Four years ago I built an airtight greenhouse
and I sealed myself inside with a bunch of plants in order to explain and demonstrate
how we interact with the air we breathe and how we're causing climate change. That story
went viral and it sort of took over my life. I kept getting asked the same question,
which was: What should we actually do to stop climate change? And while I had answers to
that, they all felt woefully out of proportion to the scale of the crisis. And eventually that
question started keeping me up at night. By 2020, I was working full-time on climate change and
I started planning a documentary to answer that question. But the pandemic put that project
on hold and my stress over climate change took a toll on my body, to the point
where I actually needed surgery. So, after several years I feel like I’m finally
able to answer that question and I also feel like I’ve learned to cope with the crisis without
it eating away at me on the inside - literally. Now, In order for the answer to make sense, you
need to have a good understanding of the science and the scope of this problem, so without further
adieu - let’s jump back to the year 1856, when a science named Eunice Newton Foote discovered
that jars filled with carbon dioxide got hotter than jars of regular air when both of them were
exposed to sunlight. And from that she rightly concluded that, quote “An atmosphere of that
gas would give to our earth a high temperature”. We now call this “The Greenhouse Effect”:
sunlight passes through the Earth's atmosphere, bounces off the Earth at a different
wavelength that excites greenhouse gasses like these* and transfers heat energy to
them - and thus warms our atmosphere. Even though these greenhouse gasses make
up less than 0.1% of the stuff in our air, they are what keeps our planet from becoming a
frozen wasteland. It’s a very finely balanced natural process. However, by adding more CO2 to
the air, even on the scale of parts per million, we’re throwing off that balance and rapidly
heating the planet to a deadly degree. We extract and burn an Olympic swimming pool worth
of oil every four minutes of every day. In doing so, we’re emitting CO2 faster than plants and
algae can absorb it - causing CO2 levels to rise. We know that this is our fault because the CO2
increase is in direct proportion to the amount of fossil fuels that we've burned and to the land
use changes like methane-emitting landfills, we also know this because the additional CO2 in the atmosphere has the isotopic signature
that we'd expect to see from human sources. We know how much CO2 was in the atmosphere and
how warm Earth was in the past because we can sample it from air bubbles trapped in ancient ice
and we can also look at the fossils of different ancient species and see where they were living,
we can study tree rings and we can look at human weather and atmospheric records. Scientists
have been studying this for a really long time and they are very sure that we are causing CO2
levels to rise faster than they have in 800,000 years and in doing so, we’re
making the planet hotter. Since the industrial revolution, we’ve increased
the amount of carbon dioxide in the air from 280 parts per million
to 420 parts per million. Not everyone is equally at fault for this, in
fact most of the blame falls on the rich. Rich countries like these* are responsible for half of
all historical carbon emissions, despite having only 12% of the world’s population. At the nation
level too, the richest 10% of a country produces five to thirteen times more carbon dioxide
than the bottom 50%, depending on the country. All these emissions mean that we’ve already
increased the Earth's temperature by 1.19ºC. We're on track for 4ºC of warming by the end of
the century but it could be as high as 6ºC. Now to put that in context, back during the last
ice age, when there was an ice sheet three kilometers deep across Canada, the average global
temperature was only 5ºC colder than it is today. Viewed another way, there have been five mass
extinctions so far in the history of the planet, three of them were caused by a rapid rise
or drop in CO2 which led to global warming or cooling respectively; each of them wiped
out between 80-90% of life on the planet. And climate change isn’t a lone
environmental crisis - it's happening in the context of ecosystem collapse caused
by habitat loss and other forms of pollution. All of this together means that we’re likely at
the start of the sixth mass extinction event. We’re heading in the wrong direction and we’re
accelerating. In part that's because we're still continuing to use more fossil fuels each year
and in part that's because of feedback effects. For example, as global warming melts
arctic permafrost melts, the methane that was trapped there gets released and
since it’s a potent greenhouse gas we get more global warming. As the climate warms, more
water from the oceans evaporates into water vapor in the atmosphere and that water vapor traps
more heat thus accelerating global warming. There’s a number of other feedback effects
but you get the idea they’re all very bad. So, why haven't we done anything already? In the 1980s, there were actually
solar panels on the White House and conservatives like the UK Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher, were giving long talks to the United Nations about climate change. Now,
I was still two days away from being born, so I can only speculate but it probably seemed like
we were going to do something about emissions and that made the executives of some
of the biggest companies in the world feel very threatened. Those working at companies
like ExxonMobil and Shell knew that strong climate change policies could be catastrophic to their
business - the business of selling oil. They knew climate change was real because they’d done their
own research and Shell even made a documentary about it, but they were worried about their
own wealth more than the health of the planet. Exxon decided in the 1980’s to, quote, “emphasize
the uncertainty in the scientific conclusions regarding the potential increased greenhouse
effect”. They paid to make bad science, they spent billions running climate change
denial ad campaigns to confuse the public, and they even sponsored media
companies like FoxNews.com. Big Oil spent billions lobbying the US
government to prevent climate action, mainly on Republicans, who also often already
have ties to the oil and gas industry. These companies influenced
voters and our politicians not to take climate change seriously. When
we did start taking it more seriously anyway, they offered a solution that
they knew wouldn’t be effective. In 2007 British Petroleum, now called BP, popularized the idea of the carbon footprint.
