♪♪ O0 C1 ♪♪ -Ow.

♪♪ -Tonight on "Retro Report," understanding the present by revealing the past.

First... [ Telephone ringing ] -Veterans Crisis Hotline.

-...can today's suicide rate be reduced with a forgotten technique?

-We're gonna send a letter saying we just care.

-Caring letters actually reduce the rate of people dying by suicide.

-Could a solution for global warming be found in a terrifying Cold War concept?

-It is known as nuclear winter.

-Smoke from fires started by nuclear weapons would block out the sun.

Inevitably, I get a question, "So is that a solution to global warming?"

-Then the lead paint problem that won't go away... -Children are lead detectors.

-...and Baby M, the landmark case that still shapes surrogacy today.

-To just give her away for $10,000, I couldn't do it.

-Plus, Andy Borowitz, humorist for The New Yorker magazine.

-Pollution isn't bad.

It's merely a sign that American industry is firing on all cylinders.

-I'm Celeste Headlee.

-And I'm Masud Olufani.

This is "Retro Report" on PBS.

-They've stunned the world.

-Oh, my God!

-Not unusual... -More secrets exposed.

-Over the past two decades, suicide rates in the U.S. have been steadily rising.

There are more than twice as many suicides as homicides, according to the most recent numbers.

The issue has emerged as a major public health crisis, and yet despite the decades of research, not enough is known about how to prevent people from taking their own lives.

-One remarkably simple intervention is now showing promise -- sending short, caring messages to those at risk, but it's a method that's been tried before.

It was first tested half a century ago in an unconventional experiment that had been filed away and seemingly forgotten.

-In 2014, I woke up restrained to a gurney, naked.

I had an I.V.

in my arm, so that hurt.

I was wondering where my clothes were.

I was wondering where I was.

I was wretchedly embarrassed, felt ashamed.

At that point, I was still very much suicidal, and I was like, "Oh, my God, what have you done?"

I was a alcoholic military sexual trauma PTSD soldier, and the world gets really small because all you can see is your pain.

I felt like I had tried as hard as I could and that I was just never gonna get it right... and I was just destined to be tortured forever until I died.

-October 18, 1973.

"This is just a note to let you know we are interested in how you are coming along."

April 24, 1974.

"We continue to be interested in how you are doing.

We want you to know that our interest in you continues.

We hope that life is going well for you at this time."

-In the late 1960s, a San Francisco psychiatrist named Jerome Motto began an unusual experiment.

He wanted to understand how to help people driven to suicide, and he recruited researcher Chrisula Asimos.

-To me, the whole idea of working with suicidal people was really new.

I do recall thinking, "Oh, my gosh.

I'm gonna talk to a lot of depressed and suicidal people all the time.

Am I ready for this?"

-Contrary to popular belief, people who threaten suicide do kill themselves.

-At the time, suicidal people were so misunderstood that the developing field created training videos to teach doctors and first responders what not to do.

-This isn't too bad, lady.

Want to succeed?

You better cut deeper next time.

-You could take almost any medical book you want, and you'd be lucky if you could find the word "suicide" in it.

-She hurt very bad?

-Ah, she's looking for sympathy, wants a little attention.

-Don't we all?

-There really was a judgmental stance that they took.

It's like, "What you've done is manipulative, and it's not legitimate, and I really don't buy into your pain."

-Motto embarked on his study with a team of researchers that included his wife, Pat.

-Let's see what we have here.

This is from the project.

This one was mine.

-They fanned out across San Francisco to talk with over 3,000 patients hospitalized for depression or suicidal thoughts.

-This is number 2,859.

-We each established a relationship with a patient in the hospital.

Here's somebody who you're sharing the deepest pain and experience with, and then that person left, and we thought, "Oh, you know, who knows what's gonna happen after they leave?"

And so we're gonna send a letter saying we just care.

That's it.

-Jerry was in World War II, and he always had letters from home.

They brought back that sense that, you know, "This will be over.

War is hell, but there's somebody out there that cares."

-We wanted it brief.

I think it was just a couple of sentences.

You know, "No expectations, and let's see if it works."

-Motto and the researchers decided to focus their study on patients who had declined follow-up treatment and to send them letters at regular intervals over the next several years.

-The key thing was doing something for nothing, doing something 'cause you cared, and I said, "I don't know how you're gonna get that across in a letter."

I really didn't.

I wasn't overly enthused.

I guess I said, "Is that all you're gonna do?"

-Before long, though, they began hearing back.

-"Please call me.

I'm really down.

Don't know what to do.

I can't talk to anyone."

-And they were able to help some of the patients get back into treatment, but they hoped the letters might be doing something more.

-Every year, we'd go up to Sacramento to the vital statistics records.

We wanted to look and see what the death records were like.

That was very anxiety-provoking, you know, looking at them, going, "Oh, don't, please.

Please don't have the names that I know on this."

-After Motto and the researchers scoured the records, they discovered something remarkable.

