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>>***: I'm *** Soule. I work at YouTube Global. It's my honor to introduce Eric Pooley.
Eric is the deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the former managing editor of Fortune
and Chief Political Correspondent for Time magazine. Eric's work has been recognized
with many awards and honors, including a 2001 National Magazine Award, the 1996 Gerald R.
Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency and four Henry R. Luce awards
from Time. And being a humble man that Eric is, I could read many more awards, but let's
just have Eric up here. Thank you.
[applause]
>>Eric: Thanks ***.
>>***: You're welcome.
>>Eric: Hi, thanks for coming out today. It's great to be with you and I appreciate the
introduction, ***. I walked in to Google and I was asked if I'd been here before, and
we started talking about people that I knew here, and then I turned around and saw an
old friend. So, that was nice. And as *** said, I'm Eric Pooley and I am the deputy
editor of Businessweek. That's not why I'm here today. I'm here as the author of a new
book called "The Climate War." It's a book about the struggle to get serious about climate
change in the United States at the federal level. So, it's a tale of battling to pass
a mandatory declining cap on carbon emissions. In the spring of 2007, I saw that the debate
was starting to shift from the science to the politics; from whether climate change
is real, although some people still debate that point, it's not really debatable, to
what we're gonna do about it. And I thought, "Well, there's a book. How about a book about
the attempt to begin to get serious in this country, which is, as you know, has lagged
the rest of the industrialized world in taking the problem seriously and beginning to try
to address it through a declining cap on emissions." Somewhat naively, I thought that if I tracked
this story from 2007 through to 2010, I might be able to tell a story with a happy ending;
that I might be able to actually write a narrative, because I wanted to write a political thriller
with the fate of the Earth hanging in the balance and that by following the characters
at the heart of this debate, by embedding with them, if you will, the way reporters
embedded with the soldiers in Iraq, but doing it on all sides of the war that I would be
able to tell the story about how we turned the corner and took just the first step to
start to get serious about reducing emissions. But a funny thing happened on the way to the
signing ceremony. We didn't get serious about it; we didn't pass a federal bill to reduce
our emissions and so the book became not just a political thriller, but actually a ***
mystery. It became a who-done-it. It became a book about all the forces that conspired
to kill climate action on the federal level. And as I was working on it, I thought back
a lot of times to when I was a crime reporter in New York in the 1980s. I worked at New
York Magazine and I wrote crime stories and in those days, there was a homicide detective
named Marty Davin who was very famous for showing up at the hospital after someone had
been shot on his turf and he would try to intercept the victim, who would be laying
on a gurney out in the hallway, and Davin would go up and lean over the guy and say,
"Who killed you?" And, which would tend to get the attention of the victim if he was
indeed conscious and he would often protest, "I'm not dead yet," and Davin would say, "Well,
you're gonna die so you might as well tell me who did it." And as I was working the halls
of Congress, interviewing politicians and lobbyists for environmental groups and all
those people who were trying to drive legislation, I often thought of Davin. And I tried to resist,
for a long time, the idea of thinking about this book as a *** mystery because climate
legislation missed a lot of near death experiences, or survived a lot of near death experiences
in the years I was working on this book. And I had a great deal of respect for the environmentalists
I was spending so much time with. And just to lay it down, I spent time and established
embargoed reporting relationships with a whole group of people from Al Gore and the Alliance
for Climate Protection to Fred Krup and the Environmental Defense Fund to lobbyists like
the folks at the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, who are trying to keep the
world safe for coal-fired electric generation and essentially stave off climate legislation
for as long as possible. A professional climate denier named Myron Ebell from the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, Jim Hansen, the climatologist, and a number of other people on various sides
of the fight right down to the activists who are chaining themselves to bulldozers to try
to prevent the construction of coal-fired power plants. So, I basically was a ping-pong
for three years, bouncing among all these groups as the story unfolded. And then finally,
this summer, after I'd finished work on the book, I wanted to close it and have it come
out in the midst of what I hoped would be the next debate and then write the final chapters
for the second edition of book, or the paperback edition. But this summer, here we are in the
hottest summer in recorded history, or at least so far it's shaping up to be that, in
the hottest year in recorded history, we've just completed the hottest decade in reported
history, which beat the record set by the previous decade, which beat the record set
by the decade before that. We're at a moment where the Russian wheat harvest is being decimated
by drought and unprecedented heat, hundreds of deaths being recorded in Moscow, wildfires,
and I thought back to somebody who said to me a few years ago, he said, "Well, when Greenland
starts falling into the sea, we'll be ready to get serious about climate change." Well,
on August 5th, a chunk of Greenland, four times the size of Manhattan, calved off and
fell into the sea. Ed Markey, the Congressman, said that's ample room for the professional
deniers to set up their own country and they're now trying to figure out what to call it.
But it is if folks need evidence that this is going on, the evidence is all around us.
