that's where the city of albany new york is today. fort orange was an early dutch fort, and you'd expect the frontier in the 1600s everything would be simple and crude. well, they have found the fanciest glass vessels, glass bottles, glass bowls from holland. the nicest things, way up there in the frontier, soldiers, people live in forts, did not just have crude, simple, out of date garbage, if you will. they had nice things. they wanted to bring the best things from home from the mother country, from europe, with them to the frontier of america. when archaeologists find these nice things, we smile to ourselves and say those officers, those soldier, they did okay for themselves. >> and where are you digging now? is there an archaeological dig you're working on now or this fall? >> well, i'm doing two things

right now. in the summer time i'm digging fort william henry in lake george, new york. fort williams henry is the sight of the last of the mohiggans so anyone who read james cooper's famous novel or seen the recent movie, that's the fort we are currently digging in the summer through adirondack community college and through the university. however, this fall here on campus, here at plymouth state university, we're digging on campus. campuses all across america do campus digs these days because it's hard for students to take the summer off to dig for something, but during the school year, campus digs, looking for the traces of the early university, that's what we love to do. i have students outdoors right now digs, and --

now digging, and it's exciting for him. 100 feet from their classroom, they are digging up a storm right now. >> thank you so much for your time. >> it's good to be here. ♪ ♪ >> coming up next, booktv presents "after words" where we invite gust hosts to interview authors. this week, daniel yergin and his new book "the quest," and they continue the story of the oil industry. it's impact on international politics and the possible energy sources of the future. he discusses his findings with associated press energy writer

deena. ♪ >> host: welcome, mr. yergin to "after words," and thank you for doing this. >> guest: thank you. >> host: let me congratlate you on this achievement. i wanted to ask you first what prompted this book? obviously, you had jr. pulitzer prize winning book about the history of oil, so why this? why now? especially when one of your primary conclusions is that for awhile, things are not really going to change much when it comes to where we get our energy from. >> guest: right. i think there's a couple reasons. one is about the big long trends won't change, a lot changed in the world. the soviet union collapsed. china was hardly in the prize. it's the only country that gets two chapters in this book. right up until what happened this year with fukushima and the

nuclear accident and the arab spring, just both with big impacts on energy. many happened. the other thing is what i wanted to do, this book is more ambitious than the prize as ambitious as i thought that was in writing it. this trying to cover the whole energy spectrum and how the pieces fit together. it was a big topic to take on, and as often happens, you found out you bit of more than you expected. >> host: it's interesting you say "fit together." after reading, i think 700-plus pages, i won't count the footnotes. >> guest: thank you. [laughter] it makes the book shorter. >> host: a lot shorter. >> guest: very perceptive of you. >> host: it's hard to see how they fit together; right? if we continue, you know, to find oil through unconventional

sources that has expanded our proven rereceivers, at least, then what prompts us to go to the renewable route, which, as you know, don't get as much bang for your buck in terms of energy produced, has lo gistty -- logistical hurdles to say the least. how do they fit together? >> guest: technology -- the story's about how technologies evolve, where do they come from and get started? so you know, you go back to when there's great excitement about renewables in the 1970s and 1980 #s. look back, and they are very immature technologies. wind today is a much more sophisticated technology, and they'll continue to develop, and i think wind, solar, the whole name of the game is to bring the costs down to be competitive, but meanwhile, what we see is technology innovation also happened in the energy area, and the picture of energy supply in

the u.s. is different than even when i started the book. >> host: you started in 2005? >> guest: 2005 and 2006. it was the shell gas only bursting into the scene in 2008. not until 2011 that people have woken up to the other thing that's happening with what's called tight oil, and u.s. oil production going up rather than going down. u.s. oil imports going down up -- instead of going up. >> host: now, you discuss in chapter two of the book the idea of the petro state, and a lot of the book is on venezuela and the rise of chavez and his nationalization of the oil industry there, and you mentioned chavez and the connection to fidel castro in cuba, and that got me thinking because there's a lot of controversy now about planning with cuba drilling offshore, especially after the gulf oil spill that we had last year.

how -- >> guest: that's an interesting chain of events. >> host: i'm trying to explain my logic here. how does cuba getting into the offshore oil game -- how does 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. gulf? >> guest: i think the thing is cuba's very close to florida, and some of the cuban waters they drill in is close to florida, and so certainly concern about just basically environmental safety and security and how it's managed in cuba. of course, for decades, it was thought that cuba might have hydrocarbon resources going back to the late 1950s actually, but now starting to drill in the waters, and oil has been very key to the relationship between venezuela and cuba because veeps way la stepped in that plays a

role the expectation would at such point that companies drill in the waters, we'll see a real intensification of concern in florida and the united states about it and put aside politics, which are complicated enough, that about environmental security. >> host: now, you also talk on page 109 actually, you state, something that struck me, and throughout this conversation of ours and going to kind of relate what you wrote here to events happening today which is what i do for a living, so while oil generates revenues, it's a capital intensive industry. this means it creates relatively few jobs adding further to the pressure on government to spend on welfare, projects, and entitlements. in this country, as you know, the moratorium following the gulf oil spill was a job killer and the push to open up more

