60 Minutes - 6/6/2021: What Happened in Wuhan?, Ransomware, Sir David

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

On this week's "60 Minutes," a lack of transparency from Chinese officials and looming geopolitical consequences have damaged the credibility of a WHO-led inquiry into how the virus that causes COVID-19 originated. Lesley Stahl reports. How cybercriminals hold data hostage -- and why the best solution is often paying a ransom. Scott Pelley reports. And eighteen years after declining to take a hard stance in his first profile on 60 Minutes, Sir David Attenborough warns about the dangers of climate change. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. I wouldn't really call what's happened now an investigation. It's essentially a highly chaperoned, highly curated study tour. Study tour? Study tour. Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It's not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see. More than a quarter of cities and counties across America say they have fended

off an attack on their essential computer networks. Hospitals, city halls, and transit hubs have all been crippled by sophisticated ransomware attacks. Cybercrime has really become a way of life and connected to everything we do and really every crime we see. At what point does this ransomware come to our phones? I think it's already on the doorstep for that. The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel. In his stunning film, Sir David Attenborough celebrates nature's wonders, a warning against humans overrunning the natural world itself.

You call the film a witness statement. A witness statement is given when a crime has been committed. Yeah, well, a crime has been committed. And it so happens that I'm of such an age that I was able to see it beginning. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Scott Pelley.

Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. In March, the World Health Organization finally released a long-anticipated and much-delayed report that was supposed to be a post-mortem of an

earlier trip to China by a WHO-led team of international scientists. The question, how did SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, originate? Among the leading theories examined, was it accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan, or did it come from infected animals in a wet market there? As we first reported just prior to the inquiry's release, the WHO probe was far from comprehensive because, as it has done since the beginning of the outbreak, the Chinese government withheld information. I wouldn't really call what's happened now an investigation. It's essentially a highly chaperoned, highly curated study tour. Study tour?

Study tour. Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It's not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see. Jamie Metzl, former NSC official in the Clinton administration and member of a WHO advisory committee on genetic engineering, is one of more than two dozen experts, including virologists, who signed an open letter in early

March calling for a new international inquiry with a return to China. The letter says the WHO team did not have the independence or access to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation, specifically into a possible accidental leak from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city where the first outbreak occurred. We would have to ask the question, well, why in Wuhan? To quote Humphrey Bogart, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Wuhan? What Wuhan does have is China's level four virology institute with probably the world's largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses. I had seen that the World Health Organization team only spent three hours at the lab.

While they were there, they didn't demand access to the records and samples and key personnel. That's because of the ground rules China set with the WHO, which has never had the authority to make demands or enforce international protocols. It was agreed, first, that China would have veto power over who even got to be on the mission. Secondly— And WHO agreed to that. WHO agreed to that. On top of that, the WHO agreed that in most instances, China would do the primary investigation and then just share its findings with these international experts. So these international experts weren't allowed to do their own primary investigation.

Wait, you're saying that China did the investigation and showed the results to the committee and that was it? Pretty much that was it. Not entirely, but pretty much that was it. Imagine if we had asked the Soviet Union to do a co-investigation of Chernobyl. It doesn't really make sense. China had ruled out a lab accident long before the WHO team arrived at the airport in Wuhan on January 14th and were greeted by people in full PPE gear. The team included some of the world's leading experts on how viruses are transmitted from animals to humans. But even though there have been accidental lab leaks of viruses in China in the past that have infected people

and killed at least one, no one on the team was trained in how to formally investigate a lab leak. They were there for a four-week mission, but two of those weeks were spent holed up at this hotel in quarantine. Once out, they had some tense exchanges with their counterparts, a team of Chinese experts, over their refusal to provide raw data. Are you getting the access you need? If the virus originated in animals, one of the mysteries has been how did it travel the thousand miles from the bat caves in southern China to Wuhan? The WHO team thinks it found the answer. What we found as part of this WHO mission to China is that there is a pathway. Peter Dajak, a member of the WHO team and an expert on how

animal viruses jump to humans, has worked on previous viral outbreaks, including in China. He says the pathway leads not to the lab in Wuhan, but from wildlife farms in southern China directly to the wet market in Wuhan, the Huanan seafood market. The theory is that somehow that virus got from a bat into one of these wildlife farms, and then the animals were shipped into the market, and that they contaminated people while they were handling them, chopping them up, killing them, whatever you do before you cook an animal. Wild animals? Yeah. Like what? They're traditional food. Civets.

