Return to Transcripts main page
The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
Adaptation Nation, A Climate Crisis Survival Guide. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired March 23, 2025 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[20:00:00]
BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: Materials. There's a premium on that now. That's the home you're looking at right there. You can see no eaves or gables or vents that suck in embers there. It looks like a "Monopoly" house some would say. But it survived. And in a place like Southern California, where the ecology is there to burn, and you either fit into that ecology or you don't.
JESSICA DEAN, CNN HOST: Or you don't.
WEIR: And some of the great burst of human innovation came during climate change if you look back through human history. And this could be the smart surviving.
DEAN: All right. Bil Weir, thank you so much.
That all-new episode of "THE WHOLE STORY" with Anderson Cooper starts right now at 8:00 only on CNN.
In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me this evening. I'm Jessica Dean here in Washington. We're going to see you again right back here next weekend.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to THE WHOLE STORY. I'm Anderson Cooper.
It's been just over two months since the devastating wildfires in L.A. County, where more than 16,000 structures, mostly homes, were destroyed. Rebuilding is challenging. It's costly, it takes time, and as the fire season grows longer and more severe, there's a real risk more homes may burn again.
It's not just wildfires, it's hurricane winds, flooding and extreme heat that's only getting worse. More than 40 percent of Americans live in regions that have experienced extreme weather. So the question is, what does it take to adapt and live in areas that are at risk?
It's a question CNN's Bill Weir has been investigating after years of covering these disasters. What Bill found is an extraordinary effort by innovators all over the world who are finding ways to build communities that can withstand the changing climate and even thrive in spite of it. He begins with the reason why he started this project, the 2020 arrival of a little boy named River.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: Oh, River.
The program you're about to see was born on the same day as my son. It was the spring of 2020 and the height of the global pandemic so they kicked me out of the hospital after just one precious hour.
What's up, big man?
That's when it hit me. This kid could live to see the 22nd century.
But what will be left?
Fire season has gotten hotter and longer.
Given everything I see on the climate beat, the very thought filled me with dread. The trillion ton monster made of fossil fuel pollution is only getting bigger and the weather is only getting weirder. So I couldn't help but wonder, where should he live? What kind of shelter? How can he power his life in harmony with everything else, survive and thrive in the age of flood and fire?
And then I remembered Mr. Rogers, who used to say that when things get scary --
FRED ROGERS, TV HOST AND AUTHOR: Look for the helpers. There will always be helpers.
WEIR: So this is a search for the helpers.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When we harness the solar power, it makes you feel great that you self-generated.
Push a button and then it pushes itself out of the water.
WEIR: The hidden heroes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not only is it more energy efficient, but it actually could save lives.
GARY LEDBETTER, RESIDENT: I tested materials these guys wanted to use. And as it's flaming in my hands, I throw it down and say, we're not using that.
WEIR: Game-changing ways to defeat carbon Godzilla.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have 85 percent of our own energy.
WEIR: While building happier, healthier, and stronger communities, come what may.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Storms, they're bigger. They're more violent. You have to design for that in today's world.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Wildfire concerns.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Climate change.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: More hurricanes.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Record-breaking heat.
WEIR: Life as we know it may be changing with the climate, but life as we know it can be is already here for those with one particular skill -- adaptation. Noun, the modification of an organism, or its parts, that makes it more fit for existence in its environment.
Yes, survival of the fittest, baby. And what Charles Darwin realized is that the fittest aren't always the biggest or strongest, but those best able to adapt and roll with the changes, like the gentoo penguin. I saw firsthand how these smart little birds are thriving in a warming Antarctic by leaving ancient nesting grounds and chasing the cold, while the species that refused to move are crashing.
[20:05:02]
In Namibia, I met the desert giraffe that changed their digestion over generations until some can go weeks between drinks.
And did you know that the camel is originally from Canada? Yes, they wandered over the Bering land bridge only 17,000 years ago and discovered the same feet, eyelids, and humps that kept them alive in blizzards also worked great in the desert. And then camels got better at closing their noses to keep out the sand. They learned to drink salt water, eat toxic plants, and position their bodies in the coolest possible angles to the sun. Now, as the planet simmers under a blanket of fossil fuel pollution, it's our turn.
The heat is bound to rearrange humanity in a big way. But the smartest humans might learn from the camel and rearrange themselves around the heat. Like in Japan, where sales of day and week-long heat insurance policies are booming, along with air-conditioned shirt technology. While the typical white tee reflects about 60 percent of the sun's rays, in China they're working on a shirt that can reflect 90 percent and keep you that much cooler.
