Shadowing Practice: How much progress have we made on climate change? - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
B2
Planet Earth is amazing.
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Planet Earth is amazing.
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510 million square kilometers under a blue sky.
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Granted, most of that is salt water,
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but the planet also hosts lush rainforests,
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scorching deserts, grasslands, tundra, mountains,
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and plains, inhabited by a rich diversity of life.
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It is in fact the only place in the known universe capable of supporting life as we know it.
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But for the past three centuries,
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that blue sky has become increasingly choked with pollution.
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The level of invisible carbon dioxide gas has increased by more than 50% since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
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As carbon dioxide is very good at trapping heat,
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this has raised the average temperature of the planet by more than one degree Celsius.
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At the start of the 21st century,
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it was predicted that continuing carbon emissions would warm the planet by about 4 degrees by the year 2100.
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This would be catastrophic.
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Food networks would collapse.
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Extreme weather events like heat waves would become devastating.
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Life on Earth would enter into unprecedented territory.
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But preventing this future seemed impossible.
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Almost every human activity produced carbon dioxide,
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mostly because our energy was overwhelmingly supplied by burning fossil fuels to generate electricity,
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produce heat and move ourselves around.
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But the Earth as we knew it was at stake,
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so people all around the world got to work.
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This video is about what they did and what a difference they've made.
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The single largest source of carbon emissions is the production of electricity and heat,
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representing almost one-third of all emissions.
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Because burning fossil fuels, especially coal and gas,
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have historically dominated power generation.
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But they're no longer the only options.
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Renewable sources like solar panels and wind turbines emit far less carbon per unit of power generated over their lifetimes.
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And globally, over 4,000 GW of renewables capacity has been built,
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almost all since the year 2000.
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but 30% of all electricity now comes from renewable sources.
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But that's the global average.
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In Uruguay, around 90% of electricity comes from renewables,
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largely wind, but also hydropower.
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And last year, the country went for 10 straight months on a 100% clean grid.
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South Australia may also hit a 100% clean grid as soon as 2027,
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thanks to wind and solar.
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And other places are not far behind.
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The North Sea might be the best place in the world for offshore wind,
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and the current rollout of wind power here enables the UK
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and Denmark to aim for a clean grid by 2030 and the Netherlands by 2035.
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India aims to power 10 million households with rooftop solar,
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adding 500 gigawatts of capacity by 2030.
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But we can't discuss the rollout of renewables and not mention where most of them are being installed.
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China.
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China is building approximately twice as much new wind and solar as the rest of the world combined.
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It's still the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide,
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though that's because of its huge population.
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The average person in China has a carbon footprint only two-thirds the size of the average Americans.
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And its emissions have been rising sharply,
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but not for much longer.
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The huge surge of solar and wind construction in 2024 kept overall Chinese emissions lower
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than in 2023 for 10 months of the year,
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and every year the amount of renewables added to the grid increases.
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This emissions reduction almost certainly isn't a one-off, but a systematic change.
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Many analysts predict that China's emissions due to coal,
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its other major source of electricity,
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will start to fall this year.
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And a new phase of low-carbon to run,
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nuclear power is being built in China and around the world,
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with over 70 gigawatts currently,
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slowly, under construction, and generation hitting an all-time high this year.
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China's new electricity system will see its overall emissions,
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a huge fraction of global emissions,
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peak in the next few years.
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It may feel like we have made no progress in the fight against climate change,
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but the power sector shows that is not the case.
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In fact, carbon emissions due to generating electricity likely already peaked two years ago,
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and will fall even under high forecasts for growth in demand,
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such as for AI.
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We're just building that many renewables,
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and investing that much in grids and storage to overcome the intermittency of renewables.
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In Chile, the Oasis de Atacama project is being built a 14.5 gigawatt-hour battery,
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enough to power peak demand in the country on its own.
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But peaking electricity emissions is not the same as overall emissions peaking,
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because because not everything runs on electricity.
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The next two largest sources of emissions are heating and transport.
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Around the world, most people heat themselves and water by burning a fuel,
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often natural gas, in a boiler,
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and move themselves around by burning an oil-based product,
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like petrol, in an engine.
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This has long been the case,
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but in some parts of the world,
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alternative approaches are now more popular.
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And where they are more popular tells us something about the near future.
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Let's look at China and Norway.
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In Norway, most households are not heated by a boiler,
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but by a heat pump,
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a fridge running in reverse, basically, powered by electricity.
