You're listening to Ted Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The pandemic is deadly, economically devastating and traumatizing to the social fabric. But if there's one crisis that's more severe and more potentially devastating is climate change. So today on the show, we have climate advocate Al Gore. He weaves how he's thinking about these two crises. We're facing into one conversation with head of Ted Chris Anderson. And stick around for this one. I know it's going to be a bit longer than usual, but it's worth it.

There's a lively debate about geoengineering halfway through. It's pretty priceless.

So a huge pleasure to welcome to this conversation, Vice President Al Gore. He served for eight years as vice president of the United States and to Bill Clinton, during which time he, among many other things, elevated questions of science and the environment.

He came within one little hanging chad of becoming president.

And and then since then, I think he's done more than any other human being over the last 20 years to to really elevate issues of the climate crisis to us, to us all across our welcome.

So, look, just six months ago and it seems a lifetime ago, but it really was just six months ago, climate seemed to be on the lips of every thinking person on the planet. Recent events seem to have swept it all away from our attention. How worried are you about that?

You know, I think this time people are reacting differently to the climate crisis in the midst of these other great challenges that have taken over our awareness appropriately. One reason is something that you mentioned. People get the fact that when scientists are warning us an ever more dire terms and setting their hair on fire, so to speak, it's best to listen to what they're saying. And I think that lesson has begun to sink in in a new way. Another similarity, by the way, is that the climate crisis, like the covid-19 pandemic, has revealed in a new way the shocking injustices and inequalities and disparities that affect communities of color and low income communities.

There are differences. The climate crisis has effects that are not measured in years as the pandemic is, but consequences that are measured in centuries and even longer. And the other difference is that instead of depressing economic activity to deal with the climate crisis, as nations around the world have had to do with covid-19, we have the opportunity to create tens of millions of new jobs. That sounds like a political phrasing, but it's literally true. For the last five years, the fastest growing job in the US has been solar installer.

The second fastest has been wind turbine technician. And the Oxford Review of Economics just a few weeks ago pointed the way to a very jobs rich recovery if we emphasize renewable energy and sustainability technologies. So I think we are crossing a tipping point. And you need only look at the recovery plans that are being presented in nations around the world to see that they're very much focused on a green recovery.

I mean, one obvious impact of that pandemic is that it's brought the world's economy to a shuddering halt and thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

I mean, how big an effect has that been? And is it unambiguously good news?

Well, it's a little bit of an illusion, Chris. And you need only look back to the Great Recession in two thousand, eight and nine when there was a one percent decline in emissions. But then in 2010, they came roaring back during the recovery with a four percent increase. The latest estimates are that emissions will go down by at least five percent during this induced coma, as economist Paul Krugman perceptively described it. But whether it goes back the way it did after the Great Recession, it is in part up to us.

And if these green recovery plans are actually implemented and I know many countries are determined to implement them, then we need not repeat that pattern. After all, this whole process is occurring during a period when the cost of renewable energy and electric vehicles, batteries and a range of other sustainability approaches are continuing to fall in price and they're becoming much more competitive. Just a quick reference to how fast this is. Five years ago, electricity from solar and wind was cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels and only one percent of the world.

This year it's cheaper and two thirds of the world. And five years from now it will be cheaper. In virtually 100 percent of the world, EVs will be cost competitive within two years and then will continue falling in price. And so there are changes underway that could interrupt the pattern we saw after the Great Recession.

I think I've heard it said the fall in emissions caused by the pandemic isn't that much more than actually the four that we will need every single year if we're to meet emissions targets. I mean, is that true? And if so, doesn't that seem impossibly daunting?

It does seem daunting. But first, look at the number.

That number came from a study a little over a year ago released by the IPCC as to what it would take to keep the Earth's temperatures from increasing more than one point five degrees Celsius. And yes, the annual reductions would be significant on the order of what we've seen with the pandemic. And yes, that does seem daunting. However, we do have the opportunity to make some fairly dramatic changes.

And the plan is not a mystery to start with the two sectors that are closest to an effective transition, electricity generation, as I mentioned. And last year, 2019, if you look at all of the new electricity generation built all around the world, 72 percent of it was from solar and wind. And already, without the continuing subsidies for fossil fuels, we would see many more of these plants being shut down. There are some new fossil plans being built, but many more are being shut down and where transportation is concerned.

