AMSEcast Conversations: Climate Change Science from Eisenhower to Bush

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This is Alan Lowe, and before we start the program, I want
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to say just a few words about President Jimmy Carter, who at
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the time of this recording was laid to rest this past week.
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I was honored over the years to meet President Carter on a few occasions.
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I was always impressed with his warmth and his intelligence.
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But our featured guest on this AMESYcast episode, Jay Hakes,
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knew the president very well, having served for many years as the
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director of the Carter Presidential Library Museum in Atlanta.
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Working with the President and Mrs.
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Carter, he helped transform that institution
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into something befitting Carter's legacy.
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Now, it's true that Carter's time in the White House had
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its share of challenges, and he had his share of detractors.
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But as Jay and others have illustrated in recent years,
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historians are now revisiting some elements of his
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administration and seeing a more positive picture.
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And one thing that cannot be denied is that Carter was a man of great
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character who led his life with compassion, faith, and integrity.
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Agree or disagree with his policies, it's hard to deny that Carter was
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always guided by his determination to do what he believed was right.
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With his death at age 100, the world has lost a true servant leader.
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Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy this episode of AMSECast.
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Welcome to AMSECast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
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a global leader in science, technology, and innovation.
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My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum
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of Science and Energy and the K 25 History Center.
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Each episode of AMSECast presents world renowned authors,
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scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between,
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sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics.
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Welcome.
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I'm Alan Lowe, Executive Director of the American Museum of Science and Energy
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and the K 25 Atomic History Center, both located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
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I'm so glad you could join us on this new type of AMSECast episode.
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On an occasional basis, in addition to our single guest
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audio only episodes, we're going to provide you with video
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programming that we're calling AMSECast Conversations.
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These AMESYcast conversations will still include the terrific
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guests you'd expect from our podcast, and sometimes we plan on
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bringing in other experts to be part of these conversations.
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Our guest today is Jay Hakes, and we'll discuss his terrific new book, The
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Presidents and the Planet, Climate Change Science from Eisenhower to Bush.
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Now, you will recall that Jay has been our guest on AMSECast
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before, when we discussed one of his previous books, Energy Crises.
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Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s.
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Now, I first met Jay when he served as Director of the
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Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta,
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Georgia, a post he held for 13 years, Jay, is that right?
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13 years.
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Now, prior to that, he had been Administrator of the Energy
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Information Administration during the Clinton Administration.
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Jay also served President Obama as Director for Research and
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Policy for the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission.
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Thank you.
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We're also joined today in our conversation with Jay by two
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experts in the field of energy and environmental policy.
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David McCullum is part of the distinguished R& D staff in the Mobility
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and Energy Transitions Analysis Group at ORNL and holds a joint faculty
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appointment in the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at UT.
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I should say University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
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When I was in Texas, UT was University of Texas, which we know is incorrect.
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Charles Sims is the Director of the Center for Energy,
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Transportation, and Environmental Policy and the TBA Distinguished
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Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy at the Baker
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School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at UT Knoxville.
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He also is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics.
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So gentlemen, welcome to AMSECast Conversations.
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Thank you so much for being here today.
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Appreciate it.
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Jay, we're going to dive into this book, which I've
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so enjoyed, Presence and the Planet, just one planet.
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When did some scientists realize that climate was changing
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and human activities were the major driver of that change?
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So let's go back to kind of that beginning of this process.
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Well, there were a few lonely voices around the world, calendar over in the
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United Kingdom, but it really starts in the late 50s with two scientists that.
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Every science student and all of us should know more about Roger
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Revell, who was an oceanographer by training, and Dave Keeling, and
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they were both at the Scripps Institution in La Jolla, California.
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And basically, what the two of them came up with is that this carbon
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dioxide, which we know traps heat, is staying in the atmosphere.
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It's not going back into the ocean, and Revell, as an oceanographer,
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said, You know, the ocean can only accept so much at a time.
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And he got Keeling to measure it.
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He set up a site in Hawaii and a few other places.
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So from this, we learned that the carbon dioxide was
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staying in the atmosphere where it would trap heat.
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And also we found from Keeling's measurements that if you measured
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it at different places in the world, the levels were the same.
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That's actually pretty important because it alerts us that
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we're dealing with a global pollutant, which is a little more
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complicated than dealing with, say, a toxic spill into a river.
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So between the two of them, they got this started, and they both published in
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academic journals, and Ravel also testified before Congress and other things.
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So I sort of trace it back, what I call the
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modern era of climate change science, to the late
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1950s.
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The name Ravel is going to come up a lot.
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today.
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Uh, let's talk quickly about Keeling though.
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There's the Keeling curve.
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So what was that?
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Was that, that graphing out of that, uh,
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seeing that, that, uh, impact on the world?
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Yeah.
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Keeling starts making these measurements and, and to kind of his
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surprise, it's a jagged line because in the Northern Hemisphere, which
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is most of the land mass, there's Plants are growing and dying, and
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you can actually see that in the carbon measurements in the atmosphere.
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But Keeling, over the years, was almost obsessed with measuring
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this, and so he was able to track the rise throughout his lifetime.
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He's not with us anymore.
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His son is quite a notice expert in atmosphere.
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Climate change can be somewhat of a controversial subject
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with people, but Keeling's data is been sort of sacrosanct.
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I don't, I'm not aware of anyone who says that carbon dioxide
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is not collecting in the atmosphere because Ravel was sort
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of a Leonardo da Vinci type interested in a lot of things.
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Keeling was very focused on how much atmosphere was accumulating.
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Charles and David, I know we talked before we taped today that some of the
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folks in this book are the people you, you read about as you were beginning
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in your profession is Killing and Ravella, those two of those folks.
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And can you tell us about the impact that they had
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as you began your studies and got into this field?
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From my perspective, it's always been a little bit more about the economics.
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And so, what we usually focus on is how has the information and the climate
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science progressed over time, and then how has that been received, right?
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And so we go through this notion of proving, okay, the climate is
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changing, and then moving on to, okay, are humans causing this change,
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and then how does the recognition that it's changing influence policy,
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and then how does the recognition that it's human caused influence policy.
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And so, Looking back at the science from my social science perspective,
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I don't know as much about the science, but we look at it as terms of,
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okay, at what point did this start to become accepted by the mainstream?
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What point did we transition from talking about documenting the concentrations
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of CO2 in the atmosphere to documenting the impacts that that has?
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And then how that then translates into a whole new
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world of climate science that didn't exist in the 1950s.
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I mean, I think what's fascinating is that both of these
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guys were not necessarily Focused on that when they started.
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And I think there was initially a lot of pushback
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and saying, well, the science is not well developed.
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These guys aren't even really, they don't even study these things, right?
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They're kind of oceanographers and things.
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And over time now we have this whole field of climate science
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that has come up to try to provide some more credence to that.
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And then I'll leave it at that for now.
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We'll go, we'll go into some more of that later.
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And not to pun fully intended, there seems to be a sea change in
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how that's viewed, though, just over the past several years, right?
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So, I was director of the Baker Center from 03 to 09.
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I remember, you know, we had a couple of discussions on climate change.
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And back then you still could find Some people saying,
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well, it's not human cause, it's not this, it's not that.
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It seems now, though, that that is accepted.
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In fact, more and more people in the public accept this, that
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aren't thinking about it every day, though they probably should be.
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So what has that been?
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Has that been just the overwhelming evidence of the science?
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better explanations of what's going on and the effects
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that we need to worry about now and in the future.
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What do you think explains that?
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And I'm sorry, Jay, to get off on this topic, but it
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interests me of how you really have seen this, this
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change in how the public views climate change overall.
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Yeah, I think over time it's just the cumulative weight
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of science has just added up, added up, added up.
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Reading this book helped me to appreciate more than I probably should have
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how much, how much good quality science there was already in those early days.
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But just more and more people, now there are tens of
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thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, you know,
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worldwide studying this issue and it's just accumulated.
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We've seen also, thanks to efforts here in the U.
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S.
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early on that seeded kind of these Comprehensive scientific assessments
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of the scientific literature on first on the physical science basis and
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then kind of the impacts of climate change and then solutions to it.
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Eventually now we have like the Intergovernmental Panel on
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Climate Change, the IPCC, which is an international process.
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Now it's a global process.
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It's in the seventh cycle, dating back to 1990, but there were
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those smaller kinds of efforts that were happening here in the U.
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S.
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at those times, getting the word out about this
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issue, certainly among folks in Washington.
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But now, as you said, just now, 50, 60 years later, it's hard to avoid.
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Right?
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Hearing about this issue, either in the news, in a school, or else there
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are still some disagreements over, for political reasons, and still a lot
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of uncertainty in certain areas of the sub scientific disciplines, but I
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think we now know, yeah, it's pretty clear the main effect on the planet.
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It's a, it's a great example of Like, I don't know if
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everybody saw the documentary on the Beatles, right?
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Where, where, uh, where they have, each of them is basically contributing
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something else to this process of creating this song or this album.
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Right.
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And it's similar here, right?
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You have folks that are documenting the concentrations and CO2, and then
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you have a whole nother group that's having to come through and kind
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of document how those, are how those concentrations are then impacting
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climate and you need another team that comes through and documents
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how changes in climate are, are having physical impacts on humans.
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And then you have to have a whole nother team that goes through and
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talks about, okay, well, what can the humans do to prevent that?
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Right?
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So it was definitely a chain.
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And I think when we teach this at our, in my classes, we talk
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a little bit about how the science translates into policy.
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You have to break that down.
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Cause I think a lot, in a lot of cases, people
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were saying, I don't believe in climate change.
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When what they might have been saying was, I don't believe that the
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impacts to me are going to be as bad as you say they're going to be, right?
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And they may have believed the climate science at some point, and I think that's
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what you were referring to, Alan, is gradual acceptance of the climate science,
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but I may have been saying I didn't believe climate change when really what
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I was saying was I don't believe it's going to affect me as much as you say.
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I see.
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Yes, Jay.
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If you want to understand the science culture of the 1950s,
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uh, you may have heard this movie Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer.
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Both Keeling and Revell were getting money from the Atomic Energy Commission
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and other funding sources and both of them believed in staying in their lane.
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So you can read their public announcements and then you can see
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what they were saying in oral interviews or Personal correspondence.
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And so they, and they realized that their funding had to go through
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different administrative changes where interests may change.
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So both of them sort of believed they should stay in their lane.
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And one of the things that Revell did was
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he was, as I say, almost a Renaissance man.
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And when he was president of the American
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Association for the Advancement of Science.
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He was one of the leaders in trying to include economists
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and other social scientists as part of the science community.
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They could apply for grants from the National Science Foundation.
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So that was how he looked at it.
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I think he was very disappointed what he got from
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economists, and that's a big part of this book.