public resources to drilling is touted by certain people in politics as a job creator. when e read -- when i read that sentence, i question whether it's a -- >> guest: i was thinking that sentence a lot applies. let's say it's a middle east country with a big huge population and doesn't have a lotter other skills in other industries, and therefore, there's not many jobs other than oil producing in the middle east with a lot of people who don't have jobs. what's clear is people looked at it carefully is the jobs themselves, and then there's the jobs of the industries that support them, and then there's the jobs that are sort of called induced jobs which are -- because people have more income. when you look at that in terms of what's happening in domestic u.s., oil, and gas development, it turns out there's secondary jobs created that people wouldn't think that there's jobs created from the offshore gulf

industry in ohio or california, and so i think that with -- it 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 for some countries, it's a huge problem, but turns out i think what we're learning now in the united states are these developments and there's a lot of secondary jobs that follow from it. >> host: what about the concept of jobs from the renewable industry which is the buzz term these days of green jobs, and there's been a lot of discussion about that recently about whether, you know, the obama administration is successful about creating the green jobs they set out to create. do you see renewable energies, wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels as great job creators? >> guest: they create jobs too, but the question is the scale of them. if you take ethanol, if you live

in an urban area as a motor fuel and so forth, but ethanol is also very important to the economy of rural area, and has had a transformative effect on some of that. i think what we've seen, there's a lot of expectations and hope for green jobs. it's just the scale. you know, these have to be bigger businesses, and there's the other question, of course, where are 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 do you see as a job creator or just the scale of the oil and gas industry so much larger? >> guest: it's a scale. if you looked at the numbers, in the last few years more jobs are created from oil and gas than green jobs, but i think green jobs will grow. i mean, the story i tell is how these industries have started to reach scale. the last year, about 120 billion was invested world wide in electric generation, renewable

electric generation, and that's a big number, and 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 mentioned ethanol. i know that's 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 least be enthusiastic about the potential. >> guest: well, i was fascinated by so many of these things. go back a century, and there's a story that's ended in about 1910 or 1920 or there was a big move for ethanol during in the great depression because farmers were in such difficult times, and there's a picture in the book of a u.s. senator pouring vodka into a tractor een gin on capitol hill to demonstrate the

potential of biofuels. i think there's limits in the united states. it's not, you know, now it's about 6% on an energy basis of our motor fuel, and larger in terms of volume, but i think the, you know, you say what's out there on the horizon and potential game changers, and one of them what's called second generation biofuels making biofuels not from food stuff, but from agricultural waste and other things or algae and things like that, and that was really hot three or four or five years ago. it doesn't get as much attention, but those efforts continue. if you say where my breakthroughs come from, one comes just because of the intensification of effort from the second generation biofuels, and one of the things, you know, you know, you see biologists now as part of the energy business,

and ten years ago, biology was not part of the energy business, so it's just part of all of what i call in the book the great bubbling of innovation. >> host: the other interesting thing about ethanol is that -- and correct me if i'm wrong or 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. >> guest: oh, absolutely. >> host: that have made it successful. i found that really interesting because there's a manipulation of the market going on to make ethanol a bigger share of what we fill 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 not tinker. how is it it was okay to tinker when it came to ethanol, and we're encouraged not to really tinker when it comes to sew -- solar and wind. >> guest: i think there's still a lot of tinkering going

on, and look at california and say 33% of the electricity by 2020 has to be from renewables, some call that a big tinker. >> host: right. .. and i'm going to come back to that i'm sure because as you know the national academy of sciences did a report called the

hidden cost of energy and one of the conclusions it made is that putting it through the life cycle of e 85 and then ethanol that it's actually more damaging in the environmentally than straight up gasoline. how do we -- >> guest: i didn't go in depth in that, i think i kind of discussed that by also of a de bate as to whether it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get out of it than you say well what energy input are you using to do it and there are very serious arguments about that. i fink we have seen a of we would have to go back five years ago the consensus support is probably stronger than it is today but it is now part of our motor fuel. >> host: covering this bill in upstate new york i know that was kind of one of the environmental things that push us. >> guest: was one of the great triggers for it but in terms of

volume dhaka is today like the united states with a million barrels a day that's kind of like a small to medium-sized oil producing country and we would be happy to have that kind of volume. but in the book the former governor of iowa and now secretary of energy or secretary of agriculture, he like others has talked about ethanol also as a way of development, and so to those parts of the country those issues when very large. >> host: energy is always regional. >> guest: the question might we have big national policies because the interests are so different. it isn't a simple thing to have an energy policy for the country our size.

>> host: all these post-it notes are just thoughts that i thought of as i was reading it but you titled aggregate disruption you talk about the confluence of the events that had a huge impact on the energy prices including the price of oil in the niger delta than the political overtaking of the oil industry and hurricane katrina and rita cover their report on the gulf coast, yet we have republican presidential candidates at least one to come into office to make gas prices to dollars a barrel and others who say that president barack obama's colin tend as president was to cause a huge increase in the price of gasoline. are any of these realistic given the global markets that is so well described in this book? how much can a u.s. president let alone a country to do with gasoline prices?

