The Joe Rogan Experience - #593 - Josh Fox

Episode Date: December 29, 2014

Josh Fox is a film director and environmental activist, best known for his Oscar-nominated documentary, Gasland & Gasland II.

Hey everybody my guest today if you've ever seen the movie Gasland or Gasland 2 the man who made it created it and the best friend of the oil industry, Josh Fox, ladies and gentlemen. What's up, dude? Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. I'm happy to be here. You know, I put on Twitter and I put online on my message board, people are talking about this, Josh Fox from Gasland movie. And you either have people who love you, who are so happy for what you're doing, or there's people and even people that don't even have a vested interest in the oil business

that get really aggressive about like debunking your claims or calling you a liar or calling you fraudulent. I think those people are mostly not people. You think they're fake? I think they're from the oil industry. Really? I mean, if you really look into a lot of those Twitter accounts, they have like 10 followers or 5 followers or 0 followers. Or you have like hyper-conservative Twitter people who like echo those.

It's a pro-oil lobby echo chamber. Well, the hyper-conservative people, that's a thing that people do do. That's like the same people that deny climate change, the same people that deny, you know. There's a direct link there. You see the climate change deniers now having in this whole new fracking denial camp.

And that's been a sustained campaign for the last six years. But it's not so surprising, considering that when we first heard from the oil industry, everything they said was untrue. So when they first came to my backyard right in Pennsylvania to lease our land, to lease the land of all my neighbors to come to the Delaware River Basin, their whole claim was that this was completely environmentally friendly and we probably won't even drill here and you should just take this free money. And they didn't let anyone know what the real consequences of this stuff was. Did they know what the real consequences were? I'm sure they know. You think so? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, there's a number of ways to prove that they know. I mean, they disclosed to their shareholders when they're courting for dollars in the financial world, that there is the possibility of spills and of these kinds of things have water contamination. So they make their investors aware of the fact that they could be sued down the line

or something like that. So that's one way that we know that they know. But they know. I mean, they know what they're doing. They have reports that we show in Gasland Part Two, partially because of their denialism, that show their own investigations into their leaks, into their contamination. Because when they leak oil and gas into an aquifer, they're not recovering that oil or gas. So that means it's a profit loss for them, right? They're not investigating this because they want to not contaminate water supplies. They investigated

it because it's loss of product. So when that oil or gas leaks out the side of their gas wells or oil wells, which they've punctured through the aquifers, they're at a loss. And currently, one of their studies, the oil industry's own studies, shows that about 40% of the oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico are leaking, that they have very, very high leakage rates in horizontal wells, like 60% to 70% in studies that they did in Alberta. And these are studies that were done by ConocoPhillips. 60% to 70% leakage? Yep.

Yep. Jesus Christ. Of the wells, not saying that the wells are leaking 60% to 70%, but that 60% to 70% leakage? Yep. Yep. Jesus Christ. Of the wells. Not saying that the wells are leaking 60% to 70%, but that 60% to 70% of them are leaking. Oh, wow. Currently. So Society of Petroleum Engineers did a report on this in 2012, I think, and their PowerPoint slides were leaked to me in which they said 35% of all oil and gas wells in the world, and there are 1.8 million of them, are currently leaking. So they know well. They know what's going on.

So to go out there and do this kind of vicious attack campaign against the films is just that. It's the same thing that the tobacco industry did and the same thing that the oil industry did with climate change. A little different than the tobacco industry, of course, because the idea is that there is some benefit to this fracking that sort of cancels out the environmental concerns. There were benefits to smoking, that's what they said. Yeah, but it means that smoking was good for you. Financial benefits for the people that- There are benefits to smoking. Smoking makes you feel good.

Yeah, but I mean financial benefits to communities that employ these people. I mean that's a lot of the pressure I know in Canada. Like I've talked to people about the oil industry in Canada, and there's two sides. There's the people who greatly benefit from the oil industry. There's so many people that have jobs up there. And then there's so many people that have seen those overhead photos. You've seen those when they follow like out past Edmonton when they fly over these areas where they just fucking decimated large chunks of. It's incredible.

And you see that I just flew from Houston to L.A. Houston to LA, because I was coming back from this trip where we were shooting in the Amazon in the jungle, investigating oil spills, investigating deforestation for this new film on climate change. But when you fly from Houston to LA, for the first hour leaving Texas, you go through the Eagleford Shale, you go through a lot of oil exploration areas. Those places are decimated. I mean, it is unbelievable. You look out the window of the plane and you see just gas well pad after scorched landscape. I mean, it's just wild.

Apocalyptic. It's really – I myself have never taken that route. I've seen a lot of the new fracking fields as you go. If you go, for example, from Salt Lake City to Fort Worth or something, you'll see – you'll pass a lot of them in Colorado. But my jaw was on the floor looking at these yesterday. pass a lot of them in colorado but i was my jaw was on the floors looking at these yesterday it's it's very weird how many people are willing to sacrifice like big chunks of of natural landscape and environments in order to profit there's like there's like this point of like there's a point of diminishing returns like if you could ruin like the like say a small patch

of land where a house is if that if you knew that's all that's going to be ruined there's this one spot and out of that spot we're going to get enough oil to power los angeles period you know everybody be good yeah it's only one lot fuck it well look i mean so much of this is a discovery and a learning process right i mean we learned that smoking was bad for us we learned that climate change was happening. We're learning that fracking is devastating to water supplies and air. And that it has a huge effect on the climate, not only because of the gas burned and the CO2 burned from the gas, but also because of the methane leakage, which is a huge other piece of this all. Because when you're drilling all these holes in the ground and you're running pipelines for natural gas, you're going to be leaking a lot. the ground and you're running pipelines for natural gas, you're going to be leaking a lot.

And what they're discovering is that methane is, you know, about 80 to 100 times more potent than CO2 is in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, as a warming agent. So it's like if CO2 is one blanket, methane is 100 blankets. So you're that much hotter by leaking methane, which means if you're at anywhere, you know, more 1% to 3% of that methane is leaking into the atmosphere as raw methane, then you're worse than or on a par with coal, which is the worst of the fossil fuels. Currently, in Los Angeles, they do both production and transportation and consumption of natural gas, of methane. In that whole cycle, in Los Angeles, the measurement was 17% of it was leaking into the atmosphere. So this drilling for natural gas,

you know, is on a par or way worse than coal in terms of effects for climate. But what I'm saying is that, you know, we have to, the overall message here is not, okay, we're going to ban fracking here. We had to keep it out of this place. We've got to keep these things localized effects. The overall message is starting to become very clearly. We are, we have to start living much more sustainably, which doesn't necessarily mean a wholesale change in the way that we do things. We can still have, you know, podcasts and computers. We just have to start to switch our energy source. I mean, if you can imagine the technology that's sitting in front of you right now, you know, what would be the equivalent of that 100 years ago? An abacus and a bullhorn or something.

And if you never changed your technology, well, that's the same stuff. These are the same fuels that we were using 100 years ago. We have new fuel sources. We solar we have wind power you have tons of energy innovations but we have left our we have because of the power of the oil and gas industry and the coal industry we have let that sector of our technological development be completely inhibited and and doesn't progress but now you're starting to see it it's a amount the amount of money. They have so much money to influence. So much money, so much power.

Now, when you see these responses to your documentary, I mean, even the New York Times had some sort of a negative response to your documentary. Well, New York Times was really mixed. In fact, a year after the documentary came out, it was the day after the Oscars that we didn't win. We were nominated for Best Documentary for Gas Line Part One. The day after, a front page article ran about gas drilling contamination hitting rivers and contaminating water supplies.

And that was the first in a series of about 10 articles by Ian Urbina. Ian Urbina, one of the best investigative reporters for the Times. And he was actually, he told me later, a year later, that he was asked to investigate all these claims of fracking contamination because they wanted to find out if my film was true. And, you know, because obviously there was this gigantic smear campaign, and still is, against the films. And he came back with even more evidence than we had turned up that fracking was contaminated,

water supplies, that it was radioactive. Why didn't they do an addendum? Who? Why didn't the New York Times, like, come back? Oh, you can look up the Drilling Down series right now. Right, but what they wrote about your documentary was fairly critical, wouldn't you say? I don't remember. I don't read reviews.

If it was the film review, I don't read reviews. I'm interested in what the political reporting is, though. I just think that it was New York Times. There's one of these headlines, Gasland Debunked Even in New York Times. This is on one of the websites that I read. Right, but that's probably

not the truth. That's probably a headline written by the oil and gas industry pointing to a line in the New York Times that maybe is critical about from one point or another. But this is the thing that they do. They will take a sentence out of context, sentences that I've said, and put them out of context. And then say, I said this, you know what I mean? Or said the New York Times said this. There's very little checking up on all that stuff. But the bottom line, Joe, is New York, state of New York, just did an exhaustive seven-year process of environmental review and a two-year health study. Not an activist-y kind of government.

They were extraordinarily cautious about doing this over a period of seven years. And they just came back with a complete and total ban on fracking. Yeah, I thought that was... That vindicates everything that we've been doing and all the reporting that we've been doing. Because they just said, look, this isn't about activism. We got, yeah, obviously the protesters got our attention. But this was about a scientific review. And when you look at a scientific review, the health commissioner in New York State said, I wouldn't want my kids living near this.

Period. End of story. What have been the criticisms, though? And what, I mean, if you broke down what you've heard that people, you know, try to debunk about your film, like what the oil industry or whoever was behind it, the far right wing, you know,ervative groups that decided to attack. What were their criticisms? Well, their mantra, in spite of this preponderance of evidence, is hydraulic fracturing has never contaminated water supplies. That's what they say over and over and over again. That seems to be impossible.

It's crazy. Yeah. But it's like saying smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. It's like saying smoking is good for you. It's crazy. Yeah. But it's like saying smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. It's like saying smoking is good for you. It's crazy. Right. But see, the point of this, and I put out a short film a couple years back, and it was in Rolling Stone, and it's online. You can watch it for free.

It's called The Sky is Pink, and that's at pinkskyny.com. So pinkskyny.com, the sky is pink. The point is not to make a plausible argument in this case right smoking is good for you climate change doesn't exist there's no such thing as fracking water contamination the point is simply to create the appearance that there's a debate okay so if you go on if you and i go on the news right and you're from the oil industry and i'm If you and I go on the news, right, and you're from the oil industry and I'm a scientist, and I go out and I say, the sky is blue.

And the oil industry says, no, the sky is actually pink. Nine times out of ten, the anchor sitting there is going to go, well, the facts are being debated. So it gives, instead of going outside and looking, you know, this is specialized information, so you don't necessarily know who's telling the truth, right? You have to do a lot of research to figure out or watch these films to figure out who's telling the truth. Hence the New York State. The appearance that there's a debate gives the public, the public gets confused and says, oh, well, maybe the science isn't really in now. Maybe we don't know enough. So that staves off regulation.

And this was the tobacco industry's strategy for decades, and it worked. They funded bogus science at universities saying smoking was good for you and all these kinds of things. And this is what's worked with climate as well. 99% of scientists or something like this, 97% of scientists say that climate change is a man-made occurrence. that climate change is a man-made occurrence. And then there's 3% of scientists that work for the oil industry that say, no, it's all fake. Well, they say it's exacerbated by human beings. They're not saying that it's caused by human beings.

They're saying that it's a natural sort of state that constantly, there's a cycle of climate change in the world that we can't predict. But it seems to be accelerating because of human beings. Oh, yeah. I mean, but that's the scientific consensus. And what just came out on fracking, there are 400 plus scientific peer-reviewed studies that have come out. We're hitting a point of an explosion of the scientific research on fracking. One paper a day is coming out right now. Now, remember, in 2008, when I started this, there were no scientific peer-reviewed studies really on the effects of hydraulic fracturing at

this level. Now you're seeing one come out a day and 98% of them are saying there are health effects problems. 95% of them are saying air problems. 76% of them are saying like water contamination, or I may be off by one or two percentages here, but this is the basics. And if you look at a very dry, boring website called Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy, all those peer-reviewed scientific papers on fracking and their effects, and there are many different categories, right? Earthquakes, health effects, air, water contamination, social costs. You can see a cross-referencing of those peer-reviewed scientific studies. So when you actually do your work and you get away from what is this atmosphere within

the media where anybody can say anything and it goes untested, right? Anything that isn't refuted is all of a sudden true. So when you read on a website, oh, Gasland debunked by this source or whatever, and you don't go and find out, and they go to great lengths to kind of hide where this information or that headline or this thing is coming from, it casts an aura of doubt. And that idea that the facts are in doubt, that there's a debate going on, is very, very useful to them to stave off regulation, to intimidate politicians, to quell the public's fears, all sorts of things that are,

would be useful in terms of movement. Now, why do I have so many fans? It's because you got millions of people right now. In America right now, 15 million people live within one mile of a gas well. And the proposal is to, you know, double, triple, quadruple that, you know, or even more. Those people know that these films are telling the truth because their lives depend on doing that research, right? If you live in an area that's about to be fracked, and you don't know what to do, you're going to do your homework, because all of a sudden your entire property values are going to go down,

your kids are going to be living in an area that's potentially unsafe, your water could go south. So you're going to go and do that research. And Gasland is going to be a really good starting point for you, and our website, GaslandTheMovie.com, is going to be a good starting point for you. So when you've dug into it, and you know that the safety of your neighborhood and the conditions in which you currently live depend on you having knowledge and using that knowledge to campaign, in a government, in a situation, where the oil and gas industry has a bajillion times more resources than you do,

then you're going to hold up these films as something which are groundbreaking and that are helpful to you. where the oil and gas industry has a bajillion times more resources than you do, right, then you're going to hold up these films as something which are groundbreaking and that are helpful to you. And that was the whole point of them in the first place, right? The point of these films, you know, like a guy like me who's never made a documentary before with a budget of like $5,000 in a beat-up 92 Camry traveling around the country talking about an issue that nobody ever talked about, Camry traveling around the country talking about an issue that nobody ever talked about this was not a this was not a the ambition that I had was not to get on HBO and make it to the Oscars and do all this stuff it was just to basically educate my community because I was scared who ever thought that this film would become popular it's ridiculous even to imagine

what did you think when you were making this and nobody had covered this subject before and you were making this and as it's going along you know you're lighting people's water on fire and and i've even seen that attempted to be debunked which i found really fascinating when people were saying well you know you could light people's water on fire before all this like okay maybe maybe one or two fucked up places where some sort of gas had leaked into the water but i mean you're talking about people that didn't used to be able to do it then there was fracking now they can light their water on fire i mean that's a weird thing lighting your water on fire is a fucking weird thing for anybody to like poo poo that and make it look like

it's no big deal it goes along with that whole climate denial sort of right-wing attitude this weird team thing this idealistic or uh ideologue idea you know what these ideologies that people subscribe to whether it's a progressive or conservative they get locked into these things and they just say what the talking points are. And that's one of them. You know, the real reason is because to admit that climate change is a problem and admit that oil and gas is a problem would upend their entire political and economic philosophy. So they have kind of cornered themselves into a denial. But is it? Because the truth of it is that when we have these types of

energy structures and political structures and economic structures, you know, what the answer is, is public sector development. The answer is collective responsibility. The answer is, how do we take on these ideas of sustainability as a society? Now, all those things are anathema to rampant deregulated international global mega corporation capitalism, right? That system wants you to go to Walmart, to drive there, you know, to use a lot of resources, to never really invest in the public space, to make sure that corporations have deregulated the workforce so that we pay people less and less. All of these things that so-called conservatives are married to,

the underpinning of a lot of those values is you have to deny climate change. You have to deny that there's people who are being harmed by this system. And that's not unusual. We live in a society of increasing social and economic inequality. A lot of that inequality is underpinned by a basic economic philosophy that's created. And oil and gas is a huge part of that. So you can't listen to the science at a certain point because your entire other world will fall apart at that moment so it's kind of

it's kind of sad you know um because now you've got people with cell phones in their pockets right whose entire lives depend on science working, denying science every single day. And that's crazy because you want science to work so that your tires don't explode on your car when you're driving down the highway at 65 miles an hour. You want science to work the aerodynamics of your vehicle. You want to make sure your plane doesn't crash. You want your cell phone to work. You want your modern medicine to keep you and your relatives healthy and alive.