The group of patients that had received the letters had about half the suicide rate as the group that had not in the first two years after leaving the hospital.

-The letters seemed to matter.

It was pretty exciting, yeah.

It really was exciting, and he was such a salesman about that, you know, that the ties that bind are really what makes, you know, life.

It's the essence of life itself.

-Motto published the results in 1976 and spread the word about caring letters at conferences afterwards, but the years passed and then decades.

-We still, over the years, couldn't believe that nobody picked this up and did this.

Why didn't anybody do this?

-All I remember is conversation about it just dwindled away.

-By the mid-2000s, a suicide crisis was emerging among American service members and veterans.

David Luxton, a U.S. Air Force veteran and clinical psychologist, was hired by the Department of Defense to help find a solution.

As he searched for ideas, he came across Motto.

-I will admit, when I was first reading the literature on this, reading Motto's work, I was a little skeptical.

There's something kind of intangible about this caring connection.

-For a field that had grown reliant on prescription drugs and finite 50-minute therapy sessions, the notion of sending letters to patients over time didn't quite fit.

-That's not what people are looking for, and what they're looking for is a pill that'll do the same thing.

To a hammer, everything's a nail.

To them, everything is medication and treatment.

-And yet, as suicide rates continued to climb, it was clear to Luxton that they needed more tools.

He kept returning to Motto's original study and a more detailed follow-up paper Motto and a colleague published in 2001.

-These caring letters actually reduce the rate of people dying by suicide, and that's been something that few other studies have been able to show have been effective at doing with any kind of intervention, and so that requires some attention.

-Luxton and other researchers have been testing Motto's technique but with a modern twist -- using text messages and e-mails instead of letters.

James Wooley took part in one study.

-The first one that I really remember was a couple months after I got out of the hospital.

"Hey, James.

How you doing?

What's going on?"

And it was no big deal at the time.

I was just like, "Oh, yeah.

They're sending me that e-mail.

Great.

Don't need that."

-Wooley had spent 10 months on the inpatient unit in intensive therapy, and he was now sober, but as he moved from the VA hospital to a homeless shelter to a room he now rents in San Jose, he hit a rough patch.

-I was scared, lonely.

I was working a new job, working -- living in a new city with -- with strangers.

You know, it was just coming back here to not much.

They sent me one around the holidays when I was particularly low.

I opened up the e-mail, and I read it, and it made me feel better.

You know, I just knew that if -- if I was in crisis again that I had a place to go, that there were people that cared about me, and it was okay, that I wasn't burdening anyone by asking for help.

-While more study is needed, researchers say that repeated follow-up contacts show promising results in reducing suicidal behavior in the short term.

-It can overlay whatever else is happening with that person, whatever their treatment may be, so when a person is in crisis, they can reply back, and we can then actively intervene and help get them into care.

-And with high suicide rates across the country, new attention is being paid to nontraditional approaches, including Motto's, more than 50 years after he mailed his first letter.

-He clearly wanted to see that happen, and I'm sorry he didn't see that in his lifetime.

-A letters approach is treating a person as an individual, not as a number, and not treating them, you know, like a cog in a machine.

That's where the real power is.

♪♪ -When it comes to having children, surrogacy is now increasingly common among Americans, and it's big business, but unlike in many other countries, the practice of having women carrying children for someone else is not well-regulated here.

The issue is left to the states, and the result is a legal mishmash.

-It all goes back to the case of a baby from New Jersey whose story riveted the public.

The moral and legal debate over the case divided the nation.

And three decades later, surrogacy is still controversial, even as more families are choosing it.

George Constantinou and Farid Ali are part of a growing group using surrogate mothers to have children -- gay men.

-I no longer feel that it's a unique story.

I'm a father now, facing the same challenges as any other parent, gay or straight.

-Yeah.

-George and Farid use an egg donor, and the twins were carried by a surrogate, Jeni Denhof, who already had two girls of her own.

-This is a dream for women, to be able to give this gift and have that feeling, knowing I provided a family for someone.

-But it was complicated.

Paid surrogacy is illegal in New York, where George and Farid live.

-Does your cat say, "Meow"?

-So they found Jeni, who lives in Colorado, where it is not.

Surrogacy laws vary widely from state to state, the legacy of the dramatic fight over a baby girl born in New Jersey in 1986.

She was known as Baby M. -It's a case that might test the wisdom of a Solomon.

-It was the first case of its kind, pitting a surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, who bore the baby for a $10,000 fee, against the child's father, William Stern.

-When she was born, she just looked so much like my daughter, and to just give her away for $10,000, I couldn't do it.

-Nobody seems to be concerned about fathers' rights.

Fathers have dreams, too.

-Stern provided the sperm and, along with his wife, Betsy, hired Whitehead to conceive and carry the child.

-The contract Mrs. Whitehead signed stated she would not try to keep the baby.

-When she gave birth, she did surrender the child, and she was so distraught, she did nothing but cry.

-The Sterns had the baby for several days.

