fancy plane rides pink lamborghinis and giant homes in california influencers love to flaunt a lavish lifestyle but what would actually happen to the planet if everybody lived like an influencer better yet how many earths would we need to sustain the lifestyle of everyone saying make sure you give this video a thumbs up make sure you like subscribe and you cop that merch below bro let's start with driving the thing i hate most on earth the most famous influencers live in america where six million cars are purchased each year and in the year 2015 americans combined driving length was from earth to pluto and back 500 times most specifically though influencers live here in the epicenter of the entertainment industry la la land you might be a romantic and think of la as the city of leading men swinging their arms and dancing on the big screen but now it's more like beefcake men swinging something else on the small screen in l. a on average people drive 9. 3 miles per day which feels insane when you're from a place like toronto but it's actually 54 less than the rest of southern california this is because many angelenos which is what you're called when you live in l.
a which is kind of amazing take public transit but when is the last time you saw a vlogger or a youtuber on a bus they'd be like oh my god is this on do i look okay it's taking a lot for me to tell you this and you know how much i love you guys something really crazy happened to me like story time okay i had to take a bus and the cream of the crop celebrities or influencers live here in the west la hills aka the hollywood hills according to public data people who live here drive the most out of everyone in all of la and things add up quickly as any employee or friend also needs to drive up into these hills to get to your house leading to an average of 11. 1 vehicle miles traveled per day this is why we constantly see influencers making videos in their car like this hi sisters hi oh my gosh that was kind of scary also did you know that 20 of meals in america are actually eaten in the car the american dream so guilty but if we're all rich influencers we can afford to buy an electric vehicle like a tesla right let's assume we can buying a tesla is still actually worse for the environment than taking public transit and charging it still relies on the current power grid also i am aware of the irony of me filming this in our car i mean we're influencers after all and since we're in cali it's not that bad california has amazing renewable energy sources in 2018 only 3. 3 percent of the power grid came from coal and 0.
16 came from crude oil compared to the rest of america where 13. 1 comes from coal and 36. 4 from crude oil so charging a tesla in la is pretty green compared to the rest of america and even the world but california still relies pretty heavily on natural gas not to mention the raw materials it takes to make a tesla in the first place when you add it all up it starts taking a toll on the earth based on equal footprint calculations we would need 4.
3 earths to sustain a world where everyone had the same driving lifestyle as an influencer that's just based off of driving in some pretty ideal conditions but what about their mansions huge houses require a lot of energy and electricity to start americans consume 15 of the world's energy and 20 of the world's electricity but make up only 4 of the world's population for context the people of india and sub-saharan africa consume only 10 of the world's electricity but make up 33 of the world's population influencers tend to flaunt these large gorgeous costly homes but the true cost is on the earth take just air conditioning for example more than half of the air conditioning units in the world are in china and the us and keeping them running uses 2. 5 times more electricity than the whole continent of africa uses in a year one study i found calculated that six percent of all electricity in the us is used for air conditioning and air conditioning our homes causes more than a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year not to mention the cement or concrete that's needed to build these large homes as surprisingly concrete accounts for five percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and is the second most consumed substance on earth after water but a lot of these influencers do their best they carpool they don't always eat meat they are minimalists is that what this is this looks like an evil villain's lair in a disney movie even if we assume that these influencers never eat meat and that they have some energy-efficient appliances in their home you can run a calculation to find out that if we all drove and had mansions like la influencers we would need 10. 9 earths to sustain the lifestyle so hold up how are we calculating the amount of earths using geographical locations and behavioral averages for income and neighborhood information we can measure an influencer's global hectares this measurement looks at how much land sea and other resources are needed to produce what each person's global hectare will be per year and there's many online calculators where you can figure out your own eco footprint but we're actually going to need a lot more earths because influencers and us right now are using a service that emits a lot more carbon dioxide than you might think and that is online video platforms the energy needed to store deliver distribute and even watch online video leads to 0.
4 kilograms of co2 emissions per hour in 2018 228. 8 million people in the u. s watch digital content for 82 minutes each day adding 1.