And yet when it comes to the other effects of fracking contamination, climate change, all of these things, all of a sudden science can't, doesn't matter. Well, I don't think it's a coincidence that the right wing is also connected inexorably with religious fundamentalism. I mean, and then religious fundamentalism is also a denial of science in a lot of ways. I mean, you're looking at sort of the same sort of compartmentalized thinking that allows people to think that the earth was made in 10,000 years ago in six days. Well, I think that there's definitely a correlation between some of the things in the past, you know, Galileo, Copernicus, these were challenged, challenges, putting it mildly. Imprisoned. But if you look at what the Pope is saying right now.

He's a different dude, huh? Unbelievable. He's really cool. So these don't have to be in conflict. Right. The Pope is saying, well, yeah, science is the way that God created things. And he's just showing us how that works. Now, whether you believe that or not, there's always a way to absorb these things.

And I think that, you know, or when you look at something like Fritjof Capra's work, The Tao of Physics, when you're looking at, you know, extreme Eastern philosophies and how they connect with what physicists are doing at the deepest level. So you don't have it doesn't have to be that way. I just think that, um, I don't know what motivates people to deny science. I couldn't crawl inside that mental space. Um, but I do know what causes people, um, to, to, uh, to need science and to need information. And that's a very profound impulse, I think, in people. And I think that you need to have cross-referencing. You need to have multiple sources. I mean, every single one of these scenes in these films.

HBO and their lawyers checked out, and we had to submit thousands and thousands of pages of references to other work and to the science to clear all of these scenes. We were actually nominated for an Emmy for research for Gas Land Part 2. Has anything been challenged legally? Any of the things that you guys have said? No. Nothing? No.

Well, that's kind of— Zero. That says a lot, doesn't it? I mean, in this day and age where people sue over almost anything, it would seem like they would just start dragging you into court just to fuck with you. Well, they've done that to some filmmakers. I feel very fortunate that that hasn't happened. How come it hasn't happened to you? Are you working for the man secretly?

My legal advice that we got through the... I'm not sure if I'm supposed to repeat this kind of thing, but they said, you know, if they did that, it would be like Gasland 3 on steroids, because we would have discovery into their work. Oh, I see. So if they did sue you, you would be able to go dig deep

and find out how much they actually knew. And I think that it was interesting, because the first film, they did crazy stuff. They attacked the Osc film, they did crazy stuff. They attacked the Oscars for giving us a nomination. This practically handed us the Oscar. We had no chance in hell of winning the Oscar. I mean, it was clear that one of the other films was going to win, like we were the underdog.

And then they started to attack the Oscars. And all of a sudden, we were like, oh, my God. My publicist was screaming up and down going, you can't pay for publicity like this. It's like, you know, so they all the attacks on the film and the first film caused, I think, an enormous amount of interest in the movie. And the second film they backed off. They didn't attack it hardly at all. We got one day where Grover Norquist and Glenn Beck and a bunch of people sort of lined up and said some stuff. Glenn Beck?

Yeah. It was kind of nice to get attacked. Glenn Beck's going after you. That of lined up and said some stuff. Glenn Beck? Yeah. It was kind of nice to get attacked by him. Glenn Beck's going after you. That's nice. Yeah. Did he cry? I don't know. He should have cried. I mean, I think if somebody said, you know, you're judged,

your life should be judged by the measure of your enemies. So if Glenn Beck and these other crazy people are against me, I kind of feel like that's all right. Yeah, that's a good sign. Or, well, he's just one of those guys where it's like he's in such a weird spot now that kind of anything he says, you automatically go, oh, fucking Glenn Beck said that? Like, ah. You know, it's like a Nancy Grace type thing. Like, oh, Nancy Grace is talking shit about you.

It's sad. It's really sad that we have provided airspace. But, you know, look, honestly, I don't think the films were popular because, you know, all of a sudden this was like a – well, I mean, I think that some of the visual scenes, you know, of Light and Water on Fire in both films, you know, did a lot. But I do think that the real reason the films were popular is because so many places are under siege from the oil and gas industry. This is a moment where the oil and gas industry is trying to expand in a way that they domestically onshore in a way that they haven't ever. So that same Society of Petroleum Engineers PowerPoint that I talked about, it said also that the oil and gas industry plans to drill more oil and gas wells in the next 10 years than they've drilled in the last 100 years.

Okay. So that means they want to drill 2 million more oil and gas wells in the United States. That's a state of insanity. That's drilling the United States into Swiss cheese. Do you know that ExxonMobil, one company, spends $100 million a day looking for new oil and gas? That's $100 million a day. A day. Now, we want a renewable energy economy. We wanted solar and wind. You could do it. In fact, in the new climate agreement

between the United States and China, China committed to building 800 to 1000 gigawatts of renewable energy power in China by 2030. So that's 15 years from now, right? 800 to 1000 gigawatts is the amount of energy that the United States uses for its power grid. So if we wanted to do all of our power and renewable energy in 15 years, we could do it. We would simply have to do what the Chinese are doing. We're not in a state where we can't get out of this problem. We can get out of this problem. The bigger problem is how much control the oil and gas industry exerts upon our government and on our media. That is the resources you're talking about are so staggering.

A hundred million dollars a day just looking for new oil and gas. And that's just one company. Yeah. Out of a lot of companies. Right. New oil and gas. And that's just one company. Yeah.

Out of a lot of companies, right? And the fact of the matter is some very smart scientists, and this was pointed out by Bill McKibben, did calculations for how much more oil and gas we could burn. Because, you know, there's a sort of budget in the atmosphere for how much carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere and methane. And what they came up with is 565 gigatons. We can burn approximately 565 more gigatons worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if we're going to stay below two degrees of warming. Now, we're near one degree of warming now, and that's already wreaking havoc on climate systems. Super storms, droughts, floods, you know. So two degrees, though, is the limit that a lot of governments have agreed to try to keep global warming under two degrees. If we want to keep it under two degrees, and two degrees is bad.

Like at two degrees, you lose 30% of the species on the planet. Two degrees is bad. But if we want to keep it below two degrees, our carbon budget is 565 gigatons. Now, currently, proven reserves that the oil and gas and coal industry has said, we have these reserves in the ground. Because oil and gas and coal industries have two bank accounts. They have money in the bank and they have oil and gas and coal in the ground. Now, if you take all the oil and gas and coal that's in the ground, not including fracking and all these unconventional resources, but what they say that we have, that amounts to 2,765 gigatons or so and change. So almost 2,800, almost five times the amount that

we're allowed to burn. So they're looking for more, right? They're spending $100,000 a day looking for more. But we already know that if they burned everything that they say they have, we'd be talking about 6, 7, 8 degrees warming. This is like telling the oil and gas world that they have to write down 80% of their assets. They're just gone. Because either their business model fails or the planet fails. They're just gone because either their business model fails or the planet fails. So is it just denying this because it's convenient, because they're still extracting money,

and because they know that if they keep going right now, they're fine. At a certain point, maybe they'll deal with it in the future. I mean, what's the thought process behind it? Do they address it at all? Let's call Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, and ask him. He doesn't take calls. He doesn't take calls. He's too busy. But you know what?

Recently he just did. He actually sued his town because they were going to put a fracking water tower in the view of his ranch mansion in Texas for $5 million. I heard about that. That's hilarious. That's actually cute. He's making, I think it's something like $100,000 an hour. But the man can't grasp the irony of him trying to keep fracking out of his own backyard. We probably just thought it would never come up.

Do you see what I'm trying to get at here? The connectivity of this moment and future planning is not adding up he's not he's not going oh maybe the press would find out about this and roast me for like a week he's not finding he's not saying that to himself what he's and this in the same way he's not saying oh maybe we should stop producing this stuff because we're going to roast the planet for centuries you know like this is the problem um or it's part of the problem. The main argument against it is that we need this oil, that we don't have enough alternative energy sources right now

to live the life that we're living, to power our cities. Is that not true? Not true. It's completely not true. So, okay, we've stopped using oil right now. Because, well well you have to phase it out okay but definitely in terms of the unconventional sources right fracked gas fracked oil um tar sands development mountaintop removal for coal all of these new expansions definitely definitely not necessary but i asked the same question several years ago because i didn't want

to be a hypocrite i didn't want to say oh well well, we can't do this because it's in my backyard, you know. So myself and the wonderful actor Mark Ruffalo and some renewable energy bankers who live in California, we asked a guy named Mark Jacobson, who worked at Stanford University, if he would please look into, he, Stanford, Mark Jacobson at Stanford had done a report that said we could get off of all fossil fuels for all purposes by 2030. And he mapped out how to do it. The problem with solar and the problem with wind is that they're intermittent, right? So the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. And unless you want to have massive storage batteries or something, you kind of need to deal with that problem. But what he's discovered was that there was a curve for when solar worked and a curve for when wind worked and that they inverted. So that if you bundled wind and solar

together, you would solve the intermittency problem up to something like 95%. So when the sun is not shining, the wind is often blowing, right? When there's clouds, you're going to have a windier day and the wind blows harder at night. So you have this ability to bundle wind and solar in a way that gets you past this problem. And he mapped this out for the whole world. So we asked him, could he please map it just for one state, for New York State? And he said, absolutely, let's do that. He devoted and Stanford devoted some resources and they came out with a peer-reviewed study that shows how New York State could get off of all fossil fuels. All fossil fuels?

For all purposes, transportation, everything. And that work is at the website called thesolutionsproject.org. You can see for every state, they've done a map for every state, how to get off of all oil, coal, and natural gas. Does it involve massive amounts of public transportation? Do people have the same freedom to drive? No. You're talking about electric cars. You're talking about fuel cells.

You're talking about technology that exists today. So it's a question of doing the transfer. And what's really interesting is you save billions of dollars in health care costs because we don't realize it, but you're breathing in fossil fuel exhaust all the time. And that causes huge amounts of death and illness in the United States. So, I mean, if you could pull it up, Solutions Project, I don't have it in front of me, but you save billions of dollars per state in avoided mortality costs. And that's just one benefit. Well, I read a study recently that was talking about people that live in urban environments live 10 years less than people that live in suburbs or in rural areas just because of air quality. Yeah, and not just the death rate, but it's also birth defects and other things.

Brake dust. There's a lot of things that people aren't thinking about. Brake dust is huge, apparently, in cities. Like, when you clean your car and you notice that black stuff around your wheel, it doesn't just stick to your fucking wheels. That stuff gets in the air. And if you're in, like, New York City...

A lot of it's asbestos, right? I don't think it's asbestos. I don't think brake dust... I'm not an expert on this. I don't know what brake. Don't quote me on that. Find out what brake dust, what the fuck brake dust is made out of, Jamie. But when you look at New York City, for example, and you see just fucking hundreds and thousands

of cabs back and forth, stop and go traffic, they're just braking constantly, braking. That stuff creates, it obviously creates dust that gets on the wheels, but it also gets in the air. That shit is awful. Our production studio is right next to the BQE. I think about this a lot. Oh, it's so bad for you, man. Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Why don't you guys go to the suburbs somewhere?

Well, I mean, I live at least half the time in my house in Pennsylvania, which is where, you know. Where it all started, right? Yeah. How fucked up is that area now? It's beautiful. It's nothing. We won. You want totally one. So no one in, we won in the Delaware river basin in two 2013. Um, we want a political moratorium at the Delaware river is, and the Dell and the New York city watershed is this interconnected watershed

system that brings water to 15 million people in New York City, in Philadelphia, and southern New Jersey. It's a pristine watershed. It's one of the last pristine rivers like that on Earth. And the Delaware River Basin is, since it's a border, it is the border between New York and Pennsylvania, between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The river basin, the river itself is controlled by this five-member body, the governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, and a representative from the federal government. In 2011, we campaigned hard to make sure that they didn't pass regulations. We won that fight when Delaware

and New York both said we're unsure about this. The Republican governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Chris Christie and Tom Corbett, wanted to frack the world's largest unfiltered water supply. They were like, we don't care. But we managed to create enough information going towards the Democrats that they paused. Now, that meant we had a political moratorium. In 2013, about 10 days after Gas Net 2 came out, in my area, there were 100,000 acres leased by the oil and gas industry. They canceled the leases. Now, that was a day, like, I've never experienced, like, to realize that they just left. 100,000 acres worth of lease. And I was surrounded by people who had leased.

They just left 100,000 acres worth of lease. And I was surrounded by people who had leased. We had 20 acres, you know, and my all my neighbors, a lot of my neighbors had leased, you know, and that was an amazing day when the oil and gas company just said, we're out of here. Now, what's added to that, New York State just passed this ban. It's a ban on high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which means that their vote on the Delaware River Basin Commission will permanently be no until that ban is overturned. If it were to ever be overturned, I don't think it will be because the conditions under which that ban was created are very complicated.

