Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Tour beautiful, historically-complex Charlottesville, Virginia with locals Evan Cheney and Allie Hill of Blue Ridge Bicycle Tours. blueridgebicycletours.com
Subscribe for more youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Charlottesville, Virginia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville,_Virginia
University of Virginia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Virginia
UVA President Tim Ryan resigns kutv.com/news/nation-world/uva-president-jim-ryan-resigns-after-trump-administration-pressure-report-department-of-justice-tim-kaine-mark-warner-june-2025
Virginia had most slaves in America edu.lva.virginia.gov/oc/stc/entries/virginia-slave-population-map-1860#:~:text=Historical%20Background,entire%20United%20States%20slave%20population
List of Presidents who owned slaves en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_who_owned_slaves
Blue Ridge Mountains en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ridge_Mountains
Lambeth Field Football History jerryratcliffe.com/oh-if-lambeth-field-could-talk-the-stories-it-could-tell
Three Notched Trail (3NT) bike project engage.albemarle.org/three-notched-trail-master-plan?tool=map#tool_tab
Loop De’Ville loopdeville.org/about
Rivanna Trail Foundation rivannatrails.org
Evan Cheney linkedin.com/in/evan-cheney-08489546
Allie Hill vabike.org/about
Chapters
0:00 Welcome to Charlottesville
0:10 Melting Lee's statue
0:45 Vinegar Hill demolitions
0:59 Colonial Charlottesville
1:40 Downtown Pedestrian Mall
2:10 Heather Heyer
2:27 Ix Park
2:53 Skyline Drive Trip
3:07 Memorial to Enslaved Laborers
3:32 Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia Rotunda
5:00 Birthplace of modern football
5:46 Rivanna River Loop Trail
6:25 Planned Three Notched Trail (3NT)
6:51 Shenandoah National Park
Tour beautiful, historically-complex Charlottesville, Virginia with locals Evan Cheney and Allie Hill of Blue Ridge Bicycle Tours. blueridgebicycletours.com
Subscribe for more youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Charlottesville, Virginia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville,_Virginia
University of Virginia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Virginia
UVA President Tim Ryan resigns kutv.com/news/nation-world/uva-president-jim-ryan-resigns-after-trump-administration-pressure-report-department-of-justice-tim-kaine-mark-warner-june-2025
Virginia had most slaves in America edu.lva.virginia.gov/oc/stc/entries/virginia-slave-population-map-1860#:~:text=Historical%20Background,entire%20United%20States%20slave%20population
List of Presidents who owned slaves en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_who_owned_slaves
Blue Ridge Mountains en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ridge_Mountains
Lambeth Field Football History jerryratcliffe.com/oh-if-lambeth-field-could-talk-the-stories-it-could-tell
Three Notched Trail (3NT) bike project engage.albemarle.org/three-notched-trail-master-plan?tool=map#tool_tab
Loop De’Ville loopdeville.org/about
Rivanna Trail Foundation rivannatrails.org
Evan Cheney linkedin.com/in/evan-cheney-08489546
Allie Hill vabike.org/about
Chapters
0:00 Welcome to Charlottesville
0:10 Melting Lee's statue
0:45 Vinegar Hill demolitions
0:59 Colonial Charlottesville
1:40 Downtown Pedestrian Mall
2:10 Heather Heyer
2:27 Ix Park
2:53 Skyline Drive Trip
3:07 Memorial to Enslaved Laborers
3:32 Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia Rotunda
5:00 Birthplace of modern football
5:46 Rivanna River Loop Trail
6:25 Planned Three Notched Trail (3NT)
6:51 Shenandoah National Park

![Dhaka, Bangladesh: Worlds Fastest Growing MEGACITY
Dhaka, Bangladesh is the capital of the most densely populated major country in the world and is the planets fastest growing city.
