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Thank you very much.

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When I was a boy,

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my parents would sometimes
take me camping in California.

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We would camp in the beaches,
in the forests, in the deserts.

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Some people think the deserts
are empty of life,

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but my parents taught me
to see the wildlife all around us,

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the hawks, the eagles, the tortoises.

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One time when we were setting up camp,

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we found a baby scorpion
with its stinger out,

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and I remember thinking how cool it was

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that something could be
both so cute and also so dangerous.

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After college, I moved to California,

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and I started working
on a number of environmental campaigns.

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I got involved in helping to save
the state's last ancient redwood forest

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and blocking a proposed
radioactive waste repository

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set for the desert.

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Shortly after I turned 30,

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I decided I wanted to dedicate
a significant amount of my life

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to solving climate change.

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I was worried that global warming
would end up destroying

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many of the natural environments
that people had worked so hard to protect.

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I thought the technical solutions
were pretty straightforward -

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solar panels on every roof,
electric car in the driveway -

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that the main obstacles were political.

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And so I helped to organize a coalition

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of the country's biggest labor unions
and biggest environmental groups.

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Our proposal was for a 300-billion-dollar
investment in renewables.

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And the idea was not only
would we prevent climate change,

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but we would also create
millions of new jobs

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in a very fast-growing high-tech sector.

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Our efforts really paid off in 2007,

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when then-presidential candidate
Barack Obama embraced our vision.

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And between 2009 and 2015,
the US invested 150 billion dollars

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in renewables and other
kinds of clean tech.

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But right away, we started
to encounter some problems.

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So first of all, the electricity
from solar rooftops

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ends up costing about twice as much
as the electricity from solar farms.

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And both solar farms and wind farms

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require covering a pretty
significant amount of land

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with solar panels and wind turbines

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and also building
very big transmission lines

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to bring all that electricity
from the countryside into the city.

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Both of those things were often very
strongly resisted by local communities,

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as well as by conservation biologists

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who were concerned about the impacts
on wild-bird species and other animals.

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Now, there was a lot of other people

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working on technical
solutions at the time.

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One of the big challenges, of course,
is the intermittency of solar and wind.

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They only generate electricity
about 10 to 30 percent of the time

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during most of year.

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But some of the solutions being proposed

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were to convert hydroelectric dams
into gigantic batteries.

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The idea was that when the sun
was shining and the wind was blowing,

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you would pump the water uphill,
store it for later,

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and then when you needed electricity,
run it over the turbines.

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In terms of wildlife,
some of these problems

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just didn't seem like
a significant concern.

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So when I learned that house cats
kill billions of birds every year,

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it put into perspective the hundreds
of thousands of birds

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that are killed by wind turbines.

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It basically seemed to me at the time

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that most, if not all, of the problems
of scaling up solar and wind

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could be solved through more
technological innovation.

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But as the years went by,

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these problems persisted
and, in many cases, grew worse.

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So California is a state that's really
committed to renewable energy,

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but we still haven't converted
many of our hydroelectric dams

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into big batteries.

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Some of the problems are just geographic;

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it's just you have to have
a very particular kind of formation

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to be able to do that,

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and even in those cases,

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it's quite expensive
to make those conversions.

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Other challenges are just
that there's other uses for water,

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like irrigation,

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and maybe the most significant problem

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is just that in California
the water in our rivers and reservoirs

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is growing increasingly
scarce and unreliable

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due to climate change.

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In terms of this issue of reliability,
as a consequence of it,

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we've actually had to stop the electricity

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coming from the solar
farms into the cities

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because there's just been
too much of it at times.

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Or we've been starting to pay
our neighboring states, like Arizona,

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to take that solar electricity.

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The alternative is to suffer
from blowouts of the grid.

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And it turns out that
when it comes to birds and cats -

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cats don't kill eagles; eagles kill cats.

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What cats kill are the small common
sparrows and jay's and robins,

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birds that are not endangered
and not at risk of going extinct.

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What do kill eagles and other big birds,

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like this kite as well as owls and condors

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and other threatened
and endangered species,

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are wind turbines;

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in fact, they're one
of the most significant threats

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to those big bird species that we have.

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We just haven't been introducing
the airspace with many other objects

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like we have wind turbines
over the last several years.

