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,

00:00:25.703 --> 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

00:00:41.470 --> 00:00:43.541
After college, I moved to California,

00:00:43.541 --> 00:00:46.410
and I started working
on a number of environmental campaigns.

00:00:46.410 --> 00:00:50.466
I got involved in helping to save
the state's last ancient redwood forest

00:00:50.466 --> 00:00:53.905
and blocking a proposed
radioactive waste repository

00:00:53.905 --> 00:00:55.538
set for the desert.

00:00:55.538 --> 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 --> 00:01:02.278
to solving climate change.

00:01:02.278 --> 00:01:05.585
I was worried that global warming
would end up destroying

00:01:05.585 --> 00:01:09.797
many of the natural environments
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 --> 00:01:16.403
solar panels on every roof,
electric car in the driveway -

00:01:16.403 --> 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 --> 00:01:25.269
of the country's biggest labor unions
and biggest environmental groups.

00:01:25.269 --> 00:01:30.090
Our proposal was for a 300-billion-dollar
investment in renewables.

00:01:30.090 --> 00:01:33.034
And the idea was not only
would we prevent climate change,

00:01:33.034 --> 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.

00:02:18.050 --> 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 --> 00:02:38.617
One of the big challenges, of course,
is the intermittency of solar and wind.

00:02:38.617 --> 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,

00:03:09.221 --> 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 --> 00:03:43.691
it's just you have to have
a very particular kind of formation

00:03:43.691 --> 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 --> 00:03:52.141
Other challenges are just
that there's other uses for water,

00:03:52.141 --> 00:03:53.579
like irrigation,

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:53.579 --> 00:03:56.083
and maybe the most significant problem

00:03:56.083 --> 00:04:00.643
is just that in California
the water in our rivers and reservoirs

00:04:00.643 --> 00:04:03.447
is growing increasingly
scarce and unreliable

00:04:03.447 --> 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 --> 00:04:30.451
And it turns out that
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 jays 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 --> 00:04:48.112
What do kill eagles and other big birds,

00:04:48.112 --> 00:04:51.185
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, they're one
of the most significant threats

00:04:57.485 --> 00:04:59.694
to those big bird species that we have.

00:04:59.694 --> 00:05:03.740
We just haven't been introducing
the airspace with many other objects

00:05:03.740 --> 00:05:07.159
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 --> 00:05:16.220
you have to clear
the whole area of wildlife.

00:05:16.560 --> 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 --> 00:05:27.351
they had to clear
the whole area of desert tortoises,

00:05:27.351 --> 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 --> 00:05:42.083
And the current estimates are that
about 6,000 birds are killed every year,

00:05:42.083 --> 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 --> 00:05:52.150
that there was really no amount
of technological innovation

00:05:52.150 --> 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 --> 00:06:00.760
in fact, you could make
solar panels cheaper,

00:06:00.760 --> 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,

00:06:09.434 --> 00:06:12.820
you just have to cover
a very large land mass with them.

00:06:13.112 --> 00:06:18.340
In other words, all of the major problems
with renewables aren't technical,

00:06:18.340 --> 00:06:19.560
they're natural.

00:06:19.560 --> 00:06:22.350
Well, dealing with
all of this unreliability

00:06:22.350 --> 00:06:23.990
and the big environmental impacts

00:06:23.990 --> 00:06:26.560
obviously comes at a 
pretty high economic cost.

00:06:26.780 --> 00:06:27.970
We've been hearing a lot

00:06:27.970 --> 00:06:31.970
about how solar panels and wind turbines
have come down in cost in recent years,

00:06:31.970 --> 00:06:35.130
but that cost has been 
significantly outweighed

00:06:35.130 --> 00:06:39.807
by just the challenges of integrating all
of that unreliable power onto the grid.

00:06:39.820 --> 00:06:42.620
Just take, for instance, 
what's happened in California.

