Crowdsourcing Sustainability

Reversing global warming | Ryan Hagen | TEDx Archivorum

December 09, 2020 Ryan Hagen Season 1 Episode 8
Crowdsourcing Sustainability
Reversing global warming | Ryan Hagen | TEDx Archivorum
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Julian Kitsz interviews Ryan Hagen on the climate crisis and what we can do about it at TEDx Archivorum as a part of TED's Countdown initiative to help accelerate climate solutions.

Crowdsourcing Sustainability homepage: https://crowdsourcingsustainability.org/
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Anyway welcome back i'm super super excited to be introducing and interviewing our next guest who can kind of serve as a bastion for what it means to be an individual in a global uh problem how can you mitigate such a massive threat all by yourself so our next guest defines himself as a huge sustainability nerd and he made it his mission to help reverse global warming asap sort of eight years ago also he majored in economics at the villanova school of business uh minored in sustainability he worked in clean technology for three years before founding crowdsourcing sustainability in february of 2018. the purpose for this was to educate connect uh sort of inform and unleash the power in quotes of uh people around the world again to reverse this aspect of global warming it's a start-up non-profit with over a hundred hundred thousand people connected uh from over a hundred different countries and these people all read our next guests sustainability newsletters uh he writes to inform minds to touch hearts in his own words and to inspire action which is of course the most important thing it's made up of a team of five interns plus himself and he does this work because he believes that global warming and ultimately climate change should be humanity's number one priority and of course everyone at ted archivorm could not agree more so please join me in welcoming ryan hagan and please um i'll be obviously interviewing to get things started but i do hope you guys can all ask lots of really interesting questions to uh get the dialogue going so welcome ryan how are you doing well thank you so much for the intro um really happy to be here and uh just grateful for everyone tuned in and who cares about this and wants to you know level up and address this issue together absolutely absolutely well let's start then with as you put it on this in your buyer eight years ago but feel free to correct but what happened what did you witness what was the moment when you said all right enough is enough something needs to change and when did you make the decision to be an individual against such a colossal problem yes so there's a few moments that stick out for me it kind of started when i was 20. i was in the middle of a summer internship this is one of the first ones and i just decided that if i was gonna have to work 40 hours a week i better find something i actually care about something that is meaningful to me otherwise like what am i what am i doing with my life kind of thing um the second moment that really sticks out was actually discovering climate change for the first time uh this is kind of shocking but this wasn't really an issue on my radar until i was about 20 or 21 and i watched an inconvenient truth and i remember this i was studying abroad in copenhagen and after watching this i was just like why isn't everyone talking about this why aren't we doing anything about it and just went down this rabbit hole of research and was like okay this is this is legit it's very wide-ranging we gotta we gotta do something about that um and then the third third moment is it's kind of silly but i was just online and stumbled across this poll like what are the most important political issues to you like rank them and i was in this you know time of like trying to figure out my life what am i going to do with my career and i just took this very seriously this silly little poll um and what i came to to realize and how i started to see it is that you know you got the economy you got health care you got immigration national security got all these really important issues that we have to figure out but the biggest one to me was obviously climate in the environment and it's just kind of this logic of if we don't get climate right everything else is going to be wrong and so it's this this view of like everything else is taking place in the context of our climate and uh there's this there's this great quote from alex steffen and he said it's not just another issue it's an era so i kind of look at everything else through this lens and you know shortly after that i i made this promise to myself uh that i'd make a career out of reversing global warming as soon as possible uh because i saw it as the best way to save and improve as many lives as possible and you know since then i've just been a huge sustainability nerd uh like you said and just learning everything i can about the climate crisis and what to do about it and trying to start sharing this with other people and trying to form these connections and a collaboration so we can work together more effectively uh on these solutions great thanks so much it's so inspiring carlos then how did crowdsourcing sustainability i believe it was 2018 how did that come about yeah so it started because i had just left my job working in clean technology i'd been there for like two and a half years or so but i was ready for a change wanted to travel and right before i left for my trip i had this i have a really close friend who asked me if i would write a blog for him a blog post an article on sustainability and i was super excited because i just had so many different things i wanted to say i've never even considered like writing before and um this idea evolved over the course of the trip from you know just this one article to like maybe i should start my own blog on this subject to to thinking like okay what like i'm only one person what can i do i think the best thing i can do is you know get as many other people together to work on this issue as possible and yeah so i just i just kind of gave it a go i felt that in the worst case scenario only some friends and family would read it and maybe that would change some minds and then i'd move on to the next thing um but i've i've stuck with it i've i felt that i you know especially back in 2017 when i was thinking about this i was like no one's talking about this the way that i think it