Furnace or drives the diesel engines along farflung rails of steel. And on the open road, well, you know what makes your auto run. For millions of years, this source of power slept peacefully in the Dark Recesses of the earth until modern magic loosed the liquid energy from its subterranean prison. The quest for oil was not only confined to land. It extended offshore. There are oil reserves under the coastal waters of the united states, mainly off the coasts of california, alaska, texas, and louisiana. The gulf of mexico, home to a rich diversity of marine life, and it also produces almost a quarter of americas oil. Tapping these offshore oil reserves helps meet a significant part of u. S. Energy needs. But when things go wrong, theres a high price to pay. In 1969, the Santa Barbara oil spill dumped two and a half million gallons of oil into the pacific, killing thousands of sea birds and marine mammals. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez Oil tanker ran aground in alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William sound. And most recently, in 2010, the bp deepwater horizon disaster, which according to u. S. Government estimates, released 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf of mexico. 57 days ago, in the dead of night, the worst environmental nightmare in u. S. History began. On a screen here and in homes across the country, we now see the live video of tens of thousands of barrels of oil billowing into the gulf of mexico every day. For years, the oil industry swore this could never happen. We were told the technology had advanced, that offshore drilling was safe. Bp said they didnt think the rig would sink. It did. They said they could handle an exxon valdez size spill every day. They couldnt. Bp said the spill was 1,000 barrels per day. It wasnt, and they knew it. In preparation for this hearing, the committee reviewed the oil spill Safety Response plans for all of the companies here today. What we found was that these 5 companies have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans site identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. Over one Million Dollars will be awarded to the teams that prove that their cleanup system could meet the competitions strictest requirements. Our first prize, the winn schmidt oil cleanup x challenge was a response, essentially, to something we all remember, the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill in the gulf of mexico. In 2010 i certainly remember, im sure a lot of folks dothis was ongoing every day, oil spilling into the gulf, the havoc it was wreaking on wetlands and other critical ecosystems of the gulf coast, you know, from texas all the way to florida. And the sort or feeling of helplessness. The spill was the size of hawaii. It was literally an oil tsunami in the gulf of mexico. Thousands and thousands of gallons of crude oil spilling into the water every minute, every day. This was a manmade catastrophe. And it just struck me that this isthis is the scariest thing ive ever seen. This is a serious threat when oil spills, not just to marine life. Obviously thats bad, and obviously the beaches. Were still getting tar washing up on those beaches now. But also to the livelihoods of the people in these regions. In the gulf, 8 out of 10 people have a livelihood connected either to the oil and gas drilling industry or to hospitality and tourism. And all of those things were devastated by this spill. The spill has brought life, uh, to a lot of the issues in the gulf and all of the ancillary businesses. Family fisheries, docks, the marina, the icehouses, the transportation companies, people who provide snacks and groceries to stores. All of that is a direct reflection of what can happen when things cease. After the oil spill, you know, they shut recreational fishing, they shut commercial fishing, and that just killed everybody in this part of the world, really. Its affected everything, and its affected every business around. Its how we count off the seasons. Its oyster season or its crab season, its, you know, crawfish season, you know, and even that were having some issues with. Weve taken it for granted for so long that its its a little disconcerting and it feels different how you approach things thats affecting my life and my culture. Two years ago, the people of bp made a commitment to the gulf, and every day since, weve worked hard to keep it. Bp has paid over 23 billion to help people and businesses who were affected and to cover cleanup costs. Today, the beaches and gulf are open for everyone to enjoy, and many areas are reporting the best tourism seasons in years. Now is the perfect time to visit any one of our states. The beaches and waters couldnt be more beautiful. Take a boat ride, go fishing, or just lay in the sun. Weve got coastline to explore and wildlife to photograph. And theres more of class dining with our world famous seafood. So for a great vacation this year, come to the gulf. This invitation is brought to you by bp and all of us who call the gulf home. Unfortunately, things for a commercial fisherman in Southeast Louisiana is not as good as