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[pensive music plays] - Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour & Company.
Tonight we're bringing you some of our favorite interviews of the year around climate, the existential challenge of our times.
Here's what's coming up, a conversation with premier television naturalist, David Attenborough, who's documented profound changes in our environment for seven decades.
Also ahead, the American politician who put climate change at the top of the agenda.
Walter Isaacson speaks with former US Vice President Al Gore.
Plus filmmaker Dan Edge documents the making of a climate coverup in his frontline series, the Power of Big Oil.
And finally, how musical artist Carole King went from natural woman to natural activist.
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- Welcome to the program everyone, I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.
The year 2022 will be remembered for a relentless torrent of climate mega disasters.
In Pakistan, intense rain and unusually high heat led to devastating floods, killing more than 1500 people.
In China, a one-two punch prolonged drought followed by historic flooding, leaving hundreds of thousands displaced.
And in the United States, hurricane Ian decimated the Florida coast with losses estimated at more than $50 billion dollars.
But in the face of these compounding challenges, today we celebrate those who refuse to stand idly by.
And we begin with Sir David Attenborough, the great naturalist and conservationist who has inspired generations to love the earth as he does.
More than half a century after his first production, the 96 year-old is still enlightening us, most recently with the BBC series, Frozen Planet II.
Take a look.
- [Attenborough] Explore all of Earth's frozen habitats.
Where life finds a way not just to survive, but to thrive.
[splash] [walrus grunts] [animal sounds] ♪ Watch it all, watch it all, watch it all ♪ ♪ Fall down ♪ Watch it all, watch it all, watch it all ♪ ♪ Fall down - I spoke with Sir David on Earth Day in April 2020, just weeks into the COVID quarantine.
When a pause in human activity created a rare moment of quiet in the natural world.
Welcome to the program, Sir David.
And I just wonder what you think of kind of being inside, unable to go outside and celebrate Earth Day, and all the changes that our planet's seen, certainly since you were born.
- Yes, indeed.
I mean, the world has been transformed.
And I've been extraordinary lucky in that I've been filming the natural world since the 1950s.
And so I've got a video documentation of how it looked to me when I was in my early 30s.
And it was a different world altogether.
I could see things that nobody else had filmed before, certainly.
I could travel into places where hardly anybody had ever been before.
It was like a marvelous, pristine world and it was rich.
And yet, of course, it was still being depleted.
Had I been there 50 years before that, I would've seen even greater things.
But now what I realize, of course looking back now, is how the world has become poisoned and depleted, and is a wreck, really, from many points of view, and there are dangers on the horizon.
- Let me ask you before I go back, because you're right, you know, in your lifespan, I mean you're 93 years old.
That's a well-known fact, I'm not being indiscreet.
And as you say, you've seen these massive transformations, but I led into this, and surely you obviously have been on top of it as well, by talking about the incredible blue skies, the lack of carbon and pollution in our air, the cleaner waters right now.
We've seen animals roaming around, as if it was still a natural world in highways, and streets of urban centers.
Do you, I mean, do you think, wow, look at what could happen if we put our minds to it?
- Yes, very much so.
And particularly in this glorious weather.
Of course, I'm locked in as we say, so I don't get out even though I'm close to one of the loveliest parks in greater London, the Richmond Park.
I can't go there, I'm supposed to stay at home, which is what I'm doing.
But the skies are so blue, the bird song is so loud and I can hear it over because there's no airplanes.
I mean, I live quite close to London airport and normally I wouldn't be able to talk for longer than 90 seconds or so before a drone of an airplane came by.
Now it's an event to see an airplane in the sky and I can hear the bird's song.
But also, the air is purer.
And when you hear reports of fish coming back into the Venice canals and so on, and you realize the world is actually changing.
And being that change is being forced upon us, the question is, are we going to be strong enough to keep these changes, to do what's needed to retain these improvements in the years to come when we've got over this particular hump and problem?
- It's been suggested that a simple message, stay home, stay safe during this coronavirus has worked.
People are doing that, they're obeying it.
Do naturalists, climate activists, people who care, need to come up with a simple message that will be equally powerful, once we get out of this, for the climate?
- Yes, we do, but you can't have a more powerful message than the one we have now.
Because you didn't actually make mention the second half of it.
Of course, the government is saying stay in, because if you don't, there is a risk of a deadly disease.
That's a pretty big threat.
And when the government says, or whoever it is, says that threat has disappeared, will we have the strength of the mind then to say, 'Okay, well we won't use the highways as much as we did, we will say at home if we can.'