00:06:42.700 --> 00:06:45.581
At the period in which solar panels
have come down in price

00:06:45.581 --> 00:06:47.760
very significantly, same with wind,

00:06:47.760 --> 00:06:49.720
we've seen our electricity prices go up

00:06:49.720 --> 00:06:52.649
five times more
than the rest of the country.

00:06:52.649 --> 00:06:54.169
And it's not unique to us.

00:06:54.169 --> 00:06:56.640
You can see the same phenomenon
happened in Germany,

00:06:56.640 --> 00:06:58.370
which is really the world's leader

00:06:58.370 --> 00:07:00.730
in solar, wind and other
renewable technologies.

00:07:01.030 --> 00:07:05.562
Their prices increased 50 percent
during their big renewable-energy push.

00:07:05.570 --> 00:07:08.740
Now you might think, well,
dealing with climate change

00:07:08.740 --> 00:07:11.470
is just going to require
that we all pay more for energy.

00:07:11.650 --> 00:07:13.350
That's what I used to think.

00:07:13.400 --> 00:07:15.265
But consider the case of France.

00:07:15.630 --> 00:07:18.720
France actually gets
twice as much of its electricity

00:07:18.720 --> 00:07:22.214
from clean zero-emission sources
than does Germany,

00:07:22.439 --> 00:07:27.030
and yet France pays almost half
as much for its electricity.

00:07:27.360 --> 00:07:28.820
How can that be?

00:07:28.820 --> 00:07:30.960
You might have already
anticipated the answer.

00:07:30.960 --> 00:07:36.072
France gets most of its electricity
from nuclear power, about 75% in total.

00:07:36.072 --> 00:07:38.760
And nuclear just ends up
being a lot more reliable,

00:07:38.760 --> 00:07:41.810
generating power 24 hours a day,
seven days a week,

00:07:41.810 --> 00:07:44.050
for about 90% of the year.

00:07:44.360 --> 00:07:47.320
We see this phenomenon
show up at a global level.

00:07:47.330 --> 00:07:49.710
So, for example, there's been
a natural experiment

00:07:49.710 --> 00:07:51.170
over the last 40 years,

00:07:51.170 --> 00:07:52.270
even more than that,

00:07:52.270 --> 00:07:55.719
in terms of the deployment of nuclear
and the deployment of solar.

00:07:56.109 --> 00:07:59.370
You can see that
at a little bit higher cost,

00:07:59.370 --> 00:08:02.659
we got about half as much electricity
from solar and wind

00:08:02.659 --> 00:08:04.416
than we did from nuclear.

00:08:05.209 --> 00:08:08.390
Well, what does all this mean
for going forward?

00:08:08.500 --> 00:08:11.890
I think one of the most significant
findings to date is this one.

00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:17.037
Had Germany spent 580 billion dollars
on nuclear instead of renewables,

00:08:17.110 --> 00:08:20.579
it would already be getting
a hundred percent of its electricity

00:08:20.579 --> 00:08:24.729
from clean energy sources,
and all of its transportation energy.

00:08:25.629 --> 00:08:28.869
Now I think you might be wondering,
and it's quite reasonable to ask:

00:08:28.869 --> 00:08:32.199
Is nuclear power safe?
And what do you do with the waste?

00:08:32.199 --> 00:08:34.259
Well, those are very reasonable questions.

00:08:34.259 --> 00:08:36.910
Turns out that there's been
scientific studies on this

00:08:36.910 --> 00:08:38.270
going over 40 years.

00:08:38.350 --> 00:08:40.060
This is just the most recent study,

00:08:40.060 --> 00:08:43.240
that was done by the prestigious
British medical journal Lancet,

00:08:43.240 --> 00:08:45.793
finds that nuclear power is the safest.

00:08:45.890 --> 00:08:47.390
It's easy to understand why.

00:08:47.800 --> 00:08:49.450
According to the WHO,

00:08:49.450 --> 00:08:52.850
about 7 million people die
annually from air pollution.

