How Climate Change Boosts The Economy | Green Business

[Music] this is Earth there's Venus Mercury and the sun now even though Mercury is twice as close to the Sun as Venus Venus is the hotter planet why carbon dioxide AKA CO2 Venus's atmosphere is full of CO2 and the greenhouse effect has r a muck since the Industrial Revolution Earth's CO2 levels have been increasing sharply and now we too are heating up granted Earth's been hotter before and colder But it's been about the same temperature for the last 10,000 years which includes all of modern human achievement like farming batas and frequent flyer miles climate change

is happening is it fixable what are the solutions who's working on [Music] this there are truly problems that we can't solve we don't yet have the cure to cancer we don't yet have the cure for Alzheimer's we don't yet have the cure For Parkinson's Disease this problem we can solve and and there's no good reason not to and so much is at stake on check global warming threatens to drive into Extinction one out of every two creatures on the face of the Earth the Arctic could literally disappear in 10 years time we're going to see

serious disruption of Agriculture huge sea level rises Millions fleeing to Higher Ground more extreme storm events wildfires more periods of drought ethnic conflicts Potential Decline and collapse of civilization I've heard enough I'm convinced I don't need to hear any more about we're all doomed we know it's a big task but it's also a fantastic and huge [Music] opportunity the US has about 5% of the world's people but we create almost a quarter of the world's CO2 CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas it's just the one making The most trouble right now a lot of

people worry about climate change but a third of Americans don't think humans are the cause we agree with the 84% of scientists groups of Faith like the Evangelical climate initiative many Fortune 500 companies and the Pentagon that's right the Department of Defense these groups know humans are the cause and that this is a big big problem figuring out whether tackling climate change is possible is the big question To get the job done we better find people who are giving it the good fight and hope the next generation is up to the task there is a

big stumbling block today there's no cost for emitting CO2 no penalty for the downside of carbon-based energy and that makes it hard to move people to clean energy now back to those scientists it's important to note that many times they've been wrong with their climate models global warming is happening much faster than Any of them predicted and that woke us up so we hit the road hunting hoping for Solutions our first stop [Music] wind wind is a renewable resource it also renews lives in Pennsylvania's rejuvenated Rust Belt laid-off Steel Workers are now hired to make

turbin and down in West Texas wind is turning dirt into gold Are you getting lots of wind noise here just that's supposed to be you know that's supposed to fit right in the picture wind noise and on the Wind [Music] Farm Cliff saw wind turbin popping up all around his cotton farm and decided to get a piece of the action before it blew away all of the developers that I approached initially were accustomed to doing business in the large ranches lots of land one or two owners My father felt that if you look around the

area around here most of the land is owned by small family farmers and the last 20 or 30 years have been difficult for family farmers and that was the primary reason why he became interested in trying to get a wind development project we had lots on ERS and lots of small tracks land and there was a natural resistance to doing all that contract stuff but once I was able to convince the developers that the the Actual construction cost on this wonderful flat Farmland with County Roads everywhere would be an absolute minimum then they begin to

take notice and and uh was able to make this happen you might could say I did it all single-handedly see I got caught in a cotton stripper in 1972 I was 30 years old it really wasn't such a traumatic situation for me I just decided that I was going to take it on As a challenge and uh worked out okay I've been very fortunate I think that global warming is is readily accepted and most farmers are good stewards of the land and and they're wanting to say something done about it and contribute to it look

at that that something before the turbin things were Bleak in Rosco when I graduated from high school I mean most of the people that uh that grew up here they couldn't wait to get out of town and and go to the big city not because they didn't love this area but mainly because there were so few opportunities for Rosco I guess we bottomed out when we lost a Dairy Queen oh yeah that's the kiss of death for a small town when your Dairy Queen closes down you're you're on your last leg but about that time

our wind industry came along and it's been a Fantastic unbelievable boom Rosco Rosco's got what will end up being for a little while at least the largest wind farm in the world and there are 400 land owners in this area that are sharing in the benefit of that project the land owners get paid on the actual amount of electricity generated their payment is a straight royalty and this is the only time they've ever had a chance to receive a steady income once It's completed Cliff's Wind Farm will power 250,000 homes and the farmers are raking

in up to $115,000 per turban per year leasing their land which is still used ible for farming and ranching the thing that's really cool you talk to a lot of the families that raised kids here and you find out that a large percentage of them have children moving back to this area because of the wind industry Vicky uh Hayes really benefited from this wi for them I hope Uh hope you'll include her she a lot better looking I am this is our daughter and our little grandson that it brought home and my son-in-law and our

little grandson so Dan's the one working with the wind turbin and it's just been a blessing Farmers really do appreciate these things this is strictly dry land we sit here and Pray For Rain and cuss the wind now what we've been cussing all these years turned out to be a [Music] Blessing it's clear when wind power reduces cussing in West Texas but in many other states people don't like wind turbines or the transmission lines they'll need that's too bad because the US Department of energy says wind from Texas North and South Dakota Kansas and Montana

has more power potential than all the electricity needed in the US if you look at wind's power potential worldwide it has the capacity to produce trillions of Watts otherwise known as Terawatts all day every day humans are now using energy at a rate of 16 ter and this runs everything cars skyscrapers chips smelters crockpots everything with electricity fuels cow dong you name it a terawatt is a trillion Watts 100 Watts Powers a 100 watt light bulb a kilowatt is 1,000 watts an average American household consumes 20 8 Kow of the terawatt piie a billion watts

is a gwatt Seattle or San Francisco eat up at least A gwatt of power 1,000 gaw is a terawatt and as soon as possible we need all 16 of those ter to come from clean climate safe sources We Now power less than 2 ter that way getting to 16 ter will be a tough task let's say 2 ter will be made from wind power we'd have to build and install one large wind turbine every 5 minutes for the next 25 years is that even possible at its peak General Motors could make six new cars every

