- I've got a question.
How long do you think we humans have?
- How long does the human race have?
- Ooh.
- Um.
- Oh, wow.
- I don't exactly know, but may be soon.
- I have no clue.
- No?
- I hope I get me at least 50 more years.
- I think there's infinite amount of time.
- Infinite.
It's infinite, yeah.
- I give us a million.
A million years.
- Being kind, I would say probably about 10 years.
- 10, 12 years.
- Thousands of years.
- 47 years, three months, five days.
It's approximate.
- We're kind of like cockroaches on the planet,
no matter how much damage we'll do,
enough of us will survive to procreate and keep it going.
- Unless we can get to another planet,
but then we're just gonna fuck it up like we did Earth.
- Well, I think that we will be here
for a long time, but we will change.
We're gonna turn back into apes.
- Have you ever wondered what would happen
if a single species took over an entire planet?
Maybe they're cute, maybe they're clever
but lack a certain,
shall we say,
self-restraint?
What if they go too far?
What if they go way, way, way,
way, way too far?
How would they know when it's their time to go?
- Due to our release through factories
and automobiles every year
of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide,
our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.
- This is bad?
- Well, it's been calculated a few degrees rise
in the Earth's temperature would melt the polar ice caps.
And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion
of the Mississippi valley.
For in weather, we're not only dealing with forces
of a far greater variety
than even the atomic physicist encounters,
but with life itself.
- That was 1958.
We've known about the dangers
of climate change for six decades.
Back then, there was so much air pollution
it would actually block out the sun.
There was so much water pollution,
Forget throwing plastic bottles into the water,
we tossed our cars in there.
We also knew someday we'd run out of oil.
- For millions of Americans,
this may be the worst weekend they've ever faced
for finding gasoline to give them the automobile freedom
they take as their due.
- I never doubted humans would find a better way
and I wanted to be part of it.
A scientist sounded the alarm
and the modern environmental movement was born.
- Unless we do bring these chemicals under better control,
we are certainly headed for disaster.
- Students all across the country
organized the first Earth Day.
- This point in time, it's very, very fashionable
to talk about the environment
but as every day proceeds, we find very,
very little concrete being done.
- As for me, you might say
I was an early environmentalist.
When I was nine years old,
a bulldozer began knocking down the woods near my home.
I retaliated by putting sand in its gas tank.
When I grew up, I became a tree hugger and moved
to the wilds of Northern Michigan
to build a sustainable homestead and commune with nature.
I wired my cabin for solar panels
and heated with wood instead of fossil fuels.
I wrote about sustainable living
and environmental issues for the Mother Earth News
and several news outlets.
I traveled the country documenting invasive species,
ecosystem collapse,
and species threatened with extinction.
- Come on, girls, boys.
- I covered protests against destroying mountains for coal.
And was once even confronted by the BP police.
- Journalist. - You're a journalist?
- Jeff Gibbs, yeah.
- By all means, you can take all the pictures you want.
- Okay.
- We'll write a report and then we have to send it
to the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office
they'll call you.
- Through all of this, I kept wondering,
why are we still addicted to fossil fuels?
So I decided to begin following the green energy movement.
What better place to check out
how our renewable energy revolution is coming along,
than a solar festival
in the Green Mountain state of Vermont
powered by 100% solar energy.
- Solar.
- I was having fun
and got a chance to ask
about getting solar panels installed.
- You can keep adding, so maybe every time
you get a tax return, buy another solar panel?
- But then, a little rain began to fall.
♪ Packed up my guitar
♪ Headed to the nearest bowling alley ♪
My camera man noticed some commotion behind the stage.
- So the festival's run off
solar energy, primarily?
- Right.
- But the biofuel generator wasn't enough,
so they wound up plugging
into the electrical grid that we all use.
- The other inverter operating,
it's actually pulling power in from the grid,
charging the batteries.
It's running backwards from the way
we originally intended to do it, but.
- That was disappointing.
But after all, it had been raining.
Maybe next time things would go better.
Luckily for us, hope was on the way.
- It's been a long time comin' but tonight,
change has come to America.
- Green activists across the country cheered
when newly elected president Barack Obama
rolled out a trillion dollar stimulus package
with nearly 100 billion dollars for green energy.
Green was finally ramping up
and everyone wanted to be part of it.
President Obama brought in environmental
from the Apollo Alliance, with shovel-ready projects.
- They've gotta put up tens of thousands of wind farms,
they've gotta put up millions of solar panels.
- Former Vice President Al Gore,
who had a few years earlier released an Oscar winning film,
shared his ideas with the president.
- We have the opportunity now
to create jobs all across this country,
in all 50 states, to repower America.
- Al Gore had already encouraged
billionaire airline owner Sir Richard Branson
to invest big-time in green energy.
- Branson is pledging future profits from his airline
to the tune of perhaps three billion dollars.
Three billion, that's with a B, to fight global warming!
- Is Al Gore a prophet?
- Ah, um, ah, how do you spell "prophet?"
- Investors came forward.
- Investor Vinod Khosla, known as the father
of the clean tech revolution,
has poured over a billion dollars of his own money
into some fifty energy startups.
- Major banks were eager to get involved.
- By 2020, we think, renewables will require
395 billion on an annual basis.
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
was both on the board of major environmental organizations
and was leading a green energy investment group.
- We build wind farms, we build solar farms,
once you build our plant, it's free energy forever.
- The Sierra Club received 50 million dollars
from billionaire and former New York City mayor
Michael Bloomberg.
Their mission?
Fight coal and promote clean energy.
- So with the mayor's gift, here's what will happen.
We'll have a large and aggressive
- It's time for America to find a new energy path.
One that takes us beyond coal.
- So funny--
- And then Bill McKibben,
one of the nation's leading environmentalists
and author of a breakthrough book called
"The End of Nature,"
formed an organization called 350.org
with the mission of igniting a global climate movement.
- Can I show off my necktie for a minute
'cause they made it for me yesterday?
It's got that 350 on it
'cause it's the most important number in the world.
- Things were looking up
and the green energy revolution was under way.
Michigan had been hit hard by the Great Recession
and hundreds of millions of dollars
in green stimulus money was arriving.
Now, to do their part for the new green economy,
General Motors introduced a new line of electric vehicles.
When the Chevy Volt was ready for release,
I attended their press conference.
- So, these electric vehicles are ready
for public consumption and we're ready
with the infrastructure, with the rates,
with the communications.
- I am extremely grateful to be here today and in fact,
this is a chance for me to say, thank you, more formally.
The Chevy Volt is upstairs.
We'll be able to take a look at it.
- You've got about 1,000 photos.
- Yeah.
- This is the plug.
It's as simple as that.
- The batteries are in the trunk?
- No, the battery in this particular design is a T-shape,
right down the center and across the backseat area.
'Cause everybody thought we killed the electric vehicle.
No, we didn't.
It's alive and well.
- So, what's charging the batteries right now?
What's the source of electricity?
- Well, here, it's coming from the building.
- I mean, is it, what's their mix of power?
- Oh, actually, Lansing feeds the building.
- What's that?
- Lansing feeds power to the building.
So, I don't know--
- They're--
- I betcha they're a bit of coal?
I think they're heavy on natural gas, aren't they?
- Right now, the car's charging off your grid?
- Right.
It would be charging off our grid, which is about 95% coal.
- How long do you think it will be
before there's a solar and wind powered grid?