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Because their models are not adequate to deal with
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50 years in advance, and so that was a big problem.
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But what impeded action was a couple things.
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One is when the climate science was developed, a big part of the motivation of
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the federal government was we thought we could control climate and the weather.
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And so if you're going to Do that, uh, their
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unfortunate side effects are attached to it.
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So, you want to get, you have to be precise, because
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you might create more problems than you, than you solve.
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And the climate science debate couldn't get away from this idea of certainty.
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That we have to have certainty before we act.
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Now, if you look at the Clean Air Act, you, you look
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at, by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s.
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They're working on probabilities.
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My argument is the risk level was clear enough
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in 1960 that we should have done something.
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I mean, you don't buy fire insurance because
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you're sure your house is going to burn down.
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And then we're using models at that point to predict what's going to happen.
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And all the models agreed with each other pretty much
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by the end of the 1970s because the temperature data
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is not as systematic as the carbon accumulations data.
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So there were legitimate reasons in the 1970s to say, well,
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carbon has a heating effect, but maybe if you take into account
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sulfur and other processes, maybe you were actually cooling.
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So, Keeling, who almost never commented much about the political
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implications, said one time, we may not, in the 20th century,
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be able to take action because people won't believe the models.
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And, of course, the political community wanted certainty because
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they wanted an excuse to postpone taking tough decisions.
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But he says in the 21st century, They may be seeing the actual evidence.
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In the 1980s, for instance, in the model, it would show that you
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were likely to get more severe storms with greenhouse gas emissions.
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There are memos saying, don't discuss this in public.
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We don't want to alarm the public.
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And So, that wasn't really, it was just, it was mentioned at a couple
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of hearings and things like that, but it's kind of brushed aside.
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Now, you can see the storm, you know, if you live in Louisiana, where I
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live, or you live in Florida, your insurance is going through the roof.
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So, I think that's the reason that we set up a very higher bar for
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understanding climate change than we do for other public things.
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Policy issues to act and we had to wait.
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And the trouble is when you wait on climate change, the carbon
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dioxide stays in the atmosphere for over a hundred years.
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Yeah.
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So as Rave said in one National Academy study,
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the die will have to some extent been cast.
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Right now, I'm just thinking maybe this is an unfair question for you.
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Do we have examples from the 20th century or before sense of where the
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public has said, or a big part of the public has said, we don't believe that.
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When you have this, this kind of weight of science starting to accumulate, where
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there's that battle to say, perhaps it's with, okay, this comes to a head about
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the same time that the Intergovernmental
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Panel for Climate Change is established.
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The U.
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S.
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approval of the treaty was in the later days of the, uh, Reagan
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administration when Howard Baker was his chief of staff and Baker
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and Schultz Both believed we needed to take action on climate change.
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And about that time, certain groups, business groups, started
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to get serious about, we've got to do something about this.
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And they were doing test radio ads on the Rush Limbaugh
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show, which was kind of in its more emphasy at that time.
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And they were running ads around the country.
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Well, you know, actually it's cooling.
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These were written by a PR firm that was, you know, they went.
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Scientific studies, but they then started to finance certain scientists
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00:17:08,675 --> 00:17:12,265
who would publish op ed pieces and form think tanks and things like that.
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They weren't the kind of scientists that ended up on the
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00:17:14,705 --> 00:17:18,244
panels of the National Academy of Sciences or, or whatever.
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So it's really in the Bush 41 administration where it really comes to a head.
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And so in the book, I've, I've got Go to Market, Go to
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Market Grit, Shapero, GTMG, Go to Market, Go to Market,
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invited to the White House to meet with the Chief of Staff.
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Until then, the interactions between universities and
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big corporations like Bell Labs or Exxon, you know,
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those companies had these very distinguished scientists.
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So they were working back and forth, giving grants back and forth.
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People were visiting Revell.
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And I have identified places where industry
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tried to slow down the train a little bit.
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But nothing like we started to see in the 1990s
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where it really became highly adversarial.
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I see.
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Let's step back for a moment from H.
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W.
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Bush and Chief of Staff Sununu, if I
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remember correctly, back to, uh, back to Ike.
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And we heard something about Ike this week at a great conference
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at the Baker School, hearkening back to Atoms for Peace.
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So, can you tell us a bit about how Eisenhower was
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introduced to the possibility of climate change and how
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that factored in or not into the Atoms for Peace program?
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Well, Eisenhower had a great respect for science.
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I think we lost something with the end of the Cold War.
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While the Cold War was still going on, it
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was like Reminiscing for the Cold War now.
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I mean, there was this great respect for
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scientists, and Eisenhower would have this.
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Because, you know, they were interested in the
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nuclear subs, so they were interested in oceanography.
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And Eisenhower would say, we're going to take action subject
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to the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Same thing with nuclear power.
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We're going to take action based on the
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recommendations from the Atomic Energy Commission.
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And I don't know that Eisenhower himself encountered climate change science.
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He might have.
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But Ravel was such a celebrity that he was actually invited to
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a fairly small with Eisenhower and his wife Mamie Eisenhower.
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And then Eisenhower, near the end of his presidency, appointed
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Alvin Weinberg to the Presidential Science Advisory Committee,
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and Weinberg was aware of the climate change issues.
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So, people like Revell were You know, advising the White House to some extent.
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Weinberg obviously was advising Eisenhower mainly on military issues.
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So, it wasn't till Kennedy that I can document that
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the President himself, you know, knew about it.
355
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But certainly people at the Eisenhower White House did.
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Yes, and Merveille again.
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played a big role with JFK.
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Oh,
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Ravel was involved with every president.
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I mean, even after his death, his former student,
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Al Gore, became Vice President of the United States.
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So, so he was very influential.
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And this, even the people who knew him and his
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00:20:24,459 --> 00:20:27,299
family don't seem aware of all the things he did.
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I mean, he, he was flying to the Vatican to speak at
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a Special Science Conference organized by the Pope.
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He was in Nairobi talking about how we need to involve the developing nations.
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And so, Ravel is a long story, and you probably
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have to read the book to get the full grasp of it.
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But I think he has been underestimated.
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And Keeling, you know, his Graph is on the wall of National
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Academy of Sciences in Washington, so, and I think most scientists
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know about the Keeling Curve, but I, I think the variety and the
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immenseness of Revell has, has not gotten full credit so far.
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And as you said, his student Al Gore, when I was director of the Baker Center,
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Eons ago now, it feels like, Al Gork, Vice President Gork, came to speak for us.
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We did a session on, on environment, climate change, and so forth.
378
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And he essentially gave us a preview of what became an Inconvenient Truth movie.
379
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The slide shows.
380
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Oh yeah.
381
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Packed that auditorium.
382
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But it was one of those surreal moments where I met him at the
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car and took him Down the hallway, the old student center at UT.
384
00:21:30,944 --> 00:21:33,604
And, you know, people, these kids realize, wait a minute, that's Al Gore.
385
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That was a fun moment.
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00:21:36,154 --> 00:21:40,854
He was terrific and and again spoke to a very packed house that day.
387
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I actually have the syllabus of the course that Ravel taught Gore.
388
00:21:45,205 --> 00:21:48,864
It has on the syllabus, it lists the name of the students.
389
00:21:49,484 --> 00:21:53,489
It turned out that one of Ravel's teaching assistants, his son
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00:21:53,489 --> 00:21:57,219
was a professor at Emory in Atlanta and he heard me speak and he
391
00:21:57,219 --> 00:22:00,959
says, you know, I think my dad has the syllabus from that course.
392
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That's very neat.
393
00:22:01,909 --> 00:22:02,489
That was fun.
394
00:22:03,139 --> 00:22:06,939
So, what, what impact, so he's, he's, Ravel is there with JFK, what,
395
00:22:07,189 --> 00:22:10,509
how did JFK view the issue, did he really have awareness of the issue?
396
00:22:10,899 --> 00:22:14,469
Well, JFK was very interested in oceanography.
397
00:22:14,579 --> 00:22:17,779
Again, it was because the nuclear subs were
398
00:22:17,779 --> 00:22:20,859
considered our big advantage in the Cold War.
399
00:22:21,019 --> 00:22:24,759
And so he kept talking about it all the time, so he has an oceanography
400
00:22:24,759 --> 00:22:27,794
speech that he gives, several months in the administration.
401
00:22:27,794 --> 00:22:32,244
So his advisor is a guy named Jerome Wiesner from, later became
402
00:22:32,254 --> 00:22:36,684
president of MIT, but he knew Kennedy because of the Boston connection.
403
00:22:37,344 --> 00:22:41,114
And his good buddy, Roger Revelle, they'd worked together on
404
00:22:41,114 --> 00:22:44,584
the nuclear experiments at the Bikini Atoll after World War
405
00:22:44,594 --> 00:22:48,674
II to find out the impacts of radiation on the deep seas.
406
00:22:48,804 --> 00:22:52,214
He says, We're doing this and I I know the guy who's the
407
00:22:52,214 --> 00:22:54,974
leading oceanographer, he's going to review this speech.
408
00:22:55,084 --> 00:22:58,574
So I saw the, the draft of the speech before Ravel.
409
00:22:59,174 --> 00:22:59,864
Edited it.
410
00:23:00,164 --> 00:23:04,314
And so then there was added a little paragraph and it basically
411
00:23:04,314 --> 00:23:09,324
said we need to understand better the interaction between the oceans
412
00:23:09,324 --> 00:23:13,004
and the atmosphere because that interaction affects our climate.
413
00:23:13,074 --> 00:23:13,874
I had done them.
414
00:23:14,304 --> 00:23:15,384
Electronic word search.
415
00:23:15,604 --> 00:23:20,594
I had missed that, but I'm in the Ravel archives and there's a
416
00:23:20,594 --> 00:23:23,544
letter from the White House thanking him for his help on this speech.
417
00:23:23,544 --> 00:23:26,684
So I said I better go back and look at it more carefully.
418
00:23:27,144 --> 00:23:30,524
And so, you know, you read that and you wouldn't notice it, but
419
00:23:30,554 --> 00:23:35,364
it basically was the point that Ravel made in his 1957 article.
420
00:23:35,494 --> 00:23:39,974
And so that was repeated in a movie that Kennedy did.
421
00:23:40,254 --> 00:23:43,134
called Oceanography, and there's only one
422
00:23:43,134 --> 00:23:46,304
other person in the film, Roger Revelle.
423
00:23:46,634 --> 00:23:50,244
And then shortly before Kennedy's death, he spoke at the
424
00:23:50,244 --> 00:23:52,904
100th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences.
425
00:23:52,904 --> 00:23:54,124
He's all an academic.
426
00:23:54,654 --> 00:23:58,554
Garb sitting behind him is Roger Revelle.
