Climate change. I’m pretty sure that most of you here have already seen so much about this topic that you’ve become completely numb to it or even started to despise it because it always comes up on your English comprehensions. Then why am I talking about this at a public speaking competition? Well, in summary, everything you have ever heard about climate change is either not the full picture or blatantly wrong.

I’d like to start by addressing perhaps the biggest misconception that I feel many of us have: That we’re actually solving the climate change crisis. Frankly, we’re not. Never mind feasible solutions, we don’t even fully understand what the major causes of climate change are, and even of the few causes that we do understand, even fewer are made publicly aware. 

Sure, many of us know things like non-renewable energy and car exhausts are major contributors of greenhouse gases, but did you know that the emissions from the production of rice is equal to that of all the air traffic in the world and that the pollution released while making a new car is equivalent to that of paving just 2 metres of asphalt road? So switching to electric cars won’t help if the roads that the cars run on are indirectly polluting as well.

Even in cases where we did develop solutions to solve an emission problem, every solution seems to always somehow offend some group of people leading to vehement opposition. Like how people in Europe think nuclear power is too dangerous but also oppose wind turbines because it messes up the scenery on their balconies.

The climate change cake is split up into many more pieces than the vast majority of us realise, meaning that even if we did manage to solve one problem, it wouldn’t change the course of things at all. We’d have to completely redesign almost all the technologies that serve as the basis of modern society, and just to make things even worse, we don’t even have time anymore. A recent study has shown that even if we were to stop polluting right this second, we would still face massive environmental repercussions.

I’ve just painted a very depressing picture of our current situation — and make no mistake, all of this is true — but is there anything we can do about it? 

Well, the first thing that we need to realise is that the whole “reduce your carbon footprint to stop climate change” thing, although technically true, is completely infeasible. Yes, if everyone in the world was to completely stop polluting, we would obviously not have pollution, but practically, that requires everyone to be a perfect human being, which is impossible. Individual efforts will not fix climate change, we need institutional action.

We also need to be aware of the technologies that can still fix this situation. Carbon-negative solutions like direct air capture can take existing pollution out of the air and turn it into biodegradeable products that we can use. These solutions are still in their infancy though, so we need to vote on governments who care less about taxes and more about the Earth and its people and who will invest to grow these technologies.

So be mindful of what the media tells you, raise awareness of the actual current situation and even start researching carbon-negative technologies now. The climate change situation is more urgent than ever before, but it is not hopeless, and together, we can still strive to restore our Earth to its former glory.