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(silence)
(gentle hopeful melody)
- [Voiceover] We inherited an astonishingly beautiful home
and with it, we've accomplished extraordinary things.
(ominous melody)
But we are changing the Earth's climate
by releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere.
Over the last several decades,
we have raised the Earth's average temperature
by .7 degrees Celsius.
This seemingly small change is already causing
heat waves, droughts, wildfires,
and storms that have killed tens of thousands of people
and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
- We see things that the climate scientists
of 20 years ago were not predicting would occur so soon.
We're not looking at one or two bad events
or one or two bad years,
we're now looking at three and four decades.
Very small changes make huge differences
in what it's like to live in places on the Earth.
- [Voiceover] Over a billion people in China,
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh
depend on the Himalayan glaciers for water,
but global warming is endangering them
and all the Earth's freshwater supplies.
Coral reefs support the richest concentration
of life on Earth,
but greenhouse gases make our oceans warmer and more acidic.
If this continues,
the coral and much of the ocean's life will vanish.
We also face rising sea levels
caused by the melting of Greenland's ice sheet.
- If we look at the last period that was warmer
than the present one, about 130,00 years ago,
sea level then was at least six meters higher than it is now
and that was only about one degree Celsius warmer
than it is today.
- [Voiceover] Global sea levels have already risen
by eight inches
and if Greenland's ice sheet melts completely,
sea levels will rise 23 feet.
- I don't think most citizen's in the world
have really grasped what is happening
and what these risks are.
Many of our major cities
will be submerged.
(gentle melody)
- Over 600 million people's homes will be destroyed
if the world's coastlines are flooded
and if we continue with business as usual,
warming the planet further,
by the middle of this century,
we could trigger runaway climate change,
a process beyond human control.
- What do you do if you have that information?
What do you do?
- Over the next six to ten years,
we have an urgent responsibility
to decide how this world is going to be in the future.
- [Voiceover] But the climate crisis
is also a huge opportunity.
We already possess technologies
that can stop climate change
and adopting them will greatly improve our environment,
our economies, our health, and our security.
- The future has turned into the present.
We can create a society that is powered by clean energy.
The benefits will be enormous.
Once we get off fossil fuels, we're not going back.
- [Voiceover] But we are in a race against time,
and some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people
are opposing the progress.
- There are a lot of adversaries.
There are people who say
there's no such thing as climate change,
there are producers of carbon who say
this is where the world is.
- The fear factor that people wanna throw out there
and just say, "We just have to stop this,"
I do not accept.
- If you fast-forward 50 years from now,
our kids are looking at the problem that we leave them,
they're gonna go, "Okay, so let me get this straight.
"You had the technology to solve the problem
"and you decided it's too big a task.
"How dumb could you be?"
- It's too late to be a pessimist, not as simple as that.
This is a moment that we don't want to fail,
we don't want to fail humanity.
- It's the battle for defend nature,
for defend the defenseless and the voiceless.
It is a battle to prevent powerful people from
despoiling the environment.
- A old saying goes necessity is the mother of invention,
we got the mother of all necessities before us.
- [Voiceover] This is a gigantic, scientific, technological,
and moral challenge.
There's a great struggle for the future of the world.
(foreboding sound)
(somber melody)
- Boone County, in its day
and when I was younger,
it was just breathtaking.
As a kid growing up here,
you roam these mountains, that's what you do.
All my life it's been such a beautiful,
wonderful, peaceful place.
So, when the mountain started exploding,
of course I was outraged.
- I heard blasting
and it was off in the distance.
And I came upon it and I was stunned.
I had heard of mountaintop removal,
but had no clue what it was.
I went up the mountain
and saw what was happening above my home.
And I took a flyover
on a small plane
and it changed my life.
- [Voiceover] They take a mountaintop,
deforest the top of the mountain, clearcut it.
- They remove all of the vegetation,
they bring in ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel
and then they detonate that
and boom, there goes the mountain.
(explosions)
- Material that's being spewed into the air from blasting,
it's rock not dirt,
and so that's something that contains arsenic
or other different metals
and stuff that you don't want to breathe.
- [Voiceover] And you also get coal
that's pulverized in fine particulates,
and that is raw coal which is containing arsenic
and lead and mercury, and a whole variety of elements.
- The dust is horrible.
I had two children that had asthma
and I started complaining because we needed to breathe.
- When you compare before mountaintop removal mining
to after mountaintop removal mining,
there is a very substantial increase
in lung and bronchus cancer.
- They'll send in heavy machinery clear away that coal
and then everything that's left, all the coal mining waste,
gets swept off the top of the mountain
into the neighboring valley,
so where there was once a mountain and valley,
you just have flat lunar landscape.