And yet, the United States Senate, just about a week before that huge Greenland ice flow
separated from the mainland, announced that it would not be debating comprehensive climate
legislation, that it would not be even debating a measly 15% renewable energy standard, which
would require utilities to get that percentage of their power from alternative means. And
I, many of you saw in the paper today, in the New York Times, a great story about renewable
electricity in Portugal, which in the last five years have, has moved from 17% to 45%
of its electricity from renewable sources. Just one example of what's possible, now obviously,
the scale in this country is completely different; much harder for us to scale up as quickly
as Portugal is doing, but at the federal level, we're not even trying. I'll talk about things
that are going on at the state and local level a little later. But the fact is, across three
years of repeated attempts, the US Senate has always been a complete obstacle to action
in this area. So, as I said, it was a who-done-it that I ended up writing. It was a *** mystery
and what I hadn't anticipated was that it would end up being one a lot like Agatha Christie's
"*** on the Orient Express" where there are multiple culprits; everybody is in on
the killing. So, I thought that I would start by talking a little bit about who some of
these culprits are and why it's been so hard for us to achieve any kind of climate action
at the federal level.
[pause]
The first group that you have to begin with is the professional deniers. And let me just
say, I differentiate between regular folks who are skeptical about climate change and
don't know what to believe and the paid professional public relations executives whose job it has
been to spread doubt and confusion about climate change for the last 15 or 20 years. And I
mentioned Myron Ebell, one of the people that I look at in the course of the book. These
are folks that I don't claim to have George W. Bush's ability to look into someone's eyes
and see down into their soul the way the President famously said he could about Putin. So, I
don't know, and I'm often asked, "Do they really believe it? Are they just mercenaries?"
Ultimately, I don't think it matters because I've come to the conclusion in more than 25
years of journalism that motive is highly overrated; that ultimately, it doesn't really
matter why you're doing what you're doing. If what you're doing is bad for the planet,
the country, the economy, the future of civilization, the fact that I talked myself into believing
it doesn't really make that much of a difference. So, I didn't take, make any grand attempt
to try to figure out if Myron Ebell and his ilk believe what they were saying. And I don't
spend an enormous time in the book dealing with science. I do, if you're not familiar
with climate science and you read The Climate War, you will pick up an awful lot of carefully
fact-checked science about exactly what's happening and why. But the thrust of the book
is politics and economics, because what I found with the professional deniers is they
were more than happy to fight this war on multiple levels for people who are still capable
of being convinced that the science is not sound and we don't really know what's happening.
They will fight it on that level. For other people that are sure that the science is real
and as I'm sure, all or most of you know, the overwhelming majority of climatologists
in this country has no doubt the basics of climate science are fundamentally understood,
have been for a hundred years, are not in dispute. Of course, there's always debate
in any realm of science. Debate never goes away and I actually think that Al Gore and
the environmental community made a strategic error when they announced that the debate
was settled and it was time to move on. Because, by refusing to engage the deniers, they seeded
the messaging space to the professional deniers, who filled it up with this information. And
Gore and the Green Group, which is the loose coalition of major environmental organizations
in this country, made a decision to stop arguing about it and say, "Well now we have to move
on." Well, even though they were right, I think it was the wrong tactic because you
all know what happened. The deniers, along with their enablers in my line of work, the
journalists who are scared to come out and say anything without hedging it, so they're
always looking for what climatologists say. "This is happening, but I'm gonna get the
appearance of balance into my stories. So, I'm gonna look for somebody who's saying 'Well,
maybe it's not really happening,' and here's Myron Ebell, or others who share his profession,
stepping up and sowing down confusion on what is actually established science." So, that's
what we call "balanced bias." That's elevating two sides of an argument, even when there
aren't two co-equal sides. And that happened with the science for many years till slowly
the journalism community began to move on from that false opposition. And then they
began to do it with the economics, which was the second great front in the climate war.
When the climate deniers saw that people were no longer swayed by disinformation on the
science, they began to fill the airwaves with disinformation on economics and they claimed
that any action to stop climate change would destroy the American economy. They hired economists,
usually from right-wing and libertarian think tanks to produce doomsday studies that claimed
to prove that if we capped carbon emissions it would kill millions of jobs and double
electricity rates. And then they would find gullible journalists who would write stories
about these without ever looking at the fine print and seeing, "Well, what are the economic
assumptions that you're putting into these models?" And economic assumptions, when you
looked at them, were completely bogus. Cite one example that I cite in my book, a study
sponsored by the National Association of Manufactures and it's assumption for uptake of wind power
year after year between now and 2030 was that we would use, we would take less wind new
generation capacity online in each year than we did in 2007. So that in other words, the
transition to a clean energy economy had already peaked. And when you start cooking the numbers
that way, it's not a surprise that you get extremely high electricity rates as your output.
