My first visual memories are of this framed poster above my crib. I would stare at it every night before I went to bed. My father was an underground comic distributor. He's always been the sort of zealig of the counterculture, as I like to call him. Painted in...
Warhol's studio, roomies with Lou Reed. He knew Art Crum and all these great artists of his generation. I mean, I was brought up in all kinds of wacky visuals as a kid. So I would stare at this painting over and over. The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.
It was painted around 1500. And if you look at these panels long enough, they start to tell a story. In the first panel, you have Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, birds flying off in the distance, elephants and giraffe and a lot of religious iconography. The second panel is where it starts to become more interesting.
Deadly sins start to infuse their way into the painting. There's overpopulation, there's debauchery and excess. And the last panel, which is the most nightmarish one, especially from a young child's perspective, is this twisted, decayed, burnt landscape.
A paradise that has been degraded and destroyed. Man may be unwittingly changing the... The burning of coal, oil and wood is releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now. Guess where the temperature goes?
It goes up. Climate change is already in our backyard. Official 2012 was the hottest year in the United States. It's 2014. 2015. Warmest year of all.
Warmest year of all. It is these activities which drove mankind out of the Garden of Eden. Hi, how are you? Pleasure, pleasure.
It's a great pleasure to see you. We can remove this. This can be adjusted.
Oh wow, this is for height control. For shorter leaders. Yes, yes. Tolerate.
What specific message do you think is the most important? Climate change is coming much, much faster. We have seen such an extraordinarily extreme weather pattern.
If you consider this vastness of this universe, this planet Earth is just a small boat. If this boat is sinking, then I think we will have to all sink together. I know that he has been a very committed and effective environmentalist. That is why I really count on your leadership and vision. Subtitles by the Amara.org community Please welcome newly appointed United Nations Messenger of Peace, Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary General. I feel incredibly honored that they chose me to be the United Nations Messenger of Peace on climate change. I stand before you not as an expert.
I want to do everything I can to learn more about this issue, see for myself exactly what's going on and what can be done. But it all kind of seems beyond our control. As an actor, I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems.
I believe that mankind has looked at climate change in that same way. We keep getting inundated with catastrophic news about the environment every single day and the problem seems to be getting worse and worse and worse. Try to have a conversation with anyone about climate change, people just tune out. If the UN really knew how I feel...
How pessimistic I am about our future. I mean to be honest, they may have picked the wrong guy. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of New York today, demonstrating for action on climate change. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called Leo a credible... voice in the environmental movement, which is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer a credible voice or stew.
Leonardo DiCaprio has just naively bought into the entire global warming hoax. Who better to educate world leaders on made-up climate change and the crisis that doesn't exist than an actor from Hollywood with zero years of scientific training? Hey! How's it going?
I'm crazy, man. Oh, are you? Come on in.
Nice to see you, buddy. So I just started this new film. It's set in the western frontier of the United States in the early 1800s.
It's basically the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and has a lot to do with men who are pillaging the natural world, wiping species out and basically destroying cultures in the process. Those are like buffalo skulls. Alejandro, they're crazy.
They're crazy, yeah. Are these fur troppers? Are these people that are selling the skulls?
People that sell the skulls, yeah. It's not embarrassing. I mean that's crazy.
And the fact that they never even reflect about it. There's an ending to this anime we cannot just... It's insane.
If you can put that in the movie that would be unbelievable. How about this, I dare you. Okay.
Anderson! Get to the boat! Come on son! I didn't grow up around nature at all.
I grew up near downtown Los Angeles. And my escape every weekend was the Natural History Museum. From a very young age, I became fascinated with species that had become extinct.
All these different animals, from the dodo to the passenger pigeon, which was the most plentiful bird on Earth, to the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine, to the great auk, the quagga, the moa. I remember the anger that I felt reading all these stories about how explorers and settlers would just wipe out an entire species and in the process decimate the ecosystem forever. The difference now is we're knowingly doing this.
It's just on a much larger scale. If we're gonna fight climate change effectively, we have to start by acknowledging that most of our economy is based on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas.
Oil powers most of the transportation sector. Coal and natural gas power most of the electricity. Now, in the first couple decades of the 21st century, in order to sustain our dependence on fossil fuels, we're going to very risky, very extreme new sources. You see this in things like mountaintop removal for coal. Fracking for natural gas.
Offshore drilling for oil. And tar sands, which is the most devastating form of producing fossil fuels. They take away massive forests. The water in the streams and rivers is poisoned.
It has severe impact on wildlife, on native communities, and it requires a huge amount of energy. simply to get it to our fuel tanks. There is no such thing as clean fossil fuel. Who clear cut all of this?
There's a logging company here in town, so typically where people need the trees cut to do any development of any sort here, there's a local mill and they process all the wood. This would be all boreal forest here. This would have started as a pretty small operation back in the mid to late 1960s. Different than it is today. Today we produce about 350,000 barrels a day of...
synthetic crude oil from this facility. There's a couple of other ones. Leonardo, there's Exxon.
They have started up a new mine just recently. And then there's Shell. So those are all the black is the oil sands?
Yeah, you can tell by looking at it that it is oil in it. So what happens in real time is we take the sandy oil, then we wash the oil out of the sand. We just pump steam into the ground and then as the ground warms... Literally the oil drops, it just falls out of the sand and we're done.
Kinda looks like Mordor. Like what? Mordor from Lord of the Rings. Such a massive operation, it's mind-blowing.
Now this, of course, is just our mining operation. We'll get to the extraction operation and the upgrading operation. The in-situ operation is some 70 kilometers or so away, but the plants are connected by pipelines and so on.
The truth is, the more I've learned about this issue and everything that contributes to the problem, the more I realize how much I don't know. How much I don't know about this issue. The first time I ever heard the term global warming, which is what it was called back then, I was in my early 20s.
I had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with then-Vice President Al Gore in the White House. He drew a picture of our planet on a chalkboard, and then he drew the atmosphere around it. And he said, this is the most important issue of our time.
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. They said all our modes of transportation, boats, trains, planes, cars, the way we produce our food, the way we build our cities, almost everything we do releases carbon dioxide, CO2. And that leads to climate change.
The polar ice caps will melt, the seas will start to rise, there will be more dangerous weather patterns, floods, droughts, wildfires. It sounded like some nightmarish science fiction film. Except everything he said is real and it's happening right now.