427
00:23:59,354 --> 00:24:02,824
So, oh, and I haven't even mentioned that they ended up hiring
428
00:24:03,104 --> 00:24:06,334
Roger Revelle to be an advisor to the Kennedy administration.
429
00:24:06,594 --> 00:24:10,454
He was this celebrity at the beginning, and he was appointed
430
00:24:10,454 --> 00:24:13,859
to the advisory committee on The Peace Corps, you know,
431
00:24:13,869 --> 00:24:18,509
along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Belafonte and LBJ.
432
00:24:18,889 --> 00:24:23,029
But then he was slated to become the president of the University of California,
433
00:24:23,029 --> 00:24:27,109
San Diego, which he had basically created, but they picked somebody else.
434
00:24:27,279 --> 00:24:31,469
So he wrote Weissner and said, uh, you have any jobs there in Washington?
435
00:24:31,469 --> 00:24:32,649
So they hired him to be a president.
436
00:24:32,859 --> 00:24:34,959
Climate Science Advisor to the administration.
437
00:24:35,439 --> 00:24:38,659
And so people like Gordon MacDonald, who's another person that
438
00:24:38,659 --> 00:24:41,679
people may not have heard of but was a very important climate
439
00:24:41,679 --> 00:24:45,329
scientist, he learned about it at that time from Roger Revelle.
440
00:24:45,369 --> 00:24:47,949
I mean, you talk to anybody in the early years and they'll,
441
00:24:48,329 --> 00:24:51,819
you know, from Daniel Moynihan to Gordon MacDonald, oh
442
00:24:51,819 --> 00:24:54,049
yeah, I first learned about this from Roger Revelle.
443
00:24:54,050 --> 00:24:54,464
You
444
00:24:54,464 --> 00:24:57,679
know, I'm just curious, talking about the history of this whole issue and
445
00:24:57,729 --> 00:25:01,489
something I think you said earlier, David or Charles, I'm forgetting now.
446
00:25:02,309 --> 00:25:07,719
But as you work with students or, you know, young professionals,
447
00:25:08,059 --> 00:25:12,179
knowing this history, how valuable for them to have that grounding,
448
00:25:12,469 --> 00:25:15,499
that understanding of how we've gotten to where we are now.
449
00:25:15,719 --> 00:25:19,169
We did a program here with the help from Humanities Tennessee about
450
00:25:19,169 --> 00:25:21,359
a year and a half ago called the Stem of History, where we tried to
451
00:25:21,359 --> 00:25:24,424
show those, those connections and how it was useful for students.
452
00:25:24,684 --> 00:25:26,664
Historians understand at least some of the science or
453
00:25:26,664 --> 00:25:29,224
the issues they're dealing with and kind of vice versa.
454
00:25:29,804 --> 00:25:32,894
I'm not trying to lead your answer here, but what do you think in terms of
455
00:25:32,894 --> 00:25:36,514
that connection for the people you work with, the people you interact with?
456
00:25:36,934 --> 00:25:41,204
Yeah, I can just quickly say the first students, young people
457
00:25:41,204 --> 00:25:44,064
in general, people say young researchers and scientists.
458
00:25:44,534 --> 00:25:46,294
It's nice reading this history because you
459
00:25:46,294 --> 00:25:48,504
see that science has never been linear.
460
00:25:48,639 --> 00:25:48,999
Right?
461
00:25:49,179 --> 00:25:52,369
There's some serendipity along the way, some connections
462
00:25:52,369 --> 00:25:55,119
that you make with people, new ideas come to life.
463
00:25:55,929 --> 00:25:57,259
Some people go and call the sacks.
464
00:25:57,259 --> 00:26:00,399
Sometimes they're roadblocks and people have to shift course, you know, funding
465
00:26:00,399 --> 00:26:03,499
gets shut down, you know, under this president and then back up on the next.
466
00:26:03,499 --> 00:26:06,480
And this is a normal course of history in our profession.
467
00:26:06,629 --> 00:26:08,989
Charles and I were applying for grants all the time and
468
00:26:09,129 --> 00:26:11,879
trying to keep up a scientific program, the momentum
469
00:26:11,879 --> 00:26:14,409
going in a certain direction, but one has to be flexible.
470
00:26:14,749 --> 00:26:17,129
And I think what we saw in some of these early scientists, they.
471
00:26:17,579 --> 00:26:18,799
They had that North Star.
472
00:26:18,799 --> 00:26:19,709
They knew something.
473
00:26:19,709 --> 00:26:20,949
They were on to something important.
474
00:26:20,949 --> 00:26:25,259
Turns out to be maybe the most important problem in our civilization.
475
00:26:25,479 --> 00:26:28,639
And they kept at it in different ways and they were pretty clever about it.
476
00:26:28,639 --> 00:26:31,129
So, I think this book has been really helpful for me to see that.
477
00:26:31,169 --> 00:26:32,209
I don't know, Charles, if you?
478
00:26:32,359 --> 00:26:35,319
Yeah, I mean, I think if you do this work long enough, you're going
479
00:26:35,319 --> 00:26:37,679
to run into roadblocks and you're going to run into dead ends.
480
00:26:38,134 --> 00:26:41,574
If you're starting off and you don't have this context, it can be a bit
481
00:26:41,584 --> 00:26:44,504
disheartening when you run into those roadblocks, but when you see the
482
00:26:44,504 --> 00:26:47,664
long course that we've all come through and the roadblocks that have been
483
00:26:47,664 --> 00:26:51,084
put there before, and the way we have adjusted course, as David said,
484
00:26:51,084 --> 00:26:54,524
and moved on to something, I think that's the kind of context they need.
485
00:26:54,894 --> 00:26:57,394
Because they do come in, especially without the
486
00:26:57,394 --> 00:27:00,364
initial context, thinking, we have to get going.
487
00:27:00,364 --> 00:27:01,564
We've clearly not done anything.
488
00:27:01,564 --> 00:27:02,544
Why have we not done anything?
489
00:27:02,544 --> 00:27:03,814
And they want to do something immediately.
490
00:27:03,814 --> 00:27:05,194
And then they're running as fast as they can.
491
00:27:05,194 --> 00:27:05,994
And then they hit a wall.
492
00:27:05,994 --> 00:27:08,014
And then they just, to have that resilience
493
00:27:08,014 --> 00:27:10,674
to jump back up takes that long view, I think.
494
00:27:11,174 --> 00:27:13,814
You know, just to hammer that home, I was watching an interview
495
00:27:13,834 --> 00:27:17,854
the other day on television by one of the better interviewers.
496
00:27:18,344 --> 00:27:22,124
And they were talking about how climate change was causing all these problems.
497
00:27:22,124 --> 00:27:25,954
And then at the end of it, the host said, and we haven't done anything about it.
498
00:27:26,484 --> 00:27:29,534
Well, I'm one that argues very rigorously that we haven't done
499
00:27:29,534 --> 00:27:33,624
enough about it, and we've fallen far short, but to say we haven't
500
00:27:33,634 --> 00:27:38,234
done anything about it, that creates the deer in the headlights.
501
00:27:38,504 --> 00:27:42,054
I'm working on an op ed right now called, The Deer in the Climate
502
00:27:42,054 --> 00:27:46,724
Change Headlights, because if you don't emphasize the solutions,
503
00:27:46,744 --> 00:27:50,304
or the at least partial progress we've made, then you're gonna
504
00:27:50,474 --> 00:27:50,974
Be
505
00:27:51,064 --> 00:27:52,194
very discouraged,
506
00:27:52,194 --> 00:27:52,754
indeed.
507
00:27:53,034 --> 00:27:56,104
Stepping back into our presidential history, a president who
508
00:27:56,104 --> 00:27:59,604
did an enormous amount for the environment was LBJ, with the
509
00:27:59,614 --> 00:28:03,614
various Great Society programs, so how did this issue of climate
510
00:28:03,614 --> 00:28:07,805
change factor into the decisions made during the Great Society?
511
00:28:08,074 --> 00:28:11,064
Well, I mean, it's kind of astonishing when you think about it.
512
00:28:11,204 --> 00:28:16,554
In the early months of the LBJ administration, particularly Bill Moyers,
513
00:28:16,744 --> 00:28:21,989
who was a, You Young, very smart staff guy for, for the president.
514
00:28:22,539 --> 00:28:26,449
And then there was a guy that no one talks about named Daniel Hornig, who
515
00:28:26,489 --> 00:28:30,869
actually worked on the Manhattan Project, uh, replaced Weisner under Kennedy.
516
00:28:31,339 --> 00:28:34,509
And Johnson didn't have anyone else in mind, so he continued.
517
00:28:34,659 --> 00:28:36,289
He was pushing this.
518
00:28:36,809 --> 00:28:40,419
So, uh, They have this meeting of intellectuals and so they
519
00:28:40,419 --> 00:28:43,909
have, you know, John Kenneth Galbraith as an economist and
520
00:28:43,909 --> 00:28:47,829
they have Clinton Roster, a historian at the time, I remember
521
00:28:47,879 --> 00:28:51,559
reading as an undergraduate, and all these distinguished people.
522
00:28:51,609 --> 00:28:56,469
Uh, and there's at the White House meeting with the president in the room, um,
523
00:28:56,469 --> 00:29:01,119
they have one person from the academic, uh, natural sciences, Roger Revelle.
524
00:29:01,389 --> 00:29:06,849
And so he's on a subpanel with Margaret Mead, the , the, uh, anthropologist
525
00:29:07,029 --> 00:29:10,089
and they write a subcommittee report laying out climate change.
526
00:29:10,089 --> 00:29:14,119
Now, it was kind of oriented towards the controlling
527
00:29:14,449 --> 00:29:17,209
climate and, and weather, which was not really.
528
00:29:17,494 --> 00:29:18,644
Revelle's big thing.
529
00:29:19,104 --> 00:29:21,084
So that's for starters.
530
00:29:21,384 --> 00:29:24,154
And he's in and out of the White House all the time.
531
00:29:24,154 --> 00:29:28,024
There's a great picture in the book of Revelle talking with Johnson.
532
00:29:28,554 --> 00:29:35,784
But the big thing that is worthy of historical mention is in 65, they
533
00:29:35,784 --> 00:29:41,714
published the scientific underpinnings of environmental regulation.
534
00:29:42,334 --> 00:29:47,094
At that time, People were kind of used to smog in cities.
535
00:29:47,114 --> 00:29:49,984
They were kind of used to rivers that caught on fire.
536
00:29:50,644 --> 00:29:55,154
They were used to dumping old tires next to the federal highway.
537
00:29:55,574 --> 00:29:57,744
And all of a sudden, these scientists, and they
538
00:29:57,744 --> 00:30:00,174
said, you know, we need baseline measurements.
