1 00:00:08,420 --> 00:00:09,850 Thank you very much. 2 00:00:10,460 --> 00:00:11,525 When I was a boy, 3 00:00:11,525 --> 00:00:15,310 my parents would sometimes take me camping in California. 4 00:00:15,430 --> 00:00:19,080 We would camp in the beaches, in the forests, in the deserts. 5 00:00:19,590 --> 00:00:22,080 Some people think the deserts are empty of life 6 00:00:22,080 --> 00:00:25,390 but my parents taught me to see the wildlife all around us: 7 00:00:25,439 --> 00:00:29,040 the hawks, the eagles, the tortoises. 8 00:00:29,170 --> 00:00:31,410 One time when we were setting up camp, 9 00:00:31,410 --> 00:00:34,510 we found a baby scorpion with its stinger out, 10 00:00:34,510 --> 00:00:36,849 and I remember thinking how cool it was 11 00:00:36,849 --> 00:00:40,240 that something could be both so cute and also so dangerous. 12 00:00:41,650 --> 00:00:44,600 After college, I moved to California and I started working on 13 00:00:44,600 --> 00:00:46,490 a number of environmental campaigns, 14 00:00:46,490 --> 00:00:50,500 I got involved in helping to save the state's last ancient redwood forests 15 00:00:50,500 --> 00:00:55,590 and blocking a proposed radioactive waste repository set for the desert. 16 00:00:55,590 --> 00:00:56,890 Shortly after I turned 30, 17 00:00:56,890 --> 00:01:00,410 I decided I wanted to dedicate a significant amount of my life 18 00:01:00,410 --> 00:01:02,010 to solving climate change. 19 00:01:02,190 --> 00:01:05,589 I was worried that global warming would end up destroying 20 00:01:05,660 --> 00:01:07,345 many of the natural environments 21 00:01:07,345 --> 00:01:09,730 that people had worked so hard to protect. 22 00:01:10,170 --> 00:01:13,180 I thought the technical solutions were pretty straightforward; 23 00:01:13,180 --> 00:01:16,060 solar panels on every roof, electric car in the driveway, 24 00:01:16,060 --> 00:01:18,820 that the main obstacles were political. 25 00:01:18,820 --> 00:01:21,300 And so I helped to organize a coalition 26 00:01:21,300 --> 00:01:25,470 of the country's biggest labor unions and biggest environmental groups. 27 00:01:25,470 --> 00:01:30,090 Our proposal was for a 300-billion-dollar investment in renewables. 28 00:01:30,090 --> 00:01:33,200 And the idea was not only would we prevent climate change, 29 00:01:33,200 --> 00:01:35,795 but we would also create millions of new jobs 30 00:01:35,795 --> 00:01:38,440 in a very fast-growing high-tech sector. 31 00:01:38,770 --> 00:01:41,629 Our efforts really paid off in 2007, 32 00:01:41,629 --> 00:01:45,500 when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama embraced our vision. 33 00:01:45,500 --> 00:01:51,319 And between 2009 and 2015, the US invested 150 billion dollars 34 00:01:51,319 --> 00:01:54,040 in renewables and other kinds of clean tech. 35 00:01:54,810 --> 00:01:57,960 but right away we started to encounter some problems. 36 00:01:57,960 --> 00:02:00,819 So first of all, the electricity from solar rooftops 37 00:02:00,819 --> 00:02:04,679 ends up costing about twice as much as the electricity from solar farms. 38 00:02:04,929 --> 00:02:06,719 And both solar farms and wind farms 39 00:02:06,719 --> 00:02:09,369 require covering a pretty significant amount of land 40 00:02:09,369 --> 00:02:11,590 with solar panels and wind turbines 41 00:02:11,590 --> 00:02:14,590 and also building very big transmission lines 42 00:02:14,590 --> 00:02:17,780 to bring all that electricity from the countryside into the city. 43 00:02:18,100 --> 00:02:22,990 Both of those things were often very strongly resisted by local communities, 44 00:02:22,990 --> 00:02:25,205 as well as by conservation biologists 45 00:02:25,205 --> 00:02:30,120 who were concerned about the impacts on wild bird species and other animals. 