All right, I want to get right to it. I want to get through the logistics. It's the 20th anniversary of a little movie that really put the climate issue on the map. It was in the wake—I want to hear just a little bit about how it came together for you. I know it was in the wake of a difficult time, and it is a spectacular example of an occasional American tradition of making a better future out of an unchangeable past, which is I think what we're up against now. But how did the movie come together? You were giving these presentations, and how did the movie happen?
First of all, thank you for doing this, and thank you to The Hollywood Reporter and to the Sustainable Organization for inviting me and for doing this about the movie. Davis Guggenheim did such a terrific job as the director of that movie. Melissa Etheridge won the other Oscar for that movie with the best song that year. I had been developing a slideshow. I started actually back when I was in the VP gig, using Kodak carousels.
Which you invented. Yeah, yeah.
You got to be careful how you say that.
No, no, no, no, no. So I had gotten to the point where the computerized version of a slideshow was really beginning to hit home pretty well. And it started with another movie, by the way, the movie The Day After, which was a science fiction movie. Many of this crowd of course knows it. And it was about the shutting down of the Gulf Stream. And of course, it happened instantly and New York went into an ice age in 48 hours. But I agreed to promote that movie, and the press said, 'Well, isn't this fictional?' I said, 'Well, it's not as fictional as the Bush-Cheney accounts of—' So, but anyway, honestly my purpose was not really and truly not to take a shot at them yet again. I mean really I'm just trying to say how I got past the hurdle of promoting a fictional account. And during that promotion series, Laurie David from here saw that at a church where we were promoting that movie, and she said, 'You've got to make that into a movie.' And I thought that was a crazy idea. I really and truly did. But she got Lawrence Bender and some others, and then Jeff Skoll got involved and saw it, and Jeff made it happen, of course. And so that's how it happened. I thought that a slideshow could not become a movie, and I thought it was silly, but I'm so glad I was wrong because the impact of the movie—from my own personal experience, I still, where I travel around the country and in other countries, people still come up and talk about it and what the impression—
It was an extraordinary—I mean it was a documentary film that won two Oscars. It made like $50 million, which is unusual for a documentary. There's no AI. There's no—what's really interesting—I'm playing to the crowd here. You can't go wrong. What's really interesting to me, because this truly—I'm not overstating this to blow smoke or anything—I can't think of another movie that put an issue out there in a way that validated the public discussion. I can't think of anything else that came close to this. And what's interesting to me is it embodies, I think for this crowd, something that interests me: the power of storytelling. And I think of where we are now, and we also see—I think of this all the time because people come up and go, 'Oh, you know, The West Wing was wonderful,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, and we, you know, fixed democracy.'
A lot of people, a huge number of people, were inspired to go into politics because of The West Wing. It had a huge, huge impact. And by the way, not only in the United States—it still serves as a beacon for humanity and politics in other countries around the world.
And we did fix the Middle East in two episodes. Well, and I was going to say about An Inconvenient Truth—if it hadn't been for me, we might have a big problem right now. So, we're in it together, brother.
Very, very, very good. But I'm interested in your—I really just want to get to, you know, kind of where we are now. And, you know, I think we're all, especially people who've been involved in trying to deal with this issue—I know we were just talking with Ed about, you know, where do we find hope now? Do you find hope? What has surprised you from, you know, 20 years ago where we would be now? I know there are instances of hope, and I want you to talk a little bit about the—you know, you talk in the film so beautifully that this is not a political issue, it's a moral issue. And I think the foes of making progress on this issue have succeeded in making it political, and I'm wondering what your strategies are to avoid that.
Well, there's a lot in that question. You started with where is the hope? There's a lot of hope. I want to be sure and cover that, and then I want to talk a little bit about what the opposition has been doing all these years. Where hope and despair are concerned, there is a roller coaster pattern with public opinion on the amount of interest given to the climate crisis and the solutions. And I've been at this a long time. I wrote my first book about it 13 years before the movie came out. And I've seen this pattern through several cycles. And we're in a climate policy recession right now because of the current US president mainly, and because of the massive spending and lobbying by the fossil fuel polluters. But the polls just in the last week confirm that public opinion here in the US is matching its highest record ever. People understand that we have to solve this. There's a certain amount of what's called climate hushing going on now. That's not climate denial. Climate hushing is where business people who are scared of Trump or scared of one of the oligarchs or something will kind of downplay the issue. But the underlying concern is very, very high. And so there is a lot of hope, and if you look at the change from the time the movie came out 20 years ago, I could give you a couple of examples. That year, 2006, there were seven gigawatts of solar worldwide. This year there are 2,930 gigawatts of solar—that's an almost 500% increase. What about—aside from Ed's house—
Ed is the OG of environmentalism. Ed and Michelle are right there, always leading electric vehicles. In December, 29% of all cars sold worldwide were EVs. And actually, the invasion—the attack on Iran—has been a major event in boosting the desirability of non-fossil fuel sources of energy. It really, really has been, and EVs provide one example. From the sales, one month after the attack on Iran, sales of EVs were up 66% from the month earlier before the invasion. We were talking earlier about how—
He's playing five-dimensional chess, clearly.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's a stable genius, so he's got that. But anyway, what we're seeing—well, here's another example. If you look at all of the new electricity generation installed everywhere in the US last year, while Trump is president, what percentage would you say was solar and wind and batteries?