minute and many car factories sit Idle let's retool and build wind turbines and check this out every day 86,000 ter hit the earth as solar power over 32 ter are pumping from geothermal power and 87 many terawatts of wind power are blowing around the globe right now we only need 16 although wind turbin are sprouting like mushrooms across the West cold plants are popping up even faster in the [Applause] east in the next8 years in China they're Build 800,000 megawatts of new coal plants that's 2 and 1 half times more plants than we have installed

in the US today although we are now neck and- neck with the Chinese as to who is the biggest polluter we should realize that in terms of what's heating the Earth what's up there now it's 80 or 85% Western pollution now the first challenge we in the west have is not to be smuck we have no right to say we should Wait until they do something for us to do something that's just wrong Point number two is it is in our economic self-interest because if we don't get going all the other countries are going to

get going there's no question that these Technologies are going to grow very quickly the question is who's going to get the business we've already seen that us has lost the solar business solar energy was basically commercialized in United States now the Biggest solar companies are in Japan and Germany the biggest winter companies again we created that industry are in Denmark and Germany if we don't get off the dime and start moving aggressively ahead to become the leaders in this vast vibrant new renewable energy field China is likely to be there well ahead of us their

automobile fuel efficiency standards are tougher than ours are and they've got a half a dozen of the most vibrant fast growing solar photovoltaic Electric companies in the world what we need to be worried about is whether or not we're keeping up with them my Approach is to make America the country that gets respected Rich secure entrepreneurial and competitive by Leading the world in clean power and Energy Efficiency the next great Global industry the good thing about the green economy the clean energy economy the low carbon economy it's a labor intensive economy it will create an

infinite Amount of jobs this is geostrategic geoeconomic It's the Most patriotic thing you can beo think or feel today green baby is the new red white and blue climate change is in fact a national security issue we need to change how we think about [Music] this this is no longer the purview of Birkenstock wear and tree huggers not that there's anything wrong with that climate change is posing risks around The world from the increasing risk of extreme weather events to sea level rise as Deltas get flooded worldwide and there are a lot of very highly

populated Deltas you can think Mississippi you can think Ganges you can think Nile uh those people are going to have to move the world is not ready to accept all those refugees so there going to be a lot of wars or nearly Wars and should they occur in some parts of the world where The United States has very significant presence and interest you'll have a security problem that affects the United States but there are closer in more more critical elements that affect security fundamentally we all understand we've got to get off our dependency on foreign

oil the nations in the Middle East are more important now because of our desire for oil if you take that out of the equation then maybe the kind of spectrum of Conflict we see ourselves and over there may change president uh George HW Bush would probably not have felt he had to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraq Persian Gulf had been home of two-thirds of the world's proven supply of [Music] broccoli [Music] I was not a big believer in global warming but you can only read so many reports so much science you know I live In

Florida and I was going to say drill drill drill but now as I know more about this I think that if oil is the problem maybe more oil is not the answer at 300,000 barrels a day the Department of Defense is one of the world's biggest users of oil getting that fuel to the front lines is incredibly expensive in dollars but more importantly in blood when you're moving large convoys of thin skinn Vehicles transporting fuel our enemies clearly understand how Critical that is to us and that is what they will attack we have to find

ways to as as one Marine General likes to say unleash ourselves from the tether of fuel then the military won't need to fight over oil and the war Fighters as you can imagine really like that [Music] idea current Greenhawk and career badass Dan Nolan headed up a task force to figure out ways to reduce mil milary oil Use early on we wanted to understand what was the real problem what was the real Challenge and so we went out we started visiting some of the Ford operating bases the fobs a third of the Army's wartime fuel

use is to run generator sets to make electricity in a typical forward operating base recently examined 95% of that electricity went to air condition inefficiently tents sitting in a very hot sandy place if it was 120° with the air conditioning Blowing in there you might be able to get it down to 100° and really what we're doing is we're air conditioning the desert so we're getting people blown up in fuel convoys to deliver the fuel to be wasted in that way just connect the dots and obviously there's something wrong with this picture we looked at

uh what was currently available in terms of adding liners to tents and that sort of things and then uh one of the folks on my team came up with the idea of spray Foam insulation this looks like a tent the only difference it doesn't move at all essentially you've got a big iglo cooler here by foaming tents we go from a 50 ton cooling unit down to a 8 tonon cooling unit which reduces our power consumption tremendously we figured that within approximately 10 months we will pay for everything so we're actually saving soldiers lives giving

them more a comfortable place to stay and saving Money and saving the environment all in that one fell Swope beond tense quickly constructed buildings that use no fuel are on the horizon what we're in right now is a monolithic dome that has its own power we have two wind turbines and two solar panels the goal is to get continuous flow into the batteries inside what we really don't have right now is utility level power storage that for me is the Holy Grail if the green Hawks get the dod to invest in Large scale Battery Technology

they could help jump start an industry when the first microchip came out it was very very expensive until Uncle Sam started investing in them and those prices went down and it became commercially viable we could use the government's buying power to make these systems more accessible on the commercial [Music] Market our mission in protecting our nation includes protecting our Environment and sometimes outside Society follows in the footsteps of the military Harry S Truman ordering the integration of the Armed Forces helped Kickstart civil rights in the' 60s because all those soldiers who lived with people of

different color and race you know in the military went home and changed their communities when the military goes green the country is going to go green but right now even as the green Hawks ranks are growing the Entrenched bureaucracy of the dod is pushing back hard against Innovation it's going to take many more bold military leaders and brave lawmakers to give this lasting [Music] traction for years now we've been hearing about climate change as some far-off event finding Solutions was smart but we thought we had time to figure things out trouble is there's no more