NEW VIDEOS WEEKLY: Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/TheDailyConversation/
Dhaka five part documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoMifNO4w6s
Beautiful shots of Dhaka:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v VYzQLArN6o
Footsteps interviews with citizens of Dhaka:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbSLomNBZcA
Video by Bryce Plank
Edited by Robin West
Connect on FB: http://www.facebook.com/thedailyconversation
and Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thedailyconvo
Music:
Dragon and Toast by Kevin MacLeod
http://incompetech.com/
Jalandhar by Kevin MacLeod
http://incompetech.com/
Heavy Interlude by Kevin MacLeod
http://incompetech.com/
Far Away by MK2
YouTube Audio Library
All video/images used in accordance with Fair Use best practices in US Copyright Law.
Script:
Everest and the Himalayas. It may not seem like this mountain range could shape a Megacity almost 600 kilometers away, but it does.
This place, the capital of the most densely populated major country in the world, is also the fastest growing city on the planet.
This is an examination of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The constant supply of melting snow and water that flows down the Himalayas to the south creates the largest delta in the world.
Much of it runs through Bangladesh, an agricultural paradise with some of the richest soil on the planet.
But all that water is also a curse. With more than 700 rivers flowing into the Bay of Bengal, many of the country’s residents become displaced when monsoon season arrives in mid June every year. Annual rainfall in Bangladesh is over 78 inches, and two-thirds of the country’s 64 districts experience regular flooding.
Combine that with the highest population density of any major country, and you understand why Dhaka is adding more than 400,000 residents a year. If even a little of Bangladesh’s precious land is overtaken by water, many of its people instantly become homeless. To top that off, when fields and villages flood, these already struggling micro-economies become even less sustainable. So people pour into the capital because that’s where the jobs are.
More than two million people now work in Dhaka’s many garment factories. That industry is the engine of the Bangladeshi economy, producing 80% of its exports. But it can be a hard industry to break into if you’re a farmer coming from the countryside, so many unskilled people find work in the off-the books economy. There’s a reason why this is known as the rickshaw capital of the world. Cash gigs like vegetable salesman, barber, shopkeeper, boatman, and cycling cabbie make up nearly 4 out of 5 jobs here. Average pay for this full-time work is less than $100 a month.
Development is a tough nut to crack. In order to raise revenue to provide better services and solve problems like traffic congestion, the city needs to bring these people out of the shadow economy. That idea was examined in the Global Post’s excellent report on Dhaka from a few years ago:
[Erik German, Global Post] “Legitimizing this vast slum economy would mean compelling millions of vegetable sellers, shop owners, barbers to get licenses, pay taxes, and formalize working conditions. It’s a gargantuan task.”
Dhakka wasn’t always so low in the global economic pecking order. In its heyday, as the commercial capital of the Mughal empire in the 17th century, it was one of the wealthiest and most prosperous cities on the planet. The Venice of the East, known then as Jahangir Nagar, was a worldwide hub of the cotton and silk trade. Its palatial caravansary, the Bara Katra, sheltered merchants traveling along the Grand Trunk Road, one of the oldest and longest thoroughfares in Asia.
Then, Dhaka fell into two centuries of turmoil that saw its status decline. First, the British took control in 1765. When they were forced out in the middle of the twentieth century, the city became the capital of Eastern Pakistan. Bangladesh finally won its independence in 1971, but only after suffering heavy damage during many battles. One of the legacies of two and a half centuries of power struggle in this region is its confusing and hard to define borders. The India-Bangladesh boundary is one of the strangest in the world.
One look and its obvious, Dhaka is taking in people from the entire region—Bangladeshi or not.
This great migration is overwhelming the city’s infrastructure and services, which simply can’t keep up. Still, there are some obvious things the country should be doing to help Dhaka better manage its growth.
[Solana Pyne, Global Post] “One deceptively simple suggestion: put control over vital services in the hands of a single municipal government accountable to the people it serves. As in many unplanned cities of it’s size, Dhaka’s police, utilities, and roadways are controlled by a dozen or more national authorities, mostly run by political appointees.” Dhaka, Bangladesh: Worlds Fastest Growing MEGACITY](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vKGITvyWMH0/mqdefault.jpg)







![Criminal Investigation, Part 1: How Russia Helped Trump Win
A criminal forensics examination of the mounting evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. Putin’s fingerprints are everywhere.
