People & Blogs
How We Took On an Oil Giant — and Won | Melinda Janki | TED
Oil companies may seem invincible, but they are more vulnerable than you think, says climate justice litigator Melinda Janki. She tells the story of how she took on ExxonMobil in her home country of Guyana, notching historic wins against the oil giant — and proving that we can turn existing laws into powerful tools for…
People & Blogs
The Controversial Climate Tool Funding Real Change | Sandeep Roy Choudhury | TED
If a company plants trees to offset its pollution, is that climate progress — or is it greenwashing? Critics of carbon markets say it’s the latter. But Sandeep Roy Choudhury, who’s spent two decades financing climate projects from rural cookstoves to coastal forests, says the real failure is discouraging companies from even trying. Hear his…
People & Blogs
How to Be a Great Listener | Maegan Stephens, Nicole Lowenbraun | TED
Have you ever left a meeting thinking: everyone talked, but nothing was achieved? Chances are that people were listening to each other, just not in the same way. Listening experts Maegan Stephens and Nicole Lowenbraun unpack the four different ways to listen, sharing a practical framework that could change how you respond, build trust and…
People & Blogs
Have you heard of aphantasia? Here’s what it is — and how to know if you have it #TEDTalks
Picture this: a rocket ship crash-lands on a planet, and an alien approaches the spacecraft. What do you see in your mind when you visualize this scene? For Alex Rosenthal (and many others), the answer is: absolutely nothing. Exploring the fascinating science of aphantasia, or the inability to generate mental images, he shows why our…
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@HeatherPeterson-p4g
October 16, 2025 at 11:24 am
Exxon won in the end. They litigated until their payout was down to nothing and those harmed got old and died. At least here in Alaska with the oil spill. I’m glad to hear she had more success, but they always win in the end. What will happen to the Amazon now that they have to feed soybeans to Chinese consumers? 😢
@xeedipu
October 16, 2025 at 11:26 am
Truly amazing. ❤
@lifemotivation6789
October 16, 2025 at 11:51 am
When you follow your purpose, the world benefits too.
@johndev6491
October 16, 2025 at 12:34 pm
Beautiful ❤️😊
@lifemotivation6789
October 18, 2025 at 10:04 am
@johndev6491 Thank you 🙏💫 When we live with purpose, our actions create a ripple effect — inspiring others, spreading light, and making the world a little better every day.
@anishmark6112
October 16, 2025 at 11:59 am
Protect this women at all costs!
@John_Bradbury
October 16, 2025 at 12:50 pm
I’m fed up of all the predictions of doom.
@vesawuoristo4162
October 16, 2025 at 12:54 pm
Truth can be very tiring.
@kingofhoarbags
October 16, 2025 at 1:07 pm
What a load of crap 💩!
Climate Change is out of style.
Find a new Hoax.
@amhelsei
October 16, 2025 at 2:01 pm
🍼👶
@kingofhoarbags
October 16, 2025 at 3:02 pm
@amhelsei 💩🤯
@amhelsei
October 16, 2025 at 5:58 pm
@kingofhoarbags ok grandpa enough youtube today, time to change your nappy
@kingofhoarbags
October 16, 2025 at 9:08 pm
@amhelsei I’m 25.
FACT:
Climate Change is a scam. Made up to funnel money to the Democratic Party.
@ExistentialWolf
October 16, 2025 at 1:15 pm
Awe the dark people are happy… we’ll go some place else and let them enjoy the shrubbery for now … awe👀😃
@vesternor
October 16, 2025 at 2:01 pm
Ha ha
@amhelsei
October 16, 2025 at 2:52 pm
… and this is the story of how it will never happen again …
@johnburger1320
October 16, 2025 at 3:45 pm
Whoop tee doo. What a crock of crap
@antonyjh1234
October 16, 2025 at 4:23 pm
What an absolute lie, winning against oil companies is using less of their product not being dressed in oil based clothes while the world uses more.
At 6 years human labour per barrel of oil that is 660 million years per day, being entered into the biosphere, or 240.9 billion human working years, per year, all this coming from a stored energy and not making anything great anymore, I thought that would have got a mention and the amount is increasing, there has been zero transition so far, just an addition to total energy so when does the great transition start and these wins for humanity, what overall has been achieved?
@vittoriobenedet2221
October 16, 2025 at 5:07 pm
Oil and gas industry provide a warm bed, hot water and thousand of essential needs to BILLIONS of people. With my heart Melinda ❤️, u are a disgrace. Wake up
@emmanueltiene-p2c
October 16, 2025 at 6:01 pm
it’s really good your interview
@keshaPatel-f5q
October 16, 2025 at 7:11 pm
What is this comment section??
@FLO-o6n
October 17, 2025 at 10:39 pm
Automatic Bots!😡 A.I. is helping in robotics/electronics, but ruining the human experience everywhere else. 😔
@joshbradstreet1736
October 16, 2025 at 7:36 pm
Legend. Come on Australia!
