Before the Flood Page #6

---

The way cows produce methane is

they eat as much as they can,

and when they are chewing, a

whole bunch of methane is burped

through the mouth uh,

into the atmosphere.

The atmosphere has

much more CO2 in it.

But Methane is far

more impactful.

Every molecule of methane is

equivalent to 23 molecules

of CO2.

And of the methane

in the atmosphere,

nearly all of it is

due to livestock.

In comparison to

emissions from other sources,

what kind of percentage

are we talking about come from

the consumption of beef?

About 10, 12

percent of the total U.S.

emissions is due to beef.

It's staggering.

But it's very easy to

envision a dietary shift,

even as minor as

switching, let's say,

from beef to an alternative.

Let's say even chicken.

The chicken will require

20 percent of the land,

and 10 percent of the

greenhouse gas emissions.

And if you compare, rice,

or potato, or wheat,

beef requires 50

times as much land.

So even cutting the

amount of beef that you eat

in half, or by a quarter, could

make a significant difference.

It, very significant.

Do you, do you at

all think that that's even

a possibility considering

that beef is so a part

of our culture?

Maybe not everybody's

ready to eat tofu, you know,

24/7.

I get that.

But even if you just have to

have some flesh between

your teeth, if you

switch to chicken,

you will have eliminated 80

percent of you what you emit,

depending on where

you are coming from.

Let's face it, it's fairly

easy to switch your diet

from one choice to another.

While working on the Revenant,

which is about man's

struggle with the elements,

we shot on location in

the Canadian snow belt.

The irony was we were hit

in with record temperatures

that completely melted our set.

In order to finish

making the movie,

we had to relocate halfway

around the world just to find

snow.

The fact that we have to come,

200 people in the

middle of the summer,

to the winter in

Southern Ushuaia,

9000 miles from where we're

supposed to be shooting

this three months ago, chasing

ice, is because it's melting.

It was a very, very warm winter.

We came down to the

southern tip of our continent

besides the South Pole, to

film this, cause this is where

this, this, the last

snow is left.

I think that, my

point of view I was saying

to my, to my son, I said,

you know, it's funny that,

it's very sad but

probably for you kids,

to see snow will be a

super eccentric adventure.

A few people will be able

to see snow in the future.

I feel like I'm in

some weird, surreal movie.

I honestly look around, and I

think, when I have children,

everything that we

now take for granted,

our planet and all of its

biodiversity and beauty.

Everything in the future

is gonna be different.

Every single light that you see

has to be completely different.

It has to come from a

different power source.

We need to build all

those things differently,

all the cars that are on the

road need to be different.

And this is one city, and

if you zoom out onto a large map

of planet earth at night,

you see electrification

all over the world.

And we're fighting powerful

fossil fuel interests

that basically want to keep

doing business as usual.

How can we possibly

turn this all around?

The fossil fuel industry

is the biggest industry

in the world.

They have more money and more

influence than any other sector,

so I mean, the more that there

can be sort of popular uprising

against that, the better.

But I think the scientific

fact of the matter is,

we are unavoidably headed

towards some level of, of harm.

So, the sooner we

can take action,

the less harm will result.

Wow. Holy crap.

That's a good robot.

Whoa!

What is your grand

vision for all of this?

The point of the

Gigafactory is to get the cost

of batteries down to the

point where it's affordable.

Right.

Batteries are critical to

the sustainable energy future.

The sun doesn't shine

all the time, so,

you've got to store

it in a battery.

How is this gonna

help developing nations that

have massive populations

that need to have power?

So, the advantage of

solar and batteries is that

you can avoid building

electricity plants at all.

So you could be in a remote

village and have solar panels

that charge a battery pack, that

then supplies power to the,

to the whole village,

without ever having to run

thousands of miles of high

voltage cable over the place.

It's like, what happened with

landline phones versus

cellular phones,

in a lot of developed

countries they just didn't do

the landline phones, they just

went straight to cellular.

And we actually did the

calculations today, like,

what would it take to transition

the whole world to, uh,

sustainable energy.

What kind of throughput

would you actually need?

Um, and you'd need

100 gigafactories. So.

100 of these?

100 of these, yes.

That would

make the United States.

No, the whole world.

The whole world?

The whole world.

All energy.

- That's it?!

- Yeah.

That sounds, that doesn't sound.

It's manageable.

That sounds manageable.

Yeah.

The Gigafactory,

when it's complete,

will have the largest footprint

of any building in the world.

Counting multiple levels, it

could be as much as 15 million

square feet.

So, Tesla can't build

100 gigafactories.

The thing that's really gonna

make a difference is if

companies that are much bigger

than Tesla do the same thing.

If the big industrial companies

in China, and U.S., and Europe,

the big car companies,

if they also do this,

then collectively we can

accelerate the transition

to sustainable energy.

And if government sets the rules

to favor sustainable energy,

we can get there really quickly.

But it's really fundamental.

Unless there's a

price put on carbon.

We're never gonna be

able to make the transition

that we need to in time.

Correct?

Yeah.

And the only way to do that is

basically with a carbon tax.

Okay, now walk

me through a carbon tax,

which is what you're saying,

is the silver bullet

for climate change.

Well the carbon tax

would be basically a tax on

any kind of activity that put

carbon into the atmosphere.

So when you tax something,

you raise the price,

people are gonna tend

to consume less of it.

In fact that's sort of lesson

number one of economics.

So you're teaching

economics at Harvard,

and you literally wrote the

book on contemporary economics,

right?

Well if I'm teaching

the course for many years,

I might as well write the

textbook to go with it.

So just to be clear,

you've worked with a lot of

Republican heavyweights,

John McCain, Mitt Romney,

and you worked for George Bush

when he became president.

I was chairman of the

council of economic advisors.

So how come we don't

have a carbon tax already?

Politicians don't

always do what professors

want them to do.

So the basic idea is

that we wanna tax bad activities

that have negative side effects

Rate this script:4.0 / 4 votes