Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that wholesome and overly generous introduction. Thank you very very much. I really appreciate that, Evan. And to all of your colleagues at Climate Base, what a terrific organization. I really appreciate it. And I want to thank Morgan Campbell and all of her colleagues at Climate Base for organizing what I know is going to be an extremely exciting week of events. I looked at the lineup. It's incredible what you all have got in store. Thank you very much for the energy and passion and enthusiasm that that's what it needs. This is a time to double down and triple down and that's what we're doing. And I also want to thank the Exploratorium team for hosting us here tonight. I've been here before. This is a great organization. Thank you. Thank you very much.
I especially want to acknowledge the presence here of my dear friend, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, who and she gets a little embarrassed when I use this phrase, but everybody's using it, the greatest Speaker of the House of Representatives in the history of the United States. And Nancy, you and I and I want to acknowledge Paul Pelosi who is my dear friend. Thank you. And Nancy, you and I have attended a lot of events over the years where we will hear this person or that person described in a grand enthusiastic way. And sometimes there have been times when I think it's a little bit over the top, but that's not the case with Nancy Pelosi. She is the absolute greatest and best. And thank you very much.
And I want to acknowledge a rookie public servant who is only three months into the job, Mayor Daniel Lurie. And you are doing a great job. I remember when I was three months into my first job as an elected official as a member of the house and you can tell early on and I've been getting such great reports from my friends all over the city and all walks of life, every parts of the city. So keep it up. Keep it up. We're for you. We're for you.
And I want to acknowledge, if you'll let me, acknowledge two organizations that are very very important to me. There is a group of climate leaders trained by the Climate Reality Project's Bay Area chapter and I appreciate you guys being here. One was here from the first 50 that were trained 20 years ago. And I'm very grateful to my partner Colin Leubkert and our team from Generation Investment Management, which is based here in San Francisco for the US headquarters. And Generation is the sustainable investment firm that I co-founded with Colin and David Blood and four other partners back in 2004. We have been here since 2017 and San Francisco is such an important hub for Generation because we fully recognize the absolutely unique role that the Bay Area plays in shepherding the transition to a sustainable economy. There is a distinct and diverse blend here of innovators and entrepreneurs, academics, investors, policy leaders and executives who are dedicated to saving the climate and dedicated to implementing sustainability solutions. And in fact, many of the most successful investments we've made in our 21-year history have been right here in the Bay Area. That won't come as a surprise to you, but it's great to be in the presence of so many friends and colleagues and to be a part of this great community this evening.
I do want to before I launch into my remarks here, I want to pause to acknowledge the loss last night of one of the most powerful moral voices our world has ever heard. Pope Francis, his humble and historic leadership for social and economic justice and especially on the climate crisis fueled a moral movement that continues to light the way forward for humanity. His encyclical Laudato Si' remains the single most inspiring text on the climate crisis that I have ever read and I fully recommend if you have not read it. It's long. It's very tightly organized. It's very deep in its analysis and its moral power. And I urge everyone to read it. And his moral teaching is especially important right now in our nation because as we have seen in the past few months, the climate movement in the United States is under attack.
It is abundantly clear after only three months and one day that the new Trump administration is attempting to do everything it possibly can to try to halt the transition to a clean energy future and a deep reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. Climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis basically 80% of it. Many of you here today have likely felt the chilling effect of the policies and the rhetoric coming from Washington DC and what the effect has been on businesses and investors and far beyond. The Dow Jones of course today fell another thousand points and since Donald Trump's inauguration it's gone down 6,000 points. But while the most visible impacts of what the new administration is doing may be in the market for stocks and bonds, that's not the only thing that he has caused to crash. The trust market has crashed. The market for democracy has taken a major hit. Hope is being arbitraged in the growing market for fear. Truth has been devalued and confidence in US leadership around the world has plummeted.
We are facing a national emergency for our democracy and a global emergency for our climate system. We have to deal with the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis. The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented.
With that in mind, I want to note that before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil. Full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil. And here is one that I regard as essential.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler's murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas, best known, I would say. But it was Habermas's mentor, Theodore Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation's descent into hell was, and I quote, 'the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.' He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, 'attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.' End quote.
The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around and expect us to believe it. At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyber attacks as traitors. They say the climate crisis is a hoax invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing. They say coal is clean. They say wind turbines cause cancer. They say sea level rise just creates more beachfront property. Their allies in the oligarchic backlash to climate action argue that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer for God's sake, need to be more realistic and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels, which is what they're pushing. Even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis, you may not be surprised to learn that this propagandistic notion of climate realism is one that the fossil fuel industry has peddled for years. The CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco, has said, quote, 'We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.' As his colleague, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed, and I quote, 'The world needs to get real. The problem is not oil and gas, it's emissions.' End quote. The American Petroleum Institute says we need quote, 'a more realistic energy approach, one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas.' So, allow me to put this question to all of you. What exactly is it that they want us to be realistic about?