The climate emergency is not solvable through individual actions alone and I’ve covered that
elsewhere, what we need is political action and systemic solutions - but by deflecting the
blame to the consumer level, Big Oil knew that they could dodge government intervention
while paralyzing the public with guilt. That type of strategy is sometimes called
“cruel optimism” and Big Oil’s latest strategy is pandering to what David Cloutier calls our
“naive technological optimism”, by promoting the myth that technologies like carbon capture
will save us, so we can continue with business as usual - despite the fact that these oil-funded
facilities emit more CO2 than they capture. So, Editing Kurtis here it’s been a while since
I filmed this and I’m going to jump in a few times through this video and sort of add some more
detail. Something I didn’t know when I filmed this is that carbon capture and storage has
the potential to be extremely dangerous because you have to transport carbon
dioxide, pressurized, through pipelines and already we’ve had one pipeline in 2020
that ruptured and spread a bunch of CO2 into Mississippi and caused dozens of people
to get quite sick. So it's not just that this technology is unproven, it's also that it
creates an entirely new environmental problem which we have not yet figured out at
all. So, I want to add, also, that while we don’t have carbon capture technology
that works yet that doesn’t mean that we should keep researching it. I do think that we
should continue to develop that technology but we can’t stake our future on unproven technology.
That just doesn’t make any sense. Okay. Oil companies also say
they're somehow going green, even though their spending proves that's a lie. The lies go on and on but Big Oil keeps
putting profit before the planet. And so, though I was born in 1989, just days
after that Margeret Thatcher speech, most of the carbon emissions that have
ever happened have happened in my lifetime. One thing that we know, for sure, is that change
is inevitable. What type of change we get is up to us. Either we ignore science, do nothing, and
make larger portions of the planet uninhabitable or we radically reshape our society to curb
emissions and secure a liveable planet. The best choice here is obvious,
but seeing as we’ve been choosing “unchecked climate change” for decades, I’m
going to take a moment to lay out both options. Content warning - this next section is
frankly terrifying but I do think it’s important to understand the stakes, which is why
it’s in the video, but if you’re already on team “I’ll do absolutely anything to stop this”
then you can skip to Part Two of this video. Okay. So, here’s what our best climate models say
will happen if we chose to continue to do nothing: Extreme heat waves in many countries around the
world will become hot enough to melt asphalt, as they already have in India. Summer heat waves
have already become lethal in places like Russia, India and, here, in Canada. And the heat will get
more extreme. That heat will also be lethal for many livestock and for pollinators too, while
simultaneously climate change will increase crop pests in certain regions. Combined with
increased drought and we're looking at massive crop failures and food shortages and the
food we do make will be less nutritious, as CO2 levels change how plants grow. The oceans
will become warmer and more acidic, which will decimate the fish populations that billions
currently rely on for food. When you consider all of that together what we are potentially
looking at is mass starvation and there’s more. As the glaciers and lakes that we rely on
melt or dry up, billions could end up without water to drink. American forest fires have already
gotten four times bigger in the last twenty years and they’ll continue to get worse. Rising sea
levels, more extreme rainfall and more intense tropical cyclones, spell increased flooding -
leading to over a billion people either dying or being displaced by climate disasters by
the year 2050 and that’s people alive today. The great injustice of environmental racism
is that the people and the countries that have contributed the least to climate change
are the ones that are the most affected by it. India is one of the countries that's
been hit hardest by the climate crisis, despite the fact that the average Indian
produces twelve times fewer emissions than the average American. Climate change also
disproportionately affects poorer neighborhoods, often neighborhoods with more people of color. We saw this with disasters such as hurricane
Katrina. But no one is safe from climate change. Carbon dioxide is what makes air feel
stale. Higher CO2 levels will impair every single person's ability to think,
possibly dropping human cognition by about 10-16% by the end of the century. I did a video
demonstrating that in my air-tight greenhouse. As animals like bats and pangolins are
further pushed towards extinction by habitat loss, they breed more diseases
and more frequently come into contact with humans - causing more frequent
deadly pandemics in the future. In addition to mass death, COVID-19
also hugely disrupted our supply chains. But with unchecked climate change, we’re looking
at a much more severe supply chain breakdown. With more extreme weather events wiping out roads
and making air and ocean travel unsafe, materials and goods will not get to where they need to go.
