latin america is exported and $90 billion to china. but they are also importing $90 billion from china. i don't think china cares. yeah, i think it is becoming a strained relationship. several factors that possibly -- lack of concerns of proper government, corruption, also long-term diplomatic aspects. >> people will focus on latin america often talk about china is that nonchalant.

they are the second-biggest economy in the world. nobody can escape that. if that happens soon, the situation in europe is going to be very damaging for other continents, not just latin america. >> we have another question right here. wait for the microphone to come. >> what are the arguments supporting the relationship with india in the united nations? [inaudible question] >> can you repeat the last part?

>> we did not catch the last part. >> would you like me to repeat the question? >> please. >> what are the arguments for supporting the relationship with india in the united nations? and is it true that germany should be better, and is it also true that with the british problem, [inaudible] >> england as a separate country with its own problems. i don't have any problem with

india having urgency. the reason why they got on the council is because they have nuclear weapons. india may have a validation come and i'm sure it's great. my argument is not that, it's about relationships. the india relationship is critical. we are at the point that latin america compared to india and china, are the emerging regions. it is latin america that is the most likely to be a partner. if you look at russia, brazil, china, and india, it is only brazil that they say is a partner and not a rival.

india is not going to have the same kind partnership with the united states. it is going to be a rival for the united states when he see ec projections of how the global economy will turn out. many people expect india to overtake the u.s. by the middle of this century. there is an opportunity to build that partnership, and the danger could be that brazil becomes a rival to the united states, which i don't think will be a healthy thing. my suggestion was strategically it makes sense to back up her cell. >> that is a good, strong points. >> there's no reason why they shouldn't be better friends. >> my wife is from there, so

there's no problem. [applause] >> one of the problems we talked about was social inclusion. we will next be looking at ethnicity, gender, as well as rights. keep an eye out for that. let's join all of our panelists and thank them for coming up here. especially john. [applause] [applause] he is able to sign books. if you'd like your book signed, i highly recommend it. we will be sticking around. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] cement is there a nonfiction author or book you would like to see featured at "book tv"? tweet us at twitter.com/booktv.

maggie koerth-baker examines the current state of energy issues in the united states. the author reports that there is no one answer to the energy infrastructure, and that a more energy-efficient world will not be as utopia, but will be better than if no action is taken. it is about one half hour. >> thank you all for coming out here. i wanted to start off this evening talking about a name that you probably haven't heard of before. hj rogers. he is not well known, but he is one of the major forces in the history of electricity. for some very weird reasons. hj watchers in 1882, is one of the richest people in the city of appleton wisconsin. he owned a paper mill and he was building a mansion on the hill and in that summer he made a

fateful decision. he went on a fishing trip with a salesman from the edison electric company. at the time, hj rogers and never sought an electric light bulb. technically, but does he was an up-and-coming competitor for him. but he came back from the fishing trip the proud owner of the rights to use edison technology in the city of appleton. it began to be the end of his successful business. this idea that thomas edison invents the electric light bulb in 1879 and everything comes together perfectly. electricity is this killer app. reality is a lot messier than that. in reality, the incandescent lightbulb wasn't invented in

1879. it was invented in 1804 by eight person named humphrey davies. heating wire up to the point where it began to glow and produce he is known as a chemist and the guy who discovered potassium and sodium, and he also created incandescent light. between humphrey davy and edison, you have prime technology that wasn't quite ready yet. even by the time that hj rogers came along, electricity wasn't quite ready. we are currently in the middle of electricity crisis. we have infrastructure that hasn't been updated in 30 years. all of those things require technology to solve our problems. but at the same time, we like to tell her cell story that where

