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♪[ominous music]♪

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(Leonardo DiCaprio) Ancient life on earth.

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Over millions of years plants and animals lived and died.

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That decomposed life sunk deep into the ground, and as a result,

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an ancient menace was created...fossil fuels.


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Black oil, coal, and gas, have created modern society as we know it.

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This ancient sunlight unleashed global industrial power on a scale

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never before witnessed in the history of the planet.

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But when burnt into the atmosphere, carbon causes climate change.

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Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate change

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is happening now and is caused by human activity.

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However, the fossil fuel industry continues to pull that carbon out of the ground.

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They drill, they extract, making trillions of dollars.

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They frack, they mine, earning astronomical profits.

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We need to keep this carbon in the ground.

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In order to prevent a catastrophic warming of the planet by 2 degrees Celsius,

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we cannot burn more than 500 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.

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But the fossil fuel industry has access to five times more than that.

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Almost 2800 gigatons of carbon pollution

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is ready to be pulled out of the ground, sold, and burned.

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We must fight to keep this carbon in the ground, and it is possible.

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>> People are ready for conversation. They're ready to understand that carbon pollution is causing this challenge,

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and that there is a simple solution. Put a price on carbon pollution.

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In the United States we spend $110 billion federal dollars on climate change events.

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That's about $300 a person in tax dollars.

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>> But we certainly need a price on carbon pollution.

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Right now it's a free good and we're using the atmosphere as a sewer and that has a real cost.

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And that cost should be reflected in the cost of carbon pollution.

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>> In the '50s in London, based on the industrial revolution,

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there was so much pollution, as you see in Beijing and around China today,

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that you actually couldn't see six straight feet in front of you.

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They put a price on pollution, and it changed.

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>> You have to put a price on carbon,

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and that can either happen by carbon trading or through a carbon tax.

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There's a moral imperative there, but there's also a business imperative.

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>> Senator Boxer and I have introduced legislation to do just that.

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We are going to do it in a way that impacts fewer than 3,000 of the most significant

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fossil fuel polluters in the country.

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And the reason you do it, is people should

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not have the " freedom" to destroy the planet.

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They cannot continue to be able to do that with impunity.

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>> The government has been subsidizing energy for decades

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to the tune now of a trillion dollars a year. We need to redirect these subsidies

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that encourage innovation. That's what we need in the world.

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But the biggest barrier is money from fossil industries that want to defend

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their market share, and which I consider the industries' walking butt. They've got

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tremendous assets underground that they want to be able to mine.

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Those are trillions of dollars of assets that the fossil energy companies used

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to evaluate their worth in the stock market. And the fact that we want to strand them,

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to leave them underground is not going over real well In those industries.

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But in fact, if we wanted to head off the worst uncontrollable damages

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from climate change, that's what we have to do.

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Thom Hartmann: Finland and the Netherlands implemented a carbon tax back in 1990.

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Both, putting a price tag on each ton of CO2 poison.

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>> In the beginning of the '90s there was a deep understanding that we should do something.

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We think that the Finnish economy should be based on sustainable energy in order

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to make our society competitive and in order to save our planet,

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which is, of course, the main target.

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Thom Hartmann: Since then, several other nations have created their own versions,

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including Norway, Costa Rica, and the United Kingdom.

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Ireland passed a carbon tax in 2010.

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>> It was very simple to introduce. When they see a carbon tax in place,

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people know that they can invest in alternatives that actually

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cut out the use of fossil fuel.

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It starts to have that effect improving energy efficiency in your homes

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and improving industries' energy efficiency.

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And what we've seen in the last 5 years is we doubled amount

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of renewable energy supplies, so the benefit for the consumer

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is if through those signals you can cut out the wasteful use of energy, then everyone

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is saving money and it more than covers the cost of the carbon tax in the first place.

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Thom Hartmann: In Australia, renewables like wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels

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like coal. Recently China put a price on carbon in over 7 regions and will add more.

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Now it's up to the United States, where there's good news at a local level.

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In 2007, Boulder, Colorado passed a carbon tax

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charging $13 for every metric ton of CO2.

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>> The carbon tax was generated and voted into place by Boulder voters.

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So it's a surcharge on electricity consumption and it's applied to residential,

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commercial, and industrial customers here in Boulder.

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The effect has been really tremendous.

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So once the carbon tax went into place,

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it has generated about $1.8 million a year.

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What's been extraordinary is that we've been able to really turn the curve,

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so to speak, on our emissions just on demand side alone.

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>> We actually proposed that every single dollar go back to American households.

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Carbon tax is the right way to go and is actually the conservative answer to global warming.

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>> Finally we're at the point where wind power and solar are coming down in price

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in a quarter of the United States. Solar voltaics are already cost effective.

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Last year more wind power was added than natural gas power.

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And this is true around the world. We have the technologies at hand.

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We are ready now to really ramp up deployment.

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>> The figures for Ireland I think show an example that you can actually

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start cutting out the carbon and your economy still holds up.

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The world didn't come to an end. I think it's a lesson for the rest of the world.

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>> We've been disappointed by the national policymakers who haven't been

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able to resolve their differences about this, and time is growing, very, very short.

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President Obama is the last president with a chance to confront this problem

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in a way that may head off the worst of the damage.

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>> But given the severity of the problem right now, we're not moving fast enough.

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We're looking at a fight to save this planet.

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And we have got to be bold and we have got to be aggressive.

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>> If it's not going to happen at the federal level or the state level,

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we in the communities where the innovation occurs,

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where we're gonna be on the front lines of the impact of climate change,

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we need to take it in our own hands

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and make the changes that we need to see.

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(Leonardo DiCaprio) If national governments won't take action,

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your community can.

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We no longer need the dead economy

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of the fossil fuel industry.

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We can move our economy town by town, state by state

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to renewable energy and a sustainable future.

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To learn more and join the movement,

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go to greenworldrising.og.

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[tranquil mid tempo orchestral music]

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