WEBVTT 00:00:08.420 --> 00:00:09.850 Thank you very much. 00:00:10.460 --> 00:00:11.525 When I was a boy, 00:00:11.525 --> 00:00:15.310 my parents would sometimes take me camping in California. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:15.430 --> 00:00:19.080 We would camp in the beaches, in the forests, in the deserts. 00:00:19.590 --> 00:00:22.080 Some people think the deserts are empty of life 00:00:22.080 --> 00:00:25.390 but my parents taught me to see the wildlife all around us: 00:00:25.439 --> 00:00:29.040 the hawks, the eagles, the tortoises. 00:00:29.170 --> 00:00:31.410 One time when we were setting up camp, 00:00:31.410 --> 00:00:34.510 we found a baby scorpion with its stinger out, 00:00:34.510 --> 00:00:36.849 and I remember thinking how cool it was 00:00:36.849 --> 00:00:40.240 that something could be both so cute and also so dangerous. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:41.650 --> 00:00:44.600 After college, I moved to California and I started working on 00:00:44.600 --> 00:00:46.490 a number of environmental campaigns, 00:00:46.490 --> 00:00:50.500 I got involved in helping to save the state's last ancient redwood forests 00:00:50.500 --> 00:00:55.590 and blocking a proposed radioactive waste repository set for the desert. 00:00:55.590 --> 00:00:56.890 Shortly after I turned 30, 00:00:56.890 --> 00:01:00.410 I decided I wanted to dedicate a significant amount of my life 00:01:00.410 --> 00:01:02.010 to solving climate change. 00:01:02.190 --> 00:01:05.589 I was worried that global warming would end up destroying 00:01:05.660 --> 00:01:07.345 many of the natural environments 00:01:07.345 --> 00:01:09.730 that people had worked so hard to protect. 00:01:10.170 --> 00:01:13.180 I thought the technical solutions were pretty straightforward; 00:01:13.180 --> 00:01:16.060 solar panels on every roof, electric car in the driveway, 00:01:16.060 --> 00:01:18.820 that the main obstacles were political. 00:01:18.820 --> 00:01:21.300 And so I helped to organize a coalition 00:01:21.300 --> 00:01:25.470 of the country's biggest labor unions and biggest environmental groups. 00:01:25.470 --> 00:01:30.090 Our proposal was for a 300-billion-dollar investment in renewables. 00:01:30.090 --> 00:01:33.200 And the idea was not only would we prevent climate change, 00:01:33.200 --> 00:01:35.795 but we would also create millions of new jobs 00:01:35.795 --> 00:01:38.440 in a very fast-growing high-tech sector. 00:01:38.770 --> 00:01:41.629 Our efforts really paid off in 2007, 00:01:41.629 --> 00:01:45.500 when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama embraced our vision. 00:01:45.500 --> 00:01:51.319 And between 2009 and 2015, the US invested 150 billion dollars 00:01:51.319 --> 00:01:54.040 in renewables and other kinds of clean tech. 00:01:54.810 --> 00:01:57.960 but right away we started to encounter some problems. 00:01:57.960 --> 00:02:00.819 So first of all, the electricity from solar rooftops 00:02:00.819 --> 00:02:04.679 ends up costing about twice as much as the electricity from solar farms. 00:02:04.929 --> 00:02:06.719 And both solar farms and wind farms 00:02:06.719 --> 00:02:09.369 require covering a pretty significant amount of land 00:02:09.369 --> 00:02:11.590 with solar panels and wind turbines 00:02:11.590 --> 00:02:14.590 and also building very big transmission lines 00:02:14.590 --> 00:02:17.780 to bring all that electricity from the countryside into the city. 00:02:18.100 --> 00:02:22.990 Both of those things were often very strongly resisted by local communities, 00:02:22.990 --> 00:02:25.205 as well as by conservation biologists 00:02:25.205 --> 00:02:30.120 who were concerned about the impacts on wild bird species and other animals. 