- [Announcer] "Sacred Ground with Tim Daly" is made possible by Patricia & Edwin Matthews through the New York Community Trust Progress Fund, by Glenmede Private Wealth, by the Murray & Susan Haber Charitable Foundation, and by the following funders.

(lighthearted music) (phone ringing) (pensive music) - One night, after dinner, a reporter called on deadline this very intense conversation about potentially catastrophic consequences, et cetera, sea level rise.

When I hung up the phone, it was only done that I realized that my 6-year-old son was playing with Legos in the room.

And he turned to me and he said, "Daddy, are we all going to die?"

(pensive music) And then I realized that I was going to have to give something up in order to do something on behalf of my kid.

- Mike Tidwell was like a lot of us, deeply concerned but not involved.

It took his son's simple and daunting question to move him to action.

This is his story, a young father who could no longer pretend that his beloved hometown was immune to the new weather patterns.

They had arrived in his own backyard.

Welcome to "Sacred Ground," a series about how climate change is here and how it is affecting our lives.

(upbeat music) (children chattering) (lighthearted music) - Welcome to Takoma Park, Maryland.

This is an amazing place to live.

It's an old trolley suburb of Washington DC.

Oh, look at your squash.

They're giant.

- Have a zucchini.

- You want me to pick that big one?

- Pick it, Mike, go for it.

- [Mike] Hey, Pat.

- [Pat] Hello.

- Hey, Wabi.

How you all doing?

- [Wabi] All right.

- It is hot.

Yeah, it's all I hear from everyone today.

It's a place where people take care of each other.

Hey, Jill.

- Hey, Mike.

- I see you've got all the produce for the neighborhood.

We call ourselves Tree City, USA.

We name our streets after trees.

Jamie.

- Hey, Mike.

- [Mike] How's it going, man?

- Good to see you, bro.

- How you been?

- Very fine.

- Yeah?

- It's a beautiful day in the 8th District.

- It is a beautiful day in Takoma Park.

This is a place where my neighbor Jamie Raskin is also my congressman.

How are the dogs?

Hi, buddy.

- They're good.

Say hi, Potter.

- Hey, Potter.

- Say hi, Toby.

- [Mike] It's a kind of place where you want to raise kids.

- My brother and I would run between the trees and in all the monkey grass.

- An amazing community, vibrant, cohesive, but there's a problem.

Our trees are dying in this neighborhood.

(rhythmic music) Every time I walk by your house, I think about all the trees you've lost.

- Yeah, well, we had a lot of really big trees.

And in the last four years, we've lost five big trees.

- So your tree guys came this morning?

- They were going to give us an estimate for taking down the hundred-year-old pin oak.

- [Mike] So it's definitely coming down?

- It has to come down.

- We wanted to do what we could to save this tree because obviously, I mean, you know, this is how big it was.

- Right.

- And it was over 80 years old.

- And it was a southern red oak.

- It was a red oak, yeah.

- Yeah.

Looking this direction, we have lost a 80-year-old willow oak, a 150-year-old willow oak, and a hundred-year-old white oak.

They were all right here, and they've all died.

It is a climate change story.

My name's Mike Tidwell.

I am a writer and a climate activist.

So you've had to pronounce terminal illness for many, many trees in this neighborhood.

- Yeah, hundreds, maybe thousands at this point, I don't know.

Lots.

- It was devastating.

It was heartbreaking to see that many dead trees of that size.

- Trees get old and they die, but what we've seen is not normal mortality.

They've been dying in numbers that none of the tree experts in this region have seen before.

So we're not just losing one 100-year-old white oak on a square block area.

We're losing dozens of them.

City records show we've lost a net canopy cover of 45 acres just in the last few years.

- The rain in 2018 was way outside the norms.

We had some 72 inches of rain as opposed to our normal of 42.

- [Reporter 1] Heavy rains and floods have plagued Maryland this month, the rainiest July on record.

So what's to blame?

The meteorologists at Climate Central say the answer is human-related climate change.

- It felt like suddenly unstoppable dominoes were falling.

Something so big was knocking down our trees, almost like bowling pins falling.

Every day, all around us, we could hear them falling, we could hear them being chainsawed.

We saw the grief stricken faces of our neighbors.

It was transformative.

- We ended up with a lot of mortality in the roots.

And these trees were compromised to the point that they could not support the top.

- 30 years ago, to see climate change up close, journalists and scientists had to go somewhere else.

They had to go to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

They had to go to the Arctic.

