00:00Breathing is stressing me out.
00:04This will affect the entire planet.
00:05I know, but it's like so stressful.
00:08As I was watching the film, I felt like I was seen.
00:12I constantly feel like I need to climb up on my roof
00:15and just start screaming to everyone to wake up.
00:30Fifteen years of that, for me, has been emotionally brutal, I guess.
00:43The feeling of being gaslit, you know, knowing what's coming from the science, not seeing
00:51it in the media, not seeing it in the public discourse, and constantly having to go back
00:59to the scientific papers and the science and the IPCC reports and remind myself that, yes,
01:04this is really happening.
01:05There's a comet headed directly towards Earth.
01:14Do you know how many world is ending meetings we've had over the last two years?
01:20Throughout famine.
01:21All in the ozone is so boring.
01:24The comet in the film was such a great, you know, sort of parallel for the satire, because
01:31you have this astronomical object, which doesn't give a crap, and it's just coming inexorably
01:40to the Earth.
01:41You can't negotiate it.
01:42You can't talk it out of hitting.
01:45And whether you believe it's coming or not, it doesn't care.
01:48It's going to come anyway.
01:49And it's exactly the same with climate and ecological breakdown.
01:55The public, in my opinion, still doesn't fully understand the depth of the climate and ecological
02:04emergency, how irreversible it is, how rapidly it's happening, and how it's going to impact
02:10literally every aspect of how we live in modern life.
02:15I think that we're on track to basically civilizational collapse if we don't change course rapidly.
02:24And the thing that really has me worried is that there's no, I don't see signs that
02:30society is going to change course rapidly.
02:41It's often treated as just another issue.
02:43There's no discussion of just how serious the impacts are going to be.
02:49What would civilizational collapse look like, right?
02:52It's still a taboo to talk about that.
02:55You still see articles about winter heat waves.
02:57They illustrate it with a photo of people playing in the beach, and they don't mention
03:01climate change.
03:02You see show after show and movie after movie that are worlds depicted that look exactly
03:10like modern life, basically, except without climate change and without ecological breakdown.
03:15That reinforces people's sense that maybe it's not that serious.
03:22Unfortunately, they tend to be the ones who get invited on the really big platforms, on
03:33CNN, on MSNBC, in the biggest newspaper platforms, because society is not ready to hear that
03:44we're heading towards full-on civilizational collapse.
03:47On a matter of principle, I can't sugarcoat anything.
03:50I just have to say what I see coming.
03:53And unfortunately, I think that's part of why my voice hasn't been such a loud voice
04:01in the mainstream media.
04:11The fossil fuel industry, to be very clear, is the root cause of what's happening to our
04:16planet right now.
04:17You burn the fossil fuel to fly the planes, drive the cars, make the electricity, et cetera.
04:22And CO2 goes into the atmosphere, traps the outgoing heat.
04:28The planet gets to a higher temperature so that it can re-equilibrate the incoming energy
04:34from the sun with the outgoing energy from the infrared emission of the planet.
04:38A hotter planet means ice melts more.
04:41You get more wildfires.
04:43The precipitation cycle changes.
04:45So you get droughts in some places and flooding in other places.
04:57We need to stop with this farce of, oh, we have to protect fossil fuel jobs.
05:04What about the fossil fuel workers?
05:06We could quickly, probably by executive order, simply have free training, free retraining
05:13for those workers to train them up for, say, renewable energy jobs.
05:35It makes you realize how just repeating something over and over again, like net zero by 2050,
05:41doesn't make it right.
05:42And I think that that is a recipe, absolute recipe for catastrophic, potentially civilization
05:50ending disaster on this planet.
05:532050 is too late.
05:55We need to go faster than that.
05:56I feel like the film Don't Look Up really shines a spotlight on this sort of institutional
06:03denial from the mainstream media.
06:05And if we can break through that, and if we start getting the climate story being told
06:10with the appropriate level of urgency, then maybe we can get this social tipping point
06:16and get this really strong grassroots movement.
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