she has a degree from the university of arizona, currently an adjunct professor in water sciences at the university of arizona. she is received a recognition for her writing as a journalist in this area, primarily in the newspaper community. she is worked on environmental issues and not only in the united states, but in china, puerto rico, and colorado. for the last year, she has focused on important environmental climate issues in the southwest of united states. she comes today as the author of a book entitled life in the hot house, how a living planet survives climate change. melanie? [applause]

>> thanks for the nice introduction and for being here. i want to start off by saying this is a project i've been thinking about a long time. the idea came to me 20 years ago when i was in puerto rico and a hurricane came to the tropical island where i was in the caribbean, and so i would never wish that on anyone as was a major hurricane, a pretty terrifying thing, but what amazed me is i came there to study tropical forests and i was on internship there, and i was surprised to see in the four months before i left the island, the leaves looked like the apocalypse after the hurricane. the leaves had grown back on the trees still standing, and even broken trees, they were sprouting afreash. . .

so i thought i wonder if hurricanes might fit in. and that inspired me to come to the university of arizona and study, wanted to look into deep time and at the university of arizona there is a lot of good climate research courses and some of them that i was looking at re in pale leoclimate and eliogeology so climate and vegetation unwanted to see what has the earth been doing in really hot times and colt times over the past -- focus on the

last hundred million years. this is all before humans. this is what lessons can we learn from what the earth does and how we can work with it? keep that in mind because it is an important element. looking back, some of you might not know that even on the long scale going back three hundred million years the high levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases tend to go with high levels of temperatures. in the ice ages greenhouse gases were low. we are in a warm phase right now. the hot house period the greenhouse gases were really high and so were sea levels. there was basically no permanent ice on the planet. i am talking 1 hundred million years as a major focus and fifty-five million years ago and sea levels were 300 feet higher

than they are today. we are not talking about getting there any time soon but those greenhouse gas levels were comparable to the kind of raids we're talking about possibly by the end of the century. it would take a long time for the years to get there but we are headed into a dangerous direction which is why i think the information we can get from these hot house climates are valuable. see levels were lower during the ice age because the ice was tying up the water. they were 300 feet lower roughly. one thing that was surprising to the climate scientists as they discovered it in the 60s and to you today is with those warmer climates also came higher precipitation rates for the world as a whole. that is not every region as my fellow authors describe. we are a fragile area in the southwest and subtropics but for the world as a cold precipitation rates would

generally doubled during those warmer periods and dropped to have during the ice ages. that has its own lessons learned on what the vegetation does because basically forced and wetlands or expanding during those hot house periods. we had gone redwood forests in the arctic circle and the tropics still had tropical forests in places they have looked at. it does seem to be a humid, hot and humid time. during the ice ages the forests in the north contracted, they were plowed over by a eighth sheets so we lost a lot of those forests. the tropics with less rainfall tended to turn into savannah or grassland. it this area was lush during the ice age which is why we are concerned here about the temperature rises because higher temperature means higher

evaporation rates. munson means can evaporate. that is the background information. we are destroying coastal wetlands which are especially important and we have been building cities along the coast and cutting down forests. deforestation and other land-use accounts for a good chunk of greenhouse gas emissions on an average year. the interesting thing is even with all this destruction our natural systems are helping us out. our greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide specifically, the

forests and oceans are taking up about half of what we are putting in the air on an average year. they are already on the job. that can give us a lesson about how much do we need to cut down? a simplistic look and a lot more detail on the background and preferences, those ideas of what we can do with this information. as i mentioned carbon dioxide and temperature tend to go up and down. some people might use that to wonder if it is natural and happens anyway why should we worry? i have a couple points. one is it may have been volcanoes emit in greenhouse gases in the mid cretaceous 100 years ago. looks like it might have been methane gas coming up from the ocean where we have trying to mine it simultaneously coming up

spontaneously and creating problems, eating the environment and now it is humans with our cold, oil and gas burning but no reason to expect this time things will be different or for it not to warm-up just because it is a different source. these archie trapping gases. they do go together and vegetation tends to go together. we tend to get more forests and wetlands during these times partly because of higher seas. the four corners area in arizona and other parts was a swampland but because much of the west was covered with an inland sea, that is not something we can afford -- so many people living on the land and even the sea level rise we are talking about by the end of this century of two or three feet is a big problem for many cities and not just about the

levels but to move around when a tsunami comes sorry traffic event that is not necessarily related to climate change. vegetation can help us but it is not a cure. even in these periods, was still hot. it's not a cure but may be used that as a sign of an adaptation that the earth has. if the earth has a living system which is part of james lovelock's theory, we see the living system and think what does the earth do in these warm times and how can we make that instead of blocking rivers from getting to the gulf of california or things we're doing in our forests creating conditions for serious wildfires that temperatures didn't exacerbate, how might we learn from that? how might they help us adapt?