could be talked about like it could resonate so much more deeply especially in the media the way we're discussing this issue um and yeah and so i just i just started writing really and you know after the first six months or so i had 500 people reading it which was well short of my like 5 000 person goal but i just kept going and then a year later there were 10 000 people reading and then less than a year from that up over 100 000 people now um so yeah and it's it's really just it's all about you know informing minds touching hearts inspiring action and talking about this in a way that's more personal and inspirational and useful like what can you actually do about this how can you talk about it and understand it in a way that resonates and makes sense to you on a personal level and yeah i think of this as like a blend of independent journalism evidence-based and a sort of activism because i'm also an activist on the side so i bring both of those perspectives in and really write with my humanity because i don't i think it's powerful to bring that in and share those emotions uh when appropriate um but yeah and so i can elaborate just a bit more on kind of the the messages or the topics i tend to write about i'm really all over the place and just follow my nose on what i think is the most important stuff for people to know um so the main themes are really like the urgency understanding the climate crisis is here now and what's going on with the effects of global warming around the world uh you know both global and personal trying to show evidence that people are far more powerful than they believe and like what you do really does matter sharing the most effective actions you can take and sharing those insights from different leaders and what they're saying trying to to kind of push back on the narrative that society has had for decades

and starting to try to to show what i think is the more accurate narrative and that is that people in the planet matter more than prophets not the other way around and that we are a part of nature not apart from nature and i think those two um messages have been kind of ingrained in our culture at least here in the us and i think so much stems from that belief system that's starting to poke holes in it i will will do something good um and then just the last the last few here are trying to make sure people don't feel guilt or shame like we've inherited this very broken system it's not our fault it's actually largely still broken because there's very powerful forces keeping it that way like a very small number of people who want to keep making tons of money uh and then more just on the messaging and framing of all this and where we are but we have the solutions we already have them there's this awesome organization called project drawdown if anyone hasn't heard of them definitely check them out they're amazing they have like the top hundred solutions to reverse global warming with like tons of research the cost um savings and all that but we have the solutions they're going to make us safer healthier and they're going to make the world more just so these are really like this is a win-win win thing uh this is also about justice like this is a big moral issue which i don't think gets talked about enough um oddly enough and then you know just sharing stories of what other people are doing and how they're making an impact because that's what gives me hope uh like how many other people are working on this and the one thing that makes me hopeful is how quickly this movement is growing and how many more people are starting to come in because we need as many people as possible and so i'll wrap up here but basically up till now or up until earlier this year it had been me trying to do step one of this plan which was build up this community uh of people who can be empowered to start taking action in the places where they live and work and more recently i've been trying to do the second part of the plan uh which is much trickier but it's been like kind of the point of it all along which is to enable this effective collaboration so people can start sharing resources ideas your skills like we all have unique things that we can bring to the table and we need everyone's right now to to make the changes that we need and so we started to connect in slack um and people are starting to share with each other and connect still trying to crack that nut of how do we scale this up and collaborate effectively but like i'm very very excited to see like ted doing the countdown project like lots of parallels what i'm trying to do and i'm just very excited that more people are starting to be like okay how do we work together on this how do we get this done who's done this well how can we learn from them and bring all these best practices and uh experiences together to to move forward faster together so many just nuggets of can't stop nodding my head like i just completely i guess i have discussing how you build your platform it's obviously a writing based it's spreading information as you're saying it kind of originated as an idea with global as a writer then what has been the biggest challenge in growing this this platform and spreading the message yeah so honestly the biggest challenges i've faced are kind of keeping the faith i mean i've been doing this for two and a half years now and especially the first year so you know you you write a newsletter you put i can't even tell you how many hours into making that happen between the research and the writing and the editing and touching it up and everything um and then you know especially at the beginning you put that out there and then the next week you're writing to like maybe five or ten more people so it's very slow going in the beginning and then i also i don't know the full impact of what people do with this i've heard tons of really cool stories of people using these newsletters in different ways which is always very uplifting and encouraging for me to be like okay sweet like you know i write this thing and i send it out there and then i'll hear back from a handful of people especially at the beginning but it's those stories of like hey like this led me to do this or this started this conversation or there's really cool one i got recently from this guy in ecuador and he's like i write climate cartoons and like comics and i've been using this as an inspiration for writing these comic books i'm like wow i'm so glad you told me that because that makes me feel