time the evidence is piling high That climate change is happening right [Music] now the consequences of climate change are being acutely felt in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state warmer winter temperatures which they've got cause more precipitation to fall as rain not snow more winter rains mean water becomes storm runoff instead of slowly recharging the groundwater as snowmelt does less snow means glaciers aren't replen finished all this adds up to Wasted water in Winter and droughts in summer lowering the output of Washington's main source of electricity hydr power and greatly reducing the numbers of salmon

as well in the last 60 years 53 glaciers have disappeared on the Northern Cascades Glaciers are also retreating in the sieras the Rockies the Alps and the Himalayas hundreds of millions of people and thousands of Industries rely on that [Music] Water as the country gears up for a green tomorrow a major place of change is on the [Music] road the world's Transportation runs on carbon-rich fossil fuels lessening The Thirst for fuel comes in many shapes and sizes planning cities so people can walk ride their bikes and take mass transit is a great start loading trucks

more efficiently using only one engine when taxiing Planes even tacking a sale on cargo ships all reduce carbon dioxide which from cars trucks trains planes and ships adds up to about 14% of all the world's CO2 and as more and more fuel is needed across the globe using fuel more efficiently is key I'm a truck driver I'm out on the road 10 11 hours a day 7 days a week I try to take at least a day off here and there see the family stop by the house See the bills they piling up I run

from uh California all the way to Texas you running temperatures between uh 95 to 110° and the coldest 4 days ago the temperature was 24° to run their air conditioners or heaters while they sleep the truckers have to keep their engines running we're burning about 1 gallon per hour even if it's during the winter or during the summer so we idle I mean sometimes up to 7 to 9 to 10 hours so you basically are Losing uh dollars you're losing dollars every time that truck is running and not moving a solution to this is the

external power unit which cools the the truck with a tiny bit of battery power and heats the truck with 1/10th the fuel you can sit there and get Frosty you can lay down and get Frosty my heaters over here that works together with this unit hot air will start popping up from the bottom of that vent and it'll start getting everything nice and warm I'm Able to conserve my fuel then I can travel longer distances without sitting there idling 9 to 10 hours you know burning 9 10 gallons this 9 10 gallons is going to

give me x amount of mileage you know it adds up so yeah that's somebody's vacation right there we don't know about the world but if all Long Haul truckers in America shut their engines off while they slept they would reduce CO2 emissions by 11 million tons and save more than 1 billion gallons of Fuel a year which is over 1 the department of defenses fuel usage fuel efficiency is critical but we also need options other than fossil fuels automobile companies are starting to say look we want to sell you the cars you want sometimes they'll

be big sometimes they'll be fast but we're going to power them on something other than petroleum products one replacement for petroleum products is biofuels now I'm somebody that owns Ethanol plants in America corn-based ethanol plants corn-based ethanol plants are nowhere near as efficient as sugar-based ethanol plants for every acre of sugar you can produce seven times more fuel than than one acre of corn a big drawback to ethanol is that it can't be refined into diesel the world's principal Transportation fuel nor can it make Airplane Fuel ethanol freezes at 15,000 ft and therefore um it's

not a good idea for planes to have Ethanol we are still in a world that runs on combustion engines there's over a million manh hours of just engineering work in a jet engine that's not going to disappear tomorrow so something's got to feed those jet engines if we want to continue to move around the world uh we're looking for renewable sustainable methods for doing that there's a promising biofuel that uses no food sources is homegrown and makes both Diesel and Airplane Fuel if you look at fossil fuels uh the bulk of the carbon that we're

burning now was algae derived the beauty of the algae is renewable on top of being renewable a clear advantage over fossil fuels a pond of algae is highly productive if I grow an acre of corn over the course of a year and I take that that piece of land and I plant as many crops as I can in 12 months the maximum yield that I'll get out of corn from an oil standpoint is about 28 Gallons if I do the same thing with an acre of palm trees for producing palm oil I'll get somewhere between

6 and 8 00 gallons if I scrape that acre of land off put a shallow pond in it without any technology just an open Pond I can get as high as 5,000 gallons of oil the promise of algae is tantalizing like many new green technologies it's expensive now but could become cheaper once pilot projects grow to BigTime operations another way to get the oil Monkey off our backs use electricity first automobiles were electric then because of the oil was so cheap and the batteries weren't ready they very quickly moved over to gasoline we've been doing

it one way for the last 100 years but now we got to be thinking about what's the technology for the next 100 years and personally I believe it's electrification of Transportation this is a very complex high-tech operation you take the extension cord and you plug It into the car all you have to do really for this is to put in the lithiumion battery which is about 10 times more powerful than the regular battery in the car although these batteries are not quite ready for mass production Untold teams of researchers worldwide are honing in on the

solutions like making them last 10 years and ensuring that they'll be recyclable the overall goal is less emissions with less expense you're Talking about being able to drive it something close to 10% of the cost of what you're driving at now now you don't have to be concerned about climate change or terrorism or anything to want to drive at 10% of the cost of what you're driving at net the net emission reduction for CO2 is better for plug-in hybrids no matter what you're using for electricity even coal plants produce less emissions through a plugin hybrid

Than gasoline does in an internal combustion engine certainly if you're using wind and solar and renewable energies you're getting an enormous reduction in emissions Pacific Northwest National Laboratories has done a big study and they say you could have 85% of the cars on the road be plugin hybrids before you need a single new power plant plug-in hybrids could also solve one of the Grid's major problems utilities have no way to store electricity for when They need it we've got to build power plants to meet eat relatively speaking a few hours a few days of the

year when demand is at the absolute highest and for the rest of the time we've got this excess capacity but with the Advent of plug-in hybrids this excess capacity could be socked away in their batteries when we're in a power crisis and it's a very hot day the air conditioning load is high and we're looking at having to turn On more fossil fuel plants then you could sign up to say my car is plugged in it's sitting at work use it as a tiny power plant and imagine millions of those power plants being able to

feed back into the grid and we avoid contributing to the carbon problem because you stored it up and if the utility wanted to use your plug-in hybrid for electric storage you could say beg me and then pay me if you go into a dealer's showroom in a couple of Years and the salesman says the local utility uh we're working on an arrangement with them but it looks like within a year or so they may be picking up a about a quarter or so of your annual car payments what's not to like about that right what's

not to like is the patchwork of laws that govern utilities across the country in some states or even counties it's against the law for people to sell extra electricity they Generate to anyone but the utilities and there's no law that says the utilities have to buy that electricity back to change all that it'll take courageous lawmakers to put country first and big utilities second for this great program could stall out even while climate change is revving up in Alaska climate change has already shortened Winters which means late formation of sea ice the strong barrier between