forests and wetlands are great at absorbing storm water so that is one thing i talk about in some detail in the book but didn't get into as expectation for -- i talked about higher precipitation but you expect more hurricanes. more extreme events and more floods. they help with that and also the temperature rises from shade and evaporative cooling. some of the lessons we apply on more regional scale, these big picture ideas would be that in humid areas like the tropics and eastern u.s. we can hope -- things we can do to help flood protection. we are getting extreme floods and expected to get worse. sea level rise will increase floods. doing things for flood

protection, puts in more wetlands tubes of floods. but that will be a good way to keep our cities, held the lead at to climate change and in humid areas, a really good idea because we know these have been on the job taking of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide in particular and to help them do that job would be a great thing but of course that requires a lot of oversight. collaborative groups. that is an import the element. you need to get local people involved so you get a good divers species and not just some plantations said that is good for humid lands. we have a different situation because we are facing more drying in between possibly more extreme rainfall so in our cities what we need to do is plant trees in our cities to help cool our cities because not only do we have the climate change temperature rise also

payment and buildings emitting extra heat so planting trees in the city is a really important thing that can help us adapt and tucson has been good about that. we are in good example here. in the forest will we need to is get rid of the small trees. get those small trees removed from the forest and a lot of environmental groups have signed on to that it and there is good action going on right now where they had a big rodeo fire. those are things and that group was in collaboration with a lot of different local people working to come to those solutions so these are broad things that a lot of people can get information and inspire their own policy ideas but one thing to keep in mind is getting more people to work collaborative lee is really important when trying to keep these systems in shape and we can do the best we can and hope to keep our plan forests at

least at some place on the mountain. thank you. [applause] >> now it is your turn. audiences need to be participatory in this world. i will ask if you have a question to come to the microphone. microphones on both files. is often true without public engagement, little can be accomplished as has been pointed out. we have three accomplished authors who work endless hours to prepare their books to inform you. it is your time and perhaps your responsibility to respond with questions and comments. let's begin with this gentleman. this lady was first. >> a question for both "life in the hothouse: how a living planet survives climate change" and mitch tobin.

is a guy at a living system, science or religion or both? if she is a religion how do we worship her? and for mitch tobin how we attack the root problem of global warming? what is the root? >> we will keep our answers somewhat short because many questions as possible. >> i address it from the scientific aspect and detail in a chapter how it has evolved in the scientific field. it has been adopted more as a earth system science but many of the same ideas lovelock originated have been adopted by that. as far as the religious they will there are people that want to worship by and i believe in freedom of religion so i think people should do what they feel is right. i have no advice on that. >> as far as solving the problem of climate change it will be an extremely difficult problem to

solve that will take decades. the key is a small number of policies can really -- reduce greenhouse gas emissions like mileage standards and energy-efficient slanders for building codes and renewable portfolio standards that require utilities and certain percentage of energy from solar and wind and other renewable sources and those policies will be really keep that this is a global problem. china overtook the united states as the top e. ritter of greenhouse gases. india is growing, really in other places aside from the united states, they have to take action if and only in the united states where we have been lagging, even if we were enthusiastic attacking the problem of global warming it wouldn't be enough because there are so many countries that are big e matters. >> maybe facebook will do it.