00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:32.610 Now, there was a lot of other people 00:02:32.610 --> 00:02:34.830 working on technical solutions at the time. 00:02:34.830 --> 00:02:36.600 One of the big challenges, of course, 00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:38.780 is the intermittency of solar and wind. 00:02:38.780 --> 00:02:42.080 They only generate electricity about 10 to 30 percent of the time 00:02:42.080 --> 00:02:43.560 during most of year. 00:02:43.560 --> 00:02:45.775 But some of the solutions being proposed 00:02:45.775 --> 00:02:50.289 were to convert hydroelectric dams into gigantic batteries. 00:02:50.289 --> 00:02:53.504 The idea was that when the sun was shining and the wind was blowing, 00:02:53.504 --> 00:02:56.480 you would pump the water uphill, store it for later, 00:02:56.480 --> 00:02:59.700 and then when you needed electricity, run it over the turbines. 00:03:00.520 --> 00:03:02.649 In terms of wildlife, some of these problems 00:03:02.649 --> 00:03:04.859 just didn't seem like a significant concern. 00:03:04.859 --> 00:03:08.980 So when I learned that house cats kill billions of birds every year 00:03:09.010 --> 00:03:12.155 it put into perspective the hundreds of thousands of birds 00:03:12.155 --> 00:03:14.230 that are killed by wind turbines. 00:03:14.630 --> 00:03:16.500 It basically seemed to me at the time 00:03:16.500 --> 00:03:20.450 that most, if not all, of the problems of scaling up solar and wind 00:03:20.450 --> 00:03:23.450 could be solved through more technological innovation. 00:03:24.190 --> 00:03:25.979 But as the years went by, 00:03:25.979 --> 00:03:29.604 these problems persisted and, in many cases, grew worse. 00:03:29.830 --> 00:03:33.070 So California is a state that's really committed to renewable energy, 00:03:33.330 --> 00:03:36.594 but we still haven't converted many of our hydroelectric dams 00:03:36.594 --> 00:03:37.949 into big batteries. 00:03:38.189 --> 00:03:40.630 Some of the problems are just Geographic; 00:03:40.630 --> 00:03:43.540 it's just you have to have a very particular kind of formation 00:03:43.710 --> 00:03:44.939 to be able to do that, 00:03:44.939 --> 00:03:46.280 and even in those cases, 00:03:46.280 --> 00:03:49.019 it's quite expensive to make those conversions. 00:03:49.019 --> 00:03:52.389 Other challenges are just that there're other uses for water 00:03:52.389 --> 00:03:53.910 like irrigation, NOTE Paragraph 00:03:53.910 --> 00:03:58.419 and maybe the most significant problem is just that in California, 00:03:58.419 --> 00:04:00.814 the water in our rivers and reservoirs 00:04:00.814 --> 00:04:03.210 is growing increasingly scarce and unreliable 00:04:03.210 --> 00:04:05.170 due to climate change. 00:04:05.170 --> 00:04:09.610 In terms of this issue of reliability as a consequence of it, 00:04:09.610 --> 00:04:12.080 we've actually had to stop the electricity 00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:14.130 coming from the solar farms into the cities 00:04:14.130 --> 00:04:16.470 because there's just been too much of it at times. 00:04:16.470 --> 00:04:20.289 Or we've been starting to pay our neighboring states like Arizona 00:04:20.328 --> 00:04:22.039 to take that solar electricity. 00:04:22.039 --> 00:04:25.529 The alternative is to suffer from blowouts of the grid. 00:04:25.649 --> 00:04:27.760 And it turns out that 00:04:27.760 --> 00:04:30.730 when it comes to birds and cats - 00:04:31.380 --> 00:04:35.180 cats don't kill eagles; eagles kill cats. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:35.180 --> 00:04:40.750 What cats kill are the small common sparrows and jay's and robins, 00:04:40.750 --> 00:04:44.700 birds that are not endangered and not at risk of going extinct. 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 00:04:51.185 --> 00:04:53.890 and other threatened and endangered species 00:04:53.890 --> 00:04:54.990 are wind turbines, 00:04:54.990 --> 00:04:57.485 in fact, one of the most significant threats 00:04:57.485 --> 00:04:59.900 to those big bird species that we have - 00:04:59.900 --> 00:05:03.740 we just haven't been introducing the airspace with many other objects 00:05:03.740 --> 00:05:06.880 like we have wind turbines over the last several years. 