This Changes Everything

Can I be honest with you?

I've always kind of hated films about climate change.

What is it about those vanishing glaciers

and desperate polar bears

that makes me want to click away?

Is it really possible to be bored by the end of the world?

It's not that I don't care what happens to polar bears.

It's just that we're told that the cause isn't out there.

It's in us.

It's human nature.

We're innately greedy and short-sighted.

And if that's true, there is no hope.

But when I finally stopped looking away,

traveled into the heart of the crisis,

met people on the front lines,

I discovered so much of what I thought I knew was wrong.

And I began to wonder,

what if human nature isn't the problem?

What if even greenhouse gases aren't the problem?

What if the real problem is a story,

one we've been telling ourselves for 400 years?

This first struck me in the craziest place.

I was in a stately home in the English countryside

that looked an awful like downton Abbey.

It was an invitation-only meeting hosted

by the world's oldest scientific organization...

The royal society.

Instead of ordering around the servants,

the people here were trying to order around the sun.

I mean the sun... in the sky.

carbon emissions and so on.

They were discussing a plan

to spray chemicals into the stratosphere

to turn down the temperature for planet earth.

-What you need to do is put a small number of particles

up into the upper part of the atmosphere.

And those particles will deflect just a tiny bit of light.

One garden hose to the sky could eliminate global warming

for the entire northern hemisphere.

In other words,

let's solve the problem of pollution with more pollution.

-So, people are terrified about talking about this

'cause they're scared that it will prevent us

cutting emissions. - Right, and also

that it's sulfuric acid.

- It is. - You're burying the lede.

Is there any possible way this could come back

to bite us in the ass,

blanketing the earth in sulfuric acid?

'Cause I'm all for it.

-Here's the thing... This idea may be crazy,

but it's also totally logical within the story

that the royal society pioneered in the 17th century.

Here's how it goes.

The earth is not, as most people thought back then,

a mother to be feared and revered.

No.

Science had granted men godlike powers.

The earth is a machine,

and we are its engineers, it's masters.

We can sculpt it like a country garden.

We can extract from it whatever we want.

These scientists helped turn the mother into the mother lode.

This story is where the long road to global warming began.

When I realized that,

I stopped tuning out those sad polar bears

because unlike human nature,

stories are something we can change.

-In the shadow of the arctic circle

lies alberta, Canada's massive forest.

An expansive virgin timberland the size of New York state

undisturbed for 10,000 years...

Until now.

It's oil... up to three times what the Saudis have

in their backyard.

No drill can tap it.

It's a sticky, tar-like oil called bitumen.

And getting the black gold out of this useless goop

is imperative.

-I find it hard to look at the alberta tar sands,

this vast hole at the center of my country,

which is strange because it's pretty hard to miss.

It's the largest industrial project on earth.

When I do make myself look,

I feel like I'm seeing that old story reaching its crescendo.

For centuries, we've been treating nature

as a beast we have to break

and then force to do our bidding.

And this is what it's come to.

But that story doesn't just shape the earth.

It shapes people...

What they see and what they can't see.

-The land up here... Lots of muskeg,

lots of bog, very, very few inhabitants.

We've got a few native bands that are up here,

been here for years I imagine.

I wouldn't say it's a wasteland,

but certainly if the oil sands wasn't here, nobody

would even know where this land was on the big scale of things

because there would be nothing to come here for.

What they would of first is they would log off all the timber.

They bring dozers in,

and they strip the overburden, is what it's called.

So, they will strip all the sub-soil, the top soil,

and the Clay off of this.

-Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world.

The vast majority of which are in the oil sands.

We're investing about $20 billion a year

in development of this resource.

That's expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

In terms of the capital

that's projected to be invest in the oil sands development,

something in the range of $150 billion to $200 billion

over the next decade or two.

If you look at the fact that oil's gonna produced

and used in any event, we believe we've got

a value proposition that's very attractive.

-I guess I'd describe the sheer scale of the work

that's going on

and what the mining companies are doing, it is fantastic.

I look at it this way.

We're cleaning up one of the largest oil spills on earth.

We take the oil out, we put back fresh new sand.

You give it 20 years after it's complete.

It comes up trees.

-The fact is the tailing ponds are being cleaned up,

and you'll to be able to drink from them.

You're gonna be able to fish from them.

The land will be brought back to its original state.

-When those British scientists first said

the earth is a machine and we are its masters,

it was really just a theory.

Humans still had to listen to nature's rhythms

and live within them.

Ships could only sail when the wind blew.

Factories could only run

where there was rushing water to power them.

But then something changed.

Engineers figured out how to take fossil fuels

from beneath the earth

and burn them on an industrial scale.

It was the merger of an ideology with a breakthrough technology,

and it changed the world.

Suddenly, we were calling all the shots.

Ships sailed in any weather.

Factories could be built anywhere

and run around the clock.

The ultimate one-way relationship with nature itself.

But that kind of relationship takes its toll.

I've spent time in fort mcmurray,

the town at the heart of the tar sands boom.

It's a place that seems to run on anything

with the power to numb,

especially the most intoxicating drug of them all.

We make about 4 grand a week,

and that's too much money, man... too much.

-I work half the year and make about $150,000.

Grossness.

-It's the money that brings everybody here.

In the long run, it's not because

I think everybody loves what they do.

-I'm not for fort mcmurray or against fort mcmurray.

I could give a shit really about what happens to fort mcmurray.

I could go get a job somewhere else.

Doesn't make a difference to me.

They're losing a lot.

You look at the rate of divorce or separations

when people move out here to work, it's huge.

You see it in people's faces

because they're leaving their families behind.

But they're doing it for their family.

-A lot of people judge it, and they call it fort mcmoney.

Now, I wouldn't want to judge that, but...

Sorry, I just got to blow my nose.

-They're making astronomical amounts of money

that they can actually have $500,000 in the bank

five years later.

And they can go home with that and start a normal life

in their hometown where they're from.

-Yes, there's ups, there's downs,

but, hell, we're having a good time.

Like, I don't even know who this guy is,

and he's hugging me. - We don't even know him.

-Well, there's one story of a foreman

who on the exact day that he hit his five years,

he'd left a note in his camp room just, "see you later.

I'm done. I'm never coming back.

I have $1 million in the bank,

and I'll never see you guys again."

-If you plan on staying in a place forever

and your entire culture and history are here,

how does that change you world view?

I found some answers just a few hours away.

A different story about the land and our relationship to it.

This story doesn't have

government and industry on its side.

But it does have some other tools.

Okay, crystal.

-When I was a kid up in the athabasca,

there was no industry up there.