AURORA FORUM AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY
5 September 2007
CLEAN, SECURE AND EFFICIENT ENERGY:
CAN WE HAVE IT ALL?
Sally Benson
Paul Ehrlich
Fred Krupp
George Shultz
J.B. Straubel
Amy Goodman, moderator
Tim Wheeler: Good evening. Thank you for coming. I’m Tim Wheeler. I’m a reporter
with The Baltimore Sun and I’m president of the Society of Environmental Journalists
[SEJ]. I’m happy to see all your bright, shining faces out there, at least what I can see of
you with the lights.
We’re here for an environmental journalism conference and we’re very happy that we
were able to do this in conjunction with the Aurora Forum tonight. And it’s my pleasure
to introduce the panel that you’re about to hear, or at least introduce you to the organizer
of the panel. I wanted to thank first of all, Mark Gonnerman, the director of the Aurora
Forum, and Amy Goodman with Democracy Now!, for agreeing to pull all this together.
[applause]
So let’s get on with the business of the affair and let me introduce Mark Gonnerman, who
is the founding director of the Aurora Forum. Mark came to Stanford twenty years ago
this fall and completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Religious Studies. As one of his
teachers, Gary Snyder says, “The most radical thing you can do is stay in one place.” So
Mark is committed to exploring this insight, through being an effective, long-term
inhabitant and citizen here. But he also likes to go on the road, and in the past ten
months, he has traveled with his wife to major Buddhist sites in Northern India, and is
just back from Chiapas, Mexico, where he and his son were part of a Global Exchange
delegation that met with Zapatistas to learn about the effects of NAFTA on indigenous
peoples' rights. Now please welcome Mark Gonnerman. [applause]
Mark Gonnerman: Thank you, Tim. The Aurora Forum at Stanford University is an
ongoing series of free and open public conversations featuring people who are adept at
turning vision into action for positive social change. This well describes each of the five
distinguished members of our panel for tonight’s conversation, “Clean, Secure and
Efficient Energy: Can We Have It All?"
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05 September 2007
Thanks to the Society of Environmental Journalists and especially Jay Letto, Chris
Bowman and Carolyn Wetzel for their great ideas and good cheer, as we went about
creating this first plenary session of the 17th Annual SEJ Conference. And thanks to the
Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford, especially Leigh Johnson and Nancy
Miljanich for their contributions to this program. Congratulations to the SEJ leadership
and to the Woods Institute for organizing a spectacular series of events this week,
including this morning’s important roundtable meeting of major news organization
executives and climate change scientists.
Many people have worked together to make our event here possible and we thank you all.
The Aurora Forum is cosponsored by Stanford’s Office of Public Affairs and Stanford
Continuing Studies. I thank David Demarest, our Vice President for Public Affairs, for
forging links early on that have brought us all here together.
We are indeed grateful to our moderator, Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of
Democracy Now! for leaving her firehouse building studio in New York’s Chinatown this
morning and joining us here. Democracy Now! is a daily international radio and TV
news program on over five hundred stations, pioneering the largest community media
collaboration in North America. In recent days, she and her tireless crew have aired a
series of reports from New Orleans on the right of return of the tens of thousands of
citizens displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the first mass exodus of people fleeing the
disastrous effects of climate change. Check it out on democracynow.org.
Amy and her brother, David, have published two books: Exceptions to the Rulers and,
most recently, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who
Fight Back. Both are New York Times bestsellers and the paperback version of Static has
been released just today. Starting last October, she is also now publishing a weekly
newspaper column entitled “Breaking the Sound Barrier.” In this and all of her work, she
in her own words, “Goes to where the silence is” and gives a voice to those who have
been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful. I want to add that Amy is a
Harvard educated student of anthropology, and this is to remind students that the study of
anthropology provides excellent preparation for anyone who is interested in journalism
and in cultivating a moral imagination.
Before I turn the floor over to Amy, who will introduce our panelists, I will outline the
format of tonight’s conversation. After about an hour of onstage discussion, we will open
up to another hour of audience questions and comments. Tonight we have decided that
we will only entertain questions that come from members of the Society of
Environmental Journalists. So if you are an SEJ member here for the conference and you
have a question for members of our panel, please stand up behind one of the two aisle
mikes, and our moderator will recognize you. So please join me in welcoming Amy
Goodman, Sally Benson, Paul Ehrlich, Fred Krupp, George Shultz, and J.B. Straubel to
the Aurora Forum stage. [applause]
Amy Goodman: It’s really an honor to be here with you tonight inn Memorial
Auditorium, the same building where Dr. Martin Luther King spoke two times about
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05 September 2007
forty years ago, saying, “We must realize that the time is always right to do right.” That
can be something we think about through tonight as we talk about “Clean, Secure, and
Efficient Energy: Can We Have it All?” This is especially relevant today. Just look at
the headlines in today’s newspapers: the San Jose Mercury News: “Water Rationing
Could Be On the Horizon”; The Sacramento Bee today: “Fatal Heat Stuns South State;
The Los Angeles Times: “Heat Blamed in the Deaths of at Least Sixteen”; San Francisco
Chronicle: “Healing the Lake”; USA Today: “Felix Weakens after Landfall: Second
Category Five Hurricane Is Record For the Season.” Global warming. Certainly I think
we’ve come to a tipping point in terms of people’s consciousness that this is a key issue
of our time.
Unless you think we would do anything less on this evening of the opening of the
meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists, we bring you truly a power panel
tonight. Let me just read from The New York Times, on Sunday. the Book Review: “As
the Republican Party was settling on its presidential nominee seven summers ago, no less
venerable a statesman than George Shultz was assuring skeptical conservatives that
George W. Bush had the potential to be another Ronald Reagan. One reason for his
confidence was the ‘Stanford shuttle’ between Palo Alto and Austin, which carried such
Hoover Institution luminaries—and White House veterans—as Martin Anderson,
Michael J. Boskin and Condoleezza Rice (Shultz's own protégé) on regular treks to
Texas.” Yes, tonight we have a panel of distinguished speakers. I’ll introduce them all.
We’ll talk amongst us and then we welcome your questions and comments.
Continuing on with Secretary George Shultz: George Shultz, a distinguished fellow at the
Hoover Institution, was sworn in on July 16th, 1982, as the 60th US secretary of state and
served until January 20th, 1989—served almost the full two terms under President
Reagan. He was Chair of the JP Morgan Chase International Council and California
Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors; awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s
highest civilian honor. He also received the Seoul Peace Prize, the Eisenhower Medal for
Leadership and Service, and the Reagan Distinguished American Award. The George
Shultz National Foreign Service Training Center in Arlington, Virginia was dedicated in
2002. He was co-chair, along with former CIA director James Woolsey, of The
Committee on Present Danger. The descendent of officers of Standard Oil. George
Shultz is one of our speakers tonight.
We are also joined by Sally Benson, appointed executive director of the Global Climate
and Energy Project in March 2007. She’s a professor also, in the Department of Energy
Resources Engineering in the School of Earth Sciences here at Stanford. She came from
Lawrence Berkeley National Labs where she was a scientist.
And to the left of George Shultz, we’re joined by Paul Ehrlich. He is cofounder of the
field of coevolution. He studies the structure, dynamics and genetics of natural butterfly
populations. He may best be known for his work on the problems of overpopulation and
in raising issues of population resources and the environment as matters of public policy.
A special interest of his is cultural evolution, especially with respect to environmental
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05 September 2007
ethics. Among his books, he wrote with Anne Ehrlich, One with Nineveh: Politics,
Consumption, and the Human Future.
Fred Krupp is also here: he is executive director of Environmental Defense, what used to
be known as Environmental Defense Fund, a national nonprofit group that links science,
economics, law and private sector partnerships to create solutions to the most serious
environmental problems. He leads Environmental Defense teams of scientists,
economists and attorneys in achieving four main goals: stabilizing earth’s climate;
preserving species and habitat; protecting human health; and safeguarding oceans and
marine life.
And we are joined by J.B. Straubel, chief technical officer of Tesla Motors. He oversees
the technical and engineering design of the electric car company, focusing on the battery,
motor, power, electronics and high level software. We’re going to begin with J.B.
Straubel, who was both an undergraduate and a master student here at Stanford, obsessed
with batteries. [laughter] Why batteries?
J.B. Straubel: Well the simple answer to that is that batteries are just about the most
efficient way that we know to store and release energy,in usable amounts. And not just
any energy but actually electricity, which is perhaps the most useful and usable form of
energy. We can convert electricity into all sorts of other types of energy, like motion, to
power a car for example, very, very efficiently. So it’s really about efficiency. That’s
really the key reason.
George Shultz: When are you going to produce a battery that can go into my Prius so I
can drive it forty miles on the electricity your touting? It needs to be small enough, safe
enough, cheap enough for me to buy it. When is that going to happen?
J.B. Straubel: Well there’s surprisingly close actually. I mean there are lithium-ion
batteries today that could almost do that. The cost is still a bit of an issue and trying to
get it to fit within the same cost range of a normal Prius today is a challenge. But if you
actually work out the dollars-per-mile that you’d be driving, it’s pretty compelling. It can
actually be cheaper than gasoline.
George Shultz: I saw your car. And the battery for your car is only like that [gestures].
It’s not very big. That’s not the problem. Well . . . [laughter] about that big. So it could
be much smaller but it’s always just around the corner. When are we going to actually
have it?
J.B. Straubel: Well we are working on it now. I’d actually say it’s closer than just
around the corner. You know, we are literally driving cars today that are working and
using similar batteries. So our perspective is that this is actually much more a near-term
solution than, you know, five, ten years away.
George Shultz: Well if you can produce that battery, that’s a revolution.
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05 September 2007
Paul Ehrlich: But it won’t make much difference in the long run. Until we start
redesigning our cities so we don’t all travel around wrapped in individual vehicles, we’re
just not going to make it. [applause]
George Shultz: How do you figure on getting around?
Paul Ehrlich: Walking, biking, mass transit; all kinds a ways, and cars should be
reserved for taking your summer vacations somewhere and for teenagers to make love in.
I mean they do have their purpose. [laughter] [applause]
George Shultz: Let me tell you something. Teenagers are way ahead of you. [laughter]
Paul Ehrlich: I think you’re right. That’s our generation, George.
Amy Goodman: J.B., can you tell us about the electric Porsche?
J.B. Straubel: Ah, the electric Porsche. That was a student project, actually. This is a
car that I converted to electric when I was still a student here at Stanford. And it was a
lot of fun. It was really a learning project for me but I also remember leaving that project
thinking that I was never going to build another electric car until batteries got a lot better.
Because it had about twenty miles of range, which was about enough to get from my
apartment to school and back, but not a whole lot else. And the one thing that was an
impetus for revisiting this whole problem was the fact that batteries had gotten so much
better. They went from lead-acid, to nickel-metal hydride, and then to lithium-ion. And
every time you could store more and more energy in a smaller and smaller mass and
volume and go further and further. Now we’re basically competitive at a high price
point, at least, with gasoline cars.
Amy Goodman: And your electric bicycle?
J.B. Straubel: Oh, that was even before the Porsche, actually. So that was one of the
first electric vehicles I built. It was a converted bicycle. I kind a got obsessed with that
for summer and spent the whole summer hacking apart a bike and welding new pieces
onto it and basically making the thing into this Frankenstein electric bike. But it was also
a lot of fun.
