Original subtitles

Message from the president of the United States

To the Congress

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere

on a global scale through radioactive materials and

a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

President Lyndon B. Johnson

1965

Last year was the hottest ever by the largest margin on record

Earth has just experienced the hottest year since record begin

This was the worst drought to hit South Africa

New El Niño phenomena has changed the weather from coast to coast

12 thousand square kilometers of coral are in danger of being wiped out

Food sources for many of our people in the other islands

Climate change migrants, people who can no longer grow crops on their lands

Scientists are highlighting the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions

2015 is the hottest year ever recorded by mankind

Over 750 deaths have been recorded

Powerful category 5 storm is the strongest ever to hit the South Pacific nation

Data published by the US and UK meteorologists say the sharp increase in 2015

can be attributed to human activities

notably the burning of fossil fuels

We begin this news hour in Paris where world leaders

have gathered for the UN Climate Conference known as COP21

It's now or never to reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels

Over the next few days, we will decide the fate of this planet

Breaking news: after years of negotiations, a Climate Deal has finally been reached

The real headline, the real news is the voluntary aspect of this

Yeah, NOT LEGALLY BINDING

This is the same old thing There is no enforcement mechanism

The original goal was to limit emissions so the planet would only warm by 2°C

Every scientist who has looked into the agreement says "that's not going to happen"

The planet will still warm by 3.5°C by the end of the century

And that's not nearly enough to stop the very worse impacts of climate change from impacting the planet

More needs to be done

DISOBEDIENCE

Coming out of this climate summit we see a very clear gap

The politicians are not stepping up

We are seeing the people and the movement stepping up to close that gap

There are groups around the world organizing to shut down the fossil fuels industry during May 2016

It's time to get issues that impact our climate and our environment seriously

Break Free is a global moment

where for the first time in a movement we’re seeing very concrete time frame

when escalated actions are happening across 6 continents

targeting major fossil fuels projects with the message that oil, gas and coal

need to be kept in the ground

It's our future! We must say no!

The level of urgency is coming together very clearly worldwide

We need to introduce May 15 to people.

We can't wait for the politicians to catch up with that understanding

So people are basically taking things into their own hands

and doing what needs to be done on the ground

Batangas, Philippines

What is legal is not necessarily just

Proposed Batangas coal plant

JG Summit Holdings, INC.

Coal per year:

3+ million metric tons

CO2 emissions per year:

7+ million metric tons

We cannot simply confine ourselves to what the law offers

it is for us to demand a different world

I remember the time when to even distribute flyers about the issue of oil

was against the law

Things remain the way they are because we allow it

The moment we do not allow it, we take away our consent

then change happens very, very rapidly

EDSA REVOLUTION, 1986

In 1986, we were able to successfully oust the dictatorship Marcos

It was not just a struggle against repression of our civil and political liberties

It was also a struggle against the dictatorship that had many dirty and harmful energy projects

We create change through empowerment of people

because we believe that's the only change that will last

From what you see here on our coast,

do you see any change in our lifestyle?

Of our homes?

Of our citizens, who they said were supposed to benefit

from the rise of this type of energy?

The promise of job opportunities,

roads, schools

You don't see any of it

I'm turning 60 soon

I was only 22 when these industries began taking over

I've been fighting for so many years

and now there are more of us!

How could I lose hope now?

Will this stop if more of us stand up to them?

We are not alone

The citizens of the world are calling for the shut down of these power plants

And in May, we will join the global movement against the coal industry

We allow our nature to be destroyed by selfishness

And the progress that has been achieved is only for the few

The church has to educate our people to oppose this false progress

Globalization cannot be avoided

What is globalized materialism consumerism, lack of care for others

What must be globalized is concern for one another

The whole world is our responsibility

Everything that we do, we are responsible before God

to make our world better each day

Most changes in society come from ordinary people

who band themselves together and embrace the same vision

and really sacrifice for the accomplishment of their common purpose

we have to protect every individual

and we have to protect our environment

The laws of nature and the laws of economics are in conflict at the moment

Either everything changes because the climate changes

and it changes our physical world

in ways that we can barely fathom

Or we change our economy in fundamental ways

but the idea that there is some middle road

where we continue on pretty much as is, that's actually not available to us

Vancouver like a lot of port cities in the Pacific Northwest is being eyeballed

to be a significant export point to fossil fuels

Kinder Morgan is, I think, the biggest, baddest project on the table right now

It would be expanding a pipeline currently moving 300 thousand barrels of tar sands a day