- [Voiceover] In the state of West Virginia alone,
there's nearly a million acres
of mountaintop removal coal mining,
more that five hundred mountains in Appalachia
that's been leveled.
- [Voiceover] They're taking rocks
that should be inside a mountain
with very heavy metals, things like arsenic,
and putting that into the valley
which is the source of the watershed.
Communities that are living downstream
have heavy toxins going into their water supplies.
It has huge human health impacts and consequences.
- The Clean Water Act, it previously said you can't
dump waste in the waters of the United States of America.
Department of Interior edited it,
you can't dump waste, but you can dump fill material.
And then they reclassified mountaintop removal waste
as fill material.
The coal is shot down a conveyor system
and go to a processing plant,
it gets crushed.
And it goes through a diesel bath.
It goes through a chemical cleaning process,
removing arsenic, mercury, lead.
- The cleaner the coal gets,
the more of the really nasty stuff that gets left here.
Everything gets pumped back up into coal slurry impoundments
is what they call 'em, we call 'em sludge dams.
It's real thick
like mud.
- [Voiceover] Every one of them leaks.
- We would play in the stream as kids,
we would gather water from the stream.
This is now a pollution spillway.
- Everyone thought the water was safe,
you know, that's well water, it'll have a little color,
a little odor, but you know, will not harm you.
My brother, he was
probably 28 years old at the time
and he had noticed a knot
starting to appear on his forehead, it was on this side.
It was very aggressive in growth.
October 6, 2006 was a Friday, he worked all week,
the next day, mom woke up and the alarm was still going off,
and he just never woke up.
And we go to the church
and we start talking,
and at that moment in time,
I realized there was actually six neighbors,
who had brain tumors, that live in about a 10 house span.
There was a little girl
that was one of my brother's friend's daughters.
She was a toddler when they had found her brain tumor.
And she passed away.
The same contaminants that were in the sludge ponds
was what they found in our water.
Barium, nickel, arsenic, lead.
I apologize, I can't remember all the
- [Voiceover] That's all right.
- All of the chemicals.
- This is the headwaters of the water
throughout the eastern United States.
This is everybody's drinking water,
this isn't just my surface water and drinking water,
this is everybody's.
- They just really didn't like what was coming out
of the work.
So, they directed us to stop doing it.
We were told, "Well, you can pick your battles
"and this is not a battle you're gonna win."
- [Voiceover] The destruction and pollution caused by coal
guarantee that no other industry will locate in the region,
making the people here a captive labor force.
As a result, the coal mining counties of Appalachia
are the poorest areas in the United States.
- Our first instinct is, "We've gotta get the kids,
"we gotta get them outta here,"
but who's gonna buy a house with contaminated water?
- Coal contributes to four out of the five
leading causes of death in the United States.
Just the soot,
that particulate matter coming from coal plants,
kills more than 10,000 Americans every year.
(futuristic melody)
- [Voiceover] At night, modern Shanghai is spectacular,
but every morning hundreds of barges
sail past the skyscrapers carrying coal to power plants.
Coal supplies most of China's energy
and China burns as much of it
as the rest of the world combined, making China
the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
All over the world, including in the United States,
coal mining is an extremely hazardous job,
but no place compares to China.
Chinese coal mining employs three million people,
it is politically powerful,
corrupt, and horrifically dangerous.
Over the last 30 years,
at least 200,000 miners have been killed
and hundreds of thousands more
maimed and crippled in mining accidents.
You are watching the end of this man's life.
Minutes after this was filmed,
the mine collapsed, killing him.
Like most mining deaths,
this one was never officially reported.
- [Voiceover] Black lung is a disease caused
by breathing coal dust.
None of these workers have protective equipment
and as a result, many will die from this disease.
- [Voiceover] An estimated one million Chinese
have already died of black lung
and up to 10 million currently suffer from it.
(sorrowful melody)
- [Voiceover] This is not a beach,
it is an enormous coal ash field.
Every year, Chinese coal plants produce 500 million tons
of this hazardous waste.
It contains mercury,
arsenic, and over a dozen heavy metals.
- [Voiceover] Because of its reliance on coal
and heavy industry,
over a third of China's lakes,
half of its rivers, and 80% of its urban groundwater
are now polluted.
The smog from burning coal covers many Chinese cities
and causes illnesses ranging from asthma to cancer.
In northern China, just breathing the air
reduces life expectancy by five years.
India is now on the same path
with air pollution even worse than China's.
- I see coal India production
doubling in the next five years.
It makes about 500 million tons hopefully this year,
we do a billion tons in 2019, as our effort,
and we are working systematically to a plan.
- [Voiceover] Our dependence on coal for electricity
is destroying millions of lives
and coal is the number one contributor
to global climate change,
but we don't need to follow this path any longer.
- [Voiceover] How many people are killed every year
in your company in the process
of manufacturing your wind turbines?