00:05:07.640 --> 00:05:09.430 And in terms of solar, NOTE Paragraph 00:05:09.430 --> 00:05:13.550 you know building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm; 00:05:13.550 --> 00:05:16.090 you have to clear the whole area of wildlife. 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 00:05:21.927 --> 00:05:23.195 called Ivanpah. 00:05:23.195 --> 00:05:24.370 In order to build this, 00:05:24.370 --> 00:05:27.490 they had to clear the whole area of desert tortoises, 00:05:27.560 --> 00:05:31.660 literally pulling desert tortoises and their babies out of burrows, 00:05:31.670 --> 00:05:35.470 putting them on the back of pickup trucks, and transporting them to captivity 00:05:35.470 --> 00:05:37.490 where many of them ended up dying. 00:05:37.490 --> 00:05:42.075 And the current estimates are that about 6,000 birds are killed every year, 00:05:42.200 --> 00:05:44.465 actually catching on fire above the solar farm 00:05:44.465 --> 00:05:46.150 and plunging to their deaths. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:46.480 --> 00:05:48.620 Over time it gradually struck me 00:05:48.620 --> 00:05:52.090 that there was really no amount of technological innovation 00:05:52.130 --> 00:05:55.420 that was going to make the sun shine more regularly 00:05:55.420 --> 00:05:57.860 or wind blow more reliably. 00:05:57.860 --> 00:06:00.870 In fact, you could make solar panels cheaper, 00:06:00.870 --> 00:06:02.680 and you could make wind turbines bigger 00:06:02.680 --> 00:06:06.080 but sunlight and wind are just really dilute fuels. 00:06:06.080 --> 00:06:09.080 And in order to produce significant amounts of electricity, 00:06:09.100 --> 00:06:12.820 you just have to cover a very large land mass with them. 00:06:13.210 --> 00:06:17.310 In other words, all of the major problems with renewables aren't technical, 00:06:17.310 --> 00:06:19.640 they're natural. 00:06:19.640 --> 00:06:22.630 Well, dealing with all of this unreliability 00:06:22.630 --> 00:06:24.280 and the big environmental impacts 00:06:24.280 --> 00:06:26.530 obviously comes at a pretty high economic cost. 00:06:26.530 --> 00:06:30.070 You know we've been hearing a lot about how solar panels and wind turbines 00:06:30.070 --> 00:06:32.440 have come down in cost in recent years, 00:06:32.440 --> 00:06:34.840 but that cost has been significantly outweighed 00:06:34.840 --> 00:06:38.960 by just the challenges of integrating all of that unreliable power onto the grid. 00:06:39.280 --> 00:06:41.990 Just take, for instance, what's happening in California. 00:06:41.990 --> 00:06:45.380 At the period in which solar panels have come down in price 00:06:45.650 --> 00:06:48.130 very significantly, same with wind, 00:06:48.130 --> 00:06:50.500 we've seen our electricity prices 00:06:50.500 --> 00:06:52.449 go up five times more than the rest of the country. 00:06:52.449 --> 00:06:54.729 And it's not unique to us. 00:06:54.729 --> 00:06:56.530 You can see the same phenomenon happen in Germany, 00:06:56.530 --> 00:06:58.360 which is really the world's leader in solar, wind, 00:06:58.360 --> 00:06:59.590 and other renewable technologies. 00:06:59.590 --> 00:07:02.800 Their prices increased 50 percent during their big renewable energy push. 00:07:04.630 --> 00:07:06.960 Now you might think, well, dealing with climate change 00:07:08.800 --> 00:07:10.690 is just going to require that we all pay more for energy. 00:07:10.690 --> 00:07:12.910 That's what I used to think. 00:07:12.910 --> 00:07:16.060 But consider the case of France. 00:07:16.060 --> 00:07:18.250 France actually gets twice as much of its electricity 00:07:18.250 --> 00:07:20.349 from clean zero emission sources than does Germany, and yet, 00:07:23.410 --> 00:07:25.990 France pays almost half as much for its electricity. 00:07:25.990 --> 00:07:29.050 How can that be? 00:07:29.050 --> 00:07:30.370 Well, you might have already anticipated the answer. 