skim right through some parts -- repetitive. i'm unaware of any conservatives who blamed it on islamic terrorism. we didn't know what it was. by the time we heard what happened he was being described in "the new york times" headlines as christian fundamentalist. gun-toting, fox news-viewing i believe. and his mannyfesto makes clear as the caller said, he isn't a christian. he uses the word christian to mean, nonislamic. it is not specifically, i don't know, black, hispanics, brown people. no, it is muslims he does not like. that's it. and yes it was very anti-muslim. he talks how he wants the jews and buddhists and all the people of europe to join with him to fight against the islam maization of europe. that is his big thing. whether or not that is connected to the insanity on some molecular level i don't know but for "the new york times" to describe him as

>> coming up next, booktv presents "after words," an hour-long program where we invite guest host to interview authors. this week, daniel yergin and his new book, "the quest." the pulitzer prize-winning author of the price continues the story of the oil industry, to impact on international politics and a possible energy sources of the future. he discusses his findings with "associated press" energy writer, dina capiello. >> host: welcome mr. yergin to "after words" and thanks for doing this. first of all let me congratulate you on what is quite an achievement, this book of yours,

"the quest." the first thing i wanted to ask you, i wanted to ask you what prompted this book? obviously you had your pulitzer prize-winning book, the price about the history of oil. so, why this, why now, especially when one of your binary conclusions is that for a while, things aren't really going to change much when it comes to where we get our energy from. >> guest: a couple of reasons. one is that long-term trends are going to change. a lot has changed in the world. the soviet union collapsed. china is the only country that gets two chapters in this book. right up until what happened this year with fukushima nuclear accident and the arab spring. both of them with bing impact on energy. the other thing what i wanted to do, this is more ambitious and the prize, ambitious as i thought that was when i was writing it because this tries to cover the whole energy spectrum

and see how these pieces all fit together. so, there was a big topic which often happens. you find out that you have bitten off more than you expected. >> host: it is interesting, you say sit together, because after reading i think 700 plus pages, i lost count, biography and the footnotes. >> guest: thank you. [laughter] >> guest: it makes the book shorter. very perceptive of you. >> host: it is hard to see how they fit together, right? because if we continue, you know, to find oil through unconventional sources, which has greatly expanded our proven record at least, than what is going to prompt us to go the renewable route, which as you know we don't get much bang for our buck in terms of the energy produced, has some logistical hurdles to say the least.

so i guess, how do you see these fitting together eventually? >> guest: it is really an evolution. technology, mean the story is a lot about how technology evolves, where did they come from and how did they get started? so, you know you go back to when there was great excitement about renewables in the 1970s and 1980s. you look back and realize there were very immature technologies. wind is a much more sophisticated technology so they will continue to develop and wind, solar, the name of the game is to bring the cost down to being competitive but meanwhile what we are certainly seeing as a technical logical innovation perhaps in the energy area and the picture of energy supply in the u.s. is really different than it looks when i started this book. >> host: is that in 2005? >> guest: 2005, 2006. the unconventional gas resolution or shale gas burst on the scene in 2008. not until 2011.people wake up to

this other thing that's happening with what is called u.s. oil production going up rather than going down. u.s. oil imports going down instead of going up, which is what we have been habituated to for so many years. >> host: now you said in a book that the idea of the petro theme and a lot of ways it is in venezuela and the rise of hugo chavez and his nationalization of the oil industry they are. and you mentioned chavez atlantis connection with fidel castro in cuba and that got me thinking because there is a lot of controversy right now about plans by cuba to drill offshore especially after the gulf oil spill that we had last year. >> guest: that is a very interesting change. >> host: let me explain my logic here. how does cuba getting into the offshore oil game, how will that affect the stability of energy if at all?

and, is there a reason for us to be as concerned as we are post this event in the u.s.? >> guest: at the thing is cuba is very close to florida and some of the waters it, the cuban waters they would be drilling and would be very close to florida so certainly concerned about just basically environmental safety and security and how it would be managed in cuba. of course, you know for decades it was thought that cuba might have hydrocarbon resources going back to the late 1950s actually, but now they are starting to drill in those waters and oil has been the key to the relationship between venezuela and cuba cuba because venezuela has played a role that the soviet union used it play in terms of propping up the cuban economy. but i think my expectation would be that at such.as the company start drilling in those waters we will see real intensification of concern in florida and the united states about it and put aside the politics which are