- Oh, golly.
- To suggest that all of the power used
for these cars will be generated from wind and solar,
in the very near future, would not be correct.
In fact, these, we're talking about charging these up
at night, so there won't be any solar at that time.
So we're down to wind and very often,
at night, the wind does fall off.
- I don't think coal is bad.
- The big battle-- The what?
Mountain top removal.
- Oh, mount...
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
- Yeah.
- It's got lovely BTUs, it's got lovely energy value.
How do you burn it more cleanly?
I mean, do you see natural gas getting bashed?
- We will be delivering power based
on natural gas very shortly.
And even with that mix, we intend to use
- Have you gotten any support?
- Oh, the environment groups are extremely supportive.
- We did install the state's largest solar array
at my company, The Board of Water and Light, it's
just down the street from here a few miles
if you want to take a look at it.
What outfit are you with?
- New World Media, we're doing a segment
on the renewable energy...
- Oh, excuse me, I gotta go for a second
but thanks.
- I decided to take him up on his offer
to check out their football field sized solar array
right down the street.
- What we're trying to do with this kind of a tour is,
get a sense for what they've already done,
as an indication of what we could do
to push the envelope even further.
- We took a hard look at wind and determined that,
around here, there's not really any real good wind coming
through all the time.
That's what we liked about solar.
You would get the power when you most needed it.
Pass these around, look at 'em.
They are pliable.
Made in Michigan, that was another good thing.
Although, the efficiency
of these panels is only about, just under 8%.
If you happen to be NASA and you happen
to own a rover running around Mars,
they have very efficient panels.
But, we can't afford those
at about a million dollars a square inch.
- The standard answer that we tell everybody is,
we're providing enough to meet
the peak requirements of 50 homes.
However, for most of the people that look
at it a little bit closer,
we generate about 63, 64 thousand kilowatt hours a year.
Our average customer uses
about six thousand kilowatt hours a year.
Six thousand into 64, it's just a little over 10.
We can meet the energy requirements for 10 homes.
Over a year.
- Will that be an incentive to put more solar on?
- Well, if you wanted to make all
of the energy required for the city of Lansing over a year?
- Well, how about--
- You'd have a solar array
that was three miles by five miles.
- Right.
But-- - We're not gonna do that.
- But, but, I mean.
- My friend from the Sierra Club wanted him
to be more positive, but he was not interested.
As a consequence of the big push for green energy,
wind farms were rising around the nation,
including near my home in northern Michigan.
- We've done coal and nuclear for years.
We've been trying to get in more into the renewable side.
These are the largest in Michigan,
I think it's 482 foot total.
- How many yards of concrete?
- It was 800 yards of concrete in the base,
right around 140 tons of resteel.
- What are the blades made out of?
- That's all fiberglass and balsam.
They're about 36,000 pounds a piece.
This tower will weigh 800,000 pounds when we're done.
Then the cell is 220,000 pounds
and the hub and rotor assembly is another 160.
It's pretty substantial.
- They were impressive machines.
But is it possible for machines made
by industrial civilization
to save us from industrial civilization?
In environmental leader Bill McKibben's home state
of Vermont, the Green Mountain state,
a site was being cleared
for the installation of wind turbines.
A group of citizens was concerned
about how the construction
might affect the mountains they love.
I joined them for a tour.
- It's going to be 21 turbines.
- 21?
- Yeah. - On this project?
- In this project, yeah.
The estimate was maybe there would be three full-time jobs.
- If the goal is to try to make Vermont the leader
in climate change, I appreciate looking
to the sky in the hopes that we can do that.
But more importantly, I'm personally looking
at the ground thinking, this is not the kind of legacy
I'd want to leave to my kids.
When I was a kid we'd go hiking in these woods,
we would be able to drink from the waters
down the hill here, and now you have to question that.
- And how long are these towers supposed to last?
20-something years, 20--
- I know, it's just a nanosecond.
- 20 years?
- Oh, it's a nanosecond in the time of energy.
- Has anybody considered
that this is mountain top removal for wind
- Yeah, and we've even had people say,
"If you can do mountain top removal
"in Kentucky and West Virginia for coal,
"then it's about time the rest of the country shared
"in mountain top removal, too."
- Hello.
- You think they're gonna tell us to move back?
- Probably.
The thing is that you've got
to have a fossil fuel power plant backing it up
and idling 100% of the time.
Because if you cycle up or cycle down,
as the demand on the wind comes through,
then you actually generate a bigger carbon footprint
than if you just ran it straight.
- Do you ever go to things where they just go,
"That's not true.
"It doesn't matter, we're gonna have a smart grid."
- Doesn't make any difference, they still gotta
have it idling.
Because, let's just say the wind stopped right now.
Just stopped for an hour.
You've got to have that power.
- What do you do?
- I'm an environmental health and safety consultant.
I usually work with businesses to help them do things,
but I would never work with scum like this.
- You didn't get me on camera doing this, did ya?
Not being judgmental or trying to play God,
but we've got to deal with population growth
and sustainable resources, we've all gotta cut back.
All this energy's supposedly going to heat a water park.
We can find unique and different ways to waste energy.
This is not a Vermont company.
Green Mountain Power will be bought out by Gaz Metro
and Gaz Metro is owned by Enbridge, as I understand it,
which is a big resource company in Canada
which is exploiting the tar sands
that wants to build the XL pipeline.
See, it's--
- And they're all in bed together.
- Still we don't know the whole story.
- Have you asked Mr. McKibben to come see this?
- He thinks anything renewable is good.
- Yeah.
- At least that's what I've heard people say.
- I am in a strange position.
I'm against our addiction to fossil fuels
and have long been a fan of green energy.
But everywhere I encountered green energy,
it wasn't what it seemed.
- This is like a perpetual energy battery.
- And where do you get the hydrogen from?
- The hydrogen that's in, the hydrogen is sourced
from any hydrocarbon material.
So, you can get it from natural gas, you can get it
from any petroleum or oil based product.
- I read about a zoo that was said
to be powered by elephant manure.
But it turned out the elephants
didn't even produce enough manure to heat
- Yeah, we don't even really make enough
in what we have, elephant wise, to even do that.
We would need a lot more.
- More elephants?
- Yep, more elephants
more manure.
- Ethanol plants also seem
to have a secret ingredient.
- This is the most productive farmland in the world
and we're not that far west of the biggest coal mines
in the world, as well.
So, bring the two together and you have an ethanol plant.
- Great, so ethanol was reliant on two things:
a giant, fossil fuel-based, industrial agricultural system
to produce corn, and even more fossil fuels
in the form of coal.
All of this in the attempt to replace fossil fuels?
It was enough to make my head explode.
I was getting the uneasy feeling
that green energy was not going to save us.
And I wasn't the only one.
- I've counted something
like 25 different alternative energy options.
So surely, among all of those,
there are enough sources
of energy to keep us living basically
the way we are in perpetuity.
That's not the reality.
Currently, we're getting, in some cases,
no energy from these potential options.
- Richard York, of the University of Oregon,
published a study in the Journal of Nature
in which he posed the question- do non-fossil energy sources
actually replace fossil fuels?
- What we implicitly assume, often,
the substitute pushes out
the thing you want it to substitute for.
What you find is,
nations that add non-fossil energy sources do not seem
to see a particular suppression of fossil fuel use.
- That's pretty mind-blowing.
We've got billions of dollars being spent
and green energy is not even replacing fossil fuels?