And in Phoenix, they now have a policy of shade that influences the way playgrounds are designed and built, and the way public health is administered.
After heatstroke deaths spiked in recent years, every first responder in Phoenix now carries body bags and ice to keep people from cooking in their own skin. Mobile solar-powered cooltainer units are being deployed to hotspots around the state. And since there's no relief even after dark, a 24-hour cooling center is now the norm.
Your office is very hot, Jennifer.
JENNIFER VANOS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF SUSTAINABILITY, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY: This is --
WEIR: This is your office?
VANOS: This is my office. Yes.
WEIR: And this is your tool kit, huh? What are you pulling?
VANOS: This is one of our tool kits.
WEIR: Jennifer is part of an Arizona state team.
VANOS: So the mean radiant temperature here is around 51 degrees Celsius.
WEIR: About 124 degrees Fahrenheit.
Experimenting with special kinds of road sealers to reflect the sun's energy back into space.
I read of a team at Purdue that came up with the world's whitest paint.
VANOS: Yes, you wouldn't want that here. We would be --
WEIR: We'd be blinded by it?
VANOS: We'd be blinded by that. That's why it goes on roofs. And I think that a tremendous amount of the buildings in Phoenix already have white roofs.
WEIR: And they are dramatically rethinking the way they plan, plant, and build.
MAYOR KATE GALLEGO, PHOENIX: When I was first elected, we pushed buildings to not go into the public sidewalk areas, and now we're saying we want to encourage it. We have a goal for 70 percent of our heavily walked areas to have shade cover because it can make a huge difference in how comfortable you are outside.
WEIR: Outside of town, the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation District is one of the first in the nation to put solar panels over irrigation canals, and they've discovered so many surprising benefits.
BEN LEPLEY, PRINCIPAL, TECTONICUS CONSTRUCTS LLC: There's two things with shading the water. One is you're slowing evaporation by 48 percent. And then the other thing is algae growth prevention close to 90 percent.
GEORGE CAIRO, HEAD ENGINEER, CASA BLANCA CANAL SOLAR PROJECT: That cooler environment gives me a few percentage points of extra generation, and it extends the life of these panels.
WEIR: And this hotbed of heat innovation also gave rise to a startup called SOURCE, which pulls water --
MICHAEL ROBINSON, VICE PRESIDENT OF ENGINEERING, SOURCE GLOBAL: Cheers.
WEIR: Cheers.
From even the driest air.
Yes. Delicious.
This two hydro-panel setup costs about 7,000 bucks. And the company says it will produce about 10 liters a day for at least 15 years.
ROBINSON: Water is really heavy, and it's really expensive to move. So what we do is we rely on the atmosphere to do that part for us.
WEIR: The heat will move us for better and worse. And as you'll see after the break, that includes adapting to a new world of water and fire.
Because the absolute worst kind of disaster is one where no lessons are learned.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:11:56]
WEIR: We now live in the most flammable era in human history, with little slices of the American dream threatened by fickle flame, even in regions you wouldn't expect. And while most are careful to prevent the kind of fires that start and spread inside, the looming threat these days comes from the outside as more and more embers fly.
This is such an incredible thing to behold. Behind me, over 100 giant fans creating 30 to 35 mile-an-hour winds, all so we can study the behavior of wildfire.
In the heart of the Carolinas, the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety creates controlled disasters, so we're better prepared for an uncontrolled future. They have a wind machine to fan flames and simulate hurricanes, a roof farm to mimic the aging process of different kinds of shingles, and ice cannons to study hail damage.
But this day is all about understanding flame, smoke, and radiated heat. The test subject is a fully furnished home built to California fire code, with stucco walls rated to burn for a full hour and a 30- foot gap from the neighbor.
ANNE COPE, CHIEF ENGINEER, INSURANCE INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS AND HOME SAFETY: Fire is sneaky. You want to keep the fire out, you have to find every place that it wants to get in and holistically protect. You can't just have the stucco and have a vulnerable window. You've lost.
WEIR: From Lahaina, Maui, to Paradise, California, I've seen firsthand the destructive power the modern wildfire, supercharged by record drought, wind, invasive species, and generations of unnatural fire suppression. And after 2025 began with the worst urban wildfire in American history, thousands of burned-out families and businesses across Los Angeles County are wondering what comes next. And studying what survived.