>> guest: president after president have discovered they have less control over energy markets. we go back to richard nixon promised independence of a photograph of in that speech in the book, jimmy carter who came in to meet energy is cornerstone and then it was part of what destroyed his presidency. president after president there are not that many levers to pull, and what has happened is that in the way our influence over energy in the country has lessened because we use to be the name of the game the biggest energy consumer now china consumes more energy than the united states and we talk about the chapter of the aggregate disruption and i have one on but the and i try to answer the question you pointed to how do we go in 2004 which view is $24 a barrel and it might collapse. four years later just four years later its $147.27.

how did that happen? one of the factors was the growth of demand are soared as unexpectedly in the emerging markets and kind of just burst on the scene in 2004, 2005 and woke up and was hard for americans to realize what they are paying at the pump was affected by what happened in provinces in china because of the energy demand and so i think that it's kind of this global market in the center of gravity has been shifting reflecting the change of the global economy. we price as much oil as china but in 20 years they could be even with us. >> host: basically the bottom line is we have very little control. >> guest: yeah, i mean, interesting things are happening in the old label and ports are going down. we are going to have a lot more efficient automobiles and mandates that will have a big impact in the global market to go from 30 miles per gallon cars

to 30 miles per gallon cars to the automobile company isn't very far away. those kind of things have a big impact and automobile makers are trying to figure out how tires disappear from new cars because they want to bring down than wait. >> host: he mentioned fuel efficiency in this a great entry point to my next question. you talk about george w. bush, in the state of a union increased the fuel efficiency and the demand for oil to get what he said pyrenean president mahmoud op boss ahmadinejad out of the oval office, so president bush thought i'm going to reduce our demand for reliance but what is interesting about that is that nowadays it seems members of the very same party are drumming the supply side and the

need to drill more at home. >> guest: bush was saying that, too. there are two characters. one is supply and one is demand and they add up in terms of the outcome. it's interesting because bush made the comment not in a state of the union address that is what he kind of said privately, but it tells you that there is a geopolitical context to all of this to reduce particularly in the time of the tight oil market to reduce the influence of the two characters among others not only on the oil market but on world affairs. >> host: is energy independence and possible because it is for the people out there that view of these debates that are not daniel yergin, premier energy experts, that are not me who cover energy day in and day out. i mean, is that a total dream

when we hear a politician is a energy independence and how much if we could say okay the gloves are off let's go. we could run a sequence president after president and say energy independence and i think the reality is we are part of a global economy. we trade a lot back-and-forth and so the real question is sort of vulnerability, energy security and it's not a question that we have to be 100% independent and i asked a center about that and said energy independence really means energy security but energy security sounds abstract and independence is a very appealing term evoke all the time. i fink we need to be in the position our economy is less vulnerable to disruptions, to shock of one kind or another and american people can count on

reliable priced flows of energy and so that answers life and are found on both sides of the equation. we become more efficient. by the way we are twice as energy efficient as we were in the 1970's. that has been a huge contribution just imagine if that hadn't happened where the trouble with being at the same time it is interesting now is people of the u.s. finished the produced and found out the energy producer. >> host: to the drilling question i've been dying to ask you this question republicans on the one hand on the hill in congress today are saying drill, drill, drill invoking sarah palin again in 2008. the democratic to that has been a concept called use it or lose it that oil companies in the country have to sell a lot of acres and are just kind of sitting on them.

i wanted to ask you you've done such a wonderful job in this book saying that you can policy this all day long but what it comes down to is the technology to get the oil that you want to get. so is use it or lose it viable? >> guest: sort of much more in the current political. i don't understand it is an illicit contact because they don't just sit on the resources. it takes time because of the other hand you don't want them rushing into the gulf drilling without having dhaka everybody and cross every t, so there is a long lead time in the energy business that you might be given a project today and you won't see that produced in 15 years and you have to allocate capital and to allocate the capitol to depend on what happens to the price and everything like that. so, there's definitely a middle ground here to have a reasonable

approach to continue to be filled the resources that are important to our economy and the jobs and the other things the we are talking about and can't do it on a reasonable basis. but right now we are in the middle of a political system so that the situation and the campaign and so 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 obviously with standard oil and t. boone pickens and the guy in a china that i will probably murder his name. wane. what is it about oil and natural gas in this whole arena that attracts these larger-than-life personalities? >> guest: it's also true like the chapter has great character. >> host: throw the book solar

-- >> guest: the first solar company -- one of them is still around making these things spiking it with coca-cola that know nothing about business or what is going in the solar business helping the government put satellites. one of the reasons i love doing this book is where do these things come from? where does wind come from, and of course where do the revolution natural gas come from? and i think that the energy business does have a lot of people who are very strong-willed who can take a lot of disappointment and maybe they are somewhat obsessive thinking about things even when it looks like the people are saying you are crazy. why are you doing that? so i love finding the characters who carry the story along almost novelistic way very important and have very important impacts in what happened.

