Before the Flood 2016 - Leonardo DiCaprio | National Geographic

thank you [Music] my first visual memories are of this framed poster above my crib I would stare at it every night before I went to bed [Music] my father was an underground comic distributor he's always been the sort of z-league of The Counter Culture as I like to call him having painted in Warhol Studio being roomies with Lou Reed he knew our crumb 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 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 on 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 [Music] The Deadly Sins start to infuse their way into the painting there's overpopulation there's debauchery and excess [Music] a

nd the last panel which is the most nightmarish one especially from a young child's perspective is this Twisted decayed burnt landscape Paradise that has been degraded and destroyed man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the through the products of his civilization 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 up 2015 which do mankind

out of the Garden of Eden great pleasure to see you we can remove this this can be well this is for height control yeah for sure 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 patterns if you consider this a vastness of this universe this planet Earth is just a small boat if this boat is thinking that I think we will have to always think together I know that he has been a very primitive and

effective environmentalist and that is why I will count on your leadership and vision thank you Mr Secretary General your Excellency 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 charac

ters often solving fictitious problems I believe that mankind is 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 too now if the UN really knew how I feel how pessimistic I am about our future [Music] be honest they may have picked the wrong guy hundreds of thousands took to the stree

ts of New York today demonstrating [Music] Secretary General Bob ki-moon called Leo a credible voice in the environmental movement which is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer a credible voice for Stu Leonardo DiCaprio has just naively bought into the entire global warning at Oaks who better to educate world leaders on made-up climate change in the crisis that doesn't exist and an actor from Hollywood with zero years of scientific training [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] so I just started this new fi

lm it's set in the Western frontier of the United States in the early 1800s it's basically the dawn of the Industrial Revolution it 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 buffaloes alejandros are crazy they're crazy yeah these fur Trappers are these people that sell the schools yeah it's not embarrassing that's crazy and the fact that they never even reflect about it that that's an ending to

this animal we cannot use that would be unbelievable how about this I dare you okay get to the boat come on sir 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 awk

the quagog 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 [Music] foreign 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 trans

portation sector coal and natural gas power most of the electricity [Music] 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 mountain top removal or coal fracking for natural gas offshore drilling for oil and the tar Sands which is the most devastating form of producing fossil fuels they take away massive forests the water and 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 controls right above the microphone 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 all boreal forest all boreal forest here started as a pretty small operation back in that the

late 1960 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 a shell so those are all the black is the oil sand yeah you can tell by looking at it that it is oil in it so what happens in real time is we take this Sandy oil and 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 then we're done kind of looks like a Mordor from Lord of such a massive operation it's mind-blowing now this of course is just our mining operation and we'll get to the extraction operation in the upgrading operation that the situ operation is some 70 kilometers or so away but the plants are connected by Pipelines 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 and 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 he 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 a Polar Ice capsule melt the Seas will start to rise they'll be more dangerous weather patterns floods droughts wildfires it sounded like some nightmare science fiction film except everything he said is real and it's happening right now [Music] wow wow beautiful [Music] I just want to know how far we've gone how much damage we've done and if there's a

nything we can do to stop it you all set mate so it's the fourth 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 buffin 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 accept you who are badass you hunt and fish here right yeah what do you what are

you fishing what do you hunt in my territory I hunt fish see ya now yeah and all the beer is this polar bear yep oh well there you go yeah and the ice here since you've been around has it been decreasing we used to have a solid ice blue not light blue like this blue heart eyes now we usually have uh kind of ice cream type of ice it's size but it's when it starts to melted now it's 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 routes more catastrophic I think it's the most dramatic transformation of a large environment ever [Music] here there are about 10 000 to 12 000 narwhals on this region the numbers are stable here in other region

s are declining wow that's awesome and they are waiting for the ice to 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 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 so many species of plant and

