the inflation deduction act, but focus more on congress and Senate instead of saying biden is the reason the plan isn't good enough for climate change. I get real tired of seeing people complain when we should be looking at the government as a whole and making representatives responsible for not representing our best interest and being bought out by these oil companies to turn the other way.
People like to complain, but the three climate scientists I follow all say the Inflation Reduction Act is working, and that it is the most effective program for mitigating climate change in US history. Could the US do more? Certainly, but I don't think it makes sense to complain about this one. Sometimes some things go right for once. It's good to celebrate those wins.
Glad you mentioned veganism several times, but you really understated how important it is and the myriad of reasons. One, it's about the animals, but more applicable here, it's the one solution that deals with reducing carbon but doesn't reduce the aerosols, which in turn causes more warming. Reducing emissions isn't a solution in any meaningful way until we've dealt with the aerosol masking and effects on albedo. MEER Reflection Project is the only group i know of that takes this seriously. We need to build lots of mirrors if we really want to solve this. And just stop eating meat. It's not good for you, and it's even worse for the planet and for wildlife. It may seem difficult but that's only a story we tell ourselves as an excuse. It really is pretty easy. And guess what? It feels great too
So, I got as far as 49:11 and I hadn’t heard anything about irreversible feedback loops or the potential changing of the AMOC. I just could listen any longer to the drivel.
I got Hannah's book out of the library a couple of days before this podcast dropped, so I'll be interested to see if what she talks about here is borne up in more depth there. I do like that she's trying to walk the line between despair and optimism - as Leena Norms here on RUclips talks about, Positive Panic is so much more mobilising than doom and gloom. I'm disappointed at the apparent lack of understanding about our food systems and the talking up of the Green Revolution. Yes, we're farming more food and getting higher yields, but framing biotechnology or a continuance of current Big Ag strategies as the way forward is worrying. We have the ability and the technology RIGHT NOW to change our food systems so that farmers are supported to move to practices that capture carbon in their soils, and are paid actual living wages while they do it. As always the barrier is oligopolys that benefit from the current system. And that's not even touching the fact that we already produce more enough food to feed the entire human population - it's just unevenly distributed. Because capitalism.
Never underestimate our capacity for self-delusion. Unfortunately the laws of physics are real and all this is pretending that simply changing where the energy is expended will matter. Oh, and selling a book, of course.
yeah it is such a waste of a brain. but these people writing their books and giving their talks are paid hamsonly byt the elite so they get reinforcement for their BS
wouldn't you say that capitalism being in crisis effectively shielding it from attempts to fix it incentivises capitalists to never allow us to truly fix problems? if all that stops us from sending them to the guillotines is a larger, more urgent crisis, where is the incentive to solve those problems?
I'm getting the impression Dr. Ritchie believes it isn't too late to do something, but that wasn't really the issue. The issue is, WILL that something be done? I think history has shown us that no, the people with the power to make change happen will not do it, as long as it threatens their hold on their power and profits.
Climate change is starting to bite the wealthy. Increased frequency of disasters is destroying the insurance industry, which will also impact real estate portfolios. There's many other similar issues which will motivate the plutocrats, but not before there's a whole world of hurt.
I think this is exactly the opposite message we need. If we actually tell people we are on course for a sixth mass extinction then at least later we can say we were honest. In 20 years young people will be furious that we bullshitted them that things might be ok if we turned down the thermostat a little.
Did you watch the video? I think there was some oversimplification for sure, but more of these conversations need to happen rather than be shut down by the doomsayers...
There is something we can do, it's just not pretty. Every day, we get closer to the Bell Riots. It just really depends on how long it takes us to get there.
I think Adam shows very little respect for radical thought here, on prison abolition, anticapitalism and veganism. I assume this is an interview posture and not necessarily reflective of his own thoughts. This one is gonna be about prisons. A lot of the current work of prison abolition is that people ***like*** to see the bad guys punished. They don't see the punishment of guilty people as a necessary evil to create social incentives for good behaviour. In fact, they are willing to compromise the entire detterence aspect of law enforcement by granting civil rights protection against fabrication of evidence and manufacture of conviction for innocent people, if it means innocent people are less likely to get punished. Punishment is not a necessary evil to achieve deterence, disabling and rehabilitation - Punishment IS THE GOAL - to obtain retribution on evil-doers by making them suffer. According to Christie (1981), most conducts that we understand in a vacuum to be "crimes" actually occur within the context of a significant civic relationship (friends, coworker, parent-child, teacher, etc.). In the context of those relationship, the stability of the relationship is often the most important factor in understanding the conduct to begin with. For example, we don't want to understand teenage classmates who get into a fight as assault and battery under any but the most extreme circumstances. A son who takes money from their parents without asking permission is almost never charged with theft. Even rape and incest are almost never understood as crimes by the people who are victimized by it while the relationship provides shelter or otherwise provide affective safety to the victim (see also disorganized attachment patterns - which is when an attachment figure is both a source of safety and danger to the subject). What this means is that the denouncing of an offensive conduct as a crime is implicitely a problem of lack of social capital from either the victim or the perpetrator. "Social capital" is the bonds of mutual trust that a person has which enables them to call upon favours and to get help and support from informal associations (friends, family, coworkers, etc.), to start projects and transform the environment. In environments where there is a lot of relatively evenly distributed social capital, the number of offensive conducts is lower, and crime reported are low. People trust in and protect each other, and they resolve conflicts among themselves. In environments where there is little social capital, the number of offensive conducts is low, but crime reported is high. People aren't able to trust and protect each other, so they rely on law enforcement to judiciarize and settle disputes. In environments where there is much social capital, but it is mostly controlled by an elite minority, offensive conducts are high and crime reported is low. Think Weinstein or Cozby. People work tirelessly to protect and enable the elites who own the social capital in the hopes that they will give them some amount of protection. They don't interpret offenses by the capital owning person as a crime, because the police can expect to hit against a wall of silence that protects the capital owners. The fundamental problem with police, is if you want to reduce, not just **crimes**, but all offensive conducts, whether understood as a crime or not, what you want to do is to create high-trust high-equality communities that take care of each other, and the intervention of police in a community to arrest members prevents them from taking care of community members and reinforces inequality and lack of access to support. If you arrest all the dads, people will grow up without dads. Having police and prisons is worse than having nothing. On a small scale, if you were killed by a serial killer, you might be better off if there was a police who had disabled the killer from finding and killing you. But on a large scale, you will not be killed by a serial killer, serial killers don't get found and don't get arrested, they roam freely among us and the police aren't doing anything. If you get your stuff stolen from you, you don't need a cop, you need an insurance guy. Sometimes you need a cop just because the insurance guy won't collaborate if you don't talk to the cop, which wouldn't be a problem if we had universal public crime indemnisation insurance. What? They say their car was stolen, there's no reccord of them ever having a car to begin with? Just give them a car, who cares? This might even stop them from stealing something else from someone else. If the government is easy to fraud/scam and there is little consequences, people won't fraud/scam other ordinary people. Ah, but I am getting into solutions already. I wanted to avoid that. Bottom line is crime is a social construct that reveals a lack of social trust between community members, and cops interfere with trust-building, so cops create a "crime" understanding of social offenses. And what should be done about social offenses is actually a matter of casuistics that account for all the social aspects and relationships in play, not jurisprudence and evidence and guilt and innocence.
Professor Simon Michaux of the Finland geographical survey has calculated that we don't have the minerals for one 25 year generation of The Green Transition. Copper reserves are for instance only 10% of what we would need.
this "don't be a doomer" conversation as usual avoids the empirical data - there's this fake assumption that doomers think we're doomed because of economics or capitalism? Hilarious - that's totally not true. No mention of the world's largest ocean shelf having 1200 gigatons of pressurized methane. No mention of the Aerosol Masking Effect being twice as bad as previously thought. No mention of Iowa being one rainfall last summer from total crop loss - and the UN predicted 309 million people without food this year - our drought -famine situation will be dire very soon. These are not "economic" reasons but rather on the ground empirical ecological reasons people think we're doomed.
well she will never do an interview with him. As long as Hannah chooses her interviewers carefully she can avoid that unfortunate flaw in her model of the world
It's not that we feel that everything is doomed, it is that we feel it is completely out of our hands. We want change, but the people who can enact that change wants only profit.
@@bonanzajellybean4802 I do. I rarely buy stuff that isn't second hand, keep my old machines running rather than replacing them, I bike pretty much everywhere and try to research companies I buy stuff from. I also vote. I feel pretty much all of that is doing absolutely jack shit. I know me not buying a product because I don't like the practices of the corporation making them isn't going to be even noticed by anyone. I do it for myself, out of sheer spite. I know full well someone else is just going to buy it, enjoy it for a while and then throw it away. Despite what we're told, individual consumers have virtually no power whatsoever. If we all took responsibility, then sure, we could make changes, but most people are perfectly happy with the way things are going.
@@bonanzajellybean4802 It really does. I do have many friends I hang out with and while it doesn't exactly give me hope for the future, it does make the present very nice indeed.
Ok, but what do we do about all the emissions we already released? Climate lag, which takes about 40 years, means the terrible effects we feel today are only from the emissions released in 1984. That's right when we started ramping up our emissions exponentially. Even if we hit net 0 emissions TODAY, we'd still be doomed if we didn't put the genie we already released 40 years ago back in the bottle. So how do we bottle up what we already released? Or is the inference here that we're somehow just going to ride them out for the next 40 years, paying no attention to all the Climate Tipping Points (these cannot be undone) which will have been triggered by that time? I'm genuinely asking.
Three separate climate scientists I follow have separately said that net zero means global temperature rapidly hits equilibrium, inside about 5 years. Their colleagues agree with them. The sting is that stopping temperature increases does not reverse tipping points we have already passed. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is ruinously expensive with our current technology, and is the only path to recovery inside our children's lifetimes. The faster we reach NET ZERO, the more we limit long term climate related damage. Much easier to prevent damage than to try to fix it afterwards.
You are right in that preventing climate change is no longer an option. Change is already happening and will get worse before it gets better. But that doesn't mean "doom". Climate change is not a binary thing where we either totally prevent it or everything gets cooked. There's a range of possible futures. Some of them much worse than others. So yes, change is happening and will continue to happen even if we magically get to net 0 tomorrow evening. But giving in to doomerism and giving up would just put us on course for worst possible future trajectory. Doomerism is nothing but the new excuse for not getting bothered to do anything, replacing denial. Both are stupid and short-sighted.
I'm glad you talked about veganism with more than just a mention. It's the best and easiest way for the average person to have a huge impact. Factory farming is the single biggest contributor to global warming. It's effect gets massively downplayed because the meat and dairy industry have a lot of money invested in keeping people on their products. I will say that most vegans generally wouldn't call "vegan sometimes" or "vegan before 6" vegan. Veganism is a lifestyle and not just a diet. Generally eating less meat and dairy would be going plant based. I do appreciate people making an effort. Because like you said don't let perfect be the enemy of good. In the future when scientists can make mock meat taste just animal meat then yeah maybe we could vegan. I don't pretend that's going to happen now. Veganism's effect on the slowing of global warming shouldn't be downplayed. People are very attached to food, so it's definitely hard to change those habits and traditions. I just wish more people would try. I wish more environmentalists would be vegan. It's not that veganism is the only solution or the end all be all, but that if you really care about slowing the warming why not do it? Or at least put a solid effort trying. Veganism with everything else has a chance at changing the status quo.
I do want to mention that for Bittman's "vegan before 6," he didn't describe himself as a vegan overall. It was an argument that such a lifestyle shift would likely result in increased health benefits and maybe in losing weight. It also limits some other foods (white sugar, pasta, processed foods) before 6 pm, foods you could eat and still be vegan. As you mentioned, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is a big deal. Why not go vegan? For me, going vegan right now would be...difficult. I'm a recovered (there's always the risk of relapse) ED sufferer with probably three different autistic people in the household, each with different food texture and flavor sensitivities, and some of the people in the household suffer health conditions that have various food restrictions as well. This makes extra changes challenging if we're feeding the household. The messaging that you can still make a difference if you go more in the plant based direction even if you don't engage in absolutes is really helpful in a situation like mine. I work on substitutions where I think I can incorporate them well, I work on having more days a week free of animal products, and I work on reducing the amount of animal products consumed when we do consume them. For most people, turning around and doing this from their normal diet as an absolute is likely to fail and result in a feeling of helplessness because you couldn't do the thing right the first time. Going through and starting with trying some plant-based products, increasing the percentage of your diet that's plant-based, etc, is a more feasible start for most of us. And then the challenge is to keep moving in the right direction. If you find you reduce your consumption of animal-based products by over 50%, that's not insignificant even if it's not all the way to having a plant-based diet.
we need to act now and what will end, if we do not act, is fucking civilisation and the modern era as we know it. so how can people not to the streets rn?
i have seen interviews and things with her for several years now. im not really a fan of the type of messaging she does along with others. they don't understand the line between saying "we are fucked we have to make positive change starting now" and pressing urgency and when people just say "were fucked there is no use" , they often group the two together and I honestly think this stupid optimism on the subject is just adding more complacency and is dangerous. just my personal thoughts though. not to mention she is a head at our world in data, which has this very neoliberal the world is great its just your attitude vibe to it in the way they select data.
Why is anti-capitalism viewed as pessimistic? It's honestly baffling. It's the whole capitalist realism meme, all over again. "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." More like, "it is easier to imagine surviving class warfare by allying with all but the most avaricious industrialists than it is to imagine actually solving our current problems and freeing ourselves to tackle bigger problems." How comfortable do people have to be to find optimism in compromising with their oppressors? Do you not want to win? Siding with the face-eaters as long as they promise not to eat /your/ face isn't how you get there. I'm sorry you feel like you've figured out the game but that's not any kind of guarantee that you'll be able to win it and it certainly doesn't help the rest of us. Capitalism requires poverty and misery to inspire everyone to compete, since there's no social safety net. We need to be building cooperative models, not holding hands with the wannabe gentry.