like there's more of an impact here but especially at the beginning like keeping the faith that this was going anywhere that it was useful that was really challenging um it's also just been a bit challenging because to do this work i moved back home like i've been living with my parents for more than two years now uh and they're like i'm incredibly grateful for them and they've been super supportive but as anyone knows like living with your parents in your 20s doesn't come without its challenges and then lastly i'd say this isn't so much about writing but just working in climate is this is a very rewarding space to be in in many ways but it's also incredibly hard like this is a tough issue to be thinking about all the time uh and just grapple with and it definitely takes a toll on mental health we're starting to see especially among young people like rising eco anxiety and climate despair so i personally am trying to take better care of myself and i hope other people out there just if you feel despair around this issue or just immobilized in any way just know that what you're feeling is natural and that i have found that action is the antidote to despair in community so as big as this problem seems as overwhelming as it is the way that i've found that makes me feel better is you know there's the obvious things like you know meditating getting into nature doing things that you love doing but also just taking action on this issue and especially if you do it with a community or with other people or an organization it really does it brings me out of a funk when i when i feel that way so i just want to share that with folks it's an incredible massive action as the antidote you tell your writer i got i got that from someone else to be clear i don't know where but i didn't come up with that only a good one i think i just because i a couple of questions are coming in and there's again so many nuggets of information but one i think when you parallel what you're saying about especially young people you know such as myself and this idea of a lot of people going oh my god there's a really really serious problem especially my generation and we're all freaking out we don't know what to do we put this question here basically saying your thoughts on gen z can we you know can they change the world do you think we're more aware and do you think that we will ultimately be the ones to do game changes i love gen z uh i'm a millennial i think basically the younger someone is the more likely they are to like get it um so i have tons of faith in younger people and i think the movements that have sprung up in the last two years have moved the needle further than it's been moved in a very long time and we need to keep that pressure up and keep building our power and working together to really get the systemic changes that we need i would also say that we can't do this alone we need the older generations to come with us and start to work with us because to be frank we are not the ones in the positions of power right now like we're not the leaders of countries we're not the ceos we need to somehow get them to start moving the same direction that we're going at the pace that we're going uh so i would say it's yes i have lots of faith i think yes we are gonna make these changes for the better we also have to find ways to work with those older generations because they have a lot of the power right now i think that's a really mature way of putting it obviously you can't don't move those structures or change those structures controlling those structures i think that's that's such a really intelligent point to make um i guess a lot of what you've been saying is just your position again it's like the few against the men it's like really trying to move a mountain and when you've you know done the research that you have and you understand the problem so clearly it must really infuriate you when people just don't get it and we have a question that's just come in basically so many people just can't accept climate change and this person is asking do you think that the us and i guess you know the rest of the world but it specifically asked about the u.s do you think you know they're ready to make a change on the environmental level is it a different relation to other countries and i guess why are people just not getting it yeah so i think first first thing real quick and i'll get more to your question but when you started to say this it made me think of it um i don't spend any time really on climate deniers or doubters anymore uh i don't think they're worth it we have enough people who are alarmed or worried um to actually make the changes we need you need a very small amount of people to make change and so we should focus on the ones who are already closer to where they need to be in terms of the us i mean if you look at surveys done by yale um they have these really interesting surveys they've been doing them for like six years at least now um and if you look at them you see that people want clean energy people want to regulate carbon and even using the words climate change like this has been very politicized in the u.s but even using the words climate change something like three quarters or 70 of people think that this is happening and 60 or 65 are worried about it so there's enough people that get that this is happening and it's an issue even if they don't get the full extent of how much of an emergency it is uh and so i think there are definitely enough people to make the changes that we need to make it's just a matter of reaching them organizing them and starting to come together to exercise our power if it's in the place you work like that company or where you go to school that institution um the community you live in and then also you can get up to like the national you know national levels of leadership but this is kind of an every level we have to work together on it and i think there are enough people that get it we just need to come together and make it happen so build and collaborate think it might be interesting just to put a pin in that for a moment and just take advantage quickly of the amount of research and time that you've spent on climate change and understanding the situation i guess we'd all be really interested to know you know where are where do we stand according to you and what you know and what are our projections where are we heading and if we take the right steps how can we maybe alter that path yeah so we've warmed the world by one degree celsius a little more than that since the industrial revolution we're on a path for three or four degrees celsius which would be completely catastrophic uh i think it's the world bank some years ago said that a four degree warmed world like we basically we can't guarantee that we'd be able to adapt to that um and so we're on a very bad path to limit warming to two degrees uh the un has said we need to increase our efforts by three times and then limit warming to the much better but you know still not great 1.5 degrees celsius we need to increase our efforts by five times um you know there's there's pretty there's a pretty good chance 1.5 degrees is out of the picture right now