I think that one of the changes that may well happen in the coming years, is that actually people have discovered that you can work in this day and age with all our various devices, you can work very, very well from home.
And there is no need to have to endure that dreadful journey packed into, like sardines in tins, going into the middle of the city.
Maybe there will be a shift in the way we work.
Now, if that happens, that's because people prefer it that way.
But will they prefer to say, 'Oh, well, we'll give up our overseas holidays, We don't need to travel as much as we want because we want to reduce the amount of noise in the atmosphere, in the skies, or indeed the carbon dioxide that we are wasting on transport that we don't need.'
That's the question, will we do it?
Do we care enough to do things that we don't enjoy, of this improvements.
- So, you know, you say, will we care enough?
And that we're facing a health crisis right, that's true, but of course the climate crisis is an existential crisis for our species, as you've said and many others have said.
And I found it really interesting that today, on Earth Day, Ipsos Maori, which is a very, very reputable poll, says two-thirds of the British people believe that climate change is as serious as Coronavirus and the majority want climate prioritized in the economic recovery.
And I know that you have, you know, you've moved from being just an observer and a lover of nature, to somebody who uses your incredible voice and your platform more as an activist and telling people and warning them about what's ahead.
I wonder what you think of the younger generation, people who are saying this about what should happen in the future.
- The heartening thing about what you've just described is that young people, who are going to inherit this earth, young people have made it absolutely clear how vigorously and vehemently they feel about what is happening to the planet.
And it is that, that in any democratic society, our leaders and our politicians to take that seriously.
Before 20 years ago, I don't think the politician did take it seriously.
I thought they thought, oh well, you know, it's 20, 30, 40 years ahead and we've got urgent things to do tomorrow or next week.
They didn't really take it seriously, but young people now are insisting that they take it seriously.
And that has been the major change, I think, in public move over the past few months.
We must take notice of what they're saying.
It's not me, I'm in my teens, I'm young but I do know that I may not know the facts about ecological sophistications, but what I do know is that the world is going to be for me to live in for the next 50 years or so.
And that's pretty powerful.
- Let me just read a a couple of stats 'cause you started by saying the world has changed a huge amount since you were born, since you were a young man.
You were young in the 1930s when 66% of the world was wilderness and carbon dioxide levels were only about 310 parts per million.
When you started your first Blue Planet in the late '90s, wilderness was down to 47%. And now it is 25%, barely 25% of our world.
So in your lifetime it's gone from 66% wilderness, to 25% and it's gone from, I don't know about that time must have been about 2 billion on the planet now it's 7 plus billion on the planet.
And a lot of this disease, many are saying, reputable doctors are saying, is partly because of overpopulation and over-farming of these animals.
What do you say to that?
- Well, it's not so much overpopulation as dense population.
The density is the problem.
And the epidemics are not new.
There was the Black Death a few centuries ago, there was the Great Plague in the 17th century in which people were dying in huge numbers in the condemnations, in the big, I suppose they weren't condemnations, but there were dense cities.
Certainly London was acidic in, which there were over, the density of population was huge and people were dying in great numbers.
So it's not new.
And anybody who knows anything about keeping animals, farmers will know perfectly well.
And anybody else who looked after living creatures, if you keep them in great densities, the transmission of disease once it starts, goes like wildfire and very difficult to control.
Well, we are living in huge densities.
Homo sapiens has increased in numbers as we just said over three times as many as when I was making my first programs.
It's extraordinary.
So it's not surprising that in fact we're getting our comeuppance from that point of view, but it's not nature, not nature having revenge or anything like that.
It is a basic fact of life that if you have huge densities of population, you will get disease that's spread very swiftly in them.
- One of the, well your latest film, A Life on Our Planet, was meant to have premiered last week ahead of Earth Day because of this crisis that has been delayed.
What were you saying in that documentary?
What were you saying about your experience and how you've, watched these developments and what legacy you want to leave?
- [Attenborough] The filmmakers who have suggested it, pointed out to me that actually I've had a film record, I've been making films in the wild since the 1950s, early in 1950s.
And before that I have plenty of memories of running in the English countryside and looking at birds and collecting fossils and being aware of the natural world.
And so I've seen that change, but I dare say I wouldn't have recognized that change.
So we're not very good at recognizing slow changes unless it had in fact been recorded on film.