539
00:30:00,874 --> 00:30:04,484
You know, it doesn't have to be toxic to be a pollutant.
540
00:30:04,664 --> 00:30:08,549
And so there's a whole Climate change is mentioned up front very prominently.
541
00:30:08,549 --> 00:30:10,169
There's a whole big section.
542
00:30:10,699 --> 00:30:14,769
Uh, the committee is chaired by Roger Revelle , uh,
543
00:30:14,769 --> 00:30:16,869
Dave Keeling is the For Gump of Climate Change.
544
00:30:16,869 --> 00:30:17,019
Yes.
545
00:30:17,409 --> 00:30:21,759
David, David Keeling is, is Dave Keeling, is is a member and
546
00:30:21,759 --> 00:30:25,929
some of the modelers from the Weather Bureau and at Princeton.
547
00:30:25,929 --> 00:30:31,749
And so this thing is very prophetic and, and in the bigger report, , it says.
548
00:30:32,059 --> 00:30:35,129
We will likely need to replace the internal combustion engine.
549
00:30:35,429 --> 00:30:40,679
So, that's treated now, it's one of the controversies being discussed right now.
550
00:30:41,049 --> 00:30:46,759
But then what happened is, you can't see carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
551
00:30:46,759 --> 00:30:50,864
It's, I sometimes, refer to it as the invisible pollutant.
552
00:30:50,904 --> 00:30:52,414
It's slow moving.
553
00:30:52,894 --> 00:30:53,924
You can't see it.
554
00:30:54,404 --> 00:30:59,624
And so beautification became kind of the byword in the Johnson
555
00:30:59,634 --> 00:31:03,804
administration, and climate change then sort of gets ignored.
556
00:31:04,084 --> 00:31:07,114
The only place that's paying attention to it is the
557
00:31:07,114 --> 00:31:11,024
Atomic Energy Commission, and basically in Weinberg.
558
00:31:11,084 --> 00:31:12,134
These weren't public commissions.
559
00:31:13,194 --> 00:31:17,164
But internally, when they sent this out for review, they were the
560
00:31:17,164 --> 00:31:21,234
ones that kept saying, hey, you know, let's not forget about this.
561
00:31:21,724 --> 00:31:25,684
For one prominent reason, if you were looking for a non
562
00:31:25,704 --> 00:31:29,124
carbon fuel source, nuclear was certainly one option.
563
00:31:30,464 --> 00:31:33,264
I'm curious, I don't remember in your notes, Jay,
564
00:31:33,669 --> 00:31:36,610
Did you find any LBJ tapes of him talking to Revelle?
565
00:31:37,170 --> 00:31:37,480
No.
566
00:31:37,490 --> 00:31:38,460
If you all listen to the tapes.
567
00:31:38,460 --> 00:31:39,880
No, I think, I
568
00:31:39,880 --> 00:31:45,550
think that Revelle made a very interesting comment one time that I picked up on.
569
00:31:45,560 --> 00:31:49,350
He said, after he had this initial meeting with Johnson, he said, Bill
570
00:31:49,350 --> 00:31:54,190
Moyers appeared to me, to Johnson, what Ted Sorenson was to Ted Kennedy.
571
00:31:54,820 --> 00:31:57,710
And both of those advisors were very brainy.
572
00:31:57,865 --> 00:32:02,274
I know that Ted Sorensen knew about the climate science, and
573
00:32:02,274 --> 00:32:06,435
Johnson, when he met with that intellectual group I mentioned before,
574
00:32:06,504 --> 00:32:09,435
Ravel said, he looked kind of uncomfortable being with this group.
575
00:32:09,844 --> 00:32:15,014
But people like Moyers were driving these ideas, and in later
576
00:32:15,014 --> 00:32:19,124
life, I, I didn't dig into this that much, but late in his life,
577
00:32:19,175 --> 00:32:22,634
Moyers starts writing about climate change and working with
578
00:32:22,665 --> 00:32:26,134
people like Bill McKibben who are sort of out there on the issue.
579
00:32:26,374 --> 00:32:30,685
The LBJ thing was kind of known before I wrote my book,
580
00:32:30,685 --> 00:32:34,374
but I think the extent of it was not really appreciated.
581
00:32:35,595 --> 00:32:38,125
We're going to step on to President Nixon now.
582
00:32:38,125 --> 00:32:39,575
And last week, wasn't it?
583
00:32:39,575 --> 00:32:40,745
I'm losing track of time.
584
00:32:40,755 --> 00:32:42,065
A little over a week ago.
585
00:32:42,065 --> 00:32:44,415
I helped, uh, thanks to the magic of Zoom.
586
00:32:44,874 --> 00:32:48,414
I moderated a conference at the, uh, Nixon Library in Yorba Linda.
587
00:32:48,975 --> 00:32:52,455
Remembering the 50th anniversary of President Nixon's resignation.
588
00:32:52,555 --> 00:32:52,995
With Frank
589
00:32:53,005 --> 00:32:53,855
Gannon as well?
590
00:32:53,865 --> 00:32:54,905
He was there, yes.
591
00:32:54,905 --> 00:32:55,405
He sent me a copy
592
00:32:55,405 --> 00:32:56,025
of his slides.
593
00:32:56,555 --> 00:32:57,215
Oh yes, he
594
00:32:57,495 --> 00:33:00,674
had really interesting slides and we had a few other folks on
595
00:33:00,674 --> 00:33:04,450
there, Garrett Graff, who just came out with a Watergate, A New
596
00:33:04,450 --> 00:33:08,040
History, and I'm one of the supervisory archivists at Nixon as well.
597
00:33:08,210 --> 00:33:11,440
So it's a really interesting conversation, but made me feel extraordinarily
598
00:33:11,440 --> 00:33:14,939
old because I remember sitting there with my grandfather as President
599
00:33:14,940 --> 00:33:17,390
Nixon announced he was going to resign the next day at noon.
600
00:33:17,970 --> 00:33:22,799
But Nixon, you know, significant environmental advances during
601
00:33:22,800 --> 00:33:26,410
that administration, EPA, NOAA, and so forth, Clean Air Act.
602
00:33:26,610 --> 00:33:29,340
How did climate change factor into his
603
00:33:29,340 --> 00:33:32,699
administration's work toward improving the environment?
604
00:33:33,665 --> 00:33:37,765
Well, he had several people working for him who were very familiar.
605
00:33:37,825 --> 00:33:41,745
Well, Daniel Moynihan, everybody said, why did Daniel
606
00:33:41,755 --> 00:33:45,504
Moynihan write a memo at the White House on climate change?
607
00:33:45,935 --> 00:33:48,635
He served on the advisory board at the Population
608
00:33:48,635 --> 00:33:55,019
Center at Harvard, the head of which was, Roger Revelle.
609
00:33:55,020 --> 00:33:58,970
And then David Freeman, who people in Oak Ridge probably have heard of.
610
00:33:59,300 --> 00:34:02,800
He was left over from Johnson's staff on the
611
00:34:02,829 --> 00:34:05,869
Science Advisors, and he wrote about climate change.
612
00:34:05,869 --> 00:34:10,730
And then Gordon McDonald was a member of the Council on Environmental Quality.
613
00:34:10,809 --> 00:34:12,840
So there's a couple of key things.
614
00:34:12,840 --> 00:34:16,340
One is, at that time, there was legitimate confusion
615
00:34:16,350 --> 00:34:18,810
about whether the earth was warming or cooling.
616
00:34:18,810 --> 00:34:21,040
This wasn't just some Weird idea.
617
00:34:21,340 --> 00:34:24,010
Temperature data, you know, a volcano can have
618
00:34:24,030 --> 00:34:26,500
quite a bit of impact on world temperature.
619
00:34:26,500 --> 00:34:31,430
So, after the Industrial Revolution, The Earth is warming very steadily.
620
00:34:31,800 --> 00:34:34,890
But then, in the years before Nixon, the
621
00:34:34,900 --> 00:34:36,610
temperature trend had started to go down.
622
00:34:36,670 --> 00:34:38,980
There was, a lot of scientists were trying to
623
00:34:39,029 --> 00:34:42,180
justify this and not getting their models right.
624
00:34:42,640 --> 00:34:46,799
There was not really a call for action except, and this is
625
00:34:46,960 --> 00:34:50,320
a very current and important issue right now, because the
626
00:34:50,320 --> 00:34:54,000
Supreme Court has been arguing that the members of the current
627
00:34:54,000 --> 00:34:57,930
Supreme Court have been arguing that the Clean Air Act did not.
628
00:34:58,105 --> 00:34:59,655
include climate change.
629
00:34:59,915 --> 00:35:03,405
It is extremely clear that it did.
630
00:35:03,765 --> 00:35:08,315
Ed Muskie, who is very important, LBJ said, I'm doing the environmental
631
00:35:08,315 --> 00:35:12,705
stuff I'm doing because Ed Muskie keeps after me to do them.
632
00:35:12,874 --> 00:35:17,114
And he, he hasn't gotten the credit he deserves in the history books either.
633
00:35:17,414 --> 00:35:18,735
But he was very aware of it.
634
00:35:19,015 --> 00:35:21,625
The, the Republican co sponsor of the bill
635
00:35:21,705 --> 00:35:23,395
mentioned climate change in the debate.
636
00:35:23,675 --> 00:35:26,604
The, the text of the Clean Air Act mentions climate.
637
00:35:26,775 --> 00:35:30,500
And yet, There are three members of the current court who have
638
00:35:30,500 --> 00:35:35,130
signed off on a dissent that said that there was no legal basis for
639
00:35:35,130 --> 00:35:39,070
distinguishing between carbon dioxide pollution and an airborne frisbee.
640
00:35:39,389 --> 00:35:41,510
It's in a footnote, but it's there.
641
00:35:41,639 --> 00:35:47,506
So this Clean Air Act, it seems at first glance, I mean, I'm, my
642
00:35:47,506 --> 00:35:50,800
own view was, well, it's not that connected with climate change.
643
00:35:50,800 --> 00:35:52,850
It's very connected with climate change.
644
00:35:53,390 --> 00:35:59,195
So in the Ford and Nixon years, This cooling issue gets cleaned up.
645
00:35:59,445 --> 00:36:01,725
They understand what the problem is.
646
00:36:01,845 --> 00:36:04,855
Some deniers will mention it, but it's not credible.
647
00:36:05,305 --> 00:36:08,704
There's one more thing that goes on during here and since
648
00:36:08,705 --> 00:36:11,325
we're at Oak Ridge, I think it deserves special mention.
649
00:36:11,620 --> 00:36:17,470
Nixon proposed and Ford implemented taking the National Nuclear
650
00:36:17,470 --> 00:36:22,739
Labs and turning them into more diversified research institutions.