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 feel it and because it seems sort of abstract now at the time there was this huge push to get the word out on global warming 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 uh you know bring environmentalism to the American Consciousness and it boil down to Simple Solutions like changing your light bulb 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 we keep finding things that aren't in the climate models they're used to project the future so that that tells me that the the projections for the

future are are really conservative if climate stays at this temperature that it's been in the last decade Greenland is is going away don't walk into the crevasse look at how violent that is rappers are going so incredibly fast this melt water is making its way to the Sea if that's not balanced by snowfall then she 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 this well this is all melted out now this was a hose it went down 30 feet and now it's melted out so wait a minute so this that's lying here used to be straight down under ice yeah so we made it that's the amount of ice that has melted yeah foreign so this entire entire out 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 season but 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 Year 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'd see water coming up on the street as the sea level rises the water is coming up back flowing into our streets through our drains if the city is underwater there's no future how do you combat them exactly what's going on as far as prevention is concerned we started putting in pumps take a look a

t this oh this is the pump yep we're in the process of building all across the city [Music] 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 slowly slopes down a little bit so the main investment is in these systems right here raising the roads and the electric pumps yeah this is a 400 million dollar project Citywide and of course uh 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 value 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 and from using the words climate change this policy began in 2011 after Rick Scott came to office no one of the early wants to talk about climate change especially our senator from Florida Marco Rubio who 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 Leo I said uh 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 a it's a speaking of global warming where

as we need some global warming 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 percent 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 these satellite data we actually have had no significant warming uh since 19

98 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 [ __ ] 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 study Physics and graduate school in a decade and a half ago my co-authors and I started to look into climate change in a more distant past we published a curve wher

e there's this long-term Cooling Trend and then all of a sudden this abrupt warming that has no precedent as far back as 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 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 rub

bish he's been called a statistical charlatan I was being attacked by congressmen up on the wall and wherever it's stuck is what they put in the church had death threats that were actionable enough that the FBI at one point had to come to my office 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 fea

r 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 a 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 singer president of 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 f

or the Koch brothers that's an organization founded by David and Charles coken good morning to you Tim 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 tha

t the temperature would rise a half a percent or a million percent and they've lobbied Congress we keep hearing 2014 has been the warmest year on record so 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 ch

ange 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've devoted their life t

o this issue is kind of mind-boggling to me sometimes it makes me want to take it if I was a scientist I would be absolutely pissed every single day of my life that these people are you know engaged in an effort to to lead us astray in the name of short-term you know fossil fuel profits so that we end up leaving behind a degraded Planet what could be more immoral than that [Music] man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization due to our releas

e through factories and Automobiles every year of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide and 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 the fact is we've known about this problem for decades and decades for over half a century every day I send you a thousand times more power than you use in a year anybody working on getting power direct from old blow hard here oh yes but not nearl

y enough roll six feet imagine the world right now if we had taken the science of climate change seriously back then spread out over Acres even square miles to compete with the cheap coal and oil still available to us 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 it well now we're on the opposite side of the street again okay now

we're on a bike lane [Music] 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 getting dumped in our backyards and in this area surrounding Beijing plus the Shandong Peninsula co-consumption is equal to total co-consumption of the United States in a not very big area people are so worried about this when they especiall

y when they get better understanding about how much of this is going to hurt their health the health of their children you know their family air apocalypse schools have been shut down the toxicity has reached that worst level and you know what woman is [Music] in China people have concerns about climate change but first and foremost because their everyday life is affected [Music] people really want to be part of the solution now environmental issues have become the biggest reason for advanced de

monstrations what we want to do is to hold them accountable to have all the power plants and their emissions go totally transparent with the public and bring them on their public scrutiny so with that he might and 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 monitoring data people can check this on their cell phone and push for poll

uting 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 you have motivated China's policy of green growth the government changes plan for renewable energy is there a giant push towards solar and wind here is that the next step China's got some of t

he biggest wind and solar companies in the world now which is like huge population China is going to prioritize wind and solar rather than coal but China can do it then I think the rest of the world can [Music] China is still heavily relying on fossil fuels but they seem to be transitioning to Renewables much faster than anyone anticipated question is can less developed countries with a rapidly growing populations make the same transition [Music] India is the world's third largest country is str

uggling with massive power shortages admiraling blackouts India has consistently said that its biggest priorities development and bringing people out of poverty [Music] 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 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 U

nited States foreign [Music] cakes or uplas in Hindi and they burn those and that's their only source of cooking energy 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 point of view if you created the problem in the past we will create it in the future we have 700 million househ

olds who cook using biomass today 700 million households if those households move to Coal you have that much more use of fossil fuel than 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 ou

r 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 a miss 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 citizens of China 34 of India 61 of Nigeria why because you're building b