And it's when I now look at those films of lakes covered in wildfire of various sorts and other, and I suddenly realize, 'Yeah, that's gone, that's changed.'
And so, it's that record, which has made it so vivid to me as to what has been going on in my lifetime.
- And now while you're in lockdown, you are also taking part in a BBC experiment whereby a lot of you are teaching young kids and you've decided to teach geography for a while.
What are you telling the kids?
Why have you decided to jump into this fray?
What's it like being a a an online teacher?
- [laughs] Well, I can't pretend that we are making special lessons in that sense, but only this very afternoon I've been recording an introduction and sound to some of the films which I've made in the past and which will be brought out and be showing again because they have a very precise educational quote message in them.
And so I'm introducing them saying, 'Look at this.'
They look at the oceans, let's look at the ocean.
They covered two thirds of the world and they have creatures in them.
They vary from this, that and the other.
And let me show you some of the things that goes on and the way it's all interconnected.
And then we will show sequences from new planet or indeed other series, which I've done in the past.
And we are, those are being edited by people who are specialists in learning by television in order to convey the messages that will be helpful.
My commentary won't be changed, only my introductions will be added.
- I just wanna end by saying you do have some solutions and you've talked about these.
Make large no fishing zones to give stocks a chance to recover, reduce land farming by half, humanity must eat less meat, you believe and phase out fossil fuels.
Of course, that's a huge, huge endeavor that, the world is trying to get to.
But I also just wonder you're 93, you say you can't go out even to the park, which is right outside your door.
What is it like experiencing this at this point?
- Well, I'm embarrassingly lucky.
I have a reasonably large car and I walk, but I walk around it more in the past three weeks, I suppose, or a month than I have for years because I'm now walking closely to different plants, which I'm particular fond, the way in which they are actually developing.
Have that airum big airum from the middle rain [indistinct] has that developed that great spike yet.
So every day I go around hoping that I'm gonna see that particular change.
And of course the weather's been so lovely, the birds have been so beautiful that it's such a consolation.
It's interesting, isn't it, that the doctors and medical profession know very well now that an appreciation of the natural world and contact with the natural world actually brings huge benefits.
Huge benefits in our pieces of mind, our peace of mind, - [Christiane] Right.
- Huge benefits in terms of our happiness and our relationship to the natural world.
- Well boy, you have brought that to such a massive global audience and we're all happy at your film.
Thank you so much to David Attenborough for joining us on Earth Day at 50.
David Attenborough there on the importance of protecting our natural world.
A message echoed at the opening of the COP 27 Summit by former US Vice President Al Gore, who said, 'We must all choose life over death and not make more long-term commitments to fossil fuels.'
Gore joined Walter Isaacson to discuss his latest initiative using sophisticated technology to keep governments and corporations honest on their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
- Thank you Chris, John and Vice President Al Gore, welcome to the show.
- Great to be with you. Thank you, Walter.
- You've just come back from Egypt where you were at the UN Climate Change Summit COP 27.
One of the big pieces of news was President Biden sitting down with President Xi and deciding to restart a lot of the talks about climate.
We've been in a really challenging situation with China over Taiwan, trade issues.
Do you think we need to recalibrate and look at the bigger issues and maybe perhaps recalibrate that relationship so we can all focus on climate?
- Well, I think climate I is an issue that can bring the US and China closer together in their aspirations for the future.
You know, China has been hit very hard by the climate crisis this past summer.
They went for 70 days with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, 104 degrees Fahrenheit over a vast swath of the country.
And the climate historians noted that there's nothing even minimally comparable in all of world history to that heat wave.
They've also had these massive downpours or rain bombs and many other impacts.
The sea level increases are threatening a huge area, particularly around Shanghai and around Guangzhou.
And so China has its own self-interest in trying to help the world community solve this crisis.
And of course the US and every other nation do as well.
But the conflicts you mentioned actually can be transcended by the work that the two largest emitters, the two largest economies have to do together in order to help the world get out of this mess.
- You're very famous, of course, of being one of the early pioneers and warning about this with, 'An Inconvenient Truth.'
But I also think of you as somebody who's been a science geek all around, space, information superhighway, for years you've been, they seem to tie together with something you announced in Egypt, which is Climate TRACE.
Tell me what that's about.
- [Gore] Oh, thank you for asking.
I am super excited about this new development.
There's a coalition of 10 independent artificial intelligence groups, data researchers, universities, NGOs that have come together to use artificial intelligence and machine learning and sensors based on air, land and sea and internet data streams to accurately identify all of the point source significant emissions of greenhouse gas pollution all over the planet.
