00:00If fossil fuels had not been discovered on the face of the earth, there had been no oil and gas,
00:04do you think civilization would be further ahead of where it is or we'd be behind? Because
00:09fossil fuels have enabled us to do many things we otherwise couldn't do.
00:12Yeah, no question about it. And we owe the men and women in the fossil fuel industry for helping
00:19create this civilization that we enjoy today. And they did not know until 50 years ago, at least,
00:27that the byproduct, this heat trapping pollution, was going to cause such problems.
00:33And, you know, just to pause on this for a moment, David, yesterday, 300,000 people were forced from
00:41their homes in Mozambique. 50,000 people two days ago were forced from their homes by these massive
00:47downpours in South Africa. Three days ago in Chile, massive fires connected to the climate crisis.
00:57Last year in the U.S., we had 12 once-in-a-thousand-year downpours in the space of three
01:03days. We had the Los Angeles fires. In my home state of Tennessee, and even more so in neighboring
01:09North Carolina, the downpour associated with that massive Hurricane Helene, we got more rain in four
01:16days than falls over the largest waterfall in the world in two and a half years. And it's getting
01:22steadily worse. Beyond that, there are very tiny areas in the world today that are physiologically
01:29unlivable. In the Sahara Desert, a few places around the Persian Gulf, the combination of heat and
01:35humidity makes it impossible for people to live for more than four or five hours outdoors.
01:40Those areas are now beginning to expand dramatically. And the World Health Organization's Climate Committee
01:47says that by 2050, we could have one to two billion climate migrants crossing international borders.
01:55A few million coming from the eastern Mediterranean with the climate drought there led to Viktor Orban
02:02and Brexit and authoritarian friendly governments that have emerged. It's hard to imagine what a billion
02:11climate migrants would do to our capacity for self-governance.
02:15And we're in danger of crossing some so-called negative tipping points, like the shutting down
02:21of the Gulf Stream. Sounds like a science fiction movie, and it was, but it's now a very real threat,
02:26and there are others.
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