Wow, wow, beautiful. I just want to know how far we've gone, how much damage we've done, and if there's anything we can do to stop it. You all set, mate?
So it's the 4th of July. We're here in the middle of the Arctic. Right now, we are standing on the ocean. We are basically walking on water. This is the northern tip of Baffin Island, one of the hundreds of islands in the high Canadian Arctic.
We are way above the Arctic Circle. And if you put your hand in the water, you will not be able to stand it for more than five minutes. It's a view of water, badass.
You hunt and fish here, right? Yeah. What do you fish and what do you hunt?
In my territory, I hunt fish. Sea, now I hunt polar bear. Is this polar bear? Yeah. Oh, well, there you go.
Yeah. And the ice here, since you've been around, has it been decreasing? kind of ice cream type of ice.
It's ice, but when it starts to melt, it melts pretty fast, much faster than before. 2040, you will be able to sail over the North Pole. There's going to be no sea ice left in the Arctic Ocean in the summer. We are...
Burning so many fossil fuels that the ice is melting. The Arctic is like the air conditioning for the Northern Hemisphere. If it goes away, that's going to change currents, that's going to change weather patterns, that's going to make floods and droughts more catastrophic. It's the most dramatic transformation of a large environment ever. Look at this.
They're right here. There are about 10,000 to 12,000 narwhals on this region. The numbers are stable here.
In other regions, they are declining. Wow! That's awesome! And they are waiting for the ice to open up, to swim in so they can catch the flounder. I can't believe what they sound like.
It's amazing. They're, like, purring. You know, I don't want to be in a planet without these animals. When I was 25 years old, I remember being asked to participate in this huge event in Washington for Earth Day. Temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying, and not since a meteor hit the Earth 65 million years ago...
ago have so many species of plant animals become extinct in such a short time. I even got a chance to interview the President of the United States. Why do you think this issue is so constantly overlooked?
I think it's because it takes a long time for the climate to change in a way that people and because it seems sort of abstract now. At the time, there was this huge push to get the word out on global warming. Now, a couple degrees difference in today's temperatures may not seem like an emergency. Back then, everyone was focused on small, individual actions.
We all have to, you know, bring environmentalism to the American consciousness. And it boiled down to simple solutions like changing your light bulb. It seemed like a positive thing at the time, you know? Changing your light bulb. But it's pretty clear that we're way beyond that point now.
Things have taken a massive turn for the worse. Keep finding things that aren't in the climate models. They're used to project the future.
So that tells me that the projections for the future are really conservative. If climate stays at this temperature that it's been in the last decade, Greenland is going away. Don't walk into the crevasse.
Oh my god! Don't get too close to the edge. Look at how violent that is. Rapids are going so incredibly fast. This meltwater is making its way to the sea.
If that's not balanced by snowfall, then the ice sheet gets smaller and sea level rises. This is actually our proper climate station. This is a climate station? I was imagining a massive igloo with all kinds of scientists doing experiments.
It really does look like broken down pool equipment. What does this connect to? Well, this is all melted out now. This was a hose that went down 30 feet, and now it's melted out.
Wait a minute. So this that's lying here used to be straight down under ice. Yeah, so we made...
So that's the amount of ice that has melted. Yeah. This is five years of melt. So this entire length is the thickness of ice that has melted throughout all of Lower Greenland in the past five years.
Right. That's hundreds of cubic kilometers of ice that's now no longer stored on land. It's gone into the sea over here. Miami, New Orleans, Boston and Long Beach, California may be doomed to fall victim to ever rising sea levels.
South Florida as we know it could be washed away by rising seas. When you look at places that are the most susceptible to sea level rise, especially in the United States, Florida is the key one. And a lot of the. Your campaign was based on giving people an understanding of what's at risk here. We don't have the liberty, the time, to debate climate change.
If you don't believe in it, I always say, bring your unconverted to us, and we'll make sure you agree that there is a major problem. We have this thing called sunny day flooding. Picture on a beautiful sunny day, all of a sudden you see water coming up on the street. As the sea level rises, the water's coming up. Back flowing into our streets through our drains.
If the city is underwater, there's no future. How do you combat that? Exactly what's going on as far as prevention is concerned?
We started putting in pumps. Take a look at this. Oh, this is the pump.
Yep. We're in the process of building all across the city. This street right here used to be fully underwater.
During high tide, you may need a canoe. And now what we did is we raised this road. And you can see the difference.
See how that area there kind of goes slopes down a little bit. So the main investment is And these systems right here, raising the roads and the electric pumps. Yeah. This is a $400 million project citywide. And of course, we're paying for it by our city revenues.
I had to raise tax revenue, which you can imagine is not a very popular thing to do as a politician. And this construction, is it going to make a difference and buy you a significant amount of time? Absolutely. I would think about 40, 50 years.
That's it? Yes. Now one of the things I always say when people ask me, they say, well, Mayor, what about after 50 years? What's going to happen? What we have to do is come up with solutions.
And unfortunately, we have a governor and we have a cabinet that doesn't believe that this is a major issue. Officials in Florida were banned from using the words climate change. This policy began in 2011 after Rick Scott came to office.
No one up there wants to talk about climate change, especially our senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, who doesn't believe that we have climate change, is not interested in assisting our state. I would hope that he would have gone out and grabbed us federal funds over the last three years to help make our cities viable. I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.
Why do you think there is such opposition about the science? I think it's politics. I think it so has to do with lobbying and industry and I always say one thing We always said uh, the ocean is not Republican and it's not Democrat.
All it knows how to do is rise Satellite data show for the last 17 years there has been no significant recorded warming. It's supposed to be 70 degrees today, it's freezing here. Speaking of global warming, where is we need some global warming?
It's freezing. There's about as robust a consensus about human-caused climate change as there is for any matter in science, be it the theory of gravity. 97% of climate scientists agree the globe is warming. Our climate is changing.
It's due to fossil fuel burning and other human activities. Unfortunately, we are fighting this massive disinformation campaign to confuse the public. If you look at the satellite data, we actually have had no significant warming since 1998. Actually, no warming. We've been cooling in recent years. If you actually believe that global warming is the biggest problem we face, you're the dumbest son of a bitch on the planet.