These are like ferrets. There's also an animal called a ferret badger. Rabbits, which we know can carry the virus. Those animals were coming into the market from farms over 1,000 miles away. Were you able to test any of the animals found in the Wuhan market for the virus? Well, the China team had done that,

and they found a few animals left in freezers. They tested them. They were negative. But the fact that those animals are there is the clue. But there's no direct evidence that any of those animals were actually infected with the bat virus. Correct. Now what we've got to do is go to those farms and investigate. Talk to the farmers. Talk to their relatives, test them, see if there were spikes in virus there first. So the team doesn't actually know if any of the farmers or the truckers were ever infected? No one knows yet. No one's been there, no one's asked them, no one's tested them. That's to be done. Despite those unanswered questions, the WHO team and their Chinese counterparts all agreed that this hypothesis of a pathway from bat caves to butcher shops like these is the most likely explanation. Something like 75% of emerging diseases come from animals into people. We've seen it before. We've seen it in China with SARS.

Is the lab leak theory any more or less speculative than your pathway? For an accidental leak that then led to COVID to happen, the virus that causes COVID would need to be in the lab. They never had any evidence of a virus like COVID in the lab. They never had the COVID-19 virus? Not prior to the outbreak, no. Absolutely. No evidence of that. Jamie Metzl begs to differ, pointing to the lab's own reports that it sent field researchers to the bat caves who brought back samples with viruses. We know that among those viruses, one of them is the virus that is genetically most related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

But most related isn't the same, right? Yes, exactly. But we do know that there were nine viruses, at least least that were brought back. And it's extremely possible that among these viruses is a virus that's much more closely related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And when I put all those pieces together, I said, hey, wait a second, this is a real possibility. We need to be exploring it. The pathway that Peter Daszak and the team have come up with, now, that sounds plausible.

Oh, it's certainly plausible. Very seriously plausible. No, it is plausible. Let's just say that that theory is correct. You would have had an outbreak perhaps in southern China where they have those animal farms. You may have seen some kind of evidence of an outbreak along the way. And there wasn't? There wasn't.

But listen, your theory is also full of holes. I wouldn't say it's full of holes, but it's incomplete. That's why we need access to the data in order to prove one hypothesis for another. Metzl says Peter Dajak has a conflict of interest because of his longtime collaboration with the Wuhan lab. I'm on the WHO team for a reason. And you know, if you're going to work in China on coronaviruses and try and understand their origins, you should involve the people who know the most about that. And for better or for worse, I do.

He says the team did look into the leak theory during a visit with lab scientists and deemed it extremely unlikely. We met with them. We said, do you audit the lab? And they said, annually. Did you audit it after the outbreak? Yes. Was anything found?

No. Do you test your staff? Yes. But you're just taking their word for it. Well, what else can we do? There's a limit to what you can do. And we went right up to that limit. We asked them tough questions.

They weren't vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable, correct, and convincing. But weren't the Chinese engaged in a cover-up? They destroyed evidence, they punished scientists who were trying to give evidence on this very question of the origin. Well, that wasn't our task, to find out if China had covered up the origin issue. I'm just saying, doesn't that make you wonder? We didn't see any evidence of any false reporting or cover-up in the work that we did in China. Were there Chinese government minders in the room every time you were asking questions?

There were Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff in the room throughout our stay, absolutely. They were there to make sure everything went smoothly from the China side. Or to make sure they weren't telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You sit in a room with people who are scientists and you know what a scientific statement is and you know what a political statement is. We had no problem distinguishing between the two. Speaking of political statements. A thing called the China virus. Geopolitics loomed over the inquiry with some tit for tats.

Beijing said COVID-19 originated in the U.S. The Trump administration accused China of a cover-up. There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples, and they didn't volunteer to share the genetic sequences. Matt Pottinger, the then Deputy National Security Advisor, quoting from Declassified Intelligence Information, says Beijing also hid that several researchers at the Wuhan lab had come down with COVID-like symptoms and that the Chinese military was working with the lab. There is a body of research that's been taking place conducted by the Chinese military

in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has not been acknowledged by the Chinese government. We've seen the data. I've personally seen the data. Why the military? Why were they in that lab? We don't know. It is a major lead that needs to be pursued by the press, certainly by the World Health Organization. Beijing is simply not interested in allowing us to find the answers to those very pertinent questions. What the U.S. government does know, he says, is that the Wuhan