>> host: people of some interesting facts, too. like the effective prohibition on ethanol and the alcohol based fuel for the robbery of solar panels of pipelines to feed hydroponic marijuana growers in california. it is interesting tidbit that surprised even an energy writer like myself. >> guest: it tends to be seen as an abstract question sought out there they experience the pump and so forth and i really want to show eight to people doing things and the solar manufacturers back in the 80's, i mean they were puzzled why are people stealing these things? of course because they wanted to be able to draw all electricity without the utility because the police could determine that there was a surge of electricity in the marijuana business.

>> host: now in the book -- >> guest: let me also say that one of my favorite characters in the book who is a man who was a professor of caltech and walked out one day in 1948 and couldn't breathe the air in los angeles because it was so dirty, and he gave of his favorite subject which was kind of a stand y pineapple was sweet to work on the question where does small come from but he was also just suddenly realized this runs through the whole book he identified the active ingredient in marijuana. >> host: really? interesting to read the other irony is in america i forget his name it was probably on my post-it notes, but the guy that wrote one of the first papers was the same of the peak oil and those seem incumbent. you would think the guy was like we are going to run out of this stuff. >> guest: he is a figure whose

shadow continues far beyond him. >> host: thought was interesting because it begs the question for me as a reader and one of the things that comes up in the discussion is that he failed in his projection to incorporate technology that he wrote a paper which today has opened up a role for natural gas. >> guest: that's right when he was writing is peter probably five or six years after the first had been cracked and was just a -- he's right about technology, but there is this seen people kind of come to the view that technology is over and that, you know, we've gone as far and we know what we know and we look at the world we live in and say saudi who's a french scientist who in 1824 wrote a

paper about this steam engine explaining it and he's also a soldier his father had the minister of war because he was convinced the british had the french napoleonic war because they are masters of this technology and he talked about this revolution that had kind of captured the world for the first time it was a human or animal lieber it was technological ingenuity and the call this the great revolution, and i think in a way this book is kind of a story that's unfolded over two and a half centuries, and i am absolutely convinced just the world we live in a lot of engineers and entrepreneurs are going to continue >> host: that is great to my next question which is at times in the book you seem to oscillate between on the one hand the government policies mandates what have you subsidies

are needed to kind of get the switch going and get away from fossil fuels which were 80% dependent on somewhere around there and then another place in the book when we talk about the oil sands and also the california blackout revelation dawa to -- the local use it just they messed up and were to blame in part for the oil sands they should have or in california they were not great at tweaking the market and they made some mistakes there so i guess where do you come out at the end of today? 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 zero allele is and the energy and the alternative energy is going to be carvin, is it going to be

environmental control? i guess i am not seeing the bridge. >> guest: you have to look at 30 states that have requirements about the technology in that generation. that is the force of law. governor jerry brown, the same governor jerry brown who in the 1970's helped kickstart the legislation in 2011 and it has the force of law, so you have that going on, so i think that energy is so tight, so fundamental it's so tied up in government policies, legislation, regulation. when you look at energy in the united states the notion of the kind of wild cat going out is a very highly regulated activity to want to drill a well it is highly to regulate. i think california which these

people and california remember the california energy crisis is only a decade ago and the state was just in deep trouble. it was a fundamental mistake in the regulation. a bee regulated have of the market and not the other half. and they assumed california would be in the recession and they didn't figure out that maybe california will have an economic boom and run against bill walsh and that's what happened. >> host: what you say to people who say step aside to policy makers and just let this sort it out based on the market dynamics and not mess with the market's? we don't have a federal market yet. >> guest: we have the federal it's 54 miles per gallon it is a very powerful piece with energy regulation so you go down the list and lots of things are happening and kind of will continue to happen and you have the california resources board most haven't heard of it it is

the closest thing we have to a global regulator that the world automobile industry. >> host: so they triggered -- this could be triggered federal states and because the market they said this will happen in california. you can't build one car for california and another for nevada so it has the impact and then we find automobile manufacturers all over the world paying attention to it, so there are a lot of things happening that actually people don't see that are certainly a part of this fabric of the government and market and as always there is no final fixed frontier as to where here is here but this kind of ongoing interaction. >> host: let me ask that another way. you said you've come a long way since you started writing this book in 2005 and now we are here. would we be where we are today without the government intervention in energy? >> guest: if we hadn't had fuel efficiency standards i

think we would have a very different picture to give that but it's going to be an adventure. it's not a question should we give government -- i've told the story of samuel, who was kind of i mean, he was like the greatest businessman of the 1920's and people song on his words and said one of the things they want to do is preserve his name and then he also presided over the famous bankruptcy and great depression and came this close to going to jail and died in the paris metro but you go backward different companies in one city so now from whole electric power system for instance it is eight regulatory bargain. that's the way the system works, so it has grown a bit. >> host: in your chapter on historical you delve into the deepwater horizon incident and

