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[MUSIC PLAYING]
IRA GLASS: So thinking about what I was going to say to you,
I found myself thinking a lot about this quote
that we had on our radio show about a year ago.
I do a radio show.
It's heard around the country.
It's a podcast that's heard around the world.
And it's a documentary show.
And we did this thing that was a tiny item in the news.
And at the time, the United Nations
was holding one of the international meetings
that they hold now and then about climate change.
And this particular one was in Doha, Qatar.
And the goal of this meeting was incredibly modest.
Basically, what they were trying to accomplish,
if they were lucky, they were going
to come out of this meeting, they
were going to squeak out of it with an extension of something
that everyone at the meeting had agreed
to back in the 1990s, or almost everyone-- the Kyoto Protocol.
And basically, if they came out of this,
they were going to say, OK, we all agreed to this in '97.
Let's just keep agreeing to it.
And just imagine how frustrating it
would be to be a delegate who's taken a few weeks of his time
to go and fly to this meeting.
You're a delegate.
You're interested in climate change.
First of all, think about everything you're not doing.
First and foremost, the world's governments
had agreed a couple years before this,
in 2009, that we have a goal now.
They agreed the one thing that we absolutely cannot do is
allow the planet to get two degrees warmer.
And that would be a disaster in more extreme weather, food
shortages, more droughts, quicker melting of the ice
caps, sea rising more quickly.
So 141 countries agreed to that.
And it's a wide array.
Like, it's China, it's Russia, oil-producing countries
like the United Arab Emirates.
Even the United States agrees to this.
That's how universal it was.
And so now it's a couple years later.
No one has basically done much of anything to accomplish that,
to stop us from going to two degrees.
In fact, every year the amount of carbon dioxide
we're pumping into the atmosphere
is actually bigger than the year before.
This conference is not addressing
that in any kind of substantive way.
So they're meeting.
And they're talking about reasserting these old accords.
And Tuesday of that week, a Typhoon
called Bhopa hits the Philippines.
This is December of 2012.
It kills over seven times as many people
as Hurricane Sandy killed just a couple of weeks
before here in the States.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-We are at a critical juncture.
We are at a critical juncture.
And the next few hours represent a crucial opportunity for us
to ensure that we are on the right trajectory
to address the climate crisis.
IRA GLASS: OK.
So this man talking is the lead negotiator
from the Philippines at these climate talks.
His name is Naderev Sano.
Maybe you've heard of him.
Maybe you haven't.
And when the hurricane hit, he gave a talk,
he give this speech that many people noticed
around the world.
And they noticed it mainly because, as you'll hear,
it was a very unusual speech, a very unusual kind of tone
he takes on-- like, in this very bureaucratic, dry,
diplomatic setting.
An important backdrop for my delegation
is the profound impacts of climate change
that we are already confronting.
And as we sit here, every single hour,
even as we vacillate and procrastinate here,
we are suffering.
Madame Chair, we have never had a typhoon
like Bhopa, which has wreaked havoc
in a part of the country that has never
seen a storm like this in half a century.
Finally, Madame Chair, I am making an urgent appeal, not as
a negotiator, not as a leader of my delegation,
but as a Filipino.
I appeal to the whole world.
I appeal to the leaders from all over the world
to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face.
I appeal to ministers.
The outcome of our work is not about what
our political masters want.
It is about what is demanded of us by 7 billion people.
I appeal to all.
Please, no more delays.
No more excuses.
Please let Doha be remembered as the place where
we found the political will to turn things around.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
IRA GLASS: So of course it's not the place
where we found the political will to turn things around.
And one year later, just this past November, in 2013,
during yet another deeply ineffective UN climate
summit-- this one was in Warsaw-- Naderev Sano
again found himself stuck at a conference
watching the news from his homeland on a television.
And this time it was a much more terrible storm than Bhopa.
This is Super Typhoon Haiyan.
And you've all heard about this.
Towns totally leveled.
Nothing standing.
Over 6,000 people dead.
4.1 million people displaced.
No food supplies for a little while.
There was a very real possibility that lots of people
were just going to starve to death.
And Naderev Sano gave another talk.
You can find this on the internet.
He took the mic, and this time he
talked about how this super typhoon--
he said that this time his own hometown was hit.
And he said for a couple days they
thought his brother was dead.
And then, you know, thank goodness,
they heard from his brother.
His brother's alive.
His brother was now just spending all of his time
burying bodies.
Had no food.