@JustinZupancic
October 16, 2025 at 8:17 pm
“Nature lives in my house and garden” like is this for real?
@matthill1294
October 16, 2025 at 9:01 pm
Wow phenomenal work! If you threaten people’s lives you should be able to defend. Oil isn threatening the lives of every living thing.
@JNKprops
October 16, 2025 at 9:12 pm
A world where the system has not yet been bought by the companies. 😢
@graciousfury
October 17, 2025 at 12:23 am
If the oil industry collapses, how will people watch TED Talks on their computers and cellphones that are made from petroleum?
@TheTanman412
October 17, 2025 at 9:27 am
If we reduce oil by 90%, start making our own energy for our homes and cars with solar+battery and only use it for plastics and small devices like computers, how will we convince gaslighters like you that this is worthwhile? Why is the option always binary, to use it the way we do currently or to stop it 100% ? Have you ever even entertained the idea of reducing it by 10% maybe 30%? How about 95%? And who do you actually think is claiming we can reduce our oil use by 100%? And why does the idea of even trying to reduce bother people like you? What interests do you gaslighting narcissts have in ALWAYS trying to make it sound impossible? Should we get rid of the fire department because fires cannot be stopped 100% of the time? Should we not have laws against gun possession for violent criminals because it’s impossible to stop 100%?
@graciousfury
October 17, 2025 at 2:11 pm
@TheTanman412 You have made a number of erroneous conclusions about what I think based on a simple question that I have put forward. Perhaps there is something much deeper going on here than simply reducing oil usage.
@fantasyvew3168
October 17, 2025 at 1:03 am
Wonderful argument and managing explanation….
That was amazing interview.absolutely impressive and important topics to solve the environmental problems…
@BonnieShadow33
October 18, 2025 at 7:19 pm
It wasn’t an interview. It was a talk. Nobody was asking her questions, she was sharing a presentation that she came up with.
I do agree that it was wonderful and so important!
@TyEMW1014
October 17, 2025 at 3:30 am
So wet they named Penis pills after my ex girlfriend. I’ve a lot of Aunts and Anthony’s running scams at me.
@TyEMW1014
October 17, 2025 at 3:31 am
and yes Conan was talking at me. Bjork has written to me for a long time. its my Gem they stole, an you’ve heard an army of me.
@TyEMW1014
October 17, 2025 at 3:33 am
I confused her. Cool Eyebrows was Rosalind. She did a arosof song trying to explain it.
Blackwall street screwed everyone over with Lisa. Should have been Rosalind. Green Briar.
@TheTanman412
October 17, 2025 at 9:27 am
If we reduce oil by 90%, start making our own energy for our homes and cars with solar+battery and only use it for plastics and small devices like computers, how will we convince gaslighters in this comment section that this is worthwhile? Why is the option always so binary, to use it the way we do currently or to stop it 100% ? Have you ever even entertained the idea of reducing it by 10% maybe 30%? How about 95%? And who do you actually think is claiming we can reduce our oil use by 100%? And why does the idea of even trying to reduce bother people like you? What interests do you gaslighting narcissts have in ALWAYS trying to make it sound impossible? Should we get rid of the fire department because fires cannot be stopped 100% of the time? Should we not have laws against gun possession for violent criminals because it’s impossible to stop 100%?
@Saunterisland
October 17, 2025 at 12:20 pm
What will occur is a surge in the usage of fossil fuels in the next couple of decades. After 2050 fossil fuels will become more and more expensive and regulated. Other fuel alternatives are being developed for extended usage in fossil fuels. A trade-off will ensure that fossil fuels will begin to lose the chariot race as electric vehicles take over the same markets. When fusion power plants go online and become successful fossil fuels will drop off the throne and become secondary. Third-world countries will eventually get electricity for vehicles but not for at least the next 50 years.
If humanity survives the next major political shift, fossil fuels will eventually become more of concern than expected
@urbanstrencan
October 18, 2025 at 11:30 am
The oil industry needs to see that people can fight against them and win 🤟⚡
@camp44mag
October 18, 2025 at 12:01 pm
For the good of all, may what Melinda Janki is doing happen everywhere. There is hope.
@OutbackHype
October 18, 2025 at 5:04 pm
Boomer will long gone before that happens
@いぬきゃっと
October 19, 2025 at 1:48 am
If oil companies stopped making energy, mankind would be extinguished from this world.
@saranbhatia8809
October 19, 2025 at 2:38 am
Nature shows the way…..we need to make environmental consciousness.
@saranbhatia8809
October 19, 2025 at 2:42 am
Well said!
@PaRAtro0per
October 19, 2025 at 10:30 am
Well we need a ton of lawyers like her throughout the world then.