- They don't even know that that's a question, yes.
- The story that we're in, right now, is okay,
we're in ecological hot water,
but there are technological fixes
and if we're just creative enough,
if we're just ingenious enough
and if we just work hard enough, we will triumph.
Seeking technological fixes, one after another,
is simply going to lead us to another level
of catastrophe sooner rather than later.
- We wanna believe that these things are gonna be available
for us, so if we get a little worried
and somebody comes up with a new thingy and promises
that this will do it for us, we wanna believe.
- Because we're a little worried,
are we desperate to accept any idea that sounds alternative
or green?
Are we avoiding looking too closely
because we don't want to know the answer?
Ozzie Zehner, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley
and Northwestern University was asking some
of the same questions.
- I mean, I thought that solar
and wind were probably very good solutions.
It wasn't really even that long ago.
One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion
that alternative technologies, like wind and solar,
are somehow different from fossil fuels.
Well I hear a lot of the time that solar cells
are made out of sand.
- Have you ever thought about solar panels?
The main ingredient
that makes them work is silicon, or sand.
- This is the raw material chips
are made of, sand.
- They don't use sand at all.
I'll show you what...
So, this is one of the ingredients,
it's actually mined quartz.
- Spruce Pine, North Carolina,
regarded as the finest source of high purity quartz
in the world, for semiconductor, solar
and communication applications.
- You can't use sand because sand has too many impurities.
So, you start with a very high quality quartz
and a very high quality coal, and then you put
those two together into an arc furnace and you melt them.
- The quartz is then melted with coal
in a large furnace at temperatures of
- And so you need more coal to do that.
I'll get another coal out.
When we melt these together,
we get silicon metal and carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide just goes off
and you got rid of the carbon
and you're left with silicon metal.
This is not clean coal apparently.
- Not clean coal.
Ozzie Zehner said it was an illusion
that renewables were replacing coal or any fossil fuel.
Environmental groups continued telling a different story.
- We've already seen more than 25%
of the U.S. coal fleet has already either retired
or is on a schedule to retire.
- Coal plants were closing, but Ozzie explained
that well meaning people were being misled.
- NV Energy's now gonna go ahead and shut down the plant
and go with renewable.
One of the largest solar plants
and that's gonna happen right behind me.
- Since you can't replace a coal plant with solar,
they're actually replacing the coal plant
with two natural gas plants,
and natural gas is a fossil fuel.
This is the Las Vegas Co-Gen natural gas plant.
This is one of the facilities
that's replacing the coal plant that's being shut down.
This is the Sun Peak generating facility.
This is the second natural gas plant
that was used to replace the coal plant.
And you hear the same story in Iowa.
- Instead of using energy generated
by coal-fired power plants,
the solar farm will now avoid
about 2.1 million pounds of carbon pollution.
- But then they're building a larger natural gas plant.
This is a 650 megawatt natural gas plant.
That's four times more megawatts
than the coal plant over there that it's replacing.
And they're doing the same thing in North Carolina,
which was the subject
of that Years of Living Dangerously series.
- Duke Energy operates a coal plant right
outside of Asheville that is the biggest source
of climate pollution in western North Carolina.
And we are working to retire that plant
and replace it with clean energy.
- But what they don't tell you is
that we're also building a larger natural gas facility.
- So, we'll be retiring a two-unit 376
We'll invest $750 million
to build a state-of-the-art natural gas plant.
- When Michael Brune stands up and talks about clean energy,
he's using solar cells and wind turbines.
- This is the new world
100% clean energy.
- When Michael Bloomberg stands up and says,
"Cleaner energy," he's talking about natural gas.
- Create cleaner energy: solar, wind, and natural gas.
- In fact, the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign
actually coincides with one of the largest expansions
of fossil fuel production that we've ever pulled off,
most of that being natural gas.
- Ozzie's assertion
that renewables were not replacing fossil fuels,
if true, would upend all of our assumptions
about green energy and what was going to save us.
What would happen if I asked the same question
to industry insiders?
Like, where do solar panels come from?
- Well, you have to start with a mine.
Or, what's stopping us from running the world
on 100% solar and wind?
- Well, intermittency is one of the major challenges.
- Grid stability.
- The sun's everywhere, except when it's not there.
- There's a lot of developers that were flocking
to California, wanting to connect their solar farms
and wind farms.
The utilities would turn to me and my team
to help them look at what the impact to their grid would be.
- When we add solar cells
or wind turbines to a grid,
do we get to shut off a coal plant?
- That's certainly the goal, the problem is,
or the difference is that renewables are intermittent.
All of a sudden, a cloud cover could come over
and your solar generation could drastically decrease,
and if you don't have something else there
to meet whatever the load is at that moment,
then you're gonna have power outages.
- So, we don't get
to turn a fossil fuel power plant off
when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing?
- Well, it's not that easy.
We need to be able to back up that power
to keep the system steady all the time
so it doesn't collapse.
Most likely that's through fast-acting gas plants,
but also what we call the baseload plants,
either nuclear or coal that are on all the time
but that maybe can be dialed down during the day
and dialed up when demand starts rising.
- Does it affect the efficiency
to turn fossil fuel power plants on and off?
- Oh, yeah.
They don't like to be dialed up and down.
It does make, that's wear and tear for them.
- Turning them on, turning it off, there's energy used
and lost and any time,
kind of like when you turn on your car on and off,
you use a little extra gas
to get it turned on.
I do still think you have
to maintain a baseload of some kind.
- What's the solution then?
- You need energy storage.
- Without storage, you can't count on it.
- If you can store the energy that's created off
of things that are intermittent like solar and wind,
you can store that, now you're reducing your need
for a baseload.
- But would adding storage
like batteries increase the carbon footprint?
- Yeah, absolutely.
In a big way, actually.
And as more energy storage gets on the grid,
it has a mass scale implication.
- When I looked up how much battery storage
there is, it was less than one-tenth
of one percent of what's needed.
In a couple years, they begin to degrade
and need to be replaced a few years later.
I learned that the solar panels don't last forever, either.
- Some solar panels are built to last only 10 years.
So, it's not as if you get this magic free energy.
I don't know that it's the solution,
and here I am helping to sell the materials
that would go into photovoltaics.
- And so to overcome profound limitations
of solar and wind, rarely discussed in the media,
a new generation of technology was rising
in the California desert.
- What is this?
- What we're using is a field of mirrors
to focus sunlight onto a tower.
The power plant itself, at 377 megawatts,
will be the largest of its kind in the world.
- This will become the biggest solar plant in the world!
There's some people that look out in a desert,
and they see miles and miles of emptiness.
I see miles and miles of a gold mine.
- But this next generation
had a fossil fuel secret, too.
- This solar facility burns natural gas pretty much
every morning in order to get it started up.
- How long do they have to burn it for?
- Hours, usually.
This is the incoming natural gas for the facility.
This plant would work about as well without natural gas
as I would without coffee in the morning.
- Or maybe how you would be without food.
- Or without food, yeah.
They have to file for acid rain permits,
permits for nitrous oxide emissions,
they have to apply for carbon offset permits.
Because they're producing carbon dioxide here,
so they have to offset that.
The whole thing is built using fossil fuel infrastructure,
from the concrete to the steel to the mirrors,
to the backing on the mirrors.
The sun is renewable, but the solar arrays are not.
- Oh, come on.
There's got to be something renewable.