46 00:02:30,600 --> 00:02:32,610 Now, there was a lot of other people 47 00:02:32,610 --> 00:02:34,830 working on technical solutions at the time. 48 00:02:34,830 --> 00:02:36,600 One of the big challenges, of course, 49 00:02:36,600 --> 00:02:38,780 is the intermittency of solar and wind. 50 00:02:38,780 --> 00:02:42,080 They only generate electricity about 10 to 30 percent of the time 51 00:02:42,080 --> 00:02:43,560 during most of year. 52 00:02:43,560 --> 00:02:45,775 But some of the solutions being proposed 53 00:02:45,775 --> 00:02:50,289 were to convert hydroelectric dams into gigantic batteries. 54 00:02:50,289 --> 00:02:53,504 The idea was that when the sun was shining and the wind was blowing, 55 00:02:53,504 --> 00:02:56,480 you would pump the water uphill, store it for later, 56 00:02:56,480 --> 00:02:59,700 and then when you needed electricity, run it over the turbines. 57 00:03:00,520 --> 00:03:02,649 In terms of wildlife, some of these problems 58 00:03:02,649 --> 00:03:04,859 just didn't seem like a significant concern. 59 00:03:04,859 --> 00:03:08,980 So when I learned that house cats kill billions of birds every year 60 00:03:09,010 --> 00:03:12,155 it put into perspective the hundreds of thousands of birds 61 00:03:12,155 --> 00:03:14,230 that are killed by wind turbines. 62 00:03:14,630 --> 00:03:16,500 It basically seemed to me at the time 63 00:03:16,500 --> 00:03:20,450 that most, if not all, of the problems of scaling up solar and wind 64 00:03:20,450 --> 00:03:23,450 could be solved through more technological innovation. 65 00:03:24,190 --> 00:03:25,979 But as the years went by, 66 00:03:25,979 --> 00:03:29,604 these problems persisted and, in many cases, grew worse. 67 00:03:29,830 --> 00:03:33,070 So California is a state that's really committed to renewable energy, 68 00:03:33,330 --> 00:03:36,594 but we still haven't converted many of our hydroelectric dams 69 00:03:36,594 --> 00:03:37,949 into big batteries. 70 00:03:38,189 --> 00:03:40,630 Some of the problems are just Geographic; 71 00:03:40,630 --> 00:03:43,540 it's just you have to have a very particular kind of formation 72 00:03:43,710 --> 00:03:44,939 to be able to do that, 73 00:03:44,939 --> 00:03:46,280 and even in those cases, 74 00:03:46,280 --> 00:03:49,019 it's quite expensive to make those conversions. 75 00:03:49,019 --> 00:03:52,389 Other challenges are just that there're other uses for water 76 00:03:52,389 --> 00:03:53,910 like irrigation, 77 00:03:53,910 --> 00:03:58,419 and maybe the most significant problem is just that in California, 78 00:03:58,419 --> 00:04:00,814 the water in our rivers and reservoirs 79 00:04:00,814 --> 00:04:03,210 is growing increasingly scarce and unreliable 80 00:04:03,210 --> 00:04:05,170 due to climate change. 81 00:04:05,170 --> 00:04:09,610 In terms of this issue of reliability as a consequence of it, 82 00:04:09,610 --> 00:04:12,080 we've actually had to stop the electricity 83 00:04:12,080 --> 00:04:14,130 coming from the solar farms into the cities 84 00:04:14,130 --> 00:04:16,470 because there's just been too much of it at times. 85 00:04:16,470 --> 00:04:20,289 Or we've been starting to pay our neighboring states like Arizona 86 00:04:20,328 --> 00:04:22,039 to take that solar electricity. 