Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Chevy Humphrey: Oh, come on. I work in a science center. Good evening, everyone.

[Applause and cheers]

Okay. That's what I'm used to hearing. We hear noise all the time, but things that are fun, exciting, and kids are learning, and adults are learning, so: Good evening, everyone!

Audience: Good evening.

Chevy Humphrey: Thank you. My name's Chevy Humphrey, and I'm the President and CEO at Arizona Science Center, and I'd love to extend a warm welcome to all of you tonight. We are thrilled here at the science center to host this inspiring partner event with Arizona State University. We hope all of you enjoy tonight's program on one of the most pressing problems of our time.

Our evening's theme challenges us to imagine how we want our future to be powered—specifically to examine how we can meet the world's growing energy needs in a sustainable fashion. I encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to engage with our extremely knowledgeable panelists and guests during the critical dialogue. Tonight's conversation highlights a spirit of deep thinking and reflection on complex science issues that we at Arizona Science Center strive to encourage all of our guests and on a daily basis.

Please join me in welcoming the infamous Dr. Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University. [Applause] Under Michel's leadership—his decade of leadership—ASU has advanced the New American University, pursuing the highest levels of academic excellence, inclusiveness to the broad public, and maximum social impact—

- and I have a little sidebar. I know I'm supposed to stick the script. Sorry, Michael, but—I went to Texas over the holidays, and I told people I was from Phoenix. I hadn't seen a bunch of people—friends—in a long time. They go, "Oh, my gosh. I want my kids to apply to that Arizona State University. I heard a lot of great things."

I got to say, "I know Dr. Michael Crow, and he's done all of this wonderful work at ASU, so please have your children apply and bring them to Arizona." Thank you so much for what you done for our community and the leadership that you've brought to Arizona.

[Applause]

Michael Crow: Hello, everybody. Glad everybody could be here. This is a big classroom, and we're very excited about the opportunity to have so many folks in this big classroom, and we're very excited about our partnership with the Arizona Science Center. It's one that we've been trying to figure out—how you take a university, which in its most common form often acts as if it's really close to death. It's like it's connected in a morbid kind of way. The faculty wear brown, hooded costumes and chant in Latin.

It's difficult sometimes to find ways to connect. Our partnership with Chevy and our partnership with the science center is fantastic, and we're very excited about it.

Imagine that you're here in a classroom, but let me let you know about we actually work. Forget all your painful experiences in classrooms.

When I was in the fourth grade, my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Trioli, who was on the U.S.S Arizona when it was sank—you can imagine how tough that guy was. He used to whack my on my hand—this side—with a ruler, with the metal edge this way—cuz he said, "You talk too much." [Laughter] I'll try not to do that tonight.

We're not that kind of classroom. Let me put into perspective what we are. Arizona State University is a knowledge enterprise. We have three principal products.

Our most important product and our most complicated product that we try to produce are people. Our objective in the production of these people is to produce people that have the capability to learn anything and to adapt to anything that they encounter. It's different than producing an engineer. It's different than producing an artist. It's different than producing a sustainable scientist. It's just different. Can you learn anything? Can you adapt to anything?

Our second product are ideas. Can you build a city in a different way? Can you conceptualize ways in which we might have some opportunity to move past this late, what I call burn-the-rock stage of human evolution?

Right now, we are so sophisticated that the energy system for our 7-billion-person planet is principally reliant on the extraction of old, dead plants and old dead animals; the lighting them on fire; the boiling of water to turn crude wheels, from which we extract some form of electrical output, from which—through some unbelievably inefficient system—we distribute it ultimately to our inefficient use. Other than that, it's a fantastically sophisticated world.

So what you need universities are people that can conceptualize things in a different way, and you need ideas about how to do things in a do things in a different way. Then the last thing that we produce—and something that we've been working vigorously on at ASU, through our research enterprise—is our really technical term that we call "stuff." Stuff.

It may, for instance, a genetically altered cyanobacteria organism which has the capability of operating at certain efficiency levels to produce certain kinds of fuels. Or it may be what we think of in the combination of people, ideas, and stuff, through what we call our light works initiative.

Here's an idea for you: We have X photons—X amount of photons delivered to the planet. Most of you are aware of that. It's called the sun. The sun actually produces particles. The particles travel all the way to the earth.

Those particles can be used. The simplest form is our present not-so-sophisticated technology to take those photos and convert them into electrons through what you know of as solar energy systems.

How about building an entire economy around the concept of photons and taking those photons, converting them electrons, converting them to molecules, converting those molecules to fuels, those molecules to food, those molecules to medicine—because at the end of the day, if you have photons, electrons, and molecules—if you have those three things, you can do almost anything. You just to conceptualize in a different way.

We are certain of the following: No matter what you hear; no matter what your political views are, your political ideology, or how your political views or political ideology affects your view of science, which I find amusing—some of you should laugh—

[Audience laughter]

- then I'll know it's not a completely hostile audience.

[Audience laughter]

- and that is that there are as more energy from the photons produced by the thermonuclear reactions on our nearby star called the sun than any amount of fossil fuels presently located in any form, anywhere on this planet.

If we plan to be here for the indefinite future, we must find a way to produce a different kind of person, a different kind of set of ideas, and a different set of stuff—to think about our energy future in a different way. That's what we do. That's why we built the Global Institute of Sustainability. That's why we build the School of Sustainability.

So, welcome to ASU and the science center's classroom. Thank you.

Oh—Rob Melnick, I'm going to introduce. Rob is our Executive Director and Executive Dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability and the School of Sustainability and is a longstanding and fantastically successful faculty member at ASU, who used to be the director of the Morrison Institute.

All the great things the Morrison Institute has done through the decades have come out of the mind of Rob Melnick and his companions. He knows how to get things done, he knows how to make things happen, and he's going to introduce our discussant. Rob—thank you.

[Applause]

Rob Melnick: President Crow will hit me with a ruler on the hand if I talk too long with—I'm not sure which side—so I'll be very, very brief. It's my pleasure tonight to introduce our moderator, Eve Troeh.

Eve, welcome back to Phoenix. We've worked with Eve before with great pleasure. Eve is a senior reporter on the sustainability desk of Marketplace by American Public Media.

I suspect many of you, like myself, listen to Marketplace on a regular basis, usually on my drive home. She files feature stories and breaking stories, primarily on sustainability issues and how they impact business and the economy. She started with Marketplace as a staff member in 2008.

Prior to Marketplace, she was a freelance reporter in New Orleans. Prior to that, she earned her undergraduate degrees in anthropology and journalism from USC. Eve is gonna be our moderator tonight, and she will guide the discussion and introduce each one of your panelists. So, Eve, thank you much for being here tonight. We really look forward to it.

Eve Troeh: Thank you.

Rob Melnick: Eve Troeh.

[Applause]

Eve Troeh: Alright. Now we get to test the microphones. Can everyone hear us okay up here? Can you hear me okay? Alright. Great.

Audience: Got some [inaudible] back there.

Eve Troeh: Yes. Let's go through this. We have a few more introductions to do. Thank you all so much here for being here. To get this out of the way: Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace, is a great guy [laughter] and a fine human being. [Laughter] That's the question I get asked the most often.

We have three distinguished panelists here to talk about the future of energy. First, we have Mark Jacobson. He hails from Stanford, where he is a professor of civil and environmental engineering, also the director of the Atmosphere and Energy Program.

The main goal of Jacobson's research is to understand better severe atmospheric problems, such as air pollution and global warming, and develop and analyze large-scale, clean, renewable energy solutions to them. He's published textbooks, and he's testified before Congress. He served on the Energy Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.

Next, we have Peter Byck. Peter has over 20 years of experience as a director and an editor. His documentary, Garbage—guess what that one's about—won the South by Southwest Film Festival in 1996.

He's also gone on to do some documentary work for behind the scenes on Hollywood films, such as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Most recently, he's completed his 2011 film, Carbon Nation, which he has presented all over the world, including at educational institutions and companies such as Boeing, Nike, Google, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart.

Our third panelist is John Hofmeister. He is the distinguished sustainability scholar at GIOS here at Arizona State. He's a Julie A. Wrigley Private Sector Executive-in-Residence for Sustainability at the School of Sustainability. He retired as the President of Shell Oil Company in 2008 to found and head the nationwide nonprofit Citizens for Affordable Energy. He also has a book out—I believe in 2010—called Why We Hate the Oil Companies.

We've got three very different points of view here, and we hope it will be a great discussion. There were several audience questions, which were submitted beforehand. Those we've attempted to incorporate into the discussion. We won't necessarily be identifying specific questions from that pool, but we've done our best to put them in the topics here. We're not set up today to do audience Q and A at the end of the discussion—just so everyone's aware of that.

I'd like to start off by having each of the three of you take your turn and answer something that may seem a little odd, but—where you see your role in the energy world. What your work does in the energy world, what impact it has. Also, when you look at the U.S. right now and how we use energy, what do you see in terms of the U.S.'s use of energy right now? I'll start with you, Mark.

Mark Jacobson: Thank you. I study the atmosphere and climate and air pollution, in particular, and methods of solving large-scale climate and pollution problems. My role is really not only to provide information—scientific information—about what's causing pollution and which chemicals are causing problems, but also looking at solutions to these problems. The solutions that we generally look at large-scale, clean, renewable energy solutions. We'll probably talk about that later.