The second sector ready to go. In addition to the cheaper prices for some of forty five jurisdictions around the world, national, regional and municipal, where laws have been passed beginning a phase out of internal combustion engines.

So help us understand just the big picture here. Now, I think before the pandemic, the world was emitting about 55 gigatons of what they call CO2 equivalent. So that includes other greenhouse gases like methane build up to be the equivalent of of CO2. And am I right in saying that the IPCC, which is the global organization of scientists, is recommending that the only way to fix this crisis is to get that number from fifty five to zero by 2050 at the very latest, and that even then that there's a chance that we will end up with temperature rise more like two degrees Celsius rather than one point five.

I mean, that is that's approximately the big picture of what the IPCC is recommending.

That's correct. The global goal established in the Paris conference is to get to net zero on a global basis by 2050. And many people quickly add that that really means a 45 to 50 percent reduction by 2030 to make that pathway to net zero feasible.

And that that kind of timeline is is the kind of timeline where people can even imagine. It's just it's hard to think a policy of 30 years. So so that's actually a very good shorthand that humanity's task is to cut emissions in half by 2030, approximately speaking, which which I think boils down to about a seven or eight percent reduction a year, something like that.

If I'm if I'm not wrong, not quite.

Not quite that large, but. But close. Yes.

This year we've done it by basically shutting down the economy. You're talking about a way of doing it over the coming years that actually gives economic some economic growth and new jobs. Let's talk more about that.

Well, in addition to doing the two sectors that I mentioned, we also have to deal with manufacturing and all the use cases that require temperatures of a thousand degrees Celsius. And there are solutions there as well. We also have to tackle regenerative agriculture. There is the opportunity to sequester a great deal of carbon in top soils around the world by changing the agricultural techniques. There is a farmer led movement to do that. We need to also retrofit buildings. We need to change our management of forests and the ocean.

But let me just mention two things briefly. First of all, the high temperature use cases, Angela Merkel just 10 days ago with the leadership of her minister, Peter Altmire, who's a good friend and a great public servant, have just embarked on a green hydrogen strategy to make hydrogen with the zero marginal cost. Renewable energy and we're building retrofits are concerned just a moment on this, because about 20 to 25 percent of the global warming pollution in the world and in the US comes from inefficient buildings that were constructed by companies and individuals who were trying to be competitive in the marketplace and keep their margins unacceptably high and thereby skimping on insulation and the right windows and LEDs and the rest.

And yet the person who or company that buys that building or leases that building, they want their monthly utility bills much lower. And we can retrofit buildings with a program that literally pays for itself over three to five years. And we can put tens of millions of people to work in jobs that by definition, cannot be outsourced because they exist in every single community.

Just going back to the hydrogen economy that you referred to there, when some people hear that, they think, oh, are you talking about hydrogen fuel cars? And they've heard that that probably won't be a winning strategy. But you but you're thinking much more broadly than that. I think that it's not just hydrogen as a as a kind of storage mechanism to act as a buffer for renewable energy. But also hydrogen could be essential for some of the other processes in the economy, like making steel, making cement that that sort of fundamentally carbon intensive processes right now, but could be transformed if we had if we had much cheaper sources of hydrogen.

Is that right?

Yes. I was always skeptical about hydrogen, Chris, principally because it's been so expensive to to make it to crack it out of water, as they say.

But the game changer has been the incredible abundance of solar and wind, electricity and volumes and amounts that that people didn't expect. And all of a sudden, it's cheap enough to use for these very energy intensive processes like creating green hydrogen. I'm still a bit skeptical about using it in vehicles. Toyota has been betting on that for twenty five years and it hasn't really worked for them. Never say never. Maybe it will. But I think it's most useful for these high temperature industrial processes and we already have a pathway for decarbonising transportation with electricity that's working extremely well.

Tesla's going to be soon the most valuable automobile company in the world already in the U.S. and they're about to overtake Toyota. There is now a semi truck company that's been stood up by Tesla and another that is going to be a hybrid with electricity and green hydrogen. So we'll see whether or not they can make it work in that application. But I think electricity is preferable for cars and trucks.

Let me ask you, though, about nuclear. Some environmentalists believe that new generation nuclear power is is an essential part of the equation if we are to get to a truly clean energy future. Are you still pretty skeptical on nuclear power?