00:07:30.370 --> 00:07:32.050 France gets most of its electricity from nuclear power, about 75% in total. 00:07:37.090 --> 00:07:39.370 And nuclear just ends up being a lot more reliable, 00:07:39.370 --> 00:07:41.620 generating power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 00:07:41.620 --> 00:07:45.160 for about 90% of the year. 00:07:45.160 --> 00:07:47.620 We see this phenomenon show up at a global level. 00:07:47.620 --> 00:07:49.090 So, for example, there's been a natural experiment 00:07:49.090 --> 00:07:51.460 over the last 40 years. 00:07:51.460 --> 00:07:52.960 Even more than that, 00:07:52.960 --> 00:07:54.639 or in terms of the deployment of nuclear and the deployment of solar, 00:07:58.419 --> 00:08:00.460 you can see that at a little bit higher cost, 00:08:00.460 --> 00:08:02.169 we got about half as much electricity 00:08:02.169 --> 00:08:06.639 from solar and wind than we did from nuclear. 00:08:06.639 --> 00:08:08.830 Well, what does all this mean for going forward? 00:08:08.830 --> 00:08:10.840 I think one of the most significant findings to date is this one. 00:08:10.840 --> 00:08:13.659 Had Germany spent five hundred and eighty billion dollars on nuclear 00:08:13.659 --> 00:08:15.280 instead of renewables, 00:08:17.470 --> 00:08:19.509 it would already be getting a hundred percent of its electricity 00:08:19.509 --> 00:08:21.099 from clean energy sources, and all of its transportation. 00:08:26.409 --> 00:08:27.520 Now I think you might be wondering and it's quite reasonable to ask: 00:08:30.009 --> 00:08:32.469 Is nuclear power safe and what do you do with the waste? 00:08:32.469 --> 00:08:33.969 Well, those are very reasonable questions. 00:08:33.969 --> 00:08:36.070 Turns out that there's been scientific studies on this 00:08:36.070 --> 00:08:38.770 going over 40 years. 00:08:38.770 --> 00:08:40.240 This is just the most recent study 00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:42.250 that was done by the prestigious British Medical Journal, Lancet, 00:08:42.250 --> 00:08:44.260 finds that nuclear power is the safest. 00:08:44.260 --> 00:08:46.930 It's easy to understand why. 00:08:46.930 --> 00:08:48.640 According to the World Health Organization, 00:08:48.640 --> 00:08:51.040 about 7 million people die annually from air pollution. 00:08:53.500 --> 00:08:55.570 And nuclear plants don't emit that. 00:08:55.570 --> 00:08:57.430 As a result, the climate scientist, James Hansen, looked at and he calculated 00:08:59.350 --> 00:09:01.750 that nuclear power has already saved almost two million lives to date. 00:09:01.750 --> 00:09:04.210 It turns out that even wind energy is deadlier than nuclear. 00:09:07.120 --> 00:09:09.790 This is a photograph taken of two maintenance workers 00:09:09.790 --> 00:09:11.500 in the Netherlands, 00:09:11.500 --> 00:09:13.630 shortly before one of them fell to his death to avoid the fire, 00:09:15.640 --> 00:09:17.260 and the other one was engulfed in flames. 00:09:17.260 --> 00:09:20.440 Now what about environmental impact? 00:09:20.440 --> 00:09:21.760 Well, I think a really easy way to think about it is 00:09:21.760 --> 00:09:24.070 that uranium fuel which is what we used to power nuclear plants 00:09:24.070 --> 00:09:25.930 is just really energy dense. 00:09:28.210 --> 00:09:30.340 About the same amount of uranium as this Rubiks's Cube 00:09:32.890 --> 00:09:34.660 can power all of the energy you need in your entire life. 00:09:35.440 --> 00:09:38.680 As a consequence, 00:09:38.680 --> 00:09:40.600 you just don't need that much land 00:09:40.600 --> 00:09:42.880 in order to produce a significant amount of electricity. 00:09:42.880 --> 00:09:44.830 Here you can compare the solar farm I just described, Ivanpah, 00:09:44.830 --> 00:09:47.410 to California's last nuclear plant, 00:09:47.410 --> 00:09:50.770 Diablo Canyon. 00:09:50.770 --> 00:09:52.750 It takes 450 times more land to generate the same amount of electricity 00:09:52.750 --> 00:09:54.790 as it does from nuclear. 