Original subtitles

[narrator] In 1856,

a scientist named Eunice Foote conducted an experiment.

She filled one tube with regular air

and another with carbon dioxide,

put thermometers in them, and placed them in the sun.

And she noticed the tube of carbon dioxide

got a lot hotter and stayed hot longer.

She published her results,

noting that "An atmosphere of that gas

would give to our earth a high temperature."

Three years later,

Edwin Drake struck oil in Western Pennsylvania.

A hundred years after that first well,

the American oil industry celebrated its centennial.

And they invited the physicist Edward Teller,

one of the inventors of the atomic bomb,

to make a speech about the future of energy.

"We probably have to look for additional fuel supplies," he told the crowd.

"Because the extra carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels

causes a greenhouse effect."

Which he believed would be sufficient

to melt the ice cap and submerge New York.

By 1965, scientists were confident enough

to formally warn the US president,

Lyndon B. Johnson.

[narrator] A decade later, Exxon's own scientists

were making grim predictions.

By 1988, it was front-page news.

And since then,

we've kept pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

at an accelerating rate.

We have a world economy today

that depends on fossil fuels for most of its energy.

[narrator] A third of it from oil.

It's a tremendous irony that the very substances

that helped us achieve this level of development today

are now the very substances that endanger the future of civilization as we know it.

[narrator] Governments are starting to agree

that we shouldn't let the world warm more than 1.5 degrees centigrade.

And we're on track to blow past that by 2030.

So why is it so hard to turn off the tap?

And can we do it in time?

[man 1] Industrial nations have developed a great dependency on oil.

[man 2] It has added a new freedom to our lives.

[man 3] The invaluable stocks of oil in these exotic islands.

[man 4] Their wealth is cracking the old life of Arabia wide open.

The Nigerian government love the oil more than our lives.

[man 5] Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide surround us.

If man continues to abuse his environment,

Earth, too, may become barren.

[Yergin] The story of oil is a story of geopolitical clash,

of technological advancement, and intense competition.

[man] The story of oil is a story of inequality.

It's a story of dominance.

The Nigeria in which I was born in was just a couple of years

before the ending of the British colonial rule.

[Hawke] At the time, it was an agricultural economy.

[Bassey] Cotton from the north,

cocoa from the west, and rubber from the midwest.

[Hawke] And in the area where Nnimmo grew up, fishing.

[Bassey] The Niger Delta is an area

that is crisscrossed by water bodies,

creeks, streams, rivers, estuaries,

which is the breeding ground for most fish in the Gulf of Guinea.

[Hawke] It was so fertile, fishermen could just leave their traps at high tide

and pick them up at low tide.

And in the evenings...

[Bassey] Children would sit around in the moonlight,

and the elders would share stories.

[Hawke] They didn't know they were sitting on

one of the most oil-rich regions on Earth.

Until the British granted Shell and BP an exclusive permit to explore for oil.

They struck black gold in 1956.

[Bassey] Nigerians were extremely hopeful

that the discovery of oil in their communities

would bring about positive changes in the economic well-being,

in the health conditions of the people, in terms of employment and everything.

[Hawke] And just a few years later, Nigeria won independence.

The future looked bright.

After all, fossil fuels had transformed other countries.

The world's wealthiest nations had once been much poorer.

The amount of work a person could do

was the amount they could do with their hands,

possibly helped by a horse or mule.

Coal was the first discovery that changed all that.

[Hawke] Ancient organisms in oceans and swamps

had soaked up the power of the sun.

Their fossils compressed over millions of years into coal.

And, a mile or more down,

into natural gas and crude oil.

Burning coal, this time capsule of the sun's energy,

helped Britain become the first industrialized nation

and the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.

And then oil came along.

[Yergin] And that started off this kind of boom.

It was discovered that gasoline,

which had been kind of this waste product when they refined oil,

was actually a very good fuel for cars.

[Lord Browne] Oil was the most energy-packed

liquid source of power that you could get your hands on.

[Yergin] Right from the beginning, it was very important to the British Navy,

who wanted to have access to British-controlled oil.

It started as a syndicate of private investors,

that went on a journey and an adventure

to find oil in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in Persia.

That was the start of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

[Hawke] Later renamed British Petroleum.

And they were just in time.

[Yergin] The First World War began with cavalry charges and people on horses.

And it ended with airplanes,

with tanks, with trucks.