87 00:04:22,039 --> 00:04:25,529 The alternative is to suffer from blowouts of the grid. 88 00:04:25,649 --> 00:04:27,760 And it turns out that 89 00:04:27,760 --> 00:04:30,730 when it comes to birds and cats - 90 00:04:31,380 --> 00:04:35,180 cats don't kill eagles; eagles kill cats. 91 00:04:35,180 --> 00:04:40,750 What cats kill are the small common sparrows and jay's and robins, 92 00:04:40,750 --> 00:04:44,700 birds that are not endangered and not at risk of going extinct. 93 00:04:45,040 --> 00:04:51,185 What do kill eagles and other big birds like this kite as well as owls and condors 94 00:04:51,185 --> 00:04:53,890 and other threatened and endangered species 95 00:04:53,890 --> 00:04:54,990 are wind turbines, 96 00:04:54,990 --> 00:04:57,485 in fact, one of the most significant threats 97 00:04:57,485 --> 00:04:59,900 to those big bird species that we have - 98 00:04:59,900 --> 00:05:03,740 we just haven't been introducing the airspace with many other objects 99 00:05:03,740 --> 00:05:06,880 like we have wind turbines over the last several years. 100 00:05:07,640 --> 00:05:09,430 And in terms of solar, 101 00:05:09,430 --> 00:05:13,550 you know building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm; 102 00:05:13,550 --> 00:05:16,090 you have to clear the whole area of wildlife. 103 00:05:16,420 --> 00:05:21,927 So this is a picture of one third of one of the biggest solar farms in California 104 00:05:21,927 --> 00:05:23,195 called Ivanpah. 105 00:05:23,195 --> 00:05:24,370 In order to build this, 106 00:05:24,370 --> 00:05:27,490 they had to clear the whole area of desert tortoises, 107 00:05:27,560 --> 00:05:31,660 literally pulling desert tortoises and their babies out of burrows, 108 00:05:31,670 --> 00:05:35,470 putting them on the back of pickup trucks, and transporting them to captivity 109 00:05:35,470 --> 00:05:37,490 where many of them ended up dying. 110 00:05:37,490 --> 00:05:42,075 And the current estimates are that about 6,000 birds are killed every year, 111 00:05:42,200 --> 00:05:44,465 actually catching on fire above the solar farm 112 00:05:44,465 --> 00:05:46,150 and plunging to their deaths. 113 00:05:46,480 --> 00:05:48,620 Over time it gradually struck me 114 00:05:48,620 --> 00:05:52,090 that there was really no amount of technological innovation 115 00:05:52,130 --> 00:05:55,420 that was going to make the sun shine more regularly 116 00:05:55,420 --> 00:05:57,860 or wind blow more reliably. 117 00:05:57,860 --> 00:06:00,870 In fact, you could make solar panels cheaper, 118 00:06:00,870 --> 00:06:02,680 and you could make wind turbines bigger 119 00:06:02,680 --> 00:06:06,080 but sunlight and wind are just really dilute fuels. 120 00:06:06,080 --> 00:06:09,080 And in order to produce significant amounts of electricity, 121 00:06:09,100 --> 00:06:12,820 you just have to cover a very large land mass with them. 122 00:06:13,210 --> 00:06:17,310 In other words, all of the major problems with renewables aren't technical, 123 00:06:17,310 --> 00:06:19,640 they're natural. 124 00:06:19,640 --> 00:06:22,630 Well, dealing with all of this unreliability 125 00:06:22,630 --> 00:06:24,280 and the big environmental impacts 126 00:06:24,280 --> 00:06:26,530 obviously comes at a pretty high economic cost. 127 00:06:26,530 --> 00:06:30,070 You know we've been hearing a lot about how solar panels and wind turbines 128 00:06:30,070 --> 00:06:32,440 have come down in cost in recent years, 129 00:06:32,440 --> 00:06:34,840 but that cost has been significantly outweighed 130 00:06:34,840 --> 00:06:38,960 by just the challenges of integrating all of that unreliable power onto the grid. 131 00:06:39,280 --> 00:06:41,990 Just take, for instance, what's happening in California. 