Then Mrs. Whitehead came back very upset and said she needed to have the child for a few days back in her house again, and then she would bring the baby back to the Sterns.

-But when she didn't come back, the Sterns got a court to order Whitehead and her husband to return the baby.

-Police officers showed up at her home, and there was some confusion, and she did what I think any woman would do, any mother who loved their child.

-While the police were there, she passes the baby out the window to him.

They both escape and flee to Florida.

-Whitehead had been hiding in Florida for 87 days when police found her at her mother's house and took the infant away.

-Desperate to keep the baby, Whitehead turned to the media.

-They stole my baby, and they're letting them get away with it!

-She had many a press conference talking about surrogacy and her child and this was her child and they were taking her child away from her, and it started to capture the press and the public.

-It was the first contested surrogacy case in United States history.

Courts had never seen it.

The media had never seen it.

The public had never seen it.

-Throughout the trial, the press was fascinated with the story and the issues it raised, from income disparity... -The father, Stern, a biochemist, married to a pediatrician, pitted against the mother, Whitehead, a high-school dropout married to a garbage collector.

-...to potential exploitation of women.

-Mary Beth and Sara.

Mary Beth and Sara.

-We don't want to see surrogate mothering being sort of a cottage industry for the poor women of America.

-Ultimately, the case raised questions about how modern families are made.

-One out of seven married couples in the United States cannot have children because they are infertile, and adoption is no longer a viable process in this country.

-There's nothing in the best interests of any of these children that they be separated from their natural mothers.

-Inside the courtroom, testimony included a dramatic tape recording of Mary Beth Whitehead calling Bill Stern from Florida.

-No, Mary Beth.

No, Mary Beth.

Wait, wait, wait.

-That's what I'm gonna do, Bill.

[ Baby crying ] -Please, Mary Beth.

-Don't cry.

-Lawyers for the Sterns introduced the tapes, saying they show Mrs. Whitehead is too unstable to win custody.

Her lawyers said they only show how much she cared.

-Good evening.

Baby M goes to her father.

-In the end, the judge gave custody to the Sterns and ruled for the first time that a surrogacy contract could be enforced.

-I'm on my way to the appellate division right now.

-But on appeal, the New Jersey Supreme Court disagreed.

-They had not much of a problem about the issue of custody, but the question is, "What do we do about surrogacy?"

-Let's assume that the surrogacy agreement is declared void.

-The court found the exchange of money for a child illegal, perhaps criminal, and potentially degrading to women.

-To my shock -- shock -- 7-0 it was voted not enforceable.

They said, "We're not going to allow this to happen in this state."

-But the justices also ruled the trial court was wrong in terminating all the natural mother's parental rights, including visitation privileges.

-I want to be able to see her, but I don't need her in my home to love her.

-She did not get full custody, but she won a battle that preserved the rights of other women which influenced law around the world.

-This was the beginning of a very big step in the world of family, and the law had totally failed to keep up with it at all.

No one had really looked at it, considered it, put together what to do about it.

-Mrs. Whitehead!

[ Indistinct shouting ] -Even after the decision, the country remained fascinated with the story of Mary Beth Whitehead and Baby M. A made-for-TV movie was watched by millions.

-[ Crying ] Mommy, no!

Don't take me, Mommy!

-And states began passing laws outlawing or limiting paid surrogacy.

-Michigan today became the first state to outlaw paying a woman a profit to be a surrogate mother.

-Visions of Mary Beth Whitehead screaming, "Give me back my baby!"

frightened people from this concept and made them turn away, but it didn't stop people from having children through surrogacy, and, in fact, if anything, surrogacy grew after 1988.

-It grew in part because of a new development in reproductive technology -- in vitro fertilization.

-Doctors remove eggs from the woman's fallopian tubes.

The eggs are mixed with the husband's sperm to allow the fertilization to occur outside the body.

The resulting embryo is placed back in the woman's uterus.

-This technique also allowed a surrogate to carry a baby produced with another woman's egg.

-The surrogate mother had no genetic link to the child.

-In 1990, in California, surrogate mother Anna Johnson sued for custody of a baby conceived in a laboratory using the egg and sperm of the intended parents.

-But Judge Parslow ruled she was simply a host, in effect, a foster parent.

-Very quickly, there was a switch to the nongenetic surrogacy where the effort was, "Well, let's try to get around the opinion of the New Jersey Supreme Court."

-At least 99% is now gestational or egg donor surrogacy.

-Surrogacy, it's almost doubled in the past six years.

-The tide of public opinion began to turn... -Like real-life storks, surrogates are bringing babies to an increasing number of families all across the country.

-...as celebrities started coming forward about their use of donor eggs and surrogates.

-He's here, and he's perfect.

That's what Kim Kardashian has to say about her and Kanye's new baby boy, who was born via surrogate.

-No one keeps track of how many surrogate babies are born.

-I'm quite comfortable in saying it's several thousand a year children being born.

-George and Farid met Jeni through an agency, Circle Surrogacy, where she also worked after the twins were born.