00:08:52.920 --> 00:08:54.650
And nuclear plants don't emit that.

00:08:54.760 --> 00:08:57.710
As a result, the climate scientist
James Hansen looked at it.

00:08:57.710 --> 00:09:00.410
He calculated that nuclear power
has already saved

00:09:00.410 --> 00:09:02.460
almost two million lives to date.

00:09:03.030 --> 00:09:06.510
It turns out that even wind energy
is more deadly than nuclear.

00:09:07.060 --> 00:09:10.350
This is a photograph taken
of two maintenance workers

00:09:10.350 --> 00:09:11.500
in the Netherlands,

00:09:11.500 --> 00:09:15.160
shortly before one of them
fell to his death to avoid the fire,

00:09:15.160 --> 00:09:17.540
and the other one was engulfed in flames.

00:09:18.041 --> 00:09:20.120
Now, what about environmental impact?

00:09:20.120 --> 00:09:22.128
I think a really easy way
to think about it

00:09:22.128 --> 00:09:25.510
is that uranium fuel, which is
what we used to power nuclear plants,

00:09:25.510 --> 00:09:27.300
is just really energy dense.

00:09:27.630 --> 00:09:31.976
About the same amount
of uranium as this Rubik's Cube

00:09:32.160 --> 00:09:35.669
can power all of the energy
you need in your entire life.

00:09:36.660 --> 00:09:37.950
As a consequence,

00:09:37.950 --> 00:09:39.750
you just don't need that much land

00:09:39.750 --> 00:09:42.480
in order to produce
a significant amount of electricity.

00:09:42.660 --> 00:09:46.150
Here you can compare the solar farm
I just described, Ivanpah,

00:09:46.150 --> 00:09:48.220
to California's last nuclear plant,

00:09:48.220 --> 00:09:49.430
Diablo Canyon.

00:09:49.430 --> 00:09:53.840
It takes 450 times more land
to generate the same amount of electricity

00:09:53.840 --> 00:09:55.505
as it does from nuclear.

00:09:55.505 --> 00:09:59.110
You would need 17
more solar farms like Ivanpah

00:09:59.110 --> 00:10:02.120
in order to generate
the same output as Diablo Canyon,

00:10:02.140 --> 00:10:04.901
and of course,
it would then be unreliable.

00:10:05.560 --> 00:10:09.090
Well, what about the mining and the waste
and the material throughput.

00:10:09.550 --> 00:10:11.651
This has been studied
pretty closely as well,

00:10:11.651 --> 00:10:12.781
and it just turns out


00:10:12.781 --> 00:10:17.530
that solar panels require 17 times
more materials than nuclear plants do,

00:10:17.550 --> 00:10:20.694
in the form of cement,
glass, concrete, steel -

00:10:20.760 --> 00:10:23.972
and that includes all the fuel
used for those nuclear plants.

00:10:24.160 --> 00:10:28.250
The consequence is that what comes out
at the end, since its material throughput,

00:10:28.250 --> 00:10:31.247
is just not a lot of waste from nuclear.

00:10:31.260 --> 00:10:35.197
All of the waste from the Swiss
nuclear program fits into this room.

00:10:35.320 --> 00:10:38.910
Nuclear waste is actually the only waste
from electricity production

00:10:38.920 --> 00:10:41.560
that's safely contained and internalized.

00:10:41.560 --> 00:10:43.420
Every other way of making electricity

00:10:43.420 --> 00:10:46.050
emits that waste
into the natural environment,

00:10:46.050 --> 00:10:49.267
either as pollution or as material waste.

00:10:49.621 --> 00:10:51.961
We tend to think of solar panels as clean,

00:10:52.039 --> 00:10:54.462
but the truth is that there is no plan

00:10:54.462 --> 00:10:58.330
to deal with solar panels
at the end of their 20 or 25-year life.