>> maybe. is doing amazing things around the world. anyone who figured out how to combat global warming with facebook i would like to hear the idea. >> we should have long lines at these microphones. you don't ask questions we will ask you questions. >> i am a skeptic. i'm not a skeptic about climate change. we had climate change ever since we had climate. what are amish skeptic about is the predictions. i clearly remember back in the 1970s when i was an undergraduate the predictions were be where, within a few decades we will have an ice age. now based upon data from prestigious universities like he's anglican, that all of a sudden the ice age predictions

were wrong and now we are going to have global warming and the seas are going to rise and i don't believe the predictive value of that stuff. >> and your question is? >> convince me about predictive value about global warming. >> i would like to start with your information upon in the 70s the predictions of an ice age because i tackle that in my book because it is something people have in their mind. it was happening then, there was research going on in the sediment where scientists were realizing we can see the ice ages in the settlement because of how the chemistry of oxygen was operating in the sediment. so they thought we can see these cycles and it tends to happen, the warm period like the one we're in now lasts 10,000 years or so so there is a chance we could be going back into one but

even the lead author of that report, that scientific paper who published a book with his daughter called ice ages, he noted that that would be the normal situation that we would be heading towards but in fact was of a greenhouse gases we are putting in the air we would expect to see a warming and there is a graphic in his book, i have a copy of, which shows warming very much like what we have been experiencing. we know these greenhouse gases are warming. we have known that for long time. we know the earth has its own cycle. we are moving at out of its usual balance. that is the thing we are reckoning with here. the other thing you mentioned is the prediction so you are speaking to the climate models and wondering about those and that is another reason why i did not use climate models except i mention them in the introduction and for the most part i just

look at the evidence in the fossil record of how the climate behaved during hot periods and warm periods and basically there you can see very clearly that when greenhouse gas levels are high temperatures are high and when greenhouse gas levels are low temperatures are low and interestingly enough one of the main researchers on that has noted that where the temperature rise comes of 4 doubling of carbon dioxide, which we head toward by midcentury is about 5 degrees fahrenheit given the fossil record which is right in the middle of where the computer models are saying so it actually does end up supporting the computer predictions without going into them. >> do you have a quick comment? >> i'm not a climate scientist and i don't play one on tv but i listened to climate scientists for their opinions and predictions and the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe that this is true. this has been documented with surveys. the analogy i use if i went to

tender but colleges and nine told me to take moloch for my skin or something and one of them said i am skeptical, i would go with the nine out of ten. i am not a climate scientist but the vast majority of them believe that this is a real serious concern. >> do you have a quick question? can we move to the next gentleman? >> i have a rather in the weeds question about the guy at principal and different plants that come with the increasing co2 levels. and ultimately the final reset mechanisms the system useds to bring the co2 levels background, ocean acidification and the final way that the carbon gets back into the ground.

>> there are several different scales involved here. at the shorter term scale we do have the forest taking up carbon on a a daily basis, helping us sometimes to their detriment, taking this carbon dioxide up and storing some of it. on a longer time frames we have wetlands people still two thirds of forests of wetlands are forested so they work together. across hundreds of years and millennium you get for instance since the last ice age when the ice moved off of the northern areas where it is now tundra you get wet lands developing and they are taking up carbon. they are eating and other greenhouse gas, methane. over the long term the overall effect is to take down greenhouse gas power. the really long-term of millions of years is where you have got

weathering of mountain building to bring carbon dioxide down. for reasons i go into detail on the book and it would be a little lengthy but basically helping -- turning that rock into -- getting buried in the sediment in the ocean eventually. there are several scales and plants help all those scales. we have the forestry in the short term and plants pulling carbon into wetlands and plants speed up the process of weathering. has those temperature. higher temperatures mean higher weathering rates so there's a natural mechanism. >> the next gentleman is next. >> i want to thank you for three good talks. and on the southwest i appreciate that.

just in partial response to this i also look at the science cannot in newspapers and things but in scientific journals and in nature and science since the early 70s and more recently many books by peter ward and lovelock and schneider and others and has lovelock and peter have shown through their data, not true models, the science is ultimately robust. my question is in view of the fact that in the united states there seems to be anti science momentum where people think of science as politics or religion or ideology. how do you keep from getting so discouraged? how do you keep in the fact that

nobody knows the science in the general public, the general public is so uninformed? >> would you like to take that? >> i don't even think about letting myself get discouraged. i see it as my role and responsibility as a scientist at the university to serve the public. that means i see it as my role to do science useful to the public and to work harder every day to communicate the science better and my goal is to prove to you not just to provide information but proved and show and demonstrate and convince that environmental conservation really benefits us, fundamentally benefits our well being.

