to washington to be a push to let's have do what the market wants to let's not think it. so how is it that it was okay to tinker when it came to ethanol and we are encouraged not to really tinker when it comes to solar and wind? tractor i think there's a lot of tinkering going on. here in california, use a 33% of your electricity by 2020 has to

be from renewables, some would call that a pretty big tinker. we do a lot in this country by mandates, by requirements, such and such a percentage of motor fuel has to be biofuels. such in such percentage of electricity has to be renewable. that's the way if you just look at it and you say kind of want to give them the boost to it and health industries like wendy gets its scale, it is mandates. most of the renewables is wind because when this sort of almost an alternative, another form of conventional energy. >> host: ethanol i didn't see a lot about the environmental, welcome back to that i'm sure because as you know, international academy of sciences did a report called the hidden cost of energy. one of the conclusions it made is that if you look at the lifecycle of e85 and ethanol,

that it's more damaging environmentally than straight up gasoline. how do we -- >> guest: i didn't go in depth in that. i think i kind of discuss that but also by the debate as to whether it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get out of it and you say well, what energy input are you doing to do it. there are arguments about that. i think they would have to go back five years ago, kind of consensus support of ethanol is probably stronger than it is today, but it is now part of our motor fuel. >> host: i remember covering that in upstate new york and that was one of the environmental things that pushed us to ethanol. >> guest: that was one of the great triggers for it. but in terms of volume, biofuel today in the united states is about a million barrels a day. that's kind of like no small to

medium sized oil-producing country would be happy to have that volume. will in the book, the former governor, now secretary of energy, secretary of agriculture, he has talked and he liked others has talked about ethanol also than as a way of rural development. so i think to those of some parts of the country, those issues are very large. >> host: energy is always regional. >> guest: you always get to question why do we have big national energy policies? its regional. we're a big country so it's not a simple think of a single energy policy for a country our size of. >> host: once again in reading the book so many times and always posted notes are just thoughts that i thought of when i was reading it, but in the

chapter that you titled aggregate destruction, you talk about a confluence of world events that had a huge impact on energy prices, particularly the price of oil. venezuela's local overtaking of the oil industry, hurricane katrina and rita. and yet we have republican presidential candidates, at least one, vowing to come into office and make gas prices $2 a barrel. and others who say that president obama hole it in as president was to cause huge increase in the price of gasoline. aren't any of these arguments realistic, given the global oil market that you so well described in this book? i mean, how much can you as president, let alone a country do with gasoline prices? >> guest: president after president has discovered that they have less control over energy markets. go back to richard nixon

promising project independence. i have a photograph of him in the book. jimmy carter came in and was going to make energy is cornerstone, and then it was part of what destroyed his presidency. just go president after, there aren't that many levers to pull. and what has happened is that in a way our influence over energy as a country as a lesson because we used to be the name of the game, the biggest energy consumer. china now consumes more energy than the united states and would talk about the chapter, aggregate destruction, then i have one on the demand shock. try to answer the question pointed to. how did we go into thousand four, interview with oil than $20 a barrel and it might collapse, four years later its $147.27. how did that happen? one of the factors was in the growth of demand sort of almost

unexpectedly in emerging markets, and it had just burst on the scene in 2004, 2005 and kind of woke up. it was hard for americans to realize that what they were seeing at the pump was partly affected of what happened in provinces in china whose name they didn't even know because energy demand. so i think it was this kind of, this global market and the center of gravity has been shifting reflecting the changes in global economy. we still use twice as much oil as china, but in 20 years they could be even with the. >> host: right. basically the bottom line is we have very little control. >> guest: i mean, interesting things are happening our oil imports are going down. we are going to have a lot more efficient automobiles, another mandate love a big impact on the global market to go from 30-mile per gallon cars to 54-mile per gallon cars by 2025, which from the viewpoint of an unreal company, not very far away.