651
00:36:23,290 --> 00:36:27,870
And it was called ERDA, the Energy Research Development Administration.
652
00:36:28,299 --> 00:36:30,660
And then it was quickly folded into the new
653
00:36:30,660 --> 00:36:33,900
Department of Energy when that was founded in 1977.
654
00:36:34,540 --> 00:36:39,549
So, my argument was, the creation of ERDA was actually more important.
655
00:36:39,760 --> 00:36:44,460
it was in the Department of Energy, because before that,
656
00:36:44,460 --> 00:36:47,500
solar energy had been part of the National Science Foundation.
657
00:36:47,510 --> 00:36:51,069
So then they founded what was called the Solar Energy Research
658
00:36:51,069 --> 00:36:55,180
Institute, which is now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
659
00:36:55,680 --> 00:36:59,485
So, Nixon and Ford, I don't think People
660
00:36:59,485 --> 00:37:01,365
have gone around giving them credit for that.
661
00:37:01,375 --> 00:37:03,485
It was a reaction to the Arab oil embargo.
662
00:37:04,065 --> 00:37:06,795
But it was a very positive reaction.
663
00:37:06,795 --> 00:37:08,675
It's saying, hey, we need to get smart about
664
00:37:08,675 --> 00:37:11,045
these things and look at all the fuels.
665
00:37:11,095 --> 00:37:15,964
And again, we aren't where we need to be today, but
666
00:37:15,964 --> 00:37:18,745
we're better off because of decisions like that.
667
00:37:19,475 --> 00:37:22,725
I wanted to ask you, what is the oil crises that happened in the 70s?
668
00:37:22,755 --> 00:37:24,195
Does that speed up?
669
00:37:24,980 --> 00:37:27,060
Are shift away from fossil fuels or does that that
670
00:37:27,070 --> 00:37:29,110
make us double down on fossil fuels in your mind?
671
00:37:29,670 --> 00:37:32,520
Well, I think there were two things going on.
672
00:37:32,520 --> 00:37:35,300
One is the Middle Eastern countries that showed that
673
00:37:35,300 --> 00:37:38,109
they could kind of boss us around or affect our economy.
674
00:37:38,140 --> 00:37:43,530
And two, we had a theory of peak oil that we were running out of oil and gas.
675
00:37:44,160 --> 00:37:50,545
So So, the main initial reaction was, well, let's produce more coal.
676
00:37:51,405 --> 00:37:56,175
So this, this creates an awkward situation for Jimmy Carter, who's
677
00:37:56,175 --> 00:38:01,355
an environmentalist, but he inherits Nixon and Ford's thing, and, and
678
00:38:01,374 --> 00:38:05,725
they were talking about coal, coal, coal, Gasified coal, liquefied
679
00:38:05,765 --> 00:38:11,615
coal, and a guy who we know about, but the general public doesn't,
680
00:38:11,645 --> 00:38:15,594
Gordon McDonald was the guy who got up and said, you know, we can't
681
00:38:15,605 --> 00:38:20,264
be moving to this kind of coal economy because of climate change.
682
00:38:20,274 --> 00:38:26,135
So Carter's advisor, Frank Press, says, you have to distinguish here on
683
00:38:26,135 --> 00:38:29,465
solar between the thermal panels that were on the White House, which are.
684
00:38:29,700 --> 00:38:31,670
Purely symbolic in my view.
685
00:38:32,170 --> 00:38:38,280
And photovoltaic panels, which can be improved at the speed of a iPhone.
686
00:38:38,940 --> 00:38:41,760
Press said, you know, photovoltaics are not ready now,
687
00:38:41,760 --> 00:38:45,250
and they might not be ready until the 21st century.
688
00:38:45,560 --> 00:38:49,200
But our best thing is to invest in photovoltaics
689
00:38:49,220 --> 00:38:51,300
because eventually it'll be cheaper than coal.
690
00:38:51,560 --> 00:38:52,289
And so that's pretty much it.
691
00:38:52,480 --> 00:38:53,460
That's pretty prophetic.
692
00:38:53,920 --> 00:38:57,760
And then when Carter passed the windfall profits tax on the
693
00:38:57,770 --> 00:39:00,570
oil companies, all of a sudden there was a big pot of money.
694
00:39:00,580 --> 00:39:01,690
So where did that go?
695
00:39:01,770 --> 00:39:02,160
It went.
696
00:39:02,580 --> 00:39:06,570
some of it to this coal stuff, but a lot of it went to solar.
697
00:39:06,770 --> 00:39:09,720
And you just look at it on a line graph and you see this
698
00:39:09,730 --> 00:39:14,079
huge bump that comes down with the next administration.
699
00:39:14,730 --> 00:39:17,799
Well, Vervell said one time, he said, we got serious.
700
00:39:17,799 --> 00:39:20,130
We started driving 55 miles an hour.
701
00:39:20,130 --> 00:39:23,750
We got more fuel conscious of mileage standards.
702
00:39:23,750 --> 00:39:29,330
And, and, uh, and then when prices came down, we got lazy.
703
00:39:29,850 --> 00:39:33,130
And Ravel said something to the effect, maybe we need another
704
00:39:33,130 --> 00:39:36,990
Arab oil embargo to make us use energy more efficiently.
705
00:39:37,810 --> 00:39:38,950
So, what about nuclear?
706
00:39:39,050 --> 00:39:42,740
I know President Carter had to deal with the Three Mile Island incident.
707
00:39:43,710 --> 00:39:46,850
That being an alternative to combat climate change
708
00:39:46,850 --> 00:39:49,620
suddenly was thrown into a bit of a disarray.
709
00:39:49,870 --> 00:39:53,610
Yeah, this was kind of a marriage gone bad in the sense
710
00:39:53,630 --> 00:39:57,780
that people like Weinberg and others saw a perfect
711
00:39:57,780 --> 00:40:00,860
partnership between climate science and nuclear.
712
00:40:01,810 --> 00:40:07,680
And so you have the three mile island and Carter incidentally helped develop,
713
00:40:07,710 --> 00:40:13,130
Rick overdeveloped the early subs and he also cleaned up the first major.
714
00:40:13,620 --> 00:40:16,200
nuclear accident in North America.
715
00:40:16,200 --> 00:40:19,530
So he's alive today at 99 and he's probably absorbed more
716
00:40:19,530 --> 00:40:23,790
radiation than almost any other person in the country.
717
00:40:24,170 --> 00:40:29,109
When Three Mile Island takes place, the cooling systems inside break down.
718
00:40:29,250 --> 00:40:33,159
It shows that not enough attention was being paid to it.
719
00:40:33,599 --> 00:40:37,039
But the containment vessel, which is basically
720
00:40:37,039 --> 00:40:39,379
two to three feet of concrete, contained it.
721
00:40:39,399 --> 00:40:43,049
So there really was not any external
722
00:40:45,720 --> 00:40:48,890
Basically, a lot of people wanted to not only put a
723
00:40:49,350 --> 00:40:52,730
moratorium on nudist plants, but they wanted to shut down
724
00:40:52,730 --> 00:40:55,950
the ones we had, kind of like Japan did after Fukushima.
725
00:40:56,830 --> 00:41:00,819
Carter fought that very strongly, and some people in the nuclear industry did.
726
00:41:01,290 --> 00:41:04,420
viewed him as a opponent of nuclear because
727
00:41:04,420 --> 00:41:05,940
he didn't support the Breeder Reactor.
728
00:41:05,940 --> 00:41:08,100
In fact, in Oak Ridge today, there are probably
729
00:41:08,100 --> 00:41:10,180
still people mad about the Breeder Reactor.
730
00:41:10,459 --> 00:41:14,280
But I've been able to convince all those people, when I get a chance to talk to
731
00:41:14,280 --> 00:41:18,519
them, that the Breeder Reactor was not quite ready for implementation, and we
732
00:41:18,519 --> 00:41:21,660
would have been better off at that point to take Carter's suggestion and take
733
00:41:21,660 --> 00:41:26,720
that money and explore what are the different ways of generating nuclear power.
734
00:41:27,440 --> 00:41:29,570
So, then what happens?
735
00:41:30,280 --> 00:41:32,410
It's, it is extremely strange.
736
00:41:32,440 --> 00:41:36,670
When the industry group forms in the early nineties to oppose
737
00:41:36,810 --> 00:41:41,680
climate science, basically, some of the nuclear groups join in.
738
00:41:42,150 --> 00:41:44,169
Some of the natural gas groups go in.
739
00:41:44,170 --> 00:41:48,039
And natural gas is actually, for a good while, going to benefit from going in.
740
00:41:48,370 --> 00:41:49,790
Trying to deal with climate science.
741
00:41:49,790 --> 00:41:51,860
I mean, eventually, that is a fossil fuel,
742
00:41:51,860 --> 00:41:54,940
and it leaks methane, so it's not forever.
743
00:41:55,180 --> 00:41:56,910
But how did that happen?
744
00:41:56,910 --> 00:41:58,650
And I can't fully explain that.
745
00:41:59,160 --> 00:42:02,810
I think it, it was partly they got mad at environmentalists,
746
00:42:02,860 --> 00:42:07,689
because I, I find when I speak in conservative areas,
747
00:42:08,039 --> 00:42:10,649
the first question is, do you support nuclear power?
748
00:42:11,349 --> 00:42:14,069
And I say, I think it's a good option if we can afford it.
749
00:42:14,499 --> 00:42:19,185
I, I think it's, uh, been proven to be Quite safe, and it doesn't take a lot of
750
00:42:19,185 --> 00:42:23,725
land, but the way we've produced it in the past has been extremely expensive.
751
00:42:24,455 --> 00:42:28,224
And once I say that, they will listen to anything I say about climate change.
752
00:42:28,745 --> 00:42:31,295
If my answer to that was no, the door is shut.
753
00:42:31,785 --> 00:42:35,854
So I think the environmentalists, in looking back, may wish
754
00:42:35,854 --> 00:42:38,425
they had taken a somewhat different approach, and I think the
755
00:42:38,425 --> 00:42:41,245
industry might have wished they had taken a different approach.
756
00:42:42,170 --> 00:42:46,930
And that's why I say it's a potential, uh, a romantic
757
00:42:46,930 --> 00:42:49,730
relationship that could have been better than it was.
758
00:42:50,510 --> 00:42:52,100
Now, I want to step outside the U.
759
00:42:52,100 --> 00:42:52,240
S.
760
00:42:52,260 --> 00:42:56,530
for a minute because one thing I learned from your book was the views
761
00:42:56,530 --> 00:42:59,770
of Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister on climate change.
762
00:42:59,770 --> 00:43:00,730
I had no idea.