That has not been possible in the past because even though you can use satellites to look down at methane emissions, you can't see the whole earth with the kinds of satellites that measure methane.
But you can see it.
With CO2, you're looking down through a column of air that's so enriched with CO2 that the so-called signal to noise ratio makes it impossible to just see it chemically.
But if you use all the wavelengths and measure the infrared heat signature, the smoke plumes, the ripples of water in the cooling pond, how many fan blades in the cooling fans are operating, the internet data streams for the offtake of electricity, and other sources of information.
You can fit those together into machine learning algorithms that are incredibly accurate in pinpointing where the pollution is actually coming from.
Exactly how much is coming from which, and what the trend is over time.
We get from all the wavelengths from 300 existing satellites from the the US, Europe, Brazil, China, India, Germany, and Canada.
We see the entire earth surface multiple times every day.
And we can use all of that, those different sources of information to really identify and track the emissions.
But now we can apportion it correctly.
We found, for example, that the oil and gas industry has under-reported their emissions.
Their emissions are actually three times higher than what they have reported to the UN.
And the old saying, you can only manage what you can measure applies here because most of the emissions come from countries that have pledged to get to net zero by 2050.
Here's how they can do it.
We can identify those sites precisely and for companies that have pledged to get to net zero, we can show them how they can buy the same steel and the same amounts from a supplier that has one-tenth of the global warming pollution of a supplier that they might be using now.
And there are hundreds, thousands of similar examples.
- So you could take this data and can you pinpoint it directly to one steel plant of one oil refinery here in Louisiana or something and say this particular plant is doing this much pollution?
- Absolutely.
And it's very, very exciting.
We have started with the largest 20, largest 72,000 plus, the largest emission sites around the world.
By next year we'll have millions and essentially all of them.
We won't have the backyard barbecues, there's a long tail.
But we'll have 99% of the emissions identified to where they're coming from.
And not only do we have the specific plant, we can show you the different parts of each plant.
The so-called metadata, what the technology is and who owns it.
We have ownership data for almost all of them and we are seeing others send us more information that we're verifying.
Since the release last week, we've been deluged with incredible amounts of new data.
And in the nature of machine learning, the more data, the more accurate it becomes.
One other point, they can't cheat with this.
There's no way to cheat because they would have to falsify multiple different data sets from multiple domains.
It's absolutely impossible.
So we have accountability and identification for the very first time.
- Is your goal with Climate Trace to shame some of the companies?
And how would that work?
- We're just providing the facts.
We're not the climate cops.
We're a little bit similar to the Neighborhood watch organization, our neighborhood's the globe.
And if somebody wants to use it to name and shame, we can't prevent them from that.
But I think the highest and best use of this information is to identify the opportunities to easily reduce emissions without hurting productivity or profitability.
We can do that right away.
- So you think you may be able to work with these companies if you're able to identify it as opposed to just shaming?
There could be a carrot and a stick?
- No question about it. Take steel, for example.
There are companies that use electric furnaces instead of blast furnaces.
If you look at the full spectrum, and it's all available on the climate trace.org website, by the way.
You can find the same amount of steel, same quality, same kind from a supplier whose emissions will be less than one 10th of the emissions that come with a supplier that you may now be using.
Most of these manufacturers have excess capacity, they can serve more customers with lower emissions and the ones that lose customers with the high emissions will be challenged, not necessarily named in shamed, but challenged to change their technology and change their business model.
- I think you've made a deal with one of the government entities in Mexico, for example.
Tell me about that.
- Well, there are actually two cities in Mexico.
One in the Western Cape region of South Africa, two in in Europe, six overall.
And we cut it off at six because we were focused on the launch at the United Nations conference in Egypt.
And we decided to sign up six sub-national governments as a kind of a trial run.
They love it, they're basing policy on it.
But we are going to open it up in the new year to any municipal government, state, provincial, regional government, and any nation state that asks for our help, we'll do it all for free and we will assist them in identifying exactly where they can reduce emissions.
- You spoke of the World Bank as being a part of a fossil fuel colonialism.
What does that mean and what do you think the World Bank should do?
- Well, the World Bank and the other multilateral development banks that are part of that system, what it's supposed to do, is to open up access for developing countries to the private capital markets.
At present, if you are in Nigeria and you want to build a new solar farm, it makes imminent economic sense.
