Welcome to the global archive,
a vast storage structure located 800km north of Norway.
It contains the artwork from every national museum.
There are pickled animals stacked up two by two.
Every film, every book, every scientific report, all stored on banks of servers.
But the conditions we are experiencing now were actually
caused by our behaviour in the period leading up to 2015.
In other words,
we could have saved ourselves.
We could have saved ourselves.
But we didn't.
It's amazing!
What state of mind were we in, to face extinction
and simply shrug it off?
By nature, I was always an introvert.
But I guess, you know, the airline business needs
a face, blah, blah, blah, blah.
A personality.
32-year-old entrepreneur Jeh Wadia is starting up India's third low-cost airline in 2005.
The time for India is now.
The time for developing business in India is now.
He's got 1,200 employees, most of whom have never set foot on an aeroplane.
What are the different kinds of hijackers that you might have?
Uniforms!
Uniforms are... Do I care? No, no, do I care?
Why are you scared of a little smoke?
Are you going to be scared and run from fire?
It's not a toy, it's not a perfume bottle.
You've got to aim it, hold it. That's it.
I was in London at the time when Stelios created easyJet,
and I was fascinated with basically how he did it.
Evacuate, evacuate!
Go this way, go this way!
We'll be offering fares from 600 rupees all the way down to one rupee.
How many people can afford a one rupee fare?
I would imagine every single Indian can.
A rickshaw driver can, you know, servants.
In the year 2005, having an elite class who can fly in a country of a billion people, it's ridiculous.
Search. Visible impacts of climate change leading up to 2010.
101 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's the hottest day ever recorded.
700 people are now feared dead after the strongest ever recorded day's rainfall in India's history.
It's official. The past year has been the driest in Melbourne's history.
The dessert is advancing at the phenomenal rate of three miles every year.
Dozens of Antarctic ice shelves collapsing faster than anyone predicted.
18 countries are underwater and 1.5 million people are affected.
Fernand Pareau has climbed Europe's highest mountain, Mont Blanc, over 150 times.
Here he's guiding a family from England.
At 82, Fernand's the oldest guide still working in France.
Over his lifetime, he's witnessed huge changes
in the mountains.
There's a ladder extension on the bottom here now.
Extraordinary to think that these are the Alps in December.
Here in Chamonix, as across the Alps,
there is a dramatic lack of snow, and exceptionally warm temperatures.
It is a glimpse into the future.
More than half the ski resorts in Europe could shut down in the next 50 years because of global warming.
So nobody goes skiing, big deal. The thing is it's not that, is it?
That's the whole point.
The fact that you can't go skiing any more or the glaciers are melting is not really the point.
The point is that that's a signal that
basically the earth is destabilising and all the norms
that have allowed life to exist are as it has done are changing.
List climate change, major events,
up to the present day.
This is a couple of days before Katrina struck.
Most people are following the evacuation order in getting out of the city.
But New Orleans born Alvin DuVernay had no intention of moving.
I got up Saturday morning and there was a buzz in the neighbourhood.
Everybody was running around and I was like, "What's up?"
"The hurricane's coming."
I checked on the web and, sure enough, all of the models had it aiming right for us. Bull's-eye.
This is a monster, and it's coming.
Walked through the house a few times, putting things up, you know.
My silk rug from Nepal up on the top shelf, and my guitar.
You just do these things, you know.
Another way to do that is get all your stuff and go.
That's option one.
Probably the best option.
I didn't grow up with that option.
Alvin collected his 84-year-old father,
then barricaded the two of them inside his house as the hurricane approached.
You stare Mother Nature in the eye.
Usually, she's fairly benign.
Then she comes along, methodically, ruthlessly,
and then she stands toe to toe with you and dares you.
Dares you. "Go ahead, get your best equipment out.
"Go ahead, do it, let's dance."
I think one's got to be very careful
about attaching a particular event to global warming.
But nevertheless the intensity of hurricanes is related to surface sea temperature,
so increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming.
By first light, the water in Alvin's house was chest-deep and still rising.
He helped Alvin Snr into their boat and headed for dry land.
You just want the boats floating, so it's no big deal to launch the boat.
There's no landmarks, really, to speak of.
That's a real different perspective, driving through your neighbourhood at tree level.
Then, all of a sudden, you realise there's a lot of people who stayed behind.
There was no coastguard or police.
Most of our national guard was elsewhere in the world.
Iraq, Afghanistan.