3 billion kilograms of co2 to the atmosphere per year so if we all became online influencers our co2 release would be astronomical plus we'd be uploading so much and then downloading so much so the servers and the energy to cool the servers would be insane did you know they're trying to put servers up in the arctic so we don't spend as much money trying to cool them and as much energy trying to cool them either way uploading and downloading all this video would be really bad for the planet not to mention the closet back in the closet i see hello darkness my old friend the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry in the world responsible for 10 of greenhouse gas emissions mit calculated that the global impact of producing polyester alone was somewhere around 706 million metric tons of carbon dioxide or about what 185 coal-fired power plants emit in a year let alone selling the products so if 80 of people in the majority world shopped like influencers in la we would see a 77 increase in carbon dioxide emissions associated with clothing production a 20 increase in water usage and seven percent increase in land use who knew you'd have a gay man telling you to shop less usually we just have girls being like oh my god be my gay best friend come shopping with me it's like honey if it ain't a circular economy it ain't happening not really killing it is the gay best friend right now am i we'll include all that info in the final tally of global hectares but before we get to that let's talk about an influencer's favorite substance and i don't mean tummy tea i mean oil half the world's oil is consumed by only 17 percent of the world's population these countries are known as the oecd nations and they are also responsible for 33 percent of the world's co2 emissions america itself produces 15 of the world's co2 emissions compared to bangladesh who has half the population but only produces one percent of the world's co2 emissions per year remember the sprawling mansions we mentioned earlier people in bangladesh do not live in these the 163 million people of bangladesh live within their country which is the size of about alabama americans on average consume 10 liters of oil a day but we canadians fare even worse at 10. 2 liters of oil a day compared to a bangladeshi who only uses 0. 1 liters of oil per day a lot of this oil is used up from flying which is something that influencers love to do even during a global pandemic even if we keep the influencer lifestyle vegan we're also going to assume that they're pretty much shopping only local they got those expensive la grocery stores we're going to include a flight from new york to la every two months which i think is actually being kind of generous for influencer lifestyles when you study them but we're gonna put that in as well we discovered that if everyone lived like an influencer we would need 12.
9 earths to sustain the lifestyle so what can we collectively take away from this we made this video to dissect the idea of the aspirational lifestyle that affects all of us including us i mean like i've got a fig tree back there i want it to look pretty we're all impacted by the consumption habits we see online and in media but if we all lived like bangladeshis we would only need this much of the earth to sustain all life which is astounding and in our current climate crisis are these not in some ways an aspirational lifestyle i know this can get complex and muddy when we talk about poverty or the quality of life but the global happiness council found that in 2017 americans were the unhappiest they'd ever been since starting that initiative even though they were working eating driving and consuming more than ever in fact if we came together as a species and evenly distributed our fuel and energy consumption across the seven billion people on this planet we would all have the same energy use as somebody in switzerland in the 1960s look at those gorge trams look at those cute little outfits they honestly look happy and the life expectancy of somebody in switzerland in 1965 was the same as it is in america today which is much higher than the world average for more information on this you can check out our podcast on youtube which is all about influencers with the link in the description ultimately we're not advocating to live in substandard conditions but to just question are we actually in better condition today now when we're consuming more than we might have been in the past and can we re-evaluate our beliefs and our ideals about this aspirational lifestyle and what it means to have lots of things and now let's talk about the elephant in the room we are from canada if you cannot tell we drive around in giant ass vehicles like that one please blow out the license plate or we could get sued that's a gas guzzling machine if i've ever seen one so just by living in our culture we are treating the world unfairly we are contributing to co2 emissions more than most people on this earth and although mitch and i like to call ourselves queer science educators who try to use comedy and drawings to make sure that science is for everyone sometimes my friends will go to a party and say oh this is my friend greg he's an influencer at this point i will usually push them over smash a plate and drop kick them in the face something we can try and work on as influencers is to stop selling this culture of consumption and money and capitalism first class fun yeah like the luxury of it all because we know that's not good for the environment or the planet even though it does well on the youtube algorithm it honestly does mansion tours all over the place i just think it would be cool if culturally and i see this movement slowly happening we could agree that it's actually not that interesting to just have lots of money to just buy things that are way too expensive that in the first place often exploit places that don't have as much money yes the responsibility is always on corporations like youtube and google and the government but we as people also have to have a hand in thinking critically about these wealthy luxurious lifestyles and what we actually think is quote unquote cool the climate crisis is going to be probably the most defining thing that happens in our lifetime and we know that like dominating our natural environments to create these wealthy lifestyles is not going to hell so yes we are influencers who made this video classic i know it's a lot harder than it sounds you can't just change culture overnight but i do think it would be interesting to challenge the ideas that luxury and opulence and all these things are something that we should all desire and want because they're literally impossible we would need 12.