And in that conference, Naderev Sano says, OK,
in solidarity with my brother and all of the people back
in my country who don't have any food,
I'm just going to start fasting until meaningful action is
finally taken by this conference to address the climate.
So he fasts for a week or two.
And the conference ends.
And he stops fasting.
And here we are.
And I bring all this up today because, like most of you
in this room, I have the luxury of picking and choosing
what I work on, what projects I work on.
And sometimes, I'll just tell you,
as a reporter, as a journalist, it feels like any minute
that I'm not talking about climate change,
it's like I'm turning my back on the most important thing that
is happening to all of us and the most important story.
And it's like it's like a meteor that is slowly
spinning towards the earth.
And it'll be here by the time our kids are grown.
And what am I doing about that?
Like me-- most days, nothing.
OK?
Nothing.
And I wonder if somewhere in the back of your heads,
you have this too.
That's what I'm here to say, that there
is this problem, this project, this moonshot
that you should be working on that you're not
giving much time to.
And when Astro and Megan and Puneet and Rich
invited me to come and asked if I wanted to give the opening
talk at this conference, I thought a lot
about what I would want to say to a group of 70
intense, accomplished, super-capable inventors,
engineers, entrepreneurs, and millionaires,
who are literally holding a conference to save the world.
I was like, what do I want to say that room?
And what I want to say to you guys
is we should do more about this.
And why aren't we doing more?
And I know that a handful of you in this room, a handful of you
absolutely are devoting your work lives to this.
And you should totally take this moment
to have a moment of total moral superiority to the rest of us.
And I know also that some people here, you
are experts on things that are so specialized and different
than this, at viruses, or how the brain works,
or the molecular biology of plants, or aging.
It makes no sense for you to switch to this.
But I think actually most of us in this room
are generalists, if I count the roster of people correctly.
And we can choose where we apply our energy and our skill.
And I want to make the case for you
why this should be something that we are all
working more on.
And not just in this room-- this video
might end up on the internet.
If this ends up on the internet, I want to say, you too,
I'm talking to you too.
So a quick review.
A quick review of how bad things are right now.
As I said earlier, scientists and the world's governments
have agreed two degrees is the tipping point we want to avoid.
That's two degrees Celsius.
That's 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
This past fall, in 2013, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change said if we want
to avoid that, we should not put more than 1,000 gigatons
of carbon into the atmosphere.
And they said basically, if you measure
it, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
we've put about half that amount in the air.
And an Oxford professor, one of the authors of the IPCC
report, Myles Allen, calculated the way we're going,
we're going to reach 1,000 gigatons.
We're going to reach that number pretty soon.
In fact, basically, it's two years before my wife
and I pay off the mortgage on our condo.
It's the year 2040.
Or put another way, if you in this room
had your kids when you were older than 26 years old,
when they are your age, this will have already happened.
But despite the danger, we have not turned this around.
The amount of carbon dioxide that we're
putting in the atmosphere does not fall each year.
It rises, as I said.
The temperature of the Earth right
now is 8/10 of a degree warmer than it was 100 years ago.
2/3 of that warming has happened since 1975.
In May of last year, we reached 400 parts per million
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,
as best as we can tell.
For the past 800,000 years it only
got up to 280 parts per million.
And we seem to be seeing the effects, right?
More extreme weather here in California-- for example,
less rain fell in 2013 than any year
since records have been kept, which is 1850.
The snowpack right now is 12% of where it normally is.
Drinking water supplies in some places are endangered.
There was an article about this in the "New York Times"
this weekend.
And my favorite detail from that article
had to do with the trade-offs.
Like, there's so much less water,
there are all these trade-offs that Californians
are going to have to make.
My favorite one was this one.
Quote, "The heavy demand for water, the heavy water
demand of growers of medical marijuana, six
gallons per plant during a 150-day growing period,
is drawing down streams where salmon
and other endangered fishes spawn."
In other words, California, thanks to climate change,
you all have to choose between salmon on the one hand
and pot on the other.
I think we should vote.
OK?
Who wants salmon in the coming world apocalypse?
Salmon?
OK.
Pot?
We are about evenly split.
I'll remind you that pot will get you
through times of no salmon better than salmon will get you
through times of no pot.
So we're going to have to make some choices.
The changes that we're making to the environment
are big enough right now that we are
living during the sixth great wave of extinction
on our planet.
And this one is one that we created.
A really wonderful "New Yorker" writer, Elizabeth Kolbert,
has this new book about this new mass
extinction that just is coming out now.
She notes, quote, "In the end, the most deadly aspect
of human activity may simply be the pace of it.