132 00:06:41,990 --> 00:06:45,380 At the period in which solar panels have come down in price 133 00:06:45,650 --> 00:06:48,130 very significantly, same with wind, 134 00:06:48,130 --> 00:06:50,500 we've seen our electricity prices 135 00:06:50,500 --> 00:06:52,449 go up five times more than the rest of the country. 136 00:06:52,449 --> 00:06:54,729 And it's not unique to us. 137 00:06:54,729 --> 00:06:56,530 You can see the same phenomenon happen in Germany, 138 00:06:56,530 --> 00:06:58,360 which is really the world's leader in solar, wind, 139 00:06:58,360 --> 00:06:59,590 and other renewable technologies. 140 00:06:59,590 --> 00:07:02,800 Their prices increased 50 percent during their big renewable energy push. 141 00:07:04,630 --> 00:07:06,960 Now you might think, well, dealing with climate change 142 00:07:08,800 --> 00:07:10,690 is just going to require that we all pay more for energy. 143 00:07:10,690 --> 00:07:12,910 That's what I used to think. 144 00:07:12,910 --> 00:07:16,060 But consider the case of France. 145 00:07:16,060 --> 00:07:18,250 France actually gets twice as much of its electricity 146 00:07:18,250 --> 00:07:20,349 from clean zero emission sources than does Germany, and yet, 147 00:07:23,410 --> 00:07:25,990 France pays almost half as much for its electricity. 148 00:07:25,990 --> 00:07:29,050 How can that be? 149 00:07:29,050 --> 00:07:30,370 Well, you might have already anticipated the answer. 150 00:07:30,370 --> 00:07:32,050 France gets most of its electricity from nuclear power, about 75% in total. 151 00:07:37,090 --> 00:07:39,370 And nuclear just ends up being a lot more reliable, 152 00:07:39,370 --> 00:07:41,620 generating power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 153 00:07:41,620 --> 00:07:45,160 for about 90% of the year. 154 00:07:45,160 --> 00:07:47,620 We see this phenomenon show up at a global level. 155 00:07:47,620 --> 00:07:49,090 So, for example, there's been a natural experiment 156 00:07:49,090 --> 00:07:51,460 over the last 40 years. 157 00:07:51,460 --> 00:07:52,960 Even more than that, 158 00:07:52,960 --> 00:07:54,639 or in terms of the deployment of nuclear and the deployment of solar, 159 00:07:58,419 --> 00:08:00,460 you can see that at a little bit higher cost, 160 00:08:00,460 --> 00:08:02,169 we got about half as much electricity 161 00:08:02,169 --> 00:08:06,639 from solar and wind than we did from nuclear. 162 00:08:06,639 --> 00:08:08,830 Well, what does all this mean for going forward? 163 00:08:08,830 --> 00:08:10,840 I think one of the most significant findings to date is this one. 164 00:08:10,840 --> 00:08:13,659 Had Germany spent five hundred and eighty billion dollars on nuclear 165 00:08:13,659 --> 00:08:15,280 instead of renewables, 166 00:08:17,470 --> 00:08:19,509 it would already be getting a hundred percent of its electricity 167 00:08:19,509 --> 00:08:21,099 from clean energy sources, and all of its transportation. 168 00:08:26,409 --> 00:08:27,520 Now I think you might be wondering and it's quite reasonable to ask: 169 00:08:30,009 --> 00:08:32,469 Is nuclear power safe and what do you do with the waste? 170 00:08:32,469 --> 00:08:33,969 Well, those are very reasonable questions. 171 00:08:33,969 --> 00:08:36,070 Turns out that there's been scientific studies on this 172 00:08:36,070 --> 00:08:38,770 going over 40 years. 173 00:08:38,770 --> 00:08:40,240 This is just the most recent study 174 00:08:40,240 --> 00:08:42,250 that was done by the prestigious British Medical Journal, Lancet, 175 00:08:42,250 --> 00:08:44,260 finds that nuclear power is the safest. 