00:09:54.790 --> 00:09:57.430 You would need 17 more solar farms 00:09:59.920 --> 00:10:02.320 like Ivanpah in order to generate the same output as Diablo Canyon. 00:10:02.320 --> 00:10:05.800 And of course it would then be unreliable. 00:10:05.800 --> 00:10:07.960 Well, what about the mining and the waste and the material throughput. 00:10:10.120 --> 00:10:11.920 Well, This has been studied pretty closely as well. 00:10:11.920 --> 00:10:13.510 And it just turns out 00:10:13.510 --> 00:10:16.270 that solar panels require 17 times more materials than nuclear plants do, 00:10:18.610 --> 00:10:21.490 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, steel, etc. 00:10:21.490 --> 00:10:23.230 And that includes all the fuels used for those nuclear plants. 00:10:23.230 --> 00:10:25.480 The consequence is that what comes out at the end since its material throughput 00:10:27.730 --> 00:10:30.160 is just not a lot of waste from nuclear. 00:10:30.160 --> 00:10:32.560 All of the waste from the Swiss nuclear program fits into this room. 00:10:34.570 --> 00:10:37.000 Nuclear waste is actually the only waste from electricity production 00:10:38.950 --> 00:10:41.230 that's safely contained and internalized. 00:10:41.230 --> 00:10:43.210 Every other way of making electricity 00:10:43.210 --> 00:10:45.490 emits that waste into the natural environment 00:10:45.490 --> 00:10:48.010 either as pollution or as material waste. 00:10:48.010 --> 00:10:50.589 We tend to think of solar panels as clean 00:10:50.589 --> 00:10:53.410 but the truth is that there is no plan to deal with solar panels 00:10:55.270 --> 00:10:57.790 at the end of their 20 or 25 year life. 00:10:57.790 --> 00:11:00.220 A lot of experts are actually very concerned that solar panels 00:11:00.220 --> 00:11:02.440 are just going to be shipped to poor countries in Africa or Asia 00:11:04.180 --> 00:11:06.459 with the rest of our electronic waste stream to be disassembled, 00:11:10.780 --> 00:11:13.210 often exposing people to really high level of toxic elements, 00:11:13.210 --> 00:11:15.610 including lead, cadmium and chromium, 00:11:15.610 --> 00:11:17.980 elements that because they're elements, their toxicity never declines over time. 00:11:20.680 --> 00:11:23.200 I think we have an intuitive sense 00:11:23.200 --> 00:11:25.660 that nuclear is a really powerful strong energy source, 00:11:25.660 --> 00:11:28.360 and that sunlight is really dilute and diffuse and weak, 00:11:31.150 --> 00:11:33.430 which is why you have to spread solar collectors or wind collectors 00:11:35.290 --> 00:11:38.320 over such a large amount of land. 00:11:38.320 --> 00:11:40.750 Maybe that's why nobody was surprised 00:11:40.750 --> 00:11:43.150 when in the recent science-fiction remake of Blade Runner, 00:11:43.150 --> 00:11:45.910 the film open a very dark dystopian scene 00:11:45.910 --> 00:11:48.340 where California's deserts have been entirely paved with solar farms. 00:11:52.480 --> 00:11:53.860 All of which, I think, raises a really uncomfortable question: 00:11:53.860 --> 00:11:56.740 In the effort to try to save the climate, are we destroying the environment? 00:11:59.020 --> 00:12:02.290 Well, the interesting thing is that over the last several hundred years, 00:12:05.710 --> 00:12:07.030 human beings have actually been trying to move away 00:12:07.030 --> 00:12:08.860 from what you would consider matter-dense fuels 00:12:08.860 --> 00:12:11.710 towards energy dense ones. 00:12:11.710 --> 00:12:14.140 That means really from wood and dung towards coal, oil, natural gas, uranium. 00:12:16.990 --> 00:12:18.310 This is a phenomenon that's been going on for a long time. 00:12:18.310 --> 00:12:20.230 Poor countries around the world are in the process still 00:12:22.090 --> 00:12:23.620 of moving away from wood and dung as their primary energies. 00:12:23.620 --> 00:12:26.500 And for the most part, this is a positive thing. 