Alvin rescued over 100 people, and their pets, over two long days,
including a 95-year-old man and a six-week-old baby.
When that little basket came out of the window,
that was a pretty special time.
And just as peaceful, eyes closed...
It just stops you in your tracks.
Dead stop. You take a breath, you know.
There's nothing more precious than that.
Alvin's neighbours were the lucky ones.
Hurricane Katrina was America's worst weather-related event to that date.
But it was just a taste of what was to come.
"It is our fault." After years of debate, some of the world's top scientists have concluded...
"Unequivocable" is the word they use.
Human activity is...
..contributing to changes in our earth's climate,
and that issue is no longer up to debate.
In Andermatt, they've covered a glacier with a special protective sheet to reduce its summer melt.
One way I do my bit for the environment is turning to 30 with Ariel.
This is offsetting all those flights that I take that I have to for my job.
David Cameron even wears recycled shoes made from old firemen's trousers.
Despite all the efforts to control pollution and its effects on our climate,
the level of greenhouse gas emission has reached a record high and shows no signs of being reversed.
Despite the Kyoto Treaty and all the talk of
reducing emissions of carbon dioxide,
levels of this key greenhouse gas are rising faster than ever.
6.30am on a cool Autumn morning and Alvin's heading off to work, searching for more oil.
Ironically, the oil infrastructure off
the coast of New Orleans suffered major damage during the hurricane.
But Shell moved fast to carry out repairs and, just nine months later,
the rigs are online and everyone's back at work.
Oil was formed when ancient plant life in the oceans absorbed energy from the ancient sun.
As these plants died, they settled on the ocean floor
along with the dead bodies of tons and tons of ocean creatures.
Over the millennia, temperature increased and the organic
matter was gradually cooked until the sun's energy was stored inside oil.
150 million years later, Shell's geologists analyse where the oil
might be, then drill three miles down into the seabed to collect samples.
Here you are, Al. Here's your stuff.
Thank you. We get the samples and analyse them for the fossil contents.
The microscopic fossils.
It's just another geo-scientific tool in order to improve your possibility of finding oil.
In my opinion, probably arrogantly, it's a pretty high calling actually
to try to do that, to try to figure out or maybe take apart time itself.
Go back a few thousand years and the energy available to grow our crops
or feed animals was limited by the daily sunlight falling on the earth.
But now, we use the energy equivalent of hundreds of years of sunlight every single year.
Every part of modern life is now literally made of oil.
From CDs and plastic bags, to medicines and computers.
From clothes and carpets, to cosmetics and cell phones.
It's truly a wonderful and necessary substance. Then there's our food.
Each calorie we eat uses nearly 100 oil calories to produce, package, refrigerate, transport.
Fossil fuel produced fertilisers now feed about a couple of billion people who could not otherwise be sustained.
It would be prudent for humanity to carefully use the remaining oil to build a new society run without it.
Instead, we're burning up tens of millions of barrels every day. It will be gone.
It will run out, leaving pretty much none for future generations,
even though we in the oil industry are working our asses off looking for and finding this magical substance.
Push it back!
Then you see it, and you smell it, and it's greasy and ugly and smells
so much like money, it's just beautiful.
£13 billion in 2005. That's £1.5 million an hour, £400 a second.
And a hefty chunk of those profits came from here, Nigeria,
where most of the population lives on less than $1 a day.
This is the water we drink.
22-year-old Layefa Malemi has an ambition to train as a doctor and then work in her home village,
Cojabanee, where Shell started building this medical centre.
Like hundreds of other community projects across the Niger Delta, construction has been abandoned.
Shell maintains that's because of the risk of kidnapping.
13% of the oil revenue is supposed to be spent on community development.
But the local people's share is almost all lost to the corrupt political system.
So despite being in the most profitable oil region in West Africa, Layefa's village has no
health service, no secondary school, no electricity, and no drinking water.
Layefa is describing a phenomenon known as "the resource curse".
Paradoxically, finding oil usually increases a country's poverty.
As the oil wealth is concentrated in hands of a few,
so the agriculture, education, and health system of the country become neglected and often collapse.
The local people's health problems are compounded by gas flares,
burning night and day throughout the Niger Delta.
Asthma, bronchitis, skin diseases and cancer have all been linked.
That gas is found alongside oil,
but, as it's dangerous to transport, it can't easily be sold to overseas markets.