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And in terms of solar,

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you know, building a solar farm is a lot
like building any other kind of farm:

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you have to clear
the whole area of wildlife.

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So this is a picture of one third of one
of the biggest solar farms in California,

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called Ivanpah.

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In order to build this,

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they had to clear
the whole area of desert tortoises,

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literally pulling desert tortoises
and their babies out of burrows,

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putting them on the back of pickup trucks,
and transporting them to captivity,

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where many of them ended up dying.

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And the current estimates are that
about 6,000 birds are killed every year,

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actually catching on fire
above the solar farm

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and plunging to their deaths.

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Over time, it gradually struck me

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that there was really no amount
of technological innovation

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that was going to make
the sun shine more regularly

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or wind blow more reliably;

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in fact, you could make
solar panels cheaper,

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and you could make
wind turbines bigger,

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but sunlight and wind
are just really dilute fuels,

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and in order to produce
significant amounts of electricity,

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you just have to cover
a very large land mass with them.

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In other words, all of the major problems
with renewables aren't technical,

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they're natural.

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Well, dealing with
all of this unreliability

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and the big environmental impacts

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obviously comes at a 
pretty high economic cost.

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We've been hearing a lot

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about how solar panels and wind turbines
have come down in cost in recent years,

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but that cost has been 
significantly outweighed

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by just the challenges of integrating all
of that unreliable power onto the grid.

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Just take, for instance, 
what's happened in California.

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At the period in which solar panels
have come down in price

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very significantly, same with wind,

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we've seen our electricity prices go up

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five times more
than the rest of the country.

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And it's not unique to us.

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You can see the same phenomenon
happened in Germany,

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which is really the world's leader

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in solar, wind and other
renewable technologies.

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Their prices increased 50 percent
during their big renewable-energy push.

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Now you might think, well,
dealing with climate change

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is just going to require
that we all pay more for energy.

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That's what I used to think.

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But consider the case of France.

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France actually gets
twice as much of its electricity

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from clean zero-emission sources
than does Germany,

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and yet France pays almost half
as much for its electricity.

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How can that be?

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You might have already
anticipated the answer.

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France gets most of its electricity
from nuclear power, about 75% in total.

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And nuclear just ends up
being a lot more reliable,

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generating power 24 hours a day,
seven days a week,

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for about 90% of the year.

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We see this phenomenon
show up at a global level.

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So, for example, there's been
a natural experiment

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over the last 40 years,

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even more than that,

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in terms of the deployment of nuclear
and the deployment of solar.

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You can see that
at a little bit higher cost,

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we got about half as much electricity
from solar and wind

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than we did from nuclear.

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Well, what does all this mean
for going forward?

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I think one of the most significant
findings to date is this one.

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Had Germany spent 580 billion dollars
on nuclear instead of renewables,

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it would already be getting
a hundred percent of its electricity

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from clean energy sources,
and all of its transportation energy.

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Now I think you might be wondering,
and it's quite reasonable to ask:

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Is nuclear power safe?
And what do you do with the waste?

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Well, those are very reasonable questions.

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Turns out that there's been
scientific studies on this

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going over 40 years.

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This is just the most recent study,

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that was done by the prestigious
British Medical Journal Lancet,

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finds that nuclear power is the safest.

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It's easy to understand why.

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According to the WHO,

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about 7 million people die
annually from air pollution.

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And nuclear plants don't emit that.

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As a result, the climate scientist
James Hansen looked at it.

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He calculated that nuclear power
has already saved

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almost two million lives to date.

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It turns out that even wind energy
is more deadly than nuclear.

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This is a photograph taken
of two maintenance workers

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in the Netherlands,

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shortly before one of them
fell to his death to avoid the fire,

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and the other one was engulfed in flames.

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Now, what about environmental impact?

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I think a really easy way
to think about it

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is that uranium fuel, which is
what we used to power nuclear plants,

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is just really energy dense.

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About the same amount
of uranium as this Rubik's Cube

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can power all of the energy
you need in your entire life.

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As a consequence,

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you just don't need that much land

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in order to produce
a significant amount of electricity.

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Here you can compare the solar farm
I just described, Ivanpah,

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to California's last nuclear plant,

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Diablo Canyon.

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It takes 450 times more land
to generate the same amount of electricity

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as it does from nuclear.

