Bill Nye: We Can Still Save the Planet –– Paris, 2015
- 6 years ago
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Transcript - So my grandfather went into World War I on a horse, on a horse. I don't know if you've ever ridden a horse but if people are shooting at you it's just not the best place to be. You're high off the ground; they shoot the horse and you're now immobile and you may end up underneath the horse and it's all very bad in that regard. Twenty years later, when both of my parents got involved in World War II, nobody who was fighting a war did it on a horse. Everything changed in transportation in just 20 years so let's do it again. Let's make all electric cars. Let's make all the electricity from wind and solar.
Just that world leaders all showed up in Paris this year is a fantastic thing. Furthermore, the United States President showed up there. The president, whether you like him or not, is the most influential single guy in the world, single person in the world and he went to the trouble to go there, committing the United States to reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years. And they all agreed to get together every five years and check on each other, see if the other countries are holding to their commitments. Now the trouble is if a country is making more carbon dioxide than they agreed to in 2015, then it agreed to in 2015, there's not too much anybody can do about it, except world opinion is very important. World leaders are very interested in what people think of them and us.
And as I say all the time, if the U.S. were leading, if the U.S. were out in front on energy technology everybody in the world would be following the same way everybody in the world knows who Mickey Mouse is. If we had a culture of renewable energy people would embrace that culture and use renewable energy.
The biggest news in science this year for me was the U.S., which is the world leader in all this energy burning, fossil fuel burning and using a lot of energy per person, the U.S. now has 53 percent of our population who believe that humans are causing climate change. So 53 percent is enough to get elected president. And so maybe climate change will be an issue in the next presidential election here in the United States and that will influence the whole world.
A few weeks ago I was in West Virginia and I got an email from somebody in the Speakers Organization, the organization that led to my being hired to speak there The Clay Center in Charleston West Virginia here in the United States. And it said don't talk about coal; it's a very sensitive subject here. The president's policies have greatly affected the coal industry and so on and so on. When you're in that part of the world they have a technology called mountaintop removal. So they take off the tops of these very high hills, these mountains, and there's the coal all at this level all over the state of West Virginia and it ruins the local ecosystems. The streams get full of all this crud. They use these slurries to pump powdered coal around, use explosives and they destroy the forest that was there. Read the Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/dJlMSw.
http://bigthink.com/videos/bill-nye-on-the-paris-climate-negotiations
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Transcript - So my grandfather went into World War I on a horse, on a horse. I don't know if you've ever ridden a horse but if people are shooting at you it's just not the best place to be. You're high off the ground; they shoot the horse and you're now immobile and you may end up underneath the horse and it's all very bad in that regard. Twenty years later, when both of my parents got involved in World War II, nobody who was fighting a war did it on a horse. Everything changed in transportation in just 20 years so let's do it again. Let's make all electric cars. Let's make all the electricity from wind and solar.
Just that world leaders all showed up in Paris this year is a fantastic thing. Furthermore, the United States President showed up there. The president, whether you like him or not, is the most influential single guy in the world, single person in the world and he went to the trouble to go there, committing the United States to reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years. And they all agreed to get together every five years and check on each other, see if the other countries are holding to their commitments. Now the trouble is if a country is making more carbon dioxide than they agreed to in 2015, then it agreed to in 2015, there's not too much anybody can do about it, except world opinion is very important. World leaders are very interested in what people think of them and us.
And as I say all the time, if the U.S. were leading, if the U.S. were out in front on energy technology everybody in the world would be following the same way everybody in the world knows who Mickey Mouse is. If we had a culture of renewable energy people would embrace that culture and use renewable energy.
The biggest news in science this year for me was the U.S., which is the world leader in all this energy burning, fossil fuel burning and using a lot of energy per person, the U.S. now has 53 percent of our population who believe that humans are causing climate change. So 53 percent is enough to get elected president. And so maybe climate change will be an issue in the next presidential election here in the United States and that will influence the whole world.
A few weeks ago I was in West Virginia and I got an email from somebody in the Speakers Organization, the organization that led to my being hired to speak there The Clay Center in Charleston West Virginia here in the United States. And it said don't talk about coal; it's a very sensitive subject here. The president's policies have greatly affected the coal industry and so on and so on. When you're in that part of the world they have a technology called mountaintop removal. So they take off the tops of these very high hills, these mountains, and there's the coal all at this level all over the state of West Virginia and it ruins the local ecosystems. The streams get full of all this crud. They use these slurries to pump powdered coal around, use explosives and they destroy the forest that was there. Read the Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/dJlMSw.