(group indistinct chattering and singing) (uplifting music) - Another story, we were camping in Yosemite, so we opened the tent and we saw the bear and he was jumping on our cooler.

(mimics bear growling) And we had to just stand there and watch him eat all of our food.

- Stories are sacred.

We humans have been telling stories since basically forever and we always will.

Stories are important because, well, they guide us towards a better future.

Every time a new crisis came along, new problems needed to be solved and so new stories were created.

Climate change is one of those crises.

So what's our new story?

My name's Charles Loi.

(upbeat music) My friends and I set out to find that narrative, starting in our own backyard, California.

We began to grapple with the larger story of this place and the journey forced us to confront the very nature of stories, how they change and who gets to tell them.

We began to see that the best kind of story is the one that's both true and empowering.

The kind that reminds you of the beauty of the world.

That reminds you of the power that you already have.

So this is an invitation to one of the greatest stories on earth...

Ours.

- [Director] And action.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San Francisco-based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment, and medical science and innovation, and by the Community Foundation of Sonoma County.

Additional support provided by donors to The Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media.

A complete list is available.

And by the following.

(upbeat music continues) "Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(relaxing music) - Everyone knows that fossil fuels are a leading factor in climate change, but not everyone knows how prevalent oil production still is in California.

We wanted to see it for ourselves.

So we hit the road.

(upbeat music) Kern County produces about 80% of California's oil, as well as a lot of our food.

We met up with Cesar Aguirre, a community organizer here.

He let us tag along as he inspected oil wells, taking care not to trespass.

- That flare is on right there.

You see that small flame coming out of that post?

- [Charles] But we didn't stay long.

- Yeah, okay.

Let's go back in the car.

- Okay.

- [Charles] All right.

Security?

- Yeah, he was like, you're not going on the lease, are you?

- [Charles] So what just happened?

- [Cesar] We just, we got pressed by private security and that happens a lot.

Sometimes it's when they're bigger entities, they have private securities at patrol.

So we try to be as careful as possible.

(light music) - What Cesar showed us was jarring.

Look, it's not like we imagined California only as a place of endless possibility and progress and sunshine, but this was a side we'd never seen before.

So where did these oil wells come from?

Okay, long story long.

We used to burn a lot of wood and coal and whale blubber, and then we turned to oil, because of its high energy density.

That energy comes from the sun.

California used to be mostly underwater, where marine organisms fed on solar energy through photosynthesis.

When they died and were buried in the sediment, the absence of oxygen meant they couldn't decay, locking in their carbon.

Meanwhile, tectonic plates shifted, including the Farallon Plate, which subducted underneath the North American plate.

Over millions of years of heat and pressure that buried organic matter transformed into oil.

And there it stayed, safely stored forever.

Just kidding.

In the 1800s humans discovered how useful oil is and how plentiful it was in Southern California.

And there was a boom here.

From producing half a million barrels in 1893 to 73 million barrels in 1910, more than anywhere else.

California was once the oil capital of the world.

But there were consequences.

(drone buzzing) - This red tank, right here.

- Yeah.

- You see that silver bell on top?

Can you film that for me?

That silver bell?

- Yeah.

- [Cesar] Something's coming out of it.

- This thing?

- Yes, yes, yes.

That thing.

Can you come to this tank again, just so I can see the valves on top?

- Sure.

- [Cesar] Yeah, look, you see how this one doesn't have a river of oil coming down from it?

Now go to the other one.

Okay, right there.

Woo, all of that, that's coming out of it.

I don't think that's properly closed.

- [Charles] This was an obvious problem.

But sometimes you need more than the naked eye to spot oil leaks.

Cesar and I met up with Kyle Ferrar, a scientist with FracTracker.

- Hey Kyle.

- Hi.

- [Cesar] You look like a military contractor that's waiting for us to do a deal.

(Kyle indistinct chattering) (Kyle laughing) You smell that dude?

These were the wells that have that exemption, man.

They're allowed to vent at the wellhead.

- [Kyle] It seems like this is going to be a common loophole that a lot of operators are going to be using.

- [Cesar] Yeah, especially if they do their own tests.

- [Kyle] What a crazy exemption.

- [Cesar] Yeah.

