A Breakthrough Moment?
A Matter of Degrees
Dr. Leah Stokes, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson
4.8 • 533 Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2020
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Climate change is no longer a far-off scenario. It's happening now. It's getting more intense every year. And young people are seeing a scary future play out right in front of them.
In recent years, the youth climate movement has gained unprecedented strength. Borrowing from the civil rights movement and early environmental activists, young leaders are forcing politicians to grapple with climate change in new ways. Are we truly at a breakthrough moment? Or a breaking moment?
In this episode, we'll hear stories from Erin Bridges, Isha Clarke, Varshini Prakash, and Mary Anne Hitt.
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A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Do you think we're at a breakthrough moment? |
| 0:04.4 | We are either at a breakthrough moment or a breaking point moment. |
| 0:09.8 | That feels sure. |
| 0:13.5 | Depending on the day, I feel either very apprehensively helpful or absolutely terrified. |
| 0:26.9 | At the beginning of 2018, climate activist Aaron Bridges was leaning toward terrified. |
| 0:32.7 | That's because 2018 was a terrifying year for the climate. |
| 0:36.9 | That's right. A lot of destructive forces came together |
| 0:39.8 | that year. It was yet again one of the hottest years on record. The report found the earth |
| 0:44.6 | has been warming for decades and the hottest 20 years have all happened since the mid-1990s. |
| 0:51.2 | Two slow-moving hurricanes crushed the southeast, breaking all-time rainfall records. |
| 0:56.5 | And it is pummeling the Carolina coast, and its impact will extend for hundreds of miles. |
| 1:02.6 | The center of the storm just made landfall in Ritesville Beach, North Carolina. |
| 1:06.8 | And in November, California saw the most destructive wildfires in state history. |
| 1:12.4 | The campfire scorching more than 100,000 acres, destroying more than 6,700 homes and buildings. |
| 1:18.2 | This weekend, paradise looks like a war zone. |
| 1:20.8 | It was also the year the United Nations released a really dire climate assessment. |
| 1:26.3 | It said we had just over a decade to prevent a very, very bad scenario for the planet. |
| 1:31.9 | According to a new report, experts say that we have until 2030 to avoid catastrophe. |
| 1:38.1 | It also says if unprecedented changes are not made and made soon, there will be irreversible |
| 1:43.4 | damage to the planet. |
| 1:45.2 | Aaron read that report and so did a lot of other people. And it was one of the first times that |
| 1:52.2 | the UN really kind of went in on like the scale of devastation that we were anticipating from the |
... |
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