Greg, I'm standing in front of your creation, and it looks like it was sort of airlifted in here after the fire. It is so relatively unscathed. How much of that is luck? How much of that was by design?
After this, Pacific Palisades house went viral for its survival, architect Greg Chasen told me that the vacant lot next door was a fire break made of luck. But the house is a definition of fire adaptation, with a wall instead of a picket fence around native landscaping, tempered glass windows with metal frames.
[20:15:01]
It's striking how clean the lines are, and that is advantageous when it comes to blowing embers. There's just less to get hung up on, right?
GREG CHASEN, ARCHITECT: I really think it is. A lot of the other new houses that burned in the area, they have gable upon gable upon gable. It's just creates more and more areas for fire and embers to collect and do damage.
WEIR: In a search for other lessons learned, I went back to paradise, five years after the deadliest mainland fire in the last century.
HEIDI LANGE, RESIDENT: I did a metal roof, stucco, Vulcan vents. I have more gravel than any normal girl would.
WEIR: After the Camp Fire, two-thirds of the population never returned. But the people who rebuilt, like Heidi Lange, really want to be here.
LANGE: I kind of took an inventory of, you know, everything that was still here. And my community, and my neighbors, and my friends, and my church, and my job was all still here. So my little village, my little village is here in Paradise, and I'm happy to be here.
LEDBETTER: It's infectious, that spirit of survival and community. It's like, yes, I want to be plugged into this.
WEIR: Up the hill, Gary Ledbetter built what may be the most fireproof home in California.
LEDBETTER: I had my own torch and my own Bic lighter, and I tested materials these guys wanted to use.
WEIR: Is that right?
LEDBETTER: Yes.
WEIR: You were trying to burn their samples?
LEDBETTER: Yes. And as it's flaming in my hands, I throw it down and say, we're not using that.
(LAUGHTER)
LEDBETTER: Bring me something else.
WEIR: He bit the cost bullet and got commercial-grade garage doors to hold up in high winds.
LEDBETTER: Tempered glass.
WEIR: Put screens on the inside and a rooftop sprinkler system tied to the swimming pool. And he says it all started with a shift in mindset learned from those folks at the Insurance Institute.
LEDBETTER: I can control what I have on my property. And so that's where I focus. Instead of being a whiner and saying, man, I wish the government would just cut that (EXPLETIVE DELETED) down, that's out of my control. It's out of my sphere of influence. But this is.
ANNETTE RUBIN, RESIDENT: So I'm originally from Seattle, Washington.
WEIR: But when it comes to turning anxiety into action.
RUBIN: And I met my husband up there.
WEIR: My favorite story unfolds across the country and along the beautiful Gulf Coast beaches of hurricane country.
RUBIN: I was bartending and he was playing professional football for the Seattle Seahawks.
WEIR: And until she led the life of an NFL wife and started her family near in-laws on Florida's Gulf Coast, Annette Rubin never experienced a tropical storm.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The most powerful storm ever to make landfall on the Florida Panhandle.
WEIR: Her first was a cat-5 monster named Michael, and when she Googled the building codes for her county, realized their new home might not survive.
JOHN KING, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The window to evacuate is closed.
RUBIN: So I was sitting there holding Eva, a brand new mom, thinking, if this stays on the same path, we're not going to make it, and it's too late to leave.
WEIR: While their home was spared, Annette was so shaken, she set out on a mission to build a home strong enough for a category 5.
RUBIN: I went down this rabbit hole of how do we build a fortified structure, and in my mind, I was thinking, this is America. We should know how to do this now. Hurricanes are not surprises.
WEIR: After months of research, she landed on an Italian technology that uses sprayable stone to cover insulated panels.
First, you make these panels any shape you want round, straight. It could be a roof. It could be stairs. It could be a park bench. It could be an airport. And then you spray it with stone, either shotcrete or gunite.
With zero experience in construction --
RUBIN: Over here is our mesh machine.
WEIR: Annette started a company called Vero Building Systems and is trying to get folks to think differently about shelter.
RUBIN: So we have a 250 mile-an-hour wind rating, where Miami --
WEIR: 250?
RUBIN: Yes, there's never been a hurricane that fast before, as well as a two-hour fire rating. Around the world, we've probably got 60 to 70 different tests from different countries, rainfall tests, air change tests, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, wind. It's pretty incredible what these panels can stand up to.
