VICE (2013) s01e08 Episode Script
Fighting Chances
This week on "Vice," we send Thomas to square off against the toughest fighters in West Africa.
OK.
My fight's about to start.
I just saw the guy.
Then we find out how climate change is transforming our planet.
It's very hard to reverse climate change, especially issues like sea level rising.
The water is coming in quite rapidly.
Shit.
The world is changing.
Now, no one knows where it's going.
But we'll be there, uncovering the news This is World War III.
culture, and politics that expose the absurdity of the modern condition.
That little child has a huge gun.
This scene isn't really kosher by American standards.
I was interviewing suicide bombers, and they were kids.
This is the world through our eyes.
We win or we die! This is the world of "Vice.
" Hi.
I'm Shane Smith, and we're here in the "Vice offices in Brooklyn, New York.
For our first story tonight, we go to Senegal in West Africa.
There are only a few countries in the world where soccer isn't king.
One is here in America because we have baseball, football, and basketball, and another is Senegal in West Africa because they have a type of voodoo, no-holds-barred fighting called laamb wrestling.
Now, with unemployment in Senegal running at nearly 50%, what started as a way for poor villagers to blow off steam at harvest time has turned into one of the only ways they can survive.
_ _ Yeah, two, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ha ha ha! Yeah.
One.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah.
Two.
Ha ha! Ohh.
Hi.
It's Thomas.
I'm at a Senegalese muscle beach here in Dakar.
This dude's lifting a 70-kilo dumbbell made of car parts, and I'm about to do the same because I've got to train for a fight on Saturday.
They wrestle in a traditional style called laamb here, which is kind of like MMA but with a lot more Sufi mysticism involved.
Can I go in real quick? OK.
Got to get my weight up a little.
Oh! Oh, oh, oh! Laamb is Senegal's national sport and its top wrestlers Deion Sanders-level superstars.
Over the last 20 years, laamb has exploded into a multi-million dollar industry with corporate sponsorship, omnipresent advertising, and wrestler salaries in the millions.
Sports journalist Malick Thendoum is pretty much the Howard Cosell of Laamb wrestling.
_ _ _ This in a country where the average income is $3 day if you can find a job, which you cannot.
The rise in popularity of laamb wrestling actually coincided with the downfall of the Senegalese economy.
It's the last, like, you know, hoop dream of all these kids who can't find work otherwise.
_ _ _ _ So Dakar is obviously the capital of laamb wrestling.
One of the major figures, though, is this guy Bombardier, who is from a fishing village in Mbour.
He is actually a former fisherman himself.
We're going to go up to Mbour-- It's about an hour north of here-- and see if we can't learn how to fight and then maybe have a match.
You know, just real quick.
There's wrestling camps all over Senegal to take advantage of the sport's sudden popularity, but only a few are presided over by an enormous megastar like Bombardier.
Physically enormous, we mean.
The guy is basically a building.
_ We're getting fitted for our gamba right now.
It's the traditional wrestling garment.
_ The wrestling itself is your basic Greco-Roman grappling with occasional punches.
You try to throw your opponent to the ground, and if anything but your knees and elbows touch dirt, you lose.
What really makes laamb laamb though is all the crazy ceremonial business surrounding the fights.
Wrestlers enter the ring up to an hour before their match to fire up the crowd with traditional good luck spells and coordinated dance routines.
The first step on my road to laambdom was crafting my own signature dance from a set of stock moves.
_ _ Next came the actual wrestling.
_ Yeah? OK.
Well, I'm about to fight.
_ _ _ _ Ugh! Aah! OK.
_ OK.
_ _ Ohh! Ohh! Ehh! Ehh! _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ What's up, dude? Oh, I don't know how I feel about this.
_ I thought maybe I'd let the little guy win to make his father happy.
Then I realized he was winning.
Getting even one of his tiny feet off the ground was like trying to uproot a tree trunk.
Oh! Hey! This kid's really good.
Ha ha ha! Ohh! Ha ha ha! Holy shit.
Like most things in West Africa, the most important aspect of laamb wrestling is witchcraft.
Each laamb wrestler has his own Marabout, who helps him prepare for his fight on the spiritual plane.
Bonjour.