Just in the past century, CO2 levels in the atmosphere have
changed by as much, 100 parts per million,
as they normally do in 100,000-year glacial cycle.
Meanwhile, the drop in ocean pH levels
that has occurred over the past 50 years
may well exceed anything that happened in the seas
during the previous 50 million.
It's estimated that one third of all reef-building corals,
a third of all freshwater mollusks,
a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals,
a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds
are headed toward oblivion."
If you want to get really alarmed,
you could start to read mainstream experts
like former NASA scientist Jim Hansen.
He's the one that the Bush administration
tried to punish for accurately stating
the science of climate change.
He makes the case in this article
that he wrote this fall that I completely recommend,
that letting ourselves get to two degrees is too much.
He says, when you look at the models
where they came up with the two degrees,
they leave out something called slow feedback cycles.
And so, for example, they don't take
into account what's going to happen
with the melting of the Arctic, of the Antarctic,
and Greenland ice-- that actually, that can create
a kind of feedback loop that will speed on itself.
And he makes the case that we have to limit ourselves
to a one-degree temperature increase, not two.
And he says that to do this, we need to cut carbon emissions.
He runs the numbers.
He says we need to cut carbon emissions by 6% a year.
And in addition, we have to have a massive reforestation
program.
So what can we do?
I'm here to enlist you.
What can we do?
It turns out, I was interested and surprised
when I started looking into this to give this talk that this
is actually a moment of enormous opportunities, some big
and some small.
And you can summarize them pretty succinctly.
Like, we need to generate power differently,
we need to transmit it more efficiently,
and we need to waste less of it when we consume it.
Those are the three big areas of opportunity.
And when it comes to generating power, energy sources that
do not throw carbon dioxide into the air,
they are still just a tiny proportion of the energy
that we make.
So solar is 0.5% of the energy used around the world.
Wind is 2.5%.
We have just not succeeded in making solar and wind as
cheap as other electricity on a mass scale.
And this is obviously a huge project that lots of people
are working on.
Lots of money is chasing.
When it comes to solar, there are different estimates
on when we're going to get to that point
where it's as cheap as other kinds of fuel.
I've seen 2015 as an estimate.
I've seen 2020.
There are some projects that seem
on the verge of being ready for prime time.
There's one in particular I want to talk about.
Bill Gross give a talk here at Solve for X last year
where he outlined a series of steps
to make solar energy as cheap as other electricity.
And his methods are totally ingenious-- like,
the ingenuity.
His premise is basically-- he says the solar cells,
the solar panels have gotten so cheap, and what's expensive
is basically building frames and stuff
to put them in place into these arrays.
And basically, he just walks you through all
the ingenious things you can do to make that cheaper.
And it's on video.
I totally recommend it.
I won't repeat it all here.
And I emailed him this week.
And he said that since last year's Solve for X meeting--
and he said partly thanks to it, this
was his launch pad-- he raised $2 million
to build a pilot solar field like he described.
He hopes to be done that by the end of this year.
He hopes to be selling the things next year.
And he said that, including the price
of storing the electricity, he thinks
that they'll be able to make solar electricity for 3.9
to 4.9 cents per kilowatt hour, which is basically
the holy grail of what he's trying
to do, without subsidies, without a carbon tax.
It'll be cheaper than electricity
made from coal or gas, though he still has to, you know, do it.
He has to do it.
The optimistic version of his business plan
has him selling gigawatts in about three years,
competing head to head with other kinds of electricity.
Wind energy is in a very similar place-- growing,
still a tiny portion of all the energy we produce,
still an opportunity for people to get in and try
to figure out, how do you make this
as cheap as electricity made from coal or gas?
And bringing down the cost is the next trick.
If you guys don't know this, one of the most interesting
investments that Google has made in wind power
is in this company called Makani.
And it's basically like wind energy
without the expense of building the tower.
Like they don't build a tower with the big propeller
thing on it.
They basically take these little robot
airplanes that fly in loops with a wire
carrying the electricity down to the ground.
And by getting rid of all those expenses,
the hope is that they'll be cheaper
than electricity made from coal or gas.
Again, I talked to somebody from there, Andrea,
who is here at the conference, Andrea Dunlap.
And she said that they're also in a prototyping phase
and still a few years away from this.
So there's all of that.
Calling around to climate experts
and asking what else could be done,
one answer I got a few times from people
was just batteries-- like, storing energy made by wind
and solar power so that energy can be on tap 24 hours a day
and not just when the sun shines or the wind is blowing.
