"I believe mankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, as if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away.

But I think we know better than that. Every week , we’re seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here right now. Droughts are intensifying, our oceans are acidifying, with methane plumes rising up from the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections.

None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact. The scientific community knows it, industry knows it, governments know it, even the United States military knows it. The Chief of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear, recently said that climate change is our single greatest security threat.

My Friends, this body – perhaps more than any other gathering in human history – now faces this difficult, but achievable task. You can make history… or be vilified by it.

To be clear, this is not about telling people to change their light bulbs or buy a hybrid car. This disaster has grown BEYOND the choices that individuals make. This is now about our industries, and governments around the world taking decisive, large-scale action.

Now must be our moment for action.

We need to put a pricetag on carbon emissions, and eliminate government subsidies for oil, coal and gas companies. We need to end the free ride that industrial polluters have been given in the name of a free-market economy, they do not deserve our tax dollars, they deserve our scrutiny. For the economy itself will die if our eco-systems collapse.

The good news is that renewable energy is not only achievable but good economic policy.

This is not a partisan debate; it is a human one. Clean air and a livable climate are inalienable human rights. And solving this crisis is not a question of politics, it is a question of our own survival."                               

  -  Leonardo DiCaprio