Founder John Weltman says finding surrogates is surprisingly easy.

-Every month, between 600 and 1,000 women apply to our program to be a surrogate.

-Jeni says she never worried about giving the babies up, nor did she feel exploited.

She said she was aware of the clear medical risk of carrying twins.

-You have to be okay recognizing, "This is not my baby, and, yes, I'm offering my body."

They go over all the various things that can happen, including risking your life.

Most surrogates, we know the risks that we're taking.

-Family, this is Jeni.

Jeni, this is our friends and family.

-Hi!

-Hey!

-That was quite an emotional journey for her, as well as physical.

She got to be a rock star for nine months to these two gay guys in New York.

-We were not in need financially.

That being said, I never like to downplay the fact that, yes, I was compensated to carry these kids, and it helped our family.

-Jeni's fee, around $30,000, was just a small part of the entire cost.

-The surrogate, the egg donation, the fertility clinics, the surrogate agency, the trips back and forth, I'd say at least $120,000.

-Because it's so expensive, some intended parents try to find surrogates themselves online.

Others turn to a global marketplace of clinics where the costs of surrogacy are often lower.

-By some estimates, prospective parents spend more than $1 billion each year hiring egg donors, surrogate mothers, and brokers all over the world.

-Even as it grows, the surrogacy business in this country remains largely unregulated.

Unscrupulous operators have made off with clients' money and created surrogate babies just for sale.

-I think it is the Wild West in surrogacy because there's no required license.

You don't have to be a lawyer.

You don't have to be a social worker or psychologist.

People are entering this, some of whom are very honorable and some of whom are not so honorable.

I'd like to see regulation take place.

-But regulation requires laws, which many states have never implemented, and that may be the most lasting consequence of Baby M. -There's nothing resolved about the question of whether we as a people are going to embrace surrogacy.

-Baby M set back surrogacy that everybody just doesn't want to touch it.

Legislators are very, very concerned about whichever way they go, it offends somebody the other way.

It's a very highly controversial topic.

-A few states ban paid surrogacy.

Others allow it in certain circumstances, and many have no legal framework at all.

In part under pressure from gay men, some states have recently lifted restrictions, including New Jersey, where Baby M was born.

-What comes next after one gets married?

Kids, so that's the logical next step.

There needs to be, you know, surrogacy equality in all states.

-As for Baby M herself, Melissa Stern is now an adult.

At 18, she terminated her legal relationship with Mary Beth Whitehead and was adopted by the woman who raised her, Betsy Stern.

-She went to college.

She went to graduate school.

She met a man.

She married that man.

Melissa has done beautifully.

-The Sterns and Melissa have shunned publicity all these years, ever since their case set off a debate about parenthood that has yet to be fully resolved.

-The benefit to surrogacy is biological ties to your child, and it's just gonna get bigger and bigger because the bottom line is, people want kids.

♪♪ -Today, after decades of study, researchers have identified one factor that can significantly affect a child's development, performance in school, and even increase the risk of criminal behavior -- exposure to lead.

Tainted water in communities like Flint, Michigan, has attracted a lot of attention, but for most children, that exposure comes from peeling paint and contaminated dust.

-About half a million children, most of them in poor neighborhoods, have elevated levels of lead in their bodies.

Now, some of you might be asking, "Didn't we deal with that decades ago when the U.S. government banned the use of lead in paint and gasoline?"

The problem is, we left one question unanswered -- Who would pay for the cleanup?

♪♪ -Well, I'm gonna go in.

-In Providence, Rhode Island, June Tourangeau is known as the Lead Lady.

[ Knock on door ] -I am a licensed practical nurse.

Hi, Jasmine.

How are you?

-I'm good.

-And I have been working with lead-poisoned children for the last 23 years.

Hi, Elijah.

Hey.

How are you?

-Lead is an environmental neurotoxin and can cause brain damage, learning and behavior problems in children.

-We obviously will do the developmental assessment.

-Elijah Riske lives in Rhode Island, one of only a dozen states that require blood tests for elevated lead levels in children.

-We go into the homes because an important part of seeing the children medically is we need to see what's in the environment.

Once a child's poisoned, that's when action is started.

Do you find he says two or three words together?

You like that.

-Not three.

Two sometimes... -Two, okay.

-...but definitely not three.

-Okay.

-See?

-Elijah, do you want to do my pen?

You want to do it?

-The government says any elevated lead level is dangerous for children.

Elijah's, at 24 parts per deciliter, was off the charts.

♪♪ Lead is so toxic, we put strict limits on using it in consumer products decades ago, so why hasn't childhood lead poisoning gone away?

-Lead has many uses, far too numerous to detail here.

-For much of the 20th century, lead was everywhere -- in gas, in exhaust from our cars, in water pipes and house paint.

Neurologist David Bellinger studies its effects on the brain.

-Lead was a viewed as a occupational hazard.

Childhood lead poisoning was first identified around 1900.

-We use lead despite the known risk, while some European countries began removing lead from paint in the 1920s.