So, yeah, maybe you could just talk a little bit about your background, the studies that you've done. I was the classic science and math geek in high school. I studied physics in graduate school a decade and a half ago.
My co-authors and I started to look into climate change in the more distant past. We published a curve where there's this long-term cooling trend, and then all of a sudden, this abrupt warming that has no precedent as far back as you can go. And it got named the hockey stick because it looks like the blade of a hockey stick.
And once we had published that graph, I had set myself up to do a lot of research. up for a completely different life. Why is that? What did they do specifically? I was vilified on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, on Fox News, that I was a fraud.
Other German scientists have called it statistical rubbish. He's been called a statistical charlatan. I was being attacked by congressmen.
They threw spaghetti up on the wall, and wherever it stuck is what they put in the chart. I had death threats that were actionable enough that the FBI, at one point, had to come to my office to investigate. to investigate an envelope that had been sent to me that had a white powder. I've had threats made against my family.
These folks know they don't have to win legitimate scientific debate. They just need to divide the public. And all of that hatred and. Fear is in fact organized and funded by a few players. Fossil fuel interests.
Folks like the Koch brothers finance a very large echo chamber of climate change denialism. The reality is a lot of climatologists believe that the science is not settled. Global warming is illusory. We're actually going through a period of global cooling. It's easier to believe in a benevolent God, the baby Jesus, than it is in some kind of theory about global warming.
Websites and news outlets and think tanks, they find people with fairly impressive credentials who are willing to sell those credentials to fossil fuel interests. Dr. Fred Singh, I'm president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. The weather balloons around the world show no warming of the atmosphere in the last 25 years. You have all of these organizations with lofty sounding names like Americans for Prosperity or the Heartland Institute.
These are front groups that are funded by corporate interests. Americans for Prosperity is really just a front group for the Koch brothers. That's an organization founded by David and Charles Koch.
And good morning to you, Tim. Thank you, Mel. Welcome here. What are you going to get for your money?
We hope to see policies change. coke industries is one of the largest privately held fossil fuel interest in the world and they're doing everything they can to protect that wealth would you give up all that industrialization would you give up all the productivity that's brought us all the lives that is saved over the last hundred years so that the temperature would rise a half a percent or a milli percent. They've lobbied congress.
We keep hearing 2014 has been the warmest year on record. So here Mr. President catch this. James Inhofe is probably the most prominent congressional climate change denier. Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
He's the chair of the senate environment committee. There are some people who are so arrogant to think. that they are so powerful they can change climate.
Man can't change climate. It might not be surprising to learn that James Inhofe is one of the largest recipients of fossil fuel money in the U.S. Senate.
Fossil fuel interests have bought our House of Representatives and Senate Environment Committee. We can't get a climate bill passed through our Congress because it's controlled by fossil fuel funded climate change deniers who are blocking any bills. that would attempt to deal with this problem. How they're able to discredit scientists who have devoted their life to this issue is kind of mind-boggling to me.
Sometimes it makes me want to take a deep breath. I'm sure. If I was a scientist, I would be absolutely pissed every single day of my life. These people are engaged in an effort to lead us astray in the name of short-term fossil fuel profits so that we end up leaving behind a degraded planet. What could be more immoral than that?
Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release through factories and automobiles every year of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer. This is bad.
Well, it's been calculated a few degrees rise in the Earth's temperature would melt the polar ice caps. Fact is, we've known about this problem for decades and decades, for over half a century. Every day a thousand times more power than...
Anybody working on getting power direct from old Blowhard here? Oh yes, but not nearly enough. Roll six B.
Imagine the world right now. If we had taken the science of climate change seriously back then. Since then, our population has increased by almost 5 billion people and counting. China has recently surpassed the United States as the world's number one polluter.
The problem has become even more difficult to solve. Hello. Hello.
Well, now we're on the opposite side of the street again. Now we're in a bike lane. In the last 35 years, China has been through a massive industrialization and urbanization, and it's growing. China is the factory of the world, manufacturing for all the Western countries.
And much of the pollution of that industry is... It's getting dumped in our bed yards. And in this area surrounding Beijing, plus the Shandong Peninsula, coal consumption is equal to total coal consumption of the United States.
In a not very big area, people are so worried about this, especially when they get better understanding about how much of this is going to hurt their health, the health of their children and their family. In China, people have concerns about climate change, but first and foremost, because their everyday life is affected. People really want to be part of the solution. Now environmental issues have become the biggest reason for mass demonstrations. What we want to do is to hold them accountable, to have all their power plants and their emissions go totally transparent with the public and bring them under public scrutiny.
So with that in mind, I've started a national pollution map database. So this is all the major factories in China, nearly 9,000 of them. Those who are in red are not in compliance with the standards.
Every hour they need to give people their money. monitoring data. People can check this on their cell phone and push for polluting factories to address their violations.
It's absolutely brilliant. You don't allow these companies to operate in the dark. And the media is very helpful. Chinese media talks about climate change on a regular basis.
On a constant basis. You give people the data, you empower the people. And this popular support has motivated China's policy of green growth.
The government changed its plan for renewable energy. Is there a giant push towards solar and wind here? Is that the next step? China's got some of the biggest wind and solar companies in the world now. Even though China has some of the largest challenges, like huge population, China's going to prioritize wind and solar rather than coal.
If China can do it, then I think the rest of the world can. China is still heavily relying on fossil fuels, but they seem to be transitioning to renewables much faster than anyone anticipated. The question is, can less developed countries with rapidly growing populations make the same transition?
India is the world's third largest emitter yet the country is struggling with massive power shortages and rolling blackouts. India has consistently said that its biggest priority is development and bringing people out of poverty. We care about climate change.
But the fact is we are a country where energy access is as much a challenge as climate change. We need to make sure that every Indian has access to energy. From what I understood, there are 300 million people without power, without light here in India.
That's equivalent to the entire population of the United States. Hello. How are you? I'm troubling you, but they haven't seen this before.
Yes, Sunita. What does this do? Today in villages, Indian villages, you will find people take cow dung and they make what is known as cow dung cakes or uplas in Hindi, and they burn those.
And that's their only source of cooking energy. About 30% of households in India are yet to have access to electricity. If you want to provide electricity to everybody, we have to ensure that our electricity is affordable.
India has a vast reservoir of coal. We are probably the third or fourth largest reservoir of coal in the world. Coal is cheap. Whether you and I like it or not, coal is cheap.