those kind of things have a big impact. you can see the automobile maker trying to get out of actually do this. you may notice the spare tires have disappeared from new cars because they want to bring down the weight. >> host: you mention to efficiency. that's a great entry point into my next question. you talk about george w. bush doing the state of the union endorsed to increase. and to get what he said iranian president mahmoud ahmadinejad and hugo chavez out of the oil office. so bush thought hey, i'm going to reduce our demand but what's interesting about that is nowadays it seems members of the very same party, the republican party, are just dreamt the supply-side. more supply, drill more at home. open up and war. >> guest: bush was saying

that, too. he was basically, there are two characters your. one being supply, when the debate in their the ones who add up in terms of outcome. there's interesting because bush made that comment not in a state of union address. that's what you have 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 on the oil market, but world affairs. >> host: can we drill our way out of energy independence? is it even possible because why i'm asking, i'm asking this for the lay people out there, that these debates, premier energy experts, 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. drill anywhere we won't. >> guest: we could run sequence of president after president after president saying energy independence, and i think the reality is that we are part of the global economy. we trade a lot of these back and forth. so the real question is sort of vulnerability, energy security, that it's not a question that we have to be 100% independent. and i asked one senator about that. actually energy independence means energy security. but energy security sounds abstract. energy independence is very appealing. i think we'll be in a position where our economy is less vulnerable to disruption, to shocks in one kind or another. and american people can count on reliable, reasonably priced flows of energy. and so the answers i think are

found on both sides of the equation. we become more efficiently by the way, we're twice as energy-efficient as we we work in the 1970s. that's a huge contribution, just imagine if that hadn't happened the trouble we would begin. at the same time what's interesting now, we have seen people thought u.s. is finished as a producer, and find out that actually u.s. is not done as a producer. >> host: to the drilling questions, i've been dying to ask a question as to read this book, some republicans on the one hand on the hill and in congress today and on the campaign trail are saying drill, drill, drill. invoking sarah palin in 2008, drill, baby, drill. and the democratic response to that has been a concept called use it or lose it, that oil comes in this country have to sell a lot of acres and are just kind of sitting on them. i want to ask you this because you did such a wonderful job in this book saying that you can

politick policy this all day long, but when it comes down to is the technology to get the oil that you want to get. so is use it or lose it a viable concept? >> guest: sort of much more. i don't understand the use of use it or lose it concept actually because companies don't have an incentive to just sit on resources. it takes time. on the other hand, you don't want them rushing to the gulf and drilling without having dotted every i and cross every t. so i think there are long lead time and energy business that you might begin a project today and you will see that producing in 15 years and you have to allocate capital and her allocation of depends on what happens to price and everything like that. so, you know, i think there's middle ground here to have a reasonable approach to continue to develop resources that are important to our economy, and

also the jobs and all the other things we were talking about and country it on a recent basis. but right now and we are in the middle of a political system so that the situation and campaign, and to all of the discussions about energy like everything else tend to be more polarized. >> host: there's a lot of great characters in this book, and john rockefeller withstand all, t. boone pickens is mentioned. there's the guy in china. >> guest: wang. >> host: what is it about, you know, oil and natural gas in this whole arena that attracts these larger-than-life personalities? >> guest: is also true like the wind chapter has great characters. >> host: all of them. >> guest: for solar. these two guys, the first solar company -- [talking over each other]

>> guest: one of them is still around. spiking it with coca-cola. honey, these guys who know nothing about this say let's go into the solar business. one of things i love doing this book is witty things come from, where did the solar business come from, where did when come from? and court were to be natural gas come from. and i think 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 the people are saying you are crazy, white a doing that? so i don't find these characters who carry the story a long, almost any novelistic way who but are very important, had very important impacts. >> host: you also pulled some really up interesting facts. like effective prohibition on

ethanol and alcohol-based fuel, or the robbery of solar panels off pipelines defeat basically marijuana growers in california. just really interesting tidbits that surprise even in energy writer like myself. >> guest: energy tends to be seen as kind of abstract they question out there, people expense of the gassing thousands of for. i really want to shove it sort of a world of people, and people doing things. solar manufactures back in 80s, they were puzzled, why would people stealing these things? because they want to be able to draw electricity without drawing from the utilities because then the police to determine if there was a surge of electricity. they were in the middle -- marijuana business. >> host: in the book -- >> guest: let me also say that one of my favorite characters in the book, a man who was a