Everything will be fine if we just convince people to live differently. Oh, that's great! How did no one think of that before? We had T. Midgley Jr. sniffing lead to prove not only is it not harmful, but beneficial. The Italian politician that went to drink water full of PFAS and said to the people it was good. The Japanese guy eating fish from Fukushima, which should be the least harmful thing on the list, but it just shows a trend. People will do anything for profit. Unless you can put healthy food at the price of junk food and raise the prices on junk food to exorbitant numbers, you won't get anywhere. But how would you produce that amount of healthy food, with good agricultural practices, without pesticides, intense deforestation and many other ugly things? How would you keep obesity running rampant, while throwing away more than 2 billion tons of food every year, and letting a lot of people die from starvation? How would you use all water to grow monoculture crops to feed the animals inside intensive farms? And how will you do all that with clean energy, since farmers do not want to lose profit and keep throwing away food or junk, whatever the name is? How would you describe the environmental catastrophes brought on by mining? Have you heard about nickel in Indonesia, where they're still burning coal because they don't want to import energy as they'd lose profit? How about South Africa? Papua New Guinea? Nothing? The thing that is less harmful doesn't mean it's risk free. How would you describe landfills full of clothes, electronic devices, etc.? How would you describe Indian cotton farmers that are forced to buy seeds every year because they've been modified to bear fruit just once? I mean, the list just goes on and on, but the comment section is not a place for that. If there isn't a u-turn in human behaviour, there's no place for optimism in climate change matters. I would argue that this is also denial and climate inaction. Saying that we're not doomed doesn't benefit anyone but those seeking profit. You say that saying we're doomed makes you not care? Oh, I still eat organic, don't eat meat, don't drive a car and so on, but I do think we're doomed. Let's put it this way. If you see 15 people engaging in violent behaviour of any sort, what does it change for you if you arrive 16th and do the same thing? Nothing! You're the same as the first one. As for me, I just decide not to participate in violence and destruction, but that doesn't mean the other 15 will follow my example. On the contrary, other 15 will join in. And you may scale it up to your pleasure. Just let me ask you one last thing. If this is something our existence relies upon, how is money the issue? Shouldn't we ensure our existence before talking about money? If electric cars will save us, how come they were costing 100k at launch? Profit comes first and, if someone survives, it will all be good. Now it's up to you and this thoughtful scientist to explain this to a lot of people. I'll give you a pass if you convince one. The time starts now.
I would like some advice for those that are monetarily challenged, ie poor. I already buy used cars that get driven into ground, and then buy another used car. I would love to eat more fresh vegetables and fruits but the price is just getting higher. Please we need more direction on what to do to save ourselves and the planet
@@junderlandgames1186 Finding a way to live somewhere that you can grow your own vegetables is the challenge. If you have access to a backyard, that's a great way to turn a few hours a week into better food than you can buy, and the exercise is healthy and free too. But if you live in an apartment and don't have the money for a fancy wall-mounted hydroponic system, it's hard to take that first step.
Swapping red meat to chicken or fish is one simple change that makes a significant difference for the climate, even if that's just one meal a week. You can do that even if you live in a food desert, and even if you only have access to fast food. Another useful change is to eat beef mince dishes that contain beans, fairly common for Mexican dishes. The beans replace half the meat with vegetable protein.
Humanity is a capable species. We can fix these problems. If you ever feel like you have no purpose in your life. Make THIS your purpose. Make fixing this problem your BUSINESS. Your JOB! Your MISSION! I am looking at jobs in this industry and moving my time to solving this. Let's be the shephards of this world. Let's fulfill the role to meet the moment.
Adam makes one very important point: humans can do more than one thing at a time. However the order that we do things makes a big difference. The first thing we need to do is take control of the media away from the ultra capitalists.
I would hate to do something for living, and not even know what is the source of biggest problem in my field of "expertise". the fact that she even mentions meat, which is fraction of total food consumption of each person, which is small fraction of each person's contribution, with most of it being from energy consumption for phones and pc's, which also is a tiny fraction of total contribution, like, there's literally nothing we individuals can do to limit this, cause we're barely contributing to it to begin with. well, lamericans can do something, they can protest for their government to close all the 1000's of military bases they have around the world, and to reduce military spending, cause that's the sole contributor that no one needs and that we'd feel basically overnight if it were removed...
Meat and dairy accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization. Whether feeding our cows methane reducing seaweed, or switching to chicken, or switching one meal per week to plant based protein, that helps more than most other decisions we can make as individuals. If you can buy an EV and charge it on solar power, that's even better but most people can't do that yet. Even better than that is to buy an electric bike and use that instead of a car, if that's something you can do. I can't. Most other climate mitigation efforts depend upon governments and corporations.
Sorry, but we’re doomed. We know what needs to be done to solve climate change, but we’re unwilling to do it as a whole species. We keep hoping someone’s going to invent some magic tech that’s going to make everything better, and no one wants to challenge capitalism, and its dream of unlimited growth, as the fundamental driver of climate change.
Even if all of society was suddenly brainwashed into prioritizing the elimination of greenhouse gasses and transitioning to 100% clean living... its TOO LATE. All of the sand has slipped through the hourglass. We. Are. Doomed.
Most Americans I know do not buy a new car every three years. A lot of people lease cars and lease agreements are usually three years long so people will then trade in their leased car for a new one and the leased car will be sold as a used car. It may be that I live in a more rural area, but lots of people do hold on to their cars for a very long time
I'm in the US. Most people I know keep new bought cars at least 5 years. Almost none of my friends lease. A map showing the average time people keep new cars could be very enlightening.
It's not even that. You can have one rich person who buys a new car every year, but then someone a bit less rich buys a one year old car and sells it at five years, someone else buys a five year old car and sells it at ten years, someone else buys a ten year old car and drives it until it dies... The real question is, what is the median age of a car when it goes to the wreckers?
Adam, "tomorrow" will definitely be worse not better for a long time to come, even if we keep the temp below 1.5C according to scientists. By the way, today we are at 1.15°C rise and going up quickly. Based on the NOAA chart we'll reach 1.5°C around 2040 or just 16 more years. We need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions even faster now.
@@Muddslinger0415 we were on track to 3.5°C by 2100. Now we're on track to 2.7°C by 2100, so we're making progress. Of course, 2.7°C is still a kind of hell for most of humanity, but it's better than it could've been. Every 0.1°C we get that down, the fewer people will go through hell, floods, fire, and famine.
Increase the thickness of winter Arctic sea ice, means it lasts longer through the summer and covers a bigger area. Solutions to do that are difficult, basically on the scale of building several city-sized freshwater snow machines on the northern shores of Canada, near the Beaufort Gyre, where most of the winter sea ice is formed with the help of the Arctic Ocean currents.
The thing that scares me most about the future is not that we don't have tools to deal with the climate crisis, however difficult it is to implement them, the problem is we're struggling in so many fronts as a society, dealing with extremism in politics and religion, fueled by rampant disinformation at unprecedented levels as a result of mismanaged social media and AI. So it would be hard to tackle the climate if we were focused on that, but it's a million times harder to do it while flat earthers in every subject are stronger than ever.
The worse it gets, the more unity and desperation will ignite change. We're already seeing that positive social tipping point in progress, particularly in our younger generation. Problem is how many people will die, how many refugees, how many species extinct, how many feet of sea level increase?
Look into REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE: it uses less water, also restores abused water tables, it is also scalable because multiple crops are grown contiguously, and animals and plants can be raised without the chemicals used in traditional GMO hybridized tillage farming. This is a factor that should be pushed to really impact the food situation. It would also address one of the key problems with the current food: lack of nutrition found in modern mass-produced food.
Yes! This! I'm always frustrated by these types of conversations when they talk up the effects of the Green Revolution but blatantly ignore the massive downsides it brought it terms of soil and animal health. The amount of carbon drawdown you get from a properly managed pasture (especially silvopasture operations) is unreal.
I’ll be the annoying Vegan here. Sorry everyone. First off, if you want to eat meat, that’s perfectly fine. The reality is that most westerners really over consume meat. If you want to talk about the meat industries impact on climate change you need to discuss the economics of it. They’re using tobacco tactics on us, with our own money, as mandated by the government. It’s an injustice to not explain what a Caged Animal Farm Operation is. Because that’s where 90% of meat comes from. If you want to come at it from the Health angle, then you need to sit down with Dr Micheal Greger. He’s the encyclopedia on the health benefits of a Plant Based diet. Which would have profound effects on public health outcomes. Even the go to “meat is good for you” summary admits a reduced intake improved health outcomes. Seriously, I think you two would jam really well. You really should explore these topics in depth in the future. You’re the perfect ambassador for the cause, because you understand both sides well. Loved the episode! Really got me feeling things and my mind working. Keep up the great work.
I don't agree with the message at the end that people can think we can make ALL the necessary changes without life getting worse in some, or many, ways. That leads to selfish and naive decision making - anything perceived that will make your life 'worse' will be denied and blocked because 'we can do it without making life worse.' Life is going to get worse for almost everyone on the planet. It has to in order for us to attempt to fix all of the problems. That is a noble and necessary sacrifice.
I really appreciate how respectful and good-faith the discussions (even the disagreements) are in this podcast. I like it when people gracefully acknowledge that they may be wrong about something.
This conversation really just seemed more masturbatory than anything. I don't mean to be a downer and I hate dumping on optimism but so many of the points were catch 22's to other points. It isn't possible to have cheap/clean energy when it is the economic driver it is in nearly every arena. We'd plunge into economic depressions immediately. And each year, those use numbers just track upwards. Just google up the expected energy use by the tech sector anticipated by 2030 alone. Its always a record year of fossil fuel production/consumption, its always a record year of waste creation. Hell, I live in a "blue" state and fossil fuels are our economic backbone and we are bottom 20 in waste diversion because we lack end stream markets for recycled goods. Efforts at best amount to degrees of slowing, but little else. We can't transition to cheap green energy without upending the system at its heart, which our host and guest agreed couldn't be done. Our economics are defined by a refusal to accept laws of thermodynamics and a general amorality. I could get an EV today, yet the shipping, manufacture, planned obsolescence, material mining plus the simple reality that my state/county runs its grid on coal and gas just makes it a fancy coal vehicle. Less emissions from the vehicle, more emissions from the plant. Consistently, every year EV sales go up, more tax credits get promised, yet every year our air quality gets worse. (Fun fact, early onset cancer is up 79.1% since 1990 globally. Google it). The legal prospects for ending ANY industry would take decades, and every "solution" is up against the reality that it needs to be monetarily profitable which creates an inevitable race to the bottom. All of these systems are so deeply interconnected that there is just no way to untie this knot, especially when those with the least interest have the most power. It was like the conclusion of every point they made was about eliminating capitalism at its core, or saying certain sectors need to be forcibly removed from capitalism, and then saying "but there is no way to end capitalism." The reality I see is that this isn't about changing economic systems nor political systems, its about trying to change individual beliefs and paradigms on a global scale. Certainly, this isn't impossible, but it will take generations. It will be the slow erosion of beliefs for some, and the rapid, violent shattering of beliefs for others depending on the winners and losers from disaster to disaster. For me, the conversation stopped being about preventing catastrophe some 20 years ago, the conversations we need to be having are more about how will we respond to the waves of catastrophes that await us. Planning for climate refugees, pandemics, pollutants/early illness, preparing more infrastructure, teaching more analog skills etc. The book title gets it right, it most likely isn't the end of the world, but it very likely is the end of modern lifestyles and systems. We are an adaptable bunch, and (gestures to Jeff Goldbloom) life finds a way, but me saving resources by going vegan while using less water in the sink and driving an EV won't matter for squat when a company down the road uses millions of gallons of water to frack a single well one time, off gassing methane in the process so that I can charge up that EV and smile that "I did my part" is just a preservation of the entrenched system killing us. No green energy alternative can create the same economic incentive, so round and round we go. Also, Jevons Paradox is nothing to sneeze at, studying the ways efficiencies can directly lead to inefficiencies is pretty gutting to so many climate optimists (including a younger me, once upon a time). Sorry to be a downer. I hope like crazy all I know ends up being wrong, or we crack fusion (but even then, watching global GDP plummet us all into a depression since economies don't like "free" anything would be something to contend with). Until we find ways to live and be satisfied with a more reciprocal relationship to our natural systems, I fear we will always just be playing whack-a-mole with one climate/economic triggered issue after the next. I really really hope I'm wrong. Sorry for the rant, I just really wanted this video to pick me up and make me smile that maybe I'd missed something and was wrong, but sadly it felt more like the embracing of recycled delusions for sake of feeling less hopeless and more meaningful as we circle the drain. I'm gonna go touch grass now. Be well everyone, I hope anyone reading this impromptu manifesto finds a reason to smile deeply today. But also, whoever you are, stop reading youtube comments. No way thats good for anyones mental health.
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Thank you for this show Adam. Such a huge fan
What do you do to challenge the backlash, and help things to deal with other enviromental problems?
Especially if you make no money and live at home
If I can raise ant farms and they give me enough protein to my smoothie, I'll do it, lol
With the Bokksu sponsorship - looks like you can't get the kimono AND use the factually code because the former requires a code too.
Factually, the average american keeps their car for around 8 years. I get that most people buying electric are well off but man, every three years seems like a special kind of privilege.
EVs don't matter if electricity still produced from fossil fuels.
EVs are a detail, not a solution. Good public transportation is way more efficient and feasible for reducing emissions.
EVs, at this point, is just a market for people to get rich.
My guess is Adam means used cars, which need to be replaced much faster because of the extra wear and tear.
I haven't had a vehicle in over a decade that lasted longer than 3 years because maintenance costs are outrageous, along with mandated (expensive) insurance, etc. We can't even afford a vehicle now :/
@@3nertiaok that’s a skill issue on your part and maintaining your vehicle.
I agree every three years is a level of privilege that I have not been exposed to. Almost everyone I know has a car from the 90's or 00's.
It's not that people are saying fuck it and giving up or that the problems we face are unsolvable. It's that the people in power either do not want change or are afraid to enact the policies we need to survive because most people will not accept the drastic reduction in lifestyle necessary. We can't keep living like this though
You're forgetting another possibility, which is that those who have the power to make changes are only capable of enacting mostly-incremental changes, for a variety of reasons, especially economic ones. For example, businesses cannot make dramatic pivots to new technologies without taking on massive risk and potentially screwing themselves. However, given some encouragement by government (see: Biden Bucks $$$ from infrastructure bill), as well as time to test new tech, companies can then justify taking on *quantified* risk to transition to new platforms. I am in the oil and gas sector and I see this happening. The ship turns painfully slowly but it is in fact turning.
It’s not because they are afraid of backlash, it’s because oil rules the world and they are just cogs in that system.
Welcome to capitalism where it's Profits over People!
Problem is, whatever country keeps burning the fossil fuels will win.
It’s because they know rich people can just move wherever the fuck they want while the poorer people living in coastal cities are just gonna die. They don’t give a fuck
I haven't watched much yet but my current position is that we're all fucked but I wanna fight anyway. Like that quote about fascism. You don't fight fascism because you'll win, you fight it because it's fascism
I agree. The biggest reason I don't think this problem is fixable is similar to how I think poverty isn't just solved. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It doesn't mean we should stop caring.
