so i'm robert stone i'm the director of pandora's promise which is the documentary that chronicles the conversion of a number of high profile environmentalist from being anti nuclear to pro nuclear really in light of climate change and how that how they're thinking of all as they became more and more concerned that the conventional solutions advocated by the environmental movement for climate change really weren't working we need to think something else need to think outside the box and the more they looked at it the more they liked it and the more they realized that what they had previously thought about it was wrong and there their process of conversion on this issue very much mirrors my own went to a lot of environmental film festivals a lot of talk a lot of environmental groups the film is played about one hundred universities across the united states that fifty in canada really i was influenced by stewart brand who i've known for a long time in my previous film featured him prominently what sent me on my journey which is that the question is often asked can you be an environmentalist and be pro nuclear and in light of climate change can you be an environmentalist and not be prone to wear and i think that really struck me as being true and i was thinking about that most of the time when i was making this film it's not a technological problem that we need to solve in many ways it's not a political problem it's actually a psychological problem in decoupling nuclear weapons which was the great existential threat of my generation from nuclear power which is the great promise to solve the xs central thread of your generation and that's kind of what the film is about and i don't know how many people know about the sundance film festival but it's kind of a little hotbed left liberalism run by robert redford is a lifelong environmentalist and anti nuclear activists to lead programmers of the festival who've been i'anson nuclear their whole life saw and completely changed their mind you're in a new film that was just at the sundance festival called pandora's have a long track record with sundance having been there with my first film which is an anti nuclear film and the nuclear weapons radio bikini many years ago became an island and my last film that was there was a film called earth days which was a history of the environmental movement so there was a lot of curiosity about this movie to say the least that i would come there as the sort of anti nuclear environmentalist i'm with this particular film so on opening night i polled the audience and i said oh how many of you would you know if you stopped in the street would consider yourselves and say nuclear was about eighty percent i was surprised that twenty percent actually admitted to being pro nuclear at sundance but then they raise their hands q and a after the film and i ask the same question and that was the response those things does not happen folks it was weird and nobody associated with the film and the founders of none of us expected that kind of a turnaround and the other thing was great is that so many people who consider th own selves and i think nuclear would actually come to see the movie because most of the time people go see movies that comport with their ideological beliefs in this case people have come out to see this film not just to sundance but everywhere who was who are against it and i've done this kind of polling wherever i've gone this is even at environmental film festivals where the film has won many a top awards and stuff like this so why why is this i do have empathy for the people who disagree with me because i was that person you know and i don't i don't think that you're as a serial evil or stupid or or you know you've got your head screwed on wrong if you're insane nuclear i think you've been misled as i was and you believe a whole series of things that if you add them all up make perfectly logical sense to deep for your position but if you want packet because i'm i understand where you're coming from because i went through the same process you can reach people i'm not coming at this saying i love nuclear power the way a renewable energy advocate would come and say well i love solar i love wind because it represents x y and z and fits into some broader ideological scheme i'm just saying this this is a tool to solve a problem that you and i care about which is climate change ok there's also the conversion narrative the idea that people in the film and myself i used to think like you and i changed my mind and that story of how i changed my mind engage the audience and to go through that same process themselves so we're not saying you guys are wrong and getting into a confrontation saying well this is all the data points that proves you're wrong a kind of a debate situation but we've been misled the leaders that we believed in the people that we trusted to provide us information about climate and energy and renewable energy and all of a nuclear energy have misled us i can and i could go down the list of a number of leading environmental activists who can reach millions and millions of people who have privately told close friends of theirs that they know nuclear needs to be a part of the solution but they will not say so publicly because it will undermine their position as a leader of a big movement you know it would they think it's too risky to come out and say but they know that ats actually true but you know in a debate with me they'll rip me to shreds you know try to we didn't take any industry funding that we were completely independent or very very careful but i mean i was certainly accused all you go on the web you know there's tons of stuff about how he took money and i'm a bought and paid for stooge in the nuclear industry but that really didn't fly and we were very careful about that chicago tribune the most important environmental documentar by a lot of very important people and influence as we had i think there were seven articles in the new york times about the movie which is extraordinary so you get a lot of media attention was seen by a lot of influential people now the film was picked up by c n n and in the we leading up to the broadcast for the world's leading climate scientists came out and wrote an open letter supporting the contention in the film that nuclear powers absolutely essential if we're going to solve climate change so that  became the story that week four of the world's top environmentalist have written an open letter calling for more nuclear power they say it's the only way to reverse climate change well look i know the folks who wrote the letter these are good hearted people they're well intentioned people first what's the cheapest what can actually come online and be affordable here in the u s and around the world's what's cleanest what reduces emissions