WEIR: While her homes can be painted or sided to match any neighborhood, Annette says the biggest challenge is getting contractors to change their ways and to convince customers that an extra 10 percent or 20 percent cost upfront will eventually pay for itself in lower energy and insurance bills.
[20:20:06]
ROY WRIGHT, PRESIDENT/CEO, INSURANCE INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS AND HOME SAFETY: Insurers expect losses. That's why we have insurance. They aren't trying to get out of that. We're not going to stop the ignitions from wildfires. We're not going to stop the hurricanes or the derechos or tornadoes, but we can narrow the path of destruction, and that really is our goal.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:25:05]
WEIR: Water, everybody knows we can't live without it. But living with it will only get harder as earth gets hotter.
When the first wave breached -- whoa!
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The death toll from Hurricane Helene is now 225 across six states.
WEIR: It's times like these we are forced to remember just how much of the modern world was built by draining, and pumping, and damming, and dredging, and developing to keep water out of our way. But water never forgets where it came from, and the fight never ends.
So we should probably check in with those who have been fighting water longer and better than most.
Welcome to Holland, a country carved from swamps and built below sea level. Land of the mythical little Dutch boy who plugged a leaky dike and saved a nation.
Long before there was even a United States, all the green you can see here was under water. And that is when the ingenious Dutch came up with a cool new way to keep their feet dry with wind. And for 450 years, these three windmills have kept this patch of Holland dry, pumping it from down there into this canal.
This is not really a country, it's a machine built against the forces of nature. And now that those forces are getting harder to fight, some Dutch want to pull their finger out of the proverbial dike, and instead of fighting against water, learn to live with it.
And just a five-minute bike ride from the Center of Amsterdam -- Noa.
NOA LODEIZEN, SCHOONSCHIP RESIDENT: Hey.
WEIR: Nice to meet you.
LODEIZEN: You too.
WEIR: I get a taste of what that means.
Good morning.
LODEIZEN: Hi.
WEIR: Good morning.
This is Schoonschip, a neighborhood of 46 families who built a new kind of waterfront property by floating it in a cleaned up industrial canal.
LODEIZEN: Everyone has its own designer, so that's also quite interesting, but that's also why it has its charm.
WEIR: This is Noa. Yes, that's her name. And she is a single mom, drawn here by community and sustainability.
LODEIZEN: Everyone has solar panels, and whenever the solar panels in my surrounding is full, I can share it with my neighbors.
WEIR: With sun power, heat pumps, and no gas hookups, she says the community produces 85 percent of their own energy while sharing electric cars and bikes.
Should I take the shoes off or no?
LODEIZEN: No, no.
WEIR: Oh, OK.
LODEIZEN: Dutch do not take their shoes off.
(LAUGHTER)
LODEIZEN: I don't know why. OK. So welcome to my home.
WEIR: Thank you.
Her son, Yanu, is fishing and splashing off the kitchen when I arrive, but it feels less like a houseboat and more like an airy, modern home.
Do you know how cool your house is?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
WEIR: Because if I lived here, I'd be telling everybody how cool my house is.
LODEIZEN: So here you see that we're under the water.
WEIR: Underwater level, yes.
A trip to a neighboring basement reveals the foundation is a watertight concrete box, held at the corners by pilings that keep the homes in place while allowing them to rise and sink with the tides.
LODEIZEN: So sometimes the water goes up here. So you do notice a difference in height.
WEIR: Right.
LODEIZEN: You know, so if there's a lot of rain then we go up. So it is about a clear boat.
WEIR: Right, exactly.
LODEIZEN: Yes, yes.
WEIR: But do you feel safe in a storm? Do you feel like you would on land?
LODEIZEN: I mean, land, you're also not so safe.
WEIR: That's true, that's true.
LODEIZEN: I'm thinking, what's more safe?
WEIR: That's a good point. That's a good point.
LODEIZEN: We are bouncing along.
WEIR: Yes.
LODEIZEN: No, so I feel safe. Yes.
KOEN OLTHUIS, DUTCH ARCHITECT: Imagine if we bring this back to a lake, we can have thousands of floating houses on it, even floating aquaculture on it, even the floating wetlands.
WEIR: Koen Olthuis is a Dutch architect and global authority on new ways to live with water.
