This bestselling author is calling out billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for their 'false solutions' to the climate crisis.
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00:00But I do think it's important to be a multi-planet, not just one planet but another planet.
00:03So the most dangerous false solution is any solution
00:08that leads us to believe that we have more time than we do.
00:20It's interesting that several of these billionaires who have gone into
00:23the climate arena like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are developing their own Planet B.
00:32They are spending a huge amount of their excess fortune to develop space programs
00:40and are explicit about why they're doing it.
00:42That they believe that we will lose this fight and that we need to bring humanity to space,
00:51to colonize Mars, to build space colonies, which is what Jeff Bezos wants to do.
00:56And they've gone on record saying it's because they believe the Earth will become uninhabitable.
01:02And I think that if we leave this to them, they're absolutely right.
01:05It will, because these are not serious solutions that they're putting on the table.
01:13The idea that has the most traction is sometimes called solar radiation management.
01:19What it actually means is trying to manage the sun.
01:23So the way you would try to manage the sun is by spraying,
01:31and usually the idea is to do this with aircraft, with airplanes, to spray
01:38particulate matter in the upper atmosphere to try to reflect more of the sun's heat
01:45back to outer space.
01:47So sometimes people talk about the risk of this being that we would never see
01:51a blue sky again, which of course is a horrible thought.
01:55But there's a much bigger risk, and the bigger risk is that this very well could interfere
02:03with the monsoons in India and in Africa that are the source of fresh water.
02:11One is carbon capture that is attached to fossil fuel production.
02:18So attached to, say, a coal plant or a gas plant, they would capture the emissions at site
02:26and somehow bury them underground.
02:30There have been a lot of problems with storage of this.
02:34It doesn't get at the polluting impact of the sun.
02:38This is a huge problem because if you're talking about, for instance, fracked gas,
02:48which is where much of the gas is coming from, the environmental impacts are not only at the site
02:54where they are being turned into electricity.
02:58It's also at the site of extraction.
03:00The same is true for coal.
03:01Then there's another form of carbon capture, which is referred to as air capture.
03:08And so this is the idea of capturing carbon from the air and burying it underground,
03:14so the emissions that have already gone into the atmosphere.
03:18And then you would build kind of metal trees to suck the carbon out of the air.
03:23My concern with this is that it's actually a very extraction-heavy
03:29response to the climate crisis, because it requires a whole bunch of more extraction
03:36to get the metal to build these trees.
03:38And then once again, you have the problem of where you're going to put it.
03:42Is it going to be secure?
03:43Whose communities are going to be sacrificed to bury this?
03:51One of the false solutions is the idea that we can live exactly as we're living,
03:56keep consuming as much as we're consuming, but just get our energy from another source.
04:00We actually have to consume less.
04:02But I think that in order to lower our emissions as quickly as possible,
04:06it makes much more sense to invest in renewable energy,
04:10in investing in the parts of our economy that aren't extraction-based,
04:15like the care economy, teaching, health, the arts, all of that.
04:20And then the other thing we should do is we should plant a lot of trees.
04:26We should rehabilitate landscape because this is natural carbon capture and storage.
04:33It's called a tree.
04:34It doesn't require any metal or mining.
04:40We need to be radically cutting our emissions by around 10% a year
04:46in countries like France and Canada and the U.S., and we need to do it right away.