professor at caltech and walked out one day in 1948 to breathe the air in los angeles because it was so dirty. he gave up what was his favorite subject which is trying to understand why pineapples were sweet to work on the question of where to small come from. but he also said he realized that he was a man who identified the active ingredient in marijuana. >> host: interesting. the other irony was the guy, i forget his name, probably on what my post-it notes, but the guy that wrote one of the first papers on fracking was the same guy that -- those in kind of incongruent to me. like you would think the guy, where going to run out of this stuff -- >> guest: he said figures it shadow continues far beyond him to the present-day. >> host: it was interesting because it begs the question for me as a reader, is one of the

people, one of the things in the peak oil discussion is he failed in his projection to incorporate technology, yet he wrote a paper -- fracturing which today has opened up a new world. >> guest: and when he was right in his paper, probably it was five or six years after the first wells have been fractured and it was just, so he was right about technology, but there is this thing that people kind of come to view technology is over. and that we've gone this far, we know we know and just live in our world we live in. technologies will continue to happen. there's a character in the book who is a french scientist who, in 1824 voted paper about the steam engine explaining it, but he is also a soldier.

he talked about this great revolution that kind of captured the world and for the first time it wasn't cuban labor. it was an animal labor. it was technological ingenuity capture. and he called it the great revolution. and i think in a way this book is kind of -- it had been folded over two and half century. i'm convinced just the world we live in, there's a lot of engineers, a lot of entrepreneurs that will continue. >> host: my next question, at times in the book you seem to oscillate between on the one hand, government policies, mandates, subsidies are needed to get this which going and get away from fossil fuels, which

were 80% dependent on, somewhere around a bit and other points in the book when you talk about oil fans and also the california blackouts, regulation, debacle. you suggest that government intervention messed up. you know, was to blame in part for the oil fans that think the ss as they could have, or in the case of california initiative work at tweeting the market. they made mistakes there. so i guess where'd you come out at the end of the day? i mean, do we need government policies to make this transition? and if not, what's going to drive that? will it be high prices because of demand? high prices because of the cost to get to where the oil is, alternative energy is going to be carbon, is going to be environment to control? i guess i'm not seeing the bridge in terms of -- i think it

to look, there are 30 states that have requirements that renewable technology and electric generation. that's the force of law. governor jerry brown, the same governor jerry brown in 1970 health kick start the original wind business. now just signed legislation earlier in 2011, and that's a, it has the force of law. it is the law. so you that going on. so i think that energy is so, you know, so fundamental that it is so tied up in government policies, legislation, regulation. unit, when you look at energy in the united states, the notion of the kind of wild category, it's a very highly regulated, particularly if you want to drill a well. it's very hard to regulate. i think california which for these people in california will remember the california energy crisis was only a decade ago in a state with just in deep trouble.

it was a fundamental mistake in the regulation. they deregulate half the market and they didn't deregulate the other half and they soon kind of california was in recession and it just didn't figure out that maybe california, run up against the wall and that's what happened. >> host: what you say to people that are like we should just step aside, policy makers, politicians, just let this sort out based on market dynamics and not mess up the market. we don't have a federal rps. >> guest: you know, we have the federal, 54 miles per gallon is a fairly -- ferry powerful piece of legislation. so you go down the list, lots of things are happening. kind of will continue to happen, unfold. and you have the california air resources board, most viewers have heard of it, carpet, the closest thing we have to a global regulator world automotive industry.