igger 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 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 the lifestyle and I would also argue that it's probably not going to happen so we are dependent 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 you're shaking your head obviously he was her Indian style which means no right who will invest Leo let's be real about this whole how will you understand it we are doing more investment in solar today China is doing much more investment in solar today than the US 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'll 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 o

f Africa it's the poor of Bangladesh who are impacted today by what I believe is the first signs of climate change anyway s 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 got destroyed we are back King doing this and then you get one unseasonal rainfall it's absolutely like the last straw on the camel's back foreign 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 and they want lights they want heat they want the lifestyle that we've had in the Uni

ted States for the last hundred years if we're going to solve this problem we all have a responsibility to set an example more than that help the developing World transition before it's too late [Music] we are seeing events that we did not see in the past it's not about when the entire islands are underwater as 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 fresh water points and that's how people get t

heir 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 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 we have to come to a

ccept the reality that we may not be able to accommodate all of our people we have adopted a policy of migration with dignity we bought a piece of land in Fiji so that if people choose to migrate today they can do it they must do it as a matter of choice where 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 phone [Music] islands in the Pacific we're Paradise in Peru throughout Palau we have sea level rise coming into the f

armlands coming into the homes when was this an intact island with homes on it how long ago 12 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 foreign [Music] what we've done to the rest of the world is just it's Criminal it's not jus

t 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 1 billion people [Music] [Music] here we are we're on a what was a pretty healthy coral reef What's missing you've seen almost nothing swimming around is this a dying coral reef I think this Reef has had it if we're p

ushing the system really hard and that is a serious anime to the health of Carl's and their ability to grow [Music] 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 they were 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 three billion years ago and have just a whole lot of slime [Music] we're taking away the ecosystems that normally help us to restabilize 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 of 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 carbon bomb and releases massive carbon emissions back into the atmosphere [Music] is not very good you can't see anything here this is scary this isn't natural this is all fire at all I've never seen anything like this welcome to Sumatra 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 broke 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 look like from above just as far as you can see rows of palm oil they have destroyed so much of

this Force it's unbelievable we're standing in the last place on Earth they still have elephant Rhino orangutan and tiger together in the wild thank you what a beauty the expansion of Farmall industry in Indonesia have taken over about 80 percent 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 in the forest fires released 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 water stake is not only the livelihood of the people [Music] but also the life of these four species I can't even comprehend what these forests must have looked like forests were Rhino and elephant orangutan would be populated into the thousands [Music] these guys are a byproduct of the forest loss because of the Farmall industry you know they're effectively refugees from forests

that no longer exist wow that's a good grip yeah strong okay I'm gonna get you some fruit don't be scared the carrot or the fruit definitely the fruit that's what you guys are after huh there you go do you like carrots or not so much oh my God they're amazing [Music] I always remind people that when they go out to pull a thing you know these are the lucky survivors what happens to all the other orangutans you know all the others are dead and the reason people are chopping down the forest to pla

nt palm oil plantations is 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 luxury ecosystem 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 foreign 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 uh 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 t

he planet in the U.S 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 cow's produced methods they eat as much as they can and when they are chewing a whole bunch of methane is burped through the mouth into the atmosphere the atmosphere has much more CO2 in it but methane is far more impac

tful 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 U.S 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

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 in half or by a quarter could make a significant difference very significant do you 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 eighty percent of what you emit depending on where you're coming from let's face it it's fairly easy to switch your diet from one choice to another two steps there there okay ready thank you 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 half

way around the world just to find snow the fact that we have to calm 200 people in the middle of the summer to the winter in the south in shria 9 000 miles from where we're supposed to be shooting these three months ago chasing eyes because he's melting it was a very very warm winter we condemned the southern tip of our continents besides the South Pole to film this because this is where this this last snow is left I I think that my point of view I was saying to my book to my son I said you know

it's funny that it's very sad but probably for your kids to see us know will be in a super eccentric Adventure a few people will be able to see us know in the future foreign [Music] 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 [Music] every single light that you see has to be completely different has to co

me 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 foreign 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 if they have more money and more influe

nce than any other sector so I mean the more that they can be sort of a popular Uprising against that the the better but I think the scientific fact of the matter is we are unavoidably headed towards some level of of harm so the sooner we can take action the less harm will result [Music] holy crap that's a good robot whoa what is your Grand Vision for all of this point of the gig factories to get the cost of batteries down to the point where it's affordable but batteries are critical to a sustai