Glass is renewable.
- Glass.
Glass is not renewable.
- Iron's renewable.
Aluminum?
That's renewable.
I recycle my soda cans.
I know it's renewable.
- Yeah, the problem with all of these materials is
that it takes an incredible amount of energy to mine
and process all of the materials
that go into building something like this.
You use more fossil fuels to do this
than you're getting benefit from it.
You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels
in the first place, instead of playing pretend.
- That green energy has nothing
to do with fossil fuels is apparently a story
only meant for you and me.
Here is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
speaking to oil and gas company insiders.
- It's a combination solar gas plant.
It's a turbine that we just take from a gas plant,
suspend it from a big scaffolding, a tower,
and surround it by giant mirrors in the desert.
The plants that we're building, the wind plants
and the solar plants, are gas plants.
- What kind of game is being played?
- Well we're basically just being fed a lie.
For instance, you'll hear
about Germany running on wind and solar.
- They were getting 50% of their power
coming from the sun.
- There were days this past summer
when the Germans were generating 80%
of their power from the sun.
- But Germany
is still Europe's largest consumer of coal.
- Uhh.
- Only a small fraction
of their energy actually comes from wind and solar.
In fact, Germany is pushing forward with a large terminal
that could import natural gas from the United States.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla,
when he announced his Gigafactory battery plant,
he said it would power itself with wind and solar energy.
- Through a combination of geothermal, wind and solar,
it will produce all the energy that it needs.
- But in fact, it has lines connecting it
to the same electrical grid that we're all connected to.
Electric cars, wind turbines
and solar panels use rare earth metals.
And in fact, a rare earth mine is
right up the street from here.
In mining these deep deposits, about 90%
of what they pull up out of the ground contains uranium,
thorium and low level of other radionuclides.
Radioactive waste that has to be disposed of somehow,
they kind of turn it into a paste and spread it
over the desert floor.
- Well, that's good for the desert, right?
- Yeah, the desert loves that.
Tesla's electric cars are built with aluminum,
which uses eight times more energy
to manufacture than steel.
They use lithium, which also relies on toxic mining.
And even more graphite, which is one
of the rarest forms of carbon.
In fact, the investors wanted
to open several new graphite mines
after Tesla announced the Gigafactory.
Apple claims to be 100% renewable.
- We never stop thinking about what's best for the planet.
We now run Apple on 100% renewable energy.
All of our facilities, worldwide.
- And they did chop down a forest
to put up solar panels near their North Carolina plant.
But they didn't disconnect from the grid and they can't.
- Duke says energy hungry companies
like Apple can never go entirely off the grid.
- They're still hooked up to our grid.
- Despite all of the claims,
I haven't found a single entity anywhere in the world
that's running on 100% solar and wind alone.
- It turns out, you don't just need fossil fuels
to run a place like Ivanpah, you need the devil himself,
or in this case, themselves.
- All of the mirrors that you see there are built
by the Koch brothers, Guardian Glass Industry,
a company that they control.
Koch Carbon creates a lot of the inputs that are used
to create the cement and the concrete and the steel.
And not only that, they build the plants
that builds polysilicon for solar cells.
They have, actually,
their own solar line called Solar Molex.
From every step of the process, the Koch brothers are there.
- But, they're the evil doers.
- Yeah , the funny part is
that when you criticize solar plants like this,
you're accused of working for the Koch brothers.
That's the idiocy in all of this.
This absolutely can not extend civilization's life.
This relies on the most toxic and industrial processes
that we've ever created.
- The beauty of a solar facility,
and particularly this technology,
is that it is so environmentally benign.
I, too, had once thought
deserts could be sacrifice zones.
I was wrong.
Deserts are not dead.
They are, in fact, full of ancient life.
In the desert, the Joshua tree stands, waiting,
waiting for the giant ground sloths
and the mammoths that shall never return.
The Joshua tree depended on the giant mammals
to reach up high and eat their seeds,
and thus disperse the Joshua tree.
But now, stranded in time and space,
the Joshua tree awaits a new fate.
To be sacrificed
in the name of progress.
- Joshua trees are torn down to make way for solar projects.
23ABC's Cassie Carlisle travels
to the Mojave Desert to talk to neighbors.
- They're not your usual tree.
More like something from fiction,
but these Joshuas are causing quite an uproar.
- No, it makes me sick that they're clearing them off,
killing them real quick,
and now they're grinding them up,
getting rid of all the evidence.
- Not far from Ivanpah Solar,
Daggett, California was home
to several generations of solar arrays
including some of the first on the planet.
Ozzie and I thought we would take a trip
to see where it all began.
- This is one of the sunniest places in the planet, really,
and it's the center of the solar industry
and they've been building and dismantling
and building arrays here for about 40 years.
- Then we happened to run
into the mayor of Daggett.
- And then the solar plants out there, my husband,
back in, I'd say '83, '84, they worked out there building
that solar plant out there.
- Yeah, the SEGS.
- And everybody here worked.
- How's that held up?
Is it, are the jobs still here?
- No.
Jobs went bye-bye.
They have their normal people that run the plant,
the plant operators and stuff like that,
the big wigs, you know, they have that.
Where that energy's going, I don't know.
- Were you originally optimistic
that the solar would bring more jobs
and development for people?
- Yeah, we really did, we really did.
A lot of things come into this town, they come and go.
They go really fast.
- Do you see this?
- Then Ozzie and I discovered
that the giant solar arrays had been razed to the ground.
- Oh, my God.
- I mean, this was huge.
It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at.
A solar dead zone.
Look at the blowing sand.
- Yeah.
There's sand everywhere,
there's sand dunes forming around this area.
- Wow.
So, after all the mining,
the fossil fuels,
the toxins,
the environmental destruction,
here's what happens next.
Only a few years after it was built,
things at Ivanpah began to fall apart.
Broken mirrors littered the desert.
Yes, these giant solar
and wind technology installations may last
only a few decades,
then tear it down and start all over again.
If there is enough planet left.
It was becoming clear that
what we have been calling green, renewable energy
and industrial civilization, are one and the same.
Desperate measures not to save the planet,
but to save our way of life.
Desperate measures rather than face the reality,
humans are experiencing the planet's limits
all at once.
- Every different perspective I look at
and imagine, well, we could do more of this,
or go to a larger area or use more of that.
Well, it turns out, there isn't more.
I looked at marine production and fish production
and found that peaked 20 years ago.
More and more of what we eat is from fish farming.
The current acres of actively farmed land,
that has peaked also.
The rivers are already being irrigated
to about the limits of what they can sustain.
The Colorado River doesn't get to the ocean anymore.
Well, then you start looking at ground water,
the Southern Great Plains,
and I think they can almost predict when they will run out
of ground water and it's in a decade or two.
A human vulnerability at the global scale,
that any one of them we could maybe compartmentalize,
but we're seeing them propagating
across topic after topic of society and the earth system.
And I don't think the people
in charge are near nervous enough.
- Though each
of them takes climate change seriously,
every expert I talked to wanted
to bring my attention to the same, underlying problem.
- There are too many human beings using too much, too fast.
- As a global community, we really have got
to start dealing with the issue of population.
- Population growth continues to be the,
not the elephant, the herd of elephants, in the room.
- Can a single species
that's come to dominate an entire planet--
- Be smart enough to voluntarily limit its own presence?
- Is there any precedence for that in nature?
- Wow.
- We have to have our abilities to consume reined in.