- So we have here an optical gas imaging camera that shows hydrocarbons, like you would see smoke or water vapor, you know, with the naked eye.

Okay, yeah, we're seeing wisps.

We have a major leak here.

And so we're going to report this as a complaint to the air district.

(tense music) - [Charles] Extracting oil releases greenhouse gases and air toxins.

Some of this stuff is called volatile organic compounds, VOCs.

I could get into how benzene is like one of the main compounds that you probably associate with the smell of gasoline.

I could tell you why ethyl benzene is important in the production of plastic, or about N-hexane, which is used to extract vegetable oil.

But here's what matters.

These chemicals are dangerous.

VOCs cause a whole range of health issues, from asthma, to cancer, to neurological disorders.

- The person that lives behind the oil well, that we talked about, that was via the Comanche, has dizziness, fatigue, headaches, nosebleeds, almost on a daily level.

Speak to anyone in Arvin.

They have the same symptom profile.

And it's all symptoms that are linked to chronic exposure of gases that are linked to oil and gas development.

- We have communities in Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, that are experiencing the same symptoms, because they're being exposed to the same pollutants.

- [Charles] Air pollution from oil and gas production kills 7,500 Americans a year.

And the closer you live to oil wells, the higher your risk.

- Just recently you found a leak, right across from the Grim Way Academy.

- Remember, I made you guys fly the drone over there?

- Yeah, I was going to say, is that the one?

- Where I asked you guys to fly, it is where the leak was.

- I think I filmed leaks at there at least a dozen times.

Yeah, plumes blowing into the elementary school playground.

- I grew up in the Central Valley and you almost always know someone that has asthma, either from high school, or just someone in your community.

It's very common.

- [Charles] It's no mistake that these wells are placed here.

Cesar told me about the Cerrell Report, a state commission study from 1984.

It analyzed which communities pushed back against waste sites and which ones don't.

- It showed a list of most likely and least likely to resist communities.

The least likely to resist communities were places where it's low income, places where it's conservative.

Kern County is the most conservative place in California.

If polluters exist where the community is not respected by politicians, then they're going to get away with it for a very long time.

Morningstar is a neighborhood where we were able to get the state to do something that they had never done.

So the state came, they addressed the leaks within like two or three days.

- Why the quick action on that and not on everything else?

- That's a good question.

I wonder why a brand new affluent neighborhood, that has an average square footage of 2,500 square feet got action, while Arvin had to fight for 10 years?

California is not the green environmental haven that everyone thinks it is.

The laws that exist here, the giant towers of regulation, mean nothing without enforcement.

And that's what we're lacking.

Two thirds of idle wells are leaking in California.

We deserve better.

California needs to do better and oil companies need to do their part.

(tense music) - [Charles] California passed a historic setbacks law, requiring oil drills to be placed a certain distance from schools, hospitals, and homes.

But in 2024, the oil industry tried to block it with a referendum.

Activists like Cesar and Kyle fought back and the referendum was finally dropped.

Oil setbacks are now beginning to make California's air just a bit cleaner.

This issue isn't just in Kern County.

It's everywhere.

And it affects all of us.

Some places just hide it better.

In Los Angeles where image is currency, they hide old wells behind facades, fake buildings.

And even shopping centers.

(upbeat tense music) But oil has written the very design of LA.

Shooting through its arteries, its veins, to its very heart.

How did this happen?

During the oil boom, supply outstripped demand, and just in time a niche product began to spread, the automobile.

Oil had found its customer base, and the world began to look a lot more like Los Angeles.

We know that fossil fuels harm our health and our climate.

So why is it so hard to quit?

Are we nuts?

Well, sort of.

So I talked to a shrink.

This is Dan Lieberman, a psychiatrist and professor at George Washington University.

- Human nature is a combination of the rational and the instinctual.

As a psychiatrist, I believe that the instinctual plays a much larger role than people give it credit for.

- [Charles] Dan Co-authored a book called "The Molecule of More," which explains how human behavior is shaped by our brain chemistry, especially by dopamine.

- Dopamine, although we think about it as the pleasure molecule, is in fact better described as the title of the book, "The Molecule of More."

It is constantly pushing us, driving us to accumulate more resources, to make the future more safe and more prosperous.