Amy Goodman: Professor Benson.
Sally Benson: We still need to think about where the electricity comes from. And today
in the United States, fifty percent of our electricity comes from coal. So until we can
change that, electric cars will only go so far in terms of dealing with the global climate
change problem. They certainly are great in terms of air pollution because they’re much
cleaner to drive around but they’re not a tremendous benefit until we shift to a lower C02
intensity source of electricity.
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05 September 2007
J.B. Straubel: The most compelling thing I think about electric transportation is that
electricity is such a flexible fuel. You’re absolutely right.
Sally Benson: I agree.
J.B. Straubel: But today there’s a significant fraction of the electricity on the grid
coming from coal. It’s you know, the last, least desirable thing that we should be
generating it from in my opinion. But every single year, that carbon intensity of a
kilowatt that are coming out of the outlet, is dropping.
Sally Benson: I agree with you.
J.B. Straubel: And I think that trend is going to continue indefinitely. So essentially by
building a transportation infrastructure that can run off electricity, you can basically
power that off of you know, whatever the mix is that happens to be on the grid, you
know, in a given year. And all of the different forces pushing that to become cleaner and
cleaner and lower carbon intensity will happen in parallel and benefit it.
Sally Benson: I agree but I think people need to understand it’s not the solution today.
Simply shifting to an electric car doesn’t mean your carbon footprint will necessarily
decrease today. I agree entirely that electrification of transportation is a really good way
to go but it doesn’t solve the problem today.
J.B. Straubel: It still uses energy. There’s no simple solution.
George Shultz: Well how do you win baseball games? Everybody thinks you win a
game when a guy comes up in the ninth inning. You’re three runs behind, two outs,
three and two, and he hits a home run and wins the game. That’s not the way you win
baseball games. You win baseball games by singles, stolen bases, hit batsmen, errors,
occasionally a home run, all kinds a little things. So it seems to me one of the great
errors in this is to think there is some magic solution. One big thing; if we can only find
it.
Paul Ehrlich: How you win baseball games is to start in the first inning.
George Shultz: Well wait a minute. The answer is you do a whole bunch of things and
let them add up to something.
Paul Ehrlich: But you start at the very beginning of the game to do all those small
things. The trouble is the beginning of the game was around 1950, so we’re really late
today.
Fred Krupp: J.B., when you talk about the fact that the grid is becoming less carbon
intensive, I think that’s accurate and I understand why you say that, but I think we have
to remember that the atmosphere doesn’t know from carbon intensity. It knows about the
total ignitions that are going into the atmosphere from the United States, China, and the
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other countries. And so just becoming better by reducing carbon intensity can’t be the
goal, we have to reduce total emissions. I know you don’t disagree with that but I just
think we have to be careful not to hold out the intensity metric as though it’s what’s
going to solve our problem. It won’t.
J.B. Straubel: I do totally agree with you. Actually, I think the long-term solution is
really solar electric powering electric transportation. That’s the one that really eliminates
emissions and you don’t even have an intensity discussion. There just isn’t any carbon
involved in the entire cycle.
George Shultz: A big problem with solar energy: I’ve been trying to put solar panels on
my house for the last five months and the regulatory process, you can’t get through it.
What’s going on here anyway? Why is there a regulatory opposition to solar energy?
Paul Ehrlich: Let me broadcast something about my colleague here, because if you
didn’t see his wonderful op-ed in The Washington Post today, “How to Gain a Climate
Consensus,” it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on all those steps we could be
taking.
George Shultz: You talking about me?
Paul Ehrlich: You. Yes. This is your article. [laughter] But I wanted to save you
because she started out by insulting you so badly and it seemed to me that’s not really a
good procedure in a meeting like this. But not only that, let me say that he has also
joined with another Stanford person, Bill Perry, to say exactly the right things about our
nuclear weapons and so on. You’ve got a real hero up here. Stanford is, as usual, in the
lead.
Amy Goodman: George Shultz, tell us about what you wrote in The Washington Post
today.
George Shultz: I share Fred’s concern that we have a moment when there are problems
that we can see with the environment. At the same time, there are problems we can see
with our dependence on oil, which is a bad thing from our national security standpoint.
And there are problems with high and volatile prices of energy from an economist’s
standpoint. So you see three things coming together. And if you think about it, each one
of these impulses has a different constituency. But if you look at them, they all are kind
of advocating the same thing. So from a political standpoint, it’s a very precious
moment, a chance when something might actually happen. And so you want to be sure if
you can that what happens works and that something does happen. And my article was
along those lines. And to say that during the Reagan administration, we confronted the
problem of depletion of the ozone layer and we developed a treaty called the Montreal
Protocol, that has not solved the problem but it has done a great deal. It’s really an
environmental treaty that worked. [applause] And it had the characteristics that it was
universal. The Kyoto Protocol is a total failure. It’s just doesn’t come close because it
doesn’t cover everybody. You’ve got to get something that covers everybody. And then
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you’ve got to set some goals to be sure, but you’ve got to have things that people actually
do, actions to take, and pledge people to take those actions. Then something starts to
happen, and then you start to focus.
This wasn’t in my article, but I’m a great believer that if you focus on something really
hard, it’s amazing what comes out of that. If you really start to focus on how to save
energy and do a better job of using energy—in our homes, in our companies, and
wherever we are—there is so much low hanging fruit, there’s fruit all over the ground to
pick up that will make you much more energy efficient. So that was the pitch in this
article. Let’s get going. And let’s get going on a track where people actually will do
something, not just talk about it. Do something.
Amy Goodman: Do you see a connection, Secretary Shultz, between global warring and
global warming?
George Shultz: Say that again?
Amy Goodman: Well between global warring and global warming. And what I mean
specifically when we talk about global warming—fossil fuels, this whole push for using
more and depending on oil . . . . What do you think about the connection between the Iraq
War and this issue of global warming at home?
George Shultz: I don’t think the Iraq War had anything whatever to do with it. The Iraq
War—and whether you agree or not with the invasion of Iraq—the problem is there is a
radical movement that uses the weapon of terror and we have to confront it, and we have
done that successfully in some respects here, and that was the object of the Iraq War. It
had nothing to do with oil at all.
Paul Ehrlich: I disagree totally. If you go back in history, our entire presence in the
Middle East has been entirely focused on seeing to it that we can keep some kind a
control over the fossil fuel supplies. [applause] You go back to Churchill and the
destroyers. You go back to Roosevelt, the Sykes Peko Agreement, the Red Line
Agreement, the Gulbenkian Agreement, we created—Churchill created—Iraq because of
the oil wells at Kirkuk, and I can’t remember where the other one was at the moment, but
it doesn’t make any difference. I think Stanford Professor, Gretchen Daily said it very
well, “Would we be planning to invade Iraq if their major export were broccoli?” We
would just have left it. I’m not saying that this was in George Bush’s head. God knows
what was in his head. But, certainly, everybody who knew the history knew what would
happen. We’re now in a situation where the knowledgeable people haven’t got a clue
what to do, even though every person I know personally, Republican and Democrat, was
opposed to the idea to begin with. Now we’re in a mess where we’re waiting for General
Petraeus to come back and see if he’s going to betray us. That will be interesting to see.
[applause] . .
George Shultz: It’s perfectly correct to say that we are understandably preoccupied with
an area that contains a huge proportion of the oil reserves of the world. That’s a different
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statement from saying that the reason we went into Iraq was the oil. Those are not
connected.
Fred Krupp: Could I just say that . . .
George Shultz: But I don’t think, frankly, debating the Iraq War is pertinent to . . .
Paul Ehrlich: That’s what I was just going to say.
Fred Krupp: The beauty of the moment is people can have widely different views of
Iraq but agree with the agenda that the secretary set out in The Washington Post, where
he talked about cap and trade for carbon and doing something about it.
Paul Ehrlich: I think that’s because he understands the political situation. There’s what
we ought to do and there’s what we might be able to do.
Fred Krupp: Actually Paul, here’s the thing. We have air pollution problems all over
the world. We have never solved one of them without having a mandatory legal limit on
how much of this junk you can throw into the air.
Paul Ehrlich: No. I wasn’t against cap and trade, no.
Fred Krupp: Whether you’re for taxes or cap and trade is almost secondary issue. The
first issue is we need to pass a law that says we have to have a legal limit and a legal
mandate to reduce these emissions. And until we do that, we’re all kidding ourselves that
voluntary actions, however laudable, are going to solve this problem. We need to get
congress to do what California has already done, what Florida has done: set a mandatory
legal limit for how much of this stuff you can throw into the air. [applause]
Paul Ehrlich: Why are Fred and I so terribly nervous about this? The answer is that
there’s uncertainty in the global heating situation, and I prefer heating to warming
because warming sounds so cozy. You guys [the journalists in the audience] have not yet
brought home to the general public what the real issues are. For instance, everybody is
scared witless of sea level rise, and it could be catastrophic in fifty or seventy or a
hundred-twenty years, but I guarantee you, for the next ten years, you’ll be able to outrun
it. You don’t have to worry about it. But when you think of changing the entire water
handling super infrastructure of the world—the fact that we have a relatively ecologically
incompetent agricultural system—it’s utterly dependent on present patterns of climate.
For example, when the glaciers in the Himalayas stop feeding the rivers that are shared
by Pakistan and India—two countries that hate each other’s guts and have lots of nuclear
weapons—that’s a real concern for us. And it’s going to be primarily agricultural
problems that are going to bring to bring this to a head. And also water for cities in Peru
and so on where they’re utterly dependent on the melting glaciers as well. There’s a lot
of uncertainty. The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports are very
conservative. Virtually every climate scientist I know is concerned that the uncertainty is
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working in the direction that actually things are going to be a lot worse. And most of the
data coming in—the mental meta-analysis that all the scientists do—indicates that
already there are signs it’s going to be worse.
George Shultz: So we should be doing something then.
Paul Ehrlich: Oh, exactly. I mean that’s why we want to do something that will stop
the total from rising and start getting it down because we owe it to our kids and
grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Fred Krupp: Not to extend this, but that’s why when you mention taxes, taxes are fine.
It’s a good first instinct. Everybody understands we have to effect pricing and knows that
will effect behavior, so taxes with a legal limit are okay, but you absolutely have to have
that legal limit: the cap.
Amy Goodman: Sally Benson, talk about the Global Climate and Energy Project that is
here at Stanford.
Sally Benson: Stanford University has a project called the Global Climate and Energy
Project [GCEP]and our goal is to perform fundamental scientific research to develop
breakthrough technologies that will provide energy without the potential for global
warming. So that’s our goal. We invest in a broad range of technologies, everything
from solar photovoltaics, to advanced batteries, to carbon capture and storage, to new
approaches to much more efficient combustion. And we have over two hundred students
involved in the project. We have fifty faculty members at Stanford. We also have people
from universities around the world participating in this effort.
Having said that, we are focused on the longer term—the ten-to-fifty-year
timeframe—and I see our role as keeping that pipeline of innovation full. So that as we
do what we can do today, we can improve efficiency, we can conserve, and we can shift
to renewable resources that are available today like wind in particular. And even perhaps
in their timeframe of ten-to-twenty years, we can begin to capture and store carbon. But
we need to continue to keep that innovation pipeline filled and really drive down costs so
we can really imagine shifting our energy system to depending up sustainable, renewable
energy flows, as compared to depletable energy stocks, which is what we do primarily
today.