which is a tragic tragic thing to say i mean that the island nations their slogan has been 1.5 to stay alive but i mean the bottom line is we need to move as quickly as possible and prevent as much warming as possible because that's going to limit the destruction and the challenges we will face

another key thing i think is just the ipcc report from 2018 one of the biggest things that stuck out to me was they said that we need rapid and far-reaching transitions in every aspect of our of society that are and these transitions are just unprecedented in terms of scale so we're in a big hole but at the same time we have all the solutions we need and again i'd encourage people to go check out project drawdown um so we have these solutions and they're ready they're economical what we're missing is the power to implement them and there's this there's this great great quote by bill mckibben i want to share uh and he says the possibility of swift change lies in people coming together in movements large enough to shift the zeitgeist so it's all about movements and this people power um so i would just encourage the key thing to keep in mind i think is there's this vast difference between the best and the worst case scenarios and as far as we know we're still largely in control of where we end up on that spectrum and although the effects of global warming are far worse than most anyone expects we also have the capacity to rebuild a better society much faster than anyone thinks is possible right now and it's just because we think linearly as humans but these climatic and social processes actually move exponentially and so i just think those are some important things to keep in mind when things look this dire that's that's actually so interesting you know that we as humans we think linearly but the problems are exponential so it's just beyond us of innate reasoning and that's why it's so deadly uh you were touching a little bit on solutions there i just saw this question which says what do you think of david wallace um the uninhabitable earth and particularly his ideas about the tech solutions to climate breakdowns just thought you were touching on solutions i thought it was an interesting question to throw in yeah so i can answer part of that um i read half of his book and i think it was really well written i think he's great i do that a lot with books um and it was awesome i mean there's just so much that's hard to swallow um i i've been meaning to go back to it but in turn so i don't know specifically what tech solutions he was talking about or i think that was probably in the second half of the book but just in general the i'll talk about tech solutions like wind and solar those are cheaper the cheapest form of electricity and two-thirds coming in coming up on three quarters of the world right now uh we need to accelerate the deployment of those they're ready um battery storage is really taken off the costs are plummeting along those same paths we saw as solar and wind um and you got some other technologies that don't get nearly enough attention like heat pumps transforming our heating to electricity because basically we have to electrify everything that's how we're going to get to a zero carbon economy um i know the ones like refrigerants like if you go if you again if you look at project drawdown there are these very powerful greenhouse gases not co2 not methane that are like thousands of times more powerful and they're in refrigerants so like our air conditioners our refrigerators what have you and that's something no one ever thinks about like that's another technology that needs to be worked on and deployed at scale and then the other the other side of the technology that i would think about or how i think of it is you got the technology to reduce emissions and then you have the technologies to take emissions out of the atmosphere and that second bucket is going to be very important i think i think you get more bang for your buck on natural solutions like the most efficient technology that we have of removing co2 from the atmosphere are called plants and and soil so i think we need to you know take care of the low hanging fruit first but that doesn't mean we can't also invest in the the machines that are starting to do this as well it doesn't seem that those are economical yet but we definitely need to invest in them because this this is an all hands on deck this is a moonshot kind of uh operation we need to work on here absolutely um developing that further on solutions uh somebody is asking what you think about inver in person protests and movements versus social media's effect on sort of protesting the the status quo concerning climate change what are your thoughts on that i mean social media is great uh keep doing it but if it's ever gonna cut into time of an in-person protest i mean go to the in-person protest um those are so much more powerful there's actually a lot of really encouraging research about them i'll see if i can remember off the top my head um the best one i think is if you google like the 3.5 rule there's some research by erica chenoweth and she i mean her research was on non-violently like basically it was about regime change at the national level and she was saying it takes only 3.5 percent of a population's sustained action and participation to non-violently like take over that regime but i've listened to her in podcast since then she's like i believe this principle holds for smaller scale efforts as well and so you can see this in companies too like amazon like one per one percent of employees came together and started demanding they act on climate and they're still nowhere near where they need to be but they totally accelerated the climate action within that organization that was just one