the most are produces no emissions when you power it up and then also what can come online quickly and of course we have to look at what safe nuclear power if you apply those tests comes in either lasts or almost last in almost every category what became evident to me is that  leadership of these groups they're really representing a green power movement which is really a political movement masquerading as an environmental movement and that became very evident in the fact that the climate scientists were disagreeing with them and they were then discrediting the climate scientists and we were on the side of the scientific community so all all hell broke loose in the week leading up to the broadcast we had lots of wonderful debates the one between michael shellenberger and ralph nader was priceless bill gates obama jeffrey sachs richard branson paul allen nathan myhrvold the world's leading climate scientists all saying we need nuclear energy because we can't bet the planet on solar which provides one tenth of one percent and on wind which is totally dependent on federal subsidies that is a very dangerous bet the response that they've gotten is just rejection out of him and this fear mongering that you've been doing your forty years has been effective and halti the growth of nuclear energy we've stopped it you in the environment stopped at twenty percent of our electricity that twenty percent save one point seven million lives millions of other lives would have been saved had we had zero pollution and instead this kind of fearmonger i mean look at the record forty years we've had three bad accidents sure noble the world health organization says seventy people have died outside of the soviet union in fukushima and three mile island nobody has died by contrast coal kills over three hundred thousand people per year so you can you can kind of paper these grand scare theories limit but the reality is there's an empirical public health you know listening start with energy efficiency put aside everything  we are very wasteful in energy correct we react who are you how can you answer the question that we've become more energy efficient over the last two hundred years ralph if you look at the energy studies over two hundred years energy intensity has declined meaning we get more units of g d p per unit of energy just two hundred years that's a long term trend and over that same period of time our energy consumption increases now we're going to tell the one point three billion people in the world who burn wood and dung for their energy that they need to become more world with wind and solar and she goes yes i do and he was like what and i got all excited by said ok let's just go in for the kill but but but you know got ahead of me and he said that he said he looked at emerson cooper he said anderson i want the american people to know that if you if they care about their children and grandchildren if they care about the future they should not give one red michael moore who's an old old friend of mine has a film festival he invited me and we did like a forty five minute q and a afterwards and he got it and all of us to be this was an entirely anti nuclear crowd packed house michael brought of the biggest anti nuclear rallies in this country back in the one nine hundred seventy s so what are the lessons from this the facts are not persuasive they're not the social science about this is really interesting that in fact if you just present somebody with facts that are contradictory to their core beliefs they actually become more beholden to those core beliefs the confirmation bias you tend to filter out information that contradicts your belie motivated reasoning is the other thing which is more pernicious actually because it does mean that we actually act on our core beliefs and we do in our rational thinking and facts so this actually gets policy making and decision making at very high levels you know the source of the information who the person is who's telling you something is much more important what that information is where you know we do live in a world where people are getting their information through facebook their news through facebook feeds and things like this where things are friends pass around and if their friends share those values with you core values they you can you can be very very sect of addicts advocate for nuclear because they hey they know hey i know you know we share political values we share environmental values and you've done this journey about all my friends were sort of i think default anti nuclear but i didn't think i don't really hang out with activist i've never been an activist myself is like like really robert like but it was a tough sell for them and now they're all hugely supportive of me because i was just like look i share your values you want clean air you want to better life your kids well here's you know they're like oh well you know me i think about this film like oh i i know you robert ok and you convince me and that's what it is a lot of people who work in the nuclear industry never tell their their friends when they're taking their kids to a soccer game that they work in the nuclear industry the values alignment is what that's about and you cannot be safe it's not something that you the nuclear industry consider cook up higher madison avenue firm to manufacture it has to be genuine it has to be genuine or it doesn't work so if you're going to be out there as i think everybody in this room is on a daily basis in their interaction with people and be an advocate for nuclear power you need to understand what your opponents think the only way you can believe this is if you're in the pay of the nuclear industry or you're crazy i think you've probably all heard that i certainly have the logic of their belief that we can run the world on wind and solar makes complete sense to them but this is primary energy that's the met a clean energy you have fossil fuels very simple graph if you break it down most people in the environmental movement most of the self described environmentalist believe that that chunk of non fossil energy is entirely wind and solar that's what they believe so all of this opposition is really based on a bunch of environmental of assumptions that are wrong and you know there are assumptions that i had and was part of what led me to make my film earth days actually i mean i believe the stuff that we're running out of fossil fuels that eventually all of these alternative sources of energy will become much more cost effective in relationship to fossil fuels energy efficiency will reduce overall energy demand that's absolutely believe it was assumed that wind and solar would gradually replace fossil fuels that's been the assumption going back to the one nine hundred seventy s amory lovins in saying that forever and the environmental