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00:00Thank you very much and thank you. Ethan I've actually known Ethan longer than you might suspect when he was very young. We work together . Oh I remember those young days I was in a restaurant not long ago and a woman came up to me and said you know if you dyed your hair black you would look just like Al Gore . I said Well thank you . She said You sound like him too. Anyway I want to thank you Ethan and I want to compliment John Moore the CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. I've had the pleasure of working with John and his team as well. I rely on Bloomberg New Energy Finance for some of the statistics that I deal with a lot. And I'm not going to try to acknowledge everyone who should be acknowledged . My friend Debbie Dooley is going to come out after this. The head of the Atlanta Tea Party and I want you all to listen real carefully to her and I have a couple of real close friends here Brooke Porter who works with me on the Kleiner Perkins side of things and Ryan pople who runs a terrific electric bus company called Pro Terra . I have a disclosure on that. I'm invested in pro Terra all the proceeds go to the Climate Reality Project. But Ron's doing a terrific job and I don't want to embarrass my son Albert but he's here and I'm awful proud of him. He's getting ready to work in this field also. All right. So I don't have much time so I'm going to go pretty quick here Ethan and then you're going to do whatever Q and A. We have time for there are basically only two questions that are involved in the climate crisis. The first one is do we really have to change . Do we really have to solve this. Is it real is it bad. Is it so serious that we really have to make profound changes. And of course the scientific community's long been virtually unanimous . But more important than the scientific community or any of us who try to advocate for the the scientific message on climate . Mother Nature has been weighing in and an extremely powerful way . You know we're still putting 110 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day and it traps a lot of heat energy. The cumulative amount of manmade global warming pollution now traps as much heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by 400000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs going off every day. And it's a big planet. But that's a lot of energy and it's raising temperatures and 90 percent of it goes into the oceans. And so we're seeing a lot of effects . Primary and secondary and tertiary we're seeing stronger ocean based storms like Hurricane Sandy which hit it came across waters to the windward of Manhattan that were 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Super Typhoon Haiyan a little over one year ago went across the waters five degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal when it hit Tacloban and in the Philippines just last two to three weeks ago. Vanuatu 90 percent of the buildings in their capital were destroyed. And again that typhoon went straight across the same warmer waters. You also get a primary impact where a lot more evaporation comes off the oceans into the atmosphere and puts the water cycle on steroids . The average humidity in the world is four to 5 percent more now than it was just three or four decades ago. And this these atmospheric rivers funnel toward where the the conditions release precipitation whether it's rain or snow it's more rain and snow now. But we get these huge downpours and floods and the same heat also causes the droughts and there are so many trip wires here there are tipping points so-called that could be catastrophic. But the majority of scientists give the overall impression that we still do have time if we have all hands on deck and really get going on this to avoid the truly catastrophic unsurvivable outcomes. So the answer to the first question do we have to change is yeah we really do. And the good news is for all the chatter about denial and all that the business community's leading the way a lot of governments are now finally beginning to move. The U.S. China agreement was really pivotal just today. The province of Ontario in Canada is announcing a cap and trade program 70 for Canada's supposedly following an anti climate policy but 75 percent of the people in Canada are going to be living in provinces and cities that have cap and trade or a carbon tax or both. California is another example of an influential regional government there many around the world. And we're seeing a dramatic change. China just announced two months ago that it is going forward with a nationwide cap and trade program. The middle of next year the WTO makes all the carbon fees and taxes treatable like a value added tax. So it really is going to shift the center of gravity dramatically. But the answer to that first question is yes we have to change the second question and the one that I want to focus on here is can we change if we decide we really have to make this transition. Can we do it. Many years ago when I first started speaking and writing about this I used to say that the hard truth was that the maximum we were capable of doing still fell short of the minimum that would actually solve the crisis . But the net conclusion from that reality was we just have to expand the limits of what's possible. And here is the great exciting news that I daresay has brought many of you here as this conference has grown from two hundred to twelve hundred and is on the way up in the years to come. There are some fields of science and technology that yield to research and development in an astonishing way. The computer chip revolution is the iconic emblem of that reality. The cost down curve has been so stunning it's just amazing and we have many people here. Know I want to ask the question here but the smartphones now have way more computing power than the most powerful supercomputers of just a couple of decades ago. So the good news is that many of the renewable energy options that are so exciting fall into this category. They're yielding two to Orrin D spending with dramatic costs down curves that have changed the limits of what is possible now. You know just a little over a decade ago the consensus forecasts for what the wind capacity of the world would be by 2010 was what was it was 30 gigawatts. We reached 2010 and we exceeded that projection twelve times over 15 years ago. The projection was that the solar energy market would reach a growth rate of 1 gigawatt per year by 2010. The reality was when we reached 2010 we exceeded that by 17 times over last year forty five times over. This year