When the Allied navy switched to using oil instead of coal,

those ships could go further before refueling.

[Hawke] Oil put the world in motion.

[Lord Browne] People were finding newfound freedom,

driving all over the place, flying all over the place.

It's pulled millions of people out of poverty.

[Yergin] What oil did was really create the modern world.

[Lord Browne] Pipelines were built, roads were built,

gas stations were built, refineries were built.

Everybody wanted investment in oil and gas.

[Hawke] But the profits were lopsided.

[man] The ocean of crude oil underneath Persia's desert

led the way to the Middle East oil boom.

[Hawke] Iran was making just a fraction of the profits from their own oil,

while the British raked in the rest.

And they decided they were sick of that deal.

[reporter] The long-smoldering Iranian nationalists made clear their intention

to seize the oil industry and expropriate the British company.

[Hawke] So in 1953,

Britain and the US engineered a coup,

overthrowing Iran's democratically elected leader to install the Shah.

[Lord Browne] Because they felt that he was more amenable

to having a great relationship with the West.

[Hawke] Which is how a young Lord Browne ended up there.

I spent many years as a child in Iran

when my father was working in the oil industry.

[Hawke] And when he turned 18, he started working for BP himself.

[Lord Browne] I joined the oil industry

believing it was a place where you could solve problems

that no one had solved before.

How could you use oil to go further and farther?

[Hawke] At the time,

BP was one of seven companies from just three countries

that controlled 85% of the world's oil reserves.

And over in Nigeria,

they quickly learned that oil didn't mean prosperity for everyone.

Under colonial rule,

the British had forced diverse states into a single nation.

And after independence, Nnimmo's home region

announced it was seceding.

As a young child, I did not fully understand

what was at stake.

To me, the most exciting thing was

there was going to be a new nation called Biafra.

[Hawke] But this region encompassed most of the Niger Delta

and its oil reserves.

So when the Nigerian government declared war,

the British gave their support.

My village was more or less a war front.

[Hawke] The government blockaded the region.

It's estimated that more than a million civilians

died of starvation.

I still hear voices in my head sometimes

of people asking for help, crying for food.

It's not something you forget in a hurry.

[Hawke] Biafra surrendered in 1970.

The next year, Nigeria joined OPEC,

an alliance of oil-producing nations

that wanted to take back control of their resources.

And in the '70s, they wielded their power,

raising oil prices,

with some countries boycotting the US for their military support of Israel.

Suddenly, it turned into a crisis

and a shock to the political order.

[reporter] Gasoline stations ran dry.

Airlines cut back flight schedules.

Factories were forced to close.

[Hawke] And in 1979, when the Iranians overthrew the Shah

and took back control of their oil,

prices went through the roof again.

And while that was bad for oil consumers...

It's ridiculous. You just don't know where it's gonna stop.

[Hawke] ...it was great for oil producers.

Nigeria became one of the wealthiest countries in Africa.

But after that '70s boom,

oil prices crashed

and so did Nigeria's economy.

[Gross] The idea of the resource curse

is that countries don't necessarily do better

just because they have an abundance of natural resources.

It can throw off the currency valuation,

make other industries less competitive.

[Hawke] And cause economic turmoil and corruption.

The problem is not the resource.

The problem is how the resource is exploited.

It's one thing for a country to get oil revenues.

It's another who gets the money, and where does it go.

[Bassey] A large chunk of that has been taken off by transnational corporations.

[Hawke] And the money that stays

goes to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation,

which is owned by the government

and is also in charge of regulating the country's oil industry.

So you have an operator who is also a regulator.

[Hawke] And since independence, billions have disappeared.

That level of corruption,

it corrupts not just people economically.

It corrupts the political system.

[Hawke] And there were other costs.

In the Niger Delta, over 50 years of spillage

has created 27,000 miles of toxic oil swamps.

[Bassey] Kids are swimming in water covered in crude oil.

Life expectancy is at 41 years,

maybe one of the lowest in the entire world.

[Hawke] Fishermen can no longer just leave their traps at high tide.

You have the fisher folks who go into the rivers

and toil all day and all night, and catch nothing.

[Hawke] And no more moonlit nights.

[Bassey] The gas flares set up by the oil corporations

burn 24 hours, every day.

[Hawke] And on top of all that,

Nigeria is a hot, dry country,

which means it's more sensitive to rising temperatures.

And as of 2020, the global average temperature

has increased by more than one degree centigrade.