the chain of mistakes that led to the offshore oil spill in u.s. history to the id 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 are you surprised that this congress to be hasn't passed the legislation reflecting the lessons we've learned in the deepwater horizon? are you surprised by that? >> guest: a lot has happened. you've had the reorganization of the regulation of the offshore oil industry. that is a big deal. you have had much deeper understanding and coordination of it and it was an accident that was kind of thinking the unthinkable that it just couldn't happen because we know how to do it. willy did happen and as a result of that there are a lot of

consequences we of a new regulatory regime. >> host: it's going to be changed with the new administration. >> guest: i think the emphasis on safety will argue about timing, does the agency have enough people come has the agency banned needing more funding. there's all those questions but nobody is going to back away from the commitment to safety. i mean, no one would ever want to have that tragedy anything like that happen again and you also have the establishment of the two consortium that actually if it should never happen again but should it happen again have the know-how to quickly staunch an accident like that so that it doesn't that it turns into the kind of macondo accident that went on and on with the oil pouring out. >> host: there was the axson to your referenced in the world that was even longer in terms of the flow of oil and trying to kill the well. >> guest: this was a great

debt, and you could see they have a kind of invented technology along the way to deal with it. now that capacity is there but the safety system that we have is that it 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 be unacceptable otherwise. >> host: you talk about the reorganization that's under way in the service as you know renamed after the incident to the bureau of the energy management and regulation and enforcement. now that has been further split to the leasing part and the safety part. but in your book it seems to me, and maybe i am misreading this, that you kind of downplay what exists between the regulator and the offshore oil and gas industry. you write safety officials have to carry their own lunches and

flow a couple hundred miles out to inspect platforms and anything once they're even a bottle of cold water on a hot day. does this oversimplify some of the problems we encounter? we had regulators, we had people that were in charge of getting the business with these companies doing drugs with them, partying? >> guest: or into talking about what happened in denver? >> host: there were two reports of the gulf coast, one in lake charles and the of the rim port arthur and new orleans, he i believe was fired for the win to the events. >> guest: i know about the one in denver, i don't know about the others it's not the offshore industry that was indeed what could be described as a very deep coziness, but i think that who your inspectors are going to be they are people who live in

south louisiana, and the coastal area, they may go to the same churches on sunday morning as the people who are also working on the platforms, but that doesn't mean they are not going to be rivers and enforcers. we now have seen a couple of reports that have come out trying to understand exactly what happened in the congo and we had the presidential commission, the federal agency has come out with one come and see if they are very important lessons to the drama and clearly part of the reorganization was to try to consider a different functions because the 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 after it had its accident that you have to separate those two functions. on the water it was just a purpose of that was to show how much things have gone 180 degrees that you couldn't

have a bottle of water. who's to it seems like a little tongue in cheek. >> guest: it was to capture haven't changed. the accident was a momentous accident. people's lives were lost. it affected the livelihood of so many people, covered so much of the ocean. i think that we are still actually you don't just go from one way of doing things to another way over my i think we are still in a transition finding out the way that we properly regulate it and with this preeminent objective of safety. >> host: now you mentioned when you go into the nuclear energy, one of my obsessions -- >> guest: >> host: do mengin leggitt from regulators, you know, in the week there was an investigation just like with the gulf oil spill. the presidential appointed panels and in charge of it.

[inaudible] >> guest: it's interesting he's one of the great characters in the book because the people actually know who he is. and the people of the younger generation i found have never heard of him that he's not only the father of the nuclear navy he's 62 years active duty which is incredible and he's also the father of the nuclear power as much as any single person and he was a very cantankerous person. he told the other admiral crazy. jimmy carter who had been in a nuclear submarine nurse said he called the greatest engineer of all times. >> host: today you put jimmy carter if you possess in the book you put jimmy carter on the spot in an interview of some sort. >> guest: its rigorous to get into the navy that he would interview the people and have to chair so people feel uncomfortable and the sun would come in their eyes and so she's interviewing young james earl carter and carter said i can 57

did my class at annapolis and he says to him why not the best? why didn't you do better than that because he was sort of bragging about it and that became the title of the campaign autobiography. it's very interesting after the three mile lilacs' event in pennsylvania in 1979, carter appointed him to evaluate and i concluded and the look the letter that rickover wrote to carter lacks after the accident and i was struck that sort of he could apply it to many accidents -- >> host: wrote in the margin i wrote in the margin this is like you've cut and pasted it or the joint investigation and the offshore -- >> guest: you have cascading effect as if one of them hadn't

happened you wouldn't have the disaster and do whatever other circumstances where you would have seven out of ten of them and nothing happened but if they all come together exactly. i read that letter and i had the same reaction that you did. >> host: back to nuclear, rickover was to the lead investigation into the three mile island, and at the end, he warned against the cops and robbers and drum of the government regulators and the nuclear industry coming and he also said that the government regulators would never be suspicious and could not adequately to the job and that is how it was created. inco is basically the body that is -- >> guest: its self regulation to the it to have tight government regulation and in the industry where they go out and critique each other and they are a very tough on each other. there is the recognition that if one of them makes a mistake,