So, that's what they did. When you look at it, that's just one example, there are a lot
of others, in the fine print of all of those studies, but the reporters wouldn't actually
ever bother to look under the hood of these studies. They would just present the doomsday
report and I got the feeling that if somebody affiliated with the National Association of
Manufacturers had stood up and said that in 2030, the sky will be yellow and the sun will
be blue, the headline the next day would read, "Sun Will Be Blue Economist Warns" and they
would just put it out there. So, the press enabled the deniers as, and I call them the
"deny and delay community" because step one was denying climate science and step two is
delaying climate action. It was less interesting as I hung out with the professional deniers
to see their twisted take on the science then it was to learn about their view of the politics
because they laid out an entire playbook for how they intended to kill climate action and
let me tell you, it worked. I think I'll read just a couple of paragraphs from an interview
that I did with Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Quote:
"'Global warming is a problem that will be easy to solve,' Ebell said. And now his little
smile was back because Ebell was in his comfort zone again saying something counterintuitive
and outrageous." Quote "'We'll solve it in 50 years. We'll take carbon dioxide out of
the atmosphere and one one-hundred thousandths of the cost of the solutions that Al is banding
about.' Ebell kept referring to Gore by his first name. Al, as if they were colleagues
who were working in an atmosphere of mutual respect, when, in fact, CEI had spent years
trying to trash and discredit Gore. It was impossible to imagine Gore referring to Ebell
as Myron. Ebell's full-time job was to keep alive the impression that the scientific debate
was wide open, and yet here he was conceding that climate change was a problem, though
an easily solved one, that levels of greenhouse gas were rising and that this would eventually
need to be addressed. It felt surprising, but it shouldn't have. As those who tracked
him over the years had pointed out, Ebell was always dependably opposed to climate action,
but his stance on just what was happening to the planet seemed to morph to fit the moment.
A connoisseur might call today's formulation 'classic late period Ebell.' Spotting his
opponents, much of the scientific argument, but still holding out against doing a damn
thing. 'I could concede a lot on the science,' he said. I don't, but I could and I'd still
think this was the wrong way to address the problem. The public doesn't agree with me,
though. They say if there is warming, then we have a moral obligation to solve it. If
there's not, then we don't. As a result, he explained those who opposed climate action
needed to dig in on the scientific details and concede nothing." Quote "'The science
is still the battleground. The battle is still over whether this is really happening and
whether we are really causing it.' It was a war and Ebell could see Gore's troops massing
on the far ridge." Quote "'We want to drive a wedge between bi-coastal, elite opinion
and heartland opinion,' he said. 'We have to protect our base from a hundred million
dollars a year in Al Gore's advertising. I don't think we can ever win over your typical
New Yorker or San Franciscan, but we don't need to. This battle is for the heartland.
If we protect our base, we win.'"
So, the goal for the deniers was to protect their base by scaring the pants off people
with these doomsday arguments; arguing that so-called cap and tax, a national energy tax,
would destroy their household budgets and destroy the economy and throw the mellow out
of work. And the reality is that the cap that was being debated in the United States Senate
would have imposed costs of roughly 70 to 140 dollars a year per household by 2030.
For low income households, it was a net plus. There were rebates that would actually make
sure that low income Americans came out ahead. So, the idea that this was gonna be an onerous
burden was simply not true, but that didn't stop the opponents of climate action from
putting out their false reports and it didn't solve the Senate Republicans from picking
up that rallying cry. And they were the second group responsible for killing the climate
bill, where the Senate Republicans who opposed climate action to a man. There wasn't a single
senator and a woman, a single man or woman in the United States Republican Caucus this
year who was willing to come forward in support of climate action. We look back now on 2008,
2007, even 2005 as the good old days of bi-partisanship on this issue. When you had John McCain as
the leading proponent of climate action in the US Senate, more recently with a conservative
primary challenge, McCain stopped talking about it and then did a flip-flop and called
the senate bill based on the bill that McCain himself had co-sponsored years ago, a farce
and said he wouldn't support it. His mantle of republican climate courage was adopted
by Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who tried to hammer out a climate bill for
about ten months between 2009 and 2010 and then jumped ship the weekend before they were
set to unveil the bill. He did this for a couple of reasons. He was getting completely
hammered by his own party and he had come to the conclusion that the Senate Democrats
weren't serious about trying to move a bill this year. What led him to that? Well, the
fact was they weren't serious. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, decided that
he was gonna try to curry favor with Latino voters by pretending that he was gonna move
an immigration bill instead of a climate bill. When he signaled that, even thought there
was no immigration bill written, and there was a climate bill waiting to move, that was
a pretty good indication that the Senate was just playing politics and wasn't ever really
gonna try to pass a bill. Now, it was in the interest of all the Democrats to go through
the motions. Now some of them wanted to do it but the will of the Senate was not there.