Amy Goodman: In the audience there are hundreds of environmental journalists, and
journalists are always following the money, so can you talk about why the large
companies who are pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into GCEP, into this
program, are doing this? I mean companies like, for example, Exxon Mobile.
Sally Benson: Right. So the Global Climate and Energy Program has four sponsors;
Exxon Mobile, General Electric, Toyota and Schlumberger. These four companies came
together in about 2002, and, after discussions with the university, decided that they would
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like to to support this fundamental scientific research program that would be part of a
contribution to addressing this issue.
Amy Goodman: When I was looking at this, I was particularly interested in Exxon
Mobile. Because so much has been done around their muddying the waters, to say the
least, about public understanding of global warming, the whole idea of pouring money
into these think tanks that just raise questions about what has now come to be the
consensus around global warming. How does that affect the research at Stanford?
Sally Benson: I don’t think that affects the research at all. All of the research that’s done
is initiated by faculty members. They come up with ideas. They submit proposals to us.
We allow basically any kind of proposal, but sometimes we also lay out very challenging
scientific targets, like performance goals, for example, for solar PV [photovoltaics]. So
all of the work, you know, it’s organic, grassroots. We then undergo a peer review—a
scientific peer review—with independent, academic institutions and the research
laboratories around the world. So we believe there’s a great deal of independence and it
reflects the interests and the capabilities of the Stanford faculty, as well as the various
other universities around the world who participate in it.
Paul Ehrlich: Let somebody else from Stanford chip in, in defense of GCEP. I’ve
known Lynn Orr [GCEP Project Director] for many years. The idea that he would sellout
in some way, or the fact that any of the scientists involved with it would . . . . And
believe me, I have nothing to do with it. I’ve gotten lots of flack from environmental
groups because, “Why should Stanford take money from these outfits?” Our general
principle at Stanford, and since we don’t get a lot of money elsewhere, is you’ve got to
work with a lot of different people. And big corporations, even Exxon, has some
excellent people. That said, I don’t think that the dirtiness of money makes a big
difference. It’s how it’s spent. And I think a good thing to do is take dirty money and
spend it right.
Finally, I’d say, however, if they’d asked me, I wouldn’t have taken any from Exxon.
Only from a PR point of view; in other words, if this was during the Vietnam War, I
would’ve said, “Don’t take money from Dow,” for instance. In other words, just because
it raises so much fuss. But I don’t think a thing wrong has been done with that money.
Exxon did break its agreement, as I understand it, with Stanford, not to use Stanford in its
advertising. So Stanford tried to be careful. I know that Lynn and the other people
involved with GCEP have been absolutely straight. If you sold out at Stanford, the rest of
the university would jump all over you. We are a free, open society where everybody’s
work is looked at, where you’ve got to get it in the right place. I think it’s a bad thing to
imply that Stanford has somehow done something wrong. I think they did something
silly in taking the money from Exxon, but only from a public relations point of view.
Sally Benson: I think the university and the faculty and society are better off for having
this project. If you look at the exciting work in solar PV, if you look at the exciting work
in new batteries, I think this is something that Stanford can be really proud of. And I’m
confident that we’re going to make a difference—both in the short and long run—in
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terms of the pipeline of innovation. On balance, this is an extremely valuable project to
Stanford and the global community.
Amy Goodman: George Shultz.
George Shultz: I think what is happening is people are being exposed to a flow of
factual information and opinion, and they’re changing their minds. And over the last,
say, fifteen years, there has been a lot of discussion of these issues, and the trend of
opinion has shifted, and that’s true in corporations as they look at it. And at least from
what I have known of the oil company executives, they say to themselves, “We’re in the
energy business and if there’s some new form of energy that’s coming along, we want to
be involved. And so we better find out about it. And we’re willing to put money into
learning about it.” The amount of money that Exxon provides for Stanford is a drop in
the bucket, I’m sure, compared to the amount of money they’re spending in their own
laboratories. And there was recently, I think a month-and-a-half ago, a report from a
major petroleum group that astonished people by the point of view in it. And it was
particularly noted because the person who was the principle author was Lee Raymond,
the recently retired chairman of Exxon, who was kind of tough-minded hardliner on this
issue. So I think people are shifting their gears. And you were telling me about a
meeting you were in with a lot of corporate executives actually making a totally different
pitch than maybe they would’ve made three or four, five years ago.
Fred Krupp: Yes. The secretary and I were talking earlier about the United States
Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). And it includes GE, Jeff Immelt, and Chad
Holliday from DuPont; Jim Rogers from Duke Energy. It also now included Pepsi Cola,
Caterpillar, John Deere. All these companies have said they want a federal mandatory
law that would reduce global warming pollution in this country immediately, in five
years, in ten years, with escalating goals until the final goal that they’ve all subscribed to
for a national program. This would be sixty to eighty percent reductions from current
levels by 2050, but very substantial reductions in five and ten years as well.
And so I think you’re right, Secretary Shultz, in that we have a special moment where
never before in the history of enacting environmental laws, not in the Clean Air Act or
the Clean Water Act, did we ever have companies coming together saying, “We need to
deal with this problem.” Why are they doing that? The head of a utility plant is trying to
make a decision, “Do I buy a coal plant or do I build a gas-fired plant? Do I build a
nuclear plant? Do I invest in some of these centralized solar thermal plants?” And
without knowing what the rules are going to be—these plants are going to last for forty
years—it’s pretty hard to make the decision. Why are they doing that? When California
and other states—New York, Massachusetts, all the Northeast—when all those states
move ahead, when the governor of Florida—the Conservative Republican Governor
Charlie Chris—signs a decree saying they’ll be sixty percent emission cuts in Florida,
these companies say, “It will be easier for us if there’s one uniform carbon market than to
have all of these different programs springing up.” I believe that there is a value to
integrating all this into a national program, but I do think a state such as California should
be allowed the right, as they are with the Clean Air Act, to ask for deeper reductions than
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05 September 2007
a federal program is likely to have. So there’s tremendous momentum now and it’s a
very special moment. We could actually get a law passed in this congress.
Amy Goodman: Paul Ehrlich, do you see leadership coming from the top of this
country? What do you think has to happen?
Paul Ehrlich: I’ll take the Fifth on the first question. But I think the action is at the
level of industry, those people there. I happened to end up in Alaska right after the
Exxon Valdez spill, and I ended up in a meeting with lots of their thirty-five year old
execs, and had them up there in training. And they were the first generation of the green
kids taught in school. And they were all enraged at Exxon. They felt that they had
personally been disgraced, and so on. I think there’s huge potential in industry.
Fred and I were talking about this earlier, in part because they have to do something that
the federal government doesn’t do, and that’s plan beyond the next election cycle.
They’ve got to look at where their investments are going and so on, and so they want
ground rules. They want to know what’s happening. They want their kids to have a
descent world. I’m ambivalent on this because I don’t think we’re going to pull it off
because of politics primarily, not that we don’t know how to do it.
I’m probably the only one in the room that can remember this, but some years ago we
fought a thing called the Second World War. And it popped on America’s horizon
around 1939 big time. In two years, instead of making automobiles, we were making
thousands and thousands and thousands of airplanes in the same plants. And when it was
over four years later, in another year or so we were making thousands and thousands and
thousands of automobiles in the same plants because we converted our economy on an
emergency basis to meet a big crisis. We did it I think extremely successfully, and it led
to a lot of prosperity. It actually took us out of a depression. So if we really wanted to . . .
. I think George is exactly right: if we have the will and we decide to cooperate and we
get people together in Washington from both parties working. Two of my old friends
were Jack Hines, who unfortunately died, and Tim Worth. One was a Republican, the
other was a Democrat. They worked really hard to come together with plans that would
make the United States a better place environmentally. That’s the spirit we have to get
back to, but I think the people that can get us back there are industry executives more
than anybody else, and people in industry. [applause]
George Shultz: Let me strike an optimistic note because there’s a tendency to be blue
about things. Partly drawing on what Paul just said: if you get the industry people
involved, they are the people who actually go and do things. They’re action oriented. If
they start doing things that are going to contribute, that’s how you’re going to get to the
goals that you set.
But I also have the experience of a long history with this. When I was secretary of labor
back in 1969, for reasons that I’ll never know, the president made me chairman of a
cabinet task force on the Oil Import Control Program. At the time, President Eisenhower
had left us with a program that said that you couldn’t import more than twenty percent of
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05 September 2007
the oil you used. And we could see that that was unraveling. So I studied it. And shortly
thereafter—by this time I was secretary of the treasury—came the Arab Oil Embargo,
you remember, and this was the first big oil price spike. And there was no Department of
Energy, so we in the Treasury, inherited the problem. And people would come in and tell
me about alternatives to oil. And I’m not a scientific person but even I could listen to
what they say and said, “This is pie in the sky. None of these people have anything really
worthwhile to say.”
Now it’s totally different. The kinds of things that you’re doing—and these things are
going to be sustained. The price of oil may go down. That’s going to be sustained. And
there are all sorts of things that people are starting to talk about. Amory Lovins is sitting
here in the audience. He’s written a terrific book on the oil endgame. [applause] And he
keeps pointing out, you know, there are light, strong materials. And if automobile
companies would start building their cars out of them the way Boeing builds planes out
of them, you would have a lot less weight to carry and you’d use less energy to do it, and
this is one of the many ways he suggests for getting there. And there are so many things
that are practical and doable and they’re right there. And “the battery is around the
corner,” as you say. I hope. I’m waiting for that corner. But there’s so much that’s there
that can happen if people will actually do it. And maybe the kind of impetus from what
Fred is talking about is what causes these things to gel and people to take them seriously
and do it. But it’s all there. It’s all there this time. It wasn’t there before.
J.B. Straubel: I agree with everything you’re saying. I think there is a lot of optimism
from the large industry side, but I actually have even more optimism on the
entrepreneurial side. I think that’s easy to overlook. But there’s an enormous amount of
talent and people—really quite smart people—working on ideas that might not be
practical but trying out so many different things.
George Shultz: If you live in this area, you’ve got to believe in that.
J.B. Straubel: Some work, some don’t, but I think it’s a much more efficient way to
filter those ideas and find some of the good ones. And I think if you look at some of the
ideas and the incentives that are driving the bigger companies, they might actually be
coming from more of these entrepreneurial types of organizations or groups, some at
universities, some at small companies.
Paul Ehrlich: You don’t want to be too US-centric though. For instance, if you look at
the rate that the Chinese are building coal-fired power plants, it’s truly and deeply
frightening already. In other words, five years down the road, there’s going to be so
many more. I personally wouldn’t—if I were king of the world, which seems
unlikely—permit a single coal-fired plant to be built unless it had good underground,
guaranteed carbon sequestration. [applause] We ought to get off of that. We could pay
people to stop coal mining. During the Second World War, it was an extremely
honorable occupation. It was also the center of a lot of labor disputes, as some of you
will remember. It ought to be worth our time and money to retire the coal miners and to
make people tighten their belts and find other sources of electricity. You’ve got to have
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05 September 2007
the incentives in there. Right now we are still actually subsidizing a huge amount of the
carbon that goes into the atmosphere. We don’t have to do that. That’s someplace again
where the government actually has to get pressure to be taking some action.
