The narrative of planet earth, and of humanity itself, is being written by many authors. Some positive, others negative. And sometimes, extremely negative.
At the top of that list is climate change. A narrative the didn’t exist before the industrial revolution, but it’s now causing widespread death and destruction, today, through the end of the century, and beyond.
Former Vice President Al Gore knows this well, and continues to be a voice of reason, as well as hope, during these turbulent times. I wish I could share his enthusiasm, and I do hope that we take his advice and take action, but at the moment I don’t believe we’ll do enough, soon enough.
Which means that future generations will suffer. This outcome has become far worse do to the current administration’s intent on causing as much death and destruction as possible in the decades to come. Their climate change policy is nothing short of barbaric.
But I digress, as this article is highlighting Al Gore’s recent talk at the 2025 TED Countdown Summit on June 16, 2025. As we all know, a narrative thread that’s designed to slow progress on addressing the climate crisis involves a nonstop stream of lies and misinformation disseminated by the fossil fuel industry. In their latest PR con job, they’ve introduced the phrase “climate realism”.
Is it realistic to ignore the 1 to 2 billion climate refugees that the climate scientists are warning us will cross international borders and have to move inside their own nations by 2050 because of the climate crisis?
And over the next half century, according to Deloitte, it would cost the economy $178 trillion if we don’t act. But if we do act, we can add to the global economy by $43 trillion.
Granted, climate change is a complex subject, and there’s no single answer. But without question the answer involves a dedication to mitigating the use of fossil fuels whenever and wherever possible. In his talk Al Gore features some of the progress that’s been made, but also talks about what still needs to happen.
I believe that we as human beings have the capacity to recognize that our survival is at stake and that we need to move faster even though the big polluters have the political and economic power to try to block us.
And the interesting thing to realize, is that doing so is not only beneficial to the health of humanity, it’s financially beneficial. Win-Win. But the need for profit at any cost continues to threaten everyone on this planet. Our story is now being written by some very bad actors, and it’s a story I wish had a happier ending.
A lot of people are suffering. But do we want to vastly increase the number of people that have to go through that hardship and suffering instead of dealing with the cause of the crisis and solving the climate crisis?
Transcript
Thank you very much for the warm welcome.
It’s been 10 years since the Paris agreement, and every single nation in the world, 195 nations agreed to try to get to net zero by mid-century. And let me deal with the elephant in the room, one nation, only one has begun the process of withdrawing, and the Trump administration has also:
- Cancelled executive orders on climate and energy
- Withdrawn from international climate organizations
- The have declared a so-called “energy emergency,” in order to promote fossil fuels
- Phased our government support for clean energy
But bear this in mind. During the first Trump four-year term, investments in the energy transition doubled. We have seen solar capacity more than double, electric vehicle sales have doubled, wind energy went up by almost 50% during his first term.
And we are seeing that 60% during his first four years of new energy came from renewable energy and coal investments went down almost 20%. So, there’s good news and there’s bad news. A lot has happened in the last ten years.
But I want to ask this question. The fossil fuel industry wants to ignore the amazing good news and they are labeling the commitments that the world made at the Paris negotiations as a fantasy, and they’re calling for an abandonment of the efforts to reduce fossil fuel burning. And they’re now advocating a new approach that they call, “Climate Realism.”
Well, climate realism, according to them, we should abandon the efforts to deal with the principal cause of the climate crisis, 80% of it comes from burning fossil fuels, and we should focus on adaptation as well, almost exclusively. Well, we need adaptation. A lot of people are suffering. But do we want to vastly increase the number of people that have to go through that hardship and suffering instead of dealing with the cause of the crisis and solving the climate crisis?
They, according to climate realism, historically, the energy transitions have taken place very slowly. So we have no right as human beings to even imagine that we could go faster in the future than what history has told us was the reality in the past, even though human civilization is at stake.
For the so-called climate realists, the goal of solving the climate crisis is way less important than other goals such as, especially, increasing energy access to developing countries, which is, obviously, important, we’ll deal with that, but they want to do it, obviously, by burning more fossil fuels.
According to climate realism, it’s just not practical to stop using the sky as an open sewer for the emissions from burning fossil fuels and the other emissions, Instead, we should just continue using the sky as an open sewer. So, where climate realism is concerned, I have some questions.
Is it realistic to ignore the 1 to 2 billion climate refugees that the climate scientists are warning us will cross international borders and have to move inside their own nations by 2050 because of the climate crisis? You know, the temperatures keep going up. Ten hottest years were the last 10. Last year, 2024 was the hottest year in all of history.
Yesterday in parts of the Persian Gulf, 52.6 degrees, and for those of us who use Fahrenheit, 126.7 degrees. A few days ago in Pakistan, 50.5 degrees, that’s 122.9 in Fahrenheit. And they’re telling us that as the temperatures go up and the humidity goes up, the few areas in the world today that are labeled physiologically unlivable for human beings are due to expand quite dramatically by 2070 unless we act to cover all of these vast, heavily populated areas.
Is it realistic to ignore this crisis? Look at what a few million climate refugees have done to promote authoritarianism and ultra nationalism. How can we handle 1 to 2 billion in the next 25 years? Already here in Kenya, there are 800,000 refugees. 300,000 of them in in this place, where of course the USAID cuts are now cutting the food aid 70%. Is that what they mean by adaptation?
We have to also ask if it’s realistic to ignore the devastating damage predicted to the global economy. Whole regions of the world are becoming uninsurable. We see this in my country where people are having their insurance canceled, they can’t get it renewed. We have seen predictions that we could lose $25 trillion in the next 25 years just from the loss of the value of global housing properties.
And over the next half century, according to Deloitte, it would cost the economy $178 trillion if we don’t act. But if we do act, we can add to the global economy by $43 trillion. You know, I had a teacher said we face the same choice in life over and over again, the choice between the hard right and the easy wrong. It seems hard to choose correctly, but it would turn out to be even harder to take what looks like the easy wrong.
Is it realistic to ignore the fact that right now Greenland is losing 30 million tonnes of ice every single hour? In Antarctica, decade by decade, the ice melting has accelerated. We’ve seen the doubling of the pace of sea level rise in the last 20 years and the predictions are that it’s going to continue dramatically.
Is it realistic to ignore the rapidly increasing climate crisis, extreme events that are occurring, practically every night on the television news? It’s like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. We lost 3.5 trillion dollars just in the last decade.
And you know, the fact that these scientists were absolutely correct decades ago when they predicted these exact consequences, should cause us to pay a little more attention to what they’re predicting is in store for us in the years ahead if we do not act. The drought last year and continuing at some level in the Amazon, the worst drought in the history of the Brazilian Amazon, 90% of the Amazon River in Colombia went dry.
This is the third year in a row that we’ve had these massive fires in Canada. When I left Tennessee to fly over here, we were breathing in Nashville, Tennessee, smoke from the Canadian wildfires. And they’re still getting worse today. The wildfires have doubled over the last 20 years in frequency and they’re due to increase even more.
Is it realistic to ignore the massive health impacts of the climate crisis? You know, the University of, well, the World Health Organization has long told us it is the most serious health threat facing humanity. Just last week the University of Manchester released a new study warning that three species of fungi in the next 15 years, because of increasing temperatures and increasing precipitation, will pose a significant risk of infection to millions of people. The fact that the fungi are being pushed into the range where they can threaten humans, that is not a fiction.