Batteries-- it's still just like we're
at some very basic stages in a lot of ways.
And then a few people mentioned that cars
would use much less fuel, they would be much more efficient,
if they were just lighter.
And I knew nothing about this a few days ago.
And one person told me, if we could just
make cars with lighter materials--
like, replace steel with aluminum and carbon fiber,
reinforced plastic, and other materials--
they said you could double or triple gas mileage.
I was like, that seems crazy to triple gas mileage.
And then I read VW has actually rolled out a super light car
called the XL1, which is just 1,753 pounds.
It's roughly half the weight of a VW Golf or a Jetta.
And it's a hybrid.
It runs on diesel.
And its gas mileage is 261 miles to the gallon.
With one gallon of gas, you can drive from New York to Boston.
I also wanted to mention just other ideas
about this, where you could just kind of look around
this room at people who are doing things.
Leslie Dewan is here.
And her company, Transatomic Power, they're
creating this technology that is really
closer to the thing in "Back to the Future"
where you put garbage into a flying DeLorean
and turn it into energy than anything I've ever heard of.
Is she here?
She's here somewhere.
Maybe she's not here.
She's here.
I saw her here earlier.
Basically, they take nuclear waste,
and using molten salt reactors, they
create cheap, clean, emission-free energy.
Lonnie Johnson has developed a way
to make clean electricity without fossil fuels or wind
or steam.
He pushes hydrogen ions across two membranes.
Another project, it's been explained to me
that 90% of the electricity in the United States
comes from steam, which is moving and spinning turbines.
And one of the people here is Karen Gleason from MIT.
She's developed a hydrophobic coating.
It basically repels water.
And if you coat a heat exchanger with this,
it works seven times better.
It improves the overall efficiency of a power plant
by 3 to 5%.
If it were employed everywhere power plants are worldwide,
it would basically, through that efficiency,
provide as much electricity as made by 150 power plants,
but with no extra carbon emissions.
It would save 1/2 billion megatons of carbon every year.
But the last area of opportunity for engineers and investors,
the technology that I have to say seems the most exciting
to me as a non-scientist-- and I think this is really
the true, unexplored sci-fi breakthrough that you would
always want to see in this kind of thing-- is like, OK,
you would think this would be job number one.
If you have a planet which is just
getting more and more carbon dioxide in the air,
why can't someone figure out a way
to remove carbon dioxide from the air in large quantities,
cheaply?
And this is something that a number of people
are working on.
But the projects tend to be-- like I was talking--
there's somebody here who actually
does this work, Otto Steinfeld.
And I was talking to him.
He was saying you have tens of thousands doing something
that industry wants, that the fossil fuel industry wants,
which is putting things up in smokestacks,
up at the top of smokestacks, pulling the carbon dioxide out
of that.
And he said there are only four or five people in the world who
are trying to just figure out, how
do we suck carbon dioxide out of the air
and not put it back up in the air?
Let's just get the stuff out of the air.
And there are projects.
There are a bunch of projects like this.
There's a guy named Klaus Lackner from Columbia.
There's a guy David Keith up in Calgary.
There's very few people.
And I talked to Lackner this week.
And he said that he and the others,
they're all at kind of very similar stages.
There have some basic technology down.
But they need investors.
And they just need a lot of people
working on the engineering problem
to turn what they have into something
that is ready for prime time.
Lackner's version is really interesting.
His thing, you don't have to be in a place
with high concentrations of carbon dioxide.
Just go anywhere.
You don't attach it to a smokestack.
You just drop it anywhere.
There's no fans in it or anything, no moving parts.
It's basically very slow wind speeds, a 2-mile-an-hour wind,
moves enough air through the filters to capture the CO2.
And he would basically build them
the size of a standard shipping container.
He says one of them the size of a shipping container
would be able to pull a ton of carbon dioxide out
of the air every day.
Though he hasn't built one like that yet.
What he has is a unit that works in his lab, right?
So he's many steps of money and engineering from that.
And I asked him, OK, so how many shipping containers
like that would you need to actually suck all the carbon
dioxide out of the air that we make?
And he didn't hesitate.
He knew right away.
He was like, 100 million.
You'll need 100 million of them.
Which sounds insane.
And then he's like no, no, no.
We make 80 million cars around the world a year.
That's a number you can make.
You can manufacture that.
And he thinks that you could get the price to a point
where each one costs about the same price as a car.
