The Age of Stupid Page #3

But the quarter of that

energy makes stuffs for us.

Western company pay Chinese workers

crap wages to make crap plastic toys,

then ship them to Europe,

and wrap them in more plastic.

Punters drive to the out-of-town

megastore in their gas-guzzlers.

Plastic toy and plastic box

goes into plastic bag.

and back it goes to a Chinese landfill where it

stays for about, hmm, 50 thousand years?

Water from the bottle's

much better than the tap.

...Mountain spring spot.

and 10,000 times more expensive for you.

It's a tricky decision.

Lots of ideas have tried

to take over the world,

but there's only one winner.

Telling us we'll be happier,

more atracttive with better skin,

if only we buy their product.

To get there,

they create incentives and insatiable

desire to buy more and more stuff.

Americans have been advertised that longest,

and they now each consumed

twice as much energy as an European,

and 50 times more than someone from Kenya.

If all the 65 billion here on earth

consumed like European or Japanese,

we need two more planets worth of resources.

If everyone consumed like

American or Australian and Canadian,

we need another four.

And in 2040 or so when

there are about 90 billion of us,

we need two more again.

Capitalism's only goal

is ever expending growth,

but ever expending growth

on just a one not expending planet

It's impossible.

The con economic system is disastrous,

not just for the planet

, but for most people, too.

the richest one 1% to take 40% for themselves,

leaving just 1% for the poorest to have.

But anyone wanting to live

differently is fool ticket every time.

With profit, the only measuring step,

destroying the planet

is written into the system,

and run away climate change

is not very surprising result.

The logo effectively is color,

you know, light grey, you know,

orange telecom, they are orangey black.

Our logo is fluorescent color.

Where everything changes in economy

in minute, you have an airline moving in.

Because people can basically

do business alot faster,

if businesses grow a lot faster,

people have more disposable income,

then, you know, consumerism sets in,

and you know where the verge

where base consumerism is setting in,

just moving a lot like America.

Here, Jeh travels to

Airbus headquarter in France,

as they'll be supplying him

with 26 planes in his first 3 years.

We have only 200 aircrafts

commercially flying in India, China has 800.

Ultimately, you know,

we have a very long way to go,

playing catch up with China

catch up with Europe,

or, you know, say, America one airline

South West, has 417 aircrafts.

That's double the amount

of aircrafts we have as a country.

You know, we simple sentence

for me, summarizes it all.

Thing is gonna get better.

In my main house,

is has 10 feet of water in it,

marinated in that sludge

for 3 weeks, almost.

So it's current state of

my house, it's been demolished.

It's flat piece of a property waiting

for another house to go on that.

I lost everything, everything that i owned,

I mean everything from family heirlooms

to the paper towels sitting on your kitchen counter,

in everything in between, it goes on and on.

Two beautiful, beautiful

oak trees I did not lose,

you know, local, indigenous,

quikes, virginianas, live oaks

that sprawl all over the place,

beautiful, beautiful things.

That's what I have left, two old oak trees and

an empty lawn, everything else is gone.

That sucks.

Losing everything you have,

it's so overwhelming.

And the grief that comes

with that, it is just profound.

We have an unspoken collected pact

to pretend climate change wasn't happening,

as though as long we ignore it

hard enough, It wouldn't be true.

Not absolutely everyone,

a few were shouting fire.

Hello, come on in.

One of the greatest difficulties

with climate change

is that the effects of our emissions today are

not actually realized in terms of the temperature

for 30 or 40 years so there

is this time-lag system.

Which makes it difficult for us,

humans, to respond

because we're evolutionary equipped

to deal with the very immediate threats

like advancing armies or dangerous animals.

We're not so well-equipped with dealing rationally

with very long term problems like climate change.

So we have to act now to stop

something happening in the future,

if we wait until the full temperature

effects are already upon us,

then it's far too late to stop.

If you remember one single

number above all else,

make it two degrees,

now everyone in the world pretty much,

the European Union, big multi-national corporations,

Greenpeace, political parties,

all agreed that we have to stabilize global temperatures

within 2 degrees above pre-industrial level,

and the reason for that is because, if you cross that threshold,

the narrow tipping point in the earth system,

which could drive the warming

process essentially out of control.

Huge amount of carbon

could be coming out of the world,

trees and soils, methane could be coming

out of the perma-frost in Siberia

and it's that extra input of greenhouse gases

into the atmosphere,

which then leads us up to the worst case

scenario to 6 or more degrees

and the eventual wipeout of most

of the life on earth.

So power emission has been going up

, between, let's says, 1950,

and now they need to level out

, stabilize, and then decline

just as rapidly to sustainable

levels about an 80% cut by 2050.

But crucially, to keep the temperature

rise within 2 degrees,

this point of stabilization need

to be at around 2015.

And so that means, really, the time,

timeline we've got, ticking clock,

is that we have to stabilize global emission

within just 7 years from now as we speak 2008.

And scale of this task to achieve

a transformation to a low carbon economy

of the entire,

entirety of human civilization,

is obviously, is huge, monumental task,

probably the greatest humanity ever faced.

Remember the English family

who went to see the glacier?

They're back home in Cornwall,

south west England,

inspire to start tackling

their own energy wasting.

It says that the average Individual in the UK responsible

for emitting 10 tons of greenhouse gas a year.

They're calculating exactly how much

climate-change-gases their family currently produces,

and how it can be reduced.

Yeah, but that's the average

individual, there are five of us.

Whichever way you look at this,

it isn't good.

We produce about half of our food, and we try keep

our consumption of meat and dairy down.

My car runs on chick fat and

we do cycle when we can.

We just got our wind turbine,

which will produce all our own electricity.

We're aiming to cut down to

about one ton each per year,

which is apparently the sustainable amount

that the world's trees and plants can reabsorb.

But the big problem is flying,

just one mid-term flight, say, London to New York,

would blow our entire carbon

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