Like you had a six-year environmental impact study. You had a two-year environmental impact study. You had a two-year health review. The health review says something very interesting and unusual. It says that the oil and gas industry now has to prove that they're safe. That's a reversal of the burden of proof. What it normally is, is the citizens who are being contaminated have to prove that they were made ill or their water was contaminated, the air. That's a very hard thing for individual citizens to do. Scientists have to do that.

Universities have to do that. Labs have to do that. It's extremely costly. So the fact that New York State has just said, no, actually, oil and gas industry, you guys are the ones who have to prove that you're safe, when there's this huge preponderance of evidence that they're not safe, that they can never be safe,

that they're injecting chemicals into the ground and into the air. So that's a huge preponderance of evidence that they're not safe, that they can never be safe, that they're injecting chemicals into the ground and into the air. So that's a huge thing. So the Delaware River Basin is a national treasure. You know, it's an amazing place. The Catskills, go visit if you're ever in. No, I've been there. My parents used to live in Pennsylvania. Okay.

Yeah, so I've been there. It's gorgeous. I was inviting the listeners to come. But yeah, you should go too. No, it's gorgeous. That part of the world is amazing. But yeah, you should go too. No, it's gorgeous. That part of the world is amazing. The reason why everybody used to go vacation in the Catskills. Sure.

It's fantastic. A lot of summer camps. Yeah, it gives you this reset. You just get out into nature and you see what it's like. Is there any sort of method or is there any sort of preparation for cleanup for these things? Or is there any sort of preparation for cleanup for these things? Have they ever come up with a way to remove these areas that have been contaminated, to remove the contaminants from the water and the wells? Well, the way this has been described to me is under the ground, right? If you have a fracking leak or a benzene leak under the ground. This is extremely hard to clean.

You can treat the water once it comes to the surface, but getting the contaminants that are stuck to particles within the aquifers, almost every scientist or every scientist I've ever said is it's almost, it's virtually impossible. It's done. So once you fuck it up, it's done. That's the real problem right now with all this stuff. It's not just fracking wells, but it's also injection wells. We do a lot of waste injection in America.

What does that mean? We inject toxic waste into the ground. And we have been doing this for decades. Just to get rid of it? To get rid of it. Sort of like Nevada does with nuclear waste. Right. They just sort of stick it in a mountain.

The theory several decades ago was if we inject it deep enough, like Nevada does with nuclear waste. Right. They just sort of stick it in the mountain. And the theory several decades ago was if we inject it deep enough, we'll never see it again. Because water aquifers are generally between 400 and 1,200 feet. They're pretty shallow. These deep injection wells can be 10,000 feet deep, right? But what we're

discovering, and there's a really jarring Scientific American article about this by a guy named Abram Luskarten, who was also investigating fracking. We worked on a lot of these things, not together, but on parallel tracks for years, shows that, well, whoops, we made a mistake. There are artesian springs. There are hot springs. That water travels under the ground. There are hot springs.

That water travels under the ground. And we've been injecting all sorts of toxic waste, not just the oil and gas industry, although that is one of the bigger shares of this injection process, right? Produced water, all these chemical, you know, influenced or infused waters. But just from the chemical industry, any industry, you're using – when you have liquid toxic waste, there are places all over the United States where you can just inject it into the ground. The problem is that those injection wells are leaking at rates higher even than the oil and gas wells, that they leak at the surface, that they break down. 10,000 feet and they get to the surface. Yeah, that's what they're showing. That's what they're saying. This one EPA scientist was bonkers in this article.

He said, you know, look, this is a terrible policy. We're going to discover that all of our groundwater is polluted between now and 100 years from now. So it's sort of the environmental equivalent to picking up the carpet and sweeping shit under the rug. Kind of. Except it comes right through the carpet and starts fucking with your house. It comes up out of the carpet after a while.

It's like in Poltergeist when they build the whole subdivision on the Indian burial ground and the graves start coming up through the suburban basement. That's like the metaphorical equivalent. But, you know, look, it doesn't even take hiding this stuff underground. hiding this stuff underground, we are distanced from natural environments to a great degree and that we miss a lot of this. You know, there is no agency for reporting spills, onshore oil and gas spills in America. But Energy Wire, another amazing reporter named Mike Sorohan, ran all these records for one year, 2012. What he found by plumbing the depths of state agencies' records and all this kind of stuff was that there were 6,000 oil and gas spills onshore in the United States in 2012 alone. Spilling more oil, gas, wastewater, and other fracking fluids and stuff.

and wastewater and other fracking fluids and stuff, they spilled 16 million gallons, which was four million more gallons than the entire Exxon Valdez spill in one year on shore. Now, are people noticing this? I mean, they probably are where they are at. Is it being reported in the media? Not a lot. It wasn't a groundbreaking story. For me, it's astonishing to know that we had 6,000 oil and gas spills in 2012,

spilling more oil, gas, and wastewater by a third than the Exxon Valdez spill. It's mind-boggling. So we're in a state where we're kind of distanced from how this actually all affects the natural systems that keep us alive. the natural systems that keep us alive. Um, and you know, what's, what's, uh, always amazing, wonderful to me about going home after being on tour or being, uh, you know, on a shoot or something is that I go home and have confidence in the water. Like I know what's, I know what it's going to taste like. I know that it's in good shape. I know that by and large, it's not going to be contaminated. And that is something that in the northeast of the United States is an extraordinarily precious resource and has a price tag on it for New York City.

It's worth billions and billions and billions of dollars per year to have that pristine watershed, and New York City tries to protect it. And that is, to a large degree, why this fracking fight has gone all over and has become such a huge thing in the media. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your idea is by doing this and what you've sort of gained from exploring this and creating these documentaries is this argument that we can't keep going the way we're going. There is no way. We eventually will pollute

everything. And that there has to be some sort of acknowledgement and recognition of this. And some steps have to be taken. And there's a huge blowback, a pushback from that, from the people that are extracting money by doing things the way they are. And I think that's one of the things that people are arguing that are pro-fracking, even people that aren't even in the industry. They're those folks that tend to leave to lean towards conservative ideas because they go, Hey, we need jobs. Hey, we need, you know, industry. It's good for business. And what you're saying, I think, and I think it's pretty hard to argue that ultimately, if we keep doing what we're doing, pumping shit into the ground and fracking and all the waste that's getting into the oceans. Ultimately, we've only been doing this for a couple hundred years.

If you go back- Less. Yeah, less. But let's be really conservative. Let's say 200 years. Sure. 200 years ago, there was so much less pollution, so much less waste. There was no nuclear waste.

There was no fracking. The oil wells that existed were- It was a totally different sort of a setup than we have today. much less waste there was no nuclear waste there was you know no fracking there was the the oil wells that existed were it was a totally different sort of a setup than we have today the the things that they're doing now these offshore oil rigs like jesus fucking christ like the amount of waste the amount of actual pollutants that get into environments the the things that we're doing in these third world countries where they just go in and and all that economic hitman shit where they take over these environments and you know and give these people loans that they can't possibly pay back and then oh we'll just extract your resources then whoom they set up this credit system that is impossible to sustain and then they use it as just sort of a

method to get in and start extracting at a certain point in time that it's gonna fuck up everything like if it goes on another 200 years or another 500 years how much longer can it be done to deny that there's some sort of a process in in in place that has to be mitigated that has to be slowed down seems kind of crazy yeah you have to realize that i mean we don't uh yeah you're gonna have an epidemic of health problems. But isn't it crazy that a guy like you, you, just a regular dude, makes a documentary and it's one of the leading voices? I think it's surprising. It's very surprising.

But I feel like I had no choice. You know, it felt like it was a life and death issue to me. And I think that's why we're seeing so many victories. I mean, this is astonishing what's happened. A grassroots movement kept the most powerful corporations in the history of money out of an entire state of New York, out of France, out of the Netherlands, out of huge sections of Australia, out of a lot of South Africa. I mean, we're racking up win after win after win. huge sections of Australia, out of a lot of South Africa. I mean, we're racking up win after win after win.

The reason is because people are trying. I mean, we're also losing a lot of places, no question. Like South Dakota. But I mean, that we're winning anywhere is kind of incredible. But it's because I think people understand this is a life or death issue. And it's not that big of a leap. And this is the point of all these new thoughts. Like I'm working on this new film, which is not fracking. It's about climate change.

It's about how people fight in general. And it's about values. But it's not that big of a leap to go, oh, you know what? I don't want a fracking well in my backyard. But even if I win and I don't have the fracking well in my backyard, in 20 years from climate change, I could lose everything I love about my backyard. So this can't just be about my own place. It's got to be about all over the place.

And all of a sudden, everyone's on the front line. Because when you take into account that you have fracking in 34 states, right, proposed for huge amounts of area, and then you take into account, well, if you look at some of the maps on sea level rise, you lose like all of Florida, you lose most of our coastal cities on the East Coast, right? Those people are on the front line. If you look at the Keystone XL pipeline running through the middle of the country, those people are on the front line. If you look at the people who are fighting tar sands development in Utah or mountaintop removal and long wall mining in Appalachia or fracking in California, for that matter, you know, all of these things do start to add up and become one fight.

And we have an amazing convergence of purpose, I think. When you look at people in the fracking movement, look at people who are in the climate change movement, look at people who are fighting coal, or people who are basically trying to deal with health, like public health, like what you're talking about in terms of pollution standards in cities. These things are adding up. And the fight for, I think, social and economic inequality are bound together. there was a brilliant piece that I just read about Eric Gardner, I think it was in Salon, and why environmentalists should be interested in the fact that Eric Gardner was killed by a police in New York City. Well, he had asthma. Asthma is a consequence of inner city black people living in impoverished, bad environmental conditions.

When you look at the black neighborhoods that are near coal-fired power plants or in bad, you have asthma rates that are much higher than in white neighborhoods, which are more affluent. These things are tied together. So what we're seeing, when I look out and go, okay, yeah, you're right. We have a crisis. The fracking might have been my way into understanding this crisis. Or someone else's might have been climate. Someone else's might have been how the Rockaways were submerged under Hurricane Sandy.

Someone else's might have been Eric Garner's death and going, oh, wow, this man might have survived had he not had asthma, had that not been an environmental indicator for people in rural communities of color, I mean, urban communities of color. So, yeah, there's a thing that's starting to wake up here. And it's very exciting to watch. So because once you're inside of it, it's like a different system. You know, you have a lot of mutual support. Like people who are in the anti-fracking movement, if you meet somebody who's from Wyoming or from South America

or from California or New York, you're immediately in a sort of kinship situation where now your brothers, your family, your friends, we're working on this. We're working on trying to fix this problem. And you see a different system of values start to get engaged. And recently, just down in the Amazon with these incredible Kichwa people and places. What part of the Amazon? Well, I was in two places. I was in the Peruvian Amazon along the Marignone River, where we saw devastating oil spills in the middle of the jungle, just from pipeline ruptures. And then another place called Sarayaku in Ecuador, which had actually successfully fought off the oil and gas industry and won reparations from them and got rid of them.

So we kind of like went to the Pennsylvania of the Amazon and to the New York. And I read a paper, interestingly, uh, by a guy in, um, in Massachusetts, peer-reviewed scientific paper, which showed that indigenous values, protecting the forest, protecting deforestation, are actually something that should be rewarded financially because they're the ones who are protecting, um, the earth from climate change. the earth from climate change. So their values of respecting the forest, not cutting it down, all these kinds of things actually has a current price tag on it that says, you know, these people are keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

These people are, um, cause the Amazon without the Amazon, we'd be screwed. You know, like we, we, the Amazon breathes in so much of the carbon dioxide that we export and breathes it back out into the world as

oxygen. If you've seen Inconvenient Truth, you see Al Gore's line that staggers up and down. That's because summertime in the Amazon breathes in all of our CO2 and breathes it back out as oxygen. So these people are actually protecting, simply because of their value system, are protecting us in the way that we're doing things. So there is something to be gained from looking at. Now, I'm not saying you got to live in the middle of the jungle and eat barks, bugs, lizards, and leaves. I'm not saying that. But there is something of a conversation that has to happen. And it's happening right now between, you know, what do we really, what really makes you feel,

you know, what is really the point, right? Is it just to consume as much as we possibly can and burn up all these resources and live in this incredibly wasteful way? Or do we have to start to have a conversation about what does all this mean? What are we doing as life on the planet? And can we move towards more sustainable ways of being? And the science and the economics from every standpoint says, absolutely, we have to phase out oil and gas. And by the way, the great thing about this is we can. And if we actually want to continue to live in a democracy, which is our values, right, we have to, we have no choice. Because oil and gas is currently destroying our ability to have democracy in America.

And so, by the way, is the banking industry. You know, there was the study. Just too much influence, too much power. Well, I mean, Princeton University did a peer reviewed study that asked this kind of naive question. Hmm. What form of government does America actually have? And they did all this research and looked at all these public policy questions, and they came back with a result. Lo and behold, America is not a democracy.

America is an oligarchy currently, which is why you can have 90% of people want background checks for people buying AK-47s, and we don't get it, and 80% of people can want a minimum wage hike, and we don't get it, or 75% of people want curtail know, want, you know, a minimum wage hike and we don't get it. Or 75 percent of people want curtailing of global greenhouse gas emissions and we don't get it. It's because we're not in a democracy that actually our voting and our opinions don't have an influence on the things that matter the most to us right now, unless you're an oligarch, unless you have a billion dollars and you can play that game. So the answer to what form of government America has right now is not a democracy, which means our democracy has been destroyed by those people who are currently taking it away from us. And if we want to have those democratic values, we have to start to take back the power, which means you have to start to organize and you have to do all the things that happens when, you know, we don't have democracy anymore.

And if you look back in history, well, could you really say that America was a democracy when black people couldn't vote, when women couldn't vote? You know, no. In fact, looking back at American history, America wasn't a democracy most of the time. It was a democracy of some, but not most. And right now that some is getting smaller and smaller and smaller to the 1% who have control of the reins of power. And if we want to take that stuff back, then you have to start to realize that you have to do every single thing that all of those very potent social movements have done throughout history. What did black people do to fight? Everything. We made movies. We made protests.

We did lobbying. We made movies. We made protests. We did lobbying. We created organizations. We fought in all the creative ways. We made films. We made a whole culture of resistance. If you're talking about the women's movement, if you're talking about the movement of black people. And the same thing is happening, I see this, in the current crisis.