_ _ _ _ _ The Marabout's rites are tailored to give wrestlers strength and confidence in the ring _ and to guard against any spell or evil eyes the opponents may throw at you.
This is all accomplished by bathing yourself in various types of tree water.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ Bombardier's Marabout also gave me 4 bottles of to-go baths to use right before the fight.
So This is my fight kit.
_ All right.
_ _ _ _ _ _ Bombardier rose to glory by beating undefeated champion Mike Tyson, the Senegalese Mike Tyson.
There's a Senegalese Mike Tyson.
Like most Mbouri kids, Bombardier worked on a fishing boat before he became a superstar, and it goes without saying they still love him down at the docks.
_ _ _ If the hometown hero worship seems tinged with a little desperation, it's because Bombardier isn't just the biggest local kid to make it off the docks, he's pretty much the only one.
We're in the fish market in Mbour.
This is one of the departure points for the Senegalese boatpeople, basically kids who couldn't find work here, went to Spain to try to make a living.
They have a saying in Wolof that's actually "Barcelona ba-sook," which means Barcelona or death.
Which is kind of funnily ironic because about 95% of those who got on boats here died.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ While the likes of Bombardier and Mike Tyson wrestle to sold-out stadium crowds, most laamb matches are still neighborhood affairs, held wherever young wrestlers can find enough space for a ring.
To test my training, Bombardier organized a laamb tournament in his old Mbour stomping grounds.
As night fell and the drum circles started trying to play over each other, hundreds of local kids assembled around a well-lit but particularly litter-strewn parking lot.
For several hours, the combatants walked around the ring, dousing themselves in voodoo water, drawing pentagrams in the dirt, and then rubbing the excess pentagram dirt across their wet bodies, while traditional Senegalese griots warmed up the crowd.
Then a lion came out and did the national anthem, and Bombardier led an inaugural chorus line with his wrestling students.
After one last Marabout bath, it was my time to shine.
_ _ _ _ Oh, that's cold.
_ Yeah, I'm feeling fucking good right now.
_ I know, right? I can't believe I won either.
I spent the following two hours trying to get Bombardier and his guys to admit they fixed the fight, but they all insisted I legitimately bested my opponent and that my Marabout was probably better than his was.
Laamb is obviously not going to make every young Senegalese kid a Mike Tyson.
level star, Senegalese Mike Tyson or otherwise, but this is a full-blown national phenomenon.
The laamb explosion is bringing in billions of dollars of outside money and becoming its own commercial industry, which, in a country with nearly 50% unemployment, ain't too shabby.
Still can't believe I fucking won.
The past decade was the hottest in recorded history.
This has resulted in sea level rise, floods, and chaotic storm events.
For many countries around the world, this has dire implications because huge amounts of the global population live at or around sea level, and according to the latest scientific data, the problem might actually be worse than we previously thought.
_ We're here in Piazza San Marco in Venice, and it's obviously flooded.
There are seagulls swimming by.
Why? Because the world is sinking.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the global sea level has risen 22 centimeters in the last 100 years and is expected to rise anywhere from one to two meters in the next hundred.
This means that cities like Venice are in real trouble.
Shit! Ha ha! It's about 11:00, high tide's at noon.
The waters, as you can see, are already coming in.
It's coming in quite rapidly.
The tourist stalls, which sell Venice T-shirts and stuff, now sell temporary booties because flooding in Venice is the new normal.
_ No, no.
Wow.
They're closed, which I can understand considering their bar is about 4 inches underwater.
It's so prevalent the flooding here that they've just built walkways, and everyone's just going about their business as if this is the new normal.
How many times a year is this area flooding, a roundabout number? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ If Venice is now spending 1/3 of the year underwater and sea levels are continuing to rise, it means that not only Venice is facing a huge problem but that many other cities at sea level around the world will, to varying degrees, have these same problems to deal with in the near future.
Now to try to understand the scope of these problems, we contacted Sir Robert Watson, a leading environmental scientist who was once the senior scientific advisor to the World Bank.
We're clearly seeing changes in temperature.
We're clearly seeing changes in precipitation patterns with more floods and more droughts.
We are seeing sea level rise.
Once you get to half a meter, one meter, are quite serious effects for many parts of the world, potentially displacing large numbers of people in coastal areas, low-lying deltaic areas, small island states, et cetera.