You have to think about this from this point of view. created the problem in the past, we will create it in the future. We have 700 million households who cook using biomass today, 700 million households.
If those households move to coal, you have that much more use. of fossil fuel, then the entire world is fried. If anyone gives you this very cute stuff and tells you, oh, the world's poor should move to solar, and why do they have to make the mistakes that we have made?
I hear this all the time from American NGOs. And I'm like, wow. You know, I mean, if it was that easy, I would have really liked the US to move towards solar.
But you haven't. Let's put our money where our mouth is. We have to practice what we preach. Absolutely.
I'm sorry to say this. I know you're an American, and please don't take this amiss, but your consumption is going to really put a hole in the planet. And I think that's the conversation we need to have. I'll show you charts from this perspective.
Electricity consumed by one American at home is equivalent to 1.5 citizen of France, 2.2 citizen of Japan, and 10 citizen of China, 34 of India, 61 of Nigeria. Watch. Because you're building bigger, you're building more, and using much more than before.
The fact is that we need to put the issue of lifestyle and consumption at the center of climate negotiations. Look, I... There's no way I don't agree with you. How can you argue that?
You're absolutely correct. And I think, yes, it's a very difficult argument to present to Americans that we need to change our lifestyle. And I would also argue that it's probably not gonna happen.
So we are dependent if... if we want to solve the climate crisis, on the fact that hopefully renewables like solar and wind will become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper the more money we funnel into them, the more we invest into them, and ultimately it will solve that problem. But I... You're shaking your head, obviously, so... I'm shaking with our Indian style, which means no. Right.
Who will invest? Leo, let's be real about this. Who will invest and how will you invest in it?
We are doing more investment in... in solar today. China is doing much more investment in solar today than the U.S. is.
What is the U.S. doing which the rest of the world can learn from? You're a fossil-addicted country. But if you are seriously disengaging, it's something for us to learn from. And it will be leadership that we can all hold up to our government and say, listen, if the U.S. can do it, and the U.S. is doing it in spite of all their pressures, we can do it as well. The sad part of it is it's just not happening.
And people like me, we are rich enough to withstand the first hit of climate change. but it's the poor of India, it's the poor of Africa, it's the poor of Bangladesh who are impacted today by what I believe is the first signs of climate change. What did you plant here, Haji? The anjals.
People have planted onions here, but they are not good. So February, March, which is when the crops are standing, they got half the year's rainfall in just five hours. Half the year's rainfall in five hours.
So these crops are all destroyed. They are destroyed. Their back is breaking doing this. And then you get one unseasonal rainfall. It's absolutely like the last straw on the camel's back.
We need countries to believe that climate change is real and urgent. It's not a figment of their imagination. The U.S. has been the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in history.
And there's no doubt that we've all benefited from fossil fuels. I know I have. My footprint is probably a lot bigger than most people's. And there are times when I question, what is the right thing to do? What actions should we be taking?
There are over a billion people out there. Without electricity, they want lights, they want heat, they want the lifestyle that we've had in the United States for the last hundred years. If we're going to solve this problem, we all have a responsibility to set an example, and more than that, help the developing world transition before it's too late. We are seeing events that we did not see in the past.
It's not about when the entire islands are underwater. It's well before that is going to be the crisis. And it's already happening. What we are facing at the moment is severe flooding. It's gone into the freshwater ponds, and that's how people get their drinking water.
Have you spoken to people in the scientific community that have given you some sort of a time frame? Given the scenarios and the projections put forward by the science, our islands will be underwater. And so the question is, what do we do about it?
At the moment, internally, we are relocating the communities from certain parts of the island to where the water has not come up. But our long-term strategy is something that I've been discussing internationally because we have to come to accept the... that we may not be able to accommodate all of our people. We have adopted the policy of migration with dignity.
We bought a piece of land in Fiji so that if our people choose to migrate, to migrate today, they can do it. They must do it as a matter of choice. Well, I've got grandchildren, I've got 12 grandchildren. I'd like to be able to go away knowing that they will continue to have a home.
Islands in the Pacific, we're a paradise in Korea. Throughout Palau, we have sea level rise coming into the farmlands, coming into the homes. This is unbelievable. When was this an intact island with homes on it? How long ago?
Twelve years ago, when you came, there were people living here. So within the 12-year period, this is the result. It's just a small picture of one place. The small island nations who contribute the least to the causes of climate change are actually going to feel the worst impacts, the worst scenarios, because of global warming. What we've done to the rest of the world is just, it's criminal.
It's not just sea level rise. We've taken these coastal ecosystems that used to be dominated by incredibly abundant fish, and we've knocked the whole system down, reversing half a billion years of evolution. One billion people depend on fisheries from coral reefs for virtually all of their protein. One billion people. Here we are, we're on a, what was a pretty healthy coral reef.
What's missing? You see almost nothing swimming around. Is this a dying coral reef?
I think this reef has had it. We're pushing this system really hard, and that is a serious enemy to the health of corals and their ability to grow. It's causing loss of people's livelihoods. It's causing starvation.
This is happening all over? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think reefs as we know them are going to virtually disappear.
The oceans are like this big buffer because they absorb carbon dioxide. They take up about a third of the CO2 that we're dumping into the atmosphere. So because of that, they are a stabilizing force in climate.
The problem is the ocean can't do its job fast enough with this absurd rate of carbon dioxide emissions. You know, life isn't going to disappear in the ocean. There will always be life in the ocean, but it's not going to be necessarily the kind of life we want.
We could go back to 3 billion years ago and have just a whole lot of slime. We're taking away the ecosystems that normally help us to re-stabilize the climate. Like oceans, rainforests absorb carbon from our atmosphere.
Decades and decades of the forest breathing in the carbon, storing it in the trunks and the leaves and the organic matter. So those carbon emissions are being held safe for us. Until we clear them and light them on fire, it acts like a carbon bomb. And releases massive carbon emissions back into the atmosphere. Wow, this haze is intense, isn't it?
No, the visibility is not very good. You can't see anything here. This is scary. This isn't natural, this is all fire. This is not natural at all.
I've never seen anything like this. Welcome to Smetana. There are three big tropical rainforest areas left in the world. The Amazon in South America, the Congo Basin in Africa, and the Southeast Asian rainforest which spans Indonesia.