complicated enough, but about environmental security. >> host: now you also talked on page 109 actually, something that struck me and i think throughout this i'm going to relate what you wrote here to events happening today, which is what i do for a living. so, so you stayed loyal can generate a great deal of revenue. it is a capital intensive industry. this music creates relatively few jobs adding further to the pressure pressure on government to spend on product and welfare entitlements. in this country as you know, the moratorium following the gulf oil spill was a job killer in the push to open up more public resources to drilling is being touted by certain people in politics as a job creator. so when i read that sentence, i question whether, is it a really big shock to readers? >> guest: let's say a middle

east country with a big youth population and it doesn't have a lot of other skills and other industries, and therefore there aren't that many jobs. you can get very large oil producers and a lot of people who don't have jobs. what is interesting and has become clear as people look at a more carefully. the jobs themselves and then there are the jobs of the industries that support them and then there are the jobs that are called induce jobs which are people who have more income. when you look at that in terms of what is happening in the domestic u.s. oil and gas development actually it turns out that there a lot of secondary jobs that are created that people wouldn't think that their jobs being created for the gulf, offshore gulf industry in ohio or california. so, you think that any kind of depends on the country and the scale and the kind of, whether you have all of these other industries that support it. so some countries it is a huge

problem but it turns out i think what we are learning now in the united states with these developments, there are a lot of jobs, secondary jobs that followed that. >> host: what about the concept of jobs from the renewable energy industry which as you know the buzz term these days, green jobs. and there has been a lot of discussion about that recently about whether the obama administration has been successful about creating the green jobs. do you see renewables, renewable energy, wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels as great job creators? >> guest: they create jobs too. the question is the scale. is interesting if you take ethanol, if you live in an urban area with as motor fuel and so forth but of course ethanol is very important to the economy of rural areas and has kind of had a transformative effect on some of that. i think what we have seen, there's a lot of expectations

and hope for green jobs. it is just the scale. these have to be bigger businesses and then there's the other question, of course, where the elements that go into a green economy going to be manufactured? >> host: and on the green jobs versus i guess the fossil fuel jobs, i mean is one better than the other? is a the scale of the oil and gas industry that is so much larger? >> guest: if you look at the numbers you would see in the last few years more jobs have been created through oil and gas than through green jobs but green jobs are going to go. the story i tell us how these industries have started to reach the scale. last year about $120 billion was invested worldwide in electric generation, renewable electric generation and that is a big number. so it does start to create more and more jobs but it just takes time because the whole energy system is so large. >> host: you you mentioned ethanol, and i know that is towards the end of the book so i'm going to jump there because

you mentioned it. i found that part of the book really interesting. you seem to be a believer in biofuels. is that accurate? or at at least be enthusiastic about it? >> guest: well, many of these things like biofuels and ethanol and electric cars, you have to go back a century and you sort of find we are picking up the story that ended in 1910 or 1920 or there's a big move for ethanol during the great depression because farmers were so, having such difficult times and then we had castle hall in the 1970s. there's a picture the book in the book of a u.s. senator pouring vodka into a tractor engine on capitol hill to demonstrate the potential of biofuel. i think ethanol, we have seen limits in the united states. it is now about 6% on an energy basis of our motor fuel. and a larger in terms of volume. but, you know you sort of say what's out there on the horizon?

what are the potential game changers? one of them is what is called second-generation biofuels where you are making biofuels not from foodstuffs but from agricultural waste and other things or algae and things like that. and that was really kind of hot three or four or five years ago but didn't get as much attention. those efforts continue and so you can say where mike mike breakthroughs come from? one may could come from the intensification from these second-generation biofuels and one of the things -- it is part of what i call in the book the great bubbling bubbling of innovation. >> host: the other thing i found interesting about ethanol is that and correct me if i'm wrong or if i'm misreading it as we talk about the book, but it

seems to be a success, right? it seems to be getting a foothold because of government policies. that is made a successful and i found that really interesting because there is a manipulation of the market going on to make ethanol a bigger share of our, what we fuel our cars with that was accepted, whereas there seems today in washington to be a push to let's just have the market do what the market wants to do and let's not tanker so how is it that was okay to tinker when it came to ethanol and we are not -- encouraged not to really tanker one it comes to solar and wind? >> guest: i think there still a lot of tinkering going on. to use her phrase tinkering, if you say 33% of your electricity by 2020 have to be for renewals, some would call that a pretty big tanker. so we do a lot in this country by mandates by requirements, such a percentage of motor fuel

has to be biofuel in and such a such a percentage of electricity has to be renewable and kind of that is the way if you just look at it and you say, kind of what is giving the boost to it and helping the industries like wind get to scale? it is these mandates. most of the renewables are going into wind because linda sort of the lumber alternative, another form of conventional and. >> host: i didn't see a lot of discussion about the environmental question and we will come back to this in a conversation i'm sure. as you know the national academy of sciences did a report called the hidden cost of energy in one of the conclusions it made was that if you look at the lifecycle of e-85 and ethanol, that it is actually more damaging environmentally than straight up gasoline in the car. i mean, so -- >> guest: i didn't go into depth into that.