Here, it was marketed as safe and clean.

-The danger of lead poisoning can be easily minimized by being careful to clean one's hands.

-And in 1925, after a temporary moratorium, the U.S.

Surgeon General resisted calls to remove lead from gasoline.

-Much of the research was funded by industry, and the thinking was that a child had to show clear signs of toxicity in order to be harmed by lead, and once a child recovered, all would be well.

-But in the 1940s, independent researchers discovered that wasn't true.

-Most of them failed in school.

They got in fights.

They clearly had residual neurological problems from their lead poisoning.

-As evidence mounted, lead was finally removed from house paint in 1978 and from gas in 1996.

Children's lead levels plummeted.

-The cumulative effect of these interventions has to be regarded as one of the handful of greatest public health successes of the last 50 years.

-But some were left behind.

Today, at least half a million American children age 5 and under have dangerous amounts of lead in their bodies.

♪♪ -State of emergency has been declared in Flint, Michigan after high levels of lead were found in children's blood.

-Their plight was all but forgotten until the 2015 crisis in Flint, Michigan, over lead in the drinking water.

-If you thought America's lead crisis was limited to a single town in Michigan, think again.

The fact is that lead is an epidemic.

-And most lead poisoning doesn't come from tainted water.

It's from old lead-based paint, and 1/3 of American homes with children under age 6 still have lead paint.

-So our state capitol is almost directly across the street from where I used to live.

♪♪ Those four windows right there, those are the four windows that I believe poisoned Sam.

-When Liz Colon was just 22 years old, her family bought their first house, an old fixer-upper in Providence, Rhode Island.

-A few months later, Sam was diagnosed with lead poisoning.

He went to his routine visit at 12 months old, and his blood came back at 36.

There was lead in everything, every painted surface in every room, the backyard, the soil, the exterior.

We had to cover the windows in plastic, put, you know, duct tape on the doorways, anywhere there was a friction surface, just to make it temporarily safe for him to be able to come home.

-It didn't take long for Liz to become an advocate with the local Lead Action Project.

-85% of our housing stock was built before 1978, so the majority of our housing stock has a lead-paint problem.

I wanted to be able to protect other kids from having to go through this.

It only takes this much dust to poison a child for life.

So Sam became the face of lead poisoning, in posters in doctors' offices and advertisements on buses.

-Sam was poisoned nearly 20 years after lead paint was banned, and all that time, even though there were some federal grants to help homeowners who qualified, we never developed a system to deal with all the paint that remained.

-The Department of Housing and Urban Development isn't doing enough to reduce the danger of lead poisoning for children.

-America is doing little or nothing about it.

-Looking for cost-effective answers.

-One of the strictest lead laws in the state is not being enforced.

-There's still quite a ways to go.

Blood lead levels of kids have fallen significantly, but now we know that essentially any blood lead level in excess of zero is problematic.

-Economist Anna Aizer analyzed lead test and school data from Rhode Island children born between 1990 and 2004.

-When you link children's disciplinary infractions and test scores with their own blood lead levels, you see a very clear relationship.

Children with an elevated lead level are, in fact, 20% more likely to have been suspended from school.

They show aggression and difficulty with impulse control, and their test scores suffer.

-The data also shows who were the most affected.

-Families that live in old homes, those are gonna be the kids who are most likely to be exposed to high lead levels, and those are gonna be poorer children.

-While the cost of making those old homes safe seems overwhelming, Aizer says we're paying anyway by leaving them full of lead.

-We're paying for special education.

We are paying for school resource officers.

We are paying for the juvenile courts, and we are going to see the manifestation of that in crime, in educational attainment, and employment and earnings later in life unless we take steps to reduce those numbers.

-Welcome.

Come on in, Rosa.

-Thank you, Ms. Piven.

How are... -But taking those steps is expensive and difficult.

-We're gonna test the bathroom.

Anything that comes up 1.0 and above is considered hot.

-Lead testing is done house by house, room by room.

The most dangerous spots include doors and windows where friction turns old paint to lead dust.

-This is 6.5, so that's pretty hot.

-Removing lead paint can cost thousands of dollars, and even properly covering it up is beyond what many homeowners, landlords, or even states can afford.

-Rhode Island is going after the makers of lead paint.

-Looking to fund a cleanup in 1999, the state of Rhode Island sued paint manufacturers, claiming that by selling a dangerous product, they had created what is called a public nuisance.

Attorney Bob McConnell represented the state.

-The definition of public nuisance is, it's a harm that society ought not have to bear, and they kept promoting their paint with the knowledge that it could harm children.

The government just doesn't have enough money to -- to de-lead all the houses.

-It is a public health tragedy that can only be stopped by making them pay.

-We're not asking for past damage.

We're not asking to compensate the kids who have been poisoned.

It's forcing the wrongdoer to clean up the problem.

-McConnell's firm, Motley Rice, sued in other states, too.

-Several cities, taking a lead from those who have sued the tobacco companies for damages, have decided to sue the paint companies.