percent of employees getting back to more the protest aspect of this i personally think that's one of if not the most powerful thing people can do as long as you're peaceful about it um and there's a couple more studies out of like stanford and harvard that are something along the lines of uh i'm not going to remember if i could i could follow up with folks if they're interested because i've written about it before but it's basically the more protesters there are it actually swings votes in an election um and there's one other thing i'm blanking but i am more than happy to follow up with that stuff protesting is incredibly powerful i mean it's everything you're saying is just so insightful like it's so clear that you you base your judgments off of a place of research and i think to me it's like mixed in with common sense as well and i just it's surprising how like that's so lacking in so many things i think that's that's really really great i guess further then on solutions and all the research you've been doing outline for us what are the big things then globally as opposed to on the on the individual sort of few versus the many what needs to happen on a bigger scale for things to change yeah so i'm not i have i have a short list um this is definitely not comprehensive i'm sure there's a lot of other things you could add to this but just generally speaking i think these would be very powerful um ending fossil fuel subsidies and putting a high price on greenhouse gas emissions uh fossil fuel subsidies right now something like 500 billion direct subsidies globally and the imf has said that if you look at the indirect um subsidy which you know is like social costs like health care and other things like that they're putting the price for society the price of these subsidies at like five trillion dollars which is insane we're subsidizing the thing that is destroying us um so that would be a big one another one is to get money out of politics and start to really fix democracy because we need a government that serves the people and not corporations and the fossil fuel millionaires um that's definitely a problem in the u.s i'm sure it's a problem in other places to varying degrees another big one is to invest heavily in carbon sequestration and other sustainable technologies research which i mentioned briefly a moment ago we really need to figure out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale we're already past what has been deemed the safe amount of co2 in the atmosphere we're at like 415 parts per million right now and the safe amount is 350 which we haven't seen since before i was born um and so yeah and then also investing and deploying the solutions we have today so invest in these future better technologies but also we have what we need right now so get those out into the world they're ready they exist they're economical um this natural i think doesn't get nearly enough attention and that's to start reforesting instead of deforesting moving to regenerative agriculture instead of you know degenerative agriculture just this industrial thing we got going on um if we do that it would also make our food healthier it makes the soil work for us uh and a whole host of different things um and just that general theme of strengthening and working with nature rather than destroying it and destroying biodiversity and really the web of life upon which we depend for everything whether we realize it or not um so those those are really the big ones and then the last one is just really getting back to the thing i've been talking about all along is getting more people to step up like this isn't an issue of being right in an argument it's not a scientific problem it's not a technological problem it's a problem of power and to overcome this entrenched power and the status quo and these forces trying to keep things as they are so that i can keep making money to overcome that you need like that film equipment the gibbon quote you need a lot of people working at every level to start making those changes piece by piece yeah incredible i think um on what you're saying as well uh someone's posed a really interesting point which i think directly relates to when you're discussing the the kind of the big players in the societal scheme of things and the question is should central banks play an active role in climate change

i haven't thought about that a ton i would say yes i mean the money getting the money flowing in the right direction is hugely important given the system we have right now um and i think banks are starting to wake up to this i mean i know i saw like in 2019 early 2019 that 34 central banks came together and we're basically like we need to start integrating these climate um this climate information and decisions in data into where our money's going because if we don't start accounting for this and the impacts of climate change and the transformation that needs to happen in the economy if we don't account for this in our decision making there could be a massive collapse in asset prices and if people are interested in this you can look it up they're basically worried about what some are calling a carbon bubble um but i mean even if they're just selfishly trying to make more money the fossil fuel industry is a dying industry like we're going to have this massive transformation in society and the future of the economy is going to be sustainable so like yes central banks should like morally do the right thing whatever but they also have all the financial incentive in the world to start putting their money into the projects and companies that are going to be the most successful going forward so ryan i guess i want to ask do you think we're going to do it do you think we're going to make a big enough of the change in your opinion i don't think it's that black and white i think we are going to get our act together it's just a matter of how quickly do we do it and how much suffering do we mitigate by acting quickly and i mean even if you were just to follow like the financial trends of this like i said like renewables are cheaper right now than fossil fuels that's a very good trend more people are getting involved like i think we're not going to get the absolute worst case scenario i don't think we're going to end up limiting it to 1.5 degrees celsius as much as it pains me to say that i think we'll end up somewhere in the middle and i'm hoping it's 2 degrees or less but it really all comes down to