to close to 900 thousand barrels a day

5 TANKERS A MONTH

TO OVER 30 TANKERS A MONTH

KINDER MORGAN PIPELINE SPILLS IN THE PAST 60 YEARS: 70

There is no way to clean up a tar sands spill in this kind of water

They are saying the best they can get in ideal conditions

is 50% cleaned up

If there is one thing about this part of the world

it's that ideal conditions are pretty few and far between

The pipeline itself crosses a lot of very important rivers

for people's drinking water, for communities,

for the salmon stocks, which are so important for this region

All the way as it goes back to Northern Alberta, where we already know the impacts that it's having

on the Athabasca river, which is becoming one of the most polluted waterways in the world

and human health impacts that's having on First Nations communities downstream

Alberta tarsands, the biggest industrial project in the world

where the size the of Earth that you wanna move is the size of Texas

Kinder Morgan makes 13 million dollars a day

and not only do they make that much but they’re subsidized by the Canadian government

We are mobilizing the community, with 100% consensus by this Tsleil-Waututh nation

where we had a referendum and they said

"we can negotiate for millions of dollars with Kinder Morgan

That can help some of our people out of poverty

Or we can use our own little resources that we have and fight them"

100% consensus we chose to fight them

So right here, is home

you know, we haven't left. This is where we've been for thousands of years

85% of our diet came from the waters behind us

We've been measuring the quality of water here for 20 years

It's getting progressively worse

We are devastated, and what we are trying to do is rehabilitate

the damage it has caused

We are going to court to sue for Canada for not consulting us on Kinder Morgan expansion

One of the ministers said "why the first nations don't take the money, they need it"

we don't need it more than our land

We will do it, whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't happen

in anyway possible

We are going to launch a massive flotilla of boats from here

and surround the terminal on the other side, where tankers fill up

as well as have a group of folks on land march to the gates of the marine terminal

so that we block it from both the land and the water

That is in a lot of ways a battle between a story of the old and a story of the new

There's a lot of powerful forces trying to make sure that the story of the old continues for as long as it can

We've seen disobedience move from being something that

A few people do to the mass movement confronting the fossil fuels industry

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON JULY 18, 2015

A massive oil rig outfitted for Royal Dutch Shell's remote Artic exploration

parked in Seattle’s harbor on Thursday

But not everyone is happy about it

They have convinced us that progress is only made from the exploitation of the Earth

Everyone is coming to protest

We have scientists, ecologists and city council members

who are willing to get arrested because they understand the severity of this moment

Stand up in whatever manner you can

This is our lunch counter to sit on

This is our history to be made

We hold the world in our hands

SHELL TO CEASE OIL EXPLORATION

SHELL ABANDONS ALASKA ARTIC DRILLING

Civil disobedience is a powerful tool in social justice work

The law, its not sacred and to challenge it shakes our consciousness

If you can take that radical action

in a way that genuinely speaks to everybody else

Then you not only have their attention

You have their inspiration

And you build movements that way

Number one: preparation

Calibrate what you are asking for

And how you ask for it, so that you can win it

Then you've got to choose your strategy

You've got choose a tactic, a target that can successfully grab public attention

Then you've got to make sure that you execution is flawless

The media will look to every opportunity to delegitimize you

If there is one misstep, one act of violence, it's over

I've never been in the White House

But the ability to chain myself to the outside of the White House

turned out to be important, and empowering,

and anyone could do it

Most of us don't have huge sums of money

All of us have a body that we can put in the way

I wanna say very clearly that civil disobedience is but one tools in the activists' toolbox

It is not the first one you should reach for

and if you use it all the time, then like any other tool,

it's going to get dull

That said, civil disobedience has a role to play

Nobody should have to go to jail about the climate change

in a rational system, that would be the last thing that would happen

But because the way power is distributed in our world, sometimes we have to

One of the central threats to democracy today

is the corporate capture of government

We are up against tremendous resources, and those resources are smart

The corporations go strait to the politician that is going to be in the committee,

that is going to pass the law they want to pass

and threaten their reelection exactly the right time

The strategy of global corporations on Climate Change

was partly to recognize that they had a trump card with the United States' government