Unfortunately, human beings being a mixture of rationality and instinct, we don't have full control over our behavior.

It's not always rational.

Concerns about climate change are driven by human behavior.

And human behavior is in large part affected by the chemistry in our brain.

Dopamine drives us for more and more and more.

And that makes it difficult to put on the brakes, and say, "Hey, if we want to reduce climate change, we're going to have to consume less."

- It seems like the solution is not stopping that, but redirecting it.

- I think that's absolutely right.

Find times in history when people have been able to get large numbers of people to act contrary to human nature.

I don't think you can find it.

- Chemicals like dopamine got us to where we are today, but there was one limiting factor, planetary boundaries.

Developed by a group of scientists, led by Johan Rockstrom and Will Steffen, this concept frames climate as one of the nine systems that our planet depends on.

Civilization has thrived in an ecosystem based around a temperature of about 15 degrees Celsius.

Anything beyond that, and it's a different kind of a planet.

One less suited to us and the other life forms around us.

So we have to limit global warming to about 1.5 degrees Celsius, or the entire system will collapse.

- Dopamine can help us approach climate change, by giving us excitement and motivation for a solution, but the brain develops tolerance very quickly.

You stimulate it, you get the buzz, and then the buzz goes away, 'cause you're supposed to get something new to stimulate it.

We contrast it with a different set of brain chemicals, which we call the here and now chemicals.

Those are the chemicals that allow us to process things that are going on in the present moment.

Things that we experience through our senses, the emotions that we feel, satisfaction, fulfillment.

These might include things like serotonin, oxytocin, to orient us to social relationships.

- More versus enough.

Is that a good summation?

- You know, I think that that is a good summation.

Pleasure is different from happiness.

If you work towards the happiness of someone else, saying, "Hey, I want to make things good for other people, so I'm going to make some sacrifices for myself."

That reliably gives you yourself happiness, and maybe it's also the path to a better world.

That's really what addressing climate change is about.

- Okay, so it's about finding a way forward between the limits of human nature and... (horn honking) Nature.

To orient ourselves to the future, we went north and explored the trade-offs between harnessing energy and healing community.

(upbeat music) We met with Oshun O'Rourke, a fisheries biologist with the Yurok Tribe.

She and her team showed us the work they're doing to restore the Klamath River.

- Do you want me to get that rope down?

- I can get it.

(Oshun laughing) (Charles indistinct chattering) - Yes, perfect.

All right.

We do a lot of research and monitoring, checking on the health of the fish.

We can carefully look at their gills.

If they're red like that, that means that they're very healthy.

This is what the outside of one of our acoustic tag receivers looks like.

- [Charles] Kind of looks like a bomb.

- It kind of does.

Yeah.

(Oshun laughing) - So how does it work?

- [Oshun] Each tagged fish has a a unique tag number.

So if people are able to catch those fish, like down river in a screw trap, we can record their growth, and also see like how long it takes them to get down the river.

This is our live box.

We're going to scoop out the fish.

- Oh wow, there's a huge one here.

- Oh yeah.

Our rotary screw trap catches juvenile, out-migrating salmon.

Looks like 5.35, let's say.

(Charles indistinct chattering) 5.35, okay, yep.

And then we put 'em in there.

Now this one, as you can see, it has a distended abdomen.

So that is an indicator that this fish has sea Shasta.

- [Charles] This guy's not doing so well.

- Yeah, he might not make it.

- Was he sick?

- He is sick, yeah.

- As climate change warms oceans and rivers, pathogens like sea Shasta are proliferating.

So fish populations need every chance they can get to increase their resilience.

These diseases used to be an even bigger problem on the Klamath.

A bit of history.

Like many tribes here in the 1800s, the Yurok lost 90% of their land to settlers.

Then, in the early 1900s, they lost their river to dams as part of a so-called reclamation project, dams were built all over America.

They provided much needed electricity, carbon-free, but could be an ecological disaster.

Fish populations in the Klamath river plummeted, destroying the Yurok way of life.

It took generations of work to build consensus to remove the dams.

After a catastrophic 2002 fish die off, most locals finally agreed.

And today Oshun's work is part of the world's largest dam removal project.

Just in time, as global warming threatens these waters.