Well, the market is skeptical about it, Chris. It's been a crushing disappointment for for me and for so many. I used to represent Oak Ridge where nuclear energy began. And when I was a young congressman, I was a booster. I was very enthusiastic about it. But the cost overruns and the problems in in building these plants have become so severe that utilities just don't have an appetite for them and it's become the most expensive source of electricity now.

Let me hasten to add that there are some older nuclear reactors that have more useful time that could be added on to their lifetimes. And like a lot of environmentalists, I've come to the view that if they can be determined to be safe, they they should be allowed to continue operating for a time. But where new nuclear power plants are concerned, here's a way to look at it. If you are, you've been a CEO, Chris. If you were the CEO of a I guess you still are.

If you were the CEO of an electric utility and you told your executive team, I want to build a nuclear power plant, two of the first questions you would ask our number one, how much will it cost? And there's not a single engineering consulting firm that I've been able to find anywhere in the world that will give put their name on an opinion, giving you a cost estimate. They just don't know. A second question you would ask is, how long will it take to build it?

So we can start selling the electricity and again, the answer you will get is we have no idea. So if you don't know how much it's going to cost and you don't know when it's going to be finished, and you already know that the electricity is more expensive than the alternate ways to produce it, that's going to be a little discouraging. And in fact, that's been the case for utilities around the world.

Geoengineering is making extraordinary progress. Exxon is investing in technology. Exxon is investing in technology from global thermostat. That seems promising. What do you think of these air and water carbon capture technologies?

Well, you and I talked about this before, Chris. I'm I've been strongly opposed to conducting an unplanned global experiment that could go wildly wrong.

And most are really scared of that approach. However, the term geoengineering is a nuanced term that covers a lot. If you want to paint roofs white to reflect more energy from the the the cityscapes, that's not going to bring a danger of a runaway effect. And there's some other things that are loosely called geoengineering like that, which are fine. But the idea of blocking out the sun's rays, that's insane in my opinion. It turns out plants need sunlight for photosynthesis and solar panels need sunlight for producing electricity from the sun's rays and the consequences of changing everything we know and and pretending that the consequences are going to precisely cancel out the unplanned experiment of global warming that we already have underway.

You know, they're glitches in our thinking. One of them is called the single solution bias. And there are people who just have a hunger to say, well, that one solution, we just need to latch onto that and do that and damn the consequences. Well, it's nuts.

But let me push back on this just just a little bit, because because let's say that we agreed that a single solution or nothing attempt at geoengineering is crazy. But there are scenarios where the world looks at emissions and just sees in 10 years time that say that they are just not coming down fast enough and that we are in risk of several other liftoff events where that this train will just get away from us. And we will be we will see temperature rises of three, four, five, six, seven degrees.

And, you know, all of civilization is at risk, surely.

There is an approach to geoengineering that could be modeled in a way on the way that we approach medicine like for hundreds of years, people we don't really understand the human body. People would try interventions and some of them would work and some of them wouldn't isn't. No one says in medicine, you know, go in and take an all or nothing decision on someone's life.

But they do say, let's try some stuff. If if an experiment can be reversible, if it's plausible in the first place, if there's reason to think that it might work, we actually owe it to the future health of humanity to try at least some types of tests to see what could work. So, so small tests to see whether, for example, seeding of something in the ocean might create illnesses in a non-threatening way. Carbon sinks, or maybe rather than filling the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, a smaller experiment that was, you know, was not that big a deal.

But to see what that cost effectively, you could reduce the temperature a little bit. Surely that that isn't completely crazy and is at least something we should be thinking about in case these other measures don't work?

Well, there have already been such experiments to see the ocean, to see if that can increase the uptake of CO2. And the experiments were an unmitigated failure, as many predicted they would be. But that, again, is the kind of approach that's very different from putting tinfoil strips in the atmosphere orbiting the Earth. That was the way that solar geoengineering proposals started.

Now they're focusing on chalk. So we have chalk dust all over everything.

But more serious than that is the fact that it might not be reversible.

But that's the rhetoric response. Is that really like the amount of dust that you need to make to drop by a degree or two wouldn't result in chalk dust over everything.

It would be it would be unbelievably like it would be less than the dust that people experience every day anyway. I don't know.

First of all, I don't know how you do a small experiment in the atmosphere. And and secondly, if we were to take that approach, we would have to steadily increase the amount of whatever substance they decided we'd have to increase it every single year.