176 00:08:44,260 --> 00:08:46,930 It's easy to understand why. 177 00:08:46,930 --> 00:08:48,640 According to the World Health Organization, 178 00:08:48,640 --> 00:08:51,040 about 7 million people die annually from air pollution. 179 00:08:53,500 --> 00:08:55,570 And nuclear plants don't emit that. 180 00:08:55,570 --> 00:08:57,430 As a result, the climate scientist, James Hansen, looked at and he calculated 181 00:08:59,350 --> 00:09:01,750 that nuclear power has already saved almost two million lives to date. 182 00:09:01,750 --> 00:09:04,210 It turns out that even wind energy is deadlier than nuclear. 183 00:09:07,120 --> 00:09:09,790 This is a photograph taken of two maintenance workers 184 00:09:09,790 --> 00:09:11,500 in the Netherlands, 185 00:09:11,500 --> 00:09:13,630 shortly before one of them fell to his death to avoid the fire, 186 00:09:15,640 --> 00:09:17,260 and the other one was engulfed in flames. 187 00:09:17,260 --> 00:09:20,440 Now what about environmental impact? 188 00:09:20,440 --> 00:09:21,760 Well, I think a really easy way to think about it is 189 00:09:21,760 --> 00:09:24,070 that uranium fuel which is what we used to power nuclear plants 190 00:09:24,070 --> 00:09:25,930 is just really energy dense. 191 00:09:28,210 --> 00:09:30,340 About the same amount of uranium as this Rubiks's Cube 192 00:09:32,890 --> 00:09:34,660 can power all of the energy you need in your entire life. 193 00:09:35,440 --> 00:09:38,680 As a consequence, 194 00:09:38,680 --> 00:09:40,600 you just don't need that much land 195 00:09:40,600 --> 00:09:42,880 in order to produce a significant amount of electricity. 196 00:09:42,880 --> 00:09:44,830 Here you can compare the solar farm I just described, Ivanpah, 197 00:09:44,830 --> 00:09:47,410 to California's last nuclear plant, 198 00:09:47,410 --> 00:09:50,770 Diablo Canyon. 199 00:09:50,770 --> 00:09:52,750 It takes 450 times more land to generate the same amount of electricity 200 00:09:52,750 --> 00:09:54,790 as it does from nuclear. 201 00:09:54,790 --> 00:09:57,430 You would need 17 more solar farms 202 00:09:59,920 --> 00:10:02,320 like Ivanpah in order to generate the same output as Diablo Canyon. 203 00:10:02,320 --> 00:10:05,800 And of course it would then be unreliable. 204 00:10:05,800 --> 00:10:07,960 Well, what about the mining and the waste and the material throughput. 205 00:10:10,120 --> 00:10:11,920 Well, This has been studied pretty closely as well. 206 00:10:11,920 --> 00:10:13,510 And it just turns out 207 00:10:13,510 --> 00:10:16,270 that solar panels require 17 times more materials than nuclear plants do, 208 00:10:18,610 --> 00:10:21,490 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, steel, etc. 209 00:10:21,490 --> 00:10:23,230 And that includes all the fuels used for those nuclear plants. 210 00:10:23,230 --> 00:10:25,480 The consequence is that what comes out at the end since its material throughput 211 00:10:27,730 --> 00:10:30,160 is just not a lot of waste from nuclear. 212 00:10:30,160 --> 00:10:32,560 All of the waste from the Swiss nuclear program fits into this room. 213 00:10:34,570 --> 00:10:37,000 Nuclear waste is actually the only waste from electricity production 214 00:10:38,950 --> 00:10:41,230 that's safely contained and internalized. 215 00:10:41,230 --> 00:10:43,210 Every other way of making electricity 216 00:10:43,210 --> 00:10:45,490 emits that waste into the natural environment 217 00:10:45,490 --> 00:10:48,010 either as pollution or as material waste. 