[Music] the crowds around the mona lisa are so bad that museum workers walked out recently claiming the working conditions were too dangerous instagrammers created safety hazards during the poppy super bloom in california historic cities inundated by tourists sensitive habitat destroyed monuments damaged this phenomenon is known as over-tourism and it's affecting the planet in unprecedented ways the crowd is almost more impressive than the sunrise there's a way in which tourists can alter the experience of visiting something such that they ruin the very experience that they've been trying to have that's the essential condition of uber tourism [Music] i would put tourism in the large bucket of things that people do that have been made possible now with fossil fuels historically tourism was only for a small wealthy elite in fact it was common to stay within 50 or 100 miles of where you grew up european nobles or very upper income people could go going on grand tours in europe there was also religious travel however you didn't have the kind of let's go take a disney vacation type thing until the 20th century and eight million people a year come flocking from every corner of the world to disney's hundred million dollar dream in action as western societies gained a middle class tens of millions of people could suddenly afford to travel and mass tourism began and that's what's happening again today with rapidly developing countries in the last 30 years or so you've had the emergence of this global middle class that has come out of middle income countries so brazil mexico china india where millions of people have achieved this wage levels where they're also able to travel overseas trips from china alone rose from 10 million to 150 million in under two decades and globally we've gone from 25 million to 1.4 billion trips today but that's not the only factor budget airlines like ryanair allowed tourists to fly cheaply and airbnb has increased the supply of lodgings in response to overtourism many cities are starting to tax tourists more heavily and put daily limits on cruise ship visitors and regulating airbnbs so that locals aren't priced out of their own cities but it's even more challenging to mitigate the effects of all this travel on climate change the biggest part of any trip is the flight just from one flight from new york to london and back you're doing about a third of the damage that a car does over the course of a whole year and cruise ships aren't much better ships are one of the most efficient ways you could move across the surface of the earth but they're using one of the dirtiest fuels climate activist greta booneberg made a statement by choosing to take a six day journey on a carbon neutral schooner rather than fly across the atlantic and in europe the flight shame movement has taken hold some are calling it the greta effect in honor of the famous teen environmentalist greta thundberg