Because we're not good at reining them in
if there are seemingly unrestrained resources.
- Species hit the population wall a lot and then they crash.
I mean, that's a common story in biology.
If that happens to us, in a way,
it's the natural order of things.
And I don't think we're gonna find a way out of this one.
I don't.
- As a scientist,
what leads you to that conclusion?
- Well, because right now, a large percentage
of that number is supported by industrial agriculture,
which is heavily subsidized by oil,
and it's not sustainable,
and there's no going back.
Without seeing some sort of major die-off in population,
there's no turning back.
- What's the thing that nobody ever asks you
that you want--
- Nobody's ever asked me if I'm scared.
- Yeah.
- And, I am.
I actually am scared.
I lose sleep over all of this.
- It took modern humans tens of thousands
of years to reach a population of 700 million.
And then we tapped into millions of years
of stored energy, known as fossil fuels.
Our human population exploded.
It increased by 10 times in a mere 200 years.
Our consumption has also exploded,
on average ten times per person,
and many times more in the Western world.
You put the two together,
the result is a total human impact 100 times greater
than only 200 years ago.
And that is the most terrifying realization I have ever had.
We humans are poised for a fall from an unimaginable height.
Not because of one thing,
not climate change alone,
but all the human-caused changes
the planet is suffering from.
So, why are bankers, industrialists
and environmental leaders only focused
on the narrow solution of green technology?
Is it the profit motive?
And why, for most of my life, have I fallen
for the illusion green energy would save us?
Clearly, to answer this question,
I needed professional help.
- Keep my stuff.
No, I never heard...
- I'll just be honest with you about my dilemma.
You can be my clinical social psych--
It's like, the right has religion,
and they have a belief in infinite fossil fuels.
Our side says, "Oh, it's gonna be okay,
we're gonna have solar panels,
we're gonna have wind towers."
Soon as I heard you talk about our denial of death,
I'm like could that be it?
Could it be that we can't face our own mortality?
Could we have a religion that we're unaware of?
- Absolutely.
I think you've hit the proverbial nail on the head.
What just differentiates people from all other forms
of life is that, we're not only here
but that we know that we're here.
If you know that you're here, then you recognize,
even dimly, that you'll not be here someday.
And on top of that, we don't like that we're animals.
So we don't like that we're gonna die someday,
and we don't like that you could walk outside
and get hit by a fuckin' meteor.
What human beings did back
in yesteryear is to envelop ourselves
in culturally constructed belief systems.
You know, call them cultures,
call them world views, schemes of things.
Whatever you call them, every human community has them.
Every culture has an account of the origin of the Universe.
Every culture has a prescription
for how you're supposed to behave while you're here.
And every culture offers its denizens hope of immortality,
either literally or symbolically.
Then the question is, well, what happens when you bump
into people who don't share those beliefs?
Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not,
that's undermining the confidence
with which you subscribe to your own views,
and exposing you to the very anxiety
that those beliefs were constructed
to eradicate in the first place.
If we're to make progress, whatever that word means,
or even to persist as a form of life, we're gonna need
to radically overhaul our basic conception
of who and what we are, and what it is that we value.
Because the people that you referred to earlier,
both on the left and the right
that think we're gonna be able to discover more oil,
or solar panel ourselves into the future,
where life will look pretty much like it does now.
You know, only cleaner and better.
- Either with more oil or greener or both.
- Correct.
I think that's just frankly delusional.
- What I'm hearing is that, if I haven't come to grips
with my own anxiety about death and life,
and presented with a reminder of that, I'm highly likely
to make some tragic decisions for the community.
- Yes.
The only solution in principle is, as Albert Camus put it,
he said, "There's only one liberty, to come to terms
with death, thereafter anything is possible."
I find that downright inspiring.
- As for our environmental leaders,
who dwelled in comfortable illusions,
how tragic of decisions were they capable of making?
I was about to find out.
- They claim they're just using forest residues,
but actually a great deal of what the McNeil facility,
and lots of biomass facilities burn, is whole trees.
As you can see by this pile that's stacked right
outside of the facility, these are trees.
- It turns out that the biggest source
of green energy in Vermont is something called biomass.
Burning trees to create electricity.
- This is definitely not the way.
At the first step is actually looking at our lifestyles,
how we can reduce our energy consumption.
This is all the ash that has varying levels of toxic metals,
a great deal of radiation
because these trees have been absorb...
Oops, there's the...
- You're in uh forbidden territory here.
- Are we?
- May I ask both of you to come up to our office, okay?
- Is that something you're interested in doing?
- It's not an interest, you've got five seconds
or I'm calling 911.
- Okay.
- We've got two individuals here--
The police will be down here in about two minutes.
- But you asked us to leave and we're doing so.
- I'm not asking you to leave,
I'm asking you to come up to the office.
- Okay, thanks for the offer.
Maybe next time.
You got everything here.
You have the number one polluter in the state
that people think emits magical fairy dust
from the smokestack.
Reality is what you have is a facility
that burns 400,000 green tons a year of trees.
This facility burns thirty cords of wood per hour.
- That's a hell of a lot of wood.
- And on top of that,
it actually burns natural gas, as well.
- And to think you would have to have 10
of these to replace one average coal-fired power plant.
It's just not gonna work.
- It's just nuts.
It takes a great deal of fossil fuels
to cut down all these trees,
to truck 'em in, to use the big machinery
to dump the wood chips everywhere.
So, the idea that somehow this is not anything to do
with fossil fuels just doesn't even make any sense.
It couldn't happen without fossil fuels, in fact.
- How did the environmental groups
get pulled into this?
- Obviously, the main factor is delusion.
A lot of these environmental groups have been saying
that all we have to do is, for instance,
switch our fossil fuel economy over
to a few solar panels and windmills,
and we can continue living life as normal.
Some of the environmental groups have been,
for years, touting facilities like this saying that,
number one, it's carbon neutral.
That this will actually help us fend off climate change
because there are no CO2 emissions.
It actually emits over 400 thousand tons
per year of carbon dioxide.
"Oh, but once we cut 'em, they'll grow back."
They'll grow back over a period of decades to centuries
but if we cut every tree in the United States,
it would be able to power the country for a year.
Then what happens when, you know, those trees are gone?
- I discovered biomass plants
were not even always biomass plants.
- This is actually a solid waste incinerator
that's posing as a biomass plant.
The impact in this community is severe.
The plant is right next to a Head Start school
for preschool kids.
There is Green Hill Manor and
that's an assisted living senior residence.
And there's also a Catholic elementary school
right next door.
- How do you know they're polluting?
Can you see it ever?
- We can see it.
The snow at the elementary school
and at the preschool is covered with black,
some kind of black soot.
We just had it analyzed
and it came back as mostly tire chips.
They have to add tire-derived fuel
to raise the temperature of the fire,
because anybody who's tried to burn green wood or wet wood,
knows that it doesn't burn very well.
- But this biomass plant had
yet another surprise.
- They admit that they burn 20.1 tons per hour
of creosote treated railroad ties.
Besides that, they are allowed to burn 500 pounds per hour
of PCP treated railroad ties.
These are shipped in from Canada.
It's not green, it's not renewable, it's
it's not anything that they claim it to be.
Yet, they got $11.5 million grant
because it was classified as renewable.
The plant owner told us
that they were having trouble getting enough wood chips.
And he even asked us if we had any scrap wood
where we lived, would we call the plant
and let them know so they could come up and pick it up.