Coastal Villages and the violent Bearing Sea winter storms as the exposed soil is much softer than sea ice the village of nuk with 340 residents is losing 80 ft a year of Coastline their barge Landing the main source of incoming Goods is gone as is their dump their freshwater Supply is next to go they've got to move 9 miles Inland the cost $130 million four other Villages are also designated imminently threatened with 184 more on Deck 600 M away and still in Alaska there's a team fighting climate change with an untapped energy source that saves

money clears the air and even warms your [Music] bath we're at Chen Hot Springs I'm Bernie Carl and uh here's Bert ner they're our [Laughter] goats Alaska has more geothermal energy than All the states put together but yet China Hot Springs is the first geothermal power plant in the state of Alaska Gwen Holden is Bernie's chief engineer for energy projects I'm pregnant with uh twins right now that's right 6 months pregnant Gwen's main job with Bernie was exploring the potential of the China Hot Springs themselves what people were saying was that the 165° fhe water

that we had wasn't high enough for generating Power your typical geothermal plant is operated at 250f or greater so you're really looking for very hot water or even steam I knew that I could make electricity from this water and I brought in a drill rig and I started drilling a well over here before long Bernie and gwy did a successful test at the same time way back in Connecticut giant manufacturer UTC power was working on the same solution we needed 165 200 degree water when you go to China Hot Springs there's 165 degree water coming

out of the ground that's where Bernie Carl comes in now this power plant is making power off of water that's not as hot as McDonald's coffee we developed lower temperature technology so you don't have to go after 300 or 400° water or steam this is working we're doing it I mean the lights are on right now geothermally now we're going to enter the largest ice stru in the world to be up all summer now Forbes Magazine voted This the dumbest business idea of the Year Mr Forbes can kiss my ass this entire structure has kept

cold geothermally it cost me about $12 a day to refrigerate this place if you did it on diesel fuel standard it would be $750 a day it's the cheapest thing going our electricity was costing us 30 cents of KW right now we're at 5 cents of KW in 3 to 4 years we'll be one penny per kilowatt hour will'll have the cheapest energy in the state of Alaska people say where do you stand on global warming I said well if someone thinks there's not global warming then they must have their head up their ass I

said if you pull your head out and open your eyes you'll notice the Glaciers are melting you will notice that the sea ice cap is almost gone so do you think there's global warming yes there is do I think man is causing global warming I think that we add to it do I think we're causing it no But that doesn't make any difference I want clean water and I want clean air and that's so simple usually what I get is people say well why hasn't this been done before I don't know I have no idea

if I can do it here maybe it'll catch on to the other 230 villages in Alaska and maybe if it catches on there what if it starts catching on in the towns what if every everybody caught on what if they did it because it made Sense in their pocket what if they had more change at the end of the day for being responsible what about [Music] that climate change may be hardest on the oceans where hundreds of millions of people get their main source of protein off the coast of Oregon is a dead zone the

size of New Jersey thousands and thousands of dungeon crabs seaw worms and sea stars have died because oxygen levels are so Low pockets of oxygen depleted seawater have long been common far offshore but with a combination of climate change induced fluctuations in currents and winds the most severe low oxygen conditions ever observed on the west coast are now plaguing marine life climate modeling predicted what has become an annual occurrence since 2002 scientists have no idea whether this is [Music] reversible Energy Efficiency is getting The services you need like a cold beer or a hot shower

or a comfortable house using as little carbon generating fuel as [Music] possible Energy Efficiency starts with buildings which account for about 40% of all us greenhouse gas emissions which is more than double that of transportation and that's because we use a lot of fuel oil and natural gas to heat buildings we use Electricity to light them and cool them currently a bit of this electricity comes from Renewables but a big chunk comes from natural gas and nuclear nuclear power splits atoms and opinions proponents tout its ability to produce massive amounts of non-carbon energy opponents have

distaste for radioactive waste potential for rogue nuclear bombs made from that waste and the enormous cost for new nuclear plants there is disagreement on whether nuclear power is A must in tackling climate change but right now one other energy source has the Lion Share of the market we're looking right now at a US electricity business that's about 50% cold and the fact is coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel there's no debating that it is absolutely the dirtiest fossil [Music] fuel nobody has figured out on a large scale a commercial scale how to strip out CO2

from the emission stream and More importantly haven't figured out where we put it if we strip it out Home Depot has a wonderful program they funded the planting of 300 ,000 trees already and are planning on funding more and as a tree grows it sequesters carbon Ed and I started running the numbers and we were shocked a single medium-sized coal plant in 10 days of operation completely negates those 300,000 trees over 100-year lifetime so that was a real eye opener and kind of made a sick To our stomach to be honest with you so Ed

and Christina formed the nonprofit group architecture 2030 by 2030 most buildings will be new or renovated they say if we urge lawmakers to raise the bar on efficient building standards making all those new and used buildings super low energy users we won't even need coal by 2030 and all it will take is to ratchet up the technology we have in hand if we were to shift to the most efficient Lighting Technologies now on the market we can cut electricity use worldwide by 12% [Music] that would enable us to close 705 of the world's nearly 2400