The state I see right now of society—I think it's pretty severe in terms of not only climate and air pollution but also energy security. Worldwide, 2-1/2 to 3 million people die every year from air pollution prematurely—cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, complications from asthma. The same sources that are causing global warming cause this air pollution.

Global warming—the Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly. In September, it reached its lowest level in satellite history. It may disappear entirely in ten years, and that may trigger a really sudden feedback—a tipping point—because you uncover the dark ocean below, and suddenly you're not reflecting light any more, and you're heating up even faster.

The rate of change of temperature today is so fast, it's faster than any—in fact, it's ten times faster than the average rate of change of temperature during deglaciation from the last ice age. It's a significant rise in temperature.

We've had warmer temperatures on the earth 100 million years ago, but nobody lived back then. We have 7 billion people right now. If we melt all the ice on the earth, it's about 65 to 70 meters of sea level rise will occur. That will flood seven percent of all the coastal oceans worldwide. That's a significant problem.

Finally, energy security is something that's really important. Prices of energy are going up, and that reflects the fact that fossil fuels are limited resources. We need to convert to something that is not such a limited resource that has a free fuel price, and it will turn out to a clean and renewable energy system.

I'll pass for now to the next speaker.

Eve Troeh: Yeah. Go ahead, Pete.

Peter Byck: I knew nothing of pretty much everything that my film has six years ago, and I've been bit by some sort of bug that I don't what it is, but I can't stop learning about energy, clean energy, and solutions. In making Carbon Nation and then promoting Carbon Nation, I've also learned that most Americans agree on a lot of the issues, especially around energy, but none of us know that because we're not being told that, and we’re being told that we're a polarized country.

When I look at the storytelling of all the different pieces of this puzzle, I see a lot of manipulation, a lot of selective use of data. When people just learn commonsense, good business approach to getting to a clean energy economy, they want it. They want it big time.

My place in that world that I've self-appointed myself—and got a couple of friends with me—is to tell the stories, to show people what's possible, and not only show people what's possible—to show people what's already happening. One of the things I've learned as well, certainly on this promotional tour, is that there's a lot of people working towards a clean energy economy, but they have no idea how many other people are working alongside them. They have no idea, so even the folks who're at the forefront have no idea how many people they have working with them, because there's a lot—

Just to glue it together better, we need to get a lot more stories out there. Storytelling—just gettin' the stories out there, inspiring people. I'm an activist—there's no question. I am not objective whatsoever in my journalism. No question about it.

The way I see—the second part of your question of how America is with energy right now. We don't have an energy policy, really. The biggest national energy policy I see is with the Department of Defense. Every base in the United States is now in competition to see who's gonna be the first net-zero energy waste and water base.

That is huge, cuz when the DOD spends my money on things I like, I'm pretty happy about it. To get all that technology of smart grids at those bases that our cities are anyway will give us—to get all the stuff about clean energy being—how do we deal with intermittency? There's a lot of solutions that they're workin' on right now.

John can talk forever about how many different rules we have across the country—like the patchwork of rules we have for utilities—it's ridiculous. I personally think we need executive orders. I don't know if that's where you would go, but we probably agree that we need a national energy policy and a national grid as well.

Eve Troeh: Thanks.

John Hofmeister: I joined energy in 1997. Before, I worked in other technical companies, but mainly from a consumer point-of-view. Companies like GE, Honeywell, Nortel. I joined Shell in 1997, and that was my introduction to the energy world. I have been committed to it ever since.

I approach energy as an operator. I used to have 6 million citizens looking for gasoline every day, multiple refineries, multiple drilling rigs, multiple offshore rigs, onshore rigs, chemical plants, wind farms, solar farms, and bio-refineries in the making. From across the entire hydrocarbon world to the renewable world, looking at the energy future of the country, I found two serious, serious shortcomings that are as difficult to deal with today as any time in our history.

The first shortcoming that we face in our society is the fundamental lack of information in the minds of our citizens that is complicated by misinformation and disinformation that comes from these myriad of sources that Peter mentioned. That lack of information, that lack of knowledge, even lack of curiosity in the world in which we live today—when Michael Crow points out the possibilities of the future—is a serious handicap.

The second fundamental problem that we have in dealing with the energy today is: "Who's in charge?" I submit: No one's in charge. I submit: There's a Darwinian struggle underway among energy producers; energy consumers; government officials throughout the federal system, including the federal government, the state governments, the local governments. All across this land, everybody has the better idea, and they're dealing with a public that is either uninterested or lacking the information they need.

There's no question but that we have the resources, the technology, the financial capital, and the human capital to go any direction we want to go, provided you can fill up your tank on the way home; provided the air conditioning or the heater was on while you were gone, and so your home is comfortable when you get there; provided the TV comes on to watch the news this evening; provided the alarm clock works in the morning.

In other words, we want instant energy now, we want it to be affordable, and we don't wanna go through what the poor folks in the New York metropolitan area went through after Sandy, which is spending part of our lives in gas lines. When you had the gas lines the last time in Phoenix because of a pipeline breakdown, I heard from your mayor, I heard from your governor, I heard from—you name it—because the brand that I represent is well represented in this city. Thank you very much for all your business.

The reality is: We want energy now, we aren't about to tolerate any slippage in the energy supply, and Peter's absolutely right—there is no plan. There has been no plan.

We're on our eighth president promising some form of energy independence without a clue where to go, how to do it, or who to work with. That starts with Richard Nixon, and it goes right to Barack Obama, including his inaugural address this past week—where who knows what he mean when he says we're gonna tackle climate change and we're gonna deal with clean energy. Because if you predicate the next four years on the last four years, we'll be right where we started in 2016 when we go through another election campaign with the promises that we've all heard before.

I get very animated on this subject, but I have—I think—a balanced and mature view about the possibilities that science and academia and solutions can provide, and I'm very upbeat about the future if we can get control of ourselves.

Eve Troeh: Alright. We will be talking more about the inaugural address later on. Mark, I wanted to go to you, because you have been known to have a body of research that talks about the fact that if we wanted to go to a carbon-free energy system, we could do that, starting tomorrow. We could deploy resources and technology that we have currently, and we could get there in a much shorter timeframe than a lot of people have talked about.

I want you to talk a little a bit about that plan—what it entails, what it physically looks like, and why the timeline has been set so much longer when there's evidence that you've found that we can do it much faster.

Mark Jacobson: In our group—actually, over the last several years, we've been developing plans. First, we developed a technical feasibility plan to repower the entire world's energy infrastructure to one based on current technology—wind, water, and sunlight. We've also developed a plan for the United States and for individual states—New York State and California.

These plans are actually out there. The first two—the U.S. and the world plans—they've been published for several years now. They really look at how much—if you wanted to power just with wind, water and sunlight—that's like wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar plants, some geothermals, some hydroelectric, a little bit of tidal, a little of wave. That's really it.

Not only for electricity but also for transportation and converting all the cars to electric vehicles and some hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and also for industrial processes going to either electricity or hydrogen for those, and for heating and cooling—mostly, again, electricity and maybe some hydrogen for some processes.

It turns out—you can actually reduce—just by converting to electricity, in particular, and to some extent hydrogen—you can reduce the world's power demand by 32 percent, just because it's so much efficient than internal combustion.

In the United States, it's about a 37 percent reduction in power demand, and in a place like California, which is reliant heavily on transportation, where you get the most benefit, it 's a 44 percent reduction, without even changing your habits.

The first step is to convert to wind, water, sun, electricity, hydrogen. Now, how much you think—that's gonna take a lot of land, a lot of resources, a lot of materials, a lot of devices. Well, it turns out you can do 50 percent with wind, 40 percent with solar, and 10 percent with everything else.

That 50 percent wind is 3.8 million 5-megawatt wind turbines. That takes up about—some over ocean and about 0.6 percent of the world's land for spacing that can be used for multiple purposes, including farming, grazing, ranch land, open space. The actual area on the ground of all those wind turbines is the size of Manhattan. It's about 38 square kilometers.

Peter Byck: Is that number of turbines U.S. or world?

Mark Jacobson: World.

Peter Byck: Got it.

Mark Jacobson: 3.8 million. Every year, the world produces 70 million cars. In World War II, the United States produced 330,000 airplanes in five years. The world produced 700,000 plus—780,000. This is not a technical difficulty to produce 3.8 million turbines.

Then the rest—the 40 percent solar plus the rest—it takes another 4 percent of the world's land, so that is 1 percent of the world's land to repower everything for all purposes. That's not a limit on lithium, for example, for battery-electric vehicles. There's enough lithium in known reservoirs for up to 3 billion vehicles.

Right now we have 800 million vehicles in the world, and that's how many you'd really wanna replace, but you could go up to 3 billion without running out of the resources. For other technologies, there's enough rare earth elements. You get job creation, but the economics is there, too. Wind on land—not offshore—it's more expensive—but onshore wind, geothermal, and hydro all are cost-competitive.

Just to give an example: The five states with the highest penetration of wind in the United States are—what I mean, penetration—percent of their electric power—South Dakota is number one, with 23 percent of its electric power last year from wind. Iowa, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wyoming.

The cost of electricity in those states went up 2 cents a kilowatt-hour between 2003 and 2011. All the states went up 3-1/2 cents a kilowatt-hour. Hawaii went up 17 cents a kilowatt-hour. It's because of—you have to transport all this fuel. You have to mine it. You have to refine it and do all sorts of things. The fuel costs of wind and also solar is free, but they have higher capital costs.