@@benjaminkowal7310 and it doesn’t mean we can’t make it better.
"the world is garbage and we're all gonna die, might as well make the best of it"
We're going to be destroyed by an ice age... oh wait.
We're going to be destroyed by acid rain... oh wait.
We're going to be destroyed by global warming... oh wait... it's climate change now!!! The polar caps will be gone by 2010!!!!
I don't think fascism can fundamentally survive all that long whenever it does happen, and it can be prevented, but yeah, you fight fascism because it's fascism.
Ironic how it is too expensive to fix things but money isn't an object when it comes to bailing out banks, the stock market and funding wars that have nothing to do with the US.
Well there's fixing things, and then there's forcing people to an unfinished tech that hurts them overall.
It's not too expensive to fix things, Joe Biden passed the largest and most expasive infrastructure bill in US history while Republicans raged about it 6 months ago. Republicans constantly attempt to prevent us from fixing these shapes.
The grid itself is very old, unreliable, and inefficient in much of America. Some Cali wildfires have been due to fallen lines when ancient retention clips on lines decades past their expiration date fail and drop a live line. "It's too expensive to replace them all!" The wildfires seem more expensive to me... plus everyone doing EVs here would overwhelm the grid in this area of the midwest, not to mention outages from storms and floods.
@@jer280 if the us just spent a few percent of the "defense budget" ($825 billion in 2024, so just 1% would be 8.25 billion), whatever tech you're talking about, it would massively improve
@@LordDustnDirt the power of privatisation and corruption! did you see the john oliver segment on it?
edit: nope i was thinking of something else but i can't find it. or maybe i couldn't find the right episode
The real way we need to stop excess waste is to shift the culture away from planned obsolescence. When it's a successful business plan to build and sell something designed to break so that you must repurchase the waste is immense and entirely unnecessary. In the energy and the resources to produce the product and especially in the energy to ship those products to their markets and the actual waste from the obsolete product being discarded.
That goal can only be achieved through government legislation that is actually enforced. Tricky when your political system has been captured by ultra capitalists.
This ties in with charging the manufacturer for the collection and recycling costs of their packaging. It would be tricky to track and enforce, but charging corporations a percentage of the retail price of their product for objects that enter the waste stream too soon would be a good path. "Too soon" would be a sliding scale, probably based on the retail price again - an object selling for $500 should last a lot longer than an object selling for $5.
I'd like to challenge the view on planned obsolescence. Cars are the biggest issue here. And while some people do pick up a new car every couple years, that car isn't totaled as "wasted". When I was a kid, a 10 year old car was a miricle on wheels. Metal bodies would rust, parts were expensive, and it wasn't worth keeping beyond that. My current car is already 13 years old... And it's fine. It had 1 major maintenance issue, and outside of that it has just been normal brakes, oil, and tire changes. And it isn't just my car, most cars made today will have a 15-20 year lifespan. And EVs with composite bodies could last literal decades with a battery swap every 10-15 years. Most home appliances use to last 5-7 years, and now 10-15 is normal. Most major items that we own will last far longer than we use them ourselves, and will live a 2nd life in someone else's home long before they see a landfill.
Yes, we throw away a lot of things, and we could make a lot of headway on things like single use plastics. But the big things you buy should be lasting (or at least have the option of lasting) 15-20 years. That's pretty good in the grand scheme of things.
Man, Adam asked some great questions here and was very polite and accepted what I felt were unsatisfying answers.
For instance, with electric vehicles, what about the maintenance of road systems? Parking lots? Long expansions of water, electrical, and other utility systems to feed car dependent suburbs? What about pollution from tires degrading on the roads? What about the noise and visual pollution and its effects on the health of not only surrounding people, but wildlife? There are so so so so many reasons that EVs are not a huge gain.
On the topic of degrowth, the criticism was about how well we can "sell" this idea. Yet, our extractive capacity already exceeds the potential yields of the planet. We will either choose to degrow or we will be forced by material necessity to degrow in response to crisis. This isn't an individual problem either. Most of the issues deal with production, distribution, manufacturing, etc. Not consumption. This focus on the consumer end is part of the corporate gas lighting process of shifting the blame onto regular people.
Now, my background is in environmental philosophy and I am on board with the general premise that the world isn't ending and that we need to deal with the hopelessness we are experiencing after our period of denial (both just strategies to avoid having the change anything, which is the underlying issue), but I can't help but feel that this interview is swinging too hard in the opposite direction. Adam brings up wonderful counterpoints and I would have loved a more serious response to them. I would have loved to come away from this interview with a greater sense of hope, because the situation does truly feel hopeless, but this sadly didn't do it for me.
The underlying notion that economic growth is compatible with environmentalism makes me deeply sick to my stomach and only reinforces my feelings of despair about the whole thing.
I utterly agree with you, I really wonder if reading the book would offer anything of value. You can FEEL them changing their vocabulary to downplay what they are actually saying.
@@bonanzajellybean4802 I did a little digging into the Hannah Ritchie and all I could find was your typical neoliberal market based capitalist dogma solutions that have infiltrated and dismantled environmental movements for decades.
I doubt reading her book would contradict the deeply problematic material she's put online. Hannah seemed genuinely passionate about environmental causes in this interview, but the literal meaning of what she's wrote reveals to me a subjugation of the natural environment to mere economic extraction.
It's entirely possible that she's blind to this internal conflict, as that's not unusual concerning environmental action, and I don't want to express any hate towards her as a person for espousing this dangerous rhetoric. I just don't want these orthodox market solutions taken seriously; we're half a century past the point where we can repeating that same old mistake.
Adam probably should have pushed her a little harder than he did, but I also understand the desire to be accommodating to guests.
At least they mentioned veganism several times, as this actually is a very real part of the solution.
But what they failed to grasp was aerosol masking effect and how reducing fossil fuels is actually going to increase the rate of warming.
MEER Reflection Project is the only hopeful solution I know of that addresses this.
My fear as a person living in a coastal area is that yes its not ending, but me and my kids will get to live as climate refugees when our area is unlivable. Paying a mortgage on a house I can't live in being resented by the residents of wherever I have to relocate to.
All part of the plan! Welcome to capitalism! More for those at the top and less for us! Profits over People! :/
Interestingly coastals may be aware of that, many people living in the west coast region.. may have to move because of drinking water.
Also consider that people live in Arizona and don’t seem to think it won’t become America’s Sahara soon enough. I don’t know why they aren’t fleeing en masse yet.
Theyre actually moving to Arizona and Florida @@WASDLeftClick
Sell NOW. I have the same fears living in Central Texas. I know that life is complicated, but have an out plan.
My main disagreement with her overall stance is the mischaracterization of degrowth as sacrifice and having less. She doesnt sufficiently aclnowledge how western society is the way it is because capitalist forces shaped it that way and degrowth is the act of us shaping our lives and desires ourself. Degrowth is realizing the desire to upgrade your car every three years just because is inherently bad and something we shouldnt want, but market forces convice us otherwise by placing themselves as the default. And that the forces that shape our desires will always shape it to there benefit and thats why new technology and economics alone will not be sufficient to save us. So shes right about incremental steps, but she doesnt acknowledge the adjacency individuals have in changing the world by changing theirs.
Well if your solution is to sit around and wait for The Revolution, you're going to be sorely disappointed. But Leftists love being disappointed, it makes us feel morally righteous.
There are different levels of degrowth.
Not buying a new car every 3 years is one thing
Completely abandoning flights is a whole other thing (and for people like me, that would mean permanently abandoning my family).
Absolutely. My family bought undeveloped property 12 years ago & opted to go solar. Not grid tied with solar as a supplement, 100% solar. It was a learning curve at first, being used to grid power that you don't really need to think about. It's now 2nd nature to look for the most energy efficient appliances, not buying unnecessary gadgets, looking for USB rechargeable small appliances, lights, etc. I don't feel that cutting my energy usage back by a substantial amount has lowered my quality of life one bit
we have brown sheep but if you buy brown woolen clothing, they take white sheep wool and dye it brown, so the colour is more even. Dye is a highly poluting energy intensive resource and we do it for almost no reason at all, the brown sheep wool is mostly thrown away. To me that's how I visualise degrowth. There are things we can do that make barely any lifestyle change but are contrary to the way capitalism and mass manufacture operates.
@luci_is_lucifer Hannah is totally not advocating degrowth! On the contrary she is advocating to make people see how they contribute to the solution without making loads of sacrifices. Do read her book!
Theres something very odd about an episode on climate change and reducing our carbon footprint having an ad for snacks shipped from half the world away. Seems like the kind of thing we should be discouraging in the grand scheme of things.
We have been sharing foods and culture across continents and oceans since the silk road. No need to hate this one niche and culturally educating form of trade.
@@thekingoffailure9967 The silk road didn't burn 4 litres of fuel per second frivolously transporting plastic packages of mostly air into the opposite hemisphere...
We have the internet now, culture can be shared through the transfer of knowledge and if there's a market for foreign snacks, they can have businesses that produce them set up closer to where the customers live
SeaCargo transport has the lowest carbon footprint.
It s very low on the scale of priorities.
Planes, trucks and even trains are worse.
So let s keep rational and focus on the worst offenders.
20:40 All the examples mentioned previously are at best a 50% reduction in emissions if fossil fuels are removed. Anyone that thinks we can get out of this crisis without cultural change, and doing things like monopoly busting, tighter emissions regulations, addressing the profit motive via individual income ceilings, ending stock buy backs, making institutions required to adopt telecommuting whenever possible, strengthening environmental agencies, etc. simply moving off of fossil fuels in the near future really only helps in places where that is even possible by regulation. Don't get me wrong I think we 100% should eliminate ICE vehicles, but acting like that is adequate is naive, and talking as if market forces alone are enough to do that is misguided.
Climate change isn't a consumer problem its a regulatory one, which has been caused by the failure of regulating our modern economies, and simply acting as if this is a problem that consumers can defeat by "voting with their wallets" is just more of the same free market propaganda that got us in this mess in the first place.
100% correct.
Not to mention the greenwashing lobby to make people feel good about their continued pollution ("net-zero" is complete horseshit) creating inertial drag.
This is second only to the "carbon footprint" gaslighting guilt brought to you courtesy of big oil.
The real hard work (and why we are screwed) is in regulation of the excesses of unbridled greed. Politics for sale in America at least, has made the necessary action all but impossible. And for the world's largest economy of self-absobed, businesses-as-usual, narcissists... restraint is untenable.
We aren't doomed, but we are f*cked.
Completely agree. You can't have infinite growth while living in a snowglobe. Success is going to be impossible until we create a path for somehow producing less, consuming less and polluting less. Its just literally not possible to fix this if we have to make 4% more stuff year over year forever.
@@GStarGoku3 The thing that drives me crazy about this the most is that transitioning away from our infinite growth economy doesn't send us to the dark age. Degrowth means that we stop this madness, it doesn't mean we forget how to do manufacturing, it means that we slow advertisement, we incentivize and regulate corporations to focus on supporting workers over shareholders, as a society we need to seek technological changes that keep our currently quality of life with fewer resources instead of new and different technologies and experiences.
Ideally I would love to see a world where business interests aren't the only politically important ones, and a world where if a single person has the power to affect 100s of lives or more and they knowingly make a decision that can harm or kill those people, then those people in charge are held accountable, and a world where hiding information about accidents, or incidents result in wealthy owners making poor decisions to face real jail time in general population and have all their wealth stripped and given to the victims that their greed created.
First, if we eliminate fossil fuels, we eliminate 85% of the carbon-added to the atmosphere (some amount comes from wood and agriculture). Your 50% number implies that only _some_ fossil fuels are eliminated, eg. I eliminate fossil fuels locally but I just exchange it for fossil fuels being burnt at the power plant. But if the power plat is also not using fossil fuels then the total reduction in carbon added to the atmosphere would, by necessity, drop by more than 50%.
but long term... Evolution, survival of the good-enough-for-now. Eventually the species that can't adapt to a changing world will die out and ones who don't mine fossil fuels will eventually take their place. The bad news for humans who value human existence is that humans are unlikely to stop digging up fossil fuels :) Right now we're the most adapted species because the Earth is cold and loaded with bio-fuels. And once that epoch is expired, a new species will take our place. Maybe they'll have brains, maybe not. But they'll be more fit for the new Earth environment. And that's how things evolve.
Quoting myself, but Hannah's line of reasoning is actually dangerous and ignores all the actual warnings scientists are screaming about. "Anyone who claims CC isn't the end of the world and doesn't mention the list to follow doesn't actually understand where we are at with the science now in the last couple of years. The insect extinction (by mid century we don't know if the planets ecosystems as a whole will collapse from this, its the most dangerous thing facing humanity), aerosol demasking (we are already at 1.5C if not more, according the big study last year the more realistic idea of where we are heading is 5-10C of warming by end of century and the oceans the last 18 months are on fire since the removal of sulfur dioxides from shipping fuel), AMOC slowing (Its already slowed 25% and as the oceans warm might stop completely before the end of the century), needing to end all fossil fuel extraction now (The UN panel on climate change said we needed to stop all new fossil fuel extraction by 2019, its now 2024), ocean deoxygenation ( we are already seeing dead zones in the oceans from this), daytime temps being beyond human survivability (Per the maxwell plank institute north africa and the middle east will have lethal day time temps by the mid 2050s) and microplastics and endocrine disrupting chemicals making us infertile (this one is nearly as terrifying as the insect extinction by end of the century our ability to reproduce is in doubt) Hannah sounds like your typical journalist who believes the individual responsibility argument for climate change and doesn't understand how much worse things actually are in the just the last few years. If we want to avoid calamity nothing Hannah discussed is nearly close to enough fast enough or broad enough to avoid the potential collapse of all ecosystems on the planet and humanity as we know it with them."
I live in an apartment complex that has relatively low rent. When I was forced to buy a car last year (big red Ford squished the car I’d had for 18 years), I had to buy a gas engine because there’s no way for me to charge an electric vehicle overnight.
It’s not financially feasible for me to move to an apartment where charging a vehicle is possible. It would increase my monthly expenses by over $1k per month between rent and EV car payment.
Not trying sway you in any way. But dont forget to factor that the EV Will probably save you money on fuel. If you bought a new ICE car, youd still have a new car payment.
Can you find any used EVs in your area?