The particulate air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels kills almost 9 million people a year, costs almost $3 trillion per year from the burning of fossil fuels for both energy and petrochemicals. Let me show you an example from my country. Cancer Alley is the stretch that runs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. All these red plumes are particulate pollution that people are breathing in.
The green areas by the way are are majority minority, mostly African-American areas. In the middle of Cancer Alley, Reserve, Louisiana has the highest cancer rate in the United States, 50 times the national average, and they want to put even more petrochemical facilities there.
Is it realistic to totally ignore the acidification of the world’s oceans? 30% more acid than before the industrial revolution and 93% of all the heat is being absorbed in the oceans. That’s why the coral reefs are in such danger. 84% in danger right now, we’ve seen massive die offs.
That’s why a lot of the fish are at risk. 40 to 60 percent of all the fish species face an extremely high risk, as the rivers and estuaries, where they have spawning and in their embryonic stages, continue to heat up. And 50 percent of all living species that we share this planet with are at risk of extinction.
Is it realistic to ignore that? My faith tradition tells me that Noah was commanded to save the species of this earth. I think we have a moral obligation as well. Is it realistic to ignore the predictions of a fresh water scarcity crisis? Already 40% are are facing water scarcities.
In the mountain glaciers here in the Himalayas, one quarter of the world’s population depends on that meltwater, but depending on whether or not we act, 80% of all those glaciers will disappear in this century.
We can act. Now this just happened in Switzerland. A 600-year-old city was completely destroyed by a glacial avalanche. Now they’re adapting.
Is this realistic? To put white sheets over the remaining parts of the glacier? Well, God bless them, I hope it works. But these are the kinds of extreme measures that people are being pushed to in order to avoid reducing the burning of fossil fuels. Because the fossil fuel industry and their petrostate and financial allies have control over policy.
In lots of cities, particularly in places like India, the water wells are going dry. In Bengaluru, 4 million people now have to buy expensive water trucked in because their wells have gone dry.
What about the food crisis that scientists are predicting? Is it realistic to ignore that as well in order to avoid doing anything to reduce fossil fuel emissions?
Now, why also, do these so-called climate realists ignore all the good news about the miraculous decline in the cost of the alternatives to fossil fuel? Is it possibly because their business models are threatened ff there is a cheaper, cleaner alternative that creates many more jobs? Might not be good for them the way they calculate it. But the rest of us have a stake in this.
This could be why they’ve been consistently wrong in their predictions in the past. For example, Exxon Mobil in the year of the Paris agreement had a prediction about solar capacity in 2040, 840 gigawatts. Well, this year we’ve already tripled the number that they predicted for 15 years from now. In OPEC the same year predicted electric vehicle sales would barely increase.
Well, they were wrong. Here’s what it is actual sales to date right now. Same year, OPEC predicted that it was just unrealistic to think that solar power would ever be able to compete in cost with the burning of fossil fuels, but now it is by far the cheapest source of electricity in all of history.
Now, you know, a lot of other people have been surprised by how quickly these costs have come down. University of Oxford studied 3,000 past projections and the average predicted decline was 2.6% a year, the reality was 15% per year. And when you compound the number like that, it makes quite a difference.
Here are all the past projections from the International Energy Agency of what solar energy was likely to do. Their projections year by year. And here is the reality of what has actually happened. Uh, it really is quite extraordinary. My goodness. Nobody could have imagined that it would be this incredible, but it is, and it’s right before us, and they still want to ignore it.
Since 2015, the world has installed twice as much solar as all fossil fuels combined. Solar is the breakout winner in fuel sources. Electric vehicles have increased 34 times over since the time of the Paris agreement. Vehicle sales in China, 52% are already EVs and within five years the prediction is 82% of all car sales will be electric vehicles.
Also by the way, China in April installed 45 gigawatts of new solar capacity in one month. That’s the equivalent of 45 brand new giant nuclear reactors in in one month. It’s actually incredible what is happening and the cost of all of these clean energy technologies has come down quite dramatically, particularly solar and even more dramatic is utility-scale batteries, 87% down. That’s making a huge difference as well.
But I have to say this, there’s one thing that the so-called climate realists are right about. In spite of this progress, we are still moving too slowly to meet the goals of the Paris agreement. We have got to accelerate it. We have the ability to do so, but the single biggest reason we have not been able to move faster is the ferocious opposition to virtually every policy proposal to try to speed up this transition and reduce the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
And the fossil fuel industry has used a lot of bright, shiny objects to divert the public’s attention and deceive them into thinking there are solutions other than reducing fossil fuel use. For example, carbon capture and storage and direct air capture and the recycling of plastics. And, you know, they’re much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions.
They’re employing their captive politicians and policymakers to help confuse the public. Here’s an example. Tony Blair, speaking for his foundation, his foundation gets massive funding from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, etc. He said, “Oh, well, the center of the battle has to be carbon capture and direct air capture.”
Well, he really should know better. You know, Upton Sinclair wrote in my country, years ago, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something if his income depends on him not understanding it.” The income goes to the foundation, as I understand it.
But here is carbon capture. These are the ones operational. These are the ones that have applied for permits. These are the ones that have had the big public announcements. Oh, boy, look, we’re going for carbon capture.
We don’t have to reduce the burning of fossil fuel. We’ll capture it all as it goes out the smokestack. It is a fraud. It is a deception imposed on the people in order to try to change policy and to make the policy what they want.
And because they’ve captured the politicians, they have been able to force the taxpayers in countries around the world to subsidize fossil fuels, to actually subsidize the destruction of humanity’s future. What would happen if we got rid of those subsidies?
Well, the International Monetary Fund said that we would get $4.4 trillion in savings, which happens to be just about the exact amount we need to finance the transition to renewable energy. That’s where a lot of the money can come from. We’d also save a lot of lives and we we’d also reduce emissions by a third in five years and we’d reduce income inequality.
So, is it realistic to ignore this urgent need to reform the world’s financial infrastructure so that we can properly invest in the climate crisis? Most of the financing comes from private sources, but developing countries are not getting their share of it. We need to reform the policies that are leading to this because 100% of the increased emissions expected are going to come from the developing countries.
We’re about to see massive reductions in emissions. It’s really it may have already started especially in China with all their renewables, but the developing countries, that’s where the emissions increases are due to take place. And yet they only receive less than 19% of the world’s financing for clean energy, but almost 50% of the money flooding in for more fossil fuels. The single U.S. state of Florida has more solar panels than the entire continent of Africa.
That is a disgrace because Africa has 60% of the world’s prime solar resources, yet only 1.6% of the financing for renewable energy. But look at what’s happening with the investments for fossil fuels in Africa. There’s a dash for gas, there all of these new facilities. There are three times as many fossil fuel pipelines under construction and proposed for construction to begin in Africa as in all of North America.
Uh and you take those LNG terminals, the cost of one of them, there are 71 in in the works, 31 already existing, $25 billion. That’s the exact amount that would provide universal energy access to all of Africa. So maybe we could spend that money a little bit better. But instead of financing actual energy access to renewable energy, they want access to the resources to export it from Africa instead of giving access for Africans.
You know the potential for solar and wind in in Africa is 400 times larger than the potential energy from fossil fuels. Every single country in Africa could have 100% energy access using less than 1% of its land. Most including the country we’re in, less than one .1%. of their land.
What else are they ignoring? Well, they’re ignoring that with solar and wind, you don’t face the fuel supply chain risk, that you don’t face price volatility for fuel. Look at what’s happening energy oil and gas soaring because of the war in the Middle East. In fact, they don’t have an annual fuel cost at all.