Fred Krupp: Well it’s just a little bit hard, Paul, to lecture the Chinese about building
coal plants when we continue to build coal plants. It’s a little bit hard to tell them they
have to limit their emissions when we have no limit on ours, as you know.
Paul Ehrlich: I’m totally in agreement. I’m just saying they’re not going to listen to us.
[applause]
George Shultz: This is one of the things in the Montreal Protocol. We did things that
put us in the position of being able to look other countries in the eye and say, “We’re
doing it. You can do it. Here’s how.”
Fred Krupp: But the beauty of Montreal Protocol is, as you know better than anyone,
that it not only required us to limit our use of chloral floral carbons, it required the
developing countries ten years later, with a ten year lag time, to do the same. And so we
absolutely do need an international agreement that covers all the countries, but we’re
going to have to give them a little extra time. But first it starts here, and one of the
wonderful things about having an audience of a lot of journalists is as the momentum
builds—as Arnold Schwarzenegger takes the bold action that he’s taken with AB 32 and
California, and the California legislature enacts that, and California has a carbon limit.
And now Florida and the Northeast have that. It’s a very simple test to know if a
politician or an elected official is for doing something or not. As journalists from
communities all over America, all you need to do is ask the elected officials and do a
story on their answer: “Are you for a mandatory legal limit on greenhouse gases or not?”
Paul Ehrlich: Let me bring the elephant into the room then. You’re at Environmental
Defense. Everybody who’s numerate in our society knows that one of the major reasons
that carbons are going to keep increasing of course, is because the world’s population is
increasing. We’re going to add, if we’re lucky, two-and-a-half-billion more people.
That’s half-a-billion more than were alive when I was born. And they’re going to have a
disproportionate effect on the carbon emissions. And yet the United States has no
population policy. We can’t point at anybody else on this issue at all. We have a picture
of a congress that argues about immigration, while never talking about how many people
should live in the United States. And Environmental Defense, as I recall, doesn’t make it
one of their major priorities. I don’t think you guys ever talk about it. [applause]
George Schultz: I’m not sure where you’re going, but I was thinking I don’t want to go
there.
Sally Benson: I want to go back to the issue of developing countries.
Fred Krupp: I think I better talk about population.
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Sally Benson: Okay, you can talk about it and then I want to get back to developing
countries.
Fred Krupp: We have written about population and you’ve done a wonderful job
educating people about the relationship between population and pollution for decades
now, Paul, and my hat’s off to you for doing that. But we’ve written about the fact that
population—and we’ve published papers—is a key factor here. We don’t think we are
equipped and have the resources to be effective advocates in the population arena. There
are other groups that have more expertise than us in that area. But we are equipped to say
no matter what the population is, our absolute carbon emissions need to go down. And
that will force technologies that will bring money to entrepreneurs. That will get capital
meeting up with technology so it gets deployed in a way that’s very important. But it’s
not to discount population. It’s just not what we’re expert at.
George Shultz: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let’s just look at the population picture
because right now we live at a kind of golden moment in an economic sense. Economic
expansion is taking place all over the world in an unprecedented way. And really, for the
first time, a lot of countries that have been mired in poverty forever are raising their
heads up. And this is China, India, and so on. There is economic expansion taking place
there.
And what happens when that takes place? What happens is that the fertility rate drops.
You will give women some kind of role in society and let economic expansion take place
and the fertility rates drop. It happens everywhere. Right now the population is actually
declining in a great many of the developed countries; literally declining in Japan, in
Germany, for instance, Italy, Portugal, Spain. And in countries—China with its one child
policy . . . as the cohortswork themselves through—all of a sudden China will not be
having these big additions to its labor force. India’s population: the fertility rate is
dropping. So population control is happening as a result of economic forces.
Paul Ehrlich: That’s why I gave them an absolute number rather than talking about the
rates. And the best news there, of course, is that population rates are dropping and
shrinking in the richest countries. Which is where they should shrink because of course,
per capita, we put much more pressure on the life support systems without which we
cannot survive and which we’re now very busily wrecking. So I agree with that
optimism. Nonetheless, two-and-a-half-billion more people. I mean, if you look at
China and India, many observers think what’s going to happen is they’re going to
fractionate. In other words, it’s not like the Chinese are getting rich and the Indians are
getting rich. There is embedded, in each of those gigantic countries, a quite large gettingmore-and-more-rich country, if you have read what Norman Myers has said about the
new consumers and so on. In 1972, Dennis Pirages, a political scientist and I, wrote an
article in The New York Times on “What if All The Chinese Had Wheels?” And here we
are, more than twice as many Chinese as there were then, or roughly twice as many, and
now they’re all trying to get wheels. That does not speak well for what’s going to happen
with the carbon flux.
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George Shultz: They’ve had bicycles for a long time.
Paul Ehrlich: I know. We should get their bicycles. We should learn from them.
Sally Benson: But I want to go back to the developing country issue. I mean,
electrification can do so much to improve the quality of life. It provides lighting. It
provides access to communication systems. It enhances education. So I think we need to
be very careful as we think about developing countries not to get in the way of that
progress and improving the quality of people’s lives who are being lifted out of poverty
right now. So I absolutely agree we need a global policy, but we have to respect the
needs of those people whose lives are beginning to improve as a result of economic
expansion.
Fred Krupp: I completely agree with that. The mistake that people make sometimes is
to associate the emissions of pollution as being inextricably linked with economic
progress. The utility industry argued that was the case here in the United Stated with
sulfuric dioxide. Well, we’ve managed to reduce sulfuric dioxide emissions in this
country, as you know, by more than half and we’ve had a tremendous amount of
economic progress. There’s no reason we cannot do the same thing with carbon dioxide.
We can have caps on carbon dioxide emissions ultimately in China and India. We can
have reductions and we can have lots of economic expansion. And you know better than
anyone that that’s true because of all the technologies that you see in the lab.
Paul Ehrlich: Steve Schneider says we don’t have to go through another Victorian
Industrial Revolution to raise these people up.
Sally Benson: But I think that we’ll need to help. I mean if you have the choice today
between a coal plant and a coal plant with carbon dioxide capture and storage, the cost
might be double. And to tell a developing country, “Well, you know, you have to pay
double what we paid to build our economy on the back of much cheaper electricity.” So I
think if there are ways to bring together the international community to help implement
or leapfrog technology to put in more solar, to put in more wind, to put in carbon capture
plants, but I think that they’ll need help. I think we need to help them.
Amy Goodman: Robert Kennedy, in his book, Crimes of Nature, writes about the
massive level of subsidy of oil and coal to the tune of some one hundred fifty billion
dollars. Let me ask George Shultz. Do you think the subsidy should end?
George Shultz: I think you have to be very careful with subsidies and, in general, I’m
against them for anything. I believe that you’re much better off to let the market operate.
And so as we think of new technologies, for example, I’m very reluctant to see us
subsidizing this technology or that technology. Let the market operate. Let the
technologies get themselves to the point where they can compete in the marketplace.
And I would say that about coal, oil, nuclear, whatever it is.
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Amy Goodman: But if these innovations can’t in any way compete with this massively
subsidized oil and coal . . .
George Shultz: Well I’m not so sure they’re massively subsidized. If you stick a stick
in the ground in Saudi Arabia you say, “Oh, damn, oil, not water.” It just comes out. It’s
very inexpensive. And that’s part of the problem. And, in the past, we’ve had these
periods when the price of oil went up and we started to do something, and then it would
go back down again and everybody would stop. And it would stop because the price
could go way down because the cost of producing it in these countries is very, very low.
Fred Krupp: I think you’re onto something here. The market is really important and
the subsidies are very uneven. We have a very uneven playing field. But one of the
things that makes the playing field so uneven is the fact that if you burn coal without
capturing the carbon dioxide and throw it into the air, I guess the economist call it “an
externality, an external cost.” Well it’s not external to our planet. It’s killing our planet.
That is a huge subsidy beyond any I think you meant to refer to that we give to the fossil
fueling industry when we don’t force capture of those emissions.
So if you want to really have a market . . . . In my view, capitalism has worked really
effectively. It’s lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Markets process
information rapidly. They bring new, cheaper, higher-value products to market all the
time. Today there is a new iPod touch that’s just been released. I mean, amazing
products come to market, but markets don’t work for the environment. We are chewing
up nature. And this will continue until we eliminate the most basic subsidy of all by
saying, “No more! There’s going to be a legal limit, a cap on the amount of this global
warming pollution.”
You don’t have a market to figure out how to innovate the new battery. You don’t have
enough of a market to figure out the new battery technologies or the low weight cars that
Amory [Lovins] wants to get on the road, or the systems to capture carbon that are
worked on right here in Palo Alto. That is the most basic thing we can do, and then let’s
watch capitalism work. Because until now, capitalism is, while good for a lot of things, it
has been horrible for this problem, and we can only get that market system working if we
correct that fundamental flaw. [applause]
George Shultz: I’d like to ask Fred a question. This is kind of an inside question. Let’s
agree that the effluent from a coal fired power plant is an externality and so it’s a cost,
and therefore, instead of it being free to the company, we recognize it as a cost and we
say to them, “You’re going to pay a heavy tax on that.” What’s wrong with that?
Fred Krupp: At first . . .
George Shultz: Fred, I should explain. Fred believes in the cap and trade system and I
believe in it too, but I’m not sure it’s the universal answer to everything. And an
alternative is to use the tax system, achieving sort of the same result by saying, “We’re
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going to make this so expensive compared with other things that you won’t do it
anymore.”
Fred Krupp: The attraction of a tax is that we correct the price signal to some extent.
We make bad things somewhat more expensive. And we could all be for that. I am for
that. But we need to remember that what we’re trying to solve for here isn’t to make
some things a little more expensive. The problem we’re trying to solve is to limit the
absolute quantity of these gases going into the atmosphere, and that is why having a legal
limit and creating a market that way makes it transparent to the American public—to
citizens all over the world—whether the politicians are doing the right thing or not.
The scientists tell us we need to reduce the emissions by sixty to eighty percent. We pass
the legal limit that either meets that scientific test or it doesn’t. It makes it simple to
know who’s on the right side and who’s not. When you use a tax, eight dollars a ton of
carbon sounds good, but it’s a few cents a gallon of gasoline. It may not solve the
problem if you set it at the wrong level and that’s why I don’t want to have a law pass
congress where people have the feeling, “We’ve done it, we added a modest tax or a
small tax.” Let the public know whether we’ve done it or not by knowing what the legal
limit is. And if under that cap you want to do some taxes, that’s fine too, but in a cap and
trade system, that will have the effect because they’ll be a limited number of permits. It
will have the effect that the companies that put more out will be paying a lot more. But
instead of going through Uncle Sam, it will be going directly to whoever can prove that
they’re reducing emissions.
And I think governments can effectively decide how much is too much and the public can
help make that decision. But when the government starts picking winners and losers . . . .
I mean, I’m old enough to remember the Sin Fuels Project where we spent a few billion
dollars without a lot of results. I’d rather have a cap and trade system where the
government’s role was to make sure the only reductions that get credit in this system are
real reductions. They’re scientifically valid. But have that money go directly to the
entrepreneurs who can do it, as opposed to the government. I think that’s a better answer
too. But the basic reason, George, is in a cap and trade system. . .