-The industry admitted old paint could harm children but insisted the real fault was with homeowners and landlords.

-Once the paint has been sold, the condition of that property was not the responsibility of the manufacturers of paint.

-After nine years of litigation, in 2008, the Rhode Island Supreme Court and courts in several other states ruled for the paint companies.

-What the court said is, "The manufacturer, you weren't in those homes to decide how they were gonna be maintained."

Some chose to maintain their properties.

Some chose not to.

-The case was over, and we were extremely disappointed.

It was a tough pill to swallow.

-But in California, the case continued for 18 years.

Larry Brooks runs the Lead Poisoning Prevention Program in Alameda County.

-In the heart of our county, in the city of Oakland, we actually have a child lead-poisoning rate higher than Flint, Michigan.

I know that when they put the lead in the paint, they weren't intentionally trying to poison our communities, but once they discovered that the lead in the paint was harming their customers, it was time to start doing something about it.

-For the first time, the courts agreed.

-A California judge has ordered three paint companies to pay for the removal of lead.

-This was a big victory here in California, but it sure did take a long time.

-The judge, in his order, indicated the paint companies are the cause of the problem and they had a responsibility to help us to address lead-paint hazards.

-But some of the companies continued to fight, appealing the $400 million judgment unsuccessfully to the U.S. Supreme Court, and while they've now agreed to a settlement in California, they are still defending cases in other states.

-The idea of holding companies responsible for conduct over a century ago is more than troubling.

-But for Liz Colon, the California decision feels like a vindication.

-Someone is actually going to be held accountable for the first time ever.

That's big.

-And while she agrees, June Tourangeau is frustrated that after 20 years, children are still getting poisoned in their own homes.

-Children are lead detectors, and it's sad that a child has to be poisoned before red flags are raised.

Why should this still exist when this is a preventable disease and people know about it?

-So she continues teaching parents, like Elijah's mother, Jasmine Riske, how to protect their children from further poisoning.

-The only person that I have to help me is my landlord, and, I mean, he's been notified multiple times, and there's nothing.

We didn't have the money for, like, a nice, fancy apartment.

Because people have less than somebody else, their children deserve to be sick.

How is that fair to anybody?

-Jasmine worries about the long-term effects of lead on Elijah... -So I just -- -No, no, whatever questions.

No, please.

You're always gonna watch him, and if you ever feel that he is not doing the things that he should be, then you definitely talk to the pediatrician.

We can't change what has happened, but we can go forward.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-...just as Liz once worried about Sam.

-I think it was the direct result of lead poisoning that he was slower in school.

He was impulsive, and it was hard for him to process math and reading comprehension, but he did okay because we put a lot of work into it providing extra support wherever we could.

Sam today is 24 years old.

He's really grown up, and he's really worked hard.

He now works with adults with disabilities, and he's great at his job, and he loves it.

-30% of children in some neighborhoods on Cleveland's east side could have lead-poisoning issues.

-18 cities in Pennsylvania reported higher levels of lead exposure than Flint.

-Now New York Mayor de Blasio ordering lead inspections of nearly 130,000 public housing units.

-All across the country, communities are still looking for resources to fix the problem of old lead paint, but it's hard to know where they will find the answer.

-I understand why they want to resist, but my hope would just be that the paint companies would work with others and try to address the hazards that they unintentionally created.

It's like addressing a oil spill.

Those companies have to step forward and clean up the accident that they created.

♪♪ -Amid mounting evidence today that global temperatures are on the rise, some scientists have suggested cooling things down artificially.

They propose trying to manipulate the earth's climate through a process known as geoengineering.

-It's a radical idea that comes from a very unlikely place -- scientific research developed during the 1980s to study the environmental impact of a nuclear war.

The fear was that nuclear war, most likely between the United States and the Soviet Union, could plunge the globe into a civilization-ending ice age.

Scientists called it nuclear winter.

-Administration officials from the president on down have been using hard-line rhetoric against the Soviets all year long.

-The administration's message to Moscow has been that it's not going to be business as usual anymore.

-Today, in virtually every measure of military power, the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage.

The Soviet military buildup must not be ignored.

-If the United States are going to continue their cause, then I'm afraid that the world is doomed to be on the brink of nuclear war.

-It was a real fear in the early '80s that we were in a more dangerous period than we had been perhaps since the missile crisis in 1962.

-In the 1980s, tens of thousands of nuclear warheads already faced off, but Cold War calculations pushed the superpowers to build even more.

-It was a balance with tremendous destructive power on both sides, so we were in this very, very tenuous situation right at the edge of a cliff.

-There are 40,000 nuclear warheads in the inventories of the U.S. and the Soviet Union today.

We must ensure it not be used.

-It started quietly, but it is picking up steam and may be gathering strength, the movement, if that's the right term, to somehow bring pressure on leaders of both the United States and the Soviet Union to stop, just stop the nuclear arms race.

-That movement was called Nuclear Freeze, and as its message spread across the nation, it brought together a wide swath of Americans.