And the only guy getting hammered over this was Lindsey Graham, so he said, "Why should
I stick my head up out of the fox hole here and take friendly fire from my own party if
the Democrats aren't really gonna try to do this?" So he jumped ship. So, after you've
got the Senate Republicans as being culprits, you've gotta add the Senate Democrats to the
list of people who are in on this *** because the truth is Harry Reid never had the juice
to try to lead his committee chairmen to actually move a bill. And the committee chairmen, with
the exception of Barbara Boxer and John Kerry, were not serious about trying to do it. I
mentioned that every Republican in the Senate was opposed to climate action. There were
a few, like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who probably would have come on board had
there been an actual bill. And the Democrats, after everything crashed and burned were quick
to blame the Republicans as being the guilty party, ignoring the dozen or so Midwestern
Democrats who were also opposed to climate action. These were not all from the Midwest,
but largely from the Midwest, from coal-burning states; from states that either mine and produce
coal or states that depend on coal for their electric fired electricity, excuse me, their
coal-fired electricity. So, there are 25 states in the US that get 25%--I'm sorry, 50% or
more of their electricity from coal. And it's hard to tell whether those Democratic Senators
are really worried about the effect on the economy of a climate bill, which they say
they worried about, or whether they're just worried about the effect on their re-elections
if they support climate action. Because, as I said, all of the best studies show that
the economic effect of climate action, especially the very modest, early step that's being debated
in the Senate, would be minimal. What wouldn't be minimal was the force of the attack on
the politicians if they supported this. And so, these people were scared; I believe more
of the politics than they were of the economics. And they realized, I think, how difficult
this was gonna be in the summer of 2008, when the Lieberman-Warner bill crashed and burned
in the United States Senate. They realized that again, in the summer of 2009, at the
moment of the greatest success for the climate movement, when the Waxman-Markey bill passed
the House of Representatives by a very narrow margin, but it did pass. The first time that
either house of Congress had ever passed a major landmark piece of climate legislation.
And what happened after that scared the pants off the US Senate because as soon as that
bill passed and the environmental groups that had been pushing it and the Coalition of Environmental
and Fortune 500 groups called USCAP that had helped write the bill, and had been instrumental
in pushing it through; a signature moment of compromise between environmental America
and corporate America coming together to try to get something done. They got it passed,
they all took a breather and it was a big mistake because that was the moment when the
opposition to climate action unleashed the full fury of its opposition. That was the
rise of the Tea Party Movement; started on the 4th of July, 2009. Obviously there had
been some Tea Party demonstrations around tax day in the spring, but if you recall,
the 4th of July demonstrations, just a little over a year ago now, unspooled an enormous
amount of fury at all of the politicians, especially the eight Republicans who had voted
in favor of that bill and swing state Democrats. There were expensive advertising that came
on the air immediately targeting those courageous politicians. There was the full rage and fury
of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and every other right-wing commentator on the airwaves and
it essentially caught the climate action community flatfooted. It terrified the US Senate and
it even led the political strategists inside the West Wing of the White House to think
that maybe this was gonna be too hard to do. So, there was a climate bill, it had passed
the house, it was ready to steam on toward the Senate with some important modifications
to be made to get it to 60 and the White House and the Senate decided not even to try to
move that bill. The White House was pushing what was described to me by multiple Obama
advisors as a quote "stealth strategy" toward moving climate policy that would deploy the
President only sparingly. It would deploy him, usually on a weekday afternoon on a visit
to a solar factory or wind turbine factory, where he would say all the right things about
the need to accelerate the transition to clean energy. He would talk about the need to cap
carbon, he would say all the right things when the country wasn't listening, but for
the first 18 months of his administration, he did not make a single prime time address
calling for this. There was one shining moment in the first address to the joint session
of Congress, what we usually call the State of the Union, but in the first year of the
president, president's term, it's not a State of the Union address, it's just called the
Joint Address. So, that was a moment when he said he'd wanted Congress to send him a
bill that capped carbon. He never devoted an entire speech to the issue until after
the BP spill that forced his hand and Obama wanted to change the subject from the oil
spill to climate and energy. I mean, he wanted to change it to anything he could and the
logical place to go was the need to get off oil. So, he began talking about it a little
bit in June and July, and he scheduled an Oval Office address, maybe some of you saw
it, where he sat down and he explained what the country was doing to cope with the oil
spill and he explained that this was yet another reason to get off fossil fuels. And then instead
of saying, "And we know how to do it. We need to put a cap on carbon emissions. We need
to price carbon so that clean energy becomes economically competitive and profitable."
The President said, "We don't know how we're gonna get there." He didn't use the word cap.