763
00:43:01,069 --> 00:43:03,640
Can you tell us a bit about how she approached the issue?
764
00:43:03,640 --> 00:43:05,940
And she was really kind of ahead of her time in a way.
765
00:43:06,769 --> 00:43:07,089
She
766
00:43:07,090 --> 00:43:09,929
was a chemistry major at Oxford.
767
00:43:10,339 --> 00:43:15,349
Her position was as a conservative person that believes in
768
00:43:15,349 --> 00:43:19,314
small government, I should be opposing what climate change is.
769
00:43:20,325 --> 00:43:21,855
science is telling us to do.
770
00:43:22,105 --> 00:43:23,965
But as a scientist, I can't do that.
771
00:43:24,255 --> 00:43:25,865
So she was kind of famous.
772
00:43:25,865 --> 00:43:29,615
She had cabinet meetings that were devoted,
773
00:43:29,624 --> 00:43:32,354
the entire subject was climate change.
774
00:43:32,895 --> 00:43:37,924
And she actually came out here to, she went to Colorado, where the
775
00:43:37,924 --> 00:43:41,935
Atmospheric Research Lab is located, and she spent a day out there.
776
00:43:42,375 --> 00:43:45,525
And apparently when they finished the, the You know, they
777
00:43:45,525 --> 00:43:48,325
were using probably overhead projectors at that time.
778
00:43:48,605 --> 00:43:51,375
When they finished the allotted time, there were still some
779
00:43:51,375 --> 00:43:54,305
slides that hadn't been displayed, and she demanded that the
780
00:43:54,305 --> 00:43:57,575
meeting be extended so they could view all of the slides.
781
00:43:58,225 --> 00:44:02,045
And if you go back, her speeches are easy, pretty easy to access.
782
00:44:02,534 --> 00:44:06,515
The, um, Margaret Thatcher Foundation has them all online.
783
00:44:07,075 --> 00:44:10,315
And, but there's two major ones that I cite in the book.
784
00:44:10,665 --> 00:44:12,395
So she's very prophetic.
785
00:44:13,344 --> 00:44:14,485
She was gone.
786
00:44:14,495 --> 00:44:19,625
She had been replaced by John Major by the time of the Rio Summit.
787
00:44:19,835 --> 00:44:23,164
And one might imagine if she was still there, I mean Prince
788
00:44:23,165 --> 00:44:27,215
Charles, now King Charles, was lobbying the Bush administration.
789
00:44:27,285 --> 00:44:31,895
But John Major didn't have the commitment to climate that Thatcher had.
790
00:44:32,175 --> 00:44:37,475
But in Europe, The mainline conservative parties have pretty much
791
00:44:37,475 --> 00:44:42,215
accepted climate science, and I give Thatcher some of the credit for that.
792
00:44:42,834 --> 00:44:44,235
Talk to us about Rio a bit.
793
00:44:44,245 --> 00:44:45,675
That was 1992.
794
00:44:46,155 --> 00:44:47,105
What was accomplished there?
795
00:44:47,105 --> 00:44:47,975
What role?
796
00:44:48,860 --> 00:44:50,510
How did the Bush administration, H.
797
00:44:50,510 --> 00:44:50,750
W.
798
00:44:50,750 --> 00:44:51,730
Bush, approach that?
799
00:44:52,150 --> 00:44:54,350
Well, the Europeans were pushing very hard to
800
00:44:54,350 --> 00:44:59,140
stabilize in climate at 1990 levels by the year 2000.
801
00:44:59,360 --> 00:45:03,970
That sounds easier to do, but when you understand the energy infrastructure
802
00:45:03,989 --> 00:45:08,925
and the moving parts that have to be changed, to use energy differently.
803
00:45:09,245 --> 00:45:10,455
Very ambitious goal.
804
00:45:10,695 --> 00:45:14,075
And so the Europeans wanted a binding target.
805
00:45:14,895 --> 00:45:21,134
And Bill Reilly, who is the secretary or the head of the Environmental
806
00:45:21,135 --> 00:45:24,695
Protection Agency, was pushing within the administration for that.
807
00:45:24,705 --> 00:45:26,605
A few other people were pushing for that.
808
00:45:27,105 --> 00:45:30,495
But The main thrust within the administration, coming from the
809
00:45:30,495 --> 00:45:36,325
economists at the White House and from Sununu, was strongly against that.
810
00:45:36,995 --> 00:45:43,244
And so, Bush basically decided not to support a binding resolution.
811
00:45:43,594 --> 00:45:47,575
They had a good point, and I try to be fair to all concerned.
812
00:45:47,575 --> 00:45:51,285
In the United States, a treaty supersedes U.
813
00:45:51,285 --> 00:45:51,475
S.
814
00:45:51,475 --> 00:45:51,905
law.
815
00:45:52,685 --> 00:45:58,220
So, most countries could sign a binding target, and It wouldn't mean that much.
816
00:45:58,230 --> 00:46:00,750
In the United States, if it's in a treaty, it can be litigated.
817
00:46:00,760 --> 00:46:03,430
So there was some argument.
818
00:46:04,060 --> 00:46:08,460
But then, if that's your argument, then come back
819
00:46:08,630 --> 00:46:12,379
and support updating the auto efficiency regulations.
820
00:46:12,399 --> 00:46:15,710
They were way overdue from being renewed.
821
00:46:16,150 --> 00:46:19,460
It was right during the first Iraq war.
822
00:46:19,890 --> 00:46:23,210
So the idea that we shouldn't be dependent on oil.
823
00:46:23,600 --> 00:46:26,950
either for climate reasons or for middle eastern politics
824
00:46:27,100 --> 00:46:29,500
and the senators were mentioned in both by this point.
825
00:46:29,510 --> 00:46:32,099
By this point, climate change is right up there.
826
00:46:32,360 --> 00:46:34,410
And the administration fought very hard.
827
00:46:34,500 --> 00:46:37,390
They had the votes to break the filibuster to get it through.
828
00:46:37,720 --> 00:46:40,620
On the second vote, uh, the administration changed
829
00:46:40,699 --> 00:46:43,960
eight senators, I believe, and it went down and was not.
830
00:46:44,225 --> 00:46:48,215
Renewed till the second Bush signed a bill
831
00:46:48,215 --> 00:46:50,895
with auto efficiency standards in 2007.
832
00:46:51,475 --> 00:46:54,235
So, uh, that was a pivotal time.
833
00:46:54,235 --> 00:46:57,315
And in Rio, you know, it was very exciting in a way.
834
00:46:57,315 --> 00:47:00,435
I mean, you're bringing in all these countries from all over the world.
835
00:47:00,750 --> 00:47:04,030
Bush attended, which gave it a certain dignity,
836
00:47:04,310 --> 00:47:06,950
uh, that the American president had come.
837
00:47:07,330 --> 00:47:10,960
But when you go into a presidential archive, you can read all their
838
00:47:11,050 --> 00:47:14,559
internal correspondence about what they're saying about so and so and
839
00:47:14,560 --> 00:47:19,320
this and that, and it's, uh, in its own way, it's kind of entertaining.
840
00:47:19,320 --> 00:47:22,900
But at that point, you could say, well, you know, in 1992,
841
00:47:22,930 --> 00:47:26,619
that's a pretty big deal that we have this conference, and
842
00:47:26,620 --> 00:47:30,180
we pretty much say that you ought to stabilize by 2000.
843
00:47:30,190 --> 00:47:30,470
Now.
844
00:47:30,920 --> 00:47:34,060
The United Kingdom went down substantially in the 1990s.
845
00:47:35,295 --> 00:47:40,525
actually accelerated faster in the 1990s than we'd been accelerating before.
846
00:47:40,525 --> 00:47:44,325
So we, we kind of failed the test in the 1990s.
847
00:47:44,934 --> 00:47:46,704
You state when we're talking about the H.
848
00:47:46,705 --> 00:47:46,945
W.
849
00:47:46,945 --> 00:47:49,755
Bush administration, you said by the time of that presidency,
850
00:47:49,755 --> 00:47:53,565
there'd been a breakdown of the old circle of scientific elites.
851
00:47:54,094 --> 00:47:55,595
So what do you mean by that?
852
00:47:55,595 --> 00:47:58,065
And then that being the case, how does a
853
00:47:58,065 --> 00:48:01,325
president or public servant then get reliable?
854
00:48:01,800 --> 00:48:04,090
Scientific information upon which to act.
855
00:48:04,460 --> 00:48:10,379
Well, this actually could merit a whole book, just the evolution of think tanks.
856
00:48:10,379 --> 00:48:14,400
You know, when I write an op ed, I don't get paid for it, you know.
857
00:48:14,459 --> 00:48:18,129
I do it because I want to communicate with the public.
858
00:48:18,660 --> 00:48:22,540
And then I read the people that are also doing op eds, and I
859
00:48:22,680 --> 00:48:25,320
know through various sources how much they're getting paid.
860
00:48:25,710 --> 00:48:28,150
Five, ten thousand dollars per op ed.
861
00:48:28,680 --> 00:48:32,040
There's a group of scientists who aren't
862
00:48:32,040 --> 00:48:34,690
really publishing in peer reviewed journals.
863
00:48:34,700 --> 00:48:38,129
They don't have the prestige or the kind of people who are on the panels of
864
00:48:38,129 --> 00:48:41,879
the National Academy of Sciences who are already, who are heading up think
865
00:48:41,879 --> 00:48:46,300
tanks or they're being subsidized by the coal industry or, or whatever.
866
00:48:46,619 --> 00:48:51,290
And they're given almost as much credibility as these other people.
867
00:48:51,500 --> 00:48:53,660
Even the Washington Post, the Washington Post
868
00:48:53,970 --> 00:48:56,409
during that time period was publishing a lot of.
869
00:48:56,610 --> 00:49:02,490
Climate denial op eds and my view is if you're going to publish it,
870
00:49:03,170 --> 00:49:06,870
find out who paid for it because the reader deserves to know that.
871
00:49:07,179 --> 00:49:09,889
So that's, that's kind of what I'm talking about.
872
00:49:10,210 --> 00:49:13,880
You know, maybe we over revered scientists in the 1950s during
873
00:49:13,880 --> 00:49:17,559
the Cold War, but we maybe need to get back to that a little bit.
874
00:49:17,880 --> 00:49:22,100
But in some ways it was good because Ravel always
875
00:49:22,140 --> 00:49:24,640
believed that science should speak with one voice.
876
00:49:24,990 --> 00:49:28,840
So if you read Ravel, he signed off on different reports
877
00:49:28,840 --> 00:49:31,499
in his career that are slightly different because you know,
878
00:49:31,519 --> 00:49:34,249
I've been on a panel of the National Academy of Sciences.