That being said, if you can find a used Hybrid vehicle that may be a nice compromise depending on your needs.
Good luck out there!
@@jschroemanyou're not saving $1000 per month on fuel. That would be a tank of gas every day
@@jschroemanThe infrastructure is not there. You need to have access to electricity over night or a EV isn’t in the cards for you.
That means EVs are for rich people with houses or indoor parking.
You can’t expect people to charge their car after work, spend like an hour at the charging station every night just so they can make sure they can drive to work in the morning.
Or drive home on 40% and then be stuck in the morning when the thing doesn’t start.
It’s either massive increase in charging stations or switch to public transport. Or they invent a better battery tech.
@@jschroeman Hi Johnny! Luckily, I only commute 2 days a week, so I only spend about $120/month on gas between work, errands, and socializing. My new (to me) car has a green mode, so I use that to drive around my city. It’s also a manual transmission 6 speed so it’s enjoyable to drive.
My city is sprawling with crap public transit. When I commuted 5x per week, I took the bus. When my schedule went hybrid, I decided to save myself the uncertainty, stress, frustration, and drama of riding the bus.
If my personal life had worked out the way I hoped it would, I would have had a house and a garage. In that case, I probably would have bought an EV. My husband decided that only his desires matter though 🫤
@@WaddyMuterscharging stations aren't cheaper than the equivalent in gas lol. Doesn't matter how long it takes, unless you're plugging in it at home you see absolutely no savings.
Idk if anyone’s brought this quote from Mark Fisher yet: “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Capitalism and shortsighted profit-seeking are to blame. We need to move away from our current approach, full stop!
Dr. Ritchie did a great job, great episode. The best part was the individually packaged junk food shipped across the world immediately followed by discussion of food impact on climate.
This one had me yelling in my car repeatedly (to the podcast version). There’s no meaningful “we” that can take action outside the constraints of the capitalist system that has shown it has very entrenched interests with counter-incentives to a long-term liveable planet. When Dr Ritchie mentioned the last 30 years of inaction, on her way to saying that we COULD do something going forward, I would have appreciated some pushback/questioning of the reasons for that inaction and how the next 30 years are to be any different. If the rules of the game aren’t changed away from quarterly growth targets, then there is nothing else to be done or said.
You bring up a good point, and one that really more people who care about a healthy, sustainable future and realize the capitalist barriers that are in place to prevent that, should be discussing much more.
Some have. I don't know if you are aware, but see the Culture in Decline series by Peter Joseph and The New Human Rights Movement book and/or Peter's talk "A Viable Society" especially the last half which talks about solutions and means towards that solution that work to build a new system.
I'm inspired by the words of the late great, Buckminster Fuller, who said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
We won't fight with mass general strikes, the powers that be have too many oppressive war machine tools to deal with that.
We need strong, local mutual aid communities and worker co-op networks that can provide for the people in free and abundant ways that would be impossible for the capitalist system and rulers to achieve through their corrupt and misguided bureaucracy.
One Small Town model shows to be quite capable of helping the bottom-up social change. There may be others, but that one seems to be the front runner.
@@coolioso808I think you are right, but there's a missing step there where the corrupt and misguided bureaucracy Witnesses and Accepts the superiority of the more humble model. If it worked out in any way like the socialist projects of history, they would be destroyed as a "threat." They will declare war just because your plan is better than theirs. Can your one small town stand up to the military budget of the corrupt status quo?
The world won’t end, it’ll just become a living hell.
"the world will be fine, it's just us who're fvvked" as George Carlin said more or less.
I'm currently working on an adventure game set in a climate apocalypse and literally wrote the line "The world didn't end, everything just got harder." the other day. Feels appropriate.
Does the world you’re building look like that in Fast Colors or Reminiscence?
@@need-to-know- I'm not familiar with either but Reminiscence's Wikipedia page says it's set in a partially flooded Miami, and that aspect is similar.
It's set in a flooded city and follows the community that's formed around the people who failed to evacuate and are trying to build a viable life while restricted to the upper floors of multistory buildings. It's a somewhat fantastical scenario (the flooding happened all at once in a giant storm, the government collapsed almost immediately, the number of survivors is small, ect) but I'm trying to take the survival methods and problems presented by the setting seriously and come up with solutions given available materials that are at the very least plausible.
@@unseen370 hmm I like it. Number of survivors is small? That must have been some storm ⛈️ !
Not really accurate, there are multiple issues right now that could kill all life on the planet. The top one being the insect extinction. We are going to be down 50-60% of the entire biomass of insects on the planet by the 2050s and pollinating insects are trending to be completely extinct. The entire ecosystem of the planet could collapse at that point is the most dire warning facing us from scientists. Ocean deoxygenation could kill us in hundreds of years and ocean acidification will kill all life on the planet within a few thousand years. When you read what the actual scientists are warning about in the last couple of years, its far, far worse than anything you have heard before.
wow are you going to upload that game anywhere? I'd love to see it, sounds amazing
As paraphrased from Mr. Carlin; the planet's gonna be fine, it's gonna keep on spinning and recover after we're gone, we are just a bad case of fleas and one day, nothing from us will remain.
Yup
@@toms5996 ... ur assuming Everyone does Not sabatoge others. Ur assuming the other ENTIRE NATIONS WONT REACT VIOLENTLY AND U R ASSUMING NO ONE WOULD EVER USE NUKES OR OTHER WEAPONS. U R FORGETTING HUMAN NATURE IN UR LITTLE PEP TALK ! .
@@toms5996 it's not defeatism. Someday, humans will maybe have left, or evolved, or some natural disaster comes around, or any number of cataclysmic event may happen. The Earth will continue spinning with or without us on it. Nothing lasts forever, in 100 years, no one will know who I was. I'll be a name on a rock, then that name will fade in time. We live, we die, but it's the stuff in between that's interesting. I'm excited for whats next for me, but the end comes for all of us, including our species someday.
@@Zaniel8 Us in Finland and us Nordics not to mention the Baltics have centuries of knowledge what comes to this issue. To answer your statement - no, nation states will not use nukes. The reason for that is that all the developed countries in the world will fare just fine with the climate change. In fact, all of us developed countries will fair even better.
It's not a a topic that is widely talked about, but Northern Europe, Canada etc. will get much richer due to climate change.
@@Tb0n33999 In the end everything will come to and end. What has that to do with human civilisation? Us humans will do just fine at least the next 1000 years. How we will react to change, whether internal or external, is up to us.
The amount of energy we spend on removing single use/short life items once their span is over and the amount spent on making them is nuts. Capitalism incentivizes replacement instead of long lasting and maintainable. I have some clothing I've owned for over 20 years. Disposability needs to die outside of certain limited applications.
ALMOST EVERYONE HE KNOWS BUYS A NEW CAR EVERY 3 YEARS?!
What madness is this? What kind of people behave like this?
He's spending too much time with rich folks. He's got completely out of touch with the reality of normal people's lives.
@@tealkerberus748You don't have to be "rich" to get a new car (often leased, not bought) every 3 years. Just (upper) middle class. This will often be a car provided by the company that employs you.
And it's a bit irrelevant. Those cars don't get scrapped after 3 years. They get sold as used cars for a decade or 2.
@@oerthling this sounds like lifestyle creep... You reach a new income bracket and start spending more, to the point you're just as broke again. 😅
A 3-year lease is the most common way that people "buy" new cars. They practically force you to take a 3-year lease at the dealership by showing you how much money you would lose if you buy your car and use it for the full lifetime. This is especially true for electric vehicles. I just bought my first car I've ever owned at age 36 and I was convinced to lease the car for 3 years by accepting a $14,000 discount. I don't think rich people are the only people who finance new vehicles with a 3-year lease with 50% residuals. Maybe it is just an American thing?
I'm not a rich man but right now I am 3 years into a 5 year loan and the equity I have in the car could cover roughly half of another CPO. weigh that against getting back into a bumper to number warranty and understanding that likely I will be making a car payment for most of the next 27 years until I retire. It's more fiscal responsibility. A single repair job right now could cover 2 years of payments depending on what it is. Now my payments are 300 as I always buy a couple years old and take care of my cars so I get max trade in. Last time I didn't even ever buy tires for the car as I rode less than 20k miles in 39 months, so actually i spend less than anyone by updating condistently
Reject doomerism, embrace absurdism.
This is the way🎉
Denial is absurd.
Boycotting capitalism would be far more effective of a strategy though ...
@@3nertiaAny boycott will be capitalized on and disarmed by the system it tries to boycott. Such is the nature of capitalism.
Reject EVERYTHING - except absurdism. And cats, of course. Embrace absurdism and cats.
Make publicly traded companies illegal. Infinite growth forever is the myth that is ruining everything.
That's a very compelling suggestion.
So all private equity then?
@johnf4680 nah we are over the zenit with many things.
It won't happen quick until the ocean life we extract for food collapses. Japan is hedging their bets on this with the way they catch and store tuna. And who knows what climate changes like the collapse of the Gulf Stream will mean for the parts of Europe that enjoy it's protection.
And the 3'-10' rise of the oceans as the polar caps melt will only really effect people on the coast. Oh, and our major ports.
So yea, it might not be a sudden catastrophic collapse, but that inevitable trickle is just as dangerous.
We talk about hope vs doomerism, when we should be talking about ANGER. I don't want these platitudes, which only alleviate people's anxieties; i want the opposite: want to see people ANGRY. I rather peoole know JUST HOW BAD things are, so that maybe they can finally get ANGRY, because "where we need to be" is on the streets, every day, until goverments take action.
Anger isn’t a positive thing in a society, anger is easily manipulated. I just want the people getting their information from this video to read a book, I want the people who don’t even watch climate change content to watch this, that’s the issue. We are several leagues deep in a sea of useless information.
This is barely the surface level, and Adam’s platform is great because he provides the entertainment lacking in a lot of informational content while the guests does the actual informing.
And it’s presented in such a way that the audience member doesn’t feel out of place with the information because it’s shown as though he is learning with the audience.
it’s really great and tactful but don’t let this be your stopping point. Anger isn’t right. It’s not hope or complacency, it’s the fact that we are systemically becoming less and less informed and less and less interested in becoming so.
@@jordanburton9819 i get it, and I love Adam'a interviews, but this is too urgent. you know how how sufragettes and civil rights activits EVER got even an inch from the ppl in power? when, and only whem, they finally got angry and demanded it, violently when necessary 🤷🏻♀️ shit will not changed as long as we're only asking nicely
Things aren't "bad" by any measure. Global lifespan and standard of living keep rising. Hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty by industrial civilization.
@@gregorymalchuk272I think this is also something to be said - We are the frog in the boiling water with some critical exceptions;
For someone who is from the developed world, it's easy to say that omg things are just getting worse and worse. If last year was your first year with access to electricity, you'd think that things are only getting better.
We have to balance these narratives so that A) Yes the climate crisis IS the problem of this generation and will take monumental leaps to solve but B) The standard of living of most people is in fact getting better across the board.
I want to see us move away from an ownership economy to a "library of everything" economy. Me and all my neighbors don't need our own lawnmower and hedge trimmer and edger. We can pull our resources and share it day to day. Same with a lot of different things. That is what degrowth is ultimately about. Less stuff, but more access to that stuff, cooperation and sharing.
so long as it is moderated by a App that isn't owned by Big Tech I agree....those bastards will try and own that space and lead us to serfdom
Communism is disgusting
Lol. Go ahead and try that and see what happens the first time something breaks on that lawnmower or a week long stretch of rain and now everyone's lawn is overgrown and they all need it tomorrow. Fantasy island level notion. Because... you know... humans and all...
@@johnadams3800 we have a functioning tool library in my small town that include several lawn mowers. It is great. I don't think many people are too obsessed with their lawns and can tollerate some variability in grass condition. So this is not a fantasy at all. it is reality
@chookbuffy several. That's a key difference. The proportion of users to available equipment matter... the closer it is to 1:1, the less problems you are going to have.
Adam, I love your work, but it is difficult to overstate how much these "things will be fine if we all pitch in a little and we trust the people in charge :)" conversations drive me toward feelings of despair. I went in thinking "I should be more optimistic and protect the hope that I have even better," and left feeling more keenly than ever that I am constantly being bullshitted and we're absolutely fucked.
It's the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, yet we constantly try to downplay it with alternatives that will end up being a splash in the ocean in comparison.
Climate Change isn't the biggest threat to America, not even a crisis to be concerned about 😂 climate changes and man made climate change is bs🤦 obviously people don't do real research. Our impact on the climate is irrelevant because it's so minimal. Now if you were talking about humans impact the environment now that's a different story, but it's a difference between climate and environment 😂
Not only that, but these types of people are not thinking of unknowns. Even doing the right things, there will be challenges we haven't seen before.
Bigger than the threat of nuclear annihilation that sat over our heads for decades?
Gotta keep that cha-ching status quo chugging along. After all, the sudden ramp up of once slow and passive g3noc!des is purely incidental and has nothing to do with the growing crop failures and incrementally dwindling supply chain that will also accelerate soon. As the lights go out in one country at a time, or as one town or another gets burned off the map, we simply move on like they never existed. We'll do that until the very end.
Few people understand the way you do. Seeing these children argue over these details when we have no answers.
The consumer behavior problem you brought up Adam is one that was created by the auto industry. If we make it more economical to keep and maintain a vehicle and stop the constant churn of the auto industry to convince everyone that they need that new version of the vehicle it will help. Car manufacturers have been going for years to make each new years model more desirable than the last with the least amount of actual improvements to keep their profits sky high. They don't want us to move to 100% electric because it is nowhere near as profitable to them.
It's not just cars, planned obsolescence is a business model everywhere in corporate America.
It's reoccurring revenue on top of a race to the bottom in quality, in order to generate exponential profits (via higher margins) to the investor class. Bonus points when you squeeze labor as well.
@@grumpyoldman6503 that's precisely why it should be countered by regulation the race and for profit is a terrible game imposed on the people by the wealthy owner class. It does nothing for us. Just look at any competitive market it's always making competition and "Winning" the goal and trying to convince everyone it's the only way to do things. It's a poisonous pointless ideology pushed by the same neoliberal crap that got us here to begin with. Hell just look at apple and the iPhone. It created the smartphone market and since it's creation it has ramped up production and the model churn of such things so that by the time one goes to market it's already obsolete. Now apple every year charges a massive premium on name alone touting it's new tech advances. Tech advances which more often than not their competition Android has had for a decade. Meanwhile as long as they can each keep their fans foaming at the mouth about how one is better than the other they all run to the store to buy the new hotness to prove it to anyone who will listen. As long as I have been alive people have constantly talked about how "they don't make them like they used too" and that's all just planned obsolescence for the purpose of satisfying greed, which anyone with common sense knows is a never ending impossible to fill bucket that is only benefiting those at the top.