Anyway, I can go on and on about this, but I'm sure—

Eve Troeh: Well, so, the year here. The timeframe that we're talking about, too, with full deployment, with full aggressiveness to get to carbon free—you say it can be done by when?

Mark Jacobson: If we put our mind to it, it's technically feasible to start it today and by 2030, but—from a practical point of view, there's so much embedded infrastructure, the full conversion wouldn't probably happen until 2050—but I think we can get—actually, if we started today and said, "All new energy infrastructure is clean—wind, water, and sun, plus electricity and hydrogen"—then you gradually replace the old stuff—by 2030, you could probably get rid of 75 percent of it, and then the rest would gradually get rid of over time.

Eve Troeh: Right. What's conspicuously missing from this plan is any type of fossil fuel scenario at all. This is with flipping a switch and immediately eliminating fossil fuels from the system—that's what you're talking about.

Mark Jacobson: It's not immediate. It's gradually phasing them out, but no new technologies would be fossil fuel—no new natural gas, no new coal, no new actually nuclear or biofuels either. This is excluding biofuels, coal, nuclear, natural gas. It's all real renewable energy systems.

Eve Troeh: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. John, I wanted to ask you, because 2050 is an important year, I believe, for you as well, when you're thinking about energy systems. Where do you see things going if you had your way between now and 2050?

John Hofmeister: I have written, in terms of moving to a carbon-free energy system—and it would take 50 years to do so in the way in which I would describe it. What we have to come to grips with is that existing economy investments will not be written off easily by those who have made the investments to date until such time as they experienced the full economic benefit of what they have previously invested in.

Eve Troeh: Give me an example of that.

John Hofmeister: 250 million cars on the road today. The owners of those cars are not about to write them off and somehow suddenly change direction until they've gotten what they consider the economic value of their cars.

Utilities that have built power plants as recently as this year—brand-new power plants starting up. They're not gonna suddenly wanna turn those off, because—where's the economic return on the investment that they've made? Coal mine operators. Drilling rig operators.

In other words, you've got an invested economy that is going to be looking for the full-cycle economic return before they consider future options. They're 9 million people alone work in the oil and gas industry. If they think there's a future of no more oil and gas, for whatever reason, they're not gonna be happy about that.

There's another several million people work in the hydrocarbon-based electricity generation industry. They wouldn't be too happy about that future, either.

The problem is that you have got to have a plan. You can do anything with a plan. The plan has to have short term, it has to have a medium term, and it has to have a long term—50 years being the long term.

Short term in the energy space is like zero to ten years. Nothing happens in energy space in a year or two, which coincides with an election cycle. Nothing happens in energy time. So zero to 10 years is short term; 10 to 25 years, medium term; and 25 to 50 years.

Taking advantage of the assets you have while looking at the assets you will ascribe to—but here's what we have to get past: Every interest group in every part of the energy system is going to have its eye on survival and success for itself, and so then you look at all of these various groups—from the cleanest to the dirtiest, from the oldest to the newest—and then you start looking at the consequences of what you're trying to do—we are in a democracy. Scientists—you could say unfortunately—don't get to set the rules—don't get to make the plan.

We go through a democratic process. We have been through the last several years of rather difficult democratic processes, and there's challenges. I come at it ultimately—if we keep the governance that we have over energy—which I said earlier is no governance—we're never gonna have a plan.

I think Mark's ideas—Mark's solutions—are brilliant and possible, but without a plan as to how you're gonna get ther—without a plan that has continuity, that has the predictability, that has the stick-to-itutiveness to see it through—it's very difficult to pull it off, and so we're stuck in this dilemma that we have.

Eve Troeh: How do you see fossil fuels playing a role in the next 50 years or over the course of 50 years? What speed and types of pursuing fossil fuels makes sense as we transition to something else? Ideally.

John Hofmeister: I think there's two approaches to energy that have to be part of the dialogue. One is to clean up what's dirty so that you can use it in more clean ways. Another is to use more clean and understand how it is dirty. I mean, wind farms and solar farms—there are implications. There are consequences of—

Eve Troeh: Such as?

John Hofmeister: I think land erosion on wind farms is a very serious problem. I think bird kill. Wind farms have the highest incident safety record in the energy industry. There are more human injuries in the wind industry than in any other part.

From mining coal to working on offshore platforms, the highest incident rate's the wind industry, and it's not gettin' any better, because climbing those wind towers is very, very hard on the human body. Working in those extreme conditions is very hard on the human body. They have the highest safety incident rate, and so that's an issue.

What you have is this—with the role of fossil fuels, I think we have more than we need, but they're not easy to get, and they're getting harder and harder to get, but the technology means we can keep using them.

I would offer in the short, medium, and long term, over that journey towards carbon-free—I think we have to transition our way through this with—the way to make dirty energy clean is through regulation. Force it to be cleaned up. Some will drop out. They won't wanna go through the cost or the effort. We will have a diminishing of those who pay it all that much attention, but there will be those who will stick with it.

Also, if we can't govern ourselves, who governs the world? In terms of the world's use of fossil fuels, with the 3 million people— only 2 billion of the 7 billion actually have access to all the fuel they want. Two billion have no access, and three billion have limited access. There's this balance of how does the world go forward as well.

I think fossil fuels are gonna be around for decades and decades to come, even in the plan I'm proposing, but we would shift to cleaner. We would gradually move the fleet to electrify it—hydrogen fuel cell battery as a combination—and public transportation as a major, major part of transportation of the future.

We would see—as oil becomes too expensive, you can find the substitutes, which is electrification because if you can—in the meantime, there are other solutions. For example, I'm busy promoting the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel, as sort of the bridge.

Eve Troeh: That's what you mean by "cleaner."

John Hofmeister: "Cleaner " is natural gas. Also, changing what is in the fleet. Less dirty internal combustion engines. Eventually getting rid of internal combustion engines. Making them too expensive through regulation is the way you're gonna get there, but, of course, you need a governance process to make that happen.

Eve Troeh: Hmm. Mark, I want to give you a chance to address the safety issue with the wind industry because I know wind is a big part of your plan. The safety concerns on wind are not something that I had heard much about, myself.

Mark Jacobson: Sure. Let me first talk about birds. Okay.

Eve Troeh: Everyone loves birds. Right?

Mark Jacobson: Yeah, wind turbines kill birds. The American Bird Conservancy estimates between 40,000 – 400,000 birds are killed by wind turbines inside the U.S. each year, but the rate of bird deaths from wind turbines is one-tenth the rate of natural gas bird kills and [inaudible] bird kills because oil and gas kill birds in three different ways—through land degradation and erosion, through air pollution, and through buildings of structures that they run into.

If you look it up, there's a paper by Silverpool 35:56 on energy policy a few years ago that looked at this. In fact, wind turbines killed about the same number of birds per kilowatt-hour as nuclear power. It's all relative. In terms of the absolute numbers, 400,000 birds—that compares with about 10 to 50 million birds killed by communication towers each year; 80 million by cats in the U.S. alone, by the way[audience laughter]; 900 million to a billion by buildings and windows, so that's a red herring.

In terms of human deaths—okay, this is worse—coal kills 30,000 people every year in the United States alone from air pollution, another 500 to 2,000 from black lung disease—which are all—the black lung disease is part of the processing of coal. It does still. In fact, a $70 billion subsidy has gone to the coal industry since 1970 through the black lung disease program and the families of the survivors.

Natural gas kills another 6 to 10 thousand people in the United States alone, and that's not even counting the higher death rates in other countries due to the air pollution.

In terms of the workers, between 2000 and 1970—when I last had this conversation and somebody pulled out all the statistics—one person had been killed in the entire wind industry in the United States from falling off from a turbine. That was between 1970 and 2000.

I haven't followed it so closely since then, but I doubt it's that much higher. It might be higher. There might be more injuries, but—I don't know all the statistics—those are the numbers from then. There was only one person. This was by a person who was totally against wind and was sending me the statistics.

Eve Troeh: Okay.

Peter Byck: I've climbed a wind turbine, and it was incredibly slow and well harnessed. They break into three parts. You climb the first third. You get through a trapdoor. They close the trapdoor. You climb up the next third. You get through that trapdoor. They close that one, so you can only fall so far. Then we got— [Audience laughter]

- if you fell.

Eve Troeh: If you were to fall—

Peter Byck: Then, once you get to the top—one, they don't have the blades going, which makes a lot of sense, but for a filmmaker, it was kinda bummed, cuz I wanted to film them right there. Then you're double-harnessed at the top. I'm absolutely petrified of heights, and I was going slowly. I would find that—I would love to know the source for that.

John Hofmeister: The statistics are recorded in companies and states and so on. Nationally, there's no number available because there's no requirement—

Peter Byck: But you can compile 'em.

John Hofmeister: You can compile them if people are willing to give you the information.

Peter Byck: Mm-hmm.

John Hofmeister: What I'm talking about is the incident rate. This is an OSHA measurement of human injuries. I'm not talking about fatalities.

Peter Byck: Is it like per capita?

John Hofmeister: [Cross Talk] The knees, the elbows, the shoulders, the fingers—working with the tools, the cold conditions.

Eve Troeh: Okay.

John Hofmeister: The incident rate, in terms of affecting people's ability to work. It also has the highest turnover from an employment standpoint of any part of the energy industry. I'm not denying the effects of health on the general population. I was only referring to the work within the wind industry itself. Relative to work in other supply areas, this is significant.