movement has put all its eggs in the basket  climate treaty that we're going to say combine reduce carbon emissions and then i think a really important one that's been discussed today is the idea that more energy leads to more environmental destruction so the assumption was there was the in the oil to put so much of our technological prowess of the finding more and more oil that the cost is is low energy efficiency will reduce overall energy demand that's absolutely believe we've been improving energy fish see since the beginning of the industrial revolution and we keep using these three things there goes every nuclear plant we have energy efficiency well the more productivity we get per unit of energy the lower the cost of energy the lower the cost per unit of energy in terms of productivity  use jergens paradox or the rebound effect so energy efficiency gains are largely offset by energy use elsewhere not in the ne particular thing you know your refrigerator is much more efficient than it was thirty years ago all that airconditioning is a classic example of that growing demand this is rio de janeiro the world needs more energy they're going to get energy we're adding the energy equivalent of another brazil to the planet every year every year adding another country the size of brazil in terms of energy use is you know man plus energy is that a bad thing well actually more energy lift people out of poverty it allows women to get an education and enter the workforce lowers birth rates so high energy societies are wealthier healthier better educated and better stewards of the environment so it's exactly exactly opposite of one of the core beliefs the environmental movement which is that if you provide humanity with more energy they will of the environmental movement is that we are facing a political problem that can be solved like the civil rights problem the gay rights problem any other kind of a social movement that we've lived through and that you need to go out into the streets and demonstrate against the forces of power in this case the forces of power are the big oil companies like what the environmental movement did to nuclear regulate it to death and use lawsuits and all of this protests this is what they're now doing to the fossil fuel industry as an attempt to change the course of how we use energy but it's very difficult to legislate c o two out of existence unless you've got a viable  alternative to replace the fossil fuels so you know i applaud president obama what he's doing but we need we need something to replace the fossil fuels that we're trying to tax and regulate to death so it's a complex thing and i think one of the real objections that i have to the way the environmental movement is approaching this problem is to say it's not us you know it's not me it's not my it's not my consumption of energy it's oil it's a conspiracy of the big power big big corporations stuff like that and you can see the same thinking has been going on for decades and decades but climate change is a different problem than solving pollution solving water pollution air pollution like it was in the seventy's so the key arguments against nuclear is it's unsafe proven by fukushima and chernobyl which we all know killed millions of people there's a toxic legacy it's a moral the toxic waste is mountains of it it's absolutely immoral it's expensive and just getting more expensive removals are just cheap and getting cheaper and it's not disruptive to the existing energy paradigm and this is a core motivation environmental movement is that we don't just want to replace fossil fuels with nuclear and have the same big centralized power plants in the same corporations we want a revolution we want to change the way the world works we want to we want to democra democratized energy we want to completely transform things we don't just replace peter with paul and the number one reason to be against nuclear is it's unnecessary because who needs it because we've got wind and solar but there's a romantic vocabulary that goes with renewable energy living in harmony with nature it's safe it's free it's the democratic it's looked to has an overarching narrative to the renewable energy dream it's very attractive that that advocates for nuclear energy  need to find that narrative need to find that dream need to have that positive overarching vision that goes beyond simply the technological aspect and saying well it's safe you know it's or it's not that bad this is a really interesting graph on the best days are doing pretty well midday but in the worst in january you get nothing but this is what everybody forgets as if the planet stops rotating the clouds part and germany is baking in the sun because the sun shines on germinate twenty four hours a day well a question that can be asked if you're an environmentalist is you know brown coal is the dirtiest fuel of the planet the worst if there is one source of energy i think we could all agree on that we got to get rid of the brown coal what was the percentage of german electricity that came from brown coal and twenty thirteen is anybody's guess twenty six percent what was the percentage of german electricity that came from br actually does have a vision they actually have of the nation they have implemented it they've bet they've gotten political support they've got support for the political class and they see it as a national goal to become green  know like we want to go to the moon that's their machinable project and they put a lot of money into it so that's a good thing but they need to be judged on what they've actually succeeded in doing and right now they're just being judged on their good intentions and wishful thinking but you know the good thing about what they've done is that they are providing a proof of concept about whether this is actually possible and until somebody does this and does it to the scale that germany has done in a country as industrial as a germany it would always be held out there is a dream and what we're seeing is the reality of it the world health organization has calculated that three million people die every year from fossil fuel pollution and that doesn't even include the four million to die from indoor air pollution but let's just take the outdoor air pollution cost of fossil fuels three million a year in the same organization the world health organization i think we all have some respect for except for how we call the who says that this is the so i think it's a fair thing to say but what the hell maybe i'm wrong by a few million but anyway if you do the math that's a hundred and fifty million people killed premature deaths from fossil fuels in the last fifty years and sixty for the nuclear and yet the entire environmental movement is up in arms against nuclear power and doesn't really you don't see big pickets