They could stand in the way of global action

by blocking American action

There's a lot of state failure in the United States

The legislator is bought and paid for oil companies and another companies

We have to roll back the corporate capture of our governments

if we want to try to fix these problems that conflict directly

with their industry bottomline

There's nothing radical about anything we are talking about

Radicals work at oil companies

If you are willing to get up in the morning

and make your fortune by altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere,

and you're willing to do it when scientists told you what will happen

and when you've seen it happen, when you watched the Artic start to melt

If you're willing to do that, than you're radical and our job is to try and check that radicalism

An investigation is underway on Exxon Mobile

The huge oil company buried research about the effects of climate change

Reports suggest that more than 30 years ago

Exxon's own scientists were taking climate change projections into account

in its operational plans

Exxon was on the cutting edge of science

They wanted to be in the cutting edge of science 40 years ago in climate change

October 31, 1997

The Greenhouse Effect

assess the potential environmental damage of CO2

They understood that farther down the road, if the science was accurate

there would be limits placed on emissions from fossil fuels

so their strategy at that time was that "we want to have a say on what those limits look like"

When their senior scientist told their senior executive about what was coming,

Exxon started making sure that all its drilling rigs were climate proof,

so they could stand the rising sea level

But they did not tell the rest of us

Just the opposite

Exxon is providing leadership through API in developing the petroleum industry position

Exxon position Emphasize the uncertainty

Around 1989, there was a shift in the thinking of the executive level

and that was when Exxon joined this group called the Global Climate Coalition

which sounds very green, but in fact they were put together

to fight any policy reaction to climate change

Victory will be achieved when average citizens "understand"

Media "understands"

uncertainties in climate science

Exxon and others ended up hiring the veterans of the tobacco industry

to try to make the same

The basic argument that the cigarette's guys have made

After 3 decades of investigation,

no causal link between smoking and disease has been established

Scientific evidence remains inconclusive as whether the human activities affect global climate

It was effective, and it cost us a generations worth of time

man has a time window of 5 to 10 years

before the need for hard decisions regarding

changes in energy strategies might become critical

JUNE 6, 1978

We just recently crossed 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere

We are literally releasing all that CO2 that got buried underneath Earth surface

over a 100 million years

And we are releasing it over a time frame of a 100 years

a million times faster than nature buried it

That is without precedent

It's unclear that living things, including human beings,

can adapt to changes that occur that quickly

In the Philippines, at least 6 thousand farmers were blocking a highway

to demand the government to provide rice

The farmers are starving

Behind all this, there is the rising global temperatures

causing the whole region to suffer the worst drought in more than 20 years

We've began to see serious stress on the global food system

And we simply won't be able to grow enough food to feed 10 billion people

in a warming world

There is a study that looks at temperatures to come

in much of the Middle East

And what they found was that the combination of heat

and humidity for stretches of time, by 2100

would not be compatible with human life

A new study published yesterday finds climate change exarcebated

the worst drought ever in modern Syria,

aggravating social unrest in the country and helping to push it over the brink into civil war

A record of 1 million refugees and migrants that have now crossed into Europe

in Europe's worse refugees crisis since the 2nd world war

In other words, the very real security threat posed by climate change

is only going to get worse

You got to put your bodies upon the gears,

and upon the wheels, upon the levers

upon all the aparatus, and you got to make them stop

And you got to indicate to the people who run it,

to the people who own it, that unless you are free

the machine will be prevented from working at all

Social movements are different from ordinary politics

in that they are not simply about how to divide up the goods

but about what a good is

it enters a domain that goes beyond immediate self-interest

into what's - we're part of this as responsible human beings

The secret of civil disobedience is moral clarity

Gandhi said "I'm a human being first

and a citizen of my country second"

He targeted the fact that Indians weren't allowed to make their own salt

And had a massive salt march, across India to the coast

where he bends down and picks up sea salt

How could someone possibly prevent you from doing something like that?

