[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: 10, 9.
Ignition sequence starts.
6, 5, 4, 3, 2.
Lift-off!
We have a lift-off!
Lift-off on Apollo 11.
ANU RAMASWAMI: When the moon launch happened,
I was very young.
But I remember the excitement.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: There was something fundamentally
new in our own understanding of ourselves
as species on this planet, represented
by looking at Earth from outside.
BESS WARD: And when we could see the Earth as a whole,
you recognized that everything on the Earth
is connected to everything else.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: It was a critical piece
of the story of why the environmental movement emerges
in 1970.
WALTER CRONKITE: Earth Day, a day
dedicated to enlisting all the citizens of a bountiful country
and a common cause of saving life
from the deadly byproducts of that profit.
CHILDREN: (SINGING) This land was made for you and me.
STEPHEN PACALA: We had rivers that would catch on fire.
DAVID WILCOVE: Because of the garbage and pollution in it --
DDT and the harmful impact it was having
on lots of birds and fish.
STEPHEN PACALA: The bald eagle, our national symbol,
was nearly extinct.
WALTER CRONKITE: America must undertake
a revolution in its way of life to clean up the mess each of us
has made.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: The challenge was profound.
[MUSIC]
ROBERT SOCOLOW: Princeton had one of the most ambitious
responses.
In fact, the last half-century of research
at Princeton in environment can be
thought of as one big gulp of excitement, leadership,
innovation.
ALL: Yeah!
BESS WARD: Environmental research
at Princeton really started with Rob Socolow in the '70s.
STEPHEN PACALA: Rob was one of a couple of academics who I think
of as environmental prophets.
They understood, before others, just how serious
these problems were and that they weren't going away.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: And I came to Princeton in '71
with a mandate to invent interdisciplinary environmental
research, find problems that would
require collective responses from several parts
of the campus.
One of them was about energy efficiency in buildings.
In the 1950s and '60s, energy use
was equated with prosperity.
And so the question was this prosperity doesn't come free.
And one can ask whether the same levels of services
could be accomplished with less energy.
It seems an obvious question now,
but it was a subversive question in 1971.
STEPHEN PACALA: And so Rob started a center here,
focused on a wide variety of energy and environmental
problems.
And that effort allowed Princeton to seamlessly jump
into the middle of the applied aspects of the climate problem.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: Princeton has a secret weapon,
in another institution, just a few miles away,
called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.
I think that's the worst name I know for any institution.
STEPHEN PACALA: A mouthful.
We'll call it GFDL.
Inside the GFDL, two luminary scientists,
Suki Manabe and Dick Wetherald, made the world's first climate
model, a model of three different components on Earth
that collectively determine our climate --
the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land surface.
BESS WARD: The importance of climate modeling
is to figure out what factors, what equations,
explain what we know happened in the past
and then turn the crank forward and see, where does that
take us in the future?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: It's the best tool.
In some sense, it's the only tool
we have for doing reliable projection of what
the future looks like, how sea level, how flooding,
how extreme heat will interact with human beings
and society, which can be used for society to defend
themselves.
And that's the kind of influence that makes a difference.
STEPHEN PACALA: Because of the center of activity
on climate in Princeton and the partnership between GFDL
and the university, many others were attracted here,
across the whole sweep of what is now called climate science.
There's George Philander, who studied El Nino and La Nina
and became one of the most prominent climate scientists
in the world.
BESS WARD: Princeton has put a lot of effort
into studying CO2 in the ocean, the atmosphere,
and the terrestrial system as well.
What Michael Bender and John Higgins wanted to do
was find the oldest ice, because ice preserves
the composition of the atmosphere at the time
that it was formed.
What Bender did was develop a way to actually date the ice,
using argon isotopes.
We don't know what the oldest ice is.
But so far, they've got 2 million years,
which is pretty old for an actual physical record.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: So we have an incredibly
diverse and interdisciplinary approach
to the problem, which really is fairly unique to Princeton.
BESS WARD: It started in full force
with the Princeton Environmental Institute.
That really facilitated that communication
between engineers, and scientists,
and the larger community.
ANU RAMASWAMI: I've been here about nine and a half months.
And I've found that the barriers are almost
non-existent to collaborating.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: The humanities, economics.
YUEH-LIN (LYNN) LOO: Social scientists,
political scientists.
STEPHEN PACALA: Biology and ecology.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Environmental policy.
ANU RAMASWAMI: It was always important,
but it's critically important now,
to bring the pieces together.
In my own field of urban systems, we look at not only
individual cities, but how cities
affect the entire planet.
DAVID WILCOVE: The university has a field station
called Mpala, which is located in central Kenya
and has been a hub of both research and undergraduate
education for several decades now.
With respect to biodiversity, the planet
is not doing so well.
How do we protect wildlife and wild lands
in an increasingly hot, crowded, and hungry world?
That collaboration across multiple disciplines --
that's the only way we're going to really address these
concerns.
STEPHEN PACALA: And Princeton continues to build.
Recently, it established the Andlinger Center
that is dedicated to producing alternative energy to solve
the carbon and climate problem.
YUEH-LIN (LYNN) LOO: A lot of what
we do today is build on all this legacy that had happened
in the '70s and '80s, innovating and developing new measures
to improve energy efficiency in buildings
to emerging solar cell technologies,
to new battery chemistries.
One way to view the climate challenge
is really looking at it as an energy challenge that's wrapped
up in the carbon challenge.
The energy sources that we use today --
more than 80% is fossil fuels.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: And one of the key questions
becomes, how quickly can we transform
to be less dependent on the fossil fuels and more dependent
on carbon-free fuels?
And Princeton, from the very early days,
has been a leader in trying to figure out
the answer to that puzzle.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 2: Princeton researchers have
achieved a major milestone.
Their test reactor produced 3 million watts
of fusion power, a new world record.
STEPHEN PACALA: Fusion is technically a nuclear reaction
that happens when two atoms are crushed together and form
a helium nucleus.
And when that happens, a little bit of the mass
is lost and converted to pure energy.
And so at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab for the first time,
they were able to --
what amounts to lighting up a star in Princeton, New Jersey.
YUEH-LIN (LYNN) LOO: It's one of the few zero-carbon energy
source.
And so if we can figure out a way to do this sustainably,
economically, it lays the pathway for us
to get to a zero-carbon economy.
(SINGING) Yeah, there'll be no pollution in that land,
be no pollution in that land.
STEPHEN PACALA: If there hadn't been
that activity over the last 50 years,
we wouldn't be in the position we are now
to solve the climate problem.
The long-standing tradition here with luminaries
that attracted other luminaries means
capability in the present day.
ANU RAMASWAMI: It's a huge opportunity
where Princeton is really set up wonderfully
to lead for the next 50 years.
YUEH-LIN (LYNN) LOO: Especially making me hopeful
is the urgency and the passion that the younger generation
is feeling.
SPEAKER 3: This is the NSTX test cell.
This is where all the magic happens.
ANU RAMASWAMI: The younger people
have this fire in the belly.
They see themselves as being impacted by climate change.
And they see it much more as, how can we
collaborate to solve some of these grand challenges?
BESS WARD: Environmental challenge facing humanity right
now is survival of the species.
In order for the species of humans to survive,
the rest of the planet has to survive.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: A new problem, not present at the beginning,
called polarization is making every dialogue more
complicated.
There's nothing Republican about a cloud or Democratic about sea
level rise.
What I wish is that universities can distinguish themselves
in depolarizing the conversation.
STEPHEN PACALA: We've got the stuff we need right now.
Let's just do it.
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