In Indonesia, we're seeing fires being intentionally set in order to create palm oil plantations, which grow the cheapest vegetable oil in the world. It's in cooking oils and processed foods, in your cosmetics, in your detergents. This really cheap commodity is making companies tremendous profits.
What does the condition look like from above? Just as far as you can see. Rows of palm oil. They have destroyed so much of this forest, it's unbelievable.
We are standing in the last place on earth that still have elephant, rhino, orangutan and tiger together in the wild. What a beauty! The expansion of the farm oil industry in Indonesia has taken over about 80% of our forests. Indonesia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Companies bribe government officials to issue a permit for them to stop burning the land. And the forest fires release a copious amount of carbon. Last year, in 2015, when the forest fire happens in Indonesia, it emits more carbon daily than the entire U.S. economy.
And forest fires continue to happen. What's at stake is not only the livelihood of the people, but also the life of these forest species. I can't even comprehend what these forests must have looked like. Forests where rhino and elephant and orangutan would be populated into the thousands.
These guys are a byproduct of the forest loss because of the fire mold industry. You know, they're effectively refugees from forests that no longer exist. Wow, that's a good grip. Yeah, strong.
Here, I'm going to get you some... Don't be scared. The carrot or the fruit? Definitely the fruit.
That's what you guys are after, huh? There you go. You like carrots or not so much? Oh, my god.
These are amazing. I always remind people that when they go on the poor thing you know these are the lucky survivors what happens all the other orangutan you know all the others are dead and the reason people are chopping down the forest to plant palm oil plantations because people keep buying the stuff People have to realize that what they do in their supermarket, the decisions they make in their daily lives, are affecting places like the local ecosystem. If palm oil is in almost everything we buy, how are consumers supposed to avoid this?
If these products have such a devastating impact, why aren't governments setting restrictions to prevent these big corporations from destroying the planet just so they can save money? If you want something that you can do without appealing to any higher authorities such as government or whatever, I can't think of an easier out than changing your diet. You can start tonight.
So you're a scientist who studies the effects of agriculture on climate, but you grew up raising cattle and taking them to slaughter, right? I'm a scientist. That's the most important thing. So of all the reasons for tropical deforestation, the foremost is beef. And beef is one of the most inefficient uses of resources on the planet.
In the US, 47% of land is used for food production. And of that, the lion's share is just to grow feed for cattle. The things that we actually eat, like fruit, vegetable, nuts, it's a percent.
Most importantly, cows produce methane. And methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. The way cows produce methane is they eat as much as they can.
And when they are chewing, a whole bunch of methane is burped here. through the mouth into the atmosphere. The atmosphere has much more CO2 in it, but methane is far more impactful. Every molecule of methane is equivalent to 23 molecules.
of CO2. And of the methane in the atmosphere, nearly all of it is due to livestock. In comparison to emissions from other sources, what kind of percentage are we talking about come from the consumption of beef?
About 10, 12% of the total US emissions is due to beef. It's staggering, but it's very easy to envision a dietary shift even as minor as switching, let's say, from beef to an alternative, let's say even chicken. The chicken will require 20 percent.
of the land and 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions. And if you compare rice or potato or wheat, beef requires 50 times as much land. So even cutting the amount of beef that you eat or by a quarter could make a significant difference.
Very significant. Do you at all think that that's even a possibility, considering that beef is so a part of our culture? Maybe not everybody is ready to eat tofu, you know, 24-7. I get that.
But even if you just have to have some flesh between your teeth, if you switch to chicken, you will have eliminated 80% of what you emit, depending on where you're coming from. Let's... let's face it, it's fairly easy to switch your diet from one choice to another.
Two steps there. There. Okay, ready.
A little faster. While working on The Revenant, which is about man's struggle with the elements, we shot on location in the Canadian snow belt. The irony was, we were hit with record temperatures that completely melted our set.
In order to finish making the movie, we had to relocate halfway around the world just to find snow. The fact that we have to come 200 people in the middle of the summer to the... Winter in the south in Ushuaia, 9,000 miles from where we're supposed to be shooting this three months ago, chasing ice because it's melting. It was a very, very warm winter.
We can go to the southern tip of our continents besides the South Pole to film this, because this is where the last snow is left. I think that my point of view, I was saying to my son, I said, you know, it's funny that it's very sad, but probably for your kids, to see snow will be a super eccentric adventure. A few people will be able to see snow in the future.
I feel like I'm in some weird surreal movie. I honestly look around and I think when I have children, everything that we now take for granted, our planet and all its biodiversity and beauty, everything in the future is going to be different. Every single light that you see has to be completely different.
It has to come from a different power source. We need to build all those things differently. All the cars that are on the road need to be different.
And this is one city, and if you zoom out onto a large map of planet Earth at night, you see electrification all over the world. And we're fighting powerful fossil fuel interests that basically want to keep doing business as usual. How can we possibly turn this all around?
I mean, the fossil fuel industry is the biggest industry in the world. They have more money and more influence than any other sector. So, I mean, the more that there can be sort of a popular uprising against that, the better.
But I think the scientific factors... the matter is we are unavoidably headed towards some level of harm. So, the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result. Wow.
Holy crap, that's a good robot. Whoa. What is your grand vision for all of this?
The point of the Gigafactory is to get the cost of batteries down to the point where it's affordable. What? Batteries are critical to a sustainable energy future.
The sun doesn't shine all the time, so you've got to store it in a battery. How is this going to help developing nations that have massive populations that need to have power? So the advantage of solar and batteries is that you can...
avoid building electricity plants at all. So you could be a remote village and have solar panels that charge a battery pack that then supplies power to the whole village without ever having to run thousands of miles of high voltage cable all over the place. It's like what happened with landline phones versus cellular phones.
In a lot of developed countries, they just didn't do the landline phones. They just went straight to cellular. We actually did the calculations to say like what would it take to transition the whole world to sustainable energy.
What kind of throughput would you actually need? And you need a hundred gigafactories. A hundred of these?
A hundred of these, yes. That would make the United States... No, the whole world. The whole world?
The whole world. All energy. That's it? Yeah. That sounds...
That's manageable. That sounds manageable. Yeah. A gigafactory, when it's complete, will have the largest footprint of any building in the world.