So we should be moving in this direction, not least because it creates three times as many jobs for each dollar spent as compared to a dollar spent on fossil fuels. Why do they also ignore the fact that methane is as bad as coal when the leaks are factored in and the leaks are ubiquitous. And right now in the European Union, the fossil fuel lobbyists are arguing as hard as they can to stop legislation to try to deal with methane leaks because they think it’ll cause them some money.
So, what’s really behind this preposterous theory call they call climate realism? Could it be that they’re kind of panicking a little bit about the loss of their markets? According to the IEA, all of the fossil fuels are projected to peak within the next few years. We’ve seen since the Paris agreement a complete turnaround in where the majority of investment is going, and emissions may have already peaked in several of these sectors and this is according to the climate trace precise measurements of peaking and a lot of these sectors are ones that need even more attention.
Agriculture, steel, etc. But last year, if you look at all the new electricity installed worldwide, 93% of it was renewable, mostly solar. So, the IEA has told us long since. We have all the technologies we need and proven deployment models to reduce emissions 50% in this decade. And clear line of sight to the other 50%.
A friend of mine in Tennessee said, “If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy, he’d have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.” Well, if you look at how long it took to install a gigawatt of solar 20 years ago, a full year, now it’s down to 15 hours and it’s on the way down still.
So, here’s what I believe that the climate, so-called climate realists are most wrong about. They don’t believe that we the people who live on this planet, have the capacity to make the changes necessary to save our future.
The greatest president in my country’s history, Abraham Lincoln, said at a time of dire crisis, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty. We must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew.”
I believe that we as human beings have the capacity to recognize that our survival is at stake and that we need to move faster even though the big polluters have the political and economic power to try to block us.
We’ve got everything we need. The people are demanding change. The one thing that they tell us might be in short supply is political will, but always remember, political will is itself a renewable resource. Let’s get out there and renew it.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
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Are We Still Human If Robots Help Raise Our Babies? – Sarah Blaffer Hrdy at TED2025
/in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Family, Humanity, TED Talk/by Mark LovettWe were all babies at one point in time, and as we couldn’t care for ourselves, that responsibility fell to one or more adults. Typically our parents, but in some cases other relatives. In any event, our upbringing was a matter of human-to-human contact. But what about in the future? With AI and robotics advancing rapidly, will non-humans begin playing a role in raising future generations?
In her brief talk at TED2025, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy reminds us of the process that’s been in place for many thousands of years, and poses this exact question. As an anthropologist and primatologist, as well as a Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, Sarah has unique insights on this issue.
An interesting point that Sarah brings up is that neuroscientists have detected activity in brain regions associated with social understanding in young babies when interacting with people, demonstrating early social wiring in their brains. Which had me wondering whether that would still be true with a robot.
To be honest, this is one talk that I feel should have been five minutes longer. It felt as if the question was posed, some background offered, but little attention paid to the answer. For me, this highlighted the fallacy of “less is more”. In this case, less was definitely less, to the point that the message fell short.
Transcript
I guess you’ve already figured out, like it or not, artificial intelligence is going to change the nature of human work. But will it change human nature? That’s going to depend on what we do with it.
Right away, the mother and the grandmother in me wants to know, “Ooh, hey, can we program robots to help us care for our sleep-depriving, time-consuming babies?” That’s before the evolutionary anthropologist in me cautions, “Whoa. Shouldn’t we first ask why such costly, costly, slow-maturing babies evolved in the first place?”
For that, we need to go back, oh, six million years, to when humans last shared a common ancestor with other apes. Babies back then, like this common chimpanzee baby today, would have to be held in skin-to-skin contact, never out of touch, not for a minute of the day or night for months after birth, nursed for years.
It just seemed natural to assume that among the bipedal apes in the line leading to the genus Homo, babies could similarly expect single-mindedly dedicated maternal care.
Until, that is, anthropologists figured out how hard it would have been for bipedal apes with only stone-age tools to survive and escape extinction in the face of climate change and other Pleistocene perils.
To stay fed and manage to still rear their helpless, helpless, slow-maturing babies, mothers needed help. Unless male and female group members other than the mother, allomothers, had helped to care for and provision babies, there is no way we humans could have evolved.
Fortunately for us, as brains were getting bigger and distinctively human prefrontal cortices were taking shape, our ancestors were increasingly sharing food and sharing care of children. Neural circuits crucial for mutual understanding co-evolved right along with shared care.
Fast forward to the ever-faster changing modern world. Mothers still labor to help support their families, as mothers always have. But many no longer live in mutually supportive communities, with kin far away and even with dads helping more, allomothers were in short supply.
Good daycare, even if available, unaffordable. No wonder parents everywhere use devices to keep their babies monitored and entertained. Already, 40% of US two-year-olds have their own tablets. Soon, robots will be programmed to provide a wider range of services, ranging from bottle-feeding to keeping babies safe, warm, cleaned, and even educated.
But given the role of engagement with others in the emergence of mutual understanding, is this a good idea? Think back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Still living and rearing children as people in this iconic photograph, taken about half a century ago among African foragers. Babies then, to stay safe, still needed to be held by somebody.
But that somebody did not have to be their mother. Right after birth, others might reach for the baby. This mother who has just given birth allows others to gather around. She’s passed her baby to her own mother to massage its scalp. If one of these allomothers happens to be nursing, the baby’s first sweet taste of milk will come from her.
Soon, babies will be monitoring nearby others, deciding who responds, figuring out how best to engage and appeal to them. By six months, the sharp little milk teeth are peeking through their gums, their appeals might be rewarded with kiss-fed treats, maybe honey-sweetened saliva or premasticated meat.
And babies soon are learning to reciprocate, starting to share. Babies everywhere will just spontaneously offer food to somebody else, anybody, really. Active agents in their own survival, babies are flexible about who or what they attach or consider as family.
Something to keep in mind if robots are programmed to respond even more rapidly and reliably than preoccupied parents do. And as they get older, they will spontaneously point to things, or hold something out, as if saying, “What do you think of this? What should I think of this?”
Eager to engage with other minds and learn what they’re thinking. They care. They care very much who notices them do something nice, like a toddler rushing to pick up something someone has dropped and hand it back. They care not just with what others think, but with what others think about them, their reputations.
As developmental psychologists were learning just how “other-regarding” human babies are, neuroscientists using new baby-friendly technologies made a surprising discovery. With a soft, wired cap slipped on the baby’s head, neural activity was detected in the medial prefrontal cortex, long before most neuroscientists even assumed it was active yet. As babies process eye gaze, actions, deciding who to trust, emulate, and love.
Little humans process their physical world in much the same way other apes do. Nothing much different there. It’s in these social realms where they really differ. Inter-subjective sensibilities starting to emerge early in life, right along with targeted social smiles.
Brain circuitry that evolved to help babies elicit care and survive, prepared our ancestors to mature into adults able to communicate and cooperate in new ways, whether constructing shelters or processing and sharing food, or eventually, one day, collaborating with widely dispersed others in order to send robots to Mars.
Tens of thousands of years from now, assuming Homo sapiens aiensis is still around, whether on this planet or some other, I have no doubt that they will be bipedal, symbol-generating apes, technologically proficient in ways we can’t even dream of yet.
But will they still be human in the way we think of humans today? Interested in the thoughts and emotions of others, eligible for mutual understanding? That’s going to depend on how, by whom, or what they are reared.