@jasonbaker1887 Another fun fact: the modern over-reliance on cars is itself a result of heavy auto industry lobbying. GM bought up most of the streetcar grid we once had so that the lines could be torn out and replaced with its own busses. Relying on capitalist forces to solve environmental problems only perpetuates the issues of modern capitalism.
Habitat restoration leader and climate activist here. I’m quite curious about how this video is going to go.
Some things I can say, without watching the full video. Yes we will have to mobilize every single organization, system and Community in order to confront the crisis that we are facing.
Every single person person should be involved in as many ways as possible
I don't see how you minimize the consequences of living in a (potentially) 6C world. I'm pretty sure the climate science community has been unequivocal - those scenarios are disasters for humanity. Large portions of the world really do become unliveable, and if we go into a prolonged war over the remainder, especially a nuclear conflict, it could be the end for us.
@@JoshuaBenitezNewOrleansbut how realistic is it to think everyone is going to do everything they can in time to prevent mass catastrophe?
@@Neddoestit’s not. Especially with the profit motive and capital being the main drivers of climate change. People are enslaved to generating capital for the state that is owned by the oligarchy, so the average person has zero power to change the system we live under or has the capability as an individual to avert the coming climate catastrophe. The world’s militaries and industries are the culprits that will not change their behavior no matter what and they are the primary contributors to climate change, because they are in competition with each other, and therefore we can not survive or avert what is coming because it would require the worlds militaries and industries to lay down their arms and for industry to sacrifice the profit motive in order to save the world. I can tell you the exact moment when that will happen, when it is too late. Every single consumer on the entire planet could go green tomorrow, and it still wouldn’t stop what is happening if the world’s militaries and industries don’t also get on board. It’s like our obsession with electrifying cars, even though road transport only accounts for 15% of emissions. Do you think that a 15% reduction in emissions is enough to stop climate change? Me either. But they act like it is the pivotal issue that will save us, if we all just electrify road transport.
Without a human centric government in the seat of power in every country on earth, we are screwed. No military or industry will kneecap itself by taking a loss to transition from fossil fuels while faced with competition that is willing to use fossil fuel to get an edge over the competition.
It's meh.
Our present consumption behaviors and the associated degree of industry will bring about planetary ecosystem collapse and mass extinction regardless of emissions.
Clean industry, absent de-industrialization, degrowth, population reduction via responsible breeding, and rewilding, will not save us.
Also, everyone with a choice absolutely should transition to vegan.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make." 🙃 (I've gone from feeling happy whenever spring arrives to being filled with dread because the summers are getting so dangerously hot. I'm in the UK...)
Same feeling here, in the Pacific NW of the USA. In 2021 we had a 45.5C day in Portland where it rarely gets to 37. I believe the follow year is the one where you got the bad heat. Spring used to be my favorite... now it just feels like the calm before the storm.
Lord Farkwa how are you doing
De growth also isn’t about behavior change… it’s about redistribution. Hunger is a policy choice… food gets wasted because it is profitable to do so. We don’t need to commute to work 5 days a week… more free time and easier access to necessities is a very easy sell
I really, truly, want the guest to be right, but I'm thoroughly unconvinced.
It also seems like she's simply responding to a straw man argument based on a misinterpretation of Jason Hickel's work on 'degrowth.' Agreed on the non-viability of behavior change efforts (I say this as a behavioral scientist).
100% agree
Hannah is in the Techno-optimist cap. Her faith on "data" that is easily measured and the reality that the world has mroe nuance and connectedness is a clear sign of this. Her misunderstading about peasant farmers feeding themselves and complete ignorance of degrowth (as per her trainwreck interview with Rachael Donald) shows how deluded she is. It is a damn shame and waste of a brain
Isn't it strange that when arguing in favor of changes under capitalism, Adam never asks why the giant fossil fuel companies would ever be willing to allow these changes to occur?
I don't believe in doomerism, but I do believe in not ignoring the elephant in the room who keeps stomping on your head.
Fine. "Big Fossil" doesn't like it. We established that. Good we talked about it. And now? What, apart from doomerism, are possible actions you can take based on this information?
It's the old saying, "God, give me the endurance to change what I can, give me the patience to endure what I can't, and give me the wisdom to differentiate the one from the other." "Capitalism" is something you cannot change. "Giant fossil fuel companies" are something you cannot change.
So you either take the easy way out - doomerism and inactions because everything is futile - or you can do what you can and advocate for what is realistic. An alternative paradigm to capitalism is not realistic, PFTT, Keynesianism and Social Market Economy European style / New Deal is realistic. A revolution putting "giant fossil" on walls is unrealistic. Pressuring politicians for stricter standards AND EVALUTAING THEM - see "compact pickups" which were phased out by standards too strict and the loophole of pickup lorries - is realistic.
@@enysuntra1347 I don't think you or anyone can say things that are perfectly possible are unrealistic.
Everything that hasn't happened can seem unrealistic until it happens.
We arrange able to judge exactly where the world is going and when people will reject this system.
What is definitely unrealistic is surviving much longer with capitalism as our default.
It's based on competition and consumption and just doesn't align with the way nature works.
The environmental crisis will just continue to worsen without ditching the profit based mindset.
That may seem "unrealistic" but at least it respects the laws of nature. Something capitalism refuses to do...
@@MattAngiono Really? Nature doesn't work according to the same principles as capitalism? How so?
Water seeks the easiest path to flow. Species compete for limited ressources, some are outcompeted (red squirrel, black rat,...). Plants can only grow so far as ressources allow; there are transporters "shipping" ressources to where they are needed, eg mykhorriza, insects, microbes.
Capitalism is so successful because Adam Smith stumbled upon resilient systems that can self-adapt to a lot of changes; and this is exactly how nature works for longer than humanity exists.
Right now, EVERY new "intelligent design"-approach ignores the evolution market economies have done and are simply outcompeted by those systems. The Social Market Economy or French/Scandinavian Socialism take "capitalism" and tweak it so the result is more desirable; however, both are under attack since the 1980s and have to prove they can overcome Reagonomics, Thatcherism and "Cocaine Labour".
Leninism, Maoism, or Libertarianism, however, have failed nine ways to Sunday. Milei will fail, and we all know why. Truss failed. And don't even ask me about the "Third Way"-economies like Falangism or Peronism.
@@MattAngiono Really? Nature doesn't work according to the same principles as capitalism? How so?
Water seeks the easiest path to flow. Species compete for limited ressources, some are outcompeted (red squirrel, black rat,...). Plants can only grow so far as ressources allow; there are transporters "shipping" ressources to where they are needed, eg mykhorriza, insects, microbes.
Capitalism is so successful because Adam Smith stumbled upon resilient systems that can self-adapt to a lot of changes; and this is exactly how nature works for longer than humanity exists.
@@MattAngiono
Right now, EVERY new "intelligent design"-approach ignores the evolution market economies have done and are simply outcompeted by those systems. The Social Market Economy or French/Scandinavian Socialism take "capitalism" and tweak it so the result is more desirable; however, both are under attack since the 1980s and have to prove they can overcome Reagonomics, Thatcherism and "Cocaine Labour".
Leninism, Maoism, or Libertarianism, however, have failed nine ways to Sunday. Milei will fail, and we all know why. Truss failed. And don't even ask me about the "Third Way"-economies like Falangism or Peronism.
The question is not can we solve climate change, It's can we deal with the political obstacles in the way of solving it.
We are over 1.5. Waiting 10 years to call it is stupid.
Im onboard with stopping oil and rewild now even though I'm likely to be among the dead. But I don't see us doing anything to curb consumption.
Decoupling the economy from growth and instead tie to the environment and people. But whatever we do we’re late. We need to have the rate of consumption.
My last car lasted me 13 years, and the one before that lasted me 9 years. Aside from my very first car, I've never bought another car until the previous one died on me.
I've always assumed this was the normal way to extract maximum value from our car purchases.
In the video she gave an example, if someone drives a car three years and gets a new one, it's not necessarily a negative - usually someone else out there buys the used car and it still gets it's "average car life". That used car buyer is probably also upgrading from an older car that's even worse for the environment. The oldest cars are going to die on someone, but it doesn't necessarily have to be you.
Till the wheels fall off is the only way to roll. The car culture is one of our most twisted human obsessions. Seeing the world through a windshield on the same road to hell day after day. This guest never mentioned military fossil emissions either. All wars are bankers wars.
"Died" is a relative term entirely dictated by context. Motivated people and people in developing countries can keep vehicles on the road for a million miles.
@@charlesbonnet8057Unless they ban internal combustion engine cars, in which case, western car buyers will denied all improvements to the ICE, and the western vehicle fleet will undergo "Cuba-fication" where people will desperately keep jalopies on the road as long as possible.
Sorry but Hannah Ritchie is deeply wrong in her book, not honest at all in her representation of the problem, and she doesn't actually advocate that any substantial changes sufficient to avoid the catastrophe that is already active on the planet.
Incidentally, the fossil fuels industry loves climate optimism.
I think the elephant in the room is that we need to address our ecominc system and have fundemental change. Our way of consuption of the planets resources is not sustainable.
I for one am in favor of socialism being the system we change to. Where we rationally plan what our economy will look like and choose to embrace sustainablitly, rather than the way things are now with impersonal, irrational market forces and powerful undemocratic organizations running the economy.
You won't hear about such solutions from Our World In Data editor. Just look who finaces that project.
We needed to address the economic system and fundamental change 30 years ago. We are so, so far past incremental change being enough. we need sudden, dramatic global changes to have any chance of avoiding 2C and according to the more recent research might actually be heading to 5C-10C by end of century as we better understanding the masking effect of aerosols and the impact of methane released from the permafrost is having.
That’s exactly what gets you a “doomer” label nowadays
Adam thinks that being anticapitalist is a sort of perfectionism that ignores smaller changes in favor of the one big change, which he thinks will take a very long time to achieve and is therefore not practical. I disagree. We live in a world where companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have quickly and radically changed the lives of every single person in this country, and most people around the world. The way we live now would have seemed impossible even twenty years ago. But because it was accomplished by giant corporations, we accept it as normal and acceptable. But why should we limit ourselves only to major changes enacted by corporations for their own profit motives? To say this is the true doomerism, because these companies are destroying the world and doing immense damage to all of us every day, even apart from climate change problems. Moving away from capitalism and towards socialism is literally the most practical thing we can do.
I guess commuinsm, where Soviet furnaces burned 2-3X more coal, oil, gas, and material inputs for the same output is somehow better.
@@gregorymalchuk272Who said anything about communism?
One of their main points was contrary to your strong single solution, saying we're stuck with capitalism on this timescale (battling climate change.)
While we could enact massive sudden improvement if everyone agreed, there's an incredibly heavy burden of our society, culture and lifestyle you're trying to heave out of the way. It doesn't matter how similar to our current lives it could be, or how easy or how improved, what stops us is the fear and mystery. If you came up with the way to convince everyone and get it done, you'd be president tomorrow.
11:44 in “adam ruins everything” on electric cars he totally ignores the second hand car market. Here he does it again. These cars don’t cease to exist when someone buys a new car. They get purchased by someone else. Cars stay in the roads for many years and change hands several times.
Regardless of what kind of car you drive, they all drive on fossil-fuel derived rubber tires. Car tires contribute to 300,000 tons of rubber particle pollution in the US and UK alone. Tires contribute 1000x more to particle pollution than car exhausts. Car tires are found to be responsible for 78% of microplastics.
The solution is to invest in other forms of transportation that are more efficient and less carbon intensive, like trains.
@@Guavauava I agree with you on this point, but that hasn’t been a point made by Adam when he has spoken about electric cars publicly. People need to make real fact based arguments to make a case against something. All cars have so many negative externalities. Pick one of them. Don’t make up fake ones instead.
I’m actually more on your side. But I’m tired of people making it harder for anti car activism by making arguments that make us look like we don’t understand how markets work.
Right, buy buying a used car is still better than buying a new car, if more people bought less new cars it would normalize fewer sales (at least that's the idea) and it's the building of the cars that releases the most GHGs because it's ENERGY that causes the most GHGs, not necessarily driving itself, although driving does release CO, Carbon MONoxide, which reacts differently than carbon being released in manufacturing and energy sectors because that C attaches to oxygen when released into the atmosphere to become CO2. There is a reason warming was happening before cars.
@@whatabouttheearth but used cars are getting bought. There isn’t a surplus of used cars. If people stopped buying new cars the price of used cars would skyrocket. It already happened during the pandemic with the semiconductor shortage in the auto industry.
Yes it would be nice if people stopped buying cars and used public transportation, but in North America that really isn’t an option because our public transportation systems are so bad and local governments don’t want shift resources to improve them. They would rather just add another lane because that is the politically safe option. So no, just buying used cars wouldn’t work until there are good ways to reduce demand for cars.
The reality of this is that MOST vehicle sales in the US are new vehicles, and the typical car in the US is only driven up to about 10 years before being retired and most used cars being sold are only between 2 and 3 years old. So ignoring the fact personal vehicle electrification currently necessitates the production of millions of new EVs to replace existing ICE vehicles (many of which would be retired before the end of their useful lifespan), the used car market does really represent a great carbon sink and ignores an inconvenient fact that cars aren't typically driven for their entire life span. Adam is 100% correct that Electric vehicles are a stop gap and are a marginal gain public transit and alternative commuting (i.e. telecommuting) are required changes to decarbonize the transportation networks on developed countries.
The other issue too that will start to become apparent soon is that the used EV market that will be the need to replace battery packs, right now the battery in EVs constitutes most of the emissions produced to create the vehicles and even our best LiON batteries have a shelf life of less than a decade. Generally now since most car loans are amortized over 5-8 years by the time an EV makes it to the used market its will likely need to have a new battery pack installed. In fact this is currently a problem for all of the EVs sold during the late 2000s and early 2010s, a lot old Leafs and Codas can be bought cheap because they need a new battery pack that nearly costs the same as a new modern EV.
The used market is fine for ICE vehicles but until the usable battery life is improved the EV used market will remain nearly useless. The used car market really only represents a way for people to save money of the purchase of vehicles it doesn't really act as a way for people to decarbonize, the people that buy a new car every few years and sell their lightly used car are required for the people that want to buy a used car. If everyone drove every vehicle to the end of its usable lifespan, then every car would need to be bought new cause there would be no used market, and the same number of vehicles would be manufactured.