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And last year, 9 out of 10 new vehicles bought in Norway were EVs,
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with the country set to phase out the sale of non-electric vehicles soon,
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maybe even this year.
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Meanwhile, in China, most cars now sold are electric or hybrid.
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Uptake has just exploded in recent years.
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That's partly because China dominates the manufacture of EVs,
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but also because of what it has in common with Norway.
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Cheap electricity.
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In Norway, it comes from hydropower.
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In China, from solar and wind.
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Where electricity is cheap, it just makes financial sense to electrify heating and transport.
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In fact, while on average around the world a little over 20% of all energy is used as electricity,
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in Norway it's 47%, in Guangdong province it's 49%,
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and in Zhejiang province it's 51%.
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As renewables, particularly solar, roll out across the world,
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the price of electricity will fall,
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making electrified systems, such as in transport and heating,
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but also industrial processes, much more appealing.
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As well as being more efficient,
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those systems are then tied to the carbon emissions of the electric grid,
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which, being based on renewables,
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will be low, much lower than running them on fossil fuels.
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These sectors will see their emissions start to tumble in coming years as electrification percentages rise.
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Of course, decarbonising transport is much more complicated than just replace cars with electric cars.
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You can watch my whole video about that.
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And this process can be accelerated with appropriate government policies.
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This has happened in China and Norway, but now elsewhere too.
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In East Africa, Ethiopia banned the import of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2024,
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encouraging the development of EV infrastructure.
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While in Kenya and Rwanda,
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policies are buildings charging stations and shifting both public transport and two-wheel mobility,
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like scooters, to electric vehicles.
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Both to reduce emissions, but also improve the poor air quality in cities.
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A win-win.
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The world has made huge progress,
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reducing emissions from power generation and to a lesser extent heating and transport.
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At the start of the century,
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scientists predicted four degrees of warming, maybe more, by 2100.
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Now, based on current actions by our governments,
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we will most likely see between 2.2 and 3.4,
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with the best guess being 2.7, degrees of warming.
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Global emissions may have already peaked,
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and if not, will do so soon.
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Emissions in advanced economies are already back to their levels from 50 years ago.
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That's huge, but obviously still not enough.
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At 2.7 degrees, we will still see enormous negative impacts on wildlife,
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agriculture and public health.
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Every tenth of a degree of warming extra makes the world a more unstable, dangerous place.
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But that 2.7 degrees is based on real-world government policies,
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what we're actually doing now.
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It doesn't account for increasing our ambitions or recent innovations becoming practical at scale.
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If governments announced 2030 targets are reached,
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along with any legally binding longer-term targets,
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we're likely looking at 2.1 degrees by the year 2100.
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Yes, that's still too high,
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but every tenth of a degree makes a difference.
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And there are many areas where we've only just started to see real alternatives to the status quo,
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practical ways to reduce emissions in the coming decades.
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We haven't, for example, talked about iron and steel.
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Long labelled as hard to decarbonise because of the huge energy required to melt iron,
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supplied by burning coal, but industry represents around 7% of all emissions.
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But in recent years, alternatives to coal have become economical and supported by government policy,
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such as using green hydrogen and using electric furnaces,
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which can of course be powered by clean sources, producing green steel.
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Globally, 43% of planned new steel furnaces are electric,
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and China, which produces half the world's steel,
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now only approves new electric furnaces that process scrap metal.
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Cement is another industry with a large carbon footprint,
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only slightly less than steel,
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due to its energy-intense production,
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but also the fundamental chemical reaction that produces cement, releasing CO2.
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Some are pushing the industry to change the recipe for cement,
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but as it's the second most traded commodity in the world,
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only second to water, that's a tall order.
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So the industry will likely need to rely on carbon capture units being retrofitted to existing cement plants.
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And these already exist.
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They are currently being slowly implemented.
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I actually made a video visiting one of them.
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With the right policy support,
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both steel and cement have potential to slash their emissions,
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over 10% of global emissions, in the coming decades.
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We've also not yet mentioned work on the other side of the carbon equation.
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By protecting natural carbon sinks,
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like forests, we not only suck more CO2 out of the air,
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but also reduce emissions of carbon through deforestation,
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and of course, protect biodiversity.
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And since the year 2000,
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carbon emissions due to land use change,
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about half of which is due to deforestation, have reduced by 30%.
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In the Amazon, deforestation has halved in the past two years.
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All around the world, small local projects seek to restore lost tree cover,
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plant new mangroves, and protect land from development.