spent a trigger federal states and those because of mark this is what happened in california. will, you can build one in 16 in california and another car for nevada so it has to impact and even automobile manufactures all over the world are paying attention to it. there are a lot of things happening that people don't see that are certainly part of this fabric of government and market. and as always, there's no final fixed frontier where here is here but it's kind of an ongoing interaction. >> host: let me ask that another way. you said we've come a really long way since you started writing this book in 2005, and now we are here. where we are, would we be where we are today without government intervention? >> guest: well if we have yet to efficiency standards i think we would have a very different picture to give that, but it's government intervention, and

study questions what should we have a government. i tell the story of the man, he was sort of like the greatest businessman in the 1920s, and people were falling over his words. he said when he wanted do is preserve his name and then he also decide famous bankruptcy in the great depression. died with just a few cents in his pockets. but go back to insult, really at the beginning of the 20 century is when we started regulate electric car business because used to have 20 or 30 or 40 different electric power companies all serving one city. so hold electric power system, for instance, i mean where the regulatory, that's the way the system works here. >> host: in your chapter on conventional resources, you delve into the deepwater horizon incident and a chain of mistakes.

you talk about the missteps. i mean, how do you explain why these missteps occurred and why they were, as you say, no established methods for stanching the flow of oil? and then also i was wondering, are you surprised that is, congress to date has not passed any legislation reflecting the lessons we've learned from deepwater horizon but are you surprised? >> guest: i think a lot has happen. you have the reorganization of the regulation of the offshore oil industry. that's a big deal. you have had a much deeper understanding and coordination of a. i mean, it was an accident, kind of thinking the unthinkable, it couldn't happen because we know how to do it. well, it did happen. as a result of that there are a lot of consequences. we have a new regulatory regime. >> host: which can be changed

with a new administration. >> guest: but i don't think, i think the emphasis on safety, you know, they will argue about timing, does the agency have enough people? does it need more funding? there are all those questions around it but i think nobody is going to back away from the commitment to safety. no one ever wants at that tragic, anything like that happen again. and you also have the establishment of two consortia that actually, you know, it should never happen again, but should it happen again, have the know-how to quickly start an accident like that so it doesn't turn into the kind of macondo accident that just went on and on with oil pouring out of. >> host: there was an earlier accident you referenced in early find somewhere else in the world that was even longer in terms of the flow of oil and trying to kill the well. >> guest: this was at great depth, you know, when you can see the to kind of intense technology along the way to do

with it, not the capacity is there, but the purpose of the safety system we have is that never has to be used again but you need it in place and you need the resources committed so that if something does happen you can do it because it would just be unacceptable otherwise. >> host: you talked about the reorganization that is underway, it was renamed after the incident. that has been further split do the leasing, leasing part and environmental and safety park. but in the book it seems to me, and maybe i'm misreading this, but that you kind of downplay the coziness that exists between the regulator and the offshore oil and gas industry. you might safety officials now had to carry their own lunches and a flu a few hundred miles out to inspect platforms.

does this oversimplify a bit some of the problems we encounter? we had regulators and people that were in charge of doing business with these companies? >> guest: aren't you talked what happened in denver? >> host: there was one incident and then to author goes court judgment ghost pashtun gulf coast. >> guest: i mean i know about the one in denver. i don't know about the others. in denver, it's not the offshore industry. >> host: it was a royalty in kind program gets back a very deep coziness. i think that who are your inspectors going to be? they are people who live in the coastal area. 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're not going to be tough enforcers. i mean, we have now seen a couple of reports that, trying to understand in fact what happened in macondo. with at the presidential commission, the federal agency has come out with one. and i think that there are very important lessons to be drawn. include part of the reorganization was to try and kind of separate the different functions because the mineral management service have the job of both promoting offshore development and the responsibility of managing the safety. and i think other countries have learned, such as britain did after it had a bad offshore accident, he had to separate those two functions. on the water and, unicom it was just, the purpose of that was to show how much things had gone 180 degrees, that you couldn't have a bottle of water. >> host: did you go too far? >> guest: i think i was just

trying to capture how it had changed. the accident was a momentous accident. people's lives were lost, it affected the livelihood of so many people. it covers so much of the ocean. i think we're still in, you don't just go from one of doing things to other things overnight. i think we're still in a transition, find out the way the proper to regulate it. with his preeminent objective of safety. >> host: you mentioned when you go into nuclear energy, another one of my obsessions, you mention that -- >> guest: tell me about your obsession. >> host: you mentioned government regulators in the wake of three mile island there was an investigation just like with the gulf oil spill. presidential appointed panel. at rickover. >> guest: is with great characters in the book because