calf fired power [Music] plants if every New Yorker swapped out all of the light bulbs in his or her apartment for CFLs we could run the subway system on the Savings got to love this commute huh these are beautiful so bright kind of feels like we're on a prairie here with the grasses behind me a lot of Illinois species but we're actually 12 12 stories above street level we're on the roof of City Hall and this was our first experience with a green roof the temperature on a green roof is about 80 or 90° in

the summer whereas the temperature on a black roof can be Up to 160 170° I can feel the heat emanating from this other black roof over here so bringing that temperature down on the roof surface makes it easier to air condition inside but it also keeps the ambient environment around the building cooler which reduces air condition cost for your neighbors we calculated that if we can reduce the temperature in the City by 1° we can save $150 million a year on air conditioning Costs as effective as green roofs are there's something even more valuable and

cheaper too I'd like to see what color the roof is it should be white in this climate we have a lot of coal being burned in power plants to run air conditioners to take away the heat that wouldn't be in the buildings in the first place if they had light colored roofs besides cooling the Earth by reducing cold use white roofs also help cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight Making up for the ever decreasing amount of sea ice that used to reflect sunlight by the time you got all the roof white you will be cooling

the Earth equivalent to having grabbed 24 billion tons of CO2 out of the air which is equivalent to tapping global warming for the next 7 years years it's it's huge architect Bob Fox and Company have added up a few energy efficient benefits of their own in the Bank of America building we're using about half the Energy of a typical building of this size we're using half the portable water of a building this size we did spend uh a lot of money to put in the green components of this building but all of it has a

very short payback period so it's not what does it cost to do a green building it's what does it cost not to do it New York City has great new buildings but 85% of the buildings that we will have in 2030 we already have today and So if we're really going to make a dent we've got to do some retrofits I would like to see some of the effort transferred into installing real efficiency for lowincome people many of these apartment buildings are just dreadfully inefficient and the whole thought of taking gas and simply blowing it

out uncocked windows is enough to make one cry bad economics it's bad carbon and it's worse for poor people I see United States having almost A full employment Economy based on retrofitting rebooting a nation when you renovate a building you're not going to take that building ship it overseas renovate it then ship it back you're going to renovate it on site we're going to have to weatherize millions of buildings that's thousands of contracts millions of jobs billions of dollars beginning to flow in a positive direction to help the United States go from being the world

leader in Pollution to the world leader in Solutions the Empire State Building is is old uh it has a lot of complicated details and old systems the building is is up for some major technical Renovations anyway and instead of doing uh a normal renovation that makes it nicer but not more efficient we can do both at once we're here at the Empire State Building today and our goal is to make This building the most efficient building it can be we're talking about putting a shelf that would reflect the sunlight onto the ceiling into the space

so that it would be re-reflected down deeper into the space the breakthroughs in one area can drive further breakthroughs in another we're here to change the rules for example if we dramatically improve the building envelope then we can dramatically downsize The Mechanics for Cooling and heating that means by the way I pay for a smaller cooling plant I've saved money and my tenants who pay for the operating expenses of the building will have a lower occupancy cost depending on what choices are made we can save about 38% of the energy and make it a lot

more comfortable and healthy and productive to work in give it higher real estate value and I think if we can do such a great retrofit in the Empire State Building nobody else Has an excuse remember those 16 terawatts five could be knocked off the list with our new friend Energy Efficiency the cheapest fastest and cleanest way to let coal stay in the ground and out of the air nothing that we recommend in the form of energy efficiency costs money it all saves money so that's a rich field to mine it's like a Saudi Arabia under

our [Music] Cities Energy Efficiency is a no-brainer but because it's free to emit CO2 making carbon based energy artificially cheap Energy Efficiency is still routinely ignored besides buildings that's a huge mistake in the industrial world in the industrial setting what happens is lots of Industrials are throwing away really really hot gases that they haven't recaptured as power because they're not in the power business and that steel Mills you'll see these big flares one plant over in Northern Indiana takes that heat and makes 95 megaw of power and that's one mill in Northern Indiana and the

amazing thing if you stand on top of this Mill is you look around the rest of Northern Indiana you can see flares just look around say you could do another one there you can do another one there this electricity made from wasted heat is onethird the cost of the steel Mill's regular electricity and if we Made use of all wastes to energy opportunities World CO2 emissions would be reduced by 12% maybe more I don't know of any bigger opportunity to make more money reducing more CO2 than this one so if you don't give a damn

about the environment do it because you're you're a greedy bastard you know and you just want cheap power cheap power for most means less power needed refrigerators under the energy star program are now one half the price and Use one quarter the energy as their 1975 models the real trick today is how we get rid of the old ones this is very typical of the average fridge we pick up utility companies have hired us to go out to customers homes pick these things up verify that they work bring them in here and recycle over 95%

of the materials that went into making refrigerators are really bad bad environmental time BMS CFC 12 which is In the cooling circuit that what people typically call Freon is 10,720 times greater a global warmer than CO2 we suck out the oil and the refrigerant and we do that simultaneously then you take the polyurethane foam which is in the insulation in this refrigerator you have 2.5 tons of CO2 equivalent just in the installation we did all this wonderful milling and Heating and all that what we Wind up with is Freon R11 or cfc1 that is doomed

for Destruction and that's what we do with it when I was 20 years old I started producing uh rock and roll concerts I did everybody from Elvis to Sinatra and two tours with the Rolling Stones everybody goes well how did you go from Rock and Roll to refrigerators and I said it was was quite easy it involved a jetty right after I did Rodney Danger Fields US tour I went surfing after a Hurricane and I hit a jetty and I actually died I drowned and they brought me back to life and I decided that I