Our modern infrastructure will be under constant bombardment from increased storms; our power grids
are already experiencing an increase in outages because of this. Add to that the fact that
we’ll be spending more of our time and energy just on survival - on shelter, food and water and
on fighting off the future pandemics - and it’s clear that doing nothing is infinitely the more
expensive option. Climate change is predicted to cost $2 trillion to the American economy each
year by the end of the century unless we act now. And after all of that, if we survive, we will
eventually still run out of fossil fuels and we’ll still have to make the transition to renewables
- but we’ll be stuck with a changed climate. Carbon dioxide sticks around in the air for
centuries, so however bad we let this get, it will stay that bad for generations. So, this option is, in a word, apocalyptic.
It’s global ecosystem collapse and mass extinction. This is the direction
we are currently headed in. I know that that might sound hyperbolic
and to that I say my sources are in the description and it also might feel like
governments are taking action on climate, right? Afterall, 70 countries have set targets
to get to “Net Zero” emissions by the year 2050 and that’s a step in the right direction,
but there are three major issues with this. First, to be clear, these are targets, not plans
and a destination without a road map is a sure way to get lost. That’s why, despite these targets,
we’re still subsidizing and expanding fossil fuels more than climate adaptations and mitigations. Secondly, a 30 year timeline is way
outside of the reach of achieving in a two-term presidency and any unfinished
work by the current administration could get trashed by the next
incoming conservative leader. Lastly, we’re not even talking about
“zero” emissions, we’re talking “net zero”, which is to say we’ll still be emitting in the
year 2050, but these targets are counting on carbon capture technology for “negative emissions”
despite that this tech does not yet exist. So, no - we’re not doing enough. Not even close. But
the good news is that the future is uncertain. We can stop climate change from getting worse. We
can make rapid and radical changes this decade. We can rapidly stop using fossil fuels, transition to
renewables and adapt to the warming we’ve already committed ourselves to. We can create a future
where our cities are less polluted and where fewer people die from respiratory illnesses
and where, for once, everyone can thrive. Yes, the best time to act on
climate change was decades ago, but it's still not too late to prevent the worst of
climate catastrophes. The longer that we wait, the faster that we’ll have to curb
emissions and the harder it will be to do the work - as climate disasters
will demand more of our attention. Now, whether we act or continue
on course with business as usual, this is a choice that we are making and, so
far, we have been choosing climate change. I did my Masters studying renewable
energy and in the decade since then I’ve had many moments where I’ve
realized an entirely new dimension to the issue of climate change and sort of
like peeling through the layers of an onion, just when I think I understand the problem, I
find another layer. After all, climate change is challenging because we’ve built our entire
modern civilization around using fossil fuels, so getting rid of that requires completely
rethinking and rebuilding our society. Our incremental attempts to halt emissions
have so far been futile, as noted by our still accelerating rate of carbon emissions. We tried
free market solutions for the last 30 plus years and we’re even worse off than when
we started. We're not going to solve this issue just by switching to
electric cars and planting some trees. So, let’s go through these issues and
their solutions, one layer at a time. I’ve already talked about how your carbon
footprint is a scam and it's really not deserving enough to even be called a layer
of our climate onion - it’s much more like the sticker, but I will share a few very quick
tips for how to shrink your carbon footprint - if for no other reason than your peace of mind. Here
goes. Fly less. Swap your truck for a cargo bike and your car for public transit. If there isn't
any in your suburb, move into an apartment in a city that has it. Stop buying stuff you don’t
need. Stop eating meat. If you own a home, make sure it’s well insulated, get off of gas by
switching to a heat-pump and an induction cooktop and turn your lawn into a native habitat or
food garden. If you’re particularly wealthy, one of the biggest things you can do is to
divest your investments away from fossil fuels.