Watch part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoUAIiHBeA0
Subscribe to TDC: https://www.youtube.com/TheDailyConversation/
Video by Bryce Plank and Robin West
Music:
Dark and Cinematic Ambient, TDC Remix by Motion Array
Long Note Two by Kevin MacLeod
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/?keywords=electro+sketch&Search=Search
Like our page on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/thedailyconversation
Script:
For years, Moscow has dreamed of undermining the US-led liberal democratic order that it views as a threat to its oligarchy and the regime of Vladimir Putin, but its 2016 election activity demonstrated a significant escalation compared to previous operations.
In September 2015 — a few months before Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders squared off in the Iowa caucus - the FBI notified a cyber-security contractor working for the Democratic National Committee that it had been infiltrated by a Russian cyber-espionage group.
It was the opening move in a hacking and information warfare campaign whose capabilities Russia had been developing for decades.
Twenty years earlier, it launched the first major international cyber attack. Russian hackers infiltrated computer systems across the US government and stole so many files that if all the documents were printed and stacked, they would be taller than the Washington Monument. They also broke into networks in Canada, the UK, Brazil, and Germany.
Despite this intrusion, the U.S. was mainly concerned with fending off the Chinese, whose headline-grabbing attacks did more damage.
Toward the end of George W. Bush’s second term in 2007, Russia began using hacking for political purposes. First, it punished Estonia for joining the NATO military alliance. Then, Moscow shut down Georgia’s Internet before invading the small country—the first time in history cyber-weapons had been used in an actual war.
President Obama’s Secretary of Defense put Russia and China on notice that any moves against America’s critical infrastructure would not be tolerated and warned that the United States would consider a serious cyber attack an act of war.
[Leon Panetta] “Attackers could also seek to disable or degrade critical military systems and communication networks. The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be a cyber Pearl Harbor.”
In 2014 and 2015, as the US sanctioned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, a Russian hacking group systematically infiltrated the State Department, the White House, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. State had to repeatedly shut down its systems to expel the intruders. While in Vienna, Secretary Kerry’s team had to use Gmail to communicate.
President Obama received briefings on all of these attacks, but the White House thought retaliating too strongly could start an all-out cyberwar or even a real war.
But the Russians became more emboldened. They intercepted and broadcast a phone call of an Obama administration official expressing frustration with Europe. Then they stole documents from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and released doctored versions to make it seem Soros was funding Putin’s opposition.
Still, they were met with little resistance for crossing the line, so they crossed it even more. On the day a French TV network debuted a new channel, its entire system was shut down by malicious software that began to rapidly destroy its computers. A quick-thinking tech identified the infected machine and disconnected it. The Russians behind the attack tried to make it look like the work of terrorists, calling themselves the Cyber Caliphate.
Next, the Kremlin ordered the first known successful cyber attack on another nation’s power grid, disrupting the electricity supply of 230,000 Ukrainians.
Which brings us to the operation to interfere in the election—the first time a foreign government has acted so boldly against American democracy.
Seven months after he was first notified by the FBI of the Russian intrusion in the DNC’s computer system, the cyber-security contractor finally confirmed that an unauthorized user was inside the network.
It’s unclear exactly why it took him so long to take a closer look. Part of the problem was a lack of follow-through by the FBI agent who had warned him the year before. But the Democratic National Committee - a non-profit - also hadn’t spent enough money on cybersecurity. The party would pay dearly for that mistake.
It then brought on leading cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and within a day it was confirmed that the breach had originated in Russia and was the work of two different hacking groups: Cozy Bear — believed to be either Russias Federal Security Service or its Foreign Intelligence Service, and Fancy Bear — thought to be Russias military intelligence agency, GRU. Criminal Investigation, Part 1: How Russia Helped Trump Win](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xCf6qkRJuy4/mqdefault.jpg)
![The Mission To Destroy The Worst Greenhouse Gasses
One companys quest to find and destroy CFCs, HCFCs, and HFC refrigerants - and methane-leaking wells - as fast as possible. These gases superheat the atmosphere much more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO2).
