Hey, this is Penn Badgley. I'm doing a little guest hosting today.

If you want to learn how to take real, lasting climate action like I do,

I want to invite you to join Countdown, TED's new global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis.

Here's a talk from the Countdown Global Launch Event given by

UK Parliament member David Lammy. To hear more of these ideas and get involved, check out

countdown.tad.com and subscribe to the Countdown podcast wherever you're listening to this.

I've got to start by admitting that in many ways, me giving a talk about how climate action can help black communities is surprising.

I grew up poor and black with a single mother in Tottenham, one of the most deprived areas in London in the 1970s and 80s.

Climate change was the last thing on my mind. And representing

Tottenham as its member of Parliament for the past 20 years, my focus has been on trying to reduce

the deprivation I grew up around. In the past, the climate crisis never featured at the forefront

of my politics because it was never one of the most immediate

challenges my constituents are facing, or at least it didn't feel like it. Rising sea levels feel

unimportant when your bank balance is falling. Global warming is not your concern when you can't

pay the heating bills. And you're not thinking about pollution when you're being stopped by the police.

And so perhaps this is why, as the Black Lives Matter movement roared across the world,

there's been so little mention of saving black lives from the climate emergency. For too long,

those of us who cared about racial justice, treated environmental justice as though it was

elitist. And at the same time, the leaders who did focus on climate change were usually white

and rarely bothered to enlist the support of black voices in their work. Even progressive allies

sometimes took our votes for granted and assumed that our community didn't care or wouldn't understand.

The truth is the opposite is true.

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