Counting multiple levels, it could be as much as 15 million square feet. So Tesla can't build 100 gigafactories. The thing that's really going to make a difference is if companies that are much bigger than Tesla do the same thing. If the big industrial companies in China and the US and Europe, the big car companies, if they also do this...
then collectively we can accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. And if government sets the rules to favor sustainable energy, we can get there really quickly. But it's really fundamental. Unless there's a price put on carbon... We're never gonna be able to make the transition that we need to in time, correct?
Yeah. And the only way to do that is basically with a carbon tax. Okay, now walk me through a carbon tax, which is what you're saying is the silver bullet for climate change.
Well, a carbon tax would be basically a tax on any kind of activity that put carbon into the atmosphere. So when you tax something and raise the price... People are going to tend to consume less of it. In fact, that's sort of lesson number one of economics. So you're teaching economics at Harvard, and you literally wrote the book on contemporary economics, right?
Well, if I'm teaching the course for many years, I might as well write the textbook to go with it. So just to be clear, you've worked with a lot of Republican heavyweights. John McCain, Mitt Romney, and you worked for George Bush when he became president. I was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
So how come we don't have a carbon tax already? Politicians don't always do what professors want them to do. So the basic idea is that we want to tax bad activities that have negative side effects on other people in society.
So we raise the price of cigarettes by putting a tax on cigarettes. People are going to consume fewer cigarettes. Climate change involves a variety of negative side effects and costs.
Carbon tax forces people to take account of those costs. I think trying to appeal to people's social responsibility It's really very, very hard because people have complicated lives and they have lots of things to worry about. They don't want to have to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't.
Every time you turn on your car, are you supposed to think, uh-oh, what am I doing to the climate? What carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing. So let me get this straight. You're a Republican who wants more taxes.
Well, one of the important things to keep in mind is that if you have a carbon tax, you can turn around and cut other taxes in response. For example, payroll taxes. This is a tax shift rather than a tax increase.
So is it possible to ever pass a carbon tax now, given the current political situation? I mean, half the people in office still don't believe in climate change. Yes, we can. During the campaign, President Obama didn't want to say the word carbon tax because it pulled terribly.
If we want to change the president's view of carbon taxes, we need to change the public's view of carbon taxes. Think of gay marriage. Remember, Barack Obama ran against gay marriage. I am not a supporter of gay marriage. When did he switch?
when the polls started switching. I think same-sex couples should be able to get married. Politicians, whether we call them our elected leaders or really our elected followers, they do what the people want them to do.
We need to preach to the American people. Once the American people are convinced, the politicians will fall in line very quickly. President Obama and representatives from nearly 200 other countries are trying to reach an agreement to keep global warming in check. In December, the world will come together at the UN Climate Conference in Paris, and we will see whether or not we can...
muster the collective political will to reach an ambitious, comprehensive agreement. This is a critical year. Leo. How you doing, man?
Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. Last time we had a hug, everybody had a... Did you see the result of the thing after he gave it?
Oh, really? Oh, yes, I remember that. I forgot about that.
Good to see you, Secretary. So, after decades of failed negotiations, what makes this negotiation different from all the rest? I remember the footage of George Bush Sr. saying, we've just learned about this thing called global warming. We come to Rio proud of what we have accomplished and committed to extending the record on American leadership. on the environment.
I mean, we had climate summit after climate summit, and we've seen so little action. Well, let me tell you why this is different, and it really is different. Last year, President Obama was able to stand up in Beijing with Chinese President Xi and announce intended reductions in emissions for Paris. Well, guess what?
When the two largest economies in the world and the two largest emitters in the world stand up and make a statement like this, that that's created a momentum that never existed before a lot of things are coming together tragically the full measure of the negative impact of climate change is coming together too what's happened now is that you have mass populations that are moving as a result of climate climate refugees pouring into the capital or you have huge fights over water which could erupt into wars And any extremist philosophy could appeal to people if they have nowhere to live, no way to live, and that's when people are vulnerable. If anybody thinks I'm kidding you about that, it's happening today. And the greatest fear about all of this is leaving this planet in better shape than we were given it, and that's not what we're doing today.
Today I spend most of my time understanding how can we secure a prosperous future for humanity in a situation where we're starting to hit the ceiling of what the planet can cope with. We're chairing something called the Earth League, which is a network of leading Earth system scientists. We try and gather, really, all the knowledge we have on understanding our future on Earth. We are, on average, moving towards four degrees warming this century. And we haven't been in a four-degree warmer world for the past four million years.
So it's not as if it's a place we know very well. So give me one sort of picture. of what the world may look like if we do not take action. Well, to begin with, for the past 12,000 years, temperatures are almost miraculously stable. In fact, average temperatures vary with only plus minus one degree Celsius during this entire period.
This perfect planet with this perfect atmosphere. Exactly. And so let us then move upwards in temperature. Where are we right now? Well, today we're approaching one degree Celsius.
Already at just... 0.85 degrees. We're seeing faster than predicted impact. This storm is so big, so vast, 60 million Americans will feel its power.
We're in a historic drought. The world's coral reefs begin to collapse even before 2 degrees. And it's predicted to hit 1.5 to 2 degrees, so already now. That's already probably going to happen. That's already probably going to happen.
At 3, 4 degrees, we will have heat waves which make many regions in the world not livable any longer. Agriculture will be collapsing around the equator. That would take us beyond being able to responsibly feed humanity.
What makes scientists so nervous is that we can reach a point where Earth takes over and start reinforcing warming. This is what we call tipping points, and the most obvious one is Greenland. Greenland for the first time is melting on its entire surface, to a point where instead of being a white surface becomes a dark surface. and suddenly instead of being a cooler, becomes a self-heater.
Because of the fact that the ice can no longer reflect back. Just the color change. Just the color change of the ice. Suddenly all these feedbacks start kicking in.
Methane stuck under frozen permafrost thaws to a point where it starts getting released. And that in turn warms the ice. which releases more methane. Correct.
That's if we don't take immediate action. Yes, that's business as usual. But the Paris Climate Summit that we are soon approaching in December, if world leaders come together properly, the window is open, but barely open, to transition back into a stable planet. Last time we had our climate summit, you couldn't say that we could go to scale on high-tech, clean energy solutions.
But now in Paris, we can say so. We actually have the proof. You know, you wake up in Germany, you wake up in Germany, in Germany on Saturday morning, you're likely to get 30% of your electricity from solar and wind, and not from a few energy utilities, but from over 2 million citizens delivering to a grid.