Whether your entrance point is Occupy Wall Street, looking at banking, your entrance point is environmentalism. Your entrance point could be public health. Your entrance point could be gun control. You know, you're starting to see people really do that organizing and democratic work. And what's amazing to me is that that means democracy is alive and well in America. It's working to some degree. And we're seeing that this is our tools, our culture, our tools, our information, our tools, our radio shows like this, you know, to talk about where we need to go as a society. Because currently, it's not just the environment that is being destroyed, contaminated, and havoc is being wrought upon. It is our system of government. Yeah, I think that what we're dealing with now, what we're dealing with now is the amount of information that we can get on a regular basis is so far above and beyond anything that's ever existed in human history.

in history, that these old systems that were in place where they kind of deny facts or distort truths or keep extracting money and keep certain structures, influential structures in place, they're slowly but surely being exposed. And ultimately, I mean, I really, I'm a huge fan of technology. And when I follow technological trends and you pay attention to these transhumanists and futurists and you look at what they're projecting as far as like the next few decades, there's going to come a point in time where we're literally going to be able to read each other's minds and you're going to have full disclosure of virtually everything that everyone does.

That's kind of scary. It's terrifying, but in a sense it's not because – I mean it's terrifying because we value privacy. We value the idea that we can – but privacy also equals secrecy when it comes to corporations. And that's one of the things that they're doing. And even though we know how much influence oil and gas companies have, banking industry has on politics and lobbyists, we know all that. We only know it in the sort of kind of peripheral sense. You got to kind of really dig deep to find out the actual facts and who the fuck has the time to do the research?

Like when you were talking about the seven year study that New York state, this exhaustive study that they had to do. I mean, that's a lot of goddamn work. And people had to be hired to do that. It had to be their job. That's what they did. Yeah. It was a functioning democracy.

A lot of digging. Yeah. A lot of fucking digging. Part of that, though, was tapping into collective willpower and collective research because part of the study in New York was public comments, public hearings. Right. So the people, you had two minutes. You went and got up in front of the Department of Environmental Conservation, you said your two minutes. And the EPA did the same

thing when they did their scoping process on fracking. So it wasn't just government people getting paid, it was also public participation, which meant that it was a democratic process that was at work there. We are collectively so much smarter than any one of us and so much more motivated than any one of us. So when you're doing, I remember going early on and very naive days of taping stuff for whatever I was making. I didn't even know if it was a whole film at that point. Six hours of public testimony, two minutes per person, you know, and just going on and on and on. But this is what ended up actually creating the fracking ban. Because in each one of these environmental review periods, there were a chance for the public to comment. The most public comments that had ever been

recorded pre-fracking on one of these environmental impact studies was a thousand. pre-fracking on one of these environmental impact studies was 1,000. And in the first fracking review, I think it was 2009, they submitted 13,000 public comments. In the second review, they submitted 74,000 public comments. And in the final review, they submitted, or I say they, but I mean the movement in New York, submitted 204,000 public comments on an environmental impact study. Now, for the DEC to do its job, it's required by law to respond to every one of those. 200,000 comments? 204,000, yeah. Which means that that democratic process, yeah, it delayed the review by years and years,

which is part of the point, but it also meant that this issue was so important to people that they actually did public comments on an environmental impact study and went out. This is like way more than like when MoveOn sends you a petition, you just click yes. This is like doing your homework and getting it out and doing all those kinds of things. You know, so that was really significant. But that was a democratic process. That was New York saying to its citizens, we don't really know what this process is. What are your concerns?

And how do we address them? It's the opposite of what Pennsylvania did. It's the opposite of what a lot of Ohio did. They just opened the door and said, all right, come on in. You want to frack? Go for it. What's the worst offender when it comes to

the allowing of fracking, the allowing of environmentally damaging extraction methods? Well, I mean, you just— South Dakota's off the charts, right? North Dakota. North Dakota. North Dakota. They're going crazy now, right? The Bakken Shale is a disaster area.

They're going crazy. I was just up there, and over the summer, it is one of the worst. I mean, you've got flaring frack pits, emissions. Criminals. Out the wazoo. Moving from all over the country. it is one of the worst. I mean, you've got flaring, frack pits, emissions. Criminals moving from all over the country. A lot of criminals. No background checks, get a job, make $100,000 a year, dig holes, light them on fire. A lot of...

Mad Max. No, but actually there are reports on... Food and Water Watch did a report on social costs and found that all these indicators, social cost indicators go up in fracking areas, truck traffic, socially transmitted diseases, domestic violence, arrests, everything where you're going to have a dislocated young male population living in camps in these places.

Those kinds of things go up. And you're right, there weren't any background checks, and you had sex offenders, and you had all this kind of stuff. Sounds like a party. They're bringing in people from all over the country, aren't they? Prostitutes are like on buses. You can see the Bakken shale from space. NASA was like, wait a minute, did we build, it's brighter than Chicago, it was brighter than Chicago, brighter than Minneapolis. From space.

Because they're flaring off, guess what? And the product that tyrannized my area of Pennsylvania, natural gas, is being wasted and flared off and burned off on all these oil wells in the Bakken Shale because they have no method for transporting natural gas. Why is that? Well, when you're doing this drilling, you're getting both oil and gas, right? The oil is worth something. The gas isn't worth as much. Dry gas right now on the market is very low. So they're not capturing the gas at all. So when you drill an oil well, you're going to get some part of it, which is oil and another huge part of it, which is the gas.

The gas on the site will be burned off. First of all, because it's explosive. Look at the photos. So you have like, oh, it's behind. Yeah, there you go. So you have Bakken formation. So that's all. That means that every like 500 feet, there's a huge natural gas go, Bakken Formation. So that means that every 500 feet, there's a huge natural gas fire in the middle of a field. That's enormous. That is fucking crazy. It is bigger than Minneapolis. It's not bigger than Chicago.

But NASA was like, wait a minute, what is that? And I just went up there. This was going to be in the new film. And we saw not only these huge flare stacks, but we saw through only these huge flare stacks but we saw um uh through a fleer camera which is this camera that captures gas that raw methane even though they're burning it all off it's escaping from a lot of the infrastructure up there so there's all these people breathing that shit in so the massive fucking oh breathing that shit i've seen pictures of workers there's frack sand right so

they when they inject the water and the chemicals into the gas wells to they need fresh sand to keep the it's a propent it keeps open the cracks frack sand is actually made of silica silica gives you silicosis it's really deadly lung disease um i've i've seen these dudes call this like frac sand spill or spill of sand like um the bachan beach and like hanging out on the frac sand like swimming in it making jokes and stuff like this what these workers have no idea i'm just well there's a new piece that we just um i just did on workers in the oil and gas industry and we don't know where it's going to land yet we've seen if hbo wants it and maybe there are other channels that want it but a lot of these workers are not told what they're what they're handling and there's

an epidemic of really serious illnesses among the fracking workers whether they're in pennsylvania or in the bock and shale or in new orleans or wherever and i mean new orleans the bp oil spill cleanup people they brought in prisoners, for a lot of that? Well, they were also told that they weren't allowed to wear respirator masks and all sorts of stuff. I mean, like inhaling volatile organic compounds is bad for you. It gives you headaches. It can give you peripheral neuropathy. It can also give you long-term effects.

term effects. The great Theo Colborne, who just passed away a couple weeks ago, who was one of my teachers, she was in her late 80s. She discovered all the fracking chemicals. She started off talking to workers. And the workers would come to her and say, do you know anything about these chemicals? And she said, oh, yes, I do. And she, at her website, TEDx, the Endocrine Disruption Exchange, TEDx.org, you know, cancer to all sorts of things. And you can look at the list there. But on site, these workers are not told that they're handling toxic chemicals. These workers are not told that they're drilling into formations that are radioactive. These workers are not told don't get that stuff on your clothes. Don't expose your hands to it.

Don't breathe it in. They're not given these kinds of protections. Currently, if you're working in the oil and gas industry, the fatality rate is seven times the national average for other industries. Seven times? You have a lot of guys. Due to disease or accidents? No. Most of that stuff is all long-term.

This is immediate. Fatalities are a lot of accidents. Gas and oil wells explode. But the majority is truck accidents and heavy equipment accidents because truck drivers in the oil and gas fields are not subject to the same truck driving laws. I mean, I know I keep going on and on about how awful this is, but it's all true. Truck driving laws in the United States say you can't drive, I think it's more than 12 hours. But if you're an oil field truck driver, there's something called oil field

exempt. You're oil field exempt, which means you can travel six hours to get to your oil well, but let's say the load isn't ready there yet. So you can sit on location for six hours and then still have to drive another six hours. And so you can sit on different locations and not, that doesn't count. So as one worker put it to me, you're 25 hours into a 24 hour day. And guess what? You're driving a big rig around in western PA, perhaps, or in North Dakota, that's full of toxic fluid in the back of your thing. And then you're so tired that you drive off the road and into a creek. And that's how you have a big spill. Or you're so tired that you flip your truck onto somebody's vehicle, as happened to a good friend of mine's close friend.

of mine's close friend, the truck flipped over, killed the person in the driver's seat and the person in the passenger seat was not killed. I mean, you're seeing traffic accidents on the rise. And so there's a great article in Ian Urbina's Drilling Down series in the New York Times about truck accidents. And the piece that we're doing um uh talks about the chemicals and the workers that are exposed to chemicals with several workers who were made very ill on the on the job site by being exposed to they're they're told to squeegee off the top of the chemical that's on the top of the well pad site and then put it into their trucks um and

they get it all over themselves and and then other um workers are killed because the sites are not safe so this is a new piece that we i i hope um will be coming out in the next month or two um about the work in the gas fields that the the driving thing is terrifying to me oh yeah because you're on the road right yeah you see those guys driving trucks and everybody's heard the stories about guys on truck driver meth, and they make more money if they can get there quicker. So they've put regulations in to make sure that drivers are not allowed to drive certain hours.

But you always hear about people violating those, like the guy that got in that car accident that killed Tracy Morgan's friend and hurt him, the guy who was driving that truck for Walmart. Is that what it was? Yeah. Was it Walmart? Yeah. I. The guy who was driving that truck for Walmart, is that what it was? Yeah. Was it Walmart? Yeah.

I mean, that guy was driving more than the limit, more than what he was supposed to do, and he fell asleep. Fell asleep and crashed into their limo. Falling asleep behind the wheel when you're driving a huge oil and gas truck is a common and perilous situation in these fracking areas. How did they get that exemption? I think it happened in the 60s where they argued that they needed more flexibility. I mean, look, you look into every single environmental law that's on the books right now in America. There are attempts or full-out exemptions.

The oil and gas in the fracking industry is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Safe Drinking Water Act is the primary public health protection law for our groundwater, right? It says if you're going to inject toxic material under the ground, you need a permit from EPA, or you need to ask if you need a permit. Fracking in 2005 was made explicitly exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act in the 2005 Energy Bill, which was Dick Cheney's project. It was their number one thing that they were after to this huge fracking explosion. And they're currently still exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. In fact, there are exemptions for the oil and gas industry from most of our major

environmental laws, the Clean Water Act, which is about surface water, the Clean Air Act, which is what Obama administration is using to enforce new rules, the Superfund Act. The Superfund Act is like a fund that oil and gas was supposed to pay into to do environmental cleanup, right? So that was signed in, I think, 1980 by Jimmy Carter in 1979. And the only reason we have a Superfund Act is because there was a little horse trading in Congress that to get the Superfund Act passed, guess what they did? They suspended environmental impact studies in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore drilling. Whoa.

So that's why you have this huge amount of offshore drilling on the Gulf of Mexico and not, for example, on the Atlantic coast. It's because they don't have to do an environmental impact study down there. Why? Because they wanted to pass this Superfund to do toxic cleanup onshore in America. Now, 30 years, 35 years later, the oil and gas industry has completely weaseled out of their obligations to pay into the Superfund Act. So they're exempt from the Superfund regulations for fracking. And every single fracking well pad site would be considered a Superfund site because there's that much. How does it work?

How the fuck does that continue? Go ask Princeton. And they still get subsidized as well, which is even crazier. Well, this is what I'm trying to explain here. I'm not talking about abstract concepts or abstract influence. You can trace these things really clearly. You can see, you know, if you read your history. In fact, a lot of this stuff is in the presidential report on the Deepwater Horizon spill. It's a fascinating document. It reads kind of like a spy novel. You can, you know, like the rig explodes,

people jump off into the water. But you also get the history right there of how all this stuff happened. And one of the conclusions in that presidential report was that the oil and gas industry was in fact too big, more powerful than any branch of government that ever tried to regulate it. So what you're seeing right now is that they're not more powerful, however, than citizens working together. And this is what we keep campaigning, keep saying that the answer here is the grassroots. The answer here is us working together as a grassroots movement. And you've seen this in California. Californians Against Fracking was started, I think, when we did the press conference kickoff here in L.A. in 2013. And we have started a new thing called Solutions Grassroots, which is, you know, the Solutions Project did the science on how to do renewable energy. Solutions Grassroots is actually putting the tools to develop renewable energy at a grassroots level in the people's hands.

the tools to develop renewable energy at a grassroots level in the people's hands. So at our website, which is solutionsgrassroots.com, and we're doing a solutions grassroots tour, we're going town to town to build renewable energy resources at a democratic level. So when you go into a town, we do like a presentation, whether it's we actually had a play going for a while, We sometimes do concerts. We do talks. And then we go into the citizenship and say, look, do you want solar on your roof? Here are these companies that will do it. Do you want to buy locally sourced wind power? Well, here's how you can do it in certain states, right? Do you want to create an energy collective in your town?

Here's the resources for it. So a lot of times it's just giving people information right then and there and saying, you know, getting people riled up and excited and giving them the support to do it. So we're going to do about a 40 city tour of solutions grassroots in New York state in February and March. and I'll be doing that with Zephyr Teachout who was an incredibly popular candidate for governor who won 35% of the vote against Andrew Cuomo in his last election and a number of musical guests

I think we're going to be doing that in February and March. We'd love to do the Solutions Grassroots Tour in California love to do it in other states so you can go to solutionsgrassroots.com you can sign up there there are links that directly you can buy solar, you can buy wind power, you can do all that at a consumer level. But more importantly, what we're trying to do with Solutions Grassroots is get a

grassroots energy movement towards getting ourselves off fossil fuels. Because, you know, this, even though like you can map this out at Stanford and you have these great, amazing celebrities all talking about renewable energy, the people have to get it done. We have to get it done. We have to say, you know what, I don't want to buy oil and gas and coal to heat my home, to power my home anymore. I don't want to do that anymore. I want to get off of it. Some of the resources are very expensive, like buying an electric car. That's out of the range for a lot of people. But getting solar on your roof actually is economic. It makes sense. Buying locally sourced wind power is possible in a lot of states. It's not in California, I don't think, but it is in New York

state. There's a company called Ethical Electric that we have a link to at our website, solutionsgrassroots.com. So you can just basically say, you know what, I'm going to buy wind power instead of buying electricity from coal or oil or gas. And, you know, you've done a huge amount right there. this stuff. New York, by stopping fracking, kept the equivalent of 57 million cars off the road just by keeping that stuff in the ground there. And I think the equivalent of taking 72 coal-fired power plants offline for a year, the movement is actually going to help solve these things. So it's like, how do you get people together? Well, we just get together. We have a film screening. There are a lot of great films on this stuff. We have a tour, we have a talk, and you start organizing locally. And while this is going on, you still got North Dakota

that's just going off the rails. You do, but I have to believe- How much of an environmental impact is the burning of that? You were getting into that, but the burning of that natural gas. Well, I mean, I don't have direct figures for that. But what I do know is that a lot of these new unconventional resources have to be stopped. So, Bakken shale is actually unconventional oil. It's shale gas. It's fracked oil.

