Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution

You couldn't really miss Gianni Agnelli.

He was involved with everything Italians love.

Sex, cars, and sports.

Every woman was in love with him.

Every man wanted to be him.

People that were around him, they were all in awe of him.

Gianni had a great eye.

Obsessed by aesthetics.

Everybody tried to copy him.

When he was around, the face of life changed.

Electricity.

Gianni played a big role in saving Fiat.

Fiat put the whole of Italy on four wheels.

Then the unrest started.

We had the sense of evolution.

He had great sympathy for workers

and also for their plight.

The industrial comeback of Italy is Fiat.

And it changed Italy completely.

Mr. Agnelli. He was the king of Italy.

Are you aware of what's going down on the street today?

You know what's going on down the street? Nope.

You know that there's a climate march

going on down the street? You don't know.

Do you know there's a climate march going on down the street?

What is it? A climate march.

No, I didn't know. You don't know about that.

There might end up being more people waiting for the new iPhone

than for the parade. We'll see.

And if that's where the parade's gonna be,

it's completely empty, so.

James Redford: I've always been a little skeptical of marches.

I feel like they're more for the marchers than anything else.

I had no idea what it was gonna be like.

All I'd been told is that they were expecting about 40,000 people.

A little bit more energy going on down here.

I think there's more people

than they thought there would be.

No. Just touch the screen?

Yeah, just touch the screen. Don't touch the--

No, keep it this way. Oh, like that.

Man: We're a radical group. You are?

Yeah. What's so radical about you?

Well, we advocate for a separate hypothetical militant underground

to actually carry out direct actions against industrial infrastructure.

Good luck with that. Thank you.

James: Hey, Habitat animal, come here!

How's it going today? Woman: It's a bad, bad day for polar bears.

James: Yeah, it is.

Crowd (chanting): Climate change has got to go!

Hey, hey, ho, ho!

Climate change has got to go!

Hey, hey, ho, ho! Yeah! Whoo!

Woman: There's often a disconnect.

Like, people say they're green, but they still drive everywhere.

And they make thousands of copies at work.

Sandy was that wake up call

to us as New Yorkers, to say,

"Climate change is actually a real issue that we have to deal with."

Crowd: Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets!

Look who showed up at the climate march,

Mark Ruffalo. Hello.

Walmart, Google, Apple,

Crayola, Johnson & Johnson--

all of these companies have moved to a hundred percent renewable energy,

not because they necessarily care about climate change,

although I think in their hearts they do... Yeah.

...but because they see it's economically better for them.

James: Well, I'll tell you something.

You know, you see something like this

and see all the commitments that organizations are willing to make,

and then I'm like, "Really?

I can't turn my thermostat from 72 to 68?"

Close to a half a million people

wanting some action on climate change.

The whole thing left me thinking about some very specific questions.

So I'm thinking back on that climate march,

and the bottom line to me is

that 400,000 people showed up

and said, "Do something!"

I mean, it was oddly like, celebratory in a way.

I can't help but think that renewable energy

or the hope of it is tied up in that somehow,

because, as far as I'm concerned,

I don't know what else would give people a sense of hope, right?

The question is, "What about renewable energy?"

I mean you hear a lot about, "Oh yeah, they promise," or this and that.

But honestly, honestly...

can we make enough renewable energy

to supply the world and replace fossil fuels?

How would we do that?

And will we do that? Most importantly.

That's what I want to know.

You know, there's a family angle to this business about energy.

Like a lot of people, my grandfather, Charlie Redford,

he struggled supporting his young family during the Depression.

Eventually, he got an accounting job at Standard Oil.

And 30 years later, he retired near the top

of the Chevron corporate ladder.

His son, Robert, my dad, took quite a different path.

He started out working at the loading bays at the Standard Oil refinery,

but his penchant for the arts took him in a whole other direction.

the movies.

And well, that worked out pretty good.

I'm Alexander Pierce.

My father served in the 101st. Come on in.

James: But being in Hollywood was never going to be enough for my dad,

or my mom, for that matter.

I grew up in a home with active and engaged parents,

particularly when it came to the promise of solar energy.

They even made an Academy Award-nominated short film about it.

Woman: I'm very worried. Man: Somebody do something.

Man 2: Don't look at me, man. Man 3: Find more oil!

Man 4: One of the most important solar energy developments

involves photovoltaic cells.

James: So you'd think with this sort of pedigree

that I would have an honorary degree in renewable energy, right?

But the truth is, I don't.

Luckily, I have a friend who's doing well with energy

and environmental projects on the global markets.

And in his spare time, he helps connect philanthropic capital to energy innovation.

Hey, hey! How are you?

Good. Good to see you. Good to see you!

So about 10 years ago, there was this epiphany that I had.

I worked at a company where we tried to forecast

the future of the Internet and digital media.

But then I realized that that's what the last 30 or 40 years had been about,

sort of the story of humanity was about the microprocessor

and all the things that it enabled, that changed our lives.

But I felt like the next 30 or 40 years was about energy,

because that's the lowest common denominator of every other resource.

If you have infinite energy,

you can boil the ocean and make water you can drink.

If you have infinite energy,

you can reconfigure the chemical bonds in a plant

and make a fuel you can put in your car.

So if we're going to scale the world for 11 billion people,

energy is what it's about.

What you just described to me is exactly what my problem is,

because it--

I-- I just keep on bumping up against these uber realities...

And it's too big. It's too big!

So first and foremost, it sounds like you are not doing much

and that you have... energy paralysis.

It's very hard to get excited and do something meaningful

about something you can't see, right? Right.

You have never seen energy.

What you have seen is the result of it.

You've seen the car move. You've seen the light come on.

Maybe it would be, for me, for my own edification... Yeah.

...if you could take me on the journey of the lonely electron.

The easiest way for me to think about this

has been the analogy to water.

So think of the electricity grid

exactly like a set of water pipes.

The amount of water that's flowing, right,

the current is the size of the pipe.

And then how much power we're delivering,

how strong that motion is is the pressure,

how hard we're pushing that water. That's voltage.

So if you want to think about electricity,

moving electrons just like moving water,

the size of the pipe is current,

the force of the water is the voltage.

That make sense so far? Yes.

Okay. So there is a power plant somewhere,

and at that place, we make some form of heat,

like we burn coal or gas

or we have some radioactive reaction that makes heat,

and we use that heat to boil water.

We boil water, we get steam.

And that steam goes, "Do-do-do-do-do-do-do," up.

And when it goes up, it turns a turbine around.

That turbine turning makes electrons move.

And out of that power plant, we're pushing a big number of electrons...

...down a big pipe.

But then you come to this little thing called a substation.

And what happens at the substation is

we take these really high voltages that are kind of dangerous,

and we're going to step them down, so we're now pushing less electrons,

less hard than we did right out of the plant.

And then that electron moves through the wires to go to your home.

It goes out of the socket through your phone,

making the screen light up, then goes back in,

and then (whooshes)... goes through the rest of the system.

And by the way, you can actually do this.

You can track it yourself. I am a trail runner,

and the most instructive exercise for me

to understand the power system

was to find a power plant

and then track the power line corridor

where the transmission lines go,

and just start running.

James: So off I went, just me and my phone camera.

Coming in here, they're going that way,

they're going that way, and they're going over there.

There's towers going everywhere.

Super trippy driving by the Chevron refinery.