It could be used for cooking and heating within Nigeria, but building
the infrastructure is expensive, so the oil companies just burn it off.
The flares emit about 70 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
More than the annual emissions from 10 million British homes.
They just do whatever they like.
Why are American cities designed so it's almost impossible not to have a car?
Why were a hundred railways in cities like New York,
Philadelphia and Los Angles bought up and then deliberately destroyed?
Why did the electric car get scrapped?
Why were we, along with Australia, the only two countries not to sign the original Kyoto climate treaty?
Why was an oil company lobbyist allowed to change official
government reports on global warming?
Why was the same PR firm employed by the tobacco industry to persuade the public that smoking is healthy
then employed by the oil industry to convince us there was still doubt about climate change?
Alternative energy has been available for 50 years, why have we barely used it?
Why were solar panels taken off the White House?
Because, right from the early days of the industry,
the oil men and their obscene profit have had an unhealthy influence on the people running our country.
Now, they are the people running our country.
And they're providing the cash, too.
Oil business isn't just in bed with the government.
It is the government.
Here, Layefa is going to a nearby village, Odiama, that was massacred by the government.
The village was involved in a dispute about ownership of
a piece of land on which Shell planed to drill for oil.
The government claimed that the village was harbouring terrorists, and, when they sent the military in
to find those terrorists, the villagers opened fire on the soldiers.
Layefa has gone to hear the villagers' side of the story from Omiekma Wekid.
Amnesty International investigated the massacre and concluded that, although the government was
responsible for the killings, Shell Nigeria should have made sure that their activities
did not contribute to the conflict.
They burned them off.
MUSIC: "William Tell Overture" by Rossini
Human history is littered with the corpses of people who had stuff worth stealing.
Animals.
Water.
Shiny things.
Fertile land.
Spices.
Mm, nutmeg slice. Tea?
But when it came to stuff worth pinching, one continent had it all.
Ivory, copper, cotton, rubber, wood, tin, gold, diamonds, and people.
As cheap energy, slaves were unbeatable, until a less troublesome
energy source was discovered and the new era began.
Human numbers increased five times over.
With each person wanting more and more stuff,
oil became the resource worth fighting for all around the world.
You want to know the real reason we went to war in Iraq?
According to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, it's a simple three-letter answer.
Not WMD, it's O-I-L.
You might read that the ex-chairman of Shell said over the weekend that
oil could hit over $150 a barrel as world production begins to peak.
Not really good news for a country whose entire economy,
not to mention its entire way of life, is based on cheap oil.
Throughout our history,
the deal was we left the world in a better place than we found it.
That was progress.
The wheel, the rule of law, penicillin.
It was our covenant to our children and grandchildren.
My children weren't angry with me for breaking the covenant.
They were too busy trying to stay alive to waste energy on blame.
Trying to negotiate their way through food riots, refugee camps and the collapse of society.
But I think my grandchildren would have been angry,
had they survived into adulthood.
TRANSLATION
Skiing in the desert.
Heating the air.
Lighting empty offices.
Energy is so ridiculously cheap
it makes perfect economic sense to just piss it away.
China is the new bad guy,
because they are building a new power station every four days.
But a quarter of that energy makes stuff for us.
Western companies pay Chinese workers crap wages to make crap plastic toys,
then ship them to Europe and wrap them in more plastic.
Punters drive to the out-of-town megastore in their gas-guzzlers.
Plastic toy in plastic box goes into plastic bag.
Two days later, the toy is broken,
and back it goes to a Chinese landfill
where it stays for about, hm, 50,000 years?
# Water from the bottle's much better than the tap
# Ooh, water from the bottle's much better than the tap
# Ooh, mountain spring spa... #
800 times more energy wasted and 10,000 times more expensive for you.
It's a tricky decision.
Whee.
TRANSLATION
# You keep saying you've got something for me
# Something you call love, but confess
# You've been messing where you shouldn't have been messing...
# Now someone else is getting all your best... #
# ..Boots are made for walking
# And that's just what they'll do
# One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you. #
TRANSLATION
Lots of ideas have tried to take over the world,
but there's only one winner.
3,000 adverts bombard us every day, telling us we'll be happier,
more attractive and with better skin if only we buy their product.
Together, they create within us an insatiable desire to buy more and more stuff.
Americans have been advertised at longest and they now each consume
twice as much energy as a European, nine times more than a Chinese person, 15 times more than an Indian
and 50 times more than someone from Kenya.