Thank you.
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Why Climate Action Is Unstoppable and Climate Realism Is a Myth – Al Gore at TED Countdown 2025
/in Climate Change, Environment, Government, Science, TED Talk/by Mark LovettThe narrative of planet earth, and of humanity itself, is being written by many authors. Some positive, others negative. And sometimes, extremely negative.
At the top of that list is climate change. A narrative the didn’t exist before the industrial revolution, but it’s now causing widespread death and destruction, today, through the end of the century, and beyond.
Former Vice President Al Gore knows this well, and continues to be a voice of reason, as well as hope, during these turbulent times. I wish I could share his enthusiasm, and I do hope that we take his advice and take action, but at the moment I don’t believe we’ll do enough, soon enough.
Which means that future generations will suffer. This outcome has become far worse do to the current administration’s intent on causing as much death and destruction as possible in the decades to come. Their climate change policy is nothing short of barbaric.
But I digress, as this article is highlighting Al Gore’s recent talk at the 2025 TED Countdown Summit on June 16, 2025. As we all know, a narrative thread that’s designed to slow progress on addressing the climate crisis involves a nonstop stream of lies and misinformation disseminated by the fossil fuel industry. In their latest PR con job, they’ve introduced the phrase “climate realism”.
Granted, climate change is a complex subject, and there’s no single answer. But without question the answer involves a dedication to mitigating the use of fossil fuels whenever and wherever possible. In his talk Al Gore features some of the progress that’s been made, but also talks about what still needs to happen.
And the interesting thing to realize, is that doing so is not only beneficial to the health of humanity, it’s financially beneficial. Win-Win. But the need for profit at any cost continues to threaten everyone on this planet. Our story is now being written by some very bad actors, and it’s a story I wish had a happier ending.
Transcript
Thank you very much for the warm welcome.
It’s been 10 years since the Paris agreement, and every single nation in the world, 195 nations agreed to try to get to net zero by mid-century. And let me deal with the elephant in the room, one nation, only one has begun the process of withdrawing, and the Trump administration has also:
But bear this in mind. During the first Trump four-year term, investments in the energy transition doubled. We have seen solar capacity more than double, electric vehicle sales have doubled, wind energy went up by almost 50% during his first term.
And we are seeing that 60% during his first four years of new energy came from renewable energy and coal investments went down almost 20%. So, there’s good news and there’s bad news. A lot has happened in the last ten years.
But I want to ask this question. The fossil fuel industry wants to ignore the amazing good news and they are labeling the commitments that the world made at the Paris negotiations as a fantasy, and they’re calling for an abandonment of the efforts to reduce fossil fuel burning. And they’re now advocating a new approach that they call, “Climate Realism.”
Well, climate realism, according to them, we should abandon the efforts to deal with the principal cause of the climate crisis, 80% of it comes from burning fossil fuels, and we should focus on adaptation as well, almost exclusively. Well, we need adaptation. A lot of people are suffering. But do we want to vastly increase the number of people that have to go through that hardship and suffering instead of dealing with the cause of the crisis and solving the climate crisis?
They, according to climate realism, historically, the energy transitions have taken place very slowly. So we have no right as human beings to even imagine that we could go faster in the future than what history has told us was the reality in the past, even though human civilization is at stake.
For the so-called climate realists, the goal of solving the climate crisis is way less important than other goals such as, especially, increasing energy access to developing countries, which is, obviously, important, we’ll deal with that, but they want to do it, obviously, by burning more fossil fuels.
According to climate realism, it’s just not practical to stop using the sky as an open sewer for the emissions from burning fossil fuels and the other emissions, Instead, we should just continue using the sky as an open sewer. So, where climate realism is concerned, I have some questions.
Is it realistic to ignore the 1 to 2 billion climate refugees that the climate scientists are warning us will cross international borders and have to move inside their own nations by 2050 because of the climate crisis? You know, the temperatures keep going up. Ten hottest years were the last 10. Last year, 2024 was the hottest year in all of history.
Yesterday in parts of the Persian Gulf, 52.6 degrees, and for those of us who use Fahrenheit, 126.7 degrees. A few days ago in Pakistan, 50.5 degrees, that’s 122.9 in Fahrenheit. And they’re telling us that as the temperatures go up and the humidity goes up, the few areas in the world today that are labeled physiologically unlivable for human beings are due to expand quite dramatically by 2070 unless we act to cover all of these vast, heavily populated areas.
Is it realistic to ignore this crisis? Look at what a few million climate refugees have done to promote authoritarianism and ultra nationalism. How can we handle 1 to 2 billion in the next 25 years? Already here in Kenya, there are 800,000 refugees. 300,000 of them in in this place, where of course the USAID cuts are now cutting the food aid 70%. Is that what they mean by adaptation?
We have to also ask if it’s realistic to ignore the devastating damage predicted to the global economy. Whole regions of the world are becoming uninsurable. We see this in my country where people are having their insurance canceled, they can’t get it renewed. We have seen predictions that we could lose $25 trillion in the next 25 years just from the loss of the value of global housing properties.
And over the next half century, according to Deloitte, it would cost the economy $178 trillion if we don’t act. But if we do act, we can add to the global economy by $43 trillion. You know, I had a teacher said we face the same choice in life over and over again, the choice between the hard right and the easy wrong. It seems hard to choose correctly, but it would turn out to be even harder to take what looks like the easy wrong.
Is it realistic to ignore the fact that right now Greenland is losing 30 million tonnes of ice every single hour? In Antarctica, decade by decade, the ice melting has accelerated. We’ve seen the doubling of the pace of sea level rise in the last 20 years and the predictions are that it’s going to continue dramatically.
Is it realistic to ignore the rapidly increasing climate crisis, extreme events that are occurring, practically every night on the television news? It’s like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. We lost 3.5 trillion dollars just in the last decade.
And you know, the fact that these scientists were absolutely correct decades ago when they predicted these exact consequences, should cause us to pay a little more attention to what they’re predicting is in store for us in the years ahead if we do not act. The drought last year and continuing at some level in the Amazon, the worst drought in the history of the Brazilian Amazon, 90% of the Amazon River in Colombia went dry.
This is the third year in a row that we’ve had these massive fires in Canada. When I left Tennessee to fly over here, we were breathing in Nashville, Tennessee, smoke from the Canadian wildfires. And they’re still getting worse today. The wildfires have doubled over the last 20 years in frequency and they’re due to increase even more.
Is it realistic to ignore the massive health impacts of the climate crisis? You know, the University of, well, the World Health Organization has long told us it is the most serious health threat facing humanity. Just last week the University of Manchester released a new study warning that three species of fungi in the next 15 years, because of increasing temperatures and increasing precipitation, will pose a significant risk of infection to millions of people. The fact that the fungi are being pushed into the range where they can threaten humans, that is not a fiction.
The particulate air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels kills almost 9 million people a year, costs almost $3 trillion per year from the burning of fossil fuels for both energy and petrochemicals. Let me show you an example from my country. Cancer Alley is the stretch that runs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. All these red plumes are particulate pollution that people are breathing in.
The green areas by the way are are majority minority, mostly African-American areas. In the middle of Cancer Alley, Reserve, Louisiana has the highest cancer rate in the United States, 50 times the national average, and they want to put even more petrochemical facilities there.
Is it realistic to totally ignore the acidification of the world’s oceans? 30% more acid than before the industrial revolution and 93% of all the heat is being absorbed in the oceans. That’s why the coral reefs are in such danger. 84% in danger right now, we’ve seen massive die offs.