-In order to stop this arms race, you first got to freeze it.

-One of those was the astronomer Carl Sagan.

-Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room.

One of them has 9,000 matches.

The other has 7,000 matches.

Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger.

Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in.

-Sagan was a very effective communicator.

I mean, he was a voice for the scientific community, in some sense.

-In 1983, Sagan used that popularity to draw attention to a troubling new scientific finding about nuclear war.

-Dr. Carl Sagan and more than 100 other scientists have concluded that the long-term effects of nuclear war would be much worse than anyone has predicted so far.

-We studied a range of consequences of various nuclear war scenarios, if I might have the first slide.

High-yield nuclear weapons explosions... -Climate scientist Alan Robock was in the conference audience.

-It was a very new idea, that smoke from fires started by nuclear weapons would go up in the atmosphere, block out the sun, and make it cold and dark and dry at the earth's surface, having impacts on agricultural production.

-As Russian counterparts weighed in via satellite link, this view of nuclear war's destructive power took hold.

-For the first time, we see that the consequences of a nuclear war might be absolutely devastating for nations far removed from the conflict.

-The initial splash on this story was profound.

It was kind of self-assured, even existential destruction.

Nuclear winter, even the verbiage, is portentous.

-To illustrate the point, Sagan helped produce a short film showing just how devastating nuclear winter might become.

-Beneath the clouds, virtually all domesticated and wild sources of food would be destroyed.

Most of the human survivors would starve to death.

The extinction of the human species would be a real possibility.

-It is known as nuclear winter.

-This is not some peacenik nightmare.

It is a theory supported by at least 40 American scientists of high repute.

-Today, a panel appointed by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences agreed with Sagan.

-The Pentagon has accepted as valid the theory of a nuclear winter.

-The implications of nuclear winter are that we shouldn't build more, but we should build less.

-It was a combination of everybody's work that kept making a stronger and stronger case that this theory was true.

-The fear of nuclear winter soon became another of the many issues impacting Cold War strategy.

-A great many reputable scientists are telling us that such a war could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the earth as we know it.

What are we talking about with a whole nuclear exchange, a nuclear winter?

-Gorbachev certainly has testified to the fact that this increased his concern about the consequences of nuclear war and the arms race.

-Today, I, for the United States, and the General Secretary for the Soviet Union, have signed the first agreement ever to eliminate an entire class of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons.

We have made history.

-But even before that treaty was signed, some of the gravest predictions made by nuclear winter theorists had begun to thaw.

-Those of us who were doing more global models, we didn't get anything like the result that Sagan was getting.

I mean, we got a climatic effect if you put that much smoke on there, but we didn't get the kind of effect they were talking about.

-Nuclear winter, argues one group of scientists, is what will surely follow nuclear war.

Other scientists with their own computer calculations of the doomsday scenario say life after nuclear war will not be so much nuclear winter as nuclear fall, severe but survivable.

-Nothing we've seen in our simulations or in the work going on now leads me to believe that the extinction of the human race is a real possibility.

-Over time, better modeling caused many of the original nuclear winter theorists to agree that nuclear winter's effects were likely more moderate than they had initially supposed.

-There's a pattern to how some phenomena and stories play out.

The first idea is very stark, and then the scientific process is like piranhas that nibble away at the soft stuff, and whatever's left is the hard skeleton of the ideas, the enduring part.

-Even when you get back to the nuclear autumn thing, you're still having huge environmental effects that would have agricultural effects, so it was more a matter of nuance in intensity rather than a matter of, is it real or not?

It didn't have to be quite hyped so much, but that there were climatic effects was important.

-But as the predicted effects of nuclear winter became more subtle, the headlines faded away.

-I think a lot of the public went away with just the message that this was an exaggerated concern and they didn't have to worry about it.

-Over the years, another global issue began to focus the public's concern.

-When I show my results of the climate response to smoke from nuclear war, inevitably I get a question, "So is that a solution to global warming?"

-Nobody's talking about exploding a nuclear bomb, but the idea of harnessing a nuclear-winter-like effect to reduce the global temperature has intrigued policymakers and scientists for some time, and it is gaining traction.

-The scientific evidence that these technologies could reduce risk is very strong.

-One technique under consideration involves dispersing a cloud of sulfate particles into the stratosphere to partially obscure the sun and reflect sunlight away from the earth.

-The main benefit is it would cool the climate, and so it would reduce all the impacts of global warming.

There would be fewer severe storms.

There would be less sea-level rise.

There would be less temperature change, which might affect agriculture, so all the negative aspects of global warming would be reduced if you could do it.

-The concept is not without controversy.

-This idea of responding to global warming essentially with nuclear winter light, I guess you could call it, the science leads to some very worrisome questions.

-The problem is, it's unclear what else solar geoengineering would do.

-I should mention that I have written a paper with 26 reasons why geoengineering would be a bad idea.

Anything built by humans and operated by humans can fail, so would you trust our only planet to this?