(speaking in foreign language)
(hopeful melody)
- Phenomenal things are happening.
The cost of renewable energy is plummeting.
Technology's developing much faster than I thought
and price is coming down much faster than I thought,
the price of solar, the price of batteries,
smart technologies.
Ultimately, it will be the low cost option
and it feels free.
- If you plot a graph of prices
of different ways of making electricity non-renewably,
there's this curve that comes down from heaven
and climbs on your head and that's solar and wind power,
those costs are dropping rapidly
whereas the other costs are tending to go up.
- [Voiceover] A new nuclear power plant
can produce electricity for 10 to 20 cents a kilowatt hour,
a new coal power plant is in the six, eight,
possibly 10 cents a kilowatt hour range,
depending on where you are,
a combined-cycle gas plant is in the five, six,
seven cent a kilowatt hour range,
for a new solar power plant,
the unsubsidized cost in the world
are just over five cents a kilowatt hour,
the average new wind power contract
was four cents a kilowatt hour.
Wind energy contracts are being signed in Oklahoma
for less than three cents a kilowatt hour,
you cannot build and generate electricity
from any other source in this country cheaper than that,
nothing else can touch that price.
- By about 2017 in about 80% of the world,
renewables will be competitive against grid power.
Anybody who doesn't understand this
is not paying attention to the data.
- We've doubled every year for the last eight years.
We investing into a massive scale grid integration
where every home has a solar system.
We deploying solar storage in California,
piloting the testing on it to see how it goes,
and then Tesla is investing into
large scale storage to reduce the cost.
At some point, solar storage will be combined
with every single system we deploy.
If you had the solution that I'm describing,
you'll be able to produce energy for your home,
store it in the battery in the day and consume it at night.
The solar industry creates local jobs.
You actually have to go to somebody's house
and install the solar systems.
We take away all the complexity,
so the equipment's free, installation's free,
we deal with the permits,
what you pay for is essentially the electricity.
Average home will probably save about, in California,
15 to 20 thousand dollars over the 20 year period.
- Our company will be a multi-billion dollar business
in just a few short years.
We're talking about replacing or disrupting
the electricity sector which is obviously
a multi-trillion dollar sector.
We've got a better machine,
it does the trick, it produces electricity for less
and without any of the social costs.
- [Voiceover] Some of the world's largest
and most profitable companies
from Apple to Facebook to Google
are converting their operations to renewable energy.
- This is an enormous opportunity.
By 2020, we would like to produce as much energy
as the total group consumes from sustainable sources.
It's in line with our vision
and what the customer wants us to do,
but it's also, at the end, a good investment.
- You think you have a good handle
on how fast something can be done and then you go to China,
"What the hell did they do?
"How did they do that?"
In the last few years,
China increased its electric generation
more from renewables
than from all fossil and nuclear plants put together.
- The more you build renewables, the less they cost.
The less they cost, the more you build,
the less they cost.
This is a self-reinforcing process
just like with microchips or consumer electronics.
In the case of wind power,
we've great improved the aerodynamics of the blades.
We're using better-power electronics
and we're designing new kinds of wind machines
that work very well even in lower wind speeds.
All these things work together,
so wind machines become
cheaper and they become more productive.
You can start mass producing
what used to be a handicraft.
(speaking foreign language)
- The whole energy infrastructure
is going to change over the next 50 years.
Solar and wind,
that's gonna be our primary source of energy.
- [Voiceover] In western Europe,
the transformation has already begun.
- Spain was 45% renewable electricity in 2013,
Scotland 46%,
Portugal 58%,
and these are all growing rapidly.
Denmark is headed for 100%
renewable energy of all forms
and they have the most reliable electricity in Europe.
- [Voiceover] But there are over a billion people
in the world who have never had electricity at all.
- Basic access to electricity is critical
for children's education,
it's critical for safe cooking of food.
It's central for basic things in life.
The struggle to end global poverty
and the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change
must be seen as two sides of the same coin.
If we don't do one,
we won't address the other and vice versa.
- [Voiceover] Most of Kenya's 40 million people
don't have access to conventional electricity.
For them, solar power is revolutionary.
- People can jump over the old infrastructure.
Power generation is going mobile.
It's gonna be on every rooftop.
It's gonna be with a solar home system.
(light melody)
People don't have to buy upfront their own power generation,
they can pay for it every single day in an affordable amount
which is less than what they would spend
for the alternative which is kerosene.
At the end of one year that product becomes theirs
and they're getting energy for free.
When I sat down and start thinking
of how much I using in a month for paraffin,
it's much better to get this one, to get the solar,
than to buy the paraffin.
- We project over four years that these low-income customers
will save over 750 US dollars per household
and our ambition is to get to a million homes
as fast as possible which we think we'll be doing by 2017.