Eve Troeh: Great. Thanks for clarifying. Peter, I wanted to ask you what you think of the idea of any of these plans that are looking at 2050 or 2030 or 2070 or 2100. In your film, you talk about the fact that—to put it bluntly, we're already screwed—

Peter Byck: Yeah.

Eve Troeh: - and I wanted you to chime in on the idea that any plan enacted could really get us where we need to go, and what do we do in the face of that?

Peter Byck: Yeah. Pretty much, we've already got too much CO2 up there already, so, right now, we're past the point of real damage. Hurricane Sandy—Superstorm Sandy—I've been very, very slow to say any weather event was climate. I think the Katrina thing being blown up is—it was perfect for the Al Gore film and great for the poster—but the real problem with Hurricane Katrina was—it was a hurricane—I think it was a 2 when it hit New Orleans, but they had really bad levies, so it's an Army Corps of Engineers and a budgeting problem.

I like exactly this plan because I wanna go to a low-carbon economy as quickly as possible. What I understand with John is that things take time, and if you want industry on board, give them a comfort level. Give them a comfort level upfront so that they come on board—with U.S. cap, pushing cap and trade.

My theory on that is: Once industry comes on board to something like a cap-and-trade program, they're gonna see so quickly how much money they can make doing the thing I want them to make, it's gonna go faster than what you told 'em it was gonna go, and their comfort level is gonna increase because they're making money.

It's almost like: Tell 'em what they wanna hear, and then let them find out how fast it's gonna go. You look at Wal-Mart. They came into the energy efficiency stuff—they needed a good P.R. piece, and then they realized how much money they were saving. They went to it full-bore, and they're energy leaders. They've leaders of trucking efficiencies and all sorts of things.

We've got too much CO2 up there already. Superstorm Sandy—you had 25-foot waves in Chicago on Lake Michigan at Chicago, you had 2 feet of snow in Appalachia, and you had New York City flooding. That wasn't Wednesday in Chicago, Thursday in Appalachia, Friday in New York. That was the same day. Same time. I think that's a pretty good sign that things are getting out of hand.

Eve Troeh: Mm-hmm. Do we need a plan for that?

Peter Byck: Yeah, we do.

Eve Troeh: In this mix?

Peter Byck: Yeah.

Eve Troeh: That hasn’t been addressed by either of these plans here.

Peter Byck: Exactly. When I started the film in 2007, I met this guy who I thought was—he was tellin' me how his cows and the soil could sequester enough carbon to slow down and reverse climate change. I thought, "Sounds great. I'm gonna film ya cuz I'm filmin'. I hope you're right, but—ehh." Right?

I'm been in touch with John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project consistently for the last six years. The Marin Carbon Project is now funding research at U.C. Berkeley. Their research is coming back that's showing huge, huge capabilities of grazing land basically being able to do what it did for 500,000 years already, with cattle or bison or [inaudible] or sheep on grasslands. We've got half a billion years of R&D that this works.

When those systems are turned on, when they're doin' what they were set out to do, the roots of the grasses go down ten feet. When roots go down that far, and the plant dies, the carbon stays down there, and it stays down there for centuries. In a natural system, we're sequestering carbon in massive amounts.

What we've done with the way we farm, and what we've done with the way we raise our cattle, is we've overgrazed. We're using a lot of chemicals in farming that's killing the ability for the soil to do what it wants to do. We've turned off the system. Right now, soils are expiring carbon. That's one of the biggest exports of the United States is carbon from soil.

Their studies are coming in. I'm talking to ranchers who are seeing this, that are having green grass during droughts. I actually got a meeting with McDonald's in December, and they're looking at this.

What happens when you finish cattle on grass—you don't finish it on corn. There are a whole lot of issues that happen with the corn finishing of cattle. One, corn is poison for cattle. You have to give them antibiotics, cuz they're in the feedlots—that's another bad system—and 80 percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. go to cattle. F.Y.I.

It's a huge system change. When you finish cattle on grass, you need eight more months per cow, so that's a money thing, but when you finish the cattle on grass, you get healthy food. You get high omega-3's and low omega-6's. With the corn finish, you get high omega-6's, which are not good for humans, and you get low omega-3's, which are good.

When I went to McDonald's, I said, "I think I found a way for you guys to turn your main product into a health food, slow down and reverse climate change, but I don't know if you can do it makin' money—

[Laughter]

- making as much money, but I think you can, because when you do the foraging and you do the work with the cattle on the grasslands, it produces 40 percent more forage than if you hadn't done it. It's 40 percent more. You sequester water in huge amounts. Very important in this part of the country. Per hectare, it's 27,000 gallons of new water that wasn't there before they do the new treatment, which is the old treatment.

Forty percent more forage—well, guess what? Fifty percent of your cattle industry is food. Fuel prices are going up. Corn and fuel are tied together inextricably.

Right now, instead of just being a filmmaking, observing thing, we're now being put in a position where I'm actually having farmers calling me—like, I had a guy call today and say, "Hey, who'd you have call me?" He was yelling at me—and so we're in it now!

I wanna help discover whether this can be done economically, cuz I know it's gonna produce healthier food, I know it's gonna slow down climate change, and I know if it doesn't work economically, it's not gonna happen. We're all about makin' things work economically, and I think it will work economically.

We're not talkin' about—that could be a film, right there. Just think if McDonald's is just looking at this—what that does for them as a citizen of the world.

Eve Troeh: Right. I do think it's interesting to think about the role that corporations plan in this. I've done a lot of coverage of corporate sustainability for Marketplace. When we look at the role that business plays versus the role that government has played and the hopes for what government can do in the coming 4 years or 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, there's an interesting tension there. Sometimes it seems, surprisingly, that business is taking things further than government is willing to.

Peter Byck: And faster.

Eve Troeh: Yes. At times. On certain things. I want to talk—we can talk about wind and solar and wave energy, but the reality is in the U.S. right now, we are doing a lot with fossil fuels. The horizontal hydraulic fracturing industry has taken off. We hear all the time that North Dakota has the most jobs in the country because of all the oil drilling that's going on up there. The reality is we're producing more fossil fuels than it seems we have in a long time and set to continue doing so, especially with natural gas. That's been touted as potentially a good thing because it's a "clean-er" fossil fuel—

Peter Byck: That's good marketing.

Eve Troeh: - than some of the other options.

Peter Byck: That's very good storytelling.

Eve Troeh: Well, you can answer first.

[Laughter]

Eve Troeh: This idea of natural gas—it seems that we are—we're drilling it. I mean, we're getting it. It's happening. It's flowing and doesn't seem to be any slowing down of it any time soon. This idea of it as a bridge fuel—a bridge from what and to what—and is that even a proper way to think of it. Peter, I will let you go first, but I'll ask you to be succinct.

Peter Byck: You got it.

[Audience laughter]

Clean coal does exist—good marketing. The fact that natural gas is clean is just good storytelling and good marketing. I think the oil industry are the best storytellers we've had since Shakespeare. They're brilliant—absolutely brilliant.

[Audience laughter]

Mark Jacobson: Why do we hate them? Why do we hate them?

Peter Byck: Yeah—there's a lot there, but I know that you can answer the issue of natural gas, cuz we were just talking about this before here, so I'm gonna dish it over.

Mark Jacobson: Natural gas is a bridge to nowhere, but let's just look at it. First of all, it puts out 60 to 70 times more carbon dioxide and air pollution per unit of energy generated than wind. Why would you even start there, when there's plenty of wind to repower the entire world seven times over. Wind in fast-wind locations over land worldwide—so that's only 15 percent—I mean, 15 percent of the entire world's land has fast-wind locations, and you only need less than 1 percent of that to repower the entire world.

You don't even need this natural gas. As I talked about before, wind is even cheaper. In the Dakotas, it's cheaper than natural gas. It's literally 3 cents a kilowatt-hour in some cases—to 4—but on average, they're pretty similar. You can go to bad wind locations, and it'll be more expensive. Anyway, it's on the same order.

The comparisons should be coal with gas—is the first thing. It's really coal with wind, coal with solar—sorry, gas with wind, gas with solar. Let's just compare even natural gas with coal. Okay, natural gas is cleaner than coal in terms of the air pollution emissions, but they both emit a lot of different air pollutants. Natural gas emits more ammonia. The NOx is pretty similar. Coal emits more sulfur dioxide—more carbon monoxide. Natural gas is more methane and more volatile organic carbon, if you look at the whole chain.

In terms of the air pollutant emissions, they both emit a lot, but coal is actually more of that, so that's one for natural gas. However, in terms of—the same pollutants that cause coal to harm health also offset some of its climate warming.

Now, if you just look at carbon dioxide and methane, then natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than coal per unit energy generated but more methane. If you actually just looked at those two species, then it's kind of close.

People argue about the methane emissions—how much leakage—it all depends on the leakage rate of the methane and the timeframe you're looking at, but it's relatively close. Even if it favors natural gas, you haven't looked at the whole picture. You have to look at all the other pollutants.

When you look at the other pollutants, it's hands-down coal causes less global warming per unit energy than gas because it emits so much sulfur dioxide that it offsets half of the warming from coal due to the carbon dioxide and methane.

Peter Byck: You're saying sulfur dioxide actually is a cooler.