But we again, don’t need more consumer-based
solutions, we need an energy revolution. 61% of the electricity in America is
currently made by burning fossil fuels; we need to get that number to zero by
monumentally increasing our production of wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear power. The carbon footprint of ethanol biofuel made
from corn is actually worse than that of gasoline and with the way most hydrogen is currently
produced it can also be worse than coal or natural gas. These are maladaptations to
climate change - things that sound good, but actually help perpetuate our use of oil
and gas. We just need to stop burning things for energy - this isn’t the stone age and
thankfully, renewable energy is affordable. Solar is now actually the cheapest way for
most countries to generate their electricity. Without fuel, everything must go
electric. We need to upgrade our homes with electric water heaters,
heat pumps and induction cooktops. Our transportation and our industries also need
to make the change. In many cases we could simply swap out oil and gas technologies for electric
versions that already exist but in other cases we’ll need to change what and how we produce
things and I’ll come back to that in a minute. Switching everything to renewable electricity also
presents a great challenge for our energy supply and demand. For example, solar panels produce
energy only when the sun is out and we can’t simply build a big electric battery to store all
of it for night-time use. The biggest battery on the planet can power a million homes for half an
hour. So we need decentralized storage solutions like vehicle to grid which would allow for
electric vehicles to give back energy to the grid; and we need smart “packetized energy”, wherein
devices like electric water heaters can be programmed to prioritize energy use when there is
a surplus and to use less when there’s a shortage. All of this together means we'll need to
massively re-tool the electricity grid, which is currently already struggling to keep up. In addition to powering everything with renewable
electricity we’ll need to use less energy and that means centering efficiency in how we design
everything. One example of this is to end the continued sprawl of suburbs in favor of denser
cities. This entire neighborhood houses about the same amount of people as this one apartment
building. Being spread out like this has many energy disadvantages with more overall exterior
walls suburbs take more energy to heat and cool than apartments. For the same reason that
a bunch of separate ice cubes melt faster than one big one. That’s one of the reasons that a
typically detached house uses twice as much energy as a typical apartment but perhaps even more
importantly the sprawl of suburbs forces us to rely on cars and all the infrastructure
baggage that comes along with them. More densely populated cities are more bikeable
and more walkable and that saves energy and it makes people healthier and happier.
We can also improve housing insulation and build in ways that let sunlight inside in the
winter and keep us shaded in the summer. We’ll also have to change how we grow food including
changing the machinery we use. We need ourselves off of the energy intensive fertilizers
we use and change what we chose to grow. Right now, a lot of the food we grow
is used to feed animals - while just half of the calories we grow actually get eaten by humans. We can massively reduce our energy
use by reducing the amount of meat we consume. One step we can take is to stop sending billions
of dollars of subsidies to animal agriculture. And there’s more we can do. Here in Canada, most
of the food that gets grown in the country gets wasted and that means wasted energy. We can enact
policies and create government programs that help feed more people while
simultaneously reducing food waste. The biggest emission reduction that we can make
with zero lifestyle cost is to demilitarize. The American military has a bigger
carbon footprint than the country Sweden. Essentially we could
take nuclear disarmament one step further and work towards
ratcheting down militaries around the world. We can also put an end, by law, to super
yachts, private jets and many of the gas guzzling luxuries that only benefit the most
elite of our societies. And everyone in the Global North will need to learn to consume less
and to take better care of the things we have. It’s neither sustainable nor remotely
necessary for us to be producing fourteen items of clothing for everyone
on the planet each year. By pumping the breaks on consumer culture industries like
fast fashion we can save tons of energy. We can reduce industries of material extraction
and production, while investing more in service and knowledge-based economies. And we also need
to reconsider our relationship to the economy. Our society is fixated on growing the economy,
even when it is self-sacrificing and even if endless economic growth on a planet with
finite resources is physically not sustainable. But we don’t actually need growth to improve
society. In fact, Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, does not reflect the change in well-being
of the vast majority of people. Rather, GDP is an aggregate that hides inequality. While American
GDP has risen steadily over the last 60 years, adjusted for inflation, the
richest american today is about 30 times wealthier than the richest american
was 60 years ago, while over that same time, minimum wage has fallen by
37%, adjusted for inflation. America has “healthy GDP growth”, alongside
growing inequality. Things like breastfeeding, Wikipedia and even this non-profit and
free-to-watch video are all products and services that do not contribute to economic growth. In
fact, you could argue that they hurt the economy, due to potential sales losses in things like
baby formula and encyclopedias. Meanwhile, the military industrial complex, the tobacco
industry and yes, the fossil fuel industry, all contribute to the economy, at great costs
to human life. This is what David Pilling calls “perverse accounting”, where “we value precisely
the opposite of what is actually beneficial”. Unrestrained capitalism has mostly benefited
a small wealthy minority, at great cost to the health of the majority and in the process, it’s
put the fate of the world at risk. Capitalism got us here and capitalism is not going to get
us out. What we need is economic degrowth. If over one third of Brits believe that their
job doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the world, then maybe we need to do those jobs less.