>> you showed us some graphs that indicate population will be continuing to grow in the south and southwest and may be particularly in arizona but i am wondering, with evidence of warming in the southwest, water shortage in the southwest and perhaps other problems, that these predictions on continuing rapid population rose may in fact be leveling off and people may be rethinking moving to the southwest in particular. >> if it gets to 130 n phoenix you might not want to move their but it is pretty hot here and people are moving here until the economic downturn. eventually we will reach the day of reckoning with resources like water which are not limitless. we are actually pretty far from that. in the west and in arizona the

vast majority of water is used by agriculture and typically to grow very low value crops like alfalfa. over the next couple decades you will see a massive transfer of water from farms to cities so that will buy as more time but eventually we have to look at things like desalinization in the sea of cortez war on the pacific coast as a way to get more water supplies and so i am sure that is where things are headed. we can't grow limitless and without end. there has to be some an end point. >> got to get a test here. and my okay? >> a little lauder pleased. >> we are 400 parts per million or just below of co2 in the atmosphere expected to double by mid century. is that correct? >> 400 from the original 280.

>> so we are expected to be 5 or 600. by the end of the century may be 700. >> quite feasible based on what we're doing. >> you mentioned that parts per million exceeded 1 thousand in the mid cretaceous period or the war times. if we are heading in a naturally warmer time anyway could you talk a little bit about what the human impact is and what might have been the natural increase in co2 as compared to the increase? we only have a minute or so left. >> that gets back to the other idea we were talking about. we would normally be made be in a few thousand years heading into an ice age and lower carbon dioxide levels. we are putting them into the air

and creating a kind of an unusual situation for the nurse based on the previous warnings. one of the concerns i have is even as we are doing this we continue to add carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas and cutting down systems like forests and destroying wetlands that could be helping us. humans need to tackle it on both ends and do everything we can to reduce our individual use, fossil fuels, driving less, losing less heating and cooling and all those things you are very familiar with but also think about on a local scale planting a tree can call your house and save electricity and also take carbon dioxide and budget for trees in these environments. i will stop there. >> you mention a lot of research based on climate data from 50 to

1 hundred million years ago. how are scientists able to take accurate measures of so long ago? >> there are people doing it. actually one of the people i learned a lot from, judith parish for utah, people working mostly in the last two million years in this ariane's in lake sediments, i can give more information on the names but basically you look in several different places. sediments are great place because you can find information about temperature from the chemistry of the sediment and sometimes they will preserve plant parts. wetlands are great at preserving plant parts so you can even count the little microscopic details on trees or leaves you find in the sediment. there are a variety of other ways. many of you are familiar with the ice cores where you get temperature and carbon dioxide information. it is harder to get information on greenhouse gases once you get

past the ice ages three million years ago. that is because we don't have -- you still get information in its oil and leave and creative ways. i will name a few people working on it. julie cold, tony would house, 0 one davis, help day. there are dozens of people. i will feel terrible later about all the people i forgot. there are some excellent researchers here and i would be happy to give more names. >> our time is essentially over. apologize to the questioners but gives me time to thank the authors again for their

wonderful contributions. [applause] >> before we part i have a comment of congratulations to this audience. i had the privilege of serving almost seven years as assistant secretary of state of science and technology adviser to colin powell and condoleezza rice. i think the appearance of all of you at the discussion is a positive sign. it is an illustration that has not often been repeated around the country or around the world. you should be very much encouraged by the fact that you are willing to come in on a sunny day to discuss these big issues. that is the point. unless there is going to be some anticipatory discussions followed by anticipatory proactive decisions by the public and has suggested driven by public interest and pressure, i doubt we will be talking about the same issues not only next year but in the next generation.

i want to thank you for joining this engagement. i hope you enjoyed it and profited from the discussion. plenty of opportunity to engage the authors at the signing area where someone surprisingly signing their books for sale. we encourage you to go to the web site for the book festival where there will be a survey concerning this session and the festival is general. lastly, you are sincerely invited to be a friend of the festival. you can do so by going to the information booths located around campus. wonderful opportunities to become engaged in this fine activity which has become a major part of not only the landscape in tucson but i would remind you of the landscape in the united states given the fact the we have been broadcast live today. i appreciate your being here. [applause]