I wanted to hear about this history firsthand.

So I asked Oshun to introduce me to her favorite tribal elder.

This is her dad, Tiger.

But maybe don't call him an elder.

- This has always been our place in the world.

That's never changed.

And so having the mentality of sustainability and stewardship is something that is going to help us to be able to thrive in the future.

- I hope that we will be able to restore the salmon population of the Klamath basin, so that people will be able to remain here, you know, and continue that way of life.

(relaxing music) - Oshun and the Yurok Tribe gave me hope.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the problems.

Better to just ignore them.

That's what I used to do.

I get home and scroll past all the bad news, straight to the distractions.

(cat meowing) Oh, cat video.

(cat meowing) But then I read a book, "The Ministry for the Future."

The novel's set in the future, but it's grounded in today's realities.

Climate change leads to tragedy, but humans respond with bold action.

We incentivize sequestration with a carbon coin.

We block the sun by spraying sulfates into the air.

We drill glaciers to stop them from melting and we begin to restore the world.

This book was one of the first things I'd ever read about climate change that made me feel hopeful, and it kind of changed my life, and I wasn't the only one.

So we went to go meet the author of the book, Kim Stanley Robinson.

I wanted to start with, I guess this is a simple question, but why did you write this book?

Was there a mission, or just an experiment of ideas?

- Oh no, it was very programmatic.

I think literature is always political.

I have no hesitation in saying that I write political novels, because all novels are political, and you might as well recognize it as a tool and put it to use.

Also, I'm a science fiction writer, I set my stories in the future.

You set a story in the future, you're expressing a theory of history, and you're also saying the future could be better or worse.

(upbeat music) California is a terraformed space.

You're eating geo-engineered foods, and fossil fuels are running in your veins.

At that point you've got to give up on taking moral stances and get practical about how do we get through this century?

We have the technological and social abilities to create prosperity, when we don't, it's a failure of imagination and it's lacking in courage.

Oh, and faith in other people.

So the failures are on us, but the potential for succeeding is always there.

It hasn't been a great start to the 21st century, but we're only a quarter of the way through it, and now it's somewhat of a do or die.

We need to succeed in this big social project.

(bright music) - [Charles] Imagination, courage, faith in each other.

This is the stuff we need for a better future.

- Everybody is a science fiction writer for their own life.

You imagine your future, and you imagine if I do certain things in the present, I'll get to a good future.

That's my utopia.

Or if certain things happen to me that are bad right now, that's your dystopia.

- I would love to sound like a crazy old man when I tell people, you used to not be able to see the mountains.

I promise they used to be stuck behind a wall of gray pollution.

I want to be the last person to experience the type of pollution that puts people's lives in danger.

- I don't have a daughter or a son yet, but it breaks my heart to know that I'm going to have to raise them in the dirtiest air.

And when they get asthma, I'm going to be the one responsible for the fact that they had it because I didn't move them into a a better environment.

So, I can either move away, and make that somebody else's problem.

Or I can fight for it and make sure that it's no one's problem.

And I've chosen to fight.

(uplifting music) - Our spiritual and and cultural beliefs are intertwined with all the things that live and grow here.

It'll be a lifetime of work for myself and and many others.

- Galileo insisted that this was a devotional exercise.

That science was a way of knowing God better.

- Stories about sun gods and earth goddesses, these are not primitive explanations of natural phenomenon.

What they are are projections of the unconscious.

These stories have important themes of renewal and growth and salvation, and I think those are the most powerful stories.

- [Charles] I don't know when you'll see this.

(solemn music) Maybe it'll just sit on your shelf for a while, collecting dust in the corner.

But maybe one day these stories will be useful somehow, accompanying you right when you need them.

Until the other lights arrive.

And the big one always does.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - It's still there.

- [Speaker] We put a gopro on the screw trap.

- [Speaker] Man, Jeremy loves the water.

(upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] You can visit our website for more information, related educational materials, and additional resources.

It's all at ClimateCalifornia.org.

- [Announcer] "Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San Francisco-based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment, and medical science and innovation, and by the Community Foundation of Sonoma County.

Additional support provided by donors to The Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media.

A complete list is available.

And by the following.

(upbeat music continues) "Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(string music)