Mark Jacobson: Is a reflective component that not only reflects radiation directly but increases cloud thickness and so reflects more radiation. This is well known in the scientific community, but nobody wants to talk about it because we don’t—you wanna get rid of both coal and gas. They're both bad. One causes more warming. The other causes more air pollution and health problems, but it's just not true to say that natural gas is clean. It's just not true at all. It's a fiction.

In fact, it's one of the leading components that's causing the Arctic ice to melt because it emits both methane, which has a very high global-warming potential. In other words, it causes fast warming of the climate, and it emits black carbon from natural gas flaring. That causes a million times more warming per unit mass than carbon dioxide and is the second leading cause of global warming.

Both these components are—in fact, the European Union passed a law last year mandating or trying to control black carbon emissions, and U.S. also just has—well, the U.S. plus a group of 20 countries, including the whole G-8, just signed an agreement that they're trying to control methane and black carbon emissions to try to save the Arctic. About 14 percent of all the methane emissions come from natural gas.

If you want to increase natural gas, all you're gonna do is destroy the Arctic further. Plus, they have all these ships now going to the Arctic as it's melting, trying to extract more oil and gas, and what they're doing is dumping black carbon because the ships have a lot diesel. They use bunker fuel, which is the dirtiest type of fuel possible, and it's just darkening the snow and ice there and causing it to melt even faster.

It's like a positive feedback—all these ships going there to get more gas to cause more climate warming faster and faster. It's just a disaster waiting to happen, and if we don't stop all the gas drilling and all the gas use right now, as well as all the coal use, we're gonna get to that tipping point in climate.

Pollution particles worldwide are masking half of global warming. Global warming, since 1850, has been about 0.8 degrees Celsius, but really it's been 1.6 degrees Celsius, except 0.8 degrees Celsius is being hidden by sulfates and nitrate and some organic particles and gases.

Peter Byck: Global dimming, right?

Mark Jacobson: It's dimming. As you clean up air pollution, which we wanna do, you're suddenly gonna have all this warming, so it's a much more serious problem—global warming is—than people really realize. I think we have to stop talking about bridge fuels and taking our time and using technologies that might be available in 10 or 20 years and start action right now to do this. This is a scientific result. This is not just an advocacy result.

Eve Troeh: John, your take on natural gas.

John Hofmeister: I'm not going to argue with Mark's science because it's impeccable, and I commend the scientists that have worked on this and who have these answers. The reality is, however, we live in a society where choice is available to us—has been available to us—and I think we ultimately want choice. We want the choice to smoke. We want the choice to eat bad foods. We want many choices.

But the bridge fuel idea, to me, works in a variety of ways. Because we have a long road ahead of us to move to a different kind of an energy system, I use the term natural gas as a bridge fuel because until we have acceptability of both battery and hydrogen fuel cell for personal transportation, for trucking, other transportation requirements, we're not gonna stop transporting ourselves or commerce.

We need a way to move away from oil because oil is becoming increasingly scarce. It's not that we're running out. It's not that we don't have more than we'll ever need. It's that oil is becoming very problematic to produce from a technology standpoint, whether it's off Brazil in the Pre-Salt, whether it's in the Arctic, whether it's off East Africa, whether it's off the coast of California or deepwater Gulf of Mexico.

Oil is becoming increasingly difficult to produce at a time when the world wants extraordinary more amounts of oil. China, for example, used 5 million barrels a day in 2005, 10 million barrels a day in 2011, and needs 15 million barrels a day in 2015. Where is it coming from?

The U.S. at a full-employment economy uses 20 million barrels a day. We only produce 6.8. We were at 5, so we've moved up from 5 to 6.8. We can't satisfy our transportation needs in the next 10 to 20, 30 years if we don't use natural gas as a transportation fuel because, I submit, we will not have battery and hydrogen fuel cell replacing internal combustion engines in that timeframe. Therefore, I see it as a bridge to electrifying the fleet.

We can turn natural gas—by producing more—into compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, gas to liquids. We can turn natural gas into methanol. We can actually turn natural gas into gasoline. Because we have hundreds of millions of people who want the choice to go out to their driveway or go out to the street, turn on the ignition, and go. We have to come to grips with the fact that this is not pretty, this is not pleasant, but it's reality.

When we try to push science onto the uninformed, they're skeptical. When we try to push—whether it's nutrition, whether it's physical well-being, whether it is health care, whether it is gun control—when we try to push well thought-through, different ways of doing things in our world—in our U.S. world—we meet resistance.

There's a fundamental anti-intellectualism in our society. It's been there. It's there today. It will be there tomorrow. The anti-intellectualism puts the scientific solutions, unfortunately, at a lower level of priority than today's immediate choice and tomorrow's expectation of continued choice.

We have to come to grips with this in real time, in our society, working in anything but a perfect political system or political process, where we have special interests spending freely, which—it's unconscionable to me that we tolerate the special interest spending the way we do in this country, right or left, depending on your political point of view, when it is completely manipulating the system, based upon what it takes to get elected.

We've given up representative democracy for special-interest democracy. That's a bigger problem. I realize we're here to talk about science. I'm talking some political science, which I think is every bit as critical to the set of solutions we would embrace as the science solutions.

Eve Troeh: I'm wondering—

Peter Byck: Can I jump in—real quick?

Eve Troeh: Yes.

Peter Byck: A lot of people who are very concerned about climate change are thinking we need some sort of Pearl Harbor moment. Unfortunately, the whole issue about climate change is that's slower than that. It's happening, but it's just slower than that. No bullets are being fired—yet. There's no consensus for moving quickly—which I think makes a lot of sense—because there's no consensus that there's a problem.

Personally, I think that the reason there's no consensus on that there's a problem is because your former industry did a really, really, really good job of poisoning the well of discourse with regard to whether we've got climate change or not.

I've had people from Shell—I interviewed 'em. Shell's major climate guy—his name is David Hone. He told me personally, "Yeah, we used to do that. We're not doing it anymore." That's what he told me in 2009. I had a fellow from Exxon at a dinner in 2008 say, "Yeah, we've definitely been putting out a lot of disinformation on the issue of whether climate change is real and that the science isn't there."

It's the same tack that was used to kill health insurance during Truman's run, and it's the same tack that was---you know—cigarettes—"We don't know if the science is right that it's causing cancer."

I think the most powerful act that someone from the oil industry could make right now, who knows humans are causing climate change—which I know you know—I've read your book and enjoyed your book—is to say, "Yes, we did that, and—

guess what?—it wasn't true. We've got a big problem on our hands."

I think you would dissolve the conflict in this country on this issue so that we all could be on the same page. I think it would be one of the bravest, strongest, most patriotic acts that could be done.

John Hofmeister: With respect to my former company—

[Applause]

- that was essentially acknowledged in the first sustainability report in 1998, which published results from '97. The acknowledgement was made, and since that time, it has been a progressive effort to change the way the company thinks. I don't speak for the company anymore because I'm not a part of it, but I see no difference in the company's operations today than I did in the migration toward—

- I helped to lead the effort in this country with the United States Climate Action Partnership to create a bona fide, real cap-and-trade system, which was part of a 35-member voluntary organization with about 30 companies and about 5 environmental NGOs.

Peter Byck: Very, very cool.

John Hofmeister: We put a platform in front of the Congress in 2009 as the new administration came into office and the Democratic majority took over the House and the Senate. Waxman and Markey got a hold of it, put their name on a bill, and they basically turned what we had proposed—what 35 organizations agreed to as a solution for cap and trade—they all but turned it upside down.

Peter Byck: That's 35 organizations, including Big Oil, big environmental groups—

John Hofmeister: GM, Ford—

Peter Byck: - big manufacturing.

John Hofmeister: GE, Seaman's—as well as Friends of the Earth and Natural Resources Defense Counsel. We all sat at the same table, and we agreed voluntarily. It went to Congress and—with all due respect to elected members from Virginia and West Virginia and Indiana and Illinois, who wanted to protect their coal industry—they just completely changed around what was in the framework to figure out how they're gonna get enough votes to pass it.

It only passed by six or eight votes in the end. It was a bipartisan opposition—is what I'm saying—because it was a Democratic Congress at the time. Then the Senate wouldn't even touch it, and the White House wouldn't touch it either.

This was a super-majority Democratic Congress and a majority Democratic House and a White House that was brand-new, and with all the campaign promises notwithstanding. You know, "The oceans will stop rising, and the earth will begin to cool," and so forth.

The political process—there are serious problems with it. I can't speak for other—I can't speak for any oil company any more, but I think I was not alone at the table. Conico was there, and BP was there, and Exxon has led the parade on talking about a carbon tax.

Some would say, "Why don't we go with a carbon tax?" Well, the last time we taxed energy was in 1993 when the Clinton Administration proposed a BTU tax to get 6 cents on a gallon of gasoline with Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Congress gave 'em 3 cents. That's the last time we moved on an energy tax.

Peter Byck: And look at the economy of that decade.

John Hofmeister: With the 3-cent tax, the Democrats lost the House in the next election—partly because of that 3-cent—We don't like to tax energy in this country.

Eve Troeh: Let's go back to the idea of cap and trade and a carbon tax. I am curious, a, whether people think that that is the A+, number one, best-of-all-possible-worlds solution, and whether it is at all politically possible in the U.S. in any conceivable timeframe than we can imagine here on earth.