He didn't come out in favor of a specific piece of legislation and hearts sank throughout
the climate and clean energy community that night because it became clear that the President
was not going to be driving a particular piece of legislation, even though what was being
called the worst environmental disaster in American history gave him a perfect opportunity
to do that. He felt that it was gonna be too hard. He felt that he had already asked the
United States Senate to do enough; tap into their political capital with difficult votes
for the stimulus bill and healthcare reform bill and the bailouts of the auto industry,
etc. So, he wasn't willing to try again and so, when the President would have members
of the White House to talk about climate and energy legislation, they would leave, he would
not make a comment, they would step up the microphones and say they had had a wonderful
exchange of views and nothing specific would come out. So, the final culprit is the President
of the United States. And I didn't really expect when I began a book called "The Climate
War," that one of those wars would be unfolding inside the West Wing of the White House, but
that's what I discovered. There were people in the White House, notably Rahm Emmanuel,
the Chief of Staff and David Axelrod, the Chief Strategist, who felt that the public
was not in a place where they were ready for the President to make this a signature agenda
item. He could talk about it, he could play to his base, he could do the Tuesday at the
Vestas Wind Turbine Facility, but in prime time when it counted, and certainly when he
was campaigning, heading into a mid-term election was not the time to do it. So, in retrospect,
2009 was our window of opportunity. This is no surprise. In my book I describe Al Gore
sending a memo President Obama in the first days of the Obama Administration laying out
exactly why it was important for the President to get behind a mandatory declining cap. In
2009, why the, why it had to be the first big agenda item after he finished the economy,
not kicked down the road, mainly because the countries of the world were meeting in December
of 2009 in Copenhagen, to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Treaty and if the United States
came up empty handed, showed up in Copenhagen empty handed without a bill to reduce emissions,
the global deal was gonna crash and burn. That's what Gore warned Obama about and that's
precisely what happened in December of 2009. So, where are we now? We haven't done the
hard work. We're about to experience a mid-term election where votes for climate action will
probably go away. Could it have been any different and what we can we do over the next few years?
I think in 2009, if Obama had surveyed the landscape after the Waxman-Markey bill passed,
but then ran into that buzz saw of opposition. And he had said at that time, an economy wide
cap is gonna be too hard. We've gotta lead a tactical retreat to just a cap on the utility
sector, which makes up 40% of the emissions in this country." It's a great place to begin.
We've already got a cap on sulfur dioxide--the pollution that causes acid rain-- it was passed.
And the Clear Act Amendments of 1990, it went into effect in 1995, it has reduced that pollution
ahead of schedule and below cost. It's been a huge win. The utility sector knows how to
regulate its smokestacks. EPA knows what to do. Let's start there and let's take the next
year to get it done. Let's get everybody around the table and figure out how to do this. I
think we'd be celebrating a victory; a first small step now instead of yet another defeat.
The climate action community, the Green Group, was not willing to take that stand because
they were so invested in a mandatory economy-wide cap, they weren't willing to retreat. It would
have required presidential leadership to get that done. And the President didn't stake
that claim, he did not lead on that, he did not lay out a vision for something that was
achievable given the difficult economic and political situation of 2009 and 10, and as
a result, we didn't get it done; anything at all. In the last few weeks, before the
Senate pulled the plug on the bill, they tried to beat a retreat to that utility-only place,
but it was too late, it was too complicated, they couldn't get it done in the short period
of time that they had at hand. It may be the place to begin when we start with a new Senate
after the elections. It may be possible to just start there, but in fact, my hunch is
gonna be that we're not gonna be able to even address that for a couple of years. I think
we're going into a period now and I hate to say it and I have avoided making apocalyptic
predictions, but right now it looks like this is where we are. If we're gonna be losing
votes and we weren't even close to 60 for an economy-wide cap, I think it's gonna be
tough to get to 60 for the next year or two and I think we need to change the math a little
bit, we need to change the politics a little bit, we need to put some points on the boards.
We need to, in other words, reduce emissions without having a mandatory cap for awhile
and then come back to the idea. In Copenhagen, when it was crashing and burning, I sat with
Al Gore and I asked him, "What happens if we can't pass this bill in 2010?" And he said,
"Well, if the Senate refuses to act or the climate bill fails or is watered down beyond
recognition," he said, "that's an event horizon beyond which it's almost impossible to see."