it course people and a third generation actually know who he is. and the people of the and the generation have never heard of him. he's not only the father of the nuclear navy, 62 years on active duty which is incredible, he was also the father of nuclear power as much as any single person. he was a very cantankerous person. he go the other admirals crazy. jimmy carter had been a nuclear submarine are said, called him the greatest engineer of all times. >> host: today you put jimmy carter, he which unique -- on the spot where he says -- [talking over each other] >> guest: rickover would interview the people and he would have a chair like a short one of the chair legs of people feel uncomfortable or have blinds so the sun will come in your eyes. so he's interviewing young james earl carter who was once ago in a new committee. and carter did something like i was seventh in my class. kannapolis. and rickover says to them, why

not the best? why didn't you do better than that? carter was sort of bragging about it. and that became the title of carter's campaign autobiography, why not the best? >> host: that's great. >> guest: it's very interesting them after the three-month i'll accident which was a nuclear accident in pennsylvania in 1979, carter appointed recovered to evaluate -- i included in both the letter that rickover to carter. i was struck by because you could apply to many accidents those matter. >> host: i said this is like you can cut and pasted and it was the oil spill commission. or the joint investigation with the coast guard and the offshore. >> host: exactly. what you have is you have a series of cascading mistakes. if one of them hadn't happened would have the disaster, and to me that other circumstances we have seven out of 10 of them and

nothing happen. but if they all come together. when i read that but i had the exact same reaction you did. >> host: so that's rickover. rickover was called to lead the investigation at three mile island. and at the end, he warned against the cops and robbers entered against government and the nuclear industry. and he also said that government regulators would never be suspicious and could not adequate to the job. that's how intel was created. ..

ok, you got to clean up your act. they're working together to set standards. my question is the oil spill commission the president set up in the wake of the deepwater horizon disaster called for an entity for oil and gas privilege. do you think that is needed? government regulators, how can you prove government regulators were insufficient for nuclear and not conclude government regulators were insufficient on offshore in the wake of thewater horizon? >> guest: this is still evolving. there are similarities but also big differences because basically the nuclear companies don't compete with each other. so once you start having people regulating each other strangely enough you raise antitrust

questions which have to be managed and how will that work? and also in a sense it is similar that you don't have that many nuclear operators. you have a lot more. certainly there are going to be industrywide associations that are going to both monitor and push technology and so forth. but it is hard for and industry like your land gas industry to have that kind of regulation against antitrust. >> host: you say in the book on page 524 more than any president before him barack obama has invested his administration in remaking the energy system and driving it for a reasonable foundation. you say, quote, he raised the stakes of renewable energy to the level of a national -- that destiny living with the recent bankruptcy of the solar energy companies and $500 million loan

guarantee from the department of energy and the new york times had an article about a geothermal plant with federal backing in nevada with financial trouble. after the failure of cap and trade legislation in congress and now looks like renewable energy is questionable in some parts of the political sphere. you are advising president barack obama, would you tell him to hold on his bet on available double down? >> he made a big commitment and believes very strongly, i don't think he will fold. i don't think there's wherewithal to double down at this point when the whole focus is on consolidating the federal deficit and extending. it will be tough to talk about any stimulus including the green stimulus. in the 1990s i was in a task force for the department of

energy and one of the things i was struck by is volatility of spending and r&d. not state loan guarantees and things like that but the basic function of the federal government to support basic r&d philippe -- support young scientists and engineers. 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 this didn't. it came out of the department of defense after the cuban missile crisis. how do you communicate with your base in a crisis? i do believe given the complexity and importance of energy is consistent, reasonable level of r&d spending so people can make careers. not a question of picking winners and losers but creative people who will bring us innovation and changes we will

need for growing world economy which is one of the basic underlying themes that tie the book together. >> how do you get that consistency? you mentioned carter. carter was gung-ho for it but reagan came in and i am cutting these subsidies. it seems that when you talk about later in the book in the renewable section about japan, how amazing leaps and strides, china a huge manufacturer of solar arrays, japan basically said we are going to stick with it. we are going to go and not give up. >> the question about prices. in the 70s, prices go like that with energy prices and once that happens the urgency just disappeared.