It's gonna be profitable, the cheapest source of electricity, but you will have to pay an interest rate seven times higher than the interest rate paid in the developed countries, the US, Europe, OECD.
Why?
Because they have political risk, rule of law risk, corruption risk, climate risk.
Several other layers of risk in these developing countries that the private markets are are leery of.
The role of the World Bank is supposed to be to take those top layers of risk off the top so that these countries can compete for interest rates that are competitive so that they can move forward in their economies.
But instead the World Bank has not been doing its job.
They've actually been supporting more fossil fuel and it's nuts!
And the person who, the previous president appointed to run the World Bank is a climate denier.
He ran for Congress as a climate denier.
It's a long history of statements.
He's now saying, 'Oh no, I'm not.'
Well, okay, but we need new leadership.
- Is Biden able to change the president of the World Bank?
Or push it?
And should he and who should he appoint?
- Yeah, yeah, he should push it.
The World Bank position, the head of the World Bank is a position that has traditionally been filled by the US.
That's an informal agreement since World War II.
And every administration has been reluctant to lose that privilege.
And so they're reluctant to change heads in the middle of a term.
But nothing could jeopardize the US Hold on that position more than having climate denial policies in the World Bank.
The votes of the shareholders are necessary and the US can't do it unilaterally.
But Germany has come out in favor of changing the World Bank Head, Australia has as well, several other countries.
We have the votes and I'm hopeful that they will get rid of this current head of the World Bank, put a new person in.
And more important than the head of the World Bank is to broaden the mandate to give them more leverage.
That is to come up with terms that allow them to loan money in a way that brings in lots more private capital along with it.
That's again, what it should be doing.
And the problem is, well look at it this way: I mentioned all of those electricity plants installed worldwide, 90% of 'em are renewable last year.
But if you look at where they went, mostly to the rich countries, and if you look at the ones in the US and and Canada, 96% of the money to bill them came from the private sector.
In Africa, only 14% of the money comes from the private sector.
'Cause they don't have access to these markets.
And when they depend on government money, it makes them more vulnerable to these state owned enterprises that are in the pockets of the fossil fuel companies.
And there are sometimes corrupt relationships and they can keep going forward with fossil fuels.
And there is a so-called dash for gas in Africa now, and it's fossil fuel colonialism because the resources that are developed are intended to go straight to Europe and straight to Asia.
They don't benefit the people of Africa.
They leave them with what will come become stranded assets because the fossil fuel facilities are no longer competitive now.
And as years go by, they're gonna be less and less competitive and it leaves them with climate chaos.
So yes, it's fossil fuel colonialism.
One LNG export terminal in Africa would cost about $25 billion.
You could pretty well put renewable energy all across the continent for that.
- One of the topics of the COP 27 that you just came back from, the climate change summit was, I think is called Loss and Damage.
- Yeah.
- Which in some ways is like a reparation to the countries that were hurt by climate change.
Is that something that I don't know is possible politically and I think Senator Kerry even, was not too enthusiastic about it.
Tell me about what you think.
- Well, I sympathize with John Kerry's response on this because he has to bridge the gap between the just aspirations of these developing countries and the very difficult political situation in the wealthy countries.
They don't want to hear, the developing countries don't want to hear us talk about how difficult our politics are, but it's reality.
- And isn't there some validity to that?
- If you're asking me my opinion, I am in favor of payments for loss and damage.
I think it's morally justified.
Some European countries have already signed up to it.
But is it justified to point to the realistic political obstacle?
Sure it is.
Again, that doesn't help us make the countries that are suffering understand any better, but loss and damage is layered on top of a justifiable demand for adaptation funding.
You may remember that for the last 10 or 15 years, there has been a $100 billion pledge by the wealthy countries to help poor countries with adaptation to climate.
Those pledges haven't been kept either.
And so it kind of widens the divide between the way developing countries are looking at this and the way the wealthy countries are looking at it.
The way to fill that gap is to say, look, the amounts that will ever come government to government, as justified as they are, and again, I'm for it, but they're gonna be dwarfed by the amounts that should be flowing from private sources because we are in the early stages of a global sustainability revolution, empowered by artificial intelligence and machine learning and distributed super-computing and the biology revolution.
This revolution has the scale of the Industrial Revolution coupled with the speed of the digital revolution.
And Africa and the other developing parts of our world will benefit enormously from this.
You know, they leapfrog the landline telephone networks that we rely on and went straight to mobile.
It's a similar situation.