- We're not talking
about some old industrial site,
we're next to one of the most beautiful places in the world.
- We're next to Lake Superior, this is Keweenaw B...
this is actually L'Anse Bay, it's part of Keweenaw Bay.
It's Lake Superior, our lake.
So, it's a very sacred place to many people.
- Are you with the news?
- No, there's supposed
to be a climate change rally.
- Oh.
- Michigan State University students,
inspired by 350.org, were holding a rally
for the clean energy future they'd been promised.
- Imagine when I found out
that it is the largest on-campus coal plant in the nation.
The goal is to get the whole world moving
beyond fossil fuels.
- Who wants to do a 350 sign on the steps?
- But it turned out Michigan State had a form
of green energy in mind the students did not support.
- The university contracted
with an energy contracting company.
They put together a modeling tool.
The first two or three months
that the steering committee was using this modeling tool,
it didn't even contain data for wind or solar.
So there was
- Adam told me they were planning on
substituting coal burning with biomass burning.
- But the permit that is currently being considered
by the state is a permit for 24,000 tons of biomass,
I think per year.
And the plan is to do that in all four boilers.
Unfortunately, the steering committee considers
biomass renewable at the moment,
which we're not happy with.
- Michigan State wasn't the only university
to go green.
- I'm happy to announce that Carolina will be going
beyond coal in the next decade.
Now, as we begin to wean ourselves on coal, we are about
to try another alternative energy source, biomass.
- And who was here
to help the University of North Carolina switch
from burning coal to burning trees?
- So, it is a great pleasure to be here today
to celebrate the remarkable step
that the university is taking to say,
"We're gonna do our part."
- A remarkable step, indeed.
We're to do our part by getting out
of bed with coal companies
and into bed with logging companies?
Where did the idea of colleges going green
by burning trees come from, anyway?
A little college called Middlebury in the heart of Vermont.
- Welcome to the celebration of the opening
of Middlebury's new biomass gasification system.
It's now my great pleasure to introduce
this afternoon's speaker, Bill McKibben.
- What powers a learning community?
And as of this afternoon, the easy answer
to that is wood chips.
It's incredibly beautiful to stand over there
and see that big bunker full of wood chips.
You can put any kind of wood in, oak, willow,
whatever you want.
Pretty much anything that burns we can toss in there
if we can chip it down to the right size.
And there are very few similar cases anyplace
in this country of that kind of change over that scale.
But it shows it could happen anywhere
and it should happen anywhere.
In fact, it must happen everywhere.
- It must happen everywhere.
And now it's time for a nature break,
enjoying our sustainably managed Michigan forests.
- If you walk through here and you look,
there's virtually nothing growing.
A little bit of grass occasionally.
- And it seemed that biomass plants, indeed,
were suddenly everywhere,
like this one in Cadillac, Michigan.
In Detroit, an incinerator
that burned garbage was considered green.
- The Detroit incinerator is known to emit horrible smells
and pollutants that neighbors say make them feel sick
and put their health at risk.
- It's a stink, it's a horrendous stink.
- A proposed biofuel plant
for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan would consume trees
from tens of thousands of square miles.
- In order to create 40 million gallons of ethanol,
they were going to have to use up
over a million tons of green wood.
We pointed out that they were gonna be using
more natural gas than they were gonna be creating ethanol
to displace the natural gas.
If you continue to do this,
you're gonna be fertilizing the forests.
- Fertilizing forests with?
Fossil fuels? - Fossil fuel
based fertilizers.
- Made from natural gas?
- Yeah.
Then came a ballot proposal backed
by Bill McKibben and nearly every major environmental group,
requiring Michigan to get 25% of its electricity
from renewable sources by the year 2025.
- This year, Michigan voters have a choice:
keep burning dirty coal and oil, or move Michigan
to clean, renewable energy like wind and solar.
Vote 'Yes' on Proposal 3.
- Surprisingly, Proposal 3,
also known as 25 by '25, was the brain child
of an organization that was 100% biofuels and biomass.
- Allowing America's farms, ranches and forest lands
to be active participants in contributing
to America's energy future.
- These are the biomass
and biofuel plants across the U.S.
How did this happen?
And it wasn't just the U.S.A.,
it was all around the world.
Wood chips, which is just a euphemism for trees,
are being exported to Europe from America,
British Columbia, Brazil, and Indonesia.
Wherever they can get them from.
Biomass, especially when you add in biofuels,
is by far the largest portion of green energy
around the world, even in Germany,
source of the solar miracle.
But maybe I was missing something.
Maybe I had it all wrong.
I decided to ask people protesting fossil fuels
how they felt about biomass and biofuels as green energy.
Would you say we don't need to do biofuels
and food and forests for energy?
- No, no, definitely not.
Of course not, of course not.
- Burning biomass, any kind of combustion,
is something we just need to move away from.
- The more trees we have, the better.
- A lot of that didn't grow overnight.
If we cut it down, we don't know the impact of that.
- You're here as an oak tree?
- Yes.
- If I had a chainsaw,
that wouldn't be saving the planet, would it?
- No, it's a painful,
it's a painful way to go.
I can tell you that right now.
- It would take you a while to regrow.
- Yeah, oh yeah.
And it wouldn't be me, it'd be an off-spring.
- With so many people doing it on such a massive scale,
all of a sudden at once, that's pretty serious.
- No, I think we should not be burning trees.
- No, no.
- Why would we cut down trees?
- We shouldn't replace one terrible way of getting energy
with another terrible way of getting energy.
Because it's one thing.
- Clearly, most citizens are opposed
to biomass and biofuels.
But what about environmental leaders?
At times, they have promoted biomass but other times,
they sound like they are against biomass.
Like this Sierra Club policy,
"We are deeply concerned about the implications
of wood-to-energy for native forests."
Or this statement signed on by 75 environmental groups,
"Burning forests for energy will destroy one
of our best defenses against climate change."
But then again, their language leaves loopholes
that enable biomass.
The NRDC says you must use the "right types of biomass."
The Dogwood Alliance says
maybe small biomass plants are okay.
And the Sierra Club flat out states,
"biomass can be sustainable."
Which side are they really on?
I thought for sure with the camera rolling,
environmental leaders would speak for the trees.
- No frackin' way.
- Where's the science, where's the science?
- We're here to tell a story about what the forests
of this state, of our commonwealth, mean to us.
- Does your organization have any stance on that?
- I'm not sure I would say we support it as much
as we can wrap our heads around it.
We've almost made a peace with the timber industry.
- I'm just curious, what's your group stance
on using forests for biomass?
- Biomass is renewable, biomass is sustainable.
- And I'm with Clean Water Action,
we don't really have a stand on it.
If the director of the Sierra Club was here,
she'd be able to talk your ear off about it.
- I'm the director for the Sierra Club in Pennsylvania.
- Does the Sierra Club support
or not support biomass?
- Um... I'm not totally prepared to talk
about our policy on biomass today.
Our position is somewhat nuanced,
so I just want to be careful not to...
- So, you're with 350?
- I am.
- Do 350 have a position on biomass
'cause I'm kind of actually--
- I can't really speak for 350.
- Do you personally have an opinion about
whether we should be burning trees for green energy?
- No, I don't have an opinion on that.
I like a fire.
- One of my biggest concerns
as an environmentalist is that we're trying to burn trees,
there are tree burning power plants.