In 2019, researchers found that switching to a four-day workweek could reduce British
carbon emissions by 20% in just five years. Which is to say nothing of the fact that working
less reduces stress and makes people happier. Speaking of cutting back on work, by
eliminating the fossil fuel industry, we'll also be eliminating the 300,000
American jobs in the fossil fuel industry. We don’t want to leave those people behind
and we don’t have to. A green transition would create more than twice as many jobs then we’d
lose with oil and gas. That’s new jobs, building solar panels and mass transit and we need to
help train those people for free for those jobs. Unfortunately though, our society is already
leaving people behind and the reality is that we can’t make meaningful change on climate without
making meaningful change on social justice. These two issues are intrinsically interlinked.
In her book “Becoming Abolitionists”, Derecka Purnell dives into how climate
change will persist as long as we have systems of oppression that divert
the worst of climate disasters onto marginalized communities and onto people
of color. We need to dismantle these systems, including the prison industrial complex and
we need to equitably distribute the costs and benefits of climate action. That means the
rich pay more and those who need more help get it. By taxing the super rich we can help to pay for
much of the change that we need. An extremely modest 3% total annual tax on billionaire’s
wealth would raise trillions of dollars in the US. Besides, we actually can’t
have a billionaire class and also have a habitable planet. It’s Jeff’s
$500 million superyacht and its support yacht, or a liveable future - but we can’t have both. We can also help transition everyone to a
greener future by making higher education free like it is, like any of these* countries
already do and by providing everyone with enough money so that they can meet their basic needs,
like we did during the pandemic, but more and forever. Despite what you might expect, economists
have shown that such a Universal Basic Income, or UBI, would not make people work less, not that
it would even be a bad thing. Universal Basic Income studies show improvements to education,
mental and physical health, decreases in addiction and crime and it makes people happier,
less stressed and increases trust in public institutions. All of those benefits result in a
UBI actually saving money for the economy overall. Lastly, the countries that contributed the least
to climate change are the ones that are suffering the most and they need justice. We need to talk
about climate reparations - that is, financially helping these countries; and we need to talk about
opening our borders to climate migrants - to all of those who are forced from their homes due,
in large part, to our unrestrained use of fuel. At the very core of our rotten climate
onion is the very fact that climate change is an intersectional issue, which is to say it is
tightly tied to many of the biggest issues that humans face. I think when I first fully realized
this, it was when I was involved in an ongoing group protest against the construction of an oil
pipeline and one of these intersectional issues blew our group apart. It’s an all-too familiar
story: an old white man in a position of power in our group was making repeated unwanted advances
on a woman in our group. This made many people deeply uncomfortable while many of the mostly
older members of the group didn’t think it was that big of a deal. It got so bad that
after five months of vigilance on our part, when the construction crews finally trucks
came to build the oil pipeline on the site that we’d been trying to protect, none of us
were actually there to do anything about it. Patriarchy killed our ability to work
together to fight for climate action. And that broke me. Literally. It was the singular
depressing and stressful event that, on top of the pandemic isolation and on top
of climate anxiety, led to a dormant disease in my intestines to flare up to the point where
I needed surgery. It physically changed my life. It was that event that made me realize the full
scope of how power, masculinity and oil are all tied together. We’ve somehow tied “being a man”
to burning fossil fuels. The culture of American men is one of trucks, lawn-mowing and NASCAR
and as such, men not only have higher emissions than women, but they’re less likely to join a
climate protest or see climate as a major threat. Our modern societies currently run
on oil and gas and our societies run much to the benefit of the mostly white men that
dominate them. Fossil fuels are both literally and figuratively about “power”. The CEO’s
of oil and gas companies are some of the wealthiest men on the planet and they
are men - like literally 99% of them. These companies are deeply aggressive,
exploitative and colonialist. To this day, foreign oil corporations are causing deadly oil
spills in developing nations and ramming dangerous pipelines through Indigenous territories in
developed countries without their consent. I’ve come to realize that part of solving climate
change means solving all of this. We need to decouple “masculine” from “fuel” and from “power”.