-Meanwhile, the Cold War danger that pushed scientists like Robock to study these climate effects remains.

In fact, the nuclear landscape is more complex than ever before.

-There are a lot of weapons out there.

-Rarely has North Korea tested missiles at this pace.

-I want this, our nuclear arsenal, to be the biggest and the finest in the world.

-It's important for countries and leaders to be keeping in mind what nuclear war would do.

Even small exchanges could be absolutely devastating.

You're gonna have first the destruction effects.

You'll have fallout.

You may have some climatic effects that -- that spread.

-Heaven help us if there were a small nuclear exchange.

You could end up with being on the worse end.

It's like with global warming.

You know, the worst-case scenarios can happen.

I guess the good news about nuclear winter is it remained a theory.

-The global consequences of nuclear war is not a subject amenable to experimental verification, or at least not more than once.

Maybe we've all made some serious mistake in the calculations, but I wouldn't want to bet my life on it.

-A new problem with our nation's water turns out not to be new at all.

-New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz investigates.

-Mass destruction.

-Sexual relations.

-Potato.

-Fear.

-USA!

-Aah!

-Hello.

-Aw, damn it.

-None of it makes sense.

-Maybe you guys should get a sense of humor.

-[ Laughs ] -He knew this was gonna wind up in a crazy place -Today, I'd like to celebrate my glorious hometown, Cleveland.

The Ohio of my youth offered a unique tourist draw.

-41 industries discharging directly into the Cuyahoga a smelly, off-color brew.

Raw sewage.

-Chocolate brown.

-Debris.

Oil.

-It oozes rather than flows.

-Water so pristine, this is the name of the city's football team.

An artisanal cocktail of industrial waste and human goo, the Cuyahoga River suddenly burst into flames, but the people of Cleveland took this episode of aquatic combustion in stride, covering it on page 11-C of the local newspaper.

Why were Clevelanders so blasé about a phenomenon that usually only happens to rivers in hell?

[ Screaming ] Maybe because the Cuyahoga had caught on fire before, 12 times before.

-I know that wasn't the best fire.

I remember a '52 fire.

I think that one probably would've won the prize for the best fire.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Cleveland finally had what every city dreams of -- a brand.

-♪ Cleveland rocks ♪ ♪ Cleveland rocks ♪ -But while Clevelanders celebrated their sizzling river's newfound stardom, a radical environmentalist was plotting to rain on Cleveland's flaming parade.

-Each of us all across this great land has a stake in maintaining and improving environmental quality, clean air and clean water.

[ Distorted ] Clean air and clean water.

-Richard M. Nixon, the founder of a shadowy group of eco-extremists... -The government's new Environmental Protection Agency comes into being tomorrow.

-...the EPA.

The implacable Dick Nixon was determined that history would remember him for just one thing -- clean water.

EPA goons fanned out across the Cuyahoga, cruelly draining its precious oil and sewage and replacing them with an infestation of fish and wildlife.

-The Cuyahoga is now a poster child of clean water.

-Experts say the water has changed.

-As the power-mad EPA imposed its iron will, the nation was at risk of losing its favorite pastime -- watching water catch fire.

[ Cheering ] While unhinged aqua activists claim that flammable drinking water is somehow uninviting, some patriots understand this country's history from sea to burning sea.

-I've been to a lot of the fracking seminars.

If you go back in history and look at how the Indians traveled, they traveled to the burning waters.

-♪ Just around the river bend ♪ -Americans need to support a new direction for the EPA with uniquely qualified leaders.

-Pruitt is a known climate-change denier.

-...has repeatedly sued the EPA to roll back environmental regulations.

-Andrew Wheeler, former coal lobbyist, is now the acting head of the EPA.

-Luckily, the EPA no longer has a blatant clean-water bias.

This is the administration we need to make America conflagrate again.

-The Trump administration is set to relax offshore drilling rules.

-...rolling back regulations that were put in place after the explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon, the worst offshore oil disaster in U.S. history.

-An inferno on the water.

-Thanks to the wonders of modern water contamination, Americans no longer have to go all the way down to the river to find polluted water.

-Imagine turning on your kitchen faucet and the water pouring out catches fire.

-We can enjoy it in the comfort of our own homes as we huddle around the warmth of our kitchen sinks.

-Wow.

-Our new, improved EPA understands that pollution isn't bad.

It's merely a sign that American industry is firing on all cylinders.

-Fire, fire, fire, fire!

♪♪ -History is full of surprises if you know where to look.

-"Retro Report" on PBS.

Thanks for watching.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This program is available on Amazon Prime Video.

♪♪ -Next time... -Overpopulation, so long predicted, has stolen upon us.

-...did we overreact to fears of overpopulation?

-"Panic" is not too strong a word to use.

-And what does the fate of boxing tell us about the future of football?

-Some now wonder if football can survive its very essence.

-Plus humorist Andy Borowitz.

-If that scientist wants people to understand his explanations, he should try making his science more interesting.

-Next time on "Retro Report."