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There are also enormous projects like one billion trees in New Zealand and the Great Green Wall of Africa,
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though these have many problems of their own.
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Deforestation is still occurring at far too fast a rate,
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but slowing it in the tropics has been a quiet small victory for the past few decades that looks set to continue,
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and in temperate regions we've actually been net gaining forest cover since the year 2000.
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Clearly, it can be done.
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Working with, rather than against,
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natural systems will play a key role in our trajectory this century.
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But you may have noticed something about this video,
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an area of the world where no large projects have been mentioned.
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What about America?
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Here emissions have decreased by 20% since the year 2000.
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But earlier this year, the US elected Donald Trump back into the White House,
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who made it clear that climate change was not a priority,
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that environmental protections will be rolled back,
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and that the country will leave the Paris Agreement again.
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This is obviously going to have negative impacts on emissions both in America and around the world.
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Confidence in climate progress has been shaken.
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Many seem to believe that his re-election has killed the clean energy transition,
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slamming the door on our future.
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This is not true.
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For one thing, America represents around one-eighth of global carbon emissions.
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That means that while American emissions may plateau for the next few years,
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I personally think a big increase is unlikely,
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they represent a small minority.
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And as we have seen,
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other large emitters like China and Europe are making ambitious plays to reduce their emissions.
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But more importantly, do you know where else is investing huge amounts into renewables that we haven't mentioned yet either?
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The Middle East.
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In fact, the Middle East is the fastest growing renewables market outside of China.
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Companies like Oman, the UAE,
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Qatar and Saudi Arabia are developing huge solar projects.
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Just last month, the UAE announced the world's largest round-the-clock solar and battery facility,
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even larger than the Oasis to Atacama,
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coming online in the next two years.
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These countries are built on oil and gas,
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and they're now ploughing money into renewables because they recognise it as the future.
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Globally, twice as much was invested last year in clean energy technologies and grid upgrades as was invested in fossil fuels.
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The fact is, the energy transition isn't happening because it's the environmentally right thing to do,
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it now just makes economic sense.
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Solar and to a lesser extent wind are now so cheap that they are preferable to burning fossil fuels in many cases,
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making electric systems cost competitive.
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It's for this reason that heat pumps will continue to outsell gas boilers in the US,
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Individual states will continue rolling out renewable power generation and investing in geothermal power.
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The US has the real potential to lead the world here,
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and after all, it does involve drilling, baby.
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Drilling.
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One person, even if they are the most powerful person in the world,
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is not going to derail the transition to clean energy,
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and by extension, massively reduced carbon emissions.
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That transition is now inevitable and happening at pace around the world.
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The question is, just how quickly will it happen?
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Will it be fast enough?
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Will we get to net zero fast enough?
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We've already brought expected warming down from 4 to 2.7 degrees.
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If we follow through on our medium-term targets,
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we can get that down to 2.1.
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If we are ambitious and push for net zero and utilise all the strategies in this video and more besides,
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we can still limit warming to less than 2 degrees.
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We have lived through a period of ever-increasing climate impacts,
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but also ever-increasing ambition on climate.
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We need this to continue.
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Every tenth of a degree saved matters.
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But as the re-election of Trump shows,
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we cannot take it for granted that progress will continue to accelerate.
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I don't want you to come away from this video thinking we have done enough on climate change
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or we are moving fast enough,
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because sadly that is still not the case.
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The great adventure of securing our future is in jeopardy
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if we do not keep climate as a core concern in who we vote to lead us,
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who we choose to work for,
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and how we spend our money.
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But most importantly, it's not an adventure we need to start.
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It's an adventure that has already made great strides.
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An adventure we need to continue and see through to its final destination.
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Maybe you can be a part of this great story keeping our Earth amazing.
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I built this 1 to 100 million scale Earth from scratch over the course of two weeks and also filmed the process.
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So if you would like to see an extra video of me talking through how I made this,
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You can watch that right now if you have a Nebula subscription.
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I post all my videos on Nebula a day before releasing them on YouTube,
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as well as exclusive content like this model-making video,
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but also me playing Daybreak with a team of climate scientists,
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and a whole documentary about making my new YouTube studio.
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All of these videos can be watched ad-free,
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downloaded to your device to play offline,
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and each view of a video on Nebula supports me as a creator more than each view on YouTube
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because of how Nebula works.
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It's a collective of hundreds of video creators who co-own the platform,
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and who share the revenue subscriptions users pay based on the watch time their channels get.