- 70% of the people in Bangladesh
have no access to electricity.
So, we thought, "Now, this is an opportunity,
"starting with clean energy,"
so we created a company called Grameen Energy
to bring solar energy in the villages.
So, in 10 years later, we are the largest off grid
solar system in the whole world.
And we have reached already
one and a half million households in Bangladesh.
- [Voiceover] So, you've already reached 10%
of the households in Bangladesh?
- Almost, yeah, exactly.
It took us 17 years to come to one and a half million,
it will take less than three years
to make the next one and a half million.
Whether it's in India, whether it's in Africa,
or whether it's in Latin America,
this is available to anybody.
- If renewables are cost-competitive already,
they're growing very rapidly,
then why do we have to worry about the climate problem?
I don't think that Exxon
or Chevron or Peabody Coal
is going to say, "There's a better technology,
"I guess we lost, you get 'em solar industry,
"we had a good run."
If we wanna prevent runaway climate change,
we can only burn about a third
out of the fossil fuel reserves that we already know exists.
In 2013, the energy industry invested
650 billion, billion with a B, dollars in exploration
to identify new reserves.
(foreboding melody)
- Now, I really believe that
the climate is changing naturally
and that the temperature for the last
eight or nine years has been cooling,
and that the Arctic ice has been increasing,
and that there's a great deal of misunderstanding
out there about climate change.
- Most of the the coal industry has acted very analogous
to the tobacco industry when scientific evidence
was coming out that cigarette smoking
is extremely hazardous to your health.
- The assertion that
global warming is occurring today
and it's occurring because of the release
of CO2 and anthropogenic gases, methane and such as that,
it's really a hoax.
I really believe it's the greatest hoax ever
perpetrated on the American people.
- [Voiceover] We have to take on the richest companies,
the richest industries, and the richest individuals,
in the history of the world.
- So, I'm not disputing that
increase in CO2 emissions in the atmosphere
is going to have an impact, it'll have a warming impact.
Now, I think there are much more pressing priorities
that we as a human being race and society need to deal with.
- What makes this more criminal than anything else
is that we have viable economic alternatives
that are available today.
- We are travelling in the right direction,
the difficulty that we have is
we do have a clock in front of us.
- [Voiceover] And do you think that we'll do this
fast enough to deal with the climate problem?
- We have no choice, yes.
(gentle melody)
- [Voiceover] Once we have clean electricity,
we can begin to electrify many processes
from steel-making to heating
that now require fossil fuels.
And by electrifying transportation,
we can end our dependence on oil
which will solve many problems
in addition to climate change.
This is the floating city of Makoko.
Over 100,000 people live here without government,
sanitation, or electricity.
- You can look around the world
at countries with a heavy reliance on natural resources
and you can see lagging developing,
high levels of inequality, authoritarian rule,
massive corruption on a grand scale.
Nigeria became a centralized petrol state,
a country in which more than 85% of government revenues
were dominated by crude oil.
Texaco, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell,
British Petroleum, and other major companies,
all went into one area,
and that is known as the Niger Delta.
(tribal music)
- [Voiceover] What was the nature of the relationship
between the oil companies and the Nigerian government?
- [Voiceover] Nigeria's economy was marked
by grand corruption.
Huge sums of the oil revenues
that should've been used for investment
in Nigeria and its people have simply gone out the door
to line the pockets of private individuals.
Nigeria's now the largest economy in Africa
and yet most Nigerians are living at or below a $1.25 a day.
You have very low employment,
no more than 30,000 Nigerians are employed
in the oil and gas sector even today.
So, it's a deeply unequal society.
And consequently,
very unstable in terms of social violence, insurgency,
and the environmental devastation of the Niger Delta
is massive.
- Thousands of miles of pipeline and oil infrastructure,
essentially the plumbing of the oil industry.
Underwater, in the swamps, up the creeks,
there are daily spills, leakages,
which have fouled creeks, rivers, and soil,
and Exxon Valdez, a year in terms of oil spills.
For years and years,
every day, 24 hours of the day,
gas was being flagged in Nigeria.
- [Voiceover] To this day, the sky is orange
at midnight from gas flames.
(pressing melody)
- [Voiceover] Around the world, in Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Africa,
oil fosters corruption, dictatorship, and war.
The world would be a much better place
if we didn't need oil anymore.
And soon, we won't.
Hybrid vehicles, which have a rapidly growing market share,
are the first step in a profound revolution.
Electric vehicles don't pollute or emit greenhouse gases.
They are silent, easier to maintain,
and less expensive to drive.
Gasoline costs five times more than the electricity required
to drive an electric car the same distance.
- [Voiceover] Electric cars get cheaper
and better all the time, the motors, the power electronics,
the computers that control the thing,
and especially batteries which were the expensive part.