879
00:49:34,249 --> 00:49:37,110
It's a group decision and I may not agree with every word in
880
00:49:37,110 --> 00:49:40,545
the report, but I'm I'm not going to file a minority report.
881
00:49:40,714 --> 00:49:44,924
So the idea that now scientists are just speaking out as individuals,
882
00:49:44,924 --> 00:49:47,924
you know, this and that and not doing it through this National
883
00:49:47,935 --> 00:49:52,095
Academy of Sciences process, I can argue both sides of that.
884
00:49:52,234 --> 00:49:55,694
But it does allow a lot of junk science to start coming into the
885
00:49:55,705 --> 00:49:56,365
dialogue.
886
00:49:56,904 --> 00:50:01,875
So what would you all recommend then if I'm a maker of public policy or
887
00:50:01,875 --> 00:50:05,944
if I'm just a citizen wanting to learn more about environmental policy?
888
00:50:06,394 --> 00:50:07,575
Climate change.
889
00:50:08,384 --> 00:50:09,394
What are those sources?
890
00:50:09,394 --> 00:50:12,004
How do I test the source I'm looking at?
891
00:50:12,014 --> 00:50:14,734
God knows on the internet you can find anything now.
892
00:50:14,994 --> 00:50:16,474
How do you test that to know this is a
893
00:50:16,484 --> 00:50:19,394
valid, good source of scientific information?
894
00:50:19,864 --> 00:50:22,144
Well, I mean, some people wouldn't want to hear this,
895
00:50:22,144 --> 00:50:26,414
but most of our government sites, you know, NASA, NOAA,
896
00:50:26,794 --> 00:50:30,289
Energy Information Administration, EPA's stuff is fine.
897
00:50:30,519 --> 00:50:34,239
It's pretty good, uh, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
898
00:50:34,239 --> 00:50:38,469
I mean, you have hundreds of scientists come together and they put out charts.
899
00:50:38,779 --> 00:50:42,379
The thing is, they've all been through sort of a peer review process.
900
00:50:42,909 --> 00:50:48,029
So like when I testify before Congress, I'm, I'm testifying before
901
00:50:48,429 --> 00:50:52,779
Republicans and Democrats, people from Oklahoma, people from Vermont.
902
00:50:54,204 --> 00:50:56,904
At the end of my testimony, it's kind of been peer
903
00:50:56,904 --> 00:51:00,174
reviewed, you know, in the political dialogue.
904
00:51:00,604 --> 00:51:04,884
And so I don't go in there with some wild idea that I can't back up.
905
00:51:05,694 --> 00:51:07,634
And we really lack the chance.
906
00:51:08,304 --> 00:51:15,704
One time, when peak oil was so big, I gave a speech to the National Association
907
00:51:15,704 --> 00:51:21,774
of Geologists, or one of the big groups, to show why peak oil was not true.
908
00:51:21,774 --> 00:51:25,719
And I said, any opponent who thinks it's a big deal, I'll
909
00:51:25,729 --> 00:51:28,489
appear with them on the stage and we'll discuss it together.
910
00:51:28,490 --> 00:51:30,969
No one, no one showed up.
911
00:51:31,919 --> 00:51:35,829
And it's kind of that way with climate change, and it's true on both sides.
912
00:51:35,829 --> 00:51:39,499
I mean, everybody's talking to people they already agree with, and
913
00:51:39,499 --> 00:51:44,194
what we need is a panel where everybody gets up and maybe we'll stay
914
00:51:44,194 --> 00:51:48,094
there for three hours and you can examine my assumptions and I'll
915
00:51:48,114 --> 00:51:51,274
examine your assumptions and I'll give you my evidence and you give me
916
00:51:51,274 --> 00:51:55,174
your evidence and then maybe at the end we'll know what the truth is.
917
00:51:55,434 --> 00:51:58,694
And I would just add, yeah, also Jay, you mentioned
918
00:51:58,694 --> 00:52:01,054
IPCC kind of in the international context.
919
00:52:01,064 --> 00:52:02,534
In many countries, including the U.
920
00:52:02,534 --> 00:52:05,084
S., have like a national climate assessment, the NCA.
921
00:52:05,574 --> 00:52:09,074
In these circles, it is true, the scientists as much as possible
922
00:52:09,074 --> 00:52:11,819
try to speak with one voice and then they're They're scientists.
923
00:52:11,819 --> 00:52:15,109
They tend to be quite open about where there are the uncertainties.
924
00:52:15,109 --> 00:52:19,139
And there's certainly differences of opinions on certain topics.
925
00:52:19,139 --> 00:52:22,779
But these end up becoming, and I think whoever's listening to this
926
00:52:22,789 --> 00:52:26,009
podcast should see that, these are the authoritative sources in the field.
927
00:52:27,389 --> 00:52:30,739
And I think there are other analogs in other areas as well.
928
00:52:30,739 --> 00:52:34,819
Health and medicine and whatever you can imagine.
929
00:52:35,029 --> 00:52:39,009
I think this period where there was a bit of this divergence in how
930
00:52:39,009 --> 00:52:42,989
health As Jay was talking about how the science was perceived, it has
931
00:52:42,989 --> 00:52:46,429
a lot to do with this whole notion of science communication, right?
932
00:52:46,439 --> 00:52:49,189
I mean, this was the period when we were talking about global
933
00:52:49,199 --> 00:52:52,869
warming, and then we used that terminology for a long time, and
934
00:52:52,869 --> 00:52:57,069
then people started to take that and use it against, against it.
935
00:52:57,069 --> 00:52:59,960
Oh, well, it's not warming, because I'm, our area is, right?
936
00:52:59,960 --> 00:53:01,182
It's very cold day today, right?
937
00:53:01,182 --> 00:53:01,589
Exactly, right?
938
00:53:01,589 --> 00:53:03,469
And then you start realizing, okay, let's not use that term.
939
00:53:03,479 --> 00:53:04,159
There's another term.
940
00:53:04,484 --> 00:53:06,284
So that's a, that's one example.
941
00:53:06,334 --> 00:53:09,624
Uh, I mean, David knows this as well, but I mean the, with, with the IPCC
942
00:53:09,624 --> 00:53:12,644
process, which is the gold standard in my mind, in terms of communicating
943
00:53:12,644 --> 00:53:16,344
the science, there's the peer review that's done by the scientists.
944
00:53:16,654 --> 00:53:20,094
And then there's a separate document that is created for the policy makers.
945
00:53:20,234 --> 00:53:23,054
And I think this is interesting where they go through and there's a bit
946
00:53:23,054 --> 00:53:25,784
of a veto power on the part of the governments to decide what they want.
947
00:53:26,199 --> 00:53:28,749
in their brief versus what's not in their brief.
948
00:53:29,369 --> 00:53:33,299
And that is not necessarily misrepresenting the science,
949
00:53:33,299 --> 00:53:35,489
but it's just selectively reporting the science, right?
950
00:53:35,839 --> 00:53:39,689
And that becomes a key issue with the communication of the science as well.
951
00:53:40,019 --> 00:53:41,919
And David said scientists are very good at
952
00:53:41,979 --> 00:53:44,909
communicating, uh, the uncertainties in their model.
953
00:53:45,229 --> 00:53:46,789
I think sometimes I struggle with this.
954
00:53:46,789 --> 00:53:50,139
Honestly, I, I do think that there's some issues with reporting,
955
00:53:50,529 --> 00:53:53,379
not issues, but just communicating uncertainty is hard.
956
00:53:53,409 --> 00:53:54,809
I mean, probabilities are hard, right?
957
00:53:54,809 --> 00:53:56,099
If you sit down and try to talk about
958
00:53:56,099 --> 00:53:57,209
them, they're very, they're very confusing.
959
00:53:57,779 --> 00:54:00,919
So I think there's been struggles with reporting uncertainties,
960
00:54:01,179 --> 00:54:03,289
not necessarily in the models, but just the fact that.
961
00:54:03,619 --> 00:54:06,629
The modeling has natural uncertainty built into it.
962
00:54:06,789 --> 00:54:07,979
That's not necessarily, we don't know.
963
00:54:07,979 --> 00:54:09,029
There's just randomness.
964
00:54:09,479 --> 00:54:11,869
So I think those three, those three things all kind of fit in a bucket
965
00:54:11,869 --> 00:54:15,789
around communication where the communication started to become an issue.
966
00:54:15,989 --> 00:54:18,969
And a lot of times I think the scientists take that and they, they, they
967
00:54:18,969 --> 00:54:21,569
seem to think, well, we, we just need to put one more decimal point of
968
00:54:21,569 --> 00:54:24,359
precision on our estimates and then that'll make it, that'll make it work.
969
00:54:24,359 --> 00:54:26,899
And they're missing the point that it's not the science.
970
00:54:26,899 --> 00:54:27,829
I don't need to go from.
971
00:54:27,889 --> 00:54:30,299
From, from six decimal points of accuracy to seven,
972
00:54:30,329 --> 00:54:32,279
I just need to do a better job of communicating.
973
00:54:32,679 --> 00:54:34,579
And education, I think, is part of that as well.
974
00:54:34,589 --> 00:54:39,049
What we do with K 12 here, how we kind of introduce these concepts to students.
975
00:54:39,259 --> 00:54:39,659
And Jay?
976
00:54:40,189 --> 00:54:43,359
I can make one very specific suggestion.
977
00:54:43,569 --> 00:54:48,904
One is when one of the scientists was testifying, the, um, Senator said,
978
00:54:48,954 --> 00:54:52,964
why are you giving us this information in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit?
979
00:54:53,824 --> 00:54:58,514
And the response was, well, the journals that we publish in all use Celsius.
980
00:54:59,214 --> 00:55:01,504
Climate change sounds a lot worse in Fahrenheit than it
981
00:55:01,504 --> 00:55:04,674
does in Celsius, and we still haven't gotten past that.
982
00:55:04,694 --> 00:55:07,284
I mean, the two degree warming, for one
983
00:55:07,284 --> 00:55:09,744
thing, is not average two degrees Celsius.
984
00:55:09,764 --> 00:55:12,534
It's a lot more here, less here.
985
00:55:12,604 --> 00:55:13,204
Effects.
986
00:55:13,569 --> 00:55:18,759
Wind currents and maybe eventually ocean currents and then you know, what's two
987
00:55:18,759 --> 00:55:24,319
point Celsius is what three point six Fahrenheit So, you know that that would
988
00:55:24,329 --> 00:55:30,579
be for starters Converting all journals read mainly by Americans to Fahrenheit
989
00:55:30,689 --> 00:55:33,967
So I think we need to wrap up today But I guess one
990
00:55:33,967 --> 00:55:36,789
question as we as we go out start with you David and
991
00:55:36,789 --> 00:55:40,179
Charles What would you say to our listeners in terms of?