Tradewater: https://tradewater.us/offsetnow/
Subscribe to TDC: https://www.youtube.com/TheDailyConversation/
Refrigerant animation courtesy of https://www.youtube.com/@GeniusEngineering
Information sources:
CA.Gov High GWP Fact Sheet https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/high-gwp-refrigerants
EPA Refrigerant Phaseout https://www.epa.gov/ods-phaseout#:~:text=Class%20II%20substances%20are%20all,phased%20out%20as%20of%202020.
EPA HCF Phasedown https://www.epa.gov/climate-hfcs-reduction/frequent-questions-phasedown-hydrofluorocarbons#:~:text=Consistent%20with%20the%20AIM%20Act,listed%20in%20the%20AIM%20Act.
Difference between refrigerants https://www.coldroommaster.com/cold-room-refrigerant-system/
EPA: How to Properly dispose of refrigerants https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ConstrAndDemo_EquipDisposal.pdf
EPA: Understanding Global Warming Potential https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials#:~:text=Methane%20(CH4)%20is%20estimated,27%2D30%20over%20100%20years.
International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 Report https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter_07_Supplementary_Material.pdf
0:00 The Problem
1:00 Acquiring Refrigerants
3:40 The Destruction Process
4:49 Founding Tradewater
5:30 A Climate-First Mission
6:35 Going International
8:26 Capping Methane Leaks
Script:
The secret sauce inside this heat pump, your fridge, and air conditioner, is the refrigerant that circulates inside, expanding and compressing to move heat from one space to another.
But if this chemical escapes it’s a problem because it heats the atmosphere much more than an equivalent amount of Carbon Dioxide. [show how many times CO2]
So, when an appliance reaches the end of its life cycle, the refrigerant is - hopefully - recovered into canisters that often get left around to degrade and leak.
[Show clip from Honduras of canister leaking]
Few people understand how big of a disaster it is when this happens.
Luckily, the most potent warming gasses are no longer produced or are being phased down, but because there’s no easy way to properly get rid of it, there are probably many million appliances and tanks full of it still out there.
Fortunately, one company has made it their mission to hunt down these canisters - these climate grenades - and safely disarm them.
To learn more, I visited them in Chicago.
“There’s no regulatory obligation to destroy this stuff, and that’s a role we can come in and help fill.”
Valeria leads a team that travels across America finding refrigerants and paying people cash for them. She took me along on a quick local pick-up.
We didn’t want to freak the customer out by filming them in front of their house, but back at the warehouse, I saw the goods.
Inside, I found Moises working on the next step.
How refrigerant gases are destroyed.
The team stores the refrigerants in these larger tanks until they’ve aggregated enough to fill this beast.
That happens at a facility like this one that superheats the refrigerant.
“Rotary kiln incineration…we are literally burning this gas to break down the chemical bonds and rendering the component parts essentially inert.”
When I sat down with Tradewater’s founders at Jackson Park, I learned this work started on a much smaller scale.
[Explaining carbon offset credit, California Cap and Trade, and how the company makes money]
[Gabe discusses how refrigerants are usually collected and destroyed, and how TW’s climate-first approach is different]
[Tim discussing growth]
With its US operation set up and scaling quickly, the team is working internationally to make an even bigger impact, but that comes with some serious challenges.
[Gabe on navigating each country’s different systems]
Back in the US, Tradewater has begun partnering with state governments to stop another dangerous gas from escaping: the methane spewing out of millions of uncapped, orphaned oil and gas wells, emissions that have a warming potential 81.2 times that of CO2 over a 20 year period.
The team is leveraging the skills of former oil and gas industry workers who get this specialized job done right.
[These gasses cannot be sequestered once released]
Thanks for watching, make sure you’re subscribed here to catch the next climate solution I profile. The Mission To Destroy The Worst Greenhouse Gasses](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xDwH4u4hbYw/mqdefault.jpg)