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You would need 17
more solar farms like Ivanpah

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in order to generate
the same output as Diablo Canyon,

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and of course,
it would then be unreliable.

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Well, what about the mining and the waste
and the material throughput.

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This has been studied
pretty closely as well,

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and it just turns out


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that solar panels require 17 times
more materials than nuclear plants do,

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in the form of cement,
glass, concrete, steel -

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and that includes all the fuel
used for those nuclear plants.

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The consequence is that what comes out
at the end, since its material throughput,

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is just not a lot of waste from nuclear.

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All of the waste from the Swiss
nuclear program fits into this room.

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Nuclear waste is actually the only waste
from electricity production

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that's safely contained and internalized.

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Every other way of making electricity

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emits that waste
into the natural environment,

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either as pollution or as material waste.

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We tend to think of solar panels as clean,

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but the truth is that there is no plan

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to deal with solar panels
at the end of their 20 or 25-year life.

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A lot of experts are actually
very concerned that solar panels

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are just going to be shipped
to poor countries in Africa or Asia,

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with the rest of our
electronic-waste stream,

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to be disassembled,

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often exposing people
to really high level of toxic elements,

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including lead, cadmium and chromium,

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elements that because they're elements,
their toxicity never declines over time.

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I think we have an intuitive sense

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that nuclear is a really powerful
strong energy source

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and that sunlight is really dilute
and diffuse and weak,

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which is why you have to spread
solar collectors or wind collectors

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over such a large amount of land.

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Maybe that's why nobody was surprised

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when in the recent science-fiction
remake of Blade Runner,


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the film opens with a very
dark dystopian scene

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where California's deserts have been
entirely paved with solar farms.

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All of which, I think, raises
a really uncomfortable question:

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In the effort to try to save the climate,
are we destroying the environment?

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The interesting thing is
that over the last several hundred years,

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00:12:04,870 --> 00:12:07,250
human beings have actually
been trying to move away

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from what you would consider
matter-dense fuels

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towards energy-dense ones.

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That means, really, from wood and dung
towards coal, oil, natural gas, uranium.

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This is a phenomenon
that's been going on for a long time.

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Poor countries around the world
are in the process still

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of moving away from wood
and dung as primary energies.

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And for the most part,
this is a positive thing.

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As you stop using wood
as your major source of fuel,

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it allows the forests to grow back
and the wildlife to return.

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As you stop burning wood in your home,

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you no longer need to breath
that toxic smoke.

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And as you go from coal
to natural gas and uranium

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as your main sources of energy,

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it holds out the possibility of basically
eliminating air pollution altogether.

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There's just this problem with nuclear -

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While it's been pretty popular to move
from dirtier to cleaner energy sources,

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from energy-diffuse
to energy-dense sources,

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nuclear is just really unpopular
for a bunch of historical reasons.

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And as a consequence, in the past,

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I and I think a lot of others
have sort of said,

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"In order to deal with climate change,

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we're just going to need all the different
kinds of clean energy that we have."

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The problem is that it just
turns out not to be true.

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You remember, I discussed
France a little bit ago.

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France gets most of its
electricity from nuclear.

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If France were to try to significantly
scale up solar and wind,

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it would also have to significantly reduce
how much electricity it gets from nuclear.

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That's because in order to handle the huge
variability of solar and wind on the grid,

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they would need to burn more natural gas.

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Think of it this way,

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it's just really hard to ramp
up and down a nuclear plant

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whereas I think we're all pretty
familiar with turning natural gas

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up and down on our stove.

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A similar process works
in managing the grid.

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Of course, it goes without saying

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that oil and gas companies
understand this pretty well,

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which is why we've seen them invest
millions of dollars in recent years

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in promoting solar and wind.

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This just raises, I think,
another challenging question,

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which is that in places
that are using a lot of nuclear -

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half of their grids that are
mostly nuclear and hydro -

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going towards solar and wind
and other renewables

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would actually increase carbon emissions.

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I think a better alternative
is just to tell the truth.

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That's what a number
of scientists have been doing.

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I mentioned earlier

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that hundreds of thousands of birds
are killed every year by wind turbines;

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what I didn't mention
is that a million bats, at a minimum,

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are killed every year by wind.

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The consequence has been

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that bat scientists
have been speaking out about this.