But now you can see those impacts right outside your front door.

And it's not me saying it's climate change that's killing our big old trees at such a rapid rate.

It's the city arborists, it's the public works department, it's the tree care companies.

My one block in Takoma Park is a proxy for every street, every community in the world.

- It was specifically the larger, older trees that that had been around forever- - Right.

- That were dying, stacking up like cordwood everywhere.

- And this was not just Takoma Park.

We were getting reports in New York, New Jersey, everywhere.

Our native trees in this region are no longer native.

We've changed the climate, so these trees are foreigners now.

(dreary music) - [Tim] There's a tradition in Takoma Park to take dead tree trunks and carve them into beautiful tributes to the lost beloved trees.

Mike's a writer, an accomplished, award-winning writer, so he poured his grief into a book, "The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue."

But that's not the end of the story.

(upbeat music) - Writing is my passion.

I spent the first half of my career as a freelance print journalist.

I got to see a lot of the world.

But then in 1990, I read a book by the great author and activist Bill McKibben called "The End of Nature," the first book written for a mass audience on the issue of climate change.

And in it, Bill lays out, when you combust fossil fuels, you emit an odorless, invisible gas, carbon dioxide, which migrates to the atmosphere, stays up there for up to a thousand years, and traps heat.

It's creating a warming blanket around our planet.

- As I stand here today, there's a lot of people going buying cars.

Any car, when it burns a gallon of gasoline, gives off five and a half pounds of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide.

- I remember the color of the paint of the apartment I was in when I read that book.

Time stood still.

I was freaked out.

And I promptly went into my own version of denial.

- [Bill] When we gather here in 50 years, the old trees maybe dead from heat stress.

- I didn't deny that climate change was happening, but I denied that it was going to impact me and my family anytime soon.

So I was able to go ahead and continue to be a freelance journalist.

I had dream assignments.

I had an editor who said, "I want you to go down to The Bahamas, and I just want you to go from island to island riding the mail boat."

I was able to write stories about riding horses along the Silk Road routes in Central Asia or backpack across Sicily.

I loved my life.

- We need new light bulbs that draw less currents.

We need new cars that use less fuel.

- But there it was in the back of my mind, this reality of climate change.

And it was a whisper of, you have a responsibility to deal with this.

- There are not 50 simple ways to save this Earth.

There are only difficult ways, ways that'll take a lot of sustained effort.

- My son, Michael Alexander Tidwell, was born May, 1997.

Once you have a kid, it completely rearranges how you see the world.

There was a front page story in the Washington Post in January of 2001.

It was the most shocking scientific, comprehensive assessment of climate change at the time.

And for whatever reasons, that snapped me out of my denial.

I became increasingly alarmed that people generally weren't paying attention to this.

I realized that I was going to have to give something up in order to do something on behalf of my kid.

I was going to have to walk away from this charmed life as a freelance writer.

- [Tim] Research shows that millions of people are aware of the science on climate change but don't act on it due to a sense of personal powerlessness.

But Mike Tidwell walked away from his writing career and became a full-time climate activist.

(upbeat music) - The group I wanted to work for did not exist, so I had to form a nonprofit on my own.

Came up with the name Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

This is where it happens.

These are our organizers, our lobbyists.

The first thing people see when they come in is this very interesting solar hot water collector.

This was put on the roof of the White House in 1979 by Jimmy Carter, and they created all the hot water for the White House for a long time.

And then in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president in '81, he didn't like solar energy, and took 'em down.

The very first campaign I ran was me by myself, where I tried to lobby legislators to pass a bill to mandate seven and a half percent of Maryland's electricity come from carbon-free sources.

I didn't know what I was doing.

Our bill got squished like a bug by the fossil fuel lobbyists.

That's how I began.

And I learned.

I learned how to get journalists to pay attention.

I learned how to be creative in your messaging.

The eastern shore of Maryland loses an acre of land every day.

An acre of marsh turns to water every day from sea level rise.

I want to get caught up on the endangerment finding backtracking that the EPA is proposing.

- [Quentin] Yeah.

- I need to learn more so I can write about it, talk to reporters about it.

- Mass v. EPA was a big finding that greenhouse gases are in fact pollution.

It basically undergirded every regulation that the EPA has ever done regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

- We're going to just write a petition letter highlighting all the reasons that we need to keep the endangerment finding in place and then email it out to our list.

- Well, as usual, our congressman Jamie Raskin, I'm sure, would be eager to speak out on this issue, so keep that in mind.