If all 6.5 billion people here on Earth consumed like Europeans or Japanese,
we'd need two more planets worth of resources.
If everyone consumed like Americans, Australians and Canadians, we'd need another four.
And in 2040 or so, when there's about 9 billion of us, we'll need two more again.
Capitalism's only goal is ever-expanding growth,
but ever-expanding growth on just the one not-expanding planet is impossible.
The current economic system is disastrous.
Not just for the planet, but for most people, too.
400 years of capitalism has allowed the richest 1%
to take 40% for themselves, leaving just 1% for the poorest to have.
But anyone wanting to live differently is thwarted at every turn.
With profit the only measuring step,
destroying the planet is written into the system
and runaway climate change is a not very surprising result.
# Just can't get enough I just can't get enough
# I just can't get enough I just can't get enough
# I just can't get enough I just can't get enough... #
The logo effectively is colour.
You know, Orange Telecom, they have orange and black.
Our logo is fluorescent colour.
Everything changes in an economy the minute you have an airline moving in.
People can basically do business a lot faster.
If businesses grow a lot faster, people have more disposable income.
Then, you know, consumerism sets in.
We're the verge where consumerism is setting in.
Just moving a lot, like America.
'Glide slow, glide slow.'
Here, Jeh travels to Airbus headquarters in France,
as they'll be supplying him with 26 planes in his first three years.
We have only 200 aircraft commercially flying in India.
China has 800.
Ultimately, you know, we have a very long way to go, playing catch up with China or catch up with Europe.
In America, one airline, Southwest, has 417 aircraft -
double the number we have as a country.
So this is not, of course, your final design choice...
One simple sentence, for me, summarises it all.
Things can only get better.
My main house, it had 10 feet of water in it.
It marinated in that...
sludge for three weeks, almost.
The current state of my house, it has been demolished.
It's a flat piece of property waiting for another house to go on that.
I lost everything, everything that I owned.
I mean everything from family heirlooms to the paper towels sitting on your kitchen counter,
and everything in between.
It goes on and on.
Two beautiful, beautiful oak trees I did not lose.
You know, local, indigenous, quercus virginianas.
Live oaks that sprawl all over the place. Beautiful, beautiful things.
That's what I have left, two oak trees and an empty lawn.
Everything else is gone.
That sucks.
Losing everything you have...
..it's so overwhelming.
And the grief that comes with that is just...
It's profound.
We had an unspoken collective pact
to pretend climate change wasn't happening,
as though as long we ignored it hard enough, it wouldn't be true.
Not absolutely everyone.
A few were shouting, "Fire!"
Hello, come on in.
One of the greatest difficulties with climate change
is that the effects of our emissions today
are not actually realised in terms of the temperature for 30-40 years,
there's this time-lag in the system,
which makes it difficult for us humans to respond
because we're evolutionarily equipped to deal with very immediate threats,
like advancing armies or dangerous animals.
We're not so well-equipped with dealing rationally
with very long-term problems, like climate change.
We have to act now to stop something happening in the future.
If we wait until the full temperature effects are already upon us,
then it's far too late to stop.
If you remember one single number above all else, make it two degrees.
Everyone in the world, pretty much, the European Union,
big multi-national corporations, Greenpeace, political parties,
all agree that we have to stabilise global temperatures within two degrees above pre-industrial levels.
The reason for that is because, if you cross that threshold, there are tipping points in the Earth's system
which could drive the warming process essentially out of control.
Huge amounts of carbon could be coming out of the world's trees and soils.
Methane could be coming out of the permafrost in Siberia.
It's that extra input of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which then leads us to the worst case scenarios
to six or more degrees and the eventual wipeout of most of life on Earth.
Our emissions have been going up between, let's say, 1950 and now.
They need to level out, stabilise, and then decline
just as rapidly to sustainable levels, about an 80% cut, by 2050.
Crucially, to keep the temperature rise within two degrees,
this point of stabilisation needs to be at around 2015.
That means, really, the timeline we've got, the ticking clock,
is that we have to stabilise global emissions
within just seven years from now, as we speak, 2008.
The scale of this task, to achieve a transformation to a low-carbon economy
for the entirety of human civilisation is obviously a huge, monumental task.
Probably the greatest that humanity's ever faced.
Remember the English family who went to see the glacier?
They're back home in Cornwall, southwest England, inspired to start tackling their own energy wasting.