interesting that reagan appears in the book in a number of different places. his acting career -- >> i never knew that. he was a man around like ge. >> guest: but before that -- >> host: showing my aide actually. >> guest: acting career really got a bad place and doing stand-up comedy introduce a singing group in las vegas. i wanted to use that as a story of the electrification of the country because that happened after world war ii. we had growth rates like you see in china today and it was -- these wonderful commercials please the talk about ronald reagan and nancy reagan, let me show you my electric service like a vacuum cleaner that people take for granted. but there is a consensus on something that wasn't there before. i remember what was not a consensus was the question of

energy efficiency. it makes good economic sense. makes good sense to do it. there's a critical animosity fighting about it. >> host: people snore. it is not sexy. you can see it. there is no -- >> guest: that is the challenge for the energy commissioner of the european union. there's one big problem that there's no red ribbon to cut. you can't have an opening ceremony like with your turbine. >> host: it goes to one of the big challenges of this topic which takes political courage which 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 whole point of cap and trade is price control and the quote every republican's sites is there are necessarily skyrocketing energy prices. that was the whole point of cap and trade. the whole point. when you start manipulating it and building in basically diminishing the price signal for the consumer, you talk about it over and over again what changes people have is an increase in price. as a kid my mom said to me we don't -- turn your light on. that resonates. very hard political road to walk.

>> guest: i think right now economy and jobs and unemployment, these other dominating questions or concerns about the global economy and your approach energy issues that are so important differently than you do during good times when there's a wealth affect at work. now there's the fear factor at work. to that effect would you do. go back to see that no congressman will vote for gay syntax. find a more efficient, the way we go about it is we have you efficiency standards and wasted do it and recycling our culture there. >> host: if we continue to go like this, up and down with our support of renewable energy and

other countries either remain constant or go like this or rise will we ever get into the clean energy raise? what was interesting is the whole china and japan and asia being ahead of us is we are behind. is very clear from your book. are we ever -- >> guest: i don't think we are behind. i think we are at the forefront technologically. china manufacturing, low-cost manufacturing and driving down the cost. that is why they are moving so fast. not like they have a great insight that we don't. they also have very important wind resources and i quoted a chinese government official talking about winds in the northwest. it is a natural disaster. now we bernard this as a precious resource. whether china has x number of wind turbines i don't think we are winning or losing in that

race. at the heart of it is what is happening in innovation. we continue to be -- our great universities. we have something else. we have more players coming into the game. venture capitalists and others with more going on. i don't think we will lose. i think what is on the horizon right now or coming down the road would be a better way to put it is an electric cart race or race to the electric car and that is a strategic element. >> host: another thing of was struck with linking what you say in your book to more current events. during the negotiation of the kyoto protocol, working for the clinton administration at the time pushed using markets like

we did -- lent him have written about mission trading and pricing solution and have never -- [talking over each other] >> guest: another ronald reagan story. when i was a young man, kathleen was considered a great technological advance. now we're going to get rid of it. you remember and looked around the cabinet room and said none of you are old enough to remember. >> host: he was arguing against -- he wanted to have a mandate. command and control. he said there are three issues. cost, cost and cost. the cost of climate change without the market system far too expensive for any economy to bear. do you agree with that? our attempt in the u.s. to set up a market system from

legislation is permanently stalled. is the clean air act too expensive? >> it is interesting because the whole development of using markets to solve environmental problems with the development of the 1980s-1990s as a more efficient way to have command and control doing it. >> host: republican idea. >> guest: goes back to george w. bush's administration. needed to go to ronald reagan's administration and mend, productions for reducing s 02 from coal generation was much lower than anticipated. what i find when i was listening to people talk about cap and trade in that narrative always went back to what happened in the early 1990s and i was fascinated. wanted to get the story. how did that happen? then we found out cap and trade