those bp commercials would have you believe. My Shrimp Production is down, still down, between 40 and 60 in my area. Ive been making a living on lake boeuf myself for 29 years on the boat. I cant do it anymore. My oyster production is down at least 93 . In the last 4 years, i might have sold about 1,500 sacks. In 4 years. I used to sell that a week. But 240 millions worth of bp commercials has a lot of people believing that were ok. Were not. People are losing it because they cant do what they want to do for a living. So you get a choice of lets go do something else. They give you an option. Well retrain you. I say, what you gonna retrain me to be, a brain surgeon . Or a cable installer. Either one of them sucks. I dont have the education to be a brain surgeon and im not going to go install cable. If you take me and put me in the Carpenter Field or the welding, well, im putting somebody else out of a job. So here comes that domino effect we were telling you about. Oyster production is like the canary in a mine. Ok. The canary dies, you in trouble. Get out of there. Until we get our oyster population back, which filters the waters, were not going to have a good environment. You know, commercial fisherman, you have highs and lows economics. Highs and lows with weather, hurricanes, you know. But this manmade disaster is just lingering. The technology that was being used to clean up the deepwater horizon spill, the oil in the gulf of mexico, was the same technology as had been used in the exxon valdez spill in alaska. In fact, there were some of the same machines, the same tools, stuck in storage, brought out a couple of decades later. As if nothing had changed. The industry hadnt moved from where it was in 20something years. The idea of an xprize challenge to find a better way to clean it up seemed like the most obvious and practical thing to do. So xprize came up and set an audacious but achievable goal. 2,500 gallons per minute of oil cleaned up at 80 rate of oil clean up. And you have to do it in 14 months. That 2,500 gallons per minute was about double the industry standard. This is technologically achievable. It is. People just havent been incented to do it. We have one shot to get this right. Once we launch the prize, we cant change the rules. The teams are spending their own money. And so we want to make sure we get it right. And so, we spend a lot of time talking to all the potential stakeholders, including those that would hopefully adopt these technologies and buy these technologies from the teams that are competing at the end of the day. The top 10 teams got to test at the only place in the world you could test oil spill technologies at scale. You know can imagine, you cant just go spill oil in the ocean and test things out and see if they work. So there is actually a facility in new jersey run by the u. S. Government, on a naval base where youve got a massive tank several football fields long that allows you to spill oil and simulate oil clean up. Renting that was quite expensive for us. And it was on a naval base, so it was very hard to get clearances. So these teams would not have been able to afford to rent this facility, nor would they have been able to get access to use this facility. And it also allowed us to create these, more or less, real world conditions, whereby we could test and see if these devices would work in the real world. All aboard keep the faith, baby. Keep the faith. 10 finalists came together at the end of that 14 months. 10 finalists came up with something. [cheering] nice job just like we planned. Ive never seen a machine pick up so much oil, ever. Its remarkable. And it turns out that the winning design at the end of the competition had actually been on somebodys drafting table several years earlier. It was just sitting there when there was no demand for the new product, no need to clean things up better than we were already doing. With an overall Oil Recovery Rate of 4,670 gallons per minute, more than 3 times the industrys previous best tested recovery rate, our 1 million first place winner, team elastec American Marine. [cheers and applause] in 2011, we awarded our Wendy Schmidt oil clean up xchallenge. The winners, elastec American Marine with a Million Dollar check. And this, of course, is the prize that they won for more than doubling the industry best standard for oil clean up that had existed to that point. Prizes have actually been around for over 300 years. Back in 1714 was the longitude prize. It was a 20,000 prize put on by the British Government to help us figure out where we were from a longitudal basis when we were crossing the oceans. And everybody assumed when they put this prize out there that it would either be a ships captain or it would be an astronomer that won this prize. And it was actually a clock maker. And he was this outside innovator that nobody ever would have expected to win a prize like this. Napoleon used prizes. We have canned food because napoleons army needed to be fed and so they figured out a way to preserve food, right. Lindbergh flew across the atlantic for a prize. There was a 25,000 prize for the first