better do something different as I'm out there going underwater and I'm uh going somewhere else I said you know leave me on Earth and I'll do something good for the world and you know what it was a life-changing event okay these are uh Grease Monkeys it looks like hi Wade how's it doing good Every refrigerator we pick up in this program is like taking two cars off the road for an entire year 10 tons of CO2 equ my father was an inventor in fact he invented the styrofoam ice chest and some of his cohorts were

actually the people that were responsible for polyurethane foam being used so my father was responsible for putting those things out there and I got to go clean up their Maps The mess we're giving our kids to clean up strains the imagination in the States along the Rocky Mountains later and warmer Winters are having a devastating effect hundreds of millions of pine trees have been killed by the tiny pine beetle once held in check by the now disappearing winter cold snaps The Beatles have much more time to ravage in Helena Montana the kild off Forest surrounds

the town and unfortunately the Cost of clearing the timber which they have to do and then Milling it is more than the beetle munched wood is worth in the western us over 24 million Acres of pine trees are dead and since trees help cool the air it's looking like their loss could heat up the interior West even more which could really hurt the water supply Agriculture and tourism of an already stressed out [Music] Area right now tomorrow 2 Earth is on the receiving end of 86,000 ter of solar power solar panels and Towers aren't cheap

yet but sunlight is free for the taking the excitement in solar right now are the the forests of mirrors in the desert that collect solar energy boil water spin turbines in that sense it's a very traditional electric generating technology using the heat of the Sun instead of the heat of burning fossil fuels a drawback to Big solar in the Desert is having to string up citybound transmission lines through protected lands and national forests popping photovoltaic systems on the rooftops sidesteps this snake pit what is so great about this rooftop problem project here is that the

electricity goes right to the grid this will create energy for 165,000 homes and what I like about it to put this rooftop on created jobs it proves that you can protect the environment and protect the economy at The same time because of these giant projects coupled with local and federal tax breaks the cost of solar is going down for homeowners as well and for the communities where solar is is still too expensive Van Jones has dedicated his life to helping folks afford the panels by focusing on the people installing the [Music] panels that's that's Richmond

right there tough tough Scrappy you keep Barking that's [Music] good [Music] I was driving back from Marin County and I've been like a spirituality Retreat you know you know like you know like not something that my community and people I was dealing with was really in interested in and I was driving back over the bridge and I'm thinking I'm going back to Oakland you know I'm going Back to pollution cancer clusters and I just had this this thing in my mind and I just said you know we need green jobs not jails those four words

four syllables have just totally turned my life around because you know that's that's what I'm about grid Alternatives is like the Habitat for Humanity of the solar industry they are trying to get solar panels up and you know low income communities people who need Them we do the installation for free and then the homeowners finance a portion of the equipment cost with a low interest loan that they get from the city want to make sure the wind don't blow my money off the roof so we won't put it in unless from day one they're going

to have savings if it doesn't make dollars it doesn't make sense that's right gr Alternatives they're making sure that the low-income people who need the solar panels can get The solar panels and then solar Richmond makees sure that disadvantaged people get trained to do the work so it's a two for one so uh how how like have you been a part of this program this will be my 10th week 10th week is is it good it's the best thing that ever happened me oh really why you say that cuz you know it's a lot of

lot of lot of stuff that's going around just negative yeah negative stuff A lot of Times you know these guys you know they're on probation they're on parole you know the probation officer just you know assumes the worst about them and then when they see them blossoming and doing something positive even they were getting choked up this is more of a way you to Branch out you know get ahe get a job you know provide for your family see a lot of times when people look at urban communities what they see is deficits They see

what's not there and when I look all I see is assets I see you know entrepreneurs you know Visionaries Geniuses Hustlers you know and that's what we need right now some Visionary genius Hustlers and now I can be a owner of my own company in like you know four or five years six years you know just by starting at the bottom you got to start somewhere to build up to the top so if you want to have a green economy it's got to be about reclaiming stuff it's Also be about reclaiming people reclaiming neighborhoods that's

the Great economy usually when I was working I never thought about my son and about the future now I can think about the future of my son when I'm working so I'm working for a calls now like Daryl van also had a little motivation besides meeting the younger Jones we met the man who showed van what working for a cause was all about as my Father would say are you reaching back are you helping some are you throwing a rope back down my dad had an impossible task of you know trying to fix a school

then they gave him 5 years he did it in one year I was a principal uh they gave me Jackson Jr of course which was supposed to been the uh the worst of the worst worst of the worst and we turned it around where it was the best of the best you hear my Father's story it's just so so hopeful that's how I feel about the country that's how I feel about this whole planetary crisis I I know the ending I already know the ending and it's it's so amazing to think how discouraged people are

and they don't believe you can do something and then you show some leadership and have some hope and you bring out the best in people I don't have the answers but I know people do have the answers nobody's told them you Can do it nobody's asked them you solve it and and and and that's how you lead that's how I lead it's the people that nobody's heard from that are going to solve the problem I just think come back maybe in a few years and you'll be able to see solar panels all over now the

power's going to be going out and the money's going to be staying in the house that's that's what this is all about Mother We helping with the With the environment now we got the right kind of light bulbs and now we got solar paneling on the roof to reduce the energy build here we making energy we sending energy to the Energy company now we saving money right now who get my I'll let you know come look at the at the meter clockwise is this way right that's when it you know you're using up power this

is going counterclockwise so it Means we're feeding power into pg& most this is the future it's a place for ordinary people to earn some money and for low-income people to save some money that's going to be the green economy to save the [Music] world all of these clean energies and energy efficiencies cut down carbon emissions in huge numbers together they combat four fifths of man-made CO2 the other fifth of carbon emissions Comes from the burning down of rainforests that's right 1/5 of all human CO2 emissions are from deforestation to clear land for farming cattle grazing

and expanding cities and whether the carbon is from a coal plant in Indiana or a raised rainforest in Indonesia it heats the planet exactly the same every year we destroy enough Forests to equal half the size of California or Oklahoma and Maryland combined or eight vermonts so protecting rainforests is a big deal on the carbon Frontier but what we learned next was a real kick in the gut even if we stopped all carbon emissions today the Earth will still continue to heat up because we've put too much CO2 up there Already if you could split