we're on track to exceed that projection by 62 times over . So the most confident projection just a decade and a half ago was X is exceeded this year by 62 x. Now you know that's in the realm of almost computer chip certainly flat screen TV ise mobile phones. We're seeing a an amazing transformation of the energy landscape. And guess what. There are other tipping points not just bad ones that generate fear but good ones in markets. I've only been in the business world for 15 years now and I'm very proud of Generation Investment Management. My my co-founder and partner David Blood I'll be joining him are on a red eye in London tomorrow morning. I want to name our firm blood and gore by the way but the other partners wouldn't hear of it. But even though I've only been in business for 15 years one of the things I've learned is that when you have a new product or service that's going into the market. Apparently there's a difference a significant difference in the business reality if it's more expensive than the incumbent or cheaper than the incumbent. Who knew. It's a little bit like the difference between 0 degrees and 1 degrees Celsius or 32 degrees and 33 degrees Fahrenheit. That's a difference of more than one degree. It's the difference between ice and water and in markets. The difference between more expensive then and cheaper than is the difference between capital markets and financing that is frozen up and capital that is flowing liquidity to new investments to seek out new opportunities. And once those liquid flows start in an environment where the cost down curve continues to plummet and also add in the fact that the awareness of the insanity of continuing to put all this heat trapping pollution in the atmosphere begins to dawn on more and more people and customers demand of businesses that they give them environmentally responsible and sustainable options. That's why you see businesses in every marketplace advertising their greener than the competition because on the margins those consumers who are aware now really demand this. That's why we're seeing this big shift toward electric vehicles. That's why we're seeing the shift in construction and building an architecture and design toward zero carbon sustainable structures and I could go through every single industry and you would recognize the same trend this is happening. We are going to win this battle. The only question is how long will it take . But we will win this struggle and the business community is leading the way. I was in Abu Dhabi I met with the desired Energy Prize folks just before I came out here. And while I was over there some of y'all are very into this and you know that Dubai water and electric opened their bids on a huge new tranche of solar Peavey and it was under six cents per kilowatt hour under six cents. What an earthquake that is. And the winning bidder says it's unsubsidized and no government assistance whatsoever. We're now seeing the same kind of trends with with batteries the new Elon Musk new a battery Gigafactory in Nevada is closing in on two hundred dollars per kilowatt hour which not only makes the evenings way more competitive but also has profound implications for grid storage for off grid homes and and businesses. Here's a question I will ask how many people here have a cell phone and no longer have a landline telephone contract. Could I see a show of hands . Look around. Look around. We are not many years off from a day when I could ask this audience or one like you how many of you no longer have an electric utility grid connection. It won't be that percentage but it will be growing year by year. I'm not going to. Well I'm not going to use the phrase death spiral except in telling you I'm not going to use it . But this will think about cell phones for me. Let me use that analogy I've used that before. There were projections in the future. Back in 1980 I remember because I'm an early adopter and I got one of those first big clunky cell phones. You know I thought that thing looks so cool. I look back at pictures of me with that big break up inside my head now and it looks so silly . But during those days it was really cool right at that time . AT & T then call Ma Bell hard McKinsey to do a world market survey how many of these things are we going to be able to sell by the year 2000. And they studied and cogitate it and came back and said we think you're going to be able to sell as many as nine hundred thousand of those by the year 2000 while the year 2000 came and they sold nine hundred thousand in the first three days . And now there are six point four billion cell phone connections . Now why were they not only wrong but way way wrong first and for reason first reason they did not fully take into account the incredible cost down curve that drove simultaneously the drop in price and the increase in quality. They didn't predict either one of those things next. They did not realize that in. They did not take into account the fact that the purchasers were not baroque bureaucratic government institutions or large corporations or parastatals but they were individuals and they included not only early adopters like I was back then but people who who really just wanted to get telephone service . And finally they did not take into account that the majority of people in the world lived then in regions that did not have landline telephone service so they could leapfrog the old landline technology and go straight to the mobile phones. And now as many of you know in sub-Saharan Africa they do well just practically everybody in Africa has a cell phone now and they're getting smarter. The cell phones are getting smarter very quickly but they they do way more business and commerce on mobile telephones than people in the United States or Europe do . And some of you know the examples of that that week we could explore here the same thing is true of solar panels because in the areas that don't have an existing electric grid I did I saw an analysis in part of Kenya where the cost to hook up a home in a village to a conventional electric grid is four thousand dollars per home with solar. Two hundred dollars. That's one of those the cheaper than examples. And I've got a friend who sells these things in India and he was describing a conversation with a woman householder there who said no no I can't afford 30 rupees per month. Well how about one rupee per day. He said sure fine. You've got a deal she said. And she knows extremely well that there are 30 days in a month. But she also knows that she doesn't necessarily want to pay for every one of those days only five days a week or school day. She wants her kids to get