person that could fly nonstop from paris to new york or new york to paris. And it went on and on and on. In fact, prizes were one of the main tools that governments had to get innovation because either, you know, our modern Research Institutions werent set up or, you know, the money just wasnt being set. And then came around world war i, world war ii, when the government really started funding innovation and just started throwing a ton of money at things, that prizes sort of dissipated. When we started the xprize back in 1996, everybody knew that only governmentsin fact, only two governments could put human beings into space. And the purpose of the xprize was to change what everybody knew about that by requiring a demonstration of private space flight twice in two weeks with the same ship. And that kicked off the whole suborbital space flight industry. And launch of the Spacex Falcon 9 rocket, as nasa turns to the private sector to resupply the International Space station. We can do this for other things. We can do this for energy and environment. We can do this for oceans. We can do this for exploration. We can do this for health. And thats what really launched the version of xprize that we see today. Right, that is not just about space. The oceans are under attack. If we wanted to destroy the oceans, if we set out to do that, i dont think could do a better job than were doing now. Is that the kind of planet we want to live on . You know, youve got pollution. Youve got co2 absorbing into the ocean. Youve got 80 of the plastics 450 billion tons of plastic manufactured every year, and 80 of its not recycled. And it ends up in the ocean and it ends up in these giant gyres of plastic which are in every ocean now, not just the pacific gyre that people talk about. Were overfishing. 90 of the big fish are gone. And at the same time, you can say weve explored about 5 of the oceans. We have better maps of the surface of mars than we have of under our own oceans on our own planet. Theres something wrong there. Right . Our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the ocean has to change in, i would say, the next few decades, or we reallywe are really putting our own survival at risk. Theres life on this planet because of the oceans. Life started in the oceans. It continues to govern things, everything from the climate to global food supply, right. And yet this sort of watery deep, as it were, is still basically unknown to us people. Not only do almost 3 billion people make their living with Work Associated with the oceans, but its a major source of protein in the human diet. 70 of the oxygen we breathe comes from the oceans. We need the oceans, the oceans dont need us. Thats the fundamental disconnect. The biggest silent threat to the oceans from humans is Ocean Acidification. Its happening. Its happening 10 to 100 times faster than at any time in the last 50 million years. In fact, since the 1900s, early 1900s, the ocean is 30 more acidic. Ph, or really the acidity of the ocean, is changing as a result of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. This is ultimately sort of the evil twin of climate change. We look at global warming. We talk about the changes in our atmosphere. We need to look at the changes in our ocean. Weve been pumping Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere, especially since the industrial revolution, with the burning of fossil fuels. And that Carbon Dioxide has to go somewhere, and some of that is going into the oceans. They estimate about 30 has gone into the oceans. And the problem in the oceans is it has to react to that Carbon Dioxide. And thats how we get the phenomenon of Ocean Acidification. Over 70 of all of the oxygen in our air, the oxygen we breathe, is produced by phytoplankton in the ocean. That means when youre putting that at risk by changes in ph, youre putting at risk the very air we breathe, quite frankly. This is why its a threat of geologic global proportions. If you like jellyfish more than shellfish, then its not a problem, cause theyre gonna love an acidic ocean. Youll have plenty of jellyfish. But if you like mussels and clams and oysters and things that you like to eat, theyre in big trouble because they can no longer make their shells. Were seeing the effects of this already. So were cousins. Our dads are bill taylor and paul taylor, and they run taylor shellfish. And im brittany taylor, and this is diani taylor. That, too. And were the fifth generation of our family to work for our family business. I really take pride in the fact that our companys part of a Big Community and its very familylike. We have many families, not only mine, but many other families that have their whole families that work for us. The ocean is so acidic that it is dissolving the shell of our baby oysters. Our farm is what has kept this family together. Its our glue. I cant imagine. It would be devastating to lose such a big part of our history. When we started farming oysters over 100 years ago, we relied on the natural reproduction of oysters in the bay to occur in order to get our oysters. But as the industry has changed, we started