Hi, it's Forrest Whitaker, guest hosting today. I want to tell you about a new initiative

from TED called Countdown, a global collaboration to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis.

Countdown gives us tools to change the world for the better. The threat of climate change is real,

and is necessary to discuss it both locally and globally.

Now here's a talk from the Countdown Global Launch event given by fossil fuel scholar Miles Allen.

Miles is not just knowledgeable about the causes and impacts of climate change.

He has radically exciting ideas on tackling fossil fuels.

To hear more and get involved, check out countdown. ted.com and subscribe to the countdown podcast, wherever you're listening to this.

So here's a thought. The fossil fuel industry knows how to stop causing global warming.

But they're waiting for somebody else to pay, and no one is calling them out on it.

I was one of the authors of the 2018 IPCC report on 1.5 degrees Celsius.

And after the report was published, I gave a lot of talks, including one, to a meeting of young engineers

of one of the world's major oil and gas companies.

And at the end of the talk, I got the

inevitable question, do you personally believe there's any chance of us limiting global warming to

1.5 degrees? IPCC reports are not really about personal opinions. So I turned the question around

and said, well, if you had to fully decarbonize your product,

that is, dispose safely and permanently of one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton

generated by the oil and gas you sell by 2050, which is what it would take, would you be able

to do so?

Would the same rules apply to everybody? Somebody asked, meaning, of course, their competition. I said, okay, maybe they would. Now, the

management just looked at their shoes. They didn't want to answer the question. But the young

...