00:10:58.543 --> 00:11:01.837
A lot of experts are actually
very concerned that solar panels

00:11:01.991 --> 00:11:05.521
are just going to be shipped
to poor countries in Africa or Asia,

00:11:05.627 --> 00:11:07.976
with the rest of our
electronic-waste stream,

00:11:08.086 --> 00:11:09.532
to be disassembled,

00:11:09.660 --> 00:11:14.040
often exposing people
to really high level of toxic elements,

00:11:14.040 --> 00:11:16.560
including lead, cadmium and chromium,

00:11:16.560 --> 00:11:21.709
elements that because they're elements,
their toxicity never declines over time.

00:11:21.970 --> 00:11:23.810
I think we have an intuitive sense

00:11:23.810 --> 00:11:27.444
that nuclear is a really powerful
strong energy source

00:11:27.626 --> 00:11:31.180
and that sunlight is really dilute
and diffuse and weak,

00:11:31.297 --> 00:11:34.760
which is why you have to spread
solar collectors or wind collectors

00:11:34.760 --> 00:11:37.240
over such a large amount of land.

00:11:37.680 --> 00:11:39.450
Maybe that's why nobody was surprised

00:11:39.460 --> 00:11:43.427
when in the recent science-fiction
remake of Blade Runner,


00:11:43.570 --> 00:11:46.600
the film opens with a very
dark dystopian scene

00:11:46.600 --> 00:11:51.549
where California's deserts have been
entirely paved with solar farms.

00:11:52.420 --> 00:11:55.511
All of which, I think, raises
a really uncomfortable question:

00:11:55.880 --> 00:12:00.857
In the effort to try to save the climate,
are we destroying the environment?

00:12:01.770 --> 00:12:04.870
The interesting thing is
that over the last several hundred years,

00:12:04.870 --> 00:12:07.250
human beings have actually
been trying to move away

00:12:07.250 --> 00:12:09.460
from what you would consider
matter-dense fuels

00:12:09.460 --> 00:12:11.400
towards energy-dense ones.

00:12:11.510 --> 00:12:16.360
That means, really, from wood and dung
towards coal, oil, natural gas, uranium.

00:12:16.589 --> 00:12:19.300
This is a phenomenon
that's been going on for a long time.

00:12:19.300 --> 00:12:22.004
Poor countries around the world
are in the process still

00:12:22.004 --> 00:12:24.605
of moving away from wood
and dung as primary energies.

00:12:24.605 --> 00:12:27.760
And for the most part,
this is a positive thing.

00:12:28.310 --> 00:12:31.240
As you stop using wood
as your major source of fuel,

00:12:31.240 --> 00:12:34.830
it allows the forests to grow back
and the wildlife to return.

00:12:35.106 --> 00:12:36.960
As you stop burning wood in your home,

00:12:36.960 --> 00:12:40.274
you no longer need to breath
that toxic smoke.

00:12:40.387 --> 00:12:43.660
And as you go from coal
to natural gas and uranium

00:12:43.660 --> 00:12:45.190
as your main sources of energy,

00:12:45.190 --> 00:12:49.789
it holds out the possibility of basically
eliminating air pollution altogether.

00:12:50.250 --> 00:12:52.270
There's just this problem with nuclear -

00:12:52.270 --> 00:12:56.360
While it's been pretty popular to move
from dirtier to cleaner energy sources,

00:12:56.360 --> 00:12:59.390
from energy-diffuse
to energy-dense sources,

00:12:59.390 --> 00:13:03.440
nuclear is just really unpopular
for a bunch of historical reasons.

00:13:03.793 --> 00:13:06.300
And as a consequence, in the past,

00:13:06.300 --> 00:13:08.590
I and I think a lot of others
have sort of said,

00:13:08.590 --> 00:13:10.720
"In order to deal with climate change,

00:13:10.720 --> 00:13:14.660
we're just going to need all the different
kinds of clean energy that we have."