the atmosphere into 1 million equal parts you would see that very few parts would be made of carbon dioxide that's why scientists measure these tiny yet powerful amounts of CO2 in parts per million the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is around 350 parts per million we are currently at 387 and that means that we really have to get down to zero emissions during this Century and we have to be well on the way by the middle of the century and secondly we've got to suck some stuff out that we already put up

there and we've got to get on that path sooner rather than later or we will pass this point of no return this Tipping Point Beyond which we can't actually fix the problem things will spiral out of [Music] control if we have it already pass the Tipping Point most scientists believe It's fast approaching once the booming economies of Brazil Russia India and China take off CO2 levels could easily get to 550 parts per million or higher by 2050 and when 350 is considered the safe threshold and hey even if you consider 450 a safe threshold 550

is horrifying herrst melts releasing massive ounts of new CO2 and methane sees 20 ft higher a billion people without fresh water it could happen if we do nothing you can Bet on it happening but there is a solution if we trust our planet's 5 billion years of research and development and work in concert with nature the land could revert to what it does best taking Airborne carbon and and storing it sequestering it back in our forests farms and pastures first we've got to stop burning down the trees a couple Solutions in the Amazon a major

cause of deforestation is to clear grazing land for beef cattle and farmland to grow soy to feed the kattle if the meat eaters like myself go meatless just one day a week it would reduce not only huge amounts of CO2 but also the powerful greenhouse gas methane a byproduct of cow burbs second EC tourism when people who live in or next to rainforests make more money protecting them the rainforest [Music] stay in addition to forests Farms hold vast potential for grabbing CO2 out of the air and storing it in their soil but alas most conventional

Farmers have yet to jump on the sequestering bandwagon generally a conventional Farm is set up more like a factory the soil is the factory farmers buy inputs whether they're seeds fertilizers herbicides pesticides and they bring those into the Factory the soil and they have product going out the other end the problem with that system is it's based on a an industrial model and we all know that every Factory and every industry wears out but when the soil wears out we're in trouble but in organic farming systems we're improving the soil and the health of the

soil while we're using it one of the pieces that we're beginning to understand about what happens in the life of the soil is micro risal fungi it Is a fungi that will attach itself to the root hair and it creates a symbiotic relationship with the plant the micro risal fungus is the main mechanism by which carbon accumulates in the soil not for a season not for tens of Seasons not for hundreds of Seasons but up to thousands of years these micro Riz of fungi flourish in organic systems they're not as prevalent in conventional systems so

chemicals inhibit their growth or sometimes like fumigants will Kill them another thing that kills the fungi is leaving Fields fellow what we happen to know here in our research is is one of the best things you can do is put in a winter cover crop what's really important about this is it leaves a place for this Michael risal fungi to stay alive and grow and when we do that we can literally sequester over 1,000 lbs of carbon per acre per year but the other really important piece to this is cover cropping greatly Reduces the capacity

for that soil to erode because you have crop and root there to hold it in wind or rain there's a lot of carbon in soil preventing it from eroding not only keeps enormous amounts of carbon carbon from being released the resulting carbon rich soil would retain water in drought absorb water in flood and produce healthier food this is the beauty of what Organics gives to the world it's actually as I like to say it's biological it's a Regenerative approach to farming it's a regenerative approach to taking carbon dioxide out of the air and building soil

Health at the same time naturally grazed grasslands can also reverse erosion and potentially sequester huge amounts of carbon the best soils are always produced naturally under tall grasslands I'll show you some of my favorite Grasses here there this is a bunch grass the cows love it it's an ice cream plant which means that they will choose it over everything else the grass co-evolved to be trampled chewed and left alone if you bite off the top of the plant that much of the root dies back I'm sure every plant's a little different ratio but in that

die off all this material that has now been kind of abandoned by the plant is food for the micro Rizal activity the bacteria that Is how soil gets built down there the cow's manure also vastly increases a healthy grass land's ability to sequester carbon but many grasslands are not healthy many of our soils have been mistreated and through compaction either from animals humans or from Machinery develop what are called plow pans which are very thick compacted layers of clay that cement together and don't allow the roots to penetrate deeply in the soil and the roots

are the Major plant organ that is associated with soil Improvement and carbon sequestration so the carbon Farmers sliced through the compacted soil allowing the Grassroots to grow 3 to 8 ft bringing tons of carbon down deep we want to be having so much carbon sequestered that we actually have to hire people to burn coal to get carbon dioxide back up into the atmosphere because we went too far and I see this as our version of a victory Garden the whole world can do if we can achieve a major shift in managing grasslands forests and Farms

then these natural land use practices give us the potential to draw down 39% of Mankind's current CO2 emissions now this is new science to be sure but the early numbers are taly over the next 50 years these game changers could reduce atmospheric CO2 by 50 parts per million in our dirty little hands is an Unheralded solution that could help lead us back to the safe level of 350 parts per million if all these Solutions are such great ideas why haven't they happened yet because clean energies are at a disadvantage carbon emissions are causing climate change

which will cause trillions of dollars to combat yet emitting carbon costs nothing now there's a powerful option for getting Energy Efficiency and clean Energy to expand from less than 2 ter to all 16 we've got to find a way to give a common set of incentives to people to reduce the generation of greenhouse gases the most efficient way to do that is to put a price on carbon that can only be done artificially by government Intervention which means a bigger government hand on the economy because the problem's not going to go away otherwise so you

know we shouldn't think That this problem will be solved by running out of coal or gas or oil it will be solved by addressing the emissions from coal and gas and oil we need a powerful Market signal that will tilt the whole system away from where it is today where pollution is free and everybody says hey we'll just pollute to a whole new ball game where pollution no longer is free in fact it's more and more expensive and anybody who's intelligent is going to start polluting Less putting a price on carbon which is now tepidly