He was taking the weakness point of his opponent,

and targeted it to generate the most moral clarity

Different forms of civil disobedience shaped the basis of the abolition movement

the women suffrage movement

of the civil rights movement

It is time for us to say that if you don't do something about it

we will have no alternative but to engage in broader

and more drastic forms of civil disobedience

in order to bring the attention of a nation to this whole issue in Selma, Alabama

In the core of activism is one single things, and it is voice

So many people in the world, their voice is actually not heard

The civil rights movement had a grounded belief that the first and most important thing to do

was to allow the people who are on the ground to be able to shape the direction

and to be the front of what was happening

It was about building the capacity to organize one action

and mobilizing the public, to show up in support of an action

The effect of civil disobedience is often to raise the cost of business as usual

to disrupt normal processes and procedures,

which makes it more costly to resist change

than to agree to it

The African people are realizing that apartheid means nothing else

but oppression and exploitation

To change these conditions, the leading Black liberation organization,

the African National Congress, has began a mass movement of civil disobedience

defying the laws of the racial superiority, called apartheid

Civil disobedience brings a spotlight to the violence of oppressive states and industries

The civil disobedience that occurred in South Africa the Apartheid years

Defied all the Apartheid laws

and it was really, really strong

because it happened everywhere, from street committees

to unions, to labour movements, to students' movements

Everybody found an aspect of Apartheid laws that affected them

And then used some kind of mechanism to defy it

It didn't change over night, and it wasn't one day of civil disobedience

It takes time and you will have obstacles

But I really don't that there's any fight that we cannot win

if we have the numbers

We've been struggling against this pollution for years,

by which I mean the reeckless industrialization in the Aliaga region,

called the "industrial zone"

TURKEY

101 coal power plants by 2023

TURKEY CO2 EMISSIONS

268+ million tons of CO2

We've been through times dominated by capitalism

and we still are

Now it is the private companies

They conduct environmental studies among themselves

When we stand up against it,

they prepare another environmental report and study

to build those plants

When new plans were built, or in development,

people were promised new jobs and money

- people were deceived a lot - it has always been like this

In March 1989, me and my friends had been elected mayors

A lady from the General Directorate of Environmental Management

in Ankara called and said "we haven't met, but I will give you

some bad news about Aliaga

because it's important"

"A thermal power plant of 1000 megawatts

using imported coal will be built in Aliaga"

I summoned all the mayors from çigli to Kinik

Such an attack of wild capitalism starting in Aliaga

will spread to other areas in Turkey.

The thermal power plant will not be built here,

because our people don't want it!

We will plant our trees,

in the thermal power plant site, with our children!

Come and uproot them if you can

On May 6, 1990, then Izmir mayor Yusek Cakmur,

and our 18 municipalities

made a human chain in protest

Approximately an area of 60 kilometers,

with over 50 thousand people

When we did it,

it was the biggest environmental action ever held in Turkey

We managed to stop a thermal plant by our struggle

But we couldn't prevent a wider industrial site

Today, in Aliaga, several thermal plants are being built

No one speaks up

People there were almost about to chase us out

They openly said it. "You're destroying our source of living"

We said, "you get cancer, you'll die here"

"But we don't have jobs. Shall we live in hunger?"

They tame people by hunger

I put them on buses and took them to Yatagan

We arrived in a village where villagers told about

the impacts of the thermal power plant

One villager had a nose like a rabbit's

One had half an ear

They told about births with malformation

because of the power plant

When we returned,

everyone joined the protest

We have a movement plan

We invite all the anti fossil fuel, life advocates

both in Turkey and around the world

to help us stop the rot caused by the fossil fuels

hand in hand, altogether

We'll keep that 90's spirit alive

You cannot pretend that we do not exist

You cannot plead ignorance to our problems, because we are here

What power means in the context of social change

is of course the story of David and Goliath

When the Philistines sent their powerful warrior Goliath

to go confront the Israelites, who are afraid

Until finally David, who is not a warrior, but a shepherd

went to king Saul and said "let me go fight Goliath"

the king said "you are not equipped, you've got take my sword, my shield, my helmet"

he is so heavy that he can't move. And he reflects for a second

He says "Wait a second. I'm a shepherd, not a warrior"

He takes off all that armor, picks up a few stones

goes to face Goliath

It's only when he discovers his own resources,

not those of his opponent,

as the foundation of his strategy, that things became to shift

And that's what creates those moments of opportunity for the Davids of this world