218 00:10:48,010 --> 00:10:50,589 We tend to think of solar panels as clean 219 00:10:50,589 --> 00:10:53,410 but the truth is that there is no plan to deal with solar panels 220 00:10:55,270 --> 00:10:57,790 at the end of their 20 or 25 year life. 221 00:10:57,790 --> 00:11:00,220 A lot of experts are actually very concerned that solar panels 222 00:11:00,220 --> 00:11:02,440 are just going to be shipped to poor countries in Africa or Asia 223 00:11:04,180 --> 00:11:06,459 with the rest of our electronic waste stream to be disassembled, 224 00:11:10,780 --> 00:11:13,210 often exposing people to really high level of toxic elements, 225 00:11:13,210 --> 00:11:15,610 including lead, cadmium and chromium, 226 00:11:15,610 --> 00:11:17,980 elements that because they're elements, their toxicity never declines over time. 227 00:11:20,680 --> 00:11:23,200 I think we have an intuitive sense 228 00:11:23,200 --> 00:11:25,660 that nuclear is a really powerful strong energy source, 229 00:11:25,660 --> 00:11:28,360 and that sunlight is really dilute and diffuse and weak, 230 00:11:31,150 --> 00:11:33,430 which is why you have to spread solar collectors or wind collectors 231 00:11:35,290 --> 00:11:38,320 over such a large amount of land. 232 00:11:38,320 --> 00:11:40,750 Maybe that's why nobody was surprised 233 00:11:40,750 --> 00:11:43,150 when in the recent science-fiction remake of Blade Runner, 234 00:11:43,150 --> 00:11:45,910 the film open a very dark dystopian scene 235 00:11:45,910 --> 00:11:48,340 where California's deserts have been entirely paved with solar farms. 236 00:11:52,480 --> 00:11:53,860 All of which, I think, raises a really uncomfortable question: 237 00:11:53,860 --> 00:11:56,740 In the effort to try to save the climate, are we destroying the environment? 238 00:11:59,020 --> 00:12:02,290 Well, the interesting thing is that over the last several hundred years, 239 00:12:05,710 --> 00:12:07,030 human beings have actually been trying to move away 240 00:12:07,030 --> 00:12:08,860 from what you would consider matter-dense fuels 241 00:12:08,860 --> 00:12:11,710 towards energy dense ones. 242 00:12:11,710 --> 00:12:14,140 That means really from wood and dung towards coal, oil, natural gas, uranium. 243 00:12:16,990 --> 00:12:18,310 This is a phenomenon that's been going on for a long time. 244 00:12:18,310 --> 00:12:20,230 Poor countries around the world are in the process still 245 00:12:22,090 --> 00:12:23,620 of moving away from wood and dung as their primary energies. 246 00:12:23,620 --> 00:12:26,500 And for the most part, this is a positive thing. 247 00:12:26,500 --> 00:12:29,980 As you stop using wood as your major source of fuel, 248 00:12:32,050 --> 00:12:34,510 it allows the forests to grow back and the wildlife to return. 249 00:12:34,510 --> 00:12:36,340 As you stop burning wood in your home, 250 00:12:36,340 --> 00:12:38,410 you no longer need to breath that toxic smoke. 251 00:12:40,990 --> 00:12:43,750 And as you go from coal to natural gas and uranium 252 00:12:43,750 --> 00:12:45,790 as your main sources of energy, 253 00:12:45,790 --> 00:12:48,130 it holds out the possibility of basically eliminating air pollution altogether. 254 00:12:50,830 --> 00:12:53,050 There's just this problem with nuclear - 255 00:12:53,050 --> 00:12:55,240 well, it's been pretty popular to move from dirtier to cleaner energy sources, 256 00:12:56,890 --> 00:12:59,890 and from energy diffuse to energy dense sources - 257 00:12:59,890 --> 00:13:02,230 nuclear is just really unpopular for a bunch of historical reasons. 