It says that the average individual in the UK is responsible for ten tonnes of greenhouse gas a year.
They are calculating exactly how much climate change gases their family currently produces
and how it can be reduced.
But that's the average individual. There are five of us.
Ah. Ooh.
Whichever way you look at it, this isn't good.
We produce about half of our food
and we try to keep our consumption of meat and dairy down.
My car runs on chip fat and we do cycle when we can.
We've just got our own wind turbine, which will produce all our own electricity.
We're aiming to cut down to about one tonne each per year,
which is apparently the sustainable amount
that the world's trees and plants can reabsorb.
But the big problem is flying.
Just one return flight, say London to New York,
would blow our entire carbon budget for about three and a half years.
Apparently, other than setting fire to a forest, flying is the single
worst thing an ordinary individual can do to cause climate change.
So, it's a bit of a dilemma, because we've just been invited to go skiing in France.
They are now flying from Newquay, which is our nearest airport, so 40 minutes from here, to Bergerac,
which is, you know, an hour and a half or something from it.
Literally, we could leave here in the morning... We live in Cornwall.
We could leave Cornwall in the morning and be in Bergerac for lunch, after lunch.
But if you actually think,
"This is going to cause the death of people, it's actually going to affect people,"
and make that direct connection, then it is a really scary thought.
Obviously, us not flying to France or not flying wherever
is hardly going to solve the problem, but it's down to what you think is the correct thing to do.
Because everyone else is doing it, that's not a good reason.
You only have to look at the terrible things in our history that everyone regrets now.
You know, massacres, the Holocaust etc.
A lot of that was just going along with what was the predominant thinking at the time.
I'm almost jealous of the time, five, ten years ago, when I could just jump on a plane with impunity.
I didn't even think about it. It was just blissful.
No moral dilemma there, whatsoever.
Needless to say, they didn't take that flight.
And joining a climate change protest march may not be everybody's idea
of a tenth wedding anniversary, but Piers and Lisa have shared ideals from the moment they met.
My friend, we went along to the party together and she basically took me
straight over to Piers and said, "Hey, look, Piers, this is Lisa."
And that was it. That was it. We just...
SHE CLICKS HER FINGERS
And spent the whole evening talking about wind turbines.
Piers has been developing wind farms in Africa, America and Britain for over 15 years.
But he knows that they will only help solve the climate crisis
as a small part of a total reordering of western society.
There's still this idea that somehow we have to find THE solution, THE silver bullet.
No single renewable source is going to be the solution. Absolutely not.
And Piers doesn't think much of the other option,
whereby everyone crosses their fingers and hopes that a miracle technology will be invented in time.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be developing other stuff. Absolutely, we should be.
We should be throwing everything at it.
But you've got to make use of what's available now.
In the UK, we've got a great wind resource.
We've just got to bite the bullet and go for it.
Piers has purposed a new wind farm at Airfield Farm in Bedfordshire, central England.
He could have 15 turbines installed and generating 13 megawatts of electricity within a year.
We're the leaders of the revolution, aren't we?
That's it. Outraged faces.
Edward, I've lost your face again. Sorry.
That's it. Yeah, good man.
Well, the protest balloon is now going up. While that's happening, I'll just explain where we are.
MOBILE RINGS This is the site of an old World War Two bomber base.
Phone, bollocks.
Can we all have a thumbs down as well?
UK-wide surveys point to about 70-80% in favour of wind farms as a concept.
The difficulty is when you've got one on your own doorstep.
Then it's the "not in my backyard" syndrome.
Jim, what's the problem?
The problem really is that this is one of the least windy sites in the country.
I hope it's not going to get too windy tomorrow and it wraps itself around the church.
Well, I live in Coddington and we're going to be absolutely surrounded by these high masts.
They're going to obliterate the view.
What it normally always comes down to with wind farms is the aesthetics, you know.
Everything else is basically put together to try and back up the ultimate thing.
The ultimate thing is they don't want to spoil their view.
I'm bit concerned about the low-level noise as well.
The wind farm site is right next to the world-famous Santa Pod drag-racing strip.
Anybody you ask here, nobody's against wind energy.
That's the point. It's against inappropriate wind energy use. OK.
Hypnotic. You're driving along and you tend to see the sails revolving
and you're not concentrating on the driving.
Ernie Braddock will benefit financially having turbines on his farm,
but now he's in conflict with his neighbour, Victoria Reeves.
Well, everyone is very unhappy about it.
