Mark Ruffalo: We Can Go Gracefully Into a Green Future, Or We Can Go Kicking and Screaming, But There Is No Choice

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And so, we're going to see more and more water destroyed as we get more and more desperate to extract concentrated energy forms, carbon energy forms, that are increasingly becoming less and less easily available to us. And that is going to be what our generation is going to be dealing with for the next 30 or 40 years, until we get off of it.

Mankind's been carried to this point; all of our technology -- all of our development -- everything -- it's been perfect. This concentrated energy has been a gift to carry us to this very moment. And this very moment has given us the technology that we need to leave those fossil fuels behind. And now is the time we're either going to move into our future, which is our legacy, which is our destiny, which has been offered to us with some grace and some willful insight; or, we're going to be dragged kicking and screaming, but we're going this way. We are at peak oil; we are peak energy. That's why we have the Deep Water Horizon; that's why we're having the accidents that we're having; that's why we're having hydrofracking; that's why we're even entertaining the idea of pouring hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic waste into our ground is because we've gotten to a point where our energy is waning.

At the very same moment, we have the technology to leave it behind. The unfortunate part about America is that we've been led by our noses from the energy company. We see it in our subsidies that we're paying them; we see it in their enormous profits; we see it in the wars that are being carried out throughout the world; we see it in the cost of our military protecting these energy investments. And so, there's an enormous amount of money and power concentrated into this one sector of the American economic scene that is dictating that we stay in the fossil age. The rest of the world is leaving us behind.

And it's happening. People are waking up. I was just talking to a farmer here today. He put solar panels in in New York State. It's not exactly the mecca of solar energy that anyone would believe. He put solar panels on his barn in August. For two months, he dipped into the negative; now he's 2,000 kilowatts above. He's blown it away. He's so far in the green right now, and he's telling the farmers around him who are saying he was an idiot, and now they're thinking about solar. It can be done. It's happening all over the place.

It's happening. California's doing it. California's really moving ahead on energy. They're making this happen. They have a model that's actually working there. And New York has a chance to do it, too, and we have a governor who actually happens to be an incredibly ambitious man, and if someone could crack this nut -- if someone could create an economy that's tied to a green energy manufacturing implementation with a whole reworking and reinvigoration of the way we deliver this energy, that is a multi-billion-dollar economy that's sustainable, that's local, that will change the face of this nation.

All of the money -- all of the untold taxes that we pay for our energy -- if we knew what we really paid for a gallon of gas, we would be appalled. I'm sure it's up to $30 a gallon. When you look at the wars, you look at the security, you look at the subsidies -- you back all of that into what we're paying for our energy here -- then solar, wind, geothermal, wave and hydro begin to look like a serious, serious alternatives, and I'm telling you, it's only a matter of time 'til the well dam breaks on this. It's happening all around us.