You held the first hearing on holding oil companies accountable for misleading the public on the issue of climate change.

- Yeah.

The evidence seems overwhelming that for decades, the oil industry understood the lethal threat of climate change, but misled the American people and buried the scientific truth of climate change.

Democracy and climate survival are entirely intertwined in my mind.

Big gas, and oil, and coal had a great deal going, and we were all, in a certain sense, complicit in it and dependent on it.

But they want to keep it going and they wanted to keep it going when they knew it was a catastrophe for humanity as early as the 1960s and '70s.

- Right.

- [Jamie] They could understand, you know, greenhouse gas emissions and they could understand the processes of climate change.

- Here we have photographs of bill signings of legislation that we've passed across the region.

This bill in DC is for building efficiency and clean energy.

This is a Virginia bill that was primarily for offshore wind power.

This is a bill for wind and solar power in DC.

This is energy efficiency in Maryland.

And this is the Inflation Reduction Act.

- The landmark climate healthcare and tax bill.

- There we go.

- President Biden signing the Inflation Reduction Act today comes after more than a year of negotiations.

- [Reporter 2] It makes massive investments in cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

- [Reporter 3] And it directs large investments to fight pollution in underserved communities.

- [Reporter 4] This is legislation that has seen quite a journey.

- [Reporter 5] A hard fought victory.

- In 2022, we passed that law, which would trigger 300 plus billion dollars in government investments in clean energy and trigger up to $1.7 trillion in private matching funds, the strongest piece of legislation passed by any country in the world to solve climate change.

It was wildly successful in the two years that it had to make a difference - With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate.

- Donald Trump came in and the Republican Congress, and they have slammed the door on most of that.

- Donald Trump was very upfront about it.

I mean, he got into the room with big gas and big oil and he said, "I'm your guy, and you guys have got to put up the money."

The loss to Trump in 2024 meant that they were going to immediately start trying to turn the clock back on all of the progress we've made on climate.

- Right.

- And it's so dangerous, and destructive, and backwards looking.

- We see incredible climate extremes right here in Takoma Park.

Our trees are dying.

- Yeah.

- That's going on.

- [Tim] Mike was depressed.

After 20 years of devoted effort, he was now convinced that it was too little, too late.

There were countless nights spent alone reviewing the ravaged climate landscape.

- And that's when I went through the second major convulsion of my life, where, yes, I had to admit defeat, I had to deal with fear again.

This narrative of if we work hard enough and just deploy enough clean energy, the worst won't happen to us.

The worst is happening to us.

Clean energy alone is not enough.

So what other possibilities are there?

- [Reporter 6] 2024 was the hottest year on record.

That is now two years in a row the global temperatures have shattered records.

- [Mike] We have crossed some kind of threshold.

We are in a world of runaway warming, which is why we're seeing these unbelievable wildfires.

- [Reporter 7] Fear is growing tonight as flames light up the Los Angeles hillsides.

- [Reporter 8] Alaska's having a major heat wave.

- [Reporter 9] Trends that have already triggered dramatic consequences on weather patterns.

- [Mike] We keep going to a new level in terms of these impacts.

- [Reporter 10] This bleaching event of the Great Barrier Reef is the worst I've ever seen.

- [Mike] 30 million people displaced in Pakistan.

- If our numbers and our appetites continue to expand, then our impact on the Earth can only increase.

We need to accept that we live in a world of limits and that we're about to hit those limits.

- [Mike] We are not going to save ourselves through clean energy alone.

- We don't have decades.

We hardly have years.

- [Mike] We've got to think about new solutions, using technology that we don't even have, but we've got to invent it.

(pensive music) - [Tim] While looking for answers, Mike explored even the radical extremes of the climate movement.

- Ning, how are you, man?

- Hi, Mike.

- Good to see you.

- [Ning] Nice to see you, Mike.

- Thanks for coming.

My neighbor, Dr.

Ning Zeng at the University of Maryland, wants to bury trees all over the world that are dying from climate change.

- Trees compose of mostly carbon.

So if they are left alone on the forest floor, they would decompose, the carbon would go back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, which we know is a powerful greenhouse gas.

So I have been looking at a method called wood vault, where we can take those dead trees and bury them underground so that they don't decompose.

(pensive music) - It seems like that technology today is where solar energy was in the 1970s.

And we don't have 50 years to develop it.

- [Tim] Desperate, Mike started leaning into a highly controversial technology known as geoengineering.