one guy had one idea and it completely changed the world. that is not what success normally looks like. if that is all we know, we are doing ourselves a disservice. if you don't understand that the electric grid that we have today is not a perfect thing, it is not an ideal system and it has flaws that put us at risk even beyond renewable generations. you are not going to understand what our energy problems actually are, and you won't understand what solutions are either. that is one of the big reasons i wrote my book, turn to. i want to tell stories that help people to understand how this technology that we base our lives around work, and how it will be to expect what we can and can't do about energy over the next 30 or 40 years. to tell that story, i have to start in the state of wisconsin. in 1882, thomas edison was putting together the first centralized electric grid in the world in new york city. at the same time, hj rogers was

working on his electric grid in appleton wisconsin, and came very close to actually beating edison to the punch. edison opened his in september 1882, and hj rogers came on with his two months later. it was the first electric power plant in the entire world. appleton, wisconsin, was the first place. without edison's team of geniuses, he failed miserably. when you understand why hj rogers failed, you have a better understanding of how the grid works today and why there are some problems with it. hj rogers's first problem was a technological problem. specifically he had no idea what he was doing with the technology he purchased. there were no such thing as electric linemen in 1982 or

electrical engineers. that was a job that thomas edison staff was and venting as they went along. none of them had come west with the generator that hj rogers bought. he bought the technology, but nobody had told them what to do with it. that matters because the grid is harder to manage than he realized. i like to talk about the electric grid as being a lazy river at a water park. the grid is not one wire, it is a circuit of wires that connect consumers background to the power plant again. you have to have that loop, or you will get blackouts. likewise, the grid has to operate in the specific parameters. it has to move at a constant speed. and it has to move along at a constant debt. that is analogous to what engineers call the voltage.

how you maintain a constant speed and depth is maintaining a perfect balance between electronic supply and electronic bread. g4 made some mistakes. he owned a paper mill in wisconsin powered by a water wheel. he thought he could save money by having the same water will that powered his paper mail, to also powered his electric generator. the problem is that the paper mill -- when it was running at full capacity, the generator was producing more and electricity than it could manage. electric light bulbs were

burning out very quickly. everyone of every one of them cost about $36. that became an expensive mistake. even if hj rogers had been competent, and there were people who were competent who set up these grids, there was a chance he still would've failed. that is because of the business problem. in 1882, there were exactly only one thing you could do with electricity. that was like a lightbulb. but you could not recoup the costs to light the light bulb. this is a huge problem. up until the 19th century, very few american businessman had any kind of experience dealing with businesses that required you to build this massive, expensive infrastructure before you could get started. there was something affecting a lot of the industries at the time. also long-distance rail. in all of those industries, what you saw were companies failing over and over. hj rogers eventually went

bankrupt. people who bought the electric utility went bankrupt. and so the people who bought the electric utility in appleton. it was not until the 1920s that it was a profitable business. and even then, it was because electric utilities set out to create their own demand. they set out with a concerted effort. along the way, they created the toaster oven, the curling iron, and they found lots of different things to do with electric motors. items in turn sure some of you have seen history books we can see small towns having these great big networks of electric streetcars. a lot of those were actually owned by utility companies, trying to find something for people to do with electricity during the day. it only work for you could serve

a lot of people at the same time, not in rural cities. for many years, womack america was not modernized. it wasn't until the 1930s to 1950s when the federal government stepped in and started spreading the cost of building this infrastructure over the entire country that you were really able to get everybody up to the same speed on a technological basis. i think there are a few important things that we need to learn about the history of electricity. the first thing is that the electric grid we have right now, it evolved and it wasn't designed. it evolved in the ends of people who had no idea what they were doing. it shows today. we don't have storage on our electric grid. that is a big surprise to a lot of people. we have batteries all throughout our lives, but there are no batteries on the electric grid. that balance between supply and demand it still has to be maintained is something that has

to be maintained mainly by people in grid control centers all over the united states. they were 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they have to maintain that balance on a minute by minute basis. all throughout the day. the second thing that we need to learn is that a technology can fail for a really long time. and still end up becoming something of a buddhist to the way we live. i think there are a lot of analogies between the history of the lightbulb and the history of solar power. i have had people tell me that solar cells where it invented in the 1940s. if you look at the history of the lightbulb, you can see that technology can fail on a technological basis for 80 years. and it can fail in the business basis for another 40 years, and still end up becoming something that we are completely dependent upon today.