We'll lose value on our properties, we'll not be able to sleep.
It WILL make a difference. Ernie, you have no idea, believe me.
According to Victoria, they stopped a wind farm up in Scotland, on their other estate in Scotland,
back in the mid '90s, and that was a great victory.
It can't rely on the wind, it can only deliver... It's an additive.
An additive? Do you mean additional?
Yes, it is additional.
It prolongs resources, put it that way.
No, Ernie, it doesn't. It's got to.
It does nothing of the sort, believe me.
It's got to. It's an emotional campaign. It's about fear.
Mostly based on complete bollocks, frankly.
But, never mind, facts are not a problem, you know.
It's a fair fight,
and I hope you lose. All right.
This is August 2005, just after Mumbai's worst ever floods,
and a couple of months before Jeh's first flight.
Show Daddy how good you are at this.
Show Daddy how fast you can go.
Come on.
Press this. Ooh.
No more pushing, it's battery operated.
'So, I can't see an issue there.'
See your grandpa.
Jeh is descended from one of India's richest and most powerful business dynasties.
They've pioneered everything from ship building in the 18th century to internet services in the 21st.
In a roundabout way, his privileged upbringing sparked the idea for the low-cost airline.
What do you want me to do? I'm going to the airport.
Throughout basically my life, from a young age, I used to hang out with tons of, you know, servants' kids.
You know, that sort of stuff. When you go home,
you suddenly think, "Why do I have so much, and these guys have nothing?"
That sort of shit. That constantly, constantly, constantly ate me up.
Everyone is here for a purpose.
The idea is to realise what your higher purpose is
and then understand how you are going to fulfil it.
And eventually I realised what my higher purpose was.
It was to ensure that I eradicated poverty.
Jeh volunteers at a charity which helps villagers lift themselves out of poverty.
But even by private jet and jeep, it's a five-hour, 900km-journey.
Hiring a private jet, basically, costs as much as a village does.
To take a village from below poverty and put it above poverty.
So, effectively, it defeats the purpose.
Therefore, I decided to, you know, try the trains.
From Bombay, it takes about 26 hours.
I said to myself, "Wow, this is incredible."
People pay good money and still have to put up with this rubbish.
15 million people travel by train in India every single day.
Jeh's dream is to get them all off the trains and into the skies.
We're not at war at the moment. It's not a war.
But if people actually recognised the full implications of what's in store for us,
they would be treating it like a war.
You've only got to take Airfield Farm for example. That was a US airbase.
People flew out of there and died for a cause, which was massive at the time, a global problem.
And we have ourselves, now, a real global problem that needs that kind of level of commitment.
There are many, many other industries that need to be looked into first, before aviation.
It's not a question about choosing one industry to target.
Ultimately, we all contribute to greenhouse gases,
we all contribute to the crisis that we have today with the planet.
So ultimately, you know, ensuring that our planet is safe and healthy
is each one's job, task.
Whether you do it in your own way by using less tissue paper, using less paper, so that trees are not cut,
buying green cars or not flying.
Obviously, if you're not doing it, the demand goes down.
The demand goes down, the supply goes down.
Life's about demand and supply, or supply and demand.
Strange.
Watching these film fragments.
It's like looking through binoculars, observing people on a far off beach,
running around in circles, fixated on the small area of sand under their feet
as a tsunami races toward the shore.
Here's Alvin.
He's just taken early retirement after 30 years on an oil industry salary
and he's planning to spend his later years outside, enjoying nature.
Oh, certainly I'm an ecologist and an environmentalist.
I really don't have a problem squaring that, working for an oil company that I feel has...
Done a pretty good job in...being environmentally friendly.
When I started working in the oil industry, in about the mid '70s,
it was a clear path for me, as a scientist coming out of college.
I didn't know the detail of what goes on in the industry,
the goods and the bad.
But indeed every industry has that, goods and bad.
Would I do it again, knowing what I know now?
Of course I would do it again.
I mean, you need to work, you need to do something.
'Message one.'
The worst example I've had is a lady, an old lady, who came up to me in a public exhibition
and gave me a cutting from a newspaper, with a picture of a guy being shot.
Local anti-campaigns were one of the key factors
stopping about 80% of the proposed wind-energy projects in Britain.
Had they all been built, 10% of our electricity would have been non-polluting.
How the heck are we meant to persuade people like India and China that they should develop
in a more sustainable way when we're not prepared to even accept the odd wind farm in the landscape?