>> where is this? [inaudible conversations] >> the climate change panel wraping up at the university of arizona. analysts laura lopez-hoffman, melanie lenart and mitch tobin prepare to meet with the audience and sign their books. in 30 minutes coverage from the tucson festival of books will continue with women in leadership. former white house dr. connie maury no and gloria phelps, president and ceo of km. booktv live with coverage today and tomorrow from the third annual tucson festival of books and 4 complete schedule on event coverage visit booktv.org. >> global warring, not global warming. >> an extreme title but the situation is quite extreme. a lot of the analysis around

climate change stops when it is going to get warranty level will rise a little bit. what that means in terms of national security and economic issues and geopolitical issues. we are seeing a little bit in the arctic where suddenly there is conflict where there hasn't been before and new players are coming into areas that are completely unexpected. china has an icebreaker. they know what is going on in the arctic caused by climate change so they want a piece of the action. it is changing the way global politics and economics are acting out. it is disconcerting. >> why would china have an icebreaker and what is going on in the arctic to be concerned about? >> there is oil and gas in the arctic. a lot in russia. the pipelines in russia unlike the alaska pipeline built on permafrost. of pipeline is only as good as its weakest point. part of the pipeline goes down you lose your delivery system. it makes sense in that situation

to -- if russia ships the shipping they are not tied into europe, they can deliver to china instead so they can continue to supply without losing the revenue stream. now you turn off the tap you lose the revenue stream so china increasingly wants a piece of the action especially russian oil and gas. >> what is your background? how did you get involved? >> i was a journalist for a long time and a correspondent and going to places like the pacific. it will disappear because of rising sea levels. i started to wonder what that means? it disappears. does it lose the un and do the u.s. waters become international waters? china and taiwan fighting for control, and the u.s. as well. it was the u.s. stomping ground after the cold war. now hillary clinton, the area is

really getting quite extreme. if you get countries disappearing, that well-balanced geopolitical passports starts to shift in ways we haven't considered and should be considering. >> global warming is the book, how environmental, economic and political crises -- >> booktv has 48 hours of nonfiction authors and book programming every weekend from saturday to monday morning at 8:00 eastern. to get the complete we can schedule the mailed to you every week signed up for the booktv alert on booktv.org. or text of the word book to 99702. standard message and data rates of 5. nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> local content vehicles traveling the country visiting

cities and towns as we export our nation's history and some of the authors who touch the ball on it through work. this weekend on booktv we take you to downtown indianapolis for a look at the new kurt vonnegut memorial library. >> kurt vonnegut was the greatest american writer. he was a world war ii veteran. he was a hoosier. he was a satirist. he was a political activist. he was a husband. he was a father. he was a friend. he was a friend to his family. he would write to his fans. he wrote more than 40 pieces of work including plays, novels, short stories. some of his more familiar books are slaughterhouse 5, perhaps his most famous, breakfast of champions, cat's cradle and many others.

he always brought in his midwestern roots and often wrote about indiana and indianapolis specifically and if i may read a quote, many people ask why should the library the indianapolis and have many different answers but i found this great quote that says all my jokes are indianapolis, all my attitude their indianapolis. my attitude their indianapolis. if ever suffered myself from indianapolis i would be out of business. everything about me is indianapolis. we think that is a green light to establish the kurt vonnegut library in indianapolis. we have an art gallery, a museum room, a reading room, gift shop and a unlike to share details about these with you today. this is provided timeline.

i did like to read the quote at the top of this beautiful painting created by the artist chris king and by a kurt vonnegut scholar named rodney alan. both of these individuals lived in louisiana. all moments, past plead with the present and future, always have existed and always will exist. you can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the rocky mountains. they can see how permanent all the moments are. it is just an illusion we have on earth that once the moment is gone it is gone forever. something unique about our time line is the actually start on the right side and move to the left rather than a left side and move to the right. when the thing we want to mention about this quote, we hoped kurt vonnegut would know

that while he may think that was the moment is gone is gone forever. the we like to think the moment of kurt vonnegut will live on forever and occurred vonnegut library. he went to cornell university studying chemistry, he did not plan to go into architecture unlike his father but he did think he would move into a science career and he was not very interested in doing that. he enlisted in the army during world war ii and i want to point out a moment on the timeline that is very important in the life of kurt vonnegut in that it is 1944. he is dying from an overdose, probably intentional, alcohol and sleeping pills, he is captured by germans and belgians during the battle of the bulge.