"Eat local food" he sais,
then advertises candy shipped from japan delivered directly to your door.
Regarding the hopelessness, i cant speak for others, but i know that my hopelessness is compounded by a multitude of factors, from the broken political system in the united states, to the fact that i dont have even a single vote in the system that is dragging the world with it because im canadian, to the fact that our political leadership up here is nothing but wannabes who constantly try to be their murrican counterparts. I want to see a better world, and i want to be wrong, but the seeing an active genocide being propped up my the government down there, and knowing that the opposition party would be doing the same or worse, really drives home the lack of actual power that most of us have over the things that determine the overwhelming majority of the actual damage being done.
Also, im a queer disabled person staring down the barrel of a virulently anti-queer fascist movement that has been rising across the world, and knowing that the people in charge of my province are actively dedicated to making my life worse, or ultimately ending it, if they can get away with it.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I don't feel fine
I think a bigger issue was actually raised in an older factually we as individuals have far less impact then corporations and government. Most of those who want to make positive changes also usually can't afford it. A good example of this is the aussie electric conversion kit. It allows you to convert your current petrol car or hybrid to an electric for a fraction of the price but even that fraction at 30.000$ is still far to expensive for most people.
Cancelling millionaire tax breaks would allow the government to pay for any pre 2015 or 2020 car to be converted through a government rebate of 100% would make a massive difference cleaning up so many cars but they're not likely to do it.
In the end I think most of us are jaded from understanding that us as individuals can't make an impact and those that can are to greedy.
Converting cars is a rich car collector option. It's for people who are willing to pay extra to keep a beloved chassis.
It was never meant as a cheap way to get an EV. For that price you get a cheap new EV or a used better one.
An EV and an ICE car don't share much internally. And the doors and seats aren't the most valuable parts of a car.
30:30, calling China a "middle income country" is a bit disingenuous to what actually happened there however the key factors to Beijing's de-carbonization and a major decarbonization strategy employed in the late 2000s and early 2010s was regulating the quantity of personal vehicles, when they can be used, limiting where they can be used. China recognized in the past decade that the move to a car centric society (for them started in the mid 80s) was going to becoming a major nightmare, and started their famous license plate policies (i.e. only certain cars with certain license plates can drive on certain days) doing this they were able to regulate a significant cap on the traffic and air pollution that was being caused by commuting in city centers. Over the last decade has poured butt loads on money to improve its public transportation infrastructure and even when they started building those (now populated) "ghost cities" the first thing they did was add a rail station to nowhere before starting any other project because their government deems that to be important. Now these new pre-planned, pre-built cities are pretty easy to get around in.
The implication that Dr. Ritchie is trying push is that the climate issue is a technology thing and that every small success will build up to big successes, but the issue is that isn't really how this works the reason that China has been so successful at decarbonizing (they still have a ways to go) and have made insane advances in electric car production and solar technology isn't because that is what the market wanted or leaders of the country being invested in the pursuit of knowledge, its that the Chinese government sees climate change as an existential threat and unlike countries like the US regulate corporations and hold them accountable for their actions through company ending fines, requiring CEOs and management to step down or even face legal charges. If a company in the US poisons waterways to 100s-1000000s of people that company will face fines, but nothing happens to management (look at just all the terrible things monsanto has done) where as in China if an accident like that were to occur, the upper management C-Suite execs are taken to court and put on trial, there as a pretty controversial trial in the last 5 years where a chemical company did have a spill and killed people the CEO was tried and found guilty of murder and given a death sentence. Holding the biggest polluters accountable for the destruction they cause is an incredibly necessary step to dealing with climate change.
Claiming that countries can improve but then not pointing out that the improvements are not due to technology changes but instead by policy change is pretty infuriating, especially with how flippant Dr. Ritchie's response to Adam's introduction of public transportation as a necessary change is. Calling electrification of personal transportation anything but a stop gap is naive.
it's not policy, it's having communists in power and a way to distribute the surplus that isn't adolescent billionaires.
the west fundamentally lacks the political infrastructure to do ANYTHING AT ALL, and even if we did, people in the western cores are too stupid to comprehend, too self-centered to care.
Thanks so much for this! I work hard every single day in the renewables industry (I make highly detailed survey maps of large areas in the rural US for mega wind and solar farms), and it really sucks when people insist it's too late and there's no hope and we shouldn't bother. I guess that makes me solarpunk?
There is a RUclips channel Knowing better. When I try to go vegetarian I literally have nightmares about hamburgers so that's not an option for me since I already have insomnia. But he says, skip meat at breakfast that's 33% vegetarian. When I heard that I started not eating meat at breakfast and lunch. 67% reduction from me!
Nightmares? That's a real uhhh issue you got there bud
Veganism is nice from the environmental impact standpoint, but it completely ignores the reality of human biology and a couple of hundred thousands years of evolution that has made us omnivores.
I have insomnia too from my busy mind. CBD oil before bed helps but mindfullness practice to improve my concentration has had a marked increase.
I don't think people who care about the world can ever sleep soundly :(
at 11:00 the carbon debt isn't just at manufacturing there is a huge carbon at the point of disposal as well, at the end of life of any product it MUST be disposed of correctly, it needs to be broken down and the hazardous parts need to be made inert. If that means those parts can be fed back into the system to make more of that same product great, but otherwise we are causing environmental hazards if we.
A: Don't correctly dispose of the product at the end of its lifecycle (which is the route all manufactures in the US takes for everything and its dispicable) which turns into enviromental non-GHG pollution that has the power to destroy eco-systems which then can lead to GHG production and reduction in sequestration
B: Pretend that the correct disposal of these products doesn't create any emissions (which is what a lot of EV advocates do, even though there is a big foot print when it come to breaking down and re-refining the various precious metals contained in the product)
THE COST OF DISPOSAL NEEDS TO BE FACTORED IN! EVs will always be a band aid solution, a single diesel commuter engine that can carry 100-200 passengers will always produce fewer emissions over its lifetime than 100-200 EVs driven solely by individual people. EVs are and will always be a marginal gain unless paired with social solutions like improving transit, 1 EV buss that carries an average of 20 people a day will always out perform those same 20 people requiring 20 EVs to be built. Like its crazy to think that EVs are the solution to the problem, an economic world centered around individualism is what has gotten us into this mess and it will not get us out of the this mess.
The carbon question also doens't mention at all in this podcast that we have warmed enough that the permafrost is melting and dumping huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Which is a much more potent greenhouse gas and is going to rapidly accelerate warming in the next decade.
This is painful to watch. She seems utterly clueless about the scale and nature of the problems faced by humanity.
Hey Adam. Are you going to mention why you still partner with Better Help?
26:15 Dr. Ritchie has such a narrow focus each of these arguments that keep getting made are overly simplifying what is going on, ignoring the light pollution issue (which actually is a very big issue) using LED bulbs as an example of how the improvement of efficiency doesn't mean that the gains won't be diminished with additional use ignores two the emissions required to make them, and the emissions required to dispose of them. Yes overall even with people using them in abundance with respect to older technologies like tungsten or fluorescent in the US the year-to-year power savings through their use has been astronomical, however this ignores that there is a big cost to the manufacturing of the various electronic components, and there is a big cost to disposing of them correctly after they have been used up. There has also been a big issue industry wide where LED bulbs only last 3 or fewer years, MANY LED bulbs are made with inferior components and are wired in series making a product that contains dozens of components that can completely fail if even a single one dies meaning that most of these products die before their lifespan should dictate it should. Technically you can return bulbs if they die prematurely under their manufactures warranty but no one does.
Its easy enough for the end user to repair LED bulbs, but the fact of the matter is most people don't and when you start to account for the increased manufacturing and disposal costs of LED bulbs over tungsten filament, LED still comes out a head but not by as much as being lead on here...
Spot on!
It is amazing how the so-called smartest people in our society are acctually ignorant of suh things....I think it is no coincidence. I am no Einstein but I was not the best student at school but i've noticed that those who were the best and brightests were actually performing on tests that always had a clear answer in the back of the text book or took a view/position that was favourable to those in authority.
Hannah seems to be one of those types. I'm sure there are thousands or so brilliant female minds that could do her job but not be brainwashed into neo-classical economic ideology.
Hae you heard about Jevons Parodox or the Rebound Effect. LEDs are a good example of that. People buy a lot more precisely because they use less power and as a result they use more energy (or at least embodied energy).
I've got Philips ultra-efficient light bulbs that run room temperature and seem to last forever. They get 180 lumens per watt, about as good as you can get in the 120 volt market. I don't think the state or the power companies are subsidizing costs on light bulbs anymore, so I bore the full cost and reap the benefits.
@@gregorymalchuk272 I am happy you managed to find some light bulbs that have lasted a long time, but as someone who has been using LED bulbs has purchased expensive and cheap ones and repairs them, I can assure the vast majority of these bulbs do not last, to the point where every box of LED bulbs I have purchased going back to 2012 has a 5-10 year manufacturer warranty included as part of the purchase. i.e. these companies are so certain that their products will have failures that they are willing to replace their 5 dollar light bulbs when they die instead of just using quality parts (decent caps for the most part).
Those Phillips bulbs aren't even available where I live, and are also the glass and filament style which cannot be opened, repaired and resealed like the plastic dome bulbs, which means that their life span cannot be easily expanded through minor repairs like replacing the cap on the board. Also just because one company has decided to make a good durable product at a premium for what is already a premium product doesn't change the fact that the market is flooded with unreliable products produced by US mega corps.
I put solar panels on the roof of my house. This lowered my consumption from the grid down to nearly zero. I don't have a battery storage system (yet) - so I do use electricity at night for AC (required to exist in South Texas where I live) and ancillary uses; we have changed our behavior to use high power systems - like the washer and dryer, and dishwasher - only during the day. This behavior change, coupled with Solar energy has driven our usage of the grid power (which itself is being moved towards solar and wind) to less than 1%: 99% less than we used 2 years ago. There is also a tax rebate that helped (slightly - the year I installed it for $63,000 - I got a $5000 rebate [based on my income unfortunately I'm not rich].) At the end of the day I traded a $300 power bill (during high usage periods) for a $300 loan payment - so largely a net zero cost change for me. But the tradeoff for me was lowering my carbon footprint from grid use down to 1% - which has to have a positive impact.
Are you allowed to harvest your own rainwater? That's the next thing you can do to limit your environmental impact - collect the water off your roof and use it for your needs instead of mains water taken from an aquifer or river somewhere. Of course a lot of housing in the US is unsuitable for this because the roof is covered with toxic bitumen products, but if you have a clean roof material then water self-sufficiency becomes very easy.
The next step after shelter, water, and electricity, is growing your own food, but that's a lot more work than the first three.
@@tealkerberus748 I think it depends on where you live, and the municipality rules and state laws. That being said, if you use swales and small ponds on your own property, I think you would have a better chance of not getting into any trouble with laws. IANAL - caveat emptor. Do your own research on the subject.
I am a nihilist. I am convinced that global climate change is going to be humans extinction event, simply because we as a species are too amoral to manage our own intellectual development. But I still do my part because I also know I might be wrong. Why are both of you assuming that nihilist and Dick are synonyms?
Ok plz step out of the way, we are trying to save ur life and stuff whether your philosophy wants us to or not bro
It sure is easy and convenient to give up
Adam, maybe your buds are buying a new car every couple of years, but the average age of a car on the road in the US is over 12 years. And where I live, the electricity is hydro-not great for other reasons, but carbon free. And I have 6kw of solar on my roof. So when we shuttle our kids to the three different teams we coach (with 3 teams worth of gear), in our huge EV, we’re at least not spewing carbon. Would be better if we rode the bike, but it’s WAY better than our Ford Flex was. And, we like the car. If it keeps running, we’ll never buy another car.
Cars are horrible beyond the carbon emissions.
I'm not a doomer, I just don't see how we overcome the opposition's money without resulting to violence. The billionaires can literally buy the laws they want and basically pay to not obey the ones we have. And we're not willing to have a second French Revolution about it.
I think along with a lot of people in this comment section, I feel a little weird about this episode. I'm a big fan of the show, but this definitely feels just like an electric car commercial. In reality, the vast majority of pollution and carbon emissions come from factories I haven't heard anything about that the changes in actual industry other than what we can personally do, because there are some kind of far possibilities for us to actually combat the industry itself, but I did not see that addressed in this episode, perhaps you could do an episode on that.
I'm in the camp that thinks advanced civilization is on its way out but I still encourage people to keep fighting.
Setting up our lives and homes so that we can handle a transition to a mediaeval/iron age technology isn't easy, but that's the long term resilient choice. If green tech or cold fusion does suddenly come along and rescue us all we won't have lost anything, but being prepared for Decline or Collapse is the best way to not die in that scenario.
...on the Impossible meat and the like, I find the replacement most useful in situations where the meat is normally present but not a real focus. Meat taste and texture is a real integral part of a burger, but in something like a taco dip where you could use beef, turkey, or pork and the difference wouldn't be super noticeable, it seems to do fine. I'm also really hopeful on dairy substitutes -- plant-based cheese is still not something I feel good about but I've pretty well been able to switch to plant-based milk and cream substitutes without issue.
What is required is a radical change in social values, away from consumerism and instant gratification toward minimalism, understanding what is essential and a willingness to make deep sacrifice. Sadly, I'm the pessimist who sees only a very slim chance of such a thing happening. Then again, I have seen many amazing things in my life, so who knows?
If there's any good to come out of millennials/zoomers/Gen A coming up in an economy that allows for very few luxuries, it's that we're being forced to adjust our values to match.
I think this is the wrong approach. People adapt their morals to their material and cultural context. Consumerism and instant gratification exist side by side with grueling diet and exercise regimens, as well as many other forms of moral puritanism.
If we created larger systems where it's possible and encouraged to live with sane limitations, most people would adapt easily. We should focus on changing systems, not on individual moral improvement.
You are a realist not a pessimist. Don't let most people's rosy optimism (or propaganda) doubt how you feel
This is an unpopular opinion, but I would support a gas tax of 50 cents or so a gallon, to fund decarbonization efforts.... charging infrastructure, power grid, etc. But some people absolutely lose their shit over 20 cents a gallon.
Lose their shit over a penny of gas but continue to go to restaurants where they pay $100 per meal
Put the tax on fuel and direct the income from that tax to grants for low-income drivers to change up to electric vehicles. Don't let the government keep that tax as income or they'll get dependent on it and they won't want that income drying up.
Or just uh... Stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry...