- [Voiceover] The limiting factor in making electric cars
as practical and affordable as conventional cars
has been the batteries.
- The price of batters over the last five years,
they drop in half.
They're expected to drop in half again
in the same period of time
without any radical breakthrough
just a slow steady increment.
Now, if you drop to one-third, one-quarter
of what it is today,
you can get a 300-250 mile range car for $25,000,
competitive at the get-go, much cheaper to operate,
fundamentally a much better vehicle.
- [Voiceover] Between 2009 and 2015, sales of electric cars
around the world rose tenfold.
Electric cars will be broadly competitive
with conventional cars by 2025
and they have another advantage.
- Should I put it in Sport Insane Mode?
(woman screaming in excitement)
- [Voiceover] They're really cool.
But we have a long way to go.
Without stronger government support,
it will take decades to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles.
In the meantime,
there's another way to reduce oil consumption.
Urban design can make a huge difference
in how much driving we do and how much energy we use.
- Right now, everybody's thinking about climate change,
it's the big problem that we have to solve
and we do, absolutely,
and it needs more attention than it's getting,
but we also have to see it in concert
with all the other benefits that you get
when you address it.
The energy the planet needs is defined by how we live.
It's not just about getting a more energy-efficient car,
it's about using cars less.
We're gonna be building cities
for about two to three billion people between now and 2050,
we better get it right.
- [Voiceover] Many of those cities will be in China
whose urban design has followed
a pattern of freeways and sprawl.
- In China, they're building
what I call high-density sprawl,
it's the same as our American suburb,
but instead of two stories, it's 10 stories.
A tower isolated from street
and street has been completely given over to cars.
Way across town are jobs in a factory
or in an office building,
and they have built a physical environment
that needs the car.
Take Beijing, today.
You have a city with only 30% of the population owning cars
in complete gridlock, they can't move.
China is building cities for 350 million people
over the next 20 years,
that's the same as building
the United States all over again.
If they get that wrong, we're all kind of doomed
to tell you the truth
because if those urban forms cause pollution
and demand more and more energy,
I don't think that we're gonna be able to solve
the carbon problem.
The good news is
they see the hole that they're digging themselves into
and if they get it right,
then they can become a role model
for the rest of the developing world
and it's fairly easy to get it right.
(serene melody)
(speaking in foreign language)
Jaime Lerner was one of the greatest revolutionaries
in urban design 'cause he was the first one to
begin to shape a city around transit,
dedicating streets to city life as oppose to cars.
- [Voiceover] Jaime Lerner's policies
controlled urban sprawl, expanded parks,
and provided affordable and convenient public transit.
- He invented the idea of bus rapid transit,
treating a bus like it was a train.
- [Voiceover] In central Amsterdam,
most trips are made on bicycles.
There are 18 million bicycles in the Netherlands.
More bikes than people.
- I define a good urban form very simply.
Number one, it's human scale.
The streets are narrow, intersections are easy to cross,
cars are going slower, so there's better space
for bikes and pedestrians,
and along the way, you have all the social gathering places
that make a city neighborhood exciting
and interesting to live in.
The best neighborhoods mix age groups
and income groups and activities.
The best neighborhoods have shops and jobs
and park and school and libraries
and has this all mixed together.
When you start talking about
the life that used to be part of a healthy city,
everybody gets it and they want it back.
Every crisis is an opportunity not to be lost.
This is a crisis, but it's a huge opportunity
'cause we can shift the way we build cities
and we can shift the way we live
into a much more positive outcome
not just for climate, but for the planet,
the economy, our social well-belng,
and our health, everything.
(rapid melody)
- [Voiceover] These are northern muriqui monkeys.
They are unique among primates
because they live as equals
without dominance or competition.
- The muriquis are a completely different kind of primate
from any others that we know anything about.
They're peaceful, they associate with each other,
there's no aggression the way you see
or pecking order the way you see in most other animals.
They provide this model of behavior
that we sort of aspire toward.
- [Voiceover] But these animals now face extinction.
(sorrowful suspenseful melody)
95% of their forest has been cut down
and there are only a thousand of them
left in the entire world.
- [Voiceover] These animals could disappear
in our lifetimes.
I just find that
really
alarming.
- [Voiceover] The muriquis are just one casualty
of a vast process that is destroying whole ecosystems
and is a major contributor to climate change.
- It's the destruction of the forests
particularly the rainforests and the boreal forests
around the world that is responsible
for such huge emissions of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere particularly
when the forest are clearcut and burned.
- [Voiceover] Most of these emissions are caused
by the global industrial food system
which originated in the United States after World War II.
- Before World War II, most farms were diversified.
On the same farm where you were growing grain or vegetables,
you were also growing animals.