Was that Ed? Good for you. 93%—92.7%. If you include the rooftop solar, but in the state of Texas—no, but seriously, most people will try to guess 30%, 40%, something like that. It's unbelievable. And in the state of Texas, the home of the oil and gas industry, 80% of all the new electricity generation for last year was solar and wind. And worldwide, 85%. And EVs—I mentioned they're just taking off. The only thing that's coming down in price faster than solar is utility-scale batteries, and they are expanding and amplifying the impact of solar and wind on the grid. But this brings me around to the opposition to all of this.
And of course, Donald Trump said—it was on videotape—went to a room full of fossil fuel executives: 'Give me a billion dollars and I will eliminate, get rid of all the regulations and laws you don't like.' I'm paraphrasing, but it was an accurate paraphrase. And we're in the middle of that transaction playing out now. But the fossil fuel industry has become hegemonic where all areas of policy that affect their business model is concerned. If you go to the international conferences—this year it'll be in Turkey, last year it was in Belém in Brazil, etc., etc.—the largest delegation, larger than the other 10 largest delegations put together, are fossil fuel lobbyists. And they've spent billions and billions of dollars deceiving people using the same model—and you know the book and the movie, Merchants of Doubt. The model was written by the tobacco industry, and it was taken and adopted by the fossil fuel industry, and they're still at it. They even run in school board elections in some key states. No kidding. And local elections. They have such a huge amount of money focused on this task. And, you know, they're way better at capturing politicians than emissions.
And all around the world, they have captured enough of the politicians and policy makers to be in effective control of the policies that affect their business model. Now, there are some holdouts. The European Union is under pressure, but it's kind of holding firm. And we're now seeing forward movement in places like South Korea, places you wouldn't expect like Ethiopia and Nepal. They're both going 100% EVs and all renewables. It's happening all around the world because every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. And last night—I turned on the morning news this morning. You know, they're raging fires in my part of the country, just south of where I live in Georgia and in Florida. 100% of my home state is in drought right now. 100% of Georgia is in drought. 61% of the entire land mass of the whole world last year had at least one month of extreme drought. And here in the West, you had a light snowpack and it melted quickly, and you're now seeing the heat and drought take hold. And I hope to God the fires do not come back, as the worst fire last year was in this city—God bless you all—is so horrific. And the second, the Eden Fire, was even more houses destroyed, and all around the country. The extreme wildfires worldwide have doubled in the last 20 years. And by the way, that movie that I mentioned, The Day After, about the Gulf Stream shutting down—well, this morning in one of the English newspapers is a whole big article summarizing the recent dire warnings of the scientists who found yet more confirmatory information that this is a very real threat within the next 25 years.
Right. And for people that don't remember from the movie, you talked very explicitly about if the Greenland ice shelf melts to a certain point, which seems probable given what happened in Antarctica.
In Greenland today, Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour, night and day. And if there is a tipping point here where the gradual threat of climate change becomes immediate—if that happens and the Gulf Stream ceases to exist as we know it, we're in an ice age in like 10 years.
No, no, no. It would take a long—I mean, I'm not going to give you the I-wear-makeup version, but I've spent a lot of time with him. But it would be bad. It would be very bad and would be bad on a scale that is beyond anything we can compare it to today. But there are other tipping points as well that are as immediate as that. For example, the number of climate migrants crossing international borders to escape unlivable conditions—the combination of heat and humidity is what can make areas physiologically unlivable. At present, the number of areas around the world that are categorized thusly are fairly small: in the Sahara Desert, parts of the Sahara, parts of the perimeter of the Persian Gulf. But we are now raising temperatures so quickly, and humidity—because the oceans are giving up much more water into the sky, a one-degree increase, there's a 7% increase in moisture—so the combination is now making much larger areas physiologically unsurvivable. And the World Health Organization's climate division has warned that by 2050, 24 years from now, the world could see more than 1 billion climate migrants crossing international borders. Now, my faith tradition teaches me to welcome the refugee and embrace the stranger and love the foreigner. But my previous lifetime in politics taught me that if there's too much too quickly, there is a heightened risk of xenophobia and the kind of hatefulness that—luckily the Hungarians just booted out Orbán last week. But if a few million migrants from the Eastern Mediterranean into Hungary and Central Europe caused Orbán and all of the—and contributed to Trump, by the way—if that came from a few million climate migrants, can we even imagine what 1 billion climate migrants might cause? We could see dire threats to our capacity for self-governance in the chaos that would be a risk if that occurred.
Here, let me give you some good news quickly. If these positive trends I was mentioning about solar and wind and EVs really accelerate—
And if we get to what they call true net zero, then half of the human-caused CO2 will have fallen out of the atmosphere in as little as 25 years. If we just stop using the sky as an open sewer, right, and stuffing it with this heat-trapping pollution—we have so much up there accumulated now, it traps as much extra heat every day as would be released by 750,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day on the Earth's surface. I mean, these are forces that are beyond a scale that we as human beings have ever had to even contemplate or think about in the past.