Their twisted version of realism is colliding with the reality that humanity is now confronting the accumulated global warming pollution because these molecules linger there on average about a hundred years and it builds up over time. It's trapping as much extra heat now every single day as would be released by the explosion of 750,000 first generation atomic bombs blowing up on the earth every single day. Is it realistic to let that continue? Is it realistic to think that if we opt out of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, we'll be able to just wish it away and continue with business as usual? Well, mother nature makes a pretty good case against that argument. Every night on the TV news is like a nature walk through the book of Revelation. Is it realistic, for example, to continue stoking the risk of wildfire in California after what has already happened to so many communities here in Northern California? And just look at the devastation caused by the Los Angeles wildfires in January. Is it realistic to tell homeowners around the world that the global housing market is expected to suffer a $25 trillion loss in the next 25 years, 15% of all the residential housing stock in the world if we do not change what we're doing? Is that realistic in their view? Is it realistic to continue quietly accepting 8.7 million deaths every single year from breathing in the particulate co-pollution that also comes from burning fossil fuels? That is the number of people who are already being killed. And according to health experts, it is, and I quote, 'the leading contributor to the global disease burden.' When you burn coal, oil, and gas, it puts the heat trapping pollution up there, and it puts the particulate and 2.5 ppm pollution into the lungs of people downwind from where the facilities are burning the fossil fuels. Is it realistic in their view for governments to manage 1 billion climate migrants crossing international borders in the balance of this century? That's how many the Lancet Commission estimates will be crossing borders in the decades to come if we continue driving temperatures and humidity higher and making the physiologically unlivable regions of the world vastly larger by continuing to put 175 million tons of man-made heat trapping pollution into that thin shell of the troposphere surrounding the planet. You know what that blue line looks like? That thin blue shell is blue because that's where the oxygen is. And it's so thin if you could drive a car straight up in the air at highway speeds, you'd get to the top of that blue line in 5 to 7 minutes. That's what we're using as an open sewer. Is that realistic? I don't think it is.
We've already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power. And power seeking is what this is all about. Our constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump. Someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power. Imagine what the demagogues would do as we continued toward a billion migrants crossing international borders. We could face a grave threat to our capacity for self-governance. Is it realistic to continue inflicting the financial toll that the climate crisis is taking on the global economy? According to Deloitte, climate inaction will cost the economy $178 trillion over the next half century. And is it realistic to miss out on the economic opportunity that we could seize by going toward net zero that over that same period climate action would increase the size of the global economy by $43 trillion. A question with particular relevance in nearby Silicon Valley. Is it realistic for the semiconductor industry to experience losses of up to 35% of annual revenues due to supply chain disruptions caused by the stronger and more severe cyclonic storms and supercell storms? Is it realistic to continue with a system of financing that leaves the entire continent of Africa completely out? Right now, the entire continent of Africa, fastest growing population in the world, has fewer solar panels installed than the single state of Florida in the United States of America. That's a disgrace to the makeup of our financial system. But Africa has three times as many oil and gas pipelines under construction and preparing for construction to begin than all of North America. It is ridiculous to allow this system to continue as it is. How is that realistic or fair or just? Is it realistic for us, all of us here, to consign our children and grandchildren to what scientists warn us would be hell on earth in order to conserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry? The predictions of the scientists 50 years ago have turned out to be spot-on correct. Their predictions just a few decades ago have turned out to be exactly right. Should not that cause us to listen more carefully to what they're warning us will happen if we do not sharply and quickly reduce the emissions from burning fossil fuels. Is that unrealistic to listen to a proven source of advice?