Denmark today produces over 100% some days of its electricity needs from wind. 100%. It's totally renewable.
And remember that once you've invested in wind and solar, you actually have free energy forever. Countries like my own in Sweden, there was an enormous uprising among people, you know, from youth groups to civil society organizations to the point that the Prime Minister announced three weeks back that Sweden will now become the world's first fossil fuel free nation. I was shocked at the way that propelled itself from below. I think we have tipped the world towards a sustainable future. The fear is are we doing it too slowly?
Ladies and gentlemen, you are here today to write the script for a new future. The fate of our planet is in your hands. I am a small island girl with big dreams from the island of Majuro in the Marshall Islands.
Back when I was six or seven, my grandpa told me about how... The ice in the North Pole and South Pole will melt away, and as they melt, the water will rise and soon flood our islands. This agreement is for those of us whose identity, whose culture, whose ancestors, whose whole...
is bound to their lands. This agreement will help the world prepare for the impacts of climate change that are already here and also for those we know are now headed our way inevitably. Nearly a quarter of a century of global climate talks have come to this pivotal moment in Paris. 195 countries saying they'll do everything in their power to change.
I see that the reaction is positive, I do not hear any objections. The Paris Agreement for the climate is accepted. There's no doubt that this agreement is a massive step forward. But does it go far enough? The Paris Agreement calls for keeping climate warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius while striving for 1.5.
There's no mention of a carbon tax. There's no mention of any penalties. There are no enforcement provisions.
We just have to take it on faith that all these countries are going to follow through with what they say. How likely is that? This is an unattainable deal that Congress has already voted to reject. The fact that we're going to have a 26 to 28 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, that isn't going to happen. I chair the committee that has jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency.
Hey man. Good to see you. Thank you so much.
You doing alright? Absolutely. Alright. Come on.
The Paris Agreement ended up being a historic agreement, not because it gets us to where we need to be eventually, but for the first time locking in all countries into a new world. verifiable steps and targets that they're going to take, it creates the architecture that allows us to finally start dealing with this problem in a serious way. So you were happy with what she was doing?
I was happy that we put the architecture in place. The targets that have been set. are nowhere near enough for what the scientists tell us we have to do eventually to solve this problem. But if we can use the next 20 years to apply existing technologies to reduce carbon emissions and then start slowly turning up the dials as new technologies come online so that we have more and more ambitious targets each year, then we're not gonna completely reverse the warming that now is inevitable, but we can stop it before it becomes catastrophic.
And it's no secret that you've been under great opposition to try to implement some of your climate change initiatives. And... We got some folks on the other side. Yeah.
So somebody that comes into office that does not believe in the science of climate change, do they have the capacity and the power to dismantle everything that you've already worked for? Even if somebody came in campaigning on denying climate science, reality has a way of, you know, hitting you in the back. nose if you're if you're not paying attention and i think that the public is starting to realize the science in part because it's indisputable I admire your optimism.
Yeah. But you start to look at the science, look at what's going on in the Antarctic, and scientists saying that there are sections of ice that guarantee four to six meters of ocean level rise, which will be catastrophic for the future. You are the leader of the free world.
You have access to information that most people do not. What makes you terrified for the future? A huge portion of the world's population.
lives near oceans. If they start moving, then you start seeing scarce resources, the subject to competition between populations. This is the reason why the Pentagon has said, this is a national security issue.
This isn't just an environmental issue. This is a national security issue. In addition to just the sadness that I would feel if my kids can never see a glacier the way I saw when I went up to Alaska. You know, that's the romantic side of me.
That's the side that takes a walk with my daughters, and I want to be able for them to see, or my grandkids, I want them to see the same things I saw as I was growing up. Even if you were unsentimental about that, in very hard-headed terms, you've got to worry about the national... National security implications of this and the capacity for the existing world order as we understand it to survive the kinds of strains that the scientists are predicting without action.
This is why we have to take action now. If we keep pushing, keep prodding, and most importantly, keep educating the public, there's no reason why we can't solve this problem in time. Thank you for your time, Mr. President. Thanks for the good work you're doing. Thank you so much.
Good? I realized that the science community, we have not done the best job, frankly, of communicating this threat to the public. But when you go up there and see it with your own eye, how thin the world's atmosphere is. Tiny little onion skin around the earth. That's all the oxygen that we breathe, that's the CO2.
Everything we burn goes into it. It's an astonishingly fragile film. I knew intellectually how the Earth's system works, because that's what I've been doing for 20 years, to see how the atmosphere and the ocean, all the elements of the system work together. So I understood it intellectually.
Well, it's like being an ant trying to understand what an elephant looks like by crawling all over the elephant. Boeing, we're up there in orbit, and you can see 1,200 miles in any direction. Let me tell you, it's kind of a revelation.
Seeing all the cities at night, millions of people all working away, doing something. Come around the day side of the world, seeing the natural systems, the hurricanes. Huge, great big wheels, you know, over the oceans.
Saw the Amazon River go between my feet for like five minutes, you know, on a whole green carpet either side. Just beautiful, all the way out to the sea. And, you know, there was a sun coming up over the Amazon, the whole forest waking up and doing what it does every day. breathing in and breathing out.
So at the end of all that, I became immensely fond, more fond of the planet, which I never thought about when I actually just live on the surface. And also kind of fond of the people on there, too. It's like being taken away from your family and coming back. And I wish it all well. Just before Christmas I got told I got pancreatic cancer, stage 4, so it's elsewhere in me, not just in one place.
So, you know, the odds are I won't be around for very long. You know, it's a very small chance of survival. So, that's really motivated me to think about what's important to do, and what can I contribute in the time I have left.
So this is a model simulation of the Earth now. We have about 20 satellites that are dedicated to looking at the Earth every day. One looks at clouds, one looks at the sea surface temperature. OKO looks at carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
All this information comes in, and this is the tool we use to do climate simulation. Here's an example of one thing we can see. This is ocean surface temperature as measured from space.
This is the whole world's surface temperature. You can see the poles melting there. Wow. Yeah. This is the way to do it, man.
I mean, this is the way to really see what's going on. Here's a Gulf Stream. Look at this.
This is the motion of the ocean. This is like a great piece of art. It is, isn't it? Biggest impact would be here.