They can leapfrog the old, dirty, poisonous sources of energy in the past and go straight to the cheapest energy in the history of the world according to the International Energy Agency and others.
But they need access to capital in order to enter the marketplace and involve themselves in this revolution.
- Vice President Al Gore, thank you so much for joining us.
- Thank you.
- Incredibly, the COP summit ended with no word on curbing fossil fuels and emissions because of pressure from Saudi Arabia and China.
Our next troubling question is why it's taken so long for governments to get their act together on the climate emergency.
Well, the answer may lie in a documentary series from PBS Frontline called, The Power of Big Oil.
It details how fossil fuel companies have successfully lobbied for decades to undermine climate science.
Take a look at the trailer.
- [Announcer] This big oil knowingly spread disinformation.
- An epic three-part series.
- They said that climate science was uncertain, that action wasn't required.
- Our job was to fight back against the progressive agenda.
- We concluded that none of these technologies were gonna be competitive against oil.
- Big money had infiltrated the Halls of Congress.
- There's an urgency to the situation that is not being answered.
- It's incredibly revealing.
And I spoke to the producer of the Power of Big Oil, Dan Edge, about holding these corporations to account for so much deception.
Dan Edge, welcome to the program.
- Thank you.
- So you've produced this documentary series on, The Power of Big Oil.
We are airing on Earth Day at a time when not a huge amount of attention is being paid to the climate.
Tell me why and what the narrative is that you were trying to explore.
- It's an extraordinary narrative and it goes back the entire span of my life, actually.
I'm 44 years old and our story starts 44 years ago, when Exxon, at the time the biggest oil company in the world, started pioneering research into climate change.
And our story over the three films tells really the story of what happened next and how the fossil fuel industry, chief amongst them, Exxon, managed to stave off any concerted action to tackle climate change over a 40-year period.
So it really is the story of how we got to where we are today.
And the spectacular success that big oil had, particularly in the 1990s in crafting a narrative, the consequences of which we're very much living today.
That narrative was that the science of climate change was uncertain, and that narrative was that any attempt to tackle climate change would be prohibitively expensive.
Now there's lots wrong with both of those arguments, but they were enormously powerful and we are living the consequences of those arguments right now in 2022.
- So then I guess the question, because you have a clip about the politicians who I guess were lobbied to believe and buy into that narrative.
I just wanna play for you one of the clips and we can discuss it.
This is then Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican.
Now his work helped doom Kyoto and other such things.
And this is what he says to you now: - They lied and yes, I was misled.
Others were misled when they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly.
I mean, they lied.
- [Interviewer] If they had said then if they'd held their hands up there and said, yes, this is real.
Could it have been different?
- Oh, absolutely.
It would've changed everything.
I think it would've changed the average citizen's appreciation of climate change.
- So Dan, is it that they were naive?
Is it that they, I don't know were being lobbied?
There was a lot of money flying around?
- I think there's an extent to which we all were, I was sort of coming of age, if you like, in the mid 90s.
And, I was very much felt, I was growing up in a world where no one really knew what was happening with climate.
And, but the scientists who we have interviewed at great length for this series tell a different story.
You know, the science of climate change was largely settled in the 1980s.
And the specific fact that climate change was happening, was part of the scientific consensus by 1995.
So what our series charts is the extraordinarily successful campaign that industry, the fossil fuel industry embarked on in that period.
And which continued for the decades to muddy the waters, to muddy the waters in terms of the science and to muddy the waters in terms of the potential economic costs of doing anything about climate change.
It was very successful and it worked in terms of public opinion, but as our interview with Chuck Hagel makes clear, it also worked in the Senate.
- And, you also did talk to a lot of formers, so to speak, people who had been involved in this lobbying, involved in this attempt to shift and shape the narrative, including those who work for the very famous American Petroleum Institute, which seems to bear the brunt of a lot of the blame when people talk about this particular angle of the climate debate.
Here's what one former consultant told you: - There's great pressure that came from the clients to talk about jobs.
We've tried to tell clients we really can't measure jobs accurately, but you know, you have to get paid at the end of the day.
So, we ended up doing the best we could talking about jobs, but you don't really know.
- The first people that will lose their jobs are the American coal miner.
- It would cost probably five, six, 700,000 jobs a year.
- And that would hurt the US automobile industry and it would hurt the US economy.
- So this is really a campaign of fear, but it's really extraordinary to hear that guy the consultant basically saying, 'We kind of made it up.'