Small island states are really quite threatened.
One small island state that is particularly threatened is the Maldives, a far-flung nation that is composed of 1,192 islands spread out across the southern Indian Ocean.
The Maldives is one of the lowest lying countries on Earth, never rising more than 8 feet above sea level, and because of its problems with climate change, the Maldives has become the poster child for the climate reform movement because what's happening today in the Maldives is in the mail for the rest of the world as sea levels continue to rise.
You know, Manhattan is as low as Malé.
If you cannot defend the Maldives from climate change and sea level rise, you will not be able to defend New York, and you will not be able to defend your homes either.
Mohamed Nasheed is the ex-president of the country, who's also been called the Mandela of the Maldives due to his many stints of being imprisoned and tortured while campaigning for democracy in his country, and after finally winning the presidency in 2008, he immediately began a global campaign for climate reform.
Famously he carried out one of his first cabinet meetings underwater in an effort to bring global awareness to the fact that his country is disappearing into the ocean.
_ _ _ President Nasheed traveled around the world seeking to ratify agreements that would slow down the effects of climate change.
His message was simple-- "What's happening to us now is going to happen to you later.
" In 2009, he personally addressed the United Nations and delivered a very, very drastic message.
_ _ _ Now because of his environmental campaigning and his radical reform ideas, Nasheed was the victim of a military coup in 2012 that ousted him from office, and despite being continually under threat by the police and military, he's persisted in delivering his message of democracy and climate reform, traveling on a growing flotilla of fishing boats that sails from island to island, gaining public support for his environmental platform.
_ _ So you're basically living climate change Yes.
in your environment daily here in the Maldives.
Yes, yes.
_ Right.
_ We met up with his flotilla and followed President Nasheed on his tour, preaching for the return of democracy and the continued perils of climate change.
And as the flotilla passed an island, President Nasheed stopped the boat to explain what is happening to his country.
_ _ Yes.
_ _ Right.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ You're looking for new places for your country to go if, in fact, it sinks.
You've famously done things like looking for land for your people in Australia or Sri Lanka or India because you don't want to become climate refugees, I believe.
_ _ _ What happens when bigger countries have the same problems and they can't go anywhere? _` _ _ _ Right, right.
_ _ _ So if we don't do something to stop climate change, what happens? _ _ _ _ I think there's over a hundred cities with a population of over a million people currently today in coastal areas.
Every one of those will have to think how would they protect themselves? You can build infrastructure to protect yourself from sea level rise, Or you can retreat, and you can move inland.
However, can one imagine moving New York City? Can you imagine moving Washington, D.
C.
? And the answer is no.
You would still clearly want to protect them.
Humans can adapt to change.
The challenge is how do you adapt to rapid change? _ Hurricane Sandy, which was only a tropical storm when it hit New York, that clearly was a wakeup call that one of the most important areas, economic areas, of the U.
S.
A.
, one of the most populated areas was quite vulnerable to a single storm.
Over there is New Jersey, that's the Hudson River, and this is about 3 feet of water on my street, Desbrosses in New York City.
It goes all the way down, all the way into Tribeca, and all the way to West Broadway.
Lower Manhattan is completely underwater.
Hurricane Sandy hit New York with a 13-foot surge that flooded large parts of the city, causing loss of life and over $50 billion worth of damage.
After the storm hit, we met with the Deputy Mayor of New York Cas Holloway to discuss the problems that the city now faces due to climate change.
Right after Sandy, Governor Cuomo went on record saying, "I believe this is going to happen again.
Climate change is here".
What is the city's position on that? What's your position on that? If you're asking the city's position on whether climate change is here or is a real concern, the answer to both those questions is yes.
We certainly agree with that.
Look at the reality of the weather patterns and the damage that it has caused.
We're certainly going to see more intense storms that cause flooding and cause surge and sea level rise.
We have 529 miles of coastline in New York City.
Sandy really brought into sharp focus, hey, it is irresponsible for public officials to simply say, "Well, climate change isn't happening.
" No, we have to say, "This phenomenon is happening.
We need to deal with it.
" Now not all public officials share New York's concern about this issue.