00:12:26.500 --> 00:12:29.980 As you stop using wood as your major source of fuel, 00:12:32.050 --> 00:12:34.510 it allows the forests to grow back and the wildlife to return. 00:12:34.510 --> 00:12:36.340 As you stop burning wood in your home, 00:12:36.340 --> 00:12:38.410 you no longer need to breath that toxic smoke. 00:12:40.990 --> 00:12:43.750 And as you go from coal to natural gas and uranium 00:12:43.750 --> 00:12:45.790 as your main sources of energy, 00:12:45.790 --> 00:12:48.130 it holds out the possibility of basically eliminating air pollution altogether. 00:12:50.830 --> 00:12:53.050 There's just this problem with nuclear - 00:12:53.050 --> 00:12:55.240 well, it's been pretty popular to move from dirtier to cleaner energy sources, 00:12:56.890 --> 00:12:59.890 and from energy diffuse to energy dense sources - 00:12:59.890 --> 00:13:02.230 nuclear is just really unpopular for a bunch of historical reasons. 00:13:02.230 --> 00:13:04.780 And as a consequence, in the past, 00:13:04.780 --> 00:13:07.450 I think a lot of others have sort of said, 00:13:07.450 --> 00:13:09.520 in order to deal with climate change, 00:13:09.520 --> 00:13:11.170 we're just going to need 00:13:11.170 --> 00:13:12.850 all the different kinds of clean energy that we have. 00:13:15.490 --> 00:13:16.990 The problem is that it just turns out not to be true. 00:13:16.990 --> 00:13:19.600 You remember I discussed France a little bit ago. 00:13:20.920 --> 00:13:22.240 France gets most of its electricity from nuclear. 00:13:22.240 --> 00:13:24.430 If France were to try to significantly scale up solar and wind, 00:13:27.339 --> 00:13:29.170 it would also have to significantly reduce how much electricity it gets from nuclear. 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, 00:13:35.980 --> 00:13:38.079 they would need to burn more natural gas. 00:13:38.079 --> 00:13:40.120 Think of it this way, 00:13:40.120 --> 00:13:42.250 it's just really hard to ramp up and down a nuclear plant 00:13:44.139 --> 00:13:45.790 whereas I think we're all pretty familiar with turning natural gas 00:13:45.790 --> 00:13:47.829 up and down on our stove. 00:13:47.829 --> 00:13:50.350 A similar process works in managing the grid. 00:13:50.350 --> 00:13:52.930 Of course it goes without saying 00:13:52.930 --> 00:13:55.240 that oil and gas companies understand this pretty well, 00:13:55.240 --> 00:13:57.310 which is why we've seen them invest millions of dollars in recent years 00:13:59.350 --> 00:14:03.250 in promoting solar and wind. 00:14:03.250 --> 00:14:05.500 This just raises, I think, another challenging question 00:14:05.500 --> 00:14:07.990 which is that in places that are using a lot of nuclear, 00:14:07.990 --> 00:14:10.360 their grids that are mostly nuclear and hydro, 00:14:14.170 --> 00:14:15.639 and going towards solar and wind and other renewables 00:14:15.639 --> 00:14:17.620 would actually increase carbon emissions. 00:14:17.620 --> 00:14:19.930 I think a better alternative is just to tell the truth. 00:14:21.519 --> 00:14:23.380 And that's what a number of scientists have been doing. 00:14:23.380 --> 00:14:25.620 I mentioned earlier 00:14:25.620 --> 00:14:27.730 that hundreds of thousands of birds are killed every year by wind turbines. 00:14:27.730 --> 00:14:29.380 What I didn't mention is that a million bats at a minimum 00:14:31.899 --> 00:14:33.880 are killed every year by wind. 00:14:33.880 --> 00:14:35.829 The consequence has been that bat scientists 00:14:35.829 --> 00:14:37.480 have been speaking out about this. 00:14:37.480 --> 00:14:40.209 This particular bat species, the hoary bat, 00:14:40.209 --> 00:14:42.339 which is a migratory bat species, 00:14:42.339 --> 00:14:44.649 is literally at risk of going extinct right now 00:14:46.449 --> 00:14:48.940 because of the significant expansion of wind. 00:14:48.940 --> 00:14:51.640 It's not just wind, it's also on solar. 