258 00:13:02,230 --> 00:13:04,780 And as a consequence, in the past, 259 00:13:04,780 --> 00:13:07,450 I think a lot of others have sort of said, 260 00:13:07,450 --> 00:13:09,520 in order to deal with climate change, 261 00:13:09,520 --> 00:13:11,170 we're just going to need 262 00:13:11,170 --> 00:13:12,850 all the different kinds of clean energy that we have. 263 00:13:15,490 --> 00:13:16,990 The problem is that it just turns out not to be true. 264 00:13:16,990 --> 00:13:19,600 You remember I discussed France a little bit ago. 265 00:13:20,920 --> 00:13:22,240 France gets most of its electricity from nuclear. 266 00:13:22,240 --> 00:13:24,430 If France were to try to significantly scale up solar and wind, 267 00:13:27,339 --> 00:13:29,170 it would also have to significantly reduce how much electricity it gets from nuclear. 268 00:13:32,980 --> 00:13:35,980 That's because in order to handle the huge variability of solar and wind on the grid, 269 00:13:35,980 --> 00:13:38,079 they would need to burn more natural gas. 270 00:13:38,079 --> 00:13:40,120 Think of it this way, 271 00:13:40,120 --> 00:13:42,250 it's just really hard to ramp up and down a nuclear plant 272 00:13:44,139 --> 00:13:45,790 whereas I think we're all pretty familiar with turning natural gas 273 00:13:45,790 --> 00:13:47,829 up and down on our stove. 274 00:13:47,829 --> 00:13:50,350 A similar process works in managing the grid. 275 00:13:50,350 --> 00:13:52,930 Of course it goes without saying 276 00:13:52,930 --> 00:13:55,240 that oil and gas companies understand this pretty well, 277 00:13:55,240 --> 00:13:57,310 which is why we've seen them invest millions of dollars in recent years 278 00:13:59,350 --> 00:14:03,250 in promoting solar and wind. 279 00:14:03,250 --> 00:14:05,500 This just raises, I think, another challenging question 280 00:14:05,500 --> 00:14:07,990 which is that in places that are using a lot of nuclear, 281 00:14:07,990 --> 00:14:10,360 their grids that are mostly nuclear and hydro, 282 00:14:14,170 --> 00:14:15,639 and going towards solar and wind and other renewables 283 00:14:15,639 --> 00:14:17,620 would actually increase carbon emissions. 284 00:14:17,620 --> 00:14:19,930 I think a better alternative is just to tell the truth. 285 00:14:21,519 --> 00:14:23,380 And that's what a number of scientists have been doing. 286 00:14:23,380 --> 00:14:25,620 I mentioned earlier 287 00:14:25,620 --> 00:14:27,730 that hundreds of thousands of birds are killed every year by wind turbines. 288 00:14:27,730 --> 00:14:29,380 What I didn't mention is that a million bats at a minimum 289 00:14:31,899 --> 00:14:33,880 are killed every year by wind. 290 00:14:33,880 --> 00:14:35,829 The consequence has been that bat scientists 291 00:14:35,829 --> 00:14:37,480 have been speaking out about this. 292 00:14:37,480 --> 00:14:40,209 This particular bat species, the hoary bat, 293 00:14:40,209 --> 00:14:42,339 which is a migratory bat species, 294 00:14:42,339 --> 00:14:44,649 is literally at risk of going extinct right now 295 00:14:46,449 --> 00:14:48,940 because of the significant expansion of wind. 296 00:14:48,940 --> 00:14:51,640 It's not just wind, it's also on solar. 297 00:14:51,640 --> 00:14:53,529 The scientists who were involved in creating the Ivanpah solar farm 298 00:14:53,529 --> 00:14:55,959 and who were involved in clearing that land have been speaking out. 299 00:14:58,149 --> 00:15:01,120 One of them wrote, 300 00:15:01,120 --> 00:15:03,399 "Everybody knows that translocation of desert tortoises doesn't work. 301 00:15:03,399 --> 00:15:05,290 When you're walking in front of a bulldozer, 302 00:15:07,089 --> 00:15:09,160 crying, and moving animals and cacti out of the way, 303 00:15:09,160 --> 00:15:11,199 it's hard to think that the project is a good idea." 304 00:15:11,199 --> 00:15:13,480 And now we can see these phenomena at work at an international level. 