In fact, many members of the federal government deny that, A, climate change is our fault and therefore, B, that there's anything we can do about it.
Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas.
It is a harmless gas.
The science just simply doesn't back up the issue of global warming.
I mean, yes, does the climate change? Of course it does.
It's changed for thousands of years.
The fact that all this is happening due to manmade gases, I really believe is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
There are always deniers or people that are not willing to accept the latest scientific information.
More than half the American population doesn't believe in evolution of which there is superb scientific evidence ever since Darwin.
In an effort to explain why so many in America continue to deny this crisis, we met with writer and investigative journalist Professor Christian Parenti on Far Rockaway Beach, one of the hardest hit areas in New York, to hear his thoughts on climate denial.
We've been all around the world talking to world leaders.
We've been seeing the effects, we can see it here in New York.
Why in America do so many people insist it's not happening? There's been a really concerted effort to invest in messaging that denies science.
The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful industry in world history.
They have enormous amounts of sunk capital-- pipelines, these refineries.
The idea of moving off of fossil fuels on to clean energy is a very serious threat.
Koch Industries is one of the largest privately held companies in the U.
S.
It's a major petrochemical, oil refining, oil services firm.
They're elite, right-wing political activists.
This is not a secret conspiracy.
They're very open about it Sure.
Right.
and they invest heavily in the political process.
This outfit called the Donors Fund has ponied up close to $100 million to fund climate denial Right.
fund bloggers, media, to deny a very, very broad scientific consensus.
Yeah.
They are defending their economic position very openly by investing in messaging.
We are not in global warming.
It's a theory, it's not a fact.
It's never been proven.
The science is not settled.
Get off of it.
Now it's important to remember that America is the largest energy consumer in the world.
We also are the largest polluter per capita, we consume the most oil, and are the only country in the Western world not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
Clearly America has a huge negative impact on the global environment.
However on the positive side, it also has the power to affect climate change by altering its current consumption patterns, which it has to do because if it doesn't, we are all in serious trouble.
_ It's very hard to reverse climate change, especially issues like sea level rise.
Once you set it in motion, it is just not reversible.
The time to act was yesterday, and the question is, "How quickly will the world "wake up to the fact that we have to do things differently?"
OK.
My fight's about to start.
I just saw the guy.
Then we find out how climate change is transforming our planet.
It's very hard to reverse climate change, especially issues like sea level rising.
The water is coming in quite rapidly.
Shit.
The world is changing.
Now, no one knows where it's going.
But we'll be there, uncovering the news This is World War III.
culture, and politics that expose the absurdity of the modern condition.
That little child has a huge gun.
This scene isn't really kosher by American standards.
I was interviewing suicide bombers, and they were kids.
This is the world through our eyes.
We win or we die! This is the world of "Vice.
" Hi.
I'm Shane Smith, and we're here in the "Vice offices in Brooklyn, New York.
For our first story tonight, we go to Senegal in West Africa.
There are only a few countries in the world where soccer isn't king.
One is here in America because we have baseball, football, and basketball, and another is Senegal in West Africa because they have a type of voodoo, no-holds-barred fighting called laamb wrestling.
Now, with unemployment in Senegal running at nearly 50%, what started as a way for poor villagers to blow off steam at harvest time has turned into one of the only ways they can survive.
_ _ Yeah, two, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ha ha ha! Yeah.
One.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah.
Two.
Ha ha! Ohh.
Hi.
It's Thomas.
I'm at a Senegalese muscle beach here in Dakar.
This dude's lifting a 70-kilo dumbbell made of car parts, and I'm about to do the same because I've got to train for a fight on Saturday.
They wrestle in a traditional style called laamb here, which is kind of like MMA but with a lot more Sufi mysticism involved.
Can I go in real quick? OK.
Got to get my weight up a little.
Oh! Oh, oh, oh! Laamb is Senegal's national sport and its top wrestlers Deion Sanders-level superstars.
Over the last 20 years, laamb has exploded into a multi-million dollar industry with corporate sponsorship, omnipresent advertising, and wrestler salaries in the millions.
Sports journalist Malick Thendoum is pretty much the Howard Cosell of Laamb wrestling.
_ _ _ This in a country where the average income is $3 day if you can find a job, which you cannot.