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Nebula also finances big new projects with creators,
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like Boomers by Tom Nicholas and Modern Conflicts by Real Life Law.
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Obviously I'm biased because I'm a co-owner,
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but increasingly on my lunch breaks I've just been watching Nebula instead of YouTube because it's just a better viewing experience.
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There's no ads, the design of the site is actually good,
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and I don't have to hunt for a creator to watch
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because the entire feed is creators who are making interesting, thoughtful stuff.
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If you would like to get a Nebula subscription,
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then you can pay monthly,
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annually, or once for lifetime access.
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If you choose to pay annually,
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then you can use my link,
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go.nebula.tv slash simonclark, and you'll get a 40% discount,
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which works out to $3 a month.
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That'll be linked down there in the description, by the way.
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Three dollars a month I think is incredible value.
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So that link again is go.nebula.tv slash Simon Clark,
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so get access to heaps of exclusive content including my making of video attached to this video.
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Thank you for watching,
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and a massive thank you to JD who 3D printed most of the icons that you saw me place around the globe.
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You may have heard of JD's band,
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they're called The Longest Johns.
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Her sisters died from Perk and mine,
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but she'll run for decades more.
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She'll run for decades more.
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And also thank you to Nick from The Progress Playbook for chatting to me
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and suggesting some of the projects featured in this video.
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Do check out The Progress Playbook,
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which is linked in the references down below,
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for regular good news stories about the energy transition.
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I also could not have made this video without the support of my patrons.
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People who support me on patreon.com forward slash Simon Oxfiz get early access to my videos,
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exclusive content every month, notably a vlog that goes behind the scenes.
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This month's vlog is going to be all about basically how this project came to be,
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a little bit about how I sourced the materials and how I wrote this video.
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So if you'd like to watch that,
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and if you would like to vote on a video topic a month,
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you can do at the producer tier and above,
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then you know where to sign up.
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It's down there in the description,
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patreon.com forward slash Simon Oxfiz.
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And this just in, this body of water will now be known as the Gulf of Zak Subin.
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Wait, no, sorry, it's been changed.
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The Gulf of Ali Pasha Sadri.
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No, wait, I'm just hearing.
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It's actually the Gulf of Dan Hanvey.
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Thank you so much for supporting my work.
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If you like this video,
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then please consider checking out a previous video I made in
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a similar style looking at how we can turn cities into carbon sinks.
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If you like this video then please do the YouTube pleasantries,
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drop it a like, share it with somebody who you think would also enjoy it
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and that just leaves me to say thank you once again for watching.
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I'll see you in the next one.
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Context & Background
The video titled "How much progress have we made on climate change?" explores the significant changes in our planet's climate due to human activity, particularly focusing on carbon emissions over the past three centuries. It highlights the various ecosystems of Earth and emphasizes the alarming rise in carbon dioxide levels since the Industrial Revolution, which has led to a rise in global temperatures. The discussion then shifts to the measures taken worldwide to combat climate change through renewable energy sources, showcasing success stories from different nations such as Uruguay, South Australia, and India. This context provides valuable insights not only about environmental issues but also establishes a solid vocabulary and themes relevant for English learners.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- Carbon emissions: Refers to the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, primarily from activities like burning fossil fuels.
- Renewable energy sources: Energy derived from natural processes that are constantly replenished, such as solar and wind power.
- Clean grid: An electrical supply that is produced entirely from renewable resources.
- Climate change: Long-term changes in temperature and typical weather patterns in a place.
- Extreme weather events: Severe or unusual weather phenomena that can cause significant impact, such as hurricanes or heat waves.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To improve your English speaking skills effectively using the shadowing technique with this video, follow these steps:
- Watch the video once: Focus on the overall message without worrying about understanding every word. This will give you context.
- Select short sections: Break down the video into smaller segments of 30-60 seconds. This makes it easier to manage and repeat.
- Listen carefully: Play each segment and listen to how the speaker articulates the phrases, paying close attention to pronunciation and intonation.
- Practice shadowing: Turn on the audio and try to speak simultaneously with the speaker. Aim to mimic their rhythm and accent, which will enhance your fluency.
- Rewind and repeat: It's essential to listen multiple times until you feel confident. Repeat the exercise until you can speak without the video.
Using this shadowing site method can bolster your English speaking practice, enrich your vocabulary, and improve your overall listening comprehension. This approach also allows you to learn English with YouTube in a practical and impactful way, while developing your own shadow speech capabilities for real-world applications.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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