Look around you right now.
How many things you see aren't made with plastic?
Can you make a video on the inflation deduction act, but focus more on congress and Senate instead of saying biden is the reason the plan isn't good enough for climate change. I get real tired of seeing people complain when we should be looking at the government as a whole and making representatives responsible for not representing our best interest and being bought out by these oil companies to turn the other way.
People like to complain, but the three climate scientists I follow all say the Inflation Reduction Act is working, and that it is the most effective program for mitigating climate change in US history.
Could the US do more? Certainly, but I don't think it makes sense to complain about this one.
Sometimes some things go right for once. It's good to celebrate those wins.
Glad you mentioned veganism several times, but you really understated how important it is and the myriad of reasons.
One, it's about the animals, but more applicable here, it's the one solution that deals with reducing carbon but doesn't reduce the aerosols, which in turn causes more warming.
Reducing emissions isn't a solution in any meaningful way until we've dealt with the aerosol masking and effects on albedo.
MEER Reflection Project is the only group i know of that takes this seriously.
We need to build lots of mirrors if we really want to solve this.
And just stop eating meat.
It's not good for you, and it's even worse for the planet and for wildlife.
It may seem difficult but that's only a story we tell ourselves as an excuse.
It really is pretty easy.
And guess what?
It feels great too
So, I got as far as 49:11 and I hadn’t heard anything about irreversible feedback loops or the potential changing of the AMOC. I just could listen any longer to the drivel.
I got Hannah's book out of the library a couple of days before this podcast dropped, so I'll be interested to see if what she talks about here is borne up in more depth there. I do like that she's trying to walk the line between despair and optimism - as Leena Norms here on RUclips talks about, Positive Panic is so much more mobilising than doom and gloom.
I'm disappointed at the apparent lack of understanding about our food systems and the talking up of the Green Revolution. Yes, we're farming more food and getting higher yields, but framing biotechnology or a continuance of current Big Ag strategies as the way forward is worrying. We have the ability and the technology RIGHT NOW to change our food systems so that farmers are supported to move to practices that capture carbon in their soils, and are paid actual living wages while they do it. As always the barrier is oligopolys that benefit from the current system.
And that's not even touching the fact that we already produce more enough food to feed the entire human population - it's just unevenly distributed. Because capitalism.
Never underestimate our capacity for self-delusion. Unfortunately the laws of physics are real and all this is pretending that simply changing where the energy is expended will matter. Oh, and selling a book, of course.
yeah it is such a waste of a brain. but these people writing their books and giving their talks are paid hamsonly byt the elite so they get reinforcement for their BS
wouldn't you say that capitalism being in crisis effectively shielding it from attempts to fix it incentivises capitalists to never allow us to truly fix problems? if all that stops us from sending them to the guillotines is a larger, more urgent crisis, where is the incentive to solve those problems?
I'm getting the impression Dr. Ritchie believes it isn't too late to do something, but that wasn't really the issue. The issue is, WILL that something be done? I think history has shown us that no, the people with the power to make change happen will not do it, as long as it threatens their hold on their power and profits.
Climate change is starting to bite the wealthy. Increased frequency of disasters is destroying the insurance industry, which will also impact real estate portfolios. There's many other similar issues which will motivate the plutocrats, but not before there's a whole world of hurt.
Lol love how almost every comment here is calling out the bullshit platitudes
yeah that makes me feel a little less shit today :D
I think this is exactly the opposite message we need. If we actually tell people we are on course for a sixth mass extinction then at least later we can say we were honest. In 20 years young people will be furious that we bullshitted them that things might be ok if we turned down the thermostat a little.
Did you watch the video? I think there was some oversimplification for sure, but more of these conversations need to happen rather than be shut down by the doomsayers...
There is something we can do, it's just not pretty. Every day, we get closer to the Bell Riots. It just really depends on how long it takes us to get there.
I think Adam shows very little respect for radical thought here, on prison abolition, anticapitalism and veganism. I assume this is an interview posture and not necessarily reflective of his own thoughts.
This one is gonna be about prisons.
A lot of the current work of prison abolition is that people ***like*** to see the bad guys punished. They don't see the punishment of guilty people as a necessary evil to create social incentives for good behaviour.
In fact, they are willing to compromise the entire detterence aspect of law enforcement by granting civil rights protection against fabrication of evidence and manufacture of conviction for innocent people, if it means innocent people are less likely to get punished. Punishment is not a necessary evil to achieve deterence, disabling and rehabilitation - Punishment IS THE GOAL - to obtain retribution on evil-doers by making them suffer.
According to Christie (1981), most conducts that we understand in a vacuum to be "crimes" actually occur within the context of a significant civic relationship (friends, coworker, parent-child, teacher, etc.). In the context of those relationship, the stability of the relationship is often the most important factor in understanding the conduct to begin with. For example, we don't want to understand teenage classmates who get into a fight as assault and battery under any but the most extreme circumstances. A son who takes money from their parents without asking permission is almost never charged with theft. Even rape and incest are almost never understood as crimes by the people who are victimized by it while the relationship provides shelter or otherwise provide affective safety to the victim (see also disorganized attachment patterns - which is when an attachment figure is both a source of safety and danger to the subject).
What this means is that the denouncing of an offensive conduct as a crime is implicitely a problem of lack of social capital from either the victim or the perpetrator. "Social capital" is the bonds of mutual trust that a person has which enables them to call upon favours and to get help and support from informal associations (friends, family, coworkers, etc.), to start projects and transform the environment. In environments where there is a lot of relatively evenly distributed social capital, the number of offensive conducts is lower, and crime reported are low. People trust in and protect each other, and they resolve conflicts among themselves. In environments where there is little social capital, the number of offensive conducts is low, but crime reported is high. People aren't able to trust and protect each other, so they rely on law enforcement to judiciarize and settle disputes. In environments where there is much social capital, but it is mostly controlled by an elite minority, offensive conducts are high and crime reported is low. Think Weinstein or Cozby. People work tirelessly to protect and enable the elites who own the social capital in the hopes that they will give them some amount of protection. They don't interpret offenses by the capital owning person as a crime, because the police can expect to hit against a wall of silence that protects the capital owners.
The fundamental problem with police, is if you want to reduce, not just **crimes**, but all offensive conducts, whether understood as a crime or not, what you want to do is to create high-trust high-equality communities that take care of each other, and the intervention of police in a community to arrest members prevents them from taking care of community members and reinforces inequality and lack of access to support. If you arrest all the dads, people will grow up without dads. Having police and prisons is worse than having nothing. On a small scale, if you were killed by a serial killer, you might be better off if there was a police who had disabled the killer from finding and killing you. But on a large scale, you will not be killed by a serial killer, serial killers don't get found and don't get arrested, they roam freely among us and the police aren't doing anything. If you get your stuff stolen from you, you don't need a cop, you need an insurance guy. Sometimes you need a cop just because the insurance guy won't collaborate if you don't talk to the cop, which wouldn't be a problem if we had universal public crime indemnisation insurance.
What? They say their car was stolen, there's no reccord of them ever having a car to begin with? Just give them a car, who cares? This might even stop them from stealing something else from someone else. If the government is easy to fraud/scam and there is little consequences, people won't fraud/scam other ordinary people. Ah, but I am getting into solutions already. I wanted to avoid that.
Bottom line is crime is a social construct that reveals a lack of social trust between community members, and cops interfere with trust-building, so cops create a "crime" understanding of social offenses. And what should be done about social offenses is actually a matter of casuistics that account for all the social aspects and relationships in play, not jurisprudence and evidence and guilt and innocence.
Professor Simon Michaux of the Finland geographical survey has calculated that we don't have the minerals for one 25 year generation of The Green Transition. Copper reserves are for instance only 10% of what we would need.
this "don't be a doomer" conversation as usual avoids the empirical data - there's this fake assumption that doomers think we're doomed because of economics or capitalism? Hilarious - that's totally not true. No mention of the world's largest ocean shelf having 1200 gigatons of pressurized methane. No mention of the Aerosol Masking Effect being twice as bad as previously thought. No mention of Iowa being one rainfall last summer from total crop loss - and the UN predicted 309 million people without food this year - our drought -famine situation will be dire very soon. These are not "economic" reasons but rather on the ground empirical ecological reasons people think we're doomed.
well she will never do an interview with him. As long as Hannah chooses her interviewers carefully she can avoid that unfortunate flaw in her model of the world
It's not that we feel that everything is doomed, it is that we feel it is completely out of our hands. We want change, but the people who can enact that change wants only profit.
I don't disagree, but you do have SOME power with the way you chose to spend your money! Diet and lifestyle play a huge role!
@@bonanzajellybean4802 I do. I rarely buy stuff that isn't second hand, keep my old machines running rather than replacing them, I bike pretty much everywhere and try to research companies I buy stuff from. I also vote.
I feel pretty much all of that is doing absolutely jack shit. I know me not buying a product because I don't like the practices of the corporation making them isn't going to be even noticed by anyone. I do it for myself, out of sheer spite. I know full well someone else is just going to buy it, enjoy it for a while and then throw it away.
Despite what we're told, individual consumers have virtually no power whatsoever. If we all took responsibility, then sure, we could make changes, but most people are perfectly happy with the way things are going.
@@LarsaXL , I agree, it can be really disheartening. Try to find community, face to face community with some of your values. It helps, I promise.
@@bonanzajellybean4802 It really does. I do have many friends I hang out with and while it doesn't exactly give me hope for the future, it does make the present very nice indeed.
Ok, but what do we do about all the emissions we already released? Climate lag, which takes about 40 years, means the terrible effects we feel today are only from the emissions released in 1984. That's right when we started ramping up our emissions exponentially. Even if we hit net 0 emissions TODAY, we'd still be doomed if we didn't put the genie we already released 40 years ago back in the bottle. So how do we bottle up what we already released? Or is the inference here that we're somehow just going to ride them out for the next 40 years, paying no attention to all the Climate Tipping Points (these cannot be undone) which will have been triggered by that time? I'm genuinely asking.
Three separate climate scientists I follow have separately said that net zero means global temperature rapidly hits equilibrium, inside about 5 years. Their colleagues agree with them.
The sting is that stopping temperature increases does not reverse tipping points we have already passed. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is ruinously expensive with our current technology, and is the only path to recovery inside our children's lifetimes.
The faster we reach NET ZERO, the more we limit long term climate related damage. Much easier to prevent damage than to try to fix it afterwards.
@@naomieyles210 I have seen no study which says this.
You are right in that preventing climate change is no longer an option. Change is already happening and will get worse before it gets better.
But that doesn't mean "doom". Climate change is not a binary thing where we either totally prevent it or everything gets cooked.
There's a range of possible futures. Some of them much worse than others. So yes, change is happening and will continue to happen even if we magically get to net 0 tomorrow evening.
But giving in to doomerism and giving up would just put us on course for worst possible future trajectory.
Doomerism is nothing but the new excuse for not getting bothered to do anything, replacing denial. Both are stupid and short-sighted.
I'm glad you talked about veganism with more than just a mention. It's the best and easiest way for the average person to have a huge impact. Factory farming is the single biggest contributor to global warming. It's effect gets massively downplayed because the meat and dairy industry have a lot of money invested in keeping people on their products. I will say that most vegans generally wouldn't call "vegan sometimes" or "vegan before 6" vegan. Veganism is a lifestyle and not just a diet. Generally eating less meat and dairy would be going plant based. I do appreciate people making an effort. Because like you said don't let perfect be the enemy of good. In the future when scientists can make mock meat taste just animal meat then yeah maybe we could vegan. I don't pretend that's going to happen now. Veganism's effect on the slowing of global warming shouldn't be downplayed. People are very attached to food, so it's definitely hard to change those habits and traditions. I just wish more people would try. I wish more environmentalists would be vegan. It's not that veganism is the only solution or the end all be all, but that if you really care about slowing the warming why not do it? Or at least put a solid effort trying. Veganism with everything else has a chance at changing the status quo.
I do want to mention that for Bittman's "vegan before 6," he didn't describe himself as a vegan overall. It was an argument that such a lifestyle shift would likely result in increased health benefits and maybe in losing weight. It also limits some other foods (white sugar, pasta, processed foods) before 6 pm, foods you could eat and still be vegan.
As you mentioned, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is a big deal. Why not go vegan? For me, going vegan right now would be...difficult. I'm a recovered (there's always the risk of relapse) ED sufferer with probably three different autistic people in the household, each with different food texture and flavor sensitivities, and some of the people in the household suffer health conditions that have various food restrictions as well. This makes extra changes challenging if we're feeding the household. The messaging that you can still make a difference if you go more in the plant based direction even if you don't engage in absolutes is really helpful in a situation like mine. I work on substitutions where I think I can incorporate them well, I work on having more days a week free of animal products, and I work on reducing the amount of animal products consumed when we do consume them.
For most people, turning around and doing this from their normal diet as an absolute is likely to fail and result in a feeling of helplessness because you couldn't do the thing right the first time. Going through and starting with trying some plant-based products, increasing the percentage of your diet that's plant-based, etc, is a more feasible start for most of us. And then the challenge is to keep moving in the right direction. If you find you reduce your consumption of animal-based products by over 50%, that's not insignificant even if it's not all the way to having a plant-based diet.
Just started watching but my guess will be at the end this is only partially convincing and we are probably still effed by any reasonable estimation
we need to act now and what will end, if we do not act, is fucking civilisation and the modern era as we know it.
so how can people not to the streets rn?
i have seen interviews and things with her for several years now. im not really a fan of the type of messaging she does along with others. they don't understand the line between saying "we are fucked we have to make positive change starting now" and pressing urgency and when people just say "were fucked there is no use" , they often group the two together and I honestly think this stupid optimism on the subject is just adding more complacency and is dangerous. just my personal thoughts though.
not to mention she is a head at our world in data, which has this very neoliberal the world is great its just your attitude vibe to it in the way they select data.
@@TheFamousMockingbird
She is a head at Our World in Data, lmao.
I'm 'meat as a treat' diet. Most meals for me are now plant based, with maybe 2-4 meals a month containing meat.
Why is anti-capitalism viewed as pessimistic? It's honestly baffling. It's the whole capitalist realism meme, all over again. "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." More like, "it is easier to imagine surviving class warfare by allying with all but the most avaricious industrialists than it is to imagine actually solving our current problems and freeing ourselves to tackle bigger problems." How comfortable do people have to be to find optimism in compromising with their oppressors? Do you not want to win? Siding with the face-eaters as long as they promise not to eat /your/ face isn't how you get there. I'm sorry you feel like you've figured out the game but that's not any kind of guarantee that you'll be able to win it and it certainly doesn't help the rest of us. Capitalism requires poverty and misery to inspire everyone to compete, since there's no social safety net. We need to be building cooperative models, not holding hands with the wannabe gentry.