lab director published studies about manipulating bat coronaviruses in a way that could make them more infectious to humans. And there were reports of lax safety standards at the lab. They were doing research specifically on coronaviruses that attach to the ACE2 receptors in human lungs, just like the COVID-19 virus. Is that a smoking gun? No, it's circumstantial evidence, but it's a pretty potent bullet point when you consider that the place where this pandemic emerged was a few kilometers away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lack of transparency has led to widespread criticism of the WHO for agreeing to China's demands. The one thing that I wish that the WHO had done is to pick up their megaphone and start screaming through it to demand that China be more transparent,

that it open its border to allow American CDC officials and other experts from the WHO and around the world to come investigate and to help. After 18 months and 3.5 million deaths worldwide, it was hoped the team would provide some clarity on the origin of COVID-19. But the exercise ends with even more questions than it began with. has led a growing number of prominent scientists and public officials to call on China to provide greater transparency and access to investigate the source of the virus, including whether it originated at the lab in Wuhan. But China is digging in, saying it considers the investigation in its country complete and that any further inquiry should focus on other countries,

including the United States. Last month, President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to redouble their efforts to investigate how and where COVID-19 first emerged. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties

can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're seeing just how defenseless our food and fuel supplies can be to hackers. This month,

the largest meat producer in America was forced to close for several days. And that was only three weeks after hackers shut down the main source of gasoline for the East Coast. Both were ransomware, attacks by hackers who break into a computer network and lock it until ransom is paid. Colonial Pipeline paid more than $4 million in May to get fuel flowing in the East again. As we first told you in 2019, critical public service networks are also targets. 26% of cities and counties, for example, report that they fend off network attacks every hour. Perhaps even worse, dozens of hospitals have been held hostage all across the country. In January 2018, the night shift at Hancock Regional Hospital watched its computers crash with deepest apologies. The 100-bed facility in the suburbs of Indianapolis got its CEO, Steve Long, out of bed.

We had never been through this before, and it's something that I read in the journals, and I say, oh, those poor folks, I'm glad that's never going to happen to us. But when you come in and you see that the files on your computer have been renamed, and all of the files were renamed, either we apologize for files or we're sorry. And there was a moment when I thought, well, maybe they're not so bad. They said they were sorry. But in fact, they had encrypted every file that we had on our computers and on the network. Well, the ER, as we have said, still had... Long told 911 to divert emergency patients to a hospital 20 miles away.

His staff turned to pen and paper. Nothing electronic could be trusted. This is a ransomware, so this is a virus that has gotten into the computer system. Would it have the ability to jump to a piece of clinical equipment? Could it jump to an IV pump? Could it jump to a ventilator? We needed a little time just to make sure about that. But time was a luxury not offered in the ransom demand. Your network has been encrypted. If you would like to purchase the decryption keys, you have seven days to do so, or your network files will be permanently deleted. And then it gave us the amount that we would need to pay to get that back.

And that came to? About $55,000. That was the same price demanded of the city of Leeds, Alabama, three weeks after Hancock Hospital. Mayor David Miller was surprised his town of 12,000 would be a target. Not much to notice in Leeds, at least not since Charles Barkley graduated from the high school. I didn't know that this malware attack was actually a ransomware attack. As soon as we found that out, that took it to a little different level.

How do you mean? Well, it was going to cost us some money. Like the hospital, the city of Leeds was cast back into the age of paper. No email, no access to its personnel files or financial systems. Can all companies and local governments expect to be attacked? I think everyone should expect to be attacked. The FBI's Mike Chrisman says cyber crooks know governments and hospitals are likely to pay because they can't afford not to. Until a promotion, Chrisman was in charge of the FBI's cyber crime unit. You're waiting for the day that somebody says we have the 911 system held hostage in a major city and we need $10 million today.

I hope that day never comes, but I think we should prepare for that possibility. Chrisman says in 2017, 1,700 successful ransomware attacks were reported, but he figures that's less than half. Most businesses, he says, would rather pay than admit they were hacked. I'm aware of one ransomware variant that affected all 50 states that had some $30 million in losses and over $6 million in ransom payments. I would tell you that the losses are very significant and easily approach $100 million or more just in the United States. That ransomware variant he's talking about is the one that held Hancock Hospital hostage. It's called SAM-SAM after one of its file names. Experts told Steve Long SAM-SAM is unbreakable.