In the Gulf Stream. Yeah. This current here, see it?
The dumping of ice off melting Greenland would stop this conveyor belt. And the Gulf Stream would slow down, stopping the transport of heat from here. from here to there.
And then Europe would get cold toes because there's a lot of heat transport from the tropics across the North Atlantic that keeps Europe warm. So Europe would get colder? Yeah. Because that's the big misconception about climate change is that everything gets warmer.
Yeah. Wow. And here's the most advanced precipitation satellite in the world. It's very important because we think the biggest impact from climate change is the moving of the precipitation belts. So it'll go further out.
So we're already seeing... So that causes more drought in places that are already too hot. Yes. And there's a lot of papers written in the State Department elsewhere how that sustained drought has helped fuel the conflict, the Syrian civil war, Darfur, Sudan, all these places that are short of water, short of food. Is this the route the entire planet, or is it just this particular region right here?
No, expected the whole world, we expect. Bits of India expect in the U.S., Oklahoma, you know the Dust Bowl region, we expect that to get much, much drier over the next few decades. Oh my God.
Right. And what about my home state of California here? Not looking great, I'm afraid. Now, our models predicted persistent drought in the Dust Bowl and here for 50 years from now. But we're just seeing the worst drought in 900 years here right now, so it's coming a bit earlier than we thought.
We're talking about this happening over a period of a few decades. It's just consistent, not great news. No. But a lot of people are kind of confused about the issue. You know, the facts are crystal clear.
The ice is melting. The earth is warming. The sea level is rising. Those are facts. Rather than feeling, oh, my God, it's hopeless, say, OK, this is the problem.
Let's be realistic. Let's find a way out of it. And there are ways out of it. You know, if we stopped burning fossil fuels, the planet would still keep warming for a little while before cooling off again. So you're saying that if we do the right thing...
Right. We're gonna heat up, or we're gonna... It'll turn off, and then it'll start cooling again.
Would that Arctic ice sheet start to then increase again? Once the cooling started, yeah. So there really is a possibility to repair this projector that we're on. Absolutely.
Interesting. Yeah. There's hope. You see, we have an incredible...
I'm sorry. incredibly positive attitude, just about everything, though. It's amazing. Yeah, I do.
I'm basically an optimistic kind of person. I have faith in people. I really do have faith in people. And I think that once people come out of the fog of confusion on an issue or uncertainty about an issue and realistically appreciate it at some level, the threat, and they're informed of what the best action is to deal with it, they got on and did it. And what seemed like almost a painted a view of our Earth on the third day of creation.
It's almost as if he wanted to show the fragility of our planet by depicting the Earth and its atmosphere enclosed in glass. Pope Francis has officially released his encyclical on the environment. The document is both a call for immediate action to stop global warming and a cry for justice for the poor.
Our common home has fallen into serious disrepair. Hope would have us recognize that there is always a way out, that we can always redirect our steps. That we can always do something to solve our problems. Still, we can see signs that things are now reaching a breaking point.
This is a direct message from the Pope. It's a huge deal. Grazie per dedicarmi questa udienza.
One of the most important spiritual leaders on the planet. DiCaprio. He has now called upon the world community to accept the modern science of climate change. A pope has never done anything like this in history. Your holiness, thank you for dedicating this private meeting with you.
Being able to spend time and sit with the Pope was a pretty profound experience. This is a book, Hieronymus Bosch's. It was hanging above my crib as a young boy.
There was definitely an urgency in his voice. He said that as far as the Paris conference is concerned, he felt it was a step in the right direction, but certainly not enough. He feels we all need to keep speaking out about this. This issue as loud as we can and that we must immediately take action. But more than anything, he said to pray for the human race.
After everything I've seen, it's become pretty obvious that we're no longer living in that first unspoiled depiction of Eden. We're in that second panel, what Bosch called humankind before the flood. And what haunts me the most is that last panel, the one with the charred, blackened skies, the planet that we collectively have left to ruin.
The question is, can we change our course in time? Now, if this was a movie, we could write the ending of this script, and we could figure a way out of this mess. But real life doesn't work like that, and we can't pretend that we know how this is going to end. The only thing that we can do is control what we do next.
How we live our lives. What we consume. How we get involved.
And how we use our vote to tell our leaders that we know the truth about climate change. The last speaker for this signing ceremony is the Academy Award Best Actor and the United Nations Messenger of Peace, Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio. Thank you Mr. Secretary General for the honor to address this body. Thanks to the distinguished climate leaders assembled here today who are ready to take action.
As a UN messenger of peace, I have traveled all over the world for the last two years. I've seen cities like Beijing choked by industrial pollution, ancient boreal forests in Canada that have been clear-cut, and rainforest Indonesia that have been incinerated. In India, I met farmers whose crops have been literally washed away in america i've witnessed sea level rise flooding the streets of miami in greenland and in the arctic i was astonished to see that ancient glaciers are rapidly disappearing well ahead of scientific predictions all that i've seen and learned on my journey has absolutely terrified me now think about the shame that each of us will carry when our children and grandchildren look back and realize that we have the means of stopping this devastation but simply like lack the political will to do so. Yes, we have achieved the Paris Agreement. More countries have come together here to sign this agreement today than for any other cause in the history of humankind, and that is reason for hope.
But unfortunately, the evidence shows us that it will not be enough. A massive change is required right now, one that leads to a new collective consciousness, a new collective evolution of the human race, inspired by the and enabled by a sense of urgency from all of you. We can congratulate each other today, but it will mean absolutely nothing if you return to your countries and fail to push beyond the promises of this historic agreement.
After 21 years of debates and conferences, it is time to declare no more talk, no more excuses, no more 10-year studies, no more allowing the fossil fuel companies to manipulate and dictate the science and policies that affect... affect our future. The world is now watching.
You will either be lauded by future generations or vilified by them. You are the last best hope of Earth. We ask you to protect it, or we and all living things we cherish are history.
We try, deny, believe, to believe, can't believe I don't wanna say goodbye Star falling from the sky We will all be judged by what we leave behind I'll say goodnight Hey, too late, too long You in the eye, in your eye, in your eye We're fine in time, we're the same, we're the same, all to blame. I don't wanna say goodbye Star falling from the sky Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na I just need a minute to breathe I just need a minute to breathe Just me, a minute degree And just me