This newfound so-called climate realism is nothing more than climate denial in disguise. It is an attempt to pretend there's no problem and to ignore the reality that is right in front of our faces. What's never present in this so-called realism is any credible challenge whatsoever to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They never address that. They just wish it away and say, 'Oh, it's unrealistic to actually do anything about it.' I wish we could wish it away, but we cannot. The hard reality is that the fossil fuel industry has grown desperate for more capital. They're seeing their two largest markets wither away. Electricity generation number one, transportation number two. They've been losing their share of investment in the energy market to renewables. And so, they're panicked. That explains why they are so aggressively using their captive policy makers to block meaningful solutions. Of course, as you know, they're way better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions. They've grown very skillful at that. They are the wealthiest and most powerful industry lobby in the history of the world. They make the East India Company look like a popcorn vendor. They are the effective global hegemon. They have used their war chests and their legacy network of political and economic power to block any reductions of fossil fuel burning emissions. Whether at the international conferences that we call the COP conference of the parties in the UN process or at the global negotiation for a plastic treaty, they blocked anything there too. Why? They're losing the first market of electricity generation because 93% of all the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year was solar and wind. They're losing that market steadily. EVs are rising dramatically. They say they've slowed down. Well, we just got the new figures. An 18% increase year-on-year here in the United States in many countries much faster than that. And so their third market, they're telling Wall Street that they're going to make up all of the expected lost revenue in their first two markets by tripling the production of plastics over the next 35 years. Well, we might have a word to say about that. Is that realistic? Because we've already found the scientists say that some seabirds are manifesting symptoms like Alzheimer's disease from the plastic particles in their brains and they found that it crosses the blood-brain barrier in humans and the amount has doubled just in the last decade. Do we really want to continue that? It's crazy. But they are blocking action at both of these international forums and they're blocking action in the deliberations of nation states even in states and provinces and even at the local level. Anywhere in the world where there is an effort to pass legislation or regulations that reduces the burning of fossil fuels, they are there with their money, with their lobbyists, with their captive politicians blocking it as best they can. And the solution is what you're doing here in climate week here in San Francisco. We have got to rise up and change this situation.
That's also why they are touting ridiculously expensive and hilariously impractical technologies like building giant mechanical vacuuming machines to suck it back out of the atmosphere after they put it up there. Could that someday be a realistic part of the solution? Perhaps. Perhaps. But not now, not even close. But they use it as a bright shiny object to distract attention and say, 'See this. See this. This could be so miraculous. We don't have to stop burning fossil fuels at all. We can actually continue to increase the burning of fossil fuels because look at this bright shiny object. We've got this vacuuming machine.' Well, CO2 is 0.04% of the molecules in the air. You're going to use an energy-intensive, ridiculous, expensive process to filter through the other 99.96% of the molecules. It's absolutely preposterous. In reality, the sustainability revolution is powering more and more of our global economy. It has the scale and impact of the industrial revolution, and it's moving at the pace of the digital revolution. By the way, in Texas, which used to have a free market for energy, there over 90% of all their new electricity generation last year was solar and wind. And you know, they've got captured politicians there. They're pushing legislation in Texas to legally require any developers of solar and wind to spend time and money developing more oil and gas before they're given permission to develop renewables. That's not realism. That's pathetic. That is a sign of desperation. They don't trust the free market. They're just relying more and more on the politicians who will jump when they tell them jump and ask how high when they tell them to jump again. So, around the world, the market is transforming. Since the Paris agreement, the cost of solar has dropped 76%. The cost of wind is down 66%. Utility scale batteries are down 87%. In 2004 when Generation was founded it took a full year for the world to install 1 gigawatt of solar power. Now it takes 1 hour to install 1 gigawatt of solar power. And it's not just renewables. We're seeing the sustainability revolution rapidly take hold across the rest of the global economy from transportation to regenerative agriculture to circular manufacturing and so much more.
So as we gather here to kick off climate week and as we gather on the eve of Earth Day, we have to treat this moment as a call to action. So, I'm here not only to respond to the invitation for which I'm grateful, Morgan, and others. And Evan, I'm here to recruit you. Many of you are already working on this, but those of you who are not, I'm here to recruit you. We need you. This is the time. This is a break glass moment. This is an all hands on deck moment. And now is the time to look at every aspect of your businesses, your investments, and your civic engagement to determine whether or not you can contribute even more to solving the climate crisis. It's easy to adopt our own versions of climate realism, to say that the challenge is too great. Some people worry about that. To say that our individual role is too small to have an impact. Some use that as an excuse that if the government won't act, what can any of us do about it? Well, just as the climate crisis does not recognize borders between countries, it does not either recognize delineations between the duty of government and businesses and all significant participants in the global economy. Climate change is already impacting your life and work and will more so through disrupted supply chains, increased liability, changes in consumer demand and more. This is a moment when we all have to mobilize to defend our country. And remember, the antidote to climate despair is climate action. It was in this city in the 1960s that Joan Baez first said that the antidote to despair is action. And we need to remember that now. And during a time when people were tempted to despair in the struggle for civil rights in this country, Martin Luther King said something about overcoming the forces that try to discourage you and halt progress. He said this, 'If you can't fly, run. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.' And that's where we are. And every one of the morally based movements in the past had periods when advocates felt despair. But when the central choice was revealed as a choice between right and wrong, then the outcome at a very deep level became foreordained because of the way Pope Francis reminded us we have been created as God's children. We love our families. We are devoted to our communities. We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment ever that we as human beings have the capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource. Thank you very much.