The animals provided fertility
in the form of their waste to the plants
and the plants provided food for the animals.
After World War II, there was an effort to
convert some of the powerful technologies
that had been developed
as part of the war effort to peacetime uses.
Ammonium nitrate is the main ingredient of munition bombs
and it also is the same ingredient as fertilizer.
In 1947, the big munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama
converted from making bombs to making fertilizer.
Once you've got that seemingly inexhaustible source
of nitrogen fertilizer,
you don't need animals on your farm
and you can move toward monoculture production
that is to say all corn or all soybeans.
This kind of agriculture is actively promoted
and it becomes more profitable
to feed animals on feed lots rather than on farms.
The other important technology
that came out of the war effort was pesticides.
Many of our pesticides began their life as nerve gas
that would kill people at a high dose
and at a lower dose, you could kill insects with
which was a convenient thing because
monocultures have lots of pest problems,
so you need a lot of chemicals.
The secret ingredient of this whole system
I've been describing is fossil fuel.
Fossil fuel is what allows you to make pesticides,
most of them are petrochemical pesticides.
Fossil fuel is what allows you to make fertilizer
which turns into nitrous oxide when it's exposed to oxygen
which is a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon.
- [Voiceover] In the short term,
industrial food is less expensive
because it's mass produced and automated.
As a result, consumption of meat and processed food
has increased dramatically.
- Since the government encourages
the growing of things like corn and soy,
they are, in effect, subsidizing
the building blocks of fast food.
The corn becomes the cattle feed
and the high fructose corn syrup and the sodas,
and the soy becomes the oil
in which most of the fast food gets fried.
We are not supporting people trying to grow
what are called specialty crops i.e real food.
- In the United States,
less than 4% total of farm acres
are dedicated to either fruits or vegetables or tree nuts,
it's a tiny proportion.
- [Voiceover] This system has become unsustainable.
It takes up to 10 times more land
to feed ourselves with meat as it does
to feed ourselves with plants.
As a result, 30% of the Earth's land is now being used
for the production of livestock,
the giant lagoons that store their waste,
and the vast areas needed to grow their food.
- There are literally billions
of animals being raised for food and
huge areas of forest and woodland
are cut down to grow the grain to feed the livestock.
- [Voiceover] In the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso,
over 20,000 square miles have been deforested
to grow soybeans for animal feed.
- The most profitable driver of deforestation
in Latin America is soybeans.
If I'm a farmer in Mato Grosso,
I can down forest and make five to seven hundred dollars
every hectare every year of profit.
- [Voiceover] Blairo Maggi and his brother
became billionaires this way.
They are now the two largest soy producers in the world.
Most of their production is exported to China to feed pigs.
(speaking in foreign language)
- The Maggi family faced little resistance
while destroying forests
because between 2003 and 2010,
the governor of Mato Grosso was Blairo Maggi.
- He was the leader of the governors
and he was kind of the spokesperson for the group,
making the pressure on the present,
very strong pressure on the present.
- [Voiceover] While Maggi was governor,
Mato Grosso accounted for half
of all deforestation in Brazil.
- [Voiceover] Now, deforestation has moved north
into the Amazon
which is endangering the water supply
for tens of millions of people.
- A forest generates its own rainfall.
You can cut down a forest
and what happens to the rainfall in that particular region?
You cut down a vast area of forest
and you're going to have global impact.
- [Voiceover] Much of the water supply in southern Brazil
depends on the forest to the north.
As those forest disappear,
so does the water.
Since 2014, Brazil has experienced severe water shortages
for the first time in its history.
For Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million,
this has become a crisis.
- I would say that for the last two months,
almost every day
after 10pm
and before 6am,
there's no water, it's not raining on the top,
there are place that they don't have water half of the week.
We're seeing tensions between Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro
because Rio needs the water to produce the energy,
but Sao Paulo needs the water for the people,
and they're fighting where to put the water
like how to use the water,
something that we couldn't imagine 10 years ago.
- [Daniel] In 2013, deforestation came up 28%
above the previous year.
- [Voiceover] How come?
- Soy is starting to run out of space.
- Not only are these carbon dioxide emissions increasing
as we destroy and burn the forest,
but there's less forest left to absorb the CO2
that we've put into the atmosphere
from burning our fossil fuels and so forth.
It's pretty shocking
when you think of the vast destruction
of the forest around the world.
- [Voiceover] Nowhere in the world
are the forest more valuable to the Earth's climate
than in Indonesia.
These peatlands store as much carbon
as all the world's other forests combined.
The Indonesian government owns these forest
and has promised to protect them.
Which is exactly the problem.
- These deep peat layers, 10 meters deep or more,
they sequester 10 times more carbon than Amazon forests
and yet these have been drained and dried out
and burned at a frightening pace.
- Everything you are seeing was filmed
covertly and illegally in 2014.