Capitalism isn't necessarily a problem, to me it's "capitalism without regulation" that's more problematic
@@charlesbonnet8057 Capitalism will always find a way to deregulate itself.
Everything will be fine if we just convince people to live differently. Oh, that's great! How did no one think of that before? We had T. Midgley Jr. sniffing lead to prove not only is it not harmful, but beneficial. The Italian politician that went to drink water full of PFAS and said to the people it was good. The Japanese guy eating fish from Fukushima, which should be the least harmful thing on the list, but it just shows a trend. People will do anything for profit. Unless you can put healthy food at the price of junk food and raise the prices on junk food to exorbitant numbers, you won't get anywhere. But how would you produce that amount of healthy food, with good agricultural practices, without pesticides, intense deforestation and many other ugly things? How would you keep obesity running rampant, while throwing away more than 2 billion tons of food every year, and letting a lot of people die from starvation? How would you use all water to grow monoculture crops to feed the animals inside intensive farms? And how will you do all that with clean energy, since farmers do not want to lose profit and keep throwing away food or junk, whatever the name is? How would you describe the environmental catastrophes brought on by mining? Have you heard about nickel in Indonesia, where they're still burning coal because they don't want to import energy as they'd lose profit? How about South Africa? Papua New Guinea? Nothing? The thing that is less harmful doesn't mean it's risk free. How would you describe landfills full of clothes, electronic devices, etc.? How would you describe Indian cotton farmers that are forced to buy seeds every year because they've been modified to bear fruit just once? I mean, the list just goes on and on, but the comment section is not a place for that. If there isn't a u-turn in human behaviour, there's no place for optimism in climate change matters. I would argue that this is also denial and climate inaction. Saying that we're not doomed doesn't benefit anyone but those seeking profit. You say that saying we're doomed makes you not care? Oh, I still eat organic, don't eat meat, don't drive a car and so on, but I do think we're doomed. Let's put it this way. If you see 15 people engaging in violent behaviour of any sort, what does it change for you if you arrive 16th and do the same thing? Nothing! You're the same as the first one. As for me, I just decide not to participate in violence and destruction, but that doesn't mean the other 15 will follow my example. On the contrary, other 15 will join in. And you may scale it up to your pleasure. Just let me ask you one last thing. If this is something our existence relies upon, how is money the issue? Shouldn't we ensure our existence before talking about money? If electric cars will save us, how come they were costing 100k at launch? Profit comes first and, if someone survives, it will all be good. Now it's up to you and this thoughtful scientist to explain this to a lot of people. I'll give you a pass if you convince one. The time starts now.
I would like some advice for those that are monetarily challenged, ie poor.
I already buy used cars that get driven into ground, and then buy another used car.
I would love to eat more fresh vegetables and fruits but the price is just getting higher.
Please we need more direction on what to do to save ourselves and the planet
Maybe I have a so called ‘poor’ mindset. But I’m just not sure how to get out of it
@@junderlandgames1186 Finding a way to live somewhere that you can grow your own vegetables is the challenge. If you have access to a backyard, that's a great way to turn a few hours a week into better food than you can buy, and the exercise is healthy and free too. But if you live in an apartment and don't have the money for a fancy wall-mounted hydroponic system, it's hard to take that first step.
@@tealkerberus748 yep I don’t even have access to a drive way
Swapping red meat to chicken or fish is one simple change that makes a significant difference for the climate, even if that's just one meal a week. You can do that even if you live in a food desert, and even if you only have access to fast food.
Another useful change is to eat beef mince dishes that contain beans, fairly common for Mexican dishes. The beans replace half the meat with vegetable protein.
Humanity is a capable species. We can fix these problems. If you ever feel like you have no purpose in your life. Make THIS your purpose. Make fixing this problem your BUSINESS. Your JOB! Your MISSION! I am looking at jobs in this industry and moving my time to solving this.
Let's be the shephards of this world. Let's fulfill the role to meet the moment.
Adam makes one very important point: humans can do more than one thing at a time. However the order that we do things makes a big difference. The first thing we need to do is take control of the media away from the ultra capitalists.
I would hate to do something for living, and not even know what is the source of biggest problem in my field of "expertise". the fact that she even mentions meat, which is fraction of total food consumption of each person, which is small fraction of each person's contribution, with most of it being from energy consumption for phones and pc's, which also is a tiny fraction of total contribution, like, there's literally nothing we individuals can do to limit this, cause we're barely contributing to it to begin with. well, lamericans can do something, they can protest for their government to close all the 1000's of military bases they have around the world, and to reduce military spending, cause that's the sole contributor that no one needs and that we'd feel basically overnight if it were removed...
Meat and dairy accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization.
Whether feeding our cows methane reducing seaweed, or switching to chicken, or switching one meal per week to plant based protein, that helps more than most other decisions we can make as individuals.
If you can buy an EV and charge it on solar power, that's even better but most people can't do that yet. Even better than that is to buy an electric bike and use that instead of a car, if that's something you can do. I can't.
Most other climate mitigation efforts depend upon governments and corporations.
So what I got from all of this is that we are indeed doomed.
Sorry, but we’re doomed. We know what needs to be done to solve climate change, but we’re unwilling to do it as a whole species. We keep hoping someone’s going to invent some magic tech that’s going to make everything better, and no one wants to challenge capitalism, and its dream of unlimited growth, as the fundamental driver of climate change.
>No one wants to challenge capitalism.
Because they saw what happened when Salvador Allende tried to challenge capitalism. He got ruthlessly crushed.
When I learned that Jimmy Carter installed solar panels at the White House in the freaking 70s and then Regan later _removed them,_ I lost hope.
Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
Even if all of society was suddenly brainwashed into prioritizing the elimination of greenhouse gasses and transitioning to 100% clean living... its TOO LATE. All of the sand has slipped through the hourglass. We. Are. Doomed.
Also I think scientists have said that we should have done something about climate change twenty years ago.
Hold on a minute. Most Americans buy a new car every three years? As a non American, that seems insanely wasteful.
Most Americans I know do not buy a new car every three years. A lot of people lease cars and lease agreements are usually three years long so people will then trade in their leased car for a new one and the leased car will be sold as a used car. It may be that I live in a more rural area, but lots of people do hold on to their cars for a very long time
He actually said that most people HE KNOWS buy a new car every 3 years. I don't think that's the average
@@angeladansie4378 What it says is that he hangs out with too many rich folks.
I'm in the US. Most people I know keep new bought cars at least 5 years. Almost none of my friends lease. A map showing the average time people keep new cars could be very enlightening.
It's not even that. You can have one rich person who buys a new car every year, but then someone a bit less rich buys a one year old car and sells it at five years, someone else buys a five year old car and sells it at ten years, someone else buys a ten year old car and drives it until it dies...
The real question is, what is the median age of a car when it goes to the wreckers?
Adam, "tomorrow" will definitely be worse not better for a long time to come, even if we keep the temp below 1.5C according to scientists. By the way, today we are at 1.15°C rise and going up quickly. Based on the NOAA chart we'll reach 1.5°C around 2040 or just 16 more years. We need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions even faster now.
We have already hit 1.5 that number is dead we will hit 2.0 before 2040 your numbers are not accurate
@@Muddslinger0415 we were on track to 3.5°C by 2100.
Now we're on track to 2.7°C by 2100, so we're making progress.
Of course, 2.7°C is still a kind of hell for most of humanity, but it's better than it could've been. Every 0.1°C we get that down, the fewer people will go through hell, floods, fire, and famine.
Now how do we preserve summer sea ice?!
Increase the thickness of winter Arctic sea ice, means it lasts longer through the summer and covers a bigger area.
Solutions to do that are difficult, basically on the scale of building several city-sized freshwater snow machines on the northern shores of Canada, near the Beaufort Gyre, where most of the winter sea ice is formed with the help of the Arctic Ocean currents.
IMO there is no solution on Capitalism.
The thing that scares me most about the future is not that we don't have tools to deal with the climate crisis, however difficult it is to implement them, the problem is we're struggling in so many fronts as a society, dealing with extremism in politics and religion, fueled by rampant disinformation at unprecedented levels as a result of mismanaged social media and AI. So it would be hard to tackle the climate if we were focused on that, but it's a million times harder to do it while flat earthers in every subject are stronger than ever.
The worse it gets, the more unity and desperation will ignite change. We're already seeing that positive social tipping point in progress, particularly in our younger generation.
Problem is how many people will die, how many refugees, how many species extinct, how many feet of sea level increase?
Look into REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE: it uses less water, also restores abused water tables, it is also scalable because multiple crops are grown contiguously, and animals and plants can be raised without the chemicals used in traditional GMO hybridized tillage farming. This is a factor that should be pushed to really impact the food situation. It would also address one of the key problems with the current food: lack of nutrition found in modern mass-produced food.
Yes! This! I'm always frustrated by these types of conversations when they talk up the effects of the Green Revolution but blatantly ignore the massive downsides it brought it terms of soil and animal health. The amount of carbon drawdown you get from a properly managed pasture (especially silvopasture operations) is unreal.
@@GaraksApprentice she wont because she is mates with Bill Gates....who loves big Agg and all teh joys of pesicides
I’ll be the annoying Vegan here. Sorry everyone. First off, if you want to eat meat, that’s perfectly fine. The reality is that most westerners really over consume meat. If you want to talk about the meat industries impact on climate change you need to discuss the economics of it. They’re using tobacco tactics on us, with our own money, as mandated by the government. It’s an injustice to not explain what a Caged Animal Farm Operation is. Because that’s where 90% of meat comes from.
If you want to come at it from the Health angle, then you need to sit down with Dr Micheal Greger. He’s the encyclopedia on the health benefits of a Plant Based diet. Which would have profound effects on public health outcomes. Even the go to “meat is good for you” summary admits a reduced intake improved health outcomes. Seriously, I think you two would jam really well.
You really should explore these topics in depth in the future. You’re the perfect ambassador for the cause, because you understand both sides well.
Loved the episode! Really got me feeling things and my mind working. Keep up the great work.
I don't agree with the message at the end that people can think we can make ALL the necessary changes without life getting worse in some, or many, ways. That leads to selfish and naive decision making - anything perceived that will make your life 'worse' will be denied and blocked because 'we can do it without making life worse.'
Life is going to get worse for almost everyone on the planet. It has to in order for us to attempt to fix all of the problems. That is a noble and necessary sacrifice.
I really appreciate how respectful and good-faith the discussions (even the disagreements) are in this podcast. I like it when people gracefully acknowledge that they may be wrong about something.
It must always be remembered that, naivete is not limited to the un/undereducated.
This conversation really just seemed more masturbatory than anything. I don't mean to be a downer and I hate dumping on optimism but so many of the points were catch 22's to other points. It isn't possible to have cheap/clean energy when it is the economic driver it is in nearly every arena. We'd plunge into economic depressions immediately. And each year, those use numbers just track upwards. Just google up the expected energy use by the tech sector anticipated by 2030 alone. Its always a record year of fossil fuel production/consumption, its always a record year of waste creation. Hell, I live in a "blue" state and fossil fuels are our economic backbone and we are bottom 20 in waste diversion because we lack end stream markets for recycled goods. Efforts at best amount to degrees of slowing, but little else. We can't transition to cheap green energy without upending the system at its heart, which our host and guest agreed couldn't be done. Our economics are defined by a refusal to accept laws of thermodynamics and a general amorality. I could get an EV today, yet the shipping, manufacture, planned obsolescence, material mining plus the simple reality that my state/county runs its grid on coal and gas just makes it a fancy coal vehicle. Less emissions from the vehicle, more emissions from the plant. Consistently, every year EV sales go up, more tax credits get promised, yet every year our air quality gets worse. (Fun fact, early onset cancer is up 79.1% since 1990 globally. Google it). The legal prospects for ending ANY industry would take decades, and every "solution" is up against the reality that it needs to be monetarily profitable which creates an inevitable race to the bottom. All of these systems are so deeply interconnected that there is just no way to untie this knot, especially when those with the least interest have the most power. It was like the conclusion of every point they made was about eliminating capitalism at its core, or saying certain sectors need to be forcibly removed from capitalism, and then saying "but there is no way to end capitalism." The reality I see is that this isn't about changing economic systems nor political systems, its about trying to change individual beliefs and paradigms on a global scale. Certainly, this isn't impossible, but it will take generations. It will be the slow erosion of beliefs for some, and the rapid, violent shattering of beliefs for others depending on the winners and losers from disaster to disaster. For me, the conversation stopped being about preventing catastrophe some 20 years ago, the conversations we need to be having are more about how will we respond to the waves of catastrophes that await us. Planning for climate refugees, pandemics, pollutants/early illness, preparing more infrastructure, teaching more analog skills etc. The book title gets it right, it most likely isn't the end of the world, but it very likely is the end of modern lifestyles and systems. We are an adaptable bunch, and (gestures to Jeff Goldbloom) life finds a way, but me saving resources by going vegan while using less water in the sink and driving an EV won't matter for squat when a company down the road uses millions of gallons of water to frack a single well one time, off gassing methane in the process so that I can charge up that EV and smile that "I did my part" is just a preservation of the entrenched system killing us. No green energy alternative can create the same economic incentive, so round and round we go. Also, Jevons Paradox is nothing to sneeze at, studying the ways efficiencies can directly lead to inefficiencies is pretty gutting to so many climate optimists (including a younger me, once upon a time). Sorry to be a downer. I hope like crazy all I know ends up being wrong, or we crack fusion (but even then, watching global GDP plummet us all into a depression since economies don't like "free" anything would be something to contend with). Until we find ways to live and be satisfied with a more reciprocal relationship to our natural systems, I fear we will always just be playing whack-a-mole with one climate/economic triggered issue after the next. I really really hope I'm wrong. Sorry for the rant, I just really wanted this video to pick me up and make me smile that maybe I'd missed something and was wrong, but sadly it felt more like the embracing of recycled delusions for sake of feeling less hopeless and more meaningful as we circle the drain. I'm gonna go touch grass now. Be well everyone, I hope anyone reading this impromptu manifesto finds a reason to smile deeply today. But also, whoever you are, stop reading youtube comments. No way thats good for anyones mental health.
3 new solar farms went up in my area over the past couple years
You can charge electric bicycle with solar pretty easy