nable energy future the sun doesn't shine all the time so you've got to store it in the 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 to the whole village without ever having to run thousands of miles of the high voltage cable a

ll 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 cellulose and we actually did the calculations say like what would it take to transition the whole world to uh sustainable energy what kind of throughput would you actually need and you need 100 gigafactories so 100 of these 100 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 disguageable that sounds manageable yeah the gigafactory when it's complete it'll 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 a hundred gigafactories the thing that's really going to make difference is if companies that are much bigger than Tesla do the same thing the big industrial companies in China and the US and Europe the big car co

mpanies 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 going to be able to make the transition that we need to in time correct yeah 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 clima

te change well the carbon tax would be basically a tax on any kind of activity that put carbon into the atmosphere so when you attack 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 advisors so how come we don't have a carbon tax already politicians don't always do it professors want them to do [Music] 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 don't consume fewer cigarette

s climate change involves a variety of negative side effects and costs [Music] a carbon tax forces people to take account of those costs I think trying to appeal to people's social responsibility is really very very hard because people have complicated lives 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 ca

rbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing so let me get this straight your 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 is a tax shift rather than the 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

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 the 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 are really our ele

cted followers they do what the people want them to do we need to preach 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 U.N climate conference in Paris and we will see whether or not we can muster the collective political will to reach an ambitious comprehensi

ve agreement this is a critical year Leo how you doing man thank you I really appreciate it last time we had a hug everybody 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 Senior saying we've just learned about this thing called global warming we come to real committed to a ship 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 that that's created a momentum that never existed before a lot of things are coming together tragically th

e 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 climate or you have huge fights over water which could erupt into Wars 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 me about that it's happening today and the greatest fear about all of this is leaving thi

s planet in better shape then we were given it and that's not what we're doing today [Music] 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 and I have the privilege of sharing something called the Earth League which is a network of leading or assistant scientists try and gather really all the knowledge we have on understanding our future on on Earth we are on average

moving towards four degrees warming this century and we haven't been in a four degree warmer World um 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 with 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 a

tmosphere exactly and so 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 million Americans will feel its power we're in an historic drought the world's coral reefs begin to collapse even before two degrees and that's predicted to hit 1.5 to 2 degrees so I already know so it's already probably going to happen that's already probably

going to happen four 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 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 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 feedback start kicking in methane stuck under Frozen permafrost Falls to a point where it starts getting released and that in turn warms the planet even more which releases more methane correct correct that's if we don't take immediate acti

on 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't say so we actually have the proof and you know you wake up in Germany on Saturday morning you liked it to get 30 of your electricity from sola

r and wind and not from a few energy utilities but from over 2 million citizens delivering to a grid Denmark today produces over a hundred percent some days of its electricity needs from wind 100 is totally renewable and remember that once you've invested in wind and solar you actually have free energy forever in countries like my own in Sweden it was an enormous Uprising among people you know from youth groups to Civil Society organizations to the point that the Prime Minister announced three w

eeks back that Sweden will now become the world's first fossil fuel Free Nation you know I was 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 [Music] thank you foreign [Music] you are here today to write the script for a dear future [Music] the Faith of Our Planet is in your hands I am a small island girl with big dreams from the island of Maduro 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 being 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 ha

ve come to this pivotal moment in Paris 195 countries saying they'll do everything in their power to change [Applause] there's no doubt that this agreement is a massive step forward but does it go far enough the parents warming to well below two degrees Celsius while striving for 1.5 there's no mention of a carbon tax there's no mention of any penalty 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 l

ikely is that [Music] 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 [Music] hey man good to see you thank you so much absolutely all right 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 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 I was happy that we put the architecture in place the the targets that have been set in Paris 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 emissio

ns 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 going to 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've got some folks on this 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 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 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 tha

t 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 not 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 uh scarce resources the subject to competition between populations this is the reason why the Pentagon has said this is a national securit

y issue this isn't just an environmental issue it's a national security issue you know 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 to 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 w

orry about the 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 thanks for the good work you're doing thank you so much good I realized that the science Communit

y we have not done the best job frankly of communicating this threat to the public for 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 so that's all the oxygen that we breathe that's the CO2 everything we burn goes into it it's an astonishingly fragile film you know I knew intellectually how the Earth system works because that's what I've been doing for 20 years to see how the atmosphere in the ocean all the elements of