He said, "It may mean there's a fundamental flaw in the architecture of the political
solution. But the problem," he said, "is that we don't have a plan B. When it comes to reducing
emissions, there's really not a lot of alternative to reducing emissions. That's what you need
to do." So, there's the cap, there's the idea of a tax. The politics of a carbon tax are
just as fraught as the politics of a carbon cap. So, what we need to do is shut-up the
Chicken Littles, who say that we can't reduce emissions, by reducing them for a while. And
we have a lot to build on. Emissions had been declining in this country and not just because
of the recession. In the great state of Texas, a governor named George W. Bush, passed a
mandatory renewable energy standard, a renewable electricity standard in, I believe the year
was 2009 that it took effect. It's now been taking effect, it's now been in effect for
a decade and it has helped give birth to the Texas wind industry, which has created something
like ten thousand jobs. It has created ten gigawatts of wind-powered electric generation
and it has helped reduce emissions in the great state of Texas. They have not done this
because they're worried about climate change. They've done this because energy is what Texas
does and they see a market and they see a opportunity to make money. But they've reduced
emissions anyway. So, again, remember I said motive is overrated? Any reason that anyone
has for getting into the game and reducing emissions, I'm all for. That's why it's such
a tragedy that the Senate wouldn't put a renewable energy standard into its energy bill. Of course,
now it's pulled the plug on the bill itself. It says they're gonna come back to it in the
fall, but they fail to see that what we need in this country is a market. What we need
to do is level the playing field for clean electric generation so it can compete against
dirty electric generation. It's not a difficult concept to understand. There are a lot of
different ways to do it and we may be able to experiment with some other ways before
we get back to a cap at the federal level. That's why it's so important now that the
western front in the climate war is unfolding now in California with an attempt to roll
back a bill called AB 32, which made California the first state in the country, excuse me,
yeah, the first state in the United States to put a mandatory declining cap on statewide
emissions. People wanna roll that back now. There's a ballot initiative that's being bankrolled
by two Texas oil companies and that is a huge battle. The second battle is gonna unfold
in the United States Senate when senators try to strip the EPA of its authority to regulate
greenhouse gases. Remember back, I said in 2007, I thought the politics were shifting,
that the debate was shifting from science to economics? One of the things that led me
to believe that was the Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court of the United States held
that the EPA had the duty to decide whether carbon emissions posed a threat to public
health and that if it did, then it had the obligation to regulate. EPA has since made
that determination and is scheduled to roll out regulation beginning in January of next
year. The Senate is gonna try to strip EPA of that power. And depending on what happens
to the balance of power in the Senate, it could be a very close vote. That's incredibly
important because the Senate has made it clear that it isn't gonna act on this issue anytime
soon. So, what the Senate is saying is, "We wanna reserve the right to do nothing on this
issue. We want the perogatives of power to be reserved for the United States Senate so
that we cannot act." Ok, we wanna prevent the United States from doing this. Now this
is an area where I know that President Obama is gonna be throwing his considerable might
into turning back at any attempt to roll back EPA. And I hope very much that the attempt
to strip EPA of those powers, or delay their implementation, will be defeated just as two
previous attempts this year have already been turned back. However, EPA regulation is what
John Dingell, the veteran Congressman from Michigan, once described as "the glorious
mess." It is gonna be a glorious mess of regulation, which is going to lead to litigation. Why
is that? Because the only way the EPA can regulate is to do so on a source by source
basis, power plant by power plant, factory by factory. So, there's gonna be lawsuits
around every stationary source of emissions. In other words, we are moving from a moment
of attempted legislative compromise between the environmental community, the regulatory
community and the corporate world into a period of renewed battling between those entities.
Environmental organizations that had been putting their money in their manpower into
finding a compromise in Congress are now pulling back and they're putting their manpower into
the courts. They're going back to suing the *** to shut down the dirtiest power plants.
There are 153 coal-fired power plants east of the Mississippi that were built in the
50s and 60s that are terrible sources of pollution and extremely inefficient and they should
be shut down tomorrow. And the EPA will be rolling out its draft regulations in September
for implementation beginning in January and it is devoutly to be wished that some of these
most polluting plants are not gonna be able to meet EPA standards and will have to be
shut down finally. The whole search for a compromise in the Congress and the whole reason
for a cap was to reduce rate shocks and regulatory costs on industry, on the utility industry
and the manufacturing industry so that they could find ways to smooth out their costs
by trading carbon permits between various emitting entities. It was a compromise that,
as I mentioned earlier, was very successful when it was used for sulfur dioxide. It was
a compromise championed by Republican President George H. W. Bush, and then it was demonized
by the current Republican Party and turned into a crazy left-wing scheme and Enron Rube
Goldberg contraption, a way to put the investment bankers in charge of climate action. You saw
what the attacks leveled on, what were actually, what was actually a centrist approach, was
vilified as being a kooky left-wing, Al Gore, eco-hoax to seize control of the energy economy.
And as a result of the success of those attacks, they're now right back to EPA command and
control regulation of the kind that they wanted to avoid in the first place. So, it's gonna
be ugly for a couple years, folks. And my hope is that a couple of years of bitter battling
in the courts between the environmental groups, the corporations, and the EPA will make everyone
wake up and smell the coffee that there's a better way forward here. And maybe those
groups will then go back into the legislative arena and that the Republican Party and the
conservative wing of the Democratic Party will agree that it's time to actually get
serious. And maybe when that happens, I'll be able to write a happy ending to my book,
The Climate War. So, with that, I'd like to open the floor to questions.
[applause]
>>Male member #1: Just started reading your book on the iPad; kudos to your publisher
for getting it there. Your writing style is quite engaging and informative.