when are people going to when are enough people going to step up and start taking the actions necessary as uncomfortable as they may be um to start making this happen faster and with the research you've been doing and the stuff you see um i i understand clearly what you're saying that you know we will wake up it's just a matter of when this this matter of when is obviously going to have huge implications on not only human welfare but as you were saying we are not separate from mother earth we are part of the of the cycle we just kind of mechanized the the the ecosystem in many ways what are the adverse effects on a big scale and a small scale that we're going to see

i mean we're already seeing it albeit slowly um you've got the obvious sea level rise uh the the maps of the world will be redrawn by the end of the century um that's one of the most irreversible ones just because you can't stop ice uh from melting um desertification that's happening more and more i mean the basic to take a step back it's it's basically you know you got the floods droughts more intense storms more extreme weather in both ways like more like drier places are going to get drier wetter places are going to get wetter and what this basically all means wildfires you name it what this basically all means is the the building blocks of society like food water a safe place to live people's livelihoods like their jobs they're going to get harder to do as and there's going to be less of some of those as this crisis accelerates i would want to also say though like this is a lot of doom and gloom but i think one of the biggest things that we can also do is you know talk about this issue more but it's really really important and i've been working on this i think everyone needs to to work on this as well it's just imagining the future that we do want like making these changes makes everything so much better like clean air clean water i i imagine like cities that are quieter and more like people biking around healthier food like if you start imagining what these changes will bring it gives everyone and yourself something to move towards to fight for and it's not just like this is bad we have to stop this i think there's some psychological thing in our ancient brains where like like just being against something isn't good enough to sustain momentum you have to be moving towards something like what is that thing you're you're working towards and that itself is very powerful well that's incredible i think you're exactly right um yeah i mean that was just incredible information i mean i'm completely blown away obviously everyone here knows a lot of the facts but you bring in such a fresh angle you've obviously done your research and i'm just thank you so much that was really just such a wonderful interview anyone who has not subscribed definitely you know exactly what to do to reshape uh this better future i guess i want to close mine just by asking you know it's as we said already it's kind of common sense right it's like i want clean air i want better food i want to feel better i want the world around me to just be more lovely why is it so difficult for us to to not want that more or would you say that people do want it it's just it's back down to your argument that you know we don't have enough of an impetus to make that happen i mean i think there's a couple things i don't think the vision has been spelled out as well as it could be um and like that's on all of us i myself still need to be like okay what else am i working towards i've got a whole like google doc i've actually crowdsourced this document which is kind of cool and i did a very bad job of articulating all the different things that people want to see and make happen but i think that's part of it i think the green new deal i don't know as much about the european version but just that framework is very powerful because it goes from talking about climate as the sacrifice and this cost to this thing that's going to give people jobs and make our lives better like that's key to these changes the other part of your question there i think is for a really long time and it's very it's very easy to feel this way but just like powerless uh this is a massive problem there's so much that needs to be done it feels like the corporations and the government aren't moving the right direction or actively moving in the wrong direction they just don't really care but i think this is a moment where we need to recognize and discover and exercise our power as individuals and start working together collaborating with others organizing and when you do those things you actually can influence those much bigger power structures and like it's one of those it's it feels very impossible until you make it happen and we're starting to see more and more examples of places around the world where we are making inroads we are starting to move the needle and we just need to keep that going and building that power building these organizations and that momentum and we'll we'll get to where we need to go ryan i mean thank you so much in fact we just had a comment coming ryan thank you keep inspiring and informing the rusty hinge of history is opening couldn't agree more everyone please subscribe to ryan's newsletter i know i myself will be doing so immediately and i should have done so already guys thank you so much for a wonderful november edition of tedx archivorum we will be back in december with the same sort of things and new exciting speakers and i believe ryan you will be a returning guest absolutely thank you so much for having me thank you so much ryan thank you everybody and we'll see you all in december.

Intro
When was the moment you decided to act on climate change and why?
How did Crowdsourcing Sustainability come about?
What is the newsletter all about? What messages do you focus on?
What has been the biggest challenge so far? 
What do you think about Gen Z? Can they change the world?
Is the US ready to make the necessary changes?
Where do we stand? Where are we heading? What steps can we take? 
What do you think about David Wallace Wells and tech solutions?
Protests and advocacy: online vs in person.
What needs to happen on a bigger scale for things to change?
Should central banks play an active role in addressing climate change?
Do you think we're going to do it? Will we make a big enough change? 
What are the adverse effects we're going to see? 
Why is it so hard for us to make these changes? Why don't people want this more?