he is in a boxcar with other american pows, unlikely to be bombed. this was a beautiful cultural city that was not a military target. has he rode in on a train he was able to use a beautiful city and place in a slaughterhouse for the rest, and slaughterhouse 5. soon we have an exhibit that recall the exhibit that his world war ii experience became so important in his riding and later in his life. i start with a photo taken after he was released as a prisoner of war along with fellow prisoners.

and the purple heart was guided by his son to was. he received the purple heart and kurt vonnegut was embarrassed because of the purple heart for cross site. so many of his friends had suffered from other types of physical problems and disease. we had a science first edition of slaughterhouse 5. slaughterhouse 5 is the most well-known book written by kurt vonnegut of the 30 some pieces of writing that he completed. this was the most famous. >> why? >> let me give you a little bit of history about what happened in germany.

and my impressions -- he was taken to the slaughterhouse when he was in dresden, the allies bombed dresden and his own country men as well as allies bombed of this city. it was a horrible bombing. literally a firestorm. tens of thousands were killed and these were noncombatants. these were women and children and old people. one of his tasks as a prisoner was to go out and bring the bodies from these burning buildings and also was required to bury these bodies of women and children and that affected his life tremendously. he came back from this world war ii experience being completely against war. he was searching for peaceful

resolution to conflict and support another approaches to other problems. i will point out a photo taken after he came back from the war. he got married to jane fonda get from indianapolis. this was taken on their honeymoon and you see in uniform, they had three children. and van many years later, his sister alice died a day or two after her husband died in a freight train accident. and four children and three of them came to live with the family. they have a large household. seven children and at this time kurt vonnegut was writing books

that have that time were less familiar and he published several books and articles for magazines as well as working a job as a car salesman for bob. the experience of writing about dresden and what happened to him was tremendously difficult. it took him 20 years to publish slaughterhouse 5. his wife encouraged him to write it. she worked as his editor on the book and asked questions and got clarity on issues and helped retrieve a lot of those memories that he had repressed. because of the family situation with more children, and the success coming with the

publishing of slaughterhouse 5, his marriage was rocky. his daughter had mentioned a month ago that experience and publishing of the book and all that -- contributed to their marriage dissolving. at that time. turtle kurt vonnegut had mmet -. now the political activity exhibit. he continued to talk about his

interest in finding peaceful solutions to conflict. that is another thing that made him very popular during the vietnam years and after. this photo which was given to us by the new york times was taken during the first gulf war and there he is, i am sure it was a large crowd. to his dying day he would attract a large crowd. i have been told he was like a rock star in his different speeches in large auditoriums always filling the auditorium. so here we are in the art gallery portion of our library. unlike to show you a float that was given to us by his artistic

collaborator. it says i don't know what it is about hoosiers but wherever you go there is always a hoosier doing something very important. this was in cats cradle. a very funny exchange that the main character has with a fellow traveler on a plane and that fellow traveler -- next we have possibly the most famous piece of artwork, the sphincter. in his humor he associated the -- this anatomical features. we actually have used this in other pieces of our exhibit including our timeline which you may have thought had stars in the sky but actually it is this.

we also have life is no way to treat an animal. this is a tombstone for his famous character who appeared in many of his books. it is understood that a this is based on kurt vonnegut himself. character of kilgore trout died at the age of 84 and kurt vonnegut also happened to die at the age of 84. >> what did he die from? >> he collapsed. he fell down the steps of his new york city home. he went into a coma and never came out of it. he often joked that cigarettes

would kill him. he would sue the makers of pall mall of because the warning label on a cigarette package said it would kill him and they had not yet done so. that he actually happened to be smoking a pall mall of while standing -- >> next we have two pieces of artwork created by morley safer, one of our honorary board members. a close friend of kurt vonnegut. they both shared a close friend, sydney austin who wrote the introduction for the last book that came out. these two pieces of art. the first of the occasion of kurt vonnegut's birthday was created in 2003. the second was created when morley found out kurt vonnegut had died and that was in 2007.