So because our politics are gridlocked
when it comes to climate change, I
think the burden is even greater on business and inventors
and researchers, on the power of the free market, on all of us,
to try to make changes, because I
think the government isn't going to be
a tremendous amount of help.
Though I think a real moonshot approach to this,
to climate change, would not just involve technology.
I think it would take on public opinion.
It would take on politics.
There's been a well-organized, well-funded campaign
to raise doubts about climate change that has totally worked,
been totally effective.
Groups like the Heartland Institute,
and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cooler Heads
Coalition, funded by the fossil fuel companies,
funded by the Koch brothers-- it's been so effective,
climate change is a totally toxic political subject.
Barely came up during the last presidential election.
I'd remind you that like just five or six years ago,
presidential candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney
openly called for immediate action on climate change,
until it became impossible to be a Republican and do that.
And if I were to describe a doable political goal
for the next four years, it would
be make the Republican Party safe for politicians
who think climate change is real.
That's the goal.
And there's a former Republican congressman
who got kicked out of office because he believed
in climate change-- his name is Bob Inglis-- who
is leading the charge on this.
He's got a group.
We did a story about him on our radio show.
One of our producers, Ben Calhoun,
reported on what Inglis sees as the opportunity that
is out there.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-If you look at the polling of Republicans on climate change,
one of the first things you notice right away
is this huge gap between how Republican citizens feel
and how Republican politicians vote.
A recent non-partisan poll by Pew
found that 44% of Republicans believe
the climate is changing.
Another by Gallup found that 40% of Republicans
are actively worried about climate change.
IRA GLASS: And then Ben points out that
just a couple years ago, in contrast
to that, on the House Energy and Commerce Committee,
all 31 Republican members unanimously voted down
symbolic language that would've simply acknowledged
that the climate is changing and that humans
are contributing to it.
-That gap-- 40% percent of Republican voters
worried about climate change versus 0%
of that committee-- that's Inglis' target.
That's his business opportunity.
That's what makes his mission seem realistic.
It's like 40% of Republicans want ham sandwiches.
Surely you can persuade a few more Republicans
to sell ham sandwiches.
IRA GLASS: So Inglis' group at one point counted
other Republicans in the House and Senate
who had ever publicly acknowledged
that climate change was real.
And there were 20 names on their list
out of 278 Republicans at the time.
And Ben asked Inglis about this.
Could this really be all the Republicans
who think that climate change is real in office there?
-Do you know, personally, Republican members
who find the science credible but would never
say so publicly?
-Oh, yeah.
-Can you name them?
-No, I'd better not do that.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
IRA GLASS: Anyway, so I would just say that some of you
work for businesses, run businesses that give money
to both political parties, which is great.
When you fund Republican candidates, when
you donate to the Republican Party,
I would just say you could be using that money
to nudge the entire party toward your own beliefs
on climate change.
You're already spending that money.
But in addition, I think there has
to be a way to nudge the national consensus on this.
That will create the space for politicians to change.
I think it's fine if everybody doesn't
agree on climate change.
But I think it's toxic if climate change stays
a partisan issue, if it's a one-party issue.
I've talked to principled conservatives who simply
believe-- the way to think of climate change
is that it's a conspiracy between professors who
want grants and liberals who want more government.
That's all it means to them.
And I think we have to change that.
We have to remove the face of Al Gore from climate change
and make it nonpartisan.
And say, you know, you know who believes in climate change?
It's business, insurance companies, Monsanto.
Who's in favor of a carbon tax these days?
Exxon.
True fact.
Their official position.
And I think something like a carbon tax
would change so, so much.
It would totally change everything
about trying to spur these investments.
It would just create a completely different set
of incentives.
A carbon tax would just make everything so different.
And the problem with a carbon tax is that no one in America
wants it.
No one in America wants a carbon tax,
because nobody wants their gas prices to go up.
That is the most toxic, third rail--
like, nobody wants to see higher gas taxes.
And there's an interesting proposal
out there by Bob Inglis to solve that problem,
though I've heard it from Democrats too.
And the proposal is, you raise gas taxes,
you have a carbon tax, and at the same time
you lower everybody's income tax and do it with a formula
so that basically you try to make it
so that everybody comes out neutral.
But the incentives are weighted so that now people
have a reason not to spend on carbon.
So this is a conference about what the organizers are calling
moonshots, projects that can change the world,
and mix a huge problem and a radical solution
and a breakthrough of technology.
And I really love the idealism of that.
And I love the idealism of the idea
that they would bring together people
from different disciplines with the thought
that when we talk to each other we would have something
to say that could be useful to each other.
