Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
10 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2021–2026
15:50 · 14M views · Sep 22, 2021
Kurzgesagt examines what individuals can do about climate change, covering lesser-known carbon sources and why systemic and political change matter more than personal footprints.
Cited in climate threads to argue that individual action is not enough and that political pressure is needed.
20 comments from Hacker News
One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Kurzgesagt and they recently (looking at date, well, last year - still recent in the scale of things) had a video on global warming - Can YOU Fix Climate Change? this video There's also Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change? - [LINK] Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's Complicated. - [LINK]
You are not representing the seriousness of this situation adequately (in my opinion). This excellent cartoon video explains the seriousness of all the lesser known sources of carbon: this video Seems like Chairman Xi is serious about tackling Climate Change so he does not get deposed if the Gobi desert grows and eventually swallows up half of China.
Kurzgesagt made a really good video about climate change [0]. What stuck with me the most was that if I would eliminate 100% of my emissions in my entire life, I would save 1 second of global energy sector emissions. [0] this video
>Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, the most-popular decentralized digital currency, have a notoriously large carbon footprint (bitcoin mining alone consumes about half as much electricity in a year as all of the UK). So to leverage a cheap source of energy to run their bitcoin mining operations, Lochmiller and Cavness found themselves partnering with oil companies to repurpose a byproduct, primarily methane, that’s typically vented or burnt off in flares. Aren't crypto miners using GPUs to "mine" bitcoins? Doesn't that also mean every person who plays video games is also responsible for stressing the power generation system. And as GPUs become more powerful to give better frame rates and fancy tech like RTX, they also become more power hungry. Doesn't that also mean the massive data centers like the what Google is running for Stadia with massive number of GPUs is responsible for taxing the power generation system? Or people who train Deep Learning models with billion of parameters on GPUs? I do see people pointing fingers at Deep Learning and how it isn't "carbon neutral" but the other things are not really talked about. That being said, I am not people/companies who use GPUs aren't the cause of global warming or are somehow singlehandedly making it worse I believe that as a society we are kind of involved in this. Finger pointing will really keep going in circles. I am not the biggest fan of pop science as it often oversimplifies problems but this video by Kurzgesakt is very
Kurzgesagt made a video about it, and they say, and I agree with them, the answer can only be political pressure: this video They also mentioned the stat that if 1 person lived totally carbon neutral for 70 years, that would offset only 1 second of current global CO2 emissions, which I'm going to presume is sourced properly. I'm not very optimistic. Politicians follow the polls and go with what's popular, and if the people living in the rich nations have to pay more to fly to Asia for cheap holidays, and iPhones, etc, get more expensive because of carbon tax, the majority probably won't support the governments and will instead vote in populist idiots that will make things "great again". In the poorer countries, being told that the decades-old luxuries they've envied from richer nations will cost more because of government policies will also not be popular, never mind that the policies are meant to save the future.