So how's it going? All right, yes.
Not too much trouble? Not really, no.
Nobody's punched me up yet, anyway! Good.
Piers has come back to Ernie's farm with a plan to make the turbines less visible,
trying to kick start the planning process that the anti-campaign has now held up for 18 months.
Another 18 months of climate change.
Another 18 months where I've been able to do nothing about it.
Yeah, I feel really, really fucked off with it.
You must be feeling the same as me.
It's just... I mean how long have we got?
Piers's compromise reduces the number of turbines from 15 down to nine.
This is still the equivalent electrical power to fuel 11,000 homes. Yeah.
So there's still a lot of power.
Exactly the opposite is happening to the very thing that needs to happen.
These things need to be speeded up, and actually they're getting slowed down.
Plenty of politicians are talking about it, but when it comes down to it,
it's just not happening.
It is just not happening, folks.
Governments will only go as far as the population demands.
That means mass protest on an unprecedented scale.
Direct action like this is essential if you are going to turn an issue around in a short period of time.
We've found that many, many times in the past, from the suffragettes onwards.
The very fact that the crisis is taking place within our generation and it's happening right now
means that we are tremendously powerful people.
So this position of despair, and "I can't do anything,"
and "there's no point," it's completely illogical, it's exactly the opposite.
TRANSLATION
There is no shortage of grey matter in this species.
We can do some amazing things.
But I don't think we've been very smart about how we use our resources, how we, quite literally,
burn up something as beautiful and useful as oil. Literally burn it up.
That's it, it's gone, it's done.
I think most people were becoming disenchanted by this point.
We'd stopped believing that this was the golden era of human civilisation
and started questioning our collective values.
All I can hope is incredible disasters like Katrina
and the horrible wars and what not that are going on around the world will snap us out of it.
I'd like to see us headed in the right direction for the good of mankind.
# I still believe in chasing dreams... #
Hey, how are you doing?
Jack on the rocks, perfect. You know what I like.
# I had my share
# I drank my fill
# And even though
# I'm satisfied
# I'm hungry still... #
Before this disaster, I had a lot of stuff.
I was a classic consumer.
Two years later, I've learned a lot about happiness and the pursuit thereof.
# So here's to life
# And every joy it brings... #
Happiness is not in the latest gadget,
the latest electric toothbrush or something like that.
All of that stuff,
it's just not the stuff of life.
Not for me, any more
# Here's to life
# Here's to love
# Here's to you. #
BANG
Come on! Stupid.
BANG
Climate scientists can estimate
how much of the remaining fossil fuels we can safely burn.
This amount is called the global cap.
Under this proposal, the world's governments would make a binding
international agreement detailing how to distribute the global cap.
The earlier the start date,
the greater the chance of not triggering runaway climate change.
The total global emissions for the first year, say 2012,
will be set at their current level.
Every year following, they'd shrink until, by about 2065, they're almost zero.
Initially, each country would be allocated an emissions quota
according to how much they currently consume.
But this would change over time.
America would slash its emissions 90% from its current over-consuming position.
Europe too would decrease massively, as would China.
But India and Africa would increase until, by about 2025,
each human being on the planet
would have equal rights to the Earth's resources.
Equity is the only option morally, and also practically,
as developing countries won't sign up to anything less.
The total emissions would then keep decreasing every year until,
by 2065, we'll have weaned ourselves off fossil fuels and prevented the worst impacts of climate change.
As to how each country divvies up its share to its citizens, there are various options on the table,
the most promising of which is individual carbon rationing.
Mr WS Morrison is here to explain.
If, in the course of the war, we are short for a time of this or that article of food,
rationing will give everyone, rich and poor alike, an equal share of all that's going.
Under the scheme, everyone in UK would be allocated an annual carbon allowance.
Stored electronically, like a supermarket loyalty card,
points will be deducted every time we buy or use non-renewable energy.
For example, using electricity to power appliances in the home.
Or travelling somewhere by plane.
Or even buying petrol for your car.
The best way you can help is by rationing yourselves.
I'm sure that all of you will buy your fair share and no more.
Airports were expanding all over the world to cope
with the exploding number of cheap flights we were all demanding.
Jeh was doing everything he could to join the party.
Ultimately, the art is to hug and then kick.
She thinks the PSF is payable, you're saying the PSF is not payable, what's wrong with you?
Now!
Yes or no?
Did I ask you that question or did I not ask you that question?