Are you aware of the problems with biomass or biofuels?
- Yeah, yeah, I'm not as aware of that
as I could be or I should be.
- Jeff Gibbs, working on a documentary.
In Michigan where I live, where I'm from,
there's large plants that burn trees for energy
and pretty much whole trees chipped up.
Do you have a thought about whether
that should be a part of green energy or not?
- The great thing about green energy is
you don't have to pick a favorite.
- Jeff Gibbs.
- Oh, hello.
- My biggest concern is that in Germany, for instance,
they're moving towards solar and wind
but 60% of their actual energy is coming from biomass.
60% of what's considered renewable energy.
Burning trees for energy?
- I don't know the details out of Germany.
What Germany's really doing is a lot
of sun and wind and that's really powerful to see.
- I'd like to see us come out
against any burning of trees-
- All right, well go ahead and do it.
- for clean energy.
Would you-
- Although I confess I stoke my wood stove
almost every night of the winter,
so I'm not really the right person to ask.
- But designating green energy for power plants?
- Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
It's not what this day's about.
- But if we're burning trees
instead of fossil fuels.
from Taiwan.
- Oh, good.
- We're wondering what role do you want
to play in this
- I think the biomass question's a non-starter.
I found only one environmental leader willing
to reject biomass and biofuels.
- So we are talking
of the old oil economy trying
to maintain itself now
through another raw material, the green planet.
The only reason corn and soy has been planted for biofuel
in this country is the subsidies make it profitable.
I think the big crisis of our times is
our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions.
We shifted to measuring growth,
not in terms of how life is enriched
but in terms of how life is destroyed.
- Her honesty was refreshing.
But as for the rest of them, I wondered,
what are they hiding?
And why are they hiding it?
Is it their ignorance?
Or is it something else?
What if they, themselves, had become misguided?
What if they've made some kind of deal
they shouldn't have made,
and are leading us all off the cliff?
It was long past time for me to come to grips
with the other elephant in the living room.
The profit motive.
The only reason we've been force-fed the story,
climate change plus renewables equals "we're saved!",
is because billionaires, bankers,
and corporations profit from it.
And the reason we're not talking about over-population,
consumption, and the suicide of economic growth is
that would be bad for business.
Especially the cancerous form of capitalism
that rules the world,
now hiding under a cover of green.
- Today Bloomberg Philanthropies is making,
I'm happy to announce, a new investment
of $30 million in the Beyond Coal campaign.
We have more.
I'm glad to say that more
than a dozen additional funders have committed
to match that $30 million.
- And who were these new partners?
One of them was Jeremy Grantham.
Billionaire, world's leading timber investment advisor.
They were not investing in trees
to turn them into nature preserves.
Which might answer another riddle,
why is this name redacted on the Sierra Club's tax return?
Would they be embarrassed to take three million dollars
from a man who made his living selling the forests
of the world?
Bloomberg, bringing a timber investment billionaire
to the party, was no coincidence.
Bloomberg sponsored a U.N. climate session
to discuss ramping up biomass
and biofuels around the world.
Billionaires were in love with the idea of turning
what was left of nature into green profits.
Remember when Al Gore had gotten Richard Branson
to invest billions into saving the planet?
- Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic,
powered a Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam
on a coconut oil mixture to highlight the potential
of this amazing oil as a clean energy biofuel.
- Branson had actually invested in biofuels.
He was attempting to replace the jet fuel
damaging the planet with biofuels
that required the consumption of the living planet.
And it was game-on for the airline industry.
Dozens of researchers
from all over the northwest gathered
in Missoula the past two days to explore the idea
of converting the region's mass of reserves
of wood into jet fuel.
Especially with the demand for aircraft fuel expected
to grow by a billion gallons in the northwest alone.
- United Airlines will buy a $30 million stake
in biofuel company, Fulcrum BioEnergy.
The airline used 3.9 billion gallons of fuel last year.
- What technology was Silicon Valley billionaire
Vinod Khosla hoping to profit from?
- Nature takes a million years to produce our crude oil.
KiOR can produce it in seconds.
- The company took over this old paper mill
where logs are picked up by a giant claw,
dropped into a shredder and pulverized into wood chips.
Clean gasoline?
- Clean, green gasoline.
- There must be a downside.
- There is no downside.
- The bank that crashed the economy,
ruined millions of lives and has their tentacles
on the levers of power,
what would their favorite form of green energy be?
- One of the very interesting markets
that we deal with is Brazil.
It's unlike any other market in that today,
alternative energy isn't really alternative energy.
It's so much a part of the fabric of the society.
The country began to utilize its vast resources
of sugarcane to produce ethanol.
- There was a man from Goldman Sachs
who was particularly in love
with turning forests into profits.
- Has everybody got enough coffee?
Might want to get some more.
- Meet David Blood, former CEO
of Asset Management for Goldman Sachs.
How much money did Mr. Blood believe should
be invested in green energy?
- A natural alignment for something in the order
of $40-50 trillion worth of capital.
- $40-50 trillion.
And who was going to help the man from Goldman Sachs,
help him raise that astronomical amount of money?
- A gentleman some of you may recognize
and know, Bill McKibben.
- It's entirely dependent on what kind
of political will we can muster.
And if we do not get this done very fast,
then we're not gonna get it done.
- And so Bill McKibben went forth
to generate the political will for trillions
of dollars in green investments.
- Our next guest has been called
our nation's leading environmentalist.
- And you are, in some sense,
the Grand Poobah of the environmental movement.
- My guest tonight is on a global crusade.
- On a global crusade for what?
- Commit to divesting from fossil fuels.
We can't justify investing our money in companies
that are basically running Genesis backward.
- So when you divest from fossil fuels,
and invest in green funds, what are you investing in?
I took a deep dive into Securities
and Exchange Commission filings to find out.
For instance, in the Green Century Funds,
recommended by 350.org and Bill McKibben,
I found less than one percent solar and wind
and 99% things like mining,
oil and gas infrastructure companies,
including a tar sands exploiter,
McDonald's, one of the companies driving meat consumption
across the planet,
Archer Daniels Midland,
one of the world's largest producers of biofuel,
Coca Cola, the largest creator
of plastic pollution on earth,
logging and paper companies including one
that brags about biomass burning. And banks.
Lots of banks -
including BlackRock, the largest financer
of deforestation on earth.
- The business that they're engaged in
is actually destroying our life support system.
- The Sierra Club, also partners
with a green fund called Aspiration.
Aspiration also includes dozens of companies profiting
from the destruction of the planet,
including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Chesapeake Energy.
- In order to maximize the
of the well,
the shale formation will be hydraulically fractured.
- The Russian gas giant, Gazprom.
- Gazprom owns the world's largest
explored gas reserves, 36 trillion cubic meters.
- And in perhaps the most bizarre twist of all,
the Sierra Club's green fund's biggest holding is in Enviva,
the world's largest consumer of forests,
to be incinerated in green energy biomass plants.
Of course, one investment option is a green fund,
run by Bill McKibben's buddy, David Blood.
And who was the chairman of this fund?
Someone familiar.
- Use capitalism, it gives incentives
for people to do their best.
- Al Gore and David Blood partnered
to form a company called Blood and Gore.
No, scratch that, Generation Investment Management.
And within this fund, Blood and Gore designated
a special investment category targeting $650 million
of biomass and biofuels.
Funny thing was, they partnered
before Al Gore's film came out.