Now we have to say that the American Petroleum Institute says that people like yourself, critics are cherry picking information from the past and that the industry's position has evolved with the science.
Has it evolved with the science and did they make it up?
- It's clear that both API's position and the members of API like Exxon was not consistent with science in the 1990s.
It has evolved, however, I mean, API and Exxon speak very differently about the reality of climate change now in 2022.
What's clear though that was happening in the 90s with that particular clip you played is that a very conscious and very clever effort was being made to paint any action on climate change, any attempt to regulate fossil fuels as catastrophic for the economy, extremely powerful argument.
And Paul Bernstein, who we saw talking there, what he goes on to say is, of course what we weren't taking into account.
And even then he knew he should be taking into account as an economist.
What we weren't taking into account were the potential costs of not tackling climate change.
And this is very much what we're living now in 2022 with climate crisis all over the world, all over the United States costing billions and billions and billions of dollars.
And those costs were not factored in, to the economic forecasting commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute in the 1990s.
- I wanna take you to what I think you consider the sort of turning point in the 90s when, the Clinton years where the climate agenda was basically put on the back foot.
And here we have Jerry Taylor, former Cato Institute, and that, of course was founded by the Koch brothers.
- When I became part of that world, we thought the odds were pretty long against us.
We did not expect to prevail in the climate debate [TV: against the problem that scientists don't say exist] - By the end of the decade, however, the climate skeptics and denialists were in a position of strength.
Now they had pretty much run the table in every decisive fight we had won.
- They won the battle.
I was intent that they would not win the war.
It became clear to me at that point that it was gonna be a longer war.
- So what does Al go think now and what do you think?
Have they won the war as well?
- No, I think Al, I don't wanna put words into his mouth, I think, but I think Al Gore would say the war continues, if you like.
But what he does acknowledge and what other people who have fought for action on climate change over the last three or four decades, all acknowledge is that they got beaten a lot of times.
I mean the clip we saw there concerns the victory of industry in the 1990s in preventing Kyoto.
The Kyoto Treaty being rashed by the United States.
But it's a template that worked and was played out again when President Obama launched an ambitious climate program early on in his time as president, which was compensively outmaneuvered as the second episode of our series tells a story of by industry and by the Koch brothers specifically, and of course, president Biden now.
- Well, let me ask you then, because one of the obvious poster boys for that problem is within his own party and that Senator Joe Manchin and he has put out all these same reasonings, you know, jobs, the coal industry, he also is, whatever the right word is implicated, connected with part of part of that industry.
So how much has been learned when you consider that one senator can hold up such a massive, massive pledge by an administration?
- I think the simple answer is not much.
And what struck us, my filmmaking team throughout the series, what struck us time and time again, it's like, 'Wow, it's like Groundhog Day.'
They were having the same arguments, the same conversations, and the same myths were being pedaled 30 years ago.
And the same structural problems with democracy, with American democracy specifically, are preventing change.
And so I'm not sure much has been learned and sadly the what we see is the same thing, same damn thing happening over and over again.
And I know for people who feel very strongly about climate change, President Trump obviously was very opposed to any action.
And President Biden's arrival was a moment of great hope.
But unfortunately, what we've seen researching this story over the last 40 years is there've been quite a few of these moments of hope.
There've been quite a few of these moments where change has not only seemed possible, but has seemed probable and every time it's run into the same systemic blocks that President Biden is facing now.
- So you were not very successful in getting oil industry actually to talk to you on camera for obvious reasons.
Everybody gave you statements and the like.
Independently and completely separately, I had the opportunity to interview Bernard Looney, who as you know is the CEO of BP.
And like many in the business and certainly many CEOs, they all profess to be converts now and to understand, but that it can't happen overnight.
Let me just play you that little part of the interview I did with the CEO of BP.
- This is not a light switch.
We don't turn a 112 year old company on its head overnight.
But we've carried out the biggest restructuring in our history.
We've entered offshore wind and the largest and fastest growing markets in the world in the US and the UK.
We're involved in hydrogen, we're doubling down on electrification, we're doing all of the things that a company of ours needs to do to be part of the solution.
- Are things shifting?
And also, what do you make of the Bernard Looney argument?
- I think things are shifting.
I think many of the people we've interviewed for a series of question, whether they're shifting anywhere near fast enough, and I would note that BP was saying all this stuff more than 20 years ago when CEO John Brown rebranded the company as beyond petroleum.
And they haven't moved very far beyond petroleum in the intervening 20 years.