And if we ever stopped, then there would be a sudden snap back, like the picture of Dorian Gray, that old book and and movie where suddenly all of the things caught up with you at once. The the fact that anyone is even considering these approaches is a measure of a feeling of desperation that some have begun to feel, which I understand. But I don't think it should drive us toward these reckless experiments. And by the way, using your analogy to experimental cancer treatments, for example, you usually get informed consent from the patient, getting informed consent from seven point eight billion people who have no voice and no say who are subject to the potentially catastrophic consequences of this whack a doodle, a proposal that somebody comes up with to try to rearrange the entire Earth's atmosphere and hope and pretend that it's going to cancel out the fact that we're putting one hundred and fifty two million tons of heat trapping, manmade global warming pollution into the sky every day.

That's what's really insane as scientists decades ago compared it this way. He said, if you had two people on a sinking boat and one of them, one of them says, you know, we could probably use some mirrors to to signal to shore to get them to build a sophisticated wave generating machine that will cancel out the rocking of the boat by these guys in the back of the boat. Or you could get them to stop rocking the boat. And that's what we need to do.

We need to stop what's causing the crisis.

Yeah, but that's a great story. But if but if the effort to stop the people rocking in the back of the boat is as complex as the scientific proposal you just outlined, whereas the experiment to stop the waves is actually as simple as telling the people to stop rocking the boat, that story changes. And I just I just think that I think you're right that the issue of informed consent is a really challenge.

One, but I mean, no one gave informed consent to do all the other things we're doing to the atmosphere, and I agree that the moral panic issue is the moral hazard issue is is is worrying that if you if we became dependent on geoengineering and took our way, our efforts to do the rest, that would be tragic.

It just seems like I wish I wish it was possible to have a nuanced debate of people saying, you know what, there's multiple dials to a very complex problem. We're going to have to adjust several of them very, very carefully and keep talking to each other. Like, wouldn't wouldn't that be a goal to just try to have a more nuanced debate about this rather than all of that geoengineering can't work?

Well, I've said some of it. You know, the benign forms that I've mentioned, I'm not ruling those out, but blocking the sun's rays from the earth. Not only do you affect seven point eight billion people, you affect the plants and the animals and the ocean currents and the wind currents and natural processes that we're in danger of disrupting even more. So, you know, they're techno optimism is something I've engaged in in the past. But to to latch on to some brand new technological solution, to rework the entire Earth's natural system because somebody thinks he's clever enough to do it in a way that precisely cancels out the consequences of using the atmosphere as an open sewer for heat trapping manmade gases.

It's much more important to stop using the atmosphere as an open sewer. That's what the problem is. All right.

Well, we agree that that is the most important thing for sure. And speaking of which, do you believe the world needs carbon pricing?

And is there any prospect for getting that?

Yes. Yes. To both questions for decades. Almost every economist who's asked about the climate crisis says, well, we just need to put a price on carbon. And I have certainly been in favor of that approach, but it is daunting. Nevertheless, there are forty three jurisdictions around the world that already have a price on carbon. We're seeing it in Europe. They finally straightened out their carbon pricing mechanism. It's an emissions trading version of it. We have places that have put a tax on carbon.

That's the approach the economists prefer. China is beginning to implement its national emissions trading program. California and quite a few other states in the U.S. are already doing it. It can be given back to people in a revenue neutral way. But the opposition to it, Chris, would, you've noted, is impressive enough that we do have to take other approaches. And I would say most climate activists are now saying, look, let's don't make the best the enemy of the better.

There are other ways to do this as well. We need every solution we can we can rationally employ, including by regulation. And often when the political difficulty of a proposal becomes too difficult in a market oriented approach, the the fallback is with regulation and it's been given a bad name regulation. But many places are doing it. I mentioned phasing out internal combustion engines. That's an example. There are one hundred and sixty cities in the US that have already, by regulation, ordered that within a date certain one hundred percent of all their electricity will have to come from renewable sources.

And again, the market forces that are driving the cost of renewable energy and sustainability solutions ever downward. That gives us the the wind at our back. This is working in our favor.

I mean, the push back on carbon pricing often goes further from parts of the environmental movement, which is to a push back on the role of business in general. Business is actually capitalism is blamed for the climate crisis because of unrelenting growth and to the point where people don't trust many people don't trust business to be part of the solution.