@Allastrology
October 19, 2025 at 10:50 am
You are my Shero!!
@almightydaniel
October 19, 2025 at 11:03 am
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍🏻
@ryanwc67
October 19, 2025 at 11:16 am
The oil industry is being undercut everyday from clean energy, similar to a glacier collapsing from its product use. Soon its foundation will be non-existent and it will collapse like a avalanche.
@beautifulgirl219
October 19, 2025 at 2:45 pm
The oil and gas industries are today and have been for over a CENTURY the recipients globally of the largest financial subsidies of any and all industries, often through the tax codes, but at times with direct payments and supports from governments. Don’t let them lie to you about subsidies and other industries like solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, hydro, batteries, etc., which combined equal a tiny fraction of a percentage of the subsidies the O&G industries receive NOW and have received. That’s NOT EVEN INCLUDING the environmental degradation COSTS they INFLICT but DO NOT PAY FOR. Is that allowed for Nuclear? Not remotely. Any of the alternatives? NO!
@Charles.MBrown-j5s
October 19, 2025 at 3:17 pm
I am on a 60 year quest started as a teenager to overcome the second law of thermodynamics that was inspired by reading View from a height, Doubleday 1963, a science anthology by Issac Asimov. He first wrote very convincingly about the principle that energy is conserved when changing form then wrote much less convincingly about the concept of entropy.
The concept of entropy is stronngly accepted to this day after being promoted by a prominent astrophysicist, science popularizer, and Quaker Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington who considered the second law of thermodynamics to be the most fundamental and universally certain law in all of science. He believed that entropy never decreased so the universe faces an ultimate heat death of stagnation so somehow the universe had to start with low entropy. Eddington had a deep metaphisical side so he also believed that God was beyond the relm of science. Let me put it this unusual way, the second law will fail before God is disproven. Furthermore, God would then be supreme over an eternal non doomed universe.
Energy changes form without gain or loss. Uniformity or diversity is not, in itself, a form of energy. Therefore entropy is an extraordinary claim burdening the law that energy is conserved even if it is changed in form. Thermal energy’s almost universialy observed present partial transformation range with an unusable residue is an inelegance.
Because the second law is intensely accepted it is hard to find people that want to prototype devices that may falsify the second law. Therefore I am posting this essay as a comment on YouTube to attract teams or exceptional individuals with access to suites of complex equipment to build exploratory prototypes that will prove the concept then home in on a good recipe then fine tune for small scale production. A lot of small sample working device trinkets can then be presented and handed out widely to people at media conferences. A low power proof of concept prototype would power a LED in an eyecup with Inspectable parts and assembly and dummy versions as controls.
Go ahead and start to build something indspired by this introduction without my involvement. We can meet after there is solid crowd verification.
After small scale prototypes are made with a widely known process many enterprises will be able to think of large scale prototypes and how to make them. There is no need to have one manufacturer emerge. All competent manufacturers should develop their processes without exclusivity or forced dominance. I don’t think I have outstanding abilities at this phase so I’ll help but mainly get out of the way.
Let’s reframe Earth’s low diversity abundant ambient heat as a thermal energy waypoint between heat and other forms of energy.
Energy sensible refrigerators that absorb heat and yield electricity would complement computers as computing consumes electricity and yields heat. Computing would be almost free. Chips could have energy recycling built in.
This would improve performance and lower cost.
Full heat recycling, all electric, very isolated underground, undersea, or space communities would be highly survivable with self sufficient EMP resistant LED light automated vertical farms, thaw resistant frozen food storehouses, factories, nonstale dwellings, self contained elevators, safe rooms, and horizontal transports.Some electrical equipment groups could be consolidated into local networks when suitable. Liquid nitrogen cooled superconducting networks would become practical.
In a flourishing civillization, small self sufficient electric or cooling devices of many kinds and styles, lamps, smartphones, hotplates, water heaters, cooler chests, fans, radios, TVs, cameras, security devices, robots and robot test equipment, scales, transaction terminals, wall clocks, open or ciosed for business luminous signs, power hand tools, ditch diggers, pumps, and personal transports, would be available for immediate use incrementally anywhere as people as individuals or larger social groups see fit.
If a high majority thinks our civilization should geoengineer gigatons or teratons of greenhouse gasses out of our environment, instalations using devices that convert ambient heat into electricity can hypothetically be scaled up do it with a choice of comsequences including many beneficial ones.
Refugee communities would be buildable quickly. Fire safes would preserve contents to 1000 C for years.
A simple rectifier crystal can,
just short of a replicatable long term demonstration of a powerful prototype, almost certainly filter the random thermal motioren of electrons or discrete positiive charged voids called holes so the electric current flowing in one direction predominates. At low system voltage, a filtrate of one polarity predominates only a little but there is always usable electrical power derived from the source, which is Johnson (observation) Nyquest (theory) thermal electrical noise. Max Plank anticipated that ambient thermal noise would become usable with advances in technology.