In Indonesia, filming without a journalist visa
is punishable by five years in prison.
During Indonesia's annual burning season,
thousands of illegal fires destroy vast areas of forest
causing air pollution so severe
that airports close for hundreds of miles.
This deforestation makes Indonesia
one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases
along with China and the United States.
Most of these forests are destroyed to plant oil palms,
trees which make a great deal of money
for a very small number of people
because palm oil is used in everything
from girl scout cookies to cleaning products.
As a result, no other commodity
has such a massive impact on our climate.
- [Voiceover] When they clear these lands,
they go down to bare soll, so everything that walked,
grew, slid, or flew is dead, is annihilated.
- [Voiceover] The island of Sumatra
once contained 100,000 orangutans,
less than 7,000 remain.
When land is deforested for palm oil plantation,
orangutans lose their habitat.
When they attempt to return,
the adults are shot and killed.
But the babies clinging to them are sometimes rescued.
The battle to save the orangutans
is not just the battle to save the orangutans,
it's a battle for climate change,
it's a battle for everything,
and all the other species that are in these forests,
it's a battle for the long time economic development
of the indigenous community
versus the benefit for the bank accounts of the super rich.
Local farmers are often evicted
from their traditional lands.
The river levels go down,
the fishery which is the main protein supply
for local communities is destroyed.
- [Voiceover] Palm oil production has boomed
over the last decade making these men billionaires.
(ominous melody)
It is highly profitable
because illegal deforestation is cheap.
And so is labor.
(speaking in foreign language)
- So, this is the irony,
you cannot possibly argue that
that kind of behavior is in the interest
of any kind of economic development.
It's purely in the interest of some guy
whose already got a billion dollars in a Swiss bank account,
everybody else loses.
- [Voiceover] With regard to deforestation,
has corruption been a major problem?
- When it comes to corruption,
it's something that we are not proud at all.
Bribery, extortion money,
it's something that can be easily
observed happening.
- [Voiceover] In 2002, public outrage lead to the creation
of the Corruption Eradication Commission or KPK
which rapidly became
the most trusted institution in Indonesia
and one of the only hopes for protecting
the forests that remain.
- [Voiceover] We're having this interview
in October of 2014
and just a few days ago,
your investigators arrested the governor of Riau.
- Yeah.
- [Voiceover] For taking bribes
from a very important palm oil industrialist.
- Yeah.
- [Voiceover] I see.
- [Voiceover] I have been told
the Indonesian parliament is also quite corrupt.
- Yeah.
- [Voiceover] Do you think that it will be necessary
to prosecute extremely politically powerful people?
- Yes.
- [Voiceover] From very powerful families?
- Yes.
- [Voiceover] Shortly after this interview,
the president of Indonesia nominated a corrupt general
to head the already highly corrupt national police.
The KPK prostested,
forcing President Joko to withdraw the nomination,
but the national police retaliated
by arresting Bambang Widjojanto
and KPK chairman Abraham Samad on fabricated charges.
As we finish this film,
their futures and that of Indonesia's forests
remain in jeopardy.
- [Voiceover] How can the global community
rule out corruption, arrest this deforestation?
It's proving enormously difficult to do.
- We do what is called a brand attack.
We go off to the consumers of
the products of the company,
"Do you know that when you buy
"this chocolate or this soap or whatever,
"you are contributing to the destruction
"of the Sumatran rainforest
"and are contributing to climate change?"
- Companies realize that their customers care about forests.
- [Voiceover] In addition to the products we buy,
we can have an enormous impact on deforestation
by changing our diet
which would also benefit our health.
- When we talk about feeding the world,
we have to ask, "Feeding the world what?"
If the world wants to eat meat
the way we're eating meat now,
nine ounces per person per day,
we need 2.3 more worlds just to grow all that grain.
China's undergoing a dietary transition right now
as they move onto the western diet
and start eating much more meat.
Type 2 diabetes used to be called adult onset diabetes
and we had to change that name
when it started showing up in children,
but in 1980, you could not find
a case of this disease in children.
People who eat heavily plant-based diets
have lower rates of obesity, lower rates of type 2 diabetes,
lower rates of cancer.
- [Voiceover] In a five year study of diet and health,
scientist found that a mediterranean diet
that reduces consumption of red meat and processed foods
reduced strokes, heart attacks,
and deaths from heart disease by 30%.
- [Voiceover] How much longer does someone live
if they had a plant-based diet?
- They might get as much as a decade of life.
However, it's not just how many years you'll live,
it's the fact that you're gonna live
in a more healthful way.
- [Voiceover] Industrial crops and industrial meat
also use vast amounts of hormones,
pesticides, and antibiotics.
These chemicals cause disease
and antibiotic resistance in humans.