00:14:51.640 --> 00:14:53.529 The scientists who were involved in creating the Ivanpah solar farm 00:14:53.529 --> 00:14:55.959 and who were involved in clearing that land have been speaking out. 00:14:58.149 --> 00:15:01.120 One of them wrote, 00:15:01.120 --> 00:15:03.399 "Everybody knows that translocation of desert tortoises doesn't work. 00:15:03.399 --> 00:15:05.290 When you're walking in front of a bulldozer, 00:15:07.089 --> 00:15:09.160 crying, and moving animals and cacti out of the way, 00:15:09.160 --> 00:15:11.199 it's hard to think that the project is a good idea." 00:15:11.199 --> 00:15:13.480 And now we can see these phenomena at work at an international level. 00:15:16.540 --> 00:15:18.370 In my home state of California, 00:15:18.370 --> 00:15:20.410 we've been stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain 00:15:22.329 --> 00:15:23.860 in order to handle all that intermittent solar and wind. 00:15:24.250 --> 00:15:26.230 It's sprung a leak. 00:15:26.230 --> 00:15:28.300 It was equivalent to putting 500,000 cars on the road. 00:15:28.300 --> 00:15:30.640 And currently in Germany, 00:15:30.640 --> 00:15:33.220 there's protesters trying to block a new coal mining project 00:15:34.320 --> 00:15:36.240 that would involve destroying the ancient Han back forest 00:15:36.240 --> 00:15:38.730 in order to get to the coal underneath, 00:15:38.730 --> 00:15:41.100 all in an effort to phase out nuclear and expand solar and wind. 00:15:43.440 --> 00:15:46.380 The good news is that I think that people still care about nature enough 00:15:48.510 --> 00:15:50.310 for these facts to matter. 00:15:50.310 --> 00:15:52.770 We saw last year in South Korea 00:15:52.770 --> 00:15:55.110 a citizen's jury deliberated for several months 00:15:55.110 --> 00:15:56.880 weighing these different issues. 00:15:56.880 --> 00:15:58.890 They had to decide whether they were going to phase out nuclear 00:15:58.890 --> 00:16:01.650 or keep it and expand it. 00:16:01.650 --> 00:16:04.140 They started out 40 percent in favor of expanding nuclear 00:16:06.540 --> 00:16:08.040 but after several months and considering these issues, 00:16:08.040 --> 00:16:10.320 they ended up voting 60% to expand nuclear. 00:16:10.320 --> 00:16:13.020 A similar phenomena just happened last week in Arizona. 00:16:15.120 --> 00:16:17.100 The voters had a ballot initiative 00:16:17.100 --> 00:16:19.200 to vote on whether or not to continue with nuclear 00:16:19.200 --> 00:16:21.150 or to phase it out and try to replace it with natural gas and solar. 00:16:23.220 --> 00:16:26.160 They ended up rejecting at 70 to 30. 00:16:26.160 --> 00:16:28.500 And even here in Europe, we saw the Netherlands 00:16:28.500 --> 00:16:30.150 is the one of the first countries in recent memory 00:16:32.700 --> 00:16:34.740 to actually announce as they did last week 00:16:34.740 --> 00:16:36.360 that they're going to start to increase their reliance on nuclear power 00:16:36.360 --> 00:16:37.890 in recognition that there's just no way 00:16:39.810 --> 00:16:41.250 they could generate significant amounts of energy enough from solar and wind 00:16:43.110 --> 00:16:44.970 to meet their climate targets. 00:16:44.970 --> 00:16:47.370 I think it's natural 00:16:47.370 --> 00:16:49.560 that those of us that became very concerned about climate change, 00:16:49.560 --> 00:16:51.210 such a big environmental issue, 00:16:51.210 --> 00:16:53.310 would gravitate towards really romantic solutions 00:16:56.540 --> 00:16:58.980 like harmonizing human civilization with the natural world 00:16:58.980 --> 00:17:01.140 using renewable energies. 00:17:01.140 --> 00:17:03.090 But I think it's also understandable that as the facts have come in, 00:17:05.849 --> 00:17:07.650 many of us started to question our prior beliefs and change our minds. 00:17:10.410 --> 00:17:14.030 For me the question now is 00:17:14.030 --> 00:17:16.859 that we know that renewables can't save the planet, 00:17:16.859 --> 00:17:18.660 are we going to keep keep letting them destroy it. 00:17:18.660 --> 00:17:25.510 Thank you very much.