>>Eric: Thank you.
>>member #1: I guess you've been doing it a long time, so, but you seem to be preaching
to the converted. So, I wonder how you picked a side and what you would say to someone who
view you, who views you the way you view those you call deniers, as somebody who might be
sincere, but is profoundly mistaken on the science?
>>Eric: Fair question. The, as I say, I don't, I reserve the term deniers for the paid professionals
whose job it is to sow doubt and confusion about climate change. I use the word skeptics
for everyday folks who are skeptical about whether it's happening and I hope that my
book. I'm delighted that you find my writing style engaging, my mother does too and I hope
that it's engaging to people who are confused or in doubt about what's going on. But as
I set out to write the book, I decided that I couldn't pretend that there were two equal
sides here. I couldn't write a book that said, "Well, some people say this is happening and
some people say it's not." I felt that that would be intellectually dishonest. It's not
what I believe. I have been looking very, very closely at the evidence, the scientific
evidence for climate change and I find the evidence overwhelming. I find it extremely
compelling and I think that people who take a fair look at what's happening, and the weight
of evidence that's described in my book and many others, will be lead to that same conclusion.
That said, there are people, roughly a quarter to a third of the country according to the
polls, who aren't sure it's happening or don't think it's happening. And I am, I'm not here
to call you a denier or to question your motives. I think there are people of, as I say in the
book, and maybe you haven't gotten to this part yet, people of goodwill who don't think
this is happening. That said, there are plenty of books out there that explain what's happening
and why. And I didn't feel that what I brought to the party would necessarily be another
book about climate science. There are some great ones. A good one by a climatologist
named Heidi Cullen, called "The Weather of the Future," just came out last week. Jim
Hansen's "Storms of my Grandchildren" is another one; there are a lot of terrific books. So,
I didn't feel that what I wanted to do was write another book about climate science.
I'm a political reporter and a business editor and I wanted to write about the intersection
of politics and economics and write about the argument over getting this done. So, so
my book I guess, is for people that think it's real and wonder why it's so hard to take
action because there are valid economic arguments that need to be addressed. In my view, the
climate policy has moved a lot further than the climate politics and the policies have
actually figured out how to cushion Americans from rising electricity rates, for example,
how to cushion carbon intensive industries from competition with non-carbon constrained
economies. So, I think we know what to do; we just lack the political will to do it.
If you are a climate skeptic and you're feeling left out of my book, I would say you might
stick with it and it might bring you around, or you could always, I don't know.
[laughter]
I hope that my argument is compelling enough that it can turn some people's minds and I
know that, in fact, it has turned a few because I've been hearing from some people. But that
said, I don't claim to be a magician and if you don't find the arguments compelling, then
I would urge you to go deeper into the science because I think the science is compelling.
>>member #1: Thank you.
>>Eric: Yes, sir.
>>Male member #2: Well, that was actually a rather depressing talk. I guess I sit here
thinking, "What can we do?" And the only thing that came to mind was, well maybe if the Internet
does put every single current journalist onto the unemployment line, that'll be a good thing.
But I guess I have one specific question. You didn't talk at all about international
politics. My sense is that I hear a lot of arguing with reform, unless the Chinese and
the Indians do this also, then anything we do is pointless and hurts us. And you either
hear that argument in completely different contexts, like health and safety regulations.
So, is that important or is Congress so focused on inside the beltway that it doesn't really
matter?
>>Eric: That's incredibly important and it's a very important argument and I'm glad you
brought it up. My book opens in Bali at the International Climate Negotiations there and
it closes in Copenhagen with an afterword that takes the story up through the most recent
Senate bill. So, international negotiation is incredibly important. The truth is that
until the United States acts, a global deal is not possible. So, the global deal is not
waiting on China; the global deal is waiting on us. And the argument that we shouldn't
act until China and India act is completely misinformed for a couple of reasons. Now,
lemme not sound like I'm just rejecting it out of hand, I understand the fears of competing
with China and I understand the fears of people who are worried that their jobs are gonna
be exported to China. The trouble here is that we're trying to legislate via the rear
view mirror. We're trying to save 20th century manufacturing jobs instead of worrying about
developing 21st century jobs. The fact is that China is stealing our bacon in the clean
energy race. China is already receiving twice as much venture capital money in clean energy
as the United States. In the second quarter of 2010, it received more venture capital
funding than the US and Europe combined. So, money is flooding into China. And why is it
flooding into China? Because they have a market. Why do they have a market? Because a centralized
authoritarian government that plans the economy has decreed that they'll have a market and
is spending nine billion dollars a month in public money to make sure that clean energy
is incented. They are expecting to spend upwards of 300 billion dollars on clean energy in
the People's Republic over the next decade. That's just public money. So, we can't compete
with that level of spending. We need a market to pull our private dollars off the sidelines.