everybody is vulnerable. so they are very tough on each other. >> host: when i think of how it works i have it in my mind that it's kind of like the same concept when you are like, you know, in a school playground playing a game and one of the police doesn't do his job for the team and your like okay you have to clean up your act it's like you are working together for the standard but my question is the oil spill commission the president conducts in the deepwater horizon disaster calls for an impolite entity for oil and gas drilling. do you think that is needed? are the government regulators -- hawken you concluded that government regulators were insufficient and not conclude that government regulators were insufficient on offshore in the wake of deepwater horizon we need something else. >> guest: this is still evolving. there are similarities but also big difference because first of all the nuclear companies don't compete with each other, so once you start having people you

raise antitrust questions that have to be managed and how would that work and also it simpler because you don't have that many nuclear operators, so certainly they are going to the industry-wide associations that are going to kind of with monitor and also pushed technology and so forth, but i think it's hard for an industry like the oil and gas industry to have that kind of self regulation again partly because antitrust immediately becomes an issue. >> host: you see in the book on page 524 more than any other president before him, barack obama has investigated the administration making the energy system and driving it toward the renewables foundation. you say, quote, he has raised the stakes in renewable energy to the level of the national destiny. the destiny is with the recent

bankruptcy and the solar energy company of the 500 million-dollar loan guarantee in the department of energy and today "the new york times" front page there was a section had an article about a geothermal plant that had a federal backing in nevada that's in financial trouble after the failure of cap-and-trade legislation in congress and now it looks like a renewable energy subsidies are kind of questionable in some parts of the political sphere. if you are advising president barack obama would you tell them to double down? >> guest: i think he can't. he made a big commitment to it and believes very strongly so i don't think that he is going to fold. i don't think there's a wherewithal at this point where the whole focus is on the federal as i say consolidating the federal deficit and spending so it's tough to talk about any

stimulus. in the 1990's the task force of the energy r&d to the part of energy one of the things struck by is the volatility of spending on nt and not talking the that the big loan guarantees and things like that but it's a basic function of the government to support basic young scientists, young engineers and that is where we have an internet. if the internet doesn't come out to the garage and some people believe two things to come out of the garage and the department of defense after the cuban missile crisis concerned about how do you communicate with your bases in the crisis commodore military bases, so i think what i do believe given the complexity and the ports of energy what we need this kind of consistent reasonable levels of r&d spending so that people can make careers and it's not a question of picking winners and losers but it is supporting the

creative people who are going to bring as innovations in the changes that we are going to need for the growing world economy which is kind of one of the basic underlying themes that ties the whole book together. >> host: how do you get that consistency because it seems like you mentioned carter and carter was gung-ho for it and then ronald reagan came and he was like i am cutting all of these subsidies. this seems like that when you talk about leader in the book in the renewables section about japan and how amazing leaps and stripes japan has been able to and then china, the huge manufacturer of solar. it seems that japan basically said we are going to stick with this. we are going to go -- >> guest: in the 70's the conviction was the prices are going to go like that but instead they went like that. once that happens, the sense of

urgency just disappears. it's interesting, ronald reagan appears in the book and a number of different places. his acting career -- >> host: i never knew that. that was a crazy revelation with eg. >> guest: but before that -- >> host: i almost said my age by the way. >> guest: his acting career got a bad place and he was doing stand-up comedy and a singing group in los las vegas and i wanted to do a story of the electrification of the country because that is what happened after world war ii. we had growth rates and our electricity demand like you have seen in china today and these wonderful commercials that talk about ronald reagan and she said welcome to my house let me show you my electric service and it's like a vacuum cleaner these people take for granted. but i think that there is a consensus on some things that wasn't there before coming in -

one of them -- and i remember there wasn't a consensus on this is the whole question of energy efficiency and because it is just it makes good economic sense and makes good sense to do it and i don't find that there is a kind of political animosity about it that there needs to be. >> host: this model think people who snore. it's not like you can't see it, you can -- there's no -- >> guest: that is the challenge i close the energy commissioner the european union to say this is important stuff but there's one big problem there's no red ribbon to cut you can't have an opening ceremony like you can with your beautiful new turbine or something else. >> host: also, too it goes to one of the big challenges in this whole topic and one that takes a lot of political courage which is clear is a personal

responsibility. barack obama got into a lot of trouble when she talked about cap-and-trade in an editorial board in california where will hold wind cap-and-trade has been a price signal and now every republican side which is they are going to necessarily skyrocket energy prices so the whole point of cap-and-trade, that's the whole point and when you start manipulating it at the end of the day by building basically diminishing the price signal for the consumer will need to talk about this over and over again what changes people's habits is an increase in price. i remember as a kid my mom saying to me we don't own a pg&e turn the bedroom light off. that resonates, but it seems that is a very hard political road to what when people get