- 80% of the antibiotics that are produced in America
go not to human beings,
they're going to farms,
and it's destroying a critical medical tool.
- [Voiceover] Reducing meat consumption
would also allow us to reforest
millions of acres around the world
that are now being used to raise and feed animals.
- [Voiceover] The good news is that
there's a way out of this.
We start sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
as degraded lands return forest,
it's hard to hold these forest back, it's huge.
- Food in our culture are big part of the problem,
but have the potential to be a big part of the solution.
- [Voiceover] Farmers all over the world
are developing healthier ways of growing crops
that store carbon in the soil
and help reverse climate change.
- We try to design the farm where
instead of making one large field of one thing,
we've tried to make it kind of an interesting ecology,
something that has smaller fields, flowers.
We have a succession of crops that are coming in.
They're picking squash out here and cucumbers
and there's gonna be pumpkins in the back there.
For our crew, about 50 of them
have full-time employment here.
We have to make a place where they can have secure lives,
so the kids can go to school,
and they can think about college,
they don't have to think about moving some place
to get to the next job.
And they're growing old with us.
Crops will have insects that can become a problem,
but there's a whole army of beneficial insects,
natural enemies to those,
and suddenly you have insect control right in your field.
They're doing work that might otherwise be
something you pay attention to with a pesticide.
In the end, we have plants that are really vibrant, healthy,
and they resist diseases, and the resist insect attacks
when they're healthy.
- We used to think it took eons
to build an inch or two inches of topsoil, but in fact,
we have, I mean, I can point you to farmers
who in their lifetime have built several inches of topsoil
where it didn't exist before,
and that soil is, of course, carbon,
carbon taken out of the air.
- So, we're building carbon, we're building
organic matter in our ground,
and still we're growing beautiful, economic crops.
This is really basic stuff,
but it is the piece that will unlock
the ideas of how agriculture does better
in terms of climate change and soil life
and healthier plants and healthier production.
- [Voiceover] It's time to celebrate innovation
that is big scale
and could bubble up into a global solution.
California is right at the helm.
- There's a sensitivity to the natural environment.
It's in the air I breathe, the people I meet.
- [Voiceover] In 2006, California enacted
comprehensive legislation to address climate change.
- There was a political coalition
between environmentalist who cared about climate change,
people who were concerned with health,
and fiscal conservatives who were just looking for a way
to save money for the cities.
- [Voiceover] California requires that electrical generation
be derived from renewable sources
for one-third of the supply
and that's gonna be achieved by 2020.
In 2014, California is already better than 22%.
- 33% is already looking like a floor not a ceiling.
We have not had any power plants burning coal for years.
- [Voiceover] Carbon has a price.
Those who pollute have to buy credits
and those credits then generate funds
to invest in sustainable practices.
- [Voiceover] By 2020, we need to have
a million solar rooftops
and we need to have a million electric vehicles on the road.
- [Voiceover] We have the most intelligent
building standards that make our buildings,
residential and commercial, more efficient.
- The cleanest and cheapest of all energy
is the energy that you don't have to use.
- [Voiceover] Every office building had low ceilings
and a lot of fluorescent lights and black glass,
majority of the energy being used in these buildings
was artificial light, but it was daytime,
and all it took was to make tall ceilings,
natural glass windows,
and you don't have to use artificial light.
When we saw things that way,
we also made better human environments.
- California had a requirement
that the auto companies begin producing cars
that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions
and after litigating with the auto companies
and taking our case all the way
to the supreme court, we won.
As a result of this legislation,
there's a whole series of changes
in the way cars are being built.
- What is required is an integrated effort
in electricity generation,
transportation of people and goods,
land use, the way food is grown, the way forest are managed,
the whole way of life has to be sensitive
to the requirements of nature.
- First, people deny that they're part of the problem,
then they deny that there's a solution,
then they tell you that if there is a solution,
it's too expensive,
the growth in our economy, we believe, is tied to
our ability to innovate, to use energy more efficiently,
to create products that other people
around the world are gonna want to use.
- There's a lot California can do and is doing,
but it has no impact unless others join with us,
sooner rather than later.
(hopeful melody)
- [Voiceover] This is a unique human challenge.
It cannot be solved by one country or one state.
- [Voiceover] Every day we are making the world
more dangerous than it was yesterday.
We have to reverse that system
to come to a place where every day can be safer planet
than it was yesterday.
Life is about creativity.
What kind of planet you want to create?
- [Voiceover] In the end, I go back to this story where
there's an older person who owns an estate.
And he says, "I want to plant a tree."
And the gardener says, "Well.
"You don't understand it's gonna take a generation
"for this tree to mature,
"you won't be here."
And he said,
"In that case, there's no time to lose, is there?"
- [Voiceover] We can stop climate change.
(inspirational music)