And so, the real international argument, or international competition that we oughta be
talking about is the race to dominate the clean energy economy, which we are badly losing
to China now. Item two, today's New York Times, China is closing 2,087 of its dirtiest, most
polluting factories by decree on September 1st, I believe the date is. So, that's more
than two thousand of their dirtiest plants, which is gonna have a serious reduction in
their carbon intensity; it's not gonna get them all the way to their targets. But the
idea that China is not acting is an obsolete argument. China is acting in ways that we
can't. In fact, the very day that the Senate announced that it wasn't gonna be debating
a climate bill, China announced that they're putting into place a carbon trading program.
So, the day that we said we're not gonna have one, they said, "We're gonna experiment with
one." So, China is moving ahead. But there's an important distinction between China and
the US. The US had a one century or more head start over China and India in developing our
prosperity through a carbon-based economy. It would be unfair for us to expect China
to get into the game on the exact same timetable that we're doing. So, the notion that we oughta
wait for China to act, and in fact, the idea that China and India don't have to act is
entwined in the international treaties. They are part of the developing world, which is
not required in the Kyoto Treaty to reduce emissions. We're part of the developed world,
which is required. We, alone among the developed world, refused to sign, refused to ratify
the treaty. So, I like the statement that was made by Republican Senator John Warner,
co-sponsor of the Lieberman-Warner climate bill in 2008, when he said, "We can't allow
China and India to hide behind our skirts of inaction." Ok, if we, if we continue not
to act, we continue to give them a reason not to act. In fact, China has proven that
they wanna dominate clean energy; they're number one in wind energy production, number
one in solar PbC production. They are moving ahead with their low-cost manufacturing advantages
as well as their huge government pushed market. I think it's probably already too late for
us to beat them at the clean energy race, but we can at least stay in the game. And
in order to do that, we need to price carbon and we need to put in place renewable energy
standards and do a lot of other policies; all of which we know what to do, we just need
the political will to do them. Yes, sir.
>>Male member #3: Two short questions. The first is how much is the failure to pass action
related to the economic collapse and the specter of job loss potentially being so unpopular
in this time with people being out of work? And the second short part there is, you think
it'd be easier to, instead of raising the cost of carbon to lower the cost of clean
energy through rebates? Is that more politically, more political will behind that than maybe
capping carbon?
>>Eric: Two good questions. The, I'll start with the lower of the cost of clean energy.
I'm all for that and it's gonna take R&D and deployment money to do that as well. And,
the question is what's the funding mechanism to actually put the billions and billions
of dollars into that that we would need to make a real dent in it? The nice thing about
the cap is that it gives you a revenue stream and you can spend that revenue stream on intensive
R&D, and you're not just raising the cost of fossil fuels, you're also lowering the
cost of clean energy. But should we do that? Yeah, we should start by getting rid of the
subsidies for fossil fuels, which are still a subsidized energy source in this country,
and I think that's still globally. There's a lot of disinformation from fossil fuel companies
saying, "Well, we can't just give clean energy all these subsidies and artificially reduce
the price." But we've been artificially reducing the price of petroleum for generations in
this country and, in fact, we've never priced in the social cost of petroleum, the cost
of the pollution, the cost of oil spills, the cost of climate change; none of those
costs are factored into the cost of carbon since spewing carbon is free. So, the first
step would be to close that loophole and put into place what the opponents call attacks,
what's really just a common sense fee. It's a common sense pollution fee. If I wanna go
down to the dump and dump all the stuff in my garage down at my local landfill, I have
to pay to do that. So, I don't think of that as a tax, I think of that as a use fee. So,
I do think that I'm all for reducing the cost of clean energy through subsidies, incentives,
rebates, what have you, but I think in these constrained times, we need a revenue stream
to do that with. To your first question, yeah, one of the culprits was clearly the greatest
economic downturn in 70 years; one of the reasons this was so hard to do. The Waxman-
Markey bill passing the House in the summer of 2009 was proof that it didn't have to prevent
climate action, but it certainly made it much harder to do. And it's ironic because, in
reality, a cap would, although it does have a short-term economic impact, it would have
a long-term impact that would be a, that would put us on a higher growth path. So, there's
actually an economic argument for constraining carbon and the, that equation is understood
all the way to the top of the Obama Economic Council. Larry Summers, in conversations with
environmentalists and Fortune 500 executives last year, described the economic approach
as a scissors. The first blade of the scissors would be the stimulus bill, which had 70 or
80 billion dollars just for clean energy deployment. The second blade of the scissors would be
the cap, which would bring all of this private money off the sidelines and create an enormous
incentive and unleash innovation and pick up where the stimulus bill left off. But,
the sad thing is that our scissors is short one blade, right? So, we're trying to cut
but we're not really getting it done. And I think this'll be the last question. Can
we have time for one more?
>>presenter female: No, unfortunately we don't--
>>Eric: Sorry about that.
[applause]