We need to get more women into positions of power and we need to shrink the gender pay gap. American
women only earned 84% of what men earned in 2020, and we need to shrink the gender gap that we
see in leadership roles in governments and corporations. Women make up only 7% of government
leaders, yet we’ve seen that having more female representation in parliament leads to more
progressive climate policies being implemented. We also need to decolonize. We
need to respect Indigenous rights and fully include Indigenous nations
in climate policy decision making. All of this is essential in preventing the
renewable revolution from playing out in the same sorts of racist and sexist ways that the
oil and gas industry has for over a century. When scientists discovered
that smoking causes cancer, we regulated the tobacco industry so that they
could no longer sell cigarettes to children. We’re now in a place where we know that the
fossil fuel industry is endangering the entire planet and we need strong governments to
stop them. We need to break up monopolies, strengthen our governments and our public
institutions and nationalize certain industries. During both the World Wars, US presidents
nationalized many American industries. Our governments have the power to
nationalize the fossil fuel industry in order to prevent it from further expanding
its operations and instead to force it to transition into renewables on a timeline
that is compatible with a liveable future. We need to make it harder for corporations
and money to influence politics and easier for people to have their voices heard. America
already has antitrust laws on the books that they can use to break up mega conglomerate
corporations, which would help to reduce the power that companies have over our government. We could
enact laws to reduce corporate lobbying. We could work to end gerrymandering. We can reign in voter
suppression and put spending limits and corporate donation limits on political campaigns which make
it nearly impossible for anyone but the wealthiest and most well-connected of society to get elected.
We can enact political reform such as proportional representation in Canada and follow countries
like Belgium in lowering the age restrictions on voting so the generation most affected by
climate change can actually cast a vote. And a functioning democracy requires a strong,
free press and healthy education systems and currently ours are failing. We can publically fund
them and fix them. There is so much we can do. Lastly, climate disasters are here already -
and we need to adapt. At an individual level, we need to pack our own go-bags and have an
emergency plan for if there’s a fire or a flood. But at a systemic level, we’ll need
to build physical infrastructure, like the sea wall built to protect
Venice against major flooding events; and we’ll need to prepare more for emergency
response, like pop-up cooling stations for people to shelter in during deadly heat waves. As climate
disasters wreak further havoc on people’s health, access to free healthcare is a climate adaptation
strategy that we need. Climate change is already posing a mental health crisis and we need scalable
solutions like group therapy to solve that. As housing is already out of the reach for
many, becoming increasingly so for others, and as climate disasters are predicted to destroy
167 million homes in the next twenty years, we need to recognize housing as a basic
human right and act on it. Affordable housing is a climate adaptation and changing zoning
regulations to allow for denser housing can help. If that monumental to-do list made
it feel like the climate challenge is too overwhelming, then let me
stop you before that sense of “it’s pointless to even try”
doomerism burrows into your brain. Climate change is terrifying and hard. It's
the biggest threat our species has ever faced. And once you turn knowledge about climate into
realization, it can feel impossible to think about anything else. It can feel paralyzing, especially
since many of the problem-solving skills that we learn in capitalist societies are utterly useless
against it. When the scale of the environmental crisis really clicked with me I instinctively
looked to my consumer choices. I wanted to go zero waste, I wanted an electric car and a passive
solar house with my own garden and all of that was, frankly, really out of touch because most
of that is simply not affordable to most people. Now this might sound a little too “Chicken Soup
for the Soul”, but I should have started by looking inwards. I needed to do what the author
Britt Wray calls “internal activism”. I needed to do the emotional work of coming to terms
with the climate change that is already here and accepting that my future will be more of a
struggle than the one that I was promised. I also needed to do the internal work of de-programming
colonialism, capitalism and the patriarchy and the work of building a mental framework that is more
anti-racist and that centers social equitability. For example, buying a car is not an affordable
option for most people and solutions to climate change need to apply to everyone - like
fighting for good, affordable public transit. A lot of the internal work is emotional. Many
of us are stuck in the first stage of grief around climate - denial. Our survival tactics
are saying “if we pretend we don’t see it, maybe it will go away”, but this isn’t going away.