That’s why a lot of the fish are at risk. 40 to 60 percent of all the fish species face an extremely high risk, as the rivers and estuaries, where they have spawning and in their embryonic stages, continue to heat up. And 50 percent of all living species that we share this planet with are at risk of extinction.
Is it realistic to ignore that? My faith tradition tells me that Noah was commanded to save the species of this earth. I think we have a moral obligation as well. Is it realistic to ignore the predictions of a fresh water scarcity crisis? Already 40% are are facing water scarcities.
In the mountain glaciers here in the Himalayas, one quarter of the world’s population depends on that meltwater, but depending on whether or not we act, 80% of all those glaciers will disappear in this century.
We can act. Now this just happened in Switzerland. A 600-year-old city was completely destroyed by a glacial avalanche. Now they’re adapting.
Is this realistic? To put white sheets over the remaining parts of the glacier? Well, God bless them, I hope it works. But these are the kinds of extreme measures that people are being pushed to in order to avoid reducing the burning of fossil fuels. Because the fossil fuel industry and their petrostate and financial allies have control over policy.
In lots of cities, particularly in places like India, the water wells are going dry. In Bengaluru, 4 million people now have to buy expensive water trucked in because their wells have gone dry.
What about the food crisis that scientists are predicting? Is it realistic to ignore that as well in order to avoid doing anything to reduce fossil fuel emissions?
Now, why also, do these so-called climate realists ignore all the good news about the miraculous decline in the cost of the alternatives to fossil fuel? Is it possibly because their business models are threatened ff there is a cheaper, cleaner alternative that creates many more jobs? Might not be good for them the way they calculate it. But the rest of us have a stake in this.
This could be why they’ve been consistently wrong in their predictions in the past. For example, Exxon Mobil in the year of the Paris agreement had a prediction about solar capacity in 2040, 840 gigawatts. Well, this year we’ve already tripled the number that they predicted for 15 years from now. In OPEC the same year predicted electric vehicle sales would barely increase.
Well, they were wrong. Here’s what it is actual sales to date right now. Same year, OPEC predicted that it was just unrealistic to think that solar power would ever be able to compete in cost with the burning of fossil fuels, but now it is by far the cheapest source of electricity in all of history.
Now, you know, a lot of other people have been surprised by how quickly these costs have come down. University of Oxford studied 3,000 past projections and the average predicted decline was 2.6% a year, the reality was 15% per year. And when you compound the number like that, it makes quite a difference.
Here are all the past projections from the International Energy Agency of what solar energy was likely to do. Their projections year by year. And here is the reality of what has actually happened. Uh, it really is quite extraordinary. My goodness. Nobody could have imagined that it would be this incredible, but it is, and it’s right before us, and they still want to ignore it.
Since 2015, the world has installed twice as much solar as all fossil fuels combined. Solar is the breakout winner in fuel sources. Electric vehicles have increased 34 times over since the time of the Paris agreement. Vehicle sales in China, 52% are already EVs and within five years the prediction is 82% of all car sales will be electric vehicles.
Also by the way, China in April installed 45 gigawatts of new solar capacity in one month. That’s the equivalent of 45 brand new giant nuclear reactors in in one month. It’s actually incredible what is happening and the cost of all of these clean energy technologies has come down quite dramatically, particularly solar and even more dramatic is utility-scale batteries, 87% down. That’s making a huge difference as well.
But I have to say this, there’s one thing that the so-called climate realists are right about. In spite of this progress, we are still moving too slowly to meet the goals of the Paris agreement. We have got to accelerate it. We have the ability to do so, but the single biggest reason we have not been able to move faster is the ferocious opposition to virtually every policy proposal to try to speed up this transition and reduce the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
And the fossil fuel industry has used a lot of bright, shiny objects to divert the public’s attention and deceive them into thinking there are solutions other than reducing fossil fuel use. For example, carbon capture and storage and direct air capture and the recycling of plastics. And, you know, they’re much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions.
They’re employing their captive politicians and policymakers to help confuse the public. Here’s an example. Tony Blair, speaking for his foundation, his foundation gets massive funding from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, etc. He said, “Oh, well, the center of the battle has to be carbon capture and direct air capture.”
Well, he really should know better. You know, Upton Sinclair wrote in my country, years ago, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something if his income depends on him not understanding it.” The income goes to the foundation, as I understand it.
But here is carbon capture. These are the ones operational. These are the ones that have applied for permits. These are the ones that have had the big public announcements. Oh, boy, look, we’re going for carbon capture.
We don’t have to reduce the burning of fossil fuel. We’ll capture it all as it goes out the smokestack. It is a fraud. It is a deception imposed on the people in order to try to change policy and to make the policy what they want.
And because they’ve captured the politicians, they have been able to force the taxpayers in countries around the world to subsidize fossil fuels, to actually subsidize the destruction of humanity’s future. What would happen if we got rid of those subsidies?
Well, the International Monetary Fund said that we would get $4.4 trillion in savings, which happens to be just about the exact amount we need to finance the transition to renewable energy. That’s where a lot of the money can come from. We’d also save a lot of lives and we we’d also reduce emissions by a third in five years and we’d reduce income inequality.
So, is it realistic to ignore this urgent need to reform the world’s financial infrastructure so that we can properly invest in the climate crisis? Most of the financing comes from private sources, but developing countries are not getting their share of it. We need to reform the policies that are leading to this because 100% of the increased emissions expected are going to come from the developing countries.
We’re about to see massive reductions in emissions. It’s really it may have already started especially in China with all their renewables, but the developing countries, that’s where the emissions increases are due to take place. And yet they only receive less than 19% of the world’s financing for clean energy, but almost 50% of the money flooding in for more fossil fuels. The single U.S. state of Florida has more solar panels than the entire continent of Africa.
That is a disgrace because Africa has 60% of the world’s prime solar resources, yet only 1.6% of the financing for renewable energy. But look at what’s happening with the investments for fossil fuels in Africa. There’s a dash for gas, there all of these new facilities. There are three times as many fossil fuel pipelines under construction and proposed for construction to begin in Africa as in all of North America.
Uh and you take those LNG terminals, the cost of one of them, there are 71 in in the works, 31 already existing, $25 billion. That’s the exact amount that would provide universal energy access to all of Africa. So maybe we could spend that money a little bit better. But instead of financing actual energy access to renewable energy, they want access to the resources to export it from Africa instead of giving access for Africans.
You know the potential for solar and wind in in Africa is 400 times larger than the potential energy from fossil fuels. Every single country in Africa could have 100% energy access using less than 1% of its land. Most including the country we’re in, less than one .1%. of their land.
What else are they ignoring? Well, they’re ignoring that with solar and wind, you don’t face the fuel supply chain risk, that you don’t face price volatility for fuel. Look at what’s happening energy oil and gas soaring because of the war in the Middle East. In fact, they don’t have an annual fuel cost at all.
So we should be moving in this direction, not least because it creates three times as many jobs for each dollar spent as compared to a dollar spent on fossil fuels. Why do they also ignore the fact that methane is as bad as coal when the leaks are factored in and the leaks are ubiquitous. And right now in the European Union, the fossil fuel lobbyists are arguing as hard as they can to stop legislation to try to deal with methane leaks because they think it’ll cause them some money.