i think i kind of disgust that also by the debate as to whether it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get out of it and then you say, what energy and what are you using to do it and there are very fierce arguments about that. i think we have seen, it would have to go back five years ago that kind of consensus support around ethanol is probably stronger than it is today. but it is now part of the comet is part of our motor fuel. >> host: i remember covering it in the state of new york. that was kind of one of the impairment of things that pushed us to ethanol. >> guest: that was one of the great triggers for it, you know and in terms of volume, auto fuels today in the united states or about 1 million barrels a day. that is kind of like a small to medium-size oil producing countries would have to have that kind of volume. but you know, in the book,

former governor, now secretary of energy, secretary of agriculture, he has talked about, he like others has talked about ethanol also as a way of rural development. so i think, to some parts of the country, those issues loom very large. >> host: right. energy has always loomed large. >> guest: you look at the question why don't we have take energy policies? we are the country. it is not a simple thing to have a single energy policy for a country our size. >> host: once again and reading your book so many times and that all these post-it notes are just thoughts that i thought of as i was reading it, but in the chapter that you titled aggregate disruption, you talk about world events that had a huge impact on energy prices, particularly the cried -- price of oil.

venezuela's political overtaking of the oil industry there, hurricanes katrina and rita. to cover those on the gulf coast yet we have republican presidential candidates, at least one, bowing to come into office and make gas prices $2 a barrel and others who say that president barack obama's whole intent as president was to call a huge increase in the price of gasoline. are any of these realistic given the global oil market that you so well described in this book? i mean, how much can a u.s. president let alone a u.s. country do with gasoline prices? >> guest: president after president have discovered that they have less control over energy markets. when you go back to the richard nixon, project independence. jimmy carter who came in and is going to make energy is cornerstone and then it was part of what destroyed his presidency. i mean you just cope president

after president. there aren't that many levers to pull. what has happened is that in a way, our insolence over energy as a country is lessons because we used to be the name of the game and the biggest energy consumer. china now consumes more energy than the united states, and we talk about the chapter about aggregate disruption and then i have one on the demand shock and trying to beat answer the question appointed to. how do we go into thousand four, the general view is oil $20 a barrel and it might collapse. four years later, just four years later it is $147.27. how did that happen? one of the factors was the growth of demand, almost unexpectedly and emerging market and it kind of just burst on the scene in 2004 in 2005 and kind of woke up -- it was hard for americans to realize what they were paying at the pump is partly affected by what happened in provinces in china whose

names they didn't even know because of energy demand there. and so i think there is this kind of, this global market in the center of gravity has been shifting reflecting the changes of the global economy. we still use twice as much oil as china, but in 20 years they could be even with us. >> host: right. basically the bottom line is we have very little control. >> guest: yeah. i mean, interesting things are happening. our oil imports are going down. we are going to have a lot more efficient automobiles and talk about another mandate that will have a big impact on this global market. from the viewpoint of an automobile company is not very far away. those kinds of things have a big impact. you can can sort of see the automobile may curse trying to figure out how we actually do this? you may have noticed the spare tires are starting to disappear from new cars because they want

to bring down the wait to meet those fuel efficiency standards. >> host: you talk about president george w. bush who endorsed the fuel efficiency increase, and hence decreased eric demand for oil. to get what he says iranian president mahmoud ahmadinejad and lugo chavez out of the oval office. so bush thought, hey i am going to reduce our demand to make us less reliant but nowadays members of this very same party the republican party, are drumming the supply-side. we need to drill more at home, and open up anwr. >> guest: certainly, bush was saying that too. basically, there are two characters here. one is named supply and when his name demand and they're the ones who add up in terms of outcome but it is interesting because bush made that comment not in a state of the union address.

that is what he said privately but it tells you there was a geopolitical context to all of this to reduce particularly during that time, the very tight oil market to reduce the influence of these two characters among others on not only the oil market but on -- >> host: is energy independence even possible because i think, why i'm asking, i'm asking is for the lay people out there. daniel yergin premier energy expert, preface energy day in and day out. i mean is that a total pipe dream when we hear politicians say energy independence and how much, if we could just say okay, the gloves are off, let's go guys. gives we could run a sequence of president after president after president saying energy

independence and i think the reality is that you know know we are part of the global economy and we trade a lot of things back and forth. so the real question is the vulnerability, energy security. is not a question that we have to be 100% independent, and i asked one senator about that. he said actually energy independence means energy security but energy security sounds abstract and energy independence is a very appealing term. i think we need to be in a position where economy is less vulnerable to disruptions, two shocks of one kind or another and the american people can count on reliable reasonably priced flows of energy. so the answers i think are found on both sides of the equation. by the way we are twice as energy-efficient as we were in the 1970s. i mean that has been a huge contribution. just imagine if that hadn't happened, the trouble we would

be in. at the same time what is interesting now is seeing that, people thought u.s. spinach as a producer and find out -- go is good to the drilling question and i've been dying to assess you this question. republicans on the one hand from the hill and in congress today and on the campaign trail are saying drill, drill, drill. invoking sarah palin again in 2008, drill baby, drill. and the democratic response to that has been a concept called use it or lose it, right? that oil companies in this country have to sell a lot of acres and are just kind of sitting on them. i wanted to ask you this because it is such a wonderful job in this book, saying that you can politics, policy this all day long but when it comes down to the technology to get the oil that you want to get. is use it or lose it a viable comment?

>> guest: it is much more in the current political arena. i do understand the concept actually because i mean, companies don't have an incentive to just sit on resources up. it takes time because on the other hand you don't want them rushing into the gulf and drilling without having you know, dotted every i and crossed every tv. so i think they're there are long times in the energy business that you might be given a project today and you won't see that producing in 15 years and you have to allocate capital and your allocation capital depends on what happens to price and everything like that. so you know i think there there is definitely a middle ground here to have a reasonable approach to continue to develop resources that you know are important to our economy and also the jobs and the other things we are talking about and do it on a reasonable basis. but you know right now, we are in the middle of a political system, a situation in campaigns

all of the discussions about energy like everything else tend to be more polarized. >> host: there is a lot of great characters in this book, and john rockefeller obviously with standard oil comity boone pickens is mentioned. there's the guy in china and i will murder his name. what is it about you know, oil and natural gas in this whole agreement that attracts these larger-than-life personalities? >> guest: it is also true the win chapter has great ureters. >> host: all of them throughout the book. >> guest: of course solar, the two guys, the first solar company. one of them is still around. they are supposedly spiking it with coca-cola. these guys who know nothing about business and say let's go into the solar business.

the government putting up satellites. where did the solar business come from? where did wind come from and where did the revolution of natural gas come from? i think that the energy business, it does have a lot of people who are very strong-willed, who can take a lot of disappointment and maybe are somewhat obsessive and sticking with things, even when it looks like you know people are saying you are crazy. why are you doing that? so i love finding these characters to carry the story along in a novelistic way, who are very important have him port and impacts in terms of what happened. >> host: you also pull up interesting facts like the effects of prohibition on ethanol and alcohol-based fuels, or the robbery of solar panels off pipelines to feed basically marijuana growers in california. i mean just really interesting

tidbits that even in energy writer like myself is surprised. >> guest: energy tends to be seen as an abstract the question that is out there. i really want to show people doing things, and you know back in the 80's they were really puzzled. why were people doing these things? of force because they wanted to be able to draw electricity without drying utilities because then the police could determine there was a surge of electricity and figure out someone was in the marijuana business. >> host: now, in the book -- >> guest: by the way let me also say one of my favorite characters in the book, harry higgins smith who is a man who was a professor at caltech and walked out one day in 1948 and couldn't breathe the air in los angeles because it was so 30. he gave up his favorite subject which is trying to understand

why pineapples were sweet to work on the question of where did smog come from. but he was also just, suddenly realizing he was the man who identified the active ingredient in marijuana. >> host: really come interesting. , interesting. the other guy and i forget his name, is probably on one of my post-it notes, but the guy that wrote one of the first papers on fracking was the same guy that proffered peak oil and those same kind of income grew us. they think the guy -- >> guest: m. m. mk m. cain or -- m. cain hubbard. >> host: i found this really interesting because that begs the question for me as a reader, one of the things that comes up in the whole peak oil discussion is that he failed in his projection to incorporate technology, yet he wrote a paper

about fracturing which today has opened up a vast new role for natural gas and for trade oil. >> guest: that's right and when he was writing his paper, probably five or six years after the first 12 that contract and it was just, so he was right about technology. but you know there is this theme that people kind of come to this view that technology is over. and that you know we have gone this far and we know what we know. just look at the world we live in and you say well that's not true. technology is going to convince his happened. there's a character in the book, who is a french scientist, who in 1824 wrote a paper about the steam engine, explaining it but he is also a soldier. his father had been minister poorer under napoleon and he was convinced there was a geopolitical thing that the napoleonic wars, they were masters of this technology. he talks about this great revolution that had kind of captured the world.

the first time it wasn't human labor. it was an animal labor. it was technological ingenuity captured and he called this the great revolution. i think in a way this book is kind of the story of this great revolution that unfolded over two and a half centuries. and actually invented the world we live in. a lot of scientists and engineers in a lot of entrepreneurs and it is going to continue. >> host: that is a great entrée into my next question. at times in the book, you seem to oscillate between on the one hand, government policies mandates have the subsidies that are needed. you have to get the switch going and get away from fossil fuels which were 80% dependent on, somewhere around there and other points in the book where you talk about the canadian oil sands and also the california blackouts, the regulation debacle, you suggest that government intervention messed

up. they were to blame in part for the oil sands not being developed as they should have or the case of california, they just weren't great at tweaking the market and made some mistakes there. so i guess, where do you come out at the end of the day? i mean, do we need government policies to make this transition? and if not, what is going to drive it? is it going to be high prices because of demand? high prices because of the cost to get to where the oil is and the alternative energies are going to be -- carbon and environmental controls? i'm not seeing the bridge. >> guest: i think you have to look at 30 states that have requirements about using renewable technology in electric generation. that is the force of law. governor jerry brown's, the same governor jerry brown's who in the 1970s helped kickstart the

original wind business now has signed this legislation earlier in 2011, and that is a pretty, it is the force of law. it is the law so you have that going on. so i think that energy is so fundamental that it is so tied up in government policies, legislation, regulation. you know the fact when you look at energy in the united states, the notion of what kind the kind of wild category. it is very highly regulated activity. if you want to drill in well it is very highly regulated. i think california, which the people in california will remember the energy crisis was only a decade ago. it was a fundamental mistake in the regulation that deregulated have the market and they didn't deregulate the other half. and they assume california would be in a recession. they just didn't figure out maybe california is in an

economic film and is run up against the wall and that is what happened. >> host: what you say to people who say we should just step aside, policymakers, politicians, let them sort it out based on market dynamics and not mess with the market? we don't have the federal market yet. >> guest: we have many states and you know we have the federal, the 54-mile per gallon is a very powerful piece of energy regulation. so you go down the list, there are lots of things that are happening. and kind of will continue to happen. and you have the california air resources board. a lot of viewers have not heard of it. is the closest thing we have to global regulator to the world automobile industry. they trigger federal states and also because of the market they say this can happen in california. well, you can build one car for california and other car for nevada. so it has an impact in the new

find automobile manufactures all of the world are paying attention to it. there are a lot of things happening that actually people don't see that are certainly part of this fabric of government and market and has always, there is no final fix frontier to wear here is here but it is kind of an ongoing interaction. >> host: so let me ask it another way. you said we have come a really long way since 2005 and now we are here. would we be where we are today without government intervention in energy? >> guest: well if we hadn't had fuel efficiency standards i think we would have a very different picture. it is not a question of should we have government. i tell the story of samuel and saul who was sort of, i mean he was like the greatest businessmen of the 1920s and people saw his words. one thing you want to do was

preserve his name and he presided over the most famous bankruptcy in the great depression and became as close to going to jail and died in the paris metro was just a few cents in his pocket. but you go back to insult, really at the beginning of the 20 centuries when we started regulating the electric car business because we still have 20 or 30 or 40 different electric power company serving one city. so now, the whole electric power system for instance is, we have a regulatory bargain. that is the way the system works. so it has grown up with it. >> host: in your chapter on unconventional resources, you delve into the deepwater horizon incident and the chain of mistakes that led to the offshore oil spill which was the largest in u.s. history. you talk about the missteps. i mean how do you explain why these missteps occurred, and why there were as you say, no established methods for stopping the flow of oil?

and also i was wondering, are you surprised that congress to date has not passed any legislation reflecting on the lessons we have learned from the deepwater horizon. are you surprised? >> guest: i think a lot of us happen. we have had a reorganization of the regulation of the offshore oil industry. that is a big deal. you have had a much deeper understanding and coordination of it. it was an accident that you know thinking the unthinkable, we thought it couldn't happen because we knew how to do it. well, did happen and as a result of that there were a lot of consequences. we have a new regulatory regime. >> host: which can be changed with a new administration. >> guest: but, you think that the emphasis on safety, you know you can argue about timing. does the agency have enough people inside of the agencies and is a need more funding? they're all those questions

around it but i think nobody's going to back away from the opportunity to commit to safety. no one wanting anything like that to happen again and you also have the establishment of two consortia that actually, it should never happen again but should it happen again, the know-how to quickly stanch an accident like that so that it doesn't turn into the kind of macondo accident that just went on and on with the oil pouring out. >> host: there was an earlier accident you referenced in and 85 somewhere in the world, even longer in terms of the flow of oil and trying to kill the well. >> guest: you know this was a great depths, and you could see they had kind of invented the technology along the way to deal with it. now that capacity is there, but the purpose of the safety system that we have is that it never has to be used again but you needed in place and you need the resources committed so if something does happen you can do

it. it would be acceptable otherwise. >> host: right. you talked about the reorganization underway. the service was renamed after the incident, they osha and it's meant regulation. now that has been spread to leasing and the environmental and safety part. but in the book, it seems to me, and maybe i'm race reading this, but you kind of downplay the coziness that exist between the regulator and the offshore oil and gas industry. you write phase safety officials now have to carry their own -- and they flew a couple of hundred miles out to inspect platforms and they are prohibited from doing anything once there including a badr bottle -- water on a hot day. we had regulators, we had people that were in charge of doing

drugs with these companies, partying. there was one in denver and there were two inspector general reports off the gulf coastcoastcoast, one in lake charles and the other i believe in port arthur. no, new orleans. new orleans chief was fired a belief are going to sporting events. >> guest: i mean i know about the one in denver. i don't know about the others. denver is not the offshore industry but there was indeed -- what can be described as a deep coziness. you know i think that, who are your inspectors going to be? they're people that live in south louisiana and in the coastal areas. they may indeed go to the same churches on sunday morning as the people who are also working on the platforms. but that doesn't mean that they are not going to be tough enforcers. i mean we have now seen a couple of reports have come out trying to understand exactly what happened in macondo with the

presidential commission, the federal agency has come out with one and i think there are very important lessons to be drawn and clearly part of the reorganization was to charlie and kind of separate the different functions because the mineral management service had the job of molding offshore development and the responsibility of managing the safety. i think other countries have learned, such as britain after it had bad offshore accident that you have to separate those two functions. on the water and you know it was just, the purpose of that was to just show how much things had gone 180 degrees and you couldn't have a bottled water. >> host: did he go too far though? it seems like there's a little tongue-in-cheek nest there. >> guest: i think we are still, you know the accident was a momentous accident. people's lives were lost. the affected the livelihood of so many people. covered so much of the ocean. i think we are still actually --

you don't just go from one way of doing things to another way overnight. i think we are still in transition finding out the way to properly to regulated and you know what the preeminent object with is safety. >> host: now you mentioned when you go into nuclear energy, another one of my obsessions, you mentioned that government regulators, you know in the wake of three mile island there was an investigation just like with the gulf oil spill. the presidential appointed panel and rick gober was in charge of it. admiral over, right. a navy guy. >> guest: he is one of the great characters in the book because the third-generation know who he is. and the younger generation i found who have never heard of him. he is not only the founder of the nuclear navy. he is 62 years active duty which is incredible. he was also the -- of any single

person and a very cantankerous person. he drove the other admirals crazy. jimmy carter who'd been a nuclear submarine are, said, call them the greatest engineer of all times. >> host: jimmy carter, he put jimmy carter on the spot, right? in an interview of some sort? >> guest: it is rigorous to get into the navy. he was short one of the chair legs of people would feel uncomfortable and he would have lines where the sun would cover their eyes. is intervening young james earl carter and carter said something like, i came in 57th in my class at annapolis. rick gober says to him, one of the best? why did you do better than that? carter were sort of bragging about it and that became the title of carter's campaign autobiography, why not the best? it is very interesting, after

the three mile island accident in pennsylvania in 1979, carter appointed brick over to evaluate a form it. included the letter that rick overrode to carter and i was struck by it because it sort of -- many accident. >> host: i wrote in the margin, essentially, you have cut and pasted it with the oil spill commission or the joint investigation of the coast guard and the offshore. >> guest: exactly because what you have is a series of cascading mistakes. up one of them hadn't happened he would have the disaster and you may have had other certain steps, seven out of 10 of them and nothing happened but when they all come together. when i read that letter at had the exact same reaction you did. >> host: he was called to lead the investigation into three mile island and at the end, he

warned against the cops and robbers and drum between government regulators and the nuclear industry and he also said that government regulators would never be sufficient and cannot adequately do the job and that is how intel was created. inn is basically a body basically. >> guest: is self-regulation. you have very tight government regulations and then you have the industry where they go out and critique each other. they are very tough on each other. if one of them makes a mistake, everybody is vulnerable so they are very tough on each other. >> host: i think about works and i imagine in my mind. kind of like the same concept when you are kind of like, you know, on a school playground and you are playing a game in one of the lawyers doesn't do his job for the team and you are like okay you have to clean up their act. kind of like they are looking together to set standards.

but my question is the oil spill commission that the president set up in the wake of the deepwater horizon disaster called for in inn like entity for oil and gas drilling. do you think that is needed? how can you include government regulators were insufficient for nuclear and not simply that government regulators were insufficient offshore? guest ghost this is still evolving. there are similarities but there are also big differences because first of all, basically and nuclear companies, they don't compete with each other. so once you start having people regulating each other, strangely enough he you raise the antitrust questions. it has to be managed and how does that work? and also, you know, in a sense it is simpler because you don't have that many nuclear operators. so, certainly they are going to be industrywide associations

that are going to kind if both monitor and also pushed it knowledge and so forth. but, i think it is hard for industry like the oil and gas industry to have that kind of self-regulation again partly because antitrust may become an issue. >> host: you say in the book on page 524, more than any other president before him barack obama has investigated the administration in remaking the energy system and driving it toward a renewable foundation. you say quote, he has raised the stakes in renewable energy to a level of national audacity. that is looming recently with the solar energy company that gave the $500 million loan guarantee to department of energy and today "the new york times" front page had an article about a geothermal plant that had federal backing in nevada that is in financial trouble. after the failure of cap-and-trade legislation in

congress, now now it looks like renewable energy is questionable in some parts of the political sphere, if you are devising president barack obama, would you tell him to fold his other renewable or to double down? >> guest: i think he can. is made up a commitment to it and he believes in it very strongly. i don't think there was a wherewithal to double down on it in this point in the whole focus is on the federal, consolidatine federal deficit and extending so i think it is going to be very tough to talk about any kind of stimulus including a green stimulus. in the 1990s, the r&d for the department of energy, one of the things i was struck by and i think it is still there and i talk about in the book is this volatility of spending r&d and not talking about the big loan guarantees and things like that but it has been a basic function

of the federal government to support basic r&d, to support young scientists, young engineers, and that is why we have an internet. the internet didn't come out of somebody's garage. some things do come out of people's garages but that was not one. it came out of the department of defense after the cuban missile crisis. how do you communicate with your bases in a crisis, your military bases? so i think what i do believe, given the complexity and importance of energy is what we need is consistent with a reasonable level of r&d spending so people can make careers and it is not a question of picking winners or losers but supporting the creative people who will bring bring us innovation and the changes we are going to need for a growing world economy which is kind of one of the basic underlying themes that ties this whole book together. >> host: how you get that consistency because no seems like you mention carter. carter was gung ho for it and

then raking came and he was like i'm cutting all of these subsidies. it seems that when you talk about the renewable section about japan, and how amazing leaps in strides japan is made as solar and china have a huge manufacture of solar. it seems like japan basically said hey, we are going to stick with this. we are going to really go full bore. >> guest: back to your earlier question about the crisis because in the 70s instead they went like that. once that happened the sense of urgency just disappeared. it is interesting reagan appears in the book and a number of different places. is acting career. >> host: i never knew that. it was one of these revelations where he has been around with ge. that is just my age by the way.

>> guest: after that he his acting career got in a bad place and he was doing standup comedy and introduced a singing group in las vegas. wanted to use that as the story of the electrification of our country because that is really what happened after world war ii. we had growth rates in our electricity demand like you see in china today and it was an amazing work of these wonderful commercials that talk about, ronald reagan and nancy reagan did where she had the camera and said welcome to my house. let me show you my electric service. is like a vacuum cleaner. like these people take for granted. i think there is a consensus on some things that weren't there before and they think one of them, and i remember vividly there was not a consensus on this. this whole energy efficiency and becoming energy efficient. ed: 's good economic sense and makes good sense to do it and i don't find there is a kind of political animosity that there used to be. >> host: i think you are right.