[Hayhoe] Heat waves are getting stronger, more frequent, and more deadly.

It is powering hurricanes that intensify more quickly.

Wildfires are burning much greater area.

Climate change is not responding

to our annual emissions, what we're putting out this year,

it's responding to our cumulative emissions.

[Gross] So, the rich countries caused the problems.

We're the ones who put out all these carbon emissions over all these years.

[Hawke] But developing countries are facing the brunt of the cost.

It's already pushed millions of people to flee their homes.

[Bassey] The clock is ticking, and we can wonder whether there's any hope

that we can pull this off

or whether we've come to the precipice as the human race.

[Hayhoe] What's at risk? Not the planet. It will survive.

What's at risk is us.

[Hawke] The world emits around 50 billion tons

of greenhouse gases a year,

more than it ever has.

And governments agree we need to get to net zero by 2050.

And achieve carbon neutrality.

We're gonna move to net zero in a transition...

...a strong aspiration to reach net zero.

...significantly reducing emissions.

...legislation for net zero.

Nigeria has rolled out institutional frameworks

to cut emission by 20%.

This issue is not like the coronavirus,

where you need one vaccine to deal with one virus and its variants.

This is a very broad issue that needs lots of solutions.

And it's gonna require a lot of technology that really hasn't been developed yet.

[Hawke] But there have been dramatic changes.

Wind and solar power are now cheaper than coal in a lot of countries.

Battery technology is improving rapidly.

Governments are investing in more hydropower and nuclear plants.

Electric cars are getting cheaper every year.

And for long-haul ships and planes,

engineers are working on biofuels and liquid hydrogen.

And people are working on solutions for every piece of this pie.

And the current goal isn't to get to zero carbon emissions.

People are targeting net zero. Net zero.

They're saying, "We will produce carbon, but we will offset it."

[Hawke] By restoring forests, wetlands.

[Lord Browne] Techniques in the ocean.

[Hawke] Which can help soak up more carbon.

Or carbon capture technology,

which is still expensive.

That's an issue with a lot of these solutions.

So, many governments are trying to tip the balance.

More than 40 countries have a price on carbon

to make burning fossil fuels more costly.

And over the past decade, the US has been moving from coal

to natural gas, the result of fracking.

The US went from being the world's largest importer of oil

to the world's largest producer of oil.

[Hawke] And the natural gas plants the US has been building

are major investments in a fossil fuel future.

But it's helped the country significantly reduce emissions.

And emissions are dropping in Europe, too,

but global emissions are not.

[Gross] When you look at where emissions are growing right now,

all of that is happening in the developing world.

Even if the United States and Europe all work together to fix the problem,

we're still not there unless we bring the developing world along,

because that's where the emissions of the future are.

Without keeping emissions down in the developing world, we'll all fry.

As a Nigerian and as an African,

it's very, very tough to see people living in extreme poverty

and tell them, you know, "Let's wait a few years

till we get the best possible solution to get you out of that."

The average young person in Africa

wants to have the same amount of energy as the average young person in America.

They want to have the same type of opportunities.

And energy is that golden thread

that hinders people to reach their full potential.

[Hawke] While Nigeria's land is energy-rich...

It's the country that has the largest energy access deficit in the world.

[Hawke] In a country of around 200 million people,

almost half don't have access to electricity.

And for those who do...

[Bassey] Every day at nine o'clock in the morning,

public power supply goes off where I live.

It comes back at 2:00 p.m.

and then it goes off again at 8:00 p.m.

[Hawke] So most businesses

rely on diesel-powered generators to keep the lights on.

There's 800 million around the world that do not have access to energy.

And to have enough energy to live a full and dignified life.

It's not an inconvenience.

It's the difference between life and death for a lot of people.

[Hayhoe] They need to be able to develop,

to have electricity and infrastructure like we do.

But today, we know there's better ways to do that

than the ways we did it 200 or 300 years ago.

So you hear about leapfrogging,

that developing countries can just jump over the technologies

that the wealthy world used to get wealthy.

Instead, they'll develop based on renewables.

[Ogunbiyi] There's a bit of a hypocrisy with the developed countries

asking countries that currently do not have that much money

to leapfrog and transition out of something that they're still doing.

Let's say I have an auntie in Lagos Island,

and she takes a public bus

from her home to her business every single day.

She's been saving up money to buy a little two-door car,

which probably runs on diesel or petrol.