finally, we need to learn that big changes that just completely sweep the nation are not necessarily things that happen individual bite individual. we don't have intellectual a electrical grid system today because individual people decided they wanted to bring their houses up for electricity. it is more complicated than that. it involved private investment, public investment, and how all of those things allow people to make individual choices. that really affects the way we have to think about the future of electricity today. all of these things i've been telling you about, where some of the flaws are in working from, these are things that experts in energy already know. but they are not necessarily things that the general public knows or that even the people who have to make decisions about our electric infrastructure now. i think that's a big deal. i set out to write this book partly because of nepotism. my husband is in energy

efficiency analyst. what he does is figure out how to make buildings as energy-efficient as possible for the least amount of money. after he got this job, he started coming home and talking to me about the stuff he was learning and the stuff he was trying to explain to his clients, and he kept talking about how there were these things that were completely basic information to him, to the point that he didn't even think they were worth talking about, his clients had no idea about. and it affected the decisions they made and it affected the mistakes that they made. i really wanted to try to bridge that gap between the bubble of expertise and everybody else. i think that bubble of expertise is something that it is easy to get into. i know that because i have made the same mistake. i have a background in journalism. and i wrote mostly for print magazines until i started working for this new company in

2009. you don't get a lot of feedback as a journalist in print magazines or in newspapers. you don't get a lot of angry e-mails unless it is some crazy person who is writing in all capital letters. at "boing boing", i started to see real-time responses to what i wrote and what questions people had and what things they didn't understand. because of "boing boing", i got out of this bubble that i trapped myself in. and i started to learn about how i could better communicate science to people than what i was doing wrong is a science communicator. one of the things that i learned is that there were words i didn't realize were jargon that were actually jargon. reading the "boing boing" comments, i realized that most of my readers -- educated people, people who are excited about science, they didn't know what purity meant.

half of them thought it was a good old boys system that they were friends and kept out new ideas, and very few seem to realize that there was discomforted a process that was really all about -- scientists editing each other's work and figuring out ways to save this may not be correct information, but we have said that you were probably doing the signs correctly you're probably not making mistakes in your methodology or ridiculous leaps of logic, even though we don't know whether you are right or not. and that it's hard to explain to people. it is a hard thing to remember to explain to people, and we don't do a good enough job as science communicators of remembering that there are things that we know that other people don't know. we have to get outside of our bubble. i think that the internet does an amazing job of forcing me to do that and forcing other writers to do that as well and i think the internet does an

amazing job of communicating communicating science. one of the things i learned last summer when i was preparing to do a presentation at a convention of science museum, was some statistics about how americans understand understanding of science has changed over the last 30 years. there is a man at northwestern named john miller whose specialty is studying public understanding of science and sociology. he has been doing this for 30 or 40 years. in 1988, he found that 10% of americans understood science well enough to understand what they were reading in "the new york times" science section. he did that same survey in 2008. that number went up to 28% of americans. they could now understand "the new york times" science section. there is a possibility of that having to do with "the new york times" science section getting dumber. but i like to think it has to do

with how we communicate science. thirty years ago, the only place you are going to read about it was in a newspaper, which has a specific tone to the way that they write. they have very specific audiences. if you go online, you can find so many more different ways that people are talking about that same paper. they might be doing it seriously, as a joke, as a video, they might be doing it as an interactive discussion. each one of those things is a different way for somebody to get interested in science whom might not have sought out signs to begin with if it were just in the newspaper. it allows you to bring in new audiences and allows you to reach out to people in their own cultural language to talk to them about stuff that was really, you know, only one next 30 years ago. i think that has helped immensely. i am incredibly proud to work as a science journalist. i think it makes my writing better. i think it was an incredible