for society is big and complex legal much harder to do than something fairly focused. so i would say what are we doing about climate policy today? getting cars to 54 mpg is a form of policy and energy policy. renewable standards, 1-third of electricity in renewables. >> host: we could do this transition from a fossil fuel base renewables out of the price of carbon. >> others would say you have to have some form of price on the carbon and that would change everything but that becomes a complex -- very complex political question in the united states. what i was trying to -- also we

have to realize energy transitions actually take a long time. we did big business today but small compared to the overall energy business but it is going to grow. >> host: a minute left and i am going to tap paraphrased it. here it is. in a massive book with one quote -- [talking over each other] >> host: you were talking about an indian scientist, head of the environment industry. he offered an unusual perspective. the world is divided into three. the climate atheists, climate agnostics and climate evangelicals. we could probably put people that are in the public into the categories. which one are you?

>> guest: the whole story about measuring carbon going up in the atmosphere and impact on climate but the timing is with the models are going to show -- i am not a climate scientist. that is not what i'm doing. what i try to do is explain how the scientific consensus turned into a political consensus. that is what i'm trying to do. >> host: agnostic? you don't want to label yourself? >> guest: a wanted to tell the story and help people have a framework with these issues whether it is climate and, energy to see them in perspective. i wanted to do it in a very negative way. >> host: thank you very much. >> that was after words, booktv's signature program in which authors of latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers and others familiar

with their material. afterwards airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. saturday, 12:00 and:00 p.m. sunday at 12:00 a.m. monday. you can watch afterwards on line. go to booktv.org and click on afterwards in the booktv series in the upper right side of the page. >> you worked in different communities with profs to talk about democracy. tell us how you decided to do your research and why. >> we were trying to understand the relationship between globalization and democracy. at an end of the 20th century the united states was in a period of dramatic change. dramatic political, economic, social and environmental changes the change people's lives in a lot of ways. we wanted to understand what does that mean for local democracy? people everyday capacity to make a difference in our community,

participate in governance of their communities and make it better? some the seven of us chose five communities that had experienced globalization differently. there were two communities we chose that are what caught the county and durham county, north carolina that we characterized as landscapes of consumption. those of the communities the economy is dominated by consumption of something whether it is a medical service or educational service or the environment itself where the tourism economy is vital. it can also be communities dominated by fire. there is an acronym, fire which refers to finance insurance and real-estate. we also chose two communities characterized as landscapes of production and those are

economies that are dominated by manufacturing, agriculture, resource based economies and things like that. those helped eastern north carolina and chatham county, north carolina. the third economic landscape that was looked at was the landscape of the state. these are communities, maybe state capitals or maybe communities that host a military base and the fortunes of those communities are determined by much broader political decisions made in state capital washington d.c.. looking at these five communities with these three different kinds of economic bases, we get to see how people's lives are impacted differently with broad global economic changes. >> you talked with people about

political participation and a lot of people talking about voting. what were you looking for? with a democratic political participation consist of? >> guest: we are anthropologist's. we are interested in talking to people about what they do. rather than getting too much emphasis on something like voting and say and voting is up or down, rather than thinking about what people are or are not doing as many other pundits and scholars have done we went out to talk with people, sit in their living rooms to participate in civic organizations, to follow along with non-profit organizations or community groups or neighborhood watch groups. send in these different environments, following people around to figure out what are people doing? if they are not participating in bowling leagues what are they

doing? if they're not voting anymore are there other creative ways people are working to make their communities better and we found in spite of some pretty dramatic obstacles, obstacles of social inequality, obstacles of intense burdens on time, families are working more and more, many families have multiple jobs, struggling with things like child-care and the political system is becoming more and more confusing to navigate. in spite of that we found enormous creativity and people doing interesting things. >> host: did you spend a lot of time there? how did you decide what to do? >> guest: we had in each of our five communities we had full time for 12 months and with free

