We WILL Fix Climate Change!

Our home is burning. Rapid climate change is destabilizing our world. It seems our emissions will not fall quickly enough to avoid runaway warming, and we may soon hit tipping points that will lead to the collapse of ecosystems and our civilization. While scientists, activists, and much of the younger generation urge action, it appears most politicians are not committed to doing anything meaningful. While the fossil fuel industry still works actively against change, it seems humanity can't overcome its greed and obsession with short-term profit and personal gain to save itself.

And so, for many, the future looks grim and hopeless. Young people feel particularly anxious and depressed. Instead of looking ahead to a lifetime of opportunity, they wonder if they will even have a future, or if they should bring kids into this world. It's an age of doom and hopelessness, and giving up seems the only sensible thing to do. But that's not true. You are not doomed. Humanity is not doomed. [Music]

Despite the seriousness of the situation, for years positive trends have accumulated, and there is finally some good news and a clear path towards our collective climate goals. Welcome to our Ted Talk. Please watch this video to the end. Check out our detailed sources afterwards to learn more.

Okay, let's start with the scariest things: cancelling the apocalypse. Some of the most widely shared stories about climate change are that it is an existential threat, the end of human civilization, and maybe even our own extinction event, and that it's basically unavoidable now. But what does science actually say?

As of 2022, the global average temperature has risen 1.2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees was the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement, but we are not likely to meet it. Already, with the warming we have today, hot places will get hotter, wet places wetter, and the risk and strength of extreme weather events increase significantly. Warming beyond 2 degrees makes all of these extremes more extreme. Extreme weather events become more common, with more ecosystems under major pressure. Some will not survive at 3 degrees.

Significant parts of Earth, especially in developing countries, might become unable to feed their populations. Heat waves will become a major global issue. Large-scale natural systems will break down. The scale and frequency of hurricanes, fires, and droughts will further increase and cause trillions in damage. Poor regions and subsistence farmers will be hit the hardest. Hundreds of millions of people will need to leave their homes. In the 4 to 8 degrees range, the apocalypse begins: the hot house Earth, where things change so quickly that it may become unable to support our large human population, and billions may perish, leaving the rest on a hostile alien planet.

A decade ago, for lack of action and perspective, many scientists assumed a four-plus degree world was our future, and a lot of public communication focused on exactly this future path. Luckily, it's much less likely that this version of the apocalypse will come to pass. If current climate policies stagnate, we're likely to end up with warming of around 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, which is scary and tragic and far from acceptable. But this is actually good news.

How? In the last decade, we've seen enough progress that most scientists now think that we have likely avoided apocalyptic climate change. Although substantial risk still remains, we can pretty confidently say that humanity isn't going anywhere. Civilization might have to change, but it will endure. This begs the question: what has changed over the last 10 years, and is this really good news?

The invisible shift. You probably know this story. The last decade has been an immense failure for climate policies around the world. Instead of passing comprehensive binding bills that would meaningfully reduce emissions, we mostly did nothing. A lost decade with one negative record after another, and this story is true, and it's one reason why so many people are giving up. But it is not the whole picture.

Despite the lack of climate policies and ongoing lobbying and misinformation campaigns from the fossil fuel industries, there was a lot of progress. Let's go back 20 years to see why today is so different. Between 2000 and 2010, greenhouse gas emissions had grown by 24%, three times as much as the increase in the previous decade. Subsidies for fossil fuels aimed at promoting economic growth caused a colossal increase in their consumption. For developing countries like China and India, coal was the cheapest fuel for growth, while rich countries showed little interest in changing their ways.

In 2010, many people expected these trends to continue. Instead of decreasing fossil fuel use, its consumption would rise. The next decade turned out to be very different, though. First of all, coal burning in developing countries like India has slowed down or leveled off, like in China, and it's plummeted in rich countries like the UK and US. Since 2015, 34% of planned coal plants have been canceled, and 44 countries have committed to stop building them.

Ten years ago, that would have seemed like wishful thinking. But today, we can say with confidence: coal is dying. It's just not competitive anymore, because technologies we thought would remain expensive matured rapidly. Instead, renewable electricity has shown explosive progress. In a mere decade, wind energy got three times cheaper. Solar electricity is now 10 times cheaper than coal or any other fossil fuel burning power plant.

Despite the massive subsidies and global infrastructure propping up fossil fuels, 25 times more solar and nearly five times more wind electricity is produced today compared with 10 years ago, which is, of course, not nearly enough. One of the biggest obstacles is the variability of their power output. Renewables need a lot of energy storage to be a reliable power source, like expensive batteries. Amazingly, battery prices have decreased by 97% in the past 30 years, and 60% in the last decade alone, which will serve all kinds of green technology, like electric cars.

You might say, "Well, that's great, but didn't Kotz Kazak's last climate video say that while wind and solar are nice, we need nothing less than a fundamental transition of our global industrial system?" Yes, but luckily the shift goes beyond just the energy sector. Throughout the economy, people are working on improving current technology to lower emissions.