part of making me able to write this book. that is what i want to talk to you guys about today. i am extremely happy to talk to you about anything or answer questions, from communicating science to "boing boing", to anything us. >> thank you very much, maggie, let's give her a round of applause. for the q&a, we have a microphone here. and we will pass it around. if you could just wait until you get the microphone before you ask your question. >> hello, maggie. i'm a regular reader of "boing boing." i just want to know, if you have any idea about how to combat the anti-science campaign that is going on right now? >> i do, actually. this is one of the things i found in the course of writing this book. it was an incredible story that made me think about communicating these controversial topics in way that

i had never thought about doing before. there is a nonprofit in the state of kansas that started doing these focus groups in 2008. they were talking to people in wichita and kansas city about what you thought of climate and energy. they kept running into this thing over and over where they would have some guy who thought that climate change was a socialist plot. when you came out and asked him what he thought about energy, he changed his lightbulbs, he owned a toyota prius, he was excited about wind power, and there were other reasons you could care about energy and get to the same conclusions. one of the things that i think would be really helpful in this discussion is trying to break down some of those walls of the item on the site and you are on the outside and we can talk to each other. i think that there is a lot of opportunities for me to say, i have seen the evidence that shows me that climate change is

happening. i'm not going to tell you it's not. but i know you have reasons to care about energy in other ways, so let's have a conversation and talk about what compromises we can come to together, and what things we can agree on together. i think we need to do more of that. one of the things that has disappointed me a little about environmental writing online is that it tends to be very preaching to the choir. we need to do a better job of talking to more people about the stuff in making an effort to reach out to communities and individuals who might not be drawn in by the same message that i am drawn into. that is something i talk about in the book and it is something that is a good way to get around the anti-science message by circumventing it entirely. two thank you for explaining the lifecycle of an idea and how long it takes. i'm going to ask a question. now you have convinced me that solar power and wind power will

be fine. my wife's family owns a beach cottage in a small beach town. there are guys that have approached the town and said that they are going to put energy catchers and bingo, there is electricity. however, this requires wired infrastructure from the energy source of the town. this will go to the houses and neighborhoods, and it seems that the whole idea really isn't getting off the ground. how does that energy generated get turned into energies for houses? >> this is something that is very interesting. before i wrote this book, i did research on nimby-ism, the not

in my backyard idea. whether there was anything thinking about how you could get around that. i ended up running into interesting research. in europe, they have had a lot of solar and wind development. along the way, they have figured out ways to get around this problem. a lot of it ends up coming down to having communities participating in these projects rather than just having the project happen to them. i think in denmark, if you build a wind farm, you have to offer the community or person whose property you are building on, a 20% stake in the wind farm. suddenly, nimby-ism disappears. i think that's a great idea. i have no idea what it would take to actually get something like that implemented in the u.s., because it is different from how we traditionally thought of infrastructure development. the idea of this interactive participatory infrastructure development is very different and you end up running into a

lot of inertia, where we have never done things that way, but we don't want to because change is scary. and it is in the-ism on the part of groups instead of nimby-ism of individuals. it will take thinking about things in a different way. >> all right. >> other than horrible inefficiency, can you talk about what is wrong with the grid and what we might be able to fix that? >> yes, absolutely. one of the things that is wrong with the grid is this fact that we have to manually balance supply and demand minute by minute. if we had storage or if we had some of the technologies that make up what people talk about when they talk about smart grids, we could do a better job of keeping the stuff that we are completely dependent on every minute of our lives, more

reliable. right now, we are at risk of a lot of different things that can cause grid failures. texas actually learned this last winter. they had cooled snaps that were not anticipated. they had demand for electricity rising, but they weren't expecting it to rise that much. then they had the cold, freezing pipes at the coal-fired power plants. and what you get out of that is blackouts. that is something you could circumvent and have a better chance of getting around if there were storage on the grid. it is not religious about how we make the world safe for wind and solar and how we build a utopia. it is how we actually prepare ourselves for the 21st century. we have a lot of this technology that hasn't changed since the 1970s. i can't think of anything else i depend upon that much.