OLTHUIS: It's a matter of rethinking the country. The circumstances are different than 50 years ago, different than 200 years ago. We have more water. We have climate change. We have urbanization. And you have to ask, is this the best way to do it? As you can see here, also a fun one.
[20:30:00]
WEIR: His office outside Rotterdam is called Water Studio and is filled with models of current and future projects.
OLTHUIS: This one, it floats on the water, but if there's a disaster or there is a hurricane or something, you push a button and then it pushes itself out of the water.
WEIR: Wow.
OLTHUIS: So it starts to be a stilted house. It just floats everywhere.
WEIR: Yes.
OLTHUIS: But if you don't want the waves to hit the building, you push a button.
WEIR: You raise it up.
OLTHUIS: Yes. It goes up six meters so 18 feet above from the soil.
WEIR: While that is just a new twist on the Miami mansion, what he's really passionate about is housing for the masses.
OLTHUIS: If we make neighborhoods --
WEIR: Scale, density. He wants to float entire apartment buildings and dormitories. He's working on a 5,000 acre floating park and mangrove forest in Qatar. And in the Maldives, where livable land is precious and fleeting, Water Studio designed a neighborhood of 5,000 floating homes in a lagoon, near the capital, protected by coral reefs.
OLTHUIS: That means that if you have a neighborhood, and then after maybe two or three years, you see some difference in demands, you can start moving buildings around. You can bring them to another place, you can add extra buildings to it. So we go from static cities to much more dynamic cities.
WEIR: Right. So for example, a floating restaurant could move to one part of town, maybe where the business folks are for lunch, but then somewhere else for dinner.
OLTHUIS: Absolutely. Yes. There are so many cities that have always been afraid of the water. There are no sidewalks. There's no boulevards. There's -- water is something to be afraid of.
WEIR: Right.
OLTHUIS: And what we try to show people, that water can also be your friend if you treat it well with the right technology.
WEIR: And when it comes to Noa and her Schoonschip neighbors, water is what keeps them connected, leaning into nature and each other to build a sustainable village in the middle of Amsterdam.
LODEIZEN: I don't understand why we don't do that more. No, because it's only because we have -- you have a separate house. So if you want to retreat, you can.
WEIR: Right.
LODEIZEN: But if you don't, you can get support, you can have friends, you have a nice surroundings. So it's so much better to stimulate each other. So, yes, I think this should be the future.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:37:20]
WEIR: In an age of so much questionable behavior by billionaires, there is no question Bill Gates is different.
When I'm looking for stories of hope, I would call this a target-rich environment.
BILL GATES, FORMER MICROSOFT CEO, BUSINESSMAN AND PHILANTHROPIST: Innovation is the hope. Yes.
WEIR: While most in his tax bracket chase profit, he chases solutions to the biggest problem of all.
How many companies do you have now? Over 100?
GATES: Over 100, yes.
WEIR: When Harvard's most famous dropout stepped down from Microsoft in 2008, he focused on global health. But when it became more obvious that the carbon Godzilla of climate change was hurting global health and everything else, he founded Breakthrough Energy.
GATES: We hope that you're inspired by what you see here. We hope a lot of partnerships come out of this.
WEIR: Mission, find and help fossil fuel disruptors and Godzilla killers in every sector of the economy.
GATES: It's our power to invent that makes me hopeful. That's what Breakthrough Energy is all about.
WEIR: His investments include thermal batteries that store clean energy as heat in huge blocks of graphite, glowing hot enough to make steel or power factories.
This is just a hot rock in a box.
ANDREW PONEC, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, ANTORA ENERGY: Exactly.
WEIR: Heated up by either wind or the sun, right?
PONEC: People sometimes feel like they're insulting us by saying, hey, that sounds really simple. And we say, no, that's exactly the point.
WEIR: He's poured fortunes into next generation nuclear and deep geothermal to tap the abundant power beneath our feet. And at Breakthrough Energy Summit in London, dozens of startups are on display. But amid all the gee-whiz tech, it's telling that Gates was most keen to show off breakthroughs in the unsexy world of home efficiency.
SCOTT THOMSEN, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, LUXWALL: Can you feel that getting hot?
WEIR: Yes, yes.
Like a new way to insulate windows from a booming startup called LuxWall.
THOMSEN: Put it up here. Here's our product.
WEIR: Oh, wow.
THOMSEN: Yes, nothing. If it's like zero degrees Fahrenheit outside, that would be 15 on the inside. We're 67.
