[ominous music] (Leonardo DiCaprio) Ancient life on earth.
Over millions of years plants and animals lived and died.
That decomposed life sunk deep into the ground, and as a result,
an ancient menace was created...fossil fuels.
Black oil, coal, and gas, have created modern society as we know it.
This ancient sunlight unleashed global industrial power on a scale
never before witnessed in the history of the planet.
But when burnt into the atmosphere, carbon causes climate change.
Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate change
is happening now and is caused by human activity.
However, the fossil fuel industry continues to pull that carbon out of the ground.
They drill, they extract, making trillions of dollars.
They frack, they mine, earning astronomical profits.
We need to keep this carbon in the ground.
In order to prevent a catastrophic warming of the planet by 2 degrees Celsius,
we cannot burn more than 500 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.
But the fossil fuel industry has access to five times more than that.
Almost twenty-eight-hundred gigatons of carbon pollution is ready to be pulled out of the ground, sold, and burned.
We must fight to keep this carbon in the ground., and it is possible.
- People are ready for conversation. They're ready to understand that carbon pollution is causing this challenge,
And that there is a simple solution. Put a price on carbon pollution.
In the United States we spend $110 billion federal dollars on climate change events.
That's about $300 a person in tax dollars.
- But which certainly need a price on carbon pollution.
Right now it's a free good and we're using the atmosphere as a sewer and that has a real cost.
And that cost should be reflected in the cost of carbon pollution.
- In the '50s in London, based on the industrial revolution,
there was so much pollution, as you see in Beijing and around China today,
that you actually couldn't see six straight feet in front of you.
They put a price on pollution, and it changed.
- You have to put a price on carbon,
and that can either happen by carbon trading or through a carbon tax.
There's a moral imperative there, but there's also a business imperative.
- Senator Boxer and I have introduced legislation to do just that. We are going
to do it in a way that impacts fewer than 3,000 of the most significant
fossil fuel polluters in the country. And the reason you do it , is people should not have
the " freedom" to destroy the planet.
They cannot continue to be able to do that with impunity.