Peter Byck: My cousin Eric is a Libertarian. There's a friend of mine in Louisville named Tourney 1:03:44 who makes Tea Party people look like Liberals. When I sit down and speak with them about the externalities of carbon, they get it, they hate it, and they wanna get it taken care of right away. For them, a carbon tax or cap and trade makes the most sense, and it's a big issue, and it's on the books for them.

Again, it's a storytelling issue. No one knows how many Libertarians and Democrats—and Republicans, for that matter—that are actually on board with this already right now. Because that well's been poisoned, we're not hearing each other.

Eve Troeh: I'd like to ask Mark—do you think that it is the best way to fund a transition to a clean-energy economy? In California, the system which is moving forward—the idea behind it, anyway—is that you charge companies for their pollution. You use the revenue generated from that to then fund their transition to cleaner energy. Is cap and trade the way to transition the way that you're hoping to?

Mark Jacobson: First of all, there are a variety of policy mechanism to make this transition, and those are a couple that are on the table. I think the first thing to recognize is—between 2003 and 2008, the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. received $72.5 billion in subsidies, so the first thing to do is stop the subsidies.

Then, if you really wanna go to clean, renewable energies, you increase the subsidies—you can move those subsidies to production tax credits for wind and solar and the other good things and the battery electric vehicles. We need electric charging infrastructures to help vehicle expansion. Solar feed-in tariffs, for example.

There are a lot of individual targeted rules that can be put in place to promote energies, but if you just have—let's say—a carbon tax, all that does is it slows down the fossil fuels. It doesn't get rid of them.

Unless you can really—some coal plants, for example, are grandfathered in under the Clean Air Act Amendment, so they don't have to—in the 1970s, when the Clean Air Act Amendments were first passed, they thought that a lot of these coal plants from the '50s wouldn't survive another five or ten years, so they got grandfathered in. They can just run without any air pollution control devices, so they put out huge amounts of pollution and kill lots of people.

Peter Byck: And they're still running cuz they're cheaper than making the new ones.

Mark Jacobson: Yeah. They pay themselves off, and they run 2 cents a kilowatt hour sometimes. You've gotta regulate these and make 'em go out of business. One way is to actually just force them to put in control devices, and that'll make 'em go out of business because they can't afford it, because it'll be expensive. If you do that through a carbon tax, that's fine, or cap and trade, that's fine—I'm not really particular which mechanism—or you just have regulation.

China manages to do everything just by command and control. That's how Los Angeles cleaned up its air—

Peter Byck: Pesky democracy.

Eve Troeh: Not in a democracy.

[Laughter]

Mark Jacobson: But they do it, though. They put in transmission lines between Three Gorges Dam and Beijing. They're just piled right on top of each other. No regulation of them. You just put as much transmission as you need on one corridor, and they do it. They put in wind turbines where they want—you know, everywhere.

That's not what's gonna happen in the U.S., but Los Angeles had a very command-and-control economy, and it reduced the pollution so significantly between the 1950s and today. That's why all air pollution regulation worldwide is based on Los Angeles air pollution control regulations. In fact, that's where the whole history of air pollution regulation really started—is in Los Angeles.

That's the model that you really wanna start—you really wanna follow—is a command-and-control one where you set regulations. You limit the emissions, and you force them to put in technologies to limit the emissions. That should include CO2 emissions, as well as the other air pollution emissions.

There are a lot of mechanisms. I don't have a favorite, but I think you really need a suite or basket of ones that would be for any given area.

Eve Troeh: But at the federal level, and given that we are not moving toward a Chinese model of government, how do you think that that could be managed at the federal level in a policy [fading voice].

Mark Jacobson: I think that actually most implementation of this clean, renewable system will occur at the state level.

Eve Troeh: Okay.

Mark Jacobson: At the federal level, you can do a lot, but I think—like the production tax credit for wind and solar needs to happen, too—and those are good, but taking away the subsidies from the oil and gas industry and coal industry—but increasing slightly—no, phase out the subsidies because you don't wanna subsidize the energy industries forever.

Just keep in mind that all the subsidies that wind and solar are getting is about one-tenth of what the oil and gas and coal industry got in their first 15 years of those industries, if you look historically. Even though it sounds like a lot today, it's actually very small compared to what these other industries have been getting, not only for their first 15 years, but for decades and decades since then.

Why does these coal and gas [inaudible] companies need subsidies now, when they're such mature industries. You know, oil was discovered in the late 1800s and coal in London in 1223 or so.

Eve Troeh: [Inaudible] [Laughter] John, cap and trade. What do you think?

John Hofmeister: Cap and trade really got—the well was poisoned. You're absolutely right, Peter, when you use those terms. The well was poisoned with Waxman and Markey, because it was such a dastardly deed that they did. Even the 35 companies from U.S. Climate Action Partnership—virtually all of them walked away from Waxman and Markey.

Eve Troeh: But would that have been the answer?

John Hofmeister: I think it would have been a helpful—

Peter Byck: Start.

John Hofmeister: - start to taking seriously the price of carbon. Actually, the reason that my company—and I was in favor of it, and still am, by the way. I penned a recent op-ed that's not published yet on returning cap and trade to the states, like California or New York. With RGGI, where you have the Northeastern states. Make it a state solution, as you suggested, Mark.

I think because the whole cap and tax storytelling took place. It was not tax. In a real cap and trade process, those who reduce their carbon emissions get credits. Those credits are like money. You can use that money to reduce your carbon even further and get more credits. You're investing in the future of a cleaner company.

I said to said to Ed Markey, "Ed, if you give me enough time, we can give you emission-free refineries. The technology is possible, but I need 30 years, and I need the others to have to do it, too, because I can't just absorb those costs and still compete if I'm the only one doin' it."

I said to him—after the Waxman-Markey vote, I went to him and said, "Ed, I think we need Plan B, because the Senate's not gonna take Plan A, so we need a longer runway. We need time, and time is really the solution that we need on many of these kind of problems."

I haven't given up on cap and trade, but I don’t think the federal government will touch it—not certainly in the next four years.

Eve Troeh: Do state programs, like California's system, make a difference—or renewable energy standards at a state level? Can these sort of build up to a federal—if not a centralized energy plan, can we get where we need to go with state- and city-level actions?

John Hofmeister: The risk is the evaporation of industry in California. That's the risk.

Peter Byck: It just started. The carbon market just started in California—or it starts in February.

Eve Troeh: Right.

John Hofmeister: But if Arizona recruited California industries because Arizona has no cap and trade, and it's not going to—just as Texas has recruited so many companies from California in the last five years because of the free market versus California market type of operations in Texas. I happen to live in Texas.

That's where you do need federal leadership, because if one state starts competing with other states, you could have a free-for-all, and that is not gonna solve the problem. It's just gonna move it around.

Eve Troeh: But, Mark, the city and state level is something you feel optimistic about?

Mark Jacobson: Yes, because if you wanna advance a large-scale renewable energy plan, you're not gonna do it at the U.S. level. Nobody in the U.S.—it's too paralyzed for that to happen right now. There are states that really want to do things, and some states are already doing a lot of stuff but can do more so.

It's more practical if you want to convert a state's infrastructure at this point. After—let's say—one or two states start on that path, then maybe the federal government will wake up and say, "Wow! Maybe this is good for the whole U.S," but I think you have to have some example that it can work on a smaller scale, so you gotta start somewhere. To try to start on the whole U.S. and say, "We're gonna change the entire energy infrastructure"—that's gonna be a non-starter. Nobody's gonna—they don't even know where to start doing that.

Peter Byck: But even taking it down to cities—you know, we haven't really talked about buildings, per se. We've talked about the power for buildings, but that's what 40 percent of our energy—

Eve Troeh: In San Francisco—

Peter Byck: - in this country, 40 percent of our emissions are from buildings.

Eve Troeh: Heating and cooling those buildings—operating—

Peter Byck: And all the power inside. The cutting-edge architects are working on making buildings into batteries. They're not there yet, but that's there aspiration—and distributed power. We have a lot of power generated onsite, so there's a lot more efficiency than having to go down the power lines and things like that.

Cities are doing it, and mayors get it, cuz they're there. With building efficiency standards and re-zoning laws and things like that, a lot can happen. A lot is happening at the city level. Then those mayors become governors. Then they're gonna take that success, and they're gonna take it to their states, and eventually one of those governors is gonna become president. Right?

The real missing thing is national policy. There's a vacuum for national leadership right now, and I think, again, it's a storytelling issue for the president. "Just tell us why. Tell us why we want clean energy. Tell us why. We wanna still have our air conditioning. We still wanna drive our cars. I still wanna fly." I have a huge carbon footprint right now because they're aren't biofuels for planes yet.

"Just tell us why we wanta do it cleaner. Tell us how expensive electrons rally are. Show us that coal is very expensive when you bring in all the externalities. Show us that nuclear is tremendously expensive when you bring in all the externalities, and make the case."

John Hofmeister: The reality is it doesn't poll well. The issue of climate—the issue of energy—doesn't poll well in terms of the attention that someone like the president would pay to it, whether it's this president or the previous seven.

Coming back to the Pearl Harbor. I think that this—

Eve Troeh: Yes. This idea of having a Pearl Harbor moment that creates a sense of urgency around changing the energy system.

John Hofmeister: What I write about is: We're headed for that Pearl Harbor moment within the next half-decade. What it will look like are national gas lines everywhere. Series of rolling national blackouts everywhere.