That said, I mean the different oil companies are clearly moving at different speeds and at different ways.
And there is a growing awareness that things do need to change.
What our series really charts is that it could have happened and started that evolution could have started so, so long ago and didn't because he is right.
It's not a light switch. You can't just turn it off.
You can't just stop oil tomorrow.
Civilization would fall apart, cause huge suffering.
But Exxon for instance, were researching the world leaders actually in researching solar and other renewable forms of energy in the early 1980s.
This is more than 40 years ago.
And they switched it all off.
They switched all of that research and development off in the 80s.
And so-- - Why?
- Because it didn't make money.
And the then CEO Lee Raymond was very open about that.
His focus, particularly when oil prices dropped in the early to mid-80s.
His focus, he said, had to be on shareholder value and making as much money as as possible, which is how corporations work.
And so those research lines at that point were not going to compete with oil and gas in terms of ease of use and how much money it can make for the company.
So it's very understandable in an economic sense and he makes the argument quite compellingly in our film.
But it's at the same time a tragic missed opportunity.
I think both for the company and for the world.
- We've heard a lot also about the climate scientists, those who write the big, you know, annual or however often they write it, the UN climate reports.
They're getting very disheartened at least anecdotally, some of them say, what is the point?
We've been putting out these really scientifically sound predictions and warnings and actual roadmaps to change and it's not really making any difference.
There's an actual debate.
Should we keep putting them out there?
I just wondered what you thought about that and and do you see any light at the end of this quite dark tunnel?
- I can understand the scientist frustration because many who we spoke to who work on the IPCC reports from the early 90s expressed that frustration.
They've been saying the science is largely there since the 1990s.
And it doesn't seem to have changed anything.
And lot of the scientists like James Hansen, who was the sort of godfather of climate science, almost the grandfather of climate science.
He told us how sort of naive he was really, that he really believed, okay, now we've found out a set of scientific facts now public policy will follow.
Now, it's been a sort of lifelong education in the reality of politics for him.
That it really isn't that simple.
I think we are in a different era now though.
And that's for the fundamental fact that we are living through climate crises in a way that we weren't 15 years ago.
And that's all over the world.
Of course, that's not just the United States.
So the reality of the science is really quite plain to see.
And the reality of the costs of not acting on climate change is really quite plain to see.
So we have a generation coming through now who are living climate change rather than just hearing a sort of confusing debate about climate change.
And that's a fundamentally different dynamic.
And that paradoxically does give me some hope.
- Yeah. Because they are voting with their green consciences, certainly many young people.
And you know it, as we say goodbye, it is worth remembering that climate used to be a bipartisan consensus and that it just, all that collapsed, as you say around the 90s.
Dan, thank you so much.
The Power of Big Oil.
- Thanks.
- And finally, tonight, musician Carol King is without a doubt, one of pop's all time great singer songwriters, but these days she's less focused on creating new hits.
Instead, she dedicates her considerable talent and passion to protecting the Northern Rockies; one of America's last great natural treasures.
I asked Carol King what motivates her to fight for causes ranging from climate to voting rights to women's freedoms.
She answered with perspective, gleaned over her 80 years.
- What I believe is the solution?
Okay, I'm gonna get very 30,000 foot here, but I am 80.
So give me that. [laughs] - [laughs] You go right ahead.
- There are cycles.
There are cycles.
I mean, we, history has cycles.
We've been through bad times before.
I'm not sure they've ever been this bad in terms of the absolute knocking down of the pillars of our democracy.
But I feel that if everybody as like one little molecule in the whole organism, that is society, you know, which comprises so many different kinds of people.
A lot of people are struggling and don't have time to think about politics, but politics is affecting them.
And I think, shows like yours are so valuable because people watch them and they learn.
It's not just, 'Oh, we're filling time.'
You are educating people.
And that's what I see my role as, is educating people about issues I know about and encouraging people to get involved.
To educate themselves from more than just one source so that you can make an intelligent decision and get involved and do it in a knowledgeable way, and ban with other people, organize and vote because that's the foundation on which our future rests.
And the same thing is true about the Climate Crisis.
Act! Take action write to the president, write to the Congress people be involved, would be my overarching message to everybody that is outraged as I am about some of these decisions.
- Wise words from Carol King, turning outrage into action.
And that's it for our program tonight.
Remember, you can follow me and the show on Twitter.
Thank you for watching Amanpour and Company on PBS and join us again tomorrow night.
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