George Shultz: I’m willing to make the carbon tax revenue neutral. If you’re worried
about raising too much money, I’m with you.
Fred Krupp: No, I’m mostly concerned that in a cap and trade system you know where
the cap is. We can evaluate that against scientific claims. In a tax system, we don’t
know how much of a reduction we’re buying. And this is one where we’re betting the
planet. And I don’t want to be wrong.
Paul Ehrlich: I’m also in favor of a cap and trade. But the nice thing about a tax system
is we know exactly how to do it. And if it’s not working right and you’re not getting
towards the thing you want, you can change it with the stroke of a pen, as opposed to,
say, putting sun shades in space or some of these other charming plans that are put out
there. I think there are situations where cap and trade is much better, but I think we send
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the wrong message, for instance, by keeping gasoline as cheap as it is. We’d send a
much more dramatic message to people who aren’t paying attention otherwise.
[applause] So I think it’s a combination that needs to be done.
Fred Krupp: A cap and trade system will make gasoline more expensive because the oil
companies will have to buy permits to sell their gasoline because of the carbon issues.
Paul Ehrlich: But when you see the five-dollar-a-gallon gas tax on the pump . . . .
People have told me that the way most citizens in the United States judge the state of the
economy is by how much they’re paying for gasoline. So it is one way to get a message
out.
Amy Goodman: J.B. Straubel, what about practical solutions and what role should the
government play?
J.B. Straubel: As far as subsidizing and this whole idea of trying to pick winners, I
think it’s had a checkered past, especially in the renewable energy and alternative fuels
market. I think there’s almost as many examples of that—and the fluctuation in subsidies
and government policy—actually causing more problems than it solves. The wind
industry, I think, was a great example of that. Electric vehicles were a good example of
that. I think the bio fields are a budding example of that.
I actually think that the greater issue of trying to solve a carbon management policy is a
better way that the government can intervene, or have an impact on this entire field,
rather than just individually picking one technology or another. And near term, there are
lots of technologies on the horizon today that are economically competitive in niche
markets. Some of those niche markets are actually getting quite large and I think we’ll
see those niche markets growing into mature economies—even without subsidies—and
competing head to head with fossil fuels that are becoming more expensive for different
applications.
So I’m actually pretty optimistic that you know there’s a lot of activity and a lot of
progress being made, and this is driven even by the economics that are in place today
without requiring some new subsidy or tax or something like that. There is a lot going
on.
Amy Goodman: Let me ask about the role of the media with journalists here, and what
role it has. Has it helped? Has it hurt? Two examples: Tom Campere, in 2004, had an
ad that was a picture of President Bush and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia holding
hands, and it said, “If you think our nation’s energy policy is in good hands, think again.”
[laughter] The newspapers wouldn’t run it. Then you had Laurie David, who did An
Inconvenient Truth, and Arianna Huffington, who had a video. It was a picture of an
SUV under a blanket. And it said, “What if you could get a car that got forty miles per
gallon?” And then it said, “The fact is you can. The problem is Detroit won’t make it.”
And the networks all refused to run it. And Les Moonves at CBS said something like,
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“We have network headquarters in New York and in Los Angeles and in Detroit and
we’re not going to do it.”
George Shultz: I think you have to back up a little bit. From the standpoint of the
automobile company, they want to produce what people will buy. And if people want to
buy big SUVs, that’s what they produce. So if you do some of the things that Fred is
talking about or that I’m talking about or Paul’s talking about—put on a tax or
something—then people don’t want to buy those big things and won’t and so they won’t
get produced. And so a company responds to demand and you need to work at trying to
structure that so that you get the kind a result that you’re looking for.
Amy Goodman: Paul Ehrlich, do you think it’s just that the people don’t want it?
Paul Ehrlich: No, I think one has to also take into consideration where the profits are
and how much advertising goes into it, but I think George is right. If you put the right tax
on or arrange the cap and trade system so that it affects this, you can have a lot of impact.
Amy Goodman: The auto industry spends something like fifteen billion dollars in ads.
Paul Ehrlich: Exactly. And so that’s one of the things that you’ve got to find ways to
counter. But if you want to know how the media’s doing on all of the issues, it’s a
disgrace. Let’s face it, the major media are disappearing. The coverage, if you go to the
newspaper of record, The New York Times, and take out Andy Revkin, their coverage of
climate issues is pathetic. It’s just like their early coverage of the Iraq War. What do we
have? We have FOX News? [applause] Do you know what a CAFO is, a concentrated
animal feeding operation? These are things where you get ten million hogs and you put
them in a building the size of this and then outside you get a fifty-acre lake of hog feces.
And it’ll sometimes fountain from fermentation or reverse the dam, flows down the river,
and applies a neurotoxin to anybody who gets too close it. It’s really interesting. This
flood of hog feces is called in science, “The FOX News effect.” And so . . . [laughter]
[applause]
Amy Goodman: George Shultz.
George Shultz: I’ve had an interesting experience with the media because I held four
different cabinet posts and also I had an office in the White House for four years. So, in
the White House, you observe the White House press. The White House press is almost
totally preoccupied with politics; who’s up, who’s down, that’s their beat. In the
departmental press—Treasury, Labor, in my case, Budget, State— there are reporters that
follow those areas. By and large they’re very knowledgeable people and they do a
terrific job of covering what’s going on. I’d go on a trip and I would always read what
Bernie Bertzman or Don Overdorf or somebody wrote because I might learn something
about what’s going on on the trip. They’re really terrific reporters.
Now I don’t know the structure of the press well enough in the environmental field to
know about this, but I should think that there are people who follow—you would know
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about this Fred—who follow these things, and my guess is they all turn out they’re very
knowledgeable people and they write pretty good stuff worth reading, but I just don’t
know enough about it. But you know.
Paul Ehrlich: But how reporters get published is another story. Think about it for a
minute. We went through a celebration in this country of passing through three hundred
million people about a year ago, even though nobody has ever even come up with a semisane reason why there ought to be more than a hundred and forty million Americans.
There wasn’t a mention of the other side of the story in the press. There wasn’t anything
on the major media. Has anybody seen an article in a major media source that points out
that the continuous—it’s going to go to infinity by current standards—growth of the US
population has got a big thing to do with how much greenhouse gases we’re putting in the
atmosphere? Has there been one single prominent story in any major media source? And
that’s not because the reporters don’t know because I know a lot of them. It’s because
they don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. They’re just like the foundations, which
also used to support issues in population. They’ve all backed off now and there are other
important issues like, uh, maternal healthcare and gay rights and so on, all of which will
be totally moot if we allow the greenhouse gases to go to the point where we’re going to
have a five or six degree centigrade rise in global temperature. And yet, the foundations,
the media and all have backed off totally. And I’ve talked to lots of people, lots of
reporters; they all know it. They just say, “Not a story. We can’t get it published.”
They’re not interested. It’s too tricky and so on and so forth. They leave that comment
to Rush Limbaugh.
George Shultz: I’m going to run you for president.
Paul Ehrlich: Sorry. Sorry.
George Shultz: On the platform . . .
Paul Ehrlich: You want to be my vice president though. Right?
George Shultz: No, no. On the platform that at the end of your four year term, you want
to cut the number of Americans in half. [laughter] You’re going to get elected, hah, hah.
Sally Benson: So I’d like to go back to your question, and I think it’s a very serious
issue. I think the American citizens are really very confused about this issue. There are
studies that show that the ozone issue and the climate change issue are mixed up in
people’s minds. I know in the interest of balance you try to present multiple points of
view, but I think the way the public reads this now legitimizes their sense that there really
still are a lot of outstanding issues. I think something needs to be done. We need a
concerted effort to try to have a clearer picture that the people will begin to understand.
My neighbors don’t understand this issue. I talk about it a lot and I think it’s really a
national crisis.
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05 September 2007
Fred Krupp: I do think that something different has been happening over the last
eighteen months. And whether it’s Al Gore or Hurricane Katrina, the media in general . .
. . Eighteen months ago I would have agreed with you Sally that all the stories are on the
one hand this, on the other hand that—but in the last eighteen months, I think we should
give environmental journalists a lot of credit for helping stir this special moment in the
revolution that George is talking about. There’s a much broader understanding. When
Governor Chris signs an order limiting greenhouse gases in Florida, seventy-eight percent
of Floridians—Republicans, Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives—say that’s great.
When AB 32 gets passed in California, eighty percent of California thinks it is great that
there’s now a legal limit on greenhouse gases. I think in the last eighteen months people
have come a long way, thanks to a lot more ink and a lot more space on environmental
issues.
Sally Benson: And I still think there’s a long way to go.
Paul Ehrlich: Not only is she right there, I did a press conference at the National Press
Club just before the last election about the environment. Every single question was on
climate change. Let me explain to you that it’s not at all clear that climate change is the
worst thing we face. It may be, it may not. Land use change, destruction of biodiversity,
the deterioration of the epidemiological environment, the toxification of the planet, all
may have more troubles built into them, but the press has not covered those issues. They
still think, and I had a big argument about this with Ben Bradlee— the guy who used to
run The Washington Post—about this. He didn’t want his reporters—he told me and
Steve Schneider—to know anything about science. Because then they could be unbiased
reporters.
And so they think, for example, that the truth always lies in the middle. If you think back
about scientific disputes in the past, the truth never lies in the middle. There was not an
ether breeze. There isn’t evolution below the species level, and special creation above it.
Find me a scientific issue where the truth lay in the middle. It just doesn’t happen and
yet that’s the approach they take. And they drag in the same six—as a very good
environmental reporter, Ross Gelbspan, described them—“Hood ornaments on an engine
of disinformation: the climate monkeys,” the see-no-warming, hear-no-warming, speakno-warming people. Six people—five of them with no scientific credentials to speak
of—counter the thousands of scientists who have put a huge amount of time and energy
into forming what I think is the broadest scientific consensus on a major issue ever put
together on this planet. And yet, they have been brilliant. Brilliant! The Wall Street
Journal’s editorial pages . . . . The Wall Street Journal is a great paper. Of course, it may
not last now, but the editorial pages, of course, are worse than Mickey Mouse comics.
They’re still publishing this crap. I mean, the press has got a lot a work to do and I feel
sorry for the reporters who are trying to get it done. [applause]
George Shultz: Far be it for me to defend the press. [laughter] I actually think there are
a lot of good people.
Paul Ehrlich: Yes, that’s right.
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05 September 2007
George Shultz: But what about The New York Times? It runs this section quite
often,“Science of the Times.”
Paul Ehrlich: Every Tuesday.
George Shultz: It’s pretty good.
Paul Ehrlich: About half-and-half. Some of the stuff is just off-the-wall bad, and some
of it is excellent.
George Shultz: Well, but they’re making an effort to inform people.
Paul Ehrlich: They are. But it’s on . . .
George Shultz: It’s very careful.
Paul Ehrlich: It’s a back section once a week, whereas the single most important
problem facing humanity today—if you include the nuclear weapons situation between
the US and the Russians in there—is the environmental situation. It’s still on the back
pages. You hear debate after debate after debate among democratic candidates with not
the slightest hint of any seriousness being given to these problems. I won’t even mention
the debates between the Republican candidates because like Pete McCloskey and bailed
out of the party but . . . .