but it is 1970s technology. that is one of the biggest things. making the grid more stable and something that has less inherent fiddling around behind the scenes. it has to happen to get it to work. it is not as stable as it looks right now, and i think we could do a better job of that. >> the smart grid? >> yes. >> what is that? >> it is a lot of different things. one of the things people are talking about is demand response. right now, these guys that control supply and demand on the grid and keep it balanced had only one way to control the demand side of that equation. that is why these customers who are called demand response customers. organizations that use a lot of electricity like a factory, they are paid a premium to be on call so that that grid control -- the grid controllers can call them and say we have too much demand

and i'm not supply, they need to shut up their power for a little bit. they can get the grid balance out so people don't have blackouts. one of the things we're talking about when we talk about smart grids is expanding the market out to smaller businesses and individuals, and basically making it something we can all participate in. usually using smart appliances. appliances that communicate with the grid controllers or that can sense changes on the electric grid and respond to those. it is usually stuff that you don't actually have to have drawing electricity all the time to get the benefits. your air conditioner doesn't have to be on constantly to keep your house cool. same thing with your kurt schrader. there have been some really good studies of this. up at the pacific northwest national laboratory. they have done this in real world test cases and cities. they found that when you set

this up correctly and you give people the option of being able to opt in and opt out whenever they want, they have a control panel in the house, they can say i want to be on demand response today, but not tomorrow -- when you do that, not only do they not notice that their appliances are going on and off, but they also never opt out. as long as they have the ability to do it, they don't necessarily do it. giving people the ability is important. you, again, have the issue of having to have participatory interaction with infrastructure rather than just having infrastructure happen to you. that is one of the big things that smart gripper first year. there are a whole host of other technologies, some of which affect consumers and others that you would never know had changed, but it is more than one thing, and that is part of the confusion. >> is that part of that? >> yes, absolutely. that is part of making sure you

can produce electricity and you are in electricity producer, that is about helping you be able to work with the grid in a reasonable way. right now, if you are an electricity producer and have a solar panel on your roof, the grid controllers can't see you. you are a blind spot. they don't know where it's coming from, and they don't have the ability to cut it off if we are to have too much on the grid. that is one of the big things that smart meters are going to enable them to do. to have you be a good citizen of the grid rather than a squatter on the grid. >> is there any feeling that electric cars might take off enough that they will affect the amount of electricity that we need to produce in a way we can build the network? >> i don't know that that's going to happen. in fact, actually, electric cars could have the potential to be a

source of storage on the electric grid. one of the problems is people don't think they will get rolled out fast enough to supply that storage that we want fast enough. the problem is it takes a really long time for the u.s. electric fleet to turn over. i think that it is somewhere near 40 years. we have had tons of toyota prius 's be sold, but it is still a drop in the bucket compared to the number of vehicles out there. it threatens the grid. if anything, we will get more it to use as storage and that will help the grid. >> thank you all for coming. i really appreciate it. [applause] [applause]

>> for more information, visit the author's website. maggie koerth-baker.com. >> now joining us on tv on c-span 2 is doctor judith reisman. she is most recently the author of this book "sexual sabotage", how one mad scientist released a plate of corruption and contagion on america. doctor judith reisman, who is the mad scientist you are referring to? >> unhappy to say and that would be the founder of the kinsey institute, which is still alive and rushing along. it is still going on and driving in bloomington, indiana, at the bloomington university. gender reproduction can be instituted, and he was a man who is involved in the sexual torture of hundreds of children

in his own work. i keep saying that that is not a reliable scientist, but it has been in little difficult to get that across. >> very quickly, remind us about the kinsey report and how he developed that whole thing. >> world war ii was over, officially in 1945. our guys were returning from overseas. they were traumatized, the nation was traumatized. a couple of years later, in 1948, mr. kinsey's book came out called sexual behavior in the human male. the propaganda around the, and i do call it propaganda, it was that this man, this great conservative scientist, was going to tell the american public the truth about all of us, what we were doing sexually, when her grandparents were doing sexually and her parents were doing sexually, and he was going to reveal what was going on and

