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"This decade is a moment of choice unlike any we have ever lived," says Christiana Figueres, the architect of the historic 2015 Paris Agreement. The daughter of Costa Rica's beloved President José Figueres Ferrer, she shares how her father's unwillingness to lose the country he loved taught her how stubborn optimism can catalyze action and change. With an unshakeable determination to fight for the generations that will come after us, Figueres describes what stubborn optimism is (and isn't) — and urges everyone to envision and work for the future they want for humanity.
This talk was part of the Countdown Global Launch on 10.10.2020. (Watch the full event here: .) Countdown is TED's global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, in the race to a zero-carbon world. Get involved at
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WHAT! Dislike before like?
Yay the early bird Woohoo!!
First comment YAY
no
I dont understand anything but still watch lmaoo
That’s nice but please don’t vote!
Bujare Ademi xD
Subtitles?
Changing climate means getting people out of poverty. Poor people will do anything (including damaging the environment) to get ahead.
Non poor too. There is limit for ecological resources to use. So changing climate is removing people from the this world.
totally agree with you, i think first we need to change material conditions
@Dmitri Zaslavski I agree with you but we also need to reduce our standards of success.
Today this is the accumulation of material goods.
As long as this is the measure of success, curbing wasteful production will be fruitless.
@Mike C I would disagree with you about second point. Reduce standart of success? So you only want to limit how well people can live?
Change? May be. But how? I would not really like to live as people do in China, which follow something like hive community, where you live for community and do what community wants you to do.
What is the goal then?
@Dmitri Zaslavski
You miss my point.
People accumulating goods we rarely use and end up in a closet somewhere don’t benefit our lives nearly as
much as the costs in resources.
Though this is mostly true for wealthy individuals but it’s also true for middle class individuals.
The economy seeks to sell items whether we need them or not.
Commercialism seeks to manipulate us into a belief that we need such materialism to be happy.
Which has no correlation.
The only thing that makes people happy is financial security.
Very nice views. But how to do it in counties like india, where corruption is rampant among politicians from top to bottom and population reaches unbearable counts. Should UNO not think OVER such problems and help such countries?
It’s not a good situation but no one will come fix someone elses corrupt government. The people must to mobilize and do it themselves.
India?
The whole world is corrupt and bankrupt.
I agree with you 100% We can do this, and the mice said “Yes we can bell the cat” and everybody agreed and then an old mouse said “Great Idea who will bell the cat?” I have live long enough to know that the people that are driven by greed the “Fat Cats” will use there wealth and power and influence to block our efforts because they don’t give a dam about the future generations or the planet. I will never give up trying despite that fact that I try every day for zero carbon and it is failing. I have tried for 50 years and now we need to do something. Your Father faced an army that he could see, how do you fight an army that you cannot see? When you figure that out do another video.
Well said
Don’t focus on the hows, keep focus on the vision you want to create and take any type of action. We start with baby steps.
@Abundantia Yes I watched what bob years ago and taking baby steps it did not work then either. I have invented many things that did not exist, I have succeeded what others have failed, the two things I have never been able to over come is ignorance and greed in others as I posses neither. It is impossible to over come people that have no moral comas unless you kill them all and to do that I would have to become what I detest.
Amazing and truly hopeful speech. I also believe that all the things we need to do can be done too, and that this is not the end!
Is there such a thing as blind optimism and stubborn optimism or are they the same thing? Maybe we need both.
Am I refusing to vote a sign of pessimism or a blind optimism that everything will turn out OK regardless? I would like to believe its the latter because I can’t in all likelihood choose a lesser evil.
TL;DW Don’t be a Doomer, but don’t think the problem will go away on its own either.
Yes! Okay. Mrs. Bird is the Word
Save Our Planet
If you are looking for a way to help the environment you can use ecosia they are a search engine that plants trees with their profits.
Since when were the UN interested in democracy?
Duh.
