What Took Us So Long to Address Climate Change?

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Academy Award-winning documentarian Charles Ferguson says there is a good reason why authoritarian oligarchies are the worst nations at dealing with climate change.

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CHARLES FERGUSON

Charles Ferguson is a filmmaker and writer. He is the founder and president of Representational Pictures, and the director and producer of Inside Job, winner of the 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and of No End in Site: The American Occupation of Iraq, which was an Academy Award nominee as well. His latest film, Time to Choose, is the first comprehensive examination of how to address climate change and the bigger challenge of global sustainability. Ferguson was originally trained as a political scientist and holds a B.A. in mathematics from University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He has also been a consultant to the White House, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of Defense, and several U.S. and European high technology firms.

In 1994, Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies which he sold in early 1996 to Microsoft, which integrated FrontPage into Microsoft Office. After selling Vermeer, Ferguson turned to research, writing and filmmaking. He is the author of five books, including High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars. Ferguson's most recent book is Predator Nation, focuses on the roots of the financial crisis and economic inequality, and was published by Random House/Crown in May 2012. He has written for The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications. Ferguson spent several years as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a director of the French-American Foundation.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Charles Ferguson:  If we don’t deal with climate change we and certainly our children are in for a very rough time. We’re already seeing heat waves and extreme weather and droughts and wildfires as a consequence. That’s extremely clear. I come from California and you don’t need scientists to tell you about climate change if you come from California. It’s all over the place. It really is. It’s very obvious just wandering around the state. Spring comes a month earlier than it used to. It’s much hotter in the summer. There’s much less rain. So there are those kinds of consequences but if we let this problem continue to worsen then 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now our children are going to suffer a lot. About half of the world’s largest cities are on coastlines and if the Greenland ice melts then the sea is going to rise by over 20 feet. And half of the world’s cities will be underwater literally. And weather will be far more extreme. The last time that the world was as hot as it will get this century if we don’t fix climate change was about 100,000 years ago and scientists have found evidence of extremely destructive storms. Storms that were strong enough to lift very large boulders from the bottom of the ocean and put them on top of mountains. So Hurricane Sandy is very, very minor trouble compared to what we’ll face if we don’t handle this problem.

But in the last decade there’s been remarkable progress in renewable energy technology, in electric cars, in sustainable agriculture. And now we know how to solve this problem. And in fact we could solve this problem in a way that would make the world more prosperous and healthier and happier. Renewable energy is becoming quite competitive economically with energy from fossil fuels. Within five years electric cars will be fully competitive with gasoline powered cars and they’re much less expensive to operate and maintain. They’re also quieter. They also accelerate faster by the way. In most regards we could have very useful, happy, productive, prosperous, healthy lives by dealing with this problem.

The countries in the world that are the most prosperous and have the most equal distribution of income and wealth and also the longest life expectancies are in general the countries that are dealing best with climate change. Germany, Scandinavia, Japan, a number of European countries. And the countries that are behaving the worst are countries that are very corrupt and that have a great deal of poverty and inequality. It’s not a coincidence that countries like Venezuela and Indonesia and Russia ...

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