access to the school work on the Internet. She wants to be able to charge the mobile phone without walking 10 or 15 miles to the nearest charging opportunity. So it is spreading like wildfire . Now we hear this ridiculous meme energy that that coal is the solution to energy poverty. No it's not. It's more expensive . And by the way they don't have the regulatory compact that the US and Europe had back in the early part of the 20th century that included a mandate for universal service. They'll just run that you know when they do a timber and copper and coal. They run the wires to the mines and the large manufacture and bypass the villages and people want to be able to communicate and they want the energy they want the solar panels and they're getting them. The politics of this well I'm going to let Debbie Dooley speak to that but let me tell you one quick story from when I was in the United States Senate. The last four years that I served in the United States Senate coincided with the presidential term of the first President Bush George H.W. Bush . Very nice man. He vetoed during those four years. Forty four pieces of legislation. Actually no he vetoed forty five pieces of legislation. One of them and only one of them was overturned . Which of the 45 bills were overturned. It was a satellite television viewing Rights Act 24. I remember when Strom Thurmond stood up on the floor of the Senate and said I'm going to vote with the senator from Tennessee and against my President I hate to do it but my people want to have satellite dishes on their roof if they choose to have them it satellite dishes versus the cable monopoly is exactly the same architecture widely distributed architecture that the solar panels rely on . And when you have individuals who want the power and the opportunity in their own hands and they're being told No no no you've got to plug in to this monopoly and pay whatever they say you're just like those people in the first Matrix movie with tubes running in you where they'll just take out as much money as they see will not kill you. People want their own opportunity to shape their own future and renewable energy is providing that it is a wonderful side effect from my point of view that we're going to dramatically reduce the carbon sessions now . Oh my goodness I've got a lot more to say but I've run out of time. Let me just close by saying Before I go to whatever questions you have I mentioned at the start of my talk that business is leading the way on this. They really are. I'm not flattering this audience you know that to be true. We do have a problem with governance . And of course I don't want to get into the reasons why the United States government is sclerotic now and dysfunctional . But I do want to make a point that anyone who cares about the future of the world and the future of this country or the future of your communities has to think deeply about how we can bring democracy back to life. The campaign finance is killing this . You look at some of the dumb decisions that are being made and the same thing is being done. You hear about this war on coal as such nonsense. There is a war on solar. There is a war on solar out there with these legacy utilities and coal companies using their historic political power campaign contributions and lobbying to pass the most ridiculous laws to put taxes on people that won't put solar panels on their roof. And I get the fact that there are some subtleties to this in having a fair charge for the infrastructure. But the time when the solar electricity comes in is when the utilities most need it. They can avoid expanding capacity unnecessarily. So it's really all about stock prices and I'm not against their stock prices going up unless it's at the expense of the public interest. And they say infrastructure. They're free riders. What about the sewage infrastructure. Think about that for a moment. This hundred ten million tons every day going into the ATM they're using the atmosphere as their sewage infrastructure and they're threatening to destroy the future of human civilization . They're not going to get away with it because and it's all of us . It's not going to demonize them. It's a whole pattern that has grown up over the last hundred and fifty years. But we need to think clearly about this and we need to see the obligation we have to the next generation and not just blindly go along with a dysfunctional political system that gives all the power to the people who give the most campaign contributions and hire the most lobbyist. There's way too much at stake way too much at stake. And finally when I was when I was a boy I was inspired by President John F. Kennedy when he announced the flight to the moon put a person on the moon bring him back safely again I was recently down at Cape Canaveral. Oh that thrilled me at the age of 13. And I remember people older than me on that day and time saying oh that's a bad idea. It's going to waste a lot of money it's never been done before it's a big mistake. But eight years and two months later Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and the moment he did so there was a great cheer that went up in Mission Control in Houston Texas. The average age of those systems engineers that day was twenty six years old which means among other things their average age when they heard that challenge was 18 and today's 18 year olds. Today's young people are raring to go and they want a challenge. They know that we've got to do this name . They know that we can do this. They know we've got everything we need with the possible exception of political will but ladies and gentlemen political will is a renewable resource. Thank you very much. I appreciate it . Mr. Vice President thanks so much for this terrific comments and of course I was gonna use your line but you used it first about political will being a renewable resource. I have. I have but one question then of course which is would you consider running for president this year . I didn't expect that question but thank you very much I am a recovering politician. I'm on about step nine. And the longer I go in recovery the less chance of a relapse. Thank you all very much. Good to be here. Thank you .

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Gore Says Utilities Using the Atmosphere as a 'Sewer'

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks about climate change, growth in renewable energy and federal governance of the energy industry. Gore speaks at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance The Future of Energy Summit 2015 in New York. (Source: Bloomberg)

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