- Hi, I'm Robert Downey, Jr.,
Founder of Footprint Coalition
and this is Action Planet.
(upbeat music)
- I'm not a scientist, but my lay understanding
of the science is that the situation
is growing more and more urgent.
- When you take action, your life gets meaning.
When you get meaning in life, you become happy.
- When people connect, they care.
- When you're feeling well and doing well,
you have no choice, but to be well to the planet.
- We are up to the task of managing this crisis.
- And it's a mountain we can climb if we climb it together.
- If we don't do what science demands,
we pass a tipping point and it's out of our control.
- The mission of Footprint Coalition is also the definition,
an Alliance for combined action.
We really are interested in the media side of things
in content, and I think it really mobilizes folks.
It does me when I can have these complex ideas
kind of collapsed into something that I consider
just a little minute or two blurb
that helps me understand the largeness of something.
We try to keep it fun, light and easy-ish to understand,
and then super important is we give grants
to some of those R&D folks that are gonna really
write the rules and come up with technologies
that maybe 50, 75, 200 years from now, we'll be thankful
that we give them the attention they deserved
when they were in their infancy.
One of the innovations and then investments
that really blew my mind is this
fascinating company called RWDC.
They're a bio-based alternatives to plastic.
But the way they do it is by feeding
used cooking oil to microbes.
And that innovation in and of itself
is kind of part of the flywheel of,
I think, the innovation that's required.
We have to take something and use more natural resources
to make our products.
So it does just that.
As far as an investment in grants,
there's these folks who are essentially writing the rules
for what is the ethical compliance
and behaviors that are going to be necessary
as we enter cellular agriculture
and acellular agriculture where we're growing leathers
and making meat alternatives, literally out of science.
This stuff is like Isaac Asimov would blush.
We didn't do it with AI.
We didn't do it with the internet.
It's not too late to do it
for these other emerging technologies.
(upbeat music)
There was a specific moment of inspiration.
And I have to thank that Bezos fellow
because a few summers ago,
he asked me to be a keynote speaker
at the re:MARS Conference.
And while I was putting together my presentation,
I thought, hey, I probably don't know
what I'm getting myself into
but I'm gonna spend the next 10 years dividing my time
between my day job, my kids, my family,
my just day-to-day responsibilities, and this.
And so far it's been a little daunting
in that it takes a lot more than half of one's
waking hours to even scratch the surface of this stuff.
But anybody who knows me knows that if I'm not engaged,
I am, uh, boring alert.
I need something bigger than me.
And I also love to be a worker amongst workers.
You know?
(calm music)
Oh boy, okay. That's a first.
Iron Man would solve today's crisis,
first of all, he'd be doing it from the after world
because he has alighted to greener pastures.
It'd be like this.
He would inspire Peter Parker in a dream.
Peter would then go to Dr. Strange and Bruce Banner
and tell them they must find Shuri in Wakanda
or wherever she's presently located
because she is the one most likely to already be working
with the kind of technologies that we would need.
(upbeat music)
I'll just grab an easy one, you know,
stop the single use plastics and don't buy them.
Because for the sake of that convenience,
you are feeding the beast.
Reducing animal protein intake also is something that,
again, it's about reduction in mitigation.
It's not about some massive sacrifice.
Vote your planetary conscience.
That's always a big deal and plant something.
(upbeat music)
Retirement party that I pledged
at the re:MARS Conference,
it's gonna be like this.
It will be a completely off the grid concert.
It will be within a wind turbine powered roller disco.
That's just where I'm at today.
We'll keep building on it.
Send ideas in and you can be my party planner, everybody.
(calm music)
When my mind has changed regarding the climate crisis
from when I was a kid to now, it was when I was a kid,
it was foretold.
And now as a middle-aged male,
I'm seeing that it is upon us.
It is imminent.
I'm also not one of those doomsday, nay sprayers,
shame thrower, blame throwers.
It doesn't matter, you know?
We are up to the task of managing this crisis.
I know it.
(upbeat music)
For the young person who is in their anxiety
about this crisis, I have a twofold answer.
One is, this is not your anxiety to deal with.
You inherited this.
This is our fault.
So A, get off your own back and B, know that you are
the greatest generation, because you're going to inherit
certain of the innovations that we scrambled
to put together.
The wind will be at your back,
and you're gonna be the benefactors
of this new world notion that we can all act in a way
that preserves our planet.
By the way, we keep talking about it.
This planet, even if we wind up
exploring others and colonizing,
let's leave a nice artifact behind.
It's like a clean up your room thing.
So anyway, I've immense belief in the current generation.
I think they're exactly the souls we need.
(calm music)
The Northern white rhino.
There's two of them left right now.
They're both female.
So I would start with something that bridges the gap
between addressing the de-extinction debate
but also saying, can we just make two partners
for those two females?
They'll take care of the rest.
To me, reduce.
Reduce is something that's tangible to me.
Can I do that thing that I'm not going to stop doing,
can I do it less?
Can I be comfortable with something that gives me
the same zing as bacon, but doesn't burn up
that many resources to get it to my table
and into my gullet, you know?
So a little less goes a long way.
Some of this sounds like Benjamin Franklin's Almanac,
you know?
If I had to pick a single word to describe
the state of play right now, I would call it fluxtastic.
We all know it. We're feeling it.
So much is changing.
We're kind of like gripping our seats, but yet as we come
out of the wormhole that has been the pandemic
and all of the other issues that have been bubbling up
over the last year, there is this sense
of this pending newness and springtime.
And I feel like there's some circles closing
and there are, I mean, you know,
no big reach here, brighter days ahead.
(upbeat music)
If there's something that I'm hopeful for for the planet
it's, you know what, what's that great U2 lyric?
I can't change the world,
but I can change the world in me,
if I rejoice.
The idea of the possibility of this attitudinal shift
catching on and becoming the norm,
I mean, that's a golden age moment right there.
So, the better we think, the better world we'll step into.