There was nothing that we could do to unlock those files. Our only choice was to wipe the system and hope that we had backups or to purchase the decryption keys. To pay the rent. Indeed, that is exactly what that means. But Sam Sam had infected the hospital's backup files. The FBI advised Long not to pay, but after two days, after his staff filled out 10,000 pieces of paper, he paid the ransom. The crooks demanded digital money known as Bitcoin. Ransomware is possible only because Bitcoin is so difficult to trace. Mayor Miller held out two weeks before he paid his Bitcoin ransom after a little bargaining. I just had to grit my teeth and realize that this was a business decision,

and that was the way to do it. So they asked for $60,000 and you paid $8,000. How did you get there? Well, I got a degree in finance. Actually, our city inspector and our city clerk let them know that, hey, you're dealing with a very small town here. That's a lot of money to us, and we think we can scrape together $8,000. The thieves were honorable. In Leeds, at Hancock Hospital, and in many cases,

the ransom buys decryption keys that actually work. The crooks need credibility to keep the ransoms flowing. Did you ever find out? Never. Who they were or where they were? No. Wouldn't you just love to know? Wouldn't I love to know.

Leads may have been hit by one of the many ransomware variations that simply scan the Internet blindly, looking for vulnerable networks wherever they may be. How many targets do they attack at a time? You could conservatively say in the thousands, the tens of thousands. Tom Pace runs NetRise, a cybersecurity firm based in Austin, Texas. So this isn't a crook sitting in front of a desktop, breaking a sweat, trying to break into somebody's system. This is something they unleash that's automated and they sit back and drink

coffee until they get the results. That certainly appears to be the rule, not the exception. Making the coffee may be the hard part. Pace showed us a website that offers ransomware for rent. An attacker can use one of many illicit products here, and the website takes a cut if ransom is paid. And something else that's interesting here is they actually provide you with basically a chat room where you can ask questions to the people who maintain this architecture for you. Frequently asked questions for criminals.

Exactly. Tom Pace logged onto the site and used it to encrypt a network of his own. So all of the files that are on this system have now been successfully encrypted. So this took you just slightly over five minutes, and you didn't write a single line of code. Correct. Off the shelf. Off the shelf. Ready to go. Pace told us ransoms are

typically modest, like at Hancock Hospital or Leeds, Alabama, $50,000 or so. If you're asking for millions from everybody, that's just, everybody doesn't have millions to pay, right? So finding that sweet spot and sticking to it has worked well. And that's why the same ransom was asked of little Leeds, Alabama and great big Atlanta. Correct. The city of Atlanta has experienced a ransomware cyber attack. Three weeks after Leeds, Sam Sam slipped into Atlanta's City Hall. Howard Shook is a councilman and chair of the finance committee. 911 was up and running, but for a

while the police did not have the ability to do computer checks on license plates and, you know, cars they were pulling up on and that kind of thing, which was a concern. What else crashed? The court system went down, which was a major inconvenience for the thousands of people cycling through municipal court. Sam Sam demanded $50,000, but Atlanta refused to pay. Instead, the city spent $20 million to recover on its own. It took months, and seven years of police dash cam video was never recovered. Why did you think paying was a bad idea? At first it was just instinctive. I mean, if you're being violated, I don't know why you should

reward somebody for having done that. It must gall the hell out of some of your clients to pay the bad guys. Absolutely. I mean, we have lots of clients who are incredibly angry. I mean, you have to imagine this is for many of them, the worst day of their professional career and sometimes their life. A day made even worse by the occasional high-end ransom. Pace told us one of his clients paid almost a million dollars. Another paid up after receiving this threat. Would it not be a shame if we leaked all of your internal data

about your clients and customers? Sounds to us like a large lawsuit waiting to happen. So they're extorting them in two ways. They're extorting them by actually encrypting all of the files, and then they're extorting them by threatening to also release the data. Once this transaction is completed and the client gets his files back, how does he know he's not going to be attacked again? There's no way to really prove that he will not be. We try and do a really good job of making sure we reduce all the

vulnerabilities and entry points, but there is no guarantee that they won't come back to the same organization that they just successfully impacted, though we haven't seen that happen very often, though it has happened. In 2018, the Justice Department said it unmasked Sam Sam. A grand jury indicted two Iranians, neither named Sam. The FBI says the two Iranian suspects were in it for the money, not espionage. They collected $6 million before they went quiet after the indictment. Prosecutors say the suspects are in Iran where they can't be extradited. The most threatening ransomware tends to come from countries, including Russia, that the FBI can't reach. Is cybercrime becoming to the FBI what banks were in the 1930s?