The rise in popularity of laamb wrestling actually coincided with the downfall of the Senegalese economy.
It's the last, like, you know, hoop dream of all these kids who can't find work otherwise.
_ _ _ _ So Dakar is obviously the capital of laamb wrestling.
One of the major figures, though, is this guy Bombardier, who is from a fishing village in Mbour.
He is actually a former fisherman himself.
We're going to go up to Mbour-- It's about an hour north of here-- and see if we can't learn how to fight and then maybe have a match.
You know, just real quick.
There's wrestling camps all over Senegal to take advantage of the sport's sudden popularity, but only a few are presided over by an enormous megastar like Bombardier.
Physically enormous, we mean.
The guy is basically a building.
_ We're getting fitted for our gamba right now.
It's the traditional wrestling garment.
_ The wrestling itself is your basic Greco-Roman grappling with occasional punches.
You try to throw your opponent to the ground, and if anything but your knees and elbows touch dirt, you lose.
What really makes laamb laamb though is all the crazy ceremonial business surrounding the fights.
Wrestlers enter the ring up to an hour before their match to fire up the crowd with traditional good luck spells and coordinated dance routines.
The first step on my road to laambdom was crafting my own signature dance from a set of stock moves.
_ _ Next came the actual wrestling.
_ Yeah? OK.
Well, I'm about to fight.
_ _ _ _ Ugh! Aah! OK.
_ OK.
_ _ Ohh! Ohh! Ehh! Ehh! _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ What's up, dude? Oh, I don't know how I feel about this.
_ I thought maybe I'd let the little guy win to make his father happy.
Then I realized he was winning.
Getting even one of his tiny feet off the ground was like trying to uproot a tree trunk.
Oh! Hey! This kid's really good.
Ha ha ha! Ohh! Ha ha ha! Holy shit.
Like most things in West Africa, the most important aspect of laamb wrestling is witchcraft.
Each laamb wrestler has his own Marabout, who helps him prepare for his fight on the spiritual plane.
Bonjour.
_ _ _ _ _ The Marabout's rites are tailored to give wrestlers strength and confidence in the ring _ and to guard against any spell or evil eyes the opponents may throw at you.
This is all accomplished by bathing yourself in various types of tree water.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ Bombardier's Marabout also gave me 4 bottles of to-go baths to use right before the fight.
So This is my fight kit.
_ All right.
_ _ _ _ _ _ Bombardier rose to glory by beating undefeated champion Mike Tyson, the Senegalese Mike Tyson.
There's a Senegalese Mike Tyson.
Like most Mbouri kids, Bombardier worked on a fishing boat before he became a superstar, and it goes without saying they still love him down at the docks.
_ _ _ If the hometown hero worship seems tinged with a little desperation, it's because Bombardier isn't just the biggest local kid to make it off the docks, he's pretty much the only one.
We're in the fish market in Mbour.
This is one of the departure points for the Senegalese boatpeople, basically kids who couldn't find work here, went to Spain to try to make a living.
They have a saying in Wolof that's actually "Barcelona ba-sook," which means Barcelona or death.
Which is kind of funnily ironic because about 95% of those who got on boats here died.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ While the likes of Bombardier and Mike Tyson wrestle to sold-out stadium crowds, most laamb matches are still neighborhood affairs, held wherever young wrestlers can find enough space for a ring.
To test my training, Bombardier organized a laamb tournament in his old Mbour stomping grounds.
As night fell and the drum circles started trying to play over each other, hundreds of local kids assembled around a well-lit but particularly litter-strewn parking lot.
For several hours, the combatants walked around the ring, dousing themselves in voodoo water, drawing pentagrams in the dirt, and then rubbing the excess pentagram dirt across their wet bodies, while traditional Senegalese griots warmed up the crowd.
Then a lion came out and did the national anthem, and Bombardier led an inaugural chorus line with his wrestling students.
After one last Marabout bath, it was my time to shine.
_ _ _ _ Oh, that's cold.
_ Yeah, I'm feeling fucking good right now.
_ I know, right? I can't believe I won either.
I spent the following two hours trying to get Bombardier and his guys to admit they fixed the fight, but they all insisted I legitimately bested my opponent and that my Marabout was probably better than his was.