it is not, you know. you can't see it. >> guest: that is the challenge i've posted a former energy commissioner of the european union. this is great stuff but there is one big problem. there is no red ribbon to cut. you can have an opening ceremony for it like you can with a beautiful new turbine or something else. >> host: also t, it goes a thing to one of the big challenges in this whole topic, and one that sees a lot of political courage which is basically there is a personal responsibility. barack obama got into a lot of trouble when he candidly talked about cap-and-trade in an editorial board in california, where the whole point of cap-and-trade has been a price signal, and it is a quote that every republican sites which

will necessarily skyrocket energy prices. the whole point of cap-and-trade is, the whole point of when you start manipulating it and the market at the end of the day by building in, but basically diminishing that price signal for the consumer, you talk about in this book over and over and over again what changes people have is an increase in price. remember as a kid my mom sing to me dina, we owe pse&g. turn your bedroom light off. it seems that is a very hard political road to walk when people are going to get angry about that. >> guest: that is why, that's right. i take right now in the bad economy, jobs, unemployment, these are the dominating questions. the concern about this weakness in the global economy and you approach energy issues because they are so important

differently during good times when people, where there is a wealth effect at work. there is not a wealth effect at work now. there's a fear factor at work. that affects what you do but you can go back and see that no congressman, no congress woman is going to vote for a gasoline tax. gasoline tax would save by more efficient cars. that is what happened in europe. the way we go about it is we have fuel efficiency standards. that is the way to do it and it kind of reflects our culture there. >> host: but if we continue to go like this, right, up and down with our supporter of renewable energy and other countries either remain constant. like this or rise, will we ever get into the clean energy race? what is so interesting with the whole china and japan in asia being ahead of us is that we are behind very clear from your book

>> guest: i don't think we are behind. i think we we are at the forefr. we are at the forefront technologically. china has the manufacturing, low cost manufacturing driving down the cost, so that is why they are moving so fast. it is not like they have some great insights that we don't. they also have some very important when sources. in the book i quote the a chinese government official. now but regard them as a precious resource. i don't think, whether china has a x member of wind turbines, don't think we are winning or losing in that race. i think at the heart of it is what is happening in the innovation. i think that we continue -- are great universities. i think, and we have something else. we have more players coming into

the game, venture capitalists and others so there's just more going on. i don't think we are going to lose. i do think what is kind of on the horizon right now or coming down the road would be a better way to put it is the kind that kind of electric car race. a race with the electric car, and that is, that certainly have strategic elements to it. >> host: one of the other things i was really struck with and again this is me linking what you say in your up to some more current events. during the kyoto protocol, doer eizenstadt was working for the clinton administration at the time, pushed using markets just like we did for s. 02 and like we do with lead. by the way trading and pricing pollution if you want to say it, it -- my article so thanks.

>> guest: right, another ronald reagan story. when i was a young man, gasoline was considered this great technological advance the got rid of knocking and now we are going to get rid of it. he looked around his cabinet remini said none of the world enough to remember that. >> host: he talks about when he was arguing against the europeans basically he wanted to have a mandate. command and control. he said, there are three issues, cost, cost and cost. the cost of mitigating climate change without a market system would be far too expensive for any economy to bear. do you agree with that is as you know our attempt in the west to set up a market system to be legislation is permanently stalled with no hope. is the clean air act too expensive? >> guest: it is very interesting because i mean, the whole development of using markets to solve environmental

problems with the development of the 1980s and 1990s as a much more efficient way. you have the command and control doing it. >> host: a republican idea. >> guest: that's right. it goes back to george h. w. bush's administration and indeed it goes back to ronald reagan's of frustration. the cost reductions for reducing s. 02 from coal electric generation was much lower than had been anticipated so, but i find as i was listening to people talk about cap-and-trade, in that narrative always went to back what happened in the early 1990s and i was fascinated. i kind of wanted to get the story of indeed how did that happen? and then we just found out that cap-and-trade for society as big and complex and economy and it is much harder to do than something that is fairly focused. so, i think you know, so i would say you say what are we -- what

is climate policy today? i would say getting cars to 54 miles per gallon is a former climate policy as well as an energy policy. were noble standards, you know, one third of california's electricity is from renewables. that is climate hall is it. >> host: we can do this transition from a fossil fuel basis of electric over noble without a price or permit? >> guest: others would say that you have to have some form of a price on carbon and that would change everything. but that becomes you know, a complex political, very complex political question in the united states. but i think, what i was trying to, and also i think we have to realize these energy transitions actually take a long time. we did big business today but it is still small compared to the overall energy business but it is going to grow. >> host: there's one quote and we have a minute left and i was going to paraphrase it does i

don't -- oh know, here it is. but i wanted to ask you about it. it really struck me. one quote kind of jumps out at you. you were talking about an indian scientist, the head of the environment ministry and his name is remy sure. he offered an unusual perspective. he said the climate world is divided into three. the climate atheists, the climate agnostic, and they climate evangelical. i think we could probably put people that are in the public system categories. which one are you? >> guest: i think i look on climate. it is clear the whole story about the measuring of carbon and carbon has gone up in the atmosphere and the impacts on the climate. with the timing is in what the models are going to show. i'm not a climate scientist. that is not what i'm doing so what i td