WEIR: Drafty homes and leaky vents cost Americans up to half of their heating bills. So Breakthrough is backing Aeroseal, a fix-a-flat for houses.
AMIT GUPTA, CEO, AEROSEAL: It doesn't stick to anything, doesn't stick to the walls. It only goes where the leaks are.
WEIR: When sprayed into a pressurized home, he says it closes every leak within hours at a fraction of the cost of a remodel.
What attracted you to this idea?
GATES: Well, it's one of the best kind of climate technologies where the pitch is not only that you're using less energy that's good for the environment, but you're saving money. And you're seeing demand going up.
[20:40:09]
KAMALA HARRIS, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The bill, as amended, is passed.
WEIR: Many of these companies currently benefit from federal incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Democrats a couple of years ago. But the second coming of Donald Trump --
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Drill, baby, drill.
WEIR: -- threatens to claw it all back.
GATES: There's a lot of societal benefits and energy security benefits, so we're hoping that a lot of those incentives survive. WEIR: What do you say to disillusioned folks who just think we're
running out of time and the grownups aren't taking this seriously enough?
GATES: Well, I'm spending billions of dollars and finding the best innovators. The only way to square the need for this emissions reduction and people's desire to not be the one who pays a high price for it is innovation. And that's, you know, why the companies here, their scaling up is how we get the best of both worlds.
WEIR: After the election, Trump and Gates dined together at Mar-a- Lago. And while Breakthrough Energy says he remains invested, they just laid off dozens of people working on climate policy, partnerships and summits like this one.
It remains to be seen who in Silicon Valley will retreat and who will follow moves like this one from Google and build a kind of headquarters that can create 90 percent of its own energy.
KATE BRANDT, CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER, GOOGLE: As you can see, the way it's designed, the light is hitting different panels at different times.
WEIR: Right.
BRANDT: So you're getting more solar capacity.
WEIR: Interesting.
BRANDT: Out of the design.
WEIR: That's so cool.
BRANDT: Of course, looks really beautiful, too.
WEIR: These dragon scale solar panels could be an architectural game- changer, along with the innovative heat pump systems in the basement. In the summer, these pumps pull heat from the building and stores it underground, and in the winter they bring it back up.
BRANDT: We're using, effectively, the earth and these pipes as our battery for this building.
WEIR: That's very cool.
BRANDT: Yes.
WEIR: See you later, gang.
And for every Bay Area whale --
That's fun.
There are hundreds of hopeful minnows angling for accelerator seed money, like Telo, which is building a city-friendly electric pickup truck that parks like a compact car and can even be configured with on-board solar panels.
JASON MARKS, CEO, TELO TRUCKS: So what you're looking at is a crew cab pickup truck with Tesla range, but the footprint, the length and width, of a two-door Mini Cooper.
WEIR: And then there's MightyFly, out to disrupt expedited delivery trucks from the sky.
Could I send my kid to Grandma's in this?
MANAL HABIB, CEO AND FOUNDER, MIGHTYFLY: I wish. I actually fit inside, so I could transport myself, but this is for cargo only.
WEIR: OK.
Manal Habib says her cargo drones will soon be able to haul 500 pounds up to 600 miles, business to business.
HABIB: This can be like retail, it can be manufacturing, it can be medical, it can be defense.
TOM CHI, INVESTOR: This type of thing is intrinsically adaptable.
WEIR: And her investor, Tom Chi, believes autonomous electric drones will displace the Amazon-sized, fossil-fueled supply chain of today, and all the traffic and pollution that comes with it.
CHI: Because of the form factor of this vehicle and the fact that it doesn't necessarily need to go through major airports, then it has the ability to do much more of kind of a point to point grid connection across the country.
WEIR: He is the named inventor on 77 patents, and after co-founding the Moonshot Factory, Google X, started an accelerator for companies that are net positive for nature by making the green choice irresistible.
CHI: What if we made it so that the thing that had the best unit economics was also best for the planet? Right? Then a lot of the fights that we're having around, like, please, let's do some good things for the planet, please, let's do some -- we could just skip them.
TOM STEYER, INVESTOR AND BUSINESSMAN: We're not looking for a silver bullet, we're looking for silver buckshot. We need dozens of things to solve dozens of ramifications.
WEIR: Just west of the Bay Area, at his gorgeous and regenerative ranch on the Pacific Coast --
Tom, thank you so much.