The tar sands, for example, in Canada, which you mentioned, the Keystone XL pipeline, this is another unconventional source. So without a doubt, we have to rule out unconventional new sources of these fossil fuels. And then we have to start to phase out the other ones. But you know, do I have a direct figure for how much damage? I don't have it in my head. I just know that someone just did the math on the new york ban and that you can research i think it's at oil change international there's a website oil change international um or dirty energy money.com i think links to a dirty energy money.com is an amazing website where you can actually plug punch in your senator or congressman or congresswoman and find out how much money they took from the oil and gas lobby um and where it came from um

but i think oil change or i mean I might have it on my phone. There was an article I read recently about the Duke University pro-fracking study that they put out and the influence that the oil industry had on that. And they traced it back to the money that was involved in oil industry that had something to do with Duke University and that had an influence on the fracking study. Again, the template is the tobacco industry. When you have these places like North Dakota where you have so much momentum, there's so much money,

so many people have a vested financial interest in keeping it going and so many people are benefiting from it. How the fuck do you stop something like that? how is it even possible to slow that monster down? You know, I have to believe in the same things that have worked over the last eight years with the fracking movement. And I have to believe in the things that have created social and economic change in the past. You know, I don't think there is any other answer than organizing, mobilizing. And that is, we can point to New York as this great example.

We can also point to the Obama campaign in 2008. It's this incredible grassroots mobilization. It's about neighbor talking to neighbor. It's about canvassing. It's about being involved at a local level. I really think that that's the case. I think you have to make more responsible energy decisions personally, obviously. And there are ways to do that. And I gave the website out. But I think the most important thing to do, I mean, you're going to have states which are very challenging. I mean, in Florida right now, the sunshine state, it is illegal to have a home off the grid. Yeah, isn't that hilarious? It's like... Now, how did that happen? All the conservative people in government there decided that they wanted to keep everyone

totally addicted to oil and gas. What the fuck? Well, I mean, but this is what they do. They could do that, though. Well, I mean, but this is what they do. They could do that, though. Yeah, I mean, it's, you, you,

you, I think the, the good news is that you're seeing fracking really be a game changer, not in the way that the oil and gas industry thought it was.

They thought this was a game changer for their continued world domination. I think it's a game changer for how we're going to start to change all this because there's so many people involved. Well, because it's so, it's also the, the impact is so fucking devastating. So it's so obvious. You can see it and you can, you can look at it, you can look at it. You do not want to

live in one of these areas. And that's the bottom line. And you have enough people who are saying not in my backyard across the states you have a movement but you have enough also enough people like that are going to north dakota because of the money i mean they they're like fuck this you know i can make some money i can retire i can do this i can do that i can have a life for myself give me that opportunity that oil is still going to be more expensive than solar and wind at a certain point. So it means that you get solar and wind ramped up, you're going to be able to undercut them in the marketplace. But one thing I have to tell you is these are conditions that are created by the government. If you invest $1 million in oil or coal or gas, you get about three jobs, 3.8 jobs. If you invest $1 million in wind and solar, you get 9.5 and 9.8 jobs respectively.

So you get much more jobs out of doing renewable energy. It's just the math. Like that's not, It's just the math. Like, that's not. And by the way, you would not do that job in the Bakken Shell. You are bathing in oil and fracking chemicals. Your job there is extraordinarily short-lived. Not just in the Bakken Shell, which are particularly harsh conditions, right? Because you might be living in a trailer that's costing you a huge amount of money per month with no running water and it's freezing there and people die just trying to go there and live there. Or you might be living in like a man camp, like really bad working conditions.

They're called man camps. You don't want to live in a man camp. You don't want to live in a man camp. But what I'm saying is these jobs are not good for workers. They're not good for the environment. And at a certain point, and Van Jones says this in our worker piece, Van Jones says, you know, like you could create jobs by chopping the heads off of small kittens. You could call it a job. Don't stop doing that. It's a job.

But at a certain point, you have to have a moral standard. That is true, right? That is an interesting thing, the creating of jobs. But at what cost? When can you stop saying it's creating jobs and start saying that you're profiting off of fucking up a spot forever? Where they're at right now in North Dakota, how long would it take to clean that up? You can't just pass everything just because, oh, it's a job. Therefore, we don't have to look at what the job is can you put like a big brita filter on the whole state no

you can't and and the truth is that a lot of that land is um first nations land um you know and uh we met an amazing uh kid who was i think he was 19 or 20. His name was Lance. He was running for tribal council in the Bakken Shale, and his whole plan was to implement wind. Do you know that North Dakota is the windiest place on Earth? Like, in the United States, not on Earth. Like, it's been said 20 years ago or more that just three states, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas, can provide all of America's energy needs with their wind resource.

For all of them, including the fleet of 300 million cars. Just wind. Just from wind in three states, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas. Would they have to cover the states in these stupid fucking windmills? No. No. No. And by the way, a lot of those places are farmlands right

which very very sparsely populated and you can actually do farming in wind at the same time you have a wind tower in the middle of the family now you don't know that would be fine you probably wouldn't even notice if your corner or whatever it was came from where a wind farm was but if you were having a fracking pad in the middle of a farm with all those toxic emissions um you'd probably be a little worried about what you were eating so essentially they could shut down those fracking sites that are fucking up everything and then set up in those same places wind towers that would provide more energy um not just more energy in the moment but when you think about wind and solar, you're tapping a resource that is unlimited.

Unlimited, completely sustainable. Forever. Forever is a really crazy word when you think about energy, because we always think about energy as finite. Oil, gas, it's going to run out. Your gas is going to run out in your tank. Think about wind. Yeah, you're not going to tap the wind.

You're not going to tap the wind. And when you think about where the resource is at, the offshore off of the North Atlantic coast, you have an enormous wind resource in the North Atlantic. So setting off offshore wind, I mean, you could have all of the Northeast powered by wind power off of Long Island. And they could be so far out that you would hardly even see them from the beach. Wow. That's a thing that people don't think about. You think that's what it is? You think wind or solar and wind? Well, it's both.

It's all of them. It's distributed generation. Distributed generation of power so that we're not dependent. I mean, look, you're going to have more super storms. The places on the Rockaways that still had power were the ones that had solar. You know, you have these storms and all these things knock out the grid and then you have big blackouts all over the place. This is a bad system. You're losing. It's not efficient. It's not close to you. It's vulnerable. When we're talking about offshore wind, absolutely.

In fact, there's a study also by Mark Jacobson that suggests huge amounts of offshore wind turbines actually dampen hurricane winds. They slow down the winds and they dampen the storm surge. So you are talking about building $30 billion wind walls, I mean, sorry, sea walls around a lot of major cities like New York. But you could build it as a wind farm instead, and you actually make your money back. Now, it's an enormous amount of wind turbines, 70,000 wind turbines or something like this, that would say that you would lessen the storm surge, for example, for Katrina or Sandy, by 50% or more. But when you consider the fact that Pennsylvania projections are 200,000 to 600,000 gas wells, you know, 70,000 wind turbines doesn't sound like quite so much anymore.

But this is the future. We know that the future is going to be renewable energy. We know that that's the way it's going to go. The question is, will we be able to prevent oil and gas right now from a next era of contamination and destruction. So it's just the momentum of the system that's in place. Yeah. The amount of money that's involved, the amount of influence that's involved, and the amount of people that depend upon those industries for jobs and slowly sort of transitioning

out of that. Yeah. Well, we have to. I mean, there's simply, there's a moral and environmental and health imperative to doing so. And even if we do, it's going to be really difficult to mitigate the damage that's already been done. For sure. That's true. And also, even if we do, we're still going to experience a great deal of climate change warming. It's going to be very difficult to reverse a lot of those effects. Carbon dioxide lasts hundreds of years in the atmosphere.

So we're going to have trouble. It's going to be tough. And that's why we need resilient values that are different than every man, every woman for himself and every SUV for itself. That's why when we're talking about fracking, we're talking about global warming, we're talking about a movement to try to change these things. It can't simply be check this box. Now I have wind power. I'm good. We're in for some things that are going to be rough and they're going to require us. I mean, they're rough now. I mean, when you look at all the things that are happening, too great a proportion of our population in the United States or around the world are suffering from illness, are suffering from disenfranchisement of one kind or another.

We have to start to move in a direction where we're working together a bit more. Yeah, and there's some weird trends that we're seeing here in California that really freak me out, like the fact that we're in the worst drought of something like 1,200 years, some fucking crazy number. of something like 1,200 years. Oh, yeah. Some fucking crazy number. They threw out 11 trillion gallons of water we would need to make up for the amount of drought we've had over the last three years, just three years.

Like, that's weird, man. And it makes you think, like, you're living in this place that doesn't have any water coming in. You got to get all your water from somewhere else. It's a double whammy, too, because the Colorado River, which is supplying a lot of the Southwest, is also dry, running out of water. Yeah, they're having droughts in Colorado as well. So you're talking about things that are getting worse.

And look, if it was up to Coca-Cola, they would just sell you every last drop. I mean, you know, but is that what we want? I think what we need to do is figure out a way to take the salt out of the ocean. That bitch is right there. Seems like a lot of water. I don't know, but what I do know is that, like, without getting straying too far down the path,

I think over and over again, what we've seen were our social movements that are built on neighbors and community ties working together. Do you know anything about desalination plants or any of that shit? I don't know anything. It seems like something that could be done, right? I mean, I know it can be done.

They've already done it. I think I just heard that they built a car in Europe that runs on salt water. Yes. Yes, they have. Yeah. That was pretty fascinating. I want to... How dope would that be?

You go to the ocean to fill up... It's like a lotus or something. Yeah, it's fast as fuck. It's beautiful, too. So you know about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's like these cars that they're coming out with, these electric cars are really amazing and fascinating,

like the Tesla, all the stuff that Elon Musk is putting out. He's got a new Tesla Roadster that can go 400 miles now, which is the new limit. I mean, that's pretty incredible. Yeah, they're really expensive. Yeah, they're really expensive. I wish that... Mark challenged Mark Ruffalo challenged him

to make one that's under $30,000, I think, and do it in the next couple of years because that's the real barrier. I always have to say that when somebody gets up and we do a lot of interactive, whether it's speeches or public or screenings or Q&As, there's always somebody who gets up and goes, well, I have solar panels on my roof and I have a Tesla.

And I'm always like, and you're rich. Right. You know, so these can't just be about individual solutions. I mean, I love, I mean, obviously Elon Musk is like way ahead and he's making amazing stuff and he's showing the world that it's possible. At the same time, like these need to be affordable solutions for people. Well, right now, you know, what's the cheapest car you can get? Like an economy car, like a regular car. Like you can get a car for like 20 grand, right?

Like a real, yeah, you can get a car for way less. But I mean, I've never had a car. I've never bought a new car. I don't know. But if you bought a new car. I like buying used cars. What's that? Probably $13,000 probably've never had a car. I've never bought a new car. I don't know. But if you bought a new car. I like buying used cars. What's that? Probably $13,000 probably.

For like a real. Pretty shitty. Well, even if it's not shitty, just doesn't have anything in it. Just real base, very small car with not a lot of horsepower, skinny tires. I just bought a Camry Hybrid 2007 for $11,000. Do you hate life? No. What are you doing?

Wait, what? What's wrong? No. What are you doing? Wait, what? What's wrong with that? What do you have? It's boring. You know, the beautiful thing about... Actually, it's not boring at all. The Camry Hybrid's not boring at all? Yeah.

Who are you? It almost... It's from another planet. It almost slid off the road. Well, you know it's not boring. It almost slid off the road. That's why it's not boring. It doesn't handle well.

No. It makes it exciting. It doesn't drive well. You want to know what's not boring? It almost slid off the road. That's why it's not boring. It doesn't handle well. No. It makes it exciting. It doesn't drive well. You want to know what's not boring? What? Where you drive it. Where you drive it? Yeah, where you drive it.

Why are you driving it? Well, I mean. You going off-roading? Your Camry Hybrid? No. Dude, what I'm trying to say is. What are you getting upset about? I don't know.

What are you. You're not making sense. You're saying it's not boring, but you're not giving me any reasons why it's not boring. The car doesn't make it boring. What you're doing with your life is what makes it boring or not. I'm sorry. That's total nonsense to say my life is more exciting because I have an exciting car. That's ridiculous, dude.

I'm not the one not making sense. Well, that's not true. What you do with your life matters. You don't need a car to have an exciting life. Period. That's not what I'm saying the one not making sense. Well, that's not true. What you do with your life matters. You don't need a car to have an exciting life. Period. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying automotive engineering. Automotive engineering is, to me, I'm a huge fan of engineering and of technology.

The camera is watching how much money you're not spending on gas because you can see how much gas mileage you're getting on their little onboard computer. You know? No, I understand what you're saying in that term. But as far as the kind of car it is, it's a boring car. It's got a sunroof. That's exciting to you. And I can put on lots of awesome music. Well, I mean, those are good things for sure.

What is that? Nissan Versys 12,800. Wow. That's not a bad-looking car, either. 12,000 bucks. I don't know. Honestly, if you want my real opinion, I think all the cars are boring right now. All cars are boring.

These cars are boring. I like the cars from the 70s. Yeah. Those were cool. Oh, for sure. The 60s, really. The 70s, they started getting a little weird. I like the 70s, too.

Well, the 70s, it became weird because of the gas crisis. They started developing these really shitty shapes and really cheap cars and competing with Japan. The 60s were... I saw a 70s Continental on the street yesterday. It was mind-bogglingly beautiful. It was 25 feet long. Sure. 70s Cadillacs, too.