Oh…maybe you have a point.
Go Away
its own other
Sorry we are on our way to renewable energy and a healthier environment.
Weird title.
Real climate science dot com
I’m Vegan; that’s the bare minimum we can all do ~3 times a day to preserve the future and it’s actually an amazing lifestyle with so many benefits, I love it (and the food)! 🙂
Hola Christina, saludos from Guatemala. You brought tears to my eyes.
What kept me listening after you said social justice was your mention of Rule of Law. I will begin by trying to establish my credibility in the realm of ecology, tell you about my ecological footprint.
I have no car; I walk or ride a bike very few exceptions, then it’s shared transportation with at least four other people. I rarely travel by plane. My non-organic waste, which I compost myself, amounts to a one gallon bag every couple of weeks. I don’t use insecticides or herbicides, except for occasional boric acid to keep ants and cockroaches out. I eat almost no processed food and my diet is very simple, two and a half pounds of chicken meat and organ meats a week between myself, three cats, and a neighbor’s dog. So, i think I have done my part to avoid contributing to anthropogenic climate change, given that it is wholly anthropogenic in origin, which I am not completely convinced.
Now, to the Rule of Law. I am completely convinced of its necessity if we are to solve all the problems facing us as a species and even problems facing the planet and life on it.
Without Rule of Law, there can be no collective action. Without collective action, we can’t solve big problems. But, here is the heart of the great divide that has the human species so polarized, not all collective action is respectful of the Rule of Law, as the collective action by the military in your personal history seems to prove. Let’s assume for the moment that the military were wrong; their action was unlawful.
Why was it wrong, unlawful? It was unlawful, most importantly, because they violated freedom; they used force, or the threat of, to overthrow an election that, we will suppose, was free, in other words, conducted without coercion or deceit on the part of the participants.
Perhaps the military also violated the Constitution, the social contract between the politicians and the People, and so, they violated the (hopefully freely negotiated) right of the People to decide by majority vote on how to hire the people who control collective force.
Those two principles, freedom and rights/obligations, together with respect for property (without which there is no basis for negotiation) and equitable compensation for proven damages are the foundation of human society, of collective human action. If these are not respeced, we do not associate; we do not form societies; we do not act collectively.
The Law must defend these if there is to be any collective action at all. In other words, collective action itself must not violate these principles or it will destroy itself.
These principles are the Law, and the Rule of Law is when collective action and the institutions that have evolved to organize that action do not violate the Law itself, do not violate what makes collective action possible. That includes legislation as a means of collective action. Legislation must also not violate the Law or it will destroy society, sooner or later.
I hope that humans are not ignorant enough to destroy the planet’s only hope of preventing the destruction of the planet and all life on it by meteors and other problems that only the collective action by humans can solve or, as Thomas Sowell says, find alternatives for.
Climate change, assuming it is anthropogenic (or not) can be solved without violating freedom, property, and rights/obligations, but we must not make the use of force more inclusive than for the strict enforcement of the Law. It’s much too dangerous, genocidally, speci-cidally, planecidally, dangerous.
What we can make more inclusive is freedom and property. We can extend the respect for the freedom and property of more life forms. We can, voluntarily, give equitable compensation for proven damages to the species and territories we have extended the respect for property and freedom to. (Proven damages because unlawfully violating the freedom, property, and rights of individual humans weakens collective action the way a virus can weaken and even destroy an organism, one cell at a time.)
Pollution has a perfect solution in the strict protection of property. Your garbage is your responsibility; don’t dump it in my property, my land, my water, my air, my body, etc.
Enforcing the Law is Justice, it is social because it preserves society. Anything that violates the Law is anti-social by definition.
What we need is for the Law and Justice to be more inclusive, to apply it equally among all human beings so that our collective force is not drained by divisions and we can then extend the Law and Justice to as many other living things as possible.
Let’s get our own house in order first or we won’t have the strength we need for more.