Laamb is obviously not going to make every young Senegalese kid a Mike Tyson.
level star, Senegalese Mike Tyson or otherwise, but this is a full-blown national phenomenon.
The laamb explosion is bringing in billions of dollars of outside money and becoming its own commercial industry, which, in a country with nearly 50% unemployment, ain't too shabby.
Still can't believe I fucking won.
The past decade was the hottest in recorded history.
This has resulted in sea level rise, floods, and chaotic storm events.
For many countries around the world, this has dire implications because huge amounts of the global population live at or around sea level, and according to the latest scientific data, the problem might actually be worse than we previously thought.
_ We're here in Piazza San Marco in Venice, and it's obviously flooded.
There are seagulls swimming by.
Why? Because the world is sinking.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the global sea level has risen 22 centimeters in the last 100 years and is expected to rise anywhere from one to two meters in the next hundred.
This means that cities like Venice are in real trouble.
Shit! Ha ha! It's about 11:00, high tide's at noon.
The waters, as you can see, are already coming in.
It's coming in quite rapidly.
The tourist stalls, which sell Venice T-shirts and stuff, now sell temporary booties because flooding in Venice is the new normal.
_ No, no.
Wow.
They're closed, which I can understand considering their bar is about 4 inches underwater.
It's so prevalent the flooding here that they've just built walkways, and everyone's just going about their business as if this is the new normal.
How many times a year is this area flooding, a roundabout number? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ If Venice is now spending 1/3 of the year underwater and sea levels are continuing to rise, it means that not only Venice is facing a huge problem but that many other cities at sea level around the world will, to varying degrees, have these same problems to deal with in the near future.
Now to try to understand the scope of these problems, we contacted Sir Robert Watson, a leading environmental scientist who was once the senior scientific advisor to the World Bank.
We're clearly seeing changes in temperature.
We're clearly seeing changes in precipitation patterns with more floods and more droughts.
We are seeing sea level rise.
Once you get to half a meter, one meter, are quite serious effects for many parts of the world, potentially displacing large numbers of people in coastal areas, low-lying deltaic areas, small island states, et cetera.
Small island states are really quite threatened.
One small island state that is particularly threatened is the Maldives, a far-flung nation that is composed of 1,192 islands spread out across the southern Indian Ocean.
The Maldives is one of the lowest lying countries on Earth, never rising more than 8 feet above sea level, and because of its problems with climate change, the Maldives has become the poster child for the climate reform movement because what's happening today in the Maldives is in the mail for the rest of the world as sea levels continue to rise.
You know, Manhattan is as low as Malé.
If you cannot defend the Maldives from climate change and sea level rise, you will not be able to defend New York, and you will not be able to defend your homes either.
Mohamed Nasheed is the ex-president of the country, who's also been called the Mandela of the Maldives due to his many stints of being imprisoned and tortured while campaigning for democracy in his country, and after finally winning the presidency in 2008, he immediately began a global campaign for climate reform.
Famously he carried out one of his first cabinet meetings underwater in an effort to bring global awareness to the fact that his country is disappearing into the ocean.
_ _ _ President Nasheed traveled around the world seeking to ratify agreements that would slow down the effects of climate change.
His message was simple-- "What's happening to us now is going to happen to you later.
" In 2009, he personally addressed the United Nations and delivered a very, very drastic message.
_ _ _ Now because of his environmental campaigning and his radical reform ideas, Nasheed was the victim of a military coup in 2012 that ousted him from office, and despite being continually under threat by the police and military, he's persisted in delivering his message of democracy and climate reform, traveling on a growing flotilla of fishing boats that sails from island to island, gaining public support for his environmental platform.
_ _ So you're basically living climate change Yes.
in your environment daily here in the Maldives.
Yes, yes.
_ Right.
_ We met up with his flotilla and followed President Nasheed on his tour, preaching for the return of democracy and the continued perils of climate change.
And as the flotilla passed an island, President Nasheed stopped the boat to explain what is happening to his country.
_ _ Yes.
_ _ Right.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ You're looking for new places for your country to go if, in fact, it sinks.
You've famously done things like looking for land for your people in Australia or Sri Lanka or India because you don't want to become climate refugees, I believe.
