Do We Need A Plan B For Climate Change?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At a recent press conference on the new US budget questions were asked about funding for climate change initiatives. The answer was stark. “We’re not spending money on that anymore,” reporters were told, they’re a “waste of your money”. The new administration is sceptical about man-made climate change. Most of the world’s scientists and governments, however, are not. The Paris Agreement committed the world to prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees over pre-industrial levels. That target looked close to impossible even before the election of Donald Trump. So – our question this week – do we need a ‘plan B’? Scientists have been developing some very ambitious ideas to re-engineer our climate. They have created materials that could suck carbon dioxide out of the air and a scheme to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere. But – if ‘plan A’ fails – might any of these last-ditch ideas actually work?
(Photo: The smoke stacks at American Electric Power's Mountaineer coal power plant in New Haven, West Virginia. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:25.7 | and a lot more watching. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.2 | At a press conference with the director of the US Office of Management and Budget |
| 0:35.0 | earlier this month, a journalist raised her hand. |
| 0:38.0 | What message is President Trump trying to send by cutting funding for climate change research, she asked. |
| 0:45.4 | The answer? |
| 0:46.4 | Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward. |
| 0:50.5 | We're not spending money on that anymore. |
| 0:52.2 | We consider that to be a |
| 0:52.8 | waste of your money. Most of the world scientists and other governments don't |
| 0:57.8 | consider tackling climate change a waste of money. But this week President Trump signed an executive order rescinding |
| 1:06.0 | Obama-era rules aimed at curbing global warming. With one of the world's |
| 1:10.8 | richest countries backing away from its commitments, |
| 1:14.0 | fragile international agreements to deal with the problem, |
| 1:17.2 | agreements which were already thought by many to be too little too late, |
| 1:21.6 | are even less likely to succeed. |
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