Amy Goodman: George Shultz, do you think President Bush has made a serious
mistake downplaying global warming to the extent that he has, and that would be putting
it mildly. [laughter]
George Shultz: I’m not in Washington. I don’t go there much. But there has been a
gradual change, just as we have been talking about industry people. And my sense is
right now, that the view of this issue today in the White House is rather different than it
was five or six years ago, or when President Bush took office. I might say that he has
somehow been identified with killing the Kyoto Treaty. That was done by our negotiator
in Kyoto, who signed a treaty after the senate had voted unanimously to tell President
Clinton not to have a treaty concluded that didn’t impose any obligations on developing
countries. That’s what sunk the Kyoto Treaty. So it’s been a mixed up picture, but I
think like the country in general, there has been a gradual shift that we’ve been talking
about here and my guess is that that’s been happening in the White House.
Any Goodman: Do you think Al Gore helped make that change? [laughter] [applause]
George Shultz: I’m supposed to be in full disclosure that I’m a Republican. [laughter]
And I was glad that Bush beat Gore. And, is that what you want me to say?
Amy Goodman: You said you . . .
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05 September 2007
George Shultz: Do you want to have a partisan discussion here now about that? Is that
what you’re trying to do?
Amy Goodman: No. I was serious. Because you talked about that change. Do you
think Al Gore has been a key part of that change?
George Shultz: I don’t know that he’s been a key part, but I think he’s played a part..
Paul Ehrlich: He didn’t play much of a part when he was vice president, actually.
George Shultz: Well he was one of the people in Kyoto. I don’t think he was our chief
negotiator, but he went there. And I think it was a great disservice to this effort for us to
sign a treaty that the Senate had voted unanimously was not acceptable. If you’re
negotiating on behalf of the United States—and I’ve negotiated some treaties on behalf of
the United States—you work with your constituency; namely, the United States Senate in
particular, but also the House. And you keep them informed. And when you sign a
treaty on behalf of the United States, you want that treaty to become law. In other words,
you want it to be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the United States Senate. So you have
got to pay attention to their views.
Fred Krupp: I think that is a very valid criticism.
George Shultz: I believe we need a global negotiation. And we need to have skillful,
well-informed negotiators who are back-and-forth at Washington all the time and keep
the Senate particularly well informed, so that by the time we get through and sign
something, at least two-thirds of them are on board. So then it becomes law and we
actually do something. Because, in the end, we don’t want to just talk about this issue
forever. We want to get something to happen.
Amy Goodman: Let’s open up the discussion. If you have a question, go to one of the
microphones. You’re first.
Audience Question: Thank you. In terms of especially Secretary Shultz and Mr. Krupp
being optimistic and talking about how this is a special moment in time . . . to put it
bluntly, “What planet are you on?” Because the Europeans who for ten years have been
serious post-Kyoto still can’t get near their goals. Forget about the United States, which
is nowhere near what was in the Kyoto Protocol. If you look at the intergovernmental
panel on climate change, it had the worst-case scenario being business as usual. But yet,
you look at the most recent emissions, we’re worse than that. So how can you be
optimistic about things being about to change when all the data is showing things are
trending even worse? Why are you so optimistic in light of all that data?
George Shultz: Well, I’m a doer and a negotiator and a mediator. And if you do those
things, you have got to be optimistic that you can get something to happen. But then I
look at the things that are going on, the sort of things that she’s [Sally Benson] talking
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05 September 2007
about and that could be multiplied lots of times around. If you go over to Berkeley or
you go to MIT or you go to lots of different places, there are people . . . and you look at
the venture capital world. Things are happening like they have never happened before.
Ten, fifteen years ago, you couldn’t by any means describe this range of activities. So it
seems to me that one of these days, the battery is not going to be around the corner. It’s
going to be here, and so are some of these other things. And that’s what makes me feel
that we are seeing this problem now more clearly than before and more broadly accepted
than before, and we see that there are things that you can do about it. Therefore, if we
can do something like what Fred is talking about and set a cap, we know there are enough
things going on to do about it that, if we work hard, we can meet that cap. That’s what
makes me optimistic.
Fred Krupp: I agree with what George has said and I’ll just add a couple a things
briefly. One, the Europeans: the real period for Europe starts in 2008 and runs until
2012. It’s only 2007. So judging them now based on their high school record when
they’re still in seventh grade is kind of unfair. There are a lot of reductions going on and
I think by 2012 they will meet their targets. Two, there is a lot of entrepreneurial activity.
There are a lot of engineers working on this. There’s a lot of capital flowing. J.B. may
be right, that this will happen anyway. I believe that we can’t afford that gamble, that
bet. We’re close to enacting a cap that really will get the money flowing and guarantee
our success.
Why do I say we’re close? In the United States Senate, in the last six weeks, we’ve had
six more senators say that they are for a nationwide program of dramatic reduction.
Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, Lindsey Graham from Georgia, Blanch Lincoln from
Arkansas, John Warner from Virginia. More and more people who haven’t been there
are now saying they are for this. You have Senator Lieberman and Senator Warner say
that they’re going to markup a bill. You have Congressman Rick Boucher saying he’s
going to markup a bill. All the states have moved, which has had tremendous impact on
the politicians in the industry. So we are closer than you think. There is a lot of
momentum for getting something done.
Audience Question: Hi, I am John O’Donnell from Ausra. We build large scaled solar
power stations. Much has been said about the press in the last few minutes, and I want to
ask a current events question about the press. Last week, the Senate Majority Leader,
Senator Reid, came out saying that no coal plants should be built anywhere on the planet,
that there was no such thing as clean coal and that his home state, Nevada, was going to
lead by example. And Senator Reid—there were three large-scale coal fired power plants
planned for the state of Nevada—came out and announced his opposition to them. And
in the national press—on an issue that’s front-and-center for the challenges of climate
change—there was deafening silence. In the state of Nevada, the labor community
decided to come out against him because of a concern that, “Well, if these things were
taken away, nothing would be given us instead.” And this Friday there’s a hearing on
precisely the California-proposed fourteen hundred pounds, or eleven hundred pounds
per megawatt hour being adopted in Nevada, and yet no one in the national press is
covering the Senate Majority Leader trying to lead by example, starting with his home
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05 September 2007
state. And the kind of traditional labor versus environment thing that we thought we
were over twenty years ago seems to be going on.
Amy Goodman: Would someone like to comment?
Paul Ehrlich: I’m not sure that the right thing to say is no more coal plants. The right
thing to say is no more coal plants unless we have proper sequestration of the carbon.
And at the same time saying that we should be making all kinds of efforts to train people
out of digging coal and get them to doing other things. If you listen to Amory [Lovins] . .
. and I think he’s right. If you listen to John Hart, he says the same thing. Almost
everybody says that if we’ve got the will, we can get the job done. It’s not clear that
that’s correct, by the way, because an awful lot of greenhouse gases are already out there
and we really don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. What is perfectly clear to me,
and I think a lot of other scientists, and I’ve been looking at this forty years now, is that if
we don’t do something very fast and very big, then we’re really running gigantic risks.
That’s why I’ve switched all my research to cultural evolution. It isn’t a matter of
developing new batteries. We have all the technologies we need. We have all the
knowledge we need—just increase the rate at which populations are dropping, to
sequester carbon—we do all sorts of things. It’s an issue of politics and political will.
And here’s an example of a politician trying to do something, but he hasn’t been on the
front pages. Right or wrong with his suggestion, these are the crucial issues, much more
important than who’s elected. Well, maybe not, but you can’t tell. We have such a
wonderful array of choices for the next election.
J.B. Straubel: One quick comment on that too. I think part of that also goes to the
public awareness and education issue. I don’t think people really understand the
disproportionate impact coal plants have on a global warming. It’s just perceived as a
coal plant that’s kind of dirty. But if you really look at the impact that one coal plant has
relative to things like cars . . . . An, not to downplay the significance of what we’re doing,
but one new coal plant can have the impact of almost the entire Ford Motor Company.
It’s really amazing how big of an impact that can have. And I don’t think that’s
understood. I mean we can get a lot of press by converting cars and having transportation
run on electricity . . . but there isn’t quite as much incentive or understanding around
what it means to get two or three coal plants off the books that were previously planned.
I think that’s just education. That’s people understanding what’s important and what’s
not. [applause]
George Shultz: Let me say something that’s not going to be popular. Let’s say you’re
the US negotiator. You’re trying to negotiate this treaty. And, obviously, you’ve got to
get China on board. If you don’t get China on board, you’re wasting your time. And
China is desperate for electricity. China is expanding fast. If you say to the Chinese,
“Sign an agreement to stop growing,” they’re going to say to you, “Out of here.” If you
were trying to manage the Chinese economy, you wouldn’t agree to that. So they’re
building coal plants. Who can be surprised? They’ve got lots of coal and it’s a way to
produce electricity cheaply. So there. And it has this big harmful effect. So what are
you going to do, you’re a negotiator? You say, “Don’t build any coal plants.” They
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05 September 2007
won’t do that. So I say, “Okay, let’s work together to see how we can find our way to a
coal plant that is much less of a problem than what you’re building today.” And there are
coal plants that can be built today that are far better than the ones that are being built in
China right now.
And, in order to get people in low-income-per-capita countries—and China, of course,
has lots of money, but low-income-per-capita countries—do things, we should do
something that we did in the Montreal Protocol. Namely, we said, “We’ve gotta have the
low income per capita countries in this, so we’re going to create a fund.” The United
States put the biggest amount into this fund. And we used that fund to help the low
income per capita countries do the things that we wanted them to do, and that they
wanted to do, but in many respects couldn’t do without some help. Maybe the World
Bank has a role here.
In other words, I’m saying the practical matter is if you’re negotiating, you have got to
face the reality. And the reality is that you can’t say no more coal plants. It won’t work.
So you’ve got to say, “How can we get the coal plants to be better,” and maybe we can
get capture and sequestration. Although I’m told by a lot of the people who work on this
it’s very questionable whether or not you can really do that effectively.
But that’s the reality that you have to work with and I think there’s a great deal that can
be done to have the coal burning be much less of a problem than it is right now. So don’t
say, “I won’t settle for anything but the perfect.” If you can settle for something that’s an
eighty percent improvement, take it, I think.
Sally Benson: So I just want to add a little bit on two topics. One is CO2 capture and
storage. There’s been a lot of progress in ten years on CO2 capture and storage. There
are three worldwide projects and, collectively, there’s almost twenty years’ experience.
So this does look quite promising and it will help us deal with the coal issue. The other
factor is, as everyone says, “No new coal.” Well, I don’t think we know enough today to
run our electricity system if we don’t have something—either coal or nuclear
power—something as the backbone that keeps the system running. We don’t have the
technology today to have a grid that allows us to have a completely distributed renewable
energy system. One day I think we will. I don’t know when that day will be and we need
to work towards it today, but we need to think very carefully before we’re willing to
compromise issues on power quality, reliability, and those factors which we’ve all come
to depend and rely on.
J.B. Straubel: I disagree with that point. I actually think the technology exists, but can
we do it at the same price per service as coal?
Sally Benson: I think that technology exists at the margin. We know how to add a little
bit of wind, maybe twenty percent wind we can do, maybe thirty percent. We can add
some PV, but that’s not a system that’s eighty percent renewable with intermittent power
distributed from many different sources, going to many different places, dealing with day
to night variability. We don’t have the storage systems in place today. So I’m all for
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05 September 2007
going down that pathway, but I don’t think that if we wanted to systematically shut off
coal plants tomorrow that we would be able to have the reliability and power quality that
we have today.
