Stop Being a Climate Change Doomer

Climate Change doesn't have to scare the Emojis out of you.

[abraham]

I'm surprised you didn't mention how acid rain practically disappeared, just like the ozone hole

[mattterway]

“Eat meat only 6 days a week”
Me who is poor and cannot afford meat: my work here is done

[jixster]

Good video. But I have to disagree about blaming consumers for buying plastics, meat, driving cars, etc. You cant expect millions to subvert the economically feasible options presented to them. For example to provide for a family a father must drive to work, burning fuel. People want to live their lives and dont have time to scrutinize every little detail when this decision has a miniscule impact anyway. But yes, voting for the right people is certainly the most valuable thing people can do- government intervention may be the only solution

[historysuit]

3:14 Update on this part, US is now investing close to 320 billion, so yea a lot more

[heiloloheimir]

I know I might be a bit late to this, but the reason that the world so effectively managed to ban the spray cans in favor of the ozone layer was because it was a small sacrifice with plenty of lower emitting alternatives that wasn’t too difficult to quickly phase out to avoid destroying the ozone. When it comes to phasing out coal and oil use, the problem becomes much more difficult as alternatives are more scarce and because we’ve already built so much infrastructure related to those products, making it difficult to just phase it out like the spray cans all of those years ago

[eliasstenman]

Imagine if we were all like “COVID-19 is gonna kill us all anyways” and started hugging every random person on the street.

[Waterboyofsuperman]

“Good news doesn’t generate news like bad news.” Such an important idea to avoiding getting sucked into a negative vortex, not just in climate change, but also military conflicts, political disagreements, economic hardship, religious disagreements, etc.

[TrashSpace]

One more good news: Where I live, there is a sea called "Bodensee" and apparently when my dad was a child, that sea was polluted as hell and stank because factory's keept polluting the water. But that soon changed after some laws were brought up and they tried to clean the water. Now the sea is a drink water source for thousands of people and the water is crystal clear :)

EDIT: Because of my big skill issue in the english language, I managed to confuse a "sea" with a "lake". In german a lake is called "See". So I apologize.

[BarelyNoticeable]

Content aside, I love how this channel has bred commenters who genuinely “respectfully disagree” and provide true “constructive criticism.” This place, I like this place. The comments do make very good rebuttal points though, please read and respond to them.

[michaelhurley]

It probably took a lot out of you as a Brit to praise France. I'm glad you survived 😅

[michaeletzel]

"Gigawatts-per-hour" (GW/h) is not the unit you're looking for. What you meant to use was "Gigawatt-hours" (GWh). The first one is the rate of change of power and the second one is the total amount of energy in Joules.

[JCDenton]

We need to approach climate change the way we approached WW2, and that includes with messaging to the folks at home. Big victories were celebrated during the war, and helped encourage people to keep supporting the war effort by rationing, building, working hard, and of course fighting. The same goes here, good news will bolster people's morale and tell them they can make this happen they just need to keep fighting to the finish.

[thevisigoth]

I like that people are legitimately starting to consider nuclear as an alternative. That makes me happy.

[thecosmicloaf]

As an Irish person, I appreciate the lengths you went to remove UK mainland from the EU map but still keep the Island of Ireland as one whole EU region. Thank you <3

[brooksfaucette]

The most important thing that needs to change is stigma about nuclear energy. It's extremely safe, doesn't produce much waste in comparison to fossil fuel and we can control how much energy is produced at what time unlike solar and wind. And we even have uranium sitting around from old nuclear warheads from the cold War we retire every year.

[socialhermit]

I wish climate activists and the news talked like this more often. Instead of only focusing on the bad and being aggressive and angry, the optimistic tone and statistics showing just how much progress we have made is far more convincing and much more likely to persuade people on the other side. You actually made me feel a bit better, so thank you.

[yorankoppes]

5:35 This is a tricky point. People have to stop buying polluting products, I completely agree with you. The problem is that companies can easily pretend to be green. It's not always possible to buy the least polluting products even if you wanted to, because you need to know which products are actually green. Although I imagine solving this problem is very doable, we still have to actually do it.

[AmateurContendr]

I feel like concern about these issues is like any kind of anxiety. A healthy amount is needed to encourage the right choices, but too much can just result in a depressive nihilism about the topic.

I think videos like this are important to remind people that, while climate change is a serious threat, we aren't 100% powerless to do anything about it.

[spore]

It's a fun video and all with a nice sentiment that will hopefully ease a bit of anxiety, but it feels a bit off the mark especially with the new IPCC report being more well, pessimistic than the last one. Ideas like telling people to just stop supporting polluting companies is more difficult to apply than ever as we live in the most corporately consolidated time in history where even buying food for a reasonable cost usually involves tacitly supporting all manner of ecology exploiting business. It's rough. It's also nice to see reports of air getting cleaner, but it's important to note we are comparing air from when leaded gas was available to time 25 years later (and during a car-halting pandemic). Air has many fewer pollutants in it in many cities due to new requirements like the catalytic converter, but sadly those converters don't do too much to lower the greenhouse gasses emitted from a car. That is obviously not to say that the clean air is "useless", just that it isn't really indicative of us solving a climate temperature problem which is what people are doomin' on about.



As a last aside, around the 3:30 mark you talk about wind capacity using the unit "Gigawatts per hour" which I believe may be a typo or misunderstanding. Gigawatts are a unit of power which is a unit of energy per time. GW/h isn't a unit I've seen (energy per time per time?), though GWhr (a unit of energy) is common. If you just meant how many GW (how much energy per time) we generate then in the year 2000 we were already generating just shy of 20GW of wind power. This has done well to move up to around 750GW today which is very impressive, but scientists aren't as bad at seeing exponential curves as you'd think so this isn't like some completely unforeseen impossibility in wind power development. If you meant GWhr, then even in 2000 we were able to generate far more energy than that from wind. Nowadays wind power is probably breaking through the Petawatt-hr barrier. This is awesome, but in terms of the total energy use of humanity on Earth is still under a percent. Solar is looking a bit rosier with its explosive growth, but we still have a long way to go and in the face of even comically bold "immediate net zero emission" climate predictions showing increasing damage to the environment for years to come just due to the sheer inertia of 2 centuries of industrialization it's not hard to empathize with the people who aren't feeling so hopeful.

[wiegraf]

I absolutely heard about the action taken to solve the ozone layer problem. It was a big win. But to be honest, we've had the "everyone gets together to solve the problem" meetings for decades and decades on climate change and this is a much harder problem to solve. The guy in charge of the "everyone gets together to solve the problem" meeting IS AN OIL EXECUTIVE this year and he has been abusing his position constantly!