_ _ _ What happens when bigger countries have the same problems and they can't go anywhere? _` _ _ _ Right, right.
_ _ _ So if we don't do something to stop climate change, what happens? _ _ _ _ I think there's over a hundred cities with a population of over a million people currently today in coastal areas.
Every one of those will have to think how would they protect themselves? You can build infrastructure to protect yourself from sea level rise, Or you can retreat, and you can move inland.
However, can one imagine moving New York City? Can you imagine moving Washington, D.
C.
? And the answer is no.
You would still clearly want to protect them.
Humans can adapt to change.
The challenge is how do you adapt to rapid change? _ Hurricane Sandy, which was only a tropical storm when it hit New York, that clearly was a wakeup call that one of the most important areas, economic areas, of the U.
S.
A.
, one of the most populated areas was quite vulnerable to a single storm.
Over there is New Jersey, that's the Hudson River, and this is about 3 feet of water on my street, Desbrosses in New York City.
It goes all the way down, all the way into Tribeca, and all the way to West Broadway.
Lower Manhattan is completely underwater.
Hurricane Sandy hit New York with a 13-foot surge that flooded large parts of the city, causing loss of life and over $50 billion worth of damage.
After the storm hit, we met with the Deputy Mayor of New York Cas Holloway to discuss the problems that the city now faces due to climate change.
Right after Sandy, Governor Cuomo went on record saying, "I believe this is going to happen again.
Climate change is here".
What is the city's position on that? What's your position on that? If you're asking the city's position on whether climate change is here or is a real concern, the answer to both those questions is yes.
We certainly agree with that.
Look at the reality of the weather patterns and the damage that it has caused.
We're certainly going to see more intense storms that cause flooding and cause surge and sea level rise.
We have 529 miles of coastline in New York City.
Sandy really brought into sharp focus, hey, it is irresponsible for public officials to simply say, "Well, climate change isn't happening.
" No, we have to say, "This phenomenon is happening.
We need to deal with it.
" Now not all public officials share New York's concern about this issue.
In fact, many members of the federal government deny that, A, climate change is our fault and therefore, B, that there's anything we can do about it.
Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas.
It is a harmless gas.
The science just simply doesn't back up the issue of global warming.
I mean, yes, does the climate change? Of course it does.
It's changed for thousands of years.
The fact that all this is happening due to manmade gases, I really believe is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
There are always deniers or people that are not willing to accept the latest scientific information.
More than half the American population doesn't believe in evolution of which there is superb scientific evidence ever since Darwin.
In an effort to explain why so many in America continue to deny this crisis, we met with writer and investigative journalist Professor Christian Parenti on Far Rockaway Beach, one of the hardest hit areas in New York, to hear his thoughts on climate denial.
We've been all around the world talking to world leaders.
We've been seeing the effects, we can see it here in New York.
Why in America do so many people insist it's not happening? There's been a really concerted effort to invest in messaging that denies science.
The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful industry in world history.
They have enormous amounts of sunk capital-- pipelines, these refineries.
The idea of moving off of fossil fuels on to clean energy is a very serious threat.
Koch Industries is one of the largest privately held companies in the U.
S.
It's a major petrochemical, oil refining, oil services firm.
They're elite, right-wing political activists.
This is not a secret conspiracy.
They're very open about it Sure.
Right.
and they invest heavily in the political process.
This outfit called the Donors Fund has ponied up close to $100 million to fund climate denial Right.
fund bloggers, media, to deny a very, very broad scientific consensus.
Yeah.
They are defending their economic position very openly by investing in messaging.
We are not in global warming.
It's a theory, it's not a fact.
It's never been proven.
The science is not settled.
Get off of it.
Now it's important to remember that America is the largest energy consumer in the world.
We also are the largest polluter per capita, we consume the most oil, and are the only country in the Western world not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
Clearly America has a huge negative impact on the global environment.
However on the positive side, it also has the power to affect climate change by altering its current consumption patterns, which it has to do because if it doesn't, we are all in serious trouble.
_ It's very hard to reverse climate change, especially issues like sea level rise.
Once you set it in motion, it is just not reversible.
The time to act was yesterday, and the question is, "How quickly will the world "wake up to the fact that we have to do things differently?"