So, what’s really behind this preposterous theory call they call climate realism? Could it be that they’re kind of panicking a little bit about the loss of their markets? According to the IEA, all of the fossil fuels are projected to peak within the next few years. We’ve seen since the Paris agreement a complete turnaround in where the majority of investment is going, and emissions may have already peaked in several of these sectors and this is according to the climate trace precise measurements of peaking and a lot of these sectors are ones that need even more attention.
Agriculture, steel, etc. But last year, if you look at all the new electricity installed worldwide, 93% of it was renewable, mostly solar. So, the IEA has told us long since. We have all the technologies we need and proven deployment models to reduce emissions 50% in this decade. And clear line of sight to the other 50%.
A friend of mine in Tennessee said, “If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy, he’d have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.” Well, if you look at how long it took to install a gigawatt of solar 20 years ago, a full year, now it’s down to 15 hours and it’s on the way down still.
So, here’s what I believe that the climate, so-called climate realists are most wrong about. They don’t believe that we the people who live on this planet, have the capacity to make the changes necessary to save our future.
The greatest president in my country’s history, Abraham Lincoln, said at a time of dire crisis, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty. We must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew.”
I believe that we as human beings have the capacity to recognize that our survival is at stake and that we need to move faster even though the big polluters have the political and economic power to try to block us.
We’ve got everything we need. The people are demanding change. The one thing that they tell us might be in short supply is political will, but always remember, political will is itself a renewable resource. Let’s get out there and renew it.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
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Chris Bell protects his family from a possible intruder – Live at The Moth
/in Family, Humor, Personal Stories, The Moth/by Mark LovettSometimes our personal stories fall into the “life is full of unexpected surprises” category, and this is a perfect example. Chris Bell believes someone is breaking into his apartment, which poses a threat to his family, but in reality, it’s not the intruder he assumed it would be — it was the police.
Such stories remind us that what we think may be going on, may not always be correct. But at the same time, even stories that involve a mistake at one level, can hold deeper meaning below the surface and say something new about us.
What I appreciated about Chris Bell’s story, is the blend of humor and tension in his narrative. A bit of self-deprecating humor with the chunky peanut butter, the confusion about what was making the sound in his kitchen, the tense moments of confronting a potential intruder, followed by relief that it was only the police.
What about you? What stories do you have to tell that, on the one hand are a bit embarrassing, yet on the other hand, revealed something about your character?
Transcript
It’s 3 AM and I can’t sleep. Because I’m up wondering what I would do if my wife and two young kids were ever attacked by a grizzly bear.
I mean, would I have the courage to stand up to this beast and just do whatever I can do to protect them? Or would fear hijack my decisions and cause me to freeze or even worse, run away?
I don’t know. And that’s why this scenario has bothered me, haunted me, ever since the moment I first became a father.
Fortunately, there aren’t any grizzly bears in our neighborhood. But there have been several break-ins and robberies. Our landlord worked the night shift, so he installed this big fancy security system in his luxury apartment upstairs. But downstairs, in our barely basic two bedroom, I’m left to be my family’s security system.
So when my wife tells me she saw a mouse skurry across the kitchen floor, I see it as an opportunity to prove myself. The next day I immediately go to the store and pick up one jar of premium organic peanut butter. That’s just like me, a little chunky.
And after everyone goes to sleep, I put a little bit of that peanut butter on a mousetrap and strategically place it in our kitchen. Now, this night we’re experiencing waves of heavy rain and wind. It looks like someone’s throwing buckets of water against the window. And when the wind hits the house, you can hear the walls creak and groan. Around 11:00, I’m just watching the news and pop, the electricity just goes out.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I wake up to a bang. And I remember, ah, my mousetrap. So I get up, out of bed, wearing nothing but my boxers, flick the light switch and realize the power’s still out. Then I hear it again. Bang, bang.
So now I’m thinking, the mouse must have got its tail caught in the trap and it’s running around the kitchen, slapping it on the walls and cabinets. So now I’m rushing down the hall in my boxers, in the dark, trying to get to this mouse before it tears up our kitchen.
And right as I’m about to turn the corner, bang, bang, bang! And I stop. Because that doesn’t sound like a mouse. That sounds like a rat. And a big one.
So I go to the pantry and grab a broom and hold it like a spear from Wakanda. Cuz I know I got one shot to stab this thing before it tries to bite me.
So I carefully creep around the corner and leap into the kitchen. Only to see my trap right where I left it, untouched. Now I’m standing there wondering, what’s making that noise?
And from the kitchen door by my son’s bedroom, bang, bang, bang! Startled, I turn around to look through the window to see the figure of a dark shape pounding on the door. That’s when I realized, it wasn’t a mouse, it wasn’t a rat, that’s the sound of someone trying to break into our apartment.
And just then my son comes out of his bedroom in his Batman pajamas. And behind me, I hear the footsteps of my wife and daughter coming down the hall. So out of pure reflex, I turn the broom sideways and slam all my weight up against the door, trying to keep whoever wanted in out.
But now I’m close enough to see that there’re actually three figures pressing to get in. And they’re all bigger than I am. And when they see me, they erupt into shouting. And this causes my daughter to scream and my son to burst into tears. And at this point, my heart is beating like thunder because I’m I’m just gonna be real, I was scared.
This wasn’t some imaginary grizzly bear. This was real. And I knew if I couldn’t keep this door shut, they would get in and possibly hurt my family. And that thought terrified me. But it was the feeling of fear that told my body, you need to do something.
So I closed my eyes and pressed my nose up against the window so they could see my face clearly. And I did the one thing that I felt would turn these intruders away. I gripped my teeth and I growled.
But I growled like I was delivering a contract written in my own blood that said if they dared cross this threshold, I will show them exactly how ferocious a protective parent can be. And when I opened my eyes, the figures were now completely still. And the sound of their shouting was replaced by the soft sound of rain.
But now the figure up front revealed that he had his arms fully extended, revealing that there was only a thin pane of glass in between my chest and his gun. And when I saw this, I just felt like I was frozen.
And that’s when I heard, “Sir, drop the stick.” Followed by my wife, “Babe, I think it’s the police.”
Five minutes later, three very wet police officers are standing in the center of our kitchen. Turns out the wind from the storm shook the house so bad that it triggered one of the motion detectors from my landlord’s security system upstairs. This sent a silent alarm to the police station. So when they responded, started pounding on doors and looking through windows, they saw me standing in the kitchen, in my boxers, holding a broom as a weapon.
They thought they stumbled across a domestic situation.
Eventually, I got to explain my side of the story. And after I did, the officer who pulled his service weapon stepped up and said, “So so you mean to tell me I almost shot you because you was trying to catch a mouse? With a broom?”
My wife is not gonna believe this.
Fifteen years later, my young kids are now college students. And uh, believe it or not, we have never been attacked by a grizzly bear.
But if you were to ask me the same question, what would I do? I’ll still be real and say, I don’t know. But after the night I tried to protect my family from a mouse, I am a little bit more certain that I wouldn’t just run away. Thank you.
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Stop Telling Single People to Get Married – Peter McGraw at TEDxBoulder
/in Community, Friendship, Relationships, Society, TEDx/by Mark LovettWe would like to think that all the decisions we make are of our own choosing. They are, to some extent, of course, but oftentimes social norms have a way of creeping into the equation. We do something because everyone else is doing it, or our friends and family expect us to. Sometimes it’s related to our culture, or our religion.
Marriage has a way of falling into this trap. In his recent talk from TEDxBoulder, Stop Telling Single People to Get Married, Peter McGraw walks us through the changing social norm of getting hitched, and offers us a new way to look at the concept of significant other.