Because we have no plan, and because we have regulatory activity taking place in certain parts of the energy system, which will effectively curtail dirty energy by reducing the ability to produce it, without the consequent build-up of alternative sources of energy, and the population is growing, and the economy is strong.

Come back to the point I made about oil is too difficult to produce and the world needs more. Even the incremental production increases the U.S. are seeing is not going to be enough to close the gap over the next—say—five years from now—2016, 2017—and we're gonna face shortages, high prices—and that will be the wakeup moment when we say to ourselves, "We don't like blackouts. We don't like gas lines. How did this happen, and what are we gonna do about it?"

If we have the current set of governance conditions that we have today, we could probably go backwards. We'll "drill, baby, drill." We'll reopen those decommissioned coal plants, which will be a serious, serious problem.

Eve Troeh: Okay. Opening, reopening coal plants. We have an issue on the table right now with the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Nebraska governor has now said that the pipeline can come the state, so now the ball is squarely in President Obama's court, deciding what to do about this pipeline.

I think, A, there are a couple of assumptions out there that you read so often in the media—that the pipeline will bring cheaper energy down the line, that it will create these jobs. It almost sounds—the way things are going in the media now—that it's almost like an inevitability—that this going to happen.

What are the consequences of the Keystone XL Pipeline going through, and what does that mean about how much we as a society want to or going to be able to transition to cleaner energy?

Peter Byck: Can I just give a couple of details before you jump in? Cuz I wanna hear what you've got to say.

Eve Troeh: Yeah.

Peter Byck: I spoke to the Alberta government about—

Eve Troeh: I think we all do.

Peter Byck: - and they told me that tar sands—first of all, they wanted me to say oil sands—fair enough—but tar sands create 50 percent more carbon than conventional oil.

Eve Troeh: Mm-hmm. It takes more energy to get the energy out.

Peter Byck: Yeah. They told me that. That was with the government who supports the whole issue. Then another thing that I've learned is: The world's second-largest dam—behind Three Gorges—is a berm in Alberta holding back, basically, the contaminated water from the process of making the tar sands. That's just sittin' there.

As we know with disasters, when they happen, it costs more to take care of it. If John's future happens, it's clearly going to be a lot more expensive to deal with then than it would be to deal with it now with things that might cost more now, but it'll be cheaper in the wrong run.

Mark Jacobson: I wanna say—part of the—we were talking about electric cars and also the oil from the tar sands. The transition to electric cars, I think, is actually one thing that might actually occur a lot faster than people think, because electric cars are so much more efficient than internal combustion—gasoline, diesel, biofuel, whatever type of thing you're burning. It's five times lower price for fuel.

It's 80 cents a gallon equivalent to drive an electric car compared to $4.00 a gallon for gasoline. Why would anybody even drive something else? It's because they haven't tried it yet. It accelerates more. It has more torque. It has a greater efficiency. It's quiet. Nothing breaks down. There's fewer moving parts. There's no engine.

Eve Troeh: There's currently a bit of fear, I suppose, from the Boeing incidents that have happened recently, as well.

Mark Jacobson: Yeah, there's fear—

Eve Troeh: There are all these setbacks of adopting the technology that people might have.

Mark Jacobson: There's always the fear that the batteries heat up, but it turns out they don't—once they figure out how to fix the initial problems. I've been driving an electric car for three-and-a-half years now, and—I don't understand why I ever drove anything else—because there wasn't anything [cross talk]

Eve Troeh: What is it? What do you drive?

Mark Jacobson: I don't wanna say.

[Audience laughter]

Eve Troeh: Is it a Tesla? No. That's okay.

Mark Jacobson: Yeah, it's a Tesla.

[Audience laughter]

Mark Jacobson: It's a very efficient car. It drives—but fuel cost—as I said, it's 80 cents a gallon equivalent.

Peter Byck: Talking about [cross talk] investment. It costs more to buy right now.

Mark Jacobson: Yeah, it's more expensive. The Tesla—excuse me, the roadster is more expensive [cross talk] —

Eve Troeh: Yes, yes.

Mark Jacobson: - but the [inaudible] cars—like the LEAF—it's on the order of $5000.00 to $7000.00 more, but it pays itself off over a 15-year cycle. If you drive 15,000 miles a year, which is the average in the U.S., it not only pays itself off—you get a little extra. If the price of gallon goes to $8.00 a gallon, and the electricity equivalent price goes up to $1.70, you'll even get a huge bonus.

From the economic point of view, if you look at the whole lifecycle of the fuel plus the car costs, it's a cheaper investment, but it also makes it—you don't have to go to the gas station anymore. You could charge it. If you have a garage, you can charge it there. Charging the new Tesla Model S—you can go 310 miles on a charge. It charges one hour—

Eve Troeh: He does not have a sponsorship deal, as far as a I know. [Laughter][Cross Talk]

Mark Jacobson: No, I'm just saying that—cuz people don't realize how efficient these cars are, so once they do—a lot of people do in California, cuz there's a lot of people driving these cars now—that they would never go back. This argument that, "We have to worry about the price of gasoline"—well, if you're worried about the price of gasoline, get an electric car."

Eve Troeh: How many people in here drive an electric car? Anyone? A few hands. How many hybrid drivers? A few more.

Peter Byck: How many want an electric car?

[Audience laughter]

Eve Troeh: This is not the Oprah Show. I'm sorry. We're not giving away any electric cars.

[Audience laughter]

Peter Byck: There's a big pit here with four electric cars.

Mark Jacobson: I think it's kind of a moot point because—they're not gonna go out of business overnight. The oil industry is not gonna go out of business, but I think if you're gonna keep spending and wasting money on higher fuel prices for gasoline, then I think you really should consider going to a different type of vehicle. That's what I think will happen as these prices go up. It's actually better that oil prices do go up to help speed this conversion.

Peter Byck: Can I ask a question? Do you think that the lithium battery and the rare earth issues and the pollution of mining the batteries for electric cars—do you think that's being held to a higher environmental standard than the whole way we're doing things right now?

Mark Jacobson: First of all, even for rare earth elements—for electric cars, you need lithium, which is not really rare earth. It's not a rare earth. In fact, it's not even toxic. It's not like lead or nickel or cadmium. It's not even on EPA's cancer list at all or toxic list. It's something that can be recycled, too, and will be recycled, but there's enough lithium—as I think I mentioned earlier, there's enough lithium for 3 billion cars worldwide, and we have 800 million.

A lot the lithium is in Bolivian salt flats—the salt flats are not even soil, so you're not even mining in mountains or anything else. It's like one meter below the salt level, and so it's hardly any degradation. Certainly, you don't want to degrade the whole salt flats, but it's not anything the same as mining earth.

The other thing—these are one-time things, whereas coal and oil and gas, you have to continuously mine over the life of the vehicle or the coal plants. It's a continuous, nonstop process, whereas for each of these devices—you do it once for the one car, and then you recycle the material, so you can do it for other cars. It's much less invasive. You can't even compare it, I think, to—

Eve Troeh: Drilling for oil and gas?

Mark Jacobson: - drilling for oil and gas, because of the fact that it's just much less needed.

Eve Troeh: Back to the Keystone Pipeline, and I would like you take on that, John, because I know you like to point out that all of these internal combustion engine cars are in production right now. Of those that are coming onto the market, it's still the majority of the vehicles being made—obviously, the super majority of this crowd also still drives a traditional gas car. I do.

Peter Byck: I do.

Eve Troeh: We know that Mark doesn't.

[Laughter]

Eve Troeh: How do we balance that? "We're going to need this oil." Some people have also argued that, "Well, if the U.S. doesn't go through with the Keystone XL Pipeline, that oil will simply be sent to other markets to be used anyway, so one way or another , it's coming out of the ground. It's getting burned." How do we reconcile that with a desire to move toward clean energy for our own country?

John Hofmeister: In reality, we don't. We postpone the decision on clean energy by—

Eve Troeh: What do you mean?

John Hofmeister: We're gonna continue to use dirty energy from different sources. Canada has a sovereign national strategy to develop the oil sands for the good of the nation, for as far into the future as they can see.

If the U.S. market doesn't want the oil, the minister, Mr. Oliver, has told me, other markets will. He's been to China. They'll be happy to take it. They will solve the problem of building a pipeline to the west coast of Canada one way or another. If we don't take it, it will go to the East—to Asia.

There has been much said about this particular pipeline, but in the context of pipelines generally, there are some 200,000 miles of oil liquid carrying pipelines in the U.S. With respect to the Ogallala Reservoir, there are more than 24,000 miles of pipelines carrying liquids on the Ogallala Aquifer in multiple states. This has been particularly ceased upon as an issue by 350.org and Bill McKibben and several other environmental groups because they want to take a stand on oil sands oil as—what was aid earlier—a dirtier form of oil that the globe cannot afford. That is a point of view. Bill is entirely titled to that point of view.

It wasn't until Bill and his social network joined arms around the White House in November 2011 that President Obama paid this any attention at all. Heading into an election year, messages from Bill, as well as other environmental groups, said very clearly to the Democratic reelection campaign committee for the President, "If you approve this Keystone XL Pipeline, we're gonna stop our contributions to your campaign." When the President flew out of the White House on that Sunday morning when the demonstrators were locked in arms around the White House—and this is all documented—he saw 10,000 people locked in arms on his way to go play golf in a helicopter.