She says, "I don't have any money to buy the electric car."

And you say, "No, you have to continue on the bus till you get the electric car."

That is what energy transition looks like now in Africa.

Before you can tell the developing world "Don't use fossil, don't use coal,"

you have to have financing behind that.

[Hawke] For Africa to actually transition,

experts say it would take an investment of 70 billion every year.

[Bassey] The global north should pay a climate debt

for the exploitation that has gone on for so many years.

Those who created the problem have a duty to invest in making this happen.

[Hawke] And when global leaders met in Paris in 2015, they agreed.

The landmark Paris climate accord

included something called the Green Climate Fund,

a way for wealthy countries to help developing nations transition.

They pledged to give 100 billion a year by 2020.

And we are nowhere near getting that.

[Hawke] They've fallen short by 90 billion.

Some wealthier countries are investing billions

in clean energy projects across Africa,

but they're investing even more in fossil fuels.

In 2020,

Britain's prime minister addressed a UK-Africa summit.

There's no point in the UK reducing the amount of coal we burn,

if we then trundle over to Africa

and line our pockets

by encouraging African states to use more of it, is there?

[Hawke] But days later, it came out that 90% of the energy deals

that Britain had made that week

were in fossil fuel projects.

And the pattern continues.

[Gross] China has made wind and solar technologies much cheaper,

but they're also still investing in coal plants.

[Hawke] And recently, the US has invested nine billion

in fossil fuels around the world,

most in sub-Saharan Africa.

While the streets of wealthy countries are getting cleaner,

with cars that are more fuel-efficient or electric,

a lot of these old fuel-guzzling models

aren't vanishing from the face of the earth.

They're exported to countries like Nigeria,

because they're the only kinds of cars most people there can afford.

Africa is basically seen as a dumping ground for technologies.

[Hawke] And though Nigeria is the largest oil producer on the continent,

the few refineries they have are closed or dysfunctional.

So they export their crude oil around the world

and import most of their fuel from the Netherlands and Belgium.

But it's not the same stuff that they burn.

Investigators found that diesel samples contained sulfur levels

204 times what's allowed under European fuel standards.

[Bassey] There's a lot being invested in destruction in the world today.

The challenge the world faces now is to move from a system of inequality

to a system that is more just and more fair.

[Lord Browne] I certainly feel ownership of both the benefits of oil and gas,

and the issues, including climate change.

[Hawke] Back in 1997,

Lord Browne made a speech that shocked the oil industry.

There is a discernible human influence on the climate.

The oil world reacted badly

and declared that I had, quote, "left the church."

[Hawke] But now the world's oil giants

are also acknowledging we need to get to net zero.

[Gross] They see which way the political winds are blowing

and they're going with them.

[Lord Browne] They must contribute to the solution,

not just hope that the word "sorry" can get you out of the penalty box.

Most companies have a choice to make.

[Hawke] But overall, these oil companies have chosen oil.

Renewables make up less than 1% of their investments.

One report estimates that in 2030,

most of the world's oil giants

will actually be producing

more oil then they do today.

And while private companies once ruled the oil world,

government-owned ones now produce half the world's oil and gas,

and many of their economies are largely dependent on them.

[Gross] Countries that are very economically dependent on oil

face a real challenge.

Their production tends to be cheaper than anybody else's,

so they'll probably be the last people,

as it were, to turn out the lights on this industry.

[Yergin] The 88-trillion-dollar world economy

has been based on an energy system

in which oil has a preeminent role.

Other energy transitions took centuries. This is meant to happen in 30 years.

[Lord Browne] I expect oil will be around for quite a long time,

but it will be used by people who have no option but to use oil.

Rich countries who are historically responsible

for the greatest proportion of carbon emissions,

they have the greatest responsibility to act first and most.

[Gross] So, there's this issue of fairness,

and in a sense, everyone is right here, but it doesn't really matter.

We all need to work on this together, whether or not it's fair in any sense.

[Ogunbiyi] Developing countries are saying, "We want to be part of this."

"We want to transition, but we really need the help."

We cannot achieve our climate goals

if we don't achieve universal access for everybody.

The story of energy, climate change,

and development have to be one of the same.

[Yergin] Thirty years from now, the world will look different.

How much it will change and how different it will look,

that's still very hard to see.

Sometimes it's difficult to dream about the future and the way to get there.

But a new system is possible.

And that is where my hope is.

[closing theme music playing]