I had a 1979 T-Bird with T-tops. I drove all across America in 1994 and 95. And, man, I loved that car so much. It was the most awkward. It never went above 65 miles an hour. Whatever, it didn't matter. This was 1994. And it was removable glass roof bright green

phenomenal i called it the emerald city yeah t-tops kind of went away man t-tops are awesome they were big with like smoking the bandit no but i agree with you though to a degree because like i went i met the the people who work for toyota at the environmental media association awards that the prius was a sponsor of. And I said, I'm not ever going to buy a Prius until you make one with a sunroof. I was like exactly the same thing. I was like, why do you hate life?

Why, why can't I have one with a sunroof? Right. Cause it's like, you're right. There is this, this idea that they're boring, but if you've ever gotten behind the wheel of a Tesla, dude.

Oh, I have. Yeah. They're unreal. They're the engineering's phenomenal. You just like, you hit the accelerator and your head just yeah like i guess the bat and it's like a rush you can go zero to 60 in like two seconds something crazy like that well it's not quite that but it's close

i mean it's uh three something three seconds you know and this is the new one that's all-wheel drive i mean the the engineering that they're coming out with with these things there's a new company that i was just uh communicating with them uh them online a couple of days ago that has some fucking crazy new sports car, Renovo Motors. It's kind of counterintuitive because it only goes 100 miles on a charge. But what they're doing is they're essentially creating like an electric viper. I mean, it's just this fucking ridiculous. It has a thousand foot pounds of torque, which is unheard of. It's also kind of like silly.

Well, what they're doing is just creating like, I'm a huge fan of engineering. I'm a geek for technology. So when I see someone just say, okay, what can be done now with everything we have? What is the best version of this we can make? You know, yeah, it's not reasonable. It's not affordable for almost anybody. I can't afford one. It's a half a million dollars for one of these fucking things.

That's the car right there. That's crazy. It's insane. It's good looking, too. It looks like a 60s... Yeah, it's beautiful. Aston Martin or something. Yeah, it's beautiful.

Beautiful car. The shape is awesome, but 100 miles. I mean, looking, too. It looks like a 60s... Yeah, it's beautiful. Aston Martin or something. Yeah, it's beautiful. Beautiful car. The shape is awesome, but 100 miles. I mean, dude, I love driving. I've driven in every single state. One contradiction here is that Gasland movies are road movies. Right, so it is kind of funny, right? I love being out on the open road in a car. I will disappear for months.

I mean, like, there's nothing more exciting to me. Now, I mean, I made Gasland and Gasland 2 in a 92 Camry, a 93 Camry, and, like, slept by the side of the road and just, you know, I mean, New Mexico, just pull off, just go to sleep under the stars, like Wyoming next to the Hoback River, like on your way up to Yosemite. You know, this is the most amazing thing about America I mean like America is those roads out in the west and you you I just I'm in love with it like I hate flying with a passion I'm actually going to take the train back um from here because I want to film it I want to figure out what it's like to take the train. But you want to talk about infrastructure development. Why don't we have high-speed

trains that take us from LA to New York? Well, again, Elon Musk is working on that right now. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that I think it's an amazing thing and it definitely has to be worked out. And that's what's going to take the transition because you buy a new car right now, it's going to last you 10, it's going to be on the road for 10 or 15 years. There's another environmental impact that we're not thinking about when it comes to planes. The people that live near airplanes, they're showing all these studies now, lung diseases and all sorts of health risks that people have that just live near airports. Because the burning of these fossil fuels, like in massive amounts, just jet engines burning off untold millions of gallons of fossil fuels per year. And, you know, the airline industry would be equivalent to a medium-sized country in terms of emissions.

And I think you're a medium-sized European country. Don't quote, well, I just said it. But, you know, it's a big sector of emissions. And especially since you consider a lot of these flights are going over Alaska and going over the poles, they're depositing their emissions there. So you actually have a greater amount of CO2 up in the polar ice cap where we actually need it to be colder because it's reflecting a lot of the sun's light going back out into space because of the white ice sheets up there. So you want them to be cold. But basically up in the poles, you have more emissions because a lot of the flights are crossing over the top there. Because they're going from, you know, United States to Europe, United States to Asia.

Those are going to be polar routes. Isn't one of the big concerns with these electric vehicles the actual material of the batteries themselves? Like a lot of it is coming from what they call conflict minerals. And a lot of it is coming from these places like the Congo or Afghanistan is a big source of lithium or lithium ion batteries. Really? Yeah. Afghanistan's a big source of lithium, lithium ion batteries. Really?

Yeah. Well, it's one of the huge discoveries that they had a few years back, that there's more lithium in Afghanistan than almost anywhere in the world. Yeah, it's trillions of dollars of lithium that they're going to pull out of the ground to make batteries with. And that's one of the reasons why they believe the United States had a vested interest in staying in Afghanistan. Also, there's a huge oil and gas pipeline. Sure, and natural gas, which is what was being fought over during the Russian and Afghani, the whole Mujahideen situation. But when you look at these batteries that are in these cars, they're really kind of inefficient. It's an issue.

It's a big issue, no question. And that's why I'm saying, like, again, the answer to these problems is trying to take some kind of collective responsibility. When we go through our regular daily life, we don't, you know, I mean, like, people say, oh, I recycle. That's all fine. That's all good. That should be just, like, no-brainer. But what we're talking about is trying to make these types of decisions where we know of the consequences and we have to be able to process them. Yeah. But we do know that one of the big things that is from from the standpoint of all of these issues that you're bringing up, there is no question oil and gas is at the top of the list, both in terms of climate change and global warming, but also in terms of these localized pollution effects, which are getting less and less local, right? Everyone's

downstream from something. But you're absolutely 100% right. Solar panel manufacturing, wind manufacturing, extractive, all those industries don't get a pass just because they're renewable energy. They have to be subject to very vigorous laws that control the damage that they do as well. Otherwise, you're going to repeat the cycle with a new industry. And in fact, if you don't actively oppose oil and gas, if you don't say we have to keep the oil in the ground, okay, let's say you ban or you shut down all the coal-fired power plants in the United States. or you shut down all the coal-fired power plants in the United States, what we're going to do if we don't stop it is export the coal. And we're exporting tons of coal right now out of the United States that we're not using.

We want to export the gas even if we don't use the gas here. So it's got to be about keeping it in the ground. There's another problem, which is that if you create more energy, all of a sudden people go, oh, there's energy. It's great. I can just use lots of energy. So you end up building more of everything. So you might end up in a situation where energy becomes cheaper and then people use more of it and we haven't actually made any progress. So it is a question of making those kinds of limitations on keeping the oil and coal and gas in the ground and not just multiplying it so that you end up using more and there's plenty of examples of countries that don't have any

regulation on environments like look at what the fuck is going on in china when you see these cities that are just toxic cities there's cities in china where they have just gray skies from pollution and people wearing masks like was it Beijing? Beijing. I'm going to go out there at some point in the next six months, I think. I haven't been there yet. Is that all coal? Coal. They're starting to try to frack in China, but they don't have a lot of water.

But China just made this enormous commitment, right? Like I said, 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of renewable energy. But yeah, in Beijing it's so bad that they broadcast i think on televisions the sunset in certain places they broadcast the sunset because you can't see it you can't see it i want to see that i want to tape that well there's a i mean i just think that there's examples like we we get to see this spectrum of of you know places where it's like completely sustainable and beautiful and natural I mean you can go to the Colorado Rockies and see how beautiful and clean fresh the air is and that you can go to Beijing and you can say oh well people are capable of this too

You know you go to a place like Boulder that doesn't let anybody build in the mountains like they have a very strict Or you go yeah ten miles away in Weld County, which is fracked to hell dude you know so you have the first world in the third world in the third world in the first world that's just the way it is and what defines what defines um the poverty of those locations is i think the health of their environment it's not the scary thing too is that people are doing things that can't one of the indicators the the the thing that freaks me out about fracking and when I see the pros and the cons and I see the arguments for and against, the one thing that seems to be undeniable is that you can't clean it up. It's like it gets to a certain point where, you know. We don't want to be in a place where the entire planet's on life support. And what I mean by that is you have to purify and treat every single drop of water that you've found. You don't want to get there.

No. We're not that far from there, though. But the truth is that, yeah, you make a good point that a lot of these, I say at the end of Gasland, too, environmental victories are always temporary, but the losses always seem to be permanent. You can't restore, you know, some of these incredibly, you know, biologically diverse areas by replanting with, you know, something else. There's a bottom line to what nature has made that needs to at this point actually have rights and be preserved. You know, and that's a big part of all of this. But I got to say that in the midst of all of this incredibly negative, difficult information, I'm very positive about it.

I'm very – I have – I'm not going to say I'm optimistic because I don't really know you know but I do feel a real positive charge from being involved and that's the thing like you feel better about being involved with this right when it first came to my backyard I spent three weeks sleepless nights could not sleep could not was terrified. And never felt more alone. You know, thinking like, oh, my God. You know, because when you live in a beautiful area like that, that's environmentally pristine, you're always kind of waiting for the axe to fall. Whether it's going to be like a mega casino or a Walmart or an oil and gas. Because it's too nice. Because it could be, you know, because, yeah, because it's unlike a lot of other places.

Right. But, you know, I never felt more alone. I mean, nowadays, you know, like I mentioned, if you're involved in this, you can go anywhere and have friends. It's a wonderful feeling to know that you're connected on that level. I mean, I've toured, in addition to putting these films on HBO, which is a massive exposure, a couple million people each time we do that with the films, we've toured grassroots, I've toured to 300 cities around the world just to meet people and talk to them and give them answers. And that's an incredible, not answers, but answer questions, have a discussion. That's an incredible experience um being in life yeah i i think it's cool that people

are waking up and realizing that we're involved in this society that really hasn't been thought out that well in terms of sustainability or the impact of the future like i remember fukushima when that happened was a huge wake-up call for lot of folks. And they realize you can't shut off these plants when they go offline like that. When the power gets disrupted and there's no ability to cool the rods, like everyone's fucked. Like that area is fucked eternally. I mean, it will be fucked 100,000 years from now. It will be fucked for longer than there have been people. And then this is something that we just did.

I'm not an expert on that, for sure. Well, the half-life of all that stuff is like 100,000 years. How long has there been people in this form? Has it been a million? 200,000? A lot of the fracking chemicals don't biodegrade. So you're talking about putting things into the earth. We need to shoot it into space.

That's what we need to do. Aliens will come back and kick our ass. Fucking assholes littering space. Did you guys do this? Launch this fucking shit in space? Then we'll find out. Didn't they just find... The environmental cost of using the jets to launch into space.

Oh, yeah. Accelerating global warming. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, the truth of the matter is though that these problems have answers and those and the the problems boil down to being political problems social problems as much as they end up being chemi chemistry problems and you know contamination problems they are really about how skewed our system is right now and who's got the levers of control of the and and what i what i'm seeing start to happen which is really

remarkable is people starting to win well it's just information information becomes undeniable in this day and age this is too much of it it's just like it's too easy to just do research and see the studies. It's too easy to look at the environmental impact that you could literally see with your own eyes. And also to see where the influence is, to see this system that's in place. Is this system in place because it's the best way to do it? Or is this system in place because people are already hugely influential and extracting massive amounts of money and then spreading that massive amounts of money to our quote-unquote representatives through lobbyists and what have you and then that's the hold-up is that the hold-up i mean

it seems like that's the hold-up well that was the question of gasoline part two which is that we saw this huge movement on fracking um and then we saw, and we had the most, you know, in a way, liberal, progressive president we've had in a long, long time. Why wasn't there more action on this? Why didn't we see change when all of a sudden, and that was the question. So Gas Line 2 became this investigation into the government. And it wasn't about fracking contaminants in the water and fracking pollutants in the air. It was about these fracking dollars that were contaminating the political system. And that was really the investigation. How does that happen?

And what we found was really startling. And it's definitely, I would say, you know, it's on my own film, but definitely worth watching that because this is all about a trilogy for me. You know, looking at first my kind of consciousness opening up and understanding what was happening with fracking in the first movie about environmental issues. The second movie really about being about government and about how government was treating the crisis. And this last film, which is not a Gasland film, the last film of this sort of trilogy in my mind is about climate. And it's about the whole ball of wax. It's about how are we going

to deal with this climate crisis from the standpoint of all these systems in place. It seems like people are more aware of how fucked up our process is now than have ever been before. I think people kind of look at the democratic process when I was a kid, my parents were, you know, my age, they didn't really have this awareness of the whole system that was in place. But what can that do, right? Sometimes that can make you cynical and detached and apathetic. The antidote to that is to get involved. And then it makes you, it leads you down a pathway which is more connected.

And I think ultimately more fulfilling. Well, there's always going to be, whenever's a problem any kind of a problem there's going to be people that respond in different ways like some people respond to being overweight by saying fuck and I'm fat I'm just going to keep eating cheeseburgers and some people look at themselves and go you know what I just need to start doing something about this vehicle and this meat wagon that I'm traveling around this world in and cleaning it up you know it's it's, it's that choice. It's like, there's a lot of factors involved. But isn't it the one that is less depressing when you're actually active? And that's the point, right? I, I, I, I, I'll quote Mark Ruffalo again and saying,

if you're depressed, you're not doing enough. Like if you've, or something like that. I think that's true though, that if you're feeling afraid and isolated and, and depressed and sad about these things, the antidote isn't Prozac or more therapy. Although, you know, those things might help you. The antidote is to get involved and to work with your fellow man and woman and your neighbors in your community to do something about this. Because we, you know, we can't, I mean, this is from self-experience. I mean, like, I get exhausted and I get downtrodden, I get upset, I get worried and I get freaked out. And then the antidote is always to go back out, talk to people, work with them. And then you feel like this charge. Now I'm here. And yeah, information helps.

this community in the Amazon of a thousand people four and a half hours down river from the nearest population center, which wasn't a big population center, and they have solar powered internet in Thatch's Roof Hut.

Whoa. Watching you porn. Amazing. They weren't doing that. They were on Facebook though. They are. Trust me. When you're not there. That's really interesting. I didn't think about that. Of course they are. They were on Facebook, though. They were on Facebook, though. Trust me. When you're not there. That's really interesting. I didn't think about that. Of course they are.