cultivating our own oyster larvae, our own baby oysters. So when we started doing that, we needed Something Like our hatchery, which is kind of like a greenhouse where you can raise up the baby shellfish and the baby oysters to get big enough so that we can go and plant them on our beaches. It took us a while to figure out what was happening in our hatcheries relating to Ocean Acidification, just because theres so many Different Things that can happen to make seed not survive. One of the things the hatcheries realized was that the clams and oysters were having problems forming their shells, so that made them look at the ph levels cause that can account for it. Shellfish is very vulnerable when its first being created. And its the acidity in the water that makes it hard for them to form their shells. So when it reaches the baby oysters in the first few days of life, that acidic water actually will dissolve the shell, which is calcium. And if they dont make it through the first few weeks of its life when its being affected by Ocean Acidification, then we have no oysters to plant on our beach. So its something that we truly experience and deal with on a daytoday basis. Its not something thats gonna happen potentially in 5 or 10 years. Along the coast of oregon, theres a specific function called upwelling where deeper water is coming up towards the surface. And its that deeper water that is the acidic water. We dont know how bad Ocean Acidification is going to get. Were just starting to experience the consequences of it. What were experiencing here in the puget sound is what other people will be experiencing not too long in the future. I definitely want to be able to pass on our business onto the next generation. Yeah, it would be fun to share that experience with the next generation, like our dads shared with us. And this really brings us to the next xprize challenge, right, that were launching right now. Were looking for teams to come together to develop accurate, portable, deployable sensors to tell us what the ocean ph is in various places. Right now if you want to discover how acidic the ocean is, we can do that with devices that exist. In shallow, temperate waters, we can get a pretty accurate measurement. But it costs almost 40,000 a day to go and get that information. And theres no need for that anymore. Surely we can deploy technologies that can be used universally in many applications, and also in this way, help to launch an Ocean Services industry where lots of information can be shared along all the kinds of people who need to understand this, whether youre running a fishery, whether youre running a boat service, whether youre doing research somewhere. What are we dealing with . Is the ocean more acidic when its colder . When its deeper . When its closer to shore . We dont know any of this information. So were hoping through this competition that a lot of doors will open and we really will improve the state of awareness about the health of our oceans. In fact, were calling it Ocean Health Xprize cause a healthy ocean is not a rapidly acidifying ocean. And if it is, what are we gonna do to mitigate that . You cant really do anything to adapt to Ocean Acidification or mitigate it until you understand how severe how it is, where is it severe, how are the organisms adapting or not adapting to it . So its really hard to say, this is exactly what were going to be able to do until we have these sensors in place. This prize is all about measurement. Its all about the fact that we just havent we havent explored the physical parts of the ocean, we really havent explored the chemistry of the ocean. And this prize is challenging a brand new generation of explorers to do just thatcreate those tools that will give everybody the solutions, ultimately, to addressing what is a global threat to ocean health. We are in a single, wonderful ecosystem on this planet. And the system has evolved over millions of years without us, by the way. What is our relationship, actually, in the system we live in . cause were part of it. And i think we can do very, very well if we think about our relationship to Natural Resources in that way, including the oceans. We really are gonna have a very different planet in a hundred years. We would be the firstfirst generation in the history of humanity to knowingly make choices that do not benefit our descendants, to knowingly refuse to address the things that they will look back and say, what were you thinking . People in my position who have the capacity to help make a difference have an urgent responsibility to do that. We dont have an urgent responsibility to build our foundations up so that they can function 100 years from now. Thats not the purpose. The purpose is to go out and be effective now. This is when it counts. 07 24 23 07 24 23 [captioning made possible by democracy now ] amy from new york, this is democracy now what has been happening at the texas border does not seem tos stop. Greg abbotts implementation of the blue system and the wire on the border is, sadly, not an immigration policy, not a strategy it is a strategy leading to the deaths of women and