It's Friday, January 3rd, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Chris Mooney.

And I'm Indravis Gontas.

Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at climatedust.org, and you can follow us on

Twitter at Inquiring Show and on Facebook at slash Inquiring Minds podcast.

So this week I interviewed actor, writer, director, and producer Mark Ruffalo, who is now most famous for his portrayal of

Bruce Banner or The Hulk in the latest series of Marvel films. But he made his acting career

playing roles in a wide variety of critically acclaimed and thought-provoking indie films,

like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Kids are all right, and you can count on me to

name just a few. His films have often touched on social issues like same-sex marriage,

alternative lifestyles. So essentially, his characters show us how we craft our self-identity

in terms of our memories, our values, and our behavior. So maybe it's not so

surprising that he's also made ways as an activist. He's worked to stop the process of hydrofraking

near his own home, and most recently he became the spokesperson for Put Solar on it, which is a

campaign to encourage the use of solar energy. Here's what he had to say about the current state of the energy industry.

Long gone are the days where we just stick a straw on the ground and beautiful concentrated

carbon comes bubbling to the surface.

And now we've engaged in this new era of energy extraction, which is extreme, which is

using unconventional methods to extract to this carbon, hydrofracking, mountaintop removal,

tar sands, butemone development, and deep sea drilling. And all of these new

...