There's no way around it. Human beings like watching naked human beings. There's just no way around that. The areas that you went to were the crisis of the oil spills and the pipelines breaking. Is there any effort to clean that up? I went with Amazon Watch. They were our kind of guides. There's an amazing local affiliated

organization called Allianz Arcana. We were guided by these folks who are environmental monitors that are sort of self there's a system of indigenous environmental monitors that go out into the jungle and find these things and report on them. But I would say right now, what we're going to, and I haven't

set any of this up yet, but what I'm going to try to do with the release of the new film, since there are actually a lot of organizations that kind of guide us through the process, there's Occupy Sandy, when we're looking at Hurricane Sandy, there's Amazon Watch and Allianz Arcana and these incredible environmental monitors in these indigenous parts of Peru and Ecuador. There's a foundation called Empowered by Light, which helps distribute solar panels in Zambia. So when the film actually comes out, we're going to connect our audience to a lot of those organizations that are doing that work to be a kind of funnel in the same way that we tried to be a funnel for the fracking movement. So if you went to

Gaslandinthemovie.com and you put in your zip code, you could find the fracking organizations in your local area or the national organizations working on fracking. I think in the same way, we're going to try to connect people through the film to these organizations. But right now, I haven't done enough of that work to kind of set up the mechanism but when we do release this new film which is currently untitled um they're at the website you'll definitely have links to amazon watch and alianza arcana and empowered by light and occupy sandy and um some of the uh northern colorado rebuilders who rebuilt each other's homes in the midst of the High Park fire, the biggest fire in recent times. You know, where there is a solution,

we're going to try to connect our audience to it. Have you been able to or invited to debate any of your detractors on any of these subjects? Because you're very informed. You have all these statistics you can pull. Obviously, this has been a huge part of your life for many years now. Yeah, I've done it on TV a bunch of times. I mean, those TV to suck, man.

You get these three minute fucking spews, you know, and there's two heads on two different frames and one, you know, Fox News person who's I won't debate people who have no credibility. I won't debate people who have no credibility. So if you have some kind of charlatan who's like, you know, um, like trying to just make a name for himself, uh, to do this, I won't even do that. But I wanted to try to get, I wanted to try to get in the room with T Boone Pickens.

Who's that? Um, he's a natural star from the sixties. And that's T Boone Pickens. That's T Boone Burnett, I think. But T Boone Pickens is a guy who was promoting natural gas, who was an oil baron.

And he refused to talk to me in written debate. How weird. Yeah, totally flat out refused. I think T. Boone would just be out there. Toothpick in his mouth. Yeah, they flat out refused. And I've tried. I wanted to get people who were actually representative of the oil industry to talk to me about that or those government officials. I would do that.

But what the oil and gas industry has done is create these PR firms. There's one called Energy In-Depth, which is just a fracking. I mean, it was created by the super majors. It was created by Shell and BP and Chesapeake with money for their, and, you know, I've done a few against them. Early on, they invited me to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they ganged up on me and I debated them. And that's online. There's a great one where I was in Frostburg, Maryland, where an oil and gas engineer, we did a debate,

and another one in Arkansas. They don't get a lot of attention. But they're fun, though. They're fun to kind of destroy them. What are their arguments? Well, their arguments are that there are no environmental impacts, that you can't prove them. I mean, they say these things that are just utterly 100% false. And then you can say, well, here's this study and here's that study and here's one by scientists and here's one by your own industry.

So they lose every time. That's a debate. But why do they have them then? Do they know they're going to win? Are they just so confident that they think they're just going to be able to smooth talk their way through the whole thing? You'd have to ask them. Fox News it all? Well, the ones on TV work very much like the way you just said.

I mean, unfortunately, in these types of scenarios, it kind of gets a little egg-heady and boring to explain the science. But that's the only way to really truly debate right and but it's harder it's hard to do that in soundbite those fucking shows man when they have two people like you know someone said all right we're gonna talk to josh fox from the movie gas land and next to him is satan you know and and satan has uh you know money fucking coming out of his collar and money. He just stuffed his jacket stuffed with money. And I mean, it's so hard to fucking, you're dealing with these three minute chunks.

And it's like, who talks over people the loudest? But you do it over and over again. You do it over and over again. And that's been my experience. You know what Peter Schiff is? Economics guy. Really, really interesting guy. And he's one of the few guys that – he's very controversial.

And he's always on these Occupy Wall Street things. And he doesn't believe in the market the way it's set up right now. And he firmly believes that they should have allowed the banks to collapse because they were they sucked and they weren't functioning properly and in a free market you allow things to fail and then you rebuild and would have been better for everybody and that this bailout was very detrimental to our process anyway i had him on the podcast and it's so interesting watching him talk because brilliant guy but he's used to talking like really fast because you have like seven minutes to bang this out. I'm like, dude, we got hours, man.

We're cool. So you could see an hour in, he settles back. We started drinking. We brought in some whiskey. It's that style that you become accustomed to when you do those debates of just rapid fire. There's one window on the left and one window on the right. And you got seven minutes. Seven minutes and everyone's trying to make their point.

And it's a skill that you have to develop. Yes. I mean, but there's no way to learn it unless you keep doing it. Yeah, you got to go to war. So luckily, you know, I've been able to learn that. You know, it's been, look, if you ask me in 2010, would I still be doing this in 2014? There's no way I would say yeah i mean like i mean i don't know you started in 2008 that's when you started filming in 2008 but you know i mean

i'm a theater director and a playwright and a filmmaker well i'm looking at your fingernails you obviously play guitar that's banjo those are banjo yeah okay but like no the the thing is that that um you know i'm used to moving from one project to the next to the next to the next. It's been an incredible sustained effort to work on this. But what's amazing about it is that it's constantly rewarding and fulfilling to do it. And that when you enter into this moment of thinking about all these issues that we've been talking about, I think it really changes your brain. And you can see, you know, there might be one main river of the work that you're doing but there's thousands of tributaries that are going into that and they're fascinating and there's

thousands of other subjects that you could use to branch off of this that are, you know, enough to really keep you occupied. And I love the act of interviewing people for a documentary. I love the act of interviewing people for a documentary. I love the act of meeting people that way. There's something about it which I think is really amazing, that you can meet on another level that way. Because your agenda shines through to people. And if you really care about what you're doing,

they recognize that you care. And all of a sudden it's not an interview anymore, it's a friendship. And Al Maisel is the great documentary filmmaker who was in his 80s who made Salesman and Gray Gardens and Gimme Shelter. He said to me, the whole process is a friendship. You get to know, and then everybody gets to know. So some of my best friends in the world at this point are the people who started off as subjects in my films, who we went to spend some time with them at their place in Wyoming or at their place in Zambia

or at their place in, I don't know, Pennsylvania or somewhere. And you become friends with them. And I get Christmas cards from them. You have to catch up with them and you know like uh john fenton who's in uh the gas and both gas and one and two who is in pavilion wyoming his case was the shot heard around the world where they where epa finally came in and said yep fracking fluids have contaminated the water here and it's because of fracking um you know he's one of my best friends on the planet right now and and i just you know like i

don't know what my life would be like if i didn't have these people's friendship and their camaraderie and you know you know like it's just like what life is now so it's um yeah and and you know we started this talk this question was about sound bites i think that's just a skill that you have to try to figure out and um you know luckily, luckily, you know, I feel comfortable doing that. I think a lot of the time it's very taxing, though. Do you stay in touch with some of those folks that were having some pretty profound health consequences to fracking? Like that woman who was really sick because of the filters that they were using to filter out their water wasn't filtering out those specific toxins that they were using? Well, John's lost all of his hair.

He's lost his eyebrows. Whoa. He has constant ringing in his ears. And what is this from? Well, he went up, he had two different forms of alopecia, one of which can be caused by chemical exposure, although the research on that is very... It gets better when he leaves town. It grows his eyebrows back when he leaves town? It doesn't even fucking move.

It's really weird. Well, that's a big question, right? Right. A lot of these people have moved or were forced to move. And they're thinking about it the way he deals with it. He tries to leave from time to time. But, you know, when you have built your own home by hand and you're on your wife's parents'

several generation farm in Wyoming, it's not always that easy to leave. Now, do these guys get compensated for these spots that are fucked up? In some cases, sometimes they have a percentage of the mineral rights, sometimes they don't.

You know, Calvin Tillman, for example, the mayor of Dish, Texas, they have a percentage of the mineral rights sometimes they don't um you know uh calvin tillman for example the mayor of dish texas who's also a friend good friend um he did leave he left the mayor moves out of his own town and gas line too and you know you know that's what i say in the film you know it's like when when things are bad you know things are bad when the mayor moves out of town and he left you, and he started to raise his kids in the next town over where they didn't have shale. And what was his issue, environment? What was his health issue?

Well, he was worried about his kids getting nosebleeds. He was worried about... They were getting nosebleeds. They were getting nosebleeds in the night. The asthma was getting worse. They had breathing issues. And he was having a new daughter on the way. They were planning another child.

He had two sons, and his wife says, look, I mean, they did monitoring of the health of the whole town, and they found elevated levels of a whole host of illnesses. And do they do? It starts with nosebleeds, and it starts to become respiratory problems, but then you don't know, like, what are going to be the long-term effects of this. But they had exposure that they mapped out from ambient benzene in the air, dimethyl can see the maps that they did of long-term and short-term exposures and that those exposures can cause health effects in the whole town of Dish, Texas.

And these are directly attributed to these chemicals? Oh, yeah. Well, they have pipelines and they have oil and gas sites and they have compressor stations. And how far away do you have to get away before you don't experience the effects of those chemicals? That's what they did, some of the mapping. This whole town of Dish had those effects. So they're fucked. Yeah, and a lot of people have moved.

And a lot of people have been, he goes down the street and would point gasoline to him and says, you know, look, I think it's 40% of these people are in a lawsuit trying to move. Because what happens when you buy a house, right? You put all of your present and future assets into that house. Because what happens when you buy a house, right? You put all of your present and future assets into that house. So if oil and gas comes in and destroys the area, you've lost so much of that asset and the houses are worth a fraction of what they used to be. I mean, so your only choice at that point is to have a lawsuit to get out. Now, when you have a lawsuit, nine times out of ten included in that settlement with oil and gas, let's say you win.

You get to the best case scenario. You get a settlement for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Included in that settlement is a nondisclosure agreement, which means you can never talk about what happened to you. And nobody else can find it out. In a famous case in Pittsburgh or outside of Pittsburgh, the Halwich family, who are featured in Gasland Part Two, who ended up signing a nondisclosure agreement, they got something like $700,000 to move, to leave their homes. And they did move. But what was discovered when Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pressed to get information from that nondisclosure agreement because they they argued that it was a matter of public health they found out that the oil and gas industry had actually gagged their eight and ten year old children and they gagged the kids they said the kids couldn't talk about oil and gas or fracking or what had happened to them and when the world you could do that how's an eight

year old kid consent this is what my question was. So this was featured on the Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert brought this up and, you know, like, lampooned it and everything. And I had an interview. Well, I won't go down that road. But another family that I know very well, and I can't say which one, who had signed a nondisclosure agreement, who had left their multi-generational property in a state which people are very attached to their land, and they had to end up leaving.

That person, a representative of that family, said to me, hypothetically, forget my meaning, if I was an oil and gas company, I might argue that unborn generations of future children would not be able to speak about that and force you to negotiate from there. You see what I'm saying? So that he was indicating that the oil and gas company in question in this particular case had tried to gag their unborn children. And that forced them to negotiate back from there how is that possible i just don't understand how that could be legally binding because the first amendment um you know right if the government tried to do it would be illegal right that pertains to the government private corporations and private individuals can make deals to gag each other all they want it's not the government doing that

the government can't tell you you can never speak about this that's against the first amendment but it's not doesn't count but you know there's one thing that you can get around these non-disclosure agreements which is a congressional subpoena so

when Henry Waxman was doing an inquiry into fracking, when the Democrats in the House had subpoena power, when they were in the majority in 2010, the Waxman Commission on Fracking asked me, can you connect us with people who have nondisclosure agreements? And we did. We gave them names and they were able to testify. And it's something that I've asked of several senators currently,

because, I mean, well, when the Democrats were in the majority, I asked Senator Gillibrand's office, can you please create a subpoena so that some of these people could come in and testify? I've asked this over and over and over again of officials on the Hill. Please, please, please, let's have public hearings with the public. Not with oil and gas talking heads. With people.

Let's have people testify in Congress of what's happening to them with oil and gas contamination. Why not do that? I just can't imagine a world where it makes sense that you could put a gag order on an eight-year-old. That's this world. Well, especially when it comes to America. You don't have to imagine it at all.

Something like gas and oil. I mean, it seems so criminal. That just seems... How could you sign that away? If little Timmy, 10 years from now, it's kind of mafioso, weird kind of godfather kind of a thing, right? It's creepy.

It's creepy that that's a practice. Or North Korea, where you've got multiple generations in jail. Yeah. These are multiple generations that can't speak about what you wrought on their property. Or actually what you didn't agree to admit to doing, but you paid them to leave and shut up. That's amazing.

Because most of those court settlements don't have any admission of wrongdoing. And how many people are actually winning in court? I mean, are they settling with these folks just to get them to shut up? The court is, you know, it was Ron Paul who was running for president right in 2008, I think, who was arguing that we should do away with the EPA because all of these individual contamination cases can be handled in the courts. Let me tell you, you don't want to take the oil and gas industry on in court. You know, I mean, they have, they will put motions and thousands of dollars and thousands of lawyers and you don't want to try to take these guys on in court by yourself.

I mean, I asked, there's a case in Gasland Part 2 in Texas where the EPA was enforcing an imminent and substantial endangerment order. out of their water well because the top of the headspace of the water well is venting off so much gas that they can just the hose that they attach to the top of the water well just lights every single time and now they have this pipe that they can light off the top that EPA got involved there and then at a certain point after Obama's 2012 speech on touting the virtues of natural gas all these epa investigations shut down they shut down in pennsylvania texas and in wyoming um and uh this was extremely suspicious to me right and this is what we report on in gas night part two um you know i asked the epa and one of the epa officials off the record said to me, well, we were worried that the gas company in question

was going to outspend the government on legal fees. So we simply couldn't afford, as the government, to keep prosecuting this case. That's so crazy. So I went to NRDC. I went to a number of Sierra Club. I went to try to get advocacy to say, can you please take this case on? These people are left in the lurch with nothing. And they said, well, you know, what makes you think we can take it on? If they were going to outspend the government, they're going to outspend us. I mean, like, these were the questions, right?

Because you can just take motion after motion and tie things up in court and do this for decades. The amount of money that they have is just so scary. It's like government money. Oh, it's way more than that. I mean just so scary it's like government money it's like they would pay more than that i mean i mean i mean like they are a government like an entire country i mean it's like that kind of money so it's so it's just so hard to believe that things have gone so awry that you have this huge huge industry that is poisoning people and then paying them to shut the fuck up about the fact they're poisoning. But I can sit here and tell you that all of New York State just did the impossible.

