I'm good. Thank you for joining me here. I really appreciate it.
I should have worn my hat.
You should have. Do you have it? Where is it?
No, I don't have it with me right now. Congratulations on all you're doing. I read you regularly and thank God you're doing what you're doing. You've got a real talent for it.
Well, I appreciate that very much. You were an early adopter of the Holler's.
Yeah, well, I live in Nashville. So, I follow it very, very carefully. And what show was I on recently where I was promoting you? Oh, it was Tim Melton. Yeah, there you go.
My friend Tim who he rocks a Holler hat on his show, speaking of Nashville. Why don't we start by talking about what's going on in Nashville early May, this climate training May 1st and 2nd. What is a climate training?
Well, thank you for asking, Justin. I'm really excited about it and I hope that people will come in large numbers May 1st and May 2nd. And the sign-up deadline is next week, April 13th. We still have a few spaces left. Get your name in as soon as you can. This will be the 20th anniversary of these trainings. 20 years ago, I put out my movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It became widely viewed. I was very happy about that. It created new climate advocates and it made some money. I donated every penny to establishing a new NGO that I set up called The Climate Reality Project. Climate Reality Project has been sponsoring climate trainings to train climate leaders all over the world. I've done 62 of them, two-full day training, and it's free, by the way. If you come to this climate training, you will get very latest up-to-date scientific information, not only the causes of the climate crisis, but also the solutions to the climate crisis. Really good people who will help you find new communication skills and networking skills with others who are of like mind, also climate advocates. You'll have a mentor help you be an effective advocate for the kind of sensible climate policies we need.
The reason I started these trainings 20 years ago, the climate issue, it's complicated. At bottom, it's really pretty simple. We're using the sky as an open sewer for all of the global warming pollution, CO2, and also methane and some others. We're putting up 175 million tons of it every single day, and that thin blue line, well, we just got the pictures from the Artemis 2 mission. Golly, they were great. Showed very clearly the thin atmosphere around the planet. It's so thin that if you could drive a car straight up in the air at the speeds you'd have on I-40, you'd get to the top of that thin blue line in about 5 minutes. Blue because that's where the oxygen is, and that's where all of the global warming pollution is. So, it adds up over time, and the accumulated amount now traps as much extra heat in the earth's system as would be released by 750,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day. It's insane that we're doing this. That's the reason the weather's been so crazy, extreme events like in Waverly, and even the big storm that hit Nashville recently. And every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. Record high temperatures and 10 hottest years in the last 10. Incredible damage is done, and even more dangerously, we are getting close to some of these negative tipping points. Some of them sound like a science fiction movie.
How are we doing in terms of the race to not have the end of the world? You know, have we helped ourselves at all?
Yes, we have helped ourselves. Unfortunately, we haven't made enough progress because we're still adding to the overburden of this heat-trapping pollution, and the crisis is still getting worse faster than we're deploying solutions. But we have made progress. All of the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year, what percentage do you think was solar and wind renewable? More than 90%.
Solar is the cheapest electricity in the history of the world and wind is close behind and the only thing coming down faster in price than solar panels is utility scale batteries. If you look at it on a global basis, the world is investing every year twice as much in renewable energy as it is in fossil fuel. That's real progress. And if you take the second largest source of emissions after electricity generation, it's transportation. The latest month for which we have figures, electric cars, we had a kind of a standing start 10 years ago and in December 29% of all the new cars sold worldwide were electric vehicles.
I am now a driver of an electric car. It took me too long to get there and I will say I'll never go back. Now when I drive other cars, it feels like I'm driving the past. It's just a different vibe. It was super easy to just install a charger in your house. Saving money.
Save a lot of money. And do you miss going to the gasoline stations and filling up?
I will say the range part of it is the one thing if we're going to take long road trips, that's the kind of thing that you got to sort of plan ahead and think about.
They're getting a lot more charge stations out there. They had a slow start but they're getting them out there now.
Right. But you did mention that you were viewing it from a global perspective and I wonder is that because there's been so much pushback from the fossil fuel industry here in this country? There's a lot of resistance here especially now that this guy's in the Oval Office with the people that helped put him there giving him a billion dollars to get him there. Are we falling behind?
