Carbon

♪[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.

97% 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 2800 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 we 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.

>> The government has been subsidizing energy for decades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

which is, of course, the main target.

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

including Norway, Costa Rica, and the United Kingdom.

Ireland passed a carbon tax in 2010.

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

people know that they can invest in alternatives that actually

cut out the use of fossil fuel.

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

and improving industries' energy efficiency.

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

of renewable energy supplies, so the benefit for the consumer

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

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

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

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

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

In 2007, Boulder, Colorado passed a carbon tax

charging $13 for every metric ton of CO2.

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

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

commercial, and industrial customers here in Boulder.

The effect has been really tremendous.

So once the carbon tax went into place,

it has generated about $1.8 million a year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are ready now to really ramp up deployment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we in the communities where the innovation occurs,

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

we need to take it in our own hands

and make the changes that we need to see.

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

your community can.

We no longer need the dead economy

of the fossil fuel industry.

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

to renewable energy and a sustainable future.

To learn more and join the movement,

go to greenworldrising.og.

[tranquil mid tempo orchestral music]