For a while, I was stuck in the bargaining phase, thinking that if I could just buy the right
eco-friendly things, then in some way I could escape climate guilt. Others are stuck in anger
or in depression and this is intense and those are valid emotional responses. This is not a
just situation and many people suffer moral injury because of it. Anger and sadness are
neither good nor bad emotions; they just are. These feelings evolved because they are survival
strategies; adrenaline gave us the energy to fight off that attacking sabertooth tiger. But
we didn’t evolve to spend long periods of time in heightened states of stress - it’s
not healthy. It certainly wasn’t for me. You can’t take care of the climate
if you don’t take care of yourself and your mental health. I didn’t do that and it
put me in the hospital. I couldn’t contribute to the movement for over a year. So find someone
to talk to, meditate, run to relieve stress, find time to process this, find what works for
you. I'll leave resources in the description. I’ve learned that living with climate change is a
lot like living with an incurable chronic illness. It sucks. And no matter what you do,
it’s never going to go away entirely. Hoping for a cure gets you nowhere, but you can
learn to live with it. You can find treatments and diets - or take actions - that reduce the
symptoms. There will, at times, be suffering, but you can still live a meaningful life. And
that is the final stage of grief - acceptance. By that I don’t mean accepting that climate
change is coming and there is nothing we can do so we might as well lay down and die - I
mean accepting that climate change is now a part of our lives and we have to plan our lives
accordingly - we have to adapt and mitigate. Since I stopped thinking about climate change
in terms of hope, I have felt much more able to function and to do the work that needs doing.
I fight for our climate because it's the right thing to do, not because I'm hoping for, or
expecting, a specific outcome. And I really think that that is a more resilient perspective: climate
action gives me purpose, while hope can run out. Regardless of the outcome, I
want to be able to look back and know that my life honored those who have
already lost their lives in climate disasters. I want to live my life in line with my
values. And I want to be able to tell my now two-year-old niece that I did everything
I could to secure her generation's future. I also think that in a world where
less and less seems to make sense, having a clear sense of purpose for good
makes everything feel a little bit better. And finally, this brings us all the way back to
that question I was asked back in 2018 which is: What can you and I actually do about climate
change? And the answer is: it depends… Okay, before you start typing your
angry comment just hear me out! It depends on who you are, on what your interests, abilities and personal privileges are,
as well as what your local community needs. There are a lot of different approaches
and finding yours is a bit of a personal journey. No one approach is perfect, but we need a lot
of people working together on all the angles. As I've stressed throughout this video, we
need system change, that is, we need strong governmental action on climate. For people
living in democratic countries, we need to vote and campaign for politicians who put climate
action at the center of their ideology. That means climate aware politicians, who talk about ending
fossil fuels as soon as possible, who understand the intersectionality of climate, wealth, race and
social justice. It means politicians who signed the pledge promising not to take money from fossil
fuel companies. We cannot continue to cast votes for parties like the Canadian Conservatives, who
officially do not recognize that climate change is even real. If you’re still not sure who to
support, there’s third party organizations like LeadNow who give climate ratings to political
candidates - I’ll leave links in the description. And voting is literally the least you can do to
help get a climate leader get elected. Political campaigns need volunteers with all sorts of skills
for all sorts of positions such as these* and they need donations too. Between municipal, state
and federal elections, there is pretty much always a campaign happening near you, at any time,
that you can get involved in - so you don’t have to wait and anyone can help. You could start today
by Googling what elections are happening soon, near you figuring out which campaigns
you might want to get involved with and then just reaching out to them
through their website or their socials. Future Me again. I just want to stress that
elections are a necessary starting point but they’re not enough on their own and in
part that’s because people tend to say that they care about climate change but when
they actually get to the ballet box they often forget that concern and I think part of the
reason for that is that the mainstream media is just not giving adequate coverage to the topic and
we need to change that and we can by doing things like mass protests. We can get climate change on
the news and get it on peoples’ minds and even when people want to vote for climate change their
votes often don’t count because of issues like gerrymandering and voter suppressions and even
when we do get someone elected we can’t be sure that their not just going to forget about their
campaign promises as they often do. I’m looking at you Justin Trudeau saying that we were going
to have no more elections with first-past-the-post in 2015. Anyway, we have to hold these politicians
accountable and we can do that through protesting. Now, at the risk of sounding too repetitive,
global emissions are continuing to rise annually. What we have been doing to stop that has been
insufficient. We need to try everything that we can cause this is really important and we need
to be trying things that are radically different. When you look through history at movements like
the women’s suffrage or the civil rights movement, those things didn’t just happen in an electoral
ballot box vacuum. They happened because millions of people raised their voices and marched to the
streets. We need mass protests and general strikes for movements like this, like climate
