0:00:00.961,0:00:05.658 [ominous music][br](Leonardo DiCaprio) Ancient life on earth. 0:00:05.658,0:00:10.861 Over millions of years plants and animals lived and died. 0:00:10.861,0:00:16.095 That decomposed life sunk deep into the ground, and as a result, 0:00:16.095,0:00:21.611 an ancient menace was created...fossil fuels.[br] 0:00:21.611,0:00:27.836 Black oil, coal, and gas, have created modern society as we know it. 0:00:27.836,0:00:33.484 This ancient sunlight unleashed global industrial power on a scale 0:00:33.484,0:00:37.051 never before witnessed in the history of the planet. 0:00:37.051,0:00:41.253 But when burnt into the atmosphere, carbon causes climate change. 0:00:41.253,0:00:46.001 Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate change 0:00:46.001,0:00:49.690 is happening now and is caused by human activity. 0:00:49.690,0:00:54.304 However, the fossil fuel industry continues to pull that carbon out of the ground. 0:00:54.304,0:00:59.127 They drill, they extract, making trillions of dollars. 0:00:59.127,0:01:04.804 They frack, they mine, earning astronomical profits. 0:01:04.804,0:01:09.486 We need to keep this carbon in the ground. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 In order to prevent a catastrophic warming of the planet by 2 degrees Celsius, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 we cannot burn more than 500 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But the fossil fuel industry has access to five times more than that. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Almost twenty-eight-hundred gigatons of carbon pollution is ready to be pulled out of the ground, sold, and burned. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 We must fight to keep this carbon in the ground., and it is possible. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 - People are ready for conversation. They're ready to understand that carbon pollution is causing this challenge, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that there is a simple solution. Put a price on carbon pollution. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 In the United States we spend $110 billion federal dollars on climate change events. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That's about $300 a person in tax dollars. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 - But which certainly need a price on carbon pollution. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Right now it's a free good and we're using the atmosphere as a sewer and that has a real cost. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that cost should be reflected in the cost of carbon pollution. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 - In the '50s in London, based on the industrial revolution, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 there was so much pollution, as you see in Beijing and around China today, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that you actually couldn't see six straight feet in front of you. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They put a price on pollution, and it changed. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 - You have to put a price on carbon, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and that can either happen by carbon trading or through a carbon tax. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There's a moral imperative there, but there's also a business imperative. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 - Senator Boxer and I have introduced legislation to do just that. We are going 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to do it in a way that impacts fewer than 3,000 of the most significant 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 fossil fuel polluters in the country. And the reason you do it , is people should not have 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the " freedom" to destroy the planet. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They cannot continue to be able to do that with impunity. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 - The government has been subsidizing energy for decades 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to the tune now of a trillion dollars a year. We need to redirect these subsidies 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that encourage innovation. That's what we need in the world. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But the biggest barrier is money from fossil industries that want to defend 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 their market share, and which I consider the industries' walking butt. They've got 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 tremendous assets underground that they want to be able to mine. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Those are trillions of dollars of assets that the fossil energy companies used 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to evaluate their worth in the stock market. And the fact that we want to strand them, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to leave them underground is not going over real well In those industries. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But in fact, if we wanted to head off the worst uncontrollable damages 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 from climate change, that's what we have to do. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 (Thom Hartmann) Finland and the Netherlands implemented a carbon tax back in 1990. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Both, putting a price tag on each ton of CO2 poison.