I think it is. Cybercrime has really become a way of life and connected to everything we do and really every crime we see. And I know that by 2020, we expect to see 50 billion devices worldwide connected to the internet. So the question becomes, at what point does this ransomware come to our phones, where some crook says, I've got your phone, send me 50 bucks? I think it's already on the doorstep for that. I think some of those devices that connect to the Internet can not only be compromised, but they can be used to facilitate other attacks under the command and control of bad actors. This can be, I have your phone, I have your car, I have your house,

anything that's connected to the Internet. Absolutely. The FBI says Colonial Pipeline and JBS, the meat processing company, were each hacked using ransomware for rent from two Russian-based groups. For nearly 70 years, Sir David Attenborough has been exploring the planet, taking hundreds of millions of television viewers on eye-opening journeys through the natural world, jungles and island archipelagos, deserts, and deep under the sea. No place has been too remote, no animal too elusive for Sir David and his talented team of filmmakers to document. The man known as a national treasure in his native Britain is 95 years old now,

but age and the pandemic haven't slowed him down. When we sat down with him last fall, he was about to come out with a new book and a stunning new Netflix film, A Life on Our Planet. They are what he calls a witness statement, a firsthand account of what he has seen happen to the planet and a dire warning of what he believes awaits us if we don't act quickly to save it. The Living World is a unique and spectacular marvel. In this film, Sir David Attenborough's voice is the same, sonorous and soulful, reassuringly familiar.

Dazzling in their variety and richness. But his message is uncharacteristically alarming. The way we humans live on Earth is sending it into a decline. Human beings have overrun the world. We're replacing the wild with the tame. Our planet is headed for disaster. You call the film a witness statement. A witness statement is given

when a crime has been committed. Yeah, well, a crime has been committed. And it so happens that I'm of such an age that I was able to see it beginning. And so I enjoy saying doom, doom, doom on the contrary. I'd rather enjoy it. Thrill, excitement, pleasure, joy, joy, joy, joy. But if you've got any sense of responsibility, you can't do that.

Sir David spoke to us via Zoom near his home in London, where he'd been living in isolation due to the pandemic. I imagine you living in a house full of things that you have collected from travels around the world, a sort of cabinet of curiosities. Well, that is true, in a sense. I mean, certainly I've got a cellar full of rock, lots of rocks. And sometimes you pick it up and you say, good Lord, what on earth is this?

Or indeed, why on earth would I bother to pick this up? He studied geology and zoology in college and was working as a producer at the BBC in 1954 when he convinced his bosses to let him loose and start traveling the world. He was just 28 years old. Wherever I went, there was wilderness. Sparkling coastal seas.

Vast forests. Immense grasslands. You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness. It was the best time of my life. David Attenborough became a household name in 1979 with his groundbreaking BBC series Life on Earth, which was seen by an estimated 500 million people worldwide. I know it sounds like a publicist's slogan,

but it is the greatest story ever told. It's a story of how life developed on this planet and led to you and me sitting here talking across an ocean. Viewers were drawn in by Attenborough's enthusiasm and sense of wonder. This was his first filmed encounter with endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda. It was really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise all that is aggressive and violent, when that's the one thing that the gorilla is not, and that we are. I remember it very vividly. They ended up, two of them, sitting on me,

two of the babies sitting on me. Was I alarmed? Was I frightened? Was I concerned that the mother of those two baby twins was going to turn on me? Not at all. Not for a microsecond. It was the biggest compliment I can remember receiving. You were being accepted into that family. And it was unforgettable.

Unforgettable moments in the wild is what Sir David Attenborough has become known for. There's barely a corner of the earth he hasn't been to, or a species he hasn't shown us in a new way. He's done more than just bring the natural world into our homes. He's helped us make sense of it. They are on parade. Given it a story. She's seen enough. Full of characters and complexity.

Not to mention excitement. Take a look at this from BBC's Planet Earth 2. A snake's eyes aren't very good, so if the hatchling keeps its nerve, it may just avoid detection. I saw that on a plane, and I started talking to the person next to me in my seat, saying, you have to watch this. This is extraordinary. They thought I was crazy. Well, the job of a narrator for natural

history films is a bit of a doddle. A bit of a doddle? A bit of a piece of cake. How's that? It's really pretty easy, because the animals are so fantastic. Sir David has always been an animal advocate. In the early 1960s, he was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. But in his films, he rarely focused on the destruction of their habitat or climate change. You were skeptical of climate change. I think that's interesting because I think it makes your warnings now all the more powerful. Yes, certainly so.