change, to succeed. We need to be able to get this issue on people’s minds and we
need to be able to pressure politicians. And that’s why democratic freedoms are not just
about voting. It’s also the right to protest. Non-violent civil disobedience groups like
The Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future among others need
people to help organize and train volunteers, to plan events, to make banners, to get
the word out, just to name a few tasks. You can organize at the company you work for, or
at the university you attend. Students and staff across Canada have already succeeded in
getting over a dozen universities to divest their assets from fossil fuels. These campaigns
are most likely to be effective when they focus on specific and actionable goals
for the company or university. In the face of climate chaos,
protesting is not a radical act, it’s a rational one. When the COVID-19
pandemic happened, we completely changed how our societies operated and we spent trillions
of dollars on the issue. Climate change is a much bigger crisis and we need to fight
for a proportionally bigger response. There are nearly 2000 climate action lawsuits that
are either completed or are still ongoing. Whether its cases against oil and gas pipelines like
Keystone XL and the Trans Mountain Expansion, or class action lawsuits from teenagers, or
lawsuits against Big Oil for lying to the public about climate change, these cases matter. They can
slow down the construction process for pipelines, they help to shift public awareness
and perception of the problem and most of all, they can win, like last
year when a Dutch court ruled that Shell must reduce its greenhouse gas
emissions by 45% by the year 2030. While this climate action option isn’t something
that everyone can get involved in that easily, it’s an important part of the work being
done. Every country, including the US, needs an Environmental Court, which has judges
that are already educated in environmental laws and agencies that do not presume
that the government can do no wrong and that is something that any
citizen can organize and fight for. In the months since I’ve filmed this the US
supreme court has rolled back constitutional rights to abortion and pre-emptively curbed
the environmental protection agencies ability to regulate carbon emissions and myself
along with a lot of people are quite concerned that we’re witnessing the very start of a
bunch of rollbacks to constitutional rights, to basic human rights and it’s a big concern.
If you want to stay up to date on what’s going on I really recommend the podcast “5-4”;
it’s about why the Supreme Court sucks and it’s really, really well done and I also hope
that you’ll check out demandjustice.org to see how you could get involved in actually helping
to fix the Supreme Court by doing things like getting them to add more Justices -
add more seats. Yeah, that’s it for me. I’ve put a list of organizations and their
websites in the video description that you can contact today to get involved with and you
don’t just have to volunteer your time, either. You can find a career that helps to combat
the climate crisis. You can build windmills, become a politician, repair bicycles,
work in education, work for a non-profit. Hopefully by now you understand
that there are so many paths to fighting for climate action that there is
definitely a place for you in that fight. Ultimately, to solve climate change,
we need to get more people to fight for climate action. Research suggests
that it might take just as little as activating 3.5% of the general public
to get a social movement to succeed. That’s not that much. That’s very doable. But to
do it, we need to be talking more about climate. Most Americans say they “rarely” or “never”
discuss global warming with friends and family. If we want to halt emissions, we need to change
that. Especially considering that people that hear about climate change several times a year are
more likely to support strong climate policies. We have to stop pretending
that this isn’t happening; we need to stop gaslighting ourselves
and each other - this is a big deal. These conversations aren’t always easy
to have, so here are some tips. First, take a moment to think about who you’ll
be engaging with before you get started. Really listen to people and ask them
questions without attacking them and try to meet them wherever they are. Figure out
what they care about and what would make them care about climate change. Remember that the goal in
these conversations should be to get everyone to shift just a little more towards helping the
climate. Sometimes that means inviting someone to go to a climate march with you, but other
times it’ll mean trying to convince people that, maybe, it’s a bad idea to unthinkingly
spread Big Oil propaganda on Facebook. Whoever they are, approach them with compassion
and try to engage with them about how they feel about these things, because we often let our
opinions on matters of fact get tied up in our emotions. Know that a lot of people feel
a lot of guilt and they can feel under attack, especially when their jobs are heavily reliant
on fossil fuels. It’s often worth getting into what a Just Transition could be like in
the conversation, as early in the conversation as possible, so the people understand that
environmentalists aren’t out to get them. Also know that it’s sometimes not worth engaging
at all. There are a lot of people that are determined to never change their minds when shown
new information or new perspectives - despite the fact that is literally what learning is.
There are a lot of trolls out there too, especially online - I know - and
these conversations just aren’t worth your time and frustration.
So please, don’t feed the trolls. But most of the time and with most people,
it’s worth it and we need to try. Yes, it takes practice, but we just have to
start having more of these conversations. This is by far my densest and longest
video ever and I know that it doesn’t make for easily shareable water-cooler
chatter content, but I do hope it can help spark some meaningful conversations so please
consider sharing it, if you can. And, again, the video description has resources and sources
and links for everything that I’ve covered. And thank you for watching.