lift the curtain. he said that we were really a bunch of sexual adventurers and everybody was doing all these kinds of things. the tabloids didn't believe it, but a lot of those that were perceptive day. it was picked up in universities all over and filtered to everywhere else. >> who filtered -- who funded this? >> they shifted the money. they shifted it directly into the american institute model penal code. the research was based on all these fronts and lies. gerri: why did you call him a conservative scientist? >> they defined him as conservative. americans never would've

accepted a man who is a bi- homosexual. he was having sex with his students, he was having sex in making pornography. he was involved in all sorts of things. things that would have caused massive damage. he was so abusive to himself. this is not a normal guy. and he certainly was the major, major proponent of the idea that children are sexual from birth and can be unharmed with sex. >> are the lasting effects of the kinsey study's? >> huge. absolutely huge. i had no idea when i started on this thing. i just copied off his charts and graphs about these things being

done to these children, calling them orgasms, and i thought well, okay, i'll do something else. that was in the 1980s. they didn't take your bet. it took me years to figure out why. it turned out that yes, kinsey's research became the foundation for major changes in our sacks lives. i just came back from a global tour. kinsey is everywhere in china, serbia, switzerland, holland, the netherlands, of course. he has been a foundational change for the west worldwide. >> there is a book of >> when you say he is in china, what do you mean? >> there is a book of the kinsey institute put out in 2007 called

kinsey is a man who changed the world, and they translated that into chinese. it sold 500,000 copies in 2007 and i was contacted by some chinese professors who ask me, they said we looked everywhere for something contradicting, because those sexual conduct in the chinese youth was enormous after that book. they contacted me and asked me if they could translate my book into chinese. as some kind of response to the father was in the kinsey research. there was a feature film made about this as well. this was did a major documentary last year identifying kinsey as the basis for the horrific

sexual education program. as i say, just came back from the philippines. he is involved in every aspect. he is looked at as a guy who revolutionized sex for us. he said you could do all these things with no downside. well, people, we have had some serious downside. we have a pentagon now, you know how many guys were found using child pornography in the pentagon. we have judges who have been picked up we have presidents and coaches and so forth. people are being told this was always like this. well, i have news. it was not always like this. >> when did you first get interested in this research that you are doing? >> well, it comes down to something like this. it was very personal. i was living in a nostalgic world writing for captain

kangaroo, singing songs. doing television for cbs, nbc. my daughter was sexually assaulted by a 13-year-old boy. i began to look around and say wait a minute, how did this happen? it made no sense. following that trail, it led me to doctor kinsey, which led me to hugh hefner, which moved me into looking into the pornography issue, which made me the principal investigator for the u.s. department of justice study on images of child crime and violence. so there we are. >> should pornography be outlawed? >> oh, yes. originally it was, you know. we didn't lose anything by going back to that.

it has had a huge impact on child sex abuse. no question about that. in the netherlands where i said that, i was on television. and i said that playboy had been producing child cannot pornography based on the research for doj since at least the 1950s. playboy sued me for it libel and slander in the netherlands. they would never see me here. if they see me here, give us a jury trial here. the judge looks at all the documentation and the images of the children and said no, she's right. playboy lost to little old me. >> when and where did you get your phd and what is it and? >> my phd was from cleveland, ohio, in 1980, or 1979.

i'm getting too old to remember these things. it was on communication on the way in which mass media effects change and changes to the human brain and changes to the human being, and changes to human culture. >> were you doing here at liberty university? >> i am bringing my knowledge to the faculty and they have taken my archive, which is massive in the next room. they have taken thousands of books and documents so there will be a home for this material and we will be able to have a record of this whole history of the history of the sexual revolution as it was changed in the united states and the western world. >> and "sexual sabotage" is your third drug? >> it depends on how you count. third or fourth. >> are youki