I meet another major investor who shares that philosophy. Tom Steyer adapted his billion-dollar investment skills to the climate crisis long before Chi or Gates, and even ran for president to elevate the topic. STEYER: Environmental justice, climate justice, save the world.
WEIR: You must have relationships with some of the most powerful moneymen in the world, investors, men and women. Do they get the problem? I don't know which is worse, if they don't get it or if they do and then don't care.
[20:45:01]
STEYER: I think some people actually do really care about money. I think a lot of those people are focused very much on the short term, and they feel like I'm going to do everything legally, but I'm not going to worry about the second order effects of what I'm doing. I don't think we're going to be able to change everybody's attitudes, and we have to accept people will be self-interested. That's OK.
Under that circumstance, how are we going to win? The answer is cheaper, faster, better products. That's how we're going to win.
WEIR: While he laments the speed and scale of the crisis, Steyer is a techno optimist.
STEYER: I think if we don't destroy the natural world, human life on earth is going to be better than anyone can imagine now.
WEIR: And he's convinced that big oil is doomed because alternatives are only getting better, faster, and cheaper.
STEYER: We're winning right now, in 2023, of new electricity generation worldwide, 86 percent of it was renewable. That's killing, in multiple ways.
WEIR: Texas is the greenest energy state in the nation.
STEYER: In Texas, where the elected officials can't say enough bad things about renewables, has tripled its solar in the last three years, and they do by far the most wind. Are they doing that to be nice? No. People don't realize it. Solar and wind are the two cheapest sources of electricity on the planet earth.
SYD KITSON, FOUNDER, BABCOCK RANCH: Come on in.
WEIR: And coming up --
KITSON: I knew that I wanted to be a different kind of developer.
WEIR: We'll meet the pioneers who are harnessing that cheap, clean energy.
KITSON: How can we be ahead of climate change?
WEIR: To build the most resilient communities.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's what we're doing.
WEIR: In the country. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:50:48]
WEIR: As disasters got more unnatural, and innovative solutions got more affordable, I used to wonder how long it would be before some town went all in on clean energy and resilient, earth-friendly design.
When Hurricane Ian crashed ashore in 2022 --
And you can hear that freight train hum.
WEIR: I had no idea that the example I'd been looking for --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just like muck.
WEIR: Was just a few miles away.
KITSON: These are hurricane-resistant windows up to 150 miles an hour. These things were bowing in like this.
WEIR: And the man who built Florida's very first sustainable town spent that same storm in this house wondering if his dream would blow away.
KITSON: All I kept thinking to myself is, oh, my gosh, I told everybody they can shelter at home. And when you see something that violent coming through, and you're untested -- I know we had done the science, we had done the engineering, we'd done all the things that we could do. But you don't know until you're tested.
WEIR: Syd Kitson learned a few things about being tested as an offensive lineman with the Cowboys and Packers before injury ended his career at age 27. He knew what he wanted to do next, though, thanks to an inspiring afternoon spent with a real estate developer from his alma mater.
KITSON: He never mentioned money. What he said to me is, I have made a positive impact on these people's lives. So I remember thinking to myself, that's what I want to do. And having spent years and years in the woods camping and really appreciating nature, the environment, I knew that I wanted to be a different kind of developer.
WEIR: And then he found just the piece of land to prove it, Babcock Ranch. Over 140 square miles of wilderness and wetlands close to Fort Myers, where his vision for a new kind of community took shape.
KITSON: This new town could work in harmony, hand in hand with the environment, not against it, not fight against it, but work with it.
WEIR: He bought 91,000 acres, sold most of them back to the state, so his new town would be surrounded by protected nature, which in a storm is the best water storage system ever invented.
The average Floridian developer would clear-cut every square inch, right? KITSON: Well, we've seen it.
WEIR: Yes.
KITSON: Yes. What they do is they come in and they just literally take it, knock everything down, wetlands, and fill them up. And that's just not what we should be doing.
WEIR: He also wanted the newest town in the Sunshine State to be powered by sunshine. So he stalked the head of Florida power and light into an elevator just to pitch the idea, and then spent years fighting back both fossil fuel interests and environmentalists trying to stop this massive array. They buried all their power lines, landscaped with only native plants, and engineered the whole town for high winds.
Then came the test, category 4 Ian, which stalled over the 5,000 new residents for eight hours, with Syd in the middle, worried sick all the while.