Lignite has a very low energy density

That means that you have to dig up a lot of it to get not that much energy

And in burning it, you emit a whole bunch of other dirt

essentially which it is why this is not just bad just for the climate, but it is also terrible for people's health

GERMANY PRODUCES 178 MILLION METRIC TONS OF LIGNITE COAL PER YEAR

OR 248 MILLION METRIC TONS OF CO2

Germany produces and burns more lignite than any other country in the world

in absolute terms, including India and China

We look at this now and we see the dirtiest of all the fossil fuels being dug up

And of course it is the central driver of climate change

which is a central driver of conflict, hunger, destitution, depravation around the world

This stuff has to be left in the ground

This little town called Proschim produces 100% of it's own electricity from renewables

and still exports stuff into the grid

Like this village is actually the future we need

Here you have agriculture, biogas, solar power,

you have a functioning community

And this is the frontline in the struggle against the madness of profit-driven extraction

The government has slated Proschim for destruction

because there is coal underneath it

What was seem here is the future being eaten by the past

Fossil fuels are the past in more than one way

They are the past of the capital,

the past of energy, the past of our relationship to nature

Hello! We can leave your land if you want

Ok, so this was Frau Rösch, who was asking what we were doing in her land

and her... I started explaining "we are doing this film"

she said "are you against lignite?" "yeah"

"ok, so you can walk wherever you want"

Folks lived here a few years ago, this is their lives

The government said "you can't be here, because we are going to dig this up.

Because there is coal underneath"

They have grown up here, they were planning to maybe die here

This kind of images, that's also why we are doing this

This folks here being evicted from their homes

because we cannot stop destroying the environment

This cannot go on

All the political work that you do when you're mobilizing for a big disobedience action

will ultimately be for naught if the action is not a success in tactical terms

We are telling the situation as it was last year

Here is the opencast mine in Garzweiler

This whole area was our action target

Now, there are always 2 kinds of obstacles that you have to have in mind

The first is geographic, or let's call "technical obstacles"

Then, second challenge: police and corporate security. let's call this human or political problems

Our goal is not to fight the police

Our goal is to get around, because they are not our enemy

Our enemy is lignite production inside the pit

So when the police started forming a line,

with sheer determination, we are walking through the police

Not hitting them, not engaging violently

just walking through

We ensure that all the four actions that managed to get into the pit

I've been doing civil disobedience actions for 17 or 18 years now

It's very hard to get a sense of empowerment,

to actually feel with every fiber in your body that you can make it

that we can actually stop this

The moment when we were running towards this diggers,

when we saw that they were all shut down

I remember this moment us "we've done it!"

It was an unbelievable moment of personal and collective empowerment

in a struggle that all too often seems brutally hopeless

In May we're gonna be more people,

and hopefully they won't be able to stop us

Last year they couldn't, so let's see if we can do this again

We think we can

If you say you can't deal with climate change without

a revolution in values, a revolution in the way we think,

people will say: well, we don't have time for that kind of thing.

The truth is, what we don't have time for is continuing to try the same thing that hasn't worked

for two and a half decades.

We continue to be inspired by ordinary people

having the courage to stand up against corporate interests,

even against government policies that will bring harm to their communities.

Hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible,

as opposed to the necessity of the probable.

Organize, organize, organize

There is no other way

We don't have the tanks, and we don't have the armed forces.

Nonviolent civil disobedience is me making my voice heard

against a powerful force that is holding us back.

Keystone turned out the be a great victory because all over the country and the world,

people looked up and saw that you actually can beat big oil.

It may seem impossible right now to defeat climate chaos,

but social movement have shown

that the limits of the possible are there to be moved.

My hope is that we come out the other side of this

with a global sense of a new kind of power for the climate movement.

What we need are new ways to do new things.

To practice civil disobedience is necessary to be able to pursue a better life for our people.

Batangas now is the center of action against fossil fuel

It's quite possible that a more radical approach will bring rapid change.

It's straight math.

How many people are active and engaged on this issue?

How hard are they pushing? How coordinated are they?

It's the people who are engaged that determine what government does.

And all we have is a choice to make about whether we're going to be one of those people or not.

The science is pretty dark and things are changing very fast.

But I am absolutely sure there is going to be one hell of a fight.

Join the global movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground