moon. just a quarter of all americans history he was the fbi director. after he died, there was a decision by congress that no one in the democracy should be able to unmask the power and the longevity that hoover did. so, they instituted this tenure term. what it's been interesting is that since hoover, know if ti director is it that tenure limit and i think with robert mueller what we are seeing is the cal ripken like record that we have never seen since hoover and are unlikely i think ever to see again. mueller was sort of this right mix of a low profile individual who was very driven, very ambitious but didn't seek out the spotlight and was able to weather a lot of controversies in a lot of storms, served his presidency and attorneys general well and is on track to leave office in september with what almost everyone seems to think

is a very successful tenure term. >> can watch this and other programs on line at tv.orb. >> now, antonia juhasz talks about the 2010 oil rig explosion which killed 11 men and released millions of barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico. this is an hour and a half. [applause] >> thank you all for coming and thank you -- the center for biological diversity and for helping me celebrate the launch of might look "black tide" which was just released on monday and time for the one-year anniversary of the explosion of the deepwater horizon. i wanted to hold this event on

earth day. i can't think of a better place to do it then it is boys and poets which has always made such a wonderful home for me and for my books. i think this is the third book in a row that i've launched and headed up event at us boys and poets right here which is incredibly wonderful. busboys and poets supports our arts and supports are learning and it supports are being able to come together in rooms like this and talk about critical events at a critical time. and i am -- please support busboys and poets not only tonight but every night and future events. i also wanted to pull together an event for earth day that rocked together the people in the groups whom i thought had really done the most heroic and ongoing and important work not only in the wake of the explosion of the deepwater horizon but preceding it. there aren't that many organizations and people,

communities who have been focused on the ongoing dangers of offshore drilling, the ongoing dangers to people, to our environment, to our ecology and to our development, and the groups who have really -- two of the groups who have been at the forefront of that work are greenpeace in the center for biological diversity and they have been at the forefront of the response to this disaster not just in the wake of the explosion but in a year-long effort, which involves 210 million gallons of oil being released into the gulf of mexico on an ongoing ecological crisis, and ongoing human crisis in the ongoing environmental crisis. these groups have continued to be there. i wanted to make sure that we presented the best discussion that we could and i couldn't ask for two better people to join me in the discussion tonight and john juhasz the oceans campaign

director and peter galvin who is the conservation director at the center for biological diversity. they are each going to speak and speak to you and i am going to speak as well and then we will have a discussion with some questions. then i will sign your book so thank you all very much for being here tonight. [applause] >> can you all hear me okay? hi again in thanks for coming and i echo antonia in saying it is nice to have an opportunity to come to busboys and poets. greenpeace's response to the deepwater horizon blowout began pretty much immediately. we could see as good many others that this was going to be one of the biggest disasters that we have faced on our continent. so, one of the things that we had to do in the beginning was figure out what the appropriate response to something on this

scale looks like. that is not an easy question. it quickly became apparent that one thing that was needed was a second opinion, some ground trooping. we were hearing from very early on what was clearly spanned from not just bp but our own government. so we felt it was necessary to be there on the ground to provide images to be able to share first-hand accounts and ultimately be able to collect data on what the true scope and impact of this disaster were on the ecosystem of the gulf of mexico. so it started with a small team that was basically there are just as the oil was starting to reach the shore and we were working in the coastal areas of louisiana primarily but also alabama and mississippi and it did in florida as well. looking as the oil came ashore and what was happening to it.

was at washing into the wetlands where the miles and miles and miles of them doing their job and keeping it out of sensitive habitat? what was the cleanup response looking like? where there are huge numbers of wildlife being killed are not? these were all questions early on. how much oil was coming out wasn't something we could answer he sleep at lease we could talk about where we were seeing the oil and what the impact look like on the ground. overtime -- backing up a little bit -- part of that we spend a little time in the day and by use and coastal waterways of the gulf of mexico. when i was there and barataria bay in louisiana, unfortunately we saw things that are going to stick with me probably for the rest of my life. nobody wants to see dolphins

surfacing through oil or you note dead fish or dead birds or any of that is pretty awful. i think as a marine biologist some of the worst things about the habitat was going to be lost, seeing oil that had covered the entire expanse of some small islands that were actually critical habitat for birds. these are bob erred rookeries that were just completely packed. bird high-rises really and knowing that the oil was likely going to kill off the vegetation, the grasses and the other vegetation that holds these islands together so the island fairly quickly was likely to wash away. there there is a lot of alternate habitat of many similar type so the long-term effects that could have on many of the sea birds, including the

brown pelican which had just come off the endangered species list. there is also disturbing to look at things like hermit crabs. you don't read a lot in the newspapers or on cnn. you are not saying anybody talk about hermit crabs. noah has kim in keeping a running count and using hermit crabs as evidence for the lawsuits but in one area, certainly not bigger than the size of this room i saw what i estimated to be 10,000 dead hermit crabs, and sitting there kind of counting those at the same time these birds are walking around eating these oil soaked hermit crabs knowing that those birds are likely not going to make it. that hold beach habitat, at least in that area at that time, was no longer capable of sustaining life. so then we moved farther offshore. we brought one of our ships, the arctic sunrise, to the region

and we put together a three-month long research expedition where scientists from over a dozen institutions, mostly golf universities, to again really try to get a second opinion to begin collecting more data on what the true scope and impacts of this bill were on the ecosystem. we looked at the plankton. primarily be focused on the crab larvae with scientists from tulane university and one of the challenges for us throughout this was, you know we have a 24 hour news cycle where people want instant answers but science is slow. the data we collected with this one small project is one small piece of the impact. we been collecting the data took months. but to analyze that will probably take them two years. so on the one-year anniversary had a lot of people asking us.

what happens? was this as bad as everyone said? was it not so bad like the government and noaa was saying? the answer is i think it is going to be decades before we can look back and feel like we have a true sense of what the damage was. but we did see that the science from tulane found these mysterious orange globs in their samples that they are fairly sure were caused by disperse and. the oil and the disperse dispersant entering the food chain in the gulf of mexico through these larva baby blue crabs. we also work with the consortium of scientists from a number of universities using acoustic monitoring buoys. basically these buoys that set out there and listened for noise so i merrily they were recording vocalizations from whales and

other beach whales. this was important because it is difficult to actually understand what is happening with wales by counting them. mostly they are underwater. so they had a dataset stretching back several years in the same area so we were able to compare the whale population used to look like in that area of the gulf with what happened after the disaster. and again it is too early to really say what the detailed results were but they did find that in the side closest to the deepwater horizon, there are far fewer whales after the accident than there were before. this is significant because government scientists estimated there are losing three would be enough to wipe out the population and this again, whales are slow to mature and they have low numbers of boss rang and they are very vulnerable. we worked with scientists from

texas a&m, not exactly who you would think would be the most eager to partner with greenpeace but it is interesting because despite all the money for research many the scientists we talked to found it very difficult to get access to funding to do research that might not be popular. so bp was giving out the money and they felt that they had some say in tibet -- directing the type of research and obviously that wasn't okay so it is part of why we wanted to be out there. texas a&m scientists came out and were looking at oil in the water column and we were doing work to see how much oil we were finding on the bottom. around this time is when noah, not just noaa but the u.s. government with no of's name on it that said three-quarters of the oil was gone. you may remember it. actually if you look at the numbers and not how they talked

about the numbers, really the reverse was true. three-quarters of the oil was still there in the little had evaporated in a smaller amount had been recovered but most of it was either still in the water washed up on the shore or down there on the bottom. that is what we found. about a mile deep well, well away from the deepwater horizon. i think it was 50 miles away. we were finding oil on the bottom. we brought up the samples and adjust reeked of oil. we also found signature of the oil so not like a big thick dense cloud. signature oil three miles to the west of the deepwater horizon site. this is far away from and innate different direction than people had been previously looking. later on, we actually took a two-person submarine down to the gulf. i had a nice opportunity to be

the pilot of a a a sub and we brought scientists from the university of north carolina and airing conservation biology institute down to look at the impact of the spill on deep-sea coral and the gulf of mexico. part of it was really helping people understand how complex the gulf ecosystem really is. you think of the gulf of mexico and people out there have very different ideas. maybe you think it is a bunch of oil rigs and it is nothing special but actually it is really one of the more biologically rich places i have ever been. you see dolphins and birds in numbers that you don't see in many other places. and so at the bottom of the gulf in many areas you have these incredible communities, even reefs of deep-sea coral and these are far too low sunlight. so they are not the same kind of coral you are used to if you

have been scuba diving or snorkeling in the tropics. but still a similar role as far as providing habitat for commercially important fish sometimes and also high areas of biodiversity. we are happy to see the area that we visited that there was no visible impact of the oil but again really this is about something we are going to be still analyzing years from now. a lot of it was whether there is some legal impact, whether it is affecting their growth rate, their reproductive rate and whether they are more susceptible to disease and that kind of thing. unfortunately at the same time a little bit closer to the deepwater horizon site is a different kind of submersible that is able to go deeper. another group of scientists was finding oil that had carpeted the bottom and killed huge numbers of coral. and i guess the one thing i forgot to mention that i will just touch on, we started this

expedition actually far from the impact site out in the dry tortugas. if you remember when the accident began, in the very early days, people were quite sure that the oil would be pulled into the loop current and be sucked through the florida keys and potentially into, all the way up the east coast of the united states through the gulf stream. the good news is that didn't happen, at least not in large amounts that so we were there looking in the dry tortugas adds bunches which are important bioindicators because they pump huge amounts of water through them each day. so they are good place to look to see if there are sublethal impacts of low quantities of oil. again it will be quite a while before they finish that analysis, but it is a good reminder that science is slow. our policymakers seem to have been too quick to assume that they knew what the impacts of this were, and far too quick to

forget that this could happen again. really, the thrust of our work took two directions. one was providing a second opinion and getting the facts about what was really happening and the other was reminding our policymakers that we can't allow this to happen again. a lot of our work has been moving forward, making sure that we learn from this and do not allow drilling in the arctic and we do not allow a neutral in any player. ultimately that we phase out offshore drilling and move away from that to clean renewable energy. i will stop there. [applause] >> thank you. introduce yourself for the camera.

>> good evening. my name is peter galvin. in the conservation director of the center for biological diversity. thank so much for coming tonight. i want to want to tangle busboys and poets green toads -- greenpeace and antonia and the great server she is done in writing this book are code is codas not a happy topic but an important one to know as much as we can about. in the early days of the deepwater horizon disaster the media was portraying the event as if this was a natural disaster a terrible natural disaster due to a technological glitch that was beyond control of humans, and early on and even in the first night as we spoke, it was clear to us that this is not a natural disaster. this is a policy disaster. this is a disaster caused specifically by policies implemented by the u.s. government. and as we have began to look through the to the minerals

management service now, bomber, the new agency, we began to realize that thousands of these drilling plans had been issued with categorical exclusions, the lowest level of environmental analysis done and interestingly the minerals management service which is no stalwart of environmental protection, would not allow these same exclusions and arctic drilling. so basically, and we have known some of this for quite some time, but the reality was it all became very apparent that the gulf of mexico was basically a national sacrifice area and the policies of the government were intended to make it a national disaster area, national sacrifice area. a-year has gone by and what have we learned? and the sad reality is, not

much. we have learned a lot about the impacts of a spill but not a lot -- we haven't made a lot of policy changes that are going to prevent us from this disaster recurring next time. we recently released a report available on our web site at i logical diversity.org, and in the report we calculate mortality numbers for a variety of different species based on the best available evidence that was available. government reports, scientific reports, and one of the big problems with oil spills and you see this in the press where they start to mention numbers have recovered animals. only a small number of the animals that die are ever recovered. the ocean is a big place and humans just don't run across all of the mortality's. for example, we conclude that 6000, approximately 6000 sea turtles. in the event, 26,000 dolphins

and whales. and the toll will rate as the largest environmental disaster to occur in the united states and hopefully there will never be a this bill petitions. the nine losses range in a variety of areas, clean water act lawsuit against bp. the government has filed a that we are seeking and those fines we the gulf area for environmental restoration and land acquisition, we are seeking $19 billion in penalties against

bpm this is the clean water act on a calculation of negligence which a certain penalty we are not even sure the amount isn't more than 200 million gallons but that is the best estimate bp cough up $19 billion everybody is pointing the finger at everyone else. a few hours a report that puts a lot of the transocean. of course bp has sued transocean asserting the transocean should pay not bp and of course this is going to be going on for a long long time. one of the reasons we felt it was very important to file our lawsuit was to make sure that the government doesn't try to offer some kind of sweetheart settlement and certainly, you know we know that wouldn't

happen under the bush administration. no question about it and we are concerned that could happen under the obama administration. just of course weeks before the disaster obama stood on -- the president stood on giving a press conference and said oil rigs don't usually blow up. nuclear power is safe, and we could see that there is a massive disconnect that just a huge disconnect between the reality and the policy procrastination, or whatever that word is. thank you. you are right. and it is really just amazing to see that gap, and it is staggering. some of the other litigation that we filed is over disbursements. we launched a lawsuit over the use of these dispersants we heard so much about during this bill. the reality is the epa approved the use of these dispersants but they don't actually test what

will the dispersants themselves do to various endangered species? what are the impacts of dumping millions of gallons of dispersants and if any of you listen to democracy now the other day, our executive director was on and amy goodman pointed out and interesting that she noticed the main dispersants used in this bill is actually banned in the u.k.. it can't be used in the u.k. so bp has a stop pile of millions of gallons of the stuff that can't be used in u.k. or anywhere in your. what do they do at the stuff lex lets ship it to the u.s. and use it. we have got to get rid of it. and these kinds -- we see how so many decisions, these policy decisions are made basically with a gun to the head. you have lisa jackson ahead of the epa desperately tried to figure out is anything i can do? is there anything we can do on the and the government is under criticism for an action.

well, we are going to dump millions of gallons of this stuff because we have to show people we are doing everything we possibly can and we will deal with the impacts later because our decisions are being made on a 24/7 news cycle. that is the scary, scary reality that we live in where our policy decision are being made in very short windows. it used to be people have the best way to make decisions as to look forward seven generations. well, we have gone from seven generations to 24 hours. and that is no way to make decisions. so we have got the dispersants lawsuit going and the bp clean water act lawsuit, p. p. transocean clean water act action. we are in the middle of a giant litigation morass. there have been, we just found out today, 100,000 lawsuits now

filed over the bp oil spill. 100,000 that and that doesn't include ken feinberg's payoff -- payment scheme. that is a separate deal. a lot of these are big tort cases, people who lost their livelihoods and didn't take the compensation route from bp, and it is really amazing to see. our attorney is part of the plaintiff steering committee in this thing. it is a very cumbersome group. it is very important that public interest environmental roots be in there because as good as travelers are and they are trying to do the best they can for their clients, they are not necessarily -- public interest in an barman to groups have a different outlook on things and it is our goal to get as much as of that money as possible of the 19 million back to the goal for restoration and not to bobby jindal's crazy sand barriers or any crackpot idea he has come up with to spend the money. we wanted to be spent on land

acquisition and to make people whole. we filed endangered species listing for the dwarf seahorse. is the smallest seahorse in the u.s., the third or fourth smallest in the world and it lives in sea grass beds. i think we have all seen seahorses and aquarians. they are viewed of the little things and dairy very sensitive, very sensitive to changes in habitat and decimation of sea grass seagrass and of course a lot of what happened was with the dispersants, the oil doesn't go away. it just breaks into smaller particles and sinks to the bottom and of course these get into the sea grass beds and are a real problem for the seahorses and other creatures who live down there. we are currently looking at as john mentioned the brown pelican was a rare success story under the endangered species act where they come back from really a few hundred to tens of thousands of individuals in the last 20 years, a real happy story.

but, this bill has really put the recovery in jeopardy and now we are looking and talking to a variety of scientists of whether it would be necessary to put the brown pelican back on the endangered species list due to this. we filed an endangered species listing petition trying to get the atlantic blue fin tuna added to the endangered list and we have some. the blue fin tuna is a very highly prized fish that is becoming more rare. it is one of the fish that is that high-end sushi restaurants. you see a very expensive piece of sushi say over 10 or $15, there is a good chance it is blue fin tuna. earlier this-year a blue fin tuna upwards of 1000 pounds was auctioned off in tokyo for gore hundred thousand dollars for one fish, $400,000 so you can imagine there is an enormous economic pressure to keep the species off the endangered list.

the blue fin tuna spawning areas in the gulf of mexico. it is prime spawning area, the atlantic blue fan and much of it was inundated by the oil spill. it was like a direct hit. scientists estimate that 20 to 30% of the young were lost and that is just the beginning. we don't know what the longer-term implications aren't a lot of these things, it is a combination of factors. is not just the oil spill. there is a huge amount of habitat degradation that is already been already been occurring so now you add this impact and it is kind of like how many cards can you pull out before the house of cards just collapses? we filed a lawsuit over the policy that allows these categorical exclusions, and one of the things we found right after this bill was that ep had written a letter to the epa months before the spill demanding that more categorical

exclusions be granted because these environmental studies were taking too much time and they were so duplicative because they already had the answers because they had been drilling so safely for so long. so we have that going on. we have a lawsuit -- actually it is actually several different lawsuits because the fifth circuit court of appeals is somewhat byzantine in this process. we are challenging over 40 individual drilling plants in the gulf right now. most of these have been granted since the spill. that is what is important for prude people to understand is that very little has changed. ken salazar, you know he will go down in history as he wants to keep the boot, his boot on the heel, on the neck of bp and so the boot, when you look into the history of the loot it turns out that secretary salazar, there was virtually no greater champion of expanding drilling

in the gulf than ken salazar. .. we possibly can to try to make sure this never happens again. please look at our web site and see our policy recommendations on a report we just released, companion report to the wildlife

polk and thanks again so much. [applause] >> i will take a tight leash on myself. >> please pass the sign in sheet around. folks can sign it as it comes around to you. thank you all so much and thank you to john and peter for being here tonight. the devastating impact of the gulf oil spill, this is my third book. my first was the bush agenda, and that looked at the relationship of the bush administration to a handful of

corporations including oil corporations, energy service companies and weapons manufacturers. it was a natural corollary to the discussion for my next book which was the tyranny of oil:the world's most powerful industry and what we must do to stop it and that looks at the power of industry, policy relationship of this industry to our government and policymakers. somewhat ironically at this point of that book took its title from a speech that candidate obama made when he became the first african-american to win the iowa caucus and he announced in that speech he would be the president who ended the tyranny of oil and in the same breath, at the door in iraq and i thought that was incredibly powerful and i used to open the book and used as the title of the book. when the deepwater horizon

exploded on april 20th off the coast of louisiana i was in houston with a group of oil activists--that is the wrong word. a group of people who live in oil impacted communities around the world, nigeria, cassocks than, alaska, california, texas league of the mississippi. the annual shareholder meeting, they came to explain to the shareholder what it means to live in a chevron impacted community. and while we were there it had been a couple weeks during the course of our time after the explosion happened, after the loss of life of 11 men after the oil started flowing, when we realized that not only was this an enormous loss of life and an enormous disaster but a crushing reality to people like myself

who spent a significant amount of time being in places where oil operations take place. something dawned on all of us. the oil industry had absolutely no idea whatsoever what to do about a deepwater blowout. none at all. they said they knew what to do. they said they had plans to know what to do, the reality was what they knew how to do, dealing with the blowout at 400 feet. most of the time since the 1970s most deepwater drilling mend drilling at 400 feet below the ocean's surface. what deepwater drilling means now is drilling at 5,000 feet below the ocean's surface. the ocean is 5,000 feet below. this well was another 13,900

feet below that. slightly further out, not even the deepest well is another well that is as far down as mount everest is up. what we found out is even though they guaranteed to us that they knew what they were doing they were trying to apply technology developed in the 1970s for 400 foot wells to a 5,000 foot well and they didn't know what they were doing and they weren't able to stop the gusher. not only that but they had guaranteed us that were there to be a blowout and everyone knows there can be because that is what you planned for, the gulf of mexico is one of the most difficult places to drill in the world which is why there's a lot of gas there. it bubbles up. it kicks. it makes drilling difficult and everyone knows this and every plan written for drilling in the gulf says we can handle

blowouts. the blowout has been increasing in the gulf, happening more frequently. the people on the ridge knew that it was having a difficult time. this was the second rig to try to drill this well. the previous rig had been kicked so hard that it was kicked off of the well and went home. the deepwater horizon was a replacement. it was $100 million over budget. it was many days off schedule and the people on the rig knew that they were in trouble. the industry promised that it could handle an oil spill were the worst to happen of 300,000 barrels a day. what we found out was likely at its worst, this was a thousand barrels a day and yet they had no capacity whatsoever to deal with it.

they did not have ships ready to contain the oil. they didn't have underwater vehicles ready to address the blowout. they didn't have scanners to skim it up. they have prepared and not believe that, after the 1989 disaster they had been committed to responsible for legally obligated to invest in research on what to do if they have an oil spill and prepare for it. they hadn't. none of them. they are using the same technology for 14% of the oil was cleaned up. today in response to this, to put this in scale what happened was because they didn't know what to do and spend three months walking around -- they were trying very hard. they were trying very hard. their engineers were very hard at work. they wanted -- but they couldn't

for three long months. what happene2 they actually -- no one felt there are only 148 of these in the world. basically going on for 20 years. they are pushing out this far because there is a lot of oil out there.

what we know about the deepwater is when you have an accident it is a long way to go to get to it and there's a lot of oil. and put the amount of oil into context we have all been hampered from being able to explain and grass putting into words the significance of a size of the spill. that is because we can say the words that will make it more dramatic which is the largest oil spill in world history. there's only one reason we can't say that. that is because saddam hussein intentionally, in the most blatant way possible use oil as a weapon in 1991 and intentionally open up tankers to attack american and british troops with oil in kuwait. that is the largest oil spill in world history. because he did it intentionally. had that not happened this would be handed down the largest oil

spill in world history. two ten million gallons of oil were released. one of fame we know for sure, when i learned it was bigger than we thaw and the 11 men who died, the story was not going to end with them or their family. it was going to spread and was going to spread to all the people across those who live around the ninth largest body of water and was going to affect the sea life and everything that lived in the ocean. the thing to know about the gulf coast is everything in the ocean is part and parcel to everything that lives on the land. is part and parcel to all the people and their real livelihood and understanding of their community. the effect on the sea is the effect on the people and the livelihood of the community of those people. what i learned in going down in the last couple weeks in the first couple days that i was there was a huge story.

two -- transparency was so difficult. getting information was difficult. first time i went down, private security guards, police officers keeping us off of the beaches. you couldn't take pictures. you could record the event. one thing that happened was controlling the story became very important to everyone involved. and one full that bp utilized, use of what john was showing. greenpeace took such important photographs of this event. the photographs to capture it. they are used throughout my book to try to make tangible imagery the story of this event. capturing those photographs, one reason why was remember in the exxon valdez, it was the photographs of oil soaked birds

that caught people's souls and people organized aggressively in their response and shutdown exxon stations and protested and demanded policies and they got out of the bush administration a critical piece of legislation. the oil pollution act. in 1969 off the coast of santa barbara when an oil well. they were galvanized and ready. they sought imagery that captured the hearts and souls and years later they got earth day, the clean air act and the environmental protection agency and 11 years of organizing later they got a moratorium on offshore drilling. the brown pelicans soaked in oil, state bird of louisiana captured people. captured our hearts and minds. pictures started to go away and

what most people assumed was the pictures were going away because oil birds were going away. less birds, less images. as the number of oil birds increased the photographs were decrease in. the reason why was we started threatened to be thrown in jail if we went with and 40 miles, 40 feet of additional if we went on beaches where there was oil. i was trying to go on boats to take pictures and talk to people, about near blooms, and when the person driving the boat found out i was a book author they said i would get a $40,000 fine and get thrown in jail. even though it meant being thrown in jail i did what i could to tell this story and we all did our best to do it but the story became difficult to tell and i knew that was going to happen and that is when i

decided this was going to require more than a few days. it was going to require a full book and investigation and spending as much time as possible in those communities most affected. i spend my time and realized my previous book for those who have read them are really policy books. my background as public policy. i work for two members of congress. my masters is public policy from georgetown. this is going to need to be a very different book and it is really a book that is -- the human story of human impact and the people impact on all sides. i talked to people employed and the oil industry, oil executives, environmentalists, policymakers. i spent a lot of time talking to people here and down there.

the story it told, just to say i was overwhelmed by the graciousness that the hardest point of their lives taking me in, i stayed in people's homes and played with their children and went to their churches and went to work with them when there wasn't any work to be done. i was really brought in and continued to be brought in and the most impact full stories were the ones i tried to tell one year later. the story began at a chevron shareholders meeting. it doesn't conclude but the next step is a week ago when i was in london at bp's shareholder meeting and i went there with five gulf coast residents and people who were deeply impacted by this-after representing their community and the gulf coast fund will pursue an amazing organization found and after katrina to link 200 small community based organizations so

they could organize together, stepped up in response to this disaster to do the same thing in response to the oil disaster because what we heard time and time again as i traveled to the gulf coast was people who had just recovered from katrina, who had worked so hard to get themselves back on their feet financially, emotionally, spiritually and then the oil struck. and you could feel this sense of sorrow and how can we get a break? we worked so hard and now the oil is here. the gulf coast fund had organized in response to katrina and now in response to the oil disaster and they helped bring these community members to

london and this was the president of the louisiana oyster association and tracy coons of the louisiana shrimpers association. her husband mike, incredibly powerful speaker. he said in his documents leading up to the meeting that he learned his lesson from the disaster. it was going to go deeper into the deep water and push more into deep water drilling but it had waited risks and was ready to go. so they had come to explain to board and the chairman of the board and a new ceo bob dudley what it means to meet people from the gulf coast experiencing this disaster. we did a bunch of press. the bbc love those. they knew who we were. we showed up. bp would not give any of the gulf coast residents access even though they held legal proxy to

get in. i got in because i purchased shares and i didn't know they haven't gotten in. we got separated. i got into the meeting and purchased shares and had a special card that said i couldn't speak inside the meeting during the time shareholders get to speak but i went in anyway and when i found out they weren't there i spoke anyway and i said bp had not lived up to its financial leverage the legal or moral obligations in the gulf, that was arguing to fan mail about the amount of oil spilled. when peter cited a figure of $25 billion that they owed, what bp is trying to argue instead of a per barrel rate, it wants to pay at a rate and the day rate equate to not $20 billion but $3 million. bp is arguing half as much oil

has been spilled. they cleaned a lot. how can that be? bp is fighting every step of the way the claims process. one result of the oil pollution act was a company that spilled the oil has to set up a claims process. fortunately this has got a lot of press this week. bp made that process so cumbersome and the cfo for the state of war and is suing bp saying they intentionally made it cumbersome. only one third of the claims have been paid out. 40% have been processed. that means most people in the gulf have an out of work for a year, they haven't gotten any money. this is a subsistence area of fishing and they can be there fishy there and if bp had not

made good on these claims but the other thing i came to do was deliver a message from keith jones who is someone i spent a tremendous amount of time with over the course of writing this book and his son gordon was 28 years old and works for a company that -- he was a cement mixer on the deepwater horizon and he died the night the rigor exploded. he and all the 11 men died died fighting to save the reagan. they could have all been somewhere else when the rig blew. they could have survived. they all stayed where they were to try to save it and they all died. gordon died one week prior to the first -- the birth of his second son leader of the maxwell garden. he burst -- died after the birth of his second son. he died because he said his co-worker was tired and was supposed to take over for him,

don't worry, i will keep working. he -- send me a statement which said bp and trans ocean and halliburton and cameron had cut corners. they had taken this complicated offshore drilling and turned into something that was just about making money and they were greedy and they had rolled the dice with gordon's life and lost. he wanted to make sure this doesn't happen again. what every presidential commission and investigation and scientific study concluded is this is a problem -- the problems that led to this disaster in no way isolated to b p. one of the things i go over in the book is looking at the oil

industry. what did the oil industry do in response to this disaster? not only what did environmentalist's do, not only what scientists do but what did the oil industry do. what they did, i think qualifies as one of the most successful lobbying efforts on behalf of the oil industry to date and that is a lot. their strategy was isolate bp, make this a vp problem but even within that, bp is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the united states, you are taking a big gamble that half of the oil in the united states is dangerous. they said it is the mvp problem but it was a fluke. that has been worked. one of the reasons it was able

to work was unfortunately because the obama administration on which i named my last book, while this administration is not and will lead and restoration, externally isn't the way the last administration was, it doesn't get its money from the oil industry. it gets its money from the oil industry but it is a finance industry. even this government is not immune from the incredible weight and financial lobbying and pressure of the oil industry. even this government that came to that pressure, the key moment that peter mentioned and john mentioned, when basically public attention was completely suede and altered and really lost the

momentum, not the entire race. on august 16th. let me back of the little bit. there was enormous public pressure the weather was after 1989. enormous public attention on this disaster. people were gripped. there watching, there was a huge push for legislation. there was a great number of bills moving through congress. great momentum to see some pass. the well was capped which was fantastic but that didn't end people's attention. they cared about the outcome of this disaster. the more important thing was the climate czar went on every morning television back to back to back and said the vast majority of the oil is gone. that was a end scene moment. and it was not true.

the same document she was looking at, same scientist who worked on that document said it is exactly the opposite. the majority of the oil is there. only a portion of it is gone. what the obama administration wanted to do was get this problem on the way. that is not to say there weren't thousands of government employees that worked very hard to address this disaster because there were, but the overarching problem the obama administration faced was the more president obama's name was linked to it the lower his poll numbers fell and he had a lot of other things to do. he was trying to pass health care. he had two wars he was fighting. he had a recalcitrant -- he wanted to get out of the way. he did that with two million gallons of dispersant and they did that with a long history of

limiting the real numbers coming out of the well. and they did it by telling us that the oil was gone before it was. the combination of the obama administration following that track and the oil industry working hard to make us believe this was a fluke incidents more convenient that it is a british company. made it so that the push for policy, the impact on people's livelihood and the ecosystem stopped and the push for change in policy to deal with this industry stock and what we know for certain is this was not just a bp problem. let's look at the incident

itself. pp are the managers responsible for every final decision and they made every final decision. transocean is the owner and operator and transocean operated that rig in an unconscionable way for the safety of its workers. hundred of maintenance issues that went unattended. a blowout preventer that was low on batteries and leaking hydraulic fluid, alarm systems that were intentionally inhibited. i have to say this every time i talk. the woman who i think is the heroine of the day, andrea slater who was on the bridge at the time has been tainted by the industry as the wrong door on the rigged. if anyone read the new york times article that covers this it was picked up to be the movie for this. they paint andrea has at fault.

when she was the her one of the day. how she was the heroine of the day, the alarm on the rig had been inhibited. when natural gas came into the rig light should have flashed. alarms should have sounded. as soon as the gas came and it should have been sealed. so that everybody was safe even if we had to dive. none of that happened. alarms were turned off. they can record information so we knew what happened but alarms would go on. she was sitting on the bridge and she said the alarms didn't go off and she pushed the button that made the alarms go. what transocean and bps saying is why did she pushed the alarm minutes earlier? it is her fault! no. it is their fault they have the alarm inhibited. transocean is the largest owner and operator of offshore rigs in

the world. everything that went wrong on that rig is something to be concerned about. every rig operating around world. halliburton, largest energy services company in the world failed in these operations. every single oil company who didn't know what to do in response to this disaster who happened prepared, guilty in this disaster and what the bottom line is, all these companies are to blame and need to pay up. vp buddy for children'socean, halliburton and cameron. the bottom line is we shouldn't be having these operations and that is what we learned after 1969 and what we should be learning today. the obama administration knows this. all of them were good on this issue. even when obama was running for office at first he was opposed to offshore drilling and then he was for offshore drilling in the middle of the campaign.

same thing happened to john mccain. the oil industry won it because they were running out of places to operate and they were willing to make that risk and spin those dice and risk the lives of the people in wild places of the golf. we can't let them do that. one of the amazing ends of this story is when i started writing this book, you couldn't get an environmentalist to say anything bad about the oil industry. these industries, oil and fish and oil in the gulf as part and parcel of being there. one of the story cartel in the book is the fish and petroleum sector--in liana and the king and queen of the festival are in my book sitting on their throne and have these crystal crowns, made in crystal is a mean oil derrick coming out and shrimp wrapped around it and that describes the relationship between fish and petroleum in

the gulf. one thing we learned is the gulf thanks of the thaw of the petro state, a really isn't. i work in oil so angola is petro state. iraq is a petro state. 90% of gdp is from oil. louisiana is 8%. what the people who worked in the industry told me, by the end, you know what? we could do without this work. we don't like it. it is dangerous. give us something else to do. we can organize in the golf. it is hard to organize for the alternative. we can work on it but we need your help. you folks can work with green beans or the center of biological diversity or california and vermont and d.c.. you have to fight so we can have

alternative energy jobs, wind and solar. the hardest cut oil workers said this to me by this time. they are ready but they need our help. and the 1-year anniversary is the time. it is the opportunity. it is the time the world is focusing on this issue again. public attention is gripped again. we can actually organize a see change to put it into place. thank you very much for listening. obviously there is a great deal more about this in the book. we are eager to answer your questions and have a discussion. thank you very much for being with us tonight. [applause] [inaudible] >> right here we can take one more question from the back to get a little more covered.

thank you very much. thank you for taking everybody's attention on this. >> two questions. where is the money coming from for the scientific research for the next year or more or whatever you said, and where are the court cases? who is sponsoring those where that money comes from? the washington post, lisa burke county --murkowski had an op-ed that the the man -- [inaudible] >> the money for our litigation is coming from you, thank goodness. our members, we have 42,000

paying members, 3,000 e-mail activists and people are responding. they are sending in the money we need to keep in court. we have an incredible team of 22 lawyers. we are working with a host of oil -- other lawyers who volunteer their time. with the help of our members and our supporters we will continue the litigation fight for as long as it takes. that is the good news. i think the other part of the question was -- oh. i don't you -- [inaudible] >> as far as where the money for the science is coming from, a lot of it is held up. bp is not making that available. antonia juhasz mentioned they deliberately made the process really complicated and the

scientists we talk to, many have done incredible job collecting data under difficult situations. they can't get money to analyze this. it is kind of a mess. there is some governments funding -- funding but a lot is tied up in the court process. to say it is being analyzed is not being -- not being shared with the public because they are treating it as evidence. that doesn't mean the public doesn't have a right to know. eyewall also give a blow for friends at cvd who are doing great work. they don't get corporate funding. we don't take government money. thanks for making it possible for us. >> one of the problems is that bp has put up $500 million for research as they should.

they should put up $500 million for research but they are in control of the fund so they are requiring scientists to sign three year confidentiality agreements. they are trying to guide the research. all the great scientists are foreign. there is another money. there is bp money and then there is nothing. our scientists are trying to find support where they can. they are getting it from groups like greenpeace and the center for biological diversity and universities. so therefore they all need our support. we have to counter bp's control of the funds with alternative funding. people like dr. samantha july who is an amazing woman who i spend a lot of time within the book. she has gone to the bottom of the ocean once a month every month since this happened. she mapped the oil on the bottom of the ocean two inches thick and 80 miles from the site of

the blowout. she was on the team that found diploma. she is fighting know what every single day. these scientists need our support. >> we had long suspected that it came out, might have been the freedom of information act requests. a lot of documents, thousands of documents emerged in the last few weeks that bp is doing everything possible to specifically direct how the money goes. i don't like the way this is going. pull the plug on this and give this money to these people because they have a good background in the oil industry so let's spend the money over here. you can imagine -- studies benefit them and thing they will use in their defense and get a tax deduction for donating $500 million for their defense

in court. >> the opportunity to work on this, bring the national guard home, rework on this. we are anxious to work with you. a real tight question. and operational experience in 1970, we had to report every single thaw of oil we filled. we absolutely cannot use it. absolutely could not do that. >> they still have to record every release of oil and millions of gallons are released

into the ocean, workers got all the time, sitting with his wife and newborn baby and trying to make her feel better by saying these explosions happen all the time. the worry about it. it is not something to worry about. he had broken his arm and leg and all came out in the interview and oil spills happen constantly and one of these things, it was 2.5 million gallons that were used in the gulf of -- the mexican gulf of the gulf of mexico after the oil spill in 1979. the oil research -- industry didn't do any research. they didn't study it and just use it again this time. it was a source of a gusher underwater and we have seen

footage of that to spray the dispersants. 98% just went into the ocean. >> it was reported a while ago that the $20 billion people were supposed to put into the fund was directly connected to the gulf production money but is that still the case? it was important but i haven't heard that again. the obama administration apparently allowed them to tie that to gulf oil production so that bp would hold the administration hostage because if they didn't allow more drilling in the gulf, was anything done about that? >> the reality is the company was about to go down the tubes.

the share price was dropping every day. market capitalization was put in half in a matter of days. had some agreement not been reached, the government's fear was this company would go way. one of the largest companies on earth would die in front of the sand then we will pay and we won't have the british punching bag available to us. a calculation on a very short-term basis, 24/7 calculation was made that we have to have something that gives us certainty with funds available but possibly more important, at that point the obama administration determined it is not in their best interests politically or in the governance of the country, to allow this company to die at that time. that is what $20 billion

represented more than anything else. >> one thing i would add. the moratorium the obama administration put in place wasn't on drilling in the gulf. was just on exploration. drilling continued. we are producing more oil at this time that we were at this time last year. production didn't suffer at all. to make the point, people who think drill baby girl is the answer, we are producing more oil now that we were at this time last year but the price of oil and gas are significantly higher. they are not connected. the first new lease for exploration was granted to bp. exploration grants are going left and right and all the companies are getting new grants. out of that $20 million put forward, the claims are taken care of, that $20 billion was

just a promise. 3.5 has been delivered. that is for everything. every potential charge against bp. is not nearly as large as it sounded. >> time for one last question. >> the clean water act lawsuit that we filed seeks $19 billion entirely separate from the other $25 billion fund. >> [inaudible] -- have you think you will get this put on? >> real good question. we are in a terrible spot.

for decades -- it is a sad irony that under a democratic administration when we have been able to fight back in the darkest days of all branches of government controlled by hostile anti environmentalists that we have been able to beat back those challenges and basically the wolf was taken off of the endangered species list by a act of congress. first time this ever happened. all in a calculation to reelect senator don toucher. a naked calculation made by the bean counters that the white house. all i can say is it is very depressing. we think we will get them on the endangered species list because a different group of people makes that decision. the thing is if they don't make that decision we will get it on the list. will they pass a bill to take off the list subsequently? this is the question everyone is asking. you see it like the domino theory they talked about in

vietnam. if you can take the wolf off the endangered species list by legislation, one of the most charismatic animals there is, i understand your question about the sea horse which is a darling little creature. let's not somewhat short. we are in a world of hurt in that regard. >> one question i get asked a lot. how good a job did they do with the cleanup effort? it is a difficult one to answer but for me it comes back to the simple truth which people don't want to face and that is where you have offshore drilling you have the risk of accidents and this gets back to what antonia juhasz was saying. they are rolling the dice and it is a matter of time. this was not so much an accident as an accident waiting to

happen. that is why we need to be working together more than ever to make sure it doesn't happen again. we need to get rid of offshore drilling. >> more importantly we have to get rid of dependence on oil. the idea that all of us here -- to be able to get here you may have gotten here, i think that is one of the reasons people don't get that emotional about this. i will drive down to for coast -- wait a minute. not just drove in a car that use oil. how do you turn that around? that is the bottom line. as far as -- $20 million is ridiculously low. i was fined $200 for putting a catch a bottle in a trash can

that was not recycled trash can. we do are really good job. i am amazed you can get away with so much crap. >> an important place to end. our own responsibility, our own culpability dealing with oil. there are two pieces of that. one is hands down the largest source of oil, usage of oil and gasoline is transportation. it is cars and planes and trucks. i think the greatest solution for that is we are at a time of economic crisis, incredible ongoing job loss. if we can make the type of public commitment to public transportation like we did to public highways we could have an amazing job program and we could move people in public

transportation instead of moving people in cars and that would be a huge shift but the whole field of advocacy for public transportation is just one that doesn't get a lot of support and a lot of energy and the silver bullet, there are individual actions we can take but collectively we will be far more powerful and the way to be more powerful collectively is by demanding public policy that makes it possible for more people to make that choice away from individual use of cars. the other piece is the industry. i have spent a lot of my life trying to organize around the oil industry and it is one that is difficult to organize around because the wealthiest industry beat planet has ever known and it is not susceptible to the type of consumer boycotts so many large companies are. all that is missing is continuing to have that type of corporate analysis that allows

us to say the industry is making a choices. companies are making choices and using money in a way that is making it hard for us to make individual decisions and policy decision that we want and to continue to bring that corporate analysis into the picture and support the organization to be mindful of exchange and biological diversity and studies that do that work and target the industry and oil companies as a whole so we can attack the negative work they are doing and support the positive alternatives at the same time. >> thank you all. [applause] >> thank you all very much. i am going to sign books somewhere. even though we have gone over. >> is there a nonfiction offer or boat you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at

booktv@c-span.org or tweak us at twitter.com/booktv. >> "climatopolis: how our cities will thrive in the hotter future" is written in a breezy popular style and has a sort of breezy optimism to it. you right at one point, quote, the innovative capitalist culture will allow us to make a houdini style escape from climate change's most devastating impacts. what makes you so sure of that? >> my mother always told me to avoid wishful thinking and i always try to be provocative to see if folks are awake. i take climate change very seriously. now that my two minutes is up. i love good jokes. i take climate change very seriously. my optimism is really -- the core of my optimism and i don't want you to walk away thinking i

may not even optimists. when we anticipate a challenge, in a world of seven billion people or perhaps nine billion people, if enough of us are scared and aware of the challenge climate change opposes the beginnings of addressing do in head on is anticipating a problem and give our best minds mark zuckerberg and a few ucla faculty, in a world where we have seven billion to nine billion people anticipating major challenges and anticipating that there will be a market just as folks use their blackberry to text my exciting voice, in a world where there is a need for climate change and innovation that demand creates supply, my optimism is not naive wishful thinking but if we anticipate that unlike the titanic if we can see the iceberg ahead and we are afraid of the iceberg this is the beginning of lead time to take corrective action that will help

many of us to adapt to this very scary scenario. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> this june on in depth the balance between security at liberty, the difficulty in a climate change treaty and the limits of international law. your questions for our. university of chicago law professor eric holder. the perils of global leadership and i will take your calls, e-mails and tweets on booktv. >> we have in our society this view that we are divided selves. that we have reason over here and the motion over here and the two are at war with one another. if you are emotional you are not rational and irrational your naughty emotional. and society progresses to the extent that reason which is trust worthy can surpass the

motions which are untrustworthy. this bias has led to a view of human nature that we are fundamentally rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives. if lead to a lot of academic disciplines that tries to study human behavior using the methods of physics emphasizing what they can count and model and ignoring all the rest. it has led to an amputation. a shallow view of human nature we emphasize things that are rational and accountable but ignore the things down below. it created a culture in which we are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about the motions. really good at talking about health and safety and professional skills but about the most important things like character and integrity we often have very little to say. alastair mcintyre, the great philosophers that we live in a system where we have words for important things like honor and vice and virtue but don't have basic understanding of how they fit together.

he said imagine you had science words like neutron or gravity but didn't understand how physics works or how they fit together. that is where we are. we do have this amputation which blows us in a certain way and it blows us in the direction of the prevailing breeze we are not always satisfied with. i went to high school and my folks live in wayne, pennsylvania up, just west of here and you see parents in many places attracted to a certain style of raising their kids. go to an elementary school out there and third graders come out wearing these 80 pound backpacks. if the wind blow them over there like beetles stock on the ground because we want them to study and do homework and get ready for the harvard submissions test. they get picked up by saabs and audis and volvo because it is did have a luxury car as long as

it is from a country hostile and u.s. foreign policy. they are raised and picked up by this creature i wrote about who are highly successful career women who take time off to make sure their kids get into harvard and they weigh less than their own children and are doing a little exercises at the moment of conception in the delivery room, cutting the vocal cord themselves, the baby pops out and mandarin flashcards and learn chinese. they turn into little achievement machines. they are not really happy. they don't think this is the most important thing but to tell your mom down the street is doing and they feel sort of trapped into a system which they ridiculed but can't renounce. they are often in a system where they sort of into it that morality and character matters most but don't have a vocabulary for it so when people talk about morality we talk about other

things. so we have the ben and jerry's ice cream foreign policy. i joked in one of my books that ben and jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste. doesn't kill germs, asks them to leave. we have a whole foods market, grocery stores where all the cashiers' look like they're on loan from amnesty international. my house. do we by their seaweed based snacks for kids who come home and say i went a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer. and so i think this is sort of the world we are trapped in but we realized that is not all there is. there is more. to life. more that we should be experiencing. i was thinking about this problem and became aware of this other sphere of life where they

were looking into sort of the deeper things and it wasn't theologians, wasn't really philosophers but people who study the human mind. we are in this incredibly exciting period in the study of the mind and it has been done across a wider range of spheres like neuroscience or psychology, behavioral economics. people are looking into the human mind and it is a revolution of consciousness if you want to put it that way because when you synthesize their findings across these different spheres used art with three key insights. the first is the conscious mind rights the autobiography of our species. most action, most of the impressive action is happening and consciously below the level of awareness. one way to think of this is the human mind can take in twelve million pieces of information a minute which it can consciously process 40. all the rest being done without our being aware of it and a lot of the things that are going on

are somewhat odd and my favorite research finding in university of buffalo is people named dennis are more likely to become dentists, people named lawrence are likely to become lawyers. and, just to we gravitate toward things that are familiar with is why i named my daughter president of the united states brooks. some things going on and second -- and consciously are impressive. it is not the tangled web of sexual urges that sigmund freud imagined. it is just a different way of understanding the world. and often yielding superior results. one of the tips i read about is if you have a tough decision and can't make up your mind tell yourself you will decide by a coin flip. then flip the coin but don't go by the coin flip but your emotion to it. are you happy or sad it came their way?