KITSON: Next morning I got up, I jumped in my truck, and I started driving around. I spent four or five hours. I hit every single neighborhood here, talked to the people, but people were wandering around like, what, what just happened? Because on TV all you saw was destruction, unfortunately, loss of life. And just, all around us, massive flooding. And they're walking around going, wow, we're looking pretty good.
WEIR: While neighboring towns were devastated, Babcock Ranch never flooded, never lost power, and has since survived Hurricane Milton in similar fashion.
[20:55:03]
KITSON: We've talked to a number of the insurance companies, and they're open to rewarding good behavior, rewarding building the homes the right way, building a community the right way because it's just not the home construction, but the community itself also needs to be storm-resistant. And I think Babcock has proven that. So let's reward good behavior and then maybe others will do the same thing.
WEIR: The idea is spreading. And just up the coast in Bradenton Beach, the guy on the roof there is trying to take it to the next level.
MARSHALL GOBUTY, HUNTERS POINT DEVELOPMENT FOUNDER: People say, well, I did my house to code. Well, OK, great. So you don't have to go to jail. That's a good thing.
WEIR: But when it comes to energy efficiency or cost or any of that --
GOBUTY: Yes, exactly.
WEIR: Code has nothing to do with it.
GOBUTY: No, we reinvent the code.
WEIR: Marshall Gobuty once ran a blue jean company, but is now a leading pioneer in net zero home construction. That is shelter which creates more energy than it uses.
GOBUTY: When we harness the solar power, and you get to take a look at your cell phone, and you get to say that you self-generated 98 percent of your power, it's a pride factor.
WEIR: Yes.
GOBUTY: It makes you feel great that you self-generated. And so if every one of these homes self-generates, it should be 98 percent over the whole year. And so I believe that the future will be this way. We just have to keep making more examples.
WEIR: His Hunters Point Development is a lot closer to the ocean than Babcock Ranch, with no room for a big solar array, so Marshall focuses on next level strength and efficiency.
GOBUTY: So, for example, this only has to be 16 inches wide and we're making it 32 inches wide.
WEIR: Each of his Pearl Homes has doubly thick footers, anchoring solid concrete walls and hurricane cane straps to hold down the steel roof.
GOBUTY: Code calls for two or three straps. We have hundreds.
WEIR: Building above the garage is a common way to stay dry in these parts, but here they raise the entire neighborhood an extra 3.5 feet just to be safe.
GOBUTY: FEMA has a flood zone, so you're 16 feet above by the time you step into your home. So there's --
WEIR: That's a pretty good buffer there, even for the biggest storm surges.
GOBUTY: And that's why our insurance is one-third of what normal insurance policies are.
WEIR: Foam insulation adds strength and helps keep the air conditioning inside where it belongs, which means fewer solar panels on the roof to meet a family's needs on demand, even in a blackout, thanks to the battery that's included.
No electric bills.
GOBUTY: No electric bills.
WEIR; In Hunters Point.
GOBUTY: No, for example, a home similar to this size would be 250 to 275 a month. We don't have that bill.
WEIR: I know everybody watching this is now dying to know, what's the price tag for one of these? How does it compare to the neighborhood?
GOBUTY: Well, that's a great question. So, for example, on Bradenton Beach, Anna Maria Island, a comparable new home like this, maybe $4 million or $4.5 million. We start at $1.25, and then waterfront with the dock is $1.65.
WEIR: That's still a lot for most Americans, but he's working on a new development of 720 net zero rentals as one more step in his construction revolution.
Do you try to convince other major builders to copy you, and what do they say?
GOBUTY: We welcome them. I want them to come. I call home builders and I say, please, we'll open up our books to you. There are national home builders that could take 5 percent of what they build and build them this way and see the success. That's what we're hoping for.
WEIR: Life as we know it can be is right here for the taking. But in 2024, America elected a man who will kill it all in the cradle if he can.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The next item here is the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty.
WEIR: For so many of the efforts you've seen in this program, federal support is now in peril. From the solar canals outside Phoenix, to the wind farms of Texas, to the incentives for anyone who wants to build the next Babcock ranch.
Can blue cities and states, nonprofits, and good-hearted corporations keep up the fight without any federal help?
We're about to find out. And before we know it, Generation Alpha will be old enough to tally what's left and wonder what could have been. And those will be the lucky ones, the survivors, maybe some thrivers who were surrounded by helpers with the wisdom and freedom to adapt, starting now.