00:13:14.750 --> 00:13:17.630
The problem is that it just
turns out not to be true.

00:13:17.770 --> 00:13:20.300
You remember, I discussed
France a little bit ago.

00:13:20.440 --> 00:13:22.990
France gets most of its
electricity from nuclear.

00:13:23.160 --> 00:13:26.949
If France were to try to significantly
scale up solar and wind,

00:13:27.269 --> 00:13:31.662
it would also have to significantly reduce
how much electricity it gets from nuclear.

00:13:31.864 --> 00:13:36.920
That's because in order to handle the huge
variability of solar and wind on the grid,

00:13:37.132 --> 00:13:39.339
they would need to burn more natural gas.

00:13:39.449 --> 00:13:40.450
Think of it this way,

00:13:40.450 --> 00:13:43.510
it's just really hard to ramp
up and down a nuclear plant

00:13:43.679 --> 00:13:46.770
whereas I think we're all pretty
familiar with turning natural gas

00:13:46.770 --> 00:13:48.219
up and down on our stove.

00:13:48.219 --> 00:13:50.929
A similar process works
in managing the grid.

00:13:51.100 --> 00:13:52.870
Of course, it goes without saying

00:13:52.870 --> 00:13:55.970
that oil and gas companies
understand this pretty well,

00:13:55.970 --> 00:13:59.900
which is why we've seen them invest
millions of dollars in recent years

00:13:59.900 --> 00:14:02.057
in promoting solar and wind.

00:14:02.960 --> 00:14:06.380
This just raises, I think,
another challenging question,

00:14:06.380 --> 00:14:09.790
which is that in places
that are using a lot of nuclear -

00:14:09.790 --> 00:14:13.140
half of their grids that are
mostly nuclear and hydro -

00:14:13.610 --> 00:14:16.409
going towards solar and wind
and other renewables

00:14:16.409 --> 00:14:19.200
would actually increase carbon emissions.

00:14:19.328 --> 00:14:21.930
I think a better alternative
is just to tell the truth.

00:14:21.930 --> 00:14:24.310
That's what a number
of scientists have been doing.

00:14:24.310 --> 00:14:25.470
I mentioned earlier

00:14:25.470 --> 00:14:29.180
that hundreds of thousands of birds
are killed every year by wind turbines;

00:14:29.200 --> 00:14:32.270
what I didn't mention
is that a million bats, at a minimum,

00:14:32.270 --> 00:14:34.197
are killed every year by wind.

00:14:34.220 --> 00:14:35.471
The consequence has been

00:14:35.471 --> 00:14:38.120
that bat scientists
have been speaking out about this.

00:14:38.120 --> 00:14:40.939
This particular bat species,
the hoary bat,

00:14:40.939 --> 00:14:43.019
which is a migratory bat species,

00:14:43.019 --> 00:14:45.679
is literally at risk
of going extinct right now

00:14:45.679 --> 00:14:48.170
because of the significant
expansion of wind.

00:14:48.520 --> 00:14:51.360
It's not just wind, it's also on solar.

00:14:51.360 --> 00:14:55.229
The scientists who were involved
in creating the Ivanpah solar farm,

00:14:55.229 --> 00:14:58.802
who were involved in clearing
that land, have been speaking out.

00:14:58.979 --> 00:15:00.280
One of them wrote,

00:15:00.280 --> 00:15:04.269
"Everybody knows that translocation
of desert tortoises doesn't work.

00:15:04.269 --> 00:15:06.409
When you're walking
in front of a bulldozer,

00:15:06.409 --> 00:15:09.350
crying and moving animals
and cacti out of the way,

00:15:09.350 --> 00:15:12.049
it's hard to think
that the project is a good idea."

00:15:12.289 --> 00:15:16.840
And now we can see these phenomena
at work at an international level.