I don’t see how the second law of thermodynamics can implicate itself into preventing this from working.
In 1973 I filed for US patent 3890161A DIODE ARRAY for an array of metal1/ insulator/metal2 diodes that refrigerate while concurrently producing electric power. The patent was granted in 1975. It was opened to the public domain in 1992. Development is in the public domain while granting me writing attribution.
The plausible net electrical filtrate from diodes can be aggregated in a first grouping of separate diodes in consistent alignment parallel. After a primary level of grouping that preferably is in parallel where current is additive, compound parallel and series where both current and voltage are additive, networks can be built to provide desired DC current and voltage. Within limlts, parts of the network can be shorted out or open circuted without electrical or chemical harm. Widely scalable electrical power always paired with equal refrigeration is thus possible. The efficiency of each diode is probably low because the initial power within each diode is nanowatts which doesn’t graph far beyond the near linearity near the 0,0 orgin. This inefficiency affects the performance but not the equality of the thermal absorbtion and the electrical yield.
The maximum energy is converted from ambient heat to productive direct current electricity when the load electrical resistance is equal to the array internal electrical resistance. Maximum calculated electrical power output (watts) is k (Boltźman’s constant), one point three eight x 10^ minus 23, times T (temperature Kelvin) times bandwidth (0 Hz to a natural limit ~2 THz @ 290 K) times rectification halving and nanowatt power level rectification efficiency, times the number of diodes in the array.
There are a billion measurment cells of 1000 square nanometer area each per square millimeter, 100 billion per square centimeter.
Order is imposed on the random thermal motion of electrons by the structual orderlyness of a diode array made of diodes made within a slab:
Host crystal in this example is silicon or germanium
P type boron doped
—–‐——‐—-_____– Out
🔻🔻🔻🔻
■■■■■■___ + Out
N type phosphorous doped
All the P type semiconductor anodes abut a metal conductive plane deposited on the top face of the slab with nonrectifying joins; the N type semiconductor cathodes or common cathode abuts the bottom face. As the polarity filtered electrical energy is exported, the amount of thermal energy in the group of diodes decreases. This group cooling will draw heat in from the surrounding ambient heat at a rate depending on the filtering rate and thermal resistance between the group and ambient gas, liquid, or solid warmer than absolute zero. There is always a lot of ambient heat on our planet, more on equatorial dry desert summer days and less on polar desert winter nights.
There are other plausible breeches of the second law of thermodynamics. Hopefully a lot of people, mostly as independent teams, will join in expanding the breech. Please share the successes or setbacks of experiemental efforts. The topic deserves crowd financing, discussion and prototyping attempt action. Crowd development would be resistant to confiscation or burial. At best there could be science quality colaboration.
These rectifiers could be various types, such as:
• Field emission diodes: An array of needles the needles made of carbon nanotubes or another electrical conductor tipped with an emmisive material probably LaB6 abutting straight in and also separated by a thin insulator or vacuum gap from a metal plane substrate surface.
• Schottky diodes: A metal needle-to-semiconductor junction diode, the semiconductor may be Gallium Arsenide or Indium Antimonide.
• Silicon or Germanium crystal diodes: A well-established technology. These diodes may have poor performance in this application
These devices would probably become segmented commodities sold with minimal margin over supply cost. They would be manufactured by advanced automation that does not need financial incentive. Applicable best practices would be adopted. Business details would be open public knowledge. Associated people should move as negotiated and freely and honestly talk. Commerce would be a planetary scale unified conglomerate of diverse local cooperatives. There is no need of wealth extracting top commanders. We do not need often token philanthropy from the top if the wide majority of people can afford to be generous.
A pile driver dropping its hammer three meters over a four million strike service life far outweighs the energy of melting scrap metal to make the hammer. This is negative entropy in manufacturing objects.
Aloha
Charles M Brown
Kilauea, Kauai, Hawaii 96754
@MichaelWolfe1000
October 19, 2025 at 5:01 pm
All is well, but we won’t be able to do away with fossil fuels anytime soon. Unless we give up streaming, mobile phones, transportation, housing etc. keeping anything resembling our current lifestyle.
@willm5814
October 19, 2025 at 9:04 pm
You’re wrong
@askadia
October 19, 2025 at 6:01 pm
With all this far right-wing and authoritarian shift throughout the Wolrd, I’m affraid we’ll win against the oil industry less often…
@ydoicare2000
October 19, 2025 at 6:14 pm
Yaaaaaa. No
@alistairbascom6933
October 19, 2025 at 7:25 pm
I read about her almost everyday in the papers. Can’t believe i am hearing her voice.
@willm5814
October 19, 2025 at 9:03 pm
You are a model for us all 💕🙏🙏🙏🙏