And it's such an amazingly diverse group
from all over everywhere, too.
There's an interesting moment in the interview
that President Obama gave the "New Yorker" a couple weeks
ago.
He said, "I think we are fortunate at the moment
that we do not face a crisis of the scale and scope
that Lincoln or FDR faced."
It's an interesting thing to say because, of course, we do.
We do.
The climate is that crisis.
And the president actually knows that.
He's described climate change as a crisis.
He's used the word crisis and said,
just last year, the question is not whether we need to act.
The question now is whether we'll
have the courage to act before it's too late.
And I think what's going on is that he is just
like me and you and all of us.
He knows that that is true.
We're in this crisis.
There's a meteor slowly heading towards the Earth.
But he's got a lot of things that he's supposed to be doing.
Like, he's busy.
He's busy.
He's got a lot of stuff.
And unlike the problems that Lincoln and FDR faced,
global warming is happening silently.
It's happening invisibly.
And it's so easy for all of us to push this
into the back of our minds.
And I didn't come here thinking I had a moonshot idea.
But I think if I were to say one,
I think it would be that we could move forward
with the feeling-- the feeling that we'll
have once it's too late, we need to have that feeling now.
We need to move with that kind of urgency now, all of us.
I think human beings, we seem to be
built for denial in a really powerful way,
and especially about things have to do with our own extinction.
I have no idea why that would be.
But I would speculate because if we all
walked around all the time knowing
we're going to be dead pretty soon,
it would be just hard to function.
So we're just built to just push certain stuff away.
And that's kind of what this is.
And we all have other stuff we're
doing that can take our minds away from it.
So with that in mind, I want to play you
something that President Kennedy had to say,
for all of us who feel like, oh, we've got too much to do,
I'm not thinking about that, I've
got other stuff that I'm dealing with,
President Kennedy had something to say in the speech
where he called for the first moonshot.
I know this by heart.
Maybe you do too.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-We choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the goal in this decade
and do the other things.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
IRA GLASS: I've always thought that's such a weird move,
"And do the other things."
That makes it so much less powerful.
Why is "and do the other things" in that sentence?
It just totally ruins his moment.
He's totally messing that up.
But I think he's saying, OK, we've
got to make this moonshot.
But yeah, we got a lot of other stuff
we've got to deal with too.
I think he's talking to us.
He's talking to us right now in a way
that applies to our situation.
Listening to that speech again this week to come here,
I realized, Kennedy does this thing.
He not only lays out all the impossible steps ahead.
He says specifically, we're going
to have to invent metal alloys which don't exist yet.
We're going to have to invent guidance and control systems.
He's very specific about that.
And then he's also very specific about wanting a deadline.
He says there's a deadline.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-And this will be done in the decade of the '60s.
It may be done while some of you are still here
at school at this college and university.
It will be done during the terms of office
of some of the people who sit here on this platform.
But it will be done.
And it will be done before the end of this decade.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
IRA GLASS: I think a decade is so smart.
I think nothing happens without a decade.
Nothing happens without a deadline.
A deadline is so smart.
And we need a deadline.
He put the moonshot on a deadline,
and we need a deadline.
We need a deadline.
And I'd say, well, let's just call it a decade.
You know what I mean?
Let's call it a decade-- or way faster, but a decade at
the latest.
Like, this is urgent.
The thing I'm advocating here is so corny
that honestly, I feel a little embarrassed
to be doing it, because you all are really serious
people who do serious things.
And the language-- I feel like the only language
we have for this is really the stuff of comic books,
where everyday life includes speeches
about how great power leads to great responsibility.
Literally, I'm saying we all need to stop what we're doing
and save the world.
That's my thesis to you.
And so I thought I would end this talk with a comic book
quote from a comic book hero-- a California resident,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In season seven, she gives this speech.
And she's not fighting carbon dioxide atoms.
She's fighting forces of evil of the kind
I don't really need to get into right here.
All you need to know is they are literally
hellbent on doing what greenhouse gases will
do-- destroy the Earth, OK?
So she's up against the same thing we are,
though she uses the word "evil" to describe it.
So just replace the word "evil" in here
quote with what we face.
And she says this comic book thing
that I think is so beautifully put.
She looks around a room of people
just like this one, a group about the size of this one,
actually, and explains that they're up
against a kind of threat they have never encountered before,
a kind of evil that is fundamental and
world-destroying.
And she says to them, and I say to you,
"There's only one thing on this Earth more powerful than evil.
It's us."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]