We have a climate policy recession under Trump for sure. But adoption of solar and wind and EVs is still moving forward here in the US. 90% of all the new electricity in the US last year was a renewable. And even in Texas, the home of the oil and gas industry, 80% of all the new electricity installed in Texas last year was solar and wind. It's because solar electricity is by far the cheapest electricity in the history of the world. I mentioned that but it's worth mentioning again. And if you have solar panels and an electric vehicle, you are really saving a lot of money. And of course it reduces the emissions and that helps to solve the climate crisis. We are gaining on the crisis. I'm optimistic that we're going to solve it. I'm certain that we will. The problem Justin is unclear at this point whether we will be able to solve it in time to avoid some of the catastrophic damages that the scientists have been warning us about for so long. These climate scientists have been proven dead right on what they predicted 20 and 30 years ago should lead us to pay more attention to what they're warning us about now.
There's this sort of theme in the pushback. If India and China aren't going to do it, if we do it, it kind of is pointless almost. But my general sense is that China actually is adopting a lot of this technology.
They are adopting it big time. China is by far the world's leader in adopting solar and wind and electric vehicles, utility scale batteries and the other technologies and they're exporting them. Betting on the energy source of the future whereas we are doubling down on the old dirty obsolete fossil fuels of the past. The thing about China is they are building so much, using so much energy that they are also continuing to build new coal plants. But they've just crossed most people believe is their peak emissions and their emissions are starting to come down because they've invested so heavily in solar and wind. India is the same way. All out for solar in particular and they just announced a quadrupling massive solar they already have. This is happening worldwide because it just makes economic sense and common sense. So the rest of the world really is moving on this. The US has traditionally been the world's leader bringing about changes that humanity needs and we do need US leadership to accelerate this energy transition and the sustainability transition writ large. I'm hoping there'll be a change in the next election.
I was going to say, is US leadership an oxymoron these days?
Well, of course trying to lead us in the wrong direction.
I know. I wanted to cover the climate stuff first. We got to talk a little bit about what's going on in the world. It is on fire right now. Do you regret not attacking Iran when you were vice president?
Well, it was completely predictable, but let me first of all say, Iran does pose a threat in the future. Our intelligence agencies have warned us within 10 years, they might be able to develop ballistic missiles that could hit the United States. They have been trying to enrich uranium to the level where they can use it to make nuclear weapons. Now, the last leader of Iran, the one that was killed in the attack, issued a religious order that they would definitely not build a nuclear weapon. I don't know if you can believe that or not, but the new guy has not repeated it. So, there is a reason to be concerned about what they've been up to, and they've been sponsoring terrorism, Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis and you know the whole score there. But, you've got to go about it in a sensible way. And for 47 years, every president, Democratic or Republican, the first question that they deal with is, what about the Strait of Hormuz? Iran has a coastline, a rugged coastline, hundreds of miles along the eastern border of the Strait of Hormuz, and they are able to shut it down. They can launch cruise missiles at ships from the back of pickup trucks, and they can hide the pickup trucks, and they can put deadly explosive mines in the Strait of Hormuz with little fishing boats. It's been the principal strategic challenge confronting anyone in the National Security Council in the White House thinking about a conflict with Iran for almost 50 years. And according to the news reports, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others asked President Trump when he started planning this attack, what are we going to do about the Strait of Hormuz? Trump responded, 'Oh, don't worry about that. They'll surrender before they have a chance to do that.' That is not the kind of mistake you want the president of your country to make because it has put us in an extremely difficult situation where he's made the underlying problem worse than it was. Again, I don't want to give anybody the impression that there wasn't a reason to be concerned about Iran. There certainly has been. But, the best way to go about it, even though it's controversial, is to try to get a negotiated settlement. And that's what the two previous presidents did. And of course, Trump attacked all that and said, 'No, we're just going to bomb them back into the Stone Age if they don't do what we tell them to do.' And the world doesn't work that way. Really an historic miscalculation by President Trump. I regret it deeply because it has really hurt our country and we're going to have a hard time working our way out of this hole that he's dug and put us in.