Well, you must be so happy about that. Does that feel like a huge victory? Yeah, of course. I was actually coming out of five days in the Amazon jungle having investigated oil spills on foot and in boats and incredibly arduous, of contact and we were coming out on a boat and we were passing by a cell tower and my phone blows up as they're as they're making the announcement and made it back to civilization in time to go on chris hayes that night and do it

live skype from the from the amazon did you film the text coming in? I filmed them the next day. Because I was like, I filmed the text the next day. I think there are some reaction shots of me. Because I was actually on the bow of the boat, like hanging out, like getting a tan, like listening to my tunes. Wow. And I was like just hanging out and not doing much.

And all of a sudden, like my phone, which I was playing music on in my headphones just starts to go beep and I was like well that's weird like I guess my phone's working again you know because we were like halfway out on the Marignane River because I could hear the beat and I pick it up and I was like

no way do you anticipate that this is going to be like this is just a start? It's going to start trickling down other states or moving to other states? No such thing as trickle down. It'll be a domino if we make it. Trickle down's a bad word.

Yeah, you know what I mean? It certainly helps. But I want to ask all those people who made New York possible to get involved in the fight in PA and get involved in the fight in California. I mean, I think we have to be strategic about it. I think from a national organizing standpoint, New York was always strategic.

The idea that New York mattered enormously, not just because New York is beautiful and matters and we don't get fracked up, but also because if we can get that win, then there's a huge win for science. There's a win for reason. There's a win for grassroots. But now, without question, that movement has to double down and be more vigorous in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Maryland and Colorado and California.

Now, do I think that there are certain places that we should focus on because we have a chance, you know, where we actually have viable energy? Absolutely. There's a new governor in Pennsylvania. His name is Governor Wolf. He is the very first governor of Pennsylvania ever to be elected when there was an incumbent that was running. And the VA has never thrown out a governor before. Really? Yeah. And this man is a Democrat, and he has now the huge weight and moral responsibility of all the havoc that the fracking industry is wreaking in Pennsylvania.

Is that part of the platform that he ran on? He was very wishy-washy about it. He's already got a contradiction in his policy. He's pro-fracking, but he's against fracking in the Delaware River Basin. Now, that's unequal protection under the law in my book, right? So why should people in the river basin have extra protection whereas other people in the rest of Pennsylvania don't?

That's a big problem. That's why New York is all 100% frack-free because if they were going to ban it in the New York City watershed and not ban it like in, you know, Arthur or something, New York, or Alfred, New York, you know, then there was a problem. You have a mistake because if you don't ban it in Alfred and you ban it in the New York City watershed, well, the oil and gas industry can sue you and say, look, oh, we should be able to open up and drill in the New York City watershed. So they kind of had to do, you know, one law for everybody. Governor Wolf has already kind of in principle broken that ideal, right, to say, all right, well, we're not going to have any change in the river basin, which means fracking would be no good for the Delaware River Basin.

But we're going to allow it in the Susquehanna River Basin or in the Allegheny River Basin. That's a huge problem. So he's got to own up to it. And he's not even in office yet. He's governor-elect. But on January 20th in Harrisburg, I will be there with incredible fracking activists, Pennsylvania Against Fracking and Clean Water Action, and a whole host of folks to protest that and start to talk about how this governor has to pay attention in the same way that Governor Cuomo had to pay attention.

Harrisburg is all, that's Rush Limbaugh country. Harrisburg is, you know, I mean. That's where my family used to live there. Really? Yeah. They're like, it's so right wing. That's one of the reasons why they moved. They're like, this is crazy.

Ed Rendell, governor of PA pa former governor of pa who opened the doors for the fracking industry famously calls it pencil tucky you know the pa is pittsburgh and philadelphia and kentucky in between i don't know if i believe that i mean i i it doesn't matter to me like i said like there's the first world in the third world but then there's the blue areas and the red states and the red areas and the blue states. Right. And where I play doesn't really matter. You know, we play in red areas and blue states and blue areas and red states just as much as anywhere in the bluest and the blue and the reddest of the red. We've got a phenomenon happening in America, which is green tea.

You know, talk about fracking from a progressive standpoint, you're going to talk about all the things that we just talked about, environmental issues, social inequality, inequality, et cetera. If you're talking about it from a land rights perspective, private property rights is one of the bulwarks of conservative philosophy. You don't have any private property rights in a fracking area. So you've got people who, if I had the card in my pocket, I'd pull it out and show it to you, but my wallet went into the Amazon and it disintegrated. It's called Marcellus Patriots for Land Rights. It's got the don't tread on me snake with an oil rig going right through it. These are conservative guys who go to CPAC every year who are adamantly anti-fracking.

So you have this strange bedfellows thing happening where you've got anti-fracking activists in the middle of rural Pennsylvania who vote conservative or who have conservative values all of a sudden realizing that they're on the same side as environmentalists from New York. And that's an interesting conversation to be a part of. Well, it's just survival. It's just a matter of recognizing that you can't just keep fucking polluting everywhere. That's not conservative or liberal, but conservative ideologies and mindsets, they get trapped.

People get trapped in this one sort of team mentality. And that team is like always support big business, always support industry, always support the creation of jobs. Those things are wrapped around occasional unfortunate things that happen to the environment. Eh, poo-poo, not a big deal. The real big deal is that we've created all these different jobs and all these liberals want to save the spotted owl and those fucks don't even understand about logging.

Those kinds of mindsets. And a lot of times what's really crazy— It's not about the spotted owl. It's about the spotted person at this point right well it's also the weird thing about those mindsets it's a lot of those people are poor a lot of those conservative folks are poor and it doesn't benefit them at all but they've locked themselves into this sort of uh very rigid well it's not a revelation to say that very smartly the conservative element that's aligned with the 1% and big business found social issues that were going to be resonant

among people who are in rural areas who are poorer and used those as wedges to make people vote against their own economic... Connect wells to gay marriage, somehow or another. Connect fracking to gay marriage. But what's really exciting and interesting is like i've had um at our production space in brooklyn when when there were things to do in new york you know we had um uh one of the guys who was running um new yorkers against fracking who was h positive, gay man who was living in the house, hosting conservative CPAC, you know, dudes from central PA living under the same roof, hanging out, starting to talk about these things. And that was amazing. And I wish I had taped that conversation, you know, between the guy with the rainbow flag and the guy with the, you know, like conservative values from six generations.

Ronald Reagan tattoo. Yeah, like, and it was remarkable to see the change happen. A change where these people acknowledge each other and the openness that it created. And so I think there's hope there. I mean, that's one of the things. I just couldn't believe watching this conversation between these two guys. Have you experienced much personal backlash from this? I mean, have people gone after you?

Has there been, like, some weird moments? It's all personal. It's so weird. Like, you could look at a smear campaign from outside and go, oh, that shouldn't affect you at all. That's a total, you know. But it does get you and especially, you know, when you really get into it, you know,

and they ran ads, you know, in Ohio of me smoking cigarettes like at a LA... a movie premiere in 2008. You know, I used to smoke.

I quit smoking. You know, and they would do this to run personally and say, oh, look. Look at this guy. He's a total hypocrite

and everything. Because you were smoking? Mm-hmm. How does that make you a hypocrite? Well, because I'm talking about carcinogens in the water supply and all of a sudden, you know, I was smoking. This is a picture from 2008. When did you quit smoking?

A long time ago. Well, I think I smoked for a long time. No, not an hour ago. You know, you quit for 10 years, but i've definitely been off cigarettes for a very long time now so uh along the way did you realize like hey i can't keep talking about environmental impacts and health impacts when i'm poisoning myself sure is it part of the reason why you quit um i think so i mean i think you just quit when you feel like you have to quit that's also i had a couple of relatives get cancer not lung cancer but you know it did it wakes you up um i don't know i mean i don't i've not really ever talked about

this in person in in any kind of public forum um i mean when you're in the theater and you're a filmmaker and you know like you smoke i mean people smoke um i actually started smoking when i was in a play uh the glass Menagerie, when I was 17. I was playing Tom in The Glass Menagerie. And that role calls for you to smoke five cigarettes during the performance. So that started me. that there is um a problem when we stop being human beings and start being like pods of information that can't have contradictions right um the idea that but at the same time like it's not something i wanted like they will use every piece of information they have against you if they can

of course right so you don't want to give any fodder for that um you know did i quit smoking because i thought it would be pressure no i quit because i felt like i wanted to quit you know what i mean i felt like i was done with that and it was a problem um but do i think that you know we're not all uh i mean you can't be a saint um you know but at the same time like i, I think that that's maybe a good example of kind of downward pressure. Like, you've probably, you may have noticed that during this two-hour whatever interview, you've cursed like 25 times and I haven't at all. I don't notice that. Well, I haven't at all.

Say it. No. Say it five times. No. Don't be scared. No, I won't. Why? Because I just think that to a certain degree it's not respectful to some of the people who are in my audience. Really?

We have one curse in Gasland and it's worth it and one in Gasland too. But these are the kinds of things that whether or not you want to recognize it, they will either use it against you or you have to realize like what's underneath it all. Right. Do I want to. I don't want to do that right now in this role as a person who is working on these issues. Because it would get in the way. Yeah. And it's easy enough to not do that and then to examine the reasons why you would or wouldn't.

You know, it's one of those things that I think a lot of people really get into that. It's hard. It's a burden to to put yourself out in public and be exposed in the way that you are. But especially an individual, an individual with limited financial resources going up against an empire. I mean, that's what you're doing. You're going up against the oil empire. Yeah. You're a significant bump in the road.

I think it's, the more I like to think of it more as that these films were a vehicle for people to start to understand what was happening to each other. Right? That's why Gasland is in 12 states. Because it's a comparative study. And I wanted to show people in Pennsylvania, look, this is what's happening in Wyoming. This is what's happening in Arkansas. This is what's happening in Arkansas. This is what's happening in Texas. And these are people from a broad spectrum of political opinions.

So they're not all progressive lefty type folks. They're not all conservatives either. I actually didn't ask most of the people what their politics were. But the idea that this was connective tissue. And I have to go out and represent that, you know, as well as the fact that I have a dog in this fight, you know what I mean? Like, I want to win.

I don't want to see these places that I love destroyed. Right. Whether those are the places that I live, like in Pennsylvania, or the places that I've visited that are remarkable and that are on the chopping block, you know. Especially because there are places that have been destroyed. It's not like these are theoretical ideas that may or may not come to fruition.

No, absolutely. You can go to North Dakota and you can look at that fucking spot and see those poor people. That sand thing is freaking me the fuck out. I need to see that. I need to see these people playing in this silica sand. There's a Facebook page called oil field fails i think it's facebook page it's really it's actually more popular than gas line page they have like 140 000 followers we have 115 000 followers oil field fails on facebook has like crazy stuff on it. It's like burning explosions, directional drilling gone awry where they're shooting

fracking fluids out into a field, Halliburton trucks. And they make memes out of them. It's like a Halliburton truck overturned. It says, go home, Halliburton. You're drunk. And it's for comic value among dudes in the oil and gas industry. And you can just go on there and it's all these blatant, really dangerous situations, human rights abuses, people like bathing in chemicals, like out in the open on Facebook. Have you found it?

Oil field fails on Facebook? I'm looking for a good one. They did some whole bunch of holiday stuff. It's not that funny. Oh, well, there's a lot of like, you know, like, or look up directional drilling fail on YouTube or whatever. Yeah, like you've got it there. You've got the podcast. I mean, the Facebook page.

Yeah, see, there's a broken, there's a truck that's fallen off the road, another truck that's fallen off the road. And these are just guys that are fucked up. road and these are just guys that are fucked up yeah and that's where i saw the bachan beach or whatever like um uh with the dudes like hanging out at the at the huge crane that's falling over i mean some of it is funny it's like bloopers but that when you realize that these are people who could be dead because of that truck accident or um you know, imperiled by, there's a flare. You can see one of the flares in the window of the store. Where? I don't understand what's going on in that picture.

Yeah, me neither. Okay, so you saw the, you see that's a reflection in the window of a flare across the street. Oh, really? How do you know that? It looks like it's in a store. It's not in the store. It looks like it is. It just looks like it is.

It's confusing. Okay. So you see that those types of flares are what makes that. And those things are just burning off this natural gas that they're trying to get rid of because it's not what they're looking for. Right. And by doing that, you're polluting. I mean, you're fucking burning the gas. Well, you're burning CO2.

You're burning unrefined gas, which also has a lot of other stuff in it besides just methane. What is that documentary? Is it The Overnighters? Is that what it is? Yeah, that's about it. I haven't seen it yet. It's about North Dakota, about the crazy just— I hear it's really good.

Yeah, I've heard it's really good as well. Just the nutty gas industry and all these crazy colorful characters. I use the word colorful very lightly. I haven't seen it. I have not seen it. It's supposed to be great. But listen, I think what you're doing is awesome. Thank you.

I think it's interesting. It's, you know, all fucking people that agree and disagree. It's like a very hotly debated subject on my message board and on Twitter page. And so many people are so fucking angry at you. It's interesting. I don't think they're real people. I think some of those people might be real people. But a lot of them are people. A lot of them are trolls. But not a lot of them aren't, man. These people that I know, these are people that have been on my message board for years and

they talk about all sorts of things, but they lock on to those conservative ideals, those conservative talking points. All I would say is like, this is not a progressive or conservative issue. This is about science. And I would invite those folks who are getting angry at me to go to physicians, scientists, and engineers' website. Just type it in, physicians, scientists, and engineers for healthy energy. At their website are 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers cross-listed by topic on everything that we report on. scientific papers cross-listed by topic on everything that we report on. And they back up what we report on substantively in every case. So if you're one of those people who decides that cell phones work by magic or your car works because you sprinkle pixie dust under the hood, then fine. But if you're going to participate in the modern world, what you need

to do is heed what science is saying to you. And science is saying very decisively at this point, fracking does all the things described in the gasoline films. It creates flammable water. It creates water contamination. It creates chemicals in water. It creates air pollution. It creates health effects. It creates civil unrest. It creates fractured communities. All these things can be studied from objective scientific standpoint and come out to be proven and true from a standpoint of science and reporting. So the people getting mad at me about it, look inward because I don't know what you're getting mad about. You've got to come to the, to grips with the fact that if you're participating in this way and you don't believe that this is an

object of witchcraft, then you must deal with the fact that you're wrong. The Twitter page is Gasland movie. Um, your website, Gasland, uh, the Twitter is Gasland movie and the website is Gasland, the movie.com. I also mentioned our new project, which is SolutionsGrassroots.com, which is the renewable energy and democracy organizing hub that we're trying for. Thank you very much, man. Thank you. It's been really fun. Josh Fox, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back tomorrow with the great Russell Peters. And until then, we'll see you soon. Thank you. Much love.