Everyone loves a good TEDtalk:
The main driver of global warming is human action: How much carbon we put into the atmosphere, according to author David Wallace Wells. He argues that whether we choose to act or not act, we are deciding our planet’s future.
Wallace Wells says that no matter how many solutions we deploy, we probably won't be able to decarbonize in time. We won't be able to beat climate change, only live with it and limit it.
This better future won't be easy. But the only obstacles are human ones. Science isn't stopping us from taking action, and neither is technology. We have the tools we need today to begin which is why more than new tools, we need a new politics, a way of overcoming all those human obstacles -- our culture, our economics, our status quo bias, our disinterest in taking seriously anything that really scares us. Our shortsightedness. Our sense of self-interest. And the selfishness of the world's rich and powerful who have the least incentive to change anything. Now, they will suffer too, but not as much as those with the least, who have done the least to produce warming and have benefited the least from the processes that have brought us to this crisis point but will be burdened most in the decades ahead. A new politics would make the matter of managing that burden, where it falls and how heavily, the top priority of our time.
No matter what we do, climate change will transform modern life. Some amount of warming is already baked in and is inevitable, which means probably some amount of additional suffering is, too. And even if we take dramatic action and avoid some of these truly terrifying worst-case scenarios, it would mean living on an entirely different planet. With a new politics, a new economics, a new relationship to technology and a new relationship to nature -- a whole new world. But a relatively livable one. Relatively prosperous. And green. Why not choose that one?