The only way to go forward is to regulate, to force businesses to do the right thing. Do do you think the business has to be part of the solution?

Well, definitely, because the allocation of capital needed to solve the. Crisis is greater than what governments can handle. Many businesses are beginning to play a very constructive role there. They're getting a demand that they do so from their customers, from their investors, from from their boards, from their executive teams, from their families. And by the way, the rising generation is demanding a brighter future. And when CEOs interview potential new hires, they find that the new hires are interviewing them.

And they want to make a nice income, but they want to be able to tell their family and friends and peers that they're doing something more than just making money. One illustration of how this new generation is changing careers. There are 65 colleges in the U.S. right now where the college young Republican clubs have joined together to jointly demand that the Republican National Committee change its policy on climate lest they lose that entire generation. This is a global phenomenon. The Grétar generation is now leading this in so many ways.

And if you look at the polling again, the vast majority of young Republicans are demanding a change on climate policy. This is really a movement that is building still.

I was going to ask you about that because one of the most painful things and I of the last 20 years, it's just been how climate has been politicized. And certainly in the US, you've probably felt yourself at the heart of that a lot of the time with people attacking you personally in the most merciless and unfair ways often. I mean, do you really see signs that that might be changing led by the next generation?

Yeah, there's no question about it. I don't want to rely on polls too much.

I mentioned them already, but there was a new one that came out that looked at the wavering Trump supporters, those who supported him strongly in the past and want to do so again. The number one issue, surprisingly to some, that is giving them pause, is the craziness of President Trump and his administration on climate.

I mean, you've been the figurehead for raising this issue and you happen to be a Democrat.

Is there anything that you can personally do to, I don't know, to open the tent, to welcome people to try and say this is beyond politics, dear friends?

Yeah, well, I've tried all of those things and maybe it's made a little positive difference. I've worked with the Republicans extensively. And, you know, well, after I left the White House, I had Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson and other prominent Republicans appear on national TV ads with me saying we've got to solve the climate crisis. But the petroleum industry has really doubled down enforcing discipline within the Republican Party. I mean, look at the attacks they've launched against the pope when he came out with his encyclical and and was demonized not by all for sure, but there were hawks in the anti climate movement who immediately started training their guns on Pope Francis.

And there are many other examples. They enforce discipline and try to make it a partisan issue, even as Democrats reach out to try to to make it bipartisan. I totally agree with you that it should not be a partisan issue. It didn't used to be, but it's been artificially weaponized as an issue.

I mean, the CEOs of oil companies also have kids who are talking to them.

Do it feels like some of them are moving and are trying to invest and trying to find ways of being part of the future. Do you see signs of that?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that business leaders, including in the oil and gas companies, are hearing from their families. They're hearing from their friends, they're hearing from their employees. And by the way, we've seen in the in the tech industry some mass walkouts by employees who are demanding that some of the tech companies do more and get serious. I'm so proud of Apple. Forgive me for parenthetically praising Apple. You know, I'm on the board, but I'm such a big fan of Tim Cook and my colleagues at Apple.

It's an example of a tech company that's really doing fantastic things. And there's some others as well. There are others in many industries, but the the pressures on the oil and gas companies are quite extraordinary.

You know, BP just wrote down 12 and a half billion dollars worth of oil and gas. Assets and said they're never going to see the light of day two thirds of the fossil fuels that have already been discovered cannot be burned and will not be burned.

And so that's a big economic risk to the global economy, like the subprime mortgage crisis. We've got 22 trillion dollars of subprime carbon assets. And just yesterday, there was a major report that the fracking industry in the U.S. is seeing now a wave of bankruptcies because price of the fracked gas and oil has fallen below levels that make them competitive, make them economic, is the shorthand of what's happened there that electric cars and electric technologies and solar and so forth have driven have helped drive down the price of oil to the point where huge amounts of the reserves just can't be can't be developed profitably.

That's mainly the projections for energy sources in the next several years uniformly predict that electricity from wind and solar is going to continue to plummet in price. And therefore, using gas or coal to to turn steam turbines to to make steam to turn the turbines is just not going to be economical. Similarly, the electrification of the transportation sector is having the same effect. Some are also looking at the trend in national, regional and local governance. But let me come back to Chris, because we talked about business leaders.

