“You can find examples of really big environmental problems that we’ve already solved.”
Climate change is solvable, argues Hannah Ritchie.
Doomerism about the state of the planet is widespread right now. Many see climate change as an insurmountable problem that we won’t be able to tackle. But the reality tells a different story, says data scientist Hannah Ritchie.
By looking back at the data and how the world has changed over the centuries, you can find examples of big environmental problems that we’ve already solved. By tracing the evolution of human history, we can see that human progress often conflicted with environmental impact. The more that humans progressed, the more the environment degraded. Ritchie argues that now, we’re in a unique position where these two things are no longer in conflict, thanks to recent technologies that decouple our human well-being with our environmental impact.
Timestamps: 0:00 – An ‘insurmountable’ problem? 1:10 – 4 key targets to solve climate change 04:27 – How we reduce our emissions 09:36 – Being an ‘urgent optimist’ Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-t…
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