His talk includes a number of beautifully humorous moments (it’s a lesson unto itself) but beyond the laughter, Peter provides us with a brief history lesson on how the cultural norms of marriage have changed over time. And as with most social paradigms, it’s complex.
Impactful talks are always about shifting our perspective, so Peter offers some suggestions as to how we can view the solo life on equal footing with marriage.
As you listen to Peter’s talk and read through the transcript, notice how he’s taken us on a journey that is both personal and, at the same time, universal.
Watch as he turns the spotlight from himself to the world at large, then over to the audience. We always want to know what’s next, where the story is heading. And we learn something along the way.
Transcript
My not so subtle request: Stop telling single people to get married.
20 years ago, I threw myself a bachelor party as a new professor at CU Boulder. Backs were slapped, stories were shared, glasses clinked. But there was a hitch: I wasn’t getting hitched.
My rationale, without a wedding in sight, why do married folks get to have all the fun?
Unbeknownst to me, that night I joined a movement. The solo movement, where being single isn’t just tolerated, it’s celebrated. Not less than, not better, just a different path filled with opportunities to live remarkably.
In 1960, 90% of adults in the United States would go on to get married. Today, 50% of adults in the US are unmarried. 25% of millennials are projected to never marry. And don’t get me started on what’s happening with Gen Z.
Yet, we still live in a world built for two. Married people have access to over 1,000 legal advantages unavailable to singles: tax breaks, social security benefits.
Singles invest heavily in marital milestones. This made sense when everyone got married. But for us lifelong singles, we have to buy our own crockpots.
And then there’s Aunt Sally, who keeps asking, “So, is there anyone special?” How many of us have an Aunt Sally?
Lately, a chorus of media voices have traded Aunt Sally’s question for a prescription: Get Married. You don’t believe me? There’s a book called Get Married. And it came out, of course, on Valentine’s Day.
The “Get Married” advocates like to point to data that show that married people report higher life satisfaction than single people. Their conclusion: Get married and get happy. Your bonus: you get to save civilization.
Now, you might be wondering, and the answer is no, I’m not anti-marriage. I’ve even had a couple near misses.
But I am against over-prescribing marriage based on correlational data that the “Get Married” crowd is a little too wedded to. Any serious scientist who looks at these data comes to the same conclusion: that is, the people who get married are already slightly happier to begin with.
But there is a happiness effect in the data. There’s a wedding day bump. But it fades fast. For 30K a pop, the average US wedding, at that cost, you can take 15 vacations. Without your in-laws.
But here’s the real puzzle. And it’s one that the “Get Married” crowd can’t answer. And that is this: If getting married makes you happy, why is it that the happiest places on Earth feature the most people going solo? This is especially the case in Scandinavia.
I say, rather than treating the rise of singles as a bug, let’s treat it as a feature. A feature of progress, especially for women.
The arranged marriage was invented 4,400 years ago in order to form business alliances during harsh agrarian times. Women were treated more like property than partners, with a husband receiving ownership from the father at the altar. Thankfully, today, marriage is more about love, and it’s increasingly optional.
The story of the rise of singles is the story of the rise of women. And it really got rolling with the invention of the spinning wheel. The spinsters who used it could earn their own money and escape being owned by a husband or a father.
With the invention of birth control and greater access to education and economic opportunities, “I do” is becoming, “Do I?”
The spinsters of yesterday and the cat ladies of today are not old maids. They’re trailblazers, pioneers of independence.
Urbanization, apartments, and the home appliances that were invented for housewives are spurring a huge increase in people living alone, especially in cities like Stockholm.
Intrigued by these happy Scandinavians, I swapped out my Stetson for an Indiana Jones style fedora and headed to Sweden, a global leader in gender equality. And I found lots of one-bedroom apartments filled with singles, some by choice, some by chance, but living rich, interconnected, remarkable lives.
So let’s dispense with the calls to get married. They’re either already preaching to the choir or shouting into the wind. There are the “someday” singles. They’re looking for their person, sometimes waiting hopelessly. The “just may” singles are open to possibilities, the hopeful romantics. But of single adults in the United States, half have other priorities.
They’re not looking for love or lust, whether for now or forever. And they’re channeling their time and their energy and their intention into education, building businesses, creating art. For many singles, they live meaningful lives. Singles give more time. They’re more likely to care for elderly parents and disabled friends, more so than their non-single counterparts.
So what should we tell single people rather than get married? Let’s start by expanding the concept of significant other. It originally included family and deep friendships, including family of choice. Indeed, science shows that social connections broadly predict life satisfaction.
I’ve never put a ring on a finger, but I have significant others. They are my brothers and sisters in the solo community around the world. There’s my brother from another mother, Darwin, who’s taught me more about unconditional love than any lover has. And here tonight is my soul sister, Julie, who was at my bachelor party 20 years ago. I love you, Julie.
Next, let’s advocate for policies that support a family of one. Sweden’s social safety net is given to all citizens individually: universal healthcare, free or low-cost education, affordable childcare, and eldercare. No spouse required. Amen.
And lastly, let’s elevate single living to be on par with married living. Not better, not worse, just a different path filled with opportunities to live remarkably.
I always thought that there was something wrong with me for not wanting to get married. The prospect of it felt like I would be wearing an ill-fitting suit, or worse, a straitjacket.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of problems. There’s a lot of things wrong with me. But putting a ring on it is not going to solve my problems.
And as I was nursing a broken heart after one of my near misses, it hit me: I’m not half waiting for a whole. I’m wholehearted. I’m complete, I’m healthy, I’m financially stable, I do meaningful work, I have a wide and deep connected group of friends. I feel wholehearted, and I hope you do too.
In the end, there is no one remarkable life. There are remarkable lives. And no amount of pearl clutching or calls to get married are going to drag us back to the good old days, which, to be honest, weren’t that good to begin with.
Someday, single living and married living will stand side by side, equal. In the meantime, the solo movement has a big tent. Never married? Divorced? Separated? Widowed? Welcome. We celebrate you and our married allies.
The future is about options, not prescriptions. So let’s toast to a world that honors both the choice to settle down or go solo.
Cheers.
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What if community is built by sharing stories we hide?
/in Community, Personal Stories, Public Speaking, Storytelling, TEDx/by Mark LovettSónia Silva is a master storyteller. It’s as simple as that. Full disclosure, I do know Sónia as we’re friends who also work together on the TEDxLisboa curation team. So I was quite happy to hear that she was going to give a TEDx talk of her own at TEDxPraça Gil Eanes in Portugal. Her talk, What if community is built by sharing stories we hide?, speaks to the ability of our personal stories to connect people, and in doing so, strengthen communities. If you have a story to tell, but you’ve been holding back, this is a story that you should listen to.
There’s so much wisdom in Sónia’s talk, so much so that I can’t highlight it all, but here are five pearls of wisdom that resonated with me.
As I’ve written about many times before, the essence of personal storytelling is sharing a part of your life experience with others, so that they can understand themselves, their community, and the world at large in a new way.
And I loved her mentioning “messy human stories”, as every person I’ve worked with over the years had a messy story to tell in some respect. Truth be told, they didn’t always tell the messy parts, which was a shame, as what’s different about us, and discussing what didn’t work out the way we wanted, forges a stronger connection with those hearing your story.