J.B.Straubel: I disagree. I think a distributed system could end up being more reliable
and more robust in a lot of ways. It might end up being more expensive in the near term.
Sally Benson: Today there are studies going on in Hawaii where they’re trying to move
to a high degree of deployable wind, and they’re having real power quality issues. And
this is even on small-scale grid. So there are technological issues that really need to be
addressed. Again, I agree with the direction—and I’m all for that direction—but I think
we need to have some caution about how quickly we move without thinking about how
this whole complicated system works.
Paul Ehrlich: I don’t know, I’ve got to really bring an elephant back in. It may be that
we’re just going to have to do with less dependable power, with less use of electricity,
just like we did when I was a kid with a perfectly decent life. [applause] Because the
stakes are just too high. If you keep saying, “We can’t change because we won’t be able
to all have air conditioning.” For example, I don’t know what’s going to happen in
places like Florida and Phoenix when they discover they can no longer afford electricity.
And all the buildings have been built so they’re absolutely unlivable unless you have air
conditioning. Those are the things that we have got to start changing, and fast, because
we are not going to maintain the current standard of profligate use of everything that a
portion of Americans now share. I think it’s absolutely impossible. You can try it, but
the consequences for our grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to be truly
horrendous.
Amy Goodman: Let’s take two questions from the audience.
Audience Question: Speaking as an environmental journalist who’s an ex political
journalist, let me say that you should be very happy with the work that we environmental
journalists do because when the political reporters get ahold of the climate change story,
which they inevitably will, it’s not going to be pretty. [laughter] [applause]
My question is what is the Pearl Harbor? You talked about the World War Two analogy,
Paul Ehrlich. Jim Hanson addressed SEJ last year and said we have at most ten years to
save the polar ice caps. It’s now nine. And I believe in the last twenty-four hours I read
a story that said polar ice caps are pretty close to being gone, or the Arctic Sea ice is.
What about oil? What about the states taking over driving this issue because the federal
government has not? What is the Pearl Harbor going to be? Because all of the things
that you say are true, but nothing is happening.
Paul Ehrlich: I think one of the problems, for instance, is you say to the average person,
“The floating sea ice in the Arctic may be gone.” And it looks like it’s going to go very
much more rapidly than we thought. That’s one of the places where the IPCC was
probably too conservative. And people say, “Wow, great. We’ll be able to run ships
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05 September 2007
back and forth up there.” What they miss of course, is that the albedo, the reflectivity of
a planet will change very significantly. We will absorb a lot more of the sun’s radiation
through the relatively dark seawater that was previously reflected by the ice caps. That’s
one of those famous positive feedbacks, exactly what you don’t want to have, but people
don’t understand that. So they say, “Wow, so the polar bears die,” or, “Yeah, we’ll get
some new trade routes,” or, “Yeah, we’ll be able to drill for oil. The Russians are already
making claims out there.” It’s going to exacerbate the entire climate change system,
which among other things, supplies us supplies us with our food, which is pretty
impressive and important.
Audience Question: Robert McClure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A quick
background for this question: I write a blog called “Dateline Earth” where a couple years
ago we declared ourselves very interested in the one hundred one percent solutions to
global warming. So that’s where this comes from. I’ve heard a lot of talk here tonight
about how the market’s going to drive all this and how we can harness the market. I’m a
big believer in the market, but do you know what we have going in there? We have a
hundred and fifty million dollar ethanol plant going in. Okay, that’s going to do very,
very little in terms of global warming. That’s the kind a thing that we get from the
market. Meanwhile, we also have in the Seattle area, more than half of our global
warming pollution—because we get a lot of our power from hydropower—comes from
cars. Cars are not going to be effected, if I’m not mistaken, by cap and trade system.
Here’s what I’m getting to. Why do we have this dichotomy? Why do we have this false
dichotomy that we either have to have cap and trade or we have to have carbon taxes?
Why can’t we have both? And if the answer is politics, dissect that for us.
Fred Krupp: We can have both, but we absolutely need to have the cap and the legal
limit. You don’t get the ethanol plant because of the market. You get the ethanol plant
because you have the government in there picking technologies. In this case the
technology, conventional ethanol, is not a good solution to global warming. At best, it’s
a marginal contribution. So the answer is let the government do what governments do
best. Mandate levels come down. Be the umpire. Have the EPA judging, as they do
with sulfur dioxide. Who’s reducing? How much emissions? Have the EPA giving out
permits. You cannot build more coal-fired power plants and put out CO2 unless you’re
retiring other plants or unless you’re sequestering the carbon.
This was the special moment in February we went through in this country. I was lucky
enough to be involved with Environmental Defense when Bill Reilly—who spent some
time right here on the Stanford campus—called me and said that KKR [Kohlberg, Kravis,
Roberts] and TPG [Texas Pacific Group] weren’t going to go forward with the biggest
buyout in history of TXU unless Environmental Defense and NRDC [Natural Resources
Defense Council] approved a Greenhouse Gas Management Plan. And we negotiated
here in San Francisco and the Bay Area to drop the number of new coal-fired plants from
eleven to three. We never blessed the three going forward, but said the drop from eleven
to three is an improvement. We got them to spend four hundred million dollars on wind
power, four hundred million dollars on energy efficiency and to pledge that their total
carbon footprint was going to go down to below 1990 levels, even with whatever
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05 September 2007
construction they did. You will only have the market working once you have a law
harnessing the market. That is what we need.
Audience Question (continued): Right. But what I’m saying is what would be wrong
with having a carbon tax in addition? You’re not answering that question.
Fred Krupp: You could have a carbon tax as well.
Sally Benson: But I think the other thing is performance standards. Why not have
mandated increases over time in the efficiency of cars? That’s another policy instrument
that can be part of the mix.
Fred Krupp: USCAP has called for that as well.
Paul Ehrlich: I think I speak for every single ecologist I know, with trivial exceptions,
biofuels is a scam. It’s a subsidy system for Archer Daniels Midland [applause]. You
don’t have to be an ecologist or rocket scientist to think about this. All you have to
realize is that the plan, is in some sense, to double an already ecologically incompetent
agricultural system to feed SUVs. And I love it. For instance, they keep saying, “We’re
only going to use wasteland.” Well, one of my colleagues has a beautiful cabin in Rocky
Mountain Biological Lab outside of Gothic, Colorado, a wonderful piece of mountain
meadow. It’s classified formally on the local tax roles as “desolate.” Stanford campus
will be a wasteland and we will have switch grass growing on it if some of these people
have their way. So that’s not the way to go. In some circumstances you might get a little
positive out of if, but look at the things Dave Tillman and others have written in the
scientific literature: all the corn, if it was turned into ethanol, would fuel fourteen percent
of our automobile fleet each year. And of course prices are already being driven up for
poor people. In my view and that of every colleague I have, it’s the worst general idea
that’s come up with the environmental front in the last thirty years.
Fred Krupp: But would you say the same about cellulosic ethanol?
Paul Ehrlich: Small contributions, maybe. I’m real nervous about people’s
classification of what’s wasteland in this world. There was a very famous statement
made by somebody saying, “If we do this exactly right, globally, we can get some real
contribution.” And I think to myself, “What has humanity done exactly right for even
two years?” In other words, I think we have to have a system with some buffering in it
where, as George has been pointing out quite correctly, there are compromises you have
to make. You’ve got to have negotiations and so on. I don’t want to be negotiating along
the edge of the cliff. I’d rather be negotiating a few hundred yards back just in case fifty
yards of the cliff is going to fall into the sea.
Amy Goodman: Let’s take another question from the audience.
Clint Wilder: Hi, Clint Wilder with cleanedge. com. I published a book this summer
called The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth in Investment Opportunity, so
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I’m generally optimistic about industry moving forward in this area. My question is for
Fred: I’m glad you brought up the TXU situation because I was going to ask about that
anyway. Please explain a little more about the role of Environmental Defense in that deal
and if you see your group and others like your group playing that kind of role in these
kinds of industry deals moving forward.
Fred Krupp: Well Environmental Defense has a long history of working with
companies. We’ve worked with FedEx to have them redesign their truck so it’s ninetyseven percent less polluting; with McDonald’s to get out of the styrofoam clam shell and
also antibiotics and their poultry, etcetera. In the case of Texas, TXU is planning eleven
major coal-fired power plants and there are about a hundred and fifty or so planned all
over this country in different states. Not all of them will be built but they have been
proposed. Our Texas office suggested we do something a little bit out of character for us,
and that was to oppose them from being built because the plans were, frankly,
unconscionable. Not just me saying “unconscionable” but the CEO of a major utility,
Entergy, used that word, Wayne Leonard.
So we led a nationwide campaign in cyberspace—Tom Friedman has written probably
the best piece about it—and galvanized folks to learn about the problem and journalists
to write about the problem. So TXU is facing tremendous opposition in terms of getting
those plants built. At that point, completely unbeknownst to us, KKR and TPG were
looking to buy out TXU, change the management . . . and perhaps the stock price wasn’t
as high as it otherwise would have been if we hadn’t been campaigning against their
plans. I don’t know. But they did approach us, given the role we had played, as well as
NRDC. They said they would not go forward with this deal unless we approved their
new plans to manage greenhouse gases. That was the role we played and we are certainly
open to playing that role in other situations.
But I think the bigger lesson here isn’t what Environmental Defense did, it’s that there
was a moment where this issue went from the apartheid issue pre-1984 to post-1984,
where suddenly, companies investing in South Africa were just viewed as doing
something wrong. I think from this moment on companies that proposed to build
facilities that are going to increase global warming emissions, when we need to decrease
them, are going to be branded, rightfully, as immoral. [applause] And that’s a good
thing.
Audience Question: I’m Barbara Bernstein. I’m an independent radio producer, in
Portland, Oregon. I want get to a really big picture. I drove down from Portland today
and I’ve been doing this route very regularly for the past thirty-five years and I never saw
the glaciers on Mount Shasta so tiny. In fact, it looks like they’re disappearing. And then
I drove passed the headwater, or the top of Shasta Reservoir, and there was no water in it.
And then when I got closer to the dam, there was some water but it was the lowest I’ve
ever seen it in thirty-five years. So beside the fact that I realized the drought down here
is worse than I realized, I also started wondering about all the people in Southern
California that get their water from Shasta Reservoir. Which makes me think about this
whole thing as an opportunity to totally rethink our paradigms. And Paul talked about
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this earlier, about the need to rethink the way we design our built environment so that it’s
built not around cars, and commuting long distances and having large carbon footprints,
but that it’s built around people being able to walk and bike and have mass transportation.
I’m also wondering about creating an energy infrastructure. If anybody has any thoughts
about the community energy projects that are going on around the country where we start
thinking small and creating energy for small communities, as opposed to having the giant
grid that we have right now and things like the California water system.
Amy Goodman: Next comment.
Audience Question: My name is Felicity Barringer. I’m with The New York Times. On
a point of personal privilege, Professor Ehrlich and everyone in the room, I strongly
recommend that you look at the article on China’s environmental and climate problems
ten days ago by my colleagues, Joe Kahn and Jim Yardley. You might redefine your
definition of the word pathetic.