Eve Troeh: [Cross Talk]

John Hofmeister: Not that his carbon footprint isn't large to begin with, but he's the President. Right?

Eve Troeh: Right.

John Hofmeister: He looked down, he saw these folks, and he came back and said, "We gotta do something about this." He took it out of the hands of Hillary Clinton and said, "We're not gonna approve this—not now."

I don't know anybody in the industry that thinks he's not going to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline because—as I've said in many forums—in today's reality, it's a no-brainer. We have these pipelines today. That 800,000 barrels a day can come to the Gulf Coast refineries.

I signed the deal in the expansion of a refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, that has been using Saudi Arabian oil, and the contract to expand the refinery with the Saudis agrees that we will displace Saudi oil with oil sands oils as and when we can when this pipeline gets built, and this was in 2005—6, I think. Saudis will in turn take that oil to the East that would otherwise come to the U.S.

You have all of these agreements, and you have all of this backdrop, and not to approve it would really put—I don't think it would accomplish what many environmentalists think it would accomplish. I think it would be more divisive than anything else.

Eve Troeh: Interesting. One quick question. We are running low on time, and we'll wrap up in a moment.

Peter Byck: Why does Canada need to send the oil here to refine? Why can't they refine it there?

John Hofmeister: The cost of building refineries from Greenfield is too great. Much cheaper to build the pipeline and use existing refining capacity that can handle it—cause that's another alternative, but it's way way capital-intense to do that.

Peter Byck: Just a little point: The pipeline to Vancouver is being very strongly fought by the Canadians as well, so it's not a slam-dunk, but I agree—I thought, "Of course, he's gonna approve it after the election." Obama and the Keystone.

Eve Troeh: On that note, I'm gonna take a look and quote here from the inaugural address. People have noted that eight sentences were devoted to climate change, which is more than perhaps any other topic got. One started off with, "We the people still believe that our obligations as Americans are not to ourselves but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations."

It's a vague statement, to say the least. What do each of you think that statement means, in terms of what will happen with the future of energy under this administration and then going forward from there? Is there a real promise to do that from the American people or from politicians? What can we make, if anything, from a statement like that in an inaugural address? Mark and Peter and then John.

Mark Jacobson: I think he's kind of kowtowing to the environmentalists who've been saying he hasn't been saying anything about climate. He didn't say much about climate in the election campaign. He's done more than the last administration in trying to push clean, renewable energy, but not nearly as much as he should and nothing close to changing the infrastructure of the U.S. or addressing climate change.

I think he's totally on a different plane from what scientists think or what you need to do to solve this problem. We need 80 percent reductions immediately effective of all carbon emissions. Nothing like 20 percent or 10 percent—20 percent, 30 percent—these are just ridiculous numbers to actually have any impact on climate change.

We need 80 percent reduction because what's happening right now is emissions not only of carbon—by the way, carbon dioxide is only 40 percent of global warming—about 43 percent of global warming. There's black carbon, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, which is from oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbon. There are a lot of other components of global warming, and he's only focusing on that [fading voice].

Eve Troeh: One element.

Mark Jacobson: Usually, he focuses on just one element of it. You really need to have huge reductions. When you just have vague statements like that—the DOE is doing good stuff, and a lot of energy technologies are coming out, and costs of wind and solar have come down.

Those are good signs, but you really need this transformation, and there's no sign that he's even talking about transformation as opposed to these gradual changes. These gradual changes--the things are improving, yet—You have more wind and solar, but you also have more natural gas, and this is the problem.

Just to give you some statistics: In 2012, there was about the same installation of wind and natural gas in the U.S. over—yeah, it was almost the same—a little more natural gas. Then solar and coal were tied for third and fourth. But why are we having any coal added? Why do we have any natural gas? You need 100 percent new wind and solar, plus some of the other ones, and zero natural gas and coal.

Now, there was a month in 2012 in September—the only new sources of energy—electric power—in the entire United States were wind and solar power—for one month, but it didn't last a lot longer. That has to be the norm—where you shouldn't have any new natural gas, any new coal, any new oil refineries—they should be made obsolete—be put out of business—by raising their price so high.

The alternatives exist, so if people will start flocking to the alternatives, and when they flock to the alternatives, those prices drop. I think that really has to be done, but he's not on that plane yet.

Eve Troeh: Does a message like that help unify this divided America that you've seen over the past few years?

Peter Byck: It's not enough, and it's not speaking to the folks who are skeptical. People like to be respected. They like to be heard. There's gotta be a way for the President to listen publicly to the debate and then help us get to where we wanta go. I think he's grossly underestimating the enthusiasm and appetite for America to lead on this issues, both within the country and outside the country.

I've been in Europe, and I've had the environmental minister of the U.K. tell me, "As soon as the U.S. gets on board, we get this thing going. If the U.S. doesn't get on board, it doesn't happen." I've had the same thing from the head of the Scottish government. I've had enough Europeans tell me that Americans have this enthusiasm and this entrepreneurial spirit that nobody else has—that the world's waiting.

I've talked about patriotism before. I feel so strongly about that. I think he's so under-estimating how many people would agree with him if he learned how to tell the story in a way that just sidesteps climate, because that well is poisoned, and just went to economics and health and patriotism and national security.

If he just really did that, I think he would bring enough people along that he would get it done. I can just see it. I've been on the road. I see it. We're not a polarized country. We are not. We are told we are so many times, we all believe it, but we're not. If he knew that—if he knew that and really could see that and could have the confidence as a politician—cuz that's what I learned in his first term. I forgot he was when I voted for him the first time.

[Audience laughter]

These are politicians, and they need to know that people are in front. Some politicians don't. Some do. But he already has what he might not think he has to have the courage to just push this.

Eve Troeh: It is really cool, in your film, to see the geographic diversity and the socioeconomic diversity of people involved in these different levels of green jobs and fields and things like that. It is a nice slice of America in the film.

Peter Byck: It's not even a slice. It's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It feels to me what critical mass must look like two years ahead of time. It's like that close—is the way I see it. We need a leader to strike the match and light that healthy fire. Maybe it's not fire. [Laughter]

Eve Troeh: Anything to make of the statement?

John Hofmeister: I think it's a rhetorical statement with nothing behind it at this stage. We'll see if there's something more in the State of the Union address, but the base of credibility is not strong, given the last four years—by anyone that I know in both the environmental side, as well as the industry side.

I'm interested in solutions going forward. I know a lot of my former colleagues are interested in defending the past, but the past is behind us. Let's move forward. I framed a three-page solution through a Cabinet member friend of mine went to the President about a year ago, which could have been part of his campaign but was not, and it deals with the real governance of energy over a long term.

If we don't come to grips with the governance of energy—we can't have a president and 13 executive branch agencies, 26 congressional committees, 1800 federal judges, 50 governors, 50 state legislatures, 50 state court systems, and thousands and thousands of municipalities and townships and counties governing energy. It's chaos.

We had this problem in this country in the monetary system in the 19th century. We had no monetary system management to speak of in the 19th century. In the 20th century, the monetary system collapsed not once but twice in the first 12 years. We fixed it in 1913 with an independent regulatory model that set the big rules—the big rules for the monetary system of the country.

As a consequence of the big rules under the Federal Reserve Act, we have the world's largest economy today, and we have the only benchmark currency in the world today. When we're in trouble, we know the Fed is there to bail us out. I know there's trouble with some people within the Fed. They don't like the idea.

I think we need an equivalent parallel agency for energy. I wrote this up in a three-page memo to the President. I haven't heard word one, but if we don't change the governance, we'll be talking about the ninth president who will promise us some kind of solutions in the future, and we'll be talking it about whether the Democrats and Republicans have the right answers when neither does. We have a big governance problem, and we won't reach the scientific conclusions that we should without the proper governance governing it.

Peter Byck: Can I share something that you and I—on our first phone call? John painted a picture of five years from now—a bunch of problems happening, and people making bad decisions under extreme catastrophe. You were saying that everyone knew BP was a bad operator in the Gulf. All the oil industry folks knew that. When they had the explosion, it wasn't a surprise to everyone in the oil industry.

Everybody else in the Gulf—all the other companies—were actually doing a good job of keeping their operations good and healthy. There was a big rift between the oil industry and Obama when he shut down the whole Gulf—not having a conversation with you guys. I think that's really important because that conversation piece is the key. If he had sat down and said—and it's just Obama—it's everybody. If we all sit down and have these conversations—my Uncle Phil. You know, it's there.

Eve Troeh: Where is here?

Peter Byck: He's in New York. [Audience laughter] He sent me climate denial articles the whole time I was shooting the movie. I made the movie for him, and he understands the approach, and he likes it. He gets it, cuz I talk about money.

John Hofmeister: If I could just close on the point I was making—the statutory authorities would be to determine at an independent regulatory level the sources of future energy—number one. Number two, the efficiencies that we would achieve or seek to achieve through technology. Number three, the infrastructure requirements related to the supply and distribution of the forms of energy that we would produce, and, fourth, the environmental protections to make sure our land, our water, and our air are safe and clean.

If we don’t have that kind of regulatory authority built into law, we're gonna be sitting here four years from now right where we are today, except the situation will be even worse than it is today. That's my prediction.

Eve Troeh: I'm going to say we've had plenty of fuel for conversation. I will now let everyone re-energize themselves. We'll adjourn to the reception out in the lobby of the science center here. Thank you so much for taking part. Thanks to all three of the panelists.