Remember my opening line? Where I mention Sónia is a master storyteller? Well, consider this a masterclass in how to craft a compelling story that includes you — the storyteller — but focuses on the wisdom that you bring to an audience. Watch her talk (at least once, preferably more) and read the transcript below. You’ll find it’s time well spent.
Transcript
I remember the moment the doors swung open and I saw 25 kids stare me up and down. I was six years old, and I did what I knew best. I hid behind two large trees: my father’s legs. We had just moved from Germany to Portugal, to Lagos, my family’s hometown. And my mother gently assured me, “Darling, don’t worry. In Portugal, all the kids are just like you.”
What does that even mean when you’re six? Sure, I spoke Portuguese, sure, I looked Portuguese. I still do. Brown eyes, brown hair. But the way I dressed with funky leggings and Birkenstocks, and my references, and the way I carried myself, it was all German.
I forced myself into a new story, one that said behave Portuguese, and I started to perform belonging. I pushed my parents to buy me a new backpack and new clothes, like a round collar shirt I hated, just to fit in. And you know the funny thing? Back in Germany, all I dreamt about was being blonde.
This in-between feeling made me write stories to cope with it, and to feel seen. So, look around, and I mean it. Look to the person behind you, to the person next to you, please. How many times have you changed who you are, your tone, your clothes, perhaps even the way you love, just to fit into one narrative?
We bump into each other, we wave at our neighbors, and yet, our stories remain unheard. Are we a community, or just people sharing time and space? We think community or belonging is about sameness, you know, same beginnings, same milestones, same endings.
But what if the real glue between us isn’t sameness, but the courage to live our own really messy human stories? What if instead of asking where do I fit in, we ask what story do I bring? That shift turns us from spectators to co-creators, and from performing to really showing up. And as we scroll our life away, I think this is deeply needed.
My old shyness made me help people find their voice as a communication coach. And today I want to share with you how public storytelling helps us build stronger communities and find our voice as well. So, my first real taste of public storytelling was Humans of New York.
I stumbled on a post and I saw an old street cleaner sitting in a bench. He was remembering how he used to play there with his little brother, and how he used to protect him from the monsters of the neighborhood. That park was their safe place, like my father’s legs were mine. So, different story, different time, but same emotion.
That hit me. Stories turn strangers into people we care about. Brandon Stanton wasn’t trying to save the world, to preach, or even to sell. He just listened to stories, he took pictures, and he shared their exact words. It started a global craving for stories, of regular people, anonymous citizens, like us, not celebrities. And why? Because they resonate.
There was also The Moth, a live stage where people tell their personal stories. Just guts and grace. In a dark room full of people, they cry, they laugh, and they breathe in sync. And what about Human Library? Even better. You don’t borrow books, you borrow people. And you sit with them face to face.
Someone society has deep stigmas about. And you read through their life with an honest conversation. What these projects have in common is that they were built with and for community. They started small, and they had volunteers who believed in the power of stories to create change. No fancy setup, no forcing, just curiosity and presence.
What moves me most is what they teach us. Empathy doesn’t come from headlines or from data. It’s emotional education by direct exposure without someone else’s filter. In public storytelling, you don’t end with a solid, moral conclusion. Each one has the freedom to pick what they want. And that’s totally the opposite of how I was taught stories at home or at school. If you missed that one correct answer, you failed the test. Do you remember that?
Now, I know what some of you might be thinking: “Oh, there she is, telling that we should reveal ourselves to the world.” Well, no. That’s exactly the myth I want to break. Being yourself doesn’t mean being by yourself. Personal stories are not narcissism. They are invitation. Have you ever wondered why so many TED talks have personal stories? It’s not coincidence, and it’s backed by science.
Researcher Paul Zak explains that when we tell an emotionally engaging story with a good structure, you trigger oxytocin, the hormone that is responsible for trust, connection, even community. So, when we share something, and it doesn’t mean a secret, it means sharing something real and raw, meaning being vulnerable, you open the door, not to be stared up to, but to invite people to do the same. And when you listen, you often find yourself and you act.
Like in the project Hart Verhaalt in The Hague, where they bring together communities that often don’t cross paths, like older Dutch migrants and Pakistani women. They tell their story, they clap, but afterwards, they collaborate. They reflect and they discuss with the audience. And sometimes they start projects inside the city, when before that, they ignored their existence.
When we find meaning together, we co-create future. When we find meaning together, we co-create relations. And eventually, I grabbed the mic and I became a storyteller. And I became a volunteer, and I became the co-host of the Portuguese edition of Storytelling Lisboa, where I welcome between 80 to 100 people. Portuguese, foreigners, and even cats! All colors, all ages, like the perfect Portuguese patchwork.
One day I told a story about my body, about validation, about sex, and still not being a mother. Women cried with me, womb to womb. At the end of the event, while I was putting away the chairs, a person came up to me, a young man, 18, 20 years. And he said, “You’re gonna make it.” And we gave a hug, strong and lasting. And for a moment, he was the storyteller. So I whispered, “I think you have a story too.” And he said, “I do. But I’m not ready yet. Thank you for sharing yours. Now I see you.” I have just met a man with a wound like mine.
We had more in common than gender could guess. And it’s from these brief unexpected moments that we realize that we are all carrying stories, even when we don’t know how to tell them yet. When we are honest, you don’t control who you touch, but you create the space for it.
And nowadays I can tell you that I wear my leggings and my Birkenstocks with no shame. We have built something beautiful in Lisbon. It’s a monthly comeback to stories around an imaginary campfire. But not to retell stories that no longer serve us from generation to generation. We tell new ones, open to all the human experience, with self-acceptance and with agency. That’s why I believe that these places are truly important, especially in countries like Portugal, full of identities and still afraid to speak out. We are quiet, we dismiss ourselves.
So, in case you’re wondering, how can I create such spaces? Let me share with you five key elements.
First one: Warmth. I feel welcomed. A cozy space, warm lights, a clear tone, a group of volunteers that welcome you and enable storytelling practices so you can feel safe.
Second: Empathy. I’m not alone. We echo stories, not to fix you. We share and we recognize emotions, and each one is accountable for the way they show up.
Third: Perspective. I never thought about it this way. Thematic events, they help us broaden our perspectives. We see the experiences on the same topic with different lenses, but the same humanity.
Fourth: Inclusivity. I respect. No hate speech. When everyone is included, we grow. You don’t have to agree, but you respect.
Fifth: Dialogue. Tell me more. Curiosity opens dialogue, and conversations build community. And you know what’s the best of it? You don’t need permission. Anyone can create the space, anyone can hold space.
So let me close with this. We are made of cells, but mostly we are made of stories. Stories shape our beliefs. Stories shape the way we act, we connect, and how we will be remembered. We keep reteling stories that no longer serve us, or even worse, we allow other people to silence them, or to write them for us.
And that ties us to a single thread, a single narrative. By sharing our imperfect stories and truly listen to others, we are reclaiming back community as a space of belonging and not of conformity, so we can weave a web of stories and threads that holds us across divisions.
Sometimes you go far away to find community, but look around, and you may find it. Storytelling is the way of saying, “I see you, I hear you, I’m here too.” So this is my final call: Tell your story, even if it’s messy, even if your voice shakes. Create space, build community, not to fit in, not to perform, to belong.
Obrigada.
Back to you…
Okay, so now you’re inspired to share your story, regardless of who you are and the mess you’ve made. But if you’re still hesitating to share, think about how the connections we make through storytelling provide that sense of belonging we all yearn for. Let others know they’re not alone. That a story told is a story heard.
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