the system work together so I understood it intellectually but it's like being an aunt trying to understand what an elephant looks like by crawling all over the elephant but when we're up there in orbit and you can see 1200 miles from any direction I mean 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 creepy Wheels you know over the o

ceans saw the Amazon River go between my feet for like five minutes you know I have 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 you know breathing in and breathing out so I I you know the interval that I became a mentally fond more fond of the planet you know which I never thought about when I actually just live on the surface and also kind of follow t

he people on there too it's like being taken away from your family and coming back and um you know I wish it all well uh just for Christmas I got told I got um pancreatic cancer yeah I'm stage four so it's elsewhere in me not just in one place so um you know the the odds are I won't be around for very long and you know it's very small chance of survival so uh that's really motivated me you know to think about what's important to do and what can I contribute in the time I have left so this is a m

odel 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 Oco 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 could see the poles melting there wow yeah this

is the way to do it man and 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 isn't it biggest impact would be here in the Gulf Stream yeah this current here is it The Dumping of ice off melting Greenland would stop this conveyor belt and the the Gulf Stream would slow down and stopping the transport of heat from here to that and then Europe would get cold toes because there's a lot of heat transp

ort from the tropics across the North Atlantic it keeps Europe warm I mean Europe would get colder yeah because that's the big misconception about climate change is that everything gets warmer yeah and here's the most advanced precipitation satellite in the world is very important because we think the biggest impact from climate change is the moving of the precipitation belts from the equator that are further out so we're already seeing Society 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 of Syrian Civil War Darfur Sudan all these places that are short of water short of food is this throughout the entire planet or is it just this particular region right nope I expected the whole world to expect bits of India expect in the U.S Oklahoma you know the Dust Bowl region if 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 uh not looking great I'm afraid now our models predicted persistent drought in the Dust Bowl and here for 50 years from now what we're just seeing the worst throughout 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 now kind of confused about the issue you know the facts are crystal clear the ice is melting the E

arth is warming the sea level is rising those are facts rather than feeling oh my God it's hopeless say okay this is the problem let's be realistic let's find a way out of it and they're always out of it you know if we stopped burning fossil fuel right now the planet would still keep warming for a little while before cooling off again you're saying that if we do the right thing right I'll make sure that we're going to heat up but we're gonna it'll turn off and then it'll then it'll start quittin

g again with 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's not interesting yeah so let's hope seem to have an incredibly positive attitude just about everything though it's amazing yeah I do right actually I'm basically optimistic kind of person I have faith in people I have 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 ab

out an issue and realistically appreciate it at some level the threat and they're informed of what the best action is to to deal with it they got on and did it and what seemed like almost impossible to deal with you know became possible I still think a lot about that picture that used to hang above my crib the story of The Garden of Earthly Delights actually begins on the outside of the painting or Bosch 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 depicting the earth and its atmosphere enclosed in glass Pope Francis has officially released his encyclical 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 no

w reaching a Breaking Point this is a direct message from the pope it's a huge deal one of the most important spiritual leaders on the planet is now called upon the world Community to accept the modern science of climate change a pope has never done anything like this in history being able to spend time and sit with the Pope was a pretty profound experience uh what's 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 c

oncerned 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 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 [Music] 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 planet that we collectively have left to ruin question is can we change our course in time now if this was a movie we could write the ending of this script and 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 peace Mr Leonardo DiCaprio thank you thank you Mr Secretary General for the honor to address this body and thanks to the distinguished climate leaders assembled here today who are ready to take action as a U.N messenger of peace I have traveled all over the world for the last two years I've seen cities like Beijing Choke by industrial pollution ancient b

oreal forests in Canada that have been clear-cut and rainforest Indonesia that have been incinerated an India met Farmers whose crops have been literally washed away and America have witnessed sea level rise flooding the streets of Miami and Greenland and in the Arctic I was astonished to see that ancient Glaciers are rapidly disappearing well ahead of scientific predictions all that I have 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 lacked 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 Conscio

usness a new Collective Evolution of the human race inspired 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 affe

ct 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 birth we ask you to protect it are we and all living things we cherish our history we wait we pray [Music] for the rain for rain flush away we try to deny not to believe foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] too late too long foreign [Music] [Music] we're the same we're the same [Music] I don't wanna say foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreig

n [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] come on [Music]