992
00:55:41,149 --> 00:55:44,319
Is there a positive view right now with climate change?
993
00:55:44,319 --> 00:55:45,149
What can we say?
994
00:55:45,349 --> 00:55:47,929
As Jay said earlier, we have big challenges
995
00:55:47,929 --> 00:55:49,679
ahead of us, but some things have been done.
996
00:55:49,969 --> 00:55:51,349
Where would you say we stand now?
997
00:55:51,349 --> 00:55:54,389
Are we in bad shape in how we're approaching it?
998
00:55:54,399 --> 00:55:56,569
Or have we made significant progress and we're
999
00:55:56,569 --> 00:55:58,599
on the right path or somewhere in between?
1000
00:55:59,009 --> 00:56:01,119
You have to look really hard, I guess, to find a good thing.
1001
00:56:01,120 --> 00:56:06,459
I think the one good thing is that the leaderships, we don't seem
1002
00:56:06,459 --> 00:56:08,849
to be waiting on the federal government for leadership anymore.
1003
00:56:09,349 --> 00:56:13,784
And I think Jay's point about this being a global pollutant really puts a lot of
1004
00:56:13,784 --> 00:56:18,344
emphasis on the federal government to take the leadership role, but I think when
1005
00:56:18,344 --> 00:56:21,744
you see the long track of where we've been, you've realized that waiting on that
1006
00:56:21,744 --> 00:56:26,014
is creating a lot of stops and starts and things, and we have stopped relying
1007
00:56:26,014 --> 00:56:29,609
on them to be the leader, and we start to see leadership coming from State
1008
00:56:29,609 --> 00:56:32,479
governments, for instance, who are trying to pass their own climate policies.
1009
00:56:32,879 --> 00:56:34,479
There's limits to that, right?
1010
00:56:34,479 --> 00:56:37,929
There's limits to how much the city of San Francisco can do, but it's
1011
00:56:37,939 --> 00:56:41,059
good to see that there is some things that are happening at the local
1012
00:56:41,059 --> 00:56:43,639
level, and then so hopefully you get sort of more of a bottom up
1013
00:56:43,639 --> 00:56:46,579
groundswell of support for, for policy instead of all of us waiting
1014
00:56:46,579 --> 00:56:50,299
for an administration to come in and somehow enact a policy that's not
1015
00:56:50,299 --> 00:56:53,409
going to be overturned or ruled out in the Supreme Court or something.
1016
00:56:53,459 --> 00:56:56,109
And the business, I mean, this is another example of where now, and
1017
00:56:56,109 --> 00:56:58,729
then there's a whole other issue with sort of documenting those.
1018
00:56:58,989 --> 00:57:02,069
Those steps that businesses are taking, that becomes another issue.
1019
00:57:02,269 --> 00:57:04,409
Businesses can say they're doing a lot of stuff on climate change, and then
1020
00:57:04,409 --> 00:57:07,414
you want to go through and document that so that they don't just Say it.
1021
00:57:07,444 --> 00:57:08,044
Say it, right.
1022
00:57:08,544 --> 00:57:11,604
But this is a point where businesses would have waited until the
1023
00:57:11,604 --> 00:57:15,034
federal government was going to force them to do it for years.
1024
00:57:15,054 --> 00:57:18,264
And now they are the ones who are sort of taking the lead.
1025
00:57:18,264 --> 00:57:21,954
And then I think now the next challenge becomes sort of documenting the
1026
00:57:21,984 --> 00:57:24,664
actual impacts of the things they're doing so that we can hold their
1027
00:57:24,664 --> 00:57:27,474
feet to the fire and show, yes, they are actually doing these things.
1028
00:57:27,919 --> 00:57:30,429
Yeah, and I think what Charles just said here in the U.
1029
00:57:30,429 --> 00:57:30,609
S.
1030
00:57:30,609 --> 00:57:31,989
plays out globally as well.
1031
00:57:31,989 --> 00:57:35,459
There's been this shift over time since, um, the early days when
1032
00:57:35,459 --> 00:57:38,589
countries started coming together in Rio and then beyond to, in
1033
00:57:38,589 --> 00:57:41,719
these international climate negotiations processes, the so called
1034
00:57:41,719 --> 00:57:45,419
COPS, the Conference of Parties, that, that's shifted also from kind
1035
00:57:45,419 --> 00:57:49,029
of a top down to a, more of a bottom up, you know, country driven.
1036
00:57:49,094 --> 00:57:50,074
process, right?
1037
00:57:50,114 --> 00:57:53,704
And so now countries are on, they're required, uh, they're on
1038
00:57:53,704 --> 00:57:56,834
the hook since the Paris Agreement of 2015 to, um, put forward
1039
00:57:56,834 --> 00:57:59,624
every single year or, or every few years, but then updates every
1040
00:57:59,624 --> 00:58:02,544
year, the so called nationally determined contributions in DCs.
1041
00:58:02,544 --> 00:58:05,954
And then these, now these long term strategies, basically now every
1042
00:58:05,954 --> 00:58:10,564
country has a, some semblance of a, or they're supposed to kind
1043
00:58:10,564 --> 00:58:13,574
of have a roadmap, a plan to get there, which then filters down.
1044
00:58:13,584 --> 00:58:15,894
There's a North star now for basically every country.
1045
00:58:16,174 --> 00:58:18,944
In some cases, it's not very stringent in other cases.
1046
00:58:21,069 --> 00:58:22,269
It's really ambitious, right?
1047
00:58:22,269 --> 00:58:24,309
And that gives the signal to all the states, all the
1048
00:58:24,309 --> 00:58:27,059
cities, all the companies, this is the direction of travel.
1049
00:58:27,349 --> 00:58:30,349
And we are seeing a lot, and in this country with these major
1050
00:58:30,349 --> 00:58:34,759
pieces of legislation in the past couple years, the Inflation
1051
00:58:34,759 --> 00:58:37,229
Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the
1052
00:58:37,229 --> 00:58:39,529
Chips and Science Act, which are really moving the needle.
1053
00:58:39,789 --> 00:58:43,119
And I think a lot of that stuff is still in the pipeline.
1054
00:58:43,444 --> 00:58:46,784
And a lot of, we're going to start seeing a lot of steel in the ground projects,
1055
00:58:46,804 --> 00:58:50,374
you know, solar panels on people's roofs, electric vehicle chargers all over
1056
00:58:50,374 --> 00:58:53,964
the place here in the later part of the 2020s and certainly in the 2030s.
1057
00:58:53,964 --> 00:58:56,584
So there's, I think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic, but at
1058
00:58:56,584 --> 00:58:59,724
the moment we are, there is still a, a so called gap, an emissions
1059
00:58:59,734 --> 00:59:02,954
gap and kind of where we need to be to get to two degrees, 1.
1060
00:59:02,954 --> 00:59:05,154
5 degrees and where the world is, is heading.
1061
00:59:05,234 --> 00:59:09,074
But the gap, yeah, can hopefully be closed in time.
1062
00:59:09,154 --> 00:59:09,354
Yeah.
1063
00:59:09,434 --> 00:59:09,914
Very good.
1064
00:59:09,954 --> 00:59:13,224
And Jay, as we approach yet another presidential election.
1065
00:59:13,449 --> 00:59:16,279
What is your view right now on where we stand with climate change?
1066
00:59:16,885 --> 00:59:19,465
Well, you know, when I was writing the last
1067
00:59:19,485 --> 00:59:21,565
two pages of a book like this, it's difficult.
1068
00:59:22,715 --> 00:59:27,875
And I had an ending that was like, our political system has failed us, we
1069
00:59:27,875 --> 00:59:32,834
got a filibuster, we don't have bipartisanship anymore, things are bleak.
1070
00:59:32,884 --> 00:59:38,085
And I changed that, and the end is a picture of Carter, I was at
1071
00:59:38,095 --> 00:59:42,255
the event, he asked me to speak at it, but they took ten acres
1072
00:59:42,265 --> 00:59:45,595
of his farmland in Plains and built solar panels panels there.
1073
00:59:46,275 --> 00:59:48,685
I've had the chance to spend a lot of time with him
1074
00:59:48,685 --> 00:59:51,465
over the years and I've never seen him so happy.
1075
00:59:53,065 --> 00:59:59,515
And, but, the next year, MIT publishes a report that
1076
00:59:59,515 --> 01:00:05,135
solar in the last 40 years had reduced costs by 99%.
1077
01:00:06,745 --> 01:00:09,535
So, it shows what technology can do.
1078
01:00:10,370 --> 01:00:12,550
And I know, Alan, you are very interested
1079
01:00:12,550 --> 01:00:16,170
in innovation and the pace of innovation.
1080
01:00:16,170 --> 01:00:20,980
So, we know what we need to do, which is a big part of this.
1081
01:00:21,450 --> 01:00:24,740
And so, we just can't do it at a leisurely pace.
1082
01:00:24,890 --> 01:00:29,085
It has to be all everyone on board pulling
1083
01:00:29,085 --> 01:00:32,325
their oar, uh, to even to keep it to 2.
1084
01:00:32,615 --> 01:00:36,615
5 degrees Celsius is going to take a pretty serious effort.
1085
01:00:36,615 --> 01:00:39,045
I think technically we could keep it at 2.
1086
01:00:39,625 --> 01:00:43,185
Uh, if you put the politics into it, that's a pretty heavy lift.
1087
01:00:43,225 --> 01:00:47,705
But, but I, I, I think right now I'm more trying to oppose
1088
01:00:47,705 --> 01:00:52,345
the pessimism because I don't see that leading to action.
1089
01:00:52,365 --> 01:00:56,095
It just leads, don't blame me because I understand climate science, but.
1090
01:00:56,525 --> 01:00:57,605
There's nothing we can do about it.
1091
01:00:57,635 --> 01:00:58,475
That's the worst.
1092
01:00:58,515 --> 01:01:00,045
That's almost as bad
1093
01:01:00,045 --> 01:01:01,115
as climate denial.
1094
01:01:01,715 --> 01:01:03,605
Gentlemen, a fascinating conversation.
1095
01:01:03,605 --> 01:01:05,615
Our first AMSECast conversation.
1096
01:01:06,324 --> 01:01:09,715
Charles and David and Jay, thank you so much for joining us.
1097
01:01:09,935 --> 01:01:12,235
Thank you all for listening and watching and
1098
01:01:12,235 --> 01:01:14,534
join us next time on AMSECast Conversations.
1099
01:01:19,685 --> 01:01:22,475
Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSECast.
1100
01:01:22,785 --> 01:01:25,025
For more information on this topic or any
1101
01:01:25,025 --> 01:01:28,245
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1102
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1110
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1112
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1113
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1114
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