But back to the subject at hand: we have had some hearings in congress after USCAP
was formed, which Mr. Krupp alluded to. There was the hearing in the Senate
Environment and Public Works Committee. Senator Kit Bond, a Republican from
Missouri, took on the executives in front of him and said, “All of you are going to make
money out of all of this. GE, you’re building wind turbans and nukes. Duke, you know,
you’re going to be able to sell cheaper electricity if you get these carbon costs. My
constituents are going to pay,” he said, “My constituents in St. Louis are going to pay.”
Really quickly, starting if you would, with Secretary Shultz. If we get to sixty or eighty
percent below current levels of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, how much is that
going to cost? Who’s going to pay, and how is that going to be sold politically? I throw
it out to all of you but Secretary Shultz, you’re an economist.
George Shultz: I can’t tell you exactly how we can get there and how much it’s going to
cost and who’s going to pay, but I fundamentally agree with what Fred has said. If we
say we’re going to get there and we make a determined effort and we create the right
incentives, it’s amazing what is produced by that, and you don’t know what people are
going to come up with. And perhaps they’ll think of some way to get the things done we
want to get done much less expensively. Maybe we’ll decide that we don’t have to get
everything done that we use to get done, as Paul is suggesting. It’s another way of
putting the point of energy efficiency and using it less. So all of these things, it seems to
me, are what you bet on. Our system has always produced when it has had to, so lets
work at it and see if we can’t produce this time.
Amy Goodman: I’d like to get questions from all three people who are standing. Just
each make your comment or your question and then we’ll put them all to our speakers.
Audience Question: I’m Margot Roosevelt with The Los Angeles Times. This question
is for Professor Ehrlich. Let’s say that we were to accept the fact that two billion more
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05 September 2007
people on the globe is not sustainable and that in order to solve the greenhouse gas
problem we have to drastically curb population. So what exactly would you propose?
Audience Question: Nancy Weiland. I’m with the California Climate Action Registry.
About a year-and-a-half ago, I read an article in Scientific American that stated we
needed a national defense industry response to climate change. And you touched upon it
briefly when you said that some manufacturing companies like Raytheon or Boeing, or
national defense industry manufacturers switched over to other technologies. What
would it take for our government to start to recognize this as a national security issue and
begin flowing money and contracts to some of those large defense organizations?
Audience Question: Duane Gang with The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California.
Secretary Shultz, you mentioned that we’re wasting our time if we can’t get China on
board. How can the United States and Western Europe get China on board? Are there
pressures that the United States and others can use, such as tariffs, to try to get China to
start curbing their emissions?,
Paul Ehrlich: I’ll start, I guess. First of all, let me say that the point of view that we
need fewer people has been very well expressed by the entire scientific community
repeatedly, including the 1993 statement by fifty-eight academies of science. What we
need to do first of all, in the United States, is set an example. In the Reagan
Administration, we started the disgusting woman-killing Mexico City Policy, which has
hurt a great deal in letting people control the size of their families. The Bush
Administration immediately reestablished it. So instead of having leadership in the right
direction, we’ve had leadership in the wrong direction. We are the most overpopulated
country in the world by the standard of how big we are—third largest in actual numbers
of people—and the per capita consumption mixed together makes us a huge force. And
yet we have no population policy here. As people have said, how can you tell China to
stop burning coal as long as we’re burning coal? Until we have a population policy at
home and still . . . . For instance, until we give better breaks to women and encourage the
other countries to do it . . . . Where we’ve had most of the progress in poor countries is
where they’ve had population policies in which they’ve put computers in school, given
women opportunities for education, and have given women opportunities for jobs.
In Costa Rica, which our group looked into specifically, when their decline stalled, we
found out that we neglected that we had neglected the men—that it takes two to tango.
And while they had been changing women’s views, they hadn’t changed the machismo’s
view. The sociologists know how to do this stuff. It would be really easy with some
leadership to cut the rate of population growth and start, gradually, a humane reduction in
the size of the population. You just have got to get people thinking about not how many
kids they want but what kind a world those kids are going to live in. In other words,
don’t satisfy your personal desires for how many little bits of yourself you leave in the
world but think about what kind of world those kids are going to live in. We could do
much better, as George pointed out. We’re already doing well in many countries.
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05 September 2007
The US is a Fifth World country, in terms of population policy. Virtually, every other
poor country in the world already has a population policy, and it’s trying very hard, and
in many cases succeeding. Europe has started to shrink, which it desperately needs to do.
But, again, there’s still all sorts of nonsense about “the problem with an aging
population.” I won’t give you a dissertation on that. I’ll just tell you as any demographer
can that that is a statement that is spherically senseless. It’s idiotic from any point of
view you look at it. [applause]
George Shultz: Yes, China. I use the example of China as an example of a general
problem. The low-income-per-capita world has been mired in poverty and a lack of
progress for decades and decades. And in the last couple of decades, somehow they have
been getting their act together and following more sensible economic policies. And so
you see China, India, all around the world those low-income-per-capita countries are
growing. And when they grow, they use energy. And so we’re saying you want to
approach this on a global basis. If all that happens is we do things here and in Europe
and Japan, that’s not going to get you to the end you want because it’s a global problem.
So you’ve got to reach out to the countries that have low incomes, that are finally starting
to grow and say, “How are we going to get them aboard?” That’s what we did in the
Montreal Protocol. And you have to set that as one of your major problems in this global
warming exercise. And I think you want to persuade them that it’s to their advantage to
get their emissions under control, but you also have to come forward with some ideas
about how to do it. And in many cases, probably you have to help them do it by
providing some resources that will help them do this instead of that.
So it’s a hard, difficult negotiation. But if you do it right, I think you can get them on
board. To take the China example: in most of their cities, they’re choking to death. You
don’t have to tell them about pollution because they see it all around them and they know
they have to do something about it. So you’ve got a lot to work with. So it isn’t just
China, it’s a whole group of countries that you have to work with and you have to figure
out how to get them in with you and working on this problem and find all kinds of
different ways.
Amy Goodman: George Shultz, who do you think is tougher to get on board on taking
global warming seriously, China or Exxon Mobile?
George Shultz: Well, I think people are seeing the problem more and more. Everybody
is on board, but the question is, “How?” You go to China and you say, “Well what am I
going to do? You tell me it’s terrible to burn coal. How am I going to get the
electricity?” So you’ve got to have an answer to that question. And so there are some
answers that you can develop and you can get at it but that’s the way I would go about it.
Now as far as your little provocative question about Exxon and China, I’m not going to
bite on that. Thank you very much. [laugher] And that’s enough. [applause]
Fred Krupp: I would say that there’s no chance China is going to accept limits, caps,
until the United States does. And the first and most important thing we can do is show
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05 September 2007
some resolve and join the rest of the industrialized world and accept a cap on emissions.
That’s the first thing we have to do to get China onboard. But George is right: it’s not
just China. I don’t know if people in the audience know what the third and fourth largest
emitters are. We talked a lot about one and two: the United States and China. Number
three, number four? Indonesia, number three; Brazil number four. Eighty percent of
Brazil’s emissions are through deforestation; seventy percent of Indonesia’s emissions
are through deforestation. Some of the low hanging fruit, “fruit on the floor,” I think you
said before, is working with those countries to get them to stop deforesting, because
that’s a huge amount of our emissions. Twenty percent of the world’s emissions, more
than all of America’s cars and all of America’s coal-fired power plants, come from the
deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil.
George Shultz: So that really illustrates a point: one size does not fit all. The variety
out there of things that you need to do and you can do is very great. And so you’ve got to
get countries to do the things that are often unique to them, and you gave a couple of very
important examples.
Mark Gonnerman: Please remember that we’re the first species to come along that can
prevent it’s own extinction. So let’s get to work. On behalf of the Aurora Forum, the
Society of Environmental Journalists, and Woods Institute for the Environment at
Stanford, I want to thank Sally Benson, Paul Ehrlich, George Shultz, Fred Krupp, J.B.
Straubel, and Amy Goodman. Good night. [applause]
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Participants' Bios
Amy Goodman (moderator) is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!
This independent news program airs daily on over 500 radio and television stations in
North America. She recently began a weekly syndicated column, “Breaking the Sound
Barrier,” with King Features. Amy and her brother, journalist David Goodman, coauthored the books Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who
Fight Back and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers,
and the Media That Love Them. She has reported on dozens of major issues and
significant political figures, including Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide as he
returned from exile in 2004. She also worked on the radio documentary “Drilling and
Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship,” which exposed Chevron's role in the
killing of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet another oil
spill in their community.
Sally M. Benson was appointed executive director of the Global Climate and Energy
Project (GCEP) in March 2007. She is also a professor in the Department of Energy
Resources Engineering in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford. A ground water
hydrologist and reservoir engineer, she has conducted research to address a range of
issues related to energy and the environment. Her research interests include geologic
storage of CO2 in deep underground formations, technologies and energy systems for a
low-carbon future, influence of climate change on critical habitats, biogeochemistry of
selenium, and geotechnical instrumentation for subsurface characterization and
monitoring.
Paul R. Ehrlich is co-founder of the field of coevolution. He studies the structure,
dynamics, and genetics of natural butterfly populations. He may be best known for his
work on the problems of overpopulation, and in raising issues of population, resources,
and the environment as matters of public policy. Hs research group currently studies
checkerspot butterflies, and is investigating ways that human-disturbed landscapes can be
made more hospitable to biodiversity. A special interest of his is cultural evolution,
especially with respect to environmental ethics. His most recent book, co-authored with
Anne Ehrlich, is One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future.
Fred Krupp is executive director of Environmental Defense, a national nonprofit
organization that links science, economics, law and innovative private-sector partnerships
to create breakthrough solutions to the most serious environmental problems. He leads
Environmental Defense's teams of scientists, economists and attorneys in achieving four
main goals: stabilizing the Earth's climate, preserving species and habitat, protecting
human health and safeguarding oceans and marine life. Since he joined Environmental
Defense in 1984, its annual budget has increased from $3 million to $71.8 million, fulltime staff increased from 50 to nearly 300, and membership expanded from 40,000 to
more than 500,000.
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George P. Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the
Hoover Institution. He was sworn in on July 16, 1982 as the 60th US secretary of state
and served until January 20, 1989. He is chairman of the J. P. Morgan Chase
International Council, the Accenture Energy Advisory Board, and the California
Governor's Council of Economic Advisors. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the
nation's highest civilian honor, in 1989. He also received the Seoul Peace Prize (1992),
the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service (2001), and the Reagan Distinguished
American Award (2002). The George Shultz National Foreign Service Training Center in
Arlington, Virginia, was dedicated in 2002. He was named a Distinguished Fellow of the
American Economic Association in 2005.
J.B. Straubel oversees the technical and engineering design of the electric car company,
Tesla Motors. He focuses on the battery, motor, power electronics, and high-level
software sub-systems. Additionally, he evaluates new technology, manages vehicle
systems testing, and interacts with key vendors. Before joining Tesla Motors, he was the
CTO and co-founder of the aerospace firm, Volacom Inc., where he invented and
patented a new long-endurance hybrid electric propulsion concept that was later licensed
to Boeing. A Stanford alumnus, he has also built an electric Porsche 944 that held a world
EV racing record, a custom electric bicycle, and a pioneering hybrid trailer system.
Comments?
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