angry with that. >> guest: that's right. i think right now we have jobs and unemployment, these are the dominating questions and concerns about the kind of weakness of the economy and we approach energy issues because they are different than you do during good times with the affected work it's not a wealth effect work now there's a fear factor at work and that affects what you do that's why you go back in the u.s. system to see that no congressman is going to vote for a did gasoline tax. a gasoline tax would save by more efficient cars that's what happened in europe so the way we go about its reflects our culture. >> 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 riots will be ever get into the clean energy links? it's so interesting to hold china and japan and asia being ahead of us is that we are behind it's very clear from your book. are we ever going to be able to -- >> guest: i don't think we are behind. we are at the forefront technologically. china has been manufacturing low-cost manufacturing driving down the cost, so that's why they are moving so fast. it's not like they have some great insight that we don't. they also have some very important resources in the book i quoted the chinese government officials talking about the wind in the northwest because they used to regard them as a natural disaster and now as a precious resource. i don't think it is whether

china has wind turbines and i don't think that we are losing in that race a to get the heart of it is what is happening in innovation, and i think we continue to be. that's where we have our great universities. and we have something else. we have more players coming into the game, a venture-capital lists and others so there's just more going on. i don't car race or race for the electric car, and that is -- that certainly has strategic elements. >> host: one of the of the things i was struck with and again, this is me linking what you say in the book with some more current events during the kyoto protocol working for the clinton administration at the

time using the market's just like we did for es o2 which by the way whenever i've written about the mission trading and market pollution -- >> guest: x ackley and it's another ronald reagan story he says when i was a young man it was considered a great technological lead vance and we looked around as the cabinet and said none of you are old enough to remember. >> host: he talks about when he was arguing against the european basis he wanted to have a mandate, command-and-control he said there are three issues, cost, cost and cost and the cost of litigating the climate change without of market systems would be too expensive for in the economy to bear. do you agree with that because

as you know our attention in the u.s. to put the market system and the legislation is permanently stalled with no hope. is the clean air act too expensive? >> guest: it is interesting because the whole development of using markets to solve environmental problems was the sort of a development of the 1880s to the 1890's as a more efficient way to have the command in doing it. >> host: the republican ideas. >> guest: that's right. it goes back to george h. w. bush's administration and ronald reagan's administration and demand the reduction of cost, for reducing the besso to -- s02 had been anticipated, but i find when i was listening to people talk about the cap-and-trade command that narrative always went back to what happened in the early 1990's and i just kind of wanted to get the story of

how did that happen coming and then we just found out that the cap-and-trade for the society is even more complex in the economy and harder to do than something that is fairly focused. so i think it's, you know, if you say what do we do about the policy today, i would say getting the karst 54 miles per gallon is a climate policy as well as energy policy. reno will standards, one-third of the electricity we talk about from the renewable, that's climate policy. >> host: we can do this transition from the fossil fuel based out of the price on carvin? >> guest: others would say we have to have some form of the price on carbon and that which would change everything. that becomes a complex political question in the united states

but i think what i was trying to -- also we'd just have to realize the energy transitions actually take a long time. wind is a big business today but it's still small compared to the overall energy business but it's going to grow. >> host: there is a minute left and i'm going to paraphrase it because -- here it is. i wanted to ask you because it really struck me in the book with one quote kind of -- you are talking of an indian scientist of the environment ministry. he offered an unusual perspective and said the climate world is divided into three. the climate acs, the acrostics, and the climate evangelicals. i think we could probably the people that are in the public in

some categories. which one are you? >> guest: i look on climate if carvin is going in the atmosphere and impacts climate with the timing is and what the models are going to show i'm not a climate scientist, that is not what i'm doing, so what i try to do is kind of explain how the scientific consensus turned into a political consensus so that's what i was trying to do. >> host: are you agnostic? you don't want to label yourself? [laughter] >> guest: i wanted to tell the story and help people with the framework of how to time and with energy and everything comes along to see them in perspective and that is what i try to do and i wanted to do it in a very negative way. >> host: thank you very much. >> guest that was "after words," booktv's signature perham kimmage authors of the latest nonfiction books

are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with the material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the book tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. >> he worked in different communities with several professors to talk about the democracy. tell how you decided to do your research and why. >> we try to understand the relationship and the global relationship and the democracy that the end of the 20th century the united states had a dramatic change, a dramatic political and economic, social and environmental changes change people's lives in a lot of ways so what we wanted to understand was a does that mean for local democracy, what does that mean for people every day capacity to make a difference in their

communities to participate in the governance of their communities, to make things better? and so the seven of us chose five different communities of north carolina that have experienced globalization differently. there were two communities that we chose in north carolina that we characterize as landscapes of consumption's and those are the kind of communities that the economy is dominated by the consumption of something whether it's medical services or educational services or the environment itself where the tourism economy is? we can also be communities that are dominated by fire and what we -- which refers to the finance insurance and real estate. we also chose to communities