And if you're going to make a statement about the world, you'd better make sure this isn't just your own personal reaction. And the only way you can do that is to see the work of scientists around the world who are taking observation as to what's happening. That's what's happening to temperature, what's happening to humidity, what's happening to radioactivity, what's happening ecologically. You've said that climate change is the greatest threat facing the planet for thousands of years.

Yes. Even the biggest, the most awful things that humanity has done and so-called civilisations have done pale to significance when you think of what could be around the corner unless we put ourselves together. Deserts in Africa have been spreading. There could be whole areas of the world where people can no longer safely live. The hottest temperatures yet recorded in Death Valley and yet we are such optimists that we say we go to bed and I say, oh well, that was exceptional. Gosh, that was interesting, wasn't it? That was the highest temperature. Good Lord. Oh well, that's the end of that. Not at all. Wait. Wait another few months. Wait another year. See you again. Over the years, Sir David has repeatedly visited Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Now, Coral Reef is one of the most dramatic and beautiful and complex manifestations of life you can find anywhere. But on his last trip, he was stunned by what he saw.

And we went on this reef, which I knew, and it was like a cemetery, because all the corals had died. They died because of a rise in temperature and acidity. There are still people who are going to see this and say, well, look, it's not that bad, and technology will evolve to come up with some sort of a solution that we can't even imagine. No. We live in a finite world. come up with some sort of a solution that we can't even imagine? No. We live in a finite world. Ultimately, we depend upon the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat and indeed every lungful of air that we breathe.

I mean, if it wasn't for the natural world, the atmosphere would be depleted from oxygen tomorrow. If there were no trees around, we would suffocate. I mean, and actually, in the course of this particular pandemic that we're going through, I think people are discovering that they need the natural world for their very sanity. People who never listened to the birdsong are suddenly thrilled, excited, supported, inspired by the natural world, and they realize that they are not apart from it. They are part of it.

So by saving nature, we are saving ourselves? Oh, without question. You say in the film, we're not just ruining the world, we've destroyed it. Is it that far gone? It's not beyond redemption. Redemption, he says, depends on a complete shift to renewable energy and an end of our reliance on fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry does not want the world to move off fossil fuels. No, it doesn't. But in fact, we know ways in which we can get from the sun up there just a tiny fraction of the amount of energy that sprays on this earth 24 hours a day, one way or another, for nothing. If we could solve the problems of storage and

transmission, the world is ours. We have all the power we need. Why should we go on poisoning life on Earth? It sounds simple when you say it. So it is. Sir David also wants to see what he calls a rewilding of the planet, giving plants and animals on land and in the ocean time and space to bounce back. The World Wildlife Fund says that two-thirds of the Earth's wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years. The repopulation of the oceans can happen like that in a decade, if we have the will to do it. But we require everybody to agree that.

If you were to pick up the phone and speak with President Trump or President Xi of China or Prime Minister Modi in India, what would you say? I would say that the time has come to put aside national ambitions and look for an international ambition of survival. It seems politically the tide is moving in the opposite direction from that, of nations more looking inward

and not as being part of a larger international community. That's what's going to sink us in the end. That's what's going to sink us in the end. That's what's going to sink us. Can you be optimistic at all? We don't have an alternative. I mean, what good is it to say, oh, to hell with it, I don't care? You can't say that.

Not if you love your children, not if you love the rest of humanity. How can you say that? It's the young that Sir David now puts his faith in, and they, it seems, have faith in him. Just listen to the reception he received when he popped up on stage at Britain's largest music festival. Thank you. Thank you very much. There is a huge movement around the world of people from all nations, young people who can see what is happening to the world and demanding that their government should take action. That's the best hope that I have. Obviously, my generation failed.

We've allowed it to happen. We've allowed this to happen, Sir David Attenborough says, despite being the smartest creatures that have ever lived. Now, he warns, we need more than just intelligence. We need wisdom. After all, this planet is all we have. There is nowhere else to go. Do you believe there's life elsewhere?

No, not really. But also, I think that that's a, I mean, it's an interesting theoretical question, but it's a theoretical question. Why would I want to go and live on the moon when I've got this world of badgers and thrushes and jellyfish and corals. Why would I want to go and live in the moon? Because there's nothing else there but dust. I'd say, well, thank you very much. I'll stay where I am and watch hummingbirds. I'm Leslie Stahl we'll be back next week

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