00:15:16.840 --> 00:15:18.580
In my home state of California,

00:15:18.580 --> 00:15:21.779
we've been stuffing a lot of natural gas
into the side of a mountain

00:15:21.779 --> 00:15:24.410
in order to handle all that
intermittent solar and wind.

00:15:24.470 --> 00:15:25.570
It's sprung a leak.

00:15:25.570 --> 00:15:28.300
It was equivalent to putting
500,000 cars on the road.

00:15:28.300 --> 00:15:29.620
And currently in Germany,

00:15:29.620 --> 00:15:34.050
there's protesters trying to block
a new coal mining project

00:15:34.050 --> 00:15:38.020
that would involve destroying 
the ancient Hambacher Forest

00:15:38.020 --> 00:15:40.120
in order to get to the coal underneath,

00:15:40.120 --> 00:15:44.424
all in an effort to phase out nuclear
and expand solar and wind.

00:15:44.790 --> 00:15:47.145
The good news is that I think

00:15:47.145 --> 00:15:50.810
that people still care about nature enough
for these facts to matter.

00:15:50.810 --> 00:15:52.770
We saw last year in South Korea

00:15:52.770 --> 00:15:55.570
a citizen's jury deliberated
for several months

00:15:55.570 --> 00:15:57.290
weighing these different issues.

00:15:57.470 --> 00:16:00.420
They had to decide whether they were
going to phase out nuclear

00:16:00.430 --> 00:16:02.521
or keep it and expand it.

00:16:02.630 --> 00:16:06.080
They started out 40%
in favor of expanding nuclear,

00:16:06.080 --> 00:16:08.620
but after several months
and considering these issues,

00:16:08.620 --> 00:16:11.890
they ended up voting 60%
to expand nuclear.

00:16:12.060 --> 00:16:14.770
A similar phenomenon
just happened last week in Arizona.

00:16:14.890 --> 00:16:16.700
The voters had a ballot initiative

00:16:16.700 --> 00:16:19.640
to vote on whether or not
to continue with nuclear

00:16:19.640 --> 00:16:23.500
or to phase it out and try to replace it
with natural gas and solar.

00:16:23.620 --> 00:16:26.160
They ended up rejecting at 70 to 30.

00:16:26.270 --> 00:16:27.860
And even here in Europe,

00:16:27.860 --> 00:16:31.900
we saw the Netherlands is one of the first
countries in recent memory

00:16:31.900 --> 00:16:34.560
to actually announce,
as they did last week,

00:16:34.560 --> 00:16:38.646
that they're going to start to increase
their reliance on nuclear power

00:16:38.646 --> 00:16:40.520
in recognition that there's just no way

00:16:40.520 --> 00:16:44.340
they could generate significant amounts
of energy enough from solar and wind

00:16:44.340 --> 00:16:46.060
to meet their climate targets.

00:16:46.560 --> 00:16:47.760
I think it's natural

00:16:47.760 --> 00:16:50.870
that those of us that became
very concerned about climate change,

00:16:50.890 --> 00:16:52.820
such a big environmental issue,

00:16:52.850 --> 00:16:56.160
would gravitate towards
really romantic solutions

00:16:56.240 --> 00:16:59.830
like harmonizing human civilization
with the natural world

00:16:59.830 --> 00:17:01.550
using renewable energies.

00:17:01.550 --> 00:17:05.416
But I think it's also understandable
that as the facts have come in,

00:17:05.416 --> 00:17:09.520
many of us have started to question
our prior beliefs and change our minds.

00:17:09.975 --> 00:17:12.053
For me the question now is,

00:17:12.551 --> 00:17:16.449
Now that we know that renewables
can't save the planet,

00:17:16.459 --> 00:17:18.943
are we going to keep
letting them destroy it?

00:17:19.272 --> 00:17:20.640
Thank you very much.

00:17:20.776 --> 00:17:22.496
(Applause)