It's based on reflecting sunlight away from the planet.

In some ways, it mimics a natural occurrence.

(eruption rumbling) - In 1991, Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, exploded.

It deposited millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.

Sulfur dioxide has the property of reflecting sunlight.

This one volcano in 1991 in the Philippines cooled the entire Earth by more than one degree Fahrenheit for over a year.

So the question that scientists are asking today is, can human beings, in the face of runaway climate change, safely deposit enough sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, cooling the planet long enough for us to complete the transition off of fossil fuels?

(pensive music) This is a controversial issue.

- [Tim] From the beginning of his journey, Mike Tidwell stood on the shoulders of Bill McKibben, one of the first activists.

They finally met in 2003, and since then, have worked together, protesting, lobbying, and even getting arrested together.

- [Mike] Bill McKibben has written a new book called "Here Comes The Sun" about how solar energy is finally cheaper than fossil fuels and spreading dramatically all over the world.

I went to see him at a book signing.

- Hey.

It's good to see you, brother.

- [Mike] What's going on, man?

- How are you, man.

- [Mike] It's been a little while.

- [Tim] Mike Tidwell and Bill McKibben, fellow warriors drawn to a cause that's so big and so complicated that it intimidates most of us into quiescence.

The health of our planet, for them, is not just a job, it's a test of our humanity, the only way to live.

- We're in extreme carbon overshoot.

So we also have to have negative emissions, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere if possible.

And then, as you know, Bill, there are others who are saying, "Well, can we reflect sunlight away from the planet?"

- And that's something that you've thought about for a long time.

I mean, as you know, better than anyone, it's a insane idea.

- Totally insane.

- You know, having filled the atmosphere with CO2, we're now going to fill it with sulfur in order to- - To fight pollution with more pollution.

- You know, but it's possible that we're going to have to break the glass and pull that lever at some point.

I think that right now, in the next three or four years, the main task, since we're on a roll with sun, and wind, and batteries, is to build the hell out of it and build as much as we can, as fast as we can.

The proof of concept is definitely there.

- Yeah.

- It's called China.

(laughs) - Yeah.

- In May, China was building three gigawatts of solar panels a day.

Now a gigawatt's the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant.

So they were putting up one of those in solar panels every eight hours.

We're ceding the technological future to China.

They're going to own the future.

America invented the solar cell, America had the first commercial wind turbine, but China's going to make all the money.

(chuckles) I had the great good fortune to have my first grandchild about 18 months ago, who this book is dedicated to.

So I now know and dearly love someone who's going to be around in the 22nd century.

I think this is the single most important thing we could do in short order to give that century a chance of being something other than dismal, maybe something quite, quite beautiful.

(lighthearted music) - My dad used to say to us, "When everything looks hopeless, you're the hope."

And I feel like you are very much the hope, the people who are fighting to build a clean energy future or the hope.

- When my son was young, he would build Lego houses and he would put Lego solar panels on the roof, 'cause he thought every house in America must have solar panels 'cause that's all my dad talks about.

Is the solar new here?

- The solar is new.

A couple of months ago, we were able to install solar panels, where before the solar company would look at our land and say, "No, it's not worth it 'cause you've got too much shade."

And now we have 22 solar panels that we installed on the garage and on our house.

- I mean, I tell people, Takoma Park has become a small power plant of solar because we've lost so many trees.

(lighthearted music continues) (children chattering) As I take my morning walk in Takoma Park, I regularly pass the neighborhood playground just a block from my house and I see those kids dependably there every morning.

And I realize that the work that I've been doing for decades is not about me.

The work is about them.

They represent our future.

(lighthearted music) So even in my own backyard, where I've seen the impacts of climate change, I now have this baby pin oak that's right there at the foot of the mama oak.

I'm taking care of it.

I water it and I protect it from predators.

And I just hope that this tree can grow old, can grow healthy in this same neighborhood.

I haven't given up.

I'm kicking my legs hard.

I'm kicking them as hard as I ever have.

I can envision a way out of this.

And because I can see it, I can fight for it.

- Albert Camus wrote, "Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

For Mike, generosity took the form of action, showing up to do the work at hand.

On behalf of "Sacred Ground," I'm Tim Daly.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] "Sacred Ground with Tim Daly" is made possible by Patricia & Edwin Matthews through the New York Community Trust Progress Fund, by Glenmede Private Wealth, by the Murray & Susan Haber Charitable Foundation, and by the following funders.

(lighthearted music) (lighthearted music) (distinguished music)