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This particular bat species,
the hoary bat,

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00:14:40,939 --> 00:14:43,019
which is a migratory bat species,

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is literally at risk
of going extinct right now

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because of the significant
expansion of wind.

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It's not just wind, it's also on solar.

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00:14:51,360 --> 00:14:55,229
The scientists who were involved
in creating the Ivanpah solar farm,

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00:14:55,229 --> 00:14:58,802
who were involved in clearing
that land, have been speaking out.

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One of them wrote,

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00:15:00,280 --> 00:15:04,269
"Everybody knows that translocation
of desert tortoises doesn't work.

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When you're walking
in front of a bulldozer,

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00:15:06,409 --> 00:15:09,350
crying and moving animals
and cacti out of the way,

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it's hard to think
that the project is a good idea."

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00:15:12,289 --> 00:15:16,840
And now we can see these phenomena
at work at an international level.

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In my home state of California,

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00:15:18,580 --> 00:15:21,779
we've been stuffing a lot of natural gas
into the side of a mountain

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00:15:21,779 --> 00:15:24,410
in order to handle all that
intermittent solar and wind.

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It's sprung a leak.

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It was equivalent to putting
500,000 cars on the road.

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And currently in Germany,

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there's protesters trying to block
a new coal mining project

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that would involve destroying 
the ancient Han back forest

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in order to get to the coal underneath,

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all in an effort to phase out nuclear
and expand solar and wind.

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The good news is that I think

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00:15:47,145 --> 00:15:50,810
that people still care about nature enough
for these facts to matter.

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00:15:50,810 --> 00:15:52,770
We saw last year in South Korea

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a citizen's jury deliberated
for several months

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00:15:55,570 --> 00:15:57,290
weighing these different issues.

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00:15:57,470 --> 00:16:00,420
They had to decide whether they were
going to phase out nuclear

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00:16:00,430 --> 00:16:02,521
or keep it and expand it.

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00:16:02,630 --> 00:16:06,080
They started out 40%
in favor of expanding nuclear,

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00:16:06,080 --> 00:16:08,620
but after several months
and considering these issues,

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00:16:08,620 --> 00:16:11,890
they ended up voting 60%
to expand nuclear.

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00:16:12,060 --> 00:16:14,770
A similar phenomenon
just happened last week in Arizona.

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00:16:14,890 --> 00:16:16,700
The voters had a ballot initiative

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00:16:16,700 --> 00:16:19,640
to vote on whether or not
to continue with nuclear

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00:16:19,640 --> 00:16:23,500
or to phase it out and try to replace it
with natural gas and solar.

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00:16:23,620 --> 00:16:26,160
They ended up rejecting at 70 to 30.

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00:16:26,270 --> 00:16:27,860
And even here in Europe,

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00:16:27,860 --> 00:16:31,900
we saw the Netherlands is one of the first
countries in recent memory

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00:16:31,900 --> 00:16:34,560
to actually announce,
as they did last week,

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00:16:34,560 --> 00:16:38,646
that they're going to start to increase
their reliance on nuclear power

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00:16:38,646 --> 00:16:40,520
in recognition that there's just no way

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00:16:40,520 --> 00:16:44,340
they could generate significant amounts
of energy enough from solar and wind

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to meet their climate targets.

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00:16:46,560 --> 00:16:47,760
I think it's natural

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00:16:47,760 --> 00:16:50,870
that those of us that became
very concerned about climate change,

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00:16:50,890 --> 00:16:52,820
such a big environmental issue,

339
00:16:52,850 --> 00:16:56,160
would gravitate towards
really romantic solutions

340
00:16:56,240 --> 00:16:59,830
like harmonizing human civilization
with the natural world

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using renewable energies.

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00:17:01,550 --> 00:17:05,416
But I think it's also understandable
that as the facts have come in,

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00:17:05,416 --> 00:17:09,520
many of us have started to question
our prior beliefs and change our minds.

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00:17:09,975 --> 00:17:12,053
For me the question now is,

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00:17:12,551 --> 00:17:16,449
Now that we know that renewables
can't save the planet,

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00:17:16,459 --> 00:17:18,943
are we going to keep
letting them destroy it?

347
00:17:19,272 --> 00:17:20,640
Thank you very much.

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(Applause)