Carbon Nation

Male narrator: This is Earth.

There's Venus.

Mercury.

And the sun.

Now, even though Mercury is twice as close

to the sun as Venus, Venus is the hotter planet.

Why?

Carbon dioxide, aka CO2.

Venus' atmosphere is full of CO2

and the greenhouse effect has run amok.

Since the Industrial Revolution,

Earth's CO2 levels have been increasing sharply,

and now, we too, are heating up.

Granted, Earth's been hotter before, and colder.

But it's been about the same temperature

for the last 10,000 years--

which includes all of modern human achievement,

like farming, piñatas, and frequent flier miles.

Climate change is happening.

Is it fixable?

What are the solutions?

Who's working on this?

Kristina Kershner: There are truly problems that we can't solve.

We don't yet have the cure to cancer.

We don't yet have the cure for Alzheimer's.

We don't yet have the cure for Parkinson's disease.

This problem we can solve,

and there's no good reason not to,

and so much is at stake.

Eban Goodstien: Unchecked, global warming

threatens to drive into extinction

one out of every two creatures on the face of the earth.

Richard Branson: The Arctic could literally disappear in ten years time.

William K. Rieley: We're gonna see serious disruption of agriculture.

Art Rosenfeld: Huge sea level rises.

Sherri Goodman: Millions fleeing to higher ground.

Sadhu Johnston: More extreme storm events.

John P. Holdren: Wildfires.

Jeff Moyer: More periods of drought.

William K. Rieley: Ethnic conflicts.

Lester Brown: Potential decline and collapse of civilization.

Kevin McCullough: I've heard enough. I'm convinced.

I don't need to hear anymore about we're all doomed.

We know it's a big task.

But it's also a fantastic and huge opportunity.

narrator: The US has about 5% of the world's people,

but we create almost a quarter of the world's CO2.

CO2's not the only greenhouse gas,

it's just the one making the most trouble right now.

A lot of people worry about climate change.

But a third of Americans don't think humans are the cause.

We agree with the 84% of scientists,

groups of faith,

like the Evangelical Climate Initiative,

many Fortune 500 companies, and the Pentagon,

that's right, the Department of Defense.

These groups know humans are the cause,

and that this is a big, big problem.

Figuring out whether tackling climate change is possible

is the big question.

To get the job done, we'd better find people

who are giving it the good fight,

and hope the next generation is up to the task.

There is a big stumbling block--

today, there's no cost for emitting CO2--

no penalty for the downside of carbon-based energy--

and that makes it hard to move people to clean energy.

Now, back to those scientists:

it's important to note that many times,

they've been wrong with their climate models--

global warming is happening much faster

than any of them predicted.

And that-- woke us up.

So we hit the road- hunting, hoping for solutions.

Our first stop? Wind.

Wind is a renewable resource; it also renews lives.

In Pennsylvania's rejuvenated Rust Belt,

laid-off steel workers are now hired to make turbines.

And down in West Texas,

wind is turning dirt into gold--

Cliff Etheredge: Are you getting lots of wind noise here?

That's supposed to be, you know,

that's supposed to fit right in the picture;

wind noise on a wind farm.

narrator: Cliff saw wind turbines

popping up all around his cotton farm,

and decided to get a piece of the action

before it blew away.

All of the developers that I approached initially

were accustomed to doing business in the large ranches.

Lots of land, one or two owners.

David Etheredge: My father felt

that if you look around the area around here,

most of the land is owned by small family farmers,

and the last 20 or 30 years have been difficult

for family farmers, and that was the primary reason

why he became interested

in trying to get a wind development project.

Cliff Etheredge: We had lots of owners,

and lots of small tracts of land,

and there was a natural resistance

to doing all that contract stuff.

But once I was able to convince the developers

that actual construction costs on this wonderful flat farmland,

with county roads everywhere, would be an absolute minimum,

then they began to take notice,

and then, we was able to make this happen.

You might could say I did it all single-handedly, see.

I got caught in a cotton stripper in 1972,

I was 30 years old.

It really wasn't such a traumatic situation for me,

I just decided that I was going to take it on as a challenge,

and uh, worked out okay.

I've been very fortunate.

I think that global warming is readily accepted,

and most farmers are good stewards of the land,

and they're wanting to see something done about it,

and contribute to it.

Look at that, isn't that something.

narrator: Before the turbines, things were bleak in Roscoe.

David Etheredge: When I graduated from high school,

I mean, most of the people that grew up here,

they couldn't wait to get out of town,

and go to the big city.

Not because they didn't love this area,

but mainly because there were so few opportunities.

For Roscoe, I guess we bottomed out

when we lost our Dairy Queen.

David Etheredge: Oh yeah, that's the Kiss of Death for a small town,

when your Dairy Queen closes down,

you're on your last leg.

But about that time, our wind industry came along,

and it's been a fantastic, unbelievable boom to Roscoe.

David Etheredge: Roscoe's got what will end up being,

for a little while at least,

the largest wind farm in the world,

and there are 400 landowners in this area

that are sharing in the benefit of that project.

The landowners get paid

on the actual amount of electricity generated.

Their payment is a straight royalty.

And this is the only time they've ever had the chance

to receive a steady income.

narrator: Once it's completed,

Cliff's wind farm will power 250,000 homes.

And the farmers are raking in up to $15,000,

per turbine, per year, leasing their land,

which is still usable for farming and ranching.

David Etheredge: The thing that's really cool,

you talk to a lot of the families that raised kids here,

and you find out that a large percentage of them

have children moving back to this area

because of the wind industry.

Vicki Haynes really benefited from this wind farm;

I hope you'll include her;

she's a lot better looking than I am.

This is our daughter,

and our little grandson that it brought home,

and my son-in-law and our little grandson.

So Dan's the one working with the wind turbines,

and it's just been a blessing.

Cliff Etheredge: Farmers really do appreciate these things,

this is strictly dry land,

we'd sit here and pray for rain and cuss the wind;

now what we've been cussing all these years,

turned out to be a blessing.

narrator: It's clear wind power reduces cussing in West Texas,

but in many other states, people don't like wind turbines,

or the transmission lines they'll need.

That's too bad, because the US Department of Energy

says wind from Texas, North and South Dakota,

Kansas, and Montana, has more power potential

than all the electricity needed in the US.

If you look at wind's power potential worldwide,

it has the capacity to produce trillions of watts--

otherwise known as-- terawatts.

All day, everyday,

humans are now using energy at a rate of 16 terawatts;

and this runs everything-- cars, skyscrapers, ships,

smelters, crockpots, everything--

with electricity, fuels, cow dung, you name it!

A terawatt is a trillion watts.

A hundred watts powers a 100-watt light bulb.

A kilowatt is a thousand watts.

An average American household

consumes 28 kilowatts of the terawatt pie.

A billion watts is a gigawatt.

Seattle or San Francisco eat up at least a gigawatt of power.

A thousand gigawatts is a terawatt.

And as soon as possible,

we need all 16 of those terawatts

to come from clean, climate-safe sources.

We now power less than two terawatts that way.

Getting to 16 terawatts will be a tough task.

Let's say two TW will be made from wind power.

We'd have to build and install one large wind turbine

every five minutes, for the next 25 years.

Is that even possible?

At its peak, General Motors could make

six new cars every minute.