we are in the front of the kurt vonnegut libraries. we have his typewriter that was used in the 1970s and was donated to us by his daughter. he wrote many of his more familiar books in the 1970s. we are happy to have this typewriter. he was not a fan of high technology and did not use a computer. he preferred to use the typewriter to his dying day. he liked to work in his home in an office chair and a coffee table. he would slump over his typewriter. he would go out into the world every day. he talks about how he learned

you could buy postage over the internet and he thought that was horrible because then if he chose that route he would not have the everyday experience of going to the post office and those everyday experiences encountered during his walks or the basis for his stories. he met a number of interesting characters in new york city and going out and meeting people was a way for him to capture new material. kurt vonnegut is timeless because we have the same issues. we are suffering with war and disease and death and famine and environmental issues. he said your planet's indians' system is trying to get rid of you. he thought we should take care

of the planet. these issues have resurfaced and it does not look like we have found any viable solutions to these problems so i think his work is timeless. >> local content vehicles are visiting cities and towns as we look at nation history and authors who have written about it. go to c-span.org. >> a visit booktv.org to watch any programs you see on line. tyke the author or book title on the upper left side. and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the left side of the page and collecting the format. booktv streams live on-line for 48 hours with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> we are to national press club

talking to spencer abraham about his book lights out. to only what the solutions are to the energy crisis. >> i watch what seems to work and what i felt was not working. first we need to increase dramatically the enrolled nuclear energy plays in the united states. right now it is 20% of our power and i think it should be 20% by 2013. we also need to increase the role of renewable energy in the united states. right now is wind, solar and biomass. these are only 2% of our energy and we really need them to be much higher and we need to support that effort and i am a conservative so i'd have -- what we need to is find ways to improve energy efficiency so that we don't demand as much

growth as right now projected to be the case. >> what do we do about the argument to keep costs down in terms of incorporating other energy sources? >> that is a challenge and i think most of these are things we should be willing to bear. private-sector should and can and will play an active role in these new forms of energy but there's a role for the federal government to encourage them as well. the last couple years we have seen some progress along these lines but it will take a lot more at least given what looks like the demands finally in the united states and if we don't do it we will see prices for energy skyrocket. we will see america at the mercy of producing countries who are exporting to us our energy and they can put this in a difficult

position and if we don't address these issues we will have growing environmental challenges as well. what the book tries to show is a pathway to address all of those. i think there is but it will take will and tough decisions and we have been a little unwilling to make those tough decisions for the last few years. >> do you tackle how to change public perspective and the perception of what we should do? and be more cooperative? >> it is a good point. one of the real impediments to what we need to do energy is what they call the not in my backyard syndrome. one thing i found as energy sector is it didn't matter what energy project or energy infrastructure deployment there was tremendous resistance because people didn't want it near them. they wanted lots of energy and cheap energy but didn't want anybody to make it or use it

around them. to be grown-ups about this, to say yes it would be terrific if we could have all the energy facilities somewhere else. we need them to be deployed on a broad basis and i address that. a solution to convincing americans to do this but the more we explain the consequences of not allowing projects to go forward table see the benefit ultimately to our country. >> have you found resistance is along party lines or is that a myth? >> the not in my backyard resistance is universal. it does no regional or other kinds of boundaries. it has grown in recent years and

that is not surprising. the populations increase. that means we need more power and also has a people in the history of mankind almost every major innovation tends to be dependent on new supplies of energy. we marvels that the high-tech revolution of the 1990s and since but that revolution is largely driven by the electricity to manufacture chips and components of the electricity needed to operate laptops, all of this, that is the challenge because of the sentiment we need to read about the amount of energy available and which in turn meant more plans or transmission lines and more public resistance. >> thank you for your time. i appreciate it. >> here are a few upcoming book fairs and festivals from around the country.

booktv is live at the tucson festival of books. visit booktv.org for the schedule. the virginia festival of the book will take place in charlottes ville. booktv will be airing several events live online unser's day the seventeenth and friday the eighteenth. visit booktv.org at the scheduled time for any live on line program and click the watch icon to if view the event. the scheduled programs live on booktv.org check the upcoming program section of the page. and the sixteenth annual storytelling festival happens in south carolina. this three day event begins on march 17th. is there a book festival the use of? e-mail and name, date and web site to on booktv-c-span.org. you can visit booktv.org for upcoming 2011 fares and festivals. >> on tuesday,