that were characterized as landscapes of production and those are economies that are dominated by manufacturing, agriculture, resource based economies, things like that, and those were in eastern north carolina, and then before the economic landscape that we looked at was the landscape of the state, and these are communities may be state capitals or maybe communities that host the military base, and the fortunes of those communities are determined by a much broader economic political decisions made either in the state capital or washington, d.c. or something like that. so, by looking at these five different communities with these three dirty different kinds of economic bases we get to see how people's lives are intended differently by the broader

global economic changes in the century. >> so you talk with people about political purges of vision and a lot of people sometimes regret just as voting democratic position consist of. >> we are anthropologist's commesso cielo cultural anthropologists interested in talking to people about what they do. rather than giving too much emphasis on something like voting and saying well, you've no, voting participation in the voting is up or down rather than thinking about what people are or are not doing as many other pendants and scholars have done. we went out to talk to people to sit in their living rooms to participate in the civic organizations to follow along with the nonprofit organizations or community groups and neighborhood watch groups we set up in all these different environments reading the newspaper, following people

around. what are people doing if they are not participating in bowling leagues anymore what are they doing if they are not voting so much anymore are there other ways for the people working to make their committees better and indeed and we found in spite of some pretty traumatic obstacles yahoo! and obstacles of intent on time many families have multiple jobs with things like child care they are struggling and the political system is becoming more and more confusing to navigate and we felt enormous creativity and people do interesting things. >> how did you conduct your research? did you spend a significant amount of time? how did you decide what you were going to do? >> we had in each of our communities cited a demographers who were their full time for more than 12 months with

research prior to the 12 months involved research for the next six months we followed over the years since then. but the primary research period was an intense 12 months working more than 40-hour workweeks whenever public meetings are taking place, whenever a particular controversy happens we interviewed people in in-depth interviews. i remember there are numerous times when a lot of people you want interview are busy so you follow them along. you drive place to place and talk to them along the way and understand their lives and their work and things important to them. we documented public meetings and followed public debates about different things come so we get a really sort of on the ground look at the ways people

participate in the local governments. >> how does media fit the way people think about democracy you guys read a little bit about how they can in the categories of people are in but that again pingree. does that have an effect on people's participation? >> it does have an effect on people's participation. i think when we interviewed people about this we do a number of flights to and participation politics interviews coming and we found certain things people feel guilty about not participating more than they do they are sometimes afraid of participating, and that adds to the additional feeling of obstacles in participation, but more importantly, we fundamentally have taken our eye off the ball and we are striking out when it comes to understanding american politics and where the key decisions are

made, how they are made and how people are participating and focusing on many pundits or scholars in the media and in general i think that we just -- the whole conversation is just off. it just doesn't match up with people's lives that we are, you know, perhaps we are using outdated terms where we are reflecting on perhaps we are missing it because the society has changed the way of understanding and hasn't kept pace but i think what the book has done is allow us to seek new forms that nonprofit organizations have become increasingly important to governments in the local, regional and federal level and people's participation in the nonprofit organizations need to

be understood as a part of american democracy. we need to look at the ways people are coming up with new spaces for themselves rather than looking back at what people did to participate in the politics 50 years ago and say this is something per dissipation and increasing or decreasing we need to ask the question what are people doing today and how does that matter and what are the opportunities and obstacles that exist that people are finding in the work they are actually doing. >> do you think since you and your research that we are on the path to getting people more meaningfully involved in political participation? >> yeah but it's mixed. it's mixed because many new opportunities have developed for direct savitt engagement, and it's often times it can be very meaningful. i like to think about all the we

don't necessarily right about this in the book i like to think about the way that in so many aspects of american democracy they are often responding to the actions of others if you are voting or responding to the candidates that are represented because you are writing a letter to the political leader and responding to things they have done or if you take of the protest but when you form a nonprofit organization or community group it is a uniquely proactive expense where you have the capacity to create a mission to create the whole organization and something that didn't exist before and that is the new space in american democracy that wasn't relevant in the 20th century but it's important now. but the challenges that is really complicated. when you take an increasingly complicated political system

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

parallel story to be told along side of this growing trend and curbing divide we also have a growing divide civic engagement and that's a real threat for democracy. >> and you were on a college campus, so as a professor do you see more involvement by students who are in college compared to the people that you are working with the north carolina? is this a good time to get people involved? to the need to get involved earlier? >> i think so. but what i see is with the students that are finding new ways to get engaged and what it means to be politically active they are sort of the tried and true kinds of activism involved in the bitter immersion and we're just starting to understand what that means.

i spent a large chunk of my time working off-campus so work with people on the regional community, economic development, environmental issues, with a lot of non-profit organizations and community groups and government agencies and i see an enormous amount of creativity and enormous amount of change in the ten years or so that since i did my primary research in north carolina five seen some pretty big changes in terms of accountability in terms of the relationships between the federal government, state governments and nonprofit organizations, we have some new forms of oversight common forms of record keeping, documentation and accountability that are starting to emerge, whereas at the end of the 1990's when we are studying things for the