You're suspended. You're suspended. Both of you come into my office right now.
Does it take 20 more attendants to clean this?
Keep paint with you.
It's all in a day's work.
Maintaining my brand means something to me, OK?!
If I see my stepladder like this, and if I find dirt,
you'll be fired!
OK?
Now!
Yes.
June 11th, 2007 in a hotel room in Bedford,
Piers is polishing his speech for tonight's showdown with the local planning committee.
This committee can approve this application.
If you do, you will show courage and leadership.
He has just six minutes to convince them to approve his wind farm.
I'm absolutely confident that if you approve this project,
you will look back on the decision and say "Thank goodness we said yes."
But the committee rejected Piers's application, saying that his wind farm would be conspicuous
and out of place in the Bedfordshire landscape.
That it would decrease enjoyment of nearby footpaths
and negatively impact a listed building and an ancient monument.
In other words, it would spoil the view.
We're delighted that it's been refused, yes.
It's a wonderful result.
It just shows if you work hard, if you look at all the facts,
if you do it fair and with balance, you can get a good outcome.
Ten against and one in favour.
It might even have been 11 against and one in favour.
But there was only one guy that actually...
voted in favour of it.
Cheers.
Hi, Mum. It's Piers.
I think it was 10-1 or 11-1 against.
Yeah. Just fucking...
Waste of time.
I could have said anything, to be honest.
I don't think it would have made any difference.
Of course we're worried about global warming.
That's got to be something that we're all concerned about.
We're all doing our bit to try and conserve...
And looking at renewable energy.
Of course, absolutely, yeah.
I mean, we're part of...
Yes.
And it is global warming.
For the first time, scientists confirm the link
between climate change and our awful weather.
Emergency services scramble to Bedford's...
As the flood waters finally work their way along the Great Ouse,
other parts of Bedfordshire didn't escape.
We've lived up here for over 40 years
and we've never, ever had anything like this.
At least 80,000 fatalities in Burma today after Cyclone Nargis...
Emergency across Western Europe with drinking water strictly rationed in Holland, France...
Forest fires, which are still sweeping across Spain...
A price worth paying for motorists' right to drive, said Lord Clarkson.
Good news for the UK wine industry, especially...
The latest is that New Orleans will not be rebuilt a third time, said the Louisiana government.
Total destruction of India's dams would end Pakistan's drinking water crisis.
As US president Chelsea Clinton refuses Africa's demands for water...
San Francisco's extraordinary heat wave continues into Los Angeles...
Extreme weather somewhere on the planet...
An estimated 35 million Chinese refugees... Skiing in the Alps is over.
A new Channel Four documentary asks, is global warming really happening or a natural cycle...
The highest land temperature...
More than 100 million people are homeless tonight as...
Massive methane emissions from Siberia...
The last Indonesian tree found...
The fuel crisis... The European Union today permanently closed all of its borders.
Villages must be reserved for food production.
London is under water again as last night's 30-foot storm surge overcame the Thames barrier...
New Zealand has also now closed its borders, leaving 22 million stranded...
100 million refugees from the Middle East and continental Europe are all heading north...
Half of species are now extinct, scientists estimate and eco systems are collapsing...
Past two degrees. We cannot now stop runaway climate change.
There are simply too many people to feed.
Suicide rates increase 800%.
The Amazon rain forest is still burning.
And anyone who cannot bear to eat their own cats and dogs...
We are entering the eighth world food crisis.
World temperatures today, passing four degrees.
..has launched retaliatory nuclear strikes...
We wouldn't be the first life form to wipe itself out.
But what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly.
What does that say about us?
The question I've been asking is,
why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance?
Is the answer because, on some level,
we weren't sure if we were worth saving?
TRANSLATION
Please proceed near the aircraft and take care of your responsibilities.
You know, if all of us stood united, the world would be different in every way.
Unfortunately, that's not the reality.
If we can't even stand united on eradicating poverty in the world,
why does the health of the planet have any chance?
Thank you, sir.
In my opinion, our use or misuse of resources in the last hundreds years or so,
I probably would rename that age something like "The Age Of Ignorance."
"The Age Of Stupid."
TRANSLATION
I just find it...surprising.
That after so much effort, the final act of our existence should be suicide.
So why did I build this archive?
It's a cautionary tale. Not for us.
Too late for us.
But for...
well, for whoever,
whatever,
eventually finds this recording.
And away you go.