being tried in Europe and the US is critical the devil is in the details of how these carbon laws are written we bore you to tears with cap trade versus carbon tax debates but either way an effective place to focus is on carbon-based fuels at the source there's only a relatively small number of companies oil companies Coal companies natural gas companies who are bringing carbon into the economy we can Make those suppliers pay for every ton of carbon that is in the fuels that they Supply and as the price of carbon goes up dirty Technologies

become more expensive and it opens up a space for clean Technologies to come in and compete so whether a price on carbon happens soon or down the road forward-thinking companies are already moving ahead as if carbon cost the money and they're finding out it actually Does the Walt Disney Company has created an internal carbon tax making all divisions pay for emitting carbon their carbon tax inspires employees to use less energy emit less carbon create more profit since 1994 Dow Chemical has spent $1 billion on Energy Efficiency so far da says it's earned more than $9

billion in Energy savings and for the folks at Stonyfield Farm the world's largest organic yogurt Producer it's become clear just as existing buildings need to be retrofit existing businesses need the same we found that we're actually turning our operations Inside Out by empowering the folks throughout the business to drive out waste to drive out excess carbon production we had to build a waste treatment plant because we had exceeded the capacity of the local Wastewater system so the team actually came up with an entirely different approach that Traps the gases that are being created by the

waste and that gas has actually been used now to actually operate the facility and so they took something that was a cost center and a pollution Center and turned it into a profit Center which means this thing is now making me money the transportation team is an even better example here they've reduced over 6 million Trucking miles that's a 60% carbon reduction these teams together in the Last three years have generated 7.8 million of profits for my company that's $7.8 million it translates into 46 new jobs and so even through the recession we were growing

jobs so there's nothing that makes more sense from an economic point of view than reducing your carbon footprint so let's say making economic sense is the goal then the real work begins intensifying Energy Efficiency standards making clean energy cheaper than carbon Energy giving the pentagon's green Hawks a megaphone completely changing our land use practices this is going to be an engineering political and Industrial Revolution tion don't think big think huge I think what we have to understand is that we're looking at a World War II level of mobilization when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor FDR

said we're not Going to sell any more private cars we're going to make the planes and the tanks and the whatever we need to do to win this war with planes for example the goal was to produce 60,000 people were very skeptical cuz no one had ever seen arms production numbers like that before and in the end we produce not 60,000 but 129,000 planes the key point there is it didn't take decades to restructure the US industrial economy it didn't take years it was done in a matter of months If we take that same level

of enthusiasm interest and focus in trying to come up with sustainable initiatives and renewable energy sources there's no doubt in my mind we can achieve that when we look back at World War II we think of the greatest generation tackling climate change calls for Extraordinary Generations let's get a look at uh Weston over here solar panels you put solar panels in that's the easiest way Right now wind power isn't very feasable in this area cuz there's rarely enough wind all they've been developing it's the so um wind turbines which run on Lower amount of wind

or instead of the traditional blades it's a cylinder shape with propellers on it so it spins winds horizontally instead of vertically like this one thing's for sure the new generation is ready to take the rains to harvest the 16 ter of clean climate safe sources from 86,000 ter of solar 32 ter Of geothermal and 870 ter of wind power for the current generation although some will need a bit of prodding there are a number of leaders as well we need more many [Music] more that's that's the shot right there that's it they're putting the panels

in it's exciting this is what I what I've been working for praying for I wish my dad we're here to see it well he my dad passed away in May and Um he uh great man so so so anyway I'm doing this for him and for my son and it's uh this is the most beautiful scene in the [Music] world right [Music] [Laughter] [Music] here [Music] [Music] it's a unifying cause to address the climate change problem ultimately I think it could be uh one that reminds people of our common [Music] Humanity [Music] we all agree

that there is some aspect of it that we can embrace the environment the economy or national Security and we can all move forward together with it [Music] all these crises uh uh have set into motion something good people want to to turn the ship around and that is what we have to rely on the people awakened can do Miracles and that's what we need and that's what we're going to [Music] get [Music] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] when Gesa first decided to locate its factories in Fairless Hills what was here was a rusted out shell of

a former US steel facility that had been leftow for 15 years then they refitted it and actually brought jobs in as opposed to Outsourcing which I really appreciate And put a lot of Steel Workers back to work Jim Boward worked for us steel and he was absolutely impacted by the Rust Belt phenomena and he lost his job it's a big happening in your life to be all of a sudden found to be out of work and trying to support family and kids going to school it's tough I worked in a building next door that is

actually on the ground right now in the process of knocking it down right Now am I supposed to be smoking on fil my white sees that's I'm in trouble I worked all where you see that scrap that's actual building and my cranes are laying on the ground chopped up and it's kind of sad really it's been 25 years over here maybe gessa will build a wind turbine plant on this side too this spot right here holds a very special spot in my Heart right there I fell over right here and had a heart attack actually

I looked up at this Tower and everything got real mellow and I looking up at it again and the wind's blowing real good and I still have a hell of a future ahead of me our plant here last year produced about 500 turbines and we have created over a th000 jobs and it's a story that can be recreated throughout the United States and that's what this is all About we built the first major offshore wind farm in the UK my day job is I have to make money for my business but it it just does

not get me out of bed frankly and one of the best antidotes for that that you know I found personally you know get out in a boat and you look up at this thing it goes beyond well we actually made x million profit last year we did that and the feeling that that brings is just infectious you want to do more of It there's a piece just standing here right now particularly if you weren't here with that camera How about if the camera wasn't here no if you weren't here with that camera if I was

here by myself okay just standing here sitting here just leaning up against that tree it's a feeling I don't get very often I put it that way I haven't had very often in my Life