Was that movie just about climate change
- On one side, we have gold bars.
Mm, mm, mm.
Don't they look good?
I'd just like to have some of those gold bars.
On the other side of the scales, the entire planet.
If we do the right thing,
then we're gonna create a lot of wealth.
- And when it came time for Al Gore
to choose between the entire planet and getting him some
of them gold bars, what choice did he make?
Here's Al Gore earning his keep by pretending to care
about the rain forest while lobbying Congress
on behalf of the sugarcane ethanol industry.
- Let me come in on the Brazilian effort here
with the issue of the possibility of expanding into
that Amazon River basin with further deforestation
to produce more ethanol out of sugarcane is a worry.
And apparently you're not as concerned about that.
- No, no, I am, I simply forgot.
What's been going on there, it is really very troubling.
And with your permission, I'll show you a very quick example
of it over a period of 25 years.
- The invasion of sugarcane monocultures
in the region clashes
with the indigenous people's right to land.
These are images of a last ditch attempt
by the Guarani-Kaiowá to resist eviction.
- Important to note that the exploitation
of the sugarcane growing areas in Brazil does not have
to inevitably have the knock-on consequence
of causing destruction in the Amazon.
- Sugarcane fields are burning.
They're set alight before the harvest
to eliminate the leaves and tops of the plant,
which makes cutting more efficient.
Environmentalists blame the seemingly
endless sugarcane fields for air and water pollution
on an epic scale.
And along with deforestation, the threat it poses
to the environment is becoming clear.
Once the indigenous families were expelled,
the land owners set their homes on fire.
- Is there anything too terrible
to qualify as green energy?
- Thank you very much Secretary Mabus, and the U.S. Navy for
once again, inviting me to speak with you today.
The Navy's work to help launch
this new fuels industry is invaluable.
- The U.S. Navy has a special message
this year.
It is time to turn green.
Joining the vessels is what the U.S. Navy calls,
it's great green fleet of warships,
powered by fuel from renewable sources like algae,
grass and animal fat.
- Animal fat?
- The next time you fill up
at your neighborhood gas station,
you might find yourself pumping a little alligator
into your tank.
That's right, U.L. Lafayette researchers
have developed alligator fat
into a renewable source for biofuels.
- And once we run through the animals, what's next?
GE, who brings you nuclear energy and wind turbines,
is ready with a plan.
- I believe that liquid fuels, chemicals,
are eventually gonna have to be made
from sustainable raw materials.
We believe that seaweed is one
of the most attractive opportunities.
- Better hurry.
One year after it was filmed, this seaweed forest was dead.
You might ask yourself, how could men destroy
what remains of nature to enrich themselves?
Well, that's why they're billionaires and you're not.
The takeover of the environmental movement
by capitalism is now complete.
Environmentalists are no longer resisting those
with a profit motive, but collaborating with them.
The Nature Conservancy is now the logging conservancy.
- We will capture the most important pieces biologically
and there will be another large block sold
to timber investment groups.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has become the union
of concerned salesmen, having taken millions,
not for science,
but to create markets for electric cars.
The Sierra Club sells electric cars
and solar panels right from their website.
- The best thing about Sungevity is
that they make it easy for you.
All that you have to do is to say yes.
- The New York Times partners with ExxonMobil
to bring you the good news about biofuels.
- Algae derived fuel
could help us meet growing demand.
- Treehugger.com, which claims
to be the largest single source of environmental news,
was founded and funded by Georgia Pacific,
a logging company.
In fact, they are neighbors.
Georgia Pacific is owned by our friends, the Koch brothers,
who are likely the largest recipient
of green energy biomass subsidies in the United States.
Yes, the merger of environmentalism
and capitalism is now complete.
But maybe it's always been complete.
- How is 350.org funded?
- Well, not very well.
- Who are your funders?
- To the degree that we have any money at all,
it's come from a few foundations in Europe and U.S.
- Which ones?
- Ah, let's see.
The, uh, I'm trying to think who the biggest funders are.
Ah...
There's a foundation in, based in Sweden called,
I think it's called the Rasmussen Foundation
that I think has been the biggest funder.
- So you don't get money from Pew or Rockefeller
or any of those big foundations?
- No, we did.
Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave us some money right
when we were starting out.
That's been useful, too.
- But they no longer fund you?
- I don't know, I don't have this sort of-
- Really?
- Funders sitting in front of me.
- That's usually something that people know.
- Rockefeller's been one of our, is one of the,
is a great ally in this fight.
- You just sold your TV network to Al Jazeera.
- Right.
- And that government is basically nothing
but an oil producer.
- Gas, mainly and oil.
- Your take on that, about a hundred million dollars pre-tax
from a country that bases it's wealth on fossil fuels.
Isn't there a bit of hypocrisy in that?
- Well, I get the criticism, I just disagree with it.
I'm proud of the transaction.
- You couldn't find, for your business,
a more sustainable choice?
- What is not sustainable about it?
- Because it is backed by fossil fuel money.
- I get it, I get it, I get it.
- And so, if you got yourself
an environmental movement and environmental leaders,
why not buy the holy day itself?
Happy Earth Day!
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
♪ You make me want to say
♪ Ah, you make me want to say
- Now we are facing the greatest sets of issues
that we've seen in my lifetime.
It's time now for a new generation to jump up
on the stage and create a habitable country,
a habitable planet, that we can all enjoy.
Are you that generation?
I need to thank Building Energy
which provided so much solar power to this
that we powered the entire event with solar energy.
- But when I went backstage to see
what was really going on.
- It ain't running this whole thing on that, Jack.
I can tell you that.
For a toaster is 1200 watts.
So, that run right there could run a toaster.
- I found the installer.
- Hi.
- Are they running the festival
on these solar panels?
- The concert is run by diesel generation system.
They didn't ask us to energize the concert.
- Oh, okay.
- And we'd also like
to thank our incredible corporate sponsors
who've been behind the movement to end extreme poverty
and tackle climate change since the very beginning.
I want to thank Toyota.
Citibank.
We want to thank Caterpillar.
- We're standing at the construction site
of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
It looks like there are
at least three bulldozers actually bulldozing the land.
People have gone through the fence,
the bulldozers are still going
and they're marching over the dirt mounds.
Get the fuck off!
Get the fuck out of here!
- Without these partners, it wouldn't be possible.
Let's give them a round of applause, everyone.
- Now I know this all might seem overwhelming.
It's a kind of thing
that we normally don't try and think about.
But by not thinking about it,
it stands a good chance of doing us in.
I truly believe that the path to change
comes from awareness.
That awareness alone can begin to create the transformation.
There is a way out of this.
We humans must accept that infinite growth
on a finite planet is suicide.
We must accept that our human presence
is already far beyond sustainability,
and all that that implies.
We must take control of our environmental movement
and our future from billionaires
and their permanent war on Planet Earth.
They are not our friends.
Less must be the new more
and instead of climate change,
we must at long last accept
that it's not the carbon dioxide molecule
destroying the planet,
it's us.
It's not one thing, but everything we humans are doing.
A human-caused apocalypse.
If we get ourselves under control, all
And if we don't...
♪ Ah-Ooh
♪ Ah-Ah-Ooh
♪ Ooh-Ooh
♪ Ah-Ooh
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
♪ Ah-Ah-Ah
♪ Oh-Oh-Ah
♪ Ooh-Ah
♪ Oh-Oh-Oh
♪ Ooh