I think you were getting into question a moment ago about capitalism itself. And I do want to say a word on that, because there are a lot of people who say maybe capitalism is the basic problem. I think the current form of capitalism we have is desperately in need of reform. The short term outlook is often mentioned, but the way we measure what is of value to us is also at the heart of the crisis of modern capitalism. Now, capitalism is at the base of every successful economy and it balances supply and demand unlocks a higher fraction of the human potential.

And it's not going anywhere. But it needs to be reformed because the way we measure what's valuable now ignores so-called negative externalities like pollution. It also ignores positive externalities like investments in education and health care, mental health care, family services. It ignores the depletion of resources like ground water and topsoil and the web of living species. And it ignores the distribution of incomes and net worth so that we have when GDP goes up, people cheer a tooth. Two percent, three percent.

Wow, four percent. And they think great. But it's accompanied by vast increases in pollution, chronic underinvestment in public goods, the depletion of irreplaceable natural resources, and the worst inequality crisis we've we've seen in more than 100 years that is threatening the future of both capitalism and democracy. So we have to change it. We have to reform it.

So reform capitalism, but don't throw it out. We're going to need it as a tool as we go forward if I solve this. Yeah, I think that's right.

And just one other point. The worst environmental abuses in the last hundred years have been in jurisdictions that experimented during the 20th century with the alternatives to capitalism on the left and right.

Interesting. All right. Let's have one more question here. Are you encouraged by the ability of people to quickly adapt to the new normal due to covid-19 as evidence that people can and will change their habits to respond to climate change?

Oh, yes, but I think we have to keep in mind that there is a crisis within this crisis. The the impact on the African-American community, which I mentioned before on the Latino community, indigenous peoples, the highest infection rate is in the Navajo Nation right now. So some of these questions appear differently to those who are really getting the brunt of this crisis. And it is unacceptable that we allow this to continue. It feels one way to you and me and perhaps to many in our audience today.

But for low income communities of color, that's an entirely different crisis. And we owe it to them and to all of us. To get busy and start using the best science and solve this pandemic, you know, the the phrase pandemic economics, somebody said the first principle of pandemic economics is take care of the pandemic. And we're not doing that yet. We're seeing the president try to goose the economy for his reelection, never mind the prediction of tens of thousands of additional American deaths.

And that is just unforgivable, in my opinion.

So, Al, you, along with others in the community, played a key role in encouraging Ted to launch this initiative called Countdown. Thank you for that. And I guess this this conversation will is continuing among many of us.

If you're interested in climate watching this, check out the countdown website at Countdown, not dot com and be part of ten, ten, twenty, twenty. When we're trying to put out an alert to the world. The climate can't wait that that it really matters. And that's going to be some amazing content free to the world on that day. Just that. Thank you all for your inspiration and support.

In doing that, I wonder whether you could end today's session just by just painting us a picture.

You know, like how might things roll out over the next decade or so? Just tell it. Tell us whether there is still a story of hope here.

I'd be glad to forgive. I got to get one plug in. I'll make it brief. July 18 through July twenty six. The Climate Reality Project is having a global training. We've already had eight thousand people registered. You can go to climate reality dotcom now a bright future. It begins with all of the kinds of efforts that you've thrown yourself into an organizing countdown. Karius you and your team have been amazing to work with and I'm so excited about the Countdown project.

Ted has an unparalleled ability to spread ideas that are worth spreading, to raise consciousness, to enlighten people around the world. And it's needed for climate and the solutions to the climate crisis like it's never been needed before. And I just want to thank you for what you personally are doing to organize this fantastic countdown program.

Thank you. And the world, are we going to do this? Do you think do you think that humanity is going to pull this off and that we will that our grandchildren are going to have beautiful lives where they can celebrate nature and not spend every day in fear of the next tornado or tsunami?

I am optimistic that we will do it, but the answer is in our hands. We have seen dark times in periods of the past and we have risen to meet the challenge. We have limitations of our long evolutionary heritage and elements of our culture, but we also have the ability to transcend our limitations. And when the chips are down and when survival is at stake, and when our children and future generations are at stake, we're capable of more than we sometimes allow ourselves to think we can do.

This is such a time. I believe we will rise to the occasion and we will create a bright, clean, prosperous, just and fair future. I believe it with all my heart.

I'll go. Thank you for your life of work, for all you've done to elevate this issue and for spending this time with us now. Thank you.

We are X.