research prior to 12 months and follow-up research the next six months and followed up over the years since then. but the primary research period was an intense 12 months working more than 40 hour work weeks. whenever public meeting caretaking place, whenever particular controversy happens we interviewed people, in-depth interviews. remember numerous times when people you want to interview are busy. you follow them along and you say you don't have time for an interview but mind if high-tech road trip with you and they are driving to from place to place and you talk to them along the way and understand their lives and their work and things that are important to them. we meticulously documented public meetings and debates about things. we got a really on the ground look at the ways that people participate in local

governments. >> host: what did you learn about the ways media affect how people think about democracy? you wrote about how the group as into categories. some are apathetic and some are angry. does that affect people's participation? >> it does have an effect on people's participation. when we interviewed people about -- we did a number of lifetime participation interviews and we found certain themes people feel guilty about not participating more than we do. sometimes afraid of participating. that adds to the additional feeling of better obstacles and participation but more importantly we fundamentally have taken our eye off the ball and we are striking out when it comes to wonder standing american politics. and where key decisions are made and how people are participating.

by focusing on as many pundits or scholars do in the media in general, will hold conversation is off. doesn't match up with people's lives. perhaps we are using outdated terms. perhaps we are reflecting on -- perhaps we are missing the boat because societies change and their way of understanding about what our book has done has allowed us to see new forms that nonprofit organizations have become increasingly important to governance at the local or regional and federal level and people's participation in nonprofit organizations needs to be understood as part of american policy. we need to look at ways that

people are carving out a new space for themselves. rather than looking back at what people did to participate in local politics 50 years ago and say this is something -- participation in this old form is decreasing or decrease in we need to ask the question what are people today and how does that matter and what are the opportunities and obstacles to that? and the work they're doing. >> host: do you think you sent -- since you have done your research we are on the path to getting people more meaningfully involved in political participation? >> yes but it is mixed. it is mixed because many new opportunities have developed for direct civic engagement. it can be very meaningful. i like to think about also we don't necessarily write about this in the book, like to think

about the way so many aspects of american democracy voters are often -- citizens are often responding to the actions of others. if you are voting you are responding to the candidates you are presented with. if you are writing a letter to local leader you are responding to something they have done or something that happened or if you take a protest and you are responding to something that has you excited but when you form a nonprofit organization or community group it is a uniquely proactive space where you have the capacity to create a mission statement leiber and level organization that didn't exist before. that is a new space in american democracy. wasn't so relevant in the middle of the 20th century but it is important now. the challenge is that is complicated. when you take increasingly complicated political system that we have in the united

states and you recognize that it takes enormous business acumen, takes enormous political literacy, takes enormous amount of time to be fully engaged in this, it starts to raise red flags. consider also that many scholars, many people have reported there's a growing divide between rich and poor in the united states. we have a shrinking middle class and this is fairly well documented shift in the american demographic. environment. but what we have looked at is the way that social and economic inequality in the united states impacts and contributes to a broad political divide and there's a parallel story

alongside this growing trend, growing divide between rich and poor and civic engagement. that is a real threat to democracy that we need to manage. >> host: you work on a college campus. as a professor do you see more involvement by students in college compared to people that you are working within north carolina? good time to get people involved? do they need to get involved earlier? >> with students that i see they're finding new ways to get engaged and redefining what it means to be politically active. social media is part of that. there are the tried and true kinds of parts of activism that we like to see students involved in but there are a lot of other things emerging too and we are starting to understand what that means. i work off campus as well. spend a large chunk of my time

working off-campus with people in regional community and economic development and environmental issues. i work with a lot of non-profit organizations and community groups and governing agencies and i see an enormous amount of change. in ten years or so since i did my primary research in north carolina, i have seen some pretty big changes in terms of accountability, in terms of the relationships between the federal government, state government and nonprofit organizations. new forms of oversight, new forms of record keeping, documentation and accountability starting to emerge whereas at the end of the 1990s when we were studying things for the book it felt like the wild west. there was