Before the Flood Page #8

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our climate summit,

you couldn't say that we could

go to scale on high tech,

clean energy solutions.

But now in Paris, we can say so.

We actually have the proof.

You know you wake up in

Germany Saturday morning,

you're likely to get 30

percent of your electricity

from solar and wind, and not

from a few energy utilities,

but from over 2 million

citizens delivering to a grid.

Denmark today produces over

100 percent, some days,

of its electricity

needs from wind.

100 percent.

It's totally renewable.

And remember that, once you've

invested in wind and solar,

you actually have

free energy forever.

In countries like

my own, in Sweden,

there was an enormous

uprising among people.

You know, from youth groups to

citizen side organizations,

to the point that the prime

minister announced three weeks

back that Sweden will now

become the world's first

fossil fuel-free nation.

- Congratulations.

- I was shocked

at the way that it propelled

itself from below.

I think we have tipped the world

toward a sustainable future.

The fear is are we

doing it too slowly?

Ladies and gentleman,

you are here today to write

the script for a new future.

The fate of our planet

is in your hands.

I am a small island girl

with big dreams from the Island

of Majuro in the

Marshall Islands.

Back when I was six or seven,

my grandpa told me about how

the ice in the North Pole

and the South Pole

will melt away,

and as they melt, the water will

rise and soon flood our islands.

This agreement is for

those of us whose identity,

whose culture, whose ancestors,

whose whole being is bound

to their lands.

This agreement will

help the world prepare

for the impacts of climate

change that are already here,

and also, for those we know are

now headed our way inevitably.

Nearly a quarter of a

century of global climate talks

have come to this

pivotal moment in Paris.

195 countries saying they'll do

everything in their power

to change.

There's no doubt that

this agreement is a massive step

forward.

But does it go far enough?

The Paris Agreement

calls for keeping climate

warming to well below

two degrees Celsius,

while striving for 1.5.

There's no

mention of a carbon tax,

there's no mention

of any penalties.

There are no

enforcement provisions.

We just have to take

it on faith that all these

countries are gonna follow

through with what they say.

How likely is that?

This is an

unattainable deal that Congress

has already voted to reject.

The fact that we're

going to have a 26-28 percent

reduction in CO2 emissions,

that isn't gonna happen.

I chair the committee

that has jurisdiction

over the Environmental

Protection Agency.

Hey man.

Good to see ya.

- Thank you so much.

- You doing alright?

Absolutely.

Alright. C'mon.

The Paris Agreement ended up

being a historic agreement,

not because it gets us to where

we need to be eventually,

but for the first time, locking

in all countries into verifiable

steps and targets that

they're gonna take.

It creates the architecture

that allows us to finally start

dealing with this

problem in a serious way.

So you were

happy with what came of it?

I, I, I was happy

that we put the architecture

in place.

The, the targets that have been

set in Paris are nowhere near

enough for what the scientists

tell us we have to do eventually

to solve this problem.

But if we can use the next

20 years to apply existing

technologies to reduce

carbon emissions,

and then start slowly turning up

the dials as new technologies

come on line, so that we have

more and more ambitious targets

each year, then, we're not gonna

completely reverse the warming

that now is inevitable, but we

can stop it before it becomes

catastrophic.

And it's no secret

that you've been under great

opposition to try to implement

some of your climate change

initiatives. And.

We've got some

folks on the other side. Yeah.

So someone that comes

into office that does not

believe in the science

of climate change,

do they have the capacity

and the power to dismantle

everything that you've

already worked for?

Even if somebody

came in, campaigning on denying

climate science, reality has

a way of, you know,

hitting you in the nose if

you're not paying attention.

And I think that the public is

starting to realize the science,

in part because

it's indisputable.

Admire your optimism.

- Yeah.

- But

you start to look at

the science,

look at what's going on

in the Antarctic and,

and scientists saying that

there are sections of ice that

guarantee four to six

meters of ocean level rise,

which will be catastrophic

for the future.

You are the leader

of the Free World.

You have access to information

that most people do not.

What makes you terrified

for the future?

Uh, a huge portion

of the world's population

- lives near oceans.

- Mhm.

If they start

moving, then you start seeing,

um, scarce resources.

The subject of competition

between populations.

This is the reason why

the Pentagon has said,

this is a national

security issue.

This isn't just an

environmental issue.

This is a national

security issue.

You know, in addition to just

the sadness that I would feel if

my kids can never see a glacier,

the way I saw when I went up

to Alaska, uh, you know,

that's the romantic side of it.

That's the side that takes

a walk with my daughters

and I wanna be able to, them

to see, or my grandkids,

I want them to see the

same things as I saw

as I was growing up.

Even if you were

unsentimental about that,

in very hard-headed terms,

you've gotta worry about

the national security

implications of this,

and the capacity for the

existing world order

as we understand it to

survive the kinds of strains

that the scientists are

predicting without action.

This is why we have

to take action now.

If we keep pushing keep prodding

and most importantly keep

educating the public

there's no reason why, uh,

we can't solve this

problem in time.

Thank you for

your time, Mr. President.

You bet.

Thanks for the good

work you're doing.

- Thank you so much.

- Alright. Good?

I have realized that as

a science community we have not

done the best job, frankly,

of communicating this threat

to the public.

But when you go up there and

see it with your own eye,

how thin the world's

atmosphere is,

tiny little onion

skin around the earth.

That's all the oxygen that

we breathe, that's the CO2,

everything we burn goes into it.

It's an astonishingly

fragile film.

You know, I knew intellectually

how the earth's system works,

'cause that's what I've

been doing for 20 years.

To see how the

atmosphere and the ocean,

all the elements in the

system work together.

So I understood it

intellectually.

Mhm.

But it's like being

an ant trying to understand

what an elephant looks like by

crawling all over the elephant.

But when you're

up there in orbit,

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