We're rapidly replacing old incandescent light bulbs with LEDs that are 10 times more efficient. In 2020, about 7 out of 10 new cars in Norway were electric or hybrid. In 2021, it was already eight out of 10. And the list goes on, from electric heating and better insulation to ships traveling at half speed to save fuel. Wherever you look, you find scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs trying to solve some aspect of climate change.

Enormous amounts of human ingenuity are being brought to bear on this problem, with more and more people deciding to prioritize preventing rapid climate change. Solutions for low carbon production of cement, electronics, and steel, and innovations like artificial meat and carbon capture are in the works. The more of these technologies we deploy, the cheaper new and better technology gets, the cheaper they get, the more people use them, and so on.

We can see the impact already: the domestic CO2 output of rich countries is falling without a major recession. Since the year 2000, the EU as a whole shows a 21% decrease, Italy 28%, the UK 35%, Denmark 43%. But the best news may be that emissions are no longer necessarily coupled with economic growth. In the past, this was an inconvenient truth: to get richer, you had to emit more, which led to fierce arguments between developing and developed countries about the fairness of reducing emissions while their populations were still poor.

But in the last decade, we've seen that it is possible to increase prosperity without increasing emissions. Emissions in the Czech Republic dropped 13% while their GDP grew by 27%. France reduced their CO2 emissions by 14% while increasing GDP by 15%. Romania saw an 8% decrease and 35.5% growth. And even the largest economy on Earth, the USA, decreased emissions by 4% while growing their GDP by 26%.

Some of you may call this a numbers trick, that rich countries are just exporting emissions to poorer nations by moving the dirty parts of their economies, like manufacturing. But even when we account for all of our imported goods, the numbers still look positive. It's no longer a matter of having to choose between prosperity and the climate, as it seemed to be a decade ago.

Developing countries will profit from that because as rich countries pay for the expensive development of green technologies, they can adopt them more cheaply. They can skip most of the high emission phase that today's rich countries went through. We are at the point where not decarbonizing is a bad business decision. And we haven't even really talked about solutions like carbon capture. In 2000, it didn't really exist. In 2022, that technology does exist and costs around $600 to remove one ton of CO2 from the atmosphere.

As investment pours in and the technology matures and begins to scale, it's likely that these costs will plummet over the next few decades. So everything's fine then? Well, let's not get carried away. All of these processes are great, but not nearly fast enough. We're still doing way too little, and technology will not magically solve everything.

We need to use fewer resources and use them longer. Design consumer goods that are repairable and durable and decrease our energy requirements. We need much better infrastructure, agriculture, and cities. It will still be hard work, especially to get the right policies passed and enacted. But for the first time ever, there are a few trend lines pointing solidly in the right direction.

Now imagine if all of this was achieved without proper financial and political support, and despite fossil fuel lobbying. Just think what humanity can do when climate change finally gets the political attention and funding it needs.

So is it okay to feel hopeful again? The situation is still dire and serious. So what's the point of focusing on this side of the story? The trap of hopelessness. Climate change can feel overwhelming and make your future seem bleak. The sadness and hopelessness that many people feel is real and very destructive because it causes apathy—apathy that is only serving the fossil fuel industry that is still delaying change.

However, it can, in a sense, be said that they have weaponized hopelessness. We are now in phase four in the public debate about rapid climate change action. Phase one was climate change is not real. Phase two was climate change is real but not caused by humans. Phase three was climate change may be caused by humans, but it's not that bad. Phase four is climate change is no longer avoidable; we are doomed, and it doesn't matter what we do.

If we want the world to change, we first need to believe that change is possible, and we have an abundance of evidence that it is. Changes to our industrial system are gaining momentum. Technology gets better and cheaper. Climate change has become a key issue in most free elections. As more and more younger people move into influential positions, they prioritize climate change and work on new solutions. In 2022, most governments not only acknowledge it but set their own net-zero goals in democratic and autocratic countries.

The results of years of fighting a steep uphill battle are now clearly visible. The pressure needs to keep increasing to make sure that the promises made today are actually kept. Climate doomism is the equivalent of giving up, even though you can still prevent not just the worst case, but also mitigate most of the bad things, make changes in time to adapt better, and prevent the poorest from suffering.

That is why hopelessness and apathy are so dangerous. If the last, in any ways, wasted decade has shown anything, then it's that progress is being made and that dire scenarios are just predictions, not our sealed fate. As of 2022, based on current global policies, we will end up in a 3-degree world. Now it's our job to yet again prove the predictions wrong.

Despite how serious and urgent things are, we need to turn that 3 degrees into a 2-degree, and then see where we can go from there. For that, we need hope, and we hope we gave you that today, at least a little. You should feel that things are serious, but also that you have a future; that you could have kids without dooming them or the world; that taking action today is worth it; and that despite powerful industries doing everything to delay it, society is changing.

If you need a more concrete roadmap of what you can do personally, we're working on a follow-up video to talk about that in greater detail. Weaponized hopelessness are the only trump cards left for the powers that don't want change. Don't let them win. [Music]