305 00:15:16,540 --> 00:15:18,370 In my home state of California, 306 00:15:18,370 --> 00:15:20,410 we've been stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain 307 00:15:22,329 --> 00:15:23,860 in order to handle all that intermittent solar and wind. 308 00:15:24,250 --> 00:15:26,230 It's sprung a leak. 309 00:15:26,230 --> 00:15:28,300 It was equivalent to putting 500,000 cars on the road. 310 00:15:28,300 --> 00:15:30,640 And currently in Germany, 311 00:15:30,640 --> 00:15:33,220 there's protesters trying to block a new coal mining project 312 00:15:34,320 --> 00:15:36,240 that would involve destroying the ancient Han back forest 313 00:15:36,240 --> 00:15:38,730 in order to get to the coal underneath, 314 00:15:38,730 --> 00:15:41,100 all in an effort to phase out nuclear and expand solar and wind. 315 00:15:43,440 --> 00:15:46,380 The good news is that I think that people still care about nature enough 316 00:15:48,510 --> 00:15:50,310 for these facts to matter. 317 00:15:50,310 --> 00:15:52,770 We saw last year in South Korea 318 00:15:52,770 --> 00:15:55,110 a citizen's jury deliberated for several months 319 00:15:55,110 --> 00:15:56,880 weighing these different issues. 320 00:15:56,880 --> 00:15:58,890 They had to decide whether they were going to phase out nuclear 321 00:15:58,890 --> 00:16:01,650 or keep it and expand it. 322 00:16:01,650 --> 00:16:04,140 They started out 40 percent in favor of expanding nuclear 323 00:16:06,540 --> 00:16:08,040 but after several months and considering these issues, 324 00:16:08,040 --> 00:16:10,320 they ended up voting 60% to expand nuclear. 325 00:16:10,320 --> 00:16:13,020 A similar phenomena just happened last week in Arizona. 326 00:16:15,120 --> 00:16:17,100 The voters had a ballot initiative 327 00:16:17,100 --> 00:16:19,200 to vote on whether or not to continue with nuclear 328 00:16:19,200 --> 00:16:21,150 or to phase it out and try to replace it with natural gas and solar. 329 00:16:23,220 --> 00:16:26,160 They ended up rejecting at 70 to 30. 330 00:16:26,160 --> 00:16:28,500 And even here in Europe, we saw the Netherlands 331 00:16:28,500 --> 00:16:30,150 is the one of the first countries in recent memory 332 00:16:32,700 --> 00:16:34,740 to actually announce as they did last week 333 00:16:34,740 --> 00:16:36,360 that they're going to start to increase their reliance on nuclear power 334 00:16:36,360 --> 00:16:37,890 in recognition that there's just no way 335 00:16:39,810 --> 00:16:41,250 they could generate significant amounts of energy enough from solar and wind 336 00:16:43,110 --> 00:16:44,970 to meet their climate targets. 337 00:16:44,970 --> 00:16:47,370 I think it's natural 338 00:16:47,370 --> 00:16:49,560 that those of us that became very concerned about climate change, 339 00:16:49,560 --> 00:16:51,210 such a big environmental issue, 340 00:16:51,210 --> 00:16:53,310 would gravitate towards really romantic solutions 341 00:16:56,540 --> 00:16:58,980 like harmonizing human civilization with the natural world 342 00:16:58,980 --> 00:17:01,140 using renewable energies. 343 00:17:01,140 --> 00:17:03,090 But I think it's also understandable that as the facts have come in, 344 00:17:05,849 --> 00:17:07,650 many of us started to question our prior beliefs and change our minds. 345 00:17:10,410 --> 00:17:14,030 For me the question now is 346 00:17:14,030 --> 00:17:16,859 that we know that renewables can't save the planet, 347 00:17:16,859 --> 00:17:18,660 are we going to keep keep letting them destroy it. 348 00:17:18,660 --> 00:17:25,510 Thank you very much.